Enchanted Community

BLOG 7/3/2016. WHAT’S BEHIND OUR DISTRUST OF PERSONS?

One of the enigmas of the current and wearying coverage of the presidential campaign is the recurring report that while Secretary Clinton has stunning credentials, … that people “don’t trust her.” A couple of factors need to be introduced here. One is that we do, in fact, live in a culture of cynicism, and tend to be a bit suspicious of lots of things. The other is that we see in ourselves also a tendency to hide stuff that we don’t want others to know, so we naturally superimpose that on to others, such as Secretary Clinton (and other political candidates).

Perhaps it is our own confession that we ourselves tend to create personas, or something like ‘facades’ to hide behind. We want to project to others a more commendable person than we really see ourselves to be. As we say: We put our best foot forward, and seek to hide what we don’t especially want to be in the public domain. If Secretary Clinton has an obvious motivation it is that she has always be very ambitious, from her earliest days. She is an achiever. She wants to project a persona that will enhance her ambitions. Her opponents and critics want to pry away that persona, and when she is protective of it, it breeds their distrust.

I can empathize with her. I, at the tender age of 26 was ordained to be a Presbyterian pastor, and with that came the title: Reverend.  To be called ‘Reverend’ carried with it a call to create a clergy persona, and to act in a manner that reflected something other than normal red-blooded humanity, to speak a bit differently, to often avoid being totally honest, to dress as a ‘church professional,’ and to avoid being too earthy. It was an artificial life. I still had  doubts, anger, unanswered questions, hormones, etc. It was a clergy persona and a bit dishonest. It also meant that people didn’t know who I really was. ‘Clergy’ are not expected to confess their sins too candidly. And so one becomes programmed to hide one’s real humanity. That meant that it was a favorite indoor sport for many to gloat over the pastor’s failings. It also meant that those who were not clergy, would often assume their ‘churchy’ personas, when they were in the presence of a clergy person, i.e., to assume a more pious demeanor.

More recently this has come under healthy scrutiny. There has been a call for clergy and all of us to demonstrate authenticity, to come out of hiding. But to be thusly authentic ‘freaks-out’ some folk. The late Henri Nouwen put that in different words when he called upon us to seek clarity, to be transparent, to “seek littleness.” I like that: humility, freedom to be real, authenticity, etc.

We do live in a society /community of imperfect, broken, hiding, bewildered, frightened, protective-of-their-true-selves persons, … and who therefore create or assume a persona behind which to hide in so many human relations. But in our Christian faith, our first confession is that we are sinners, i.e., imperfect, guilty, frightened persons who do not want too much light shined on the real ‘us.’ Such a confession, however, enables true intimacy, true honesty, true freedom to be who we really are. This is the great leveller, the great democratizing principle in our Christian faith Jesus, who was in the form of God, did not seek equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself of no reputation. He was never in hiding. He was authentic and transparent. That made him a most amazing figure among all of the giant self-aggrandizing figures of his day.

We should not be surprised that the current crop of politicians are seeking to project the persona they want to public to see. We all do it to one degree or another. What is behind that persona is another question. Who is the real me? Who is the real you? What is there about me that I don’t want you to know? What is there about you that you don’t want me to know? That can remain a mystery, or the honest confrontation of that can set us free to be truly human and authentic. Our distrust of others probably begins with some suspicions about our honest with ourselves. What do you think?

http://wipfandstock.com/what-on-earth-is-the-church-13883.html

BLOG 6/29/2016. SO MANY MIXED SIGNALS: THE CHURCH

I sometimes wonder what the image of the church is (if any) among those whose only encounter with the phenomenon is formed by their exposure on the media. A young friend asked me over supper recently, the innocent question: “Why is the pope called the Pope?” That, in turn requires a whole historical background of the development in one particular expression of the church. And how does one explain the grandeur, the sheer splendor of the Vatican, with the teachings of Jesus about the danger of wealth.

