Archives For Christians to Know

It’s a simple but counterintuitive finding.

As Cal Newport tells it in Deep Work, when University of Chicago colleagues Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson invented a psychological testing technique called the experience sampling method, they were eager to find out what kinds of activities truly gave people joy and fulfillment.

The experience sampling method involved giving test subjects a pager and then randomly paging the subjects during a day. When they were paged, the subjects were to immediately record what they were doing and what their feelings were. This method, as opposed to relying on test subjects to keep a diary on their own throughout a day, was found to be far more effective in prompting people to accurately document the connection between different kinds of activities and their state of mind.

Here is what Csikzentmihalyi wrote of their fundamental finding:

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s mind or body is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

This prompted him to write the book Flow about that particular state of being. Flow I

Our instincts, of course, are to seek happiness and contentment in relaxation, fun, and doing as little as possible. There is, of course, nothing wrong with relaxing. We need downtime. Even the occasional binge watching of a TV series. Yet, being fully engaged in something – physical training, carrying out a challenging work project, figuring out a complex jigsaw puzzle – that pushes us and stretches us is actually an essential ingredient of a full life.

This, interestingly enough, is what the whole Christian life offers.

When, with God’s help, we commit ourselves to living out God’s love and purposes in all phases of our lives and the life of the world, we are immersed in something both challenging and worthwhile. This will translate into new consciousness of our choices and our habits every day of our life. It may mean taking on projects and challenges at a larger scale. These projects or challenges may well be way beyond what we believe we can handle with the skills and experience we’ve developed on our own.

This is what I believe the Jesus was talking about when he talked about the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven. He modeled it for us. Committing ourselves to it, paradoxically, can give us our best moments in life. Not necessarily easy. Or relaxing. But it can make us fully alive to who we should be.

This is what I would call the “kingdom flow.”

A great example is Bob Muzikowski. As he describes it, he was saved and made sober on the same day. When he subsequently moved to Chicago from New York to get away from reminders of his former drinking life, he started a little league on the city’s troubled Near West Side that attracted, to his amazement, 300 youth the very first time he put out notices about it.

His dive into a larger purpose did not end there. His professional life continued in the financial world until he began to talk deeply with Bob Buford and then joined the Halftime Institute when Buford launched it. In this process, Muzikowski found that he continued to be drawn to the needs of the communities he had experienced through the Near West Little League he had helped establish. So he gave up his comfortable financial career to convert an abandoned Catholic elementary school on the Near West side into the Chicago Hope Academy, a college and life preparatory high school with a strong Christian faith element. Muzikowski purposefully developed it to be more affordable for poor and minority youth than typical private high schools. He also recruits the best teachers he can find from around the country.

This has not been easy work.

“If I hadn’t had a Halftime journey, my life would have been easier and less stressful today,” Muzikowski says, “but it would definitely be a lot more shallow.”

Not everyone may feel the calling to do something that meaningful on that scale. But in every life I am convinced there are needs and purposes that God is offering us to be engaged with and choices to make every day. Responding will move us beyond our own interests and needs while tapping the talents and skills we have and even those we don’t know we have.

When we move from faith in God and what God offers to us through Jesus to a deep commitment to living with God’s purposes firmly in mind every moment, we go from getting to the starting line to actually running the race of which the Apostle Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 9:23-25.

This is an essential point of what I mean by the phrase “whole faith.” When Jesus said he was the way, the truth, and the life, he was not pointing only to life after death. He was, as I understand it, pointing to a true life that begins when we synch our lives with God’s purposes. That true life begins in the here and now, and that God-filled life will never end. After death, it will be even more glorious and complete. This is the new and abundant life that Jesus promised. Being in this kingdom flow give us the sense of flow and challenging, immersive purpose that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described.

Our churches should help us understand this and develp the kingdom flow in our lives.

I know I need that help at times. The brokeness of the world, incuding the dysfunction of how we treat God’s earth, is at times overwhelming. When I don’t hear churches calling us to bring God’s kingdom into this world to the best degree possible, I am dismayed. I even find myself questioning my faith.

