Daily Fragment: Jesus Doesn’t Want Leaders – He Wants First-Followers

April 17, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

With all the talk in Christian circles about the calling and forming of leaders, you might think that “leadership” was a major theme of Jesus’ teachings.  It wasn’t.  Jesus never calls for leaders.  He calls for followers.  Consider this video from Derek Sivers, which he presented at TED:

From the transcript: “Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire…New followers emulate followers, not the leader.  Leadership is over-glorified.  Yes, it started with the shirtless guy, and he’ll get all the credit.  But you saw what really happened[:] There’s no movement without the first follower…The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow, and show others how to follow.”

Reflection:

Christ alone is the head of the church.  In the Old Testament, the leaders of the people of God are all flawed, most are destructive, and many are outright wicked.  In the New Testament, there are worldly authorities, but no kingdom leaders apart from Christ.  There are only first-followers — people like Paul, who said “follow me as I follow Christ” (1 Cor 11:1).  Let’s be honest.  The concept of leadership appeals to our pride and egotism, and the concept of “servant-leadership” appeals to our worldly pride (we are “leaders”) and to our spiritual pride (look at what Christian leaders we are, how willing to humble our great selves even though we are leaders!).  Pride is insidious, and it will finds its way into anything; but I like the concept of the first follower.  (1) It takes true courage and humility to be a first-follower, for you will be thought a fool.  (2) First-followers show others how to follow Christ; they re-present Christ, making him visible to others, showing what it looks like to strive to follow Christ in this context, and showing that such striving is possible.  (3) The true leader gets the glory, and the first-follower celebrates the leader instead of himself.  (4) What Sivers describes as the “tipping point” is arguably where the church goes astray, where following becomes the “in” thing to do.  But we “follow” Christ when we live the life of genuine striving and sacrifice and suffering to which he calls us; when we succeed at that, following Christ will never be attractive to worldly values; when we fail, the church becomes indistinguishable from the world.  As long as we have followers and not leaders, the church will remain the church.

 

Filed Under: Daily Fragment

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

April 16, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

Changes are afoot at Patheos.com — at the Evangelical Portal — and at Philosophical Fragments.  In brief:

Patheos has unleashed its new design – check it out.  Better image and video capacity, a more intuitive architecture, more advanced tools that will keep you abreast of other content at the site.  Some of the most interesting developments are still to come.  Visit the homepage, visit the Library, the Faith and Family space, Patheos Press, and the Book Club.  Let me know what you think.  The greatest sources of traffic at Patheos are the blogs, but until now the blogs have not been promoted on the site as well as they should be.  Sometimes changes takes some getting used to, but I think you’ll enjoy the changes.

The Evangelical Portal is going through a re-envisioning process.  I want to rebrand it (the “Evangelical Portal” has never been an inspiring identity), reposition it (many of our most prominent bloggers are left-of-center, and I’d like to have more content representing the vast middle of American evangelicalism, which is center-right), and relaunch it with an expanded (yet more focused) set of writers.  There will be much more to say about this in the weeks and months to come, but I’m presently reaching out to potential sponsors, partners and investors who could get behind the vision of developing a better forum for, and representation of, the evangelical mind.  American Catholics have developed an excellent tradition of thoughtful, critical, creative Catholic reflection (think Neuhaus) on matters of society and politics.  Evangelicals by and large have not.  The aspiration for the new Evangelical Portal (in its new, rebranded form) will be to form a kind of Op Ed page for evangelical America, an instrument to cultivate a better conversation amongst evangelicals on issues of society, public policy, science and the like.

Philosophical Fragments has a rather different look, and I’ll need to make some adjustments (getting rid of the awful font in the header, for instance) before I’ll be happy with the look.  But…let me be honest.  I’ve had a tough time with this blog.  Some of the things I’ve written here have done very well, the readership for this blog is disproportionately influential, and I’ve really enjoyed my interactions with readers.  All of these are reasons to keep going.  But I’m rarely able to write consistently.  Unlike some others at Patheos (including my good friend Elizabeth Scalia, who is the managing editor of the Evangelical Portal and a fantastic blogger at “The Anchoress”), I do not blog as a part of my job.  I blog when I have free time, and that free time has become increasingly scarce over the past year.

I’ve become convinced in recent weeks, however, that this can be a helpful, clarifying limitation.  The intention for this blog was originally to write more “fragmentary” pieces — one-paragraph pieces that offer different angles, creative thoughts, helpful distinctions for the ways in which we understand faith, culture and public policy.  So what you’ll see at Philosophical Fragments, beginning tomorrow, is a Daily Fragment (a brief thought, never more than a single paragraph, which can never be more than ten or twelve lines, TBD), a Daily Link (which may sometimes have some framing text, but no more than five sentences), and a weekly column that can be up to 1200 words (I’ll choose a day and title).  After I’ve published some content along these lines, I’ll rearrange the blog to make the content more accessible in those forms.

