VW Diesels and our Complicity

Yet the Volkswagen scandal is a reminder of how our human sinfulness, in ways both individually and corporately, holds us back from shalom. It’s a story of greed, pride, self-deception and outright lies, mostly by engineers and corporate officials. And even if I didn’t know about it, on some level, no matter how clean my fossil-fueled vehicle seemed to be, I remained complicit in a world economy that is damaging creation.

My bro-in-law has one of these VW Diesel's that were included in the scandal. He purchased it because, quite frankly, it's a sweet car and got great gas mileage with low emissions. Two out of three of those things remain true. Unfortunately, it's just polluting a lot more than anyone thought.

The first response to something like this is typically anger. Angry at the system, at Volkswagen, corporate greed, and just generally feeling lied to and cheated. The second response, though, is frustration. Frustration at all the things we were angry about, and how it feels like we can't change them, but then the general frustration of realizing that, no matter how much we wish we weren't, we're part of the problem.

VW had some motive (largely financial) to lie about the emissions of these vehicles. They knew that with the right combination of performance and the perception of being green, these things would sell like crazy. And that's what happened. The problem was, it wasn't actually possible to put those two things together. It couldn't perform as well as it does and still be as green as they had hoped. So they cheated.

The pessimist in me says that VW knew that there was a whole crop of people who would love to drive a green vehicle, but had no intention of sacrificing performance to do it. That's not necessarily wrong, but it's also not necessarily green. Lots of people would be "green" if it didn't cost them much...

Living Christian(ly)

The Christian life is about realignment. We are realigning our way of "being" from a focus on ourselves to a focus on God and others. This realignment can occur because we are already treated as if the realignment is complete; because of Jesus, we are seen as having achieved what will take us a lifetime (and more) to actually work itself out into our external reality. Often times, however, we trade the reason for our realignment with the results of our realignment, and end up in a mess.

The common approach towards realignment in the modern church is to focus on people's behavior and what they do. If we can get them to live the way that God calls us to live, then it is relatively unimportant what they actually think about it. The world will be a better place simply because we are all living according to God's ideals. In some cases this consists of teaching people to live according to the moral standards of God: don't use bad language, treat other people kindly, read your Bible, pray, serve in the church, and things like that. In other cases, it's teaching people to live according to the social standards of God: do not tolerate oppression, care for the poor, fight against injustice. Getting people to do is more important than getting them to understand. And this lack of understanding has led to, well, a lack of understanding of what it actually means to be a Christian.

When I was in grade school, we were taught how to do math by teaching us facts about math. Two + Two = Four. As long as you memorized these facts, you could get yourself to the correct answer. The math curriculum my children are going through thirty years later has introduced some significant changes in how math is taught. Rather than simply teaching the facts of math, they are trying to teach the theory behind it. Why does Two + Two = Four? In other words, the reason that Two + Two = Four is just as important as the end result. It's the modern equivalent of "showing your work". How you got to the answer is just as important as the fact that you got to the answer at all.

Modern Christianity has traded the reason for the result and so most people assume that as long as they are acting like Christians (living out something similar to the values listed above) they are Christians. Jesus teaching, however, stands in start contrast. He makes clear that it's entirely possible to be doing all the right things, but miss the main point. Our "realignment" is only possible because Jesus has made it possible. If we attempt realignment without Jesus, it doesn't actually work in the long run.

What we need to do is remember that the only reason that we can realign our deepest desires, our deepest affections, and our deepest loves, is because Jesus has already done it perfectly in his life, death, and resurrection. As a result, we can actually begin to live a life that is truly in alignment with the way that Jesus calls us to live: loving God, and loving others.

Speculating on Jesus: Where to look?

Given that the vast majority of American's already believe that Jesus was a historical figure, the challenge for the Christian person is to define who Jesus was, rather than that he was. The fact that he existed is assumed to be true, but this raises several difficult questions. The first question, "Why should I care?" is covered in this post. We must clarify for ourselves and for those around us why we should have any interest in researching who Jesus actually was; what is it that makes him stand out from all the other historical figures that we could study? This, of course, leads to the second question. If our interest in Jesus is piqued, where should we actually turn to find out more about him? That is the topic of this post.

