Plastic Surgery and the Church

I was thinking of the church the way I see it and the way it was when I got saved as a child. I think it is not inaccurate if I said that the present church has almost no similarities to the church less than a generation ago. Things that were anathema then are fashion trends today. I want us to examine the progression to the transformation we see.

Let me highlight a few changes. Less than twenty short years ago, only drug addicts and Rastafarians (who were almost synonymous) wore dreadlocks. Today we can see pastors and all sorts of ministers sporting them. I remember that the same case was with the shades, especially dark ones. It was said that drug abusers wore them to hide their blood-shot eyes from the public.

A Christian applying make-up was nowhere. But today you will see a minister from a paint factory proudly showing off her different coats of makeup, many times instead of preaching. In fact there are Christian ministries dedicated to the same to make our girls learn how to look (be painted) good. Most churches will call an expert to run such a program for their ladies. In it they will be taught everything from undercoats to pencils. I have never heard any training on ladies to be godly women, committed to their families and submitted to their husbands as the scriptures ordain.

Twenty years ago it was inappropriate to hold hands with a person of the opposite sex in public even when you were planning to get married. Now it appears as if the only thing a Christian can’t do in church openly is having sex. I remember a pastor friend challenging the youth when hugging started twenty plus years ago. He told them (us) that if you must hug something, then hug a tree (instead of someone of the opposite sex).

A few short years ago the terms my dear, sweetheart, darling etc were terms strictly meant for people in love and in romantic surroundings and where there was no other company. Today everybody seems to be a darling of everybody else, even total strangers. Makes one wonder whether it is English that has changed!

No self respecting woman or girl let anyone see her chest, leave alone the cleavage. The only time you saw a breast was when a mother was suckling. Today, however, it appears as if the breasts have replaced or are an extension of the face even in church. The calf was the closest one got to a woman’s private parts. Now it appears as if one is walking in sin if a piece of the thigh cannot be seen.

The only place women held leadership positions were in the women’s fellowship and probably the Sunday school. Now they run churches, holding virtually all positions in some churches. Even churches that held the Bible as supreme in that respect have had to bend their theology to give women any position they want as they are a substantial constituency (as if the church is a political party).

As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths. (Isaiah 3:12)

Deception is when we think this is a sign of progress whereas God is talking of it as judgment. What we are thinking as being accommodating God is calling compromise or even worse, rebellion.

What happened? How did it happen?

When I did engines in school, it was a rule that when overhauling an engine you must be the one to put it together again. This was because with the so many parts which are identical, yet slightly different due to their individual wear, you were the one who knew how you arranged them and so would be best placed to return each part where you took it from. You can’t change engine parts at will because different manufacturers make their parts differently. That is how many view the church, so standardized that no change can be applied to the structure. Incidentally I wish that would be the church because it would be impossible to change what the manufacturer (God, the creator) intended.

But the church is a body, a living, growing organism. It appears as if it is more difficult to introduce corruption there than in a purely solid mechanism, until we think of cosmetology, the science of manipulating living organisms so that you can change their appearance or function. I am speaking here as a layman as I did not even study Biology in school.

Plastic surgery was initially used for restorative purposes. For example someone receives severe burns that skin in places cannot grow back normally due to the severity of the burns. The doctor would cut a piece of skin from a healthy part of the body and engraft it to the burnt place. The same thing was done when a person was in an accident at which he lost a part of their body.

But we have gone farther. We have taken plastic surgery to greater heights and created other purposes for the same. Today plastic surgery is associated more with modifying the way our body looks like than restoration. That is why we are seeing people adding their behinds to become more appealing, increasing or decreasing the size of one’s breasts and lips and even removing aging evidence on our faces. Thus it is now possible to look 25 when you are fifty or more.

Many of us know of this musician who hated being negroid to the extent that he literally changed the way he looked. It was impossible to connect his pictures when he was a boy to his later appearances. I can’t vouch for the truth of stories that his nose, which had literally been replaced with a more ‘acceptable’ one, had a habit of falling off once in a while.