But even the concept of: church, is hardly the whole picture. Somehow the church, in the design of Jesus, and the scriptures, is the recreation of the human community as God intended it to be. It is a people ‘called out’ of all other “lords and loyalties” to be the incarnation of a whole new community that incarnates their love for the God who calls them in Jesus Christ, and also who incarnate God’s love for one another. These form themselves into all manner of communities and colonies in a myriad of different circumstances, cultures, economic and social conditions, hostilities, and generations. There is no one expression. The church is a huge mosaic.

In the media one confronts all manner of good, bad, disgusting, thrilling, oxymoronic, contradictory, and awesomely beautiful folk—who identify themselves as the church: political arch-conservatives all the way across the spectrum to political and social progressives. So many mixed signals. One does need discernment, alas!

Even the venerable Apostle’s Creed (and Creed of Nicea) of the early centuries distinguished between “the holy catholic church” and “the communion of the saints.” The church refers to the whole company of the people that Jesus has called to himself and to new life in which he, himself, is the one true foundation—and then the communion of the saints, which word communion has the very intimate flavor of strong and knowledgeable relationships to it. It is a fact that one can celebrate, and be taught about, one’s Christian calling in larger assemblies, … but it is near impossible to have sensitive, knowledgeable, caring, and responsible relationships in larger assemblies, so smaller communions are required.

Jesus sought out twelve intimates to spend his months of earthly ministry with. (Remember, even among these there was a traitor.) Communion involves mutual engagement in being responsible for other real persons. Jesus said that wherever two of his followers were together in their identity with him, that he was there with them. Does that mean that my regular informal encounters with several of my Christian friends at the coffee shop, where we share a keen interest in each other’s Christian life and engagements, … is the communion of the saints? Or does my engagement with my pastor over beer constitute that as such communion? Or is my decades-old friendship with intimate friends now separated by many miles, but which is still vital and is a relationship that can be considered “the communion of the saints”? I don’t doubt it at all. Relationships in which I can embrace all of the one another” responsibilities spelled out in the New Testament writings and which is alive and dynamic meets the test.

As I have often written, the whole subject of the church is complex and ambiguous. Both holy catholic church and communion of the saints are essential components of the New Humanity that God is creating in the world. One friend offered the metaphor that these two expressions are like the phenomenon that aspiring mountain climbers experience: first, the staging area where experience climbers teach the aspiring climbers of the joys and hazards, physical demands, and unexpected components, … but then, secondly there is the base camp, that small group of climbers committed to each other’s welfare on the climb. I like that: the church, and the communion of the saints. Maybe this will help you sort out the mixed signals (or maybe not?). I would appreciate your comments

http://wipfandstock.com/what-on-earth-is-the-church-13883.html

BLOG 6/26/2016. THE FUTURE IS INEVITABLE … AND IRRESISTIBLE

Allow me to take you on a bit of a circuitous journey. The future is a very real threat to a whole lot of people, as we are watching their response in the world today. At the same time the future is always inevitable and irresistible, no matter how much one might want to return to the imaginary security of the past. This is a difficult reality for most people—as we will see, even those who pertain to be the church

I thought of that this past week watching Congressman John Lewis and his colleagues do  their ‘sit-in’ on the floor of the House of Representatives. It reminded me that when John Lewis and his young friends initiated the many protests against racial injustice those decades ago in the South, and formed the Southern Christian Leadership Council—they were futurists, and at the same time a sizeable portion of the African-American community, while wanting the end of segregation, at the same time prized the security of their African-Communities where they were the dominant majority and could practice their own customs and have their own leadership. They were torn, but the idea of a future where they had to compete in an integrated society was not popular with many of them. They wanted a just future, but were not quite willing to forsake the security of their own existing communities.

