God’s Failed Ambassadors

Or Don’t Trip … He Ain’t Through With You Yet

While I was thinking through what I was going to say about “The Story of (My) Christianity”, I was left with a bunch of issues that I struggled with. It's the whole idea of God sending us to be His ambassadors and then seemingly not being able to equip us adequately for the job. I see it in my church. I see it in my life. I see it in my heart. Shouldn’t there be a more demonstrable difference between “us” and “them”? Why are we still so broken?

A friend of mine put it this way: “If God is to be the all powerful diety he is, why does he not do more to change us when we confess his Lordship over our lives? Yeah, yeah, free will and all that, but still what are we saying when we are calling him "Lord"? Isn't part of that an invitation for Him to change us? Sure, it takes work on our part, but I could use some help and, if you believe the surveys, so does everyone else. When I look at the Christian community, I see epic fail and it's really hard for me to just say that it's all our fault. If we are to be representing Him, and if we are calling Him the Lord of our lives, then I would think we would get more help...and if He isn't then how can we say the blame is all on us?”

We were created in the image of God and declared “good”. Good. We forget that part of things, that as image-bearers, we have inherent worth. We don’t always live up to that potential, what we were created to be. We could look at our place in the greater scheme of things as a matter of us not being able to save ourselves, but that’s not the whole story. We’re invited into a way of life, a life of transformation. We don’t have to remain as we are, mired in the mess of our lives. We can seek a path of wholeness, become humans to be restored in all the dimensions of humanity.

Probably points more to our misunderstanding of God and our relationship with him. We don't have to be perfect to be dispensers of God's grace. Martin Luther spoke of Christians as being simultaneously saints and sinners. It has taken me quite a while to understand that God’s not interested in fixed vessels. We have it in our heads that we need to be perfect, have our act together, be the “best” representatives that we can be because how else can we be used by God.

This idea of perfection has crippled my spiritual walk. The Bible seems to not only demand perfection, but it seems to imply that perfection is attainable now. Then someone pointed out to me that I had a screwed up view of “perfection.” When we read the word “perfection” through our modern mindset, we see the Greek ideal of perfection. We can’t attain that. Yet for most of my spiritual life, I was tormented by the guilt of failure because I couldn’t reach this goal of perfection. My life was littered with seemingly endless failures. But when you read perfection more through the eyes of the original audience, you find the Hebrew idea of wholeness. Being complete is something that we can attain.

We are no more immune to sin and temptation than our neighbor, as much as I (and many in the churches) would like to believe otherwise. We’re sick and we need resurrection, divine healing. He calls us to join with Him, to be set free of the lives we’re imprisoned in into a new world, a new way of living. In our imperfection, in our brokenness, we know each other’s pain and weakness—without room for judgment—and can best be there for one another. We can be the consoling arms of God for one another.

Our actions define our eternity. The strongest, most impactful message you can have about your faith is the one we speak with our lives. If we aren't living it out, it invalidates anything we have to say on the subject. If what we say and how we live don't match, we've probably already lost the battle. There’s the heart of my struggle. I’ve tried to follow Jesus and it’s hard. There’s nothing simple about it. It’s paradoxical. It’s counter-intuitive. Often I feel as if I know the truth, but have no experience of its reality or fail to fully live it out.

God is engaged in a gentle dance with us, wooing us to Him not wanting to force Himself on us, but rather wanting us to freely choose to love Him; to join with His redemptive mission for each other and for creation. He chooses to work through a failed people for reasons we may never understand. We are cracked vessels, works in progress. God doesn't give up on us … we give up on ourselves. We aren’t defined by our failings and stumbling. We’re defined by how we get back up, bruised knees and all, dust ourselves off, and keep on our journey.

Ambassadors of Love

Many people call themselves Christian and we often refer to ourselves as a Christian nation. Have you ever wondered how some people can call themselves that? Or rather, how some folks can do some of the things they do and cloak themselves in religion or the Word of God?

On the flip side, there are a lot of folks who cloak themselves in the veil of religion to simply justify their biases. In other words, they have a belief/predisposition then seek to undergird said belief with Bible verses; bringing their vision to their faith and creating dogma around it.

Which is why I don't tend to dump on Christianity when a "Christian" does something kooky or Islam when a "Muslim" does something contrary to their tenets. There are folks who call themselves Christian, Muslim, Wiccan or what have you whose actions clearly run contrary to the beliefs of those faiths.

We’re all eikons, image-bearers of God, created to relate to God, to relate to others, and to govern the world as such. Christians, in particular, ought to be ambassadors of God. Take that seriously, to reflect God, His love, His holiness.

Too often we run around as if we have diplomatic immunity, a get out of hell free card, that places us above everyone else. Instead, we ought to be the first servants. I think that’s what being missional boils down to for me (and how my faith makes sense to me).

If there’s a “fear” to my faith that I keep coming back to it’s that I take very seriously Christ's words when He talks about people doing things in His name and when they finally come to meet Him, He tells them that He never knew them. Cloaking myself in His name and missing the point of my religion … that’s not the kind of Christian I want to be.

What defines how you see yourself in your faith?


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Learning as a Christian Lifestyle

Christianity was mean to be a lifestyle, one that was meant to distinguish us from the world. Some of our elite few have figured out how this is supposed to look: protesting Disney, boycotting laundry soap, not going to movies or watching television. Thus we become known for who we are against rather than who we are for. Interestingly, what you focus on tends to be what you become (think about that all you gay protestors).

One aspect of a “Christian” lifestyle is the posture that we are all learners, even those of us who function as teachers. We're all God’s students. Now, information download isn't the point and a lot of our churches have become great for making folks knowledgeable. It leads to dilemmas where you find yourself having conversations solely with other Christians who know as much as you.

Learning is a function of discipleship. Think of discipleship as a kind of spiritual apprenticeship. Where teachers share their learning but with a mindset difference: not one of a person above handing down knowledge to those who don't know but rather more like people working alongside others, sharing what they've learned and challenging others to work out meaning in their lives. If nothing else, it would certainly dispel the misperceptions of “positions” in the faith.

