I sat with Larry Crabb at a conference a couple of years ago. We talked about his concept of the church being a safe place “where people connect and are forever changed.” My heart longed to be a part of such a church. If pastors want this, I said, imagine how people in the congregation must long for it.
More recently I read his book, The Safest Place on Earth (Word, 1999). I’m not sure this kind of church exists, but I pray one day it will.
On a porch in Miami Beach, Crabb saw at least a hundred chairs arranged in neat rows. In each chair sat an elderly person staring straight ahead. There was almost no interaction among them.
Sound familiar? Crabb says it should.
We live in a day with great worship and great teaching, but are we experiencing the safe place of spiritual community?
“We’re doing a lot,” Crabb writes, “but I wonder if the Spirit, who lives in a circle with two Others who are always relating, sees us as the retired people on the porch: lined up in chairs facing straight ahead with no life passing back and forth among them.”
Spiritual community, true and intimate, is “turning our chairs” toward each other, but that is risky. It requires that we deal with the brokenness of people. Our churches are full of them. And we must wrestle with our own broken state. “Brokenness is not attractive,” Crabb says, “not until we’re broken in a safe place.”
To build this community, we need to move from being “fixers” to “travelers.” So Crabb, the psychologist, tells us rather than restoring souls with psychotherapy and law, we need to be ministers of grace who help people “move upstairs.”
We can live in the “lower room,” where we either hide problems or parade them; or, we can move to the “upper room” where the Trinity will meet us. There God will release in us what is already in our hearts, passion to worship, trust, grow, and obey the Lord. What our souls most desire we already possess in Christ. But ascension to the upper room won’t happen without a safe community.
I must admit I’m a bit uncomfortable with Christian mysticism (Crabb’s idea of rooms draws from the mystics); but I’m a lot more uncomfortable with a church that is not “a safe place to hit bottom.”
How can our churches become safe places? Crabb suggests we start with prayer. Then we should arouse the life of Christ in each other. “Togetherness in Christ encourages movement toward Christ,” he says.
While reading this book in a coffee shop, I was moved to prayer for my own church to become the kind of community Crabb describes. A young woman, quadriplegic, came in. As she was being fed her lunch by a friend, I began to understand what Crabb was talking about. In a safe-place church, there is no self-sufficiency. We are truly dependent on God. And in a safe-place church that need is expressed in dependence on each other. That is true, spiritual community. Building this kind of community won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.
Roger D. Haber, senior pastorBridgeway Community ChurchCarol Stream, Illinois
A Quantum Leap of Faith
Daniel McCabe
Who doesn’t love the smell in the breeze after a refreshing rain? I even enjoy the flash and crackle of a Louisiana thunderstorm as long as the local TV weather guru doesn’t give it a first name. In this part of the country, when a storm gets that familiar, it’s time to head north until the coast is clear, or else you’ll be washed away in your sleep.
The forecast for the church is a wet one, according to Eddie Gibbs in his book, ChurchNext: Quantum Changes in How We Do Ministry (InterVarsity Press, 2000).
The church must quickly identify the major storm centers if it is to awake to another sunny Sunday. He warns that these “storm fronts do not simply represent a short-term threat churches must survive in order to return to the familiar and more tranquil conditions that they have previously known. Rather, these storm fronts represent boundary lines that separate two very different worlds” (p. 11).
Gibbs gives a first name to nine storm centers and points to the sunshine beyond their churning winds.
By his own admission, Gibbs offers no detailed rescue plan, but he is confident that his paradigm will lead to practical, shape-defining solutions. Gibbs closes each chapter with a handful of ideas that each pastor or church leader can implement in his own setting.
Gibbs calls for major changes; yet, he would quickly admit that his paradigm, any paradigm, is lifeless without God at the center.
“Only God can grow a church,” he writes. “Our task is to collaborate with God in his work.” He is not shy, however, to point out the “old man” logic that has led to the closing of thousands of churches and to the defensive posturing of thousands more. “Churches cannot stand apart from society and invite people to come to them on their terms. Rather, churches must go to the people” (p. 39). They must be missional, living not for themselves, but for the world that Jesus loved so.
