People in Positions of Authority are Liable if They Don’t Warn Their Charges of Potential Danger
The thirty-third chapter of Ezekiel opens with some vague references to upcoming danger, a watchman, and heeding the warnings of the lookout.
Who is this watchman, we wonder? Could it be an anticipation of Jesus? Or perhaps John the Baptist who will herald the way for Jesus?
Maybe it’s you and me. It could be all of the above, yet there is nothing to imply that Ezekiel might be God’s lookout.
However, in verse seven, God declares that he has indeed made Ezekiel the watchman. I didn’t see that coming.
But since most prophecy—perhaps all biblical prophecy—carries multiple perspectives, one for them then and one for us now—the watchman could be any of these other possible options, in addition to Ezekiel.
The Two Duties of the Watchman
There are two key things to note about the watchman. First, his duty is to be on the lookout and sound the alarm. It doesn’t matter if the people pay attention or not.
Their outcome is on them. The key is that the person keeping watch alerts everyone when he sees danger.
The second key is if the watchman is negligent and fails to warn of the danger he sees. Then he must bear the burden of the deaths of all the people who he failed to warn.
The people depended on the lookout to do his job and he failed them.
While we may never find ourselves perched in a tower scanning the horizon for an attacking army, our assignment may be looking for other things.
Perhaps our job is one to protect, to watch for dangers be it physical, financial, emotional, or spiritual.
Maybe we are in a position of leadership, and those under our care expect us to stand guard to warn them of trouble. This may be for our family, our work, our community, or our church.
Be On the Lookout
We need to be on the lookout and warn people of impending danger. If we fail to sound the alarm, any harm that befalls them rests on us.
Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
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When going to church—whether as a visitor or a regular attendee—there are three keys to having a successful, meaningful, and spirit-filled experience. These are attitude, prayer, and expectation.
Without addressing these critical elements, many church services will fall short of expectations.
Following these three essential steps, however, can make most any church experience—despite its shortcomings—positive, even beneficial, and, dare I say, memorable.
Yes, it is true. In visiting all these churches, I’ve experienced both positive and negative outcomes. And most of these outcomes hinged on attitude, prayer, and expectation.
1. Attitude Is Everything
If we go to church with a bad attitude, we shouldn’t expect to enjoy our time there. It’s foolish to assume a positive outcome from church if we go there with a surly disposition.
When we approach church with positive anticipation of what will occur, our attention will focus on the positive elements of the service and give us the ability to extend grace to the negative aspects.
Our attention will celebrate the noteworthy and give us the ability to overlook the not-so-great.
And remember, every church, congregation, and service will possess both positive and negative elements. No church is perfect in every way, just as no church is completely flawed. Our attitude determines which of those two aspects we focus on.
I approached most all the churches we visited with a positive perspective. Most of the time this came naturally. A few times, however, I needed to work on adjusting my attitude.
Seeking a positive attitude means my overall approach to the church was positive.
Even so, that doesn’t mean I noted only positive elements. In visiting churches, I sought to share both positive and negative, celebrating the good that I witnessed and attempting to learn from the not-so-good that I encountered.
This is the reason I opted not to visit Church #69 (“Suffering from a Bad Rap”). From what people told me about their experience with this church and how the people who went there treated them, I formed a highly negative impression.
Based completely on this secondhand information, I developed a bad attitude about this church and suspected my experience would confirm what I anticipated.
Since I had such a bad perspective, I saw no point in visiting them until I could turn my mindset from negative to positive. I tried unsuccessfully for a couple of years to adjust my attitude, but I never could.
Therefore, I felt a visit would unfold as a futile encounter and produce no valuable insight or significant spiritual interaction.
I now realize—albeit too late—that I never prayed about this. I never sought the Holy Spirit’s intervention to correct my flagging attitude.
Through prayer, I’m quite confident God would have turned my attitude around. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to seek him in this.
This brings us to the next point: prayer.
2. Prayer Is Essential
When Candy and I embarked on our 52 Churches adventure, we committed ourselves to a pre-church prayer each week. Initially this was before we left our house, but later it occurred during our drive to church.
