Emerge and Restore

An illustration

2005-12-09T15:30:00.000-08:00

Don't see our inability to unwaveringly focus on and imitate Jesus as a problem? Well...okay...but here's an article that came to me that probably got loud cheers from the church it was written to, but illustrates both Christians' need for "conquest & control" (see Nov. 6 post) and our failure to mold our ethics to Jesus' standard. Here goes:

"You've probably seen the grungy-looking guy on the corner with a hand-lettered cardboard sign that says "Will work for food." (I don't know why, but some people give those guys money instead of offering them a mob. The sign doesn't say "Give me money." Surprisingly enough, I've found that the sign-holders don't respond cheerfully when you seriously propose that you would be willing to pay them for actual physical labor. Oh, well...) I don't know how you respond to such a sight, but how would you react if it was a 14 year old girl holding the sign? Maybe you saw this recent news item:
Edmond, OK - Tasha Henderson got tired of her 14 year old daughter's poor grades, her chronic lateness to class and her talking back to her teachers, so she decided to teach the girl a lesson. She made Coretha stand at a busy Oklahoma City intersection with a cardboard sigh that read: "I don't do my homework and I act up in school, so my parents are preparing me for my future. Will work for food."
There was a flood of calls to talk radio stations either praising the mother or blasting her for publicly humiliating her daughter. On motorist even called the police.
My observations: 1). I'm glad the mother tried, but 14 is a little late to get serious. Respect for teachers, pride in completing a task, and being punctual are virtues that a TWO-year old should be learning. 2). To all the folks upset with the mother, I say we could do with a lot more public humiliation these days. When this country started, folks were put in stocks in the public square for the express purpose of humiliation. 3). Anyone who thinks it is their responsibility to call the police in such a case is seriously confused. The desk sergeant who took the call should have said, "A - it's not your kid, B - She deserves it, C - Don't you have something worthwhile to do with your time?"

Okay, say what? Let's ignore the denigration of the poor at the beginning of the article for now. Did I just hear an ambassador for Christ just say we need to humiliate more people? Really? And the thing is, not too many readers are going to have a problem with this. They have been trained not to see the glaring disparity between this strategy for achieving "Christian" objectives and Jesus' strategy for advancing the kingdom. Didn't Jesus come to defend the poor and helpless (regardless of the reason for their poverty)? Didn't Jesus come and give love and dignity to those from whom the religious institutions would take it away (the religious institutions call them "sinners")? Did the Creator of the Universe ever use his infinite power to force people to do what he wanted them to do? Can we not see that the use of "stocks in the public square" is as sinful now as it ever was, even if we achieve the desired outcome from the person we punished? Why in the world would we ever try to achieve moral behavior from a motivation of fear rather than from a knowledge of God?

I agree that the mom in the story is reasonably clever. It's kind of a funny scene, worth a spot as odd news on some local station, maybe even worth a chuckle. I'm not making a case for this being child abuse. But it is a case of someone using their power and authority to elicit a desired response from someone under their authority by humiliation and threat of further humiliation if the desired outcome is not attained. I'm not here to criticize the mother, but I do criticize the church who has bought into this ends-justifies-the-means mindset. I do criticize those who see this story as a commendable parable of how Christ's followers should behave. Does this pass for Christ-like behavior these days?

Since when do we get to humiliate people into giving us our desired outcome? Why do we get so upset when the secular left (convenient label, not necessarily an accurate one) bullies us by attacking the Ten Commandments or "in God we trust", yet we'd gladly use the same bullying tactics to further our cause if we had the chance. Do we ever think that it might be possible to achieve what we want and still have Jesus disgusted with us?

And why are we fighting for taking "pride in completing a task, and being punctual"? Those things are fine, but their relationship to Christian ethics are shaky, at best. They much more closely resemble American middle class values...maybe something the church needs to work to separate from Christian values. We seem to have a hard time telling the difference.

Jesus' example is one of love, of giving up power, of radical transformation, but not through power structures. May we learn to turn our backs on our striving for power and embrace the way of Christ.

Isn't Jesus Too Easy?

2005-12-08T08:45:00.000-08:00

I'm finding myself a little frustrated by how much difficulty the Christian world has actually emulating Jesus in both their personal lives and in the organizations they build. I often see people pulling some scripture out of Revelation or the Old Testament as scriptural justification for their actions (actions that rarely would be out of step with accepted behavior in society at large or in church culture...why are those things so similar?), and when I inevitably ask, "Let's look at this through the lens of Jesus....can you imagine Jesus doing that?", they look annoyed and hold strongly onto their proof-text from Leviticus.

I consistently teach that the Gospels hold priority for us as we shape our theology and ethics, and that Jesus must always be the first place we look for when we want answers. It's so tempting to want to run to Paul, whose messages are so much more conveniently structured and rational. And frankly, Jesus never taught about church elders. But he did teach about shepherding and how a shepherd treats his sheep. He was very clear about what leaders shouldn't look like. And Jesus never taught about the theological implications of baptism...but he was baptized. I recently preached 20 lessons walking through the Gospel of John, emphasizing how I think we can glean a complete ecclesiology (understanding of the church) from the life of Jesus. He's subtly teaching us how to "do" church. And when we ask who we should be as the church, the first thing that should shape us is the life of Jesus. But oddly, enough, that's a radical message to much of Christianity. As I finished up the lessons from John, a church member came to me privately and we had the following conversation:

HIM: "You've just deconstructed virtually the entire church."
ME: "Do you mean the church Jesus is looking for, our particular congregation, or the current popular understanding of church?"
H: "You've just deconstructed virtually our entire understanding of the church."
M: "Well...yes."
H: "If we do what you're saying, nearly everything will have to change."
M: "Do you think that what I've said inaccurately depicts what Jesus would have the church to be...am I just making it up?"
H: "If we do this, nearly everything will have to change."
M: "Well...yes."

Have we become more afraid of change than of being separated from Christ? Somehow we've managed to admire Jesus, to talk about him a lot, to invoke his name, to call upon his power to fix our problems, but not be transformed by him. It happens in our personal lives, in how we treat people, which I talked about in the last post. It happens in the way we structure our churches (impersonal, hierarchical, Sunday-focused, maintenance mindset, self-focused, counting success by looking only at the 3 B's: budget, buildings, & butts). We unintentionally betray the Gospel when we tell people "You need to come to church." No, you need to get to know Jesus. It happens in the discourse of the larger Christian world. If you ask me, using any of the popular labels Christians use today to identify themselves(conservative/liberal, right vs. left, Democrat/Republican, mainline/evangelical) is an admission that our viewpoint skews heavily in one direction, that we are more concerned with being in a certain camp than aligning ourselves with Jesus (Yes, labels are necessary for convenience's sake, but they help little in pointing toward truth). See Volf's article here:

http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=1529

Maybe we need to get rid of all our agendas that we try to accomplish in Jesus' name, in order to please him, and insist that our entire agenda simply be Jesus himself.

Another person approached me and asked me if I was serious that just Jesus was the answer to everything. I told her that he wouldn't help her learn to change the oil in her car or perform surgery, but spiritually, yes. Our lives and behavior must be formed first and foremost by him. Our churches must be formed first and foremost by him. She asked, "Isn't that just too easy?"

Broken Barriers

2005-12-02T09:32:00.000-08:00

I've spent a good portion of my teaching during Advent not just focusing on preparing for the coming of Immanuel, but also in simply adoring the one who inexplicably chose to come and be with us in the first place.

One direction I felt pulled in as I meditated on the Advent passages was to examine the easily overlooked, yet revolutionary fact that God came to us and offered relationship. How does that one part of the Gospel story transform us? Yes, Jesus came and ministered to the sick and needy and leprous and impure. But the fact we use those labels implies self-rightiousness in some sense, because they often cover up the fact that even the best of us are in many ways needy, impure, sick and at least inwardly leprous (the physical disease kills your nerves, your ability to feel). Jesus didn't break down the barriers when he talked to and cared for prostitutes, or when he ate with tax collectors, or when he healed the broken and unclean. By that time, the real barrier had already been destroyed. It was destroyed the minute the infant Christ's flesh touched human skin. When he began to relationship with us "lowly worms"; when he lowered himself to become one of us.

The barrier that was broken was between human and God and Jesus wiped it out. The barriers between sick and well, pure and impure, needy and wealthy, etc. are largely of our own making, because we are all in the same boat. And for us to erect barriers is an affront to the Christ who tore them down. He came to open the gate...but we sure love our gates. To be able to close people out, to say that we won't relationship with them, they are not good enough is a precious ability to us. But it's not Christlike.

I'm not very good at predicting what the people in my congregation will respond to and what will offend them. At times I've shook with trepidation as I've preached something I knew would step on toes, only to be greeted with applause and congratulations. Other times I ram something home with confidence, expecting to be cheered, only to be met by icy silence and offense. This was one of those times. Although one good friend literally slapped the pew in front of him in agreement, I also saw several gaping jaws, many people turn away in disgust, and a few outright angry glares as I said something along the lines of this:

"We love hierarchies. All of us operate by them. You do, I do. We learn it through 'cultural transmission', but we all rank people. Somewhere in our heads exist some sort of list that ranks people from most valuable to least valuable. Our lists may vary a little, but I think if we wrote them down, we'd find that they are very, very similar, with celebrities and athletes, wealthy business men and politicians, maybe doctors and lawyers at the top. And at the bottom would be the homeless, the disabled, the elderly, the addict (at this point I at least have the full attention of our homeless addict, with whom I am good friends, and whom I will blog about sometime...we met him in our jail ministry). These hierarchies of human worth exist, but they are sinful. Jesus destroyed these destinctions, and left us an example that teaches us to root them out of our lives, too.

"Many of our problems of 'self-esteem' stem from these hierarchies, our feelings of inferiority. We fume and stew because some nobody treated us like we occupy a lower place on the totem pole than they do. We get upset because our current situation in life puts us on a lower rung on life's ladder than we deserve.

"I challenge you to start paying attention to how these hierarchies of worth play out in your life. Pay attention as you talk to people who are both higher than you and lower than you on your personal continuum of value. See how your entire attitude and habits and mannerisms change between people you encounter who are different sides of the scale. Force yourself to see and admit that which we all do...we assign value to people and treat them differently according to how those values make us feel about them. Then force yourself to admit that it's wrong.

"I challenge you to speak the exact same way to the lawyer you know and the next guy that you meet who is begging for money. Feel the same about them, value their God-given worth equally, I dare you. Treat the person who is not the same race you are the exact same way you'd treat someone who shares the same skin color with you. Talk to the person who speaks with an accent with the same amount of patience you'd show someone speaking English. Don't speak to the caretaker of the disabled person in the wheelchair, speak to them. Feel just as comfortable when someone with torn, dirty clothes steps onto a elevator with you as you would if they were wearing a suit. Treat a criminal like a human, Jesus did. Treat everybody the same. I promise you...if you haven't been practicing, you can't do it. You are too well trained. Too used to listening to the world's system of values and not to God's. Too used to valuing what looks and acts and speaks just like you and too used to being afraid of what's different.

