Tag Archives: questions

changing my name

Posted on by
Reply

Maybe I shouldn’t, but I just did.  I changed the name of this blog.  Same address, new name.

The Original Name
When I first started blogging with WordPress, I began with a simple notion: that our approach as the church in planning for the future was MAD (mutually-assured destruction).  My argument (which I still believe) was that we all collude to maintain an ineffective status quo.  For some, the argument goes that we haven’t worked hard enough to transform the entire world to orthodoxy.  For others, it is attachment to a mid-20th Century approach to church to the exclusion of all other visions.  And for still others, it is simple ignorance to the simple truth that there are other options.  Our collusion may not be intentional, but it is still there.  So I called the blog “uncollusion”.

This spring, life for me changed.

The New Name
I did not retire.
I am still active in ministry.
I just don’t have a church home.

My position at the church vanished and suddenly I became a stay-at-home Dad while also discerning a call to new ministry with a new congregation.

The tradition tells me I shouldn’t write about this.  It also says that I should have a job before I look for one…and yet that ship has sailed.  The tradition wants me to at least pretend to be some power-player, glad-hander whose ministerial chops are unassailable.  We all know that’s bologna.  What we need is a bit more candor and a bit more introspection.  Because everything about transition ministry is terrifying and challenging for everyone involved and we pretend its not.

And yet, where can we find more hope than in a beginning; a new relationship?

I won’t write about my previous church, nor will I write about my daughter, who deserves her anonymity.  What I will discuss is my experience and the challenges I am facing.  So, for the foreseeable future, this is a blog about being a minister searching for ministry and a Dad stretched to the limit.

If you want to follow, I think things are about to get bumpy.

Go with the flow

Posted on by
Reply

We make it too easy on ourselves to forgive the avoidance of making difficult decisions.  We choose the status quo over the tremendous restructuring of our world and the expectations we have for society.  As Christians (and/or Jews) many of us should know better, especially in light of what Scripture tells us are GOD’s desires.  For atheists and agnostics, we do it despite the obvious rational opposition.

I was listening to a radio story about California, which is moving heavily from electricity produced by coal and natural gas and toward electricity produced by natural (greener) technologies like wind and solar.  This is good news!  Concerns arose over the less “dependable” nature of these energy producers–as long as we define “dependable” by on-demand predictability and not long-term sustainability.  Personally, I would prefer to live with a couple of brown-outs because its overcast, knowing that we’ll have electricity tomorrow.  But my Mom tells me I was good at delaying gratification when I was growing up.

The debate, which we say is about power sources, is really about something else: are we a people that must have instant gratification or are we a people that adapts and innovates?  Does sustainability take a back seat to instant comforts?

Many pundits bemoan the state of young people and the world we are living in–saying that we don’t know how to sacrifice and work hard.  As the argument goes, those of us in the Internet generations don’t know how to work and therefore are a burden (and failure) in the eyes of our parents.  And yet, it is the world that they have passed down to us that gives priority to strip-mining and devastating extraction methods to produce constant and consistent electricity from which we all benefit.

Because we all seem to want this, it means that we all need to decide to want something else: a tomorrow.

I’m reminded of an argument Theodore Hiebert makes in The Yahwist’s Landscape.  He argues that our typical understanding of humanity’s role to be good stewards of creation comes from the Priestly writer’s creation story (Genesis 1), which was written in the 500s BCE.  The earlier righter, know as the Yahwist (perhaps writing 500 years earlier), who is responsible for the creation story in Genesis 2-3, described a different responsibility.  Verse 23 says:

therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.

This image is not of steward, subduing creation, as if it is for humans to control the fate of the world.  Instead, it is the image of the farmer, charged with tilling the ground owned by someone else: GOD.

The difference in descriptions is subtle, but substantive.  The world’s resource aren’t ours to use and abuse–but to make grow responsively.  If you think about it, when the land grows week, the farmer gives it a chance to refresh before planting new seeds.  When water is needed for the land, humans don’t pretend to be gods, but we bring sufficient water to the land.