It is also true of the current Islamic phenomenon known as ISIS/ISIL. The Islamic Middle East got arbitrarily carved up by the colonial powers early in the 20^th century, cutting across ethnic, religious, and traditional boundaries and in so doing tending to obliterate what had once been a very dominant and culture-creating Islamic empire, that encompassed a large part of the Middle East, North Africa, Spain and Europe up to the gates of Vienna. It is not surprising then that there has emerged a group of radical Islamic people who want to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate and culture of almost a millennium ago so that they can return to that hegemony of the past.

We saw this in the Brexit vote in the UK this past week. Those opting to leave the European Union were demographically primarily the aging and rural Boomers who want to return to the day when “Britannia Rules the Waves” –which day of British dominance and autonomy from the rest of the world economy will never return.

And, sadly, I watch it in the church. In the city in which I live (Atlanta) I watch venerable old church institutions diminishing, closing their doors, selling their property and ceasing to be as their congregations age, their endowments run dry, and their whole sense of mission was only preserving the former days of their prestige. Here were magnificent sanctuaries, vested clergy, awesome performances of liturgical services, all the while assuming their permanence. But in so doing they lost their contagiousness with the gospel of Jesus Christ. They lost their sense of mission and of the future and of Christ’s passion to seek and to save the very real persons of new generations. Their future was in the past. They became, sadly, only stagnant pools of religious Christianity, and are being totally ignored by the emerging generation.

The Christian faith, and God’s people, however, have God’s future written deeply into their DNA. They pray: “Thy kingdom come (be coming), and Thy will be done,” with an urgent sense of the invasion of God’s future into our present. Jesus’ mandate throbs with this passion: “When this gospel of the kingdom shall have been preached to every ethic group / every nation, then shall the end come.” –the inevitable and irresistible future. God’s New Creation/Kingdom is where our security lies and it is full of change and challenges. But it is this world and its persons and its future that God so loves. Irresistible and inevitable. We should be on tip-toe!

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http://wipfandstock.com/what-on-earth-is-the-church-13883.html

BLOG 6/22/16. ORLANDO / PULSE: A CULTURAL DIASTOPHISM?

The events in Orlando, at the Pulse nightclub those two weeks ago have been so omnipresent in the news, and receiving so much commentary, that one wonders if they are in some sense a cultural diastrophism? A diastrophism takes place when the subterranean tectonic plates shift and in so doing obliterate or totally rearrange all of the familiar landscape on the surface above them. O, to be sure, there have been cultural tremors on the subject of same-sex relations for the past half century, or more, in church, in military, in qualifications for many places in society. There was the Stonewall Inn tragedy in New York in the late ‘60s, and others. But this event in Orlando produced an outpouring of grief and love for the gay community that was quite unique. Who would have thought, only a few years ago, that the names of the victims of the massacre in the Pulse would appear on the cover of Time Magazine, with their pictures and a very searching article seeking to interpret the even in sympathetic and compassionate terms to its readership?

In my own life, I have been the product of a very conservative Christian perspective. Growing up in the mid-20^th century, same-ex relationships was hardly a subject ever discussed in the polite society with which I was familiar. Among the conservative evangelical contingent within the Presbyterian Church it only became an inescapable issue in the late ‘70s when there was an overture to ordain practicing homosexuals. The debate over that consumed the church for all the years that followed. It was the watershed issue defining one’s faithfulness to Biblical authority (as my colleagues saw it). To be candid, yes, those espousing the ordaining of homosexual persons did, in fact, frequently sit lightly on Biblical authority. I spent decades in the leadership of the conservative evangelical organization within the Presbyterian Church, and engaged in many debates over this subject.

But the culture was shifting under my feet. I have found myself living in a metropolitan community, and in a wonderful neighborhood, with a large percentage of LGBT persons who have become dear friends. Even so I was pretty resolute on my own interpretation of such. But then again (as I have related in recent blogs) the majority of the world’s population is under twenty-five years of age, … and their cultural values are shaped differently.

