Commoditizing Jesus - A Lover's Quarrel

Briefly perusing the introduction of Victor Davis Hanson's 1999 book, _The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization_, it occurred to me that the phenomenon others have observed in culture at large - efficiency/productivity as the governing ideal, leading to commoditization on a broad scale, leading to a soul-numbing sameness that mocks the very wealth that produced it - has metastasized into the church with disastrous results.

Sadly, we are reaping that harvest here in Amarillo at my home church. Oh, yes! There is a shiny, seductive veneer of success, but it is measured in the stuff of mammon: tushes in the pews, clams in the tiller, squares on the architect's drawing table, spires on the horizon and column-inches in the Globe-News. It is all very impressive.

Impressive, as in: just like those huge churches in the sprawling, youthful, fabulous suburbs of Las Vegas, or Atlanta, or Dallas.

Impressive, as in: just like all the other kings and kingdoms of this world.

But the banality, the sameness, the damnable soullessness of it all...

...a soullessness that crucifies the prophet, casts aside the shepherd and kisses the king's scepter.

...a soullessness that brooks neither thoughtful dissent from its vision nor substantive challenges to the judgment of its patrons (and their hirelings).

...a soullessness that keeps family and spontaneity and tradition at a careful arm's length but embraces production cues, pixels and scripts as if they were long-lost lovers.

...a soullessness that trades spiritual passion, classical wisdom and the earthy grace of God Himself for something newer, more glamorous, less risky and more controllable - in other words, a cheap harlot who does what she's told and keeps her mouth shut. Or else.

...a soullessness that basks in the heady affirmation and fawning loyalty of the ninety-and-nine but steadfastly refuses to hear and heed the mournful cries of the scattered one.

...a soullessness that views pastoral responsibility and church governance in terms of the iron fist, the wagging finger and the dismissive wave rather than the outstretched hand.

...a soullessness that insists on no special accommodations for the old and weak but throws itself shamelessly at the young, healthy and beautiful (and who - coincidentally - have a lot of upside salary potential).

...a soullessness that trades away the deep, abiding, long-suffering, forebearing and messy love we once knew as agape for the manufactured stuff of on-demand pity, off-the-shelf counsel and the latest training in interpersonal techniques, demographic profiles and marketing trends.

Didn't Jesus say that we could not serve both God and mammon?

qb

Freedom and Virtue

Detouring briefly...

qb has been steadily devouring Yoder, Hauerwas and Thiessen Nation, as well as copious amounts of Willard (of course). One of the strains of thought that winds its way through all of that material implicitly - and occasionally, in the case of Willard, explicitly - criticizes the annoying American habit of venerating freedom above all other collective ideals. Their writings, however, argue for a higher level of virtue among the American people.

But qb is wondering: if virtue is the aim (and if agape love is the highest expression of virtue), is not freedom a sine qua non, necessary even though not sufficient? Can a person pursue love without the freedom to choose to do so? Why is devotion to freedom antithetical somehow to the Christian idea of virtue?

qb

Brad Delp, R.I.P.

As a naive 11-year-old, I flew from my home in Albuquerque to McAllen, TX, to stay with my dear grandmother, my uncle and my aunt, and play a couple of tennis tournaments. Grandma took me to the mall one day, and I splurged, putting down about 7 slaps for the recently released, eponymous album called "Boston." I had heard that the lead guitarist was an MIT-educated brainiac who had designed and built his own 24-track recording equipment, and that was impressive enough, but all I knew as a preadolescent was that those guys knew how to rock, and that vocalist...

...wow, did he have a great set of pipes and a beautiful rock timbre.

I guess other rockers had more musical influence on the scene, but I never felt their loss quite this much. Maybe I'm just older. Maybe I've had similar pangs of despair now, and this is a bitter reminder. Or maybe it's just because this guy was such a stand-up, classy, kind fellow, and it seems like such a waste. Maybe it's all of that. But this really hurts.

