Metamorphic Journey

Chemical Sensitivities

2008-03-11T14:48:00.002-06:00

A man I got to know over the past couple years suffers from a variety of chemical sensitivities, particularly those related to perfumes and other scents. When he is exposed to such chemicals for an extended period, as might occur in the workplace, for example, he can become quite ill — even to the point of becoming incapicitated. Such exposure is, quite frankly, toxic to him.

Now since perfume is not really a necessity for life, one would be inclined to think that a great deal of his predicament could be resolved by simple making the workplace in question a "scent-free" zone. That seems like "reasonable" accommodation. Indeed, that is what his employer did, officially.

The problem, however, is that there was a fair degree of non-compliance with the official policy by certain employees — employees who seemed to take reminders of the policy and the reasons for it as a personal effront. They, after all, experienced no toxic effects from any of these scents, but rather quite enjoyed them and found their presence of positive benefit to their own work experience and productivity. My friend, therefore, was just being petty about a matter of preference, and making them out to be villains — evil, even.

This situation, of course, made the workplace even more toxic. Now it was no longer merely chemically toxic to my friend, but also socially toxic. It was, in many ways, a good place for my friend to work, with many good people, but it had become hazardous to his health.

I saw parallels between the chemical sensitivities of my friend and some reactions I and my family members were experiencing to certain aspects of the ongoing church reality we were in the latter part of last year. Like the chemical sensitivities of my friend, these sensitivities arose in large part from prior life experiences which left us particularly vulnerable, although our reactions were not just sensitivities to what was present, but also sensitivities to what was absent. In any case, the sensitivities we had developed meant that the environment was not entirely healthy for us.

Now the fact that a particular environment is noticeably not healthy for someone who has developed particular sensitivities does not mean that the environment is uniformly bad or toxic for everyone. Actually, a church environment which is uniformly unhealthy for all who attend is probably an extremely rare phenomenon. (And I suspect that a church environment that is uniformly healthy for all might also be rare). Yet this seems to be incomprehensible to many people, who seem to automatically read a wholesale attack against the church into any suggestion that some may not find the environment helpful in some manner — church leaders may perhaps have become particularly sensitized to taking things far too personally. Just like the perfume wearers in my friend's workplace.

Three years ago, I started this blog as a place where I could "think out loud" openly about the things I was experiencing in this journey of faith, in and around the church. I talked about the challenge of hearing God's direction of when to stay and when to go. Ironically, this time it seemed necessary to avoid such openness, as I began to sense that that would simply add a kind of social toxicity to the other issues that we were experiencing as unhealthy. And perhaps doubly ironic was the fact that when we first joined with this particular church community two and half years ago, one of the things we found most notable was that here it seemed people could be free to be open about their struggles, disappointments and failings — even those involving their past experiences with "church". And now we were feeling that old guardedness — the sense of having to wear a mask over our true selves in order to coexist with others who also increasingly seemed to be much more guarded.

It's been over two months now since we left. A decision that was necessary for our ongoing spiritual health, but a decision made painful by having to leave a lot of good people who would never be in position to fully understand either why it was necessary or why it was painful. Because to be truly open about those matters was just going to rip apart what was still left of what was good there — if not for us, at least still for some, maybe even many.

Off to San Diego

2008-02-23T16:11:00.002-07:00

Yvonne and I are off to San Diego tomorrow morning for the National Pastors' Retreat and Convention sponsored by Zondervan and Youth Specialties. We're both looking forward to hearing some of the speakers, like N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight, and Phyllis Tickle, as well as the Retreat led by Ruth Haley Barton.

Maybe when we're back I'll be in a space to start writing about the journey of the last 9 months or so, which has seen us move from church home, through toxic space, to a kind of homeless waiting period where we're sort of at home anywhere and nowhere.

A Message from my Computer

2008-02-18T15:13:00.005-07:00

From toothpastefordinner.com via on coffee

2007 Book List

2008-01-03T22:45:00.001-07:00

These are the books I finished reading in 2007:

Home to Holly Springs
Jan Karon
Justice in the Burbs
Being the Hands of Jesus Wherever You Live
Will & Lisa Samson
Divine Nobodies
Shedding Religion to Find God (and the unlikely people who help you)
Jim Palmer
His Dark Materials (series)
Philip Pullman
Reforming the Doctrine of God
F. LeRon Shults
Murder is Easy
Agatha Christie
A Community Called Atonement
Scot McKnight
a long way gone
memoirs of a boy soldier
Ishmael Beah
Gifts of the Desert
The Forgotten Path of Christian Spirituality
Kyriacos C. Markides
Women, Ministry and the Gospel
Exploring New Paradigms
Mark Husbands and Timothy Larsen, ed.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
J.K. Rowling
Lifesigns
Intimacy, Fecundity and Ecstasy in Christian Perspective
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Power Failure
Christianity in the Culture of Technology
Albert Borgmann
The Gospel According to Starbucks
Leonard Sweet
Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief
Dorothy Gilman
Who Killed Albus Dumbledore?
What Really Happened in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince?
John Granger, ed.
Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish
Dorothy Gilman
The Conversion of the Imagination
Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture
Richard B. Hays
Mrs. Pollifax on Safari
Dorothy Gilman
The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax
Dorothy Gilman
The Real Mary
Why Evangelical Christians can Embrace the Mother of Jesus
Scot McKnight
The Sacred Way
Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life
Tony Jones
finding naasicaa
letters of hope in an age of anxiety
Charles R. Ringma
Chasing Francis
A Pilgrim's Tale
Ian Morgan Cron
This Beautiful Mess
Rick McKinley
The Ethical Imagination
Journeys of the Human Spirit
Margaret Somerville
Life in the Balance
My Journey with Breast Cancer
Dr. Marla Shapiro
Simply Christian
Why Christianity Makes Sense
N.T. Wright
Bono
in conversation with
Micha Assaya
The Way of the Heart
Connecting with God through Prayer, Wisdom, and Silence
Henri J.M. Nouwen

The Problem of the Good

2007-10-20T13:40:00.000-06:00

F. LeRon Shultz has given me some new language to refer to a collection of problems we encounter all around us, "The Problem of the Good". In Reforming the Doctrine of God he writes:

Framing the issue simply as the "problem of evil" misses the broader biblical understanding of human and divine agency. Already in the story of the Garden of Eden, eating from the forbidden tree signifies the acquisition of "the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2:17). The problem in Jesus' ministry is not merely the evils that threaten the poor but the goods (wealth, oppressive power) that seduce the rich. To those who had been crushed by the evils of social injustice, Jesus brought healing and wholeness. The resistance to divine agency in the ministry of Jesus was strongest among those who had the "goods" of earthly life. This means that Christian theology must also speak of "the problem of the good."

It seems to me that the "problem of the good" manifests itself in several ways. Early on, Moses warns of the problem of prosperity in Deuteronomy 8 — the danger that when we have lived in prosperity we will forget God who brought us out of the land of bondage. When one compares the vitality of the Christian church in the two-thirds world to that of the developed world, it is hard not to concur with Moses' warning about prosperity.

There is another problem that Joseph Ratzinger helped raise my awareness to, although it had been pushed much closer to the surface by numerous other writers, including Isaiah. At one point in his book Jesus of Nazareth, the current pope is examining the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, and notes that the entire prayer is in the plural: "Our Father, ... give us this day our daily bread ... " If we, together in community, pray for daily bread, and God gives that sufficient bread into the hands of a few, then He has fully answered our communal prayer. But if the few retain the good gift of God for themselves, then the intent of our communal prayer is not achieved. And as prosperous North Americans who have cupboards full, we may need to ask whether the good bread we have filled our stomachs and our cupboards with was not in fact the bread we were given to answer the prayer of our poor brothers.

So the "problem of the good" warns us who live in prosperity that not only must we guard against forgetting God, but even when we recognize our goods as coming from God and give Him heartfelt thanks, we are not finished. Rather we ought also to ask whether the prosperity we experience and thank God for is indeed our own to enjoy, or that which belongs to our poorer brother or sister.

But there is yet another aspect of the "problem of the good" that afflicts us — an aspect that arises in the context of our pursuit of the good, even our pursuit of the good on behalf of the other. How often have we tried to do good to another — to express our love or support, perhaps — but the means we choose to do that good do not deliver the desired result — our actions or words, understood in the context of the other's personal history and pain, bring pain rather than comfort, discouragement rather than support, anger rather than peace. And yet our intent was to do good and our actions, too, in another context, were good.

This problem of our pursuit of the good arises particularly in the context of church leadership. Many good things, good aspirations, become problematic without our notice. Our pursuit of "excellence", for example, can exclude from service many whom God has placed in our midst for our mutual growth and encouragement, not to mention those for whom service would have been the means for their own healing or salvation — people we exclude because they or their skills do not yet measure up to our ideal of "excellence". Our employment of the best current thinking on strategic planning, or vision casting, or leadership dynamics, or whatever valuable skill or technique we choose to use in our pursuit of the good can so easily blind us to the gifts that God has placed among us in our community — gifts that thus go unutilized, or worse, are suppressed and damaged.

Jesus pointed this problem of the good out to the scribes and teachers of the law. For all their study of God's word, and their application of it to the lives of the people, the end result was not the good they sought. Rather Jesus' evaluation was that they had merely laid on the people crushing burdens, and had not lifted a finger to ease the load. We see this too in our churches today, and on the blogosphere — people who are so intent on pursuing the good of biblical study and solid doctrine that they place crushing burdens on the weak and refuse to help lift the load — even to the extent of railing against any who would try to ease the burden of this poor, burdens sinners.

I, and others, have written elsewhere of the dangers of allowing our vision of the good to become our supreme objective, indeed our God. In Life Together Bonhoeffer writes of how "God hates visionary men", because in their pursuit of their vision of what Christian community ought to be, they actually destroy the community that God has called together. Gordon MacDonald wrote recently in an ill-titled piece The Dangers of Missionalism of the dangers of a belief that our worth as persons is derived from the accomplishment of some great work, some great good.

A worst case scenario from a generation ago might be Jim Jones and his horrific ending in Guyana. The mission became all-consuming, and it turned dark. Not only did the leader go down, but most of his followers self-destructed, too.

Time and time again we see the ill-fated effects of the pursuit of the good, by pastors, by elders, by church members, by denominations and denominational leaders, by people of all sorts within the church (and without). So much so that one current DMin student is doing her dissertation on the experience of individuals who have encountered significant stress, grief and pain as a result of church leaders' pursuit of the good, as they understood it.

But perhaps the biggest problem we encounter with this whole matter comes when we fail to understand that we are working with the "problem of the good", categorize it instead as the "problem of evil", and end up demonizing those whose actions have brought us pain, grief, distress and oppression. Because then we ourselves end up becoming the "evil" against which we fight — ourselves becoming the perpetrators of violence, cruelty and oppression.

The problem of the good is a big problem indeed.

Divine Nobodies

2007-08-14T13:40:00.000-06:00

The current online issue of Next-Wave features a reprinted excerpt of a book by Jim Palmer entitled Divine Nobodies: Waffle House Theology. It served as a good antidote to The Church of Celebrity.

For that matter, so did Len Hjalmarson's recent post on The Kingdom Prayer. I particularly appreciated the closing paragraph:

In this world direct assault tends to perpetuate injustice. As a result, the Kingdom of God works in a way that seems foolish to the wise: where we expect power, the kingdom path often leads through weakness. The Son of God dies the death of a criminal, and wins a great victory. Between the times God’s kingdom rule is expressed in weakness and humility.

The Church of Celebrity

2007-08-13T01:00:00.000-06:00

Some time ago I audited a course on the theology of film. Tonight a particular clip that was played in that course came back to mind — the opening voice-over by Susan Sarandon to the movie Bull Durham: "I believe in the Church of Baseball."

I think I was in a church like that this morning (or rather, yesterday morning now, I suppose). Not of baseball specifically, but sports definitely. And not of sport in its widest sense, just the celebrity sense. And while sport celebrity certainly dominated the liturgy, there were numerous spots given to celebrities from music and other pop-culture spheres. One of the curious features of this church was that as numerous as the quotations and illustrations from various celebrities were, far more time and emphasis was placed on establishing the bona fide celebrity credentials of the individual than was spent on the actual quotation or specific illustration.

Celebrity also seemed to me to be a key component of the principal text for the day — a quote attributed to Neil Young along the lines of getting yourself noticed in the biggest, widest circle possible and not settling simply for Moose Jaw. Ironically, the only scriptural reference was from Ecclesiastes — and of course the author's celebrity bona fides had to be established by virtue of his wealth and his 1000 wives — for whom "Celebrity" would certainly have been included within the ambit of all that was "vanity of vanities and chasing after the wind".

I can suppose that the speaker thought he was encouraging people to go out and make a difference in the lives of people. And indeed the closing movie clip from Pay it Forward could have really reinforced that message. But for me, the omnipresent underlying theme music of "Celebrity is Everything" just drowned everything out, and changed it all from "making the difference that you can" to "go big or go home".

Another irony, perhaps, lies in the fact that everywhere else God seems to be speaking into my heart and mind that trying to make a name for oneself is the perennial human sin problem. God has already made a name for me, a name that He alone knows now, but which He will reveal to me at the changing of the age. It is the name that God bestows by grace that is my true name, not that which I could make for myself. The irony lies precisely in this: reminders that it is God that is at work to bring about His Mission in the world, and we get to join in with Him like little kids following Dad around with their plastic lawnmowers actually encourage me to get out there with Him, working hard at whatever my hands find to do — but messages like that from the Church of Celebrity, cajoling me to get out of Moose Jaw and go for the gusto just leave me deeply depressed. And I don't think I am alone in that.

Two years ago, when I first became involved with this particular faith community, I found it tremendously refreshing that I did not have to put on a particular mask in order to be accepted and welcomed into the community. Today, however, I was keenly aware of how thoroughly that had changed — how much pain, uncertainty, and confusion lay hidden behind the masks of proper social behaviour all around me. And I was painfully aware that, no matter how much I needed these people, I simply have no more strength to put on the masks necessary to keep the connections up.

In short, I recognized that I felt profoundly homeless yet once again.

And in between I wonder, can the Church of Celebrity ever become the Church of Broken, Humble Servants once again?

America's Next Top Pastor

2007-07-31T14:09:00.000-06:00

HT to the InternetMonk for this hilarious episode in reality TV:

Interpreting the Story

2007-07-20T17:40:00.000-06:00

The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scripture. The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out. Interpretation of Scripture can never be a purely academic affair, and it cannot be relegated to the purely historical. Scripture is full of potential for the future, a potential that can only be opened up when someone "lives through" and "suffers through" the Sacred text.
Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI
Jesus of Nazareth

Living in a Large Enough Story

2007-07-14T13:00:00.000-06:00

About two weeks ago, I was listening to Dr. Marva Dawn's public lecture entitled Living in a Large Enough Story. The content of the lecture, but even moreso the title, seemed to resonate with a number of other sources that I was interacting with both before and after.

One such source was Irish philosopher Richard Kearney, who was interviewed in a three part CBC Radio Ideas broadcast entitled The God Who May Be. In one of the three parts, Kearney talked about the way the stories we, as a society or culture, tell ourselves shape and limit the reality we experience. One example was the stories about Irish self-identity — stories about the clear and unalterable differences between the British and the Irish races that had been told for centuries. The fact that these stories had no real basis in any scientifically observable reality did not stop them from creating and maintaining a reality of polarization in Northern Ireland. It was only after people began to tell stories of Irish self-identity rooted in the experience of the Irish expatriates around the world — who greatly outnumber the Irish in Ireland, but who still maintain fierce Irish pride identity even alongside other patriotic identity — that it began to be possible to conceive of a way in which the "two solitudes" could share power without either abandoning their own self-identity.

In effect then, the old stories were too small to permit a solution to "The Troubles" — such a solution required a much larger story, and indeed a story that enlarged the people shaped by that story.

Albert Borgmann, in his book Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology doesn't use the concept of story, but he does document the way in which our technologies have reshaped our reality, and generally in a reducing sort of way. Many things that once involved a whole community of people have now, through the wonders of technology, become things that can be enjoyed fully (?) entirely on one's own. Music, for example, once required the gathering of musicians and audience, can now be experienced in far greater quality and high fidelity on one's personal iPod. Indeed, I have been told that one of the latest "things" is for kids and young adults to get together at an iPod dance — where everyone get out and dances to their own iPod playlist. This strikes me as the ultimate in drawing a large crowd so that we can all be alone together.

While the connection of technology to story may not seem obvious at first glance, a little reflection shows just how much the technological culture relies on stories to fuel its juggernaut — stories told in many styles but mostly in 30 seconds. The entire marketing industry has developed to tell stories which encourage us to become ever greater consumers of the fruits of the technological machine.

Ultimately though, these ubiquitous small stories are small not just because they are short. Actually, their principal smallness lies in the way they make up an overwhelming story that says to each of us, "Your basic meaning and purpose in life is simple: to be a consumer", and the longer we live in this story, the smaller we become as people — ultimately we become little more than just a cog in a big machine; a battery plugged into the Matrix to provide energy for the machine world, as it were — metaphorically, if not literally.

There are, to be sure, other collections of stories focussed on a different theme: stories that tell us that our value, our worth, is achieved by accomplishing some great task. Gordon MacDonald addressed this theme in a recent print issue of Leadership Journal, in an article entitled "The Dangers of Missionalism". Missionalism is what MacDonald calls adherence to this story theme, and considers it to be particularly a leader's disease. (I would have used "missionism" or "visionism" for what MacDonald proceeds to discuss, with "missionalism" left for a different sort of thing, but that wouldn't have fit that issue's theme of all things "Misional" nearly so well. Granted, that's a small quibble about an otherwise well-conceived and well-delivered article.) MacDonald calls this "ism" a disease, because it has the long term effect of crippling the leader's soul. Or to put it another way, that story is just too small to live in without being shrunken into something less.

Getting back to Marva Dawn, the Church has been called into being as part of a very large story, and for the purpose of inviting all comers to live in this large, and soul enlarging, story. This story has cosmic scope and room for all — in this story there really are no small parts, since our value is not achieved by making our own great name nor by being fodder for the machine, but as a gift freely given — a gift that is so much larger than what we are in the habit of articulating.

What is so astounding, therefore, is that my own experience with church is that so many seem to be so full of their own variants of the larger culture's small stories. In so many ways, the large and enlarging story that is ours by heritage and by calling has been neglected in favour of the little and belittling stories that we repeat to ourselves over and over, little realizing that while they may borrow Biblical, religious and churchy language, they really are more akin to the small stories of our surrounding culture — even, or perhaps especially, when they seem to most vehemently opposed to the surrounding culture. And the longer people live in these small churchy stories, the smaller they become.

I suppose it ought not be surprising that George Barna is finding so many people leaving "church" in order to seek after God. I know I seem to find the struggle against all these small stories to be becoming a much harder and more exhausting task. Perhaps it is the haunting call that glimpses of that large story are generating that make it so much harder to live in and around all the small stories, and particularly those of the churchy variety. And yet, I am convinced that it is not possible to live the Christ-following life, to live in God's large story, by oneself alone — to do so would ultimately end up being just a variant of The Truman Story in which I play in every scene — a frighteningly small story, to be sure.

So what to do? How do I do whatever is necessary to enter more fully into this large story? I already know many of the suggestions that would come from asking these questions into the crowd of church attenders and church leavers that are seeking their own answers, and find them to be too closely connected to the very small stories I'm struggling with. The only answer that I can find is to do what I can, knowing that it will not be enough in itself, and crying out like the psalmists of old, "O Lord, make haste to save me".

Lord, have mercy on your people, for your great Name's sake.

What a Week!

2007-05-15T20:16:00.001-06:00

This past week began with a dead fridge and a counterfeited credit card, and ended with a lost cell-phone and a stalling car while making a left turn ahead of oncoming traffic. These items made for a rather interesting inclusial to the main body of the week – attending the Regent College Pastors' Conference in Vancouver.

Actually, our trials are light and momentary as compared to those of the residents of Vancouver's downtown eastside, where Joyce (Heron) Rees directs the relational ministry of Jacob's Well in Canada's poorest neighbourhood. And the inclusial really did highlight things that Joyce, Len Sweet and John Stackhouse all spoke of in some way or another – the announcement of the Good News of the Kingdom of God has to take place in the midst of actual life.

More than anything, the announcement of Good News points our attention to the fact that God is always at work – in our lives, and in the lives of those to whom we are to proclaim the Good News. What we need, more than anything, is the eyes to see the signs of God's presence and activity all around us. Far too often we have been too hung up on the idea that everything is up to us, that we walk into situations where God was already at work, and try to rely on our programs or techniques as if we had to bring God to the situation. How much better to be reminded of the first rule of the Hippocratic Oath: First do no harm.

It was also good to be reminded that the Old, Old Story includes God's first commission to the human beings made in His Image: Be fruitful, multiply, fill and care for the earth, and take responsibility for its well-being in all things. Caring for the earth and caring for the poor are part of God's work for all human beings, and cannot be exempted from His work of redemption and restoration to which He calls Christ-followers in particular.

All told, it was a very good week.

Harry Potter and the Missing Scripture Lesson

2007-05-07T10:00:00.000-06:00

When I went to pre-order the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Amazon produced its list of "what other people who bought this book also bought". So I succumbed and bought the John Granger edited book Who Killed Albus Dumbledore? What Really Happened in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince? It was an interesting read – all the various chapters were originally written as articles in HP cyber fandom.

What really struck me was just how detailed and energetic the HP fandom rank and file are in their scouring of the HP canon for information to help understand this alternate world known as the Potterverse. Numerous everyday people are comparing parallel passages, debating which language is "literal" and which also "symbolic" and looking for hints of what is yet to come in the back story. Just how will the creator of this world bring it to a conclusion? At what cost, and to whom, will the world finally be put to rights?

These people are excited to study and understand this world that they get to inhabit for awhile.

Christians also believe in another world – a world revealed in the canon of writings produced by its creator; a world called the Kingdom. It too operates according to different rules than the everyday world we inhabit. Actually our text tells us that this Kingdom world is the "real" world, and that our everyday world is truly the artificial, humanly constructed world. And that the creator of this other world has made it infinitely richer and more glorious than our everyday existence.

Given this belief, you would expect that the energy expended to dig into the back story, scouring the canon for information to understand the way this Kingdom world works, and what is coming next, would greatly exceed the efforts expended by HP fandom. Or I, at least, would so expect it.

Yet it has seemed to me that this is not the case. It has seemed to me that within the evangelical tradition of which I have been a part – a tradition labelled "word-centered" by Richard Foster in his material on the various traditions of the Christian faith – has been becoming ever less and less interested in the founding and shaping texts – what HPer's would call the canon. And I am certainly not alone in this observation. The internetmonk has made a similar observation in his post The Strange Case of the Missing Scripture Lessons, and points to other posts on the same observation.

Why this is happening, I do not know. I have some suspicions, but charity demands that I not elevate them to probabilities without stronger evidence. But it concerns me. I wonder about the long-term effects this trend will have on our churches, on the faith of the gathered people, and ultimately on our broader society. I wonder how God will respond. I wonder at what point He begins to repeat His words from Jeremiah 2:

"The heavens are shocked at such a thing and shrink back in horror and dismay," says the Lord. "For my people have done two evil things: They have abandoned me — the fountain of living water. And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns that can hold no water at all!"

High and Lifted Up

2007-04-02T21:40:00.000-06:00

Last Sunday we sang a familiar chorus, whose words are these:

Open the eyes of my heart, Lord.
I want to see You —
to see You high and lifted up
shining in the light of Your glory.
pour out Your power and love
as we sing Holy, Holy, Holy

It struck me as we were singing that when Jesus speaks of being "lifted up", he generally is refering to his death on the cross. That thought made the song seem a little odd — not heretically so, as sometimes happens to me, but more along the lines of thinking it likely neither the lyricist nor the performing musicians would be comfortable with that reading of the song.

Well, on Wednesday morning I was listening to Darrell Johnson's summer school course on the gospel of John, and he was discussing the Palm Sunday text in John 12 where some Greeks come to Philip saying, "We would see Jesus". Darrell made the point that he doubted these Greeks were asking simply for Philip to point out which in the crowd was Jesus, nor were they merely asking for a chance at an autograph or photo-op. Rather, they really wanted to know what made him tick, what was the core of what he was about. Which, I presume, is the same desire expressed in the opening lines of the song we sang.

Jesus's response is a bit curious. In the past, it has struck me a somewhat as if Jesus were blowing these Greeks off — "Sorry, I've no time left for you. Much too busy. Goodbye." But what if his answer is straight to their desire, and really focussed on the core of what he is about? This is what he says:

"The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.

Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name."

Then a voice came from heaven: "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him." Jesus answered,

"This voice has come for your sake, not mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself."

Jesus, who only does what he sees the Father do, summarizes his purpose and intent as manifesting the glory of the Father by falling into the earth and dying. The Father's name, nature and character will be glorified principally by Jesus' death on the cross. In other words, it is precisely when Jesus is "high and lifted up" on the cross — in weakness, pain, and humiliation — that he most completely shines "in the light of [the Father's] glory".

This is a staggering thought to reflect up this Holy Week, and particularly on Good Friday.

Staggering, and also terrifying, because Jesus seems to expect his followers to adopt a similar approach to life — to glorify him and the Father in the same self-giving fashion. Perhaps, we won't really want to "sing Holy, Holy, Holy" when we truly see Jesus — or if we do, it will be to a much different melody than the light-hearted, wistful tune we sang on Sunday.

Connecting the Dots — Too Much or Too Little?

2007-02-06T12:25:00.000-07:00

If it didn't happen so often, it would be surprising the way things I encounter from quite different places seem to tie together.

For instance, I'm reading Richard B. Hays The Conversion of the Imagination which is about the way Paul uses, interprets and re-interprets scripture. One of the notable things is that Paul seems to expect his correspondents to know the scriptures quite well — well enough to pick up his references, quotes and allusions. Considering the number of Gentiles to which he writes, it's a bit surprising. Obviously, Paul expected the Gentile Christians to have become well versed in scripture, even though it wasn't their background at all. Unlike Paul, however, many of the gurus of our current time suggest that such an expectation is unrealistic — it's one thing to expect people who grew up in the church (i.e. analogous to Jewish Christians) to follow references to scripture, but you can't expect new believers to learn that stuff. So the Bible becomes harder and harder to find in so many of our worship gatherings — intentionally so.

Quinn Fox contrasts that approach to Starbucks, who've made an art form out of getting their customers to learn a whole new vocabulary and culture.

Perhaps we ask too little of people, not too much. I wonder. So does Nathan Colquhoun in his post on TheOoze. Except instead of contrasting the church with Starbucks, Nathan compares it to Playboy.

God in Thin Places

2007-01-23T17:24:00.000-07:00

In his book, Simply Christian, N.T. Wright describes three ways of seeing the relationship between the realm of heaven (or the divine) and the realm of earth. The pantheist seems them as the same realm, and the deist seems them as totally separate and distant from each other. The Christian viewpoint, Wright contends, is to see the two realms as distinct, but near — overlapping and interlocking. It is in these thin places where heaven and earth interconnect — where the realm of heaven actually breaks into the realm of earth — that God is known to us.

Scripture is full of such places, beginning of course with the Garden, where God walks and talks with the adam creatures He has made as His image, until they break the relationship and push the realms apart. But throughout Genesis we see God continuing to break through in thin places: talking with Abram, at the stone at Bethel where Jacob sees the ladder between heaven and earth, and again when Jacob wrestles with God and is renamed Israel. Exodus, too, is full of thin places: the burning bush, the pillar of cloud and fire, and most of all the Tabernacle upon which the shekinah glory rests. And throughout the First Testament, the tabernacle and its successor, the temple, are the most prominent of thin places — where God meets with His people.

