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From Faith to Follow

August 24, 2012 in Church with 37 Comments

I keep coming back to Confessions of Faith. As I dance around this (repeatedly) there’s one major thing I’m trying go get to: we as Christians have regularly created the impression that being a Christian is defined by thinking/believing the right things.

Thinking the right things isn’t bad. At some level it’s necessary. But I don’t want to say with, say, Philip Schaff, that belief in the content of the creeds is “necessary and sufficient” for salvation.

So what if our recitations of our shared narrative began with a phrase other than, “I believe,” a phrase that was was self-involving in a different way?

What if we recited together, instead, something like this?

I worship God the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who brought us up out of the house of bondage, the God who did not spare his own son but delivered him up for us all and raised him from the dead;

And I follow Jesus the Messiah, his only begotten son, who was anointed son of God by the Spirit, taught us with authority, healed the sick, fed the hungry, embraced the outcast and the sinner, cast out demons, beckoned us to follow, took up his cross, loved me and gave himself for me, reconciled the world to God, was raised from the dead and enthroned as Lord and King, and sent his followers and Spirit out into the world;

I receive the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ, given by Christ that I might walk in faithfulness, receive forgiveness, crucify the flesh with its passions and desires, and receive a share in Jesus’ own sonship, speak in God’s name, extend forgiveness, make peace among people, heal the sick, feed the hungry, embrace the outcast and sinner, cast out demons, take up the cross and pour myself out in self-giving love for the good of my neighbor, be raised to newness of life, and thus live and reign with him forever.

That’s what I’m getting at. There are lots of good, true things in our statements. But how do we talk and think about who we are such that we are always remembering that our statements are self-involving? Not merely involving of our minds, or our “hearts,” or our beliefs, but summoning us to participate in the narrative of the coming reign of God?

Thoughts?

Creating Space

August 16, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, blogging, Church with 56 Comments

Blosphere confessional: I rant here sometimes. More than that, some might say that I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about a couple issues that come around regularly.

To the point: I can be downright confrontational about the fact that the Bible is not inerrant or that the world as we know it is the result of an evolutionary process.

Why poke the hornet’s nest? (And, it is a hornet’s nest!)

Here’s the reason: one of the most important messages we communicate when we talk about our faith is what the borders are, outside of which one cannot be part of “us.” The ways people speak about inerrancy and creationism in some quarters communicates this: that if there is an error in the Bible or if we are here as a result of an evolutionary process then Christianity is not true.

When we communicate the either/or of Christianity or a Bible that has mistakes or of Christianity or a world that is 4.5 billion years old, we are setting up Christianity for an increasing number of people heading toward the door.

Here’s the script: if you tell a high school kid that it’s either inerrancy or bust, and this kid goes and takes an introduction to OT or introduction to NT course in seminary, this young adult is going to have to go for bust unless she can reconfigure her Christianity to make room for a Bible that is not, in fact inerrant.

Sometimes it doesn’t even take a class.

What if your student is particularly “diligent” (*ahem*) and decides while working at summer camp that during the time when the kids are off sailing during sailing class he will sit down and outline the last week of Jesus’ life according to the four Gospels? (I have a “friend” who did this once…)

That’s right: if your students actually read the Bible rather than just talking about what the Bible “is,” they will discover that the Bible that you have bundled up with Christianity does not exist. And then they will have to choose to either deny the actual content of the Bible, cling to the system they’ve been given, and stay Christian, OR to leave Christianity because the options before them are clear, OR to reconfigure their faith in light of the Bible we actually have.

This is an unbearable burden to place on Christ followers. It is a false choice to create a choice between inerrancy or atheism. In short, marrying inerrancy to Christianity is pastorally disastrous.

Why do I rant about “what the Bible is”? Mostly, because I want as many of us as possible to be creating more space within the world of faithful, Jesus-following Christianity for people to continue following Jesus whether or not they’ve found a mistake in the Bible.

Or, to put it another way: there is no reason that someone should feel as though their whole faith is called into question by Bart Ehrman’s NT Intro course.

I have a parallel agenda with evolution: I have read some about evolution. I’m no expert.

But what I do know is that by treating evolution as a scandal to the Christian faith we are creating choices for our college students that not only lead them to being unduly scandalized by their education, but also to fleeing from fields where they might be most useful to the world.

On the latter point: while we get our knickers in a wad about why evolution is demonic, I have an agnostic/atheistic friend who spends all day as an evolutionary biologist studying the evolution of cancer cells so as to help lay the groundwork for future more effective treatments.