Robert Caldwell at BreakDividingWalls.org has challenged me in a few areas, among them being the idea of the lifestyle of discipleship. He puts it this way "This lifestyle, while governed by some common 'essential' characteristics, should be as unique and varied as our respective gifting, affinities and lives. In other words, my lifestyle for cultivating discipleship relationships will most probably be different than yours because my gifts, affinities and life circumstance are different than yours. And your context will most probably be different than that of a person you disciple for the very same reasons. However what should be common is that we have all been intentional about establishing the rhythms and activities of our lives to allow us to easily share life (Koinonia) with other disciples."

So examine the rhythm of your life. See how you can best open your life to share it with other people or if there are areas of your life that you can change to help do this better. We’re all in this together.


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Courtesy Flush for Jesus (Or, On Being a Stepford Christian)

One of the things that made me absolutely miserable about my Christian walk was the guilt of it all. It was like the church body I was a part of had this singular idea of how a Christian life should be led and any deviation from it and you were made to feel like you were a bad Christian. It was a whole culture of thought and deed. Life was to be lived according to a rigid set of rules, clear cut dos and don'ts (heavy on the don'ts because the don'ts were what separated us from "the world"). Books weren't to be trusted unless they were written by MacArthur, Piper, or a few select mini-popes. Music, movies, any entertainment really, had better have been purchased at a local Christian book store (CHRISTIAN bookstore, not one of those Catholic ones).

Forget the idea of trying to be genuine, there was a set of rules you had to live by, all within the greater context of a culture and mindset. You had to get up and do “devotions” (which meant 30 minutes of Bible reading and prayer). Lord help you if you didn’t “get your day started right.” It got to be so that folks made each other guilty and miserable, robbing each other of the joy of their spiritual journey, by making each other feel like you were not loving God if you weren’t spending that critical 30 minutes in study. I know folks who’d end up reading the Bible during their “morning sit down” in order to squeeze in their time while getting ready for work, calling in their spouses to discuss applicable verses. (Thus the lament for a courtesy flush for Jesus.)

If you were a woman, you were expected to be a wife (sorry, no single Christian women allowed; you could only be fulfilled as a Christian as a wife. Technically you had to be a wife AND mother to fully be in the club). You were expected to homeschool, because what right thinking Christian would dare allow their kids into the public school system. And, since you weren’t expected to hold a job, you had to otherwise make the most of your time, I don’t know, threshing wheat or something.

It was a game of keeping up with the spiritual Jones’ enforced by the mega church mafia.

It got to the point where I felt like I had to put on a show, rather than be real with other Christians. Mind you, it’s not the discipline of Bible study and prayer that I’m down on. It’s the guilt-laden coercion into it. Basically, folks were being made into Stepford Christians, or other people’s idea of what a Christian should be. It is ironic that in Christ we’ve become free from the law and sin, only to become slaves to one another. To quote Michael Yaconelli in his book, Messy Spirituality:

“Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. it is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of the spiritual life begins where we are NOW in the mess of our lives. Accepting the reality of our broken, flawed lives is the beginning of spirituality not because the spiritual life will remove our flaws but because we LET GO is seeking perfection and, instead, seek God, the one who is present in the tangledness of our lives. Spirituality is not about being fixed; it is about God's being present in the mess of our unfixedness.”

Christian spirituality should be about encountering the person of Christ, and then a living out of that interactive relationship in every moment of life. It’s about knowing God, not knowing about God. We don’t need hyper-regimented, guilt-filled lives to call ourselves spiritual. God sees you. He knows you. You might as well be honest, authentic, and interact with Him in the midst of how you are … not how others think you ought to be. Each relationship is different. There shouldn’t be any Stepford Christians.


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Forbearing One Another (or, This Discipline Sucks)

Once again I’m trying to figure out an aspect of my faith, in this case wrestling with what is supposed to be a simple command: “Forbear one another”. So I'm trying to ask myself a few simple questions:

What does it mean to forbear (bear with or give slack to) one another and what does it look like in your life?

What does it mean to give people room and space to be who they are?

What does it mean to give people room and space to become who they are?

What does it mean to give people room and space to contribute and belong despite imperfections?

Who are you called to bear with?

It’s easy to like people who like you or are like you. The true test of your faith comes in loving your enemies. The annoying. The “extra grace people”. And think of how good God is at forgiving, putting up with, looking past the mistakes of, and loving people … and how we’re called to reciprocate it by forbearing one another.

So I’m stuck with this simple prayer: “Lord, teach me to love.”


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Church Eats Its Own Part II: No Room for Sinners Here

People fall.

I don’t even think of it as falling any more. We screw up, it’s what we do. The measure of our faithfulness isn’t in how many times we fall down (or how creatively, because believe me, some days it feels like I have an entire Research & Development wing devoted to finding new ways for me to screw up), but in our ability to get up, dust ourselves off, and keep going.

Yet too often, the Church eats its own. It’s like we make a sport of trampling over the fallen as if that’s part of their punishment and our holy duty to do so. We assume the authority to judge whether another is doing ministry the way God wants, living lifestyles in line with how “Christians should act” (because there’s only one mold apparently), and being spiritual the way we should (again, back to that one mold).

No wonder so many niche ministries have such a defensive posture when talking to their brethren. They recognize that it’s easier to think ill of our neighbor, that they don’t do ministry right, rather than credit them with not only wanting to do ministry, but appreciating their ability to do things you can’t and reach people you couldn’t. There’s lots of room to be the body of Christ, yet too many folks want everyone to be a toe. Listen to how different church people treat each other when they disagree. We can’t have a generous orthodoxy, where one party doesn’t have the sole key to how things are interpreted, but rather we not only slander but dehumanize our brothers and sisters.

Heaven help you if you actually sin. Again, love and forgiveness should be our calling cards, but we can be a murderously intolerant lot. I’d daresay there is a hatred in how we treat folks sometimes, especially those we’ve deemed fallen/sinners. The thing about fallen folks is that now their façade is gone. There’s no longer that need for pretense, you are what you are, it’s been revealed to all (and in truth, it now makes you … no different than the rest of us). Our treatment of “the fallen” should be where we shine most, being a hospital for the sick, demonstrating the grace, the redemption, the inclusion, and the power to transform and heal as a community comes along side them.

Basically people, I know I’m going to “fall” (we’ll just my regular lifestyle hiccups as mere stumbles). I know I’m going to let people down. I know that I will struggle. And when I do, I want a community to come alongside me, allow me to be broken, and then help restore me in love and grace. That’s what I’d like to see out of a spiritual community.


