All posts by Rod White

Acceptance: Fast or furious? Quakers and Puritans keep arguing.

Building community, Film/TV, , , , ,

I’ve seen the trailer for Fast and Furious 7 so many times it has taught me lessons. Like this one: Before the big stunt, one of the team mates does not understand what is going on and refuses to drive his car into a parachute jump (not kidding). Vin Diesel has a plan for this acrophobic team mate, since everyone knew he would be too afraid to do this crazy thing. Most of the team is fast at getting out of the plane; this one hold out is furious when they get him out, too. That’s the church. Some people are good at “wild,” some are less so, but we still figure out how to jump from the same plane in our hot cars. Right?

Well, maybe the church is not exactly like that. But our team is a lot like other teams. For instance, the other night at the BW Stakeholders meeting there was a brief interchange between a couple of the good people present. Their back-and-forth was another in a long line of similar conversations stretching back to the beginning of the country, even the beginning of the church! One of us said something like, “The Holy Spirit should run a cell, not some person or program.” Another of us answered back something like, “I just joined a cell that is very structured and I find it comforting.” One was ready to jump and one wondered about the plan.

Prophecy and order

Prophecy vs. order is always the balancing act of the church (I still recommend this book by one of my professors). Some people are always ready to jump — even think jumping is holy. Other people want to know the plan and think jumping all the time leads to destruction. They sometimes don’t like each other.

These days people think being one way or the other is just a matter of one’s “bias” or one’s “personality” or even “preference.” People have generally decided to not decide things in the name of tolerance. But I think there is an important issue that each growing person of faith can and should decide.

  • Is having a consistent order to things (which can quickly become law) numbing my faith?
  • Is having the freedom to follow the Spirit in every circumstance (which can quickly become selfish) undermining the community?
  • Is there really a contest between the individual and the community, between freedom and covenant?

There usually is a contest, but should there be?

I was surprised, for some reason, that we were having that kind of argument at the stakeholders meeting. I should not have been surprised since the church has been sorting out these relationships since the beginning. Especially in the American church, prophecy vs. order has been a constant place for arguing. For instance, at the last General Conference of the BIC I wound up on the outs with some people when I questioned the leadership — their reactions to me were not unusual. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1600s New England, the Puritans had similar reactions when Quakers landed in Boston to preach their radical new faith. The Puritans, who had been so rebellious in England, were now in the place of protecting an order they had built in the new world from someone even further out than they were. Bernard Bailyn describes the two sides very well — you can see how the descendants of the arguers are still with us!

Quakerism had emerged as the ultimate descent from rational, Biblicist, clerical Protestantism into subjective, anticlerical, nonscriptural, millennialism that threatened the basic institutions of civilized life – church, family and social hierarchy—that they were struggling to preserve. [The Quakers] challenged such fundamentals as the sanctity of Scripture, the principles of predestination and original sin, and the propriety of religious “ordinances”: the sacraments, scripted orders of worship, structured preaching, and the formalities of prayer.

Among the church plantings popping up in the Philly region these days this divide is still being played out. The Presbyterians inherit the role of the Puritans, hang on to over-rational faith and resist women and other people who traditionally don’t have power – especially “enthusiasts” who undermine the Bible with their feelings. On the other hand are Pentecostals who, like the original Quakers, trust their personal experience and bravely attempt to get everyone into their own version of it — all in the name of following the Spirit and applying the Bible.

Isn’t there a middle?

I am aligned with the “Anabaptists,” the kind of Christians who were also kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for being disorderly and just plain wrong. But I try to force myself into the middle, when it comes to prophecy and order, somewhere between Pentecostal and Presbyterian. For one reason, I think every version of Christianity usually has some brilliance to it. We are all one in Christ. But I also have more practical reasons and scriptural reasons, as well.

The Apostle Paul was confronted with this dividing point when he was writing to young churches. In chapters 14 and 15 of Romans he does a brilliant job of forcing himself into the middle by telling everyone to accept one another like Jesus accepts them — not because they are right or have rights, but because of Jesus. In 2 Corinthians 9 he charts middle ground by telling everyone to become like everyone for the sake of the mission — not merely because of empathy or tolerance, but because of Jesus. Paul puts himself firmly in the freedom/prophecy/filled-with-the-Spirit camp. But he uses his freedom to firmly protect those who don’t feel it. There is no point in having freedom if one uses it to win a point or to dominate everyone else. Freedom is for love. At this point some people among the BIC might think I eat meat sacrificed Philadelphia idols. That doesn’t mean I need to chew it in their face all the time. We all need to stick together in Jesus. Some people in our cells need enough structure to help them feel safe enough to grow – their cell leader can provide it without writing a new set of commandments for them.

Even when Paul is very frustrated by the people who are turning the Galatians back toward the Jewish law, he is generous: “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. …If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other”(Galatians 4:14-15). He keeps his eye on the prize, “Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible” (1 Cor 9:19).

The leader of the plane jump probably needs to be “fast.” That will undoubtedly make some team mate “furious” about all this jumping. The leader needs to consider that certain valuable members of the team are not just like him. The point isn’t feeling unfettered or secure; the point is being in love and following Jesus. Some people will always be in love and follow Jesus in a more orderly way, some will be wilder. That’s how it is. Regardless of our differences or even liking one another, we can all be one with Jesus and grow toward having generous hearts. We can recognize who we are and who someone else is — and see all of us in the light of Christ.

Suddenly we were talking about hell again

Doing Theology, , , , , , , , ,

Suddenly we were talking about hell. Last night after the PM, it came up again, like it often does, because that is what everybody seems to have been taught about Christianity: it is heaven or hell. People don’t really believe in heaven or hell. But they would love to be Christians.

