Notes from the Pastors

Periodic reflections from Pastors Tim and Richard.

November 4, 2024

Essay Series: Efficiency

#6: Final Thoughts

A few final thoughts on efficiency.

Action Steps (or Inaction Steps)

As we’re into the final two months of 2024 and are starting to think ahead to the kind of people we want to be in 2025, some of us probably need to prepare to take some (seemingly inefficient) steps. Steps like:

• Pruning – cutting some “branches” from your life so that the other branches might bear more fruit (Jn. 15:2).

• Slowing down – laying down our desires for “great things” for ourselves and being content instead with what God has for us (Is. 45:5).

• Replacing some activity with prayer – because “What a man is on his knees before God, that he is, and nothing more” (Robert Murray M’Cheyne).

The Spirit of the Age

At the beginning of this series, I made a case that efficiency is one aspect of the “spirit of our age,” meaning that it’s central to the “defining spirit or mood” of our time. But that word “spirit” can take on another sense that is also applicable here.

In the unseen realm, spiritual beings are actively working to influence, empower, and turn human events. These are angels and demons, demons being “evil spirits” or fallen angels who now do the devil’s work of stealing, killing, and destroying. While we might imagine them acting in dramatic fashion the way they do in Hollywood, their work is usually far more subtle.

• Even though Peter believed he was just looking out for Jesus by wanting to keep him from death in Matthew 16, Jesus recognized (and named!) that the spirit animating Peter’s words. Peter must have been shocked to hear Jesus say to him, “Get behind me, Satan!” Yet Satan is exactly who had prompted and encouraged him to focus on “human concerns.”

• Same with the kings and kingdoms of this world. They aren’t inherently evil, but the evil one, whom Jesus calls “the prince of this world” (Jn. 12:31), takes every opportunity he can to employ their worldly power for his diabolical ends. That’s why last week’s passage (Dan. 8:24) could say that Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ power was “not his own.”

So it is with efficiency. It’s not inherently evil, but the evil one is happy to use efficiency to pull us away from Christ – to get us focused on “human concerns,” to justify and rationalize our sin, to reshape our view of God such that we make him out to be a genie and to reshape our view of other humans such that we make them out to be tools we can use. When we say efficiency can become another god, we mean that quite literally!

Power

It seems to me that, while we love how our speed fosters efficiency, speed is an enemy of spiritual power. We’ll drill down into this more in our sermon series in 2025, but briefly:

• In our age of shallow stimulation, people are yearning for depth and power. We ache for the transcendent, for something that’s outside the frame of our tightly-ordered, fully-explained existence.

• That power/transcendence is not able to be manufactured by our own effort (even by our most efficient efforts). Without the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit, all we’re able to produce is a Christianized version of the best of what the world already has to offer (entertainment, education, community, etc.)

• The only way to access the Spirit’s power is to slow down and take the “inefficient” step of leaving good work undone to instead ask God for his power.

The preachers hearing from congregants “How could you have known my situation? You were speaking right to me”… the Christians hearing from neighbors “When you texted me to say you were praying for me, it was at exactly the moment when I received some bad news”… these aren’t the Christians who maximized their working hours; they are the Christians who accessed the power of the Spirit. And in my experience, those I know who most evidently exhibit this sort of spiritual power are those who move slowly.

Tim Higgins

OCTOBER 21, 2024

Essay Series: Efficiency

#5: Efficiency and Prayer

The relationship between efficiency and prayer deserves a reflection of its own. But the best use of your time (see what I did there?) on this topic is not to read anything I could say, but rather to read the essay called “Work and Prayer” by C.S. Lewis. I invite you to do so now:

https://redeeminggod.com/work-and-prayer-by-c-s-lewis/

Some of us might want to quibble with Lewis’s articulation of human free will, but for the purposes of this essay series, I just want to highlight a fatal blow he deals to the ultra-efficient person’s aversion to prayer.

How many of us have thought: “I only have X minutes. I feel guilty about not using this time to pray, but it’s going to be more productive (and therefore more God-honoring) to do something instead!” (And by the way, once we’ve used this line of reasoning to justify 10 minutes of work instead of 10 minutes of prayer, it can easily be extrapolated to justify a full day of work completely devoid of prayer.)

But that’s where Lewis calls out our inconsistency.

Say you’re preparing to lead a Bible study. Whether you spend an extra ten minutes working on sharpening your lesson plan or spend that same ten minutes praying over the lesson, you’re trying to bring about a desired outcome that God hasn’t yet seen fit to grant (encouragement, challenge, edification transformation in the lives of group members, etc.). The question I’m usually asking in that situation is: “Which is more likely to bring about the desired outcome?” But I’m not sure that’s the best question. Remember Lewis:

“The kind of causality we exercise by work is, so to speak, divinely guaranteed, and therefore ruthless.'“

This is what makes me want to work efficiently! “… You can be sure that if you pull up one weed that one weed will no longer be there” – I love that sense of control, that I’m doing something measurable to increase the likelihood of a favorable outcome. But actually, this doesn’t mean work has a stronger causality than prayer. It may be pretty near “guaranteed” to achieve what I expected it to achieve (one less weed in the garden, or one less unclear statement in the lesson), but what if God had something better to be achieved that was only available through prayer? By praying instead of pulling the weed, there might be one more weed in the field, but there might also be a harvest beyond what would have been naturally possible, even after the most efficient work.

Prayers are not always – in the crude, factual sense of the word – “granted.” This is not because prayer is a weaker kind of causality, but because it is a stronger kind. When it “works” at all it works unlimited by space and time. That is why God has retained a discretionary power of granting or refusing it; except on that condition prayer would destroy us.

If we really knew what prayer could do (or more accurately, what God is inclined to do in response to our prayers), we’d be convinced that the most “efficient” thing we ever do is to pray.

And reflect on this: all of the above is only an answer to the ultra-efficient person’s aversion to prayer on their terms, appealing to what they already value (i.e. results). The (arguably) more important reasons to prioritize prayer strike at the root of efficiency itself, like:

• How can we be confident that we’re engaged in the right endeavors in the first place if we haven’t sought God about them?

• What good will it be to have done all sorts of things for God but not have a relationship with Him? (Answer: no more good than it will be to have done all sorts of things for our spouses but not have a relationship with them.)

In the end, a surefire test of whether the quest for efficiency has become an idol is this simple question:

How is your prayer life?

If we’re too busy working for God to take time to meet with Him in prayer, efficiency has become a higher love than our love for God himself… and it needs to be dethroned.

Next time: Final thoughts on efficiency

Tim Higgins

OCTOBER 14, 2024

Essay Series: Efficiency

#4: My Journey with Efficiency

Hopefully I haven’t given the wrong impression with this series: I’m not at all writing from a place of mastery on this one. This has been a lifelong struggle for me.

Growing up, I gathered that one of the highest compliments someone can receive is this one: “He’s a machine.” In other words, “He doesn’t seem bound by the normal constraints that hold ‘mere’ humans back. He’s maximally productive.” What higher praise could someone hear? Wouldn’t we all love our teammates, our doctors, our accountants, our group project partners, our sales reps to be machines?

And I got that compliment a lot. Early in life, my brain started scanning for ways to maximize efficiency and squeeze every drop out of life. If I did my Math homework on the drive to youth group, I could go straight from football practice to youth group on Wednesday nights. If I saved my second period English essay to do during first period History (because that teacher lectured too slowly anyway), I didn’t have to do it the night before. I got good at figuring out what was going to be on tests; then I wouldn’t waste my time learning things that weren’t going to be tested. You can imagine how excited I was about video lectures in college classes – I could save those for the weekend and then watch them on 2.5x speed.

Junior year of college, my apartment-mates started asking if I ever slept. That’s because my most normal pattern was something like 2:30am-4:30am sleep, then wake up for football workouts, then 8am-10am nap, then class, then 1pm-3pm nap, then football practice. (I didn’t have to come back home for naps, because I could easily fall asleep on the couches in the locker room.) In all, I was sleeping for three two-hour periods a day (which I now realize is not exactly in line with medical recommendations). To me, this was the best of all worlds. I could maximize each day, having fun when there was fun to be had and sleeping at the times when there wasn’t anything fun to do.

And it “worked.” I was able to be involved to the maximum in church and parachurch ministries, excel athletically, excel academically, and fill up my tank socially for good measure. I started taking pride in being a well-rounded Renaissance man – it felt like I had found a way to have it all.

This is the point in the story when there’s supposed to be some kind of “then it all came crashing down.” Maybe that would have been good for me, but if I’m honest, it never really did. Rather, God has been slowly chipping away at my idolatry of efficiency little-by-little, such that I have come a long way but sense that I still have an even longer way to go.

A few key moments (in case snippets from my journey are helpful for anyone else):

For many people, marriage tempers the obsession with efficiency; not for Sarah and me. On the contrary, part of what drew us to each other was our common passion to squeeze every drop out of life.

So in our first year of marriage, when a major earthquake hit Haiti, we dropped everything and went to help with relief efforts. The missions org that ran that trip, though, was from a very charismatic Christian tradition, and they went about the trip far differently than I would have. Most notably, before we would go out each day to construct temporary shelters, we would spend multiple *hours* seeking the Lord in prayer.

For me, this was highly distressing: “There are people out there sleeping without roofs over their heads! Every minute we’re not out there means fewer people get shelters!” But for the others on our trip, they seemed to think: “What good are we going to be able to do if we haven’t sought the Lord’s help?” Sure enough, there ended up being plenty of “that could only have been God!” moments on that trip as a result of the team’s prayerful seeking of his empowerment and direction.

That Haiti trip was somewhere around when I started reading through the Bible in a year most years. This practice has been corrective for me in many ways, but in those years around 2010 I remember being struck by how many examples of (what I considered to be) inefficiency there were in the Bible (see some in post #2 below)! I was being forced by scripture to consider that God might not be as consumed with efficiency as I’d expect him to be.

When I made the transition from “secular” work to pastoral ministry in 2016, part of what was energizing about it was also what was challenging about it: there’s always more work that could be done. As a high school teacher, there are eventually no more papers to grade, no more lessons to plan – your work is done. Even if you wanted to do more, there’s not much more you could do. Not so with pastoral ministry: there’s always another visit that could be made, another ministry that could be launched, another call that could encourage someone. How does a pastor ever willingly stop, knowing that there’s so much more that needs to be done? And in light of there being so many needs, how important is it to maximize productivity during those finite work hours?

Yet when I read biographies of pastors and Christians, the ones I find myself drawn to are often those most unconcerned with efficiency. I admire people like Eugene Peterson and Francis Chan; when I hear their approach to life and ministry, it resounds. Tim Keller didn’t write his first book until he was over 50; I think people like that have got it right. What’s more, I find myself utterly turned off by so many of the pragmatic church growth go-getters out there; when cultivating my own friendships and partnerships, I gravitate toward the people who are just quietly going about their faithful, unimpressive lives. If I like these people so much, why don’t I live like they live?

So I have, a little. COVID slowed many of us down. Then eight nights in the hospital after my appendix burst (January 2021) slowed me down more. I read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer during that hospital stay (and felt sincere guilt that I was reading it on 2x speed).

That’s about when I started going to bed at a decent hour even when my emails haven’t been responded to. When I started feeling some contentment with a day’s work instead of *only* feeling guilt about not being able to do more. When I started embracing limits not as obstacles to be overcome but rather as gifts from God to remind us of our all-important dependence on Him. When I started scheduling in advance (okay, still efficient) with people even though I had no agenda, just to spend time connecting with them and encouraging them.

I’m not ready to say that the healthiest version of myself is one that would be completely unrecognizable to everyone who has known me as a “machine.” God is a God of order and made his image-bearers to bring order out of chaos. There’s a way to structure and plan and optimize using God-honoring creativity. But I do hope I’m a healthier version of myself 20 years from now – one in which I am moving more slowly and humanly in all the ways in which “slow” and “human” are honoring to God.

