Beautiful changes come by way of transition …

Some of the most beautiful changes come via various transitions. These leaves illusrate the transitions of foliage. They also serve to remind us of our own personal transitions.

Mission of thanksgiving …

Many gave of their time to serve others this Thanksgiving …

Enjoying Thanksgiving with our neice …

What fun Kelsey is …

Domestication of the Gospel … an all too often practiced habit …

Doing some reading for an upcoming message led me to pick up Leslie Newbigin’s, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. It is always encouraging when you read a missiologist who epxresses what you sense and feel you are guilty of and so also a number of well-intentioned evangelical Christians.

The idea of a “domesticated gospel” is not new. In fact reading over at Natalie’s site it seems some have made it a sport to satirize the very subculture from which came the critique. We often know ourselves better than we are willing to admit.

Judge for yourselves whether or not Newbigin offers an interesting insight.

But inexorably we move on to the point where the Bible is subjected to the scrutiny of reason and conscience and is found to be full of inconsistencies, absurdities, tall storied, and plain immorality.
What is striking about the books which were written, especially during the eighteenth century, to defend Christianity agsint these attacks, is the degree to which they accept the assumptions of their assailants. Christianity is defended as being reasonable. It can be accomodated within these assumptions, which all reasonable people hold. There is little suggestion that the assumptions themselves are to be challenged. The defense is, in fact, a tactical retreat. But, as later history has shown, these tactical retreats can - if repeated often enough - begin to look more like a rout.
Perphaps the experience of a foreign missionary may usefully illuminate my point I wish to make. When I was a young missionary I used to spend one evening each week in the monastery of the Rmakrishna Mission in the town where I lived, sitting on the floor with the monks studying wwith them the Upanishads and the Gospels. In the great hall of the monastery, as in all the premises of the Ramakrishna MIssion, there is a gallery of portraits of the great religious teachers of humankind. Among them, of course, is a portrait of Jesus. Each year on Christmas Day worship is offered before this picture. Jesus was honored, worshippped, as one of the many manifestations of deity in the course of human history. To me, as a foreign missionary, it was obvious that this was not a step toward the conversion of India. It was the cooption of Jesus into the Hindu worldview. Jesus had become just one figure in the endless cycle of karma and samsara, the wheel of being in which we are call caught up. He had been domesticated into the Hindu worldview. That view remained unchallenged. It was only slowly, through many experiences, that I began to se that something of this domestication had taken place in my own Christianity, that I too had been more ready to seek a “reasonable Christianity,” a Christianity that could be defended on the terms of my whole intellectual formation as a twentieth-century Englishman, rather than something which place my whole intellectual formation under a new and critical light. I too, had been guilty of domesticating the gospel. (p.2-3)

May not be too strange bedfellows …

My friend Spencer Burke expresses the need for a metaphorical shift in leadership when he calls us to be Fellow Travelers rather than Tour Guides. Sometimes want to find the place between the polarities of the Calvinist-Arminian controversy he is not sure of a fit anywhere. Yet, here is a quote from Calvin that may remind us of the value of a variety of traditions as we work out what it means to follow Jesus in the “transitional moment” (read choose between “postmodern”, “emerging” or your favorite description or anti-description).

On Isaiah 2:3 Calvin wrote,

“Next Isaiah shows that those who take upon them the office of teaching and exhorting should not sit down and command others, but should join and walk along with them as companions; as we see that some men are very severe instructors, and eager to urge others forward, who yet do not move a step.”

Colors of Fall

Dodge Ball and Age …

Would you be …? Led to not only acting as a commissioner for a “Dodge Ball” fundraiser, but also playing in several games. Standing or sitting and judging play was not a problem. Playing in several games definitely took its toll. I remember well playing dodgeball in younger days - I sure didn’t get home feeling like I do right now. It was great fun - my body is telling me I will pay for the fun I used to enjoy without concern.

Rae did a great job organizing this event - hats off to her!

Don Miller at it again …

As if I needed to begin another book before completing another but …. A great quote in the first chapter has me about ready to put all others down to finish Searching for God Knows What.

