By shrewd I don’t mean slick. I mean being discerning, as Jesus said he wants us to be. After 36 years of working as a church planter, pastor, and consultant, I’m not so sure we’re very shrewd. I know I haven’t been at times. The next five weeks are going to be a mea culpa as a way to consider what a shrewd faith looks like.

Shrewd has a shadowy side, so let’s get clear on what I mean. By shrewd, I mean being discerning. I like how Eugene Peterson translates Jesus, when he said “streetwise people are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light. I want you to be smart in the same way” (Luke 16:8). In the immediate conversation, Christ is talking about handling money, but it seems to me that Jesus is looking for us to be wise in every walk of life. He wants us to be as wise as those who are savvy, even if their character is unseemly. The point is not to be like them, but to learn something from them in terms of being shrewd. What then does shrewd look like?

After 36 years of working as a church planter, pastor, and consultant, I’m learning that shrewd begins with a very familiar idea. It’s the implications from this idea that make me wonder whether we’re very shrewd. Being shrewd begins with understanding the times, a very familiar idea. The sons of Issachar “understood the times with knowledge of what Israel should do” (I Chr. 12:32). They were streetwise, in tune with the times. But what are the times we live in? Many cultural analysts, including Richard John Neuhaus, Walter Brueggemann, Michael Frost, and James Davison Hunter say the church faces a situation similar to what the Jews encountered in Babylon 2,500 years ago. In “To Change the World” Hunter writes, “Ours is now, emphatically, a post-Christian culture, and the community of Christian believers are now, more than ever – spiritually speaking – exiles in a land of exile.”

These analysts are not referring to fallen humanity’s exile from God or how Christians are exiles on the earth (Heb. 11:13). They instead believe parallels exist between the Babylonian exile and the situation the church faces today. “Though it is quite possible that this portrayal from Jeremiah is not applicable to Christians in all times and all places,” Hunter writes, “I do believe this is a word for our time.” The parallels are there.

After Solomon’s death, Israel and Judah split. Over the next 200 years both nations became idolatrous. Exile was God’s judgment against idolatry (2 Chr. 36:17-20), beginning with the Assyrians sweeping away Israel in 722 and the Babylonians beginning to sweep away Judah in 597. In similar fashion, many see much of modern evangelicalism as idolatrous, mimicking American individualism and consumerism. Tim Keller describes it as “highly individualistic and consumerist.” Babylon was a polytheistic culture with 1,197 temples. The Jews were monotheistic, outsiders. Western culture embraces inclusive faiths. Christianity is an exclusive faith – an outsider in today’s world. I think shrewd Christians see these parallels. They understand the times, but what are the implications? I think there are at least four that shrewd Christians should consider:

• Whether we are often only whittling rotten wood
• Whether we operate in realistic time frames
• Whether we are measuring the most important thing
• Whether we have sufficient cultural capital

I’m not in the habit of writing a series, but every once in a while it might be beneficial. Next week I’ll examine the first implication. Are we often only whittling rotten wood? After we’ve considered these four implications of exile, see whether you are better able to assess whether we’re shrewd in the way Jesus wants his followers to be.

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Abortion is an ancient atrocity, especially for unwanted female babies. In I B.C., Hilarion wrote a letter to his pregnant wife Alis while he was out of town. If she had a boy before he made it home, “keep it,” he wrote, but “if a girl discard it.”¹ The famed physician Hippocrates performed abortions. Tertullian described his tool kit as including “a copper needle or spike by which the actual death is managed.”² Abortion was a leading cause of infertility as well as death among Roman women. It is an ancient worldwide tragedy that continues to this day. On average, a Russian woman undergoes seven abortions in her lifetime. Close to a quarter of all pregnancies in the U.S. end in abortion.

Given these statistics, it would be easy to lose hope. Christians shouldn’t, however. Heaven is for those who believe as well as those who can’t believe. Jesus said those who have the mental capacity to choose whether or not to believe in him are already judged, but not those who have never had the capacity to choose one way or another. “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (Jn. 3:18-19). For the mentally infirm as well as babies, either infants or aborted, God welcomes them into his kingdom if they die. He writes the final chapter.

The Jews understood this, as when King David’s infant son became deathly ill. David grieved, prayed, and fasted. Still, his son died. When David sensed his son had passed away, he ceased praying and asked for a meal. His servants were stunned. David asked why. “He is dead. Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him but he shall not return to me” (II Sam. 12:21-23). David knew he would one day rejoin his infant son in heaven.

In theological terms, the church has long held that individuals are saved by God’s judicial grace until such a time as they have sufficient capacities to accept or reject Christ’s payment for sin. It’s hard to say at precisely what age children became accountable. According to medieval theology, children became diminutive adults at the age of seven, the age of reason and accountability. Before this age, God judiciously applies Christ’s payment for sin to every individual, even though every individual is born in sin. It’s a paradox – justice and grace. It means abortion, while horrific, is not a reason to lose hope. God writes the final chapter of this tragic story, and it’s a redeeming one. Horror and hope fit together, even though it’s a bit of a paradox to us.

