My son Dylan and I are reading through David Macaulay's fantastic series of books about buildings. We've read about the construction of castles, pyramids, and cities, and right now we're reading Cathedral.

The timing is interesting, given that our church is in the middle of fund-raising for a new facility. The morality of such construction projects is increasingly questioned by those who cite the poverty of the developing world, and the massive needs around us here at home. I find myself reading Macaulay's book and looking at his drawings through the lens of my own struggles with our project.

Why do some buildings strike me as self-indulgent and offensive, while others impress me with a message?

In the case of the medieval cathedrals, I can't help reacting to the abuses that financed them, like the display of relics and the sale of indulgences. I also react to the throne-and-altar alliances that the cathedrals incarnated: the church sanctified the kings of this world and their wars. History rightly pours scorn on these aspects of cathedrals, and highlights the fact that on Sundays most of them are now empty.

As I've watched contemporary building programs both at a distance and up close, I notice that a project's legacy is often soured by manipulative funding campaigns, or by designs that are patently self-serving. Such buildings become symbols of corruption rather than places for fostering godliness.

I recall a visit to the Crystal Cathedral in southern California years ago. Parts of the campus were beautiful. But the famous building itself was bizarre. Wherever I went around the exterior, I saw myself in a massive mirror. When I went inside, I found that all the seats faced straight ahead, not toward the pulpit, so that it was far more pleasing to watch the massive TV screens than to look at the actual preacher.

In fact, I was in a space built for cameras, for viewership rather than worship. In such places, I don't begrudge the cost so much as the message.

Consider some ways in which the medieval cathedrals transcended their often vainglorious origins:

1. The cathedrals were direct expressions of the faith of common people.

Bishops didn't build cathedrals; craftsmen did. Whole lifetimes would be spent cutting stones, carving ornaments, blowing glass, climbing scaffolding. The craftsmen remain anonymous, individual contributors to a vast conception meant to evoke the created order. That kind of devotion is worth something. It is not to be sneered at. The level of skill these laborers had is stunning even in the pages of a book for children.

2. The cathedrals united generations.

The people who dug the foundations were dead long before the cathedral was consecrated. In these projects there was a sense of continuity, of one generation receiving a charge from another, carrying on the work, and passing the charge on to their children.

This aspect of cathedral-building in a community's life is no longer seen as valuable or even desirable, a fact that speaks of a deeper corruption in us than mere materialism. In a word, it indicates decadence.

3. The cathedrals have a present-day impact on a person's soul.

They say something. They speak to even the most unlearned child. When you walk around the outside of a cathedral, it doesn't flash back your own image, but a vision of another world. When you go inside, it doesn't say, "Look at the jumbo-tron." It says, "Look up!"

The aspersions cast on buildings can also be cast on all the arts. If it is a selfish luxury to make buildings with a message, then it is also selfish to make songs, paintings, photographs, poems, and novels. All of the arts require time, devotion, and money. But we miss the balm of God-given creativity when we lower all of life to the utilitarian bottom-line.

Our building in Orland will not rise above commercial-grade design and construction, which saddens me. But I also know that our design is flexible. We can humanize it by the arts we can afford, and we will. Above all, we will have worship space that encourages participation, not viewership. We'll have large spaces for many purposes, but also very small spaces set aside for one-on-one counseling and prayer.

The cathedrals were only possible because a strong culture knew what it wanted to say and how to say it. While our building will never be an artistic marvel, it will be a clear message.

By Matthew Raley As the Orland Evangelical Free Church raises funds for a new facility, I am in charge of communicating the vision. I have had many struggles with the fundraising process, most of them in the small hours of the morning.

Fundraisers, as a rule, shouldn't confess their doubts, but should project certitude. This building is God's will. They should not admit that the future holds uncertainties, or wonder aloud about communication ethics.

Furthermore, in our case, response to the vision for ministry that we've articulated has been positive. In many cases, passionately so. We're getting this response because the ministries that will be advanced by a new building are the fruit of decades of prayerful work by many, many believers in this region.

Why bother confessing pastoral struggles when the laws of fund raising forbid it and when support for the project is already strong?

Simply put, I don't feel that people should accept my certainties until they've heard my struggles. Here is one: how to show leadership when so many people are used to salesmanship.

There are similarities between the two.

Both salesmen and leaders have to present a strong case for their proposals. They have to show passion, and they have to transfer that passion to others through articulate presentations. In the final analysis, they have to move people.

But there is a crucial difference, one that goes to the heart of what a pastor is.

A salesman aims his message at people's existing priorities. The customer wants a red car. She likes red. She wants to see the red cars the salesman has. The salesman who walks her over to a yellow car and spends five minutes extolling the virtues of yellow is an idiot.

If I'm a salesman-pastor, my goal is to sell the new building. I speak to the most immediate, tangible priorities the people have, and show that the building will scratch their itch. Y'all want larger space, better lighting, no more leaks? Have we got the plan for you!

But a leader aims his message at what people's priorities must become.

The people in any church have narrow priorities. Some are devoted to their families, but not engaged with the community. Others are passionate about learning the Bible, but need to put that learning into practice. For most, the weekly grind of life forms horizons that are too near, and they need to see how the Kingdom of God calls them further.

So, if I'm a leader-pastor, my goal is to draw people out of their narrow corners to embrace new priorities. I show how scripture calls us all to personal growth, and how it calls us to be part of corporate experiences of God's power. For a leader, the building is a secondary product of this kind of spiritual growth -- an important indicator of whether something real has happened, but only an indicator.

We are living in a time of salesmanship, not leadership. Many of those who are supposed to lead -- pastors and politicians all the way to artists and intellectuals -- have given up their callings and opted for the easier course of selling.

We are now smaller, uglier, and more cynical. We expect communication to be manipulative.

But in the struggle to communicate I have two certainties.

First, the believers in Orland are constantly striving to enlarge their Kingdom priorities. They have given more time, money, and prayer to their ministries every year. They are seeking training, giving counseling, crossing generational and cultural lines to build each other up.

I am certain they will see the need for larger kingdom priorities not as manipulation, but as encouragement. I return to this confidence as a way of keeping my tone with Christ's people respectful.

Second, I am certain that the Lord will notice his people changing their priorities, and that he will provide the facilities we need -- in the time and the manner of his choosing. We will see God move -- the greatest sight of all.

To sell a mere building would be to settle for considerably less.

My sermon on Sunday explored the connection between ignorance of God and unbelief. When God's people don't know his history, his promises, and the worldview he instantiates in the Bible, they cannot have confidence in him. In their worship, God becomes a mystery guest. The broad ignorance of American evangelicals about the faith they claim is well-documented. But I have many questions. Specifically, what kind of ignorance are we facing? In order to have abiding faith in God, what should evangelicals learn? And how?

Many have decried evangelicals' biblical illiteracy, which I have seen all too often. Once, at a banquet where I'd been invited to speak, I was seated next to a woman who'd been highly involved at the host church. She told me about a T.V. movie she had seen: a young man in olden times was sold into slavery by his own brothers, was taken to a foreign country, even wound up in prison, but eventually became the nation's ruler. The movie was really exciting, she said, adding brightly, "And it was based on a true story!"

There is, beyond this, a lack of doctrinal knowledge. People no longer learn a system of teaching about the faith, a biblically derived intellectual framework. Some even attack doctrine as a hindrance to faith.

Further, people lack a knowledge of devotional disciplines, which the spiritual formation movement now aims to teach. Further yet, there is a broad decline in practical family skills like parenting, budgeting, and communication -- skills that used to be inherited but now have to be taught.

All these species of ignorance populate evangelical pews. Churches are filled with men and women who are confident socially -- who smile and laugh with their friends, and who are eager to be involved in activities. Many of the people have confident political views as well. But let God become the sole focus of conversation, and their eyes show a certain retreat, a vulnerability and wariness.

So, what are we dealing with?

First, we are oppressed not such much by individual ignorance as by cultural ignorance. Regardless of what individuals may or may not know, communities don't know enough. People do not have a large enough fund of shared knowledge.

Cultural knowledge is, as the rhyming preachers say, caught not taught. It is gained in the rhythms of a way of life. A person learns the story of Joseph deeply -- learns Joseph's traumas, learns his importance, learns the Lord's providence in his life -- not because she hears about him in a class, but because in her church Joseph is still alive. He is a constant reference point, an icon of God's faithfulness in human suffering. Joseph is shared.

