The stem bent, pent in seed, grow straight
And stands. Pain breaks in song. Surprising
The merely dead, graves fill with light
Like opened eyes. He rests in rising. — Wendell Berry

We here at Mbird were saddened to hear of the recent death of Wendell Berry: a brilliant novelist, poet, essayist, and farmer. While most will remember Berry for being a gadfly of modernity who beckoned people to return to their roots, this would overlook the Christian beliefs that undergird his countercultural vision. Berry was, first and foremost, a Christian who believed in a God who clothes his people with a splendor that surpassed the flowers of the fields. Because within his environmentalism and agrarian ideals, there was a vision for a life that isn’t earned but received with gratitude; not of striving for more than we were made to have but the abounding peace of already having enough.

In that vein, Berry has been a constant source of inspiration for Mbird over the decades. Below are a few of our favorites (see here for a more exhaustive list).

“A People and a Place,” by Grace Leuenberger

Belonging to each other and to a place are two commitments increasingly falling out of fashion. Transience has long been typical, and settling down can be seen as settling. … And yet, as Berry asserts throughout Jayber Crow and his other work, our participation in community, even ones that disappoint us, is essential to the human experience — including the church. We were designed to need God and need each other.

“Wendell Berry Wants to Shoot a Drone,” by Josh Retterer

One of the central burdens of Berry’s writing has been to allow his readers to know themselves as recipients of God’s grace and to accept the great invitation to live as members of his body.

“Wendell Berry’s Plea for Grace” by Josh Retterer

A bit of wisdom that is catechized among the elders extant in the movement is learning to love limits and to be satisfied with little, as the parable goes according to Berry, otherwise, “To be satisfied with much is impossible.” These limits are imposed simultaneously by nature and by the limits needed for the structures to form relationships, both communal and familial. Limits are good, like the Law is good, but like the Law, those limits do not provide the means to accomplish it.

“Boomers and Stickers: Wendell Berry’s 2012 Jefferson Lecture,” by Ethan Richardson

“Boomer” names a kind of person and a kind of ambition that is the major theme, so far, of the history of the European races in our country. “Sticker” names a kind of person and also a desire that is, so far, a minor theme of that history, but a theme persistent enough to remain significant and to offer, still, a significant hope.

Poems by Wendell Berry:

1. “Original Sin“
2. “Remembering That It Happened Once…“
3. Do Something That Won’t Compute
4. “A Sleep Poem“
5. “Enemies“
6. “Marriage“
7. “What Hard Travail God Does in Death“
8. “Grace“

The post A Novelist, Poet, and Prophet of Grace appeared first on Mockingbird.

We are just ONE MONTH away from the fall conference, this October 2–3 at St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in Bloomington, MN (a close suburb of Minneapolis). See a full schedule here.

Our theme this time is Grace for the Ages, and we will explore what grace looks like at different stages of life. We’ll hear talks on everything from grace in parenting adult children to lessons from the last third of life, the relief that can come from realistic depictions of imperfect people in middle-grade novels, how a church focused on consolation rather than happiness-seeking could benefit a generation of stressed-out young people, how God actually shows up in the young adult years, and more! (I hear they may even be some puppets.)

With a full lineup of speakers, good food, an art tour, and wonderful music, it’s sure to be a wonderful time!

RESERVE YOUR SPOT TODAY

Andrew Root, “Young People and a Church of Consolation: Evangelism in an Age of Despair”

Gretchen Ronnevik, “Sandwiched Between Crises: the Fusion of Grace and Truth in Midlife”

Paul Zahl, “Grace for Children, Grace for their Parents, and Grace for Retired Old Men!”

Tony Robinson, “Grace for the Sometimes/Frequently/How About ‘Always?’ Challenging Relationships Between Adult Children and Parents?”

Grace Leuenberger, “Qualifying the Unqualified: Grace in Young Adulthood”

Melina Smith, “Faith Begins With Play: Enchanting the Next Generation”

Manuela Thames, “Multiple Exposures: Finding Grace Amidst the Noise of a Layered Life”

Joey Goodall, “Kids Don’t Follow”

Mark Koschmann, “Most Simple, Most Ordinary, Most Terrible: Grace for Ivan Ilych and the Rest of Us“

The post Minnesota Conference Talk Titles appeared first on Mockingbird.

In another interview with the late Larry King, Parton said people asked her if she was offended when people assume she’s a “dumb blonde.” She replied, “I say no because I know I’m not dumb and I know I’m not blonde.” She was often quoted as saying, “It costs a fortune to look this cheap.”

That was more than just good media training. Parton showed she was more cunning than those who looked down on her: She didn’t seem the least bit offended by the questions, nor did she seem to be the least bit shaken in who she was.

When people think others look down on them because of their background, they typically respond in one of two ways: shame or resentment. Shame works itself out with a kind of desperation to get away from one’s roots so as not to be lumped in with whatever is made fun of back there. Resentment expresses itself as “If you dare think you’re better than me, I’ll make you pay.”

Parton knew some people would find lots of things about her embarrassing and uncultured — her accent, her appearance, her background in mountain poverty, her religion rooted in Southern revivalism. What made her different is what she did with that awareness, and that was to avoid even the slightest bit of impersonating shame or resentful defensiveness.

But Dolly wasn’t completely shameless:

People say shamelessness is a superpower, and there’s a lot of evidence for that. We live in a time ready-made for sociopaths — people who are invulnerable to what others think of them, who refuse to apologize or even to acknowledge their own vice or hackery or foolishness or cruelty. What made Parton different is that she was unashamed but she was not shameless. She could laugh about herself because she knew what mattered to her and what didn’t. […]

Dolly Parton didn’t need us to love her, and that’s why almost all of us did.

Rest in peace, St. Dolly.

2. Therapy speak is nothing new, nor is the criticism surrounding it. And rightfully so — words like “trauma” or “gaslighting” or “depressed” seem to be thrown around today without consideration for their validity. Everywhere on social media you can find people diagnosing themselves with ADHD, OCD, among other acronyms.

That isn’t to say someone’s feelings are not valid when they use such terms or that their experiences of hardship are not concrete realities. But we used to go to therapists or psychologists, not TikTok, for diagnoses. Psychiatrist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell sees this trend from the young women she treats:

One girl told me she had assigned herself a diagnosis of depression, which she later acknowledged she thought would make me care about her. Another girl was stuck on an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, mostly because it made her feel less alone by connecting her to a vocal and vibrant online community.

Several young women insisted they fit the clinical definition for anxiety, because it was less scary to blame an inherent flaw in their brains than to explore the causes of their very real discomfort — which turned out to be a mix of anger toward their loved ones and guilt for having those feelings. Another girl said she used her various self-diagnoses as a container for whatever felt like “too much” about her, allowing her to fulfill what she thought was the teenage female’s highest calling: to be chill.

In some cases, my patients’ self-diagnoses were spot on. In many others, however, the psychiatric label seemed more like a compromise between uncomfortable feelings and the desire for social acceptance. Are these labels a source of strength or a straitjacket? Are they helping young women find help and acceptance or standing in the way? The answer isn’t so simple.

Young women aren’t the only contributors to this phenomenon, but they are its most dedicated subscribers.

What is the solution to therapy speak? According to countless news articles, the answer is talking about how dangerous it is. But it ignores the very real hurt that people are attempting to describe. As Garfinkle-Crowell charitably writes, young women need

an environment in which girls can stop blaming their own brains for every problem and where they don’t feel they have to be sick to be heard. Until they have access to a more nuanced lexicon of human troubles, however, we need to listen differently.

3. Did you know that they are growing teeny tiny chia-seed-sized human brains in labs?! Insane! Not incompletely unfathomable, of course, but I just had to share this next piece by Claire L. Evans for Wired: “AI Is Dead. Organoids Are Alive.”

Created by biologists around the world, human brain organoids are “kept at a womblike 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit for eight months” in order to produce brain waves. They are essentially “neural guinea pigs,” designed to be tested on for pharmaceutical and disease research. Plus they respond to stimulus, Evans discovered:

I’m sitting on the fire escape of my office building, peering at a grid of 59 squares on my laptop screen. I’ve been told that each of the squares represents an electrode in the Melbourne laboratory of the biocomputing startup Cortical Labs. And on each of those electrodes is a tiny culture of living human neurons. At the moment, my screen is registering fleeting spikes from those neurons—the spontaneous activity of brain matter in a vacuum. I click a square, zapping off an electrical hello to neurons 8,000 miles away. In response, all 59 electrodes spike at once.

For a moment, I’m giddy with a feeling of new power. I click around, sending those distant neurons hopping; my screen fills with the peaks and valleys of their electrical pulses. I page over to the neurons’ environmental settings. If I wanted to, I could drop their onboard temperature or nuke their precise gas mix of oxygen and CO2. If I did that, they’d certainly die. It’s about as significant a paradigm shift as I can imagine for computing: No matter how badly you mess up your code, things on the computer don’t normally die in real life.

I’m not sure what to say of the bioethics of it all, only that the uncertainty exists over whether or not these organoids could be considered sentient beings. Evans explains:

When I set out to report this story, I was sure it was about consciousness: the eerie moment a quarter-peanut of flesh sparks with self-knowledge, and what that precipice means for the researchers responsible. I imagined long dark nights of the cell and tiny funerals for spent neurons. What I found, however, was that nearly all scientists who keep organoids see the consciousness question as a distraction.

