The Devil’s Gauntlet by Tullian Tchividjian from New City Church Blog

Here's a great blog that was forwarded to me by Ben Euler...I think it is very interesting in light of the conversation raised by Jeff Klein, in many of our Bible classes, and in the evangelical community today concerning the church's role in our culture and bringing redemption to people's lives...

John Piper once said, when asked what books have influenced him the most, “Before I answer that question, let me make one important observation: books don’t change people; sentences do.” Well, as much of a book lover as I am, I totally agree with Piper.

There have been a number of sentences that God has used in my life to mold and shape the way I think about Him, me, and this world we live in. One of those key sentences come from a little known booklet entitled The Devil’s Gauntlet, by Os Guinness (you’d be thanking me until Jesus came back if you bought it and read it).

On the last page he sums up the necessary strategy that the church must employ if we are ever going to faithfully engage our culture for the glory of God. He says, “The ultimate factor in the church’s engagement with society is the church’s engagement with God.”

It is this sentence which led me to write this years later for a book entitled The Younger Evangelicals, by Robert Webber:

I was blessed to grow up in a solid Christian home. The middle of seven children (4 brothers and 2 sisters), I was raised in an environment where authentic faith was lived out before my very eyes. I have always known who God is and I have always known that He sent His Son to die on a cross for sinners like me. As far back as I can trace, strong Christian conviction and devotion to Jesus Christ have been defining marks of my family heritage. My dad, who was born and reared in Switzerland, is a well-known and respected psychologist who has always put his family before anybody or anything. My mom, the eldest daughter of Billy and Ruth Graham, is an award-winning author and speaker whose commitment to discipling her children surpassed any other competing ambition. Growing up, my other brothers and sisters walked the straight and narrow, for the most part, rarely giving my parents any real trouble. Then there was me… different story!

It’s certainly not an excuse, but I found it difficult growing up as a middle child. At times I was bunched with the “older ones”, and at other times I was bunched with the “younger ones”. I ended up, it seemed, bearing the responsibilities of both and enjoying the privileges of neither. I wasn’t sure where I fit in (still don’t at times), and I wanted to be heard, to be distinct. But instead of “casting all of my anxiety on Him”, I turned to the world. At sixteen I dropped out of high school, was kicked out of my house (actually escorted off of our property by the police), and began living in a manner I thought would satisfy. I craved freedom more than anything. So, committing myself to a lifestyle with “no boundaries”, I became a promiscuous, drug-using, club-hopper living in South Florida, who pursued pleasure harder than most. It wasn’t, however, until after I had lived this way for six years that I began to realize my so-called freedom had made me a slave to desires and habits that were quickly destroying me. I had been seeking satisfaction so vigorously that I was unconscious of just how unsatisfied I had become. I was hungrier for meaning at 21 than I had been as a teenager. I found that while the modern world offers so much “this side of the ceiling”, it could not offer me what I longed for the most, namely, purpose. The world had not satisfied me the way it had promised, the way I had anticipated. The world’s message and the world’s methods had hung me out to dry. I hungered desperately for something, Someone, “out of this world.” Broken and longing for something transcendent, I began going back to church with my parents.

I was very thankful that I walked into a church that was different : A church where the distinctiveness of God was sensed immediately. In the music, in the message, and in the mingling afterward, it was clear that God was the guest of honor there, not I. I had suffered the consequences of the modern world’s emphasis on the individual, and I was unbelievably refreshed to discover a place that took the focus off me and put it on Him. He was the one being “lifted up for all men to see”, not the pastor or the musicians. He was the difference I longed for, not some carefully orchestrated performance that, believe me, I would have been able to see right through. He was not communicated in the distasteful ways, whether stylistically or otherwise, of which I had grown weary. Whether or not I understood everything the preacher said that morning didn’t matter. I was the recipient of something more powerful, more dynamic, more jolting, than a “user-friendly” service with its “seeker-sensitive” sermon. I was observing the people of God honoring God as God, and I was drawn in by the glorious mystery of it all. I was being evangelized, not by a man-centered show, but by a God-centered atmosphere. I was experiencing what Dr. Ed Clowney calls “Doxological Evangelism”. It was, quite literally, out of this world!

