Page 4385 – Christianity Today (2024)

Q:The tithe is clearly taught in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament it seems to be downplayed. Are those of us who give 10 percent of our income doing something not required?

—K. Dale Miller, Wilmore, Kentucky

A:A simple yes or no to this question would be horribly misleading.

We know that the law of Moses mandated the tithe (see Lev. 27:30-33), at least in part to support the ministry of the Levites (Num. 18:21-24). Like many other laws, however, it was frequently observed in the breach, although the prophets insisted that failure to pay the tithe was nothing less than robbing God (Mal. 3:6-12).

There were also offerings to be paid. Moreover, faithful Israelites were to be generous with their alms, so that the poor of the land were supported.

In practice, the prophets found themselves inveighing against greed and social injustice (e.g., Amos) and against a raw form of capitalism that squeezed out the poor (Isa. 5:8-10). In other words, even within the Old Testament we should be careful not to isolate the tithe from broader demands of generosity and social justice.

The only passage in the New Testament that explicitly authorizes the tithe does so in a rather backhanded way: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices. … But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matt. 23:23, NIV).

Jesus’ primary point, of course, is to criticize the scrupulous tithing of even a few herbs grown in the back garden if it is at the expense of fundamental issues of justice, integrity, and mercy. But one might have expected Jesus to say, “You should have practiced the latter, and let the herbs take care of themselves”—or some thing equally dismissive. Instead, he says, “You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.“

After the Cross and the Resurrection, the New Testament provides no passage with the same explicit conclusion. That raw fact leads to all the usual debates about the nature of the continuity and discontinuity between the old and new covenants.

Does the tithe continue as a divine mandate because it has not been explicitly abrogated? Or is it part of the “old order” that is passing away?

However we resolve that broad question, all sides agree that some New Testament writers insist that Christians be a giving, generous people (1 Tim. 6:18). So, at very least, we must insist that believers under both covenants are expected to give generously.

Some may wonder, Is the dispute about nothing more than the amount? Is there something about 10 percent that is entrenched in moral law?

The following two points will help focus the issue.

1. Beware of pride. There is always a great spiritual danger in thinking that if in some area we have satisfied a specific, concrete demand we have done everything that God requires. Ten percent is a lot of money to some folks; to others it’s not very much. Isn’t that one of the lessons to be learned from Jesus’ comments about the widow’s mite? To suppose that God demands 10 percent—and nothing more—can itself foster a remarkably independent and idolatrous attitude: “This bit is for God, and the rest is mine by right.” Likewise, if you choose to give more than 10 percent, you may become inebriated from the contemplation of your own generosity.

2. Remember why you’re giving. A strictly legal perspective on giving soon runs into a plethora of complicated debates. Is this 10 percent of gross income or of net? How does this play out in a country where a progressive income-tax system rises to 90 percent of in come? If we choose to tithe from our net income, are we talking “take-home pay” only, or does it include what is withheld for medical insurance and retirement benefits?

It would be easy to list such questions for a page or two without ever asking, “How can I manage my affairs so that I can give more?” That is surely a better question than “What’s the correct interpretation so that I can do whatever’s required and then get on with my life?”

Christians will want to acknowledge with gratitude that they are mere stewards of all that they “possess.” Moreover, New Testament ethics turn not so much on legal prescription as on lives joyfully submitted to God.

This is why the most penetrating New Testament passage on giving is 2 Cor. 8-9. Under severe trial, the Corinthians’ “overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity” (8:2). Even so, they first gave themselves to the Lord (8:5).

So, why not aim for 20 percent in your giving? Or 30? Or more, depending on your circ*mstances (8:12)? “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that … for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (8:9).

By D. A. Carson, research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Got a question you’d like answered? E-mail cteditor@christianitytoday.com with “Directions” in the subject line of your message.

“Pure evangelism.”

That’s why David Bruce spends hours every week watching movies and writing about them—all in his free time and for no compensation. Bruce says he’s a missionary to a “pre-Christian” world, one so influenced by motion pictures that they have become the world’s “common language.”

Bruce is pastor of the 130-member Patterson (Calif.) Covenant Church. He describes Patterson as “a town of 9,500 surrounded by cows.” While attending a Billy Graham crusade in San Jose in 1997, Bruce heard Graham cast a vision: “I challenge Christians to use the Internet for good.” A few days later, Bruce began planning a Web site to review movies from a Christian perspective and use those reviews as a springboard to the gospel.

Bruce had never used e-mail before starting Hollywood Jesus. He took a crash course in creating Web sites, and Hollywood Jesus launched in March 1998. It has registered almost two million hits since then, and more than 800 Web sites link to it. Web surfers from around the world visit the site regularly. Bruce, a father of seven, has enlisted the help of his daughter Kathleen to manage the ever-increasing pile of e-mail he receives.

A representative of New Line Cinema wrote Bruce to let him know the studio appreciated his review of Pleasantville. Bruce has also been interviewed by German television and the Wall Street Journal.

Through Hollywood Jesus he engages “pre-Christians” in an exploration of ethical, moral, and even Christian themes in popular movies. When these bridges are built, Bruce says, he is able to cross over them with the gospel. Every review ends with a link to a presentation of the gospel and an e-mail address for responses.

“One of the things you’re going to do as a missionary,” Bruce says, “is to listen to the stories of the people. In their stories you’re going to [hear] connecting points you can use to tell them the story of Jesus Christ.”

Hollywood Jesus differs from most other movie-review sites by Christians in that it presents the parallels between individual films and the gospel without passing judgment on a film’s objectionable elements. This reflects Bruce’s missionary intentions. “The personal struggle has been to divorce myself from a moralistic approach,” he says. “I try not to blast Hollywood for sex, violence, and language. I have to stay away from throwing rocks or moralizing to win and keep my audience.”

Bruce believes this strategy liberates Christians to enjoy movies. “You have this sense of freedom when you think, I can enjoy this movie—not accept everything that it says—because these people are using their gifts and, in a lot of ways, presenting pro-God themes unwittingly.”

Reviewing the movie Forces of Nature by Bronwen Hughes (who also directed Amy Grant videos), Bruce addresses the concepts of human destiny and God’s intervention; Life Is Beautiful opens a discussion about having hope and joy amid crushing circ*mstances; Patch Adams affirms the value of human beings as created in the image of God. Bruce likens the heroes of Saving Private Ryan to the shepherd who leaves the 99 to find the one lost lamb.

Based on the pile of responses Bruce has received, Holly wood Jesus is drawing seekers. Bruce’s mailbox gets fuller by the week, and he responds to all letters, many from “pre-Christians” who thank Bruce for giving them a different perspective on various films. A German visitor to Hollywood Jesus wrote to say The Thin Red Line “stimulated me to think about what’s after my life [and] what am I going to [experience] after my death.”

The popularity of Hollywood Jesus has come as a pleasant surprise to Bruce, and he is investigating ways to expand the site, enhancing its television section, and launching a section for fashion. He hopes his daughter Kathleen will begin coverage of popular music.

“God uses our culture to tell us about how much he loves us,” Bruce says. “If I can get a person to see Jesus in the films they see, I’ve done my job.”

Matt Donnelly is assistant editor of Christianity Online magazine (comag@ChristianityToday.com).

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah … saying, “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” But Jonah set out to flee … from the presence of the Lord.

And the people of Nineveh believed God. … But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled … at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. —Jonah 1:1–3; 3:5, 4:1–2, NRSV

Give us a sign.

One day, some Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus for a miraculous sign. Impress us, Jesus. Convince us, Jesus. We’ve heard rumors of your sleight-of-hand with water and wine, your conjuring tricks with bread and fish, your banishing stunts with demons and pigs. The word’s out that you’re Messiah: but we demand credentials. Give us a sign.

Jesus rebukes them: “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah” (Matt. 12:39, NIV).

A curious sign, this. Why not the sign, say, of Elijah? Now there was a prophet—calling down heaven’s fire, outrunning horses, staring down kings. Why not Isaiah? A towering, glowering man, I picture him, all sinewy muscle and wild-eyed zeal. Why not Daniel? Serene and shrewd in the face of folly and evil, holding tight the truth amid a world glutted with pagan traps and trappings.

But Jesus said Jonah: the runt prophet, the rebel prophet, the sulking prophet.

Of course, the sign of Jonah is two-fold: it’s an image of Jesus’ dying and rising (Matthew’s emphasis, 12:38–40); and it’s a warning to the Israelites that, though even wicked Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah, they are in danger of refusing one “greater than Jonah” (Luke’s emphasis, 11:29–32).

But I wonder. For Jesus to compare himself with Jonah at first offends. Jonah was a rebellious, petty, sullen man, self-serving and self-protecting. His sense of what matters was terribly skewed. But maybe that’s exactly the point: the sign of Jonah is an image, not just of dying and rising, not just of hearing and heeding, but also of incarnation and crucifixion—of Jesus coming to be with us, to share in our fallen humanity, to empty himself, to become sin for us. Jesus, just as he identified with us in the stable and on the cross, chose as his mascot the prophet most like you and me.