The Second Testament relates the good news that God is not satisfied with meeting with His people in only isolated thin places, but has invaded the realm of earth Himself. Jesus becomes the ultimate thin place — the place where God is known most fully and completely — replacing the temple, and expanding it beyond imagining. All of us who are "in Christ" have become living stones of this new ultimate temple — the Body of Christ — and with the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, the thin places proliferate, until we see the final culmination of the New Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven, where the entire city — indeed the entire earth — is awash in the presence of God, dwelling among His people, "as the waters cover the sea".

Dear Lord, You indeed are the God who has made Yourself known to me in numerous thin places: at the Communion Table, during the public reading of the Bible, in the communal liturgies of the church, in songs of worship, in the deep assurance of Your upholding strength in the face of pain and uncertain health, in the ongoing love of a good woman, in stories of grace, of death and resurrection.

Open my eyes that I may see the thin places all around, where your presence fairly shouts to those who can hear, where every bush is ablaze with the Glory of God. And transform my heart and my life that I too may be, in some small measure, a thin place — a place where Your presence is seen by those around me.

Community, Hockey, Leadership and YouTube

2007-01-06T19:45:00.000-07:00

A New Wineskins interview with Sally Morgenthaler (HT to Len Hjalmarson) started my thoughts running in the eclectic mix suggested by the title of this post.

In our local gathering, we tend to associate the concept of Community with the part of our vision statement that refers to being a place that people can call home — in other words, it's about the sense of belonging. Sally Morgenthaler reminded me of Joseph Myers' book The Search to Belong which I read two years ago in the break between Christmas and New Year's. Myers' major contention is that "belonging" takes different forms in different "spaces", and that people's sense of belonging can be very strong in any of those different spaces. Different people will see their own "belonging" to a particular group — the local church, say — in terms of the particular space that they've chosen to interact with that group in.

Myers distinguishes four distinct spaces: public, social, personal and intimate. Each of these spaces has its own "rules" for appropriate interaction — the sorts of conversations and behaviours that are acceptable in that space. The boundaries between adjacent spaces, however, are a bit fuzzy, a reality that allows for conversations or interactions to start in one space and drift into the adjacent space in a natural manner. Jumps between non-adjacent spaces, however, are experienced by most people as disconcerting.

The spaces also differ in terms of the number of relationships people can typically sustain in each space — most people can only sustain a very small number of intimate relationships, more personal relationships, and on to a rather large number of public relationships. As a result, people will manage relationships over time by shifting them from one space to another. As long as both parties are comfortable with the space in which the relationship operates, the sense of belonging or community can be quite strong in any of the spaces — even though the way that sense is experienced will differ.

One of the great difficulties that churches have, Myers contends, is that they don't tend to respect the choices people make as to which space their church commitment and connectedness will operate in, but rather have a tendency to want to push all people toward a particular space. Related to this tendency is that churches often are not very good in creating environments in each of the spaces in which community can be fostered. Morgenthaler puts it this way:

The reality is, the church only operates marginally well in one area, and that is public. Even at that level, our public events and services are simply a collection of privatized experiences. They are usually not as communal as a football game. There, the jumbo-tron acts as presider and prompts us to high-five each other or yell at each other across the stadium.

This remark got me thinking about the hockey game that I and a number of clients and colleagues attended in Edmonton on Tuesday night. You would have to say that there was an obvious amount of public space community evidenced in the crowd attending that game. People were connected in a number of ways: many wore Oilers' jerseys or sported the Oilers' logo in some prominent manner; the crowd eagerly engaged in the "call & response" liturgies prompted by the various electronic signage equipment; they cheered, oohed, and booed more or less as one throughout the game; they hugged or slapped each other on the back when the Oilers scored, and kissed when the smooch cam focused on them. Indeed, the crowd was rather fanatical in its commitment to public community at this event — I guess that's why they are called fans. Obviously the experience of community and belonging can be very real and satisfying in public space.

When Myers describes social space, I always think of a cocktail reception or the milling about conversational environment of a church foyer. To be honest, this is the space in which I am the least comfortable — I really have to be psyched up and rested to engage well in social space, and even when it goes well the experience almost always leaves me exhausted. This reality creates a bit of a problem for me in the development of new personal space relationships — you simply can't progress directly from public space to personal space without creating a disconcerting discontinuity.

However, there is another space that lies between public space and personal space — a space I call "collegial space". This is the space where people work together in some common purpose. I suppose that in an academic sense one could consider this a subdomain of social space, but for me what I experience in a collegial environment is so much different from what I experience in a social environment that I have to think of them as different beasts. In reality, almost all of the personal space relationships I have had throughout my life have evolved from collegial space relationships, rather than from social space relationships. While my experience is certainly not in the majority, I strongly suspect that those who, like me, are more comfortable in collegial space than in social space actually make up a fairly sizable minority.

When I have truly felt "at home" in a church "community", I have been solidly connected in public space, collegial space, personal space and even intimate space. In that context, I am most able to give myself to being fully present in social space contexts as well.

Ironically for me, whenever the church leadership (of which I was typically a part) would decide that we needed to be more intentional about creating opportunities for building "community" in the church, invariably the means would be to create social space events. It would have never occurred to anyone to look at the degree of connectedness we were fostering in the public space, and certainly not to look at ways of making collegial space more open.

Encouragingly though, the growing popularity of the word "missional" suggests to me that churches ought to be becoming increasingly focused on opening up collegial space — after all isn't missional all about working together on common mission with Christ and with His body? Yet our leadership paradigms and structures really don't deal with this sort of objective very well. We need more than just tinkering or creating another program. Morgenthaler puts it this way:

Leadership in a truly flattened world has no precedents. Never in the history of humankind have individuals and communities had the power to influence so much, so quickly. The rules of engagement have changed, and they have changed in favor of those who leave the addictive world of hierarchy to function relationally, intuitively, systemically, and contextually.

Those who are up to the challenge of the new world will draw on that deep knowledge. And they will look to the marginalized — including women — not as necessary evils in a politically correct world, but as their own leaders, mentors, and guides. The brightest will finally dump the myth of the great man, park their egos, and follow the one Great Man into the relinquishment of power.

This is, of course, similar to what Alan Roxborough argues in his book, The Sky is Falling!?!. The world we are in is undergoing significant discontinuous change at many levels. The old ways of getting from point A to point B are breaking down, along with many of the old standard techniques for leadership. We need a much more open platform, where the old hierarchies are often bypassed to allow the best of novel and creative approaches to emerge.

Which brings me to YouTube — an extraordinarily successful and open venture that has changed much of our world in two short years. Yesterday I listened to a CBC Radio piece on YouTube which identified a few ways in which YouTube has brought a whole new reality into existence, almost entirely due to it's fundamental paradigm of making it easy for anyone to put up a piece of video and thereby bypass the old hierarchies of mainstream media. Halifax city police, for example, found it far more efficient and effective to post some surveillance tape footage to YouTube to seek public assistance in solving a particular crime than the use of mainstream media ever would have been. Even David Letterman finds it effective to promote his mainstream media program on YouTube. But even more fundamental is the expectation that mainstream media will increasingly use YouTube as the place to find fresh faces for its own industry — directors, writers, actors — bypassing its own former hierarchies for its own purposes.

YouTube was created by two guys in a garage, because they wished they had an easy way to post video to the internet and thought maybe others might too. Classical leadership structures had nothing to do with it, and probably would never have come up with anything like it.

Is it too much to expect that in such a period of discontinuous change, the Holy Spirit might not just move in a similar way, calling some other unknown people on the margins to do what hasn't been seen before, and open up whole new spaces for participation in the work of the Kingdom? Oddly enough, the Holy Spirit seems to have had a penchant for doing just that sort of thing before — making us see in the result the likeness of Jesus Christ in a way we'd not seen for a long time — and turning the world upside down in the process.

Oh, but isn't it hard to expect the unexpected, and to actively participate in waiting for we know not what, going to we know not where? Sounds an awful lot like Abraham, doesn't it? Abraham, the man of faith and friend of God, whom Paul delights in using as an exemplar for the new faith community of Christ followers.

2006 Book List

2007-01-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

These are the books I finished reading in 2006:

Jesus: Safe, Tender, Extreme
Adrian Plass
God's Life in Trinity
Miroslav Volf & Michael Welker, editors
Isaiah's New Exodus in Mark
Rikki E. Watts
The Potter's Rib:
Mentoring for Pastoral Formation
Brian A. Williams
From the Village to the City
Delbert L. Wiens
The Last Word
Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture
N.T. Wright
Free of Charge
Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace
Miroslav Volf
Longing to Know
The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People
Esther Lightcap Meek
Pop Goes Religion
Faith in Popular Culture
Terry Mattingly
Marriage Made in Eden
A Pre-Modern Perspective for a Post-Christian World
Alice P. Matthews
& M. Gay Hubbard
The Mountain of Silence
A Search for Orthodox Spirituality
Kyriacos C. Markides
The Sky is Falling!?!
Alan J. Roxburgh
Reframing Paul:
Conversations in Grace & Community
Mark Strom
Living the Resurrection
Eugene H. Peterson
The PAPA Prayer
Larry Crabb
Finally Feminist:
A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender
John G. Stackhouse Jr.
Now, Discover your Strengths
Marcus Buckingham &
Donald O. Clifton
Christian Reflections on The Leadership Challenge
James M. Kouzes &
Barry Z. Posner (ed)
Eat This Book:
a conversation in the art
of spiritual reading
Eugene H. Peterson
Spiritual Mentoring:
A Guide for Seeking and Giving Direction
Keith R. Anderson &
Randy D. Reese
the Emerging Church:
Vintage Christianity for NEW GENERATIONS
Dan Kimball
Christ Plays in
Ten Thousand Places:
a conversation in
spiritual theology
Eugene H. Peterson
Talking the Walk:
Letting Christian Language Live Again
Marva Dawn
Starting Well:
Building a Strong Foundation For a Lifetime of Ministry
Richard Clinton &
Paul Leavenworth
Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt
Anne Rice
Plan B: Further Reflections on Faith
Anne Lamott

The Nativity Story

2006-12-12T20:30:00.000-07:00

Last night about 30 or so people from our church went together to see The Nativity Story. This seems to me to be one of those movies where how you experience it depends in a very large measure on your own context and expectations. This review of the movie, therefore, is probably mostly about my own reflections on what I observed.

Scripture gives us very little about Joseph — Matthew says simply that he was a righteous man. Interpreting just what a righteous man looks like is a significant part of the impact of this movie. There can be no doubt that this Joseph, played by Oscar Isaac, is really, truly a good man. In very many ways, Joseph reflects the person that Jesus will be known to be, and there are numerous "flash-forwards" to Jesus' story — Joseph's response to the commercialized temple court is but one example. Even more telling is what Mary says to her unborn son as she tends to a thoroughly exhausted Joseph — you will have a good man for a father, one who gives to others even at the cost of himself.

One reviewer I read was disappointed at the angels — he was looking forward to some real heavy duty special effects, particularly of the angel choir, and got far less than he'd wanted. There can be no doubt that the angel visitations were significantly understated. But to me, the fact that the angelic presence never totally overwhelmed any of those to whom he was sent simply emphasized that each one had to respond, to choose what he/she would do with this message. Far from eliminating the need for faith, these angelic messages were calls to walk very much in faith. In this way, our calls are no different than theirs, which makes their examples that much more relevant to our lives.

In many ways, there was a lot that was understated about this movie — enough to make me wonder whether that isn't part of the point. We did hear, after all, that in Elijah's meeting with God, God was not in the fire or the earthquake or the devastating wind, but rather God was in the still small voice — indeed, we heard it twice.

Our culture, even the evangelical christian subculture, is more fond of impressive actions, big noises, and gross overstatements. We are, I suspect, far more comfortable with Herod's way of making a point — build two pools with a waterfall in between in the midst of a desert, and back it with gold tiles to reflect the light even if it means starving more and more of his people. In the context, Herod's behaviour is truly obscene. But then, what of the advertisements that preceded the movie? Surely the message that the appropriate way to bring peace and harmony to a world of increasing hostilities between the affluent self-indulgent village of "wants" and the subsistence survival of the village of "needs" is to buy yourself a Toyota Camry is just as over-the-top, just as obscene. And yet, I admit, my own initial reaction to that ad was that it was just silly (as in amusing) and mostly harmless.

The disparity between Herod's power and wealth, and the poverty and powerlessness of the people was clear enough that we understand the great attraction that "the prophecy" of a messiah held. But we also see considerable disparity between the sort of messiah that Herod fears and that the people long for, and the one that God seems to be bringing. We see it in Mary's question to Elizabeth about why would God choose someone of such little importance as her for this great event, and we see it Gaspar's wondering observation that this Bethlehem stable is an unusually humble place for the birth of the greatest of all kings — of God Himself wrapped in flesh. God is not in the fire or the earthquake — God is in the still small voice.

A number of reviewers were less than enthused with Keisha Castle-Hughes portrayal of Mary. Frederica Matthewes-Greene thinks she is totally disengaged from the astounding and terrifying things that are going on around her. Scot McKnight finds her far too much in the "pious, pensive, and passive" mood of Catholic tradition to reflect his understanding of the much more aggressive, "bring it on" Mary he sees in the Magnificat, and expounds in his just released book, The Real Mary. I, however, did not see a docile Mary, disengaged from the events around her. Rather, I saw a woman who made a conscious decision to return to Nazareth, knowing full well the dangers that would await her there, even against the advice of her cousin Elizabeth and the retrojected wish of her mother, simply because she had made a promise. Her observation to her parents, warning her of the potential for death by stoning, that the destiny of the one she carries outweighs her fear of whatever "they" may do to her reflected to me the deep calm faith of the later martyrs. She is not unaware of the terrifying events swirling around her, nor disengaged from them — rather she has made her faith override her fear, just as Joseph does.

Scot McKnight may well be right about the "real" historical Mary, but in this movie, where understatement is everything, I think the decision to leave the Magnificat to the end fits. The way that God will fill the hungry and turn away the rich empty is going to be much different than what any fiercely nationalistic first century Jewish peasant girl could ever imagine. And in the flight into Egypt, this Mary is already starting to come to grips with that reality — a reality we all must eventually come to grips with.

Following this Messiah is going to involve more than giving up our dates, wine and pillows. Following this Messiah is going involve us not just in Gold and Frankincense, but also in Myrrh. Because this God doesn't play by our rules.

Name-calling in the Church

2006-12-03T22:01:00.000-07:00

Scot McKnight has a thoughtful post entitled Name-calling in the Church concerning the ways in which we use "labels" for people — sometimes in appropriate and useful ways, but regretably often as weapons.

I long ago noticed that the web is a place where negative labels tend to get throw around quite a lot — by persons of all persuasions. It's one of the reasons I lurked for so long, and still am somewhat hesitant to engage too often on other's sites.

The very nature of blog comments and forum posts, with their "keep things short and to the point" credo, makes the use of shorthand expressions (i.e. labels) invaluable — if everyone understands the shorthand in the same way, that is. But the great diversity present in the blogosphere almost guarantees that at least some — if not many — of the readers and engagers will not understand these shorthand terms in anything like the same way. Indeed, even saying that a particular label is "negative" probably is true only in specific contexts with specific groups of "speakers".

Regretably, it seems to me that more and more of the world is becoming like the blogosphere, with more and more avenues of life involving people from vastly different contexts engaging each other quickly and tersely, using the same words and phrases, but rarely realizing that they do not mean anything like the same thing to the other. And the more important a subject, the more likely we are to be discussing it in just such a highly diverse, rapid-fire environment.

It's no wonder that our "civil society" seems to be becoming so much less "civil". Maybe we all just need to slow down a bit, and spend a lot more time listening.

A Rough Thursday

2006-11-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

This past Thursday evening I attended a session of our local denominational group outlining a restated vision. I found myself growing rather ambivalent towards what was being presented. On the one hand, I struggled with a number of issues around language — I was very aware that I wasn't at all sure that I knew whether the words and terms used meant the same thing to the presenters as they did to me or to others. With uncertainty around a common understanding of the language systems in use, how could there be any certainty of any real commonality of vision flowing from a common vision statement? These language questions just seemed to intensify the feeling of doubt as to whether I really belonged here in this tradition any more. Yet on the other hand there was much of what was presented that I could be encouraged or even excited about, if I could just get past the doubts.

At the end of the meeting I started to express to an individual beside me that some of the things we had discussed would require a pretty significant change in paradigm, particularly in concepts of leadership and governance at play in our congregation, if the desired outcomes were to be truly realized. But the conversation went badly and degenerated quickly, with my frustration becoming rather evident in both tone and content — I don't think any real communication happened at all. And it certainly wasn't gracious on my part.

Was the gulf between the tradition in which I had been nurtured and in which I had laboured for so long and who I had now become so great as to have become unbridgeable? And who had I become, anyway? What was it that fed this ugly lack of grace that I had experienced within me? What would it take for me to allow God to lead these people through whatever roundabout path He chose? Had it come to the point where we must part company for me to grow in grace, or would that trouble just follow me? These were questions that I pondered as I drove away and began the post-mortem reflection.

I found the following quote at NextReformation:

“There are two ways to picture how God interacts with history. The traditional model shows a God up in heaven who periodically flashes a lightning bolt of intervention: the calling of Moses from a burning bush, the Ten Plagues, the prophets, the birth of Jesus. The Bible indeed portrays such divine interventions, though they usually follow years of waiting and doubt.
“Another model shows God beneath history, continuously sustaining it and occasionally breaking the surface with a visible act that emerges into plain sight, like the tip of an iceberg. Anyone can notice the dramatic acts — Egypt’s Pharaoh had no trouble noticing the plagues — but the life of faith involves a search below the surface as well, an ear fine-tuned to rumors of transcendence.”
Philip Yancey, “Soul Survivor,” page 252

What I found as I reflected was that the systems of language and symbol that predominate in the churches of my tradition tend to be more consistent with the first model, particularly so when the subject at hand is vision or mission. At times in the past, the language has been quite explicit that the completion of the mission depends entirely upon us, indeed that God is counting on us to accomplish His mission and if we don't step up to the plate it simply will not be accomplished — there is no "Plan B" as it were. And of course, there is no time to lose. This puts enormous pressure on those who take the subject seriously.

Regrettably, however, taking up the vision cast in such an environment often results in that course of events so ably described by Bonhoeffer in Life Together.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

I have certainly experienced this within myself. And as I reflect upon it further, I find that I am most susceptible to the temptation to see in the current situation only those barriers to the ultimate vision when I have been too long immersed in systems of language and symbol which encourage me to think of God as largely non-active in the world, and mission as something we bring about. Unfortunately for me, the systems of language and symbol that are most prevalent within my tradition are precisely those which do just that, and I have been immersed in them for a very long time.

I also realized that it had once again been quite awhile since I had gotten my Liturgy Fix, as I put it once before. So on Sunday morning I returned to St. James Anglican, on just the right day to hear Arthur speak from Hebrews, mentioning how symbolic systems shape us, for good or for ill. He focussed particularly on the eucharist, on the now common understanding of its being rooted in Christ's sacrifice that He made "once for all", and on the historic anglican emphasis on the primary direction of the eucharist being from God to us, moreso than from us toward God.

Once again, the entire effect of the liturgy — including the corporate prayer of confession, the eucharist, and the passing of the peace — was that of the Holy Spirit re-membering me into the Body of Christ. Although I thought that I was getting along fairly well, my experience on Thursday evening proves that I need more than just a light fix of liturgy every two or three months. Rather I need to be much more deliberate in immersing myself in an environment of language and symbol that remind me that it is God, and not us, that is primarily at work in fulfilling His mission in the world, and building His Kingdom — an environment that redirects me over and over again to the reality expressed in the words with which Bonhoeffer finishes his section on community:

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship is in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and pray and hope for it.

From Village to City

2006-10-17T22:00:00.000-06:00

For at least a month Len Hjalmarson has been posting quotations from Delbert Wiens; most notably from his very long 1973 article From the Village to the City.

I finally downloaded this article / short book and read it in full over the weekend. From the Village to the City is Wiens' attempt to develop a grammar for expressing the way their history as Mennonites in America has shaped who they have been and become as Mennonites. The movement from the village to the town to the city is both a literal historical movement, but also a metaphor for the way in which the changing cultural systems have shaped the language, habits, thought patterns and faith of his faith community.

I found huge amounts of his descriptions almost directly applicable to my own historical background. My ancestors were not Mennonite, but they were German speaking residents of eastern Europe (notably Russia and Poland) who lived in tightly integrated ethnic / church communities in the old country, and who moved as whole communities to the Alberta frontier — as much due to the pressures of ethnic / religious persecution as to economic opportunities.

Even though he was born in Alberta, the world my grandfather grew up in was not the same as the world my father grew up in, which in turn was not the same as that in which I grew up, and which again was not the same as the world my children have grown up in. In many ways, the shifts that Delbert Wiens describes, and which I recognize in my own family history, parallel in a much shorter time period the huge societal shifts from pre-modern to modern to post-modern.

I grew up in the town, but still with close enough ties to the "village" and the "farm" to be able to personally relate to that culture. But I have spent all my adult life in the city — with all its diversity and fragmentation. Church life, on the other hand has lagged behind in a sense, retaining a "town" character far longer. But even there, I have now tasted the riches of the diversity of ecclesiastical expression that Wiens' metaphor associates with "city" and found it to both fill something was notably missing in "town" church while also fueling a sense of discongruity — I have become at home in many very different church expressions while simultaneously being at home in none. This leaves a longing for more of a "village-like" community.

What Wiens has helped me see much more clearly, however, is that a return to the "village" would not really fill that longing. I have been changed by the city in ways that can never be undone — both for good and for ill — and there really is no way I could ever return. The deep community of the village was based on a narrow commonality of thought that I could now never fit into.

No, the only way forward is through the turmoil and disjointedness of the city, seeking developing forms of community that are indeed city forms.

The really good news, of course, is that for all its brokenness and for all its characteristic rebellion against God, the ultimate end of the city is not destruction and replacement by the village (or the garden), but the transformation of the city into the "true" city — the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. The ultimate destiny of the city is not the judgement of destruction upon Babylon, but the blessedness of the New Jerusalem, where God Himself dwells among His people — people of every nation, race and tongue — where all the diversity and individuality forms the basis for a new and deeper community.

That is certainly worth pressing on and through towards.

3 Gifts

2006-10-10T19:15:00.000-06:00

My, it's been a long time since the last post. Part of that has had to do with travel I've had to engage in for work — trips to Hay River, Edmonton and Ottawa in the past two weeks, and a lot of preparation for those trips the week prior. And part has had to do with a recurrent weariness concerning the state of my little part of the overall church.

The weariness was particularly heavy just prior to departing for Hay River. But then I received from God the first of three gifts: Miroslav Volf's book Free of Charge. Waiting in the airport, on the plane, and in the hotel, I simply devoured the first half of this book, in which Volf portrays God as giver, and outlines both our motivation for and possibility of giving as God gives. All of our giving, of course, involves the giving of things we have first received from God — a reality that makes it impossible for us to deal with God on a mutually advantageous transactional basis. There is no making deals with God — we have nothing He needs (indeed nothing that didn't originate with Him) nor any way of enforcing any "contract" we might strike with Him.

I was also particularly struck by his observation of three distinct motivations for giving: the pure delight in the one(s) we give to; the need of those we give to; and finally, giving to support the other in his/her giving. These three motivations were ably illustrated for me by the TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that I caught in the hotel in Ottawa. I don't typically watch much television, but the few episodes of this program I've seen have certainly involved giving to people who were very much in need. Often those needy families were also involved in giving to their communities, and the rebuilt home served to allow that giving to continue. And, of course, it was impossible not to see the pure delight the design team had in the children whose rooms they designed, and the joy they experienced in the delight of those who received their gifts.

Certainly both of these gifts left me feeling immersed in the reality of God's presence, and ongoing work of restoration of His creation and establishing of His kingdom.

The third gift came after my return, and was a bit different. I was listening to recordings of N.T. Wright speaking at Wycliffe College in Ontario earlier this year, on Romans 8. I was particularly struck by the progression of "groanings" in the passage. First, creation is groaning as in birth pangs, waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. Secondly, we too groan. And finally, the Spirit groans in making intercession on our behalf because we do not yet know how to pray as we ought. Wright suggested that often the vocation of the church is indeed to groan at the very place of the world's pain, lifting it up to God who in Christ has fully entered into the pain of the world and who in the Spirit continues to brood over the world — much as He did in the beginning, brooding over the chaos that was being formed into an ordered world — intent on bringing the new creation to fulfillment, in and through His called people.

It was as if God spoke to him, assuring me that this weariness, this "groaning" if you like, over the state of the church, was not without it's purpose. Rather it was part of the working together with God in entering into the place of the world's pain, a pain that looks to the perfection of God's church as its hope of redemption.

To be sure, I very much do not know how to enter this pain redemptively on behalf of the world — to pray as I ought. Rather it is by faith that I must trust that indeed the prayer I cannot yet pray is being actively being brought to the Father by the deep groaning of the Spirit within.

Pre-Reformation Worship

2006-09-18T21:20:00.000-06:00

This morning I was listening to Andy Crouch interacting with a group of worship instructors. One of the observations he made concerned John Calvin's view of worship as being the action of the Holy Spirit moving through the actions of the people. At the time of the reformation, medieval worship had pretty much become the domain of the priesthood — the priests did everything and the people were merely spectators. Part of the reformation was a return of worship to the people, both in terms of a return of the Word to the people by the use of vernacular translations and expository preaching, and a return of acts of worship.

The observation Andy made was that in many churches today, the situation is very similar to pre-reformation worship — the priests have simply exchanged their vestments for microphones.

In looking back over almost 50 years of church attendance, I can see that there has indeed been a slow but steady movement toward this "pre-reformation" worship. At the time, I didn't notice it. Perhaps that was due in part to the so-called "frog in a kettle" syndrome — if things change slowly enough, you don't notice them until you're dead. But perhaps it was also due in part to the fact that for much of that time I was one of the "priesthood" — I didn't notice the ways in which our ways of "worship" was both permitting and promoting the disengagement of the people from the act of worship and turning them largely into spectators, because I was still busily engaged.

But it is not only in the acts of worship that we have moved back to a pre-reformation state. The place of the Word in our worship has also changed — where once the Scripture was the main thing, and the sermon was its servant (even if done poorly or boringly) as were the songs, now the talk and the music are the main thing and the scripture, if present, is their servant.

Part of this movement may be related to another observation that Andy made: it is almost impossible to enculturate an incarnate message in a culture that is itself not incarnate. North American culture in the 21st century has no real flesh and bones meat (in greek: carne) to it — it's a mass culture that exists almost only on a screen.

Of course, Western culture has not really been incarnate for a long time — before the advent of television and other mass culture media, much of Western culture had become largely cerebral — certainly Western theology has been almost exclusively cerebral and not incarnate for a very long time. The good, if late, impulse to bring theology into the indigenous culture has occurred precisly at the point when that culture has moved to becoming even less engaged with the materially "real".

Between the two factors, we've become unable to see any connection between an old and very earthy story and the virtual reality of today's culture. So just as the pre-reformation priest kept the Bible away from the people — convinced as they were that the people could never understand it, and didn't want to anyway — so too many of our present day priests are careful to keep the Bible safely measured out in small doses, pre-digested for the masses.

