I Once Was Lost

Everts, Don & Doug Schaupp. I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Press, 2008.

I Once was Lost is a brief book that investigates and proposes a threshold-oriented perspective of faith development among postmodern skeptics. The book is significant, because of the five thresholds it presents as the authors seek to reorient our viewpoints concerning the journey toward God for postmoderns. In this review, through the purviews of summary and critical questioning, I will overview the five thresholds covered in this book, and make connections with my North American church planting context.

I Once was Lost shares critical reflection concerning the postmodern journey into Christianity. Initially, the authors analyze their experiences in college campus ministries seeking to learn from their students and friends. As they consider what has happened and what is happening in regards to their ministry contexts, the authors arrive at two formative conclusions. Everts and Schaupp remark, “The first lesson [postmoderns] have taught us about the path to faith is that it is, in the end, mysterious. Again and again, we found ourselves marveling at transformations that we never would have anticipated and shaking our heads in frustration at those who seemed near to faith but never got there.” (18) The authors allow themselves to wrestle with the implications, excitements, and frustrations of the mysterious faith-building pathways traveled by postmoderns. In the end, they decide that mystery leads to liberty. Mystery, although unpredictable and undefinable, presents much needed relief for church planters. With firmness, Everett and Schaupp conclude, “We cannot create life. It is impossible for us to predict why some of our friends will choose Jesus and why others just won’t. We don’t know how to change hearts…The path to faith is mysterious. To admit that is liberation. The monkey is off our back, and onto God’s back, where it belongs.” (19) In I Once was Lost, the pathways of faith development among postmoderns are celebrated as mysterious.
Second, I Once was Lost, reveals the organic nature of postmodern faith pathways. The authors share, “The second lesson this group of new believers has shown us is that the postmodern path to faith is organic.” (20) By referring to Jesus’ parable in Mark 4:26-29, the authors focus intently on verses 28-29: “All by itself the soil produces grain–first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.” According to Everett and Schaupp, “Heeding this lesson, we are able to recognize the different stages of growth and seek to love our non-Christian friends wisely and sensitively, adjusting to where they are in their growth.” (21) Instead of seeking an either/or pathway to faith, I Once was Lost advocates an organic, season-oriented approach.

After constructing the mystery and organic frameworks for postmodern faith development, the authors dive into their five thresholds proposal. The first threshold involves a movement from distrust to trust. Poignantly, the authors reveal the challenging context for today’s church, “In another day and age, God, religion, and church enjoyed the general respect of the culture. Not today. Religion is suspect, church is weird, and Christians are hypocrites. Distrust has become the norm. People are tired of the ‘sales tactics’ often employed by Christians and are offended by our bait-and-switch attempts at introducing them to Jesus. In the past, the occupation of evangelist was viewed as a respectable profession, even by secular society. Today, evangelist has fallen to the very bottom of the pit, among the most distrusted occupations.” (31) Furthermore, Everett and Schaupp share from their own experiences, “When people first find out we are Christians, we often literally see them shift from relaxed to rigid, from warm to suspicious.” (31) In an interesting twist to conventional evangelical thinking, the authors muse, “When trust has not yet been established, lostness feels like wise skepticism and right thinking. If Christians are fanatical and narrow-minded, keeping one’s distance seems like the smartest posture to take toward us…Until this framework of distrust is shifted, growth is nearly impossible.” (32) From there, the authors share “Five Knee-Jerk Reactions to Distrust”: Defend, Bruise, Avoid, Judge, and Argue; however, they also propose “Five Kingdom Habits to Build Trust”: Pray, Learn, Bond, Affirm, and Welcome. Perhaps, the opportunity to operate in a climate of distrust could have a positive impact on the church. With encouragement, Everett and Schaupp suggest, “We need to learn to be unfazed by distrust. We are in an age of distrust, so instead of being surprised and reactionary when our coworkers or neighbors don’t trust us, we need to learn how to respond kindly and quickly begin the normal, basic and foundational investment of trust-building.” (37) How are you seeing and experiencing the climate of distrust referred to in I Once was Lost? In what ways are you seeking to build trust with a non-Christian friend?