Jonah is us. Those other prophets—so free and bold, so daunting and undaunted, so flinty and unflinching—they are larger than life. The story of how God spoke to them, how they spoke to God, how they spoke for God: it’s as intimidating as it is inspiring. Who can equal them? Who can walk astride the earth like Isaiah? Who can command and demand and reprimand with Elijah’s authority? Who can endure the heavy hand of God like Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Hosea? Those prophets are men apart.

And then there’s Jonah. See him: hands plowed deep into his pant pockets, shoulders folded down in a perpetual slouch, face cast in a hardened sneer. He complains about the weather. It’s too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. He complains about the government. He complains about his neighbors. He complains about his church. The music’s loud. The preaching’s dull. The young people leave messes, they’re unruly and irreverent. The services go on and on. He doesn’t complain about his neighbor’s cat: instead, he poisoned it.

Isaiah is who we want to be. Jonah is who we are. Jonah is lord of the half-hearted, tribal chieftain of those who want God only on their own terms. I don’t find him attractive: I find him all too familiar.

God calls him to rise up, go. He rises up and goes all right: “But Jonah set out to flee … from the presence of the Lord” (Jon. 1:3, 10, NRSV). He’s not simply evading the task: he’s fleeing God. And now we touch something in Jonah that is elemental, part of the roots of our humanness: we really don’t want God.

For years, I’ve read devotional books and gone to workshops and conferences designed to deepen my life in God. I have an entire shelf of books just on prayer—its purposes, its nature, its aims. I have gleaned a litany of techniques for praying with focus and passion. I have learned what to relinquish and what to embrace as I approach prayer and practice it. Reading these books has been an apprenticeship to masters. If I had spent similar time and effort learning, say, the craft of violin-making, I would by now be able to make curvaceous, dark-burnished, sweet-toned instruments that wept or laughed, effortlessly, just to touch them.

But I’m not praying much better.

After I had read many of these books, I realized something. The books mostly assumed, and so did I, that I really wanted to get closer to God. The basic conviction behind those who write such books, and those who read them, is that every Christian’s primary stance toward God is Isaiah-like: “Here I am. Send me!” But that is not my primary stance. Nor is it probably yours. My primary stance—and yours perhaps—is Jonah-like: “But Jonah set out to flee … from the presence of the Lord.”

Why do Jonahs do that?

Jonah had good historical reasons, good personal reasons, for not wanting to go to Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria. Assyrians were cruel with bloodthirst, both capricious and calculated in doing evil. Their specialty was sacking and burning. They were a looming threat for the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and within 70 years of Jonah’s ministry would carry Israel into exile. They were not good people. Think of someone who has hurt you, betrayed you, who threatens to devour you. Think, if you can, of someone you hate, or have good reason to. That’s an Assyrian. Jonah was sent to their capital.

The story of Jonah confirms a dark suspicion we have about God. The suspicion is, God will always ask me to do the thing I least want to do, go to the very last place I desire to go. If I say I won’t go to the prairies or India, God will send me there. If I tell him I hate Bosnians, or Tutsis, or French Canadians, that’s exactly to whom he’ll send me.

Let’s state the suspicion in theological terms: God is a hard taskmaster, harvesting where he has not sown, gathering where he has not scattered seed. Maybe, in our bones, most of us fear God in the way we fear cyclones and Cyclopes, tigers and tyrants: not a wisdom-giving fear, but a skittish, nerve-sheering fright. God is out to get us. God wants to send us to the hellish Ninevites, and if we bolt, to loose the hell of storms and swallowing sea beasts upon us. Why, except that he’s a demanding boss?

I heard Paul Yonggi Cho speak a few years back. Yonggi Cho is pastor of the largest church in the world. Several years ago, as his ministry was becoming international, he told God, “I will go anywhere to preach the gospel—except Japan.” He hated the Japanese with gut-deep loathing because of what Japanese troops had done to the Korean people, and to members of Yonggi Cho’s own family, during World War II. The Japanese were his Ninevites. But God called him to preach in Japan. Oh, you’re a hard one, harvesting where you have not sown. He went, but he went bitter. The first speaking engagement was to a conference of 1,000 Japanese pastors. He stood up to speak, and what came out of his mouth was this: “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” And then he broke and wept. He was both brimful and desolate with hatred. At first one, then two, then all 1,000 pastors stood up. One by one they walked up to Yonggi Cho, knelt at his feet, and asked forgiveness for what they and their people had done to him and to his people. As this went on, God changed Yonggi Cho. The Lord put a single message in his heart and mouth: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Here’s something: God does not look on the outward appearances. He looks at the heart. And sometimes, he calls us to a work we do not want to do in order to reveal our heart—to reveal what we really believe, our deepest yearnings. How powerful, anyhow, is the blood of Christ, Reverend Cho? How far does the gospel of peace, the ministry of reconciliation, reach? Can it heal hatred between Koreans and Japanese? Can it make a Jew love a Ninevite? Can it make you be reconciled to … well, you know who?

Maybe that’s the problem. As it turns out, Jonah is not afraid God is too hard. His suspicion, actually, runs in exactly the opposite direction: God is too soft. “O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee. … I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (4:2, NIV). What use is it denouncing murderous Ninevites if they simply can repent and God will show them mercy? What kind of fool, run-amok God would do such a thing? He’s neither tame enough nor tough enough.

The portrait of God that emerges from the story of Jonah is a God both too hard and too soft: too hard on us and too soft on our enemies. He’s stern toward his children and indulgent to ward strangers. He scolds all the wrong people, pampers all the wrong people. He gives fatted calves to prodigals and not so much as a goat to his dutiful sons.

You’ve been teaching Sunday school for 12 years without a break. The only time anyone noticed was when you were sick one Sunday and forgot to phone for a replacement. The Sunday-school supervisor, curt and cold, said she thought you were thoughtful enough to know better than that. The next Sunday, everyone’s astir: a real-estate broker, notorious for his swindling, just converted and baptized, shared a moving testimony. The church got a cake for him and em braced him like a son.

It’s hard to follow a God who does those kind of things. It’s hard to obey a God like that.

Obey. I used to think Jonah’s central lesson—its moral, the nugget to mine for sermons or Sunday school—was how important it is to obey God. After all, disobedience is costly for Jonah: a sea storm, a near-drowning, a fish belly. And, in the end, the same unbending command: Go!

But I don’t think that’s the story’s main thrust. For one thing, God uses Jonah’s disobedience rather effectively. The reluctant prophet becomes the accidental evangelist. He boards ship with pagan sailors to Tarshish. Jonah’s not interested in these men. He’s avoiding not just God, but everyone. He goes down into the hold of the boat to sleep. But God sends a storm. The sailors—decent men—try everything to save the boat from going down. Then, when all that fails, they wake Jonah up and ask him to pray. That doesn’t work either. They cast lots to find out who’s causing the trouble, and—wouldn’t you know?—the lot falls on Jonah. “Who are you?” they ask. “What do you do? Where do you come from?” (Often pagans have to force us to identify ourselves.) Jonah answers, with what sounds like staggering smugness, “I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land” (1:9).

They keep trying, with all strength, courage, ingenuity, to save the ship, themselves, Jonah, but nothing doing. So, at Jonah’s bidding, they toss him overboard. Earlier, these men prayed earnestly to their own gods (1:5). But in our last glimpse of them, we see their boat, their faces, blur and darken as the water surges up above Jonah’s sinking body. They fear and make sacrifices and vows to Jonah’s God, the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land. God uses Jonah’s disobedience, openly confessed (1:10), as an opportunity to reveal himself to pagan sailors.

God is not interested in our obedience so much for his sake. He can just as well use our disobedience. Obedience is for our own good. But in the end, obedience by itself is not much good. Jonah, under compulsion, finally does the will of God: trudges off to Nineveh, preaches as he’s told. He is obedient. But he’s more miserable in his obedience than in his disobedience. In the ocean’s depths, in the fish’s belly, in his disobedience, Jonah feared death and prayed for deliverance (2:7). But under the wilted vine, with Nineveh saved, in his obedience, Jonah longs for death, and prays for God to deal it swiftly and unflinchingly (4:3). “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus than to trust and obey.” Jonah didn’t write that song. Jonah doesn’t sing that song. Jonah hates that song.

Is God solely, or mostly, interested in our obedience? No. There is something deeper down than that. Obedience, actually, can harden us to God more than disobedience can. If you doubt it, compare the older son with the younger one in the parable of the prodigal; compare the Pharisees and religious rulers with the tax collectors and prostitutes in the stories about Jesus. Or just look at Jonah. Obedience by itself can make our heart withered and bitter and barren as a husk.

What is God mostly interested in? Strangely, anti-climactically, it has to do with concerns: the objects, the depth, the rightness of, the right to, our concerns—and his. No sign will be given to you except the sign of Jonah. But is this sign not also God’s extravagant, unbroken concern for both the evil and the complacent, for Ninevites as well as Jonahs, for prostitutes as well as Pharisees, for my enemy as well as for me?