Cultural knowledge is not fully conscious. The bulk of it is prejudicial. It is not theoretical or abstract, but instantiated. It is not even coherent, in the sense that the community has fully untangled all its paradoxes. Cultural knowledge is gut-level.

Which leads to a second point: evangelical ignorance is not merely a dearth of facts but of emotion. Evangelicals do not recognize the significance of the Bible, of doctrine, of devotional and practical godliness -- recognize the significance at gut-level. Spiritual realities leave them unmoved.

When people do not have shared knowledge, they do not feel deeply enough.

A Christian way of life in America has been lost. Its rhythms of community are loose, and its shared symbols are neglected or sentimentalized. For a long time now, evangelicalism has been a parasite on consumerism, having little vitality or nourishment on its own. This is why evangelicals become wary when they're confronted with God himself. They do not share him; they share worldliness.

Pastors have been frantically trying to replace cultural knowledge with mere training. Give the people more facts, more tools, more tips.

In particular, pastors have been trying to make applications of biblical knowledge using generalizations. Joseph's story isn't "practical enough" as Genesis narrates it. In order to become "practical," the man Joseph has to be atomized into a series of "principles" that can be "applied" to "real situations in your life." So, keep a good attitude in hardship. Always do your best, whether you're in prison or in power. Just like Joseph in olden times. See ya next week.

This training approach is not necessarily wrong. But it won't educate the kind of ignorance we face: it won't build up a community's shared knowledge. It won't train people's guts.

If evangelicals are going to believe God deeply again, the preacher will need to address his own ignorance. He will need to explore how the Bible instantiates truth artistically -- through poems, narratives, and, yes, sermons. He will need to find how he can instantiate the same truth, bringing the Bible's instances to life with such specificity and detail that no one can ignore the implications. He will need to recover a sense of drama with God as the central character, not human beings.

In other words, evangelical ignorance results from the emotional detachment of evangelical preachers.

Early in 2007 I went to a writers conference in Colorado Springs, the home base of Ted Haggard. Haggard was supposed to have been a headliner at the conference, but a couple months prior he had become a headliner in a less positive way: he had resigned from his megachurch and from the presidency of the National Association of Evangelicals because of drug use and sexual immorality. Though he was not speaking at the conference, he haunted it.

At most meals, conversation discovered members of New Life, where he had been pastor, and gingerly probed them, finding them in various stages of anger and sorrow -- and also defensiveness. One man of Calvinistic views and Socratic habits, whose method I had the misfortune to witness over dinner, peered at a New Lifer through heavy glasses and questioned whether Pentecostalism had been the real cause of Haggard's fall.

The hardy soul under interrogation insisted New Life was going to be just fine.

In this buzz, I happened to be pitching a novel about pastoral deceit (since published as Fallen). I took it to a mentor for some feedback, an editor who lives in Colorado Springs, and after reading the first couple of pages he mused about the lightning chain of people he had witnessed saying to each other on the day Haggard fell, "Have you heard about Ted?"

Colorado Springs had been haunted for months.

It is not free yet. Two weeks ago, an article reported that Haggard was back, not at New Life, but at a church in Illinois. What are we to think about his return to preaching? The piece sampled many reactions, three of which made me realize something about the nature of unbelief among Christians.

Start with H.B. London of Focus on the Family -- a faithful man who is devoted to restoring fallen pastors, and who had been helping with Haggard's restoration. The article summarizes his view: "a return to vocational ministry in less than four or five years would be dangerous." Then London is quoted as saying, "To sit on the sidelines for a person with [Haggard's] personality and gifting is probably like being paralyzed. If Mr. Haggard and others like him feel like they have a call from God, they rationalize that their behavior does not change that call."

That kind of personality and gifting. He's wired to lead. You can see why he rationalizes his return, but . . . it's dangerous.

A negative assessment majoring on compassion. London's emphasis probably isn't reflected accurately by the article, but I wonder why the nod toward Haggard's charisma and talent is needed at all, and why his return would be dangerous rather than completely unjustified.

The statements seem tempered. What I think ought to be sharp edges of principled reasoning are blunted. As reported, they are weak.

A second reaction comes from Leo Godzich, who has met with Haggard weekly as part of the restoration process. "If all men are honest," he says, "all men are liars and deceivers. Once someone is gifted and called, that is something they generally cannot escape. . . . True redemption occurs when someone is fulfilling a destiny and purpose in their life."

Those sentences almost made me blow out a swig of coffee.

1. The doctrine of moral equivalence: all men are Haggard. Hit the gong. Not all men have systematically deceived their wives, their children, their associates, their subordinates, their boards, their constituents, and the public at large in order to cover up their behavior.

2. The notion of calling: Haggard "cannot escape" his "destiny." Get the hook and yank Godzich offstage. There's a substantial difference between "not escaping" and renewed self-promotion.

3. The new salvation: "true redemption" as fulfilling your purpose. It's trapdoor time for Leo. Down to the dungeon. True redemption is actually the forgiveness of sin, not the fulfillment of a calling that is very much in question.

This is the perversion of principles to fit a man.

A third reaction comes from the Illinois pastor who invited Haggard to preach. Chris Byrd says, "I had confidence his heart was solid, his theology is sound and the message he's always brought to the body of Christ would come forth." By what standard was Byrd confident that Haggard's heart was solid?Why should I be confident Haggard's theology is sound? On Byrd's say-so?

This is the substitution of pious avowals for discernment, again because of partiality to a man.

I constantly encounter people whose faith in Christ is in crisis. The reason is always the same: their relationships are entangled in unconfessed, unrepented sin. Sometimes the sin is their own; often it belongs to others. In order to salvage these relationships, they want to give and receive compassion. They want to have the space to change, and they want to give that space to others.

They are dancing a minuet of mercy with their partners. To keep the dance going, they have to keep Christ from cutting in. They have to redefine sin, broaden righteousness, and avoid judgment. But after years of giving and receiving vague compassion, they have relationships haunted by destruction. And when their rationalizations no longer give comfort, they want Christ to wave his magic wand and do a "work of transformation" -- which he won't do on such terms.

This is an anatomy of unbelief today.

In all likelihood, many New Lifers from that haunted 2007 conference have learned something about true redemption -- that sin, righteousness, and judgment will not be redefined by partiality, and that forgiveness is a sharp tool for healing.

My prayer is that they've gained a gospel worth believing.

Sermon audio (October 5, 2008): Jesus Invades Your Experience The other day, I was riding with our old Dutch dairyman Pete in his massive red truck. Over the grinding of the diesel engine, we talked about today's young men, and Pete observed that they seem to take years to figure out who they are, and what they should be doing with their lives. "I see it over and over, even in good families. There's something missing in these guys."

His comment made me think of my three-year-old son Malcolm, a tough, thick-set package of nuclear energy. He knows what he wants and he lunges for it. He had wanted, for instance, a ride in Pete's red truck, thinking it was a fire engine, and he cried angry tears on my porch when we left. I wondered why our society dissipates boys' drive and potency, and what I need to do to ensure that Malcolm keeps a healthy sense of self and grows up strong.

The woes of boys are getting increasing comment these days, but the problem of the formless, unmotivated, needy self is everywhere. Many people seem to lack solid identities, to be unable to form healthy relationships, seem to drift from one thing to the next like so much channel-surfing through life.

In this context, a pastor's temptation is moralism. Every month or so, after surveying someone's personal wreckage, I think, "I really need to do a series on time management," or, "I've got to preach on financial priorities." I wonder whether I give enough "practical application," telling people what's what.

If moralism is a temptation as a pastor, it is doubly so as a father. It is enticing to think that I can build up my son's identity through his submission to my authority.

Moralistic preaching and parenting tries to rebuild crumbling boundaries using precepts. Thou shalt and Thou shalt not. If you allow entertainment to suck your time, then of course there won't be enough hours in the day for your responsibilities. Thou shalt turn off the T.V. If you blow your money on toys, restaurant food, and mortgage-backed securities, then of course you won't have a financial chair when the music stops. Thou shalt not go into debt.

But moralism has been the downfall of contemporary Christianity. The precepts of godly wisdom nurture life in those who already have life; but among the legions who do not, the Get a clue! method of preaching doesn't edify. The "practical applications" of moralism merely compound people's guilt.

Moralism has been the downfall of Christianity because it is not the gospel.

