Lessons from Laodicea: Missional Leadership in a Culture of Affluence

Lessons from Laodicea

Missional Leadership in a Culture of Affluence

ROSS A. LOCKHART

Foreword by Darrell L. Guder

LESSONS FROM LAODICEA

Missional Leadership in a Culture of Affluence

Copyright © 2016 Ross A. Lockhart. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Lockhart, Ross A.

Lessons from Laodicea : Missional Leadership in a Culture of Affluence / Ross A. Lockhart.

xxvi + 166 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

isbn: 978-1-4982-3903-5 (paperback) | isbn: 978-1-4982-3905-9 (hardback)| isbn: 978-1-4982-3905-9 (ebook)

1. Mission of the church—United States. 2. Mission of the church—Canada. 3. Christianity 21st century. I. Title.

BV2070 .L4 2016

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 02/11/2016

For Laura,

who reminds me daily through

marriage and ministry

that discipleship means joy.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface: 
Botox or Bypass?

Acknowledgments

Introduction: 
The Laodicean Captivity of the Church

Part I: Living in Laodicea

Chapter 1: Canaanite Idol—Gideon’s Prime Time Debut

Chapter 2: I’m Not Rich (and Other Laodicean Lies of the 1 Percent)

Chapter 3: Don’t Make Baby Jesus Cry (and Other Handy Ways to Domesticate the Gospel)

Chapter 4: Here I Am to Worship (the Unholy Trinity of Me, Myself, and I)

Chapter 5: Full of It? Beyond Bankrupting Functional Atheism

Part II: Leaving Laodicea Behind

Chapter 6: Fifty Shades of Grace—Lessons from Jonah (Call, Confusion, Confession, Conversion, Community)

Chapter 7: Q3 Minority Report Following Jesus in the Ruins of Christendom

Chapter 8: Five Mark’ S of the New Missional Community

Chapter 9: Missional Microwave Holy Spirit Lessons on Heating Up Lukewarm Leadership

Chapter 10: Hurry on Down—the Price is Right (Zacchaeus-Like Faith in the World Today)

Conclusion: Silver and Gold I Have None —The Laodicean Cure?

Bibliography

Foreword

The missional theological discussion, as it has unfolded in the last years, has evidenced significant areas of consensus together with a great diversity of complementary and conflicting responses. There is, for example, a general consensus that Christendom, at least the Western Latin-based strand of it, is over or is ending. This is generally regarded as an opportunity to engage the church’s ancient apostolic mission anew, and to do so by confronting the problematic compromises and reductionisms that have accompanied the linkage of church and state.

That text entails reading our Christendom legacy dialectically, recognizing in the centuries of Western Christendom many evidences of God’s faithfulness interacting with human rebellion and compromise. Simplistic dismissals of the cultural and theological legacy of Western Christendom are not an option. Nor is the commitment to read and interpret this history with critical openness and to name the cultural captivities honestly and bravely an option. Our vocation requires such risk-taking honesty, especially today.

Supporting and guiding this confrontation of Christendom’s captivities is the reclamation of a distinctive understanding of the authority of Scripture for the church. Missional hermeneutics is emerging as the disciplined engagement of the biblical text as the Spirit empowered instrument for the continuing formation of faithfully witnessing communities. Such interpretive strategies investigate how the text continued the apostolic formation of such communities then, and how it does so today. Missional hermeneutics thus takes seriously the fundamental missional vocation of every gathered community to continue the witness to Christ in a particular context.

The seven letters that open the Revelation of St. John are intriguing examples of such ongoing biblical formation of these distinctive Christian communities in Asia Minor. They reveal how intimately the Lord of the church knows these congregations of witnesses. Coupled with that intimate knowledge is the clarity of the commission he has given each one to serve him as his witnesses. They are carrying out that commission in diverse ways, reflecting obedience, struggle, confidence, and profound problems. There is a prophetic sense in which the situations of these seven churches anticipate challenges that the Christian movement will face throughout its history. We study them with gain as they guide us to recognize in our own corporate lives as witnessing congregations where and why our Lord affirms, comforts, accuses, and judges us. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, these texts can profoundly shape us today so that we can walk worthy of the calling with which we have been called (Eph 4:1).