“So if the difference between Christian faith and all other forms of spirituality is that Christian faith offers a relational dynamic with God, why are we cloaking this relational dynamic in formulas? Are we jealous of the Mormons? And are the formulas getting us anywhere? Are modern forms of Christian spirituality producing better Christians than days long ago, when people didn’t use formulas and understood, intrinsically, that God is a Being with a personality and a will of His own? Martin Luther didn’t believe in formulas, and neither did John Calvin. Were they missing something or are we?” (SFGKW, p.13-14)

Saint for a Culture of Death? …

The week before Halloween, or Reformation Day as I have referred to it, I was in the DFW airport returning from a meeting at Fuller Seminary. I often pick up a copy of the Dallas Morning News (Saturday, October 30, 2004)- generally dwarfs the Dailing Oklahoman. I found an article in the Religion section that reminded me of our increasing culture of death - read infatution with all things death. The title of the article, “To Catholic Church’s chagrin, Mexicans honor ‘St. Death.’

The article chronicles the wildly successful ministry of David Romo in Mexico. Here are a few quotes of interest -

“Images of “la Santa Muerte” = a Grim Reaper-like skeleton swathed in white robes, with a toothy grin and scythe in hand - are everywhere. Dozens of parishoners hold statues of the image in their laps, occasionally caressing them. Some glass-encased candles bear the legend “death against my enemies.”

I am certain this runs counter to the words of Jesus - “Bless them that curse you.”

“It’s like the Santa Muerte is a holy figure for our times, with so much drugs and prostitution and criminality.” (Homerio Aridjis - novelist who has written a collection of fictinal stories titled La Santa Muerte)

The environment of distrust creates the need to trust something, why not a statue who with the right “method” will grant your request to avenge you against your enemies.

“Simply put, the old, familiar stuff is not enough anymore,” she said. “They need something more in this modern era.” (Katia Perdigon Castaneda)

Likely the most important statement. Could it me a modern religious machine has lost its connection with the changes in world, culture and society creating the need for self-examination?

What about the children? …

I stumbled back across some notes from a small discussion group I shared in at Glorieta last October. Ivy Beckwith, who recently released Postmodern Children’s Ministry, made reference to some research suggesting about 1% of all children are getting spiritual formation from their parents. Yet, 90% of paretns believe they are the primary source of spiritual formation for their children.

Dallas Willard offers a simple understanding of the activity of spiritual formation. We will be spiritually formed by something - actively or passively we are being spiritually formed.

If parents really believe they are the primary source of spiritual formation for their children and yet only 1% of all children are getting their spiritual formation from their parents, then it stands to reason “Christian” parents have largely determined their children should be spiritually formed by other influencers. Parental passivity is indeed active spiritual formation. Their hopes must rest upon the community to which they attach themsleves and their families with the hope that particular community is a faith community that is diligent to teach.

The rub comes when these same parents discover their children have been poorly formed. Thinking they have offered their children to a community of faith - who only enjoys life-sharing at most three-four hours a week - they become enraged the community of faith is not doing a better job.

The problem - the community of faith cannot overcome a passive parental spiritual formation for the key ingredient according to the pattern in Scripture is to talk about life and faith all the time - eating, traveling, playing - all the time. If there is no talk then the child can only assume spiritual things only matter a few hours a week during the course of life. And when that discovery is made unwittingly the child has become spiritually formed in a way different than their parents say they would like but consistent with the living of their lives.

We then fall back on the proof-texting of a verse in the Hebrew Scriptures - “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.” My mentor offers a take on this verse that ruins the idea that the parent who plants the seed will eventually see that seed blossom. If the seed is a three-four hour spiritual exercise given by someone other than the parent, then when the child is old he/she will only give the time to spriitual things they learned as a child. They will not depart.

Spiritual formation is more than taking/dragging children to a spiritual gathering a couple of times a week. If it is assumed that is all it is then parents reap what has been sown.

I pray for our parents - and their children.

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