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Freedom and Responsibility

Freedom is a gift, but it’s a gift that comes with certain responsibilities. It requires us to be accountable for ourselves. On the one hand, we don’t want anything to get in the way of our freedoms, but on the other hand, some folks can’t handle their freedom. In America, we want the right (and have the dream) to work and supply for ourselves, without government not as supervening mommy. Leave me alone and let me make my own decisions. Yet already we’re seeing breathalyzers built into cell phones to prevent drunk-dialing or cars to prevent drunk driving. We’ve seen the demise of super sizes because McDonald’s made us fat. Not us. We didn’t drink too much or eat too much. Other people were responsible for that.

It’s a vicious cycle: we want options, freedoms, choices; but when things go wrong, we blame others, be they government, church, or our circle of friends. In the larger scheme of things, society tends to over react and, as a consequence limit (or at least encroach on our) freedoms in order to protect the few that can’t handle their choices. We have this fear of ourselves, of others, of community, of government, religion, and of the unknown. We definitely have a fear of taking chances, making mistakes, and being held accountable.

Truth be told, too many people want to be told what to do; that’s why there is such a comfort to rules, that’s the draw of becoming legalistic or fundamentalist. They want the black and white picture of reality and hate (or at least distrust) anything that smacks of gray. And they don’t mind the encroachment of their freedoms in order to secure their vision of safety.

The price of true freedom is personal accountability. Freedom goes against our sense of control, and ultimately, that’s what the extra rules that make up our walk boil down to. Freedom means challenging yourself and exploring new ideas, not sealing yourself away from everything that you might consider an evil influences. No amount of rules or intervention by the government in the name of safety and security is going to keep everyone from abusing the freedom that they have been given. Or being abused by it. There are simply consequences to our choices. With great freedom comes great responsibility.


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Growing Through Disillusionment*

The other night a group of us were out together: Maurice Broaddus Rob Rolfingsmeyer, Rich Vincent, and Lauren David. We hate to shatter any illusions, but during the course of our discussion we came to the startling conclusion that we can be asses (except for Lauren). It’s not like any of us set out to be the Dr. House of the theological set, it’s more of a resignation to the facts. We’re not going out of our way to be an ass, we simply know we can be asses. And yet the question comes up “do we have any business attempting to model what the church should be about, much less the love of Christ?”

We have a certain idea of what a saint is and are too quick to label people saints without considering what we mean by the term. After all, even the best of people are but flawed vessels, yet flawed vessels are the only kind of person God works through. To quote Miroslav Volf, “I am not a Christian because of the church, but because of the gospel. However, it was only through the broken church that I received the gospel. Because of the gospel, I participate in the church.” Think of some of the greats. Mother Theresa of Calcutta was known for her temper and how mean she could be. Francis of Assisi hated lepers despite talking about how much we should love everyone. Yet God manages to continue His work through us.

It’s easy to fall into cynicism. A cynic is a frustrated idealist, with the emptiness they so often experience being a symptom of their inability to let go of their idealism. Most people are idealists at first but there must come a time in everyone’s lives when your ideals and your dreams must be measured against reality; where “what could be” and “what ought to be” is measured against “what is.” The false facades begin to crumble and those things which had been so solid and so true are not able to withstand the crush of practicality. What do we do when this happens? How do we handle our disappointment with the truth of life itself? It’s what we do with these questions that end up fundamentally shaping our mature selves. Do we hide in a corner and deny those things that seem to be crushing defeats? Do we toss up our hands in frustrated resignation and give up on whatever it is that we’d dreamed of for so long?

Such profound disillusion is often wrestled with the transition from childhood to adulthood (and thus probably a contributing factor to the condition of being a spiritual teenager). Starting with your parents and moving onto the institutions you want to hold dear (school, the government, etc.), it becomes a struggle to survive nothing, and no one, being as you thought they were.

There is an option that allows for growth and maturity in our lives. From its very foundation it is frightening and tends to take a lot of work (some of which may call for sacrifices which you’d never imagined). Fusing your ideals with the reality you have to work with. Hunting down those parts of your ideals that are able to be sacrificed without losing the whole and learning to integrate new ideas and new thoughts which previously seemed foreign and even counter to what you held so dear. Sometimes it calls for a delicate shifting of boundaries without sacrificing the core of your beliefs. Sometimes even the core must be discarded.

It’s not so easy to make the changes in our lives necessary to balance reality with ideals. It’s an uncertain time fraught with error and simply speaking, those mistakes must be made. If there is to be any room for growth you need to be unashamed of your own fallibility. Your mistakes are what mold and shape you if you learn from them. The lessons rarely come easy and at times can be quite frustrating.

We have faults and we make mistakes, so we’re going to need your grace as we journey together. We keep in mind the words of a friend of ours: “Instead of talking about what horrible people we are, why don't you go out and try to be the people you wish we were? If we do such a horrific job at loving people, why don't you go show us how it's done? If we are incapable of meeting hard to like people where they are at, why don't you go meet them where they are at?”

*A Maurice and Rob tag-team blog effort. With Lauren as the cheerleader.


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Negative Testimonies

We have a natural sense of God as our protector and desire to seek His protection. We want His protection, especially in light of the fact that we can’t protect one another. When bad things happen, it’s like we long for God to step in, in a more direct way, and control things. We don’t ask such things when things are going “okay” (or as we’re making our own bad decisions). It’s like we want a “sovereign” God when it’s convenient.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of what it would be like to give a “negative” testimony about God. We’ve all heard the “God gets the glory” testimonies when things go well for us, when circumstances work out in the end. But what if we don’t get “the end” – what if we can only see the darkness and all we have to offer is the “where was God when ... ?”

How do we go about sitting the blame at His doorstep? In learning how to live in tune with God, how do we deal with the negative things that happen to us? I know Christians who have no idea what it means to be with Him. Just as I know many self-proclaimed atheists who have a greater sense of how Christ lived with a sense of His grace, love, peace, and desire for social justice. Who understand a time to grieve, a time for lament, better than many who claim to follow Christ.

