Lutheran Confessions

Did the new pope just say even atheists are saved?

2013-05-23T10:27:00.000-05:00

This week Pope Francis's Wednesday homily made the headlines. Since the press, most Protestants, and lots of other people are prone to mis-hearing and misunderstanding Roman Catholics, it is no surprise that his topic caused a stir.

Here are the touching points:

1) Everyone is redeemed through Jesus, including atheists.
2) Everyone can do good, even non-Catholics or non-Christians
3) Pursuing that which is good is a a place of encounter... do good and we will meet each other there.

Here are two key quotes from the homily:

“They complain,” the Pope said in his homily, because they say, “If he is not one of us, he cannot do good. If he is not of our party, he cannot do good.” And Jesus corrects them: “Do not hinder him, he says, let him do good.” The disciples, Pope Francis explains, “were a little intolerant,” closed off by the idea of possessing the truth, convinced that “those who do not have the truth, cannot do good.” “This was wrong . . . Jesus broadens the horizon.” Pope Francis said, “The root of this possibility of doing good – that we all have – is in creation”

"The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can... "The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!".. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

So let me come out in full agreement with the general line of his thinking. I'll illustrate why I agree with him in what follows. Then I'll also try to illustrate why so many people will persist in misunderstanding his and my theological approach.

Caricatures Hurt, Listening Heals

Here's the rub. The reason why the pope's sermon is big news has mostly to do with outsiders to Roman Catholicism failing to listen to the subtlety and distinctions of Roman Catholic thought, and instead doggedly persisting in caricatures of Roman Catholicism.

The first misunderstanding tends to be this one: "Now the pope is saying you can be saved by good works rather than saved by Christ. It's the Reformation problem all over again. Here we stand. We can do no other. Draw our line in the sand. By faith alone!"

Except that is patently not what the pope is saying. Justification/salvation/redemption is still accomplished "through" or "in" Christ, both for people of faith and for those who lack faith in Christ. The pope is not saying good works save. He is saying those who do good works, even those outside the Catholic faith, are saved through Christ. We would need to enlist Thomas Aquinas to flesh all of this out in detail, but essentially, the good we do is itself already participation in the good that is Christ, so in the Roman Catholic theological system there is simply not a conflict between salvation through good works and salvation through faith in Christ. It's all "in Christ."

Now, this presents its own kind of problem I will come to in a bit, but for the time-being, let's consider it. What the pope is arguing is in alignment with a concept popularized by the Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, that of "anonymous Christians." This is to say, some people (atheists, for example) in doing good are living life in Christ even though they do not (yet) know this. In this sense they are still anonymous Christians. There remains the possibility that at some time they might become overt Christians, but it is not required.

Protestant theologians have often argued something similar. Karl Barth is the premier example. For Barth, there is a difference between our cognizance of being saved, and our salvation. You can be saved without knowing it. The truth of your salvation is, in this sense, not dependent on your awareness of it. For Protestants of a Barthian stripe, then, the proclamation of the gospel is still an imperative, because it is a great gift to bring people to awareness of the salvation already accomplished for them in Christ. But their salvation is not dependent on their finally coming to awareness of their salvation in Christ.

So, returning to the Pope's sermon, it is fairly clear he is operating with the "anonymous Christian" concept in his sermon. As I mentioned, this does present one problem. What if the atheist he said is being redeemed by Christ doesn't desire to be redeemed? What if the atheist responds, "No thank you, I don't want to be a part of your eschatology." The model the pope is espousing is in this sense at least mildly presumptive. It assumes that his vision of the ends of humanity is wider or more true than the atheist vision. We'd need another blog post to cover this territory, but I raise it here just to note that not all peoples of the world are going to be reassured by the pope's sermon that ALL are redeemed.

But what else is the pope (or any Christian, for that matter) to do? If we believe Christ is the salvation of the world, it's rather hard for us to not at least hope that salvation in Christ is extended not just to believers but the whole of humanity, even the whole of creation.

But returning to the Christian perspective, I offer two additional insights that I hope will help readers understand more fully why this matters so much to us as preachers of the gospel, why Lutherans and Protestants can faithfully embrace the pope's viewpoint, and why it does require some creative thinking.

Extra ecclesiam nulla salus

So there's this really old Latin phrase, "outside the church there is no salvation." The most recent Roman Catholic catechism interprets it to mean, "All salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body."

So, you could, if you wanted to, interpret the phrase to mean that you are only saved if you are in the church. But again, this is a failure of imagination. What the phrase really says is that salvation comes through the church, which is the body of Christ. In other words, the church is an instrument of salvation, perhaps the preeminent one, essential to the economy through which God is redeeming the whole world in Christ. Nevertheless, the church is for the sake of the world, not a bounded set all the insiders of which are guaranteed salvation.

So many people seem to interpret it in this second sense, and in so doing lack grace, and imagination.

Faith in Christ, Faith of Christ

In this last part, please bear with me as we get a little technical with some Greek grammar. Protestants have tended to put a lot of emphasis on salvation through our faith in Christ. The emphasis here is on our belief. You have to believe.

However, in the New Testament, the phrase often translated as faith in Christ can be with equal integrity translated as the faith of Jesus Christ.

For those who want all the fancy terminology, here's the opening paragraphs of a great blog post on the topic...

The interpretation of Iesou Christou as an objective genitive (faith in Jesus Christ) in Galatians 2.16 and 3.22 (cf. Php 3.9) is the overwhelmingly pervasive reading of that construction. Fairly recently, however, scholarship has had to come to terms with the work of many scholars such as Richard B. Hays, who argues most strenuously that our modern fixation on the freedom of the individual conscience distorts Paul’s concerns. In his article, “Jesus’ Faith and Ours” (Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin, 7 No. 1 [S-O 1983], 2-6), Hays argued that nowhere in Galatians 3 does Paul place any emphasis on the salvific efficacy of “believing,” and nor does he speak of Jesus Christ as the object of human faith. Paul insists that we are redeemed/justified by Jesus Christ’s faithfulness (pistis Iesou Christou) on our behalf, not by our believing.

The case for the subjective genitive interpretation (faith/faithfulness of Christ Jesus) is grammatically the most obvious. BAGD notes that translating the genitive as “in” is possible with reference to pistis, but acknowledges that pistis is usually found without an object. Moreover, translating the genitive as “of” is most commonly preferable with most other words. Noteworthy among the arguments for the subjective genitive view is that when pistis takes a personal genitive it is almost never an objective genitive (cf. Matt 9:2, 22, 29; Mark 2:5; 5:34; 10:52;Luke 5:20; 7:50; 8:25, 48; 17:19; 18:42; 22:32; Rom 1:8; 12; 3:3; 4:5, 12, 16; 1 Cor 2:5; 15:14, 17; 2 Cor 10:15; Phil 2:17; Col 1:4; 2:5; 1 Thess 1:8; 3:2, 5, 10;2 Thess 1:3; Titus 1:1; Phlm 6; 1 Pet 1:9, 21; 2 Pet 1:5). Douglas Campbell, an advocate of the subjective usage, has been accused of being too dogmatic or dramatic by Brian Dodd, who has sympathies with the subjective camp, because Campbell makes the statement that how we take Paul’s usage of pistis Christou Iesoumight “open up the possibility of a major reevaluation of Paul’s . . . theology as a whole.” However, Hays in both the article mentioned above and his dissertation,The Faith of Jesus Christ, highlights the significance of this alternative translation when he makes the statement that in Galatians, Paul insists we are justified by Christ’s faith/faithfulness, not our believing.

Steve Douglas concludes in his blog post, "The case is, then, rather strong for the belief that the faith that we stand upon is not our own, but that of Jesus, upon whose merit alone we may hope to be justified."

In other words, perhaps it is the Protestant tradition that has been in error all of this time, placing such strong emphasis on a misinterpretation and failed translation of a key concept in Paul. If we are indeed saved by the faithfulness of Christ rather than our faith in Christ per se, this frees us up for all kinds of things, including...

Do Good and We Will Meet One Another There

I love this line of the pope's sermon. He is seeking common ground between people's of various religious commitments. In the strict theological universe that sees stark lines between Catholic and Protestant thought, the job of the faithful is to draw lines in the sand, illustrating why the pope is so wrong, so troubling. But if indeed Christ's faithfulness is our salvation, then we are set free to go meet the other in the common ground we share in creation, in Christ.

Jesus broadens the horizons. Indeed. Jesus broadens the horizons to such a degree that we can no longer even see them. There is, in the famous lines of U2, No Line on the Horizon. The expansiveness of Christ's grace is so immense, it leaves us reeling and unsettled, until we stumble into our neighbor, whoever they are, and then we meet each other there.

Best quote ever anticipating Trinity Sunday

2013-05-22T22:12:00.004-05:00

The phenomenology of the transition from primary reflection to secondary reflection can be a very helpful model for properly locating trinitarian doctrine in relation to Christian faith as a whole. Within the dialectic of primary and secondary reflection, the development of trinitarian doctrine cannot be simply another item of primary reflection, as if people decided at some point to add to the list of Christian beliefs the odd notion that God is both three and one. Rather, it represents a secondary reflection that was motivated by the necessity of reconceiving the entirety of Christian faith in light of certain breaks in the flow of Christian experience. The very formulation of trinitarian doctrine has nevertheless objectified it, making it simply another item in the list of Christian beliefs. Thus instead of appropriating trinitarian doctrine as a unification of Christian experience, we are stuck on asking how to conceptualize the objective referent to which that item of faith refers. What we need is a reinvolvement in the secondary reflection that brought about the formulation of trinitarian doctrine. We need to reexperience the disruptive breaks that led to the development of trinitarian doctrine as secondary reflection in order to "make strange," and thus rediscover, the holistic meaning of trinitarian doctrine. Therein lies the particular and indispensable virtue of engagement with the process of the development of doctrine.

Excerpted from Retrieving Nicaea by Khaled Anatolios, p. 35

From my bishop after the tornadoes in Oklahoma

2013-05-21T14:45:00.000-05:00

Friends:

Late this morning, I was part of a teleconference with Oklahoma VOAD (Volunteer Organizations Active in Disasters) to discuss needs and the coordination of resources for the disasters in Carney, Little Axe, Shawnee, Newcastle and Moore. They affirmed several things that I put in my letter this morning in terms of our immediate response to the disaster.

1. Our best immediate response is to hold up everyone involved -- both victims and first responders -- in prayer.

2. Making monetary donations are best. To address immediate needs, please direct donations to the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma or the Central and Western Oklahoma Region Red Cross. To address long-term needs, please send donations to the Arkansas-Oklahoma Synod Office. Online donations can be made through the Synod Website.

3. Individuals with specific training (i.e. licensed mental health professionals) should contact the Red Cross before heading to OKC.

Some things are not needed right now:

1. In-kind donations. The infrastructure for receiving, storing and distributing in-kind donations is not in place yet. Also, those who have lost their homes do not have anyplace to store in-kind support either. In-kind donations will be needed down the road. We'll let you know what is needed and when.

2. Individual or group volunteers. Again, the infrastructure for coordinating work groups and individuals who want to help is simply not in place yet. At this stage, volunteers can actually get in the way and slow down the work of first responders and trained search and rescue personnel. You can start to plan for these groups and we will let you know when they are needed.

This recovery will take a long time. Groups and donations will be needed for some time to come. While we all want to help immediately, patience is required. Thank-you all for your care, your compassion and your concern for the people of Oklahoma.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

The New Digital Age

2013-05-20T17:17:00.002-05:00

Start reading this book, and the breathless descriptions of what will happen in the future will catch you off guard. This book sounds like two men describing the new digital age as utopia, everything better and brighter and more beautiful. At first, it's almost relentless. I caught myself saying over and over, "Yeah, right... like all of this is every going to come true, or be as wonderful as the authors seems to be arguing it will be."

But then you keep reading. And you realize this isn't wish fulfillment per se (although in a certain sense all futuristic prognostications are wish fulfillment), but rather an amazing brainstorming session describing what the future in all likelihood really will look like, envisioned by two authors who know more about the impact of digital media on geopolitics and culture than almost anyone else.

I'm reminded of that notorious quote by an aide of Karl Rove's. The aide said that guys like [the reporter interviewing him] were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Well, if anyone is an empire, Google is an empire. It's a benevolent empire. Their motto is, "Don't be evil," after all. But they are an empire.

So if you want to catch up with reality as it is being created, you need to read this book.

If you keep reading, you'll also discover that this is not utopia Schmidt and Cohen are describing. Different economies, different nations, different cultures, are going to embrace and relate to new digital media in different ways. But in each case, again, the authors are fairly convinced the kinds of technologies they are stewarding into being will have the net effect of improving and even perfecting reality.

In this sense, the subtitle has a double meaning. First, it is simply true that digital media is reshaping the future of people, nations and businesses. But it is also true, for better or worse, that Schmidt's and Cohen's peculiar approach to digital media is itself steadily reshaping the future.

These two are in the business of creating the future they imagine. That they have actually taken the time to write down on some scraps of paper the visions they are currently enacting is remarkable.

Disbelieve it if you will. Argue with it you must. But what you can't do is discount that Google is doing its level best to make what is described in this book not as an alternative future but a future-present reality.

An Ecclesiology that "Starts with the Spirit"

2013-05-16T14:21:00.000-05:00

Last weekend at synod assembly you were discussing the decline of Protestantism in America. On Facebook your theology-nerd friend was proclaiming, once again, the Barthian notion that the church is a Word-Event. Meanwhile, your child moves home from college with a book on communio-ecclesiology, and says the source and norm of church is the Eucharist.

Then Brian McLaren comes and knocks on your door and wants to talk about emergent Christianity. That night, you go to an art exhibit and Alan Hirsch is there discussing the missional church. Some Pentecostals walk in and start singing in tongues.

Okay, so this never happened in reality. But if you are paying attention to reflections on ecclesiology (theologies of 'the church') then in all likelihood you've had at least some exposure to almost every single one of these streams.

So which is it? Is the church a word-event, or communion, or missional, or emergent, in decline, or what?

Here's where Cheryl M. Peterson's recent work, Who Is the Church?: An Ecclesiology for the Twenty-first Century, gets to work. In four laconic chapters, Peterson walks the reader through Protestant decline, neo-orthodox Word-Event ecclesiology, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox inflected communio-ecclesiology, and missional/emergent theologies of the 21st century.

Many readers will not find anything especially new hear, but the one thing that will be new is itself worth the time. Peterson ably lays each of these ecclesiologies side-by-side in lucid detail. The early part of her book is analysis, after all, rather than innovation.

