Page 2966 – Christianity Today (2024)

When I was in college, members of a certain scholarship program were required to attend a one-day “leadership development” seminar, in which we took a personality test and discussed—well, ourselves, mostly. Then the seminar leader made us all lie on the floor for 20 minutes in silence so that we could get in touch with the “divine spark” within us. I used the time to pray. The girl next to me fell asleep (apparently she was sparkless).

This was not a religion class. The leader had conducted these seminars for people in companies all over the country. We were impressionable (okay, a bit skeptical) 19-year-olds at a secular university. And we were being fed Gnosticism. Lesson of the day: ancient heresies are alive and well in modern culture.

Gone are the days when the average Christian could get away with not knowing what the Rule of Faith was or how the biblical canon developed. In recent years, the early church has become the subject of public debate and an enormous amount of confusion. The tempest over The Da Vinci Code has finally begun to subside, but the speculations and questions it raised among readers still reverberate.

In 2006, a National Geographic Society documentary introduced Americans to the newly translated Gospel of Judas, painting it as a juicy subversive text and even bringing up Hitler’s praise of the Oberammergau Passion Play to show where the Christian vilification of Judas led. (If only the church had listened to those tolerant, enlightened Gnostics!) Bookstores teem with authors claiming to overturn the traditional understanding of Jesus or the accepted history of the earliest church. Many current books portray Gnosticism as a vital, exciting, alternative Christianity suppressed by a power-hungry Catholic hierarchy.

And it’s not just a matter of bestselling novels or passing academic trends. As Philip Jenkins describes in this issue, Gnostic ideas have never really died—they have cropped up in medieval heretical movements, 19th-century poetry, modern psychology, and esoteric groups like Scientology. In today’s atmosphere of pick-and-choose personal religion, Gnostic-like beliefs meld easily with popular “spirituality.” After all, it’s nice to hear that I’m special, that God is inside me, that the key to ultimate life is to know who I really am. Sin? Beside the point.

When the Gospel of Judas controversy broke, New Testament scholar Darrell Bock wrote in an article for Christianity Today, “It is important to appreciate that many people asking questions or embracing the recent materials have no background in church history, so they have no way of assessing what is being said. Their questions are quite sincere in light of the repeated message they are hearing that the new materials should change our view of history.”

I knew there was a good reason why Christian History & Biography exists.

In this issue, we want to lay out the basic facts that will help you evaluate and respond to the dizzying array of wild theories and “evidence” in bookstores and on TV, and also to recognize Gnostic ideas when you encounter them in alternative spiritualities and popular culture. Hint: “divine spark” spells trouble.

Next issue: How the Holy Land Became Holy

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

I believe I am one of the few literate adults living who has not read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. But I did listen to it as an audiobook. The problem with audiobooks, in my experience, is that at points my mind wanders and the words momentarily stop registering. This happened as I listened to The Da Vinci Code. Sometimes when I caught my mind drifting, I would rewind; at other times I would just let it go and try to piece it all together. I confess: This is no way to do justice to a book. I felt that I owed Dan Brown better. After all, we graduated from high school together.

There was, however, a place in the book when I did stop the tape and hit rewind—several times. It was a turning point in the plot that involved the protagonists in a conversation with a character named Leigh Teabing. Brown had styled Teabing as a kind of expert on things early Christian. The point that really caught my attention (and not just me but, I’m sure, millions of readers) was Teabing’s very matter-of-fact statement: “More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament and yet only a relatively few were chosen for inclusion—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them.”

“Wow!” I thought to myself, “talk about provocative.” The statement had the sound of being altogether authoritative. And for that reason, it is all the more unsettling for the Christian who is accustomed to thinking that there are only four gospels, the canonical gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Brown is right about the fact that there were other gospels. What needs a closer look is how the “other gospels” were related to the four in the early church. In order to do this, one has to understand how and when these four came to be regarded as a finalized list of authoritative gospels.

Old and reliable

One of the most important factors in the early church’s canonization of the four gospels is their shared antiquity. Though occasionally some scholars argue that the fourth gospel was written c. 110, it is usually dated shortly before the year 100. Matthew and Luke seem to have been written 10 to 30 years earlier than that. Mark is usually supposed to have been earlier still. This puts all four gospels between the years 50 and 100. This also makes the four gospels the earliest extant records of Jesus’ life, a fact not unimportant for the early Christians.

A second crucial element in the early church’s decision to ascribe the four gospels special status is their apostolicity. This means that each of the four gospels was perceived as either having been written by an apostle or under the supervision of an apostle. The Gospels of Matthew and John were identified with the apostles by the same names. There was a strong tradition that Peter stood behind the writing of Mark, who, according to the early church father Papias (c. 60-130), “interpreted” him. Finally, Luke was recognized as the traveling companion of Paul. The apostolicity and antiquity of the four-fold gospel, more than any other factors, ensured the collection a secure and central place in early church life.

Early consensus

There is evidence that Christians held a high view of the four gospels very early on. Around A.D. 95, we find Clement, a bishop in Rome, authoritatively citing words reminiscent of the Sermon on the Mount (1 Clement 13:1-2). The only question is whether he is drawing on Scripture or on oral tradition that preserved Jesus’ teaching independently of the gospels. In my view, because Clement’s citations come from the same passage in the Gospel of Matthew, it makes most sense to surmise that he is using the written gospel itself, with some admixture of Luke.

Around the same time, if not slightly later, there are intimations that Papias knew the gospels, perhaps even all four. The so-called “longer ending of Mark” (Mark 16:9-20), which most text critics regard as a spurious addition tacked on around A.D. 125, seems to reflect bits of Matthew, Luke, and John—and of course Mark itself. At the very least, this demonstrates that the four gospels were in broad circulation. It may even be the case, although it is impossible to prove, that the four gospels by this time constituted a collection in its own right, a sub-canon within the slowly emerging New Testament canon.

Firmer evidence for the four-fold gospel’s authoritative status comes from the apologist Justin Martyr around the year 150. Following the philosophical terminology of his day, Justin preferred to call the gospels “memoirs.” Justin records that the church used these “memoirs” regularly in their weekly services. This would seem to indicate that the four gospels had achieved a de facto canonical status.

Around this time the famed heretic Marcion of Sinope, convinced that it was necessary to eradicate any Jewish elements from the Christian Scriptures, took it upon himself to pare down the received collection of Christian books. The only gospel that “made the cut” was Luke, but only in an edited-down version. It has been widely argued (notably by Adolf von Harnack) that the Christians first began to think about the concept of a biblical canon only in response to Marcion. But given the evidence of Justin, this seems very unlikely. We are better off maintaining that it was actually Marcion who was reacting to an established de facto canon.

A fragmentary list of New Testament books known to us as the Muratorian Canon can, despite some scholarly opinion, be reasonably dated to around 170. This provides an important piece of second-century evidence for the gospels’ canonicity. Unfortunately, the beginning of the Muratorian list is broken off. The fragment begins, “The third book of the gospel, according to Luke.” It later continues, “The fourth gospel is by John.” Interestingly, Luke is presented as the third gospel and John, the fourth—exactly the canonical order as we have it today. It is hardly a stretch to suppose that the missing first and second gospels were Matthew and Mark, respectively. Matthew, being the favorite gospel of the early church, was almost always positioned first in similar such lists and whenever the four-fold gospel was brought together in one volume.

The power of four

The first church father to mention all four gospels by name was Irenaeus some time around 170. He strenuously objected to the various heretical sects (including that of Marcion) who had latched on to only one of the four gospels in order to substantiate their teachings. In Against Heresies, Irenaeus wrote:

The Gospels could not possibly be either more or less in number than they are. Since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is spread over all the earth, and the pillar and foundation of the Church is the gospel, and the Spirit of life, it fittingly has four pillars, everywhere breathing out incorruption and revivifying men.

