There Are No Unimportant Players

We now know the two teams that are going to be heading to the Super Bowl on February 3. They have been working for the entire season, hoping to put together enough victories to find their way to the ultimate stage, complete with a pop music halftime show and some wonderful commercials (hopefully).

Football is a sport that is based on preparation. Coaches develop pretty complicated playbooks, and it is the responsibility of each member of the team to know his job in every possible situation. Even when it seems like a particular player is irrelevant during a certain play, he has a job to do in that scheme. You could be the wide receiver in the left slot, and the play is to send the halfback to the right, but you still have a job to do. It may not be the most important job and not play, but it is an important job. After all, the entire purpose of running plays is to coordinate the members of the squad towards the predetermined end. Even the wide receiver who will never receive a pass to the left on a run to the right may need to pick up a blocking assignment. If it is a halfback draw, he might have to begin to run a route as a type of bluff before the quarterback hands off the ball.

The coordinated effort of 11 people on the field makes all the difference, and if they all don’t do their jobs, it is not going to be successful. There are no unimportant players on the field.

Therefore, they need to prepare ahead of time. There may be those times when the seemingly unimportant player actually has the most important job on the field. That slot receiver on the left might not have immediate interest in a halfback run to the right, but as the play develops and if the running back is able to proceed into the secondary, that wide receiver might be still moving down the field. He might be in a position to make a key block that turns a 10 yard run into a 25 yard run. Those types of things make a difference even if they do not seem to be immediately applicable.

How often do we feel like that slot receiver on a running play? We might not feel like our job matters very much. I’m not just talking about our day jobs. You may feel this way about your day job, but this is a much more wide-ranging conversation. It can be really simple. We can be talking about things like whether or not it makes a difference that I smile and say hi to the person I walk past on the street. We can be talking about things as major as whether or not I should bother trying to go back to a particular college because I feel like I am just a number there.

There were all kinds of times when we wonder if we are important. Does it really matter if I am nice to that cashier? She has probably seen hundreds of people today, and some of them were nice while others were not. Does it really matter how I treat her?

Does it really matter if I stay at this particular college? Even though I feel like God is called me here, I just don’t feel like I am important to the college or anyone else. Is it really the right spot for me?

I would like to suggest that there is a connection in between preparation and significance. An important part of any useful preparation is an understanding of the significance that a particular task possesses. It is important to be nice to people because it makes a difference to them. I should smile and say hi to that person because it may improve his or her day. That is significant. That means that I need to go into that store with the right attitude. I need to prepare ahead of time to make a difference in that person’s day.

On the bigger questions, I need to think about why perhaps God might have me in a certain place. I might be at a particular college for a particular reason. However, I need to make sure I have prepared myself to even think about such difficult things. Have I considered why I might be here and what significance I may have on campus? After all, even if I might not feel great about something at the time, maybe I am just upset. Maybe it is just an emotional time. Maybe I need to prepare to make this decision by preparing to think about how serious it really is. It is a heavy decision, and it is one that I should not make lightly. I need to think ahead of time and prepare so that I am ready to make a potentially life altering decision that no one would argue is insignificant.

When I think about this issue of significance, I can't help but think of the Old Testament. Why did God give us all the back story? My salvation is not based on doing the history of the Judges. It is a wonderful book of the Bible, but Judges tells me a lot more about the history of Israel and it tells me about Jesus Christ. We say we are Christians, so what does the background information of the Old Testament really do for us?

It provides us with that preparation. It helps us establish the type of world that Jesus Christ decided to enter. It points us towards the people group that God had His Son born into. When we read the Old Testament, we are prepared from Messiah. We see a world looking forward toward that Messiah and suffering the consequences of human sin. We see a conflict, and we desire a resolution. We are prepared for that resolution because of what we know.

Naturally that is not the only purpose of the Old Testament, but it is an important one. Much like John the Baptist was a forerunner to Jesus Christ, the Magi found Jesus because the scribes of Herod pointed to it Old Testament prophecy about Bethlehem. Even when the Old Testament is not prophetic or directly related to Jesus Christ, it establishes the groundwork.

Going further though, it is not just about laying the groundwork, but because of the obvious sinfulness of humanity and the hopelessness of the human condition, we see the significance of Jesus Christ all the more clearly. When set against the background of so much darkness, the light seems all the brighter. Why does the one star in the night sky seemed so bright? It is surrounded by black.

