Beautiful Idols

A friend and I were strolling the streets of Barcelona back in February. Our conversation turned to just how we may identify people. I will tip my hand quickly to say I fear the practice of categorization simplifies our lives. We really have no need to get to know someone. Once we can, by our ruler, measure someone we may then determine their worth to us. We either choose to engage them on deeper levels or we dismiss them. And, everyone knows our goal is simpler lives. Let’s not take the time with people - takes to much out of us.

Slowly I am making my way through Pete Gall’s My Beautiful Idol. It is not a difficult read. Rather, about the time I think I have time to make great strides through the book I encounter people. My vocation will not allow a quick dismissal. I cannot categorize those who come by as having value or merit based on some hidden ruler. Imagine the mental conversation. “Now Joe sure is getting on my nerves. I have spent hours with him and he just does not seem t listen. I am going to have to turn this one off. What a waste of time.” (Yes, fictional character.) Life would be simpler if we could dismiss those who did not benefit us in some way. Read more

An Evening of Worship and Thinking About Waking Up

I met Brian at the very first National Pastor’s Convention in San Diego. Evangelism formed the nexus of his “breakout” during the conference. I can still see the image of the bridge in Central America after a recent hurricane. The photo taken by a National Geographic photographer captured in a photo image what Brian suggested our evangelism efforts had become - a bridge that did not connect people with the Good News. Brian would go on to write More Ready Than You Realize, his description of a way forward with the Good News of Jesus and the Kingdom of God.

Patty and I attended an “Advance” with Len Sweet who invited Brian and Grace to be the special guests. We spent a couple of days on Orcas Island. Beautiful. Thought-provoking. I will not forget Grace wrestling with the profound implications of thinking afresh about what it means to follow Jesus. The emotion was palpable. She voiced what many around the room were both feeling and thinking.

Since that time we have had a number of encounters over the past years since that retreat - Emergent Conventions, Emergent Gatherings, phone calls and e-mails. Despite the baggage that goes with “Emergent” and the regular criticisms, the deep appreciation for Brian’s honest wrestling with how Jesus may be Good News today stirs me more deeply than the rampant misunderstanding and label mongering that follows.

This evening and tomorrow I am in Dallas for Brian’s Everything Must Change Book Tour at Cliff Temple Baptist Church. I read an advance copy. I met Shawn and Nathan this evening, a couple of fellows from Frisco, TX. We enjoyed several planned “conversations” thinking about a segment of the meeting. We talkd about things we agreed with and those we thought may be over-simplifications. After all, those who attend these things are not automatons who hang on every word. Instead we have continued to think long and hard about issues raised and how we might bring the Good News of Jesus to bear on the world and among those with whom we serve.

My friend Ed loves to use the phrase, “money quote.” Well, one of the money quotes that has implications much broader than the context in which the comment came was, “We need to stop sub-contracting our brains to political parties.” Surely you may see where this quote could also go. Too many have been told what to believe - outsourcing as it were their very convictions to those either considered smarter, older, or deader (if that is a word). Contextualization demands we engage today, it is the eternal moment we live in that needs redeeming from ruin and to be found as it is lost - lost in any number of ways.

We were challenged to think what it would take, what action we may consider that would result in personal change. The one thing I am mulling at this late hour is an abandon to the way of Jesus that leads with passion and gentleness and respect. Put another way, thinking about the implications of Philip Yancey’s, The Jesus I Never Knew, and what Paul told me is that same theme on steroids in Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus, it is time to help people see more than a caricature of Jesus. More than what one Damah Film submittal referred to as, “The White American Jesus.” Leading in this vein will not come without a personal commitment to an abandonment to the way of Jesus that transcends the cultural box, or sub-cultural box, in which Jesus often seems trapped.

For those concerned by this post, this is not the place where the slippery slope gets me. It is not the place to suggest an abandonment of orthodoxy. Rather, it is a re-affirmation that to maintain orthodoxy without right practice is a hollow game leading people away from the transformative work of the Triune God. A game I gave up long ago.

From the Margins … The Way Forward … More Reflections from Western Europe

Quite fitting it was to finish reading a Leslie Newbigin work on the flight over to Barcelona. Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship proved a great introduction to the thoughts if the late Michael Polanyi. Missionaries offer keen insight, especially when trying to get one’s mind around the discontinuous cultural changes we face here in North America. We do well to listen and discover the ways in which we have accommodated to a certain ethos, pathos and logos of a bygone era.