For now, let's set aside the third question that I presented in the first post on the subject. That question, "how can I trust what I'm reading?", is so important to this second question that I debated whether or not it should come first. Upon reflection, however, I decided that it was better to set it aside for now and simply address what the material related to Jesus life actually says. As we approach Jesus to find out more about him, I think that we will find that our assumptions about him are that he is fairly innocuous; the image that we have is of a kind, caucasian gentleman with a lamb cast around his shoulders. Surely this Jesus cannot be much of a bother; this Jesus won't demand much from us. He is safe. As such, questions of whether or not we should put our confidence in what is actually recorded about Jesus won't really arise until after we've examined the material and found that, far from being innocuous, he is actually quite dangerous; far from demanding little, his claims are actually quite demanding. If not for us, at very least for the way in which we view the world. After coming into contact with who Jesus actually is and what Jesus actually teaches, we find that–if we are to trust him–we cannot go on the same way we have been prior to this moment. Everything changes if what is said about Jesus is true. And that is the point where most of us will be awoken to our senses and we will actually ask the question, "should I trust this material?" And when we ask it, then we will answer it. Until then, we'll just consider where we should look.

The place to begin, of course, is in the four account of Jesus life that are often referred to as "The Gospels". These four accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, each take a particular perspective in writing about Jesus, and each of them has a particular audience in mind. They were written by four different authors at four different time periods. Yet despite those differences, we find an amazing cohesiveness between the four books. If we begin with these accounts, there are at least two things that we will begin to see; to data points, if we can call them that, as we discover who Jesus actually is.

First, we'll discover what the very early followers of Jesus though about him. Two of the writers are Jesus disciples (Matthew & John), one of them is a close follower of Jesus who would later spend time with Peter (Mark), and the other is a historian who spent extensive time researching Jesus life and traveling with the Apostle Paul. Certainly, their perspective on who Jesus actually was ought to be important to us. They were the ones who saw him, walked with him, heard him, and ultimately believed in him. These four biographies of Jesus life give us all that we need to make a clear determination of what the early church thought about Jesus: namely, that he was Savior and Lord.

Second, we'll discover what Jesus thought about himself. Jesus was not shy about making radical claims about his identity, and his biographers do not soften these claims. This in itself is worth noting. If the early followers of Jesus knew that he made claims about himself that they did not believe were true, they would have taken great claims to scrub them from the record, as it were. Yet they didn't do that. This indicates that, not only did they believe Jesus, but it also gives us confidence that Jesus believed these claims about himself as well. The most outrageous claim, and the one that finally got him sent to his death (at least from the religious leaders perspective), was that he was God, the creator of the universe. Again, this is an outrageous claim that, were you or I to make it, would make us look like absolute fools. Indeed, Jesus would have looked like a fool too, had he not proved it with his death and resurrection–or at least, that's clearly what his early followers believed about him.

Once we have come into contact with what the early church thought about Jesus, and what Jesus believed about himself, we turn our attention to the next question: what did Jesus believe about the rest of the universe? Or, what did he believe about God? What was his belief about how the world operates, and why it was that he needed to come and offer some sort of salvation? We'll find in short order that what Jesus believed, and the "scripture" that he used, was the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians would refer to as the Old Testament. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus opens to the center of that Scripture and claims that he is ushering in the fulfillment of all that it promises; at the end of his ministry, Jesus takes time to show that everything that was written in the Hebrew Bible pointed towards him. At very least, what we learn from this is that Jesus viewed the Old Testament as trustworthy. They were so trustworthy, in fact, that not only did God deliver them to his people so that they would know what it was that he expected of them, but then, in a great cosmic act of mercy, fulfilled the demands himself. This is the reason why Jesus can say to his followers that the only way to get back into God's good grace, as it were, was through Him. He was the gate into the life you've always wanted, that you've always tried to create. 

Finally, we come to the implications. What does this all mean? For that, we turn to what Christians refer to as the New Testament. A collection of letters and teaching that were written by the very early church leaders and distributed amongst the churches. They, too, were considered authoritative and trustworthy. In the letters we find the early church leaders instructing the people on how the fulfillment of God's law ought to impact our lives, today. One thing that stands out: the expectations of God still matter, it's just that our failure to live up to them isn't held against us. The good news of Jesus is that since he has fulfilled them, our failure to fulfill them will never be held against us again, so long as we put our confidence in his efforts rather than our own. It was unacceptable to the early leaders that you would want to have Jesus, but disagree with him about what he viewed as sin. You couldn't have it both ways. If you acknowledged that Jesus was God, Lord, and Savior, then you also had to agree that what Jesus believed about how God intended the world to be (evidenced through Jesus' scriptures and his own teachings) was actually true. You couldn't claim to follow Jesus, but reject what he taught, even if those teachings led to some discomfort in our lives.

