The terrible and wonderful reasons why I run long distances.

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Many of us have been inspired by examples like those of Shane Claiborne and others from the New Monastic movement. We desire a simpler, less consumptive, less acquisitive, less consumeristic, and less materialistic life.

The struggles come with how far you go in any given direction.

Food is a good example. I've always been attracted to vegetarianism. But I generally hate fruits and vegetables. So it's a bit of a struggle. Your choices as a vegetarian eating out are already pretty limited, but if you can't stand--to speak totally hypothetically of course--mushrooms or tomatoes, your choices can evaporate in any given restaurant or dining experience.

But what you can do, I decided, is just eat less meat. If you aren't able to eliminate, you can reduce.

And from that conclusion I reached another conclusion. Beyond meat, you could just eat less overall. Again, not with any aim at being "healthier," though that's a nice side benefit. The goal is shifting to being a more ascetic than consumptive person.

All that to say, if you start wading into a theology of food you can be taken into a million different directions. Most of which are wonderful and laudable. I have friends who are vegans and locavores. I have friends who raise chickens in the city, friends who keep bees, and friends who only eat "God's food."

And me? I just eat less. Snack less. Get a medium rather than a large. Don't go back for seconds. This is simpler for me.

And this applies to more than just food, this idea of less. Three big easy rules are this:

Eat less
Buy less
Drive less

To be sure, these rules won't make you a Shane Claiborne or anything. These rules won't remove you from the webs of economic and industrial complicity. These rules won't make you "clean."

But these rules are simple to remember and easy to implement. While you can buy chickens and should research clothing factories, you can also focus on less. For many of us, less seems more practicable. Less is an asceticism for "ordinary radicals."

And maybe--if more people worked on less--less would, in the end, be more.

I’ve been reading some books (like this one) and online essays lately on evangelicalism and evolution, and I have to stop and ask myself: Can evangelicalism really incorporate evolution into its theology system, or do these very attempts expose the problems of evangelical theology that need to be addressed? I’m not sure evolution and evangelicalism in its [Read More...]

I’m beat. Worn down. Burned out.

I’m sick of the in-fighting. Sick of the one-upping. Sick of relationships that seem to be more about what we can do for one another than how we can love one another.

I’ve gotten away. Taken some time off. Spent some time getting caught up on my sleep.

But nothing has satisfied my soul. Nothing has given me the rest I so desperately need.

And I stumble across these words.

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.  I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” Matthew 11:28-30, The Message

And I know I haven’t really turned to the One thing, the One person, who can give me what I so desperately need.

More of Him. To learn the unforced rhythms of grace. A real rest.

How are you feeling today? Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? 

The latest movement in neo-patriarchal evangelicaldom is a call for women to return to covering their heads in worship per the instructions of Paul in 1 Corinthians 11. The movement’s website features a quote from neo-Calvinist scholar R.C. Sproul: “The wearing of fabric head coverings in worship was universally the practice of Christian women until the twentieth century. What happened? Did we suddenly find some biblical truth to which the saints for thousands of years were blind? Or were our biblical views of women gradually eroded by the modern feminist movement that has infiltrated the Church…?” Do you think Sproul is right? If not, what would you say to Sproul and on what authority would you justify your response?

The head-covering movement breaks down their argument into four pieces according to Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians. I don’t think you can wiggle out of their argument if you have a flat view of Biblical interpretation and you disallow the “cultural context” card. So here are the four arguments:

1) Creation Order
“For a man ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man” (1 Corinthians 11:7). The first reason for women to cover their heads is to show that men are superior to women, according to Paul’s anthropology. They are not merely complementarian (“equal with different roles”), according to this verse. If man is the glory of God and woman is the glory of man, then man is an intermediary of God to woman. This verse expresses hierarchy unequivocally; I don’t see any other way to understand it.

If you accept Paul’s word here uncritically without allowance for translation into a different cultural context, then you should leave whatever church you’re a part of and find out how to become a satellite of Mark Driscoll’s church, because this is what he teaches. Paul goes on to say in verses 8-9: “Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man.” So understand, women, that according to Paul (at least for the sake of this particular argument), you exist for the sake of men.

2) The Angels
“Therefore the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels” (1 Corinthians 11:10). Now this is a little bizarre to me. What do angels have to do with it? The woman writing for the head-covering site turns to Ephesians 3:10 for an explanation: “So that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places,” saying that the “rulers and authorities” are another word for angels. The writer imagines what the angels see when they see men’s shiny bald spots and women’s doo-rags in worship together from heaven:

They see males and females worshiping together as equals. On top of all that through head coverings our women show all present that their position as a woman is also redeemed. No longer are they at war usurping and longing for the mans position of authority (Gen 3:16). Instead they’re content in the role God ordained for them in Genesis 2.

The problem with this sentence is that exemplifies the tortured logic of complementarianism. No, men and women aren’t “worshiping together as equals” in this arrangement. Paul made it clear in 1 Corinthians 11: the head-covering is not intended to express different but equal, but superior and inferior. You can’t have it both ways. What about Galatians 3:28 where it says “there is no longer male and female”? If Galatians 3:28 and 1 Corinthians 11 are of equal weight, then we are at an unresolvable impasse, because Galatians 3:28 contradicts everything that Paul has just said in 1 Corinthians 11:7-9. (That’s why I say Galatians 3:28 is the universal while 1 Corinthians 11 is the pastorally contextual, but anyway…)

By the way, the writer advances a completely eisegetical interpretation of Genesis 3:16, which has nothing to say about women longing for the man’s position of authority: “To the woman he said, I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” The most straightforward interpretation of this sentence is that the woman’s desire for her husband is the cause of his ruling over her, i.e. that their relationship hierarchy is a reflection of the curse of sin.

3) Nature
“Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head unveiled? Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him?” 1 Corinthians 11:13-14. If Paul’s view of “nature” is prescriptively binding upon us as believers today, then any male youth pastor who has ever had long, nappy hair for the sake of “relevance” has degraded himself.

Interestingly and unsurprisingly, the head-covering site supports its argument by going to another place in Paul’s letters where he talks about what’s “natural” and what isn’t — the infamous anti-gay clobber verse of Romans 1:26-27: “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.” Basically, the argument of the head-covering site is that if you’re going to accept Paul’s view of “nature” as prescriptively binding on the homosexuality issue, then you have to accept it on the head-covering and gender hierarchy issue too. I agree with them.

4) Church Practice
“If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God” (1 Corinthians 11:16). The writer of the website explains that she thought this verse let her off the hook for wearing head-coverings along the lines of Paul’s counsel to believers about not being contentious over “disputable matters” in Romans 14. But when she connects verse 16 with verse 2 (“I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions just as I handed them on to you”), she concludes that Paul is saying there is no other church in which women don’t cover their heads to pray.

She uses this verse to stave off the escape hatch that some conservative evangelical women try to deploy with the alleged Corinthian temple prostitution that might be behind these teachings:

Some argue that Paul commanded women to practice head coverings because if they didn’t they may be identified with the temple prostitutes in Corinth who didn’t wear one. However, in  verse 16 Paul shows that this goes beyond Corinth and is the practice of all churches, everywhere. Just think geographically of the churches that were in existence at this time: Corinth, Phillipi, Thessalonica, Ephesus, Iconium, Caesarea, Antioch and many more. They all practiced head coverings. All these churches have a mixture of Jews and Gentiles fellowshipping in them and are from different cultures. They are spread out geographically over thousands of miles over such places as modern day Israel, Turkey & Greece. Yet, they all hold to the same Christian doctrine regarding head coverings. How can such unity be accounted for except the church understanding head coverings as a command for all Christians?

Response:
So what do you think? Has she convinced you? If you are a Biblical inerrantist without anything governing your Biblical interpretation other than the “self-interpreting” text itself, then you’d better go buy a hijab before Sunday. As for me, I have several lenses that I use by which I evaluate all the nuts and bolts instructions that I read in the Bible.

1) “I desire mercy not sacrifice.”
Hosea 6:6 is the only Old Testament verse that Jesus quotes twice in the same gospel, in Matthew 9:13 and Matthew 12:7. In both cases, Jesus is defending people who are being judged by Bible-quoting Pharisees, first Matthew’s party guests and then his disciples picking grain on the Sabbath.

It will require a book to talk about all the implications of mercy not sacrifice, but here’s my best paragraph summary. When I see the greater arc of scripture through this lens, it seems to me that God is saying that He does not need us to act in a certain way or abstain from certain things for the abstract sake of honoring him, which would be sacrifice. It is rather that all of God’s instructions concerning our holiness shape our hearts so that we can embody the mercy He wants to make sovereign over all of us, which is best exemplified in the instinctive actions of Jesus’ paradigmatic merciful figure, the Good Samaritan. One verse that corroborates seeing this as the purpose of God’s teaching is what Jesus says in Mark 2:27: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Or Ephesians 2:10: “For we are His poetry, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” I could add about twenty other proof-texts but I’m not going to.

