My interview on What’s Best Next with Stephen McGarvey, editorial director of Salem Web Network, has been posted over at Crosswalk.com.
Stephen asked great questions and the interview was a lot of fun! We talk about how this book is different from other productivity books on the market, why we need to start with God in our definition of productivity, the place of generosity in our productivity, and much more.
While at T4G in April, I did an interview with ERLC. It’s now posted at their site, and here it is as well:
In the video I talk about the essential relationship between doctrine and practice, how this was exemplified by the great evangelical social reformer William Wilberforce, workplace Christians as the often overlooked engines behind the spread of the gospel today.
In response to Ann Coulter’s article on the ebola doctor, “Ebola doc’s condition downgraded to idiotic,” one person on Facebook said “If you remain a fan of Ann Coulter after reading this, you are as pathetic as she is.”
I understand his strong reaction, and disagree very much with her article, but the fact that she was willing to state her views so clearly serves one vital purpose: it forces us to think hard about what the Scriptures teach and helps us refine our understanding of the truth.
Coulter argues that those who go off to the developing world to serve Christ forget “that the first rule of life on a riverbank is that any good that one attempts downstream is quickly overtaken by what happens upstream.” Hence, “if Dr. Brantly had practiced at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ, he would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia.”
Further, “your country is like your family. We’re supposed to take care of our own first….Right there in Texas, near where Dr. Brantly left his wife and children to fly to Liberia and get Ebola, is one of the poorest counties in the nation, Zavala County — where he wouldn’t have risked making his wife a widow and his children fatherless.”
I think the best summary of Coulter’s point was made by a person on Facebook, who wrote: “Our neighbors start with those closest to us.”
Is that true?
Do Our Neighbors Really Start with those Closest to Us?
On the face of it, to say that our neighbors start with those closest to us sounds like common sense. But the surprise of the gospel is that in some sense Jesus was very much committed to countering that very notion in his teaching.
For example, Jesus himself left heaven and came to earth to save us. We were by no means his closest neighbors. We weren’t even in the same universe. Yet he came anyway. That is one of the things that makes the gospel so glorious. He didn’t have to come get us, yet he did.
Likewise, Jesus tells the parable of the shepherd leaving the ninety-nine (his closest neighbors) to go after the one (Luke 15:1-7). That is a risky thing to do! It is not at all about loving those closest more than those far away; if anything, those closest are actually put at risk.
And the parable of the Good Samaritan is about loving our enemies — whom most people at the time didn’t even regard as their neighbors at all. Though the issue wasn’t physical proximity, in Jesus’ day the common thinking was that people were decidedly not to love their enemies. That’s simply another form of the notion that our neighbors start with those closest to us — though with “closest” defined in relational terms rather than in terms of physical proximity.
At the same time, the rich man in Luke 16 was condemned for failing to love the poor man who was right at his gate — not halfway around the world. And in one sense the Good Samaritan was indeed loving his closest neighbor after all, because he was serving a dying man he had come across right in front of him in the road.
How does this fit together?
Though it’s tough to figure out, I’d suggest something like this. When we encounter a need right in front of us, we are to meet it. In that sense, we are indeed to serve those closest first. But when it comes to meeting long-term needs (including relief of the poor in Africa), we are not commanded to always start with those most physically nearby. The issue becomes one of calling and gifting — where one can serve best — and making sure we don’t let the needs nearby become an excuse to keep us from meeting the sometimes much more challenging needs far away.
If the ebola doctor had passed by a man bleeding on the road on the way to serve in Africa, that indeed would have been a bad thing. But when faced with two large fields of great need (America and Liberia), it is right and appropriate to choose the one farther away.
Further, in relation to Coulter’s point that it would have had more impact for Dr. Brantly to serve people in America (and been less risky), the above passages show us that it is right to do this even if the people farther away are less influential and more risky to reach.
Which raises another issue, best summarized by a Facebook commenter as well: “If he went to Africa to try and help the sick, only to get sick himself, it does seem a little pointless.”
In other words, is what Dr. Brantly did pointless?
We’ve already seen that that can’t be true, based on the emphasis Jesus places on helping those who are indeed far away and even taking risks to do so. To this we could also add his insistence that we serve “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40).
But why wasn’t it wasteful for Dr. Brantly to go to Africa, only to catch ebola and have to be brought back at great expense?
Here’s another way to ask the question: Why does God commend taking risks to serve “the least of these”? And why does he commend that even when the whole attempt ends up costing way more than any results that we see?
Why does God operate this way?