For me the transforming moment was when I encountered two writers whose arguments I found quite inescapable. One is David Gushee, who is a dean among evangelical ethicists, and the author of the magisterial book: Kingdom Ethics. He is a professor at a local university and I have been drawn to his blogs. So when he admitted that he had changed his position on the whole debate, and written it in a book: Changing Our Mind, I was compelled to read it, and found it very persuasive. He, in turn, pointed me to a younger author, Matthew Vines, whose upbringing was identical with mine in both family and church. He was member of a large Presbyterian Church in Kansas that was of a conservative evangelical persuasion. But as a sophomore at Harvard, in what for him was an inescapable and traumatic moment, he had to admit to himself that he was gay. That being so he faced it head-on and returned to Kansas to engage his family and his church, and to take a year’s leave from Harvard and to all of the intense Biblical research on the controversial texts, etc. He has written all of this up in a very convincing book: God and the Gay Christian. For me the book was inescapable, enlightening and liberating to be able to get inside of the heart and mind of one whose upbringing in family and church so identical with  my own. He does not dismiss (or ‘whitewash’) the controversial texts. I needed this. I have had to face the conscious, and sub-conscious factors that have shaped me with new eyes. Gushee and Vines. They may have give us clues on a possible and inescapable cultural shift.  I commend them both. “O, the deep, deep, love of Jesus.” Stay tuned.

http://wipfandstock.com/what-on-earth-is-the-church-13883.html

BLOG 7/19/2016. AGING ‘BOOMERS’ CLINGING TO A WORLD LONG GONE

There is something sadly, or tragically, ironic about so much that it taking place today in this global scene. I’m watching it in both the political scene, and in the church (ecclesiastical) scene. The somewhat dominant culture that emerged after World War II, was the huge Baby Boomer generation, who after being radical for a time (the ‘Woodstock’ generation, etc.) then settled down to create a safe and prosperous generation, as they still had one foot firmly planted in the traditional ‘Greatest Generation’ of their parents. But then they became very conservative, by and large, and in economic, political, and ecclesiastical dimensions sought stability and control by creating institutions, and government that was comfortable for them, even while realizing due to the Viet Nam war, and other realities, that there were forces at work in the world where American hubris and strength didn’t prevail as the world became smaller and smaller, as the Cold War with Russia challenged them with near in-solvable problems diplomatically and militarily.

But then, like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, they went to sleep and slept through the revolution which was the result of the very world they had created. Their children, who were the Generation X generation, were enormously gifted, but cynical and attempted to avoid their responsibility in the emerging new world. They were followed by the huge Millennial generation, which were much more tuned-in, and creative, and transformational, … even as the world came closer to home. Ah! then the huge Millennial generation began to create the whole computer, digital, social media, Silicon Valley—the generation of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, … and a global, informational connectedness that their Boomer grandparents could hardly conceive. They broke the rules, offended the status quo.

The world was now on everyone’s iPhone, and the information age is now incarnate in Generation Y, and now Generation Z (or iY) which is now the largest ever generation. And get this: the majority of the world’s population in now under 25 years of age. But, alas, the aging Boomer generation, now is desperately clinging to an imaginary world in which they were more comfortable, more in control, and more familiar—that world in which they were dominant in post-World War II. So here we are with aging Boomer church leaders seeking to ‘fix’ the declining church institutions they had created, ‘fix’ the denominations that hardly register with the emerging generations, clinging desperately to the heyday of leadership produced by theological academies, and in which they had some influence. They are desperately still seeking to define the moral and ethical climate … and nobody is listening.

In politics it is almost humorously apparent in the current presidential campaign, as (ironically) the one candidate, who seems to see this huge shift in population and attitude, and the potential of the emerging younger culture, is himself the oldest of the three. The loudest of the three is himself the quintessential aging Boomers who wants to make the nation the dominant force in the world, … but the world has changed exponentially in the half century since the era he wants to reproduce. The difficulty is that in politics, Generation Y is unconvinced by what they see in Washington, and with the church they have simply abandoned the patterns of their parents and grandparents, and are creating new forms that are more intentional and relational and radical. The same generational crisis is seen in the UK, where the Brexit vote next week (to leave the European Union) is being aggressively sought by those same aging (and rural) Boomers who want to recover the day when the UK was autonomous—which day will never return in a global society. The moral, theological, political, ethical scene of 2016 is in a hugely different world than the aging Boomers can even comprehend. Wow! Stay tuned …

http://wipfandstock.com/what-on-earth-is-the-church-13883.html

BLOG 6/15/2016. “IT IS NOT GOOD THAT THE MAN SHOULD BE ALONE.”

