Thinking Outside the Box

In November of 2000, Richard Foster wrote in his newsletter that the mega-churches “have within them the seeds of perpetual superficiality.  The mega-church by its very nature must gravitate toward an ​“entertainment religion” which turns worship into a constant effort to keep people occupied and happy.”  When I was a pastor, the denominational leadership was enamored with the mega-church approach, and the big push from my bishop’s office was a challenge for pastors to “think outside the box.” 

But thinking and superficiality don’t go well together.  In an email discussion with other pastors, I raised a question about discipleship and about whether people being brought in by church growth strategies were indeed becoming disciples, and the reaction from other pastors was hostile.  They were simply not open to asking this question; of course they were making disciples; they were bringing people into the kingdom.  Who would ever even doubt this? Then, later, a friend of mine asked our bishop if there was room in the denomination for thinkers, and his response was “no.”  He wanted pastors who were bringing about measurable numerical growth and thinkers, I suspect, might get in the way of that.

So what did he mean by thinking outside the box?  He wanted pastors to think about more effective ways to bring more people into the church: things like using power point or inserting video clips in sermons.  The field for thinking acceptably outside the box was limited to strategies for “growing the church,” and did not extend to anything else.

But at the same time, they did try to market themselves as people who were using their minds.  That was clear in the advertisements from one of the new church plants in describing their pastor.  They wanted him to appear as someone engaged in thinking creatively, as someone using his mind.  But it was an empty claim.

As things have turned out, there seems to be some doubt about what churches like Willow Creek (which was the model for many of our pastors) were actually accomplishing.  People were coming in the front door while others were going out the back.  They were not successful in making disciples; they were just contributing to measurable numerical growth.  What these people coming in the front door were being “won” to is another question altogether.  Not being open to rethinking and reevaluating was a harmful thing; a church needs to have room for thinkers, people who will truly think outside the box, maybe in ways the leadership will not like but which could prevent longer-term problems. 

The Oddest Inkling

A few months ago, the reading group I belong to discussed a Charles Williams novel. Williams was a member of the Inklings and a close friend of CS Lewis. I first started reading him after reading an interview with JI Packer, who recommended him highly as someone with a strong awareness of the supernatural world.

In the introduction to The Descent of the Dove, a history of the Holy Spirit in the Church, WH Auden writes: “In his company one felt twice as intelligent and infinitely nicer than, out of it, one knew oneself to be. It wasn’t simply that he was a sympathetic listener — he talked a lot and he talked well — but, more than anyone else I have ever known, he gave himself completely to the company that he was in.”

TS Eliot, similarly, wrote an introduction to All Hallows’ Eve (one of Williams’ more unsettling books): “Some men are less than their works, some are more. Charles Williams cannot be placed in either class. To have known the man would have been enough; to know his books is enough; but no one who has known both the man and his works would have willingly foregone either experience. I can think of no other writer who was more wholly the same man in his life and in his writings.”

And yet, he didn’t impress everyone in a positive way. He and CS Lewis were close friends, but JRR Tolkien disliked his books, and Lewis’ enthusiasm about Williams put a strain on his friendship with Tolkien (who blamed That Hideous Strength, the third volume in the space trilogy, on Williams’ influence). Alan Jacobs, in The Narnian, suggests that anyone reading his biography will tend to find him “somewhat creepy.” And he finds Williams’ novels “deeply disturbing.” Since I haven’t yet read his biography, I can’t comment on what Jacobs says about it, but I can see why he finds the novels, especially All Hallows’ Eve, disturbing. But still, CS Lewis, WH Auden and TS Eliot believed they, in some sense, became better people through his personal influence.

JI Packer, the one who first interested me in Williams, says, “With a powerful imagination fed by Trinitarian and incarnational faith, Charles Williams used fiction to explore how people react when the supernatural enters their lives, and how then to find the path of peace. The fantasy novels that resulted make a riveting read.” And TS Eliot makes a similar observation: “For him there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world.... To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural.” That’s the thing that keeps bringing me back to his books, this intense awareness of the supernatural in our lives.

Discipled Through Books

John Denver says this in one of his songs:

   “I guess growing isn't hard to do

    Just stand against the wall

    Once I was just two feet high

    Today I'm six feet tall”

“Growing isn’t hard to do,” because physical growth just happens over time. We don’t have to think about it or do anything to bring it about. But spiritual growth is completely different and requires an intentional effort. I really struggled with this as a new Christian. I hadn’t grown up in the church, so the idea of spiritual growth was new to I me. And, to complicate things further, almost immediately after becoming a Christian I entered the US Navy.

Boot camp was a struggle for me as a new believer, because not only did I have no understanding of how to grow, I had no resources to make use of apart from the weekly worship services, which turned out to be very helpful (although the drill instructors reminded us as we left to attend church, “your soul may belong to Jesus, but don’t forget that your ass belongs to Uncle Sam”).

After boot camp I started damage control school at Treasure Island in San Francisco. Since I had become a Christian partly under the influence of the book Run, Baby, Run, by Nicky Cruz, I looked up the address of Teen Challenge in San Francisco and took a bus out there for a visit, arriving unannounced one evening.

I don’t know what I was hoping to find there. The people I met at Teen Challenge seemed to be generally discouraged themselves, and they certainly didn’t have much of anything to offer me, although one of the guys warmly reminded me that Jesus is our hope and that I needed to find strength in Him. The problem was that I didn’t know how to go about doing this.

After damage control school I was being sent to shipfitting school in San Diego, but during my time at Treasure Island I often traveled home to attend the Christian Life Center in Santa Rosa. One Sunday a guy named Frank Hernandez told me that he and his associates, a group called Agape Force, were also going to be in San Diego, so I went looking for him shortly after arriving there.

What I had been looking for, both from Teen Challenge and from Frank Hernandez (who I was never able to find) was fellowship with older, more mature believers. And what I ended up doing was finding this, for the most part, in reading Christian books. This has been the driving force behind my reading in all the years since that time. I recently read this quote from George Verwer (who has been a major influence in my life): “I came to Jesus because of a praying woman, a gospel of John, and Billy Graham. I was discipled largely through life-changing books.”

I did later encounter other believers — George Verwer, for example — who were a great encouragement and help to me, but Christian books became, and continue to be, a mainstay in my Christian growth.