For the needy contemporary self, the only hope is God-focused individuality, the unique expression of God's glory in a reborn personality. As we are seeing in our series on the man born blind in John 9, Jesus himself has to invade a person's life, not merely to reset what a person does, but who a person is.

Consider an observation: Human beings cannot define themselves, but are only defined in relationship.

There are two common myths about the self. One is that you can be true to some wisdom or potential inside your personality, wisdom defined by you alone -- the Oprah storyline. The other is that you can improve yourself, work hard, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps -- the moralistic storyline. The two myths are equivalent in the sense that they both portray individuals having potential on their own.

Malcolm is growing up in a society that preaches these myths, and that requires him to invent himself according to one or the other, and sometimes both.

The reality is, Malcolm doesn't have any sense of self autonomously. His definition of who he is comes from his relationships -- and it always will. He learns about himself through the process of relating to me, to his mom, to his grandparents, to other adults in the community like Pete. His self-awareness as an adult will grow in the context of interaction. He defines himself in relationship.

If I surrender to the temptation of moralism, then I will raise Malcolm using precepts. I will portray Jesus as the person with high standards, who is forgiving of Malcolm's faults, but who is all too frequently "disappointed." Malcolm's relationship to this Jesus will teach him a sense of self that is sickened by failure.

This is not the Jesus of John 9, who heals the blind.

Jesus is Malcolm's creator, and designed Malcolm to display the works of God. All of Malcolm's traits have the potential to make God's glory visible. Because Malcolm has this potential, Jesus is invading his experiences. Jesus is not waiting for an invitation. Having paid for sin, and bringing new life with him, Jesus is able to slather Malcolm's eyes with mud and give him spiritual sight. As Malcolm is defined more and more by his interactions with Jesus, even Malcolm's limitations and faults will become visible marks of divine love.

The gospel calls for a new individuality in Christ, a uniqueness forged by loving relationship. The gospel resets who people are. I don't know if the passive, disappointed Jesus who is just waiting for people to be interested in him is the sole cause of today's unformed, unmotivated, needy self. There may be more causes than Christian moralism.

But I do know that what's missing from people today is Jesus himself.

For many Christians, individualism has become distasteful. The phrases American individualism or rugged individualism do not carry positive connotations anymore. The team player is now the epitome of godliness in churches -- the guy who doesn't make trouble. The person who goes it alone, who isn't swayed by majority opinion, who makes his or her own decisions based on inner-directed priorities is a difficult person, someone who needs to be teachable.

Which is to say, malleable.

When I was in seminary, individualism was the cultural trait blamed for the breakdown of community in local churches. People were just too independent. They didn't realize how much they needed each other.

I see similar themes among emergents, many of whom are searching for corporate identities to restore a sense of togetherness, and to discover a mission that is larger than self. For them, individualism is the beating heart of the consumer society, in which people take, use, and throw away without regard for their responsibilities.

I also hear a distaste for individualism among reformed evangelicals, who criticize a therapeutic gospel they see as too centered on the first-person singular. Self-esteem, the morphing of sin into addiction, the rationalizing of personal failings, they say, all come from a sick culture of self-love.

All of these perspectives target real problems. But they finger the wrong culprit.

In John 9, we get an extended look at a man whom Jesus heals of blindness. In almost every respect, this man is helpless: physically incapable of sight, economically destitute, socially outcast. Yet, after he is healed, we discover that he has one quality that raises him above the civil and religious rulers. He is able to stand alone. In the story, he will not yield to any form of pressure -- not to intimidation by his neighbors, nor to the status of the Pharisees, nor to the lack of support from his frightened parents, nor even to the formal punishment of excommunication.

In a new series of sermons, we will explore how Christ used this man's individuality to glorify the Father. In the process, we'll discover how individuality results from the unique way a person comes to identify with Jesus.

I believe one of the most important qualities a Christian can exhibit is uniqueness. Put another way, the greatest potential witness for the power of Christ is a Christian who refuses to conform, who does not give in to fear of what other people think. Like the man born blind, the Christian who can stand alone has the opportunity to reflect Christ's glory through a singular gem.

Churches should be nurturing individualism of this kind. It is characterized by a discerning conscience, a gut-level attachment to Christ and his power, and a willingness to stick out -- all qualities that we will unpack in this series.

To be sure, every Christian is called to the relational graces of love. The restraint of self in the interests of others is at the heart of Christian community. Those who practice self-indulgence in the name of individuality are missing the deep identification with Christ they should exhibit in their thoughts and actions.

But love is not the sum of people-pleasing flatteries.

The real culprit behind the breakdown of community, the loss of shared mission, and the growth of the self-esteem gospel is not individuality but consumerism.

The consumer measures goodness by how much can be bought for the lowest price. The Christian individualist measures goodness by how high a price Christ paid for him. The bottom line for the consumer is, "What's in it for me?" The bottom line for the Christian individualist is, "What's in it through me for Christ?" To find the safe bet, the wary consumer looks at what the majority does, but the Christian individualist looks only at what Christ does -- and sees no risk.

I don't think consumerism is individualistic at all. Consumerism is deeply conformist. If the bottom line is what's in it for me, then my assets had better be safe. And the safest thing is to be with the herd. Though we can't escape the refrain, "Be true to yourself," we see masses of people who dress the same, talk the same, listen to the same music, and drive the same cars.

For the consumer, the self to which he must be true is his demographic.

In this new series, then, we will explore the paradox that strong, healthy individuality is the expression of a life submitted to loving Christ. And I think we'll also stumble onto a greater paradox -- that strong individuality in Christ is the foundation for strong togetherness.

Sermon audio: Do Evangelicals Portray Jesus Accurately? This question from the community invites me to do what some believe I do best: criticize my own subculture. Of course, I will answer, "Evangelicals often do not portray Jesus accurately." And, of course, I will try to specify which evangelical qualities are misleading. By merely asking this question, someone has presumed a negative answer.

There is a larger issue. What attitude should we have toward the deepening problems of evangelical churches?

The criticisms from emergents that American evangelicals are Christianized consumers, that they lack authentic community, that their worship is stilted, and that they are not on the side of the poor all have merit. The doctrinal criticisms from the reformed movement (MacArthur, Piper, et al.) rightly indict the lack of biblical integrity among many evangelicals. Even the criticisms that the church growth movement has made over the past thirty years -- that churches are not reaching non-Christians -- are accurate. (The criticisms just happen to be accurate of the church growth movement itself, as well.)

Put all of these criticisms together, and the picture is dire. A movement that is not growing, not intellectually coherent, and not engaged with other cultures is a movement near death.

James Stockdale, one of the most famous American POWs in North Vietnam, has been used as an example of how to survive dire situations by business author Jim Collins. (The book is Good To Great.) What kind of man did not survive the POW experience? Stockdale said the optimist, the man who was sure he'd be home by Christmas, but whose steadily retreating target dates for release were never kept. The positive thinkers died.

The survivors, said Stockdale, had two things. They had faith that they would survive, and discipline to confront the brutal facts of their environment. Collins tagged this the "Stockdale paradox," the irony that unstinting honesty about dire situations can actually bolster the faith one needs to survive.

I want to see evangelicals eschew optimism about their predicament.

Let's take, as an example, their recent explosion of support for Gov. Sarah Palin. Personally, I like her. She gives a great speech. I admire her decision not to abort her baby boy, and I respect the way she and her husband have handled the appalling media abuse of their 17-year-old daughter. I think the clash of the classes her nomination has provoked is good old-fashioned political fun.

But the adulation of her by evangelicals is in one important respect delusional. She will not change Washington from the vice president's mansion -- populists to the contrary. She will not change American culture. She will not even change the culture of evangelical churches -- though she reflects and represents them well. Her presence on the national stage simply does not address the spiritual issues we face.

We won't be freed from the dire evangelical crisis by Christmas.

A brutal honesty about our future says:

1. Our compromise with America's consumer society has been a disaster. Consumerism will have to be rooted out of our churches soul by soul.
2. Our transformation of churches into entertainment platforms has been a disaster. Devout worship of the living God will have to be rediscovered soul by soul.
3. Our financial selfishness will have to be corrected by the good hand of God soul by soul, until we are once again the people who stand with the poor.
4. Our doctrinal ignorance and folly has turned our brains to mud. Knowledge of the truth will have to be taught soul by soul.
5. Our fear of the cultures around us, and our refusal to interact meaningfully with them -- that is, interact beyond marketing ploys -- has left us unable to articulate the gospel in our own time. Soul by soul, we will have to rebuild a vigorous way of life and witness in hostile territory.

