The headline in the New York Times on Sunday read, "Anglican Conservatives, Rebelling on Gays, Will Form New Power Bloc." Conservatives from Africa, South America, India, Australia, and the United States met in Jerusalem to "create a new ecclesiastical province in the United States and Canada to absorb the parishes that have been outraged by the American church’s consecration of an openly gay bishop in 2003 and the Canadian church’s blessing of same-sex unions." The story put my week at the conference of the Evangelical Free Church of America in perspective. As we debated a thorough revision of our statement of faith in St. Louis, there were none of the Anglican agonies.

My Episcopalian brothers and sisters have endured a crisis of doctrine, conscience, and fellowship for years, a crisis induced by an American leadership determined to remake Christianity in their own image. Only now do conservatives have a chance to emerge from the crisis with a communion they can embrace. My friends with Episcopalian parishes would affirm the work God has done among their people, but the strain in their voices when they describe meeting with machine-driven bishops tells some of the cost of that work.

I continue to be inspired by their example while thanking God that I don't have to carry their burden. I am blessed by the godly leaders of the EFCA.

When I first heard about the proposal to revise the EFCA statement of faith, I was suspicious. I have little confidence in organizations. One of my largest challenges as a leader is my own cynicism about institutional goals: I can't bring myself to use the lingo of teams, which I associate with conformism. So when the word unity shows up on banners, I'm chiefly interested in discovering the agenda behind it.

But now I can honestly say --

I interrupt this repentance just to emphasize that my suspicion of many leadership practices in institutions is unchanged. I don't like grand visions, glossy marketing, rah-rah speeches, videos, ads disguised as magazine articles, groupthink disguised as fellowship, the exaltation of the team player as the ultimate example of godliness, or the permanent smile of the mass communicator. Just so that's clear.

I like networks of people in relationship with each other. I like to see those people, as unique individuals interacting with other unique individuals, make corporate decisions on the basis of biblical principles and their shared history. I like leaders who understand that this kind of process can't be reconciled with marketing, but only thrives on good old deliberation.

The reason I was won over to the revised statement of faith is that the EFCA's leaders -- President Bill Hamel, the board of directors, credentialing director Greg Strand, and the Spiritual Heritage committee -- showed that unity was not their slogan but their goal. They showed their integrity with patient engagement and transparency.

To strengthen our unity, we need a statement of faith that stirs us with its truth and timeliness, and the proposed revision certainly delivers. Its statement on the doctrine of God slams the door on open theism, letting the Lord's full glory out:

"We believe in one God, Creator of all things, holy, infinitely perfect, and eternally existing in a loving unity of three equally divine Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Having limitless knowledge and sovereign power, God has graciously purposed from eternity to redeem a people for Himself and to make all things new for His own glory."

The new statement on the Bible is specific and sweeping:

"We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors. As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged. Therefore, it is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises."

Paragraph #4 on Jesus Christ is filled with terms evoking the biblical narrative of redemption, and paragraph #8 on Christian living is a needed affirmation of God's purposes for salvation. As a confession of the biblical heritage of Evangelical Free churches, this statement will deepen our unity for decades to come.

But more important than producing a strong document was how the leaders produced it. A key issue for many pastors and lay leaders around the country was whether an affirmation of the premillennial return of Christ (#10) should be included in the new statement. At first, the spiritual heritage committee recommended that the term premillennial be dropped. They had good reasons, and at first I agreed with them. It is not an essential doctrine for a person's salvation, and it does pose difficulties for our cooperation with outside ministries.

But as I listened to older pastors in the movement, the significance of my own commitment to premillennialism deepened. This particular teaching was a passionate focus of the fathers of our movement more than a century ago. It has relevance today as evangelicals decide whether their engagement in politics is a matter of Christianizing the State or evangelizing souls. The EFCA is not among those calling for Christian laws in order to hasten the return of Christ. Christ will set up his own law, in his Father's time.

The EFCA leaders said they would listen to input from the churches. When that input showed a strong desire to retain premillennialism in the revision, the leaders did listen. They put the term premillennial back in the statement. Then they won over most of those who had originally supported dropping it. They impressed me with their reverence for history and fellowship.

The 2008 conference adopted the revision by an 86% vote. I am proud to have been a part of it. I'm grateful for the consistent orthodoxy of our movement. And I'm encouraged to have witnessed the deliberation of a network of people, not the operations of a machine.

We were desperate to get out of the apartment,even that late in the day. Storms roved east, disillusioned gold miners headed back into the desert, and we rode under as far as the mountains until the pines were thick and the rain fell faucets between gapping lace work of needles.

Gray light deepened. Darkness crept down the ridges, grew in soft spaces amid the trees and covered the swollen creek its mad rushing- and the pool. The mist of the water fall raised its slow, cold heart to the rain.

We walked the paths along the creek and rain ran down our hooded coats. Cold undeniable forced us in. Squares of light opened out into the night and the fire touched our faces and our clothes- those that we finally shed to the floor to feel the waver of heat set free on skin. Did we finally know what we had been waiting to know all our lives? And now? When I shiver?

I sit in a suburban St. Louis hotel room trying to understand my own reaction to the dust-up between James Dobson and Barack Obama. Admittedly, I'm in the haze that results from a day of conference meetings. I'm also irritable because travel destroys the daily rituals on which I depend for well-being, and because travel to a denominational conference is particularly charmless. More importantly, I am worried about my dad, who had stoke-like symptoms on Tuesday. I freely admit, I may not be thinking clearly.

