Brain Bombs Archive

The following is an interview between Rich Nathan, senior pastor of the Vineyard Church of Columbus, OH and Dave Travis, Senior Vice-President of Leadership Network about Nathan’s new book, Who Is My Enemy?, published this spring by Zondervan.

TRAVIS: Rich Nathan is the Senior Pastor of the Vineyard Church of Columbus, Ohio. I have enjoyed getting to know Rich and his team over the last few years and even got to visit their congregation a few years ago. Though the Vineyard movement began in California, some of their largest churches are in the Midwest. Not only is their church large, but it also very aggressive in church planting.

Rich was raised in a Jewish home but came to Christ as a freshman in college. From there he was on to law school and then taught business law at Ohio State. He had a growing sense that the Lord was calling him to leave his position at Ohio State and to begin to pastor the church. The leaders of the church also felt the same. In 1987 he began his pastorate of the Vineyard. The church was about 150 in 1987 and now has a little over 6000 in attendance in 2002.

A few weeks ago I got to interview Rich about his new book.

TRAVIS: Well, tell me about your new book, Rich.

NATHAN: Well, it’s titled, "Who is my Enemy? Welcoming People the Church Rejects."

The reason that I titled it that way is that I think that the conservative church in America has mislabeled our enemy. If you are a part of the conservative church, we definitely have a set of enemies that are clearly identifiable and they would include gays, liberals, feminists, new agers, postmoderns, everyone on the cultural left. We have misidentified the enemy.

If you look at the way Jesus related in the first century, the Romans were marching through the streets of Judea, they had their pagan standards, they were involuntarily conscripting Jewish young men into their armies, were taking Jewish daughters into wealthy Roman homes to serve as servants and cooks. They were taking the best of the crops of Judea, they were taking taxes.

Jesus never said the problem of first century life is the Romans. He never said that the problem of first century life in Judea was the amoral people that are ruining our culture. What He continually said was the problem that we have as Jews in the first century is that the people of God have failed to act like the people of God. The salt has lost its saltiness.

And that’s revolutionary in terms of the way that the church relates to the world. Because we sincerely in the church believe, at least in the conservative part of the church, that the problem of the world is those immoral people out there or those folks who don’t share our political views or those folks who are ruining our schools rather than that the people of God, that is the church, are not acting like the people of God.

TRAVIS: Why did you decide to write this book?

NATHAN: The book is intended to be a bridge book. I’m not interested at all in being politically correct or in drifting with the culture or simply being an echo in the culture. I want to have a very firm anchor in scripture, but also have my arms and the arms of the church open as wide as the arms of God are to the world.

It seems like in the church world today, you’ve got one of two opposite alternatives. On the one hand, in the main line church, there is an attempt to be welcoming, but the welcome is often merely an echo of the culture. So it’s a welcome without grounding. It’s a welcome without an anchor in scripture. On the other hand, conservative churches frequently will have an anchor in scripture, but their posture and manner of relating to the world is one of rejection. And what the world picks up from the conservative church is: "We’re not welcome here. We know that people like us are not going to be welcome in your church."

TRAVIS: You’ve talked about several topical areas that you’ve felt need addressing. How do you address those in the book?

NATHAN: This books springs out of my own life and the life of our church. I open the book with an illustration of an incident that happened with my son was playing baseball when he was in high school. He was a good baseball player and one summer when he was fourteen or fifteen he played in a tri-state league. His team played an 80 game schedule and we used to drive from Ohio to Michigan to Indiana. Marlene, my wife, and I saw this as an opportunity for us to get outside of the walls of the church and be real people with a dozen or fourteen other couples, all of whom traveled to watch baseball. Every evening we’d all have dinner together, then line up our lawn chairs on the first base line. Everybody had their coolers and we talked.

There was one Christian couple that used to literally sit about fifteen feet behind the dozen or so other couples and they didn’t interact. They found out that a couple of the fathers had brought beer to the parking lot and then they discovered a rule that said that you aren’t allowed to bring alcoholic beverages within 150 feet of the ball field. Somehow they either measured it or found out that the distance was 128 feet and petitioned the league for a ruling. A ruling came down: no beer. Then they pressured the coach of the team to strongly warn the parents to not drink beer. The last portion of the season I had to listen to non-Christians, with whom I was attempting to build relationships, just curse Christianity. You know, those blankety-blank Christians, they can take their morals and shove them, that kind of thing. This was a sincere Christian couple that was attempting to live out their convictions but they did so in such an unappealing way that they slammed the door of the Kingdom in the face of those who might have been entering. I think we can do a better job.

