This weekend I’ll be attending the Resolved Conference in Palm Springs, hosted by John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church. Some of you will know that my theology is at significant odds with much of what is (vehemently) preached by John MacArthur and others in his camp. It’s safe to say that my understanding of the gospel will be in many ways subtly, yet significantly, different than many of the 3000 or so people expected to be in attendance.
Still.
These folks are my brothers and sisters (I’m pretty sure women are allowed at the conference). They proclaim Christ and they are singularly devoted to understanding Christ accurately and living and preaching that understanding faithfully. That means that I have the most important thing possible in common with them; it means that we are united by one Spirit. I mean that in all seriousness.
Of course, I’m not sure many of them would agree – especially if they discover that I’m a Fuller student…or a charismatic, an egalitarian, or an anarchist Anabaptist for that matter. I guess we’ll see : )
I will be blogging through the course if the weekend with some of my thoughts on the conference. Speakers include, John MacArthur, Al Mohler, C.J. Mahaney, and Steve Lawson. It’s been a long, long time since I attended something like this, so I’m likely to experience a bit of culture shock at the outset.
Jack White is a performer – no ifs, ands, or buts about it – and yet he has the audacity to expect a relationship of mutuality from his audiences. If you’ve ever preached, given a speech, or performed on stage in any capacity then you know exactly what he’s talking about here. There is a kind of reciprocal relationship that can exist between artist and audience, giver and receiver, wherein the gift is nurtured and grown between them.
The problem, according to Jack, is that American audiences are increasingly “spoiled,” by which he seems to mean lazy or entitled. Referring to the rock concert, Jack says, “It’s supposed to be a sharing experience.” Is it just me, or is he describing something we see happening in churches too?
For my part, I would say that Americans have increasingly lost the imaginative realm of the gift as the locus of relationships. Hence, we’re less able to conceptualize our relationships as anything but marketplace exchange; a tragic loss that has crippled institutions of art and spirit as sacred spaces of human formation - largely because we’ve thoroughly saturated those realms with the metrics of the marketplace. Consequently, I tend to think that by purging gift-space of marketplace dynamics we might be able to re-appropriate the role of artists and priests as performers in an appropriate sense.
UPDATE #2: You’d think I would have learned from last quarter, but no. Again, one of the classes I wanted was full. So instead of Theology and Pop Culture, I’m taking the next runner-up in the poll: Ministry Issues in Gender and Human Sexuality.
UPDATE: Well, the results are in and the winners are:
Thanks to everyone who voted! Classes start Monday. I’m looking forward to these courses and will keep you posted on the content as the quarter progresses.
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Yesterday I finished my two Spring classes at Fuller Seminary, which means it’s time to pick my classes for Summer. As with last quarter, I’m going to invite you, the readers of Pastoralia, to choose my classes for me. I only have 3 courses left to complete my masters degree (woot!), which means this is your last chance to help choose the courses I take in seminary.
Please make three choices in the poll below. However, one of the three must be a one-week seminar, so choose one of the Seminars in the poll. You have until Tuesday, June 15th the vote.
Scroll down to see the syllabus summary of each class and a link to the full description:
Remember: Pick 3, including 1 seminar!
Seminar #1 – Urban Immersion
This course is designed as an interactive, participatory learning immersion that will connect participants with the historical and contemporary socio-cultural and ministry dynamics of Los Angeles. Using the city as our lab, we will journey through city streets, exploring both the urban context and faith responses to the context. We will engage both heads and hearts, using a model analysis guide, as we encounter various approaches to community and city transformation.
Seminar #2 – Advocacy for Social Justice
In civil law, advocacy is the act of pleading for, supporting, or recommending active espousal of someone’s cause. Social justice is a reference often used to talk about the structuring of a just society in order to address and correct instances of poverty, racism, sexism, or human oppression and exploitation. Advocacy for social justice is arguably an integral, though often ignored, part of the Judeo-Christian moral and spiritual mandate to speak up for or take up the causes of those who suffer yet have no advocates. This course explores what it means for every Christian–whether working in a ministry context or in a secular calling–to observe God’s call “to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” Participants will explore various biblical, theological, and historical traditions of social justice. We will investigate detailed examples of injustice as well as models of advocacy, both in the United States and internationally. Finally, students will research and uncover specific and tangible ways in which ordinary Christians can intervene individually and organizationally in order to help remedy instances where injustice exists.
Ministry Issues in Gender and Sexuality
This course will deal with the spiritual, psychological, sociological, and physiological aspects of gender and human sexuality. The focus will be on specific issues relevant to persons in Christian ministry.