So, tune in tomorrow for the new regime of Philosophical Fragments!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Marriage Without Entitlement – Tullian Tchividjian Interview, Part 2

April 12, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

On Tuesday I posted Part 1 (“When Jesus is Everything, There’s Nothing to Fear“) of my interview with Tullian Tchividjian, grandson of Billy Graham and head pastor at the renowned Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  Below is Part 2:

* * *

So our relationship with God in Christ is the “one thing needful,” and you speak of how this liberates us because we don’t need the approval of others.  We don’t need anything because we already have Christ, who is everything.  What does this mean for marriage?

When I speak on this topic, marriage is one of the illustrations I use because it touches home with so many people.  All relational tension is the result of me feeling like I need something from this person and I’m not getting it.  The only thing with the power to relieve that tension is the realization that I’m now free to give everything I have without needing anything in return.

When I come home late from a long day, what the next two hours look like will be largely dependent on my grasp of the gospel.  I can go home at the end of a long day and feel very needy and entitled.  I deserve, I might think, love and affection and attention from my wife and three children.  And if I don’t get it from them, given everything I’m sacrificing for them, I may feel that I’m entitled to disappointment and anger.

Yet when you get the gospel, you realize, if they never give me love or attention or respect, I haven’t lost anything.  In fact, the grandest display of the power of the gospel in the life of the believer is when I love those who hate me.  As Jesus said, it’s easy to love and respect those who love and respect you.  But where does the power come from to be that counter-intuitive?  It comes from the otherworldly power of the gospel.

In your story, the truths took hold in you in the midst of great hardship.  I could tell a similar story myself.  What’s the role of suffering in helping us to see what is truly necessary and what is extraneous or even distracting?

This is the subject of my next book, coming out in the fall, tentatively entitled Glorious Ruin: How Suffering Sets You Free.  The overarching thesis of the book is that suffering does not rob you of joy.  Idolatry robs you of joy.  Suffering is often something being taken away from us that we feel we cannot live without.  For some people, it’s their body, their health, their minds, a relationship, and so on.  But the question I always ask is, What is the one thing that, if God took it away from you today, you would feel like life isn’t worth living?

If you answer that question, you start to get a handle on what your idols are.  So often for me, suffering has been the result of those seasons or those discrete moments when God is prying my hands open and taking something away from me that I’ve been holding onto more dearly than him.  Once that thing is taken away, you realize that you’re free.  You probably never knew, until that thing was taken away, how dependent upon it you’d become.  Then it’s gone and it strikes you: Wow, I was clinging to fool’s gold.

This silly illustration I give people when I travel is, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve walked around my house barking at my wife or kids because I cannot find my keys and I’m certain someone else has lost them.  Then, lo and behold, a few minutes later I’ll stick my hands in my pocket and find my keys.

As silly and stupid as that sounds, that’s the way most of us live our lives.  They keys are in our pockets — and we’re frantically trying to find something we already have.  Suffering is like that.  We become dependent on something or someone to make us feel like we matter.  But when that is stripped away, we cry foul and we don’t want to live anymore.  This is the definition of idolatry.  It’s not a wooden statue. It’s something we’re holding onto more tightly than God, and something we’ve become dependent on for our value and sense of importance.  God loves us so much that he’ll take those things away from us and set us free.

 

Filed Under: Marriage Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Bulletin Board: Screenplay Competition, Computer Gaming Job, and Grants for Evolutionary Creationists

April 12, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

I’m hoping to start using this blog not only for full-length commentary posts, but for bulletin board material, keeping people abreast of interesting opportunities or pointing to great articles and such.  So let’s get started.

  1. Act One, which seeks to cultivate Christian film artists (writers, directors, etc.), is holding its second annual Screenplay Competition.  Got an idea for a movie?  Get it ready for the June 1 deadline (May 1 is the Early Bird deadline), but be sharp.  Act One is serious about the film industry, so make sure your screenplay is written to the exacting professional standards (I recommend a program like Final Draft for help) of the industry.  Nothing will get a pass just because it has a nice message.
  2. A friend of mine, Brent Dusing, is CEO of Lightside Games, which produces social media games like Journey of Moses, which has attracted millions of players on Facebook.  It’s not heavy handed or anything of that sort, but Lightside Games seeks to make games that are just as entertaining and just as professionally crafted as any others, but that direct people toward scripture.  They’re working on a game that will take place in the world of the New Testament.  If this sounds appealing to you, they’re hiring a Front End Engineer (developing Flash Client games), a Back End Engineer (integrating the games into the Facebook platform, etc.), a Senior Game Designer (someone who has built successful social games) and a Junior Game Designer (someone who can learn the industry from the ground up.  Go to LightsideGames.com for more info.
  3. BioLogos, which aims to bring about greater understanding and acceptance within the church of mainstream science and particularly evolution, was given a very substantial grant from the John Templeton Foundation recently.  They’re giving grants from $30k to $300k for projects that work at the intersection of evolution and faith.  Even those who are skeptical, but open-minded, on the issue are invited to apply.  Go here to learn more.