I also remember reading this recent story of a man who accused his wife and was awarded damages because what he married is not what he got. Incidentally the wife had gone to another country to change her appearance because she ‘realized’ that she was not attractive enough. She was then able to meet this man who married her. But her plastic surgery did not go to her genes. When she got a child, the man saw that it couldn’t have been the product of them both but DNA results showed otherwise. That was when he realized that his wife had altered the way she looked and sued her for deception and false pretenses. It is interesting that they have put the two photos of the same woman and it is so stark that it is easy to feel for this man.

Is this what has happened to the church? How has it been possible?

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12:1, 2)

I suggest that cosmetology has entered in the mind of the church. We have started to be excited by what the world thinks about us more than God has revealed to us. When we think that relevance to the world is of more worth than what God says we will of necessity start modeling ourselves to be more attractive to the world. When we look to the world and its systems with admiration instead of pity for what it needs, we simply abort the purpose of our being.

The reason a person undergoes plastic surgery is that they are not content with what they look like because they think the world looks down on them. They will therefore start altering what they think will improve their attractiveness. That is why a girl will starve herself to be able to be slim like a model because she thinks a model is admired by all without realizing that models are many times exploited to their bones.

As I write I remember one time ministering in a high school. A very pretty girl came and greeted me in a very familiar way. I was shocked because I had never seen her. Until she told me who she was! She was from my village and in fact we had more or less grown up together. But she was changed! She was originally a very beautiful black. What had happened is that she had bleached her face to look very light. To me she was more beautiful when she was black. But somehow she was deceived or deceived herself into thinking that being black decreased her beauty. I don’t know what happened to her later as our paths have never crossed since but I would imagine something similar to the girl who was sued by her husband after she got children.

Psalm 73 also tells of someone who had the same struggle the church is going through as he looked at the wicked in the eyes of the world. He became very frustrated and was inches from backsliding, until he got God’s view of things. Then He is able to really see people in the light of a God who has a complete hold of things. He sees that he, instead of needing the worldlings, is supposed to minister to them by opening their eyes to the reality of God’s word.

What is success? Your definition will define whether you are a plasticized model of the original you. This is because the world has its own definition of success while God has His. When God created man, He sought to give man His kind of success. Man’s fall brought another standard, a lower standard. The problem is that this standard, though clearly lower and temporal, is visible as it has a habit of parading itself.

Where does the world market itself? Of course the most visible is the media. We have newspapers, radio, TV and of course the Hollywood. Who rules that realm?

Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: (Ephesians 2:2)

We may argue all we want but we ought to realize that the devil has a hold on the media. How does he do it? He draws our attention to the visible. Then he is able to make it tantalizingly attractive that we feel that we may die if we can’t access it. The media is the number one feeder of greed and covetousness. And many other sins too.

Most of the corruptions I have mentioned started growing exponentially when we started having 24 hour TV channels that for lack of sufficient content to fill time started showing movies a lot of the time. I was in the media around that time and am therefore talking from the pot.

About that same time the TV became affordable. Before then only the rich could afford even a black and white tube. Then came Greatwall, the TV for the masses. Now almost anybody could afford a TV without taking a loan or needing to be creditworthy, though for most they had to sacrifice a lot to be able to buy it.

After that was the VCRs which were inaccessible because people had no TVs. But now people could watch movies whenever they wanted if they had a VCR, which also became affordable though for most they had to either take a loan or visit credit traders who could mortgage your salary for the same. But it was a craze then.

After that it was all downward. The media started ruling the masses. What with all the movies being spewed from the TV and being watched on the VCRs? We started being flooded with the world on the world’s terms. There were movies and talk shows and news and debates. All of a sudden people couldn’t do without something they had just started having. In the past, apart from cinemas which were a preserve of the rich, it was the government that took movies to the populace in open grounds once or twice a month. Now you could watch any movie without going through the government censorship process.

Of course all that was not for nothing. The prince of the power of the air was not after giving people options but limiting them. People started talking like the movie and TV stars. People started dressing what they were seeing. People started behaving like their heroes. Eventually people started thinking like the media was programming them to.