In I Once was Lost, the second threshold of postmodern faith development involves moving from complacency to curiosity. The authors describe such a shift in the following manner: “To go from being complacent about spiritual things to being intrigued is a natural process. Our souls and our minds are built by God to be curious, to ask questions until we have landed upon satisfying answers. So this move from complacent to curious isn’t easy, but it taps into a desire and need that is wired into all people.” (51-52) Everett and Schaupp summarize this movement in three distinct stages: 1) Awareness: “Awareness of more options, more paths in life, is often the first baby step out of complacency. As people hear about Jesus, their old answers and old pictures of God slowly become antiquated and inadequate,” 2) Engagement: “Engaging with a real Christian, becoming friends with a Christian and taking time to read through the life of Jesus were concrete actions that caused [the author’s friend’s] curiosity to grow stronger over time,” and 3) Exchange: “This is an intense form of curiosity that means being so curious that you want to exchange ideas, ask questions and offer your own opinions.” (52-53) After describing the movement from complacency to curiosity, the authors provide three ideas for provoking curiosity among non-Christian friends: 1) encourage questions, 2) use parables, and 3) live curiously. (54-58) What responses have you received from your non-Christian friends when you have encouraged questions, shared stories, or lived in curious ways? How are you living curiously? What additional suggestions for provoking curiosity would you make?

The third threshold presented in I Once was Lost involves an openness to change. At this point in their journey, the postmodern skeptic seriously considers the changes necessary to embrace life with Christ. As we all know and experience, this can be quite challenging. Everett and Schaupp state, “Out of all five thresholds, becoming genuinely open to change is often the most difficult to overcome. Change is beautiful and horrific, after all. (Even for postmodern folks who proudly wave a banner of ‘openness,’ being open to real change is a tough thing.)” (69) At this point, the call to followers of Jesus includes: patience, enduring prayer, and a reminder of the mysterious and organic frameworks of postmodern journeys toward faith. The authors reiterate, “In the end it is only God’s Spirit that is able to overcome the human hesitancy, fear of pain and spiritual enemies that are against someone at threshold three. But when God does this, when he uses our patience and our prayers and our faithfulness to bring someone to a place of being open to change, it is a wonder.” (82) Are you sharing a journey of faith development with someone who has recently crossed into this threshold? Describe your shared journey at this point.

After an openness to change takes shape, Everett and Schaupp propose that postmoderns truly become seekers. They describe the journey across this threshold in the following vignette: “Those who have recently traveled the path to faith tell us that after trusting a Christian, becoming curious about Jesus and finally being open to change in their life, they still weren’t necessarily wanting to come to conclusions. For each of them there was another shift, a fourth threshold, to come: they needed to lean into the journey they were on and decide to purposefully seek final answers, a resolution. They needed to become seekers.” (85-86) Furthermore, the authors highlight this threshold, “There’s a subtle but important difference between someone who is sort of meandering toward God and someone who is purposefully seeking out and exploring Jesus. When someone is truly seeking, there is an urgency and purpose to their searching.” (86) From there, the authors suggest three major trends among seekers: 1) Seekers seek Jesus, not just God, 2) Seekers count the costs, and 3) Seekers spend time with Christians. (87) However, once someone shifts from an openness to change to a full quest after Christ, how are we to help? Everett and Schaupp share “three tangible ways [we] could starting living the kingdom in front of a friend who may need help becoming a seeker rather than a meanderer: 1) Show them how to build their lives on Jesus’ words, 2) Open up your prayer life to them, and 3) Provide satisfying answers to their initial questions.” (89-90) The authors conclude their description of this threshold by saying, “If the Spirit of God works in the concrete circumstances of someone’s life and in the profound depths of their soul, they can cross threshold four: moving from meandering toward Jesus to seeking some final conclusions. And once someone is seeking, only God knows where it might lead.” (101) What would you challenge about this threshold? What “tangible ways [of] living the kingdom in front of a friend” would you add?

Finally, Everett and Schaupp share a strong call to their postmodern friends to enter the Kingdom of God, and this marks the final threshold in their proposal. Initially, the authors remark, “While a truly open-ended, pressure-free process is most needed around thresholds two and three, it isn’t as helpful here at threshold five. Letting people just slide casually and vaguely across the line sounds very postmodern-sensitive, but with such a laissez-faire approach we keep people from knowing there is even a line to cross. And we don’t help them move from being lost to being redeemed.” (107) Then, after building a case for such urgency in Luke 15, the authors challenge, “Our friends stuck at threshold five need a concise summary of what Jesus and his kingdom are all about. They deserve to know, in a nutshell, what Jesus calls people to and what it means to become one of his.” (111) How would you challenge this urgent approach? How are you calling people into the Kingdom of God?