But when I come across Christians like Bob Muzikowski, my spirits rebounds, and my faith grows. I am encouraged, too, that there are growing numbers of Christians in the kingdom flow who are working in their own ways to change how we treat God’s earth in the process of growing food from it. Like Bob Muzikowski, they have taken on missions that are challenging and require of them tremendous sacrifice. Gabe Brown, Joel Salatin, and Ray Archuleta are just some of them.

The testimonies of their lives and the impacts of their lives say a great deal about what the whole Gospel offers to you and the world and about its truth beyond its words.

Steve Barg is an example of a Christian working to protect and renew God’s earth through a career in land conservation. I worked for Steve for ten years when he was the executive director of Conserve Lake County, a non-profit organization based in Grayslake, Illinois. He had come to that position after using his gifts as an environmental educator for the Park District of Highland Park as well as for Lake Forest Open Lands. Steve is a dear friend who has a contagious enthusiasm for the beauty of the living world around us, particularly for birds. He and his wife Susan now live in Elizabeth, Illinois, in Jo Daviess County, which is at the northwest corner of the Prairie State.

Steve Barg, Executive Director of the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation

Steve Barg, Executive Director of the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation

Nathan: Can you tell me about your current profession and the kinds of projects you and your organization area currently working on?

Steve: I serve as executive director of the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation (JDCF). JDCF’s mission is to preserve land for the lasting well-being of people and wildlife. This includes protecting high quality wildlife habitat for rare species, scenic overlooks, working lands and Native American Heritage sites and providing public access to these sites. We have a staff of 10, eight full-time and two part-time. It’s interesting – there’s no local government entity that preserves open land and make it available to the public. So, as a non-profit, we serve a unique and valuable role for the county in terms of acquisition, creating access, and opening the preserves to the public.

But we also do a lot more. We also rally communities around conservation projects and engaging people on the land and with the land. One example is the Wapello Preserve in Hanover. Hanover’s a town of 800 that is suffering and depressed like a lot of small towns in Middle America. They were, as a community, dead set against us coming in and purchasing land. They didn’t know who we were and what we did. I wasn’t there at the time, but Christie (our staff point person on the project at the time) tells me that at the first few meetings they had with the community, around 200 people filled the community center. They came mostly because they were curious but a lot of them were anti-conservation. We heard things like: “You’re taking land off the tax rolls.” “It’s good farmland.” “What do you want to do with this land?” And now, eight years later, the community fully embraces this preserve. They have a Friends of Wapello Preserve volunteer group that stewards the property and wants to do more. They even want to build an interpretive center next to the property.

I’m also proud of the work we’re doing to preserve Native American heritage sites, which is something that not every land conservation group does. There are lots of sites along the Mississippi and Apple Rivers – burial grounds, effigy mounds, village sites, and ceremonial sites. There is a rich history here of people living on the land.

And the Driftless area is just a beautiful landscape and certainly a place worthy of protection. We’re part of the Upper Mississippi River Blufflands Alliance, a group of land trusts that works in the Driftless area. It’s a neat collaboration that’s developed out of that.

Nathan: What inspired you to pursue a career in conservation? And how did that relate to your Christian faith? Was there a connection?

Steve:  It was probably my great-grandfather, my mother, and my father. They were the three influencers in my life. My great-grandfather introduced me to gardening and working in the soil. My mother just loved birds, and we lived right next to a field that had lots of birds. We always had binoculars on the dining room table along with a bird book. And my father just loved to camp and be outdoors and loved the North Woods but liked open space near home, too.

I would say right off the bat I don’t ever remember not understanding that there was a connection between the natural world and my belief in a created world. I think that understanding became more consciously alive when those beliefs were challenged by a professor in college who was clearly not Christian and in fact blamed the Christian faith for a lot of the degradation of the environment, at least in the United State and the Western hemisphere.

