Guthrie on Sad People, Safe Churches

Another outstanding post from The Gospel Coalition. The interview is with Nancy Guthrie. She and her husband founded the Griefshare ministry out of their own grief. Her story is here, and well worth the read.

This struck me, I am sorry to say, when we first started our first Griefshare group last January. After a few sessions, a new member of the group surprised us by coming to our Sunday morning worship service. I was especially attentive that morning to the question, "What word of comfort and hope will she hear this morning? Will her pain be addressed?" To my surprise, and discomfort, the answer was "no". There was no acknowledgment in the entire service about the suffering of loss. No prayers that might have addressed this. No mention in the scripture reading. No hint during the sermon.

I am not sure that every worship service needs to address every human need and condition. Something I read a few months back suggested there is something quite shallow, and well, un-gospel-like to have only happy thoughts during a service of worship.

Here is Colin Hansen's interview with Nancy Guthrie. I'd love to hear what you think of it.

Why did you initially become interested in making churches a safe place for sad people?

Because I’ve been a sad person, and I know what it is to look to my church for companionship, practical help, prayer support, and theological clarity in the midst of overwhelming and perplexing sorrow. I remember attending a church choir retreat three months after burying my daughter and saying to the group, “I’m not sinking into depression. I haven’t lost my faith. I’m just sad, and I need you to let me be sad.” The truth is, most of us are uncomfortable with sadness, as individuals and as churches. We want to fix people and help them to feel better, and we are far less patient than God is with the process he uses to bring healing.

But making a church a safe place for sad people is about much more than providing personal and practical support. A social club can do that. The gospel is what provides the solid truth that grieving people need to inform their feelings and undergird their hope. For a church to be a safe place for sad people does not merely mean that we offer comfort and acceptance. Sometimes it means that we gently but boldly challenge misbeliefs or misunderstandings of Scripture.

Last week I was with a friend whose mother had died, and we were just beginning to talk about what people were telling her about her mother being right beside her, watching over her. As I was beginning to talk through what the Scriptures have to say about what happens after death, another woman who was there with us stopped me and proceeded to tell us about her experiences of seeing and hearing from her parents after their deaths, convinced that these visions were from God. People long for supernatural signs in regard to the deaths of their loved ones, and unfortunately they often endow those experiences with far more authority than they give to Scripture. A church that is a safe place for sad people will lovingly present the Scriptures as authoritative and sufficient, providing all we need to entrust our loved ones to God.

What’s the most helpful thing we can do for a fellow church member struggling through grief?

Grieving people have four primary needs that the church has a key role in addressing:

1. They have intense sadness that is lonely and lingering that needs to be respected.
2. They have significant questions that need to be addressed in light of Scripture.
3. They have broken relationships that need to be healed and normalized.
4. They have a deep desire to discover some meaning and purpose in their loss.

While we make room for people to be sad, we want to walk with people in expectation that God will indeed do a work of healing in their lives so that they do not stay stuck in their sadness, but emerge from it strengthened in their confidence in God, deepened in their understanding of the Scriptures, and equipped to serve others.

What are some common errors we make when trying to help someone going through a difficult time?

On a practical level, we say, “Just call me if I can help.” The truth is, when you’re going through a family crisis or grief, you don’t really want to have to keep asking for help or organize all of the help you need. To have someone assume the responsibility for organizing meals and other practical help is a great gift. Even better is the person figures out what is needed and simply says, “I’m coming over Wednesday morning to do your laundry.”

Sometimes we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing to someone who is hurting so we say nothing, adding to his or her hurt by ignoring it. Or we’re afraid that “bringing it up” will make the person sad, not realizing that our “bringing it up” actually allows that person to release some of the sadness they are already feeling.

On a spiritual level, I often hear Christian leaders or counselors say to the person who is grieving something like, “It’s okay to be angry with God. He can handle it.” I know they are trying to encourage authenticity before God and with other people, and that is worthwhile. But a church that is a safe place for sad people brings the truth to bear on the untruths and misunderstandings that serve as grounds for anger toward God rather than giving permission to hold on to or simply vent that anger.

Perhaps another mistake we make is assuming that people have grasped the sovereignty of God that has been preached from the pulpit. Often it is not until believers’ lives are shaken by circumstances or sorrow that they are finally ready to delve into deeper theological truths. As they are struggling to put together their understanding of a loving God with the God who allowed the accident or the illness, we have to be ready to talk through the implications of God’s sovereignty in very real terms. And usually it is not one conversation that settles this, but must be a series of conversations, giving time for these deep truths to settle in.

What is the uniqueness of a gospel-centered church in the way it ministers to people grieving a loss?

I don’t remember a lot of what my pastor said when we stood at my daughter’s graveside. But I remember him saying, “This is where we ask, ‘Is the gospel really true?’” And I remember whispering to myself in that moment, “Yes!”