So first, Peterson wants us to stop dreaming Christendom dreams. Many if not most people are no longer looking to the church for the kinds of volunteer and community resources they did in the last century. There are many contexts to volunteer and build community in the 21st century. The church is just one. To stop dreaming such dreams, the church needs to discover once again what it is for, and who it is.

One faithful push in this direction is an approach to church as Word-Event. Informed by theologies of Barth and Forde, this ecclesiology sees the church as in a sense "created" by the proclamation of the gospel. This places emphasis on the God who acts, and centers the church in the Word. Peterson's primary concern with this model (a model she views primarily positively, it should be added) is that it focuses on the Spirit's work of gathering the church rather than sending the church.

Vatican II, especially in the work of Yves Congar, centered much of the global conversation on ecclesiology in communion ecclesiology. Here there is a quest for the unity of the church, grounded in God's communion as Trinity, and our communion with God in the Eucharist. Engaging the work of Robert Jenson and Phil Butin (my neighbor here in Fayetteville!), Peterson notes how communio-ecclesiology both centers and de-centers the church. "The gracious privilege of participating in the koinonia of God's trinitarian life cannot be possessed or kept by the church" (Phil Butin, 76).

Which leads us to the missional/emergent tradition currently shaping much of present-day ecclesiological conversation in North America. Engaging especially the work of Craig van Gelder and Darrel Guder, Peterson argues that Van Gelder's Spirit-led ecclesiology offers sufficient critique to the Guder emphasis on the missio Dei in that it notes that the missio Dei begins with the Spirit.

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In the last two chapters, Peterson offers her constructive argument. Drawing on "Pentecostal" insights, Peterson begins with a narrative method, allowing the story in Acts and the creeds itself to narrate a pneumatologically informed ecclesiology.

Building off of George Lindbeck's Israel-like ecclesiology, and taking this "interfaith" and ecumenical approach with full sincerity, Peterson proposes that the church "receives its particular identity and purpose through the Holy Spirit, which in the Acts narrative is promised by Jesus after his resurrection and received at Pentecost" (105).

From Acts, Peterson takes her cue, and proposes three roles for the Holy Spirit in relation to the church:

1) The Spirit is mission director, guiding and directing the church's witness by giving prophetic speech to various leaders in the church, who are described as being 'filled with the Spirit' in order to witness to Jesus.
2) The Spirit as 'verifying cause' by which certain groups are incorporated into God's eschatological people.
3) The Spirit as supervisor and sustainer of those in Christian community or koinonia.

After a brief chapter illustrating how the ecumenical creeds teach us to develop our ecclesiology "starting with the Spirit," Peterson offers an epilogue, a vision for revival. This is quite different from a "plan for survival" (another type of ecclesiology Peterson warns readers away from in her first chapter). For Peterson, a Spirit-breathed church will reflect the experience of new life that the Holy Spirit brings in and through us.

Peterson's book is a great starter book on a pneumatologically-informed ecclesiology. I look forward to her next book, which I hope will be an even more in-depth constructive theology of the church that starts in the Spirit.

Great Summer Reads 2013

2013-05-11T20:08:00.000-05:00

I know, I know. Not everyone goes around creating summer syllabi. And most of us
are completely able on our own to select books to read while chilling at the coffee shop or lounging in a canoe.

Nevertheless, I can't help myself. So here are five-ish recommendations, great books to read this summer that won't leave you disappointed, may change your life, and at the very least will give your head some elevation if you packed your tent but forgot your pillow.

First, consider reading a straight up work of ecclesiology. Friend and colleague Cheryl Peterson has a new work out about which I'm totally excited. Periodically we need to be invited to re-think what we mean by "church." Cheryl's book "starts with the Spirit" as it considers what the church is for, what the church is.

Second, Rich Melheim's offers a compelling case for energizing simple faith formation rituals in the home. He not only encourages us, but offers us a path for making it happen. We are going to try and get Rich to come to Northwest Arkansas this fall. He's fun and full of energy and you will love this book.

Third, a book quite like Melheim's by Bruce Feiler, New York Times best-selling author, is also about helping families flourish. My wife and I are reading it this year and going out for meals and conversation around it.

Fourth, I don't think you'll be disappointed if you read The New Digital Age. Since Google has such an incredible influence on all of us, it isn't bad to know a little bit about the approach to our era their leading thinkers and leaders are considering.

Finally, I'm going to recommend two serious works of theology. This won't be for everyone, but if you've never read or seldom read theology, you might try it out. Retrieving Nicea is the more difficult read of the two, but helps offer historical context for Nicene Trinitarian theology. The other From Pentecost to the Triune God is a work by a Pentecostal on Trinitarian theology. It's very, very readable, and helps readers think about the Trinity starting from the Spirit.

As a kind of "sixth," let me recommend a book you can download for free, and that will free you and your community to "How Much Is Enough: A Deeper Look at Stewardship In Age of Abundance" to live in God's abundance. I'm recommending to all of my parishioners who lead our stewardship ministries or who hope to encourage us to greater faithfulness in this area to read this set of essays some time during the summer.
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This is the bonus section. Other books I'm recommending or plan to read, in various genres:

A book on writing: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

A book on disorder: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

A book on leadership: The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

Another Pentecostal book: Spirit of Love: A Trinitarian Theology of Grace

A theological book on creativity: Resurrection City: A Theology of Improvisation (Prophetic Christianity)

My main sci-fi read this summer: The Human Division

A book on improv: Bossypants

A book on liturgy: Liturgy as a Way of Life (The Church and Postmodern Culture): Embodying the Arts in Christian Worship

Rob Bell: Drops Like Stars: A Few Thoughts on Creativity and Suffering

A literary novel: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel

A critique of the internet: Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory

I most definitely and especially welcome readers' recommendations in the comments. Happy reading this summer!

And if you've read this far, two more books, forthcoming in the summer or early fall, that need to go in your purchase queue:

Tolkien, Elves, and Resurrection

2013-05-06T11:55:00.003-05:00

Excerpted from Tolkien's:

ON FAIRY-STORIES

But the 'consolation' of fairy-stories has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. I almost would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite. I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there is no true ·end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale - or otherworld - setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never· to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and·in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy-story; of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the 'turn' comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.

Even modern fairy-stories can produce this effect sometimes. It is not an easy thing to do; it depends on the whole story which is the setting of the turn, and yet it reflects a glory backwards. A tale that in any measure succeeds in· this point has not wholly failed, whatever flaws it may possess; and whatever mixture or confusion of purpose.

This 'joy' which I have selected as the mark of the true fairy-story (or romance), or as the seal upon it, merits more consideration.

Probably every writer making a secondary world; in fantasy, every sub - creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: 'inner consistency of reality'' it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the 'joy' in successful Fantasy can thus be explained :as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a 'consolation' for the sorrow of this world,· but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, 'Is it true?'

The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): 'If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world.' That is enough for the artist (or the artist part of the artist). But in the 'eucatastrophe' we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater - it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world. The use of this word gives a hint of my epilogue. It is a serious and dangerous matter. It is presumptuous of me to touch upon such a theme; but if by grace what I say has in any respect any validity, it is, of course, only one facet of a truth incalculably rich: finite only because the capacity of Man for whom this was done· is finite.

I would venture to say that approaching the Chris tian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the cor rupt making; creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels - peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: 'mythical' in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe: But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's ·history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the 'inner consistency of reality'. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.

It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be 'primarily' true, its narra tive to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had pos sessed. It is not difficult, for one is not called upon to try and conceive anything of a quality unknown. The joy would·have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree (The Art is ·here in the story itself rather than in the telling; for the Author of the story was not the evangelists); as the joy which the 'turn' in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.) It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe. The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is pre-eminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. Because this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men - and of elves.

Legend and History have met and fused. But in God's kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the 'happy ending'. The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.

Want to hear more? Listen to these podcasts, lectures by Professor Gregory Walter of St. Olaf College on "what a fairy story is.

Part One: http://bit.ly/WTyOhH

Part Two: http://bit.ly/VVA5os

Missional Networks Spread by Losing Control: Presentation at ELCA Three Leadership Tables Workshop

2013-05-03T00:16:00.000-05:00

Clint Schnekloth @ Three Leadership Tables workshop from ELCA Churchwide Organization on Vimeo.

Confessions of a church insider to those not affiliated with a church

2013-04-29T22:09:00.001-05:00

Can I seek your forgiveness in advance? What I write here may be wrong in all sorts of ways. But I'm listening, I really am. I'm trying to understand.

Here's what I know. We in North America live in a culture that has thoroughly imbibed Christian faith. It's in the air, the water. It's so much a part of our history, in some ways we can't even know how much our perception of family, volunteering, work, and leisure, are "Christian."

On the other hand, I live in Fayetteville, Arkansas. It's a very religious town. It's a very religious state. Yet even here, in what some call the Bible Belt, I encounter more people who do not affiliate with a congregation than those who do.

So many of my neighbors who are culturally Christian don't formally affiliate with a church.

And on many levels a lot of adults I know who are not affiliated with a church live more Christian lives, and are more deeply faithful, than some people who go to church.

This leaves me in sort of a pickle. I am proud of the way many of my non-churchgoing neighbors comport themselves in the community and world. With no religious ostentation, no secondary layer of do-goodism, they just go about their business. They make quality things. They work and play well with others. They serve in the community. They provide food for their children.

They're not perfect. Like those inside the church, they could use a good challenge sometimes, even a swift kick in the pants. They make bad choices. They shout at people on the phone. They hoard their wealth.

You know what I mean. In other words, the outward marks of the lives of non-churchgoers are, on almost every level, identical to the outward marks of the life of those who wake up and go to church Sunday morning.

In addition, generally speaking, they believe. They have faith. It is articulate or inarticulate to greater or lesser degrees. But they have faith. And specifically they have faith in Christ. They believe Christ makes a difference in their life, in the world. Those who do not go to church often have more than a general religious sensibility. They identify with the life and proclamation of Jesus.

In this way also they are just like churchgoers. I know more than one lifelong churchgoer who cannot articulate the Christian faith better than those who have rarely darkened the doors of a church building.

But then on Sunday mornings, while us churchgoers head off for worship, they head off for, well, whatever it is they do on Sunday mornings. Frankly, stuff I'd also like to do some Sunday mornings--read the paper, go for a run, drink coffee, mow the lawn, sleep in.

--

So here comes the conundrum. There are many days, most days, when I want to invite them in to our congregational life. And I do. I'm proud of what we do, and who we are. I'm constantly inviting others.

Then there are days when I have my doubts. Why should I interrupt their lives? Why should I convince them to add an additional layer of outward religiosity to lives that are already in many aspects faithful, spirit-filled, and good? Is it even possible that by getting them to affiliate with us, I will distract them or draw them away from excellent ministry in which they would otherwise be engaged, although not overtly on behalf of the church?

In other words, is it possible that by asking them to join us as church, they will in fact become less of what we want them to be as church than prior to their affiliation?

Is there a way to do more church by being less church?

Is this what Dietrich Bonhoeffer had in mind when he outlined some notes on "religionless Christianity"?

For example, he writes to Eberhard Bethage on July 18, 1944:

[Religious humanity] must therefore live in the godless world, without attempting to gloss over or explain its ungodliness in some religious way or other. We must live a "secular" life, and thereby share in God's sufferings. We may live a "secular" life (as one who has been freed from false religious obligations and inhibitions). To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a human--not a type of human, but the human that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life.

Or again to Eberhard Bethage on July 21, 1944:

During the last year or so I've come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is not a homo religiosus, but simply a human, as Jesus was a human...

--

So if I ask inquirers returning to the church why they are returning, what do they say? Well, for the many who after long absence come back, I often hear, "I missed it." Missed what? Well, "it." Pretty much what I miss if I miss a Sunday worship. Things like liturgy, sermons, the people, Eucharist, hymns. The whole "going to church" gig. There is a kind of meaning-making in the church that can't be had by other means.

"There was just something missing in my life." Worship seems to re-frame things for us in ways we can't always comprehend. There are fathom-less depths to gathering for Christian worship in community that are often numinous even if difficult to articulate.

So, this leaves me with a couple of confessions. First, I confess that part of me wants to figure out how to turn church completely inside out. What if there were a way to bring everything people seek from "going to church" out into the daily lives of people, so that the thing they miss could come to them in the already present vocations they engage in from day to day. This is the this-wordliness of Christinaity.

Although I have trouble imagining what this might look like, it takes my breath away considering possibilities.

A second confession is more dangerous to say aloud. Essentially, the question becomes: By inviting people to church, are there any ways in which I make them less Christian? Let me give some examples. If they give 10% of their income to a local shelter, but when they join the church they hear our stewardship appeal and divert some of their giving to us, is this a good thing?

If, prior to coming to worship on Sunday mornings, they used to use that time to care for an ailing neighbor, catch up on essential conversation with their spouse, and simply rest, is that a worthy swap of time?

Or, if by becoming more overtly Christian or religious, those we have invited into our community now think there are especially "Christian" ways to do ordinary things, is there danger here? I think there is.

Gregory Walter writes, in his recent blog post, "I would much prefer, if there is a Christian difference in giving, to see how the economy of God's promise alters or frees up ordinary giving so that we can engage in ordinary giving in all its conflict and impurity [as opposed to giving that supposedly has some missional or ecclesial or evangelical 'end']."

And what kinds of habits are new members of our community learning when they become part of our community of faith? Are we really being as faithfully Christian in this community as we should? If those outside the church are being more faithful than those inside the church (and some are) perhaps the more evangelical posture is to tell people not to go to church, not to join my church.

These are simply thought experiments. Remember, I said at the beginning this post could go all kinds of ways wrong. Perhaps I'm completely off-track.

But here's what is on my heart. I really want to invite my friends and neighbors who are not currently attending a church to come join us at mine. I can imagine the many, many ways in which our church would be stronger, and do better ministry if they were a part of our community of faith. I desperately want to invite them in ways that strengthen us, and offer them a context where they can grow spiritually, and be strengthened in faith and life.

But I'm somewhat suspicious of my motives. So I don't want to invite for the wrong reasons. And I'm especially concerned that by inviting them, they'll hear implicit in the invitation a judgment on them that I actually don't have.

I want to offer space for those currently not affiliated to rediscover what they miss, while honoring what is already Spirit-filled in their daily vocations and work and life. It's going to be different for each family, really each individual.

And before I try to change their habits and invite them to become a part of what I do weekly, I want to make sure I have examined myself and motivations so what I invite them into serves not me but the free course of the gospel in the world.

Or something like that.

The Vine and the Bible: A Meditation on Video Loops and my new iPhone

2013-04-27T19:00:00.002-05:00

Neo-Luddite Confession

I honestly thought, recently, that by navigating to Instagram and getting my first iPhone this past week, I was catching up with developments in social media. I'm a textual kind of guy, after all. I blog, preach sermons, write books. My favorite method of communication in the social media era is the status update.

