GreatRidge Station

There is an old Charlie Brown cartoon, with Linus’s famous line: I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand. (Original strip, here)
Well, it turns out, that idea was not so far from wrong.  There’s something that I had always suspected, and now there’s good documentation to suggest it’s true–people who love mankind (theoretically), tend to despise people (in practice).

I read pretty broadly, and I’ve been challenged and encouraged by some of the material on Orthodoxy Today. Eastern Orthodox Christianity seems to be something one must be born to, but nevertheless, I find their approach to be both faithful and courageous.
Here’s a link to an article they recently reposted. It is taken, verbatim, from the Wall Street Journal. It is by Paul Johnson, and it’s called The Heartless Lovers of Mankind.

I’ve been pondering this, and frankly, I’m troubled. Hear me out.

Last week, I had a conversation with a friend, who told me about a study that shows that as Christians mature in their faith, they tend to drift away from the church. It’s as though they outgrow it. It seems that, given the current state of evangelical Christianity, we are left with a bunch of churches filled with immature people. That, in itself, is a scary thought.

The other issue–and this might be the big one–is that leaders do not have the ability to lead people to greater things. No room for growth; people move along.

In an age of smallness, we need giants.

Don’t think that this is only a problem for churches. Take a quick straw poll amongst your friends: “Why did you leave your last job?” Often, unless a layoff was involved, the answer will be that “There was no-where for me to go.”

So we have an epidemic of people who have something to offer, and no-place for them to offer it. Churches (sadly) provide little eternal vision, and careers stall out in businesses where there is no clear sense of “where do we go next.”

Here’s my word of wisdom for you.

Church Leaders: If you have mature Christians leaving out of boredom, maybe you are not able to disciple them to full maturity and conformity with Christ. Let this haunt you.

Business Leaders: If you have good workers leaving because there is no opportunity for advancement, you are certainly missing out on opportunities to grow, improve, and innovate.

There are exceptions to these axioms, of course, but they are exceptions. People need the opportunity to grow and to contribute at ever-increasing levels. In short, they need to be able to serve better and more deeply out of the rich depths of a) God’s grace, b) their abilities, c) their interests, d) their experience, and e) within their community, whether that is their work team, a bunch of volunteers, or a ministry setting at church.

Never give yourself so much slack that you say “that’s just the way things are.” If they are that way, do something about it. After all, you are ultimately accountable for the things that are entrusted to you.

Mark 8:22-25 (ESV) — And they came to Bethsaida. And some people brought to him a blind man and begged him to touch him. And he [Jesus] took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Do you see anything?” And he looked up and said, “I see men, but they look like trees, walking.” Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. And he sent him to his home, saying, “Do not even enter the village.”

Until a few years ago, this was a perplexing verse, and it made no sense until we had the medical technology to restore someone’s sight. This verse demonstrates what we learned recently: There is more to seeing that getting the eyes to work. There is complex brain training (Or as Dr. Les Alsterlund would put it–vision therapy) that has to happen before people can make sense of what they see. This phenomenon is recorded in scripture, but it has only been in the last 20 years that we figured out what Jesus was talking about.