Nevertheless, in my hotel room -- which has that twenty-year menthol smell, yet has been declared "non-smoking" -- I slog through several articles about the controversy.

It appears that, in order blunt Obama's outreach to evangelicals, Dobson attacked him for misusing the Bible. The AP, which received an advance copy of Dobson's broadcast remarks, reported, "Dobson took aim at examples Obama cited in asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy — chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, 'a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application.'"

Dobson said, "I think [Obama is] deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology."

While I listen to the guy shouting into his cell while he gets ice in the hallway, I wonder if the AP might alert its writers that Leviticus is a book.

Next, I gather that Obama attacked Dobson for attacking him. The speech Dobson had cited, Obama argued, was saying that people of faith should ''try to translate some of our concerns in a universal language so that we can have an open and vigorous debate rather than having religion divide us.''

Obama said, ''I think you'll see that [Dobson] was just making stuff up, maybe for his own purposes.''

Then lots of religious spokespeople started attacking Dobson and Obama.

After I find all this on the Internet, I realize that I could've just listened to the TV in the next hotel room, which has been bellowing about the fight with perfect clarity.

What is my reaction to Dobson vs. Obama? I regard it as an imposition, a bother, another of the 24-hour news cycle's pestilential contretemps that I would ignore if it weren't for the politicians' blundering into the pastoral zone.

So, while vainly striving to ignore various aspects of my fellow guests' lives -- their children, their dogs, their gastro-intestinal dramas -- I try to understand my lack of partisan fervor. Don't I care when the Bible is abused by public figures? Don't I have an opinion about whether Obama's Christianity is legitimate? Shouldn't I offer some guidance for my flock as to which man is right? Or am I just resigned to the ultimate equivalence of all political and doctrinal positions?

Partly, I am reacting to Dobson's salvo as a pressure tactic, as a way of forcing every evangelical pastor to line up with him against Obama. We have created a culture of complaining, in which the loudest and most abrasive player drives others from the field. I feel this culture is degrading, no matter what message is being pushed, and I am not going to participate in the game.

Further, I am less than inspired by the wording of Dobson's attack. He says that Obama is "distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible." I'm not sure what Dobson means. The traditional understanding? Does he mean that Obama is using a straw man instead of dealing with real evangelical positions? Or does he mean that Obama is distorting the Bible itself? He doesn't quite say either. And what does he mean by saying that Obama makes these distortions to fit "his own confused theology"? And that Obama is doing it all deliberately?

I fear that Dobson has fallen into the populist habit of stringing words together for their connotations rather than crafting them for meaning. The tactic makes insinuation sound direct. In this case, it certainly communicates Dobson's feelings to evangelical insiders, but it draws no blood. Obama's theological problems are other than Dobson insinuates.

Even further, I am dismayed by the strategic imbecility of making Leviticus an issue in a political campaign. The people at Focus just didn't think this one through. Are we really going to win a public argument with Obama about hermeneutics, the relation of the Old and New Testaments, and which portions of the Bible "apply today?"

Obama's rhetorical questions about which Bible passages should determine public policy were sophomoric, just what we have come to expect from politicians trying to sound highbrow. But no matter how you choose to answer such things, it's not safe to take the tone lower. A little irony goes a long way.

Finally, I'm not convinced that Barack Obama's theology is, as Dobson charged, "confused." Obama's theology is banal, the sort of spiritual generalizing one hears on NPR, as if "translating our concerns in a universal language" is a self-explanatory aspiration, as if having "an open and vigorous debate" is not by definition living with ideas that "divide us."

I will continue to fight such clichés disguised as profundities from my pulpit. I'll do so because doctrines are not ultimately equivalent: Obama's Christian zen is just a repackaged modernist liberalism. I'll try to fight with better weapons than Dobson wants to hand me.

But for now, I put in my earplugs and go to sleep.

Thelonious used to call life and death play things.Rocking mirth on his knee, he spoke in dissonant bursts. He led us to the night sky lake where he sent out accusations to bob on havoc-rippled reflections of the moon and to float ashore to the line of us.

I watched him like a man watches the gauge go to end, gripping the wheel and steering though he just as well stop. It will stop here or it will stop there, and here or there are both a thousand miles from towns and borders in a waste of dry words split before and behind by a long black line.

Death is easy. It paints what it has heard of beauty and then describes the painting while shadows pool in its sallow cheeks. Death's words are severed hands that scratch and scatter like November leaves on cracked and gray, forgotten streets. Death hobbles down empty halls on broken feet, calling for the doctor with a bitter back to God.

Yet hasn't my heart found definition in words? None other than the tongue can lift up this confession: I stood with him by the lake pronouncing accusations until I became dizzy from the hazard alterations of light and dark, hypnotizing into memory with a permanence that seemed not to weigh on the others. Their words were tossed about to someone else's shore, but the wind brought mine to my feet.

Death is easy, yes, but life is hard. We struggle, my friend, and always have.

Last week, someone showed me a review of my novel Fallen on Amazon. The reviewer, Keith Hammond, made my day with some very generous praise, and then raised an issue that I've encountered often:

My only complaint is that the story seemed too personal and allegorical to be completely fictional. I would have preferred the book to have an addendum where the author directly talks about the issues or situations that caused him to write such a compelling book.

The first person to make this kind of comment to me was one my editors at Kregel, who, during our line-by-line slog through the manuscript, said that the dialog was "a little too good." He wondered what experiences I had plundered. After the novel was released, my secretary gave it to a relative, who finished it and made the hair-raising assertion, "Obviously, Raley's had an affair." Then there are the youth at my church, who have dissected the story with frightening precision, tracing eccentricities and obsessions from my habits into my narrative.

