Lutheran Confessions

Hyping Hyphenated Lutherans

2012-01-27T22:06:00.002-06:00

Two "threads" on "emerging" Christianity have caught our collective attention in recent years. It seems there are equal parts excitement and confusion around this emergence, and so I make an attempt here to summarize the threads and especially highlight how they influence contemporary Lutheran theology and practice.

Theological Emergence

The first thread, a largely theological conversation about a "new kind of Christianity," has been especially championed by Brian McClaren, Phyllis Tickle, and Philip Clayton.

Because I don't think everyone needs to read the works of these three theologians in great detail, I offer an overly simplistic (but hopefully useful) summary of the argument.

I start with Philip Clayton. Clayton, whose areas of academic specialty include the philosophy of religion and the religion and science conversation, essentially ventures out into slightly uncharted waters for himself and makes a proposal for the centrality of transforming theological discourse (the book is Transforming Theologies) to the emerging church conversation. For Clayton, emerging = progressive (what some would label liberal). His book is probably helpful as an introductory text in theology for seminaries of a liberal persuasion, but it does not break nearly as much new theological ground as most reviewers have claimed.

Phyllis Tickle also observes an emerging theological shift, but identifies it more out of an historical locus, what she terms The Great Emergence. She offers an attractive thesis, that the church emerges in a new and better form approximately every 500 years. Since we are now 500 years after the Reformation, and the Reformation was the last great emergence, we are ready for another one. Her thesis, which she substantiates on historical grounds, mirrors Clayton in some ways by seeing all churches in this era as not only emerging but also converging to slightly left of center.

Finally, Brian McLaren has essentially popularized the kinder, gentler, more open kind of Christianity so many North American Christians are seeking these days. His new kind of Christianity mostly popularizes what we might call progressive Christianity. It's not that the ideas are new, it's just that they are now popularized and offered to a wider and more receptive audience. Interestingly, McLaren also likes the word "transforming." The emergent conversation is enamored of its lingo.

Ecclesial/liturgical Emergence

The other thread is much more of an ecclesial and liturgical conversation. This is not to say that there are not also plenty of theological arguments within this conversation, but the direction tends towards how churches might be organized differently, and how communities might worship together differently.

It's hard to get a handle on precisely how to define this "emergence." Typically it is edgy stuff, ministry with the marginalized, in marginal places, but it also often has a hipness to it, an artistic edge, coupled with an ecumenical and winsome communality. I'm a fan of the emerging church conversation, and learn much from it. I think it reminds us to consider beauty, to reinscribe our everyday community practices with theological import and wisdom, and I don't think it hurts anything if it happens to be hip, happening, and culturally contextualized along the way.

It's also a conversation that successfully sells books.

There's a lot you can read on this topic. Maybe the best early survey was by my dissertation advisor, Ryan Bolger, in Emerging Churches. Bolger (together with co-author Eddie Gibbs) offer a research based summary including 9 core practices of the emerging church:

The nine (9) core practices are:
1. Identifying with Jesus (and his way of life)
2. Transforming secular space (overcoming the secular/sacred split)
3. Living as community (not strangers in proximity at a church service)
4. Welcoming the stranger (radical and gentle hospitality that is inclusive)
5. Serving with generosity (not serving the institution called "church," but people)
6. Participating as producers (not widgets in the church program)
7. Creating as created beings (this is a great chapter!)
8. Leading as a body (beyond control and the CEO model of leadership)
9. Merging ancient and contemporary spiritualities.

More recently, a nice collection has arrived: The Hyphenateds: How Emergence Christianity is Re-Traditioning Mainline Practices. The sub-title includes a favorite emergence term, "re-traditioning." Emerging churches think of themselves as re-traditioning more than innovating per se.

It is no surprise that many leaders in the emerging church movement, therefore, actually come out of an existing tradition, or remain in one in order to re-tradition it. This book offers essays by such church leaders and pastors. Three of the essays are by ELCA Lutherans: Nadia Bolz-Weber (pastor of All Saints and Sinners, Denver, Colorado), Nate Frambach (professor of youth culture and mission at Wartburg Theological Seminary), and Timothy Snyder (scholar, editor, and a variety of other things in St. Paul, Minnesota).

The basic thesis of the book is that all the authors are hyphenated in that they combine/meld/weave/smash their own tradition into creative synergy/tension with emergence. Frambach, for example, coins the term "Luthermergent." He sees himself as an interested observer cataloging this Luthermergence. Bolz-Weber and Snyder are, each in their own way, signally embedded in the emergence itself as Lutherans who both benefit from, and struggle with, the way they are as hyphenateds.

I recommend you read the book in its entirety in order to hear the narrative in the voice of the authors. Hearing their collective voices (some hopeful, some angry, some aloof, some prophetic) gives a better sense than anything I've read recently of what this emergence, if it is anything at all, is like.

My basic thesis is that emergence is definitely something, but it isn't quite as sui generis or radical as some of the press would like to have us think (just read the copy on the back of all these emergent books to see what I mean).

I did, however, brainstorm a fun way to try and illustrate where various pastors, theologians, and individuals are on the Hyphenated Continuum. What, you might ask, is the hyphenated continuum? Well, if these folks are hyphenated, then they are "Lutheran-Emergent." But where are they on that continuum? To offer an analysis, I list a host of Lutherans, and then place an asterisk (*) at the place on the continuum in the term "Lutheran-Emergent" that best indicates how Lutheran or Emergent they are, at least from my perspective.

I push back into history in order to illustrate that actual emergence is nothing new, exactly, and also point out some important figures (I think especially of Schleiermacher) who were in all likelihood attempting something similar to the emerging church conversation while not labeling it as such.

I know this is completely nerdy and hokey, but bear with me. It's kind of fun (if a name below is unfamilar, google it... It's a mix of important historical theologians, living pastors and theologians, and a few others, all Lutheran--including Jesus).

Luther*an-Emergent: Nadia Bolz-Weber

L*utheran-Emergent: Nathan Frambach

Lutheran-E*mergent: Timothy Snyder

Lutheran-Emerge*nt: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Lutheran-*Emergent: Martin Luther

Lutheran-Emergent*: Friedrich Schleiermacher

Lutheran-Emergent *: Georg Hegel

*Lutheran-Emergent *: Friedrich Nietzsche (he was so emergent he was Lutheran again)

Lutheran-Emer*gent: Paul Tillich

Luthera*n-Emergent: Clint Schnekloth

Luth*eran-Emergent: Lois Malcolm

Luther*an-Emergent: Cynthia Moe-Lobeda

Lutheran-Emerge*nt: Katie von Bora

Lu*theran-Emergent: Mark Hanson

Lutheran*-*Emergent: Jesus

As you can see, life as a hyphenated Lutheran has been going on for some time, and it is more of a graded scale than an absolute form. I encourage you to create your own chart, and chart your own theologians, church leaders, and self.

Why does any of this matter? I think I can summarize it in this way. All of this matters because those of us who have been traditioned into Christ actually think it is worth considering what life together should look like, and we should be sensitive to the needs of religious others who are often alienated from our communities because our traditions have become hardened instead of held loosely and lovingly.

I think Lutheran-Emergents are trying to figure out, each in their peculiar ways, how to maintain a strong center with an open door.

Do you sleep?

2012-01-27T11:14:00.001-06:00

"I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here."

William Gibson says this about himself in his recent non-fiction essay collection, Distrust that Particular Flavor. He also says, "An individual who watches no television is still a scarcer beast than one who doesn't have an e-mail address," which I have found particularly true whenever I tell people I don't watch television.

And yes, I get most of my writing and other projects done in about the amount of time the average person watches television.

Which leaves some time for sleep.

A week in the life of a pastor

2012-01-26T10:47:00.001-06:00

Very few pastors have a "typical" week. Pastoral ministry is subject to the vagaries of human life even more than the typical profession, because the lives of so many people intersect the life of a pastor.

There are some constants: we always "land" at church for Sunday (and sometimes midweek) worship, scheduled weekly bible studies, small group, or staff meetings. But the other peculiar aspect of pastoral ministry is how free the pastor is, much of the time, to create their own schedule.

So here is a record of how I spent this past week. It's one way to do this work, certainly not the only way, but definitely a blessed and pleasing way to spend time in God's mission to the world.

Saturday (January 21): I was supposed to have been in Seattle, Washington attending the Phinney Ridge hosted Faith & Font training. A full Saturday immersed in learning about the catechumenal process that church engages in to form adults towards baptism and beyond. However, all flights were cancelled to Seattle for the snow. Instead I found myself at home, and so took the opportunity to finish work on my dissertation. I spent approximately four hours editing the introduction and first chapter according to the standards of Turabian. Spent most of the rest of the day with the family, but also, during some naps and in the evening after the children were in bed, finished reading two books, including one I'm reviewing for a journal (James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree), and another we're using as the basis for our Lenten study (Dave and Jon Ferguson's Exponential: How You and Your Friends Can Start a Missional Church Movement). Also prayed through the church directory for all our members, and prayed for prayer requests from a Facebook thread.