Jehovah God, would you look down on Brad Delp with mercy? And on his family, friends and bandmates?

qb

Eat This Book

From Eugene Peterson's new masterpiece, _Eat This Book_, p. 11:
*****
Reading is an immense gift, but only if the words are assimilated, taken into the soul - eaten, chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight. Words of men and women long dead, or separated by miles and/or years, come off the page and enter our lives freshly and precisely, conveying truth and beauty and goodness, words that God's Spirit has used and uses to breathe life into our souls. Our access to reality deepens into past centuries, spreads across continents. But this reading also carries with it subtle dangers. Passionate words of men and women spoken in ecstasy can end up flattened on the page and dissected with an impersonal eye. Wild words wrung out of excruciating suffering can be skinned and stuffed, mounted and labeled as museum specimens.
*****

Even this magnificent morsel does not do justice to what I'm finding here. Run - don't walk - to Amazon.com and order it. Let Peterson take you by the hand and walk you gingerly into God's world, the world that inhabits the holy Scriptures, the scrolls that John, Ezekiel and Jeremiah ate so long ago.

qb

Willard on Church Leadership

We can only tantalize ourselves here with an excerpt, but Dallas Willard has some interesting things to say about our inclination to create cults of personality around charismatic leaders, who then strip from us our sense of need to hear from God ourselves. The whole section is worth reading, pp. 80-84 in Hearing God.

Spokespeople for the Christian community as well as the general public are frequently heard to lament the way in which cults turn their adherents into mindless robots. In our highly fragmented society, which is dominated by gadgetry and technology, lonely and alienated people are ready prey for any person who comes along and speaks with confidence about life and death - especially when that person has some degree of glamour and professes to speak for God.

There are now more than two and a half thousand distinct cults active in the United States alone, most based on the premise that God speaks to one or several central people in the group in a way that He does not speak to the ordinary members. These members are taught not to trust their own minds or their own communications with God except within the context of the group, with all its pressures toward conformity to the word from on high. Frequently adherents are taught to accept pronouncements that are self-contradictory and fly in the face of all common sense if the leader says they must...

...But the more mainline religious groups, if they would be honest, might find that their own models of leadership actually prepare the way for cult phenomena because they too use these methods to some extent. I must ask myself, as a Christian minister, to what extent I, in order to secure enough conformity and support to maintain and enlarge my plans, might be prepared to have people put away their minds and their own individual experiences of guidance and communication with their Lord. [emphasis added]

Willard goes on to concede that "having everyone personally confer with God does risk disagreements and uncooperativeness." He suggests that the answer is not to avoid the circumstance, but rather to understand that "if the spirit of the prophets is subject to the prophets, individual prophets may from time to time find themselves earnestly questioned and examined - perhaps overturned - by those they are appointed to lead. These leaders will then...need a true humility - everyone thinking others better than themselves (Phil. 2:3) - for them to carry on with their work."

Willard's argument begins earlier in the process and goes further into the implications of both individual conference with God and leadership that does not foster it. But he confirms a great deal of what we have been saying here out of, for example, I Corinthians 14, in which we find Paul saying that individuals (what Willard calls whimsically the "ordinary people") ought to aspire to the gift of prophecy, not merely assume that one person - generally today identified as the all-powerful "senior pastor," but perhaps including a small cabal of sycophantic "elders" - has the sole responsibility of hearing God and then conveying the truths to the congregation.

Thoughts?

qb

Saul's Legacy

I Samuel 8-9 has some fascinating aspects that might be thought to relate to modern, American-style, evangelical Christianity, or at least the version of it that is most familiar to me. I'm seeing it up close lately at my home church, where the new CEO/preacher has taken full advantage (to say the least) of the authority conferred on him.

1. Saul arose as a result of popular demand for a king despite repeated, prophetic warnings about the tragic consequences that would surely ensue.

2. There was a Samuel on the scene, a prophet who routinely heard the voice of God directing his steps. He was on the scene before Saul and at least had the ear of the people, if not the assent.

