The parable of the sower in 21st-century America

When we’re taught evangelism or church development, the early church is held up as an example. One church development movement, The Acts 16:5 Initiative, takes its name from this verse:

So the churches were strengthened in the faith and increased in numbers daily.

Photo by Razief Arlie • bit.ly/sxc-hu-adlie

There’s a fundamental problem, though, with modeling 21st-century congregational growth on the first-century model. And the problem is the church.

In the parable of the sower, Jesus taught that the seed of God’s word can fall on different sorts of soil, and different types of soil yield different results.

Peter

When Peter preached in Jerusalem, he was working with fertile soil; the Jews were prepared and waiting for the Messiah. When they gathered in Jerusalem for the festival of first fruits, what we call Pentecost, Peter could convert 3,000 people with one sermon by quoting the prophet Joel, because his listeners all knew exactly what he was talking about.

We focus on the Jews who rejected the Messiah, but we forget that most of the early followers in The Way were Jews who accepted the Messiah. They did not see themselves as Christians, but as what we would now call Messianic Jews.

The main objection Peter had to overcome was, “How do we know this Jesus of Nazareth is truly the Messiah we’ve been waiting for?”

Paul

When Paul preached at the Areopagus, the soil was not as fertile. It was rocky ground, cluttered by a profusion of deities. Rome was similar, having imported all sorts of gods from other cultures, including Greece and Egypt.

We get all worked up about mimicking the church-planting practices of the early apostles, but we forget that they were talking with people whose culture was inclined toward philosophical and religious inquiry.

The main objections Paul had to overcome were, “Jesus of Galilee? Never heard of him. Who is he and where is Galilee?” or “How is your one God any better than all the gods of Olympus?”

Us

When we preach in 21st century America, we don’t have soil. We don’t even have rocky ground. We have pavement.

We focus on our God of love and forget that for many people, the worst hurts they’ve received have come at the hands of people who called themselves Christians. They were ripped off by a televangelist, or bullied in a church youth group, or were shunned by churchgoers who disliked their dress or lifestyle or ethnicity.

The main objections we have to overcome are, “You Christians are just a bunch of hypocrites,” and “How can we believe you when you can’t even agree amongst yourselves?”

People in America have been so hurt by the church in so many different ways that they have paved over their wounds. They are armored in asphalt. They won’t be converted by sermons or teaching or tracts passed out on street corners. To reach people like this, we have to wait patiently for the cracks to appear. That takes patience.

Of course, sometimes God plows under people’s pavement with a great crisis: illness or unemployment or some other tragedy. When that happens, we can be there to provide support. But only if we’ve already been walking authentically, living out a faith devoid of hypocrisy and full of love.

Putting a republic to the test

I just finished Michael Lind's book What Lincoln Believed. It's not a biography, it's a philosophical examination. It covers Lincoln's religious, economic, and racial views. For most of his life, he was a deist. He was a Hamiltonian, while most of his Southern opponents were Jeffersonians. And while he belived "all men are created equal," he believed human rights didn't necessarily equate with civil rights.

What stunned me most about this book was how it changed my view of the American Civil War. Common wisdom says the war was about slavery. Confederate sympathizers have said it was about state's rights, but none could pretend that the primary right being argued about was anything other than the right to buy and sell human beings.

Lincoln did not run for office on an abolitionist platform. Like the country's founders, he was willing to allow slavery to remain where it already existed. The point of contention was whether Southern slaveholders would be allowed to export slaves to the new territories in the West.

When, after Lincoln's election, Southerners demanded concessions on threat of secession, Lincoln refused to be blackmailed. In a letter rejecting one compromise proposal, he wrote, "We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told … the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten…"

The "beaten" pro-slavery minority, tried, as Lincoln put it, "to break up the government." When Lincoln said, in his address at Gettysburg, that the war was testing whether the republic "can long endure," he was not talking about slavery. He was talking about the ability of a democratically elected government to quell an internal rebellion by an angry minority.

In an address to Congress in 1861, Lincoln summed up the matter this way: "When ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets…there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves…whatever they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by a war…"

I have sometimes wondered why the union bothered to fight. If Southern states no longer wished to be part of the Union, why force them to stay in it? Here's why: The Constitution contains no mechanism for a state, once admitted to the union, to later separate from it. That means the Southern states' secession was unconstitutional. Lincoln's duly elected administration was opposed by insurgents who flouted the country's founding principles. As Lind puts it, "The Civil War was about law and order in the service of democracy."

Lind's text is a bit dense at times, but it is worth working through to get at these gems of insight about one of our nation's finest presidents and darkest times.

Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

The change we really need ...

...is the change few are prepared to talk about. It's not "politically correct."

Thomas Merton wrote, "the salvation of society depends, in the long run, on the moral and spiritual health of individuals." He was writing in the context of spiritual maturity as related to sanctity. "You cannot save the world merely with a system. You cannot have peace without charity. You cannot have social order without saints, mystics, and prophets."

But our saints, mystics, and prophets are often silenced by a society that believes it is more important to protect people's feelings than to speak hard moral truths.

It's one thing to revile speech that is hateful, based on irrational fear and prejudice. It's another to forbid honest discussion of moral questions, such as why some religions condemn particular actions as sin.

If we cannot discuss such things openly as a society, how can we solve the problems that plague us?

For example: A recent study, referenced in this Wall Street Journal article, found that "the numbers of unfaithful wives under 30 increased by 20% and husbands by a whopping 45%." This despite the fact that "more than 90% of the population believes that cheating on one's spouse is always wrong."

The author's sources speculate on a variety of possible causes for this phenomenon, including the prevalence in our society of people with multiple sex partners prior to marriage -- a habit that some apparently are unable to break after marriage.

Few people outside the pulpit seem willing to go out on a politically incorrect limb and point out that our society not only permits this behavior, it encourages it. Surely none of us wish to be accused of pointing out planks in other peoples' eyes. But we do our society no favors by censoring or vilifying those saints and prophets who affirm the notion that unmarried people ought not to have sex.

Professor Daniel N. Robinson, of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University, said in a lecture about John Stuart Mill, that in our society "...the sensitivity to the needs, and indeed the temperament, of others is such that thought must be censored and speech must be transformed. If Mill isn't turning in his grave, he should have."

Robinson is quite right that the inhibition of free speech hampers liberty and prevents productive discourse. When 90 percent of people say adultery is wrong, while increasing numbers of people commit adultery, then we are becoming a nation of hypocrites, and we must speak up about it.

Infidelity is just one example of moral and spiritual disease. There are many others, including greed, corruption, bigotry, apathy, and certainly hypocrisy. But coercing people into silence lest their opinion hurt someone's feelings will only hamper our nation's healing and our spiritual growth as individuals.

We can only bring about the change our nation needs if we are free to openly discuss -- with respect and honesty -- the moral and spiritual health of the individuals it comprises.