Maybe it boils down to our fairly flawed concepts of God. Sometimes it’s like we have to prove He even exists, or we believe that during our dark times, He always seems to be busy elsewhere. On the one hand, He’s pretty unrelatable, beyond anything our minds can even comprehend. Even the idea of trying to have a relationship with Him, of loving Him, or Him loving us, often staggers our imagination. On the other hand, we tend to “humanize” God, make Him relatable. To a degree, we have to in order to attempt to understand Him. But it’s like we have forgotten that Jesus was fully human, someone we can relate to and more importantly, someone who can relate to us.

We see God as outside of everything, picking and choosing at random when He chooses to intervene. Saying that He’s sovereign, but not knowing what that means. We may have the idea that all things are under His ultimate control, but hate when He has to let some things play out to not run roughshod over our free will. It’s like what we have to sometimes do as parents: we have to let out kids make their bad decisions and live by the consequences of them in order to let them be formed into the people we want them to be. Other times, we’re seemingly powerless, and have to watch our children go through unfortunate or tragic circumstances, with our children not always realizing how we grieve with them.

There does seem to be a great mystery in when God chooses, or can, to intervene; and when He doesn’t in order to fulfill His greater scheme of love. Sometimes we simply want to be shown how things are, all around us, written in us; we sense when things aren’t how they should be and long for how things were meant to be. In the mean times, in the darkness, there may be nothing good in the situation, but we still believe. We want to trust in the belief that God grieves with us, alongside us. In the frustration of not being able to protect the ones you love, the situation still sucks. So sometimes I have to honestly cry out:

I’m still angry. I’m still hurting. I don’t know what good you’re going to bring out of this. I don’t know what lessons you’re trying to teach through all of this. It’s not fair, but it’s not like my sense of fairness is greater than Yours. It’s not like I have a greater desire for justice than You. I don’t love my people more than You do. Help me to have the faith to believe that you are good. That you are in control.

May all of your expectations be frustrated,
May all of your plans be thwarted,
May all of your desires be withered into nothingness,
That you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child
And can sing and dance in the love of God,
Who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

• The Benediction by Brennan Manning


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Selling Salvation

The dilemma (from a reader): I was told just recently that a church's "success" is seen in it's fruit. If you can't point where souls are being saved, then your church is stagnant and something is wrong and instead of playing the blame game, you need to start by looking in the mirror … Do I need to love more? Yes. Do I need to show more mercy? Yes. Patience? Yes. Self-control? Yes. Etc, etc etc. Add that to the "how many souls are you saving?" line and you can start feeling like crap.

It boils down to this: how should one approach evangelism, especially in an environment of "all Jesus sales pitch, all the time." Since I covered this one in a previous blog, I have a friend guest blogging for me.

Guest Blog by Rob Rolfingsmeyer

Yes we are called to go and preach the gospel to the world...but...we are also called to be fully human. To be fully human we must build relationships with people. Now, if you build relationships with people for the sole purpose of trying to preach the gospel to them, you're not really building a relationship...you're building a customer base. We are not here to sell the gospel...St. Francis said to his disciples, "Go and preach the gospel to the world and, if you must, use words." In other words, preaching doesn't have to be oral.

For example, I hired a guy who had just reawakened to his faith and was just absolutely adamant about convincing people about the truth of God and Jesus. He used to get mad at me because he would drag me into an argument with whoever he was talking to. I'd end up saying something "profound" and the room would just go quiet. Usually it was agreeing with his viewpoint but coming at it from completely out of nowhere. I never tried to engage these folks in discussions about it. All I did was build relationships with them because they were good people and I liked talking with them.

One day I was working a six hour mini-shift with this girl who was ardently against God because of the whole suffering happening to good people thing. She asked me how I can believe in a good God (came to find out later, SHE never started conversations about God). I came at it from a different angle than what she had been hearing, then finally I left it with, "when someone suffers, don't you think God cries too?" She burst into tears (I have that effect on people)...of course this was the end of a four hour conversation. After that she was really interested in this whole Jesus thing. I never set out to convert her, trust me on this, I'm a Catholic who used to be Protestant, I get people trying to convert me a lot...there is nothing more annoying.

This is GOOD NEWS that we're talking about. Your life should quietly preach the gospel to others. There are times that you may feel prompted to explain Jesus to someone but there are others where the other person must prompt it. Being a human being and developing relationships is essential to the gospel...in the movie "The Big Kahuna", Danny Devito says basically that if you want to preach to someone, ask them how their kids are, find out what there dreams and hopes are. In other words, don't develop a relationship for the sole purpose of conversion. Once again it's selling something to a customer. As a car salesman I developed relationships with customers first and sold them a car. The whole point of the relationship was to get them in that car. Is that what we're supposed to do? Is evangelization just a tool to get someone to think like us, act like us, believe what we believe? No, Jesus came to restore the relationship between not only God and man, but man and man. Think about how Jesus evangelized. People came to him. He didn't seek people out to convert. He built relationships with disciples, news spread of this man who was saying things that no one had ever said before. Maybe we need to revamp our message and look at different angles, maybe we need to act in such a way that people seek us out, and not try to pass out tracts or hammer someone with the gospel message. Maybe we need to be friends first, fulfilling our humanity.

Sorry this was so long, I don't know if it clears anything up for you. If I sound like a heretic, well, I'm sorry.


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Belong Before You Believe

The church should be countercultural, a school of life, a pocket of resistance against the status quo, a foretaste (and first fruit) of things to come. It isn’t always.

The question becomes, should we join a church? (The short answer is “yes” and I’ll now refer you to “Why go to a church service?”). The issue that fascinates me is the one of how and why we go about becoming “members” of a church, because there are some real consequences to this decision.

Some people just aren’t joiners, or at least want no part of the rigamarole of joining. Whenever I’ve joined a church in the past, there were forms and doctrine statements that I had to sign to attest to their beliefs. I have NEVER been to a church were my beliefs lined up perfectly with theirs (mostly I skim them to see whether or not I can still drink). More than once I’ve told them that I can’t sign their membership papers because they would be making me lie to them (usually, they say that it’s just an acknowledgment that we know what the church believes. I still couldn’t shake the feeling like I was being Mirandized). Some churches have made me go through classes, as if you could actually flunk out (Lord knows, to my wife’s dismay, I’ve tried). Most times, joining a church has been more like an arranged marriage: can we live with each other.