To make Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 11 into a universal prescription for all Christians at all times seems to me to affirm sacrifice instead of mercy; it’s saying that God has an order with which He created things that we just need to follow without any other sanctifying reason for doing so. Ultimately I understand God to be a pragmatist; everything He commands of us is for a real loving purpose, not merely to be decorations who “know their place” on His well-ordered shelf. Scripture bears witness to the way that religion is most abused by those for whom mercy has no place in God’s purpose, who make it instead all about God’s honor. Many evils have been committed for the sake of abstract honor (google honor killing, for example). That’s why God makes it clear through Jesus that He desires mercy not sacrifice.

2) “Love God; love your neighbor”
Since Jesus said that all the law and prophets hang on the two commandments to love God and love your neighbor, St. Augustine concluded in his De Doctrina Christiana that unless we can explain how a particular teaching increases love of God or neighbor, we do not understand it well enough to apply it in practice. The challenge with this lens is that it can be immediately tossed aside by saying, “Well, if you love God, then you’ll do what His book says to do” (according to whatever is its most straightforward, “self-interpreting,” presupposed to be universal meaning). When you use that logic, you’re in effect saying that interpretation itself is unloving to God.

So in order for the Great Commandment to actually function as an interpretive lens in the sense in which Augustine suggested, I need to be able to explain how a particular Biblical teaching increases my love of God or neighbor, or if I’m going to claim that it isn’t universally applicable, I need to have an account for why it was a love God, love neighbor issue in its original pastoral context. And if you’re going to say that everything in the Bible is universally prescriptive, then you’d better find some rattlesnakes to play with (Mark 16:18).

Love of God has to do with worship, which I understand to be most purely delighting in God for His own sake. This involves purifying myself of the tendency to “worship” as an act of performance in which I am doing it “to be seen by others” (Matthew 23:5), to feel a sense of superiority and self-justification for myself, or to win favor from a God whom I do not trust to have already loved me unconditionally.

Worshiping God also requires smashing every other idol in my life that I make into a god, including individual Biblical teachings that are being overemphasized to the detriment of the Bible’s overall witness. Now here an interesting issue comes up. I see us living through a time in which “traditional gender” has become an idol among the conservative evangelicals.

I recognize that there are very real problems with sexuality in our culture that we need to defend ourselves against. But when girls have to wear extra-large t-shirts and shorts over their bathing suits to go to church youth swimming parties, their bodies are being fetishized in a way that goes far beyond an earnest desire for holiness. This fetishization not only interferes with girls’ ability to worship God fully without shame; it consumes the attention of the church community in all sorts of demon-attracting ways. With regard to the question of head-coverings, I worry that head-coverings in our context of idolized “traditional gender” would serve to reinforce that idol and take worship away from God, putting the focus instead on our performance of “traditional gender.”

Now the other side of the Great Commandment is love of neighbor. In Paul’s 1st century context, if uncovered hair had an erotic connotation, then for women to cover their heads in church would be a loving thing to do for the sake of men in the community. But in the context of today’s neo-patriarchal movement, the “love your neighbor” implications of such teachings have proven to be quite different, and tragically so.

We have seen report after report in the last few years of sexual abuse that occurs in neo-patriarchal churches with impunity as a direct result of the power dynamics created when bareheaded men have all the authority and covered-up women don’t. If the reason for women to cover their heads is to make it clear that men have all the authority, then the head-covering itself serves to reinforce the implicit teaching that when Deacon Bobby touches you, you don’t do or say anything that would disrespect his authority.

Conclusion:
So the universal use of Paul’s teaching fails both the love God and love neighbor criteria for me, though it fulfills both in the particular pastoral context of 1st century Corinth. Since all scripture is supposed to be “useful [see the pragmatism] for teaching and making disciples,” that simply means that we need to translate Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 11 into our context. To translate the “problem” of 1st century women letting down their hair into our context means to me that men and women both should think about how we can dress in such a way that will maximize the love of God and neighbor when we gather for worship.

We need to recognize that there are a variety of possibilities for interpretation here. Should we dress drably for the sake of humility or beautifully for the sake of creating an ambiance of delight in God? Should we dress informally to show hospitality to the outsider or elegantly so that we will enter more deeply into the holiness of the space? I don’t think that establishing hard and fast rules is the point so much as being prayerful and loving in deciding how you can balance delighting in God through your fashion with avoiding a distraction for others. And if you look at 1 Corinthians 11 and conclude that you need to wear a hijab, I won’t judge you.

Filed under: Bible, General Topics, Theology

When it comes to egalitarian gender roles in the church most people go to Galatians 3.28, "there is no longer any male or female." That text is huge for me, but the one I regularly go to is this one:

Matthew 20.25-28 (NLT)
But Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must become your slave. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.” 

I find a lot about the gender roles debates to be distracting and off-topic. What does it mean to be a man or a woman? What are our proper "gender roles"? Can a man stay at home and a woman be the bread-winner? And so on and so on.

To be sure, these are important questions and important debates. But for me, they are often beside the point.

The problem, as I see it, is less about what men and woman can or can't do than with a group of men in the church exerting power over another group--women. In short, men are "lording over" women in the church, exercising top-down power via a hierarchy. More, this group of men is prohibiting another group (women) from having access and input into the very power structure that is being used against them and excluding them. That's lording over. And gender aside, that sort of lording over is prohibited by Jesus. "But among you it shall be different."  

For example, what rankles in my own local church context is that women have to ask men for permission. Women have to be allowed to do things. And it is this concentration, use and gatekeeping of power that is sinful.

The issue isn't really, fundamentally, about what "roles" men are equipped for versus women. The whole debate about "gender roles" is often beside the point and, I think, often a manipulation to keep our eye off the ball.  Because the only role in the church is the role Jesus took upon himself. The only role in the church is being a servant. 

So when you see a group in the church using and then excluding others from power--rather than eschewing power the way Jesus did--you move about as far away from Jesus as you can get. This is importing into the Kingdom satanic, worldly manifestations of power, bringing sin into the very heart and life of the church.

Dear brothers, repent. Repent and believe the gospel. The Kingdom of God is at hand. 

Among us it shall be different.

The day before her birthday, Emily in Baton Rouge was lamenting the fact that her husband had never once surprised me with a cookie cake. (Hint, hint.)

The next day, her husband “surprised” her with what Emily called “quite possibly the best present I’ve ever received — not only hilarious, but delicious as well!”

Meanwhile, writes Chanisa in Danbury, Connecticut: “This is what my husband wrote on my birthday cake after I nagged him about it for a week.”

related: I don’t want to hear another damn word about flowers

Jesus’ woes against the Pharisees in Matthew 23 should be mandatory daily devotional reading for American evangelicals. It’s incredible how much we resemble the religious insiders who crucified Jesus. One of the things that Jesus says about the Pharisees in verse 4 is that “they tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others.” We are living through a time in which many Christians measure their “faithfulness” to God according to the weight of the burdens that they tie up for others to carry, the prime example of course being the homosexuality issue. What’s farcical is when Christians act as though they are making some great sacrifice and bearing some great cross on account of how strict they are in their consideration of what other people do.

The ancient Christians were martyred for doing things that put them at odds with the social order like refusing to participate in the pagan festivals and refusing to buy meat that had been sacrificed to pagan gods. I have total respect for someone who gets persecuted or scorned because they are choosing to act differently than the people around them. I don’t disrespect people who have a different Biblical interpretation than I do on the issue of homosexuality. Many Christians are able to hold their perspective with humility and grace.

But when you go on and on about the heroic martyrdom of your anti-gay position, then you’re making it pretty obvious how much self-justification you’re getting out of it. When you’re in a sub-culture whose most distinguishing marker of identity for the last forty years has been its sexual traditionalism, there’s nothing risky or martyr-like about holding onto a position that keeps you from getting kicked out of your sub-culture. In our balkanized society, conservatives demonize liberals and liberals demonize conservatives. This is expected; neither can complain with any degree of integrity that they are persecuted or martyred; both have echo chambers in which they can isolate themselves and feel completely supported in their views.

The reason why no argument, no matter how strong the Biblical grounding, will ever sway most evangelicals on homosexuality is because their tribal identity depends upon the moralization of sexual normalcy. That is the entirety of what the code-word “Biblical” means. It doesn’t have anything to do with following Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount or Galatians 5:22′s spiritual fruit or James’ insistence on living out your faith through works or Leviticus 25′s year of Jubilee. The way evangelicals determine whether someone is “Biblical” or not is to evaluate their beliefs about sex and gender. That’s the only sphere in which the adjective is deployed.

To stop being anti-gay would involve a complete crisis of identity for the evangelicals. The moralization of sexual normalcy was the evangelicals’ means of recovering their dignity in the early seventies after taking a beating form the civil rights movement. Because it isn’t racist to say that the reason we’re middle class instead of poor is that we don’t sleep around outside of marriage and we don’t need to spend our tax dollars subsidizing poor peoples’ immorality with welfare.