If only they were so devoted to their schoolwork.

So I guess I'd better tell all.

From start to finish, Fallen is invented. I didn't model any character on a person I've known, nor have I ever had to endure what Jim, the narrator, goes through. I've found that fictionalizing real-life scenarios and personalities almost always yields a flat story because there is too much authorial judgment on the characters and too little sympathy. A novelist needs to keep his cool.

Yet, for me, Fallen is a personal book. Mr. Hammond and others are right. The book is personal in this sense: almost every vile act I portrayed in the story was invented from what I have seen in my own soul.

When I drew characters for the story, for example, I tried to load them with contradictions. Jim loves his wife and daughter, but also treats them with selfish disregard. He wants to be gracious, but gives favor with calculation. Pastor Dave is an emotionally driven man, yet he disguises his motives by intellectualizing. Also, Dave wants to see himself as compassionate towards others, yet his core motivation is self-pity.

Each of these contradictions -- and many others in my characters, male and female -- has its origin in some struggle of my own for integrity. I simply implanted my hypocrisies within the quite different personalities of my characters. I hate confessing this procedure, because it makes the story feel like public nudity. But that's what I did.

The same is true of the relational struggles that the book portrays. I put my follies into all of the marriages and working partnerships. I invented the male characters' misconceptions of women, from their flippant infatuations to their ordeals in marriage, out of similar misconceptions of my own. While the power struggles among church leaders in the book grew out of the invented scenarios, my own anger in sympathy with each character showed me how the struggles would deepen.

The crimes in Fallen, then, were not written as veiled reports but as shame-faced extrapolations.

There are two important differences between my approach and the method of fictionalizing personal experiences.

First, as a matter of technique, memoirs-as-novels start with scenarios and create characters to fit, which yields a false story. A human being is not a robot. Fictional human beings cannot be robots and be true. So I started with characters and then shaped the scenarios. Every day I wrote, the characters surprised me.

Second, I would only write a memoir-as-novel to vent bitterness. I may be unusual in this tendency, and other authors might have other motivations. But, as a matter of repentance, I don't write to vent. I used to. Creating a little world in which all of my judgments are validated can be satisfying. But writing such things does not edify anyone. I found the method of spreading my darkness among many characters to be sanctifying. Instead of judging the sins of others, I was able to examine my own.

This is a method that I feel bound to follow. The subject matter of Fallen does not need more angry scribblers. But, I hope, a repentant one might do some good.

Your lover sits in the straight backed chairwith her old lady's shawl, draped over the green cushion, and her old lady's charms within her acoustic body.

Years ago you made those climbing notes in the dark halls of tall stone when the thousand associations held out palms of echoes and gave to thunder. You were the master facing his slavery.

Now, with the mysterious halls abandoned, with all associations left there and your mind forced into the words that people hang on for grace or for condemnation, your lover waits to speak. But when she does, will it matter what she says?

Sometimes I find a post that hits me in the gut. On Tuesday I saw "Confused Christian" on the new and anonymous My Bloggerings, and read expressions of what many evangelicals feel these days. It made me ask whether God's eye has left his people. MB, the blog's creator, wrote that she grew up charismatic but turned away from the sign gifts movement after she got married. "I just didn’t think that is what the Bible was all about." But now she feels that she can't replace it with anything.

At her current church, she says, "I am so unsatisfied with watered down preaching and 'anything goes' philosophy because God after all will still love you.  I want more than this." She sees professing Christians living as immorally as non-Christians, being focused on their careers rather than their children. "My church has lost the art of mentoring younger people and feeding them spiritually.  Instead, the goal is to make friends who drink and have poker games at their house and hit on girls at the Champs restaurant in our city."

MB says she wants a deeper community where life with Christ is more vibrant. "But I’m afraid that this is only a dream.  For I have visited so many churches only to be let down by them all.  Am I just expecting too much?"

Her experience is depressingly common. I often look at the demands of ministry and echo her question, adding another of my own. Is there any tool for nurturing spiritual life that works?

Morality doesn't work. Parents and church leaders who focus on raising standards of behavior only have scare tactics to motivate people. There's a wealth of material to use -- a culture that is spiraling into anarchy, case after case of self-destruction, evidence from medicine and social science about the effects of vice. But the reality is that people are not primarily motivated by fear. If future danger and immediate pleasure compete for people's attention, who wins?

Community doesn't work. The old line that embers burn when they're close together is true as far as it goes. But a pile of sticks won't make its own spark. Strong community without vibrant spirituality just strengthens people's selfishness under the cover of love and loyalty.

Family doesn't work. The fumes of human sin are most toxic when inhaled up close. The flame of the tongue, the heat of anger, the slow burn of bitterness have a way of suffocating all godly aspirations. Far too many families, if we're honest, have a well-preserved skin of faith, but their vital organs have been pickled.

Doctrine and preaching don't work. Neither do programs, buildings, or media. Truth be told, I can't think of a single spiritual tool that makes any impression on a heart that refuses to seek God. The tools only make that heart worse. Which means that, when people will not listen to the claims of God on their lives, the tool that is so useful at so many other times, the church, doesn't work.

There is only one thing that affects hearts like we have among evangelicals today. It is a single moment, the moment when the presence of Jesus Christ becomes frighteningly real, when a professing believer raises his face and discovers that God's eye, far from leaving him, has been locked on him all along, and has seen everything.

For that, MB and the rest of us have to pray.