Sunday: Three worship services, as presider and worship leader, while we hosted a guest preacher, Joe Liles, a mission developer in Bentonville. Cottage meetings at noon to listen to our congregation as they talked about their vision for mission for the Pastor of New Communities we are hoping to call. Home by 4 p.m., family time for the rest of the day. Wrote the review of James Cone's book that evening.

Monday: In at 8, caught up on office stuff, 9 a.m. conference call with some pastors all of whom are studying the Exponential book together. ELCA clergy from across the country, we formed the group as a side conversation on the ELCA Clergy Facebook page. Then some worship planning, time spent writing thank you notes to members of our congregation, then over to visit our 100 year old member who has recently gone on hospice care. Back to the office, printed dissertation material and took it to the post office, also started some sermon research. Somewhere in here I also wrote a blog post about the CEB.

Tuesday: Counseling/coaching sessions with folks at 8 and 10, visit to our Bears group in between, more worship planning (installation of council members, prep for a baptism class and baptism this Sunday), follow up phone calls, sorted a huge pile of books to start work on the next stage of the dissertation, and drafted a follow-up summary of the cottage meetings for our Wednesday e-blast. Home in the afternoon, then 6 p.m. bible study (Acts 19), 7-9 p.m. meeting with the call committee to summarize cottage meetings findings and plan next steps.

Wednesday: Morning at home, noon bible study (Acts 19 again), followed by a brief conversation about updating the front wall of our worship space, meeting at coffee shop at 1:30 p.m. pick up son from school, back to the coffee shop for a spiritual direction conversation, back to the church for final preps for my high school Augsburg Confession class, pre-baptism class at 5 p.m., 6 p.m. supper with our LOGOS group, 7 p.m. class with the high schoolers. Came home and cleaned the house in preparation for a birthday weekend for our soon-to-be one year old.

Thursday: Writing this blog post. Meeting to plan Lent and and our cultural change approach to leadership development and missional multiplication. Lunch with university students at Hog Haus. Finishing touches on sermon research and worship planning. Home for the afternoon. Evening church council meeting preceded by a finance committee meeting.

Friday and Saturday: Free days, family visiting for the big birthday.

The strange silence of the bible #CEBtour

2012-01-23T15:20:00.002-06:00

A few months ago, I embarked on a journey reading and evaluating the new Common English Translation of the Bible. Since the bible is such a big book, it can take quite a while to actually get into the swing of evaluating a new translation. Typically, I have found the easiest way to compare two translations is to simply open them up, side by side, and read passages one at a time, back and forth between the two translations. It is work mostly for the eye and the mind.

I have compared new translations with the NRSV before, and have typically found them wanting. As a result, the NRSV has remained my default and preferred bible translation. It is the translation most commonly in use in our denomination, it is a translation widely respected by scholars as well as the ecumenical Christian community. It is translated by "verbal equivalence," a style of translation common among some of the most respected bible translations such as the NIV, ESV, and KJV.

When I picked up the CEB, something about it caught my attention in a way no other translation had before. Since the NRSV truly is my heart translation, and the translation most common in our churches, it takes something really special to create a tipping point. I've never been attracted to paraphrase bibles like The Message or the New Living Translation, because generally speaking they represent the ideology and perspective of the translator more than the original text. And although I like word-for-word translations for study (like the NASB)--for devotional use, or use in groups or reading aloud, they lack that certain je ne sais quois.

A few weeks ago, I actually became convinced the CEB was worth experimenting with as a substitute or even a replacement for the NRSV. I've always struggled with the high level of English in the NRSV. It is difficult for children, and even many adults, to understand because it is translated at what language experts call level 11. The CEB, on the other hand, is written at level 7.

Another way to understand this is to say the CEB is translated into the English of USA Today, whereas the NRSV is written at the level expected of someone entering college.

The CEB is also verbal equivalence plus common english. This means the translators use contractions, and make other choices that ensure that the bible "reads" like people would speak common english today. If you'd like to understand this terminology better, and compare various translations and their approaches, there are some good charts out there.

--
So about three weeks ago we started using the CEB as our primary text for lectionary readings during worship. As much as I'd like to be able to make a decision about a translation simply by eyeballing it, the truth is that the bible was written to be heard, and it is impossible to tell whether it is a good translation until you are hearing it read out loud regularly.

Donald H. Juel, one of my favorite bible teachers, writes about this in a little essay he wrote before his untimely death a decade ago. The essay has been collected in a new volume of his work, Shaping the Scriptural Imagination: Truth, Meaning, and the Theological Interpretation of the Bible. It's a spectacular little volume, and I'm saddened that Juel isn't still available to teach in our seminaries. His was a bright light.

His essay's title is, "The Strange Silence of the Bible." He points out, "For most people in the church, the Bible is part of an oral/aural culture. For scholars, the Bible is studied largely in a silent world" (35). I can mistakenly assume that judgments concerning the relative merits of translations can be made while reading silently. When we started reading the CEB in worship, I realized the only way to really judge a bible translation is by how it sounds.

This is probably why a better way of describing these translations is they focus on "verbal equivalence" rather than "dynamic equivalence." Sometimes even what you write might not be as equivalent when read aloud than when written. The difference between spoken word and written word is important.

As we have been reading the CEB in our worship, I note two things. First, I don't think very many people have noticed that we have switched. The bible simply isn't that familiar to people anymore, so for those who don't have a "heart" translation in mind, whatever we read is always new to them, rather than a replacement for a familiar text.

However, a few folks more familiar with the NRSV have commented on the new translation. They notice a few phrases that simply don't ring the same way (the most recent was in Mark 1, where God says speaking of his Son Jesus in the NRSV, "With him I am well pleased," whereas in the CEB it says, "In him I find happiness."

What I notice myself is that the readings are easier to follow when I'm listening to them, especially if I put down my bulletin and just listen.

All of us always still have work to do practicing our reading of the bible out loud in public worship. There are better and worse ways to do this. It is unfortunate that our choirs rehearse, and pastors agonize over their sermons, but lectors do a lot less (generally speaking) to prepare their reading of the Scriptures in public worship.

I intend to offer a Lectors Boot Camp some time this spring to address issues around the public reading of Scripture, because it really does matter how we read. It is a kind of performance, and rehearsal helps.

Juel has this to say about rhetoric and the public reading of Scripture,

"Students at Princeton Seminary must take a year-long required course in speech. One facet of the course is devoted to public reading of the Scriptures. Students begin with a passage like the account of Belshazzar's feast in Daniel 5 and are asked to 'play' with different ways of reading the story. Resistance is great among most students who may not know the Bible but have a fixed notion of how it should be read--usually with great reverence and solemnity, but with very little inflection. The course aims to give them a greater sense of the possibility of the spoken word and of their options as readers. Their exercises include attention to the wide variety of literary genres from narratives to psalms to letters, while exploring oral means appropriate to the public performance of such material. In view of my own experience as a member of congregations where Bible reading is a regular feature of worship and yet is almost never interesting or engaging, I can only applaud such efforts."

We will continue our CEB experiment through this spring, hearing this translation for a while to get a sense of how it "plays" in Christian worship. I have not yet decided whether to keep it or revert to the NRSV (although I suspect it is the first translation ever that is giving the NRSV a run for the money), but I do know we will only be able to judge whether it is worth retaining through regular and weekly hearing of it rehearsed and heard and sung and shouted and whispered in public worship. The bible was written for such.

* You can follow tweets on the the CEB Blog tour at #CEBtour

** In this year of the gospel of Mark, there are two essays in the Juel volume on Mark (Juel focused his scholarship on this gospel) that are worth their weight in gold. Buy the book you won't be disappointed.

The White, Middle Class Captivity of our Denomination

2012-01-21T13:26:00.003-06:00

Two books I've read this week have changed me, permanently. Emily Dickinson said of poetry,

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

Much the same can be said of theology. So imagine me with the top of my head off right now.

I've always known that are our denomination was too white, and too middle class. There's something about Christian faith in the United States that seems to reinforce race categories rather than reduce them. This is a tragedy of immense proportions precisely because central to the gospel is the reconciliation of races and ethnicities.

Sports, businesses, schools, you name it, all of them are more racially integrated than the churches, especially mainline Protestant churches, of which general class our denomination is a member.

So I read with fear and trembling James Cone's new book, The Cross the Lynching Tree. Really if you read only one piece of theologically informed non-fiction this year, make it this one. Among other things, Cone draws our attention to the fact that no one, not one single theologian of note in the last century, has ever drawn a sustained comparison between the innocent suffering of those lynched in the United States, and the cross/lynching of Jesus Christ.

