:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

We are lucky to have the multi-talented Alise Wright as our guest blogger for today’s post:

I don’t know if music can technically be a part of your DNA from a scientific standpoint, but I’m pretty certain that music was etched into my soul from the start. From my earliest days, music has played an integral role in bringing me joy.

Likewise, the church has always been a part of my life. Some of my first memories are in the church. I can’t think of a season when the church hasn’t been a key character in my existence.

It makes sense that the two would find their way together.

It started from an early age, singing and playing the piano with my family music group. We were like the von Trapp family singers, only with cassette tapes of Amy Grant and Sandi Patti. And there were only five of us. And none of us were running away from Nazis. But otherwise, just the same.

Later music and faith came together in our church’s choir. Then again in college at the Newman Center. I’ve played the organ for a small mainline church and a keyboard stack in a large mega church.

Music and faith are inextricably linked for me.

But music as a ministry? That idea was a bit more elusive.

The overwhelming majority of my church experience has taken place in congregations where women were not permitted to be leaders.

No one ever said that women couldn’t serve, they just couldn’t lead. Women could teach Sunday School or work in the nursery or beautify the church building or be a part of music. However, the distinction between serving and leading always seemed to make these things the lesser ministries, and because I’ve never been one who liked to be pushed to the sidelines, I simply didn’t think about playing music as a ministry. It was just something that I did as an act of worship.

Then music was taken away from me for a season. I was told that I could attend church, but not have anything to do with music.

I thought that I could put it away. I could still worship from my seat on Sunday morning. I could still sing along to my MP3 player. I could still play the piano in my home.

But though this was all true, there was something missing.

The ministry aspect of music.

No matter how much I wanted a more prestigious seeming ministry, music was the ministry to which God called me. Playing was a way for me to enter into worship, but it was also a way for me to help others do the same. By doing this, I was participating in ministry.

And when I was ministering to others, God ministered to me.

If the creator of the universe can minister to me without a fancy title, I don’t need a title to minister either.

About Today’s Blogger

Alise Wright is married to her best friend and is mom to four incredible kids. She loves knitting, writing, playing keyboards in her cover band, and eating soup. She also loves making new friends and you can connect with her at her blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

About the Women in Ministry Series

The Women in Ministry Series is a collection of guest posts that aims to:

• Provide an alternative to the women in ministry debates by telling the stories of women in ministry.
• Encourage women to explore their God-given callings.

You can stay updated on the latest post each week by signing up for the weekly e-mail list. (You also get a free E-book if you sign up in January)

Comment Policy: Everyone is welcome to leave a comment. However, this series takes for granted that women are called by God into every facet of ministry. This is not the place to debate that point and such comments will be removed. Women have been told “no” in far too many places. This is one place that is committed to saying “yes.” For more about the comment policy, read here.

Next Week’s Blogger: Tamara Lunardo (of Tamara Out Loud)

When I began giving my latest E-book away, I had to ask an important question: Why am I writing this book?

Giving up on any hope of making a profit had a way of sharpening my focus, training my heart to think beyond bank accounts, page views, and marketing platforms (though I will see a few benefits along these lines in the long run). Giving a book away is all about a passion for an idea, believing in my message to the point that I’m willing to share it as widely as possible at any cost.

I didn’t hold back with my latest E-book project. I created something that has value. Even a free book shouldn’t be a waste of someone’s time. I offered readers a chance to buy it for $.99 because I wanted to both provide a simple download option and a chance for them to support my work. However, the free download links on my site provided the same ideas and the same format.

Part of my motivation for this latest adventure in publishing had to do with helping to clean up a really big mess—a mess that I’ve contributed to over the years—divisions among Christians.

As I’ve shared my thoughts on unity and processed how we can make things better on this blog, a central idea emerged. It was not only worthy of an E-book, it was important enough to give it away.

I don’t plan on giving all of my books away this widely, but I know that I’ll do it again. It has been a refreshing reminder that storing up treasure in heaven and blessing others can sometimes fall aside, neglected while I try to build up financial security. Sometimes we have callings to fulfill and wrongs to set right.

Sometimes I need to try something new—something that doesn’t quite make sense but feels just so right that I can’t resist the call of adventure.