I believe that, once we are honest about these things, we will have ground for a strong faith that Christianity will survive and prosper in the future. The moment we look at these five realities, harsh though they are, we realize that the tool for teaching soul by soul is everywhere in this country: the local church. The body of Christ in its many meetings has been doing this job for centuries. We just need to start doing the job again.

Our ultimate ground for faith is our Lord and his plan. As we follow him afresh, Jesus is well able to portray himself accurately in his churches.

Sermon audio: Should Faith Influence Politics? I once tried to be a speechwriter for a gubernatorial candidate in Oregon.

The former five-term congressman was fighting to win the Republican nomination, and his staff thought he needed help in the English language department. He began speeches by saying, "You all know I'm a straight shooter. So what you hear tonight is coming straight from the shoulder and straight from the heart." His researcher winced every time she heard it.

Since I was a recent graduate of the congressman's alma mater, someone recommended me to the campaign manager as a speechwriter. So, by and by, I showed up at the headquarters wearing chalk stripes and carrying a portfolio of political stuff I'd written, and I got the volunteer position.

At one point during the interview, the manager left me sitting alone in her cubicle. I happened to look up, and was startled to see the congressman, his hand in the trouser pocket of his Brooks Brothers suit, chewing gum and staring at me without any intention of saying hello.

He didn't want a speechwriter.

The first meeting I attended was with the congressman, the manager, and the researcher. The goal was to produce an op-ed about the release of a murderer because, that year, the crime issue was a good bet for mobilizing voters. But we got stuck on the first line. "The first line," said the congressman, "has to be, 'You've got to be kidding!'"

Silence. The researcher offered, "We could start by stating what we're objecting to." The manager nodded.

"No. Just, 'You've got to be kidding!'"

The meeting lasted all of ten minutes. He didn't want to be told what to say.

There were road trips. Several of us would pile into a Lincoln and roar down the I-5 at 90 mph, the radar detector blinking on the dashboard. One would think it was an ideal time to get to know the man whose voice I was supposed to capture in writing. But the candidate took numerous calls, chatted with the driver, and read position papers. I had very pleasant conversations with his wife -- number three, very smart.

I watched and listened to the congressman for a day, and returned a week later with a draft. I handed the speech to him, the manager smiling, and without so much as a glance, he handed it to the driver. "I won't be using it today." And we were off again.

But a few miles up the freeway, the phone rang. It was the manager. She asked the congressman if he was on the speaker phone, which he was. So he switched to the hand-held. "Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah." Click. He reached into the pile of papers his driver had put in the car and read through my speech.

"It's good. Yeah. I like it. Some good lines in there."

But he went back to "straight from the shoulder and straight from the heart."

Evangelicals have savored their few moments of influencing politics. But they haven't achieved the cultural change they were hoping for. The country hasn't turned to Christ. Families are not measurably stronger because of any legislation passed. The main evangelical successes have been in opposition to gay marriage and abortion, not in advancing a vision for the country.

The lack of progress boils down to resources.

In politics, you have to influence a five-term congressman. You have to be big enough, mobilizing a large enough constituency or having the money to lobby him. Or, you have to have access to the person who influences how much funding goes to his district. Or, you have to have helped elect him in the first place.

Fundamentally, he must want to listen to you. And even that is not enough. He can think of many reasons to listen to a lot of other people too.

Evangelicals have committed vast resources -- not just financially, but in terms of grass roots organization, media time, and depth of experience -- to influencing five-term congressmen. They have been successful at becoming big. But now they are experiencing again how hard it is to move a nation from the top.

What would have happened if, for the last twenty years, they had committed the same resources to making disciples for Christ? Imagine the impact on American culture if local churches had been successful at saving marriages, nurturing new generations of Christians, deepening people's knowledge of the Bible, and developing their capacity to pray. Imagine the impact if local churches had been as passionate about God's priorities as they've been about ballot initiatives.

When confronted with what it really costs to make disciples, most evangelicals for the past twenty years have said the same thing. "We don't have the resources. We don't have the time, the money, or the patience. We can barely make disciples of our own kids."

The sad reality of these two decades is that political parties have been able to attract evangelical resources, but the cause of making disciples has not. We will talk about the political implications of this reality on Sunday morning.

My candidate for governor got the nomination, but went down in flames that November. My effort to influence him didn't even survive the primaries. He fired the campaign manager.

There is one thing that will make a five-term congressman want to listen. A cultural transformation in his district. The question is, how much do evangelicals really want to influence politics? Are they willing to move a nation from the bottom?

Sermon audio: Should a Christian Question Authority? I'll tell you about the time I got sent away for counseling.

When I matriculated at Willamette University in 1989, freshlings were herded through a course on world views. That year, the powers assigned readings from Victorian England -- Mill, Dickens, Marx, et al. -- and we were supposed to discuss them seminar-style. This was intended as a perspective-softener. We would get points of view from other times, other social strata, and other students, and we would come to the breezy but Correct conclusion that the world is not as we assumed.

But what the powers intended as a means of softening my perspective, I took as a means of expressing it. Well, I thought, they said we should discuss. So I did discuss. I discussed what I thought of Darwin's theory, Mill's utilitarianism, and the university's relativistic world view -- all of which I'd had the distinct impression was relevant. But I discussed my perspective without the least intention of softening it, which meant I wasn't really obeying the powers.

My professor took me aside after about two weeks and said, "I want you to go talk to Charlie." She meant Charles Wallace, the university chaplain. She was nice about it, but she'd clearly had enough. You're a Christian, she seemed to say. Maybe Charlie the Christian will know what to do with you.

2008 is the third year I've collected questions from the community about spiritual and moral issues for a sermon series. (The link to the two previous years is on my blogroll.) The first question that jumped out at me from this year's batch was, "Should Christians question authority?"

I have to admit my bias.

I have a contentious personality. For me, arguing is fun, and arguing with authority figures is even better. Winning those arguments is so much fun that it's probably immoral.

So I chose to address the question about authority because it appealed to my baser instincts.

In addition, trouble-making is part of my heritage. My grandfather, my great aunts and uncles, my dad and his sister, have all been contrarian and stubborn. On vacation, I took my family to visit Aunt Jan, who has used her genetic sonar for absurdity well and often. Over breakfast (french toast battered with eggs and whiskey), we sounded off against Mel Gibson's Passion, the evangelical mania over it, and its theology. We also shared precious moments of confrontation with the film's devotees.

In the end, however, we had to agree that the underlying reason we hated it was that everybody loved it. Tell me the last time everybody was right.

But personal and familial biases aside, I also chose to address the question about authority because of the questioner's sensitivity. The woman asked specifically about the virtue of meekness. Can a Christian habitually criticize those in authority without becoming arrogant? Don't we owe submission to those over us?

I have learned valuable truths by over-exercising my critical faculties. I've learned, for example, that the vast majority of people hate arguing. Contention fills them with dread, and they will not voice their opinion if they fear that someone will debate them. This has led me to nurture discussion by shutting my mouth. I've also seen that the process of learning must go deeper than mere questioning. If I am really going to learn a subject or a skill, I have do things contrary to my experience and instinct. That means, again, shutting my mouth so that I can submit to my teacher.

These are good arguments for meekness.

But I have learned something else. While critical questioning is a terrible way to discover whether an authority is speaking the truth, it is a great way to discover whether the authority is interested in nourishing, imparting, engaging, and being understood, or whether he is merely interested in conformity. The authority figures I've known who nurture life in their students have all embraced criticism as a sign of a living mind.

What we face today is not the authority of a few. We face the authority of the masses, the despotism of the People. We face the unrelenting tyranny of everybody's opinion. We used to wear what displayed our place in our culture. Now we wear the latest fad. The legacy of ethics used to teach us how to make decisions. Now, our decisions are dictated by fashion, and our ethics are retrofitted rationalizations.

I think that churches, in this environment, need to focus less on controlling people's behavior than on educating their consciences. This means using the authority of parents and elders to earn submission and to empower people to question. I believe that the church where this is achieved will continue to make new Christians, generation after generation. That is the theme I will preach on Sunday morning.

At Willamette, I went to the appointment my professor had already scheduled with Charlie. I don't remember much about our session, except that we ended up trading favorite scenes from Monty Python, and that I continued in class as usual. Charlie the Christian did indeed know what to do with me.