Even at the height of the lynching era, when liberal Protestant theologians could have and should have made it at least one part of their theologies of the cross, they did not. It was and remains a glaring oversight, and example of how wide the racial divisions are and continue to be.

I do not intend to point any fingers here. I live in a predominately white and middle class neighborhood, have served churches that include the same constituency, and went to schools that were also predominately filled with this race and class. I have failed on so many levels, the best I can do is simply note this issue and pray that the Spirit will change me, and change us as a church.

As a church, we keep lamenting that we are a shrinking denomination, and we think this is because we've lost our identity and missional impulse. But what if in fact we are shrinking because we are in captivity to white middle-classness?

Stephanie Spellers, in a short essay in another new book recently out (The Hyphenateds: How Emerging Christianity Is Re-Traditioning Mainline Practices) asks the very hard question, "Is the emerging church movement a white church movement?" She herself leads an Angli-mergent community in Boston, and is a black woman priest.

Here's the paragraph that took the top of my head off:

"Looking back, mainline churches can boast a historic commitment to social justice, reconciliation, and even antiracism, at times standing in the vanguard of cultural and social change. Those days of leading change have passed, and now we are scrambling to catch up. The irony is that, as I have interviewed and consulted with church leaders about the systemic decline of the mainline churches, many say we are suffering because we forgot who we are, chasing trends and watering down our traditions so much that there was nothing left for anyone to believe in or connect with. Research shows we've shrunk because we make up a mostly white, upper-middle-class church [Episcopalian, but Lutherans are close to this, if a little more solidly middle class], and that particular slice of America stopped growing at the very same time that other racial and cultural groups blossomed. The problem isn't that we let go of our identity. It's that we clung to it too tightly. As our neighborhoods changed, and hybridity became the rule, we came to look like cultural dinosaurs; suspicious of change, judgmental of emerging cultures, and incapable of venturing out to build relationships in the transformed cultures around us" (13).

Read that again three times and memorize it. It's one of the truest things I've ever read about us as mainline Protestants.

And the only way to bust out of captivity is to break the chains that bind us and leave our prison cells. Which means openness to change, loving engagement with emerging cultures, and venturing out to build relationships with people of other ethnic, racial, economic, and religious status.

Where is the top of your head now?

A Disseminary

2012-01-21T05:00:00.000-06:00

"What importance does the staggering éclat of Napster have for theological educators? It suggest the possibility of what one might call a “Disseminary,” a common effort to put as much theological sustenance at the disposal of as many people as possible. It suggests that a Disseminary can serve the mission of theological education by raising the tide of theological literacy among its students and among interested believers (and non-believers). A Disseminary sets out as rich a banquet of theological wisdom as it can manage to offer, without trying to set standards for who consumes it, how well, when, how often, or… anything.

A disseminary: a site that uses electronic technology to spread as much theological nourishment as possible, without devoting energy to policing the results of that distribution. No degrees. No requirements. No restrictions. Put it out where users can grab it. And get out of the way." (AKM Adam, Practicing the Disseminary: Technology Lessons from Napster)

This is an essay from the Napster era but even more incredibly applicable now than before. Given recent possible legislation on the free exchange of information, etc., theologians and churches need to decide how and whether to make resources free and available. Many on-line faith communities now function more and more like the disseminary he describes.

An Unusual Bibliography

2012-01-20T11:36:00.002-06:00

The following books all sit on my desk at close hand as I plod along on the dissertation, and I wonder if anyone else in the whole of North America has this particular constellation of books at hand to do their work... If you are looking for something to read in 2012, you could do a lot worse than pretty much anything listed here.

Bibliography

Blascovich, Jim and Jeremy Bailenson. Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New

Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA:

The MIT Press, 2010.

Borgmann, Albert. Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology. Grand

Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. 2003.

Boyd, Danah. Taken Out of Context. PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2008.

Brock, Brian. Christian Ethics in a Technological Age. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,

2010.

Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage.

New York: Peter Lang, 2008

Burgess, Jean and Joshua Green. Youtube: Online Video and Participatory Culture.

Cambridge: Polity. 2009.

Campbell, Heidi. Exploring Religious Community Online: We Are One in the Network.

New York: Peter Lang. 2005.

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. New York:

W. W. Norton. 2008.

Crouch, Andy. Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. Downer’s Grove, IL:

InterVarsity Press, 2008.

Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 1991.

_______. Marshall McCluhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!. New York: Atlas and

Company, 2011.

Darnton, Robert. The Case for Books. Jackson, TN: PublicAffairs, 2010.

Dean, Kenda Creasy. Almost Christian: What the Faith of our Teenagers is Telling the

American Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1984.

Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. New York:

Penguin, 2009.

Detweiler, Craig. Halos and Avatars: Playing Video Games with God. Louisville, KY:

Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.

Dickerson, Matthew. The Mind and the Machine: What It Means to be Human and Why

It Matters. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2011.

Doctorow, Cory. Makers. New York: Tor, 2010.

Drane, John. After McDonaldization: Mission, Ministry, and Christian Discipleship in an

Age of Uncertainty. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. 2008.

Estes, Douglas. SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World. Grand Rapids, MI:

Zondervan. 2009.

Fowler, Robert M., Edith Blumhofer, and Fernando F. Segovia, ed. New Paradigms for

Bible Study: The Bible in the Third Millenium. New York: T & T Clark, 2004.

Friesen, Dwight. The Kingdom Connected: What the Church Can Learn from Facebook,

the Internet, and Other Networks. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. 2009.

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy.

Second Edition. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Gerhardsson, Birger. Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission

in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 2004.

Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon,

2011.

Goody, Jack. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1977.

Halavais, Alexander. Search Engine Society. Cambridge: Polity. 2009.

Harmless, William. Augustine and the Catechumenate. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical

Press, 1995.

Hoffman, Paul. Faith Forming Faith: Bringing New Christians to Baptism and Beyond.

Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012.

Illich, Ivan. In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalion.

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Innis, Harold A. The Bias of Communication. 2^nd Edition. Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 2008.

Jacobs, Alan. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Oxford University

Press, 2011.

_______. Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,

2010.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York

University Press, 2006.

Johnson, Maxwell. The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation.

Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. University of Notre Dame

Press, 2007.

_______. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University of Notre Dame Press, 1989.

_______. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and

Tradition. University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.

McCluhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Corte Madera, CA:

Gingko Press, 2003.

_______. The Medium is the Massage. Berkeley, CA: Ginkgo Press, 1967.

_______. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.

McGonagal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can

Change the World. New York: Penguin Press, 2011.

Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967.

_______. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Pagitt, Doug. Church in the Inventive Age. Minneapolis, MN: Sparkhouse Press, 2010.

Pettegree, Andrew. The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 2010.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show

Business. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

Satterlee, Craig. Ambrose of Milan’s Mystagogical Preaching. Collegeville, MN:

Liturgical Press, 2002.

Smith, Christian. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American

Teenagers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural

Formation. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 1973.

Stephenson, Neal. Anathem. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010.

Thomas, Douglas and John Seely Brown. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the

Imagination for a World of Constant Change. Self-published, 2011.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from

Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

Ward, Pete. Participation and Mediation: A Practical Theology for the Liquid Church.

London: SCM Press. 2008.

Weinberger, David. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital

Disorder. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007.

Wuthnow, Robert. After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings are

Shaping the Future of American Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2010.

Unhelling Hell

2012-01-19T22:11:00.001-06:00

"This is the tragedy of our human condition, that we fall so far we can no longer see or hear the true God, and we imagine the condemning God is the only God. And then, the God we imagine becomes the God we get" (Luther)

But this is not the true and only God, Luther continued. In Jesus Christ, the true God breaks into even the most utter despair. In the one who cries out, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" God joins those whom darkness has swallowed. In so doing, Christ unhelled hell, Luther preached, declaring that Christ's descent to hell means there is no place that any one of us could ever end up, no depth to which we might ever sink, but that even there he is Lord with us. Even there he says, "Come with me."

-excerpted from Frederick Niedner's essay "Barely Enough: Manna in the Wilderness of Depression," The Christian Century, January 25, 2012.

ReLent

2012-01-19T14:55:00.003-06:00

Title for whole season: ReLent (Five weeks beginning February 26th): Twitter account to follow through the season: @ReLent

For our tradition Lent is a season of repentance, which includes a) sorrow for our sin, b) trust that God in Christ truly forgives us, and c) plans to do better. This Lent, we "relent" from some of the ways we have failed to respond fully to God's mission for us in the world, we trust that Christ is forgiving us and the Spirit leading us, and we look at creative ways to do better.

