Bandits No More

We live in a dangerous world. People are out to get us. They want to kill us, maim us, abuse us, steal from us. They want to destroy our way of life.

And we don’t know what to do.

Thursday, someone took a suspicious object into a middle school in Clovis, New Mexico. After locking down the school and having police in place all around the school they discovered the object was a burrito. It was a really BIG burrito (30 inches), but still only a burrito. Scary.

Burrito’s are pretty dangerous. Just imagine how many calories and how much fat a 30 inch burrito would have. I bet the tortilla wrapper wasn’t even whole wheat.

Maybe burritos aren’t the biggest danger we face. But neither are terrorists. Though more dangerous than burritos – and absolutely murderous on many occasions, the worst they can do is kill us. We would be foolish to let our fear of terrorism control our lives – and equally foolish to pretend there is no threat. We need to find a healthy balance of preparation and busying ourselves with what we need to do.

Supporters of Beth Stroud looking for a change in the UMC blame the current UM position on homosexuality on homophobia. Translated into plain english, they’re saying the majority in the UMC – at least the majority as determined by General Conference voting over the past 30 years – is AFRAID of homosexuals/homosexuality. Sometimes they generalize: We’re afraid of the Different. We feel threatened. We might find that we’re different too.

Is fear a factor, or is this just another way of the schoolyard challenger yelling, “Chicken!” – encouraging us to be more afraid of being afraid (or seen to be afraid) than acknowledging danger?

Is there any danger – anything to be afraid of? I suppose one could express a fear of displeasing God; a fear of leading the church astray; a fear of leaving people in brokenness away from the transforming grace of God; a fear that sexual hedonism will become the norm in the church as it is in the broader culture. Of course each of these presuppose the idea that God has an opinion – a preference – regarding human sexual relations, and that we can best discern that opinion/preference by consulting scripture before we consult our feelings, experiences – even our science.

Assuming any or all of these (or others) might be legitimate fears, what might be an appropriate response? Calling out the police? Deploying sharpshooters? I don’t think so. If we look at Luke 15, we see the Pharisees and Jesus arguing about holiness and how to relate to those perceived as unholy. If we take Jesus as authoritative, then we can learn from his approach of defining holiness as not merely adhering to certain codes or standards, but bringing people back to God. Now this is a tough place to stand. It can easily be on the precipice of the slippery slope to antinomianism – “as long as I’m ok with God I can do whatever I want.” But Jesus DID describe his way as narrow – and I think it is in more than one way.

Late last year, in accordance with the United Methodist Book of Discipline that declares that a “self-avowed practicing homosexual” is ineligible for appointment as a United Methodist pastor, Beth Stroud lost her clergy credentials. Today the verdict of that court was reversed on appeal. Today’s decision was based on two points:
1. The General Conference has not defined “practicing homosexual”
2. The paragraph in which this rule occurs identifies the rule as based on the fact that the practice of homosexuality is “not compatible with Christian teaching.” “Christian teaching” is “doctrine.” The first restrictive rule in the UM Constitution limits what can be changed in our doctrine. The appeals court rules that because the GC had never spoken on the non-incompatibity of this restriction with our “accepted doctrine,” it was therefore unconstitutional.

Sigh.

I have no reason to doubt that Beth Stroud loves God. I have no reason to doubt that she has abundant skills for pastoral ministry. But that is irrelevant. Although these are disciplinary qualifications for ordained ministry, they are not sufficient. This organization we call the ordained ministry of the UMC, like all organizations, has certain requirements. Some of these are positive: skills, abilities, achievements, practices, qualifications that must be in hand or in life before one is ordained or if one wishes to remain ordained. Some are negative – practices, attitudes, dispositions – that one must refrain from or not evidence it one is to be or remain ordained. We find most of these requirements in the Book of Discipline, though each Annual Conference adds some further specifity and hoops to jump through. Some of the requirements have long standing in the Christian tradition, some are peculiar to United Methodists. Some of our requirements are common and comprehensible to the ordained in other church groups, some aren’t. Some make great sense, some are completely arbitrary. I like some of them, I don’t like others.