Reading Rob Bell won’t damn you

My friend brought up Rob Bell. He’s reading Love Wins and he thinks that his guilty pleasure in the book might put him outside the faith. No it won’t. This is what Rob Bell says in Relevant magazine:

“I believe…people choose hell now. I assume people, when you die, you can choose hell. So there is no denial of hell here. There is a very real awareness that this is a clear and present reality that extends on into the future. But the real question is essentially if millions and millions of people who have never heard of Jesus are going to be tormented forever by God because they didn’t believe in the Jesus they’d never heard of, then at that point we will have far larger problems than a book by a pastor from Grand Rapids.”

I haven’t really kept up with arguments about Rob Bell. Who is it that quibbles with him about what he is thinking? It sounds like he is just like my friend, getting his head out and realizing that people have been speculating about the afterlife for a long time. These days, people are recognizing that the Renaissance/modern views that have dominated theology for 500 years may not be all they’re cracked up to be – like those views probably aren’t nearly as serious about the Bible as they claim to be.

Ten-year-old faith on NPR

Before I got to the PM it was hell on NPR, of all places! On Snap Judgment a twentysomething woman was telling her lack-of-faith story. It was not as if she had closed the book, she just had other things to do. I am much more interested in what this woman says about heaven and hell than what Rob Bell wrote. I’d love to introduce her to the Jesus she’s never met.

She talks about her ten year old self realizing that everyone is going to die. Her mom tells her that she imagines death as a curtain opening to a white light. But then she goes to the store to pick up dish soap and that is about it from Mom.

This is the character of the piece. Afterlife would be nice, but the necessities and allure of the present: the mundane responsibilities and the boyfriends, are occupying most of the space where faith might reside.

Final Judgment in the Florence Duomo

But she gives faith a try. After seeing a painting of hell in Florence, she imagines an afterlife and decides she has more goodness than sin and will make it to heaven. She learns a prayer from her friend and makes a container for holy water in her bedroom complete with a toothpick cross taped to it.

Ten year old faith is about as far as most of us get, unfortunately, and it proves about as sturdy as you might expect — or maybe as sturdy as your faith has proven to be. I guess whole denominations kind of practice ten-year-old faith, but none of them would say that’s all there is to Jesus.

Submitting to the latest hell

So back to this woman on Snap Judgment. For a week she prays, until a boy puts a love note in her locker. Then she forgets to pray. Love affairs continue to come and go. In high school she learns nihilism and existentialism. Post college she learns insurance claims, automatic bill pay, and how to move your car on certain days so you don’t get towed.

She is so vividly making a commitment all the time. But she is acting like she isn’t! Doesn’t that resemble a lot of people you know? They collect a bunch of thoughts that contradict and confuse them and leave it at that, as if automatic bill pay were real and Jesus a pleasant irrationality they can get to later, maybe. Like Bell protests, people choose the hell of submitting to the latest oppression and succumbing to the mundanity of whether to have a beer or not as their big choice. That’s hell enough.

But sometimes she still misses something to pray to. People die. The piece ends with her at work on a Saturday wondering what to do that night. She no longer believes in hell, maybe not heaven, maybe another dimension, maybe ghosts.  But like her mom was with her, when she asked her about things at ten, she hasn’t gotten far enough to make a choice. The end of her story is clever: “Then I feel a cold familiar feeling run through me, a knot in my stomach that gets tighter and tighter by the minute. ‘Damn,’ I think, ‘I really have to register my car.’”

I groaned out loud as I motored down Washington Ave. Jesus will knock on her door again and she will think He’s from some horrendous painting from Florence. Jesus will knock on her door and she will not even hear it because she fell asleep in front to the TV when she was finishing up The Wire. Jesus will knock on her door and she won’t even be home in her own life because she’s occupied with her list of little demands the system is making on her — as if that were her life. It is a poor worship she is choosing. Her little dish of holy water, as absurd as it was, made more sense than bending the knee to the DMV!

Obama runs over Jesus in victory lap

The Mission, , , , ,

Last night I watched the whole State of the Union address for the first time since I can’t remember. Good speech – even usually-disapproving pundits had to admit that. After forty-five minutes most of us were getting a little tired, but not the president, who is not daunted one bit, apparently, by getting thumped in the last election. He threatened vetoes, did some mild trash talking, said we won’t “screw it up” so no one would think he had too much dignity, and presented a whole list of things he knows Congress won’t approve but which most of Philadelphia (who did not watch the address) probably thinks are already law, since they seem like common sense.  I love Philadelphia.

It seemed like a self-referential victory lap. And since he did not mention drones, banks or Dallas, I pretty much did a lanky jog with him.

I won’t comment on the whole speech or you won’t read this whole blog post either! But I will comment on the first part and then lament a few things:

Barack Obama said:

The shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong.

9-11 is over, we’ve returned devastated Afghanistan and Iraq to their people and now we only risk their lives when we bomb them or supply weapons to various factions instead of doing it in person.

At this moment — with a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production — we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth. It’s now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next fifteen years, and for decades to come.

The Empire struck back and now we are on top! Europe schmeurope, China don’tcha whina, even manufacturing is moving back stateside. We’re #1! (I wish I could depict the president crowing for you. He even has a 50% approval rating).

Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?

I can only hope that a couple of his ideas get implemented. I don’t think a lame duck can undo what the 1% have been engineering since Ronald Reagan — when someone except them gets a raise these days it is national news! Federal employees got a 1% raise in December — at that rate they might catch up with the 1%’s raises in what, 100 years?