For the five weeks of Lent, we focus on key themes:

We Multiply: Did you know a multiplying missional movement can start with you?

We Dream: Are we dreaming God-sized dreams?

We Connect: Are you in a group that is connecting the unconnected to God?

We Apprentice: Who has invested in you? Who can you pour yourself into to encourage and develop a leader?

We Catalyze: Are we identifying artists to lead us and catalyze God's mission in the world?

How will we engage these topics during Lent? The whole congregation will hear a big picture message on the topic on Sundays in connection with the Old Testament lesson for that Sunday. Then, there will be a "going deeper" and very practical message on Wednesdays following the singing of Holden Evening Prayer. Staff will discuss the book and topic weekly at staff meeting. Council and other leadership team will attend ALL Sunday and Wednesday services to lock in on the message and discuss in their committee and council meetings. We will offer a book discussion (Dave and Jon Ferguson's Exponential) face-to-face for the whole congregation (see details at the beginning of Lent), as well as a Facebook group discussion.

Come get marked with ashes on February 22^nd for Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the season, and commit to full participation in these events as we challenge ourselves to live as fully devoted Christ-followers in the real-lent world.

Mark Driscoll: Look at me!

2012-01-18T11:16:00.001-06:00

Ever since Google acquired Blogger, more metrics have been available to bloggers, including stats on the number of views of individual blog posts. Although this helps bloggers write content that attracts readers (since Google added this feature, I've been able to increase from 8,000 to over 12,000 visits per month), it also introduces a kind of regular temperature taking of the readerly climate, not an altogether good thing.

For example, the most popular recent post on my blog was "To Tebow or not to Tebow." It has been read 690 times. Another frequently read post was "Jesus vs. religion: a death match," read 423 times. Each post was riding a wave of media attention, and served as creative commentary on it.

On the other hand, recent posts on social justice have received much more modest views, including "Love in society is named justice" (124 views).

If I scroll back through, this trend is a persistent one. Posts that are timely, commenting on hyped or popular issues, are read widely. Serious and less flashy pieces, not so much.

Herein lies the rub. As a blogger, and someone who likes to cultivate a readership, this means I will naturally tend, now knowing the metrics, to post flashy commentary rather than creative substance. Not exclusively, mind you, but it does push in that general direction. Those same popular posts also attract more chatter and comment, another sign of cultivating a readership.

I want readers. Metrics teach me how to cultivate them, but also cultivate a childish approach to blogging, which I might call the "Look at me!" effect.

A prime example is my recent response to Mark Driscoll's silly gender remarks about the church in Britain. For those who haven't heard of him, Driscoll is a young, conservative, and macho mega-church pastor from Seattle who loves to reinforce gender stereotypes. In this case, I thought of responding on this blog to his remark in an interview for Christianity Today that men will not go to church in places where "guys in dresses are preaching to grandmas."

Instead, I posted this to Facebook:

Mark Driscoll, macho-Seattle pastor, claims that young men will not go to church so long as there are “guys in dresses preaching to grandmas.” Just for the record, I LIKE to wear a dress while preaching, and I love to preach to grandmas. And grandpas. And parents. And children. And pretty much anyone who will show up. Any guys out there with me on this? Hope to see you tomorrow, cause I'll be wearing my dress, and there will be a lot of grandmas! :)

This status update garnered 27 "likes" and 42 comments. So of course I was tempted to write the blog entry I am now writing.

However, I'm worried. I'm worried about the immaturity this can evoke in me. Of course I want the kind of attention and size of congregation and audience Driscoll has. So I could ramp up my rhetoric in response to his, posturing around with smarmy utterances to attract an audience all of whom is united in their disdain for the rantings of such a problematic preacher as Driscoll.

The problem? Aside from the fact that my response would then be identical to his, in the observe, and so fiercely macho and immature at the same level at which he is operating, it would also not address the root problem, one Driscoll is trying to address even if his method is deeply problematic. There is a root issue here about which both of us agree.

There are not enough young men in the church, and it is probably the fault of the church, at least in part, that they are not in our churches.

So if I am going to write a blog post that seeks to counter Driscoll's absolutely ludicrous gendering of Christianity in ways counter to the gospel, I need to argue with it at the proper points while also agreeing with his general concern.

I am inspired, for example, by preachers like Priscilla, Aquila, and Paul who, when encountering preachers preaching a gospel slightly off from the gospel they were proclaiming, took them aside and corrected them, and regularly argued with people of other religious traditions concerning the right understanding of the gospel (see Acts 18). It is not that we can't or shouldn't argue. It's how we argue that matters.

I happen to think, for example, that we have too narrowly constricted, to the point of a straight-jacket, what it can mean in our culture to be a man. And the church has played along with this. As a result, men feel out of place in many churches not because churches aren't manly, but because manliness has been so ill-defined in our culture that men are uncomfortable being the kind of men they are rather than the kind of men the culture demands of them.

To rectify this, we don't need to re-assert traditional gender roles, but rather open up space in our churches for the diversity of genderedness actually present in our communities. What else does Paul mean when he says there is neither male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus, after all?

So, Mark Driscoll, if you ever read this, I have this to say. Your cockiness is unbecoming, and it tempts me to be fierce and cocky back at you. Instead, I'd simply like to invite you to consider the possibility that the lack of men in our churches has more to do with the overly defined and constricting gender roles asserted in our culture and than wedded to certain forms of the gospel than it actually does to do with clergy being overly effete and feminine or preaching to churches full of grandmothers.

After all, it used to be, and still ought to be, quite masculine to have great respect for, and a warm relationship with, your grandma.

And there are some seriously righteous dudes who wear dresses.

Just sayin'.

King and The Beloved Community

2012-01-16T21:45:00.002-06:00

"We only deserve his legacy if we move even beyond these demands to something even greater -- the ultimate destination that King stood for: a Beloved Community.

Dr. King recognized that it was not enough to march, that it was not enough to sit-in, or enjoy equal access. This was merely the absence of negatives. King called us to a community that has moved past demands, to true brotherhood and sisterhood. The Beloved Community is a stunning vision of total relatedness. In this society, the divides that we currently live by, are subsumed into a community of love. It is a vision, as he saw it, of black and white together. Today we would have to expand those boundaries to many other ethnicities and lives.

But knowing this also explains why Dr. King strove unrelentingly to bring white Americans along with him, rather than excluding them, as some in his movement desired. It was not because he was soft, as some claimed, but the opposite, because he was hardened, possessed of a transcendent vision."

Excerpted from Martin Luther King Day: Let King Be King via @huffingtonpost

Guest Post from Professor Gary Simpson of Luther Seminary

2012-01-14T19:39:00.000-06:00

OK—A Happy Constellation of Some UnHappy Things: Haiti, slavery, and earthquakes.

So, today, 1/11 is the two-year commemoration of the devastating 7.0 earthquake with its 52 aftershocks of 4.5 or greater. Yesterday, 1/12 was Human Trafficking Awareness Day invoking our prayers and action regarding the contemporary global situation of slavery of some 2.5 million persons.
Perhaps the greatest slave uprising in modern times was the one depicted in the five paintings on the Wikipedia entry for Haiti.

And now, two things for those who by nature and/or nurture tend to process things Lutheranly:
First, Lutheran philosopher, Georg Hegel (also a kind-a theologian—he was after all a Lutheran seminary grad and wrote four not-too-important books on theology) was quite taken by the Haitian slave revolution that lasted from 1791-Jan 1,1804. As a newspaper reporter, commentator, and publisher he kept his reading audience in Germany up to date on the latest happenings. And, the Haitian slave revolution was the phenomenon that he reflected upon philosophically in his most famous and most influential chapter of all time, Master and Slave in The Phenomenology of Spirit (a chapter that I find flawed, but what the heck, it outed slavery like little else philosophical-theological had ever done!).

And second, I commend to you a recent essay on Haiti by Lutheran Pr. John Nunes. John is the President and CEO of LWR, a fantastic leader and provocative theologian, and hails from Montego Bay, Jamaica. The essay is: "Seeing the Other Side: Critical Modernist Poetics and Postcolonial Haiti," Concordia Journal (Winter 2011). Yup, that’s right, John is an LCMS pastor, and also a PhD candidate in theology at LSTC and defending his dissertation in less than a week. Free access to his essay at:

http://issuu.com/concordiasem/docs/cjwinter11

Just some beautiful diatoms for your Saturday

2012-01-14T08:33:00.000-06:00

Diatoms are single cell organisms that make a cell wall out of silica. They are sometimes called "algae living in glass houses." Turns out, they make 30% of the world's oxygen. They are also incredibly diverse in shape, almost like snowflakes. Their frustule (outer walls) are gorgeous.