But the thing is, my likes and dislikes are, at this point, irrelevant. As one who has entered the System, I have pledged myself to uphold it. It is my job to submit to it. This is tough sometimes. I sometimes don’t like to submit (ok – rarely; submission isn’t fun). But I was not forced to become a United Methodist pastor. I am not forced to remain one.

And neither is Beth Stroud.

Here are links to the 10 parts of my review/discussion of Steve Sjogren’s, The Perfectly Imperfect Church: Redefining the “Ideal” Church. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10.

With this post I’ll close out my discussion of the 13 “paths” Steve Sjogren traces for the “struggling church” to become a “perfectly imporfect” church. The eleventh path, True, deals with doctrines & beliefs. Sjogren divides these into those that are essential, traditional, and opinions.Not surprisingly, he urges churches to pay the most attention to the essentials (under which he counts “Who Jesus is,” “How we get truth,” and “How we get right with God.” I have to agree with him that most churches have enough agreements in these areas that they can exhbit basic unity with each other. Path 12 is Cooperative. The perfectly imperfect church lives out its misison in connection with other churches. It does not act like the only true church or seek to exalt itself above others. Finally, churches should be Leading Out. By this Sjogren seems to mean that churches should be bold and set strong, healthy examples for people.

The Book as a Whole: Sjogren’s other books are more useful than this one. His most useful books for ordinary church ministry include, Conspiracy of Kindness; Irresistible Evangelism; and 101 Ways to Reach Your Community. This book would have worked better as an extended magazine article rather than a complete book. Perhaps if he’d spent more time on it he could have made it more substantive, meriting book-length treatment. My wife also read the book and thought the beginning of the book was good – especially where Sjogren says there is no single right way to be a healthy church. Her take on the rest of the book was that he then proceeded to deny his first point, implying that the “low-church Vineyard” way was the best.

Time to get a move on here, so in this post I’ll deal with several of Sjogren’s “paths”s to becming a “perfectly imperfect church.” Path 8, which he calls Trusting, is about small groups. Small groups, he says, are the best way to build disciples, equip leaders, and maintain healthy body life. If you’ve read other books on small groups you’ll find nothing new here. Path 9 is Atmospheric (I’m not sure we use that word in East Texas – must be an Ohio thing). Atmosphere (East Texans do use that word), he says, is “what people feel in a church.” We help the atmosphere by allowing coffee in the sanctuary, paying attention to lighting, color, temperature, and seating in the worship space, and the flow of the service itself. Path 10 is Generosity. A healthy church is not stingy with its resources and through its acts of generosity – with outsiders, with other churches – trains its people to be generous. Of these three paths (Trusting, Atmospheric and Genrosity), I think this might be the biggest leverage point for the struggling church. In my experience fear is a major factor in the struggling church. Will we be able to keep the doors open? Will we be able to keep our own children in church? Will we be able to pay the bills? The natural response to money worries is to hang on more tightly to what one has. Stinginess seems to wise – and we know being wise is somehow connected to being godly. In the process we miss God – who is generous beyond our wildest imagination.

Michael Totten has been paying close attention (on site) to the recent happenings in Lebanon. If you check out his blog you’ll find many insightful reports on his time spent with Lebanese hunting for freedom. In a post today he notes:

Some of the tent-city residents have told me their goals are not only national. The goals of some of them (but not all of them) also are global. They truly believe they are resolving the clash of civilizations here in Beirut by proving that Christian and Islamic civilizations can co-exist in peace and in friendship. Lebanon has long been a bridge between East and West. In the future it may play the crucial role of a peace broker.

But it is not going to work if Lebanon cannot become a mature liberal democracy. Dictatorships notoriously use divide-and-rule tactics to pit their enemies against one another. Syria has been playing that game inside Lebanon – and on the world stage – for a long time. Terrorism is only one of the sinister byproducts of that. War is another.