Our intent was to seek God’s blessing for our time with that church and to request a positive outcome. We only forgot to do this a couple of times, with our lack of prayer serving to diminish what we encountered at those churches.
So significant were the benefits of our pre-church prayer that we continued this practice when we weren’t visiting a new church but instead were attending our home church.
Most of the time I would pray, and Candy would add her addendum as she felt led. Other times I asked her to pray.
After a few weeks, I realized our pre-church prayer could easily slip into a rut, with us repeating the same phrases week after week.
To avoid falling into a vain repetition (see Matthew 6:7 in the KJV), I would seek Holy Spirit insight on what specific things to pray for during our drive to church each Sunday.
As a way of example, and not to imply something for you to copy, here are parts of some of our pre-church prayers:
“Thank you, God, for the opportunity to go to church today. Please teach us what you would have us learn.”
“Papa, at church today may we receive what you want us to receive and give to others what you want us to give.”
“May we worship you today in spirit and truth” (see John 4:23–24).
“Holy Spirit, direct us to divine encounters with the people at this church so that we may encourage them, and they may encourage us, as needed.”
“Please give us positive attitudes so that we may see what you want us to see.” (I prayed this prayer a few times, but Candy clarified that she already had a good attitude. It was mine that needed adjustment. She was right.)
“We thank you, Jesus, for who you are and what you’ve done for us. May we celebrate you today at church.”
“God, please speak to us through the sermon today.”
As we returned to our home church, these types of prayers continued, though some new ones were a bit more pointed, as in:
“Please direct us, Holy Spirit, to someone to minister to today at church.”
“May you give us opportunities to pray for others before and after the church service.”
“Father, today at church, may we see others through your eyes and encourage them in Jesus’s name.”
Use these examples to form your own pre-church prayers. But regardless of the words you say, know that prayer is essential when you head off to church.
These prayers don’t need to be fancy, but they should be heartfelt and Holy Spirit driven.
Prayer establishes the groundwork for what happens next.
3. Expectations Form Experience
The foundation formed by prayer prepares us for the church service. It serves to shape our expectations, which will drive our experience.
Most of the time, positive expectations result in positive outcomes, while negative expectations prompt negative results.
With prayer establishing the basis to move forward, we should easily slide into a mindset of positive expectation. This is how we put our faith into action.
We say our pre-church prayer in faith, and we prove it from the actions that spring forth from our expectations.
When we expect great things to happen at church, we will see the positive most every time. If we expect disappointment, we will surely encounter it.
As I said before, we will never experience a 100 percent perfect service, nor will we ever experience a 100 percent horrible one.
Church experiences exist on a continuum from good to bad, positive to negative. And yet, when we walk in with positive expectations, our experience will skew toward the positive.
For most Sundays, our pre-church prayer did exactly that. Yet, on a few occasions, I needed to breathe a booster prayer as we pulled into the church parking lot, walked through the doors, or encountered some initial disappointment.
These prayers sometimes came forth as little more than a groan, but God granted my plea every time.
How to Go to Church Summary
Whether visiting a new church or attending our home church, we should follow a wise strategy, remembering that attitude is everything, prayer is essential, and expectations form experience.
May we receive God’s blessing when we go to church, and while we’re there, may we be a blessing to others.
May it be so.
Action Step
Go to church with the right attitude, covered with prayer, and with high expectations.
Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
This nondenominational church meets in a public school auditorium.
Consider these four discussion questions about Church #16:
1. Renting space saves the church from purchasing and maintaining a facility.
Whether you own your building or rent space, how can you maximize your outreach and better impact your community?
2. They use more technology than we’ve seen so far. When not displaying song lyrics, Bible verses, or clips, they project the pastor’s video on a large screen behind him.
How much technology does your church use during your services? Does it add to or detract from the experience?
3. Aside from a greeter and the two pastors saying “Hi,” no one talks to us. We learn that people wearing green nametags are available to answer questions. After the service I spot a man with a green nametag, but he rushes by.