But I wouldn't have known what to do at Willamette if I hadn't been given a trained conscience.

One night during my first year of college, I was riding with some fellow believers, all from the same InterVarsity group at Willamette University, and we were talking about the megachurch we attended. Willamette is a secular liberal arts school (its historical connection to Methodism is now purely notional). It's the oldest on the left coast, and has the ivy of the Ivy League without the pedigree. It is not the preserve of the wealthy, necessarily, but let's just say I was only there because of a scholarship. And, at that time, Willamette had little interaction with the surrounding community of Salem, Oregon.

The megachurch we all attended had a dynamic preacher and up-tempo music. It was known as a relatively wealthy church, the cars in the parking lots being a major indicator. Because of its youth group and extensive children's ministry, it was also the place in town for families, especially white ones.

My friends and I went there for the preacher, who was smart, likable, and passionate. But the wealth of the congregation, or maybe the display of it, was somewhat embarrassing. And the music was irritating. In all, my friends in the car were conflicted about the church, frustrated with it.

At last, one guy said, "It's just so middle class!" The rest laughed bitterly.

I was taken aback by the hostility in his voice, and by the others' identification with it. Even though I felt the same frustrations with that church as the others, I couldn't understand the contempt they were expressing for being bourgeois. It hadn't occurred to me to think of myself as having risen beyond my origins. My thought was, "All of you are middle class."

In that year of 1989, there wasn't a name for young evangelicals who went to liberal arts schools, took books, cinema, and ideas seriously, and explored such exotica as liberation theology. There wasn't a name for graduates who followed their passion for the poor into work with Habitat For Humanity. There wasn't enough momentum for politically liberal evangelicals at the start of Reagan's third term to gain a label. Nor was the suburban megachurch the object of scorn that it is now.

But today my friends would be called emergents.

I have spent time on this blog exploring the barren flats of evangelical populism. Now it is time to take a look at the swamp of evangelical intellectualism.

I should be clear about my use of the term. I'm not using intellectual as a synonym for scholar. A scholar is removed from ordinary life and work to pursue an academic discipline. An intellectual is not so much removed from ordinary life as disaffected from it. He is embittered by the lives other people lead, contemptuous of their lack of sophistication, and resentful of their lack of attention to his accomplishments. The intellectual class sees itself as society's critic, wrote Robert Bork in 1996 (Slouching Toward Gomorrah, p 83):

Its members are generally critical of, if not actively hostile to, bourgeois society and culture. They are, moreover, susceptible to utopian fantasies.

Not all farmers are populists. So, too, not all scholars are intellectuals in the sense I am describing. And, truth be told, very few intellectuals are scholars. Most are merely glib with general knowledge.

Think Al Gore. Tortured, complicated, afflicted by a sensitive conscience -- and proud of all three. He is not trained deeply in any academic field. He studies science not for knowledge but for advocacy. His career trajectory is typical of an intellectual: liberal arts training, journalism, politics. His intellectualism, at least in many people's eyes, redeems him from grubbiness. He's more than an advocate, more than a politician, because he's about ideas.

Some of intellectualism's cultural characteristics:

1. Urban, not rural.

2. Scornful of business and money. Money is corrupt, and the businesspeople who pursue it are all animated by greed -- all of them.

3. Contemptuous of patrimony. Wherever an intellectual came from, whatever class or location or religion, that is the seat of hypocrisy and sick living.

4. Patronizing toward the middle class. All those poor, narrow people who just work, work, work in their office cubicles and then go to Applebees, all those parents with massive strollers and screaming children, who've never even met a poor person, who've never gone to Guatemala, who only care about money and their 401Ks and the prohibitive cost of filling their SUVs ...

5. Able to evoke positive emotions only with abstractions. Obama.

I see all of these characteristics among emergents. Now, the emergent phenomenon is about many things -- theology, history, abuse by authority figures. Emergents target many legitimate evils: consumerism, a mistaken identification of Christ with the Republican party, the neglect of the arts. Many stories are coming together to make the emergent stream. But it's intellectualism that I am finding over and over again. Many emergents are about class.

Here's a funny thing. Both evangelical populism and intellectualism, even though they have the opposite cultural characteristics, lead us to the same place: grievance. I doubt that resentment is going to advance the Kingdom of Christ, whether it comes from self-satisfied middle class Americans or self-hating middle class Americans. So why do so many evangelicals seem to seethe with it?

My friend's outburst that night in 1989 showed me early signs of the splintering of evangelicalism, and nearly twenty years later I'm still trying to figure out what it means.

The headline in the New York Times on Sunday read, "Anglican Conservatives, Rebelling on Gays, Will Form New Power Bloc." Conservatives from Africa, South America, India, Australia, and the United States met in Jerusalem to "create a new ecclesiastical province in the United States and Canada to absorb the parishes that have been outraged by the American church’s consecration of an openly gay bishop in 2003 and the Canadian church’s blessing of same-sex unions." The story put my week at the conference of the Evangelical Free Church of America in perspective. As we debated a thorough revision of our statement of faith in St. Louis, there were none of the Anglican agonies.

My Episcopalian brothers and sisters have endured a crisis of doctrine, conscience, and fellowship for years, a crisis induced by an American leadership determined to remake Christianity in their own image. Only now do conservatives have a chance to emerge from the crisis with a communion they can embrace. My friends with Episcopalian parishes would affirm the work God has done among their people, but the strain in their voices when they describe meeting with machine-driven bishops tells some of the cost of that work.

I continue to be inspired by their example while thanking God that I don't have to carry their burden. I am blessed by the godly leaders of the EFCA.

When I first heard about the proposal to revise the EFCA statement of faith, I was suspicious. I have little confidence in organizations. One of my largest challenges as a leader is my own cynicism about institutional goals: I can't bring myself to use the lingo of teams, which I associate with conformism. So when the word unity shows up on banners, I'm chiefly interested in discovering the agenda behind it.

But now I can honestly say --

I interrupt this repentance just to emphasize that my suspicion of many leadership practices in institutions is unchanged. I don't like grand visions, glossy marketing, rah-rah speeches, videos, ads disguised as magazine articles, groupthink disguised as fellowship, the exaltation of the team player as the ultimate example of godliness, or the permanent smile of the mass communicator. Just so that's clear.

I like networks of people in relationship with each other. I like to see those people, as unique individuals interacting with other unique individuals, make corporate decisions on the basis of biblical principles and their shared history. I like leaders who understand that this kind of process can't be reconciled with marketing, but only thrives on good old deliberation.

The reason I was won over to the revised statement of faith is that the EFCA's leaders -- President Bill Hamel, the board of directors, credentialing director Greg Strand, and the Spiritual Heritage committee -- showed that unity was not their slogan but their goal. They showed their integrity with patient engagement and transparency.

To strengthen our unity, we need a statement of faith that stirs us with its truth and timeliness, and the proposed revision certainly delivers. Its statement on the doctrine of God slams the door on open theism, letting the Lord's full glory out:

"We believe in one God, Creator of all things, holy, infinitely perfect, and eternally existing in a loving unity of three equally divine Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Having limitless knowledge and sovereign power, God has graciously purposed from eternity to redeem a people for Himself and to make all things new for His own glory."

The new statement on the Bible is specific and sweeping:

"We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors. As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged. Therefore, it is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises."

Paragraph #4 on Jesus Christ is filled with terms evoking the biblical narrative of redemption, and paragraph #8 on Christian living is a needed affirmation of God's purposes for salvation. As a confession of the biblical heritage of Evangelical Free churches, this statement will deepen our unity for decades to come.

But more important than producing a strong document was how the leaders produced it. A key issue for many pastors and lay leaders around the country was whether an affirmation of the premillennial return of Christ (#10) should be included in the new statement. At first, the spiritual heritage committee recommended that the term premillennial be dropped. They had good reasons, and at first I agreed with them. It is not an essential doctrine for a person's salvation, and it does pose difficulties for our cooperation with outside ministries.

But as I listened to older pastors in the movement, the significance of my own commitment to premillennialism deepened. This particular teaching was a passionate focus of the fathers of our movement more than a century ago. It has relevance today as evangelicals decide whether their engagement in politics is a matter of Christianizing the State or evangelizing souls. The EFCA is not among those calling for Christian laws in order to hasten the return of Christ. Christ will set up his own law, in his Father's time.

