Victim, Vanished or Visionary? What an amazing way to classify your parishioners. They are visionaries, or they are just hanging around using up resources. Nice.
Here we have an example of a leader bullying those that are hurting or needy. To accomplish this, life situations of those that are hurting are greatly oversimplified. This is necessary so that the trite advice given later will apply to any and all situations.
The Victim is a disciple who hasn’t recovered from past wounds and hurts.
The Vanished are disciples who’ve allowed their faith to become dull and flat and therefore have vanished from making any impact in the church.
The Visionary is the disciple who is eager to exercise his faith, to be a part of something bigger than himself and to be useful to the Lord.
From the linked article
Message to the victims – GET OVER YOURSELVES. You’ve used up the allotted time for grieving, so apparently you are not active in dealing with your pain. GET GOING!
Message to the vanished – YOU DON’T IMPRESS ME OR JESUS. Get to work!
From the article, some characterizations of the victims and vanished:
Too often, the victim or the vanished individuals look at their lives and conclude they have nothing to give to the Lord or His church. Too often, the victim and the vanished excuse themselves by letting their hearts get triggered by old terminology or unpleasant memories.
Sometimes we need to take a hard look at ourselves and draw the conclusion that we could use a spiritual makeover. Yet victims and the vanished largely refuse to travel on this thrilling road. The victims are adamant that they’re not the ones who need changing, and the vanished frankly don’t want to put the necessary energy into the process.
From the linked article
In other words, victims are blame-shifters and the vanished are lazy. There is no room for disagreement as that means, by definition, that you are playing the victim. The remedy? Stop being defeatist and get going. There is no room for people that are not doing ‘awesome’ things for the Chicago church. If you’re not awesome, you must be lazy. Anyone without a resume of recent accomplishments needs one sure fire cure – a rebuke to get to work.
This article and the ones from the previous post spring from two glaring omissions in recent years. One is making any change at all in how we view discipleship. The other is how we misconstrue the ekklesia, commonly referred to as the church.
Jeff Jornigan wrote in an older article about misconceptions of discipleship
Misunderstanding #1: Spiritual accountability can be imposed.
Misunderstanding #2: Accountability means that someone leads and someone follows.
Misunderstanding #3: Accountability focuses on performance.
The conclusion of the matter, to quote the article:
Our accountability relationships are to encourage one another and to have a ransoming effect by “buying back” lost intimacy with Christ. Then we are free to pursue righteousness, wooed by love and not hounded by duty.
Also, discipleship on a timeline just doesn’t work. I hope to read this book, soon. From the sample chapter:
So, if your agenda has time tables on it, throw it away…. I have found that it can often take a decade for a person to decide to follow Christ, to manage to overcome the major problems in his or her life, and then, finally, to begin to bear fruit in the lives of the people around him or her. “Oaks of righteousness” do not grow up overnight.
As for ekklesia, there’s not enough space to address that. Look up the word in Vine’s. It means “the called out ones”. It has been translated “church”. Substitute ‘called out ones’ for the word church and you’ll see what I’m getting at.
More later, gotta run.