:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

Over the weekend our kitchen was full of bowls with hacked up apples, huge pots boiling with water, a food mill, and rows of quart jars. The promise of homemade applesauce for the long winter prompted us to spend the bulk of our Sunday hard at work in our kitchen scrubbing, cutting, boiling, and ladling.

I like to play the part of the menial slave who just focuses on one big project: washing the apples, cutting the apples, etc. My wife is far better suited for the supervision and “big picture” part of canning. She’s good at reading recipes and devising a plan.

I’ve never been good at following recipes. I usually forget something. Knowing this tendency, I could stand in front of a cook book for hours trying to make sure I got it right. If I was in charge of making the applesauce by myself, there’s a chance I could still be standing in front of the cookbook today.

When you’re canning something, you need to follow the instructions carefully to ensure everything stays sterile and that you cook your fruit/vegetables enough. The instructions are important, but the nourishment comes from putting them into practice and making something. No actions, no applesauce, no matter how well I think I understand the instructions. In fact, the instructions aren’t doing me much good without the applesauce they’re supposed to produce.

Theology often needs more applesauce.

That is to say, if theology provides us some critical instructions and guidelines relating to the nature of God, they’re only useful to the point that we actually meet the God we learn about. Our nourishment is knowing God and doing his will—it’s like eating a warm loaf of bread.

For all of my pouting about following recipes, the irony is that I often prefer just reading theology over putting it into practice. I’m malnourished because I miss out on God’s sustaining presence. If I’m not producing fruit that will last—or fruit that is “preserved”—there’s a chance that I’ve put too much value on learning “about” God rather than living “with” God.

Recipes are useful for pointing us in the right direction. We need good recipes just like we need good theology, but if the recipes don’t lead to something substantial and life-changing, we’re probably just starving ourselves.

I take my metaphors to their natural conclusion, which I feel is my warrant as a writer. So, when someone says, “I go to church to get fed,” I can’t help thinking of a baby sitting in a high chair with his mouth open and someone stuffing food into it. Fussing and spit up is part of it.

That metaphor of being “fed” at church has been a powerful one. When Willow Creek Community Church  conducted their church-wide study called Reveal, they discovered that they needed to help their people become “self-feeders.” In other words, mature Christians had grown too dependent on being spoon-fed truth. Church was not a self-serve buffet, but rather a series of high chairs.

We need teaching and instruction, especially if we’re young in the faith. The Bible is tricky, but we also need to learn how to pray and serve others.

Have we possibly associated church too closely with being fed spiritual truth to the exclusion of some other important things?

And related to that, How responsible should mature Christians be for their own instruction in the faith?

The difference between now and most other times in Christian history is that we have access to incredible resources such as books, blogs, online videos, and podcasts. We have accessible commentaries, study tools, and hundreds of trained teachers publishing books that will crack open the Bible for us.

There are some amazing books being published by seminary professors right now that languish in obscurity between the academy and the church because they’re a little technical at times. Make no mistake, teaching yourself is hard work.

I’m not trying to say that pastors preaching sermons are unnecessary. Rather, I wonder if it’s time to reimagine what being “fed” could look like and whether we focus so much on being fed that we forget about the other things that our churches could do. In the process we can take a lot of pressure off our pastors and allow them to focus on ensuring we are becoming spiritually healthy, living as obedient disciples, and serving others where needed in our communities.

I personally know that it’s much easier to spend ten hours pouring over a commentary because Paul said truth is important. However, I’m not quite as fast to jump to the aid of the poor in my community for a few hours, even though we see examples in Acts of the early church providing for orphans and widows, to say nothing of James.

Focusing on teaching truth is pretty easy for folks like me, especially those of us who enjoyed seminary. However, teaching and instructing is just one part of the larger picture. In addition, it may be possible to still do it well without reinventing the wheel.

I’ll be honest, I’m not a lover of sermons. There have been sermons that changed my life, but I think there could have been many, many more life-changing sermons if the pastor stopped talking after fifteen minutes and we focused on putting it into practice as a community. In other words, it’s good to teach that Jesus delivered people from evil spirits, but I’m just as interested in taking time on Sunday to pray for people who feel tormented by temptation.

Each denomination has its strengths when it comes to teaching and preaching. I come from a background that was heavy on teaching, so I’m writing from that perspective—hoping for a little more practice and a little less head knowledge when I gather with believers in community.

I’m aware that we need diversity and that my experience will differ from others. I’m also aware that these are big, systemic and tradition-based matters I’m raising today. Change, if it ever happens, would be slow.

