Minding the Excluded Middle

In 1982, long-time missionary and missiologist Paul Hiebert published an important article he titled "The Flaw of the Excluded Middle." He was addressing an issue that many missionaries face when they have grown up in a Western culture that is deeply skeptical of anything supernatural, yet are suddenly trying to work in a culture that believes nearly everything is tied to the supernatural.

For example, when Hiebert was a missionary in India, there was an outbreak of smallpox in his village. Western doctors nearby had unsuccessfully tried to stop the spread and so many of the villagers turned to a diviner who claimed they would need to sacrifice a water buffalo to the goddess of smallpox named Museum in order to appease her anger with the village. The elders of the village went around collecting money from every household to purchase the buffalo, and were highly offended when the Christians refused to give them anything because it went against their religious beliefs. Because of this, Christians were excluded from drawing water in the village wells or purchasing food from merchants. Things came to a head for Hiebert when a young Christian girl contracted smallpox. A church elder named Yellayya came to the school where Hiebert was teaching to ask him to pray for God to heal the girl from smallpox. In Hiebert's words:

"My mind was in turmoil. I had learned to pray as a child, studied prayer in seminary, and preached it as a pastor. But now I was to pray for a sick child as all the village watched to see if the Christian God was able to heal." 

Hiebert points out, correctly I think, that sometimes we have created an unhelpful divide between heavenly matters and earthly matters. There are all the great doctrines and theologies about the nature of God, angels, demons, Heaven and Hell. 'Separate and apart' from these are the things we deal with every week that we consider 'this-worldly' things, such as our vocations, visits to the doctor's office, the sources and types of foods that we eat, and the relationships we have with our family and friends. In between these things is an area that we do not address enough of the time. How do Heaven and Earth actually interact with one another?

To the spiritualist who sees angels, demons, and miracles hiding under every rock, the secularist offers a valid corrective, that empirical data matters and we have a role in contributing to the path of our lives. To the secular materialist, who wants to claim that we came from nothing, will return to nothing, and our lives mean nothing, the spiritualist offers a valid corrective, that there is much about the world which matters deeply, yet evades our ability to measure, categorize, or explain it.

Fortunately, as Hiebert points out, Scripture offers us a third path which refuses to devalue either the spiritual realm or the world in which we live. God's call to us for salvation has eternal spiritual implications, but is also deeply rooted expectations for the way we love and treat everyone around us, from the President to the 'least of these'.

It is here in the middle that we find important questions addressed. It gives us a healthy place for reflection about things such as the meaning of life and death for those of us still alive, the way we think about blessings, illnesses, successes, and failures, and the way we navigate life in this world through our own uncharted waters. Even if we're going to Heaven when we die, what is our purpose for being here until then? What is the significance of how we use our time and energy in the lives of people around us? How exactly do we involve God in our lives, and what actually happens when we pray?

Scripture affirms both the spiritual and the physical, and I am convinced that the more our churches learn to live and teach into this middle area which connects them, the more people will find our faith relevant and useful in the world they actually inhabit.

Making Space

If I could summarize meaningful leadership in one phrase, I would call it "making space." This begins with God. God imagined the living things he would create, and he made a space that we could occupy to fulfill the purposes for which we were made. To some degree, every time we empower another person to become more than what they are, we have created a space that they can inhabit in a new way. I think Ephesians 2:10 expresses this idea well:

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. 

We have the blessing of participating in God's work, but it took God as our leader to create the opportunities for the good works we are able to do. It has something to do with our own initiative, but it has every bit as much to do with God knowing our potential and taking the initiative to give us the space to grow.

In every relationship, there are power dynamics involved. Generally, whether for reasons of age, experience, title, or seniority, in most interactions and scenarios there is a person who has more power and a person or people with less power. Whether they realize it or not, those with power are gatekeepers for how everyone else is able to function and to experience the possibility of growth. I want to invite you to think about the areas in your life where you might possess some type of control, and how people are being affected by your use of power.

What about the person with a great talent who is too shy and uncertain to ask for the opportunity to use it? How about the person who won't be noticed because of their ethnicity or economic status, for whom your influence might could open a door? Who do you know that feels bound by past mistakes and would be deeply blessed if someone were to offer them the chance to be thought of as a valuable person, and not just a "guilty" person? What would it take to create enough space for a second chance for them? What difference could a little of your assistance make? Many of us would not be where we are had there not been someone willing to take a chance on us and give us some space to grow. "Come and help me. Let me show you how."

This is equally true of groups. Need stronger relationships among your people? Create and schedule a space where friendships can develop. Wish that people showed more initiative? Ask them and learn from them what you could do to help remove barriers that are deterring them. Want to move in a new direction? Let your people help you to imagine the world you are all wishing to inhabit together.

People who don't feel powerful will seldom succeed in seizing opportunities for themselves, and might not get up the nerve to try. When you think about people who are a few years behind you, with a little less experience than you and fewer connections than you, I wonder in whom you might could invest a little of yourself so that they have the space to become something more? You--yes, even you--might be intimidating to the person who needs you the most, and doesn't know how to ask for your help. We should be grateful that God sought us out to bless us, even before we knew we needed him. Perhaps we can do the same for others.

You Can Do Anything, But Not Everything

You can do anything you want if you just put your mind to it. Have you heard that before? Maybe your parents or a favorite teacher said that to you when you were growing up. It is a huge blessing to know people love and believe in you. It is an awesome experience to work hard for something and to have success and achievement. But I wonder if sometimes we've taken the belief that we're capable of doing anything and have mistaken it to mean that in our life we'll actually be able to accomplish everything that catches our interest.

I don't know about you, but I'm a recovering workaholic. Some of the most important people in my life are the ones who have urged me to quit biting off more than I can chew, to put on the brakes, to do fewer things, and to do them well. I have a hard time stopping the cycle where I take on a new task, convinced that with enough time I can master it or make it better, and then before I'm done with it, I've already picked up another. And then another. If I'm not careful, I'll end up with a pile of good intentions, but little accomplished that feels satisfying. 

In a timeless universe where our bodies would never wear down, we could learn to play every instrument, speak every language, build every structure, read every book, win every award, and accomplish everything we intend to do. But that isn't the universe where we live. We live under the restraints of time and of energy which get soaked up with the many thorns, thistles, and unexpected obstructions we encounter.

I'm reminded of the classic song lyrics from Jim Croce: "There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you find them."

We can do some things very well, but the truth is that all of us will have things we look at and say, "If only I had more time, I could have done more, and I could have done better." Knowing that we are going to have to leave some things undone should make us deliberate about what things we commit ourselves to doing. Jesus said in Matthew 16:24a-25:

"If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

It isn't just the image of suffering for Jesus--picking up the cross--that's important here. It's also the idea that there will be parts of my life that I have to let go, because otherwise I won't give God the space in my life that God deserves. To deny yourself means giving up something. To lose something means you won't have it. On the face of these ideas, that sounds unpleasant. We really will have to say 'no' to some things in order to say 'yes' to God.

But at the other end of this promise is something more hopeful. Jesus assures us that when we willingly deny ourselves and lose something because of our dedication to him, by some wonderful mystery, it is for this very reason that we'll end up finding it again. "Great is your reward in Heaven," he says. Our losses, whatever they are, will be temporary, and God's generous blessings to us will one day overwhelm any sense of lacking we might have had before. Don't let the many things that interest you distract you from the one thing that matters most.