Filed Under: Bulletin Board

When Jesus is Everything, There is Nothing to Fear – Tullian Tchividjian Interview

April 10, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

I had a fascinating phone conversation with Tullian Tchividjian a few weeks ago.  I could not publish it immediately, since I was in the midst of the Jeremy Lin project, but I want to publish it now in installments.  Tullian, a grandson of Billy Graham, is pastor of the very prominent (founded by D. James Kennedy) Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a contributing editor to Leadership Journal, and author of books like Unfashionable and Surprised by Grace.  His latest book, Jesus + Nothing = Everything, sounds fantastic.

I experienced, when I broke my neck, the truth Tullian expresses with such mathematical rigor in the title.  Informed my neck was broken, I was overcome with a strange but undeniable elation at the realization that none of it mattered.  Many of the things I had fought for, things the world cares for very deeply, were being stripped away from me.  But I realized I needed nothing but Jesus Christ.  Tullian actually cites the very verse that came to summarize this for me: Paul’s words in Philippians 1 that “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

Enjoy Part 1 of the interview, on the backstory to the book, and how the central realization of the book shaped his leadership and ministry:

* * *

What’s the backstory to your latest book? What do you mean by the title Jesus + Nothing = Everything, and how did you come to this realization.

I was theologically and biblically trained to understand that the gospel was necessary not only for non-Christians but also for Christians.  Once God saves us, he does not move us beyond the gospel but more deeply into the gospel.  I understood that cognitively.

It really hit home for me functionally in the summer of 2009, for two reasons.  My father was sick and slowly dying at the exact same time that the church I had planted five years earlier was merging with Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church.  We had anticipated difficulty, fireworks, resistance, but we didn’t know exactly what form that would take or how intense it would get.

In the summer of 2009, the strain was really, really intense. I was being attacked and maligned and threatened.  It was a terrible time for me and our family and our church.  Over night, I had become the father of a blended family.  When you try to merge anything, a family, business or a church, you can expect difficulty — but I had not expected to be personally attacked in the way I was.

Then, that summer, when everything was at its worst, I went on vacation with my family.  On the first morning I woke up early, and I hadn’t been sleeping or eating.  I’m not naturally prone toward depression and despair.  I’m an extrovert.  I love life.  But I was in the pit of despair, and reading Colossians 1, and really had it out with God.  I let it all boil over and basically demanded an explanation for why God had ruined my life. It was through Colossians 1, in a time of absolute desperation, that I discovered that I wanted my old idols back (not just my old life) — and God loved me too much to give them to me.

The specific idol I had been clinging to — though I didn’t realize it until then — was the idol of approval and acceptance.  I was working through Colossians 1, and what it meant for me on the ground of life is that all the acceptance and approval and affection that you’re seeking in other people you already possess in Christ.

Your deepest longing for approval and acceptance has already been met in Christ — that set me free in a way that changed me forever.  It was at that point that “Jesus + Nothing = Everything” ceased being merely a theological commitment.  It became my functional lifeline.  So, while I never want to go through that experience again, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world because it was during that time that God taught me the explosive power of the gospel’s relevance for me now.  As I put it in the book, I discovered the “now-power” of the Gospel.  The gospel doesn’t just save us from the past.  The gospel transforms everything in my life now, today, and tomorrow.

So that’s really the back-story of the book, and it was while I was sitting on my balcony overlooking the Gulf of Mexico in the condo we were renting that I realized, in a brand new, fresh and liberating way, just how necessary the gospel is for everyday life.

How did this realization shape your life as a pastor and leader in the church?

When you realize that you already possess everything you need in Christ, you recognize that you don’t actually need anything from anybody.  Everything you need, you already have in Christ — you don’t need anything more, so now you can now spend your life giving yourself away.  That invests your life as a leader with unbounded courage.

Now, I can walk into a meeting to announce an important decision and not be worried that some in the room might not like it, and fight against it.  I can live my life with unfettered sacrifice because I don’t need to win.  I’m free to lose, and that’s something leaders face all the time.  So much of their own sense of value and worth and identity is wrapped up in success as the world defines it.

But when you realize that because Jesus won for me, I’m free to lose, because Jesus succeeded for me I’m free to fail, that makes you a powerful leader.  You can live your life with reckless abandon, realizing on the one hand that, like Paul said, to live is Christ and to die is gain.  Everything I need I already have.  There is nothing anyone can strip away from me that I actually need.  I’m free to be unpopular, free to make tough decisions, free to stand on principle and do what’s right even if people will resist it.

It changed me as a leader.  I have more courage.  I’m able to lead more boldly.  I’m able to lose and not have to walk out of a meeting getting my way.  I can be sacrificial.  I can give myself away, because all I need is Christ.  I don’t need anything else.  I’m now free to give everything I have without needing anything in return.  I can love those who hate me, I can turn the other cheek when I’m slapped in the face, because my dignity and my sense of value is not wrapped up in what I have in this person or this project.  It’s wrapped up in Jesus.

That changes everything.

* * *

Come back Thursday for Part 2 of the Interview.

Filed Under: Interviews
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