I think the answer is: grace. God is a God of grace, and since grace is unmerited favor, it by definition cannot be clearly seen if the primary focus is on helping those who seem most influential. For then it looks like there are conditions — namely, how influential you are. To show manifestly and decisively that grace is grace — that is, without conditions of merit or influence or ability — God serves (and commands us to serve) those who seemingly have nothing to offer, even at great risk.
This, in turn, allows us to see those with seeming influence (in Coulter’s example, Hollywood power-brokers) in the right light as well — namely, as those who in fact do not have anything to offer of their own either, but rather who are just as dependent on God as those visibly in great need and without influence.
So God isn’t creating an us vs. them scenario where people of influence don’t matter but those of no influence do, or where people next door don’t matter but those 8,000 miles away do. Rather, he is doing exactly what it takes to make it clear that we are all equally and fully dependent on grace.
That’s why we read “God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Corinthians 1:28-29).
Coulter’s Real Problem
In sum, the problem is not first of all Coulter’s pragmatic argument that helping influential people here in the U.S. is better because it will be more effective (as insensitive as that is).
The problem is that she is failing to recognize that when people like Dr. Brantly go help those who have nothing to offer in far away lands, it helps those of us in America as well. For it helps us see that we are all equally dependent on God’s grace. That’s the message America needs. It’s the message we all need to grasp to the core of our being, and something that can’t happen if we avoid helping the sick worldwide.
In this sense, then, Dr. Brantly’s going to Liberia is indeed far more influential for God’s kingdom than had he focused on helping turn Hollywood power-brokers to God. For it shows that God is not dependent on such power-brokers, and that those with influence in the world are not in any special category before him.
That’s the message of grace, it’s the message we all need to hear, and it’s exactly what Dr. Brantly has demonstrated in his life.
PovertyCure now as an app that makes their content easily available for your iPhone.
I love PovertyCure’s vision because they actually understand how to overcome poverty. It can be done — as long as we understand the correct principles (which most initiative so far haven’t). So I highly recommend checking out their site as well as their app.
Here’s their vision:
PovertyCure is an international coalition of over 250 partner organizations and 1 million individuals spanning 143 countries and counting. We produce films and educational resources advancing partnership-based solutions to poverty that challenge the status quo and champion the creative potential of the human person.
In our efforts to combat poverty worldwide, we too often fall into paternalistic, donor-recipient models that fail to distinguish short-term relief and long-term sustainable development. Oftentimes this approach can have tragic unintended consequences. Our call to solidarity with the poor means more than providing institutional assistance and aid. It demands a deeper view of the human person predicated on an appreciation for the creative capacity of each and every human person. Effective compassion situates those afflicted by poverty not as objects of our charity, but as subjects and protagonists of their own integral development. When we understand people as made in the image of God and endowed with his divine creative spark, it changes absolutely everything about how we understand poverty and development.
It’s time to shift our focus from aid to enterprise, from paternalism to partnerships, from poverty alleviation to real human flourishing.
That’s what Ed Welch says in his helpful, short article Offer Advice Carefully. And he’s absolutely right.
Why are we so bad as Christians at giving advice? I have my thoughts, but the best thing to do about it is this: stop thinking we know everything about another person’s situation, and realize that when something isn’t a matter of explicit and clear biblical commands, advice is to be offered as an interchange that respects the person’s individuality and more detailed grasp of the situation.
One mark of bad advice, Welch notes, is that it is dispensed “quickly and casually.” Here are three examples he gives that I think most of us have encountered (and been incredibly annoyed by, even though they seem “spiritual” at first; Welch shows why they are not):
You just need to trust God. This advice sounds biblical, but the word “just” shows that it is tossed out as a platitude. The person might already be trusting God, it sounds superior—it is bad advice.
You need to forgive the person. This too seems to be a biblical exhortation, but it does not have the humility to realize that there are other biblical themes about God’s compassion or his stand against injustice that might be more relevant. Better to say, “I think that we should talk about forgiving this person, but Scripture says a lot to us when we have been hurt. What do you think are God’s good words to you now?”
You need to tell your boss what is bothering you or take it to a superior. This is bad advice because it never took the time to listen and recognize that the person was not asking for advice, but she was hoping to have a friend with whom she could share her struggles. This advice comes from the notorious “let me fix you and move on to someone else” school of advice.
Fantastic examples. Then he adds:
My point is not that it is wrong to give advice. It is that in our haste and casual handling of Scripture, we confuse our advice with “God has said . . . .” This can be disrespectful because we’ve offered a blanket statement without much thought to the particulars involved. Or maybe the person was not even seeking advice but only someone to listen. We need to be sure we know what the person is asking for before we start talking.