The EFCA leaders said they would listen to input from the churches. When that input showed a strong desire to retain premillennialism in the revision, the leaders did listen. They put the term premillennial back in the statement. Then they won over most of those who had originally supported dropping it. They impressed me with their reverence for history and fellowship.

The 2008 conference adopted the revision by an 86% vote. I am proud to have been a part of it. I'm grateful for the consistent orthodoxy of our movement. And I'm encouraged to have witnessed the deliberation of a network of people, not the operations of a machine.

Last week, someone showed me a review of my novel Fallen on Amazon. The reviewer, Keith Hammond, made my day with some very generous praise, and then raised an issue that I've encountered often:

My only complaint is that the story seemed too personal and allegorical to be completely fictional. I would have preferred the book to have an addendum where the author directly talks about the issues or situations that caused him to write such a compelling book.

The first person to make this kind of comment to me was one my editors at Kregel, who, during our line-by-line slog through the manuscript, said that the dialog was "a little too good." He wondered what experiences I had plundered. After the novel was released, my secretary gave it to a relative, who finished it and made the hair-raising assertion, "Obviously, Raley's had an affair." Then there are the youth at my church, who have dissected the story with frightening precision, tracing eccentricities and obsessions from my habits into my narrative.

If only they were so devoted to their schoolwork.

So I guess I'd better tell all.

From start to finish, Fallen is invented. I didn't model any character on a person I've known, nor have I ever had to endure what Jim, the narrator, goes through. I've found that fictionalizing real-life scenarios and personalities almost always yields a flat story because there is too much authorial judgment on the characters and too little sympathy. A novelist needs to keep his cool.

Yet, for me, Fallen is a personal book. Mr. Hammond and others are right. The book is personal in this sense: almost every vile act I portrayed in the story was invented from what I have seen in my own soul.

When I drew characters for the story, for example, I tried to load them with contradictions. Jim loves his wife and daughter, but also treats them with selfish disregard. He wants to be gracious, but gives favor with calculation. Pastor Dave is an emotionally driven man, yet he disguises his motives by intellectualizing. Also, Dave wants to see himself as compassionate towards others, yet his core motivation is self-pity.

Each of these contradictions -- and many others in my characters, male and female -- has its origin in some struggle of my own for integrity. I simply implanted my hypocrisies within the quite different personalities of my characters. I hate confessing this procedure, because it makes the story feel like public nudity. But that's what I did.

The same is true of the relational struggles that the book portrays. I put my follies into all of the marriages and working partnerships. I invented the male characters' misconceptions of women, from their flippant infatuations to their ordeals in marriage, out of similar misconceptions of my own. While the power struggles among church leaders in the book grew out of the invented scenarios, my own anger in sympathy with each character showed me how the struggles would deepen.

The crimes in Fallen, then, were not written as veiled reports but as shame-faced extrapolations.

There are two important differences between my approach and the method of fictionalizing personal experiences.

First, as a matter of technique, memoirs-as-novels start with scenarios and create characters to fit, which yields a false story. A human being is not a robot. Fictional human beings cannot be robots and be true. So I started with characters and then shaped the scenarios. Every day I wrote, the characters surprised me.

Second, I would only write a memoir-as-novel to vent bitterness. I may be unusual in this tendency, and other authors might have other motivations. But, as a matter of repentance, I don't write to vent. I used to. Creating a little world in which all of my judgments are validated can be satisfying. But writing such things does not edify anyone. I found the method of spreading my darkness among many characters to be sanctifying. Instead of judging the sins of others, I was able to examine my own.

This is a method that I feel bound to follow. The subject matter of Fallen does not need more angry scribblers. But, I hope, a repentant one might do some good.

Sometimes I find a post that hits me in the gut. On Tuesday I saw "Confused Christian" on the new and anonymous My Bloggerings, and read expressions of what many evangelicals feel these days. It made me ask whether God's eye has left his people. MB, the blog's creator, wrote that she grew up charismatic but turned away from the sign gifts movement after she got married. "I just didn’t think that is what the Bible was all about." But now she feels that she can't replace it with anything.

At her current church, she says, "I am so unsatisfied with watered down preaching and 'anything goes' philosophy because God after all will still love you.  I want more than this." She sees professing Christians living as immorally as non-Christians, being focused on their careers rather than their children. "My church has lost the art of mentoring younger people and feeding them spiritually.  Instead, the goal is to make friends who drink and have poker games at their house and hit on girls at the Champs restaurant in our city."

MB says she wants a deeper community where life with Christ is more vibrant. "But I’m afraid that this is only a dream.  For I have visited so many churches only to be let down by them all.  Am I just expecting too much?"

Her experience is depressingly common. I often look at the demands of ministry and echo her question, adding another of my own. Is there any tool for nurturing spiritual life that works?

Morality doesn't work. Parents and church leaders who focus on raising standards of behavior only have scare tactics to motivate people. There's a wealth of material to use -- a culture that is spiraling into anarchy, case after case of self-destruction, evidence from medicine and social science about the effects of vice. But the reality is that people are not primarily motivated by fear. If future danger and immediate pleasure compete for people's attention, who wins?

Community doesn't work. The old line that embers burn when they're close together is true as far as it goes. But a pile of sticks won't make its own spark. Strong community without vibrant spirituality just strengthens people's selfishness under the cover of love and loyalty.

Family doesn't work. The fumes of human sin are most toxic when inhaled up close. The flame of the tongue, the heat of anger, the slow burn of bitterness have a way of suffocating all godly aspirations. Far too many families, if we're honest, have a well-preserved skin of faith, but their vital organs have been pickled.

Doctrine and preaching don't work. Neither do programs, buildings, or media. Truth be told, I can't think of a single spiritual tool that makes any impression on a heart that refuses to seek God. The tools only make that heart worse. Which means that, when people will not listen to the claims of God on their lives, the tool that is so useful at so many other times, the church, doesn't work.

There is only one thing that affects hearts like we have among evangelicals today. It is a single moment, the moment when the presence of Jesus Christ becomes frighteningly real, when a professing believer raises his face and discovers that God's eye, far from leaving him, has been locked on him all along, and has seen everything.

For that, MB and the rest of us have to pray.

Every Sunday, flights of lunacy from pulpits make sober Christians cringe. I guess, sooner or later, a maniacal statement was bound to go viral. For one thing, lunacy in preachers is so common. For another, the presidential campaign this year demanded a Republican sacrifice to balance Jeremiah Wright. And for another, the reliable men who provided self-satire in the past have either retired or gone to their reward. So, in the providence of God, John Hagee became the guy who took evangelical lunacy to the next level.

Major news organizations had been eying him suspiciously ever since he endorsed John McCain for president, principally because Hagee has described Roman Catholicism in the pungent terms of whoredom. But his elaborate support of Israel had been in his favor, at least freeing him from the taint of anti-Semitism. Alas, there was a sleeper.

Hagee had preached that the holocaust was part of God's plan to get the Jews back to the land. As reported in the New York Times, he said,

How is God going to bring them back to the land? The answer is fishers and hunters. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and forces you. Hitler was a hunter. . . . That will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, "My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

Late last week, McCain dumped him.

By Monday evening, Joe Liebermanwas pushed to answer whether he would speak to Hagee's group supporting Israel, becoming the latest politician to wish he hadn't consorted with preachers. (Lieberman said he will speak to the group.)

Hagee's comments about Hitler provoked debate that almost reached theology. There was, for instance, a post by Claire Hoffman on Sunday about the many "plans" God seems to have for the world.

The offense Hagee gave was in making God the author of Hitler's genocide. His statement as reported is exegetically indefensible. Jeremiah (the prophet from Jerusalem, not Chicago) never wrote that the murder of six million Jews would bring the Israelites back to the land. That idea is pure Hagee.

Doctrinally, Hagee's statement is loose -- at best. While he did say that God allowed, rather than caused, the holocaust, Hagee still explained the holocaust as God's calculation that Israel's return to the land was more important than six million lives. That explanation is, as theologian John McCain might say, "crazy and unacceptable." (Necessary qualifier: it is possible that Hagee makes other statements elsewhere in the sermon, or in other sermons, that clarify his understanding of God's wisdom and justice.)

But a neglected aspect of Hagee's offense is pastoral. His statement minimizes the unspeakable human cost of Hitler's genocide, a cost that is still within living memory. It's a clichéd spiritualizing of loss to say to the grieving that God had better things in mind for them than living with the ones they love. God does not call his pastors to glorify him by trivializing human suffering.