The horrific carnage at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando has so many subtle ramifications and implications for all of us. One of them is that we are created to live in community and we do not do well when isolated. In the creation account, recorded in Genesis 2, there is the observation by God, the Creator, after he had created Adam that it is not good that the man should be alone. To resolve that need, God created for him a woman. Yet one one of the first tragic results of humankind’s rebellion against their Creator was the fracturing of that primordial community, as the man and woman began to blame each other, and to hide their nakedness from each other. What follows in human history is the sad account of jealousy, hostility, alienation of tribes from one another, warfare, and the total failure of human to prosper in an attempted autonomy.

The reality is that humans have a built-in need for caring community. It may sound strange coming from me, but the Pulse nightclub was evidently just such a caring community for the GLBT community in Orlando. Here were all of those GLBT (mostly) young adults engaged in all kinds of fruitful professions, and yet often having to hide who they were from family and working associates, who found each other and those others before whom they did not have to hide in a nightclub. (Was Jesus and his new reconciling community even a factor in their lives?)

The Old Testament promises that emerge piece by piece describing the new creation that God is going to inaugurate in the fullness of time …  has always the component that it is going to be a new creation in which there is peace between all of God’s creatures, i.e., “the lion and the lamb shall lay down together.” “I will make all things new.” Then as Jesus emerges onto the human scene he goes, not to the religious, but to real humans in all degrees of brokenness and guilt. Consider that the giant missionary of the first generation church could easily be labeled as a Jewish terrorist and murderer. That which Jesus accomplished by his cross is described as his ministry of reconciliation—reconciliation between God and humankind, and between humans themselves, so that they are no longer isolated from God or from each other. No one was excluded from Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation … sophisticated sinners, human failures, crude and effed-up sinners, economic sinners (greedy and avaricious), violent sinners, gentle and lonely sinners—you name it.

And what was their responsibility to each other? It was not to forsake the assembling of themselves together. This they had to do in all kinds of venues, considering each cultural and existential setting. Being together was not a place but rather a community of caring. (One can be terribly lonely in so many so-called church institutions, i.e. “Nobody knows my name.”) Every believer is to wear as his daily footwear “the readiness of the gospel of peace.”

In many totalitarian regimes Christian assemblies are outlawed, or restricted by the authorities to specific locations. But God’s children have a way of finding each other because they need the support of the others of God’s family. In Egypt, in recent years, the Islamic government has prescribed on certain places where Christians could meet, and made it a crime to meet spontaneously elsewhere. But God has a sense of humor. Ostensibly the largest Christian assembly in the middle east is in a slum located in the garbage dump for Cairo, and is the Coptic church of St. Simon the Tanner and consists of over 15,000 Coptic Christians who meet in a place where none of the ‘proper’ people of Cairo want to go. They have carved out a meeting place in a mountain of rock and there they gather and encourage each other and worship the God who has redeemed them in Christ. Their community is contemptuously known in Cairo as Garbage City.

A true church is where we who belong to Christ find one another and are equipped, where we are no longer alone, and where the most confused and lost and needy are not excluded.

BLOG 6/12/16. SOMETHING WEIRD: CHURCH MEMBERS IMMUNIZED TO THEIR MESSAGE?