Ross Lockhart finds in the letter to Laodicea a serious missional crisis in this first-century community that merits close attention on the part of contemporary communities emerging from Christendom, especially in North America. The crisis is exposed in the claim of that community, cited by its Lord: For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing (Rev 3:17). Their affluence, and their reliance upon it, make them subject to profound judgment: . . .you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked (ibid.). The threat is that the Lord will spew them out of [his] mouth (Rev 3:16). Lockhart suggests that the unfaithfulness of the spiritually threatened Laodicean church is not only a problem then but a prophetic pointer toward a crisis that threatens Christianity today, especially in the cultures shaped by the Constantinian establishment. The impact of that legal and cultural establishment upon the apostolic churches from the fourth century onward was that they became affluent, owners of property and managers of wealth.

The New Testament communities founded by the apostolic missionaries were marginal, vulnerable, insecure, and unprotected communities. They were subject to persecution. Part of their formation as disciples becoming apostles was our Lord’s emphasis upon the suffering that would often result from their witness. They were to take up their cross and follow Jesus. There is in the New Testament no trace of any expectation that Jesus’ mission would ultimately lead to political status and cultural clout. There is no mention of a building defined as a church in the Bible. When establishment comes, a different kind of persecution begins to shape the church: the temptations of power, property, privilege, and protection. The letters in the Revelation of St. John, together with the synoptic accounts of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, are astonishingly relevant examples of missional formation for the Constantinian church and its heirs.

It is that relevance which Lockhart explores in this book. He focuses upon the responsibility of the church’s leadership today to equip congregations to recognize their captivity to affluence and the threat to their faithful witness which that captivity engenders. The default mode of Western Christendom is institutional maintenance, which relies upon land, real estate, endowments concrete treasures where our hearts are also. That reliance upon affluence reflects, as Lockhart documents, our culture’s idolization of affluence. It is not only a problem out there in the unchurched world. It is a reality that shapes virtually every dimension of the church’s life, faith, and action. Thus, to encounter the gospel is to be confronted with a conversion from bondage to affluence to liberated service of God’s kingdom. Both the biblical witness and a sober reading of our context of affluence require that the church come to Jesus anew in order to be equipped for our witness. The author’s program spells out what it means for the late and post-Christendom church today to not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect (Rom 12:2).

Darrell L. Guder

Princeton, New Jersey

Preface: 
Botox or Bypass?

Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people?

—Jeremiah 8: 22

Botox Defense Adds a New Wrinkle to the Legal Lexicon. The attention-getting headline from a local newspaper, went on to offer more juicy details of a fifty-one-year-old woman’s legal defense while representing herself during a trial on a charge of refusing to give a breath sample at the roadside. ¹ Apparently, the driver was pulled over by the local police shortly after midnight, driving half the posted speed limit and weaving dangerously on the highway. She was given four chances to blow into a Breathalyzer, failing to register a sample each and every time.

Her defense? The driver argued in court that she couldn’t purse her lips properly around the Breathalyzer because of Botox injections she received a week earlier while on holidays in Mexico. The driver did admit to drinking alcohol the night of her arrest, but did not comment on how many drinks she consumed. It would be just as interesting to know how she could sip a glass of wine without spilling it down the front of herself after that Botox treatment! Surprisingly, the judge dismissed all charges after being presented with a letter from Dr. Botox in Mexico confirming the recent treatments. Lawyer friends of mine tell me it’s now being referred to with amusement and bewilderment simply as the Botox defense.

Not long after reading this story I found myself in the doctor’s office for my annual check up. I noticed a large, new sign in the waiting room that read, Effective January 1st, our clinic is pleased to offer patients regular Botox treatments for a set fee. Really? I teased my doctor, is that what healthcare has come to—injections for big puffy lips? My doctor smiled and said, Hey, some people think they need that stuff. You know, nip and tuck—a little fix here, a little help there. Maybe it’s the same in your business, Reverend, he said with a warm smile and a wink. Ouch.