“The world”, says Richard John Neuhaus, “desperately needs the Church to be the Church”, not to do church differently. The difference that people are longing for, in other words, is a difference in being, not doing. So while many church “strategists” are locating reformation and revival in structural renovation, we must remember that the deepest needs of the Church today are spiritual, not structural. And yet, we are told that the Church’s cultural relevance depends ultimately on its ability to keep up with the changing structures, on its ability to do church differently.

I have good news for all of us who are becoming weary of this type of pressure: We don’t have to keep up the way we think we do; the world doesn’t want us to! So how do we compete? We don’t! We must come to see that God has established His Church as an “alternative society”, not to compete with this world, but rather to offer a home to those who realize the homelessness of life in this world without Him. It is the calling and the privilege of the Church to be “against the world for the world”. We should be encouraged and challenged by the historical reminder that the Church has always served the world best when it has been most counter cultural, most distinctively different from the world.

My fear, however, is that the modern church’s emphasis on “structural renovation” and “doing church”, is inadvertently communicating to our culture that we have nothing unique to offer them, nothing that is deeply spiritual and profoundly otherworldly. And as a result, they are looking elsewhere. We are so busy emphasizing the modern notion of doing (techniques, methods, programs, marketing strategies, etc.), that we are missing the opportunity to be who we are called to be. “Bigger is better and newer is truer” seems to be the banner under which church-growth conferences all over the country are organized and advertised. We have mastered the program, while eclipsing altogether the Master Himself. Our focus on doing church has certainly overshadowed the biblical focus of being church, and this comes at a time when our culture is growing weary of slick production, while growing hungry for authentic presence. They do not want entertainment from the Church; they want engagement by the Church: engagement with historical and cultural solidity that facilitates meaningful interaction with transcendent reality. It is ironic that just when our culture is getting vertical, the Church is spending most of its time and energy getting horizontal. Just when our culture is yearning for difference from the world, the Church is looking for creative ways to develop similarities to the world. Just when our culture is looking to the past, the Church is pronouncing the “irrelevance” of the past.

In order for the Church to establish its voice in our postmodern culture we must remember who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. We must avoid the modern tendency towards “chronological snobbery”, believing that our time is the most important time while expressing little regard for history, tradition, and all those who have gone before us. We must remember that we are the people of the future, formed by the past, and living in the present. We must remember that our citizenship lies in “the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God”, not man. We must remember that while “contemporary only” people operate with their heads fixed frontwards, never looking over their shoulder at the stock from which they have come, and “traditional only” people operate with their heads on backwards, romanticizing about the past and always wanting to go back, the Church, in contrast from both extremes, is called upon to be a people with swiveling heads: learning from the past, living in the present, and looking to the future. We must remember that it is our unique privilege and responsibility to remind our culture that this world is not all there is, and that they are not left to the resources of this world to satisfy their otherworldly longings. For, as Lauren Winner notes, “[People today] are not so much wary of institutions as they are wary of institutions that don’t do what they’re supposed to do.”

As the Church, we are supposed to provide this world with that transcendent difference they long for because only the Christian Gospel offers a true spirituality, an otherworldliness, that is grounded in reality and history. It is only our story, the Christian story, that fuses past, present, and future with meaning from above and beyond, and we are supposed to tell it.

The old saying that we should “not be so heavenly-minded that we are of no earthly good” is true, as far as it goes. But it seems that in the modern world our earthly good depends on our heavenly-mindedness. In our present cultural climate, it becomes necessary for the Church to remember the words of C.S. Lewis who maintained that Christians who “did the most for the present world were precisely those who thought the most of the next” . Or as John Seel has put it, “The timeless is finally that which is most relevant, and we dare not forget this fact in our pursuit of relevance”. All good and wise reminders that we have been entrusted with a timeless truth that can transform any weary culture and open their eyes to a world beyond their own: the story of a simple Jew who made a difference because He was different.