However, I think we need to step back and imagine some new possibilities:

What could it look like if we took some of the teaching pressures away from our pastors and placed it on ourselves?

How could we ensure that teaching still happens?

Would our pastors be able to minister a little more effectively with less teaching responsibilities?

I had to confront one of my fears a few weeks ago. It’s a bit too private to share all of the details on a blog, but if I had to list the top three things that freak me out, I’d say this is right up there. It’s the kind of fear that I can’t control, that I know can only be resolved through prayer that I’ve been too afraid to seek.

A few weeks ago, I decided to take action. I wasn’t facing anything life threatening or uncomfortable, but I was in a situation that made it really easy to face that fear. The freak out was pretty awesome: sweaty palms, beating heart, short breaths. I was a ball of fun at close quarters in the elevator that day.

And then something changed. I gained an understanding of the actual source of my fear, and I realized that I’d completely mischaracterized it. It wasn’t quite as bad as I thought, even if it still kind of freaks me out.

By staring into my fear, I discovered a weak point in its defenses, and you’d better believe I’m praying into that weak spot with everything I’ve got.

On Becoming Less Fearful

I had a chat with some classmates at my 10-year college reunion, and one guy asked how we’ve changed over the past 10 years. One friend said that he is now less fearful after working through so many hard times at his first job. He cares far less about what people think of him, and he is far more confident as takes risks and pursues challenges.

In a sense, his first job blasted him with so many sources of stress and anxiety that they soon lost their power. He saw them at their worst, and he realized that God was able to sustain him.

There are real things to fear in this world, but so much of what we fear is insubstantial, lacking teeth. The substantial parts of our fears may knock us around when we face them, but God is able to deliver us because Jesus is Lord over all.

Facing our fears often seems like a terrible at idea in the thick of things. However, we’ll never have a chance to experience God’s power and deliverance unless we own our fears and let him begin working in us.

I have found that deliverance is often a process, a series of stumbling steps forward. As I discovered in the elevator that day with my nervous faith, God can break through and begin to heal us when we face our fears.

I used to be a cluttered pack rat that clung to possessions I had no business keeping around. Moving to Connecticut changed that quite dramatically through the twin forces of necessity and shame.

When we planned our move to Connecticut, my wife wisely sat me down for the talk. We had to make a budget. I sat down to it kicking and screaming. I hated to think of limitations on our spending. As we came to grips with our limited income due to my career change from a mindless nonprofit drone into a hard up writer, we realized that we needed to downsize—big time.

I never would have put our extra book shelves up for sale. I never would have given away six liquor boxes worth of books to our local library. I liked our table. The couch was sorta comfy. The sleeper sofa was my idea in the first place. They all had to go.

Our storage shelves, our lawn mower, and all of the work we’d invested in completely renovating our home—all of it had to go. We had to move into an apartment that was half the size of our home. Some things we sold, but quite a few things were given away.

It was tough to part with so many things all at once. They were all part of the life we’d been planning at our home in Vermont. 

Moving day wasn’t easy. We drove our truck in and our landlord acted like a disgruntled child, throwing his hands up in the air dramatically when he saw how much stuff we had. Despite all of our sorting and thinning, we still had too much stuff. We filled our closets to the gills. My in-laws took a car load of items home with them.

We lived in a state of chaos for a few weeks. The rabbits weren’t happy. We eventually organized our lives to a certain degree, but it still felt cramped in our apartment. A year later we moved into a nicer apartment with a storage unit. That took the pressure off until a cross-country move loomed.

As if we couldn’t thin out any more, we set to work once again, dishing off yet another chair, our new kitchen table, and a bunch of my seminary books. We knew how to thin out by this point. It’s a miracle anything from our time in Vermont remained.

I’ve thinned out our possessions and moved about five times now, and I don’t miss one thing that I gave away or sold. Even the furniture that means something to me is replaceable. I’ve grown far less attached to my clothing, books, and furniture after passing through so many “thinning sprees.”

When you see how you feel about these objects in retrospect, you realize how important it is to love your family, friends, and even what you do for a living.

In retrospect, I can see that it was insane (for me personally at least) to think owning a nice house was more important than working at a job that I loved, doing work that felt significant and fulfilling. The house was the cart before the horse. I thank God every day that my wife was accepted at the University of Connecticut, that we sold our home in Vermont, and that I had to piece together some kind of writing career from our dark little Connecticut apartment surrounded by storage containers and books.

Having purchased so many things that I deemed important and then giving them away on such short notice changed me. I saw myself shift from really wanting certain items to living without them again and surviving just fine. It’s like shock therapy for the consumer lifestyle.