The plain fact in John 2.10 is that Jesus makes the best wine. The contrast with Coke is instructive. No one makes the best Coke: what you're drinking is either Coke or it isn't. Coke is mass-produced according to a famously secret recipe, and the production is quality-controlled to ensure the brand keeps its identity. Indeed, the whole point of Coke is that the dose you drink now is indistinguishable from what you drank fifteen years ago.

Here's a ruthless reality: mass society has no interest in beauty. Mass society is fanatical about sameness because, in order to make money, a product has to appeal to the largest number of people. Any unusual characteristic that might irritate customers must be eliminated.

Maintain the ruthlessness just a moment longer. Churches that serve mass society have no interest in beauty. The ethic of sameness dictates that a church fit the prevailing tastes. If it does not, it will lose people. Such churches emphasize conformity rather than depth.

There are other reasons why the churches of mass society don't care about beauty.

For one thing, beauty costs too much. European churches of the 1700s had maintained music directors, composers, instrumental ensembles, and choirs for hundreds of years - a cultural investment that eventually matured into the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The fact that his music is one of the few remaining gospel witnesses on that continent doesn't ease the jaw-dropping impact of the price tag.

Beyond that, people who make beautiful things are weirdos. Bach was notoriously hard to get along with. He played the organ too loud. His music was too complicated.

Further, they're pretentious weirdos. Bach couldn't just play the violin. He had to write three and four parts for one violin to play at the same time.

Contemporary church people weigh these exalted considerations and agree that getting the masses to pray the prayer is more important than art.

This puts mass society churches in direct conflict with Jesus.

Two women anointed him with costly perfume (Luke 7.37-38; John 12.3). This means a craftsman fussed over the ointment, mixing it according to a refined recipe and throwing out the batches that weren't up to standard. His weird fixation with getting the stuff to smell exactly right was what made it so pricey. Jesus accepted the women's offering of scent.

According to John (19.23-24), Jesus wore a seamless tunic valuable enough that the Roman soldiers gambled for it rather than tear it into four parts. This means a weaver put extra labor and skill into the garment, creating a unique cloth that would be valuable not for its utility but for its beauty. Why was Jesus wearing such expensive threads?

Because he cared about physical expressions of beauty. He knew that beauty ministers to the human soul. So when he made wine - just as when he made the souls that would consume it - he made it surpassingly well.

The question today is not how we will win souls to Christ if we invest in beauty, but how we will win them if we don't. Our Coke society - with its killing conformity - is creating an audience thirsty for wine.

Every Sunday, flights of lunacy from pulpits make sober Christians cringe. I guess, sooner or later, a maniacal statement was bound to go viral. For one thing, lunacy in preachers is so common. For another, the presidential campaign this year demanded a Republican sacrifice to balance Jeremiah Wright. And for another, the reliable men who provided self-satire in the past have either retired or gone to their reward. So, in the providence of God, John Hagee became the guy who took evangelical lunacy to the next level.

Major news organizations had been eying him suspiciously ever since he endorsed John McCain for president, principally because Hagee has described Roman Catholicism in the pungent terms of whoredom. But his elaborate support of Israel had been in his favor, at least freeing him from the taint of anti-Semitism. Alas, there was a sleeper.

Hagee had preached that the holocaust was part of God's plan to get the Jews back to the land. As reported in the New York Times, he said,

How is God going to bring them back to the land? The answer is fishers and hunters. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and forces you. Hitler was a hunter. . . . That will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, "My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

Late last week, McCain dumped him.

By Monday evening, Joe Liebermanwas pushed to answer whether he would speak to Hagee's group supporting Israel, becoming the latest politician to wish he hadn't consorted with preachers. (Lieberman said he will speak to the group.)

Hagee's comments about Hitler provoked debate that almost reached theology. There was, for instance, a post by Claire Hoffman on Sunday about the many "plans" God seems to have for the world.

The offense Hagee gave was in making God the author of Hitler's genocide. His statement as reported is exegetically indefensible. Jeremiah (the prophet from Jerusalem, not Chicago) never wrote that the murder of six million Jews would bring the Israelites back to the land. That idea is pure Hagee.

Doctrinally, Hagee's statement is loose -- at best. While he did say that God allowed, rather than caused, the holocaust, Hagee still explained the holocaust as God's calculation that Israel's return to the land was more important than six million lives. That explanation is, as theologian John McCain might say, "crazy and unacceptable." (Necessary qualifier: it is possible that Hagee makes other statements elsewhere in the sermon, or in other sermons, that clarify his understanding of God's wisdom and justice.)

But a neglected aspect of Hagee's offense is pastoral. His statement minimizes the unspeakable human cost of Hitler's genocide, a cost that is still within living memory. It's a clichéd spiritualizing of loss to say to the grieving that God had better things in mind for them than living with the ones they love. God does not call his pastors to glorify him by trivializing human suffering.

Inhumanity is entirely human. God has no complicity in it. The only reason there are not holocausts in every nation, every day, is that the good hand of God restrains human malice.

It is tempting to pronounce woes against the gotcha culture that has claimed Hagee. But I think the current animosity against preachers could be part of God's plan. Preachers must now remember that we can be YouTubed, and that our fulminations can reach those who won't interpret us charitably. We may learn how significant our words really are. We may discover a godly caution that is appropriate to teachers (James 3), and may find boldness in truths instead of self-indulgent abstractions.

But that, of course, will require us to study.