That got me thinking. Is that how people view faith and spirituality today? A little nip and tuck on their moral character; a wee enhancement of their soul; a weekly boost or injection of faith in order to see them through the days ahead?

I love my adopted home in the Pacific Northwest. Cascadia, the region that includes Oregon, Washington state, and British Columbia, is a unique, beautiful, and soulful part of God’s creation.² As I said to a congregation not long after arriving on the West Coast, Some of you were born here, and the rest of us got here as fast as we could. And it’s true. Heaven is a local call in the land of lattes and Lululemon. But I often wonder, after serving congregations across Canada and global church service from Africa to Northern Ireland, why do people here appear to be so resistant to active involvement in a worshipping community? I’ve never lived in a place like Cascadia before. You know, where everyone is comfortable with spirituality, but freezes up, and run the other way with yoga mats, if you try and place that spirituality within a particular religious tradition. Spirit—yes. God—uh oh. Jesus—whoa.

In no way do I want to diminish or scoff at Cascadians’ spirituality. It’s a great starting place. I have a deep affection for the doctrine of prevenient grace—the notion that before we know or love God, God knows and loves us. God as covenant maker and covenant keeper—that’s important. So, evangelistic conversations are different here in Cascadia. People will discuss spiritual things, but often clam up when you try and locate that spirituality within a specific tradition. If one stays in that place too long, of course, the danger is that spirituality just becomes a nice, but not necessary, addition to an already perfect life. Cascadian spirituality, left on its own, may not move people to a state of justification, instead allowing them to use the Botox defense against the possibility of a relationship with the living God revealed in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Or, as Darrell Guder so aptly names the danger, an imaginary, non-incarnational, docetic spirituality.³ Our story as Christians—or perhaps more humbly, people who are trying to figure out what it means to follow Jesus—is not a story of Botox, but bypass.

I had a visit this past spring with a church friend who spent the weekend in hospital with chest pains. I descended the staircase at our local hospital to the emergency ward and checked in with the harried nurse. I followed the wave of her dismissive hand to the cardiac assessment unit, and there was the man resting uneasily on a narrow bed, complete with shiny railings and plastic sheets. We talked about his situation and the tests that were being run. It looked like surgery was the next step. There’s no simple fix . . . my doctor told me, the man said, looking rather grim. This is going to require an intervention that may either give life or take it away. Now the stakes were higher. I could see it in his eyes. Would you pray with me? he asked quietly, his voice breaking with emotion.

I saw that look again later in the same week when people came forward in the chapel on Ash Wednesday. A hearty number of pilgrims, seeking their own balm in Gilead, filled the wee space as rain danced from the outside on stained glassed images of prophets Micah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. As I scanned the congregation, I knew some of their stories and needs but was glad on that day that God knew the full story. As they made their way forward down the aisle, the texts of the day were still ringing in their heads and echoing in their hearts:

Even now, declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Last year’s palm branches dissolved into a black and smelly heap of ashes. I leaned forward and accepted the Word of God’s judgment on this death-denying culture. The woman gently marked my forehead with the sign of the cross and whispered something between a fact and a promise: Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.

I returned to my wooden pew and sat waiting in anticipation. Waiting . . . as I did in my own doctor’s office for that annual check up. Waiting . . . as I did with the church member trying to get a handle on the doctor’s diagnosis. Waiting . . . as a child of God, a recovering sinner, a follower of the One whose cross is before but whose yoke is easy and burden is light. Waiting . . . knowing that the life of faith worth living is not about easy or quick fixes. Waiting . . . with a keen awareness that there is no Botox Christianity worth seeking nor serving in Cascadia or anywhere else. Waiting . . . on the One who the tradition calls The Great Physician who alone can bypass my sin and at last, Create in me a clean heart, O God.

Acknowledgments

The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.

—John 1: 14, The Message.

