“I can’t help but thinking that at this level, it’s not really the priority.  I mean, I’d gladly trade my Lotus developed suspension for some Toyota developed door trim.” – James May, reviewing an inexpensive Malaysian car.

Let’s be honest. There is an element of any corporate worship service that boils down to performance. This isn’t meant to be a criticism per se, but simply to state what I take to be a clear reality that the way things are done in contemporary worship settings (and by this I mean contemporary as in current, not any particular style of worship), execution of the specific elements matters. Anyone who has been to a church where the worship band was awful or the preacher put you to sleep is keenly aware of this. Some level of execution is important. Most people, given a choice and all other things being equal, would choose a service with a high production value over one with generally poor execution.

One disturbing trend in many churches, though, is a preference for execution over thoughtfulness. There are many reasons for this, I think, and many of them have their roots in the more widespread emergence of what Lindbeck would call “experiential expressivism” in recent years. Whatever the cause, most worship pastors, and to a large extent most parishioners prefer well executed services to meaningful ones, or, perhaps to put it differently, the “meaningfulness” of a service is a function primarily of its execution, rather than its content.

This actually leads to some pretty interesting consequences, at least in practice. Consider, for instance, the abundance of new worship songs which sound fun, have a good beat, and can move people to a different emotive state, but whose content is either remarkably thin, or worse borders on theological garbage. Think about whether, at a typical worship service, the songs are chosen because they sound good together (or have a particular emotional movement to them), or because they harmonize theologically. My sense is that if many of us were honest we find ourselves in services where, if there is planning, that planning is primarily centered around emotional content rather than theological content, which suggests that the primary aim of our execution of worship services is to make us feel good, rather than to actually encounter God in some sort of meaningful way.

Which brings me to my opening quote. What, really, is the priority in what we’re doing in corporate worship? It seems to me, unfortunately, as if we’ve traded our foundational beliefs and theology for a more emotional product that makes us feel good, at the expense of some pretty serious theological incoherence and inconsistency. I want to be very clear that this is not a question of worship *style*, at least in the sense that many of us think of it, nor is it a function of the amount of pure effort or thought – I’ve been in thoughtful an coherent services ranging the gamut of multiple dimensions in the traditional / progressive divide. What it is a question of, I think, is the *types* of thought we put into our services:

• Do our words, welcomes, prayers and songs speak with a unified theological voice? Do they suggest a common eschatology, soteriology, etc? If so, what is that voice? If not, what message are we sending?
• Do we spend more time thinking about the flow of the service, especially the emotional flow of the service, than we do the voice of the service? For example, when we consider movement, are we thinking primarily along the dimension of how a particular sequence of elements will people will feel, or about the progression of the message and proclamation of the sequence (e.g. fast song, fast song, slow song; or song about Jesus’s life, song about Jesus’s death, song about Jesus as risen Lord)?
• What metric do we use to evaluate whether a particular service was “effective” or “well executed”? Do we look at performance criteria (i.e. how well everything came off), emotive criteria (i.e. how well everyone felt at the end), or transformative criteria (i.e. did anybody actually change as a result of what we did here)?

Unfortunately it’s not hard to find examples of services which are, by and large, both poorly planned and poorly executed, but it’s probably even easier to find services which are poorly planned and well executed. Perhaps it’s too much to ask for a well planned, well thought-out, well executed service on a consistent basis. But if we have to choose between the three, it seems to me the priority shouldn’t be on execution.

It seems to me that most Pro-Life people I know really aren’t Pro-Life at all. They are, rather, Anti-Sex. That is, the abortion debate is often just a cover to wage war on the sexual revolution and the Dawn of the Pill. What many Pro-Life people are angry about is the casual sexuality of our age, an era of “abortion on demand.” Pro-Life advocacy, then, is often (consciously or unconsciously) really a way to get sexually promiscuous people to face the “consequences” of sexual activity. The focus on life is often cover for Puritanical worries about sexuality in modern America.

Why do I draw this conclusion? Because most Pro-Life people I know are only Pro-Life in this one area, and only in this one area. They are not, generally speaking, consistently Pro-Life. For example, most Pro-Life people are…

…not Pro-Life when it comes to gun control.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to preemptive war.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to capital punishment.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to global malnourishment.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to universal health care.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to entitlement programs for the women and children of the working poor (to remove the economic incentives for abortion).

…not Pro-Life in promoting condom usage to prevent teenage pregnancy or AIDS in developing nations.

In short, the only thing many conservatives are Pro-Life about is, well, abortion. Which, incidentally, is the only thing on the list that’s about regulating sexual behavior.

Which kind of makes you wonder…

Springsteen’s words have been on my mind in the past few days with the current hot button issue in the church I currently worship at, at least for the next few months. The issue itself isn’t really my concern – frankly I could completely care less, and I suspect most of the people in my general area probably agree. I’ve been well beyond where the progressive group is wanting to go, and I think they’re going to be highly disappointed when they get there and realize it’s no different from where they are now, but for the moment let’s set that aside. The larger issue here, in my view, is the one raised by Bruce: What if what you do to “survive” kills the things you love?

The core motivation for the push, in my view, is for the “next generation” – our kids, if you will. I think this is, on the surface, wholly commendable. Certainly when you talk about a tradition, one of the questions that isn’t asked enough is how we can change and adapt the tradition to make it relevant to the next generation – how we as the current generation can excite and enable the generation below us to continue practicing that which we have found to be true and important, even if the specifics of that practice looks slightly different than the ones we embraced. I think in this particular case there is sincerity in the motive of those who would move things forward – they are genuinely fearful of the state of worship that will be handed to their children, and I think with good reason.  Personally I would have a whole different list of concerns when it comes to worship if I were making the list, but I can certainly understand their dissatisfaction and desire to pass to their children something better than what they experience themselves.

But here’s the issue: what if what you endure to bring change ends up being more destructive than the status quo – in other words, again, if what you do to survive ends up killing the things you love. Put in the context of this specific discussion, if the transition becomes a fight, and the fight becomes nasty (which isn’t, you know, entirely out of the question when you’re dealing with things that have marked traditional social boundaries for 150 years), do your kids inherit a legacy of different worship, or do they inherit a legacy of their friend’s parents – people who called themselves Christians – saying really mean-spirited, hurtful things about their parents? In college ministry we deal often with kids who’ve come from churches which have endured painful splits, and the fallout from the deeply personal attacks that result can be dramatic, having powerful and destructive consequences for the children of those involved in the actual arguments years after the fact. If what you do to pass your children a legacy you think they’ll appreciate (which, in fact, they might not) results in driving them away from the tradition of Christianity altogether – fear is a dangerous thing.

My personal opinion is that given the current climate, it is going to be difficult for either side to come away with a victory worth having. Neither group stands to gain enough to offset the incredible level of damage that might result should either side start taking things personally. I think there may be solutions which are acceptable to both sides, but crafting something that diffuses the situation – let alone making everyone come away feeling good about it – is going to take divine guidance to say the least.

]]> http://blog.wisch.org/random-thoughts/if-what-you-do-to-survive/feed/ 0 http://blog.wisch.org/random-thoughts/on-how-we-see-god-working/ http://blog.wisch.org/random-thoughts/on-how-we-see-god-working/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:17:21 +0000 Jeff http://blog.wisch.org/?p=1494 A couple of days ago a friend posted a status update on Facebook about his personal experience of searching for God working on that particular day. His final sentence ended as follows: “Even if we do not see God working we need to have faith that he is still working in us Even if we do not see God working we need to have faith that he is still working in us.”  That status update raised a few personal questions for me regarding how we perceive God to be working in the world, and some deeper issues associated with that.

The core of the issue, really, comes down to this question: “When we look for evidence of God ‘working’ in the world, what criteria do we use to judge whether God is actually working in the world?” While there may be some objective truth about whether God is working in the world around us, the way we interpret events around us as either being part of God’s plan or not seems to be much more subjective and open to personal interpretation.  Our tendency, I suspect, is to judge what God is doing in the world based on our perception about the relative success of particular things we think God should be doing in the world – in other words our perception of how God is working in the world is intimately colored by our own values and agenda, and in a very subtle way, we’ve changed the question from, “How is God working in the world?” to, “How is God working in the world around me to increase my wealth/happiness/satisfaction?”

