Metamorphic Journey

Chemical Sensitivities

2008-03-11T14:48:00.002-06:00

A man I got to know over the past couple years suffers from a variety of chemical sensitivities, particularly those related to perfumes and other scents. When he is exposed to such chemicals for an extended period, as might occur in the workplace, for example, he can become quite ill — even to the point of becoming incapicitated. Such exposure is, quite frankly, toxic to him.

Now since perfume is not really a necessity for life, one would be inclined to think that a great deal of his predicament could be resolved by simple making the workplace in question a "scent-free" zone. That seems like "reasonable" accommodation. Indeed, that is what his employer did, officially.

The problem, however, is that there was a fair degree of non-compliance with the official policy by certain employees — employees who seemed to take reminders of the policy and the reasons for it as a personal effront. They, after all, experienced no toxic effects from any of these scents, but rather quite enjoyed them and found their presence of positive benefit to their own work experience and productivity. My friend, therefore, was just being petty about a matter of preference, and making them out to be villains — evil, even.

This situation, of course, made the workplace even more toxic. Now it was no longer merely chemically toxic to my friend, but also socially toxic. It was, in many ways, a good place for my friend to work, with many good people, but it had become hazardous to his health.

I saw parallels between the chemical sensitivities of my friend and some reactions I and my family members were experiencing to certain aspects of the ongoing church reality we were in the latter part of last year. Like the chemical sensitivities of my friend, these sensitivities arose in large part from prior life experiences which left us particularly vulnerable, although our reactions were not just sensitivities to what was present, but also sensitivities to what was absent. In any case, the sensitivities we had developed meant that the environment was not entirely healthy for us.

Now the fact that a particular environment is noticeably not healthy for someone who has developed particular sensitivities does not mean that the environment is uniformly bad or toxic for everyone. Actually, a church environment which is uniformly unhealthy for all who attend is probably an extremely rare phenomenon. (And I suspect that a church environment that is uniformly healthy for all might also be rare). Yet this seems to be incomprehensible to many people, who seem to automatically read a wholesale attack against the church into any suggestion that some may not find the environment helpful in some manner — church leaders may perhaps have become particularly sensitized to taking things far too personally. Just like the perfume wearers in my friend's workplace.

Three years ago, I started this blog as a place where I could "think out loud" openly about the things I was experiencing in this journey of faith, in and around the church. I talked about the challenge of hearing God's direction of when to stay and when to go. Ironically, this time it seemed necessary to avoid such openness, as I began to sense that that would simply add a kind of social toxicity to the other issues that we were experiencing as unhealthy. And perhaps doubly ironic was the fact that when we first joined with this particular church community two and half years ago, one of the things we found most notable was that here it seemed people could be free to be open about their struggles, disappointments and failings — even those involving their past experiences with "church". And now we were feeling that old guardedness — the sense of having to wear a mask over our true selves in order to coexist with others who also increasingly seemed to be much more guarded.

It's been over two months now since we left. A decision that was necessary for our ongoing spiritual health, but a decision made painful by having to leave a lot of good people who would never be in position to fully understand either why it was necessary or why it was painful. Because to be truly open about those matters was just going to rip apart what was still left of what was good there — if not for us, at least still for some, maybe even many.

Off to San Diego

2008-02-23T16:11:00.002-07:00

Yvonne and I are off to San Diego tomorrow morning for the National Pastors' Retreat and Convention sponsored by Zondervan and Youth Specialties. We're both looking forward to hearing some of the speakers, like N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight, and Phyllis Tickle, as well as the Retreat led by Ruth Haley Barton.

Maybe when we're back I'll be in a space to start writing about the journey of the last 9 months or so, which has seen us move from church home, through toxic space, to a kind of homeless waiting period where we're sort of at home anywhere and nowhere.

A Message from my Computer

2008-02-18T15:13:00.005-07:00

From toothpastefordinner.com via on coffee

2007 Book List

2008-01-03T22:45:00.001-07:00

These are the books I finished reading in 2007:

Home to Holly Springs
Jan Karon
Justice in the Burbs
Being the Hands of Jesus Wherever You Live
Will & Lisa Samson
Divine Nobodies
Shedding Religion to Find God (and the unlikely people who help you)
Jim Palmer
His Dark Materials (series)
Philip Pullman
Reforming the Doctrine of God
F. LeRon Shults
Murder is Easy
Agatha Christie
A Community Called Atonement
Scot McKnight
a long way gone
memoirs of a boy soldier
Ishmael Beah
Gifts of the Desert
The Forgotten Path of Christian Spirituality
Kyriacos C. Markides
Women, Ministry and the Gospel
Exploring New Paradigms
Mark Husbands and Timothy Larsen, ed.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
J.K. Rowling
Lifesigns
Intimacy, Fecundity and Ecstasy in Christian Perspective
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Power Failure
Christianity in the Culture of Technology
Albert Borgmann
The Gospel According to Starbucks
Leonard Sweet
Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief
Dorothy Gilman
Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?
What Really Happened in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince?
John Granger, ed.
Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish
Dorothy Gilman
The Conversion of the Imagination
Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture
Richard B. Hays
Mrs. Pollifax on Safari
Dorothy Gilman
The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax
Dorothy Gilman
The Real Mary
Why Evangelical Christians can Embrace the Mother of Jesus
Scot McKnight
The Sacred Way
Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life
Tony Jones
finding naasicaa
letters of hope in an age of anxiety
Charles R. Ringma
Chasing Francis
A Pilgrim's Tale
Ian Morgan Cron
This Beautiful Mess
Rick McKinley
The Ethical Imagination
Journeys of the Human Spirit
Margaret Somerville
Life in the Balance
My Journey with Breast Cancer
Dr. Marla Shapiro
Simply Christian
Why Christianity Makes Sense
N.T. Wright
Bono
in conversation with
Micha Assaya
The Way of the Heart
Connecting with God through Prayer, Wisdom, and Silence
Henri J.M. Nouwen

The Problem of the Good

2007-10-20T13:40:00.000-06:00

F. LeRon Shultz has given me some new language to refer to a collection of problems we encounter all around us, "The Problem of the Good". In Reforming the Doctrine of God he writes:

Framing the issue simply as the "problem of evil" misses the broader biblical understanding of human and divine agency. Already in the story of the Garden of Eden, eating from the forbidden tree signifies the acquisition of "the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2:17). The problem in Jesus' ministry is not merely the evils that threaten the poor but the goods (wealth, oppressive power) that seduce the rich. To those who had been crushed by the evils of social injustice, Jesus brought healing and wholeness. The resistance to divine agency in the ministry of Jesus was strongest among those who had the "goods" of earthly life. This means that Christian theology must also speak of "the problem of the good."

It seems to me that the "problem of the good" manifests itself in several ways. Early on, Moses warns of the problem of prosperity in Deuteronomy 8 — the danger that when we have lived in prosperity we will forget God who brought us out of the land of bondage. When one compares the vitality of the Christian church in the two-thirds world to that of the developed world, it is hard not to concur with Moses' warning about prosperity.

There is another problem that Joseph Ratzinger helped raise my awareness to, although it had been pushed much closer to the surface by numerous other writers, including Isaiah. At one point in his book Jesus of Nazareth, the current pope is examining the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, and notes that the entire prayer is in the plural: "Our Father, ... give us this day our daily bread ... " If we, together in community, pray for daily bread, and God gives that sufficient bread into the hands of a few, then He has fully answered our communal prayer. But if the few retain the good gift of God for themselves, then the intent of our communal prayer is not achieved. And as prosperous North Americans who have cupboards full, we may need to ask whether the good bread we have filled our stomachs and our cupboards with was not in fact the bread we were given to answer the prayer of our poor brothers.

So the "problem of the good" warns us who live in prosperity that not only must we guard against forgetting God, but even when we recognize our goods as coming from God and give Him heartfelt thanks, we are not finished. Rather we ought also to ask whether the prosperity we experience and thank God for is indeed our own to enjoy, or that which belongs to our poorer brother or sister.