I’m just old enough to remember that at one time, not long ago really, the central task for the faithful preacher of Jonah was to convince hard-bitten, science-bred parishioners that there are fish in the sea big enough to swallow a man whole, and to explicate just exactly how a man could survive intact three days inside such a fish. The main hermeneutic for the book was not theology, but ichthyology—the scientific study of fish. So now let me confess my secret heresy: the fish question is beside the point.

The real puzzle of Jonah—its perpetual source of wonder and doubt—is this: why is God so deeply concerned about, not just Nineveh, but this man Jonah? This sulking, griping, stingy, self-absorbed little man—why him? Why would God pursue him to the ends of the earth, to the bottom of the sea, to the outskirts of Nineveh?

I bought a rhododendron bush two summers ago. I paid $8.99—a cut rate, because it was well past planting season, and the plant’s leaves had a blight, a charred brittleness at their edges. But the earth around here is endlessly fertile, and I figured it would do fine. I was right. I planted the rhododendron at the front of my yard, and it flourished. The leaves turned a waxy dark green, and the next spring it flamed bright with pink-red flowers. A burning bush.

I live in a cul-de-sac that’s perfect for playing road hockey: flat, wide, little traffic. Teenagers from all over the place descend on the street on summer evenings and have noisy, tussling hockey games. One morning, after the neighborhood teens had been playing road hockey the evening before, I went out to water my rhododendron. I looked down and saw that a large branch from the bush had been broken off, leaving be hind ragged edges. I picked up the branch, and a wave of bitterness and anger came over me. Should I phone the city, I wondered, and have hockey banned on my street? Should I go out when those teenagers return this evening, and scold and threaten them?

“Mark,” the Lord seemed to say to me, “do you have any right to be angry?”

“I do.”

But the Lord said, “That’s just a cut-rate bush that you neither made nor tended. You merely planted it, and it grew. But these boys are my creation, made in my image. Should I not be concerned about them?”

Should God not be concerned about Nineveh, or New York, or Duncan, British Columbia?

Should he not be concerned about teenagers playing road hockey, breaking bushes?

Should he not be concerned about smug, sullen prophets?

Should he not be concerned about middle-class, middle-aged pastors who stew over broken rhododendrons?

Should he, plain and simple, just not be concerned?

More and more, I see my whole view of God depends on how I answer that.

No sign will be given to you except that of the prophet Jonah.Mark Buchanan is pastor of the New Life Community Baptist Church, Duncan, British Columbia.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Many evangelicals live in a very strange world, a sort of dark Dr. Seuss landscape in which peaceful places can shift hazardously at a moment’s notice. At times, the landscape is fairly flat and stable. Lots of different people and communities and ideas and concerns can exist together, with good-natured exchanges all ’round, including even the occasional sincere and civil disagreement—a sort of Serengeti water hole. But sometimes the ground transforms abruptly, and evangelicals find themselves perched on top of a steep mountain of truth. From here, any step away is a step down. Worse, any step risks a calamitous slide all the way down a slippery slope to wreckage on the opposite deadly danger below.

In the last couple of years, however, American evangelicalism has been wracked with controversy over a quite different issue. Now the question is so-called inclusive language translations, those versions that have changed some or all of the Bible’s use of generic masculine language to language that explicitly includes, or at least does not implicitly exclude, women. No more mankind or man or he who will and so on when all persons, not just males, are meant. Interestingly, when the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) was released in 1989, some evangelicals were happy to use it as the first translation to apply such principles in a sweeping way, while most other evangelicals simply ignored it. The earlier battle over the RSV perhaps had sorted things out: you either liked and used the RSV or you didn’t, and the same would go for the NRSV.

The ground did not heave up until a significantly altered edition of evangelicalism’s most widely used modern translation, the New International Version (NIV), emerged in Great Britain in 1996, with a U.S. edition reported to be in the works. This magazine has traced the resulting controversy in its pages. Periodicals such as World magazine, Bible scholars such as Trinity International University’s Wayne Grudem, and popular leaders such as James Dobson sounded an alarm against what they saw to be a serious threat to—well, to what? Why had the rather peaceful plain of Bible translations—to each his own, there’s room enough for all—tilted into a sheer cliff down which one would tumble if one surrendered one’s position at the peak?

A spate of books has appeared to advise us in this situation. None are more helpful than two by conservative evangelical Bible scholars, Bethel Seminary’s Mark Strauss—Distorting Scripture? The Challenge of Bible Translation and Gender Accuracy (InterVarsity)—and Trinity’s Donald Carson—The Inclusive Language Debate: A Plea for Realism (Baker). Especially because both authors are at the same time experts in translation and personally committed to traditional viewpoints on gender relations, their moderate perspective on this issue deserves a wide hearing. They surely cannot be accused of—that is, of abetting—sloppy or duplicitous translation in the cause of feminism.

Strauss and Carson identify several realities that some of the zealots have failed to see clearly enough. First, they recognize that all translations have infelicities, and even outright errors. Despite our best intentions, even in committees (and sometimes especially in committees!), we human beings make mistakes. No translation is perfect. Second, they recognize that in the very nature of the case, translation is always approximate because no two languages can be converted exactly into each other. The exact word isn’t ever quite le mot juste.

Third, and perhaps most important, they recognize that translation of gender language is especially difficult nowadays because English usage is itself changing, and not changing everywhere at the same time in the same way. Some of us do use mankind, and others humankind. Some of us use he generically; others scrupulously say he or she; and still others switch back and forth between he and she. So the translator has unavoidable trouble trying to connect the fixed languages of biblical Hebrew and Greek with the moving target of contemporary English—one might even say, of contemporary Englishes.

Fourth, and perhaps most radically, Strauss and Carson recognize that some of us are making way too big a deal about relatively small changes. Yes, something is lost when a translation moves away from the image of the solitary godly person in Psalm 1 (“Blessed is the man who”) to the collective (“Blessed are those”). But how much, really? Enough to warrant blasting a Bible with a shotgun and mailing it back to the publisher? Enough to sanction threats to a Bible society if it doesn’t cease producing the offending version? Enough to justify the dismissal of a seminary professor involved in the translation project a year before his retirement? Enough to keep a new translation out of the hands of people who would welcome it both for their own reading and for sharing the gospel with friends who might be very sensitive to gender questions?

Carson describes the disproportionate reaction of some critics as “Bible rage.” What agenda could possibly be pressing people to such instant and insistent opposition? Some critics openly articulate their fear that such inclusive translations represent the not-so-thin edge of a feminist wedge that will lead next to feminine language for God (not just for human beings) and from thence to outright goddess worship.

To be sure, there have been some moderating noises from this camp. Yes, they allow, some changes can legitimately be made in translation where the original languages clearly mean—in their literal words, not just their phrases—to include both men and women. But they allow relatively few. Making too many, it seems, might set off an avalanche. Yet the revised NIV, which occasioned this latest ruckus, scrupulously avoids crossing the line from inclusive language for human beings to feminine language for God. Even the NRSV preface explicitly acknowledges that the one sort of change does not entail the other. Furthermore, since the Bible’s original languages themselves contain obviously feminine language about God, an extreme position on this matter (“let’s stay in this ditch so we don’t slide over into the other one”) is indefensible.

A previous generation of evangelicals worried over the RSV because they felt that great matters of the gospel were at stake. However right or wrong they were about this perception, that controversy seems much more important than the anti-inclusive language crusade today. It is simply not the case today that we are presented with translations that portray God as a goddess (though there is an odd thing called “An Inclusive Version” that uses “Mother/Father” to refer to God—though blessedly few churches have bought this New Testament for their pews). We are not presented with translations that try to “improve” on the Bible by conforming it to this or that ideology. The more-or-less level plain of legitimate translation alternatives has not in fact been turned into an all-or-nothing cliff face of “Christian” at the top versus “anti-Christian” at the bottom. We instead have been gifted with a range of translations by earnest Christian scholars who have aimed at the edification of the church and the evangelism of the world.

Frankly, when it seems evident that Jesus himself used an Aramaic paraphrase of the Old Testament (CT, April 26, 1999, “What Bible Version Did Jesus Read?” by Craig A. Evans, p. 98); when evangelicals enthusiastically support missionary Bible translators all over the world whose versions—because rendered by a few people with relatively few linguistic tools at hand—are always much less accurate than the English translations we are privileged to enjoy; and when hundreds of thousands of conservative evangelicals are buying and using such dynamic translations as the New Living Translation and such paraphrases as The Message—well, it’s difficult to believe that all of this sound and fury truly centers on the integrity of Bible translation.

So if it isn’t really about translation, then American evangelicals confront a hard question. Has the fervor in this latest battle for the Bible instead been aroused by the clash of social and political agendas? Have Bible-loving evangelicals, in fact, succumbed to the temptation to co-opt the dignity of God’s Word for something much less ultimate, much less certain, and much less glorious?John Stackhouse is the Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology at Regent College, Vancouver, and author of Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil (Oxford University Press).

Eight years after the New York Giants and the Buffalo Bills knelt in a huddle for public prayer at the end of Super Bowl XXV, the wall of separation between God and the National Football League has all but washed away. The blend of faith and football has not only attracted fans and foes alike, but put preachers on the playing field and running backs in the pulpit.

