As I was discussing the first part to this article with my community, the discussion took a new turn. That so many Christian leaders often dishonor their subordinates by disrespecting them in various ways was unquestionable. We had all either seen it inflicted upon co-workers or had experienced it personally. What was puzzling to us was why a large number of workers at Christian organizations allow the leaders or pastors to mistreat or dishonor them with regularity?
Why is it that so many capable, well-qualified, rational, and intelligent people working for churches or Christian organizations continue to work under abusive bosses while barely making a living wage? Most of these people will have very little problem getting better paying jobs somewhere else under a more favorable condition, but to them, leaving their current jobs is utterly unfathomable.
Or, even worse, after years tolerating ridicule, marginalization, humiliation while making next to nothing, when the organization finally terminates them because their usefulness has run its course, if given the opportunity, they will not hesitate to rush back to work under the same abusive conditions.
When questioned, a large number of these Christians not only do not acknowledge any abuse they might be experiencing, but they will readily tell you that God wants them to work where they are. To a point, I believe the last statement. I put up with six years of abuse at a place where the management’s motto was, "The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves." because I felt God wanted me to be an anchor of stability for my coworkers. However, I constantly challenged the leadership and demanded that people under them be treated with dignity and honor.
One of the biggest forms of abuse is using God as an excuse to manipulate people into getting them to do your bidding or as I call it, “pulling the God-card.” This way there is no room for discussion. If you say, “God told me to do this or that”, who am I to question God? I also know how often the above phrase is used as an excuse not to face reality. I believe a large segment of the above Christians suffer from what psychologist, Martin Seligman, called “Learned Helplessness”.
Several decades back, psychologist Martin Seligman developed his theory of “learned helplessness”. Subjected to repeated punishment, animals and humans come to believe they have no control over what happens to them, whether they actually do or not. In Seligman’s original experiment, dogs given repeated electrical shocks would prostrate themselves and whine, even when escaping the abuse lay within their power.
Please click on the following links for more details on the above experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
http://www.noogenesis.com/malama/discouragement/helplessness.html
You might protest, “Shah, you are talking about dogs and electric shocks! Where in heaven’s name do you see that being done to people in any Christian organization?” We don’t use electric shocks, but we have our own ways of beating people into “Learned Helplessness” that border on cultic practices.
According to psychologists the following are some of the characteristics of a cult group, which produce “Learned Helplessness”:
1. The group’s leader is reputed to have the potential of bringing a resolution to the problems of humanity.
To put it in our terms, church members often expect their leaders to bring solutions to the world’s and personal problems through their callings as apostles, prophets, evangelists… (Eph 4) or their gifts of the Spirit, words of wisdom, knowledge, prophesy… (I Cor. 12).
2. The leader is also drawn into believing the grandiose role accorded to him and justifies his actions by referring to the transcendent mission suggested by the group’s philosophy.
I don’t know why so many of us have the tendency to put our leaders on pedestals, treating them as super humans not realizing that by doing so we create the potential for a man to believe in “the grandiose role accorded to him”. This is not to say that the leaders just fall into this trap. Having been made in God’s image, we all have a god-complex and want to rule as such. Very few of us can resist constant praise and accolades aimed at our gifting or style of leadership and not fall prey to thinking that we, somehow, are better than others and called to rule over them.
If a pastor is constantly told how great a teacher, healer, prophet or leader he is, he eventually will come to believe that he is impressive and magnificent. And soon after, if he is ever questioned about his imposing behavior, he will refer you to all his accomplishments and how God has called him to accomplish the church’s mission statement.
3. To ensure stability as a close-knit social system, the group manipulates the activities and views of its members. All members are required to comply with the group’s norms. If they appear to question the values, they will face estrangement, which results in feeling acutely hopeless, uncomfortable and unhappy. This will also prevent members from leaving the group.
Every church or Christian organization I have ever known had its own set of “biblical” norms. All staff or church members were required to follow those “biblical” standards. Within several of these organizations or churches, you were demanded to obey the norms and be grateful for being a part of the entity. Those who dared to question the norms were marginalized, shunned, and labeled as, “ones who dare to touch God’s anointed”. Naturally, fearing a great feeling of stress and alienation, the majority of members complied with what the leadership deemed to be the norms, especially staff members. To control the people and prevent them from leaving the church, it was not unusual to make them feel that the only entity that would ever give them a place or a job was the one they belonged to at the present. So, by leaving the place, a member, no matter how talented, was always in danger of never being able to find a place or a job somewhere else.
What are the outcomes of such treatments? Creating a generation of helpless Christians who would stay in abusive situations out of fear of alienation, rejection, being deemed unworthy, worthless, or being called a heretic.