It may seem like a narrow distinction, but there is a huge gulf between believing that God is working toward my happiness, wealth, and satisfaction and simply believing that God is working. Even though most people say they don’t believe in a prosperity Gospel, most of us have an implicit assumption in our theological foundation that God should reward those who are good and punish those who are evil. As someone who is good, then, I should be able to see evidence of God working around me to make my life better – I should get the new job, or the raise at work, and my kids should never act up, always get good grades in school, and be the star of their respective soccer teams. We wouldn’t be so naive as to publicly say we believe this, of course, but let’s examine the core question again: what criteria do we use to determine whether God is working in the world? Do we really believe that God is working (at the time) when our 401k takes a 40% hit, or we suddenly have termites eating up our house? Insurance companies and lawyers seem to find God working in tragedy (always nice to see they aren’t liable for “acts of God”), but we seldom take that view ourselves when the ball comes up double zero. No, if God is working, he must be working *for* me.

The danger then, as I see it, is this: if God is in the business of looking out for my personal interests (as I define them), then everything is fine, so long as things are going the way I want them to. But when your father dies of cancer, or you lose a child to a miscarriage, or your husband leaves you after three months of marriage, it becomes rather difficult to write those events into the narrative “God is working for good” if by “God is working for good” we really mean “God is working to improve the personal satisfaction, happiness, and wealth of all those who are called according to his purpose.”

If God is ultimately, primarily interested in improving the lives of those who are faithful to Him, then the conclusion one is forced to draw in the above conclusions is that a) God isn’t doing a very good job of “working for the good” or b) the people in the above situations more or less deserve what they got. It’s also possible to conclude that c) the situations above really aren’t that bad, and that the people in them stood to suffer far more unless these situations happened, but I think this argument cheapens the very real pain and suffering people go through in times of crisis. If we accept conclusion a), then God is impotent or tyrannical, and if we accept conclusion b) we move quickly to a place of pride and arrogance or guilt and shame, depending on which side of the crisis we’re on.

One of the major underlying issues in this process is our common practice of using analogies that point from man to God, as opposed to the other way around.  In the ensuing discussion, my friend compared how his father treated him (not letting him steal candy from a store) to how God treats and sometimes disciplines us.  Both my friend’s analogy and our tendency to apply our personal thought process to God fall under this category of analogy. The problem is that the analogy between God and man turns out to be rather tenuous.

Let’s consider the example of comparing God the Father to an earthly father. When we invoke this analogy in the incorrect direction, we are saying that we can infer how God the Father treats us by observing how earthly father’s treat their children.  Thus just as earthly fathers may know much better than their young children which actions are beneficial and which ones are not, God the Father knows better than us and influences things around us so that we will make better choices.  The problem with applying this logic is that we are in some sense creating God in our image, rather than the other way around.  Furthermore, every analogy breaks down at some point – so exactly how far do we carry this particular one? Can we also infer that God the Father abandons his children, as earthly fathers often do? Does he disappoint them with no good reason, as earthly fathers often do? What of fathers who treat their children with indifference or neglect? Are these qualities we can ascribe to God as well? Just how strong is this analogy?

Obviously I think there is something to the analogy – we do not call the first person of the Trinity “God the Father” for no reason, and the Bible itself clearly speaks in these terms (see also Matthew 7).  But I believe the analogy should generally run from God to man, rather than the other way around.  In other words, we should infer how to treat our children based on how God treats us, rather than inferring how God treats us (especially on a topic as diverse and intricate as theodicy) based on how we treat our children.  When we start to run the analogy backward, there are some pretty serious issues that come up.

These issues seem small, but they manifest themselves in devious ways when we make inferences about how God thinks/acts based on how we think/act.  It shows up when we superimpose our will on God’s will, when we take our interests and judge God’s actions on how well he promotes them, while ignoring or overlooking the possibility that God might be interested in, or doing, something else in the world (think Isaiah 55).  It happens when we write our stories in such a way that God is on “our side” to the exclusion of other people.  Do we really think that God chooses sides?

The functional upshot of all of this is that we don’t always know what God is doing, and we have to accept the idea that he isn’t always doing what we think he should be.  As God promises to usher in “a new heaven and a new earth”, we need to be aware of the fact that God’s work might mean we lose the privileged position we occupy in the current world. Unfortunately, we often find it easy to write our view of God’s agenda as if it is pretty much identical to our own, limited, personal agenda. When we do this, we begin to measure God’s faithfulness in terms of whether or not he is serving our own interests, rather than by looking at events in the world and engaging in the process of discerning what God is doing, and how we can participate in that.

The first view prays for God to “bless us”, while the second view asks for God to reveal to us where is working, believing that God’s work is blessed already.

So in a practical sense, we return to the question, “What criteria do I use to judge whether God is working?” If my standard amounts to me getting a raise at work, the kids doing great in school, my 401k not losing value, attendance at my church generally trending upward, and Republican candidates winning political races, I would suggest that I’m thinking in terms of the first view rather than the second, and that I’m making “God’s agenda” into my agenda, rather than the other way around.

The problems involved in thinking about evangelism as a practice, therefore, are not only strategic but ultimately theological. The argument of this book is that the prevailing model of practical reasoning employed to a great extent by contemporary evangelism is inadequate to the Christian faith, ecclesiologically bankrupt, morally vacuous, and tyrannized by a means-end causality that is eschatologically hopeless insofar as it externalizes the means from the end. The way this usually works is that once the aim of evangelism is asserted in terms of converting, initiating, recruiting, or persuading, strategies are developed and implemented, typically on the basis of their strictly utilitarian value in reaching that end.  Both the “end” and the “means” then tyrannize the church as it is forced to forget itself and the One whom it follows in the name of both the end and the means. In the process, the church’s fundamental calling to bear faithful witness is edged out in favor of what “works.” Moreover, we who have been made witnesses by the Holy Spirit fail to be guided in our practice by Spirit-formed virtues such as love, hope, faith, presence, patience, humility and courage, for “witness” has now been hijacked by an evangelism that turns it into a tool employed as a means to something else – namely the converting or initiating of other persons. Evangelism finds it all too easy to jump ahead to some imagined result and then to adjust the meaning of witness in accordance with what will “work” to achieve that result.  It forgets that Christian witnesses engage in the practice of evangelism for no other reason than that they have been made witnesses.

Before starting, I think it’s only fair to say that I’m a stakeholder in this debate on multiple levels. I’m a Christian, but more than that I’ve been actively involved in university ministry for over 10 years. In that time I’ve dealt with close to 1,500 students as a speaker, class teacher, and counselor. I’m as concerned about the exodus of teens as much as anyone else, but unlike the New Apologists, I have a very different perspective on why it is occurring, and consequently what the solution should be. I think it’s also important to say that I recognize that the men who are crisscrossing the country on speaking tours do genuinely believe they are doing good, that their work is a “ministry”, and that ultimately they are doing God’s work, saving people from the evils of liberalism. Unfortunately, my own experience suggests that Christian Apologetics – specifically Christian Apologetics as it is currently practiced – misses the mark in several important areas, and indeed causes more harm than good.

The New Christian Apologists read the absence of the 18-35 demographic in our churches to be a symptom of good, biblically based, young Christians from strong families meeting activist, staunchly atheist, liberal professors in their university classrooms, who pervert the truth of God and lie to our children.  The problem, then, is one of information – if we can supply our children (and specifically those in college and those about to be in college) with “good” information about how they can counter the “bad” information they are receiving or are about to receive, then we can really make a difference in the problem of our teens leaving the church in droves. There are a wide variety of takes on what this information should look like, and my purpose here is not to debate any of them head on. I agree, in general, that we could and should do a much better job of inviting our youth into meaningful discussions about faith, and that we should try to get them to engage in the philosophical dialog with the world that Christianity has been involved in since the time of Paul. Where I disagree, however, is in the fundamental premise that this lack of information is the real cause of students rejecting Christianity. There are a lot of kids who leave the church, to be sure, but there is something else – something much more major – going on here, I suggest.