Next time: Efficiency and prayer

Tim Higgins

OCTOBER 7, 2024

Essay Series: Efficiency

#3: Problems

We live in a place and time in which efficiency is prized above much else (see essay #1 below). However, the Bible’s treatment of efficiency is mixed: it doesn’t treat efficiency as an inherent positive (see essay #2 below).

As such, we need to be wary of falling into an over-prioritization of efficiency that turns this gift (which is often good) into an idol.

As with many idols, though, we don’t always immediately see the harm that can be done by worshiping efficiency. It seems so harmless! However, here are four ways in which an ultra-focus on efficiency can cause damage:

1)  If efficiency is king, it can dull my ability to appreciate and enjoy God’s good gifts.

One of my college football coaches, immediately after winning a national championship, famously locked himself in the coaches’ locker room to call high school recruits. He couldn’t even enjoy the victory for a minute before thinking about the most efficient way to reach the next goal (“imagine how impactful it will be if these high school recruits get a call from me immediately after they watched us win the championship?”).

This seems extreme, but if efficiency is always good, my coach’s actions make sense! Every moment spent celebrating/relaxing/enjoying is a waste, because it could have been spent investing/producing/working.

Ecclesiastes repeatedly critiques the person who works efficiently but never stops to enjoy God’s gifts: “It is also the gift of God whenever anyone eats, drinks, and enjoys all his efforts” (Ecc. 3:13).

2) If efficiency is king, I tend to see people as tools to help me reach my goals.

This is a danger any line of work! In ministry, it’s the pastor who sees the hospital visit as a distraction from the “real” work of preaching, who sees the marriage crisis as a hindrance to the “real” work of visionary leadership, who sees the struggling teenager as an impediment to the “real” work of speaking at conferences and events. People aren’t efficient; relationships take time!

Often, when we’ve spent time investing in real people face-to-face, we don’t have much tangible to “show” for it when it’s over. So if the measure of our lives is how much we’ve been able to produce in a finite amount of years, the problems of messy people are almost always going to seem like a distraction from what “really” matters.

But of course, this is all backwards. Jesus didn’t see people as distractions from his mission; people were his mission. His disciples and the crowds weren’t tools to help him develop a platform that would grow into a movement – they were beloved children of God whom he cared for deeply.

Think about when Jesus is called to the house of Jairus (Mark 5). Time is of the essence; his daughter is dying! But then a bleeding woman grabs the hem of Jesus’ robe. If efficiency is king, we wouldn’t fault Jesus for shrugging her off to stay focused on his time-sensitive task. But to Jesus, efficiency isn’t king. So he stops to give this woman his full attention. In the meantime, of course, the child dies. But God vindicates Jesus’ “inefficient” decision when he raises the child from the dead.

3) If efficiency is king, it can be difficult to experience true rest.

When you have a day off work, do you plan it to the minute? When you have a vacation, do you script every moment of your itinerary to maximize the time off? Many of us say, “Of course we do! If life is busy, better make sure we maximize any breaks we get from the hustle and bustle!”

The danger is that we turn our “time off” into more hustle and bustle – just hustling and bustling to try to maximize our rest. But true rest is more than taking PTO. God wants us to enjoy times of cessation from the very quest to maximize, to optimize… times to just enjoy Him and His gifts.

4) If efficiency is king, I’m pridefully rebelling against the one who controls time.

 In this helpful article, Ben Brophy identifies the (sometimes frustrating) message of Ecclesiastes 3: “…human beings are at the mercy of time. We can’t control birth or death, planting or reaping, wars or peace. But God isn’t at the mercy of time. He made it and controls it.”

Part of what lies underneath our idolization of efficiency is our refusal to submit to God’s constraints on our time and instead to wrest control of time for ourselves. This isn’t actually all that far from the M.O. of Satan himself, who has been at work since Genesis 3 to influence us to view God’s constraints as harmful and to carve out a “better” existence for ourselves. In that sense, it’s not an overstatement to say that our ultra-focus on efficiency can even be satanic!

Once we’re convinced that idolizing efficiency is sinful and problematic, it still isn’t easy to break free of old patterns. But a first step is to see it for what it is.

Next time: My journey with respect to efficiency

Tim Higgins

SEPTEMBER 30, 2024

Essay Series: Efficiency

#2: Pumping the Brakes

There’s no doubt our world loves efficiency. We avail ourselves of every technology imaginable to maximize the productivity of our every minute at work, and then when it’s time to enjoy some PTO, we even plan our vacation time to the minute to make the most of our rest! The more effective the techniques and technologies, the more we are able to squeeze out of every moment we live.

What did you think of the last entry? Do you agree with this assessment of how pervasive our love for efficiency is? Do you find yourself pushing back in defense of efficiency’s merits?

Let’s explore what the scriptures say.

Scriptures That Seem to Commend Efficiency

Ephesians 5:15-16 – “Pay careful attention, then, to how you walk—not as unwise people but as wise—making the most of the time, because the days are evil.”

There it is: we need to make the most of every hour we have!

Matthew 25:26-27 – “His master replied to him, ‘You evil, lazy servant! If you knew that I reap where I haven’t sown and gather where I haven’t scattered, then you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and I would have received my money back with interest when I returned.”

It doesn’t seem like the master has much tolerance for our failures to maximize returns on his investments! He expects everything he has given us (=every hour he has given us?) to bear fruit.

Proverbs 27:23-24 – “Know well the condition of your flock, and pay attention to your herds, for wealth is not forever; not even a crown lasts for all time.”

This is just one of many proverbs commending diligence. The reason given: even if you have wealth now, this is no time to relax! You need to be on guard against losing it!

We could also point to Joseph as an example of someone commended for his efficiency. In Genesis 41:34-36, Joseph’s strategic planning for the famine makes maximal use of all crops to prepare optimally for a time of lack.

For that matter, wasn’t even Jesus concerned with making the optimal use of every moment? In Mark 1:37, people are looking for him – they want his blessings (including healing!), and they are at his door! But he thinks preaching elsewhere will be a more effective use of his time than lingering here to take care of the needs in Capernaum: “Let’s go on to the neighboring villages so that I may preach there too. This is why I have come.”

But then there is another thread throughout scripture that seems counter-efficient.

Scriptures That Seem to Challenge or Subvert the Drive for Efficiency

Leviticus 23:22 - “When you reap the harvest of your land, you are not to reap all the way to the edge of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and the resident alien; I am the LORD your God.”

But it’s so inefficient to leave potential profits on the table like this!

Exodus 20:10 – “…the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. You must not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female servant, your livestock, or the resident alien who is within your city gates.”

After years of slavery in Egypt in which there were no days of rest, Israel must have found this new Sabbath policy to be radical! It was completely counter to the virtues of the nations around them, which were working to maximize economic efficiency. To give up (from productive work) one day in seven entirely? Madness!

Mark 1:35 – “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he got up, went out, and made his way to a deserted place; and there he was praying.”

This is immediately before the “efficiency” verse in Mark 1 that we looked at earlier! Jesus doesn’t just disregard the people who are looking for him in order to preach elsewhere (which we can understand as a “productive” use of time); he was already disregarding them in order to get his time of prayer and solitude! How inefficient to go off and pray when there are so many to be preached to and healed!

John 13:29 – “Since Judas kept the money-bag, some thought that Jesus was telling him, ‘Buy what we need for the festival,’ or that he should give something to the poor.”

Wait. Jesus put Judas in charge of the money-bag? He has long known Judas is a devil (Jn. 6:70-71)! People worked hard for this money, and sacrificed in order to give it to Jesus and his disciples, trusting that it would be put to good ministry use! Yet Jesus chose to entrust those funds to the man he had called a devil? How much money ended up stolen by Judas that could have been used for good? How inefficient!

All this is not to mention God’s choice to send His Son to a place in time in which news (and people) moved approximately 2 mph, at a walking pace. Imagine the increased reach Jesus could have had in a world with social media (or at least with automobiles)!

At minimum, this second set of scriptures makes it clear that efficiency can’t be an ultimate priority to God, the way it is to many of us.

Answering an Objection

Now somebody will say: “But even the apparent inefficiencies in Scripture turn out to maximize efficiency in the long-term. Sabbath rest made the people of Israel more productive on their six workdays, and probably gave them greater longevity! Taking care of the poor minimized revolts and social unrest! Jesus’ prayer time made his preaching and healing more effective! See: God is efficient; he just takes a longer view than we do!”

This objection does capture something worth acknowledging: namely, that God did make the world such that we would generally flourish if we live according to his commands. His commands aren’t arbitrary; they are conducive to life and health and prosperity and plenty (conducive to shalom!).

That said, I have a few concerns with this objection:

• This objection flirts with rejecting a sinful hyper-focus on efficiency… by keeping efficiency in first place, just extending the timeline. The idol of efficiency is not dethroned; it’s just baptized as godliness!

• It risks attributing to God something like the self-interested hypocrisy of the casino that preaches at us to reuse our towels and conserve water… only to feature massive fountains blowing water into the hot desert air out in front of the building. What was portrayed as sacrificial and altruistic was actually purely self-serving?

• But most of all, I worry this objection misses what these commands are borne out of. They are not cold and calculated to maximize productivity; they proceed from the character of the God who made them. And the God of the Bible isn’t pragmatically ruthless; he owns the cattle on a thousand hills and (as such) needs none of our contributions. His mindset and position are those of abundance, not of scarcity. And he is fundamentally concerned not with products but rather with people, not with outputs but rather with relationships, not with contracts but rather with covenants.

And right there might be the most ungodly feature of our drive for efficiency: it leads us to treat people as tools to be used rather than as beings to be loved.

Next Time: Problems caused by idolizing efficiency

Tim Higgins

September 23, 2024

Essay Series: Efficiency

#1: The Spirit of Our Age?

In the early 19th century, William Hazlitt coined the phrase “the spirit of the age.” That useful phrase has become common shorthand for what’s assumed in a given place and time – the assumptions, values, and ideas that are “the air we breathe” in a particular culture. It’s what’s captured by the German word “zeitgeist” – “the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time” (Oxford dictionary).

The spirit of the age is what Paul calls “the ways of this world” in Ephesians 2:1-3.

1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins 2 in which you previously walked according to the ways of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the disobedient. 3 We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath as the others were also.

Of course, while there are universally shared elements of fallen humanity’s default opposition toward God, “the ways of this world” often manifest differently in different places, times, and cultures. The “defining spirit or mood” in Babylon around 600 BC was distinct in some ways from the “defining spirit or mood” in Japan in 1944, which was distinct still from the “defining spirit or mood” in Alabama in 1963.

So when we launched the My Suburb Project in 2021, we gathered with others from our towns and asked this question: How would you describe the spirit of our age?

• How do people in our towns spend their time?

• What stories do they tell?

• What practices/rituals are foundational? What are the values here?

• What are the creeds? The fears?

• What’s the worldview espoused here, and what do our neighbors believe the good life looks like?

An exercise like this isn’t easy, because in many cases, the most foundational aspects of the “spirit of our age” are invisible to us. They’ve so comprehensively become integrated into the air we breathe that even many Christians no longer think of them as distinctives of our age; we think of them as universal givens.

I wonder what you’d nominate as candidates for “the spirit of our age” on the North Shore in 2024.

• Autonomy (“I belong to myself”)?

• Expressive individualism (“This is who I am”)?

• Anxiety (“Life feels overwhelming”)?

• YOLO (“Don’t miss out, because you only live once”)?

In this short series of notes over the coming weeks, I’d like to put forward a nomination of my own: efficiency. There are many other defining moods that make up our zeitgeist, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that efficiency is near the top of the list.

You’ve heard people call this a “microwave society.” We want results now – drive-through fast food, same-day delivery, tooth whitening strips, AI-generated artwork, weight loss miracle drugs – and these are all good examples of the love of efficiency that dominates our age.