While this may not seem the most convincing line of argument today, Irenaeus’s statement needs to be understood against the backdrop of a larger argument, which presupposed a theological correlation between creation (made up of four zones) and the new creation, Jesus Christ (revealed by four gospels). While certain scholars have accused Irenaeus of originating this policy of “these four and no more” in order to squelch competing sects with their gospels, the evidence for a much earlier four-fold gospel canon is more compelling.

Apocryphal tales

This is not to deny that there were other gospels in existence at the end of the second century. There were. The Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Judas, and the Gospel of Thomas were among them. Many similar gospels continued to be written during the next two centuries. Most of these were composed and used by Gnostic believers who were deeply critical of the beliefs and practices of the Great Church. Like their orthodox opponents, these sects also typically attributed their gospels to apostles or other well-known Christian figures. This was no doubt a bid for authority, as if to say, “Okay, if you say your gospels go back to the apostles, we can say the same thing about our gospels.”

Historically speaking, those touting the apostolic origins of the apocryphal gospels had little to stand on. These texts came much later than the four-fold gospel collection. The canonical gospels were all first-century documents; all four offer credible eyewitness accounts of Jesus of Nazareth. The apocryphal gospels, written generations later, can barely compete with this claim.

In addition to these factors, the apocryphal gospels’ often surreal narrative and/or patently suspect Christology marked them off decisively as unacceptable for church use. Contrary to some scholarly opinion, the boundaries of the canon were largely determined by the criterion of right belief. Even though a few non-canonical gospels proved to be of passing interest to an equally few church fathers in the East, these texts were never seen as being on par with the four evangelists. The canonical gospels had established themselves in church tradition so firmly and at such an early point that it comes as no surprise that they have remained utterly uncontested as the church’s only gospels. That is, until very recently.

Therefore, when Brown’s Leigh Teabing says, “More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament and yet only a relatively few were chosen for inclusion,” this may make for good fiction, but this is no way to do justice to history. Yes, there were other gospels written over the course of early church history (although nowhere near “eighty”), yet Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John remained in a league by themselves. When the church began to draw lines in a more self-conscious way after the second century, it didn’t have to think hard about adding to or subtracting from the gospels. The era before the four-fold canon was a time out of mind. They knew no different.

Had all this come up with Dan Brown at our 25th high school reunion this past spring, I just might have mentioned it. But if I had done so, I would have also had to thank him. Now that the hype and the furor surrounding The Da Vinci Code have subsided, Christians can be thankful that Brown has prompted us to listen carefully to early Christian history, to rewind, and to be reminded that there is no other gospel.

Nicholas Perrin is assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

[The Gnostics] wander from the truth, because their doctrine departs from Him who is truly God, being ignorant that His only-begotten Word, who is always present with the human race, united to and mingled with His own creation, according to the Father’s pleasure, and who became flesh, is Himself Jesus Christ our Lord, who did also suffer for us, and rose again on our behalf, and who will come again in the glory of His Father, to raise up all flesh, and for the manifestation of salvation, and to apply the rule of just judgment to all who were made by Him. —Irenaeus, Against Heresies

In the year 177, Pothinus, the 90-year-old bishop of Lyons (in modern France), died after Romans beat him for two days. Pothinus’ crime: insisting that Christ was the Christian God. Terrible persecution had come upon the Christians of Lyons and the neighboring city of Vienne, some 16 miles south on the east bank of the Rhone River. Christians were burned alive in the amphitheater. The young servant girl Blandina, after many tortures, was finally gored to death by a bull. Each martyr sacrificed himself or herself in imitation of the passion of Christ, their Incarnate God, in the hope of resurrection. So fundamental and pervasive was their resurrection-faith that the Romans cremated the martyrs’ corpses and dispersed the ashes in the river to defeat any notion that the Christians would be raised bodily from their graves.

Pothinus’s successor was named Irenaeus, meaning “man of peace,” and the early Christian historian Eusebius honored Irenaeus as a peacemaker in keeping with his name. But this irenic pastor and diplomat was also the second-century church’s most informed, prolific, and theologically profound opponent of Gnosticism.

Earlier Christian leaders such as Ignatius of Antioch and Justin Martyr had argued against false teachings that resembled Gnosticism, but Irenaeus was unique in his careful study of Gnostic myths (especially those taught by Valentinus) and in his immense, tireless reply.

Apostolic pedigree

Irenaeus was born sometime between 130 and 140 in Smyrna—today the city of Izmir in Turkey. As one strolls through the ruins of the ancient marketplace with its impressive colonnades, it is not hard to imagine the boy Irenaeus skipping by the altar of Zeus or observing Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, in theological discussion with the future Roman presbyter, Florinus, who later embraced the Gnostic ideas of Valentinus. In his youth, Irenaeus learned the key components of the Christian faith under Polycarp, who had been taught by the apostle John and others who had seen Christ.

Martyrdom was never far from Irenaeus. Polycarp was killed in February of 155/56. An account left by the church of Smyrna, The Martyrdom of Polycarp, provides a window into the faithfulness of an old man who saw himself as sharing in the sufferings of Christ and hoped for the resurrection of the body.

Irenaeus moved from Smyrna to Lyons (then called Lugdunum) and became a presbyter there. He was a trusted emissary of peace and on at least two occasions represented the church in doctrinal and liturgical controversies. The great persecution of Christians in Lyons occurred during one of his diplomatic missions to Rome, and so, when he returned, he became bishop in Pothinus’ place.

Irenaeus wrote a number of books in his pastoral role, including Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, a short presentation of Christian faith. But his greatest literary work was the five-volume Against Heresies, written around 180 in response to the Gnostics and also the heretic Marcion. It is still valued today, not only because it is an early example of Christian biblical interpretation and theology, but also because it gives a careful account of a variety of Gnostic beliefs. Irenaeus broke new ground by consulting the Gnostic teachers and reading their literature in order to understand their teachings. He occasionally exaggerated his descriptions for the sake of argument, but now that we have access to many Gnostic writings from the Nag Hammadi collection, we know that his representations of Gnosticism were generally quite accurate.

Wolves in sheep’s clothing

With his heart for peace, Irenaeus opposed the Gnostics not out of desire for power but out of concern for their salvation. He wanted, he said, to “turn them back to the truth” and “to bring them to a saving knowledge of the one true God.”

Furthermore, he was a pastor with a responsibility to care for his flock. His opponents were enticing members of his community away from apostolic faith with a message that sounded true but wasn’t. He therefore saw the Gnostics as false teachers who had cleverly and artfully clothed an unorthodox theological system in a deceitful, seductive costume. “Error,” he noted, “indeed, is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced … more true than the truth itself.”

As he wrote these words, Irenaeus had in mind Jesus’ warning in Matthew 7:15 about false prophets who come in sheep’s clothing but are inwardly ravenous wolves. The Gnostics sounded, and frequently acted, just like orthodox Christians. They read the Bible, used the Bible, and cited the Bible. But the way they understood the Bible, the way they put its pieces together, differed dramatically from the perspectives of Irenaeus, Pothinus, Polycarp, and John.

Irenaeus believed there was an unbroken line of tradition from the apostles, to those they mentored, and eventually down to himself and other Christian leaders. The Gnostics interpreted the Scriptures according to their own tradition. “In doing so, however,” Irenaeus warned, “they disregard the order and connection of the Scriptures and … dismember and destroy the truth.” So while their biblical theology may at first appear to be the precious jewel of orthodoxy, it was actually an imitation in glass. Put together properly, Irenaeus said, the parts of Scripture were like a mosaic in which the gems or tiles form the portrait of a king. But the Gnostics rearranged the tiles into the form of a dog or fox.

As a pastor, then, Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies in order to describe the heresies that were threatening his congregation and to present the apostolic interpretation of the Scriptures. He revealed the cloaked deception for what it was and displayed the apostolic tradition as a saving reminder to the faithful.

God became flesh

The Gnostics who threatened Irenaeus’s community tended to divide things into two realities—one good, the other bad. In response to such dualism, Irenaeus presented the unity of apostolic faith.

For example, Irenaeus’ opponents divided “Christ” from “Jesus.” Christ, they said, was a divine spirit-being from the heavenly realm (the Pleroma, or “fullness”) who did not become really incarnate, so he could not really suffer. He was not truly human, but either only seemed to be human or temporarily inhabited a human named “Jesus.”