We Christians shock our people into helplessness, not by electricity, but with our words and behavior. We may not lock people in cages, but we have our way of keeping them within boundaries which are created by the “dos and don’ts” of the organization. So many of our leaders strip people under them of every ounce of dignity, talents and gifting by showing love and attention only when it meets their needs to control the people. By doing so, many Christian organizations have created a whole generation of helpless Christians who have come to believe they cannot effectively function anywhere else except within the particular organization. They have become like the dog, which, after being given numerous electric shocks, feel that being mistreated is his lot in life and there is nothing he can do about it. This psychological treatment is so effective that even after leaving an organization, many Christians, given the opportunity, in a heartbeat, go back to the same abusive place.
There is a happy ending to the above experiment. It was noted that the only way to get the helpless dog out of its cage was to send in another dog that had never been shocked. With the gate left open, upon receiving the first jolt of electricity, the new dog would bolt out of the cage and by doing so, it would teach the helpless dog to get out as well.
May I challenge and encourage all of you to be the restorers of honors lost. Be like the last dog, when it comes to confronting the abuse that is taking place in our Christian communities, go in, speak up and help a friend or two restore their honor by showing them the way out.
"I looked at all the caged animals in the shelter. The cast-offs of human society, I saw in their eyes love & hope, fear & dread, sadness & betrayal. And I was angry. "God," I said, "this is terrible! Why don't you do something?" God was silent for a moment & then He spoke softly, "I have done something," He replied. "I created you.” Author- Jim Willis
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Whatever Happened To Honor? Part I
Why is it that after almost 40 years of being a follower of Christ, I still feel out of step with most of American Christianity and feel as if there is something wrong with me? Why is it that as much as I tried, I could never sacrifice relationship over the American Church’s corporate mentality?
These questions were always running in the back of my head like one of those looped videotapes you see in stores that keep showing the same thing over and over again. Often my response was, “You are too sensitive. Don’t be so petty. Get over it. You can’t expect everyone to be wrong so it must be you?” And so on.
Let me give you couple of examples of what I am talking about.
If I was in my office working on my computer and a friend walked in, I would stop everything I was doing to attend to the person who was sitting across my desk. I wanted him/her to know that at that moment they were the center of my attention and nothing else mattered. Yet, if five minutes later I walked into the same person’s office, it would deeply hurt and offend me that my friend would continue banging on the keyboard without once looking up to listen to what I was saying. No, this had nothing to do with one’s ability to multitask or lack of it. To me, this all had to do with giving importance to a friend over an email that could be sent 10 minutes later.
If a friend needs a job, that need becomes my need, especially, when I know some people who might be interested in giving him/her a job. Unlike so many people I know, it is not good enough for ME that I can refer the friend to the right people. I take it upon myself to make sure the people know he/she is my friend and expect them to treat my friend with utmost respect. For, how they treat my friend is a reflection of their treatment of me.
I can imagine what kinds of questions might be going through your minds. What if the email couldn’t wait for 10 minutes? Don’t you think just directing the person to the right people should be good enough? Whose got the time to do follow-ups? Exactly, you are hitting the nail on the head. These were my questions too, yet I hardly ever remember an email that could not wait for 10 minutes and I could always make the time to follow up with my friends’ job hunts.
Does that make me a people pleaser? Am I an insecure person who wants to make sure everyone around him is happy with him? Believe me, I continually scrutinize myself over my actions. Did a desire to give people importance make me an “airhead”, as the president of the Christian organization I worked for once called me? He believed that only an “airhead” would give so much attention to just anyone.
It was only a few years ago, while teaching a seminar on honor and shame, the building block of most Oriental cultures, that I realized how much my culture of origin has to do with who I am today.
The formative years of my life in Iran was shaped under a Shame-Based culture—shame vs. honor. I really don’t want to take the time to talk about that culture. However, it is sufficient to say that within that culture, honor is the greatest attribute one can seek. Giving honor brings a person more honor. I was taught that taking care of my friends or my community was an honorable act.
By the way, the Bible, having been written in a Shame-Based culture is filled with passages dealing with this issue. Consider the following passages.
Leah said, "God has presented me with a precious gift. This time my husband will treat me with honor, because I have borne him six sons." Genesis 30:20
Genesis 45:13 "Tell my father about all the honor accorded me in Egypt and about everything you have seen. And bring my father down here quickly."
Luke 9:26 "If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels."
Revelation 21:27 "Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life."
Unfortunately, honor is an attribute, which, for the most part, has lost its importance within the American church. Most of my experience has taught me that taking the time to honor people of God is not conducive to the American corporate church mentality. Unless, of course, you are a mega-church pastor, an accomplished author, the president of a Christian organization or a televangelist with a funky hairdo, then we better honor God’s anointed or His wrath shall come upon us.