Help me here. Is it possible that some folk become so overly familiar with the in-house life of a Christian community/church that they actually become immunized to its dynamic purpose of being God’s New Creation people? I was rocking along as a fairly well-accepted and appreciated pastor in a traditional church, trying to equip its members to be salt and light in the community, when I had an un-traditional idea for the morning’s sermon. If, I thought, God’s people are to be those well-equipped and contagious messengers of the life and teachings of Jesus, and if they have signed on to be his faithful disciples by virtue of their baptisms, … then they ought to be able to share that ultimate reality in some simple terms to their compatriots in the pew on a given Sunday morning. Right? … Wrong. At a given place in the sermon I gave them an on-the-spot assignment to find a partner near them and to share their experience of new life in Jesus with that partner. Wow! Those who were still thrilled with their new life in Christ were eager and ready, … but those who had been content to be passive partakers of the services and liturgies and church-night suppers, … but who felt no responsibility to communicate what they considered their own private spiritual experience were, to put it mildly, really irate with me and charged me never to embarrass them again like that.

It was then that I began to ponder the possibility that comfort-zone Christianity, that made no demands of discipleship, could immunize a person to the true life of discipleship, and put them in the “Many will say in that day: ‘lord, lord,’ and I will say to them: ‘I never knew you.’” It stands to reason that if Christian faith is having Christ living in us, then that passion which motivated him to give his life, to be a herald of grace to the spiritually lost of this world, would be present in us. Right? Jesus came on a search and rescue mission to real flesh and blood sinners. Why then are not all those who name his name, contagious with that love and able to lovingly and sensitively communicate it?

Or there was a time when we had a team of proponents for evangelism at a denominational conference center for a summer, and with our team of eager young adults found all kinds of creative ways to communicate our purpose. But that didn’t please some of the denominational staff, so they came unannounced to our doorstep to express (in none too polite terms) their displeasure with what we were doing. Mind you, these were ordained denominational staff, O.K.? So one of our gentle young team members asked them how they came to Christ, and to share their faith experience with us. That ignited their next explosion and their retort that their faith was a private thing, and none of our business. Wow! Church members who not only were immunized, but who had totally missed the dynamic of faith in Christ.

Or again, a wonderful team of mostly young adult, college and seminary young people we had recruited to do a fruitful Christian outreach in the midst of the annual civic orgy called Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Along with a coffee house, music, and other media, … our director gave one absolute requirement, namely that in the five days of our experiment, that they sit down on the curb with someone they didn’t know, and introduce the message of Jesus,  and write it up for us. For several of them, gifted young adults who had grown up in the Christian church, this was a life changing event, and for several it was actually a converting event. They had never had to take their faith outside the Christian community before. Over-familiarity with the in-house experience had immunized them to Christ passion to seek and to save the lost. Tragically, this is all too common. All of us inside the church need to be regularly re-infected with Christ’s passion for lost men and women, and our calling to be his missionary arm.

http://wipfandstock.com/what-on-earth-is-the-church-13883.html

BLOG 6/8/16. ‘GENERATION iY,’ THE CHURCH, AND MY RECENT BOOK.

The regular readers/subscribers to this blog of mine may have noticed recently that I have posted a hyperlink at the bottom, which deserves a bit of explanation. The reality is that it is Jesus Christ who is building his church, and he builds it in each different cultural setting in forms and internal disciplines that reflect the hugely diverse/differing cultures geographically, generationally, and ethnically. One of the realities frequently overlooked is (as I have mentioned previously) that each new emerging generation also reflects a culture of its own, being formed by differing dynamics.

So here we are in the year 2016 and in a world where over 50% of the population are under twenty-five years of age. It is also a world of younger adults significantly formed by the omnipresence of the internet—a phenomenon inconceivable only a few years ago. This emerging generation’s grandparents were the Boomer generation, at the time the largest generational culture. They were, in the 1950s and ‘60s, a restless generation who protested, created colorful events such as the Woodstock festival, introduced a drug culture, such phenomena as the free speech movement, and the free sex movement, etc. … but then they settled down and became a very conservative generation as they missed the stability of their parents’ generation (I’m obviously and admittedly generalizing here). In many ways they represent a schizophrenic generation: one foot in their parents’ stable generation and one foot in the digital culture they were in process of inventing, … possessive and self-assured.