This book first began to take shape as I strolled through the Goreme Open-Air Museum in the Cappadocia region of eastern Turkey. It was my second visit to that beautiful land and as I toured the empty cave churches, with their stunning frescos of the Christian faith painted boldly on the walls, I could not help but reflect on home and wonder about the future of the North American church navigating through the ruins of Christendom. There I was standing in a once-vibrant Christian community now turned into a cold and somber art museum. I could almost hear the whispered witness of those who once lived, prayed, laughed, ate, and loved one another as Jesus commanded them. The gaunt and fading frescos of Christ on the walls of those ancient cave churches felt like a warning to me. The sovereign God we know in Jesus Christ builds and dismantles the church visible according to the Spirit’s mission in the world. I wondered how we might, in a North American culture of affluence, remain faithful to the risen Christ who is on the loose in our neighborhoods wherever we live, work, and play. I wondered what it might mean to be the sent people of God, living and sharing the gospel in this twenty-first-century individualistic, secular, and consumerist North American culture.

My return to Canada and subsequent writing has been full of treasured conversations and prayerful reflection. I am indebted to the academic institutions where I am privileged to teach: St. Andrew’s Hall, The Vancouver School of Theology, and St. Mark’s College at The University of British Columbia. I am equally grateful for my weekly guest preaching in local churches across the country where faithful disciples teach me what God is up to in their neighborhoods. I am thankful for the opportunity to test out and receive feedback on early drafts of this work through speaking invitations at the Cruxifusion conference, St. Mark’s College Lenten Lecture Series, the Presbyterian Synod of Saskatchewan, and the Epiphany Explorations conference. I am especially beholden to friends and colleagues who read drafts of this book and improved it greatly by their suggestions and encouragement, including Richard Topping, Jason Byassee, Will Willimon, Robert Fennell, Ed Bentley, and Darrell Guder. To Darrell in particular, I owe a deep and sincere thank you for writing such a thoughtful Foreword to this work.

I also wish to express my heartfelt thanks to the good folks at Cascade Books for their support and encouragement throughout the publishing process. A special word of thanks to my editor Rodney Clapp and his commitment to making this work a more faithful witness to the gospel.

Finally, it has been said that behind every successful person there stands a surprised spouse. What most pastors/professors will tell you, however, is that behind every faithful person stands an even more prayerful spouse. From coast to coast, and around the world, it has been a tremendous blessing to share life and ministry with my wife Laura. Together, we give God thanks for kingdom work, including the stewardship of raising Emily, Jack, and Sadie. To Laura be the thanks and to God be the glory!

Ross A. Lockhart,

St. Andrew’s Hall, Vancouver.

Introduction: 
The Laodicean Captivity of the Church

What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?

—Mark 8: 36

Pick up your cross and follow me, a friend winked, cheerfully teasing our group of pilgrims bubbling away in the warmth of the hot springs of Pamukkale. The delightful resort town in western Turkey has welcomed visitors down through the ages seeking its restorative properties. In fact, Pamukkale once went by another name—Hierapolis. Hierapolis was famous during Greco-Roman times as a commercial city and military colony in the Lycus Valley. Its distinctive white castle postcard look and warm-water baths gave it a resort feeling long before discount websites offered weekend spa getaways. Our group was on a pilgrimage in the footsteps of Paul and as the pilgrimage leader, I made the decision to detour for a few days to explore the Seven Churches of the Revelation.

As we relaxed in the warm water, we were only about ten kilometers (six miles) north of Laodicea. Unlike touristy Pamukkale, Laodicea today sits mostly abandoned under layers of dirt. From the motor coach, if you blink you will miss it. In the days of the early church, however, Laodicea was the most important city in the Lycus River Valley, nestled between Hierapolis and Colossae and quite a distance east of Ephesus. Laodicea was on a major thoroughfare making it a banking, finance, and textile center as well as a decent spot to catch the gladiator games. It was on the right side of the tracks and its posh inhabitants liked to show off their wealth. When an earthquake destroyed the city in 60 AD, the locals turned down government money and simply paid for the rebuilding of the city out of their own pockets. Excavations have revealed such luxuries in Laodicea as a gymnasium, two theatres, a stadium, and a sophisticated water system. The Beverly Hills of the Roman province of Asia, Laodicea is mentioned in Paul’s letters, for example Colossians 4:13–16, but is perhaps best known in John’s writing as the lukewarm church:

And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the origin of God’s creation: "I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that