So setting myself the challenge of communicating via images is kind of like asking a poet to paint their poem.

Not surprisingly, most of the first Instagram images I posted were of books (admittedly highly stylized with the Instagram patinas). This is a snapshot of my current profile on Instagram, for example.

But this week I started capturing short video interviews of youth in our congregation, hopefully for use at our strategic planning event tomorrow and perhaps for confirmation and worship in upcoming weeks. Today, while shooting some of these videos at our confirmation retreat, the kids asked (almost in unison), Are you making a Vine?

If you haven't yet heard of Vine, you're not alone, even if you soon will be. I hadn't heard of it. Well, I think I had scrolled past it recently while looking at possible apps to download for my iPhone. When I saw the description, "Vine is the best way to see and share life in motion. Create short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way for your friends and family to see," I immediately thought, Hmmmm.... looping videos, video creation. No, not so much.

But all of the twelve year olds had heard of Vine, and when they saw me making videos for worship, it's what immediately came into their minds.

This was when I realized that by migrating to Instagram, I had only caught up in the sense that being four steps behind counts as "catching up."

High schoolers, perhaps Millenials, are all migrating to Instagram and away from Facebook, and for various reason. For a great interview on some of these reasons, see Mark Zuckerberg's recent conversation with Wired magazine. In fact, for many many many reasons, read this interview. His insights into the shift to smaller groups on-line, and much more, is essential insight into how the web is changing (and responding to) community in the 21st century.

So, that generational cohort is "visual," but normal visual. Apparently the next cohort is hyper- or super-visual. It's not enough that images be images. Images have to loop and move and twist and adapt.

Why does this matter for Christian faith?

Well, from an educational perspective it matters quite a lot. Adults still think a great way to teach children bible stories is to give them crayons and have them draw pictures of what they hear described. But in this era, I am beginning to wonder if Christian education by necessity needs to include handing the whole class iPhones, and saying, "Go, make a Vine of this bible story. Post it and share it with your friends. Let's find out what they think about it."

Then send them off and see what they come back with.

And in fact, in this new media era, this exercise can be done without even gathering for class. Just text the challenge out to them, and get them working. New media requires our attention. We are invited to consider how to layer into our existing faith formation and worship practices.

For example, once kids have created some Vine looping videos, why not share them during worship, at the offering. Who says you can only share special music at the offering? Who made that rule up? Why not memes, or Vine videos, or a slideshow of Instagram photos from the past week?

And who will do this? Is Adapt social media creations for worship an item on our Time & Talent Survey? If not, why not?

In fact, new media is inviting us into a wholesale re-appraisal of how to conduct faith formation. None of us have even scratched the surface. Take any new development--iPad apps, social media, venues for creativity in all kinds of places--and ask yourself, What does it mean for us to explore Christian faith here, in this place, with these tools?

Old and new media layer like tells

And these new media don't replace existing media. Instead, they layer old upon new and mix them together in creative fashion. Like tells archaeologists excavate in Israel, you can find ancient media compressed right next to or even inside new media. For example, if the confirmation youth need to look up the Bible verse you are hoping they'll "Vine," they can of course simply navigate to that great Bible app for the iPhone published by Lifechurch.tv. This is another app I downloaded today. With it, you can stream all kinds of translations to your phone. You can also download translations, and audio recordings of some of the most popular translations. On the drive home from the confirmation retreat, I listened to four chapters of the gospel of John read from the NIV translation.

In this sense, my intuition to post photos of books to Instagram wasn't as out-of-touch as all that. A good book, posted as an Instagram-edited photo (or even better, scanned in some kind of looping video on Vine) might illustrate as much as anything the interconnections of all these media. A conversation expanding underneath in the comments, and a series of likes--well, that starts to look like a community around books.

Know any other community that gathers regularly around a book?

The Hardest Question

2013-04-22T11:29:00.000-05:00

If you're looking for quirky, cutting-edge commentary on the lectionary, consider The Hardest Question.

This week, a phenomenological approach to glory and the gospel:

http://thq.wearesparkhouse.org/featured/easter5cgospel/

And a vision of heaven's descent to us:

http://thq.wearesparkhouse.org/featured/easter5cnt/

Guest post: Cyndi Maddox shares her testimony of the journey to baptism at the Easter Vigil

2013-04-15T23:40:00.000-05:00

My Journey toward Christ

I have always believed in God, but the thought of going to church was uncomfortable for me until now. Growing up, church was not part of my life. I learned about the Christian religion through basic bible stories during Easter and Christmas holidays. I was a believer despite my limited exposure to the bible.

My family moved to Ft. Smith, AR, from Memphis, TN, when I was 10 years old. The culture of the two cities was remarkably different. My discontent with the move made it difficult to fit in to my new community. Adjusting to the Ft. Smith way of life was equally challenging. One of the first questions that peers usually asked me was, “What church do you go to?” Nobody in Memphis had ever inquired about my church life. My answer, “We don’t go to church”, often alienated me from others. Several peers in elementary school told me that I would “go to hell” if I was not “saved”. I did not understand what they meant. Those experiences made church seem like a scary place in my mind. The questions and perceived judgments became few and far between during my teenage years.

I sporadically attended various churches with friends as I grew older. The services were always unfamiliar, yet sometimes the sermons spoke to me. I attended midnight mass twice. The first time was awkward. It was my first experience with communion. Everyone passed around a loaf of bread to break off individual pieces as they drank out of the same cup. The person sitting next to me was ill, so all I could think about was germs and how many people would get sick after sharing the same bread and cup. I missed the importance of that meal.

The second service I experienced was about a month after my grandfather passed away in 2008. I went to St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Jonesboro with my future in-laws. The suggestion of attending midnight mass with them was comforting during my time of grief. The reverend spoke about the significance of fathers and grandfathers. As I listened to the sermon, I knew I was meant to be there at that moment. I skipped communion during the service, but had a better understanding of what taking communion meant to the congregation.

In the fall of 2011, my husband, Tim Maddox, and his firm, deMx Architecture took on a new project. He began designing a columbarium for the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. He spoke fondly about the project on occasion. One evening in January 2012, Tim told me about a series of lectures about death and dying that had been planned due to the new columbarium for the church. One of my favorite former professors from the School of Social Work at the University of Arkansas, Dr. John King, was the lecturer. I could not miss the opportunity to be taught about that aspect of life by Dr. King, so Tim and I planned to attend the series.

Through conversation about the upcoming lectures, I learned that my friend and supervisor, Erin Rongers, was a member of the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. Small world! It was nice to know someone from the congregation before my initial visit. She shared positive experiences about belonging to the church. I met many members of the congregation during the lecture series, including Linda and Stan Salmonson. They would later become a significant part of my baptismal journey. Everyone was kind and encouraged Tim and me to attend their worship services.

We thought it would be good to learn more about the church, the congregation, and the Lutheran denomination so Tim and I set up a lunch meeting with Pastor Clint. He described the traditions of the church, worship services, and bible studies among many other topics. I hesitantly shared my religious history with Pastor Clint. He said that numerous new visitors to the church had similar experiences. Many had limited religious backgrounds or were coming from different denominations for a variety of reasons.

My spiritual journey toward baptism began in spring of 2012. After attending several of the contemporary worship services, I decided that this was the church for me. Pastor Clint preached inspiring sermons that always spoke to me. I quickly felt a sense of belonging and acceptance from the congregation. This was something that I had not felt at any of the other churches I had visited in the past.

I decided to participate in the Wednesday lunch time bible study and met a very special group of people. The timing and topic was perfect. It seemed like a sign that I needed to be a part of this congregation. Bible study focused on an introduction to the bible, taking participants through the entire bible using The Greatest Story participant book as a guide. I was intimidated at first due to my lack of knowledge of the bible. Everyone openly shared their feelings and opinions about the text. We seemed to be learning new things together at times. I was ready to take communion following many weeks of worship services and bible studies.

Tim and I officially joined the church on July, 15, 2012. The welcoming rite was touching. Throughout the weeks following our membership, the theme of baptism came up on occasion. Baptism was not something that I had even considered until a conversation with Pastor Clint. It was a revelation to understand that there were other adults new to religion and interested in baptism. The decision to be baptized was not a difficult one. I was already on the path toward a better relationship with Christ and baptism was the next sensible step.

A new group named “Our Lives This Text” was formed in order to help candidates through the progression of baptism and affirmation of baptism. I was going to be baptized and Tim decided to affirm his baptism during an Easter Vigil ceremony. Support from the “Our Lives This Text” group was extraordinary. Group leaders and sponsors dedicated so much of their time and passion to the candidates. Linda and Stan became sponsors for Tim and me. Every week, the group seemed to grow. New candidates joined the journey and new sponsors committed to them. We shared a meal and discussed the weekly gospel in small groups. Our Sunday evening gatherings were enlightening and motivating. I enjoyed the growth of new friendships. The Easter Vigil sounded beautiful as described by Pastor Clint. I felt proud to be part of it. All candidates were gifted with the Lutheran Study Bible and the Evangelical Lutheran Worship hymnal to assist in their journey. I will always cherish and utilize these gifts of knowledge.

I became extremely nervous during the morning of the Easter Vigil. Tim and I arrived at the church around 6:10PM and waited for more people to turn up for the 6:30PM start time. We waited in the car for a few minutes before walking into the church. We found the commencement bonfire on the opposite side of our entrance. A large group gathered and as the ceremony began, individuals lit candles from a paschal candle ignited by the bonfire before the procession into the sanctuary. Scriptures to honor and remember our Lord were read. The baptismal ceremony began with babies and children. Three adults were blessed with baptism. My name was called and I moved toward the baptismal font. As I leaned down, the aroma of the Easter bouquet surrounding the font was welcoming. I was consumed with happiness and faith as the baptismal blessing was given by Pastor Clint while water flowed over my head.

On Easter day, my new friend, Cindy Johnson, stated, “God places people in our lives for a reason”. I absolutely believe this is true. I am so thankful for all of my new friends and Pastor Clint. I have so much to learn and am confident that I will have the support that I need to continue my spiritual journey as a newly baptized Christian. I hope to be able to support others as well. Thanks be to God!

Cyndi Maddox

The Glory of the Thing Itself

2013-04-14T14:54:00.006-05:00

Although I read widely in philosophy and appreciate much of it, there is one area of philosophical study, and a rather major one at that, that has left me perplexed and befuddled. Phenomenology. Early in seminary I remember picking up a volume of Husserl (I think it was Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology). I read the first ten pages and promptly put it down. It was like reading the opening pages of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Clearly there is a there there, something of import, perhaps even epochal, but for the life of me it remained impenetrable, opaque, impossible.

Have you ever felt this way? Put off by the insurmountable complexity of a book, a piece of art, a new skill to acquire? In any event, I did, and so set phenomenology aside, I thought for good.

Then, a serendipitous set of circumstances sent me back to phenomenology for a second look. My first stop: I read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on phenomenology (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/). That helped, kind of. There's a reason people write encyclopedia and dictionary and Wikipedia entries. They're concise and (hopefully) clear and helpful. They provide a map. In the case of phenomenology, however, this only took me so far.

Then, I had a big on-line discussion with some friends who teach theology and read lots of phenomenology. I worked out a bunch of my confusion by discussing phenomenology with them. I turned this discussion into a steampunk theology blog post

http://steampunktheology.blogspot.com/2012/11/phenomenology-of-geist.html

One friend said, "Phenomenology can't be gotten on the cheap." I considered this both a challenge and an invitation. So, I took the recommendation of my friends, and read the book that probably offers the clearest and most contemporary interpretation of the field of phenomenology, Jean-Luc Marion's Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. If you're going to read just one book as an introduction to this field (unless, of course you want to go the source, in which case Cartesian Meditations will do nicely), make this the one. It's not an easy read, but then again, Marion is a French phenomenologist. Clarity of prose is not a hallmark of French philosophy.

If you read Marion, you will learn that the definition of phenomenology is contested even by phenomenologists themselves. If we just take the trajectory of Husserl-Heidegger-Marion, we see that Husserl believed a phenomenon gives itself in intuition, Heidegger believes a phenomenon is disclosed through things, being itself, and Marion argues that phenomenon give themselves in their givenness. Things are their givenness.

Already I think you might be intuiting why this stuff is difficult, and why it cannot be gotten on the cheap. The reason it matters to Husserl, Heidegger, and Marion to "bracket" out as many consideration in order to consider "the things themselves" is simple in its complexity--they believe our approach to understanding, interpretation, and seeing the world hinges on letting things become manifest as what they are, without forcing our own categories on them.

Heidegger spells this out explicitly when he looks at the etymology of the word phenomenon. It comes from "phainomon," which means "what shows itself, the self-showing, the manifest." "Logos" (which produces the "ology" of "phenomen-ology") is that which is conveyed in speaking, and lets something be seen as something.

So why is it so important to return to the things themselves and let things become manifest as what they are, without forcing our own categories on them? For Marion, and really for all phenomenologists, the bracketing out of our own preconceived notions, perceptions, and more, in order to arrive at the thing itself, actually increases givenness. The more we return to the thing itself, the more we perceive what is given precisely in its giving itself, the more rich, full, "saturated" the phenomenon becomes.

Marion in his extensive work on phenomenology as phenomenology of givenness, calls this "saturated phenomenon." A saturated phenomenon has a surplus of intuition. As an amateur phenomenologist hearing Marion define a saturated phenomenon, I cannot help but think of things like glory and mystery. In some things, often in very ordinary things, there is simply more there there than we dare to imagine. In this sense much that is ordinary is simultaneously extra-ordinary.

The unique perspective phenomenology brings to things like glory is that the saturated phenomenon in its glory is precisely glorious in the mundane, the simple. In his book In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomenon, Marion considers such everyday phenomenon as a lecture in a lecture hall, friendship, paintings, and the human body. John Caputo says of saturated phenomenon, it is "[the idea that] there are phenomena of such overwhelming givenness or overflowing fulfillment that the intentional acts aimed at these phenomena are overrun, flooded—or saturated."

Or to take Marion in his own conceptuality, saturated phenomenon "cannot be aimed at," they are unforeseen and catch us by surprise. They "cannot be born," they are so overwhelming to our senses that they dazzle us. They evade any analogy of experience. They are for this reason difficult to depict or describe, and are, in a sense, visible but so bright that we cannot regard them. Finally, saturated phenomenon are so overwhelming that they invert the relationship between the phenomenon and the I. Instead of an object being subject to an "I", the "I" becomes subject to the phenomenon, even constituted by it.