Most bristle when asked. They gesture to the organoids themselves — tiny balls bobbing in liquid solution like droplets of olive oil in vinegar — as if to say, give me a break. “Consciousness is so qualitative,” complained Annie Kathuria, an organoid researcher, when I visited her lab at Johns Hopkins. “How am I supposed to measure something qualitative on a tissue that’s floating in a dish? Someone has to define it. That’s what I say to everyone: Define to me what consciousness is, in quantitative terms.”

The request is rhetorical, of course. Humans have been trying to define consciousness since the days of Plato and nobody’s come close to nailing down the general idea, let alone a list of quantitative metrics. But it reflects a strong tendency in biology labs to want to focus on the practical, rather than the philosophical.

4. The Club dei Brutti, the World Association of Ugly People, just held its annual festival in Italy last month. The yearly celebration was created to commemorate the ugliness of its constituents and elect a new club president (the latter of which is a rigorous process). It’s also a difficult induction process for newbies, who wait to have their “ugliness painstakingly assessed.” For Harper’s Magazine, Barrett Swanson reports directly from the room where it happens:

At the back of the headquarters, evaluations and inductions are boisterously under way. I soon learn that ugly assessments can be executed by any standing member, which in this case means a trio of brash teenagers. Each wears a set of glinting braces and a Club dei Brutti T-shirt. I watch as one fiftysomething man named Maurizio — who is dark-eyed and whippet-thin, a poor man’s Adrien Brody — performs a little runway spin for this squad of unsmiling judges. One of the boys rubs his chin contemplatively, and then, with an auctioneer’s velocity, distills Maurizio’s deficits to a swift “excellent” rating, “because,” as the boy alleges, “you are really and truly ugly.” At first, Maurizio’s posture deflates, and he plods back to his waiting partner like some sort of jilted Charlie Brown […] The onlookers around me seem cowed and guilty, as if they were all somehow complicit in this wounding evaluation. But then something wonderful happens. Because it turns out that old Maurizio was stunting. He’d been feigning desolation. His shamefaced posture soon utterly reverses, and he offers us an impish grin, pointing at all the onlookers, as if to say, Ha, I got you, man! The room now explodes with a glissando of laughter, and old Maurizio repeats gleefully, as though in a trance, “I’m really and truly ugly! I am really and truly ugly.”

It’s uncertain whether we would all react to an examination of our ugliness in the same way as Maurizio. But for its members, the club offers freedom:

The most crucial part of the Club dei Brutti ethos is their belief in the spiritual equality of every human being — that beneath the frivolities of appearance, a common dignity should belong to both the beautiful and the ugly. We all give this idea lip service, of course, but how many of us actually believe it? […]

In any event, standing at the world’s Ugly People Festival, you can’t help getting the sense that far from simply celebrating their ugliness, what these Italians are really doing is enacting their good humor. And it may well be that their peals of silvery laughter are indisputable evidence of their true communal achievement — of establishing a complex and nuanced internal self apart from their appearance.

5. For kicks and giggles, here’s McSweeney’s with “Relax, if Food Is No Longer Safe to Eat, Just Eat Cake“:

Admittedly, lots of pantry staples are currently unsafe to eat — everything from fresh produce (because of cyclospora) to eggs (because of salmonella) to bread (because there are literally bits of glass in it). Other foods, like ground beef, have gotten expensive thanks, in part, to infections like New World screwworm […] But there is one food that hasn’t been recalled: cake. […]

Thanks to simple, shelf-stable ingredients and high-temperature baking, cake remains relatively safe to eat (as long as you don’t eat carrot cake made with actual carrots — they’re riddled with E. coli). Who cares if everyday Americans can no longer eat bread without chipping a tooth or bleeding internally from all those shards of glass? They can eat cake. The same goes for fresh greens. We have it on good authority that a layer cake is considered a salad in most of the Midwest.

See also Points in Case’s “Your Dad’s Itinerary for This Relaxing Family Vacation, Dammit,” and The Beaverton‘s “Polyamorous Vegan Baristas and Conservative Uncles Unite in Memory of Dolly Parton.”

Cartoon by Emily Flake for the New Yorker

6. Get your copy of Law and Gospel: A Theology for Saints (and Sinners) out for this last one. Earnest L. Corbett writes about the “Architecture of Guilt,” how the secular age’s disposal of religious law has failed to deliver its supposed promise: to free us from guilt and shame.

The modern individual feels a low-grade, persistent fever of the soul. We see this in the explosion of impostor syndrome, a psychological phenomenon where high-achieving individuals live in constant terror of being found out. We see it in the frantic need to justify one’s existence through hyper-productivity, social activism, or the curation of a morally pristine digital avatar. We feel we are in deficit, but having erased the theology of sin, we have lost the vocabulary to name the Creditor.

This is the great paradox of the secular age: We have removed the Judge, yet the courtroom remains. We have boarded up the confessional booths, but the line of penitents stretches around the block, waiting for absolution from a silent sky.

Forensic theology proposes that this anxiety is not a malfunction of evolution or a misfiring of brain chemistry. It is a sensor. It is the smoke detector going off because there is, in fact, a fire. The debt is not a feeling; it is an ontological status. The modern man feels guilty because, in a very real, structural sense, he is guilty.

Corbett uses imagery to drive home this point. The universe is a living cathedral, and sin is the vandalism of its structure: “Guilt is a legal standing.”

Left to our own defenses against this “infinite debt,” we search for something or someone to clear the slate. And it has Seculosity written all over it:

The secular response to this infinite debt is performative justification. Having removed the atonement, the secular man must atone for himself. This is the engine behind the “workism” religion of Silicon Valley and the “activism” religion of the modern academy. We try to balance the ledger with the currency of good personhood. We volunteer, we post the correct political opinions, we recycle, we work 80 hours a week to prove our utility.

We are desperately trying to pay an infinite mortgage with Monopoly money. This creates the exhaustion of the modern age. We are running on a treadmill, trying to outpace a debt that compounds faster than our righteousness can accrue. […]

But the most critical failure of the secular court is the lack of a mechanism for restoration. In the Christian forensic system, there is a penalty (death) and a payment (the cross), followed by restoration (resurrection). In the secular court, there is only the penalty. Once “cancelled,” there is no ritual for return. There is no blood that can wash the digital record clean. The secular sinner is exiled to the outer darkness, with no priest to hear their confession and no altar to absorb their guilt.

7. Happy John Van Deusen new album release day!!! Here’s his latest, featuring Andy Squyres:

Strays:

• “How to Stop Being Self-Obsessed” in The Dispatch
• On Ted Lasso, G. K. Chesterton, and Christianity in Common Good
• Seen & Unseen‘s Graham Tomlin on why we are all so exhausted

The post August 22-28 appeared first on Mockingbird.

Oh, and it’s ALSO available on our fancy new MBird phone app (iOS and Android).

But [Rahab] took the two men and hid them. Then she said, “True, the men came to me, but I did not know where they came from. And when it was time to close the gate at dark, the men went out. Where the men went I do not know. Pursue them quickly, for you can overtake them.” (Josh 2:4–5)

This story reads like a scene from a Cold War–era action movie. Joshua, leader of the Israelites, sends his spies to scope out the city of Jericho. They take refuge with Rahab, a prostitute, who saves their lives by hiding them on her roof, lying to the authorities, and sneaking them out of the city. In exchange, the spies agree to spare Rahab and those of her house when the Israelites invade.

For ancient literature, it’s pretty thrilling stuff, and yet as a child I remember being appalled by the story. I mean, she lied, right? Is the Bible saying that’s okay??? It’s funny how rigid the young mind can be about rules. Not to mention the old mind. It’s also strange that I didn’t suffer the same agony over the fact that — in Joshua 6 — the Israelites murder almost the entire city. Still, Rahab’s story begs the question: Is lying always wrong? A Christianity Today article summarized the issue: “The Bible condemns deception … Even so, when Rahab’s story is told … the Bible — while not justifying her lie — does not condemn it. The same is true of the midwives’ lie (Ex 1:15–21) and Elisha’s lie (2 Kgs 6:19).” Beyond scripture, I think we can all envision scenarios both routine and extreme in which lying might be commendable, and yet none of this lessens the general importance of telling the truth; it only suggests that the ethical water is a tad murky.

Is lying always wrong? Who cares? Ethical purity was never the point. We don’t worship the law, nor are we saved by it. The Bible contains much ethical teaching but is not an instruction manual. It is rather — as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it — the story of “God’s search for man.” Twice in 1 Corinthians, that great expert in the law, St. Paul, writes that “‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things are beneficial.” Such a notion doesn’t lessen the importance of the law but emphasizes the strange freedom that comes from trusting in a loving power greater than ourselves.

The post A Righteous Lie appeared first on Mockingbird.

M: Ethan, thanks so much for joining us! To begin, tell us a bit about your background and your congregation.

EM: Well, I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, spent all my life in this area with the exception of my time at college. I was raised near Grove City, which is where our church is located. When I went to college at Eastern University in Philadelphia, I swore I would never come back to Western PA, but you know how that goes. You make a vow to yourself and you break it instantaneously.

I always felt a call to pastoral ministry. I discovered the Episcopal Church when I was in college and then came back to do seminary here in Pittsburgh. Before seminary ended, I, along with some others, decided to plant a church here. It’s been 20 years, and we’ve been here ever since. I also have a wife and three daughters who have been stalwartly supportive for some odd reason.

Our church is Grace Anglican. It is somewhat uncreatively named, I would say.  It is an unusual church in some ways, simply because it’s so collegiately oriented. We have about 40 professors and then about 300 undergraduates attending, plus about 350 other residents. So it’s oriented pretty strongly around academic life. And that’s been a blessing and a challenge. It’s also been very energizing and galvanizing for the church.

