Taking the Time

It's here...the rest, the pause. Do you notice it? That time the year when time slows down? I just finished all the pre-Christmas tasks. It's very quiet outside and in, and now, for just a few days ahead, I can see that the way is clear...to notice something or someone else, to listen, to be in the moment of now, to enjoy Christmas present. God's gift of time is surely hallowed by the pause.
Let us rejoice and be glad in it...right now.
Peace to you and yours.

Against My Mother's Advice

One of my guiding principals for raising children has been to "catch them being good" and ignore them when they misbehave. My mother taught me this, and for the most part, it's worked well. I have been ingrained with this principal so much that it spills over into the way I treat adults. When people are misbehaving my first impulse is to ignore them, and not give them attention that they might be craving. Most bad behavior in adults doesn't seem to rise to the level demanding my own outspoken criticism.
Being a pastor, this is a hard burden to carry.  I've often been asked to be the "enforcer" of a moral code from some in my flock who think it's part of my job to correct other people's behavior.
 "That so-and-so!...Why can't you say something to them?"
Not many of them want me to correct their own behavior, of course.
So now I'm grieved by my brothers and sisters in Christ whose bad behavior I can't ignore.  I did march with my Muslim neighbors a few weeks ago, chanting "ISIS is not Islam" in front of the White House, because I could understand how they felt. I feel the same way when someone does something despicable in the name of my religion.  Solidarity with them seemed appropriate.
So, now, against my mother's advice, I have to pay attention--and call attention--to bad behavior. I can't ignore ignore it anymore, those--mostly hateful words--that are coming from people who self-identify as Christian.  I'm speaking out, signing my name to various petitions circulating in the wake of the latest round of hate speech, saying that their brand of Christianity is something I don't even recognize. 
On the other hand, I can't help feeling that all this public shaming of bad-behaving Christians is just giving them more attention and amplifying their message.  Does evil need attention in order to thrive?  Mom, I think I can say that we're on the same page about these sorry Christians, but I sure wish that they didn't get all that attention.

Why is there a boat in your sanctuary?

One of the organizations that shares our building--Arlington Neighborhood Villages has people who regularly walk through the church sanctuary to get from their office to the church office. One of their delightful volunteers ran into a church member last week and asked "Why do you have a boat in your sanctuary?" Aside from being just a fun thing to have in a sanctuary, the boat and its various appointments, like a "sail" and a "wheel," have helped us visualize the metaphor: the church is like a boat because...
we need the wind of the spirit to make it go
everyone has to work together on the crew
sometimes there are funny words we use, that only other 'sailors' know: port, starboard, fore and aft
on a boat, you need to wash (in the baptismal font) and eat (in communion)
sometimes there's stormy seas
Every week until Thanksgiving, we're using the boat in worship to play with the idea of church. We were inspired by Joan Gray's book, Sailboat Church, in which she advocates for a paradigm shift from a "rowboat" church--something that moves on human power--to a "sailboat church" that moves on the power of the wind/Spirit...Nice to remember and it's just fun to see all the kids, big and little playing in the boat on Sunday morning.

Feedback loops in a culture of generosity

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:34)

So is your treasure behind a fence or on a table? I’m starting to think about the stewardship season, and the relationships between all of our collective wealth and our individual wealth, and what that has to do with the purposes of God.  The church is a funny community.  Part of our business is inspiring generosity so that more people are inspired to be generous.  That is, it’s the church’s job to call people to faith in Jesus Christ, so that we will be able to live more and more like Jesus, and give ourselves away.  Seems like a circular kind of purpose.

And so it is. We gather money and resources in order to give them away and in the process transform ourselves and others into better givers.  It’s a feedback loop: more generous people mean more and more life to share around more and more (or longer and longer) tables.  In the classic feedback loop, every pass through the loop amplifies the signal being fed back. When you want to short circuit the feedback loop, you put up a barrier so the signal stops.  The signal eventually dies.  If we want the message about a generous life style to die down, we can hoard our wealth.  If we want to call people to follow Jesus, we can practice generosity.

I read something from a person who was teaching about stewardship in order to inspire participation in the PCUSA’s campaign for starting “1,001 New Churches.” This is right on the money (pardon the pun):

“The church does not teach stewardship in order to float its budget for ministry that has not yet happened. The church teaches stewardship as a way of life. ... in communities awakening or re-awakening to God, almost nothing can be more important than realizing that your life, and all its assets, are a gift [and so are to be given away in order to fulfill their purpose! Ed.].

The feedback loop effect is well-documented in communication theory. Jesus taught about giving oneself away as the way to live in order to find true life: "If you try to save your life, you'll loose it, but if you loose your life for my sake (that is, for the right reasons), you'll find it."

Church Disrupters

“Disrupters” have been all over the business news for several years now. Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC—are all writing stories and making lists about those people for whom “no one company is so essential that it can't be replaced and no single business model too perfect to upend.” [Caroline Howard, Forbes Staff]  Venture capitalists and looking for them; business schools are studying them; aspiring entrepreneurs want to be like them. These are people who don’t just think outside the box, they smash the box to build something new. It can make them wildly successful and rich. You’ve heard of some of the businesses they’ve started—Netflix, Amazon, Uber, Kickstarter, airbnb—or maybe you haven’t. Even those of us who aren’t social media savvy can still see how the pace of change is disruptive to our lives, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. However, Good News is here, too. We’ve seen this before.

