Collateral Damage from the Sacred/Secular Split

Today I am continuing to read in Nancy Pearcey's book, Total Truth. On page 36, she speaks about Bob Briner and gives a quote from him that got me to thinking:

In his book Roaring Lambs, Bob Briner describes his student days at a Christian college, where the unspoken assumption was that the only way to really serve God was in full-time Christian work. Already knowing that he wanted a a career in sports management, Briner writes, "I felt I was a sort of second class campus citizen. My classmates who were preparing for the pulpit ministry or missionary service were the ones who were treated as they would be doing the real work of the church. The rest of us were the supporting cast."
The underlying message was that people in ordinary professions might contribute their prayers and financial support, but that was about it.

Several thoughts come to mind with this quote - I mainly want to talk about the role of pastors as "supporting cast" in the Christian life, but there are a couple of other things worth touching on. I'll talk about pastors in another post.

This little passage from and about Briner illustrates Pearcey's contention that Christians live in captivity to the culture because of a bifurcated worldview. It is the fact/value or secular/sacred split which confines matters of faith off to the spiritual realm and divorces them from the "real world." Such a worldview is ubiquitous in the secular realm, but there is a real sense in which it got its greatest impetus from the church back in the early part of the 20th century. What Briner experienced at his "Christian" college is the direct result of the Bible School/Missionary movement.

I never thought I would say this, but I have come to believe that in many ways the Bible school/Missionary movement has harmed the cause of Christ in the U.S.. Let me issue a caveat before people start sending me nasty e-mails and comments (if I am to get nasty e-mails and comments I want to be sure and get them for the right reasons). The problem is not that too many young Christians felt called to the ministry or missionary service. There still aren't enough missionaries in the world today and there aren't nearly enough young people preparing for ministry to replace pastors and staff who are retiring or leaving ministry. The problem is in the worldview that came with this "call" to Christian service. The worldview had three fatal flaws:

1) America was not a mission field.

2) The secular/sacred split - the Christian worldview really has nothing to say to the world that exists outside of the church.

3) The message of salvation is the totality of the Christian message. In other words, those Christians who didn't have the guts to go into the ministry or mission field were taught how to "witness" on the job, but they weren't taught how to do their jobs to the glory of God, nor how to bring distinctive Christian ethics to their jobs. Interestingly, it was Christians who were the first ones to be "working for the weekend," i.e. Sunday when they could go and do Christian stuff and redeem their ungodly mammon by tithing it to Christian causes.

I have seen some examples of this personally. When I was in college I was involved with Campus Crusade and went to KC-83 - a big Christmas conference they sponsored. On the one hand, Crusade has done a terrific job of equipping college students and professors to interact "Christianly" on campus. But I'll never forget Bill Bright's closing words at the conference. After an impassioned appeal to join the staff of Campus Crusade, he closed his message with "I'll see you all at staff training next year." I don't think that Bill (who I agree is one of the great evangelists of the last century, I'm not trying to slam him here, just disagreeing with one thing he did) or the current Crusade staff would endorse a sacred/secular distinction, but sometimes our zeal for our ministry can cause us to make rhetorical overstatements. In this case, it was clear that the truly committed Christian would go on staff. It would have been nice to acknowledge that you could be truly committed to Christ and do something other than go into the ministry.

Similarly, I attended Columbia Biblical Seminary and Graduate School of Missions in the late 80's and early 90's, and was involved in many missions conferences and read many great missions books. One of my heroes is Jim Elliott. One of the things Jim was famous for was his belief that, with so many churches in America, it was hard for a Christian to justify why he or she would stay here and preach the gospel when there were so many people around the world who had never heard. Jim made two mistakes here - number one was in assuming that all of those churches in America were actually preaching the gospel and that all of those church members were really Christians. Secondly, he didn't view America as a mission field.

I won't belabor the point anymore, because much has already been said about the damage that Christian withdrawal from the "secular" arena. What we need is not so much training in how to "witness" on the job, although that is a part of it. What we need is for millions of Christians to flood the so called "secular" arena and simply bring the Christian worldview to bear in that arena.

One of the good things about the blogosphere is that there are lots of folks taking a Christian worldview into the world. A couple of my favorites are Jeff Clinton at the Dawn Treader and Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost.

Comments

[Jeremy Pierce]

Crusade is much better about this nowadays, at least in the northeast. I don't think Bill Bright ever meant to give that impression. I think he always believed he was talking to those in the audience whom God meant for the particular ministry of Crusade, and the others there were really not his audience. He didn't know who those people were, but he had such a strong view of God's sovereignty in human choice that he knew better than to give a message to everyone that wasn't meant for everyone. The problem is that the other people are all there and won't hear it how he meant it, which is why Crusade bends over backwards to say that they don't mean to say that full-time ministry is a higher calling.

The biggest conference in the northeast (which is the only area without a Christmas conference due to most of the students being from other parts of the country and being home at Christmas) is now the Winter Conference that meets in Providence, and the theme is to encourage people to go into the world, to do the very sort of thing that you're saying is most important in this post. They do have a call for people to come join them in working for Crusade, with the primary goal to influence those who will then go into the world, based on the model of multiplication rather than addition, but once that purpose is in place it's harder to get the idea that those professions are spiritually lower.

The first thing I had wanted to say, though, was that Muslims like very much to talk about how Christians have a false sacred/secular dichotomy, and that's part of their apologetic, because they rightly think it's obvious that God cares about all of life and wants everyone to serve him equally. It's unfortunate that they're right, especially because that view that Christians hold isn't at all faithful to Christianity itself. People who give in to this are basically giving feeding into a Muslim apologetic against Christianity, just as people who won't fellowship with anyone of a certain denomination or who won't go to church at all are feeding into a Muslim apologetic about Christian disunity and Muslim unity (though the latter half of that is really untrue anyway -- they just won't admit it).

[David]

Thanks for the comment Jeremy - I didn't want my post to come off as a slam against Crusade, yet that incident sticks in my mind as typical of a mindset we were encountering back in the 80's. I've met alot of Crusade folks in Reformed circles in the last 10 years or so and they seem to have a pretty well rounded view of things. Back in the 80's Crusade and Bill Bright were doing what evangelicals did. Since then, with folks like Chuck Colson becoming popular and the CURE folks and others bringing worldview issues to the forefront, evangelicalism seems to be turning, although I know there are still pockets out there that still keep the split going.
On the Muslim thing have you read Neil Uchitel's post in the Christian Carnival - he tracks with you on that?

[Adrian Warnock]

This is great. To me this fits in with the concept of Eph 4 ministries which exist to equip those of us (like me) who have "proper jobs" out there in the world.