M: So there’s a university in town?

EM: Yeah, Grove City College, which is a fairly large private Christian college. I live about three blocks away from it. Most of those students come from some form of a Christian background, but only a few grew up in an Anglican-like church. Most come from Presbyterian or nondenominational backgrounds.

M: What are the challenges presented by having a lot of professors in your congregation?

EM: Well, because we have professors from so many different academic backgrounds, you’re dealing with a great deal of variety and sometimes interdepartmental complexities — and on occasion, disputes — and some of that will spill over in your church, and you have to try to navigate those waters. But at the same time, we try to put up a slight boundary between work and church. To say: when we’re here, we attempt to take off some of those professional hats, so that in this place we don’t function primarily as “Professor of English” or “Professor of Political Science” but as brothers and sisters in Jesus.

We also have a lot of administrators from the college, and they don’t want to be on when they’re here. They don’t want to be asked about school politics. They want to simply be a worshipper. So some of those dynamics are occasionally tricky to navigate, but most people understand that boundary and honor it.

It’s also a complexity to have so many students at our church. Are we a church of 600 on a Sunday or 300 on a Sunday? Well, it depends on what day of the year. Summers are emptier because the students and many of the professors are away.  And it’s also complicated in terms of things like financial giving, because students can’t really do that. At the same time, we never lack for volunteers because they volunteer for everything, and so our ministries are full of volunteers, and we don’t do the 90-10 rule — where 10% of the people do 90% of the work. Most of our people volunteer, so we have no problems there. But sometimes, our numbers don’t match our finances, at least in terms of how most churches think about finances and planning.

M: So, your church has two main Sunday services — at 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. Seems like odd times …

EM: The worst worship times in all of Christendom.

M: Haha. Tell me about that.

EM: Yeah, we rent from a Lutheran church in town. They’ve been marvelous. They’re really generous with space and with our rental rate. At the same time, because it’s their building, they get the ideal times for worship. Our 8:30 a.m. service gets about 280 people. Which is crazy. If I were in college, I would never get up that early on a Sunday. And then we have a 5:00 p.m. service, which gets more people, and that service tends to be more family-oriented. There are lots of kids and we have our Christian Ed before that service, so it tends to attract families.

M: Are there differences between the two services in terms of music or liturgy?

EM: No, they’re exactly the same. We use the 2019 Book of Common Prayer, and it offers the opportunity to use the 1662 Communion Canon, which is a briefer, more Protestant version of the service. So we use that. We tend to be “formal low church” at Grace, and that churchmanship is reflected in exactly the same way at both services.

I don’t generally like the divide between traditional and contemporary, just because I think it’s a more modern way of defining worship. Our service is pretty stately and pretty traditional in terms of our musical repertoire, but during communion, we usually sing things that I would say are modern hymnody. That mix tends to be pretty effective for what we’re doing. I don’t think it would be effective in every context. Grace Anglican has recently planted a church that’s about a half hour away, and they have a more broadly contemporary repertoire and it works there. And I think that’s cool. But for our culture and situation, more traditional Protestant hymnody works best.

M: You said the 1662 Communion Canon is “more Protestant.” What do you mean by that?

EM: Within the Episcopal/Anglican parlance, “low church” never means informal. Most people think it does, but it doesn’t. Low church means formal but Protestant worship where you would never use things like sanctus bells and incense, you would never chant the Gospel lesson, and things like that. “High church” tends to mean a more Catholic-looking or ritually-dense worship. So, within our very broad tradition, there are a lot of complexities that enter in because of our breadth — a lot of blessings too — but certainly complexities. You permit a lot under a big tent in terms of worship styles. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is officially known as our Formulary Text, so that’s the thing that officially forms Anglican doctrine, along with the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. And I’m a confessionalist, so I don’t like a situation in which anything goes. I always like having some sort of doctrinal standards. So for us, the Formularies that form our tradition are really important, and we try to be faithful to those in a generous way, in a kind way and, to use an old word, Latitudinarian way, giving people space, but also honoring those things and not jettisoning them.

So that 1662 Prayer Book tends to be more on the Protestant low church side, and I believe in it. So I try to lean into that identity at Grace. But of course, I function really well with people that don’t.

M: Right. It’s not like you won’t get coffee with them.

EM: Exactly. I prefer a martini, but you know.

M: So, what do you think it is that draws newcomers to your church, and what kinds of things do you do to welcome them and encourage them to keep coming back?

EM: I would say it differs between our academics, our townies, and our students. When it comes to students, I would divide them into three groups. Maybe a third of the students are coming from Reformed backgrounds, and sometimes, at least in their own denominational histories, they tended to not have the same experience of the gospel being present every Sunday — the sense of Christ crucified even for very imperfect Christians who don’t really live this thing out with any consistency, right? So they really need a message that says that God expects more failure from us than we expect from ourselves. They’re coming from a background where that message wasn’t as present as it could have been, and they need that very badly.

M: So you’re giving them more of an absolution message than a sanctification message.

EM: Yeah. Which, as we know, ironically, leads to more sanctification.

Then we have another group of students from Pentecostal and nondenominational backgrounds, which I think is interesting. There’s a cultural turn right now toward more ritualized forms of religion. I actually have suspicions about it — I don’t think it’s all good — but I think this turn is due to the fact that we’re all children of deconstruction. Everything from politics to family to religion has been deconstructed, and after people have lived in the acrid ashes of nihilism and cynicism for a long time, they want something that’s more formal, rooted, connected, historic. I think some of that is premature eschatology — they want the kingdom right now in all of its fullness — and I think there are some traditions that proclaim themselves as infallible, and that’s bonkers. I’ve seen the underbelly of the beast and whatever the Church is, it ain’t infallible, ever. Nevertheless, that more ritualized and structured experience is something that people are looking for. So I think some of our Pentecostal and nondenominational folks have come for a rootedness and a creedal faith that has been helpful to them.

The third group among our Grove City College students are the ex-exvangelicals. In other words, they were ex-evangelicals, but they soon discovered that that sucked. It was really humorous: I had one of them say to me, “Look, I’ve discovered that if you give up worshiping Jesus, you end up just worshiping yourself and you’re a worse Messiah than he is,” which is the best line ever. So we get a lot of them — students who got burned over churches’ social stances, or from church hurt, either real or imagined, and eventually they end up at Grace.

After the students, there’s the townies. With them, what we’ve become in some ways — not in all ways — is a place to have a kind of traditional church experience. For example, during Christmas services or Holy Week services, we always get lots of people from town who don’t go to Grace Church normally, because at least some of them see our church as “the town church.” If you want these things done in a more historic way that has a sense of dignity, then Grace does it pretty well, so, they think, we’ll just go there. We get a lot of that.

The Anglican shtick, with all of its complexities, also tends to attract a lot of the academics, who like it because there is a cerebral significance to the liturgy that is quite satisfying. It’s theologically rich, the cadence is lovely, and so forth. But when that’s coupled with a sermon that is affectively-oriented — that is connecting to the rag and bone shop of the heart — plus a physicalized worship service where your body is engaged, where you kneel, make the sign of the cross, and so on, it can be a great way of integrating intellect, emotion, and our physicality. So I think that academics like it for all those reasons. I also think that the simple gospel-centered conception of the Christian life — not just the gospel as the sort of the entryway into Christianity, but as the beating heart that keeps the body alive — that conception is appealing to all of those groups.

Anyway, those are probably the principal reasons why we’re doing okay. But I’ve asked myself that question, too — why people keep coming — because I don’t really always know what I’m doing.

M: Haha. Perhaps you don’t have to.

EM: Yeah. I’m not a great strategic thinker in terms of what programs we need to implement for the next five years. I always say the phrase “five-year plan” was invented by Joseph Stalin, so I’m a little skittish when it comes to employing it too frequently. But at the same time, after 20 years, I’m seeing now that there’s an enormous gift to that kind of systematized thinking. It’s almost like Luther’s “first use of the law.” I just think it keeps things on the right track, and that’s really useful. Thankfully, in ministry, I’ve developed relationships with people at Grace Church who are very good at that kind of thing. So even if I’m not good at it, there are people who are doing it. I’m more of the theologian guy — I’m not even a professional theologian, but my interests are more in line with that, and so I just try to keep the gospel as central as I can.

Our new tagline for the church is “Where the gospel is the main thing in everything,” which I like. And that’s my job, just to keep that central in a warm and winsome way. I think that’s probably the secret to things.

M: So, by God’s grace, you’ve managed to keep this church plant alive for 20 years now. I guess it’s not really a plant anymore — it’s a thoroughly established church. But I’m sure in the early days of the church, it was pretty tenuous, right? Was there a particular decision you made or something you did — like a program or form of outreach — that, looking back, was the key to becoming less tenuous, something specific that helped to solidify and sustain the community, long-term? 

EM: I’ve had to think about that question a lot lately because, as you may know, I’m writing a book for Mockingbird right now about church planting. It’s a gospel prolegomena. So I’ve had to ask that question, but I have a very unsatisfying answer for you, which is: no.

When we were first thinking about planting, I was still in seminary. I was only 24 at the time. And we had a group of five people who were leading this effort, none of whom had any experience church planting. But there was a local priest, and they were all coming down to his church, which was about 30 miles from their home. He asked me: “Ethan, would you plant a church so that they would have a place to worship? I think there’s potential in the Grove City area for a plant.” After hemming and hawing, I eventually agreed. But we didn’t have money and we didn’t have experience. We didn’t have a ton of connections in the area — the others knew some people, colleagues and so forth, but not necessarily people that would want to jump ship from their own ecclesiastical communities and join some new upstart thing.

