...pulled upwards to heaven by God...

Thoughts on Introversion and Church

2011-11-05T13:52:00.000-07:00

I was talking to an acquaintance of mine recently, and she was bemoaning the fact that she's at this church where, all things being equal, it should be pretty much the perfect church to go to.

But it's not. She feels disconnected, the church doesn't resonate with her. The pastor and worship leader recently approached her because they can see that she is a disciple of substance, she has things to contribute, there is a maturity and experience to her that will be a benefit to their church, and she's willing to contribute them.

But try as she might, she doesn't feel a connection with the people of that church. They don't come up to her to strike up conversations. They're more than willing to let her drift in the background.

Church, and in fact most human social groupings, are far more tuned to extroverts than introverts.

For an extrovert, every group of people is an interesting and exciting challenge. They can engage and converse and get energized, it's a charge to talk to people, to push, to see their ideas and beliefs interact with others. Any social group, whether church, or a game, or anything else, is a delight to some degree.

But to introverts, it's torture. Actively interacting with crowds of people, with uncertain demands, with wide arrays of non-arranged information, is simply draining. Walking into a group activity and actively deciding which things are really important is absolutely exhausting and troubling.

And there are ranges of introverts as well. Some are much more objective in their approach to life, while others are plagued by subjectivity and relativism from an internal basis. "I think this way, but I know others don't...what is the correct way to approach this? How much can I afford to not care how others will take this?"

Introverts can often seem very selfish to extroverts, because they want things on their own terms.

The things that I have learned so far in life on this topic are:

A. I must be internally motivated. I must approach people with a firm idea of who I am, what my strengths and weaknesses are, and what I mean to accomplish. I cannot afford to have unrealistic goals or expectations, because it will trap me in a focus on things that I will fail at, rather than on things that I can succeed at.

Some failure can lead to learning and growth, while other failure just leads to more failure. Much of it depends on whether I am proceeding from a strength or a weakness. We aren't all meant to be good at the same things, and if I spend my time trying to be good at something that I'm not meant to be good at, it will always be difficult and troublesome for me.

If I am going to engage in something which I know is a weakness, I need to have reasonable goals for that expenditure of my time...am I just doing this because of what I will learn from it? Do I actually expect to master something which unattainable for me? Are my expectations actually in any way likely to be fulfilled? Will I learn anything from it?

We can spend our lives doing things in service to the church, telling ourselves that it's self-emptying and servant leadership, and actually be wasting our time and others because it isn't within our calling or strength, and somebody else could fulfill it much better if they'd just get off their ass and commit. My own failure to be good at something not within my calling shouldn't be some call to martyrdom and self abuse; it should be an admission that this role cannot be fulfilled adequately by one person at this time, perhaps followed by a question of whether it is actually needed in that particular form at this time.

B. I can't expect people to come to me, because they aren't.

Since the model for behavior in churches is extroverts, people expect me to come to them. If I don't come to them, they are generally going to assume that I'm self-sufficient or even stand-offish, and they aren't going to go out of their ways to disprove this. If I want to be involved, I'll get involved.

The problem here, of course, is that while extroverts feel involved because they're involved (this is, admittedly, a broad generalization) introverts generally look for resonance, i.e., am I understood here? Does this reflect elements of me? Do I belong here?

An introvert can be incredibly involved and feel very self assured (or at least, come off that way) and feel entirely alienated with a group very easily, because the internal motivations that they act from don't actually resonate with the group at all, especially among the introspective.

There is a degree to which, being part of a church community, I'm going to hope that other people love me enough to get involved with my life, to intrude, to ask hard questions, whether or not it seems like I want them to. But in reality, that isn't our culture. we aren't that people. We don't tend to be that community.

To some degree, introverts have to build that community for themselves as an artificial construct, and then wait for other people to catch up, for their own health and sanity.

Thoughts?

Incarnation

2011-09-10T12:40:00.000-07:00

A podcast I listened to recently talked about incarnation, and the idea that much of our current culture follows an incarnational idea where Christ is born, and then later dies, is resurrected, and then goes to heaven, and that's the end of it.

But that more accurately, when Christ comes to earth, He brings something with Him that doesn't leave when He does, that in fact, spreads throughout humanity, and that it is an aspect, or even the purpose, of the incarnation. Christ in us. Us abiding in Christ. Incarnation.

The birth, the advent, is the planting of a seed.

In many cases, in our current culture, we want the church to be the end-all, be-all. Church is going to provide me with my education. It's going to show me meaning. It's going to give me direction. It's going to feed me.

But that's wrong. The church's job is to teach me to feed myself, to identify myself, to know myself as a disciple of God, in God, abiding in God, so that I can grow and work out of that identity.

I should hit a point where Church is no longer my main/sole source of identity, but rather is where I grow out of. My giftedness, my calling, is identified there, but this should lead me out into my community, out of my strengths, to lead and help others to grow.

To say that I am not called to be a leader is to say that I am not a disciple. If I live in the land of the blind, once I have learned to see, I must help others around me who have not learned this yet. If I refuse to do so, then sight is wasted on me.

The major problem with this is that as a culture, church has become rather inclusive. We don't know how to ask questions about things other than church, because you can't be outside of church while being in church. You're here or you're there, not both. Our paradigm for church often traps us within it, rather than freeing us to live out of it.

If being in Christ has freed me, made me a new creation, brought me self awareness and empowerment, and led me onward through the abiding provenient grace of God, then every action is a new step in incarnation. If I am not pursuing incarnation, I am, unfortunately, pursuing death. But our church culture is, in many cases, especially within the Protestant church, trapped in a dispensationalist waiting room dynamic where we wait for God to save us from this world. We are not engaged in collaborative eschatology, because we believe that that eschatology only leads to doom for this world, despite Christ's pronouncement of Regeneration and new life for creation.

How will we grasp and engage the Gospel in a way which pushes us out of our cocoon into life? How will we become infused with incarnation so that life is made abundantly available to others, so that our participation in the Aeon Zoe leads us beyond the confines of our observational life?

Notes on "Erasing Hell"

2011-08-07T10:53:00.001-07:00

1. Chan doesn't bother to define "heaven" or "Salvation", even though one would suspect that, since the book is about hell, defining the other possibilities would be important. Additionally, to whatever degree he does define salvation, it appears to inhabit Soteria far more than Sozo.

2. Shortly after entering into the territory of Universalism, he notes that Origen was condemned as a heretic for his beliefs. However, what he does not say, there or in the footnotes, is that the beliefs that Origen was condemned for had nothing to do with Universalism.

3. Chan also notes a passage where he shows Bell as a Universalist, but in fact in that passage, Bell was only actually noting what was believed by them...he did not actually state that he himself holds to this doctrine. But Chan presents him as doing so.

4. As Chan argues for why God allows sin, he does not do so in terms of love. Chan is, of course, very much on the reformed/New Calvinist end of things...a Wesleyan Argument which begins at love wouldn't really resolve for him.

5. Lots of rabbit trails. Chan often asks one question, and then answers a different one.

6. Mixes a lot of literal and figurative. Robes of white is alternatively literal/figurative, and somehow it's questioned how a robe of white could find purification while the wearer was entering the purgative experience of the lake of fire. Chan states that he went into the book praying to see truly, but he still enters into every topic with his own personal way of seeing things, which is very mixed, and presents a convoluted argument at best.

7. Judgement and retribution do not appear to serve Love, in how Chan uses them.

8. Chan argues that the bible does not say anything about second chances after death, but he does not deal with the question of whether the bible actually ever deals with anything outside of this life.

On page 36 he specifically talks about how frightening it is that somebody would create doctrine based on what authors in the bible didn't say, but he himself does this throughout the book. Things are assumed to be true by Chan, without questioning whether they are true.

"have you stopped raping your wife yet, mr. smith?"

9. Chan declares things in the foot notes (footnote 15) as 'getting off track' that have to do with God's character and how people wind up where they do.

10. On 48, he misquotes Bell about what hell is, saying that Bell only states that hell is here. You have to ignore major portions of what Bell said to get to this point. He goes into this in detail of footnote 4 in chapter 2, but without actually addressing Bell's point at all.

11. ACDC holds equal weight with Rob Bell on hell.

12. Chan does not bother to explore helenism and how it affected first century Jews. Jews believed these things and had words for them, so they are true of Jews... never mind that the words they're using are Greek words for Greek concepts.

13. He says that he isn't commenting on whether the beliefs of first century Jews were accurate, just what they believed, but this closely follows statements that God is progressively revealing more and more of the nature of existence to us. Leading the witness?

14. He equates Hades with Sheol, when they are entirely different places.

15. He talks about the purpose of Hades being retributive, but Hades wasn't Jewish, it was Greek, and Yaweh didn't put people there...Zeus and the rest of his pantheon did. Supposedly, Preston Sprinkle, a "new testament scholar" in his early 20's did all of the research for this and then Chan wrote it up...

16. He's quoting Ezra and Enoch, books which are specifically not taken as canon in the bible, as some of his evidence for what was widely believed by the Jews about Hell. Is this actually accurate, or are these just convenient sources? Are we going to see quotes from the Revelation of Saint Peter as well?

17. So, since Jesus grew up in a world where Jews believed in a hell as a place of fiery torment for unbelievers, and he spoke about it, it must have been true? Ah, the joys of circular reasoning.

18. He notes that Bell mentioned Gehenna as a garbage dump. However, the picture that Bell paints in his quote is nothing like any garbage dump we would allow. But then he goes back and quotes a bunch of NT verses, and inserts "garbage dump" for Gehenna, when what would be closer would be "Somolian battlefield". He's using metaphor badly to make a point.

19. He pins Bell's entire point about Gehenna on a scholar in the 12th century...without verifying if this is Bell's actual only point of reference.

20. On page 71-72, Chan states that the circumstancial events of life (psyche) are life. It's entirely possible that contrary to John, for Chan Aeon Zoe only counts after we die.

21. on page 73 Chan states that based on the sources they found which are, once again, merely what people believed at the time in the sources they quoted, that since Jesus never directly speaks against these sources, that it must be exactly as they believed.

22. He argues that since Jesus argued about other things, but didn't argue about hell, that that proves that hell must have been right...rather than dealing with the fact that Jesus ministry almost entirely dealt with who we are in this life. The entire hermenuetic of this book is one where everything in the bible points o the afterlife, the nature of which is a given, and which is dismissive of who we are in this life apart from salvation.

23. page 76 since Jesus never used hell to refer to how we treat each other here on earth, trying to say that how we behave toward each other on earth can be hellish is obviously a non point. Strawmen, marching on.

24. Page 77 ACDC continues to hold equal ground with Bell.

25. "Outer Darkness" and "weeping" always refer to hell, apparently. There no actual verification of this, it's just tossed in. "Nobody in Jesus day would have understood these terms in any other way, as we saw in the previous chapter". But these terms weren't used in that chapter. It's obviously in not in the wilderness outside the house where, at night, wolves and lions roam, and there is no defense against them. Yup, we're obviously thinking in terms of Jesus' world here.

26. Because Jesus uses Annihilation terms in several person, but eternal torment terms in one, eternal torment is probably the right one. Uh?

27. Punishment and correction are different things to chan. What is the purpose of punishment in the hands of a Loving God? This question is not answered. God will, after all, do what he wants, and who are we to question Him?

28. I don't punish my children for non-corrective reasons. Why does Chan punish his children?

29. Chan says that he's going to get into what the Greek says, but then says that he read a bunch of scholars from different denominations, and they all used the word the way that he believes it should be used, so it means what he wants it to mean.

30. Believe of Revelations 20:10, we know that everlasting really means everlasting, because everything in Revelations is literally true. Of course.

31. Chapter 4 (page 97) begins by reiterating that because Jesus didn't go out of his way to disagree with the sources that Chan quoted, He must agree with them.

32. Paul never uses the word hell, but he talks about wrath and punishment, and was obviously motivated by wrath and punishment for those who don't follow Christ, especially with regards to all of the persecution he himself suffered (98 to 99, bottom of page to top).

33. Page 99, Chan doesn't couch what Paul is saying to the Greeks in terms of how the Greeks would have heard it, just in terms of how HE hears it.

34. Page 101, Chan talks about not sidelining God's more difficult attributes for his more pleasant ones. But this entire book is about wrath. God's wrath is not, to Chan, an attribute of His love.

35. Page 107, death is metaphorical, but nothing else here is. Um?

36. Chapter 6, we're now dealing with predestination, and the idea that God created people specifically to go to hell for his Glory. He says that Paul raises this as a possibility, so it must be true. But he spends half the book bashing Bell for raising things as a possibility. I guess as long as that possibility is one that agrees with his lense of truth...

37. 131 Chan once again resorts to "God will do what God wants to do". What is the nature of the God that Chan follows? "whatever God wants it to be". Um?

Humanity

2011-05-26T04:20:00.001-07:00

I've been pursuing a train of thought lately about what it is to be human, and to pursue humanity.

To me, proceeding from my Faith, humans are a blend of what is material/animal, and what is spiritual. So that which is human celebrates or embodies both of those parts/elements.

There are many activities we can pursue in our lives, and almost all of them can be done in a human way, or in a more animalistic, or more spiritual way.

This is an overall flaw that I've seen with Christianity for some time...You can be as creative as you like, so long as all of the creativity happens in a box. Your stories have to have a happy ending (at least for the right people) and be fairly two dimensional. There has to be some moral lesson that's easily identifiable, even if such doesn't ever really exist in real life in that manner. If you're going to do anything supernatural, it generally has to involve angels and demons and spiritual warfare. It's all sort of insipid.

And don't get me started on Christian "music", which can only be measured by how able it is to be used in a worship service in church. The joy of niche markets.

But at the same time, there are many "secular" things (if such a term truly has any meaning...yes, I understand that the idea behind something being secular is that it is devoid of religious influence, which is sort of a double edged sword...it can also mean, at length, that secular is only devoted to the animal, rather than the human...) which are themselves over-focused.

There are many great activities...sex, eating, various other forms of activity...which easily become only about the immediate, about my satisfaction right now. But all of these things can also serve to draw us together with others, to celebrate the connections between us.

Scientists are increasingly aware that at a Quantum level, everything is connected, and that life is important, that connections to other humans are incredible valuable, and that when we deny those connections, or attempt to live against them, we live against ourselves, we deny our own existence.

How can anybody ever truly be who they are, who they are "meant" to be, if they are busy denying who they are?

Feelings

2011-05-01T11:07:00.000-07:00

Today, our pastor talked about how when we are baptized, we put death the hold that our feelings have on our lives...to wit, when it comes to service to Christ, our feelings do not matter.

Now, never mind the place that our feelings seem to have in contemporary worship.

What this also communicates to me is that my hurt, my pain, my suffering, doesn't matter when it comes to church, to life.

What has been communicated to me over and over is that, past a certain point of maturity in the church, any trouble I have, problems in my life, are my job to deal with. I am not to bring my brokenness, my issues, to church, because there are other people I need to be serving there. God can deal with my brokenness on my own time.

Maybe this is true to some degree. I suspect that there's a certain level of balance required here, as Dr. Larry Crabb found after writing "inside out", which sort of said the same thing.

But what I have found to be true in my life is that unless what I am going through makes sense to others, and has currency with their experience, it doesn't matter. I need to shape up and get on with the program.

It's very hard to listen to this sort of thing, to live this life, and to want to live.

Fasting

2011-04-27T13:57:00.001-07:00

Recently, the worship leader at our church announced that he wanted the team to begin fasting on Wednesdays as a sort of spiritual preparation.

Now, I can fast, but what it mostly does is make me really uncomfortable, and cold, and make it really hard to think, which is not good on a job where I'm having to constantly think very fast and accurately. It's just not particularly useful to me.

But even more so...fasting is just another stress in my life. It doesn't add anything.

Now, people will say "yes, but you have to prepare yourself, and going without can be a great way to meet God..."

Fine. Try going without sex or intimacy for the most part within a married relationship for 3 or more years. Try having the few instances where something nice happens be completely random and out of your control. Try spending all of your time struggling with lust and desire, without any good way to resolve or deal with it, through no fault of the other person in the relationship who is themselves struggling with a variety of physical and emotional conditions which render it frankly impossible for much to happen.

Damn right you do a lot of praying, and struggling. It's like being washed away all of the time, pounded by needs and thoughts. Try THAT fast.

Then come and talk to me about food. Once a week. Whatever.

the nature of love: a theology (part 2)

2011-03-20T05:40:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting a feel for what Oord is doing in this book (finished Crazy Love and a couple fiction books in the meantime, it's been hard going)...Oord isn't saying what I thought he was initially saying. And the book is not a thesis paper, so much as an exploration, so expecting it to work like a thesis paper led me to make some unhappy assumptions.

There are four terms that we get from the Greek language that we use to talk about Love (as opposed to the English languages' one, "love"), i.e., Agape, Phileo, Eros, and Stoa (C.S. Lewis wrote a book, literally titled "The Four Loves", that we tend to reference a lot, but the language is very evidently there for anybody who cares to look at the Greek version of the NT) and Oord is delving into his understanding of how those work.

He says Agape, unconditional love, is not the natural love of God, but is, rather, God's love toward those who are unjust, hateful, hellful.

He says instead that God's natural love is Eros, which responds to beauty and goodness by giving more beauty and goodness, and that forms of Eros which are selfish and lustful aren't actually love. This is an interesting perspective, and has lit off a number of thought bombs inside of my head. The book has suddenly become invigorating.

the nature of love: a theology (part 1)

2011-02-19T08:57:00.000-08:00

I received this in the mail the other day, and have begun to read through it and attempt a thorough investigation of it. I've been looking forward to this book since reading Oord's previous, "Relational Holiness", which pointed a lot toward Love but didn't define it.

I'm very interested in how Oord sets the stage for the discussion, but at the same time, I'm a little irritated. We're covering a lot of the same ground in early chapters here as Rollins' "How not to speak of God", but Oord's outlook seems much more locked. On page 12, in the 3rd and 4th paragraph, he makes comments about how the statements about love seem to contradict each other (with regard to the term "the world") but doesn't comment on what is meant by "the world" in these passages may be different depending on context, which seems to draw a false argument. It may be something that is covered at length later, but he talks about finding a coherent definition of love...if what love is toward, or affecting, is different, but appearing to use the same vague English word, then we're already at loggerheads for clarity.

His early response to mystery as something meaningful, but often used as an out when our theology fails is well taken, and I shouldn't be taking his preface as the argument itself. I will need to see, at length, how this treatise stands in conversation with "how not to speak", to make sure that I'm not jumping the gun.

Oord continues to define biblical love, stating that it is intentional, compassionate, and bent toward the overall wellbeing or shalom of individuals. But he does not say, strangely, that it is relational, and in fact goes so far as to say on page 48:

"I do not believe that we should say that agape is expressed within the Godhead. I think agape is best defined in terms of loving responses to evil. The members of the Trinity would not have done evil to one another, and therefore agape would not need to be expressed one to another. But we should say God expresses other forms of love within the Trinity."

This presents a major issue for me. Not only is the definition so far non-contextual/ relational, but Oord seems to be stating that Agape love is Love which is professed specifically in opposition to sin, a sort of curative to the fallen condition. My reading of the bible, between Jesus, Paul, John, and others seems to render Agape as more of the constant condition of God which will overcome all evil, rather than being prescriptive against it. Jesus calls His followers to take on His character, which is in turn the character of God...God loves as He is, not as He prescribes toward condition.

Tired

2011-02-16T14:26:00.000-08:00

I'm just really worn out, of late. There's so much to do, and so little energy to do it with.

There are moments when everything is really clear, and I can see what's going on, and I can see hope ahead.

But those moments are rare, and they're usually because I've read the right collection of things at the right moment. Even rarer, it's because I had the right conversation.

Increasingly, I'm not really sure what church is for, outside of self-perpetuating church.

