As I was getting ready to tweet that I was headed to a Session meeting tonight, I was reminded at how foreign that term sounds to folks outside of the church (or even beyond Presbyterian and reformed circles). In fact, I often tell people that I am going to an elders’ meeting, or simply something at church. Below is a good definition of the term “Session,” which comes from our church’s officer contact page.

“Session” – derived from the Latin, sessio, meaning “seated” or “sitting” refers primarily to King Jesus’ shepherdly oversight of His Church, the Body of Christ, from where he is “seated” today at the right hand of God the Father. Secondarily and derivatively, in the local congregation, it refers to the exercise of this oversight through men called, equipped and led by His Spirit, and recognized by the congregation by the work of the same Spirit, for the accomplishment of His Mission and the display of His Glory in and through the congregation.

What strikes me the most here is the clear, comforting and yet sobering statement that Jesus Christ is the head of His Church — not the elders or pastors. Such an understanding of submissive shepherding stands in stark contrast to our culture’s view of leadership, does it not?

The people at Pyromaniacs recently published a set of spoof posters titled, Emergent-See Po-Motivational Posters for Emerging Christians: the All-New Motivational Posters for the Emerging Church Conversation Chaos. When I first heard about them I thought, “Oh, these are gonna be good.” So I started reading—I laughed; I chuckled; I became quiet; my heart began sinking; I wept.

While aimed squarely at the emergent church movement, there is really nothing “all-new” about the lies being lampooned here. It has been said that good satire always contains an element of truth, one of which is that the stuff that is satirized in these “motivational” posters is the stuff of ministry—yes, even ministry in the church. I have conversations with the folks in the posters on a regular basis (and you can put my picture in the one above, too). The deceits of the devil are indeed subtle and pervasive—and fatal.

I have been waiting for some time for folks within the Dispensational Premillenialism camp to accuse Barack Obama of being the Anti-Christ. Finally, when we are well into the 2008 presidential campaign cycle, the warning message has filtered its way into the mainstream media. On its heels comes the shocking revelation that Barack Obama may actually be the Messiah. As a casual observer, the latter seems to be the more widely held public opinion (no doubt fueling the eschatological concerns).

It is fascinating. I mean, really, fascinating. It is a window into what the multitudes must have been blogging about when Jesus walked through the countryside. In fact, it was exactly what they were blogging about. They were wild and frenzied with uncontrolled hope for exactly the same reasons … they had no real spiritual awareness, per se; Jesus was going to be the guy who finally got the country in order.

Talking Jesus Dolls Vanish: It makes the Lifeway catalog look positively evangelistic! At least the abominations of the medieval church were not made in China.

Most of my junior year in Mr. Lavelle’s high school English class was spent memorizing poetry from throughout the vast spectrum of Western literature. The final examination was to recite on paper some sixty different verses of poetry and prose. As pointless as it seemed at the time (akin to learning algebra), it was an exercise that has had a lasting effect. I was reminded recently in conversation of just how many of those assignments stuck with me over the last eighteen years: “He prayeth best, who loveth best, all things both great and small; for the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all” (Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner); “Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found” (Pope, An Essay on Criticism); and then there was Richard Lovelace’s famous love song, To Althea, From Prison: “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take that for an hermitage.” That last half of Lovelace was a stretch (I admit to googling it), but with some prodding I could come up with more … In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree … on second thought I will spare you further torture, suffice it to say that I am thankful for having Mr. Lavelle as a teacher and being on the receiving end of his passion for poetry. Paul J. Lavelle, Jr., age 54, of Harrisburg, PA passed away peacefully after a courageous battle against cancer on Tuesday, March 13, 2007.