That's phenomenology for you, and it certainly sounds abstract. But I can send us to a graphic novel that represents saturated phenomenon perfectly, and illustrates all the points above. Kevin Huizenga, in his Glenn Ganges comics, now assembled in the book Gloriana, if not intentionally commentary on the saturated phenomenon, is evocative of it.

Take, for example, the story "The Sunset." In this story, Glenn has an explosion of thought while experiencing a sunset (see picture). Huizenga designs a page that looks very abstract, even chaotic, to depict his experience. He says of it, "The idea was to hit you with an unexpected, almost physical feeling, when it changes, and then a series of wallops and crescendos and noise, and to have it feel almost like music, and then build up to a busy fold-out, and then fade back to 'normal.' A lot of it was doodling things and playing them off each other. I put the pages on the floor and played around with the rhythm until it felt close enough." (http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/52915-kevin-huizenga-s-gloriana-glenn-ganges-euphoria-and-the-uncertainty-of-life.html)

In another story, "The Moon Rose," Glenn goes to considerable lengths to explain to a family standing in the street that a giant blood red moon they are seeing on the horizon is not a sign of the end times, but is instead a "saturated" scientific phenomenon that has puzzled theorists for centuries, and requires a fascinating set of psychological and scientific explanations to resolve. However, in the process of explaining the red moon, something new happens both in his perception of it, and their perception of him, and their perception of the moon, all of which leaves things even less explained than prior to his mini-lecture.

In both instances, readers of the graphic novel are given concrete examples of how the very mundane experiences of daily life cannot be aimed at; the moon and the sunset catch him and them by surprise. They cannot be born; they are so overwhelming to the senses that they dazzle the eye. They evade any analogy of experience; Huizenga struggles even to adequately depict them in the comic medium. They are for this reason difficult to depict or describe, and are, in a sense, visible but so bright that we cannot regard them. Finally, saturated phenomenon are so overwhelming that they invert the relationship between the phenomenon and the I. Instead of an object being subject to an I, the I becomes subject to the phenomenon, even constituted by it. Glenn, both in describing the moon to his neighbors, and his experience of the sunset, loses himself (literally because he is no longer even pictured in the comic frames) and so is constituted by the phenomenon even while trying to constitute it.

Huizenga describes the process of creating the comic this way, "Something clicked and I felt really high and good about what I was doing, not that it was necessarily very good or smart, but actually that it was kind of stupid and weird, and had taken on a life of its own, and I felt good about everything in general. It felt really intense, out of nowhere. It was a rare thing."

The point of chasing down phenomenology and gaining the equipment necessary to bracket and perceive that which gives itself precisely in its givenness is not to be able to play circular language games, or befuddle readers with turgid, difficult prose, but because in such philosophical practices, the experience of intensity and goodness, out of nowhere, precisely in the regular and every day, is more likely to take place. Such "saturated phenomenon" and our experience of them opens doors to theological reflection we have mostly only dreamt about.

Husserl and the phenomenologists are not the first thinkers to call for a return to the "thing itself." Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, the Old Testament theologian Martin Luther wrote a justly famous work, the Heidelberg Disputations[1], at the center of which sits three theses that have sparked the imagination of theologians ever since. Luther wrote:

19. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly »perceptible in those things which have actually happened (Rom. 1:20; cf. 1 Cor 1:21-25),

20. that person deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

21. A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.

Any Christian reader who has read this set of theses is forced to re-consider in their religious life how often they or others have constructed a theology of glory; more importantly, they are challenged to ponder what it really means to call a thing what it actually is. They are invited to see things in themselves through suffering and the cross.

The classic Latin phrase to label this kind of thinking is theologia crucis, a theology of the cross. It's more than a doctrinal system or set of theories. The theologia crucis is a whole way of being in the world. Thus Luther's insistence that this is about whether or not someone even deserves to be called a theologian. Theologians of glory miss the boat, calling good evil and evil good, and just so divest themselves of the proper status of theologian altogether.

Luther also insists that "the things themselves" are focused in suffering and the cross. This is a solid and classic Christian commitment, more often articulated in piety than actually developed into a theological worldview or way of seeing the world. Yes, Jesus dying on the cross for us saves. Clearly the cross is central to our theology. But many if not most Christians most of the time wear this cross as an accoutrement rather than allowing it to transform their whole being in the world. Taken seriously, however, this way of thinking about the cross considers the cross not as an object of veneration, but as a lens, a bracketing tool. The cross is, as it were, a philosophy, a philosophy of life informed by who God is and has been in the world.

So return to Marion. Marion writes, "From now on, it is necessary that we learn to see what shows itself simply and strictly inasmuch as it shows itself, in the absolute freedom of its apparition. There is nothing easy about this apprenticeship, for what shows itself first gives itself and to see what gives itself, we must first renounce constituting and 'grasping' it (in the Cartesian sense), in favor of simply receiving it. But to receive, in philosophy as elsewhere--what could be more arduous?" (Marion, Being Given, 321) Anything start to click when you read this? Getting down to the givenness itself, seeing what shows itself without "grasping" it means to be subject to, to "suffer" that which gives itself. To be truly receptive to what first gives itself is a hallmark of Christian faith--it also happens to be a hallmark of Christ's own faithfulness. Christ's ultimate prayer, the one that gives the deepest indication of who he is, and who he is in God, is the one prayed last in the garden, "Not my will but yours be done" (Luke 22:42).

Then Marion again, "The saturated phenomenon therefore culminates in the type of paradox I call revelation, one that concentrates in itself--as the figure of Christ establishes its possibility--an event, an idol, a flesh, and an icon, all at the same time. Saturation passes beyond itself, exceeds the very concept of maximum, and finally gives its phenomenon without remainder or reserve." (Marion, Being Given 241) Marion sees Christ as, in a certain sense, the phenomenon sine qua non.

However, to get clear on who precisely Christ is and what the gift of Christ means is going to take just a bit more phenomenological work, and one more round on the topic of the thing itself, this time by way of Augustine. Put your gloves on. There's some thorny terminology to work with here, but it is well worth your time, if you are willing to slow down and sit with it for a while.

Although Augustine never picks up a theology of the "Name of God" in one specific work, it is a discussion that wends its way through many of his books. The "Name of God" has long been discussed in Christian theology, and Augustine does not shy from it. It's a discussion that goes much deeper than what kind of gendered or non-gendered language to use for God (which seems to dominate our contemporary discussion of the issue), and instead goes after whether or not God can be named, and if God is named, how many names or which names can suffice to name God. In the Church Fathers, this has in many instances resulted in (and here I am dramatically over-simplifying the "Name of God" discussion) recognizing that the proliferation of names for God is one way to with integrity and dignity give indication of the ultimate un-nameability of God.

So, when Augustine gets busy naming God (as Marion points out in a late chapter in his 2012 book, In the Self's Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine (Cultural Memory in the Present), he offers all kinds of names, but his preferred name for God (or "denominating" God) is a little quirky Latin word: idipsum. Bear with me. So, one way that Augustine denominates God repeatedly in his classic work on the Trinity, is this way, "idipsum quod Deus est, quidquid illud est" (that itself which is God, whatever that might be). The idipsum in Augustine is "the thing itself." Augustine goes to great lengths to avoid defining God with any more detail than this. It is a denominator without any determination. God is who God is, but this particular title does not in any positive or negative sense offer any specific attributes of God.

Augustine will even, in his Confessions, use this denomination as a name of God in praise of God. "Itaque, tu Domine, qui non es alias aliud et alias alier, sed idipsum et idipsum et idipsum, 'sanctu, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus omnipotens" (And therefore, you, O Lord, who are not here another and there otherwise, but the same thing itself and the same thing itself and the same thing itself [in other words,] holy, holy, holy")[2]. In other words, Augustine understands his preferred denominator for God--the thing itself--as roughly equivalent to the classic trifold name of God sung and spoken in the liturgy--holy holy holy.

Returning to Jean-luc Marion, Marion argues that this way of naming God in Augustine "shows" God without "signifying" anything. It is exactly like the way God names Godself in Exodus in the burning bush. Moses asks, "What is [God's] name?" and God replies, "I AM WHO I AM" (3:13, 14). The reply from the burning bush could just as easily have been the simple word, "HOLY," and a comparable sense of what or who God is would have been signified.

So, Marion, in his own words and in his translation of Augustine, decides to burrow down into Augustine's use of this tight little word. "What is idipsum [the thing itself]? How will I say this, if not by saying idipsum? My brothers [and sisters], if you can, understand idipsum. For, whatever else I say, I do not say [the signification of] idipsum. Idipsum therefore remains radically and definitively apophatic, says no essence, and reaches no definition. If it indicates God, it does so only by its own powerlessness to say him. All its privilege as most appropriate name comes, for idipsum, paradoxically from its patent void of signification, which frees for it the possibility of denominating without pretending to define" (Marion, In the Self's Place 300).

Here we are getting close to the thing itself as well as calling a thing what it is rather than calling the good bad or the bad good. By naming God with a name void of specific signification, it paradoxically names God as God is rather than subjecting God to our projections of how we might wish to define God.

This same re-naming takes place in the naming of Jesus Christ, where the angel gives direction, "You are to name him Jesus" (Matthew 1:21), with direct reference to the Old Testament text, "They shall name him Emmanuel, which means God with us" (1:23). In other words, Jesus Christ is to receive the name that adds nothing more than what is already apparent in the name of God itself, I AM WHO I AM, for this is the God that goes with the people in Godself and as Godself.

So we return to one last big block quote from Marion: "What must you hold [as true]? That he became Christ for you, because he is himself Christ; and Christ himself is understood correctly [as] I am who I am, in the mode in which he is 'in the form of God' [Philippians 2:6]. There where 'he did not consider it his property to be equal to God is precisely where he is idipsum. Thus, in order that you might partake of idipsum, he himself first partook of you, 'and the Word became flesh' [John 1:14] so that the flesh might partake of the Word)... Idipsum can be incarnate by paying the price of kenosis and can give itself in partaking of [humanity], then it becomes clear that, for Saint Augustine, the function and characteristic of idipsum are not governed by Being, at least in the sense that metaphysics will understand Being in its ontology, but by the charity of God. It is because he first reestablished the "I AM WHO I AM" in its originally soteriological signification that Saint Augustine can deploy it in its most extreme reaches in the figure of the humble servant. There is idipsum for us, there where the 'form of God' takes on the 'condition of a slave,' in Christ the Savior" (Marion, In the Self's Place 302).

What is going on here is a careful theology of the cross interpretation of God's name in Exodus. There is some danger, when interpreting God's name spoken from the burning bush, in reading it as an assertion of power, glory, control. You get this kind of interpretation in, for example, the Harry Potter novels, where "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" arises out of fear of the one being named, because of their transcendent power. But God's denominating Godself as "I AM WHO I AM" is not of this order. God is not Lord Voldemort. God is God. And God is never more God than when God is giving Godself away in Christ, completely and utterly. The power of God rests securely in the powerlessness of God in the cross and in Christ. Returning to the Marion phenomenological language one last time, God is God in God's givenness. The intensity of the given, saturated phenomenon is, in Christian theology, most visible, most shown, in suffering and the cross. All phenomenology does is help explicate this line of thought, already available in Scripture in such passages as Exodus 3 or the Christ hymn of Phillipians 2.

So what does such a return to the thing itself, what does a theology of the cross, look like in run of the mill daily Christian life? I'll take two recent status updates I read recently as case studies. First, from a parishioner:

"There are angels on earth, covered in grime and smelling like stale cigarettes."

It is the expectation of a theologian of glory (and all of us are in various ways theologians of glory) to expect to see God in the beautiful, the wonderful, the, well, glorious. This is the kind of theology behind much popular contemporary theology, where, for example, giving to God is supposed to return blessings from God--or where proper faith will result, supposedly, in your best life now. Even simply in regular old daily life, we tend to look for God in beautiful things, like sunsets, happy events, and the births of babies.

So for my parishioner to identify the presence of the angelic in the grimy, stale smoky self is to see the glorious under the form of its opposite--to experience the messenger of God under the form of the opposite of glory, under suffering and the cross. Many of us also intuit this, discovering God precisely in our suffering, in the poor, in our cranky neighbor. Or even in our own suffering and cross-bearing.

Which brings me to the second Facebook status update, from a colleague:

"Sometimes being in ministry feels like having so little to offer - like i dig deep and yet all i have to put on the table is some dryer lint and a couple broken Happy Meal toys and i'm sure the deal is off and yet God seems to look at that and go 'perfect! THIS i can work with. let's get to it!' and again i am having to question God's judgement."

This is self-emptying on the human level comparable to the self-emptying of Christ, or the self-emptying of God, each one echoing down to the next and "partaking" in each other's life. From a phenomenological perspective, and with the insights gained here, we can see that the reason God can work with this weak and pathetic offering is that God in God's very name is also self-emptying. The thing itself (God) can glorify the thing itself (dryer lint) in the thing itself (Christ).

Returning to Huizenga's "The Moon Rose," all that explanation of the apparent size and color of the moon as it rose in the sky, as glorious as it is, as much as it partakes in divine holiness, is explained awkwardly and nervously by a math and science geek who does not quite know how to talk to his neighbors. The neighbors, equally, under the sway as they are of odd apocalyptic narratives that have convinced them a certain kind of red moon is an indicator of the end of the world, receive his scientific explanation with something less than grace, more like fear, certainly awkwardness.

Yet that very awkward moment is, on another level, glorious. Beautiful people talking beautiful things in beautiful prose are distant from the thing itself. Frequently such supposed beauty calls the good bad and the bad good.

A theologian of the cross, a community informed by the spirit that guides the phenomenological enterprise, angels smoking cigarettes or Christians who only have pocket lint to offer--these have a fighting chance of calling a thing what it is and getting to the things themselves--infused as they are by idipsum, the thing itself. Idipsum idipsum idipsum--sanctus sanctus sanctus.

[1] The full text of the disputation is available at http://bookofconcord.org/heidelberg.php. For a seminal commentary on it from a theologian known for "calling a thing what it is," see Gerhard Forde's On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther's Heidelberg Disputation (1518) (Eerdmans, 1997).

[2] Here I am making use of the fantastic commentary and translation of this work by Jean-Luc Marion in his In the Self's Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine (Stanford University Press, 2012, 296ff.)

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Professors Gregory Walter and David Hahn of St. Olaf College for many edifying conversations that provided much of the fodder for this essay.

Jesus Showed Himself Again

2013-04-12T14:58:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you have to fish on the other side of the boat.
Sometimes you are inspired to swim with your clothes on.
Sometimes you count your fish.
Sometimes love is a challenge.
Sometimes you know someone so well you hardly know who they are.
Sometimes breakfast fixes everything.
Sometimes you eat fish for breakfast.