There's this thematic bit we have in church about "being fed". People will leave a church because "they aren't being fed", or fire a pastor, or start a new program.

At it's heart, being fed is finding something you can get turned on by, that you can be passionate about, that you can engage with.

Yes, we have an entertainment based culture, and people like to be sponges. I tend to get my "fed" through engagement, especially on the intellectual side, but also in liturgy where I'm aware that the things that I'm doing with others are just as significant as they are for me. Which means that the Baptist or Nazarene Eucharist tends to be really bare bones for my taste...but I'm not sure what would really be better.

I've been told that church is for worship of God and the training of disciples, and that if I've gotten to the point where I'm engaged in part of that worship leading and training of disciples, then the church isn't accountable for feeding me at all anymore...I need to find my own feed outside of church.

But I was not raised with this idea in mind, and increasingly as I've aged, I've found it very hard to connect with the church, because so little of it is focused on me.

This sounds, and probably is, really selfish. But, for instance, if the natural progression of things was that you'd start out hiking, and once you knew hiking, and could lead wilderness retreats, maybe with some camping thrown in, you'd start rock climbing.

And somebody would train you to rock climb.

I feel like I'm being pointed out the mountain, with no gear, and asked why I'm not half way up it yet. There's nobody else on that cliff face, but...I should be on it.

This makes me pretty depressed. I try to engage people online, but the internet is filled with people trying to win personal battles about issues which have nothing to do with God, and everything with the ability of humans to be right.

It's just rough.

Sometimes...

2011-02-02T17:09:00.000-08:00

it's difficult to be anything but tired.
there are simply too many things
too many problems
too many shattered dreams
too may new rules
too many new problems
too many new tragedies

We want to fall, limp and spent, but we can't.
Too tangled in these webs we weave
too frozen
too bound
too intertwined in the lives of others
and the ongoing disasters of our own.

Oh Lord
Oh Lord
It's all coming apart around me
it's fragments and shards
slashing and flashing around me
and Lord
I have no idea where I'm going
I have no idea what you're doing
It's all beyond me.

Why am I here?
Why am I even typing?
What is the point in questioning
in trying
in breathing?

my heart has no refuge but continuing onward
folding the next basket of clothes
answering the next phone call
dealing with the next rules change
watching the next life shatter.

What do I hope in, Lord?
where is the life in this world around me?
Will we all be ground to dust?
What will justice mean when we are dead and gone?
What is shalom for, if those who inhabit your earth will not be here to see it?

Who would we even be, were we gripped by your wholeness?
If the finite is grasped by God...

I feel dead, but walking
trudging on, waiting for the final strike.

Where am I going, God? Why am i still here?
Is it only to make sure that others get through?

I'm so tired.

Searching 2

2011-01-01T10:46:00.001-08:00

(Goth Tourist 1 and 2 come on from up state left. They are obviously dejected)

GT1: Man, we've looked everywhere for Jesus, but we can't find him.

GT2: Yeah, everybody says that they have Jesus, but you have to live up (or down) to their standards before they'll let you met him. And even then...

(together): It's not clear that any of them actually know Jesus.

GT1: Look, it's one of those guys.

GT2: Huh? Oh, yeah. Let's see what he's spewing.

GT1: I was going to avoid him.

GT2: It's a car wreck kind of thing, y'know?

(They come to downstage right, and there is the Impressive church goer from scene one, on soap box, preaching.)

ICG: You all need to come to realize that you are sinners! that you are fallen! that you are worthless! and you can only escape the fires of hell and damnation if you turn to JESUS (Pronounced GEEE-ZUSSS!)

GT2 (sotto voice) So my life sucks, and the world is going to hell, but I need to realize that I suck, and will spend eternity in suffering, unless I turn into a joyless husk here on earth?

Listener 1: Yes, it's excellent news, isn't it?

ICG: Your hearts are filled with rebellion and turning away from God. You say to yourselves, "I am good enough without God, I can make it on my own, there is place for me in heaven." But Jesus sees you for your lying, empty hearts, and condemns you, and the wrath of His Father will be spilled out upon you in the midst of your hubris!

Listener 2: So we're all rebellious jerks who hate God?

GT1: I don't hate God. I just want to find Jesus.

GT2: But not that Jesus. Not the Jesus who hates me unless I jump through a bunch of hoops.

ICG: You despise God! You mock God and his principals, your very culture and lifestyle spits in the perfection of God! You are like the attendee, invited to the wedding, who killed the servant!

(a man who has been listening at the fringe steps up. He should be moderately ridiculous...a silly hat, some sort of apparrel which immediately announces that self image is not important to him. We'll call him Jesus' Brother)

JB: That's enough, man. You're totally harshing on my brother Jesus. (he stands opposite the ICG, but not on a platform, about mid stage)

ICG: (splutters indignantly) Your brother???

JB: That's right, my brother Jesus. And let me tell you, man, you're totally misrepresenting. And I can't have that, I've got to represent.

GT1: This should be interesting.

ICG: You godless hippy. Who are you to represent the everliving perfect God?

JB: Man, I may be a hippy to you, but I'm a new creation, whereas you're living in the past of your sin and destruction, and it's left you angry and hollowed out, and you're taking it out on everybody else. You keep telling these people how worthless and empty they are, but they see that same sense of emptiness and worthlessness reflected in you. How are they ever going to believe you?

ICG: it's not my job to be believed, it's my job to be without sin, and to follow God!

JB: Man, you've got it so wrong. But maybe you're following a different god?...

ICG: (Roars) WHAT DID YOU SAY???

JB: Man, you've got to back off. Jesus, man, when he came, he came to free the world. He said that he came that anybody who would abide in Him, who would follow Him, would be a new creation. They'd be like a spring of living water, a fountain of life welling up in this broken world, bringing life and freedom and hope and joy and peace to everybody around them. He said that they would fix the broken, heal the wounded, free the enslaved, that they would be a source of peace and wholeness. Man, when was the last time you fixed anything with this anger and self-righteousness of yours?

GT1: The man's got a point.

GT2: I wonder if this guy knows Jesus?

JB: Man, you bet I know Jesus, he's my brother. There's no brother like Jesus, nobody anywhere, and he's given me a whole new life. And the more I live in that life, the more I let my heart look like his, the more I don't have to be dragged down by what I used to be, by what I used to do. When I fall, I get up. When I fail, I see what I did and I fix it and move on. I don't need guilt, man, because I've got Love.

ICG: You say you have love, but it's a permissive, tolerant babble that will bring ruin and destruction!

JB: It's the love of Christ, man, and it's an unconditional call to the world to answer the open invitation to a feast for all eternity, the ulimate party. You say I'm killing the servant, but you're gunning down the guests, dude.

ICG: How dare you! You're watering down the Gospel of Christ!

JB: how can you say you have the Gospel?

ICG: Because I know the Word of God, and i teach it.

JB: You can't teach the Gospel without love.

ICG: Your love would damn the world.

JB: The Love I follow brings a world of Grace to creation.

ICG: Teaching Grace only excuses their sinful lives!

JB: NO, man, you're totally wrong. With Grace, they don't need sin anymore, because Christ and the followers of Christ fill that hole, and point them to a new grace, a new passion, a new life. You're just teaching death, and I'm not going to help you dig that grave. Peace out. (he starts to leave)

GT1: He's weird, but...hey, can we come with you?

JB: Yeah mean, no problem.

GT2: We want to meet Jesus.

JB: I'm all about people getting to know Jesus. I'll be totally glad to introduce you.

Observations

2010-12-05T06:09:00.001-08:00

The people who talk most about death to self also seem to have the highest need for personal spiritual experience.

The Christian Life has been a matter of assent for centuries, to the degree that we do not realize how what we have is but a pallid shadow of it's former intent. We have no measure of comparison.

We generally assume that our normal is the norm. It generally isn't.

The church does not equip is for the struggles that lie ahead. Only community does that, and church is generally not community on the level that it needs to be. And people continue to suffer in silence.

Sometimes despair is the honest choice. But will you go to God with your despair, or will you cup it in your hands and pretend that nobody else can see it? God won't necessarily take your despair away, but he will share it with you.

Pain shared is pain diminished; Joy shared is Joy increased exponentially (Spider Robinson)

If church is not a place where you feel free to share what is bothering you, what is eating you, what is breaking you, then where will you ever feel that? And church is not where you experience that, then what is the point of church?

Searching

2010-11-06T13:25:00.001-07:00

There are two men dressed in hawiian shirts with cameras on their neck. They should scream "tourist". Their clothing could be goth with lots of tatoos as well, it doesn't matter, so long as they communicate "other".

They walk on stage, and up stage left, to where there is a door to a church. They engage in RPS, and one of them loses, best two out of three. Obviously feeling defeated, he pulls a book out of one of the enormous pockets in his pants, and flips through the book. Reading out of the book to his friend:

Tourist 1: "I want to meet Jesus."

Tourist 2: *nods*

Tourist 1: Okay, here I go. *he enters the church building*

Parishoner 1: Greetings to you in the name of Christ!

Tourist 1: (hopeful) I want to meet Jesus.

Parishoner 1: *looks him over* Well, obviously you'll be wanting to turn your life over to Christ. Just come with me and we'll say the sinner's prayer together, and get you saved!

Tourist 1: *checks the book, looks up at the Parishoner suspiciously, then back at the book.* I want to meet Jesus.

Parishoner 1: Yes, yes, and as soon as you get saved, we can get to work on that.

Tourist 1: *looks confused and suspicious, and walks past the Parishoner, to where another is standing* I want to meet Jesus.

Parishoner 2: He says that he wants to meet Jesus. Does this look like somebody who wants to meet Jesus?

Parishoner 3: Oh, not at all. Why, you don't devotions every day, do you?

Tourist 1: Er

Parishoner 2: Exactly!

Parishoner 3: You don't attend church every Sunday Morning, Sunday evening, Prayer meeting Wednesday night, and small group, do you?

Parishoner 2: Preach it, praise the Spirit!

Parishoner 3: You don't sweat out at night the convictions of the preacher and how it reflects in your shallow, haunted life, do you? You aren't ruled by the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, convicted by Penal Substitutionary Attonement that you are worthless scum deeply in need of a Saviour, powerless to save yourself, devoid of all worth aside from what JEESUS gives you, Amen?

Parishoners 1 and 2: AMEN BROTHER! Praise the LORD!

Tourist 1: But I want to meet Jesus.

Parishoner 3: You? Don't make me laugh, you're obviously here one of those prank shows, you've probably got a camera crew with you at this moment. Making one of those post-modern pranks on the true believers. Well, we're not falling for it. Wants to meet Jesus, bah. What a load of hooey. You refuse to acknowledge our culture, our doctrine, but you say you want to meet Jesus? How Ridiculous.

Tourist 1: *walks out dejectedly to his friend*

Tourist 2: Well?

Tourist 1: Yeah, I don't think that they know who Jesus is either. I'm beginning to think that there is no such person as Jesus.

Parishoner 3: Do you hear that? He denies that there's a Jesus!

Parishoner 2: Praise God that we have you to defend us from the scoffers and false teachers!

Parishoner 1: Praise God!

Hands

2010-10-31T15:05:00.000-07:00

My hands are not effective
My hands are
broken
twisted
charred
they have been twisted
they have served
that which devours

Oh Gracious Holy Lord
please take these broken hands
please heal them
take them
make them yours
until your kingdom comes

.....

My heart is not effective
it twists
it lies
it burns
it shatters dreams
and demeans these things
to which Your Love returns

Oh
take this heart
My Lord
My God
resuscitate this husk
that from it life and blessings true
spring forth in loving trust

.....

My whole heart
wants wholeness
but I eat dust and horror
I devour empty dreams and denial
Am I what I eat?

Oh Lord
Oh redeemer
Only you can change this diet
Only you can free this soul
Only in you can I be beautiful

My soul trembles
My redeemer
that you would look upon me
that you would treasure me
that you would desire me

Lord, take this broken heart
This soiled soul
this empty spirit
and make them in your
Holy image
That I might also
treasure
and desire
and contemplate
You and Your creation.

.....

Oh Lord
How I cling to this control
it's chaos, I know it
what I cling to,
What I live for
It isn't at all what I want

Oh Lord
What will it take
to pry these cold, dead fingers
from this grip of death
so that Your Life
Your Kingdom
can truly break through?

My Love Not Mine

2010-10-31T14:45:00.000-07:00

Changes Forgotten

Will I be changed by Love?
As Love walks in my murder fields
Clearing away the barbed wire
filling in the trenches
defusing old mines and bombs
love asks, am I willing to change?

I say
"Love, I have been trying to change for you.
"I think nice thoughts when I can.
"I read loves book.
"I go to the place where the followers of Love gather.
"I read about what Love is doing in the lives of others.
"I give money to support the activities of Love."

Love shakes its head
Love smiles as Love weeps
and draws a weary arm across Love's unshaven face
"I don't want your sacrifices, I want your heart".

And I say
"Love, my heart is dead, it doesn't work."
I mumble
"I don't think it ever really has.
"You can have it if you want it...for all the good it will do you."

Love's head snaps back.
Love is furious
Love's wrath is on Love's face
the red glow of my hand print shows clear
on Love's face

Love says
"I will wait until you are ready"
"Until you call for me"
"Until you choose to live."

Will I ever be changed by Love?

.....

Failure to Accept

Will I refuse Love?
Will I drive it away
Chasing it with sticks and stones
and hurts
will I cry and scream after it
driving it before me
hoping to hear weeping and wailing (and gnashing of teeth)
that it's sorrow might match mine

But Love
Love is both furiously passionate
and gentle
merciful
as a lamb
Love says
"Not today, then."
Love waits outside my door
with a good book
and an apple
and a cup of coffee
Love puts the best face on my refusal.
Love waits
But Love knows
that I cannot.

Love wants to run to me.
(and embrace me)
Love knows that there is no justice
in the torture that I am subject to
(that I subject myself to)
Love gently pleads,
entreats,
to enter
to rebuild
to engage
to comfort
to create.

Love knows that people think Love is a monster.
Love knows that people find Pyhrric comfort in seeing Love
as wrathful and judgmental

But Love will wait.
Love waits until my screaming voice is hoarse
Until I fall on my knees in exhaustion
until I have given up
and wait in desperation
for an end.

Love enfolds me in Love's arms
Love brings cool water
blessings
silence
Love waits with me in the dark hour.
Love waits for me to let it in.
Love wants to enfold and embrace my heart.

.....

Exculpation

My heart, I see
is this point inside of me
where what I feel
what I think
what I desire
what I dream
all comes together...

But it's broken.

My heart needs a compass
a guide
or it seeks the short term
the desperate path
the empty way
the lethal
the left turn
as much as anything good
or pure
or true

And Love says
"I am meant to be there."
"I am meant to be part of that."
"I am meant to be included."
"I designed you to connect to me."

"Your heart isn't broken.
Your heart is starved,
thirsting beyond all thirst
needing beyond all desire
but
if you let me in
if you seek me
the true source
with all of your parched and desperate heart
A spring if living water
that has lain restive within you
will spring forth
in babbling
joyful
celebration
of Love, and all that you are meant to be
all that I intended for you to be
And you will truly live
And you will truly be
and you will truly dream."

Love begs me to open my heart
to life
Love begs me to unbar those gates
to fling wide the portal
to run screaming for the freedom of His arms
to encounter Love and Life
Forever.

2 Kings 17 and onward

2010-10-18T19:08:00.000-07:00

From 7 onward in chapter 17, the writer, who we realize at this point is writing from Babylon, looking backward, has been going through all of this just to communicate to us how Israel fell from what God had instituted it to be. A lot of the repeated statements, the observations from context, begin to paint a very different picture of the world of the Israelites then the one I knew as a child. The very culture of the surrounding area begins to inform something that begins to cry loudly that much of what I have taken for granted about the bible, about it's culture, is wrong.

It's worth noting that even though there were worthy, Godly people in Israel, such as Isaiah and Ezekiel, that God still judged the people as a whole for sinning against Him, and He lifted His hand of protection, His favor, His blessing from them, and they fell to the various enemies around them.

It notes that they practiced the customs of the lands around them, that the Kings practiced customs that were from the lands around them, rather than that were of God. These included raising temples in the high places to other gods, allowing homosexual temple prostitutes (and in a male oriented culture, the only purpose of these cult prostitutes could be to have sex with other men, as women were not of significance).

"And the people of Israel did secretly against the Lord their God things that were not right". In their hearts, the people Israel were something other than God's, as all secret things belong to and originate from the heart, and it's the heart that God seeks above all other things.

"They built for themselves high places in all their towns, from watchtower to fortified city". This echoes babel...whenever the OT mentions high places, it seems to be indicating places of worship. One notes that the temple held the highest place in Jerusalem. They created places where the objectives of their heart could find worship, apart from God.

"They set up for themselves pillars and Asherim on every high hill and under every green tree". Asherim was thought to be the mother of the gods at that time, and was represented by a pole, or a grove. She was widely worshiped in the surrounding cultures, and was held to be the wife of El, creator of all things (see Snow Crash for an abbreviated, if entertaining, outlook on this).

These people, who God had called to be His, weren't His. They were from the same family, a family that had been rescued and called by God, but in many ways, they were exactly like the people of other nations around them. They had the same idols, the same gods, the same sexual practices and preferences, the same foibles, etc. They were not in any way set apart, or seeking to be satisfied in God. Holiness held little attraction for them...it was something for priests.

"And they burned their sons and their daughters as offerings and used divination and omens and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking Him to anger. Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them out of His sight. None was left but the tribe of Judah only."

One remembers the description of God on the verge of the flood...His heart sorrowed because of the sheer relational evil of mankind, the depths to which their selfishness had taken them, and it's destructive impact on creation. He destroyed them with a flood for the good of creation.

People like to talk about God's wrath, but they ignore the fact that God acts on behalf of the good of all creation, not just from some personal slight. In fact, David goes on at length about how God is quick to forgive, to forget, to bless, and very slow to anger. Even though the majority of Kings of Israel (and Judah) were quite evil and selfish, God was extremely merciful toward them, and repeatedly, showed them great mercy where he could have allowed destruction to fall upon them from other nations. He called again and again for them to turn their hearts toward Him.

It's worth nothing that the Israelites could have done everything that God asked them to do, and not have been incredibly restricted in how they lived their lives. It's just that they thought that everybody else had it better. Having a King was better. Having temple prostitutes was better. Burning your kids and burying their ashes under your doorstep was better.

To be the person who says "God brought us out of Egypt, and fed us, and cared for us, and gave us this land, but I'd rather kill my kids for good luck..." that's truly a darkened heart, a heart turned from goodness, from Love, from community...a heart that seeks only it's own understanding and pleasures.

And yes, we see reflections of ourselves in this. But at the same time...can we truly ask ourselves what would be different? Would we know it if we saw it? What does the law of Love truly look like?

What God's got to say

2010-10-04T19:26:00.001-07:00

There was an event this past Sunday night where everybody gathered together after a week involving fasting and praying to say what God had told them.

Not everybody spoke, but most everybody seemed to be in agreement that God had said something to them.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. It's not clear if we're actually walking in the realm of "I heard an audible voice", or if it was "there seemed to be this theme to things, and these is the "word" I distilled it down to".

I always get suspicious about things like this, because people tend to hear what they want to hear. Or rather, when you get them to the right place, they can hear what's going on in their heads anyway, because things clear out.

OTOH, maybe I'm not making enough space, though anybody who can tell me how to clear out space and make it easier to focus inside of my head without drugs is welcome to step up.

The fellow facilitating the event chose to hear what everybody had said as expressions of desperation, which was his theme going into the event. And that's fine... but it seems like he was essentially saying that people were feeling what they had been feeling when they started, which is fairly redundant to my mind.

Overall, I've felt pressured and disconnected from the whole business, so I've kept my mouth shut as much as possible so that I don't rain on anybody's parade. I'm obviously not getting whatever is going on, and haven't been in increasing amounts. Such is life.

