“I can’t help but thinking that at this level, it’s not really the priority.  I mean, I’d gladly trade my Lotus developed suspension for some Toyota developed door trim.” – James May, reviewing an inexpensive Malaysian car.

Let’s be honest. There is an element of any corporate worship service that boils down to performance. This isn’t meant to be a criticism per se, but simply to state what I take to be a clear reality that the way things are done in contemporary worship settings (and by this I mean contemporary as in current, not any particular style of worship), execution of the specific elements matters. Anyone who has been to a church where the worship band was awful or the preacher put you to sleep is keenly aware of this. Some level of execution is important. Most people, given a choice and all other things being equal, would choose a service with a high production value over one with generally poor execution.

One disturbing trend in many churches, though, is a preference for execution over thoughtfulness. There are many reasons for this, I think, and many of them have their roots in the more widespread emergence of what Lindbeck would call “experiential expressivism” in recent years. Whatever the cause, most worship pastors, and to a large extent most parishioners prefer well executed services to meaningful ones, or, perhaps to put it differently, the “meaningfulness” of a service is a function primarily of its execution, rather than its content.

This actually leads to some pretty interesting consequences, at least in practice. Consider, for instance, the abundance of new worship songs which sound fun, have a good beat, and can move people to a different emotive state, but whose content is either remarkably thin, or worse borders on theological garbage. Think about whether, at a typical worship service, the songs are chosen because they sound good together (or have a particular emotional movement to them), or because they harmonize theologically. My sense is that if many of us were honest we find ourselves in services where, if there is planning, that planning is primarily centered around emotional content rather than theological content, which suggests that the primary aim of our execution of worship services is to make us feel good, rather than to actually encounter God in some sort of meaningful way.

Which brings me to my opening quote. What, really, is the priority in what we’re doing in corporate worship? It seems to me, unfortunately, as if we’ve traded our foundational beliefs and theology for a more emotional product that makes us feel good, at the expense of some pretty serious theological incoherence and inconsistency. I want to be very clear that this is not a question of worship *style*, at least in the sense that many of us think of it, nor is it a function of the amount of pure effort or thought – I’ve been in thoughtful an coherent services ranging the gamut of multiple dimensions in the traditional / progressive divide. What it is a question of, I think, is the *types* of thought we put into our services:

• Do our words, welcomes, prayers and songs speak with a unified theological voice? Do they suggest a common eschatology, soteriology, etc? If so, what is that voice? If not, what message are we sending?
• Do we spend more time thinking about the flow of the service, especially the emotional flow of the service, than we do the voice of the service? For example, when we consider movement, are we thinking primarily along the dimension of how a particular sequence of elements will people will feel, or about the progression of the message and proclamation of the sequence (e.g. fast song, fast song, slow song; or song about Jesus’s life, song about Jesus’s death, song about Jesus as risen Lord)?
• What metric do we use to evaluate whether a particular service was “effective” or “well executed”? Do we look at performance criteria (i.e. how well everything came off), emotive criteria (i.e. how well everyone felt at the end), or transformative criteria (i.e. did anybody actually change as a result of what we did here)?

Unfortunately it’s not hard to find examples of services which are, by and large, both poorly planned and poorly executed, but it’s probably even easier to find services which are poorly planned and well executed. Perhaps it’s too much to ask for a well planned, well thought-out, well executed service on a consistent basis. But if we have to choose between the three, it seems to me the priority shouldn’t be on execution.

Full gallery available here.

It seems to me that most Pro-Life people I know really aren’t Pro-Life at all. They are, rather, Anti-Sex. That is, the abortion debate is often just a cover to wage war on the sexual revolution and the Dawn of the Pill. What many Pro-Life people are angry about is the casual sexuality of our age, an era of “abortion on demand.” Pro-Life advocacy, then, is often (consciously or unconsciously) really a way to get sexually promiscuous people to face the “consequences” of sexual activity. The focus on life is often cover for Puritanical worries about sexuality in modern America.

Why do I draw this conclusion? Because most Pro-Life people I know are only Pro-Life in this one area, and only in this one area. They are not, generally speaking, consistently Pro-Life. For example, most Pro-Life people are…

…not Pro-Life when it comes to gun control.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to preemptive war.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to capital punishment.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to global malnourishment.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to universal health care.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to entitlement programs for the women and children of the working poor (to remove the economic incentives for abortion).

