Enchanted Community

BLOG 3/20/16. I’M FOR A RADICALLY THIS-WORLDLY CHRISTIAN FAITH

That’s right. I’ve about ‘had it’ with detached, other-worldly expressions of the Christian faith that don’t take this world as the object of Christ’s re-creative love seriously. I look at so much of the church’s hymnody that I have grown up with, and find it more like escape from Christ’s calling to discipleship, than anything that smacks of: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It sounds so ‘spiritual’ to sing: “When all my labors and trials are o’er, and I am safe on that beautiful shore,” … but Jesus came right into this brokenness, this rebellion, this human tragedy … into the ‘stink and stuff’ of this very real and immediate human scene as the incarnation of Gods to reconcile it all unto God. We are not call to be, or allowed to be escapists, but as the incarnation of God’s New Creation.

At the threshold of this 2016 Holy Week we need to be reminded of this. Jesus walked right into the conspiracy of religious and political principalities and powers, took their worst, gave his life, and inaugurated a radical New Creation right into the ‘here and now’ of this human scene. His calling to those who embrace who he is and what he came to be and do, is: “As the Father has sent me, even so am I sending you” (John 20:20). And into what is he sending us? He is sending us into the realities of where each one of us is right now—from heart-warming and commendable, to frightening and discouraging and destructive. In one part of the world it may be into the midst of such a hostile culture that to be Christ’s follower one must live a very clandestine / ‘underground’ life of Christian love and faithfulness. In another setting it may be in the context of all kinds of aberrations, or quasi-Christian expressions that distort Christ’s message in order to use it to shore-up their own prejudices. The contexts are infinitely diverse and go from encouraging to wicked.

I am one of the only one of my Christian associates (that I know of) whose favorite magazine is the UTNE Reader, which is an alternative press publication that makes no pretense of being religious. It is a product of culture that is a-religious in a sense, but realistic about spiritual hungerings. But it also takes this world and its realities very seriously, and it reprints articles about environmental issues, emotional issues, cultural realities, etc. that I don’t find in the ostensible Christian magazines. I read it to keep myself in touch with a world that is beyond my immediate experience, but in which dwell a whole generation of real persons with ill-defined and subtle spiritual longings for which they are always trying to find solutions, … seeking to fill Pascal’s “God-shaped vacuum” is ways that never get there. But the journal deals with issues that people grapple with in their daily lives, and with issues that I seldom hear mentioned in other-worldly worship services.

Jesus’ calling in the Sermon on the Mount is that his people are to be those who identify with the poor, who are peacemakers, who are merciful and hospitable, who are willing to be persecuted and verbally assaulted, to mourn with those who mourn … so that outsiders should see their New Creation lives and get a clue that God is behind them (cf. Matthew 5:1-16).

My own state legislature (Georgia) has just passed a ‘religious liberty’ bill that it says is an attempt to keep the culture from being secularized.( Lotsa luck!) Yet it ultimately legitimates discrimination against lifestyles that it finds distasteful. What these zealous and ostensible Christian legislators miss is that Jesus sends us to this very secular, ‘this-worldly’ messed-up culture to be the sons and daughters of light, to love those real persons who are still captive to all kinds of emptiness and brokenness. We are called to be a very this-worldly expression of God’s radical love. Jesus became flesh and blood and lived in the midst of the daily realities of of human brokenness, what with all of its poignant, tragic, often brutal dimensions—indifference, prejudice, shallowness, greed, hatred, … loves, good works, and and spiritual longings. To this this-worldly context he also calls us to be his present incarnation. Heaven is our hope, but our calling is to the here and now persons and realities of our own lives. Blessings on you.

BLOG 3/16/16. THOSE REMARKABLE PERSONS KNOWN AS: CLERGY

In my last blog I wore my ecclesiastical gadfly hat and challenged the whole category of sacralized persons known as clergy (or as: the reverend). Now let me reverse the field and put on my missiological-clergy chapeau and acknowledge realistically, that as the church has created that class of (ostensible) leadership, persons who have been designated as clergy, there have been over the centuries both incredibly fruitful and exemplary leaders, … (along with those who were, to be charitable, self-important, often enigmatic, if not outright pious frauds, alas!).