Evidence of the relationship between God and the gridiron is everywhere: players such as Deion Sanders, Reggie White (now retired), and Eugene Robinson identifying themselves as born-again believers; chapel services in nearly every NFL club dressing room before games; public, midfield prayers after games; and churches turning to Super Bowl Sunday as a day for halftime evangelistic outreach. It may sometimes be difficult to see where religion ends and regulation play begins.

Players may use public Christianity to enhance their good-boy images, and the church may use Christian players to enhance its message that even tough guys can believe. The blurring of roles, and the suspicion of mutual exploitation by players and their pastors, has raised the question whether sports and spirituality genuinely belong in separate realms, not stirred together.

MYTH OF CELEBRITY? The mass appeal of professional football has attracted the attention of churches trying to make Christianity culturally relevant to seekers. And the power of celebrity in American culture shows no sign of dimming.

A testimony from Christian NFL greats Reggie White or Mike Singletary can draw those who might ordinarily not sit through a Sunday-morning sermon. “Statistics show that young people in horrible numbers have turned away from the church and yet they still watch television and are influenced by newspapers and magazines and the Internet,” says Wendel Deyo, former Cincinnati Bengals chaplain and president of Athletes in Action (AIA), a Lebanon, Ohio-based ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ. “If we can capture their attention long enough for them to hear, then we’ve accomplished our objective. The issue is [the players] have visibility, and that visibility provides an opportunity for more people to hear the gospel.”

During the past 41 years, professional football has come from behind as an “also ran” in professional sports to the very top of public interest. The Super Bowl is now broadcast in 170 countries, carried live by the BBC and even is translated into Navajo for tribal fans in Arizona. While stadium attendance has its ups and downs (in 1997 it hit an eight-year low), television interest in the game has never been stronger, with the league raking in at least $17.6 billion under a 1998 pact that gave games to ABC, ESPN, CBS, and Fox over the course of eight years.

In describing the popularity of sports evangelism, Wheaton College sociology professor Jim Mathisen says “the Christian community has bought into the larger cultural myth” surrounding professional athletes.

Mathisen and Tony Ladd, head of Wheaton College’s athletics department, are coauthors of Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestantism and the Development of American Sports (Baker Book House, 1999). Ladd says the 150-year interaction between evangelicals and athletes has not always been cordial. Ladd notes that pitcher-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday left professional baseball in part because of the culture of the profession.

Things began to change in the early 1970s, when evangelist Billy Graham was named grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses parade, which preceded the annual college football game in Pasadena, California.

In turn, Graham and other evangelists more frequently included athletes’ testimonies as part of their crusade meetings, renewing what Graham had learned in his first Charlotte, North Carolina, crusade with runner Gill Dodds: having a popular sports personality can boost attendance and response.

While the Ladd and Mathisen book notes the more recent intertwining of. professional sports and evangelism, Ladd says there is a not-so-subtle difference between the amateur accomplishments of a dedicated collegian and the multimillion-dollar salaries of today’s pros. Where the amateur was lauded for dedication, the pro may be admired for worldly success as much as anything.

“Some Christians try to suggest professional sports builds character,” Ladd says. “On a professional level, sport is a business, and yet we carry over the myth [from amateur athletics] into that professional arena.”

Despite the worldly example that comes from admiring men who earn small fortunes for tossing a ball, Christians cling to their celebrity role models. “With the cultural assumption that athletes should be role models, the Christian community has, alongside that, its own star system,” Mathisen says. “We still think that somehow evangelicals have a right to be heard if [Reggie] White and [Mike] Singletary are two of us. It’s a merging of the two star systems. I think, sociologically, it’s a reflection of our marginalization, our sense of inferiority. We’re still not sure we’re accepted by the big boys and girls. Maybe that [celebrity affiliation] will help us.”

Deyo, who has labored long in the NFL vineyard, disclaims any interest in a “star system” but admits that the quarterback who says he lets Jesus call the plays of his life can be an attractive person to many inside and outside the church.

“Behind that is the fact that they have a great amount of influence. Our conviction is that if you know Christ, you’ll want to make him known,” Deyo says.

Ladd, however, worries that such ministry may come as an extension of the “spectator culture” that has many reclining in easy chairs to watch games, rather than participate in exercise themselves. Christians may decide to sit on the sidelines and watch, Ladd says, and let the star athletes run the evangelistic plays. Deyo disagrees, saying the persona of a Christian athlete can inspire other Christians to tackle evangelism with renewed fervor.

“If we can capture the platform that an athlete has, we can cultivate the community at large,” Deyo says. “For Christians, it gives them opportunities for evangelism. It not only affirms their faith, but gives them reasons to be bolder in the marketplace.”

ODD TEAMMATES: The sight of football players from opposing teams meeting on the field and kneeling in prayer after a game gives a prime-time boost to Christianity. But such public displays also draw criticisms from those both inside and outside evangelicalism.

“If God gives one team the victory, then what kind of judgment does that show on the loser?” says Henry Brinton, pastor of Calvary Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, Virginia, and an admitted football fan. “It’s not that I’m a football prude. I enjoy the game, but I believe in a separation of God and gridiron. I believe God is with us in our best efforts, but God does not necessarily bless everything we do.”

The post-game midfield prayer session leaves Cris Collinsworth, formerly with the Cincinnati Bengals, a professed evangelical and Fox sports commentator, a bit cold. “I struggle with the on-field prayer for some reason and have a tough time explaining it,” Collinsworth told CT. “Maybe it is because I am very private about my beliefs. My family and I go to church every week, but somehow that post-game huddle leaves me feeling uncomfortable.”

By contrast, Athletes in Action’s Deyo says the post-game prayers represent fellowship and not flash. “When you see guys praying after the game, they pray because they’re brothers in Christ,” Deyo says. “It’s one of the few times they’re able to be together during the season with a common bond and a common stake.”

Those outside evangelicalism hold a different view. “Many of us worship a god, but just wish these Sunday afternoon football players could leave the sermons to Sunday morning services,” thundered Adrian Wojnarowski, a sports columnist for the Bergen Record in New Jersey. “They can save themselves the humiliation of hypocrisy, save us an unsolicited class.”

WHEN A PLAYER FUMBLES: Wojnarowski delivered his scathing comments—which were echoed by sports commentators in Toronto and other cities—after the much-publicized January arrest of Atlanta Falcons free safety Eugene Robinson on a misdemeanor charge of soliciting an undercover police officer for sex. The charge was wiped clean after Robinson—who on the Falcons’ Web site advertises that he is “a Christian who just happens to play football”—agreed to participate in a pretrial “diversion” program in March.

On the morning of his arrest, Robinson had received the Bart Starr Award from AIA, given annually to the player whose life is deemed to “best [exemplify] outstanding character and leadership in the home, on the field, and in the community.” Robinson returned the award after his release on bail.

The dilemma for a Christian celebrity like Robinson is that when he sins, he is in the spotlight. The church’s response can be to turn from its fallen hero, to suspend book contracts and speaking engagements.

After explaining himself to his teammates and fans, and taking a pay cut this year from $1.8 million to $1 million, Robinson appears to have recovered from his ordeal and received the forgiveness of his supporters. “My situation dispels the myth that all Christians are goody-two-shoes, straight-laced and self-righteous,” Robinson told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June. “This throws some humility in there, and it makes people realize that I suffer from human frailties like everybody else.”

So far, Robinson has received the support of his colleagues in Atlanta, while other Christian NFL veterans have also rallied behind him. Mike Singletary, a previous Bart Starr Award recipient, says the church needs to support Robinson and not gossip about him.

“I have to look at my own life and say, sometimes I’m not too far from that myself,” Singletary says. “Instead of pointing the finger at him, I have to pray for him.”

LOCKER ROOM MINISTRY: Multi million-dollar contracts and life in the public eye create unique challenges and temptations for professional football players who are Christians. Ministries such as Pro Athletes Outreach, Champions for Christ, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and AIA attempt to minister to players and their families.

To combat any misuse of a sports figure, AIA’s Deyo insists that his group is as much involved in discipling players as promoting them. “We not only want to project this influence but protect who the athlete is and who he stands for,” he says. “Athletes get prostituted; people pay for their services with little regard for their needs. Most of what we do with AIA is behind the scenes, meeting needs and ministering to the players.”

Deyo maintains that athletes who are at once idolized by and isolated from their public need the work he began in NFL locker rooms in 1974.

“Once they make it to the pinnacle of their profession, they begin to realize there’s something significant missing,” he says. “People pay to see them perform, ask for their autographs. They begin to live a different lifestyle because of the culture.”

Because of the heavy demands on players, on and off the field, Deyo believes many professionals—when they can be reached—are ripe for the gritty brand of evangelism AIA offers. “We found virtually from the beginning to have 50 to 70 percent of the players involved in a chapel program, or a high percentage of guys coming out for Bible study. Across the league, there’s always been very favorable results,” he says.

How favorable those results have been is a subject for some discussion. While scoffers such as columnist Wojnarowski have always been around, Singletary says it is equally dangerous to have the church promote a professional player without investing in discipleship.