Thoughts on the Spirit

2010-09-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

I am constantly bombarded with statements that essentially say, if my faith was enough, if I was open enough to the Spirit, then I would encounter the Spirit.

These are people for whom worship (singing/music) is a time of esctasy and joy. They are people who have witnessed healings, and who have engaged in speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit, etc.

These are people who have witnessed miraculous healings in their own lives and their own children. Though they seem to have little room for anything which has been claimed by the "New Age" camp, whether or not those are things that God put there for His use.

My belief on these things is not that they don't exist, but that God doesn't use them with me, they are not the gifting He chooses to pursue with me.

I made a statement to this effect in a leadership meeting last night, and several of these people became very upset.

But I would venture the following. Just as I do not enter into experiential worship in the same way that they do, I also do not get upset if we don't have a really big encounter with the Holy Spirit every week. God is still there. God is working. I do not need fireworks or even a small, still voice to have absolutely Faith that God is doing things. If God chooses to use fireworks, that would certainly be comforting, but so far, He has not.

I certainly believe that people who are pursuants of experiential worship on a high degree are people who are comforted by this evidence of God's presence, and see it as necessary in all things. But what they may not be allowing is the certainty that God is present and working even when they cannot see it, and that they do not need to suffer guilt when God "does not show up".

Contrarily, it has been suggested that I have a closed heart, and am putting up walls to what God can do, and as a result, He respects this and does not act. My only counter to this is that I have been begging him to heal my heart for years, and so far, it has not changed anything a great deal, and I fear that I am doing things which are not in His will within that scope. It's so very difficult to tell.

a dramatic idea

2010-08-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

Lights up on an empty stage, projector screen in the back, three chairs along the front stage right.

Light up on the narrator.

Narrator: So, there's this girl in your church. Let's call her...Mary.

Narrator: Huh?

Narrator: Ah, okay then, I'm informed by our legal department that it would be incredibly inappropriate to use the name "Mary" for this example. Hey, what's in a name anyway? No?

Narrator: Okay, let's call her Judith then. Is Judith okay with everybody? Okay? Ok.

(Pictures start to come up on the screen behind the narrator, starting with pictures of a young girl, possibly finger painting, eating cookies and juice, playing sports, etc.)

Narrator: Judith has been in the church here whole life. One of the nice ladies in the choir led her to Jesus when she was 6. She's had leading parts in the church children's cantata every year. She was an honor's student at her school, went to Belize on missions multiple years in a row, the whole enchilada.

Narrator: Now, when she was 19, that jerk, you know him (but we don't say his name), he left her at the altar. Probably for some floozie. You know how they are. Yeah, we were all heartbroken about that, but you know Judith, she's a trooper. We all continued to hope that she'd find that strong, Godly man who would make her life complete.

Narrator: You know. Like we do.

Narrator: Now, a couple of months ago, this friend of Judith's started visiting. Her name is Meredith. Is Meredith okay? Yes? No, she won't say that word, okay? Ok.

Narrator: Judith and Meredith have been coming to church together for a year. They help out with the children's classes. They help deliver meals to the elderly. They advised the teens on planning their next missions group. They both have an incredible way of delivering personal points of bible study, and you can really see this glow about them that says that they're both on fire for Christ.

Narrator: But.

Narrator: Recently, it's become clear that there's a glow to them that...well.

(Judith and Meredith have grabbed two of the chairs from the side. They are sitting together, about mid stage, as he's talking. The spot zooms in at this point, and they are holding hands. And looking at each other.)

Narrator: Wellllah! We can't be having any of that now, can we? Break out the barbed wire, get the machine guns...somebody has to inform these two lovebird that they are now an abomination, deeply in need of repentence! (The narrator pulls up a bible and begins leafing through it) where's that passage? Ah, right. (passage is displayed on the wall.) So, first, one person needs to address them about their fault.

Concerned Citizen 1: (walks right up to them) (Screams and admonishes) This is an abomination! What you are doing is evil and intolerable! How could you betray us like this! You must repent right now!

(Judith flinches violently. Meredeth shelters her beneath her hands and her bible, and glares at the man).

Narrator: Hrm. Doesn't seem to have taken. Next step, a group of concerned elders.

(A melange of male voices are heard in the background, adminonishing, delivering judgment. Judith begins to cry, to hide behind her chair, reacting as if she's being struck. Meredith attempts to shield her, to protect her.)

Narrator: Yeah, not seeing the repentence here. Oh well, there's only one thing for it.

(A picture of a full church congregation shows up on the projector, with a male voice saying "will you not repent of your filthy, abominable habit, in the name of Love and Christ!")

(A gavel bangs, and closed doors to the church show above, and the two girls walk sadly and woundedly away.)

Narrator: Ah well, I guess that's justice for you.

Narrator: Or was it? I mean, really...if that's justice...what are any of us doing here?

Narrator: A gold star to the first person to name what has been missing from this entire proceeding?

Narrator: No?

Narrator: I'll give you a hint. They were cast out in the name of it.

Narrator: That's right, from the back row. Love. I'll get you your star next week, promise. Well. Maybe.

Narrator: How good to know that we are righteous, that we live in moral correctness...but where's the Love?

Concerned Citizen 1: Hang on now! (jumps out into mid stage). You can't tolerate that kind of sin! What kind of body would we be if we gave succor to that sort of thing in the Holy House of God? That's simply not tolerable. What kind of Christian do you call yourself, anyway?

Narrator: Oh, don't worry, you guys have already kicked me out, I'm just here for the show. Did you know, by the way, that up until a century or two ago, actors could not be buried in hallowed ground? Heh.

Narrator: So, we aren't required to show love when it might be mistake for tolerance? We have to avoid sin, and all appearance of sin, before there's a place for love? Is that it?

2010-08-29T06:01:00.000-07:00

If what we see in the bible is affirming of relationships, mutual submission, total sacrifice on the part of the husband, and mostly support for single Christians otherwise, then not only do I not see condemnation for homosexual marriage, I also see no particular help for those who are living as celibates within marriage. Paul is clear that this leads to temptation; however, it is our duty as christians to mature to the point where we see the falseness of temptation to acts outside of marriage, and we live in spite of those temptations.

So it is my duty to learn to live without the physical intimacy that I long for, and to see this as an opportunity for growth, and perhaps future ministry. And at some point, I can hopefully die and not worry about it anymore.

Until then, it's just figuring out mechanisms for mentally working around the resulting depression.

How quickly we forget

2010-08-22T13:40:00.001-07:00

If we will not express love toward others, we will express hatred or indifference.

If we will not allow ourselves to feel love for and from others, we will sink into darkness, stoicism, and anger.

If we will not pursue peace with our whole heart, our heart will become consumed with disquiet.

We must be the change we wish to see, or be buried by the vagaries of life.

Entropy

2010-08-21T07:16:00.001-07:00

In this moment
In this place
I am a child of God
A follower of Christ
and yet full inhuman.

A broken cup, waiting for the morning coffee
that will surely gouge the lip
of it's drinker

Did I but ask for an egg
I was not given a scorpion,
Yet I have become one.

To forgive is not to forget
Yet I have forgotten, forsaken
so much...

I have misplaced my heart
I have forgotten my love
I have sacrificed sanity
on the altar of continuity

I'm not even sure
that the words that I speak to Him
Mean what I want them to say.

What is truth
that I may speak it

What is truth
That I may live it

How would I know love
if it bit me
and twisted my ankle?

If my perception of love
has no bearing on the validity
of the love that you give
(in your own way)
Then does it matter if I am loved?

What good is a heart
if the only response to life
is sacrifice?

What good is caring, or compassion
if all roads end in
"yes, but we must!"

How much further must I walk
before I can stop?

Unity

2010-08-19T06:28:00.000-07:00

I know of many people who grew up in the church, but left because they felt that it had nothing to offer them, except insults to their character and intelligence. I was in fact surrounded by people like that during the time that I was attending a Baptist College, Cedarville, back in '94 - '96.

Throughout the course of my life, I have witnessed various Evangelicals complaining that people accuse them of hypocrisy and judgement, and quote verses about not quitting, and the need for unity in the church. I know that these people are quite earnest in their arguments, they aren't trying to manipluate people (beyond what they're used to, culturally), but they're simply missing the point.

I was having a discussion about this with our assistant Pastor, Kevin Atkinson, the other day. One of the major issues that has always gripped the church is the drift toward dualism, and issues with being, knowing, and doing.

Many Christians (heck, most humans) break life down into either knowing or doing, especially in our modern age.

It could easily be said that most Evangelicals/Fundamentalists are gripped by knowing. It's important to them to know specific things about God and Christianity, and be able to haul out verses and arguments that specifically back those up. Comfort and Cameron epitomize this with their "way of the master" witnessing tool, which centers around using a flawed logical argument to show people that they are sinners and condemned, and so have to do whatever they say they do.

Most of these arguments are based around the following:

-Upholding a specific moral code
-The need to be cleansed of sin, so as to avoid hell
-The six day creation
-The flood
-The virgin birth
-Armageddon
-Unity of the church

Despite the fact that those arguments have nothing to do with life here on earth at this time for the most part, don't have anything to do with what Jesus talked about, and generally can only be upheld by telling people how wrong they are, which makes for a difficult witnessing platform.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to lean toward doing. Charity, Environmentalism, Acceptance, Tolerance, etc. become the overall focus. If we do the right things, we live like Christ. The problem with this standard is that, once you get past the list of activities, there's very little authentic lifestyle to it...it's still an accepted list of activities, and in many case precludes any kind of hard stance on what it is to actually be Christlike. However, it is attractive to be "doing" focused, whether conservative or liberal, because it gives you attainable objectives to aim for.

The third option here, breaking the dualistic standard, is being. If I am focused on being like Christ, on being with God, then everything I do and think comes FROM that relationship with God, rather than bringing me to it, or doing for them. This is incredibly difficult to communicate to people who are trapped in specific paradigms of doing and thinking, because the difference seems slight.

But to people who have been rejected by the church, who are told that they are heretics and antichrists who are scoffers against God, they can easily see that these people are far more focused on what they know and can argue, or what they do and can accomplish, than who they are.

Somebody who is flawed, but is able to admit that they are flawed, that they are not perfect, that they do not know, and that they accept this and they accept other people like this, is somebody who is truly following Christ, who is studying Paul, who is embodying the example of John. What they do and what they know is not nearly as important as the relationship that they embody, both with God, and with the people around them.

The hypocrisy of the church is intolerable precisely because the church insists on a perfection that it cannot attain itself, and yet it so often demands of non-Christians before it will accept them into relationship.

But Jesus made it clear, without relationship that is non-manipulative, that does not put standards and rewards before people who are not aware enough to understand them, that does not make demands that break realtionship, people are not actually following Him.

In fact, what drives people away from church is that they sense the spirit of antichrist within those churches, and knowing that they are hollow, that they are not authentic, that they are centered on action or knowledge instead of being and relationship, that it will be a waste of their time, and they go elsewhere.

Hope and reason

2010-08-16T06:09:00.000-07:00

There are a number of aspects of the Christian life which are meant to bring hope to the world.

But different people find or perceive hope in different ways; find and perceive Love in different ways.

When we demand that everybody find the same enlightenment from the same hope, we get into very dangerous waters. But then, I've begun to believe that there is no such thing as a safe channel...just better blinders.

So. I know that resurrection awaits me, at the hands of a loving God who knows my needs and seeks the reconciliation of all creation. And that's fine.

But it's a fact, like the sun rising in the morning, or new fees on my cable bill. It's going to happen, it's out of my hands, me being pleased or unpleased by it isn't going to change it at all.

The inevitable doesn't bring me any particular hope or pleasure. As well to be pleased that gravity continues to function today, or that the oxygen/nitrogen mix of our air continues to be survivable. It simply is.

This is a baffling perspective to people who live in terms of battles and victory, who have a worldview in which we are all part of a victorious army that is only waiting for God to declare "game over", not realing that battle is a limited metaphor, rather than the whole shape of the truth. Those especially who have been given over to a dualistic worldview have taken this to very dangerous and destructive ends.

I've begun to suspect that "the place where God is, where He dwells with the resurrected mankind" will look very little like what people want it to, or what our common mythological folklore will look like. We've imagined too little, too limitedly, and then rejoiced while the world around us burned.

God wants the best for me, but if the best way that I can serve the Kingdom is by suffering terribly with cancer, or tortured to death, or witnessing the death of my family...then God will allow it to happen, because He's not just working for me, He's working for the regeneration of all creation, and I am just a small, vital part of it.

So Joy, Peace, Hope...these things are elements that I rarely and briefly glimpse. Mostly I am ground down by daily reality, by stresses beyond my control, by elements that everybody else seems to take for granted. I cannot assume that the world will somehow take on a form pleasing to me, or that I will at some point find peace in things which are inevitable. I must either find a way through this, change utterly, or be destroyed in the process.

Morpheus had to die, because he could not change (enough) without dying. Perhaps I am the same. I don't know.

Eikon and Semantics

2010-07-31T05:27:00.000-07:00

I've spent much of the last decade + getting into various fruitful and fruitless conversations with people who either are or used to be Christian. I think it's fair to say that most of us have fixated on some aspect of Christianity and overfocused, so that everything we argue or discuss is filtered through a specific viewpoint...even those of us who are fairly post-modern.

What this has done for me is show me how many variations there are on who Christ is, or what Agape is (or Love), or what Christianity is, or what the Gospel is, or what Church is for, or what Worship is for, etc.

Or even what the purpose of Theology and Doctrine are.

Years of fruitless discussion online between people who are angrily certain that their viewpoint is correct, but who refuse to define my terms, has convinced me quite thoroughly that if people will not fulfill the first rule of communications (the way you mean to communicate something may not, in fact, be what your audience hears, unless you take pains to make sure that you are speaking your audience's language) then communication doesn't happen...we just talk past each other through different semantic variances.

The dream of Eikon for me was that people would come together and discuss and live discipleship. They would follow Christ, they would love one another and their surrounding community, and they would strive to be authentic in doing so.

So some definitions, just to try to trim down the possible variances in this statement.

When I say "that people would come together", I'm talking about community, relationship, and some measure of accountability. One will note that this is essential in "live discipleship". Discipleship which consists only of the individual coming to know the Word more, or taking on better leadership roles in the church, is meaningless so long as it does not form deeper reciprocal relationships.

When I say "discuss", I mean that people would both talk and listen, and be in an environment that encouraged that sort of encounter. Churches do a lot of talking (and expect congregations to do a lot of listening)...encouraging people to talk back out of their listening is a fragile and delicate thing, because it's so unusual within our culture. It requires a number of things:

A. Being willing to allow for silences, and discomfort, while people find the heart to move.

B. Being sure that the Spirit will move and work even if we don't see it, and that our giving up control over the direction of things allows God much more room to move among us.

C. Not structuring things as much in terms of "the one guy talking turns the conversation on and off as he needs to". If it's in community, the group has to move the conversation. This can lead to sessions where a certain conversation is repeated, but sometimes allows for different facets to come out, or for things to be worked out. The point is not to "win" the conversation, but to allow people to explore things that were not previously allowed them.

D. Conversation should lead to action, or it all becomes "just talk".

When I say "follow Christ", I mean that they would really focus on Christ, and abide in Him, and pray to Him, and emphasize things among each other to help in becoming like Christ, seeing Christ in their lives, acting out love and forgiveness and mercy and grace and patience and humility and the other fruit of the spirit toward one another. This also follows with authenticity...people have to know who they are going to be before they can do what they are going to do in a manner which will have them identified with Christ...being and doing are, once again, very reciprocal, relational things.

However, much of what Eikon is about, at this time, is (so far as I can tell) a ramping up process of knowing...the being and doing won't be an emphasis for a year or two, in terms of how I have perceived what has been communicated to me. So, Eikon is about things that we can do because we already know who Christ is...but not necessarily knowing who Christ is, or actually doing things.

When I say "Love one another"...this hits the crux, doesn't it? So many of us have such weird and extreme expectations of love. We expect emotion, and often obsession, and some really dangerous and non-reciprocal things.

But I have firmly come to believe that you often have to see love to learn it. I practiced love at Eikon by showing up regularly and serving where I was able, even at the cost of talking to others in order to get things done and make sure that people could get out of the building on time, and that people who needed to have conversations could have them. As a result, there are a lot of relationships I didn't form, which could be a very Martha way of approaching things. But somebody has to do the work so that other people can have the conversations, and I was willing to be that person.

All too often, the perspective that people have about churches is "it's that place I go to to learn stuff and hang out with people". There isn't a focus on "what can I do to serve, what can we do together to make this a bigger and better thing as a community". This is, to a large degree, because church is something that serves and pleases ourselves, rather than something that forms a community that models Christ.

Which is also because many of us are from churches that model atonement and justification rather than the Gospel.

Authenticity is a quality missing from many churches. Authenticity means that you speak and LIVE passionately and earnestly what it is to be Christ, and you put all other considerations aside. You worry far less about what might offend people, or what will make you successful, and spend your time instead trying to express Christ and Love so clearly and absolutely that there can be no doubt..."and they will know you by your love for one another".

I've got piles and stacks of little booklets and discussion packets, and lists of the Eikon "theology". Many of them work only at the surface level...there is an ongoing assumption that we are already on the same page and already have the same understanding of things, while at the same time, every arc of 'services' at Eikon has skimmed the surface, trying to show how people actually have very different understandings of church, God, life, Gospel, love, etc. Rather than finding Unity, the services have focused far more on how we're not focused, and how we don't have any particular core together other than how we all see different things.

BUT.

That's my perspective. I think that (or have come to see that) there are people for whom what is said expresses precisely what they believe, or close enough to fill in the gaps. There are people who experience love, and community, and fruit within Eikon. There are people for whom what is discussed at Eikon is almost too deep, too much, too intense, and they can barely stand it. So they have found somewhere authentic, somewhere real, somewhere that truly touches who they are, and where they are going.

I've been waiting for over a year for the light to come on, and to truly understand what's going on at Eikon, and what I'm meant to be in it. Instead, I've felt more and more alienated within it...I love talking to John and Ryan, but I've increasingly felt that when I talk to Ryan, I wind up talking past him, that he is hearing different things than I'm saying, and after a year of conversations, I'm no closer to understanding what his filter is for perceiving what I'm saying.

I think that Ryan sees himself trying very hard, and communicating very clearly but carefully, and I think that he has a very firm goal in front of him that he's pushing toward.

But I am unable to understand that goal from what he is saying. I can only perceive this as a failure on my part, that I am so bound up that I am incapable of perceiving what he is trying to communicate to me, that I am so impatient that I am unwilling to wait to see it. That I am so bound up in previous church traditions that my expectations have blinded me.

Or...I have hit the point where I am only willing to be in a certain kind of community, and Eikon is definitely not that community at this point. And...I live in a completely different town, and can't afford the gas to drive down to Little Rock as often as would be necessary to truly form and maintain the relationships within that community, and should have paid attention to this glaring warning sign when I started this venture. I should have looked realistically at what was required of this community, rather than just how cool the people were, and truly accounted to myself for whether I could pay the price required.

Mea Culpa.

Criticism

2010-07-25T05:28:00.000-07:00

As a culture, we don't offer or receive criticism very well.

Especially within the church, where, as we all know, everything is black and white, many people tend to react as if any criticism is a harsh attack, lacking in grace, and cannot be allowed.

But Paul himself says that as we grow in maturity, we should be open to the rebukes of those who love us, knowing that they only intend for our good, and that we should accept these words with patience, humility, and thanks, and ponder them. Or words to that effect.

I know that I've been told many things that are wrong. The way that I find out how wrong they are is to toss them out in discussions as bold statements and see who will correct me, and learn from the correction. By all accounts, this makes me strange, but it's a very convenient way to correct my knowledge.