But since tomorrow is a day recognizing St. Patrick, let me start with him since he sort of emerges out of nowhere in the 5^th century to become one of the great clergy-missionary figures of the Christian church, from whose influence came generations of Celtic missionaries. But Patrick is a study in God’s design of Christ building his church. It is difficult to be dogmatic about his life, records being essentially non-existent, … but he was captured as a youth in Great Britain, taken to Ireland as a slave. He later escaped and returned to Great Britain and took on the ecclesiastical orders to become a priest. He then returned to become a pioneer missionary in Ireland, among the very folk who had enslaved him. The sketchy records leave all kinds of blank spots, but are indicative of what had been true from the very beginning of the church, namely, that it is a missionary community. In Patrick’s day the only church existent in the world was the Church of Rome. That being said, there was very little, very slow, and very sketchy communication between Rome and Great Britain, and even less with remote Ireland. So Patrick was pretty much on his own with what he had absorbed from the early orders and self-understanding of the church of his youth. Yet, for all of that, there came into being a monastic community that produced generations of missionaries who evangelized much of Scotland, England, and Europe. That was the church that was known and existed in that day.

Then go all the way back to the first generation. Acts 20-22 tells of the new convert, Paul, who went to the commercial center of Ephesus and gave witness in the synagogue about Jesus the Messiah. A small number of those Jewish folk responded and Paul baptized them and spent months discipling them into the teachings and praxis of God’s New Creation in Christ. Then, as the record continues, there is an astonishing development. It says that within a couple of years “all Asia (minor) heard the gospel.” From whom? It could not have been from Paul, but had to have been from those ordinary folk, on their ordinary trade routes, whom he had mentored, or discipled. From that early point you see that the church is incorrigibly contagious with its discovery of God’s new life in Christ. It was never primarily the apostles, or some church professionals, but primarily all those baptized who embraced their own missionary calling and took the gospel into the corners of the world. (There are colonies of believers today in the most unlikely, hostile, and remote corners of the world. The gospel is ‘out of  control’).

Yes, there were those who proved themselves as leaders, those who were knowledgeable in scriptures, who mentored others, who modeled and mentored others into maturity. But the church has always been, in its integrity, a people movement. There is no way to explain the global expansion of the church other than by the contagious lives and witness of millions of ordinary Christian folk. As the category of clergy emerged there appeared some remarkable figures, whole missionary orders within the church. Monastic communities on the frontiers of civilization were gospel outposts of hospitality and Christian presence, staffed by priests. One gives thanks for all of those giants of the faith over the centuries, whom we know and whose writings we have. But the spontaneous expansion of the church was always a people movement. The fulfillment of God’s design for the church will never be accomplished by church professionals, but by the contagious and spontaneous lives of ordinary followers of Christ. It’s leaders’ (or clergy’s) task is to equip them for that mission. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

BLOG 3/13/16. AN M.DIV DEGREE AND $2.00 WILL BUY YOU A CUP OF COFFEE!

OK, maybe it’s time to revisit the whole concept of clergy (and maybe lose a lot of friends), but periodically I think we need to de-mythologize the whole notion of professional clergy. I myself have some mixed feelings about this—after all, for over 60 years I have flown under that rubric myself. But a couple of things this week have provoked me to take another shot at it. For one, I looked at the gentleman all vested and stoled, looking ever so ‘ecclesiastical’ leading the procession at the burial of Nancy Reagan, and wondering to myself: “I wonder what he is really like under all of those vestments? He’s obviously good at performing the liturgies of the church, … but what’s he like close up?”