For years I have watched the leaders in the Southern Baptist Church of my upbringing use the homosexuality issue as a means of jockeying for power and attacking rivals’ characters. I’ve never seen  the issue come up in a true pastoral context where someone’s actual discipleship was concerned. The constant charge being brought against the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, for instance, is that they’re really pro-gay under the surface, which means that CBF pastors are under intense pressure to prove their fidelity to the anti-gay cause in order to stave off their delegitimization.

I realize that I can’t see into other peoples’ souls to see how much of what they profess is said out of fear of more conservative Christians discrediting them. I just know that for a long time I kept my mouth shut and toed the party line for this reason. In my case, being anti-gay wasn’t a stance that I held out of integrity but in order to protect my right flank from attack.

Whatever you believe, don’t do so out of fear of whichever tribe you fall into. Ask God to show you the truth, and be obedient to what He reveals. Whether you believe it or not, that’s the way I’m trying to live. The most critical part of your witness is the humility with which you hold your beliefs, which does not mean at all that you’re not allowed to speak honestly about them. I’ll try my best to love and respect you. But if you’re going to make a big fuss about your heroic martyrdom for the burdens that you tie up for others to carry in order to demonstrate your loyalty to the evangelical tribe, then I’m going to say get over yourself!

Filed under: Church Culture, General Topics

Pastor Steve McCoy recently tweeted this and ignited something of a firestorm on the internets:

And honestly, I understand the backlash. Especially from a therapeutic perspective, it just sounds wrong. The emphasis – deeply – almost immediately triggers images of fundamentalist spiritual and emotional abuse of kids, abuse that is very real, abuse that I experienced as a child, abuse that I have witnessed firsthand in several church environments.

But here’s the thing. I’ve used the word ‘brokenness’ to describe the theological idea of humanity’s sinfulness. Like, a lot. Honestly, I wrote a book that relied heavily on the brokenness metaphor when describing the serial killer Dexter, highlighting his ‘dark passenger’ as an extreme example of our sinful shadow self. There is a scene in that show where Dexter’s sister Deb falls apart and, in tears, exclaims, “I’m what’s wrong! I am broken!” It is a powerful revelation of the truth of her situation, and it is a truth revealed in our own lives whenever we encounter devastating failure or contradiction within ourselves.

The sticky wicket, though, is in the application. It is one thing to affirm the general theological truth that human beings are broken people, flawed people, failing people, fragmented people, often-running-away-from-wholeness people. That we can be damned destructive sometimes, and that this is what’s wrong with the world. It’s one thing to affirm that theological reality of fallenness and then follow it up with the far more alarming truth: that smack dab in the midst of our brokenness, we, all of us, are the very beloved of God. That the good news is the end of shame, and Jesus says we are enough.

That’s one thing.

But it’s quite another to change that theological conversation into a specifically adapted message to children, complete with a pointed emphasis that seems to almost push against belovedness itself. Specifically teaching children that they are deeply broken is an exercise in shame precisely because their brokenness is not yet their own. No matter what your doctrine of original sin might be, the beauty, the miracle, of childhood is that they have not become so wounded, nor tempted, as to have properly entered the human condition of “brokenness.” This is why Jesus was so clear: become like a child, then you can enter the kingdom. Return to the place before brokenness – the place where God was near and we were truly alive and breathed in our belovedness. The place before what has always been true became clouded by the tree of knowledge.

So, Steve, my suggestion is this. It would be better to teach our kids to just be the beloved, because that is precisely who they know they are better than we know it ourselves.

And, perhaps we, as dads, ought to remember the lesson that we are the ones who are broken – and the more we can accept our own belovedness in the midst of that brokenness, the less brokenness we will actually pass on to our children.

These are interesting times.

Times of transition.

Times of shifting and tension and evolution.

For me personally, in family, ministry, and vocational life – and for the culture in general.

The image above is from a movie my wife and I watched last night on DVD - The Impossible. Naomi Watts was nominated for the Oscar, but the film should have been nominated for – and should have won – best picture. It is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. Ever.

And perhaps I’m a bit biased because I’m now a parent. SPOILER: There is no more horrifying cinematic experience for a dad than to watch a tidal wave that separates parents from their children, as everyone else is brutally injured or killed. There is no more thrilling experience than to see parents and children reunited when all seemed lost. This is a film about a family finding love in a hopeless place. And it’s true.

That’s all I’ll say, but you must see this movie.

Afterwards, my wife and I found ourselves in tears, and driven to some deep reflection. A story like that has the power to clear away the clutter and cut to the quick, especially when it resonates with our reality. Especially if we are in some tension, transition, and evolution. Especially if there has been a tidal wave of some kind in our lives. It can create a laserbeam focus on what really matters. It can illuminate a path ahead.

I’ve written about it a bit here, but almost a year ago our church plant, Dwell, came to an end. There are things they don’t really tell you before you plant a church; and there are things you just know on the other side. Our plant was a leap of faith, not planted out of any denomination or established church, just a group of people who felt called to begin a new expression. It was 100% commitment. My wife and I gave all our time, energy, money, passion, heart, and life to the beautiful work. It sustained for a time. We had no idea that a brutal tidal wave could hit.

Specifically, we had no idea that some people, brimming with wonderful words about Jesus, could act with such careless hurt. Eventually, as the organization struggled, those closest to us backstabbed and betrayed. They forced us out of the church we planted, and thus forced the organization to its end.

I speak that story with some clarity now in order to pave the way for something else. If transition has hit me personally, it has also hit the culture at large, and the resonance between the two has yielded a strange result. I’m beginning to think that tidal waves of change have not left us merely in a post-Christendom place, where the church has ceased to occupy a place of power in the culture, but even moreso, a post-church place.

In other words, to borrow from Nietzsche, I’ve come to believe that church is dead.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Nuh-uh! My church/church plant is awesome! Tons of people come! Everyone loves it! It’s influencing our city and culture! Lives are being changed!

Totally.

But I’m not saying that your church is dead. What I’m saying is that, culturally, the church as an organizational and institutional endeavor has lost its meaning. It has so often become a superfluous community initiative or entertainment source that often relies on unhealthy motivations and manipulations to sustain itself. Some of this is rooted in the theology itself, like a view of hell that manipulates faith and service by fear, or in the structure itself, where pressures and controls around finances increase as people see less and less of a point in giving. Sometimes, it’s rooted in a cultural privilege that thrives on othering marginalized people to create an insider club. Sometimes, it is simply relying on manufactured superficial experiences and promises to draw and retain, while contradictions persist behind the scenes. In any case, the institutional course, generally speaking, is not sustainable. It is draining us – spiritually, emotionally, financially. Church planting often highlights this.

My friend Scott refers to our common point on the church planting journey as “the other side of church planting.” It’s a post-church place! But if you think that place, having been hit by waves of change large and small, is primarily one of fear and anger and bitterness, you’d be surprised.

Really, this is the place where I’ve found love.

Deep meaning.

A clear focus on what matters.

And, honestly, an abiding affection for Jesus and his church.

In other words, I believe it is possible to become pro-church in a post-church place.

And that requires that we acknowledge the tidal wave, allow it to do its thing, and find love for the church in the midst of it. It requires that we deeply question the assumptions around how we organize and institutionalize in order to reorient ourselves around meaning, not organization-building. With regard to church planting, it requires that we question whether new organizations are the healthy, sustainable, meaningful answer – whether they should really be the focus at all – or whether there might be a different, better course.

Specifically, I wonder if we can ask the question, What does it mean to build the kingdom through incarnational living in the neighborhood as our parish, without any major reference to the organization? Then, how can organizations be influenced by people living that kind of life, and bring liturgical formation to living that life? Perhaps that means a new org. Perhaps that means the rejuvenation and support of an existing one around deeper meaning.

Regardless, it means loving the post-church place for all its worth, and seeing the church continue to be Jesus’s body, the fullness of him who is filling everything in every way - in a deeply meaningful way.

Certainly, it requires that we stop, listen, and discern what the Spirit is saying to the churches in this post-church place, that we may be a part of the restored future, not the dying present.

When the debris settles after the storm, the air is uncommonly clear and calm.

The key is to find love there, gather strength there, and move forward.

It is possible.

—

What do you think? Do you feel like we are in a post-church place? What should we do about it? Also, are you a church planter with a story to tell, good, bad, ugly? I’d love to hear from you!

Wisdom tells us to pursue what is lasting, to center our attention around what will endure, to anchor ourselves in longevity. But maybe what is fleeting in this lifetime gets a bad rap. Maybe the truest, most real experiences in this life are fleeting.

Take falling in love. Every day you breeze past hundreds of people who are of little consequence to you, but then in a moment one person becomes everything to you. Your life was perfectly full before you met her, but somehow now you have a cavernous void at the center of your body that can only be filled by her presence. Once you had life dreams about what, but now you have dreams about who. It's like the the universe has whispered a tightly guarded secret to you, and you are now in possession of the knowledge that this is the most excruciatingly beautiful woman the world has ever known. You can't figure out why the entire world isn't knocking on her door, why everyone can't see what you see, why she's not on the cover of every fashion magazine, why scientists aren't clamoring to study her brain and heart, why her emails aren't winning the Pulitzer every year.

