SYNCHRONICITY: n. “the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally unrelated.”

Synchronicity. Have you ever experienced it? I have, many times in my life. One of the most dramatic was the time I was reading a music publication and noticed a musical quiz in it. The quiz asked the name of a certain classical work, the composer, when the piece first premiered, and where. My mouth dropped in disbelief! At that very moment, I was listening to the piece on my stereo!! All the information was on the album cover. Needless to say, I won the prize...

Whenever a synchronicity happens, I wake up and take notice, because I believe this is one of the ways God tries to get our attention and talk to us. I want to share my most recent synchronicity with you because it is important and relevant to what’s going on in our church right now--and to the wider Christian Church in the West.

First, from my daily devotional, “Magnificent Prayer.” This is what I read on the morning of May 29:

Prayer is the walkie talkie on the battlefield of the world. It calls on God for courage (Eph. 6:19). It calls in for troop deployment and target location (Acts 13:3).It calls in for protection and air cover (Mt. 6:13; Lk. 21:36). It calls in for fire power to blast open a way for the Word (Col. 4:3). It calls in for the miracle of healing for the wounded soldiers (Jms. 5:16). It calls in for supplies for the forces (Mt. 6:11; Phil. 4:6). And it calls in for needed reinforcements (Mt. 9:38). This is the place of prayer--on the battlefield of the world. It is a wartime walkie talkie for spiritual warfare, not a domestic intercom to increase the comforts of the saints. And one of the reasons it malfunctions in the hands of so many Christian soldiers is that they have gone AWOL. (John Piper)

Remember that acronym: AWOL... The author of the devotional continued:

We live in a war zone. Prayer is our lifeline to supply and to orders from our Commander-in-Chief. As you go through your day, see the battle for what it really is. Take your place as a soldier and wield your weapons well. Pray for new recruits and encourage those who have gone AWOL to return to the front lines.

No Christian is exempt from this warfare. God has no place for spiritual pacifists. He calls every saint to arms. (Ruth Paxson)

I came to work that morning encouraged and thankful for the wonderful, powerful gift of prayer. I thought about the 10 prayer teams that are part of our prayer ministry here at HCC, and about the new Prayer and Anointing team. Later, I went home for lunch. As I ate, I read the lead article in the latest “Mission Frontiers” magazine. Imagine my amazement when, at the end of the article I saw that acronym again: AWOL! My heart literally began to race, and my eyes seemed to pop out of my head. How was it possible for me to read such an obscure word twice in the same day--in readings related to Christian faith?!

This edition of the magazine is entitled “Losing Faith. In several articles and reviews, the reality of Christians turning away from faith--especially evangelical faith--is explored and addressed. According to Ralph Winter, the magazine’s editor, it is happening not just in the USA and other Western countries, but all around the world--at the same time that we hear how Christianity is exploding in the countries of the Majority World (Africa, Asia, South America). He lists a variety of reasons for this loss of faith, including the influence of the university/educational world and the secularism of our culture. He also points out a number of situations and factors that are causing believers to abandon their churches. These include: a “been there, done that” attitude and feeling about church worship services, the excitement and meaning found in Christian service activity, and increasing dissatisfaction with the “simplistic and mechanical measuring stick such as ‘repeat after me’ or ‘do you believe that Jesus died for you and rose again?’ understanding of Evangelicals to decide whether a person is saved or not. Winter then presents some very depressing statistics: estimates are that 75% of teenagers in Evangelical homes will lose their faith after high school. One denominational study says 85%. And only a fraction of them will “later stumble back into the church, confused, sensing an emotional emptiness.” The question for us is: “Is that trip into the world necessary?” What do we need to be aware of and address? This insightful and stimulating article goes into detail about this. Then it ends with these words:

THE CURE: In my opinion a basic problem is our blindness to the essential wartime calling of those who follow Christ. (Is this sounding familiar??) The Church has largely gone AWOL (there it is again!!), distracted or preoccupied with programs that serve our own ends. Everyone knows what happens to a peacetime army: it tends to fall apart, demoralization sets in. Soldiers want to get out of the army.

Evangelicals have misread the Bible. They are bored. Many are getting out of what they think is a peacetime army. But the Bible does not call us to save ourselves, to solidify our security, and just to talk about world problems.