Are you and other people at your church so preoccupied or busy that you overlook and ignore people?
4. The leadership at this nondenominational church does the right things to foster spiritual connection, but the people aren’t following. They’re passive, coming to church, doing church, and then leaving.
Is it the paid staff’s job to welcome visitors, or yours? What needs to change?
Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
Aligning Ourselves with Like-Minded People Results in
Isolation and Division
An issue in the corporate world is business silos. This is where a department or unit puts up walls that separate them from the rest of the company.
The leaders of these silos of information and function do so to maintain control and assure them of power. The result is a lack of communication with other units or departments, along with the hoarding of knowledge.
This means the sales department doesn’t talk with the customer service department and neither one knows what marketing is doing, along with research and development, billing, and operations.
In the end, the customers suffer and the company is less than what it could be.
You may or may not have experienced
this in the business world, but in Christian circles it’s much more common. It’s
so common that it’s hard to avoid.
For most Christians who’ve been following Jesus for a while, their circle of friends and the people they interact with have become other Christians. They have little meaningful interaction with people who don’t follow Jesus.
This, however, overstates the situation. In truth their circle of friends and the people they interact with aren’t just other Christians, they’re only other Christians who think and act like they do.
Spiritual Silo as a Group
Over the centuries Christians have become experts at dividing themselves. Courtesy of the Reformation we ended up with Catholics and Protestants.
Protestants then divided themselves into three main streams: mainline, fundamental, and charismatic. But within each of these groups, further division occurred, now amounting to over 42,000 Protestant denominations.
That’s a lot of division, disunity, and opportunities to form spiritual silos.
Most denominations isolate themselves from other denominations.
Afterall, it was disagreement that caused them to form their denomination in the first place. And once they split off and formed their new denomination, they isolated themselves from those they disagreed with.
The result is a spiritual silo. Even within denominations, individual churches isolate themselves from other churches in their own group.
Some churches go so far as to isolate themselves
from every other church.
The result of these spiritual silos is people associating themselves only with others who believe and act exactly as they do.
Their understanding and practice of Christianity becomes extremely narrow, with them on the side of right and everyone else, wrong.
Spiritual Silo as Individuals
The spiritual silos that churches form—and most every church has done so to one degree or another—spills over to the people who attend there.
Within churches people congregate with others like them, specifically others who follow Jesus with the same spiritual paradigms and priorities as theirs.
They push away people who think and act
differently, even if it’s by the smallest of degrees. This produces even
smaller spiritual silos, where members of the same church withdraw from other
members over the most trivial of issues.
Taken to an extreme a person completely retreats from church and any form of spiritual community to live an isolated life away from all other followers of Jesus. They create for themselves a spiritual silo of one.
Spiritual Silos Promote Disunity
As we associate with people who are precisely like us, we push aside all others.
The result is we spend our time with people who think exactly as we do, believe exactly as we do, and act exactly as we do. We view our own thoughts, beliefs, and actions as best aligned with God.
The logical extension is that we view all others as misaligned.
But our spiritual silos are exactly what God doesn’t want. Jesus prayed for the unity of his followers, that we would be one just as he and Papa are one.
Our divisions, denominations, and spiritual silos work against Jesus’s desire for us to get along and function as one (John 17:20-23).
And why does he want us to be one? It’s to maximize our witness to the world, so that they may know.
Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
Despite God’s Longstanding Patience Giving Us Time to Shape Up, Judgement Will Eventually Come
The book of Ezekiel is an interesting one, packed with evocative prophetic imagery that portrays God’s power, patience, and eventual judgement. As follows through much of the Old Testament the people disobey God.
He warns them to turn things around and is patient, hoping they will avoid the consequences of their wayward actions. He wishes for the best, and the people let him down.
But Ezekiel is confronted with a peculiar response to his messages of impending punishment. Like the boy who cried “wolf,” the people dismiss Ezekiel’s warnings (actually God’s warnings).
They say, “Time passes on but these threats never happen.”