Will we approach the world fearful and reactive, dragged into costly conflicts that strain our military and set back our standing? Or will we lead wisely, using all elements of our power to defeat new threats and protect our planet?

That would be nice. Post-Afghanistan military spending is out of control, however. It is hard to say there is commitment to diplomacy and building world community when the country comes to any negotiating table armed to the teeth and chanting “U.S.A.!”

Will we allow ourselves to be sorted into factions and turned against one another — or will we recapture the sense of common purpose that has always propelled America forward?

That would also be nice. However, there seemed to be no evidence that the political class wants to have a common sense of purpose — unless it is the purpose their faction proposes. For instance, Rand Paul gave his own response to the State of the Union (unasked, I presume) to make sure we knew he did not have a common purpose. Did you film one too?

Studiously unmentioned in the speech was any religion — not Islam which has been the main cause of war for Obama’s whole term, and not Christianity. God got in the last line of the speech, of course. But the word search came up with nothing for “religion, Jesus, church, faith, hope, love, Christian, Bible” or even “marriage.”

According to an ABC poll 83% of Americans identify themselves as Christians in one way or another. Most of the rest, 13%, have no religion. That leaves just 4% as adherents of all non-Christian religions combined — Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and a smattering of individual mentions. (Gallup says 77% are Christians and that includes 2% who are Mormons). The fact that the president can make a speech to Americans without mentioning Jesus is one of the most interesting, weird things about the country. But as Newshour deftly portrayed it has been that way from the beginning (link has restrictions). The elite who organized the country made sure that Jesus would stay private, not public, even though most of them were Christians, too. I’m OK with that since I don’t want the government “screwing up” the church. But it is still odd.

Even though I give the speech a high rating (which I am sure Barack is waiting to hear), and even though I can whip up some admiration for the president’s audacity, competitiveness and attention to some of my greatest irritations, the speech made me glad, as usual, that Jesus introduced me to an alternative way of life and glad that Circle of Hope keeps giving me a chance to practice it.

My fantasy is that the president was being restrained, but what he really wanted to do was quote James 5:

“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.”

That would have been nice — and true.

Your socks are going to get dirty on today’s march. Keep cleaning.

Film/TV, The Mission, ,

Life in the Spirit is like cleaning. Clean the inside of the cup, not just the outside you think people can see — stuff a cloth way down in that spiritual “cup” and scrub out that dried crud on the bottom. Don’t do it to because you must be perfectly spotless to be presentable (God help you!). Do it to participate in the cleansing that is freeing us from what gums us up. Cleaning is a big thing to us Jesus-followers. We get good at it. Today is a good day to roll up our sleeves.

Jesus demanded that self-appointed spiritual authorities who opposed him get some cleaning skills even though they thought they were already clean enough.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. Matthew 23:25-26

For a great dramatization of this part of the Bible, check out a clip from the famous movie, Jesus of Nazareth. (And yes, I know putting a blue-eyed Jesus in this post is ironic).

I come by my understanding parentally

My parents were big on cleaning, so I am kind of picky about it. I am picky mostly because they were picky about how well I cleaned for them — not because I find some moral purpose in having things spotless! One of my specialties among the family housekeeping chores became cleaning floors. My father, the Navy man who rose to the rank of bosun’s mate, was a passionate trainer of floor cleaners. For him, the use of brooms, even mops was purely preliminary to swabbing the deck. No floor was clean until one got down on his hands and knees and scrubbed. If brushes (down to toothbrushes) were necessary, they should be at hand.

The big lesson in his floor-cleaning class — the thing that separates real cleaners from pretenders, is the art of rinsing. Here is his secret: Even if one doesn’t use soap, the goal is to extract every bit of soapy/dirty water off the floor — get it ALL into the bucket and out the door. (And don’t spill it on the back porch or your mom will slip on it when she gets back from the hairdresser). Do not (under threat of unpredictable repercussions) just spread that dirt around with your dirty mop until there is an even layer of film that makes it look like the floor is clean. If your dad is running around in his socks and undies (which he will be!) the evidence of your sloth will quickly be discovered on the bottom of his socks.

Spiritual cleaning

Floor cleaning may be a subject for me and my therapist. Thorough spiritual cleaning is a good subject for me and Jesus. It is tempting to just sweep the “dirt” here and there in our lives and never get it into the dust pan and out the door. It is tempting to water down our sin and still leave it like a film that no one is willing to call dirty. It is much more challenging to give the floor of our hearts a good scrub, dump the bucket far outside our spiritual house and be ready for living water.

Our relationships, our leadership, our societal obligations often show the effects of random sweeping. We spread more toxic dust with our wifty attempts to appear tidy than we accomplish cleaning, most of the time. It is very challenging to get down on our knees and inspect the floor of our community for the layers of waxy build-up and grime that we have started to think is the actual color of the floor.

Philly street cleaning
Budget cuts make Philly responsible for its own street cleaning.

I hope my metaphor is helping you out. Along with all the personal and communal dirt we should stop spreading around, we should all get out our dustpans and get started on the mess building up around us. The national holiday honoring Martin Luther King is a great day to clean something. I think today should be called “national racism day” or something more descriptive of the dirt on our collective floor. Hordes of people will be out mopping but the sinful grime is likely to be there again next year. The whole country keeps sweeping that sin around instead of throwing it out.

Racism is not just the sin of being mean and depriving people of their rights, as wicked as that is. It is the sin of losing sight of what a clean floor looks like. Behind racism is the sin of imagination-deficit. That’s the sin that makes us blind to what we can do to make a difference, like making a friend with someone who is not immediately likely to be our friend, like letting our anger about societal lies and injustice boil over, like Jesus told certain Pharisees the truth.