…not Pro-Life in promoting condom usage to prevent teenage pregnancy or AIDS in developing nations.

In short, the only thing many conservatives are Pro-Life about is, well, abortion. Which, incidentally, is the only thing on the list that’s about regulating sexual behavior.

Which kind of makes you wonder…

Forgive us when we forget the comfort of your love, our fellowship with your spirit, and the tenderness and compassion you have called us to show to a world in need. Forgive us when we care so much about ourselves and what we want that we forget to love our neighbor, and in so doing forget to love you.

Almighty Father, take from us all hatred and prejudice and discord. Remind us that there is but one Body and one Spirit, and one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, so that we may all truly be of one heart and of one soul, united in one holy bond of truth and peace, of faith and charity, and that with one mind and one mouth we may glorify you, through Jesus Christ our Lord who reigns together with you and the Holy Spirit, in a Kingdom without end. Amen.

Springsteen’s words have been on my mind in the past few days with the current hot button issue in the church I currently worship at, at least for the next few months. The issue itself isn’t really my concern – frankly I could completely care less, and I suspect most of the people in my general area probably agree. I’ve been well beyond where the progressive group is wanting to go, and I think they’re going to be highly disappointed when they get there and realize it’s no different from where they are now, but for the moment let’s set that aside. The larger issue here, in my view, is the one raised by Bruce: What if what you do to “survive” kills the things you love?

The core motivation for the push, in my view, is for the “next generation” – our kids, if you will. I think this is, on the surface, wholly commendable. Certainly when you talk about a tradition, one of the questions that isn’t asked enough is how we can change and adapt the tradition to make it relevant to the next generation – how we as the current generation can excite and enable the generation below us to continue practicing that which we have found to be true and important, even if the specifics of that practice looks slightly different than the ones we embraced. I think in this particular case there is sincerity in the motive of those who would move things forward – they are genuinely fearful of the state of worship that will be handed to their children, and I think with good reason.  Personally I would have a whole different list of concerns when it comes to worship if I were making the list, but I can certainly understand their dissatisfaction and desire to pass to their children something better than what they experience themselves.

But here’s the issue: what if what you endure to bring change ends up being more destructive than the status quo – in other words, again, if what you do to survive ends up killing the things you love. Put in the context of this specific discussion, if the transition becomes a fight, and the fight becomes nasty (which isn’t, you know, entirely out of the question when you’re dealing with things that have marked traditional social boundaries for 150 years), do your kids inherit a legacy of different worship, or do they inherit a legacy of their friend’s parents – people who called themselves Christians – saying really mean-spirited, hurtful things about their parents? In college ministry we deal often with kids who’ve come from churches which have endured painful splits, and the fallout from the deeply personal attacks that result can be dramatic, having powerful and destructive consequences for the children of those involved in the actual arguments years after the fact. If what you do to pass your children a legacy you think they’ll appreciate (which, in fact, they might not) results in driving them away from the tradition of Christianity altogether – fear is a dangerous thing.

My personal opinion is that given the current climate, it is going to be difficult for either side to come away with a victory worth having. Neither group stands to gain enough to offset the incredible level of damage that might result should either side start taking things personally. I think there may be solutions which are acceptable to both sides, but crafting something that diffuses the situation – let alone making everyone come away feeling good about it – is going to take divine guidance to say the least.

The core of the issue, really, comes down to this question: “When we look for evidence of God ‘working’ in the world, what criteria do we use to judge whether God is actually working in the world?” While there may be some objective truth about whether God is working in the world around us, the way we interpret events around us as either being part of God’s plan or not seems to be much more subjective and open to personal interpretation.  Our tendency, I suspect, is to judge what God is doing in the world based on our perception about the relative success of particular things we think God should be doing in the world – in other words our perception of how God is working in the world is intimately colored by our own values and agenda, and in a very subtle way, we’ve changed the question from, “How is God working in the world?” to, “How is God working in the world around me to increase my wealth/happiness/satisfaction?”