Back in the day, clergy were also often scientists, and it was actually a Lutheran clergy person, the Francis Wolle (1894), who published the first account of the diatoms of North America. I love to learn of clergy who are "also" something else. Clergy should be leaders in inquiry and wonder in the world. I like that Wolle cared for a congregation AND cataloged diatoms with a microscope.

Thanks to Evelyn Gaiser for alerting me to this beautiful part of creation in the recent issue of Word and World: Theology for Christian Ministry.

Diatoms are also incredibly sensitive to the environment, and tell us much about how our environment is doing. Dr. Gaiser writes, "Diatoms are indeed a blessing in so many ways; they remind us of trustworthy sentinels of the state of our water resources, and by thinking like them, we should be able to more responsibly care for our threatened planet."

Love in society is named justice

2012-01-13T22:20:00.001-06:00

I was honored recently when Lutheran World Relief asked to see if I'd be willing to be a guest blogger on their blog (blog.lwr.org). They plan to post a series of short blog posts that look at the sustainable development work of LWR from a Lutheran perspective.

Lutheran World Relief works to fight poverty and promote a more just and peaceful world by helping people help themselves. Your support provides the foundation for LWR’s work.

When the invitation e-mail arrived in my inbox, my immediate reaction was, "Lord have mercy. I've been so distracted by blogging about Tim Tebow and that silly hate-religion love-Jesus video, that I've neglected the weightier matters of justice." And it's true, so much of our media culture serves to distract us from the slow and steady development work groups like LWR are doing on our behalf, and through our giving.

Father, forgive me. Seriously.

However, upon further reflection, I realized things weren't as bad as all that. In what follows, I'm going to share some ideas on what you can do to support the ministry of LWR. These are all things I do personally, most of them weekly if not monthly. I could do more. We all could, but these are a start.

ELCA clergy have, as part of their letters of call, a commitment to work for justice and peace on behalf of the poor and marginalized. Such ministry is always easier to list on a call letter than it is to actualize in daily life, but I can tell you the top ways I focus my ministry in a way that supports the work of LWR.

I invite readers to adopt at least these practices as followers of Jesus who believe, together with ethicists like Niebuhr and King, that "love in society is named justice" (a phrase I just learned in a spectacular new book I'm reading by that greatest of contemporary theologians, James Cone).

So here's my list, in order of priority. If you do nothing else, do #1. Everything else is justice gravy.

#1--Set up monthly automatic giving to Lutheran World Relief. Give sacrificially. Imagine the effect we could have collectively if all of our giving to LWR exceeded our giving to our local congregation, or the amount we spend on Starbucks each week.

#2--Learn more about the difference between ministries that provide necessary and important emergency relief, like homeless shelters and food banks, and ministries that engage in sustainable development work that addresses the root causes of poverty.

#3--Participate. LWR has dozens of programs designed for local congregations and groups. Sign your group up to get alerts.

#4--Decide LWR is going to be the primary social ministry of the church that you support, donate to, and advocate for. Tons of organizations are asking you for your money and your time. Guaranteed, dollar for dollar, LWR is at the top of the list of organizations that really make a difference in the world.

#5--Follow LWR on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever you hang out as a denizen of the digital domain. Reminders in your twitter feed or Facebook profile really will make a difference.

Jesus vs. religion: a death match

2012-01-12T21:18:00.003-06:00

I could become seriously frustrated and hyperbolic on this one, so feel free to bail right now. You have been warned.

Here goes, I'll keep it short.

Lots of people are re-posting a video that has gone viral on Youtube. It's about how Jesus is better than religion, and why the poet/rapper making the video hates religion but loves Jesus. If you really must watch it, here's the link: http://youtu.be/1IAhDGYlpqY

And much like my previous post on whether to Tebow or not to Tebow, there's a great essay out there already that offers a solid theological critique. You really should go read it:

http://www.patrolmag.com/2012/01/12/jonathan-d-fitzgerald/lame-poetry-false-dichotomies-and-bad-theology/

Here's my central point: People love this video not because it is true, but because it has high production values. It's a classic example of where the medium (a well made "music" video) convinces through the rhetorical force of the medium and accompanying soundtrack rather than the validity and coherence of the message. The medium, in fact, overrides and replaces the message. It swallows it.

--

In fact, an inversion occurs, to such an extent that the very thing the poet is declaiming (religion) becomes the thing he is celebrating, because his video is a classic example of what "religion" is. He says religion is about how you look on the outside rather than what is on the inside. Ipso facto, this video is all about presentation.

Religion makes high production value videos in front of cool buildings with guys in fancy clothes instead of feeding the poor.

Religion needs really cute guys who can rap handsomely about their weakness in order to prove that Jesus is about weakness rather than strength.

Religion needs bad rhymes to cover up inelegant prose. As one teen noted, "It's like he built the poem around a rhyme. Rhyme can ruin otherwise good poetry."

Religion takes an authentic and tried and true form (a faith testimonial) and turns it into a viral Youtube phenomenon requiring lots of expensive cameras and shots, and less authenticity, in order to get everyone excited about why in a death match between Jesus and religion, Jesus wins hands down.

This video is the height of religiosity, not a critique of it. This video IS religion.

And since we still have no idea what religion actually is, other than, using the same assumptions as the video, it must be a very, very, very bad thing, the rhetoric of my preceding sentences has convinced you, right?

Those silly Protestant pastors

2012-01-11T10:16:00.001-06:00

CNN published some rather absurd survey results today (absurd not because of CNN but because of the results). Here's the article. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/10/survey-u-s-protestant-pastors-reject-evolution-split-on-earths-age/?hpt=hp_t3

[I add here that we should also be a little careful about the "science" of such a survey. The results and responses might be skewed for various reasons. It remains to be seen if Protestant clergy are as anti-evolution as this one survey indicates.]

Nevertheless, just for the record, I'm one of the 3 out of 10 pastors who finds evolutionary theory a compelling and reasonable explanation of the rise of life on our planet and the origins of biological diversity. In fact, I'm part of an incredibly small 12% of Protestant clergy who think evolution is coherent with a biblical picture of human origins.

I wish they would have included Catholics in their survey, who have generally confirmed the lack of conflict between evolutionary theory and Catholic theology.

For one example of how Lutherans engage science faithfully rather than reject it in knee jerk fashion, see our most recent social statement on Genetics.

For a great journal on the topic of the relationship between faith and science, see Zygon. For a great foundation researching questions at the intersection of faith and science, see the Templeton Foundation.

And for all of you who drift over into the fantasy section of the bookstore after perusing science titles, I add this: I see no tensions between faith and science, only opportunity for conversation and mutual exploration. I also don't reject dragons, elves, hobbits, and dwarves. I love fantasy as much as science. And did I mention parallel universes? Don't get me started. Love 'em!

To Tebow or Not to Tebow?

2012-01-10T14:28:00.002-06:00

Don't read my blog about Tim Tebow, or at least, before you do, read Chuck Klostermann's essay on Tebow first, which is the best thing written about him yet. Why? Because CK is an Übermensch. He's like the Tim Tebow of non-fiction essays. Or something.

Ok, now that that is out of the way (and having lost half my readers who are now off reading the Klostermann essay and getting lost on Grantland), let's answer the age old question:

To Tebow or not to Tebow?

To me the answer is Obvious. Tebow. Tebow all the time. Tebow without ceasing.

Why? Unfortunately it seems that most folks who are commenting on Tebow miss an essential point, that Tebow is not praying in order to win, in some kind of directly causal way, as if his prayers cause the wins, but rather, Tebow simply gives thanks for his wins by praying. That's a huge difference.

To say it another way, Tebow is more theologically subtle than people are giving him credit for, and although some people, including his own pastor apparently, are interpreting Tebow as proclaiming some kind of prosperity gospel, it is not at all clear that is how Tim Tebow understands his own prayers.

Tim Tebow is prosperous, yes. But does that mean he isn't allowed to pray, and pray wherever he is?

Seriously, if you get a new job, don't you say thank you to God? If you find out you don't have cancer when the biopsy results come in negative, don't you say thank you? So Tim Tebow kneels and says thank you.

But Tebow does more than that. He also wears that ridiculous eye makeup, which makes him look like an athletic and happy member of the band Green Day.

I started toying around with the idea of featuring the lectionary texts on eye-makeup for Sunday worship, but then decided to skip it until it becomes more fashionable. For now, I think I'll just get a tattoo or something.

But here again, we're to remember that professional football is a show, even a religion. Tebow isn't the only one who wears the eye paint. He just was clever enough to actually put a message in the eye-makeup. He found a billboard where no one had noticed.

So, let's all get over ourselves, and let Tebow pray. He may be ostentatious, he may have a slightly different piety than yours, but the dude can play a good game of football, he seems like a genuine and nice guy, and it's completely within his right to pray without ceasing.

