My father has served for decades as an elder and pastor in non-denominational evangelical churches. \u00a0He devoted extraordinary amounts of time to caring for the people in the congregations: visiting the ill, comforting the dying, counseling couples in crisis, encouraging those who wrestled with depression or mental illness or the loss of a loved one, discipling younger men, and the like. \u00a0Many were the nights in which my father was not home because he was helping other people hold their lives and their faith together. \u00a0He\u2019s also done work outside the congregations he\u2019s pastored, visiting convalescent homes, working at food kitchens, supporting a crisis pregnancy center, even bringing people in need into our home until they could get back on their feet.<\/p>\n
In recent years, however, he had the opportunity to serve in post-Katrina New Orleans, and then on a medical mission in Haiti. \u00a0These were transformative experiences, even after a lifetime of following Christ and leading others to do the same. \u00a0David Platt\u2019s Radical<\/a><\/em> helped him to understand those experiences and to hear the call of Christ anew. \u00a0In response to yesterday\u2019s post<\/a>, my father wrote that Radical<\/em> \u201chad more impact on me than any other Christian book I\u2019ve read in 30 years.\u201d \u00a0Through the book, he says, \u201cGod has challenged me,\u201d and he has had to reexamine and recommit to \u201cwhat it means to be a disciple.\u201d<\/p>\n This is what I find worth celebrating in the Radical<\/em> phenomenon. \u00a0And as Platt\u2019s second effort, Radical Together: Unleashing the People of God for the Purposes of God<\/a><\/em>, hits the bookshelves, I thought it worth examining what it means for a congregation to live out radical discipleship. \u00a0As I wrote yesterday<\/a>, what I find particularly encouraging is Platt\u2019s reception amongst theologically conservative churches. \u00a0Platt pastors The Church at Brook Hills, a 4000-member Southern Baptist congregation in Birmingham. \u00a0The book and the reception it received \u2014 along with a recent annual gathering of the SBC that Ed Stetzer told me<\/a> was more like a \u201cmissions festival\u201d than the disputatious meetings of old \u2014 are signs that some theologically conservative churches that have grown complacent and comfortable in our affluent culture are reawakening to the radicality of Christian discipleship.<\/p>\n Lest I be misunderstood: I do not mean to say that theologically conservative churches as a general rule are complacent and self-indulgent. \u00a0In fact, that\u2019s a caricature I despise. \u00a0There are activist and complacent churches on both sides of the theological spectrum,\u00a0and many theologically conservative churches have done extraordinary work not only in supporting missions agencies but also in supporting Christian service organizations such as World Vision, Samaritan\u2019s Purse and Compassion International, not to mention Goodwill and the Salvation Army. \u00a0Nonetheless, there are<\/em> many conservative churches (just as there are many liberal ones) that need reawakening \u2014 and I find it encouraging that Radical <\/em>has challenged so many\u00a0theologically conservative believers, pastors and churches to reexamine their priorities and recommit to a radically self-abandoned discipleship. \u00a0That is indeed worth celebrating.<\/p>\n Tomorrow I\u2019ll write with more positive suggestions for living out a \u201cradical\u201d faith, but today I want to warn of the dangers of the \u201cradical\u201d language. \u00a0I strongly doubt that Platt would disagree with these points (see his discussion<\/a> with Kevin DeYoung, for example), so I do not exactly mean these as criticisms. \u00a0They are more like warnings, or pitfalls that might help us \u2014 if we avoid them \u2014 to find the right path forward.<\/p>\n FIRST, in the pursuit of a \u201cradical\u201d faith-life there is a strong danger of self-righteousness and judgmentalism.<\/strong> I know this because I experienced it. \u00a0I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the Danish Christian writer S\u00f8ren\u00a0Kierkegaard, largely because I felt that the extensive criticisms he leveled against the bourgeois Lutheranism of nineteenth-century Denmark are extremely relevant to the complacent Christianity one finds in many American churches today (of all stripes). \u00a0While Kierkegaard went to great lengths to avoid these temptations, I found arising within my own heart a sense of condemnation against the believers who \u201cjust don\u2019t get it\u201d and, implicitly, a kind of self-congratulation that I had recovered a more pristine, original, and (yes) radical vision of following Christ. \u00a0I imagined writing a book applying Kierkegaard\u2019s critique to the American context \u2014 and I still might.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to speak prophetically when the church is turning away from its first love and beginning to honor the idols in the culture. \u00a0Yet one should do so with abundant love for the church. \u00a0Platt does this. \u00a0Other authors (without naming names) do not; one gets the sense that they have marinated in their contempt for years, and so they traffic in caricatures and soundbites that do more to cut the church down than to build it up. \u00a0Their criticisms do not inspire new life within the church; they become causes for division, justifications for the disaffected to leave the church, or fodder for skeptics who find their own caricature of Christians vindicated.