But there is yet another aspect of the "problem of the good" that afflicts us — an aspect that arises in the context of our pursuit of the good, even our pursuit of the good on behalf of the other. How often have we tried to do good to another — to express our love or support, perhaps — but the means we choose to do that good do not deliver the desired result — our actions or words, understood in the context of the other's personal history and pain, bring pain rather than comfort, discouragement rather than support, anger rather than peace. And yet our intent was to do good and our actions, too, in another context, were good.

This problem of our pursuit of the good arises particularly in the context of church leadership. Many good things, good aspirations, become problematic without our notice. Our pursuit of "excellence", for example, can exclude from service many whom God has placed in our midst for our mutual growth and encouragement, not to mention those for whom service would have been the means for their own healing or salvation — people we exclude because they or their skills do not yet measure up to our ideal of "excellence". Our employment of the best current thinking on strategic planning, or vision casting, or leadership dynamics, or whatever valuable skill or technique we choose to use in our pursuit of the good can so easily blind us to the gifts that God has placed among us in our community — gifts that thus go unutilized, or worse, are suppressed and damaged.

Jesus pointed this problem of the good out to the scribes and teachers of the law. For all their study of God's word, and their application of it to the lives of the people, the end result was not the good they sought. Rather Jesus' evaluation was that they had merely laid on the people crushing burdens, and had not lifted a finger to ease the load. We see this too in our churches today, and on the blogosphere — people who are so intent on pursuing the good of biblical study and solid doctrine that they place crushing burdens on the weak and refuse to help lift the load — even to the extent of railing against any who would try to ease the burden of this poor, burdens sinners.

I, and others, have written elsewhere of the dangers of allowing our vision of the good to become our supreme objective, indeed our God. In Life Together Bonhoeffer writes of how "God hates visionary men", because in their pursuit of their vision of what Christian community ought to be, they actually destroy the community that God has called together. Gordon MacDonald wrote recently in an ill-titled piece The Dangers of Missionalism of the dangers of a belief that our worth as persons is derived from the accomplishment of some great work, some great good.

A worst case scenario from a generation ago might be Jim Jones and his horrific ending in Guyana. The mission became all-consuming, and it turned dark. Not only did the leader go down, but most of his followers self-destructed, too.

Time and time again we see the ill-fated effects of the pursuit of the good, by pastors, by elders, by church members, by denominations and denominational leaders, by people of all sorts within the church (and without). So much so that one current DMin student is doing her dissertation on the experience of individuals who have encountered significant stress, grief and pain as a result of church leaders' pursuit of the good, as they understood it.

But perhaps the biggest problem we encounter with this whole matter comes when we fail to understand that we are working with the "problem of the good", categorize it instead as the "problem of evil", and end up demonizing those whose actions have brought us pain, grief, distress and oppression. Because then we ourselves end up becoming the "evil" against which we fight — ourselves becoming the perpetrators of violence, cruelty and oppression.

The problem of the good is a big problem indeed.

Divine Nobodies

2007-08-14T13:40:00.000-06:00

The current online issue of Next-Wave features a reprinted excerpt of a book by Jim Palmer entitled Divine Nobodies: Waffle House Theology. It served as a good antidote to The Church of Celebrity.

For that matter, so did Len Hjalmarson's recent post on The Kingdom Prayer. I particularly appreciated the closing paragraph:

In this world direct assault tends to perpetuate injustice. As a result, the Kingdom of God works in a way that seems foolish to the wise: where we expect power, the kingdom path often leads through weakness. The Son of God dies the death of a criminal, and wins a great victory. Between the times God’s kingdom rule is expressed in weakness and humility.

The Church of Celebrity

2007-08-13T01:00:00.000-06:00

Some time ago I audited a course on the theology of film. Tonight a particular clip that was played in that course came back to mind — the opening voice-over by Susan Sarandon to the movie Bull Durham: "I believe in the Church of Baseball."

I think I was in a church like that this morning (or rather, yesterday morning now, I suppose). Not of baseball specifically, but sports definitely. And not of sport in its widest sense, just the celebrity sense. And while sport celebrity certainly dominated the liturgy, there were numerous spots given to celebrities from music and other pop-culture spheres. One of the curious features of this church was that as numerous as the quotations and illustrations from various celebrities were, far more time and emphasis was placed on establishing the bona fide celebrity credentials of the individual than was spent on the actual quotation or specific illustration.

Celebrity also seemed to me to be a key component of the principal text for the day — a quote attributed to Neil Young along the lines of getting yourself noticed in the biggest, widest circle possible and not settling simply for Moose Jaw. Ironically, the only scriptural reference was from Ecclesiastes — and of course the author's celebrity bona fides had to be established by virtue of his wealth and his 1000 wives — for whom "Celebrity" would certainly have been included within the ambit of all that was "vanity of vanities and chasing after the wind".

I can suppose that the speaker thought he was encouraging people to go out and make a difference in the lives of people. And indeed the closing movie clip from Pay it Forward could have really reinforced that message. But for me, the omnipresent underlying theme music of "Celebrity is Everything" just drowned everything out, and changed it all from "making the difference that you can" to "go big or go home".

Another irony, perhaps, lies in the fact that everywhere else God seems to be speaking into my heart and mind that trying to make a name for oneself is the perennial human sin problem. God has already made a name for me, a name that He alone knows now, but which He will reveal to me at the changing of the age. It is the name that God bestows by grace that is my true name, not that which I could make for myself. The irony lies precisely in this: reminders that it is God that is at work to bring about His Mission in the world, and we get to join in with Him like little kids following Dad around with their plastic lawnmowers actually encourage me to get out there with Him, working hard at whatever my hands find to do — but messages like that from the Church of Celebrity, cajoling me to get out of Moose Jaw and go for the gusto just leave me deeply depressed. And I don't think I am alone in that.

Two years ago, when I first became involved with this particular faith community, I found it tremendously refreshing that I did not have to put on a particular mask in order to be accepted and welcomed into the community. Today, however, I was keenly aware of how thoroughly that had changed — how much pain, uncertainty, and confusion lay hidden behind the masks of proper social behaviour all around me. And I was painfully aware that, no matter how much I needed these people, I simply have no more strength to put on the masks necessary to keep the connections up.

In short, I recognized that I felt profoundly homeless yet once again.

And in between I wonder, can the Church of Celebrity ever become the Church of Broken, Humble Servants once again?

America's Next Top Pastor

2007-07-31T14:09:00.000-06:00

HT to the InternetMonk for this hilarious episode in reality TV:

Interpreting the Story

2007-07-20T17:40:00.000-06:00

The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scripture. The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out. Interpretation of Scripture can never be a purely academic affair, and it cannot be relegated to the purely historical. Scripture is full of potential for the future, a potential that can only be opened up when someone "lives through" and "suffers through" the Sacred text.
Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI
Jesus of Nazareth

Living in a Large Enough Story

2007-07-14T13:00:00.000-06:00

About two weeks ago, I was listening to Dr. Marva Dawn's public lecture entitled Living in a Large Enough Story. The content of the lecture, but even moreso the title, seemed to resonate with a number of other sources that I was interacting with both before and after.

One such source was Irish philosopher Richard Kearney, who was interviewed in a three part CBC Radio Ideas broadcast entitled The God Who May Be. In one of the three parts, Kearney talked about the way the stories we, as a society or culture, tell ourselves shape and limit the reality we experience. One example was the stories about Irish self-identity — stories about the clear and unalterable differences between the British and the Irish races that had been told for centuries. The fact that these stories had no real basis in any scientifically observable reality did not stop them from creating and maintaining a reality of polarization in Northern Ireland. It was only after people began to tell stories of Irish self-identity rooted in the experience of the Irish expatriates around the world — who greatly outnumber the Irish in Ireland, but who still maintain fierce Irish pride identity even alongside other patriotic identity — that it began to be possible to conceive of a way in which the "two solitudes" could share power without either abandoning their own self-identity.

In effect then, the old stories were too small to permit a solution to "The Troubles" — such a solution required a much larger story, and indeed a story that enlarged the people shaped by that story.

Albert Borgmann, in his book Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology doesn't use the concept of story, but he does document the way in which our technologies have reshaped our reality, and generally in a reducing sort of way. Many things that once involved a whole community of people have now, through the wonders of technology, become things that can be enjoyed fully (?) entirely on one's own. Music, for example, once required the gathering of musicians and audience, can now be experienced in far greater quality and high fidelity on one's personal iPod. Indeed, I have been told that one of the latest "things" is for kids and young adults to get together at an iPod dance — where everyone get out and dances to their own iPod playlist. This strikes me as the ultimate in drawing a large crowd so that we can all be alone together.

