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So with a message like the one on hell, I have to turn my attention radar off and trust that God will work even though I am deliberately not doing certain things to keep people engaged.

Are we looking for the right results?

Fairly early on when I worked at Willow Creek, I can remember having a conversation with Bill Hybels in which he said to me he felt like New Community (our mid-week services for believers) had been growing in ways that were a little too easy, and that we needed to thin out the crowd at New Community.

He said it was time to turn up the learning density and the call for commitment. I was surprised by this, and it was surprisingly liberating to think of actually deliberately trying to challenge people at such a high level. So we landed on a series that we thought would get the job done. Ironically, more people came by the end of the series than at the start.

So I decided to really up the challenge level. We developed a plan that would take an entire year to walk New Community through the entire Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi.

This time I succeeded in thinning out the crowds. Alarmingly so.

Do we shy away from sacrifice?

We deal with a call to ultimate things, a call to die to self in a way that leads to life, and a call to joy that willingly plunges into sacrifice and suffering.

Eric Metaxas's riveting biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is especially challenging in this regard. I found myself wondering, as I read through it—are our churches today producing people like Bonhoeffer? Am I becoming such a person? Am I being co-opted by the temptations of survival and success rather than sacrifice?

Bonhoeffer himself said that what was missing from the church in Nazi Germany was "the day to day reality of dying to self, of following Christ with every ounce of being in every moment, in every part of one's life."

He found that the groups which stressed a call to devotion and commitment tended to be fundamentalist/pietist groups that had pushed away from the best of education and culture in ways that left them in little ghetto-ized sectarian enclaves. But the mainline state church had been co-opted by a larger cultural captivity.

"The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the Sermon on the Mount. I believe the time has come to gather people together to do this."

He devoted his life, then eventually sacrificed it, to help the church be the church. Do we ever lead people to a similar sacrifice?

Can we see without special effects?

Clearly in the Bible spiritual leaders found ways to get people to pay attention. The prophets would use props such as plumb lines and cisterns. They would set a record for most days spent lying on one side. They would bury and dig up undergarments. They would marry women with shady reputations. Their lives often looked like something between performance art and reality TV.