Most of these improvements to efficiency are made possible by technology and techniques, two words which (uncoincidentally) share the same root. New technologies and new techniques are often borne out of the question “how can we overcome our present human limitations to get more for less?” Whether we’re interested in getting more product for less money, more accomplished in less time, more stored in a smaller space, or more results with less hassle, the impetus is the same: how can I squeeze every drop of benefit out of the finite resources I’ve got?

Advocates for efficiency will point out:

• Efficiency reduces waste

• Efficiency optimizes stewardship of limited resources

• Efficiency frees up resources that can now be used for greater goods

• Efficiency challenges the massive wastes of time that many are prone to fall into in the age of smart phones and social media

• And besides, doesn’t scripture urge us to maximize our efficiency? For example: “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.” (Eph. 5:15-16)

In light of this analysis, why would anyone want to pump the brakes on efficiency? On close examination, isn’t efficiency a pretty unmitigated “good” that Christians should wholeheartedly embrace and pursue?

When we start thinking like this, either (a) we’re correct that efficiency is an unadulterated good to be pursued wholeheartedly, or (b) we’ve been lulled to sleep to some degree by the spirit of the age such that we don’t even realize we’ve adopted the world’s idea of “good” as our own.

What do you think? Is the Christian pursuing efficiency inherently engaged in a noble pursuit? Why or why not?

Next time: Pumping the Brakes on Efficiency

Tim Higgins

September 16, 2024

comfort the afflicted

“Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.” I’m not sure when I first heard that preaching advice, but it seemed to match what I saw in scripture. 

For example, to the comfortable: “Listen to this message, you cows of Bashan” (Amos 4:1). “Let your laughter be turned to mourning” (James 4:9). 

And to the afflicted: “This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life” (Ps. 119:50). “He comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction, through the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Cor. 4:1). 

So when I accepted my first pastoral calling to North Sub, some of you noticed that I got to work applying this advice to our context. In our well-off Chicago suburb, my evaluation process went something like this: 

• I’m pastoring a church in one of the most prosperous nations in world history. 

• My town falls within one of the top 100 wealthiest zip codes within that nation. 

• The communities represented in my church are relatively safe, stable, and affluent. 

Therefore: 

• If any community has ever consisted of the “comfortable” who need to be “afflicted,” is mine not one of them? 

So I began by preaching with an aim to afflict. To be sure, I made sure the gospel was in every sermon, but you remember 2016-2021… the tone and the bulk of the content were far more “kick in the pants” than “arm around the shoulder.” 

Many of you expressed appreciation: “We needed that challenge today, pastor.” But for five years, it didn’t really feel like it was “clicking,” so to speak. I couldn’t help but feel like I wasn’t really getting through. 

Then, with the start of 2022, our church began a season of self-examination, taking inventory to discern our spiritual health. As we geared up to preach through the letters to the churches in Revelation 2-3, I wanted a maximally accurate understanding of our congregation in order to rightly apply those letters to our present situation. 

So I looked to our lay elders, each of whom has a designated portion of the congregation on his “shepherd list.” I gave them the following instructions at one of our meetings: “Walk us through the people on your list. Give us some high-level understanding of what’s happening in the lives of your people (e.g. what’s going well, what they’re struggling with, what challenges they face). Then tell us: if the risen Jesus were writing a letter to your shepherd list, what would be the fundamental message of that letter?” 

What happened next surprised me. One by one, as the elders walked through the names on their lists, a clear trend emerged: the majority of people on every list were struggling significantly. This one is grieving the sudden loss of a parent, this one’s surgery didn’t go according to plan, this one lost a job, this one was recently left by a spouse, this one is lonely in isolation, this one is under a lot of pressure from friends at school… on and on! Not many of the individual stories were news to me, but hearing them all at once was sobering for all of us in the room. 

Consequently, there was incredible uniformity when the elders reached the last portion of the assignment (sharing what they believed Jesus would write to those under their care). Almost every elder, after considering the lived reality of those on his list, concluded, “I guess Jesus’ message to those on my list would have to be something like, ‘Hang in there!’ ‘Hold on!’”  

Until we went through that exercise, I didn’t appreciate the degree to which our congregation was hurting. I now wince when I think about my previous five years of failing to “read the room.” It seems in hindsight that part of my distorted perception can be attributed to my natural inclination to preach afflicting sermons: since my favorite tool in my fresh-out-of-seminary toolbelt was the hammer of affliction, I wonder if any/every congregation would have looked like a (comfortable) nail from my vantage point! Thank you for your patience with me as I have fumbled through… and now as I still have a lot to learn about being a pastor. 

Now, despite my misapplication, the scriptures listed above still suggest to me that “comfort the afflicted; afflict the comfortable” is a pretty wise rule of thumb. Many pastors with a bent toward comforting probably need to be prodded in the direction of more “affliction.” But to the pastor (like me) whose temperament makes him all-too-ready to afflict, there may be wisdom in taking more time to be sure we’ve understood the present state of our flock. 

I now climb up on stage each Sunday consciously aware that I’m preaching to hurting people. Sure, some self-righteous folks may have spent the last week supremely confident in their own goodness. We may have some nominal believers who have spent the last week comfortably presuming on God’s grace. But there are many others in our congregation who are dealing with rejection from those they love, who are trying to decide whether to move an aging parent to hospice, who are just trying to figure out how to convince their kid to go to school. 

An afflicting message may sometimes be what’s needed, but as I preach it, I’m working to remember (too!) the frazzled mom who is at her wits’ end and filled with shame. To remember the man who is trying to figure out his worth now that he has been laid off. I’m trying to make sure there’s a message of comfort for them, too, in the midst of their affliction. 

In our Life Groups and Growth Groups, would you keep in mind the same? Be tender and gentle with your fellow group members. People may look like they have it together, but you never know the kind of stress and strain people are under. 

Tim Higgins

August 26, 2024

Church, be Care-full

What is biblical “care”?

A few “care” definitions might come to mind:

“To feel concern or interest for someone or something.”

This definition focuses on a positive internal state or feeling one has toward another. This “care” communicates the value we place upon people and things. I care about you. I care about the poor. I care about my family.

It’s one of the reasons we pray to God:

“Cast all your anxieties on Him because He cares for you.” 1 Peter 5:7

God is positively inclined toward us as His children, so He shows concern and special interest.

But we can also feel concern and interest for things. I care about freedom. I care about the environment. I care about the White Sox making it to the playoffs (whoops). And so on.

To feel concern or interest is good—even biblical! Care as a positive internal feeling or inclination is a great place to begin. But how many times have we experienced genuine concern for someone and have fallen short on acting on it? My hand shoots up!

The reason why “thoughts and prayers” are seen as hypocritical in our day is because true care goes far beyond mere feelings of concern for people.

But are there other definitions?

We use the word “care” in a negative sense, too:

“A disquieted state of mixed uncertainty, apprehension, and responsibility.”

“Cares” can refer to anxiety and emotional turmoil, as in the third verse of What A Friend We Have In Jesus:

“Are we weak and heavy laden? Cumbered with a load of care?”

Feelings of concern without faith can lead to anxiety, worry, and despair.

Jesus illustrates these “cares” in the Parable of the Sower:

“As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word but the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.” Matthew 13:22

Or Jesus’ warning to his disciples:

“But watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that Day come upon you suddenly like a trap.” Luke 21:34

Have you ever been weighed down by the cares of this life? Certainly this can’t be the biblical care we should be full of…

Or consider another definition:

“Responsibility for or attention to health, well-being and safety.”

This definition focuses on the obligation one has to take charge of and watch over someone or something. To protect. To act for one’s healing. It’s the responsibility of a nurse to care for her patients. It’s the responsibility of parents to care for their children. Who else will do it?

This type of care requires attention, vigilance, and stewardship. We say: “I left my house in her care,” or “He is going to take great care of you.”

Implicit in this understanding of care is vulnerability. Those who are “under care” are in need, sick, weak, dependent.

Consider the Good Samaritan, who, when he saw a man, beaten and stripped, half dead…

“He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.” Luke 10:34-35

He took care of him. He assumed responsibility to attend to this vulnerable man’s plight. He looked at his neighbor and thought: “No spectators.” He thought: “God has given me this weak, needy, and sick man into my charge. I will care for him.”

Friends, this is what it means to care for each other at North Sub.

We are the sick man on the side of the road. We are bodily weak, spiritually needy, sin-sick, always-dependent saints who at every moment need God and need each other. Christ is the eternally Good Samaritan who saw our plight, assumed our situation, and brought us eternal life and healing through His death and resurrection. He paid for it. And now, as members of God’s household in His family, we have been given a responsibility to pay attention to the health, well-being, and safety of each other.

Ed Welch, in his book, Side by Side, puts it this way: “We are needy…and we are needed. We all need help…and we all are helpers.” All of us. We are both the sick man and the good Samaritan, many times giving care and many times more receiving care.

The Elders are charged with a spiritual shepherding care:

“Pay careful attention to yourselves and all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.” Acts 20:28

The Deacons are charged with a physical providing care:

“that [they] may care for those who are truly widows.” 1 Timothy 5:10

And we all are charged with a “one another” care:

“...that there many be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.”
1 Corinthians 12:25

Biblical care means assuming the responsibility of helping, supporting, and encouraging one another in the church family. It means acknowledging your own need, and accepting help. It also means attending to other’s needs, and giving help.

Some of us find it difficult to know how to accept help. Others of us find it difficult to know how to give help.

The important thing in growing in our ability to biblically care for another other is to understand that we are one body, a family, needy and needed. We all have a responsibility to steward each other’s spiritual health, well-being and safety. We say: “God has given me this weak, needy, and sick person—in my aisle at church, in my life group, in my growth group—into my charge. I will care for them.” And when I am sick, needy and feel weak, I will depend upon my brothers and sisters in Christ to care for me.

We are not the Savior as we care for others. But Jesus uses our acts of help to communicate His strength in our times of need.

So, church family, I have a charge for you:

Be care-full!

Richard Moomjian

August 5, 2024

Essay Series: Apathy and its antidotes

#6: Spiritual Power

During the past entries in this mini-series (see below), we’ve reflected on:

• The spiritually apathetic (or “apatheistic”) mood in the Northern Suburbs of Chicago

• What such a world needs from the church (answer: joy!)

• How we find that joy when it has been escaping us

• The importance of community in the fight for joy

• How the presence of a joyful church family on the North Shore might impact our communities

Now I want to close with one more entry, this time circling back to our essay #2 and offering an additional answer to the question, “What does an apathetic world need from the church?” (I’m probably missing it, but this is an answer I haven’t found or heard emphasized in what I’ve read or listened to about apathy.) In addition to the all-important joy that is hard for our apathetic neighbors to argue with, I wonder if another effective apologetic in our cultural situation will be spiritual power.

Hear me out regarding why I think we should be ramping up our prayer that we would be a congregation characterized by evident spiritual power.

Today’s Mood Is Not Entirely Unprecedented

There are plenty of moments in scripture that parallel our own situation in many ways. For example:

• Elijah’s day, when Israel has grown so apathetic about the Lord that the prophet’s rallying cry to return to YHWH is met with a stunning silence (1 Kgs. 18:21).

• Mid-first century Greece, where the average citizen, though interested in spiritual things, probably didn’t feel hostile to Christianity as much as he or she felt that Christianity was irrelevant, not worth serious consideration (Acts 17:32).

Yet, in such situations, apathy toward the one true God can be overwhelmed by mini-revivals of spiritual fervor. How?

How Do the Apathetic Encounter God?

In the cases above: not by market research and sales pitches. Not by the recruitment of influencers who looked the part to lend credibility to God’s program. But spiritual power did factor in.

It’s not that spiritual power can’t be argued against; it can. People can assign alternative explanations to what they’ve seen; they can skeptically call it coincidence or charade. But it’s hard to argue against. When people experience something they perceive to be powerful, it at least makes them think for a minute. It’s different, so they want to figure out an explanation.

After all, it’s not like our world has gotten less spiritual. Certainly not – listen to our top songs and scan the list of our top rated movies and TV shows: we’re as spiritually interested as ever! In fact, the ubiquity of smart phones and 2-hour delivery and online interaction seems to have us more convinced than we’ve been in awhile that there’s gotta be more to life than just what we see!

