5 Principles

11/29/2025

11/28/2025

Addicted to Anonymity

I wonder if we in the American culture have become addicted to anonymity?

Dictionary.com defines addiction like this: the state of being enslaved to a practice or habit or something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.

When I think about the community prescribed in God’s Word, particularly in the New Testament church, I see plenty of problems for our contemporary culture. We have become a people insistent upon our anonymity. We value self-sufficiency and independence almost above all things. We write books about “self-improvement” and “self-made men”. We idolize individual achievement and we dream about financial independence, and we describe all of this as “the American dream”. We live in gated communities to keep out the undesirable community. And we see anyone asking for help as weak and sad. We have created an entire body of law around the “right to privacy” and we guard our privacy as if it is our most prized possession. There is no question but that we have, in many ways, worked exactly contrary to the type of interdependence described in the Bible.

But none of that necessarily gets us to “addiction”. The question is, are we “enslaved” to this need for independence? Is it psychologically habit-forming? If we lost it, would we be traumatized? These are troublesome questions for me. These are the questions I ask myself as I travel around the country from one church to the next talking about Biblical relationships and New Testament community. I have to say it…that kind of community is not easy to find, even in the church…maybe especially in the church.

I believe our culture’s obsession with privacy and independence and anonymity have approached the “addiction” level. I believe this because we kick and scream anytime we lose those things. Like an addiction, we actually know that we should be living in community and that we need other people in our lives, but through our actions we choose otherwise. We choose anonymity, even when we know we should not. It feels like an addiction to me. So what about the church?

In the church, we have become so consumer-oriented that we are afraid to create an environment which might actually offend someone’s desire to remain anonymous. We have done all our marketing homework and we know well what people want and what they do not want. We aim to give them what they want, because we want to be a “user-friendly” church. We create huge crowds so that a visitor can come in and, essentially, remain anonymous without being “bothered” by anyone. What’s worse, we give our own members plenty of leeway to exercise their own desire for independence and privacy and anonymity. We actually make it possible for people to be “members” without any investment in community or personal accountability at all. In a sense, we have become “enablers” of our society’s addiction.

There is much to explore on this issue. But for today, I just want to ask the questions…have we become addicted to anonymity? And how can the church offer recovery from this addiction?

Coffee

11/28/2025

The Day of the Lord
2 Peter 3:10-18

11/27/2025

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11/24/2025

Theology as God

“Theology is the science of religion, an intellectual attempt to systematize the consciousness of God. If we take the doctrine of the Trinity (which is a noble attempt of the mind of man to put into a theological formula the Godhead as revealed in the Bible) and say – ‘That is God,’ every other attempt as a statement of the Godhead is met by a sledgehammer blow of finality. My theology has taken the place of God and I have to say, ‘That is blasphemy.’ Theology is second, not first; in its place it is a handmaid of religion, but it becomes a tyrant if put in first place. The great doctrines of predestination and election are secondary matters; they are attempts at definition, but if we take sides with the theological method we will damn those who differ from us without a minute’s hesitation. Is there any form of belief which has taken the place of God with me?” Oswald Chambers

My sister married a Lutheran. Of course, by the time of the wedding, Chad (my brother-in-law) had pretty much convinced most of us that he was OK and that he was not a pagan or anything. But still, my sister was getting married in a Lutheran church. It was not a huge thing, but for my very Baptist family, it was also not a completely small thing. I think it mattered a little to some in the family.

That was a long time ago, but even by then I was already being shaped into a peacemaker…and this peacemaker was a little worried about how my very Baptist and sometimes loud and argumentative family might behave in that Lutheran church. Oh, I’m not saying I stayed up at night worrying about it. I’m just saying…I wondered.

So it was no huge surprise when, within the first 15 minutes of the rehearsal, one of my family members sitting out in the pews leaned over to another one and said (pretty loudly), “Hey look! They’ve still got Jesus up on the cross in this church!” I tried to become completely invisible…don’t know whether it worked or not…the invisibility thing, I mean. But, in the end, I did get an awesome brother-in-law out of the whole ordeal.

The point of this story is that I believe our intellectual constructs of God (i.e., our “theology”) actually sometimes get in the way of our Spiritual growth, and certainly get in the way of Christian unity. We tend to cling to the metaphors about God with which we are familiar, the illustrations and the symbols and the sound bites with which we’ve grown up as a Christian. So, when confronted by another Christian with something a little different than our own construct, it immediately creates enmity between us and that other Christian. When your metaphors are not the same as my metaphors, we have a problem, and we must be careful how we measure that problem.

I think the real danger here is that our beliefs about God sometimes become more important to us than God Himself. Call it the “deification of theology” if you want. I choose to call it idolatry…the replacing of God with some intellectual model with which we are more comfortable…or which we can better comprehend.
Really, I cannot say it nearly as well as Oswald Chambers said it above. So, I will stop trying. But I love his question: “Is there any form of belief which has taken the place of God with me?” Ouch.

Coffee