In many ways, science is beginning to catch up to scripture on recognizing these paradoxes. Dr. Sherwin Nuland teaches surgery and the history of medicine at Yale University. In his book How We Die: Reflections of Life’s Final Chapter, Nuland tells the heart-wrenching story of Katie Mason’s murder. In the chapter “Murder and Serenity,” Joan Mason takes her nine year-old daughter Katie and several of her playmates to a summer fair and briefly leaves Katie with the other mothers to visit a concession stand. Joan hears a commotion behind her and turns to see a large, disheveled man standing over the fallen Katie, a hunting knife about seven inches long pummeling furiously away at the little girl’s face and upper body.³ Katie did not survive the attack. She died of acute hemorrhage leading to hypovolemic shock. Nuland however notes that this means Katie’s final moments on earth were not filled with pain but serenity.

Katie died “in a state of apparent tranquility and release,” he writes. Science has learned that in traumatic moments, the human body self-generates endorphins – endogenous morphine – that create a sense of drowsiness and peace. Katie’s final moments on earth were filled with warmth and tranquility while gazing into her mother’s loving eyes. Joan saw it too, saying it was something like serenity. Later, she would write in her diary, “There was no look of pain in her eyes, but instead… it looked like a release.”

It’s a bit of a paradox how murder and serenity go together, but they do. It’s the same with horror and hope. Nuland, a confirmed skeptic, suspects that these paradoxes point to God’s existence. “I am not the first to wonder about the mysterious ways in which God is thought to work His inscrutable will. Nothing would please me more than proof of His existence, and of a blissful afterlife, too.”

Nothing would please Christians more than overturning Roe v. Wade. But we have to be careful that our expectations, or hopes, don’t lead us to despair. There is a blissful afterlife for aborted babies. It’s a paradox, as Christians grieve over tragedies like abortion, but we do not “grieve as do the rest who have no hope” (I Thess. 4:13). The final chapter is only being written. God is rescuing the hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of unborn babies who have been aborted. Of course, this doesn’t make abortion right. God calls his church to pray, protest, and marshal resources to abolish abortion, all without losing hope. Abortion is a heinous evil. The reality is that even if all efforts to overthrow Roe v. Wade fail, God wins in the end, as he is populating heaven with these murdered infants. Murder and serenity – a paradox much like horror and hope, since heaven is for those who believe as well as those who can’t believe.

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¹ Naphtali Lewis, Life in Egypt under Roman Rule (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 54.
² Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul 25, 1989 ed.
³ Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (New York: Knopf, 1994)

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Mazor Robotics is a medical technology company based in Israel. It’s recognized as having a healthy culture, but Hadomi has taken an unconventional route to get there. He believes the most obvious mistake a company can make is to believe an optimistic scenario. “Positive thinking is important to a certain extent when you want to motivate people. But it’s very dangerous when you plan based on that. So one of our takeaways from that was to appoint one of the executive members as a devil’s advocate.” ¹

The individual playing Devil’s Advocate helps Mazor discern the five biggest mistakes it made the previous year. “The big ones, not the small ones,” Hadomi adds. “It’s natural that we make mistakes. What do we do with these mistakes as an organization?” Not wanting to repeat them, the Devil’s Advocate probes for problems, helping the executive team implement solutions.

Hadomi’s solution comes straight from scripture. The gospel is a “four-chapter” story with human beings created to live righteously. But because of the fall, those who are religious can become “excessively righteous and overly wise” (Eccl. 7:16). It ruins them because they lose touch with reality. It works the same way with pagans, especially those who are wealthy or highly successful. People want to ride their coattails so they flatter the boss rather than help him or her face reality. The boss slowly but surely loses touch with reality.

The solution is having someone to argue the dark side of the case. The prophet Elijah did this, playing Devil’s Advocate by ridiculing the prophets of Baal as being full of it (1 Kings 18). The Apostle Paul took the same tack, lampooning overly zealous Christians in the church at Corinth for being excessively righteous (II Cor. 11:19). The Roman Catholic Church went so far as to institutionalize the office of Devil’s Advocate in 1587. Pope Sixtus V established the office of the Promoter of the Faith to argue the case against a proposed canonization of a candidate for sainthood. It became popularly known as the Devil’s Advocate, with a canon lawyer appointed by the Church taking a skeptical view of the candidate’s character and looking for holes in the evidence.

The Devil’s Advocate was opposed in court by God’s Advocate, whose job was to make the argument in favor of canonization. Pope John Paul II abolished the office of Devil’s Advocate in 1983, but in cases of controversy, the Vatican still occasionally seeks the testimony of critics of a candidate for canonization. The recently deceased columnist Christopher Hitchens was asked to testify against the beatification of Mother Teresa in 2002, a role he would later drolly describe as being akin to “representing the Evil One, as it were, pro bono.” Hitchens was however the right man to play Devil’s Advocate, since the office requires your toughest critics, not your kindest friends.

I can count on one hand those companies that I know have a Devil’s Advocate. It’s easy to claim to have one, but in most cases executive leaders have congenial colleagues rather than a consigliore. In Mario Puzo’s Godfather, a consigliore was the chief advisor to Mafia leadership who acted as crap detector. A consigliore did not risk his life in pointing out problems. Even King Arthur’s Roundtable had Devil’s Advocates, called court jesters. They ridiculed the king to keep him in touch with reality. In an economic downturn, few companies have such a person since employees fear for their jobs, leaving bosses to luxuriate in La-La Land. This is disturbingly evident in a new study conducted by the Boston Research Group.