For me, the question now is this: do I try to rejoin the "priesthood" in order to gain some measure of participative worship, or do I instead stay with the people and try in some way to subvert the trend of the past 50 years? To be honest, I have no idea which direction to go.

Kyrie eleison

Straight Talk to the Adulterous Man

2006-09-18T17:30:00.000-06:00

Michael Spencer, The Internet Monk, has a hard-hitting post on the subject of male adultery. I was particularly appreciative of his second major point, “Despite a lot attention to the 'seductress' in Proverbs, the problem in adultery is the married man, the condition of his marriage and the lies he tells himself”. He writes:

One of the marks of male juvenility, and likely eventual downfall, is the tendency to put the emphasis on flirtatious women, scantily clad women, women with cleavage, women who smile at you, women you laugh at your jokes, women who pay attention to you and so forth. I'm not saying this kind of information is all useless, because it's clearly a kind of common sense warning that anyone ought to heed. It's just mislocating the problem.
The guy about to commit adultery is a person with a marriage he's neglected and a wife he's turning into an excuse to step out on.
(Emphasis added)

I find this bit of straight, honest talk a breath of fresh air. Frankly, I'm tired of hearing about all the external things that “cause” a man to fall and destroy his marriage. The brutal honesty is that the “fall” began long, long before — not by engaging in inappropriate actions, thoughts or relationships, but by not engaging in the proper loving of his wife.

Consequently, I think Michael is spot on in his closing paragraph:

Look to that marriage of yours with the mind of Christ and the spirit of the prodigal coming home. Call upon the Lord, and he will deliver you. Declare your love for your wife, and let all your actions declare it even louder. Honor your vows, bless your children and do the right thing so that you will have no reason to be ashamed in the day of Jesus Christ.

However, there are a couple items in his first point that make we wonder if even Michael has come fully to grips with the consequences of his insight. The first point ends thus:

What would help? Communities of men that talk to one another honestly about sex, adultery, the 'plot line' of sexual transgressions and the consequences of sexual sin. David's isolation and subsequent cover-up should teach us that we can be better men if we talk to one another, confront one another, and encourage one another in specific, down to earth terms.
I like sermons about Christian guyness, but frankly, having a preacher who can use sexual terms and blunt language is overrated in terms of assisting a man in the middle of the struggle not to commit adultery. Other men, talking to you face to face, are of inestimable value. To be quite honest, if you can't talk about your specific temptations to specific people in specific terms, you don't yet have the kind of support that will yield truly helpful self-knowledge.

Quite frankly, I hear this sort of advice all the time. And just as here, it seems always to be focused on the sexual temptation. Given the content of his first point, and the content of the other post to which he points, I'm sure that Michael wouldn't be promoting the kind of “accountability” that consists merely in lists of questions about whether or not you “looked at a woman” this past week.

But I'm convinced that the real accountability a man needs is not about specific sexual temptation but about the specific ways in which he is learning to love his wife as Christ loved the church. If you can help a man do that, you do far, far more than just helping him avoid adultery.

I'm probably resigned to the fact that I'm not going to hear that kind of accountability promoted any time soon. And I'll give Michael the point that his comment about men talking frankly to men about temptation does come early in the piece, before he makes the point about the real issue being neglecting the marriage.

The thing that really bugs me, though, is that for all his blunt talk to men about taking responsibility for their own sexuality and their own marriages, Michael still hasn't stopped blaming women. Or at least that's how I hear the opening salvos in his first point, which he heads as “Adultery happens to men who do not have a truthful perspective on their own sexuality”. He writes:

Sexuality in evangelicalism is largely discussed in feminized, moralistic terms. This isn’t helpful to anyone, male or female. Sexuality is the hard-wiring and software installation of God’s creative design. It is not something we do. It is who we are. Sexuality is as much a part of you as an ignition or fuel system are parts of a car. When the car “runs,” it is because these systems “run.” When you are a man, you are a sexual man.
The separation of male sexuality from Godly identity has been a disaster, and I’ve written about it elsewhere. Castrating men for usefulness in a prissy, feminized evangelicalism is bad. (BTW- the answer to all of this is Jesus, not hairy chested men grunting and making rude noises.)

The rest of his point is that we have de-humanized men by trying to de-sexualize them, largely because of a fear of their sexuality. But why use the adjective “feminized” to describe this evil? The same process that has de-humanized men because of fear of their sexuality has also operated to de-humanize women because of fear of their sexuality — a point with which Michael seems to agree, if only in passing. Ought we then to call such de-humanized women “feminized”? Ridiculous!

This kind of name-calling gender war, in which men call anything they find de-humanizing of themselves “feminizing” or “feminist” and women call anything they find de-humanizing of themselves “masculinizing” or “masculinist” does absolutely nothing to help build the sort of self-giving commitment to one's own marriage and one's own spouse that is needed if the destructive lure of adultery upon both men and women is to be defeated.

It seems to me that the real culprit behind the de-sexing of both men and women in our supposedly Christian subculture is not feminization, but a Gnostic-like dualism that denies the goodness of the created material world, including specifically the human body, with all its God-created earthiness. The same squeamishness many christians express about sex is manifested by many urban dwellers about the source of the meat on their plate — neither are considered appropriate for discussion in polite company. And how many gospel presentations have we heard that made it seem that the best part of the “good news” was that we didn't have to make those revolting animal sacrifices anymore.

There was no need to label this very real problem mindset as “feminized” — it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that is truly feminine. To use such a label in this way simply feeds the fear of the “other” that makes living together with one's spouse in self-giving love and according to knowledge virtually impossible. Michael says:

As I grow older, I am constantly amazed at the number of men who simply have no coping skills in marriage. They are passive and helpless when they most need to act, and they are afraid — often paralyzingly so — to become vulnerable, to suffer gladly, to admit error or to seek humility. They are, in too many cases, childishly distractible by someone else when they are most called to think about and love their spouse.

I say no man who is afraid of being “feminized” by his wife because she is a woman is ever going to be able to “become vulnerable, to suffer gladly, to admit error or seek humility.”

In closing, I'll go back to what I found refreshing about Michael's straight talk to men — Grow up! Stop blaming all your problems on women: flirtatious women, scantily clad women, women with cleavage, women who smile at you, women who laugh at your jokes, women who pay attention to you, the woman you're married to who doesn't seem to ever be satisfied or to give you your due, and the evil conspiracy of womankind who've totally “feminized” everything everywhere. Be a man! Take up your cross and love your wife just as Christ loved the church.

Who are we Listening to? Thots on knowing and judging

2006-09-12T21:00:00.000-06:00

This post is a bit of a potpourri of thoughts from several sources, that I've been trying to integrate in my mind.

First a quote from Esther Meek in Longing to Know:

Humans fight to make sense of their experience! How many times in our day and in our lives do we do this! Your roommate is acting uncharacteristically; you immediately begin to search for an explanation. Or your roses are failing to bloom. Or you take a new class in a new subject with a new professor, and you find yourself immersed in terminology about as transparent as so many pieces of granite. You fight to make sense of what he or she is saying. Or your parents divorce, and you ask yourself desparately, What happened? What does this say about me? What does it say about them? What does it say about God? Trying to make sense of experiences is somewhat of a compulsion for humans.

The act of knowing is all about making sense of a whole collection of clues and data, integrating them, and then relying on the discovery and acting on it.

One major source of difficulty, it seems to me, is that we are often too impatient to sort through all the possible explanations for the data and clues available, and so settle upon the explanation that comes most quickly to mind. You might say we tend to rush to judgement when we ought to suspend judgement until more clues and more data are available.

Quick judgements are necessary in some cases — driving in traffic for example — and morally neutral in others. But quick judgements about the character or motives of other persons are usually not morally neutral, as they then form the framework through which we subsequently relate to those persons, for good or for ill.

And neither are the explanations that spring most readily to mind typically neutral. That's one of the major points that Kyriacos Markides learns in his extended discussions with Father Maximos in The Mountain of Silence. Brent Curtis and John Eldredge go even further in The Sacred Romance and suggest that the explanations of many things, particularly painful experiences, that are most quickly suggested to our mind are deliberately chosen and expertly tailored to our pain by the Adversary in order to be easily accepted by us; and once so accepted, to get us to doubt the goodness of God.

So it becomes very important that in our search for meaning and sense that we consider carefully the ideas and explanations that present themselves to us, attempting to discern who is speaking — that we learn to distinguish the various voices that speak into our minds constantly throughout our waking moments. That, of course, can take a lifetime of spiritual discipline and development.

In the meantime, what do we do? The old puritans had an answer: render to each the "judgement of charity". That is, deliberately seek out the alternate explanations for another's behaviour, and choose that explanation which casts the other the best possible light consistent with the facts. This is, it is suggested, what Paul may have had in mind when he says that "Love believes all things" — not that love is naive, but that love deliberately chooses to believe the best about the other, consistent with the facts.

I've seen in my own experience that the first explanation for someone's behaviour or comment — particularly a blog comment — is often much more critical of the other's character or motivation that is necessary. With considered thought, one can generally come up with several more charitable explanations. And with continued adherence to this discipline over time, the initial reactions tend to become more charitable than they once were.

What is particularly regretable, however, is how often we see the rule of offering the judgement of charity violated in Christian circles. So much so that instead of seeing Christians as a people whose default mode of operation is the judgement of charity, the world's accepted stereotype of Christians, particularly of evangelical Christians, is that of a people whose default mode of operation is precisely the opposite — the judgement of condemnation. The shame is that the stereotype is not entirely inaccurate.

God have mercy upon us, sinners!

Participative Worship and Romans 8:28

2006-09-09T22:40:00.000-06:00

Len Hjalmarson has a thought provoking post on the interpretation of Romans 8:28. You know the one. In the KJV it reads:

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

I think he makes a good case that this sentence really means something more like:

And we know that for the good of all things God works together with those who love Him, with those who are the called according to His purpose.

No wonder the whole of creation is groaning, waiting for the appearing of these children of God. From the beginning God designed creation to be nurtured and brought to its complete glory by the working of God together with His eikons.

Of course, no sooner do I read this post of Len's than I am listening to a talk from the Calvin Institute of Worship's 2006 Symposium on how worship is really about God working together with us — hence worship must needs be participative and not passive.

Maybe God is trying to tell me something.

Cross-Gender Friendships

2006-09-09T20:15:00.000-06:00

It's curious how some subjects just seem to keep popping up in clusters. Following hard on my thoughts on cross-gender friendships as stimulated by the movie Take the Lead, Scot McKnight has initiated a significant discussion on the same topic. The post itself is quite short, but the comments are extensive.

Two women in particular spoke rather eloquently, I thought, about the positive values of close cross-gender friendships: see comments by Jen O. and Jennifer (particularly the second paragraph of the linked comment).

I thought again about the premise set out early in the post, and seemingly accepted by most, if not all, commenters: "opposite sex friendships can lead to intimacies that destroy marriages". I began to wonder if perhaps we have not accepted a faulty premise that is in some way analogous to the faulty premise of the youth pastor that had sexually abused Jennifer some 20 years ago — to him, she was the problem, and he was simply the victim of her "dangerous" attractiveness.

Perhaps we ought to question the premise that it is the intimacies developed in opposite sex relationships that are the cause of the marital "train wrecks", rather than simply the place where some train wrecks happen. And is it only in cross gender relationships that emotional infidelity occurs? What of all the women (and men) who feel that the time their spouse spends with his buddies (or her girlfriends) is more important than time spent with them? What of all the pastors' wives who have felt that the church was the "other woman" in her husband's life — the one who got all the emotional energy and intimacy that belonged to her? And what about the hugely negative effects of the competitive husband (or wife) bashing games that go on in single gender gatherings?

Is not the real issue a failure to develop and maintain a relationship of love and intimacy with one's spouse, regardless of the presence or absence of other same or cross gender friendships? Is it not what is or is not happening within the marriage the principal determinant of success or failure? To see the external as the primary cause of the failure is as much a cop-out as the youth pastor blaming Jennifer for his abuse of her.

It seems to me that the expressed perception of close cross gender relationships as "dangerous" to marriage may be connected to a perception of love and intimacy as a "scarce" or "limited" resource, in which the more some one else gets of my wife's confidence, the less there must necessarily be for me. We recognize this idea as immature when expressed by children who fear that they will be loved less now that the new baby has arrived, but perhaps many of us never really lose that fear.

We have been made in the image of an intensely intimate God, whose triune loving relationships overflow with ever more love for all of creation. And we are the objects of Jesus' prayer that would we be one, even as He and the Father are one. Unless we believe Jesus' prayer to be in vain, it would seem we should expect to be made into people whose capacity for love and intimacy is no longer scarce but abundant!

Nevertheless, we live both in the "already" and in the "not yet". For some of us there is more of the "not yet" than for others. And so the ability to experience one's own and one's spouse's capacity for love and intimacy as abundant rather than scarce may well be vastly different from person to person and from couple to couple — and even from season to season for the same couple.

My suggestion for wise counsel is this: do whatever it takes to keep building intimacy of all kinds within your own marriage. If, because of your own history and formation and situation, that means severely limiting the degree of intimacy in other relationships, then do it. And conversely if close external relationships enhance the capacity of you and your spouse to engage more closely and intimately with each other, then nuture those relationships, be they same or cross gender, individual based or couple based. Just keep the primary focus on growing closer to your mate, by whatever means.

Take the Lead

2006-09-06T19:23:00.000-06:00

After we got home from delivering the youngest daughter to University, we decided to take it easy and watch a movie. Yvonne came home with Take the Lead, starring Antonio Banderas. It is based on the experience of Pierre Dulaine, an award winning ballroom dancer who has developed ballroom dancing classes in many schools around New York.

The DVD had a special feature about Dulaine and his work. It was particularly interesting to hear Dulaine speak about the many things his students learn about life from ballroom dancing — things like dignity, respect, communication and teamwork. I ended up feeling rather sad that I'd never really had the opportunity to engage in that pastime.

Of course, growing up in the church environment I did made that impossible. There is an old joke that begins with the question: Why are Baptists opposed to pre-marital sex? Answer: It might lead to dancing. Any sort of interaction between opposite genders that may have made some contribution to someone's downfall sometime seemed to become a proscribed activity for all — all in the name of guarding own's purity and chastity.

How ironic then was the comment made by Dr. Tim Keller the other morning when discussing the early christians, and the way they stood out from the rest of society in their approaches to money, sex and power. Chastity, he said, was really only a truly viable lifestyle if one was part of a broader community in which true intimacy and love could be experienced — and I would add in both same gender and opposite gender situations.

I suspect that the practice of proscribing anything that might be considered intimate in opposite gender interactions has not really promoted chastity, but rather made true non-erotic intimacy that much harder, and by extension made the lifestyle of chastity even more difficult.

A far cry from the lessons of respect and dignity for the other promoted by ballroom dancing — at least according to Pierre Dulaine.

What's the Bible About?

2006-09-04T21:04:00.000-06:00

This morning I was listening to Tim Keller speaking on preaching the gospel. One of the things that stood out for me was this: if you are going to preach, you have to decide whether the Bible is primarily about you, or primarily about Jesus.

I realized that much of what I have heard preached over the last many years has treated the Bible as if it were primarily about you and me — about what we must do to be good people, or to be accepted, or to inherit eternal life, or fulfill God's mission in the world, or be faithful witnesses, or even just manage stress.

But if the Bible is primarily about Jesus, and about what Jesus has done and is doing, and about how Jesus is the true fulfillment of all the stories and all the events, then preaching it faithfully would look very different.

I'm wondering if this observation doesn't tie into a question that has been rolling around in the back of my mind for sometime: What does it mean to read the Bible on its own terms rather than on our terms? And perhaps even more importantly: What does it mean for us — individually, but even more so communally — to treat the Bible as the prime authority, but to do so on its own terms?

I have a deep suspicion that it might look significantly different than what I have seen and been used to in my own church experience.

Why do Heathens Make the Best Christian Films

2006-08-29T21:50:00.000-06:00

That's the title of an essay by Thom Parham that made for some interesting reading.

A Questionable "But"

2006-08-29T16:50:00.000-06:00

Over the years I've learned many things from John Piper, and have for a long time received some of his regular emails. Just before our 30th anniversary, one weekly message dealt entirely with recognizing a couple in the church on the marking of 30 years of marriage, 20 years of formal ministry at Bethlehem Baptist Church for him, and 10 years of such ministry for her. In the middle of the piece I read this:

Their ministry has always been a partnership. There is no doubt that David is the head of his wife as the Bible says he should be. But he holds this woman in the highest esteem, as we all do. And together they have led this ministry to levels of influence beyond anyone’s dream.

The word that hit me hard falls right in the middle: but.

But is a word that is used to join two statements that, while both are presented as true, have particular relationship to each other. One only says "A but B" if either one finds that B is not typically expected when A holds, or one wants to qualify A in some manner: A is true, but only in some special or limited sense, not in the broadest or fullest sense of A standing alone.

In this case, A is the assertion that "David is the head of his wife as the Bible says he should be", which I would think has to relate at least to Paul's instructions to husbands in Ephesians 5:25-30, which immediately follows his statement that "the husband is the head of the wife as also Christ is the head of the church":

Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to sanctify her by cleansing her with the washing of the water by the word, so that he may present the church to himself as glorious — not having a stain or wrinkle, or any such blemish, but holy and blameless. In the same way husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one has ever hated his own body but he feeds it and takes care of it, just as Christ also does the church, for we are members of his body. [NET]

It has always seemed to me that any man who fulfilled this description could hardly fail to hold his wife "in the highest esteem".

So why the "but"? Why not connect these two statements with "so" or "therefore"? Why does John Piper, or the people he is writing to, seem to expect that holding one's wife in the highest esteem would not be part of the fullest sense of being "the head of his wife as the Bible says he should", or maybe even unusual or atypical of such men?

Actually, now that I think of it, why even have these two sentences in there at all? Why not just say "Their ministry has always been a partnership. And together they have led this ministry to levels of influence beyond anyone’s dream."? Is partnership in ministry something that John Piper thinks his audience will find questionable and possible evidence of the husband not being a "biblical head"? Is the notion of "headship" that is popularly affirmed in Piper's church something that a sufficiently large group of readers would assume made "partnership" and "esteem" grounds for suspicion that this pastoral staff member is maybe soft on headship?

Now that would be a sad thing indeed. But that "but" sure raises questions.

30 Years with the Same Woman

2006-08-21T21:30:00.000-06:00

Thirty years ago today, Yvonne and I stood together at the front of the church, in many ways still children, and made enormous and improbable promises to each other, in front of God and these witnesses, in the time-honoured tradition of those entering into the state of marriage. We really didn't know what we were getting into, although it seemed at the time that everyone, including us, understood exactly what marriage was. Today, on the other hand, it seems that there is little, if any, agreement on just what marriage actually is — but that's another subject for another post.

One might think that 30 years of living together on a daily basis — in each other's face morning and night, as it were — would be ample time to learn to know one another. And so it has — in some senses, at least. And yet, it seems more and more obvious that there is always much much more to know in order to truly know someone. Indeed, I've come to the conclusion that complete and exhaustive knowledge is foundationally impossible when it comes to knowing a person — if every one arrives at a place where there is no more to know than what is and has been known, then it is no longer the person that one knows, but something else — some thing else.

If this is true of knowing a human person, how much more must it be true of knowing God. The more we come to know God, the more we must be aware that God is so much more than we can know. Conversely, the closer we come to knowing all there is to know about God (as we may suppose we know), the more it is not God at all that we know.

This is, I suppose, why I intuitively have great difficulty with those Christian traditions that seem to have everything figured out; whose theology is neat, tidy and complete — among such groups I feel that it is no longer God that is being known, but something else — some thing else.

In thinking of these things, however, I am also reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre's reason for refusing to believe in God. Sartre understood God as a being that had complete and exhaustive knowledge of every aspect of creation — including human beings, and most importantly including Jean-Paul Sartre. But so long as such a God existed, Jean-Paul Sartre could not himself exist as a person, only as a thing. And this he found intolerable. As, I imagine, would I.

Yet it is in God that I actually find my true home, my true personhood. Somehow God's knowledge of me — as extensive as it is, and certainly more extensive than my own knowledge of myself — does not reduce me to a thing, but rather elevates me to a person. Somehow God chooses to know me personally rather than impersonally, subjectively rather than merely objectively — somehow God grants to me the grace of being, to some degree and in some sense at least, unknowable, even to Him. In other words, God grants me personhood by choosing not to know me exhaustively as an object, but non-exhaustively as a person.

Today I am known more completely by Yvonne than by anyone else, and yet she continues to stick with me in spite of my many faults and the many times and ways I violate her own personhood — and perhaps more importantly, she still believes that there is more to me than she has yet known, just as I most certainly believe about her. It is an amazing thing. And yet not nearly so amazing as the way God sticks with me over even longer than 30 years, after even greater depth of knowledge of who I am and have been and have done and after an even greater degree of violation by me of His personhood. God, who knows me better than I know myself and who knew me even before I was born, still believes that there is more to me than has been seen, and is determined that we shall discover it together.

This is indeed a day to celebrate and be glad.

A good vacation

2006-08-17T19:35:00.000-06:00

Yvonne and I spent last week travelling down the Oregon coast. We flew to Portland on Saturday, rented a car, and took our time moving south along the coast highway. The scenery was indeed wonderful, as most people say. And it was good to have some time to read, to talk, and just be together.

We had taken Yvonne's notebook along so I could take advantage of the wifi offerings of our hotels and do some blogging. But it was not to be — the computer failed to boot up, ending with an error message and then trying to restart in an endless cycle.

Once we were back, it took the best part of a day to recover from a corrupted registry and get the beast back to operational state — something I worked on while Yvonne was out and about with her aunt who is visiting us this week from Holland. Sunday we'll take her up to Provost to continue her Canadian visit with her younger brother and his family.

The time away certainly gave me a lot to think about and reflect upon. Maybe some of that will eventually find its way onto this blog — but probably not tonight.

Seekers and Believers

2006-07-30T21:49:00.000-06:00

Over the last little while, I've been continually running into communications about church things that use the language of seekers and believers to distinguish two apparently different and separate groups of people.

To be sure, I've heard this language for ages. But the more I think about it, the more I just don't get it. As I mentioned to a friend the other evening, to use these terms in this way seems to demand that we consider that seekers don't believe and, even more significantly, that believers don't seek. We're probably all used to the first inference, and can probably find reasonable grounds to justify it on some basis, but the second is really scary.

There have been many times when I've wondered if we haven't somehow promoted the idea that believing in Jesus becomes a completed task at some point — after a conversion experience, some catechesis and baptism, perhaps. After that the believer no longer has to seek after God, no longer has to work at making her faith her own, no longer has any need to deepen the relationship. That at least would make some sense out of why so many longtime Christians of my past acquaintance seemed so dis-interested in being challenged in their beliefs or going deeper in their knowledge of God.

I've come to the belief that we are profoundly shaped by the language we use habitually. If that's true, then it's quite possible that long term use of concepts of seekers and believers in the sense I started this post with will eventually lead us to stop seeking after God. Maybe the real problem with "churchy" language isn't that the unchurched don't understand it. Maybe the real problem is that it shapes the churched into something far less than what God intends.

Thank God that at least once in awhile one encounters some different use of language in our churches — language like that in this morning's prayer, acknowledging that we are all still need to seek earnestly after God. And thank God for reminders that deciding to follow Jesus is never just a one time thing, but that it really requires a fresh decision every day, maybe even every minute — in this particular thing that lies before me, whom will I follow? Jesus, or someone else?

Two Good Thoughts on Trust

2006-07-30T21:20:00.000-06:00

Today I read two great thoughts on the subject of trust.

Chris Monroe, the desert pastor, ties together the idea of rest and trust.

Maybe our rest is not deep enough, not effective enough, because we're not trusting enough. Trusting who? Trusting God. Maybe if we were to trust God more deeply, we would find ourselves resting more deeply. Maybe then, what's behind our rest-deficiency would be seen as a trust-deficiency.

To fully trust, we must relinquish the control, the power, turning it over to God. And when we do, it's then that we can truly rest.

Meanwhile, Joy Morris muses on hope, and links faith to giving up control and becoming vulnerable.

Today I've been thinking about hope and faith. Hope and faith create vulnerability in the person who chooses to hope and believe. I usually think of the two acts as empowering, but there is this shadow side. It's making a choice to stay soft and malleable. It's a choice not to have control or even know. Hope and faith admit one's need for help. I need God and people.

The parallels between the two struck me, as well as the timing — both on the same day. Interesting.

Who Buries the Talents?

2006-07-23T21:30:00.000-06:00

This morning's message was based on the parable of the talents. The key idea was that the world's greatest energy crisis is not oil or electricity, but the untapped potential of human beings — specifically God's people. Like the king in the parable, God has given talents to His people, and will ask what was done with them when He returns. But like the one servant, too many people have let their talents lie buried, never utilized for the Kingdom.

While the language of the sermon clearly indicated that the contemporary problem lies with the individuals to whom the talents are given, I started to wonder whether that is, in fact, the whole truth of the matter. Perhaps it comes from a sensitivity borne from my own experience, but I wonder whether perhaps the truth sometimes lies more in the collective — whether perhaps it is the community to whom gifts are given which is responsible for the suppression of those gifts.

I wondered what would have happened in Calculta had the head of the order to which (Mother) Teresa belonged had not given her permission to leave the teaching ministry of her order to go to Calcutta. I wondered what would have happened had the Pope not granted her the charter to form her own order. Would she have been able to do what she did — to be what some call the 20th century's greatest saint?

I know from personal experience that when one is in church leadership, struggling to find resources and personnel for all the ministries that the church is engaged in, that it is natural to assume that the suppression of gifts in the church is due to the individuals' own lack of initiative in implementing the gifts they have been given. But I wonder what would happen if we were to seriously consider the ways in which we do church collecively might actually be as much a barrier to the expression of God's gifts to the church.

There are so many ways in which the collective body suppresses the expression of gifting in the church. Some are related to our institutionalized goverance structures — where too much has to go through official channels before it is allowed to happen — channels that are often clogged with other things. Others are related to the language structures we employ, that subtly denigrate the gifts of the masses.

I saw such subtle language structures at work when I compared the secular and "christianized" versions of a book we were using in Focus 3. The secular book gave examples of people engaging the world in the areas of their particular strength mix — all of which involved significant and respected roles. The christianized book, on the other hand, had downgraded the examples to some of the most minor tasks one encounters in church life — suitability and/or giftedness for (or lack thereof) ought to have been obvious to all involved, except for those with the limited self-awareness of a Junior High kid.

To be sure, the individual whom God gifts for service in His Kingdom is responsible for his or her own attitude and iniative in exercising and expressing those gifts. But we all, as a collective, are also responsible for the way in which the culture we permit to form around us, and indeed actively maintain, encourages discourages the expression of all the gifts God has given to the collective. And those in express leadership positions have responsibility not only not to squelch the gifts they have been given individually, but even more so not to squelch the gifts given to the flock under their care.

May God forgive me for the ways in which I have failed this responsibility in my own leading.

A Place to Call Home

2006-07-18T19:30:00.000-06:00

One of the four components of our local church's vision is to create a place people can call home. So what does that look like anyway? To my mind, a place I can call home has the following characteristics:

home is a place where, when I am away from it, I want to return
home is a place where I am known — well known
home is a place where I fit, as the person I am, not a place where I have to fit in
home is a place where I am missed when I am away
home is a place where I can be meaningfully engaged, where there are things to do that make a difference
home is a place where I can open myself to others, and invite them in
home is a place where I regain energy and passion for the work of life

The vision of the local church as a place people can call home is truly a hugely ambitious vision. I wonder sometimes if we think enough about just how huge, and simply pass the words by as something that sounds nice.