Bob Duncan, our bishop at the time, said: “Ethan, I think you should be very careful and cautious in wanting to do this, because you’ve not yet led a church, and you don’t exactly know what you’re getting into. I’ll support you no matter what, but this is going to be rougher than you think.” And he was 100% right. One of the leaders, in fact, turned out to be, well, difficult is an understatement — he really harmed me. In other words, everything that could go wrong in the first year did, and we lacked the experience to solve it with our own intuitions.

But in spite of all that, what I saw was that “the Lord added unto their number daily those who were being saved.” Somehow new people just kept showing up. And so we had developed within about six months a pretty solid core of people that could keep this thing going. We tried little things here or there — we did mailers and open forums and things like that — but none of that really seemed to garner as much as just a gospel-centered homiletical model. I know maybe that sounds unsophisticated or not creative enough, but for whatever reason, that message resonated. I wish I could say that we did something sexier or more interesting, but we just didn’t.

M: Well, that’s actually encouraging in a way.

EM: Yeah, I’m just not that creative otherwise.

M: I know a lot of churches have communal meals, and that can be a good way to bring the community together. Did you do any of that?

EM: I forgot about that, actually. Yes. My wife and a few other women and men from the congregation would cook, and we would have meals after every 5 p.m. Sunday service. We did that for about a year and a half, and that was really valuable. It did create real bonds. And there was a wonderful brewery right down the road, so after the service and the meal, we would also have an after party. We would go get a beer, and so there was a lot of relational bonding back then, and that helped.

M: I love that. So what is the vision for children and youth ministry in your particular context?

EM: We have an incredible youth ministry. We take a non-siloed approach, so it’s hyperintegrationist. We try to get as many college students and adults from the church as possible involved in children’s and youth ministry. We don’t really take kids out of services — they’re in the worship service. We have a nursery, of course, and during the sermon we have a children’s liturgy for littles who need something more age-appropriate, but they’re in the service for 80% of it. We also have good curriculum. We’ve used Storymakers for a long time, and that’s really worked well. At the church right now, we have about 60 children under the age of 12, and then we have about 60 youth. In the youth ministry, for every two high school students, we have an adult volunteer to mentor them. So again, it’s hyperintegrationist. We do a lot of overlap on purpose that way to really connect them to the main life of the church.

The reason we do that is because one of the trajectories that we’ve seen, and Fuller has done some good work on this, is that if you take students out of worship consistently to do their own thing, then when they graduate, they have no connection or bond with the normative practice of church, so they don’t feel at home there, and they don’t really stick around. So we’re trying to help them integrate into worship, and we also, of course, include them in all liturgical functions. I’ve been really happy with that model, and it seems to work well.

It also has an evangelistic edge to it, too, because within our youth ministry, we have a lot of kids who didn’t grow up in the church, and so they’re getting acclimated to it via the youth ministry. We have a large high school population, especially, that has very little background in church. I just baptized one of them two weeks ago. But it’s a very friendly form of evangelism. “Come hang out with us. You don’t have to nod your head. You can be yourself and have your perspectives and we’ll hear you out, but we also have our own and we’re going to share that kindly, but we’re also not going to also bury it in the name of a false inclusivity.”

M: So what would you say is the most important thing that happens in church on a Sunday? 

EM: I think that depending on who you talk to, you’ll get a different answer. For me — I cribbed this language from the Second Vatican Council, though I use it in a very different theological direction — I think the source and summit of the Christian faith is the word of God proclaimed. I actually think that sacramental ministry, including the Lord’s Supper, is a subsidiary crater of word ministry. I think within Lutheranism, you have a parity between word and sacrament. It’s seen as equal. In Anglicanism, it’s different. Anglicanism is a word ministry, and sacraments are a visible manifestation of the word ministry. So that’s why Cranmer calls them visible words, and Paul says that when we eat the Lord’s Supper, we “proclaim” his death. So for us, I think the sermon — which hopefully, in a clear, biblically rooted way, offers people Christ for them as they are with all of their pains, hurts, idiosyncrasies, self-sabotaging, etc. — is the center. And then the sacrament doubles down on that.

So I would say at Grace Church, the word proclaimed is central, and that happens both audibly and then edibly.

M: So you still do the Eucharist at every service?

EM: We do, because that’s just a pattern now in our diocese, and it’s the pattern of most people. At the same time, what frequently happened in Episcopal and Anglican churches during the ’70s is that weekly Communion became the dominant service, and then sermons got short-shrifted and became sort of topical homilies that the minister didn’t put as much time into. So they didn’t really root people in the same way, and I think that actually led to some real crises in the church because people didn’t find themselves as biblically or gospelly oriented. At Grace, we do the Lord’s Supper every week, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to short-shrift the sermon. The sermon is really important.

M: Do you limit yourself to a hard 15 minutes or so?

EM: No. At Grace, the sermons are about 25 minutes, and our whole liturgy is probably like an hour and ten minutes. It’s interesting, different ministers have different opinions about sermon length, but I find that if the minister is deeply connected to the intricate pains of the human condition, has clearly thought through the Bible and this particular pericope in a clear way, and then can proclaim Christ from it — if those things are in place — then I’m cool. Like, I’m on the roller coaster and I’m willing to ride wherever. But if the minister isn’t keyed into those things, then even a five-minute sermon can seem interminably long.

M: So what other advice on preaching might you give to a new minister right out of seminary? 

EM: We’ve had so many seminarians over the years, and I always say to do three things. First, others will disagree with this and that’s fine, but I never preach using the golden thread model. Most Anglican/Episcopal services give you three or four lessons per service from the lectionary — an Old Testament lesson, a Psalm, an Epistle lesson, and a Gospel lesson — and preachers try to find the golden thread that connects all of the readings and then preach that thread. The problem with that is that those who designed the lectionary couldn’t make all of those lessons connect thematically, and sometimes they just don’t. So, I don’t know how to say this felicitously, but I think you kind of half-ass your preaching whenever you try to find a golden thread, because you’re never preaching any of the texts in all their richness. You’re just trying to find something that binds them all together. So I say to our preachers, “Just pick one of them to focus on, and try to find two or three gorgeous things about it that you can highlight. Then preach Christ from it.”

That’s the second thing I tell new preachers. In other words, Jesus in Luke 24 says: the law, the writings, and the prophets all speak about not just me but me crucified. So you have to take the Christo-centric and passion-centric model that Jesus himself taught us. That’s why I don’t think grace-centered preaching or Christ-centered preaching is controversial, because it actually is what Jesus said you should do. So being that he said that, I think we probably should listen and preach Christ from the passage.

So, you have to (1) pick a text and preach its depths; (2) connect to Christ; and then, of course, (3) connect to the rag and bone shop of the heart. That’s the third thing. You have to deal with the beleaguered human condition, because everybody in that church is carrying with them enormous amounts of agony and undiscovered darkness within and relational ambivalence. And if you don’t attach the themes of scripture and Christ to those, then it just seems like an academic exercise that is divorced from actual proclamation. It’s more teaching than preaching. So there has to be a sense in which people conclude that whatever the minister said was for me.

“I showed up and this was for me today. Something about me was addressed, and I’m seen, and it matters, and I’m really treasured and forgiven, and I’m going to be okay in the long run.” That has to be a takeaway. And I think most of the seminarians and young clergy I’ve talked to, especially if they grew up appreciating the Christo-centric and passion-centric homiletical model, are decent at the scripture bit. They actually tend to preach too much out of the text because they find everything interesting and think that the single mom who has three jobs will find it equally interesting, which is not true. So they preach too much of the text, and they often do get to Christ in a compelling way. But then I find where they are lacking is that kind of existential connection. I grew up with people that were good at that kind of connection, whether it was Fitz Allison or Janet Broderick or Paul Zahl — they were all geniuses at doing that. So I was forged in those fires, and I got used to it. But I find that’s sometimes the hardest part for the newbies to engage with, and part of that is because they’re just not old enough or they haven’t been to enough therapy yet or because ministry hasn’t done what it does to you yet. Because ministry hurts you, it just does. Like any job would really, but ministry is very people-rich, and so you get hurt a lot. And that kind of experience shapes how you say what you say to and how you connect.

M: I’m curious about how your time during the week is generally organized. Obviously, things constantly come up. Being a priest is all about interruptions. But what might your “average week” look like?

EM: I wish I could tell you. It’s always different. And I’m not a hyperscheduled person. I’m not good at that. I kind of wish I were. I think it would help me in some ways. Of course, I have a Google Calendar, and it has all sorts of things in it. But at the same time, I find that if I overschedule in this business, then I don’t have time for the interruptions in the same way, or the interruptions will end up skewing everything.

That said, I tend to have about four or five pastoral meetings a week with people. I tend to put in about 15 hours into sermons. I probably spend at least 10 hours doing admin. I do premarital counseling at least once a week. Then, of course, there’s weddings and funerals and crises and hospital visits. And as the church has grown, I find that a lot of my life is also given to meeting with staff and dealing with vestry and building quirks. So I would say that every day almost feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. And I kind of like that, in the sense that I like being nimble in ministry.

There are some times where people who are having a moderate crisis just need to wait two hours till I can get there. But there are other times where you just have to cancel what you’re doing and drive there to be with a person. And I like having that kind of nimbleness.