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Recently I came across the writings of a different Richard Lovelace—the contemporary Richard F. Lovelace, professor of church history at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, who, other than name, has little else in common with the hasty 17th century cavalier lyricist, except for having a gift at conveying complex principles (albeit a lot less flowery). One such example is the following passage from “Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal,” a book that takes a deep dive into a world where revival is “normative;” exploring the reality that our seemingly ordinary “spiritual lives” are being radically shaped and altered by God. Writing on the issue of “the gravitational force toward enculturation,” that is, the gravitational force of fallen humanity to wed the truth of God’s redemptive proclamations to the forms and functions of fallen humanity as embodied in the surrounding culture, Lovelace says:

“The evangelical stream, however, was only partially dis-enculturated, and it became increasingly less so, … But it was still largely wedded to the Puritan version of the training-code morality [an enculturated version itself; a thorough-going product of the enculturation of the gospel, rather than the "separatist" image we have of Puritanism ...], which caught on in Pietist circles also. As the understanding of grace declined in revivalism, evangelicalism erected a stronger shell of protective enculturation to guard it from the world. Not only did it cling to the Puritan taboos, but in the nineteenth century it added more: wine and tobacco, both of which had been consumed by both Reformers and Puritans. The early Temperance movement was motivated by social compassion for the victims of distilled liquor during the stresses of the Industrial Revolution, and it really called for temperance. When moderation seemed too difficult a spiritual discipline and too slow a remedy, the revivalists of the 1820′s and 30′s moved on to redefine temperance as abstinence, to the horror of Charles Hodge [professor at Princeton Seminary], who protested that the replacement of Communion wine with grape juice was an insult to Jesus and to biblical ethics. … A few decades later, coffee and tea were added to the taboo list by revivalist Charles Finney [whose] understanding of justification and sanctification were essentially severed from any doctrine of union with Christ; in effect, he taught justification by sanctification and not by faith, and sanctification by will power more than by grace.” (Lovelace, Dynamics, p194, emphasis added)

Note the connection at the end of the passage between the development of a moralistic training-code ethic and the “disconnect” of justification from the person, work and life of Christ and the union of the believer in Christ’s person, work and life. As Lovelace says almost explicitly, the degree to which we lose a clear focus on the nature and place of the “grace of God in Christ” we develop calcified hearts; as we become increasingly “accustomed to grace,” as is generally the case here in the Bible Belt, we become increasingly impervious to the life-work of grace itself.

The thrust of his argument: revivals tend to fizzle at the rate that the clarity, centrality and certainty of “God’s grace in Christ” diminishes; and the corollary—those who are “asleep in the light” are wakened and energized at the rate that “God’s grace in Christ” becomes more intensively clear and indispensably central and un-movably certain to the understanding and practice of all of life. How? It is by the prayerful, faith-filled preaching, teaching, and counseling of the Word, which is always (thankfully) accompanied by the Spirit who overcomes our faithless and self-protective resistance so as not to flop lifeless on the sanctuary floor, but so that it will have its intended, life-creating effect.

Along these lines we (those who are called as leaders in the Church) find that one of our greatest shepherding struggles involves 1) getting disentangled from the “enculturated” way in which we understand, live and teach the gospel of “God’s grace in Jesus Christ” and 2) struggling to articulate in winsome and convicting ways the extent to which we are addicted to pursuit of the Kingdom according to the forms, functions and patterns of fallen humanity. That is, it is not merely that we say “no” to “drink, smoke, chew and going with girls who do;” but more to the heart of the matter, it is that we seek to pursue “Jesus” and “the life of Jesus” and even “the righteousness of Jesus” according to the strategies and systems of the world, “according to the flesh,” as Paul says in 2 Corinthians.

Pursuing Christ and His Kingdom “according to the flesh” is so profoundly, deeply and pervasively a part of who we are and a part of the religious industry in the South, that anything that directly or indirectly counters it is dismissed out of hand—sometimes, but rarely, dismissed violently and explicitly; but more often dismissed out of hand by benign, though willful and ignorant, blindness and deafness (cf. Eph 4:17ff).

May we therefore be continually reminded of our shepherd calling: namely, to lift high the cross of “God’s astounding grace in Jesus Christ” in such a way that we and the congregations given to our care are consciously and increasingly gripped by its reality, pulsing through every aspect of life in a fallen world.