The other thing was an over supper conversation with a couple of close friends in which the question was raised to me: “Why do people go to seminaries?” These close friends know that (after my first retirement) I spent ten years as a mentor to seminarians in a number of seminaries across the country. There is, of course, no single answer to that question. People attend seminaries for all kinds of valid or questionable reasons. When I was in seminary after World War II, we had a lot of men who had had some kind of horrifying experience during the war and had promised God that if he got them out of that, that they would “go into the ministry.” Then there are those who are disaffected or bored with some other profession, and so who go to seminary to make a career change, thinking that such will bring them more fulfillment. The more healthy reason was those who had been engaged in some kind of ministry in a local scene and knew that they needed more knowledge and skills if they were to take the next steps in fruitful Christian mission. All kinds of reasons … some legitimate and some not so much so. There are those numerous ones to go to seminary primarily looking for themselves, some raison d’etre for their directionless lives.

The irony is, however, that several years in an academic institution and the awarding of an academic M.Div. degree may mean that you have some remarkable gifts, but it does not equip you to engage in the ministries of Christian formation that will enable God’s people to, themselves, be fully equipped to engage in their own fruitful lives in the vicissitudes of their daily ‘marketplace’ lives. Not a few of the professors in seminaries are marvelous academics, but have never been in the trenches of reality where they were the teaching-shepherds of God’s people.

And the designation of clergy also raises questions. The venerable sociologist-theologian Jacques Ellul names that as one of the subversions of Christianity, and calls for the de-clergification of the church. Or, maybe, what does it do to hang the title reverend upon some man or woman who is also a sinner saved by grace?

One has to look to Jesus, first of all, to see that his seminary was to call men and women to follow him on the back roads of Palestine, and to learn from him, and to have the message modeled by him and to be mentored by him … so that he could ultimately call on them, themselves, to make disciples and know that they understood that to mean that they were to do to others what he had done to them. True teaching-shepherds (cf. Ephesians 4:11-13) are those in the Christian community who engage others in the disciplines/formations that will form them into God’s New Humanity, the demonstration of his purpose that they be conformed to the image of Christ. They are mentors, models, and teachers. They allow others to get close to them, to know them, to ask questions, until the authentic New Creation life of the pastor is reproduced in those who are their followers, or disciples, i.e., God’s people for whom those mentors are a gift.

Something in that direction. But the conception of clergy as is popularly conceived is not a part of that, … and an M.Div. degree may have nothing to do with it! There, I’ve said it.

BLOG 3/9/2016. APPLE, AIRBNB, UBER … AND THE CHURCH

Those who think creatively and who think futuristically fascinate me. As someone has said, such creative people “suspend the horizons within which everyone else thinks.” I sat listening in utter fascination the other day when Charlie Rose interviewed the CEOs of Apple (Tim Cook), Airbnb (Brian Chesky), and Uber (Travis Kalanik). I had to chuckle because in the earlier days of my rather long life, such stuff would have been consigned to the category of science fiction.  Add to them the other transformational figures in this emerging culture such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, … and on and on. What is true of all of them is that they tend to be young, they have imaginations, they sense real needs, have a focus on the customer, and who see nothing as impossible. They are all creative, and they are all futurist.

But, alas, there are huge segments of the population who want it as it has always been, or the way it used to be. They are not all that interested in creativity or in the future. This is quite obvious in the current presidential campaign in which there are those who want to “make America great again,” or “take back America,” and conversely others who want “a future you can believe in.”

The church is not at all immune to this. I admittedly have the proclivity of being a futurist and to have an eye to the emerging generational culture—even though I am getting ancient. This became an obvious problem to me in a church I once pastored which was predominately older folk, but in a community with a generation of younger adults who had a difficult time identifying with ageing churches. My leadership was formed by my Biblical sense of the church’s mission, and by the church’s definition as given in New Testament scriptures, and did not give it liberty to be a “comfort zone” religious institution, but rather an incarnational community of the radical and subversive teachings of Jesus and the apostles (note those adjectives).

There began to emerge a subtle and persistence resistance to my leadership among a number of my designated leaders (elders), and hearty encouragement only by a few. So we resolved to have a retreat and to invite an elder from another Presbyterian Church, who was also a remarkable management consultant, to lead it. As a part of the weekend retreat she ran us all through a Myers-Briggs personality discipline. The weekend was cordial and we concluded it without coming to any dramatic conclusion. But she invited me and my wife to lunch the next week, and chuckled that the problem was obvious, namely, I was an INTJ or a futurist, as were only a few of the other elders, but the majority of the elders were resistant to that and wanted stability and traditional church structures. Futurist are always a very minority factor in the scheme of  things.