3. Saul was a commanding, physical presence with drop-dead appearance. The author of I Samuel doesn't give us much to go on concerning his personality, so I'm not sure if he was a charming guy or not. But he was certainly noticeable for his looks and his stature.

4. God, at times, will allow us to do our own thing knowing consequences will occur and people will get hurt. God intends to use the consequences of our disobedience to bring us back to Him. This is the redemptive curse at work. (Thanks to DM for this insight.) Can you think of more interesting aspects of the setting here?

qb

The Prophetic Call

From Brueggemann, _The Prophetic Imagination_:

"The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us."

__________

A brief reflection on Brueggemann, FWIW (stipulating that Brueggemann is right, for argument's sake). Let's see where it leads.

In the midst of institutional church leadership drunk with the promises of self-consolidating, self-validating, self-perpetuating power, how does a prophet arise? Where does he gain his legitimacy, his voice?

Brueggemann's infinitives are telling: the prophet is to nurture, to nourish and to evoke. The prophet does not impose himself. His legitimacy is not a matter of [carnal] power but of [spiritual] substance. He accepts that few will listen, and it saddens him, but it dims neither his hope in Christ, his faith in God nor his love for God's people. With both rod and staff, he shepherds those who will listen toward "a new consciousness and a new perception" that stand over against the tacit norms and the spoken imperatives of a fatally enculturated church. His prophecy is content to begin with a whispered riddle among those whose ears are tuned.

But Brueggemann's picture begs the question: whence arises the prophet's claim to divine favor? Among the shrill competition for an audience by a horde of would-be prophets armed with proof-texts, reams of demographic survey data and intimidating stacks of case studies, what form does the hand of God's favor take? How does the modern Amos know when it is time to thunder forth, and how does Ezekiel know when simply to mime his message in some cryptic, enigmatic way?

There are so many more questions to raise, but this bite is big enough for now.

qb

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

A Complete Review of Frost's _Exiles_

There can be no question that Michael Frost is a thoughtful guy, a critic with a deep and thoroughgoing desire to live victoriously after the manner of Christ. The first half of the book is a withering but good-natured critique of Christendom, especially its American, evangelical manifestations, which have departed in so many subtle ways from the liminal, exilic calling that Jesus modeled for us. Frost's extended meditation on what God's incarnation in Jesus implies for our mission on earth is passionate, moving, profound and relatively free of facile pap. His argument that the church must aggressively rid itself of unholy alliances with earthly kingdoms -- in the first half of the book, that means governments and quasi-governmental institutions -- is compelling. It is reminiscent of Roxburgh's little jewel on liminality and the church, and it is unfailingly practical.

Unfortunately, Frost apparently finds it impossible to believe that the kinds of exilic values he holds, and that he urges on the rest of us, are compatible with political conservatism, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary that he does not bother to consider or cite. The second half of the book is little more than Frost's grandstanding and rapid-fire recitation of liberal talking points. His finely tuned sensitivity to nuance and paradox in the first half of the book gives way to an incoherent strafing run fueled by contempt for George W. Bush, corporations (Frost inexplicably neglects to observe that corporations are themselves people and could not exist without the personal investments of people -- and especially the publicly held ones that are responsible for a tremendous amount of the wealth that makes global-scale benevolence possible) and the diverse, multifaceted motivations for the current Iraq war. Frost justifiably deplores Western paralysis during many of the recent humanitarian crises across the world (e. g., Rwanda, Sudan, the Balkans) for our failure to stand courageously with the voiceless and downtrodden and oppressed, but then he turns a blind eye to the liberation of thousands of silent children and dissidents imprisoned (to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands wantonly exterminated) under the Hussein regime in Iraq, implicitly and blithely writing them off as unworthy of the very blood Frost rightly wanted us to shed in those other places. These latter chapters are classic paeans to modern, liberal myopia and simplistic, utopian politics, both of which are unworthy of such a thoughtful, engaging author.