It may seem like a narrow distinction, but there is a huge gulf between believing that God is working toward my happiness, wealth, and satisfaction and simply believing that God is working. Even though most people say they don’t believe in a prosperity Gospel, most of us have an implicit assumption in our theological foundation that God should reward those who are good and punish those who are evil. As someone who is good, then, I should be able to see evidence of God working around me to make my life better – I should get the new job, or the raise at work, and my kids should never act up, always get good grades in school, and be the star of their respective soccer teams. We wouldn’t be so naive as to publicly say we believe this, of course, but let’s examine the core question again: what criteria do we use to determine whether God is working in the world? Do we really believe that God is working (at the time) when our 401k takes a 40% hit, or we suddenly have termites eating up our house? Insurance companies and lawyers seem to find God working in tragedy (always nice to see they aren’t liable for “acts of God”), but we seldom take that view ourselves when the ball comes up double zero. No, if God is working, he must be working *for* me.

The danger then, as I see it, is this: if God is in the business of looking out for my personal interests (as I define them), then everything is fine, so long as things are going the way I want them to. But when your father dies of cancer, or you lose a child to a miscarriage, or your husband leaves you after three months of marriage, it becomes rather difficult to write those events into the narrative “God is working for good” if by “God is working for good” we really mean “God is working to improve the personal satisfaction, happiness, and wealth of all those who are called according to his purpose.”

If God is ultimately, primarily interested in improving the lives of those who are faithful to Him, then the conclusion one is forced to draw in the above conclusions is that a) God isn’t doing a very good job of “working for the good” or b) the people in the above situations more or less deserve what they got. It’s also possible to conclude that c) the situations above really aren’t that bad, and that the people in them stood to suffer far more unless these situations happened, but I think this argument cheapens the very real pain and suffering people go through in times of crisis. If we accept conclusion a), then God is impotent or tyrannical, and if we accept conclusion b) we move quickly to a place of pride and arrogance or guilt and shame, depending on which side of the crisis we’re on.

One of the major underlying issues in this process is our common practice of using analogies that point from man to God, as opposed to the other way around.  In the ensuing discussion, my friend compared how his father treated him (not letting him steal candy from a store) to how God treats and sometimes disciplines us.  Both my friend’s analogy and our tendency to apply our personal thought process to God fall under this category of analogy. The problem is that the analogy between God and man turns out to be rather tenuous.

Let’s consider the example of comparing God the Father to an earthly father. When we invoke this analogy in the incorrect direction, we are saying that we can infer how God the Father treats us by observing how earthly father’s treat their children.  Thus just as earthly fathers may know much better than their young children which actions are beneficial and which ones are not, God the Father knows better than us and influences things around us so that we will make better choices.  The problem with applying this logic is that we are in some sense creating God in our image, rather than the other way around.  Furthermore, every analogy breaks down at some point – so exactly how far do we carry this particular one? Can we also infer that God the Father abandons his children, as earthly fathers often do? Does he disappoint them with no good reason, as earthly fathers often do? What of fathers who treat their children with indifference or neglect? Are these qualities we can ascribe to God as well? Just how strong is this analogy?

Obviously I think there is something to the analogy – we do not call the first person of the Trinity “God the Father” for no reason, and the Bible itself clearly speaks in these terms (see also Matthew 7).  But I believe the analogy should generally run from God to man, rather than the other way around.  In other words, we should infer how to treat our children based on how God treats us, rather than inferring how God treats us (especially on a topic as diverse and intricate as theodicy) based on how we treat our children.  When we start to run the analogy backward, there are some pretty serious issues that come up.

These issues seem small, but they manifest themselves in devious ways when we make inferences about how God thinks/acts based on how we think/act.  It shows up when we superimpose our will on God’s will, when we take our interests and judge God’s actions on how well he promotes them, while ignoring or overlooking the possibility that God might be interested in, or doing, something else in the world (think Isaiah 55).  It happens when we write our stories in such a way that God is on “our side” to the exclusion of other people.  Do we really think that God chooses sides?