We can see that with Jesus too. I think it was beautiful when he’s asked to heal Jairus’s daughter, then he immediately gets pulled away to heal the woman with the issue of blood, then has to go back and take care of Jairus’s daughter. I just love how he was willing to say, “okay,” and let himself be moved in a different direction. Not always, of course. I mean, he had to go away and pray sometimes and just be alone, but he was also very nimble. And I just appreciate that tendency in people. I think it’s perhaps an overflow of the theology of grace that you don’t take yourself or your schedule so seriously that you end up ignoring people, because even if, by the way, their crisis doesn’t seem to matter to you, it might be their whole world. So I try to be available for those things. I also have a marvelous staff that is willing to do that too.

Even when I don’t over plan, man, my weeks are always full. There’s no such thing as a 40-hour week in this business, at least not for me. Maybe that has to do with my own tendency to overdo it sometimes. I have weeks that are a little more relaxed, but I never have one that’s very empty. Something always fills it up.

M: So as a church that preaches grace, how do you deal with difficult people? 

EM: It’s interesting. I’m okay with difficult people. I think they’re there to teach me how to love. I’m not being romantic about it. Sometimes they hurt me. But at the same time, I’ve really appreciated, for example, dealing with borderline personality folks and people with certain mental challenges. Because that helps me to realize the church has all sorts of people in it who are coming from beleaguered backgrounds and are imperfectly healed and imperfectly healing. And that gives me an opportunity to say maybe I could grow too.

The types of difficult people that I have a great deal of trouble with are people that are blind to their own faults and very self-righteous. People that can’t admit that they could be wrong about something. I don’t know what to do with that. It’s really funny too, because sometimes with folks like that I think to myself, “I’ve been offering this message now for so many years and I thought you were hearing it, but it doesn’t seem like it got in.”

M: Haha.

EM:  Now, there have been times where we’ve had to confront people. And sometimes when you confront people that are so angry with you, they just leave. You’re saying, “Look, what you’re doing is hurting people,” and they project on you and they blame you, and then they just bolt. But the best of them — and I have seen this on occasion — they’ll be mad at you at first, and then after three days or so they’ll say, “You know, I was really annoyed at you, but that gave me things to think about. Will you work with me?” And that’s beautiful.

Of course, I’m difficult in my own way, too. I don’t always see it because I’m me, but my wife sees it! She’s cool, but she’s Italian, so she does express things. At the same time, God’s been very patient with me and kind to me in the midst of my own calcified nature. It’s taken a while to chip away at that. But I also have seen what can happen in the long run. I’ve worked with some people for 20 years here, and I’ve seen where people who were once hypercritical have been softened and opened. It’s gorgeous. So I’ve gotten to see what happens to people in the long run. I always think God is in the long game. Not everybody has a Saul of Tarsus moment where you get knocked down and the scales fall off. With most of us, it’s like you have astigmatism slowly healed over 30 years, not scales ripped off in a second.

So I want to be there for that. I want to have patience for difficult people. Because I know I’m ridiculous too. But again, the type that’s harder for me are just people that can’t take any ownership over their own faults — because the gospel is predicated on that. It’s like with the Parable of the Prodigal Son — he has two epiphanies, right? “And he came to himself,” and then later, “And he came to his father.” If you can’t come to yourself and have that eye-opening epiphany of: What am I?! What is in me? What snakes are slithering in this heart of mine? Then you never seek any deliverance because you think that’s what other people should do. And so that’s harder. And I don’t have a perfect answer for how to deal with that, other than to trust that maybe God is using this ministry to give them something in the future for when they do have their revelation.

M: I think that’s really an important point. In my own experience, I don’t think I was really ready for the gospel, for whatever reason, when I was 15 or 20 years old. I thought “I’m not really that bad.” And what I was really interested in was hearing some hardcore law.

EM: Totally. I think that attraction to the law is why people really get into what they call discipleship. I believe in discipleship, but not like that. It’s like when people talk about Jesus being your “Lord and Savior.” The “Savior” bit’s the nice bit. The “Lord” bit is when Jesus becomes like General Patton and says, “Enough’s enough. No cheap grace for you!” And that’s stupid.

But with a lot of people, I think it’s because they want to be different. I see this in young ministers. I think what it is is projection. When you start getting mad at your congregation, and you yell at them about how they should change, it’s because the minister wants to change. They wish that they were different. They don’t want to be slothful. They don’t want to drink too much on a Saturday night. They don’t want to have libidinally oriented thoughts every day. They want to be free, and they want other people to be free because they see the damage. But they get so frustrated inside that it’s not happening fast enough that they start hurting their congregations through a lot of rants. I’ve just never seen anybody cured by a rant. I mean, I rant at my kids sometimes and then I’m like, “Why?” I’m contradicting myself, because I know this isn’t going to work. It may shut them up for a little while, but it doesn’t cure the interior. So I like Luther’s dyad of law and gospel.

I’ve been to churches, by the way, that are so gospel-centric that they never include the law, meaning they never talk about what’s actually wrong. They just say, “You’re loved, and God is inclusive” and all that kind of thing. But that approach is so nonbiblical. The biblical message is more dyadic. It’s saying, well, the only way the cross makes sense is that you first recognize your sin, that you come to yourself and realize, Oh, wow, Ethan is kind of menacing. He’s got a lot of issues. But that doesn’t negate him from love. It just means that, holy crap, somebody needed to do something about this! There needed to be a grand intervention.

But then if you have that dyad going into the pulpit, I think that really helps people. You’re not lying about the human condition and pretending that all you need is affirmation. No, what you need is absolution.

M: Absolutely. In other words, you’re preaching the law in its second use, not in its first or third use, right? You’re not saying: here’s how you need to go out and be better.

EM: It’s interesting, I was doing this research about the Lutheran understanding of the law, and I’m convinced that Luther sort of combines the first and third use when he talks about the creational use of the law. But what he suggests is this is just how things are. You can not like it, but it’s still true. That’s just to keep the trains running on time. But the second use, the theological use, is more like this: here’s your CAT scan and it shows the tumors, and you better pay attention to it.

M: And the pain. 

EM: Yeah. It kind of unmasks the Phantom of the Opera, right? But that’s needed. And I think the pulpit is a great place for that diagnosis, but it can never end there. That’s why, for example, sermons ought never end with a challenge. I just hate the word “challenge” in general, because it’s a flogging kind of word. And by the way, the minister isn’t keeping his own challenge, right? So that’s funny. But the sermon should always end with Christ for you. Even Paul’s epistles almost always have a gospel ending. They begin with the human condition, then they apply the gospel, then Paul says how you ought to live in light of the gospel, but then he always ends with the gospel. He summarizes it in usually a benediction of sorts to say what Christ has done. So Christ gets the last word. Epistles aren’t sermons, but I just think that’s a good example for sermons — let Christ for you be the last word.

M: Do you have small groups at your church? How do you bring people together in ways that allow them to be vulnerable and develop relationships outside of the normal services?

EM: Yeah. I would actually say that this is a growing edge for us. We’ve always had small groups. We’ve had Christian Ed. We’ve had lots of dinners. We’ve had programs, in other words, that gather people in lots of ways. But our church has doubled in size in the last three years, and that radical shift has really rocked us. It sounds great — who doesn’t want to grow? But growth is really complicated, and it’s often difficult and it hurts ministries in certain ways. It hurts a sense of connectedness between people. For example, now there are two services, so you don’t know who’s going to which one, and there are all these new people, but you don’t know if they’re new. And so it’s really complicated, and we’re working on building that connection big time.

When it comes to small groups, we actually have three models. First, we have sermon discussions where people just talk about the last sermon and how it’s impacting them. Then we have Bible studies. And finally we have prayer groups that just do Evening Prayer together — they get together, have a meal, and do Evening Prayer. That’s been a big new growing thing for us.

So we’re doing all that, but we’re increasing parish dinners as well, just because breaking bread together, to use that old cliché, is beautiful and helpful and holy. It’s really bonding. And we also have lots of people who are doing those sorts of things unofficially, that is, they don’t have a banner over them or a church program title, but they’re doing these things all the time. But I would say that still needs to be a growing edge for us, simply because with that massive growth, we’ve experienced real relational strains. It’s been an unexpected challenge, actually, because some of the people who remember when we were only 20 people in a living room have struggled to adjust. It’s not that way anymore. You don’t know everybody’s children. “Who is that getting baptized? I mean, he’s been here a year and a half, but I’ve never met him.” That kind of thing. So we just need more community, more ways of connecting, and to alter some of those in order to be more inclusive.

M: I love that. Last question: what aspect of your job do you hate the most, and what aspect do you love the most?

EM: Hmm. My kryptonite is relational strain. That is to say, whenever people are estranged from each other or estranged from me personally — living into that kind of pain in order to be a reconciler. I find that kind of thing hard, partly given my own family background, maybe harder than for some other folks, which makes ministry difficult because ministry often involves that kind of thing. I would say I’m growing in that aspect of the job. I think I’m a little better than I used to be, maybe just because it’s happened so much that I’m getting used to it a little bit. But it’s never going to be something that I look forward to. Relational strain is always hard for me. It’s like a Vulcan neck grip, it just makes me lose my power.

What do I love the most? This is cliché, I suppose, or maybe just predictable, but I love ranting and raving about the love of God in Christ for destroyed people. I mean, I love creatively connecting the gospel to people’s hellscapes and agony. It’s my favorite thing to do in the world, to build bridges from the truths of scripture and theology to people’s crises and to see what happens whenever those worlds meet, whenever God meets the sufferer, to see the gorgeous fruit and the loveliness and holiness and cured relationships that flow from that place of reconciliation. That happens so much, and I’m just blown away by it. I just love it so much.