In short, the second half of the book disappoints precisely because of the wonderfully high standard he set in the first half: returning to the scandalous person of Jesus and mining His life for direction for the modern, missional church. The second half of the book could have been written to those same standards in a way that relies on hopeful, prophetic discontent with the church he loves; instead, Frost's arguments devolve into a droning recitation of the Soros party line on everything from Wal-Mart's alleged, unmitigated pillaging of small-town America to the irredeemable evils of globalization to the baseless accusation that American political conservatism is raping the environment by refusing to ratify Kyoto -- the political left's environmental Buddha. He wilfully ignores -- or, less credibly, demonstrates his ignorance of -- the market mechanisms that actually benefit the environment, such as cap-and-trade strategies that have actually reduced SO2 emissions, as well as the incredible, ecological devastation wrought on the oil-rich states of Central Asia under the repressive Soviet regimes of the 1900s.

It would seem that Frost wants to have his cake -- eco-credibility for his ecologically responsible stance on energy efficiency -- and eat it, too, betrayed by his theologically grounded emphasis on drinking good, locally made beer (a woefully energy-inefficient manufacturing process if there ever were one). Frost fails to recognize that the very economies of scale that he resents on behalf of his environmental clients actually make possible the investments that large corporations are able to make in environmental protection.

The ironies of his conflicting positions -- what if the long-term, highest and ecologically best use of crude oil and coal is to make the (recyclable!) plastics he deplores instead of the airplane fuel he guzzles as he jets around the world preaching his seductive, social gospel? -- never seem to flower into an enlightening, salutary, cognitive dissonance. And that's too bad. The first half of the book is an inspiring tour de force. And that, by itself, is reason enough for Christians -- even those evil, red-state evangelicals -- to buy the book. Perhaps in his second edition, he will return to his roots and write a second half of _Exiles_ that retains his muscular, prophetic voice without so transparently aping the Michael Moores and Ted Kennedys of the world. Unless he does, he is unfortunately less likely to get a fair hearing by the very souls he ostensibly wants to engage.

qb

Michael Frost's _Exiles_

"This book is written for those Christians who find themselves falling into the cracks between contemporary secular Western culture and a quaint, old-fashioned church culture of respectability and conservatism. This book is for the many people who wish to be faithful followers of the radical Jesus but no longer find themselves able to fit into the bland, limp, unsavory straitjacket of a church that seems to be yearning to return to the days when "everyone" used to attend church and "Christian family values" reigned. This book is for those who can't remain in the safe modes of church and who wish to live expansive, confident Christian lives in this society. This book is for those Christians who feel themselves ready (or yearning) to jump ship but don't want to be left adrift in a world where greed, consumerism, laziness and materialism toss them about endlessly and pointlessly. Such Christians live with the nagging tension of being at home neither in the world nor in the church as they've known it. Is there some way of embracing a Christ-centered faith and lifestyle that are lived tenaciously and confidently right out in the open where such a faith is not normally valued? I think so, but it will require a dangerous departure from standard church practice. It seems that the church is still hoping and praying that the ground will shift back and our society will embrace once again the values that it once shared with the Christian community...

"The death of Christendom removes the final props that have supported the culturally respectable, mainstream, suburban version of Christianity. This is a Christianity expressed by the "Sunday Christian" phenomenon wherein church attendance has very little effect on the lifestyles or values or priorities expressed from Monday to Saturday. This version of Christianity is a facade, a method for practitioners to appear like fine, upstanding citizens without allowing the claims and teachings of Jesus to bite very hard in everyday life...[This version of Christianity is disappearing] leaving only the faithful behind to rediscover the Christian experience as it was intended: a radical, subversive, compassionate community of followers of Jesus...

"I, for one, am happy to see the end of Christendom."

qb

A Few Assumptions We Seem to Make

1. "Inviting" is fundamentally equivalent to "going."