In the last four years many have come to believe that the “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West will be a primary determinant in geopolitics for some time. Violence, it appears, has been endemic since the Crusades (or if one is more historically astute, since the Jihad-driven expansion of Islam after the death of Mohammed). Now in Lebanon, we’re seeing that, at least in one locale, and at least for a short time, peace seems possible.

What strikes me in Totten’s report is that he attributes this peace and friendship not to the inner convictions or dynamics of either group (Christianity or Islam) but to a shared commitment to or participation in a third tradition, liberal democracy. Is this a variant of the argument that “deep down” all peoples really want what we Americans (I say “Americans” not “Westerners” because we seem to emphasize it the most) are the fruits of liberal democracy = political choice and economic prosperity? Is this a variant of the modern argument that religion is necessarily divisive (and in a deadly way), and so must be marginalized and privatized? Does this mean that the West is winning the “clash” or is as sign, as Totten suggests, that the clash is being “resolved”? Perhaps it is an instantiation of Huntington’s “third rule for peace,” the “commonalities rule” (Clash of Civilizations, p. 320): “people in all civilizations should search for and attempt to expand the values, institutions, and practices they have in comon with the peoples of other civilizations.”

Steve Sjogren’s seventh path, Inclusive, is inaptly named for us in the mainline churches. When we use the term “inclusive,” we’re usually talking about gender/racial/ethnic boundaries. Sjogren uses the term as synonymous with (or very similar to) what others call “assimilation” – drawing people into the Body and connecting them with others and with the mission of the church. Rick Warren uses the baseball diamond to diagram Saddleback’s system of inclusion/assimilation. Like Warren, Sjogren identifies four stages, but he rejects that model in favor of a circular model, recognizing that people continually cycle through the stages.

For Sjogren, we all start off in the hospital. We come as broken, sinful people in need of healing. In the Family, those who have (and are) experiencing healing are joined together and gain a sense of belonging to each other. After we learn to experience the koinonia that comes from family, we move to the School where we acquire skills to live life in a godly way and to be useful to God’s Kingdom purposes. Finally, healed, joined, and equipped, we become part of God’s Army, working in ministry to achieve His purposes. Since we work in an unfriendly, dangerous world, we find that before long we have new injuries and need t spend some time in the hospital again.

Sjogren’s seventh path on the way to becoming a “perfectly imperfect church” appears very rarely in church growth books. He says the church needs to be Safe. “Feeling ‘safe’ is the assurance that nothing is going to be forced upon a person at any time against his or her will or outside her comfort level.” As church leaders we need to work to maintain the safety of our people on many levels: physical, emotional, and spiritual among the most basic. Our Annual Conference is in the process of implementing (and causing local churches to implement) a Safe Sanctuary policy to protect children. Developing these policies is difficult – especially for small, struggling churches. These small churches that are used to fighting for perhaps one person to teach each Sunday school class now need twice as many. We’re looking at Summer camp now, and trying to figure out how to get twice as many adults to go as usual – when the old number was exceptionally difficult.

We live in a dangerous world – if we consider nothing more than the fragility of children, hard objects, and Newton’s laws of motion. As long as moral constraints were allowed in the broader culture, there seemed to be some damper on local human evil. Now with the divorce between morality and legality – leaving the latter as the only functioning restraint – it seems society is even more dangerous – for children.

So I understand the need for safety – for our children and also for adults. But I confess that as I read the Bible I find a God who isn’t terribly safe. Always challenging and provoking, God continually gets people in over their heads in situations they can’t handle. Read the end of Hebrews 11 sometime and see what God got those folks into. Taking Sjogren’s point, however, I have no problem thinking that as we church leaders make our churches as safe as possible so there is plenty of room for God to make his blessed trouble for people (including us!).