Recently, a friend told me the following story. He had been working for a missions organization for several years giving it all he could. Even though he had a Masters degree, he worked for a minimum wage because, like most of us, he wasn’t in the ministry for the money, but to make a difference for God’s Kingdom. For all the year he was there, along with other co-workers, he never got a raise because, according to the president of the organization, due to financial hardship, they could not afford to give any of the employees any raises. However, later on, my friend found out that through all those lean years, the president of the organization never stopped making his six-figure salary.
But even that was not as dishonoring as what happened to him during the last Christmas he was with that organization. I will let him tell the story.
“I was sitting at my desk when we were all given an unwrapped brown box.”
“What is this?” I asked.
“It’s your Christmas gift.”
“As soon as I opened it, I was about to scream. Inside the box was a gift that, two years earlier, I had designed for the board members. The management had not even bothered to change the two year old calendar that was left in the box.”
Talk about being dishonored. Yet, the management of this Christian organization, which was supposedly spreading the message of Jesus all over the world, had no idea why my friend and other co-workers were not grateful for getting a second-hand Christmas gift. To the management, this act of gift giving should have been received as something magnanimous where, in fact, the employees felt it to be so demeaning.
I literally can recount scores of incidents like this told to me by Christians from all types of denominations and backgrounds, but I finish this blog with one of my own stories.
A few days ago, just a week after my radical prostatectomy operation, I received a call from the producer of a popular Christian radio show in Los Angeles area. He had received an email from a dear friend of mine who had suggested me as a guest on the show. After introducing himself, the gentleman asked if I would be willing to do a radio interview the following day at 5:00 PM. I happily and graciously accepted the offer.
In the past 30 some years of being a believer, because of my unique background, I have been on numerous radio and TV programs. For five years I produced a Persian TV show which was aired among the Iranian community in the Los Angeles area. All that to say: I am not new to radio or TV interviews. I know how quickly a daily TV or radio show can switch directions and bump a guest off the show. So, after I got off the phone, I told my wife about the interview, but I also told her, “I am not holding my breath.”
The next day the same gentleman called to inform me that my interview was pushed back 30 minutes and a few hours later, the interview was postponed to the following Thursday at 5:30 PM.
Thursday came and went and, yes, you guessed it, I never heard from the producer. I waited till mid-day Friday hoping I would at least receive the customary phone call telling me why I was bumped or that they were not interested in interviewing me any longer, but it never happened. So, I called the producer and this is how the conversation went:
“Hi Danny this is Shah.”
“Shah???” It was obvious he couldn’t immediately remember who I was.
“Yes, the guy you were supposed to have an interview with yesterday.”
“Oh, Shah! I never told you we were going to interview you on Thursday. I said if we needed you, we were going to call you.”
“No, you did not. You called me last Monday to tell me I WAS going to be interviewed on Thursday. Do you remember?”
“Well, sorry. I forgot to tell you that we didn’t need you.”
“Couldn’t you at least, out of courtesy, call me and let me know so I could run some of my errands yesterday rather than sitting by my phone waiting for your call?”
“Well, sorry!”
We said our goodbyes and I hung up.
What bothered me the most was his tone of voice. As if he was annoyed that a peon like me would even dare ask why he thought I wasn’t worthy of a lousy phone call. All through our conversation, I wanted to ask producer Danny the following question. Again, to some the question might make me look like a sore loser, but to those who know me well, know that to me it is a matter of HONOR.
“Danny, would you have forgotten to call me if I was Pastor so and so?” I was going to name a popular mega-church pastor. We all know what his answer would have been and that is my point of contention.
Any more, just like the secular world, the corporate church has divided the people into, as an old Christian boss of mine used to say, “major leaguers” and “minor leaguers”. The “major leaguers” are the famous ones, God’s anointed, the mega-church builders. They are the ones who have written all the “how to” Christian books. They are the only ones who have something to offer to the rest of the church. And the rest of us, who don’t have the above qualifications, are the “minor leaguers”. And producer Danny was not any better or worse when it came to assessing people’s value. To him I was a “minor leaguer” who should have been grateful that his radio show even considered interviewing me. However, the story didn’t end there.
Just a few minutes after I finished talking with Danny, the phone rang again. It was him.
“Shah, I need to apologize to you. I dropped the ball. I SHOULD HAVE called to let you know that we were not interested in interviewing you.”
“Danny, this means the world to me. My upbringing demands that we honor each other. You dishonored me by not calling me back originally. And I want you to know that had nothing to do with you deciding not to put me on your show. But now you have restored my honor by apologizing to me,” I told him. He went on to apologize again, but it wasn’t needed.
Today I don’t question the validity of my feelings and actions any more. I have come to realize that my feelings are not only valid, but also they are very much biblical. Those who are made in God’s image are worthy of my time and attention. But, I am also not as bent on expecting that everyone treat me the same way. However, this does not mean that we, as those who are called to be God’s ambassadors in this world, should not learn how to treat people, regardless of their status, with a level of honor due to them.