Perhaps some would say that I’m poor in possessions and property, but I would reply that I’m rich in time and meaningful work. Those two assets are priceless.

Having gone to seminary, I sometimes think that I should be able to whip up some pretty sophisticated and profound prayers. It’s not that I took any classes on “Effective Prayers Before Meals” or “King David’s Greatest Hits.” I just think that with all of this theology crammed into my head, I should be able to formulate some really awesome prayers.

OK, I’ll be honest—theology really does change how we pray. However, theological training does not make one particularly better at seeking out God, listening to his Spirit, and speaking to him.

While my theology has helped me pray with more power, there are some prayers that I simply can’t improve. They seem sort of lame. What’s even more surprising to me is that a lame prayer can still be quite effective.

Here’s my lame prayer. At the start of each day I say something like this: “God, I offer myself and my work to you and your purposes.”

I suppose I could say more. Heck, I’m a writer. I could get that sucker up to 500 words in 20 minutes. What I have there always seems good enough because it drives at the heart of what needs to happen.

When we offer ourselves to God and open our lives to him, that’s often all he needs to get started.

That prayer isn’t a guarantee that every day will be good. I still need to keep myself on track, focus, and make good decisions. I can still make selfish decisions or lose my temper. I also need to pray a lot more than that simple sentence.

However, by offering my day to God and letting him work through me, I’ve also moved myself away from taking all of the credit. Pride is a huge struggle for writers, and I’m sure I don’t even know the half of my issues with it. If I finish my day and want to take all of the credit for my accomplishments, I know that I didn’t offer myself to God as an act of worship.

If I feel like God has carried me throughout my day and empowered me to do my work, then I have a deeper sense of fulfillment and joy because I’ve experienced God’s presence in my life and drawn glory to him.

The difference is subtle, but you’ll know it when you see it.

God wants to work in  and through us throughout the day. Sometimes it only takes a lame prayer to change everything.

How do you carve out time with God throughout the week?

Read more about creating spiritual “white space” to meet with God at Faith Barista today: How Ordinary You Holds Extraordinary Value.

You haven’t really lived until you’ve sat around the dinner table with a bunch of Catholics in their 50’s and up who braved the ruler-brandishing nuns of Catholic parochial schools. It sounds like they survived a military campaign or a long stint in prison.

“And then the nun slammed that kid’s head smack into the chalkboard…”

I kid you not. That is a real story.

There are lesser offenses, such as the nun who paraded the aisles with a ruler and whacked every single kid on the knuckles because one person talked. Even the Catholic school I attended used the same policy of punishing everyone for the offenses of the few—this was a world where ADD and ADHD remained relatively unknown.

Of course there were some kind nuns about, but they never make it to the dinner time story selection.

After escaping something like Catholic school, it’s awfully tempting to mock what you once feared. That’s why the scene in the Blues Brothers is so hilarious and over the top. Anyone who has ever cowered before a nun loves the idea of a nun who exchanges her ruler for a sword and who can levitate when angry.

When we move away from the power of someone or something we used to fear, it feels really good to mock it. It’s like you’ve confirmed that it no longer has power over you because you can laugh at it. We swing away from one extreme of fear into another of joy and humor.

A lot of former fundamentalists such as myself have done our fair share of “swinging” as well. We swing in our beliefs over the end times, the nature of truth, judging others on appearance, the authority of the Bible, politics, ethics, and who knows what else.

I have a lot of friends who are swingers—that is, former fundamentalists who have swung away from their former beliefs into  a different notion of Christianity altogether.

One of the problems with swinging, is you alienate yourself so completely from your past, that you don’t understand how it has shaped you. I can call myself a progressive-ish evangelical all I want, but at the end of the day, I’m always going to be tempted to choose the non-fundamentalist path.

When I swing away from fundamentalism, I don’t understand how it impacts me or where its beliefs come from. Swinging leaves me vulnerable to blindsides, especially in my history of theology.

And this is nothing new for Christians. The fundamentalists did their own swinging away from liberalism, not realizing they were operating within the same confines set up by the agenda of the Enlightenment where all knowledge had to be grounded in scientifically verifiable facts—hello inerrancy.

I am pretty happy to swing away from fundamentalism into the relatively undefined world of progressive-ish evangelicalism, but I’m often reminded that swinging brings its own problems. I need to not only understand the impact of fundamentalism on my own life, I need to appreciate the ways God is working among fundamentalists today.