[Today] the world’s problems are ever present in our media. In addition, we are astoundingly more capable of doing something about those problems. We have greater opportunities and greater obligations than ever in history. Yet the chasm between our unemployed resources and an effective challenge to big world problems is very great.

A major reason people are leaving the Church, losing their faith, and staying away in the first place is thus because the Church has not adequately stepped up to bat along with civil forces to beat down the corruption, disease, and poverty of at least a billion hopeless people.

Is there any explicitly Christian organization with the specific purpose of fighting global malaria? Why not? Is there any expressly Christian mission designed to fight the sources of disease in general--as does the Carter Center? Why not?

In fighting evil we can glorify God, not just help our own species. [Authors cited earlier] believe that God must create or at least approve of all this evil. Why? Since the Church does not believe forthrightly that it is Satan’s work, not God’s? Are Evangelicals content to survive rather than to soldier against it?

What do Evangelicals have to offer at present? Some intellectual concern. Also, confusion about what we are able to do. And, a history of super individual Christianity that does not readily see the necessity of highly organized teams (mission agencies) to solve the most serious problems. We tend to assume that a whole lot of saved individuals (as beneficial as that is) will be all that is needed.

We are sending hundreds of long-term mission teams out around the world without either the knowledge, skill, or theology to tackle effectively most of the profound practical problems real people have. We do a good job in talking to people about following Christ, but when their other needs cry out for serious practical solutions, we are often unprepared.

Missionaries in the past have transformed whole countries in practical ways. Today we know far more about the problems and far more about the solutions than ever before. Yet the world still sees us (Evangelicals) as merely religious fanatics propagating a salvation that is not here but only in the hereafter.

The cure for a Church that is in many ways staggering, stalling, and sitting down, the cure for our malaise and evaporating faith, is clear-cut definitive obedience. We must face and define the need to get organized answers to this world’s problems as well as getting individuals reconciled to God.

In fact, getting people reconciled to God AND to His Kingdom business must go together. Otherwise our absence at the frontlines of major global problems means we are misrepresenting God’s will and misusing the wisdom and resources He has given us to act out and speak out His love and to glorify His Name among all peoples.

Whew! When I finished this, I was both cut to the heart with clear-cut convictions about my own life of faith AND massively uplifted and encouraged--because all of this is very much in line with what I’m already discovering as I read and listen and engage the critical issue of faith and works. This is all over the place! In books and articles, in seminars and lectures, in conversations I am having (especially with the 20’s/30’s from our church who are no longer coming to or engaged in the life of Hilmar Covenant). It is also what our congregation has been involved in recently: doing a “home makeover” at Phoebe’s home! Helping a 95 year old woman--with too many cats and a hoarding problem--improve her quality of life, just because it’s what Christ calls us to do. It’s about being obedient (“Look after orphans and widows in their distress. This is religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless.” (James 1:27). It’s about the whole gospel of Christ (“getting people reconciled to God AND to His Kingdom business” going together). Reading that strange acronym, AWOL, twice in the matter of a few hours, and seeing this issue of lost faith framed in the language of warfare in both articles, made it seem like God was screaming out to me: PAY ATTENTION! This is important! This is what I desire of you--and of Hilmar Covenant Church! It will contribute to the solution I have always wanted: “MY Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven!”

What do you think? Is this perspective something we can embrace more fully and completely as a congregation? Is it a word from the Lord that we need to hear as we move forward with our new goals? Do you even agree that, perhaps, in our own ways we as a church may have gone AWOL? That we need to re-think, re-define, and understand in fresh ways what we mean by “evangelism” and “good news” and “mission” in order to be a church that will both reach the next generation AND correctly get it right: “getting people reconciled to God AND to His Kingdom business”?

What an exciting and bracing future lies before us as we continue to unpack all that it means to follow Jesus with our head and heart (yes! certainly!) and more effectively, rightly, and demonstrably with our hands. We are “saved to serve”--not alone, individually, but as “armies of organized batallions!” This is what it will take to be the Church Jesus said He would build, that “the gates of hell will not prevail against.” (Matt. 16:18) And it is this kind of faith that energizes the next generation we say we want to reach.

Can we make the changes necessary to be this kind of Church--together?

You betcha!