The Church is Flying Upside Down
“The whole world is watching!”
The chant rose up as a tampered-with jury and a geriatric judge born just thirty years after the Civil War presided over the trial of the “Chicago 7” — a band of organizers and protestors who were in the dock for their involvement in the violence outside the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1968.
The crowd’s chant strikes a chord with me. The decisions you and I make about what we listen to, what we read, and how we respond to those things have inescapable consequences that can change the course of history one one-hundredth of a degree at a time. After a while that becomes a significant shift. I often buy the lie that my everyday life is insignificant in the larger scheme of things. However, the truth I’ve come to experience in Christ is that my actions bear much more weight than I realized before. The whole world is watching you and I as we call ourselves “Jesus people” and act on his behalf. As the globe spins faster, Christianity as you and I know it is on trial in front of the whole world whether we like it or not.
The function of discernment as a biblical value is to keep one following the footsteps of Christ. It is my strong conviction that our community can pioneer an ancient-but-new, healthy approach to discernment as an example to the corners of the body of Christ we influence. It does not serve to keep us in bounds of any particular sect of the church. I don’t write to you in order to be sure our behavior remains in line with the philosophy of ministry of the Vineyard. Discernment serves a greater purpose — to ensure that we remain followers of The Way, adherents to the beauty of Christ and the will of his Father. As we seek wisdom by the Holy Spirit, the by-product is a closer followership of that Way. A lifestyle and an ethic emerge that truly sanctifies our whole person; heart, mind, soul, and strength, to love God and to love neighbor (enemy) as self. Consider Proverbs 22:5;
“Thorns and snares are in the way of the crooked; whoever guards his soul will keep far from them.”
Proverbs 22:5 ESV
The word “crooked” in this case means one living under the false pretense of piety. Let’s be clear — the one who thinks themselves to be the standard bearer of rightness is the crooked one. Thorns and snares are in their way. Guarding your soul is akin to “getting wisdom” and “insight” according to Proverbs 4. Quite a few Christians are caught in the act of going the way of the crooked. Folks are taking advice from prophets and teachers who are misguided in their own judgement. At the Vineyard, we’re not in the practice of listing them by name, but what I will say is this; as I have adopted the practice of carefully seeking wisdom before engaging with teaching, writing, prophecy, sermons, podcasts, books, etcetera — I have found a great many teachings which used to tickle my ears now cause me to cringe.
In American Christianity, consumerism has met Christendom in a dangerous concoction of devil may care, overzealous ‘content creation’ and a desire to enforce the kingdom of Heaven rather than embody it — charismatic evangelicals certainly not exempt. I mean to say, it is impossible to engage in the true kind of discernment while clicking and scrolling from one 30 second clip to another on Facebook and YouTube, slave to the algorithm proven to push people deeper and deeper into sensationalism. You may never have thought of it this way, but all that clicking and scrolling is a spiritual practice — although, not a healthy one, and not one becoming of Jesus people. Is it a daily practice of yours? Are you being formed more by Facebook, or St. Francis? The Psalms and Proverbs, or Parler?
Discernment requires an open mind. A mind that is not so wide open that nothing ever sticks or that everything passes right through, but a mind that is just so open, God can surprise you with what, who, and how he wants you to hear. That takes vigilance. It is not a destination we arrive at, but a journey that will last our entire lives.
The opening chapter of one of my favorite books, “The Divine Conspiracy” by Dallas Willard, begins with a parable of a jet pilot. The pilot, while practicing high speed maneuvers in the dark, turned the controls for what she believed to be a steep ascent and flew the plane straight into the ground, destroying the plane and killing her. She was unaware that she’d been flying upside down. Willard writes,
“This is a parable of human existence in our own times [...] most of us as individuals and world society as a whole, live at high-speed and often with no clue to whether we are flying upside down or right side up.”
Over the next several weeks I want to write about something I believe is evidently most lacking in the American church today: discernment. Simply put, the church is flying upside down and dangerously close to flying the jet straight into the ground. It would be arrogant for you and I to assume we’re exempt from this phenomenon, so we must be on our guard. For that reason, I’ll be writing about discernment as a value, a guiding philosophy, and a spiritual gift. It’s up to people like you and I — normal people — to commit ourselves to the Proverbs 4 way. Discernment is what it means to get wisdom and insight. They are our “crown” and our “graceful garland”.
Throughout this series of essays I will address wisdom, understanding, and discernment interchangeably, as a great many of the passages from scripture I’ve examined seem to view them as essentially one in the same. Getting God’s wisdom is a quest we’ll never complete. At the same time it’s critical we relentlessly pursue it.
I’m challenging myself to slow down in light of what’s going on around me. I’m striving to slow down my news intake, my categorical trust of whatever preacher might grace my social media feed, my urge to react, my yearning to complain. I want to challenge you to consider the same over the course of the coming weeks. Lent is around the corner — a great opportunity to look inward. Going after insight has been one of the most defining and revealing experiences for me and I pray it always will be. I hope you find it beginning to enrich your life even more than it already has so far as we take time together for careful consideration and slowing down.