Susan and I have always been open to people staying with us. We had a “missionary kid” from France – Keith Schuler – stay with us for a year while he attended the grad program at Aurora University where I was also going to school, We did Bible studies together, and he really challenged me and I challenged him to really explore our faith and our environmental interests. I think we were both feeling angst inside, a dissonance. We were committed to both an environmental ethic and a Christian life, and we saw those at odds in a lot of ways.

Nathan: So how did your Christian faith shape how you approach conservation and you lead the organizations that you’ve led?

Steve: I think it’s given me a rootedness and a purpose in what I’m doing and a feeling like there’s a bigger thing going on than just preserving land or getting people engaged in the land. There’s certainly a faith element for me. It’s just deep in my bones that this world was created for life. I love all the different forms of life. I’m saddened and diminished when life is degraded. That’s just deep in me.

Nathan: Steve, one of the things that stood out for me working for you was that you really embraced the spirit of each person you worked with, whether it was a staff member or a landowner or a board member. There was this openness and this humility that you had. I think people sensed that this guy has integrity. This person cares a lot. He’s passionate about what he believes. You brought together professional skill but also heart. When your heart is shaped by God in Christ I think it resonates in a way that people pick up even if it’s not on a conscious frequency. I think that really came through loud and clear from you.

Steve: I guess I know a lot of non-Christians who are also passionate and deeply caring and who are authentic people. Again, for me and for other Christians, there’s a purpose there. I believe we’re called to care for Creation, to care for one another, to care for our neighbors as ourselves, and my belief is that our neighbors are all living things. So for me that’s where I believe the rootedness and the purpose stand out in a different way than just passion and heart. I think you’ve seen that, too, in people you’ve worked with. There’s a different center to our approach to work.

Nathan: What parts of the Bible have been most inspiring to you as they relate to your life in general and to your conservation convictions in particular?

Steve: I’m never good with memorizing verses but certainly the first few chapters of Genesis say so much about Creation and its goodness and its wholeness. What really stands out are the big themes. That God created the world. That it was good. That we sinned and turned away from God. That we live in a broken world and that brokenness is between you and me, between us and God, and between us and Creation. So I see that brokenness in all of those relationships. Part of that is really painful because I feel like it doesn’t matter what I do. I can’t fix it. On the other hand, I also feel that God calls us to mend broken relationships and reconcile broken relationships and love one another. And that’s never going to be perfect either, and yet that’s what he calls us to do. I don’t know where this all ends other than God’s promise that He’ll make everything right. But sometimes you look at things like climate change and human population growth – not a lot of hope there.

Nathan: What are some of the challenges you struggle with as someone who believes that how we treat God’s earth really matters?

Steve: Not finding a home or identity in the church and always feeling a bit like an outlier. And not knowing how to change that. It frustrates me and it’s discouraging that the Church hasn’t been more outspoken. You and I have spoken about this – you can liken it to the Church’s response to slavery or the response to civil rights in the 1960s. Where is the Church in those big issues of our recent history? And where was the Church in our treatment of Native Americans? Yes, in our history you’ll find incredible stories of Christian brothers and sisters fighting against the odds and being beacons of light. But you don’t see a whole Church response. It’s frustrating.

Nathan: Amen. Can you share with me a story or a moment in your life that made you think, “This is what it’s all about”? Not theory. Not theology. Just a moment that struck your heart.

Steve: Truthfully, those things happen regularly to me. Where I’m living now I hear and see pileated woodpeckers daily. I hear and see eagles daily. I hear and see owls almost daily. I have woodcocks doing their sky display outside my back door. I have bluebirds all over the place. That’s what I love about where I’m living now. I feel like there’s hope there. There’s diversity there. But I’ll share two specific moments.