The truth is, if the Gospel I believe in is really true, then God has not swung away from the fundamentalists, evangelicals, progressives, or any other Christian camp. If we’re all devoted to the same God, then he is, in a sense, immovable.

God does not swing and shift with the times. Our perceptions of him will shift because we see in a mirror dimly, but God sees things as they truly are.

The amazing thing is that despite seeing us all as we truly are, God will not swing away from us. And even better yet, God is not afraid of nuns.

My wife was watching a British film called The Servant as part of some research. The movie was made in 1963, and when I walked by I had to laugh. The beautiful young woman who was a main character in the story had hair that was the short but puffy and curled style that you may find among senior citizens but no where else today.

She was also listening to the big band music that I associate with a by-gone era.

All of the cool, hip things from 1963 did not connect with how we define cool and hip today.

Humor works the same way. Have you ever tried to watch an older comedy? Some comedians are timeless, but at a friend’s suggestion I watched a classic comedy that was made in 1938 and didn’t laugh once. It was described as hilarious and screwball by critics, but I was bored.

Fashion, music, comedy, and who knows what else shift and change so radically from one generation to another.  Each generation has its own way of expressing its values—anything from reverence to humor will shift from one generation to another.

Last week a lot of folks were sharing a stat from the new book called The Millennials which tries to give a picture of this generation’s relationship with the church. The big money statistic was this: 70% of millennial think the church is irrelevant.

I suppose I didn’t find that shocking. In light of how radically our culture shifts with merely our movies, how we relate to God is also bound to change. The church has a relevance problem today, but I don’t think it’s quite as bad as we think.

In fact, we don’t have to let it continue to be a huge problem.

Read the rest of this entry »

I had a theology professor who once said, “Theology is not supposed to make you stupid.” At the risk of trumpeting the obvious, I like to ask myself sometimes, “Is my theology making me stupid?”

It happens sometimes.

Stupidity creeps into our theology when we take one aspect of it too far and allow it to dominate the other parts of our lives. This is particularly tricky with matters of making decisions and discerning God’s will (i.e. predestination). When it comes to making one of the most important decisions of our lives—who you will marry—predestination is lurking in the background.

I don’t think I can quite do predestination and free will justice in a small blog post, but let me at least say a few things before moving on to some thoughts on how we make important decisions, especially about love and marriage. For starters, the Bible holds us in the tension between making our requests known to God and interacting with him, while also teaching that God can set people apart and direct them.

We have extremes between “I make up my mind and do what I think God likes” and “I literally only do what I sense God telling me to do.” The former means that I like breakfast and I think God likes it when I eat breakfast, so I eat it every morning without stopping to sense if the Spirit is leading me in a different direction at the start of my day. The latter means I’ll sit and go insane waiting for God’s permission to eat breakfast every morning.

God has something to say about our decisions, but he doesn’t want us to become crazy robots who only seek input. Why else would Jesus tell us to make our requests known to God? We live in this tension where we seek first God’s Kingdom purposes and lay our lives down, while also making our requests known to God and expecting guidance and provision.

There is a huge buffer zone of mystery here.

This week’s Faith Jam is on the topic: “Finding the One,” and our theology always creeps into how we pursue our relationships.

Questions such as, “Is he/she THE ONE?” push us toward theological insanity. We could end up second guessing whether this guy or that woman is THE ONE, and we’ll forget how to prayerfully seek God’s direction in our relationships and make good decisions based on what we hear from God. Worrying about finding THE ONE simply isn’t helpful.

Does God have something to say about who we marry? You bet! However, to try to discern God’s divine foreknowledge in the midst of a relationship puts the cart way before the horse. And besides, who can think clearly about a theological mystery in the midst of a new relationship?

Trying to find THE ONE is an unhelpful bit of speculation based on a misapplication of theological mysteries. I’ve seen the fruit of people who have been completely stressed out over finding THE ONE or whether a certain person was THE ONE, and it’s not pretty.

God wants to direct us and help us make decisions. However, finding a spouse isn’t quite like a high-stakes search for a needle in a hay stack. There’s nothing I know of in the Bible that says we all have only one person who is perfect for us.

I only find very level-headed teaching that God gives different gifts of singleness and marriage to different people on different timetables. Our decision-making process is no different from daily life: seeking first God’s Kingdom, making our requests known to God, listening to God, and then obeying God. Adding anything else extra-biblical doesn’t help us with our decisions, especially those related to marriage.

I never prayed more than before I dated my wife. I wanted God’s direction throughout the process.

Looking back, I can see the wonderful mystery of God at work with us. God was both leading me and giving me the desires of my heart. The process of seeking God’s will should bring us closer to God, not stress us out or turn us into robots who only seek input before acting.