I think any regular attender is a member. By the power of their presence, they have placed themselves under that church’s “authority,” as it were, to speak into their lives. One of the church’s role is to facilitate people into the formation of Christ’s image and I understand that trying to get some manner of commitment out of them would ease that process. And I get the frustration that some leaders have when their members have a lackadaisical attitude toward regular attendance.

But you know what? I would seriously consider not joining a church. Seriously. If one of the church's roles is to make disciples, we do that (practically speaking) by being a part of people's lives and butting into them. In fact, in this regard, I don't see the church operating much differently than, say, AA (or insert whatever you want for what it is the church is trying to get you up those 12 steps to solve). Frankly, I might even go one step further and say don't be a part of any close circle of friends. Only this past week I was asked whether or not a friend's situation had deteriorated to the point of needing an intervention. An intervention certainly sounds like a group of us taking it upon ourselves to butt in where we aren't particularly wanted.

I would enter into joining a faith community with my eyes wide open to the fact that being a part of a church body means you are inviting them into your life every bit as much as they are inviting you into theirs. That's the nature of relationships and the reality of community. The deeper the relationship, the more likely butting in and holding each other into account there will be. So if I wanted to do whatever I wanted, with people being allowed to speak into my life when I want them to and only in the areas I want them, I wouldn't join any faith community - especially a smaller one where people are more likely to know me.

If you are going to speak into my life, you have to have a relationship with me. More than an “I recognize your face/I know your name” relationship. We have to have lived life together. Shared times. Then you’ve earned the right to speak into my life. People need to belong before they believe, even if they never believe. The church should be a hospice, a safe haven where people can work out their questions. Allowing doubts, allowing people of differing beliefs, doesn’t change what you believe. Accepting and welcoming people where they are and as they are doesn’t change what we believe the Bible has to say about what’s right or wrong. We can’t just be about wagging fingers at one another.


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Church is Not a Building

I think the sentiment that church really doesn't happen on Sunday is total crap (to put it bluntly). It goes against centuries of tradition - both Jewish and Christian. The pinnacle of Israel's and the Church's formation took place in public liturgical worship. The services really meant something to them. Sure, this can be abused, but so can the idea that Sunday church doesn't matter, and only picnics in the park do. For too long, evangelical Christians have been too critical of those who faithfully attend Sunday worship as if they are second-rate Christians, as if they don't know true community, as if they are not really committed, etc. Sadly, we reap what we sow: We can't talk this for long without undermining Sunday worship. I know, for some, I sound like a museum-piece... and that's ok. I don't mind. I know that it is very cool and hip right now to criticize the church, be cynical about its future, disparage its workers, and pretend that organization is the devil's greatest work. (Interestingly, the same folk who decry "organized" religion would demand that their hospital, library, and school be organized.) But I can vouch as a pastor who prayerfully puts in long hours in order to make sure my flock is spiritually fed each week, that a low attendance impacts my spirit. I preach better when my flock is with me. I preach worse when I feel alone. For more of my rantings on the necessity and centrality of corporate worship, check out my most recent sermon “All Together Now”. Please accept these ravings in the spirit in which they are given - with much love and concern. The pursuit of true spiritual transformation cannot happen apart from self-denying commitment to the good of others, and one way to maintain this stance is to meet together regularly for worship, instruction, and service. No matter how innovative the church becomes, it will never improve on the discipline and rhythm of regular liturgical formation.

(And now a link to Rich’s sermon, All Together Now, his look at Psalm 150 as if offers a concentrated vision the where, why, how, and who of corporate worship.)

Many of us have gone through what Dan Kimboll called Reality Church, the stages of our involvement with the thing we call church. Our reactions to “how we do church” has folks all over the place, calling for more “high” church to the practical eradication of any sort of weekly gathering. I know many folks have wrestled with the disillusionment of seeing some “mega-churches” sprawl out of control, focusing on the building and its maintenance—caught up in empire building—while forgetting about the community, the neighborhood. Church isn’t a place. We’ve come to think of church as that building we go to on Sundays, that performance we go witness, that thing we do.

As I am thinking about the idea of church membership, the koininia, the fellowship, that comes from belonging to a people, I can’t help but recall something I heard about pods of whales. Humpback whales come together, as a pod, with their individual songs. Once they are together, they learn a new song, changing their individual songs, and then go their way to teach their songs to others. Church is a relationship, the developing a community of faith, a sacred space we carve out in our world and lives.

With the common goal of being committed to following Jesus we gather together. The grace of God is a school in Christ and everyone is welcome in the school … but the school is meant to progress you. The school is to “graduate” disciples. The church should be countercultural, a school of life, a pocket of resistance against the status quo, a foretaste (and first fruit) of things to come. It isn’t always.

“It is important to think about the Church not as "over there" but as a community of struggling, weak people of whom we are part and in whom we meet our Lord and Redeemer." --Henry Nouwen


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On Venting

From the mailbag: "Is it hypocritical to vent about someone but act nice to their face?"

We all need to vent from time to time, to blow off steam about a person or situation. When venting becomes gossip or slander, now we’re veering off into real issues.

There are several potential dangers. Pick your venting friends wisely. My “vent circle” is pretty small, usually my wife and another friend or two. Of course, I like venting to the people I have issues with. I’d like to say that is because venting does not good if the people I’m venting about don’t know what’s wrong. In truth, it’s because I simply delight in not wasting good lines behind people’s back. That’s my own issue.*

The reason I mentioned gossip and slander is because what seems like harmless venting can sometimes shape people’s perceptions. I know that if I vent to someone who doesn’t know the person I’m venting about, my venting caricaturization of them is what will form the basis of their impression of them. I can’t then turn around and wonder why once I introduce my friends to each other, they don’t quite get along.

We’re called to love, even when we don’t always like someone. The true test of what we claim to believe lies in whether we can love our enemies and those not easy to like. Granted, sometimes the most loving thing we can do is put some distance between us and certain folks, but I would imagine the best road to take would be to be loving to their face and loving behind their back.

Which is exactly why Jesus gets on my nerves sometimes.


*Being self-aware doesn’t make it better. It usually makes me twice the jerk since I’m aware of what I’m doing and thus increases the likelihood that I’m doing it deliberately.