(On John 21, or Easter 3)

Missional networks spread by losing control

2013-04-09T18:07:00.000-05:00

Ascension

I'm going to flash up a theological concept for our consideration. Let it sit with you for the duration of this presentation. It might be an overly facile connection. I'm not sure. But consider it.

Why did Jesus ascend? What does it mean for Jesus to have ascended to the Father? It's remarkable to me that the Ascension of Jesus typically plays such a small role in our constructive theology. Aside from treatments of it in Barth's Church Dogmatics and Robert Jenson's Systematic Theology,the only exception of which I'm aware as a kind of free standing treatment is Douglas Farrow's Ascension and Ecclesia. In any event, I think Christ's going away is the primary way "in" for a theological understanding of what I am presenting here. Jesus does not control the network he started. He goes away, and leaves it in the hands of others (continually enlivening it by the Spirit's networking presence). The church has had a lot of trouble emulating this model. The church wants to maintain control even though its Lord did not.

It seems clear that Jesus understood that missional networks spread by losing control. The church can now learn from the "here comes everybody," "world is flat," broadly mediated culture that it does not need to control. It needs to think of itself as spreadable media, spreadable networks. Real church starts when all hell breaks loose. The church will be full when it is empty (Philippians 2).

Part I

It is an honor to stand among you and speak today. I can hardly believe I am here doing this. Thank you for the invite.

I suspect I have been invited because of the work I do in social media. That or maybe you were just looking for a clergyperson with a rather unusual last name. I'm not sure. In any event, I plan to invest time talking about the church and networks.

And the first thing I need to say is this: I am not going to talk about a vision for 2020, because 2020 from a social media perspective is too far away. We can't vision that far. And in a way, visioning is for wimps. In the new era, real change of necessity needs to happen now, immediately... because it can and because it will.

Everything I'm going to talk about today are things I think could and should change now. These are concepts we can integrate into our individual ministries and the ministry of the ELCA even before we leave this building this afternoon. They are assets and resources that are all around us.

Oh, and as much as possible I'm going to try and talk about my failures, how I haven't yet figured this stuff out. I think that is important, because I think at this point in the digital and world-is-flat era, we are only observing the effects of the changes, and we don't know what the total overall change is going to be. That's an important distinction. I'll come back to it.

Crowd-sourcing

I honestly don't know how many of you are regular users of digital social networks. Some of the leaders in the ELCA are pretty high profile users. Michael Rinehart is a blogging and Facebooking bishop. Stephen Bouman engages the ELCA Clergy group a lot. Bishop Hanson has a solid Twitter following. And so on.

But if you are like me, or if you want to know how someone like me functions, one way to describe it is this: "I don't do and can't do much without my network. I make use of network as a mirror, filter, feedback loop, for almost everything I do."

So, when I was invited to come and speak with you, my first reaction was, "Can I post this in my networks? How will I share this in my networks?"

At first, I started discussing it with a smaller core of trusted folks. Still a network, just not a widely digitally mediated network. I called up one bishop. I talked to parishioners. I talked to my wife. I talked to colleagues by phone. One friend said, "See, this is why they asked you, even if they don't know it. I would have gone there and told them what to do. Your first response to being invited to give this presentation was to crowdsource the response."

So here is my question and insight for your three tables specifically at this point. Before you arrived at this gathering today, how much of this did you do? Have you been making use of your networks to gain insight, let the Spirit speak, let the crowd and not just the small core be the source for vision and leadership? If not, why not?

Next, I started floating possibilities, theoretical visions, in my digital networks, especially in the ELCA Clergy Facebook group.

The first idea that came to mind was to repeat the summary of what I have heard from some colleagues who work in Latino ministry in the ECLA.

"We should put all of our eggs in one basket and devote all of our mission development, all of our institutional outreach, all of our new recruitment, everything we can muster, to developing our Latino ministries so that our church is as much Latino as Anglo by 2020."

Quite quickly I decided that although I like this proposal, I don't think I'm the best person equipped to make a case for it. So I dropped it. I did not gain a lot of conversation around this one. It didn't interest the crowd much.

So I tried idea #2, and posted it in the ELCA Clergy group. This post gathered over 600 comments in a few short days. If you are really interested in reading everything people wrote, I've put the permalink in the footnotes that I've handed out:

Apparently there is still a Babylonian Captivity of the Church, but it is of our own devising and we defend it and think well of it and do not even consider it is counter the very Reformation we supposedly represent.

The captivity is the captivity of the Eucharist. When we go on vacation, we think we have to bring an ordained person in. We think camps can't do the Eucharist without a pastor present. We think interns can't preside while serving on internship. We are nervous about authorizing lay presiders. We pre-consecrate elements (whatever kind of hocus pocus THAT is) for lay communion visitors or on the weekend we have to go to synod assembly.

We do everything we possibly can, both institutionally and personally, to act as if the validity of the holy meal of Jesus is dependent on the personal presence of an ordained minister.

In the meantime, our congregations are not aware that they are free to share this meal profligately, all over the place. They do not know, because we have not taught them, that they can preside at communion on the campus, in the coffee shop, in their own homes, at the park. They do not know that in the absence of the pastor, they could go on just fine having communion each week by designating a table host and carrying on.

We then coalesce all kinds of other ministries around the person who presides at this meal, and act as if church is only wherever the pastor is. No wonder we do not have churches starting churches. No one believes they themselves could start a church--because who can start a church without the Eucharist?

The church is trapped, and although pastors are not the only cause of the captivity, our theology of the office of the pastor in relation to the table is the primary cause, and until Christ's meal is freed up and presided at by all the baptized, in many places, and sundry times, we will not see the church grow.

* This is how to talk about this from a sacramental perspective: much the same could be said when talking about church structure, flattened network, transparent communication, priesthood of the baptized, and more.

I truly and deeply believe that this one is very close to what I want to say to you, but it is an expression of networks as it plays out ecclesiologically. And it is just a start. Although I believe in both of these posts, love them as concepts, they aren't yet the core, the cultural and theological insight I want to emphasize as central for our way forward.

Networks are distributed (Wiki)

So I posted this:

Let's say, 'hypothetically,' that you were invited to give a 15-18 minute TED talk to a gathering of some of the key leaders of the ELCA--representatives from the Executive Committees of the Church Council and Conference of Bishops, and the Churchwide Organization Administration Team. What would be THE thing that you would make central to your talk? What would you want to say?" Share your short version/response here, or make your own talk and post it in a video sharing venue or podcast.

An early response said this, when I asked why I wasn't getting a lot of concrete answers to the question:

"I think it is hard to get replies b/c it is hard to see how a TED like talk to the stewards of the institution would change the institution. I would rather put it out to the populace and let the revolution sort itself out."

Of course, I share this same suspicion. That's why I have already invited many people in my various networks to dream this dream together with us. Because I honestly think the answer to what 2020 will look like has to do with what the distributed network itself says it will be. And the social networks I inhabit all fairly universally seem to say that whatever change is going to happen, it needs to happen right now, immediately. No one knows what things will be like in seven years. Seriously.

There is deep suspicion of our institution (ELCA) among our people, very deep suspicion... And it's not because any individuals working at the ELCA are worthy of suspicion. It's more a part of how a hierarchy like ours functions as a "culture," and the general suspicion many of us now have of institutions and their power.

My suspicion is the only way to fix this is to blast things open, commit ourselves to the old Polish and Russian commitments of Glasnost, perestroika, sobornost (can you tell I used to be an ELCA missionary in Eastern Europe). Transparency is invaluable, and the way forward is to let go of control.

This is precisely why I don't think we can vision for 2020. Trying to imagine a quasi-utopia seven years from now based on our assets... we won't get there. And we won't get there because my vision is we have to let go of control. My presentation, if it is nothing else, is to offer the greatest asset for consideration we have at our disposal right now. Our greatest assets are the opportunities for self-emptying, transparency, networking.

On social media, you gain influence and authority by giving it away. Gone is the time when keeping information / authority / etc to yourself gained you more. The new social media economy is an economy of generosity. Do you want more influence? Share the influence you have with others. Give it away.

See why I at least wanted to flash up Jesus' ascension for us?

What does this mean for the church? What does it look like for the church to have an economy of generosity? What does it look like for the church to give away its influence? For that, I need to tell a few stories.

First, I Gave the TED Away Somewhat

It came to me that I could crowd-source even the tech aspect of this presentation, which meant I could illustrate the power of distributed networks to you in another way... within 10 minutes of posting a request for help, I had Michael Sladek (http://www.impressionmediagroup.com), a presentation designer, on-board from Sammammish, Washington, someone's work I had seen, who volunteered to prepare my presentation and make the visuals polished and tight with the message. The goal here was to keep in tight with the idea of TEDs more generally speaking, which have very refined if simple visual aesthetics.

I already have a team willing and able to organize and provide all tech support for an ELCA version of the TEDs if and when we decide to organize one. Because the network was already in place, it wasn't even that hard. People will give their time away for the things they care about. People care about the future of our church.

I shared an early draft of this talk with my office manager. She is also highly networked, but with a lot of unchurched people and various types of folks around the country. She was kind enough to gather feedback from them (and they were kind enough to read it).

As I already mentioned, I took the step of reaching out to ELCA peeps, and my own networks, to field test various presentation topics. Many of these were spectacular failures. I offered the vision, for example, that we shouldn't change anything, and just stay the course. This troubled many readers. Then, when I said we should stop everything, completely, just stop, this also troubled others. Some (many) of my thought experiments didn't fly in my social networks. Often they even angered or confused people. I was reminded of something a friend (Drew Curtis, who started one of the world's largest news aggregators, Fark.com) had written recently:

Notice the lesson here for ELCA leadership. It is very unlikely that we can get anyone in our denomination to do anything. But we can put things in front of them that we know they'll want to react to.

By this point I was getting very clear both what I wanted to say and why it was so hard to say it. I wanted to tell you about the strength and power of these networks for the church and mission. They are indispensable to us, they are the way forward, but there is one very essential thing we have to know about the strength of these networks in order to move forward: missional networks spread by losing control. We can only begin to imagine doing church in these contexts if we are willing to accept the inevitability that all hell will break loose.

Then, I decided to make the TED about giving the church away

Let me say what I mean, offering some examples. A few years ago, I read Neil Cole's spectacular little book on Organic Church. Neil Cole started a house church movement. He didn't just start some house churches. He started a movement. One story in that book especially caught my attention. One day, when he was out in his yard, some friends stopped by and said, "It's great you started another house church on the same block as yours." Neil's response was, "No, I didn't." They said, "Yes, you did." It turns out that a house church he had helped start had split making some new house churches, who had themselves replicated into new house churches, so that by the time this new house church was starting on his block, it was three iterations away from his own actions. He had "lost control" in one sense. But he had planted the seed of a movement.

I have heard many stories like this from around the globe. Alan Hirsch reports on some in his The Forgotten Ways. In each instance, churches seem to have discovered a way to imprint communities they are founding with a kind of DNA that lets them fly from the next and become their own birds.

It makes me wonder to what degree we are imagining mission starts and missional leadership in our churches in this way. Are we comfortable with the ministries we give birth to flying so distant from us, and iterating themselves so many times, that we can't even keep track of what they are up to (let alone record adequate statistics about them)?

I have never started an exponentially replicating movement like this. Confession. But I know that is as much my failure of imagination as anything. I want to start one. I want to start a Lutheran movement that is so viral someday somebody will say to me, "Did you know somebody started a church like yours in Texarkana?" But let me tell another story that offers a hint to why I haven't yet gone as viral as all that.

A wonderful Hawaiian family visited our church a few times last year. They haven't yet become members of our congregation, but I remain hopeful.

In the meantime, they started a Hawaiian restaurant in town (if you live in or near Fayetteville you should eat there some time soon, and regularly, it's scrumptious. Hawaiian Brian's). Before Christmas, they asked me if I could help bring in hungry families to eat a free meal at their restaurant. Because I have a network here, I was able to connect Shanea and Brian to the head of the Single Parent Scholarship Fund and the Families in Transition program at the public schools (the social worker from the school is another person I consider a "potential" member of our church--the director of Single Parent Scholarship Fund IS a member of our church). We brought fifty people out to Hawaiian Brian's for a free meal. At the meal, we had a brief prayer service blessing their new restaurant. In my old way of thinking, I would try to figure out how to "count" this as being a ministry of our church, how to guide or direct it in some way. In the new model, I believe the network is the ministry. I can set new things in front of Shanea that can open doors for her to strengthen and expand her missional ministry--but she is already doing it. Heck, she could be her own church.

Did I mention that all the networking we did for this meal happened on Facebook, in various messaging strands?

So, I think my moderate level of facility with social media provided some bridges for connections to make an event happen that might not have otherwise. The lingering question, however, is: "What do I do now?" What is my role in this network? Most of the participants aren't members. Some of the participants I never even met. Yet I am clearly in a position to be a catalyst (Shanea would like to offer the meal again), bridge-builder (I can connect her to other needs-based social service agencies, other restaurant owners interested in doing similar ministry), but do I have the time? Do I know what next steps to take? Is there possibility here for the formation of a missional community rather than a church per se, or should I be inviting this whole community into the life of Good Shepherd?

Are these even the right questions to be asking?

Which then makes me wonder, do all of you have stories like this to tell? Open doors for the opening up of new networks that are highly distributed, won't work if they are hierarchical or top down, self-emptying in the sense that the only way to move them forward is to give away your influence and just be a node among many nodes?

Then a friend almost gave all the TEDs away

A good friend, Rich Melheim, on tour right now, see http://faith5.org, and colleague many of you likely know, almost "gamed" my talk today. I had shared with him the concept, and he immediately start imagination "storming" it, as he often does. In minutes he had decided we should form a leadership team to start an ELCA version of the TED talks, invite 15 top leaders in the ELCA here to give the talks in the ELCA Headquarters chapel, bring in an outstanding recording team to record them, and then send them out into the digital world for people to view. I loved this idea, but then I asked him, "Do you know you're trying to organize a gathering in Chicago of TED talks the week after Easter, and it's only a month away?" Another good friend, David Hansen, and I reigned the concept in a bit (although I loved the energy) and we have decided it is a great idea to pursue, either as a distributed model or as a conference.

I tell this story to illustrate how putting your ideas and events out there requires giving up some control of them. People will run with them as they will. We do not have control of how people will respond to what we share with them. I don't even like the language of "reining" Rich in. Why should I do that? Here we are all, sitting down with this high level set of tables, a Tri-Table gathering, and outside these walls (actually, even immediately accessible through whatever wifi network is in this space) is a massive network, our people, and all the people they are connected to, and all the people they are connected to.

How would we be strengthened by letting them all in, or letting ourselves out? Frankly, trying to control the conversation isn't going that well. It certainly isn't spreading anything.