I have to admit that Danny’s second phone call left me with another nagging question, “Would he have ever admitted to his wrong doing if I had not confronted him and if so, why do so many Christians allow the leadership to dishonor them with regularity and yet not confront them?” which forces me to look at the issue of honor and shame from another point of view.
Stay tuned for my next blog.
These questions were always running in the back of my head like one of those looped videotapes you see in stores that keep showing the same thing over and over again. Often my response was, “You are too sensitive. Don’t be so petty. Get over it. You can’t expect everyone to be wrong so it must be you?” And so on.
Let me give you couple of examples of what I am talking about.
If I was in my office working on my computer and a friend walked in, I would stop everything I was doing to attend to the person who was sitting across my desk. I wanted him/her to know that at that moment they were the center of my attention and nothing else mattered. Yet, if five minutes later I walked into the same person’s office, it would deeply hurt and offend me that my friend would continue banging on the keyboard without once looking up to listen to what I was saying. No, this had nothing to do with one’s ability to multitask or lack of it. To me, this all had to do with giving importance to a friend over an email that could be sent 10 minutes later.
If a friend needs a job, that need becomes my need, especially, when I know some people who might be interested in giving him/her a job. Unlike so many people I know, it is not good enough for ME that I can refer the friend to the right people. I take it upon myself to make sure the people know he/she is my friend and expect them to treat my friend with utmost respect. For, how they treat my friend is a reflection of their treatment of me.
I can imagine what kinds of questions might be going through your minds. What if the email couldn’t wait for 10 minutes? Don’t you think just directing the person to the right people should be good enough? Whose got the time to do follow-ups? Exactly, you are hitting the nail on the head. These were my questions too, yet I hardly ever remember an email that could not wait for 10 minutes and I could always make the time to follow up with my friends’ job hunts.
Does that make me a people pleaser? Am I an insecure person who wants to make sure everyone around him is happy with him? Believe me, I continually scrutinize myself over my actions. Did a desire to give people importance make me an “airhead”, as the president of the Christian organization I worked for once called me? He believed that only an “airhead” would give so much attention to just anyone.
It was only a few years ago, while teaching a seminar on honor and shame, the building block of most Oriental cultures, that I realized how much my culture of origin has to do with who I am today.
The formative years of my life in Iran was shaped under a Shame-Based culture—shame vs. honor. I really don’t want to take the time to talk about that culture. However, it is sufficient to say that within that culture, honor is the greatest attribute one can seek. Giving honor brings a person more honor. I was taught that taking care of my friends or my community was an honorable act.
By the way, the Bible, having been written in a Shame-Based culture is filled with passages dealing with this issue. Consider the following passages.
Leah said, "God has presented me with a precious gift. This time my husband will treat me with honor, because I have borne him six sons." Genesis 30:20
Genesis 45:13 "Tell my father about all the honor accorded me in Egypt and about everything you have seen. And bring my father down here quickly."
Luke 9:26 "If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels."
Revelation 21:27 "Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life."
Unfortunately, honor is an attribute, which, for the most part, has lost its importance within the American church. Most of my experience has taught me that taking the time to honor people of God is not conducive to the American corporate church mentality. Unless, of course, you are a mega-church pastor, an accomplished author, the president of a Christian organization or a televangelist with a funky hairdo, then we better honor God’s anointed or His wrath shall come upon us.
Recently, a friend told me the following story. He had been working for a missions organization for several years giving it all he could. Even though he had a Masters degree, he worked for a minimum wage because, like most of us, he wasn’t in the ministry for the money, but to make a difference for God’s Kingdom. For all the year he was there, along with other co-workers, he never got a raise because, according to the president of the organization, due to financial hardship, they could not afford to give any of the employees any raises. However, later on, my friend found out that through all those lean years, the president of the organization never stopped making his six-figure salary.
But even that was not as dishonoring as what happened to him during the last Christmas he was with that organization. I will let him tell the story.
“I was sitting at my desk when we were all given an unwrapped brown box.”
“What is this?” I asked.
“It’s your Christmas gift.”
“As soon as I opened it, I was about to scream. Inside the box was a gift that, two years earlier, I had designed for the board members. The management had not even bothered to change the two year old calendar that was left in the box.”
Talk about being dishonored. Yet, the management of this Christian organization, which was supposedly spreading the message of Jesus all over the world, had no idea why my friend and other co-workers were not grateful for getting a second-hand Christmas gift. To the management, this act of gift giving should have been received as something magnanimous where, in fact, the employees felt it to be so demeaning.
I literally can recount scores of incidents like this told to me by Christians from all types of denominations and backgrounds, but I finish this blog with one of my own stories.