One is just an ethereal moment canoeing on the Wisconsin River in October. We were camped on an island, and large flocks of sandhill cranes came in about dusk. We saw them flying over and heard them land down river where we were headed the next day. I happened to be reading Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. I was reading about October, and a lot of the things he was talking about were happening. I was hearing things or seeing things or smelling things that he was writing about because we were right near where he had been writing those things. The next morning several of us got up before the sunrise and got into the canoe with flashlights and got into the water right as dawn was coming. We were in a pea soup fog. How weird it was to be on a big river in a pea soup fog because you had no idea where the shore was. You had no idea if there were any obstacles in front of you. And then all of a sudden we realized we were in the midst of a huge flock of sandhills standing in shallow water all around us. We just took the paddles out of the water and floated with the current. It was eerily quiet. The birds were these shadowy figures. And then one started trumpeting and another and another and then within fifteen seconds the whole group was trumpeting and it was loud and raucous.

Then they all took off, and they were out of sight in a second or two because it was so foggy, but you could hear them rise. It was almost as if you could hear them when they got out of the fog that was in the valley and were then in the sunlight. They had been in the same situation we were – they couldn’t see anything – and then all of a sudden they could. It was just magical. It felt spiritual. It felt wonderful. Maybe that’s why it’s stayed with me.

Steve on the Mississippi River near Hanover, Illinois, with his daughter Hannah and wife Susan in the background.

Steve on the Mississippi River near Hanover, Illinois, with his daughter Hannah. Steve’s wife, Susan, is in the background.

I think the other one had to do with my son Aaron’s death and grieving and healing and how that was connected to the land and how all that came together for me at Aaron’s Prairie (a piece of open land that Conserve Lake County came to own just north of Libertyville). It was a time when I felt dead spiritually, physically. That winter morning, you and other staff from Conserve and myself went out and spread prairie plant seeds on the ground as part of the restoration of the land back to natural habitat. I could barely walk from side to side because I was so physically spent. And just that metaphor of the prairie returning to what it used to be and my grief seeing that there was hope in those seeds – it was just a very powerful metaphor for my own healing. That was so human. That was you and me and Sarah and Tim and Cathy being a community with the land. That was a very meaningful group for me. It is still a deeply meaningful place for me. There was a very interesting whole connection of life there – the human, the spiritual, the land, the plants, the animals – that felt good at a time when I was lost.

Nathan: What you would like to see Christians do in their lives and through their churches to be better stewards of God’s earth?

Steve: You can’t be stewards of God’s earth unless you understand you’re stewards of God’s earth.

I went up to this program at Sinsinawa, a Dominican Sister’s place in Wisconsin. It’s on a geologic mound called Sinsinawa Mound. It stands out from the landscape. It’s visible even from where we live in Illinois. They were doing a series on contemplative ecology, and the first workshop was just reading and reflection during a full-day retreat. One activity involved eight short readings – each a paragraph long – and you were supposed to walk around and read each selection, silently but with the group. You were then to write your reflections in your journal. And one of the readings was about stewardship not being enough, that thinking of ourselves as stewards of God’s Creation is custodial rather than an all-in commitment. It made me start thinking about that word “stewardship.” Is it full enough? And I don’t think it is.

So I’ll end with this. A lot of the Dominican sisters come to this place called Sinsinawa. They’re women in their retired years who have lived a life of service, who are very liberal thinkers, who openly question the Catholic Church at every turn, who are progressive people. If I could go to church like the two experiences I’ve had there, that would be wonderful. There’s this huge, round, beautiful church building. It’s interestingly designed. There’s also a really interesting mix of people grounded in faith, people open to questioning their faith, people who are committed to the environment, people who are committed to art and literature and music. One of the things they did before I went to this class was they spent four weeks looking at Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment. That milieu felt right for me.

But I don’t think I’ve answered your question.

Nathan: Not really, but I think I can find a question that that would be the answer for. (Laughter) Is there anything you’d encourage Christians to do?

Steve: Get involved with the land. Start a garden. Help restore a piece of land. I think that’s a start. Get your hands in the earth.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to speak at length on the phone with a Christian I had met at a gathering of conservationists and other community members in central Illinois. He and his wife are active members of their church. They also happen to care deeply for God’s earth.

This wasn’t always the case.