I’ve been doing this for a while, and the students I know personally who’ve walked away from churches numbers probably in the tens-of-dozens.  In that total number of cases, I can think of only a handful – four, perhaps – who cited traditional apologetic questions (“I don’t really believe there is a God / How can there be evil in the world if God is all good and all powerful, etc”) as even a contributing factor in their decision to walk away.  Furthermore those who have talked about apologetic questions as reasons of their rejection of the prototypical Evangelical Christian lifestyle tend to be very well read on the subject – people who’ve done a fairly extensive amount of searching on their own in both Christian and non-Christian apologetic literature, and ultimately find more doubt than faith. This in itself is a powerful topic, and one that I might tackle later, but is somewhat tangential for the purposes of the immediate discussion. I submit that the evidence, at least gathered from an informal survey of people who actually *are* leaving the church, suggests that apologetic questions (and by extension militantly godless, atheist professors) are not really the major reason the college students I’ve talked to are rejecting faith.

Fundamentally I think there are a number of reasons why those in the New Apologetics movement make this mistake, but I’ll take a quick shot at three of them.  First, when you hold a really good hammer, it’s easy to see every problem as a nail. A dozen years ago, decent apologetic literature was genuinely difficult to find, and in general I applaud the apologetic community for a much needed refresh of presentation in the past decade. Today, however, there exists a wealth of apologetic literature, classes, books, cd’s, tapes, videos, and radio shows, all of which have a vested commercial interest in trying to cast apologetics as the solution to as many problems as possible.  As a result, the New Apologetics movement seems to be, as we like to say in the engineering trade, a “solution in search of a problem”, and when you are a solution in search of a problem, almost any problem will do. I feel like in some ways I’m being a little unfair, so let me pause and say that Apologetics does actually do a lot to help some very real problems, and I think that in some sort of academic sense it’s important that it continues. The issue, I think, is when the apologetic movement tries to create problems that don’t really exist, especially when doing so seems to serve its own economic interest.

Second, the majority of people who actually participate in driving the movement are travelling speakers and authors, as opposed to ministers. It’s not terribly difficult to imagine why this is, given that ministers generally have more than enough on their plates without spending time writing apologetic literature. Where this gets us into trouble, I suggest, is that the people who write the literature and give the speeches and drive the movement in general have become disconnected from a day-to-day ministry context in a single place. I take it to be a simple fact of life is that ministry looks very different day in, day out on the ground than it does at 30,000 feet flying over Wichita, KS on the way to your next speaking engagement. This is not to say that speaking engagements can’t be an important part of ministries in a local context, but it is to say that you can never truly understand what the particular problems in a particular ministry in a particular place (say, Wichita) are unless you actually spend time there, and a good bit of time at that. In the same way, to actually understand the needs and problems of campus and youth pastors, in a very real sense you have to be one, rather than just interacting with them.  This disconnect shows up most strongly in that apologists spend most of their time talking *to* students and pastors instead of listening to and dialoging with them.  I’m certain that every apologist worth his or her salt can of course come up with students who they’ve touched, and people who they “listen to” to help change and guide their ministry – and I’m not at all suggesting these people don’t exist.  What I am suggesting is that the majority of contact those on the professional speaking circuit have listening to actual students and ministers is self-selecting at best, and causes them to seriously overstate the prevalence of students rejecting faith due to a lack of apologetic information. This isn’t a criticism of apologetics, per-se, as much as it is the crusader type of Christian ministry that has been prevalent ever since the Great Awakening. Revivals and crusades may draw really large crowds and look really good on paper, but they often leave a lot of wreckage in their wake that pastors on the ground have to deal with months and years after they’re gone. Regardless of their message, whether these revivals and crusades on balance are a greater source of harm or good is certainly up for debate in many circles, and with good reason.

Finally, the new apologetic movement has invested itself heavily in support of a particular, and in my mind problematic soteriology – namely that salvation hinges primarily on the intellectual acceptance of a few key propositions.  In other words, salvation itself is primarily a problem of not having good information, and as a result good apologetics equates to good evangelism, and vice versa. There are a lot of things we could say about this, but I think we’ll save them for a later post. Suffice it to say that this brand of soteriology causes a lot of practical problems when you try to apply it, which lead to some of the disconnects we’ll talk about later on.

So all of that being said, if the apologists really have missed the boat and there really is something else going on here, what is it?  After all, it’s not just enough to say that kids aren’t leaving for apologetic reasons unless you can provide a decent alternative that explains why they’re headed for the door in ever increasing numbers.

For my money, the single factor that I can point to in about 75% of cases when students reject faith is the cognitive dissonance they’ve felt for 18 or more years between the outward message they hear preached at church and the actions of church members, most importantly their parents and youth pastors.  From the time kids are young, they’re told that God should be the most important thing in their lives, but the see their parents place money, work, kids, family, church – almost everything above God. In Bible class they are taught about the fruits of the Spirit, and that a life where Jesus is Lord will have certain characteristics, but they observe the lives of “Christians” around them and note that instead of peace there is worry, instead of patience there is anger, instead of kindness there is bitterness, instead of gentleness there is callousness, and the list goes on.  By the time they are entering college and having to make their own decisions about what they want to do with their lives, they’ve been given so many conflicting messages about what it is supposed to mean to be a Christian and what it seems to mean in actual practice that they’re done with the whole thing, and ready to try something – anything else. The problem, in other words, is not bad apologetics, but bad praxis. It’s easy to find a good book on Christian apologetics, but it’s much harder to find a person in churches today who lives a just, merciful, humble, Christ-centered life – and at the end of the day the problem most college students have with Christianity is the lack of the second, rather than the lack of the first.

I’ve raised a lot of issues in this post that probably merit further discussion, and it’s already extremely long as is, but let me close for now with a final critique. The apologetic movement does try to draw people in and expose them to a brand of Christianity that is, at least on the surface, less anti-intellectual than Evangelical Christianity writ large. However, in practice it often suggests a very simplistic, almost black-and-white approach to answering what are, almost always, very nuanced questions. It doesn’t really seem honest, either in an intellectual or theological context, to provide half-page or 15 minute answers to something as serious and layered as the problem of evil in the world. Indeed, the presentation of such answers seems to represent a clear and present danger to honest discussion. As a result, I think it is absolutely critical to distinguish here between the idea of apologetics practiced well, and the actuality of apologetics practiced poorly – a distinction we will probably get into in subsequent posts.

With most Christian books I’ve read in recent memory, I generally read the first few pages, say, “Oh, I know what this is going to be about”, and then spend the next 300-500 pages discovering the book was, indeed, about exactly what I suspected on page 4.  With this particular read, however, I’m close to 50 pages in and I have absolutely no idea where he’s going to end up, which is an extremely exciting and refreshing feeling.

Stone begins his book with reference to the idea of Christianity in general, and evangelism in particular, as practice.  In doing so, he begins with Alasdair MacIntyre’s (virtue ethics) definition of a practice, which is probably easiest to explain using James McClendon’s analogy of a game.

One of MacIntyre’s core principles of a practice is that if a “means is internal to a given end”, then “the end[s] cannot be characterized independently from a classification of the means”. In other words, it is impossible to separate a practice from the “internal goods” of that practice. What are internal goods? It’s perhaps easiest to start by talking about what they are not.  For starters, internal goods are not merely skills or rules. Consider baseball, for instance.  There are a variety of skills that might be required to play baseball – running, throwing, and catching, for instance.  However, none of these *are* baseball. The practice of baseball is something other than running, throwing, or catching, though all of those skills are required in order to participate in the practice. Whatever skills are required for a particular practice, however, the practice cannot be reduced to any of them, and each skill is judged by how well it serves the practice, not the other way around.

Additionally, Stone  points out that there may be “external goods” which result from a practice – in the case of baseball, money and fame – but that these external goods do not define the practice, and in fact can generally be achieved by other means which have nothing to do with the practice in question (say, being a personal injury lawyer).  Stone also notes that often times our desire for these external goods can distort the practice, and cause us to miss the point of what the practice is ”really” about, if they become our goal.

A practice, then, is about more than the individual skills required for it, and more than the external goods produced by it.  It is also about joining a tradition that self-justifies the practice, and requires participation to fully understand.  More on this in a later post, but for now suffice it to say that a practice is about more than having a certain skillset, or a certain set of rules, or a certain set of results, and even when it is done alone is an inherently social activity that requires a communal agreement on what the practice entails (think about the game of Solitare, for instance).

Let’s stop, then, and consider in our own particular context how these ideas might relate not just to the “practice” of Evangelism, but Christianity as a whole.