Yes, those intoxicating feelings become more sober over time, but what if the experience of being in love is a glimpse into the true reality of who that person is? What if it's about more than brain chemicals that swirl in your brain when she's near or an evolutionary tactic to preserve the species? What if in those smitten days you have been given a revelation from On High about who this person, at her core, truly is? She is an image-bearer of God, a beloved daughter, a breathtaking unity of body, soul, mind, and spirit tenderly shaped by the Creator, apple of the Father's eye, and therefore stunningly, heart-piercingly, life-changingly beautiful. What if what you have experienced is a truth about a person that is more true than all the lies she has been told about herself are false?

Perhaps the experience of falling in love is not unlike the transfiguration. When Jesus went up the mountain and was transfigured before the disciples, it wasn't a stage trick. What Peter, James, and John saw was the true glory of the Son. In his face sparkling in the sun, they beheld Jesus for who he truly is. They learned his true identity, one that will become fully clear when we meet him face to face, when his countenance will never cease to glow. Perhaps when you fall in love, the other person is transfigured before you, and for a brief time, you see and experience and love who she truly is. She is not the only one who is changed.

The problem with the transfiguration is that the disciples Jesus took with him couldn't handle it. Peter tried to control the situation. Maybe if I build a few tabernacles up here, he thought, I can find a place to put all this Glory. That's what we do in the fleeting moments, when we encounter something, or someone, that makes us feel small, powerless, or overwhelmed. We try to regain control. We make a tent to stick Jesus in, or we distance ourselves from the feelings, or we dismiss or judge the in-love feelings of others. I even have a suspicion that we invent rules for how women should dress and act so that men will not feel so overpowered by the dizzying splendor of a woman.

I did a similar thing every time I visited wine country for a couple of years. I would experience those fleeting moments where I was so pierced by the sheer beauty of the place, so moved by the pattern of the vineyards stretching across the hills toward the ocean, so inspired by the buds breaking on the vines that would one day be crushed to fill my empty glass, and I would have absolutely know idea how to absorb them. So I ate and drank. And I over-ate and over-drank. I literally tried to take the beauty of the land into my body, and I discovered that my body did not nearly have the space to contain it. Others try to contain natural beauty by taking hundreds of pictures, but they find that even the most wide-angle shot does not compare to the inexhaustible panorama of the place, and they may even find that the camera in front of their face shields them from the wonder before them.

You know what else is fleeting? Emotion. So we have been taught not to trust our emotions, because they are capricious and therefore unreal. We tell people in pain to get over things. We point out their emotional contradictions and try to fix them and make them "consistent." We tell them to ignore their feelings and trust the eternal Word of God, even though the Word is full of emotional people, not to mention a few fruit of the Spirit that sound strangely emotional. Scripture would seem to tell us that when feelings like peace and joy surface in our hearts, they are indications of God's presence with us, and there is nothing more real than that.

The Celtic Christian tradition heralds "thin places" - those locations on earth where the clouds that would separate us from the awareness of God break and we are surrounded by Presence. I also like to think of "thin moments" - those brief windows of time when the veils of our hearts are peeled back and we experience Reality as fully we are able. Nothing is more fleeting than time, and yet that does not make this moment any less real. Perhaps in the thin moments, we dance in step to the music of the future, echoing backwards for a few songs. It doesn't mean that the rest of life isn't real, but maybe in the fleeting experiences of falling in love, of being captured by beauty, of swooning in deep emotion, we are moving to a deeper rhythm, a heavenly soundtrack that will have its grand climax at the renewal of all things.

Changing diapers is not awesome.

In fact, it’s probably something you’d find over on 1000 Annoying Things, that non-existent netherlist we mentioned before which also features #998 When you realize you’re out of deodorant as you’re putting it on, #997 Forgetting your umbrella at the restaurant, and #996 When the hot water runs out before you rinse out your shampoo.

Mommy and daddy, you know what I’m talking about. Sure, you love your child, and yes, you rationally understand that frequent bowel movements are a sign of good health, but when you groan and grog-waddle over to the crib at three in the morning, it’s just not a pretty scene.

That’s why it’s so great when you’re expecting Number 2, but get lucky and just score a leaky Number 1 diaper. It’s like a tiny present from your little bundle of joy. So high-five the little slugger before pulling the quick-wipe and slapping on a new dipe.

AWESOME!

Photos from: here and here

Thrilled to welcome an online friend, Leanne Penny, here today! Make sure you check out her blog – she writes beautifully about choosing joy and journeying through to healing while grieving. And she’s lovely. 

Everyone has words that drive them insane, that give them goosebumps or grate their ears like nails on a chalkboard. I have one friend who cannot stand the word “panties” and multiple who cringe when someone uses the word “moist.” I try to respect their wishes and alter my vocabulary accordingly by using the word “underwear” when asking if I have a line showing through my skirt or the word “spongy” to compliment a delicious cake.

After all, I have a word that I don’t like, although mine is more likely to send me to therapy. For me, it’s the word “woman.”

As far back as I can remember I have hated the word woman. I could deal with being a lady, a girl, a female, but a woman? No. Not a woman.

But it’s not like I can avoid this word. After all, I’m a 31 year old mother of two, all my womanly bits are clearly in working order and there is nothing on earth I can do to avoid or deny it: I am a woman, I just am. So I have to get over my issues with this word because, quite frankly, it’s time.

So, over the past year, I’ve been painfully sorting through all the baggage that I’ve attached to my womanhood. I’ve found a lot of rubbish. Some of it from society, some from church and a lot from growing up the daughter of a mentally ill mom, my main example of womanhood.

My mom was a beautiful person with a tender spirit, but she got sick before I was even born and 29 years of my life was spent watching her deteriorate and fall apart until she eventually took her life.

That has made wanting to become a woman very hard for me because into my view of womanhood was built a nasty lie: women fall apart under pressure. Women are weak and nervous and simply can’t cut it. When the going gets tough, women head to the couch with a peanut butter english muffin and just give up.

And eventually they might just give up forever.

So while some women were talking about brave feminism and others were endeavoring to equalize the workplace I was focused on a different part of womanhood: accepting and surviving it. And now I believe I’ve come out on the other side and realized that what I learned growing up was the exception, not the rule. It was mental illness that was terrifying me, not womanhood.

And there was truly no better time for me to learn this distinction than right now as I am raising a beautiful four-year old daughter of my own. A little brown-eyed woman in the making. There is nothing that causes one to sort through the baggage of her femininity than having a daughter and endeavoring to model womanhood well, is there?

God, I long to model bravery to my daughter. When she hears the word woman I want her to smile and and look forward to her future. I want her to grow up believing that she is capable of whatever she is called to, that she has a right to be in any room, any role that God puts her in.

I want her to feel beautiful in her own olive colored skin, I want her brown eyes to reflect the depth of her soul and all the strength, wit and wisdom that her creator so carefully wove into her.

I pray that she will go through life laughing at the idea that she is “lesser than” because she is female.

I pray that she feels confident more than she feels inadequate.

I pray that I can teach her strength, even when it comes out on my weaknesses.

As she grows I will work out just how to tell her about my own Mother, her Grandma Sally. I’ll tell her about all that she did right, and all the ways that she loved well. I’ll teach her about depression, too – what to look for and how to deal and how to find help.

And someday I will tell her what it took for me to be okay with being a woman and how I did everything I could do to avoid putting her on that particular journey.

I know that many women struggle with who God created them to be. After all, the circumstances of life don’t always provide us with feminine role-models that reflect God’s truth of womanhood but something completely the opposite. That’s why I’ve been so deeply thankful for places like this, for women like Sarah who, through their work have held my hand as I’ve stepped into myself, into being okay with the woman God created me to be.

Leanne Penny is a mother, writer, wife and overall creative soul who is passionate about partnering with God on the business of redemption. She lives with her husband and two preschool-age children in West Michigan where she reads, plays, cooks and squeezes the rest into the cracks somehow.

Have you struggled with calling yourself a “woman?” Do you prefer “girl” even though you’re grown-up? 

 

Jesus says to his disciples in Mark 10 that "Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all."

Paul in Philippians says that we are to "have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus" who "emptied himself" and became a servant.

Why is it so hard to take the last place, to be the least among others, to become a servant?

I think a lot of it boils down to mattering.

We all want to matter. To be the focus of respect, esteem and interest. Thus we spend a lot of time trying to show others our best side. Think about Facebook, how we fill our profiles with happy pictures, notices about our successful children and beautiful photos from vacation.

And what if it is hard to matter in the ways our culture defines "mattering"? What if you don't have a job, don't have kids, or a spouse, or money for the Instragram-worthy vacation?