The “National Governance, Culture and Leadership Assessment” surveyed thousands of American employees, from every rung of the corporate ladder. It found that bosses are eight times more likely than the average worker to believe that their organization is healthy. Some 27 percent of bosses believe their firm inspires the workers. Only 4 percent of employees agree. Likewise, 41 percent of bosses say their firm rewards performance based on values rather than merely on financial results. Only 14 percent of employees swallow this. ² Rita Gunther McGrath of Columbia Business School would say these statistics are an example of bosses suffering from “confirmation bias.” Out of touch with reality, she suggests that company leaders guard against this bias by giving one executive team member the job of looking for flaws. Wise Christians have long advocated for a contrarian voice that calls a spade a spade.

When his daughter Elizabeth was only 15 years old, William Wilberforce wrote a letter to her, asking if she had accustomed herself to self-suspicion. “We read in the Scripture that ‘our hearts are deceitful above all things,’ that we are all prone to flatter ourselves, to form too high an estimate of our own good qualities, and too low an idea of our bad ones.” He then asked Elizabeth, “Now be honest with yourself, my very dear child. Have you been accustomed to distrust the judgment you have in the habit of forming of your own character?”³ Wilberforce was asking Elizabeth if she had a Devil’s Advocate.

Most leaders are familiar with the old adage “God is in the details,” meaning whatever we do should be done thoroughly – that details are important. They’d be wise to familiarize themselves with the variant of that proverb, “The Devil is in the details,” referring to the fact that we can be unaware of the darker parts of our lives. A Devil’s Advocate addresses this problem, which is why companies – as well as churches – are wise to employ one in the task of looking for the Devil in the details.

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¹ Adam Bryant, “Every Team Should Have a Devil’s Advocate,” The New York Times, December 24, 2011.
² “The view from the top, and bottom,” The Economist, September 24, 2011.
³ “Private Papers of William Wilberforce,” published by Burt Franklin, (New York, NY), pp. 165-68.

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In a November Wall Street Journal article, Aaron Belz wrote of the “Boxes of Love” ministry. During Thanksgiving, a network of Southern California churches planned to give away 1,500 boxes to low-income families. Each contained ingredients for a Thanksgiving meal for six. Belz noted the boxes “allow impoverished families to skip food lines and neighborhood pantries and enjoy the holiday in their own homes.”¹

“Boxes of Love” started in New York City in 1987, distributing 1,000 boxes to poor families. It is a year-round operation today, offering drug counseling and job training as well as distributing food. It set a goal in 2011 of providing over 156,000 people nationwide with a Thanksgiving box.

It’s hard to counter a “feel good” story with a few hard facts, but T. Norman Van Cott gave it a go in a letter to the editor a few days after Belz’ article. Cott is a Christian and a professor in the Department of Economics at Ball State University. He doesn’t dispute the value of distributing boxes of food to the poor but writes that Big Box stores help the poor even more. “Wal-Mart and its counterparts spread far more holiday-food cheer than do churches and public-service groups.” Studies estimate the presence of Wal-Mart in a community reduces food prices somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent. That’s equivalent to shoppers receiving an additional 5.2 to 7.8 weeks of “free” food shopping. The fact that Wal-Mart’s customer base is skewed toward lower-income shoppers reinforces the beneficent consequences of its price effect.

Estimates by a range of economists indicate that the typical Wal-Mart customer saves about $1,000 per year, and the biggest savers are low-income people. The common indictments made against Wal-Mart – that it underpays its employees, is a gauche blot on the landscape, and drives out “mom and pop” businesses – is “based on gut reactions and prejudices, not careful economic analysis,” writes Robert Whaples, professor of economics at Wake Forest University.² He cites studies showing Wal-Mart pays its workers on par with competitors, barely influences the overall labor market when it enters a locality, benefits those who don’t even shop there (since competitors cut prices), and the $1,000 saved generally ends up being spent on something else, benefitting the local economy. Wal-Mart isn’t perfect, but most economists have concluded its benefits to society outweigh its costs.

The odd thing is you rarely hear faith communities hailing the benefits of Big Box stores. Churches are often unwittingly boxed into a corner when they define compassion and mercy as only distributing money, food, and clothing. It reveals how they rarely think systems. “Worthy as these projects may be,” Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith observes, “none of them attempt to transform social or cultural systems, but merely to alleviate some of the harm caused by the existing system.”³

The best way to help the poor is to create an enterprising society with entrepreneurial institutions. This is pointed out in such books as The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship From Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times. It’s a series of essays written by leading economic historians exploring the entrepreneur’s role in society from antiquity to the present. In a review of the book, Michael J. Miller writes, “the key to success isn’t particular individuals but the institutions of society and the incentives they offer.” For instance, lifting the poor into productivity happens best through institutions – in this case, businesses including Big Box stores such as Wal-Mart – and the price saving incentives they offer, especially to lower-income families.