I know you have heard this before. But I don’t know why  Jesus is the only one who seems to notice his socks are dirty. Or maybe you do notice, but Jesus is still the one down on his knees rinsing.

Seafaring: a key discipline for success

Leadership, The Mission, , , ,

I have been slowly plowing through a very well-written book: The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America–The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 by Bernard Bailyn. Maybe I am one of the last people in the U.S. who think “history” does not mean, “What I did last summer.” Regardless, I keep finding new applications for the stories of the brave and often odd people who first settled the European colonies in the United States — what they did to each other and to the people they invaded, usually in the name of God.

When I began to prepare for teaching the cell leaders last Saturday I was in the middle of reading about the famous Pilgrims. I realized that Christians, in general, and their leaders, in particular, would do well to develop a spiritual discipline that every Pilgrim had to develop. We Christians are a “seafaring” people.

The Pilgrims were radical Christians but they were normal people. Their several month voyage to North America in a small, leaky boat was amazingly brave. Most people I know are in a small, leaky boat, in one way or another right now —  I know Circle of Hope fits that description! But even if I were not connected to that vessel, I would still have the leaky boat named Rod to deal with. Yet God calls me to set out for parts unknown. I need to become seafaring even if I am not completely seaworthy. (Good metaphor for us, right?)

You know you are gaining the spiritual discipline I call “seafaring” when you are unafraid of vast waters, you are adventurous, and you can procure a ship.

I am not sure any sane person is totally unafraid of vast waters. But a Jesus follower cannot be led by Jesus if they are not drawn to the ocean of eternity and brave enough to wade in. That impulse caused the Pilgrims to load their families (little Hannah!) on disreputable boats and sail for some place they thought might finally be a place where they could live their faith in peace. I don’t totally agree with their theology, but I admire their fearlessness.

To be seafaring, it also helps to be adventurous. I am not sure  a sense of adventure is totally necessary to travelling with Jesus. Some good Christians are going to either stay in the hold the whole journey or be seasick the whole time — that’s not preferable, but it has to be OK. But it will help if you love sea air, will climb up and furl the sails, are on deck to help in a storm and love scanning the horizon for the next destination to come into view. To follow Jesus, one needs to like travelling because He’s going somewhere.

One of the least appreciated factors in being seafaring is usually the most necessary — one can procure a ship. The Pilgrims had a very difficult time getting the funds to hire one. Some families had to wait nine years to be reunited before their handlers considered them worthy of space on a ship! Our church has spent no little effort trying to find a places to live in Philadelphia so we understand how hard the practical necessity of getting a vessel. I recently learned that the “stampeders” who made the daring trip to the Klondike in Canada to mine for gold also had to be seafaring. Part of their difficult journey included building a boat to get up the river to gold fields. While there were commercial sawmills operating, the cost of milled lumber was beyond the means of most. The majority were forced to resort to milling their own lumber by hand. This involved laying a log on a scaffold and then sawing the log lengthwise using a whipsaw. This was such a hard, two-man job that many close partnerships fell apart in frustration and exhaustion — and the end result was often pretty leaky! Jesus followers in general, but certainly their leaders, understand the frustrations that come with trying to get somewhere that is hard to get to. Lord help us build the boat and stay afloat.

Circle of Hope miraculously floats and gets places. The danger inherent in that success is that fearless, adventurous, skillful people, like the survivors who invaded of North America were, are prone to thinking that their courage and power made them great. It is surprising how often people start out with God and then ten years down the road of their holy experiment are much more like their home territory’s power structure than they imagined. Most people are seafaring in the Spirit until they get somewhere; then they revert to thinking they’ve got it together or are in charge of keeping it together. Meanwhile, Jesus is looking over his shoulder wondering why they stopped following.

I led a little exercise in the meeting and had people rank themselves on a scale of one to ten in relation to the basic traits of being seafaring: unafraid of vast waters, adventurous, can build a ship. (Try it!). Then I dared them to stand when their number was called. I don’t remember any ones or twos. But we had a healthy representation all along the rest of the spectrum. There are a lot of different kind of people on our boat — I think that makes it a good ship if Jesus is the captain. I think Jesus wants us all to get there together. Some of us will always be more daring than others and a few of us will always be the ones who lead us to build our vessels. But we all need to develop a taste for sea air and need to enjoy the wonder of being saved, no matter what is over the horizon in that vast sea.

Be a people : Three key ways to be the real people of God

Building community, , , , , , ,

When we read the Sermon on the Mount and the rest of the New Testament, we are tempted to read it in a WEIRD way, as individuals who are getting personal instructions. As a result of reading it that way, many of us stopped taking Jesus seriously a long time ago because we know we cannot follow those instructions! In the middle of our fragmented daily routine we lose hope of ever really following Jesus.

That’s one of the reasons we named ourselves a circle of hope. Because the teachings handed down to us are not meant primarily for us as individuals, they offer a vision of what maturity in Christ looks like for Christian communities. God’s work of redeeming the world is always about gathering a people. Sometimes when I refer to that basic fact, or just use the term “a people,” it seems like an odd thing to say. I have to explain, “Our church is a people. We are forming a culture centered on Jesus.” It seems like a foreign concept.