Three weeks ago, my dad gave me a book, which the old man almost never does. From the early seventies, when he devoured The Lord of the Rings, to the mid-nineties, when he discovered that Calvin and Luther agreed with him about predestination, Dad was not a reader. Even now that he has books going much of the time, he doesn't talk about them much. So, for him to haul off and give me The Root of the Righteous by A.W. Tozer -- not just recommend it, but hand me a copy -- was urgent enough that I started it immediately. That night, I sat in the orchestra pit during the dialog of the Sondheim show I was playing, and devoured page after page -- only putting the book down when the conductor insinuated that a downbeat was headed my way.

I have been writing in a meandering, bloggish sort of way about evangelical populism. I have described it as a mindset of suspicion and resentment, of "us versus them," that has shut down cultural interaction between evangelicals and other Americans. I have also noted populism's emotional shallowness, as well as its conformism and corruption.

To close this theme (and the blog's readers sighed with relief), I sum up my problem with evangelical populism: it has fostered a damning self-complacency.

When we present Christianity as a social program, as one side in a protracted culture war, we commit several crimes simultaneously. We mistake the cultural legacy of biblical faith, Judeo-Christian civilization, for the gospel itself. It is a well-worn heresy, though wrapped now in the old red, white, and blue. We also take a rhetorical posture that is alien to the New Testament, that of the debater who scores points off the gaffs and weaknesses of his opponent. This vandalizes the office of preacher.

But most alarmingly, we teach ourselves by rote, election after election, that we stand for the truth, that we defend God's holiness, that we are the Lord's people doing the Lord's work. That is to say, we teach ourselves a lie. A mere glance into the family lives of church-going people these days confirms their utter lack of spiritual power.

To foster such self-complacency is to freeze souls against the grace of God.

Which brings me back to Tozer's book. The Root of the Righteous is a collection of editorials he wrote for his denominational magazine during the 1950s, and their dated quality as artifacts gives them, for me, a kind of prophetic unction, as if the Spirit makes the dust of the decades say amen.

Take the very first sentence of the book:

One marked difference between the faith of our fathers as conceived by the fathers and the same faith as understood and lived by their children is that the fathers were concerned with the root of the matter, while their present-day descendants seem concerned only with the fruit. (p 3)

That alone is a lot to ponder. Tozer meant that, in the 1950s, believers regarded a "serious-minded approach to sacred things" as something to smile at. He said, "Much that passes for Christianity today is the brief, bright effort of the severed branch to bring forth its fruit in its season." (p 4)

Take this blunt assessment: "Probably the most widespread and persistent problem to be found among Christians is the problem of retarded spiritual progress." (p 7) Or this observation about "the inordinate attachment to every form of entertainment" in the 1950s:

The average man has no central core of moral assurance, no spring within his own breast, no inner strength to place him above the need for repeated psychological shots to give him the courage to go on living. He has become a parasite on the world, drawing his life from his environment, unable to live a day apart from the stimulation which society affords him. (p 31)

Churches in the 1950s surrendered to the consumer mindset. Tozer says (p 33) that they "have become little more than poor theaters where fifth-rate 'producers' peddle their shoddy wares with the full approval of evangelical leaders who can even quote a holy text in defense of their delinquency."

Tozer also makes the striking observation that religious life in the 1950s showed "a lack of integration in the religious personality. There seems to be no vital connection between the emotional and volitional departments of the life. The mind can approve and the emotions enjoy while the will drags its feet and refuses to go along." (p 56)

Tozer fed people with an exalted view of Christ that nurtured reverent fear, not prim judgmentalism. He wrote and spoke with authority about the God who had won his submission.

Imagine strong words like his in a denominational magazine today. It's impossible: such publications have become mere public relations pieces. They would never warn Christians against dead spirituality, or its specific symptoms. That would be way too preachy.

This is a measure of how much leaders flatter us, and how deeply we need their flattery.

It's also a measure of my old man's good taste. Calvin, Luther, Tolkien, Tozer.

In view of the arrest of a pastor, Joe Barron, in Texas yesterday, I thought I would link to a post from some months ago about the distrust of pastoral authority. The issue of sexual immorality hit home this week with our family, as my wife found out that a former pastor of hers had been conducting affairs for years. Only individual repentance from all forms of sexual sin will save the church from these scandals. These are moments not to judge, but to pray for the Lord's mercy on his church.

I'll put one of my fears out there: I fear that, week after week, we pastors describe an experience of conversion that no one has. The Authorized Conversion happens when someone "asks Jesus into his heart." The act of praying this prayer, evangelicals have taught, transfers a person from darkness to light. It is the moment of salvation. Preaching drives toward it, and testimonies feature it. When we ask each other how we "got saved," we are asking about the circumstances that led to praying the prayer. We count the people who pray it, and we tell them to write the date and the hour in their Bibles.

But in my own experience, praying the sinner's prayer was only one step in my salvation -- a defining step, a step that summed up what the Lord had been doing in my five-year-old soul, but not decisive. As I remember growing up, I can see many points that were clearer, more specific. There was a day in the fifth grade, for instance, when I was in despair because I had no friends. At recess, I retreated to a far corner of the schoolyard to pray, and found friendship from Jesus.

For me, salvation is the fruit of many defining experiences and decisions, not one. And we seem to induce spiritual lethargy when we teach people to rely on a single prayer.

In high school, I saw how people went forward for tearful prayers, but almost never showed any change later. I constantly meet Christians who, in an effort to know that they're saved, have repeated the sinner's prayer so many times they've lost count. Like many of my generation, I'm suspicious of conversion numbers, even cynical that anything good comes of guiding more people through the steps. Indeed, evangelical doubt over the sinner's prayer seems to be a primary cause of the movement's splintering. Emergents and Calvinists both put the altar call at the top of their lists of "what's wrong with us."

