Can We Get Beyond the Nonsense of Either/Or?

Perhaps my intolerance for nonsense is rooted in the fact that I am getting old, and my patience with it has somehow seemed to evaporate. Or it could be because I have read – multiple times – William Willimon’s chapter on “The Pastor as Prophet” in his wonderful book, Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry.

But it could also be because I read Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. Maybe it was Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. It could be Nancy French’s Ghosted: An American Story. It could be rethinking some of Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer’s A Church called TOV.  By the way, none of those books were written by “wannabe” scholars; they were written by people with authentic credentials!

Who knows? It could be my own observations about the church as I know it in the world in which I’m living out the final years of my life. Maybe “old people” in every generation have thought this, but I don’t think the historical record will support that. Here’s an example of what I mean. I run into students – great young adults – who don’t know there is a Sermon on the Mount, much less where to find it in Matthew or Luke. They grew up in church, listening to evangelical preaching, being engaged in youth activities, going to conferences and camps, etc., but they are extraordinarily illiterate when it comes to the content of Scripture. I listen to adults – sometimes their parents? – talking, and it seems that character, values and morals don’t really matter. If it is okay to vote for politicians whose values appear to be the polar opposite to the Sermon on the Mount, can I really expect my own children to think the Sermon on the Mount is important? As long as I’m pro-life and anti-same-sex marriage, then have I figured out what “being Jesus to the world” actually means? (Read John 17:18 and John 20:21 for a hint about this whole idea.)

The prompt for this post is that, in recent weeks, I have heard all kinds of “nonsense.” On the one hand, nonsense that suggests that the deep-into-the-weeds academic stuff of biblical studies is all that matters – in some ways, an approach I think would nauseate Jesus. On the other hand, I have, in multiple contexts, heard – and I’m summarizing – “good biblical study in preparation for preaching/teaching” isn’t all that important. I’m pretty sure that nauseates Jesus, as well.

I’ve spent my life and ministry in both the academy and the church. I often tell people that somehow God blessed me with the opportunity of what I call “the best of both worlds.” At this juncture in my life, my work is mostly in the academy – but I am very engaged in the life of the church where I attend. Students at Point who know me know that my office door is seldom closed. Point graduates – lots of them – know that I’ll take them out to eat and we can “talk shop.” I go to bed every night marveling at the fact that there are people in ministry – men and women – who think I am worth talking to.

But the “prophetic voice” in my life can’t help but say that I’m sick and tired of hearing that good biblical scholarship and ministry is an either/or situation. Much of what I’ve heard recently seems to suggest that content is relatively unimportant, as long as people make decisions to follow Jesus. I recently heard a presentation that purported to revolve around the Great Commission in Matthew 28. Of at least a half-dozen mentions of that text, only once did the phrase “and teaching” even get mentioned.

Multiple times, I’ve heard a significant dismissal of preachers who say “the Greek says” in their sermons. As a guy who preached in a local church for 20+ years, while still teaching in “the academy,” I think I could count on the fingers of one hand how many of my sermons included that phrase, but I hope every sermon I preached recognized what the original text said!

The whole church-growth movement – think Donal McGavern, back in the ’70s and beyond – seems to think that evangelism is the only mission of the church. I’m certainly not anti-evangelism, but I am convinced that if we read the Great Commission as “the Greek says,” we would think there is far more to the mission of the church than mere evangelism, which may not actually be evangelism in the long run.

In Matthew 28:19, Jesus’ statement begins with a circumstantial participle (Greek nerd speaking), which is best translated “as you go . . .” Jesus is not commanding me to go; rather, He is recognizing that I always am “on the go.” I’m currently teaching an online class at Point where one of the assignments is to choose a formation issue in the student’s life, and create a program of prayer, Bible reading, etc., to work on that challenge. I’ve taught this class multiple times. The most common problem students tend to address is being too “on the go.” Jesus doesn’t need to command any of us “to go” – but oddly, I almost never hear that in preaching.

The next phrase is “make disciples of the nations, the ethnicities.” That verb is an aorist, active, imperative. Translated into language we know that might closely reflect how original readers/hearers of Matthew would have understood, it might sound like, “begin to make disciples.” That sounds a lot like evangelism. I couldn’t agree more.

But somehow, in my academic life, I’ve learned that you really can’t understand Scripture if you isolate phrases/ideas and take them out of context. So, as weird as this may be, I think I need to keep reading.

