Are you happy?

I was reading an article online that I thought people would be interested in. Pew Research Center did a study on happiness and came up with some interesting results: http://pewresearch.org/social/pack.php?PackID=1

One of the gigantic assumptions of this survey, however, is that people know what happiness is - that I would debate more than any one point of this survey. Either way, pretty interesting stuff for your enjoyment...

Three Images for Evangelism (the carpenter)

So after weeks of non-posting-ness I am back (!) to talk about the third image for evangelism. Frankly, I don't know what everyone has done in meantime without something to read on my blog. Anyways, sorry it took so darn long...

So while the first two images (the fisherman and the farmer) really focused on the task of evangelism prior to a person deciding to follow Christ, the third image (the carpenter) has more to do with what happens afterwards.

The carpenter is a critical image for the modern church to catch hold of since what it conotates is so severly lacking in most churchs' philosophy of evangelism. My dad (among other people I know) is a carpenter which makes me the son of a carpenter in several senses. What I admire about them is that they are truly craftsmen and care about their work. They take pride in what they are making. They are artists in every sense of the term, really putting a part of themselves into what they are constructing. Carpenters also see their "projects" (I'll come back to that) to the end. No carpenter worth his (or her) toolbelt would ever think of leaving a project half finished. Think of a table with three legs or a door with only one hinge on it. Carpenters know that if you don't care about your work you will, invariably, produce crap.

When we come to evangelism, the vast majority of churches have misinterpreted Jesus' call to go tell the world about Him. We have focused on conversions to the exclusion of discipleship. In other words, we'll move Heaven and Earth to get someone to pray the "sinner's prayer" but then, content with the notion that they're not going to hell, we leave them to figure out life as a Christian on their own. Denominations measure their success by how many "decisions for Christ" their churches acculmated over the past year. Most churches I have come in contact with run evangelism classes fairly regularly, but ask them about whether they have any classes on discipleship and they might look at you funny.

The point is that after helped someone come to the point where they are ready to follow Christ, why would we short-circuit that by basically "orphaning" them as baby Christians? New Christians don't magically become mature Christians. God doesn't just zap them and suddenly they are reading their Bible everyday in the original Greek and Hebrew. Just like the carpenter, we have to see our work through to its finish. The goal - a fully mature Christian that can then go out and help others follow Christ. Let me say that again in case someone missed it - our goal is help people become fully mature Christians that can then in turn help others beceome fully mature Christians. The church has largely missed this point for over a thousand years. If you were fully committed to helping someone start following Christ, be just as committed in helping learn how to do so for a lifetime!

I want to end with one final point I touched on earlier. In my analogy of the carpenter, I purposely used the word "project" to bring up a crucial issue that Christians need to understand. People that don't follow Christ are not "projects" for us to convert, they are people for us to love. It is not our mandate to see how many people we can shove into some "convert-o-matic" process that churns out decisions for Christ that really don't mean anything. I have actually heard Christians say, "I don't actually care if I know anything about their life, I just want them to 'pray the prayer'." It is this kind of cold-hearted mass produced evangelism that has largely been the church's undoing for at least the last 50 years.

If evangelism is motivated by love, we will see that the fisherman, the farmer, and the carpenter will naturally characterize our demonstration of the "Good News" to the world. And if entire churches began to adopt such a "strategy of love" we would surely hear people say as they did in Jesus' time, "look how the whole world has gone after Him!"