M: Well, Ethan, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much.

The post Where the Gospel Is the Main Thing in Everything appeared first on Mockingbird.

The “yous” she spoke to was a group of public high school teens from a class where 10% of the grade was either pregnant or had impregnated someone, and another 10% failed out before receiving their diploma. Some of us would be going to college, and some of us would be joining the military, and some of us would be honoring the terms of our probation. But all of us were on the threshold of adulthood, hoping that maybe this woman with the goldendoodle was right — that maybe the doors of life would open to us, and behind them, we’d discover that we could have it all.

I remember having a conversation with my parents after the banquet about how the speaker’s sentiment felt … off. For one, the statistics weren’t really stacked in my classmates’ favor. The reality was that very few of us in that room would ascend to such success that we would go on to be touted as an example for teenagers to aspire toward. There were real limits to the lives many of my peers had already lived or would continue to live. Children, debt, addiction: some were saddled with these responsibilities all before they even turned eighteen. And the ones that were not … well, we were rather ordinary individuals from a rather ordinary place.

Sociological considerations aside, my teenage self also felt suspicious toward anyone in a pantsuit telling me you can have it all. I thought pantsuits looked rather restrictive — requiring a kind of conformity I wasn’t sure I was well suited for. Her speech felt a bit like a sales pitch for a product I didn’t really want to buy. I wondered if she really believed it: did she actually think she had it all? Did she actually believe we, a group of teenagers with middling talent and a slight Pittsburgh accent, could have it all, too? And really, if we wanted to get philosophical, what was “it” anyway?

Was it:

1. A career that pays well with time off to go to your beach rental in Hilton Head?
2. A house with granite countertops and a pool full of chemicals and a backyard with dying grass spots where your goldendoodle peed?
3. Being a girlboss (but missing the game, the band concert, the orthodontist appointment)?
4. Motherhood on your preferred timeline?
5. Having the exact number of kids you wanted?
6. A body that “bounces back” from birth?
7. Marriage to the person you loved when you were 22?
8. Liberation from the person you loved when you were 22?
9. Homeschooling, homesteading, homemaking?
10. Confidence without cracks, belief without doubt, faith without frustration?
11. All of the above?

Was this elusive, ethereal it even what I wanted? What God wanted? I wasn’t so sure. And so I decided I’d try to figure it out.

I think it’s fair to say that I spent the majority of twenties trying to find the elusive “it.” I switched college majors three times. I had five different jobs in five years. I moved to three different cities. I tried new churches, traveled a lot, downloaded Hinge, deleted Hinge, shot my shot and got shot down, laughed in the face of rejection … and cried privately about it later. I applied for two different grad school programs and didn’t go to either. I trained for marathons, went to therapy, started saving for retirement. I served in my church, kept a regular prayer journal, wrote essays about my faith. I hoped this kind of life — one of doing it all — would yield fruit.

I was a huge dreamer in my twenties — brimming with big plans and hopes and ideas and so full of energy to execute them. Living this way was exciting and energizing … until it wasn’t. I spent the latter half of my twenties cycling in and out of burnout that manifested physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In my final months of being 29, I chased my running goals so hard that I literally broke a bone in my back and had to withdraw from my dream race (the Boston Marathon) which was run on my 30th birthday.

It was a painful way to start a new decade. And ultimately, a healing one.

My thirties began with a literal breakdown in my body — a physical sign of an inward reality that something had to give. That “something” was my determination to craft my life into the shape I wanted it to be; I had to give it up. I had to shift my values, change how I spent my time, and rethink my plans and priorities. And perhaps most of all, I had to reckon with the reality that I had been living as a loyal disciple of the prosperity gospel.

The prosperity gospel is a lot more pervasive (and persuasive) than I think most of us would care to admit or even realize. We find it distasteful coming from a well-dressed man in a pulpit on a Sunday, but I know I certainly have hoped that my faithfulness to Do It All For God would yield the kind of life I hoped for. We don’t want our best-laid plans to fail — to see our dreams evaporate into ecclesiastical vapors. What we want is to have it all … because we believe we deserve it. Being the well-dressed (wo)man looks rather appealing when you feel as if you’ve been perpetually outfitted in sackcloth and ashes.

Life is fleeting, like a passing mist. It is like trying to catch hold of a breath; All vanishes like a vapor; everything is a great vanity. (Eccl 1:2)

However, the Bible does not promise faithful followers of Jesus that they will go on to have a fulfilling career path or a frictionless faith or a blissful marriage that produces well-behaved children. That message aligns more with the prosperity gospel than the actual gospel. The actual gospel tells followers of Christ that they will be reviled and persecuted on his account and that their reward will not come until they die. The actual gospel shows Jesus Christ hanging on a cross with a criminal to his right and his left, both who deserve the bitter sponge of condemnation but are offered the sweet cup of absolution. The actual gospel isn’t really fair.

When things are not falling in our favor, it can be very hard to accept that life with Christ is not fair. At times, this can feel like a real injustice. But what sobers me is remembering that circumstances are not salvific. Only Jesus is salvific.

Let me say that again: only Jesus saves.

Is Jesus actually enough for me? I suppose this is the question I was actually trying to answer the majority of twenties.

Trying to find the elusive “it” was just another way of trying to save my life, or at least, save it to what I wanted it to be. But that plan didn’t work out. So many of my plans didn’t work out. And here on the other side of that, in another summer where so many plans didn’t work out, I truly and heartily believe that there is mercy in seeing our plans fall apart. Why? Because this is where the peace and power of God and the companionship and comfort of Christ shines most brightly.

I like how Tish Harrison Warren puts it in her book What Grows in Weary Lands:

We must accept the circumstances of today — perhaps especially those we wouldn’t have chosen — as the place of our formation. Staying in our cell is to meet God not in the how our life could be or should be, but in what it actually is, today, in this moment. Grace finds us, only ever, in the present tense. (p. 57)

I also think about what Paul writes in his letter to Timothy (1 Tim 1:12–17). It could be said that Saul of Tarsus had it all; he had the coveted standing and safeguards of Roman citizenship. He had access to power and authority to exercise that power, too. He was a man who was respected in society. But Paul tells Timothy he was a “blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man.” By all accounts, Paul should have been smitten by God. But instead, Paul isn’t treated fairly. He says, “I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief. The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 1:14).

Paul’s conversion is an example of both the corrective and the comforting mercy of Christ. God’s mercy both humbles us to acknowledge our utter lack, and it uplifts us to acknowledge God’s utter abundance. Christ’s “immense patience” (1 Tim 1:16) is always given freely, never earned or awarded to the highest and holiest bidder. Mercy is the opposite of the prosperity gospel; it is a ledger so in the red, and a savior whose blood settles the whole debt.

I believe one of the hardest parts of my adulthood has been reckoning with the reality that I so frequently would prefer to reject mercy. I see this both in my relationships with other people — my first instinct is one of indignance — but also in my relationship with God. With God, I have not always believed that his grace is actually enough. I have had a scarcity mindset that has, at times, led to deep skepticism and distrust and robbed me of gratitude and, honestly, joy.

In that vein, I do not mourn how I spent my time in my twenties. What I mourn is how much of that time I spent wondering what I had to do to feel worthy of love. I spent a lot of time worrying that maybe if I was just prettier, just thinner, just quieter, just smarter, just less-of-me-and-more-of-someone-better that, in time, I would finally be able to have it all. I was poisoning myself with the potion of prosperity when the cup of life was being lifted to my lips.

But God, in his mercy, corrected me. His correction wasn’t coercive, wasn’t scolding, wasn’t filled with accusations or irritation. Instead, his correction was personal, relational, tactile, generative. I saw this so clearly last summer, when I got to spend five weeks living in Ireland and attending a culinary school set on the coast of the Celtic Sea. The experience felt like living in the poetry of the Psalms. “You have set my feet in a spacious place,” David writes in Psalm 31. “But I trust in you, Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hands.”

My time has always been in God’s hands. Fortunately, the scales mercifully fell from my eyes and I could finally see it: I was never cut off from God’s sight.

The life I have been given is so saturated with God’s grace. Every story I tell drips with it.

I do not think I would have gone to Ireland had I gotten married and had kids in my twenties. Had I gone to seminary. Had I found a different job, had different colleagues, had I moved to New York City or somewhere else exciting. I would not have my upstairs apartment to host weary women who need a break, who need someone to take care of them for a moment, who need the ministry of a good chocolate chip cookie. I would not be writing here about the things I do. I would not have the same tender places in my heart that sometimes hurt but also allow me the ability to empathize with the walking wounded.

By the world’s standards, I do not have it all, and yet, I am enveloped in mercy. It’s from this place that I have started to let God reshape and redeem my imagination. I have begun to believe that God’s mercy can be found here: in the place I called scarce but I can actually see is abundant.

I have started to see how the life I have and the words I share from it might be able to be used as an encouragement to others. I wonder what conversations I could have with other young adults who were like me — and what testimonies or prayers I might be able to offer them as they encounter their own existential doubts and dilemmas.

I have wondered what stories I will get to live and what essays I will get to write about them. Serious pieces and funny ones: what a privilege it is to share hope and humor! Comedy is a mission field, I believe; I’d like to be one of its missionaries.

I have started to accept that if I will experience marriage and motherhood, it will look different than my peers, and that could be beautiful, too. I’ve considered what joy might be found around my kitchen table in my elder years, and who will sit there. Family, friends, poets, priests, singers, strangers, rebels, rule followers — who will I serve with my wrinkled hands? I dream of the menu: a roast chicken with herbs I grew in my garden, a bright green salad, focaccia that rose in the sunlight of my kitchen window sill, warm chocolate chip cookies, good wine.