The functional upshot of all of this is that we don’t always know what God is doing, and we have to accept the idea that he isn’t always doing what we think he should be.  As God promises to usher in “a new heaven and a new earth”, we need to be aware of the fact that God’s work might mean we lose the privileged position we occupy in the current world. Unfortunately, we often find it easy to write our view of God’s agenda as if it is pretty much identical to our own, limited, personal agenda. When we do this, we begin to measure God’s faithfulness in terms of whether or not he is serving our own interests, rather than by looking at events in the world and engaging in the process of discerning what God is doing, and how we can participate in that.

The first view prays for God to “bless us”, while the second view asks for God to reveal to us where is working, believing that God’s work is blessed already.

So in a practical sense, we return to the question, “What criteria do I use to judge whether God is working?” If my standard amounts to me getting a raise at work, the kids doing great in school, my 401k not losing value, attendance at my church generally trending upward, and Republican candidates winning political races, I would suggest that I’m thinking in terms of the first view rather than the second, and that I’m making “God’s agenda” into my agenda, rather than the other way around.

The problems involved in thinking about evangelism as a practice, therefore, are not only strategic but ultimately theological. The argument of this book is that the prevailing model of practical reasoning employed to a great extent by contemporary evangelism is inadequate to the Christian faith, ecclesiologically bankrupt, morally vacuous, and tyrannized by a means-end causality that is eschatologically hopeless insofar as it externalizes the means from the end. The way this usually works is that once the aim of evangelism is asserted in terms of converting, initiating, recruiting, or persuading, strategies are developed and implemented, typically on the basis of their strictly utilitarian value in reaching that end.  Both the “end” and the “means” then tyrannize the church as it is forced to forget itself and the One whom it follows in the name of both the end and the means. In the process, the church’s fundamental calling to bear faithful witness is edged out in favor of what “works.” Moreover, we who have been made witnesses by the Holy Spirit fail to be guided in our practice by Spirit-formed virtues such as love, hope, faith, presence, patience, humility and courage, for “witness” has now been hijacked by an evangelism that turns it into a tool employed as a means to something else – namely the converting or initiating of other persons. Evangelism finds it all too easy to jump ahead to some imagined result and then to adjust the meaning of witness in accordance with what will “work” to achieve that result.  It forgets that Christian witnesses engage in the practice of evangelism for no other reason than that they have been made witnesses.

May you treat every person with grace
knowing at one time we all lived
under the dominion of sin.

And may you remember the Lord Jesus Christ,
born of the Virgin Mary,
who entered into the world of suffering,
whose death and resurrection declares to all creation
that suffering will not be the last word.

May you know God,
not by his title,
but by his name,
the I will be who I will be,
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

And may he also be your God
watching over your ways
as you walk in his footsteps.

We pray that our lives would be planted near you – that we would send our roots deep into your word and your life, that we would draw nourishment from you, and that with the life you give we would in turn provide shelter and comfort and blessing to whoever comes under our branches.

We pray that we would not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor abide in the house of hte scornful, but that our delight would be in you, in your truth, in your grace, now and forevermore.

May you sing of God’s love and justice,
a messenger of the stories
of his deliverance in your life.

And may you search for faithful companions
as you journey through life
partners in joy and sorrow
blessings from God
for those who trust in Him.

Before starting, I think it’s only fair to say that I’m a stakeholder in this debate on multiple levels. I’m a Christian, but more than that I’ve been actively involved in university ministry for over 10 years. In that time I’ve dealt with close to 1,500 students as a speaker, class teacher, and counselor. I’m as concerned about the exodus of teens as much as anyone else, but unlike the New Apologists, I have a very different perspective on why it is occurring, and consequently what the solution should be. I think it’s also important to say that I recognize that the men who are crisscrossing the country on speaking tours do genuinely believe they are doing good, that their work is a “ministry”, and that ultimately they are doing God’s work, saving people from the evils of liberalism. Unfortunately, my own experience suggests that Christian Apologetics – specifically Christian Apologetics as it is currently practiced – misses the mark in several important areas, and indeed causes more harm than good.

