Bandits No More

I don’t remember ever giving any thought to having children while I was growing up. But when Christi and I got married there was no doubt that we planned to have children.

But which ones? There are so many models available these days, with new ones coming out every day!

Two of our children are out of high school now, and another will soon be there. I hope I’ve been good for my children. I know they’ve been good for me.

I think the main thing I’ve learned from my kids is to loosen up with my sense of humor. Their presence in the family has really opened my up. I’m sure I wouldn’t be half the pastor and teacher I am, were it not for my children. They’ve taught me many lessons in communication (unintentionally), though I’m afraid I embarrass them from time to time when we’re out in public. But I tell them that’s part of a parent’s job description.

My children are a great blessing to me. I pray that God will bless them, direct them in His ways, and employ them for Kingdom purposes from now and into Eternity.

Thanks, Kids!

Christi and I have been married just over twenty five years. If I’d kept on the same trajectory I’d been on through my growing up years and beginning of college, I probably wouldn’t be married today. I was just too shy – especially around girls. Raised in a family of boys, I hadn’t spent much time around them.

But at college Christi decided I was someone worth talking to and getting to know. Since she was gentle in her approach I wasn’t scared away. While I have not yet figured out females, I did figure out that marriage to her would be a good thing. So here we are.

Christi has been an encouragement all along the way. When I’ve felt like giving up at some point along the way, she’d tell me to keep going. When I needed help, she’s always been there.

One area I’ve always needed help is in my written communication. Since we were engaged for two years, and apart for much of that time, we wrote letters to each other pretty much every day. This gave her extensive practice reading my handwriting (I won the Gutenberg Award in high school biology class for having the handwriting that led them to invent the printing press). Now when I need my writing interpreted, proofed, edited or corrected, she’s able to do it far better than I can.

After all these years I’m still an introvert. I’m (usually) happy being an introvert. But I am much less shy than I used to be (my church people hardly believe it of me now), and I have to give most of the credit for that to Christi. Knowing her and being married to her all these years has helped me open up on many levels.

I’ll mention one last influence Christi has had on me. This one’s probably the most important. Mercy is one of Christi’s spiritual gifts. If you have that gift you know how painful that gift can be, not just because you can never meet all the needs you see, but also because you never want to tell people “no,” but sometimes you have to. I don’t have the gift of mercy, but I’ve learned a tremendous amount about mercy and compassion from Christi. I am much more gentle in my thoughts toward people than when I was young. When I was young and saw someone doing something stupid or destructive, I’d think to myself (fortunately, being shy, I almost never said it out loud, “There goes an idiot” – or something to that effect). I observed Christi in the presence of people acting like that and her comment was, “They must be having a bad day.” Through that and similar influences, she has molded my character to be more Christi-like. (As authors sometimes say, “Any defects that remain are purely of my own making.”)

Thanks, Christi!

When I finished college, I took a couple of weeks off and went straight to seminary. Both were good experiences for me. In college I finally learned how to be a good student. More importantly, I found a good wife (or rather, she found me). In seminary I learned the basics of ministry and deepened my relationship with God. I liked school. I was good at it. But after six and a half straight years with little let up, I was tired. I was ready to spend some time in the “real world.”

My first “real world” posting was to the Queen City – Bloomburg circuit. I discovered that my seminary course in Mission Anthropology was the most useful. After a couple of years there, I served as an associate at Cedar Bayou UMC in Baytown. My calling all along was to ministry in higher education. The real world experience, I thought, would make my academic work not merely academic.

I did my PHD at Fuller Seminary under the guidance of Nancey Murphy. I’d never heard of her before I arrived at Fuller, but after my first semester I discovered that her research interests in a Christianity that was faithful to Jesus and strong enough to overcome the weaknesses imported to the church from modern philosophy, paralleled my own. Her church background (Roman Catholic, Charismatic movement, Church of the Brethren) was quite different from my own, but the Jesus connection was enough.

Nancey, in teaching and conversation, stimulated my thinking and work over the next several years. More important, however, was her encouragement. As one who had to work a full time job (and a couple of part time jobs) while trying to be a full time student, and maintain my family, life was fairly stressful. Living in California was expensive, and even working as much as I was I was going deeper into debt every month. After finishing my course work and passing my comps and language exams, it was tempting to just give up – to settle for an ABD. But Nancey kept encouraging me. She thought I could not only complete my dissertation, but do it well. Her encouragement was certainly part of what kept me going.

Thanks, Nancey, for the encouragement. Thanks also, for modeling fine scholarship that serves the church and lifts up Jesus.

From Heyduck Slides

I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my parents. While that’s true from a merely biological perspective, it’s also true from many other angles also.

Both my parents instilled curiosity in me.  Some people reckon curiosity a bad thing – they say it “killed the cat.” In my experience curiosity has plenty of dangers, but not as many as not being curious.

My dad fed my curiosity by having a job that required we move regularly and live in interesting places. He also fed it by having his advanced math books on the shelf in our house. I first noticed his calculus books (he was a Navy engineer at the time) when I was in third grade. I could tell they were math books, but also that it was way beyond what I was learning in third grade. I decided I’d understand them someday, eventually leading me to take calculus myself (though I didn’t go as far in math as the engineers do).