Perspectives on Christ and Culture
The Christian community has long debated the appropriate ways for Christians to relate to their cultural surroundings. This course will focus on some key perspectives, beginning with a critical examination of the typology made popular by H. Richard Niebuhr in his classic study,
Theology and Pop Culture
This multi-disciplinary course will engage students in a two-way dialogue between pop culture and theology, with emphasis upon music, movies, TV, art, fashion, and sports. Students will develop a biblical, theological, and sociological understanding of these art forms and a critical understanding of the advertising, consumerism, and globalization that drives pop culture.
(If you read here often then you know our family has a little vegetable garden in the back yard. What you might not know is that lately it seems this is the only place God speaks to me.)
Sometimes growth isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.
Given plenty of water and sunlight a tomato plant will literally grow itself into sickness. Stems fork indiscriminately, shooting at oblique angles that crowd other branches and leaves.
This crowding limits access to sunlight and can lead to disease, but the more surprising problem is too much fruit. The wildly branching “sucker” stems soon sprout blossoms that multiply the fruit of the plant. This may not sound like a problem – and early in the season it’s fun to see so much fruit on the bush – but that early promise never really pays off. Too many tomatoes rob the entire plant of the limited nutrients, rendering all the tomatoes too small to be useful.
By regularly pruning these “suckers” the tomato plant can be limited to a few (or even just one) growth stems that yield larger, healthier fruit.
For me, the difficult part of pruning is making the decision to cut off something I have been lovingly growing for quite some time. When you have much invested, it’s more than a little unnerving to cut off an entire stem, especially one that is blossoming. Often the decision is not between stems that are producing fruit and stems that aren’t – those are easy decisions. Sometimes it’s a judgment call: which are closer to the main stem? Which show the promise of stronger fruit? Which are getting in the way of the plant growing in a strong and stable way?
It may sound silly, but these can be agonizing decisions. It takes real courage to place your knife at the base of a strong stem and sever it from the stalk. This is particularly difficult when you fancy yourself an “organic” gardener and have fallen prey to the misunderstanding that “organic” means abstaining from structure or intervention. It’s easy to think that multiplication of fruit is better than the heartiness of fruit. But that is what it means to be a good gardener, to take responsibility for the health of the whole plant.
It turns out, it’s not enough to be organic; one must cultivate as well.
“Seeker-sensitive” churches made a big splash in the 1990′s, lead by Willow Creek, with a great concern and care for helping people find God. This was generally accomplished by creating a worship atmosphere that was relevant to contemporary culture in order to provide a seamless transition from the secular world to the sacred world. The motto, via Donald McGavran, was “Nobody should have to cross cultures in order to find God.” Thanks to Willow Creek, and its clones, people were able to come and see God in a way that added sacred meaning to their beloved secular forms of soft-rock music and the corporate-marketing culture of success. It was church the church of Madison Avenue. Of course, during the 1990′s many of the more traditionally-minded churches and leaders vilified this approach, seeing it as a kind of “watering down” of the gospel message.
What the traditional churches and leaders didn’t realize was that seeker sensitive churches were the logical extension of the very form of Christendom they had passed down. Both traditional and seeker-sensitive churches assume that Christ is at the center of cultural and that God is to be found within the gates of the central palace (so to speak) that is the walls of the church. Hence, people must come to church to find God.
But during the early years of postmodernism the markers of Christendom were being rejected – religious heritage, religious symbolism, and Judeo-Christian socio-political norms – which resulted in a cognitive dissonance between those who might still want to “find God” and the keepers of the message who were still primarily speaking through the liturgies, music, and symbols of a rejected culture. In other words, “church” in it’s older forms no longer made sense. The emerging Church leaders – that is, the baby-boomer children of the traditionalists – still essentially wanted what the traditionalists wanted: God at the center of culture (perhaps even more so), but they realized that emerging generations were rejecting those symbols and traditions (as were they). Therefore, they created churches that stripped these symbols away. Seekers of God, then, could go to church to “find God” in a friendly and accessible culture that utilized recognizable idioms like soft-rock inspired worship music, entertainment-based media, and corporate-styled cafes.
Missional churches reject the most fundamental assumption underlying all of this; that Christ is the center of human culture and power. Eddie Gibbs has referred to this turn as “seeker generating churches.”
We are no longer in the business of welcoming “seekers,” or even stimulating the latent “seeking” tendencies in the otherwise pluralistic population, Rather, we are the seekers. We are not the custodians of the Kingdom. Rather, the Kingdom is the reign of God produced by a missionary God who is “at work to this very day” in the world around us. Therefore, our task is to go out and seek to find where God is already “at work” in the community and the world around us and, wherever we find God at work, to join God in that work.
Our task is to be seekers of the Kingdom and to generate new seekers of the Kingdom among us.
Questions:
To what extent has our culture in North America already rejected Christ at the center of culture? To what extent is Christ still at the center?
