Dreams Cost Money

Passion can be blinding when it comes to love, causing us to see very narrowly. The infatuated couple that have no job, no family support, and are burdened with their own personal baggage are convinced that their love will keep them in this same place of relational bliss, no matter what. Yet, within a short time the constant calls from the creditors, the moody moments each one eventually will experience, and even the simple duties of cleaning the dishes cause the passion to dim. Now they want out. They may even claim that one or both parties have changed in some unfavorable way. But usually neither have really changed. Reality worked its magic, passion waned, now they can see clearly what they were facing the whole time. Now they see what others might have seen from the beginning. The blinders are removed and clarity has come.

The effects of blinding passion can work in other arenas as well. When we set out on a task or a project that we are passionate about, radically underestimating the cost, or when we pursue a career or assignment thinking we know the scope of the project and the players involved only to be surprised that there are more dynamics then we imagined, we fall prey to blinding passion. How much has the dynamic of blinding passion effected church planting in American culture? How much is it creating a mask of delusion over the emergent, post-modern church and its leaders? How much are we missing cultural realities while trying to advance our passion? And all these questions are assuming that our passion is pure.

In my own church planting experience I can identify several areas where I either foolish refused to count the cost or where I just felt so strong about a value that I pushed forward with it at the neglect of other realities. How about the hardest blinding of all to overcome, I denied a real factor of church life because of my passion against its distorted use in the past. There are many points where my passion blinded me from issues about: buildings, children's ministry, fundraising, infrastructures, etc. In my passion to be uncompromisingly pure to my ideals, I missed some important realities.

Those that persevere and succeed are those that are willing to keep in pursuit of their goal after the luster has faded. It is those that are willing to modify their context and to adapt as they build community. In order to fulfill our purpose we must accommodate some realities we would have liked to ignore. One of these realities is the economic factor in a culture or subculture.

Cross cultural missionaries have come to understand this. They don't try to build church buildings or establish structures that cannot be sustained by the local economic condition. If they do then there will have to be a constant flow of assets from outside of that region. And in most cases dependency is considered too significant of a deficit within the faith community to establish a system that requires it.

What I see in the emerging church is small numbers. Yes, great ideas, great values, attention to the what is coming, but for now the numbers are small. In fact the very designs we are framing to express our values limit the number of people that can or will cluster together. It seems we want our cake and eat it too. We want to deconstruct the traditional church to advance our values, but we want the financial freedom of the traditional church to have full time staff members as well as other resources. We will continue to hit a wall if we don't acknowledge the reality of the economics of building and sustaining community in an American culture.

Consider the success of the Methodist circuit rider and the rural Baptist church. These faith groups planted hundreds of churches across America, impacting large percentages of the population for a number of years. In the case of the circuit riders. Their strategy matched the economics of the culture they were reaching. One full time person served multiple communities of faith. Meetings out in the open air were the culturally the norm and so they were used. Buildings came later and they came slowly. The use of tangible assets were minimal so the demand for assets were small. The same is true of the rural Baptist movement. Their design depended heavily on layity and their cultural target had very few resources and required very few material resources.

Yet, here we want to work with small groups of people, with big appetites for resources. We design and desire to have fulltime pastors and fulltime worship leaders. We, and I would add our cultural target, want high tech tools, high quality art, high quality programming. Is our design and our desires ignoring the economics involved? Maybe I am being cynical, but maybe the cloudiness of passion has cleared enough for me to see something that is really there. I believe our passion for our design of church has blinded us to the reality of paying for it. So we either need to change our design or find a sugar daddy that we will leach off of.

I don't really like the sugar daddy idea. So what changes can be made? There are two areas we can attack: our expectations or our cultures expectations. Let's consider our culture first. Can we, and do we want to, train our culture to want less in quality. Can we return to the below average quality of the wide spread kingdom advances of the Methodists and Baptists? Is that possible in our affluent culture? At some point we would have to train them to interact in a different language of culture. Maybe if we were stranded on desert island with no internet connection we could change their cultural language and then get down to the church community. It seems futile. American culture is what American culture is and we need to learn their language. So technology, quality, childcare, and buildings are here to stay.

So what about our expectations? Are we all willing to go get jobs in the marketplace and do church leadership on the side? I know that there are people that strongly advocate abandoning full time Christian workers or leaders. But I think this is neither biblical, historical, or practical. It is nothing but blind passion for an idea. Especially in American culture, I don't know that we can or that we want to. I for one don't want to work at two professions and try to raise my family. For some the bi-vocational arrangement might work, but I think the requirements to serve our faith communities are too demanding. Now, there are rural communities that still function at a slow pace with little demand. There are sub-cultures in America that expect less and could be done part time. But those places and opportunities are shrinking with each passing season.

This is another reason to hammer out the specifics of the multi-congregational campus and the spreading of evangelical monasteries. Both provide a possible solution to the economic realities. Monasteries house workers and foster community. Multi-congregational campuses can offer low cost, high quality overhead. I don't want the reality of economics to slow down the progress of the emergent church.

Gay Marriage - privacy, tolerance, or a moral yes?

Today I watched a news show that discussed the pros and cons of gay marriage. They advocated two positions. Both positions presented included some endorsement of same sex unions. It seems that everyone is shuffling around, trying to find a compromise that will pacify gay couples. The visible voices of our culture are trying to find a solution that does not get entangled in the morality of homosexuality.