While the connection of technology to story may not seem obvious at first glance, a little reflection shows just how much the technological culture relies on stories to fuel its juggernaut — stories told in many styles but mostly in 30 seconds. The entire marketing industry has developed to tell stories which encourage us to become ever greater consumers of the fruits of the technological machine.

Ultimately though, these ubiquitous small stories are small not just because they are short. Actually, their principal smallness lies in the way they make up an overwhelming story that says to each of us, "Your basic meaning and purpose in life is simple: to be a consumer", and the longer we live in this story, the smaller we become as people — ultimately we become little more than just a cog in a big machine; a battery plugged into the Matrix to provide energy for the machine world, as it were — metaphorically, if not literally.

There are, to be sure, other collections of stories focussed on a different theme: stories that tell us that our value, our worth, is achieved by accomplishing some great task. Gordon MacDonald addressed this theme in a recent print issue of Leadership Journal, in an article entitled "The Dangers of Missionalism". Missionalism is what MacDonald calls adherence to this story theme, and considers it to be particularly a leader's disease. (I would have used "missionism" or "visionism" for what MacDonald proceeds to discuss, with "missionalism" left for a different sort of thing, but that wouldn't have fit that issue's theme of all things "Misional" nearly so well. Granted, that's a small quibble about an otherwise well-conceived and well-delivered article.) MacDonald calls this "ism" a disease, because it has the long term effect of crippling the leader's soul. Or to put it another way, that story is just too small to live in without being shrunken into something less.

Getting back to Marva Dawn, the Church has been called into being as part of a very large story, and for the purpose of inviting all comers to live in this large, and soul enlarging, story. This story has cosmic scope and room for all — in this story there really are no small parts, since our value is not achieved by making our own great name nor by being fodder for the machine, but as a gift freely given — a gift that is so much larger than what we are in the habit of articulating.

What is so astounding, therefore, is that my own experience with church is that so many seem to be so full of their own variants of the larger culture's small stories. In so many ways, the large and enlarging story that is ours by heritage and by calling has been neglected in favour of the little and belittling stories that we repeat to ourselves over and over, little realizing that while they may borrow Biblical, religious and churchy language, they really are more akin to the small stories of our surrounding culture — even, or perhaps especially, when they seem to most vehemently opposed to the surrounding culture. And the longer people live in these small churchy stories, the smaller they become.

I suppose it ought not be surprising that George Barna is finding so many people leaving "church" in order to seek after God. I know I seem to find the struggle against all these small stories to be becoming a much harder and more exhausting task. Perhaps it is the haunting call that glimpses of that large story are generating that make it so much harder to live in and around all the small stories, and particularly those of the churchy variety. And yet, I am convinced that it is not possible to live the Christ-following life, to live in God's large story, by oneself alone — to do so would ultimately end up being just a variant of The Truman Story in which I play in every scene — a frighteningly small story, to be sure.

So what to do? How do I do whatever is necessary to enter more fully into this large story? I already know many of the suggestions that would come from asking these questions into the crowd of church attenders and church leavers that are seeking their own answers, and find them to be too closely connected to the very small stories I'm struggling with. The only answer that I can find is to do what I can, knowing that it will not be enough in itself, and crying out like the psalmists of old, "O Lord, make haste to save me".

Lord, have mercy on your people, for your great Name's sake.

What a Week!

2007-05-15T20:16:00.001-06:00

This past week began with a dead fridge and a counterfeited credit card, and ended with a lost cell-phone and a stalling car while making a left turn ahead of oncoming traffic. These items made for a rather interesting inclusial to the main body of the week – attending the Regent College Pastors' Conference in Vancouver.

Actually, our trials are light and momentary as compared to those of the residents of Vancouver's downtown eastside, where Joyce (Heron) Rees directs the relational ministry of Jacob's Well in Canada's poorest neighbourhood. And the inclusial really did highlight things that Joyce, Len Sweet and John Stackhouse all spoke of in some way or another – the announcement of the Good News of the Kingdom of God has to take place in the midst of actual life.

More than anything, the announcement of Good News points our attention to the fact that God is always at work – in our lives, and in the lives of those to whom we are to proclaim the Good News. What we need, more than anything, is the eyes to see the signs of God's presence and activity all around us. Far too often we have been too hung up on the idea that everything is up to us, that we walk into situations where God was already at work, and try to rely on our programs or techniques as if we had to bring God to the situation. How much better to be reminded of the first rule of the Hippocratic Oath: First do no harm.

It was also good to be reminded that the Old, Old Story includes God's first commission to the human beings made in His Image: Be fruitful, multiply, fill and care for the earth, and take responsibility for its well-being in all things. Caring for the earth and caring for the poor are part of God's work for all human beings, and cannot be exempted from His work of redemption and restoration to which He calls Christ-followers in particular.

All told, it was a very good week.

Harry Potter and the Missing Scripture Lesson

2007-05-07T10:00:00.000-06:00

When I went to pre-order the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Amazon produced its list of "what other people who bought this book also bought". So I succumbed and bought the John Granger edited book Who Killed Albus Dumbledore? What Really Happened in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince? It was an interesting read – all the various chapters were originally written as articles in HP cyber fandom.

What really struck me was just how detailed and energetic the HP fandom rank and file are in their scouring of the HP canon for information to help understand this alternate world known as the Potterverse. Numerous everyday people are comparing parallel passages, debating which language is "literal" and which also "symbolic" and looking for hints of what is yet to come in the back story. Just how will the creator of this world bring it to a conclusion? At what cost, and to whom, will the world finally be put to rights?

These people are excited to study and understand this world that they get to inhabit for awhile.

Christians also believe in another world – a world revealed in the canon of writings produced by its creator; a world called the Kingdom. It too operates according to different rules than the everyday world we inhabit. Actually our text tells us that this Kingdom world is the "real" world, and that our everyday world is truly the artificial, humanly constructed world. And that the creator of this other world has made it infinitely richer and more glorious than our everyday existence.

Given this belief, you would expect that the energy expended to dig into the back story, scouring the canon for information to understand the way this Kingdom world works, and what is coming next, would greatly exceed the efforts expended by HP fandom. Or I, at least, would so expect it.

Yet it has seemed to me that this is not the case. It has seemed to me that within the evangelical tradition of which I have been a part – a tradition labelled "word-centered" by Richard Foster in his material on the various traditions of the Christian faith – has been becoming ever less and less interested in the founding and shaping texts – what HPer's would call the canon. And I am certainly not alone in this observation. The internetmonk has made a similar observation in his post The Strange Case of the Missing Scripture Lessons, and points to other posts on the same observation.

Why this is happening, I do not know. I have some suspicions, but charity demands that I not elevate them to probabilities without stronger evidence. But it concerns me. I wonder about the long-term effects this trend will have on our churches, on the faith of the gathered people, and ultimately on our broader society. I wonder how God will respond. I wonder at what point He begins to repeat His words from Jeremiah 2:

"The heavens are shocked at such a thing and shrink back in horror and dismay," says the Lord. "For my people have done two evil things: They have abandoned me — the fountain of living water. And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns that can hold no water at all!"

High and Lifted Up

2007-04-02T21:40:00.000-06:00

Last Sunday we sang a familiar chorus, whose words are these:

Open the eyes of my heart, Lord.
I want to see You —
to see You high and lifted up
shining in the light of Your glory.
pour out Your power and love
as we sing Holy, Holy, Holy

It struck me as we were singing that when Jesus speaks of being "lifted up", he generally is refering to his death on the cross. That thought made the song seem a little odd — not heretically so, as sometimes happens to me, but more along the lines of thinking it likely neither the lyricist nor the performing musicians would be comfortable with that reading of the song.

Well, on Wednesday morning I was listening to Darrell Johnson's summer school course on the gospel of John, and he was discussing the Palm Sunday text in John 12 where some Greeks come to Philip saying, "We would see Jesus". Darrell made the point that he doubted these Greeks were asking simply for Philip to point out which in the crowd was Jesus, nor were they merely asking for a chance at an autograph or photo-op. Rather, they really wanted to know what made him tick, what was the core of what he was about. Which, I presume, is the same desire expressed in the opening lines of the song we sang.