The Sermon on the Mount by Karoly Ferenczy

But forming a circle has always been God’s way. He started with calling Abraham and eventually formed the people, Israel. Jesus, the ultimate expression of what Israel was to embody, gathered a community with his twelve disciples at the core. After Pentecost, those disciples were sent out to gather in anyone in the whole world who would be a part of the people of God, formed where they lived. In light of this community-building mission of God, the Sermon on the Mount, in particular, is not a new law that judges individual merit, it is a vision of how to embody Christ. It describes the ongoing incarnation of God. It describes the slow, relentless transforming work of God in a people that spreads from where it is planted.

In his book Slow Church, Christopher Smith highlights three important  practices that are essential to forming a people in Christ. They are also elemental to what has formed Circle of Hope as a people

1. Staying

It is astounding, actually, that a church which twentysomethings began, is characterized by people who have stuck around. The lifespan of a Philadelphia-dweller is often brief; and we have experienced our share of people being among us for a short time. We don’t judge people who are moving around; they’ll probably find their place. But we know that the work of redemption is best done by people who stay. I decided to stay for nearly twenty years now; and our other pastors and many other leaders have done the same. Many of us even bought houses and made a commitment to stick around. Rootedness in a church community and in a place makes a huge difference in what God can do.

Monks have always modeled this for me well. Some contemporary Benedictines in Iowa talk about their vow to remain with their community this way:

We live together, pray together, work together, relax together. We give up the temptation to move from place to place in search of an ideal situation. Ultimately there is no escape from oneself, and the idea that things would be better someplace else is usually an illusion. And when interpersonal conflicts arise, we have a great incentive to work things out and restore peace. This means learning the practices of love: acknowledge one’s own offensive behavior, giving up one’s preferences, forgiving.

The way of Jesus needs to be planted in a place to grow. We don’t carry it around in our imaginations; we can’t just search for it virtually. We have to grow it as it grows in us in our bodies in a place.

2. Dialogue

It is also amazing that we can stand the amount of conversation we rely on to form our community: all those cell meetings, team meetings, Mapping meetings, email, etc! It makes a few of us more than a little irritated. One woman told me she was leaving the church — not because she didn’t feel loved and did not love everyone, she just wanted less ; she wanted to go to church, not be required to do all that relating! But if we are the body of Christ (and we are) our dialogue is like the communication of neurons in a physical body’s nervous system guiding the movement of all the organs and limbs. We need it to be real.

Speaking the truth in love and having healthy conflict are fundamental to forming a people. Otherwise, faith is just a philosophy like all the others. So we work on it. Our cells are great at giving people a chance to speak the truth in love, not only because they create lasting relationships, but because they welcome in the next person to disturb the homeostasis and force new loving. We actually invite conflict with our annual mapping, our talk back times in the Sunday meetings, our doing theology times (like talking about sexuality last year) and in many other ways. We risk acknowledging our disagreement, believing that Jesus will be our agreement

3. Hard work and hard rest 

The world makes no apologies for demanding total allegiance to the workplace these days, making the workplace an all-encompassing community. In contrast, we keep insisting that allegiance to the kingdom of God is before all others and our primary vocation is found as part of the body of Christ, not as a worker in some enterprise run by someone else. Being graced with such great purpose means we are hard workers spending our lives extending God’s kingdom.

Flourishing as the community we have become took work; it has been a lot of fun, even joy, but it still takes work. To keep up the good work means surrendering to the fact that life is in Christ. Sharing love, time, tasks and money like we do sounds like the Sermon on the Mount, but it does not always seem practical to apply the teaching unless we truly find our life in Jesus. It takes concentration and energy! I love building cells, compassion teams, businesses and congregations; I love mattering, but no one should say mattering does not feel costly at times.

That’s why we need “hard rest” too. It could be called “hard” because we have to discipline ourselves to meditate, retreat and enjoy times of Sabbath. I am not talking about the dreaded idea of “work/life balance” that makes an individual the monitor of how all the hours are spent. I am talking about nurturing a culture of trust in God and others, anxiety free. We need to stop working so we can rest, play, dream, reflect, study and just be ourselves and be a people. Israel had the Sabbath day built into their culture. There is really no good work unless there is good rest, no realized ambitions unless there is dream time, few commissions unless there is prayer.

It is hard to imagine how we would apply the Sermon on the Mount and other scriptures that lay out the way of Jesus unless these three practices, among others, are at the heart of our life together. I think they have been at our heart and that is why we are still around. But 2015 will test them again. I hope we will stay, keep in the dialogue, work hard and rest hard. We are more necessary than ever in a megalopolis that needs to experience the people of God.

Participation: invitation or imposition?

Building community, Leadership, , , ,

So why am I writing my weekly blog post on December 29? For one thing, I should be out jogging off the extra five pounds I put on during the holiday. But for another thing, who in the world is going to sit down and read this post? It is December 29!

This is the bane of the info age, isn’t it? People are pumping out info from all the programs they use and then using their increasingly high-tech analytics to see if anyone is listening. The whole info machine is designed for people who want to participate. But does anyone want to participate?

Avoidance as a survival skill

I am not so sure people have the participation time or interest necessary for all the participatory things being pumped out. If I am any indication, a lot of us are not that interested in being wired up and analyzed all day. (That would make me “apathetic” on the analyst’s chart, I think). I think a lot of us are already on to the game and resist most of what is trying to get us to stop resisting and participate!

Pretty soon, I suppose we will all be required to participate just to get paid. And I don’t mean just do a job and get paid, I mean serve the ends of the product like you LOVE it. For instance, the newest business technique is to get all the corporation’s employees to be boosters online so advertising is organic and culture-creating. For instance, a consultant says: “a highly engaged workforce is also your most potent marketing tool to help build, promote, and evangelize your brand.” Tweet the product, pin it, post it, Instagram it. Capitalism meets social media. You”ll wake up in the morning and type up some cute thing your boss at Halliburton said so people will see the human side of Deepwater Horizon.