Jesus coming to earth would be significant anyway because He is the Son of God, but it seems all the more beautiful and important exactly because of the myriad of ways that we have failed to save ourselves. In fact, the more we try, the more we make our condition worse. Therefore, there may seem to be parts of the Old Testament that don’t seem to matter. Who really cares about some of the obscure characters we meet in one verse?

The fact of the matter is that every part of the Old Testament matters. Some parts don't seem to make a difference on the surface, but like that wide receiver making a block down field, they are there for a purpose. God was preparing a story, and He was preparing that story that ultimately pointed towards the most significant life to ever walk the face of our planet.

These are just a few examples, but I think you can kind of see my point here. Preparation points towards significance. Like the Super Bowl, these guys have been working all year for this game, and they all have an important job to play even if it doesn't always seem as important on the surface. We can never forget that in our individual lives either. I think that we can easily be tempted to feel like we don't matter or what we do makes no difference.

Don't fall into that trap. I'm not some kind of self-help guru, but there is one thing I do know. No one is an important. Therefore, we need to get down to business and do our own jobs. We need to do what we can with what we have to make a difference. We may not immediately see the impact of what we do, and we might never even see within our lifetimes. However, it is important to pursue our God given calling. If we do that, we will be where God wants us to be, and we will be doing what God wants us to do. There is no better place to be than right there. Not just better for us, but it will be better for all of those around us and, of course, the advancement of God's kingdom.

Don't Shoot the Messenger

Isn’t it funny that we have a tendency to want to shoot the messenger? Someone tells us something that we don’t like, and it automatically becomes that person’s problem. It may not even be that person’s decision, but we don’t like the decision, and we have to take it out on someone. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. To extend the figurative nature of the phrase, it would be like me getting upset with the mailman because he brings me bills I have to pay. It’s not his choice. He is literally just bringing them to my house.

Even if that mailman was going to disregard everything, never give me my bill and pretend like nothing happened, that’s not going to change the fact that my electric company, for example, is going to find a way to get money from me or will kill my power and I will be sitting in the dark.

Believe it or not, sometimes the messenger is delivering things to us that are unpleasant, but they are simply letting us know something that has consequences if we don’t follow through or fulfill our responsibilities. The consequences actually can be less pleasant than the news that they are delivering.

The messenger remains on the front line though, and he or she is going to deal with our immediate reaction to unpleasant news. I think about how hard it must be to be a doctor who has to deliver a bad diagnosis to a patient. I’m sure they get blamed, yelled at and criticized all the time. Patients doubt their knowledge, question their prognosis and blame them for missing something. It is not a job I envy, but the doctor has to deliver that diagnosis. Why? If the doctor didn’t do that, then there’s no way that the patient would ever look for treatment. Without being made aware of the problem, the patient would never seek treatment. Whatever condition he or she has would continue to get worse and would eventually potentially be terminal. The consequences are worse than the message being delivered. We don’t like the message, and we don’t want to hear it, but sometimes we have to hear it.

This is the end of the story though because a few things need to be true. First, the messenger needs to be trustworthy and reliable. If the mailman brought me a fake bill that told me that my power was going to be shut off, but I called the power company and they told me there was no problem and they don’t know where that bill came from, I would question the messenger. If the doctor gave an inaccurate diagnosis to me in the past, I’m going to question his or her reliability.

The messenger has an even more important responsibility in this situation, and I think this is why we have this propensity to shoot the messenger. Sure we might get mad at the messenger, but most of us fundamentally understand that it isn’t the mailman’s fault for bringing me a bill or the doctor’s fault for giving me a bad diagnosis. Any type of anger that we have in those situations is normally short-lived, and it doesn’t seem to really come from a place of deep-seated resentment. It is simply an emotional response to unfortunate news. I’m not saying it is excusable necessarily, but we very rarely get incredibly upset with the messenger unless they fail to bring our message back to wherever it needs to go to solve the problem.

Imagine a mailman who delivers you a bill, but he isn’t going to take it back to the power company to pay your bill. Therefore, he lets you know the bad news, but he isn’t able to help you solve the problem. Having a doctor tell you that you need your appendix out but isn’t able to perform the operation or refer you to anyone who can would make you upset. That would make you pretty mad at the messenger.

That’s the thing about messengers. They have to do their job as messengers. They have to be reliable and bring you news, even if you don’t want to hear it. However, they also have to reliably take the information you provide to solve the problem. They are warning you about bad consequences. The whole point of warning you is to help you avoid the consequences.