So I’m not at all convinced that it’s impossible for us to see something in our day like was seen in the examples above!

• When Elijah called down fire from heaven, the people affirmed with one voice, “The Lord – he is God!” (1 Kgs. 18:39)

• When Paul envisioned an unbelieving citizen of Corinth wandering into church, he hoped for a prophetic word that would lay that person’s life bare in front of everyone and cause the person to say, “Surely God is in this place!” (1 Cor. 14:24-25)

What Could This Look Like Today?

Displays of spiritual power. I can’t help but think about what this could look like in our place and time.

• What happens when one of our neighbors attends a church outreach event with us and, in casual conversation with a North Sub member, hears that Christian say just the right words they needed to hear, despite there being no way that Christian could have known what they were going through?

• What happens when we pray over a sick person after one of our services, and the person actually gets miraculously and demonstrably healed?

• What happens when the presence of God falls on one of our worship services so powerfully that, even though we’re singing songs we’ve sung many times before, and even though the sermon isn’t particularly novel or notable in its content, there’s a palpable electricity and weight in the room?

• What happens when someone gets up to share a testimony of what the Lord has done, and God uses their vulnerable courage to break down the walls that had been keeping one of our guests from meeting Jesus? And then we end up with a second powerful testimony that day?

• What happens when, as took place in an affluent suburb outside DC recently, a worship service starts and… just… doesn’t… stop? For days on end?

I’m just not sure who’s going to really be able to argue with that. We all want to believe there’s something more to life than just collisions of molecules; now we’d be experiencing that “something more” with our senses. We can argue rationally with Christianity all we want, but when we experience something we can’t explain, now our old apathetic secularism can start to seem insufficient, too. In light of such encounters, some unbelievers have found that there’s not only a chasm in front of them, but also one behind them.

Where Do We Get Spiritual Power?

I’m pleased to announce that next Sunday, we’ll be outlining our plan for generating spiritual power in 2025.

Just kidding, of course. That’s the problem with spiritual power as an apologetic! It can’t be mustered up! We can’t scheme or plan or willpower our way to it!

All we can do is pray for it.

And pray we must. That’s all we can do. “Lord, you don’t owe it to us to bring revival. You don’t owe it to us to fill our small group meetings and worship services with an evident spiritual power. If you choose never to give us a Mt. Carmel experience, we’ll follow you no less wholeheartedly, because our devotion to you is not contingent on miracles, signs, or wonders. That said, our neighborhoods are asleep to eternal matters. They couldn’t be more checked out when it comes to the most important issues in the universe. Displays of unexplainable spiritual power could wake some of them up from their slumber! Do it Lord, for your glory and for these precious souls caught in the grip of apathy.”

That’s a shift in what I’m praying for since sabbatical, and I’ve heard from a few of you that God has laid it on your heart independently of anything I’ve said to do the same.

Even the sum of all our best and most joyful efforts won’t be enough to wake our sleeping suburbs. Lord, move in power.

Scroll down to review previous entries in this series.

What do you think? Would you join us in praying for spiritual power to fall on our church? Text responses to 708-505-6463.

Tim Higgins

July 29, 2024

Essay Series: Apathy and its antidotes

#5: What Joy Might Do

Ultimately, we pursue joy because we’re called to it (Phil. 4:4), not first and foremost because of potential missional benefit. That said, Kyle Beshears has made the case that our joy can be a compelling apologetic for apathetic (or “apatheistic”) people!

When I think about how this might work out in practice with our friends and neighbors on the North Shore, here are a few scenes I imagine playing out: 

-              Over time, our neighbors notice that our eyes don’t light up at the things their eyes light up at. While they’re dreaming about their next new car or boat or vacation destination or pair of shoes, they notice (eventually) that we’re happy for them but not truly delighted the way they are in these things. They start to wonder what does make our eyes light up. 

-              Over time, our neighbors notice that our kids don’t need electronics to escape from boredom like other kids do. They wonder how our kids can imaginatively find ways to experience delight when there’s nothing to entertain them.

-              Over time, our neighbors notice that when we go through difficult circumstances, we aren’t rocked the way they expected us to be. They see us grieving, but through our tears, they can see there’s something surprisingly solid holding us together underneath. They wonder how we could be so unshakeable at a fundamental level.

None of these situations can or will directly move someone to pray to receive Christ as their Lord and Savior, obviously. But these can be the precursors to someone asking the sorts of questions that open the door for us to share the gospel with them. To use Don Everts’ and Doug Schaupp’s terminology, it can help them cross the important threshold from disinterested to curious.

Of course, there’s the important challenge: how can I exhibit joy if I don’t feel joy when I’m in the midst of sorrow? A thoughtful question was texted in this week along those lines. The gist was this: In light of James’ call to change our joy into mourning (4:9), not to mention Ecclesiastes’ “time to mourn” (3:4), isn’t it okay if we’re not always joyful? 

But the repeated and emphatic nature of the command to be joyful always (1 Thess. 5:16; Phil. 4:4) indicates that our mourning and the kind of joy we’re talking about in this series are not mutually exclusive. Remember, in context, James’ rebuke of joy is specifically a rebuke of glibness about sin.

2 Corinthians 6:4-10 spells out what we’re calling for in this series: “As God’s ministers, we commend ourselves (6:4)… as grieving, yet always rejoicing (6:10).” The “yet” is the key! There’s a way to grieve in which we’re rejoicing even in the midst of the grief, and that’s the kind of grieving that “commends” us as genuine.

It may take time, but if we’re living openly in view of our neighbors, and if we’re living consistently joyful lives, the genuineness of our joy will become evident. And for some, it may lead them to a new sort of curiosity.

Next: One more apologetic that may reach the apathetic.

What do you think? How might your neighbors see the joy you have in Christ? In what situations might they be most likely to notice it? Text responses to 708-505-6463.

Tim Higgins

July 22, 2024

Essay Series: Apathy and its antidotes

#4: Don’t Go It Alone

I only recently saw Toy Story 4 for the first time. Our kids get a significant kick out of the repeated scene that plays out early in the movie when Forky comes to life:

• Forky (a spork-turned-toy made by a kindergartener named Bonnie) sees a trash can.

• Believing that he is trash (because until recently, he had been trash), Forky runs for the trash can to throw himself in.

• The other toys (especially Woody) pull Forky out of the trash can while unsuccessfully trying to convince him that he now has a purpose (because a child loves him and has thereby brought him to life).

The sort of dedicated support Woody offers to Forky immediately struck me as a fitting picture of what we need from each other as we pursue joy in an apathetic world. I need friends who know I’m going to keep running back to the trash can periodically! And who jump in my way to plead with me to remember who I really am.

What We Think We’ll Find in the Trash Can

The specifics of what we’re looking for vary from person to person: control, affirmation, love, thrill, escape, security, peace. But whatever variety of “joy” we’re looking for, we’re all looking for joy. We’re searching (sometimes in the trash!) to find the delight, the fulfillment, the life that so often seems to elude us. And when we return to our old lovers, we do so because deep down, we believe there’s more joy to be found there than there is to be found in Christ.

How We Can Help Each Other Stay Out of the Trash

Last week (see below!), I wrote about the work that needs to be done on an individual level to fight for joy in Christ when it’s escaping us. But most of us have found that the pull to the trash can is strong! Old habits die hard; our old loves are familiar and comfortable for us; even our neural pathways conspire to send us back to what was harmful for us.

That’s why it’s so critical that every Forky has a Woody. We all need friends who will “exhort [us] daily, as long as it is called Today,” because without friends who will make such effort, it’s all too easy to be “hardened by sin’s deception” (Heb. 3:13).

This is different from the kind of friendship that’s celebrated in our world. We are told that a good friend affirms, supports, validates. To warn someone about their choices being at odds with God’s best for them risks imposing our values on them. How narrow-minded and bigoted to call “trash” what someone else sees as their path to authentic self-actualization!

But none of us is this open-minded in reality. If a friend is ready to shoot up a school, or to send their kid for an overnight at a predator’s house, or to walk in front of a train, none of us says, “If that’s true to who you are, I support you!” The reality is that we all have judgments about what choices are harmful, and we believe it to be loving to warn people we care about against destructive pursuits.

So, fellow Forky, who is your Woody? To whom have you explicitly given permission to jump in your way to stop you when they see you inching back toward the old familiar trash can? Who are the people who, together, can bring you “daily” exhortations to warn you against the sin that so easily deceives (Heb. 3:13)?

Joy in Christ is going to be hard to hold on to without such a community. Let’s proactively ask trusted brothers and sisters to help us stay on track, pursuing joy in the only place it can truly be found.

Next: How might our joy connect with apathetic neighbors?

What do you think? How has community helped you fight for joy? Text responses to 708-505-6463.

Tim Higgins

July 15, 2024

Essay Series: Apathy and Its Antidotes

#3: I Lack Joy. How Do I Change That?

If apathy is one of the most prevalent alternatives to Christianity on the North Shore, and if the apologetic antidote to apathy is joy, it’s critically important that we exhibit that joy! But all sorts of factors conspire to disrupt our joy. Here are some of the thoughts that run through my head during my (many) joyless moments:

• “I’m so tired. Being present here is about the best I can do today.”

• “I’ve got so much to do, so much hanging over my head, that I can’t think about anything besides getting done what I need to get done.”

• “I’m irritated that I have to do tasks I believe somebody else should be doing.”

• “I’m annoyed that the traffic and the streetlights and the kids aren’t cooperating with my wonderful plans for the day.”

• “Is God really going to bring about fruit/results/deliverance? If not, it feels like we’re just going through pointless motions.”

Your own joyless thoughts might be different from mine, but whatever the specifics, the task of recapturing joy can be quite daunting.

Before getting into practical helps on how to recapture joy, it’s worth noting that recapturing joy is a task, a duty. As counterintuitive as it may seem to “work” for joy (when we naturally imagine joy as something that just happens to us), scripture speaks of joy as something we’re morally responsible to cultivate – which makes joylessness a morally culpable sin problem.

“Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!” (Phil. 4:4)

See also texts like Deuteronomy 28:47; Psalm 32:11; 37:4; 100:2; Romans 12:8; 2 Corinthians 9:7; Philippians 3:1; and 1 Thessalonians 5:16. We are commanded to delight in our Lord and not just to worship him with our lives but to worship him with gladness.

So if we joy-deficient Christians are commanded to exert effort toward recapturing what we’ve lost, how do we do this?

Some great thinkers have addressed this question. John Piper has devoted much of his ministry to this question, and he has offered the most helpful voice for me on this topic. On the Desiring God website, you can find many of his sermons and articles on joy, and his book-length treatment When I Don’t Desire God was very helpful for me on sabbatical.

For what it’s worth, here has been my self-talk in moments of joylessness since reading that book:

• The circumstances that have me “down” are what God has for me right now. He thinks this is what's best for me.

• I need to tell him about my joylessness, to honestly take all my frustration to him knowing that it's safe to dump it there. In my mind, I hesitate here: “I can’t ask God to help me desire him; that would be like telling my wife ‘I’m not really all that delighted in you.’ That would be horrible!” But no, God knows I desire other things more than I desire him – that’s the very essence of what all sin is! And it’s only his power that can help me see things rightly, help me find joy in what I’m supposed to find joy in. So he wants to be asked to do that work in my life.

• Not only is my internal pouting never going to change my circumstances; my pouting is probably actively hurting my chances of circumstances ever changing.

• This is a chance to live in such a way that shows the world that God himself is enough. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if my epitaph read something like: “Even though he never got much of what he yearned for, he did get God, and that was enough for him. Even when his heart and his flesh failed, it was evident that God was the strength of his heart and his portion forever.”

• Life is short. Any day now, the sky is going to crack, and it will be all done. Or I'll breathe my last and say goodbye. If that day comes tomorrow – or even next year or in ten years! - I'll be like, “That was it? That’s as long as I needed to weather adverse circumstances before paradise? If I had known it would be this short, I could have been way more joyful!”