There are modern Christian movements that have connected more vigorously with people's experiences.

Graham Greene wrote a novel decades ago called, The End of the Affair. He told the story of an adulterous woman whom God lures out of sexual immorality. It was a story that reflected not just Greene's experience, but the experience of many English contemporaries -- Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Muggeridge, and C. S. Lewis being only the most prominent.

While I might have problems with Greene's theology, there is no question that literature like his shows how conversion happens in post-Christian culture far better than anything evangelicals have written.

Evangelicals need to make a lot of changes. They need to separate their political and cultural resentments from their proclamation of the gospel. They need a revival of the arts so that they can nurture people emotionally with truth. They need to understand the real characteristics of the people in their churches.

But, fundamentally, evangelicals need to rearticulate what conversion is.

The conversions I see are slow. There's the young woman who attended church in Orland for three years before startling her friends by announcing that she believed in Jesus. She told me she found Christ not by being miserable, but by being happy -- and realizing that it wasn't enough. Then there's the older man who had "prayed the prayer" decades ago, but who only found assurance of salvation when he went camping alone last summer to seek the Lord.

So one of my goals is to describe the conversion experience that people actually have: the slow, step-by-step acquisition of an art under the direction of the Master. Real Christians fumble with faith, making crude brush strokes and mixing their paints poorly. But the Master keeps instructing and the apprentice keeps fumbling. Sometimes the apprentice slips into the zone with his faith, but he slips out again. The Master just keeps him painting, painting, painting, until one day the apprentice realizes that his faith lives.

When I was asleep in the dark heat,A dove cooed and woke me. When I blanched with sweat on my sheets, A breeze stirred in the oak.

When I was lost for want of love, I had met her years before. When I felt a touch on my shoulder, I found her where she'd been.

When they despised me for a dime, They were hidden from my view. When they praised me for my works, I had changed very little.

When I drove that road ‘tween hills and river, I never thought of life or death. When he crashed in the tangle of trees, I was the man that drove him home.

When I was guilty and covering my deeds, The Ghost came hard on my mind. He directs the secret traces of my actions. He haunts the secret corners of my motivation.

A basket with a baby inside slides onto the breeze-touched river. Crocodiles swim hungrily in the sun. I was born into a world of doom, but for the wind, Which nudged me towards the gently bending reeds.

Every pastor is sure he knows how to talk to this guy:

It's easy. With Biff, here, you talk tractors, nail guns, and torque. You slip into saying "dese, dem, and dose." You use football analogies. Better yet, you tell your own football stories, if you have them. You try to pull off the coach routine. You go easy on the Bible because he doesn't care. You don't try to teach him. You keep it real concrete, because Biff's a hands-on guy, and if you try to talk theologically you'll lose him.

I don't think most pastors know this guy at all. I think most try to reach Biff with populist clichés only from laziness -- or because they're too intimidated to sit down and talk with him. I think that if pastors realized who Biff actually is, and if they began to connect with him, their churches would be revolutionized.

Here are a few things I've learned about him.

1. Biff's a genius.

Forget about losing Biff with your sermon. He's way ahead of you. That's why he stops listening. I know a contractor who hardly says a word, and who looks like he wouldn't try to follow a theological inference past the second "if." But he has a deep, sharp intellect. He figured out how to install a Czechoslovakian engine in an airplane he built -- without a manual. He reads the social patterns in a room faster than anyone else, and he can articulate what the patterns are. He has keen, biblically informed doctrinal priorities.

Pastors need to know that Biff has no trouble dealing with complexity. But he can tell when you're using complexity to disguise ignorance. And he won't sit for it.

2. Biff knows how to interact with all kinds of people.

Yeah, he looks narrow. But there's a good chance that Biff went to college. In all probability he has lived in many different places, perhaps even worked internationally -- and not just in the military. If Biff is over forty-five, you may find that he has some history with the counterculture in the sixties or seventies. In his business, he either learns how to deal with many different subcultures, or he fails.

I know a lumberman who lives to cut down trees. He just loves being alone in the woods with a saw and some timber. To look at him, you'd say he was the original good old boy. And if you only talked with him for five minutes, you wouldn't learn anything to shake that impression. You'd never know he once worked in computers. Near San Francisco.

3. Biff learned early to conform.

There are guys who are no deeper than tractors, nail guns, and torque. But Biff is not one of them. In my experience, he got the message as a young kid that he wasn't supposed to be a dreamer, that dreamers were worthless sissies. So he constructed a persona that enabled him to get along with the other guys. He talks about tractors, nail guns, and torque because that's what they talk about. But the dreamer never completely died. In fact, the persistence of that dreamer, maybe in despair, is a key to his emotional life.

In the back corner of a closet, Biff may have a world-class collection of jazz LPs, which he will only show you if he thinks you're safe. It will astound you what Biff reads, what he ponders, what he responds to. I've had guys that look exactly like Biff, lots and lots of them, become fans of my classical violin playing. That's one way I accidentally got underneath Biff's conformity.

Interesting things start to happen when Biff decides that God wants him to exercise his creativity.

4. Biff respects masculine analysis.

He likes his categories hard and neat. They can be complicated. They can be paradoxical. But they cannot be soft. Which is too bad for evangelical sentimentality, because Biff has no respect for Ned Flanders.