God works with us in the midst of our big decisions, speaking in so many different ways, and I hope that brings us to a place of peace and comfort. I’m pretty sure that’s what he wants for us.

Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to pray about what I’ve been predestined to have for breakfast.

I like to drive to church with worship music on. It often helps guide my mind to the right place. I sometimes see it as putting on my “game face” for worship. In other words, I’m putting on my mask.

This past Sunday I realized that may be a problem.

The fact that I feel the need to somehow change myself into someone different is an indication that I’m not always living my day to day life in touch with God’s Spirit. While it’s good that I could at least realize it and take steps to tune back into God, am I only taking these measures when I’m on my way to worship God in a room full of fellow Christians?

The word hypocrite comes to mind.

Honestly, this whole process is one of the reasons why I go to church: I need reminders and accountability to stay connected with God. Worshipping in community reminds me to pursue God, even if I don’t find most church services today particularly helpful in actually, you know, meeting with God. They tend to be rather busy.

From what I can see, my struggles with hypocrisy have an up side. I at least get an indication of when I’m not on the same page with God. The trick is to only care about what God thinks about this.

We all need to be built up by time with God. We need to be strengthened by the Spirit’s power whether we’re alone all day or  interact with hundreds of people.

When I feel that tug to get my spiritual “act” together for church, I have a clue about my need for God. The trick is to confess my misguided motivations. I need more of God all of the time, not just when I’m around other Christians.

That’s the problem with hypocrisy. It usually leads us to do good things for the wrong reasons. In the case of Christianity, hypocrisy can be exhausting and terrifying. We worry about what others will think about us if they find out who we really are. I forget that I typically have no problem overlooking the flaws of others, but if someone really looked at me, it’s all over.

I’ll be honest with you, I feel that tug to sit with God right now. I’m just sitting in my living room on a Wednesday morning. No one will see the immediate impact of God on my life, but I hope that as God changes me and I live for him, those incremental steps will make me the kind of person who can drive to church at peace with God, not worrying about the way I’ll appear before others.

I’ll still take my mp3 player along just in case I’m in the mood for some music.

I’m not really sure I can write the following post without offending some people. However, this issue comes up often enough, that I think it’s worth addressing head on. I’ll do my best to speak of my personal experiences, and I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to judge or condemn anyone’s calling.

About ten years ago, I thought I would enter into full time ministry on staff at a church. I never thought I would end up writing full time, though I had hoped to one day write a book. The more I thought about the dynamics of ministering on staff at a church in a salaried position, the more I became personally convinced I should not go down that road.

I hope that every church handles money, power, and ministry well, and therefore I think we need to talk about it. There’s a huge elephant in the room, and we don’t always address it: Churches hire pastors to do a job for them. If a pastor lets his people down, the congregation can fire the pastor.

Perhaps a little context is in order.

I heard horror stories in seminary about the way churches handled their pastors. I ate lunch with pastors who lived under the threat of losing their jobs because their eschatology wasn’t quite right, they didn’t succeed as counselors, or their congregations didn’t like the new praise songs.

In a rather extreme case, a pastor who lived in a parsonage was fired and told to vacate immediately—leaving him and his family in a terrible position.

I know that there are plenty of good stories about happy pastors and churches. I’m not out to drag anyone through the mud or to question anyone’s calling. What I do want to talk about is money, ministry, and how the two work together in the power dynamics of the church.

I’m not out to justify myself or to criticize anyone specifically. My beef is with our system, which may work in some circumstances, but has clearly proven less than satisfactory often enough. We stand to gain quite a lot if we can talk about these dynamics openly.

I’ll lay my cards on the table up front by saying that I support a particular ministry financially. That ministry relies on freewill offerings. In addition, there are some folks who send me free will gifts to support my writing ministry. I have no problem with financially supporting someone who is in the ministry.

However, we could run into problems when a Christian minister counts on a group he or she serves to provide a set amount of money as a salary. There is an unspoken power dynamic that may come into play when a minister is relying on specific people to provide a set amount of money. I’ve seen churches handle it well, and I’ve seen churches handle it poorly.

I’ve felt compelled that I personally, at this point in my life at least, can’t take an officially salaried ministry position. I have good friends who minister quite well as salaried pastors, and for that reason, I want to ask, “What makes a salaried ministry position work?” and “What do we need to watch out for when we have a salaried minister?”

Tuesday’s Post: What’s at Stake for Pastors

Wednesday’s Post: What’s at Stake for Congregations