This discovery is what causes most people to stop and question whether or not this source material can be trusted. After all, there are only two ways to make Jesus safer than he actually is. The first is to reinterpret what Jesus said so that it fits our pre-conceived agenda. This is the theological equivalent of having our cake and eating it too; we like the idea of Jesus, but we simply cannot accept what he taught about sin, sexuality, divorce, money, or anything else for that matter. I'll take the free gift of salvation, but functionally I'll reject the reason salvation was necessary in the first place. Surely, things cannot be that bad. The great danger of this softening, or "safening", of Jesus is that it's almost always an inside job. It comes from Christians who know that they cannot totally disparate the text, or the Bible as a whole quickly becomes untrustworthy. Better instead to reinterpret what Jesus said so that it is more palatable for the modern person. The trouble with this approach, however is that it requires us to assume that what was written about Jesus is supposed to be cryptic in nature and it's only we who have discovered the hidden code. Jesus wasn't quite as serious about sin as we make him out to be, see, we have finally discovered it. Of course, if we believe anything about the Bible, we know this is highly unlikely to be true, since it is God's word evealed to us, and a hidden or cryptic meaning would not be much of a revelation at all.

Finding that we cannot simply reinterpret Jesus claims so that they fit with what we wish he would have said, we move on to the second approach to making Jesus safe, and it is simply to question whether or not the text can be trusted at all. And this is the question I alluded to at the beginning of this post. This is when our sensibilities kick in: when we realize that what Jesus is actually calling us to is much more than simply believing he was a moral teacher or an all around good guy. Jesus claimed that he was God, that God required perfection, and that anything less than that resulted in death and eternal separation from God. "Death" is the equivalent of separation from ourselves; our souls are separated from our body. "Hell" is the equivalent of separation from God; our souls are separated from the life-giver. Yet Jesus also claimed that he was the solution to that separation. We could either try to fix the problem ourselves, or we could trust him to fix it on our behalf. Those are the two options that he presents. And if they are true, then it means that he is infinitely more important than perhaps we have previously assumed. But it can't be true, can it? Surely, his biographers must have gotten it wrong. Surely, these texts can't be trusted.

And that will be the next challenge that we will have to answer.

Speculating on Jesus: Why Should I Care?

In yesterday's post, I referenced a recent survey that indicated that while the vast majority of people in America believe that Jesus was a historical figure, we have vastly different opinions on what he was actually like. The good news is that, even in a post-Christian America, very few people are questioning the historicity of Jesus insofar as he was an actual person who walked the earth. This means that the challenge for the Christian has much more to do with who he was, than that he was, since the second piece is taken as a given for the vast majority of people we will come into contact with. This challenge, though, has at least three parts. The first one is why anyone should even care. Jesus being a historical figure is one thing; that he has any relevance to my life or that I should have any concern over who he was, taught, or did, is a different thing altogether.

I mentioned that, as simply a historical figure, most people have as much knowledge about–and interest in–Jesus as we do any other historical character we might name. Our functional knowledge of Jesus is about the same as our knowledge of Alexander the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte. We know their ethnicity, a rough sketch of what they did, and that's about it. As far as learning more about them, well, that's for the historians. Why should we feel any differently about Jesus?

The main reason I think we should care is because the chief difference between Jesus and most other historical figure is that Jesus is one of a handful of people in history who made universal claims. What Jesus claimed to be true wasn't just true for people in his day, but was presented as true for everyone, in all times, in all places. This is typical for other religious teachers, as well: Muhammad, Gautama Buddha, etc. Their claims transcend their historic footprint. Even here, though, Jesus is different.

The claims that Jesus makes are more than just universal truth statements; they are universal truth statements about himself. Jesus didn't just claim to have a message from God, he claimed to be God. Jesus didn't just claim to have the secret to transcending the natural order of life and death, he claimed to be the secret to transcending the natural order of life and death. Jesus didn't just claim that there was a message of "getting right with God", he claimed that he was the message of getting right with God. Jesus didn't just preach; he practiced what he preached by prophetically claiming that he was going to die and rise again, and then dying and rising again. This is why Jesus stands out. He didn't just claim that he had a new way of religious living figured out; he claimed that the was the new way of religious living, and called people to put their confidence in him rather than in their own efforts. In other words, Jesus stands out from all other historical figures because he was one of the small group of people making universal truth claims; he stands out even further from that group, because the claims he was making were about himself. His teaching was so radically different from even the teachers in the same historical category, that it should cause us to go deeper than his historical existence.