How do you matter in this culture when you have to take a bus, have your electricity turned off, or need to ask others for food?

Well, you find other ways to matter. For example, I have a friend who doesn't have a great deal in his life--he's poor, has no job, no family to speak of--that would commend himself to others. So he tells stories. You know these stories aren't true, but you don't want to burst his bubble because these stories give him something to share, some news of interest from his week. Most of us have things about family or work to share with each other at church. He doesn't have any of that, so he confabulates to participate in the social mixing. And though his stories don't jibe with reality, you listen attentively and express interest and concern. Because he wants to matter.

I have another friend, in similar circumstances, who uses injury and accidents to matter. Any given week his arm might be in a sling or he might be on crutches. And when you see him you inquire about his most recent injury. And he tells you the story of the accident. And you listen because this is how he matters.

Occasionally I drive a van for our church Freedom Fellowship on Wednesday. Driving that route has taught me that sometimes we matter because of what we know. And even the smallest, thinnest epistemological edge can give you this sense of mattering. At the start, being new to the route the regular passengers knew the locations and best routes to get everyone that needed to be picked up. The first few times I drove I needed help about where to go next. People helped me and it made them feel like they mattered. They knew something that I didn't. Their knowledge allowed them to help me, placed them in a superior position.

But as I've driven more and more I need directions less and less. But still the directions come. I know I need to turn left, they know I know that I need to turn left, but I'm still told to turn left. Why? Because telling me how to go helps them matter. And they are going to hold on to that mattering for as long as possible. And I'm not going to rush them. Sometimes I ask for directions when I don't need them.

Tall tales, new crutches, giving directions. There are ways to matter to others when you feel you don't have much to commend yourself. But this isn't any different, just more transparent, than what all the well-dressed, successful people are doing at church when they visit with each other. We're all just trying to show off and impress each other. It's more subtle and more socially skilled, but it's all the same thing. We all want to matter. For one person it's the crutches for another it's having the Honors student or the new iPhone or the golf score from the weekend or the new dress or the witty remark or the latest gossip or the concert tickets or the new car or the fresh nail job or the recent promotion or the new tan from the cruise.

Look at me, pay attention to me, see me as interesting and worthy of attention. I want to matter.

And I do the same thing. I'll check my blog statistics. How many hits? Subscribers? Comments? Links? Tweets?  I'll check Amazon. Book sales? Reviews?

I want to matter.

Behind it all is a deep-seated insecurity, a dread that if we aren't noticed that we aren't worth anything. And if that's the case, let's revisit Jesus' commands and example from above. How can we become insignificant and small--how can we rest into being unnoticed--given our massive insecurities?

Because I don't think we fail to follow Jesus because we are wicked and depraved.

I think we fail to follow Jesus because we want to matter.

There’s an African folktale that I’ve read with both of my sons. In the story, every child born in a village is given a song that tells them who they are, giving them their role to play within the village community. Whenever kids start misbehaving and causing conflict, the other villagers sing their song to them so that they will remember who they really are. This was basically the topic of a podcast sermon from the Meeting House that I listened to on my drive home tonight from North Carolina. I needed to hear this word because I’ve forgotten my song recently, namely that who I really am is an encourager, not a mocker or scornful accuser.

It’s amazing how I do all the things I preach about getting away from. Perhaps that makes sense. I know that self-justification is hell because I engage in it all the time. I feel the need to prove to people that I’m really evangelical by defining myself against all those wishy-washy, barely Christian mainliners and at the same time that I’m an evangelical who’s not like those other evangelicals who are so judgmental and pharisaic. Sometimes this comes out overtly in my writing; other times it’s happening in the subtext. Sometimes I can even visualize myself firing some kind of ideological machine gun at the fundamentalist citadel (“Wow, I’m so good! I tore a big old hole in their castle wall with that word choice!”)

The reason I preach about God’s desire to liberate us from our self-obsessed lives of performance so that we can experience the worship of simply delighting in His delight is because I know how badly He wants to rescue me from the suffocating self-analysis of the house of mirrors that I can’t seem to escape. I want to really worship Him and spend the entirety of my day in His presence.

So why do I open my iPhone wordpress app a dozen times a day to see how many people have visited my blog in the last twenty minutes? Why am I flipping out that the thousand hit days I was having in April have tapered off to five hundred in June? God really convicted me that what I’m doing when I open my wordpress app like that is I’m praying to wordpress instead of Him.

Anyway, I wrote something recently about this new preaching book I’ve been reading, asking the question of whether preaching should convict or uplift. I was in a kind of snotty evangelical place in my head, imagining all the mainliners who play golf or go to the beach on Sundays instead of going to church because their preachers never had any sense of urgency about convicting them over their sins. So I was out to show that I’m a good, barrel-chested evangelical who isn’t afraid to talk about sin.

But God refuted my line of thinking pretty categorically by doing two things to convict me of my own sin that did not involve people speaking harshly about my sin either directly or indirectly. First, he spoke through a person who sent me an email that included these words in response to my piece about preaching:

People in the congregation get plenty of “conviction” from daily life, and every one of them will go through periods of life where they’re giving us much as they’ve got, probably more than is healthy, and when they sink into that pew on Sunday, the last thing those particular people need to hear is one more call to action, one more reason they are not good enough… We just SO want to hear that the way God made us is O.K. We want something to grasp onto to get us through the week. We want to be reminded God hasn’t left us… So if you feel led to do a sermon like that, one that makes people feel good when they leave, that tells them they are okay and God loves them — maybe once in awhile, it really is from the Holy Spirit, and it really is good and worthwhile, and you don’t have to squelch that urge.

Mercy! I don’t know if you can experience what I experience reading these words, but they melt my heart into a sappy puddle and make me want to hug a bunch of people I’ve been grumbling about for being part of this godforsaken Northern Virginia culture where nobody has time for anything and everything is more important than church, etc. They’re tired. They’re beat up. It’s okay for them to feel good after I preach… even about themselves. Somehow when God says you tickle me pink or I’m proud of you instead of smacking us in the head with a two by four, it doesn’t give us big heads and turn us into entitled, presumptuous snotty brats. I honestly think we get that way as a defense mechanism when we don’t really believe that God loves us all that much.

The love itself convicts us insofar as we need to be convicted. And it’s not a sad thing. The love makes us giddy like Zacchaeus and want to toss aside all the stupid, petty crap that we had been doing, saying something like: “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much” (Luke 19:8). It’s that word of acceptance reminding us about the delightful “child of Abraham” we really are which causes “salvation to come to our house” (v. 9) so that we say, “Wow, I really don’t have to be the jerk I thought I was. Jesus thinks I’m cool and He wants to have lunch with me.”

The second thing that convicted me was hearing this Meeting House podcast sermon from June 9th in which the middle and high school youth pastors Sarah Stanley and Dave Churchill were filling in for Bruxy Cavey. Sarah’s words in particular just wrecked me. You need to hear the audio to get the full effect of the love in her voice.

Our words spoken or unspoken are powerful. We have this incredible opportunity to partner with God in this work of transformation and in helping one another discover our identity in Him, helping one another discover that we are beloved sons and precious daughters of the most high king…

When I was growing up, there were four things that my dad always said to me… You’re beautiful. You are a gift from God. I thank Jesus for you every day. And I will love you forever. And I never got sick of hearing those words and I don’t think that I will ever know the depth of the impact they had on my life and the way that God used them without my even knowing to dislodge the lies and the things I probably didn’t even realize I struggled with.

Sarah went on to talk about a youth pastor she had named Bo (what a stereotypically perfect youth pastor name) who saw her gifts and encouraged her to use them. When she protested that she wasn’t good enough, he said it’s not about you, it’s about Him. Then when Sarah went through a rebellious phase, Bo said to her, “I know who you are; I know who God created you to be; and this is not it.” Words of authority that convicted her by affirming who she really was.

John 1:17 says, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Normally when we think of grace and truth, we think of two things that are held in tension with one another (e.g. God has the grace to love you, even though the truth is you suck). But what the Spirit gave me as I was listening to Sarah preach is that the truth about us is not the ugly mask we’ve been wearing but the core goodness of God’s image in our hearts that we’ve covered up.

Truth in Greek is the word aletheia which is derived from lanthano (to hide or conceal). So it means literally “the un-hiding.” Yes, we need to be truthful in naming the ugliness of sin, but the truth about my sin is that it’s not who I really am. It’s a scary mask that I got tricked into wearing and I somehow don’t trust God enough to take off completely. It’s a song I get stuck in my head that I don’t really like all that much anyway, but the result has been that I forget my own song that God wrote when He created me.

My song has always been that I tell people the truth about their beauty and their gifts. My song is that I’m strangely attracted to people who have been labeled “difficult” by others and God reveals to me why they are essential to His kingdom. My song is that I love kids who are getting into trouble and I’m smitten by the way that they engage in all sorts of kindness and compassion without realizing they’re doing it. My song is that I marvel at my wife’s grace and wisdom and my heart leaps every time I get home and see my boys. If I forget my song again, will you sing it to me so that I’ll remember?