When a lot of us get wind of all that requirement our response already is, “Whoever, meet my blank screen. I’m out.” One of my friends says that the major psychological trait of the present generation (unlike the narcissism of the Boomers) is avoidance. Is the main communication skill required these days managing to avoid all that communication.

Can Jesus hope for participation?

I am especially interested in this because I am a communicator (I am typing this on Dec. 29, after all), and we, as Circle of Hope, have come up with a very participatory kind of church and a map for 2015 that requires a lot of participation which will mean a lot of communicating. Did we just get organized for a generation that is not interested in listening for more than 140 characters? — or, even more, who don’t listen at all, just consume images?

I think we might be that weird.

The corporations are actually going to try to steal our word “evangelism” and apply it to consumer offerings, as if what they produce will save people. So that’s one thing. But the other thing is that everyone with a smartphone (almost 60% of the population and escalating) already has skills in blocking out unwanted material, which is most of what’s coming at them. Yet here we are asking inundated people to believe we are not just branding Jesus and believe they should participate in his mission like the valued people they are.

How do you think that is going to work out?

Love’s pure light, radiant, beams from thy holy face

A life in the Spirit, , , ,

On Christmas Eve we will sing the mystery again with the song everyone knows and no one knows completely: Silent Night. A later verse that needs some concentration includes this line sung to the child Mary is holding: “Son of God, love’s pure light, radiant, beams from thy holy face  with the dawn of redeeming grace.”

That line reminds me of a couple of lines from William Blake that have meant a lot to me:

And we are put on earth a little space
That we might learn to bear the beams of love. William Blake

Bear the Beams of Love — Mary Southard

Awaken our hearts, Lord

Gerald May talks about Blake and the radiant beams of love in a book that has been important to me:

“I think William Blake was right about the purpose of humanity; we are here to learn to bear the beams of love. There are three meanings of bearing love: to endure it, to carry it, and to bring it forth. In the first, we are meant to grow in our capacity to endure love’s beauty and pain. In the second, we are meant to carry love and spread it around, as children carry laughter and measles. And in the third we are meant to bring new love into the world, to be birthers of love. This is the threefold nature of our longing….

Choosing love will open spaces of immense beauty and joy for you, but you will be hurt. You already know this. You have retreated from love countless times in your life because of it. We all have. We have been and will be hurt by the loss of loved ones, by what they have done to us and we to them. Even in the bliss of love there is a certain exquisite pain: the pain of too much beauty, of overwhelming magnificence. Further, no matter how perfect a love may be, it is never really satisfied. The very fulfillment of a desire sparks our passion for more; sooner or later we discover a deepened yearning within what felt like satisfaction. Even in their beauty, the beams of love can often seem too much to bear.” Gerald May in The Awakened Heart

Advent has me signing up for getting hurt again. Who’s with me?

Love is a lot to bear

I will have a lot of resolutions on my list, again, for 2015. Some of them will be the same as last year. But at the top of the list, I think I might put, “Suffer.” I mean, suffer with Jesus, the Son of God who is love.

I don’t mean that in some grandiose way, as if I were Jesus. I just want to use the capability I have, born of the capacity the Lord has patiently enlarged in my heart over years of loving me.

Oh yes, I want our church to operate effectively. I want to be successful in all the great plans we have made. I want to make good investments in buildings and business. I want to use our money efficiently. I don’t want to waste a minute. But we can do most of that and just get tired and irritable. We can do a lot of that with further arguments about justice. We can do a lot of that by exercising power and leveraging guilt and fear.

I want to act out of my heart connected to the heart of it all. I want to stay vulnerable to what Gerald May called “our passion for more…a deepened yearning within what felt like satisfaction.” That will cost us. But, at the end of the year, I want to have invested the year in eternity and to have experienced eternity invested in the year. The beams of love are shining. I want to bear them.

Being a network of congregations and why that got going.

Doing Theology, Leadership, ,

Some people discovered this piece among my pages last week. I thought I would share it again. It first appeared in the Dialogue Quarterly, fall of 2005

Let me say right off: we may use the 21st century word “network” to describe ourselves, but what we are doing is as old as Jesus. As usual, we’re ancient/future in our outlook.

That’s why we needed to put out this issue of the Dialogue. We wanted to focus on the network of cells and congregations that forms Circle of Hope because we sometimes seem strange to people. Supposedly, being a Network it is hard to “get.”

Maybe that is because people have been “got” by other thinking so the Bible is hard to “get.” One can hardly take a step in the Bible without running into God working through what might be called a network of people or without being called on by Jesus to form one!

I’m not sure the writers of the Bible would be able to “get” how most Christians in this era tolerate the enculturation of Christianity to the point that most Christians can’t form networks. Don’t you think they would be appalled by our racially and ethnically segregated worship? Wouldn’t they be amazed that many Christians think their country, their city, their neighborhood, their church, their cell is better than, or in competition with others? Wouldn’t they be puzzled at how many people resent the supposed imposition faith relationships make on their individual “freedom?” I do.

Like we are doing, I think the Bible-writers, if parachuted into Philadelphia or born here, would be very determined to perfect a network. They’d do it even when people in G’town complained about going “clear down to” Broad and Washington. They’d step it up when people in Kensington said, “So many people in the other congregations are so old!” They’d keep working it out when people in South Philly lost track of the fact that other congregations exist and vice versa, and vice vice versa.