Jesus came and when he came he broke down the barriers. Barriers between us and God, but also races, tribes, communities, economic groups, age groups, everything. And he challenges us to live like it. Can you?"

People didn't like it, can you believe it? :-) Well, I understand why now that I think about it...but it's one of the things that makes me love him more and convinces me that His is the true way.

Aliens and Advent

2005-12-02T09:25:00.000-08:00

I was one of the first customers to score the new War Of The Worlds DVD from Netflix this week and we watched it tonight. Anybody else disappointed?

And yet something about the movie sticks with me. I think it has more to do with the story than with this most current telling of it. Maybe I expected too much from the duo of Spielberg and Cruise after enjoying Minority Report so much. This version does better when it approaches things with a detached, epic disaster-movie feel; humans trapped like ants, being destroyed by forces beyond their control. When it starts to focus on people, letting them talk, things start to get ugly. Let's face it, Tom Cruise has spent too much time inhabiting his charismatic Top Gun persona to be convincing as a loser dad. And Dakota Fanning is hardly believable as a human. She's TOO precocious, too mature, too prescient, and has too much presence to come off as more than a realistic special effect. Then there's the guy that plays Cruise's son. He probably does a fine job, but his character is poorly written and annoying. I don't believe ANYTHING he does. He is inserted into the weak script to provide convenient conflict, transparent emotional manipulation, and a shameful warm fuzzy at the end.

I'm usually drawn to character-driven movies, but this one is at its best when it's clinical. To be sure, there are some great Spielbergian scenes: the river of death, the train, most of the Tim Robbins basement sequence (although part of it is a reworked Jurassic Park raptor-in-the-kitchen scene, and Robbins' character himself is a contrived annoyance). But by far the most powerful scenes are one of human helplessness, where people are hunted and slaughtered by an unstoppable malevolent force. Those were powerful to me, not because of any pornographic need for bloodshed, or of any lingering junior high sense of what's cool, but because it serves as a reminder. This story is still being told 107 years after being written because it reminds us that in spite of our need for an illusion of control over our lives, we are in a cosmic sense, helpless. We surround ourselves with stuff and technology to make our lives stable and safe, but one alien-induced burst of electro-magnetic energy (or one earthquake, or hurricane, or tsunami), and we lose those things, we are lost. Sometimes the realization that we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control is as threatening as the force that stripped us of our illusion in the first place.

I preached on the first Sunday of Advent the sheer unbelievable-ness of a God who would come and be with us, of a God who would dirty himself to associate with us. A God like that is not unheard of outside scripture, but the manner in which Jesus did it is mind-blowing. Zeus occasionally came down off Mt. Olympus, but only as a powerful warrior, impervious to any human threats against him, unable to be hurt. He only came in power, knowing that he would be safe anywhere he went. But not Jesus. Jesus lived for nine months inside a human. He was born an infant, simply incomprehensible. I have a ten month old daughter. She's amazing to me, but she would die within hours if not for the care of her mother and I. She is not powerful; in fact, she is so very delicate, so very easily injured. My three year old might last a matter of days on her own, but she too would die if not cared for. If I don't wrap her in the walls of our house and carry her where she can't go, and hold her hand as we cross the street...the world would crush her. She is not protected, except by her parents. Jesus threw off not just the power of the creator of the universe, but also the power to protect himself, and placed himself in the care of humans. It didn't have to be this way, but he came in a form where viruses could make him ill, where splinters could get infected, and where a whip wouldn't just bounce harmlessly off his back, but instead would shred and tear. He gave up not just comfort and security, but also invincibility...he gave up the reality of the illusion we strive for so mightily.

We may convince ourselves we are invincible and in control by molding and shaping our bodies to be strong and powerful. But a simple gunshot can relieve us of that fantasy. Most of us do it by acquiring plenty of stuff and technology, which boils down to money. Want to know why we live in a disgracefully materialistic society? Our stuff gives us the illusion of control. We surround ourselves with it for security. The bigger the house, the larger the SUV, the more state-of-the-art technology, the more impenetrable we feel. And War Of The Worlds illustrates what happens when we lose all that. We fall on the mercy of a mysterious other (this story also serves as a metaphor and condemnation of imperialism, looking at it from the losing side), and suddenly the always-available supplies of food, water, electricity, and other comforts are cut off. We can almost envision those for whom the alien death ray would be a welcome release from living (like much of the world does) without those things we take for granted. This story exposes the illusion for what it really is. We are so helpless that only God can get us through, no matter how much we would like to think otherwise.

At the end of the movie, humans prevail, sort of. But even that just illustrates our true impotence. Those who subdued us and met every force we threw at them, are subdued by the smallest and most inconsequential organisms on the planet: bacteria. The irony is almost biblical. Just like the coming of Jesus, when the power of sin threatened to destroy us...we were saved by the powerless, the unimportant, the vulnerable...a baby.

Experiment

2005-11-23T10:02:00.000-08:00

One thing I hate to do is get in a rut when it comes to sermon preparation. I prepare each sermon in a series in the same manner, but I prepare for different groups of sermons in very different ways. I refuse to admit that there is one right way to preach. My favorite approach so far has been (I recently finished preaching through the entire Gospel of John) eliminating all preparation except for extended meditation on the text itself and what it is saying to me in my current situation. I love to play around with the way I prep and the way I preach. I have no rules except for a commitment to Him and His Word. Maybe that's a young preacher's game, but hey, I've been doing this less than a year.

So now I'm entering into a whole brand new experiment. In an effort to connect with other branches of Christianity and experience some solidarity with other tribes, I'm going to spend a year following and preaching from the Revised Common Lectionary. A lectionary is simply a collection of passages of scripture arranged for use during worship. Many churches from the Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Methodist traditions (and others) base their liturgies on the RCL. It cycle starts again every three years.

Liturgies (or table readings, as they used to be called) have been in use since the fourth century, first utilizing continuous readings, where each Sunday picked up in scripture where the last left off (the readings during the month of March must have been inspiring = Numbers and Leviticus). Now four passages of scripture have been carefully chosen for each Sunday; one from the Old Testament, one Psalm, one epistle, and one passage from a Gospel. There have been many lectionaries over the centuries, but the main one was the Vatican's Lectionary for Mass (1969). The Revised Common Lectionary (1992) is based on and derived from that, and is the most common one worldwide.

What I like about the RCL system:

1). It's anchored in history. It's older than my roughly 150 year old tradition. It's been tried and refined for centuries by some of the greatest scholars the church has ever had. I like being tied to the ancient ways.

2). It's catholic. That word really just means universal. I love the idea of Christians all over the world, all over my city, encountering the same text with me every week. I think that's beautiful.

3). It's scripturally healthy. We're kept with a healthy diet of scripture and not allowed to give one portion too much emphasis over another. I like the balance.

4). It's Christ-centered. One portion a week from a Gospel. Every service and sermon is rooted in Christ. Nuff said.

Wish me good luck. This coming Sunday is the first week of the lectionary year (year B). We'll see how it goes (especially during Holy Week - days my church is loathe to recognize). Anybody else want to try?

Conquest, Control, and Church

2005-11-06T14:13:00.000-08:00

I was priveleged to attend a day-long seminar with Brian McLaren last week (Kansas doesn't exactly get a flood of great speakers coming through). Although much of what he said was familiar to those of us who read his books, he was challenging and left many of the 300 ministers (well...pastors - I think only four of us were from CoCs) with headaches after they thought through some of the ramifications of what he said. One thing that has made me uncomfortable about McLaren's writings is his tendancy to appear without backbone, almost pluralistic. Hearing him speak wiped away those doubts. Make no mistake, behind the humble, soft-spoken demeanor is a very bold man who knows what he stands for. Several times he made statements (about Left-Behind "theology", lack of justice in the church, etc.), that given his audience, made me cringe. I totally agree with him, but I don't know if I would have the guts to say the same thing.

Easily the most controversial topic of the day was when he asked us to rethink our notion of Conquest and Control and the role in plays in the life of the church. The Bible was written, both Old and New Testaments, mostly in a time when God's people were a minority, a marginalized group of stragglers and strays who were looked down on and often persecuted by surrounding society. But a few hundred years after Jesus, something happened. A Roman emperor became a Christian and this "new" religion was thrust into a situation of power than it wasn't prepared for and maybe shouldn't have accepted. But for better or for worse, the church ruled the western world for centuries. Wars were fought in the name of Jesus, people who didn't agree with the church were tortured and killed, entire continents were stolen away from the indigenous people, genocide was committed by "Christians." Our faith was forced on people against their will. Jesus was communicated through conquest and control. And although modernity dethroned the church as the ultimate authority in favor of reason and science, we've retained some of that conquering attitude. Sometimes we long for the "good old days" of being in charge, instead of the really old days of being persecuted and hated.

The church no longer holds a sacred place in our society. We've been marginalized in another way...we've made ourselves irrelevant and ignored. But we are NOT persecuted, at least in the West. Yet we still hold onto that militaristic language that created the need for our removal from power in the first place. We still talk of "taking back the nation for Jesus." Our most famous speakers still hold crusades. We seek to convert non-Christians instead of invite them. We sing 'Onward Christian Soldiers', 'Soldiers of Christ Arise', etc., and teach our children to be in the 'Lord's Army.' Does that sound eerily familiar to anyone else? How is this better than jihad? Because we are right and they are wrong? Or because those in power get to set the rules, and we long to set the rules for others instead of settling for playing by the different rules of Christ's kingdom?

Sure, there is plenty of war language in the Bible, particularly in the OT. But as McLaren pointed out, there is a marked difference in conquest language used by people who are fighting for their survival against vicious oppressors and conquest language used by people who are wealthy and fat and who have sacrificed their credibility by selling out to the values of their culture. It's different to be fighting for your own rights than to be fighting for power with which to overrule the rights of others. That power sounds like what Jesus catagorically avoided during his time on earth. McLaren asked for a shift in values from conquest and control to one of conservation. Conservation of the environment, of course, but that's only part of the story. Conservation of the rights and lives of others, honoring what's beautiful about them as God-given and inviting into the kingdom, but not forcing them to play by our rules until they choose to.

He reminded us of the incident in March 2001 where the Taliban destroyed the gigantic, ancient statues of Buddha that had been carved into the side of a mountain near Bamiyan long before Islam was ever heard of. There was worldwide outrage that these historical artworks had been desecrated. His question to the audience was, if you had lived in Afganistan at the time, in fact, if Christians had ruled Afganistan, would you have felt it was your Christian duty to support the destruction of those statues or to speak out and stand against the effort to blow them up? Maybe that's the difference between conquest and conservation. It was interesting to discuss. Lots of different opinions. What do you think?

I'm tired...

2005-10-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

Please understand that there are things that I love about being a minister. I love and respect ministers. Many of my closest friends are ministers. I will always support them 100% and encourage them when they need it and be impressed that they are laboring long and hard without the recognition they truly deserve. I don't want to invalidate all the great things ministers and pastors all over the country are doing for Jesus. I'm only speaking for myself. But as for me...I'm tired.