“I just think that in the final analysis, the athlete that’s out there who really understands what he has come to believe and knows who is Jesus Christ and has been discipled, he can walk forward and take or leave all of the other stuff,” Singletary says. “Others who have no foundation can feel manipulated. Jesus was never about that.”

WINNING GAMES AND SOULS: Even as professional sports transformed Sunday into a day of play instead of rest, some Christian athletes and leaders are trying to develop a twin focus in the public’s mind—not only on the game of football, but on the game of life as well.

Yet not every church leader endorses this dual method. “We’re talking about Sunday, the Sabbath, the day of rest, the Lord’s Day, and what we see on Sunday afternoons is nothing short of warfare,” Pastor Brinton says. “What I think is most interesting about what is going on, on the national scene, is how suddenly all of these warlike activities are being tied to religious devotion.”

And yet part of football’s popularity among Christians is its battle and athletic imagery reminiscent of biblical allusions to “running the race with perseverance” and wearing “the full armor of God.”

Mathisen and Ladd connect the warfare imagery to the early days of the Greek Olympics, when pagan worship and sport were combined—which strains at the concept of a day of rest, something evangelical athletes adhered to until the late 1950s.

Deyo defends Sunday play as an extension of the kind of lives Christians are supposed to lead: “[The players have] gone to chapel and had an opportunity to hear the Word of God and worship their Lord. They’ve begun to worship their Lord out on the field. Whatever we have as our occupational calling, we’re to do our work heartily unto the Lord and not unto men.”

Beyond the playing field and locker room and attuned to the work of winning souls, Christian fans in family rooms around the nation have become a secondary resource for sport-based evangelistic outreach and ministry opportunity. Evangelistic groups are marketing kits that churchgoers can use to turn a Super Bowl halftime into an hour of decision for sin-sick souls. Meanwhile, perhaps the most successful Christian outreach program that is both church-based and sport-focused is the Souper Bowl of Caring, started in 1990 by teenagers at Spring Valley Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina. The program, which collects $1 contributions on Super Bowl Sun day, has raised about $7 million for local feeding ministries and other community-based projects. For 1999, 11,300 churches took part, raising $2.5 million. Under program guidelines, 100 percent of the offering goes to ministry.

Brinton says he finds the Souper Bowl Sunday collections of food and money praiseworthy, noting the problematic use of athletics as a metaphor for Christian living. “On the one hand, I think that football can be seen as somewhat reflective of spiritual warfare, which is something every Christian is going to face. So there is a sense in which it reflects a certain muscular type of Christianity that is going to be attractive to men,” Brinton says.

“Where it can mislead is in giving the impression that God is always allied with the strong, the successful and the winners of the world, where in fact the Scriptures tell us that God often uses the weak to shame the strong.”

For Deyo, the greater goal is to have athletes reflect a positive role model and point people toward Christ. “Our passion is that when people look up to athletes and football players, they find the football players looking up to God.”

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Peter Drucker told Forbes magazine that “pastoral megachurches” are “surely the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last thirty years.” Bob Buford, a cable-TV businessman who pioneered Leadership Network for large-church leaders, says this is “way ahead, out on the thin branches. Tell me how many people, even in the churches, believe it.” In 1991 Drucker told an audience of church leaders that American churches are in the midst of a remarkable renaissance. “This, to my mind, for my lifetime, is the greatest, the most important, the most momentous event, and the turning point not just in churches but perhaps in the human spirit altogether.”

Peter Ferdinand Drucker is an old man now, 90 this year, yet his reputation in the world of business has not dimmed. He wrote “Beyond the

Information Revoluation,” the October cover story for the Atlantic Monthly. Last year Forbes had him on its cover, Fortune ran a long article, and Wired, the hip techno magazine, featured an interview asking not about the past, but the future. What other 90-year-old gets asked his thoughts on the future? The Atlantic Monthly‘s Jack Beatty published a biography. Forbes proclaimed Drucker “Still the youngest mind.” And this mind is increasingly preoccupied with the work of the church.

The kingdom of the nonprofitsDrucker is known as a management guru. (He is said to detest the description.) Many would call him the world’s pre-eminent management thinker. Oddly, this management expert has little management experience. Adventures of a Bystander is the title Drucker gave his memoirs, and it’s a revealing choice. Drucker works alone. He has no assistant, and he answers his own phone. (It’s a startling thing to punch up the number of a person this famous and to hear a gravelly voice, with conspicuous Austrian accent, croak “Peter Drucker.”) Now a days he hardly travels; people have to come to him, a constant stream of visitors to his home in Claremont, California, paying fancy prices to talk to him about their concerns. He has done this for 50 years, notoriously with businesses, but equally and increasingly with nonprofits and churches, often on a pro bono basis.

Drucker presents himself as a worldly wise man, who has devoted his life to studying very this-worldly realities. It comes as some surprise, therefore, that he gives so much of his time and interest to nonprofit organizations, and particularly to churches. For most business consultants, for most Americans, these are worthy but weak institutions. Do other management gurus offer the Girl Scouts as a model?

Drucker preaches incessantly that leaders must find out what their own unique contribution can be. He applies the sermon to himself, taking two weeks every year to evaluate what he has done and to plan for the coming year. Drucker does not work with nonprofits simply as a goodwill gesture. He involves himself with nonprofits because he sees them as strategic—indeed, as the fastest-growing and most important sector of American life.

Drucker is a Christian, a practicing Episcopalian, but from his writings it would be hard to say much more than that about his faith. He tells us that after growing up in a nominally Christian home, he was absolutely poleaxed by the accidental discovery of Soren Kierkegaard’s writings. This was so important an event that he taught himself Danish in order to read Kierkegaard’s then-untranslated works. Unfortunately, Drucker spends little time explaining how this momentous event of his youth affected him. Drucker has written 30 books, including his memoirs, but exactly one essay, written in 1949, discusses the meaning of Kierkegaard. (Kierkegaard shows that “society is not enough—not even for society,” and that “though Kierkegaard’s faith cannot overcome the awful loneliness, the isolation and dissonance of human existence, it can make it bearable by making it meaningful. … Kierkegaard’s faith … enables man to die; but it also enables him to live.”

Drucker’s writings seem determined to keep his faith a secondary characteristic for his readers. Adventures of a Bystander seems quite worldly in the way it presents, utterly without judgment, baroque and incredible sexual behavior from some of Drucker’s friends and acquaintances. Drucker hardly ever uses theological or biblical terminology to express himself, even if he is writing about something that easily fits theological categories. With some other management writer this might be an accident, but Drucker is so well educated in philosophy and theology that it has to be a conscious choice.

The rise of Nazism is the starting place for everything Drucker writes.

The point is that Drucker is not a man of pious gestures. He is not drawn to donate his extra time to charity to show that he is a good Christian. He sticks to what he does best: offering his expertise where he thinks he can make the maximum difference.

Drucker has made a career out of seeing the world from an unfamiliar angle—of noticing the significance of some factor that others miss. Fortune introduced him as “the most prescient business-trend spotter of our time.” They credited Drucker with being among the first (in the early 1950s) to see how computers would transform business, first (in 1961) to perceive Japan’s impending economic miracle, first to describe such ideas as “privatization,” “knowledge workers,” and “management by objectives.” Drucker is sometimes wrong, but he has been spectacularly right so often (not to mention interesting and stimulating) that business leaders flock to read and hear him.

Never, perhaps, has Drucker been so out of phase with conventional wisdom as in his fascination with nonprofits and churches. To understand why Drucker considers the nonprofit sector of society so pivotal, to see why he devotes so much time to the success of charities and churches, you must step back to see his whole career.

A moral passionDrucker grew up in Vienna between the world wars. As a 17-year-old just out of school, he moved to Germany, where he worked as a journalist, studied (a doctorate in law), and watched Hitler rise. Drucker’s first book, a brief, admiring account of a nineteenth-century Jew, Friedrich Julius Stahl, was banned and burned by the Nazis a few months after they came to power. Drucker had hoped for that, he says, deliberately choosing to write “a book that would make it impossible for the Nazis to have anything to do with me.” With no future in Germany, Drucker at 24 fled to England. One of his last conversations the night before his departure was with a newspaper colleague who would go on to be nicknamed “The Monster” for his role in the Nazi SS.

The rise of Nazism is the starting place for everything Drucker writes. He is haunted, not so much by Hitler as by the vacuum that Hitler filled. The Europe of Drucker’s youth lost its way, Drucker says—economically, spiritually, governmentally. Europe lacked “management,” which Drucker defines as the ability to make human strength productive under new and challenging conditions. Instead, Europe as he remembers it was fixated on nostalgic memories. The church was irrelevant. People were constantly speaking of “prewar” (World War I) as though it were the lost continent of Atlantis. And so they got Nazism, which posed as “The Wave of the Future” against this “Wave of the Past.”

Drucker’s work is dedicated to “never again.” “To make our institutions perform responsibly, autonomously, and on a high level of achievement is … the only safeguard of freedom and dignity.”