The patterns of the past, as expressed in traditional church institutions, were quite comfortable for a former culture, but are obviously not speaking to the hidden spiritual hungerings of a totally different post-Christian, even secular, age. But that doesn’t mean that there is not a need there for these products of the Information Age. We are, to be sure in a liminal period culturally. But all too much of the traditional past is held to with an idolatrous zeal by many who sit in positions of influence in congregations and seminaries. Happily, there are those prophetic younger voices who are speaking to this issue, but to older and more traditional products of the church, they are speaking in sort of an ecclesiastical science-fiction. The church that Jesus is building is alive and well, but it is and will increasingly take on new forms, … even as businesses and commercial interests have had to adapt to Apple, Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Micosoft, Google and the rest. It’ll be fun to watch. But it is happening! You may find a vital church in a corner pub on a Sunday morning, or some colony of God’s New Creation people in an expression you never imagined. Jesus said: “I will build my church,” but charged us to “go make disciples.” That’s the mandate.

BLOG 3/6/16. IS THERE A FUTURE FOR OSSIFIED, OR MORIBUND, CHURCHES?

This is as painful a subject for ostensible church communities as is terminal cancer for an individual. It is the question of the future for church institutions that have long since lost their dynamic purpose and declined into a state of ossification, or of being moribund in the mission of God. It also is not a rare phenomenon. Church institutions (of whatever Christian tradition) may start out well, but with a generation or two begin to live on their past momentum, or on the presence of a colorful preacher, or on their status in the community … but not on the mission of God.

In the era of Christendom, when the Christian faith was a dominant force in the culture, there arose different traditions, each of which wanted their traditional or denominational franchise in each new community. Some had a very strong sense of God’s mission, and some were more on the order of ‘comfort-zone’ communities of those who preferred this denomination to that one, or a church community with which they were socially, ethnically, and culturally comfortable. This was especially true for us in North American as the church expanded vigorously after World War II. But the emerging generations have challenged the traditions, and the culture has undergone a diastrophism in which all of those traditions and institutions have not only been victims of this shift in the tectonic plates caused by post-Christendom, … but more and more ignored.

The landscape is now littered with impressive church sanctuaries of those communities that have now not only aged, but are fading into obscurity … but too proud to admit it. Many in major cites are living on endowments, but not on any self-conscious sense of dynamic faith in Jesus Christ, or his mission.

Here is is the question that few are honestly willing to face: Is there a future for such church institutions that have ossified into essential fruitlessness? or become immunized to the demands of the gospel? Or become moribund and incapable of reproduction? And what is more distressing is that it is difficult to find any models or examples of such ossified or moribund churches that have come back to life again, notwithstanding all kinds of programs and conferences that propose hopeful solutions. Churches that have become so ossified over many generations do not respond to costly changes proposed by some new ecclesiastical elixir. Very few examples, or models exist, and they so rare that they are very difficult to find.

A generation ago the Roman Catholic Maryknoll Order realized that it was declining precipitously, and in danger of ceasing to exist. They asked Gerald Arbuckle, a theologian and cultural anthropologist, to research the reasons for such decline, and to propose some solutions. His conclusion was that any such community (or order) is started with a very clear founding myth, i.e., a clear sense of its calling, its mission, its disciplines … in other words: its raison d’etre. But over time that founding myth become diluted, displaced, or forgotten and the order reverts (in his words) into chaos.