My mom was a constant reader. While my dad was at work she’d take us to libraries and have stacks of books around the house. We never lacked for diverse reading material.

Together, my parents regularly took us to interesting places. Museums, zoos, aquaria, historic sites, battlefields, etc., in the US, Japan and Korea.

In addition to curiosity my parents also imparted certain character traits I retain to this day. Though I think he’s better at it than I am, my dad has always exemplified stubborn faithfulness. And my mom has embodied a skepticism, an unwillingness to bow to irrational assertions of authority. Both do so in the context of a foundational commitment to Christ.

Oh, they also did the normal parental stuff – housed me, clothed me, kept me fed, paid for most of my education. I’m thankful for all that. But the more personal stuff I mentioned above – that’s what I’m most thankful for.

Thanks Mom & Dad!

If you want to find a model of encouragement, a modern day Barnabas, take a look at Dr. J.D. Phillips, pastor of Spring Woods United Methodist Church in Houston. I served as J.D.’s associate from 1998-2003. I’ve never known anyone who better exemplified an encouraging spirit.

J.D. encouraged people to their face. He’d affirm your words and actions. He’d freely speak his appreciation.

J.D. also encouraged people behind their backs. Have you ever known a back-stabbing gossip? Someone who would spread nasty, vicious tid-bits about you whenever you weren’t around? A person who went out of his way to spread news of your failures and failings? J.D.’s exactly the opposite. In the years I’ve known him, he’d go out of his way to spread good things about people. Besides affirming me to my face, he’d call my parents and affirm me to them.

I owe a lot to J.D. I owe him for what he taught me about encouraging people (though I still have so much to learn). I owe him for the blessing he was to me over and over again through the years.

Thanks, J.D.!

One of the books I’m reading now is A New Kind of Church: A Systems Approach, by Dan R. Dick and Evelyn Burry. In the first chapter they contrast the approaches of Jesus and Paul. Very briefly, some of the contrasts are:

• Jesus was highly mobile, regularly going out to the people. Paul built stationary churches that sought to draw people in.
• Jesus used a teacher/disciple model. Paul used a shepherd/flock model.
• Jesus focused on people’s relationship with God. Paul focused on people’s relationship with the congregation.
• Jesus frequently broke with tradition. Paul was bound by tradition.

Dick and Burry reject the easy “Jesus – good, Paul – bad” assessment some might leap to. They see Paul’s model as intended to exemplify, express and extend Jesus’ model. They use this contrast to discuss current United Methodist church practice, which they say more nearly approximates Paul’s model. We build churches, invest heavily in elaborate buildings that need constant maintenance, have clear structures of authority and rules for who can do ministry and how they can do it, expect the people to come to us, and operate within set hours.

Two thoughts come immediately to mind. First, the focus on Jesus as tradition-breaker leads to a marginalization of the importance of his context. In spite of Jesus’ breaks with tradition, his moves made sense within the wider Jewish context. In spite of his differences with the tradition, his words and actions were predicated on that tradition and made sense within it. He was not starting a new religion (to speak anachronistically, yet in a way popular today), but taking the next step in God’s ongoing activity to save the world through his people Israel.

This leads to the second thought. When we read the Gospels, we see Jesus operating in Galilee, Samaria and Judea. He spoke to the poor and the rich. He dealt with insiders and outsiders. It’s easy to judge from this that he “went to all people.” But he didn’t. Though there a few exceptions, almost all his work was done in an area in which the tradition we call Judaism was “established,” or taken for granted. The Romans might have ultimate authority, Greco-Roman culture may be intruding, but his audience was at least on the periphery of the operations of the Jewish tradition. When he spoke or acted, his words and deeds could be understood within that tradition.

Paul’s journeys took him into very different settings. In Asia, Galatia, Achaia and other Roman provinces he was able to find pockets of the Jewish tradition, centered on synagogues. He habitually (though as with Jesus there were a few exceptions) that he began his ministry in each new locale. As a cultural outsider, he could find in the synagogue an audience that could understand the moves he made in bringing Jesus into the Jewish tradition. Like Jesus, his action is not best understood as starting a new religion, but as making a move in carrying out a revised interpretation of the tradition from Abraham and Moses.

A third thought, that I won’t explore with depth, is that their characterization of the Paul Model seems heavily weighted toward the Pauline ecclesiology depicted in the Pastorals, edging over into what some call “early Catholicism.” Finding the center of Paul’s model there gives too little attention to his missionary ethos.

I understand the desire of Dick and Burry to transition in United Methodism from what they call the Pauline Model to the Jesus Model. Our churches are too building- centered. We are weighed down with excessive bureaucracy and rules. We too often sit in our buildings and just expect people to show up, instead of going out where the people are. If reversing each of those situations could be as simple as changing from a Paul Model to a Jesus Model, I’d be all for it. But I don’t think it’s that simple.