• My friends and fellow congregants and neighbors are almost ALL dealing with something worse than what I’m dealing with. Everybody’s got something heavy they carry, some way in which they suffer. Would I really want something different?

• What if this is intended to be an opportunity to share in Christ’s sufferings, and I'm missing it? He’s extending to me an amazing opportunity to identify more closely with him, and instead of embracing it, I'm wishing it away. So I'm having to go through all the pain without enjoying any of the benefit!

Bottom line: our God-given task is to wake up and choose joy. To go to work and choose joy. To come home and choose joy. To put the kids to bed and choose joy. Day after day. Until he sees fit to release us from the brokenness of this world. Can we do it?

• It will take prolonged reflection daily on what’s in store for us on the other side, a robust experiential grasp of what heaven’s going to be like. We’re going to have to live here with our feet firmly planted there.

• It will take trips to the prayer closet to do the hard work when we’re feeling bitter – to attack it immediately and decisively.

Piper’s description of one such episode in his life keeps coming back to me. This is the story of a time his wife and daughter hurt his feelings by watching a show together instead of playing a game with him:

“Now at that moment the temptation for anger, self-pity, blaming, and sullenness was as dangerous to my soul as a sexual temptation. So I immediately said, ‘No!’ to the rising temptations and quietly went upstairs without any flair of woundedness or body language of sullenness. In my study I waged war. I turned my mind and heart toward the promises of God, and the surety of the cross, and love of the Father, and wealth of my inheritance, and the blessings of that day, and the patience of Christ. And I held them there. I beat down the anger and self-pity and blaming and sullenness with the blood-bought promises of God. And I kept beating till they were effectively gone.”

Something about that first-person account has been powerful for me, and God has brought it to my mind time and time again the past few months. It’s a concrete picture of what I want to do in those moments – how I can tangibly take action to fight for the joy that’s eluding me.

Next: How do we (in community!) help each other fight for joy?

What do you think? How do you fight for joy when you’re joyless? Text responses to 708-505-6463.

Tim Higgins

July 8, 2024

Essay Series: Apathy and Its Antidotes

#2: What Does an Apathetic World Need from the Church?

What is the apologetic that best addresses apathy? How do you move someone to start caring deeply about something that presently doesn’t move them?

This question is critical for the future of our witness as Christians on the North Shore. As we study and prepare for conversations with neighbors and coworkers regarding their questions about biblical sexuality, the exclusivity of Christ, the problem of evil, etc., it’s increasingly important that we’re also ready to engage with those who aren’t wrestling in earnest with any of these questions… who aren’t necessarily hostile to God or decidedly opposed to Christianity, but who just aren’t very motivated to engage at all.

Though I wouldn’t have been able to answer the above question before reading Kyle Beshears’ book Apatheism, as soon as I read his answer, it was evident to me that he is exactly right. You may find his answer to be obvious. For Beshears, the most effective apologetic to reach an apathetic person is joy. Not happy-go-lucky positivity, but the deep sort of unwavering joy that remains steadfast regardless of circumstances. The sort of contentment that suffers but still finds rich gladness amidst the tears.

How do we pass along our joy to someone who is “apatheistic”? Beshears says his own conversations with such people tend to occur in three phases:

1. First, I have them tell me what brings them the greatest amount of joy.

2. Second, I ask them to consider the fragility and impermanence of their sources of joy, causing them to doubt those sources.

3. Third, I describe how God is a powerful and permanent source of joy through the gospel and my testimony.

This is a different approach from some of the more logic-based approaches to apologetics that many of us have learned. While the more rational “proofs” have their place and can be very effective with certain types of people, they don’t tend to be effective with apathetic people. After all, the objection of the apathetic person isn’t that belief God is unreasonable; it’s that belief in God is irrelevant!

Here's how Beshears says it:

…it has been my experience that “cultural apologetics” is the most effective approach at winning the attention of an apatheist. Cultural apologetics draws on cultural evidences (e.g., art, music, literature) and universal, existential human longings to argue for the truth and fullness of Christianity. Instead of presenting Christian belief primarily as reasonable, as is the goal of other apologetic methods, cultural apologetics seeks to present Christian belief primarily as desirable.

This sounds a lot like the late Tim Keller, who often held out the goal that our unbelieving friends might one day say to themselves (even before believing the gospel), “I wish Christianity were true.”

Consider your own family members, friends, and acquaintances who are in the throes of apathy. Do they know how desirable you find Jesus to be? Can they tell that you’re yearning to worship, delighted with your time in the secret place in prayer? If they can’t see any evidence that our faith brings any joy to us, why should they want to lay down any of what brings them joy in order to explore Christianity?

On the other hand, if they can see that the Lord does bring you delight… and when they see you suffer a significant loss or setback, they see you finding joy by looking to the Lord… that has a chance to move the needle! That lasting joy (independent of circumstances) is precisely what they haven’t yet found, and as such, it may make them curious.

All this got me thinking: if joy is a key tool in our toolbelts in reaching apathetic acquaintances, how joy-filled are we as a congregation? If a guest spent a few weeks with us, and we asked them to describe our church family, how many other descriptors would they use before “joyful” or “glad” or “happy” came to mind?

And of course, once I’ve asked that question, I immediately look in the mirror as your pastor. How many people who know me would describe me as joyful? Hard-working, intense, committed, sure… but joyful? Yikes. I’m so up and down! So prone to moodiness! So often irritated and bordering on despair! How can we expect our congregation to exude joy when many of you have probably seen me walking around stressed? And how can we expect our neighbors to become interested in what we Christians have when we don’t exude as much joy about our relationship with the Lord (outwardly anyway!) as our neighbors do about their relationships with the Bears or Cubs or their boats or lake houses?

But becoming joyful is easier said than done.

Next: What do we do (individually or corporately) when we look in the mirror and find we aren’t as joy-filled as we’d like to be?

What do you think? How quickly would those around you describe you as joyful? What about our church: to what extent do we come across as a manifestly joy-filled group of people? Text responses to 708-505-6463.

Tim Higgins

June 24, 2024

Apathy and Its Antidotes

#1: Why Apathy is So Prevalent Here and Now

Caveat at the outset: maybe I’m projecting my personal struggles on others here. But I became convinced on my sabbatical that, if our church family is going to expand our North Shore impact in the near future, one of the primary obstacles we will have to overcome (by the power of God’s Spirit) is apathy. It was actually an article by the Homers’ son-in-law Glenn Wishnew that got me started on this exploration, with apathy understood along the lines of “lack of care for one’s spiritual life.”

Of course, some of our unchurched neighbors care very deeply about things of God; they hold deep convictions regarding religious matters. Some have read widely on comparative religions; some are decidedly hostile toward the claims of Christianity. But when I speak with my own unchurched neighbors, for every one of them who has arrived at an intentional decision to reject God, another responds to Christianity with… a shrug.

Kyle Beshears calls the modern-day version of this phenomenon “apatheism.” Here’s how he describes it: “Atheism believes that God does not exist; agnosticism believes that we can’t know whether or not God exists; apatheism believes God’s existence to be irrelevant.”

This isn’t to say that the average unchurched person living in a place like the North Shore is thoughtless about God; rather that their failure to cultivate a relationship with God may be attributed to different factors than the ones people based their objections on a generation ago. Intellectual questions like the problem of evil perhaps hold fewer people back from Christianity; now it’s more likely that our neighbor “believes God is irrelevant and feels apathetic toward him.”

Beshears suggests that places like the North Shore are fertile ground for this type of “apatheism.” This is because, in his words, “Apatheism flourishes in a society where belief in God is contestable and diverse and the people are comfortable and distracted. It’s found wherever people pursue fulfillment without God because he’s considered irrelevant to answering questions related to our origin, meaning, and joy.”

Unfortunately, we North Shore Christians aren’t immune to this sort of apathy. The same things that lull our neighbors to sleep lull us to sleep, too!

For example, have you ever looked at the statistics on your phone regarding how many times you pick it up per day? Only ten years ago, I didn’t have a smart phone (I was one of the last holdouts), and that number was probably less than ten pickups per day. What did I do back then instead of picking up my phone? Some of my activities may have been similar (though making use of now-obsolete devices): turning on music, watching a show on TV, etc. But I also did look out the window more. I reflected more (and reflected specifically on things of God more). I prayed more.

Contrast that with an experience I had recently: I could sense myself getting irritated and resentful, feeling despair about a seemingly insignificant day filled with too many errands and chores. When the kids got occupied for a second, I knew I had a few minutes to myself. Perfect opportunity to head upstairs and do work with God! “Lord, I feel resentful about this day! Please help me to recapture my passion for you!” Instead, what did I do? I slipped aside, pulled out my phone, and watched ESPN highlights until I was called to the dinner table.

In my head, it was justified: “This day has been filled with unenjoyable stuff I don’t want to do. I deserve a few minutes to do something I enjoy!” But that choice turned out to provide exactly zero help with my real problem, which was apathy about the Lord. My discouragement at what felt like a “wasted” day returned as soon as I put my phone in my pocket.

Our cell phones aren’t the only shiny things keeping us from doing the hard work of fighting apathy. We have any number of escapes calling for our attention: social gatherings, TV shows, sports betting, social media, video games, online shopping, etc. All of these are very good at providing immediate “hits” that numb our pain, give us glimpses of the fulfillment we feel we’re missing, or momentarily lift us out of despair. And when we go to those outlets time after time instead of pulling away to seek joy in the Lord, we (Christians included!) can find ourselves numb to things of God. The sermons that once moved us we now find *merely* interesting. The songs that once generated tears we now find boring.

As such, this great challenge faced by our unchurched neighbors turns out to be a battle we’re in the midst of ourselves.

Next: What Does an Apathetic World Need from the Church?

What about you? To what extent do you struggle with apathy toward God? Have you noticed this challenge becoming easier or harder over recent years? Text responses to 708-505-6463.

Tim Higgins

june 17, 2024

Pandemic Reflections

Reflections on the Years 2020-2021 at North Sub

When we disbanded our CRAT (COVID Re-Entry Advisory Team) in late 2022, that marked the “end of the pandemic” in some ways for our church’s purposes. Ed Mar and his team had done an incredible job advising the elders on statistics, trends, policies, etc. – no one will ever give them enough credit for their service to the church during a critical season.

Still, even as the worst of COVID was far in the rearview mirror as 2022 came to a close, I don’t know that many of us felt ready at that point to look back and reflect on what had happened – it all felt so fresh! Some wounds were still very tender.

With the benefit of a few more years of distance, I’ve found myself thinking back on the happenings and significance of the pandemic in the life of North Sub. Here are a few brief reflections.

We Were Fragile

I didn’t appreciate at the time how fragile we were. We were overstaffed. Severely under-budget. Significant pending staff transitions were in the works involving beloved, critical members of our church family. Fault lines had developed in the congregation that none of us were fully aware of. And we had a brand-new Senior Pastor at the helm who had never navigated anything like this before!

It's easy to revise the narrative and think, “Of course we pulled through COVID,” but the reality is that churches in similar situations were devastated by the pandemic such that they still haven’t recovered. When we soberly acknowledge just how fragile we were, it’s a miracle that God did what He did to pull us through!

North Sub Heroes Emerged

All the glory goes to God. That said, He used a few people in particular who “put the team on their back” during that season, delivering herculean efforts above and beyond the call of duty. Besides the CRAT (acknowledged above because of their brave, sticking-their-necks-out, taking-initiative role), three other individuals must be remembered:

• Robbie Kellogg. This man of God knew that his time at North Sub was likely coming to a close (or was going to need to change in a major way). The expected course of action would be for him to “mail it in,” using the pandemic as an excuse to kick back and let the chips fall where they may. Instead, on March 15th, 2020, he sprung to action, spending day and night figuring out how we could most effectively connect via livestream. He purchased what we needed, learned the software, installed it, taught us all what we needed to know, and kept working at troubleshooting it even though none of this was in his job description (or even necessarily in his wheelhouse). He gave us a gift of love during that season.