And what was his proposal to the Maryknolls? He insisted that mere renewal was quite too inadequate a solution to their downward path into chaos. Rather, he insisted that what was required was was refounding, by which he explained that it needed to forsake its chaos, or ossified/moribund status, clear the ground, and then with those who were willing to reclaim their founding myth to start all over again. (He wrote this up in several books still available). I have appropriated his word in the title of one of my own books (Refounding the Church from the Underside). It is a painful process. Or perhaps I could quote missiologist and friend Howard Snyder, who told us that if we wanted to know how vital our church was as a missional community, to sell our church buildings and become an intentional and incarnational colony of the Kingdom of God, but that’s an almost impossible ‘sell’ for such ossified entities. Is there a future for ossified/moribund churches? Not without much pain, and refounding is painful!

BLOG 3/2/16. “WITHOUT BLOOD, OR SPERM, OR EXCREMENT” WHAT?

This may sound weird, but stick with me here. Somewhere I have misplaced my copy of the wonderful novel Zorba the Greek, so I am resorting to my fallible memory and the one page I have saved. But it is the story of an intellectual who had grown weary of academe and had engaged in some enterprise in which he needed a foreman to assist him. He found this rambunctious guy, Zorba, who was good at his work but also loved music, dance, drink, sex and humor. After many adventures together the narrator is lamenting that his own first life he and his colleagues had turned all of life into something so “bloodless, odorless, void of any human substance. Pale-blue hollow words in a vacuum. Perfectly clear distilled water without any bacteria, but also without any nutritive substances. Without life … Life had turned into a lucid, transparent game, unencumbered by even a drop of blood,” i.e., without blood or sperm or excrement. He envied Zorba his zest for life.

On the other hand, he reflected, “the human is brutish, uncouth, impure—it is composed of love, the flesh and a cry of distress. … All the things that had formerly so fascinated me appeared this morning to be no more than cerebral acrobatics. … Everything having turned into words, every set of words into musical jugglery, the last man goes even further: he sits in his utter solitude and decomposes the music into mute, mathematical equations.”

I was reflecting on this classic after my participation this past weekend in the centennial celebration of the church which I had pastored a half-century ago. It was an overwhelming time of affirmation for me. I was asked as a guest of honor to pronounce the benediction on what is now a very fruitful and diverse company of university students, professionals of all sorts, and many thoughtful Christian folk. Who was I looking at as I stood there to send them forth into their week? What surprises, challenges, intractable problems? What uncouth situations, what fractured personalities would they encounter? What numbing routines? What career changes? What domestic or professional difficulties?

The benediction, or charge that I gave to them was: “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing that you may about in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13). My charge to them was to go as agents of that hope into their Monday morning world. The question that comes, however, is: how do we as the church’s teachers equip God’s people for such an encounter with all of the uncouth situations, the broken-ness, the surprises and challenges of each week. Is it possible that we create a concept of the Christian faith and worship that is like the “pale-blue, hollow words in a vacuum?” Could the worship experience be nothing more than an escape for a while that only reinforces our dis-incarnation, our failure to realize our mission to be the demonstration of God’s New Creation in the uncouth realities of the week? Are we equipping to give a zest for life?

Before us this week were the political primaries which have been in themselves almost frightening. There are family members and friends who are, perhaps, self-destructing. There are those larger issues which we can brush off to the margins, but which still are there: environment, the enormous tragedy of hundreds of thousands of refugees, or of that host closer to home who cannot live on their minimum wage incomes. So many unexpected surprises.

No, our Christian faith is that of God who became flesh and dwelt among us. It is a calling to live out our New Creation lives, as did our Lord Jesus Christ, amidst the realities of injustice, sickness, poverty, homelessness, and of ruthless wealth and power. It is a calling to live out our calling right in the presence of all of the realities of “blood and sperm and excrement.” Our times of worship are to encourage us and equip us to live in just such realities. That is where we become the agents of our great Hope. Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing that you may about in hope … incarnate in the realIties of this world and life.

BLOG 2/24/2016. ON A PERSONAL NOTE: BLACKNALL MEMORIAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH’S CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION

As my Facebook friends discovered, I celebrated my 88^th birthday last Sunday. That’s a long time to live. It is also is filled with fascinating memories, joyful and painful, and few are more graphic than the decade that I spent as pastor of the Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church in Durham, North Carolina in the 1960s. It reminds me of how many of the events that form our lives are those over which we have no control. That decade is on the front-burners of my mind this week because on this coming weekend Blacknall Church will celebrate its centennial.