He is making the world a better place (something I think God actually cares about) by helping push back the hold that a nefarious disease can take on our bodies (overcoming sickness–I think God cares about) by working in a field that we close off to our young people by raising all sorts of doubts about whether such activity is an active denial of the existence of God.

Seriously.

Here’s the deal: even if the most nuanced articulations of creationism over against evolution, or of what sorts of “creativity” we might find in the Bible could cohere with inerrancy, allow for the very things I’m talking about, most people will not hear the breadth of what is allowed in the nuance, and will hear, instead, the black and white either/or.

Part of my job as a biblical scholar who cares about the church is not simply to engaged in the finely nuanced positions of my colleagues, but the effects of what we say “on the ground.” And part of my calling as a seminary professor is to clear out the ground that people stand on from all the clutter that accumulates on any horizontal surface. In this case, it’s the clutter of what “chrisitanity” demands that Christianity does not, in fact, require.

So I rant about evolution. And I rave about inerrancy. In doing this, what I want to communicate is that you don’t have to make a choice between science and Christian faith or between history and Christian faith.

There are a lot of difficult choices you will have to make. I am not trying to make Christianity easy or conform it to the way of the world.

Instead, I am trying to clear out all this meaningless clutter so that we can hear, instead, that the real decision we have to make is this: “Will you lose your life for the sake of Jesus and the gospel? Will you take up your cross and follow?”

Ritual

August 15, 2012 in Church with 15 Comments

From Wayne Meeks:

Ritual is a condensed action that is intended to focus and concentrate meaning so that what is done in this nexus of sacred time and place ripples out onto all prior and subsequent doings, the doings that take place in the “profane” or outside world, resonating in those ordinary affairs with interpretive possibilities. When ritual is working, it helps us to make sense–a special kind of sense–of the other things we do. (The Origins of Christian Morality, 92)

This is a beautiful, succinct statement about ritual, one that has particular implications for sacraments in particular.

But, how do we do it? How do we allow the meaning of the moment of ritual to diffuse out into all of life?

The problem, it seems to me, is that we are too good at compartmentalizing. And, perhaps, the problem lies with those of us who are preachers and teachers, that we do not adequately infuse our rituals with meaning for them to have sufficient power to radiate out into the mundane.

What sorts of interpretive possibilities have rituals created for your world? What sorts of interpretive possibilities might our rituals create for us?

Us and Them?

August 7, 2012 in Church, Culture with 13 Comments

Genre note: this blog post is about suggestions and questions. It’s about thoughts clanging around that haven’t found a way to resolve in some sort of palatable harmony. Like real life, it’s a mess of happenings and thoughts and interpretations and rightness and wrongness.

Now that the caveat’s behind us…

I’ve been thinking about “us and them” a good bit this past week.

It started with a blog post: There Is No They. I was wrestling with my own tendency, more broadly observed in others as well, to distance myself from the folks to whom I’m joined.

No, there is no “they” that is the Evangelical church, for example, that’s doing it all wrong. It’s we. It’s I.

Sunday I gave a little talk on sexuality for a church group. Again, I found myself compelled to give a word of warning: despite our tendencies to adopt such a posture, there is no “they” who fail to live up to the gold standard in contrast to the “us” who attain to it.

When we gather to talk about sexual brokenness and sin, there is no “they” about whom we are speaking. We are all people whose lives are touched in every realm by some measure of brokenness and shame, failure and guilt. This includes our sexuality. And it includes even people who have only ever had sex with the one spouse to whom they’ve ever been married.

When we talk as Christians about homosexuality, there is no “they” about whom we are speaking. We are speaking about us, Christians, among whose number and in whose body are gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgendered sisters(-)and(-)brothers.

No, there is no “they” that are the sexual failures in contrast to the “we” who have our stuff all together.

Yesterday in the car a conversation with my seven-year-old went something like this:

    “Who’s more important, Jesus or God?”

    “Well, Jesus shows us how much God loves us. Like that Bible verse we sing about.”

    [Insert the singing of John 3:16 here.]

    “Did Oma believe in God?”

    “Yes.”

    “She died.”

    “Well, this is die in a different sense. John’s talking about life as knowing God forever.”

    “So people who don’t believe won’t get to go to heaven and know God forever?”

What kind of “us” are we talking about, what kind of “them” do I want my 7-year-old to carry in mind?

I started thinking about how people act in the world–not just the love God part, but the love neighbor part. If only “they” lived down to the lists of vices that pepper the pages of the Bible, and if only “we” lived up to the lists of Spirit-empowered virtues.