They stop taking Ezekiel (and God) seriously, which they never fully did to begin with. They feel quite justified in ignoring the word of God because they think there is no downside for disobedience.
There are Consequences
To this God says “enough.” He will withhold their punishment no longer and will fulfill all that he said. There will be no more delays.
I wonder how much we today are like these people of old, viewing God’s warnings as meaningless threats that will never happen.
Since our wrong behavior receives no immediate punishment, perhaps we’re not so bad after all. Maybe God doesn’t really mean it when he says our wrong actions are sin.
To this I hear God again saying “Enough.”
There are consequences for disobeying God, and I fear our time is up.
Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
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The experiences I share in this book More Than 52 Churches are just that: my experiences. Other people will have different observations when visiting a church.
I am an introvert, as is a slight majority of the population, but my reactions are not unique to or representative of introverts.
Indeed, everyone, both introvert and extrovert, will share my perspective to varying degrees—some more profoundly and others less so.
Regardless, know that I have never talked with anyone who claimed they could visit a new church without some degree of anxiety.
Also know that I had a most supportive wife accompanying me each week (except for the week she was out of town and I went solo: Church #61, “The Wrong Time to Visit”).
With her at my side, I stood much braver than I would have on my own.
Even so, I had to fight the urge to make a U-turn in the parking lot at Church #54 (“Emergent Maybe”) and pray earnestly to stave off a bit of a panic attack while walking into Church #58 (“Not So Friendly”).
Visiting a church with a non-supportive spouse would be even harder, as well as showing up by yourself. Given all this, it’s easy to see why someone with even the best intentions of visiting a church will decide not to.
Instead, they’ll maintain their Sunday morning status quo—whether staying home or attending the church they know, even if it’s the wrong one. Sticking with what we’re used to is so much easier than confronting our fears and going someplace unknown.
That’s why it’s so critical for a church to do everything possible to make it less scary for a visitor to show up. Being a welcoming church is a great start, but it’s not enough.
Churches need to go beyond welcoming visitors. They need to engage with them. You must be a disarming church, likeable, even irresistible.
There are many factors that make a church engaging. Three recurring themes emerged from our visits to other churches. These stand out as essential skills to master to be an engaging church.
1. Make it Easy for Visitors
Most people today go online to find information. This includes someone thinking about visiting your church. Therefore, having an attractive, up-to-date, and visitor-friendly website is key. This is the first key to be an engaging church.
A few churches try to skip this step by establishing their online home base on various social media sites. This, however, is shortsighted.
Social media platforms can change their rules of engagement at any time, restrict who sees your information, and even summarily shut you down without notice.
Yes, a church can still have social media pages, but these should direct visitors to the church website, which the church owns and controls.
As mentioned, the website must be attractive. It should look current and be easy to navigate. It must follow best practices.
This means your website needs a makeover every couple of years, or else it will look dated, which will cause visitors to dismiss your church as out of touch.
Next, your website needs current information. Remove obsolete content and add new info as soon as changes occur.
Nothing will cause website visitors to bounce from your site faster—and dismiss your church quicker—than when it includes information that’s no longer relevant.
A third key is accuracy. Some church websites are as misleading as dating profiles. (Not that I have any firsthand experience with dating websites, but I’ve heard that embellished claims abound).
Some church websites paint a picture of what the church once was but no longer is, while other sites present an image of what they want to become.
Both are lies and seriously mislead visitors, which results in disappointment. This causes first-time church visitors to become one-time visitors.
As far as the specific information a website should have, clear and easy to find service times are critical. Don’t make people search for this or wonder if what they find is accurate.
Just as important is your street address. Unless your location is well known and highly visible, assume visitors will use their GPS to get there. Make it easy for them to do so.
Next, people will wonder what they should wear to feel comfortable at your church. And even if you don’t care what they wear, they will.
They’ll want to fit in, so let them know how most people dress. Is your church come-as-you-are, business casual, or Sunday best? Somewhere in between?
If you have multiple services, note the times. Highlight any differences, such as in format, music content, and sermon style. Also note any other Sunday programming you may offer.
