When I first got into Christian radio and went to the conventions with the other specialists like me I was surprised at the conversations – it seemed all about the inside stuff of music rotations and songs and artists and other technicalities. I had expected more talk and excitement about impact and results and purposes.
One of the tendencies of people – especially men – is to stick with your cronies and talk shop. The Christian world can be the same as the rest of the world in this when pastors, scholars, theologians, and worship leaders (and radio people, and publishers, and…) hang together and talk the language of the field of their expertise with each other. There’s a wonderful world of conferences and blogs where Bible experts man-up and challenge and encourage each other. The blogs especially have been good for confronting me with the commitment and depth of so many godly people, and I thank God for specialists who guard the truth.
There’s a risk, though, in being a specialist. I saw it in Travels with Charley when Steinbeck talks about the truckers he met:
The men had little commerce with local people…
On the road their interests were engines, and weather, and maintaining the speed that makes the predictable schedules possible…It is a whole pattern of life, little known to the settled people along the routes of the great trucks.
By listening to them talk I accumulated a vocabulary of the road, of tires and springs, of overweight…I soon learned not to expect knowledge of the country they had passed through. Except for the truck stops, they had no contact with it. It was driven home to me how like sailors they were. I remember when I first went to sea being astonished that the men who sailed over the world and touched the ports to the strange and exotic had little contact with that world.
Then Z posts this quote from Larry Crabb’s book Inside Out:
Perhaps it is time to screw up our courage and attack the sacred cow: we must admit that simply knowing the contents of the Bible is not a sure route to spiritual growth. There is an awful assumption in evangelical circles that if we can just get the Word of God into people’s heads, then the Spirit of God will apply it to their hearts. That assumption is awful, not because the Spirit never does what the assumption supposes, but because it has excused pastors and leaders from the responsibility to tangle with people’s lives. Many remain safely hidden behind pulpits, hopelessly out of touch with the struggles of their congregations, proclaiming the Scriptures with a pompous accuracy that touches no one.
It's great to be a specialist but not only a specialist.
Comments