This post is part of Bonnie Gray’s Thursday Faith Jam. Visit Faith Barista today to read more stories about adventure.

When I put together my first draft of Coffeehouse Theology, I sent it to tons of friends to get their opinions. Tons. I’ll be owing my friends favors in return for the next two generations.

One of my friends said something like this, “You seem to like all of this emerging church stuff, but you don’t point out what’s wrong with it.”

Insert: double-take, wounded look, and passionate reply, “Something wrong with the emerging church??? What do you mean?”

I’ll just stick a footnote here in the middle of this post since no one reads footnotes and note without any foot that this was in 2006 before it became fashionable to stop emerging… or whatever.

Still, my highly intelligent friend shocked me. How could he doubt the goodness of this new movement trying to recover practices from ancient Christianity and critiquing the ways Christianity had been infected by Enlightenment Rationalism? I mean really, is that not awesome sauce—that is, before Parks and Recreation taught us to use the phrase “awesome sauce?”

While my time with the emerging church stuff taught me to be jaded and suspicious about the Enlightenment’s effect on Christianity, I hadn’t yet thought that this emerging stuff needed to a taste of its own medicine. Could I find the downside?

As to the details of that, I’ll leave that to the experts. All I know is that I used to think I was on team awesome. I could see the flaws in fundamentalism, mainstream conservative evangelicalism, Catholicism, and mainline liberalism, but I could not see any flaws on team awesome.

How could I see flaws on team awesome? Would I not join team awesome unless it had all of the correct answers?

Clearly the people with the flaws were those not on team awesome… All that to say, it took me a little bit of time before I could see my friend’s point.

And here’s the thing: We have lots of team awesomes. I just read about a NEW team awesome on a popular Christian blog. Only this time the blogger mentioned the conservative flawed team, the liberal flawed team, the emerging/missional flawed team, and the NEW team awesome that doesn’t have any flaws.

The new, cutting edge, revolutionary, game-changing stuff never has any flaws because its part of team awesome. That is, until it’s not.

Reading that post brought me back to that conversation with my friend and the first time that I realized I was a member of a made up team awesome. After looking over the emerging/postmodern context stuff, it didn’t take long to find some flaws that tarnished my image of team awesome.

We were now team pretty good.

In all of this, a lesson from writing a Bible commentary may help. I know, I know, you probably think I’m losing it after reading that last sentence. Just bear with me for a moment…

When writing a commentary about a tricky passage, Bible scholars start with the least likely meaning of a passage and then work toward the most likely meaning. In other words, they rarely say something is “unbiblical” or “wrong” and they rarely say that one perspective is the “certain” or “biblical” meaning.

I always liked this approach to Bible study because it keeps us in our place, seeing things in a mirror dimly, realizing that God’s thoughts are not our own. We all have our most likely take on a Bible passage, but we don’t need to create unrealistic team awesomes that are 100% correct and don’t have any flaws.

At our very best, we’d all be kicked off team awesome if it did exist.

We’re stuck with team pretty good, providing the most likely answers to life. What may surprise us is that a “pretty good, most likely answer” is really all we ever needed.

There is one question you can ask while studying the Bible that will help you see more, learn more, and hopefully apply more than you ever could by just reading the stories.

The Bible is full of people who were just like us. It was written by people just like us. The details are there, tucked away in the spare prose and poetry. The trouble is how to unlock those details so that we can relate to the people in the Bible and sort out what it means for us.

We’re not used to reading books like the Bible. There are a lot of ways that’s true, but one obvious detail is that the Bible wasn’t typed on a computer with infinite pages. The writers of the Bible couldn’t pick up legal pads at Staples or drop off a manuscript at a printing press.

The Bible was written on scrolls—precious, limiting scrolls that could only hold so much. Long-winded writers need not apply for writing the Bible.

These authors were masterful in their economy of words. They distilled stories down to the most important details. If we see something in the Bible, no matter how small the detail, we need to ask, “Why is this here?”

This one question will help you dig into the backstory and the implied situations described in each story.

There are lots of other really good questions that will help you study Bible. However, this one question:

• Forces us to slow down
• Helps us read carefully
• Places us in the events recorded with new eyes

If we can answer the question, “Why is this here?” we may be able to figure out what the Bible has to say to us. We may find hidden treasures. We may even find out why we’re here.