Their arguments are strong, especially since we have extended many legal benefits to co-habitating couples. If we are going to let two people just living together have "full benefits" then why not two people of the same sex. It seems so fair.

More than once I have asked why the government is dealing with marriage anyway. Should the government make laws based on moral standards? If they do, then who's morals do we use? Is it right for the government to be telling people what they can do in their private relationships. The rhetoric is all being driven by trying to make a case without appealing to moral standards. We are so afraid of labeling something immoral.

Moral's and values are the very things that form a society. A society without a morality or set of values disintegrates to anarchy or dictatorship. We might totally disagree with a moral standard used to form a society, but non-the-less to remove it is to redesign the society. Morals and values , regardless of their source, are the fabric of culture. It is within the commonly affirmed morals that we find strength and stability of a culture.

The united states of America was formed with certain moral values. Among them are: self-governance, free-speech, free-dissent, the significance of the individual, free expression of religion, power of state governments, free economics, balance of power, rule of law, the insignificance of social classes, personal tolerance and many more. Most of these were specifically articulated in the constitution. Others were left for the legislative branch to form. The law books reflect two centuries of codifying morality.

In our culture we have set up some morals to be higher and to trump other morals. The morality of equality trumped all the laws that had been formed about separation of races. And so it should have. The value of free economy trumps the value of being freedom to make money by establishing monopoly laws. It really is all a mess of morality, one trumping another and contradictory ones living side by side until they come into direct conflict with another. Then a choice has to be made.

Adultery is an example. We value a faithful marriage commitment but at the same time hold a morality of tolerance for those that ignore that commitment. In this case they live side by side. The difference is that one is advanced and one is tolerated. This was the same stance we took with co-habitation. We advanced committed relationships (marriage) but we have tolerated co-habitation. American law was trying to hold all of its morality, not trying to avoid morality.

Our current challenge is gay unions. We already value love and friendship between same sexes. It isn't about the freedom love someone. It is the sexual relationship and having that sexual relationship used as a basis for family that is "out of the norm." The supreme court led us to abandoned laws that restrict same sex sexual behavior. Why? Because we think gay sex is good and right? No, but because we have a value (a moral) of privacy. The moral of privacy trumps the moral of right sexual behavior between consenting adults. In fact that is one of the jobs of the supreme court, to determine which morals trump.

Gay union advocates don't want us to just tolerate their behavior, or let them do what they want in private, they want us to advocate gay unions. They want us to codify the value of homosexual relationships and declare them moral - the good and right ideal.

I am all for tolerating behavior that I disagree with but does not directly effect another person. I can even affirm the privacy of consenting adults. I will advance tolerance and privacy. Upholding these morals. But I also want to advance the morality of the male - female nuclear family. We are not being asked to choose one moral value over another, deciding what trumps what. We are being asked to reshape what we hold as right and good.

Some would argue that we have been doing that for some time. In many ways I would agree that the definition of family has been being pressured to morph for some time. The nuclear family is in shambles in America. There are plenty of problems to make that obvious. Just because the ideal is being abandoned doesn't mean it should not be the ideal. If we remove the ideal what happens when we want to return to the good and right? There has to be a stopping point. There must be a point when we "let others be wrong" but we don't call them right. I believe gay marriage is one of those issue were we say toleration, privacy, but not a re-writing of morality. We will still hold up the ideal.

To do that we have to talk about the issue within the context of morality. Marriage is all about a moral value. What is morally good and right. What moral ideal do we advance, advocate for, endorse, and reward when it comes to relationships? In case you think we should not provide rewards for moral positions. Think again. We do this all the time. We determine what is good and shape systems and benefits for those that follow that system. This reaches as far down as tax breaks for certain businesses or non-profits to extra taxes on vices. Smoking is a good example. We have decided that the ideal is to NOT SMOKE. We are willing to tolerate smokers, but we will not give them financial benefit for choosing this behavior. In fact, just the opposite, we put what could be argued as "unfair" taxes on cigarettes. Why, because we want to discourage the vice and advance our moral position of being smoke free.

Giving marriage status to homosexual unions is not about being fair to other couples that love each other. It is about labeling homosexuality as moral. I do not believe that homosexuality is moral. It is a moral issue. There is no way around that. You need to address the issue as a moral issue. Don't be afraid of thinking about it morally. Don't hesitate to ask is this a morally right.

As I re-read this I heard the challenge coming from myself. "What right do you have to say what is moral?" Good question. According to our culture I have the right to say what is moral because I am a citizen and we have a moral value that says we should be self-governing. I have the same right as the person that wants to claim that homosexual unions are moral. Government by the people and for the people. We say what is moral. We have another moral value that calls for us to freely appeal to our own faith to determine what is moral. The source of our personal conviction is left up to us. These two American morals give us the right to make the determination. How will it play out. By legislative vote and so it must. If we allow the advocates of gay union to use the same tactitics of abortion rights advocates with roe vs wade we will find America locked in a long term battle just as we have seen with the abortion issue.

So turn to your personal convictions and answer the question. Is homosexual sexual unions as the basis for the ideal nuclear family moral? I put forth that it is not and I will say more on that soon. As well, I will respond to a more common compromise I see being considered.