There are certainly a number of “skills” (for want of a better word) involved in the practice of Christianity. Prayer, meditation, study, service – each of these forms an important part of the Christian experience, but as a practice, Christianity cannot be reduced to any of them.  Additionally, it’s often tempting for us to think of these skills as the measure of the “Christian-ness” of a person, or of ourselves.  If we’re not careful, our pursuit of quiet time, study, or even service can actually subvert us from the ethos of what it means to live Christianity as a practice. Finally, we find it easy to mistake the external goods of the practice (morality especially) for internal goods.  While these external goods may result from the practice of Christianity, they are not unique to it (i.e. there are moral non-participants in the practice), and when these external goods become our ultimate aim, distract us from the essence of Christianity as practice.

What does it mean to practice Christianity?  What are the “internal goods”? What are the things so central to the practice that they cannot be characterized apart from it?

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
When they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God when the doctor calls
After some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God
when it’s gotten real late
And their kid’s not back from that party yet

No one laughs at God when their airplane
Starts to uncontrollably shake
No one’s laughing at God
When they see the one they love hand in hand
with someone else and they hope that they’re mistaken
No one laughs at God when the cops knock on their door
And they say “We’ve got some bad new, sir,”

No one’s laughing at God
When there’s a famine, fire or flood

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
when they’ve lost all they got
And they don’t know what for

No one laughs at God on the day they realize
that the last sight they’ll ever see is a pair of hateful eyes
No one’s laughing at God
When they’re saying their goodbyes

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke or
When the crazies say he hates us
and they get so red in the head
You think that they’re about to choke
God can be funny
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie
Who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus

God can be so hilarious
Ha ha, ha ha

No one’s laughing at God.
We’re all “laughing with God”.

Gaude! Gaude! Emmanuel,
Nascetur pro te, Israel!

My home base is with the Churches of Christ because that is where God has placed me for now. If I ever sense that God is leading me to a different subdivision on the Christian map, I will not hesitate to move. The truth is that I am at home wherever believers worship God, proclaim Jesus Christ, teach the Bible, live in the Spirit and love each other. The spiritual address is irrelevant.

I also remain in this nondenominational movement of my youth because I have complete freedom of understanding and conscience. I have a congenial home congregation, the Bering Drive Church of Christ in Houston, Texas, in which I have served as a teacher and an elder since 1982. A new generation of Churches of Christ is coming on the scene: one focused on Jesus Christ rather than on a church system, that proclaims justification by grace through faith rather than salvation through human effort or doctrinal conformity, and that enjoys fellowship with other believers based on commitment to Jesus rather than on sectarian allegiance or denominational membership.

I also reside among the Churches of Christ because I appreciate their founding ideals. The 19th-century Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement from which it sprang began with the goal of uniting Christians under the leadership of King Jesus without regard to human traditions or creeds. Its founders’ vision was to be “Christians only, but not the only Christians.” It adopted the more ancient slogan, “In matters of faith, unity; in matters of opinion, liberty; in all things, charity.” It professed to “speak where the Bible speaks and to be silent where the Bible is silent.” It offered freedom of conscience to individuals and autonomy to congregations. I find these ideals to be biblical in origin, refreshing in theory and hospitable for daily living on the ground.

Not everyone in Churches of Christ enjoys the freedom of which I speak, or encouragement in their local fellowship, or healthy gospel preaching from the pulpit. I encourage them to work for such results as God gives opportunity. If the doors are slammed shut in their face, these individuals must sometimes leave the “home-folks,” as the Apostle Paul was required to do, and go where God is leading. When that happens, I confidently commend them to his tender care. I deeply regret that some among these churches have been brainwashed to believe that they have no other spiritual option. Those who are responsible for such nonsense will one day answer to God.

“A curse on this place!” said thoe voice. “A curse on all those who nevere listened to the words of Christ and who have transformed his message into a stone building. For Christ said: ‘Come unto me all ye that labor and hare heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ Well I’m heavy laden, and they won’t let me come to him. Today I’ve learned that the Church has changed those words to read: ‘Come unto me all ye who follow our rules, and let the heavy laden go hang!”

“I swear that I will never set foot in a church ever again. Once more, I’ve been abandoned by a family, and this time it has nothing to do with financial difficulties or with the immaturity of those who marry too young. A curse upon all those who slam the door in the face of a mother and her child! You’re just like those people who refused to take in the Holy Family, like those who denied Christ when he most needed a friend!”

With that, she turned and left in tears, her baby in her arms.

First, I believe we live in a culture (and especially a Christian culture) that is obsessed with answers. Often we aren’t really interested in understanding the nuances and issues behind someone’s objections and questions, we simply want a talking point, ten word answer to the question so that we can spout it off and move on. When we are faced with charges of being racist, it’s easier to fire back with a quick retort than it is to actually examine and acknowledge the shortcomings of our own positions and actions. Jesus, I think, encountered the same attitude in Scripture, with people wanting checklists of what they needed to do. Jesus responds to a litany of questions regarding specifics of how we should act with two commands: love God with all you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. My hope is not that my answers to the question would become everyone’s answers to the question, but that we would all begin to think about how we will answer the question. Only when we encourage a culture of thinking about questions instead of answering them will we make any progress in finding real answers, as opposed to advertising slogans.

Second, as I mentioned in the first response, I don’t think there are simple or singular answers to any of the questions I posed. In particular, one thing I mean by that is that my response to any of those questions would be heavily influenced by the person asking the question. Are they female? a minority? an atheist? Trying to formulate a response without knowing the audience, especially with questions as richly textured as these is difficult at best, dangerous at worst. If we do not address these questions on a personal level with those who ask them, we are missing the entire point of the issues raised in many of the questions to begin with.

Finally, while the objections I raised are, in some sense, more concrete than the underlying point of my original post, I don’t feel they were really what the first post was about. For many of the questions, the first answer is that we are, at least partially, guilty as charged. I don’t believe it’s fair to say that we are *as* guilty as charged, but there is at least some reality to all of the questions asked. However, the greater issue which I hoped to raise with the original post was not whether we were homophobic and racist or not, but how closely or not our actual practice lines up with our stated theology. Any weak paradigm will manifest itself in dysfunctional practice. I believe that in many ways recent cracks in the “religious right” – excessive Christian divorce rates, highly publicized crises involving influential pastors in large evangelical churches, a perceived lack of compassion related to issues like the death penalty, homosexuality and the war, and a wide variety of other issues point not simply to imperfect individuals within a system, but endemic weakness in the system itself. If Christianity is to contend as a viable paradigm going forward, then we must examine our current system, and reform it into a system that “practices what it preaches”.

very good points. what is you [sic] personal plan of action? what can we do to improve? a change of such substantial size is daunting. does it start with us and how we live our christian lives? do we teach by example to others? when asked these questions, what will you say?

I do not believe there is a simple or singular answer to these challenges, but I do think any substantive change begins on an individual level, and then spreads to groups of individuals.

For many of us, this begins as an open and honest evaluation of our own thoughts, feelings and actions:

• I may not be a racist, but am I the inheritor of racist attitudes which surface occasionally, even if only for a moment? Why is it that I feel just a little bit of tension when a large semi-threatening looking minority walks toward me? Rationally I know nothing is going to happen, and I’m able to suppress that thought very quickly, but the reality is that it’s there, at least on some level. How does that affect my reactions to minorities and my views about their place in the community of faith in which I reside?
• How closely do I tie my political agenda to my religious views, and vice versa? Marriage is a good example of where this can become sticky – there are many male/female couples who don’t have any sort of spiritual union at all. Why do we oppose homosexual marriage because marriage is a bond between a man, a woman and God, yet we don’t oppose millions of heterosexual marriages that have nothing to do with God? And after all, if we’re really interested in protecting marriage, shouldn’t we be spending our time, effort and energy outlawing divorce instead? (thought: Is it because divorce, for most Christians, hits a lot closer to home than homosexual marriage?)
• How consistent am I in the ways I apply scripture in forming my theology? Do I find that I have differing standards for passages of scripture depending on whether they confirm or discourage a particular practice which I support or oppose? If I exclude certain practices due to lack of explicit biblical reference, yet allow others because of “necessity” or “expedience”, am I really being honest and fair in my application of criteria to determine what is “necessary” and what isn’t, and is the practice of deeming certain practices (but not others) “necessary” and thus allowing their continued use really fair and consistent at all?
• etc…

This parade of questions is likely to lead us to some very uncomfortable places – often uncomfortable because the questions and answers challenge both the views we have about ourselves and our own “righteousness-of-sorts” and the religious structures in which we’ve heavily invested. Change in either of those areas can be profoundly disconcerting. While I do think there *are* answers for the questions I posed in the previous post, I think one of the largest problems facing Christendom today is the complete ignorance among the “average Christian” that a) such questions exist at all and b) they’re fairly convicting. It often does not help that when people become aware of these and other “non-traditional” questions, our clergy frequently tend to react violently to stamp out any further thought and questioning, and people who continue to ask questions are often shunted sideways, quarantined, and never heard from again.