The turning point came in 2005 when he had back surgery while living in Ohio and couldn’t walk for some time. When he began to recover, he made it a goal to walk all 16 Metro parks in Columbus. The experience renewed his love of nature. Later, when he retired and returned with his wife to Illinois, he completed a Master Naturalist program. This, in turn, led him to get further involved with conservation through a local non-profit organization that preserves and restores natural areas. As part of their desire to live as simply as they could, they bought a seven-acre property, built a passive solar home, and have been restoring the land to native natural habitat.

Yet, he has found that not everyone at their church sees the connection between the Christian faith and the his and wife’s attentiveness to Creation.

He vividly remembers being asked by a fellow church member, “Why do you waste your time with that?”

In Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for CreationEdward Brown recounts a similar experience. He was having a conversation over coffee with a friend he deeply respected who had been the principal of a missionary school that both Brown and his wife had attended early in their lives. When Brown describes the mission organization he had founded (Care of Creation) and his personal commitment to environmental missions, he could tell this friend was distressed by all that he was saying. Here’s how Brown recounts his friends’ words to him: “He finally put down his cup of coffee, looked me in the eye and said, “Ed, what in the world does this have to with the Great Commission?””Our Fathers World #3484 IVP FINALOur Fathers World #3484 IVP Version

If you’re Christian and you’ve expressed a concern for God’s earth, you’ve probably faced something like this moment yourself. So how do you answer those questions?

The following excerpt from Our Father’s World, published by InterVarsity Press, will be helpful for you to read. You’ll see that Brown places a commitment to preserving God’s earth within the context of a whole Christian life.

He also pushes back. He highlights the negative consequences that unfold when Christian missions don’t present a complete faith that includes a commitment to shepherding God’s living world.

Here is the excerpt:

If you’ve stayed with me this long, you have a pretty good idea of why I believe caring for God’s creation has everything to do with that final command that Jesus gave his disciples: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). I’ve made a case for full, creation-restoring redemption. But my friend’s question is a serious one. He has seen the primary message of the gospel of Jesus Christ diluted by various kinds of “social gospel,” and he believes he has some reasons to be nervous. Is this just one effort to make a timeless gospel relevant, focusing on human needs but cutting out the essential heart of redemption and forgiveness of sins through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross? The history of Christian ministry is littered with the carcasses of organizations that attempted to adapt to the needs of the moment and in the process lost the spiritual power that made them unique.

So how is caring for creation different? The first part of the answer requires a review of the foundation laid in the first part of this book. Christian missions is the effort of the whole church to extend Christ’s ministry of reconciliation (see 2 Corinthians 5:11-21) to all nations and all peoples, making disciples and “teaching them to observe” all of Jesus’ teachings and commandments (Matthew 28:20), in effect teaching them to live in ways that will reverse the curse of sin throughout all of God’s creation.

We’ve seen that this process involves a restoration of each of the relationships broken at the time of Adam and Eve’s sin: our relationship with God is restored in salvation; our relationship with ourselves in sanctification; our relationship with each other in koinonia, the restored community of the church; and our relationship with nonhuman creation in learning to live in harmony with it again, a process reflected in the ancient Hebrew word shalom….. If, then, the purpose of Christian missions or ministry is the accomplishment of this kind of full redemption, including creation care is not a distraction from the main goal. It is the goal.

Countries like Kenya have experienced more than one hundred years of missionary presence, but their current state shows no improvement. Depending on what you want to measure, Kenya is possibly a great deal worse off than before the gospel arrived. Is there a correlation between this and the truncated view of the Christian missions we’ve promoted for the last century? If the biblical goal is shalom, but we thought we were finished when we delivered a simple message of salvation, it’s no wonder things haven’t worked out quite as well as we might have expected. Bad theology – or at least incomplete theology – will always give bad results.

Jesus warned his disciples of the dangers of casting out a demon and leaving the “house” swept, cleaned but unguarded. That demon returns with seven others more powerful than itself (see Luke 11:24-25). We have driven out the demons of paganism with a lightweight gospel of personal salvation. Today the churches in these countries are reaping the harvest. If we’re honest, the results of this are evident not just in the daughter churches of missionary-receiving countries, but also in many of the mother churches that sent missionaries out in the first place. Bringing creation care and missions together will restore the theological integrity of the missionary enterprise.