- I'm tired of having a job where if I lose it, I lose my income and my house and my faith community and my friends.

- I'm tired of maintaining a high standard of quality at work, yet having my job be in danger.

- I'm tired of my family being treated poorly because people are uncomfortable with me.

- I'm tired of working more hours than almost anyone else, and still being accused of being lazy because I wasn't in my office Tuesday afternoon.

- I'm tired of my wife feeling like I'm never home and never get a day off. I'm tired of her being right.

- I'm tired of being told that the three hours I spent with the paroled drug addict was a waste of my time.

- I'm tired of the snide comments when I don't wear a tie when I preach.

- I'm tired of people coming to my home and begging "pleeeeease don't cause problems."

- I'm tired of the spiritual people in the church being looked down upon for "not being realistic."

- I'm tired of acting like everything's alright, preaching happy sermons when my heart is broken and my church is falling apart at the seams.

- I'm tired of the church, which is supposed to be the safest place on earth, hurting people.

- I'm tired of working for churches I probably wouldn't attend if they didn't pay me.

- I'm tired of my salary taking up almost half the church's budget.

- I'm tired of that nagging suspicion that I'd be closer to God and more Christlike and more missional if I wasn't a minister.

- I'm tired of getting rave reviews for my sermons, but getting laughed at when I want to put into practice what I just preached about.

- I'm tired of feeling like my spiritual gifts are meaningless.

I still love God and think the church can be a thing of beauty. But I don't have to be paid by a church to be a minister. I don't have to be a preacher to preach.

I've been in jail

2005-10-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

I have a good friend who spent most of his adolescence and early adulthood in juvenile hall and in jail. He was hooked on alcohol and drugs and sex and everything else. But in jail with all the time in the world and nothing to do, he began to read enthusiastically and found his way to Jesus in his jail cell. He embarked upon a genuine journey of discipleship and although lacking an education, he has become one of the most well-read and theologically knowledgeable people I know. He occasionally schools me, reminding me how narrow my spiritual background is and how far I have to go in reaching beyond that. But my friend's life is radically different now: he is married, has a cute little daughter, owns a small business, and is a dedicated man of God.

But he has been yearning recently to go back to jail and he asked me to come with him. And so he started a jail ministry, and I accompany him once a week. This seems to be his calling, what his life has prepared him for, and he is passionate about it. In fact he makes trips to the jail three or four times a week, even though he doesn't live nearby. He does the teaching, I'm simply there for support. Because of his criminal record he need a "legitimate" person to come with him at first.

But this isn't your typical prison ministry. I've done a fair share of prison ministry, venturing into big medium- and high-security facilities with sniper towers and razor wire. I've visited inmates on death row. I've been searched and questioned and had my background checked numerous times. I think everyone should take every chance they get to minister inside a prison. But this is not a prison, it is a jail (Prisons, my incarcerated friends tell me, are MUCH preferred to jails). A small, rural Kansas county jail. If you want to minister in most prisons, you have to be put on a waiting list. No so, here. These men are forgotten by society, by their community, by absolutely everyone but my friend. He doesn't have to compete for time with anyone, and the inmates can't wait for him to come back.

I've been inside several times and it still seems a little surreal. If you watch TV or movies, you've seen prisons that are huge and intimidating, overflowing with burly guards wearing body armor. This is nothing like that. We are let in through a flimsy locked door, up a flight of stairs to "the cage." It is an old iron-barred contraption that was put together inside what used to be a community meeting room. The whole thing is about 50' by 20', including 12 cells that are 7' by 4.5' (double occupancy). The main security measure around here seems to be the fact that most of these men really have nowhere else to go if they were to break out. The entire staff of the jail in the evenings when we are there consists of a scrawny janitor and one guard who happens to be three and a half feet tall. Really. There are no firearms, so if something were to go wrong, our only hope for rescue rests on a midget with a can of mace and a teenager with a mop.

In a prison setting, normally you'd study in a supervised common room. Here, we enter the cage with the entire population and are locked in and left alone (the guards' office is down two hallways, totally out of sight of the cage, where the guard and the janitor play video games). So we sit in the little common area. And as I look around I notice that I could fashion weapons from about 25 or 30 items just in the area of the inside of the cage near me. I'd hate to think what what someone more experienced, like one of those criminal masterminds from TV, would do with it. This place is a playground for Hannibal Lector.

But there's more. These men are hungry for God in a way that startles me. Yes, some of them just want his assistance to get out of jail. But in most of them I find a level of humility and brokenness that puts to shame every single church I've ever seen. It's hard not to admit that you've done wrong when you're forced to wear an orange jump suit and sleep on a steel slab. These men show me on a weekly basis qualities that SHOULD characterize the church, but don't. They crave the Word of God so much that I am humbled. One burly, grizzled guy let us know that our first night there when he growled, "Don't go telling us a bunch of stories, we don't care...we just want the Bible." They ask questions, they communicate their confusions, they argue (although without personal animosity; they know these are the guys they MUST live in community with for the next several months), they never want to stop when our time is up. Their attitude toward the Word is what the Church's should be but isn't. And it still surprises me, but it shouldn't. Once again, God's foolishness has shamed my wisdom, and the least of these have outshined the greatest.

younger adults?

2005-09-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a random thought I'll throw out in a hurried attempt at a real post:

For years I've heard people say that teenagers are having a harder and harder time making it through adolescence unscathed. Drugs, alcohol, gangs, sex, and stupidity is rampant. But when people say that I usually ask them, "What's different now?" Usually they say that the world is headed to hell in a handbasket and society is so much worse than it used to be. Ok, maybe. But do you notice any other difference? Yeah...our adolescents are being adolescents for longer than they were when you were a kid.

For someone who loves teens, I have a strange theory about how we could help our youth and cut down and drugs, violence, teenage pregnancy, etc. Make adolescence shorter. You see, we've always had teenagers (people who's age ends in -teen), but the concept of adolescence is very, very new. It began with the invention of public schools and then secondary school and the expectation of college (now grad school is almost expected). Sure those are good things, but they also delay the beginning of a true life journey for years. That period becomes some weird stasis period where learning is expected but not much else. My grandfather used to tell me the story of finishing the eighth grade. He asked his father if he could go on to high school and my great-grandfather replied to his 13 year old son: "Don't be stupid. Get to work." According to today's values that sounds pretty cruel, almost abusive, but my grandfather did as he was told, learned the farm trade, got married at 17, raised 9 wonderful children who bless me to this day, and lived to be 90, all without ever doing drugs, taking a single drink, joining a gang, or having extra-marital sex. Of course, the purpose of the gospel is bigger than just keeping kids from getting involved in substance abuse and sex, but maybe we can agree that since those things are truly harming our society, that a downturn in those behaviors would be helpful, both on a individual and societal level.

Currently, sociologists have a hard time defining when adolescence actually ends. Some say they believe for some individuals adolescence can last into the early 30's, and most will tell you that adolescence rarely ends before the early 20's when we actually allow people to get on with their life. Even the government doesn't know - you can vote and be drafted and be the subject of a lawsuit at 18, but you can't have a beer until 21. Conversely, if you commit a heinous enough crime at the age of 15, the government will confer upon you the honor of being tried as an adult. Businesses are equally confused: Insurance companies don't consider you an adult until your mid twenties, you can't rent a car until 25, although a 21 year old can rent a U-haul if they need to drive somewhere. But one thing people are pretty unified about is that the adolescent years are intimidating, difficult, and frought with danger for those who make poor choices about their mature bodies using their immature minds.

STD's and pregnancy are rampant among young people. Between 80% and 90% of the teens you know will have had sex before they graduate high school. 30% of those will have contracted some sort of STD. More than 10% of the sexually active girls will have had abortions. But when we crunch some more numbers another interesting trend comes to light. At what age do most people reach sexual adulthood (i.e. able to procreate)? Normally by the age of 13. At what age do most people get married? The national average is 26. Do we really expect people shut down their sexuality for more than a decade until the culture says they are grown up and ready for marriage? A personal commitment to holiness is important, and of course in Christ it can be and has been done, but societally, should we really be surprised? Something has changed.

I often hear ministers urge teenagers not to be afraid to get involved in ministry, not to consider themselves too young to throw themselves into something significant, and they usually back up this plea by saying, "Remember, Mary was just a young teenager when God used her to give birth to Jesus." Well...yes, but that's an anachronism because that was the age that girls were socialized to become wives and mothers and to run a household. We can't really help it, but it's unfair to picture a 1st century 13 year old as an unsure, nervous, incapable kid who's still searching for herself. People at that time were prepared to launch into their own lives at an earlier age. I can't shake the notion that system is somehow unjust, that maybe it's the result of the sexual preferences of a chauvinistic society, but then again, our system isn't exactly producing happier, healthier young people.

So what would happen if we began to socialize teenagers more quickly? Would it help? I don't know, but maybe. Giving people purpose can revolutionize their life. Shortening adolescence would give Madison Avenue a smaller target and might cause them to pick another demographic to terrorize and ruin. It would lead to maturity in a time when immaturity is idolized. But we would really have to change the entire way we socialize our children; cosmetic change would likely do more harm than good. Remember, if this is indeed a problem, it is a systemic one; it is not the fault of individual parents and it is not to be solved by pushing your kids to get married young. I got married at 20, and my wife had just turned 19. We are glad we did, but we've had to admit that our marriage has been a journey not only of growing closer together, but also of growing up. I don't know all the answers, but I'm sure of the fact that our society has failed our young people (don't believe it? Read Chap Clark's Hurt), and that something needs to be done.

Freedom

2005-09-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

Last night some close friends who read my blog asked if I was regretting getting out of youth ministry since I was blogging about those days with some nostalgia. The answer is "not at all", although I don't regret my youth ministry days...in fact I was grown and blessed and nurtured and matured by it. I'm proud of having spent a short time in what I consider to be an incredibly special and needed and difficult profession. I'm no longer a YM because I feel God called me to another place, not because it was a bad place to be. I will always have a special place in my heart for youth ministry and youth ministers.

Besides the teens themselves, what I clearly miss most about youth ministry is the freedom and creativity that it allowed and expected. This is a way in which all ministry needs to be like youth ministry. Then, if I had tried to do the same thing, worship in the same way every time we met, there would have been a revolt. So I was challenged to make every meeting meaningful and full of life and God. I'm not trying to make a case for consumer Christianity, where we feed people only what they ask for in order to secure their presence in our assembly in the future, what I'm saying is that teenagers' natural desire for variety, for their faith to be a journey of adventure and wonder is much more healthy than many adults' tendency to want their church experience to be static and comfortable and routine, to avoid challenges and conflict. I remember being challenged every week to plan worship that would be powerful and meaningful and relevant to us TODAY, never having to rely on a formula, always approaching God in a fresh way. And the next week, in our new context, new situation, we could worship and study in a way that was appropriate to us again, even if we were in a totally different place spiritually. Was it a lot more work than preparing for worship in my current church? Sure...it was more work than preparing a good sermon. But it was vibrant and rewarding and real.