Do you have Sunday school? Is it concurrent to the service or at a different time? Do you have something separate for teens? What about college students or young singles? These are two demographics that many churches overlook.
Let newcomers know what to expect. Beyond explaining a typical service, tell them what they can encounter before and after.
Let them know how long the service typically lasts. And please, tell them the offering is just for members and regular attendees.
You should also explain your communion practices, since these vary a lot from one church to another.
At most of the churches we visited that included communion, my desire to understand and fit in with their practices so distracted me that I failed to focus on the reason why I was taking communion.
This was an epic fail for me—and for them.
Lastly, make it easy for prospective visitors to contact your church with questions. This includes listing your phone number and email address.
Just make sure you respond quickly to both. Most churches don’t, with a few delaying their response to visitor communication for days, weeks, and, in one case, even months. And some don’t respond at all.
What I’ve not included on this list of website information is a doctrinal statement. I don’t think most people care, and those who read it may seek one hot-button word or phrase, using it to eliminate your church from further consideration.
The reality is that at most churches, the people who go there don’t know what their church’s core beliefs are, and those who do know, often disagree with an element or two.
2. Create a Great Impression
Okay, so your website did a good enough job to entice someone to visit your church. Now you need to make a great impression when they arrive, knowing that their first perception of your church began with your website.
This is the second key to be an engaging church.
You’ve given them your street address, so their GPS will get them to your facility.
If you only have one entrance to your parking lot, they’ll know where to go, but if you have multiple entrances, be sure to have signs, banners, or flags directing them to the right one.
Some large churches have parking lot attendants to direct traffic to open spaces, but even some forward-thinking mid-sized churches have greeters in their parking lot to welcome visitors and be available to answer questions.
You must have someone greet them at your building entrance to give them a smile, welcome them well, and open the door. This person should focus on people they don’t recognize and not their friends.
This greeter should look for signs of apprehension or confusion, doing whatever they can to ease a visitor’s concerns or fears.
A positive welcome, however, extends inside the building too. Larger churches have visible and attractive information centers, staffed by approachable and outgoing people to assist visitors in any way possible.
At smaller churches, or those lacking the space for a visitor center, station people inside to assist those who look lost or confused.
In all this, the goal is to make a great impression, welcoming visitors well and helping them enjoy their experience.
3. Greet Well
As I mentioned in 52 Churches, there are three opportunities to greet visitors: before the service, during the service, and after the service.
Few churches do all three well. And too many fail at each one. Greeting well is the third key to be an engaging church.
As already mentioned, the pre-service greeting occurs in the parking lot, at the front door, and inside your facility. But that’s not enough.
These people serve as official greeters because they’re outgoing, engaging, and have a knack at helping people feel comfortable. However, this doesn’t mean the other 99 percent of your church shouldn’t also greet visitors.
The pre-church greeting extends into the sanctuary or worship space. This secondary form of greeting could be as simple as making eye contact, smiling, and waving or saying hello. Anyone should be able to do that.
Beyond that, everyone should look for people standing by themselves with no one to talk to or who look lost. T
alking with friends should always take second place to interacting with visitors. And remember, most visitors won’t care if someone’s approach may be a bit awkward. They’ll just be thrilled that someone cared enough to try.
For stoic churches, a nod of acknowledgment may be all you can do, while for more outgoing churches, the time before the service is a great opportunity to get to know someone.
You can even offer to sit with them during the service to help them feel more comfortable and better navigate the service. This is extremely important for churches with liturgical services, which are hard for most visitors to follow.
Next is the greeting during the service. From a visitor perspective, most churches do this so poorly they might be better off skipping it. Seriously.
If you do have a greeting time during the service, train your people to be visitor-focused, not friend-focused.
Give visitors the bulk of your attention. Make eye contact, smile, and offer a handshake. Share your name. Ask theirs. Now introduce them to someone else.
And whatever you do, don’t allow visitors to squirm in silence while everyone else is talking with others.