While many of us are content to stay in the shallow end of the theological pool when things are going well, significant loss forces us into the deep end of the things of God, and that’s a good thing. This is where our understanding of God working out his plan to put an end to the brokenness of this world caused by sin moves from a religious discussion outside of us to become a gospel reality at work in us. We want to understand the bigger picture of God’s purposes in the world to make some sense of what has happened to us. The words we sing in worship have new meaning. Christ’s victory over death is more precious. Our future hope is more real. Gospel-rich teaching and preaching, counseling, and worship help to answer our questions and bring healing to our lives.

[SDG-JS]

Anne Rice: Loves Christ but Not the Church

Another fine post by Collin Hansen on The Gospel Coalition today on the Anne Rice story circling the blogosphere.

Using today’s news medium of choice, novelist Anne Rice announced July 28 on Facebook that she has quit being a Christian. Rice, the famed author of Interview with a Vampire, says she still loves Christ. But it’s the rest of us she can’t stand.

I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

Once a “pessimistic atheist,” Rice famously resumed confessing and celebrating Mass in the Roman Catholic Church several years ago. The world learned of her change of heart in 2005 when Knopf announced they would publish Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Rice’s novel about the 7-year-old Jesus. Researching the book, she studied N. T. Wright, Augustine, John A. T. Robinson, D. A. Carson, and Craig Blomberg, among others.

Rice’s story was never tidy, however. Her son and fellow novelist is openly gay. Doubt remained over how she would regard the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings where she plainly disagreed. This week Rice removed all doubt.

In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

Rice’s defense of “secular humanism” is particularly puzzling for someone who says she remains committed to Christ and argues for the historical validity of the Resurrection. Indeed, Rice says she continues to believe in an active, loving God.

My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.

So it seems Rice has joined the loud and growing chorus that sings, “I love Jesus, just not the church.” Yet when we read Scripture, we see that Jesus Christ loved the church. In fact, he gave himself up for her (Eph. 5:25). It’s not like Jesus loved us naively. He who was betrayed by one of his closest friends and abandoned by others during his time of greatest need surely understood human failings.

All true Christians belong together to the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:27), purchased by Jesus’ blood shed on the Cross. “There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:4-6). Nobody who belongs to a local church will say that it’s always easy to love fellow Christians who have been justified and yet continue to sin. At the same time, no Christian who knows himself believes it’s always easy for others to love him, either. And yet we’ve been called to love one another according to the example of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. A maturing disciple of Christ learns to love when it’s hard and submit to the Word’s authority when we’re tempted to disagree.

Well, we can condemn Rice's choice all we want, and bemoan her lack of maturity. It does seem to me that we can easily slip into thinking of the "ideal" church, you know the one, the one where we all agree, where we are all mature, where it is easy to love one another because we are so, um, lovable. Well, that is not the church. In the church, we are all redeemed sinners. But we are all in process towards maturity in Christ. Some are well on the way, some are barely out of the gate. To love Christ is to love those whom Christ loves.

I understand the deep disappointment Rice has with the church. But she also seems as if she has picked and chosen those things about the church she wants. We all have these issues to some degree or the other. But to follow Christ is to submit ourselves to His Lordship and discipline.

My prayers go out to Anne Rice and her family, as she wrestles with this decision. [SDG-JS]

Devaluing Dads, Discrediting the Father

Great post from Wednesday at The Gospel Coalition on the value of fathers. The secular trend is to argue that fathers are not necessary. So children raised by a single woman, or two women in a relationship, will not lose much of anything by not having a father around.

As the oldest son in a family marked by divorce, I can testify to the loss of not having a father around. Some have diagnosed this as a "father wound."

We dispense with fatherhood, a basic building block of family and society, at our peril.

So why all the momentum to undermine fathers? I wonder if our discomfort with the idea of human fatherhood is a sign of a problem deeper in our souls. Bible scholars say that God is a mysterious Trinity of three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In his sovereignty, God the Father runs the universe and has set in motion the only sure plan of redemption.

Maybe we devalue our earthly fathers because we are estranged from our heavenly one. We prefer to walk Buddhism’s Eightfold Path, obey Islam’s Five Pillars, or practice our own atheist morality than answer to a heavenly Father. We’d rather invent our own salvation than acknowledge his.

Maybe we evangelicals, who do a good job of emphasizing Jesus the Son, haven’t done as well talking about his Father and ours. It was Jesus, after all, who told us not only that the Father is holy and able to cast us into hell, but that he loves us and knows our every need even before we ask. Far from a ridiculous bumbler, this

Father combines wisdom, power, and grace.Are fathers necessary? Yes, on earth—and in heaven.

Read Guthrie’s whole column at Crosswalk.com.[SDG-JS]