Our religious traditions are based, not on subduing the environment and bending it to our will–blowing off the tops of mountains or drilling for miles sideways under the ocean floor–but on doing enough for us and responding to the needs of the earth and people equally.

The coming energy wars will be a waste of time and life if we don’t first deal with appetite and the human need to dominate.  That is real root of the conflict.

the importance of Anne Rice’s quitting church

Posted on by
Reply

The news that celebrated novelist Anne Rice is quitting Christianity is no doubt be taken lightly by most of the world.  In the same way that I reject caring about the gossip of celebretries, it would be quite easy to dismiss this announcement.  And there might even be a few people out there that are thinking “I didn’t know Anne Rice was a Christian”.

Rice’s public conversion was a decade ago and she has written several books (that I haven’t read) on the subject, including a memoir.  Her wrestling with faith is actually a good story—one that should have been celebrated.

In distancing herself from Christianity, Rice stated:

“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian … It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”

She also made clear that to be a part of the group, she wouldn’t be “anti-gay,” “anti-feminist,” “anti-science” and “anti-Democrat.”

The couple of responses I’ve seen have been interesting.  An online friend responded by affirming the feelings and sentiments that Rice raises, but that being an insider is valuable in itself.  There’s a Facebook ad that Anne Rice should join the United Church of Christ, since they aren’t anti-gay, -feminist, -science, or -democrat.

As I reflect on this question, however, I wonder if we aren’t missing the meta-message.  Rice’s statement of quitting Christianity (but not her faith in Christ) isn’t simply a statement about her local congregation or  the Roman Catholic Church, but on the entire way we go about our business.  It is about her local church.  It is about the Romans.  It is about televangelists.  It is about cranky Mainliners.  It is about the people that blow up abortion clinics.  It is about the people that solicit and picket on the highway or at funerals (like this guy).  It is about Politicians using their religion for personal gain and moral pride like this one and this one.  It is about the guys who conflate political ideology with theology on a nightly basis.  To much of the country, this is being a Christian.  And to much more of the country, that is not what we want to be.

Compassion

Posted on by
Reply

Last week, while reflecting on Sunday’s gospel, often referred to as the parable of the ‘good’ Samaritan from Luke, I was handed an interesting article by Vernon K. Robbins entitled “The Sensory-Aesthetic Texture of the Compassionate Samaritan Parable in Luke 10″.  The article, steeped in a rhetorical criticism, was a revelation to me and a real joy to read–so much so that I wouldn’t dream of messing it up by trying to explain it.  But the article raised an interesting proposition about human nature that is too good to pass up.

Using the work of Bruce J. Malina and John J. Pilch, the author discusses the rhetorical nature of the body in Mediterranean storytelling.  That there are several “body zones” that represent how we interact with our world.  It goes something like this:

  1. Heart and Eyes: emotion-fused thought
  2. Mouth and Ears: self-expressive speech
  3. Hands and Feet: purposeful action

Each zone represents a different part of us.  I think we can definitely relate to these things.  For the first zone, when something is dear to us (in our heart), we will respond emotionally, right?  The same if we see something with our eyes.  The revolution of photojournalism transformed the way people began to see the world around us.  When we speak or hear things, we operate in analytical and self-expressive ways.  I’m thinking about the primacy of expressing oneself (as I’m doing now, though with my fingers) both directly (by mouth) or in response to another’s expression.  Lastly, most obvious is the connection between our limbs and action.  Even Paul uses this to describe Christians as the action of the church.

All this stuff is exciting and interesting in itself, but there was a small piece that tugged at me.  When we apply this understanding of body zones to what was happening in the parable, we can see the real effect of the actions.  The priest and the Levite, that pass the man by, the usual scapegoats in our telling of the story, are in the midst of a complex dance.  We commonly recognize that these two men (sorry ladies!) were trying to maintain their ritual purity and couldn’t touch this man.  But to do so, they needed to go nowhere near him.