I'm constantly amazed how few churches understand the power of atmosphere. By that I mean that you can totally enhance worship by putting some effort and thought into setting up your worship space. It blows my mind when I hear church leaders wonder why people come into their church's dimly lit auditorium/sanctuary and don't speak to each other or interact much. Because it's lit like a tavern in there! You feel like you should be sitting in a corner with a pitcher of beer and a pack of cigarettes, listening to a bad lounge singer croon "Muskrat Love." The first, most simple rule of atmosphere is that the brighter and friendlier a room is, the more people will chat and interact. The dimmer the room, people tend to be more calm and reserved. If my youth group was becoming too talkative to pay attention, I'd always turn out the lights and keep going. I love to play with lighting. My favorite thing about my youth room when I was a YM was that it went TOTALLY dark without lights. I even covered the exit signs. I could speak by candlelight, we journaled by candlelight, we prayed in the dark, then flip on the blinding flourescent lights when it came time to discuss. I caused a stir once because in preparation for a youth event, I blacked out all 30 stained glass windows in my church's auditorium and hung heavy blankets over the doors so that I could have hundreds of teenagers praising God un-selfconsciously (although you'd be surprised how much light is generated by a video screen even with a black background and a gray font). But that darkness helped draw them in and actually engage.

If you have an awkward kind of meeting area and people have a hard time focusing on the speaker, turn the lights out on them and put a spotlight on him. Sometimes it's better to take the spotlight off the speaker to emphasize the words. I've preached on poverty or the sick and destitute by putting a continuous series of powerful pictures on a screen while I sat down where no one could see me and preached softly over the speaker system. Very powerful.

Seating plays a role. Pews tend to keep people buttoned up, chairs are less formal. In my old youth room, depending on the mood I wanted to convey, we'd sometimes sit in chairs, sometimes in couches and beanbags and sometimes on the floor. It makes a difference whether people are seated in neat rows so that they only see the backs of other peoples' heads, or if they are seated in a circle where they can see each other.

What if we could even leave the church building sometimes to worship? Easter sunrise services are a good example of this. Once when I was teaching my youth group about poverty and having a heart for the poor, instead of ordering pizza for our youth meeting like usual I gave them bags of groceries just like our church gave poor families and made them cook their own meal with the crappy generic non-perishable food we gave to people who came to us for help (my policy: if you don't eat it, don't donate copious quantities of it to a food pantry). Then we gathered outside our building in the alley around a dumpster and worshipped while facing the reality of life in that neighborhood - people living in garages, in shacks with dirt floors, drugs houses, screaming children, trash covering the yards. Then we talked about how poor we are all when we approach God. I miss that kind of freedom and creativity and I think it would be helpful for the rest of the church, not just youth ministries.

Fun

2005-09-21T08:54:00.000-07:00

I like youth ministry and I love youth ministers. The reason I'm no longer in youth ministry has nothing to do with disliking the job, or being bad at it. It's more of a complicated mix of a bad experience, timing, the fact that some of my strengths lie in a different direction, geography, and the sad reality that I make a much better living preaching for a small church than I ever did being youth minister for a bigger one. And the toll on my wife was pretty large. Youth ministry is no longer an option for her, although I don't know if she'd tell you preaching is any easier for her.

The two biggest reasons people go into youth ministry is because of a passion for the hearts of young people and because of the sheer fun of it all. Both of those things are great, but only one will sustain YM's for more than a year or two. Once the reality of the ministry sets in, it becomes impossible for some people to do. For example, I went to college and sat in an introduction to ministry class full of nearly 70 young people who had signed up to major in youth ministry. Four years later, after classes and internships had exposed us to ministry reality, I think four of us graduated with YM degrees. Several years after that, only one of the four is still in youth ministry. Not a good testimony to how we treat our YMs.

But for those who remain longer than I did, even with all the hard things, the fun persists and will always be one of the redeeming qualities of youth ministry. The times when you actually get to spend time with and minister to teenagers...that's nice.

When I started in youth ministry, the "youth room" I was given was terrible. Small, ugly, noisy, inaccessable, a terrible classroom for anybody. I immediately began lobbying for a new one, which we eventually got. But very nearly the only redeeming quality I noticed about the old room was that it was very very close to the inner dimensions of the OT tabernacle (I don't remember how I realized that). So during a study of the Pentateuch, lingering over the stories of the OT, trying to do some creative things to bring to life the existence of ancient people, I decided to recreate the interior of the tabernacle so we could actually try worshipping as the Hebrews were commanded. So I got a bunch of materials, and we went to work. Then I decided to have some fun and put the teens in groups, each with the assigned task of building one of the articles or furnishings of the tabernacle just by reading the instructions given to them in the text.

Someone built an alter, someone built a table, another group built the ark of the covenant. It was interesting and fun and we got some truly strange looking furniture out of the deal. But the two girls I asked to make a "golden lampstand" were having trouble. Understandably, they were having trouble putting the words into a picture, much less an actual lampstand. I tried to help them, but they just got frustrated, so I asked if they'd like to work from a picture of what they were trying to make instead. They agreed, so I went and got a Bible encyclopedia and showed them an artist's rendering of the "the lampstand." One girl took a glance at the picture and glared at me. "That's a Menorah. What? Do these people think they are Jewish or something?"

Sometimes I think I'm such a good teacher...until reality sets it. :-)

Blessed by a bad church

2005-08-19T22:24:00.000-07:00

Those of you who know me know that I spent a few very long years as a youth minister in Texas. You know that those years both scarred and strengthened me. My outlook on faith, my philosophy of ministry, everything about the way I think and act as a minister was ripped to shreds and eventually rebuilt. When I'm being honest and not trying to re-frame my failed ministry in a falsely positive light, I'll tell you straight out that this was a terrible church. Some churches are hurtful because they are complacent or tired or simply misguided. Others are un-Christ-like and self-righteous and hostile. This was such a place. I could make you queasy with stories of hungry, hurting people who were treated like dirt. Your jaw would drop as I recounted evil words from the lips of those who were supposed to be the most spiritual ("We're ordering you to stop giving food to the needy. That's not the demographic we want to reach"). If I told you how my family were treated, you'd wonder why we stayed past the first month. As I've said many times, it was hard for that church to know God because they wouldn't ever let Him in the door.

Earlier this week, my wife and I were talking with a group of friends, discussing negative events in our lives that we later became grateful for and it reminded me of something I wrote before I ever had a blog. When I moved to my current location, a friend from a nearby church in Texas who happened to be a sidelined observer to everything that happened during my tenure there, e-mailed me the question:

"Why are you still a minister?"

Besides the obvious and relatively troubling, "How else would I support my family?", my answer to him was that maybe that experience taught me some things I needed to learn. It wouldn't have been right to give up because I believe that God put me there. I think he did it for my good. That particular church has imploded and will likely close its doors soon. That too, I think will be good. But I learned more in my time there than I could have in virtually any other situation. I went there as a lifelong member of the Church of Christ, and I thought and acted like one. I was the fundamentalist, ultra-conservative legalist that I now rail against in this blog. And a couple of months into it, I looked around and said, "Hey....this isn't working. Not even close." So then I began a rollercoaster ride that has brought to where I am today (although the ride continues).

A bad church taught me volumes about how not to do church, about how to alienate people and stifle them and keep them from pursuing the Kingdom of God. A bad church taught me that the church is not a building, and it taught me the dangers of thinking that it is. A bad church taught me the difference between an institution-builder and a disciple-maker. I learned to be ferociously honest with myself because nobody there was honest or real or willing to face reality. I learned to get up and get working even when I didn't want to; when I knew that I would be opposed from within the church. I developed the thick skin that it is helpful for ministers to have. I learned what it does to your soul when you keep silent when you should speak up, just for the sake of keeping your job. I learned that Christ-like churches don't just happen because you fill a building with Bibles and smiling faces. I learned to wring every last bit of living water out of a very, very spiritually dry place; I learned to look for God in the little things. And maybe most importantly of all, I learned that just as God has grace for the addicts and the abusers and the prostitutes, he also has grace for the hard-hearted, the self-righteous, the parched soul just going through the motions of faith, the frowning face who has forgotten how to love. And I think that those lessons will serve me well in the future.

And if God could bless me that much through a bad church, think of what he could do with a good one...or even an decent one that's occasionally frustrating. I understand that there are such things as toxic churches (although my understanding is narrower than Arterburn's), and would never advocate staying in such a place, I do want to send out a word of encouragement to those who are struggling with their place of worship, who feel disappointed and let down. Even if my church lets me down, drives me crazy, or holds me back a little, I think that if I can get past my consumer attitude thats too concerned with what I get out of church, if I can subdue my pride that feels like I deserve a bigger and better place, then I bet God has some blessings waiting for me, maybe he's waiting to reveal himself in some way to me...if I can just get out of the way and look to him.

It's been so long...

2005-08-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've blogged, and even longer since I've done more than a current event update. Sorry. I'm tempted to offer up the excuse that my family has just moved into a new (to us - it's like 120 years old) house. Packing up and repairing the house and unpacking...that's a lot of work and has truly been consuming our lives. But in reality, the blog silence has been because I've felt very spiritually empty lately. I might be forced to act spiritual and pretend I have something redemptive to say twice a week from the pulpit, but I don't have to do it here. The truth is, I spend a good bit of time at my computer composing things to say to different groups of people. I could have posted something had I wanted to. But I couldn't...not without pretending.

That said, while still a little out of sorts, I feel myself coming out of it. I'm spending extra time in prayer and meditation, and I'm starting to see God at work again. That's how I know my spiritual life (I know, false dichotomy...everything about me is spiritual in a sense) is on a downslide...I lose my ability to see God in the little things. I begin to look at life through "secular" eyes, and my practical nature takes over. I see my vocation as a job and not ministry. When I overlook something or someone I see a threat to my job security, not a failed opportunity to care for someone. And all the little tiny ways I usually see God every day disappear. Then I get grumpy, which is another indicator of a spiritual famine.

Sundays are often hard for me. I love the church that I minister to, but these wonderful people exist in a church structure that is not of their own choosing (what's worse is that many of them have been taught that any other structure is apostasy). The lingering legacy of the old school Churches of Christ (although many have broken free of it) is one of shallow relationships, legalistic hermeneutics, external focus, institutional leadership, and stilted, rote worship. My congregation doesn't exemplify those things, but vestiges still linger.