This is a message I gave at a Fortune 100 company recently on how to be a Christian in a secular workplace. I talk about avoiding the twin errors of spiritual weirdness (such as thinking you need to insert the gospel into every conversation, or call attention to God through strange trinkets like the “Faithbook” t-shirt I came across at a truck stop once) on the one hand and, on the other hand, thinking that our faith bears no relation to our work at all.
Then I talk about the chief way that God intends our faith to inform our work: namely, love. Love is to be the guiding principle for Christians in their work, and I show what that looks like and how even many leading secular thinkers are echoing this truth in very significant ways. At the end I talk about the results of going about our work in this way.
Update: Here’s a timeline of the message that Joshua Van Der Merwe wrote up (thank you, Joshua!):
I did not realize until the other day that Dorothy Sayers’s classic, foundational, and fantastic essay on work is online.
This is one of the most helpful articles on work that I’ve read. Keller and many others refer to it often as well.
And, we still need to fulfill the challenge she lays down in it. She says at one point “the Christian church desperately needs a theology of work.” We’ve been doing better in the last ten years (some fantastic efforts are listed below), but don’t let the existence of some great new books on this fool you. We still have a long way to go in actually working this these truths into our hearts and lives.
Here’s one of the best quotes from Sayers’ essay:
It is not right for the Church to acquiesce in the notion that a man’s life is divided into the time he spends on his work and the time he spends in serving God. He must be able to serve God in his work, and the work itself must be accepted and respected as the medium of divine creation.”
Here are some of the best books that have begun to give us a much better, articulate, and biblically grounded doctrine of work in recent days:
, by Hugh Whelchel
, by Paul Rude
, by Tim Keller
, by Tom NelsonAnd here are some websites that I highly recommend:
Question: What other books and websites would you suggest?
Seth Godin, in a post from about a year ago:
The false choice of mediocrity
Too often, we’re presented with choices that don’t please us. We can pick one lousy alternative or the other. And too often, we pick one.
I was struck by Apple’s choice to put a glass screen on the original iPhone. Just six weeks before it was announced, Steve Jobs decided he wanted a scratchproof glass screen. The thing is, this wasn’t an option. It wasn’t possible, reliable, feasible or appropriately priced. It couldn’t be done with certainty, and almost any other organization would have taken it off the list of appropriate choices.
It was unreasonable.
And that’s the key. Remarkable work is always not on the list, because if it was, it would be commonplace, not remarkable.
This is an intriguing post by Tom Nelson, author of Work Matters, over at his blog by the same name.
Here’s one of the best parts:
Some social observers are starting to refer to a younger generation facing chronic unemployment or underemployment as the lost generation. Presently it seems the church’s response in these troubled times echoes the empty words decried by the apostle James, “Go, be warm and be filled.” Have we settled in for a respectable appearing faith devoid of works? Are we not in effect saying to so many, “Go, be warm, be filled and be unemployed.”
Could we spend more time praying and thinking how to extend a hand up instead of merely offering a hand out? Could we point a way forward so that a lost generation might become the entrepreneurial generation? What if a new generation of apprentices of Jesus would not only lift up the banner of justice, but also bring the rich truths of the Gospel into the economic sphere of life? What if a rising generation would push back against a spirit of entitlement and class envy? What if a gutsy go-for-it new generation would embrace personal diligence, disciplined responsibility, self-sacrifice, risk-taking and creative entrepreneurship? What if more venture capital, economic opportunity and intergenerational mentoring were available both in our urban and suburban areas?
It is worth subscribing to Poverty Cure’s Youtube channel, whose aim is to encourage solutions to poverty “that foster opportunity and unleash the entrepreneurial spirit that already fills the developing world.”
Their latest video describes what corruption does to a nation. Lydie Hakizimana of Rwanda, who is being interviewed in the video, points out that “When there is corruption in a country…there is no hope. People don’t see themselves successful in the long-term.” “With hope you can think of a better future,” but when the leaders are corrupt, the entrepreneurial environment is killed and replaced with an environment of fear.
This caught my interest because in describing the effects of corruption, she has just described the exact opposite of leadership. As I’ve blogged before, the essence of leadership is precisely to give hope and “rally people to a better future.” In contrast, as Lydie points out, extreme corruption in a nation takes away hope, and causes people to cease believing that they can have a better future.
That is the exact opposite of leadership. What a tragedy it is when those entrusted with the responsibility to lead — to give hope and rally people to a better future — turn that responsibility on its head by turning it into an opportunity to enrich and advance themselves at others’ expense. Whenever someone does that, no matter what their title is, they have ceased to be a leader.
Here’s the video. And for more on Poverty Cure, see their website.