When I arrived in Durham in the early summer of 1958 it was a move over which I had no control, and a move which I would never have chosen. It all turned out to be the most formative decade of my life, and also the decade of total transformation for the Blacknall congregation. For me it was totally cross-cultural. The textile industry was very prominent in the southern United States in those days, and the life of the textile workers was as close to chattel slavery as you could in the economic scene of that day. I knew almost nothing about it. I came from a professional family of engineers, educators, lawyers, scientists, etc. I went to an elite liberal arts college (Davidson) and had spent the previous four years in the denomination’s campus ministry at North Carolina State. The only thing I knew about textile industry communities was that there were a couple of scholarly sociological studies about how difficult they were (Mill-hands and Preachers, by Liston Pope, and Spindles and Spires by Donald W. Shriver).

Then in a series of events that were understandable but disruptive, and over which I had no control, God rather ‘backed me into’ accepting the pastorate of this mill village congregation in Durham. Durham itself, in those days was a dismal textile and tobacco town also inhabited by two universities (Duke and North Carolina Central) which universities had pretty much a life of their own apart from the city of Durham. The church was, likewise, a marginal congregation within the Presbyterian Church, and probably the last place any aspiring young pastor would ever want to find himself/herself. … But now I am only amazed at the providence of God which caused me to land there, though I was to experience some dark and lonely periods as God faithfully formed me, and also was forming the congregation. (Today, of course, Durham is at the heart of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Textiles and tobacco have disappeared.) Blacknall has now had over a half-century of incredibly fruitful ministry to a totally new and different context under that gifted leadership of my successors.

Durham was, at that time (1958), a blue-collar town, and racist to the core. It ostensibly had the largest KKK klavern in the country. There was a pervasive low self-esteem in the city, and this was true of the church also. It was hardly a colony of vital faith—more like ‘religious Christianity’ (as described by Bonhoeffer) or just dull-grey religion, which was part of the social fabric of that marginal life. The decade of the 1960’s was also that period of turbulence what with the civil rights movement, the Viet Nam war, and the integration of schools.

Yet a significant part of my formation was the fact that the person who had used his influence to get the church to call me was a young brilliant and Christian instructor in chemistry at Duke who wanted a nearby church to which he could recommend students to go. Blacknall was two blocks from Duke’s east campus, and soon began to attract students (and faculty) who were drawn my my use of the pulpit for thoughtful Biblical exposition. But students also have a way of being relentless in their questioning, in articulating their unbelief and agnosticism. And that decade set me free to relish conversations even with the most hostile or confused. I have never been the same since. My successors in that pastorate have been awesome, and a joy for me.

I would never have chosen Blacknall or Durham, but God chose them for me, and I am going to herald his faithfulness this weekend at the centennial of Blacknall. (I will, therefore, not blog this coming Sunday).

If you want to know more, feel free to comment and ask questions. I would love it.

BLOG 2/21/2016. POLITICS, THE CHURCH, AND THE GIFT OF RE-IMAGINING

In the omni-present political reporting during this presidential campaign season, there is the editorial observation that Generation Z (or the iY Generation) is tending to forsake Hillary for Bernie for the reason that they see this present political establishment totally dysfunctional and they also see Hillary as pretty much captive to that establishment, and incapable of re-imagining it, … while they see the colorful Bernie Sanders as willing to challenge it and to re-imagine it, and so they are making his unlikely campaign for the presidency something of a challenge.

This is not the first time that such a generational and sociological observation has been the subject of studies. Some generations are very defensive about preserving things as they have always been, and then there are others who see beyond the horizons of what is to what would be a much more creative, just, equitable, and desirable state of affairs. There were some rumblings of this re-imagining capacity a few years ago in the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest, which was primarily to work of a younger generation seeing economic injustice, and caused rumblings across the political and economic landscape.