Working in public spaces, mainly cafes, provides no end of opportunities to evaluate and judge people. I like to think that I’m really good at this. That is, until I realize I’m an awful person. Then I just downgrade myself to so-so at judging others.

Some conversations I happen to overhear. Other times the conversations boom from their sources, invading the ears of everyone within twenty feet. Even my headphones can’t save me. Yes, some people talk THAT LOUD in public.

While listening to conversations, I often catch myself classifying people into types. There are the super-impractical professor types who theorize all day, the bumper sticker activists who are awesome at talking loud and bumping into me when they walk by, and the religious groups who gather for one on one Bible study or “training” that often devolves into us vs. them conversations of one sort or another.

The moment I sort people into groups, I begin to either dismiss them or to develop common cause with them. And here’s the crazy thing: I don’t even know these people, but I’m already sorting out in my head the people I’d rather have over for a cup of tea with us and our rabbits.

All of this is based on looking at how people are dressed and hearing snippets of conversations. Once I create these divides, it’s infinitely harder to be kind to people when I’ve pegged them as too liberal, too conservative, too lazy, too combative, too quirky, too impractical, etc.

I think something happens online as well. We see a profile picture of someone, read a snippet of text on Twitter or Facebook, and we immediately stick people into groups. We write up profiles for people we hardly know, bulldozing over the complexities of their lives and the experiences that shaped who they are.

What gets me is that my type classification system destroys personal stories. While we often adopt the beliefs that our families, friends, and institutions pass on to us, it’s also important to note that our beliefs and actions are shaped by our stories. Speaking for myself, my stories have everything to do with how my beliefs have evolved over time.

For example, a reader of my website may read my reluctance to support the wars of the United States and immediately classify me as some kind of liberal, pacifist, wussy who hates American or whatever. However, you can’t understand my feelings about modern warfare until you learn about the ways war has impacted my family and friends, the research I’ve done, and the stories I’ve gathered together.

Knowing this about myself, I need to extend this same complexity and mystery to others. As I think about Christians living in peace with one another, to say nothing about any other daily interaction, this tendency to pre-sort people into groups and types before actually hearing their stories cuts us off from opportunities to love people for who they are, right where they’re at.

When I catch myself thinking that someone is a “type,” I need to repent. I need to ask God for new eyes and grace to share. However, I still think all bets are off for people who don’t have an inside voice.

We’re welcoming Jamie Wright as this week’s guest blogger in the Women in Ministry Series. You probably know about her incredible blog Jamie the Very Worst Missionary. 

I’m just gonna come out and say this: I never, ever, in a million years, wanted to be a “woman in ministry”. Never. And I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would actually be one.

I grew up far from any church influence, so the very narrow example I had seen of women in ministry came mostly from television, where they were often portrayed in the form of nosy, judgmental, gossip-loving Bible-thumpers. As a teen, when I finally crossed paths with some real live women in ministry, I found them to be…well…nosy, judgmental, gossip-loving, Bible-thumpers. (“You know who’s going to burn in Hell? You, honey.” That’s how a youth pastor’s wife so gingerly shared the Gospel of Jesus with my 15 year-old self.)

Many years later, when my husband and I began the process of moving our family into full-time ministry, I wasn’t exactly aching for a chance to join the ranks of Pastor’s wives and Missionaries – at least not the ones I’d been exposed to, with their Bible tracts and sensible shoes, and their strong, loud opinions about who is going to burn in Hell.

The truth is, the women who ministered to my own wanting soul weren’t “women in ministry” at all. They were good neighbors and generous friends. They were soccer-Moms who took my babies off my hands for a few hours at a time, when I most needed help. They were steaming coffee dates where no subject was off limits, where laughter flowed freely and tears of anguish were met with tears of empathy. They were gentle spirits who whispered the Love of a Savior into my life, slowly and sweetly, because they understood that, through friendship, Grace abounds. It just does.