In the middle of all this messifying of the world, I was driving home today and debriefing the Mountain Goats concert I missed by being in Cambridge at the end of June. John Darnielle sang 1 Samuel 15:23:

The song lyrics sit in tantalizing disjunction to 1 Samuel 15:23. A crystal healer who, as AKMA put it,

is not a maleficent enchanter dedicated to a degraded deity, nor a mere charlatan; he provides clothing and shelter for outcasts, and heals the sick. His account of himself sounds more like the description of the works of the Messiah in Matthew 11:1-6, on the basis of which one might (biblically) say regarding the healer, “Blessed is whoever takes no offence at him.”(“‘What These Cryptic Symbols Mean’”, BibInterp 19 (2011): 124

“They” are sometimes more “us” than we are–a surprise reflected in the scene of Matt 25 as much as anywhere. “Lord, lord, whenever did we?” “Lord, lord, whenever did we not?”

“Us and them” can be a dangerous and self-serving weapon. For the most part, even if not always, we might want to put it away before someone gets hurt.

Gleanings in Pacifism

July 24, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 24 Comments

I have a couple of thoughts about pacifism. The first is my own:

I am not a pacifist, but I do not believe that there is any killing which does not require forgiveness.

I would like to be a pacifist. But then there’s the real world. I hate living in this tension. I would like to be a pacifist, but I have an African American friend who won’t let me–because without that brutal war, nothing would have changed for the slaved.

I do believe that the Christian’s place in society is always to bear witness to another economy: an economy where defeat of the gravest powers of the world came by the defeat, rather than military victory, of a marginalized people’s prophet-king.

Within this story, I do not know that it is possible to ever claim that a war is just.

Claiming to be a part of this story, Christians must actively work for peace: blessed are the peacemakers. That should typify kingdom people.

Then sometimes you’ve got Russia and China keeping the Security Council from doing justice. What then?

Thought two. This time, a quote from Stanley Hauerwas:

I’m not a pacifist because I’m so nice. I’m a pacifist because I’m such a mean sonofabitch I need the community to keep me accountable.

Confessing the demands of the gospel story is not, at its best, to issue a claim that faithful expression of this religion is to be like I am. We confess the demands of the gospel story to set out the impossible, glorious vision of the Kingdom of God so that we can, as a people, work toward embodying that vision and seeing that vision reflected in the world.

I talk about the economy of the cross all the time–not because my life looks like one of self-denial, but because that’s how it should look in every relationship, every dollar spent, every minute blown in front of this computer screen.

Ok, so maybe that’s a good argument for being a pacifist after all…

Compelling

July 13, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 13 Comments

A story without the power to compel us against our will is a story not worth telling.

If the story of Jesus as God’s agent to rescue the world cannot compel us to think differently than we would on our own, to act differently than we would if left to our own devices, then it is not a story worth telling, much less claiming as our own.

This is a story that is not told to be claimed as our own so much as it is written to claim us as its own.

For all my concern that this story make sense in our context, for all my concern that we allow change over time, for all my concern that we allow the praxis of the church to develop in ways that are culturally sensitive, for all of these enculturating dynamics that I think are essential, if I do not find myself repeatedly confronted by a Jesus story that is still, at essence, profoundly Other, summoning me to a way of life that I would not have on my own, then I am not telling the Jesus story.

If I “like” everything in this story as I’m telling it, I’m not telling the Jesus story. I’m telling my story as though it were his.

Birth is Easier than Resurrection

July 11, 2012 in Church with 12 Comments

Given the choice, I’d rather plant a new church than attempt to revitalize an old one. Of course, no one’s giving me the choice, so what’s it matter?

But my thinking is this: it’s much easier to give birth to something new than to raise something old from the dead.

I know, I know–church planters are ready to kill me now, for saying that church planting is easy.

It’s not. I know that.

Giving birth isn’t easy. I’ve been in the L&D room twice. I’ve seen it.

But I’ve never seen anyone raised from the dead.

Ok, so old, declining churches aren’t actually dead.

Has this post run aground yet? Wait… don’t answer that.

But here’s what I’m getting at: the things that you need to place to create a growing, thriving church plant are insufficient for turning around a declining, dying church.

The hope that I’ve heard expressed on several occasions is that a young (associate) pastor will eventually come in, and being young, attract young families. With this new infusion of youth, the church is expected to gradually revitalize.

But, to steal a metaphor from Jesus, that’s an attempt to put new wine in old wineskins.

You can go down that road if you want, but it is going to mean that the old bursts apart.

In other words, it’s going to mean that the folks who have been around for decades are going to have to walk the way of the cross. They are going to have to agree that everything they think church just “is” is going to have to die for that new life to come ’round.