In his prescription for struggling churches wishing to become “perfectly imperect,” Steve Sjogren has so far stuck with the usual fare. The next path he suggests breaks the mold – Fun. He says, “I have come to the conclusion that people only do something for a prolonged period of time when it’s fun… We are hard-wired by God to do what is enjoyable.”

I confess that I’d rather have fun than not, but I also recognize that when FUN becomes the principle by which I live I (and the people around me) am in trouble. This hedonistic approach seems foreign to the way of Jesus. “So are you saying,” you may ask, “Was Jesus a kill-joy? A many who went around with a somber look on his face? A man who constantly looked like he’d been sucking lemons?” No – I think that’s a false dichotomy.

Surely anyone who has been involved in discipling work for any length of time knows that one of the hardest parts of the job is helping people have the “want to” – the desire to become like Jesus and obey him. “If anyone wants to follow me, let him take up his cross and follow me.” I understand the concept of “cross” and the concept of “fun.” I see no overlap at all.

Of course this can make it hard for us to grow our churches if we’re always talking about taking up crosses – of living a crucified life. There’s no fun in that. No fun perhaps, but there is joy. Consider Paul in Philippians 4. The whole book has dealt with suffering: the willing suffering of Jesus; the willing suffering of Paul; the call of God upon the Philippians to a double imitation (of Jesus and Paul) in taking up their own suffering. Given all this apparently morbid talk, how does Paul close the letter? “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice!” “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” And so on.

I think Sjogren needs to do a little more work on fun.

Within a long report by John Allen in the National Catholic Reporter, I found the following:

In graduate school in the 1950s, Ratzinger found himself fishing around for a topic for his Habilitationsschrift, the book-length contribution to research a German doctoral student has to complete after his dissertation. His mentor, professor Gottlieb Söhngen, suggested that he work on St. Bonaventure.

Ratzinger liked the idea, and produced a daring thesis on revelation. He showed that according to Bonaventure, words on a page mean nothing without someone to interpret them. Ratzinger saw this insight as a refutation of Luther’s sola scriptura principle, but his superiors accused him — in what many cannot help but see today as a supreme irony — of relativism. Ratzinger seemed to be saying that scripture could mean different things to different people!

The work was rejected.

Ratzinger then focused on Bonaventure’s conflict with the “Spiritual Franciscans.” That branch of the Franciscan movement had been inspired by the apocalyptic visionary Joachim of Fiore to expect a third age of history, an era of the Holy Spirit, in which the poor would be liberated and the rich torn down. Bonaventure, Ratzinger argued, rejected this expectation of a dramatic intervention by God inside human history.

The reign of God, in other words, had to wait for the next world. Ratzinger put it this way: Orthodox belief “tears eschatology apart from history.”

Thus when Ratzinger began investigating liberation theology in the 1980s, he thought it had a familiar ring. The liberation theologians too, Ratzinger felt, wanted redemption inside history, and he saw their hopes as equally false.

In taking on liberation theology, Ratzinger saw himself picking up Bonaventure’s argument against the Spiritual Franciscans from several hundred years before (he also, according to friends, saw echoes of the Marxist-inspired 1968 student revolts in liberation theology).

History town apart from eschatology… This way of depicting the God’s relation to creation seems to have been a dominant view in modernity, and, by my assessment, one of the most deadly failings of the church. Though I doubt Ratzinger – or Bonaventure for that matter – would take it as far as Lessing’s Ugly Ditch, their theological position seems like a step on the way toward accepting the rationalization and dehistoricization of the church and doctrine.

The view of eschatology inherent in this view sees it as something so absolutely otherworldly that it becomes difficult to see the church as continuing in the eschatological age inaugurated by Jesus. Salvation – in so far as we are concerned – too easily becomes something for the individual. The Pauline view of the salvation of all creation (Romans 8:17ff), if it is retained, is pushed to the end of history – or to after the end of history.

I think I will look at this further in the future.