TRAVIS: So how then, do you teach what it means to be and act like the people of God? How do you teach some of these things to your church?

NATHAN: Well, in the book I have lots and lots of practical examples. One of the major things for us in the church is that we need to learn new categories for where we place people. We tend to categorize people as either in or out. So that you’re in Christ; you are outside of Christ. You’re in the church; you’re not in the church. And that sure is a biblical way to categorize. I mean Paul uses language of being "in Christ."

But that is not the only way that the Bible categorized people. In the east, especially in Semitic countries, there is a tendency to categorize people by the orientation and the direction of their lives. In other words, where a person is facing with respect of the center of a set. And so, Jesus would frequently say that the prostitutes, the tax collectors, who are far away from the Kingdom, will enter before the Pharisees, who were near to the Kingdom. He is recategorizing things. He’s not saying, who’s in, who’s out? He’s saying that once a direction of a person’s life, these tax collectors and prostitutes, are far away, but the direction of their lives were towards the center, towards Jesus. And they were going to make it in.

On the other hand, the Pharisees, who were near to Jesus, theologically, religiously, the direction of their lives was moving away from Christ and, eventually, the trajectory of their life would take them out of the Kingdom. When you start recategorizing people, concerning the direction of their life and how they’re doing in terms of movement and motion, it radically changes the way you see people. There was a gal who came to our church who was practicing Wican. She wore all black; she was pierced up, long black hair hanging in her face. You look at someone like that and you think she is just far out. She is unreachable. One of our interns, who has heard me teach over and over on this principle of the centered set, looked at her and said, "You know, she wouldn’t be hanging around here at all except that God is at work in her life. And I believe that the trajectory of her life, even though she is far away, is in motion towards the center." And as he began to reach out to her, she more and more moved towards the center and now she is a center going Christian. So instead of looking at a gay person, a person who is a radical feminist, or a new ager and saying, well, they are out. What we want to begin to say is, do I see any evidence at all of God working in their lives drawing them towards the center?

TRAVIS: Tell us how your views have affected your church.

NATHAN: The book springs from the life of our church. The church is one of only two agencies in our city, for example, that works with people who have Aids and who are HIV positive. The other is the Aids Task Force. In our city, the Aids Task Force almost exclusively works with white, middle, upper middle class gay men. If you’re not white and you’re not middle or upper middle class, you don’t get served. If you are a minority, if you live in the inner city, if you’re a woman, if you’re a child, all those folks come our way.

We have hundreds of people that we are working with in the Aids community. We have what we call "Faithful Friends," and there are over a 100 individuals in the church who have paired up with somebody in the community that has Aids. They go to their homes; help them clean. Many of the folks are really sick so they can’t do some of the basic tasks. They cut their hair, they watch television with them, they play cards, they go shopping together, and they’re just faithful friends. In the course of that friendship, there is opportunity for spiritual discussion as well. We haven’t had one person in 15 years die of Aids without first receiving Christ. So in a number of the areas that I am talking about we have actual ministries or outreach that extends to a particular group of folk. The book expresses how to put wheels on the welcome.

TRAVIS: You had a previous book, "Empowered Evangelicals." How is that book different from your current one?

NATHAN: It’s a bridge building book as well. What I attempted to do with that book was bridge the gap between the evangelical and charismatic worlds. I took 8 or 9 dimensions of church life and tried to communicate here’s where the conservative evangelical church would come out generally regarding spiritual gifts, worship, or the way that we look at reality and here’s the way that the charismatic Pentecostal worlds would tend to view those areas. What I attempted to do was assess the plusses and minuses and forge a radical middle.

TRAVIS: How could a pastor use this new book in their ministry?

NATHAN: It’s a book that would be extremely useful for small groups. It includes lots of study questions. It’s a great discussion starter as a church is trying to wrestle through the issue of women in ministry or the issue of how are we going to relate to homosexuals in the community or the new age. There’s enough here that a person or a small group could get together, discuss it, and debate the issues. A number of small groups are already using it.

It’s also a great book to hand to somebody who has a lot of issues with the church. Especially if they are coming from a more liberal perspective and they’re just used to disagreeing with the church’s stances. It presents what we believe, I think, in a more winsome way and also veers away from a conservative, right agenda.

It would be a good book for university students as well who are continually faced with the issue of Christianity equals homophobia or Christianity is anti-woman.