Miller is a theologian and contributor to another collection of articles written by economists, Christian Theology and Market Economics. However, this book includes essays by theologians. Christian Theology and Market Economics is a compilation of essays where writers attempt to reconnect two disciplines – Christian theology and market economics. It includes an essay written by Miller, “Business as a Moral Enterprise.” Christian Theology and Market Economics explains how business has great potential to benefit the greatest number of people, including the poor.

Albert Einstein said you could not solve a problem inside the box that created the problem. If faith communities are boxed in, imagining compassion and mercy as mostly involving the distribution of boxes of love, breaking out of the box could begin with commissioning a local businessperson every Sunday. A church could also highlight the benefits to the poor of larger business institutions such as Wal-Mart. This way, a congregation could appreciate how mercy comes in as Big Boxes as well as little ones.

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¹ Aaron Belz, “How Calvinists Spread Thanksgiving Cheer,” The Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2011
² Robert Whaples, “Cool Capitalism: In praise of entrepreneurship,” Books and Culture, July/August 2011.
³ Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From It’s Cultural Captivity (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), p. 73.

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Nearly 10 percent of Protestant churches were closed on Christmas Sunday according to LifeWay Research. Many churches that did hold services on Christmas and New Years Day scaled them back in anticipation of fewer worshipers. This might seem like a sensible thing to do but it plays into the hand of an American idol – individualism.

Don’t confuse individualism with individuality. Individuality is God making people as unique individuals. Individualism is idolatry, making the individual the final authority over right and wrong. It is the basis today for “the American Dream,” writes Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University. Delbanco says Americans first looked to Protestant Christianity to understand human flourishing. Then the nation-state became the authority for right and wrong in the 1700s. Finally, in the 1800s, the individual replaced God and Nation as the final judge of what it means to live “the American Dream.”¹

For instance, individualism shaped how American Protestants approached scripture, writes Roger Lundin, a professor at Wheaton College. They broke dramatically from the European Reformers’ understanding of sola scriptura – “scripture alone.” It came to be understood as “the Bible removed from all historical and ecclesiastical contexts.”² For Protestants, reading the Bible became “a private encounter between a God… and a reader removed from history.” Christian formation became an individualistic enterprise no longer requiring church involvement. Evangelism soon followed suit.

The 19th century revivalist Charles Finney introduced the idea of revival as a personal decision. He “put all the weight on an individual’s personal, subjective experience,” writes Tim Keller, senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. This “undermined the more traditional way of doing Christian formation, when Christian growth was gradual – whole family catechetical instruction – and church-centric.” Simultaneous to Finney’s revivals was de Tocqueville’s travels through America. He concluded that to be an American was to be an “individualist,” a term he coined.

Individualism “lies at the very core of American culture,” writes sociologist Robert Bellah in his influential book, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. It is “basic to American identity.”³ Tim Keller believes American individualism “is one of the reasons (though not the only reason) that we have the highly individualistic, consumerist evangelicalism of today.”⁴ Evangelicals assume faith can flourish without a faith community – a point made by George Barna in Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond the Walls of the Sanctuary. He calls evangelicals to a new movement that “entails drawing people away from reliance upon a local church into a deeper connection with and reliance upon God.” Discipleship will become a matter of “choosing from a proliferation of options, weaving together a set of favored alternatives into a unique tapestry that constitutes the personal ‘church’ of the individual.”

This is “nowhere in the Great Tradition of Christianity,” writes Roger E. Olson in The Mosaic of Christian Belief. Individualism is however in American evangelicalism, where church attendance is sporadic. Many claim to attend about every other week but studies show actual churchgoing is half the professed rate.⁵ Some find church services to be shallow so they don’t show up very often. Others find a headache, hangnail, or hangover is sufficient reason to skip church – obstacles that don’t prevent the same people from getting to work on Monday morning. These Christians are essentially saying faith can flourish without a faith community. I know – I tried to do this for many years.

When I was a senior pastor, we cancelled services when Christmas fell on Sunday. A lot of the congregation was out of town, so it didn’t seem worth it to me to do all the work of pulling together a Sunday service. After the pastorate, I went through a period when I claimed to get more out of staying home on Sunday than going to church. I believed my faith was flourishing without any meaningful connection to a faith community. All I needed was a small group of believing friends. I was kidding myself. The thrust of Lucifer’s work is to break the meaningful connection between words and reality. I was breaking the meaningful connection between faith and flourishing. I was being an individualist, making myself the final judge as to whether I was flourishing. But in reality I was living more like an American than a follower of Christ. I was wrong.

Several years ago Amy Welborn, a high school teacher in a Christian school, grew tired of her students complaining they didn’t “get anything” out of church. So she began taking them on a field trip to a Benedictine monastery. Students participate in noon Mass. At the end of the day they gather to talk. Over the years, students say the most moving part of the day is discovering the monks don’t cancel or scale back the Mass if no one shows up. Students felt drawn to a service that “wasn’t all about them.”

When churches cancel or scale back services, they tell believers “it’s all about them.” In a few years Christmas and New Years Day will once again fall on successive Sundays. It could also be an opportunity for some churches to push back against the prevailing trend of an individualistic faith.

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¹ Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
² Roger Lundin, From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (New York, NY: Bowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), pp. 26-27.
³ Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1996), p. 142.
⁴ http://redeemercitytocity.com/blog/view.jsp?Blog_param=238
⁵ John G. Stackhouse, Jr., “Where Religion Matters.” American Outlook. Fall 2002. pp. 40-44.

