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Of the seven spiritual gifts listed in Romans 12, the last — and I believe the most powerful but least appreciated and most abused — is mercy.
As I watch and sense what God is doing with an emerging new spiritual generation, I see that their dominant characteristic is mercy. I also have begun to realize that God wants to use “mercies” (those with the primary spiritual gift of mercy) as catalysts to unleash additional gifts in others. That, in turn, will bring this rising generation to new pastures where God’s presence can dwell among us.
This doesn’t mean everyone in this new spiritual generation has mercy as their dominant individual spiritual gift. But as a whole, they nonetheless seem to collectively exhibit the main motivations of mercy — which are a deep, personal craving for the presence of God and for genuine intimacy with others.
As a result, this rising generation has little interest or patience with the moral and cultural wars of my generation, or with our prevailing hypocrisy as we tried to fix everyone else but failed to exhibit God’s presence in our own lives. Nor can they understand the isolation, loneliness and lack of authentic community among older Christians.
It’s a beautiful Sunday morning here in Virginia, but I’m stuck with a lingering cold and sore throat. That gives me a good excuse to skip church and my ministry commitments later this afternoon in the local jail.
So what to do? I just let my ADD dog out and he’s happily occupied digging a new hole in my otherwise nice green yard, there’s some good coffee brewing (I’m partial to Gold Coast from Starbucks – two level scoops per 14 oz.), the light of a crisp blue March sky is streaming through my sun room windows, my favorite worship music is playing in the background on my iPod, and I’m relaxing in my over-sized Lazy Boy recliner thinking on the things of God.
I guess that makes this as good a time as any to bang out some thoughts on effective New Testament leadership.
We don’t need to frustrate generational “emergents” into joining churches with borderline heretical “emergent” theology. Rather, our existing churches need to let them emerge into ministry and leadership, embrace their energy and life, allow them to shake things up while mentoring them in what remains standing, burst our old rigid wine skins, and then forge common vision together within a comprehensive community of faith.
The biggest obstacle to this: The lethargy of my generation. Too many of us — including our leaders — have settled into the easy familiarity of complacency, hurts and disappointments, plus we’re tired. We’ve paid a high price for what we’ve learned and built over the years, and now lack the energy to reproduce what’s good — while discerning what’s not — from our own journeys. We’ve become old farts, set in our ways. As a result, we’ve turned our churches into cocoons. Unfortunately, however, they’re not cocoons for metamorphosis into new life, but rather cocoons to shelter us from life and change.
• By drifting into self-absorbed, post-modern subjectivity and relativism, the American Church is ignoring the liberating power of transcendent and objective truth, goodness and beauty for all of life and culture.
• By neglecting the historic doctrines of the faith to pursue “relevance” and the latest emergent fads of the day, the American Church is proclaiming a disjointed and shallow “gospel” that lacks answers to the great issues of our age.
• By promoting a narcissistic “me”-focused faith, the American Church is forgetting that God wants us to know him not merely as savior, but also as sovereign creator, lawgiver, judge and provider.
• By wanting grace without truth, the American Church is no longer serving as salt and light to our neighbors, cultures and nations.
• By falling prey to Gnostic dualism, the American Church is failing to equip believers to live out God’s precepts and authority in all spheres of human endeavor — including the “secular” and “material” world of our day-to-day existence — as it instead offers up Sunday sermon after Sunday sermon that focus, ad nauseum, on only so-called “spiritual” matters.
• By ignoring Biblical injunctions to renew our minds so we can be faithful stewards over all aspects of God’s creation, the American Church is trapped in intellectual lethargy.
• By embracing recent eschatologies of retreat, defeat and escape, the American Church is sitting on the sidelines as God’s triumph over evil continues its progressive march through history.
Even so heavenly Father, we honor your name. May your Kingdom continue to come through your will being done on earth, just as it is in heaven …
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