So I can usually expect to face people who criticize me for not wearing a tie, who become suspicious and stop listening if I mention the Holy Spirit, who complain if I preach an extra two minutes, who question me if I'm not smiling every single minute. I can often expect an attitude that cares more that we take Communion than if we actually commune with God or with each other. I can expect many people to care more that songs were sung, regardless of whether anybody understood what we sang. We always fulfill our obligation to the "five forms" of worship, but many times it feels as if things like authenticity, humanity, our heart...maybe even God, get left out. Heck, yesterday in a stunning display of institutional rather than relational thinking, I watched my wife who was attempting to rock our baby daughter to sleep during class time in the church nursery, get kicked out of the nursery because that room also doubles as the church mail room and it was time for members to go get their bulletins. [note to future church leaders: 1. Always put people ahead of institutional concerns - even corporate communication. 2. The nursery can NEVER double as anything else. If mothers don't have a private place to care for their children, they won't come. i.e. - our solution is for my wife to care for the baby at home during Bible classes, and come later for worship]

I believe that Sundays (and all other times of worship) should be invigorating, challenging, energizing, and life-giving. Yet the majority of the time I feel so drained (most Sunday nights, we go out to eat with a certain group of wonderful friends...and they are gracious enough to let me sit and brood and glare at everything, without letting me rain on their parade and ruin their fun). So many times, my heart just cries out, "Isn't there more than this?...Why can't we change?...This is religion, it's not faith...Can't we be real, can't we be spontaneous, can't we be passionate, can't we be...MORE?" I see so much that is by definition un-church-like about church that sometimes it pains me to be there. I'm tempted to cut and run, to find a place that fits my understanding of church.

But yesterday, after the normal, predictable morning worship, we shared a meal together in our fellowship hall like we do nearly every week. And I got an odd request from a man who would qualify as a "semi-regular." He's not from a CoC background, he's not well-kept, well-to-do, or articulate. He's here because friendly is something this church does well - because of that, we are surprisingly diverse. He asked if he could "bless the church with a song." Although slightly awkward in the middle of our straight-laced, routine-oriented bunch, there was no reason to deny his request. So this inelegant, uneducated, penniless man who struggles daily with what my people might call "major" sin issues stood up with confidence and presence and introduced his song by saying, "I believe if God gives you a gift and you don't use it, he'll take it away." And he began to sing. This wasn't a song that has ever been written down, it just came from his heart. And in a huge, soul-filled voice that filled up the entire room, he gave us 5 or 6 heart-peircing improvised verses. Verses about yearning for God, about waiting for him, about needing to see His face, about boldly demanding his presence, his blessing. I know a little about music, and this guy was good. Shockingly good. But also shockingly real, as the man who probably had the most to hide bared his soul for us all. Everyone in the room, from my 7 month old, to the 70 year old, was focused unwaveringly on him. Tears began flowing down faces that were startled to find them there. My wife began to weep and my older daughter asked, "Mommy, why are you sad?" She looked up toward God and whispered, "I'm not." And there for a few minutes, we experienced worship...and once again, I saw God.

Time for Camp

2005-07-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

I'll be gone until July 25th, working with my wife at a small camp deep in the middle of a Kansas wheatfield. I love camps. Once in high school, I attended 9 camps in one summer. But Silver Maple Camp has always been my favorite. Nowadays I only have time for one camp, and while there are many I could work at, this is where I'll always return. There's a sense in which I grew up there: my father directing one session, and me following him around as the resident "camp brat." There's a sense in which my faith started there: introducing me to many of the most inspiring Christians I've ever known, introducing me to God outside rigid church structure. As I recently told someone, if I had to choose what I learned about faith and God at SMC and what I learned earning a ministry degree, I'd have to choose camp. There's a sense in which my life as an adult started there: I met a girl there when we were children, and we began a camp romance as teenagers. I asked her to marry me standing on the dock overlooking the camp's tiny lake. And five years ago we said our vows in the camp's beat up old chapel, standing in the exact same spot where I'd first met her years before, too young to know our paths would lead us together, give us two beautiful daughters, and embark us on an intense/confusing/exciting journey that we've really only begun.

I'm about to go enjoy the best week of my year. See you guys later. God bless.

Community Quotes

2005-07-11T20:52:00.000-07:00

I wanted to blog tonight, but I find my brain too fried. So here's 3 interesting things I read in my quest for community recently:

On Enemies: "At the heart of Jesus' message is: 'Love your enemies. Do good to those who criticize you, who hate you. Pray for those who persecute you and push you down.' Our enemy is not someone far off in a distant land. Our enemy is somebody close by who threatens us, who blocks us. Our enemy is inside, not outside, our community."

On Forgiveness: Reconciliation is at the heart of community. To grow in love means that we become men and women of forgiveness...When I say forgiveness is at the heart of community , I do not mean we have to learn to say simply, 'You're a nuisance, but I forgive you.' It means discovering that I, too, am in part the cause of your being a nuisance, because I have dominated you, hurt you, brought fear up in you or because I haven't listened to you, or was not open to you. Forgiveness is not just saying, 'I forgive you because you slammed the door.' It's also: 'I'm working on changing myself, because I have hurt you.'"

On difficulty: "Community is a place of pain, the death of the ego. In community we are sacrificing independence and the pseudo-security of being closed-off. We can only live this pain if we are certain that for us being in community is our response to a call from God. If we do not have this certitude of faith then we won't be able to stay in community...When somebody says to me, 'I find it very painful to live in this community, but I'm here because God has called me here', then I know that person has made a passage from dream to reality. They have found their place. We will only stay in community if we have gone through the passage from choosing community to knowing that we have been chosen for community. It is for us the place of purification, and of support, given to us by Jesus, that will lead us to a deeper love and liberation, a place where cleansed of our egocentric attitudes we will be able to give new life to others.'"

- "From Brokenness to Community" by Jean Vanier

founder of L'Arche communities for the mentally disabled (www.larcheusa.org)

When your community fails you

2005-07-08T13:16:00.000-07:00

When you are making spiritual progress in a particular area is usually when Satan attacks. Right now my church is making significant progress in both understanding and living out a better theology of community. But a recent situation really underscored our need to do better.

Last week several members of our church were helping a church leader move into a new home. I wasn't there because I was traveling out of town. The items being transported included a forgotten, yet loaded rifle, safety off. An out of town relative, unfamiliar with guns, snatched the rifle out of a vehicle and began carrying it into the house, his finger on the trigger. As he bent over to pick up something else with his free hand, he inadvertantly pulled the trigger and squeezed off a shot.

Aaron M. is a guy who I really enjoy being around. He's relatively quiet, but very friendly, and I believe him to be a very spiritual man, although maybe not in a conventional way that will get him fast-tracked to a church leadership position. I suspect as I get to know him better, I'll find that he has some of the same issues with our popular understanding of church that I do. But Aaron is a servant and came that day to help out his brothers in Christ. And because of a few twists of fate and some gross negligence, Aaron got shot. As Aaron himself has told me, better him than a child (the bullet narrowly missed a grade-school age kid) or someone who wasn't a member of our church, because while angry (Aaron is an avid hunter who is naturally enraged by mishandled firearms), he is very willing to forgive.

As far as gunshot wounds go, this was relatively minor and Aaron wasn't hospitalized long. If life were a movie, he would have had a "flesh wound," although part of the bullet will remain embedded in his flesh for the rest of his life. And then a strange thing happened. Nobody talked about it. This life-threatening event got swept under the rug. More than a dozen members of our church witnessed it happen, including our entire top-tier leadership (if you're unfamiliar with typical CoC leadership structure, I'm the "senior minister", but constitute sort of a 2nd-tier leadership position), and yet for some reason virtually nobody else was told.

Aaron was present at worship the following Sunday, and I even made small-talk with him, unaware of the bandages his clothes were hiding. Many prayers were said (in fact once I actively solicited prayer requests from the congregation), but no one prayed for Aaron or praised God that no one had been killed (in retrospect, I did overhear one person jokingly ask Aaron if he was sore...does that constitute genuine concern?). In several hours of being together, the accidental shooting was never mentioned, nor was it included in our weekly newsletter, which is filled with people who we should pray for.

The reasons for this silence are probably more complicated than I realize, but I'm sure they do include an over-reliance by everybody on the leadership to handle all communication, and an unconscious attempt by the leadership to downplay any hint of incompetance on their part. But what does it say about us when our first reaction is to save face rather than to care for our hurting?

Aaron didn't come to evening worship that night. I didn't find out he was injured until evening worship. I don't know how long he went without being cared for by his spiritual family. I do know that he was very hurt and upset, wondering why no one hugged him or asked about an event which to him was extremely significant. He'd had a brush with death. It could have been a great deal worse. His life was never really in danger from the bullet itself, but doctors did tell him that for 3 days, he was at high risk for a life-threatening blood clot, and he faced that terror alone. He was not shown concern, he did not experience love, and by the time my travelling allowed me to do more than just speak to him on the phone, he had flown out of the country on business. Leaving his brothers and sisters wallowing in our failure and regret.

As Jim, a wonderful deacon who gets it when it comes to community, said this after talking to Aaron and hearing his hurt from being abandoned: "Being ignored by his family hurt that man more than a bullet ever could."

Lord...Aaron...Forgive us.

Snag...

2005-07-02T22:15:00.000-07:00

I've been studying theology of community lately and in conjunction have been spending lots of time personally in the Word recently, trying to mold, cajole, chisel and otherwise re-make my heart into that of a true minister. But I've also tried to read in order to grow intellectually, so I dove into N.T. Wright's The Challenge of Jesus. And I hit a snag. I've heard a lot of great stuff about this book, but the first third of it failed to rock my world. Suddenly, out of nowhere came a paragraph that nearly caused me to immediately resign from my job and go apply at Burger King (the only other thing I'm qualified to do, I think). This may not sound like a big deal to you, in fact this may sound like delirious ramblings...but I dropped the book and spent the rest of the day deep in thought.

Here goes: Wright makes a statement to the effect of: "People will put up with all kinds of theological weirdness...but start messing with their symbols, and watch out." He argues that the 1st-century Jewish system of religion was more about maintaining cultural and national identity through symbols of religion rather than being about a vibrant, life-changing, culture-impacting faith through relationship with the Creator. Those symbols were familiar things like Sabbath, Torah, the temple, feasts, purity rituals, etc. These things were meant to be beautiful expressions of faith that served to connect God’s people with God himself. But by the first century they had become less…they had become symbols of God’s people-in-waiting, waiting for the coming of their “Messiah” who would overthrow their Roman oppressors and restore them to their rightful place as world super-powers and rulers over the heathens who had exploited them for so long. So those once-holy means of connecting with God had been turned into symbols…symbols of pride, symbols of greed, symbols of coveting earthly power. Jesus came not to desecrate those holy things, but to tear down their earthly understanding of them. And that’s why he died…not because he offended some Jewish legalists with his grace and mercy…but because he attacked their mistaken symbols of faith, and they felt that their entire identity as Jews was under attack. They saw Jesus as someone who was trying to take away what they thought made them Jewish (when their obedience to and love for him should have been their identity)…they thought he would make them less Jewish.

And therein we learn the risk of messing with peoples’ symbols of faith. And yet I feel very strongly that the church has deified our symbols nearly as much as the ancient Jews did. I think it’s why we struggle so mightily for change, but change almost always caused strife and discord, and usually broken fellowship.