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We measure economies by two indicators—leading and lagging. Leading indicators signal future growth or decline. Bond yields are one example. Lagging indicators track whether an economy is growing or declining. The rate of unemployment is a lagging indicator. It’s not predictive as much as it reports what is happening in the job market.

Cultures operate in similar ways. The leading indicators include ideas, images, items, institutions, and individuals that are taken seriously by the general public. Together, they signal whether a culture is likely to flourish or head into decline. But figuring out whether a society is currently thriving or deteriorating requires paying attention to lagging indicators. A key indicator is how people talk.

Human language is as old as creation. God spoke creation into existence as he imagined it. In this sense, language “lagged” behind imagination. Made in the image of God, human language lags behind imagination. It is a lagging indicator of how people imagine their lot in life. And when we listen to how the continuing economic downturn has affected the way Americans talk, this lagging indicator is troubling.

“I was living the American dream,” said one African-American in a recent New York Times article, remembering his $23.76-an-hour public sector job. “Then it crumbled. They get you used to having things and then they take them away.” In his book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes The Underclass, Theodore Dalrymple reports on how worldviews can be heard in the way people talk. For those at the bottom, “a striking example” is how often they use the passive voice.¹ They get you used to having things… they take them away. The problem is always someone else.

Victimhood is the voice of the underclass. This creates a vortex, dragging down a culture. We hear it today in the accusation that the wealthy—the 1%—are the problem. But as Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon points out, wealthy and poor people, as well as the private and public sector, were all complicit in our economic collapse—whether they knew it or not. We are all in some sense culpable. Blaming others only absolves the victims from taking their fair share of the responsibility.

The corrective is a collective sense of responsibility. The Apostle Paul confronted a blame-game situation in the deeply divided Corinthian church. There were arrogant believers who did pretty much as they pleased. They were one half of the problem. There were also “wounded” believers who accused their arrogant brothers and sisters of “causing them to stumble” (I Cor.8). They were the other half of the problem. But note their passive voice. The problem was what others were doing to them. Paul reminded these wounded believers of the exodus, when the Jews played the role of victim and blamed their leaders. “All the congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron, saying, ‘You are the ones who have caused the death of the Lord’s people’” (Num.16:41). Not so. A generation of victims never made it to the Promised Land.

Today’s Promised Land is returning to high productivity and lower rates of unemployment. A generation of people who blame others or feel entitled to a well-paying job is unlikely to make it there. In the March 2010 edition of The Atlantic, Don Peck writes: “this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.”²

Peck writes that the construction and finance industries, bloated by a decade-long housing bubble, are unlikely to regain their former share of the economy. Workers will have to learn new skills instead of blaming others. Nor can we expect the public sector to return to levels that were commonplace before 2007. Public workers who feel “the system” screwed them are likely to sink to the bottom. Nor can a generation of recent college graduates expect to earn as much as those who finished school a few years earlier—unless they work much harder than many are accustomed to. In this economy, the wounded and entitled will most likely sink, feel stuck near the bottom, but then blame others for their misfortune. It’s a lagging indicator of cultural decline.

In his last sermon before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made this appeal to those on the bottom rung of the cultural ladder: We shall overcome. It was a collective call to the disadvantaged, using the active voice. “We shall overcome. Deep in my heart I do believe we shall overcome. And I believe it because somehow the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” King inspired people because he invoked the biblical language of prevailing over injustice rather than finger pointing.

It’s wise to pay attention to leading and lagging cultural indicators. Wise faith communities committed to the flourishing of all pay attention to both. They measure whether the church is contributing to the making of ideas, images, items, institutions, and individuals—leading cultural indicators. But wise faith communities also listen for lagging indicators. In 2012, they will do all they can to promote a collective sense of responsibility, hoping to halt what appears to be a cultural slide.

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¹ Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes The Underclass (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. ix.
² Don Peck, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America” The Atlantic, March 2010.

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Christmas is a story rooted in words and rebellion. Before time existed, Lucifer led a rebellion against God. It broke out with a preposterous claim that broke the meaningful connection between words and reality: “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High” (Isa.14:13-14). Words are supposed to properly define reality but Lucifer’s words were whacked out. So a war ensued. The heavenly hosts won. Lucifer and his legions lost and were cast to the earth.

This explains why the earth is first described as “formless and void” (Gen.1:2), meaning undifferentiated mass. The earth was nothing—undifferentiated—yet something—mass. If this confuses you, join the club. “Formless and void” describes disordered reality with ominous overtones of judgment.¹ Lucifer is lurking in the bushes.

Creation is the story of God speaking, ordering the disorder and making it good. Made in the image of God, Adam speaks, naming the animals (Gen.2:19-20). Adam connects words with reality because he has “insight into the natures of the various creatures,” writes Dallas Willard.² So does Lucifer, but his game plan is exactly opposite of Adam’s. His aim is to break the meaningful connection between words and reality. This happens in the Garden when Adam and Eve failed to identify the serpent as Lucifer. The couple fell. God however promised to one day rectify the situation.