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From the Mailbag

I can use some advice. I'm really considering stepping down as Emir of the Community. Bottom line is that I'm tired of the constant headache of dealing with every issue/problem, charting our direction and all the battles that ensue. When is enough, enough?

Part of me feels like I'm running out before the "job" is complete. And part of me feels like I'm the best we have to offer to do the job (this is part arrogance and part cold fact). However, the "job" is never done because there is always work to be done (as you surely know). And just as I came in fresh with bold ideas and new direction, there is no reason to assume the next guy won't do the same thing once the responsibility is thrust upon him.

I don't know, but I really believe that I can serve better in a subordinate position. I don't need (or want) to be the chief. What do you think?

Man, I know what you mean. Quietly, the other reason it took me so long to write you back is because I needed someone to encourage me to stick with this leadership thing before I could even BEGIN to talk to you about it. I was feeling beat down and discouraged, The sheer exhaustion of constantly thinking about the ministry, how best to implement things, how best to reach and shepherd people. For that matter, the fatigue of trying to move any group of people from point A to point B, physically or spiritually. You just get tired of the headache, of the constant complaints and criticisms (there's nothing like waking up to the pile of messages, e-mails, and comments about how you're wrong and not doing anything right. Or the list of suggestions of things you OUGHT to be doing.)

Then there’s the special grief that comes after you've poured yourself into people–served them, discipled them, helped them–only to see them turn on you (or them leaving your community because you’ve somehow betrayed them).

However, let me tell you, it took two things to get me back in the game:

1) the encouragement of a couple of people to remind me to be who I am and keep doing what I'm doing.

2) seeing a couple of victories. Just knowing that you've made the difference in a couple of people's lives, that what you've done has mattered.

I think this applies to any of us, no matter where we are on the spiritual journey, not just pastors, emirs, or leaders. None of us are that strong or successful - most days we’re just barely getting by. I think that's why we're told to encourage one another. The ultimate decision is yours, but sometimes it takes and outsider’s perspective to put things in place for you. Just a few things to reinvigorate you. Let's face it, the times of doubt and worthlessness constantly plague leaders of any stripe. We constantly live with the nagging voices, internal and external, and we have to know the difference between it being time to step down or move on, and "the Enemy" simply playing on our doubts and weakness.

Don't get me wrong, if the work is meant to be done, God will raise up the people to do it. We aren't bigger than the work, nor are either of us irreplaceable. However, we're here now and I don't think God is done with either of us yet.

And now I think I'll go blog all of this.*


*And because it’s my blog, I will leave out my other spiritual advice that began “Get your head out of your ass.”



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Horror and the Fear of the Lord

Have you written on the topic of the fear of God Himself related to horror? ... As a teen I read a lot of King's storytelling, thought some was trash and some powerful. More mysterious and powerful was H.P. Lovecraft of which I read some in undergrad ... I believe a great creative mind from a true biblical paradigm could do horror.

We are told to work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), yet we’ve rather lost the idea of what it means to have a fear of the Lord. To our modern minds, we have difficulty reconciling the ideas that if Jesus Christ is perfect love, then there is nothing to fear of the Most High (I think I understand the reasoning, if you look at salvation as a “legal transaction, with Christ taking the penalty for our sins onto Himself thus we have no judgment to fear). Or, because of the God is love/love casts out all fear (seeming) dichotomy, that somehow you can’t have faith and fear at the same time. I don’t believe that to be true. In fact, I want to look at the relationship between horror and a fear of the Lord.

At the root of what it means to “do” horror is the idea of fear. Part of the cathartic experience of horror is out exorcizing of some of the things that scare us, that shadow of fear that we live our lives under. Ultimately, horror is about the fear of death and horror is excited by the reality of evil. We fear for our lives and the lives of those we love. We live in fear of good being consumed by evil. Frankly, evil should be feared. Even with the full reality of Christ, we still live with the consequences of evil all around us. A mother killing her children. Religious fanatics blowing up buildings. We seek a context of understanding for that which makes no sense. A lot of what horror attempts to do is make sense of evil. Evil is irrational and uncontrollable; true acts of evil are so irrational that conspiracy theories make sense.



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Matt Cardin, in the preface of his horror collection Divinations of the Deep, posits that “the deep”, the primordial chaos, can reveal much about God, ourselves, and the true nature of our reality.

“We encounter the deep, so they say, in the dark mysteries of life: in horror, pain, nightmare, disillusionment, and death, in places where light and reason seem to be absent, or to have only a precarious foothold; at the seams of the universe where sometimes a thread comes unraveled and a ray of darkness shines through, and the light does not overcome it. To seek such glimpses and to ask such questions is always dangerous, however, because we can never know in advance what form the answers will take.”

So it struck me the other day that maybe we’re too quick to sing I Stand in Awe of You in our worship times. We may sing it, but we don’t believe it. For one, we’ve lost our ability to be awed. Secondly, we’ve forgotten that God is a dangerous terror. We want a God we can control and understand. By losing the idea of what it means to have a fear of the Lord, we end up trivializing God. Fear and love are connected because when we lose the fear, we lose love. I’m speaking of a healthy fear, one rooted in how important that object is to us, how much the object of our fear/love means to us as well as how little we can control them; and how much we fear life without them.

Even though fear and love are interlinked in both the Old and New Testament, fear is often overlooked or undermined in much contemporary Christian spirituality. Evangelicals assume that fear is the opposite of love. They rarely consider that fear is the complement of love. Godly fear that complements love is not simply terror or a sense of profound awe. Fear arises from the perceived inability to control an existential object. For example, we fear a lion when no cage exists between the animal and ourselves. Without the bars of a cage, the lion is beyond our control.

We often sense, if not experience, and existential terror. A gnawing emptiness that claws at our souls. A darkness, the deep, that threatens to suck the joy for all aspects of our lives, that can lead to a spiraling sourness to life that makes us want to crawl into bed and never get out. Some philosophers call this a “God-sized hole” that we try to fill with all manner of distraction, from the pursuit of materialism and the trappings of success to family and relationships.

Yet the terror, the ache in our soul, remains.

Even should we turn to God, we sometimes find our spiritual walks dissatisfied, as if somewhere along the path we missed, or lost, something vital. Maybe that sense of “terror” or awe of seeking a relationship with something larger than we can conceive of with our finite minds, something beyond our measure and control. And we need to cling to it, working out our salvation in fear and trembling.