Don’t call out visitors by having them raise their hand, or worse, stand up. This is most embarrassing. Instead, invite them to go to the back of the sanctuary or visitor center after the service.
The final greeting occurs after the service ends. It’s true that some visitors scoot out as quickly as possible—especially if they had a bad experience—but other visitors may be open to tarry.
Reward them for their bravery by talking to them. At the same time, don’t overwhelm or interrogate them, just be friendly.
Seek to establish a connection. If there’s any after-church activity, invite them to stay for it. This may be coffee and refreshments. Or it could be a potluck. Assure them there will be plenty of food and that they’re welcome to stay.
Ask them if they have any questions. If you don’t know the answer, take them to someone else who will be able to help.
Though not as common as it once was, you can invite them to have lunch with you.
Even if your church failed at the pre-church greeting and the mid-service greeting, a good post-church greeting can still salvage the situation, serving as a final and positive impression for them to take home.
Good worship music and engaging preaching may draw visitors, but it’s the human connection that keeps them coming back. This starts with greeting visitors well.
Engaging Church Summary
If you want your church to grow—and every church should—strive to engage with visitors; you must be an engaging church. This starts with the information you provide online, which should make it easy for them to decide to visit.
It continues by making multiple good impressions when they arrive at your facility. Then it culminates with greeting them well before, during, and after the service.
You won’t succeed in each of these areas every time, but you should work to succeed in as many of them as possible, as often as possible.
The Next Step
To do your part in being an engaging church, turn your focus from yourself and your friends to visitors and those you don’t know.
Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
Their website says we’ll find “a laid-back, coffeehouse atmosphere” with “an unconventional setting where a blend of people, of all ages, from all walks of life, can gather and feel at home.”
This is my kind of church. It’s an outlier church in a mainline denomination.
Consider these four discussion questions about Church #15:
1. Weather permitting, the service will be outdoors. I’m excited for a chance to worship in nature, but I’m disappointed I won’t experience their typical service.
Regular attendees may appreciate a special service, but how does this impact visitors?
2. We arrive and see no hint of an outdoor service. We later learn that based on today’s forecast for ninety-three degrees, they decided to meet inside.
How well does your church deal with last-minute changes?
3. The service starts with a video. It’s an allegory that shows the importance of churches maintaining their original purpose: focusing outward and avoiding the snare of self-centeredness or adopting an inward preoccupation.
How can your church better maintain an outward focus?
4. Next is a time for healing prayer, another first on our journey, and a most welcome one.
Does your church offer healing prayer for people in need? Do you?
Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
Too Many People Fail to See God at Work and Instead Oppose Those Who Follow Him into His New Ways
Jesus warns his followers what awaits them. First, they’ll get kicked out of their church and then people will kill them.
Their opponents will do so in the name of religion, thinking they’re acting in service to God, but their actions fight against God.
This means the killers aren’t coming from the world but from within the family of God.
Historically this happens whenever a new move of God occurs. The biggest movement of God was Jesus coming to fulfill the Old Testament Law. Most people miss this, and so they oppose him.
Moses
There is also Moses who leads the people from slavery to freedom. He gives them instructions on how to live as a free people. They oppose him—for forty years.
Though they don’t kill him, they provoke him so much that sometimes he wishes he was dead (Exodus 32:32 and Numbers 11:15).
The Prophets
The Old Testament prophets likewise suffer opposition and death. It seldom goes well for them.
Today’s Church Can Fight Against God
The pattern of religious conflict continues since the time of Jesus. Most notably the Reformation. Christians oppose other Christians. Christians hate other Christians. And Christians kill other Christians.
Another momentous time of Christian versus Christian hostility happens at the birth of the Charismatic movement in the early 1900s and again at its rebirth in the 1960s.
Each time God is at work doing a new thing. Each time, many of his people mount a significant opposition. And God’s messengers usually suffer for it.
Gamaliel’s Wise Advice
Don’t label the people who follow God into his new way of doing things as heretics and oppose them. Instead, we would be better off heeding the words of Gamaliel who told the religious leaders, “Don’t bother with them.