The second reason, however, has to do with the people around us everyday who have been impacted by this message. Even if all we think about Jesus is that he was a historical religious figure who taught people how to live "right", it would be difficult to deny the power of his teachings. Tens of billions of people in the last two thousand years have made it a point to attempt to live according to his teachings. Countries were built on these principles, or in defiance of these principles. The message–even if it is only a self help message–continues to inspire people to live selfless lives. I would argue that Jesus teaching were significantly more than just a self-help message, but even if they aren't, the very fact that so many people throughout history have said that his claims are the basis for their worldview ought to be enough to get us to inquire what it was that he actually said. That should be enough, I think, to at least take a cursory glance at his life and teachings and see if they have any relevance to our life today.

One final thing that may help with this first challenge, specifically for those who claim to already believe in Jesus. Do you have any desire to inquire further into his life and teachings? There are a lot of people who claim to believe in Jesus who have little to no idea what he actually said, taught, or did. They have accepted Jesus based on the historical claim that he existed, but have not actually considered what it is that they actually believe about him (or what he believed about himself.) If that's the climate of the church–where we, functionally, believe that Jesus existed but have little interest in finding out more about him–we should not be surprised when that is the climate of culture as well. Perhaps if you want the people around you to be interested in who Jesus is or what he said, the place to begin is taking a serious interest yourself!

Speculating on Who Jesus Actually Is

Jesus Christ has made a cameo in hundreds of pop culture places, from The Da Vinci Code to South Park. But, although the character of Jesus has certainly been fictionalized, satirized and mythologized over the centuries, the vast majority of Americans still maintain that he was a historical figure. More than nine out of 10 adults say Jesus Christ was a real person who actually lived (92%).

Barna Research Group, April 1, 2015. https://www.barna.org/barna-update/culture/714-what-do-americans-believe-about-jesus-5-popular-beliefs#.VSQ4Bc7maow

That Jesus was a historical figure who actually existed is a difficult fact to deny. My guess is that the reason a very small percentage claimed that he didn't exist is either because of apathy or ignorance; either they don't really care one way or the other, or they simply don't know and have just assumed that he was made up. In any case, Barna's recent survey results reveal that Jesus' existence will probably not need to be argued when you talk to your skeptic friends about Jesus.

That said, Barna's survey also revealed that people have very different ideas about what Jesus was like. Differing opinions on topics ranging from Jesus divinity to whether or not he ever "sinned" (insert your own definition of sin here) mean that even though we mostly agree that Jesus existed, we don't all agree on what he was actually like. This is fertile ground for the Christian to do some thinking: how do we know what Jesus is like? How can I be sure that what I think I know about Jesus can actually be trusted? If Jesus really existed, what type of a person was he?

The first challenge the Christian will face is moving people from the point of acknowledging Jesus existence to actually inquiry of what he was about. This is a bigger challenge than it seems. You might wonder to yourself why in the world someone wouldn't care what Jesus was really like, but insert any other historical figure into the discussion and ask yourself...do you care? How many history books have you read recently? How many historical figures have you inquired about? The truth is that most people in America know approximately the same number of facts about Jesus as they do about Napoleon or Alexander the Great. We know their nationality, a little bit about their story and what they did, and that's it. Not only do we have a very limited knowledge of who they actually are, but most of us feel no pressing need to dig any further. Why should we feel any differently about Jesus?

A second challenge the Christian will face is how we actually go about finding out more about Jesus. The easy answer is "the Bible", and more specifically, the four accounts of Jesus life, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Simple enough on the surface, but it raises a third challenge: how do we know that those accounts can be trusted? After all, we know going in that the Gospel writers were clearly biased. The writers were either one of Jesus twelve disciples themselves (Matthew, John), a close follower of Jesus and probably very close acquaintance of a disciple of Jesus (Mark with Peter), or a very close acquaintance to the famous Apostle Paul (Luke).