Who is the “them” in this sermon excerpt?  An unfortunate group of people?  A community in some Third World country?  No.  The pastor in this case is referring to the trees, waterfalls, oceans, and other living things around us.

That and other provocative insights can be found in this sermon by Reverend Timothy Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. I urge you to listen to it with an open heart and mind.

In the sermon, Reverend Keller unpacks the larger meaning of Genesis 9:1-17 in ways you have probably not heard before. There has been a tendency I’ve long noticed for Christians to highlight only the covenant between humanity and God in this chapter and to neglect the significance of the fact that the covenant is also with all of life. But Reverend Keller asserts that it is actually outlining three great relationships we must pursue — with Creation, with fellow humans, and with God.

tim-keller-head-shot-2011

Reverend Timothy Keller

Here is one other sequence of Keller’s words in the sermon:

“The Bible says Creation is speaking to you — the stars, the waterfall, the animals, the trees.  They have a voice.They’re telling you about the glory of God. And its your job as stewards of Creation, as stewards of nature to make sure they keep speaking, to not let their voice go out.  It’s your job to help them be themselves…. It’s your job to join the choir.”

We are in a world full of life and energy, in other words, and that life has been part of the God’s story and has its own unique value to God. What’s more, we are not complete if we are not attentive and in positive relationship with that life.

I continue, by the way, to be impressed by Keller’s preaching and writing.

One of the more insightful books I’ve read about the Christian books was his Walking with God through Pain and Suffering which I studied during a particularly difficult period of my life. He consistently reveals ways of understanding God and life in ways that are rooted in the Bible and yet have a nuance and spirit to them that are uniquely rich and robust.

P.S. I want to give special thanks to Ray Archuleta for recommending that this sermon to me.  I attended a full-day session on soil health farming presented by Ray Archuleta and Gabe Brown at the 2016 MOSES Organic Farming Conference in February. Two things struck me about Ray during that day of instruction: his unflagging passion (seasoned with wit and powerful stories) for building the life of soil as the central focus of good farming and his recommendation of the book The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation by Richard Bauckham. I recently reached out to him, and we had a wonderful conversation over the phone about his Christian faith. 

My sons and I have been watching many of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament games, and one of the things I’ve been struck by is the intense teamwork. Recognizing that just one loss will bring their season to a sudden end, the players give everything they have together. They exult in each other’s successes. And they press each other hard to do things right even under tremendous pressure.

Shouldn’t church be the same way?

But when the Barna Group surveyed Christians across the country a few years ago, they discovered that “…only 5% of people say their church does anything to hold them accountable for integrating biblical beliefs and principles into their lives.”

George Barna, the study’s director, said this of those findings:

“One of the cornerstones of the biblical concept of community is that of mutual accountability. But Americans these days cherish privacy and freedom to the extent that the very idea of being held accountable by others—even those with their best interests in mind, or who have a legal or spiritual authority to do so—is considered inappropriate, antiquated and rigid.”

It’s in that context that I describe the first of many features of a whole faith church.

(As background, in Needed – A Whole Faith Church, I asserted that preserving and renewing God’s earth will only become part and parcel of what it means to live a Christian life when churches have a whole faith woven into their worship, theology, and culture. I’m beginning to work out what that would look like.)

Ironically, the first feature I’ve identified does not explicitly relate to God’s earth at all. It’s this simple thing – membership in a whole faith church would not be a casual association but a deep commitment to being a follower of Jesus, to the church, and to other members of the church.

Membership, in other words, would mean something profound in a person’s life.

An article in Leadership Journal included this provocative statement:

“The church should be less like a cruise ship and more like a battleship, says Ken Sande of Peacemaker Ministries. Rather than emphasizing their casual atmosphere and fun activities, Sande says it’s time for churches to raise the bar, to focus on a serious mission, and ensure that every person aboard serves a vital function.”