The New Christian Apologists read the absence of the 18-35 demographic in our churches to be a symptom of good, biblically based, young Christians from strong families meeting activist, staunchly atheist, liberal professors in their university classrooms, who pervert the truth of God and lie to our children.  The problem, then, is one of information – if we can supply our children (and specifically those in college and those about to be in college) with “good” information about how they can counter the “bad” information they are receiving or are about to receive, then we can really make a difference in the problem of our teens leaving the church in droves. There are a wide variety of takes on what this information should look like, and my purpose here is not to debate any of them head on. I agree, in general, that we could and should do a much better job of inviting our youth into meaningful discussions about faith, and that we should try to get them to engage in the philosophical dialog with the world that Christianity has been involved in since the time of Paul. Where I disagree, however, is in the fundamental premise that this lack of information is the real cause of students rejecting Christianity. There are a lot of kids who leave the church, to be sure, but there is something else – something much more major – going on here, I suggest.

I’ve been doing this for a while, and the students I know personally who’ve walked away from churches numbers probably in the tens-of-dozens.  In that total number of cases, I can think of only a handful – four, perhaps – who cited traditional apologetic questions (“I don’t really believe there is a God / How can there be evil in the world if God is all good and all powerful, etc”) as even a contributing factor in their decision to walk away.  Furthermore those who have talked about apologetic questions as reasons of their rejection of the prototypical Evangelical Christian lifestyle tend to be very well read on the subject – people who’ve done a fairly extensive amount of searching on their own in both Christian and non-Christian apologetic literature, and ultimately find more doubt than faith. This in itself is a powerful topic, and one that I might tackle later, but is somewhat tangential for the purposes of the immediate discussion. I submit that the evidence, at least gathered from an informal survey of people who actually *are* leaving the church, suggests that apologetic questions (and by extension militantly godless, atheist professors) are not really the major reason the college students I’ve talked to are rejecting faith.

Fundamentally I think there are a number of reasons why those in the New Apologetics movement make this mistake, but I’ll take a quick shot at three of them.  First, when you hold a really good hammer, it’s easy to see every problem as a nail. A dozen years ago, decent apologetic literature was genuinely difficult to find, and in general I applaud the apologetic community for a much needed refresh of presentation in the past decade. Today, however, there exists a wealth of apologetic literature, classes, books, cd’s, tapes, videos, and radio shows, all of which have a vested commercial interest in trying to cast apologetics as the solution to as many problems as possible.  As a result, the New Apologetics movement seems to be, as we like to say in the engineering trade, a “solution in search of a problem”, and when you are a solution in search of a problem, almost any problem will do. I feel like in some ways I’m being a little unfair, so let me pause and say that Apologetics does actually do a lot to help some very real problems, and I think that in some sort of academic sense it’s important that it continues. The issue, I think, is when the apologetic movement tries to create problems that don’t really exist, especially when doing so seems to serve its own economic interest.

Second, the majority of people who actually participate in driving the movement are travelling speakers and authors, as opposed to ministers. It’s not terribly difficult to imagine why this is, given that ministers generally have more than enough on their plates without spending time writing apologetic literature. Where this gets us into trouble, I suggest, is that the people who write the literature and give the speeches and drive the movement in general have become disconnected from a day-to-day ministry context in a single place. I take it to be a simple fact of life is that ministry looks very different day in, day out on the ground than it does at 30,000 feet flying over Wichita, KS on the way to your next speaking engagement. This is not to say that speaking engagements can’t be an important part of ministries in a local context, but it is to say that you can never truly understand what the particular problems in a particular ministry in a particular place (say, Wichita) are unless you actually spend time there, and a good bit of time at that. In the same way, to actually understand the needs and problems of campus and youth pastors, in a very real sense you have to be one, rather than just interacting with them.  This disconnect shows up most strongly in that apologists spend most of their time talking *to* students and pastors instead of listening to and dialoging with them.  I’m certain that every apologist worth his or her salt can of course come up with students who they’ve touched, and people who they “listen to” to help change and guide their ministry – and I’m not at all suggesting these people don’t exist.  What I am suggesting is that the majority of contact those on the professional speaking circuit have listening to actual students and ministers is self-selecting at best, and causes them to seriously overstate the prevalence of students rejecting faith due to a lack of apologetic information. This isn’t a criticism of apologetics, per-se, as much as it is the crusader type of Christian ministry that has been prevalent ever since the Great Awakening. Revivals and crusades may draw really large crowds and look really good on paper, but they often leave a lot of wreckage in their wake that pastors on the ground have to deal with months and years after they’re gone. Regardless of their message, whether these revivals and crusades on balance are a greater source of harm or good is certainly up for debate in many circles, and with good reason.