With all these points, I'm not saying Biff yearns to hear lectures on Schleiermacher, or that he secretly watches Masterpiece Theater, or even that he is fully conscious of himself. I'm just saying that he's smarter than we think, broader, more open, more curious than we think. I'm saying that the potential in any church for significant interaction with other subcultures is far greater than most pastors imagine.

We can nurture that potential if we ditch our cramped view of people -- perverted by demographics, marketing tactics, and Meiers-Briggs tests -- and see them for who they really are.

Narrow road scars high mountains.Green-yellow grass bends with the wind. We'll never know what lies tucked into the folds of trees.

We cut through the passes that hold themselves strong and wind down sharp into blind ravines, then back up, climbing slow like pilgrims on the steep angles of a foreign land.

Wood and wire fence stakes the rounded edge of some forgotten boundary. Gray, splintering posts have stood so long they can only stand still. We crest another pass and sink a little seeing the mountains to come.

The hardest part of anything is just before the end. All the hours and all the miles multiply their fatigue, but I know the sun will dim in the salt mist of ocean spray.

Narrow road scars high mountains. Green-yellow grass bends with the wind.

I've spent many hours this week in an orchestra pit rehearsing for Chico State's production of A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim. Between keeping track of key changes, being anxious for the physical safety of our percussionist as scenery collapses above him, and enjoying the great voices of the cast, I have been evaluating Sondheim's success as a preacher. A preacher has to do more than convey information about "how one ought to live." In my view, he has to show listeners how their lives are inextricably bound to God, and how that bond impacts their decisions. That mission calls him to engage listeners with drama, emotion, narrative, and especially characters. His preaching has to display individuals who struggle with God, both rightly and wrongly.

To fulfill this mission, the preacher has several tools: the Bible (source for the dramatic material), doctrine (derived from the Bible, and delivered as principles), life experience (his own, his listeners'), etc. In a sermon, he uses these tools to redirect the motivations of his audience Godward.

I've written about the inability of the evangelical populist to go deeper than sentimentality. So much of the spiritual deadness of evangelicalism, the dearth of transforming love, goes back to the shallow emotional range of its preachers. Most, it seems, can't convey anything higher than healthful living habits.

Sondheim, though he presents what I find to be a spirituality of hopelessness, is skilled at preaching the worldly word. He has his source of dramatic material, a combination of what I'll loosely call European tradition and American showmanship. His symbols, dramatic and musical, all derive from such sources, of which he has intuitive knowledge. Sondheim also shows keen insight into life experience. He flirts with audience expectations by using stock characters whom he later rounds out with humane understanding.

Which leaves doctrine.

There is a principle that animates the story of Night Music. The characters are all troubled, some driven to morose contemplation, others to flippancy, still others to cynicism. They struggle to find what a main character calls "a coherent existence," and the field of their struggle is sex. Their escapades are often funny, usually humiliating, and occasionally moving. But each learns the doctrine by the end, learns it in his or her own way.

Night Music's doctrine? You recover a coherent existence when you find the object of your true desire. And to recognize that object, you must know yourself. The god this musical preaches so effectively is inside the human personality.

A few qualifications. Audiences don't go to musicals for spiritual training. Tony awards like those lavished on this show are not given to productions that "make a point," and this show is not "preachy" in that way. Sondheim's goal was to give people something to enjoy, not to teach them. He may or may not believe the principle this story shows.

But Sondheim is a skillful preacher.

He shows how people's lives are inextricably bound to the god of their desires, and how that bond impacts their decisions. His characters speak to people's struggles.

My wayward imagination wonders how an evangelical, with his grab-bag of practical tips, would preach the Night Music doctrine. "Five Steps to Open Communication With Your Mistress." "What Would Ibsen Do?" "Your Best Adultery Now!" If evangelicals preached sin the way they preach Christ, sin might go into as deep a decline as Christianity.

A preacher's job is not to entertain, as Sondheim's is. But evangelical preachers would teach and exhort with more potency if their Bible, their doctrine, and their life experience spoke to people's struggles. The God of the Bible is not the God of easy answers. Jesus Christ struggles with us just as we struggle with him, if the Gospel of John is any guide. He is no stranger to relational agony. And he does not use gimmicks.

I notice that when I preach this God, using the Bible's drama as powerfully and truthfully as I can, listeners take heart. They renew their struggles with greater insight, and they see God's blessings. Their certitudes gained in struggle are earned, not purchased in bulk.

So I learn something about preaching from Sondheim. But I leave the orchestra pit relieved that the living God is larger than the gods of Broadway.

Lots of us have had to endure the control-freak pastor, the paranoid maniac who has to know WHO said his sermon went too long, and WHY that individual didn't OBEY MATTHEW 18 and come to him directly, and WHO ELSE that individual contaminated with his SLANDER. HOW LARGE is the FACTION of CRITICAL SPIRITS this week? And lots of us have had to endure the Meeting during which our motivations are impugned, our divisiveness is rebuked, and we are disinvited from leadership/attendance/Christianity.

So when I wrote last week that the first step away from populism is for evangelical leaders to rediscover the foundation of their authority, many readers probably said, "O callow youth, we think not. We've had enough of pastoral authority for one lifetime."

Hang in there with me.

Authority, to my way of thinking, is not control over people. (The leader gives orders and uses levers of power to make sure he is obeyed.) Rather, authority is an indirect result -- even a byproduct -- of something no one ever sees: the workings of the leader's own conscience.

My job as a pastor is not to compel others to do good, or even to entice them into doing good, but rather to subject my own will to the Bible's commands. As others interact with me, they are confronted with spiritual choices in the natural course of relationship.