• Nate Damrose. A volunteer, Nate had no business spending the dozens and dozens of hours he spent figuring out how to hold outdoor services in our parking lot. He dusted off old equipment from storage, moved tech from the sanctuary, built new systems in the hospitality room, figured out how to run them to the parking lot, and brainstormed “what-if” scenarios for the many things that could go wrong. He trained new tech volunteers to help run these outdoor services, all out of service to the Lord and love for His church.

• Chris Firestone. Chris was serving as elder chair for that season, which was a tall task. On several occasions, the seven or so elders sitting around the table had seven or so slightly different ideas about what we should do and which way we should go! And while all our discussions were always held with undercurrents of deep respect and mutual trust, Chris had the task of holding us all together, forming consensus, and moving forward in a direction (even when that probably meant bracketing some of his own personal preferences). He also did plenty of door-to-door, on-the-ground work holding the congregation together – hearing the concerns of congregants, identifying common ground, and helping us all charitably understand each other during a time of heightened tension.

Of course, we could (and probably should) point to many more individuals who took on new roles to help the church during the pandemic. God used a handful of willing folks to take on an outsized portion of the load.

We Lost Folks

That’s the part I feel most sad about. Besides the folks who passed away during that season (due to COVID or otherwise) whose families had to settle for grieving in less-than-ideal ways, we lost dear individuals and families who moved on from North Sub to other churches. While God certainly can bring good out of such moves, and surely has done so at their new churches, there’s a loss on our side that persists even years later.

In some of those cases, their departure probably couldn’t have reasonably been avoided. It was going to happen, and the craziness around COVID brought it about. But it seems naïve to imagine that better leadership on my part couldn’t have kept at least a few of those folks in our North Sub family.

Churches Got Re-Sorted

Coming out of the pandemic (and honestly still to this day), people shifted the criteria by which they choose churches. Criteria that used to be higher up the list (Statement of Faith, worship style, geographic location, theological distinctives) now started to take a backseat to where a church stood on certain hot-button issues-of-the-moment. Many of the Christians who moved to the North Shore during the years 2020-2022 looked up prospective churches’ statements on masking and sermons on race before they looked up those churches’ denominational affiliations or doctrinal statements.

That led to a re-sorting of churches in our area – many churches now experience more diversity within their congregations on significant theological distinctives (e.g. Calvinism/Arminianism, paedobaptism/credobaptism), worship styles, and denominational backgrounds than they did pre-pandemic… while they experience less diversity within their congregations than ever when it comes to political leanings, attitudes toward cultural hot-button issues, etc.

There is a discipleship opportunity here as we need to encourage each other to keep the “main things” the main things. There’s danger in giving outsized weight to the prominent issues of the moment. That said, one byproduct of the re-sort has been that our (newly re-constituted) church does enjoy more commonality now than it did before on how we see the issues of the day. Someone who is ultra-“woke,” or on the other side, who is a hardline blood-and-soil Trump apologist (for example), is just unlikely to make their home at North Sub anymore (though we’d of course welcome their presence with us!). The influential personalities they follow warned them to run away from churches like ours, and they’ve mostly listened.

We Were All Up to Date

There’s one part of the COVID era that I actually miss and wish we could return to. For a moment in time, we were all on the same page. There was literally nothing else to do!

None of us had anywhere else to be on Sunday mornings. If the kids were sick, well, we were home anyway; the livestream can be on TV while kids are sick. Everyone was tuning in every week, because it was a chance to connect with the church family. We texted in responses to questions, and when those responses were read aloud on the livestream, we relished the window we were afforded into our brothers’ and sisters’ experiences. It felt like we were living at an important moment in world history, and we wanted to open the Word together to see what God had to say to us.

Even when we came back to outdoor services, and then moved back inside, this actually continued for several months. There were no travel sports or weekend vacations… and then when those things resumed, we were all so in the habit of watching the livestream that we kept livestreaming while we were away!

The result of that, from a pastor’s perspective, was that it felt like we could actually go somewhere. On Mondays, I could be confident that almost every individual in our entire congregation was starting their work week having heard the same word from the Lord the previous day. What one person was reflecting on, we were all reflecting on together. As a shepherd, I can’t overstate how precious of a gift that was! To be herding 300 sheep all at once instead of trusting half to circle back to the other half later and communicate to the rest of them where we’re all going!

I wonder if this is one we can recapture, by the way. Not because I think I have such great things to say; I’m realistic about that. But rather because there’s such incredible value and exponential momentum that can come from all of us moving in the same direction at the same time! What if we all committed this summer that we would stay up-to-date on sermons and church emails, even if we missed service to serve down in kids’ ministry or to be on vacation out of town?

I Was In Over My Head

I’m not sure I need to say much more about this, because you all witnessed it firsthand… and very graciously bore with your unexperienced pastor. On one hand, I’m kind of glad the pandemic hit only 8 months into my becoming a Senior Pastor for the first time. I had energy and enthusiasm which bred some optimism about what God could do in the midst of such a trial! On the other hand, wow – you all were very patient with me.

I am especially grateful (and I’ve said this part before) for the folks who very much disagreed with what I said about COVID or about government restrictions or about race or about politics or about masks during that season… and yet stuck it out anyway. The “we very much disagree with you, but we can see your heart and know you’re trying your best to honor the Lord, so we’re going to stick it out here” conversations meant more than you will ever know.

We Learned About the Relationship Between Church and State

I don’t know how much of what we did we’d do differently now with the benefit of what we learned during that season. Maybe twenty of us would answer that twenty different ways. What I do know is that very few leaders (in any field) would go back and do everything just like they did it in 2020 and 2021. And part of what that season pushed us to study more was the relationship between the church and the state. To what extent are we to submit to government authority? When has a government crossed its God-ordained limits? When is it appropriate for a church to disregard a “mandate”? Whether we’d come to similar conclusions or not during a new pandemic (and God forbid that ever comes), we will have thought through it all much more thoroughly and biblically now than we had back then.

God Brought Good out of Tragedy

We knew He would! From the very first Sunday of the pandemic, we were declaring that He would. But with a few years of perspective now, we can see some of how He carried out His good purposes for North Sub using a pandemic that the enemy intended for evil. For that reason, while I never want to go through something like that again, I do thank God for how He used COVID-19 to mature North Suburban Church, and in doing so, how He got glory for Himself.

Tim Higgins

June 10, 2024

Some Things I Love About North Sub

#6: We have room to grow in our competency in following Jesus “off-script.”

I’ve recently shared five things I love about North Sub. I gained a greater appreciation for all of these on our sabbatical (see below for all articles):

• For the questions we ask

• For the songs we sing

• For our approach to the present-day political scene

• For our place in the broader network of churches in the area

• For our approach to our local culture

While there are plenty of other posts I could write detailing things I love about our church, I want to wrap up this series (and prepare to move on to the next!) with just one area I’m convinced we need to grow.

We have room to grow in our competency in following Jesus “off-script.” 

Below find a few of my thoughts about this challenge I have for our congregation.

Why It Matters

It matters because so much of the Christian life is lived off-script.

At a worship service or small group Bible study, it’s easy enough to follow Jesus. If a friend ever asks us, “What must I do to be saved?” we’ll be ready, because we’ve been taught what to say. When it’s time to lead family prayers at meals, we can do that, because we learned the script from our own parents.

But what about when I lose a job unexpectedly – how do I follow Jesus then? When my kid starts to rebel – what’s the script? When my neighbor asks me if I think he’s going to hell – what am I supposed to say? When my boss asks me to use the expense account for a personal purchase – where’s the chapter and verse?

Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer at TEDS loves talking about the “drama” of doctrine, how we are (in the best sense) actors who get to participate in enacting the story of redemption for a watching world to see. We have scripture as our script, for sure, but so much of our existence ends up needing to be improvised! There’s no direct chapter and verse answering the questions of how much our travel budgets should be, whether to send our kids to public or private schools, or whom we should marry. The better we know the “script” (scripture), the more faithful we’ll be in our improvisation… but it’s still very often improvisation that’s needed.

How well are we prepared for the vast majority of life for which there’s no black-and-white chapter-and-verse that gives us unambiguous direction?

Evidence Suggesting We’re Weak Here

Out of our eleven Marks of a Disciple [link], one of the two that our congregation consistently reports feeling underequipped on is “walks by the Spirit.”

During our 2023 spiritual check-up, for example, only 38% of our congregation was able to say “I regularly (but not necessarily always) sense the Spirit prompting me to act, convicting me of sin, and guiding my decisions.” A larger proportion (43%) of the congregation said, “I often sense the Spirit prompting me to act, convicting me of sin, and guiding my decisions. However, sometimes I feel like I’m on my own,” while almost 19% of the congregation said “I sometimes sense the Spirit prompting me to act, convicting me of sin, and guiding my decisions. However, I often feel like I’m on my own.”

Beyond that survey, many of us tend exhibit visible discomfort when asked to step off-script. When a Life Group or Growth Group member shares a vulnerable story, when somebody visits who is from a slightly different theological background than we are, when we’re asked to fill in for an out-of-town leader… these are sometimes moments of concern for us.

Why We Might Be Weak Here

By temperament and by training, we’re more of an on-script congregation than many. We have a good number of people who appreciate a solid script to help them walk through prayer time, or Life Group discussion leadership, or guitar chords for a worship song. Whereas many congregations feel constrained by a script, many North Sub members feel most nervous when without a script. In this way, you might say we’re more “classical” than “jazz” in our affinity for improvisation.

Indeed, our worship services rarely depart from the plans we laid out for them on Planning Center. For almost eight years, my sermons have rarely diverged from the transcript I’ve held in front of me. Our announcements and Prayers of the People are often delivered on-script, sometimes word-for-word. While these stylistic choices might seem incidental, it seems to me it all goes hand in hand with how we walk with Jesus.

Our On-Script Strength Is Valuable

We’re stronger than most churches in our area when it comes to on-script discipleship. And that’s important! We can articulate our doctrinal systems, recite verses relevant to particular topics, and implement evangelistic tools to initiate spiritual conversations. The North Shore needs a church that can do these things! I hope we never lose our on-script ability, because it’s impossible to faithfully improvise without that starting point – in fact, I have ideas for how I hope we will grow in our internalization of the “script!”

Yet, because walking with Jesus often requires off-script improvisation, I feel a burden to better equip our congregation for discipleship amidst those many life situations to which the script must be adapted – never altered, by the way! But rather, so thoroughly internalized that we can confidently “act” in an unscripted situation in a way that is totally faithful to the sorts of people the script called us to be.

So How Do We Grow?

The fact is, we can’t expect to prepare people to improvise during unscripted moments if we only disciple them in sterile, tightly controlled environments. Just like we wouldn’t send our teenagers out on the road driving solo after just a lap around an empty parking lot, it would be irresponsible to send our church members out into the world after only having been shown how to follow Jesus in situations when everything goes according to plan!

This is one of the reasons I’ve significantly reduced the notes I bring to the stage while I preach and lead. I may miss some things I wish I had said, but if I never model what it looks like to trust the Spirit instead of being stuck on getting it “perfect” (according to script), how do I hope you will be empowered for your own water cooler conversations at work on Monday, when you have no script in front of you?

This is also why we brought the index cards back out and have started actively requesting once again that the congregation listens to the Spirit and shares with the congregation any edifying word that is received from the Lord. Might this get a little messy on occasion? Sure. But even the awkward working-out of the messiness will be instructive as we prepare to live as disciples in a messy Monday-to-Saturday world.

Maybe in the future we create more opportunities for Life Group and Growth Group leaders to do role play scenarios during their training, to help prepare them for situations when the group discussion goes off-script. Maybe our open mic times become a little more frequent. Maybe our music teams start making more frequent use of hand gestures and vocal cues to make in-the-moment decisions about where to take the song next. However God leads us to disciple each other in preparation for the off-script moments, I pray that:

• Instead of sacrificing our competence with the “script,” we only grow in our knowledge of the script, our love for the script, and our internalization of the script until it becomes who we are.