But Irenaeus was too familiar with the constant threat of martyrdom to let such dualism deceive his flock. The real, bloody passion and death of Christ was a fundamental element of Christian faith. Martyrdom imitated it, and Christians confessed it in baptism and worship. Irenaeus responded with a strong biblical statement that Jesus Christ was one person, both divine and human, and that he really was crucified.

This is what gave comfort to those who were martyred: “[Christ] knew, therefore, both those who should suffer persecution, and he knew those who should have to be scourged and slain because of Him; and He did not speak of any other cross, but of the suffering which He should Himself undergo first, and His disciples afterward.”

At the root of the Valentinian Gnostic myth known by Irenaeus was a division between two Gods: the supreme, transcendent Father revealed by Christ, and the arrogant Demiurge, the creator of the physical world, who was identified with the Old Testament God of the Jews. Therefore, the Gnostics divided reality into two opposing realms—the heavenly world of spiritual beings (named “Aeons”) and the material world of trees, rocks, earth, flesh, and blood.

In contrast to this, Irenaeus declared: “But there is one only God … He is Father, He is God, He the founder, He the Maker, He the Creator, … He it is whom the law proclaims, whom the prophets preach, whom Christ reveals, whom the Apostles make known to us, and in whom the church believes.” These words reveal another important theme for Irenaeus: the harmony between the Old Testament and the emerging New Testament, between the prophets and apostles. The Creator spoken of by Moses is the Father revealed in Christ. His redemptive plan has been the same throughout history.

The Valentinian Gnostics also taught that, since the material world was created by an imposter, an ignorant deity, it had no value and must perish. The human body, as part of the material world, could never be immortal. This is why Christ could not have been truly human and why, the Gnostics believed, there would be no bodily resurrection or redemption of the created order. Salvation was purely spiritual.

But according to Irenaeus, the “spiritual” person is made up of the “the union of [material] flesh and [the human] spirit, receiving the Spirit of God.” God created the physical world, and so that world has value and will be redeemed and renewed someday. God created the human body, and the body will be raised again incorruptible and immortal.

Against the Valentinians, Irenaeus emphasized the supernatural, redemptive ministry of the Holy Spirit who renews both the body and the spirit. This ministry of the Holy Spirit strengthened the martyrs to bear witness unto death in hope of bodily resurrection. This promise was based on the reality of Christ’s incarnation: “For if the flesh were not in a position to be saved, the Word of God would in no wise have become flesh.”

The faith that saves

The Gnostics had an elitist understanding of salvation; they divided humanity into two categories, the “spiritual ones” who belong to the Father and the “material ones” who belong to the Demiurge. As the “spiritual ones,” the Gnostic believed, they were destined for salvation because of the divine spark within them (unlike the rest of humanity, who are asleep and have no hope).

Not so for Irenaeus. All humans are fallen—dead in their sins—and in need of redemption. Salvation is not a matter of destiny but of faith. The eternal Son of God, who became human, reunited God with humanity. Those who believe in him have the life of the Holy Spirit in them—and only they can be called “spiritual”: “as many as fear God and trust in His Son’s advent, and who through faith do establish the Spirit of God in their hearts—such men as these shall be properly called both ‘pure,’ and ‘spiritual,’ and ‘those living to God,’ because they possess the Spirit of the Father, who purifies man, and raises him up to the life of God.”

So we see in Irenaeus the great orthodox doctrines of unity: One God, who is the Father and Creator of all things, immaterial and material, and who orchestrates one harmonious history of revelation and redemption; one Savior, who is both divine spirit and human flesh, both Christ and Jesus; one human nature, which is both spiritual and fleshly; one salvation of both the spiritual and material realms, which is by faith.

These were the doctrines Irenaeus received from those who had passed the apostolic teaching down to him. This was the orthodoxy that protected his flock against the wolves of heresy and that gave Polycarp and the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne the faith to endure even to the end.

D. Jeffrey Bingham is chair and professor of theological studies at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography magazine.Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

A few years ago, I had a bedtime routine with my kids that including telling them a story about a boy named Ernie. His adventures were as far-fetched as I could make them: Ernie and the elf. Ernie and the monster. Ernie inside a pinball machine. As absurd as the tales were, the kids hung on every word.

Stories, no matter how old we get, we are captivated by them. Fantasy stories touch a deep place within us that longs for adventure and heroism. True stories, on the other hand, bind us together in shared experience. They forge community. For the Christ-follower, biography can become a type of theology as God is discovered through the meandering journey of one’s life.

The spiritual significance and power of our stories have led our church to develop “Story Groups.” These are small groups that work through a 20-week curriculum designed to help people understand the importance of their life stories in their formation toward Christ-likeness. Story groups are discussion-oriented, with assignments designed to trace the hand of God through our personal history with the ultimate goal of having each person present his or her story. This process may be painful, but also amazingly liberating.

As the group works through the curriculum, each person begins to write the story. They delineate seasons, elaborate on crucial events, relationships, and experiences, and describe the impact these things have had on their hearts. How did it affect his view of God? Did she make vows or changes at certain junctures? How did an event trigger anger, fear, anxiety, or a new desire? Obviously, for some this process will resurrect old wounds and painful memories. But the intent of the Story Group is to journey toward accepting my life as my story. It is a way of facing the truth and embracing it.

A healing process occurs as group members read or share their stories with one another. I have seen initial fears dissolve as people open their hearts and vulnerably share with the group. Many people imagine they are alone in the pain they have experienced, the burdens they carry, and the pressure they feel. But hearing another person’s story helps us recognize our commonality. We suddenly see that we are not alone on the journey. This is both comforting and encouraging.

Of course, whenever people open up in this manner, it can be dangerous. Vulnerability always is, and no amount of covenant-making or contract-signing will reduce the risk. But what is the alternative? Sadly, what we often see in small groups is people hiding the truth about who they are behind inductive Bible studies and a prayer time. While these activities are good, they can keep us hidden. We may never reveal who we really are. But in a Story Group, I am called to share the truth about my life and who I am, while holding firmly to the truth that my identity is in Christ.

Some may wonder, why bother?

If we are new creatures in Christ, if the old is gone and the new has come, why spend so much time focused on the past? But simply because something is “gone” doesn’t mean it cannot affect our lives today. Many people carry their pasts into their present relationships and circ*mstances. And large numbers of people, knowingly or unknowingly, expend enormous amounts of energy each day fighting the truth of their story. Part of our spiritual growth must include facing the truth about ourselves. The best way to deal with the story of our lives is to turn directly toward it, walk right into the middle of it, and learn, with others, to accept the story as it really is.

Mike Lueken is co-pastor of Oak Hills Church in Folsom, California.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Too big? Too self-focused? All alike? Beyond Megachurch Myths aims to discredit these ideas about America’s largest churches. Scott Thumma and Dave Travis (of Leadership Network) meticulously evaluate megachurches to prove that much can be learned from them. The authors reinforce their assertions with extensive research—incorporating charts, figures, and statistics to bolster their arguments. The objective research, however, doesn’t disguise the authors’ pro-megachurch stance. Their observations often read like endorsem*nts.

Beyond Megachurch MythsScott Thumma and Dave TravisJossey-Bass, 2007256 pages; $19.99

Despite this affinity, their work still effectively exhibits megachurches’ positive traits, including community involvement, ability to create unity within large congregations and willingness to partner with other churches—within their community and outside their denomination.

As the book states, megachurches matter. Even if Summa and Travis don’t successfully debunk all our preconceived notions, they leave little doubt that megachurches are thriving in America and for good reason. And metachurches should take a few notes.