Now let's turn things around. Could you please explain to me why more people aren't Tebowing? I watched a mocking post go around Facebook lately implying that Tebow shouldn't pray in thanksgiving for a touchdown because in the meantime 30,000 children die of preventable diseases. However, that should simply be a reminder that more of us should be praying, not that Tebow should stop. Unless you think there shouldn't be professional football (which actually is a viable argument, but for another time and place, not here).

We should all be Tebowing in order to bring a stop to preventable diseases. And like Tebow, we should do what it takes to WIN GAMES against hunger and disease. What did you do today? What did I do?

The first thing I'm going to do is go Tebow, and start with confession. "God, I'm sorry I have not worked harder to end preventable diseases among children in our world." Then I'm going to say, "Thank you God for my health."

I might also go shop for some cheap mascara.

Visiting some Lutherans at Tyson Foods Corporate

2012-01-09T14:06:00.002-06:00

The history of Lutheranism and Tyson Foods in Northwest Arkansas are curiously intertwined. Of course, Tyson is much bigger than Lutheranism in Northwest Arkansas. Much bigger. Their corporate headquarters in Springdale has approximately 2500 employees, and that is just one of many locations for Tyson in NWA.

The reason Lutherans have a Tyson connection has a lot to do with IBP. Tyson has, over the years, acquired many other companies, and in the late 1990s (I think--any Tyson employees reading this should fact check me on details) Tyson bought IBP, a meat-packing plant based in Iowa.

Still, you might wonder why Lutherans. Well, for one, I grew up on a farm in Iowa, and we raised cattle, and we sold most of our cattle to IBP. So in a round-about if ancillary way the pastor of the only ELCA church in Fayetteville has an IBP connection.

The main connection, however, is Sioux City, Iowa, plus a few other places in NW Iowa and NE Nebraska, all of which saw many people in IBP management make the shift to Tyson, relocating them and their families to Northwest Arkansas in the process. Good Shepherd Lutheran in Fayetteville saw steady growth through the last decade, fueled to a good degree by the migration of these families to the area.

The presence of Lutherans in Arkansas is almost exclusively through secondary migration, so this should be no surprise. Some of the best evangelists for Lutheranism in this fine state have been developers of retirement communities, and these major corporations like Tyson and Walmart (not to mention the University of Arkansas) who have brought Lutherans from "up north." We have yet to, but are working on, becoming "indigenous."

As a result, our congregation is made up of many, many people who have moved here from elsewhere, especially the upper midwest.

View Larger Map

Today I had the opportunity to take a brief tour of Tyson corporate headquarters. I had lunch with six men who work with Tyson in various departments, including accounting, packaging, Walmart-division, human resources, etc. Before lunch, I had the opportunity to stop and visit with the director of the chaplaincy department. Tyson Foods is unique among major corporations in having developed an outstanding chaplaincy department. Many Tyson plants have a full-time, or at least a part time chaplain, on staff. Chaplains provide various kinds of caring and listening presence, do ministry-by-walking-around, and offer services during emergency or traumatic situations.

They also play a crucial role in helping plants and companies with very diverse religious constituencies navigate the intricacies of a multi-faith context. If you're Muslim, there are certain kinds of meat you won't want work with. If you're a Coptic Christian, you observe Christmas at a different time than the rest of the culture. And so on. One plant Tyson runs has 26 different primary languages spoken. Tyson is incredibly diverse. Chaplaincy helps navigate this diversity faithfully.

Tyson has chaplains first of all by philosophical inclination, because their CEO believes in bringing together faith and the workplace (see, for example, the center Tyson has developed at the University of Arkansas for Faith and Spirituality in the Workplace), but also because they see workplace and financial benefits. Since it is costly to lose employees or have high rates of turnover, it is not unimportant that Tyson and other companies have seen lower rates of turnover in plants that have a healthy and functioning chaplain.

After time spent with the chaplain, we ate lunch. It's a big enough place that by bringing together six men from various departments, all of whom go to the same church and work in the same complex, some of them were meeting each other for the first time. Fun to sit and listen and hear them describe their work. In the modern white collar world, it often takes a bit of listening and time to understand what it is people actually do in their work. When we work in teams, and only do part of the whole, this is even more true.

Nevertheless, touring and talking helped me understand what Tyson does much better than I had in the past. The company is about foods and meats, and it is as much about shipping, efficiencies, and packaging. They have to find effective ways to get large amounts of products all over the world, and package them in such a way that consumers want to buy them off the shelf (and since I'm a novice, layperson in this area, I'm probably not saying any of this with the precision and wisdom many of those who work at Tyson would employ).

As a result, at the headquarters there is a whole area devoted to product testing, test kitchens, test processing centers, to see both how the foods will appear and taste, but also how they will work their way along conveyor belts and other machines, all the way to how they will appear on the shelf or in the refrigerator or freezer display.

The whole building has a spectacular feel, with amazing art lining many of the hallways (think, for example, actual Andy Warhols!). It's a modern corporate office building, conference center, and educational space that has been developed right on top of what once was (and to a certain extent still is) a cattle grazing ranch.

I'm proud to have such competent, skilled people as members of our congregations, influencing and leading a company like Tyson. They give a real impression of loving their work and taking pride in their company.

On the way out, we toured the new mini-museum that charts the development of Tyson corporation. Visit it some time. It is a great example of telling the story, and reinforcing the corporate mythos.

Since Tyson food is on half of the pizzas served in our nation, and sells approximately 1/3 of the meat we eat (especially in our public schools) it's a company worth knowing about. Thanks to everyone for the tour!

As Facebook becomes more image heavy...

2012-01-05T22:31:00.004-06:00

Recently, Facebook became picture heavy. People have always been able to post photos, but the new ease with which this can be accomplished, and the relative ease with which people can edit images to include text overlay, has resulted in many more status updates published as images rather than plain text. Interestingly, if I post the right kind of picture and topic, I get more “likes” than a plain text status update, even if the update is not original to me. In other words, although the shift to an image rather than text increases overall responsiveness patterns (which are one measure of community in social networks) it is interaction around canned graphics and texts rather than the original production of individual Facebook users. Greater community, yes, but in another way derivative and a simulacra of the creativity of vibrant community.

This is a second and equally important analog of the changes we are seeing in the trans-media culture. Susan Sontag, in On Photography, says, “Feuerbach observes about ‘our era’ that it ‘prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being’—while being aware of doing just that”^⁠1 This preference for the image to the thing is illustrated frequently inasmuch as many of our efforts to show how “real” our communities are is by shining the patina of our publicity. Christian communities are more attractive, more inviting, more true, if the images they put on their publicity and marketing tools are of a higher production value. This is related to the phenomenon so many of us now know, where an incredibly “true” or meaningful experience elicits this response, “It was like a scene from a movie.” The image-ing of the event lends it credibility and authenticity.

So Sontag can, later in her book, argue that “the problem with Feuerbach’s contrast of ‘original’ with ‘copy’ is its static definitions of reality and image. It assumes that what is real persists, unchanged and intact, while only images have changed: shored up by the most tenuous claims to credibility, they have somehow become more seductive. But the notions of image and reality are complementary. When the notion of reality changes, so does that of the image, and vice versa. ‘Our era’ does not prefer images to real things out of perversity but partly in response to the ways in which the notion of what is real has been progressively complicated and weakened, one of the early ways being the criticism of reality as façade”^⁠2 That, as they say, is interesting.

“There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre.”^⁠3

“Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.”^⁠4

Benjamin Kunkel, summarizing an essay by Régis Debray titled in English translation “Socialism: A Life Cycle”: “The ‘basis of symbolic authority’ is transferred from the invisible (God), to the legible (History), and then to the visible (the Spectacle). The ‘status of the individual’ shifts from subject (‘to be commanded’) to citizen (‘to be persuaded’) to consumer (‘to be seduced’). History is never as neat as the schemas laid across it, but most people will recognize that Debray’s three-act drama has accurately captured its drift.”^⁠5

¹On Photography, 153.

²On Photography, 160

³Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves, 79.

⁴Ibid. 87.

⁵Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee. The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, 33.

Why was Jesus baptized?

2012-01-05T07:00:00.000-06:00

Since baptism is traditionally understood as a washing for the forgiveness of sins, and a sacrament that extends salvation, it should be a bit of a puzzle whenever we consider that Jesus himself was baptized by John in the Jordan River.

Here's the Common English Bible translation of the gospel lesson for this coming Sunday, which in the liturgical year is the day on which we celebrate "The Baptism of Our Lord" or "The Baptism of Jesus."