If our generation demands that theology be lived out in our lives consistently, then it is my sincere opinion that parts of our theology are in dire need of reform. We must take a hard look at what our religious traditions actually say, how we enact and apply what is said in the actual practice of our daily lives, and any disconnects between the two. I think this begins on a personal level in evaluating our own beliefs and ideals, but I also believe our churches will have to wrestle with their own discrepancies in doctrine and praxis and restructure one or the other (or likely both) if they are to survive. As we all collectively wrestle with these ideas, we must keep in mind not only the abstract minutiae, but the practical implementation of our ultimate decisions – can we consistently apply whatever doctrinal and theological standards at which we arrive, and more importantly, what are the broader (and sometimes very messy) implications implied by said application. Only when we have communicated our theology authentically with our behavior will we have a credible voice in secular or spiritual discourse.

Lord, our Father, may Your everlasting strength and resolve help solidify and bring together Your Nation of devoted followers to work towards uplifting the economy. We pray for You to forgive foreclosures, for the Nation’s dollar to be strong in value once again, and for the government to make wise and Godly decisions with the country’s national resources. Let us pray to You, oh Lord, to provide relief to those impoverished and in dire need; and for those of us with wealth and abundance to increase our charity and support as we were taught through Your divine teachings.
Amen

I received an email this evening with this prayer, and couldn’t help but be a bit disturbed regarding the sentiments it expresses.

While we seem to have acquired the view in our country that it’s God’s will for all poor people to become middle class, I think the very first line in this prayer strikes me as a symptom of one of our main problems in America today – the focus on increasing our personal wealth and well being, and promoting said within a Christian framework. The author of the prayer hopes that we will all come together “to work toward the uplifting of the economy…” The working of the Kingdom of God, the deep despair of souls wrecked by greed and pride, and the global mission of the Church seem to take second priority to having a strong, vibrant national economy. Additionally, the author doesn’t *actually* pray for relief to those who are impoverished and in need, or for charity on the part of believers, but asks that God would “let us pray” for such things.

I’m not certain, but I have to think that God’s Kingdom exists on a level that’s a bit different from interest rates and sub-prime mortgages. Somehow we’ve taken the idea that God has always wanted us to have a booming capitalist economy and that if He *really* loves us, he’ll keep the money flowing.

Two things humble me about this assumption.

The first and most scary is that it is often in the times of greatest blessing we find it most difficult to rely on God. When Jesus speaks in the Sermon on the Mount, at least in Luke, he does not say “blessed are the poor in Spirit”, but rather “blessed are the poor.” I think Jesus knew that the poor are desperately aware of their need of a helper, a savior. As one of the richest and most blessed nations on earth, I think we confuse our wealth as a great blessing, when in reality I think it often makes it much harder for us to see God, and to live the lives we’re called to. It’s much more difficult for those of us who have a vested interest in preserving the status quo to be about transforming the structures of this world to allow the lowest and the least among us to be elevated to a position of significance.

Second, do we feel we can honestly ask God to bless us further so we can be charitable when we have been such poor stewards of God’s wealth in the service of other people up to this point? As a nation, we may give more than any other country on earth toward charitable causes, but we still give a tiny fraction of what we have to helping others and solving global problems. How hypocritical can we be to ask God to grant us more money, saying that “then we’ll be able to give more?” Do we not have charity backwards? Can we not let go of what we have first and foremost, allowing God to bless us with more once we have first selflessly given what we have away?

At the end of the day, my hope and prayer is that God is doing a lot more right now than worrying about the valuation of the American Dollar, and that each of us would realize that our 401k’s have very little to do with either our eternal destination, or our present contentment and satisfaction in life.

“What I have learned from my patients since that day is that we give death power (as if it needs it) — power not to kill us but to rivet us, to silence us, to drive us from our humanity while we still live. We give death power precisely to the extent that we work to ignore it, to blind ourselves to its closeness, to imagine we have the power to stave it off forever. If we go through life imagining that, then the moment when we are forced to look at death can only rupture everything we know and paralyze us, still alive. That’s not a good way to die.”

The Post arranged for a world renowned classical violinist, Joshua Bell, playing on a 3.5 million dollar violin, to give a 40 minute performance at a Metro station in Washington DC during rush hour. Over 1,000 people passed him by, but only a handful noticed the music. It’s interesting the things we pass by and never notice. One of the most interesting quotes to me in the article is from a lady who shines shoes. “Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look.”

Generally, we think of people’s viewpoints in linear terms. We might say someone is a “lefty”, or “right-wing”, implying that they are either “liberal” or “conservative” respectively. This view generally places “conservative” or “traditional” viewpoints on the right side of the line, and “liberal” or “progressive” viewpoints on the left. It also implies that there is some gradient on the scale. A typical understanding of this idea is shown in this picture:

This view leads to certain problems, both politically and religiously, however. Because the recent discussion was religious, I’ll try to stick to those terms. Much as the person who wrote the original ten questions that sparked this discussion, many people tend to see “progressive” as an attitude that centers largely on worship. However many people who have extremely forward views on worship also have extremely traditionalist and even reactionary views on social agendas. How would a person be classified, for instance, who promoted an extremely forward and contemporary worship style, but felt it wrong to read Harry Potter, feeling that it promotes witchcraft? What about a person who feels it is wrong to have a female minister, but who feels equally strongly about actively ministering to homosexuals and inviting them into our churches? Clearly, a single line cannot adequately represent the viewpoints these people have, yet we try to force them onto the line anyway.

One possible way to reform this divide is to add a second dimension. When we start thinking in terms of planes instead of lines, the picture becomes more clear. Consider the following picture:

In this conception, the person who promoted a contemporary worship style (progressive worship) and opposed Harry Potter (socially conservative) would be on the bottom left. We need not stop at two dimensions, however. Consider the following graphic:

Imagining the third axis heading back into the page, we now can place people in three dimensional space, giving us another point of information. Certainly this can be carried on ad nauseam, but as we talk about “progressive” and “traditional”, we need to take care to make sure we’re not discussing different things while using the same word.

There are three main points in tone the questions that bother me.

The first assumption I disagree with profoundly is that if certain actions are not present in a person’s worship, they are somehow uncomfortable or oppressed in their worship to God. In many ways, the tone of the questions seems to indicate that if a person doesn’t raise their hands or clap, they aren’t worshiping God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength, and that the reason they hold themselves back is tradition, culture, or fear. I personally don’t believe there is anything wrong with clapping, raising hands, instruments, or incorporating mixed-media presentations into corporate worship times. I don’t personally clap or raise my hands during these times – but not because of tradition, culture, or fear, but rather because it is not the way my soul responds in praise to God. There seems to be an attitude of “Well why wouldn’t you want to do these things?” in the questions, and a slight hint that if you don’t do those things, you’re somehow not as spiritual as those who do. Simply because I’m free in this country to go eat a pint of ice cream doesn’t mean that I have to, or that I should, or even that I should want to. People who are “free in Christ” have the freedom to worship God in the ways they choose, but that does not mean they are forced to worship in those ways, or that they must worship God in a prescribed way. The questions also seem to assume that if there were no external barriers to how we worship God, each of us would worship God in an identical fashion, which seems to me in direct opposition to what I would say is a plain fact that each of us is different, and we all conceive and interact with God in different ways. Furthermore, this viewpoint assumes that the important part of “worship” is the action itself, not the heart behind the action. In truth, there are many places where people raise hands, clap, kneel, and use instruments which are absolutely devoid of God. Our external actions in corporate worship do not necessarily correlate to the internal condition of our hearts.