Additionally, when I receive criticism from somebody, it shows me a window into who they are and their perspective, which is tremendously valuable. There are things that I might find out about a person through criticism that I never would have known about their insecurities, their doubts, their issues by just talking about pleasant things. Those harsh conversations, those places where agreement breaks down, are some of the most valuable moments in our lives.

Do I take criticism personally? To some degree, but honestly, not for long. Somebody has a bone to pick, an axe to grind, and it comes directly from their personality, their needs, their perspective. They perceived something in the place where they were at that time, some need for validation that drove them to speak up. Taking offense at that perspective or allowing them to drag me down is merely saying to myself that I depend on them for my wellbeing, for the cushioning of my ego. And that isn't reliance that I can afford.

I know that God is with me, that He is working constantly to turn me into the person I need to be, and I know that His love and rebuke are worth far more than those of the people around me, and are what I need to be truly attuned to. This doesn't mean that I don't listen to those around me...but I don't attune the rise and fall of my mood to anybody but the one I am attempting to model. If at all possible.

Beauty

2010-07-10T10:29:00.001-07:00

Creation exists because God wills it to be. Each breath that is breathed, each atomic particle that orbits, does so because God continues to will it so.

In that, God is in all things, and all things are in God...though God would exist without those things, which creation cannot claim of itself.

Alone of all creation, man was created to exist in rapport with God, as if we were radio transceiver for some heavenly frequency that only transmitted irresistible beauty and unconditional love 24/7. Indeed, Jesus says, "He who abides in/trust in/exists in me will be a spring of living water, flowing out to nourish and heal all of those around him."

What we are presented with the Fall is the choice of man to stop receiving that Celestial signal, and engage in a passionate worship of everything short, dark, and evil that enters into their minds. Thousands of years of horror and depravity, lit by isolated moments of beauty and incredible creativity among monotony and thronging waves of mediocre apathy.

We all know, in our heart, that we were made to be so much more. Our hearts yearn for that call of beauty and life.

Understand: the fall was not a subscription to a list of moral crimes and failures, but an active turning from beauty and life. As God said, "When you do this, you will be dead".

When we return to God, we return to life in all things, in all places. We return to seeing ourselves as transmitters of the eternal bandwidth, line units in bringing all of creation back into line with the force which delights in wonder, which delights in delight, which delights in Agape.

There is a very high ladder to climb, which our earnest and willing teacher urges us to climb, to get closer to the signal, to rejoin the song, but far too many stop at the bottom rung. "I have reached the ladder, it is enough to know it is there until I die". But we are not called to know that the ladder is there, but instead we must climb, we must rejoin the signal, we must become broadcasters of the fantastic, of the lively, of the holy. We cannot truly say we live unless we will do so.

So, here's the deal

2010-07-02T14:25:00.000-07:00

Genesis 6-9 details the events of God deciding to wash man off the face of the earth. Which is all well and good.

But.

Nowhere in this story does it talk about people's reaction to Noah. There isn't any conversation bits with people coming up and asking Noah why he would do this crazy thing, etc. Just God's instruction to Noah, Noah's building of the ark, loading of the ark, 5 month voyage, settling, etc.

But growing up...

Repeatedly, I was told that Noah was mocked and derided by his Christless (yes) neighbors for being so silly as to build the ark. Despite there being nothing in the bible about this.

Further, I was taught (in multiple classes, in multiple churches) that the reason why these people were mocking Noah was because:

A. It had never rained before.
B. It had never flooded before.
C. Nobody had ever seen a boat before.

As a result, what Noah was doing was entirely ludicrous and unbelievable, and they all laughed and pointed mocked, until they all drowned. The end.

Now, there may be some reference in the NT about people not believing Noah about the Ark, and that's fine. But.

Isn't it far more likely, if we're inventing reasons for Noah to be mocked, in light of what the bible doesn't say, that:

A. It rained all of the time, as it does now.
B. There were often seasonal floods, such as what used to happen to the Nile every year which fertilized the fields, until they built the Aswam dam.
C. Noah was located uphill, inland, where there was no way for water to reach the Ark, and no flood had ever reasonably occurred in that location that would actually reach where the Ark was...thus making it seem fairly ludicrous.

I find this much more reasonable of an explanation.

Never mind that in that region, there are signs that a great flood occurred...signs that occur nowhere else on earth. And certainly, the writer of Genesis had no idea that they lived on a planet, or that there were other continents. Any body of water is referred to as a sea, one will note. These were people who lived in a specific location, and did not believe in any place that they or people they knew hadn't been to. "here, there by monsters..."

Just...no wonder so many people ditch this gig, when it's demanded that they have faith in things that aren't in any way necessary, and just seem to justify being jerks to people.

Faith

2010-06-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

I was saved when I was 7. Or so.

I grew up knowing the rules, and seeing the world in black and white, and knowing what was necessary to be a good Christian.

But i'm not sure that I really "met" Christ until was in my late 20's, until I hit the point where I knew what love was, where life became about growing in patience and humility and regard for others.

I did not meet Christ through the church. I met everybody's hope for Christ, and all of the mental baggage juggling, but not Christ himself.

I love Jesus for all sorts of reasons that I almost never encounter in church. Yes, I appreciate what He did 2000 years ago. But I love Him for what he's doing now, today, here, in and through me and so many other people. For us. With us.

I can live in all of the propositions and problems and discourses...but that's all eventually going to lead to death.

Or I can truly seek life, I can truly seek to love others as they are, to find humility in my lack of knowledge, my lack of surety. But I have to make that decision, to be open, to be thankful. To reach out.

Church is not going to help me do that, because church is really just a group of other humans struggling with all of the same things that I am, and many of them are using church as a way to hide or mask or subjugate those things, rather than growing through them.

Witnessing

2010-06-11T05:07:00.000-07:00

There seem to be two (yes, dualism is dangerous, it's more like four or five) viewpoints going forward:

Salvation is recognizing that we're doomed to hell, that Satan is out to get us, and that only if we believe that Jesus died on the cross can we be saved from the wrath of God and escape the fiery torment of hell forever.

or

Salvation is recognizing the blessing of God is open and evident for all people, and that only by trusting in Christ can I become a source of living water and blessing and healing for all people, living out the Kingdom of God in this time of Jubilee for all people here and now, and going forward into what God has in store.

One of these focuses on how we can avoid sin and live moral lives and not lose our salvation, and how we need to convince other people that they're guilty, and we all need to escape this evil world.

The other focuses on how God is already blessing the poor in spirit, is already on the side of those who hunger for righteousness, who are meek and downtrodden, who don't have a chance in how things normally are, and seeks to go out to those in need and bless them and life them up, and sees salvation as something that is active, and current, and here.

You can easily go out to strangers and tell them that they're guilty and doomed unless they accept your ideology. It's a lot harder to tell them that Jesus loves them and wants a different way for them if they don't know you enough to see the love in you.

It's Amazing...

2010-06-08T18:24:00.000-07:00

No, this is not a post about Aerosmith, fanboy.

It's Amazing how we can spend all day arguing and talking and worrying about the church and theology...

...and never actually think about, or talk to, Jesus.

But this is not a "so we need to think about Jesus more."

What this says to me, again, is that so much of what church, what Christianity, has become about, is not about Jesus.

It's about arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

It'a amazing how much we can talk about Jesus, and his Passion, and his ministry, and never once do so in a way which talks about our relationship, His love for me and mine for Him. If we want to talk about that, we have to go hang out with the poets and the musicians, because there's no room for love in the house of "getting church right".

It's amazing how much of church is actually about rationalizing ways and reasons to avoid doing what the Holy Spirit has been very strongly suggesting we do, possibly for years.

It's amazing how much of Christianity has absolutely nothing to do with Christ, and absolutely everything to do with culture.

As my friend Dave says...at some point, you have to begin to seriously question what you actually gain by claiming to be a part of Christianity, especially if what you really want to do is identify with Christ.

Digging for Fire

2010-05-18T20:05:00.000-07:00

Everywhere i look, there are Christians talking about how wicked the world is, how judgment is coming, how they're looking forward to when God comes to judge the righteous and the non.

There is no grace, no mercy, no sorrow in their tones. Just self-righteous reckoning with how they're about to get their reward/escape, and everybody else is going to get their just punishment.

This is not what Jesus came here for. Not what he called for disciples for. It's easy to find churches full of Pharisees, but where will I find disciples to teach me the way?

Oh Lord, have mercy on us.

Direction

2010-05-01T07:10:00.000-07:00

My Dad told me time and again, growing up, how every time he needed a mentor, or direction in his life, something (or somebody) showed up. It wasn't until the last decade or so that he hit a point where it wasn't obvious what he was supposed to do or where he was supposed to go.

My whole life, there's been very few times where something seemed immensely important that I do it, or go to it, and there has been...one or two people, here or there, who had an effect on actually shaping my life, rather than just providing a sounding board.

But for the most part, I feel very much adrift.

I've taken in a great deal of information in the last 5 years, and overall it's made things extremely difficult. I am aware of very few things that I can be truly sure are actually true, or accurate. This is not important so much because I need to be able to go and show off to people that I know what's true, as much as that, if I'm going to be teaching, or talking to people, and it's about things that I myself am still trying to figure out, I could wrongly influence them rather than teaching or leading them correctly, and I really don't want to do that.

The picture that I've gotten from the bible when it comes to "discipleship" is one of community and accountability and compassion and agape, where people are involved and talking and growing together, and can ask tough questions and expect reasonable responses, and really try to grow in their love together and for one another, even when it's difficult.

For most of the churches I've been in, discipleship is showing up to church on sundays, and tithing, and reading your bible and memorizing verses, and maybe teaching a sunday school class, and saying "amen" when the pastor says something really good.

But it isn't relationship. It isn't spiritual growth that's tied to actual lifestyle. It's sin management rather than Gospel exploration. It isn't missional incarnation.

Now, people will say to me, "Todd, there is no perfect church" or "How do you know that you're not expecting too much of the church?" or "You need to have more grace for people."

But I read about, or hear about, people doing these things, and being very excited and connected (not excited all of the time...I think that being excited all of the time would probably be incredibly unhealthy) and they talk about precisely how they do it, and why they decided to do it, and what they're basing it on. So I know that it's out there. I know that people are doing these things, and saying "this is what it means to be a Christian, and to live like a Christian". They're affirming each other, and involved in each other's lives, rather than peripherally once a week on a sunday morning when they shake teach other's hands, ask "how are you doing?" and then move on to the next person.

I know that I'm introverted, and depressive, and anxiety prone. Some day, when we're not broke all of the time, maybe I'll try to get one something like Lexapro to fix some of that.

But that isn't going to fix my lack of relationships or direction, or the overall frustration that I feel at how empty and pointless my life is. I just keep trucking along, doing what I can do. But it's all that I can take, at this point. I'm just passing the time.

Authority

2010-05-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

I've been attending a particular small group on Friday nights for a couple of years now.

About a year ago, the leader of the group got yanked, along with several other leaders throughout the church, to get into a bible study group so that they could actually see how to read and interpret the bible correctly. Our small group toddled on without him, doing our best in the midst of various occurences.

And now he's back. And he and I were having a conversation last night, and a number of questions came up.

Now, some context. First of all, I am a very analytical, and perhaps subjective person. I pick up details from context, from what is said and not done, etc. I've got years in the church (protestant, baptist and reformed, some bible...) and I have a fair familiarity with how churches run.

The one I most recently left, that this small group is out of, tries to go with a fairly distributed model of leadership. Which is to say, the Pastors just do their specific things (one is discipleship and teaching, the other is preaching and renewal ministries), and they generally expect people to step up and, if they can fill a need, fill it.

What's significant about how this church both runs and communicates is that the people who rise to leadership are mostly relatively ordered, extroverted people, except for the two pastors, who are both introverts, and get really worn out by the whole process. Which is probably more of the overall pattern.

Suffice to say, if you can recognize a need, and put together the resources to meet it, and aren't blatantly defying the mission statement of the church, you're good to go.

Perhaps not unnaturally, the majority of work in the church is performed by the same small group of people. They do worship, nursery, sunday school teaching, leadership programs, and most of the small groups. I can think of one family that runs a small group that doesn't do any of those other things.

Anyway. The question was put to me...I have a degree in theater, and a definite vision for theater, but I never made any steps to either A. correct programs that were going on, no matter how flakey they were, or B. run my own. Why is that?

The answer to A. is that:

1. If somebody is already directing a show, you do not take over their show. You make suggestions, but if those suggestions don't fit their schedule or their needs, you keep it to yourself and let them run things as they wish, even if that means changing almost everything within the last week of production.

2. The only way I could step in and make corrections myself would be if I had the authority to do so. Unless the church, or the community, had essentially said "this person has the authority to do X, or to make changes, and you need to listen to him", trying to do so would only create hard feelings, for the most part.

3. I do not move forward on anything unless I've been given the authority to do so. I have a lot of personal preferences. Some of them may not be relevant at all to what's going on, and may actually have a detrimental effect. I keep my mouth shut until leadership says that i need to act, and gives me the authority to act.

This may seem like a really odd way of doing things, especially to all of the type A, driven extroverts out there.

I am a subordinate. I only act within a leadership structure. I very gladly subordinate myself to others, make clear what I can do, and then act within that command structure. If I can see how things would be better, I speak up, but I am not going to go start something on my own, precisely because I know that I am a subjective person, and I need some sort of editorial or counter force running on me to make sure that I don't run too far out of reason. I know my own weaknesses, and how often I expect that something is true which in fact has no basis in what is actually happening.

Additionally, on the "why didn't I..." is because the people with the talent and drive to do something theatrical would almost certainly be from the same group that's already doing everything, and it would not be fair of me to step in and ask them to do yet another thing. Church doesn't work like that, it dies. It explodes. People have already left over that sort of thing. Just stretched too far, too thin.

Now, at this point I'm involved in Eikon (yes, my mornings are at Greenbrier Nazarene, but that's been an analytical nightmare, and I know I'm getting the wrong subjective signals on some things, but overall it's been a headache for the most part) and it's already been established from the outset who the folks are who are the movers and shakers. They've got their vision, their direction, and that's fine. And I think that once again, there's an expectation that if I wanted to do more than I have been, I would step forward and ask for it or demand it. It doesn't help that I'm the only one of them who doesn't live in Little Rock.

But there's a lot that I watch happening and wonder to myself, "where is this going" or "what could I do better for this, with the right interaction?"

I do make suggestions, or write emails, or whatever, but I strongly get the feeling that I'm aiming past what Ryan wants in this situation, so I'll wait until I'm asked, or until my expertise really fits the situation.

Until then, I'll keep brewing the coffee.

I don't know what title fits here

2010-02-28T04:41:00.000-08:00

I had a conversation last night that I had dreaded having for a while. Talking to this person, there had been a tickle in the back of my mind that this was going on.

This friend of mine (and relative by marriage) has decided that he's not a Christian. Probably hasn't been for a while, hasn't really believed in God for some time.

When I asked him what the origins of this was, he stated that he had been told these things about God, especially in the Old Testament, all of his life, that were really scary and painful and confusing and hard to believe, and nobody had ever given him a good reason NOT to doubt these things. And so he had stopped believing them.

Additionally, this person is extremely struck by social consciousness and social justice, and while the church talks big about that sort of thing, they mostly don't do it. Especially around here, the church mostly hunts and fishes and talks about sports and observes a certain social classism.

So, this guy I know, he's leaving the church so that he can find a way to go and do the sort of things Jesus did, minus the Gospel. Because you can't do those things as part of a church.

Now, I've been commenting on that sort of thing around here for a while, and the rest of my family frankly thinks that I'm exaggerating, that I have no idea. They do lots of good things (and this is true, a woman came in who has a newborn and no job, and people helped her out, and led her to the church, which helped get her some food, etc.) but I think that for the most part, the attitude of the local community is that you should come in and attend and get to know people, and they'll pray for you, and maybe your life will turn around.

But the other day, I was told about somebody who had come to the church who was dirt poor, very low on Maslow's hierachy of needs. This person had nothing in common with the other people in the church, though they tried to involve him, engage him in conversation about hobbies, etc. The person eventually left, and they have no idea what happened to him.

I think that if the church can only engage you socially, and has no bearing on your actual lifestyle (or ability to live), that in some cases, it's of only the most fleeting use, especially to somebody driven to make the world better, and who has been told that God only has use for people who are already living moral lives. (i.e., the exact opposite of the Sermon on the Mount).

I think that this is part of why our program of getting our kids 'saved' while they're young is so flawed. They're going to keep growing, and learning, and we can never afford to assume "oh, well, they became Christians when they were six, everything is going to make sense to them, and they'll continue just fine." Increasingly, many of them are falling away because they get to college and the things that they were taught (poorly and dogmatically) as children perform very badly in the face of science and school. If what these kids has been taught is closed minded and refuses to embrace questions and creation, they are going to leave us. Are leaving us.

And arguing with them about it is just going to push them further away.

Which may be a good part of why Christians in the first church, in Jesus day, only witnessed to adults. If what we're offering isn't good enough for adults, and has to be brainwashed into kids, then we must have a terribly weak Gospel.

And the Gospel I have is actually a powerful, living thing. *sigh*

Consequences

2010-01-21T14:22:00.001-08:00

We've been sold a picture of marriage that's wrong. And it's wrong in so many ways that it gets us coming and going, so that it's hard to tell where you'd have to start to fix it.

First, we've been told that you can find this one person who is really going to complete you, to make you utterly happy, to turn all of life to roses and happiness and the nice end of a romantic comedy. And we say that we don't believe in Romantic comedies, but as a culture, we believe in happy marriages.

Second, we've been taught that if we don't get married, our lives are incomplete, and that when you get married, you get this incredible, mind blowing sex with this perfect person you've found, and life is grand.

If you are not happy with the person you are, as you are, and able to grow from there, then everything else is ash, and you are lying to yourself.

You make promises to your spouse, and you get more privileges with your spouse (not entirely good ones) that you would never get with roommates...but overall the entire purpose of marriage is building a stable life with another person and (possibly) providing for offspring, getting a safety net for old age, etc. It's a microcosm of community.

If you cannot be as complete as you're ever going to need to be sitting by yourself in an empty room, you are certainly not going to be more complete because you married this person and pinned all of your hopes and dreams on them.

When you wake up one day, and the bubble has burst, and you realize that that person isn't the culmination of all of your dreams, and you aren't going to get to add new chapters to Sting's tantric sex book with them, the correct response is not "oh, well, I need a new partner." Instead, it's "So who have I been this whole time, and how have I been misidentifying my spouse's role in completing my life?"

Nobody is going to come and show you the way, and fix you, and make the path clear. You have to be working on this yourself. You have to be open to realizing that everything you've done this far may be a total waste of time, that you've been lying to yourself for years about what you're capable of, of what your dreams are really substitutions for, etc.

You cannot be the person you were created to be if you refuse to acknowledge that other human beings cannot take the place of God in your life, cannot complete you, cannot make you whole.

Thoughts on Faith and Development

2010-01-12T05:37:00.000-08:00

It struck me this morning that most Christians probably don't encounter any community focus on faith within their churches.

Please don't mistake me, plenty of churches will call for their members to have faith, and thus give, whether of their money or time, with the faith that God will respond.

In some cases, there's a call to faith through prayer, that God will answer (if not in the way that we're hoping).

But there's little actual exercise within the church bent on increasing the faith/trust of Christians/Disciples. Especially within the Protestant model, the expectation is that on your own, at home, in your own life and devotions, your Faith will just automatically increase, and you'll bring the benefits of that to your church experience.

There are a number of flaws with this. Foremost is that as a result, Faith is an entirely individual aspect/effort, and it can be incredibly weak in many cases, and because your own measure is Sunday morning in many cases, there's little framework for responsible comparison, because if anything, Sunday is a day for hyperbole in the name of worship.

Second is that most people are going to enter into the easiest life they can manage, which is generally not the best way to pursue Faith. But people don't think about doing things "the easy way", and certainly, they're going to think that they're doing things the most rational and sensible way.