Those women didn’t work in churches. They had government jobs, they were part-time consultants, some were homemakers, one was a personal trainer, another ran a daycare. They taught me that there’s a really big difference between “women in ministry” and “women who minister”. And they showed me that a woman’s ability to deeply impact the world around her, her value in ministry, isn’t limited by her job title (or her husband’s).

That means that Missionary or not, I am a woman who is called to minister. Pastor’s wife or not, you are a woman called to minister. Sunday school teacher or not, your wife/sister/daughter/friend is called to minister.

Our neighbors and co-workers are counting on us to use our God-given gifts and abilities to bring Hope to this broken world. Our families and our friends are depending on us, with our uniquely feminine voices, to speak into their lives with wisdom and authority. And the God who created us, in all our girly glory, has released us to feed the hungry, care for the sick, love the unlovely, and guide the lost.

He has invited each and every one of us into ministry. Even the chick who never, ever, in a million years, wanted to be a “woman in ministry”.

About Today’s Blogger

Jamie writes from her home in Costa Rica, where she lives with her husband and three sons. She is best known for candid conversations about life and faith on her blog, Jamie the Very Worst Missionary.

If You Appreciate Jamie, Read This

I (Ed, the owner of this blog) couldn’t invite Jamie to contribute to this series without thinking of some concrete ways to support her and her husband Steve in their ministry. Jamie had no idea I was going to do this, but I’ve been plotting  a special ask of this series’ readers. Here it is:

1. Steve and Jamie are trying to figure out their next step in ministry. Will you commit to praying with them?
2. Whether they stay in Costa Rica or move someplace else, Jamie and Steve are going to need some serious bucks. They have poured themselves out in ministry to others, and I would like you to prayerfully consider donating toward their ministry. In particular, can you give at least $10? They have some major expenses coming up that we can help them meet so that they can focus on their ministry and family. Go here to donate: Donate at PayPal Now.

About the Women in Ministry Series

The Women in Ministry Series is a collection of guest posts that aims to:

• Provide an alternative to the women in ministry debates by telling the stories of women in ministry.
• Encourage women to explore their God-given callings.

You can stay updated on the latest post each week by signing up for the weekly e-mail list. (You also get a free E-book if you sign up in January)

Comment Policy: Everyone is welcome to leave a comment. However, this series takes for granted that women are called by God into every facet of ministry. This is not the place to debate that point and such comments will be removed. Women have been told “no” in far too many places. This is one place that is committed to saying “yes.” For more about the comment policy, read here.

Next Week’s Blogger: Alise Wright

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, but you haven’t picked up my book Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life, I think I know what your problem is. You’ve probably gone to Amazon and noticed that the best possible deal is a $2 – $3 used copy that probably has all of the awesome passages underlined.

SPOILER ALERTS!!!

Who wants to read a book with all of the underlining, stars, and exclamation points already inserted? And then you need to pay an extra $3 or $4 for lousy media mail shipping which ensures you’ll probably get the book sometime in 2013. If there’s still a scrap of the cover left on it, you’ll be lucky.

Sighing, you realize that it won’t be much cheaper to pick up the E-book version of Coffeehouse Theology for $7.99, and then you’ll be robbed of seeing the beautiful cover art. This is worse than a Catch 22. It’s like a Catch 44—twice as bad.

My Insanely Awesome January E-book Offer

But wait, there is hope. What if I told you that you could download every major book I’ve written for between $3.99 and $4.99??? Would you question my ability to do basic math? Though I wouldn’t doubt that, I’ve worked on these numbers for days now, and I keep coming up with $3.99 or $4.99.

The trick is that this super-awesome, mathematically impossible feat of book discounting is only good for the month of January. Here are the links you need to pick up all three of my books:

• Coffeehouse Theology is $2.99 at NavPress
• Divided We Unite: Practical Christian Unity is a free download (optional $.99)
• A Path to Publishing is $.99

Thanks for checking out my work. And believe me, this is a fun way to get my writing in front of lots of people, so please do share these offers with your friends who are curious about how theology works, wrestle with Christian unity, or dream about publishing a nonfiction book. You’re not robbing me by passing this offer along to as many people as possible.

And speaking frankly, even if you did rob me, I’m so bad at math I wouldn’t notice.