I, for one, see the gift of prophecy in scriptures as something like a gift of holy re-imagining. Jeremiah’s calling from the Lord was to: Root up, pull down, overthrow, and destroy, then to build and to plant. (Jeremiah 1:10). It had both an irreverence for decadent religious structures, and a clear vision of something creative and new and functional that would facilitate God’s covenant purpose for his people in creative new ways: “I will write my law upon theirs hearts.” Such is true of all of the prophets. God sent them to a dysfunctional Israel in order to expose their failure to be what they had been called to be, … and then to propose new and faithful courses that he had for them. “What does the Lord require of thee, O man, but to love justice, do mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

It is interesting, moreover, that when Paul describes what are the components for the fully equipped people of God, that it includes the capacity to be a prophetic presence of the teachings and incarnation of Christ (Ephesians 4). What is prophecy? Who are these prophets that appear unexpectedly all through the New Testament records? Take it for what it is worth, but I take it that all of God’s people in Christ are to be those who can, with some integrity, exegete the culture. There is a passing reference in the Old Testament to the sons of Issachar who understood the times so they could tell Israel what to do (I Chronicles 12:32). The capacity to understand the culture in which we live, its positive and negative components, is so critical thinking about our cultural setting is essential if we are to be effective in our incarnational presence as the people of God. I know of vital churches whose staffs are studying Charles Taylor’s massive: The Secular Era in order to be alert to the cultural forces impinging upon their congregations. Prophets are often poets and novelists (or as Simon and Garfunkel: “The prophets of the day are written on the subway wall …”).

It is not only in the political arena that many things are dysfunctional. It is regularly true within the church when its participants become captive to iconic forms and practices that are inimical to the mission of God. And it is so very often the younger generation who are free and creative and brutally honest about “what is” who are those agents of re-imagining and change. This is true in the church, in politics, and in society at large. We are in a cultural white-water.

We ignore, or disparage, this youthful or prophetic insistence upon re-imagining to our peril in every component of our society. We are no longer merely isolated tribes. The cultural change, the global interdependence, the information-age connectedness, the widespread abandonment of the presuppositions of a former Christendom era require that God’s people embrace re-imagining (or their role as prophetic) if they have any intention of being fruitful in the present scene.

BLOG 2/17/16. “MUST’VE BEEN BITTEN BY A RADID FUNDAMENTALIST!”

The erudite and humorous church historian, Richard Lovelace, with his gift of metaphor, once sought to explain why some folk were so antagonistic to the Christian faith and to the Christian church. He just quipped: They were probably bitten by a rabid fundamentalist! Given the proliferation of quasi-Christian protestations by some breeds of politically conservative folk who define themselves as ‘evangelical’ brings Dr. Lovelace’s description back to mind.

On the other hand, I have lived inside the Christian church for longer than most, and, yes, there are some really dismaying persons and toxic church communities that could easily convince any sensitive person that the whole Christian proposition was a bad deal, and make them hyper-defensive against any suggestion that one should identify with it. When the witness of such negative church folk is negative about all the practices, persons, ethnic groups, etc. that they see as a threat, … they play right into the hands of those who, from Jesus’ day down to the present, falsely identify themselves as the practitioners of ‘true religion’ while at the same time contradicting the very calling to radical love that was so much the hallmark of Jesus’ teachings. Such quasi-evangelicals need desperately to go back and read and re-read the teaching of Jesus and his apostles … and then think twice before that embrace the name of Christian (or hi-jack the adjective evangelical, i.e. those who embrace Jesus’‘thrilling good news’ … to identify themselves.

Jesus was the friend of sinners. He didn’t hang out with the ‘religious ‘of the temple crowd. He entered into conversation with all kinds of questionable persons, for instance: a Samaritan woman of questionable morals, corrupt public officials, and local shady characters to name a few. His message was described as the gospel of forgiveness. He announced a whole and in-breaking New Creation where there was hope and forgiveness and reconciliation with God and with each other. He taught that his followers were to love their enemies, to do good to those who despitefully used them and persecuted them, to exercise costly love to the sick and the needy, to the poor and homeless.