Lastly, and most importantly, the bible repeatedly shows us that people develop, and are expected to develop, within relationships. The Twelve were specifically dealing with Jesus and each other constantly, and having reason to see Faith develop. Paul went out on all of his journeys with at least one person in accompaniment, often probably more. When the Quakers send people out to witness, they always do it in pairs.

When we can talk with and share with another Christian, we sharpen each other, as, says Paul, "iron sharpens iron". Not just quizzing each other over bible verses memorized, but literally giving one another the ability to compare and contrast, to enter into jobs together, to say "we will do this together, and see how God proves Himself through this, to the expansion of our Faith." I have seen a lot of groups, here and there, do this sort of thing, and I think that it helps enormously in the growth of the Faith and trust of Disciples. It just isn't considered as necessary as sin management in most circles.

Further Thoughts on the Dreamer's Manifesto

2009-12-12T18:48:00.001-08:00

C. Church should be for passion, for expression of the energy of Christ, for experiencing the Kingdom which this world should be coming into conformity to more and more through each individual heart.

In so many ways, Christianity has become about mental conformity to a set of beliefs and doctrines, with an overlay of practices and rituals.

Whether this means that you're Catholic, or Orthodox, or Anglican, or Episcopal, or Presbyterian, or Calvinist, or Reformed, or Methodist, or Nazarene, or any one of the million flavors of Baptist, or whatever else...

You are, in this day and age, at least within North America, likely to have grown up in a Christianity which has no bearing on your life, but only on your afterlife, and your overall moral compass.

For many people, the only way to be passionate about Christ is through zealotry, through how urgently Republican or Democrat they are, for how they argue on the abortion issue, or the homosexuality issue...

And in doing so, they throw away everything that makes Christ great, and healing, and incredible, and different. Following Christ becomes just another sect issue, something to make "us" different than "them" and get heated about, so that we can feel like we're involved in something meaningful.

Or maybe we'll get into it over what version of the bible we use, or what kind of worship music we use, or whether to use projectors or hymnals, or whether to have multiple services...the list goes on.

None of which gives me the sort of passion that allows me to see a person in pain and instinctively want to run to them, and shelter them, and share with them, and bring them healing.

I want to be passionately, zealously in love with people, with humanity, with bringing them the healing and mercy of the resurrected Christ who died so that they could have healing and freedom. I want to be on fire on a way which brings warmth rather that violence, which brings shelter rather than walls and structures, which allows growth rather than a stunted kind of perfection.

I believe in a church that sees people in terms of how they could be, and reaches out to help encourage that passionate growth into truly becoming the sort of people that God created us to be.

However dangerous, or troublesome, or uncertain, or doubtful that may be. Growing is always a difficult process. But done right...it produces people who are utterly sure about who loves them and who they are, and ready to go into the world to be that to other people.

More thought on the Manifesto

2009-11-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

People write Manifestos when they want to draw a line in the sand.

They can range anywhere from a number of pages, to entire volumes. Mein Kampf comes to mind, as well as The Communist Manifesto.

Perhaps best known within Christian circles is Francis Schaeffer's excellent "A Christian Manifesto", which is perhaps one of the better written books on the sanctity of life, whether in terms of abortion or nuclear war, that one could ever hope to read.

I even posted a Manifesto of my own several posts back, regarding what I saw as the creative individual's drive within the church, and which I have not finished expanding on at this time.

Which brings one to question what, precisely, the Manhattan Declaration/Manifesto is actually hoping to achieve.

An analysis:

I can't really argue with the first section about abortion and euthenasia, except that it somehow avoids Nuclear War, executions, and other matters. But then, Schaeffer's "A Christian Manifesto" did so so completely that really, why not just reference it and move on?

But the second section on marriage...

"In Scripture, the creation of man and woman, and their one-flesh union as husband and wife, is the crowning achievement of God’s creation. "

It's unclear how we get to this point. Since Christ makes it clear that post-resurrection, there won't be any marriage, the idea that marriage is the crowning (as in, end-all/be-all) achievement of creation seems rather questionable.

"Marriage then, is the first institution of human society—indeed it is the institution on which all other human institutions have their foundation."

Once again questionable. The one woman/one man marriage is a relatively young structure in the overall scope of civilization...even many of the men we see in the Old Testament who were the fathers of Israel...Abraham, Jacob, etc. had multiple wives, many of whom were actually concubines. It's fine to want to make points about marriage, but historically, the statement is not supported, so to attempt to use history to support the point is a poor beginning.

"In the Bible, God Himself blesses and holds marriage in the highest esteem."

Actually, Jesus seems to indicate that marriage is an option, but isn't the only option, and actually detracts from our ability to serve Him properly in some cases. There is some ambivalance present.

"Vast human experience confirms that marriage is the original and most important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all persons in a society. Where marriage is honored, and where there is a flourishing marriage culture, everyone benefits—the spouses themselves, their children, the communities and societies in which they live. Where the marriage culture begins to erode, social pathologies of every sort quickly manifest themselves."

I would like to have seen some anthropological documentation of this statement, if only in footnotes.

I would venture that the erosion of the stability of marriage in our culture comes far more from our image of ourselves, our individuality, the drive to be happy, the need for instantaneous satisfaction rather than long term stability etc., rather than a focused lack of meaning to marriage itself.

In society a century or more ago, marriage wasn't the end point, it was a means to an end. As a result, you could have an arranged marriage and be fine...the issue wasn't whether you loved your spouse, but whether you were building a legacy together. This point is avoided by this document, to the weakness of it's overall coherency.

I would have liked to have seen more definition of this, even perhaps linked to separate supporting documents in footnotes:

"We confess with sadness that Christians and our institutions have too often scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage and to model for the world the true meaning of marriage. Insofar as we have too easily embraced the culture of divorce and remained silent about social practices that undermine the dignity of marriage we repent, and call upon all Christians to do the same. "

I worry about the usage of the term "dignity", as it's quite often linked to the pride of individual, and I see no examples anywhere of things that we take pride in leading to Godly behaviour.

"To strengthen families, we must stop glamorizing promiscuity and infidelity and restore among our people a sense of the profound beauty, mystery, and holiness of faithful marital love."

We abandoned popular media at the turn of the 20th century, both as a response to Darwin, and the popularization of moving pictures within former burlesque halls (for an excellent history on this, check out "Pop Culture Wars, Romanowski (Media professor at Calvin University)). The fact that popular media has very little bearing on Christian morals and memes is OUR FAULT, and protesting how filthy it is is useless. Unless we choose to get involved and engage the culture, we are only complaining that we don't care for the volume of the neighbor's music, rather than involving ourselves with the neighbors.

"We must reform ill-advised policies that contribute to the weakening of the institution of marriage, including the discredited idea of unilateral divorce. We must work in the legal, cultural, and religious domains to instill in young people a sound understanding of what marriage is, what it requires, and why it is worth the commitment and sacrifices that faithful spouses make. "

The problem with this statement is that the perspective which makes it possible has not existed prior to this century, and the time in which divorce was much less common (though certainly not infidelity, which is simply documented more clearly) was less common for far different reasons, to wit: A divorced woman was useless and likely to die 150 years ago unless she had family to fall back on or wanted to become a whore. Now that anybody can get a job, and women can do quite well for themselves, divorce as an escape is much more accessible. Simply stated, this document continues to read context into history that did not exist. It's like making judgments on Columbus...had we been there, we would have thought he was making smart decisions, because we wouldn't be us.

"It reflects a loss of understanding of the meaning of marriage as embodied in our civil and religious law and in the philosophical tradition that contributed to shaping the law. "

Property, sealing treaties between nations, etc. Marriage among the peasant class has almost always been an issue of wealth an inheritance, not religion. The secular is firmly invading this document, and the materialistic thought process that follows it (especially considering the capitalistic nature of the society of most of it's authors) makes this statement extremely suspect.

"It would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in any intrinsic way, about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and protection of life. In spousal communion and the rearing of children (who, as gifts of God, are the fruit of their parents’ marital love), we discover the profound reasons for and benefits of the marriage covenant. "

The person who wrote this paragraph has a certain romantic undertanding of marriage in the past of his/her own. Probably his. Childhood itself didn't exist as a stated age until the last 80 years or so, if that. Children were to grow up as quickly as possible and become useful, with girls being married off as early as 13 or 14 until the last century. There is no such thing as a marriage covenant (in the "big C" covenant structure of the bible), so much as there is a continuing awareness that marriages are structures of power and economics within society. One wonders if this individual has read Zinn's "A People's history of the United States".

"They fail to understand, however, that marriage is made possible by the sexual complementarity of man and woman "

Is this referencing Complementarianism? Separate roles, women in their place and men in theirs as leaders and controllers of all matters marital?

"Marriage is what one man and one woman establish when, forsaking all others and pledging lifelong commitment, they found a sharing of life at every level of being—the biological, the emotional, the dispositional, the rational, the spiritual—on a commitment that is sealed, completed and actualized by loving sexual intercourse in which the spouses become one flesh, not in some merely metaphorical sense, but by fulfilling together the behavioral conditions of procreation. That is why in the Christian tradition, and historically in Western law, consummated marriages are not dissoluble or annullable on the ground of infertility, even though the nature of the marital relationship is shaped and structured by its intrinsic orientation to the great good of procreation. "

Highly romancitized, and historically inaccurate. Henry VIII formed the Anglican church precisely because he needed to find a wife fertile enough to bear him offspring. Yes, the church (Catholic) was strongly against this. But the Catholic church also enforced a structure of non-marriage of their clergy to protect against inheritance rights of those related to the priests who had donated land and wealth to the church. Marriage has a long history of property and power rights, as much as anything else, and to idealize this "ozzie and harriet" way of looking at reality is extremely flawed. Not that it isn't to be desired, but flawed nonetheless.

"They wonder what to say in reply to the argument that asserts that no harm would be done to them or to anyone if the law of the community were to confer upon two men or two women who are living together in a sexual partnership the status of being "married." It would not, after all, affect their own marriages, would it? On inspection, however, the argument that laws governing one kind of marriage will not affect another cannot stand. Were it to prove anything, it would prove far too much: the assumption that the legal status of one set of marriage relationships affects no other would not only argue for same sex partnerships; it could be asserted with equal validity for polyamorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers, sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships. Should these, as a matter of equality or civil rights, be recognized as lawful marriages, and would they have no effects on other relationships? No. The truth is that marriage is not something abstract or neutral that the law may legitimately define and re-define to please those who are powerful and influential. "

'Dogs and Cats living together! Total Chaos!' Wow, the slipper slide at it's mostly intensely illogical. So now we're using civil law as a proof for our standing on following Christ. Or are we really following Christ at this point? how much of this is actually Western Tradition, a return to the mythical "Golden Age"?

"No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a marriage. Marriage is an objective reality—a covenantal union of husband and wife—that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice and the common good. "

Marriage is an objective reality? Please define "objective reality" and give three examples. So Civil marriage is exactly the same thing as religious marriage?

"If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow. First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience is jeopardized. "

Wow. So, we only have religious liberty in America because of Marriage? Somebody needs to tell the framers of the Constitution that they got it way wrong...

"Second, the rights of parents are abused as family life and sex education programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlightened understanding recognizes as "marriages" sexual partnerships that many parents believe are intrinsically non-marital and immoral. Third, the common good of civil society is damaged when the law itself, in its critical pedagogical function, becomes a tool for eroding a sound understanding of marriage on which the flourishing of the marriage culture in any society vitally depends."

This depends upon an understanding that America is truly a Christian nation, with Christian law. Otherwise, in a civil, secular setting, this argument is relatively basis. yes, our laws come from a place, but they were also always meant to be going to a place as well...even if that place wasn't inherently or even welcomingly Christian.

"Sadly, we are today far from having a thriving marriage culture. But if we are to begin the critically important process of reforming our laws and mores to rebuild such a culture, the last thing we can afford to do is to re-define marriage in such a way as to embody in our laws a false proclamation about what marriage is. "

So we're going to use LAW to enforce Christian morals and ideals. Once again, this is where I see Phariseeism.

"And so just as Christ was willing, out of love, to give Himself up for the church in a complete sacrifice, we are willing, lovingly, to make whatever sacrifices are required of us for the sake of the inestimable treasure that is marriage."

Zealotry. This is a frightening statement.

Last section: Religious Liberty

"The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners. Isaiah 61:1 "

So, we're opening a section on Religious Liberty with the start of the actual Gospel message, for which our Lord Jesus willingly was mocked, tortured, and killed by the powers that be, rather than fight them for proper expression. We get into extremely dangerous territory here.

"Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. Matthew 22:21"

Refering to money, not our right to make laws protecting our right to practice our religion the way that we want to. "For my Kingdom is not of this world..."

"It is ironic that those who today assert a right to kill the unborn, aged and disabled and also a right to engage in immoral sexual practices, and even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be recognized and blessed by law—such persons claiming these "rights" are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife. "

We're trying the whole thing together here, you'll note, stating that the right to life and to traditional marriage are cornerstones of religious liberty, and that anybody attempting to make a different methodology to them is, essentially, repressing the religious freedoms of others.

Strange...why don't we see Jesus, Paul, Peter, et. al making this statement against the Romans?

"We see this, for example, in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience clauses, and therefore to compel pro-life institutions (including religiously affiliated hospitals and clinics), and pro-life physicians, surgeons, nurses, and other health care professionals, to refer for abortions and, in certain cases, even to perform or participate in abortions. We see it in the use of anti-discrimination statutes to force religious institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business. After the judicial imposition of "same-sex marriage" in Massachusetts, for example, Catholic Charities chose with great reluctance to end its century-long work of helping to place orphaned children in good homes rather than comply with a legal mandate that it place children in same-sex households in violation of Catholic moral teaching. In New Jersey, after the establishment of a quasi-marital "civil unions" scheme, a Methodist institution was stripped of its tax exempt status when it declined, as a matter of religious conscience, to permit a facility it owned and operated to be used for ceremonies blessing homosexual unions. In Canada and some European nations, Christian clergy have been prosecuted for preaching Biblical norms against the practice of homosexuality. New hate-crime laws in America raise the specter of the same practice here. "

Refusal to allow morality laws to apply equally to all people, despite the earlier statement "No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will, nor should persons of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions. What is true for individuals applies to religious communities as well." seems to state, as a subtext "As long as it's our God, and our rules". We've gotten too used to being on top for too long, and it has spoiled us. Our Kingdom is not the Kingdom of this world. We don't get to claim that the laws of America have to be our laws, or we're being repressed. Barbara, you stated nobody in Canada has been persecuted for preaching against Homosexuality, but they seem to be of the opinion that it has happened in this document.

"Restrictions on the freedom of conscience or the ability to hire people of one’s own faith or conscientious moral convictions for religious institutions, for example, undermines the viability of the intermediate structures of society, the essential buffer against the overweening authority of the state, resulting in the soft despotism Tocqueville so prophetically warned of.1 Disintegration of civil society is a prelude to tyranny. "

Possible, certainly. But there's still a strong lift of paranoia, of slippery slope thinking here.

"As Christians, we take seriously the Biblical admonition to respect and obey those in authority. We believe in law and in the rule of law. We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral. The biblical purpose of law is to preserve order and serve justice and the common good; yet laws that are unjust—and especially laws that purport to compel citizens to do what is unjust—undermine the common good, rather than serve it."

What is the role of the Christian in making and enforcing Law? They're refering to things happening in Canada and Europe...are we talking about global law now? What is the center of this argument?

"Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, "Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard." Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required. There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings. Inasmuch as they can claim no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack any power to bind in conscience. King’s willingness to go to jail, rather than comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring."

This is fine, but at the same time, there's a vast difference between protesting injust laws, and attempting to maintain laws which enforce morality. Which has not been clearly maintained here.

Overall, we see some interesting and disturbing trends in this Manifesto. It sets out as a religious position paper, but then in mid-stream establishes that all law comes from God, and thus Christians can use law to enforce their moral will upon the population for the good of society. The cross-over from religious to secular in this document is startling, as it entirely blurs the line between the sacred and secular, and draws direct comment on the position the writers understand themselves to hold as disciples of Christ in this world.

While much is made over the right of individuals to individual religion, the subtext seems to be "so long as they're Christian", and while it's stated that we cannot hate sinners, at the same time, oppression of others who belief differently than us is seen as more than necessary for the extension of stable government and meaningful society. Many things could be justified with this document...torture, oppression, etc. as long as they lead to the support of what is seen as the Godly majority.

The Manhattan Manifesto

2009-11-27T18:48:00.000-08:00

You can download the document here.

This is a fascinating and appalling document whose writers are, apparently, completely unable to detect the hypocrisy in their own words.

They begin by praising past Christian efforts to aid the poor, the diseased, the enslaved, and the giving of Christian lives to fight injustice.

But then they move on to this document. With brief prooftexts, they state that in light of the following:

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life
2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

They must then only define the sanctity of human life as involving abortion (though they periodically throw in things about the livelihood of the elderly, which I can only imagine is somehow still referring the non-existent death councils), that marriage is integral to culture (and Christian culture), despite the fact that much of the NT is Paul and others essentially stating that people are probably better off single, and the rights of conscience and religious liberty stating that because oppression of religious thoughts and rights is a bad thing (somehow stating that Christians in the past fought against Kings for rights, when in fact it's much more the atheists and modernists who did so) that the gays are evil.

Yes America, Gays want to kill babies and the elderly, they want to dissolve all marriage, and they want to oppress the religious (though, really, who can blame them, as much as the religious are persecuting them?)

This document is a sham. It's initial introduction is impressive, and semi-true, but then the entire rest of the document utterly betrays everything it's about. It contains no Gospel and little truth, and instead is about the need of Christian bodies to oppress others with their rules, their laws, their morality.

In the eyes of the writers of this document, the poor in spirit should just die now, and save us all the trouble.

Simply offensive. But it'll please the conservatives in our culture.

You need to win.

2009-11-25T21:02:00.000-08:00

It's okay, I understand.

Please, come to my house, and I'll help you stack faggots around the pole
You won't even have to tie me up.
Or just take this axe, and behead me
Or drive this knife through my heart.

it's just a little blood.

Because you need to win.

You need to be Righteous.

You need to be right, to be correct.

you need to know more.

And if this will help you win
help you stop fighting
stop mowing us down

Then go ahead, and kill me.

let me be the fool.

let me be the racca of your daily battle.

Let me be the false teacher that you destroy

Let me be the ear tickler you demolish.

It's okay.

But please.

Once you've slain me.

Once the great devil satan is, in me, abolished

Be aware.

There is no love in you.

There is no humility in you.

There is no patience in you.

There is no long suffering in you.

There is no hope in you.

There is no grace in you.

There is no Joy in you.

There is no peace in you.

There is no shalom in you.

There is no mercy in you.

There is no generosity in you.

There is no charity in you.

What you do have

In profusion

Is self-righteousness

Is self-awareness

Is doctrine

Is knowledge

Is polemic

Is dogma

Is theology

Is Judgement

Is fear.

If I treated my son like you treat me, they would take him away.

If Christ treated us like you treat me, we would all be damned and burning at this moment.

I may be wrong, I may be bent, I may be broken. But I need justice and mercy and grace and understanding and love from you JUST AS MUCH

As I needed it when Jesus brought it to me.

If I cannot get Gospel from Christ's followers...

then who did Christ bring it to?

Who will be the Light of the World, if we refuse to?

Who will be salt, if you refuse to stop treading others underfoot?

I despair of unity.

I despair of love.

I despair of community.

My heart is broken in the face of the knowledgable Christian.

So let me be a sacrifice on your altar.

offer me up.

Bathe in my blood.

Bask in my torment.

And then turn to God, and see.

See yourself.

See mercy, again.

Remember the Gospel.

And offer the world the face you will not give your brother.