We must maintain and nurture a “delightful terror” and “trembling fascination” toward God. God is the ultimate existentially relevant object over which we have no control. God is absolute in this regard; there is no other reality more existentially relevant to our lives – no reality over which we have less control. For this reason, we must fear God in order to truly love God. We cannot control God, therefore we must fear God.

And live in light of that fear.


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We’re More than Just Sinners*

The total depravity of man - it’s one of the five points of Calvinism. The doctrine that hammers home the point that man has no inherent goodness, no inherent value in thought, word, or deed, and that left to his own devices, man is incapable of saving himself. The emphasis is on man’s “natural condition,” his fallen state, born into and a slave to sin; in so doing this points to God’s divine grace in saving us. It’s a Gospel message that begins with “the Fall,” but I can’t help but wonder that if the story begins with humans as sinners, it fails to deal with the “why would God care about us?”

Maybe the problem begins with the fact that the story doesn’t begin with “the Fall” but with “Creation.”

Instead of seeing humans first and foremost as sinners, we need to see them as Eikons of God, created to relate to God, to relate to others, and to govern the world as Eikons. The Fall affects each of the previous: our relation to God, our relation to others, and our relation to the world. Humans, then, are cracked Eikons. There is all the difference in the world in depicting humans as simply sinners and seeing sinfulness as the condition and behavior of a cracked Eikon. Humans sin, but their sin is the sin of an Eikon. They can’t be defined by their sin until they are seen as Eikons.

It’s hard to have a discussion about the Gospel message without eventually touching on the issue of sin. And though sin is a word often tossed about, sometimes I wonder if whenever any two people talk about “sin” they are even talking about the same thing. I’ve heard definitions ranging from “the evil that men do” to “missing the mark”.

The Gospel message has been reduced to a legal transaction (Christ’s sacrifice balancing the scales of cosmic justice) or sparing us from the hands of an angry God (leading to a get your own butt into heaven, save yourself sort of salvation). If sin is just about any imperfection, any falling short, what does that project onto God? “Oops, you missed. It’s smitin’ time!”

Sin is a religious term within a religious construct, only having meaning in connection to the Divine. It’s a turning away from the life of God, an apathy or transgression of the will of God. That’s one way of looking at it. Removing the word from its doctrinal connotations, we can look at it another way. We can think of it as human error, a failure to fulfill human potential (and thus sin becomes that which dehumanizes us).

“Sin is a failure to be, we wonder, what or who have we failed to be? To answer this question, we must return to the image of God…God created us to be his image-bearers. And at the heart of the imago dei is God’s desire that we show forth the divine character. “Sin,” therefore, is the failure to reflect the image of God.” –Stanley Grenz (Created for Community, 89-90)

Now, one brief comment as I end this post today: sin itself is more than judicial failings and more than offense against the Law. Sin is the disruption of the relationship of loving God, loving others, and governing our world. Which means, the gospel is designed to heal our love for God, our love for others, and our relationship to the world.

We start the story of our faith with creation. With humanity created in the image of God and declared “good”. As image-bearers, we have inherent worth. The Fall becomes about not living up to that potential, what we were created to be. This impacts our view of the Gospel, as it attains a more holistic dimension. It becomes about seeking wholeness, humans to be restored in all the dimensions of humanity, being fully human. However, it doesn’t stop there. The inward journey leads to outward love. All grace should move us to outward expression. The Kingdom of God is now and ours becomes a ministry of reconciliation, of restoration. Transformation of everything about our world, from our societal values, to our economic structures/priorities, to our cultural identity.

We’re more than just sinners.

*Special thanks to Scot McKnight and Rich Vincent


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Guarding Yourself

In Christ we have freedom, yet we keep choking it off with our own brands of legalism. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” (Galatians 5:1) We don’t trust freedom and we certainly aren’t comfortable with this whole idea of liberation. Most people want to be told, they want the black and white picture and hate (or at least distrust) anything that smacks of gray. That’s why there is such a comfort to rules and why fundamentalism has its draw. We have this fear of ourselves, of others, of community and church, and of the unknown. We definitely have this fear of taking chances and making mistakes.

So what does it mean to be “in the world but not of the world”? Practically speaking, the answer to this question has been a form of isolationism prevalent in too many Christian circles. A quasi-monk lifestyle with the church as some sort of abbey, which if people truly practiced monastic lifestyles and lived in monastic communities, I’d be cool with. Instead what we get is this us vs. them mentality (as we cut ourselves off from any one or thing that may “taint” us with their “worldliness”) and Christian ghettos (where everything we do or participate in has to have the adjective “Christian” in front of it: “Christian” music, “Christian” karate, “Christian” candy, etc.).

Actually, it doesn’t matter what my answer to this question is because I’m going to take a stab at addressing I think what is at the heart of what people “really” mean when they start tossing that phrase around. So let’s phrase the question in a way that expresses the heart of our concern as we go about trying to lead missional lives: “how can we protect ourselves, our own spiritual integrity, while still functioning within the world?”

The big, and valid, concern is one of influences. The fear that we will get caught up in stuff that will throw us from our Christian walks, messy or not, and derail us from a life of pursuing holiness. We don’t live in a vacuum. We’ve been given guidelines and parameters (the Bible describes itself as being “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (II Timothy 3:16). While there is great freedom in Christ, we can’t just do whatever you feel like doing. And frankly, we won’t always get why there are certain restrictions. We won’t don’t always understand why we have to study and pray, for example, but hopefully our understanding comes in our participation.

All this to give you three tips in “guarding yourself. One, know your truth. Keep returning to that well of knowledge. It is the discipline of believers. We must constantly immerse ourselves in Scriptures not just for remembrance of God, but also to remember who we are and why we do whatever we do. Two, think for yourselves. Think through your faith, your beliefs, and keep stretching yourselves. In other words, keep asking questions. One of the hardest things for pastors and teachers to do is train their people how to critically think. Three, know your limits. When Christians ask me “how can you be around all of that horror stuff?” one of the presumptions is that reading/writing horror is one step on the path to the occult. (I guess we glorify the occult, make it fascination, and then little Johnny goes off to worship Satan.) Yeah, well the occult has no hold over and little interest for me outside of crafting a story. That will happen when you come from a family of obeah practitioners. So I have no problem being the “sinister minister.” However, you won’t see me being a part of the xxxchurch ministry. You get me within sniffing distance of them and I’d give Ted Haggerty a scandal target to shoot for.