Again, let’s say that the mailman took your payment and brought it to the electric company. If the electric company lost you check, said you never paid it and turned off your power, you don’t fundamentally blame the messenger. Again, the messenger has done his job. The mailman delivered the letter. You would probably be mad at the power company, and that is somewhat justifiable. Obviously you aren’t happy that you did your responsibility to avoid the bad consequence, and someone still brought that consequence down on your head. However, again, that is not the messenger’s problem. You can’t get mad at the messenger for something like that. It makes no sense. He or she did what was requested in delivering the message back.

This may seem like kind of an abstract example, but I’ve tried to make it pretty simple, and I’ve tried to relate it to our real lives because I think that we do this all the time. There are a lot of people who point out inconvenient truths. You don’t want to hear what they have to say, but they are delivering you something that is for your own good.

I sometimes feel like this is a major problem with our Christian witness today. How many times do we deliver messages, but we fail to take the answers we get back to the authority source? I can tell people about Jesus, and I can explain how He died for the sins of the world to reconcile our relationship with God and provide us the opportunity to have eternal life with Him.

That’s a pretty easy message. The gospel is meant to be simple. In fact, it is radically simple, and a lot of people write it off because it is so simple. It seems insane that something so important can be simultaneously so simple.

However, there are more difficult questions that people have about Christianity. There are things that aren’t quite so easy to understand. Why do we choose to follow one particular God when there have been thousands that people have claimed to believe in throughout history? Why does God, who Christians say is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, allow evil? Why does it seem that science and Christianity are always at odds?

Here is what I have noticed about Christianity. We are really good at delivering the message. We are good messengers more often than not. Our churches are good at putting altar calls at the end of the service. I’m not diminishing that. These are good things, and like the mailman, it’s really important that we deliver the message. Like a doctor, we need to help bring the diagnosis to the world. This is 100% necessary, so please do not think I am diminishing anything. This is not an either/or conversation but rather a both/and.

Now, after we deliver the message, people might not always be very happy with us. You have seen it. How does it go when you confront someone about sin? How does our culture react when Christian leaders say that cultural trends are not good? That is the emotional response that I talked about that is somewhat understandable when a messenger delivers bad news. I’m not excusing it, but it is not a deep-seated type of issue. It is an emotional response.

After that initial rage, I think this is where the church often times comes up short. We don’t have the follow-through. We don’t have the answers that people are looking for. Or, I should rephrase that. The answers are there, but we don’t know where they are, or we don’t know how to articulate them. Is it easy to explain why God allows suffering and evil? No way. I wrote my MA thesis on the problem of evil and suffering. I went on about 90 pages, and I know there is a lot more I could’ve said. By no means did I even begin to address this topic to the extent that it probably should have been. It is a tough problem and one that takes a great deal of study and time to explain.

However, that’s where we have to be the reliable messengers the other way and go back to the source. We need to get back into the answers that Christianity provides. A lot of people feel like nobody will answer their questions, and when nobody will answer their questions, they feel like the messenger is not being reliable in the other direction. It’s like not delivering the bill. You get pretty mad at the messenger if they don’t have enough respect for you to deliver the message. For us, that means taking their questions and trying our best to go back to God’s answers.

If Christianity can’t provide the answers, we have a problem. That’s like the power company that turns off your power even though the messenger brought your payment back. That’s not fair. The great thing about Christianity is that we have a very rich intellectual tradition. The answers are there. That is what makes Christianity different than every other religion and our God different than every other god. We need to be faithful to go and get those answers. Then, the service continues. Like the way it is supposed to happen when your power stays on because you paid your bill, people will continue to develop either as Christians or words Christianity if the service continues.

When we don’t do that, we become unreliable messengers, and no one likes unreliable messenger. Then they are more likely to shoot future messengers because they have been let down by previous messengers. If my mailman failed to deliver my letter 17 times, I’m not sure that I would trust a future mailman. Even though he might be really good at his job, my trust is going to be wavering at best and demolished at worst.

If you ever wondered why I started apologetics, this is the answer. Nobody wants to be the messenger who gets shot, but I also don’t want to be the messenger who causes a future messenger to get shot. I want to do my best to provide those answers and do my job bringing information both ways. You bring the gospel to people from God’s word, and you bring their questions back to God’s word to get the answers they are looking for. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

As we look forward then to the young year, let’s try to be the types of messengers who can be trusted. You want the church to grow? That’s how it will happen.

Hopes and Dreams for 2019

At the beginning of each new year I am always struck with a sense of hope. It is always interesting because really the first week of January is a lot like the final week of December. Very little has fundamentally changed in just a week’s time, but there is still something about the new year that gets me excited about the possibilities and the potential positive changes that are going to be coming down the line.