Inhumanity is entirely human. God has no complicity in it. The only reason there are not holocausts in every nation, every day, is that the good hand of God restrains human malice.

It is tempting to pronounce woes against the gotcha culture that has claimed Hagee. But I think the current animosity against preachers could be part of God's plan. Preachers must now remember that we can be YouTubed, and that our fulminations can reach those who won't interpret us charitably. We may learn how significant our words really are. We may discover a godly caution that is appropriate to teachers (James 3), and may find boldness in truths instead of self-indulgent abstractions.

But that, of course, will require us to study.

Three weeks ago, my dad gave me a book, which the old man almost never does. From the early seventies, when he devoured The Lord of the Rings, to the mid-nineties, when he discovered that Calvin and Luther agreed with him about predestination, Dad was not a reader. Even now that he has books going much of the time, he doesn't talk about them much. So, for him to haul off and give me The Root of the Righteous by A.W. Tozer -- not just recommend it, but hand me a copy -- was urgent enough that I started it immediately. That night, I sat in the orchestra pit during the dialog of the Sondheim show I was playing, and devoured page after page -- only putting the book down when the conductor insinuated that a downbeat was headed my way.

I have been writing in a meandering, bloggish sort of way about evangelical populism. I have described it as a mindset of suspicion and resentment, of "us versus them," that has shut down cultural interaction between evangelicals and other Americans. I have also noted populism's emotional shallowness, as well as its conformism and corruption.

To close this theme (and the blog's readers sighed with relief), I sum up my problem with evangelical populism: it has fostered a damning self-complacency.

When we present Christianity as a social program, as one side in a protracted culture war, we commit several crimes simultaneously. We mistake the cultural legacy of biblical faith, Judeo-Christian civilization, for the gospel itself. It is a well-worn heresy, though wrapped now in the old red, white, and blue. We also take a rhetorical posture that is alien to the New Testament, that of the debater who scores points off the gaffs and weaknesses of his opponent. This vandalizes the office of preacher.

But most alarmingly, we teach ourselves by rote, election after election, that we stand for the truth, that we defend God's holiness, that we are the Lord's people doing the Lord's work. That is to say, we teach ourselves a lie. A mere glance into the family lives of church-going people these days confirms their utter lack of spiritual power.

To foster such self-complacency is to freeze souls against the grace of God.

Which brings me back to Tozer's book. The Root of the Righteous is a collection of editorials he wrote for his denominational magazine during the 1950s, and their dated quality as artifacts gives them, for me, a kind of prophetic unction, as if the Spirit makes the dust of the decades say amen.

Take the very first sentence of the book:

One marked difference between the faith of our fathers as conceived by the fathers and the same faith as understood and lived by their children is that the fathers were concerned with the root of the matter, while their present-day descendants seem concerned only with the fruit. (p 3)

That alone is a lot to ponder. Tozer meant that, in the 1950s, believers regarded a "serious-minded approach to sacred things" as something to smile at. He said, "Much that passes for Christianity today is the brief, bright effort of the severed branch to bring forth its fruit in its season." (p 4)

Take this blunt assessment: "Probably the most widespread and persistent problem to be found among Christians is the problem of retarded spiritual progress." (p 7) Or this observation about "the inordinate attachment to every form of entertainment" in the 1950s:

The average man has no central core of moral assurance, no spring within his own breast, no inner strength to place him above the need for repeated psychological shots to give him the courage to go on living. He has become a parasite on the world, drawing his life from his environment, unable to live a day apart from the stimulation which society affords him. (p 31)

Churches in the 1950s surrendered to the consumer mindset. Tozer says (p 33) that they "have become little more than poor theaters where fifth-rate 'producers' peddle their shoddy wares with the full approval of evangelical leaders who can even quote a holy text in defense of their delinquency."

Tozer also makes the striking observation that religious life in the 1950s showed "a lack of integration in the religious personality. There seems to be no vital connection between the emotional and volitional departments of the life. The mind can approve and the emotions enjoy while the will drags its feet and refuses to go along." (p 56)

Tozer fed people with an exalted view of Christ that nurtured reverent fear, not prim judgmentalism. He wrote and spoke with authority about the God who had won his submission.

Imagine strong words like his in a denominational magazine today. It's impossible: such publications have become mere public relations pieces. They would never warn Christians against dead spirituality, or its specific symptoms. That would be way too preachy.

This is a measure of how much leaders flatter us, and how deeply we need their flattery.

It's also a measure of my old man's good taste. Calvin, Luther, Tolkien, Tozer.

In view of the arrest of a pastor, Joe Barron, in Texas yesterday, I thought I would link to a post from some months ago about the distrust of pastoral authority. The issue of sexual immorality hit home this week with our family, as my wife found out that a former pastor of hers had been conducting affairs for years. Only individual repentance from all forms of sexual sin will save the church from these scandals. These are moments not to judge, but to pray for the Lord's mercy on his church.

Every pastor is sure he knows how to talk to this guy:

It's easy. With Biff, here, you talk tractors, nail guns, and torque. You slip into saying "dese, dem, and dose." You use football analogies. Better yet, you tell your own football stories, if you have them. You try to pull off the coach routine. You go easy on the Bible because he doesn't care. You don't try to teach him. You keep it real concrete, because Biff's a hands-on guy, and if you try to talk theologically you'll lose him.

I don't think most pastors know this guy at all. I think most try to reach Biff with populist clichés only from laziness -- or because they're too intimidated to sit down and talk with him. I think that if pastors realized who Biff actually is, and if they began to connect with him, their churches would be revolutionized.

Here are a few things I've learned about him.

1. Biff's a genius.

Forget about losing Biff with your sermon. He's way ahead of you. That's why he stops listening. I know a contractor who hardly says a word, and who looks like he wouldn't try to follow a theological inference past the second "if." But he has a deep, sharp intellect. He figured out how to install a Czechoslovakian engine in an airplane he built -- without a manual. He reads the social patterns in a room faster than anyone else, and he can articulate what the patterns are. He has keen, biblically informed doctrinal priorities.

Pastors need to know that Biff has no trouble dealing with complexity. But he can tell when you're using complexity to disguise ignorance. And he won't sit for it.

2. Biff knows how to interact with all kinds of people.

Yeah, he looks narrow. But there's a good chance that Biff went to college. In all probability he has lived in many different places, perhaps even worked internationally -- and not just in the military. If Biff is over forty-five, you may find that he has some history with the counterculture in the sixties or seventies. In his business, he either learns how to deal with many different subcultures, or he fails.

I know a lumberman who lives to cut down trees. He just loves being alone in the woods with a saw and some timber. To look at him, you'd say he was the original good old boy. And if you only talked with him for five minutes, you wouldn't learn anything to shake that impression. You'd never know he once worked in computers. Near San Francisco.

3. Biff learned early to conform.

There are guys who are no deeper than tractors, nail guns, and torque. But Biff is not one of them. In my experience, he got the message as a young kid that he wasn't supposed to be a dreamer, that dreamers were worthless sissies. So he constructed a persona that enabled him to get along with the other guys. He talks about tractors, nail guns, and torque because that's what they talk about. But the dreamer never completely died. In fact, the persistence of that dreamer, maybe in despair, is a key to his emotional life.

In the back corner of a closet, Biff may have a world-class collection of jazz LPs, which he will only show you if he thinks you're safe. It will astound you what Biff reads, what he ponders, what he responds to. I've had guys that look exactly like Biff, lots and lots of them, become fans of my classical violin playing. That's one way I accidentally got underneath Biff's conformity.

Interesting things start to happen when Biff decides that God wants him to exercise his creativity.

4. Biff respects masculine analysis.

He likes his categories hard and neat. They can be complicated. They can be paradoxical. But they cannot be soft. Which is too bad for evangelical sentimentality, because Biff has no respect for Ned Flanders.

With all these points, I'm not saying Biff yearns to hear lectures on Schleiermacher, or that he secretly watches Masterpiece Theater, or even that he is fully conscious of himself. I'm just saying that he's smarter than we think, broader, more open, more curious than we think. I'm saying that the potential in any church for significant interaction with other subcultures is far greater than most pastors imagine.

We can nurture that potential if we ditch our cramped view of people -- perverted by demographics, marketing tactics, and Meiers-Briggs tests -- and see them for who they really are.

