Your church website says the purpose of New Season Christian Worship Center is to “reconcile the message of the cross with today’s culture, preaching the vertical message of Christ and the horizontal message of community.” I pick up similar impressions in many ethnic and multiethnic churches—the horizontal, the vertical. I don’t hear it so much in Anglo churches. Is theology in the Anglo church incomplete or are ethnic churches just more preoccupied with temporal things?
It’s not that the ethnic church is preoccupied with temporal or earthly things. And I say this with great due deference as it pertains to my Anglo brothers and sisters in Christ, but I do believe the ethnic church has a more holistic theological worldview.
I likewise have great problems with the ethnic church—or the Anglo church for that matter—that focuses exclusively on the horizontal.
Any church that does justice without it being contextualized within the framework of salvation through Christ to me is theologically lacking. It is because of the vertical that I do the horizontal. Justice is righteousness applied. Justice does not flow from the left or from the right. It flows from the high with the purpose of lifting up the low.
Now you see, the horizontal by itself will fall—if you look at the analogy here. The horizontal plane of the cross by itself will fall on the ground. But the vertical could stand by itself—it will be an incomplete gospel, but it can stand.
So I am committed to biblical orthodoxy. I am a Christ-centered, Bible-based pastor and preacher. I don’t sway from my biblical, orthodox worldview. But I do believe we have a more holistic view.
There’s a certain moral sense that drives our thirst for justice and our agitation for equality. The status quo offends our convictions, our conscience, our sense of right and wrong. But the voice of conscience in the arena of corporate morality can be stifled as certainly as we sometimes muffle the voice of conscience when it speaks to our own individual, personal morality. So I wonder: How do I feed my conscience? How do I fan that moral flame? How do I care if I don’t really care? Which I think can sometimes be a problem, even with leadership in the church.
Yes. How do we ignite the flame of compassion? And the only way to do that is through prophetic truth telling. It is a disgrace if a pastor is not prophetically speaking to his congregation for the purpose of engaging them, not just vertically, but also horizontally. I have a problem when the metrics of American evangelicalism are married to the ideals of what I call the Wall Street Cathedral.
Now I need to clearly state: I’m a free market guy. I’m a capitalist. I love our nation and the values that we hold near and dear. I have visited Latin America, I have seen what über-government intrusion has done to economic systems, to families and communities. So I repudiate this idea of total dependency on government.
Nevertheless, I have a problem when we measure success—the metrics of American Christianity—by the size of a sanctuary, by the number of people in the pews. I understand that metrics are important—we want to find ways to measure our effectiveness. But when that becomes the alpha and omega of metrics, the sole measure of our effectiveness and success, I have a problem.
How can we be happy that we have a sanctuary that accommodates 5,000, gathered together in comfort, when 10 minutes away there are people in poverty? People suffering from hunger? People struggling against drug addiction? The proliferation of gangs and teenage pregnancy? There has to be a moral imperative to live out Matthew 25.
How do we measure our effectiveness? The beautiful answer coming from Christ in Mathew 25 to me is the quintessential metric: Did you quench the thirsty? Did you feed the hungry? Did you welcome the stranger?
Or Luke 4, Did you bring good news to the poor?
Or Micah 6:8, Did you act justly, love mercy and walk humbly before our God?