The funny thing about it though is that I don’t really know what possibilities might actually come to be in the year to come. There are plenty of things that I would like to happen. I would love to complete my dissertation by the end of the year. I would love to put some finishing touches on a book manuscript I wrote last year. I would love to see our power soccer team get to nationals and come home with some hardware. All of these are big goals, and some are more probable than others, but they are all things that definitely could happen. On the continuum of achievability, they are much closer to the good side than the bad side.

Then there are possibilities that I hope happen but are bit more fantastical if you will. I might complete my book, and I would love to get a huge book deal to go along with it. Possible? Well, it is not impossible. It could happen. Probable? Incredibly far away from probable.

I plan on completing my dissertation, and it could possibly cause people in positions of power to consider certain elements of distributism when developing economic policy. Possible? I guess someone could be really bored and pick up a Ph.D. dissertation for some light reading before bed. Probable? Something tells me it will probably not happen.

As you have been taking a look at some of these possibilities, I imagine that you might agree with my assessment. Some could happen, some might not happen, but some are definitely much more likely to happen than others. However, at this point in the year, I really don’t know which ones may or may not happen, so it is fun to think about any and all of them. It is fun to think about what might happen if my manuscript happens to have a great deal of success or if my dissertation became part of a larger intellectual conversation. It might not happen, and it is incredibly unlikely, but there is an element of dreaming that still hits me as we begin the new year.

What’s the point of hoping and dreaming though? Why do we do it? Realistically, our hope should rise with the probability of achievability. For example, I should be more hopeful in the fact that I am going to have food for dinner tonight than in the fact that I might be able to influence a national conversation about distributism. However, I don’t know if hope is quite the same thing. What I am talking about here seems more like an expectation. If that is all that hope means, then there is no doubt that the likelihood of me having dinner tonight is much greater than the likelihood of distributism going mainstream on account of my dissertation.

Hope is greater than just expectation. There has to be possibility, of course, or else there’s no point hoping. There is no use in me hoping that the sun will turn purple. That’s not going to happen ever. We need to hope for something that is possible, but probability doesn’t really seem to make much of a difference. I can hope for something that is probable or improbable, and I am still hoping.

From the outside this type of hope may seem to be founded or unfounded. I may think that you are crazy about hoping for something that is highly improbable. You may think I am crazy if I think that my book could possibly get published somewhere. You may think that my hope is well-founded if it is something that is probable.

To me though, when I am talking about my hope, probability doesn’t really seem to enter into the conversation because they are hopes. For you, when you think about your hopes, you don’t really take into account what I think about them. They are your hopes, and my hopes are mine.

I think that’s why I am always struck by hope at this time of the year. Because of the unknown and the fact that hope does not depend on probability, I can’t help but think about all of the good things that may actually happen. But why do I bother doing it? What is the point of hope?

C. S. Lewis once said that, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”[1] There is something about hope that resonates with me. There’s something about hope that makes me want to look towards something better. The opposite of hope is fear. I look forward towards hopes that are good or fears that are not. I am looking forward at something, and like Lewis claims, I have this desire to look towards something that’s good. I want to have hopes. I don’t want to have to fears even though I do sometimes just like everyone else. Instead, I find these desires in me, and I want to find some kind of satisfaction for them.

Anyone who is familiar with the work of Lewis will understand that he is using this as an argument to point towards the existence of God. For some hopes like my dissertation, there is a way to satisfy that hope. I can finish my dissertation, and I will fulfill that desire to have my dissertation finished. The point that Lewis is making is that there are some things we desire but can’t find satisfaction here on earth. We desire pure love, but even our best friends and closest family members let us down at times. We desire justice, and our world seems to be a rather unjust place. Assuming that the universe is not just playing a prank on us, Lewis hypothesizes that there must be a way for these deeper desires to be fulfilled, and he grounds that in the person of God. When we are in God’s presence, we will find those deeper longings fulfilled.

If Lewis is right, we are people who want to hope. We are people who want to look for things to become better. Even if certain things are not probable, we have these desires. That applies to supernatural things. How probable is it that the God of the universe would die for the sins of His own creation? Not very probable, but it happened. It didn’t happen in the teachings of any other world religion. If they are right and Christianity is wrong, then this didn’t happen. How probable is it that there is something rather than nothing? Not very probable, but we are here. There are plenty of ways that nothing could have existed, but we find ourselves indisputably existing along with the world around us.