Lots of us have had to endure the control-freak pastor, the paranoid maniac who has to know WHO said his sermon went too long, and WHY that individual didn't OBEY MATTHEW 18 and come to him directly, and WHO ELSE that individual contaminated with his SLANDER. HOW LARGE is the FACTION of CRITICAL SPIRITS this week? And lots of us have had to endure the Meeting during which our motivations are impugned, our divisiveness is rebuked, and we are disinvited from leadership/attendance/Christianity.

So when I wrote last week that the first step away from populism is for evangelical leaders to rediscover the foundation of their authority, many readers probably said, "O callow youth, we think not. We've had enough of pastoral authority for one lifetime."

Hang in there with me.

Authority, to my way of thinking, is not control over people. (The leader gives orders and uses levers of power to make sure he is obeyed.) Rather, authority is an indirect result -- even a byproduct -- of something no one ever sees: the workings of the leader's own conscience.

My job as a pastor is not to compel others to do good, or even to entice them into doing good, but rather to subject my own will to the Bible's commands. As others interact with me, they are confronted with spiritual choices in the natural course of relationship.

For instance, when I preach, the ultimate issue on my conscience is whether my words serve the text of the Bible -- serve it both in expounding and in applying it to the people before me. If my conscience affirms that I enlightened my own ignorance, ducked no hard issue, and used excellent craft to teach a passage, then I have done my job as a pastor. The personal decisions people make come not so much from what I said, as from the time they spent interacting with my submission to scripture.

When I counsel, to take another example, I have to give biblical and Spirit-directed applications without shortcuts, gimmicks, or generalities. I also have to draw straight confession of sin out of people who would rather avoid it. Above all, I have to affirm what an individual has right, and withhold affirmation from what he has wrong. These are all issues on my own conscience, not anyone else's, and the only way I can act rightly is by obeying biblical principles. The counselee's decision to do good -- which I cannot control -- comes not so much from my direction, as from the time he spends interacting with my submission to scripture.

My conscience is the issue in every matter of daily life: prioritizing my weekly schedule, reacting to criticism, coaching others to resolve conflict, discipling my boys, loving my wife. My job as a pastor is to exhibit a submissive conscience. As people interact with me, they find themselves dealing with a way of life founded on different assumptions from theirs. The differences are what confront their souls with spiritual choices.

I am convinced that a leader earns a right to be heeded by orienting his or her conscience toward God's word. If he or she is submissive to the Bible, he or she will acquire authority, and the authority will not be hierarchical, but relational.

I have found that when I try to use the levers of power to control people's behavior, I splinter the integration of my conscience with the Bible. I have also found that the status-oriented fixations of populism involve leaders in catastrophic compromises of conscience, because populism boils down to what the Bible calls the fear of man.

I want to be able to say with Paul (2 Corinthians 1.12) that "our boast is this: the testimony of our conscience that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom but by the grace of God, and supremely so toward you."

If populism has left evangelicals resentful and suspicious of "elites," and complacent in a sentimentalized Christianity, how can evangelical leaders restore their movement's cultural vitality? Begin with a basic shift. Evangelical leaders need to rediscover the foundation of their authority.

I've noticed that a person with authority has a right to be heeded, to receive deference. For example, let's say we have a bull session about how evangelism really ought to be done, and we each proclaim our opinions, together with all the reasons why we're right. But when Billy Graham ambles over to the sofa and puts up his boots on the coffee table, we sincerely defer. We don't repent of our opinions when he starts to talk. We don't surrender unconditionally to whatever he says. But we do adjust our points of view to incorporate his.

I'm saying that a person with authority has a right to this deference. If someone in our bull session blows off Billy Graham, we disapprove because we feel that respect is something Graham is owed. The right to be heeded is powerful. If deference is not his right, then what he's got isn't authority.

I figure there are lots of possible foundations for authority. There's authority founded on skill: Billy Graham has a right to our deference on matters of evangelism because he's unusually competent. There's also authority founded on charisma: Graham has a unique relational wisdom that has won over vast audiences for decades.

Some foundations for authority crumble, and cannot be rebuilt for an age. In the days when Graham first preached, he had authority simply because he was a pastor. Almost everybody deferred to a pastor for the sake of respectability. It didn't matter whether the pastor's congregation was fifty or five hundred: they adjusted their points of view to incorporate his. But this social authority deteriorated, and by the 1970s any pastor who depended on it was feeling vulnerable.

Other foundations for authority are perverse, like popularity. A celebrity will get deference for a while just because masses of people hang on his words. But adoring crowds can turn into mobs. Graham has had the authority of popularity, and has also felt the sting of disapprobation, as when he visited the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Since he did not build his ministry on his popularity, his stature eventually outgrew the setbacks.

Evangelical leaders, for the most part, have been running scared because of the loss of their social authority. They have watched American culture scoff at the stock character of the pastor, mocking his impotence in the face of cultural changes. And they have been retreating from any hint of that old authority in their leadership, trying instead to teach, evangelize, and organize on the basis of popularity or skill or charisma.

Populism, with its easy emotionalism, has become the most common way evangelical leaders gain a right to be heeded. They hoist an apparently strong banner that rallies the troops -- and it works for a while. But this cynicism has nauseated so many believers that the search is on for community without authority -- an egalitarian delusion now tempting emergents.

I believe evangelicalism will not regain vitality until its leaders rediscover their authority's foundation. There has to be a reason for believers to listen to them, to defer to them. And subcultures outside of evangelicalism must see that reason, or they will not pay the gospel any heed.

In this connection, it's worth noting that Billy Graham (no populist by my definition) had many kinds of authority, but only depended on one kind: the coherence of his character with the Bible. That is, the force of biblical authority exerted itself through Graham's personal submission. More than anything else, this biblical integrity is what gained him the right to be heeded.

Next week, the technical specifications for gaining that authority.

This post may become a rant. We'll just see. A big part of my beef with populism is that it corrupts evangelical leaders, and I choose the verb corrupt for its precision. Populism rots a leader's soul.

1. Populism substitutes the lowest common denominator for unity.

I've said that evangelical populists whip up people's negative emotions, like resentment and suspicion, using carefully chosen enemies. The problems with "our society" are the fault of "the Hollywood elites" or some other class. I've also said that the populist can only evoke people's positive emotions through sentimentality, using symbols that have nostalgic, tear-jerking potential.

This simplistic emotionalism enables large groups of people to feel united by cheering or booing. It's easy to feel bonded while we cheer the armed forces or boo the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. A leader just has to speak to his audience's gut, and common cause has been achieved.

But evangelicals in America both need and desire a deep identification with Jesus Christ. They need the unity of the Holy Spirit, which is only attained through doctrinal purity and relational grace, through truth and love -- the very highest things anyone can imagine. What sort of leadership tries to achieve any other kind of oneness?

2. Populism substitutes clichés for truth.

The much-touted evangelical passion for the Bible is now largely spent, not because average evangelicals don't care what the Bible says but because their leaders won't teach it to them. The vast majority of sermons preached in American churches quote biblical snatches, as if Scripture were a sacred Bartlett's. Structurally, however, these quotations are not the focus of teaching, but are called upon to support the preacher's points. They are little better than slogans.

This preaching strategy is unavoidable for a populist, who conceives of his audience as virtuously stupid. He can't presume to teach The People, who already know everything they need through their vast common sense, and who are sick and tired of the university elites telling them what to think. The only thing he can do is remind them. After all, they don't need to know the conjugation of Greek verbs, and their attention span is . . .

The average evangelical in America both needs and desires God's word. In fourteen years of preaching, I have yet to encounter a single stupid person. I have heard a lot of stupid preachers, who use their audience's education level as an excuse never to master the arts of communication. What sort of leadership ducks the responsibility to teach?

3. Populism substitutes manipulation for leadership.

Manipulation is control. Manipulation is arousing people's emotions without paying deference to their intelligence. Manipulation is blame-shifting, making other classes responsible for cultural evils. Manipulation is flattering people's self-regard. Manipulation is the attempt to modify people's behavior without edifying their souls.

American evangelicals need spiritual leadership -- and I am convinced that they'll respond to the genuine article. What sort of leadership uses the tools of control?

The reason populism corrupts evangelical leaders is this: Populism is a lie. It tells The People that they are virtuous simply because they are The People. It tells them they are one when they are merely conformist. It tells them they have knowledge when they've only inherited a collection of Bible verses misapplied. And the worst populist lie of all is that The People are a herd instead of a body.

Can any leader believe such things without his soul rotting in cynicism?