Filed under: Church Culture, General Topics

If you were in Target today between the hours of 1:00-2:00 you may have overheard a conversation that made me look bad. If you didn’t call the cops or social services, thank you. Conversation at typical 6-year-old volume in Target: … Continue reading →

Tags:  children, embarrassing, funny, kids, motherhood, parenting, son, talking, why going out in public with kids sucks, wtf

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When did we grow up?

It wasn’t then, when we stood in the mountain meadow, flowers in my hair. And your hair, oh, honey. Your hair was such a mess. It took you four years to believe me that conditioner would do you good. That product would REALLY do you good. You stood in that meadow with that hair and I loved you. I loved you, imperfect. Imperfectly, I loved you.

Now, you get that serious line across your mouth, your jaw tightens in the mirror. And you run the hair product through those wild waves. Every spot in place, but thinning on the sides, in the most manly way possible, I assure you. And those silver threads sliding through the darkness, I praise them. You, after all, were made to be an older man. Your soul has always belonged to an older man.

We were both twenty-four, nine years ago, when we were married. But I like to say I was “almost twenty-five,” and that’s true as well. You, of course, had been twenty-four only six full days. I had ten months on you and a grade’s worth of life-knowledge.

I guess I think twenty-four was a bit young to get married. Twenty-five sounds more reasonable. I like to follow rules. I like to be reasonable. I say, “I was almost twenty-five.” I don’t tell them how my face was still a child’s face, round and soft. How your hair was a wild mess of fuzzy waves.

*

When did we grow up?

You stand in a backyard with friends, a glass in your hand, talking to these men who all, I realize, look like men. And you do too. You stop to remind Brooksie to keep the pebbles he’s collecting out of the garden. Then you’re laughing with the men about a story I can’t hear. And I’m so taken with the moment, the way the sun is falling back into the earth and setting its glow around you. And Brooksie is holding your leg and you reach down to gather his little body and pull it toward your chest. You hold him with just one arm and you keep talking, as if that little life you hold were a natural extension of you. Which I guess it is.

*

On Sunday, our pastor spoke about the Lord’s Prayer, about forgiving as we are forgiven. He spoke of fathers for a moment. He spoke of the power they have over us. How easily they wound us. How remarkable it can be when they get it right, when they hold us at the moment we most need to be held, or say the words when we most need to be told we are loved.

He teared up when he said, “I can still smell my dad. That’s the power he had over me.”

I tell you that. You were out of town Sunday morning and I’m filling you in on the day you missed. And when I say it, your eyes fill with tears because you know the power you hold. You know how you fail and how you do it right. And, of course, sometimes you don’t know which you’re doing or why.

Then we sit together for our very practical Sunday night planning session on the couch, looking through our calendars at the schedule for the week.  I’m salty and annoyed with all your questions. I’m holding something over you, frustrated that you didn’t read my mind four years ago about where to store our old stuff in Philadelphia. You wait until I’m finished complaining. Then we go through the calendar again. What night am I home? What nights are you gone? What are the plans for dinner and what we will do for our anniversary?

Nine years. And we plan a date for eight o’clock, once the boys are in bed. Because it’s a hard week and the boys need you to put them to sleep. And it all feels very grown up. Very normal. You with your stylish hair and gentle hands.  Me with my snappy moment and how I’m folding tiny shirts and miniature boxers. We look for a birthday present for our almost-five-year-old. And we click “complete transaction” and I leave to get ready for bed, another day married.

It’s all very grown up, how we keep choosing one another. How I come back after I brush my teeth and find you on the couch and say how I know I was salty and it was wrong. How you are a different, braver, older man than you used to be.

Think of all you’ve become, my dear.

Nine years is an eternity. Nine years is not so long. Depends on which perspective you have. Let’s take the long-view, you and me.

Let’s take the view that says this everyday, right here, when you come home from that long commute and I’m splashing around our kitchen turning disasters into dinner. Right here, as you take one boy on the bed and toss him and let the other slam your head with pillows. And you tickle until both are squealing .

This everyday, we know, we are coming to understand, is not just the growing up of our children. It is the growing up of us.

You and me.

What I’m trying to say is, I’ve noticed. I’m noticing. I’m not letting you go.

 

Sure, it’s a little bit extremely disgusting, but the gross out factor pales in comparison to the massive release you feel when a waxy boulder comes tumbling out of a cave on the side of Head Mountain. Remember: there’s nothing to be embarrassed about because this is just The Magic of the Human Body. Yes, like a loyal employee punching out after a hard day on the line, your earwax heads home with its lunchbox in hand after drowning dust and dirt on a double shift in your ear canal. The gig’s not easy and it doesn’t pay well, so when Waxy Brown’s finished his business, you know it’s because he’s done as much as he can.

AWESOME!

Photos from: here and here

this week is “healing the divides” week here at the blog, a few different posts centered on creating ways to love each other better despite our differences.  we started yesterday with 8 ways those from more liberal-progressive and conservative-evangelical persuasions can love each other better.  today, i want to talk about becoming safer people who can hold the space for safer conversations.

a really big thing that gets in the way of healthier-ways-of-living-in-the-tension-of-our-differences is unsafety.

it’s impossible to have unity and love when there’s all kinds of unsafe, unhealthy behavior going on.

to me, another word for “safety” is “healthy”.

safer, healthier people make safer, healthier conversations.

they bridge divides.

my take is that this skill of becoming safer people is under-developed ones in many churches. we are often good at bible knowledge & ministry programs & all kinds of other amazing tasks, but some of these basic healthy relationship skills are the lowest priority. maybe because they are much harder to practice!  in fact, a lot of our experiences have made church one of the most unsafe, unhealthy places on earth and that is part of the reason many people have given up on it all together. i understand. my experience has been that many systems–faith-based or not–stink at healthy relationship in community with one another.

learning how to be safer people won’t come in a rush, but it is so possible, especially when we are honest with ourselves about our own patterns. it’s always easy to finger point and call someone else “unsafe” but the truth is that there is always a way each and every one of us can become more safe ourselves.

part of bridging these divides is looking at the log in our own eye and working on ways to become safer people ourselves first.

as we do, our conversations will shift, we will become more graceful people, we will be able to hold a space with people who see things differently, we will learn some great stuff we need to learn, and in the end we will better reflect God’s image.

i wrote about these in down we go: living into the wild ways of Jesus in the chapter on welcoming pain and in different ways here the blog, but i thought it would be good to re-visit them this week as part of this series. many years ago i read safe people by cloud & townsend (really worth reading related to healthy relationships) and many of these ideas have evolved from there with time & experience. it’s been helpful to me to translate beyond individuals to communities as well.

i always need these reminders, especially when engaging in difficult conversations about hard things.

unsafe people (and communities):

• tend to be extremely judgmental and defensive.
• are quick to offer advice to others but remain unwilling to receive input or feedback.
• think we have all the answers and reflect certainty that their opinion or perspective is somehow superior.
• blame others for our mistakes but refuse to take responsibility for any of our own.
• often demand trust as implicit in the relationship without having to offer any work on our end to earn it.
• remain closed to change and are extremely rigid in our beliefs.
• offer unsolicited advice, quick fixes, and do not take no for an answer.
• use our power to make others unequal with them.
• avoid conflict all together or create disproportionate conflict to somehow gain control in our relationships.
• project that somehow we “have it all together” and rarely express our own struggles or weaknesses.

yikes! this is always such a convicting list! overall, i’d say that unsafe people & communities divide people. and they certainly can’t hold a space for the kinds of healthy, loving, honest, respectful conservations we need to have if we want to try to heal some of these deep divides between us.

but there is a better, healthier way to hold this space together.

safe people (and communities):

• are good listeners, willing to sit with painful stories instead of fixing or giving unsolicited advice.
• offer love and acceptance freely, without strings attached.
• see beyond the surface to the good that’s within us.
• help us feel comfortable being ourselves and challenge us to grow, stretch and practice.
• value relationship over opinions or differences, and nurture a spirit of equality with those different from us.
• receive help, input, and feedback instead of only giving it, and engage in healthy conflict instead of avoiding it.
• are honest and kind, brave enough to say the hard things in love, while staying honest about our own shortcomings.
• remain humbly connected to our stories and pain and are willing to share  our weaknesses and struggles with others who are safe enough.

safety should never be confused with comfort. they are two different things entirely, and that is such a misrepresentation of the word. safety is sometimes horribly uncomfortable. far harder. far trickier. far more mysterious and intangible.

but oh, becoming safer people would help create safer conversations and help heal divides that desperately need healing.

God show us how to be safer people. we want to learn.

 

All summer long, I’ll be running a series of guest posts here on the blog called “Smokin’ Hot Conversations.” These will be posts about gender, relationships, power, and the church, meant to move us to deeper reflection and conversation about the often distracting or harmful messages in Christian culture. Amy Thedinga joins us this week with a powerful post about the seduction myth perpetuated by many pastors. She’s a third generation pastor’s kid who has a story to tell, and she co-leads a house church in Highlands Ranch, CO. She’s also a wife, mom, and blogger. Learn more about her here.

