Bandits No More

My heart is broken for the current generation of young people. This Sunday I get to speak at our community’s Baccalaureate service and will have an opportunity to share my heart with them.

Since my son is graduating this year - and because I work in a church that has youth - I have the opportunity to get to know some of this year’s class. I like them, and will miss them as they go off to pursue the next stage of life. I know that going off - gaining independence - is a good thing. I sure enjoyed gaining my independence when I left home and went off to college. Good though it is, I’ll miss them nonetheless.

My challenge to them will come from the story of the rich young ruler. Commonly the focus is on Jesus telling him to sell all he had and them to follow Jesus. I’m going to approach it a little differently. This was a fellow who had so much going for him. Not satisfied with being young and rich, he thought he’d go get his eternal life ticket from Jesus. How awesome that would be - having it all in this life and the next!

But Jesus ruined his plans and he went away sad. Jesus had challenged his innermost determination of who he was going to be. “I’m going to be rich. I’m going to be in control of my own destiny.” Given that determination there was no room left for Jesus.

When these students move to their next stage of life they will likely be faced with greater freedom than they’ve ever had. No longer will Mom & Dad, their pastors, teachers and community be looking over their shoulder or following their every move. Whatever they’ve been up to this point, they can decide to to be something different now. And no one will be there to remind them of what they were.

Such freedom is awesome. I think it is a tremendous gift of God. Some of them who have not done well - who who have not stood out from the crown in any way up to this point - will make decisions that radically transform their lives for the better. Some, however, will make a different kind of decision. Free of the down home folks, they’ll make their home in the far country, forgetting their past - even the good parts.

I will challenge these students to determine here and now to be followers of Jesus - that whatever direction they take in life, it will be in the company of Jesus. If their primary decision is to follow Jesus, that determination will give them resources to handle the rest of life.

Last week I took my oldest children to see Iron Man. It looks like a typical super hero action movie, but it’s really about Tony Stark’s character development. At the end of the movie Tony is in a news conference about the extraordinary events preceding. He knows it’s to his advantage to keep quiet about his alter ego as Iron Man. His advisers agreed on that. But Tony’s last words were, “I am Iron Man.” Why’d he do it? He’d determined - contrary to his former way of living - to be a person who told the truth. Having made that determination, he didn’t have to agonize over particular situations as they came along. As a truth-teller, he told the truth.

The graduates have thousands of decisions ahead of them. Some big, some not so big. My prayer for them that all those decisions will be made in the context of a primary decision to be a follower of Jesus.

My brother’s been blogging lately about the nexus between living as Christians and living in “our” broader culture. The brings to mind what Tony Jones wrote about the “Hauerwasian Mafia” a while back. Here are some of my (brief) thoughts on these matters.

Some theologies preach a metaphysical dualism. There is a material world and there is a spiritual world. The salvation Christianity teaches is OF the spiritual world and saves us FROM the material world.  Other theologies see more unity between what we would call material and what we would call spiritual.

Most theologies preach a social dualism. There is a secular (non-Christian) world of sociality and a Christian world of sociality. Some Christians say we are called to spurn the former and embrace the latter. Others say we are called to save the latter.

I’m not yet convinced of the argument that Christians ought to have nothing to do with any forms of sociality other than church. Biological family? Jesus did away with that. Ethnic or national identity? Pure idolatry.

When it comes to family, my reading of the NT is that Jesus doesn’t do away with family. Rather, he relativizes it. While one’s primary relationship is to Jesus, with this relationship becoming the pivot for all other relationships, those other relationships are not eliminated. Jesus is still able to condemn {can I say Jesus condemned something?) those who weasel out of responsibility toward honoring parents.

Ethnic or national identification surely has a weaker case in the NT, though I still think relativizing is a better description than elimination. Jesus doesn’t only love “the world” (which we take to mean “everybody”). He also loves his own people Israel, and laments over their misguided ways. Paul loves his fellows Jews as well (Rom. 9), but is also willing to USE his Roman citizenship when it seems useful. From what I see, he never seems interested in pursuing the Roman agenda (what was the average Roman’s sense of “responsible citizenship?” I don’t know).