These three challenges become the central challenges for the Christian looking to engage the world with what they actually believe, and I think ought to be of primary importance to anyone who claims that Jesus actually exists. First, why should I care about Jesus? Second, where do I find out more about him? Third, how do I know that those accounts can be trusted?

Unless we have an answer to those questions, I think that whatever we believe about Jesus will be little more than speculation.

Entering the Fray

We are more informed than ever. We are more confused than ever. Let's call that "the fray".

My wife and I had an interesting conversation a couple of days back where she recounted what a 50-something grandmother told her about being a parent. It was one of those "back in my day" comments, but it offered a lot of insight. It had something to do with the amount of stress modern parents tend to be under while they are raising kids. It was something she hadn't experienced when she raised her own children.

It's not hard to figure out why that's the case. In days gone by, there were only a few sources of input; a few "experts" you would turn to for your parenting: Your mom. Your aunt. Your grandma. Your older sister. If you were an over-achiever you'd read a book or two. And that was it. Today, everybody and their mother thinks they are an expert on parenting, and there is no shortage of ways to be exposed to their opinion. At any given moment you have too many kids and too few, keeping them alive and killing them by the food you feed them, fostering attachment issues or loving them unconditionally, and protecting them or sheltering them. Of course it's not just parenting.

Today I spent an hour reading articles related to the recent bill passed in Indiana related to religious freedom. I expected partisan commentary as it relates to the content of the law, which may not make it any easier to figure out what to think about it, but at least I knew it was coming. What I didn't expect as much, and what was much more frustrating, was the mixed bag of supposed "experts" commenting on what Christians believe about politics and gay marriage in particular. Most of the articles–the mainstream ones, at least–were incendiary at best and downright incorrect at worst. They painted some negative portrait of the Christian perspective, only so that they could then articulate their view, the truly Christian one, the one that Jesus himself would surely have. It's no wonder we're confused. Everyone's an expert.

But then who am I? And why would I want to enter into that fray, as one more voice? Who cares anyway? And won't the only people who appreciate my input be the ones who already agree with me?

Of course, that's the nature of the "everyone's an expert" approach. Once everyone is an expert, no one is (you can say the same thing about superheros according to Syndrome from The Incredibles.) And if no one is an expert, if no one has some objective credibility or expertise on an issue other than the fact that they posted something on the internet, then in the end I'll just go with whatever opinion feels right. Most of the time, the one that tugs at my emotions the most. It's no wonder we're not willing to live in the "truth and love" tension that is Christianity. Living in that tension hurts. Period. And we don't like to hurt.

The reason I write, personally, is because I hope that there will be a renaissance of Christian thinkers who are willing to live in that tension of love and truth. Let's not treat Christian truths like we can just widdle off what we don't like; let's not also assume that we can simplify them into pre-packed tweets that can be blasted out to our followers. Let's not assume that theology doesn't impact real life and real people. Let's not assume that if truth is hard, it must not be truth at all, or must be something that's secondary to "love". Let's not assume that truth is contradictory: that if you believe marriage is between a man and a woman you must not know any gay people, or at very least you hate them if you do. Let's not assume that getting to know what God really thinks is easy, or that we can reduce it to simply how we feel at any given moment.

So I occasionally enter the fray and attempt to offer something worth thinking about. I try to treat issues like they aren't one-sided. As if there are people on the other end of the truth. And of course, as if the truth can be known.

Feel Good Faith and Thin Christianity

Most of life happens on a pendulum. I don't mean life as in the living and breathing essence of who we are, but I mean life, generally. Our worldview, our culture, and societies values.

A couple of things came up yesterday that started me thinking about this. The first was that a basketball player at a Division 1 college quit the school and will be transferring next year or as soon as possible. He was a starting player, and he quit mid-way through the season. His rationale? From what I understand (this was second hand delivered to me), the locker room was a disaster. Racism, drugs, alcohol abuse, sexuality, and on and on. Not that this kid was a prude. But at a certain point, it becomes too much.

I commented to the person telling me that this is what we can expect if we decide as a culture that value judgments can be made by the individual. What boundaries are we willing to set? Where are the lines that we draw? And then, on whose authority do we set them or draw them? It might be the institution itself (in this case, a University), it might be the government, or it might be something else, but at the end of the day someone has the authority to set the boundary points and effectively declare that this is as far as they are willing to go. As long as it is the individual, then functionally, we have declared that "no boundary marker" is the real boundary marker.