Finally, the new apologetic movement has invested itself heavily in support of a particular, and in my mind problematic soteriology – namely that salvation hinges primarily on the intellectual acceptance of a few key propositions.  In other words, salvation itself is primarily a problem of not having good information, and as a result good apologetics equates to good evangelism, and vice versa. There are a lot of things we could say about this, but I think we’ll save them for a later post. Suffice it to say that this brand of soteriology causes a lot of practical problems when you try to apply it, which lead to some of the disconnects we’ll talk about later on.

So all of that being said, if the apologists really have missed the boat and there really is something else going on here, what is it?  After all, it’s not just enough to say that kids aren’t leaving for apologetic reasons unless you can provide a decent alternative that explains why they’re headed for the door in ever increasing numbers.

For my money, the single factor that I can point to in about 75% of cases when students reject faith is the cognitive dissonance they’ve felt for 18 or more years between the outward message they hear preached at church and the actions of church members, most importantly their parents and youth pastors.  From the time kids are young, they’re told that God should be the most important thing in their lives, but the see their parents place money, work, kids, family, church – almost everything above God. In Bible class they are taught about the fruits of the Spirit, and that a life where Jesus is Lord will have certain characteristics, but they observe the lives of “Christians” around them and note that instead of peace there is worry, instead of patience there is anger, instead of kindness there is bitterness, instead of gentleness there is callousness, and the list goes on.  By the time they are entering college and having to make their own decisions about what they want to do with their lives, they’ve been given so many conflicting messages about what it is supposed to mean to be a Christian and what it seems to mean in actual practice that they’re done with the whole thing, and ready to try something – anything else. The problem, in other words, is not bad apologetics, but bad praxis. It’s easy to find a good book on Christian apologetics, but it’s much harder to find a person in churches today who lives a just, merciful, humble, Christ-centered life – and at the end of the day the problem most college students have with Christianity is the lack of the second, rather than the lack of the first.

I’ve raised a lot of issues in this post that probably merit further discussion, and it’s already extremely long as is, but let me close for now with a final critique. The apologetic movement does try to draw people in and expose them to a brand of Christianity that is, at least on the surface, less anti-intellectual than Evangelical Christianity writ large. However, in practice it often suggests a very simplistic, almost black-and-white approach to answering what are, almost always, very nuanced questions. It doesn’t really seem honest, either in an intellectual or theological context, to provide half-page or 15 minute answers to something as serious and layered as the problem of evil in the world. Indeed, the presentation of such answers seems to represent a clear and present danger to honest discussion. As a result, I think it is absolutely critical to distinguish here between the idea of apologetics practiced well, and the actuality of apologetics practiced poorly – a distinction we will probably get into in subsequent posts.

May you know that God’s news is good news,
nourishing
true
even when people tell you it is not.

And when you encounter doubt,
may you strengthen your belief
guiding you in his perfect wisdom and counsel.

Above everything, we desire to belong to you – to cling to your right hand.  We declare that we have nothing in heaven but you, and desire you more than naything else on earth.

We pray all of these things in hte name of Jesus, who rules over all powers and principalities, now and forevermore.

May you walk with Him
speak with him
share your life and soul with Him
as a friend speaks with a friend.

And may you cling tightly to God
serving him both through good times and bad
giving him your joys and sorrows
opening your heart and mind
to the one who holds you in his hand.

We confess that many times the relationship we share is shallow – that we serve you out of selfishness, believing that you bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.

We look at Job and wonder whether we would react as he did – recognizing your Sovereign right to do what you wish, accepting both good and bad from your hand with grace.  We take comfort that you were pleased with Job, and declared that he spoke rightly of you – even in his bitter complaints, and we ask that you teach us to speak honestly with you – that we would approach your throne with honest and sincere hearts.

Teach us to seek your favor, and not only your blessing – your wisdom, and not only your rewards.  Make our lives so intertwined with you that we cannot let you go, even in the depths of despair – in the land of darkest shadow.

Remind us that wherever we are, even there your hand will guide us.