It amazes me when I think about this at the beginning of a new year. I find myself with a desire to hope for things to be good. If Lewis is right in the world is not some kind of cold place that gives me desires with no hope of fulfillment, then there must be a reason I desire this hope. I must be reason it comes back to me this time of year. I would suggest to you that no matter how improbable you might think the claims are Christianity are, it would be good for you to consider why you have hopes and dreams. Why do you bother thinking about the things you want to be better? I think it’s because we are designed with a knowledge that things can be better. We are designed with the understanding that there are things that may seem improbable and even ridiculous to the world around us, but they still can be true. I don’t think I’m the only one that has some hopes and dreams going into 2019, and I think that it is a good thing. My desire to have hopes point me towards a way to satisfy my hopes. It isn’t just the simple things that occupy my day-to-day life. It is about eternal hopes as well.

[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 136-137, Kindle Edition.



How to Change the World in 2019: Chase Virtue

Over the past two weeks we have been thinking about changing the world in 2019. Naturally, that kind of what we all do every year really make our New Year’s resolutions. We think about what might not have gone so well in the previous year, and we figure out a way to make it better. You might’ve thought that you didn’t exercise enough in 2018, so your resolution is to go to the gym three times per week in the upcoming year. You might have thought that your last year was kind of boring, so you made a resolution to actually go on a vacation somewhere new and different this year as some type of adventure.

I don’t know what your particular resolution is, but I have been suggesting a few steps that our culture in general ought to take. First, we need to reduce anger. We have become a culture of outrage, and that is not healthy for any culture. In fact, that is one of the easiest ways to dissolve a culture. Beyond that, and I would argue more importantly, we need to build towards something that is good. I suggested that building communities around common interests and concerns would help do that. Not only does it help us become more closely knit to our fellow man, but it will also encourage other people. When they see the benefits that we are reaping from community, they will want community as well. Ideally, we will create a kind of chain reaction.

There’s one last thing though that we really need, and it is a sensitive topic. However, I figure that I don’t really do any of you any good if I hold out the detail that will make this work. Reducing anger is great, and building communities are great. In fact, I would argue that are necessary. However, if we don’t do these things while we are oriented towards that which is good, they are all going to be for nothing. We need a revolution of virtue in 2019.

Virtue is hard to define. People have tried to throughout history. Judeo-Christian cultures have largely embraced objective moral virtues rooted in the character of God. Aristotle talked about virtue as being a kind of mean. In 2018, it is not difficult to find someone who would say that virtue is however you define it. Virtue is whatever is right for you. Therefore, I fully understand that when I start wading into a topic such as virtue, it is really hard to have this discussion because you might have a different definition of virtue than I do.

That being said, let me start from a different point, and we might find ourselves working backward toward virtue. That may help us.

I think most of us would agree that we want the world to be a better place. No matter how you felt about 2018, it would be a good thing if 2019 was better. I would certainly hope you don’t want the new year to be worse. And, while there are some areas that I know we would disagree on, I also know that there were plenty of things we could agree on that would definitely make this world a better place. As an obvious example, the world would be a better place if fewer people were homeless or weren’t hungry at night. If we could help those people, the world would be a better place than it is currently where they experience homelessness and hunger.

If that’s true that we want the world to be a better place, then it is not hard to move to the conclusion that we are concerned about human flourishing. My examples above are physical, but it goes well beyond that. I think we can simultaneously agree that the world would be a better place if people did not have to battle with sadness and grief. The world would be a better place if we could all find joy. We’re not just talking about physical things and physical human flourishing. We are talking about all areas of human flourishing.

Therefore, when we think about what is virtuous, there has to be a dimension of virtue that is chiefly concerned with this area. Virtuous beliefs are, among other things, going to be beliefs that encourage human flourishing. Fundamentally, I think this makes a great deal of sense. After all, wouldn’t whatever is right actually be good for humanity?

If you have a hard time accepting this, consider the things that we call bad. When you think about a natural disaster, it destroys our houses, property and sometimes takes away human lives. When you think about theft, it is taking away what belongs to someone else. When you think about abuse, it is damaging another person. Bad things are the types of things that interfere with all the good things about being human. On the flipside then, I do not think it is very much of a stretch at all to conclude that virtuous things are that which encourages human flourishing.

The question then advances to a discussion of human flourishing. How does humanity flourish? What things should we do to create the best possible situation for as many people as possible in 2019? If we can figure it out, then I think that we are moving in the right direction.