After a few years in England, where he met and married his wife, Doris—they have been married more than 60 years—Drucker moved to the United States. This new home is also an important context for his work, for while Drucker has kept his accent, he is very American in his sensibilities—that is to say, practical and optimistic. In Depression America he found a hopeful and cooperative spirit, very unlike the bitterness and despair he had felt throughout Europe. When war came, America’s economy quickly mobilized to produce huge amounts of war materiel. Hitler was defeated not so much by bravery (as exemplified in Saving Private Ryan) as by industry.

Drucker, while haunted by Europe’s failure, is fundamentally an optimist. He believes in human strengths to counter human weaknesses. The science of discovering those strengths, of fitting them into a productive framework, is what Drucker calls management. As much as any single individual, he is responsible for the modern interest in it.

A society of organizationsIn the 1940s, Drucker saw something so fundamental it has held his attention more or less constantly in the 50 years since. Drucker saw that we have become a society of organizations. Drucker knew that organizations were not new—he often said that the greatest manager in history was the man who built the pyramids. But organizations had become central and omnipresent, trumping tradition and doctrine, eclipsing families and dynasties, forcing “great leaders” to show that they could exert their powers through vast bureaucracies. (Think of Eisenhower’s military victories.)

The trend was most obvious in business. Most business leaders a generation before had owned the firm. They made all the important decisions themselves. Now, a new kind of creature had taken over: the manager. He was not an owner, an inventor, or a financier. He worked for a salary. His expertise lay in getting a team of people to work effectively for a goal.

Henry Ford’s assembly line was more than a manufacturing technique, Drucker realized; it was a way of conceiving of work. The idea that any job can be broken down into its constituent parts, that different people can be trained to specialize in those parts, that they can work together in a disciplined and harmonious framework—this was not merely the way to build cars, it was the way to accomplish almost anything through organization. The crucial element was leadership, enabling various specialists to work together. That leadership, analogous to conducting a symphony, is management.

Drucker began to study business management when hardly anyone had noticed that such a thing existed. There were no business schools or management texts as we know them today. To study business was considered a sure dead end for an academic career. (Drucker was teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, where president Lewis Jones warned him, “You are going to destroy your career in academia forever.”)

Nor did business want to be studied. Drucker says his first attempts to find a company to study met with suspicion and rejection. Only by a fluke did he latch onto General Motors, which gave him complete access. The result was a highly influential book, Concept of the Corporation. Businesses began to come to him for insight and help.

Management is about peopleDrucker developed an understanding of management that was deeply humane—not mechanical, not technical, but pastoral. As Drucker wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1994, “All managers do the same things, whatever the purpose of their organization. All of them have to bring people—each possessing different knowledge—together for joint performance. All of them have to make human strengths productive in performance and human weaknesses irrelevant. All of them have to think through what results are wanted in the organization—and have then to define objectives.”

Management by objectives is a management style identified with Drucker. Sometimes, unfortunately, the phrase has come to mean something quite different than Drucker intended. For some, management by objectives means setting targets and insisting that your staff meet them. It can stand for a relentless bottom-line mentality.

That is almost the opposite of Drucker’s idea. Drucker calls for the worker, together with his boss, to develop meaningful objectives based on a thorough understanding of the work. Meaningful objectives begin with the mission of the organization and require much thought and understanding of the unique contribution a worker can make to that mission.

Management by objectives means giving workers autonomy—helping them to set goals and freeing them to find their own way to reach those goals. This is quite different from supervision, in which a manager sets goals, tells the worker how to achieve them, and then keeps a close eye on the worker to see that he follows directions. Management by objectives expects a lot of creativity from workers—and offers them considerable dignity.

A manager, whether in a ball-bearing manufacturer or in a large church, should spend hours placing people in the job to match their strengths, helping them to define their objectives, finding the resources they need to work effectively. Management is largely about people, not so much about their feelings as their effectiveness. Drucker’s unstated assumption is that the best thing you can offer a person is the chance to contribute to a worthwhile cause.

Organizations exist to meet needsDrucker’s understanding of business is also humane. He has never accepted profit as a goal for any enterprise. Rather, profit is a necessity—for without an adequate margin of profit, business cannot survive, or if it survives, cannot grow and innovate. Profit is always a means to an end, never an end.

Nor does business, in Drucker’s mind, exist to make and sell things. Business exists to meet human needs. Drucker’s starting place for management is very simple but also very stimulating: you have to define what needs you will meet, and how.

Drucker’s unstated assumption is that the best thing you can offer a person is the chance to contribute to a worthwhile cause.

One of Drucker’s examples is the emergency room of a hospital. “It took us a long time to come up with the very simple and (most people thought) too obvious statement that the emergency room was there to give assurance to the afflicted . …In a good emergency room, the function is to tell eight out of ten people there is nothing wrong that a good night’s sleep won’t take care of. … Translating that mission statement into action meant that everybody who comes in is now seen by a qualified person in less than a minute. That is the mission; that is the goal. The rest is implementation. Some people are immediately rushed to intensive care, others get a lot of tests, and yet others are told: ‘Go back home, go to sleep, take an aspirin, and don’t worry. If these things persist, see a physician tomorrow.’ But the first objective is to see everybody, almost immediately—because that is the only way to give assurance.”

Another Drucker favorite is from Sears, which around 1900 built a hugely successful business on the premise that it was their “mission to be the informed and responsible buyer for the American farmer.” Note the surprise: not to sell to the American farmer, but to buy for—and to buy well.

Broadly, then, management is ministry for helping people. It helps its employees to make a contribution to something worthwhile. It helps those outside its organization by identifying and meeting their needs. In the largest sense, Drucker defined management as a ministry for saving our society—not, probably, from damnation, but certainly from despair. For if management does not do its work well, a society of organizations will not function. It will not meet human needs. The result will be frustration and an opening to totalitarianism.

Given this humane framework, it was inevitable that church and parachurch leaders read Drucker and found much they could apply to their work—especially as their ministries grew into organizations. Leo Bartel, a Catholic diocesan administrator in Illinois, tells of going to a Leadership Network weekend where he first heard Drucker speak. “My impression of management in the business style equated to ruthlessness, getting the job done at any cost. Peter’s whole outlook was eminently Christian. He showed great concern for the enterprise and the folks in the enterprise. He spoke from principle rather than expediency. He dealt with the human condition in a compassionate as well as a very practical way.” Bartel got his hands on Drucker’s management tapes and never looked back.

Church leaders discovered Drucker—but would Drucker have discovered them? Perhaps not, except that Drucker was also discovering a fundamental problem of modern society that business could not solve.

The problem of communityFrom the very beginning of his work, Drucker understood that the growth of industry had torn people out of community. Where once, as farmers or tradesmen or craftsmen, they worked within their community, now they spend the most important part of their day working with people who don’t live in their neighborhood or go to their church or know their family. Industry efficiently produces goods, but it just as efficiently destroys traditional communities.

Yet community is a fundamental need for humans. That’s why, when Drucker wrote about gm in his first large-scale study of an organization, he recommended that companies try to create a “plant community,” in which ordinary workers have significant control over the environment in which they work. He also recommended a guaranteed annual wage, to create the job security that would help workers to identify with the company. His idea was to create community on and around the job. Such recommendations went nowhere in the post-World War II corporate world, but ironically were recognized and accepted, with modifications, in Japan. Drucker be came a renowned adviser to Japan’s economic miracle. Its “lifelong job” and emphasis on worker morale owe much to Drucker’s thinking.

He has long since realized, however, that community will not come from business. In an era of downsizing and outsourcing, the “plant community” has become almost laughable. “Fifty years ago I believed the plant community would be the successor to the community of yesterday. I was totally wrong. We proved totally incapable [of that] even in Japan. The reason is that everybody does the same job. What holds them together is what they do from nine to five, and not what they aspire for, what they live for, what they hope for, what they die for. That’s a community.”

Drucker never took seriously the possibility that government could provide community. He thought that the more we ask of government, the more frustrated we will feel. If government can’t do it, and business can’t do it, who can? Drucker shifted his hopes to nonprofit organizations. He doesn’t think it’s accidental that the nonprofit sector is growing rapidly, or that voluntarism has increased. They expand to meet a dramatically growing need for community. Drucker goes so far as to say, in his book Managing the Nonprofit Organization, “The non-profits are the American community.” Nonprofits give disengaged workers a place to make a contribution through serving others. They draw rich and poor into a web of common concern.

Churches play a particularly critical role. “The community … needs a community center. … I’m not talking religion now, I’m talking society. There is no other institution in the American community that could be the center.” Drucker gladly stresses the church’s spiritual mission, but he notes that churches also have a societal role. That’s what he meant when he told Forbes that pastoral megachurches are “surely the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last thirty years.”

Our society is extraordinarily cutthroat, Drucker says. Children are pressured to succeed from the time they are very young. “The knowledge society—with a social mobility that threatens to become rootlessness, with its ‘other half’ [of under-educated citizens], its dissolution of the ties of farm and small town and their narrow horizons, needs community. … It needs a sphere where freedom is not just being passive, not just being left alone … a sphere that requires active involvement and responsibility.”

“There is an enormous need to build … I call it the person,” Drucker told a gathering of church leaders. “That’s more than self-respect; it’s also the awareness that there is something beyond you, and something beyond the moment, and something that is not only greater than you but different from you. That is why what you are doing in the churches is so incredibly important.”