We come to you and speak only by the name and the power of Jesus Christ, our advocate and Lord, who reigns with you forever.

Amen.

Every time we visit them, I am challenged by the collision of reform and tradition, new and old. Several times on our most recent visit, Katie’s grandmother would mention, “We’re stuck in our deep ruts and we just keep going along!”, to which Katie’s grandfather would remind her, “Comfortable ruts.  Comfortable ruts.” For many things in their mind, the way things have always been is they way they should continue to be, and for many things that have changed, the best thing that could happen would be for things to go back to the way they were. I am exaggerating things a bit here to be sure (Katie’s grandmother knows more about Photoshop than my father, for instance), but I don’t think it’s terribly unfair to say that they are guardians of orthodoxy – trying as best they can to preserve both in memory and in practice “the way things were”, even though that struggle is becoming more and more difficult as the world sweeps around them.  Those of you who know me would probably agree that I’m someone who, at least for much of my life, has been primarily  disdainful of or subversive to traditions – particularly traditions which seem to serve little or no purpose.

I believe this conflict is particularly relevant as broader society continues to grapple with exactly what it means to be “post-modern”, and how (or if) we will return to some center of meaning. Obviously it has implications beyond the immediate conflict of culture to the constant clash between old and new, established and emerging. But in the end, the question comes down to this: how do we respond to change and tradition?

One option is to embrace and defend traditions at all costs. The problem with this view is that it’s easy to become like the village of Anatevka. As Tevye states:

Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years. Here in Anatevka we have traditions for everything… how to eat, how to sleep, even, how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered and always wear a little prayer shawl… This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition start? I’ll tell you – I don’t know. But it’s a tradition… Because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.

While traditions may help us keep our balance – like a fiddler on the roof – we run the risk of becoming so disconnected from our traditions that we have no idea why we practice them or where they come from. While some traditions may serve a useful purpose, it is essential that we possess at least some measure of understanding of the traditions origins and meaning. As we become more disconnected from traditions, we lose the ability to determine whether a particular tradition makes sense in a modern context. There’s an old story about a girl whose mother was teaching her to cook a ham.  The first step was to cut three inches off the end of the ham. When asked why, her mother responded that it was how she learned it from her mother. When the girl asked her grandmother, she replied, “I cut the ham off because the pan was too short.” I think all of us can think of things that we do “because it’s the way it’s always been done” that have outlived their usefulness. The unquestioned defense of tradition does not distinguish between traditions that are good and bad – it sees all traditions as important, valuable, and necessary to continue.

The other extreme tries to jettison all traditions. It starts with the assumption that all tradition is bad, and wants to throw the whole thing out and start over. That might be nice, assuming you could actually do it, but in reality we can never fully separate ourselves from the traditions we grew up with. Even if we try to throw away all the assumptions and “start fresh”, our perspective is still colored by our former practices. Furthermore, “old” traditions are usually jettisoned only to be replaced by “new” traditions that look suspiciously similar to the old ones, with a few minor changes. When we attempt to divorce ourselves from our traditions and history, the end result looks suspiciously like those who blindly defend tradition – we are disconnected from our traditions even though we still practice them.

My belief is that one of the primary tasks of each generation is to reevaluate and reinterpret traditions in a new context – to see which traditions serve a valuable purpose, and which traditions simply don’t make sense anymore. Above all, we must remain connected to the traditions we practice, instead of blindly continuing a practice we don’t understand. In many ways, this makes the job of the older generation even more difficult, as they are responsible for not only passing on traditions, but allowing things that were of vital importance to them to fade away. Furthermore, the communication of traditions cannot simply be reduced to “That’s the way we’ve always done it”, but requires patience and understanding. Above all, however, it requires open and honest communication between young and old, and a large amount of patience on both sides.

My wife’s grandparents have seen the world change around them, and while I think they mourn the passing of some things, I think they also realize that for the most part progress has been a good thing. There are new practices and new technologies they choose not to embrace, but they also understand that they cannot stop change, and are in many ways determined to be teachers of the things that were. In many ways it makes me wonder: What things will we value and strive to pass on? What novel innovations will become our cherished traditions? What will we cling to while the world changes around us? Can we preserve any of what we’ve learned from our parents and grandparents, or will their stories and experiences die with us? Someday we too will live in a world that looks very different from the one we see now. How will we change, and how will we share our stories with those who come after?