And that is why I’m tempted to give up…at least give up my striving within the established (i.e. “institutional”) church. You see, I’ve always struggled somewhat as a minister…I’ve never quite fit in. I’m usually labeled as something of a “progressive” or “liberal” voice (which one you use depends on whether you like me or not). But the thing is, it’s not because of my theology. I’m really pretty mainstream, not too out there, not too threatening. Scripture is incredibly important to me, as is the church. The reason I don’t fit in is my methodology. I don’t care for church buildings, pulpits, potlucks, administrative tasks, obligatory worship, or consumer spirituality (to make a VERY abbreviated list). Most of the ways of “doing” church that I see everyday and have seen for years I feel are inappropriate and counter-productive. If I was in charge of a faith community, things would look RADICALLY different. Yet those things I would change without a second thought are symbols to most people within the established church. Many people would literally feel less Christian without a church building to store their faith in. When I challenge people to do things differently, I’m challenging their methodology, not theology, yet it still often angers them. They’ve become attached to symbols…not Jesus.

And so I feel doomed to be an oddball, a thorn in the side of people who just want to keep things the same. I guess I had envisioned a time when ministry would be comfortable and I could lead happy, satisfied, spiritual people in reaching out to the community…but that illusion has been shattered. I see now that if I continue working for established churches, it will likely involve constant discomfort, tension, and disagreement, because I feel called to challenge those symbols…but maybe that is my calling…not comfort.

Community and the Trinity

2005-06-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

While I am breaking absolutely no new ground with this post, I think I did get several funny looks this Sunday when I taught that in order to get a better foundational grasp of relationship and community, we must familiarize ourselves with the doctrine of the Trinity (many in my particular heritage have been subtly taught that right thinking in and of itself leads to righteousness and salvation; community is a secondary goal to be worked toward after we've figured everything else out - or worse, that right doctrinal answers lead to community). It didn't really make sense to me either when I stumbled on to it for the first time a few years ago, but it goes something like this:

Our One God mysteriously exists in three separate personalities: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This isn't a stretch biblically - read the whole book and look for separate references to each, or for simplicity's sake just read the account of Jesus' baptism (Matthew 3, Mark 1, or Luke 3). Each "person" in the godhead share immutable qualities such as holiness, embodiment of perfect truth, perfect love, etc. But each also have differing roles (for instance, see Jesus' discourse in John 5:16-47). So in the Trinity we've got three separate identities that exist as one God. These identities live in relationship, a perfect relationship that is so close-knit, so ideal, that they are the same being. There is mutual submission (thus our imperatives to submit in Ephesians 5 & 6 flow not from being inferior to God, though we certainly are, but from emulating him) and love that flows between them...in fact such perfect love that He created the universe as we know it out of an overflowing of that love. We exist because of relationship, and we exist to be in relationship. Our mission is to emulate that same love and submission and caring to those around us. It's to involve the world in that relationship. Law-keeping and being right were never the point...relationship is.

In my own terribly amateur perception of basic Eastern Orthodox beliefs, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist as One through sort of a cosmic dance, acting and living and existing together, but in perfect harmony with one another. Their relationship is a beautiful dance, and God has invited His creation to join it. Sin is the spiritual equivalent of stepping on toes, and inhibits everyone's ability to continue in the relationship; because of us, the dance falters, although of course God continues on perfectly. I've said that learning from the Celts would enrich our theology...learning from the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity would be a valuable asset as well. Partly because it makes faith about relationship.

And one reason that I won't resort to charts and graphs and illustrations to describe the Trinity (water/ice/steam, apples, trees, families, triangles etc.) is because those concrete quantifications can't fully define or contain God, and because you don't describe relationships with charts and graphs and illustrations (although I do like Tony Jones' describing the Trinity to his daughter by pointing to her 3-bladed ceiling fan, then turning it on high and saying, "There."). You know what a relationship is by participating in it. And we must understand theology and ecclesiology from a relational standpoint. If we make our faith legal or transactional, we've missed the boat. Our theology must flow from a relationship with Jesus (as I believe scripture does). And the point of being "the Body" is also to be in relationship, or community with Him.

"Because God is the social Trinity, a plurality in unity, the ideal for humankind does not focus on solitary persons, but on persons-in-community. God intends that we relfect his nature in our lives. This is only possible, however, as we move out of our isolation and into relationships with others. The ethical life, therefore, is the life-in-relationship, or the life-in-community."

- Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God

Community through Stress

2005-06-25T08:50:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the reason we are so community-impoverished is because community is difficult. It calls us to a high standard. If we are to live in community, we have to live lives that are worthy of community, lives that are intentional and honest and giving and real. And that’s a tall order for any group of people at any one time.

Efforts to build community, particularly in a church setting, will generally be met with resistance, not only because it flies in the face of the institutional leanings of our current church culture, but because it’s messy. After experiencing an act of community a woman came to me with tears in her eyes and asked, “Why isn’t this what we are striving for? Why isn’t this what the church is about?” And I hugged her and said, “Because it’s going to require tears…and we’ve taught people that church should be easy and tidy and systematic…people don’t come here to face things…they don’t come here to cry.” And I asked if she thought the two of us could be brave enough to model this new style of behavior for the rest of the body. She replied, “Maybe…”

We’ve designed our church services to be clean and stress free. You enter the professionally decorated, climate controlled comfort of your worship center, are handed a newsletter by nametag-wearing people who have been trained to smile all the time and open all the doors for you. You sit in a padded seat or pew and watch good-looking, well-groomed people instruct you in how to worship and tell you what to think. Everything starts and ends on time, with no room for spontaneity or the moving of the Spirit (an elder at the church I previously served once told me, “You went two minutes over schedule…there are visitors in there who are never coming back because of you.”...I'm not kidding...two minutes). And so, community will never take place in that setting. Community requires time and freedom and challenges and bumps and bruises.

And thus, community will bring stress. Not just the stress that your own life entails, because community requires you to be present in the stress and tragedy of others' lives. And such a process will never be formulaic or bound by rules. The journey to becoming a community must be ruled by our hearts and our consciences…and by the love that I think is supposed to be the point of our faith anyway.

Community on purpose

2005-06-23T20:55:00.000-07:00

One of the first things we have to recognize and work on when it comes to community is that it never happens by accident. Put all the devout, godly people you know in a room, and although they will be genuinely great people with a genuine desire for God, a close-knit community won't magically appear. Perhaps that's because often when we are part of a group, our goal within the group is implicitly to not cause strife, to refrain from hurting feelings, to avoid getting on anyone's nerves. But with all due respect, that's not good enough. Avoidance of harm does not communicate love. Coming to your aid when harm has come your way does.

Community is never, cannot ever be passive. We can't think that by inserting our body into a church building and pasting on a false smile does anybody any good. Not being rude to the people we come into contact with isn't enough. We've been called to build them up. We've got to step up to build community. It's not enough to avoid gossip, we've got to slay gossip and confront gossipers. We've got to have ZERO tolerance for people who come to us complaining about a third party if they haven't brought this the other person's attention first. We've got to actively squelch griping and whining, as if our motives weren't selfish in the first place. Community will never grow until we realize that we haven't done our job by being harmless...we won't be accomplishing our purpose until we are helpful. Until we are the Barnabas of our time. Until we are builders instead of avoiders.

...but those are all nice words, good thoughts until I try to apply them to my life. Then things get sticky and I get cranky. I WANT to be intentional. I want to be the most loving, caring, transparent person in town. I psyche myself up and then...I get scared, I back off. How do I intentionally build a relationship with the man in my church who didn't want me to be appointed as the minister, who my teaching/preaching never connects with, who thinks teaching ecclesiology is actually wrong and improper because that word isn't found in scripture? How do I connect with the older lady to whom church is a place of comfort and stability, a link to her past and her deceased husband, and to whom my style of faith presents a destabilizing force and is something of a threat? How can I be present in the life of the sad-faced woman who sneaks into every worship just as it gets underway, and flees before the final Amen...come to find out that her former husband used to have my current job (decades ago), but left her and ran off with the church secretary, and she's so beat up and scarred by members of the church that she wraps herself in a veil of silence to protect herself? How do I impact the church leader who has the authority and influence to fire me at a whim...yet needs to be lovingly corrected? How do I do that? I know people that could succeed in those situations...but I don't feel like that person...and yet this effort...this brief wisp of fresh air has to start with me. I have to do it on purpose and forget my insecurities and reach out and touch them and do it for their sake and for the sake of Christ. I've got to love them enough that I can't let them wander through the builidng unnconnected, untouched, unloved. Lord, help me to be who I need to be...help me to love...on purpose.

Community...but how?

2005-06-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

In a class I’m teaching on Sundays, we’ve been studying ecclesiology and this week we talked about the Church as a community of faith. So I’m standing up front giving what feels like a very workmanlike and rudimentary lesson on the concept of community and I look and see people start tearing up and dabbing at their eyes. Which confuses me, because while I care a lot about this, after last week, I’m not pushing very hard. People are talking and discussing, but others are squeezing Kleenex really tightly and looking as if I shot their dog. So I wrap up class, shut down the projector and laptop and head to the back of the building for a glass of water. And suddenly I’m surrounded by people, and they are…weeping. Weeping for a community that we can talk about, but doesn’t exist in our lives yet. Mourning a church that obligates them to attend, yet doesn’t fill this burning need within them. Crying out for relationship that goes deeper than “how are you?”, “I’m fine.” Asking, begging, “How do we DO that?” These people are hungry. Not for another class, which they’ve been taught makes them good Christians, but for relationship and faith lived out in community. They are desperate for people who they can be real with, people who they trust enough to confess to, people who will provide a soft place for them to fall. They are longing for us to be the church.

But unfortunately, I had to admit to myself and to my brothers and sisters that I’m not a man who can really answer there questions of “How do we get there?” I can teach the theology of community in informative and convicting ways…but when it comes down to living it, I am impoverished as the rest of them…maybe more. I want it as much as they do…maybe more…but when it comes down to it, I’m still hiding behind my masks, afraid for anybody to see past them. We can transform the congregation into a real community...but I'm going to have to grow as much or more than anyone.

Last night we even took a baby step in the right direction, getting together with a few of the "weepers" to discuss how we can go about this, lay down some ground rules, and practice going deep with each other by pouring out our hearts a little. It felt good to actually be able to say to someone (other than my beautiful, supportive wife) how much I hate ministry (the job, not the action) sometimes, or at least the political games we sometimes turn ministry into, and how fake I feel when I have to confidently stride to the podium and act like I've got it all together, sit at my feet and learn from me. But this feels like an opportunity...I hope it's the first step on a long journey.

True...

2005-06-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

One reason I'm a huge proponent of the concept and language of mystery in the life of the Church today is because of the way that certainty and absolutes have been abused in the past and are still being abused in some circles. But beyond all my postmodern arguments and the smallness of our intellects compared to God...there's another reason a quest for certainty is sure to be disappointing: Ultimate Truth is not a thing...it's a Person. Truth IS God. Thus he is the subject of such wonder and glory and splendor and dignity and holiness that knowing him is to love him and worship him and delight in him and seek to please him with everything that we are. Those who are on a quest for certainty through the Bible are missing the point. Leaving out mystery in our search for God attempts to put God in a very small box, therefore making truth very small, very knowable. But God never says 'Ask, and Seek and Knock for objective, absolute, propositional truth'...he said, "I am the way, the truth and the life..." Coming to know God is a lifelong journey, the quest is a relationship...one that I hope will never end. Certainty has an end-point.