I don’t know that the answer can be that we simply have a world where we all have everything we want. While we may disagree on what exactly is good, there are unfortunately some people who want some of the bad things I outlined above. There are some people that want to harm other people or take property from other people. Therefore, we can’t simply have a definition that says that anything virtuous is whatever I want. It just doesn’t make sense unless we abandon our belief that there are some things that we can possibly want that are bad.

What then makes humanity flourish? For one thing, I think a clear result of human flourishing is that everyone has enough to meet their physical needs. When I think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it is hard to even talk about the higher levels of good when physical needs are not met. That’s a good place to start. However, there is a lot more to it than that. This might be a controversial thing to say, but you very rarely hear about people starving to death in United States of America today. I’m sure some people probably do, and that is a horrible thing, but most of us have the ability to have our physical needs met. Perhaps they are not met well or adequately, but in the richest country in the history of the world, even the poorest among us have a standard of living that goes well beyond many people in other parts of the world. Yet, we are not flourishing. Even many of your middle-class families might not say they are flourishing even though they are in a financial position where they have their physical needs met. There must be more to human flourishing than simply meeting our physical needs although I think that is part of it without a doubt.

If that’s true, then we have to get back to this idea of virtue being rooted in either psychology or morality. There may be a lot of overlap between those two fields, but it obviously goes well beyond the physical. It is partially physical, but it is also something that goes on in the mind. It is necessary that virtuous things relate to decisions we make, things that we do and beliefs that we hold.

We can’t just solve the problem of being oriented towards that which is good by meeting physical needs. We need to come up with some guidelines of the good actually is. I have already shown how it is not a good idea to base good on my own individual wants. That doesn’t work out very well, and it is self-defeating. However, I’m going to try to outline some things that help us define the good.

First, it does not cause harm without suitable justification. I have no doubt that soldiers cause harm to other people, but because they are defending vulnerable people who they love, I would call that suitable justification. Police officers apprehend people and take away their freedom. That is harm, but they are justified in doing so if the person is truly guilty of a serious crime. That’s why we cannot just make a blanket statement that that which is good does not curse harm. Sometimes there are justifiable reasons to cause harm, and we may even say that they are good reasons.

Second, that which is good thinks about the interests of other people. We all have some degree of self-interest, and it is not always a terrible thing. If we had no self-interest and gave away all of our food to the poor, our lives would be rather short. We need at least a little bit of self-interest to continue living. However, that which is good considers other people as more important than ourselves. If I am going to do something that helps me but hurts hundreds of other people, I shouldn’t do that thing. It may be in my self-interest, but, understood from a societal perspective, I think we could agree that it is not a good thing to do.

Even if we just stopped after these two points, there are plenty of applications for the year ahead. If you think I’m right, then why don’t we start to do things that don’t hurt other people and actually try to help them out? That’s a great way to start. That would orient our year towards virtue without a doubt. If we start reducing our anger and building communities in the interest of doing better for those around us, undoubtedly the world would be a better place. I think it is hard to disagree with that contention.

That being said, you might think this is all well and good, and you might be willing to go along with me so far. After all, I really said anything that would ruffle too many feathers yet I don’t think. However, we all know that there is a lot more to virtue than this. There are many more thorny issues that I haven’t even gotten close to, and they are the things where we are going to disagree. All I have proposed to you so far is that it is necessary to love your neighbor as you love yourself. That sounds awfully familiar. You have all heard that before from the mouth of Jesus Christ, but you might not have heard the first part of that same commandment.

Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was. It was kind of a trick question to be fair, but He gave a two-part answer. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:30-31, NIV).

The first part is where you are going to run away from me. You might be all for loving your neighbor. Most religions have been. If you read the appendix at the back of The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, you will find all kinds of things where people agree. This is one of them. Most of the world’s great teachers of come to this conclusion.

The first part is much more revolutionary, but we need to love God with everything we have. You might not want to love God. However, I would contend that without that, we are not going to be able to get anywhere near the virtue revolution in 2019 that I’m suggesting we need. Why?

God provides an objective basis for morality. Other gods can do that as well. Allah, for example, can make a similar claim. However, having a lawgiver is necessary if we are going to have the virtue revolution. We need to have a fixed point that we are moving towards. Otherwise, we are going to be moving in a million different directions. We might have some things we agree on as I outlined above, but there are going to be times we disagree. Without some type of point to move towards, it is really hard to make any forward progress.

Beyond that, I think if you actually test the claims that are laid out, you will find that they move us towards the situations that we all agreed on the bills. They move us towards things that are good. I’m not going to outline all of the evidence here for you in this post that I have already gone on far too long, but simply check the facts. When people live in the way Scripture outlines, you see these things come to be. Of course, take under advisement what I wrote about last week. Make sure that you are not basing your perception of what Christianity is and people who either assume or abuse membership. Study its claims yourself based on the primary source document. You might be pleasantly surprised what you find.