What can we do to most effectively generate seekers of the Kingdom among us?
To what extend should we still be prepared to receive “seekers” in the Christendom sense?
As part of a grad school class I’m taking I asked four teenagers three questions about their main concerns in life and how religion or faith impacts those concerns. I thought it would be fun to ask Pastoralia readers those same questions. So first, here are the questions and the responses I received from 4 teenagers:
What 3 issues stress you out most?
What are the 3 biggest challenges facing our world?
Does religion/faith help you deal with these concerns better or make them more difficult? How?
Respondent #1:
Figuring out what my priorities are, figuring out how to discover myself, and figuring out how to maintain grades without going crazy knowing that next year is going to be tough and that I procrastinate. I also dislike how my response to having a ton of things to think about is not thinking about any of them. I’m a very relaxed and mellow person… See more though, stress doesn’t get to me too much.
Disregard for the environment, poverty/greed, and parochialism.
Religion and faith do little for me. I see and respect how faith motivates people and gives them a sense of purpose, but it would be stupid to say something like “We are God’s instruments.” That belittles free will and extraordinary individual morality. What I mean is no because putting things in the hands of some unknown might make you feel better, but it does little to help your problem. Religion does get in the way of the global warming challenge though because some people deny science and endorse the supernatural.’
Respondent #2:
School, Grades, finding a job
Global warming, america doesnt care what other people think of them, the global and national economy
I don’t know, i would say neither. to say that i think religion helps in MY opinion wouldn’t be how i feel but i have this guilt feeling that if i say no it doesnt it would be wrong. i think saying that religion helps … See moreis something we have been accustomed too and for the most part is accepted by society. i dont think i could say yes or no though in regards to religion/faith
Respondent #3:
Thinking about college, self-image, and excelling at what is important to me.
Realizing the worth of a human being, disreguarding race or gender. Finding more diplomatic ways to solve world issues if possible. Letting go of selfish natures to benefit those in greater need and those with less opportunities.
My faith helps me because it gives me hope that someday these issues might be solved or improved. it pushes me toward the direction of helping make a change.
Respondent #4:
Future, Family,
World Hunger, Religious Conflicts, Environmental damage.
No it does not help me, religion tends to create conflict, especially in today’s world. We don’t need religion to solve our as well as the world’s problems or challenges.
Does this tell us anything useful about the worldview of these teenagers? In your experience, to what extent are these responses typical of American teenagers? What does this mean for churches and church leaders?
And, finally, how are their responses similar or different from your own?
My brief thoughts:
Teenagers today (or, these teenagers at least) are way smarter than we give them credit for.
Their concerns are more or less exactly the same as mine.
With the exception of one, there is very little connection between daily concerns and religion/faith and the connection between religion/faith and global concerns is mostly negative. I myself have a great deal of hope for how faith can impact global concerns, but quite frankly I share the disconnect between my faith and my daily stresses. If anything, being a person of faith has only increased by level of concern and responsibility.
UPDATE: A nice little conversation has sprung up around this video over at Bill Kinnon and Dan Kimball’s blogs. Bill wrote a classic piece on the subject a while back titled, What Is What, that I would highly recommend. If you don’t already know my thoughts on the use of media in the church, you can check out these recent posts:
She sank more and more into uneasy delirium. At times she shuddered, turned her eyes from side to side, recognised everyone for a minute, but at once sank into delirium again. Her breathing was hoarse and difficult, there was a sort of rattle in her throat.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment
Dear Fyodor,
It’s getting rough for the old girl. Despite the rattle of death in her chest, there’s still a hint of the former beauty and dignity behind those eyes and, as anyone would tell you, she’s as feisty as ever. Still, the truth is she’s dying and there’s nothing to be done about it. As we sit around her bed praying and waiting, her moments of lucidity come with rapidly decreasing frequency.
Everyone here is dealing with the ugliness of her death in their own way. My sister refuses to let her go. She stands just beyond the door, arguing in harsh whispers with the doctors and nurses. She won’t believe the facts of the case, and it’s easier to argue over the interpretation of charts and data than to look straight at the old girl herself. I don’t blame her. Looking is hard.
My older brother looks but doesn’t see. “She’s just a little out of shape,” he says optimistically. “If we can get her up and out she’ll be back to her old self, ruling the roost!” And so he hangs a dress on her and rolls on rouge and glides her round the ward in a wheelchair festooned at the handles with curly ribbon and helium balloons so she might speak with the people. I tell you it’s horrible. Such a thing would be bearable (commendable even!) if compassion was his aim, but it’s not compassion he seeks from her fellows in the ward. No, it’s her rulership he hopes to re-animate and so he props her up like some animatronic relic – a broken-down ecclesiastical Chuck-E-Cheese promising fun-and-games for all the good little children.