Contempt

2009-11-21T05:41:00.000-08:00

Something which I hear very little preaching on, but which remains a damning condemnation of otherwise Godly believers, is contempt.

Jesus covers it pretty quickly, and as such, I think that it gets lumped in with a lot of other teaching and brushed over.

He says that to call somebody a fool is as bad as murdering them. That if you call somebody a fool, either out loud or in your heart, that you are in danger of hell.

I was watching a number of videos by a favorite preacher of mine, Matt Chandler (Village Church, Dallas TX), and in one of them he was addressing the idea that Jesus could get beaten, tortured, crucified, and then get up 2 days later and walk with a group of folks to Emaus.

And at one point, he began to say, with open, heavy contempt in his voice, that only an idiot, a fool, could believe such a thing.

Somebody first needs to remind Mr. Chandler that we live in a nation where many people still believe (because the internet says so) that the Russians (or Al Quaida) have poisoned the glue on envelopes, and that Madeline O'Hare is still trying to get Congress to ban prayer in schools, even though she's been dead for 15 years. We live in a place, in a time, where people believe many things which have no logical basis.

But even more so...He has decided for himself that if somebody believes things which are illogical and baseless, that they are lesser for it, that he can publicly identify how less they are in the eyes of others.

Which is, in itself, bringing a bit of hell into the world.

Mark Driscoll, who is quite famous for his contempt of others, which brings me a great deal of sorrow, as the man has been blessed with a great deal of wisdom and a heart for God, but he worships daily at the altar of contempt, has said that God is blessed when we mock other sects and religions, such as Mormons.

And I'm sure that we all know of people who can pull verses from the works of Solomon or David where they're laying people low, calling them fools, calling down the wrath of God on them.

But we're not called to emulate David or Solomon. We're called to emulate Christ.

And Christ said, no contempt for others. No murdering them in your heart. No identifying others as lesser. Even if they cut you off in traffic. Even if they shoot up Fort Hood.

I was listening to a sermon on this yesterday, and the man pointed out that the Prodigal son, in the manner of his time, would have spent his money not only on lavish parties, but on rape, possibly on murder, on enjoying the utter bent of his heart as practiced on the world around him. He was utterly depraved...and God waited to dance with him, to welcome him home.

We are, as the preacher says, all whores and murderers. But some of us like to think that we're better, or more enlightened whores and murderers. That we have fewer idols, that we are somehow more loveable.

But as Switchfoot says, "I am the disease, and no drug is going to make it better". Each of us is a source of hell on earth. We get to decide whether we will turn that over to the Master Physician for the cure, or whether we, in our contempt and our enlightenment, can be the cure for ourselves.

We cannot say that we are humble if we are cutting others down in our hearts.

We cannot say that we follow the Christ if we are open to opportunities for murder.

Further Thoughts on the Dreamer's Manifesto

2009-11-18T19:49:00.000-08:00

B. Church should be for the sick and the broken, not the well and the getting by.

Church is where, so long as you're not falling apart and you have some nice clothes, they'll probably take you in, and then expect you to contribute to their mortgage.

I'm sure that it says that somewhere in the New Testament, right? Or maybe the Apocrypha?

But Jesus, strangely enough, came for the sick, the broken, the stained, the ruined, the abandoned. His Gospel speaks directly to a world in need of healing and reforming.

Brian McLaren points out in his book "A Generous Orthodoxy" that the biblical idea of Justice essentially restores things to how they were originally meant to be...essentially, the Maker wades into the mess and identifies things and puts them back together. It's justice which leads to restoration, not to destruction.

So if the churches we see around us are full of people who have it together, have nice suits and smiling faces and whose prayer lists are full of unsaved and dying relatives...either something's missing, or the sick people just aren't allowed inside the building.

My bet, sadly, is on the second bit.

And sick people are difficult. They have unwieldy egos, and they don't know the secret handshakes, or when to stand, or clap, or sing, or fall silent, or anything else. And they may never get it right.

But if our church experience depends on people being well before we can accept them, then technically our church experience also has nothing to do with following Jesus Christ.

There's a thought going around that, somehow, church is a holy, sacred place, so the continuing sick aren't allowed there.

But we're not called to go where it's safe, or things go our way, or where things are as they should be. We're called to go out into the world and serve, and possibly be eaten by lions or put to the sword. If we're not brave enough to do that, if we don't believe that we're called to it...

Then our church isn't for God. I'm not really sure what it's for, actually.

Further thoughts on the Dreamer's Manifesto

2009-11-15T20:14:00.000-08:00

I've been asked to further flesh out my thoughts on the Dreamer's Manifesto, which, honestly, needs to be done in any case. It was a quick and dirty list, and begs for further explanation. So without further ado:

A. Church should be energizing. It should literally be connecting with a group of people who are utterly sold out for Christ and are excited to be getting together and talking about God, or why bother?

I think that this sits at the heart of a deadly issue for many churches: they try very hard to be entertaining to capture/maintain that energy for those attending their service, but in the process they give up their claim to authenticity.

Authenticity is, unfortunately, a term that has been bandied about a great deal in recent years and, as a result, has lost a lot of it's buying power as a term. It has, in a word, become inauthentic through overuse.

What do we mean when we say that something is authentic?

We use words like "real" and "true" when we talk about something having authenticity, but I think that the best way I could put it is this:

If you go to McD's, you know essentially what you're going to get. It's always going to taste the same, and it's of dubious but generally approved quality, and everybody can generally get on board for it. They like the familiarity of it and the ease of access. The shake may not have any actual dairy material in it at all, but we're used to it, and we like it.

But.

If you go to a Mom and Pop burger joint, you have no idea what you're going to get, though if it's been open a while, you know that it's going to be good. The portions will be weird, the shakes will be real (and will probably stop your heart on visual contact). There is a realness, a confirmedness, to food at that mom and pop restaurant that's missing, inherently, in the fast food chain.

The authentic Christian church reeks of the scene of Jesus Christ. It's sold out, subversive, sacrificial, humble, loving, open, testifying, full service oriented, communal, intentional, and intensive.

When you walk into a place where you are welcomed and loved and accepted, there is an energy to it. When you can see that people are who they really are, that they aren't wearing "the sunday mask", when they can admit that everything isn't fine, when they can fall apart in their seat and they get dogpiled by people who want to be there for them...there is a realness, a connectedness, that is incredibly missing from our society.

When that connectivity, that honesty, continues into the week, into phone calls and emails and lunches and dinners and small groups and visits to the homeless folks congregating "under the bridge" and a variety of other things, you begin to catch the eddies of that energy, the idea that you've just stepped into something far more real than 'sunday church', something that goes beyond "the normal", "the accepted", "the expected", and into something new and trans formative.

And that has an energy. It's an energy that doesn't go away when I leave the service to go to lunch, because I know that it hasn't stopped just because the service has. Because that community, that church, is a lifestyle that's active 24/7, that's really becoming more and more like the Saviour (and thus, more and more like humans were designed to be, in beauty and creation and wonder and excellence), and that we all keep growing and being and learning throughout the week, and we expect it, we ask for it, we beg for it.

Me being me and growing in that, and you being you and growing in that, and sharing that with each other, makes something far larger than what we had originally.

Or, in the words of Spider Robinson: "Pain shared is pain diminished. Joy shared is Joy exponentially multiplied".

Church should be a continual source of Joy. And that Joy should push and boost everything we are, every day, always.

Thoughts on Offense

2009-11-15T20:04:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest problems that the church has is in dealing with offense, or avoiding the causation of it.

Now, at the outset, people would find this to be a fairly odd statement, as the church is fairly offensive in modern culture with a lot of it's stances. But I'm talking about how it handles itself internally.

Because of how we've (mis)handled concepts of Christian love and unity, many people will go out of their way to ignore obnoxious qualities about people until it's too late. This leads to a number of specific issues:

1. People tend to gossip more. Having ignored the guy who dominates the entire class, or the pastor who says something bone-headed from the pulpit, people will sit on it until they next run into their close friend from church, and they'll have a conversation that runs something like "I didn't want to say anything about this, and I certainly don't want to gossip, but..." and the other person will respond "oh, yes, I feel the same way."

And they won't actually go to that person and talk to them about what they did, for fear of offending them, or being offended. They'll just "talk" about it. But you know how talk is.

2. Many church goers will be incredibly passive aggressive about how they handle other people being socially obnoxious. Whole classes will sit in silence while somebody goes on a diatribe about a weird take on hermeneutics, or on how a certain politician really offends them, or whatever. And they'll just let it go, class after class, week after week, until it finally comes to some sort of maximum showdown (often in an office somewhere), which leaves the person attacked, since nobody said anything to them about it the whole time, and the person feels like people have been talking about them behind their back, and they feel undermined, and untrusted, and they leave.

3. Relative offensiveness often behaves as a filter for churches. If you're going to be offended by something that the other members of the congregation aren't, and you leave, then that's a good thing, because it means that people who aren't like them won't be trying to move in on their social circle.

The bible is fairly clear. If somebody does something to hose you off, or that seems weird or irritating, you need to talk to them about it, in love and humility, and they need to listen and respond in love and humility. If that's too much for them, better that they know it now and start figuring out what to do about it. There's a steady ladder of progression to it too, bringing in respected neutral parties to make sure that communications are solid, etc.

But I would say that any church that isn't actively teaching, modeling, and embodying this process is asking for slow death by attrition. We are meant to be a community, and community cannot exist if people are not humbly and lovingly honest with each other, to confess offense, and to work on what needs to happen to resolve it.

For instance, some people wouldn't dominate classes if other people would speak up more often. Both sides need to learn to alter how they participate. But they won't learn if that conversation never takes place.

A Dreamer's Manifesto for Church

2009-11-13T19:54:00.000-08:00

Growing up, church was/always has been an exercise in degradation.

You get up early, you dress in clothes you would never wear otherwise, and you drag yourself to this large, empty beige building where everybody pretends to be doing okay. You sit through a series of classes and sermons where you alternately hear that everything's okay and we've already won, or we're all sinners and the pastor has found a new sin. We sing some songs (because you've got to have congregational worship) and then we go home.

I must admit dissatisfaction.

People talk all of the time about going to church to get energized with hope and faith for the week ahead, but I've never found any of that in church. So the following is what I think church should be for me:

A. Church should be energizing. It should literally be connecting with a group of people who are utterly sold out for Christ and are excited to be getting together and talking about God, or why bother?

B. Church should be for the sick and the broken, not the well and the getting by.

C. Church should be for passion, for expression of the energy of Christ, for experiencing the Kingdom which this world should be coming into conformity to more and more through each individual heart.

Not that fake passion you get when the worship leader ups the tempo and sings that Chris Tomlin song in five different keys while repeating the same words over and over until you hit some sort of pheremone high, but the kind of passion you get when you get a bunch of 80's junkies all singing "Purple Rain" together on the way home from a movie, or when you walk out of "Whip It" and you all want to learn to skate, even though if you combined the coordination of the whole group, you'd still wind up falling.

The kind of passion that is totally sold out to try, even if it means we're going to fail a bunch getting there, because we're going to learn a lot from the failing.

D. Church should be the kind of place where it's okay to fail, and grandly, and publically, and where people will gather around you and dust you off and encourage you to try again, not because they're being polite, but because they know it's your calling and they really want to see Christ glorified through your many attempts, no matter how many it takes. The church that does not fear failure cannot be sold, cannot be bought, cannot be brought low, because they know that their Redeemer lives, and is far cooler than the folks at the judges' table.

E. Church should be cool. We all know when something is cool, when it's excellent, when it's far from normal. I've been in far too many churches which are exceedingly normal and boring. They are not looking forward to the marriage feast of God, they are not celebrating the coming of the groom, or the excellence of God here and now in the creation that He made for us.

If church is not a celebration, not a healing, then really, what's the point?

F. Church should be holy. Now, holy is an odd word, and it's been used to mean a lot of boring, unpleasant, pointless things over the ages. But holiness can only descend from and originate out of God's love, expressed in and through Christ. So Church should be so overflowing with love and community and togetherness that it just blows people's minds. I want to go to church to have my mind blown.

G. Church should be challenging. We are, after all, meant to be becoming disciples, people who are more open, more loving, more like Christ week after week. Not just changing what we know, but who we are. If church isn't challenging me to become more me, more creative, more open, more real every single day of my life, then it is failing.

H. Church should encourage everybody to dream better and more fantastic dreams. We are, after all, looking forward to the coming Kingdom when God will come and live among these fantastic, beautiful people He's created. What better way to witness His presence in our lives than to live out dreams that originate from that Kingdom?

I. Church should value history and tradition and doctrine, but should always be asking itself whether those things are actually helping us to learn more about the infinite Triune God, or if they have become barriers between us and the world. In any case where they are barriers to beauty and dreaming and creativity and goodness, we must tear them down and start again. We must be willing to admit that our doctrine, our traditions, have failed, and go back to the drawing board to redo them more perfectly. Or they become idols.

J. Church should be intense. It should cost, it should require sacrifice, and meaning, and weight. I should go to church trepidatious about how this is going to ask me to step out and become something more. If church lets me be a sponge, if it says that I can be a member and spent my life absorbing more spiritual milk, then it isn't just a waste, but it's a crime against Christ. This is a guy who walked on water, who came to heal and to change and to save and create a new world order where heaven comes to earth and things are fantastic. This should be the vision that drives me forward.

K. Church should be scary and comfortable and family and amazing and all of the other stuff that I didn't remember to put in. I should come away from it with ideas, and things buzzing and pushing. I should find people who will sharpen me, and be accountable with me, because we believe in each other and in being better and in healing others and in showing folks that this life here, in Christ, is fantastically better than a life in the future with Christ, or a life here and now without Christ. That the time is now, here, at this place, in this time.

Booyah.

Interesting quote from Glen Hansard

2009-11-10T07:24:00.001-08:00

"And then I started thinking about this idea of sadness and happiness, and the idea that sadness is very loud, and happiness is quiet. To use the pages of a diary, for example: The happy days are blank pages. So it’s an interesting idea that on the sad days, of course you take out your pen, and you try to figure yourself out, through art, whether it’s writing or singing a song."

Illusions

2009-11-09T06:34:00.000-08:00

Part of life, of maturity, is letting go of our illusions, and then staying that way.

But there are a lot of things that we're convinced that we need, voices that we believe we need to listen to. Things that we think we deserve.

I could be doing fine, and not really needing to engage in something at all, and the voice, not even of temptation, but merely past habit, will engage my ear...and I'll have to struggle not to listen.

It's amazing to me how little space Christianity has for answering really hard questions about what matters. There's so much culture infused with our beliefs, with our practices, culture that says "You are a man, so you must have these things, especially if you're married", but which seem to have a very poor connection to life, to Christ-likeness, to how things actually need to be.

There are parts of me that ache with the need for fulfillment, for connection. But perhaps the ways that are present for that to be fulfilled aren't correct, because we live in the world that we live in, and I need to find the self-discipline, the awareness, to live without those things, to deny myself, to deny my need.

This sort of talk echoes strongly of the hermits of yesteryear who denied themselves greatly to show how greatly they loved God (which is sort of self-defeating), or Buddhism, and so is generally eschewed in our culture. Never mind that there are individual verses about a lot of it that seem to back up what we want to do, how we want to live.

But they don't weigh well against the books that they're from. There should be a balance between dreams and desire, between goals and acquisition. Some things that I want, I'm not ready for, or I don't have the correct desire for yet. Some things aren't ready for me to have them.

Some things are simply out of my hands, and I need to learn to live with that lack of control, that lack of...having.

I don't need to fall back. I don't need to lie to myself. I don't need to collapse. And though I may ache as a result...that ache may be necessary. If I can learn to live in that ache, that emptiness, I may find a clearer exposure to the voice of God that was not there previously.

Will I dwell in the Mercy of the Lord? Will I be shielded by His Love, encompassed by His immanence? Will I be filled with my Desire for Him? The Love of my Soul awaits, throughout this Long, Dark Night...

Review of "Through the River"

2009-11-06T06:48:00.000-08:00

"Through the River" (by John and Mindy Hirst, Authentic books, 2009) is a clear attempt by the authors to disseminate the work of another author into a more understandable fashion for the layman. The book concerns itself with the perspectives that we hold (perhaps unknowingly) as Westerners that we bring into witnessing and missions which may make it very difficult for us to represent Christ accurately to others, because we're also communicating culture and world view, and may not realize how they are different than those that we're attempting to reach.

The dust jacket states that the authors are two Communications majors, one with a minor in sociology, but the entire book is written in terms of sociologists talking about philosophy. It's unclear how much of this depends entirely on the original text, (“Missiological Implications of Epistemological Shifts: Affirming Truth in a Modern/Postmodern World”, by Dr. Paul Hiebert.), but it's possible that a fair amount of the book is merely a translation with attached metaphors, rather than an entirely original work. This is not to indicate false intent, but rather than when one is engaged in translation, there is less thought given to whether what one is translating is accurate.

The essentially argument of the book is that there are three ways of looking at the world. If this already sounds like far too much of a simplification to you, then perhaps you, like I, am not the intended audience of this book.

The authors sum up all of Western History and Philosophy in three people...Plato, Copernicus, and Einstein, and they somehow lay the postmodernist movement at Einstein's feet, even though he brought us Relativity, not Relativism.

So essentially, all Westerners approach the world either through the mindset of Modernity (emphasized in Positivism), Post-Modernism (emphasized in Instrumentalism) or the apparently more preferable Critical Realism.

The essential problem here being that, saying Modernity is precisely equal to Empiricism and Positivism, and Postmodern thought can be accurately summed up in Instrumentalism, is a lot like saying that all Christians are Baptists. It's a flavor, not the whole body of the thing. Which automatically leaves me suspicious.

Our culture has moved through a whole range of movements over the last two thousand years...Christendom, Traditionalism, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Probably with flavors in between. Additionally, the Postmodernist movement itself began in the late 1800's, but is identified within this book as only starting in the later portion of the 20th century, begging the question of what the historical reference point is for the authors.

Or, more essentially, making it clear that the authors did not question their own frame of reference exceedingly before engaging with the project.

Postmodernism is written off as Relativism; i.e., people who don't believe that anything is necessarily true, because they cannot believe the perspectives of the people they encounter, and so everything is questionable.

But while Relativists and Instrumentalists are, in fact, born out of Post Modernism, they are not the whole animal, and should not be labeled as such. Many of the prominent Post Modern thinkers believe in an incredible range of absolutes, but believe that we are hampered in our ability to communicate those absolutes accurately to each other, and so we are limited in what we can communicate. If this appears to be the same thing, then it's entirely possible that my own perspective makes the entire thing appear very differently than it was intended.

The authors make frequent use of the term “truth lense” where others might state “perspective” or “world view”, as truth lense lends itself to the metaphor of looking through something more immediately than the others, to which that idea is inherent. The idea that it is necessary to state this a new way and then use the new term repeatedly through the book only emphasizes to me that perhaps I am not the intended audience of this book.

The other term that the book makes great use of is “Critical Realism”, which the authors state is a way of knowing that some things are true, but that other things are only perceivable, so one is always learning more about it. Wikipedia notes that “...the meaning of the theory is dependent on the user's pre-interpretation of words like 'perceive', 'reality' etc. such that in the longstanding debate between representational (indirect) and naive (direct) realists each side will always claim that the other has not understood their position. Thus, readers of this account must ask what the writer(s) believe(s) their words to mean. “

What the authors point to as a more precise way of seeing the world is what many other people would just call another variation on Postmodern thinking, i.e., we know that some things are true, but we do not believe that we completely perceive all of the true things, and so we will keep learning and developing.

Strangely, while the first half of the book is set up explaining these things, it does so in a completely secular way, devoid of any reference to sin or human nature, but then spends the second half of the book applying these “truth lenses” to a variety of religious experiences, such as faith and love. Over and over, the book sets out to explain things in a manner in which the authors appear to be reinventing history, or explaining on subset of thought (philosophy, communications) from a completely different, perhaps sociological viewpoint. However, since my wife is a sociologist, and I keep asking her about these things and getting negative responses, that too appears cloudy.