I’ve started to pray for patience in the passage of time. I have asked God to help me trust that his grace will not be overshadowed by my grief. I have asked him not to make me rich in money or success or power but in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

I do not know what my future looks like, but I am not resigned to a grayscale life. Life in Christ is painted with the vibrant colors of the gospel.

And mercifully, that’s what it means to have it all.

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I love the verve and chutzpah of the title. The defiance as well. I get the idea. Too often, churches and clergy roll over to forces of stagnation and entropy. Decline is rationalized, demise deemed inevitable. Many mainline denominations now offer an ecclesial version of MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying), standing ready with “legacy programs” designed to capture a church’s remaining assets and experience “death with dignity.” Perhaps that’s the best that can be done in some situations.

But Nixon’s book was a call to resistance, to not go gently into the night but to rage against the darkness, against death, to rise up in defiance. I get it. I applaud it.

And yet … and yet, we are all, our churches are all, dying. Moreover, it is only as dying churches that we can truly live. For in dying, we are raised to new life. “It is no longer I live, but Christ who lives in me,” wrote Paul to the Galatians. “And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).

It is only in dying to the self-centered self that we live.

So, the defiant word, I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church, may invite a holding on, an assertion of our human will and resolve when life is found in dying to that very grasping, to such clinging, to the willful assertion of ourselves. I respect the impulse, the drive behind Nixon’s book, but I also suspect that the title has the subject wrong.

That subject is “I.” “I refuse to lead a dying church.” The subject there is us, we ourselves, our self, our ego and institutional self-image. What if it is all this to which we need die, to be crucified with Christ, that we may truly live? “Remember not the former things, behold I am doing a new thing.” This is the word of the Lord, said the prophet Isaiah (Isa 43:18). There is dying there. A dying to what has been, which may once have served us well, which once worked just fine. But no more. Not now.

The other problem with Nixon’s title and the first person pronoun is that it’s apt to cause some clergy to put too much pressure on themselves, to think that if the church grows it’s their doing, or if it declines it is their fault. A lot of clergy are already staggering under that load and don’t need more burdens.

Resurrection is God’s work. It only takes place when we are at the end of our own resources, schemes, dreams, and pretensions. “At the end of our rope” as the saying goes, “is where God’s office is located.” New life occurs not because we assert ourselves with renewed determination and new vigor, not because we have finally found “the right minister” or the right plan, hack, or technique, but because we surrender ourselves to the God for whom “all things are possible.”

While I doubt it was Nixon’s intention or counsel, I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church, or as the title of companion volume puts it, We Refused to Lead a Dying Church, the idea is conveyed that it is really on us. If we are dying, it is because we have not worked hard enough or have not discovered effective strategies for growth.

But what if we are dying not for lack of self-assertion but because of it? What if life is found not in resistance to death but in letting go? Letting go and letting God, to borrow a phrase from AA?

Sometimes churches do simply die or close. It happens daily now. There’s some sort of bittersweet celebration of their life and a disposition of their remaining resources to a denominational fund or for a low-income housing project on what was once the site of a church.

But there’s another way to die. We can die in the Lord, unto the Lord. We can die to our self-centered, self-focused, survival-focused self and rise to utter and complete reliance upon God in Christ who sets the captive free, who gives sight to the blind, and who raises the dead.

We do not proclaim a new strategy or technique for renewal or growth. We proclaim Christ and him crucified. We proclaim God who chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God who chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God who chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one may boast in the presence of God (I Cor 1:27–29).

The church that declares such faith is a dying church. Ours is not a human potential movement. We are aware of our own fragility, our own mortality. Such a church is dying to the powers of this world and to its boasting — from which churches are hardly exempt — to be raised to a new life proclaiming “the power of God who gives life to the dead, and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom 4:17).

Only a “dying church,” that is, a church that knows its utter dependence upon this God and not upon its own reputation, past greatness, resources, endowed funds or programs, can truly live.

I have visited and counseled with more than one dying church in my time. Most understood themselves to be dying because they lacked sufficient resources — members, money, programs. “If we can just get twenty-five new members or fifteen new pledging units, we will be okay” is the kind of thing you are apt to hear.

One near-death church I visited was, however, reviving, newly alive. When I asked the pastor about what they had done, she spoke not of what she or they had done but of what God had done and was doing. It wasn’t about “what we are doing.” It wasn’t about the pastor’s determination to not lead a dying church. It wasn’t about “our strategic plan” or our mission statement or our great preacher. It was “Come and see what God is doing.”

Why would I want to serve a dying church? Because at least some dying churches may discover in their weakness God’s power. Because some dying churches may discover in their need God’s help. Because a dying church may discover that “my grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9).

“For it is in dying, that we are born to eternal life,” prayed St. Francis. We are born to eternal life, which isn’t a quantity but a quality of life, not by our striving, our fevered efforts, our achievements, or our splendid resources but by dying. In death, life.

I want to serve a dying church.

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You see, I say “tackiness is not a sin” to me.

And I say that tackiness is not a sin because, while sometimes it is right to link aesthetics and ethics, beauty and truth, it is also possible to link them too tightly. The Bible speaks of this about Jesus — “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” — while declaring him truth itself. This is the rightful warning in many of our folktales too: The girl becomes a princess because of her kindness to a disgusting toad; the ugly old beggar is revealed to be a powerful king.

And I say that tackiness is not a sin because I do look at lots of median American evangelical culture and think it tacky. I’m not just being self-deprecating calling myself a snob. I am that beholder having those class-coded thoughts.

And yet: In my better — more gracious, kindlier, more Christ-like — moments, I want to say, because I know it to be true, that having good taste does not reliably correspond to the imitation of Christ, and that having bad taste is never a justification for looking down on someone. There are many deeply tacky old church ladies who have done more in love of God and neighbor than I can ever hope to do. And I can make a firm defense of good aesthetics, including urging my fellow evangelicals to write better music and make better art, without plunging into an attitude of Can anything good come out of Nazareth? […]

When I say that tackiness is not a sin, I am not excusing bad art or approving of shallowness or breaking with the most sober and significant parts of our faith. I am saying, simply, that tackiness is not a sin — because it’s not.

And I am also saying that it is wrong if I (or, yes, evangelicalism’s less gracious critics) sally past charitable and constructive calls for beauty and excellence in the church to offer instead aesthetic disdain presented as something more substantive than it is.

As one whose aesthetic disdain is often uncharitable, I am guilty as charged. Her reflection brings to mind W. H. Auden’s Good Friday reflection, where he imagines himself present at Jesus’ crucifixion. Seeing the rowdy and bloodthirsty crowd, he watches the three grotesque executions from a distance with disdain. Why can’t they just give them hemlock like Socrates, he wonders aloud. “Then,” he writes, “averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the True, the Good and the Beautiful.” Auden, like Kristian, was well aware of how our aesthetic assumptions can keep us from seeing the kingdom of God.

See also Mbird editor Todd Brewer’s “A Church of Cringe” earlier this year. It’s a good lesson for everyone, including me, working to overcome Bluey’s transition to 3D for the movie release coming out next summer. 

2. I was prepared to hate the New Yorker’s “The Doulas Who Help Us Die.” I had the chance to write about “Celebrations of Life” for our print magazine recently, and in that reflection, I mentioned how bespoke funerals were becoming expressions of individual authenticity instead of avenues of comfort. Knowing how birth doulas are hired to help mothers achieve their “authentic” birth plans against the seemingly uncaring institution of American healthcare, the idea of a death doula helping the aged have their preferred death seemed like another occasion for an authenticity eye roll. What Alexandra Schwartz reports, instead, is a profile of caregivers who are genuinely helping the dying and their families cope with the ignored inevitable. It’s a beautiful read altogether, but here is a snippet that stood out:

Chang, who has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford, began her career in new-drug design, then worked as a chemical-contamination expert in the cleanup of the Pelham Bay Landfill, in the Bronx. She stopped working in her thirties to raise her children. Now she was an empty nester, with time on her hands. She decided to devise an experiment. She would spend a year volunteering at V.N.S. Health, a hospice in New York, and apply the doula methodology to the patients there, to see if the skills she had acquired actually worked. She practiced active listening — a kind of deep, compassionate attention meant to facilitate openness and connection — and “unconditional positive regard,” a technique, developed by the psychologist Carl Rogers, that entails demonstrating total acceptance of another person. She mirrored; she validated; she figured out how to ask exploratory, nonjudgmental questions, and how to hear the responses without adding her own two cents. If she was tempted to interrupt, she reminded herself to WAIT, an acronym she had learned in her training which stood for “Why am I talking?”

“Guess what?” Chang said. “It works.” She opened her private practice, Till the Last, in 2019. (She continues to volunteer with V.N.S.) As Chang sees it, her role is “not about telling you that you can have a good death — it’s not about trying to make it beautiful or sacred or reverent.” She prefers to think of it as a reframing. “You’re creating environments where a person is telling you things that they haven’t said to anybody else,” she explained. “Once you’ve established that trust, you can go anywhere in the future with them. You can get them to look at difficult emotions. You can have hard conversations. You can take them to places of dreaming big.” Death may be the end of life, but dying is still a part of living.