They had to cross the road to avoid this man who was wounded.

Going back to the body zone idea, the third zone (hands and feet) is about action.  So these two didn’t simply not act, they acted intentionally to avoid this man.

And

In intentionally removing themselves from close proximity to this man who desperately needed help, they also removed themselves from having to see him, by walking on the other side of the road.  I can imagine these two, spotting this guy lying in the gutter, so they cross the street and hold a hand or folder up the side of the face to keep themselves from looking.

So these two not only remove themselves from the nearness of this man, but they do so (consciously or unconsciously) to avoid seeing him and therefore feeling something about him.

Thus, the real condemnation is not that these two failed to act, but that they acted in such a way as to avoid feeling compassion for a stranger.

Perhaps there is nothing more clear about Jesus’s understanding of his faith than breaking of purity laws to help those in need.  And perhaps it is our millstone too.  That we desire to avoid communing with those that might make us feel something.  That we might not want to feel shame or guilt or pity or insecurity or anything else in our relationship with others.

In what ways do you cross the street?  Who or what do you avoid seeing?  What would it mean to show the compassion this travelling stranger shows?

Theology as dialogue

Posted on by
Reply

I talk back to my TV.

I don’t do it regularly.  I also don’t expect my TV to respond.  I don’t expect the actors in my favorite shows to stop, mid-script, turn their heads toward me, and respond to my comments or anything.

But, from time-to-time, I need to respond.  Two shows seem to draw this out of me more than any other: Bones and House.  The reason I talk back is because of religion.

Both characters are supreme intellects; geniuses of the highest order; that are at the top of their respective fields.  And both have a deep ideological faith in rationality.  I respect the subtle differences between what each one believes.  But together, they represent the modernist obsession with a systematic ordering of things and justification of progressive research.  They also represent the atheist that is bent on using those methods to disprove the existence of God.

“Well played. Religion just killed another person."

This is where I start to get mad.

I don’t get mad because I can’t handle the criticism, because most of the time I think they are pretty much right (and have a great way of expressing their skepticism).  I get mad because nobody challenges them in the way that they challenge others.  So I do it.  Every time they make accusations about someone’s uncompromising devotion to a deity, I rebut that they mimic that devotion with an uncompromising devotion to reason.  They practice an atheistic fundamentalism that seems to abound with the “new atheists,” practicing an ideological tyranny and blindness that should humble these intellectual giants.

In truth, however, that isn’t enough to get me talking at the TV.  Well, maybe it’s enough, but not enough to get me to do so on a regular basis.  No, it requires someone going over the line: a character doing something oppressive and reprehensible.  Luckily both shows will do this with some regularity.

As much as I enjoy watching these characters, I have a really hard time with how they actually treat those that outwardly express their religious beliefs.  They both move from being intellectually condescending to emotionally abusive in a shallow attempt to prove that their world-view is correct.  Sure, Dr. House is an ass and Dr. Brennan is socially incompetent, but that doesn’t make their attempts to win arguments with unsuspecting random people any less abusive, and any more justifiable.  Every single time, their abusiveness is unprovoked—they are set off merely by the sight of a clerical collar or a passing reference to GOD.  In truth, they are both pitiful, ignorant characters who abuse and mistreat those they deem inferior like atheist Pharisees demanding strict adherence to a world view of their own devising.

Occasionally, they meet their match in someone that challenges them and rivals their ability to set the terms of the debate—the very means by which they routinely get the upper hand.  But neither show ever allows for true revelation—merely the occasional insight.  At the end of each episode, the character walks away, generally feeling justified in their pre-constructed world view with only the subtlest of new understanding.

An example of this is evidenced in an episode of House (“Wilson”) from last season in which Greg and James are looking for a donor for a patient.  When the donor’s next of kin shows apprehension at “defiling the body,” House simply diagnoses the woman as a religious nutcase, so when the phone call comes that the organ is no longer viable, he says to the woman: “Well played.  Religion just killed another person.”