Paul lived an itinerant lifestyle - like some other folks I know - though his tenure in each location seems shorter than ours. I don’t see him at any point saying of a place, “This is my home.” Though Jesus appears to have had a house in Capernaum, in the period of his life depicted in the Gospels, he seems even more “homeless” than Paul. What are we to make of their homelessness? Is that aspect of their lives to be part of our imitation, our following? If it is, then most Christians for most of the time since Christ have gone seriously wrong.

Guy Williams has been blogging lately about ministry in the United Methodist Church, particularly on itineracy and matching churches and pastors. David Brooks’ column today sheds some light on the phenomena we’re seeing, particularly the gap between urban, suburban and rural churches.

Brooks describes the change over the past half century:

In the decades since, some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner.

While Brooks’ focus is on the differences between Obama and Clinton in the presidential race, I think this difference impacts our ministry personnel and deployment as well. For just about the same period Brooks has in view Methodism has increased the educational requirements for clergy. If our culture has divided in two, then our church, mainstream American as it is, may also have become divided in two. But is our pool of pastors from both cultural segments, in proportions anywhere near the proportions found in the broader culture (or even in our churches)? I’d say not.

What are the consequences for ministry if Brooks is right? Here’s what comes to mind:

• By maintaining high educational standards we are ensuring that most  of our pastors fit into one cultural segment and are at best uncomfortable in the other.
• If we want to reach both cultural segments we need to find ways to recruit and train pastors and leaders without de-culturing them. Increasing respect for Local Pastors may be one way to do this.
• We need to pay attention to culture - the culture of our congregations and the culture of our pastors. In my experience I’ve had some good fits and some really poor fits. As far as I can tell, culture never came into consideration.

I like being educated. My most effective ministry has been with those who are in that cultural segment. At the same time, I recognize the need for people who are not culturally like me - even in my current appointment - who can join in the ministry so we can reach the people of our area. This implies that when we think of multi-cultural ministry thinking of race and ethnicity alone is not enough.

My brother has been blogging about conversion lately. Today he posted on conversion and stress. Here are my initial thoughts:

Part of the difficulty is assuming we know what we’re talking about, when what we have are, in fact, abstractions. “Stress,” “Hitting bottom,” “conversions,” need more specificity. If my car is hurtling toward a traffic blockage, the thought of having a wreck might produce some stress. It would be highly irrational in that case to reason, “Oh, this situation is stressing me out. I’m going to wait until I feel less stress to convert from pushing the accelerator to pushing the brake.” I suppose the time of less stress might come sometime between coming out of your drugged stupor in your hospital bed and being presented your hospital bill (or being taken to court for reckless driving).

Or hitting bottom. Which bottom? Relative to what? If you’re eating some of that yogurt that has the fruit at the bottom, it would be a good thing to hit bottom as you get yourself a bite.

If we want to keep the abstractions, let’s try looking at it this way. Perhaps when we experience stress (whatever that might be) we find that our analytical faculties tend to weaken. Our minds are focused on other things. In that kind of situation, whether we judge a conversion or change to be good depends on the context of the stress. If we are stressed over the death of a loved one and find ourselves exposed to the marketing message of a car salesman, we might not have as much resistance. Of course it might be that we’ve needed a new car for some time (since our current car is a gas guzzling death trap), but have been unable to do anything about it because of the busyness of life - or the sickness of the loved one.

Or perhaps we’re in the driving too fast behind unmoving traffic. We become stressed over a potential wreck. A passenger in our car cries out, “Hit the brake!” Our foot makes a conversion. Our analytical faculties may not take much time to analyze the options, but it seems like an ok outcome if a wreck is averted.

Can we say that stress is some sort of discomfort manifested in the emotions? If so, can we say that our desire is to alleviate the stress - the discomfort? When Saul of Tarsus was stressed (”kicking against the goads” sounds stressful and uncomfortable), the stress seems to have been a useful instrument of God in his life.

Will the conversion stick? If the problem (stress inducer) is something like a traffic blockage, the conversion from accelerator to brake should be temporary. It’d be pretty silly to say, “I’m keeping my foot on the brae because there were cars stopped in front of me yesterday.