"John was in the wilderness calling for people to be baptized to show that they were changing their hearts and lives and wanted God to forgive their sins. Everyone in Judea and all the people of Jerusalem went out to the Jordan River and were being baptized by John as they confessed their sins. John wore clothes made of camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist. He ate locusts and wild honey. He announced, 'One stronger that I am is coming after me. I'm not even worthy to bend over and loosen the strap of his sandals. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.'

About that time, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and John baptized him in the Jordan River. While he was coming up out of the water, Jesus saw heaven splitting open and the Spirit, like a dove, coming down on him. And there was a voice from heaven: 'You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.'"

In a gospel that begins with Jesus' public ministry rather than his birth, and that in all likelihood is the first gospel written, the first attempt by anyone to tell in written form "the beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, God's Son," that this is the first story told indicates its hyper-abundance of meaning and import. Here I just hint at a few key points:

1) By being baptized by John, Jesus witnesses to the continuity between John's ministry (and the entire prophetic tradition that preceded him) and his own ministry.

2) By being baptized by John, Jesus points forward to his future ministry that continues but also transcends (without exactly replacing) the ministry of John.

3) His baptism fulfills what the prophets wrote about in Isaiah 40:3, Malachi 3:1, and Exodus 23:20. For Mark, this is the starting place.

4) Jesus' baptism sends him on a mission, first into the midst of wild animals where Satan tempts him and the angels minister to him, then straightaway into the calling of his disciples and the long journey of exorcisms, healings, teachings, and so much more that constitutes his life's work until he is crucified.

5) By being baptized for the forgiveness of sins, Jesus becomes sin, completely. Jesus repents. Given who Jesus is, the Son of God, this means God takes sin into Godself, and the nature of God (if we can say it this way), is itself repentance. This point, in the midst of all these points, should give us extreme pause for thought, humility, and repentance ourselves.

6) It's a Jesus-then, Jesus-now thing, from a literary perspective. So just as Jesus was baptized then, so too each of our individual baptisms participates now in his baptism. If this book was used in a liturgical setting (which is very likely) then it is like a remembrance of baptism litany at the beginning of worship, reminding the worshipping community of their own baptism by narrating the baptism of Jesus.

7) The baptism is like an initiation rite, initiating him into the priesthood (of Melchizedek, see Hebrews) and into the mission of his Father.

8) Jesus stands in for, in a sense is, all of humanity. His life as all of humanity begins here, in baptism.

9) Notice what the Spirit is up to in this text. Lots. It's Pentecost in the life of Jesus, which will be repeated later in the life of the church.

10) Notice what the Father says concerning his Son. It is not just initiation, it is also confirmation, affirmation, of who Jesus is as the Son of God, and what regard the Father has for who this Jesus is and what he will do and be.

And there's so much more, that doesn't even start to cover it. But that will need to wait for the sermon on Sunday.

Exponential leadership

2012-01-04T15:16:00.000-06:00

[This is an open letter to our call committee, church council, and staff at the beginning of 2012]

Dear Staff, Church Council, and Call Committee,

God is up to something among us in this new year. Are you ready?

[Alert, as you are now accustomed, this is a somewhat longish letter from me, but I really ask that you read the whole thing. The short version: I would like you to order a book and start reading it in preparation for our Lenten observances]

In mid-December, I asked the ELCA Clergy group on Facebook a simple question. What one book would you invite your congregation to read together, if your leadership had indicated an interest in studying mission development and models for multiplication, multi-site development etc.?

One dominant response I received was to go visit multi-site churches and multiplying churches. As a result, I've been working with some mission developer pastors to do Skype interviews or some other kind of conversation so we can learn first hand from innovators on this topic. Watch for these in coming months.

However, many of you have said you really liked the Almost Christian book study we did last summer, and are ready for another book. So I pressed on with the question, and although pastors offered a wide variety of ideas, the most frequently suggested book, hands down, was Dave and Jon Ferguson's book Exponential: How You and Your Friends can Reproduce a Missional Church Movement.

Here's the book description: Authors Dave and Jon Ferguson communicate a simple strategy that will engage millions of Christ followers and challenge every church leader to become a reproducing follower and leader. Exponential lays out a brief but solid theology for a reproducing strategy, giving practical 'how-to's' for reproducing Christ followers, leaders, artists, groups/teams, venues, sites, churches, and networks of churches. Weaved throughout this book is the amazing story of Community Christian Church, which was started by five friends who used the reproducing strategies found in Exponential to grow one of the most influential churches in the U.S. and develop a network of reproducing churches. Many of today's Christians consider the missional challenge of Jesus---feed the hungry, comfort the lonely, bring people to God's Word---as inspirational but not something that's achievable. Or, they've heard the challenge of Jesus and are frustrated with how little they've done. Jesus gave his followers this mission because he wants them to hear it, be inspired, and then actually do it ... Exponential will show them how. Exponential is the anchor book in the Exponential Series.

The book also (of course) has a web site that gives more information about the book series, conferences, initiatives, and so on, which you can visit here, http://exponentialseries.com/ There's a really cool series of videos you can watch that connect with each chapter.

In the process of learning from my fellow clergy, especially pastors who lead missional and church planting movements, God really started to move. We now have formed a cluster of ten pastors who, together with the authors of this book, have agreed to meet weekly for a Skype conversation to envision and learn about the ideas in the book Exponential.

I also know that we have been looking for a focus for our Lenten study, and our stewardship chair has been encouraging us (as has our council president) to identify a process for energizing participation in our committees, teams, and ministries, as well as focus directly on mission. We want to do this because we want to respond to God's gifts in our lives, and God's call on our lives. The purpose of this book is to communicate a simple strategy that will engage every Christ follower and challenge every leader to become a reproducing leader. Their hope is that every church will become a reproducing church, including ours. I think this book will offer just the kind of study and encouragement we need to move forward in fruitful ways.

So, here's my request. Would you please order yourself a copy of Exponential and start reading it? You can download it to your Kindle or order a hard copy. I'm going to begin reading this book now together with this team of clergy. Then as we head towards Lent, we'll invite the congregation into an all church study of the book as our Lenten discipline, with Wednesday messages and worship tailored to match themes and chapters in the book.

It will help us immensely if the church council, call committee, and staff have already read the book before we start the all congregation Lenten study. Thanks for taking time for this. I trust it will bear fruit.

In Christ,

Pastor Clint +

p.s. I'm sure when we all start reading this book, we'll all respond to it differently, and disagree with parts, and agree with others. I'm not offering the book as a silver bullet on how to move us forward in mission, but rather as a way for us to be challenged and grow in relationship to a book many of my peers hold in high esteem. Let's wrestle with this together. I think we will all grow!

Epiphany: Do Lutherans have an "ethic"?

2012-01-03T23:10:00.001-06:00

That may be an odd way to phrase the question. Of course Lutherans reflect and live ethically (or not). The question, however, of what might constitute a particular "Lutheran" ethic is a perennial topic of conversation (not to mention consternation). A few years back, the ELCA commissioned/convened a group that authored The Promise of Lutheran Ethics, which made various ventures into defining the parameters of ethics that could with integrity bear the name "Lutheran."

More recently, the ELCA has hosted an on-line resource, The Journal of Lutheran Ethics, which continues to gather topical essays on ethics from Lutheran ethicists and theologians. It's a great journal. You can subscribe to e-mail updates.

Last year I edited a preaching series for JLE, inviting guest pastors to reflect on the ethical implications of upcoming lectionary texts. For 2012, we shift gears a bit, this time focusing our attention on the ethical implications inherent in each season of the church calendar.

Watch for seven essays throughout the year, creative mashups of key ethical considerations as they pertain to the seasons of the church year and how to preach during them. For the newest essay, read Getting Your Meta On, a reflection on the season of Epiphany and how to preach it--kind of.

What is the gospel?

2012-01-03T00:16:00.001-06:00

"By its word of the crucified, the Christian gospel gives life, brings to birth, makes faith in God possible, and turns one toward the needs of the neighbor. For Paul, such a word can repeatedly turn a dinner club or a gathering of the like-minded into a church."

This is just one example of the limpid prose of Gordon Lathrop. It's a lovely summary sentence in a chapter situating "the gospel" within the larger framework of how gospels were understood in the Greco-Roman world. It is so very seldom that I read a theologian not just for their theology, but also for their prose. Lathrop falls into this select group.

I'll be reading this book together with a large discussion group beginning in February, ably organized by an awesome organist from Houston, Texas. If you are interested in reading The Four Gospels on Sunday: The New Testament and the Reform of Christian Worship, look the group up on Facebook and join us.

Hi, I'm a visitor

2012-01-01T16:55:00.001-06:00

Today we gathered with the saints in worship at Lord of the Mountains Lutheran Church in Dillon, Colorado. There are not a ton of ELCA congregations in the area around Copper Mountain where we are staying, so I recommend this congregation to you if you are traveling in the area.

