Let’s Get Practical

I am not big on “what if” as a bottom line. I went to a church once for several years where it seemed every sermon ended with a what-if appeal. “What if we all acted this way? What if every one of us prayed daily for such and such? What if everyone in the world was able to know…”

These fall for me in the category of daydreaming or  inspirational chain mail. “Pass this on – think of the difference it would make if everyone did this.” What-ifs are powerful in the right context. But on their own they leave you gazing into the sky, until you shake it off and get back to life.

What-ifs are probably more aptly put in the category of dreaming and visions. Can you imagine a future where… But on their own they have no power to take anyone anywhere. If I am trying to change your mind or inspire you to join up with something, I need to give you more than just a compelling vision. I need to suggest how we get there. If leadership is essentially all about getting someone from one place to another, it does only so much good to describe just how great the other place is. I need to show you the way there, and be heading there myself.

image courtesy of emplifya on deviantart.com

2010: The Year of No Blogging

Seriously: only 11 posts all year? What a lame-o blog you are reading. A person starts a blog because they have something to write about. When I started this blog I had something to write about. Actually, here’s something I never told you. When I started this blog what I wanted to write about was my thoughts on how to do church. It was the fall of 2007 and I had all sorts of thoughts about worship leading and prayer and getting small groups of people together and just doing life together, and I was thinking about how church didn’t need to be done the way church is always done in the tradition I come from. I had been in a volunteer or leadership role of some kind in a church or parachurch organization for around 12 years and I had a few things to say about what I thought it was all about.

However 2007 was also the year the last church I led in closed down, and other significant circumstances in my life all whirled into one mighty storm, and pretty soon what I had to say about church organization and service structures didn’t seem quite so important anymore. The topic on my mind was now this storm, and getting the hell out of it. And, you may have noticed, that pretty much occupied all my thinking and processing on this blog, with the occasional distraction, until this year.

Now the storm has passed (hurray), and, if I may extend the metaphor, I have looked around and noticed I seem to be in the middle of the ocean. Not all by myself, fortunately, but with family and friends around me and activities I am involved in. A pretty good life, I think. But I am in the middle of the ocean. I lost sight of land long ago and now when I’m not actively combating it I feel listless and without direction, and overall without much to say.

On the other hand I have three little impetuses (not to be confused with imps) who keep me busy and right now are careening around the room waiting for me to play with them. So for the next half hour at least, I have a direction.

The Song That’s Stuck in My Head #4

“How He Loves”
David Crowder* Band

David Crowder and his pals dare you not to smile when you see the cover of their forthcoming album, Church Music, a jab at the glitzy charm of religious television. “How He Loves”, the first single off the record is at once utterly top-of-your-lungs singable and awkwardly clunky. The verses are poetic in a high church hymn sort of way, with more creative rhyming and unexpected meters, and when I first heard them in a congregational singalong setting I found them darn well inaccessible. But it’s the singable chorus that gets lodged in my brain, another THTSIMH example of passionate melody carrying my day. And with that said, here’s a verse:

We are his portion and he is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes,
If his grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.
So heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss,
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest,
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets,
When I think about, the way…

If This Was Jesus

There are many folks out there who are dropping associations with Christianity as much as possible and using other labels or identifiers, like “follower of Jesus”. Lately I’ve been one of them. It’s a simple and surface-level way to dissociate myself from the evils and cultural crap associated with Christianity as a religion. Certain people and groups have made themselves de facto authorities and spokesmen in our culture for Christianity, the voice of the religion to the country. I can’t say I identify with many of them. Rush Limbaugh, the late Jerry Falwell, George W., Fred Phelps, and all those people who bomb clinics and pray at the gas pump. These are the more extreme, perhaps; these are also the most visible. Or Joel Osteen, The Pope, or any other national Christian figurehead for that matter. Also not folks whose faith I particularly identify with. Anyone heard of John Eldredge? Michael Spencer? Dave Schmelzer? These are people in the public sphere whom I would perhaps trust more to speak for my faith.

And yet as I was recently reminded, dissociation isn’t quite enough. Changing my language in order to say I am not like them is on the one hand only changing language, and on the other hand only an implied disapproval of them. It doesn’t do much beyond perhaps prompting someone to ask why. The Christian faith, as has been true in one form or another throughout its history, has been co-opted for other means by those who presume to represent it to the world while those who perhaps better represent the life of Jesus are silenced, or maybe just silent, and protest mostly by example if at all.

I had an exchange a while ago with a friend of mine who is an atheist, who himself was frustrated with this dynamic in modern American Christianity. “It is sad to me,” he said, “that people, who outnumber the enemy I think, give in rather than stand up for what is right. What I seldom see is public outcry by Christians against this co-opting. It is my hope that rather than run/hide/rename that more Christians would protest, fight, take back what they see as the tenets of the religion.”