A few days ago, just a week after my radical prostatectomy operation, I received a call from the producer of a popular Christian radio show in Los Angeles area. He had received an email from a dear friend of mine who had suggested me as a guest on the show. After introducing himself, the gentleman asked if I would be willing to do a radio interview the following day at 5:00 PM. I happily and graciously accepted the offer.
In the past 30 some years of being a believer, because of my unique background, I have been on numerous radio and TV programs. For five years I produced a Persian TV show which was aired among the Iranian community in the Los Angeles area. All that to say: I am not new to radio or TV interviews. I know how quickly a daily TV or radio show can switch directions and bump a guest off the show. So, after I got off the phone, I told my wife about the interview, but I also told her, “I am not holding my breath.”
The next day the same gentleman called to inform me that my interview was pushed back 30 minutes and a few hours later, the interview was postponed to the following Thursday at 5:30 PM.
Thursday came and went and, yes, you guessed it, I never heard from the producer. I waited till mid-day Friday hoping I would at least receive the customary phone call telling me why I was bumped or that they were not interested in interviewing me any longer, but it never happened. So, I called the producer and this is how the conversation went:
“Hi Danny this is Shah.”
“Shah???” It was obvious he couldn’t immediately remember who I was.
“Yes, the guy you were supposed to have an interview with yesterday.”
“Oh, Shah! I never told you we were going to interview you on Thursday. I said if we needed you, we were going to call you.”
“No, you did not. You called me last Monday to tell me I WAS going to be interviewed on Thursday. Do you remember?”
“Well, sorry. I forgot to tell you that we didn’t need you.”
“Couldn’t you at least, out of courtesy, call me and let me know so I could run some of my errands yesterday rather than sitting by my phone waiting for your call?”
“Well, sorry!”
We said our goodbyes and I hung up.
What bothered me the most was his tone of voice. As if he was annoyed that a peon like me would even dare ask why he thought I wasn’t worthy of a lousy phone call. All through our conversation, I wanted to ask producer Danny the following question. Again, to some the question might make me look like a sore loser, but to those who know me well, know that to me it is a matter of HONOR.
“Danny, would you have forgotten to call me if I was Pastor so and so?” I was going to name a popular mega-church pastor. We all know what his answer would have been and that is my point of contention.
Any more, just like the secular world, the corporate church has divided the people into, as an old Christian boss of mine used to say, “major leaguers” and “minor leaguers”. The “major leaguers” are the famous ones, God’s anointed, the mega-church builders. They are the ones who have written all the “how to” Christian books. They are the only ones who have something to offer to the rest of the church. And the rest of us, who don’t have the above qualifications, are the “minor leaguers”. And producer Danny was not any better or worse when it came to assessing people’s value. To him I was a “minor leaguer” who should have been grateful that his radio show even considered interviewing me. However, the story didn’t end there.
Just a few minutes after I finished talking with Danny, the phone rang again. It was him.
“Shah, I need to apologize to you. I dropped the ball. I SHOULD HAVE called to let you know that we were not interested in interviewing you.”
“Danny, this means the world to me. My upbringing demands that we honor each other. You dishonored me by not calling me back originally. And I want you to know that had nothing to do with you deciding not to put me on your show. But now you have restored my honor by apologizing to me,” I told him. He went on to apologize again, but it wasn’t needed.
Today I don’t question the validity of my feelings and actions any more. I have come to realize that my feelings are not only valid, but also they are very much biblical. Those who are made in God’s image are worthy of my time and attention. But, I am also not as bent on expecting that everyone treat me the same way. However, this does not mean that we, as those who are called to be God’s ambassadors in this world, should not learn how to treat people, regardless of their status, with a level of honor due to them.
I have to admit that Danny’s second phone call left me with another nagging question, “Would he have ever admitted to his wrong doing if I had not confronted him and if so, why do so many Christians allow the leadership to dishonor them with regularity and yet not confront them?” which forces me to look at the issue of honor and shame from another point of view.
Stay tuned for my next blog.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
What if?
A few days ago, the president of Iran, whose name is pronounced, Mah-mood Ah-mad-ee-neh-jaad (I got tired of listening to scores of American reporters pronouncing the name ten million different ways) arrogantly, declared that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Well, as one who was born and raised there, one who still has his parents and most of his relatives living there, I, assuredly, declare that he is a liar and there are many homosexuals living in Iran. Of course, this should not come as a surprise to any of you. What is shocking is the way these poor souls are treated. Please click on the following link, but I have to warn you, this is very graphic:
http://www.foxnews.com/photoessay/0,4644,2396,00.html#1_0
By their silence, Christian leaders in the united States are missing a great opportunity to demonstrate the love and compassion of Christ to a persecuted people group. Christians have often complaint that the secular media fails to recognize persecuted Christian minorities globally. On the other hand, the popular Christian phrase , “love the sinner hate the sin”, is seen by the world as being disingenuous. What if the Church of Jesus Christ seizes the day with Ahmadinejad’s hideous statement by supporting that very group of persecuted people? Can you imagine, the bridge, all be it small, that could be built to the homosexual community and broader liberal community if, for example, Dr. James Dobson called the church to pray and speak out against this persecution? No, this would not mean that Dobson is agreeing with homosexual life-style, rather it would clearly show an act of love and concern on the part of the followers of Christ.