I’ve heard the anger in the voice of the long-time member recounting how the pews the people had given their lives for had been pulled out of the sanctuary.

I’ve received the blank stare when I’ve asked why adults have to be relegated to juice and cookies rather than wine and cheese.

I’ve endured the excruciating choir that one day will, no doubt, be filled with fine young voices! (Or not…)

A people with a history have a shared story that defines for them “what church is.” To rewrite that story for a new generation, to embrace a people who will so rethink things that “church” won’t even be the word that comes to mind for some–this is the challenge of revitalization.

Someone who wants to revitalize has to discover how to lead a people through a holistic process of reimagining what church is from the ground up, from the inside out.

“Can these bones live?”

“You know, o Lord.”

“Prophesy to the wind!”

Yes, indeed, prophesy. And raise these bones from the dead.

My Complements…

July 10, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 10 Comments

The good folks at Christians for Biblical Equality provided me with a copy of N. T. Wright’s 2004 talk, “Biblical Basis for Women’s Service in the Church.”

Wright introduces his talk by making some observations as an “outsider” to the American Evangelical way of framing the issue and holding the debate. In particular, Wright hesitates about the language we’ve adopted to demarcate our “sides.”

“Complement is too good a word to concede to the other side.”

That was the heart of his concern.

Women should be admitted to the ministry, not on the grounds that in all things they are the same as men, but on the grounds that in many ways we evidence tendencies toward difference.

The presence of both is what makes the church stronger.

On Leaving Home

June 8, 2012 in Church, Culture with 9 Comments

An Open Letter to Jason Stellman, whom I’ve never met. Jason posted his “adios, PCA” letter on his blog last week.

Dear Jason,

Welcome to the other side of your PCA sojourn.

The step of leaving a denomination, especially when your seminary training, pastoral preparation, and ordination have all taken place within the same orbit of friends, is tremendously difficult.

You will never have the same kind of community again.

You will have other communities, and perhaps some that are even as rich, but you have bonded with folks through some of the most formative times of your theological education and career, and you can’t replace that.

You probably are losing some friends right now. Take courage–you’ll get some of them back after the wounds heal. But know this, too–many are gone forever. Hold them with open hands. Let them go. You’ll make new ones.

Many of our denominations create quite a strong identity for themselves, and many of us were part of tight-knit sub-groups within such worlds as well. This makes leaving all the more difficult.

But you’ll learn a new narrative. As many good things as are going on in that world, there is plenty of spiritual vitality to be found beyond its pale. Take courage, you’ll find yourself nourished in your new communities. It may take time, but you will find like-minded people who will help you grow in your walk with Christ and be fellow contenders with you for the Kingdom.

You’re leaving the PCA, in part, because you are seeing that the NT won’t let us separate our faith from our action. I hope you’ll learn quickly that this also means that our standard of judging our communities has much more to do with embodying the cross of Christ than the many other markers that have become popular (especially in Protestantism).

Make sure to embody this way of the cross in your responses to your detractors. I know they are many, from your blog’s comments.

Finally, as you experience the wounds of those you thought were friends, you might realize that you were a wounder of those who are friends and brothers. I’d encourage you to take this time to think about folks whom you may have wounded in your Reformed zeal–I can think of at least one by name.

I pray that as you go from the PCA, you will go in peace, as a man of peace, and find those who will receive you with the same.

Upcoming Speaking Gigs: NC & U.K.

May 31, 2012 in Church, Conferences with 11 Comments

Over the next month or so I’m going to be putting in a few miles in the air and on land. In case you’re interested, here are some places I’ll be–I hope to catch up with some of you there:

**UPDATE**

This Sunday, June 3, I will be leading the conversation at Emmaus Way in Durham. The service runs from 5:00-6:30 p.m. Hope to see some of you there.

This weekend we’re heading to NC for a family wedding, which is opening up an opportunity for me to preach in the church my mom grew up in and which she now serves as music minister:

Sunday, May 27, Oakhurst Baptist Church, in Charlotte (5037 Monroe Road – Charlotte, NC).

Then…

Tuesday, May 29, Emerging Church Discussion Group, meeting at the Inclusion Community House in Cornelius, NC. This will be less of a talk, more of a discussion.

I’m hoping to put something on the calendar for when I’m in Durham the following week. Stay tuned for that.

For those of you across the pond, I’ll be in London the first Sunday of July after a week of hard work, study, and pints in Cambridge:

Sunday July 1, Beechen Grove Baptist Church, Clarendon Road, Watford, Herts, U.K. (Confession, I actually have no idea what the various parts of that address mean. All I know is that my uncle is a pastor here and he’s invited me to preach while I’m in town!)

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