This vision is also somewhat different from other business type visions in that there really is no way to put a number on it — it is something that happens within the people who are part of this "home". External observations may give clues, but certainly wouldn't be in any way reliable. But in reality, I think the most important things that a church ought to be attempting are of this sort.

I suppose if we were to take this vision component seriously, we'd have to have some more soul-searching conversations with each other as part of the process of evaluating whether we are actually engaging our reality in a way that moves toward or away from this vision. That in itself could be a step forward.

Leadership in Chaos

2006-07-17T22:00:00.000-06:00

As Yvonne is away tonight at an Elders' meeting, discussing matters of transition arising from the lead pastor's resignation, I find myself reflecting on things that Alan Roxburgh raised in his book, The Sky is Falling!?!.

Much of our ideas of leadership are related to our ideas of strategic planning — they work well in environments where there is a sufficient degree of stability, predictability and controlability that one can reasonably move from a vision of a desired future, through the various stages of goals and plans, to achieve something approximating the intended end.

There are other environments in which the underlying presumed degree of stability, predictability and controlability simply does not exist. Some environments are truly chaotic — systems like the weather, where a very small change in initial conditions makes a huge change in the outcome. Other environments are not quite that chaotic, but do undergo periods of significant, unpredictable, discontinuous change — Roxburgh calls these environments times of transition. In these environments the classic strategic planning principles simply don't work. Nor do finely honed, hierarchically based leadership structures where each task is affixed to a specific position or function — even those these structures can be highly efficient in stable times.

In chaotic or transitional environments the highly structured leadership models fail, because they simply cannot bring the right skills, instincts, and perspectives to the situation in a timely and appropriate manner to adapt to the discontinuous changes that occur. Rather, in such environments we need leadership systems that are much more flexible and much more diversely based — who knows what particular collection of strengths and perspectives will be needed for the next thing that happens?

But a huge difficulty, it seems to me, is that such a diverse collection of "leaders" will typically have a hard time listening to, trusting, and following each other as the situations shift, unless a solid core of trust and understanding has been developed before hand, and maintenance of that core of trust and understanding remains consistently a high priority. To be sure, I firmly believe that this neglect of community, or as Roxburgh calls it communitas, is the principal reason for the disintegration of leadership in a prior experience of mine.

If this is correct, then it seems to me that the key leadership trait needed is that of keeping the overall leadership system and leaders, individually and collectively, focussed on maintaining a reality of communitas in all leadership activities and decisions. The key leader, then, for an entity operating in a chaotic or transitional environment is decidedly not an executive leader or CEO, but rather more what Roxburgh calls an abbott/abbess — one whose primary, or even sole, task or focus is in building, maintaining and strengthening true Christian community among the entire leadership team.

Regretably, I cannot point to any good examples in personal church experience that could serve as a model for such a system — and it is extremely hard to get people to buy into a process or system they have never seen in operation.

But it does give me a fresh appreciation of Jesus' high priestly prayer, where His desire for unity and community among His followers flows so eloquently and passionately. Maybe Jesus knew something about the turbulent times and environments in which His church would have to exist.

Oh My, It's Already July!

2006-07-02T19:00:00.000-06:00

The end of June is the statutory deadline for a number of things in the pension world in which I work. So June can be a very busy time — it's sort of like tax season for accountants. The end of June comes in part as a relief — now there's time to breathe, I hope — and part as a shock — where did it go?

It's pretty obvious that it didn't go into writing blogs. Indeed, I'm still mulling over thoughts for a post (or perhaps series of posts) that arises out of some stuff I was listening to at the end of May. Maybe I'll get that down finally.

While I haven't been writing, I have still been reading. Here are links to a few things I've found noteworthy, thoughtful, or just entertaining:

Alan Creech on What is Purpose?
Len Hjalmarson quoting Jurgen Moltmann: The Crucified God
Miroslav Volf's address to the 16th Annual International Prayer Breakfast at the United Nations
Michael Bells quoting Eugene Peterson on Wilderness with a Map
Michael Spencer on a former student in She's a Catholic Girl Now
The ever humorous Lark News

And that's the headlines. Film at eleven.

Walking an A Frame

2006-06-11T23:05:00.000-06:00

One of the many tasks we had to accomplish during our High Adventure was learning how to walk an A frame — a 2x4 structure in the shape of the letter "A", with five ropes connected at the apex. One or more people held each rope, arranged roughly in a circle, while one person stood on the crosspiece of the A. The frame "walked" by alternately lifting one of the legs of the A and swinging it forward.

At first glance, and from a distance, it looked as though the individual on the frame was making the frame walk, while the people on the ropes provided stability. In actual fact, the situation was almost the complete reverse — as one of our group discovered when he took his position on the frame, and tried to muscle it around.

In reality, it was the people on the ropes who made the frame walk. The leg was lifted when one person on the side pulled on the rope, while the opposite person gave slack. Then the appropriate rope at the front pulled the lifted leg forward. The rider on the frame mostly provided weight which, in conjunction with the rope straight out the back, provided stability (although by shifting the weight, the rider could make the movement easier).

Everyone had a specific and essential role to play in cooperation with the others in order make the structure move. And once we understood what those roles were, there really was no one who needed to act as "the leader".

Curiously, however, while we were figuring the system out, several individuals tried taking the leading role, instructing the others to do this or that. Usually those instructions were wrong, and it was by actively disagreeing with the temporarily self-appointed "leader" that we learned what actually was going on.

The exercise left me wondering whether there are many more things in life, particularly in the life of the body of Christ, where "leadership" is really only an immature learning phase which needs to give way as we learn the true reality of our life together.

I Am Because You Are

2006-06-11T17:35:00.000-06:00

There is, I am told, an old African proverb that says: "I am because you are. If you are not, I cannot be." Several times during our High Adventure Camp I felt the truth of that proverb.

I have discovered that I am profoundly affected (and perhaps to some degree even effected) by those around me. The essential characteristics of others with whom I am interacting— which in our Clifton StrengthFinder lingo we've been calling strengths — draw out secondary characteristics in me. When I am around people who are hard-wired empathics, for example, I am much more conscious of how others may be feeling, or am more apt to consider that carefully in how I behave or interact. I like myself better when I am around such people.

Conversely, when I engage at length with hard-wired competitives — particularly those who seem to adhere to the motto "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing!" — I become easily drawn into a desire to gain advantage over the other by pushing the other down. The end result of such interaction is, regretably, that I like myself less when I enter into those behaviours.

By myself, I am incomplete. By myself, I am less than fully human. For me to be all that God has created and intended me to be, I need community; I need the rest of the body. No matter how much my natural introverted personality craves extended solitude, and is often drained by people, I cannot be me alone.

I suppose this ought not to be surprising. If man is made in the image of a God who exists eternally in intimate community, could she ever be truly herself alone outside of human (and divine?) community?

A Few Crazy Weeks

2006-05-28T21:01:00.000-06:00

The last few weeks have been crazy in more ways than one. In the midst of all our scheduled celebrations, culminating with Adrienne's high school graduation on Wednesday, we've also been dealing with our friend's decision to leave ministry — a decision that was finally made fully public this morning. Yvonne in particular has had many different emotions over this time, which inevitably spill over onto me.

But in the midst of it all, I've been able to do some very good reading and listening. I didn't realize it when I started, but Mark Strom's Reframing Paul really fit precisely into where we were living as I came to the last three chapters. The way we are accustomed to doing church does indeed look more like the Corinthians' missing of the implications of the gospel than it does Paul's example and admonition — and we really are in danger of devouring one another in the process. But it was particularly helpful to realize that Paul doesn't make being "right" the issue — he acknowledges truth on both sides of the major battle lines, but then urges the parties to accomodate the other's "weakness" because they are both in Christ, and Christ is not divided.

Rod Wilson's course on Dynamics of Pastoral Leadership has also been extremely timely and pertinent — I may have more to say on that later.

The final event of our Focus 3 experience — a four day "High Adventure" camp — is coming up fast. What little detail there is about this camp suggests that it's a bit of an endurance event — last year everyone seemed to return totally exhausted. But there is so much work yet to be done in so few hours, I expect I'll probably be pretty much wiped out before I even get there.

The PAPA Prayer

2006-05-16T15:30:00.000-06:00

I picked up this book by Larry Crabb last week, and could hardly put it down. He provides a framework for talking about something I've known for some time now — that petitionary prayer that is not based firmly in prior relationship often becomes simply a "to do" list for us to hand to God, as if He were our butler, or the grandfather we've learned to wrap around our little finger.

More importantly, in this book Crabb describes an approach, using the acronym PAPA, to firmly embed our prayer in a first thing relationship with God, as primary and prior to petitionary prayer.

This way prayer becomes truly conversation with God — a conversation in which God Himself becomes our deepest desire and the primary request of our prayer. Such prayer will always be effective.

Exekiel's Visions of God

2006-05-16T14:50:00.000-06:00

Yvonne and I spent last week at the Regent College Pastors' Conference, featuring Dr. Maxine Hancock, Dr. Rod Wilson and Dr. Larry Crabb. It was wonderful refreshing and rejuvenating time.

In one session, Larry Crabb spoke on the three passages where Exekiel had what he called "Visions of God". In the first vision, Exekiel sees the Glory of God, which overwhelms him more than had the pains of the people we was exiled with. In the second vision, Exekiel is shown the depths of human corruption, extending even into the temple, indeed into the very inner heart of the temple. The corruption is incompatible with God's glory, and Exekiel sees the Glory of God depart by stages from the temple, until finally the Glory departs completely, an extremely painful experience to observe.

But Ichabod is not the last word. Near the end of the book, Exekiel has the third "visions of God", in which he sees the Glory of God return to the temple, into the very place of human corruption — because God is not willing to give up His people. God's Glory invading the site of human corruption is even more overwhelming that the previous two visions. The book ends with the words "The LORD is there."

As I was walking the next morning, it struck me that these visions provided a new lens through which to see some of the experiences of my life. The second vision, the vision of human corruption in the very heart of temple, was a true and sobering vision. It just wasn't the last word. So too, my profound disquiet at several things I found at the heart of the church was a true and sobering reality — it just wasn't the last word.

As I thought about it more, it occurred to me that as much as it may be necessary to speak prophetically against the evils of human corruption when God shows them to us, it is always a mistake to settle down and live there as if the judgement of damnation were God's last word on such evil. It isn't. God does not abandon his creation to destruction, but rather He returns to the very heart of the messiness of life, to be present there with His people, and to transform them at the root of their resistance, their evil.

The last word is never Ichabod, it is always Immanuel.

And the Glory of God is never so vastly overwhelming as when it invades the heart of our sin and evil to bring us into the Glory of God.

Half Past Easter

2006-05-08T17:00:00.000-06:00

Here we are, half-way from Easter to Pentecost, I'm half-way through Eugene Peterson's book, Living the Resurrection, and I wonder just which of the list of things I've done since Easter really fit that theme. I've

helped my eldest child move out of the house
picked up a tux
managed three hours of solitude on a drive back from business in Edmonton
drove around the city picking up decorations for the wedding
tied numerous chair bows, arranged asian screens, setup benches and trees
pinned on flowers, chatted with guests, smiled for pictures
watched my son get married
listened to numerous people rave about how stunning my wife and daughters looked
kept the wedding program moving, more or less as planned
dismantled and returned all those decorations
witnessed three bikers get baptized
attended a Focus 3 sponsored event in Red Deer, to help us understand how differently we're wired, and how that affects where we'll be most effective in work, in life, in ministry
went to a high school Jazz concert, ate dessert, and talked about Brian McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy
watched my wife receive her Masters degree
chatted with people, took pictures, visited Stanley Park
turned 49, becoming a perfect square
read how John Stackhouse became Finally Feminist
wondered anew at how absolutely fantastic Yvonne looks in black silk and high heels
talked at length about a friend who is burned out in ministry, wondered about how to help, and what changes this whole thing will bring
developed the worst cold I've had for a long time
tried to talk with friends about spiritual mentorship with my head plugged with antihistamine and sinus congestion
wondered at how patient God is, and how willing to accommodate his plans to where his people are at, and to move them slowly at a pace they can endure, no matter how long it seems to take, how impatient they get, and how totally clueless they can be at where he is taking them
had lunch with a friend who is higher than a kite over the fact that his son, who was nearly dead from drugs and substance abuse, is alive again, clean since Christmas, and now gainfully employed
worked too late, coughing and losing much of my mental focus, trying to finish a list of things that really shouldn't wait until my return from a week's break
tried hard to sleep off this cold
fixed some fancy cheese and meat plates for a house full of women
read too many of the wrong blogs
wondered at how incredibly easy it is for Christians to become so belligerent with each other over so many things, to the extent that they can't hear each other at all
hardly blogged at all
watched a movie with my daughter, had coffee with my wife
did uncounted loads of laundry
tried to get ready to return to Vancouver for the Pastors' Conference, with my wife, the pastor

Feed or Fan Hunger?

2006-05-03T17:33:00.000-06:00

Which are we trying to do? Satisfy people's needs or intensify their hunger?

That's how Mark Labberton ends his recent article on LeadershipJournal.net.

When I think about it, I find that my own growth has been spurred more by good questions than by answers, by things that fanned my hunger than by those that just gave me food — although answers and food have been valuable at times. But I also find that I like to give answers — maybe we all do — and often find myself pushed in that direction.

Nevertheless, I find the prospect of being part of something that fans hunger far more exciting and energizing. I think I need more of that in my life.

Being Alone

2006-04-25T16:28:00.000-06:00

This past Thursday, I had business in Edmonton with a colleague who rode along on the way up. On the way back, I drove alone, and it was wonderful — like something you've missed desperately without realizing it.

To be sure, I've had my alone times each morning on my daily walk, but somehow the focus on listening to the lectures or sermons makes it a different sort of alone time. And also, there have been times alone in the house when no one else is there — physically, anyway. But somehow peoples' auras still remain behind in so many ways that one doesn't really get quite the same sense.

With all the activities surrounding my son's wedding this past weekend, and with so many other things before that, I have not had the opportunity for the times of aloneness that my soul seems to need — or is it that I have not disciplined myself to take such sabbath times? Whichever it is, I am sure that without the tradition of silence at the end of the Maundy Thursday service, and the periods of silence throughout the Good Friday service that we were able to attend at the local Anglican church, I may not have made it through these last weeks with my sanity intact.

This blog has been an obvious indicator of the lack of silence and aloneness in my life. I'm coming to realize that blogging — at least for me — is something that flows out of that sabbath alone time. The thoughts and reflections that run around in my head never properly gel otherwise — they remain just impressions, feelings, at best half-articulated ideas. So even when time and access to one of our computers is available, the capacity to get into the space of writing is simply not there.

Seen this way, perhaps struggles with the discipline of blogging, or journaling, is not so much a failure in and of itself, but rather a symptom of a failure to to maintain the discipline of sabbath — of wasting time on God, because He is worth more than the various and sundry other things that so absorb my time.

Of course, this raises the question, How then shall I rearrange my life to respond to this insight? That too may require some alone time.

The Sea at the End of the World

2006-04-08T09:00:00.000-06:00

Stand still, and see the Salvation of our God.

That is what Moses told the people of Israel when they were standing at the edge of the yom soph — the sea at the end of the world, traditionally identified with the Red Sea, but in the mythology of Egypt much more like the realm of chaos and destruction; the place later peoples would call Tartarus or Hades — and were looking back at the dust clouds raised by Pharoah's armies, charging towards them, hell bent on destruction.

The people of Israel had seen the power of God displayed mightily in the contest of plagues, but here they were, only days later, in despair. They were, so far as they could see, totally beyond hope; trapped at the edge of the sea at the end of the world, with no way forward or bacj but into death. Perhaps it is only when we stand on the very brink of the end of the world that we are really in a place to understand the great salvation of our God.

Later, Moses would command the people to tell this story again and again — to their children, to their grandchildren, to themselves — so that they would never forget the great salvation of our God.

On Thursday evening, Carrie did just as Moses had commanded, as she told us the story of her own journey to the sea at the end of the world, and standing there in despair, as the Egyptians were racing in to sweep up everything that was left of her world. But really, her story was the invitation again to stand still and see the salvation of our God — a salvation that, like for the people of Israel, led not away from the sea at the end of the world, but through it.

Tomorrow, Holy Week begins. A week when we are invited once again to enter into the story of the great salvation of our God — when we are invited to walk with Jesus as he makes his journey to the sea at the end of the world. We are invited to walk with Jesus right up to the very pit of hell, and watch as he plumbs its depths.

The thing that draws us to this story, the thing that made Mel Gibson's cinematic retelling of it such a box office event, is not the gore and the violence and the destruction. It is instead that here, in this story, we finally see the ultimate salvation of our God, as God once again parts the waters of the sea at the end of the world — Hell itself — and makes a path not just through the valley of the shadow of death, but through death itself.

This story is the real story — the reality that the Exodus story foreshadows, and that Carrie's story echoes. The story of how in dying we are born into eternal life — the story of the great salvation of our God.

TheBolgBlog: Dreams for My School

2006-04-07T10:00:00.000-06:00

A seminary training model is built around the idea that a single person or a set of staff workers has most of the gifts in a particular church community and then we train that one person or group of persons. But, what do we do when the gifts are spread throughout the community as they are in many new forms of church? How do we continue to train the many, rather than the few?

In the first of a series of posts about his dreams for Fuller Seminary, Ryan Bolger introduces his first dream with the foregoing observation. In many ways, his description of the emerging type of church where leadership is distributed among the people reminds me strongly of what we Baptists have long said we believed in: the universal priesthood of believers.

My experience to date, though, has been that this belief is one we tend to hold intellectually, but we have never really tried to believe it experientially in our churches and our seminaries. I'm not sure if this is a result of the lure of power among the clerical class, or whether it is that our people broadly are just like the Israelites at Mount Sinai. After God spoke directly to the people, they insisted to Moses that they wanted him to go between them and God, and promised that they would listen to him and follow his leadership — just don't let God speak directly to us any more.

Whatever the reason, I have long had a dream of being part of a local congregation which did indeed express the kind of broad-based, communal approach to leadership, teaching, and many other spiritual offices. Ryan Bolger's dream sounds very familiar to me.

Reflections on Translation

2006-03-27T17:30:00.000-07:00

The final chapter in Eugene Petersen's Eat this Book is about translation. He makes the case the Bible was, for the most part, written in the language of the everyday Joe. Our task, as those called to proclaim the Good News, is once again to speak the language of the everyday Joe — in effect to translate from the everyday language of one place and time to the everyday language of another.

I heard similar comments about the role of leadership in Mark Strom's summer school class that I'm currently listening to on my morning walk.

Ironically, our Focus 3 group just received two more books to read on leadership and leadership related things. Both are "christianized" versions of secular writings — books translated from the specialized language of business into the specialized language of church and christianity. A bit of further reflection revealed that there is a huge industry engaged in just such translation — producing everything from leadership books to finance advice to novels in the unique christian dialect we need to be able to understand these things.

If Petersen and Strom are right about our task, you'd think there would be no need or market for such translated books — instead christians would be choosing to read in the language of the "outside" world specifically to learn that language and be better translaters of the Good News.

Curious. And, I think, sad.

Balaam's ass

2006-03-27T16:45:00.000-07:00

This past weekend at our denominational meetings, reference was made on more than one occasion to God speaking through Balaam's ass. For myself, I've tended to think of this story as a one time, special event, never to be repeated. I've probably been most likely to subscribe to the maxim "Just because God can speak through a donkey doesn't give an excuse to make an ass of one's self."

For whatever reason, I found myself struck by a number of incongruities during the singing sessions. I was struck how the insertion of some funky musical bridges into the accompaniment to some of the hymns simply ripped the text apart, rendering chunks of it almost meaningless. I was struck how the emotional content of the lyrics of some songs was completely at odds with the emotional content of the music. I was struck by some the bizarre theology that arose from taking some the lyrics seriously.

But most of all, I was struck by the incongruity of the inescapable observation that I was surrounded by people who were clearly sensing the presence and blessing of God in and through the singing of these songs — as thoroughly confused and theologically questionable as they were.

Ultimately, the only real conclusion is that God speaking through Balaam's ass was not just a one time, historical event — rather, God continues to speak through Balaam's ass today on a regular basis. So in the end, the incongruities of the music left me pondering not the incompetence of our denomination's musicians, but the amazing greatness and omnicompetence of God, who refuses to leave Himself without a witness even among the worst of our inanities and foolishness.

Which means there is hope for me yet.

Boy can I relate

2006-03-22T11:57:00.000-07:00

Alan Creech says:

I think lots of things

But I don't always know what to write. I've thought about writing a book before, but then I think, "what the hell am I going to fill like 150 pages with?" or however many pages a book is supposed to be. Intimidating. Blogs are like that sometimes too. That last post staring you in the face over and over again. It's calling out to you, "I don't want to be up here at the top any more! Write something else!!" Aaggghh! So I write stuff like this, pretty funny.

Emerging Worship is about Who Gets to Play

2006-03-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

Ryan Bolger starts a recent post with the above title this way:

I remarked recently that I had attended a near lifeless traditional church. More recently, I attended a traditional service that was filled with life. What was the difference? It really came down to who got to play and who didn't.

For me, this issue of who gets to play, and when and where they get to play, has been a huge part of the re-shaping of my own understanding of worship. The other issue is whether we worship God together as one people, or simply come together to stand alone before God.

In a recent listening to a Regent summer school course by Valentine Cunningham entitled The Making of the Protestant Mind, the idea of man as an individual alone before God was developed as part of the emerging Protestant ethos immediately following the Reformation and during the growth of the Enlightenment era. In reflection, I could see just how ubiquitous that idea was in my spiritual environment and just how much that idea had shaped (or mis-shaped) my own personal and spiritual development. Perhaps that is why I find the liturgical emphasis of worshipping together as one people so refreshing and full of life.

One of the things I'm still reflecting on and trying to come to grips with, though, is the obvious value my current community places on having a space where you don't have to play — where you can come as you are and not be required to do anything or be anything that you are not, or that you may think you are not. That characteristic has been an important initial aspect in the spiritual path of many of our people, and is understandably deeply appreciated and highly treasured. And I certainly want to honour that.

And yet, I'm seeing that there is a very fine line between having a space in which you don't have to play and having a space in which only the elites get to play — and many of the ways of doing things that support the former contribute to the latter. In the long haul, though, I'm afraid that regardless of whether the format of worship is liturgical or freeform, traditional or contemporary, seeker oriented or believer oriented, worship in which only the elites get to play is going to have a strong tendency toward becoming lifeless. Which, of course, means that it will no longer truly be worship of the very living God.

Does the brokenness of our current world mean that true acceptance and true community in worship is something we can only long for in the age to come? Or is there a way that we can create a space that is truly welcoming to those for whom church and religion had been abandoned as being both lifeless and oppressive — and who therefore resist anything that smacks of ritual or requirement — while still allowing for, and indeed encouraging, a true coming together as one people in our worship of God, worship in which the all the people get to play?

Who are the Righteous?

2006-03-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I was listening to Darrell Johnson's summer school class entitled Praying by the Book. In the discussion on Psalm 37, a student questioned how to understand verse 25 as true. Here David says "I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, or his children begging bread".

As much as various versions of a prosperity gospel are prevalent today, we know, if we are awake and alert, that the world contains many faithful Christians who are desparately poor. Does this verse promise prosperity to the righteous, or has David simply lived a sheltered life away from seeing poverty among the faithful?

For me, however, I was struck by the following verse where David describes the righteous in these words: "he is ever lending generously, and his children become a blessing." Perhaps David sees something that we do not. Perhaps David understands the righteous person not so much in terms of the person whose religious practice is impeccable or the person whose behaviour conforms to all the rules of the law (whether secular or sacred), but rather in terms of the person who indeed gives generously to those around him, particularly to those in need.

It struck me that probably the reason many of us do not give generously out of whatever we have, great or small, is that we are afraid that if we give generously we will not have enough, that our children will end up without. Our fear of being forsaken keeps us from being the generous person that David calls righteous. Knowing this, David says that in reality this is a false fear. David has seen that the person whose characteristic behaviour is to give generously is not forsaken, even if financial reversals happen. The man who has shared openly with his poor neighbours so that their children do not have to beg bread will not see his own children begging, no matter how serious the financial situation may get.

Generosity begets generosity. Righteousness begets righteousness. This is what David sees that we often do not.

God seems to be bringing this theme up over and over lately. It came up at Breakforth in the sessions I had with Joyce Heron of Jacob's Well. And it comes up again in a recent Christianity Today online article, Community In, Not Of, Capitalism, an excerpt from David Fitch's book, The Great Giveaway. This sentence in particular caught my eye and forced me to pay attention: "We live in fear that to give up our possessions will leave us alone and destitute when our time of need comes."

Building up substantial resources does not make one immune from these fears — something I discovered within myself recently during a mini cash-flow crunch; even though the process of completing our income tax returns and consolidating investments with a single financial advisor makes it fairly obvious that those fears were very much out of proportion to reality.

But I wonder if God is trying to tell me that even deeper behaviourial patterns are rooted in a twisted view of reality — that if I really saw clearly the depths of riches that are mine in Christ Jesus I would have a much different attitude toward my material wealth, and live much more generously as a result.

Reflections on Sabbath

2006-02-22T20:36:00.000-07:00

Mention Sabbath in the typical North American evangelical Christian subculture, and you are likely to hear either that Sabbath is a rules-based legal observance that Christians no longer need to (should?) observe, or else that Sabbath is good advice to take a day off each week to maintain work-life balance and be more efficient overall. I think both of these ideas totally miss the point of Sabbath as it appears in the Bible.

The Sabbath system set out in the Old Testament goes well beyond one day of rest each week. It extends to a year of rest for the land one year out of seven, and to the Jubilee system every seven sabbatical years. When you compare the two lists of commandments in Exodus 20 to that in Deuteronomy 5, you see that the Sabbath command changes its focus. In Exodus it looks back to creation and to God's action of resting on the seventh day. In Deuteronomy it looks instead to the oppression in Egypt and God's salvation from that oppression. Consequently, Sabbath is concerned both about our relationship to God, to our fellow man, and to the larger creation. We rest, our servants rest, our animals rest, and even the land rests.

When we look in particular at the creation narrative in Genesis 1, we can see some interesting features of Sabbath. We tend to read the narrative, as presented, from God's perspective: God works and then He rests. But humans are created at the very end of the sixth day of creation. From the human perspective, the first thing that humans experience is rest, not work. The picture is even further amplified when we notice the repeated pattern of "there was evening, there was morning, a day".

Unlike our tendency to think of the day beginning in the morning, when we get up and get to work, the Biblical mindset sees the day beginning in the evening, when we stop working and prepare to rest. The day begins with us resting — actually totally asleep and unaware of the world &mdash while God works. In the morning we awake not to a world that is waiting for our intervention, but to a world in which God has already been at work — a work that we are invited to join Him in, but a work that is already well in progress.

The big thing about these Sabbath rhythms is the way they point to the fact that our survival is based upon God's faithfulness, not on our own resourcefulness. Every night we must stop our work and trust God to keep us through the night. Once a week we must stop our work and trust God to keep us even though we see much work that could be done. Once every seven years we must not plant, give the land a rest, and trust God to provide for our needs. And once every seven sabbatical years, we must set aside our acquisitive instincts and return the land we've acquired to those whose ancestral inheritance it is.