Did you know that everything in world history has been converging on a little point known as right now? Today is the most important moment in world history. Everything hangs in the balance. If we fail, the world will be ripped to shreds, not unlike a pillow factory attacked by an army of rabbits.

This is the chosen generation. We’re part of a great turning point, a time of transition. We are responsible for the great reformation of today.

The moral fabric of society will unravel if we fail. Floods and famine will destroy the earth. Life as we know it will cease to be (as in, we won’t be able to go shopping on the weekends and watch TV for thirty hours each week).

And then again, maybe not.

The clichés, alarmist rants, and calls to action shared above are common statements we run into on a daily basis. I’ve heard them from people coming from a variety of perspectives. They may advocate different views and priorities, but they all share a common belief that “now” is the most important time.

Maybe there are some urgent needs that we face today, but we don’t know when God is returning to set things right and we lack the insight to judge whether today is truly the most urgent or important point in world history. Most of the above statements are some kind of rhetoric aimed at stirring up the masses to take action. The sources of these statements are not necessarily the most detached, unbiased observers. That prompts me to ask a tough but important question…

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I watched my friends and colleagues share a video by a young man who claimed to love Jesus and hate religion. Some identified with his passion for Jesus and his desire to leave hypocrisy behind. Others weren’t so sure he could slam the religious practices that can be so central to following Jesus with sincerity, let alone the religious tradition that has been passed on to us.

Those who had their doubts about this young man suggested that religion isn’t just bad stuff. Religion can be anything from regular Bible reading to reading liturgy to fasting. We can do all of these things with either sincere or hypocritical hearts. In response to that, the supporters of the young man said, “You’re not defining religion in the same way as him.” To that I say: EXACTLY!

If anything, this young man has succeeded in proving that we need theology today, and for that, I thank him. Any time we see well-meaning holy fervor expressed with a jumble of confusing ideas, we see a need for theology. We can’t “just love” Jesus because no one has been able to do that—ideas always creep in no matter what. There is no pure way to love Jesus that can transcend the beliefs and practices that have been passed on to us. We always attach something “religious” to our worship, and if we try to break free from the past, we’ll just make up new religious things to pass on to others.

Theology helps us because it defines what we’re talking about. Theology constructs a common playing field where we can sort out what religion actually is and all that it means. Theology saves us from turning religion into this huge, enormous, awful embodiment of everything we hate.

This isn’t to say that theology wants to “save” religion. Rather, theology helps us see what it is and what it isn’t. In fact, every theologian I know approached his video from a similar perspective—trying to grapple with the ways this young man defined religion. If we fail to define religion, its advantages, and its disadvantages accurately, we’ll cut ourselves off from traditions, beliefs, and practices that have been instrumental in guiding Christians for centuries. We may also expose ourselves to reinventing Jesus into our own image without the stabilizing influence of tradition.

The downside of theology is that it can be quite dull. In fact, the problem with most theology texts is they begin by defining their terms at length and describing the current book’s position in an ongoing discussion. This is rather dull, thankless work that is hard to present to the average reader.

I struggled to present the basics of theology in an accessible format in Coffeehouse Theology only for one reviewer to say it was too simplistic to be of any use and another reviewer to say that I’d lost touch with how to communicate with normal human beings.

When we want to make sweeping statements about religion and our beliefs, we’re crossing into complex, daunting territory. I don’t slam this young man for his sincerity or desire to share his love for Jesus. I don’t think anyone is interested in that. Rather, this is a word of caution to make sure we know what we’re talking about when we speak of such large things as “religion.”

This Jesus vs. religion thing has been around for years. There were plenty of books and blog posts about it before YouTube was a sketch in a computer engineer’s notebook. As long as we have had this discussion, we have struggled to define what religion means. For most of us, religion has come to mean “anything we didn’t find life-giving in Christianity.”

Theologians can help us sort out religion, Jesus, and what it means to follow Jesus without tossing the good things that have been passed down to us. And even if we can’t figure out what they’re talking about in their thick books with tiny text, we should at least know that the number one rule for any theology discussion is this: define your terms.