The truth is that it religion didn’t killed anybody.  However, a better case can be made against that woman’s theology.  All the more troubling is that she didn’t appear to be confident in her decision theologically; her argument was that she just got reunited with the loved one.  Her not wanting to defile the body was religious custom tacked on as a response to the situation, while her main interest was the relationship that had been restored and was now severed.  In this way, you can’t blame an institution, but the individual.  It wasn’t her faith, but her assessment of what she should do.

This is the real reason that theology is important.  It isn’t about making long descriptions of the nature of the universe or even making excuses for a checkered past, but helping people find grace and redemption in a world that ought not be so easily defined.

In the above example, House’s a/theology and the woman’s weak theology argued while a dead person’s organ literally began to rot inside her body.  Just because House gets the last word doesn’t really mean he won.  Nobody won.

Theology as argument is the modernist idea that I hope we can rid ourselves of very, very quickly, so that we can explore the nature of God through collaboration.  This small epiphany came to me while reading Listening to Beliefs of Emerging Churches several years ago.  Written as something of a conversation, five church leaders were given the opportunity to write about emergent theology.  For her piece, Karen Ward chose to integrate the writings of people from her church, Church of the Apostles in Seattle.  She could have written page after page about her own beliefs, but instead, allowed the community to express what the community believes as a community.  This reminded me that theology isn’t something for experts, but for everyone, and it is incredibly important that we treat it as a community’s responsibility.  Otherwise “study of God” is relegated to argument and manipulation.  It is my belief that theology is at its best when it attempts to help people to authentically deal with and prepare us for tough questions, including organ donation.  In the above example, the woman does not find help in her theology—she is let down by it.  In this way, theology is something to be practiced and reflected upon regularly, not sited distantly.

Section 2: Judgment–Tearing Down Mansions

Posted on by
Reply

This is the second of a tw0-part series covering David Rudel’s Who Really Goes To Hell?—The Gospel You’ve Never Heard. Rudel looks at how Scripture (The Bible) and our understanding of GOD’s purpose and of Jesus (The Gospel) intersect and where they diverge. My introduction can be found here and Section 1 is here.

In the second segment of the book, called “Judgment—Tearing Down Mansions” (chapters 5-7), Rudel constructs an immediate confrontation with the popular understanding of Jesus as judgment eliminator.  As I described before, the author doesn’t deny the judgment (far from it), but argues that the standard evangelical equation (Faith in Jesus as God is the only means of entrance to the desired afterlife) is a distortion of Jesus’s actual teachings.

Laying it out in three parts, Rudel makes the case that standard evangelical dogma is a distortion of Scripture (5), what judgment seems to really be about (6), and what faith in God really looks like (7).

“A Chain of Broken Links”

In Chapter 5, Rudel eviscerates the familiar teachings about judgment on several grounds, but primarily on their Scriptural inconsistency.  Each argument seems to rely on a human understanding or desire for what the judgment should be and uses that to fill in the gaps in Scripture.

Some of these arguments include:

  1. God can’t tolerate the unrighteous in his presence
  2. A single sin makes us unrighteous
  3. The theory of atonement based in sin/guilt/debt
  4. Does sinful behavior stop being sinful when we are ‘saved’?
  5. Jesus is the only means of forgiveness
  6. Payment for sin is a cosmic struggle beyond our ability to contribute

Rudel’s response to each of these arguments is thorough, consistent, and Scriptural.  But in ‘tearing down mansions,’ he also reveals the potential.  If the author isn’t steeped in deconstruction, he seems to naturally understand its practice, because his taking the machinery apart reveals both the essence within and our own failure to recognize what we bring to it:

We have manufactured a Judgment that suits our psychological needs rather than God’s attributes and designs.  We have our eyes so much on immortality that we’ve made the Judgment the end of the game.  We see it as a wrap-up session where God’s sense of justice (or, rather, our understanding of that justice) must be served.  But the Judgment and its aftermath are not God’s opportunity to balance a budget of wrath at the end of the fiscal year.