• With the script “hidden in our hearts,” we become more confident listening to God’s Spirit as he leads us to improvise faithfully in new scenes the script didn’t explicitly spell out.

  
  Tim Higgins

May 20, 2024

Some Things I Love About North Sub

#5: Our Church's Approach to Our Local Culture

While I could write many more notes about what I appreciate about being part of our North Sub family, I’ll limit myself to just this one more for now. Besides the questions we ask, the songs we sing, and our approach to the political scene (see below), I also appreciate our church’s approach to the North Shore culture.

5) Our church’s approach to our local culture.

Obviously, there isn’t one monolithic “American culture,” and even to talk about “North Shore culture” is to limit oneself to generalizations that won’t nearly approximate the diversity of the experience of living on Chicago’s North Shore. Yet there are some ways in which living and “doing church” in Deerfield, Illinois is much different than doing church in Lisbon, Portugal, or in Islamabad, Pakistan, because the cultures are different.

Kevin Vanhoozer says culture is “the world of meaning, made by humans, in which we dwell; in contrast to nature, a comprehensive term for the beliefs, values, and way of life passed on from one generation to the next: a ‘web of significance.’” Andy Crouch succinctly summarizes: culture is “what we make of the world.”

As each of us is born into a place and time in which individuals and institutions around us are already in-process, making things of the world, how do we relate to the world they’ve been making?

Several thinkers over the decades have categorized Christian approaches to culture, and their taxonomies can be helpful in putting words to how we ourselves want to approach culture. See summaries below of three that have been most helpful for me (some of which is pasted directly from the respective books):

H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951)

• Christ Against Culture: Christ is fundamentally opposed to culture.

• Christ Of Culture: Christ and culture are fundamentally in agreement.

• Christ Above Culture: Christ is both continuous and discontinuous with culture; culture can teach us.

• Christ and Culture in Paradox: Christians live in two worlds, need to honor both sets of commitments.

• Christ as Transformer of Culture: Christ converts people within cultures, and in so doing, transforms their cultures to be more like the kingdom of God.

Andy Crouch, Culture Making (2008)

• Condemning Culture (e.g. fundamentalists who withdraw into an entirely separate, Christian bubble)

• Critiquing Culture (e.g. thinkpieces analyzing the latest cultural trend from a theological perspective)

• Copying Culture (e.g. contemporary Christian music pop love songs to Jesus)

• Consuming Culture (e.g. uncritical enjoyment of products of secular culture without hesitation)

• Cultivating and Creating Culture (e.g. writing fiction from a Christian perspective or giving up spring break to do hurricane cleanup)

Tim Keller, Center Church (2012)

• Transformationist Model: assumes a negative view of society, adopts an active role in influencing culture, and approaches culture with an optimistic expectation of cultural change. This model’s negative view of society is drawn from a right emphasis on the fallenness of humanity. Its active role and optimistic expectation is due to its confident conviction that the work of Christ can bring about cultural transformation. The primary means of cultural engagement for adherents of this model are political action and education, although they also support Christians working in business, the media, and the arts with the express purpose of restoring culture through activism and advocacy.

• Relevance Model: assumes a positive view of society, adopts an active role in influencing culture, and approaches culture with an optimistic expectation of cultural change. This model’s positive view of society is drawn from a right emphasis on “the ‘common good’ and ‘human flourishing.’” Its active role and optimistic expectation is due to its confident conviction of seeing “God at work outside the church.” The primary means of cultural engagement for adherents of this model is the arts, social service, and justice, with the express purpose of reaching culture through accommodation and adaptability.

• Counterculturalist Model: The Counterculturalist Model assumes a negative view of society, adopts a passive role in influencing culture, and approaches culture with a pessimistic expectation of cultural change. This model’s negative view of society is drawn from a right emphasis on the “world’s hostility to the truth.” Its passive role and pessimistic expectation is due to its confident conviction that simple living and self-denial for the sake of others mark true Christianity (this runs contrary to the unyielding values of the world). The primary means of cultural engagement for adherents of this model is charity, justice, and community, with the express purpose of resisting culture through altruism and abstention.

• Two Kingdoms Model: The Two Kingdoms Model assumes a positive view of society, adopts a passive role in influencing culture, and approaches culture with a moderate expectation of cultural change. This model’s positive view of society is drawn from a right emphasis on ‘common grace’. Its passive role and moderate expectation is due to its confident conviction in “the dignity and divine significance of all work done by all people.” The primary means of cultural engagement for adherents of this model is through conventional vocation and common involvement, with the express purpose of relating to culture through appreciation and allegiance.

As you read those three sets of grids, where do you find yourself most at home?

I think members of our church family would plot themselves all over the board on those three grids, and I think that’s a positive for our church! There are moments in which we have had hard decisions to make together: Do we wear masks during a pandemic when the government asks us to? Do we partner with a local congregation or ministry that doesn’t align with our convictions in every way? Do we promote an event that, while valuable, doesn’t hit the bullseye of the specific mission of our church? We may answer these questions differently in large part because of our more fundamental difference with regards to how we approach culture.

I obviously have my own idea of where I’d plot myself on the grids above, and those dots have honestly shifted some over the last few years. But wherever any of us feels most naturally at home, it’s critical that we aren’t inflexibly rigid, as if there’s a one-size-fits-all approach to every cultural moment. While the models above aren’t equally valuable (or equally attested in scripture), most of the models listed above can find some biblical support or precedent! We should be open to God’s Spirit directing us in wisdom to react differently to one cultural moment/artifact than to another, even as each of us may rightly settle into an embrace of one or more of the above as a basic default “posture” toward culture.

Which of the above models resonate(s) with you?

On sabbatical, we visited some churches that seemed inflexibly hostile toward culture, invariably condemning it. We also visited some churches that seemed more eager to copy or consume culture, invariably optimistic about cultural trends. I’m thankful we’re a church in which folks both are challenging each other regarding becoming too comfortable in an ungodly culture and are challenging each other regarding becoming too withdrawn in condemnation.

Tim Higgins

May 13, 2024

Some Things I Love About North Sub

#4: Our Role on the North Shore

When I was visiting other churches on sabbatical, I found my appreciation for our North Sub family growing increasingly warm.  I was thankful for the questions we ask, for the songs we sing, for our approach to the political scene (see below)… and for this:

4) Our place in the broader network of churches in the area.

As another denomination (not ours) wrestled with upheaval in recent years, some denominational leaders found it helpful to frame their internal conversation using George Marsden’s taxonomy regarding the tendencies of Reformed individuals and churches. In his 1997 Reformed Theology in America, Marsden proposed that the heirs of the Protestant Reformation include Pietists, Doctrinalists, and Kuyperians.

Pietists are oriented first and foremost toward personal experience with God. Our own denomination (the EFCA) traces its lineage in part to this heritage, as do the revivalists of the early days of American Christianity. Pietists speak of “quiet times” and “worship experiences,” yearning for personal encounters with the Almighty.

Doctrinalists’ first priority is sound theology. Whatever denominations they are part of, they study the great theological writings of centuries past and seek to make sure their own doctrinal systems are rigorously coherent. Doctrinalist sermons are primarily interested in unpacking the theological truths found in a given text.

Kuyperians (or we might call them “Culturalists”) follow in the footsteps of Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper by prioritizing cultivation of the sort of Christian worldview that transforms the culture. The Culturalist’s instinct is to ask how scripture and Christian practice might influence the broader world, transforming it to look more like the kingdom of Christ. Some Culturalist churches pass out voter guides during election season and seek to rally Christians to exercise their sway in the halls of earthly power.

Obviously, these are caricatures, and few individuals or churches fit neatly into any one of the three. That said, after visiting a church even once or twice, it’s usually evident which of these three is/are most prominent!

Many have used this taxonomy to make the case: “We need each other.” Every church is going to more naturally lean in one or two of these directions, but churches in all three of these categories emphasize something that the “big-C” church needs.

So, if this is a helpful but imperfect taxonomy, where does North Sub presently fall? And what does the North Shore need from North Sub?

We are uniquely positioned in some ways, because:

• We come from a denominational heritage that has strongly pietistic roots. And as an American evangelical church, we are almost inevitably heirs of the pietistic tradition in ways that we just take for granted because in the minds of most American evangelicals, personal-experience-with-Jesus-church is what church is!

• That said, our church is in the shadow of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, a seminary that has achieved world-renowned status in the last 40-50 years. Trinity’s influence has shaped the EFCA itself to become more doctrinally-and-confessionally-oriented, and North Sub’s heritage of TEDS faculty and students has perhaps made us more theologically-minded than the average North Shore evangelical church.

• Still, when North Sub crafted a new mission statement about ten years ago, one third of it was very Kuyperian: “…to send them out as empowered disciples to transform the world.” That desire to transform the world reflects a priority among many of our congregants to see our faith and worldview make a difference beyond the doors of the church, including strategically in places of potential cultural influence.

All that to say: I came to appreciate on my sabbatical that North Sub has a well-rounded base of appreciation for all three of these streams. We can happily partner with other churches in the area due to our ability to connect on our points of commonality. We aren’t freaked out by any one of these three approaches, because we understand all three are important. And we aren’t abandoning one or more of these three in an all-out quest to prioritize just one.

Looking ahead, though, raises a different question: “Beyond who we are now, who is God calling us to be?” From our solid base of appreciation for all three of these emphases, might God be calling us to prioritize one of these for a season? Might he want us to lean into what we can uniquely bring to the North Shore that no other church might be positioned to bring (at least in the same way)? After all, a church that tries to do everything often ends up doing nothing all that excellently!

Or, perhaps, does God just want us to keep marching steadily onward with our hands on all three of these levers, seeking to make room for his Spirit to work in any of these three spheres, trusting that what we may sacrifice in excellence will be counted as faithfulness?

As church leaders have talked in recent years about questions like this one, our discussion has revolved around two main clusters of questions:

• Where are we strong? What unique gifts and opportunities has God given North Sub that we’d be wise to make full use of?

• What does the North Shore need? What emphasis is lacking? What are individuals and communities missing that North Sub could possibly step in and provide?

Those conversations are ongoing, and the elders would always love to hear any thoughts you have! These philosophical questions should (and do!) affect who we hire, what our budget priorities are, how we structure our worship services, what programs we offer – any number of critical aspects in the life of our church. Do we go “all-in” on doctrine for a season because we see a need in that area that we can meet? Do we seek instead to foreground the facilitating of personal encounters with God? Or to be the church that has its hands in the nitty-gritty life of our communities?

Pray with us as we seek God’s leading. There is a general sense that, now that we’re on solid footing, we need to be prepared for God to call us to take some risks. But I’m thankful to God that I get to serve at a church with such a well-rounded appreciation for the best of what various church traditions bring to bear.

Tim Higgins

May 6, 2024

Some Things I Love About North Sub

#3: Our Congregational Attitude Toward Politics

Visiting different churches means experiencing different worship styles, service lengths, sermon deliveries, creative elements, uses of technology, cultural norms, etc. While it was refreshing to connect with God in a variety of ecclesial contexts on our sabbatical, I found my appreciation for North Sub deepening more than I found myself getting jealous of any other churches. I gained a fresh appreciation for several aspects of our church culture, including the questions we ask and the songs we sing (see below). I was also struck by this:

3) I love our approach to the present-day political scene.

It’s not easy to know how to navigate something as fraught as our present-day political moment, and I’m not sure we’re doing it 100% correctly at North Sub. In fact, based on the fact that most of us (in hindsight) would do some things differently than we did during COVID, it’s almost certain that we’re not navigating the 2024 political moment with absolute perfection. But I love the general “lane” in which our church family seems eager to run.

I’d describe our church’s culture with regards to American politics this way:

• We generally seem to agree that it’s not possible for any church to “stay out” of politics [link].