So let me try to help us keep working with this. My goal is to take us back to some of the scripture that gave us a few of the major reasons we decided to be the church the way we are. If we hope to keep building a network of love and trust in our distant, skeptical culture, we’ll need a strong foundation to stand on.

Network

 

  1. Actually, we became a network TOO. The Holy Spirit has been inspiring similar things from the beginning.

We had the blessing of inventing how we thought God would plant a church for the next generation in Philly. We came up with an ancient/future answer: He’s going to do it like God is always doing things – bringing people face to face with him and with each other again.

Jesus had his own idea of “net” work:

“Once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore.” Matt. 13:47-8

We’re all kinds of fish in one net, too. Paul had lots of pictures to describe a network. This one is directed against individualists who can’t seem to stay connected.

“Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions. He has lost connection with the Head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow. Col. 2:18- 19

We want to live connected to the head, and so to each other like a body is held together.

  1. We had the basic goal to survive as diverse, touchable, incarnations of Jesus in a neighborhood.

We had the inspiration to do something a little harder than corralling a market share by appealing to felt needs and using clever branding. We want to be real and we want to live in our neighborhoods. So we came up with a both/and method for meeting that challenging goal. Each congregation stays small enough to be touchable and the church (network) is big enough to survive. We want the intimacy of smaller and the capacity of bigger.

For the writers of the Bible, this is common sense:

Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken. Ecclesiastes 4:12

Jesus and his people are always up against a lot. Standing alone makes us sitting ducks for evil. Intertwined, we are hard to break into wreckable pieces. We’re not proud enough, as individuals or congregations, to take the dangerous path of going it alone, just “getting ours” or just being “us.”

  1. We wanted to do our part to knit together the Philadelphia region with love

When we looked at Philadelphia’s balkanized condition, it cried out for reconciliation, and still does. Lot’s of people know about this, but very few people, especially Christians, organize to do much about it. We thought it would be a cop out not to do our part, so we planned to be a network, crossing the boundaries between the neighborhoods with our own love. We are neighborhood-based and citywide. Sometimes we use the word “glocal,” since Christians are transnational — global and local.

This is the kind of goal Paul would recommend, don’t you think? It is the kind of thing he says he was trying to do, too:

My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Colossians 2:2-3

We want to demonstrate this “unity in love” to a world that hasn’t seen it much and which thinks it is impractical. The newer translation quoted above traded the more literal “knit together” in love for “united.” I like to think of us as knitting – each person, each cell, each congregation linking with the others to form a whole piece of material. When you hear Paul talking about that, he seems to be implying that if we DON’T do that knitting, we will not have the “full riches of complete understanding.“ I think he is right. What’s more, if we aren’t knitters others won’t get a true picture of Jesus from us, as well.

  1. We wanted to give people an opportunity to get healthy and exercise their capabilities. Multiplicity helps.

The organic growth of cells propels new people into responsibility all the time because new leaders are needed when they multiply and everyone’s gifts are required to do the mutual care of each little “body.” We decentralized our mission efforts too, and called for people to start their own teams to lead us in whatever the Spirit could generate from us. This way of doing things creates ferment. We like that “chaos” because it requires the Spirit of God to generate it, direct it and keep us together in it. Having many people engaged heightens our sense of dignity and accountability. So we are flexible and accountable at the same time.

 Plus, I think pushing multiplicity is the kind of approach God has always used. The first church is the best example. After Stephen riled up the leaders in Jerusalem, the first church was attacked and forced out of town into the nearby territory. By telling the story of Jesus, they created the first network of churches.

On that day a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him. But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off menand women and put them in prison. Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went. Acts 8:1-4

When you have a system that is ordered by common love and faith and directed by the Holy Spirit it seems as crisis-ridden as Acts 8, at times. But handing everyone the responsibility to do their part wherever they are planted and expecting them to keep together in love seems like the best way to keep everyone growing into their fullness.

  1. The next generation is not a mass market, and we didn’t want to treat it like a market, at all.

Yes, yes, making church like a TV show “works.” A lot of things work that we wish did not work because people still don’t seem to understand what will kill them. Sometimes it seems pigheaded, but we don’t like to pander to people’s worst instincts just so they’ll come to a meeting, give money, or just like us. What we are trying to do instead is deliver the life and message of Jesus as a community in Christ. We want to be a safe place for people to explore God’s love as they are now. And we want to be discerning enough to keep our eyes open for where they are going to be next. We’re relevant and predictable at the same time. God knows how to speak everyone’s language, but that never makes the message inconsistent.

Some people have thought it is a little suspicious when they realize that we’re hard to “pin down.” We’re more of an amoeba than a corporation. But I think Paul was that relationship-oriented, too. Even when he was writing to believers he had never met, he presumed a common bond that would result in some good thing:

I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong– that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. Romans 1:11-12

Such mutuality forms a character trait that says a lot more about Jesus than most arguments about the Bible. In our postmodern era, being a people is more compelling than talking about what someone ought to “buy.” So, as cells, as congregations, between our congregations, and in relationship to the world at large we are trying to perfect sharing. We’re replicating the picture Paul paints in his letters:

God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. 1 Cor. 12:24-7

We may not have as well-developed and consistent character as we would like, but we are who God has. We accept that like he does. We’re not advertising ourselves. We are not a product. We’re a people.

That’s a lot of stuff in a few paragraphs, maybe too much, maybe too pared-down to make all the sense I would like. I offer it to help keep the dialogue going so we can listen to God and each other and end up creating the church the Lord would like to use next. So far, I think we have done a good job of listening and trying to keep up with him. We have, appropriately, bitten off more than we can chew and need God’s help to enable us to be what we are called to be. Let’s keep chewing.