Without malice Gibbs challenges the market-driven and seeker-sensitive strategies that dominate many churches today, arguing that they can lead to a distorted form of the gospel that proposes to meet needs without demanding serious personal transformation.
He is also concerned that they depend too heavily on the notion that seekers will continue to come through the front doors of our churches. Gibbs believes that most will not and fears that those who still do will “turn away uttering expletives as they go” if they get any hint that the church is motivated more by enhancing their institution than by listening to the seeker.
New paradigm churches need leaders who don’t mind working on the confused and messy turf of a society that is living in rebellion against God. These new leaders emphasize a transformational encounter with the living God and equip people for mission in the world.
ChurchNext is for the veteran church leader who wants to evaluate his philosophy of ministry. It is regularly insightful, though requiring a careful read, and would serve well for graduate studies on church renewal.
Daniel McCabe, associate pastorMoss Bluff Bible ChurchLake Charles, Louisiana
The New Three-Pointer
Lou Diaz
As the church awakens to a new era, the preacher must approach the pulpit with a new tactic, one not limited to the traditional, linear, reason-based explanation of the gospel.
Apologetic Preaching: Proclaiming Christ to a Postmodern World by Craig A. Loscalzo (InterVarsity Press, 2000) is both a tour guide’s orientation to postmodernism and a manual for reclaiming the apologetic role of the pulpit.
A tour guide explains the sites and their significance. This author cites the signposts in history to warn the reader. The same cultural breakdown that caused the fragmentation of the Medieval synthesis is occurring today. Modernism (dating from 1789 to 1989, from the Bastille to the removal of the Berlin Wall) is collapsing, and we are entering a postmodern world.
Understanding this intellectual revolution is critical to the person who wants to effectively communicate God’s Word. How do we proclaim Christ in a culture where plurality of values and beliefs has become an ideology? Truth is radically relativistic in postmodern thinking. How, then, shall we now preach?
Loscalzo, a pastor and former Baptist seminary professor, does not advocate compromise. His chapter “Proclaiming Truth in a Climate of Relativism” underscores preaching Christ as the only provision for salvation. Loscalzo asks rhetorically, “When we allow the subjectivism of our hearers to undermine the objective realities of Christian faith, haven’t we violated the integrity of the gospel?” The author upholds the gospel, cardinal doctrines of the faith, and the importance of avoiding hermeneutical mistakes.
The issue at hand is homiletical. How do we unpack the message for postmodern hearers? The truth remains intact, he says, but the delivery must change radically to be heard. Loscalzo’s presuppostion is that “postmodern listeners will respond more favorably to an inductive homiletic method.”
The modern world approach to preaching and apologetics is based on Western logic systems, with Aristotle being a primary influence. The syllogistic method, where the conclusion is drawn from a logical progression based on major and minor premises, will not be as effective with postmoderns, who are skeptical, subjective, selective, and non-sequential in their thinking.
This is why Loscalzo advocates the inductive hermeneutic and gives sample sermons using that model. Inductive logic moves from particular experience to forming a general principle. A narrative or story-based apologetic begins with people’s experience and moves them to a theological conclusion presented in the biblical text. It does not require a prior commitment to a proposition. The author recommends this method because it “intentionally takes into consideration postmodernism’s craving for stories and its inherent skepticism of objective religious truth” (p. 40).
Loscalzo calls preachers to reclaim the apologetic role of the pulpit as well, citing two goals from 1 Peter 3:15-16: “(1) to present unbelievers with a viable understanding of Christian faith so they may want to make it theirs, and (2) to instruct, confirm and affirm those who are already believers in faith” (p. 25). Many believers have a shaky understanding of their faith that needs the bolstering of apologetic preaching.
One chapter on practical issues suggests opportune times during the year to preach apologetic sermons. The book provides sermon topics and themes for worship services.
Apologetic Preaching has much to offer preachers who “take seriously the intersection between idioms of the age and the theological verities of Christian faith” (p. 21). It’s especially helpful for those interested in sharing Christ with postmodern people.
Lou Diaz, senior pastor Wheaton Evangelical Free Church Wheaton, Illinois
NOTE: For your convenience, The Safest Place on Earth, by Larry Crabb, and Apologetic Preaching, by Craig A. Loscalzo, are available in the Christianity Online bookstore.
Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