Jesus's response is a bit curious. In the past, it has struck me a somewhat as if Jesus were blowing these Greeks off — "Sorry, I've no time left for you. Much too busy. Goodbye." But what if his answer is straight to their desire, and really focussed on the core of what he is about? This is what he says:

"The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.

Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name."

Then a voice came from heaven: "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him." Jesus answered,

"This voice has come for your sake, not mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself."

Jesus, who only does what he sees the Father do, summarizes his purpose and intent as manifesting the glory of the Father by falling into the earth and dying. The Father's name, nature and character will be glorified principally by Jesus' death on the cross. In other words, it is precisely when Jesus is "high and lifted up" on the cross — in weakness, pain, and humiliation — that he most completely shines "in the light of [the Father's] glory".

This is a staggering thought to reflect up this Holy Week, and particularly on Good Friday.

Staggering, and also terrifying, because Jesus seems to expect his followers to adopt a similar approach to life — to glorify him and the Father in the same self-giving fashion. Perhaps, we won't really want to "sing Holy, Holy, Holy" when we truly see Jesus — or if we do, it will be to a much different melody than the light-hearted, wistful tune we sang on Sunday.

Connecting the Dots — Too Much or Too Little?

2007-02-06T12:25:00.000-07:00

If it didn't happen so often, it would be surprising the way things I encounter from quite different places seem to tie together.

For instance, I'm reading Richard B. Hays The Conversion of the Imagination which is about the way Paul uses, interprets and re-interprets scripture. One of the notable things is that Paul seems to expect his correspondents to know the scriptures quite well — well enough to pick up his references, quotes and allusions. Considering the number of Gentiles to which he writes, it's a bit surprising. Obviously, Paul expected the Gentile Christians to have become well versed in scripture, even though it wasn't their background at all. Unlike Paul, however, many of the gurus of our current time suggest that such an expectation is unrealistic — it's one thing to expect people who grew up in the church (i.e. analogous to Jewish Christians) to follow references to scripture, but you can't expect new believers to learn that stuff. So the Bible becomes harder and harder to find in so many of our worship gatherings — intentionally so.

Quinn Fox contrasts that approach to Starbucks, who've made an art form out of getting their customers to learn a whole new vocabulary and culture.

Perhaps we ask too little of people, not too much. I wonder. So does Nathan Colquhoun in his post on TheOoze. Except instead of contrasting the church with Starbucks, Nathan compares it to Playboy.

God in Thin Places

2007-01-23T17:24:00.000-07:00

In his book, Simply Christian, N.T. Wright describes three ways of seeing the relationship between the realm of heaven (or the divine) and the realm of earth. The pantheist seems them as the same realm, and the deist seems them as totally separate and distant from each other. The Christian viewpoint, Wright contends, is to see the two realms as distinct, but near — overlapping and interlocking. It is in these thin places where heaven and earth interconnect — where the realm of heaven actually breaks into the realm of earth — that God is known to us.

Scripture is full of such places, beginning of course with the Garden, where God walks and talks with the adam creatures He has made as His image, until they break the relationship and push the realms apart. But throughout Genesis we see God continuing to break through in thin places: talking with Abram, at the stone at Bethel where Jacob sees the ladder between heaven and earth, and again when Jacob wrestles with God and is renamed Israel. Exodus, too, is full of thin places: the burning bush, the pillar of cloud and fire, and most of all the Tabernacle upon which the shekinah glory rests. And throughout the First Testament, the tabernacle and its successor, the temple, are the most prominent of thin places — where God meets with His people.

The Second Testament relates the good news that God is not satisfied with meeting with His people in only isolated thin places, but has invaded the realm of earth Himself. Jesus becomes the ultimate thin place — the place where God is known most fully and completely — replacing the temple, and expanding it beyond imagining. All of us who are "in Christ" have become living stones of this new ultimate temple — the Body of Christ — and with the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, the thin places proliferate, until we see the final culmination of the New Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven, where the entire city — indeed the entire earth — is awash in the presence of God, dwelling among His people, "as the waters cover the sea".

Dear Lord, You indeed are the God who has made Yourself known to me in numerous thin places: at the Communion Table, during the public reading of the Bible, in the communal liturgies of the church, in songs of worship, in the deep assurance of Your upholding strength in the face of pain and uncertain health, in the ongoing love of a good woman, in stories of grace, of death and resurrection.

Open my eyes that I may see the thin places all around, where your presence fairly shouts to those who can hear, where every bush is ablaze with the Glory of God. And transform my heart and my life that I too may be, in some small measure, a thin place — a place where Your presence is seen by those around me.

Community, Hockey, Leadership and YouTube

2007-01-06T19:45:00.000-07:00

A New Wineskins interview with Sally Morgenthaler (HT to Len Hjalmarson) started my thoughts running in the eclectic mix suggested by the title of this post.

In our local gathering, we tend to associate the concept of Community with the part of our vision statement that refers to being a place that people can call home — in other words, it's about the sense of belonging. Sally Morgenthaler reminded me of Joseph Myers' book The Search to Belong which I read two years ago in the break between Christmas and New Year's. Myers' major contention is that "belonging" takes different forms in different "spaces", and that people's sense of belonging can be very strong in any of those different spaces. Different people will see their own "belonging" to a particular group — the local church, say — in terms of the particular space that they've chosen to interact with that group in.

Myers distinguishes four distinct spaces: public, social, personal and intimate. Each of these spaces has its own "rules" for appropriate interaction — the sorts of conversations and behaviours that are acceptable in that space. The boundaries between adjacent spaces, however, are a bit fuzzy, a reality that allows for conversations or interactions to start in one space and drift into the adjacent space in a natural manner. Jumps between non-adjacent spaces, however, are experienced by most people as disconcerting.

The spaces also differ in terms of the number of relationships people can typically sustain in each space — most people can only sustain a very small number of intimate relationships, more personal relationships, and on to a rather large number of public relationships. As a result, people will manage relationships over time by shifting them from one space to another. As long as both parties are comfortable with the space in which the relationship operates, the sense of belonging or community can be quite strong in any of the spaces — even though the way that sense is experienced will differ.

One of the great difficulties that churches have, Myers contends, is that they don't tend to respect the choices people make as to which space their church commitment and connectedness will operate in, but rather have a tendency to want to push all people toward a particular space. Related to this tendency is that churches often are not very good in creating environments in each of the spaces in which community can be fostered. Morgenthaler puts it this way:

The reality is, the church only operates marginally well in one area, and that is public. Even at that level, our public events and services are simply a collection of privatized experiences. They are usually not as communal as a football game. There, the jumbo-tron acts as presider and prompts us to high-five each other or yell at each other across the stadium.

This remark got me thinking about the hockey game that I and a number of clients and colleagues attended in Edmonton on Tuesday night. You would have to say that there was an obvious amount of public space community evidenced in the crowd attending that game. People were connected in a number of ways: many wore Oilers' jerseys or sported the Oilers' logo in some prominent manner; the crowd eagerly engaged in the "call & response" liturgies prompted by the various electronic signage equipment; they cheered, oohed, and booed more or less as one throughout the game; they hugged or slapped each other on the back when the Oilers scored, and kissed when the smooch cam focused on them. Indeed, the crowd was rather fanatical in its commitment to public community at this event — I guess that's why they are called fans. Obviously the experience of community and belonging can be very real and satisfying in public space.

When Myers describes social space, I always think of a cocktail reception or the milling about conversational environment of a church foyer. To be honest, this is the space in which I am the least comfortable — I really have to be psyched up and rested to engage well in social space, and even when it goes well the experience almost always leaves me exhausted. This reality creates a bit of a problem for me in the development of new personal space relationships — you simply can't progress directly from public space to personal space without creating a disconcerting discontinuity.

However, there is another space that lies between public space and personal space — a space I call "collegial space". This is the space where people work together in some common purpose. I suppose that in an academic sense one could consider this a subdomain of social space, but for me what I experience in a collegial environment is so much different from what I experience in a social environment that I have to think of them as different beasts. In reality, almost all of the personal space relationships I have had throughout my life have evolved from collegial space relationships, rather than from social space relationships. While my experience is certainly not in the majority, I strongly suspect that those who, like me, are more comfortable in collegial space than in social space actually make up a fairly sizable minority.