Being Circle of Hope, “the network of cells and congregations who form one church in many neighborhoods” can seem a bit strange. Some people find it hard to “get.” But somehow that seems appropriate, since the world, in general, doesn’t seem to get God too well, at all. But I think God gets us and that makes all the difference to me.

Homo Economicus : Don’t let them buy Christmas

Doing Theology, The Mission, ,

black fridayWere the pundits right and the “Black Friday” holiday was toned down a bit this year? I am praying that fad dies.

God has given what I prayed for many times; it could happen.

Maybe the 1% have scooped up so much income it is impossible to be as gluttonous as the general populace once could be. Or maybe we have already been sold so many internet connections that “Cyber Monday” is what I should be praying about, now — I’m not sure. I can only hope that one day capitalism can lose its grip on the Baby born in poverty, who was soon to be the Refugee, and then the Executed.

My hope is always stoked at Christmas time.

Homo Economicus’ engines are also stoked at holiday time.

The holiday has become a competition for the soul of Christmas. Who will humankind follow and therefore see themselves in the image of? Will “Child of God?” win out? — that view of self probably still owns the hearts of most of my readers. Or will “homo economicus” prevail? — that view of self probably gets the majority of our inner space.

Our characters are formed from the heart out. When one relates to God she is formed from the heart out. She becomes a conscious child of God. Likewise, capitalism forms a particular kind of human, one that relates to the environment in certain ways – like they rush to stores on Black Friday in response to a trumped-up frenzy. Their innate desires respond to their environment, which is all about consumer spending. They are “homo economicus” — the being to whom the advertisements are speaking, the being the proponents of a capitalist view of the world see as natural.

There are many aspects of homo economicus that might be so normal to most of us we would not even consider them topics to think about. But if we are going to celebrate Christmas, it might be wise to think about them. Let’s just try one on today. (Is “try one on” just another of a zillion shopping metaphors we use to define our reality?). Try looking at just one assumption, the one about YOU, the ONE, the individual.

Above all things, “homo economicus” is an individual.

There is nothing generally wrong with being an individual — being a secure, capable individual is a good thing. Jesus is certainly in favor of the dignity of the individual – especially when it comes to individuals coming up against oppressive systems (like sin, death and evil!).

What capitalism does not tell you when it lifts up the individual is that it is also an oppressive system that makes you an individual in its own image. It teaches us that if we do anything that is collective or if we feel that being part of a community is a given, we are surrendering our freedoms to make voluntary associations built upon individual choice.

So lets start there. Here are three of capitalism’s assumptions about being an individual that wreck Christmas.

1) Homo economicus assumes individuals are autonomous

They think they are in charge of all choices and responsible for all judgment. They think no one is born with any innate or involuntary ties to community, including their family.

So when God, who is in charge and responsible, chooses to be born into a family and forms a radical community, that’s a challenge for homo economicus. The capitalist tribe (but don’t call them a collective) is working hard to erase the Incarnation by changing the character of the “holiday” to meet their perpetual economic interests. I don’t think it is a plot or anything, or even conscious; it is just what they do.

BaptismOfJesus2) Homo economicus believes individuals are self-made

Capitalism encourages creativity and self-expression over obedience. Thus, the poor are always told to create their way out of poverty according to the rules of the economy. If they are disobedient – won’t create themselves but stay dependent, or if they subvert the laws that protect the economy, they are punished. Tom Peters says, “We are all CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc.” as if that is just a reality.

So when John the Baptist, our Advent person of the week, refuses to compete with Jesus and tells his disciples “I must decrease and he must increase” that seems kind of crazy. He’s obviously giving away the brand he made and de-creating himself – at least according to homo economicus.

3) Homo economicus thinks individuals own their bodies and the their capacities and have no obligations to society to use themselves in certain ways.

Homo economicus is not an individual like a hermit, they are an individual like a predator looking for someone a bit further down on the economic food chain – or they are at least trying to get to the IPhone 6 before someone else while supplies still last. They have been taught that reality is looking out for oneself. Like Michael Novak bleakly describes, these individuals “wander alone, in some confusion, amid many casualties” on the “wasteland at the heart of democratic capitalism [that] is like a field of battle.”

Killings By Police-ProtestsOur friends had a die-in at the Eagles game last night — at the Eagles game, that is, the scene of the society’s exaltation of battle for the the entertainment of those who can pay — the perfect capitalist event.  They looked a lot like baby Jesuses, laying out in the cold, being jeered by disappointed, many drunk, game-losers. They were prophesying; demanding that black lives matter. They were like God in Jesus, laid in a tomb to break the power of sin and death, subjecting divinity to the indignities of humanity. In the incarnation God takes on a body and then completely submits that body to the good of others. That is how a child of God is fully himself or fully herself. We are not submitted to evil forces and so surrendering our individuality, we are individuals full of the obligations of love.

I can only hope that Black Friday dies. Maybe the U.S. Americans will tire of being in a traffic jam of self-interest every time they leave their doors or log on. Already my friends tell me they are sick of social media because everyone seems like the CEO of ME, Inc. and it is tiresome to be subtly (or not-so-subtly) manipulated for someone’s self-interest every time you look at Facebook.

Many of my friends hate Christmas for similar reasons. I think they hate the Christmas stolen by homo economicus and turned into a capitalist holiday. If that’s you, please don’t hate Christmas and don’t hate the people who probably don’t consciously know they are ruining it any more than you consciously thought of them as having a philosophy. Jesus is still wheedling his way into some manger-like situation waiting to surprise them with the fact that they are saving their lives and losing them.