Sabbath subverts our tendency to rely upon ourselves. Sabbath subverts our tendency to trust in wealth and material goods. And most importantly, Sabbath subverts our tendency to oppress our fellowman for our own gain. Of all the spiritual disciplines, one could argue that Sabbath is the one most urgently needed in our modern North American society &mdash yet regretably the most ignored.

Ultimately, Sabbath forces us to focus our attention, reliance, and affection on God. I think that the New Testament fulfillment of Sabbath lies not in the abolishment of Sabbath observance, but rather in the admonition to pray without ceasing.

A lack of posts

2006-02-19T20:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know that it has been a long time since my last post. My writing hasn't been going all that well the last little while. Most of my (unproductive) energy has been going into trying to rework a narrative of my spiritual journey for a context quite different from that in which it was originally created. It just hasn't felt right, and I'm afraid of it sounding unduly "preachy".

I think perhaps I just have the wrong genre for the task at hand.

I did read a very inspiring post by Joy Morris quoting Gregory of Nyssa. I was reminded that many times when we first encounter God, there are many other things present in God's general direction that we tend to associate with God. But as we get closer to God, we often pass those other things and find them falling behind — something we can easily perceive as God's distance rather than the approaching nearness that is reality. Perhaps as we approach God every more closely, so many false associations will have to be released that it seems we have entered pure darkness.

I'm just convinced that God intends to reveal as much of Himself to us as we can stand, and if that means stripping away a lot of comforting associations that are actually not God Himself, then so be it.

Dark, stained, broken pieces of glass

2006-01-31T15:30:00.000-07:00

Can anything good come from dark, stained, broken pieces of glass?

Of course, we've all seen it happen.

At the Breakforth 2006 conference this past weekend, I encountered a number of stained items — things that really didn't ring quite true, attitudes that seemed not entirely Christlike, methods that seemed to assume too much or ignore the way they could really hurt some people, songs that reflected dreadfull theology, sound mixing that pierced the ears, and so forth.

It struck me in fact that all our methods, all our songs, all our thoughts, all our sermons, all our blogging, all our theologizing, all our leadership techniques, all our attempts at community, all our invitations to see Jesus are like dark, stained, broken pieces of glass, cobbled together.

Yet somehow, when God's Light shines through all that stain, His glory is displayed — magnificently.

This allows me to be much more gracious with my stained brothers and sisters. The stain, which from my perspective seems to just block the transmission, may have an important role to play when God gets finished with all He has planned.

Can Truth be an Idol?

2006-01-31T15:15:00.000-07:00

Alan Hartung thinks so, and makes an interesting case in his post, The Idolatry of Truth.

Becoming the Change we Seek -- A Different Look at Leadership

2006-01-31T14:30:00.000-07:00

A little while ago, I noticed a Len Hjalmarson article entitled Leadership as a contemplative movement, in which he says

The only way forward to a new kind of church is to become people of restfulness and contemplation. So long as we are driven to bring change, driven to be effective, we will only recreate the driven, oppressive, addictive and compulsive systems we have always known.

The greatest hope of influencing change is not our compulsive activity to shape a world different than the one we know, but to become the change we seek. That means becoming still.. risking the quiet and empty spaces... It means facing our own fears that there will be no one to offer approval.. no voice in the silence.. no one to clap us on the backs to say "well done." I doubt if there is any greater challenge for an active people, any greater challenge for those who are passionate to see change, any greater challenge for those called to lead. But the only way we will see lasting change is if we become the answer we seek.

This is by no means the first time I have heard or thought something similar to this. But it seems to be constantly drowned out by the ideas of leadership prevalent in our culture. And particularly by the idea that leadership requires active and well identified leaders. But does it? We are told by Agur in Proverbs 30:27 that "locusts have no king, yet they advance together in ranks". How do locusts maintain such organization without leaders? Where does their leadership come from? Or how about the slime mold, an even more leaderless entity?

What if leadership was a gift given by the Holy Spirit, not so much to individuals, but to communities? Might we not then expect to see this gift played out sometimes in a leaderless fashion, where the leadership seems to come from the community itself? Just because leadership is a spiritual gift and a needed commodity in community life, does that really imply that God must call leaders?

John O'Keefe certainly doesn't think so. In the introductory post to a new blog called quantum servanthood he says:

the idea behind this blog is simple - to teach what it means to be a servant - and not to be a leader. leaders are killing our churches. even if they are paid, or not paid, people who think they are leaders in a community of faith are killing churches. it is my personal conviction that jesus never calls anyone into leadership, but he does call us into servanthood

In some ways, O'Keefe may be echoing Bonhoeffer's Life Together where Bonhoeffer claims that "God hates visionary men". Bonhoeffer's argument is that people who have a vision of what Christian community should be, and attempt bring about that vision, ultimately end up destroying community, as the pursuit of the vision leads them to become the accuser of their brothers who inevitably move too slowly toward the "vision" for the visionary's taste. I have certainly seen this happen — and I have seen myself become just such an accuser.

I think I would differ from O'Keefe a little. I'd agree that Jesus calls us to be servants rather than leaders. But I do not believe that this necessarily means that the servant is never given a leadership assignment by Jesus. The difference, of course, remains that while the servant may be assigned the task of leader, he remains first and foremost a servant — ready and willing to relinquish the leadership task when the assignment is completed. And for such time as her assignment is that of "leader", the dedicated servant will do all she can to do that assignment to the best of her abilities, even adding skills as necessary. But to allow oneself to take on the self-identification of Leader is almost certainly to guarantee failure when the assignment is completed and the time to relinquish leadership comes.

To bring this post full circle, it seems to me that it is far more natural for one who self-identifies as a servant to "become the change one seeks" than it is for a self-identified leader. Let us therefore adopt the posture of servants — of our Lord, Jesus, and of His children — and seek to become the change we seek in our churches and in our world. After all, did not Jesus do it that way himself?

Making Do with More

2006-01-23T17:30:00.000-07:00

Making Do with More is the rather ironic title of a recent Christianity Today article about the different reality faced by today's young North American adults in a world of unprecedented affluence and opportunity.

My generation — the parents of today's young adults — learned a particular set of virtues, as did our parents before us: work hard, make the most of the opportunities presented to you, get ahead and make a better life for your children. We are frustrated when our children don't seem to "get it". But does this schema really make all that much sense when the lives our children have are already so affluent, and when the opportunities available to them are so numerous as to be largely uncountable? Has that affluence really given them a better life? Has our drivenness really given us a better life or made us better people? What if our prized virtues have somehow become vices — really and truly, and not just in the minds of our children?

I wonder if things would be different if our virtue chain had ended in a circle of concern a bit larger than just our children. What if, as the world got smaller through staggering transportation and communication advances, our circle of concern had gotten larger? What if all our hard work and grabbing opportunities had been focused on making a better life not just for our few biological children, but for the many others in the world we could have supported had we so wished?

Perhaps there are virtues both we and our children have yet to learn in order to truly live as Jesus' followers in a time and place of abundance.

Getting my Liturgy Fix

2006-01-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've written. The weekend just over a week ago was a very difficult one, with many old issues being brought to the surface yet again.

In midst of trying to deal with them, I recalled that it had been a long time since I'd last participated in a "high liturgy" worship service, and somehow sensed that that might be related to the way I was responding to the things I was facing. So after checking calendars and times, I decided to attend the local Anglican service yesterday morning.

I've found it a little difficult to explain why I seem to need a dose of high liturgy every now and then — many people seem to jump immediately to the idea of style preference, and if I prefer that style then I must not care for "our" style. But it's not really about preference.

Somehow it seems that over time, the collection of things I am involved in — worship services, study, the emerging leaders group, etc. — seem to mold me toward a more individualistic faith. The language and structures seem somehow to be geared toward a "God and me" focus, which ultimately narrows my field of concern, and makes me more anxious that that narrow ecclesial world around me "get things right". That in turns pushes me to focus more on what's wrong, and on who's wrong, ultimately discouraging me from engaging in the sorts of behaviours that would build the sort of community I believe to be vital.

Participation in a time of high liturgy just seems to reconnect me with a much bigger reality — the reality of the one holy catholic church; the whole body of Christ. Finding myself again in that wider context takes off so much of the pressure to "get it right", and I am so much better able to give what I have to give to those around me. That is to say, I'm more able to simply serve in whatever capacity presents itself, rather than feeling that drive and need to "make a difference".

It's surprising how even just one service can make a big difference to the way I relate to the world. And this time around, that change actually started already when I decided that I would go this Sunday, at such and such time, even without being there yet.

Right now I'm thinking that it may be wise for me to schedule some high liturgy into my life on a more regular basis, as a kind of preventive maintenance, rather than waiting until the need becomes obvious.

How was your Christmas?

2006-01-09T13:36:00.000-07:00

"How was your Christmas?" seems to be the standard greeting at this time of year. Mostly I suppose people to be inquiring about the various cultural aspects that have aggregated around this season of the year. Which is a little problematic, because those are precisely the sort of thing that seem to me to make the season more on the burdensome side than on the delightful and wondrous side.

But when I stop to consider this Christmas season (which liturgically starts on December 25, rather than ending on it), there have been some things that have made this Christmas season actually much more like what I understand Christmas to be about theologically than have most.

For starters, one of the problems I usually find about Christmas is that the churches of my experience never really wanted to deal with the direct significance of Jesus' birth — that God Himself took on human form — something that ought to make us stagger. Instead, there was always a great rush to get to Good Friday. Year after year, the most repeated message I would get in church as we approached Christmas was that the birth of Jesus really was nothing of importance at all. Someone (or more usually several someones) would decidedly proclaim from the pulpit (or other official place) that everyone always gets all caught up in the baby at Christmas, and totally forgets that the real gift from God was not the baby but the death on the cross. I always thought this strange, since the other complaint that came even more predicably at Christmas was how everyone always forgot that Jesus had anything to do with Christmas whatsoever.

Even more odd, when we did get to Good Friday, no one really wanted to spend any time then contemplating just what the cross involved in terms of God's taking up of humanity either — instead everyone was now in a rush to get to Easter. In many ways, I think that our churches have taken on a very heavy dose of either gnostic or docetic dualism — we are really big about the divine nature of Jesus, but really quite squeamish about his humanity. We like the idea that Jesus was God, but please let's not talk too much about Jesus being truly — that gets God a little bit too much in our face, perhaps, or too much in the "muck" of life.

This Christmas season, however, I managed to avoid hearing anyone churn out that old saw about Christmas really being about the cross — the first time in many, many years. I heard a wonderful lecture by Mark Strom, read an amazing novel by Anne Rice, and this morning listened to a very passionate lecture by Dr. Cherith Nordling, all of which took the Incarnation far more seriously than I am used to encountering at Christmas, even though Dr. Nordling's topic was more directly on Resurrection than on Christmas. Our ultimate destiny is to be raised with Jesus into the fully redeemed full humanity that is His — and so far only His, as none of us have as yet been truly human as He was even in this broken world.

God the Son was willing to join us fully in our broken humanity — even to carrying the scars of that broken humanity with Him into eternity — so that we might ultimately join Him in a true and whole humanity that truly reflects the image of God.

Yes indeed, it has truly been a good Christmas.

Purpose? Or Person?

2006-01-08T22:00:00.000-07:00

This morning's sermon was entitled simply, Purpose, and started a series about Life's Missing Ingredients. By implication, "purpose" is one of the things that is missing from the lives of many (most?) people. Supposedly, this is the message of the book of Ecclesiastes. While there was much in the sermon with which I could almost agree, and which seemed to be nearly correct, by the end I was left with a deep sense of something very wrong; that in coming somewhat close at many points the overall point was seriously missed. This post is really me thinking out loud, trying to ascertain just where that troubling sense comes from. No doubt in my attempts to get closer, I too will miss the point in some important way, but perhaps that is the way of all theological reflection.

I took the opportunity this afternoon to look through Ecclesiastes again. In doing so, it seemed to me that the book records the Preacher's attempt to determine just what is one's purpose in this life, particularly in the recognition that many ostensible purposes seem in the end to be simply pointless: vanity and striving after wind. Ultimately, even this passionate pursuit of meaning and purpose is in its own self a vanity — a vexatious and burdensome task — because "man cannot discover the work which has been done under the sun. Even though man should seek laboriously, he will not discover; and though the wise man should say, 'I know,' he cannot discover" (Eccl. 8:17) Indeed, even though God "has made everything appropriate in its time, He has also set eternity in their heart, so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end." (Eccl. 3:11)

The problem, it seems, it not that man's life is missing purpose, but rather that man (particularly when man has an abundance, and the leisure to pursue such thinking) believes that it is in fulfilling some "purpose" he will find satisfaction in his life; yet all such purposes in the end fail to satisfy. Instead, the Preacher says:

I know that there is nothing better from them than to rejoice and to do good in one's lifetime; moreover, that every man who eats and drinks sees good in all his labor — it is the gift of God.
Eccl. 3:12,13

Here is what I have seen to be good and fitting: to eat, to drink and enjoy oneself in all one's labor in which he toils under the sun during the few years of his life which God has given him; for this is his reward. Furthermore, as for every man to whom God has given riches and wealth, He has also empowered him to eat from them and to receive his reward and rejoice in his labor; this is the gift of God. For he will not often consider the years of his life, because God keeps him occupied with the gladness of his heart.
Eccl. 5:18-20

Go then, eat your bread in happiness, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart; for God has already approved your works. Let your clothes be white all the time, and let no oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the woman whom you love all the days of your fleeting life which He has given to you under the sun; for this is your reward in life, and in your toil in which you have labored under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, verily, do it with all your might.
Eccl. 9:7-10a

Early in the sermon, a metaphor of moving dirt from end of the camp to the other was introduced. Apparently, it was a common psychological pressure tactic to have prisoners of war spend many days, weeks, even months, performing some large physical undertaking — such as digging a huge hole at one end of the camp, and transporting the dirt to a huge pile at the other end — only then to have the prisoners set to the huge task of precisely reversing the task they had completed. This drove many prisoners insane, as it had no purpose.

It struck me that this will only drive those mad who believe that it is necessary or important to be able to see the purpose in what one does. The stronger the belief that one's work must have a purpose, and that in that purpose one finds what is important to life, the more devastating will be the discover that one's labor had, in actual fact, no purpose at all. But one who is able to enjoy his life in the midst of his labor, however purposeful or purposeless it may appear, will not suffer such devastation of soul.

Rather than suggesting that we must find fulfillment in the purpose of our work, I find that the Bible generally speaks of finding fulfillment in walking by faith — trusting in God who may or may not choose to reveal to us the purpose or purposes to which He has assigned us. As the Preacher in Ecclesiastes says, God has already given us our life, and to enjoy the life which God has given to us is our reward &mdash or rather, I think, part of our reward.

Augustine, I think, got it right. The unsettled feeling that many of us experience is not, in the final analysis a problem with a lack of purpose, but of seeking ultimate fulfillment in the wrong thing entirely. "Thou has made us for thyself," Augustine said, "and our souls are restless until they find their rest in Thee." John Piper, too, has it correct. In considering the first question in the Westminster shorter catechism, "What is the chief end of man?", Piper answers this way: "The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever." Indeed, Piper says, "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desire of your heart.

In the end, it is not so much the case that we were made for a purpose, as it is that we were made for a Person. And ultimately our inheritance, our reward, is that Person Himself.

Jesus as a child

2006-01-07T19:25:00.000-07:00

For Christmas I received a copy of Anne Rice's latest novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, and have just finished reading it. It is an imaginative first-person account of Jesus' life at around age 8, beginning in Alexandria and following the family journeys out of Egypt and eventually back to Nazareth, through all the violent turmoil and instability that arose in the aftermath of the death of Herod the Great. Anne Rice is noted for her historical research, making the setting of her novels as accurate as possible. This one is no different. It would be worth reading just to get a better sense of the cultural and geographic setting of New Testament accounts.

More impressive, however, is her imaginative insights into the process of Jesus' developing self-awareness and self-understanding. Just how did the child Jesus grow in "wisdom and stature" and in his own understanding of the mission he had been sent to fulfill? If he was, as the orthodox creeds insist, truly human (as well as truly God), then his understanding must have passed through some normal human development process. Of course, the gospels do not tell us about this process, and so in the end knowing the answer to this question must not be essential to the life of faith — but reflecting upon it certainly can broaden one's conception of what Christ's nature as truly human really was — and by extension, what it may mean for us to be redeemed and transformed into truly human persons.

For this, Anne Rice is to be commended. Read her book — you won't regret it.

How Amish Evaluate Technology

2006-01-06T09:30:00.000-07:00

A post on the resonate.ca blog directed me to this 1999 article in Wired. It's a very interesting piece on how Amish communities evaluate what technologies will be allowed, for what purposes, and which will not. The bishops consider how extended use of the technology will tend to shape the people who use it, and also ask the question "Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?" — a particularly important question for a people that values community highly.

The author found much guidance in his interaction with the Amish on the use of technology to apply in his own thinking — something he had most definitely not expected. His article ends thusly:

I never expected the Amish to provide precise philosophical yardsticks that could guide the use of technological power. What drew me in was their long conversation with their tools. We technology-enmeshed "English" don't have much of this sort of discussion. And yet we'll need many such conversations, because a modern heterogeneous society is going to have different values, different trade-offs, and different discourses. It's time we start talking about the most important influence on our lives today.

I came away from my journey with a question to contribute to these conversations: If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?

While he was thinking primarily of technology in terms of "things", I suspect we could also apply some of the same observations to our use of technology in terms of "methods". Might we in the church not be much better advised to have the sort of "long conversation" with our methodological tools that the Amish have, than to simply adopt whatever method seems to have "worked" in some other context? How would our decisions around music style, liturgy, program times and methods, staffing, small groups, goals and vision statements, etc. differ if we thought about what sort of people we would tend to become from long term use of these approaches? I wonder.

Living with Death, Dying with Life

2006-01-05T19:05:00.000-07:00

Living with Death, Dying with Life was the title of a lecture that Mark Strom gave at Regent College this past summer, which I listened to on my Tuesday morning walk. I've transcribed here the final few minutes of his lecture, which moved me considerably:

I want to finish with my own picture of the Jesus that we are speaking about here. Tom Wright in one of his little books has asked the question: “Was Jesus God?” and he says, Well, it depends upon which god you’re talking about. If god is some abstract removed deity who throws rocks, then no, Jesus is not that god. But the question becomes better: “What kind of god is the God who could become Jesus?”

This God could put on eyebrows and kneecaps, tear ducts and saliva glands. This God could be born under the tyrants Augustus and Herod. This God could accept the smells of shepherds and the extravagances of political emissaries. This God could start life a vulnerable hunted child born into scandal. This God could grow up under foreign domination and among terrorists and outcasts.

This God could sit in the street playing marbles. This God could wear with pride the calloused, splintered hands of an honest workman, building the houses and fixing the furniture of half-castes, outcasts, and bigots. This God could ask his cousin to baptize him along with the rest of the crowd.

This God could make the best vintage Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon even when the guests were too drunk to know the difference. This God could befriend a bloke in a tree with “small man” syndrome. This God could enjoy a prostitute washing his feet, giving her his full and undivided attention, ignoring the eye-rolling of the lawyers and theologians. This God could spend a whole night making a whip to crack over the backs of con artists who rip-off the poor. This God could wrap the greatest truths in the simplest stories and put a sting in the tail of every yarn.

This God could let himself hang on a tree; nails tearing at his sinews; blood, feces and urine running down his legs. This God could invite women to be the first to know that he was back. This God could delay his own glorious home-coming long for a bite of breakfast on the beach and a yarn with an old friend to let him know there were no hard feelings and to pass on his mantle. This God could take his own story and give it the most surprising ending.

This God — this God is worth knowing.

This God could reach into the crevices of my soul to bring to life the longings I smother so pathetically and recklessly with shameful excuses. This God could raise me up to life with him. This God could give me every blessing he could give himself. This God could draw me out of my petty self-interest without the hint of a “tut-tut”, a patronizing frown or a smile.

This God could be more infuriating and fascinating and gob-smacking than any god I could ever make up. This God could love my obsessiveness and overlook my forgetfulness. This God could laugh and cry with me and come play with me. This God could make me his glory. This God could love me. This God could make my heart good. This God could trust me. This God could never be safe, but always be good.

This God — this God is worth knowing. This God I want to know. This God I know in the face and spirit of Jesus. This God I know as I die and rise with Christ.

For more quotes from Mark Strom, along the lines of things he covered earlier in his lecture, check out this post I read yesterday by Len Hjalmarson.

Feed Problems

2006-01-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

My apologies to those of you who read my posts via email subscription or feed aggregator — there have been a few difficulties over the past few days.

For some reason or other, the feed totally mangled my Compassion in a Broken World post, as well as my 2005 Book List post (although you probably weren't all that interested in the book list). The email subscription service also seemed to have totally missed my Christ Plays in History post.

If you missed those posts, and want to read them, just follow the links included here. Of course, you can always check out the entire blog at its home location Metamorphic Journey.

The Christian and Power

2006-01-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

On this morning's walk, I listened to Dr. Andrea Sterk talking about the Uses and Abuses of Power in the Christian Roman Empire, in which she examined the way Christians utilized power in the 125 year period beginning with the conversion of Emperor Constantine.

Power, she said, is something of an ambivalent thing — it depends on who uses it and how it is used whether it is good or bad. Indeed it can even be ambivalent in the hands of the same individual, as she provided examples in her talk. The primary example of good use of power involved Basil of Caesarea, who used his influence as bishop to establish something of a combination hospital and Mustard Seed Street Ministry — gaining funding from both civic and imperial government as well as from private interests.

Nevertheless, it seemed to me that her examples followed a downward trajectory as the period wore on. The Christian community never really got over its self-perception as a minority, and a previously persecuted and potentially still persecuted minority at that, even after many years of rule by Christian emperors. Add to that the concern over the dilution and diminution of the faith with the large scale pragmatic conversions to a nominal Christianity, and there soon developed an anxiety toward opposing evil and maintaining a pure and devout faith. Social, civic and even imperial power began to be utilized in dealing with heresy, on an increasingly coercive and violent basis. From there things spread to persecution of pagans and Jews, as well as heretics — often utilizing the same religio-political rhetoric and reasoning as had previously been used by pre-Constantinian rulers to outlaw and persecute Christians. As polarization increased, the voices of moderation and conciliation were also marginalized and squeezed out.

Dr. Sterk drew some parallels to the situation surrounding the last US presidential election, where increasingly religious rhetoric was used to identify one side (or the other) of various political issues as being synonymous with Christian faith. All sides felt marginalized and oppressed; the so-called "religious right" still felt the marginalization from earlier periods, the solidly left feared the increasing power of the right who seemed to be taking over government and particularly the White House, and those in the middle felt shunned and oppressed by the extremes from both sides.

Much of the lecture reminded me of the concern expressed by the Dean of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. at the memorial service held in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 incident, when he prayed that "we not become the evil that we deplore." Insecurity concerning one's place in the world, a conviction that one is morally in the right, and the belief that the fate of civilization is at stake makes the availability of power a very dangerous thing — it is far too easy to take up the weapons of one's adversary and, in the end, simply become him.

In The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel faced this very temptation when Frodo offered to give her the one ring. "Instead of a dark lord, you would set up a queen; beautiful and terrible as the dawn. All shall love me, and despair." regrettably, history reveals that far too many Christians have not passed this test, as Galadriel did — whether faced with power in the political realm, or even just within the church.

Christ Plays in History

2006-01-01T19:30:00.000-07:00

A short while back I had marked the following passage in my reading of Eugene Peterson's Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, concerning Mark's telling of Jesus' playing in history:

Though St. Mark writes his story under the influence of the greatest of the apostles, Peter, he practically writes Peter out of the story by making clear that Peter is, in actual fact, the lead sinner. The true relation between Jesus and his followers is at stake here. Peter as the lead apostle has the potential for moving into a place of prominence alongside Jesus. By portraying Peter as the lead sinner, Mark makes sure that will not happen. If Peter as leader can be prevented from moving into the limelight with Jesus, it is accomplished for all Christians forever. And that is what Mark does. It may be his finest accomplishment as storywriter — in Peter's presence and under Peter's authority and influence, he keeps Peter from taking over the story. The glorification of Peter is blocked at the source. Whatever stellar qualities Peter acquired through his leadership and preaching in the early church, they are excised from the story; only his weakness and failures are kept. The Jesus story includes a colorful company of others, but none of them is presented in such a way as to obscure or compromise the unique and unprecedented centrality of Jesus. Peter is portrayed as a bungler, as a blasphemer, and as a faithless human being. But not merely Peter, Peter as leader. Nor do the other chosen disciples become examples for us to look up to or follow. Thick-skulled and dull-witted, they turn out to be a pack of cowards. Sir Edwin Hoskyns and Noel Davey remark on the "staggering brutality" with which Mark writes the disciples out of any part of Jesus' work.

St. Mark, in other words, tells this foundational salvation story in such a way as to prevent us from setting apart any of our leaders as spiritually upper-class, to prevent us from putting them on pedestals. This is a salvation story and the Savior is Jesus. Nothing in the storytelling is permitted to divert our attention from Jesus. There is nothing here that will play into our preference for dealing with famous celebrities instead of the despised Jesus. There is nothing glamorous or inspiring about even the best of the leaders: every one, down to the last man and woman, is saved by grace.

Maintaining that simplicity and focus — that salvation is by God's initiative and grace in Jesus — has proved to be one of the most difficult things to maintain in the Christian community. In the course of the generations, Mark's storytelling has not prevented us from developing celebrity cults, elevating Peter and others to prominence, and thereby providing seemingly easier ways of dealing with our souls than dealing with God in Jesus. And it has not prevented us from being diverted by spiritual and religious novelties that promise shortcuts to soul entertainment. But Mark's story continues to provide the honest ground to which we all return from our God-detours and soul-diversions.

As I write this out, I am struck by Eugene's sanguine optimism in his final sentence, that indeed we all return. Truth be told, I often despair that we have made our celebrity cults, our fixation on our work for the Kingdom, our God-detours and soul-diversions, so powerful that return is well nigh impossible. Perhaps indeed this is one of those places where for man it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.

2005 Book List

2005-12-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

These are the books I finished reading since Christmas 2004:

Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith
Rob Bell
Looking for God in Harry Potter
John Granger
Light from Heaven
Jan Karon
the out of bounds church? Learning to Create a Community of Faith in a Culture of Change
Steve Taylor
a New Kind of Christian
Brian D. McLaren
The Last Word, and the Word After That
Brian D. McLaren
Breaking Barriers: The Possibilities of Christian Community in a Lonely World
Lyle D. Vander Broeck
Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World
Lee C. Camp
In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership
Henri J.M. Nouwen
tuesdays with Morrie: an old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
Mitch Albom
Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2
Steve Stockman
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
L.Gen Roméo Dallaire
Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition
Hans Boersma
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
J.K Rowling
Divorcing Marriage: Unveiling the Dangers in Canada's New Social Experiment
Daniel Cere and Douglas Farrow, editors
Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire
Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Pocket Full of Rye
Agatha Christie
The Road to Daybreak: a spiritual journey
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Mudhouse Sabbath
Lauren F. Winner
The Slippery Slope: A Series of Unfortunate Events
Lemony Snicket
The Illumined Heart: The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation
Frederica Mathewes-Green
A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching Out to God in the Lost Language of Lament
Michael Card
The Meaning of the City
Jacques Ellul
Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles
Julie Ingersoll
The Resurrection of the Son of God
N.T. Wright
a Generous Orthodoxy
Brian D. McLaren
Blue Like Jazz: Nonregilious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
donald miller
the Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups
Joseph R. Myers
ReImagining Spiritual Formation: A Week in the Life of an Experimental Church
Doug Pagitt

Compassion in a Broken World

2005-12-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

At Christmas it is almost impossible not to be confronted by the stark difference between the haves — who are busy supporting the North American economy in their purchasing of all many of goods, for themselves and for others — and the have nots — most notably those suffering from natural disasters, but also those in chronic poverty or societal dysfunction.