Perhaps it’s not surprising that in this year of economic downturn there would be more people who are going hungry, but the numbers aren’t that rosy, even during the boom times. This year, however, 14.5% of American households translates into roughly 44 million people -  approximately the number of people living in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas put together. The summary statistics are convicting: food insecurity happens in every region, every type of family unit, and even across a range of incomes.

It is a silent tragedy.

And that, really, is the  real tragedy to me: the unreported and unappreciated nature of the problem. The people who represent us politically are in arms about reform which will grand Health Care to 30 million new individuals – a worthy goal – but a less expensive and perhaps more basic and critical problem that affects more people isn’t even talked about. What if we spent 14.5% of the proposed cost of health care reform on programs to provide decent food to those in need?

Many of us don’t want to confront the reality that people in our country – people in our states and in our cities – are going hungry when we spend $4 dollars on a cup of coffee and $7 on a hamburger. There are times when some of us will spend more in one meal than the USDA “thrifty food plan” allots for a week (about 37 dollars). In fact many of us would find it difficult, if not impossible, to eat for a whole week on $37.

We like to call ourselves the greatest country in the world – the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are also, it seems, the home of the hungry.

And may you find the mercy and grace of Christ
delivered to you
given freely to those who earnestly seek him.

One of the louder and more annoying cars of the weekend…

The Baja Bug was one of the cars we could pass on the track.

Pace car? Try pace bus.

A 2002 Mini Cooper for $500 bucks? The judges didn’t think so either, and gave them 1355 penalty laps.

The Gremlin, in one of its rare track appearances.

This guy didn’t make it until the drop of the green flag before breaking down.

This guy didn’t even make it on the track.

Leading in the corner.  Yeah, that roll is normal.

Look at it go!

Plenty of questionable driving during the weekend. I’ll be honest – this guy locked up the breaks every lap.

Don’t laugh at the old BMW.  It was fast.  Really fast.

Watching the cars come down the front straight.

See that motion blur?

Yeah… who says these cars are slow?

Fueling and driver changes.

Might give you an idea of how much the car is worth…

The Gremlin was black flagged for being too slow…

You do not want to see a puddle under your car.

You don’t want to see grass in your grill either.

What have we here?

Hot.

Really hot.

Yeah… I want one.

Towing is earth friendly? Really?

May you be a voice of change
crying in the desert
speaking for those who have no voice.

And though there are no grapes on the vines
and no cattle in the fields
may we be a people
who beat swords to plowshares
who rejoice in the Lord
who are joyful in the God of salvation.

Sexy.

William pop riveted some decorations onto the car…

We paid $150 yesterday to run about 3 laps. Given what we fixed, money well spent.

You know you want one.

Everyone loves our Cosmic wheels.  Too bad we only have 3.

This was my contribution.

The office.

The Gremlin next to us went all German… Should have done that on the engine…

This is the symbol for teams who bribe the judges.  We’re probably the only team with a zero-lap penalty who doesn’t have one of these.

Team WT Motorsports.

Morning driver’s meeting.

Pit row. You can hot pit here (if you take yourself too seriously) or you can bring it back to the camping area and be a bit more relaxed.

Philip getting in the car.

A view from the inside.

Headed out to the track…

At the front of the pack on a blue Texas morning…

May he heal you -
restore your sight,
cure your sores
soothe your soul.

And as you encounter Jesus,
may your life be transformed
by his healing power -
a new creation in the service of heaven.

Additionally, I’ve created a new category for prayers. One of my goals this semester is to be far more intentional and thoughtful about prayer in general, and specifically any corporate prayers of which I’m a part.  It’s inconceivable to me that we are intolerant of mediocrity in almost every area except in how we talk to God.  I don’t think I can fix that in one semester, but at least on my part I’d like to do what I can.

I keep saying that life may slow down sometime, but it doesn’t seem to. There are certainly worse alternatives, but it makes keeping up with the blog somewhat difficult sometimes. Hopefully I’ll have time to work on a few of the drafts sitting in the queue soon, but for now, I’ll be content to try and keep up with transcription, and see where we go from there.