We’re welcoming Sarah  Styles Bessey of www.emergingmummy.com today for the first guest post in the Women in Ministry Series:

There is my mother, of course. Can any woman’s story start without her mama, her first woman she watches? So I watched her, I took her freedom and confidence, her love for that well-thumbed Bible, into my bones. I can tell you how she grew up without really knowing much about this God stuff so when she somehow decided to take us to church, she came to Sunday school with me, passing out crayons, just so that she could listen and learn about her beloved Jesus, captivated. How she found herself in mothering us and found God there, too. In my later years, I watched her step out with my dad, gathering university girls, new parents, young couples, and friends around them, how she easily remembered their details, taught during home groups, cried and laughed, placing her hands on their backs to pray life into them, she feels like they are her family, I know.

Then there are the women in my churches. Because of the nature of our post-Christian society, we don’t do the mega-church thing too often here. So our communities tend to be a bit smaller, a bit more intentional, most of us are there because we want to be, cultural Christianity long since abandoned by all of our peers and parents. And in every Sunday service I attended as a kid and a teenager, there were women. They prophesied easily. They lead ministries. They preached. Taught. Read Scripture. Sang. Ministered. We sent them out as missionaries, single, married, far away from us, their smiling pictures tacked up to a corkboard in the foyer, a string of yarn connecting their pictures to push pins of their locations on the map.

Our pastor was usually a plural form.

I can tell you about Janet, whose husband was on staff with my own husband at our church. I was 22 when we moved there and, let me be perfectly clear, I was a know-it-all with a chip on my shoulder. This was no two-for-one deal, I huffed, I have a career, too, you know, and I am no pastor. It was Janet and the other gracious staff wives like Natalie, Bonnie, Sylvia, Jessamy, that revealed to me that I was a bit of an idiot, desperate for Jesus still. These women helped me to understand my own callings, my own vocation, to stop thinking so defensively, to learn generosity of grace. These women showed me the truth of life lived in ministry, they pastored me in the best ways possible, over time, gently praying, dismantling my brick walls by laughing, serving the least of these with joy, showing me a better way to live, forgiving easily. They taught me how to live a seamless life, all of my work an offering.

I can tell you about Pastor Helen here in Surrey, of her more than 30 years of, yes, “official” ministry. I can tell you about her daughter, Angela, my age, ferociously preaching in her knee-high leather boots on a steel stage. I can tell you about Idelette who turned her passion for stories and women into a life-giving movement worldwide. I can tell you about Nancy who started a small home for girls in the grips of life-controlling issues and decades later, hundreds of women are set free and transformed. I can tell you about Musu, Juliet, Nicola, Rachelle, Megan all working at the women’s residential home where I work, too, here in Canada in the daily trench work of saving lives. I can tell you about Tracy who leads worship with passionate abandon, jumping and preaching and calling out to God every Sunday in that elementary school gym where we gather together.

I can also write a line for the good men around us. The ones who support their wives as they are supported, the ones who serve as they are served. The men who listen when a woman speaks and can easily receive wisdom from her. Men who are not threatened by a woman who leads, who affirm friendship and respect and mutuality in their marriages, their work, their parenting. Good men, true men, strong to the core and holy.

Oh, can I tell you stories about women in ministry. And the reason I can tell you stories is because women have been in ministry, in all ways, in my world without question for a long time now. We left behind a lot of those gender-debates that wear a soul out and just got on with the business of loving God and loving people.

There is life here in the wide open spaces. When you stop waiting for permission from anyone but God, you’d be surprised how many of us there are here, waiting for you.

About Today’s Blogger

Sarah is a writer and non-profit marketing director. At her personal blog, Emerging Mummy she grapples with spirituality, theology, mothering, politics and almost everything else you’re not supposed to discuss in polite company. She lives in British Columbia, Canada with her husband and three tinies.

About the Women in Ministry Series

The Women in Ministry Series is a collection of guest posts that aims to:

• Provide an alternative to the women in ministry debates by telling the stories of women in ministry.
• Encourage women to explore their God-given callings.

Comment Policy: Everyone is welcome to leave a comment. However, this series takes for granted that women are called by God into every facet of ministry. This is not the place to debate that point and such comments will be removed. Women have been told “no” in far too many places. This is one place that is committed to saying “yes.” For more about the comment policy, read here.

Next Week’s Blogger: Jamie Wright (Jamie the Very Worst Missionary)