Leading and Helping When People Want to Stay Stuck

October 25, 2022

10 Quotes Reflecting on Christian Counseling

A few years back, in the process of working on my Doctor of Ministry, I read numerous books on Christian counseling. These were books on the theory of counseling and its application to specific issues. How do we engage and talk to people in such a way that helps people move forward to what God has called them to be? These are deep waters. Here are a few of my favorite quotes that I still reflect on with links to the books from which they came as I think about how to help myself and others move onward and upward, processing the past well, living well in the present, and having hope for the future.

1. “Tragedy always moves our story forward in a way that shalom could never accomplish” (Dan Allender, To Be Told, 44). My comment: think of the great stories of the heroes of the world and the faith. They experience great challenges, but they rise to meet them. This is one way to re-think the challenges and hurts we have faced in our own lives.

2. “It takes a lifetime to discover exactly how our past shapes our future so we can live wholeheartedly and passionately in the present, but we can begin. We can seize the present with greater insight and vision” (Dan Allender, The Healing Path, 185). My comment: I did a lot of reflecting on my past when I studied these books. Five years later, the insights continue to come and help me engage better in the present. Note: you can see some of the directions I explored with this here.

3. “[I]n this life we must recognize that we will inevitably experience disappointments, pain, and a lack of complete relational satisfaction. When we stop fighting this reality and become willing to accept it, we can be free to move into the world with a real sense of purpose and direction” (Harry Schaumburg, False Intimacy: Understanding the Struggle of Sexual Addiction, 99). My comment: this seems almost obvious when you say it, but how easily do we begin to think that we will avoid pain and disappointment? Happiness in this life will not be found by eliminating pain and disappointments but by finding a way to live with them. Continue reading “10 Quotes Reflecting on Christian Counseling”

October 20, 2022

7 Principles for Christian Social Engagement

As Christians, we want to see the world be a better place. Jesus has taught us to love our neighbor and to be concerned for the least of these. The problem is that when we try to get involved, we do not know what to do. We find it harder than we supposed. This can lead us to give up, but then what of our obligation to love the world?

In my view, few Christians have thought about this issue with as much clarity as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. I have learned much from him. What I have learned has enabled me to keep going in big and small ways with outreach to the communities of which I am a part. Here I want to summarize seven principles that continue to be sources of wisdom, challenge, and encouragement to me when social engagement gets hard. I will not quote Niebuhr here. You can see my summary of his views on Christian political engagement here. I am just writing these in my own words, but my thought owes much to him.

1. There is no limit to human anxiety, insecurities, and ambitions. One reason it is so tough to engage with people is because we are filled with anxiety. Anxiety is part of human life. It arises from the fact that we can see all sorts of problems that we can do little or nothing about. We are anxious about our survival, our life, our possessions, our money, our kids, our nation, our significance, and on and on.

And there is no point where this stops. No matter how much we succeed there are always new problems. We have anxiety that we will lose the things we have gained or not reach the next level. In America and the West, we have solved a lot of problems that were huge issues for our ancestors, but we have simply run into bigger problems. Anxiety explains why people accept even bad situations. They fear that if they change them, they will encounter something much worse. In engaging with society, we are dealing with anxious people.

2. Human pride is born out of anxiety. Why do people exalt themselves at the expense of others? Why do they act in selfish ways? It is in part because of their anxiety. They are worried about their survival and the survival of the things they enjoy, and they will fight for their position and prestige as much as if it were their very life. Why does a nation invade others? It is in part out of the anxiety over the prosperity, prestige, or survival of their own nation. Why do people amass goods and not worry about others? It is in part anxiety over their own position. Why does a parent think they can continually make their child happy? Some of it is anxiety about their child, but it is also pride in their own ability to solve every problem for someone else.

Pride born of anxiety is a factor in human life. We stubbornly cling to our own position and power and exalt ourselves, our things, our people, and our ideas above others, even at the expense of truth and justice. This deserves our condemnation, but it also calls for compassion because it is born out of an attempt to solve the basic problems of life, relationships, meaning, and security that we all deal with. This can take some of the edge off of the opposition of others because it is born in part out of trying to solve the same problems that we ourselves are trying to solve.