Newbigin asserts we may have built religous/spiritual infrastructure around Cartesian methodologies that undermine the move toward faith. Hoping to rival the indubitable certainties proffered by science, religious figures mounted a campaign to compete in an arena where neither discipline could possibly fare well. Achievements of objective knowing have been greatly exaggerated. When the Church hitched its proverbial wagon to the Enlightenment,

It was almost inevitable that the collapse of confidence in the great project of the Enlightenment should carry with it a collapse of confidence in the validity of the church’s worldwide missionary enterprise.

From Newbigin’s experience he witnessed sudden collapses. An entire continent once thought its mission was to bring civilization to the rest of the world now seemed to come to the place where religion once a vehicle of enculturation was pressed to the edges, marginalized. He notes the disconnect between the world of the individual and the “real” world in which people live and move. The dualism created by these two places of living sent people spiraling toward a nihilism void of real purpose. Exploring the real world placed a distant second to, “Who am I?”

Listening to missionaries in Western Europe seemed to evidence Newbigin’s description. Missing from Western Europe are the stories of widespread evangelization. Rather than a vibrant house church movement or the existence of a strengthening Christian movement noted in the global south, these missionaries face the difficult task of offering a voice from the margins. We pastors who spent the week in Barcelona sense the setting here in the States is not dissimilar.

Speaking from the margins reminds me of Father Richard Rohr’s article that forms the title of this blog, “The Edge of the Inside.” It may well be time to explicate just why I chose this for a title.

To my new friends, let’s learn together how to live the way of Jesus from the margins for the glory of God and the blessing of the world. I will be looking to learn from you.

Great quote

I have read David Wayne for some time. I really enjoy his photography tips. Today  I read this quote and thought it worth posting,

 …dogmatics cannot just be the recitation of the doctrinal statements of the church in a topical rather than a historical order nor can it be just the contemporary exposition of someone’s theological ideas, no matter how brilliant they might be. The doctrines must be churchly, and the exposition, also churchly in its basic attitude and approach, must be contemporary in its expression. If the contemporary aspect of the definition is lost, the exposition lapses into a reconstructive, historically defined approach that can at best produce for present-day examination a doctrinal overview from a bygone era. This kind of theology is no better than the attempt to take a particular document from a past era—even a document as valuable as Calvin’s Institutes or Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae—and use it as a textbook in theology. The past must be consulted, but not copied without regard to the new historical and cultural situation in which we find ourselves. If, on the other hand, the great doctrines of the church are not addressed, the exposition lapses into a subjectivity and personal or even idiosyncratic statement….There is, therefore, in dogmatic or doctrinal theology a clear relationship between contemporary faith-statement and the normative doctrinal constructs known as dogmas. The question for dogmatic theology is precisely how these dogmas relate to the biblical witness on which they have been founded, to the larger body of doctrines that belongs to theology but that has not been as closely defined as the so-called dogmas, and to the ability of the contemporary theologian or minister to proclaim the significance of the biblical witness for the present. (611) 

Frye Exegetes the Gospel via Newbigin

I came across this sentence from Leslie Newbigin from his book Truth to Tell…“The missionary action of the Church is the exegesis of the Gospel.”

 John Frye at Jesus the Radical Pastor

Book Tag

Generally my brother has a bit of disdain for being tagged. Yet, he and I share an appreciation for the thoughtful writing of Emily Hunter McGowin. So, when she tagged Paul he obliged. Then as any good brother would do, he shared the love and tagged me. I thought, “What are brothers for?” I’ll give the tag a go.