Here’s the thing, we can’t live in fear of “the world”. We’ve been given a mission and have a job to do. A job that doesn’t always allow us to remain “safe” and “comfortable.” Either we believe that we have the Holy Spirit to guide and protect us or we don’t. For some, that may mean a time within the protective bubble of the Christian ghetto. However, that doesn’t mean stay there.


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Wagers

Lately I’ve been contemplating what it means to have a truly theocentric worldview. I guess my worldview starts with the premise that life is either meaningless or it’s not; that I either matter or I am insignificant, random, or an accident. Of course most of the "questions" boil down to faith. Faith that there may not be any (satisfactory) answers. Faith that there may not be answers we would understand. And faith to trust God in the not knowing while we muddle our way through things.

Faith gives meaning to existence, which isn’t to say that I/we as Christians hold the patent on true faith. There are many different kinds of faith: faith in God, faith in man, faith in (your)self, and so on. Correct me if I’m wrong (and I know you will), but I assume that nihilists would say that we flee to the idea of God as a cop out because we can’t handle imagining a life without Him. He is our existential crutch in a meaningless life.

Just like I think that each of those faiths still have the problem of evil, I’m left with some other questions if life is meaningless. If I have nothing but this life, why should I be selfless? Why should I be sacrificial? Why should I be concerned about other people? We only have a momentary chance to “go for ours” and there is little benefit (evolutionarily speaking) to living for others (tribe, species, or what have you).

A recurring comment since my discussions fleshing out what the Bible may or may not be saying on premarital sex has been why? Going with that question, why stop there? Why restrict yourself in any area of your life? Eat what you want. Drink what you want. Both are valid, necessary, and vital drives, why not do as much of either as you want? As I study what it means to be a Christian, I am struck by this pattern of a (holistic) lifestyle of restraint. Christian living seems to be one of denying oneself in all areas of your life, learning discipline.

I believe that we, as Christians, lead lives of delayed gratifications with the ultimate belief that the supreme gratification comes with eternal fellowship and communion with God. However, again, that’s a matter of faith.


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How I’m a Christian Horror Writer

As the “sinister minister,” one of the first things that I get asked is how can I be a horror writer and call myself a Christian. I actually get asked this by “both sides”: this is one of the primary questions of my horror brethren, probably because they sympathize with the assumed grief that I get from my fellow Christians (though I’ve been invited to speak on “Horror as a Genre” at a Christian convention).

This isn’t a “once and for all” type post, but I think it’s a question worth exploring at length.

From the Christian side of the question, part of the underlying issue lies with misconceptions about the genre. When churched folk typically think “horror” they think blood, guts, and the demonic. One time, our extended family sat around the dinner table (after a church service where we symbolically drank the blood and ate the flesh of our Savior). Discussion turned to my web site having both Christian and horror content, at which point I was accused of being"lukewarm" (you have to love epithets that you have to look up in the Bible to get: lukewarm refers to those whom Jesus would spit out as being neither spiritually hot nor cold) because I write horror. "That’s demons and witchcraft" and "I’m only doing the devil’s work" are especially ironic accusations, since it’s their side of the family that has the practicing obeah people.

Sometimes I remind people like this about the Bible they are using to condemn me. We could object to the individual elements of the Bible, like the occultic parts involving sorcerers/witches, mediums, and the demons/demon-possessed. We could skip the blood and guts of people being dashed against rocks, their entrails eaten by dogs, mothers eating their own afterbirth, and tent pegs being thrust through people's heads. We could ignore the bad language (though, we play down the stuff that would be translated piss and shit today); just like we tend to gloss over the sex scenes and the rapes. Or we could realize that the overarching point of the book, the meta-narrative, is the story of redemption.

The other thing I remind these well-intentioned folk of is that the language of the genre is the language of Christianity. What do horror stories--like the ones they had to read in high school (like the stories of Edgar Allen Poe or Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery") or movies you know they have watched like "The Sixth Sense"–wrestle with? The total depravity of man (if you want a Calvinistic loaded phrase), the nature of good and evil, the mystery of the afterlife, unseen spiritual forces (like angels or demons), or the meditation on mortality/our fear of death. Even the most “atheistic” horror writers, at the very least, are moralists; using writing as therapy, wrestling with what they see in the world around them.

So the question becomes “how could I not write horror?”

On the flip side, many in my horror circles have misconceptions about Christianity, much of it stemming from a distrust of the institutional church. Let’s face it, many of their stories begin “I was raised (fill-in-the-blank denomination), until ...” the church failed them in some way. Many religious people have a narrow definition of what construes true or "saving" spirituality and arguments aren't going to convince them otherwise. They believe what they believe and they know what God has to say on the topic. Put simply, horror is not for everyone. According to my faith, in Christ we have been given tremendous freedom, not a list of dos and don'ts as many people interpret spirituality. However, we also have been given wisdom to draw our own lines for what constitutes what we can handle and what constitutes sinning against our conscience. Where this freedom becomes abused is when, for example, I assume that my line is the universal demarcation that all Christians should follow.

Look, my faith informs my writing. As writers, our worldviews–from nihilistic to religious–are a part of us and thus a part of our writing. What we believe, why we believe, it’s all in there. Are there topics that I won’t touch? I don’t know. I do know that my primary concern is "can I write my stories well?"

Admittedly, there is a distrust of art within the Protestant church in particular. It’s like we have come to believe that you can’t have art for art’s sake, that the only thing that makes art redeemable is if it’s a set up for our sales pitch (for example, if at some point the victim in my vampire story might turn to her pursuer and explain how said vampire can know Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior). Is that the sole definition of a Christian work? No, that’s propaganda, not art. It's okay if we pursue art for art’s sake. Creating beauty is its own pursuit of truth and all truth points to God. For that matter, since I believe in God as the ultimate Creator, as a writer, I’m joining in his creative work. And I firmly believe that when you are doing what you were created to do, you are doing God’s work.

So the question becomes, “how could I not be a Christian writer?”

[See also A Theology of Horror Part I, Part II, and Part III.]

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