Tyler Charles, Carol Stream, Illinois

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

To an outsider, Armonía Ministries looks like a remarkable example of local leadership in some of Mexico’s poorest communities—a network of schools, medical clinics, and community centers led by community members themselves. And it is. But Armonía (“Harmony”) is also a cross-cultural mission—not just because it welcomes short- and long-term volunteers from churches in the United States and Europe, but because its founders had to learn to cross daunting class and cultural barriers. Saul (pronounced sah-OOL) and Pilar Cruz founded Armonía in 1987 just as Saul, who holds a Ph.D. in psychology, was rising to prominence as a national leader in World Vision Mexico. As he describes in this interview with Christian Vision Project editorial director Andy Crouch, Armonía’s story is one of unlearning many of his assumptions about success and significance.

It’s a story that holds many lessons for anyone who would cross barriers of education and privilege—anyone who is asking the Christian Vision Project’s question for 2007: What must we learn, and unlearn, to be agents of God’s mission in the world?

When you began working with World Vision in Mexico City twenty years ago, how engaged were Protestant churches with the needs of the poor?

In 1985 there were about a thousand Protestant churches—for a city that was estimated at that time somewhat over 8 million people—with an average of 60 members.

We took a socioeconomic map of Mexico City. At that time, 8 percent of the residents of Mexico City were wealthy, some of the wealthiest people in the world, in fact. Then 17 percent, at that time, were middle class; 75 percent were poor, most of them surviving on less than a dollar a day.

Then on this map that highlighted areas by income, we located the churches. Of 1,000 churches, 890 were located in middle-class neighorhoods. A few were among the wealthy—mostly serving not Mexicans but expatriates. Nearly all the rest were at the borders between poor and middle class neighborhoods. Almost none were located within poor neighborhoods.

So you had vast areas of Mexico City without any evangelical Protestant presence.

That must have been a disappointment.

But I did discover a large church in one of the worst neighborhoods—a neighborhood without water, without paved roads, with very little electricity. This is it, I thought, the kind of church that mobilizes its resources to serve in a place where those resources are really needed. So I visited the pastor.

Many churches are little islands that don’t get involved with their neighbors.

Walking into the compound, we found a paradise: green grass, sprinkled water, and nice cars. The pastor received me with great joy, took me to his office, and offered me coffee. He kept a very nice office!

I asked him how in the world his church had ended up here. I was expecting him to say, “I saw the need. I saw that we could have an effect.”

He said, “You know, land is cheap here. If you protect the cars, you can have plenty of good parking spaces!”

What a unique perspective.

Now, I must say that if you come to the United States, the picture is not so different. Many churches are little islands that really do not get involved with the neighbors. They don’t realize that they can have an effect in the transformation of society.

What led you personally into this kind of ministry?

My wife has always been my partner, my chief intercessor. When we got married, we had made a commitment to work among the poor. When I was making very good money and my career as a psychologist was taking off, we had left it all behind to start a school for disabled children in a poor community. But the more I got involved in my work with World Vision a few years later, the more distant she became.

The truth was that while there was plenty of love in our marriage, our postures towards the needy were becoming very different. While I was working on these grand national projects, she had gotten involved with people with cerebral palsy. She was always asking me, “When are you going to join us?” But I was too busy to work with her. After all, I was mobilizing churches to work among the poor!

One day she stopped me and said, “Listen. You’re not the man I married. And I don’t know why you have changed so much. But one of the reasons I married you is because you had this passion for the poor. And now you have a passion to become important.”

“Well, listen,” I said, “If I can influence the churches of Mexico, and if I can mobilize them—”

She said, “Influence the churches of Mexico? Who do you think you are? Luther or Calvin?”

Well. That started a huge conversation.

My wife and I have had those “conversations.”

We took a brief sabbatical and went away to wrestle with this. We fought and fought. Then one day she said: “I don’t want to be mean, but I need to ask you. Do you really know how to work with the poor? Or do you just speak of the poor?”

I didn’t have an answer. I could speak of the poor. I could show you books. I could call the rest of the world to work among the poor. But I personally wasn’t working with the poor.

She said: “We need to learn. And if we don’t learn, how can we call others to do it?”

That ended the argument. She won. Because she was right. We agreed to live in a slum of Mexico City and focus on working alongside the poor.

Now, for my wife, working with the poor was no big deal. She didn’t want to be perceived as a power figure, somebody with access to money or who had an agenda for change, but just a neighbor. But for me, it meant disrobing from my sense of power, my place of safety. I started a little clinic—a place to serve the people and walk my children to school and talk to neighbors. And, oh, that was dreadful, because I was a neighbor—nothing more. Just a neighbor.

It’s not “let’s go transform these poor folks” but “let’s see how they and we will be transformed.”

My wife’s approach, however, was amazingly effective. She connected with prostitutes who wanted to leave their profession, with mothers who had seen their children die because of drug addiction or drug selling, who wanted to change their environment. But I wasn’t satisfied with my wife’s approach. I felt powerless.

When a church nearby offered us the use of their buildings as a community center, I accepted.

Which sounds like a good opportunity.

Exactly. It sounded perfect. We created a community center, and we started bringing people to church there. On Sundays we would wake up early and go to neighbors saying, “Wake up. Let’s go to church. Let’s read the Bible together and sing together. Come join us.” It was becoming a real parade every Sunday. People singing in the streets, knocking on doors, offering coffee to neighbors, some of whom came to church in pajamas!

But I didn’t notice that the church was taking it very poorly. The daughter of one of the leaders fell in love with one of the new Christians, a former leader of a street gang. The father cornered me after a service and said, “If my daughter marries this man, I’m going to kill him.”

Then, one Sunday, I made a huge mistake. As I was preaching, one of the local women we’d worked with came in bleeding, wearing only one shoe. Her dress had been ripped, and she had been seriously beaten—clearly by a pimp. Our little son started to yell when he saw the blood, and grabbed his mommy, so my wife couldn’t go and help her.

No one in the whole room moved toward her. So I stopped preaching, asked one of the deacons to continue the service, and I went over, took her by the hand, and asked my wife to follow me to my office. When we came out, having attended to her needs, the service was over, but a group of church leaders was waiting for me.

“You never abandon the pulpit for a woman like that,” they said. “This is completely out of order!”

I should have known that the relationship was strained beyond repair. But for a few weeks we kept bringing people to church with us. We were usually late, which is not unusual in Mexico. But one week we came singing to the door of the church building. It was locked. This was strange. No one else was there.

I went back home and got my keys. I opened the door, went in—and it was completely empty. Not one chair. Not one bench. Absolutely clean.

They had taken out all the furniture?

Everything. And on the floor was a note: “Saul, we understand that God is leading you in a different way. And we have decided to move. We have bought a piece of land and have built our own church, and you are on your own. If you can pay the bills, you can do it. Good-bye.”

The people with us were crying, cursing, spitting—they felt so rejected by the church. We tried to carry on, but the next morning the owner of the building came. “Are you Mr. Cruz? I need you to vacate the premises.”

I said I was willing to sign a contract. But he said, “No. The people who left said that you keep very bad company, and I should be careful of you.”

“Yes, I’m in very bad company,” I said. “That’s very true. I’m with sinners all the time!”

That forced us to go to a piece of land we had been given in the middle of one of the worst slums, a garbage dump. In the lower areas, people were living among the sewage. They made islands in the sewage with dirt and sand and connected them with little bridges, and there was a huge network of manmade islands on top of the raw sewage of the city. We moved to a somewhat safer neighborhood and worked for three years to clean up that property and begin a ministry there. But it was so far from where we had been before that we were starting over entirely. For my wife that was not a problem. She would be happy to start working in the garbage dump.

But for me, it was getting rid of my sources of power more and more.

It sounds like your own sense of significance was stretched to the breaking point.

Exactly. At the end of those three years, I said to my wife, “I need to quit. I want to go back to a regular church. I want to preach again. Here I’m being very ineffective. If you speak, women listen to you. When you read the Bible, women listen to you. They give you their children. You take them to hospitals. Even their husbands come and listen to you. But when I speak, they yawn or they leave. I’m not accepted the way you are. You are extremely effective. I think I’ve got to go elsewhere. I will support you. But I need a better job.”