1. One book that changed your life. I am a bibliophile. To attempt to narrow the books that have influenced me to one is nigh impossible. Nearly ten years ago I received a copy of The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard. Ironically it was given to me for helping coordinate the time of “Invitation” at Falls Creek one summer. Two interesting things - the giver had not read the book and I did not immediately read it. A couple of years before receiving my copy of The Divine Conspiracy, a friend we were talking about what we were reading. Hance suggested I pick up a copy of The Jesus I Never Knew. Immediately Phillip Yancey became one of my, if not the, favorite authors. I literally sought to buy nearly everything he had written. I have read most of his books and to this day am deeply indebted to the suggestion to read this book. Shortly after finishing The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace, I ventured into Willard’s book. A road exposed by Yancey became one I would not soon leave as I worked through The Divine Conspiracy. (Those of you who have stayed past the first three chapters of this book know well what I mean when I use the word, “worked.”)
2. One book you have read more than once. My mother in law gave me an old copy of Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. Another volume I did not immediately read but after reading Willard’s book, I picked up this classic and have read it a few times. I am not sure there is another book I have read a second time - ever.
3. One book you would want on a desert island. In college Dr. Hall taught a course on survival. Since I did not take the course, I would want to get a copy of a survival guide like those noted by Emily and Paul.
4. Two books that made you laugh. There are likely a number of books that have made me laugh. My new friend Jim Palmer gave me a copy of his first book, Divine Nobodies. I finished this book, all but about 20 pages, on a flight from Miami to Dallas this past October. I immediately wrote Jim and e-mail thanking him for the book. I told him he made me laugh and cry. While Jim opens readers up to his experiences, some funny and some sad, he writes with such a style that keeps you ready for the next comedic description of some event or conversation. For some of the same reasons, it reminded me of a book I read in the early 1990’s by a Bruce McIver, Stories I Could Not Tell While I Was a Pastor. I am not sure I have laughed harder than reading and identifying with much of what Bruce wrote in 1991.
5. One book that made you cry. There are some stories that are hard to tell. People will suggest the process is something akin to cathartic. We often run the risk of reducing someone’s story to how is “speaks” to us or for us. In doing so we may minimize the pain and the courage taken to tell those hard stories. Rene Alston wrote Stumbling Toward Faith. Rather than risk doing just what I described, I will simply say, you must read this book and you must be prepared when you do.
6. One book you wish you’d written. There is something about identifying with those whose picture of Jesus tended toward the very one dimensional variety. Yancy, I think, referred to it as the “flannel graph.” For those too young to remember the flanner graph, think the stories you have heard of “vinyl albums.” Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew restored the humanity of Jesus and helped overcome something of a gnostic vision we tend toward by pristinating his every encounter.
7. One book you wish had never been written. I am going to re-post Paul’s description here. This is tough because I generally think there is some value to most books including the ones with which I would violently disagree because I think there is something to be learned from them. I think the worst books are those that are entirely unoriginal and just boring or incredibly superficial. That said I think I’d have to go with the entire Left Behind series, mainly because I think they are deceptive. If people understood up front that they are just fiction that would be one thing. That they are taken so seriously and that the authors want them to be taken seriously leads me to view them as eschatological versions of The DaVinci Code.
8. Two books you are currently reading. Recent conversations with a couple of theologians inspired me to pick up Leslie Newbigin’s, Proper Confidence. Something of an explication of Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, Newbigin notes the need for intruders. His own story of living among the Hindu in India helped him provide insightful missiological principles for Western Churches and Christians. The rash of “new atheist” tomes - thinking Dawkins and Hitchens here - led me to pick up I Sold My Soul on eBay by Hemant Mehta. Jim Henderson of Off the Map won the eBay auction and sent this “friendly atheist” to church. We need to listen to those “intruders” willing to share life and a conversation with us. (Note: David Phillips told me reading Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge was like a root canal. I am looking for the nitrous before sitting in my chair to read it.)
9. One book you’ve been meaning to read. My friend John recommended Christopher Wright’s, The Mission of God. I admit this is way down in the stack. It looks like it could take a short sabbatical to get through. I might note, I have also meant to read Friedman’s, The World Is Flat.
10. Five people that I tag. Natalie Burris, Rick Davis, Steve McCoy, David Phillips, and Alan Cross.

Books, Books, Books

Recent additions will keep me busy for some time to come.

Chasing Francis a Pilgrim’s Tale Intriguing story of “pilgrimage.”

I Sold My Soul On eBay: Viewing Faith Through an Atheist’s Eyes I met Jim Henderson a few years ago and when I heard about Hement’s story, the “Introduction” grabbed me as if to say, “Will we listen?”

Jim and Casper Go to Church: Frank Conversations about Faith, Churches, and Well-Meaning Christians More from Jim Henderson.

Constants inn Context: A Theology of Mission for Today I recently enjoyed some time with John Franke. He not only mentioned this book but suggested reading a number of missiological texts.