When I have truly felt "at home" in a church "community", I have been solidly connected in public space, collegial space, personal space and even intimate space. In that context, I am most able to give myself to being fully present in social space contexts as well.

Ironically for me, whenever the church leadership (of which I was typically a part) would decide that we needed to be more intentional about creating opportunities for building "community" in the church, invariably the means would be to create social space events. It would have never occurred to anyone to look at the degree of connectedness we were fostering in the public space, and certainly not to look at ways of making collegial space more open.

Encouragingly though, the growing popularity of the word "missional" suggests to me that churches ought to be becoming increasingly focused on opening up collegial space — after all isn't missional all about working together on common mission with Christ and with His body? Yet our leadership paradigms and structures really don't deal with this sort of objective very well. We need more than just tinkering or creating another program. Morgenthaler puts it this way:

Leadership in a truly flattened world has no precedents. Never in the history of humankind have individuals and communities had the power to influence so much, so quickly. The rules of engagement have changed, and they have changed in favor of those who leave the addictive world of hierarchy to function relationally, intuitively, systemically, and contextually.

Those who are up to the challenge of the new world will draw on that deep knowledge. And they will look to the marginalized — including women — not as necessary evils in a politically correct world, but as their own leaders, mentors, and guides. The brightest will finally dump the myth of the great man, park their egos, and follow the one Great Man into the relinquishment of power.

This is, of course, similar to what Alan Roxborough argues in his book, The Sky is Falling!?!. The world we are in is undergoing significant discontinuous change at many levels. The old ways of getting from point A to point B are breaking down, along with many of the old standard techniques for leadership. We need a much more open platform, where the old hierarchies are often bypassed to allow the best of novel and creative approaches to emerge.

Which brings me to YouTube — an extraordinarily successful and open venture that has changed much of our world in two short years. Yesterday I listened to a CBC Radio piece on YouTube which identified a few ways in which YouTube has brought a whole new reality into existence, almost entirely due to it's fundamental paradigm of making it easy for anyone to put up a piece of video and thereby bypass the old hierarchies of mainstream media. Halifax city police, for example, found it far more efficient and effective to post some surveillance tape footage to YouTube to seek public assistance in solving a particular crime than the use of mainstream media ever would have been. Even David Letterman finds it effective to promote his mainstream media program on YouTube. But even more fundamental is the expectation that mainstream media will increasingly use YouTube as the place to find fresh faces for its own industry — directors, writers, actors — bypassing its own former hierarchies for its own purposes.

YouTube was created by two guys in a garage, because they wished they had an easy way to post video to the internet and thought maybe others might too. Classical leadership structures had nothing to do with it, and probably would never have come up with anything like it.

Is it too much to expect that in such a period of discontinuous change, the Holy Spirit might not just move in a similar way, calling some other unknown people on the margins to do what hasn't been seen before, and open up whole new spaces for participation in the work of the Kingdom? Oddly enough, the Holy Spirit seems to have had a penchant for doing just that sort of thing before — making us see in the result the likeness of Jesus Christ in a way we'd not seen for a long time — and turning the world upside down in the process.

Oh, but isn't it hard to expect the unexpected, and to actively participate in waiting for we know not what, going to we know not where? Sounds an awful lot like Abraham, doesn't it? Abraham, the man of faith and friend of God, whom Paul delights in using as an exemplar for the new faith community of Christ followers.

2006 Book List

2007-01-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

These are the books I finished reading in 2006:

Jesus: Safe, Tender, Extreme
Adrian Plass
God's Life in Trinity
Miroslav Volf & Michael Welker, editors
Isaiah's New Exodus in Mark
Rikki E. Watts
The Potter's Rib:
Mentoring for Pastoral Formation
Brian A. Williams
From the Village to the City
Delbert L. Wiens
The Last Word
Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture
N.T. Wright
Free of Charge
Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace
Miroslav Volf
Longing to Know
The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People
Esther Lightcap Meek
Pop Goes Religion
Faith in Popular Culture
Terry Mattingly
Marriage Made in Eden
A Pre-Modern Perspective for a Post-Christian World
Alice P. Matthews
& M. Gay Hubbard
The Mountain of Silence
A Search for Orthodox Spirituality
Kyriacos C. Markides
The Sky is Falling!?!
Alan J. Roxburgh
Reframing Paul:
Conversations in Grace & Community
Mark Strom
Living the Resurrection
Eugene H. Peterson
The PAPA Prayer
Larry Crabb
Finally Feminist:
A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender
John G. Stackhouse Jr.
Now, Discover your Strengths
Marcus Buckingham &
Donald O. Clifton
Christian Reflections on The Leadership Challenge
James M. Kouzes &
Barry Z. Posner (ed)
Eat This Book:
a conversation in the art
of spiritual reading
Eugene H. Peterson
Spiritual Mentoring:
A Guide for Seeking and Giving Direction
Keith R. Anderson &
Randy D. Reese
the Emerging Church:
Vintage Christianity for NEW GENERATIONS
Dan Kimball
Christ Plays in
Ten Thousand Places:
a conversation in
spiritual theology
Eugene H. Peterson
Talking the Walk:
Letting Christian Language Live Again
Marva Dawn
Starting Well:
Building a Strong Foundation For a Lifetime of Ministry
Richard Clinton &
Paul Leavenworth
Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt
Anne Rice
Plan B: Further Reflections on Faith
Anne Lamott

The Nativity Story

2006-12-12T20:30:00.000-07:00

Last night about 30 or so people from our church went together to see The Nativity Story. This seems to me to be one of those movies where how you experience it depends in a very large measure on your own context and expectations. This review of the movie, therefore, is probably mostly about my own reflections on what I observed.

Scripture gives us very little about Joseph — Matthew says simply that he was a righteous man. Interpreting just what a righteous man looks like is a significant part of the impact of this movie. There can be no doubt that this Joseph, played by Oscar Isaac, is really, truly a good man. In very many ways, Joseph reflects the person that Jesus will be known to be, and there are numerous "flash-forwards" to Jesus' story — Joseph's response to the commercialized temple court is but one example. Even more telling is what Mary says to her unborn son as she tends to a thoroughly exhausted Joseph — you will have a good man for a father, one who gives to others even at the cost of himself.

One reviewer I read was disappointed at the angels — he was looking forward to some real heavy duty special effects, particularly of the angel choir, and got far less than he'd wanted. There can be no doubt that the angel visitations were significantly understated. But to me, the fact that the angelic presence never totally overwhelmed any of those to whom he was sent simply emphasized that each one had to respond, to choose what he/she would do with this message. Far from eliminating the need for faith, these angelic messages were calls to walk very much in faith. In this way, our calls are no different than theirs, which makes their examples that much more relevant to our lives.

In many ways, there was a lot that was understated about this movie — enough to make me wonder whether that isn't part of the point. We did hear, after all, that in Elijah's meeting with God, God was not in the fire or the earthquake or the devastating wind, but rather God was in the still small voice — indeed, we heard it twice.

Our culture, even the evangelical christian subculture, is more fond of impressive actions, big noises, and gross overstatements. We are, I suspect, far more comfortable with Herod's way of making a point — build two pools with a waterfall in between in the midst of a desert, and back it with gold tiles to reflect the light even if it means starving more and more of his people. In the context, Herod's behaviour is truly obscene. But then, what of the advertisements that preceded the movie? Surely the message that the appropriate way to bring peace and harmony to a world of increasing hostilities between the affluent self-indulgent village of "wants" and the subsistence survival of the village of "needs" is to buy yourself a Toyota Camry is just as over-the-top, just as obscene. And yet, I admit, my own initial reaction to that ad was that it was just silly (as in amusing) and mostly harmless.

The disparity between Herod's power and wealth, and the poverty and powerlessness of the people was clear enough that we understand the great attraction that "the prophecy" of a messiah held. But we also see considerable disparity between the sort of messiah that Herod fears and that the people long for, and the one that God seems to be bringing. We see it in Mary's question to Elizabeth about why would God choose someone of such little importance as her for this great event, and we see it Gaspar's wondering observation that this Bethlehem stable is an unusually humble place for the birth of the greatest of all kings — of God Himself wrapped in flesh. God is not in the fire or the earthquake — God is in the still small voice.