I believe God is giving us and will give us opportunities in the future to show his mercy to this fallen world. May we be wise enough to take advantage of these opportunities
I would love to hear your comments.
http://www.foxnews.com/photoessay/0,4644,2396,00.html#1_0
By their silence, Christian leaders in the united States are missing a great opportunity to demonstrate the love and compassion of Christ to a persecuted people group. Christians have often complaint that the secular media fails to recognize persecuted Christian minorities globally. On the other hand, the popular Christian phrase , “love the sinner hate the sin”, is seen by the world as being disingenuous. What if the Church of Jesus Christ seizes the day with Ahmadinejad’s hideous statement by supporting that very group of persecuted people? Can you imagine, the bridge, all be it small, that could be built to the homosexual community and broader liberal community if, for example, Dr. James Dobson called the church to pray and speak out against this persecution? No, this would not mean that Dobson is agreeing with homosexual life-style, rather it would clearly show an act of love and concern on the part of the followers of Christ.
I believe God is giving us and will give us opportunities in the future to show his mercy to this fallen world. May we be wise enough to take advantage of these opportunities
I would love to hear your comments.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
I CE-LIBRATED LIFE TODAY
A few years ago I read, Why Jesus Went to Parties? by Max Lucado.
This is how Max starts the article:
Why would Jesus, on his first journey, take his followers to a party?
Didn't they have work to do? Didn't he have principles to teach?
Wasn't his time limited? How could a wedding fit with his purpose on
earth?
Why did Jesus go to the wedding?
The answer? It's found in the second verse of John 2. "Jesus and his
followers were also invited to the wedding."
Why did they invite him?
I suppose they liked him.
He then goes on to say that Jesus went to parties--are you ready for this--to have fun! As Chris Farley used to say on SNL, “whoop dee freaking do!” How low has the state of Christian faith in the western world sunk that one of the most prolific writers of our time has to scripturally prove that it is ok for Christians to have fun because Jesus took time to have fun.
I don’t blame Mr. Lucado. At least he is trying to take Christians out of their organizational attitude and get them to enjoy life and have fun just for the sake of fun and not as an end to another church sponsored program. He, like most western Christians, is a victim of reading the Bible through his own eyes.
Let me clarify a few things as one who is from the part of the world Jesus came from.
Please note that according to the Gospel of John, all the books in the world could not contain what Jesus did while on earth. So, to assume that our four gospels contain all that Jesus did is very naïve. In other worlds, in most probability, this was not the first time that Jesus and his disciples were attending a wedding. The only reason John reports this wedding is because this is where Jesus performed his first miracle.
Second, unlike a majority of western Christian teachers who spend most of their time teaching things about God in a didactic style, Jesus lived God before his students, and what better place than a wedding to show his disciples that the Gospel is all about RELATIONSHIP.
Third, Jesus went to the wedding because He was invited. In the Middle East culture, if you live in a small community, as I did in Iran, when someone in the neighborhood gets married, the whole community is invited. Not to invite your neighbors is a sign of disrespect. Unlike so many Christians leaders I know, Jesus went to the wedding with no agenda but to love and respect his neighbors and not looking to see what was in it for him. He went to the wedding to celebrate the new life a couple in his community was about to start.
And finally, Jesus went to the wedding to have fun. He never separated the Gospel from FUN of celebrating life. You have never experienced a true wedding celebration until you attend a Middle Eastern or an Armenian wedding. Where as in an average American evangelical wedding the main focus is on the religious ceremony, in the eastern culture, it is the celebration afterwards that truly is considered to be the wedding. No, you are not given a piece of cake and a cup of punch and sent home. Maybe, that’s because we don’t separate a wedding into a religious ceremony and a secular celebration. To us, the whole thing is about celebration.
Where did we, Christians, lose it? “How could we,” as one of my old professors at the seminary used to say, “take the most joyous religion in the world (Judaism) and turn it into boring western Christianity?” I know, historically, there are many reasons why we got to where we are today, but that is not the subject of this article.
I am sorry to say that within a few years of leaving Islam to follow Christ, I became one of those Christians who forgot how to celebrate life. I was too busy trying to make a church grow to have fun. I thought to enjoy life while there were so many hurting people around me was not godly. Today I regret spending so many years of my life not having more fun.