He understands the personal and social values of Christianity, and agrees with many of them in principle, if not with the spiritual claims of the Bible. He might even agree with me when I say there is a need in the world for the sort of love and sacrificial lifestyle Jesus demonstrated. Not that the world needs conversion to Christendom – we’ve seen how that went over. But that there is something powerful and necessary in the life and teachings of Jesus that satisfies a need in humans at large.

It’s probably worth saying at this point that most churches and ministries and Christian communities would say this is what they are about – in one form or another demonstrating to the world the life of Jesus and teaching others to do the same. But is this what the church in general is known for, at least in Western culture? Are churches the places that people go looking for help and support in their deeper needs, and growth and empowerment in their lives? Perhaps those who grew up in the church. And many of them are looking elsewhere lately.

What message then are churches sending? What do people – again, people in Western culture on these terms – think of when they think of Christianity? Or Christians? Rush Limbaugh & co.? At the very least the general hypocrisy of Christianity is glaring. Those who get the most press seem typically to be the ones resisting, categorizing and generalizing, or worse, condemning, attacking, or murdering. “Are people fighting back against them?” My friend asked me. ” Is this a concern in the modern movements?” Actually, no. Not with any visibility at least. And of course there can be a fine line between genuinely protesting the hypocritical co-opting of the faith and becoming another internet watchdog calling foul at every latest outrage from someone who is clearly less Christian than them. That of course is not what I’m thinking of here. I’m thinking of the gap between what the church is and what it could be, to put it broadly.

Culturally modern churches have taken the cool and laid back approach. Come, have coffee, let’s hang out. Which I think is pretty helpful. People need Christians to put down their guns, so to speak. My friend had a different take on it though, which frankly floored me.

“The people at your church are marketers – they want to sell me, don’t just send me a postcard about music and a good time, send me one that says I am a Christian and I don’t kill doctors. Make it very pointed. I am a Christian and I am not so stupid I think Obama is an Islamic terrorist. I am a Christian and my Christ preached love, not shooting at holocaust museums. I am tired of getting happy feel good letters and postcards – Come visit us. I want to see where they stand. I want to see them take a stand.”

The church that would send his sort of postcard probably is not the church for everyone. Then again, who would that church attract? What kind of people would walk through the doors of a church that marketed themselves like that? Troublemakers, boat rockers, idealists, activists, and thinkers. Better still, what kind of Christians would speak of themselves that way? Or live like that?

Here’s one, for starters. A Georgia pastor who has offered to take in any and all unwanted infants. Are there others?

Why Men Hate Church

There’s a great post at notthereligioustype.org on Why Men Hate Church, on the the feminine slant of church models and the general discouragement of the masculinity of church men. My favorite quote:

“If only we men weren’t such junkies for risk and success, if only we weren’t so aggressive, if only we could reign in our sex drives, if only we were more like women, the world would be a much better place, right?”

photo credit: redbubble.com

Just a Little Song I Learned in Vacation Bible School

My five-year-old niece sang this one to me this evening, complete with fist-pumping choreography:

You’re powerful
You’re unshakable
You shake me
You break me
You make me again

And while my first reaction of course was to say something like, “Wow, good job, what a fun song” or some other affirming sort of schlock, my inner reaction was – Does she have any idea what she’s singing?? Do kids this age really get explained to them the humiliation and utter destruction that God brings into the lives of people who are serious about following him? Did her Vacation Bible School teachers really get into the personal cost of believing in someone who is powerful and unshakable, and who has an intentional hand in our lives? How if this is really what we believe, and not just something we say to certain people at certain times when it’s safe or socially acceptable, our lives are for all other purposes forfeit?

“OK children, once we’ve all affixed our flies and boils onto our felt Job figures, let’s recite our memory verse for the day. Repeat after me: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him…”

I don’t think I would have been any more appalled had she dropped an F-bomb and pumped her hips.

Is the Emergent Movement Only Temporary?

In this interesting post, pastors Dave Schmelzer and Charles Park propose that the emergent movement, while currently very effective and relevant, is by its nature reaching primarily a transient population that will eventually disappear, leaving emergent-oriented churches high and dry, so to speak. The observation is essentially that the emergent movement is most attractive to the currently high volume of people leaving the church, rather than the growing population of unchurched folks, with its message, “we’re not your father’s church”, or in other words, we do church more authentically, or with more relevance, or effectiveness, and so on. It stands to reason though that eventually this outflow will stabilize as people settle out into whatever church or unchurch they choose, and the population of folks looking for what emergents uniquely offer will more or less dry up.