That day dawned with Christmas. After the birth of Christ, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem and asked Herod for directions to the baby, the King of the Jews. Herod pointed them toward Bethlehem but secretly asked they report back on the baby’s exact whereabouts. The magi found the Christ child, presented to him their gifts, but were then “warned by God in a dream not to return to Herod” (Mt. 2:12). An angel also appeared to Joseph, warning him to flee to Egypt, escaping from Herod (2:13). When Herod learned the magi had given him the slip, he was enraged and slaughtered all the male children who were in Bethlehem and all its vicinity, from two years old and under.

The Christmas story has warning signs that are warranted when we read Revelation 12. For starters, we learn that Herod was the dupe of the devil. The Christmas story is told as a woman about to give birth. A dragon is crouching before her, ready to crush the newborn. The dragon is identified as Lucifer, or the devil (Rev.20:2). The woman gives birth and the family flees to Egypt, getting past the watchful dragon. Lucifer is left seething at the child. The story closes with a warning—Lucifer declares war on Christ’s followers. The dragon aims to destroy the church.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem, an instructor of religion in the 4th century A.D., regularly warned his students: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass by. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” Flannery O’Connor and C. S. Lewis took this warning seriously, probably because they worked with words. They felt it important to identify the dragon.

Flannery O’Connor was a novelist in the 1950s and 60s. She defined her work as “the accurate naming of the things of God.”³ O’Connor identified the dragon of her day as modern writers, including Christians, who pictured life as a bucolic fairytale. They were unwittingly severing the meaningful connection between words and the “reality of the present situation.” O’Connor believed these writers had forgotten that we live in a fallen world that is often forgetful of our capacity to do heinous things. So she wrote dark novels with sinister characters, many of them Christians, with the hope that they would help readers in “the identification of this dragon.”⁴

C. S. Lewis was a contemporary of O’Connor who worked as an academician. He identified the dragon as the modern world’s loss of moral imagination. Scientism for example was responsible for breaking the meaningful connection between words and reality. It was actually a fantasy, a mistaken idea that facts are the sole province of truth while values (i.e., religions) are nothing more than matters of taste. Lewis knew this was absurd, so he wrote fantasy literature to “steal past those watchful dragons.”⁵

These Christ followers remind us that Christmas included warning signs to alert Christians to steal past the dragons. But we have to first identify them. This can prove difficult for religious institutions, since the assumption is that everything we say is meaningfully connected to reality. But like everyone else, Christians can be duped. A wise believer like St. Cyril recognized this. Shrewd Christians such as O’Connor and Lewis would say the Bible has a slightly different take on Christmas than the bucolic scene displayed in most nativity sets. They might recommend adding a dragon figurine to remind us that Lucifer is lurking in the bushes. A little statuette of Lucifer would serve as a warning sign, alerting believers to identify the dragon, wherever he may be found.

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¹ Allen P. Ross, Creation and Blessing: A Guide to the Study and Exposition of Genesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1988), p. 106.
² Dallas Willard, The Spirit of Disciplines (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1988), p. 49.
³ Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1988), p. 128.?
⁴ O’Connor, Habit of Being, p. 126.
⁵ C. S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What Needs to Be Said,” in On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature (Orlando, FL: Harvest, 1982), p. 12.

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Lawrence Summers coined “crony capitalism” in the midst of the Asian meltdown of 1997. As deputy Treasury secretary, he gave a speech in August 1998 noting, “the problems related to ‘crony capitalism’ are at the heart of this crisis.” Today, crony capitalism covers a wide array of corrupt institutional practices, including financiers sleeping in government-backed featherbeds as well as excessive executive pay. This is where the Sisters of St. Francis enter the picture.

Mother Francis Bachmann founded the Sisters of St. Francis as a Franciscan order in 1855. Nora Nash, who grew up in Limerick County, Ireland and dreamed of becoming a missionary in Africa, showed up in 1959. Two years later Sister Nora took her vows. In 1980, Sister Nora and the Sisters of St. Francis “formed a corporate responsibility committee,” writes Kevin Roose in a recent New York Times article.¹ The Nun’s committee was formed “to combat what they saw as troubling developments at the businesses in which they invested their retirement fund. They boycotted Big Oil, took aim at Nestlé over labor policies, and urged Big Tobacco to change its ways.”

Since 1980, the nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger over farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; with Wells Fargo, over lending practices; as well as with many Fortune 500 companies, including Goldman Sachs. “We’re not here to put corporations down,” Sister Nora notes. “We’re here to improve their sense of responsibility.” “People who have done well have a right to their earnings,” added Sister Marijane Hresko, when the topic of executive compensation comes up. “What we’re talking about here is excess, and how much money is enough for any human being.”

What these nuns are actually doing is fighting fire with fire. Crony capitalism involves corrupt institutions and institutional practices. Therefore, honest institutions are the best fire-line. The Sisters are part of an institution, the Roman Catholic Church. Institutions take other institutions seriously. They also see the value of overlapping networks of institutions. That’s why the Sisters’ order operates under an umbrella group—The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility—that includes Jews, Quakers, Presbyterians, and nearly 300 faith-based investing groups. These institutions give Sister Nora gravitas, the moral weight to be taken seriously.