For instance, when I preach, the ultimate issue on my conscience is whether my words serve the text of the Bible -- serve it both in expounding and in applying it to the people before me. If my conscience affirms that I enlightened my own ignorance, ducked no hard issue, and used excellent craft to teach a passage, then I have done my job as a pastor. The personal decisions people make come not so much from what I said, as from the time they spent interacting with my submission to scripture.

When I counsel, to take another example, I have to give biblical and Spirit-directed applications without shortcuts, gimmicks, or generalities. I also have to draw straight confession of sin out of people who would rather avoid it. Above all, I have to affirm what an individual has right, and withhold affirmation from what he has wrong. These are all issues on my own conscience, not anyone else's, and the only way I can act rightly is by obeying biblical principles. The counselee's decision to do good -- which I cannot control -- comes not so much from my direction, as from the time he spends interacting with my submission to scripture.

My conscience is the issue in every matter of daily life: prioritizing my weekly schedule, reacting to criticism, coaching others to resolve conflict, discipling my boys, loving my wife. My job as a pastor is to exhibit a submissive conscience. As people interact with me, they find themselves dealing with a way of life founded on different assumptions from theirs. The differences are what confront their souls with spiritual choices.

I am convinced that a leader earns a right to be heeded by orienting his or her conscience toward God's word. If he or she is submissive to the Bible, he or she will acquire authority, and the authority will not be hierarchical, but relational.

I have found that when I try to use the levers of power to control people's behavior, I splinter the integration of my conscience with the Bible. I have also found that the status-oriented fixations of populism involve leaders in catastrophic compromises of conscience, because populism boils down to what the Bible calls the fear of man.

I want to be able to say with Paul (2 Corinthians 1.12) that "our boast is this: the testimony of our conscience that we behaved in the world with simplicity and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom but by the grace of God, and supremely so toward you."

When the wind had blown against the smokeand cleared the valley, the sun shone its light unveiled until the storms came and rain relieved the blackened hills with the moist promise of green.

I believe I'm blinded by the things I've taught myself to see. The days, the dreams, the thoughts curtain my eyes while you search them for one sparkling attention. Then I wake to find the years of us you hold, not shown in age, but hidden for me alone; our youth's blossom not once taken, not had and lost, not dying.

If populism has left evangelicals resentful and suspicious of "elites," and complacent in a sentimentalized Christianity, how can evangelical leaders restore their movement's cultural vitality? Begin with a basic shift. Evangelical leaders need to rediscover the foundation of their authority.

I've noticed that a person with authority has a right to be heeded, to receive deference. For example, let's say we have a bull session about how evangelism really ought to be done, and we each proclaim our opinions, together with all the reasons why we're right. But when Billy Graham ambles over to the sofa and puts up his boots on the coffee table, we sincerely defer. We don't repent of our opinions when he starts to talk. We don't surrender unconditionally to whatever he says. But we do adjust our points of view to incorporate his.

I'm saying that a person with authority has a right to this deference. If someone in our bull session blows off Billy Graham, we disapprove because we feel that respect is something Graham is owed. The right to be heeded is powerful. If deference is not his right, then what he's got isn't authority.

I figure there are lots of possible foundations for authority. There's authority founded on skill: Billy Graham has a right to our deference on matters of evangelism because he's unusually competent. There's also authority founded on charisma: Graham has a unique relational wisdom that has won over vast audiences for decades.

Some foundations for authority crumble, and cannot be rebuilt for an age. In the days when Graham first preached, he had authority simply because he was a pastor. Almost everybody deferred to a pastor for the sake of respectability. It didn't matter whether the pastor's congregation was fifty or five hundred: they adjusted their points of view to incorporate his. But this social authority deteriorated, and by the 1970s any pastor who depended on it was feeling vulnerable.

Other foundations for authority are perverse, like popularity. A celebrity will get deference for a while just because masses of people hang on his words. But adoring crowds can turn into mobs. Graham has had the authority of popularity, and has also felt the sting of disapprobation, as when he visited the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Since he did not build his ministry on his popularity, his stature eventually outgrew the setbacks.

Evangelical leaders, for the most part, have been running scared because of the loss of their social authority. They have watched American culture scoff at the stock character of the pastor, mocking his impotence in the face of cultural changes. And they have been retreating from any hint of that old authority in their leadership, trying instead to teach, evangelize, and organize on the basis of popularity or skill or charisma.

Populism, with its easy emotionalism, has become the most common way evangelical leaders gain a right to be heeded. They hoist an apparently strong banner that rallies the troops -- and it works for a while. But this cynicism has nauseated so many believers that the search is on for community without authority -- an egalitarian delusion now tempting emergents.

I believe evangelicalism will not regain vitality until its leaders rediscover their authority's foundation. There has to be a reason for believers to listen to them, to defer to them. And subcultures outside of evangelicalism must see that reason, or they will not pay the gospel any heed.

In this connection, it's worth noting that Billy Graham (no populist by my definition) had many kinds of authority, but only depended on one kind: the coherence of his character with the Bible. That is, the force of biblical authority exerted itself through Graham's personal submission. More than anything else, this biblical integrity is what gained him the right to be heeded.

Next week, the technical specifications for gaining that authority.

That night lightning flickered over the foothills.Thunder clouds suggested rain and then denied it.

What terrain was laid down between us? And how? No two could ever maintain such a distance as in the rumple a sheet makes between naked bodies or the sound of promises rolled across the canyons or the flashes of erotic revealing only two people staring at opposite walls.

On the last clear day spirals of smoke stabbed the range and their plumes drifted south like signals of blindness.