All of a sudden flimsy dressing became acceptable since that was how the stars dressed. Makeup became commonplace because we had to look like the stars. Our language became as affectionate as the stars. Even our values had to change to bring us closer to the stars.

But it went deeper. Cosmetology went beyond the outward. We started thinking like the stars. With all the soap operas we were watching, we had to really justify our heroes. And knowing Hollywood, virtue is not of great value there. A stable marriage has never created any story line just as good news has never made any headline. Our heroes are many times habitual adulterers. But they are so nice even then! We therefore look for justification for their foibles. Adultery and fornication are sin yet they look so nice when our star is doing it. We therefore turn our face the other way so that we do not judge them so ‘unfairly’.

Ultimately, not only do we need plastic surgery on our outside. We will need to have our kidneys changed. Our old kidney is so stringent and does not allow for ‘progress’. We must have a more permissive purifier that can let us enjoy our stars without judging them.

With a kidney that allows for some impurities without making our system sick, we will realize that our heart also has a problem with all these impurities. It is threatening to go on strike because the blood vessels cannot handle all this solid waste the new kidney is allowing into the blood. What do we do now?

That is simple. Change the heart. Bring a heart that does not care what passes through provided it looks like blood. Get a heart that can pump without even assessing what it is pumping. Even better, why not get a mechanical heart that does not need the rest of the body to pump. Then you won’t have to worry whether you are pumping poison or blood into the body.

I believe this is what has happened to the church over a few years. The place of the Bible and Biblical values has been taken from the prominence we know it should be accorded to the gutters as far as our values are concerned. The more TV and movies we watch, the less Bible controls us.

Let me give an illustration. To read the Bible through (from Genesis to Revelation) in one year, you will read for about 15 to 20 minutes per day. Yet I am always trying to challenge Christians to attempt that as most people treat it as an impossibility. It is treated as the trophy for the spiritual giants.

Yet most people read at least a newspaper a day which will take an hour. Some even read more papers to get a better balance of news (which are bad news anyway). Most people keep abreast with the news, watching at least one prime bulletin a day. This is about an hour.

Assuming this spiritual giant does not spend any other time on the media but the two hours, what do you think will control his thoughts, 15 minutes in the word or two hours in hell (that is basically what news give)? We have assumed that they do not even watch a ‘good’ movie or a talk show hosted by a virtually naked woman. How spiritual can you be to counter all that negative exposure and still remain focused on heaven? And here we are talking about a person who reads through the Bible yearly. What about the spiritual minnows?

Another thing I will mention is that we imitate what we admire. In the past we admired our leaders because of what they did. They were also the ones who interpreted our world to us. We did not have many people who went places. We also did not have newspapers or radio to give us information beyond what was around us.

The other day a radio pastor was explaining what it took to make a phone call. It took more than the telephone. Since they were only in major towns one had to raise money to travel there. Due to the distances involved it required not only fare but even lunch and sometimes supper and someplace to spend the night. And that to make a call that many times would be to an office near to the person you are interested in so that they are given the message or they know you will call so will hover around until you do so.

With the advancement of communication I now can be able to reach anyone on their own line anywhere in the world. In fact I can have financial transactions without visiting the banks. To the extent that banks are becoming more and more unnecessary to most. Even people using banks will do most of their transactions online or using their cell phones.

But I digress though this is also part of what has plasticized the church.

We have an avalanche of information and entertainment. This gives us role models whose only qualification is visibility. We admire sports personalities but we know that we cannot attain their discipline and therefore prowess. They thus can’t be effective role models. We have actors whose only qualification is their plastic lifestyles. Though we know it is not easy to attain what they have, they look more or less like us, making their lifestyles attainable. We are wowed by their boldness, their fluency, their ‘genuineness’, their act. We therefore seek to imitate them.

And that is the bane of the church today. We are watching too much of a rotten thing.