“What Judgment Can We Expect?”

For Chapter 6, Rudel begins to piece together what the judgment might look like.  Using the same methodology he used to deconstruct the elements of our tradition that are inconsistent and irrational, the author makes use of a broad reading of Scripture that shows integrity to its historical roots and to the guiding theology of the Hebrew Scriptures.

What Rudel finds at the core of the judgment is what we might cast aside as the old argument about Faith vs. Works—the old Reformation chestnut that continues to divide people within today’s worship communities.  But Rudel gives it a different spin—which is entirely consistent with what scholars refer to as the “New Perspective on Paul”.  Though I won’t go into this in any detail, it should be noted that a great deal of Protestant thought, most especially for Evangelicals, is based in a tradition that dates to 16th Century rereading of Paul.  Rudel’s suggestions, though not anti-evangelical (far from it) would no doubt be taken hardest by these very groups, whose theological foundation is based there.  For a good discussion about the New Perspective, go to Scot McKnight’s blog, Jesus Creed, here.

To reconstruct judgment, Rudel uses several underlying currents in Scripture:

  1. God’s goal for humanity is to establish the Kingdom on earth—what Rudel refers to as New Jerusalem
  2. God’s ministry was extended beyond the reaches of Israel
  3. Jesus’s goal was to prepare the way for the Kingdom
  4. The primary concentration for followers should be on being Christ-like to one another

Each of these currents is heavily supported in Scripture and are a commonly-held understanding of how we work together.  There are other currents or teachings in Scripture that might be relevant to the conversation, but few have the volume of Scriptural support that these have.

Taking these currents, Rudel argues that Faith vs. Works is a false dichotomy, since Scripture strongly suggests that judgment has to do with what we do and how God judges us.  The Scriptural support leads toward God’s judgment of us being heavily based on how we judge others.

Rudel explains that he sees in Scripture an ongoing search for the Kingdom of God on earth, as represented by a New Jerusalem.  It also describes the way people would behave in this world.  So here’s his thesis on judgment:

Jesus chooses citizens for New Jerusalem whose history demonstrates they will contribute to its purpose.  All others are left outside (in hell).

Faith…and Faithfulness

The seventh chapter is an exploration about what Jesus seems to mean when using the words ‘faith’ and ‘believe.’

He writes:

[Jesus] mocks the Pharisees by explaining how their actions make no sense in light of their supposed beliefs about God.  He describes incongruities between what they do and what they claim to believe.  He points out it is incompatible for them to worry about what they will eat tomorrow if they believe God is loving, knows their plights, and cares for them.  Rather than store up savings against unseen future calamity, they should be aiding those in need today. He notes the hypocrisy of expecting long, loud prayers to a God who already knows their needs, and exposes the foolishness of neglecting to utilize God’s gifts for good.

What Rudel is dancing around is this tension in our faith—not between belief and actions—but between our actions and our nature.  For many of us, there is no tension—at least, not as we can see it.  We think that actions are actions and beliefs are beliefs and we go about our normal business as if there are easily divided walls between the world and us.  We say “I believe in God…” (and mean it), but seem to demonstrate little of that faithfulness in our personal lives.  Or we may formalize our corporate faithfulness in large demonstrations of generosity while ignoring the person that walks through our doors.

If we were better Christians, every action would bring the Kingdom closer, every action would extend beyond our comfortable boundaries, every action would help our neighbors get ready for the Kingdom’s arrival, and every action would help the people around us see Christ.

In the end, this is the work upon which God will judge us.

The final section of the book are in-depth looks at different parts of what Rudel has been arguing.  I’ve changed my mind and decided to address each one separately.  I will try to get to at least two of the four this week.  The titles include:

  1. What is The Gospel Anyway?
  2. God Surprises Everyone
  3. Making Sense of Paul
  4. Atonement Through Merit

EDITED: Changed the intro to reflect the new reality: I’m not planning on writing a third part.  That, and I listed this as the second “first” part.