All our married life (33 years), my wife, Karen, wanted to learn how to Swing dance. Although I was never against dancing and was probably the only Iranian pastor who always wanted to incorporate dancing as a part of worship, I just could not bring myself to take lessons in Swing. For some reason, I was taught that my enjoyment of life should always involve some kind of religious activity and Swing certainly was not in that category. After all, where is Swing mentioned in the Bible?
My attitude towards life has changed drastically in the last 10 years. Little by little I had to admit to myself that one of the reasons I so often feel out of step with my western leaders is because of my up bringing in Iran. I came to realize how much of the corporate culture of America has crept into the church and has become a part of our Christian life; the culture that demands every action of one’s life to be navigated by its outcome. Everything in life has to be goal oriented. Any more, our best pastors and Christian leaders are not those who necessarily had much passion for people, but organizers with great administrative gifts. Next time you meet a pastor in his office, take a quick look at what he/she keeps in his/her library. Don’t be surprised to see the number of books that are about administration, organizations and goal setting. After all, Capitalism teaches that there should be a return for your investments. You shouldn’t do something just for the sake of doing it. There has to be a positive and tangible return for your efforts, otherwise, as my ex-leader called me, “You are an airhead.”
I can’t tell you the delight and the freedom I experienced when reading Simon Tuglwell’s, the Beatitudes. In dealing with Matt. 5:4, Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth, he makes these life liberating remarks:
…Does it really make sense to say that God ‘has a purpose’ in what He does? God is his own purpose. And in that He is entirely sufficient to himself… God acts without a reason…If we are to be and to act like God, if we are to appreciate the act of God, we must come to appreciate the point of pointlessness, the joy of unnecssariness. We must learn to pay due attentions to the satisfaction there is sometimes in just doing something for its own sake, and not bias our view of life too much in the direction of those things which are always a struggle and which are always justifiable in terms of some solemn intention.
I will never forget the amount of shock and disbelief I experienced several years ago when a dear friend told me she had taken motorcycle lessons at her local CHP office to learn how to ride a motorcycle. “But you don’t even own a bike.” I said and asked; “Why did you do it?” “Just because,” she responded.
What does any of this have to do with me celebrating life today? Well, to get there, I need to set the stage. I got an iPod for my birthday this past June. I had just downloaded Santana’s first album when I went to work on the front yard. As I began to listen to the album, something came upon me.
Was it the Latin beat of the music, the fact that the song took me back to over 30 years ago when my faith was simple and my theology nonexistent, the days when I was naïve enough to trust my leadership as those who were put in their position to serve God’s people and not their own personal ambitions, the days when I trusted my tithe money to go towards spreading the Gospel in the world and not being wasted on remodeling an unneeded church office at the tune of $600,000, the time when I thought the measure of a man was in his Christ likeness and not the size of his church or how many books he has written, or maybe all of the above? Whatever it was, it made me want to dance and I did.
I took the shovel, just like Fred Astaire did with the hat rack in one of his movies, and began to do the Salsa with it. I didn’t care what the neighbors or passersby thought. I wanted to love the moment for no reason. I wanted to dance just because. I didn’t need a mandate or scripture to justify myself in the fact that I finally listened to Karen and four years ago started taking dance lessons.
This is how Max starts the article:
Why would Jesus, on his first journey, take his followers to a party?
Didn't they have work to do? Didn't he have principles to teach?
Wasn't his time limited? How could a wedding fit with his purpose on
earth?
Why did Jesus go to the wedding?
The answer? It's found in the second verse of John 2. "Jesus and his
followers were also invited to the wedding."
Why did they invite him?
I suppose they liked him.
He then goes on to say that Jesus went to parties--are you ready for this--to have fun! As Chris Farley used to say on SNL, “whoop dee freaking do!” How low has the state of Christian faith in the western world sunk that one of the most prolific writers of our time has to scripturally prove that it is ok for Christians to have fun because Jesus took time to have fun.
I don’t blame Mr. Lucado. At least he is trying to take Christians out of their organizational attitude and get them to enjoy life and have fun just for the sake of fun and not as an end to another church sponsored program. He, like most western Christians, is a victim of reading the Bible through his own eyes.
Let me clarify a few things as one who is from the part of the world Jesus came from.
Please note that according to the Gospel of John, all the books in the world could not contain what Jesus did while on earth. So, to assume that our four gospels contain all that Jesus did is very naïve. In other worlds, in most probability, this was not the first time that Jesus and his disciples were attending a wedding. The only reason John reports this wedding is because this is where Jesus performed his first miracle.
Second, unlike a majority of western Christian teachers who spend most of their time teaching things about God in a didactic style, Jesus lived God before his students, and what better place than a wedding to show his disciples that the Gospel is all about RELATIONSHIP.