The second assumption with the questions seems to me to be that what is really important in Christianity is what happens on Sunday morning. I discussed this in the email response, but I think it bears mention again here. The majority of our disagreements in churches often come on issues which are related to corporate assembly times. Of the ten questions, the only ones that can be debated as having no clear tie with “Sunday morning issues” are Questions 7 and 10, one of which I will discuss at length in a moment. I cannot believe 80% of the major issues with Churches today are related to the technicalities of how we praise God on Sunday mornings. I cannot believe there are no bigger problems out there. The original author, I think, is quite right when he asks “Is it worth spending time arguing over something like this when we could be _____”? While I appreciate the burden and sincerity of his heart, I am disturbed by the ease with which he seems to have missed one of his major points, and the ease with which many of miss the same point. Do we really believe that these issues aren’t worth arguing about, or when we say it’s not worth arguing about it, do we simply mean that people who disagree with us should stop arguing and start thinking the way we do?

The final, and I think most disturbing assumption in the email is that each of us should do, and I quote, “whatever it takes to love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.” Of all the attitudes expressed in the original questions, this, I believe, is the most dangerous. “Whatever it takes” is the most dangerous religious attitude precisely because it leads people to justify anything in the name of loving God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. “Whatever it takes” is the attitude that leads people to strap bombs on themselves, walk into buildings, and blow themselves up for the promise of Heaven. It is the attitude that leads people to fly airplanes into buildings, to murder doctors who perform abortions, to scream “God hates Fags!” at a homosexual man’s funeral, to declare holy wars, culture wars, and spiritual wars – all because, according to someone else, that’s “what it takes” to love God. There *must be* limits on “whatever it takes” to love God. In some ways it is a semantic discussion, but it is an essential one. If someone tells us that “in order to really love God, you need to ______”, we are not absolved of our responsibility to ask whether _______ is something consistent with the character of the God we are supposed to love.

At the end of World War II, many men were put on trial for their actions during the war. Many of the men replied that they’d only been “following orders.” The response of the jury was clear – soldiers have an obligation to disobey orders if they violate basic human decency. We can perhaps argue that refusing to murder someone in God’s name does not mean we’re unwilling to do “whatever it takes” to love God, but rather disagreeing about “what it takes” – but I personally reject that distinction. People who blindly and willingly obey any order they are convinced is in the line of “loving God” are a danger to themselves and others. While we cannot use this reasoning to get out of things we selfishly want to do but are prohibited from (e.g. I want to have sex with whoever I want), we must rather evaluate all of our actions and examine them in the light of the character of God.

Even with the extended amount of time that I’ve dedicated to the discussion of this situation on my blog, there is so much more that can be said. As I mentioned on Monday, this discussion is fruitful not necessarily because it reveals dissatisfaction with the particulars of worship styles, but because it exposes deep, fundamental, disturbing problems in how we view Christ, our relationship with Him, and the essence of what it means to please God.

My prayer and hope is that we would somehow be able to address the deeper questions raised by this discussion, moving past externals toward a deep transformation of our hearts, formed and reformed into Christ’s body as we journey together.

I agree that one of the primary issues we will deal with in this transitional period is the distinct difference between two groups of people – one group which is comfortable with the dynamic tension you describe, and one that is not. I think there will be some middle ground between the two groups – people perhaps like us who are “bi-lingual” to some extent, but in general I think people gravitate toward the extremes and forget the middles.

The most disturbing thing in all of this, which we’ve talked about before, is that these people who style themselves progressive really aren’t any different in their core theology from those they are fighting against. When the goals of some of the major change agents within our fellowship are geared primarily toward changes which lack real substance, we’re spinning our wheels and wasting time in a day and age where we need desperately to find our way. Altered worship styles have little if anything to do with a community of faith being transformed into a more organic body of Christ, and little if anything to do with effecting substantive change in individual’s transformations into the image of Christ. If we spend the next 30 years fighting about worship styles and baptism, I fear we won’t be around in another 30 years (not that I necessarily think that would be the worst thing).

As I’ve thought more about the entire discussion, there have been a few additional thoughts I’ll bounce off you.

First, it seems to me that such a worship-centric approach to God is dangerous in the same way as a physically-focused dating relationship. When you start dating someone, you may start to show physical affection in small ways at first – holding hands let’s say. Holding hands is fine, but you long for that day when you have your first kiss. One day it happens, and it’s wonderful – everything you thought it would be. All is good for a couple of weeks, until you become desensitized to that level in some ways, and you want to do more, go farther. In some ways this discussion sounds reminiscent of teenagers talking about their desires for extended sexual exploits – “How far do you want to go”, “No, we shouldn’t go there”, “I think it’s fine to go this far”, “You shouldn’t kiss before you’re married”, etc. I titled my blog post yesterday “ten questions of a ‘progressive’ discontent”, and I think in many ways it’s not the “progressive” (even in quotes) that is the eventual problem as much as the discontent. Do we have any reason to believe that once we attain this ephemeral change that we’ll be happy with it? In this regard I think the “traditionalists” are very correct – praise teams lead to praise bands, praise bands lead to something else, and pretty soon we’re on the slippery slope to who knows where. Where I disagree is that praise teams are a coordinated effort to get us to praise bands. I think it’s just a simple part of the human equation.

So how do we “fix” this? If we look back to the relationship example, I think one of the key parts to checking the physical relationship is balancing it with the emotional, spiritual, and mental side. If the foundation of your relationship/marriage is based on sex, there will be clear problems there. Physical intimacy is a wonderful thing, but it’s not enough to sustain a meaningful relationship. In a similar vein, corporate worship is a wonderful thing, but it is not enough to sustain a meaningful relationship with God. If we encounter God only during emotional worship highs and other “orgasmic” experiences, we are ill equipped to deal with the rest of our lives, and our spiritual journey becomes a quick dash from false summit to false summit, seeking the thrill of our last mountaintop.

Staying with a dating theme, it’s also interesting to look at what our outward appearance (and our attention to it) implies about our true worth. We tell our daughters not to dress like a hooker, because when they do they attract sleazy guys who are only interested in their bodies. Something I typically want to tell girls I overhear lamenting how guys just want them for their bodies, “If you don’t want to be treated like an object, don’t dress like one.” I feel in many ways like our attempt to alter our worship style is analogous to putting on a low cut shirt and showing a bit of cleavage in the hope of getting more guys to look at us.

Two things come out of this line of thought for me – first, are we really interested in the people who are going to look at us because of our “boobs”, as it were? Certainly we are interested in the world coming into relationship with Christ and experiencing his transforming power, just as a girl is interested in finding a man who will enter into a relationship with her, love and cherish her. Certainly that noble man might come along because he’s attracted to her body, but the majority of men are attracted to her body *and nothing else*. No matter how much time she spends or how much love she lavishes on them, most of them will never want her or see her as anything else, and when there’s a newer, more attractive girl available, they’ll jump ship and flatter her instead. The transient nature of people who are attracted to the next “new idea”, or “cool worship style”, or even “cool theology” is the same – while we hope to be a part of the transformation of the transient, we are both foolish and naïve if we believe men will be consistently transformed in meaningful and positive ways, or that true love will enter their hearts by looking at a woman’s body.

Second, what does it imply about our own perception of the spiritual worth of our community if we feel like we need to present a sexy image in order to attract someone? Like I’ve said before, there are multiple reasons why people will buy a product. People may buy iPods because they’re cool, but they certainly don’t buy motor oil for the same reason. No, rather they buy motor oil because it’s useful – they don’t want their engine to blow up. Most kind, sincere, intelligent, fun, caring girls have no problems finding guys who want to date and marry them, even if they don’t dress provocatively – precisely because there’s something more substantive than just the way they look. In fact, most girls who fit the above description don’t dress provocatively and draw attention to themselves because they recognize that the guys they’re interested in aren’t looking at their physical appearance. I’m reminded of what you mentioned a few weeks ago – that the early church made converts wait for potentially years before they were baptized. For anyone to join such a group – indeed for anyone to join a group where the likelihood of death came with the territory – there would have to be something there deeper and more attractive than the songs they sang while they were in the stinky catacombs.