In my mind, I had become a nobody. I had graduated from university, had won academic prizes, and had a significant career. But in that neighborhood,

I was no one—and it was my fault. I hadn’t learned to speak like them. My wife was speaking like them. I wanted them to understand me, and to listen to my way of speaking. Deep down, I was arrogant, and they could tell.

So I said to my wife, “Look, you’re really the pastor here. I will support you. And I will be the husband of the pastor.” We had such a war that night, a Saturday night. Our poor children had to listen to it all.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “I’m going to start attending another church.”

You’re not the first pastor to have that idea. (Laughter.)

On Sunday morning there was a knock on our door. It was my next-door neighbor, a middle-class man. He said, “Are you a counselor?”

Yes, I said.

“Please help me. I’m losing my marriage.”

I almost told him, “I’m losing mine too—let’s cry together!” But instead, my arrogance crept back in. Here was something I was an expert in! So I invited him in, and we talked for two hours. I was in my element. I felt useful. His wife joined us, and at the end of the conversation, they resolved to find a way to save their marriage. They were relieved and grateful.

Just as they were leaving they asked, “Do you go to church? Because we see you leave every Sunday dressed for church.”

And my wife said, “Yes, we do, and he’s the preacher.”

And I said, “No, no. We have a community center in one of the slums of the city. It’s muddy and smells bad because it’s next to the garbage. And in fact, what I have is a little group of people who come and listen when my wife speaks and don’t listen when I speak.”

The couple said, “We want to go with you.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. But they really did want to go. So they went with us that morning.

At church, as we were in the middle of a prayer, some people came running into the community center to say, “There’s an emergency down at the corner!”

We ran to the corner and discovered that a huge cavern, perhaps eight feet deep, had opened up under the road. A new sewage system had been installed two years before, but it had been not been sealed properly. The sewage coming down the hill was washing away the sand under the road. The road was on the verge of collapse, and there was a danger that dozens of nearby houses would be swept away as well.

Someone called the city services, but they said it would take three days for them to come. It was clear that the road would collapse before then. We had no idea what to do.

Then I felt someone touch my shoulder and say, “Can I help?”

It was the neighbor who had come with me.

“No, no,” I said. “Please, you must get out of here. You are our guest, and this situation is dangerous.”

He said, “No, I know exactly what to do. I’m a mining engineer.”

So he organized the neighbors to make sand bags, and he created a tower underneath the sewer pipes using the sand bags and wood that we took from our own building. We mobilized the whole neighborhood, stopped traffic, and put every man to work. He managed to put everything back in place.

What an extraordinary gift that he had come with you that day!

Of course, it was also an awful mess. We were all completely covered in dirt, and worse. We started working about noon and finished at three in the morning the next day. We emerged from the pit and went back to our community center, probably two hundred men, and the women had heated water for us to wash. They took our clothing, and washed it as best as they could. It was cold and drizzling, and we were shivering, but at least we weren’t smelling as bad as we were before.

And I started to cry. I said, “I’m sorry. But I need to pray. I need to thank God, because he just saved us. He saved you. He saved me. He sent this man, my neighbor, to help us, and he gave us one another to do the work. Can we pray?”

They said yes. So I put out my hands. They held my hands. We all knelt down, and I prayed.

When I stood up, I was their pastor. I could see it. From that day on, they respected me. From that day on, I became their pastor.

You see, being a pastor is about learning the language of love. People need to see you’re for real—that you really care for them, that you’re even ready to put your life on the edge for them. Suddenly my role in that neighborhood completely changed.

Does that story have implications for the way that anyone comes into a poor community?

It’s very easy for missionaries to make the mistakes I made. We build our churches on power. But we never earn the respect of people around us. And with power comes the fantasy that I know it all, that I’m the one with competence to “fix” the society I’m in.

But there’s actually great resistance to people coming into a poor community assuming they know what the people there need. We have realized that when we go into a new community, we have to take the stance that we don’t know anything. We know who we are, we say, but we don’t know how to work here. So we are open. Teach us, please.

When we have groups from North America or Europe visit us, I never have an agenda for the group or for the community. Instead, when the group arrives, we ask the community, “What can you do together? Would you be willing to do something together?” And the answer may be we just want to play football with you, or we’d like you to teach us something about computers. Or it may be, we’re good dancers. Would you like to learn to dance from us?

Visitors say, What? I came to save the world. I came to change the world. My pastor said that we were going to Mexico to change the world for Christ. And you ask me to learn to dance your folk dances?

But you know, they learn much more through this process than just by believing these fantasies that a one- or two-week so-called mission trip will save the world.

What could American churches learn that would help us be better partners for you in your mission?

I think that the American church, which I love and I’m very grateful for, is often not very conscious of its language. You hear the language of “changing the world” from Americans all the time. Well, that has enormous implications for the rest of us! Why do these Americans want to change the world? Into what kind of world will they change it? Do they know better than us? Is that what they mean?

If you come to me, even with the best intentions, and say, “Saul, I came here to change your world,”

I will feel insulted. Because you don’t know how much I love my own culture. I was born here because of God’s decision, not mine. I grew up with our music, our colors, our rhythms.

When people come and say, “Oh, you’re late because this is Mexico,” I always think, Well, so what? Mexicans are laid back. And we love it!

And the same applies when I, as an educated person, go into the slums. When I talk to them, I have to do it locally, on the streets, in their homes, wherever. And I need to be sure we are creating a language of mutual understanding. We need to agree which things we need to focus our attention on changing, and for which things we can just say, “Thank you, God. What you have given us is beautiful as is.”

Then, suppose we agree that one of the problems to address is that children are failing in their English classes. Now it would be easy to say, “Can I recruit someone from England or America to come and teach?” But first I should ask, “Is there a resource in the community?”

Someone may say, “My daughter studies English and she’s doing well. She could teach the children.” But perhaps she needs to work to support herself. Can the community band together to pay her? This kind of process is very different from coming in to “change the world.” We don’t want our neighbors to perceive us as their saviors—they should see us as their partners, their facilitators, their friends.

We pray, “Your will be done on earth as in heaven.” Doesn’t that imply changing the world?

I would distinguish between “change” and “transformation.” Change can come as a result of power. If you have power—the power of superior resources, technology, knowledge, or connections—you can bring a certain kind of change. But if you use power to put what you have down the throats of people, you never, never see them transforming. Instead you’ll see them adapting. But there’s something about “transformation” that implies a process that’s not done to someone, but a process where we both start to create a new common language, a new common world, new common understanding.

So the transformation that needs to take place goes both ways.

Exactly. It’s not “Let’s go transform these poor folks” but “let’s see how they and we will be transformed!”

I don’t at all want to suggest that Americans are not needed in Mexico. We need more of these relationships of mutual transformation. Mexicans feel so neglected, so despised sometimes by their American neighbors.

To see Americans digging alongside them, visiting in their homes, bringing Christmas gifts, sitting with them and giving them some attention, asking about the children—every year remembering their names—makes them believe that God has a community of believers who really care.

That’s the strong language of love.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

One afternoon, I received a call from a professor who had found something disturbing on a student’s drafting table. As dean of students, I went to investigate and discovered a rash of obscene and violent messages depicted in both art and written form. So I confiscated what would be needed to document the handbook violations and assigned a member of our residence life team to track down the artist.

Close to midnight, I heard from a staff member that our missing student was seen running around campus with his shirt off in the pouring rain. They encouraged him to come in and get dry, but he refused. He bunkered down in a dumpster and was convinced he was in tremendous danger.

With my job title and my degree in counseling, guess who was called in for garbage duty?

It took a while to get this young man out of the dumpster and into the dorm, and even longer to get him to go to the hospital with me for an evaluation. Once there, thanks to a release the doctors encouraged him to sign, his history of mental illness was revealed. We learned his supply of medications was depleted, and he had stopped receiving the stabilization he needed to function appropriately.

We gave him every opportunity to return to school and to complete his degree, but it didn’t work out. He eventually returned home to enroll in long-term psychiatric care.