Jesus was and is a consummate disrupter. He afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted. He moved through his territory on a mission to show us that in order to participate in the Kingdom of God a person has to give up all that comfortable stuff that keeps us in thrall to something less. God isn’t satisfied with our current business model for running the world. Jesus’ message is that there is something entirely new, just waiting to be born, that demands we do some box smashing. I follow a blogger who put it this way in a recent post:

“Jesus is an artful, courageous-but-loving disrupter of homeostasis. His goal is to help people, like us, who are prone to resisting change to keep changing in God’s direction. We’re working on being disrupted and disruptive.” [Rod’s Blog]

Following Jesus will most likely put us in risk-taking positions. Sometimes we will be indecipherable to others. Until the new business model takes effect, those who cling to the old model will likely ‘poo poo’ what's happening. What change is God provoking for the new business model at the little church with a big mission? ...and don't mean just the financial one.  There's spiritual disruptions to take place.

What About Worship?

Our little church with a big mission is trying to sort out some things about this peculiar thing we do on Sunday mornings. What is happening on Sunday in this big room we call a sanctuary and why should anyone care?  It's such an odd thing, worship.  It's completely different from anything else we do in our normal routines. It's a time we turn our attention to something or someone that can't be perceived in ordinary terms. We hope that whatever we do, we'll be touched and moved and, if we're fortunate, transformed into something beyond ourselves, by someone beyond ourselves.
But getting people to think about and describe something so intangible is difficult, particularly if we don't have the language for spiritual encounter. (See my prior posts)  So how to help people sort out the particulars of what makes for good, or excellent, or rotten worship?  What makes for an encounter with God (whatever that is) in a particular time and space? How do we even talk about that?  We frozen chosen are not necessarily comfortable with describing our spiritual lives, much less improving them. Still...this is something worth doing.

Around the Building...

With all the talk about our excess real estate assets in the mainline churches, we sometimes overlook the importance of a neighborhood witness in the area surrounding a church building.  Today, over 80 people met at this location to discuss how to better serve the elderly residents of the National Capital Region.  A group representing the "Neighborhood Villages" concept met in the Fellowship Hall for training and planning.  I think about the multiplication factor--how many thousands of lives may be touched with compassion because of the people who met here today.  It's no small thing to leverage the gifts of meeting space left to our congregation by the saints of the past who built the building and the saints of the present who maintain it.  I continue to give thanks for the amazing work of God's people from this location, whether or not they are "church-goers." They are all part of the work of Jesus.

What are we doing here? Thinking about the Church's mission of religious/spiritual Christian Formation-- Part 3

In my last post, I posed a particular question that could come up in using the metaphor of "language" to think about "religion." 

 A language is arbitrary, and morally neutral, in the sense that there exist many spoken human languages on earth, all contributing to the great human enterprise of life, without any sense in which any one language is superior to another.  It’s this particular characteristic of language—its moral neutrality—that might give one pause about using this metaphor to describe the phenomenon of religion.  Many adherents to a religion are not used to thinking of their own religious community as morally neutral.  Many would claim that their own religion is superior to any other.  What might be gained if we continued to use the “religion as language“ metaphor in this sense?

One benefit might be to open up our understanding of what makes for a “good” religion and what makes for a “bad” one, if we can even use those descriptors. Maybe we can use the language metaphor to explore other characteristics of religion, other than “good” or “bad” to see what other ideas emerge.

For example, there are dominant languages and small group languages.  Dominant languages are spoken by lots of people, and sometimes collectively abuse the power of that dominance to the detriment of non-speakers.  Sometimes the harmful effects on non-speakers of the dominant language are not obvious to the dominant speakers, but they are to the speakers of the minority language. However, human beings cannot avoid the power-dominant problems in language by refusing to speak!  In fact, remaining silent would contribute to the problem.  Languages can evolve and people can learn to communicate across language barriers in places where the speakers are willing to listen to and learn from each other.

Other characteristics of a robust language are a deep history, a large collection of literature, and a shared cultural context that transcends time and geography.  In this sense, a language is “true” when it contributes to the flourishing of human life lived in a particular cultural community.

Here's another way this metaphor can help us focus: How is a language transmitted?  Parents and care-takers, formal and informal schooling—a great number of cultural venues make it possible for children to learn a language.  It’s a lifetime job.  However, we would consider parents or care-takers defective if they decided not to teach a child a language until they were old enough to choose for themselves.  We aspire for our children that they learn to communicate in some language well enough to flourish in life and contribute to society.  We also might aspire for them that they learn more than one language.  However, to learn any language well, they have to acquire the skills of at least one particular language.

I want to propose that “growing disciples of Jesus Christ” is like teaching a language: the particular, robust spiritual language that is called Christian.  The nurturing of Christian disciples is like teaching people the particular language that nurtures spiritual health in the direction of Christian spirituality, not spirituality in general, but a spiritual shape that is like Jesus.

Does this metaphor help us to understand our mission to call people to discipleship?  Is it like teaching a language?

If we’re going to take seriously our church’s mission to “Call people to Discipleship” we’re going to have to think clearly about what that means, and put into practice the community steps that make it real.