And if you’d like to contribute to this series, drop me a line.

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Abandoning the seduction myth to water the seeds of greatness.

Amy Thedinga

A while back my husband and I attended a marriage seminar. Toward the end, they had a panel of experts (made up of pastors) who fielded questions from the audience. Inevitably, the question of dealing with lust came up. The pastor who answered gave his advice that when an attractive woman speaks to him he stares at the ground or turns and walks away (especially if she’s single).

In an instant, a hundred attempted conversations with male authority figures played across the movie screen of my memory. I say attempted because they neither engaged nor conversed, but rather stared at the ground and squirmed until their first feasible opportunity to escape. And I felt the phantom pain of a hundred arrows in wounds I thought were healed.

I get the logic. With so many high profile moral failures, leaders should guard their purity at all costs right? But at what price? What about the woman? What does his refusal to look her in the eye – to connect with her – to engage – do to her perception of herself? And what does a faulty self-perception do to her ability to walk in her power? In her design? In her calling?

In what sort of a church culture is it acceptable for a male leader to dismiss a woman out of hand and actually advise members of the congregation to do the same – in the name of guarding their purity?

A culture in which the man has an important ministry and a woman’s dignity, her very self worth is an acceptable sacrifice on the altar of his moral high ground.

Growing up in the church, I received this message a thousand different ways. Messages of purity were delivered to mixed gendered audiences but aimed at women. The pastor who refuses eye contact sends a clear message. A version of which church culture has screamed at her since birth: “You are seductive. You are a sexual vortex that I may get sucked in to. The slippery slope of my lust is your problem. And my ministry is too valuable to allow the likes of you to trip me up.”

This is the seduction myth.

See, chances are this woman is not out to seduce her pastor and run his ministry off the rails. Chances are very good that she just wants to be seen. She just wants a seat at the table. She wants someone to see the image of Christ and water the seed of greatness God has placed inside her.

Jesus did this very thing for the woman at the well. Here is a woman with a past. And not only that, she was a Samaritan. Living in a culture where she was scorned for her gender and her race – things she could do nothing about – she added insult to injury by choosing a lifestyle of ill repute. It was downright scandalous for Jesus to have a conversation with any woman, let alone this woman. Yet, he didn’t look at the ground and walk away. No, he went out of his way to approach her, look her in the eye and engage her in dialogue. I suspect he even went to the well specifically to seek her out. I believe he knew the possibility she held to change the course of a village and maybe an entire people group. He looked past her gender and what people would think or say about him to see her potential and call it out of her. Jesus’ ministry was the most important there ever was. But he understood his mission. To heal the broken hearted and set the captive free.

He, unlike so many of our leaders today, wasn’t postured in self-defense, desperately guarding his ministry to the hurt of the very ones he was called to reach.

How would the church landscape change if male authority figures followed Jesus’ lead here? What if they took their sin and temptation to God and dealt with it privately instead of making it every attractive female’s problem. What if they allowed themselves to appreciate a woman’s God-given beauty without reducing her to a sexual object? What if they put their reputation aside and stooped to affirm and empower her. Well, she just might rise up and change the world. Scripture tells us the woman left her encounter with Jesus at the well boldly declaring that Christ was the Messiah.

Or in other words: preaching the gospel.  

And many believed because of her testimony.

 

A couple of months ago, I had a conversation about my book with a former professor, a writing mentor. We were trying to get at the heart of this story I’m trying to tell in my memoir. Yes, it’s about prayer and losing it and finding it again in an entirely new, hope-giving way. But what’s underneath that?  Why did prayer become something I was so afraid of?

My former professor asked me this question on the phone: “Micha, what was—what is—the psychological enemy in you?

“That’s the center of this story,” she said.

And it is. But getting to the psychological enemy in me is hard work. After that conversation, I hunkered down. I wrote things that hurt, true thoughts in my mind that are probably crazy. And it wasn’t really freeing. It was scary. And then I was Sad.

*

I went to therapy eight years ago, when I was just a sweet little Texas thing, one year into my marriage, and completely ruled by fear. It turned out that marriage (ie having another person in my life to hold a mirror up to my soul and show me the truth of who I really was) + a commitment to live on the East coast (ie not moving back to my family after grad school which is what good people are supposed to do) + writing sad poems (and realizing maybe my poems were sad because I was sad) + having daily panic attacks about the amount of emails in my inbox and never returning any emails whatsoever because I’d never be able to return all of them = A Problem.

Going to counseling is one of the bravest and wisest things I’ve ever done.

I realized then that I had an assumption about therapy: It was for the Really Messed Up People. I assumed that you went to therapy because there was nothing left to do. It was when Bible studies couldn’t change you any more or you needed medication. And when I finally went to counseling, I’d been in a dark tunnel for a long time.

This time around, when the writing scared me, I told Chris right away. I emailed my church’s pastor of counseling. (Yes! We have one of those! I love my church.) I found a counselor. Not because I was at the end of my rope. But because I am learning that I no longer have to live there, at the end of my rope. Counseling is a beautiful thing because you are spending money and time on the thing that matters most. On Monday evenings when I get in the car after I’ve fed my boys dinner, knowing that Chris will be putting them to bed without me, I think: “Is there anything better I could be doing right now with my time and money than learning how to let God heal me?”

And I believe that. I believe it because I know I’m messed up. I don’t believe I’m messed up in the way that says: “You Guys! I’m SERIOUSLY CRAZY AND I’M SO EMBARRASSED.”  I know it in the way that says, “Honey, we are all broken. Aren’t we? And aren’t you so grateful that somebody knows how to help us?”

*

My counselor said something to me last week about sadness. Because I was joking about Sad Micha and how she shows up and everything gets dramatic.

“What do you mean when you say sad?” she asked.

I had to think about that one for a long time. Maybe what I mean is that Sad Micha feels helpless. Maybe I feel my brokenness. Like I can’t pull it together for my kids. Like I can’t control all the things I’m supposed to control. I can’t be responsible enough. I can’t open all my emails and actually read them and respond to them. I can’t not cry when both of my boys are crying and I’m hysterical about how loud we must be to the downstairs neighbors. And why? Why am I so obsessed with every single person on God’s pretty earth thinking I’ve got it together?

I said, “When Sad Micha comes it’s not the sort of darkness I lived in that first year of our marriage when I was depressed. That darkness was a tunnel and I couldn’t find my way out of it. I was terrified of that tunnel because I thought it meant I’d never be happy again.

“But this sadness. It’s a knowing. It’s heavy and it settles on me. It forces me to recognize that I’m not whole yet. And the world is not whole yet. And I desperately want everything to be whole.”

My counselor shared this passage with me from a book called Practicing the Presence of People by Mike Mason:

“Sadness is one of the Beatitudes: ‘Blessed [or in some translations, ‘Happy’] are those who mourn, for they will be comforted’ (Matthew 5:4). This suggests that sadness is very, very close to happiness. One could almost say that to the Christian they are the same—or at least that there is not true happiness without its wistful tint of divine sadness, and no sadness that does not stand on the doorstep of happiness.”

I love the kindness of this idea. I love that Jesus’ words are, Happy are the sad people. Maybe the sad people are the healers and the prophets. Maybe the sad people have been given a gift to see the world as it really is. And when we see the world, when we see ourselves as we actually are, we understand how desperately we need God to come and bring healing. We don’t have to pretend anymore. We get to need God.

Only that kind of sadness can lead to happiness.

*

I talked to Chris about that the other night. We talked about sadness being the steep cliff that lets us fall down into the happiness. We talked about how both of those things—the climbing of the Sad Cliff and the Falling off the Side of It—are scary.

He had just put August and Brooksie to bed. And Chris was leaning over August’s bed in the darkness and they were talking about life.  Chris said, “August, can you believe that some day you’re going to be bigger than me when we wrestle and you’ll win? And someday I won’t be able to wrestle at all because I’ll be old and you’ll have to take care of me.”

August said, “I know, Dad.”

And Chris said, “August, what will we do when I can’t wrestle with you anymore? When I can’t tickle you and play with you on the floor?

August turned his face toward my husband’s in the dark. He said, “Don’t worry, Daddy. I’ll always remember.”

And when Chris came out of that dark room where our boys sleep, he sat on the couch and told me the story. My husband doesn’t cry much. But he looked at me with tears in his eyes. And I hugged Chris and we both cried for a minute or so. Then I made a joke and we wiped our eyes and laughed.

My husband said something that night about letting the sadness be real to us. He said something about recognizing that every day we’re losing our kids and everyday they’re becoming their adult selves. They won’t really be the same people they were when they were wild children learning the world and depending on us to show it to them.

“We should grieve that every day,” my husband said. “Because the happiness is there, in the sadness.”

