mightychurch.com

Matt Chandler, who visited Sydney this year to speak at Rice, has been operated for a brain tumor which has proved malignant.  http://fm.thevillagechurch.net/blog/pastors/
Very sad.  I’ve listened to some of his podcasts.  They’re great.

Terrible stuff.  Praying he’ll get well soon.

Forgive my ignorance, but who is Matt Chandler? (Anyway, regardless, let’s hope and pray that he makes it…)

Pastor of an evangelical megachurch in the US.  Spoke at KCC Engage 2009 this year and a few other things in his Australian tour.

The tumor was about 1” by 2” in his right frontal lobe.
Not encapsulated, so the surgeon couldn’t get all of it.
I think this sounds bad, bad, bad.
 
He’s 35 with 3 young kids.

Yeah that’s even younger than our young pastor (of 38 years).

Which makes it even more shocking.

Suffering well: Faith tested by pastor’s cancer - Associated Press
 
Excerpts:

Chandler is trying to suffer well. He would never ask for such a trial, but in some ways he welcomes this cancer. He says he feels grateful that God has counted him worthy to endure it. He has always preached that God will bring both joy and suffering but is only recently learning to experience the latter.

Since all this began on Thanksgiving morning, Chandler says he has asked “why me?” just once, in a moment of weakness.

He is praying that God will heal him. He wants to grow old, to walk his two daughters down the aisle and see his son become a better athlete than he ever was.

Whatever happens, he says, is God’s will, and God has his reasons. For Chandler, that does not mean waiting for his fate. It means fighting for his life.

One of Chandler’s sayings is, “It’s OK to not be OK — just don’t stay there.” In other words, your doubts and questions are welcome at The Village Church, but eventually you need to pull it together.

He’s also been known to begin sermons with the warning, “I’m going to yell at you from the Bible.”

Chandler’s long, meaty messages untangle large chunks of Scripture, a stark contrast to the “Eight Ways to Overcome Fear” sermons common to evangelical megachurches that took off in the 1980s. His approach appeals, he believes, to a generation looking for transcendence and power.

His theology teaches that all men are wicked, that human beings have offended a loving and sovereign God, and that God saves through Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection — not because people do good deeds. In short, Chandler is a Calvinist, holding to a belief system growing more popular with young evangelicals.

“Matt goes right at Bible Belt Christianity and exposes the problems with it,” says Collin Hansen, author of “Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists.” “He says, ‘Enough of this playing around and trying to be relevant and using cultural touch points. Let’s talk God’s words.’”

But Barnett delivers very different news. He saw what appeared to be a primary brain tumor — meaning a tumor that had formed in the brain — that was not contained. It had branches.

Tuesday after surgery. Barnett meets with Lauren and Brian Miller, chairman of the church’s elder board. The final pathology results are not in, but Barnett shares what he knows — the tumor was malignant, fast-growing and mean.

Though he removed what he could see, such tumors send tiny fingers of cells beyond their borders — and eventually a branch will reach back and grow another brain tumor, Barnett says.

Barnett asks Lauren and Miller to keep the diagnosis to themselves for a week so Matt can concentrate fully on recovering from surgery.

On Dec. 15, Barnett shares the pathology results with the Chandlers. Tumors are designated by grade — with Grade 1 being the least aggressive and Grade 4 being the most.

Chandler’s tumor is a Grade 3.

The average life expectancy in such cases, Barnett says, is approximately two to three years. The doctor says later, in an interview, he believes Chandler will live longer because of the aggressive surgery, treatment and Chandler’s otherwise good health.

Argh I find the current Christian response to this (brutal) kind of thing—‘suffering well’ and all that—nauseating if not downright perverse. Where’s the humility in all this? I mean, I’m so special because God gave me terminal brain cancer… huh? Will his daughters be similarly ‘grateful’ when he’s gone?

It’s really quite depressing that we treat suffering with trite cliches; I would really expect a much less shallow and much more humble response.

A few random points:
- Dying isn’t necessarily suffering… yet. It’s easy to be optimistic while your ‘suffering’ is still a largely an abstract thing. I’m not saying his situation isn’t incredibly grave—it is—but talk is cheap until you’re really getting your arse kicked.
- If you’re ‘counted worthy to endure’ suffering, then by the same logic the people of Haiti must be extra worthy, as must be the parents who lose children/children who lose parents to cancer and have to live with the consequences. Give me a break.
- Cancer (or any other terminal illness) isn’t just about you! Dying is the easy part—living with the consequences in the years and decades to come, as his wife and kids will have to, is the hard part.
- Sin is sin, why do we have to pretend that it’s really “a good thing”? Isn’t that utterly perverse? The world is fallen and the effects are dire, why don’t we show some humility in the face of this, instead of trying to turn it into a marketing opportunity?

I say this as someone who lost his dad to cancer at 13 (and has spent the last 7 years with chronic pain). The rhetoric may be good at distracting us from the ugly reality of what’s at hand (and perhaps has value in that regard), but ultimately we can only distract ourselves for so long, and eventually reality will come crashing through.

Luke, who are you having a go at, Chandler or the ‘current Christian response’ (in this case, I suppose the reporter’s angle)? 
 
If at Chandler, I think you’re being a bit unfair. It probably hasn’t really sunk in for him yet.  And he’s having to deal with all of this publicly (well, he’s chosen to).  As the article said, he’s always preached God will bring both joy and suffering - in the face of a dominant prosperity gospel.  So to have integrity, to back up his words, he has to deal with this well.  Moreover his theological viewpoint emphasises the sovereignty of God, including in the details of life.
   
Humility? - I think most of these mega-church pastors have pretty big egos to start with.  But he is concerned that his children don’t become embittered.  And he has also sought to deflect attention from himself to others who are suffering, particularly from cancer.
 
I don’t think you can just draw a line straight from this situation to Haiti.
 
Yes, the world is fallen and the effects are dire.  Chandler and his pastoral staff actually do seem to have a handle on this - it doesn’t come out in this article though.  I don’t see any pretending this is a good thing, just hope that God can bring good out of suffering and evil.
   
As for the current Christian response being trite and cliche, well perhaps it is.  We all see too much virtual suffering (TV etc.) and are majorly insulated from real suffering unless directly affected.  That sounded trite and cliche, didn’t it?  Darn.

Hi Ros, yeah you could be right, I just don’t like the “suffer well” angle. It could well be that they are dealing with it more sensitively/realistically internally, while putting on a bit more of a brave face publicly (hence the AP story), but still. Blog posts like this: Acts 29 Pastor Suffers Well with Cancer don’t fill me with much hope.

I guess I’m just surprised how shallowly the issue is dealt with, I mean it’s hardly a new phenomenon—it’s as old as we are, it happens everywhere in every community, and churches are where people are hatched, matched and dispatched, as they say… yet we don’t seem to have a particularly meaningful response, I guess it’s one part a deep-seated fear of confronting our own mortality, and one part hyper-Calvinism that says ‘everything happens for a reason and God’s doing good in every situation’ that prevents us dealing with it on a deeper level.

I don’t know, maybe if people were talking about him ‘dying well’ and dropping the pretense of ‘suffering’ then I could respect that, but I guess that might be a bit much to ask!