"A Footnote To All Prayers"

2005-06-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.

Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

- C.S. Lewis

I've been thinking, conversing, reading, and writing a lot lately about our desire for certainty, and what I believe is a more appropriate alternitive: Mystery. The biggest challenge I face is communicating this lovingly to those who are certain about certainty. Maybe this poem by Lewis does a better job than I ever could (no, I don't know what "Pheidian fancies" are...). Certainty is largely an illusion not because God fickle and arbitrary, but because we are human, our intellects are prone to failure and selfish motives, and the language we use to communicate is so limited and open to misunderstanding. Even a brilliant communicator like Lewis could see that he was not able to contain God in language, that even his prayers were incomplete, and only meaningfull because God is great enough to make sense of our childish babble. We don't even have the intellectual power to really comprehend the God we attempt to worship. Lord, don't take me at my word...words can't contain you...take me at my heart...it's the only thing that can come close to knowing you...

Are you Certain?

2005-05-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a longish quote from a lecture by Walter Brueggemann that sort of articulates what postmoderns have been struggling to communicate to moderns about how they look at faith. Please understand that these are snippets from a talk which I have transcribed...(EDITED: after listening to the lecture for the first time in a while, I noticed that these comments I transcribed aren't exactly word for word...but they're really very close. Consider what's here THE MESSAGE to Brueggemann's original text):

"We all want certitude in our lives, but the Gospel is not about certitude, it is about fidelity. Fidelity is a relational category, while certitude is a flat, mechanical one. We have to acknowledge our thirst for certitude, and then realize that if we had all of the certitude in the world, it would not improve the quality of our lives at all because what we wouldn't have is fidelity...

...Fidelity is like having a teenager in the house in that, you don't ever get it settled for more than three minutes. If you aren't constantly working on it, you don't have a relationship...

...We need to recognize the promise for certitude, made by ANY voice is a false promise that cannot be kept. There is not enough certitude in the world to make us happy and make us safe. In the Gospel account, that's called the way of the cross. Jesus never makes any of his disciples certain...

...The truth of the Gospel cannot be articulated in flat, certain prose...

...It is our job as ministers to deconstruct our church members' need for certitude..."

You can download the whole sermon, plus more Brueggemann and great N.T. Wright stuff at:
http://www.emergentvillage.com/Site/Resource/Downloads/index.htm

- What do you think? Is certainty over-rated? Is it something we are incapable of, yet delude ourselves into thinking we posess because it makes us feel better?

I tend to agree...but this whole concept sure makes people uncomfortable...

Snow

2005-05-23T15:36:00.000-07:00

I originally started this blog to help hone my writing skills, since I like to write, but rarely get the time. Still don't seem to find time to put out anything of quality...but here's something I wrote for the religion column of my city's newspaper a while back:

A few months ago, late on a Sunday night, it snowed. I remember it clearly, because if I would have had my way, I would have never seen it at all. But my infant daughter was crying and it was my turn to get up. I changed her, wrapped her tightly, and rocked her back to sleep. And passing by a window as I returned to the comfort of my own bed, I saw the snow. It was snowing heavily, but the flakes themselves were light and graceful, fluttering slowly to the ground like oak leaves in autumn.
What really caught my attention was the size of the snowflakes, maybe the biggest I had ever seen. Some appeared to be more than two inches in diameter. I felt drawn to go outside to see it more clearly, barefoot, wearing only shorts and a T-shirt. I sat in the old rocker on our porch and watched the beautiful snow come down.
For an hour, until my limbs were numb with cold, I sat captivated by the snowfall. The beauty was startling; the contrast between the busy motion of the snow and the total silence of the landscape was unearthly. And I prayed. I’m no stranger to prayer, but I somehow connected with God in a way that surprised even me. There in the quiet, I knew God was at work, I knew he was close. It was just snow, but it was more than that; it was one of the most spiritually stirring moments of my life.
There’s a fascinating story in I Kings 19:10-18, where God chose to reveal himself in a telling way to his prophet Elijah. As Elijah stood on the face of Mount Horeb there was a devastating windstorm that shook the ground, but God wasn’t in the wind. Next came an earthquake, but God was not in it. Then a fire, but still no God. But then there came a gentle whisper, and Elijah knew it was Him. The Lord spoke to Elijah, encouraging him, revitalizing him for the next part of his journey. God was in the whisper. And I think God was in the snow.
Many people would like God to reveal himself to us in a gigantic, exciting, life-changing way, maybe in a piercing blast of light like with the apostle Paul (Acts 9:3). But today God chooses to reveal himself in smaller, quieter ways.
He never shouts for our attention. He won’t force his way into our lives. There will always be things in our lives that call out more urgently for our attention. Our busyness will always obscure our view of Jesus. It’s what he called “the cares of this life and the lure of wealth.” (Matthew 13:22, NLT).
Why does the omnipotent creator of the universe allow himself to be upstaged by the insignificant matters of our little world? To lead us to seek him. Because he wants us to want him. He communicates in murmurs and whispers so that we have to stop and pay attention and actively search for him amid the roars and confusion of our lives. He’s not avoiding us; he’s asking us to give the effort that worshipping him requires. He wants to be part of our lives, but we must look for him as well.
Sometimes we must overlook all the urgent, often perfectly appropriate things that consume our lives. To know he is God, maybe we’ve got to be still. Listen for his whisper. Look at a snowflake. Connect with God.

2005-05-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

Something I've only recently been brave enough to teach in the church: "IF WE TALK ABOUT ANYTHING MORE THAN WE TALK ABOUT JESUS, WE'VE MADE THAT THING AN IDOL." I was specifically referencing baptism, but everyone's got their sacred cows.

Saved...from...what?

2005-05-17T15:28:00.000-07:00

It's always been interesting to me, although I've only recently been able to connect it to the larger picture, that salvation in the Old Testament is always talked about in very concrete, "here-and-now" terms. Save us from our enemies, save us from this famine...salvation is a huge OT topic (check out the Psalms), yet without the language of Heaven or Hell. It was a salvation from earthly things.

And I wondered if that had any correlation to our life under the new covenant...or if we are just luckier than them and get to conceptualize salvation in a purely spiritual sense, thus muffling the NT's call on our lives for transformation in the here-and-now.

I slowly have begun to see that salvation has a very real, very important significance in both the spiritual and physical realm (I know...that's a false dichotomy...but it's easily understood). Just as we are saved FROM "Hell" and INTO Heaven, we are also saved FROM our sinful nature and INTO God's purpose here on earth. Maybe we need to revise our concept of salvation, too.
I think Jesus came to save us from our lusts, from our lies, from our laziness. He wants to save us from the power that greed holds over us, break us out of our bondage to our culture. He came to give us salvation from broken relationships and self-centered egotism. And he came to save us into a kingdom of healing, of peacemaking, of relationship and community. He's asked us to share in his mission of love and concern for others, of worship and generosity...that's salvation. Those things that sometimes we wish we wouldn't have to do...those things we consider obligations...those aren't values to be tolerated...they are the point of salvation: to have our brokenness restored...right now. To have the sins that are killing us destroyed and to be swept up in the excitement that comes with really doing kingdom things. We aren't saved and then gradually begin to do those good things...we are saved TO do them.

We haven't just been saved from the eternal guilt of our sins...he wants to save us from sin. Right now.

Blessed are the Poor in Spirit

2005-05-06T21:47:00.000-07:00

In my Bible, Matthew 5:3 reads: "Blessed are those who realize their need for Him..." I think that's one of the clearest translations out there (NLT). I preached recently that "We Must Be Poor Before We Can Become Rich," based on that verse. Here's a list I used:

ADVANTAGES OF THE POOR:
1. The poor know they are in need of urgent redemption.

2. The poor know not only their dependence on God and on powerful people but also their interdependence with one another.

3. The poor rest their security not on things but on people.

4. The poor have no exaggerated sense of their own importance, and no exaggerated need of privacy.

5. The poor expect little from competition and much from cooperation.

6. The poor can distinguish between necessities and luxuries.

7. The poor can wait, because they have acquired a kind of dogged patience born of acknowledged dependence.

8. The fears of the poor are more realistic and less exaggerated, because they already know that one can survive great suffering and want.

9. When the poor have the gospel preached to them, it sounds like good news and not a threat or a scolding.

10. The poor can respond to the gospel with a certain abandonment and uncomplicated totality, because they have so little to lose and are ready for anything.

Tears

2005-05-05T22:29:00.000-07:00

Since I'm still relatively new to the area, and very new to the pulpit, I've only recently joined my community's ministerial alliance, where many of the ministers from all over the area come together to study the Bible, fellowship, and plan spiritual events for the entire community.

Yesterday was only my second time participating in this group made up of 40 ministers from nearly 20 different fellowships, and both times I was met with a fair amount of incredulity both because of my age and because of the tradition from whence I come. Some of the comments include: "You're not allowed to be here, are you?" "I didn't expect to see you here." "Aren't you ashamed to be associating with us unbelievers?" (Ok, ok...lots of them asked, "How old ARE you?")

This group, the LCMA (Lyon County Ministerial Alliance) , always begins by discussing the week's lectionary passage (don't know what a lectionary is? Look it up...and think about getting out of your denominational house once in a while), which this week happened to be from John 17. Jesus' prayer that "they may all be one." Each of us got to share a few thoughts about this passage. When it was my turn...I repented. I apologized on behalf of all the members of the Churches of Christ who had been hateful and divisive and exclusive and mean. I upheld these ministers' identity as believers and Christians and expressed a desire to be unified with them, lest the world not recognize that Jesus was sent from God. And guess what...I got a standing ovation...in fact the only ovation of any kind, along with many handshakes and hugs.

Then an older Baptist minister was asked to close us in prayer. He prayed for our group, our churches...and for the "dear brother who has joined us today to take a stand for unity," and continued to pray for me and the Churches of Christ and since I thought I heard his voice break, I glanced up at him to see tears rolling down his cheeks. He finished and came and embraced me and told me stories of how many times he'd been told that he wasn't a Christian, how often he'd been excluded and shunned by my brethren. And as a final tear fell from his chin, he thanked me for my simple act of participation.

And so I learned that we have done wrong, that we've damaged our own reputation, that we've failed to earn respect. This IS important...we can't afford to be arrogant...we just need to be Christians only...not the only Christians.

Paradoxes

2005-04-28T18:20:00.000-07:00

Par·a·dox – 1. A seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true: i.e. ‘This statement is false.’ 2. An assertion that is essentially self-contradictory, though based on a valid deduction from acceptable premises. 3. A statement contrary to received opinion.

Chris·tian par·a·dox – 1. A belief, value, or way of life that contradicts the normative belief system and lifestyle of a given society or culture, yet which will result in a life that is more pleasing to and blessed by the Creator than would be possible otherwise.