One of the hardest things I did this year was follow Paul Hoffman's advice not to lead or even sit in or visit the bible study small groups that were happening during our catechumenate. A group of us had done a trial run of the catechumenate in the summer, but by the time winter came around, and we were dividing our forty catechumens and their sponsors up into small groups, it was time to let the groups just be the gospel, the spirit, and the group.

We call our catechumenate "Our Lives, This Text."

There is such a natural inclination to want an authority in the room, to have right answers. This is not an inclination only those of us as clergy or as leaders have--even the people in those groups have that sense. It takes considerable spiritual fortitude to step back and let the group itself discover the truth they will discover when they bring their lives into conversation with the gospel text.

In this model, I still have a role, a very important one in fact. I help build bridges, getting people into a place where they can meet each other and meet the text.

But then I get out of the way. Already the newly baptized are doing far better than I ever could to invite the next set of inquirers into the process. We will meet the baptismal candidates God is preparing for us by my, in a sense, getting out of the way and letting the Spirit of what we have initiated, and the network it energizes, lead the way.

My ministry will be full when it is empty. Church gets started when all hell breaks loose, because really, what will they say, what crazy stuff will they come up with in the room if the pastor isn't there to direct the conversation?

What kind of mischief might the church get up to if Jesus doesn't stick around and monitor it?

Church gets started when all hell breaks loose. Missional networks spread by losing control.

The church will be full when it is empty.

Bibliography

Henry Jenkins Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
and Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (Postmillennial Pop)

Dwight Friesen, Thy Kingdom Connected: What the Church Can Learn from Facebook, the Internet, and Other Networks (emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith)

Neil Cole, Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens

Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology

Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

Permalinks (only members of the ELCA Clergy group can view these posts):

First post in ELCA Clergy ask about TED talks: https://www.facebook.com/groups/elcaclergy/permalink/612117398815134/

Vision for ELCA in 2020: https://www.facebook.com/groups/elcaclergy/permalink/612712858755588/

Babylonian captivity (over 600 comments): https://www.facebook.com/groups/elcaclergy/permalink/606744162685791/

TED Talks (examples of TEDs with synergy with mine, I think):

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

http://www.upworthy.com/an-8-foot-tall-woman-is-destroying-the-entire-music-industry?g=2&c=ufb1

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2013/03/watch-amanda-palmers-ted-talk.html

The Relational Pastor: A Review

2013-04-05T23:22:00.001-05:00

It takes considerable skill and creativity to reconceptualize the definition of pastor for the 21st century. There seems to be a rather tight cultural lock on how the role of pastor is defined in our culture. Additionally, it takes some chutzpah to attempt to write a book that is simultaneously addressed to a popular audience and wrestles with neuroscience research, Bonhoeffer studies, Derrida, and more.

Andrew Root pulls it off. Root, who churns out a new book or two per year, writes with a breezy prose I wish more theologians would emulate. He risks simplifying his arguments a bit in order to make them accessible, but kudos to him, because people are actually reading Root.

If Andrew Root has a "shtick," it is this: he is concerned that even the notion of being "relational" or incarnational is at times in Christian ministry instrumentalized. In his first book, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation, he took issue with a type of youth ministry he observed happening (especially in evangelical circles) where relationships were cultivated not for themselves, but for the influence they might have to win youth for Christ.

Root offers an alternative, grounded out of Bonhoeffer, of "place-sharing" (Stellvertretung). In this model, relationships are not a means to an end, but are the ends themselves. The relationship is the ministry, regardless of outcomes or influence. We are called, in Christian faith, to share our lives and our places with each other.

When Root wrote that book, many readers immediately saw the implications of it for a wider set of ministries than simply youth ministry. Root waited a few years, then came back to the topic with this book, focused specifically on pastoral ministry.

Although pastoral ministry is a rich and complex profession, for the most part many theologians and church leaders (and even the popular culture) seems to know what it is they mean when they call someone a pastor. A lot of ink is spilled printing new books on pastoral ministry and ecclesiology. Much if not all of it continually plows again fields already furrowed. This is not all bad. We need to read things to remind us of who we are. We need innovative ideas and fresh approaches even if they are treading again ground we have already tread (for a list of great books about pastoral ministry, see http://theburnerblog.com/arts/books/best-books-for-about-being-a-pastor/).

However, Andrew Root definitely moves the conversation forward, and will move readers with his compelling narrative. For my money, the most compelling proposal in the book is his early thesis, in which he writes (having concluded a two chapter survey of how previous eras of human history conceived of the notion of a spiritual leader or pastor):

The time is right contextually to recover and deepen the theological perspective (of ministry as participation in the life of Christ through the personhood of the other, through relationship), helping to redefine pastoral ministry beyond te priestly reader, moral exemplar or self-help entertainer. Instead, the aim is to see the pastor as convener of empathic encounter of personhood, as the one who invites congregation members into relationships of place sharing with those in and outside the church.

Root's book is not a how-to book, offering a model for successful ministry. For that, readers will need to look elsewhere. Instead, Root, in chapters on the definition of personhood, the neurological implications of relationships, and even an engaging chapter on the connection between the hypostatic union and relational ministry, steadfastly refused to instrumentalize relationality and sticks with an exploration of relationships for their own sake.

Because of this, it is somewhat hard to imagine, at times, what this proposal for pastoral ministry might look like in various contexts. Andrew offers winsome accounts of how relational ministry takes shape in his wife Kara's small south Minneapolis congregation. These stories alone (especially the chapter titled "What this looks like") as analogy for our various ministries are themselves worth the price of the book. On the other hand, it is sometimes difficult to understand or imagine how relational pastoral ministry might work for pastors in rather large congregations (unless the relationships in which they convene empathic encounter of personhood are among the staff they lead).

However, this is more my failure of imagination than anything. Root's concept is new and challenging enough it requires creative iteration in congregational contexts other than the ones Root is himself closest (and married) to. The value of Root's narrative: he tells the story of congregations and pastoral ministry he deeply loves and cherishes.

Finally, a challenge and a recognition. One risk in Root's approach is to oversimplify. Sometimes he swims out into deep waters, then bails when it is rough. This is most often the case when he engages streams of philosophy. For example, he names the "impossibility of the gift" in Derrida, only to then abandon the theme and claim there are gifts that are possible--yet the gift he names as possible is precisely the kind of gift Derrida argues is impossible.

I would like to challenge Root, in future books, to dig in, remain with the difficulty of the material he encounters. This is itself, ultimately, more relational.

Then the recognition: I can hardly thank him enough for his final chapter. It is so much in alignment with my current thoughts on pastoral ministry that I felt as if someone standing close to my own heart had written it. The sub-title of the chapter, "leadership as letting relationships flow," is precisely how (on my best days) I hope to function. Rick Foss of Luther Seminary once told me, "Most jobs are a set of tasks with relationships embedded. Pastoral ministry is somewhat unique in that it is a set of relationships with tasks embedded."

Root says it this way: "We are professional persons, persons blessed with the gift (the financial, professional gift) of tending to our personhood as a way of tending to others." This is not personhood as individualism, but personhood as "being in relationship." It is true, and it offers a way forward for all pastors wondering how they shall be pastor in a culture and context where authenticity, networks, and time are such strangely different and precious commodities.

I have been recommending this book for young people (really, anyone) considering pastoral ministry. It will help readers see a way forward for imagining the emerging sense so many have of what Christian ministry will mean and can mean as it reclaims participation in Christ as participation in one another's lives.

I am because my neighbors are

2013-04-02T14:48:00.001-05:00

Who are we? Who are our neighbors? What are we called by God to do and be in this place? These are the kinds of big questions we are asking ourselves as a congregation as we engage in a "strategic planning" process.

We never know ourselves as well as we think. Almost always, getting to know our neighbors helps us learn more about ourselves. So the kinds of patterns of investigation ethnographers and consultants encourage are actually also very faithful ways to do ecclesiology (study the church) and theology (study God's action in the world).

Although strategic planning and ethnographic forms of research have arisen primarily out of so-called secular disciplines like the business world and academia, these are no strikes against them. The church can learn a lot from "outside" disciplines. In a way, the church is and always should be an inside-out institution. Since the church is made up of so many people from diverse human institutions (parents, non-profit leaders, workers, students, urban professional, artists, artisans, the leisured class, retirees, and more), it is no surprise that we "borrow" our methodologies from all over the place.

We do because we can, because the church is such a highly networked and resourced organization.

Our process of strategic planning has borrowed a lot from a great little book I read last fall, Susan Beaumont's Inside the Large Congregation. Although Good Shepherd is not (yet) itself a large congregation, it is on the verge of becoming one, and Beaumont spends a lot of time in her book describing "multi-cell" congregations, the type of congregation we are, situated size-wise just below the first stage of what most church consulting groups define as "large."

In this post, I describe just two parts of the information we gathered. In March, our congregation took the U.S. Congregational Life Survey. Although on many measures we described ourselves as quite like other U.S. congregations, there are some points at which we really stand out from the norm. Second, over the past two months I have been conducting a series of community leader interviews. The goal here was to hear how leaders of other organizations in our community perceive the needs of the neighborhood/city, and perceive our congregation.

U.S. Congregational Life Survey and Us

1. Our most notable growth area is in the area of prayer groups and prayer ministries. We are lower than the national average and the ELCA average on this point. This may be related to a point that comes later (perhaps we are more social ministry focused than prayer focused), but I call it out first, to indicate a part of our congregational life I plan to lead us in in a very focused way in the next year--our prayer and spiritual growth.

2. We are much less frequently bored or frustrated in worship than the national and ELCA average (72% compared to 62%), and we value the sermons much more highly than the national average (48% compared to 36%).

3. We have a very high level of satisfaction with what is offered by the congregation for children and youth (72%).

4. Our strongest area, where we consistently scored at or above the 80th percentile, was on focusing on the community. We are an outward service focused congregation.

5. 33% of our worshippers started attending our church in the last five years. Of these, our sweet spot is "returnees," those coming back after not having attended anywhere for several years.

6. I was pleased to learn that we scored in the 8th percentile for people in our congregation believing the leadership style of the pastor inspires people to take action. Since that is what I think I am doing a lot of the time in my ministry, it was good to hear that back.

7. We have a very strong sense that our congregation is currently moving in new directions, and our overall looking to the future score is high (can anyone say "strategic planning"?), but are still a little unclear what that new direction is. Like Abraham and Sarah, we've been called to a new place, but we don't have a clear vision yet of the destination.

All of the above came from the strengths report. Another report, the connections report, included these highlights:

1. We are a congregation of leaders. Many of us (56%) report having a leadership role in the congregation. Interestingly, this level of leadership comes out of a sense of joy rather than obligation much more than the national average.

2. As a congregation, we are much, much more likely than the national average to be involved in community service, social service, and advocacy groups (65%, compared to national of 42%). This is through activities of our congregation and other groups.

3. As mentioned above, we are much more likely than the national average to attract "returnees", thost coming back after not attending church anywhere for several years.

4. We are much more likely to be married, and have college degrees, than the national average (university town).

5. The three things our congregation values most, given the opportunity to rank them, are 1) sermons, 2) Holy Communion, and 3) traditional worship or music. Fourth was wider community care, and fifth was openness to diversity, and sixth was ministry for youth.

6. 70% of us said, in response to the question, "Does this congregation have a clear vision, goals, or direction for its ministry and mission?": "Yes, and I'm committed to them."

As I already mentioned, on many measures we are statistically similar to the national average, so I have not called those out in this blog.

I will be writing a follow-up blog some time soon seeking to analyze these a bit more.

Community Leader Interview Notes

I offer this more as "raw data." Interestingly, since conducting these interviews, the most intriguing outcome has been that simply by having spent time in the interview, connections have been made, and in all three cases we are already partnering in new ways between our organizations. Specifically, a group of staff from the elementary school now use our gym for exercise; we are using the local park for an upcoming event; and we are in the beginning stages of organizing a community project that is a cooperative exercise between the Chamber and our congregation.

Joey Folsom--Butterfield Trail Elementary School (kitty corner from our church)

1. Their vision: Focused on curriculum, civics, serving the students; they are focused on "rigor, relevance, relationships"

2. Strengths and weakness of neighborhood: Strengths are the families themselves, especially families that commit to a parent staying at home. This illustrates a value in the community, commitment to making sacrifice for neighborhood and children; need is that some families are unraveling and weak and struggling; 35% receive free lunches, lots of needs that mirror society as a whole

3. How can our church partner: Would love to have a core of regular volunteers coming weekly to the school; the need is for regularity consistency, older adults involved in lives of young people

4. Impression of our church on neighborhood: Biggest impression we make is in our facility sharing: sharing the parking lot, being available as emergency shelter, shared our facility while they were in their construction phase for programs; many people don't notice we are here because we are not "their" church

5. What else would you want me to know: We talked about our Thanksgiving meal programs, and their program of volunteering at the nursing home with you; facilitating relationships is an important call for us and for them; she also felt that identifying individual families and then establishing durable supportive relationships could be helpful

6. Other people to talk to: She recommended I speak with John Lindsey because there are eight apartment complexes in our neighborhood that feed into the school, and most are owned and managed by Lindsey

Connie Edmonston--Fayetteville Parks & Recreation

1. Overall, one of their big picture goals is a park within one mile of anyone living in the city

2. Biggest assets near us--Gulley Park and Lake Fayetteville

3. Events--Gulley Concert series, drama camp at Gulley, environment camp at Lake Fayetteville

4. Trying to reach the young professionals--kickball and co-ed volleyball; felt they had already been doing well with children and families, wanted to expand to young professionals- 336 playing kickball (21-35 year olds); it was clear to me that our target audience with the Pastor of New Communities is also their target audience with their new programs; they see it is a growing demographic group they want to engage

5. They want to do more outdoor education things, perhaps developing camping areas

6. She suggested I talk to Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families

7. She would love to see churches put together teams that connect with the sports activities the parks are organizing

8. They always have trouble with trash in parks/creek clean up needs/adopt a park program/trail trekker program

9. Called out the Yvonne Richardson center as an especially good resource; such good programs they often have to cap participation, do things esp. at Christmas and spring break

10. Big take away: we can use parks and recs more as a inexpensive resource, they're kind of a "deep secret" congregations could tap into more frequently

Steve Clarke, head of the Chamber of Commerce:

They believe the focus for business in NWA is: Eds, meds, innovation

Interesting Goal: Wants 35% Latino population because of shared values with current population

Making North/south connections by visiting Bolivia, Colombia, and Brazil to establish business partnerships

Impression of GSLC: Warm, friendly, doing outreach work in the community (impression)

Chamber has ten standing committees: goal is at least one event a year that is for the community; they are always looking for projects

Suggested I talk to Tyson center for spirituality in the workplace. Has a big focus on teaching leadership and faith has a place in the workplace

Suggested we talk to someone in the manufacturing community (Superior, Mexican Original, Pinnacle)

Working class issues, facility improvement issues in city is a major focus

I was the first pastor ever to come and talk to the Chamber about ways we can partner in the community

Jesus

2013-03-26T13:52:00.000-05:00

Joseph Ratzinger, before he was Pope Benedict XVI, wrote many learned books on theology and liturgy. But I wasn't surprised that when he began publishing books as pope, they were about Jesus of Nazareth and the joy of knowing Christ.