More Than a Name: Preserving Our Baptist Identity I remember Stan before he was Dr. Norman. We shared a fun time during one of my many BWA trips. Quite interesting conversations about Baptist “distinctives.” Hot topic today for we who are still “Baptist.”

The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church I hope to meet Alan soon. Lance at Shapevine works with Alan and offers a course with Alan based on this “missiological” text from an Aussie. Will be working with Lance and Alan on the this course to be taught through Biblical Seminary.

unChristian: What a New Generation Thinks about Christianity and Why It Matters I have a few friends who consider themselves, “post-Christian.” While this is my term for some of our conversations, it really means a move beyond our expressions of “Christian.” In other words, the rejection is not of Jesus but a form of Christianity that seems to deny Jesus.

Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy David has done it to me again. He is working on his D.Min. with George Fox under Len Sweet. He noted Len requires this book to be read of his students. I have David’s reading list for this semester and either I will not get much sleep following his reading schedule or I will wait on his written reviews.

This does not account for quite a few others already in the batter’s box - Proper Confidence, Whose Religion Is Christianity?, James Baldwin’s Essays, and literally a stack of others.

Non-violent Resistance … Loving “Others”

Last month I listened in to a conference call with Anthony Smith, who blogs at Musings of a Postmodern Negro. Anthony spared us some of his time to reflect on leadership in reference to power. The course tended to wrestle with gender issues. But, the matter of race is not too dissimilar. Some may argue, and with merit, African-Americans suffered a greater wound than women. Then again, if one has not walked in the shoes of a woman ….

We who shared in the call marveled at a perspective few could really grasp. Some may have wanted Anthony to feel better about life in American as an African-American and assert, “Some of my best friends are black.” Fortunately any such thoughts were kept from the conversation.

Anthony closed the conference call with suggestions for reading and listening from African-American culture. I could not help but think of the kind of value Newbigin suggests when he refers to someone who shares a different perspective as an “intruder.” (See, Proper Confidence) Those with differing view points intrude on our constructions of the way the world is and force something of an altering to include how others see life. To exclude the intruder is to risk not only potential valuable correctives but reduces the intruder to a nuisance, and so their experience less than human.

One writer Anthony suggested we read was James Baldwin. He, Anthony, mentioned the essay, “The Fire Next Time.” I picked up a copy of, Baldwin: Collected Essays. I began reading, “The Fire Next Time” and noticed it was written in 1963, the year I was born. Sitting in the doctor’s office I made it about half way through. A couple of quotes caught my attention.

The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have not other hope. The are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. (Baldwin,p.294)

And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. (Baldwin, p.294)

I at once thought of Will Willimon’s recent Christmas Eve message. We like to think we are the best characters in a story. We so want to identify with those whose experience seems akin to our own. The problem comes when we do not see our story clearly. For example, Willimon notes,

When I read the Christmas story, it is unfair for me to read myself into the places of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, or even the wise men. This was their home. They are under the heel of the Empire, their lives jerked around by imperial decrees.

I live in Rome with Caesar Augustus, or maybe in Jerusalem up at the palace with that King Herod, lackey for the Roman overlords. I’d rather see myself as one of the relatives of Mary and Joseph. I wouldn’t mind being one of the shepherds, out working the night shift, surprised when the heavens filled with angels.

Identifying with Mary or Joseph is akin to suggesting, “Some of my best friends are black.” It is to assert some false connection. It outright denies our own place in our own story. The best we can do when entering another’s story is as Baldwin suggests, and I might add finds place in the way of Jesus, love. Jesus reiterated the long standing command to love our neighbor. The Apostle Paul concluded loving our neighbor sums up the whole Law.

Resisting the shaping of a culture, an economy, a politic, or a social construct may best be done by loving others. Entering another’s story in love creates a deconstructive opportunity giving birth and life to a re-constituted way of life calling for repentance and faith and relationship with and in Christ.

Proper Confidence

Recent conversations with Scot McKnight and John Franke spurred me to pick up a copy of Proper Confidence by Leslie Newbigin. Both suggested this helpful for the current theological milieu.

My New Friend Jim Palmer to be Interviewed

Lance Ford will interview my new friend Jim Palmer tomorrow evening at Shapevine online. The videocast is free. The interview begins at 8:00 p.m. (EST) I read Jim’s Divine Nobodies on the plane home from Soularize and am currently reading his new book, Wide Open Spaces. It would be worth your time.

Next Page »