In November I attended the “Gospel and Culture” conference hosted by The Center for Faith and Work, a ministry of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. Lolita Jackson, Director of Special Projects for the NYC Mayor’s Office, was one of the speakers. Jackson is a believer who worked for Morgan Stanley for 12 years in the Investment Management division before serving as Mayor Bloomberg’s chief liaison for all Manhattan related community issues. She spoke of a meeting where the Mayor invited city leaders to a high level luncheon. Jackson noticed Jewish and Catholic leaders at the head table but wondered why Tim Keller wasn’t included. Could it be that the Mayor imagines Keller as only an individual pastor of an individual church? The other leaders represent institutions. They think institutionally. By and large, Protestant faith traditions don’t think institutionally.

Too much of Protestantism is marked by anti-institutional, individualistic orientation. It has roots in Martin Luther’s defense of his writings before an assembly (a “Diet”) in the Imperial Free City of Worms in 1521. He said he would not renounce them “unless I am convicted by Scripture or by right reason (for I trust neither in popes nor in councils).” Popes and councils represented institutions. Luther was expressing a distrust of institutions. In the 1800s this bias was coupled with Charles Finney’s emphasis on individual decisions. The result is an individualistic faith that doesn’t think institutionally.

The good news is that this might be changing. Andy Crouch is an editor for Christianity Today and author of Culture Making, an important book on the subject of culture. Crouch however admits that he did not spend enough time in his book addressing the role of institutions. In a review of James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World, Crouch writes, “If I had read Hugh Heclo’s boringly-titled but brilliantly-written short book On Thinking Institutionally before writing Culture Making (both were published in the summer of 2008), my book would have been better.” Hunter “does an excellent job of correcting my (and others’) lack of institutional vision,” he admits, “something that seems to be a besetting problem for my age cohort, so-called Generation X.”

The kingdom would benefit from more Christians like Andy Crouch. It would also benefit from more churches like Redeemer Presbyterian. It thinks institutionally. For instance, Lolita Jackson closed her talk by noting how she got Tim Keller a place at the next Mayor’s table. This is an important step in the right direction. Changing the world requires overlapping networks of institutions. If crony capitalism is an uncontrolled blaze involving many corrupt institutional practices, fighting fire with fire requires a wide array of healthy institutions. It would be beneficial for these networks if more Protestant institutions joined the fire-line.

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¹ Kevin Roose, “Nuns Who Won’t Stop Nudging,” The New York Times, November 12, 2011.

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For a while it appeared NBATV would be stuck with reruns. But then the NBA struck a deal. The season gets underway December 25th. Until then, NBATV will show reruns. That’s not necessarily a waste of time. You can catch John Stockton, the all-time NBA assist leader. His body of work pictures a role the church once performed very well.

John Stockton was one of the last NBA players to wear those ridiculous short shorts. Opponents however didn’t ridicule his play. For 18 years he led the Utah Jazz. Stockton fed Karl Malone and together dismantled the opposition with their patented pick-and-roll offense. Malone twice won the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award. He is considered today to be one of the greatest power forwards in NBA history, yet Malone attributes most of his success to Stockton’s assists.

Stockton retired in 2003 with 15,806 assists, the all-time NBA assist leader. His legacy lives on to this day. If you visit Salt Lake City, go to the intersection of Stockton and Malone (yes, those are the street names). You’ll see EnergySolutions Arena, where the Utah Jazz plays these days. Outside the arena there is a statue of Karl Malone next to a statue of teammate John Stockton. Stockton is still feeding passes to Malone.

In basketball, assist leaders exhibit three skills. They have the ability to see the entire court. Second, they know the individual skills that each teammate brings to the game. Third, they set up scorers with pinpoint passes. A pass is not an assist unless it directly leads to a score. Assist leaders serve others; they rarely score the most points in a game. They gain greater satisfaction from helping teammates succeed than scoring a bunch of points. These skills are why assist leaders generally establish the culture of a team. Stockton’s Jazz were known as ponderously pick-and-roll. Magic Johnson’s Lakers were lightning-fast Showtime. Isiah Thomas’ Bad Boy Detroit Pistons were known for lock-down defense.

For centuries the church led the league in assists. It established much of the culture of Western Europe, for example. The church saw the entire court due to its expansive theology. This established the modern university’s liberal—broad—arts curriculum. The church also knew the players, or human nature, due to its anthropology. It said education requires a telos—end—if students are to make wise use of technologies—means. The church gained these insights because of its practices, its ecclesiology. Like a basketball team, the church ran practices developing habits necessary for assisting others.

Some would say the church is hardly in the game anymore. Look at modern education. What would it take for Harvard Business School to look to the church for an assist in understanding the telos—purpose—for business? Look at our TGIF world—Twitter-Google-iPhone-Facebook. What would it take for Google or Facebook to credit the church for an assist in understanding how technologies work best? “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1854. “They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

The church could provide assistance, but it has to first get back in the game. Albert Einstein said you could not solve a problem inside the frame that created it. What if the church reframed its role as leading the league in assists? It would require a faith that sees the entire court, knows the players, and sets up institutions so that they flourish. This metaphor would also require coaching, or mentors. Dallas Willard comes to mind.