I Once was Lost seems weak on involving not-yet and new followers of Jesus in mission, and promotes an event-driven, programmatic evangelistic methodology. For the sake of time and space, I have chosen to leave out in-depth critiques of these two characteristics of the book. However, as we continue prayerfully engaging and living life with non-Christians, Christ Journey participants have found the five threshold framework significant in helping start relationships, discern relationships, and invite friends into the Kingdom. Although the ideas in the book do not originate from missional contexts, the work can provide benefit to anyone seeking to rub shoulders with those who will one day proclaim: “I once was lost.”

Grandpa's Bible Belt

I was searching the folders of my computer tonight and found this vignette. I wrote it in December 2005.

"Wow. It’s cold outside. I belong near the beach somewhere, a place full of sand, umbrellas, and fried shrimp. My bronze skin can’t take this! However, instead, I find myself in the parking lot of my daughter’s school waiting to pick her up, and the last time I checked, my favorite ocean spot is 1,463.4 miles away.

I’m still getting used to the idea that I am a parent who has to go pick my child up from school. Well, big school anyway. Just last night, my daughter revealed to me that she now knows how to rhyme. Where did that come from? It seems like yesterday my wife and I were explaining the letter ‘P’ to her, and now she’s rhyming? I’m almost certain that one day she’ll want to work on multiplication tables together. Then, she’ll want to debate ‘hot topics’ with me like foreign policy, public education, and theology. But for now, I’m happy with rhyming, because I have this strange suspicion that she is going to graduate from high school, maybe even college. Also, there’s little man. Yeah, I’ve got one in school, and one that entered the world 3 months ago. Recently, he woke up and started smiling. Now, he makes beautiful, incomprehensible noises when he smiles as if he is trying to talk or at least communicate. Pretty soon, he’s going to ask for the car keys.

Every Sunday afternoon, a house church gathers in my living room. Makes sense, doesn’t it? (house church – living room) I really enjoy participating in a house church. People are real, or they’re at least learning how to be real. Too often church centers around the ABCs: attendance, buildings, and cash; however, in the context of a house church, it seems we really experience a deep journey together. People share their successes and struggles. We pray for each other, for the mission of God, and for our kids. It’s not perfect, but it’s a foreshadowing of the Kingdom to come. Maybe God wants people, not perfection.

Our house church is new, just a couple of weeks old. Newness is fun. Newness is exciting. Last week, we were talking about encountering Jesus outside of organized church. Astonishingly (or maybe not so), it was extremely difficult to do. Thinking about Jesus in terms of a personal, active, outside of the church walls kind of being was a stretch. This was a mind-bender for us. It was easy to remember Sunday School, potlucks, worship services, service projects, and summer camps. But, Jesus, in our ‘every day lives’, what do you mean? Jesus spent some of his time in synagogues, but the majority of his interactions with people (namely sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes) occurred on mountainsides, in boats, or at the dinner table. If when Jesus was on earth, people encountered him out in the world, why do we have to go to a building with a marquee, steeple, and library to find him today? Couldn’t we meet him out in the world, too? Maybe he doesn’t like McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, or pawn shops. If so, I wouldn’t blame him.

After our feeble attempts to wrap our finite minds around this spellbound brain teaser, people began to share. However, even in what we shared, there were connections to organized church. Placing that aside, stories were told of other house church encounters, fire and brimstone sermons, and personal times of prayer, Bible study, and meditation. Without too much thought, I began to tell the story of a man I met in the playground area at a local fast food restaurant.

I remember it being a Sunday night, because a group of ladies connected to our church were going out to a steakhouse or something, and the remaining Dads whose kids were too old to just go home and be put to bed were going out for processed hamburgers, slimy, imitation French fries, and Dr. Pepper flavored club soda. (You can almost taste my sarcasm, can’t you?)

There were three of us and our kids, and after finishing our illustrious banquet of a meal, one of the Dad’s split leaving me and Jason as the remaining hardcore Father of the Year candidates. Jason and I were still getting to know each other, so we small talked for a while. After noticing his club soda had run dry, he trekked into the main area of the restaurant for a refill, and I turned in my seat to watch the kids. I can’t even remember how it started, but I’m sure it had something to do with the playing kids. Anyway, the guy seated at the table next to us struck up a conversation with me.