Since we are imitators, we will find ourselves dropping our guard even in things that are anathema to us. It is interesting that brewers look for worship leaders to promote as if there are no secular musicians needing it. How can drunkenness promote worship? Incidentally even the trainers and judges are worship leaders. What is shocking is that I am yet to hear a pastor preaching against this adulteration of worship. In fact I have seen a few congratulating the winners who literally die spiritual deaths as the devil can never promote righteousness. How can a bar sponsor an evangelistic outreach whose impact will be felt by the closing of bars? In other words the church is so deceived that they have stopped seeing, leave alone seeing straight.

The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! (Matthew 6: 22, 23)

Christ called the world darkness. It is therefore apparent that looking to the world for affirmation is swimming in darkness. Yet that is what we are doing.

Yet the sadder picture is the ‘believers’ whose eyes are glued to their TVs for the entire season of the search, even without a hint of guilt. I have seen even pastors commenting on the program until I wonder whether they know who they are serving. They do not know that it is their viewership that makes the millions to the brewer so that he will share the spillover to the ‘worship leader talent’ in the show. But do they also pray? Do they care to know how God feels about their entertainment?

Some radio programs make me wish very bad things for their sponsors and presenters. All they parade is infidelity, cruelty and a combination of the worst of human society. You are tempted to think that marriage is a fraud at all times and a stable marriage has never existed. Yet the programs are very popular. I cannot envision a fan of that program expecting honesty from their spouse at any time. Incidentally some of the presenters (probably most) are devout church people. I wonder whether they ever care to know God’s take on the rottenness they parade, leave alone reading the Bible for themselves. A constant dose of such programs will pave your road to hell faster than the devil himself would.

But it is sad that we listen to that trash, attractive as it may be. We think that knowing how the other side operates will make us better ministers which is a lie straight from hell. We never see Jesus caring to know what the devil was planning. We always see Him seeking to know how heaven operated.

We pray that what is being done in heaven happens here on earth, yet our eyes are on hell and what is happening there. How will we even know when God is releasing a breakthrough our way when all we are looking is hell’s roadblocks? We are to be so focused on heaven that like Jesus the only time we will encounter the devil is when he stands in our way, and then we shove him aside and continue in our journey. The media is so packed with hell’s agenda that it is no surprise that homosexuality marriages are being legalized and we don’t experience any shock as we expected it anyway since that is what we watch.

What about Christian media? Many of them are not much different from the secular anyway. In any case my point is that we should take a more active interest in our spiritual growth. There is this pastor I switch of the radio when he comes on because Jesus is as hidden in the program as the popular pin in a haystack. The 30 minutes are all about him. Yet this is a Christian program in a Christian radio station. And many of them are like that.

It is sad that you will see gambling being promoted in one way or the other in a Christian program. Witchcraft is being promoted and practiced by pastors in Christian programs.

There are some good programs but it is important to know that the radio or TV program will never take the place of your personal discipline to learn and practice God’s word. If it is not pushing you into getting your hands dirty in your pursuit of holiness it is not good. If it does not drive you to pray more or better then it has to be negative. If it does not lead me to agonise over the lost world then it does not serve God’s interests.

The internet is the same, even worse. More people are sunk to pornography through the net than all other avenues combined. We need to realize who rules that ‘air’ too. Then we will know that we are not kings but subversives in the system. Some Christians have been swallowed by the net to the extent that they do not know life outside it. And it is worse because it is able to get to you 24 hours a day.

We should take the internet as a tool that is a good slave but a terrible master. Many started using it until it took control of their lives. How many relationships and marriages are being broken by the internet?

I try to be careful as I use the internet, knowing that the boss still remains the prince of the power of the air and that God is giving me an opportunity to make a difference there. I am however conscious that I do not end up like Lot. He may have gone to Sodom as a minister, probably trying to ‘reach’ them with the gospel. But they were too many and too numerous to change. Eventually they changed him and all he had.

Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And of some have compassion, making a difference: And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh. (Jude 1:21- 23)

These verses guide me as I venture here. But I know it is risky business