A number of reviewers were less than enthused with Keisha Castle-Hughes portrayal of Mary. Frederica Matthewes-Greene thinks she is totally disengaged from the astounding and terrifying things that are going on around her. Scot McKnight finds her far too much in the "pious, pensive, and passive" mood of Catholic tradition to reflect his understanding of the much more aggressive, "bring it on" Mary he sees in the Magnificat, and expounds in his just released book, The Real Mary. I, however, did not see a docile Mary, disengaged from the events around her. Rather, I saw a woman who made a conscious decision to return to Nazareth, knowing full well the dangers that would await her there, even against the advice of her cousin Elizabeth and the retrojected wish of her mother, simply because she had made a promise. Her observation to her parents, warning her of the potential for death by stoning, that the destiny of the one she carries outweighs her fear of whatever "they" may do to her reflected to me the deep calm faith of the later martyrs. She is not unaware of the terrifying events swirling around her, nor disengaged from them — rather she has made her faith override her fear, just as Joseph does.

Scot McKnight may well be right about the "real" historical Mary, but in this movie, where understatement is everything, I think the decision to leave the Magnificat to the end fits. The way that God will fill the hungry and turn away the rich empty is going to be much different than what any fiercely nationalistic first century Jewish peasant girl could ever imagine. And in the flight into Egypt, this Mary is already starting to come to grips with that reality — a reality we all must eventually come to grips with.

Following this Messiah is going to involve more than giving up our dates, wine and pillows. Following this Messiah is going involve us not just in Gold and Frankincense, but also in Myrrh. Because this God doesn't play by our rules.

Name-calling in the Church

2006-12-03T22:01:00.000-07:00

Scot McKnight has a thoughtful post entitled Name-calling in the Church concerning the ways in which we use "labels" for people — sometimes in appropriate and useful ways, but regretably often as weapons.

I long ago noticed that the web is a place where negative labels tend to get throw around quite a lot — by persons of all persuasions. It's one of the reasons I lurked for so long, and still am somewhat hesitant to engage too often on other's sites.

The very nature of blog comments and forum posts, with their "keep things short and to the point" credo, makes the use of shorthand expressions (i.e. labels) invaluable — if everyone understands the shorthand in the same way, that is. But the great diversity present in the blogosphere almost guarantees that at least some — if not many — of the readers and engagers will not understand these shorthand terms in anything like the same way. Indeed, even saying that a particular label is "negative" probably is true only in specific contexts with specific groups of "speakers".

Regretably, it seems to me that more and more of the world is becoming like the blogosphere, with more and more avenues of life involving people from vastly different contexts engaging each other quickly and tersely, using the same words and phrases, but rarely realizing that they do not mean anything like the same thing to the other. And the more important a subject, the more likely we are to be discussing it in just such a highly diverse, rapid-fire environment.

It's no wonder that our "civil society" seems to be becoming so much less "civil". Maybe we all just need to slow down a bit, and spend a lot more time listening.

A Rough Thursday

2006-11-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

This past Thursday evening I attended a session of our local denominational group outlining a restated vision. I found myself growing rather ambivalent towards what was being presented. On the one hand, I struggled with a number of issues around language — I was very aware that I wasn't at all sure that I knew whether the words and terms used meant the same thing to the presenters as they did to me or to others. With uncertainty around a common understanding of the language systems in use, how could there be any certainty of any real commonality of vision flowing from a common vision statement? These language questions just seemed to intensify the feeling of doubt as to whether I really belonged here in this tradition any more. Yet on the other hand there was much of what was presented that I could be encouraged or even excited about, if I could just get past the doubts.

At the end of the meeting I started to express to an individual beside me that some of the things we had discussed would require a pretty significant change in paradigm, particularly in concepts of leadership and governance at play in our congregation, if the desired outcomes were to be truly realized. But the conversation went badly and degenerated quickly, with my frustration becoming rather evident in both tone and content — I don't think any real communication happened at all. And it certainly wasn't gracious on my part.

Was the gulf between the tradition in which I had been nurtured and in which I had laboured for so long and who I had now become so great as to have become unbridgeable? And who had I become, anyway? What was it that fed this ugly lack of grace that I had experienced within me? What would it take for me to allow God to lead these people through whatever roundabout path He chose? Had it come to the point where we must part company for me to grow in grace, or would that trouble just follow me? These were questions that I pondered as I drove away and began the post-mortem reflection.

I found the following quote at NextReformation:

“There are two ways to picture how God interacts with history. The traditional model shows a God up in heaven who periodically flashes a lightning bolt of intervention: the calling of Moses from a burning bush, the Ten Plagues, the prophets, the birth of Jesus. The Bible indeed portrays such divine interventions, though they usually follow years of waiting and doubt.
“Another model shows God beneath history, continuously sustaining it and occasionally breaking the surface with a visible act that emerges into plain sight, like the tip of an iceberg. Anyone can notice the dramatic acts — Egypt’s Pharaoh had no trouble noticing the plagues — but the life of faith involves a search below the surface as well, an ear fine-tuned to rumors of transcendence.”
Philip Yancey, “Soul Survivor,” page 252

What I found as I reflected was that the systems of language and symbol that predominate in the churches of my tradition tend to be more consistent with the first model, particularly so when the subject at hand is vision or mission. At times in the past, the language has been quite explicit that the completion of the mission depends entirely upon us, indeed that God is counting on us to accomplish His mission and if we don't step up to the plate it simply will not be accomplished — there is no "Plan B" as it were. And of course, there is no time to lose. This puts enormous pressure on those who take the subject seriously.

Regrettably, however, taking up the vision cast in such an environment often results in that course of events so ably described by Bonhoeffer in Life Together.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

I have certainly experienced this within myself. And as I reflect upon it further, I find that I am most susceptible to the temptation to see in the current situation only those barriers to the ultimate vision when I have been too long immersed in systems of language and symbol which encourage me to think of God as largely non-active in the world, and mission as something we bring about. Unfortunately for me, the systems of language and symbol that are most prevalent within my tradition are precisely those which do just that, and I have been immersed in them for a very long time.

I also realized that it had once again been quite awhile since I had gotten my Liturgy Fix, as I put it once before. So on Sunday morning I returned to St. James Anglican, on just the right day to hear Arthur speak from Hebrews, mentioning how symbolic systems shape us, for good or for ill. He focussed particularly on the eucharist, on the now common understanding of its being rooted in Christ's sacrifice that He made "once for all", and on the historic anglican emphasis on the primary direction of the eucharist being from God to us, moreso than from us toward God.

Once again, the entire effect of the liturgy — including the corporate prayer of confession, the eucharist, and the passing of the peace — was that of the Holy Spirit re-membering me into the Body of Christ. Although I thought that I was getting along fairly well, my experience on Thursday evening proves that I need more than just a light fix of liturgy every two or three months. Rather I need to be much more deliberate in immersing myself in an environment of language and symbol that remind me that it is God, and not us, that is primarily at work in fulfilling His mission in the world, and building His Kingdom — an environment that redirects me over and over again to the reality expressed in the words with which Bonhoeffer finishes his section on community:

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship is in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and pray and hope for it.

From Village to City

2006-10-17T22:00:00.000-06:00

For at least a month Len Hjalmarson has been posting quotations from Delbert Wiens; most notably from his very long 1973 article From the Village to the City.

I finally downloaded this article / short book and read it in full over the weekend. From the Village to the City is Wiens' attempt to develop a grammar for expressing the way their history as Mennonites in America has shaped who they have been and become as Mennonites. The movement from the village to the town to the city is both a literal historical movement, but also a metaphor for the way in which the changing cultural systems have shaped the language, habits, thought patterns and faith of his faith community.

I found huge amounts of his descriptions almost directly applicable to my own historical background. My ancestors were not Mennonite, but they were German speaking residents of eastern Europe (notably Russia and Poland) who lived in tightly integrated ethnic / church communities in the old country, and who moved as whole communities to the Alberta frontier — as much due to the pressures of ethnic / religious persecution as to economic opportunities.