What we’re looking at then, is the nature of the Gospel. While it seems that the Gospel will address some of the discomforts of ordinary life, there are several discomforts it leaves unaddressed AND several stresses it seeks to open our eyes to. “My shoes don’t fit, so my foot hurts.” I don’t think the Gospel says anything about that. But the discomfort of being a sinner in the eyes of a holy God? Ordinary life seems to know little of that stress.

It is in this last area that the current American church has been very weak. Thinking that stress (discomfort) is only bad (like we think pain is only bad), we do everything we can to keep people from feeling it. “God loves you. God is nice. Feel good about yourself. Everything will be ok.” Most of those things can be abstracted from scripture. But if that’s what we preach we’re committing Gospel malpractice, much the way a doctor who suppressed test results (showing cancer) would be.

We have also worked to make sure we don’t challenge people’s analytical faculties. The gospel is purely and simply therapeutic (in this case meaning only “it makes us feel better”), so we don’t need to make people think. All we have to address is the immediate feelings of stress so they can feel better. Don’t think too deeply when you can feel better today. Unfortunately, sometimes feeling better today means you die tomorrow, while not feeling better today may be just what you need to get by.

Finally, if we imagine that the only stress produced by the Gospel is the fear of hell, then we incline people to want to take care of that stress - via a ticket to heaven. But once you have your ticket, why worry about anything else? We who lead Christians need to find ways to identify relevant biblical discomforts and allow them free reign in our lives, so we can then exemplify those discomforts to the people around us. Healthy stress leads to healthy action. It’s only when stress gets burdensome that we find ourselves paralyzed, unable to act.

The United Methodist Church has been in at least numerical decline for a generation. Here in the South we look at Baptist churches with envy, since they’re usually bigger, richer, and more powerful than ours. When we hear about denominational statistics, we hear “UMC, down; SBS, up.” Well, not any more: the SBC has now plateaued. Finally some company in our misery!

Ed Stetzer has a commentary on the plateau event and has generated many interesting comments. Much of what he - and they - say sound pretty familiar to me. Change the “SBC” to “UMC,” and adjust a couple of terms here or there, and it sounds like what I’ve seen in the UMC.

Stetzer attributes much of the problem to a lack of a “Great Commission Resurgence.” I’m not an SBC, so I’m not fit to comment on the state of the Great Commission in their midst. I can say that we UM’s are still working on it. We know enough to know that the Great Commission is a good thing. We’ve started talking more about doing outreach ministry. But we haven’t - for the most part - developed any momentum in disciple making, in actually helping people cross the line of commitment to Jesus. Why is this?

I’ll offer a few reasons. Let me know what you think.

1. It’s easier to focus on our own needs, wants and comfort than to go out and reach the lost. Reaching will make us change our schedules. It might even cost us something. We just don’t have any money left after taking care of our buildings. Why don’t we let the Annual Conference take care of it? Hey - maybe we could do something - if they’d send us some money to do it. Oh yeah, they need to cut our apportionments, too.
2. Lost? What do you mean, lost? Thinking that someone is lost is way too judgmental. They just have alternate truths/lifestyles/etc. It’s unAmerican to think we have the truth and they don’t. So we’ll just mind our own business. Sure, we’ll make disciples. Our church will teach the children and make them into disciples. We’ll do it for both of the children who are on our roll. If the parents would only bring them, that it.
3. Those people out there aren’t like us. They aren’t from our socio-economic-racial group. They don’t like our music. Let’s just let the Baptist have them. What? The Baptists are growing either? Surely someone will come along and reach them. We’re working on fellowship in our friendly church.

Is it our national ECDD program (”Every Child Dumbed Down,” more commonly known as “No Child Left Behind”) that has warped our children to equate success with getting the right answers on a test? Or did the attitude precede that - success is making A’s, and you make A’s by getting right answers?