I suspect that for people coming at the idea of modernism and postmodernism, this book is an excellent introductory primer, as it does set things into very basic subsets, and uses story pictures to establish a lot of what the authors are talking about...people living in different geographic areas around a river, and how they came to live there, and how this shapes their ability to deal with each other. But it's in such a limited, and at times holistically incorrect manner, that it can only be entirely accepted, even charitably, by those with little education in the worldviews of the world in which we live.

The reading level is such that this is probably still a college level book, or perhaps HS AP. I suppose at best, to be generous, I can only say that as with all books, you need to take what you read here with a grain of salt. My engagement with the book mostly resulted in aggravation and dissatisfaction, but hopefully other readers will find it to be more useful.

Fear, Desire, and Theology

2009-10-28T18:30:00.001-07:00

Wired has an article about the resistance to vaccines due to the belief that they cause Austism (something that has never been verified at all). It makes an interesting point:

"The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard."

I'm fascinated by how this could not only be true for science, but is also likely true for religion. If people are going to go for what they think feels/sounds good at the time, rather than what is historically reasonable or proven, what steps need to be takenwithin the church to distract or even fight that kind of movement?

working...

2009-10-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

doing some open analysis of terms and philosophy at my secular blog, trying to get ahold of how the language in this book simply doesn' t make sense.

It's like when I visited LifeChurch in OKC, and they were essentially creating their own history of the bible. Fascinating, like a train wreck. Hopefully the book will get better. Currently it's mostly insulting, but i'm probably not it's target audience.

Through the River, Part 1

2009-10-23T15:28:00.001-07:00

I've chosen to read and review Jon and Mindy Hirst's "Through the River: Understanding Your Assumptions About Truth" for Viral Bloggers. There are numerous statements on the dust jacket mentioning how this book is a distillation of Dr. Paul G. Hiebert's "Missiological Implications of Epistemological Shifts: Affirming Truth in a Modern/Postmodern World (Christian Mission and Modern Culture) ".

That original work deals with how new converts can be brought into Christianity without their own culture and language distorting the Christian message...or perhaps how the Christian message can be translated into other cultures without losing it's own heart and meaning. The work focuses on three viewpoints, Positivism (modernity), Instrumentalism/idealism (postmodernism) and Critical Realism. The work apparently points to Critical Realism, which is a hybrid of Modernity and Postmodernism, as the most viable solution, as it holds that truth exists apart from perceptions, while perceptions are still valuable and meaningful in translation.

The authors, Jon and Mindy Hirst, are both Communications majors who are, according to the back of the book, looking to translate this concept through a story/picture message system regarding a village with three different populations to give this a clearer translation for educating Christians who are entering into the evanglism/conversion process with basic assumptions that are holding them back from properly engaging with their audience.

The objective of the book is an interesting one to me, as I've been increasingly observing that my own approach to Christianity, as with many other Christians, is greatly shaped by my attitudes and beliefs, and as a result, I can have a vastly different idea about what Christian life looks like than another person, even within the same church community. This does provide that we have different ways of approaching others for Christ, but it also means that we may be attempting to affect entirely different ends, with varying degrees of success or meaning.

If one's lense for interpreting (or even understanding) the gospel descends entirely from, say, an evangelical, or social justice, or orthodox, or calvinistic, or wesleyan view of the world, then certainly it's going to change everything about what I see as needing to occur. If I see Christianity as a message about not going to hell, then my drive for what needs to happen in the world as a Christian is going to be very different than one which states that the Kingdom of God is being realized here and now, or one which says that all of the major events of the bible were fulfilled in 70 AD, etc.

All of which goes to say that we can get really caught up in what each party is saying without ever communicating anything, if we buy too much into our own personal viewpoints, without any ability to consider those of others.

I think

2009-10-15T22:12:00.000-07:00

That sometimes I must come across as really whiney and self-indulgent. Entirely possible.

I'm not sure how to get around this. I'm trying to talk about how I perceive and interact with things, and it's almost as if I'm perceived as stating that the church staff (who are already insanely busy) aren't doing enough for me...

But what I'm actually trying to say is that perhaps the work that they're trying so hard to do simply isn't something that fits me.

We really get stuck into this "one size fits all" idea of discipleship. But at the same time, increasingly, I get what Len Sweet is saying about Niche churches. People are going to go where they fit in, and they're going to do church there, and hopefully make the world better in the way that their niche can.

So I could have spent the last 4 or 5 years in this church, and been heavily invested in it, but be realizing now that a lot of where it's having to go, because of who is attending it, despite what the pastor wants, is something where I'm going to be more of a distraction than an asset...

or, I could be this incredible asset, but only while fending off the desire to stab myself with something sharp out of sheer frustration and despair.

While, no, I don't think that I'm necessarily likely to find a better church somewhere. And there's the rub. People say "well, do you think you're going to find another place doing things better/ closer to your unrealistic ideals?"

Um. Probably not. Especially in central Arkansas. But this also doesn't mean that I shouldn't try, or that I shouldn't look.

I'm watching the Eikon thing come together, and it's very interesting, but at the same time, to really be attached to it, it seems like I'd need a lot of face time with people in Little Rock, and I have a hard enough time getting face time with people in Conway. And nobody here in Arkansas really likes (it seems) to engage in long, rambling emails about anything. They all depend on face time. Even the folks who aren't from Arkansas.

Ah, the joys of broad generalizations.

But, since I can't get anybody to really respond to anything, it's hard to tell how much of this is in my head, and how much of it is real. When the actual face time responses go off in the tangents driven by other people's perceptions, it's all a value driven mess anyway.

Thoughts

2009-10-15T19:12:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Erwin McManus' "Soul Cravings" in parallel with Donald Miller's "A million miles in a thousand years". This was inadvertent; I had started Soul Cravings before going to Miller's talk here in Little Rock and picking up his book, and I read one at work while reading the other at home.

The first is about how we are designed by God to need purpose and meaning and dreams and goals, or we die.

The second is about how God has allowed us the freedom to write our own stories, but how we are generally highly unfulfilled in life unless we write a good story...and many of us are writing extremely mediocre stories.

This is actually my second time reading through "Soul Cravings", but I think that there are things that hit me much harder this time through, especially when read against the background of Miller's book.

The overall point: All of my life, I've been told that i'm going to have to settle when it comes to church. There is no perfect church, there generally aren't people who are anything like me who go to church, and really the whole point of church is to get really good at bible study and praying so that I can teach other people to do it, without necessarily questioning anything in the process.

But in so many ways, that's so far from the Gospel, and Discipleship, that it's simply frightening.

I realize full well at this point that, having dug deep into a number of books and found them certifiably pointing at the truth, that I'm in a very weird head space in most churches, but especially here in Central Arkansas. The things that I want out of Christianity, the majority of Christianity has no idea about, and generally regards as heretical or distracting.

If God created us just to fall, and then to get saved and believe the right things, and go to heaven, well, sure, a mediocre life makes sense, because life doesn't really begin until you get to heaven anyway.

But if heaven is just a post-resurrection continuance of what's here, and we need to start being now who we're going to be forever, then what God is looking for in terms of my dreams, my story, has to be much different. Much greater, grander, etc. What do I have to lose, after all?

Another thing that both of these writers seem to believe very strongly is that we're meant to find other believers who believe the same thing, who have that same dream, and to journey with them.

So if church is telling us not to dream, or dream very small, or not reach very high...then maybe there's a need to find another place.

Or maybe I'm just having my mid-life spiritual crisis as early as possible. I don't know. But I'm really tired of "here".

A million miles in a thousand years

2009-10-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

Miller's book is frustrating and convicting in exactly the worst way for me, since it affirms things that I've believed for a very long time, but at the same time leaves me wondering what to do about it, and how much despair to feel about the whole thing.

Miller establishes the following points:

A. We like movies because they reflect the best parts of life, our trials, our trevails, the way we overcome things and outgrow them.

B. We are each responsible for writing the story of our lives. God isn't going to write it for us.

C. There are things that we can do in our lives to make them as real and as interesting as stories and movies, but it will involve pain and trials and sacrifice, and lots of involvement with other real people.

In fact, D. the best way to have a life that's more real is to get involved with other people who are also looking to live more real, more active lives.

I.e., through lifestyle which actively seeks Orthopraxy which plays out in the lives of others, we find meaning and purpose in life. The life which is only examined in the library, in belief, is still empty until it goes out and does something.

The problem, for me, has always been finding those other people.

Ruminations on Donald Miller

2009-10-07T05:57:00.000-07:00

Last evening, I stopped in at the Oasis Church in Little Rock to see Donald Miller talking about his new book, "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years".

I've been a fan of Miller's since I picked up "Blue Like Jazz" several years ago, which I've used in various Sunday school and youth programs, as well as just generally rereading it. It's the memoir style utterances of a very selfish, self-absorbed individual coming to terms with community and God, and so can be difficult to read at times because it's so real, and so true who we are.

I don't get off of work until 7:30 PM, and the event started at 7:00 PM (fortunately, there was an opening act) so I didn't get there until 8:00 PM (partly due to getting lost, since Oasis has no sign up indicating their presence, so I had to stop and ask). So the guy at the door let me in for free. I spent the money on the new book instead.

Miller's "talk" is a sort of blurb summation of his book, while also, at the same time, digging much deeper into some of the ideas behind it, or driving it, or leading from it. I've already read over some things that last night he spent 10 minutes talking about that are a single line in the book, if that gives you an idea.

Talking, Miller is very personable. He comes across sort of like a heavier Brad Pitt who finally decided that God was okay again. *Grin* So very focused, and energetic, but not in a bouncy way, but in a sort of "I'm going to bore this hole into your soul and leave my thought eggs, and what hatches will be beautiful. But you might not have a head left anymore" type of thing.

He's become very taking by our human need for and grip on stories. We see everything in terms of story, and of course, we are the protagonist of our story, no matter how bland and every day we are.

But Christianity, as often practiced in the modern U.S. (my wife denies that anybody has ever said this to her) states that Jesus is the climax of our story, and the rest of our life after salvation is just the denouement (I kept waiting for him to use that word, and being frustrated that he didn't. Ah, conflict). But Miller states, quite correctly, that Salvation isn't the Climax...the Wedding Feast with Jesus is. Post glorification.

He went into some really fascinating thoughts on Adam in the garden, and how there was conflict there. Usually, we read the verse where Adam was lonely, and then God tells him to name the animals, and we have this Sunday-school Flannel-graph thing in our head where Adam names all of the animals in, I don't know, six hours or something, then he takes a nap, and when he wakes up, BAM! there's Eve.

But Miller pointed out that there are millions of animals, and even if Adam was just naming the phylums, that could very well take him a century.

So...Adam's got some time on his hands, doing this naming thing. And he spends the entire time lonely, without a mate, seeing that the animals have mates, appreciating how God's creation of relationships is going (I'm inferring into this, Miller left out the mates and relationship bit, though I think it was sort of an obvious post script). So then, when God finally creates Eve, Adam is in the state of poetry..."Bone of my bone, Flesh of my Flesh, She is like me!" And there's then a climax to that sub plot...but not the whole story.

I think that one of the most beautiful things that he said was that a lot of us act like God is writing this story, and that we blame God for not having more exciting, interesting things in this story where we're the hero. He feels like what's actually happening is God hands us the pen and paper and says "no, you write me something beautiful, so that when I read it, it makes me cry because it's this wonderful thing, because your life is an offering of great story to me."

And what makes the best story, he says, is people who sacrifice their lives for others.

Miller also talked about he's part of something for Obamma called "The National Fatherhood Initiative", which among other things is trying to make sure that the children of all of the folks in Jail don't have to wind up in the same place just because that's what their Dads did. Some very cool stuff.

Perhaps, the heart of the issue...

2009-09-17T20:17:00.001-07:00

Lies with our lives.

I'm trying to come up with a way to say this succinctly and accurately.

Maybe the reason we keep having all of these arguments about music, and missiology, and E Vs. C, and Calvinism, and everything else, is that essentially, in the end, what we've done

is try to live a "normal" life, but apply a "Christian" paint job.

And the "normal" life doesn't look good with a "Christian" paint job. It offsets it poorly, the racing stripes really don't come off well... altogether, it's a kludge, and everybody can see that, but we're all trying very hard to not be too critical, to not admit that the Emperor has no clothes.

Whereas, the life of the disciple would be living like Christ, and then seeing what parts of the "normal" world actually fit into that.

I think that this becomes a very bedrock part of the issue. At heart, in the midst of all of the preferences and the changing church culture and everything else, what we're really describing is that we've been much more successful at being "Christians" than we have at being "like Christ", because being "like Christ" is something we do in spare moments of the day when we're thinking about it.

When you're at work, you have to do what is required to be successful at your business, in the way that the business is designed, in tune with the economy and the way that the world makes money. Which can be entirely, and actively antithetical to the ways of Jesus Christ. But you have to make a living, right?

When you're at home, you can be consuming, or watching, or engaged in activities with or without your family that are actively antithetical to Christ, because they have to be capable of surviving in the world as it is, never mind how it should be, right?

When you're at church, you can be living, and worshiping, and communing in ways that are fake and misleading, but everybody has always done them, and if you tried to be more vital and real, you might only actually make people uncomfortable and push them away.

Etc.

The life that we see in Christ is alien to the lives that we lead, and we struggle constantly with the fact that "one of these things is not like the other..." But we don't actually come to any real change.

Or rather, true change is this internal thing, where over time, your heart will change, you'll become a more loving, more accepting, more compassionate, praying, verse memorizing person.

But still do all of the above things and live the above lifestyles...right?

And then ache because it's wrong.

Sin isn't just the things that we do, or don't do. It can be our lifestyle, our culture. It can be everything about how we partake in "life".

If church only demands that I attend at a particular time every week, and that I stop certain activities and behaviors, then it's really just a communal self-help program, and we're just discussing what kind of music and lecture structure is most effective at helping people engage in that self help culture...right?

But none of us, I think, have very much of an idea of what that other life would look like. We don't see anybody living it. We don't have any information on what would be required to experience it. And when we talk about it to people...we get a lot of shouting, and despair, and people feeling very challenged about things that they take for granted.

Think about what would happen if a portion of your church decided that they would life like the folks in Haiti, or Africa, or what have you, for a year, and that all of the money they suddenly weren't using would go directly to compassionate ministries.

If our comfort and satisfaction suddenly were far less important than the Kingdom now...what kind of people would we be? Would we finally be thankful? Would we finally be thinking on things that are good, that are beautiful, that are fulfilling constantly? What would the world around us look like?

What kind of life would we be living?

People in 3rd world nations pity us for our wealth, because it keeps us from experiencing God. But God has chosen, for whatever reason, to place us here.

2009-09-12T04:48:00.001-07:00

Every time I realize how out of control things appear to be, I also realize how little I've come to rely on God, and have to go recenter.

A friend of mine...

2009-09-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

Has come to believe that the only way to refer to the Son of God is by His Jewish name, Yeshua (which in English would be Joshua). Jesus is actually the greek version of the same name. There are those who teach that if you do not call Him by His proper Jewish name, you're being disrespectful.

But just as God isn't God's name, or at least is only what we use, Jesus, by the same token, is only a fraction, the earthly visage, of the Son of God.

And He knows our hearts, He knows who we're really calling on, and praying to, and talking about.

But my friend...my heart breaks for her, because I know that this is a huge issue in her life, that so many of the people she's around don't know the truth, and are, in her eyes, being disrespectful to God.

What a burden that must be to her.

Rakka

2009-09-02T06:06:00.000-07:00

Few of us have the love and strength of character to be able to call our brother a fool without somehow feeling toward them in a most un-Christlike fashion; but we all imagine that we can, and we're perfectly reasonable.

God save us from the hubris of reasonable thought.

Fear of a world that eschews lies

2009-08-30T06:55:00.000-07:00

Growing up Baptist equipped me with a great deal of knowledge, but no love.

It taught me about the books of the bible, and about guilt, and about arguments against things, and rationales, and defenses.

But love was just a word on a page, something we talked about a lot but didn’t actually go anywhere near.

We turned all of the mentions of the Kingdom of Heaven into allegories for something we were going to get to some day. We practiced distance, and correctness, and identifying who the bad people were.

And now…now I have to be very careful about the conversations with my dad, and he’s beginning to sense that there are things that he’s missing, that the words don’t mean the same things, that his advice is becoming slippery.

If discipleship is supposed to free me, expanding my world, healing me, then so much of what I find in church is an anathema to it. In fact, church serves mostly as an immunizing agent, something to form discipline against, while watching for the other people who are surviving on their way through it.

To paraphrase Donald Miller, “I won’t defend Christianity to you…but I will tell you about this person named Jesus, who really loves me, and who wants to see you become the person you were meant to be.”

Not, “Christ loved you, so he did this incredible thing, and now you need to form a life reaction based on guilt.”

Not, “You know these things are wrong, so you stand convicted and bound for hell unless you accept my deal.”

Not, “God is waiting to strike down all of the evil people who wouldn’t repent at the end of time, so you’d better shape up before you get yours.”

I have a Saviour who decried the religious experts who lived only to place heavier and heavier weights on the backs of those they were meant to be rescuing, who healed people simply because he could without expecting recompense, who wept at the sight of a hurting world and who wanted to free it, and who praised the churches for their love and excellence.

We have lost our first love. We may have never truly known what love was. You can’t argue love, you can only live it.

iMonk's most recent article on atheism just breaks my heart.

Subversiveness

2009-08-20T06:09:00.000-07:00

Neal Stephenson wrote a book back in the 90's called "The Diamond Age", that dealt specifically with how culture prepares us to take our place in the world, and the difficulty of adequately passing on to our children and grandchildren how our culture is useful and meaningful, or indeed even inculcating in them the same qualities that made us fit the culture that we have.

In some ways, DA follows some of the same thoughts as Heinlein's "Starship Troopers", though with a much less fascist bent to it. They both critique our era as a time in which it became impossible to state that anything had ethical meaning, that is, that you couldn't say that one thing was morally better than another thing, or had more meaning in building a better society.

In Stephenson's book, a genius became appalled that showing up and doing the right thing to help society was regarded as strange (whether helping people at a crash site, or preparing for a flood without massive looting and rioting) and went on to form a Neo-Victorian culture in a world where corporations had more power than governments, and cultures staked out their claim in burb-clave communities all over the world.

But this individual then observed that while his children appreciated the culture he had created, his grandchildren would only grow up in that society without actually appreciating it, and would actually likely rankle against it. In order for his grandchildren to actually be able to think for themselves and appreciate their options in terms of jobs, culture, etc. they had to have context for asking the right questions, for making subtle differentiations about the difference between what people said they believed and what they actually did, etc.

The book explores what hypocrisy truly is, the actual driving social mores behind cultures, etc., while also being a rollicking science fiction adventure involving virtual reality and nano-tech, and small girl's story books.

But a central point that is realized is that in order for somebody to adequately question and understand their culture, they have to have subversive attitudes in their world which are going to drive them to become people of measure who know themselves, and measure the world accordingly, rather than vice versa.

And it struck me (and has struck me before) that this is in fact an enormous problem in the church.

What is taught, most often, is blind obedience to concepts and standards, so that in the face of questions and problems, many Christians can only repeat what they've been told over the years at increasing volume and anger

I think that there are those who would argue that some element of this is that these people don't actually have a personal relationship with Christ, and so they're not talking about somebody they know...but that's a massive tangent, and how do you quantify that anyway?

But Jesus himself seems to have spent a lot of time being subversive, and leading thought seeds behind that, in the process of bloom, would cause people to ask more and more questions, and really struggle with what they believed and why it was true.