3. Religion is not a pure quest for God, and reason can be just as fanatic as religion. Religion and reason should mitigate our anxiety and humble our pride. However, religion can easily become a tool of our pride. Thinking on the absolute, we identify ourselves with the absolute. We borrow the sacredness of the holy and apply it to our own faulty and sinful ideas and actions. We use it to exalt ourselves at the expense of others. Even the idea of grace, which should humble us, can become a way of looking down on others who don’t get it and baptizing all our ideas because we “understand” God’s grace. Continue reading “7 Principles for Christian Social Engagement”

October 11, 2022October 11, 2022

How to Live the Christian Faith Outside the Church: A Review of Cristóbal Krusen’s They Were Christians

When Cristóbal Krusen became a Christian, he thought he needed to become a Pastor to be a real Christian. As he tried to live his Christian faith outside of the work of the church, it made him wonder how other Christians had done it. How has Christianity affected those who believed it? Did it make an impact? He thought it must have because “[i]n truth, if God exists, then one should expect to find those who love him in every field of human endeavor” (This and all citations hereafter are from his book They Were Christians, 12). His book They Were Christians is the result of his search to find examples of people who put their Christian faith into action in the world. People like Florence Nightingale, John D. Rockefeller, and Frederick Douglas made a big impact on the world, and their story is well-known. However, Krusen wanted to tell the rest of the story. These people were Christians, and this made a big impact on what they did and why. That is less well-known.

I am a Pastor. I work for the institutional church. However, the majority of people in my congregation do not. One of my jobs is to help them think through how they can take the faith they hear about on Sunday and apply it to their lives. I can give them principles, but I have realized through the years that I also need examples and stories. So, I began to look at collections of Christian biographies. Most of the people in the collections were Pastors. Their examples were helpful but what about Christians who didn’t become pastors? That’s what I needed to inspire my people to live out their faith outside the church. When I saw Krusen’s book, I was intrigued. But I still wondered how much it would really help. Continue reading “How to Live the Christian Faith Outside the Church: A Review of Cristóbal Krusen’s They Were Christians“

September 10, 2022September 10, 2022

Christianity & Social Life: 15 Quotes from Reinhold Niebuhr to Help Us Engage

How do we engage in our polarized national life? There seems to be so much bitterness and so little progress. It can divide families, friends, and communities. How do we as Christians engage well in this division?

American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) believed that Christianity was about more than just the individual and the life to come. He believed that the Christian view of man could give us a perspective that would enable us to understand the challenges of the modern world and hope that they could be changed. I believe that Niebuhr had a lot of wisdom on how to engage in American society (and any society), and his insights are just as relevant as when he wrote them over the course of middle decades of the 20th century. Here are 15 quotes that illustrate the wisdom of Niebuhr in applying the Christian faith to modern society: 5 on the problem, 5 on the solution, and 5 on the hope we can have to make things better.

The Problem
1. “Actually the history of religious fanaticism proves that it is fairly easy to claim identity between the absolute and the contingent value, and thus to claim divine validity for a ‘Christian’ civilization despite all of its moral ambiguities, and to use the Christian faith as a weapon against the foe in all kinds of historic encounters” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 149).

2. “The ultimate sin is the religious sin of making the self-deification implied in moral pride explicit. This is done when our partial standards and relative attainments are explicitly related to the unconditioned good, and claim divine sanction. For this reason religion is not simply as is generally supposed an inherently virtuous human quest for God” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 200).

3. The rise of science in Western culture “gave modern culture a special animus against ‘dogma.’ But unfortunately it was not prepared to deal with the hidden dogmas in prescriptions of science itself” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 114). “In short, reason may be as obedient a servant of particular interests as religion” (ibid., 153). Continue reading “Christianity & Social Life: 15 Quotes from Reinhold Niebuhr to Help Us Engage”

January 18, 2022

9 Powerful Quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our nation was formed with the idea that all people were created equal. However, from its inception, there was a glaring contradiction to that principle in the enslavement of African-Americans. We fought a war to bring an end to this contradiction, but even after the war, justice and equality were denied to African-Americans throughout the nation and particularly in the South. For prosperous Americans, it was too easy to ignore this injustice. Thanks be to God that He raised up Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others to compel this nation to pay attention to this injustice and seek to right it. Here are 9 quotes from Dr. King that powerfully describe the conditions African-Americans faced, the method he would use to confront those conditions, and the vision of new conditions that he wanted to bring about.

All of these quotes are taken from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. compiled and edited by Clayborne Carson. I highly recommend it.

The Problem

1. “My mother confronted the age-old problem of the Negro parent in America: how to explain discrimination and segregation to a small child. She taught me that I should feel a sense of ‘somebodiness’ but that on the other hand I had to go out and face a system that stared me in the face every day saying you are ‘less than,’ you are ‘not equal to'” (3).

2. “A man who lived under the torment of knowledge of the rape of his grandmother and murder of his father under the conditions of the present social order, does not readily accept that social order or seek to integrate into it” (268).

3. “The throbbing pain of segregation could be felt but not seen. It scarred Negroes in every experience of their lives. . . . This Freedom Ride movement came into being to reveal the indiginities and the injustices which Negro people faced as they attempted to do the simple thing of traveling through the South as interstate passengers” (153).

The Method

4. “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community” (134). Continue reading “9 Powerful Quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

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