But now the Boomers are retiring … and leaving a huge question mark in the workplace and the culture. Their offspring were Generation X who were trying to figure it all out and were as a whole pretty pessimistic. They were a generation formed by all kinds of new cultural realities, such as having  two working parents, leaving them as latchkey kids. The Xers produced, then, the Millennial Generation, who have been characterized as a: “Sure, things are screwed up, but we can fix it!” optimistic generation, which was a huge generation, but innovators who produced many of the digital wizards (Gates, Jobs, etc.). They, in turn, produced the now emerging generation variously dubbed:  Generation Y, or Generation iY (internet generation), or Generation Z. This is the largest generation ever, and they are in process of creating cultural realities that are new and totally different from the slow-to-let-go Boomer Generation, which is now moving off into retirement.

So here I am,  Bob Henderson, who has lived through all of these, and cut his teeth with inquisitive university students of the Boomer generation, and has continued to be a student of the emerging cultures since then, and to realize how indifferent the church has seemed to be to these realities, as it has clung to patterns and disciplines of the past that don’t communicate to the present. My several books over recent decades are a record of my own evolution in understanding the church, and critiquing its lack of self-understanding as to its message and mission in these emerging cultures.

What is inescapably apparent now is that many of this iY Generation have no significant contact with anything known as: the ‘church. This became more and more obvious in many conversations with bright and thoughtful young adults in coffee shops and pubs—many of whom had no concept of what it was that I had spent my life doing, and were fascinated that there was any such animal as a teaching-pastor, or any such entity as the church. The older generations find this unbelievable, but I was fascinated by it and began to take notes. Out of this came my attempt to somehow communicate to my iY Generation friends what it is all about. My offering to them is the book: What On Earth Is the Church? An Inquirer’s Guide. Thus the hyperlink below. Pass the word along. To be continued …

htt://wipfandstock.com/what-on-earth-is-the-church-13883.html

BLOG 6/5/16. GOD’S GREAT “SEARCH AND RESCUE MISSION”

The inescapable dominance of Islam on the global scene, and in the media daily, makes it incumbent upon us to stop long enough to have some grasp of not only Islam, but of all of the worlds religions and its quest after spirituality. Westerners can easily be confused by the conflict within Islam between the sunnis and the shia (the conservative and the more moderate branches). At the same time there are those who simply retreat into many forms of agnosticism, which simply escape into a “one can’t know for sure” which can lead into a challenge that anyone who professes any certainty about a religious position is deceived. There are all of the other world’s religions: Hindu, Buddhism, many forms of oriental mysticism, Shinto, etc.

The reality is that Christianity has become the largest religious group in the world, and with a message that is 180 degrees opposite of the rest of the religious groups with a simple principle, i.e., the vast majority of world religions are humanity’s attempt to find and please God and to merit some kind of fulfillment in that ultimate reality. They usually are composed of obedience to (sometimes very strict) rules and traditions (Islam is a case in point), the practice of meditation, compliance with cultural traditions (Hinduism), … many different ways for humanity to achieve acceptance by whatever divine power that may be. Humanity seeking the divine.

But … the Christian faith is totally the opposite. From its seminal historical roots in the ancient middle east with Abraham, … it is the record of God seeking us, i.e., seeking his rebellious, lost human community in order to embrace them within God’s favor and blessing. In the most ancient documents the story is passed down about the dawn of the human community when the first of God’s creatures rebelled and sought autonomy and equality with their creator, … and immediately were faced with the fact that left on their own they were plagued with the reality that on their own they were in trouble, created in them an inner darkness and sense of alienation from the one who had created them. So that when angelic messengers approached Abraham, their word to him was that because he sought to be a true God-fearer, in his seed “all the nations of the earth would be blessed.” God reaching down and seeking the human community which; he loved, but which had sought independence from him. It was in this context of incompleteness that the human community, in so many forms began to create and form those religions and practices by which they hoped to please God and be restored to him. They struggled with their very understanding of who God even was, or if he were even a person they could communicate with.