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. /2 Corinthians 5

I begin with this passage for one reason: I believe in the “ministry of reconciliation.”

And I want to frame everything that follows here in the gospel that truly reconciles. I have no interest in contradicting that gospel. I have no interest in abandoning it. I aim to give my life to experiencing and sharing in that very same message.

But here’s the thing.

There’s a false gospel on the loose in the evangelical church.

And it is nothing less than a diabolical doctrine that comes clothed in a bright, angelic, counterfeit message of “reconciliation.” It is a word entrenched in institutional power and amplified by hierarchies reaching up into the halls of religious academia and pressing deep into the world of prestigious publishing. Far from a message that subverts the empire of selfish power and control by reweaving justice and peace, this gospel is one that glorifies the way of empire, often calling it “God” and claiming to be his ambassadors. Then, when injustice strikes, instead of healing there is worse abusing; instead of honesty and advocacy, complicity.

And the ministers still mouthing “reconciliation.”

It’s an old, old story really, but it is playing out with new people in new ways. I’ve written before about the current lawsuit against Sovereign Grace Ministries and how it represents a rapidly approaching counseling cliff for the evangelical church at large – a cliff especially perilous when conservative churches deal with matters of abuse. Well, this week, more allegations were filed against SGM, and they are horrific. And, as of now, the major evangelical institutions that are closely connected to SGM – namely, The Gospel Coalition (where C.J. Mahaney, a defendant in the suit and founding leader of the SGM movement, is a council member) and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (major supporter/ally of C.J. and SGM, with President Al Mohler as close friend and staunch defender of C.J.) – have not issued anything in the way of cautionary or even concerned statements regarding the man or the movement (that I am aware of). There has been total silence about a celebrity preacher and an organization that is now literally inundated with accusations of sexually and physically abusing children and conspiring to cover it all up over many years. Nor have any/many connected big-name individual leaders, themselves also institutionally powerful, come out with words of warning or grieving. Instead, powerful men like John Piper have made gestures of support in the midst of C.J. and SGM’s legal troubles.

The silence is deafening.

Just like it was when priest after bishop after archbishop in the Catholic Church were convicted and exposed having maintained silence and conspiracy and complicity all the way until the court’s verdict finally came down. And just like it is even afterwards, as Vatican supporters try to minimize the atrocities committed, citing statistics and percentages and “we’re doing pretty good, considering”‘s. Because that’s how it goes with power. That’s just the way empire does things.

Hey, here’s an idea. Where’s the guy that’s willing to lose his job by coming out with some STRONG statements of alarm, warning, grief, and mourning, at the sheer wretchedness of these allegations? Where’s the guy who doesn’t care if the leg bone’s connected to the thigh bone from whence his big publishing deal cometh and decides to tear the freaking tarp off of this twisted metal wreck of a system that halts and hesitates to even empathize with these victims and weep with those who weep at the first sign of their weeping (not to mention their months of legal case-building)? I mean, we all know how this ends, right? WE ALL KNOW HOW THIS ENDS.

But this is the way the false gospel works, and it’s an old, old story. This false gospel starts with a false god – a god who is anger. Yes, the god of this SGM movement was said to be just that – gracious – but the seedy backdrop behind this notion of grace is a god of sadistic and irrational rage. C.J.’s famous quip that we are all doing “better than we deserve” is grounded in the idea of a god of such cruelty that no matter what injustice we may have suffered in life – or perpetrated – all is better than what we really deserve, which is unending conscious torture at the hands of a concentration camp commander christ. So don’t complain! Stop being depressed! And if, by some miracle of miniscule probability, you have been chosen for eternal life by the sovereignly electing mind of this raging god (a matter, of course, to be discerned by your SGM elders), then no matter what happens to you post-regeneration, you REALLY have no reason to whine!

The most grotesque allegations to come out of this lawsuit have to do with the culture of “gospel-centered reconciliation” in this movement, where victims of abuse – often, children – were simply told to “forgive” and “reconcile” with their adult church member/leader abusers. I mean, it’s better than you deserve, right? So get over it. And smack dab in the center of this demonic-gospel culture were leaders who rise to levels of immense influence over their cruelly “humbled” people, all the while claiming to be humble themselves. These guys held the keys out of unspeakable eternal hells, and that gave them unspeakable power. Yet because the hell inside of some of them was almost as bad as anything postmortem, they perpetrated their patriarchal darkness upon innocent little ones, and then helped each other keep the concealing tarp firmly intact.*

And this false gospel of reconciliation doesn’t stop here. It is not only reserved for churches fraught with sex abuse scandals. It rears its ugly head in all kinds of conservative evangelical circles, taking the similar shape of pain-denying theologies that counsel victims to get over it and get back together with those who harmed them. The gospel is about reconciliation, right? So if your spouse hits you, forgive them and reconcile. And if your kids are starving because of a father’s gambling, get some counseling from an elder and make it work, honey. And if some friends cheated you in business, or a church member is spreading vicious lies about you, or a family member won’t stop manipulating you into situations of terrible emotional pain, hey, it’s better than you deserve because you’re a hellbound sinner too, so just reconcile with them because that’s what grace means (i.e., subjecting yourself to present pains presumably less than the eternal pain of conscious torment in hellfire).

This is all BS.

And it’s BS because it twists the truth of the ministry of reconciliation into something that perpetuates the abuse of power instead of subversively stopping it.

See, in a very present and real sense, right now, God is at work to reconcile and restore the entire cosmos to shalom, to peace and justice and wholeness:

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. /Colossians 1

This cosmic dimension of true gospel reconciliation takes precedence over all interpersonal situations of wrongdoing, conflict, or abuse. The goal toward which the resurrected Jesus is working in the world right now is not some imaginary peace where people “reconcile” in name only while the abuse is never stopped and the wrong never righted. No, this is instead a total bending of the violent and unjust world back toward God’s shalom, until it is completely put to rights on the final day.

Thus, any ministry of reconciliation that does not, as a matter of first importance, advocate for the innocent and safeguard the physical and emotional protection, not exposure, of the people entrusted to the church, is no ministry of reconciliation at all.

Because reconciliation is right.

Reconciliation bends things back to to justice and peace.

And reconciliation, rightly lived as part of God’s cosmic work to restore all things, always subverts the empire of unjust power and control. It messes with thrones and powers and rulers and authorities. It takes them to task.

And forgiveness, which is the fundamental heart-level releasing of those who have done us wrong to the capable hand of God, hoping and praying for their redemption, refusing to live in bitterness and resentment (even in the midst of our righteous anger), endeavoring to love even our enemies, does not require a faux interpersonal reconciliation that merely opens us back up to the dangerous abuses of power that caused so much pain in the first place.

Because that’s not what God is up to in the world. He is angry over abuses like these, to be sure, but that is precisely because he is not that sadistic, irrational being who is callous to all earthly pain in contrast to the eternal pain he intends to inflict upon the non-elect (and of which all are deserving). God is not anger.

God is love.

And that love is what any and every victim of injustice truly deserves.

–

What do you think about this case, and about this issue? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

*And remember, though I am responding strongly to the allegations as they have been presented – and I believe everyone should react strongly to them – they are not yet legal facts. We do not wait for a verdict before we speak out or empathize with the victims (because that is injustice in and of itself), but we respect due process before passing the final verdict ourselves.

[Update 5/17/13 8:30pm: Today's civil suit hearing has run into a severe statute of limitations setback. Read more here. It appears that some of the plaintiffs' allegations may still be admissible, and a criminal trial may be forthcoming. Regardless, the court of common sense will cast a strong verdict in light of the evidence, and the truth will shine, no matter what. Let's just hope that the abusers and complicit institutions and leaders are all held accountable.]

	rachel shared this story from Everyone's Blog Posts - My Modern Metropolis:
	Neat!

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The SS Ayrfield is one of many decommissioned ships in the Homebush Bay, just west of Sydney, but what separates it from the other stranded vessels is the incredible foliage that adorns the rusted hull. The beautiful spectacle, also referred to as The Floating Forest, adds a bit of life to the area, which happens to be a sort of ship graveyard.

Originally launched as the SS Corrimal, the massive 1,140-tonne steel beast was built in 1911 in the UK and registered in Sydney in 1912 as a steam collier which was later used to transport supplies to American troops stationed in the Pacific region during World War II. The ship went on to serve as a collier between Newcastle and Miller's terminal in Blackwattle Bay.

Eventually, in 1972, the SS Ayrfield was retired and sent to Homebush Bay which served as a ship-breaking yard. While many ships were taken apart, about four metallic bodies of vessels that are over 75 years old currently float in the bay, though none are enveloped by nature quite like the Ayrfield. The ship continues to attract visitors to its majestic presence, rich with mangrove trees.

Top image by Andy Brill

Image by Neerav Bhatt

Image by Steve Dorman

Image by Rodney Campbell

Image by Louise Evangelique

Image by Louise Evangelique

via [Bhakta's Weblog, Oddity Central]