I hope that this post is made you think a little bit about virtue in 2019. If we don’t have virtue, reduce anger or building community is going to do all that much good. We need to make sure we are moving in the right direction, and that is what I would encourage you to consider as we start the new year tomorrow.

How to Change the World in 2019: Build Community

I sincerely believe that the world can change in 2019, but in order for it to change we first need to reduce our anger as I talked about last week, but we also need to build community. I was encouraged by a friend to check out my personality type, and I ended up being an ESTJ. Here is the first sentence of the description of my personality type, “ESTJs are representatives of tradition and order, utilizing their understanding of what is right, wrong and socially acceptable to bring families and communities together.”

Obviously, you may then believe that I am biased towards believing community is important. After all, I have a personal propensity towards thinking that community is important. Maybe it’s not as important as I perceive it to be. However, I hope that you can follow me down this chain of thought because if we are going to improve our cultural climate in 2019 and make a positive change in the world, building community is going to be one of the most important catalysts to making that happen.

First of all, how do we define community? It is used in many ways. Sometimes it seems to be more geographical. We use it to discuss the people who live around us. I am a part of the central Vermont community. While that is true, community seems to have a broader definition as well. We talk about communities on Facebook. Your favorite online message board probably has community guidelines to make sure that everyone plays by the rules. However, an online message board has no geographical constraints outside of most likely not including any members from North Korea and perhaps China depending on whether or not the government approves of your topic. Consequently, when we think about how we use this word community, it isn’t enough to just say it is a geographic area.

When we talk about communities being geographic areas though, what are we implying? I am part of the central Vermont community. That does mean that I live here, but it also means something more than that. I am part of what happens in central Vermont. I’m far from the most important part, but when a new business opens in town, I benefit from it. When we get hit by an ice storm, I suffer like everyone else. I went to elementary and high school in central Vermont. Geography matters, but it only matters because there is a common interest or a common concern. That is what causes us to build community with the people who live near us. We have common concerns.

I think that when we start to think in terms of community, we cannot neglect the concept of common interests and common concerns. You can’t just put a bunch of people in the room and assume that you have a community. You have a community when those people come together for a specific reason or cause. There could even be several reasons or causes. We talk about our churches as being religious communities. We are certainly brought together to worship God on Sunday, but often times we are also brought together for various committee meetings, music practices, food shelves, or whatever other ministries your church might have. There are multiple interests and causes that bring people to church as part of a religious community. When we talk about the disability community, we talk about people who have similar situations in life. We come together to talk about things that concern people who use wheelchairs for example. The fact that we are a community is situated on the fact that we have shared interests and concerns.

Notice that there has to be a foundation of shared belief in order for a community to develop. We need to be able to unite around something in order to build that community. That is part of why we need to develop communities in 2019 because often times I think that communities are either assumed or abused.

First, when we talk about communities being assumed, I’m talking about the situation where we assume that we have a community just because we are in the same place or may identify with the same group. When I spoke above about a necessary sharing of interests and concerns, it has to be a genuine interest or a genuine concern for a person to be a part of that community. As a rather simple example, communities develop around the love of sports teams. If you are genuinely interested in the Boston Red Sox, then I think you could make a case that you are part of that community. You are emotionally invested in the successes and failures of this baseball team. However, living in New England, I have learned that there are a lot of people who say that they cheer for the Red Sox but really don’t care about baseball at all. Boston is the team in the Northeast, so it is kind of like a default setting, but there are a lot of people who simply are not at all interested or concerned about baseball. They identify as fans, but they never think about the Red Sox.

Using the definition of community that I am operating from, these people would not be considered part of the community. This is a little bit hard to measure obviously, and it is a little bit fuzzy. Therefore, the problem of assuming community occurs when we assume that people are part of a community that they are really not. Because they are in New England, we assume that they are Boston Red Sox fans. In terms of baseball, this really doesn’t make much of a difference. However, let’s move to a more important topic. A lot of people identify as Christian, but if they really never do anything to affiliate with other Christians, a church or even read the Bible, it is not accurate to say that there are part of the Christian community. Similarly, consider people who identify as Republicans. If they do not embrace any of the points of the Republican Party platform, then they really are not part of that community. Because of how people identify, we assume things about them, or they assume that they are part of a community that they are not a part of. That is a major problem.