Compassion fatigue is, of course, also a very real phenomenon. We seem to be bombarded by stories of brokenness and need so often and so extensively that, in order to maintain our own sanity, we develop a short of blindness to all that pain and misery. It struck me that this is not unlike the way we deal with signs and advertisements, as I spoke of in my last post.

Curiously, however, I find that while stories of desperate need often pass over me without impact, I never fail to be moved by stories of compassion — stories of people reaching out and responding to the needs they see in the world.

Regrettably, I find that I am surrounded not by people telling and enacting stories of compassion so much as I am surrounded by people telling stories of need and competing with each other to tell their stories in the most graphic way, to seek the most attention. As I result, I find I am growing into a less compassionate person, rather than a more compassionate person. Just like with the signs, by trying to motivate or ask directly, instead of getting greater response, ultimately this approach gets less.

Sounds sort of like he who would save his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake, will save it", doesn't it?

Signs: Asking or Giving?

2005-12-28T12:30:00.000-07:00

Everywhere you look you see signs asking you to do something: vote for me in the upcoming election, buy this product, use this service, attend this concert, support this cause, give money, give time, give blood — each competing with the others for your attention. Eventually, these signs become invisible — or perhaps more accurately, we get so that we simply don't see them any more.

Church signs, for the most part, look just the same as every other sign — they advertise times and events, and given the genre, seem to be asking for your attendance, just as the other signs do. The information is useful to those who want it, but largely invisible to everyone else.

For the past several years, my son and I have been involved in changing a church sign every week. What has made this sign different is that we have tried to avoid as much as possible asking anyone for anything. Instead we have tried simply to give thoughts, insights, encouragements, reflections to whomever is passing by, whether or not they would ever come into our building, or identify themselves with us in anyway. To be sure, there have been times when the sign has advertised an event or service — along the same lines as other signs — but up until recently, we have been able to resist those influences that would tend to turn the sign into just another asking sign.

That time may be coming to an end — we've been getting repeated, and more pointed, requests to have service times up on one side more or less permanently. To me, this is a sad development — it seems in some way to be breaking faith with the community and selling out to the ask mentality. And so I don't know how long our involvement with that sign will continue.

From time to time over the years, we would get encouraging responses back, directly or indirectly, that these messages have been greatly appreciated in the community. We have learned of people who make a point of reading that sign whenever they pass, others who copy the messages down and disseminate them in other forums, and others who have been moved or encouraged at a particularly sensitive point in their lives. And, of course, a few who find something a bit too close to home, perhaps, and become irritated or offended.

Our intention, of course, is neither to offend nor to never offend, but simply to give something of value to the community — to give freely and indiscriminately, without regard to return. Much the way I think the gospel is intended to be given out. Hearing stories of how people have been affected is encouraging, but that is just pure gift, not something that drives the giving.

Many times, however, I feel that I am totally alone in this sort of thinking — our culture is so obsessed with seeing, indeed measuring, results. And our churches are no different. Consequently, to come upon something that another has written that sounds similar is so very encouraging. In this particular case, it is Rob Bell who writes in Velvet Elvis the following:

I am learning that the church is at its best when it gives itself away. ... God has no boundaries. God blesses everybody. People who don't believe in God. People who are opposed to God. People who do violent, evil things. God's intentions are to bless everybody. Jesus continues this idea in many of his teachings. In the book of Luke he says, "I am among you as one who serves." He not only refers to himself as a servant, sent to serve others, but he teaches his disciples that the greatest in his kingdom are the ones who serve. For Jesus, everything is upside down. The best and the greatest and most important are thones who humble themselves, set theirs needs and desires aside, and selflessly serve others.

So what is a group of people living this way called? That's the church. The church doesn't exist for itself; it exists to serve the world. It is not ultimately about the church; it's about all the people God wants to bless through the church. When the church loses sight of this, it loses its heart. This is especially true today in the world we live in where so many people are hostile to the church, many for good reason. We reclaim the church as a blessing machine not only because that is what Jesus intended from the beginning but also because serving people is the only way their perceptions of church are ever going to change. ... (T)he most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and convince them to join. It is when the church gives itself away in radical acts of service and compassion, expecting nothing in return, that the way of Jesus is most vividly put on display.

Oftentimes the Christian community has sent the message that we love people and build relationships in order to convert them to the Christian faith. So there is an agenda. And when there is an agenda, it isn't really love, is it? It's something else. We have to rediscover love, period. Love that loves because it is what Jesus teaches us to do. We have to surrender our agendas.

I am learning that the church is at its best when it is underground, subversive, and countercultural. It is the quiet, humble, stealth acts that change things.

I wonder why it is so hard for us to see this.

Alone

2005-12-22T11:52:00.000-07:00

This morning I've had episodes of feeling profoundly alone. They are quite debilitating, making it impossible to work or focus on much of anything. I'd thought these had been left behind, but I guess not.

I wonder if that's how some people feel about Christmas — profoundly alone in the midst of all the "family togetherness time" language that surrounds the season.

For me today, recovery was generated by someone walking into my office to talk about distinguishing current versus long-term assets and liabilities with respect to the already convuluted pension accounting rules — totally unrelated to anything connected to the feelings of aloneness. Which, of course, makes me wonder if assisting the painfully alone might actually require less attention to the reason for the feeling rather than more — if perhaps those best situated to help are not those who identify with the pain, but those who simply engage the individual with the ordinary things of living.

Suffer the Little Children

2005-12-18T18:14:00.000-07:00

Today we witnessed our children's dramatic Christmas presentation at church — apparently the first such in this church's six year history (but don't quote me on that). Afterward we had another practice for our upcoming Christmas Eve drama.

As I was leaving following the practice, something reminded me of the first "adult" drama I participated in. My father had a role in a Christmas drama, and for some reason brought me along to one of the rehearsals. One of the men was absent — again! — and to help them out with the practice I was asked to read the part. By the end of the rehearsal, the part was mine. I was nine, I think, or ten at the very outside.

From those recollections, I was reminded of many other ways that I had participated in the worship life of that particular church community. I remember singing solos as special music on more than one occasion in the main morning worship service. I remember being appointed the official teller of children's stories in the evening service — the sort of stories that the adults are just as interested in as the children.

In a very real sense then, when I was baptized at age eleven and officially became a "member" of that church, it really was just ratification of what had been true for some time already — as a child I really was an active participating member of that faith community; a part of the body of Christ that really was being built up through my gifts as well as those of others.

I realized just how much so many of our churches have lost since then, in not making the spaces available for the gifts of all her members to be utilized in the life of the community, but rather relegating the gifts of so many to little ghettos rather than the service of the community as a whole.

Maybe that's the real tragedy in our ongoing arguments over style and technique and vision and the best way to enculturate the gospel — we are so focused on getting the stuff right that we overlook the gifts that the Spirit has given our churches in the persons of the "least" — in our eyes, if not in God's — of these members; whether children or other groups that are reduced to mere spectators.

Maybe too, it was the way that church we attended from the time I was five until just after my twelfth birthday included me as a fully participating member even as a child is what has kept me committed to this messed up way of being that we call church through all the struggles that came later.

Thank you God, for this reminder of how you have brought me to yourself through so many little, yet wondrous, ways. Teach us also how to recognize and value the gifts you give us in those little packages we rarely pause to consider.

Conflict is not Wrong

2005-12-18T08:45:00.000-07:00

"Conflict in itself is neither right nor wrong. Conflict is merely the lived experience of attempting to inter-relate with others whose experiences, assumptions, and usages of language are different from our own. It is what we do with conflict that is right or wrong."

This was a loose quote from Cherith Nordling in this morning's walking lecture; or more precisely a loose quote of her loose quote from a professor of hers some time in the past. It came up in the context of a discussion of theologies from the margins, and the recognition that the existence of the margins is prima facie evidence of a process or experience of marginalization, which means that there has been some profound wrong that has occurred in the lives of the marginalized.

For much of the past five years, I have lived in the context of a church community whose primary means of dealing with conflict was to suppress it, ignore it, or trivialize it. Only when the conflict became so extensive that these approaches could no longer contain it, was the existence of the conflict acknowledged &mdash and then, the most common approach taken was to demonize those with whom one was in conflict. Open and honest dialogue in an attempt to either find common ground or to understand the differing lived experience that gave rise to differences in assumptions, emphasis or expression simply did not occur &mdash perhaps in part because there was so little time available for such activity, time which was needed to be expended in "more important" matters such as the pursuit of vision.

The fruit of this pattern of dealing — or perhaps better stated, not dealing — with conflict was marginalization. And as people came to feel more and more marginalized, they tended to withdraw in various ways from participation in the community life. And the more they withdrew, the greater the tendency for others to discount their differing opinions, expressions, or experience as invalid, thus increasing the marginalization. And people left — not just people who had always been, as it were, on the fringe, but people who had once &mdash and often very recently &mdash been in the very thick of the community life.

The church community we are now part of wants to see itself as accepting of all sorts of people, and in particularly people from the margins — for did not Jesus go out to the margins of his society to proclaim his Good News? Ironically, a too common response of the formerly marginalized is a tendency to attempt to marginalize those they see as belonging to the "privileged" class. A prime example of this occurred last Sunday morning when the speaker, talking about the experience of marginalization felt by many women in our society, particularly around areas of crisis pregnancy — miscarriage, abortion, adoption, and the like — by her manner or speech, acted to marginalize the men in the audience. One man in particular, who spoke with me quite passionately following the service, was feeling overwhelmingly marginalized by a society in which male bashing by women in response to their experience of pain seemed to be constant and unrelenting; and most poignantly, often in the very area where empathy ought most naturally to be have been available. Of course, he spoke in language of retaliation; of "not taking it anymore" — a response that would inevitably marginalize women who had not themselves acted directly to oppress him. And so the cycle continues.

The questions this raises for me are these: If in the process of taking what I think is the Good News to the marginalized of our world, my manner or message results in the marginalization of others — particularly if consciously — is it really Jesus' message I am carrying? How do I deal with my own sense of marginalization, in a marginalizing community or society, in a way that brings the hope of God's salvation to other marginalized people without in turn attempting to marginalize those whose speech, behaviours, actions and inactions have marginalized me?

My, what one less computer can do

2005-12-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

Our household has been experiencing a bit of computer generated discomfort these past two weeks, with one less functioning computer. Two computers just don't seem to be enough to service five people, even with all our comings and goings and passing as ships in the night.

For me, it's been experienced in very limited blogging &mdash honest posting doesn't seem possible if you have to start with some unpleasantness in either kicking someone off a computer, or in asking the individual across the room to tone down the music, or whatever, so you can concentrate on thinking deeply out loud. I guess there is a certain element of privacy that is needed when opening up oneself, even to the public.

So, I certainly hope we'll hear back soon about Yvonne's notebook, in again for the third time since the summer.

Pure and Transparent Relationships

2005-12-15T13:04:00.000-07:00

In my early morning walks, I've begun listening to a summer school course on contemporary theologies by Dr. Cherith Nordling. Before getting into the genesis and specifics of various contemporary theologies, she reviewed the nature of trinity as eternal loving community.

The comment that particularly grabbed my attention and my heart was related to our eternal destiny — rather than being a "boring" existence sitting around, we are invited into the eternal loving community of Father, Son & Spirit. This means not only do we have perfected relationship with God, but our relationships with other people will be free of all the things that mess them up now. Indeed we will relate to each other in a pure and fully transparent manner, and be loved and accepted as we are.

To be fully known, to stand before God and others fully transparent, as my naked self, and feel no shame. Now that is an exciting prospect! And one that makes my heart sing!

Of Language and History

2005-12-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

This morning, on my usual early morning walk in the cold, I listened to a fascinating lecture by Dr. Sarah Williams, entitled Recovering Belief in History. Her doctoral and post-doctoral work has been in the area of Modern Religious History, a field dominated, she says, by a presumption of the secularization theory. As as result, the tendency has been to explain all religious change in the modern period by analysis of change in economic, class and other external social phenomena, and to disregard, almost by design, the language of self-reporting of individuals about their own religious experience and motivation. Dr. Williams expects that the rise of postmodernity will actual force a change in that situation, allowing (or requiring) serious historians to develop methods of investigation that bring the language and practice of belief back into the discussion of history.

Part of my own fascination with her talk was the connections I saw between her own scholastic world and the world of the churches of my experience, and my own frustration with the fact that "faith" was not something that could be discussed as it had actually developed in my own life and story, but something that had to fit into a pre-determined form that looked nothing like my experience.

But beyond that, there was much of her reports of the odd juxtapositions of folk and church belief in the lives of those she interviewed that made me think about how the language of church shapes, and mis-shapes, the life and faith of those exposed to it. As a result, my belief that we need to pay much closer attention to the effects of our language patterns in the church was re-inforced. How do we guard against the tendency for our language to promote a kind of "magical" understanding of the rituals of our faith, on the one hand, and also against the tendency of our language to promote a kind of "moralism" on the other?

Perhaps here too the rise of postmodernity, with its emphases on diverse forms of expression, will force us to multiply the metaphors and the media we use to express matters of faith — will force us out of our lazy habits of focussing too much on the one right form of expression, a habit that certainly plays into the hands of misunderstandings.

Are We Too Sophisticated to Serve?

2005-12-05T08:51:00.000-07:00

Blogger desertpastor invites dialog on the question Are We Too Sophisticated to Serve? His question raises one of my own: could it be, perhaps, that our language of Servant Leadership operates in some way for us as a rationalization for our own preference to pursue the advantages of leadership over the more radical, but far less glamorous, call to servanthood? I wouldn't want to suggest that this is necessarily the case for all, but might it not be something we need be aware of in our own lives?

Every Man's Battle: A Metaphor

2005-12-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

The sermon this morning was entitled Christmas Through a Man's Eyes, and was an articulation of the nature of a Godly man by means of a character study of Joseph, the husband of Mary. During the part about true sexual integrity, the statement was made that a truly Godly man is one who will change channels on the TV, will turn off the computer, will leave the theatre when necessary — when the content is problematic to his sexual integrity. It was at this juncture that I recalled an incident from the past and began to make connections between the struggle commonly attributed to "every" man, and those I have been encountering regarding the cultural language and mythology of Leadership.

Some years ago, we used to receive mailings from a Christian organization based in western Canada that went by the name of International Centre for Leadership Development, or something like that. It was sort of a mail-order bookstore specializing in all the popular Church Growth and Christian Leadership material — books, audio material, study guides, programs, spiritual gift inventories, and the like. The mailers were all high quality, glossy catalogs of material available. The thing about these catalogs, however, was the descriptions of the material. Never have I seen such over the top marketing hype anywhere — the superlatives were lavish and the promises beyond belief. The descriptions of the material were so overblown as to become obscene — no secular source would have made such blatantly incredible claims. I remember coming to feel dirty just from looking at these mailouts. Time and time again, I would promise myself that the next time one came in the mail it would go straight in the garbage without even a glance. But too often I would get sucked into opening it up and flipping through it, only to gag at the marketing hype.

In time, this reaction grew to extend to almost all Leadership type material. And eventually I responded the way Christian men are taught to respond to any sort of pornographic material; I banned anything remotely "erotic" from my reading list, my home, my vocabulary — in this case "erotic" referring to just about anything that touched on Leadership in any way, whether over-hyped or not.

A little over a year ago my colleagues and I took some clients out to the Cirque du Soleil when it was in town. I remember reflecting upon the performance of one particular pair of performers — one man and one woman — whom I sort of tagged in my mind as Adam and Eve, due in part to their costumes and in part to the way their performance began. There was, I was reminded, an incredible beauty to the unadorned human form, distinctly male and female, that God had created and originally declared very good. It struck me that this beauty was a thing to be appreciated and delighted in, as a good gift of God. And I was reminded of Peter's vision of the animals on the sheet, when God instructed him not to call anything unclean which God had made clean.

I know that some Christians would take serious exception to what I have just said. To them, the power of fallen human sexuality is so powerful that only by avoiding anything and everything that might be capable of arousing an inappropriate sexual interest — in effect everything sensual related to human form — can one be truly "pure" — something which is, admittedly, an incredibly difficult thing to do in such a sexually charged culture such as ours. This advice is, no doubt, appropriate advice for those who have fallen hard into addictive sexual behaviours — just as total abstinence is appropriate advice for dry alcoholics. Yet I have often wondered if perhaps the extreme nature of this advice is not in itself what has made sex into the battleground of supposedly every man, by unnecessarily transforming what otherwise would have been appropriate delight in God's good gift of the beauty of human form into something unclean — by making the simple recognition of value the sin, rather than the desire to possess what is not one's to own. Can one not fully delight in the beauty of the mountains, without being overtaken by the lust to possess them for oneself? Similarly, can one not fully delight in the beauty of a woman without being overtaken by the lust to possess her for oneself? Indeed, can the delight in the beauty of a woman not remind one of the delight one has in one's own wife — a delight that can only be appropriately enjoyed in the context of one's own marriage — in a way that is pleasing to the God who made them male and female? For myself, I have long found the answers to these questions to be Yes!, and have always endeavoured to make them so practically in my own life.

In reflecting on this whole matter, I can see how much I have been influenced by the thinking of those who demand strict avoidance of anything sensual in my own response to the challenge of the heavily charged Leadership language of our culture. But, as I concluded in my last post, this is not a viable solution for the long run. The encouragement I find in this current reflection is this: just as I have been able to find ways to live comfortably in a culture charged with the language and images of the Sex god without falling into sexual addiction on the one hand and without withdrawing from all exposure to the beauty of the human form on the other, so too there must be a way of living comfortably in a culture charged with the language of the Leadership god without falling into idolatry on the one hand and without withdrawing from all exposure to leadership language on the other.

No doubt it will be harder to find my way on the Leadership side of this parallel than it was on the Sexual side, because I have had so much longer exposure to the dark side of Leadership. But today I am more hopeful that that way can and will be found.

Soli Deo gloria!

On Leadership and Servanthood

2005-12-03T10:50:00.000-07:00

This is a post I have been putting off writing, partly because it will be long, and partly because in many ways I am tired of the subject — it seems to be getting in the way of so much I want in my life and relationships. But at the moment, it doesn't seem like I am able to avoid the subject.

The Language of Leadership

In our culture, the word "leadership" is utilized in a number of related, and yet very distinct ways. At one level, leadership is simply a task performed by one or more individuals that assists a group in self-organizing and accomplishing something. In this sense, leadership is a needed component of any group endeavour. How it happens or how it is exercised depends on the context of the situation, and therefore can take a multiplicity of forms. Some individuals have skills that permit them to perform this task in a variety of contexts, while others have skills that rarely lend themselves to fulfilling this role except in unusual circumstances. For the time, and in the context, that an individual performs the task of leadership, we call him or her a "leader". I have no quarrel at all with this conception of leadership.

However that is not the only meaning of the word leadership in our culture — indeed, I find that it actually rare in our culture to encounter this meaning alone, without overtones of other meanings. It is with these other meanings of "Leadership" that this post attempts to engage.

Just last night I heard a woman who was about to lead our group in a short devotional period express her discomfort with what she was about to do by explaining, "I am not a Leader." In saying this, she was expressing a conception of Leadership that was much more than simply the task of assisting the group toward an end — for she was certainly capable of doing that, and indeed proceeded to do that in a number of ways throughout the evening. Her statement had to do with a complex of concepts that our culture has subsumed under the idea of Leadership.

One of those aspects of this complex of concepts that make up the idea of Leadership is that Leadership is some "thing" that resides in or on those persons who are "Leaders" — it is an essential aspect of those individuals' character, makeup, or person. This produces the kind of divisional marker that makes sense of my friend's statement — some people possess this something we call Leadership and other people do not. It also makes sense of the kinds of discussions that go on concerning whether Leadership is something is primarily inate or primarily learned, and the degree to which Leadership can be developed in an individual; discussions that would make no sense whatsoever if leadership were understood solely as a task in a context.

Now it is possible that one could speak of the loose collection of qualities, skills, character traits, etc. that tend to be commonly possessed by those individuals who find themselves taking on the task of leadership (in my first sense) in a wider range of contexts than others (and hence, more frequently than others), and refer to that by the shorthand label of "leadership". We use this type of shorthand language all the time, and if that were simply what we meant by "leadership" in this personal characteristic sense, I would again have no particular quarrel. However, even if that was how the language usage began, it clearly has passed beyond that. Consider my friend's statement, "I am not a Leader", and how it would be understood if this were simply shorthand: "I do not possess enough of the particular skills, qualities, character traits, etc. commonly associated with leading to be one of those persons who takes on the task of leadership in a wider range of contexts than others." Would that have made sense of what she meant in the context in which she said it? I think not. It would have been akin to someone who had been asked to lead a group of preschoolers to the playground saying, "I am uncomfortable doing that, because I don't have the skills to lead an orchestra (or circumpolar expedition, or whatever)."

Like it or not, and whether we accept the truth of the language or not, the language of Leadership in our culture is inextricably bound up with the idea that it is a particular, even if difficult to precisely define, collection of personal characteristics that Leaders possess and that non-Leaders do not. And by extension we assume that only Leaders can / should take of the task of leadership (in the primitive sense) — a non-Leader may do so in a pinch, but things would go much better if a Leader did it.

This leads us to yet another aspect of the way Leadership is used in the language of our culture. That is the idea that Leadership is what is needed to solve the problems that we are in, whether those be problems in the workplace, problems in the family, problems in the schools, problems in government, problems in socio-political realities of all kinds, problems in ecological systems, economic systems, legal systems, whatever. Leadership is the thing that will bring peace, prosperity and salvation to our world. It is this belief that drives us to study Leadership (in the sense of personal qualities) so as to find a way to bring more of it to bear on our problems. It is this belief that drives us to try and develop more and better Leaders — because our problems are so extensive we cannot see how we can be saved without it. It is this belief that drives us to bestow upon Leadership language of trust, commitment, honor, praise, worth &mdash in a word, worship.

Following the god of Leadership

Leadership makes quite an enticing god, when you think about it. Leadership promises to solve all our problems — not just secular problems but also ecclesiastical problems. Even more important, Leadership offers us personal significance in holding out that "You, too, can be a Leader"; vaguely reminiscent of the serpent's promise, "Ye shall be as gods!" Even better, we can justify our devotion to Leadership on the premise that Leadership is a gift given by God. What could be wrong with that?

Of course, the sun is also a gift from God, as is the moon, the rain, the harvest, sexuality, etc., etc. Yet we know that worshipping these things is precisely anathema to the true worship of God — you would find no debate about that anywhere within christian circles.

Committing oneself to trust in and serve the god of Leadership is not something one does deliberately as a concious act of rejection of God. Rather this devotion is something that develops subtly and slowly, often under the guise of trying to do the work of building God's kingdom. In a way, you can see the same thing happening in the lives of Annanias and Sapphira — their devotion to money grew alongside the activity of using money to promote God's kingdom.

In my own case, I have spent almost my entire adult life in some form of formal church leadership. Had you asked me, I would have been sure that this work of leadership was entirely about following God. It was only when I experienced a major leadership clash in the context of a group of men who were equally convinced that their pursuit and exercise of Leadership was entirely about following God, and saw the effect that that interaction was having on my own soul, that I realized just how soul-destructive a god Leadership really was. How devoted I had become to the Leadership god became evident in the extreme difficulty I had in giving it up.

Prior to this experience, I had gone through a major surgery removing a cancerous tumour from my right kidney, and found it easy to trust God through it all. A few days into the recovery phase, the tube delivering the analgesic to the epidural tap on my back became dislocated. The result was not simply a loss of the pain control, but also the generation of something like fire running up and down my entire spine. There was some confusion in getting in touch with the pain control doctor, and so I lay in bed for what seemed like an eternity with this fire, not knowing what was really going on. One thought was that an infection had taken hold in the spine, which could do who knows what sort of permanent damage. I distinctly remember considering the possibility that one outcome could be paralysis, and I distinctly remember knowing deep within my soul that even if that were to happen, God would be there with me and that it was far far better to be paralysed with God than fully healthy without Him.

The reality of peacefully trusting God in that circumstance, in the circumstances of my parents' deaths, and in the circumstances of other health or life and death situations stood as a marked contrast to my inability to trust God with the leadership of the church. That is to say, I could trust God intellectually with the church, but that did not translate into the deep gut level trust I experienced with life and death issues.

What about servant Leadership?

It is a commonplace in church circles to say that "out in the world" Leadership may well be this dangerous and unGodly thing, but that's because the world doesn't pursue the right sort of Leadership. We, on the other hand, know that the right sort of Leadership is "servant Leadership" — a softer, gentler form of Leadership that is concerned with the well being of people rather than the aggrandizement of self that comes from position. We even quote Jesus in support of this idea:

You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Mark 10:42-45 (ESV)

Unfortunately, I don't think the idea of servant Leadership works, at least not the way I hear it used in actual practice. Every christian Leader I have ever met has considered himself or herself to be pursuing servant Leadership. I know I did. But is the fruit of this Leadership really all that different in the church than in the world?

The language of servant Leadership is not unique to the christian community — it has its proponents in the secular business world as well. In that usage, it means adopting the guise of a servant, doing things for those whom you wish to lead, in order that they will in turn be more amenable to following you. It is not much different from the idea that if you treat your employees with dignity and respect, and give them freedom to work somewhat in their own way, they will work harder for you and therefore by more productive and more valuable assets. (This is sometimes called management theory Y in opposition to management theory X which postulates that people are basically all lazy and self-interested and must be constantly supervised, prodded and whipped — figuratively, or in some cultures literally — into action, or they'll do nothing.)

The problem with the idea of servant Leadership in this form is that it is still first and foremost about Leadership — it's about what sort of Leadership is more effective. Serving the people you lead is first and foremost about getting the desired response from them; along the lines of the adage "you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar". Of course we all know that it's not the flies' best interest which is in focus here.

The problem we have in using the Bible in this way is that we are asking the wrong question of the text. We persist in coming to the Bible already to committed to the idea that in Leadership we will find our salvation, and ask of the Bible only how best to engage in Leadership. What we ought to ask is instead something like "If we were to spend three years hanging around with Jesus as he is presented in the Gospels, what would we conclude ought to be our posture toward the people around us who are experiencing these problems?”

Jesus' upside-down Kingdom

I am convinced that if we let the Bible speak on its own terms, rather than coming to it to see what it might say on a particular subject we've already predetermined, we would come to the conclusion that Leadership is not what offers salvation, nor is Leadership something we ought to particularly aspire to. I am convinced that if we came to the Bible on its own terms, we would see that what Jesus says in passages such as the Mark 10 passage quoted above is not that we need to pursue a different sort of Leadership than do the Gentiles, but rather that we need to abandon the pursuit of Leadership entirely. Instead of aspiring to be Leaders, we become servants. Instead of serving others in order to get them to sign on to our agenda, follow us, and help us accomplish that for which we are Leaders, we simply serve them because they are in need.