There’s nothing wrong with right answers. The problem comes when our quest (obsession?) for success prevents us from trying anything that we don’t know in advance that we can succeed at. “No, I’m going to skip the AP version of that class so I can be sure and pass.” (Or for the GPA hounds, “So I can get an A.”) Where’s the adventure in that? But maybe we don’t want adventure unless we can be sure and succeed at it.

I’ve done some sports bashing over the years - complaining about how sports has, for some, become a new national religion. Maybe in my haste I was throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Maybe the academic side needs to imbibe some of the “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (the Olympic motto - “Faster, Higher, Stronger”) attitude. That’s sure better than just doing enough to get by (what our state proficiency tests seem to be requiring).

We - the academic types - can also profit from the team aspect of sports. What can we do to get to the point where we think, “We will do better when I work harder and exert myself.” A team is made up of people of varying abilities and skills who all work together, for both the common good and individual good of the participants. Can we encourage, challenge and provoke each other? Can we dare (not letting the miscreants steal the word) each other to go beyond what each thinks he or she can do?

My children range in age from almost teenage to over twenty. My baby, however, was conceived in the early 1980s, first came to light in 1998, and went public in 2002. Here’s a picture of my baby:

Haven’t seen many purple babies? Oh well.

Some babies are able to grow up and live a normal life. My baby is now old enough to be getting some criticism. As the father, it’s sometimes hard to hear criticism. But as a father, I also know that criticism means people are paying attention to my baby. It’s criticism that will help my baby grow up and mature.

Right now I’m reading Kevin Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology. Vanhoozer’s written a pile of books - to my one - and his  baby is not only more brightly colored than mine, it’s also much longer and more detailed.  I’ve  read almost a hundred pages so far, not enough to make a fair judgment yet. I can say that I like much of what  I see in it.He clearly picks up some of the ideas I mention or hint at and develops them with much more detail. I’m not bothered by that (a) because mine was a revision of my dissertation and it was thus more limited in its conception, and (b) I didn’t want to go into that much detail. Sometimes adding great detail is a virtue. Sometimes its just more detail. At the least he’s better at the detail than I am.

I just discovered a couple of weeks ago that Anthony Thiselton argues with me in his latest book, The Hermeneutics of Doctrine. I first read Thiselton back in seminary. He’s a real heavyweight when it comes to theological hermeneutics. I haven’t gotten my copy of his book yet so I don’t know what he has to say about my baby (and its arguments) yet, but I’m just happy he read it and thinks it worth arguing with.

I’ve taught on spiritual gifts many times over the past twenty years. One of the tools commonly used in such teaching is what we call a “Spiritual Gifts Inventory.”(Here’s a sample of an online inventory.) The theory is that by filling out the inventory – often over a hundred questions – you can identify your spiritual gifts. I haven’t used inventories much lately because I’ve noticed they’re better at identifying what you like to do then what God has equipped you to do. If it’s something you’ve tried before, they’ll pick it out. Otherwise, they’ll likely miss it.

Sometimes God’s call is a direct line with what we’ve been doing – direct from our current point of view. But often it isn’t. While Moses had a desire to be used by God, his calling at the burning bush was not in line with his experience up to that point. This is why when I teach on spiritual gifts I also teach that while knowing our gifts is important, it’s more important to obey God. It is never an adequate response to God’s calling to say, ‘But God, that’s not my spiritual gift!”

God’s call in our lives has several motivations:

1. God’s call is first and foremost an expression of love. God loves us enough to involve us in what he is doing.

2. God’s call is to join in kingdom work, i.e., accomplishing his agenda for the salvation of all creation. The work to which we are called is important – it counts for something. It’s not mere busy work or hoop jumping. For some reason God is not content to do all the work himself – he wants to involve his people.

3. Responding to God’s call requires faith even while it builds our faith. When I go work out, it takes some strength to lift a weight. As I lift that weight more and more, I get stronger. In the same way, our stepping out in response to God’s call requires faith. But as we step out, as we go on adventure with God, our faith grows in the process.

4. God wants us to trust him more than we trust ourselves, our resources, and our capacities. One way Paul puts this is that God shows his strength in our weakness. If we invest all our time and energy in making ourselves strong, we leave little room for God. Why trust God when we can trust ourselves? I think that’s why God habitually calls people to do what thy can’t do by themselves.