<\/p>\n To give an example: even when we believe it\u2019s correct to criticize a church for spending so lavishly on new facilities, it\u2019s important to give a fair account of why this specific church believes that this expenditure is justified, and a nuanced vision of how churches make use of their facilities to work transformation in individuals and communities. \u00a0Christians should make sure that they have deeply understood one another and charitably represented one another before they criticize one another in public fora.<\/p>\n SECOND, being \u201cradical\u201d is not the point. <\/strong> The word \u201cradical\u201d is a sign that we are called to something extraordinary and extreme. \u00a0But we should not mistake the sign for the destination to which it points.<\/p>\n Imagine a young Christian, full of zeal. \u00a0He stretches out upon his bed and dreams of doing something \u201cradical\u201d for Jesus \u2014 converting a jungle tribe, dying in the mission fields, even becoming a sort of prophet to the American church who brings it to repentance and revival. \u00a0It\u2019s possible to yearn for these things for all the right reasons. \u00a0But it\u2019s also possible to yearn for them, as this imagined young Christian does, for mixed motives, including a sort of spiritual egotism. \u00a0He dreams of becoming a Christian hero, of the admiration he will receive, of the esteem he will feel for himself, or how grateful the needy will be, of the hagiographies that will be written. \u00a0He may not admit he feels these motives; he may not even be self-aware enough to know. \u00a0But this young believer imagines that if he can just try hard enough, if he can just discipline himself, then he can live up to that romantic image of the radical Christian.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not without reason I chose a young person for this example. \u00a0Young people, especially the ambitious and the over-achieving, still dream of what Richard Rohr calls \u201cthe heroic journey.\u201d \u00a0There is much to praise and encourage in the desire to \u201cdo something radical\u201d for Christ. \u00a0Older believers should not dampen their zeal. \u00a0But they can help guide that zeal toward the right goals.<\/p>\n One of the best indicators here is whether the \u2018radical\u2019 believer wants to be noticed for his radicalism. \u00a0So our hypothetical young believer imagines giving up his home and living upon the streets, in order to give more of his money away to the needy. \u00a0He says that he will probably write about the experience, in order that others may be inspired, but his motives are mixed. \u00a0He wants to be recognized, because there is at least a strain of egotism in his desire to be radical. \u00a0(If it seems as though I\u2019m speaking from experience, it\u2019s because I am.)<\/p>\n Radicalism is not the point. \u00a0Faithfulness is the point. \u00a0Radicalism lends itself to self-righteousness and egotism; faithfulness lends itself to confession and humility. \u00a0Jesus does not call us to be radical. \u00a0Jesus calls us to follow after him \u2014 and if we do so<\/em>, if we follow him, then we will be radically counter-cultural. \u00a0In other words, we should not focus on a preconceived image of what it means to be \u201cradical.\u201d \u00a0We should focus on Jesus and becoming like him. \u00a0Radicality will be a by-product.<\/p>\n Finally, a focus on being \u201cradical\u201d can lead us to bad solutions. <\/strong>Tell me this. \u00a0Which is more radical: living upon the streets in order to give your money to a homeless shelter, or investing your money in launching a business that can employ hundreds of people and supports their families? \u00a0Now, which is actually more helpful to more people? \u00a0Or to give another example, which is more radical: assembling an organization that helps people in poverty or assembling an organization that strengthens marriages, preventing divorce and all of the poverty that often follows from divorce?<\/p>\n The point is not to enter a discussion on policies. \u00a0The point is that the most helpful<\/em> thing might not be the most radical<\/em> thing, so \u2013 again \u2013 radicality cannot be the goal. \u00a0We must have warm hearts, but we must also have cool heads. \u00a0The excellence of our intentions should be matched by the excellence of our actions.<\/p>\n In closing<\/strong>, again, I strongly doubt that Platt would disagree with these points, so this is not a criticism so much as a development of the theme. \u00a0If we understand what radical discipleship should not mean, if we identify the pitfalls, then we are better prepared to find the right path forward. \u00a0Tomorrow I\u2019ll continue this conversation with Platt\u2019s Radical Together<\/a><\/em> and suggest more positively what it might mean for believers \u2013 individually and in community \u2013 to live a radical faith-life in the right way. \u00a0(Note: The Gospel Coalition<\/a> has also hosted a nice discussion<\/a> specifically on the issue of facilities and personnel.)<\/p>\n We\u2019re not called to be radical. \u00a0We\u2019re called to be Christ-like. \u00a0And that will be a radical thing, an extraordinarily radical and counter-cultural thing, but it may not always be radical in a dramatic and public way.<\/p>\n