People on campus thought we expelled him for his behavior, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. We just don’t disclose mental health situations over the campus e-mail. Even when accused by others of treating the student unfairly, we kept private information private, and suffered the complaints.

The lessons I learned in my decade serving at a Christian college have served me well in my new role as a pastor. I didn’t expect to find so many people affected by mental illness, meds, and their effects.

According to the 2005 Boston University Slone Epidemiology Center survey on the patterns of medication use in the United States, in any given week, 81 percent of adults in the U.S. are taking at least one medication, from insulin to Ritalin, from blood pressure pills to Prozac.

Given that staggering number, it’s obvious that a sizable percentage of the people in our congregations are on medications, some of which are mood altering or psychotic behavior stabilizers.

Does this change the way we counsel? Does this change the way we preach?

On the college campus, it became more difficult with each succeeding year to deal with medical issues when evaluating a student’s behavior and mental health. This became even harder to assess once the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted in 1996.

HIPAA was instituted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to address the use and disclosure of personal health information. The law was made for all the right reasons; unfortunately, it doesn’t always work for the benefit of those who are being protected. Armed with the appropriate consent forms, we college administrators were usually able to learn of the students’ medical histories so we could stay alert to their wellbeing.

Colleges are all about developing policies, even for ministry. But what about the local church? How can we uncover the medication issues involved in our body? What do we disclose to the staff or leadership team? And what if the leaders are the ones on Zoloft?

Too often we discover a troublesome medical history by accident—or by incident. And although most pastors aren’t medical professionals constrained by HIPAA, we still feel hamstrung about sharing personal medical information.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Something was really different about “Tammy,” one of our church’s regular attenders. She had a hard time making eye contact. She was disheveled and unkempt. She talked in an agitated and staccato pattern, as if she already knew you weren’t listening and assumed you didn’t care. She had obviously been hurt, scarred, or violated, and her tone told me she didn’t trust authority or believe

I could possibly be sincere.

I slowly pieced together her story through conversations with other women in the church. As the years passed and her church relationships grew, Tammy began to blend in as one of our own. She developed some close friendships, and she often stopped by the church office to talk with me and to pray.

Then about a year ago, and for a period of about six months, her life turned tragic. Every week there was a new development: She told us she had developed a liver disease that led to hospitalizations and the medical staff had shaved her head; the death of a close family member produced traumatic grief; she reported a clandestine relationship that turned from romantic to violent; she had wild and crazy phone conversations in my presence with people I’d never heard of. Those ministering to her tried to love and nurture Tammy through all these dramatic episodes, but we were all overwhelmed.

Her story of the death of a second family member sounded too strange to be true. It was.

With a little research, we found all her histrionics were based on lies. Even the phone calls were faked. When we confronted her with the truth, she didn’t fight us. She was defeated and broken and agreed to take steps toward recovery and mental health.

Tammy signed the release forms and agreed for us to discuss her mental health issues with past therapists and caseworkers.

What we discovered in those conversations was that Tammy’s story, like her illness, was many layers deep. The eye-opener was that Tammy had been off her medication for the last six months and had slipped back into psychotic episodes familiar to her former counselors and well-documented in her records.

We loved Tammy as best we could, in ways we thought Jesus would, but we could have served her better by recognizing her medical issues earlier.

Off With Their Meds

I am an experienced therapist who specialized in crisis work, and still I was blind to some obvious signs that Tammy was off her meds. I should have noticed some of the changes, but I think I was caught up in the day-to-day spiritual and relational issues and missed the bigger picture. In review, here are some signs that people are having meds issues—either they need meds, or are off them:

1. Significant and drastic changes in mood.
2. Impulsive or random behavior that is contrary to normal functioning.
3. Inconsistent verbal or non-verbal behavior.
4. Increased difficulty making eye contact or finishing sentences.
5. Repeatedly canceled appointments.

Going Public

How common is this in church life? Do people who struggle with interpersonal relationships and exhibit strange behaviors actually need to be on some kind of medication? As pastors, how can we find out this kind of information? After we do, who do we tell?

Key to addressing this issue is creating an environment where it’s okay to admit you have medication and mental health issues. I am now communicating with our congregation in a similar way I did with the staff and students at the college campus. Mental health is a reality, and so is mental illness. We all know people with phobias and disorders. In fact, we are those people.

I try to reduce the stigma by referring to standard mental health issues like depression and addiction in my messages. I use dramatic stories I’ve read as introductions or illustrations. And I try to communicate that mental health issues are not spiritual failings. God heals in many ways, including regular, carefully regulated doses of mood stabilizing drugs. And God can use these conditions to draw people closer to himself.

For some people in our congregation, such as those who ministered to Tammy through an accountability group, mental health is a ministry field. I don’t reveal names or imply that we have such cases in our church, but occasional references to mental and emotional wellbeing are encouraging to the hurting and to those trying to help them.

More important is how we handle mental health issues in our office, specifically when dealing with parishioners who come in for counseling. In most of my pastoral counseling appointments, I ask about medication history and current medications as a routine part of the intake process (see the box “Probing Questions”). I think it is a must.

This may seem intrusive, but most people are very comfortable with this line of questioning these days. If they aren’t, I simply move on. Some folks still feel guilty about taking medication for what they perceive to be “a spiritual issue,” but at least they know I’m open to discussing medications in the future. Because I raised the issue initially, they may feel free to bring it up later.

If they answer the medical questions, I take the time to research the condition on the internet, learning what each medication does and its side effects. Sometimes I call mental health professionals to ask how to deal appropriately with someone using that kind of medication. I don’t reveal names or specifics, just ask for some basic guidelines.

Once I know more, I follow-up by giving the counselee tools for better self-awareness and accountability. And I encourage the counselee to reveal the condition to at least one other trusted person in the congregation. The pastor should not be the only one who knows.

I give the counselee a copy of the information

I gathered. If appropriate, I will challenge him or her to get involved with a small group that deals with such issues—whether that is available at our church or another church in town. In Tammy’s case accountability has proven to be life altering. Although she now lives in a different city, she stopped by last week to visit. She is doing much better, she says, and her mood and behavior have stabilized. It was good to see her smile and to hear her laugh. It was encouraging to know that she has received help and that she is seeing her counselor and doctor as prescribed.

Wait a minute … I have a phone call. It’s one of Tammy’s accountability partners. Tammy’s counselor just called and said Tammy skipped her appointment again. The partner wanted me to know she would be confronting Tammy. It’s good to know that the system we worked hard to get in place is helping us care for one of God’s children.

Elliott Anderson is pastor of Elgin (Illinois) Evangelical Free Church.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

The words are scrawled across the collarbone of the aged department store mannequin: “Use me or abuse me.” If that invitation isn’t compelling enough, a more poetic plea is written on her chest: “Let your imagination release your imprisoned possibilities.” Several anonymous artists have answered the call. The mannequin is naked, wigless, chopped at the waist, and gloriously painted.

She’s propped in the textile area of the 6,000-square-foot space in downtown Toronto known as Sketch. The loft is filled with collages, paintings, banners, photographs, sculptures, and paint splatters on the floor.

Billed as “a working art initiative for youth ages 15-29 who are street-involved, homeless, and at-risk,” Sketch is a place where simple acts of creative play lead to healing, growth, and spiritual transformation.

“Youth who experience street life can be so heavily encumbered with hurt, shame, confusion, and the oppression of poverty, that they often first need to have a sense of safety and restoration, long before they can begin to acknowledge issues of spirituality and faith,” says Sketch founder Phyllis Novak.

Each year, Sketch welcomes more than 600 street-involved youth through workshops, open studio drop-ins, skill-building intensives, internships, and community events.

Michael, 23, moves confidently about the Sketch kitchen, speaking with pride of the day’s menu; chicken, scalloped potatoes, and squash soup. But he was fearful when he first arrived at Sketch, just over a year ago.

“I was dealing with a lot of anxieties because of my past,” he says. He has grown “spiritually stronger” through his cooking, painting, and photography, he says. “I now have a greater sense of what I believe and how I can express that.”