Following Jesus in this way is not just about taking on the guise of a servant as a means to becoming a better Leader — it is about becoming a servant, period — just as Jesus does not come down from God in the guise of humanity but rather becomes truly human.

I am convinced that if we are serious about following Jesus, we will not engage in developing character or skills so that we can be better Leaders, but so that we can be better servants.

Can't we have both?

Do we really need to abandon all aspects of Leadership in order to truly follow Jesus? Is servanthood truly incompatible with Leadership? Or might we not be able to do both, be both servants and Leaders.

First of all, I will agree that being a servant does not prevent one from taking on the task of leadership in a particular context. Nor does it even prevent one from taking on the task of leadership frequently, regularly, in a host of varying contexts, if that is what is called at the time in order to serve to the best of one's ability. Indeed, to refuse to utilize the particular skills, traits, knowledge and character that one possesses when those are called upon in the task of leadership because leadership is involved is actually to refuse to be a true servant.

What I will insist upon is that it is not possible to truly be a servant if we self-identify ourselves primarily in terms of our Leadership qualities, or lack thereof. A servant must be prepared to serve where he or she is placed, whether that task is one of leadership or not.

The problem with allowing ourselves to continue to use the language of Leadership, as if it were something that distinguished Leaders from non-Leaders, and as if it were something that ought to be developed because of its capacity to solve our problems and bring salvation, is that we are inevitably formed by the language we use. I am convinced that we can no more habitually talk the talk of Leadership and remain unaffected by it than we can freely participate in the ritual worship meals in the idol's temple and not be drawn into fellowship with the demon that stands behind the idol (1 Corinthians 10:21). This is ultimately the view of my earlier post, Cleanse out the old leaven.

Following Jesus, then, must eventually transform our language, as well as our lives, so that not only do we no longer worship Leadership as a god, we now longer encourage others to do so by the language we use.

What then is my role?

So how do I then live in light of what I have just said? I cannot change the language of the culture around me, even that small bit of culture close at hand, simply by fiat. For one thing, it doesn't work, and for another, my attempts to do so simply pull me deeper into the whole Leadership mythology. Or else they tend to isolate me from that bit of community around me.

Nor can I avoid this whole language issue by withdrawing from it, for that would mean I would have to withdraw from the world. How then could I serve those around me? And yet simply ignoring the issue also pulls me in the direction I am convinced is destructive to fall into. At times I feel like exclaiming, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” Isaiah 6:5, NIV

Oddly enough the following passage came to me as I stopped to take a break from writing this post:

The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, speak to your countrymen and say to them: ‘When I bring the sword against a land, and the people of the land choose one of their men and make him their watchman, and he sees the sword coming against the land and blows the trumpet to warn the people, then if anyone hears the trumpet but does not take warning and the sword comes and takes his life, his blood will be on his own head. Since he heard the sound of the trumpet but did not take warning, his blood will be on his own head. If he had taken warning, he would have saved himself. But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people and the sword comes and takes the life of one of them, that man will be taken away because of his sin, but I will hold the watchman accountable for his blood.’

“Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me. When I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked man, you will surely die,’ and you do not speak out to dissuade him from his ways, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable for his blood. But if you do warn the wicked man to turn from his ways and he does not do so, he will die for his sin, but you will have saved yourself.
Ezekiel 33:1-9, NIV

It seems clear that God is telling Ezekiel that the prophet is not responsible for how the people respond to his prophecy. The prophet is only responsible for declaring the message God has given him. Perhaps, then, it is not my responsibility to transform the language around me, but only to give warning of the dangers it holds. That is indeed comforting — even a reprieve from the demands of the Leadership god which does measure its servants by results.

Yet there still remains the guarding of my own soul. I know far too well how easy it is for me to fall back into the trap of doing obeisance to the Leadership god, of taking the responsibility for providing solutions to the problems of the world around me onto myself as its servant. Is there anyone who will walk beside me in this struggle, and not invite me to join again the party in the idol's temple? Is there anyone who will speak the warning to me when I wander back in there, who will take my hand and lead me out? Or is it God alone who will watch over me?

Lord, it was you yourself who said, in the context of a world not yet fallen, that it was not good for man to dwell alone. How much I feel that at times like these. I know that you have been faithful in bringing the voices of faithful men into my life when most I needed them, even when that voice is my own from an earlier time, and I know that you will not fail in that regard. But it is such a tiring task to have those flesh and blood, here and now, fellow travellers the closest at hand not seem to understand the words I speak. How long must I bear the curse of Babel? Are not two better than one? For if one falls the other can lift him up. But how will one be lifted up if he is alone?

Lord, have mercy upon me, I pray.

A People Shaping Re-enactment

2005-11-27T14:30:00.000-07:00

Where I am reading in Rikki Watts' Isaiah's New Exodus in Mark, Watts is drawing on the work of Jacques Ellul and Paul Ricoeur concerning the formative influence of a community's founding moment upon its 'image of itself to itself'. This self-perception is perpetuated in the community by propagating the energies of the founding moment into the future, most strikingly by ritual re-enactments of the found moment. "Here the community's history is retold, the values, energies, and ideals ... inculcated, and the community re-constituted through succeeding generations."

We see this, of course, in Israel's founding moment, the Exodus, which is re-enacted every year at the Passover, so that it continues to form part of the collective conciousness of the people, even to this day. However, not only is the past retold in this re-enactment, but the hopes for the future are expressed as well. "Next year in Jerusalem" it is said today. But even in Jesus' day, the Passover not only looked back to Yahweh's action in bringing the people up out of bondage in the first Exodus, but also looked forward to the promised New Exodus foretold by Isaiah, in which Yahweh would restore the Kingdom that had been taken away in captivity.

For us, as a community of faith, there are also re-enactments of founding moments that continue to shape us as a people. One is, of course, the Christmas story — just this past Friday night we met to begin to prepare a drama to re-present that founding moment, and have it speak freshly into the hearts and minds of the gathered people of God. We will give a lot of energy to getting this re-enactment just right — practicing until all who participate know exactly what they are doing, and what their part is — so that it may have the shaping and forming effect that is its purpose.

Today we engaged in another re-enactment of a founding moment — when Jesus, just before his sacrificial death, re-told and re-interpretted the Passover story as a different story of New Exodus — a story of a New Exodus deliverance undertaken by himself in an unorthodox and unexpected way; the way of the suffering servant. But unlike the Christmas story, this founding moment is a moment which Jesus himself instructed us to re-enact, to re-tell, so that the community of faith might be re-membered as His Body, as His Bride.

But the odd thing is, when we come to re-enact the institution of the new covenant of faith — our founding moment as a community — we inexplicably seem not to be concerned about preparing, about ensuring that everyone knows the part he or she is expected to play. Rather we tack it on at the end of a service (which we spent hours preparing for in every other way) and simply trust that everything will kind of work out. Even reading Paul's striking words to the church at Corinth about the overwhelming importance of this time doesn't seem to get our attention.

I wonder what is happening here. I wonder what is going on, that the most community shaping drama we could ever re-enact gets so little attention from us. Have we made this time of gathering more about us, and about celebrating our successes, our significance, that we have ceased to feel the need to be shaped by the ultimate suffering servant?

I truly hope and pray this is not true, for if it were it would not speak well for our future as a community of faith.

Mysterious Distance

2005-11-26T08:08:00.000-07:00

For many years now it has been my practice to get up early in the morning and go walking, listening as I walk to sermons, theological lectures, and the like. As we entered this fall, I was feeling just a little blah about this all, and thinking maybe a change was in order. The experience of a two hour silent prayer walk at the retreat in September was exhilarating, and so when my current audio selections were finished I started just walking — trying just to be quiet and listen to God.

However, that hasn't really played out as I expected — instead of God, my attention seems to be drawn to things of human construction. Certainly, human constructions are all around me as I walk, but it's also the societal human constructions that fill my attention — issues like church and chuch leadership, systemic problems with pension plans, and on and on. So last week, I placed an order for some more audio lectures, and am looking forward to getting back to my old discipline.

This morning for some reason, I woke up with U2's Vertigo running through my head, so I decided to dust off my CD player and pop in How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. It was an energizing experience. Most directly, the energy of the music seemed to translate into walking energy, making my pace brisker than usual of late — a good thing for my health. But it was also energizing in a personal sense. The lyrics of these songs have something of a sparse and ambiguous nature to them — is not quite clear on the surface what's going on, but it always seems deeper than what you've just picked up. The exercise of listening and reflecting and wondering seemed to put me deeper into that Mysterious Distance between a man and his God — and that's a good place to be.

Curiously, I was just speaking about something similar at drama practice last night, about needing to keep things a bit less obvious, a bit more subtle, so that they can slide in slant past the armour people normally erect against many things spiritual.

I'm wondering if, perhaps, in our efforts to explain and make clear the things of God we haven't done those who hear us a dis-service — if by connecting all the dots for them we've left them with nothing to ponder, nothing to wonder at, no way to enter into that Mysterious Distance — to say nothing of how small we've ended up making God by always speaking as if everything were sorted out neatly and understandable.

ALl I know for sure is that I need more Mystery in my life.

A Retrospective Look

2005-11-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

On Saturday afternoon, I spent some time pulling together a lot of old writings of mine. Most of them were from the period when I was the church moderator, although some are more recent. I had wanted to encourage our board members to allow a greater community to develop among the board itself, and so asked that the monthly reports include some personal reflections on what was the most exciting thing and what was the most challenging thing encountered during the past month. So of course, I needed to lead by example, and my reports faithfully contained those reflections.

Also included in the collection were some of the summaries made from visioning retreats, writings concerning our plans for the future, writings concerning what was essential and how we would tell if progress were being made — which, by the way, was not how many people we had in our building or anything else that would typically be measurable by a number.

In looking over some of that material, I was a bit surprised to see the hope, the passion, the commitment, the engagement that shone through. And I felt myself missing the man who had written that material, who believed that the church could move forward in being community, and who had been so energized by the whole project of getting there. Sure, he was more than a bit naive, and often frustrated at how slow things seemed to go, but, on the whole, he still was a more energized individual than I am now.

It made me realize just how much the events and responses and processes that followed have affected the way I see the world — not primarily the world "out there", but the world "in here", inside the church. That world inside the church is a much darker place now than it used to be, the adversaries much larger and more numerous, and the likelihood of seeing it transformed just that more distant. Perhaps most importantly, is how much harder it is to be encouraged by the enthusiasm of others and by the small, but significant, events that transpire in the life of any community.

I wonder whether these changes are permanent, or whether some of that old energy and hopefulness will one day return. I miss it.

Highly Engaged Followers of Jesus Christ

2005-11-19T09:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I read a short newspaper article concerning a study done by one of our main competitors on the subject of employee engagement in the workplace. It had a bit of a mixed message for Canadian companies, in that they ranked about fifth in the world for the proportion of employees who were "highly engaged" — a positive message — but at only about 15% of employees being highly engaged it seems that there is a lot of improvement needed.

Highly engaged employees are very valuable — they are the people who are willing to jump in and do extra or extraordinary things when the need arises, because they are highly engaged in the goals of the organization. The article indicated that the sorts of environments that go into encouraging engagement by employees vary greatly by country or by culture, taking into account the aspirations, goals and values of the employees themselves.

I was intrigued by this concept because it seemed to speak to the sort of thing we're trying to encourage in the church — highly engaged followers of Jesus Christ — without getting bogged down in the language of "leadership". People who are highly engaged may exhibit that engagement in myriads of ways, each in keeping with his or her own unique personality, skills, gifts, calling, etc. And the way in which an individual exhibits high engagement may well change over time, perhaps quite quickly as the surrounding circumstances change. An individual may take up the task of leader at one moment, when that is what is needed, and then lay it down again when the need passes — perhaps to respond to another need in a totally different manner.

The stories I heard on Tuesday night, when our two Focus 3 groups met together, as well as other things I've been hearing, tell me that the Focus 3 project has certainly played a significant role in raising the level of engagement of many people in our local body. And that is far more important than whether or not these individuals ever take up the task of leader in any formal or ongoing way, or ever take on the self-identity label of leader.

For myself, I find the language of encouraging people to be highly engaged followers of Jesus Christ far more effective in encouraging my own level of engagement than the language of developing leaders. Perhaps a large of the difference is the way engagement embraces the whole range of personality, passion, gifts, skills, life experience, calling in way that leadership language simply cannot. Anyone can be highly engaged in following Jesus Christ and living out of the Kingdom of God, there is no need to divide the body between those who are leaders — or have the potential to become leaders — and those who are not. And that certainly aligns better with Paul's metaphor of us all being indispensable members of the Body of Christ, precisely in our diversity.

I think I feel myself becoming more engaged.

Creative in the Image of God

2005-11-17T19:37:00.000-07:00

God said, let there be ... and there was.

Over and over in Genesis 1 we read these words. God speaks, and a world comes into existence. Then at the last He creates man, male and female, in His own image.

Curious how this fits in with the theme of much of my musing lately, how we speak, and by the way we speak we create (or destroy) worlds. We create and change and destroy far more than we ever realize simply by speaking. Sometimes the worlds we create by our language are roughly consistent with God's world — more often the worlds we create are at considerable odds with God's world.

Perhaps this power to create, change and destroy by our speech is part of being created in the image of God. And perhaps that is why the Bible so often notes how powerful the tongue is, and warns us to guard it well.

Perhaps that's also why God has appointed such a seemingly inefficient thing as "telling your story" to be the way His Kingdom is to take over the false worlds we humans have tried to put in place over against His world.

Cleanse out the old leaven

2005-11-14T09:45:00.000-07:00

Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump.

1 Corinthians 5:6,7

Paul gives this instruction to the church in Corinth in the context of sexual impropriety that has taken hold in the church. Jesus uses a similar metaphor in warning his disciples to beware the leaven of the Pharisees, the Sadducees and Herod (Matthew 16:6, Mark 8:15, Luke 12:1). The point of the metaphor is not that leaven is unambiguously bad. Jesus uses the same metaphor of a little leaven leavening the whole lump as an illustration of the Kingdom of God in Matthew 13:33 and Luke 13:21. Even in the Old Testament, where there are several instructions about certain offerings needing to be without leaven, leaven is not seen as universally defiling. Leviticus 23:17, for example, specifically requires one particular offering to be made with leaven.

As I understand Paul's usage, the picture is of leaven gone bad, rancid perhaps, yet still very active. Perhaps it has begun spawning some form of mold that has gotten beyond the dough and into the flour bin itself — maybe into all the cupboards. This stuff isn't going to stop growing and tainting everything made in the kitchen — it has to be thoroughly cleaned out and killed before new wholesome food can be prepared.

This imagery reminds me of the pictures that Yvonne and Berndt showed yesterday from their trip to Mississippi to provide assistance in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The floodwaters had brought mud, filth, mold and disease into the houses. Just cleaning out the superficial junk isn't good enough — the mold and disease will go right on growing in the drywall unless everything touched by the floodwater is ruthlessly ripped out.

In a lot of ways, this describes what I'm going through in various parts of my life, my belief system. I'm seeing a lot of places where the trappings of the "kingdom of this world" has come in and taken root — not just in my own life and belief system, but that of the church around me also. The stuff just continues to grow and pollute the whole structure. Ironically, a lot of this stuff didn't come in in a great hurricane driven rush, nor really even sneak in unwanted. Rather it was invited in, "baptized" lightly by a sprinkling of some Bible verses taken largely out of context, and encouraged in its takeover.

Like the people of Mississippi and New Orleans, I could really use some help in cleaning this junk out — it's so discouraging, seeing so much infestation everywhere I look. But unlike the effects of hurricane Katrina, it seems that few people see the rot I see, and so instead of helping rip the structure down to its solid elements, I find people wanting to just help put on another coat of paint — or paper over the damage with a few more Bible verses.

I am grateful for the cans of airfreshener that people are content to let me have around the place, because they do make a difference. It's just that, so far as I can see, the airfreshener and new paint isn't what's needed; total deconstruction is.

But man, people sure get annoyed when you start talking about knocking down walls — or throwing out bins of flour — when they think it's all mostly still good.

Can we take the risk?

2005-11-08T16:45:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about something Aaron, our youth intern, said Sunday morning just over a week ago when speaking about that turbulent time of life that is the teenage years. He encouraged parents and other adults to take risk in extending trust to teenagers even, and perhaps especially, when they're likely not to live up to the trust we place in them. The point is not that they necessarily deserve that trust, but that they need it in order to mature into adults.

Teenagers need boundaries to be sure. They need guidance. But they also need trust &mdash and enough space to allow them to try something and fail, and still be given another opportunity. Perhaps part of the great difficulty that many in this current young generation has in maturing into adulthood is that their parents have been far too aware of all the dangers out there in the world that they haven't been able to risk giving their kids the trust needed to try things on their own. And no doubt too, the parents haven't really taken the time to invite their kids into their own work in a way that lets them see how problems are approached and resolved.

I wonder if perhaps it is not just teenagers that need to be given trust in order to mature. In the church we often lament that people aren't taking ownership and responsibility for ministry, for service, for reaching out. So we preach at them, we build systems to track them, we impose methods of accountability on them. But perhaps the bigger problem is that we haven't really extended the trust necessary. We haven't extended the trust necessary to invite immature people into our own, oh so important, work of ministry — partly because we think we're too busy and they'd just slow us down, but also partly because they could never do the job well enough. And we certainly haven't extended the trust necessary to just paint the vision of ministry and risk having untrained and unsupervised neophytes charge in and take a stab at it on their own.

Maybe we've put too much trust in our systems and programs and structures and training, and not enough in people — or rather not enough in the God who calls those people into His ministry.

I don't know. I'm just wondering. God sure seems to be prepared to risk an awful lot on us.

Church and the role of Religious Corporation

2005-11-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

Some years ago, Chuck Colson claimed that most North American christians have a profound misunderstanding of the nature of church — they think of church, Colson said, as a building rather than as a body of people. I always thought that Colson was a little bit off in his analysis, although that might be the difference between the still functioning social institution of "church" in some parts, at least, of the United States as compared to the more secularized Canadian environment I hang out in. In my experience, no one was at all confused by language such as "the church that meets at the school" or at some other location, whereas they might take a bit longer to figure out what was meant by "the school that operates at such and such church". Everyone was quite able to distinguish between the organization that was "church" (or "school") and the label attached to the particular building that had been constructed for the primary use of that organization.

What I've since come to understand is that there really is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of church that permeates the thinking of most christians I know, myself included — the organizational conception of church that most of us operate with is profoundly different than the "body" metaphor that Paul uses to describe church.

In the title to this post I've used the label "religious corporation". I don't think there is really much practical difference between the conception of "religious corporation" and that of "charitable organization" when it comes to thinking about church. I'm going to use the term corporation in this post because I think it is a bit more precise, and also because ironically it's origins are from the Latin corpus, meaning "body".

A brief history of the Corporation

As I understand it, the idea of corporation was created as a legal concept in the realm of business. Corporation has two important fundamental features. Firstly, it is a vehicle whereby a number of individual enterprising business persons can come together in common cause in a business venture. In this capacity, the corporation provides a mechanism for the pooling of resources and the allocation of profits. The second feature, however, is more important and is the primary mark of corporation. The corporation becomes a separate legal entity, distinct from its principals or shareholders. This separation of interests is what allows the corporation to focus exclusively on the business venture at hand, without regard for its principals' other pursuits and interests. It is also what provides the principals with limited liability with respect to the actions of the corporation — bad actions on the part of the corporation can result in the principals losing the capital they invested into the corporation, but no more than that.

The separation of interests that lies at the heart of the corporation calls for those who are engaged in and with the corporation being able to distinguish between the actions that they make as part of, or on behalf of, the corporation from those actions they take on their own part. This compartmentalizing of actions has become so commonplace that we simply act that way without much thought or reflection, and we operate that way with respect to every organization of which we are a part — the church included. No one would think it at all strange to be asked whether we had performed a particular action on our own behalf or as part of the church — indeed most of us are quite aware of a need to obtain the necessary approvals for any and all actions that we might take on behalf of the church. That is, of course, just the way things work.

The apostle Paul, however, would think this very strange indeed.

Paul's concept of church as Body

In 1 Corinthians, Paul uses the image of the church as the body of Christ in several ways. We are, of course, familiar with his use of this metaphor in the context of his discussion of the diversity of spiritual gifts operating for the common good in chapter 12. Just as it is not possible for the difference between the eye and the hand to be used as evidence that the eye and the hand do not belong to the same body, so too the difference between the gifting of one and the gifting of another cannot be used to claim that the one belongs and the other does not. In addition, the diversity of gifting is essential for the body to exist at all. A body that was simply one gigantic eyeball rolling down the street would not be a body — it would just be a freak. So too with the church. Furthermore, the parts of the body are intimately joined together — when part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers, and when one part of the body is exalted, the whole body is exalted.

This intimate connection of the members to the body comes up elsewhere in Paul's instruction to the Corinthian church. In chapter 10 he alludes to it in his example of the Lord's Supper in comparison to the cultic meals offered in the pagan temples. When we eat the one bread and drink the one cup, we who are many are one body. When the pagans eat what they offer to the idols, they become intimately connected with the demon behind the idol. It is impossible to be both joined together in Jesus Christ and to be joined in fellowship with demons. Hence you cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.

Perhaps the most profoundly intimate use of the church as body metaphor, however, occurs in chapter 5. At verse 15 Paul says:

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For as it is written, "The two will become one flesh."

Being part of the body of Christ means being at least as intimately connected to Christ as the intimate connection of a man and a woman in marriage. Indeed, we know that scripture uses the marriage metaphor to describe the relationship of the church to Christ — she is called the Bride of Christ. Paul, however, connects the two metaphors together here by using calling forth the sexual imagery of one body (which is precisely what is at hand in dealing with sexual promiscuity and the free association with prostitutes) to connect the members of the church to Christ. As someone else has said, "Jesus is seeking a Bride, not a harem!"

For Paul, everything that we do — every action we take, every word we speak — we do as part of the body of Christ. What we do, the body does, and Christ does. That's why our ethics, our behaviour, is so important to Paul. There could be no more of a distinction between what a member of the church of Corinth did as a private individual and what he or she did on behalf of the body of Christ as there could be such a distinction between what the hand does on its own and what it does as part of the body.

From Paul's perspective, then, the church is not, and can never be, a religious corporation.

[As an aside, Paul would also have extreme difficulty with the commonly held concept of church as the purveyor of religious goods and services to a religious consumer who, if not satisfied with the quality of the product, simply takes his business down the street. To come back to the corporation metaphor, I suspect that Paul would say that you can't sell your shares in Church, Inc. without simultaneously making a huge and definitive change in the nature of your relationship with Jesus Christ. But that's another subject for another time.]

Does corporation have a role in church?

Often one's first response to discovering that something is not as it should be is to react against the whole system in its entirety. Hence we see many disillusioned people leaving churches that they've found to be over "corporatized" and setting up their own way of following Jesus away from "organized religion". I can hear the anger and frustration in the voices of many of my emergent friends directed against the {insert appropriate adjective here} church. But is corporation simply a pure evil when it comes to its connection with church? I think not.

Whenever any collection of people associating around a common purpose gets to be of a certain size, the need for organization becomes apparent. This was true in the early church as well, hence the need to appoint seven "deacons" to oversee the food distribution program in Acts 6. In the life of any church there are some things that just work better if supporting structures are established that everyone works within.

Corporation may not be needed by every church, but it is certainly a very useful and effective tool for dealing with the rest of society in certain areas. Corporation is often a more effective tool for dealing with ownership of communal property than trusteeship, for example, or the extremely unwieldly mechanism of true "tenants in common" ownership. Corporation can also be effective in dealing with governments and tax authorities, and can permit the use of tax receipts to make the generosity of the church members so much more financially effective.

Corporation can be a powerful tool and a profitable servant of the church, allowing the church to be more effective in the things that it does. The key is retaining the proper relationship between church and corporation.

Corporation is not spiritually neutral

While corporation can be a very valuable tool in the hands of the church, the use of this objective and utilitarian language should not lull us into thinking that corporation is a neutral concept, equally capable of being wielded for good or for ill in the life of the church. It is not neutral, and is both a valuable and very dangerous tool.

The status of the corporation as a separate entity from its principals is not just a legal fiction; it is also a spiritual reality. Every form of human organization, whether it be corporation, committee, Bible study group, service club, family, or whatever, generates a distinct spiritual entity that is shaped by and shapes the people involved. This spiritual entity is not independent of the people engaged in the organization — a change in those persons can and does produce a change in this spiritual entity — but it is decidedly distinct from them. The whole is not simply the sum of all the parts. This spiritual entity shapes the way the people engaged in this enterprise interact with each other, and acts to maintain a certain collective character to the group. It is inherently conservative, acting to retain a group identity even as the people in the group are succeeded by others. These characteristics can be very beneficial. However, this spiritual entity shares the same fallen nature as the human beings who generate it — it invariably seeks to extend its control and power beyond its place, and to seek its preservation and promotion over the original purposes of the group. Given free rein, it will become the master rather than the servant.

The spiritual power that is corporation — or city or nation or whatever — that over-reaches itself to become master rather than servant can be a very cruel master indeed. The stories of pastors and church leaders and church members who have been beaten down by this spiritual adversary are legion. Usually the story focuses on an individual or individuals who are seen as being responsible for the beating — and sometimes that could be indeed be true — but most often these individuals are merely scapegoats. The true adversary is not "flesh and blood" as Paul puts it in Ephesians, but principalities and powers — spiritual entities associated with the organizational and systemic structures that were meant to serve the body — that have stepped beyond their role as servant. Indeed fighting against the members of the group is ineffective in dealing with the corrupted and corrupting power. Rather it takes the combined effort and goodwill — dare I say community — of all members to redeem this power and restore it to its proper function.

The necessity of Community to church

In 1 Corinthians it seems that Paul's burden throughout the entire correspondence is to deal with threats to community within the church at Corinth. Paul evidently sees community as absolutely essential to being church; for starters, community is obviously inherent in the body metaphor. I've already stated my thesis that community is essential to dealing with fallen spiritual powers inherent in human organization and social structures, including the church.

However, I think a strong case can be made that community is also essential to the mission of the church. No less than Jesus himself indicated that it is precisely by the love his disciples have for one another that their identity as his disciples will be know by all men. Jesus made community the subject of repeated commands to his disciples in his farewell Upper Room Discourse and gave it central place in his prayer that followed. Luke reports in Acts that the early church was known by all for the extent of its community and the generosity of its members, and that this played no small part in the proclamation of its message and the expansion of its numbers.

The special role of elders

Elders in the church have a special role to guard and promote the place of community in the life of the body. This is, I believe, their primary responsibility, far exceeding any other responsibilities they may have as directors of the religious corporation. Community, of course, does not stop at the edges of the local congregation, but extends beyond to the entire Church — the communion of the saints in all places and at all times; past, present and future. It is not enough that our little group gets along famously with each other if we have no love for the "church down the road".

Elders must pay special attention to the maintenance of true community among themselves. This is necessary not simply because it is impossible to lead the church unless you are yourself church. It is also necessary in order that the elders may restrain the spiritual power of the religious corporation (and all other organizational structures as well) within its proper role of servant of the church. To this end the elders must always remember that the religious corporation is not the church, but merely the servant of the church, even as they themselves are only servants of the church. They must be on guard against importing techniques, language, and thinking patterns from the "world" where corporation is indeed allowed to be the enterprise. In particular they cannot allow themselves the luxury of distinguishing between that which they do as elders in the body of Christ and that which they do in any other capacity — everything must be done in service to Christ and Christ alone, in the same manner and spirit here as there (wherever here and there may be).