Third, Jesus went to the wedding because He was invited. In the Middle East culture, if you live in a small community, as I did in Iran, when someone in the neighborhood gets married, the whole community is invited. Not to invite your neighbors is a sign of disrespect. Unlike so many Christians leaders I know, Jesus went to the wedding with no agenda but to love and respect his neighbors and not looking to see what was in it for him. He went to the wedding to celebrate the new life a couple in his community was about to start.
And finally, Jesus went to the wedding to have fun. He never separated the Gospel from FUN of celebrating life. You have never experienced a true wedding celebration until you attend a Middle Eastern or an Armenian wedding. Where as in an average American evangelical wedding the main focus is on the religious ceremony, in the eastern culture, it is the celebration afterwards that truly is considered to be the wedding. No, you are not given a piece of cake and a cup of punch and sent home. Maybe, that’s because we don’t separate a wedding into a religious ceremony and a secular celebration. To us, the whole thing is about celebration.
Where did we, Christians, lose it? “How could we,” as one of my old professors at the seminary used to say, “take the most joyous religion in the world (Judaism) and turn it into boring western Christianity?” I know, historically, there are many reasons why we got to where we are today, but that is not the subject of this article.
I am sorry to say that within a few years of leaving Islam to follow Christ, I became one of those Christians who forgot how to celebrate life. I was too busy trying to make a church grow to have fun. I thought to enjoy life while there were so many hurting people around me was not godly. Today I regret spending so many years of my life not having more fun.
All our married life (33 years), my wife, Karen, wanted to learn how to Swing dance. Although I was never against dancing and was probably the only Iranian pastor who always wanted to incorporate dancing as a part of worship, I just could not bring myself to take lessons in Swing. For some reason, I was taught that my enjoyment of life should always involve some kind of religious activity and Swing certainly was not in that category. After all, where is Swing mentioned in the Bible?
My attitude towards life has changed drastically in the last 10 years. Little by little I had to admit to myself that one of the reasons I so often feel out of step with my western leaders is because of my up bringing in Iran. I came to realize how much of the corporate culture of America has crept into the church and has become a part of our Christian life; the culture that demands every action of one’s life to be navigated by its outcome. Everything in life has to be goal oriented. Any more, our best pastors and Christian leaders are not those who necessarily had much passion for people, but organizers with great administrative gifts. Next time you meet a pastor in his office, take a quick look at what he/she keeps in his/her library. Don’t be surprised to see the number of books that are about administration, organizations and goal setting. After all, Capitalism teaches that there should be a return for your investments. You shouldn’t do something just for the sake of doing it. There has to be a positive and tangible return for your efforts, otherwise, as my ex-leader called me, “You are an airhead.”
I can’t tell you the delight and the freedom I experienced when reading Simon Tuglwell’s, the Beatitudes. In dealing with Matt. 5:4, Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth, he makes these life liberating remarks:
…Does it really make sense to say that God ‘has a purpose’ in what He does? God is his own purpose. And in that He is entirely sufficient to himself… God acts without a reason…If we are to be and to act like God, if we are to appreciate the act of God, we must come to appreciate the point of pointlessness, the joy of unnecssariness. We must learn to pay due attentions to the satisfaction there is sometimes in just doing something for its own sake, and not bias our view of life too much in the direction of those things which are always a struggle and which are always justifiable in terms of some solemn intention.
I will never forget the amount of shock and disbelief I experienced several years ago when a dear friend told me she had taken motorcycle lessons at her local CHP office to learn how to ride a motorcycle. “But you don’t even own a bike.” I said and asked; “Why did you do it?” “Just because,” she responded.
What does any of this have to do with me celebrating life today? Well, to get there, I need to set the stage. I got an iPod for my birthday this past June. I had just downloaded Santana’s first album when I went to work on the front yard. As I began to listen to the album, something came upon me.
Was it the Latin beat of the music, the fact that the song took me back to over 30 years ago when my faith was simple and my theology nonexistent, the days when I was naïve enough to trust my leadership as those who were put in their position to serve God’s people and not their own personal ambitions, the days when I trusted my tithe money to go towards spreading the Gospel in the world and not being wasted on remodeling an unneeded church office at the tune of $600,000, the time when I thought the measure of a man was in his Christ likeness and not the size of his church or how many books he has written, or maybe all of the above? Whatever it was, it made me want to dance and I did.
I took the shovel, just like Fred Astaire did with the hat rack in one of his movies, and began to do the Salsa with it. I didn’t care what the neighbors or passersby thought. I wanted to love the moment for no reason. I wanted to dance just because. I didn’t need a mandate or scripture to justify myself in the fact that I finally listened to Karen and four years ago started taking dance lessons.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)