The Morning After

Rachel posted some pictures of our poor tree last night on our family blog, but here's the aftermath of the wind last night in the light of day.

Thankfully it barely grazed the car. No damage whatsoever.

Am I on a Warship or Cruise Liner?

In the book Radical David Platt gives an analogy of the Church. He tells the story of the SS United States. In the 1940s the military commissioned the construction of ship to carry troops to war. After its completion in 1952, it never really fulfilled this duty. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the SS United States was on standby, but was never deployed.

Eventually it was converted to a presidential luxury cruise ship that carried presidents and other high-profile dignitaries across the Atlantic (Platt doesn’t mention this, but in 2003, it was acquired by Norwegian Cruise Lines).

Platt uses this illustration to ask if the church has become like the SS United States. He writes:

When I think about the history of the SS United States, I wonder if she has something to teach us about the history of the church. The church, Like the SS United States has been designed for battle. The purpose of the church is to mobilize a people to accomplish a mission. Yet we seem to have turned the church as troop carrier into the church as luxury liner. We seem to have organized ourselves, not to engage in battle for the souls of peoples around the world, but to indulge ourselves in the peaceful comforts of the world.

When we see how the church is presenting itself, this can be seen very clearly. Many pastors are preaching a health-and-wealth/best life now type of gospel that people are coming to constantly. Many evangelistic appeals revolve around coming to live a better life, or even with a vague reference to escaping eternal punishment. But rarely do we hear the full gospel of costly grace.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” We often forget that Christ’s final message to his apostles was a commission.

Volumes could be and has been written about the church compromising it’s mission (Platt’s book, for instance, is superb), but one thing sticks out about this concept involves the passengers of the ship and how they relate to each other.

On a ship that carries troops, everyone has a singular purpose: they are going to war. Everyone sees themselves as a part of the whole. Each person has a specific task and their task contributes to the greater purpose. Soldiers are serving something greater than themselves. They are serving their country because their country has sent them to war with her enemies. They are also serving each other, because war is dangerous.

On a cruise liner, however, everyone is there to serve themselves. The passengers are there for a vacation, so each person will each look out for what will help them to that end. If you’ve ever been on a cruise, you may have seen an example of this. If you ever stay up later than dinnertime and wander the ship, you would notice that as the evening progresses people start getting inebriated, and as often happens when a large group of people are together and alcohol is involved, conflict ensues. One person or group is seen as interrupting the fun of another person or group.

Coming back to the analogy of the church, could it be possible that many of the conflicts of the church would be resolved if we all began looking at the church as a warship instead of a cruise ship? If we all understood that we had a single purpose with a common enemy, would we get so hung up on such petty things? Or are we too involved in doing what we want to do that we don’t have room to think of others? How do we react when we don’t get our way, or someone crosses us among our church family?

Changing the World (Part Two)

In my last post, I tried to apply a principle from the philosopher Immanuel Kant to everyday life to examine a way to change the world. This began with an inward change. The change has to come inside of us. The only person you can control and change is yourself.

Brian Tracy, when teaching on success, almost always begins his argument by talking about the Law of Cause and Effect. He opens his book Flight Plan: The Real Secrets of Success with the following statement:

Perhaps the greatest discovery in human history—the foundation principle of religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and psychology—is that thoughts are causes and conditions are effects This means you create your reality.[1]

He goes on to discuss a similar law that he calls the Law of Correspondence: “Your outer world corresponds to your inner world.”[2] This is much like Christ’s teachings on the Tree and the Fruit which states that if a tree is good the fruit it produces will be good. Gandhi also recognized this when he told us to “become the change we want to see in the world.”

With that being said, the first thing that a I must do to undertake an attempt to change the world is change myself and how I look at the world. This brings us to the second maxim of Kant’s Categorical Imperative: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.”[3]

This statement challenges the way we look at other people. We are to see others as an end in themselves and not a mean to our ends. What does that mean? Basically, we aren’t to see people as ways to get what we want, but as valuable in and of themselves. At first glance, most of us would read this and say, “I don’t use people.” But a deeper examination would show that we all unknowingly do this. Do you ever stop to learn about people who serve you on a daily basis? Do you ever treat a cashier or waiter poorly because you are impatient and they are taking too long following through with your transaction? This is something that I think most are guilty of—myself included.

This is also something that is done with those who have jobs that go unnoticed—i.e. cleaning staff, busboys, etc. I’ve heard it said by many that you can tell a lot about a person based on how they treat people in the service sector.

This principle makes us pause and think about the other person who is scanning our groceries. It really is a Golden Rule exercise when you stop to think about who this person really is. John Maxwell talks about learning a person’s story. Do we really see other people as people who have a story. The guy on the side of the road selling the Contributer has a story, and he may need to tell it to someone. The cashier at Kroger® also has a story.

If we all stopped and treated others in a way that does not make them feel like an object that will either contribute to or hinder our ability to check items off of our to-do list, then the world will be a better place.

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[1] Brian Tracy, Flight Plan: The Real Strategy of Success (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008), 3.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals 3^rd ed. Translated by James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 36.

Changing the World

Throughout the ages, many have asked how to make the world a better place and there have been a variety of answers.

Immanuel Kant was an eighteenth-century philosopher who thought about what many others do: how can the world become a better place. His most notable concept is called the Categorical Imperative, which by many has been dubbed the Golden Rule Ethic.

The Categorical Imperative has three maxims—or basic assertions—that try to get a person to look at the motives behind why they do things. The first maxim states, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction.”[1] Basically this means before you act, ask yourself this simple question: “If everyone in the world did this, would the world be a better place?”

While it’s known as the Golden Rule Ethic, it seems to take it a step further; it could possibly be called the Golden Rule on Steroids. Instead of just treating others how you want to be treated, this looks at an even bigger picture. If, for instance, a person is concerned with global poverty, to take the classic stance of the Golden Rule a person would ask, “If I were living off of one dollar a day without a clean source of water what would I want someone to do for me?” While this is a valid question, it would be overwhelming to a person to undertake trying to find ways to install water filtration systems across the world or provide food to everyone in the third world. I personally would get discouraged thinking about the thousands of dollars that would be needed to fund what one person across the world needed. Then when considering that approximately half of the world’s population (3 billion people) live in impoverished conditions, the amount of money needed to help is so astronomical. I would be tempted to either give up and do nothing (because my drop in the bucket would do very little) or I would impoverish myself trying to throw as much money as possible at the problem.

If, instead I asked, “If everyone in the world tried to attack this problem, what would it take to fix it.” Then the steps of what to do is more attainable. Let’s say the idea is to give 5% more of our income to charitable giving. What if the 3 billion of us in the world who weren't starving decided to make the small sacrifices to scrape together 5% of our income to attack that one problem? That would be a lot of money and, for most of us, not involve a large change of lifestyle. Therefore, the universal principle would not only be to give 5% (or however much is determined) of our income but maybe even to convince as many others as possible to do the same. A community fighting poverty together would be much easier and effective.

This can also apply to more personal parts of life. Before a person thoughtlessly litters, they could stop to ask, “What if everyone who drove down this road threw trash out their window, what would this highway look like?” If you saw someone at the grocery store that may need help with something, such as an older lady who may need help loading her groceries into her car. Instead of walking by and pretending not to notice the difficulty that this person is having, what if you asked, “What if no one helps this poor woman?”

So next time you ask yourself what can be done to make the world a better place, remember the encouragement that Gandhi gives: “We must become the change we want to see in the world.”

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[1] Kant, Immanuel, translated by James W. Ellington [1785] (1993). Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals 3rd ed.. Hackett. p. 30