I think we began by laughing about how funny children can be sometimes. He was a grandpa probably in his early 60s. His wife sat at the table with him staring at us from time to time out of the corner of her eye, but other than yelling at her grandson, she remained silent. I remember him wearing a green auto mechanics’ hat of some sort and a plaid flannel shirt. Without too much prodding, he began to reveal to me his Catholic upbringing, catechism classes, and pathway to what I have begun calling functional atheism. He told me that he believed in God, but he didn’t believe in the Bible, and it didn’t matter what they (religious people) told him, he didn’t believe in their book! It was just a collection of human thoughts written by humans who, I guess, pretended to know what God was thinking and saying. He continued by saying, “I don’t go to church, and I don’t have a reason to.”

Two things struck me about this man. First of all, he was a grandpa. I thought back to memories about my Grandpa. Earlier in life, Grandpa smoked, and I don’t just mean, he smoked. There’s a factory real close to where I live. It’s located right along a major freeway, and in the center of this factory are three, gigantic smoke stacks. They reach high into the sky as if to say, “Something important is going on here.” Anyway, most of the day, they spew soot, smoke, and other harmful vapors high into the sky like a huge black rainbow covering the freeway. The smoke stacks…this was my Grandpa. He would snore while he slept, and we would lovingly refer to it as World War III. You may be thinking that I’m making too much light of the situation; however, deep inside, we were all concerned for Grandpa. Grandpa had this lime green chair with a tall back that he used to sit in, smoke, and watch the news. I’ll never forget the Christmas morning my sister and I came running down the towering flight of stairs to find Grandpa’s solid green chair on its side, because Santa had bumped it over in the night. Grandpa was strong, weathered, a John Wayne type whose smile would light up the entire house.

Now, because my Grandpa lives hundreds of miles away, my wife’s Grandpa has really taken over this role for me. It struck me like waking up in a harried, disheveled state in the middle of the night. I thought one of the major problems in the church was that there were too many gray-haireds, and here was one telling me he didn’t even believe in the Bible.

This did not fit into the worldview I had formulated. What was I to do with this piercing insight? How was this to reconcile in the fortress of my mind? Secondly, what was he doing in the Bible belt? Didn’t he know that we lived in the part of the United States of America where everyone was a God-fearing Christian who never missed a church worship service, Monday night visitation, Wednesday night Bible class, Thursday night discipleship group, Friday night bridge club, or Saturday afternoon service project? He was like a Texas State Fair turkey leg in a room full of 7th grade boys. How could he speak with such confident defiance? Let me say, he was not rude. He was not condescending. He just spoke his mind with this terse yet soothing finality.

I wish I could tell you that I baptized him later that night, but to tell the truth, I have never seen him again nor would I recognize him if I saw him at Albertson’s, but I do know that he did a lot for my faith in God that night. You see, I have this problem. I haven’t ‘officially’ had a doctor diagnose it yet, but I affectionately refer to it as ‘Chris’. Sometimes, when I am really honest with myself (which rarely happens), I come face to face with my own self-guided, power-asserting, intensely selfish, applause-seeking, people-trampling idolatrous pride. Following Jesus is hard, because it means that he is number one, not me. So, here I was talking to the Grandpa who hated the Bible realizing that nothing I could say, nothing I could do, nothing I could give, and nothing I could buy would change his mind. Nothing. It was then that I remembered that I am just a ‘jar of clay’, and that I exist to show that the “all-surpassing power is from God and not from [me].” That only God revealing his love and presence to this man could bring him back.

As I drove home that night, I wondered. How many more were out there? How many more Grandpas living in the Bible Belt didn’t believe in the Bible? How many more people were out there going to work, volunteering at their kids’ schools, buying groceries, filling their cars with gas, and cutting others off in traffic who did not want anything to do with God, or at least the things and people of God they had been exposed to thus far in their lives? I felt small and insignificant. I was a dreamer who, at least for this brief moment, caught a true glimpse of what this dream’s fulfillment might mean. I gazed over the lights of the city wondering what I had gotten myself into. This must be about God, because I could never do this on my own. Of course, I would never really want to anyway."