Knowledge and knowledge workersDrucker perceives a new form of society struggling to get out of its chrysalis, with churches and other nonprofits playing a new and central role. The key ingredient to this new society is knowledge, Drucker says. The agricultural and industrial revolutions depended on brute strength, raw materials, land, machinery, and capital. In our era, it is the increase of knowledge (including the management skills to make use of it) that explains nearly all current economic development. “The comparative advantage that now counts is in the application of knowledge—for example, in Japan’s total quality management, lean manufacturing processes, just-in-time delivery, and price-based costing,” wrote Drucker in the Atlantic Monthly. The most economically important workers are “knowledge workers”—those who possess an expertise, whether brain surgery or systems analysis, youth culture or marketing, that makes them a necessary (and often scarce) commodity. Today, Drucker says, they make up the largest single group in the work force. “They differ fundamentally from any group in history that has ever occupied the leading position.”

Drucker has invested much energy in understanding how “knowledge workers” can be managed in “information-based organizations.” The hospital is an example Drucker often uses, where doctors and nurses and technicians, all specialists knowing far more about their work than anyone in management, are organized in a fairly “flat” structure to work together. “Knowledge, especially advanced knowledge, is always specialized. By itself it produces nothing.” Management is therefore not less important among knowledge workers, but more. Everything depends on highly trained people who know very little about each other’s work learning to work fluidly and efficiently together. Drucker writes, frighteningly, “The health maintenance organization is an attempt—a first and so far very tentative, and none too successful attempt—to bring the entire process of health care delivery under partnership management . …And what the HMO is attempting to do in health care delivery will have to be done in many other areas” (Forbes).

“I have a strong suspicion that the church is growing stronger, precisely because you go by choice.”

Knowledge workers need the church and other nonprofits more than ever, because their jobs are so specialized and their placement so mobile that they have little connection with community. At the same time, churches and nonprofits are part of the knowledge society. Churches have been transformed just as much as industry. First, the pastoral staffs of large and midsized churches are increasingly specialized. The minister to single adults is a knowledge worker, not just because he went to seminary, but because he has an expert familiarity with singles culture. Second, church members—who actually do the work of the church—are highly educated. They may know more than the pastor about many aspects of their ministry—whether it involves tutoring programs, contemporary music, or Christian education. Lay people are knowledge workers. The pastor, as manager, has to identify their strengths and specialization, place them and equip them for service, and enable them to work in the harmonious and productive whole known as the body of Christ.

“The knowledge worker,” Drucker says, “is … a colleague and an associate rather than a subordinate. He has to be managed as such.” Or as Catholic pastor Leo Bartel told Drucker of his church’s volunteers, “They are no longer helpers. They are partners.”

Pastoral churchesOver the last 20 years Drucker has had a good deal of interaction with what he calls “pastoral” churches. These include megachurches like Bill Hybels’s Willow Creek or Rick Warren’s Saddleback Community. Bob Buford’s Leadership Network has invited Drucker to speak to conferences of large-church leaders and has linked him to many pastors seeking advice.

Drucker calls these pastoral churches because their size is not nearly so significant to him as their orientation around meeting needs. They find their guiding light not from church tradition or doctrine so much as their analysis of their target audience. Hybels is a leading example: before beginning Willow Creek, he went door-to-door asking unchurched people why they didn’t attend church, and then built Willow Creek around their answers. Pastoral churches waste no time regretting a changing world, but see change as their opportunity for ministry. This is precisely the approach that Drucker has urged on businesses and nonprofits for decades. In many ways, pastoral churches echo the management thinking that Drucker has long emphasized.

Drucker sees these pastoral megachurches as an enormous success. They have, he believes, revitalized the church, demonstrating its relevance to a knowledge society.

Church consultant Lyle Schaller, a Drucker admirer, cautions that Drucker’s exposure to megachurches gives him a skewed perspective. Most churches have fewer than a hundred members, Schaller says. Their main goal is survival. They are too small and too lacking in resources to look much beyond themselves.

That caveat serves to highlight the kind of perspective Drucker brings. He doesn’t accurately reflect the whole landscape. He’s not interested in statistics. His vision picks out signs of hope amidst the burning rubble. His feats of optimism find opportunity where others see only shattered remains. That’s how Drucker thinks about community in America today. He sees the losses, but he wastes no time bemoaning them. Rather, he points to ways in which the past can be transcended. Regarding community, Drucker points out that now people choose what community to belong to. They choose whether or not to attend church, rather than attending because of conformist pressures. “I have a strong suspicion that the church is growing stronger, precisely because you go by choice,” Drucker says. He believes that the surge of American voluntarism—a phenomenon unique in the world, he says—represents a felt conclusion that people must make their own solutions, taking personal responsibility to build community rather than looking to government or to social theories. This sense of personal responsibility, he says, is a remarkably hopeful sign. Nonprofits must recognize and use it.

That’s management, as Drucker teaches it—seeing and seizing opportunities in new situations, mobilizing and organizing people to meet them. Good management is not inevitable, but it is possible. Human strengths can overcome human weaknesses. Drucker has dedicated his life to seeing that they do.

“I knew at once,” Drucker wrote of his discovery of Kierkegaard in 1928, “that my life would not and could not be totally in society, that it would have to have an existential dimension which transcends society. … Still, my work has been totally in society.”

It is no accident that some of the people Drucker admires most, to judge from his writings, are managers of large businesses and pastors of large churches. These are consistently people with a vivid sense of the reality of the human world. They rarely have time for theories that don’t produce results.

Such a practical perspective can lead Christian leaders into mere marketing and packaging, in fact into greed and competitive one-upmanship. Drucker won’t point you that way, though. His questions—what are we trying to do? What needs are we competent to meet?—go too deep to be answered glibly. And in the background, always, is his deep moral concern: we must work well on earth, lest destroyers like Hitler and Stalin get a foothold to do their work. Heaven and hell may not always be at risk. But human suffering and despair certainly are.

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In recording If I Left the Zoo, Jars of Clay‘s just released album, the band escaped Nashville and spent months in virtual seclusion in Oxford, Mississippi, working with producer Dennis Herring, whose previous credits include Counting Crows. If I Left the Zoo is even more daring than the first two albums, more inventive and more self-confident. Jars of Clay continues to draw on a variety of musical sources—the eclecticism that, paradoxically, has defined the band’s uniqueness. Even the most uneducated ear will pick up the country-music sounds of “No One Loves Me Like You” and the rhythm and blues (with a nod toward Motown) in “I’m Alright.”

The first several cuts are reminiscent of Sgt. Pepper, with the ebullient Jar boys raiding the sound-effects closet much the way that the Beatles did. Add to that the playful guitar riffs, the falsetto phrases, and the unconventional juxtaposition of accordion and string bass, recalling the use of Gregorian chant from the first album, and you have something that is quintessentially Jars of Clay.

Eclectic, perhaps, but not formulaic. If I Left the Zoo highlights the keyboard work of Charlie Lowell much more than the guitar-driven music of the first two albums. Warren Pettit of Greenville College detects a new maturity in the voices, especially Haseltine’s: “The delivery of his singing seems a bit more personal and intimate. Some of the polish has worn off.”

Jars of Clay have never shied away from issues like loneliness or depression—witness “Tea and Sympathy” from Much Afraid, a cautionary tale of an extramarital affair. If I Left the Zoo includes several songs on the human condition, with pithy phrases like “my affluent disguise” or “drink a toast to fear,” and a meditation on Frederick Buechner’s comment that faith is reaching for a hand in the darkness. But the album also includes “Goodbye, Goodnight,” which Haseltine describes as “a comical look at the end of the millennium through the eyes of the string players aboard the Titanic.”

Once again, as with Much Afraid, the final cut is quiet and reflective. “River Constantine” invokes the Holy Spirit (although, regrettably, the mix allows the music to overwhelm the lyrics) and does not have the elegiac power of “Hymn,” the benediction on Much Afraid, but I suspect I’ll grow more attached to it as I listen again and again.

Balmer is the author of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (Oxford, 1993), Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism (Oxford, 1996), and the upcoming Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America (Beacon, 1999).

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The next Jars of Clay may be in class right now, taking notes on the art of Amy Grant or doing lab work on the science of dc Talk. Since 1987, starry-eyed students hoping to parlay their bachelor’s degrees into recording contracts have signed up for a trailblazing program in Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) at Greenville College, a Christian liberal-arts school in south-central Illinois.

Paved with Mayberryesque streets and surrounded by enough corn fields to host a Hee Haw convention, Greenville is not the first place you’d think of going to find Contemporary Christian Music. But with the explosive growth of CCM (the genre posted $863 million in 1998, according to CCM Update), and with secular music companies gobbling up independent Christian labels, Greenville College’s CCM major seems ahead of its time.

The program was the brainchild of Greenville music department head Ralph Montgomery, who wanted to equip students for working in the music industry. “We met a lot of Christian musicians who didn’t know what they were doing,” says Montgomery. A major in CCM could train students both musically and spiritually, he reasoned.

