A Gospel of failure?

Dan Edelen at the Cerulean Sanctum posted this article and there are a lot of good points in it. I'll hit some highlights, but really you should read it all.

I've been in Christian circles all my life, so I've witnessed the
myriad ways we respond to God and to other Christians. I've seen that
thrill of experiencing God's will.

But I've also seen what happens when His will appears to us to go
“awry.” I've seen how we Christians respond to failure, and I've
concluded that more than just about anything, we need a Gospel that
speaks to failure.

You won't hear much about failure in the American Church. In
Evangelicalism in particular, failure gets held at arm's length, as if
people who fail do so because they've acquired a disease. We've
made failure into some kind of plague. “Don't come too close! I might
catch your failure and it will ruin my perfect little world!”

This is especially true inside of some more modern circles. I remember when I was about 15 or 16, a Christian musician named Michael English was discovered to have had an affair with another musician. The day after winning several Dove awards, he gave them all back because he said he couldn't accept them with a clear conscience. What did the Christian community do? Pulled all his albums from the shelves and shunned him completely. Why? Couldn't we accept that he was just as human as the rest of us? The only difference was that his was on a much more public, much larger scale. Sin is still sin, no matter how big we perceive it to be. Failure is still failure

When blessings come, they come solely by grace. We don't truly merit
blessings. God offers them to us out of the grace and riches of His
heart. Or so we say. But what happens to our view of God's sovereignty
when failure strikes? What becomes of His grace when someone's life
winds up in the toilet?

What a great point! We give God all the glory when something goes right, but we view it as personal failure when something goes wrong. I've been attempting to start a business for several years, but every time I think I'm getting close it falls apart. I've finally come to the conclusion that I'm not going to have a business right now, but just focus on family, work, church, and school and let whatever happens happen. Does God want me to do this? I'm relatively certain He's been sending signals for years, but I haven't been listening.

Two more quick points on this.

Yes, some failure clearly stems from sin and a lack of faith. We all
understand this. Our problem becomes one of ALWAYS applying that
standard to every case of failure we encounter. Case in point: what was
Job's sin?

A veritable gold mine here. I'm not sure what else I can add to it.

Notice that many of my failure examples so far in this post have
dealt with money. In America, success equates to money. Sadly, the
American Church has bought this lie. As a result, our standard for
spiritual success and maturity automatically means passing the wealth
test.

Too accusatory? Well, consider this. Your church is looking for new
elders. Which of these two 40-year old men has a better chance of
becoming an elder, the self-made man who runs his own company OR the
fellow who works the night shift as a convenience store clerk? In the
split second (Blink!) you thought about that pair, did class
distinction enter into your assessment? Has anything been said about
the spiritual maturity of those men? Don't we assume that one is more
spiritually mature simply because he runs a successful business, while
the other only makes $8/hr.?

I think Dan makes a direct hit on this as well. We are so tied up in money and we equate success and having it together to money. We don't dig into the spiritual side of life for success. That guy who makes $8/hr at the convenience store may be running a street mission during his off hours. The guy running the successful business may not have enough hours left in the day to even pray or read. Yet in the church we see the person who has Earthly success and comes to church as the one who is more spiritually mature. It's a crazy idea, but it's true.

So where do we go from here? We live Job's example and discover that God is in the blessings, but He's in the failures too. God had to allow Satan to take away everything that Job valued. Satan couldn't do it without God's permission. Maybe that happens more often than we think? Do we pass the test?