Even though he was born in Alberta, the world my grandfather grew up in was not the same as the world my father grew up in, which in turn was not the same as that in which I grew up, and which again was not the same as the world my children have grown up in. In many ways, the shifts that Delbert Wiens describes, and which I recognize in my own family history, parallel in a much shorter time period the huge societal shifts from pre-modern to modern to post-modern.

I grew up in the town, but still with close enough ties to the "village" and the "farm" to be able to personally relate to that culture. But I have spent all my adult life in the city — with all its diversity and fragmentation. Church life, on the other hand has lagged behind in a sense, retaining a "town" character far longer. But even there, I have now tasted the riches of the diversity of ecclesiastical expression that Wiens' metaphor associates with "city" and found it to both fill something was notably missing in "town" church while also fueling a sense of discongruity — I have become at home in many very different church expressions while simultaneously being at home in none. This leaves a longing for more of a "village-like" community.

What Wiens has helped me see much more clearly, however, is that a return to the "village" would not really fill that longing. I have been changed by the city in ways that can never be undone — both for good and for ill — and there really is no way I could ever return. The deep community of the village was based on a narrow commonality of thought that I could now never fit into.

No, the only way forward is through the turmoil and disjointedness of the city, seeking developing forms of community that are indeed city forms.

The really good news, of course, is that for all its brokenness and for all its characteristic rebellion against God, the ultimate end of the city is not destruction and replacement by the village (or the garden), but the transformation of the city into the "true" city — the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. The ultimate destiny of the city is not the judgement of destruction upon Babylon, but the blessedness of the New Jerusalem, where God Himself dwells among His people — people of every nation, race and tongue — where all the diversity and individuality forms the basis for a new and deeper community.

That is certainly worth pressing on and through towards.

3 Gifts

2006-10-10T19:15:00.000-06:00

My, it's been a long time since the last post. Part of that has had to do with travel I've had to engage in for work — trips to Hay River, Edmonton and Ottawa in the past two weeks, and a lot of preparation for those trips the week prior. And part has had to do with a recurrent weariness concerning the state of my little part of the overall church.

The weariness was particularly heavy just prior to departing for Hay River. But then I received from God the first of three gifts: Miroslav Volf's book Free of Charge. Waiting in the airport, on the plane, and in the hotel, I simply devoured the first half of this book, in which Volf portrays God as giver, and outlines both our motivation for and possibility of giving as God gives. All of our giving, of course, involves the giving of things we have first received from God — a reality that makes it impossible for us to deal with God on a mutually advantageous transactional basis. There is no making deals with God — we have nothing He needs (indeed nothing that didn't originate with Him) nor any way of enforcing any "contract" we might strike with Him.

I was also particularly struck by his observation of three distinct motivations for giving: the pure delight in the one(s) we give to; the need of those we give to; and finally, giving to support the other in his/her giving. These three motivations were ably illustrated for me by the TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that I caught in the hotel in Ottawa. I don't typically watch much television, but the few episodes of this program I've seen have certainly involved giving to people who were very much in need. Often those needy families were also involved in giving to their communities, and the rebuilt home served to allow that giving to continue. And, of course, it was impossible not to see the pure delight the design team had in the children whose rooms they designed, and the joy they experienced in the delight of those who received their gifts.

Certainly both of these gifts left me feeling immersed in the reality of God's presence, and ongoing work of restoration of His creation and establishing of His kingdom.

The third gift came after my return, and was a bit different. I was listening to recordings of N.T. Wright speaking at Wycliffe College in Ontario earlier this year, on Romans 8. I was particularly struck by the progression of "groanings" in the passage. First, creation is groaning as in birth pangs, waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. Secondly, we too groan. And finally, the Spirit groans in making intercession on our behalf because we do not yet know how to pray as we ought. Wright suggested that often the vocation of the church is indeed to groan at the very place of the world's pain, lifting it up to God who in Christ has fully entered into the pain of the world and who in the Spirit continues to brood over the world — much as He did in the beginning, brooding over the chaos that was being formed into an ordered world — intent on bringing the new creation to fulfillment, in and through His called people.

It was as if God spoke to him, assuring me that this weariness, this "groaning" if you like, over the state of the church, was not without it's purpose. Rather it was part of the working together with God in entering into the place of the world's pain, a pain that looks to the perfection of God's church as its hope of redemption.

To be sure, I very much do not know how to enter this pain redemptively on behalf of the world — to pray as I ought. Rather it is by faith that I must trust that indeed the prayer I cannot yet pray is being actively being brought to the Father by the deep groaning of the Spirit within.

Pre-Reformation Worship

2006-09-18T21:20:00.000-06:00

This morning I was listening to Andy Crouch interacting with a group of worship instructors. One of the observations he made concerned John Calvin's view of worship as being the action of the Holy Spirit moving through the actions of the people. At the time of the reformation, medieval worship had pretty much become the domain of the priesthood — the priests did everything and the people were merely spectators. Part of the reformation was a return of worship to the people, both in terms of a return of the Word to the people by the use of vernacular translations and expository preaching, and a return of acts of worship.

The observation Andy made was that in many churches today, the situation is very similar to pre-reformation worship — the priests have simply exchanged their vestments for microphones.

In looking back over almost 50 years of church attendance, I can see that there has indeed been a slow but steady movement toward this "pre-reformation" worship. At the time, I didn't notice it. Perhaps that was due in part to the so-called "frog in a kettle" syndrome — if things change slowly enough, you don't notice them until you're dead. But perhaps it was also due in part to the fact that for much of that time I was one of the "priesthood" — I didn't notice the ways in which our ways of "worship" was both permitting and promoting the disengagement of the people from the act of worship and turning them largely into spectators, because I was still busily engaged.

But it is not only in the acts of worship that we have moved back to a pre-reformation state. The place of the Word in our worship has also changed — where once the Scripture was the main thing, and the sermon was its servant (even if done poorly or boringly) as were the songs, now the talk and the music are the main thing and the scripture, if present, is their servant.

Part of this movement may be related to another observation that Andy made: it is almost impossible to enculturate an incarnate message in a culture that is itself not incarnate. North American culture in the 21st century has no real flesh and bones meat (in greek: carne) to it — it's a mass culture that exists almost only on a screen.

Of course, Western culture has not really been incarnate for a long time — before the advent of television and other mass culture media, much of Western culture had become largely cerebral — certainly Western theology has been almost exclusively cerebral and not incarnate for a very long time. The good, if late, impulse to bring theology into the indigenous culture has occurred precisly at the point when that culture has moved to becoming even less engaged with the materially "real".

Between the two factors, we've become unable to see any connection between an old and very earthy story and the virtual reality of today's culture. So just as the pre-reformation priest kept the Bible away from the people — convinced as they were that the people could never understand it, and didn't want to anyway — so too many of our present day priests are careful to keep the Bible safely measured out in small doses, pre-digested for the masses.

For me, the question now is this: do I try to rejoin the "priesthood" in order to gain some measure of participative worship, or do I instead stay with the people and try in some way to subvert the trend of the past 50 years? To be honest, I have no idea which direction to go.

Kyrie eleison

Straight Talk to the Adulterous Man

2006-09-18T17:30:00.000-06:00

Michael Spencer, The Internet Monk, has a hard-hitting post on the subject of male adultery. I was particularly appreciative of his second major point, “Despite a lot attention to the 'seductress' in Proverbs, the problem in adultery is the married man, the condition of his marriage and the lies he tells himself”. He writes:

One of the marks of male juvenility, and likely eventual downfall, is the tendency to put the emphasis on flirtatious women, scantily clad women, women with cleavage, women who smile at you, women you laugh at your jokes, women who pay attention to you and so forth. I'm not saying this kind of information is all useless, because it's clearly a kind of common sense warning that anyone ought to heed. It's just mislocating the problem.
The guy about to commit adultery is a person with a marriage he's neglected and a wife he's turning into an excuse to step out on.
(Emphasis added)

I find this bit of straight, honest talk a breath of fresh air. Frankly, I'm tired of hearing about all the external things that “cause” a man to fall and destroy his marriage. The brutal honesty is that the “fall” began long, long before — not by engaging in inappropriate actions, thoughts or relationships, but by not engaging in the proper loving of his wife.