The Gospel You’ve Never Heard

Posted on by
1

I’ve just started reading Who Really Goes to Hell–The Gospel You’ve Never Heard: What a Protestant Bible written by Jews says about God’s work through Christ by David I. Rudel.  An intriguing title in itself but the caption underneath it made me all the more interested: “(A book for those in the church and those offended by it)”.  Now that’s what I call a hot sell!

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll cover what strikes me most about the book, and some the insights that are most compelling.  Today, I just want to write a few words about what it is and what it is not.

This book is scholarly, but not written by a scholar.  The author is a math teacher.  He has a deep faith, liberal arts training, and brings a fresh perspective to Biblical Studies.  He, however, doesn’t have a PhD in Old or New Testament studies.  But this, in itself actually serves to his benefit, because he brings a real intensity to the text.  When he has a point to make (and he has many), he drives to it with direct examples, drawing from all over the Bible.  He also isn’t writing from an academic perspective, but an Evangelical Christian one.  This makes his arguments less about how they fit alongside Crossan’s or Ehrman’s, but how they fit against the preacher down the street.  And it is precisely this difference that allows Rudel to get to his primary point: the gospel proclaimed in most churches on Sunday morning (what he calls the “modern gospel”) is incompatible with the teachings of Jesus as depicted in the gospels.

If you want to read it for yourself, you can order it here, get a free ebook for your nook here, or go to the author’s page and download it for free.

into the wild

Posted on by
4

I just got back from a pre-Lenten retreat for presbyters of the Diocese of Atlanta.  The theme was about pastoring in anxious times, and the format was organized around five meditations with free time for reflection or rest.  It was a great experience and had me thinking from the moment we arrived.

To be fair, I’m not usually one that wants to wander off and think about what I’ve just heard, I want to engage it with other people or with action.  I either want to go with some friends to a bar to talk or write a blog post or do a charcoal response as if I were in Godly Play for adults.  This is how I prefer to respond to new thinking.

It was in this environment that I was becoming more obsessed with what connects the people in the room.  What is it that we as presbyters (priests) are?  The base and easy response to this is rehearsed and practiced so readily.  Every one of us had to give a defense of our aspirations at some point prior to ordination.  But what I kept wondering about was not a ‘what do we do in anxious times’ or even a ‘who are we when the times get anxious’, but a presupposition that we are anxious people in an anxious community and what does it mean to be leader in that system.

So then I though back to the previous Thursday, and Fresh Start.  We watched the video about leadership in anxious times by Edwin Friedman—a video I had seen four or five times before—but the synchronicity of these concepts was swimming around my head.  And today I watched this video of Peter Rollins interviewed by Spencer Burke:

And as I was watching, I was profoundly affected by Rollins’ depiction of Paul and his ministry: that we should be people of the Resurrection and that the Resurrection is about “dying, being reborn, transformed”; that our lives lived must be different.  And what all of these things are telling me and pushing me to understand is something I can’t say that I understood before: we must allow ourselves to be transformed.

I know this isn’t rocket science, but living transformed is different than assenting to the principle that we are transformed by sacramental rituals, such as baptism and ordination.  I always got that I had to live differently as a Christian, and I do.  I always got that I had to live differently as a priest, and I do.  And yet, what is always at tension for me as a Christian and as a priest is that the world no longer trusts that difference, nor responds to that difference with reverence or deference.  So that difference has become so codified and defined that it is not truly different, or understood as different, but as an ‘alternative lifestyle’.  And in some ways, an alternative lifestyle that is increasingly uncomfortable with letting go of being the dominant lifestyle.

