I will winnow them with a winnowing fork at the city gates of the land. I will bring bereavement and destruction on my people, for they have not changed their ways. — Jeremiah 15:7 (NIV)

His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire. — Matthew 3:12 (NIV)

When God talks about winnowing through his prophets Jeremiah and John, he is talking about a harsh and devastating process that, when the dust settles, reveals the grain of the true crop.

The point of a harvest is to get grain. The point of winnowing is to get grain. But because God obviously works with people and not plants, we might ask, “What kind of grain is God after?” I think that the Bible makes it plain: people who, placing their hope and belief in Jesus, receive the Holy Spirit and are empowered to love God and one another.

I’ve run across a couple of articles recently that I can only understand by looking through them using the lens of a harsh winnowing. They are from the mainstream media, and they are about the church. (I take it as a given that when the mainstream media looks at the church, they do not understand it. Probably because *I* do not really understand it, and I’m in it! But many things don’t take spiritual insight to see, they just take a pair of eyes…)

First, from the BBC, an article about how pastors in the Dutch church have stopped believing in God.

[Rev. Klass Hendrikse's] book Believing in a Non-Existent God led to calls from more traditionalist Christians for him to be removed. However, a special church meeting decided his views were too widely shared among church thinkers for him to be singled out. [emphasis mine]

It’s an article well worth reading, although it is heartbreaking… Just reading some of the quotes from various people makes me shiver.

“God is not a being at all… it’s a word for experience, or human experience.”
…
“The Church has to be alert to what is going on in society,” he says. “It has to change to stay Christian. You can’t preach heaven in the same way today as you did 2,000 years ago, and we have to think again what it is. We can use the same words and say something totally different.” [emphasis mine]
When I asked Rikko whether he believed Jesus was the son of God he looked uncomfortable.
“That’s a very tough question. I’m not sure what it means,” he says.
…
They believe that only through adaptation can their religion survive.
The young people at Stroom West write on plates the names of those things that prevent earth from being heaven – cancer, war, hunger – and destroy them symbolically.
The new Christianity is already developing its own ritual.

We have to ask the question, “What is the grain?” If the grain is destroying cancer, war and hunger, a zombie church can continue to limp along. If it is human validation and support, a zombie church can limp along. If the grain is caring and loving, a zombie church can limp along (even though it has no real power or ability behind it).

But if the grain is belief, then there can’t even be any limping here, because the question, “Is Jesus the Son of God?” is not a difficult question to understand.

There is an aspect to this story that the BBC doesn’t cover though, and that is winnowing. What will happen to such a church? Will it flourish or will it dwindle? If the North American church is any indication, such a church is going to dwindle down to just a few orthodox believers, because if you try and take God out of the church, there’s not much left to stick around for.

We’ve tried “just being nice” to each other (for many generations). The problem is that it doesn’t work.

There is a pain to winnowing. The BBC can’t talk about the pain of winnowing, because although this is a terribly painful winnowing, the pain comes from an unfilled longing for God. The pain comes from everyone who walks into a church looking for some kind of comfort from God and who is turned away by a pastor who only offers a human experience.

This will be a slow winnowing because it will take a while for all those who come for human experience to realize that they can get a more enjoyable human experience (without all the religiosity) down at the pub. For those who came from the pub after finding it empty, well… I can only hope God leads them to a believing church. Eventually those left in the church will be those who believe.

The second article is from the CBC. It talks about pastors in the US who have lost their faith. Particularly, it talks about how they are trapped – because their culture, their family and their community are all bound to the religion. They feel they can’t confess their lack of faith, because they feel they would devastate their families and congregations.

It’s interesting that they can’t trust their congregations to respond in a loving and caring fashion. It’s interesting that they don’t believe a congregation has the certainty and strength of faith to handle a pastor’s disbelief graciously. By embracing an overwhelming “Christian” culture, the church has cut itself off from the ability to gently and kindly replace a pastor who doesn’t believe. (Wouldn’t it be nice if we could manage to not ostracize someone who is struggling in faith?)

Do we really just believe because our pastors do? If our faith is only based on whether or not someone else believes, that’s pretty fragile (and essentially unchristian).

But I thought it interesting that in one case, adherence to a secular culture is winnowing the church, and in another, adherence to a “Christian” culture is producing another winnowing. In either case, having pastors who don’t believe makes for a pretty scant harvest.