If they’re doing this on their own, they will fail. But if it’s of God, we can’t stop them—and could end up fighting against God himself,” (see Acts 5:38-39). That is, don’t fight against God.
Instead of kicking the people we disagree with out of church, we would be better off seeing if God is at work.
Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
In my last post, Three People Given a New Name by God, we looked at God renaming people to give them a new identity. Today we will consider the opposite: people whose names were changed in order to strip away their identity.
I’m talking about a young man named Daniel and his three friends.
These lads were forcibly relocated after their country was overthrown. They were removed from their families and all they knew in order to be indoctrinated into the king’s service.
In a final act of reprogramming, they were stripped of their Hebrew names and given new identities.
This was not to encourage them or elevate the trajectory of their lives as God did with Abraham, Sarah, and Israel, but an attempt to remove every last bit of who they were, including their faith.
Daniel became Belteshazzar, Hananiah became Shadrach, Mishael became Meshach, and Azariah became Abednego.
We live in a world that continually gives us names, names to push us down, names to remove the identity God gave us or how he sees us.
Though these may be in the form of nicknames, such as “Shorty,” “Goofus,” or “Blondie,” they are more often labels: loser, worthless, klutz, or stupid.
Daniel and his friends didn’t let others reprogram them from who God made them to be—and neither should we.
Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
Get the Bible Reading Tip Sheet: “10 Tips to Turn Bible Reading from Drudgery to Delight.” Enter your info and receive the free Bible Reading Tip Sheet and be added to Peter’s email list.
Align with Other Believers to Build Ourselves Up and Serve Others
In my post about spiritual mastermind groups I talked about the benefit of aligning ourselves with other like-minded followers of Jesus to walk with on our spiritual journey. Now I’d like to look at the word cohort and apply that too. Let’s call this a Christian cohort.
What a Cohort Is
A cohort is a group or band of people. Though a secondary application refers to a single companion or associate, the more widely used understanding refers to many.
Though we could intentionally form a Christian cohort, just as we might a spiritual mastermind group, I think of most cohorts as being informal.
If we view a Christian cohort as a naturally developing assemblage of people in our church or parachurch organization, then most of us have a cohort, possibly several of them, which vary with the setting.
We can also be more intentional about forming a Christian cohort. Though this could take many forms, with varying functions, it could also approach being a spiritual mastermind group.
For our Christian cohort to be effective and reach its highest potential, however, it shouldn’t have only an internal focus, but an outward one as well.
Though there is a time to build each other up, there is also a time to go out into our community and help others. Forming a Christian cohort to serve is a great application of this concept.
What a Christian Cohort Isn’t
A secondary definition of the word cohort is with the military. This first started in the Roman Empire, where it identified a group of 300 to 600 soldiers. But a cohort can more generically refer to any group of combatants.
However, let us not apply this military understanding of cohort to our theology. We are not Christian soldiers marching off to war. God forbid! May we never have a repeat of the Crusades.
Though the idea of a battle applies to our journey with Jesus, this is a spiritual one—warring against spiritual forces of evil (Ephesians 6:12)—not a physical one fighting other people we may disagree with.
What a Cohort Shouldn’t Be
Though the idea of a Christian cohort is appealing, it also carries a huge risk. This is that our cohort could easily become a click, a Christian click. These clicks have existed in every church I’ve been part of. I suspect all churches suffer from Christian clicks.
These clicks are groups of friends, cronies if you will, who informally, yet effectively, form an inner circle within the Christian fellowship that excludes all others, essentially relegating them to a second-class status in the church.
Though I’m not aware of it, I suspect I’ve been part of these a time or two. But what I do realize—most painfully—is the many times I’ve been on the outside looking in. It’s a lonely place to be. May our Christian cohort never become a click.
Cohort Conclusion
When done rightly, a Christian cohort can produce an encouraging peer group to move us into a closer, more effective relationship with God—and each other. When done wrongly, our cohort becomes a click that serves as a barrier to Christian community.
May we embrace the positive side of Christian cohort and guard against its wrong use.
Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.
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