To get a sense of what that might look like, I’d encourage you to read Call to Commitment by Elizabeth O’Connor. First published in 1963, this book chronicles the beginnings and development of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC which attracted considerBook imageable attention for its unusual approach to church life and the devotion of its members to living out that faith together out in their community.

The leading figure in the origin of this church was Gordon Cosby, and one of his formative experiences was serving as a chaplain to the 101st Airborne during World War II. Cosby discovered that the average self-avowed Christian in the unit wasn’t ready to deal with moral pressure and difficulty of any sort. The faith these Christian men expressed loyalty to and the way they lived had been shaped more by the culture of their family and community than by a deep personal commitment to God.

A turning point was when Cosby led a man named Joe to profess a faith in Jesus. Cosby was delighted and anxious to see what a difference that faith would make in Joe’s life. When Cosby checked in with Joe’s commanding officer a short time later and told him of Joe’s conversion, however, he was in for a surprise.

“If Joe’s a Christian, “ he said, “nobody in the company knows it.”

So when Cosby and a tight-knit core of other committed Christians began to come together to form the Church of the Saviour in a house in Washington, D.C., fostering Christian integrity was a critical concern.

The following are key elements of what membership involved at the Church of the Saviour.

Extensive education requirements: A person desiring to be a member was required to take six courses in their School for Christian Living. In addition, as part of the process to becoming a member, a sponsor was chosen for that person who could get to know the member on a deeper level and help the member develop further in his or her spiritual life.

Ongoing growth in faith life: The School for Christian Living offered elective courses to enable people who had become members to continue to grow in their faith. Personal study programs were also encouraged.

Sacrificial commitment: Sacrificial giving was expected and all members participated in a mission group that met regularly not only carry out that mission activity but to also worship, study, and pray.

All members are ministers: Each member of the church was seen as a non-professional minister. For this reason there was a concerted effort to identify the particular ministry gifts of each member and to find ways for those gifts to be expressed in the church. Through an ordination service for laity, the church as a whole confirmed a clear role that the particular member was called to fill.

Powerful vows of membership: The book details the vows that the first members took when the church was launched in 1947. Here are just some of the statements:

“I unreservedly and with abandon commit my life and destiny to Christ, promising to give Him a practical priority in all the affairs of life. I will seek first the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness.”

“I commit myself, regardless of the expenditures of time, energy, and money to becoming an informed, mature Christian.”

“I believe that God is the total owner of my life and resources. I give God the throne in relation to the material aspect of my life. God is owner. I am the ower. Because God is a lavish giver I too shall be lavish and cheerful in my regular gifts.”

Each year, by the way, existing members renewed their membership vows as a way to remind each other of what they are committed to and their commitments to each other.

Living a Christian life: Members were expected to live a Christian life. Here’s how Gordon Cosby put it in one of his sermons:

“It is fundamental to everything which we do as Christians, that we personally develop a style of life which is recognizably Christian. This means that in our family groups, in our businesses and our government offices, when we walk in, a light goes on.”

In other words, a deep commitment to God will lead to a common Christian culture that is expressed by Christians in everyday life decisions 24/7.

The only way a church will be strong enough, however, to be a community of people where God’s ways are lived out in every phase of life (including the cherishing of God’s world) is if being a member of that church really means something.

An early brochure about membership in the Church of the Savior highlighted the danger of being a fully committed member of their church along with other disciples of Jesus: “It is indeed dangerous for if one becomes committed to this way, all life will be different and every sphere of one’s existence involved in the change.”

When was the last time your church described membership as a dangerous thing?

I realize as I write this that a sense of intense mission is one of the things I find missing in the churches my family has visited as we look for a church home.

On the other hand, I realize, too, that intensity and deep commitment to church have too often given birth to cults, abuses, and narrow, harsh interpretations of the Christian way.

Nevertheless, the Bible and many Christian thinkers have long asserted that becoming who God wants us to be happens best and most thoroughly when we are in close, committed, loving fellowship with others.

And for everything else in a whole faith church to work, that closeness, that commitment, that willingness to be accountable to each other must be present.

This is a leap of faith we must be willing to take.