His word, and that of his apostles, was that those outside of the household of faith were to be able to see their good works and be made curious by the sheer quality of their lives. There is never, never any suggestion that they were to self-righteously condemn those with whom they disagreed, or who were living life-styles that were contradictory to that to which they themselves were called. Never ‘us against them.’ Their very human lives were to the demonstrate the divine nature (Jesus living) in them. That is what they had embraced when they entered through the door, who is Jesus, and embraced the radical newness to which he called them. The central liturgical practice that he left with them was that they were to break bread and drink wine in remembrance of who he was and to that to which he had called them.

Those ‘rabid fundamentalists’ who are always making cause against real sinners, or against any costly ministries that bring real help to those desperately in need, or against members of terrorist groups, or other religions, etc. … need to meet Jesus. But beware! His calling is not safe or popular, or without cost.

And and in our current political season, it is not those who make a lot of noise about their Christian identification, but those who are proponents of the costly—even radical—love and justice that Jesus practiced and taught who deserve our attention, whether or not they profess to be followers of Jesus.

BLOG 2/14/2016. THE CHURCH IS ALWAYS HUMANLY IMPOSSIBLE

There is something awesome (and maybe a bit humorous) about the meeting this past week of the heads of the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches. Here were the leaders of two of the major and ancient branches of Christ’s church which emerged as the result of a breach of the church’s unity at the end of the first millennium. Think of the history that has transpired since then. Think of the many expressions of that church that have emerged over the centuries over differences of identity or of points of doctrine or self understanding, etc. Think of the opposition of empires and cultures and empires and dominant philosophies, and assaults on its existence that have taken place. And yet it survives, … and in the unlikely setting of Havana, Cuba, the two very colorful pontiffs from the long estranged branches meet and embrace. It recalls the words of the hymn: O, where are kings and empires now, of old that went and came, but Lord thy church is praying still, a thousand years the same.

It also reminds one of Mark Twain’s comment that the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. Periodic articles and editorials lament the demise of the church as some of its expressions fall into decay. But these are by those who don’t really understand its dynamic. The church is never a reality that is humanly explainable. As a matter of fact, the church is humanly impossible. Jesus never told his followers to “build the church.” Rather, he told them to make disciples and that he would build his church. He told them that it would be the communal demonstration of his New Creation, … but then he never told them what form it would take. He only told them that where two or three of them were together, that he would be there with them. He told them that this New Creation, this Kingdom of God, would not come with observation, that it would grow like leaven in a lump of dough. And so it has.

The apostle, later in the church’s teaching, reminded Christ’s followers that God used weak things to confound the mighty, foolish things to confound the weak, lowly-born to confound the high-born, and even things that are not to confound things that are. And so it has been demonstrated. The infant New Creation community, the church, was birthed (launched) against the hostility of the established religious powers of Palestine, but even more against the the vicious opposition of one of the mightiest empires that the world has ever known. Yet within a few generations it was itself one of the strongest presences within that empire.

And how did this take place? Who were the agents? Mostly just ordinary folk with ordinary talents, but empowered in a way that (again) is human in-explainable. When the British empire reached the southern shores of the sub-continent of India in the 17^th century (?), what did they find? The found the Mar Thoma Syrian Church of Malabar in existence ostensibly since the missionary work of the disciple Thomas those many centuries before. How did that happen?

And today, for sure, we are experiencing the diastrophism resulting with the demise of the Christendom era, and this is demolishing many human structures and traditions that came along with that in Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, and independent Christian movements. But it doesn’t mean that the church is disappearing. It keeps emerging in new forms and fresh expressions. It faces huge cultural, secular, and governmental hostilities, … but it keeps emerging in new incarnations as well as outbursts of life within older incarnations. H. Richard Niebuhr, several generations ago, pronounced denominations as the moral failure of Christianity, and that was prophetic as these formerly useful structures now deteriorate into shadows. At the same time, the Pope and the Patriarch are reminders that the church is not predictable, on the one hand, and, too, eight followers of Jesus meeting with Bibles on the patio of the coffee house remind us that the church emerges in ever new forms, and in the most unlikely places on the earth.