Now I’m all for the emergent movement, and certainly gravitated in recent years toward the values it espouses and general culture of faith it promotes. And I’m certainly not up on all the nuances and distinctions of what the emergent movement is or isn’t (what’s emergent vs. emerging, for example?). So I’m not looking for predictions or pronouncements on this question. But criticism and bickering aside about the supposed validity or theological soundness of emergent’s aforementioned nuances and distinctions, this is the first sound proposition I’ve heard that emergent is a passing phase, though one currently seeming to hit its stride.

What do you think? Are Dave and Charles’ assessments omitting something important? Or is emergent the right thing for right now, but not so much for, say, 25 years from now?

The Spaghetti Monster Is Dead

It’s been four evers since I’ve posted. The blog is sort of like the dog these days: a great idea, and one with a whole lot of promise, but seriously, who’s got the time to put into it to make it a great thing. We had some friends visit last week and it was…it was great. I was going to say it was a breath of fresh air, which I suppose in many ways it was, but that would imply that the regular air is bad. Which it definitely is not. Really it was more like relearning how to enjoy the air. I processed some things that week, dug the whole seething ball of them up and got them out on the table in a way that I’ve been looking to do for years. Counselors, friends, mentors, pastors, churches have all taken their shot and missed. But who knew in an emotionally safe setting the simple act of recounting certain key events and forgiving certain key people in light of those events would be so transformative. Like pulling the bug out of Neo, or regurgitating a basketball. Ahhh, much better.

Content, Please

I just haven’t felt like writing much lately. Ever get that feeling, the one where you know you probably have things to say if you could just get your mind up in your brain for long enough to sort them out and write them down? And so once again I am stealing time to say that I must have something to say, somewhere.

One reason I don’t write is I just dont’ feel like it. It’s not a laziness thing, or that I have more meaningful things to be doing with my time. It’s a feeling thing. A worn-out, grumpy, frazzled, or other mind-zapping feeling that just makes me think, ugh. I suppose you could call that laziness at times. And I suppose writing isn’t the only aspect of my life that suffers from periods of time like this.

This period of time has included a week full of barfing, thankfully not by me, but unfortunately the barfing pretty much all occurred between the hours of 11pm and 4am on various nights throughout the week as some sort of icky-poo virus made its way through my progeny. And out the other end too in colorful and glorious fashion. At least it didn’t all hit while I was at work, leaving Amber on her own to hold bowls, wipe mouths and change barf clothes. Bleh. At one point I simply undid the four corners of Zeke’s fitted sheet and pulled everything on his bed up in one oversized bundle, including his pillow, and carried it down to the wash.

Ick. Enough thinking about that.

We went to the informational/get plugged in meeting for new attenders today at the church we’ve been attending for the last few months. It was, um, informational. We’ve been going to a small group for a little while now, which has been great, but have been looking for ways to get involved a little further as well as address some of our own nagging questions and frustrations, some of which I’ve recounted elsewhere on this blog. It’s a large church, so much so that we’re lucky if we see anyone we know on any given week who isn’t on stage. So figuring out the scope of what’s happening there, and which sorts of things would interest us or be relevant to our spiritual journey has been overwhelming. Not so much now I think. At the meeting various folks broke it down into categories corresponding with different points on a spiritual journey, and then gave us events to try out, or names of folks to contact to make a shot at a next step. Which was nice. And actually pretty darn helpful. We will see how these next steps pan out for us, but hey – it’s a start.

Twelve minutes until Max & Ruby is over and I get to wrestle the baby alligators into their PJ’s. Time to go do something productive like surf the web.

Christianity and the Arts

It was odd last night being in church and realizing I didn’t recognize any of the songs but one. It was a strange milestone, from being a worship leader whose responsibility in part meant knowing all the songs the church sings, and most of those by heart. And as an extension of that, knowing what other songs were out there, what was popular or likely to be familiar to folks at the service, and being generally familiar with the contemporary worship genre.

That part of it all I didn’t like so much.

See to be honest I’m not much of a fan of contemporary Christian music, much like I’m not a fan of contemporary Christian…anything…when it comes to the arts. Novels, films, e-cards, they all blend together to me in a mush of message-driven fluff. Generations have passed since anything respectable as art came from anyone respectable as a Christian – Tolkien, Eliot, Dostoevsky, for example. (I’m not going for impeccable lives on a political-theater-level of scrutiny here). Lately we get…Kirk Cameron and the Left Behind series. A smorgasbord of propaganda, where the art exists for the sake of the meaning, rather than meaning emerging from art created for its own sake.

Sorry for the rant…I didn’t set out to write one. Get me on certain subjects though…