Setting it based on the authority of a human institution typically doesn't fare much better. This is precisely what causes the pendulum shifts in our culture. Most human institutions can be changed either by popular opinion, by uprising, by votes, or in many modern cases simply by the subjective opinion of appointed judges. If we don't like the boundary marker that a particular institution has set, there is typically some way to change it. And since most of us are not overly prone to moderation, our views tend to go from one extreme to the other. We go from prohibition to license in a few generations; give it a generation or two more, and we might see the pendulum swing back.

The other conversation I had related to Christianity in the first century. A friend is preaching on the book of Revelation; I am preaching on the book of Acts. A commentary on Acts that I was reading pointed out that the way to really understand Acts, or to really understand Revelation, was to read them together and see that they are talking about the same thing from different perspectives. Acts is the historical narrative; Revelation is the spiritual one. One of the descriptions is on this side of the curtain; the other describes what we cannot see, unless it's "revealed".

I shared it with my friend and he mentioned some of what he was reading in terms of the persecution of the early church and the heinous measures that the Romans would be willing to go to either in the name of sport or simply torture. It raised an important question for us to consider: how many people would still be in our churches if they knew that simply being there could get them killed? It was sobering to think about, not just for the people in the pews, but for ourselves. Would we be willing to endure brutal torture for the sake of Christ? We both believed we would, but mostly just hoped we'd never have to truly find out.

It strikes me that the Christian faith is almost always counter-cultural, and when it isn't, it suffers. I don't mean this in the way that it's typically presented, however. For example, it's easy to say that Christianity is counter-cultural when sexual promiscuity, for example, is celebrated. This is the way that we typically mean that Christianity should be counter-cultural. I'm suggesting that it should also be counter-cultural even when the values of culture appear to be in line with the values of Christianity. That is, Christianity is ultimately just as counter-cultural when it is sexual suppression that appears to be valued, as could be argued was the case in the mid-20th century, and two married people having the same bedroom was considered too risqué for TV. For one thing, sex is a gift that Christianity and the Bible celebrate. It's not embarrassing, it's good. That alone ought to have been a counter-cultural message during that time.

The real reason that the church is counter-cultural, though, is not because we agree or disagree with the values of the culture. Again, that's what we typically mean when we say we are counter-cultural, but that should be a secondary focus. Even if the values of culture appear to be in line with the values of Christianity, what remains counter-cultural is the authority by which we set our boundary markers. This is what keeps Christianity from functioning on the same pendulum cycle as the rest of culture. Our authority is unchanging; it doesn't change based on our feelings or what we think about it. Culture can appreciate our values or think that they are old-fashioned and silly, but what makes us counter-cultural is that we define our values based on God's ideals and not based on human institution or our own perceived moral compass.

It strikes me that when culture appears to agree with the church, the church is less interested in being counter-cultural, and more interested in figuring out how we can be "mainstream" with what we believe. We try to squeeze Jesus into our already relatively moral existence. Our churches begin to look like malls, our worship events look like concerts, we give away material goods to get people to enter, we give slick, well-presented "message" that showcase our public speaking ability rather than the Word of God, and we convince people that Jesus can take their mostly-good life and turn it into a really-good life. I don't want to impugn a whole generation of churches, and I am being intentionally cynical for a reason. It appears to me that the fruit that we're seeing in the Christian church in America at large begs the question: what authority does a Christian actually follow? And if that authority is an unchanging, sovereign God, then why does it appear that his opinion changes as frequently as ours?

Again, there is much good that has been done through churches that might consider themselves "seeker-sensitive" or whatever other Christian nomenclature you might want to use. I can't help but wonder, though, whether one significant downside is that as long as our worship services look like something that we produced, or come from our own minds, whether we're not just feeding into the same old story that authority is found in human institutions. And if it's found in human institutions, if the church's authority comes from the mind of the pastor or the Elders who happen to be in charge at the time, then it's no wonder that many churches will change as quick and as soon as culture. It's also no wonder that many Christians can't fathom that being a Christian might mean that you disagree with some of what culture values; they've never been taught that what makes us counter-cultural is not necessary what we do, it's who we follow.

Imagine if the church took seriously who God was, and then took seriously who we are called to be not based on our opinion or culture's opinion of us, but simply based on God's love for us. What would that look like? 

It would be a counter-cultural church that based it's authority on God, and didn't make their decisions based on what man thinks about them, but based on who God is and what he has done. That would be a revolutionary church indeed.