In his book, The Divine Conspiracy, Willard writes that many of today’s gospel messages don’t help the church see the entire court. They only help us manage our sin problem (Willard calls them “gospel of sin management”). The church can’t manage the game if it can’t see the entire court. A second mentor is James K. A. Smith. In his book, Desiring the Kingdom, he writes that much of today’s church does not understand human nature—it doesn’t know the players. Smith correctly notes that human nature operates by desire. The church too often operates by directive. Smith argues for particular kinds of practices—church services—that make assisting others second nature.

When Jack Nicklaus won the 1965 Masters with a record-breaking score of 271, Bobby Jones, the Masters’ patron saint, remarked, “He plays a game with which I am not familiar.” You might not be familiar with the church as an assist leader. I don’t recommend watching the NBA today. It’s become an artillery exercise, where players rain three-point shots from long distance. Assists are archaic. You might instead read some of the histories of the church that show how it once led the league in assists. Start with Peter Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom. Or you might find that Willard and Smith provide some coaching. At the very least, turn on NBATV and catch a few reruns of John Stockton. You’ll be reminded of why an assist is a thing of beauty.

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The Bible defines the institution of marriage as a monogamous lifelong union between a man and a woman. A family is the fruit of this union. The institution of family flourishes when led by an adult mother and father. Now consider Congress, another important institution. Would it flourish if led by an adult mother and father working together?

The mother and father image is from George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at Cal Berkeley. He writes, “People think in frames.”¹ These frames shape how we see facts. For a fact to be accepted, “the truth must fit people’s frames. If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off.” Lakoff says Republicans operate inside the frame of the strict father. Democrats operate as the nurturing mother. These differing frames explain the party’s two different takes on fixing America’s debt crisis.

The Democrat’s frame of the nurturing mother explains why they like John Maynard Keynes’s view of government—that it can nurture or nudge an economy and create jobs by spending a lot of money. Keynesians summon all sorts of facts to supposedly support this claim while conveniently ignoring other facts that undercut their argument.

The more fiscally conservative University of Chicago School argues that Keynesian stimulus can’t heal a sick economy—only time can—and fits the Republican’s frame of the strict father. Chicagoans summon facts supporting their claim that economies can only truly recover on their own and arguing that policy interventions only slow the recovery. But Republicans also conveniently ignore facts that undercut their argument.

The problem is Keynesians and Chicagoans believe there’s no middle ground: they operate as if you can’t simultaneously cut and increase government budgets. This is why the super committee failed. But our economic crisis has less to do with facts and more to do with frames. Congress is a dysfunctional family with a mother and father working against each other. Congress will only flourish when Democrats and Republicans combine the two frames, mother and father working together.

There are at least two lessons here for the faith community. First, if you want to change behavior, preach in pictures, or frames. Think of the Civil War. The crisis had less to do with facts and more to do with frames—both sides assuming God was on their side. But as Lincoln lamented, “Both read the same Bible, both pray to the same God.” The problem wasn’t so much what the Bible said; it was what believers saw.

Now think of the problems facing today’s church. Divorce rates among evangelicals are generally the same as those in the population at large. According to a recent article in Relevant, 80 percent of self-identified Christians have sex before marriage, compared with 88 percent of the general population. The problem in both cases has less to do with facts—scripture is pretty clear on these matters—and more to do with the frame. Culture has framed divorce as a matter of convenience and sex as casual hook up.

“You can’t see or hear frames,” Lakoff writes. “They are part of what cognitive scientists call the “cognitive unconscious”—structures in our brains that we cannot consciously access, but know by their consequences.”² These neural pathways affect upwards of 95 percent of the way people behave. Lakoff says too many people are “under the illusion that if only people understood the facts, we’d be fine. Wrong.”³ People understand facts inside frames. If the aim of a sermon is to change sexual behavior, it requires a picture that parishioners don’t see coming—one that reframes how they mistakenly see facts.

The second lesson addresses the question of why Congress currently doesn’t look to the church—or institutions such as family—to solve their problems. Lakoff says that would require building institutions that earn cultural capital and are then taken seriously. This requires large block grants and endowments, he writes, such as when “a group of conservative leaders got together around William F. Buckley, Jr. and… started magazines and think tanks, and invested billions of dollars.”⁴ Did you catch billions?

James Davison Hunter notes that the focus “of self-described Evangelical foundations… has long been on missionary work and evangelism.”⁵ It’s rarely on building institutions. In 2004 the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Annenburg Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation gave a combined total of over $200 million dollars in grants to “arts and culture.” In the largest Catholic and Evangelical foundations, only $10 million was given to these endeavors. Lakoff would suggest that it’s hard for the church to earn cultural capital with such relatively small investments.

Congress is too big to fail. Yet it only flourishes as a mom and pop organization—a family led by an adult mother and father working together. The challenge for Congress is recognizing how any frame can cause good people to ignore inconvenient truths. The challenge for the church is two-fold. Changing behavior has less to do with facts and more to do with frames, so preachers would be wise to reframe the message in a new picture. Second, Congress currently doesn’t take seriously the church’s definition of the family. Does the church have the financial wherewithal to build institutions that would one day be taken seriously by Congress?

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¹ George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004), p. 17.
² Lakoff, Elephant, xv.
³ Lakoff, Elephant, xiii.
⁴ Lakoff, Elephant, p. 15.
⁵ James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 82.

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