Deliberate focus on community within the group of elders is even more vital when the guardians of the corporation have allowed it to stride beyond its place and gain control it never should have had. This spiritual power cannot be attacked directly, but only indirectly through the transformation of those whose participation generates it. A group of elders who are not seriously committed to engaging openly, honestly, and deeply in each others lives can never bring such a beast back into its proper place — instead it will feast on and exploit every misunderstanding, every lack of trust, every failure of community to its own purpose.

Regrettably, the elders of too many churches have subordinated their task of being the guardians of the unity and catholicity of the Church, to the task of doing the business of the religious corporations we have called church. They have too readily immersed themselves in the development and implementation of impersonal leadership and management principles, rather than in the thoroughly personal work of community.

I have been just such an elder. God help me.

Am I Behind, or What?

2005-11-07T17:20:00.000-07:00

It's been a week since my last post. But not a week off from thinking — there've been any number of things running through my mind that I wanted to blog about, but just didn't seem to have/find/make the time to sit down and sort those ideas out. Maybe later tonight and tomorrow I can catch up.

On Saturday, instead of just wrapping up my wife's birthday gifts, I sat down and starting reading one of them — Brian McLaren's The Last Word and the Word After That. I couldn't stop. It made me cry, in several places, but probably the community mostly.

A Metanoiaic Journey

2005-10-31T14:19:00.000-07:00

In Romans 12:2, Paul admonishes his readers not to be conformed to the world, but rather to be transformed through the renewing of the mind. In others words, he seems to say that the Metamorphic Journey is first a Metanoiaic Journey. Paul's own thinking was certainly radically transformed. His encounter with the resurrected Jesus called into question many things that Paul had previously known to be obviously true, and turned them upside down. Jesus' crucifixion, for example, changes from being a colossal failure at the hands of the world's powers to a dramatic victory over those same powers; it changes from being the evidence that God has cursed him to the occasion for God to highly exalt him; it changes from being utter foolishness to the power of God unto salvation.

We tend to think of Paul's transformation as being instantaneous. Yet by his own testimony in Galatians, we can see that some significant amounts of time elapsed, during which he was no doubt wrestling with the business of making sense of the world once again. The transformation of his relationships also took some time — he certainly lost the trust of his former associates quite quickly, but it seems to have taken quite some time to gain the trust of his former victims. Their thinking had to undergo some radical transformation also, it seems.

For me, this Metanoiaic Journey continues to be quite a long and involved one, moving through a number of stages. As for many others, it seems that one stage tends to involve a lot of anger and/or frustration at those people and institutions that had had a part in perpetuating what now seems to be a falsehood. This stage is particularly intense if the now questioned former "truth" played a significant role in some loss or pain. It can also involve a lot of frustration towards those around us who just don't seem to "get it" when we try and explain why this universally accepted obvious "truth" isn't really true — frustration that just mounts when they point out the reasons why there really must be some truth there after all.

The reality, of course, is that there is some element of truth hidden away somewhere in every "obvious truth" that turns out not to be either so obvious or so true. The problem is that everything has been so obvious before, that now we no longer know where that nugget of truth resides; just that there is a lot of falseness all around it. Well meaning suggestions that we just take what is good and leave the rest just aren't helpful — they totally miss the point that it's going to take a lot of sorting out, and a lot of reaction against the old notions, before the capacity to recognize just where any residual truth lies is achieved.

Right now for me, there are three well established and widely held "obvious truths" that have long ceased to be either obvious or true, but for which the process of metanoia is still ongoing:

what works, works: so whenever we get a "good" outcome, we can assume that the process by which it was obtained was good, and simply repeat it to get more good outcomes
leadership produces results: so we can determine the personal effectiveness of a "leader" by measuring the results obtained against some pre-determined desired outcome
whatever your issue, the Bible has the answer to your question: so just read the Bible with your question in mind, and pretty soon you'll get the answer

The Focus 3 "Emerging Leaders" material I'm struggling with forces me to engage these three issues, almost at every turn, simply because so much of the material has these three beliefs implicitly in the background. While it forces me to engage the issues, it is not providing any resources with which to do so. Still, I am commited to participating in this project because, quite frankly, it's the only place I can see where the kind of open disclosure necessary for true community is actually taking place.

That leaves me with a dilemma: some of the people with whom I am participating in this course are intimately involved in leadership in this new congregation with which I am now committed (one of them being my wife). My confronting of these issues is inevitably going to call into question some of the leadership processes, choices and directions currently evidenced here. If I am open with these struggles, that is almost certainly going to add to the burden of these leaders — who may very well not be at the point in their journeys where these matters need to be wrestled with — and produce significant relationship strain that they could probably do without. Furthermore, what effect will an open relationship struggle between participants have on this developing community? On the other hand, if I back away from them, what effect will that guardedness have on this developing community? And if I address these matters only outside the leadership circle, do I just end up perpetuating a negative attitude within myself? God knows, there's already too much of that to go around in most churches.

What, then, is the wisest course? I will have to choose soon, either by intention or default, because it isn't going to just go away.

True Community Requires Diversity

2005-10-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

Today I finished reading Lyle Vander Broeck's book, Breaking Barriers: The Possibilities of Christian Community in a Lonely World. I continue to be amazed at how truly radical Paul was in the applications he makes of the gospel's implications on community and culture, and how much our practice of reading the text for answers to our questions only makes us blind to so much that would actually be extraordinarily pertinent to our lives.

Paul's tough language in the latter half of 1 Corinthians 11, for example, is extraordinary: the fact that rich and poor were eating together at all was already an amazing transformation in Greco-Roman society, yet Paul makes a failure of true egalatarian community at the Lord's Table a matter of bringing the judgement of God upon oneself.

Paul asserts that poor and rich need each other. The poor need the material things others in the community can share. This principle is illustrated powerfully in the larger church by Paul's collection for the poor in Jerusalem (see 2 Corinthians 8-9) and by the support he himself received (Philippians 4:15-16). The presence of the disenfranchised and poor in the community is a clear reminder for both the rich and the poor that what we have in Christ does not come through human achievement (1 Corinthians 1:28-31). And 1 Corinthians 12 reminds us that the community cannot be the body of Christ without its diverse parts (vv. 12-31); the gifts of all are necessary.
Lyle D. Vander Broeck, Breaking Barriers:
The Possibilities of Christian Community in a Lonely World

I'm struck by the similarities between these insights and the insights that Henri Nouwen describes in relating his experiences with the L'Arche communities he was involved in. Nouwen finds that the mentally handicapped adults he serves play an extraordinarily important role in the community that is L'Arche — and an extraordinarily important role in God's formation of Nouwen himself. There are things that must be changed in Nouwen's life and perception of himself to become truly human; things that only the severely handicapped can help him with.

This is so different from the kind of thing implied in so much "Leadership" literature; whether written from a "wordly" or "Christian" perspective. It is hard not to come away from such literature without the sense that "leaders" are a class above the rest — those upon whom the success or failure of the enterprise rests. How different from Paul's radical flattening of class distinctions in Corinth (to say nothing of his rebuke of so manner other disputes in that factious church), and of Nouwen's recognition of the indispensability of the handicapped in making us truly human.

A Bright Spot on Wednesday

2005-10-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

In looking over my last post about the weariness of Wednesday, I see I may have left the impression that everything was wearying about that day. In fact, the evening involved a meeting for "mentors" associated with the Focus 3 project, which was actually quite encouraging.

For all my struggles with the material, which will certainly still be ongoing and the subject of much more blogging as we go, this project is putting me into community with people whom God has and will use to accomplish his transforming work in my life. I particularly appreciated many of the reminders that Glenn, the leader, made to the effect that the key is not in following the script, but rather in listening to God in the life and lives of those we are in community with.

A Weary Wednesday

2005-10-29T09:58:00.000-06:00

Wednesday morning I woke up extremely tired. This weariness persisted through my morning walk, breakfast, shower and commute. It was not because my sleep had been cut short, interrupted or otherwise disturbed, nor even because the day before had been particularly strenuous or exhausting. Intuitively, I knew that this weariness was closely related to the section of study material I had browsed through late Tuesday night before heading for bed.

For a moment I thought about quickly blogging about being so tired, but there really was no time, let alone clarity of thought. I was quickly engaged in several hours of meetings, and was therefore too busy to be tired or reflective.

Not long after emerging from the meetings, and starting to look over the other things on my plate, our practice leader stepped into my office. He had a message he had to deliver to me, as well as to the rest of our practice, concerning deadlines for reporting "sales credits" for entry into the new sales tracking database. It was clear that this was a message he did not personally believe in, but felt obliged to deliver. It was not a message I cared to receive either, and as I got my assistant to pull out the details on what was supposed to go into this reporting, I felt the same sort of tiredness descend upon me.

Although it has been highly profitable and has grown considerably over the years, Mercer has never been a sales focused organization. The current generation of management seems determined to change that, however. The slogans, messages and admonitions about RevenueGrowth@Mercer are everywhere. The pressure to grow the business faster has also been increased in the face of losses incurred recently by sister companies — entities that have long had a much more sales oriented culture than Mercer. The supreme irony, however, is that the losses incurred by our sister companies are fairly closely related to some questionable business practices that had developed precisely in response to a sales mentality gone too far. All strictly without permission or encouragement, of course, since the firm values "integrity above all".

Talk about dissonance between values and behaviour.

Dissonance between values and behaviour was the subject of the study material I was looking over Tuesday night, and more closely this morning. The surface message was that we need to work at eliminating such dissonance from our lives if we are to truly emerge as effective Christian leaders. So far, no disagreement.

The problem for me is that I keep running face first into any number of sources of dissonance between values and behaviour right within the Christian community. Right within this leadership study. Even right within this chapter on aligning values and behaviour.

One source of dissonance that emerged early, and has persisted throughout the study has to do with the use of scripture. We say that as Christians we value the Word of God, and want to be formed by it in all that we are and do, particularly as leaders. And yet, we rarely allow the scripture room to speak on its own terms. Instead we come to it with the issues already pre-defined, expecting it to speak to our issues on our terms, and using it as the authority for our own prognostications. We've been doing this so long in our Christian sub-culture that we can't even see that this is what we are doing, even when we talk about being formed by scripture.

In large measure, I think this is what happened to the Pharisees in Jesus' day. They had already defined the issue of right living before God in terms of obedience to the regulations of Torah, and were determined live scrupulously by them — not like their forefathers whose sin had led to exile, from which the people had never fully returned; at least not in the way prophesied by the prophets.

What they could not see was that their very scrupulosity was laying on their poor brothers burdens that were as egregious as the exploitation of the poor that their forefathers had practiced — which exploitation was what the prophets had repeatedly warned was going to end up in God's judgement of exile. Ironically, the Pharisees' very practice of righteousness was their sin. And they couldn't see it; the light within them had become darkness and so they majored in minors and missed what was of major importance — compassion and restorative justice.

In the same way, I think the exercises in our current study chapter come close, but ultimately miss the point. Much is made of Jesus rebuke to the Pharisees about cleaning the outside of the bowl while the inside is full of greed and wickedness, and of the need to look deeply at the interior of our lives. Much is made of the need to avoid pretense, by ensuring that it is the inner reality of our lives that receives our attention, not just the whitewashing on the exterior. Much is made of the fact that what we truly value is not what we say we value, or think we ought to value, but what actually drives our actions. Yet in the end, the exercise aims to:

discern leadership values in scripture — that is, figure out what our values "ought to be";
articulate a statement of personal values — that is, figure out what scripture, relationships and experience suggests we would want as our values;
align our behaviours with what our "stated" values say they ought to be, by making behavioural goals — that is, use effort to make the exterior look like what we think it should look like

Just how does this differ from what the Pharisees were all about?

It seems to me that Jesus' rebuke is all about seeing clearly; looking clearly and accurately at what we really value; letting the light shine in on the darkness and allowing the darkness to be replaced by the light. The whole call to metanoia is about changing how we see the world, how we see reality, how we see ourselves — or rather letting the good news transform the way we see. Then what we see will change us.

Lord, open our eyes, that we may see You and be changed. Amen

What place community?

2005-10-25T21:29:00.000-06:00

On Sunday I read through 1 Corinthians in one sitting. I was surprised to see just how thoroughly the theme of "community" came up, in pretty much every section of the letter. Lyle Vander Broeck's book, Breaking Barriers: The Possibilities of Christian Community in a Lonely World, picks this up and develops it much further.

Community seems to be a very prominent theme throughout many of Paul's letters. I suppose that should not be surprising given the emphasis that Jesus gave in his Upper Rooom Discourse — again and again telling the disciples that his command to them as he was going away was that they love one another. He even made a focal point in his high priestly prayer, and told the disciples that love was the mark of true discipleship.

But the prevalence of community in the New Testament does come as a bit of a surprise when seen in the context of much of what I've been told — over and over again — in the churches of my experience. "Churches", they said, "have gotten into the habit of spending all their time on community. They've become so inward focussed that they are little more than a country club. It's time to stop wasting time on community, and start reaching the lost." Some variation on that statement seemed to come up whenever anyone suggested developing a deeper, meaningful community. It was curious, since it rarely seemed that the existing community was really much more than a superficial civility — not really like anything that would suggest a love as deep as Jesus love for his followers.

I really wonder what would happen if, instead of seeing deeper community as a threat to evangelism, we saw it as the ground and basis for all that we do. My guess is that people would start grabbing us, and demanding the "reason for the hope that is in us"; because it would be clear that God is among us.

Maybe God's Kingdom cannot be expanded by our direct efforts at all — only by the indirect means of the saints actually living as though the reign of Prince of Peace has already broken into this world.

How then shall we value our selves?

2005-10-18T12:09:00.000-06:00

In his article entitled The $65,000 Question, Chuck Colson reflects on the foundation from which human life has its value, describing things he has learned from his autistic grandson, Max. According to the utilitarian ethic that governs much of the world's philosophy and perception of value and goodness, Max really isn't much of a human being. He cannot produce much, if anything, in terms of tangible goods — rather his very existence costs society a disportionate amount of resouces; $65,000 per year just to keep him in his special school. Colson ends his article this way:

How should Max account for himself, and why should he have to? Max is more than happy to be alive, thank you very much. Max knows a joy and wonder that puts me to shame. Why is that?

Let me just suggest at this point it's because the good life is not about the sum total of what we contribute to the world. It's about loving. Utilitarianism knows nothing of love. Love is the beginning and the end of the good life, however, and it's in love that our lives must be centered. Truth matters because without truth, love is unreal. It's just another sentimentality. But we know in our hearts that within us is a love that calls out to the Love that we believe formed the universe. Otherwise, we're lost.

In many ways, the lessons that Max has taught his grandfather are similar to the lessons that the mentally handicapped adult residents of the L'Arche Daybreak Community taught Henri Nouwen. It is not what we can produce that makes us human. Nouwen extends these insights to the concept of leadership, and insists that it is not the great abilities and results that give us value as leaders either. Our greatest value as leaders comes in sharing our selves — broken and inadequate as we are — with those around us, so that in our very brokenness we may contribute to God's pouring wholeness into the world.

This is a profoundly liberating idea, and yet it is curious just how difficult it is for us to allow ourselves to own it — to grasp and live it. Perhaps we are not quite ready to give up the notion that we can generate our own value as human beings and particularly as leaders by what we can produce.

I know I desparately need to be reminded again and again that the things of greatest value in the world in general, and in my life in particular, are far beyond my power to generate — but that I am not called to do that impossible task anyway, and my value does not lie in doing it. Perhaps that is why I react so much against the language of the "pursuit of Leadership" — I know just how easy it is for me, and for others I care about, to measure our own worth by an impossible standard — and I just don't have enough Henri Nouwen's around me to keep me balanced.

It's not enough just to see the wrong.

2005-10-18T11:36:00.000-06:00

On the newly formed Leadership Journal blog, Out of Ur, James MacDonald begins a multi-part post entitled Why James MacDonald Is Not Emerging. His first point is that "observing the bad is not a credential for guiding us to the good."

I think he is reacting to a tendency seen among many who identify themselves with the emerging chruch, to define themselves almost entirely in terms of their opposition to what is wrong with that part of the church from which they perceive themselves to be emerging. I too have found this emphasis on the bad to be somewhat less than satisfying. However, I would point out that it is not just the emerging church that is subject to falling into this negative definition trap — for the past 500 years, this has been the standard operating practice in the church. So much so that we now have hundreds, if not thousands, of churches that identify themselves principally in terms of the protest that spawned their initial formation.

Lately, I have been reflecting upon my own lifelong journey of faith, and I am coming to see that it is actually impossible to divide the good from the bad in the church. That is, I am becoming increasingly aware that it is one and the same church that has been both the place where I have been introduced to, and nurtured in my relationship with God, as well as the place where I have been thwarted, opposed and misdirected in my relationship with God. I have not been influenced by one good church and also by another bad church, but rather the same church — the same people, the same structures, the same institutions, the same teachings, the same emphases — has been at work in my life both for good and for ill.

As a result, I dare not turn my back on that part of the church which has exhibited the bad, for it was there that God met me, guided me, and made me grow. Nor can I uncritically bless that part of the church which has exhibited the good, for it was there that I suffered much spiritual opposition and wrong. Rather in both, the good and the bad, it was God who was at work in my life and in the life of the church.

It is far too easy to blame the insert identifying adjective here church for everything that has been wrong about our spiritual journey, and to assume that by converting to the insert alternate identifying adjective here church we will be sure to grow spiritually ourselves and also to see that all around us develop spiritually as they should. But it just doesn't work that way. No matter which "adjective" we pursue in our practice of church, we are going to be the source of much pain and much detraction from God. But we are also going to be part of God's working in the lives of people, in spite of our "adjectives".

I'm still curious, however, to see whether James MacDonald's post of reasons why he "is not emerging" is going to be more than just "observing the bad".

Moving beyond Worship Wars

2005-10-15T14:53:00.000-06:00

From Lee C. Camp, Mere Discipleship

What does it mean, concretely, to worship in a way that makes a difference for a rebellious world at war with itself? The experience of many of us indicates that it might be a bit naive to believe that we will have much to offer to the world when our own worship assemblies and church communities have themselves become a battleground. ... It is quite easy to sermonize about "love" and "forgiveness" in the abstract. But such love is difficult to practice, because my self-centeredness runs very deep. How often have I preached that we should forgive those who do not merit forgiveness — the murderer, the warmonger, or the terrorist who has decimated or oppressed some third party unknown to me — and yet am offended and resentful when someone doesn't like me or my preaching?! Third-party "forgiveness" is cheap, requiring nothing of me. When the rubber meets the road, when I or we must forgive an offense done to ourselves, our profession of faith gets tested. Self-pity, self-absorption, and self-defense work in concert to undercut my feeble efforts to love those who have acted spitefully towards me. ...

Pride pushes me to react, to strike out, to respond to harshness with counter-harshness. Self-centeredness convinces me that my task is o have all people think well of me. Fear propels me to act and speak defensively. And yet again, true worship is the heart of the matter, for worship can occur only when the heart of the worshipper practices humility. Too often, we construe humility as self-effacement, self-humiliation, or maybe even self-degradation. But such practices know nothing of humility, for each of these practices continues gazing at the navel of self. Humility, instead, casts its vision upon the God who loves us in our rebellion, the God who loves us even in those places deep in the receses of our soul that we dare not admit. This God seeks to draw us out of our shame and heal our afflictions of soul, constantly willing to forgive, yet seventy times seven. Even more, humility reminds me that the world is not about me, but about God's purposes, God's kingdom. Rightful worship calls us to surrender our will. ... True faith means we obey Christ, turning from our will, embracing his.

In worship, we gather to bring our failings, shortcomings, and rebellion. If we wrongly envision church as a place where we are supposed to "do church right", then we are unable to come as a people confessing that we, left to our own devices, do little right; our ecclesiology, instead, must always bear witness to Jesus' declaration that the kingdom of God belongs to those who are poor in spirit, who are deeply aware of their insufficiency, their powerlessness, their inability to make any claim upon God, their inability to stake any claim based upon their own rightness.

A sense of Destiny?

2005-10-13T21:42:00.000-06:00

A very strange thing happened to me this week — an experience I hope not to soon repeat.

It began Tuesday evening as I was reviewing the study material for our next group meeting. The section began by looking at God's calling on an individual's life and some of the ways one might recognize that calling. The material then shifted to using different terminology: a sense of personal destiny. It's not entirely clear to me just what the author means by this term, but it's clearly intended to be something related to, but distinct from, the idea of vocation or call.

I do know that on Tuesday evening as I was working through this material, I sensed a shift inside myself, a distinct disquiet, that prompted me to ask whether Destiny was at all a biblical concept, or merely a pagan one. My Anchor Bible Dictionary gave me a quick insight — it talked exclusively about Isaiah 65:11,12; not a particularly pleasant passage. A bible search for "destiny" revealed that most English Bibles don't use the term much at all, outside Isaiah 65. The few that do use it primarily in the context of "there is one destiny for all men: death" or, less favourably, "the wicked, whose destiny is destruction". Finally, my old reliable Oxford English Dictionary gave definitions of destiny that were closely aligned with the concept of "Fate": something that is quite outside the range of biblical approval.

I pretty much decided that I was just going to skip the whole segment on developing a sense of personal destiny. That sounded too much like something God has been teaching me to weed out of my life, not cultivate.

The very strange thing I mentioned at the start of this post happened the next morning as I took my habitual early morning walk. I kept hearing a voice, like that of Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars movies, saying something like: "Take your place beside me, and fulfill your Destiny" — like he was trying to recruit a young Skywalker (or was it me?) to the "Dark Side of the Force".

It wasn't something that was easily brushed off. Instead, a dark something seemed to be clutching my chest as the walk continued and the voice recurred. I had to really focus on repeating over and over the chant:

Lord, have mercy
Christ, have mercy
Lord, have mercy on me.

It took a good half hour before things were normal again.

Today, however, another thought struck me. In Revelation, God gives to his faithful ones a white stone, on which is written a name known only to God. Is it not enough to know that God knows my name? Not Malcolm Kern, but my real name: the name that perfectly describes the real me — the me that I have been created to be, but whom I am not as yet. Is it not enough to know that God, who began a good work in me, is faithful to direct and complete this Metamorphic Journey and to bestow on me my true name at His good pleasure?

If God is indeed the one who, through His power at work in me, is able to do exceedingly far more than I ask or imagine, then perhaps all that is needed is to trust Him. Indeed, it seems to me that there is little to be gained — and much to be lost — by trying to glean ahead of time where God is going, as if by that knowledge I could help assure He gets me there.

I'm satisfied to leave destiny to God, and just concentrate on knowing and hearing Him better.

What is God up to?

2005-10-11T11:27:00.000-06:00

One of the exercises in the Focus 3 spiritual formation for emerging leaders material we were to discuss this past week was to look at a variety of scripture passages to get an idea of what God's mission is — what God is up to in this world. I had been a bit surprised not to find anything from the final chapters of Revelation on the list, since if there is anything in the Bible that would describe the end to which God is heading, surely it would be this vision of the end. After reflecting further on the final two chapters of Revelation, I think I may have just a bit different perspective on this whole "pursuit of Leadership" myth that I have been struggling with.

The Dwelling of GOD

The first thing I noted was:

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.

Revelation 21:3

I thought about how many times this "dwelling of God with man" came up in the biblical story:

in the garden of Eden, when God used to walk and talk with man in the cool of the evening;
with the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, where God dwelt with them, in the very middle of the camp, in his own tent (with parallels both to the tents the people lived in and to the garden), and moved with them wherever they went;
with Moses, of whom God himself says that he reveals himself not in visions and dark dreams, as to others, but with whom he speaks face to face, as a man with his friend;
in the temple that Solomon built and dedicated to God, where God dwelt visibly among the people (at least in the sense of the visible shekinah glory);
most notably, in the prologue to John's gospel, where we read: "and the Word became flesh and pitched His tent among us, and we beheld His glory — glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth";
and of course, in Jeremiah and Hosea and other prophetic books, God continues to talk about wooing his people, his wife who he took to himself but who forsake him for other lovers, and drawing them back to himself again.

Clearly, a major theme throughout scripture: God working to reverse the estrangement that occurred in the garden, when man rejected the presence of God and hid from him.

The most odd thing, however, is the shape that God's dwelling with man takes:

Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and spoke to me, saying, "Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb." And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having he glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.
Revelation 21:9-11

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
Revelation 21:2

The city as symbol of rebellion

The most astonishing thing about this revelation is that not only does God chose to dwell among men in the city, but that the Bride of the Lamb is herself described as the city.

Throughout the Bible, the city is the quintessential symbol of rebellion against God. The first city is built by Cain, who simply cannot trust that God's mark upon him will be sufficient protection for him, and instead puts his trust in the city he builds. And after the flood, the peoples of the earth refuse to disperse throughout the earth, to repopulate it. Rather, they assemble at Babel, to build a great city as a monument to themselves: even to the extent of declaring that they themselves will go up into heaven.

Again, and again, and again, God's prophets speak against the city as the symbol of greed, violence, corruption, exploitation of the vulnerable, and death. There is very little good to be said of the city anywhere in scripture.

Even Jerusalem, called out to be the City of the Great King, the city where God himself dwells among his people, becomes a symbol of rebellion. In Jeremiah, God warns the people that their faith in the "holy" city, and in the "holy" temple, is misguided — the city and the temple will not save them from God's judgement for their allegiance to other gods and other kings, no matter how well they keep up the rituals of their temple worship.

Jesus ultimately laments over Jerusalem, identifying her as the city "that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!" Matthew 23:37. Indeed, he says that it is impossible that "a prophet should die outside of Jerusalem" Luke 13:33

Ultimately, the city is referred to in Revelation 17 as "Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth's abominations". And John says that "I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus." Rev. 17:6 "And in her was found the blood of prophets and saints, and of all who have been slain on earth." Rev. 18:24

Indeed, the triumph of God and of the Lamb is proclaimed in heaven by the cry: "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!" Rev. 14:8; Rev. 18:2

Behold, I make all things new!

So what does it mean that the city — the great monument to man's power, wisdom, wealth and independence from God, the great symbol of rebellion, of sin, of greed, of violence, of sexuality immorality, of corruption and death — is made the dwelling place of God, the Bride of the Lamb? For John sees the holy city as being itself the holy place of God's temple (hence its cubic dimensions); and as the source of the river of life that flows out of the gates of the city and brings life and joy to the whole earth (much as the river that flowed out of Eden); a city so secure that her gates never need be shut, and who may welcome the kings of the earth at any time, so that they may walk in her light; a city who, with the Spirit, says "Come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price."

How amazing is the work of God, that he takes the work of man — proud, rebellious, violent and corrupt — and makes it his own dwelling, full of beauty, truth and life; for his own glory and for the good and blessing of the whole earth. No wonder the book ends with "Even so, Come Lord Jesus!

What about my struggle with Leadership?

Just this: if God can take the worst of man's rebellion and arrogant self-seeking — the city — and turn it into His own glorious dwelling, then certainly God will have no problem taking the fruits of "the pursuit of Leadership" — as self-absorbed or self-deluded as it may be — and turning it into something glorious. Never, therefore, should I fear that God's work will be thwarted, even by the misguided adventures of his people.

If then, God places me in a position to speak against the follies of Leadership run amok, it does not consequently fall to me to Lead the people back — that is, to take it upon myself to see that those to whom the message is given heed it and follow. Rather, my call must always be simply that of being a "loving adversary of every regime".