But how do you teach a genre of music that many people perceive as being more flash than art, more commercialism than ministry? “We do not graduate students to necessarily work in the Contemporary Christian Music industry,” says Warren Pettit, who now leads the CCM program. “We are just as interested in students graduating to work in the general marketplace and bringing their Christian world-view to it.”

The course load for CCM majors looks a lot like the curriculum for traditional music majors, but with ample class time on studio technology, live performance, and business. In a class called “The Philosophy and Ethics of CCM,” for instance, students wrestle with the challenges of maintaining one’s integrity in a cutthroat business environment.

Each year, 70 to 80 freshmen enter as CCM majors, but only about 15 will graduate with a CCM degree. According to sophom*ore Kenny Carlson, the program is no cakewalk. “It’s not for everybody who has stars in their eyes and wants to be a rock ‘n’ roll star,” he says, “but it has taught me that anybody can have the potential if they’re willing to concentrate on the work that’s involved.”

So far, the members of Jars of Clay are the most recognizable names on the CCM program’s roll of alumni, but nationally known artists like Sarah Jahn, Amy Susan Foster, and Stereo Deluxx are also alums.

According to Pettit, it’s often difficult for Christian schools to embrace the rock, alternative, and atypical styles that characterize music today: “It’s a shame that we’re one of few schools that have fully embraced a contemporary music curriculum.

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“Christian kitsch” or “Jesus junk” has been criticized by high-minded fellow Christians and ridiculed by the non-Christian culture. Despite the criticism, it generates more than $3 billion in revenues annually. Impediments beyond sporadic criticism have remained surprisingly few—even when we’ve deserved them.

We tend to create our own cultural artifacts by tweaking famous icons from pop culture. In the 1970s we created signs saying “Jesus Christ: He’s the real thing” in Coca-Cola lettering. In the late 1980s, we moved on to harder stuff: “Budweiser, King of Beers,” became “Be Wiser, King of Kings.” Today, usurping from dairy farmers (“Got Jesus?”) and Taco Bell (“Yo Quiero Jesus”) are the hotter trends. That we have not been sued is amazing.

Actually, one Christian company has. Ty, Inc., makers of the hugely popular Beanie Babies, filed a lawsuit in September against HolyBears, Inc., makers of similarly designed (but Christianized) beanbag animals.

The case is far from black and white, and it is for the courts, not Chrisitanity Today, to decide if HolyBears actually infringe on the copyright of the Beanie Babies. HolyBears do look a lot like their more famous cousins—substituting a Bible on the paw and a wwjd on the chest for a heart on the ear. Then again, Beanie Baby bears and HolyBears look pretty much like teddy bears have since their inception at the turn of the century.

Legal specifics aside, the HolyBears case illustrates our need to have theological and ethical guidelines when it comes to appropriating popular culture for our own ends. Inter acting with popular culture in a Christian manner means more than simply embroidering wwjd on a stuffed bear or deciding to record a Christian swing album because swing music is popular.

Bill Romanowski, professor of communications arts and sciences at Calvin College and author of Pop Culture Wars (InterVarsity, 1996), sees four ways Christians have dealt with popular culture: condemnation, consumption, appropriation, and transformation—with the last being our true calling. “Appropriating culture,” taking possession of a cultural trend for “Christian” use, he says, “is imitation rather than actually trying to engage or critique culture. It demeans cultural activity by limiting its purpose to mere ecclesiastical functions.”

Like our cover story author, Randall Balmer (see p. 32), Romanowski is skeptical about the Contemporary Christian Music industry in general. “There tends to be this attitude of ‘Buy my record and worship God,’ where consumption is equated with worship,” he says. But neither does he dismiss bands like Jars of Clay—or other “Christian culture” artifacts—out of hand: “I don’t want to demean what some people are trying to do, but you have to go into it knowing it’s loaded with weaknesses.”

One reason Jars of Clay has been so successful, not only in Christian circles but in the culture at large, is because the band pursued originality. The members may claim to be influenced by the Beatles and Radiohead, but they never attempted to be, like some other Christian bands, “a Christian Radiohead.” The VeggieTales video series has likewise gained a massive audience because it is creative and surprisingly unlike anything currently offered in secular or Christian stores.

It is neither legally nor ethically justifiable to steal intellectual property from the mainstream culture under the guise of ministry, outreach, or relevancy. So here’s to more creativity in the mindset of transforming culture. And let’s pursue transformation rather than imitation.

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Ten years ago, on November 9, 1989, the Wall came down. Swinging sledgehammers and anything else avail able, the hands of the people reintegrated East Berlin with the free world. Experts stood with mouths agape, and the peoples of the entire Soviet bloc cheered as the hated symbol of oppression crumbled.

Just one month before, the prayers of thousands of believers gathered at Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche had turned a potential massacre into a peaceful confrontation that came to be called the Candlelight Revolution (see CT, January 15, 1990). This was die Wende, the turning point. And the church was there at the center of change.

How has the church fared since then? In recent interviews with several Christian leaders in the post-Communist world, CT explored what we had learned from the past ten years that will help us serve better when the still-Communist world begins to dissolve.

Exploded economic dreamsOne of the biggest disappointments in the Eastern bloc was the failure of new economic dreams. The tales of corruption, organized crime, and failed attempts at privatization of industries are well known. But, says Croatian theologian Peter Kuzmic, the economic disappointment was due to more than greed and power-grabbing.

First, Kuzmic says, the dreams were unrealistic: “There is a saying in Kosovo: ‘You cannot jump out of the sandals and into a Mercedes.’ ” Second, “Communism stifled, in some places eliminated, creativity and initiative. You need a change of mindset for a free-market economy.” Third, “you need the kind of legal framework that will prevent corruption and dubious privatization.” Because those elements were missing when the state-controlled economies were dismantled, what followed was not a free market but a vacuum.

Fortunately, Western Christians were among those who helped write new constitutions that guaranteed economic and personal liberties. Others helped to prepare educational materials that would teach young people the Christian ethics essential to both a free market and a free society. But inculcating a broad societal respect for law, for rights, and for other people takes decades, and the economic and political transitions were measured in weeks and days.

It is not only post-Communist culture that needs ethical transformation, says Romanian Baptist theologian Danut Manastireanu. It is the church and its membership. “In my country,” he says, “evangelical Christians are not very distinguishable from the rest of the population in promoting high ethical values.”

Mark Elliott, director of Beeson Divinity School’s Global Center, makes the same observation about Russian Christians. “Many of them cut corners without giving it a second thought.” Indeed, says Elliott, even in the 100-plus new Protestant seminaries in Russia, “cheating is a serious problem because of the system they come out of.”

Life under Communism was simple. “Now we certainly are not prepared for these choices,” says Manastireanu. “The risk is the desire for a Big Brother who would decide for us and provide. And the same thing is true with respect to the church.” Under Communism, Romania’s Baptist Union was led by an autocrat. Now “we have many little dictators in the church,” he says. “Our only hope is for our generation to go away. And the best we can do is to be stepping stones for those who are coming behind us.”

This bleak account needs to be balanced by accounts of believers who suffered for truth and whose prayers helped bring down oppressive regimes. Yet, writes Polish editor Adam Szostkiewicz in a recent issue of Commonweal, “The model of courageous and faithful individuals who witnessed to their faith under Communist persecution does not easily translate into a larger pattern of religion acting as a friend of freedom and liberty for everyone.”

Eastern evangelicals have barely come out of their cultural isolation and largely avoid political participation. They have become fractured and competitive—partially because of Western dollars and maverick missions. While some ministries cooperated with each other and with existing church structures (the CoMission being the brightest example), too many seized the chance to call attention to themselves and exploit the fundraising appeal of taking the gospel to the former Eastern bloc. Mean while, ethnic wars and atrocities have compromised the historic churches, which in the wake of the political revolutions have often sided with nationalist, antimodern forces.

Beyond disappointmentsFailure creates opportunities for learning—opportunities that must be seized. First, Christians must help people find identity. Says Beeson’s Elliott: “Evangelicals have a special role to play in Eastern Europe, for they are the only Christians in the region that aren’t identified automatically with a particular ethnic group.” For example, Elliott says Peter Kuzmic’s seminary in the former Yugoslavia is “one of the few places where people from most if not all of the ethnic groups sit down at the same table.”

Western Christians have a role to play as well, as believers are desperately needed to work in conflict-resolution seminars, theological training, and even communications.

But in any effort, cooperation in mission is key. “Too often,” wrote Elliott in a 1996 article, “a wild-West, free-spirit, mighty-maverick approach to preaching ends in what might be called hit-and-run evangelism. The number of Eastern European ministries rose from 311 in 1989 to 750 in 1996. It was not just the new political scene, but a lack of coordination among Western agencies that produced the statistical boom. Partnership between Western ministries and their Eastern indigenous counterparts, as well as cooperation among the grassroots ministries within the former Eastern bloc, can pay big dividends in witness and efficiency. “One of the greatest things that came out of the Wall coming down when it comes to Christian community is that Eastern European Christians found an exit from their isolation,” Kuzmic told CT. “They had become members of the international family of God.”

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