I was blessed to just be a dad in worship today. It helped me realize what a challenge it is for my spouse to parent three small children through worship each Sunday. I'm amazed.

Lord of the Mountains really is right in the mountains. You park in a small parking lot facing a ravine, then walk into the church, where the windows on both sides of the sanctuary face out onto views of mountain peaks. You pass a large and inspiring baptismal bowl full of clear water, which accentuates the crispness of the snow outside with clarity and grace.

Lord of the Mountains was honestly one of the warmest, most welcoming congregations I have been to in years. Not only did they greet and welcome us as we entered, they also had all visitors stand up during worship to introduce themselves, and handed us small welcome bags. Sometimes I've heard of this being potentially oppressive in a worship setting, but I did not find it to be so here, because the tenor had already been set throughout the service, with an emphasis on inclusion, welcome, and grace.

Everything about the church and the pastor's message emphasized inclusion, social justice, and the life of faith as visioning the Kingdom of God.

During the early part of the service, I spent my time letting our littlest roam on the floor in a corner near the choir (the choir seating area, that is). The pastor, Joseph Holub, had designed some special litanies for New Year's Day worship. He also offered a wonderful children's sermon (I got to be the dad who took the kids up for the children's message) in which he showed the children his new journal, his resolution for the year being to journal daily and see Christ in others.

The congregation is blessed with an outstanding organist and musician. They host concert series of various sorts in Dillon. You can't help going away from this church without the impression that a) they do bang-up music, b) they are welcoming and inclusive, and c) they focus on social justice ministries.

On this last point, they decorate their narthex/welcome area with large photos illustrating their mission foci. I plan to take this last idea back to my own congregation. The large color photos printed on canvas frames illustrated more than any bulletin board could the primary mission projects the church supports.

Thank you to Lord of the Mountains for their warm welcome, and for welcoming us to the table of the Lord for communion, and sharing a good word with us. The next time we're in Dillon, we'll be back.

[p.s. I forgot to mention that the couple sitting in front of us during worship once lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas in the 1970s, and worshipped at the church I now pastor, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. Small world.]

"Reviewing the Year": The Church's Public Witness is Confession Unto Repentance

2011-12-31T13:16:00.001-06:00

The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness, By Jennifer M. McBride. Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 295, cloth.

Public and political theologies are increasingly prevalent these days, so readers picking up this fine volume could be excused for assuming, given the title, that the focus will be on the current conversation regarding such—or, given the sub-title, that the book will be a rendering of how precisely the church qua church is or can be evangelical. Either of these would be worthy undertakings, and Jennifer McBride does in fact point readers in both of these directions, while simultaneously reframing almost all of the terms in the present discussion, and offering a powerful alternative way forward for Christian public witness. She is interested in “how Protestants offer a non-triumphal public witness in a pluralistic society” (9). I am interested in convincing as many people as possible to purchase and read this book

Where McBride both surprises and pleases the reader is in her cascading series of interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theology of repentance as public witness. McBride reads Dietrich Bonhoeffer, closely and carefully, in order to substantiate the claim that the church “demonstrates and animates God’s righteousness in Christ in its particular context when it takes the form of Christ and, like Jesus himself, not only repudiates at all times and in all places any claim to goodness,” but actively accepts responsibility for the world’s sin and suffering (43). McBride argues, convincingly, that such a stance illustrates in concrete form Bonhoeffer’s famous “religionless Christianity,” as well as his concept of this-worldliness and Stellvertretung (place-sharing).

Lutherans, of all people, given our frequent inclination to remind ourselves that Luther posted those famous 95 theses in a public venue, should remember that the very first thesis was, “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.” We can thank Jennifer McBride, a resident of another ecclesial tradition who now teaches in a Lutheran institution (Wartburg College) for reminding us of our own first thesis.

McBride’s recurring refrain throughout the book is that the church’s mode of being in the world is (or should be) “confession unto repentance” (6). McBride recognizes something frequently (conveniently?) overlooked by all of us seeking for Christian distinctiveness, that “acceptance of guilt is the only exclusive claim about itself that the church has over the world” (130). We are especially prone in our North American context to attempt claims to distinctiveness that proclaim our exemplary moral stance, and the power we have to change the world for the good. McBride finds this troubling, precisely because it shifts the focus away from the Christological grounding for the church’s public witness. Christ made no such claims, but rather took the path of accepting our guilt and suffering our shame in his very body. “The church witnesses to Christ in a nontriumphal manner and demonstrates Christ’s being for the world when it takes the form of the humiliated, crucified God by accepting guilt or confessing sin unto repentance” (19). A series of select quotes offer further insight, and witness to just a few of the bon mots that pepper McBride’s book: “Bonhoeffer’s Christology compels the church to acknowledge that if this is what God does—if God takes responsibility for sin, suffering, and injustice—then the church, as the body of Christ, must do the same” (58). “Repentance is not simply an act of turning that places Christians on the ‘right road;’ it is the road itself” (63). “Obedience means faithfulness to a God whose will is free to be scandalous” (74). “It is God’s glory to accept guilt” (19).

McBride is attuned both to traditional theological approaches to philosophical theology, inasmuch as she engages a specific topic in the thought of a widely recognized and authoritative theologian—defending a christologically-informed and ecclesially-informing working out of the theme of repentance in Bonhoeffer’s works—but also takes a step relevant to contemporary theology, by engaging in the practice of ethnography (making use of the critical tools native to that discipline in the final part of her book). Her goal is to gain interdisciplinary traction for connecting philosophical theology and ethnography, She takes this step because of the immediate ecclesiological implications she sees arising from her systematic theological work in Parts One and Two of the book. She states, “Repentance is the ‘religionless’ response to the world’s valid complaints against it” (29), and offers, towards the conclusion of Part Two, the insight, “A church-community’s specific vocation may arise from conviction over a particular sin that it has committed as a local body, such as past racism. The process of confessing this sin and repenting may lead the community not only to repentant activity regarding its specific sin but also to a wider engagement with issues surrounding race on both a local and broad scale” (143).

Part Three, “Contours of a Repenting Church,” is just that, an ethnographic study of two Christian communities she believes conform to her theology of public witness. This made for a spectacular addition to what had already been a remarkable and transformative read. I found the overall flow of the book helpful—first, work out the theological implications, then instantiate them with concluding ethnographic research—and really have only one concern. There is a way in which, as much as McBride seeks to integrate the philosophical theology and the ethnographic work, she still on a technical level leaves them separate. They mutually inform one another without being fully integrated. This is less a weakness of McBride’s than it is a problematic within the fledgling movement to integrate theological and ethnographic work. Readers of the book more attuned to systematic theological considerations will likely find the first two parts especially compelling, while those more interested in learning about two communities that live intentionally repentant Christian lives in community in ways that illustrate McBride’s particular understanding of Christian public witness will respond more to Part Three.

This book has all the “equipment” of a re-worked dissertation, but none of the tedium. The equipment in this case serves a salutary purpose because it teaches us a memorable form of speech, a pattern for articulating an ecclesiological insight of Bonhoeffer’s after Bonhoeffer. In our North American context, where the familiarity of language regarding forgiveness and redemption has inoculated us to the transformative power of repentance--and inured us to our continuing complicity in political, social, and economic sin—the repetition is essential. McBride also challenges much of the received wisdom in the North American context vis-à-vis Bonhoeffer, in that she illustrates the multiple, frequent, and persistent ways Bonhoeffer is read out of context. This is especially true of the popular translations of Discipleship, in which the language emphasizes apartness from the world rather than this-worldliness, and where the language of discipleship itself is abstracted from Bonhoeffer’s larger theological project, as well as the sociological situation in which he found himself during the Nazi regime. McBride’s analysis of Bonhoeffer increased my conviction that we should take Discipleship and Life Together off seminary and college curricular lists until such time as they are read in tandem with his Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison.

Finally, if I could offer one point that I hope primarily publishers in fine publishing houses read and take to heart? This is an incredible book. It deserves wide reading in our churches and communities. I was blessed in receiving a free copy in order to write this review, but if I were to try to purchase this book, the list price is $74.00 and the lowest discount I could find on-line at the time of writing was $64. For the average pastor or lay person, this is completely unaffordable. If the book were available in an inexpensive paperback version, or for download as an e-book (for $9.99, or even $.99, a price-point at which I have seen excellent theology jump to best-seller status), I believe the book would sell briskly and widely. I would like to encourage publishers like Oxford University Press to consider this. Let’s not hide awesome works of theology away at ridiculous price-points, especially books like this one that are concerned about class and justice issues.

The Reverend Clint Schnekloth

Good Shepherd Lutheran Church

Fayetteville, Arkansas

[forthcoming as a review in Word & World: Theology for Christian Ministry]