Fifteen minutes into the lesson study I surrendered, without realizing it, to the haziness that settles over a class during a rather average presentation. I was sitting next to a young woman whom I have known for a number of years. Quite suddenly I felt a gentle nudge from her as she handed me her church bulletin. On it she had scrawled a remark expressing frustration with what was happening as the lesson progressed.
All my knowledge of this young woman tells me that she is a genuine Christian. She is not negative about her church or about life in general. So I was eager to ask her later what it was that had kindled her reactions. "I just could not relate to the teacher," she said. "He seemed superficial." Then she added, "What he talked about did not seem real to him, and so he did not come across as real to me. I did not feel he was being honest." As I listened to her I realized that for this young adult, a serious thing was happening. What should have been meaningful to her was coming across as close to meaning less. In church that morning, meaningful things seemed to become meaningless.
This kind of experience is not new to any of us. It was close to uppermost in my mind as I, until recently, wrestled with the demands of pastoring a challenging suburban church. A majority of us ministers are living uneasily with similar lackluster realities. However, talking with that young woman made me realize that I have come, without realizing it, to the point of seldom being willing to stare spiritual mediocrity squarely in the face. Even as I write this there is a prominent voice in me that says "Don't be so negative! Don't make simple, everyday problems look all that serious."
What was happening in that lesson study? What is happening within me? As I think about that teacher and as I reflect on my own feelings about my self and the church, one word surfaces to describe the essence of the challenge we face: "dissonance."
What dissonance is
Within the setting of our faith commitment, dissonance describes the internal dispute within many of us be tween the dubious, fashionable values we tend to live by and the deep faith of our souls that cries out to regulate who we are and how we live our lives. As we all know, it is too easy for us to proclaim ideas or take positions that are not answer able to our inmost convictions. When we neglect those convictions, a significant internal discomfort is created, from which we have a strong need to find relief. In trying to find this relief, we tend to be governed more by the social, political, and pragmatic values about us, making us disloyal to the center of our true inner faith and conscience.
When making these convenient adjustments develops into a way of life, we become what has been described as "unselved." That is, we become disconnected from what makes us who we really are in Christ. Learning to live satisfied with this disharmony impairs our credibility. It causes us to become glib and empty. The result is that our words and leadership influence tend unwittingly to make meaningless what is otherwise very meaningful.
Dissonance and its companion, spiritual mediocrity, take over whenever we proclaim and live by what is not from that true, inner faith, but rather from what we know to be "doctrinaire" and most palatable to our audience. We experience dissonance along with the hollow ring in our life and proclamation when, almost unconsciously, we have simply been "mouthing off' rather than drawing things fresh from what I like to call the Original Voice. Dissonance and spiritual mediocrity occur when we have slipped into spiritual and ecclesiastical "auto pilot," and have been flying this way for some time. All this is especially serious when the most seminal things of Christ once were the seat of our most significant convictions, but no longer are, while we go on as if they still were alive and current in us.
Meeting the challenge of dissonance
The antidote for the toxin of spiritual dissonance in myself is actually to find a fully renewed passion to be true in Christ to my deepest, most authentic convictions about Him and all He stands for. It is practicing with integrity the ministry He has called me to. That means finding exactly what my deepest convictions are and, by the grace and power of God, living by them and proclaiming only what proceeds from them.
All of this cries out to us to get back to the basics of Christian ministry, that is to the essentials of biblical Christianity. This means a deliberate turning away from the preoccupations of professional clericalism and ecclesiasticism. We simply must burn again with the quality of faith and hope that plummeted the early Christian and Adventist communities into a flourishing way of life.
I confess that all this is much more easily said than done, but it is nevertheless undeniably true, and I believe God is especially calling us to it here and now.
As I try to tune into where many of us are, I sense a healthy disillusionment with our own nominalism. The truth is that our present expressions and under standings of Christianity cannot stand up to the eschatological eloquence of the principalities and powers and rulers of the darkness of the world, as they con front us today. All of this cries out for an authentic demonstration of the real thing in us and in our churches.
It is true that we have made certain impressive advances. In all kinds of ways we have made some striking and genuine progress, and we are still making it. We have adapted with varying degrees of success to the immense changes that have swept the planet during the past 30 years. But our adaptations are wearing thin. We cannot afford any longer to believe the illusion that organizational adjustments, clever innovations, or mere creative programming genius necessary as these things are will bring about the far-reaching renewal that our time and situation call for. Hence the imperative to seek the real thing. This search involves efforts that we would rather overlook in favor of activities more "practical," politically correct, and not so spiritually demanding.
With all this in mind, here is the January issue of Ministry, with its theme the personal spiritual authenticity and integrity of the pastor. The theme articles in this issue challenge us to search our souls and to get back to living and ministering by the basics. They call us to come into significant contemporary contact with the epicenter of the faith once delivered to the saints. They present us the classic moral challenge of actually being rooted in and operating from the great center of Christ and His ministry. Taken seriously and acted on decisively, they could lead to critical personal turning points.
As we begin the new year, I commit myself in Christ along with you to eliminate spiritual dissonance within myself. I believe we are being called to be true to a living, genuine, biblical faith that leads to an unprecedented potency in our witness as ministers of Christ. I know I need this. I think that the church does also.