• At the same time, we refuse to become a tool of partisan politics, as if we have authority to put the stamp of divine approval on either of the present-day major political parties in the US.

• We have no illusions that the kingdom of Christ will be established on earth by political means during this age, so we prioritize the church’s witness over even the most desirable political outcomes, and we don’t invest our hopes in the latter.

• That said, we do encourage active engagement in local, state, and national politics as informed by our primary allegiance and citizenship in heaven.

Our denomination’s recent “Denials and Affirmations” summarize well our approach to several present-day political issues:

• We are not adherents of the secular “Social Justice” movement as held in progressive circles, but we do believe that biblical justice has social implications, particularly in protecting those who are most vulnerable and marginalized.

• We are not “woke” in the sense of having embraced a progressive ideology that is grounded in critical theory rather than the Bible, but we do see the need to be awakened to the global and indeed cosmic impacts of sin, including racial injustice, and to be attuned to the biblical call for gospel-driven efforts toward reconciliation and restoration.

•  We are not adherents of “Critical Race Theory” that reduces all racial inequities to a struggle between oppressor and oppressed and presents a worldview that is contrary to the Scriptures, but we do believe that the questions and challenges it raises stir us to recall critical biblical truths that we may have neglected and require our attention.

• We are not “Christian Nationalists” who believe the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation or who believe that Americans are “God’s chosen people,” but we do believe that a patriotic love of one’s nation is appropriate and that Christians should be good citizens who may freely advocate for God-honoring public policies.

• We do not believe that political means can establish the kingdom of God, but we do believe that God has appointed governing authorities to do good and that, for citizens in Christ's kingdom, King Jesus’ rule and reign transcends all other citizenships and partisan ideologies and transforms how we live in the world.

As you know, a great number of churches do not aspire to follow the course outlined above, opting instead to put more of their “eggs” in the basket of either conservative or progressive political outcomes. But I think the approach our elders have modeled and that our congregation has adopted is most faithful to the calls to “quietness” in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Timothy 2.

Paul writes 1 Thessalonians in a moment of profound political unrest, and he is concerned with how we Christians look to the outside world:

But we encourage you, brothers and sisters, to do this [i.e. love one another] even more, to seek to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you, so that you may behave properly in the presence of outsiders and not be dependent on anyone. (1 Thess. 4:10-12)

Similarly (and even more explicitly), 1 Timothy connects the quiet life of a Christian to godly engagement with those in political authority:

I urge that petitions, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all those who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity. (1 Tim. 2:2)

Trevin Wax summarizes well [link] the path these verses chart between two potential errors:

How do we avoid the danger of a quietism that would lead us to silence when we are called to speak? How do we avoid the danger of an activism that would sweep us into the maelstrom of current events and political fervor? Both dangers mute our witness. Both dangers drown out a distinctive Christian voice—the first because we are silent when we should speak, and the second because we speak but sound just like everyone else.

That’s what we’re after at North Sub. And I think it has us well-positioned to be a breath of fresh air to our neighbors, offering the hope of the gospel without that gospel being unnecessarily discredited by either the progressive or the conservative versions of worldly-minded political engagement.

[Note: I highly recommend the recent talks [link] by Jonathan Leeman at our denomination’s 2024 Theology Conference.]

Tim Higgins

April 29, 2024

Some Things I Love About North Sub

#2: The Songs We Sing

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” and that’s what our time away did for the Higgins family with respect to North Sub. Last week [see below], I shared one way in which my appreciation for our church culture grew on sabbatical; this week, I’d like to share a second one.

2) I appreciate the songs we sing.

“Songs are sermons people remember.” If this is true (and experientially, I have to admit I remember many more songs than I do sermons), then it elevates the instructive dimension of our songs. To frame it another way: if someone spends three years worshiping at North Sub, we will have taught them something through the songs we sang on Sunday mornings. The question is: will our songs have taught them well, or not well?

To be sure, there are other dimensions of musical worship besides the instructive. There’s the emotional component of pouring out our souls to God. There’s the community component of encouraging one another with lifted voices. There’s the physical component of using our bodies to worship with all our strength. Maggie and I have been thinking and praying together almost every week about how to help our congregation grow in these areas. But I was reminded during sabbatical that the instructive component of worship is important, too – and that it’s nearly impossible to properly instruct through musical worship if the song selection is watered-down or fluffy.

Indeed, this instructive aspect of musical worship is prioritized in the biblical treatments of the topic. Moses’ song in Deuteronomy 32 is jam-packed with exhortations that Israel was meant to teach to their children. When someone brings a “psalm” before the congregation in 1 Corinthians 14:26, Paul insists that the psalm is brought for the purpose of “building up.” And when Colossians 3:16 provides more color regarding just how a song might build up the church family, the emphasis is on instruction:

Let the word of Christ dwell richly among you, in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.

What the church sings, the church believes!

Once we’ve selected robust songs that teach the congregation the sorts of truths about God we’re prone to forget – and that admonish us in the ways that we’re prone to wander from God – we can think about how to set up those songs, how to arrange those songs, and how to execute those songs to facilitate emotional, communal, and physical engagement. But if the song selection is thin, there’s no way around it: we’ll end up shaping people in a thin discipleship. 

I wasn’t always so convinced of the importance of this. Actually, this is the one topic on which I ventured to engage in an extended “debate” with Dr. Carson during my visits to his office hours during seminary. My arguments back then:

• Some of the psalms are quite repetitive. Is it so bad if we sing songs that repeat simple truths over and over sometimes? Are we sure it isn’t good for us?

• What happens in corporate worship is meant to be intelligible (1 Cor. 14:9). Are we sure these theologically rich hymns meet the threshold of intelligibility to everyone singing them, including children and people with intellectual disabilities?

• If our brains have to work so hard to keep up with all the truth we’re proclaiming, where is the room to connect what we’re singing with our hearts and emotions?

However, in the ten years since those conversations, I’ve found that it’s possible to have intensely emotional experiences even while singing theologically rich songs. I’ve found that many of the worship songs I enjoyed most ten years ago didn’t age well at all – to the degree that I don’t have any desire to sing them anymore. Meanwhile, in my most difficult moments, the comforting songs that come into my mind and heart are often the ones that have stood the test of time because they are anchored in depth.

More than anything, I’ve come to appreciate more that God doesn’t merely care that he is praised; he seems to care a great deal how he is praised. Scripture testifies consistently to God’s prescriptions for worship… and his disgust for worship that isn’t offered according to what delights him.

I don’t think any church in the world offers musical worship that perfectly pleases the Lord. Experiencing the energy levels at various churches on my sabbatical convinced me that we at North Sub really can get better at bringing “all our might” to our corporate singing on Sunday mornings (like we do on Easter!). But that’s not a function of song selection, as though picking from the K-Love Top 40 would instantly awaken spiritual sleepers. Instead, it will be an insistence on continuing to sing our theologically rich catalog, accompanied by frequent reminders that this great truth we sing about deserves great emotion!

I don’t want us to drift into singing endlessly about what our hearts feel about God. That isn’t always authentic, and it keeps the focus on us. I like that we’ve asked under Maggie’s leadership, “How does God want to be praised?” And correspondingly, we’ve sung songs that proclaim who God is and what he has done – much like God’s own songbook does.

In short, the deeper we drill down in our theology, the higher we will be able to soar in praise. And while we pray for our Sunday gatherings to awaken with a spark of new life and energy and vitality, I love that we get to do so starting from a base song catalog of rich hymns and spiritual songs, both ancient and modern.

Tim Higgins

April 22, 2024

Some Things I Love About North Sub

#1: The Questions We Ask

Extended travels, especially those that introduce significant cultural difference, have an ironic way of helping us see “home” more clearly. That certainly proved true for the Higgins family on our recent sabbatical: I understand Chicago food better after having spent eight weeks eating other foods; I understand Midwesterners better after having spent eight weeks interacting with Australians and Hawaiians. And I do feel like experiencing over a dozen different churches across the denominational and cultural spectrum has helped me understand North Sub much better than I did before I left!

The consistency of the refrain from the Higgins kids each Sunday put a smile on our faces: “When do we get to go back to North Suburban Church?” It feels warm to be returning to a church where our kids feel loved, feel known, and feel excited to attend. Beyond that, visiting other wonderful churches on this sabbatical enhanced my appreciation for five particular aspects of our church’s “culture,” none of which I have been around long enough to take credit for. This week, the first one:

1) I appreciate the questions with which we engage.

Here’s what I mean: our church family spends less time asking “What does God have to say about the questions I care about?” and more time asking “What are the questions God wants me to care about?”

Of course, it’s important for local churches to engage with the questions people already care about. In fact, I have been convicted about my failure to equip our congregation on a few pressing issues that matter to folks in our church family, and I plan to address those in the months to come. That said, our human problem isn’t just that we’ve adopted the wrong answers to our questions (though that’s often true); it’s perhaps just as significantly that we’ve asked the wrong questions in the first place… or at least that we’ve allowed the most important questions to be overpowered by comparatively far less important questions.

So, certainly, local churches should equip Christians on the matters that are causing them anxiety. In our day, it’s sexuality and gender, politics and Christian nationalism, race and justice, etc. It’s singleness and dating, anxiety and mental health – the Bible speaks to all of these. But in our market-driven ecclesial landscape, the temptation is to let such topics set the agenda for the church: “Let’s give the people what they want!” There are worse paths, one might argue, than giving people solid answers to the questions that have been keeping them up at night!

The problem is that, when we zoom out on (say) 3-5 years of church life, if the whole agenda has been reactive, merely responding to the questions people are asking, we can suffer from unintended consequences. Most significant among the problems created: we fallen humans need help knowing not just what God says about our questions; we need help asking better questions. And by “better” questions I mean: the kinds of questions God prompts us to ask because the very asking of them aligns us with His priorities.

When Satan can’t succeed in a full-frontal attack on our beliefs, he’s happy to try to take our (solid) beliefs and shift them out of order. If he can get us to deprioritize the “majors” and elevate the “minors,” he can cause havoc as we begin to:

• demonize sisters and brothers who differ from us on what should be secondary or even tertiary beliefs and practices

• train the next generation to devote the best of their energy and passions to fringe issues while only giving lip services to the fundamentals of the faith

• form a self-centered Christianity in which God exists to meet my felt needs and answer my pressing questions; where I’m inviting him to fill in the blanks on my page instead of doing the harder work of getting on His page.

Scripture doesn’t read like a “hot-button faith questions” book. Much of what we’re given is placed on “shelves” that do not immediately appear to be especially relevant to our everyday lives: priesthood, temple, kingship, sacrifice, etc. That God chose to deliver His revelation to us using these categories means that we end up either (a) ignoring these “irrelevant” categories, nibbling the crumbs of what’s left around the edges of scriptural revelation in search for answers to our questions, or (b) doing the hard work of leaning into these categories, exploring them in faith that God will reward our searching. Many churches opt for the former. But when a congregation chooses the latter, we start to ask questions along the grain of scripture instead of against its grain. Our priorities slowly get reshaped such that we care more about what God cares most about, and we care less about what’s less important in God’s grand plan of redemption. It’s not that we don’t want those answers anymore; it’s that we have put them in their proper place.

At North Sub, some of the most excitement I’ve seen on your faces is when we did a service tracing “hyssop” through scripture and showing how it told the story of the gospel. Or when we did the same with the biblical mentions of color “red-purple” (argaman). These are questions no North Shore resident is asking on their own: “What does God want to say to me through hyssop? Why red-purple?” But God’s Spirit authored scripture to lead us to ask those questions, and to experience the delight that comes from uncovering what God wanted to show us about Himself through the quest of answering those questions. I love that I get to serve a church family that leans forward in their seats when it’s a topic like that! What a blessing!

We will certainly continue to show what the Bible has to say about the unique questions of our moment. But let’s continue to be a church that fundamentally wants to ask better questions just as much as we want answers to our existing questions. In doing so, our religious lives will be increasingly God-shaped… and less shaped by our selfish priorities.

Tim Higgins