I spend a lot of time planning liturgy and writing sermons. But when I really sit down to meditate and pray, what repeatedly comes to my mind and heart is a simple thought, "Jesus, I really love Jesus."

We can get really wrapped up in our Holy Week observances. We can get focused on the palms, or the foot-washing, or the stripping of the altars, or the processional cross or the new fire of the Easter Vigil, or the flowers and the Easter hymns.

But at the center of it all is Jesus Christ.

Have I mentioned that I simply love Jesus? And that I am in awe, whenever I ponder it, of Jesus Christ's profound love of the world.

I was talking today with a friend about the definition of perfection. Sometimes we use the word in an oppressive way, tying it to morals and behavior. Perfect is as perfect behaves.

But Jesus' perfection is of a different sort. Outwardly Jesus was perceived by many as a sinner with loose morals and questionable behavior. He hung out with prostitutes and let women wash his feet with their hair. He failed to pay taxes and let other claim he was the Son of God.

But what he called himself was "The Human One." His perfection, if you can call it that, was in fully giving himself away, being found fully in human form. His divinity is in his self-sacrificial love. Jesus was so much like God that he could only be found in humanity.

I don't know how to say this the right way. It can come across as highly subjective and emotional, and I do not want to imply that the only way to know or love Jesus is through simple emotion.

But I will confess that when I try to write even this simple blog post about Jesus, and think about who Jesus is for me, I start tearing up. It's overwhelming.

So many people I know love Jesus. My Muslim friends love Jesus. My Hindu friends love Jesus. My atheist friends love Jesus. My Buddhist friends love Jesus.

We all get tied up in how we are different, yet if we pause we all realize how united we are in our love of Jesus. And we are united by his love of us. Him, the human one, the one who was human first, and religious as a distant second.

There's so much more to say about Jesus. There's liturgy to discuss. There are theological conundrums to ponder. Jesus is as much for the mind as he is for the stomach and the heart.

But this week, as much as possible, I pray to stay centered in him. There's just something about Jesus.

What We Talk About When We Talk About God: A Review

2013-03-22T22:58:00.002-05:00

How does he get away with this?

This is the question I ask myself whenever I pick up a Rob Bell book.

Imagine the original book proposal sent to his editor at HarperOne. Did it sound like this?

Dear Mickey,

I would like to publish another book with you now that I've moved out to L.A. That last one just went viral, didn't it?! Anyway, tell me what you think. Nothing high tech or fancy on this one. All text in the book will be 14 point font san serif, with big margins. Use that pulpy paper I like. Instead of indented paragraphs we'll just drop a line like most blogs I'm reading recently. The full text of the book will be about the same length as a long piece in The New Yorker.

The book is about God, and it won't have any big words at all, or fancy terminology... until it does, like when I use the German word Grenzbegriff in one chapter, and then the mostly untranslatable Hebrew term kavod in another chapter. But no one will notice, because I will have won them over with my simple and approachable breathless language (you know, like the way I talk in all of those Nooma videos).

I promise

to make

lots

of lists

and format

some paragraphs

like this.

All kinds of people want to talk about God. They really do. This book will sell. It will also make a difference in people's lives. Here's my outline for the book, kind of like the table of contents.

It will be

Open,

Both,

With,

For,

Ahead,

and So.

These are the words that will shape how I talk about God in this book.

Now that's what I'm talking about.

What do you think?

Rob

No one can pull this kind of thing off (in the same way that no one could pull off long footnoted book length essays in Harpers until David Foster Wallace did it). But Rob Bell can pull it off, and does. I sat down with his book at about 8:30 p.m. this evening, and didn't put it down until I had read it through, at about 10. It might take you longer or shorter to read it, I'm not sure, but at the end, I know you will say, "Wow, that was really really good, really helpful."

I keep thinking to myself, with a certain kind of jealousy, "Why is it that Rob Bell can present what is essentially solid Lutheran theology mixed with solid liberal Protestantism, and get such huge press for it?" Because he can, and he does, far more than any of us Lutheran or liberal Protestant folk do or can.

But then, in the end, who cares if he does it instead of us. He's doing it, and it's really really good, and you should read it, and then share it with a friend. Preach it, Rob, preach it.

Now that's what I'm talking about.

Praying Holy Week

2013-03-21T14:15:00.002-05:00

I don't think I can make a convincing argument for attending Holy Week observances. There is no week more important in my piety, no time of the year that re-orients my life, work, and faith towards Christ than this week, and I wish everyone a blessed Holy Week.

But the proof of the value of these days lies solely in the experience of the services themselves, and the breadth of them. All I can do is invite you to take the time, be present for the Procession of Palms, hear the passion narrative read, wash feet and commune on Thursday, weep at the cross on Friday, keep the vigil with the newly baptized on Saturday, then celebrate the resurrection of Christ come Sunday morning.

As we begin these days, I offer this set of prayers, the intercessions from the fifth-centry Gelasian sacramentary. I am thankful to James K.A. Smith for drawing my attention to this prayer in his wonderful Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Cultural Liturgies)

A prayer for Holy Week

Let us all say, Lord, hear and have mercy. Father unbegotten, and Son of God Begotten not made, and Holy Spirit of God, the breath of the faithful, we pray, Kyrie eleison.

For the spotless church of the living God, constituted throughout the whole world, we entreat the riches of divine gifts, Kyrie eleison.

For holy priests and ministers of the Mighty God, and all people worshipping the true God, we pray Christ our Lord, Kyrie eleison.

In particular, for all teaching rightly the Word of Truth, the manifold Wisdom of the Word of God, we pray, Kyrie eleison.

For those who keep themselves chaste in mind and body for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven, and exert themselves in spiritual labors, we pray for plentifulness of spiritual gifts, Kyrie eleison.

For all religious rulers and their solders, who prize justice and right judgment, we implore the Power of the Lord, Kyrie eleison.

For agreeable weather and opportune rains and caressing vital winds and the prosperity of diverse times rightly ordered, Lord of the world, we pray, Kyrie eleison.

For those who for the first time into the name of 'Christian' are initiated, whom now desire for heavenly grace inflames, we pray for mercy to Almighty God, Kyrie eleison.

For those who are involved in the weakness of the infirmities of humanity, in envy of spiritual wickedness or various errors of the world, we implore the mercy of the Redeemer, Kyrie eleison.

For those who are of necessity traveling, or are oppressed by the powers of iniquity, or are vexed by hostile hardships, we pray the Lord the savior, Kyrie eleison.

For those deceived by heresy or superstition, we pray the Lord of Truth, Kyrie eleison.

For doers of good works, and those who assist in the necessary labors of brotherly and sisterly charity, we pray the Lord to have mercy, Kyrie eleison.

For all within this holy House of the Lord, that they may be turned to religious hearers and devout pray-ers, we pray the Lord of Glory, Kyrie eleison.

For the cleansing of our souls and bodies, and forgiveness of sins, we pray the merciful Lord, Kyrie eleison.

For refreshment of faithful souls, particularly of pastors and priests of the Holy Lord, who preside over this catholic church, we pray the Lord the spirit and judge of all flesh, Kyrie eleison.

Mortification of sins of the flesh and quickening of the life of faith, Grant, Lord, grant.

Holy fear and love of truth, Grant, Lord, grant.

A pleasant ordering of life and a creditable end, Grant, Lord, grant.

An angel of peace and holy consolation, Grant, Lord, grant.

Hear, Lord, the voice of your family who cry for preservation. Amen.

Diamonds in Arkansas

2013-03-19T23:11:00.002-05:00

I love the Natural State. It's the kind of place you constantly come across obscure little gems--literally. This spring break we committed as a family to discovering new wonders in Arkansas, and we have not been disappointed.

Our first surprise was a quick side trip into Clarksville on our way to Little Rock. Clarksville is one of those towns--when you first get off the interstate and drive through town, you think you have discovered Radiator Springs. But we ended up at an incredibly entrepreneurial radio station and coffee house for lunch. The local junior high English teacher opened it just sixty days ago.

http://www.kxiocoffeehouse.com/index.html

Enter the coffee shop, and the radio show host is in her studio to your left--available to chat while she spins tunes, broadcasting commentary live in-between songs. It's a big open warehouse space, decorated with classic album covers. There's a side entertainment room for bands. The coffee is great, lunch was solid (especially the soup) and hipster baristas from area colleges staff the joint.

If you are doing the drive from NWA to Little Rock, skip Starbucks and stop here.

After lunch, we made our way to Little Rock. Stopped in at the state capitol. Since our first grader has been studying Arkansas politics, this was an appropriate destination. The house and senate were both in session. While we were there they upgraded the wearing of body armor while committing a felony to itself being a felony. This is really the type of legislation it had never even occurred to me existed.

Let it just be noted that many men who work there have really great hair and wear some pretty snappy suits. And everyone was really nice even when our clan was noisy.

Next stop was the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. Our children were captivated by the civil rights interpretive center, especially video footage of the desegregation efforts and the nine students who persevered in their attendance. It's a powerful monument to how far we have come, and an equal reminder of how far yet we have to go to overcome racial inequality in our nation.

Next we checked in to our hotel downtown and took a walk along the river. We didn't go to Heifer or the Clinton Library this visit, although these are two of my favorite spots in Little Rock. Instead, we ate at our favorite seafood joint (which currently has this banner hanging out front), and played on the great park equipment along the river (if you have small children, definitely walk the river here--there's the built in tunnel playground, an awesome elevated bridge, and a submarine to tour). We ran into a classmate from preschool, which means we are batting a thousand. It never fails, when we road trip from Northwest Arkansas anywhere nearby, we run into classmates from preschool. I think I might label it the "Preschool Event Horizon."

The next day we headed for Crater of Diamonds State Park. This is the only diamond-producing site in the world open to the public, and the eighth largest diamond preserve in the world. So far 198 diamonds have been found on the site this year. They average 2-4 per day. We brought a change of clothes because we knew we would get muddy, and some basic digging and sifting equipment. Hundreds of people were out there digging with us.

From a distance, it looks like a 30-acre recently plowed field. And it is. But since it is also an old volcano crater, the dirt isn't quite like the dirt I grew up digging in Iowa. For one, it's purple, because the dirt has silica mixed in. Second, as you walk the field, it is possible to come across diamonds on the surface, or dig and sift for them. Some are very large.

We did not find any diamonds, but we did have fun digging, and we brought some rocks home with us. It's quite a drive getting out to the site, but well worth it, because a) Arkansas is beautiful, and b) Arkansas is beautiful. This is logging country, so you also get to see that industry at work, and smell it.

After Crater of Diamonds, we drove south to Hope, Arkansas. Along the way, we discovered Historic Washington State Park. We didn't know it, but it is an entire 19th century village they are restoring to its original state. But we were on our way to another destination, so didn't stop.

Instead, we visited the birth place of William Jefferson Blythe III (otherwise known as Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States). He was born three months after his father died in a car accident. He received the last name Clinton as a teenager when his mother re-married. In any event, he lived in this house in Hope, Arkansas, for the first four years of his life, then another house in Hope for three years, before moving to Hot Springs for his teen years.

Hope also happens to be the birthplace of Mike Huckabee. For a town of its size it has produced some rather outsized political creatures.

We came to Hope late in the day, but the young park ranger was more than kind, and gave us a short private tour of the house. They've restored the interior almost exactly, as it would have been while Bill lived there from age birth-4. It's rather poignant, actually. He lived with his mother and grandparents.

These are not destinations on the way to or from anywhere. Located just south of the Ouachita Mountain Range and above the opening flats of southern Arkansas, they are their own kind of place, with a rolling beauty. But they give indication of what is great about Arkansas precisely in their remoteness and quiet gravity.

Our bodies make our prayers

2013-03-16T21:41:00.001-05:00

Worship is a contact sport

Imagine signing your child up for youth soccer. A pre-requisite for participation is a five session class with the coordinator of youth soccer. In these classes, your child sits in rows at tables, and listens to lectures and presentations about soccer. Before being allowed to play, they do an exercise exploring the philosophical nature of balls. They get asked repeatedly why they really want to play soccer, and whether they fully understand the importance of soccer. Finally, after a presentation on the history of the development of soccer as a sport, and a short quiz, they are allowed to attend their first actual practice session.

Alternatively, imagine a group of people all who believe soccer is very important, it's healthy and fun, and they claim to center their lives around it. But they never actually play it.

This wouldn't happen, would it? Everyone understands that you learn a sport by playing a sport. It's obvious that if you really love something and it is central to your life, then you would practice it, play it. Although you might take short breaks during the game, or during practice, for the coach to review strategy... might even need certain seasons for recovery or healing, the majority of the time spent learning soccer is spent... playing soccer. Foot to ball contact, that's the key.

My argument is simple: worship and prayer ought to be considered contact sports, physical embodied activities, and the way we learn and engage them should correspond. At each stage of the journey of faith (or stage of development, say, in childhood) the appropriate way to learn about worship and sacraments is through engagement with embodied practices.

If you are a parent wondering how best to raise your child in the Christian faith, or if you have been questioning whether participation in Christian worship and community is integral to the life of faith, I invite you to read on.

Consider how you go to sleep

"Maurice Merleau-Ponty points to an intriguing analogy: sleep. I cannot 'choose' to fall asleep. The best I can do is choose to put myself in a posture and rhythm that welcomes sleep. 'I lie down in bed, on my left side, with my knees drawn up; I close my eyes and breathe slowly, putting my plans out of my mind. But the power of my will or consciousness stops there' (PP 189). I want to go to sleep, and I've chosen to climb into bed--but in another sense sleep is not something under my control or at my beckoned call. 'I call up the visitation of sleep by imitating the breathing and posture of sleep... There is a moment when sleep 'comes,' settling on this imitation of itself which I have been offering to it, and I succeed in becoming what I was trying to be' (PP 189-190, emphasis added). Sleep is a gift to be received, not a decision to be made. And yet it is a gift that requires a posture of reception--a king of active welcome. What if being filled with the Spirit had the same dynamic? What if Christian practices are what Craig Dykstra calls 'habitations of the Spirit' precisely because they posture us to be filled and sanctified? What if we need to first adopt a bodily posture in order to become what we are trying to be?" (Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Cultural Liturgies))

Try to replace "sleep" in the above paragraph with "faith." In order to grow in faith, have faith, make room for the Holy Spirit to create and in-spire faith, there are better or worse ways to assume a "posture of reception" where we "succeed in becoming what we were trying to be."