So I lived with this tension and this difference and adjusted to what seems like a domesticated Gospel so as to live the same domesticated lifestyle that is expected of clergy serving a domesticated congregation in a domesticated church.  And I have seen myself as being restricted by all of this domestication and wanting and dreaming and internally screaming for the people to become wild for the gospel and to unleash it to transform our lives and to open the windows for the Spirit to descend upon us like a dove.  And the reality is that I thought that anyone who is born is able to grow wild and that, in baptism, I was given my invitation to grow wild, and that all of the people everywhere can grow wild—but when I put that collar around my neck, the Inherited Church had me, bound and domesticated.  My eyes would blur as the wild outdoors were living without me.  But there is no leash.  The yard is not fenced.  I’m sitting in the front yard because I’m afraid of the wildness and the domesticated life is secure.

Perhaps Paul does serve as the wise guide of wildness.  His ministry was clearly unrestrained.  His emotive style was occasionally disconcerting but always engaging and reverent to the people and place that he was at.  He embodied rebelliousness and even today represents the radical and the servant at their best and most authentic.  This is the wild.

Finding the conservative voice

Posted on by
2

“The Conservative voice has left the church.” This is the statement so often repeated throughout the coverage of the 76th General Convention of The Episcopal Church.

As the argument goes, since 2003, virtually all of the conservatives have left and all that remains are a bunch of crazy liberals and a few loan voices crying out in the wilderness. If this were even remotely true, it wouldn’t be so laughable.

Somewhere between 7 and 10% of Episcopalians left the church in the last six years. That includes the attempted mass exodus of several dioceses. Let me now rerun the phrase: The conservative voice has left the church. Let’s do the math. 10 + X = 100%.  So the conservative voice was only 10% of the church? Another phrase that was tossed around: “most of the conservatives have left.” Most implies the majority, so again using the upper maximum 10%, then as of 2002, conservatives accounted for 19% of the church. In other words, simple arithamatic discredits this argument wholesale.

So why have so few journalists done the math? And why is “most of the conservatives have left” a convenient excuse?

The inherent trouble has nothing to do with a ‘conservative voice’ or numbers of conservatives in our midst. It is with our understanding of who “owns” the church. In The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle calls this the greatest argument in any reformation era: the question of authority. But in our American, brutish and thuggish understanding of authority, the more appropriate word is ownership. This is the phrasing the ‘conservative voice’ of The Living Church uses when it bemoans the departure of “the orthodox”. Othodoxy (literally, ‘right belief’) has at its core, not only an implied certainty, but a strict sense of ownership, as in “we hold the right belief and therefore must lead the unorthodox”. When one claims that they posses ‘right belief,’ it inherently implies that differing theologies are wrong, and by small extension, heretical. This is the very volley lobbed at The Episcopal Church with regularity over those 6 years. It should read in the news as “small splinter group believes The Episcopal Church is run by a vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.”

Believe me, conservatives haven’t left the church. A few political ideologues have for sure. But walk into a rural or suburban Episcopal church and take a random sampling, asking these questions:

  1. If money were no object, what would you want done to your church?
  2. If your church burned to the ground, and you had millions of dollars to work with, what would you do?

You would no doubt get a wide variety of answers, especially in college towns and in areas of dramatic change. But for most Christians, and especially Episcopalians, I think the responses would look a lot like this:

1.  If money were no object, what would you want done to your church?

  • “Redo the roof.”
  • “Fix the windows”
  • “Install that elevator we’ve been putting off.”
  • “Go crazy: get all new carpeting, restain the pews, and buy some brand new linens!”
  • “Buy new choir robes; we’ve had these for 10 years!”
  • etc.

2. If your church burned to the ground, and you had millions of dollars to work with, what would you do?

  • “Rebuild it.”
  • “Make a facility that meets our current needs.”
  • “Tear down the Parish Hall, that’s what needs to be redone!”

Of course I’ve prejudiced the responses.  I also know that the second question would get people to think outside the box, especially in terms of using the money to invest in mission, not a new church building.  But what I don’t expect from either question is a truly radical (or liberal) response: let’s build something new.  All of these responses represent the ‘conservative voice’ in the church, because even when the freedom to change for the better is given, the choice is to live with, fix, or replace.