Jesus then uses two Greek, present active participles (Greek nerd again!) to describe what “making disciples” – the actual command of the sentence – is all about. One is “baptizing them in name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (present active participle – describing “habit of life/linear” behavior). Too many people stop here. But Jesus doesn’t. He also says “teaching” (present, active participle – describing “habit of life/linear” behavior) to keep all that I have commanded you.” “Keeping” is a really interesting word – it means something like “to keep because of its value,” not “keep because you have to.” I have to “keep” my garbage until Monday evening, when I take the garbage container to the street for it to be emptied on Tuesday. But I have tons of things I “keep” because of their value – not because I have to. When Jesus says “keeping all that I commanded you,” He means the latter, not the former of those options.

Can a place where people meet, supposedly in the name of Jesus, actually be the church if they aren’t being taught to keep what Jesus taught because of its inherent value? If you are paying attention to much of what is called evangelical Christianity in our current cultural context, you know that question is more than merely important to ask. To be clear, I know of mega-churches who think “teaching them to keep” is as important as “baptizing them” in the first place. I also know of lots of churches who are not only “baptizing them,” but apparently their “teaching” doesn’t suggest any sense of evangelism. I also know of local churches who take pride in their ”smallness” in the name of “we’re teaching what the Bible says.”

This is the “it’s not either/or, but both/and” reality that the super-big churches and the barely-making-it churches need to start thinking about. 

Before I became the preacher at First Christian Church in College Park, Georgia, I had the opportunity to do some research. We were “baptizing” or “transferring” nearly 200 new people a year – but the Sunday worship attendance didn’t move significantly. It was shrinking, not increasing. The preacher then could “sell” anything, but he didn’t care a whole lot about growth in the awareness of the kingdom of God. 

Before I became the preacher at First Christian, nearly 300 members had left to “plant” a new church. After I became the preacher, I quickly learned that it was much easier to interest pagans in engaging the kingdom of God than it was to convince “the baptized” to reengage the kingdom of God. Ironically, that “church plant” no longer even exists – a testimony, in my mind, to the idea of the importance of “teaching them to keep all that I have commanded you.” 

I recently read something my cousin, who is the pastor of a rather large church in Georgia, wrote in a message to his staff. He was reminding the staff of the importance of the day-to-day work of ministry in a local church – even the very big ones. A lot of what he was talking about I would put in the category of “teaching.” But, before leaving that topic, he said every staff member should “talk to at least one new person a week.” That leads to evangelism! Then he noted that the “refreshing season” that comes from having helped someone along the journey of following of Jesus can and will provide the renewed energy to keep doing the work of ministry. That is, in my head, a very good sense of what the balance between evangelism and edification – baptizing and teaching in Matthew’s language – should look like. 

All kinds of contextual issues in life impact where our greatest energy is focused as believers. Serving God in a fast-growing suburban area likely provides far more opportunities for evangelism than if you happen to be serving in a small, rural community, where newcomers are few and far between. One’s own spiritual giftedness will certainly impact this issue. Paul is abundantly clear in 1 Corinthians 12 that the body of Christ has multiple members who are all gifted differently in order to make the body of Christ function well. But he never hints at – and in fact pushes back against – the idea that such differences ought to be used to make me feel superior to others who are gifted differently. When preachers start playing that game – great harm comes to the work of the kingdom.

One of my mentors in life often said that preachers who insisted on calling themselves “evangelists” instead of “preachers,” “ministers,” or even “pastors,” did so because they either didn’t like the fuller sense of what ministry is all about or were “too lazy to work that hard.” Whether or not that observation was (and maybe is) true is not for me to say. But it is something to think about.

My own story of faith doesn’t have a dramatic conversion story attached to it. The most natural thing in the world for me to become was a Christian, a follower of Jesus, in view of who my parents were and the family I grew up in. I’ve never gone up to the campfire testimony time on the last night of summer camp around a fire with a lighted cross gliding across the lake behind the fire! But ask me “Why have you remained a Christian?” Then I’ve got a story worth telling.

Here’s the point: the only reason I’ve stayed a believer is because of the “teaching side” of the great commission. I’m am eternally grateful for those faithful souls who – over many decades – have viewed my life as worth investing in. Two of those people, Professor Jim Evans and Dr. Lewis A. Foster, were outstanding Greek scholars who taught me much about how to grasp what the word of God says. Another of them was the associate minister at First Christian when I was the preacher there. He was much better at evangelism than I was, and I think he would say I was more of a biblical scholar than he was. But I never recall us competing with one another for the twenty-plus years we worked together – nor even now, all these years later, when we’re still the best of friends. We thought, apparently, that “both/and” was always better than “either/or.”

I hope all of this not only makes sense, but that it might challenge all of us to think more biblically about ministry, the life of the church, and who we are as the people of God. The world – and the church – is in desperate need of some “both/and” and a lot less of the “either/or” nonsense that is heard far too often.

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