At least one reason to gather for Christian worship even when it doesn't feel necessary or desirable is precisely because it is one place, one way, for us to take on a faith posture where faith can be received as a gift. Being physically present in the body in corporate worship is a bodily posture of reception. Like any bodily practice, it will be tiring, awkward, painful, thrilling, distracting, and more, depending on the moment. But that is just what it means to live faith in a body.

And in fact there is no way for us to have faith apart from the body. Our bodies are the frame through which we see and experience the world and God.

This is one reason I love the Rotation Sunday School model our Sunday school director has implemented at Good Shepherd. Leslie knows that children learn best not just through exposure to information, but rather by experiencing the biblical stories in tangible ways--through games, crafts, cooking, story, and art. We are shaped by these actions and activities in ways that then embed the Christian story not only in our minds and hearts but in our bodies. Our Sunday schoolers know the biblical story through their tastebuds and muscles as much as their minds and eyes.

This is the best and most important reason why I encourage families to participate in weekly Sunday school in addition to weekly worship. There is simply no other way to embed faith in ways that ensure that our bodies make our prayers than by assuming this weekly posture.

Faith is a posture

I wish more of us knew this: Faith is as much a posture or way of being in and perceiving the world as it is a commitment to certain doctrines or beliefs. Unfortunately, much of the educational culture of the church has failed to recognize this. So "old school" Sunday school and confirmation emphasized "stuff you should know" rather than open up the perceptions of the baptized so they imagine the world differently. Even much of Christian worship tends to focus on the "noetic"--what we need to know or believe--rather than actively assuming postures that train the body in faith.

So much of Christian education--such as pre-communion classes or traditional seminary education--has been focused on the intellect and what we are supposed to know, rather than on our bodies comportment or orientation to the world and how our being bodied and storied people is to be shaped that we might live in the world as people of embodied faith.

This is why, for example, I am committed to an open table for communion, and offer communion even for infants and children. I simply don't think children can learn what communion is apart from participating in it. In fact by being excluded from communion, children do learn something, but it is not what we want them to learn. They learn they are excluded, that this meal the pastor just proclaimed in the sermon, presided over at the table, is for lots of other people but not for them.

The liturgy is its own best catechesis, worship teaches all by itself, and children learn weekly what communion is by their presence in worship and their reception of Christ's body and blood at the table. We can't introduce children to Christ cognitively first, while excluding them from Christ bodily at the table. It splits what can't be and shouldn't be divided.

We're still stuck with the mindset that somehow the right set of classes, or the proper ideas delivered in the right way, will prepare us to receive something that is embodied. We think the intellect takes primacy over the senses. Almost all of contemporary theology, philosophy, psychology, phenomenology, and neurosciences, however, is drawing the opposite conclusion. They are now calling upon the intellect to establish not its superiority or primacy, but its own inferiority and secondarity to embodied faith.

Even our practices of worship have not been reformed sufficiently by this insight. In some ways, various ancient forms of Christian worship are actually more bodily than the forms of worship that have developed since the Enlightenment. Think of the mystery of incense, the drama of processionals, the ringing of bells and elevation of the host at communion, kneeling and standing and prostrating, the iconography of the east, and more. Or in the modern era, many churches have rediscovered this in new ways. Consider the raised hands and dancing of pentecostal worship.

How do we teach the body?

1) Next week is a holiday that teaches the body. Holy Week is intense. It invites Christians accustomed to at most weekly worship to return to church day after day Thursday through Sunday in commemoration of Christ's death and resurrection. The liturgy, the worship, is designed to embody in Christian community the very bodily events of Jesus' final days--washing the disciples' feet, the last supper, his crucifixion and burial, the empty tomb and resurrection appearances. A lecture or book about Easter cannot replace Holy Week worship that embodies it.

2) But even weekly worship and observance of high holy days will not, all by themselves, develop the kind of posture we need to make space for the Holy Spirit to prepare us for the gift of faith. The body needs daily practices also. No one has made this argument better than my friend Dr. Rich Melheim. His encouragement for families to engage in a Faith 5 is essential for our recovery of the practice of teaching the body and assuming postures of faith. He offers a series of videos on the Faith 5 (Share, Read, Talk, Pray, Bless) here: http://www.faithink.com/inkubators/f5.asp His forthcoming book is going to be essential reading for families wishing to incorporate embodied faith practices into their family life, and just so holding their family as a body together in faith: http://faith5.org

3) I'm intrigued by the early reports of the actions of Pope Francis. Clearly he knows that faith is embodied. He carefully selected different clothes to wear to represent his papacy, and his daily actions have sent indication (with as of yet few words) of how he will lead the Roman Catholic church. Ride the bus rather than the limo. Pay for your own hotel. Wave in an endearing way at the gathered throng. Clearly he knows worship is a contact sport. He learned from one of the great saints on this point, Saint Francis himself, who illustrated so thoroughly how faith is embodied or it is nothing.

4) One of my favorite communities and resources for exploring how these kinds of insights work at all levels for faith formation is this journal and web site: http://www.lifelongfaith.com

5) Finally, worship and prayer are not the only Christian faith postures. Other postures include love of neighbor, especially commitment to justice and care of the poor. In this case, the same insights apply. To feed the hungry, we have to place our bodies in places where we have opportunity to feed hungry people. We need to give our money to the ministries we wish to support (remembering Jesus said that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also, and not the other way around (Matthew 6:21)).

--
A couple of additional quotes from James K.A. Smith's very fine book, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works:

"I understand in ways I don't know, and it is my body that understands. If we're going to make sense of that, what we need is 'a new meaning of the word 'meaning''. And if we are going to appreciate faith as a kind of "know-how" that generates action oriented to the kingdom, we will need to grapple with Merleau-Ponty's account of the materiality of habit formation" (Imaging the Kingdom, 58).

"Perception [the bodies corollary to intellectual understanding] is a fundamentally different (and primary) way of intending the world, of meaning the world with the body. Perception does not just provide the raw materials to be processed by intellection... it's not a matter of valorizing perception over reflection but of reconceiving the nature and task of reflection. What Merleau-Ponty offers, then, is a new account of what we're doing when we 'know' the world objectively in a reflective mode" (Imaging the Kingdom, 72).

The People Formerly Known as the Audience

2013-03-14T15:51:00.002-05:00

What exactly are we doing when we watch something? In these moments, we are the audience, or spectators. Typically this is understood as a passive activity--in fact in many types of analysis, simply being part of the crowd, watching something (a show, a game, a concert) is denigrated as a less productive form of activity than, say, those who are doing the cultural production everyone else is attending.

More recent analysis of cultural production and participation, however, tells a more complex story. Participating in the media we view does not require blogging it, creating art in response, etc. Participation can also include evaluation, appraisal, critique, and recirculation of material. In fact, perhaps to a certain degree, it is necessary that most of us perform our role as audience or spectator in this more "passive" manner because if we were all performers, all producers, there would be no one listening, no one watching, and the noise would be cacophonous.

John Zizioulas, in his remarkable work contemporizing eastern orthodox theology, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church offers an intriguing theology of the "Amen" of the laity in corporate worship. He says the indispensable role in the liturgy of the people of God is to "say the Amen" as a response to the grace they have received. In the liturgical call and response of worship, the priest or bishop proclaims the word of God and the congregation responds with the "Amen." In Zizioulas's view, this is not seen as denigrating the people of God in any way, as if saying this Amen were somehow lower or more passive than the leader roles. It is simply the important role they play.

I was thinking about this today while reading Henry Jenkin's book Spreadable Media, where he talks about what "audienceship" means in the modern social media era. He writes,

"Some of these processes marked as 'less active' involve substantial labor that potentially provides value according to both commercial and noncommercial logic. Even though we are excited about lowering the barriers of entry to cultural production, we should not assume that audience activities involving greater media production skills are necessarily more valuable and meaningful to other audience members or to cultural producers than are acts of debate or collective interpretation--or that media properties which drive more technical forms of audience creation and participation are somehow more engaging than content that generates discussion and sharing is" (154).

Placing these two inquiries next to each other--Jenkin's work on participatory culture and Zizioulas's work on ecclesiology and personhood--does not imply that worship is best when it is hierarchical, with clergy leading and the people passively attending it, or that other kinds of culture are best if they also perpetuate this form. But it does offer a more complex analysis of what is happening when we watch something. Perhaps it isn't as necessary as we think to get everybody "doing" something in worship. In many ways they already are. And those who take a more passive mode in worship may actually be cultural producers of more media in other contexts, but faithfully saying the "Amen" in our context.

For Christian life, all this invites us to ask what the people formerly known as the congregation might be in this new media era. Some of those gathered for worship in our communities likely will, and should be invited to, make use of their greater media production skills to tweet, instagram, blog, journal, and spread the content of corporate worship. However, the majority of us will be, rightly, engaged in collective interpretation, which looks a lot like saying the "Amen." Perhaps participatory culture includes really simple but deep activities like assent, disagreement, increased perplexity, clarified thought, appraisal, critique, and more.

Introducing Easter Vigil

2013-03-11T22:26:00.002-05:00

Keeping Vigil on Saturday of Easter eve is a new practice for our congregation, even if it is an ancient pattern for the Christian church (ours will be Saturday March 30th at 6:30 p.m. at Good Shepherd, Fayetteville, AR).

Christians have for centuries kept vigil in darkness as night falls, lighting the new fire outside the church building, lighting the Christ candle from that fire, then carrying it inside, calling out in processional, "The light of Christ. Thanks be to God."

But who is the Vigil for?

Like any service of Christian worship, it is for anyone. All are welcome. It may be a new experience for many going to church on Saturday night, but I encourage you to try it. The service is so very different from what you you have experienced Sunday mornings, or at prayer-services mid-week. It is the kind of service that is better seen than told about, experienced first-hand rather than heard about second-hand, so do consider yourself invited (and for the curious among us, the Wikipedia entry on Easter Vigil is quite good, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Vigil).

The Vigil is also especially for the candidates/catechumens. It is the service at which candidates for baptism are immersed in the baptismal waters and welcomed into the life of Christ. It is the service at which those returning to Christian community, or moving from other places, affirm their baptism in Christ.

The Vigil is full of readings from Scripture. Prepare your hearts and minds to hear the slow unfolding of God's gracious activity in the world and among us. Twelve readings are appointed, not all of which are read each year, but as a whole they lift up the greatest moments of the history of God's salvific work--creation, flood, testing of Abraham, deliverance at the Red Sea, the gift of wisdom, the valley of dry bones, the deliverance of Jonah, the deliverance from the fiery furnace, and more.

But why add an Easter Vigil?

Some churches call Holy Week the "liturgy of the three days." In a way, there are not three or four services that make up holy week, but one long service divided up into multiple parts. On Maundy Thursday, the church remembers Christ's last supper in the upper room with his disciples, and his servant-act of washing their feet. On Good Friday, the church commemorates his death on the cross. On Saturday, the church keeps vigil, mourning with the disciples, buried in the death of Christ, but anticipating the Easter morn. So it keeps vigil, re-tells the story of God's might deeds among Israel and in creation. It sits with the new in faith, and watches in anticipation for the light of Christ. The Easter Vigil is in this way both very solemn, and profoundly joyous.

Following the reading of Scripture, those who have been preparing for baptism come to the waters and new life in Christ. In our congregation, we have two adults and almost a dozen children who will be baptized this evening. Even if you don't like fire or the bible, you have to like babies, right? In which case you don't want to miss the Easter Vigil, because there will be plenty of cute babies and children being baptized. But this is more than cute, this is about new life, and new life in Christ, as we welcome these new Christians in our community. At the same time, we welcome the many adults affirming their baptism as part of our period of adult inquiry.

Where did you get this idea?

Phinney Ridge Lutheran Church in Seattle, Washington has been our primary mentor for implementing the catechumenate and the Easter Vigil. Their pastor, Paul Hoffman, has written a wonderful little book I recommend, Faith Forming Faith: Bringing New Christians to Baptism and Beyond
, which tells the story of developing The Way in their congregation. In addition, our denomination is increasingly encouraging this pattern for Christian faith formation in congregations around the country, and even hosts training and publishes resources to learn more.

I can hardly describe how excited I am to be hosting this service at GSLC this year. It is an honor and a joy and a privilege to gather with others as we anticipate and celebrate again the rising of the Sun, the one raised by his Father in victory over death. We will at that point no longer be able to contain our Alleluias!

You can attend seminars, including an upcoming training at Christ the King in Houston, Texas :
http://www.rsvpbook.com/event.php?469946

Read more about Phinney Ridge and the Easter Vigil here:
http://www.prlc.org/2012/about-the-easter-vigil/

Learn more about the ELCA resources and approach here:
http://store.augsburgfortress.org/store/product/17352/Go-Make-Disciples-An-Invitation-to-Baptismal-Living

Post Punk

2013-03-10T17:20:00.002-05:00

Steampunk Theology has been live and kicking it for almost a year now. The Magus, the Alpinist and the Ecclesiast post infrequently but regularly, offering up steampunk musings with a theological bent. But you might still wonder, what is steampunk? So, for the under-initiated, here's a basic definition:

Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery, especially in a setting inspired by industrialized Western civilization during the 19th century. Therefore, steampunk works are often set in an alternate history of the 19th century's British Victorian era orAmerican "Wild West", in a post-apocalyptic future during which steam power has regained mainstream use, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power. Steampunk perhaps most recognizably features anachronistic technologies or retro-futuristic inventions as people in the 19th century might have envisioned them, and is likewise rooted in the era's perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, and art.

Just the other day I discovered a living analogy for steampunk that might interest you. I'm calling it "postpunk." Some genre writers have already been imagining alternatives to steampunk--like clockpunk or cyberpunk. In this case, the punk is literal. I found this par avion letter in my drawer while pulling together tax paperwork, so took a couple of digital photos of it to post. I think it is postpunk because it's almost like an alternative future, but one that used to be. I bought this when an international letter cost .50 cents to send (pretty close to what a domestic letter costs today), and in an era when people sent paper letters. But in this case the letter itself is also airpunk, remembering an era when innovators imagined air travel and mail delivered by air freight and balloons. All steampunk theology does is interpret these kinds of approaches to steam and punk but in theological perspective. What if theology had moved forward from an alternative history? What if the science theology took to be rigorous was of a different sort?

Discover the alternative universe at: http://steampunktheology.blogspot.com