Consequently, I think Michael is spot on in his closing paragraph:

Look to that marriage of yours with the mind of Christ and the spirit of the prodigal coming home. Call upon the Lord, and he will deliver you. Declare your love for your wife, and let all your actions declare it even louder. Honor your vows, bless your children and do the right thing so that you will have no reason to be ashamed in the day of Jesus Christ.

However, there are a couple items in his first point that make we wonder if even Michael has come fully to grips with the consequences of his insight. The first point ends thus:

What would help? Communities of men that talk to one another honestly about sex, adultery, the 'plot line' of sexual transgressions and the consequences of sexual sin. David's isolation and subsequent cover-up should teach us that we can be better men if we talk to one another, confront one another, and encourage one another in specific, down to earth terms.
I like sermons about Christian guyness, but frankly, having a preacher who can use sexual terms and blunt language is overrated in terms of assisting a man in the middle of the struggle not to commit adultery. Other men, talking to you face to face, are of inestimable value. To be quite honest, if you can't talk about your specific temptations to specific people in specific terms, you don't yet have the kind of support that will yield truly helpful self-knowledge.

Quite frankly, I hear this sort of advice all the time. And just as here, it seems always to be focused on the sexual temptation. Given the content of his first point, and the content of the other post to which he points, I'm sure that Michael wouldn't be promoting the kind of “accountability” that consists merely in lists of questions about whether or not you “looked at a woman” this past week.

But I'm convinced that the real accountability a man needs is not about specific sexual temptation but about the specific ways in which he is learning to love his wife as Christ loved the church. If you can help a man do that, you do far, far more than just helping him avoid adultery.

I'm probably resigned to the fact that I'm not going to hear that kind of accountability promoted any time soon. And I'll give Michael the point that his comment about men talking frankly to men about temptation does come early in the piece, before he makes the point about the real issue being neglecting the marriage.

The thing that really bugs me, though, is that for all his blunt talk to men about taking responsibility for their own sexuality and their own marriages, Michael still hasn't stopped blaming women. Or at least that's how I hear the opening salvos in his first point, which he heads as “Adultery happens to men who do not have a truthful perspective on their own sexuality”. He writes:

Sexuality in evangelicalism is largely discussed in feminized, moralistic terms. This isn’t helpful to anyone, male or female. Sexuality is the hard-wiring and software installation of God’s creative design. It is not something we do. It is who we are. Sexuality is as much a part of you as an ignition or fuel system are parts of a car. When the car “runs,” it is because these systems “run.” When you are a man, you are a sexual man.
The separation of male sexuality from Godly identity has been a disaster, and I’ve written about it elsewhere. Castrating men for usefulness in a prissy, feminized evangelicalism is bad. (BTW- the answer to all of this is Jesus, not hairy chested men grunting and making rude noises.)

The rest of his point is that we have de-humanized men by trying to de-sexualize them, largely because of a fear of their sexuality. But why use the adjective “feminized” to describe this evil? The same process that has de-humanized men because of fear of their sexuality has also operated to de-humanize women because of fear of their sexuality — a point with which Michael seems to agree, if only in passing. Ought we then to call such de-humanized women “feminized”? Ridiculous!

This kind of name-calling gender war, in which men call anything they find de-humanizing of themselves “feminizing” or “feminist” and women call anything they find de-humanizing of themselves “masculinizing” or “masculinist” does absolutely nothing to help build the sort of self-giving commitment to one's own marriage and one's own spouse that is needed if the destructive lure of adultery upon both men and women is to be defeated.

It seems to me that the real culprit behind the de-sexing of both men and women in our supposedly Christian subculture is not feminization, but a Gnostic-like dualism that denies the goodness of the created material world, including specifically the human body, with all its God-created earthiness. The same squeamishness many christians express about sex is manifested by many urban dwellers about the source of the meat on their plate — neither are considered appropriate for discussion in polite company. And how many gospel presentations have we heard that made it seem that the best part of the “good news” was that we didn't have to make those revolting animal sacrifices anymore.

There was no need to label this very real problem mindset as “feminized” — it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that is truly feminine. To use such a label in this way simply feeds the fear of the “other” that makes living together with one's spouse in self-giving love and according to knowledge virtually impossible. Michael says:

As I grow older, I am constantly amazed at the number of men who simply have no coping skills in marriage. They are passive and helpless when they most need to act, and they are afraid — often paralyzingly so — to become vulnerable, to suffer gladly, to admit error or to seek humility. They are, in too many cases, childishly distractible by someone else when they are most called to think about and love their spouse.

I say no man who is afraid of being “feminized” by his wife because she is a woman is ever going to be able to “become vulnerable, to suffer gladly, to admit error or seek humility.”

In closing, I'll go back to what I found refreshing about Michael's straight talk to men — Grow up! Stop blaming all your problems on women: flirtatious women, scantily clad women, women with cleavage, women who smile at you, women who laugh at your jokes, women who pay attention to you, the woman you're married to who doesn't seem to ever be satisfied or to give you your due, and the evil conspiracy of womankind who've totally “feminized” everything everywhere. Be a man! Take up your cross and love your wife just as Christ loved the church.

Who are we Listening to? Thots on knowing and judging

2006-09-12T21:00:00.000-06:00

This post is a bit of a potpourri of thoughts from several sources, that I've been trying to integrate in my mind.

First a quote from Esther Meek in Longing to Know:

Humans fight to make sense of their experience! How many times in our day and in our lives do we do this! Your roommate is acting uncharacteristically; you immediately begin to search for an explanation. Or your roses are failing to bloom. Or you take a new class in a new subject with a new professor, and you find yourself immersed in terminology about as transparent as so many pieces of granite. You fight to make sense of what he or she is saying. Or your parents divorce, and you ask yourself desparately, What happened? What does this say about me? What does it say about them? What does it say about God? Trying to make sense of experiences is somewhat of a compulsion for humans.

The act of knowing is all about making sense of a whole collection of clues and data, integrating them, and then relying on the discovery and acting on it.

One major source of difficulty, it seems to me, is that we are often too impatient to sort through all the possible explanations for the data and clues available, and so settle upon the explanation that comes most quickly to mind. You might say we tend to rush to judgement when we ought to suspend judgement until more clues and more data are available.

Quick judgements are necessary in some cases — driving in traffic for example — and morally neutral in others. But quick judgements about the character or motives of other persons are usually not morally neutral, as they then form the framework through which we subsequently relate to those persons, for good or for ill.

And neither are the explanations that spring most readily to mind typically neutral. That's one of the major points that Kyriacos Markides learns in his extended discussions with Father Maximos in The Mountain of Silence. Brent Curtis and John Eldredge go even further in The Sacred Romance and suggest that the explanations of many things, particularly painful experiences, that are most quickly suggested to our mind are deliberately chosen and expertly tailored to our pain by the Adversary in order to be easily accepted by us; and once so accepted, to get us to doubt the goodness of God.

So it becomes very important that in our search for meaning and sense that we consider carefully the ideas and explanations that present themselves to us, attempting to discern who is speaking — that we learn to distinguish the various voices that speak into our minds constantly throughout our waking moments. That, of course, can take a lifetime of spiritual discipline and development.

In the meantime, what do we do? The old puritans had an answer: render to each the "judgement of charity". That is, deliberately seek out the alternate explanations for another's behaviour, and choose that explanation which casts the other the best possible light consistent with the facts. This is, it is suggested, what Paul may have had in mind when he says that "Love believes all things" — not that love is naive, but that love deliberately chooses to believe the best about the other, consistent with the facts.

I've seen in my own experience that the first explanation for someone's behaviour or comment — particularly a blog comment — is often much more critical of the other's character or motivation that is necessary. With considered thought, one can generally come up with several more charitable explanations. And with continued adherence to this discipline over time, the initial reactions tend to become more charitable than they once were.

What is particularly regretable, however, is how often we see the rule of offering the judgement of charity violated in Christian circles. So much so that instead of seeing Christians as a people whose default mode of operation is the judgement of charity, the world's accepted stereotype of Christians, particularly of evangelical Christians, is that of a people whose default mode of operation is precisely the opposite — the judgement of condemnation. The shame is that the stereotype is not entirely inaccurate.

God have mercy upon us, sinners!