So it was that there arrived on the human scene, in the midst of history, One so unlikely, a truly human person who was the divine agent of God’s great search and rescue mission. Jesus of Nazareth, One prophesied to Abraham, and then again and again in the writings of Abraham’s heirs (the Jews)—this One appeared on the human scene to not only explain God’s love for his human community, but to live out God’s design perfectly, and to take into himself the tragic consequences of their rebellion. He was God’s explanatory and rescuing word. “The word became flesh and blood, became truly human, and moved into the neighborhood, and we beheld his glory.” “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and giving to us the ministry of reconciliation.” Jesus “made peace [with God] by the blood of his cross.” 180 degrees: Humankind seeking to please a god and achieve some kind of paradise, on one hand, … or God in love reaching down to embrace and recreate hungry hearts with such infinite kindness, forgiveness, and transforming grace. The Christian faith focuses on the sheer grace and unmerited favor of God in Jesus Christ. Human religions rely on obedience to the law, or on mystical disciplines and experiences that depend on our own efforts. Just for the record.

http://wipfandstock.com/what-on-earth-is-the-church-13883.html

BLOG 6/1/16. CHRISTIAN BAPTISM … AND POLITICS

One of the classical adult baptism formulae of the Christian community contains implications that are political through and through. In this campaign season when religious affiliation is so recklessly claimed, one needs to stop and consider what one vows:

• Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God? (To which candidate responds: “I do renounce them.” [And, just what might those forces of wickedness look like in June of 2016?]
• Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God? — “I do.” renounce them.” [What, specifically, am I renouncing?]
• Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God? — “I renounce them.”
• Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior? — “I do.”
• Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love? —” I do.”
• Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord? — “I do.”

Does that sound innocently ‘religious’ and a-political? Look again. It is an ultimate affirmation that allows no other lords or loyalties that super-cede that of Jesus Christ: political, economic, social, familial, ethnically, or nationally. This is underscored in the baptismal creed  (the Apostles’ Creed) adopted by the church it its earliest and very perilous days: “I believe in God the Father almighty, and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord.” Christians all over the world still embrace these liturgical practices, … but often very mindlessly.

Just think of the moral and ethical components of such vows of repentance (renunciation) and faith. Contemplate how such an overarching loyalty forms our character as children of the light in this global dominion of darkness. Internalize how such vows of ultimate loyalty to the teachings of Jesus Christ make of us agents of peace and order and of justice, … in contrast to the enormous forces of deception and greed, of injustice, of insensitivity to to the helpless, to poverty, to the homeless (a million refugees in today’s world).

It is not difficult to be cynical. Of course, every candidate for office comes with imperfections, … but the question who comes closest to being an instrument of righteousness? (One witty observer noted that one of the difficulties even inside the church is discerning between dirty sheep and well-scrubbed wolves!)

There are always mixed motives and often questionable agendas … at the same time some candidates are closer to seeking the common welfare than others. Still, in our baptismal vows we have renounced all the forces of evil. (I am unashamedly here benefitting from insights from Professor Jamie Smith of Calvin College). Professor Smith reminds me in his book: Desiring the Kingdom that we are part of a new polis, of the Kingdom of our God and of his Christ. We are affirming a foreign king: Jesus who is Lord of all each time we witness our baptismal vows and quote the Apostle’s Creed.

And does that make life easier for us? Not at all. Such an ultimate loyalty as we affirm in baptism very often puts us into a battle with other lords and loyalties in this fractured cultures—but it also commits us to that calling of not being ashamed of the One to whom we have vowed ultimately loyalty.

Our baptism as citizens of God’s new polis engages us inescapably in the politics of this present setting within the kingdoms of this world, … makes life interesting.

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