My fear is that the main reason we feel the need to “sex up” our external image is because there is little to attract people on the inside. If we preach a gospel of morality, or of self-help, or of political action, do we really have anything to offer people other than a pep-rally? If not, then the questions we’re discussing here become exceedingly important – maybe the only important ones. If we have not been transformed inside, our only recourse is to make the outside more attractive. If over 50% of our marriages end in divorce, if Sunday morning is universally regarded in the restaurant industry as the worst time to work, if 91% of people surveyed say that they think of Christians as primarily anti-homosexual and judgmental, if the only picture of Jesus people have is Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps, are we really surprised that nobody wants to come in?

The problem is not with our external appearances but with our internal transformation, or lack thereof. The unfortunate thing is that discussions like this one about primarily external matters serve as little more than criminal distractions in the pursuit of real change.

Thanks for forwarding me that email. I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last couple days and I think this argument isn’t anything new – but something that goes all the way back to the early church.

I think the heart of what goes on in these conflicts is the Christology (how people view Christ) of the people involved in them. Some people like traditional songs, pious/”rigid” lifestyles and approaches to scripture – all of which really kind of take emphasis off of the humanity of Jesus (what he has most in common with us) and make Jesus more distant and divine. These of course are many of the old people who grew up in the 30’s 40’s and 50’s who are often times labeled as “conservative.” At the same time there are others who like casual, emotional, experiential meetings where the presence of Christ is felt in the room with them – a rather emotional experience – where the divine Christ is exchanged for the present human Jesus whom we can all experience and relate to. I guess we would tend to call these people “progressives.” DISCLAIMER: I always hate assigning people to categories – but for the purposes of this argument – it’s helpful.

Anyway – so then the question that many ask (especially the people in both groups) is “which is correct.” And the answer is they both are correct and they both are lame … or rather limited. Neither side fully encompasses who Jesus is or what it means to be Christian – but what happens when we let those live in tension with each other? Perhaps, if this is done in a healthy way, the best of both worlds can be seen.

I think this idea of living with “tensions” is so important in churches today – we tend to think in terms of right in wrong – but if we paid closer attention to scripture we could see that many times it’s not a question of right and wrong – but of how do we let these tensions exist and how do we manage those polarities.

To bring scripture into this – we should study the Book of John more. Many times we tend to read selected stories from John and focus more on the synoptic (Matt, Mark, and Luke) Gospels. Or, if we read John we force what we see to correspond with Pauline thought. I think we should take John as it is and see how he introduced tensions about who Jesus is, what salvation is, etc. Of course a great example is John 1 “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” That is tension right there – God becoming flesh — how is that possible, how can those two things coexist? There is something there that we have to learn to live with – and obviously Christ lived out that tension and is a great example for us to look to in order to see how we should deal with tension in our communities. He also introduced them – i.e. Salvation is now and also in the future (again in John). A lot of this stuff isn’t easily explained away – but I think in recognizing that the Bible doesn’t have a unified theology of …. whatever – we should see that there is a conversation going on about who God and Jesus are. And I think it would really help us out quite a bit – to introduce that to the churches around us.

When I look at many of the most conservative people in our churches, it’s perhaps hard for me to understand the reasons they believe what they do, but it’s easy for me to understand why they continue in that belief. If it is difficult for me at 27 and you at 33 (34?) to really change and examine what we believe because of our investments, how much more difficult will it be for people who are 70 and have invested so much in their particular paradigm? While that does not excuse them from their call to grow and encounter Christ, it does, I think, provide me with a certain measure of understanding of why they act as they do, as well as giving me a reality check of my own. May we never be so invested and entrenched in our own views that we are not able to be challenged ourselves. May we never view ourselves only as the challengers, but also view ourselves as those who need to be challenged. May we never feel like we are the ones with answers, but be constantly searching for new questions.

With that in mind, I would like to pose two questions of my own. They are based on two of your questions – specifically questions 3 and 9.

In question 9, you ask “are we limiting ourselves to the most easily offended”? I wonder if it is truly necessary to offend people in order to challenge them. You will note that the people Christ offended didn’t turn toward him – in fact they crucified him. That didn’t stop him from calling them out, but it did not produce the result we’re looking for in this case – namely it did not turn their hearts toward God. Is there some way we can effectively challenge without offending? If not, is division an acceptable price? Are we willing to sacrifice “the most easily offended” (the needs of the few) for the “future of our community” (the needs of the many)? You follow up in Question 10 with the bold phrase “whatever it takes”. I know you did not intend that phrase in this context, but I wonder (especially in light of my next question) if “whatever it takes” is an approach we really want to consider.

Finally, in question 3, you ask “Is it worth spending time arguing over something like this when we could be spending time telling the world about Jesus?” I think we would both agree that the answer is, “Of course not.” My question is whether your email is in fact an argument in the affirmative. In other words, if these issues are really not worth arguing over, and if it really were more important to spend our time telling the world about Jesus, how much time have I “wasted” writing this ridiculously long email back to you? I use wasted in quotations because I think discussions like this are tremendously useful, at least for keeping our minds open. However, we must remain vigilant that we do not, as Nietzsche would say, “become the monster”. “He who fights monsters,” he says, “must take care not to become a monster himself. For when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you.” At what point do we, in our desire to bring people to a deeper and more fulfilling relationship with Christ, become that which we fight against by our own inflexibility and inability to compromise? At what point do we, as leaders who want everyone to walk in the footsteps of Christ, cease to walk on that path ourselves in the name of “helping others”? At what point do we begin to “do evil, that good may result”? There are not simple answers to these questions, and they are questions I must ask myself every day. I’m not always sure I like the answers.

Your questions have blessed me. They force me to examine myself, to examine what I believe, and to again ask uncomfortable questions I often cannot answer satisfactorily. Thankfully it is not the answers, but the questions I think Jesus wants us to have. When we rely totally on him, and not on our own wisdom, we will truly understand what it is to have faith, to love others, to be perfect. Until then, we look through a glass, darkly, on the image of perfection we will be in heaven.

Tomorrow an email response from Jeremy Hegi, and a follow-up to that on Monday.

At any rate, your questions.

While I don’t want to go through the list of excellent questions you’ve posed in bulleted form, I do want to make a couple of comments on some of the general form of questions you’ve posed.

The first type is the question: “Do we really believe it is wrong to ___?” I think, unfortunately, the answer in many cases is yes. While this may be incomprehensible to some of us, there truly are people in our church who feel, with what they believe is biblical basis, that it is wrong to have a quartet, it is wrong to have a female speak, even on a video, that it is wrong even to separate communion and the offering. These positions seem absurd to us, of course, but to them they are very important, very real, and very grounded in “scriptural fact”. We, based on our interpretation of Scripture, disagree, but here comes the hard part – how do we conclude that one of us has the correct set of Scriptural facts, while the other group doesn’t. Both sides would of course say that the other side is somehow being dishonest, or at the very least looking at things inconsistently or starting from bad assumptions – but therein lies the problem. *Both* of us are using the same set of reasoning to say that we’re right, and the others are wrong.

One of the most difficult spiritual questions I’ve been grappling with over the past 6-8 months as I’ve been in discussions with a variety of my friends is how to resolve this dilemma – in some sense, any scriptural interpretation by a community of faith actively examining scripture and honestly seeking God is valid in their context. While “actively examining scripture” and “honestly seeking God” are certainly somewhat subjective terms, and while there is a very thin line between syncretism and discernment, this is both a very disturbing and liberating statement, and it may perhaps form the basis for a post-modern Christian context. Simply because we have chosen to interpret Scripture in a pseudo-historical/critical nature doesn’t mean that is the only way Scripture can be interpreted, or even that it is the best way. The uncomfortable thing for many of us is that this idea reframes the question of “Who is right?” and answers it with the rather odd statement: “Both are, or can be.”

Let me explain with a more concrete example: you ask the question “Do we truly believe it is wrong to listen to a choir, etc?” Let me reframe that question: “Do we truly believe it is wrong to believe it is wrong to listen to a choir?” In other words, we may believe their particular interpretation of scripture is incorrect (i.e. we believe it is fine to listen to a choir, have instruments, take the Lord’s supper on Tuesday at 3:40AM), but do we believe they are wrong for believing it? This ties in closely with Question 7 you’ve posed. As I’ve visited other denominations and churches, I am clearly convinced that unfortunately, the answer is a resounding “yes” – but not only for us. This is a subtle point, but I think an important one – obviously *everyone* believes their interpretation is correct – everyone believes they are right. The best we can do is Brian Mclaren’s now famous and attacked statement – “I know there are many things I am probably wrong about, but I don’t know which things they are.”