Sadly, she scares the children. They weren’t around when she was bright and beautiful. They never attended her grand parties. They don’t know who she was (and let’s face it, as good as she might have been she was also a hard taskmaster, perhaps taking her job of keeping us safe too seriously and – I think – secretly hoping we would never grow up). So the children shrink and shriek and their lack of piety (or pity) has fermented my brother’s optimism into a swill of bitter insistence, rendering him defensive and defiant and refusing the temporary inebriation of grief.
(Can I tell you the truth? I fear her death is more than he can take. He always seemed the stronger one growing up, but I’m not sure he can keep his sanity without her strict order around the house – without her barbed-wire fences to separate the wild vines from the cultivated ones. I don’t think he realizes it was always her intention that we harvest the whole field, and I think all these years later she might even be happy to see us tear down those fences if keeping them meant letting the whole field go to waste.)
For me, it’s her delirious rants that are the most heart-wrenching. She’ll stubbornly hoist herself up to rebuke people who aren’t even in the room – resurrected memories of conflicts and passions long dead and gone to everyone but her own cruelly vivid memories that now, in her mortal distress, seem to have taken on a quality that simply overwhelms her present reality. Perhaps it’s for the best – perhaps it’s mercy – but for better or worse I find I’m not just grieving her death, I’m grieving the robbery of her chance to see the transcendence of death by the legacy she leaves in us. I think she would rejoice in that. I think she would look us in the eye and say, “It’s good to grieve me, but celebrate too. If I live on like this then death wins by making me into a mockery of life. But if I die then the life I lived will be victorious by passing on to you. Now take the best and go.”
She deserves that moment; it’s her birthright. But we won’t let her have it. We insist on preserving her because somehow we think our life is in her, when actually her life (all life!) is a gift that grows in the giving, until one day it grows so fat it swallows every one of us whole, death and all. Who would have thought, Fyodor, that the nihilism you so strenuously decried would lead not to the depraved insistence on rationalized death, but to the dogmatic insistence on irrational life?
You must be wondering how she can possibly endure for so long. It’s the machines that keep her alive. Pray for a death rattle in the chest of those monstrosities so she might finally be free from our obsessions, and enjoy a long night of rest in a well-deserved sleep.
3Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. 5For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. 6If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. 7And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.
~ 2 Corinthians 1:3-7
As if pain and suffering weren’t bad enough, one of the common features of suffering is that those who are afflicted tend to feel terribly alone in their distress. We often contribute to that isolation by distancing ourselves – either physically or emotionally – from suffering people because we just don’t know what do say or do. We want to solve problems, not just acknowledge them, and when we don’t know how to solve the problem we sometimes make the mistake of not acknowledging it at all.
The Christians in Corinth are going through a particularly difficult time and Paul wants them to know they are not alone, so he charges right out of the gate in this letter with a praise for the “Father of compassion and the God of all comfort.” Paul wants these believers to know, first of all, that they do not suffer without relief, for our God is the God “who comforts us in all our troubles.”
But notice, Paul says here that at times comfort from God comes not in the form of a solution, but in the form of empathy and understanding from others who have suffered! Paul says
“[God] comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (v4).
Paul then uses a powerful image to drive home his point: Picture a large kettle filling up from a rapidly flowing tap, the liquid racing to the brim and them gushing over the edge, splashing down the sides and running out onto the floor.
This is the suffering of Christ.
As the people who place our trust in the faithfulness of Christ, his suffering inevitably spills out onto us. Yet, this overflow is also the comfort of Christ, and as he comforts others we too are bathed in that merciful flow.
Paul’s evocative image illustrates a surprising and distinctively Christian truth that we can receive comfort and empathy from God for our sufferings because we serve a God who has himself suffered. Christ meets us in our pain and misery – not from a sympathetic distance, but shoulder-to-shoulder in the muck and mire of our broken humanity. He has been there as a broken human, and he offers us mercy from the wellspring of his empowering grace.
When we have received this mercy – sometimes in prayer, sometimes in scripture, but mostly in community – we respond by sharing it to others around us. That is the community of mercy in action. The gift of grace must be moved or else rot and spoil like lay-old manna. We are common sufferers, and common comforters, in Christ and with Christ, and by this activity we begin to enjoy a kind of equality that is peculiarly meant for the people of the Kingdom of God (2 Co 8:13-15).
In this edition of “Author Sketches” we talk to Jim Belcher, author of the recent popular book Deep Church, A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional. Jim talked to us about his own struggle to find a “third way” as a pastor and church-planter, his motivation for “theological peacemaking” and revealed how his friend Rob Bell became the catalyst for writing this book in the first place.
Well, this should be interesting.