Despite the trauma and violence these kids still face on the streets, Sketch has one of the lowest incident rates of any drop-in program in the city. Why? Staff have several theories. “Part of it is that there’s this invitation to be new every day,” says artist coordinator Kerry Boileau. “You’re not necessarily held to what you’ve done [in the past]. You can choose a new path.”

“Just by walking into this space, people feel valued,” agrees drop-in coordinator Julian Diego. “We try to let people know that it’s their space. And people have fun here. So I think they value their access to it, in a way that they become very protective of the space.”

Novak launched Sketch in 1996, with support from the Christian community, to be “an authentic demonstration of the presence and love that Christianity truly means to bear to the world through Christ.” Years of coordinating drama and visual arts at Toronto’s Yonge Street Mission had taught her that when “someone makes art, incredible transformation can take place in their lives.”

“There is a softening that occurs during the art-making process,” she reflects. “Just being around it causes all of us to drop our guard a little, become younger within, and more able to receive kindness and love.”

Such is the norm at Sketch. Youth may come out of curiosity or for the free meals, but they stay because they find something there that they haven’t found anywhere else.

Spewky, 20, has been living on the streets since he was 17. “Sketch changed my life completely,” he says. “It’s why I wake up every morning. It’s like a family here.”

Sketch board chair John Andras observes, “You’ve got to remember that their lives may have been very bleak. Street life is a hard life. They’re constantly rejected. Then they come to a place where they’re totally accepted for who they are. And they’re accepted for being valuable, contributing individuals that can succeed and create. It’s through that process of creation that a spark ignites, starts to kindle the soul, and a searching begins.”

Then, as a certain painted mannequin affirms, imprisoned possibilities are released and souls are set free.

Learn more at www.Sketch.ca

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

In the early 1880s, William D. Longstaff wrote a poem that later became a hymn called “Take Time to Be Holy.” In my branch of church tradition, we often sang this hymn. As a kid I considered it uninspiring (sorry, Mr. Longstaff), and I groaned whenever the song leader announced it. Today, decades later, I have taken a fresh look at the song and reconsidered my earlier appraisal. There’s substance here.

Take time to be holy,
Speak oft with thy Lord,
Abide in him always,
And feed on his word.
Make friends of God’s children;
Help those who are weak,
Forgetting in nothing his blessing to seek.

There are three more verses to Longstaff’s hymn, and the second verse is also worth quoting:

Take time to be holy,
The world rushes on;
Spend much time in secret
With Jesus alone;
By looking to Jesus
Like him thou shalt be;
Thy friends in thy conduct his likeness shall see.

Each line of that second verse prompts an objection from somewhere within and helps me to understand why holy people tend to be scarce.

Go down to the marketplace. Submit to the ordinary trials, skepticism, and irreligion. Let us see then if you remain holy.

“Take time …” But I don’t have time.

“The world rushes on …” And I am busy rushing with it.

“Spend much time in secret …” Secret? I like to brag about anything I do with and for Jesus.

“With Jesus alone …” Huh? And turn off my iPod and text messaging?

“Like [Jesus] thou shalt be …” I’d rather imitate Bill or Rick or Andy.

“Thy friends in thy conduct his likeness shall see …” Don’t expect me to be that kind of example.

Despite its Victorian English, Longstaff’s hymn does a pretty good job of describing the essentials of what it takes to become holy.

Becoming a holy person is intentional; you have to work at it. When God says to Israel, “Consecrate yourselves,” he is putting the ball in our court. In other words, pursue whatever it takes to be a holy man, a holy woman, a holy nation.

Holy, a volatile word

I’ve not seen myself as a holy man, although I have longed to be one. Sometimes I’ve reasoned that I don’t have the temperament or the concentrative ability for that level of spiritual nobility. And there have been times when, despite my general intention to be holy, I have felt that I failed God so miserably that I was tempted, like someone else in the past, to settle for being a servant, not a son, in his household.

I am using the word as it was used in “be holy, because I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16), where the apostle challenges a fresh Christian generation to a unique lifestyle that will set it in contrast with the pagan culture. Those who received the challenge would know instantly that they were being called to something extraordinary.

Holy starts out as descriptive of the character of God. And Christians are urged to order their lives in accordance with what they know about the nature of God. Holy can also be equated with Christlikeness and the fruits of the Holy Spirit listed in the Galatian letter. This speaks to the quality of life to which Christians are to aspire.

Sadly, the word holy gets kicked around a bit these days. While some take it very seriously, others mistakenly connect the idea with pomposity, a contrived way of living that seems more designed to impress people (some people anyway) than God.

In my childhood, there was a version of faith that seemed unreal to me. It sported a special vocabulary, a way of praying, a list of prohibited behaviors, and a withdrawal from the larger world. It was a faith-style that, for me, seemed fraught with judgmentalism and arrogance even as it projected a gloss of humility. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to be that kind of a “holy” person.

I raise the subject because I wonder if the idea of being holy is losing ground today, especially among those in a position to influence the church. Are we inadvertently losing interest in being holy (in the best sense of the word) and spending our energies on problem-solving, success, personal fulfillment, and avoiding anything that smacks of suffering?

As I read the blurbs on books about authors, as I listen to the introductions and read the brochures about speakers at various conferences, and as I tune in on the illustrative stories chosen to describe modern Christians, I hear little about anyone being holy. I just hear how successful they are.

For all I know, many of these luminaries are indeed holy and embody William Longstaff’s four-verse poem. Perhaps they do take the time to be with God, and they do remind their personal friends of Jesus. But if this is true, I’d like to hear a bit more about it. It would encourage the rest of us.

Unfortunately, Christian leaders are usually accredited to us as great speakers, brilliant and creative thinkers, scintillating artists and entertainers, and powerful organizational developers. But holy people? Maybe that’s an endangered species.

When was the last time you were invited to meet someone because he or she was a holy person with a word from God?

Ever met a holy person?

I did a dangerous thing as I worked through this essay. I asked myself who, in my own Christian tradition, have I known and observed that seems a genuinely holy person? The names—each well-known—that came to my mind first were John Stott, Billy Graham, Ruth Graham, and Joni Eareckson Tada.

I added George Verwer, Jill Briscoe, Robertson McQuilken, James Houston, and Dallas Willard. They, in my estimation, are holy people. My list grew to include many others, most of whom you would not know.

Many that I could have named have done something great for the kingdom. But as I built my list, I tried to go for what I call the Life underneath the life, the being beneath performance. I was looking for those who have consistently “walked with God” (remember Enoch?) throughout life’s small and large routines.

C.S. Lewis writes: “Nothing could be more foreign to the tone of Scripture than the language of those who describe a saint as a ‘moral genius’ or a ‘spiritual genius’ thus insinuating that his virtue or spirituality is ‘creative’ or ‘original.’ If I have read the New Testament aright, it leaves no room for ‘creativeness’ even in a modified or metaphorical sense. Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours.”

There is a wonderful story of a young brilliant rabbinical scholar who went to his superior to ask if he qualified to be a holy person—in fact, the most holy person in the neighborhood. His mentor grew irritated at the question and, at first, refused to answer. Then, because he was prodded over and over again by the young man he answered:

“You are the most pious man of our age. You study night and day, retired from the world, surrounded by the rows of your books, the holy ark, the faces of devout scholars. You have reached high holiness. How have you reached it? Go down in the marketplace with the rest of the Jews. Endure their work, their strains, their distractions. Mingle in the world, hear the skepticism and irreligion they hear, take the blows they take. Submit to the ordinary trials of the ordinary Jew. Let us see then if you remain the holiest of all men.”

The people I mentioned in the earlier paragraph have indeed (one way or another) gone to the “marketplace” and faced the ordinary trials. And I find them to be holy people because they have kept the faith in all circ*mstances and grown deeper as they kept it.

You know a holy person because when you are in their presence, there’s something about them that makes you feel elevated toward God.

Often when I enter the kitchen where my wife, Gail, is preparing a meal, I feel my saliva glands spring into action involuntarily. It’s the mark of a great cook that she can make this happen.