A primary complexity is that our social setting is more like Paul’s than Jesus’s. Where we could once describe America as a place where Christianity was the established religion, a place where even non-participants knew enough of the tradition that our moves made some sense, that is no longer the case. United Methodist congregations and people still want to believe we operate in a Christian country and society, a place where we can invite our communities to “Come Home for Christmas.” For the majority that have never thought of “church” as “home” this makes no sense. Our era is much more like Paul’s. Today, as did Paul in his journeys, we see gatherings and little enclaves of participants in the Christian tradition scattered as islands in a sea of non-participants.

Another book I’m reading now is Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. After reviewing the results of their survey of the cultural attitudes and practices of this demographic segment, they shift to discussing the religious implications. Prefacing their remarks they say,

Religious faith and practice generally associate with settled lives and tend to be disrupted by social, institutional, and geographical transitions. This connection between religious and other kinds of disruptions is a broad sociological fact.

In the context of my current discussion, I take this to be a claim that religion correlates with stability and connection to established traditions. I’m inclined to think that a decline in church participation by the young adults in their survey is directly related to the presence (dominance) of churches that act as establishment institutions while the experienced reality of their participants is disestablishment. The assumed establishment (at-home-ness) of the churches, being dissonant with lived experience leads to more easily dropping the faith. Establishment mentality, of one flavor or another, is common to both mainline and evangelical churches (the branches with which I have the greatest familiarity).

Given our diaspora-like social setting, merely going to the people is bound to be misunderstood. Sure, they can take us to be do-gooders, social reformers, nice folks. But the Christian tradition (like the Jewish tradition), cannot be reduced to those things. In this setting we need to take up again the Jesus model of teacher/disciple – the very model Paul experienced in his relationship with Barnabas and later duplicated with people like Timothy.

Apprentice-based Christianity – returning the practices of Jesus and Paul – will do several things.

First, apprentice-based Christian formation (Dallas Willard likes to use “apprentice” thinking) will be rooted in the Christian tradition. It will be an intentional growth into the work of God through history, from Abraham, through Moses and the people of Israel, Jesus and the disciples, the early church and on through the ages. Since it will be engagement with such a large tradition, there will be no quick way to make it happen.

Second, apprentice-based Christian formation will shape more than beliefs. Christian beliefs are always necessarily tied into and mutually implicated with practices and desires. We’ve tried raising a generation of Christians on beliefs alone – and even with great, awesome, true, wholesome beliefs, we’ve failed miserably. The Christian faith is a network of relationships through Christ – with God, with others, with ourselves, with the world.

Third, apprentice-based Christian formation will highlight the difference with the world. This isn’t the fortress or crusade mentality, but the conviction that the Christian tradition with its practices, community and telos is different than that of surrounding society. Teachers will escort their apprentices through encounters with the world so they can experience this difference first hand, and then debrief the experience with them. The goal will not be to inculcate a world-rejecting ethos, but rather a willingness to be different along with a broken heart for the inhabitants of the world.

Fourthly, drawing new people to the faith in this model is not a matter of setting up shop and waiting for outsiders who feel an innate need for church (or “spirituality”) to just show up. Rather, we do our apprenticeship with one foot in the Kingdom, the other in the world. While increasingly rooted and grown up in Christ, we also deepen our relationship with outsiders, letting Jesus demonstrate his reality in our words, actions, and, most importantly, our weakness (that is, our very real dependence on the Spirit all the time).

Fifthly, and finally – since I need to stop somewhere today – this way of Christian formation can be highly individualized. Since each of us are already not only in some relation to the Christian tradition, but also a variety of relationships with different segments of the world, we each have different needs. Our different places in life and different sets of experiences require individualized training in faith. While larger groups will still have their place in Christian formation, there will need to be a shift away from, “You’re this age, so you go to this class and learn from this quarterly produced in Nashville” to “These are some of the options we have this quarter, and having considered your growth in faith over the past year, these two would be good options to help you take your next step with Christ.”

Passionless Christianity and Brainless Christianity are two things to be avoided. Two additional things to avoid are merely being passionate and merely being brainy.

Our local school has kids write letters to Santa each year. Most of them end up submitted for inclusion in the local paper. One written by one of our church kids didn’t make the cut. Here it is:

Dear Santa

I like to help people on Christmas . It is fun and I think it is nice to do stuff for people who don’t have anything. I want two presents for Christmas a American girl and a puppy will you bring the rest of my presents to someone who doesn’t  get anything.

Love Gracie

In her most recent online letter, Bishop Huie has this:

Dr. Bill Carter, a Presbyterian pastor, tells a story about a rabbi who was approached by one of his students. The student said, “Rabbi, I love you.” The rabbi said, “Oh, really? Well, do you know what troubles me most?” The student said, “No, I don’t know what troubles you the most.” The rabbi said, “How can you say that you love me if you don’t know what troubles me most?”

Is it my imagination or do we tend to only tell this kind of story about Rabbis? If so, is it because other “religious leaders,” i.e., Christian pastor, are always supposed to be nice, and this kind of response has a little too much bite to be nice?

What do you think?