Also, it is important to remember that there are many ways in which we ourselves may be perceived as allowing “fear to hold us back” in how we live our lives. Even among those who call themselves “progressive”, I think the discussion of whether or not it is acceptable to drink alcohol in any quantity or situation would be a divisive issue. We *must* be able to work together and worship God with people we sincerely and profoundly disagree with. I will not lie that there are many times I don’t enjoy the thought of this proposition – most often on Sunday mornings, the time of the week when I generally feel furthest from God, the time of the week when I see just how far my goals and desires are from the people who stand around me. Some Sundays I want to walk away and never come back – like the first Sunday of the semester when Kelly spoke about the waitress and there was general laughter from the left side of the auditorium. But then I speak to someone who was listening, who was open, and whose perspective was changed, at least for a moment, by those words. If some of us do not remain, there will be no voice, and all our efforts, hopes, and dreams will be for naught.

Finally on this question, the more I speak with these people, the clearer it becomes that they don’t believe these things because they’re trying to annoy me, or because they are simply stuck in the 50’s. They often have clear, thought out, logical reasons for thinking the way they do (though again, reasons I disagree with). It is easy to cast them as resisting change simply for the sake of resisting change, but I am less and less convinced of that as I’ve discussed with them.

Another form of question you pose which is closely related, but importantly different is “Why do we believe it is wrong to _____?” The why, I think in this case, is very important. I’d like us to consider the case of a particular very conservative man in our church. He did not grow up in the CofC, but was “converted” around the time he was in college. He turned his back on his parents and family, almost to the point of disowning them, truly believing to this day they were not saved because they did not believe what he does. This is a sad tale, and one that speaks unfortunately of just how far we have to go. Consider, however, this man, and what it would require for him to change his viewpoint. Think of the amount he has invested over his considerable life in what he believes, and think of what it has cost him. Think of the broken relationships with his family, all because of his desire to be “right”, and his certainty that he is. How hard do you think it will be to change his perspective? What will it do to the tapestry of his life to admit he was wrong?

I drove back from Dallas yesterday, and before I left I had 4-5 cups of coffee with my sister. I dropped her off at the airport and headed back. I wanted to get to Ennis before stopping, because I knew there was a gas-station and a place to eat there. The problem, of course, was that I really needed to go to the bathroom. I knew I needed to stop, but I was sure I could make it. As the miles ticked off on the odometer, my situation became more and more painful, but even though there were plenty of places to stop and relieve my burden, my original goal was still in my head, and I thought to myself “Well, I’ve already endured this much and come this far, it’s only a bit further…” Eventually, of course, I stopped about 15 miles short of Ennis to go to the bathroom, but the point remains – the further I went, even though I knew it would be better if I stopped, the more invested I became in my original plan, and the more difficult it became to want to change it.

Final installment tomorrow…

Thanks for your well thought out email – I know you poured your heart into it, and it is clear how heavily the burden of our church, our fellowship, and our future weighs on you. I pray that you won’t be discouraged at the rate at which things change. When I was impatient for change, a friend of mine once compared the Church to a piece of taffy – if you stretch it slowly, you can make it do what you want. If you stretch it too quickly, it will snap. Because we do change so slowly, it can be very frustrating for change agents within, many of whom find it easier to jump ship and head to where people are a bit more “open minded”, at least about the issues we encounter so much resistance to. My prayer is that you would not go that way. We need good, honest, loving people who are able to examine and question the old ways, and who will lovingly deal with those who have come before. May you be one of those people.

I did want to answer some of your questions, though, perhaps with some insight I’ve gained in listening to the people who you’re discussing in many of your questions.

I feel like you know that much of what you mention is simply not an issue to me – either in the affirmative or the negative. I am not, by and large, interested in arguing about what we do on Sunday morning. Certainly that we *do* praise God is important, and certainly we want to be effective and meaningful in the way we do that, but we must also remember that *worship* is not meeting together on Sunday morning, but how we live our lives (e.g. Rom 12:1). My personal fear is that God looks down on us and is saddened to see us spend 95% of our energy arguing about something that occupies less than 2% of our time. Don’t get me wrong – there are certainly a host of things I would change about our corporate worship times if I could, but again, by and large, I am more interested in effecting change in the hearts of our people – change in how they live their lives, change in how they treat others, change in how they show their love for God and love for their neighbor. My personal feeling is that if we are somehow able to focus on creating people who love like Jesus did, people who truly want the best for each other, truly seek to honor others above themselves (Phil 2), then so many of these other problems would be solved.

If I truly loved other people the way Jesus did, would it bother me when we sing songs with archaic language like “On Zion’s Glorious Summit” which I’m fairly certain 95% of the church couldn’t explain to me if I spotted them the lyrics in poetic form and a dictionary? No. I would recognize that like me, they enjoy the way the song sounds, and it holds a powerful place in their memory, as it’s a song they grew up with, and have sung their whole lives. I would recognize that even though it is an extremely exclusive song in the sense that anyone who didn’t grow up singing it, and many who did, have no idea of what the words mean, it is inclusive in that it reminds us of the rich and beautiful tradition many of us share, and into which we hope to draw others. I’m not there yet. I hope to be.

to be continued…

When I woke up this morning, I was greeted by an email from a member of the church I attend, which contained ten questions of what I would call “progressive” discontent. Before I post my response, I thought it might be worthwhile to post the questions, and let us all think about them. They are sincere questions from a burdened heart, seeking to open others to a new perspective of worship. I’ve included the paragraph from his email that immediately proceeds the questions in order to maintain a bit of context. I’ve also maintained the original emphasis and bolding of text.

Be excited about this challenge or maybe you’ll be offended…but be honest as you answer these questions for yourself. Maybe this will touch something in your heart that needs touching…I pray it does. Most of us are members of the church of Christ on this email so these questions especially apply to us. So here goes the challenge…

1. Why don’t we use choirs or quartets to receive edification? Do we really believe it is wrong to listen to a choir?
2. Why is there any awkwardness in kneeling, lifting hands, or lying prostrate in our worship services when people all throughout the Bible did these things over and again before God? Do we really understand our humble place before Him?
3. Why are there some who think it is wrong to worship God with an instrument? If so, what do we do about this whole generation that is coming up that has contemporary Christian music on their iPods? What do we do with the kids from our youth groups that love going to Christian concerts? Don’t you think it is better for our kids to be listening to this music than top 40 songs laced with sexual innuendos? Is it worth spending time arguing over something like this when we could be spending time telling the world about Jesus?
4. Why do we think we have to take communion only on Sunday when in the Bible it appears the Christians took it on Monday and Thursday as well? Do we really think God will be upset with us if we remember Jesus’ sacrifice more often?
5. Do we truly worship God with the joy of the LORD? If so, why do you catch yourself sometimes just mouthing the words to songs without thinking about what you’re saying? Are you tired of going through the motions?
6. Why don’t we constantly share our stories of faith…in the corporate assembly? Why do we have issue with using the word “testimony?” God is still moving stones but we don’t know how God is moving in each other’s lives unless we share.
7. Do we (church of Christ) think we are the only ones going to heaven? If so, what should I tell my dear friends from other Christ loving Christian groups that fast more than me, pray more than me, read the Bible more diligently and have spent years upon years in the mission field feeding the hungry and telling the lost about Jesus? What did Jesus mean, then, in Luke 9:49,50?
8. Are we letting fear hold us back in any way in worship? If so, is that fear from God or the devil? Please, God, grow our faith.
9. Are we limiting ourselves as a church to the most easily offended? If so, does that mean that we never need to lovingly challenge those individuals to grow. Think about this. If Christ’s only and highest goal was not to offend people with what He said, what percentage of things he spoke on would not have come out of His mouth?
10. Do you want to do whatever it takes to love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength?…I do too. Praise God.

My response is, as per the usual, rather lengthy, and I may break it up into a couple of parts over the next few days. For those of you who don’t relate to the Church of Christ nature of this particular post, I apologize. We have a lot of growing to do, but I think there are larger issues addressed in these questions and in the response that apply across all communities of faith, though the issues may not be identical.

More to come.