The Roots of Discontent

In his blog today (11/8/06), Mike Cope posed the following scenario:

I spoke with two men.

One is unhappy at church. Some changes have him feeling uncomfortable. He just doesn’t like it. He doesn’t want to be so uncomfortable. He doesn’t care for the way the church is heading. He’s exploring other options.

The other has never been happier. He was lost and is now found. He was unemployed and through a ministry of the church has just been hired. He is pouring himself into outreach. He, with his broken, difficult past, has become an informal leader of the church. The shade of his skin, the level of his education, the type of home he was raised in — all are quite different than many others at the church. But he smiles and laughs as he talks about his new family. He grins as he introduces me to others as “my pastor.”

Both men matter. Both deserve pastoral care.

One respondent from Mike’s blogosphere then said:

But I do have a question. When and where do we find in the Bible we are suppose to be comfortable? I hear that so often. “I am just not comfortable doing that.” Why do we think we have to be comfortable in everything we do? We don’t expect that in our jobs, at least if we plan to keep a job long! So why do we think we should be comfortable in everything at church?

I don’t think it’s helpful to suppose that people think they “have to be comfortable.”

Much of the change around us can easily appear arbitrary because (a) its motivations are absent, (b) its motivations are poorly communicated, (c) its motivations are NOT communicated or (d) its motivations are not interpreted in the context of what the plausible alternatives were. It is also possible, of course, that they appear arbitrary because the observer is (A) lazy or (B) simply incapable of seeing what many think self-evident.

I would hope that folks would extend the charity of Christ to the observer long enough to discern whether the case is (A) or (B); and in the meantime, elders need to take a long look at their pastoral and institutional assumptions – not just once, but continually – to discern whether there are contributions from (a-d).

All of those things, to the extent they exist, may arise because of any number of institutional pathologies. On the one hand, the church may have invested too much power and discretion in one man, who then feels no urgency to communicate well - in two directions, we mean, taking the congregation’s pulse before moving ahead with significant change. (Some might apply the term, hubris, to that phenomenon.) Or the elders may have decided that good, transparent, open-minded communication as ideas and plans develop is too risky, that it invites discord, so they demur from openness until the train has left the station. And there are probably other possibilities. In each case, though, one can easily suppose that the tendency to control and manipulate the future shows up at different stages and at different levels of authority.

I guess what I’m saying is this: to jump right to the assumption that the observer is lazy is itself lazy. Surely we can be more thoughtful than that.

qb

The Kerry Flap

May qb just say this?

No fan of John Kerry am I, but all of this public consternation and
bellowing is just opportunistic, wilful misconstruing.  There isn't a
person alive (forgive the hyperbole here) who doesn't know that, deep
in his heart of hearts, John Kerry was trying to make sport of
President Bush, not the troops.  The references to Kerry's 1972
testimony - you remember, don't you?  The "black, the brown and the
poor" - are just more of the same.  There was an important question to
be raised about the relative merits of volunteer vs. compulsory
military service, and one of them was the nature of the interaction of
the financial incentives to volunteering and the fiscal demographics of
the young people who would be invited to volunteer.  We need to keep
those debates warm.

We're better off as a country discussing the merits of his point in the
context in which he made it instead of taking what is an obvious,
rhetorical blunder - which of us has never made such a blunder in
public speaking? - and using it to score petty political points.

Kerry thinks Bush is an ignorant boob.  He is wrong in that assessment.
But that is no justification for the kind of posturing that's going
on.  If the elephants maintain control of both houses, qb will be glad
and deeply relieved, but it will have been a Pyrrhic victory because of
the way it came about.

qb

Scot McKnight on the Emerging Church - Read It

I am so glad I read Mike Cope's blog this morning, because he directed me to a transcript of a recent speech by some dude named McKnight or something at a reformed seminary somewhere. Find it at

http://foolishsage.com/2006/10/29/scot-mcknights-full-text-of-what-is-the-emerging-church-available-here/

The reasons I bring it up are severalfold.

1. Not too terribly long ago, qb in his ruthless ignorance castigated Coop and some other silverbacks around RM-Bible for being - and this was epithetical - a *gasp* pomo. (For those of you in Rio Linda, that's short for "postmodern person." It also charmingly permits the construction of an elegant term, "pomophobe," which adequately describes qb in one of his former manifestations.) But qb's pomophobia was borne, as so many brands of xenophobia are, of an inexcusable misunderstanding of the object of his righteous indignation. McKnight's speech is a wonderful antivenin for that.

2. Some great words in there. McKnight - qb doesn't know who the Sam Hill he is - appears to be equal parts scholar and welder, which is to say, he has no trouble stepping from "noetic" and "apophetic" into "[ ] sucks." He is multifluent; he makes you laugh at your familiar self, and then he sends you whistling to the dictionary.

3. Perhaps most importantly, he urges those of us who tend to build, and then reject, caricatures of movements that we fear or suspect to give the emerging church a fair hearing, which he defines as "describing it until its adherents say, `yes, you've got it.'" This is a helpful exercise for anyone, most notably qb, who is capable of the most toxic, oblivious forms of xenophobia.

4. Finally, the substance is really good. He characterizes the emerging church as a lake into which four streams flow: postmodernism, praxis, post-evangelical and political. There is much to be admired in how McKnight has described each of those four streams: generously, self-deprecatingly, but with a clear-eyed realism. (For example, he concedes that the movement's politics are, Brian McLaren's protestations notwithstanding, solidly liberal - as Americans experience that term. But I think McKnight would deny that the political conservative or the independent could not find a home within the emerging church movement, if only as a thorn, a corrective to the excesses of the social gospel.)

So I commend this speech-transcript to you. Pour a cup of Peet's coffee into your stainless travel mug, put on your Birkenstocks (!) and sink back into a bean bag with this thing. It will do you some good; it has certainly done qb some good already.

qb