But we don't train people in churches to do that. We tell them what is true, we give a lot of "answers" about things that we know only roughly from books, or have rationalized...a lifetime of sitting in pews and listening will not prepare you for a neighborhood where the law has broken down and crime is rampant, or millions of starving children in a desert, or human slavery, or involuntary prostitution (which is another form of slavery)...

In fact, most churches are completely blind (in my experience) to how the culture of the land they inhabit shapes how they view Christ. And being unable to question where you come from makes it extremely unlikely that you're going to be able to ask the correct questions about where you are going.

People like me, people who question, people who really want to know and understand, are the exception, not the rule. How much suffering, or difficulty, is necessary to make one's brain flip over to the subversive side?

Triage

2009-08-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

When we try to separate life from things like work and ministry and make them different areas, we kill ourselves in pieces.

Running

2009-08-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

"He lives, He lives, He lives within my soul..."

It's strange the paths we take to keep coming back to this fact. The mazes that we wander in, the deserts that we pointlessly explore, when the source of our longing and refreshment is right next to us.

Just waiting for us to turn to Him again.

"His Grace is sufficient for me."

How often I forget. How far I wander. How many pairs of shoes I destroy.

And yet, He is always here, and always near.

Oh, Lord, "How Great is Your Faithfulness."

tired

2009-08-08T22:13:00.000-07:00

And tired is always the wrong time to post. But I'm here anyway.

Increasingly, I have difficulty seeing church as anything other than another burden. It's a draining activity, overall, for me. I have to go and interact with people, and probably trip over myself a lot, and try not to offend people or go too off-track.

I have to survive through the worship portion (mostly by praying or contemplating in the midst of a worship set which is usually deafening, and lacks all awe or holiness to my mind, but it's effective for others, and really, that's what counts, right?

So...where do we get this idea that we go to church to get fed, or to get filled up so that we can make it through the week?

I hear people talk about how, when they got saved, they got this enormous energy, and everything was really exciting, and church just filled them up.

Church has always exhausted me. It's a jungle of expectations and needs and problems and promises with no clear ending or purpose, and it's not, as we practice it, anywhere in the bible. It's just in our traditions.

I sometimes think that for the folks who have only relegated their time to "not forsake the company of other believers" to church have, in fact, forsaken true community in Christ anyway.

There's a time to put on that Christian mask, and show up, and sing the songs and say "amen" at the appropriate times, and then go home.

It is, essentially, precisely the same as what the Orthodox and Catholics do, but with a different set of ritual sacraments.

And I say ritual sacraments precisely knowing how little Grace and Mystery is actually communicated. When you have a schedule to keep, really, who has room for Mystery? God should have called ahead and scheduled.

I go to church to try to educate people a bit, get them to ask questions, hopefully not act as too much of a stumbling block, and get more frustrated and burnt out. And then I drive home, worshiping in the beauty of the clouds and the trees and the thunderstorms and the sunsets.

We're not allowed to take all of the beauty and wonder and just use that, we have to take all of the crud that comes with it, and practice that too. And somehow, that's increasingly less worthwhile. I have got to find a way out of this mind set.

Thoughts on Satan

2009-08-07T09:12:00.000-07:00

There is a sign in front of a church up the road that says "are you listening to God or Satan?"

Growing up, I often heard sermons about avoiding the power of Satan, painting Satan as this grand enemy who is the opposite of God, who is everything we need to worry about.

The only place in the bible where we see Satan doing anything other than advertising is Job, and it's not entirely clear how literal Job is meant to be taken anyway. For all that way know, all of the sections with the devil talking to God are just "this is how we figure this must have gone, and it works for the story/parable we're trying to tell." Certainly, it's not in a style which was built for literary accuracy.

What I've mostly observed is that the devil tempts folks. He goes around providing favorable reasons to do what we want to do anyway. And yes, there are demons out there. But I think that in many cases, they're just down the road from where people already are.

Which means that in most cases...we can't really blame the devil for anything. It's us and our sin, and our will to please ourselves, that's the big problem.

So it seems that in places where we're really focused on Satan, what we really need to be looking at is the need to take personal responsibility for how we are not being disciples, how we are not becoming more like Christ.

Thoughts?

Conversation

2009-08-04T06:11:00.001-07:00

1: So, you're leaving then?

2: Yes, it's time.

1: How can you tell?

2: The conversation has changed. It's not about the same things. It's sharper, angrier, far more bitter, more biting. It's...

1: Not home anymore.

2: Precisely.

1: What changed?

2: I'm not sure...different people came in, wanting to talk about different things. There was this hostility.

1: So it's just the people?

2: I mean...it's been 10 years. I don't know.

1: When I look back at the older conversations, the ones that you speak of fondly, they look just like the ones that we're having now, to me.

2: You...you can't possibly know what you're -

1: Is it possible that what actually changed is you?

2: ...

1: I look at you, and your friends, and you're all going off and joining these agnostic boards, blogging about social issues, but there's no Jesus in what you guys are pursuing.

2: We've come to a spiritual understanding of things, a place where

1: Where you don't have to be confronted with how that understanding avoid Christ.

2: We're not avoiding! We're

1: Then say his name. Talk about Him. Not how your life has become this thing, but who He is, and how that reflects on you.

2: You just don't understand.

1: Oh, I think I do. Have fun at your new home.

Economy

2009-08-02T18:47:00.000-07:00

I grew up among people whose economy for salvation seemed to be based around bulk shopping, or "quantity, not quality."

As in, it wasn't the quality of the disciple, but making sure that as many people as possible managed to get into heaven with their butts on fire.

Conversely, with regards to their witnessing techniques, if pursuing them offended 99 out of 100 people and sent those 99 to hell, well, they were probably bound there anyway. Quotes about the 1 lost sheep, etc.

Simply perverse. Teachers misleading their students, purposely causing others to stumble. When Jesus talks about giving offense, it's because they refuse to be like the world, they refuse to lead through power, but rather through underpower, through service, and it is precisely that humble, loving manner which is offensive to those who can only process this world through the mannerisms of the Prince of this world.

Increasingly, by the same token, I hear the call to quality over quantity. Leading others into relational, spiritual discipleship with the person of the Resurrected Saviour, whereby their lives are real, authentic, loving, humble, conversational, 24/7, and as a result, their ability to reach others for Christ is magnified, because they act not through any methodology or program, but soley from a hunger to have others know this amazing Saviour.

If you are not willing to become of one family with this person you are speaking to, regardless of how quickly they come to identify with you (if ever) then you have little business haranguing them for their life choices. Only in the manner in which we become of one life with people, one relationship, are we in fact enacting Christ in the lives of others.

Lost Love

2009-08-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

Today's sermon was from Rev 2:1-7, all about the church at Ephesus, which had lost it's first love, but was really solid on the doctrine.

Now, for those listening, it will be apparent that that first love would, of course, be Jesus Christ.

But the proof offered that the love had been lost in, say, our church, was by all of the things that we weren't doing. Which could be a tad legalistic, depending on how you chose to read/receive it.

It's my personal belief that most Christians have been called their entire lives to love God, to love Christ, but have absolutely no idea what that should look like.

They've been preached at. They've studied the bible. They've been prayed for. They've gone to small groups, missionary services, they've been guilted, altar called, etc.

But I think that for a lot of people, especially Protestants, their idea of what the love of God looks like is somebody who prays really eloquently and has memorized a lot of the bible.

There is a disconnect here, between who we are different parts of the week, and how we behave in those parts, those compartments, that directly calls into question how the love of Christ fits into our lives. Does it just mean an impactful worship service, or convicting preaching? Is it just having the correct emotional reaction at the right time?

We talk about having a personal relationship with Christ. How many of us barely have personal relationships with anybody? How many of us have the kind of relationship with Christ precisely because we're actually relatively distant to everybody? We aren't authentic with anybody, especially ourselves, and so everybody gets the same distance, the same version, the same masks.

In the discipleship modeled in the bible, we see people literally living among each other, sharing with each other, testifying with each other, loving and correcting each other, on a daily basis.

Not once a month, or once a week during a 15 minute "special moment", but on a continual basis, sharpening each other, enriching each other, praying for each other.

If "the way things are" makes this impossible...is it possible that "the way things are" is actually anti-Christ? Anti-Love? And we've bought into it, and been enslaved by it?

What, after all, do we really need to love and be loved?

Regarding pornography, sexuality, etc.

2009-08-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

Sexual addiction and pornography abuse are huge issues in the church, (see http://xxxchurch.com/ just as an example), and there are many questions out there about accountability of both Christians and leadership with regards to how these things are used and abused.

But as usual, the church is far more interested in treating (or cauterizing) the symptoms than actual dealing with the origins of the issue.

Most kids growing up in Christian culture are told 2 things about sex: 1. it's dirty. 2. it's only for marriage.

Later, they're probably provided with some biological model about it, possibly at public school, and statements about pregnancy and STD's.

Which means most Christian kids get to form all of their ideas about what sex is from...everybody else.

The Internet.

Books.

Friends.

Movies.

TV.

Radio.

Etc.

So by the time that they get to "adulthood", even if they haven't messed around, they still probably have fairly screwed up ideas about what sex is, what it's for, what their place is regarding it. They have fantasies, mis-impressions, all manner of confused role issues regarding how they exist as a sexual being created by God.

And most of them probably won't get any serious information on the subject until after they're already married.

Many Christian women spend their formative years being told, effectively, that sex is dirty, that parts of their bodies are dirty, or secret, and that they need to be careful about how they clothe themselves so as not to arouse men.

Christian men spend their formative years mostly not being told much of anything at all. They struggle with their growing sexuality in silence, or chuckling and wondering about it in locker rooms and the backs of buses, but they certainly aren't allowed to talk about it with their parents, especially not their fathers, or their pastors.

And when these people get married (often having been told that marriage is a license for sex), we find two well developed individuals with very different ideas about what life and marriage is for, one living in a vacuum of fantasies and expectations, and the other having been told that that part of them is dirty their entire lives. Either they haven't cared the whole time...or it cripples them, to some degree.

Pornography feeds fantasies of welcoming, eager women who want to satisfy various fantasies. It's easily available, it doesn't require dinner or a movie before hand, and it doesn't expect commitment.

And it's a complete lie. An empty, destructive lie, devoid of intimacy and self-worth. But if intimacy and self worth have absolutely no meaning for the average Christian (especially male), if they don't think of themselves as made in the image of Christ, if nobody has ever tried to communicate to them what sex, and intimacy, really are as an outgrowth of a healthy relationship between two people modeling and mirroring the intimacy we have with God, then all they have is empty abstinence.

And abstinence only as a rule to break is hardly a convince argument.

Everything about how our culture, as Christians, deals with this HAS to change. We need active mentorship and discipleship for teens, people who can model things for them, who can lead them into positive lifestyles of discipleship, of self-control, of sacrifice, of living for the long view, of seeing themselves created in the image of God and special and holy in the midst of that.

You can't just tell people something and expect it to sit. You can't preach at them. You have to live it, among them, in a way that's readily accessible and that truly communicats through everyday life how special each and every one of them is to God, and why that intimacy is truly far more than any fantasy or picture on a computer screen.

After all, it all comes down to what's in our hearts and minds. It's driven by what's inside of us. If people weren't pursuing those fantasies, then pornography would just be a biological display on a computer screen, of women who desperately need to be told that they have value and meaning to a living, risen Savior.

When sex is merely something that is licensed under specific sitations, then we also render it something that has no holiness to it, and it's mystery is mainly that it's hidden and misunderstood until people stumble upon it.

In the midst of a society plagued by debt and runaway addiction, we NEED the ability to be able to be disciplined, self controlled, to be able to sacrifice for the future. But nobody is modeling that for us, nobody is stepping up to say "I will stand beside you and help you with this."

The system, as usual, is perfectly designed to produce the results that it's getting.

an interview on non-Theism

2009-07-31T09:04:00.000-07:00

This post contains incredibly challenging thoughts on child evangelism, Christian ministry, and an "ends justifies the means" outlook on Christian living. Well worth reading.

Thoughts on Universalism

2009-07-31T08:05:00.001-07:00

There is a burning need within our culture as Christians to A. know the right thing, and B. be able to publicly state it.

But at the time, we say that we serve an infinite God, who is beyond our comprehension.

And much of what we say "we know" is taken far more from one verse in a particular passage, than it is from the theme of the bible as a whole.

Certainly, it feels like it makes sense, from this end, that if you died suddenly at the hands of raiders or atom bombs or disease or whatever else sometime in the last 10k+ years, that there is more beyond this life than just 'whoops, missed your chance, do not pass go".

Books like "Surprised by Hope" and "The Divine Conspiracy" point toward this life being about extremely different things than we'd like to believe, and base themselves off of thematic work rather than proof-texting. When you throw in things like "The Politics of Jesus" you begin to get into frighteningly different territory.

Certainly, we seem to have a very gnostic, dualistic view of the Christian life which focuses on the spiritual and the eventual reward of "heaven" to the aversion of all earthly things, when all of Jesus ministry dealt with who and how we are here and now. As Tony Campolo says, "There are 2,000 verses of scripture that tell us we must be committed to the poor and the oppressed... There is no concern of Scripture that is addressed so often and so powerfully as reaching out to the poor."( http://www.tonycampolo.org/newsandupdates.php)

Paul indicates very clearly that, salvation aside, we will still be judged and rewarded in the resurrection based on our works in this world, our deeds in response to the shaping of Christ.

I find it fascinating that the hearts that are often most crying out for justice, freedom, and a heavenly sense of "what is" here on earth are the most unacceptable to church folk, and church folk have the least "what is" sense of how things are on earth, since their intention is eventual escape.

My hope is not in heaven, in some distant, spiritual place, but in the actual resurrection of my physical body in a new glorified form, as promised by Christ my Lord.

My hope is in a resurrected earth, all old things (sinful things) passed away, all things become new (renewed, resurrected, recreated).

Jesus speech about "I go to prepare a place for you"? It's the Jewish wedding promise speech. Any Jewish groom proposing to his bride would say this exact same thing to her, before going to his father's house and building on an addition for them to live in, prior to the marriage. "In my father's house, there are many rooms". Not, one will note, mansions. Translation by an overenthusiastic monk.

When our expectation stops being "and then the righteous will escape, and everybody else will burn, for the glory of God" and starts being "God is a Father, who is in the process of fixing what He made, and making it into something complete, and healed, and better, and resurrected, and He intends this for ALL of creation, which groans for His touch, has chosen YOU to engage in this process with Him..." then we touch on a completely different theology than what is so often preached.

Salvation isn't just so that you can spread the salvation virus and then get out of dodge. Salvation isn't just so that your prayers can be heard, so that the people you want health or wealth or whatever for can receive what they want.

You are part of the salvific, Sozo ministry of Christ which pursues the healing needs of a groaning, injured creation.

To paraphrase Brennan Manning, if all Christians on the planet actually behaved as if they not only loved Christ, but wanted to be like Him, and act like Him to the world, can you see that everything would be different?

Justification

2009-07-30T22:52:00.000-07:00

Ghandi seems to get brought up a lot.

There's this ongoing..."yes, he was a nice guy, and he did a lot of great things. But he wasn't a Christian, so he's going to hell."

There seems to be some smugness there. A certain country club mentality. Which is precisely why Ghandi didn't want anything to do with the church.

But consider:

The person making this statement about Ghandi has made a belief statement, and gotten wet for their trouble. They attend the club of their choice every sunday (and perhaps sunday night, and wednesday). They read their club manual at various intervals, and spend regular time telling club tech support what needs to be fixed.

Ghandi, on the other hand, spent his entire life trying to free his people, and bring heaven into their lives. He helped them to stand up to slavery, oppression, and abuse without violence or resisting the enemy, he helped free them from the empty state they were in, and he eventually died for them, after a lot of hunter strikes and other methods.

In other words, Ghandi lived a life that emulated Jesus Christ.

Our country club member? Not so much.

So...I begin to have trouble here. Jesus doesn't seem to care, so much, that a person goes to the right club, as that his life emulates his master.

By this logic, if Ghandi isn't going to heaven...the country club member probably isn't either. Yes, you can't get to heaven by works.

But if there aren't any works behind your "faith", if your life is one long saga of self-absorbtion and rationalization...you may be in danger of fire yourself.

Something to think on.

Some thoughts on Doctrine in the Nazarene Church

2009-07-21T19:15:00.000-07:00

For most of this year, there has been ongoing static between various members of the Church of the Nazarene (from here on abbreviated as CotN) and the Concerned Nazarenes across a number of different discussion boards, which was only heightened by the CN crew handing out DVD's at the recent General Assembly in Orlando regarding how the church was being led down the primrose path by CotN members of a more Emergent persuasion.

Reading over belief statements of the CN members, it's become increasingly evident that their belief structure is fairly Southern Baptist, or even Calvinist in it's format. Which then also leads one to suspect that many of the CN members don't actually realize that there is much of a difference between the SBC and the CotN, other than various linguistic variances.

Admittedly, it's taken me about 7 years to realize what's actually involved in being from a Wesleyan/Armenian persuasion rather than a Calvinist/Reformed one. There is so much popular American religious culture involved here in the U.S. that you have to sift through a lot of preferences and 'local custom' to get to the heart of what's actually happening.

I suspect that you would get affirmative responses if you asked a lot of Nazarenes the following:

A. Is God fully Soveriegn, in control of everything that happens in the world, so that nothing happens that He has not allowed, so that He might be glorified?

B. Are people incapable of doing anything good unless God calls them to it?

C. Was the point of Christ's sacrifice on the cross to take the punishment that you deserved to receive from God, and is that the sum of His ministry, to save you from condemnation and hell?

D. Is the bible both authoritative and inerrant?

But these are in fact not Nazarene concepts. Wesley taught that while the spiritual side of humanity (let Us make man in Our image...) was fallen and broken, that the other aspects of humanity (compassion, creativity, etc.) were only damaged, as they were quite evident in the world, even among those who didn't follow God at all, and that the word was authoritative, but that it was only inerrant within the context of it's own writing, and that it could not be taken out of that context and make sense.

I'm not sure if Wesley dealt with the concept of Stewardship, that is, God gave Adam and Even caretaking status over the earth, so that their efforts and will directly affected the nature of the earth, and God never revoked this, so that the fallen nature of man directly affected the nature of the world, thus allowing an understanding that the state of the world is not the will of God, but that it was placed in the hands of man in the state of Stewardship...the mess is our fault, but God can still be glorified through the actions of the faithful in reaction to him...

My overall point, I think, is that many members of the CotN at this date, especially among the older generation, may actually find many ideals in common with the SBC. It's a lot easier to teach Reformation thinking than it is Wesleyan, and many pastors may have found themselves resorting to that sort of teaching to get things through to their congregations, even though it took them away from the intent of the church. We find ourselves in "lowest common demonimator" situations all too often these days, especially since education in church, all too often, is only for those going into ministry.

I know that locally, our pastor says a lot about what our church is about, and what we want to do, but I don't necessarily see those elements evident in our church except when our pastor is physically leading people. We live in a culture where, all too often, people wait to be told what to do, how to live, etc. by the Pastor, and then only absorb as much as they're willing to at that moment. We don't go to church for lifestyle, but for proper belief (it would seem).

So how valid is it to say that the CN, no matter the origins of their teachings, are not representative of the CotN? Not what it is supposed to be, certainly. But at the same time, there are very likely members who are very much in agreement with their ideals, because they haven't been taught what it means to be truly Wesleyan.

So...

2009-07-21T19:04:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm terrible at titles.

I think that it's become more and more clear that, as I participate more on various sites, I need to have a place to direct people to that's just for posts that I make of a more theological nature. Especially since they mostly get ignored on lj unless they're really positive.

This isn't any condemnation of the LJ crowd, there just isn't much of anybody there who looks forward to reading that sort of thing.

Myspace and facebook have both failed to provide me the sort of means where I can adequately express the sort of things that I wind up thinking about, at least with any sort of room or detail. Hopefully this will make up for that.

So here goes.