One reason it’s so hard for us to allow ourselves to be changed by our faith is that we naturally accept the values of the world around us; we carelessly accept the messages that surround us on a daily basis and begin to think of them as normal. Then when we see the reality that confronts us in the pages of the Bible, we tend to think of those godly values as difficult, or old-fashioned, or bizarre.
Many of the values that God calls his followers to possess stand at odds with the values of our culture. Many times, those cultural values seem to make sense, they feel normal. It’s easy to begin to doubt God’s way because sometimes his ways seem weak, or ineffectual, or foolish. But maybe that’s the point. Paul writes in I Corinthian 1:25-27: “This "foolish" plan of God is far wiser than the wisest of human plans, and God's weakness is far stronger than the greatest of human strength. Remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world's eyes, or powerful, or wealthy when God called you. Instead, God deliberately chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose those who are powerless to shame those who are powerful.”
It’s God’s intention that we rely on his strength, his power, and his values to get us through life. It’s tempting to think that we are surviving on our own strength and talent and intelligence, when God wants to remind that in his world, weakness and brokenness and frailty reign supreme. It’s one of the greatest distinctions that mark us as Christians. If we have any power, we know it comes from God, not from an illusion of possessing it ourselves. If we see clearly, it’s because our sight comes from God.
So here's a list of values I think the church should adopt (also my current sermon series); teachings of the New Testament that are counter-intuitive, that may not make sense on the surface, but will bring us closer to God, boost our spiritual maturity, and give us some surprising insights into the spiritual reality of the world God created for us. These are some ways God calls us to be different.

1. We must SURRENDER in order to WIN (Matt. 19:16-22)

2. We must be HOMELESS before we can find our HOME (2 Cor. 5:1-10)

3. We need to become SIGHTLESS to really SEE (2 Cor. 5:7; John 9:17-33)

4. We must MOURN to be HAPPY (Matt. 5:4; Luke 23:50-24:9)

5. We’ve got to WORK before we can REST (Genesis 2:1-15; Matt. 11:28-30)

6. We must become POOR to become RICH (Matt. 5:3; James 2:1-13)

7. We must become LEAST to be the GREATEST (Matt. 20:25-28; Phil 2:3-11)

8. We must work at being FOLLOWERS in order to be LEADERS (Matt. 4:19; John 10:27)

9. We must be WEAK to be STRONG (2 Cor. 4:1-11)

10. We must DIE so that we can LIVE (Romans 6:3-4; Gal. 2:20)

On Fire

2005-04-13T13:58:00.000-07:00

Keeping in line with the last post...I wonder what would happen if we treated all communication like we treat the Bible? Would we not be considered less intelligent if we did? For instance, try treating the following statement as if it were from scripture:

"THE BUILDING IS ON FIRE."

Of course, we'd approach it word by word. We'd parse it and disect it until we thought we knew everything about it. We'd haggle and argue about exactly which building was being pointed to with the use of the word "the." We'd find out all the possible uses of the word "building" and trace it's usage in popular contemporary literature. We'd whip out our lexicons to determine the proper parts of speech and tenses of "is" and "on". Then we'd study "fire" to figure out the exact type and size of fire I meant, whether the small flame of a match, or the raging inferno consuming a building. We could do that. Maybe we'd learn. Possibly it might clarify something. But...if we treated that message in our "biblical" way...would anybody be saved?

Car Parts

2005-04-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to re-teach my congregation how to read the Bible in order to pull out the core truths instead of finding individual verses to debate endlessly. There's a Brian McLaren illustration that I like to paraphrase:

We've been taught that the only way to think is to analyze, therefore the only way to read the Bible is analytically. Analysis is fine, but it's also limited. Analysis can only break down things into smaller and smaller parts. To study matter, we had to break it down to it's most basic part. For a while, we thought the smallest particle was the atom. Then we discovered those are made of protons, electrons and neutrons. But those are made up of quarks. And now we have strings? Our scientific analysis has yielded tons of knowledge, but it suddenly too complicated to almost anyone to know what to do with. I think we make the same mistake when we relegate our study of the Bible to an analysis-only paradigm.

Think of it like a car. To understand a car through analyzation, you take it apart and look at it piece by piece...reducing it to a pile of hoses, belts, rings and other junk. Yes, you will learn a huge amount of information about that car...but you won't know how to use that car for its actual purpose...by analyzing, you'll never learn how to drive. We live in a world where, spiritually speaking, people are dying to learn how to drive. But sometimes all we're willing to model for them is how to change the oil. I yearn for a church that gives driving lessons instead of playing mechanic.

Whew!

2005-04-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

Yeah...started a blog, then abandoned it. I'm lucky it didn't die. But seriously, after the birth of a beautiful daughter and a transition into a new position (I'm now the Preaching Minister, not the college minister) I'm ready to do it for real.

I was just introduced to the website www.churchmarketingsucks.com. First of all: HA! Second of all, it's actually a great site! If you know me, you know I bristle at the thought of evangelism done through sales tactics, treating the gospel as if it were a set of steak knives ("As seen on TV: Jesus") that people will own if they just say yes. But on the other hand, marketing is happening whether we know it or not. Our attitudes about coming to worship show people what we think of our church. Our worship shows what we think of God (uh oh...). Marketing is a constant, whether we recognize what we are saying or not. My church's website markets us as out-of-touch and satisfied with the most minimal effort (sorry...). We are always marketing our churches.

But we have to be sure our churches are worth marketing. For so many years we've lived with the notion that having a church building to sit in and a few people meeting in it on Sundays made us a "church." But I'm not so sure. You may have an institution...but is it part of the Lord's Church (having "Church of Christ" or "church of Christ" on your sign doesn't fix it either...)? Are you doing the Lord's work? Or talking about it? Is it a place where everyone is welcome to come meet the Savior? Or are you busy figuring out who you can "biblically" exclude? Let's make our churches worth marketing...then market them well.

"The greatest challenge the church faces today is to be authentic disciples of Jesus ... That's one reason why the statistics on Christians generally don't differ from the statistics on non-Christians. We're not living a different life." -Dallas Willard

left turn

2005-01-07T15:19:00.000-08:00

Maybe I've been mistaken in starting this blog by using terms like "postmodern." The issue here isn't whether I agree with a new cultural philosophy, it's about the church answering some questions it's been ignoring for a while. Like, how can we be the church God calls us to be instead of some republican, american-ized, health & weath shadow? How can we be a part of actually redeeming the world, especially a world that is so tragically far away from God's purposes? How can we give the world a truth message that rings true, that complies with the reality of peoples' lives, instead of forcing them to see through our colored lenses? How can we stop mouthing the platitudes that we grew up with and say something meaningful, something helpful, something powerful? In short, how can we change the world? Postmodernism is really probably just a convenient way to do that. To realize that young people don't want to be part of a church that isn't interested in changing the world (and maybe we shouldn't be either?). To realize that to be more faithful to the truth, maybe we should be skeptical of our ability to fully grasp and communicate truth. To figure out that what we do is much more powerful, and much more important that what we say. Maybe we can see this as a beginning of finding away to break away from our selfish, imperialistic American version of the Gospel, and break into something life-giving, something fresh, something reconciling, something true. We want to hold on to what we've always had as "the best" way of doing things...but mostly, I think, it's because the old is comfortable, like the nasty old hunting shirt I'd rather wear than a coat. I hope we can learn to love to grow, to embrace change (that still sounds...unrealistic/untrue), to see things for what they ought to be, instead of what we think we can accomplish. I'm done, except for a good quote that keeps me thinking, by Walter Brueggemann. I hope we can believe it:

"The transformative power of God jeopardizes all of our gestures of equilibrium and our idolatrous images of God as the great stabilizer of the status quo."

still learning

2004-12-20T09:19:00.000-08:00

www.emergentvillage.com

I was listening to some lectures and discussions from a recent Emergent Convention (which you can find at the above site - the haven for emerging church leaders), and it really showed me how far from even entering the discussion most churches of Christ are. It showed me how shallow my understanding still is, how narrow my focus, how uneducated about Christianity at large.

It reminded me that aligning ourselves with Postmodernism is not the point...it's to bring the church to a place where we can make an impact in this brand new world...and a world that the Churches of Christ are struggling to understand. To deal with this confusing new place, we are sometimes trying to shout our old answers louder, without realizing that postmodern people aren't just disagreeing with us, they are ignoring us because we aren't engaging them on the same level. We're barely speaking the same language. We care about things they don't, they care about things we've never looked at carefully before. Postmodernism is the goal only in the sense that it makes us able to be useful in this new world. And that is what we need to learn.

Getting Started

2004-12-17T20:48:00.000-08:00

www.anewkindofchristian.com

Here's a link to one of the best websites for anyone wanting to familiarize themeselves with the postmodern church movement. It's from the title of a very challenging book by Brian McLaren, who is sort of the godfather and postmodern guru of the emergent movement. Check it out.

the goal

2004-12-17T19:43:00.000-08:00

Lighthouses

2004-12-17T19:41:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty new to the world of blogging, so I'm still experimenting. Hence the lighthouse picture. Lighthouses are sort of my own personal metaphor for my Christian journey. I'd like to end up like that. Tall and unmovable, visible to the world, a reference point for those who are searching for I can't provide, but I can reflect. Structures that don't exist for themselves, but only to help others (and in way, to be beautiful). I hope God is building that kind of life in me. I hope he's doing it in Christians across the nation so that his church will be transformed, so we will die to ourselves and get lost in blessing others. Houses of light...very cool.

Emerge & Restore

2004-12-16T15:24:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my blog, Emerge & Restore. This is an unapologetically Christian blog, admittedly geared to a relatively narrow audience. It is dedicated to pursuing a dialogue between the emerging postmodern Christian "movement" and the Churches of Christ. It is an amateur effort to help the church engage the culture and its recent postmodern shift and emerge as a community that is more faithful, more loving, more helpful, more culturally appropriate than what we've experienced in the recent past, without forsaking the beauty of and our heritage within the fellowship of the Churches of Christ. My dream is of an alliance with the Emerging church while still honoring our birthright as a group born of the Restoration movement(1800-1840).

I have no liberal or conservative agenda, no desire to do away with our distinctives, but I passionately want to ensure that Churches of Christ survive the next few decades in a manner that leaves us in a position to fulfill our mission as a church; to reach out the hands of Christ to a world that is crumbling - a world that desperately needs to know a carpenter from Galillee, who raised the dead and healed the sick, who calmed the wind and sea, and who confronted the evil and corrupt, the self-righteous and arrogant. He died for the sins of the world and rose from the dead - and he is the answer for us even in a postmodern, post-Christian world. He founded this community of the faithful that we call the church - and we must live up to our calling.

I'm concerned that the Churches of Christ are convinced that our allegiance to the over-rational, propositional mindset of modernism is equated with being faithful to the Word. I'm afraid we are approaching the world loudly proclaiming answers to questions that are no longer asked. We think our apologetic IS our faith and so we end up speaking a different language than the people we are trying to reach. If the culture around us is in transition, then as disciples, we must be too.

My name is Neal Whitlow and I am a 20-something minister with the Church of Christ in central Kansas. I have a wife, two daughters, and a passion for Jesus. If I have a contribution to make to the church, I think in will be in this arena. Thanks for reading. Soli Deo Gloria.