If I were given unlimited funds, I would salvage a few beautiful things from this church, tear it down, and start anew, not only shaping it to our present needs, but trying to anticipate the needs of the future.  This includes a worship space that allows for a liturgical team that is disabled, a facility that is flexible and can accommodate significant changes in attendance, and allows us to express the theology we profess.    That’s a pretty liberal voice.

Go ahead and ask the people at your church this Sunday those two questions.  I am utterly confident that the ‘conservative voice’ is alive and well.  I dare you to prove me wrong!

NOTES and LINKS:

I have long-argued that we have over-simplified our understanding of liberalism and conservatism, especially since the 1990s, when sexual ethics became not only the center, but the exclusive province of the political debate.  The church has similarly fallen prey to this misunderstanding of these classic terms.

One of the most misunderstood notions of the church’s role in the liberal/conservative debate is to occupy “the middle”.  This is often interpreted narrowly to mean abstaining from debate or by not taking a stand for an issue that is perceived as liberal or conservative.  This position, is, in its practical application, conservative.  For instance in voting, the threshold requires 51% of quorum to vote YES.  So not casting a ballot, leaving the room after quorum is established, or voting to abstain all count as voting NO.  This applies the conservative ideology of maintaining the status quo.  For more thoughts on the moderate position, visit here.

Lastly, I have written many wonkish blog posts about this subject on my other (political) blog.  If you want to read extensively my understanding of political affiliations, visit this sequence here and here.

Varying expressions of church

Posted on by
Reply

One of the most amazing things to me is the varying expressions of church that there are already.  We allow in our minds the thought that Catholics and Baptists can both be worshiping on Sunday mornings.  This doesn’t hurt our brains.

But for some reasons, the modernists, the skeptics, and the trolls among us cannot get past the different strands and understandings of today’s Christians that are actually trying to embody the beliefs they already hold, which may or may not be the ones they inherited.

It is in this spirit that I will send you to a couple of other places to look at some interesting descriptions of the different strands of emergence.  First, I want to thank Shawn Anthony, whose blog compares these two options here.  It is worth looking at his intro first, since he did the work, so should get the props of your web visit.

Next, visit Scot McKnight’s depiction of the Five Streams, which can be found here.  His understanding of the different groupings is pretty much in line with most of what I have read and makes a lot of direct sense.  I like it, though I find myself fitting neatly into all of them, which I don’t think is the point…

After you have visited McKnight’s article, check this one out at Gathering in Light.  This one, I think, is a more accurate and useful description, if not a bit more academic.

Now, I recognize that both of these lists are a bit old, and I only just discovered them, but I think they are excellent.  I am most interested in the latter “Four Models of Emerging Churches” as it breaks up the conversation into which theologians most directly affect them.  If we can get past the intellectualism of this suggestion, it is actually much more practical, since the means of understanding a person can best be done by examining his or her influences.  For instance, if one simply knows that I was an English Major, it gives a certain useful definition to the way I may be seen.  But, if you ask me what literature most influenced me, WWI poetry and absurdest drama, you can begin to see the areas I would most likely be interested in (existentialism, personal transformation, social, political, and cultural upheaval) and what my preferred literary criticism might be (reader response and deconstructionism).  These specific examples may be difficult for a non-English major to understand, but if you and I were to have a conversation about this, you could learn a whole lot more about me than simply defining me using typical options (liberal, progressive, traditional, orthodox, whatever).

Further, if you wanted to learn more about what I think, one could actually read some of the works that I find most impressive, such as the poetry of Wilfed Owen or David Jones and the plays of Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter.  Going to these sources can be much more descriptive.

This can also be a useful shortcut in understanding what these different theological concerns represent when we are able to engage these theologies.  Clearly, based on what I’ve just shared, I am most attracted to the first model, which the writer describes as the deconstructionist model.  It is where my heart is and where my study takes me.  But I now have the means of examining three other streams through their theological forebears and current practitioners.

As we continue to examine ourselves and where we fall into this Great Emergence, I for one will find this tool handy.  I could be persuaded to explore another model if that’s where the Spirit takes me.