Have you tried stepping out in faith? A good starting point is to simply say, “Lord, what is my next step?” You don’t need to know tomorrow’s or next year’s step – just your next step. Then listen to what God says. Trust God to show his love by involving you in what he’s doing.

Spengler writes in his column in the Asia Times, in response to the conversion of journalist Magdi Allam from Islam to Catholic Christianity:

Muslim traditional society cannot withstand the depredations of globalized culture, and radical Islam arises from a despairing nostalgia for the disappearing past. Why would Muslims trade the spiritual vacuum of Islam for the spiritual sewer of Dutch hedonism? The souls of Muslims are in agony. The blandishments of the decadent West offer them nothing but shame and deracination.

Before 9/11 there was a movement in the US among some politically conservative Christians to make common cause with Muslims in reaction to what they saw as the decline of morality in our general culture. Al Qaeda and other extremist groups within Islam were unable to distinguish between the West and Christianity, thinking, apparently, that since the US is morally corrupt and the US is a Christian nation, then Christianity itself must be corrupt. It’s the same kind of judgment some of us make when we look at the evils of Al Qaeda, recognize Al Qaeda is a Muslim organization, and assume that Islam must be evil.

Since 9/11 some Christians have decided that we need to back Western culture “right or wrong,” so we can present a united front, defending “our way of life” against Islam. I believe that is a mistake. It is not our calling as Christians to:

• Fight for Western supremacy
• Fight against Islam

Our calling as Christians is to stand up for Jesus. We find our identity in Christ. Our security is in Christ, not the US constitution, the US armed forces, our Western heritage. It’s Jesus. From the standpoint of life in Christ we assess our host culture (2 Cor. 10:3-5), finding its strengths and weaknesses, its goods and its evils.

If we are going to regain the West (if we ever really had it), it’ll be by following Jesus. If we’re going to win the Muslims - either as friends or by attracting them to Jesus - it’ll be by following Jesus.

Ever since 11 September 2001 people in the West have been searching for “moderate Islam.” A couple of days ago I briefly mentioned Akbar S. Ahmed’s book, Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World, with particular reference to his revival of Ibn Khaldun’s concept of asabiyya. Ahmed strikes me as one any but the most Islamophoic would consider a moderate.

Ahmed believes that features of modernity, globalization and urbanization in particular, have put a strain on Islam. While existing in traditional societies, the families, clans and tribes were held together by asabiyya. Now that these social entities are being torn asunder, some among them feel the need to re-assert the cohesion of asabiyya, what Ahmed calls hyper-asabiyya. It is this paranoid and frenetic quest for a lost cohesion, that results in extremism and terrorism.

Some have observed the similarity between asabiyya and what modern scholars call social capital. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, has been my main source for learning about social capital. He identifies two types of social capital. Bonding social capital, akin to asabiyya, is an agent of social cohesion. It is the glue that holds a community together. Bridging social capital, working outward instead of inward, seeks out connections with other groups or to draw outsiders in.

Here in the USA, when we hear people complaining about how illegal immigrants (or immigrants in general) are diluting the sense of what it means to be an American, we are hearing an assertion that bonding social capital is lacking, or rather, that it is breaking down on a national level in favor of ethnic expressions. What is it that makes me an American? I don’t care, I’m a hispanic/white/black/turkish/italian - that’s enough for my identity. The next step, that would take us in the direction of the break down Ahmed sees, we in those who feel utterly alone. Perhaps through something like hyper-asabiyya they turn to gangs for their sense of identity.

What I see lacking in the segments of Muslim culture where hyper-asabiyya reigns (and no, I’m not an expert on Muslim culture, so correct me if I’m wrong), is bonding social capital worked to the exclusion on bridging social capital. A moderate Islam - like, perhaps, a moderate Americanism - would be concerned not only for in-group health and cohesion, but would see that health partly consisting in relationships with outsiders. Even when there is fear and fragmentation, making room for the outward focus of bridging social capital would help break down the harshness of hyper-asabiyya.