If this sounds good to you, you should know that this is just what every pastor does when they sit beside you when you die. Seriously — this is seminary 101. This is where the New Yorker’s profile loses me, because people who go to church don’t have to pay elite east coast metro pricing for someone to sit with you and help you process the end of your life. I’m glad secular death chaplains like this exist, and I think this is a great opportunity for Christian ministry as well. But also, despite the beauty of the death doula’s work, it’s worth noting that the secular world has pulled apart families and communities that provided this emotional care in the past and then returned this emotional care to us as a paid service. Remember: if money is involved, it doesn’t count.

3a. Higher ed has been taking it on the chin this summer. AI is making it hard to teach. Prominent scholars have had their work scrutinized for plagiarism and falsehood. Tenured professors are leaving solid gigs over campus political disagreements and publishing tell-alls as they walk out the door. It was nice to read something positive happening on campus for a change from Matt Dinan via the New York Times: “I Let My Students Watch Me Struggle With a Masterpiece. It Changed Everything.” Though he was a literature professor, Dinan had never read Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov before, and his joy from encountering the novel proved infectious to his class.

That my students — regular 20-somethings at a public college in one of Canada’s poorest provinces — fell in love with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s strange little town might look like a miracle from the outside, but as the narrator of “The Brothers Karamazov” puts it: “Miracles never bother a realist.” To be a realist about higher education is to acknowledge that the challenge of our moment is not primarily intellectual but sentimental. Spiritual, if you will. In the algorithmic age, effective teaching is affective teaching.

Today’s educational problems are often attributed to a deficit of focus or attention, but attention is an anemic way to understand what allows education to transform people. We’re really talking about passion, inconvenient and unfashionable as that is to acknowledge. Passion creates a unity of purpose and urgency that is the antidote to the feckless, superficial distraction of the algorithmic age. Lots of us pay very close attention to our phones, but what we lack is the sustaining passion that endures difficulty and shapes a life. […]

As far back as Plato’s irascible character Meno, would-be teachers have been confronting the problem that students must want to learn before learning is possible. For many decades, higher education has relied on a workaround to this problem: tying access to good jobs to success in school. In some cases, a desire for money and prestige leads to real, if incidental, learning. But large language models have broken this arrangement by making it possible for students to skip straight to an effortless A without doing any meaningful learning. Technology has exposed the limits of our mercenary approach to education.

Dinan teaches in a Great Books program, so his classroom is self-selected, of course. But his insight that education is more than attention, and it requires passion, is an insight as old as St. Augustine and his thoughts on properly ordered affections. We are motivated, primarily, by what we love, and any Christian attempt at faith education has to begin from that starting point. And for what it’s worth, I get it: reading Brothers Karamazov for the first time was a transformative experience for me too. 

3b. At the risk of over-Karamazov-ing your timeline, this reflection from Sybil Sender at Plough finds that the relationship between Ivan and Alyosha remains as potent a spiritual catalyst as ever. For those of you who wrestle with matters of theodicy, you’re not alone.

4. Freud would not enjoy modern therapy culture, argues Anna Ballan over at the Hedgehog Review. Psychology has been more popular than ever, but as Ballan states, Freud is often co-opted into blessing a modern framework of talk therapy that he himself would find untenable. The whole article is worth your read, but the aspect most worth highlighting is Ballan’s suspicion that pop-psychology is actually a smokescreen for people who want to avoid changing. 

Freud, read against the assumptions of our own therapeutic times, becomes uncooperative. The psychological culture popularized on screens often assumes several things: that you actually want to get better; that insight leads frictionlessly to change; that naming an issue defuses it; that the self is a project to be perfected. Freud assumes that a part of you — perhaps the most salient part — does not want to get better; that apparent insight can deepen the problem and naming an issue can intensify its grip; that the self is a kind of battlefield. If the therapy of today’s screen culture holds a mirror up to a curated self-image, actual therapy, Freud would insist, is more like a light held up over a swamp. […]

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the assumption that self-articulation liberates is only half true. The more articulate we are, the more elaborate and agile our evasions may become. Pathological symptoms are not random errors, after all: they are solutions the psyche has devised, protective compromises that maintain a precarious psychic equilibrium — a panic symptom that holds in abeyance a deeper grief, a chronic independence that protects against the anxiety of dependency, a rigid scruple that helps fend off an inconvenient desire. To unravel these is to tamper with a system that may, however painfully, be functioning. And naming a feeling — far from resolving it — can make it more dangerous, like a virus mutating under pressure. Freud noticed that his patients did something interesting. They claimed that they wanted to change, but they evolved intricate psychological ecosystems to ensure precisely that they didn’t, and they enlisted Freud as an accomplice in their stasis.

Freud’s diagnosis of modern therapy culture, writes Ballan, might be something like this: look how we’ve created a pop-psychology ecosystem that relies on the smartphone to manage our psychosis when the smartphone itself is the catalyst for our psychosis! “If Freud teaches us anything,” Ballan suggests, “it is that human beings express themselves through grand ironies.” I don’t agree with everything Freud published, but we write off his insights of at our own peril. The will is bound, the heart is deceitful, and the mind is futile: on this much, the original therapist and the apostle Paul can agree.

5. In humor this week, “Things I Hope People Would Say At My Funeral” from McSweeneys pairs nicely with the above reflection on death doulas:

“How sure are we that she’s dead? Should we double-check just to be safe? I know for a fact that she would not want to be buried alive.”

“I’m a pastor, and I can safely say I’ve never seen a sadder funeral than this one. She was objectively the most loved person ever to live.”

“If there aren’t any more seats available, just stand in the back. And if the back fills up, just spill out the door of the church into the street.”

See also: “Imagined Conversations Between My Parents While On a Family Vacation” and, from the Onion, “Crying Baby Has No Idea How Much Worse It Gets.”

6. Ok, hear me out. What if … what if … what if that whole dustup about the Australian woman breakdancer from the 2024 Olympic Games is a mix of the Mandela Effect and false memory and mob mindset? What if our society’s mutual confusion about her less-than-impressive dance showcase was rooted in misunderstanding? What if, like the woman who spilled hot coffee on her lap at McDonalds or the woman who restored the Spanish Jesus painting, we’ve all come to understand only half of the story? When the internet finds an unlucky individual to dump their collective spite upon, the scapegoat usually tends to be more righteous than we give her credit for. Perhaps that will be the case with Raygun the breakdancer?

This, of course, and the fact that they’re turning the book of Jonah into a movie. (A joke re: the above trailer for Whalefall)

7. We’ll leave the last word this week to Steven P. Millies at Commonweal, who helped me understand the August 9 mitre promotion at that evening’s White Sox game. You might have seen photos from the promotion: every one of the 38,000+ fans at the game received a free promotional bishop’s mitre, styled in White Sox colors, in honor of the team’s most famous fan, Pope Leo XIV. I, for one, thought the promotion was tacky (yet again, see point one above), a pearls-before-swine-style cash grab to fill the ballpark’s seats. Millies, however, offers a boots-on-the-ground Chicago South Side take on the night that shifted my perspective. You probably still won’t catch me wearing a Sox mitre, but then again, I also haven’t gotten an entire sports arena to pass the peace with one another either.

The close-knit neighborhoods in this part of the world are defined by their Catholic high schools and parishes. It doesn’t really matter if you’re Catholic — many at the ballpark were not. Everybody is included. The only thing that equals Catholicism’s grip on the local imagination is the White Sox. Little surprise, then, we gathered at the great shrine to celebrate one of our own with the rituals we all know.

Any doubts on that point were settled between the fifth and sixth innings when a south-side pastor, Fr. Tom Hurley (whom I would guess half of the people in the ballpark knew or had met), was interviewed on the Jumbotron. He said it would probably make Pope Leo very happy if everyone in the ballpark were to offer one another a sign of peace, which he invited us to do. And so, there in the stands, that’s what we did, just like it was a Sunday Mass. Except in my free hand I held a beer.

Strays:

• “What’s the Value of an Hour?” A helpful exploration of how and why the concept of “opportunity cost” has its limits. Includes a shoutout to Mockingbird fave Oliver Burkeman.  
• On the topic of snobbery from our first point, I appreciated this apology for poet Mary Oliver. 
• “Status Defines Friendship for too Many Americans,” so says former conference speaker Christine Emba in the Times.
• “The Legacy of Martin Luther’s Father, Hans Luther”: via Amy Mantravadi at 1517.

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Oh, and it’s ALSO available on our fancy new MBird phone app (iOS and Android).

Although heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the LORD your God, the earth with all that is in it, yet the LORD set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them, out of all the peoples, as it is today … For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. (Deut 10:14–15, 17–18)

Against the backdrop of polytheistic cultures in the ancient Near East, Old Testament writers were telling the story of a very different God than the other gods that people worshipped. This was not just a god who could influence fertility, command the weather, or guarantee success in conquering enemies. Greater than the gods who could control the natural world, this God was the source of all things. He created the heavens and the earth, and even “the heaven of heavens” belonged to him.

One might think this God to be too great, too mighty, and too awesome for humans to approach. Yet we are told that this God also loves people, not just for a short time, but for generations after generations — even if people of some of those generations would become unfaithful. Not only did this God love people; he had special love for the orphan and the widow, whose hearts have known loss and grief, who feel forgotten by those around them. He had special affection for those strangers whom others might have shunned because they were unfamiliar or different, who felt lost or unwelcome in the places or circumstances where they found themselves.

The God of gods and Lord of lords has special love for you. We are all like the orphan and the widow when we feel brokenhearted, lonely, or left behind; in all of these times, God has special love for us. When you feel unmoored, unknown, or unappreciated, you are like the stranger whom God welcomes in to share the warmth and comfort of his home. He calls you friend.

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