When we have assumed communities, we end up with distortions of the actual community. Is it fair to judge the Democratic Party by someone who may identify as a Democrat but doesn’t embrace any of the core beliefs of the party? If they do not really have any of the interests or concerns of the Democratic Party at heart, then they are not part of that community no matter what they assume or what we assume about them.

You can imagine a situation where I sit down and have a discussion with this hypothetical assumed Democrat. After talking to him, I am pretty convinced that I shouldn’t become a Democrat because he doesn’t make a good case for his position. The only problem with that situation is that I have not really addressed the core concerns of Democrats in general. I have only knocked down the position of someone who has distorted the Democratic community position. Maybe this person is assuming a position in the party, or maybe I am assuming that position in the party, but the problem remains the same. When people assume they are part of the community that they are not really a part of and do not share the same interests or concerns of the people in that community, we have a major problem.

Second, when we talk about communities being abused, I think this is a little bit easier to understand. There are situations where people might have become a part of a particular community. Once they get into that community, they might perhaps use it for their own purposes. This is slightly different than assuming community. These people are indeed members of the community that they claim to be members of, and it makes sense for them to be members of that community. That said, these are the people who take either intentional or unintentional steps to tear apart that community from the inside because many of their interests or concerns relate to themselves. They may align with the concerns and interests of the community, but they bring and ulterior motives. Being a part of a community involves a certain level of trust. You make yourself vulnerable to the other members of the community. Some people take advantage of these things and can easily cause tension or division within the community.

When that happens, there are a few potential consequences. First, the community might just fall apart. We all have seen that happen whether it be in churches or in other organizations. One person causes a major problem, and everything just fails miserably. This is normally when the person causing the division is perceived to be a prominent member of the community. Second, the community divides. This is the story of a lot of churches. Part of the community remains together, but a substantial portion departs based on this abuse. Third, and this probably has the fewest consequences, but in situations of the abuse of community, sometimes no one listens. If the community is strong enough and recognizes the abuse for what it is, the members might unite and stand against it. This happens less than we would like it to of course, but it is a potential consequence in this situation. Maybe a few people depart from the community, but in general, the community remains intact.

If we can avoid these errors of assumed community or abusive community, then we can work on developing community. We come together around common interests and concerns. This can be geographical in nature as I mentioned before, but it didn’t have to be. I am so privileged to be a part of the community that produces An Unexpected Journal. We are spread out across the country and even around the world, but we have joined together around a common interest in order to produce a publication that a lot of people seem to be enjoying and interacting with. It is different than a physical community, and there are plenty of times that I wish that we all lived in the same town and could have our meetings in person, but utilize technology to do the best we can, and it undoubtedly is a community that I am a part of and I value greatly.

These are the kind of things that need to happen if we are going to change the world. It is rare for one person to be able to change the world all by him or herself. Some people have, but as a general rule, it normally takes at least a small group of people dedicated to a cause to make a significant change. The vision may start with one person, but that person needs other people to come alongside him or her and buy into that mission. To come back to talking about our publication again, we have had a group of people committed to this project from the beginning. It is not just one person pulling the entire weight, but it has been a venture of a lot of people working together.

I mentioned this reliance on community because we live in an increasingly alienated society. We don’t think that we need anybody, and we don’t want help from anybody. Sometimes we even reject the help of people who would be willing to work with us because we do not absolutely agree on every issue. We demand absolute ideological purity on every issue, and we are somewhat surprised to find out that each of us are little bit different. We might agree on 99% of things, but at least I have yet to find someone who agrees with me on everything. That demand of ideological purity then causes us to reject the help of those that we could work with and stands directly opposed to the development of community. This tendency towards isolation and alienation under the guise of embracing independence causes people to feel disillusioned.

As a result, when we start to come together as a community, this disillusionment will become evident. People will realize that they are missing something and want to fill in that void. Community can do that for so many people. They realize that they don’t like being isolated, and they want to come together with people for a set of common interests or concerns. Once people realize the difficult situation that they have put themselves in by isolating, they want something bigger than themselves and ultimately something better.

That’s where we have to come in as we think about these issues going forward into 2019. Are we the types of people were going to identify these interests and concerns? Once we identify them, are we going to be the type of people who are willing to help develop a community around those issues? I can’t necessarily change the world by myself, but if I assist in the creation of community, I will be doing something to help change the world, and I think that is what we need to see more of in the year ahead. It obviously is not easy, and I have outlined some tough issues in this post, but they are the obstacles we will have to overcome if we truly want to start to make 2019 better than 2018.