A similar thing happens when you come into the presence of a holy person. The glands of the heart spring into motion, and you experience a fresh attraction to the God this person knows.

The opposite may also happen. The presence of a holy person can cause a sudden burst of conviction. I’m thinking of a time when a celebrity known for her flagrantly immoral lifestyle came through a reception line to meet one of the people I listed above.

With a suddenness that probably surprised her as much as anyone, she burst into wrenching tears as she extended her hand. You had to believe that godless heart simply could not remain composed in the presence of someone who projected an authentic holiness.

Holy and human

An early 20th-century Salvation Army officer, Samuel Logan Brengle, embodies for me everything I could imagine a holy person to be. Brengle served God as an evangelist and revival speaker for approximately 40 years.

Clarence Hall’s biography of Brengle records these words (in the context of the Salvation Army) from an anonymous source describing Brengle: “There are men to whose name rank and title add weight, prestige; whose position in the minds of their fellows is elevated by it. But not so with Brengle. Rank does not give increase to that name; neither would lack of rank diminish it. In the minds of people the world over, the name Brengle means holiness, sweetness, love, benediction, blessing, power; Commissioner Brengle means no more. Though the rank he has recently added is just recognition of his value to the Salvation Army, it is a superfluity in the evaluation of the man himself.”

The writer here is pointing to the Life underneath the professional life, to the characteristics that point beyond the man toward the God to whom he had dedicated his life.

As a truly holy man, Brengle did not set himself above others, nor did he attempt to flaunt some kind of cheap piety.

Hall writes: “Looking him over at close range, men saw in Brengle these three: humanity, humility, and—humor … to them the most surprising of these was humor. Others (found) that this man’s saintliness sparkled and bubbled with good nature, that his humor was gentle, whimsical, graceful. His smile was the kind that opened suddenly, like a bursting skyrocket; it would start in his eyes, twinkle there, then wreathe and wrinkle over his face, shake his body, and seem to run vitalizingly to his very toes.”

People sought his presence. Again, Hall (quoting a Salvation Army associate): “I have seen the leading commissioners, engulfed with a thousand duties, set aside their papers, dismiss their stenographers, lock the door, and wait upon the American preacher. They wanted him near, they felt their need of this holy man, and all their actions seemed to say: ‘It is holy ground, Brengle is here.'”

I have read the Brengle biography at least a dozen times. Few books in my library inspire me as much as this one does when I feel that my personal arrangements with God are slipping (or, to use Longstaff’s words, when I am not spending time in secret with Jesus).

What I see is a man who knew lots about life in the streets but saw it from the perspective of knowing lots about life in the Lord’s presence. After reading of Brengle, I’m pointed in a better direction: seeking deeper communion with the Father.

Common threads of holiness

When one reads the Scriptures and the church fathers on this theme of being holy, and when one reads appropriate biographies of the great spiritual champions, and when one observes the lives of less-than-prestigious people who seem to have gone deeper with Jesus than most, you see these commonalities:

1. They don’t second guess their decision to intentionally follow Jesus. They possess a powerful (not necessarily spectacular) sense of personal conversion, and they readily invite others to share the same experience.
2. They conscientiously prioritize life so that they spend ample time in personal worship, reflection in Scripture, and prayer (listening to God and absorbing whatever God wishes for them to know and experience).
3. They make a steady effort to discipline their lives toward virtues that reflect Jesus. They cultivate a healthy hatred of sin and all that corrupts life.
4. They cultivate healthy relationships—both giving and taking—and add value to each human encounter. I might add that they usually understand that their connection with God is often in the context of “community” and not merely as solo-saints.
5. They engage the larger world with a humbled mind to serve and seek justice and mercy for those weaker than they.

I see these qualities in Commissioner Brengle, and I have no doubt that this man would have been a spiritual influence in any branch of the Christian movement. Not because of his giftedness as a preacher and evangelist, but because of this underlying holy life that compelled people to feel nearer to God when he was around.

Clarence Hall writes of a night when Brengle was introduced to a crowd as “the great Colonel Brengle.” He was apparently disturbed by this excessive introduction and wrote in his journal: “If I appear great in their eyes, the Lord is most graciously helping me to see how absolutely nothing I am without Him, and helping to keep little in my own eyes. He does use me. But I am also conscious that He uses me, and that it is not of me that the work is done. The axe cannot boast of trees it has cut down. It could do nothing but for the woodsman. He made it, he sharpened it, he used it, and the moment he throws it aside, it becomes only old iron. Oh, that I may never lose sight of this.”

This perspective made Brengle tender, not hard.

“There is nothing about holiness to make people hard and unsympathetic and difficult to approach,” Brengle wrote. “It is an experience that makes a man pre-eminently human; it liberates his sympathies, it fills him with love to all mankind, with compassion for sinners, with kindness and pity for them that are ignorant and out of the way. And while it makes him stern with himself, it makes him gentle with others.”

The soil of suffering

One of the elements of Brengle’s life that many of us would like to avoid is the fact that the man knew suffering. During his assignment to the Boston Corps, he was accosted by a thug who threw a paving brick at him from a distance of just ten feet. The brick hit Brengle in the head with full force, and he almost died. He was forced to spend 18 months in rehabilitation. From then on, he suffered periodically from excruciating headaches and bouts of depression.

During his recovery, Brengle wrote what was probably his best book, Helps to Holiness, and would often quip, “Well, if there had been no little brick, there would have been no little book.”

Hall writes that Brengle “never allowed himself to give in (to physical weakness) until completely overcome, but would laugh away all minor complaints as mere trifles, maintaining a happy buoyant spirit until some malady positively forced him to bed. His spirit drilled his body into an habitually erect and optimistic carriage, which could be forced to drop but could not be induced to droop.”

Brengle said: “God does not make pets of His people, and especially of those whom He woos and wins into close fellowship with Himself, and fits and crowns for great and high service. His greatest servants have often been the greatest sufferers.” I don’t think the Commissioner would have had a lot of use for a prosperity gospel or for a faith that is devoid of struggle.

The Life beneath life

It may be time for all of us to rethink the meaning of being holy. To ask ourselves again: what is the Life beneath that life of technique, skill, and charisma to which we have recently given so much attention?

Peter is credited with the question, “What kind of people ought you to be?” He asked this while sensing that civilization as he knew it was unraveling.

With today’s realities (climate change, terrorism, globalism, human-engineering, awesome human suffering), his question is just as relevant now. And the answer—if it’s a good answer—is probably the latest description of what it means to be holy.

It’s worth a vigorous discussion for every church leadership team, every covenant group. You don’t arrive at a final definition of being holy. But you pursue it, talk about it over and over, pray for it, experiment with it, and each time you get a fresh rendition of what God wills the people called by his name to be.

A congregation, regardless of size, deserves a holy pastor whose life is on display and worthy of mimicking. Paul says as much to Timothy: be an example for the believers in speech (how you speak and what you speak about), in life (your personal life), in love (how you maintain healthy relationships—spouse and children first), in faith (how you visibly walk in alignment with God), and in purity (your morality and ethics in everyday life).

A small group deserves a holy facilitator. An organization deserves a holy president. A worship team deserves a holy worship leader. And the world of the arts deserves holy artists.

Few would disagree. But the fact remains that we are fearful of this subject, of being holy. It’s much easier to explore the steps to better friendships or better Bible study or coping with anger and insecurity.

We sometimes fear that in the pursuit of being holy, we will fall into the trap of putting on an act, or being caught when we fall short. A reasonable concern. So let’s be aware of it. Let’s have friends close enough to call us to account when need be.

I go back to William Longstaff’s hymn, which I once found so boring. Perhaps the music could be spiffed up, but leave the words as they are and sing them often. They open the doors to a recitation we all need to hear: how to pursue the way of being holy.

I bet Samuel Logan Brengle loved that song.

Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership and chair of World Relief and lives in Belmont, New Hampshire.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

There are roughly 300,000 churches in the United States, and almost half have the CCLI license for congregational worship music. But for the Church Video License, the number is just over 40,000.

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Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.