2. A Christian community must have a physical headquarters.

3. Bigger is necessarily better, numerically speaking.

4. Efficiency and standardization are paramount virtues for the Church.

5. We need one leader to conceive and articulate vision and ideas.

6. Dissent is inherently divisive and dangerous.

7. Marketing - segmenting, and then catering to those segments' whims - is essential to reach the modern world with the Gospel.

8. Prophetic and apostolic roles (even if not viewed as identical with or equivalent to the Apostles per se) are relics of another time and place.

9. The focal point of Christian life, and therefore the arena of outreach in which we ought to invest most of our resources, is the Sunday assembly.

10. We need more hirelings, not fewer.

11. The tithe's proper "storehouse" is the church tiller.

12. Institutional orthodoxy is of comparable rank to doctrinal orthodoxy.

13. If our building, our staff and our programming were taken away from us, our congregation as we have always known it would cease to exist.

14. Experimentation is as dangerous as dissent.

In a moment of raw candor a couple of months ago, a close friend challenged me to describe what "my" church would look like if I were to start from scratch. At the time, out of false humility, I demurred. I have since come to understand that it is possible (essential?) to re-imagine the church according to my current understanding and still exhibit the humility to know that my concepts are subject to error, correction and outright contradiction by God or His people. So I'm walking down that road my brother challenged me to walk...not with the intent of actually starting "my" own church (which is terrible language to use in reference to Christ’s church), but as a means of coming to a coherent sense of what I understand the mission of Christ's people to be so that I can act on that understanding, in faith and in cooperation with God's people.

Michael Frost (Exiles, Chapter 1) says that the church has lost something vital through the centuries as it got comfortable with its respectability and cultural status as the focal point of social life: the dynamic, shared, multifaceted leadership of apostolic, prophetic, evangelistic dimensions (see Eph. 4:1ff), preferring the safe predictability of the pastoral and teaching gifts. I do not for a moment believe that returning the apostolic, prophetic and evangelistic (A-P-E) dimensions to church leadership must diminish the pastoral and teaching (P-T) gifts; if anything, the rise of A-P-E amplifies the need for strong P-T dimensions as a corrective. We take new ground with A-P-E, and we settle it with P-T. But we expend all of our energies these days on P-T, except for those hollow "programs" of the church that are designed for "outreach," by which we mean ultimately "inviting the unchurched to get churched at our church." No wonder, then, that the culture sees us as self-indulgent posers. What does that religious mall out on in affluent, fast-growing suburbia say to Amarillo? "If we build it, they will come." And they laugh at us. They won't come, for the most part (except for the members we borrow temporarily from other fellowships!), because they suspect rightly that we're all hat and no cowboy. If we really believed what Jesus said and taught, we'd be unafraid to jettison the distinct trappings of middle-upper-class, white, cultural religion and go engage the very ones to whom Jesus went to proclaim the kingdom of heaven's presence among us: the poor, the downtrodden, the outcasts, the lepers.

We have lost the "go" from the Great Commission with an undue focus on the "as you go" aspect of the Greek/Aramaic used there. We seem to assume that "as you go" implies a sort of benign, passive, trickle-down, side effect of so-called "discipleship." Our local preacher is right to call us to intentionality; he has the right wine, in other words, he just has the wrong wineskins to put it in. McManus and Eldredge both have important things to say about this, but we've got to go further and more wisely with it.

I know I'm a little slow on the up-take, but I'm finally getting to where many of you already are and have been for some time. I'm asking you to help me (a) figure out how to get this message out there for discussion, and then (b) get this message out there for discussion. Or perhaps I should say that I want to help you get this message out there where we can evaluate it soberly and open-mindedly. Our contest is not with our local preachers per se; it really is with the entrenched spirits of myopia, stasis, comfort and cultural respectability that have us paralyzed and imprisoned in Christendom’s world view, from the grassroots all the way up (ugh!) to our leaders. Time for a breakout. Now, how to go about it?

Looking Ahead in the Stone/Campbell Movement

Al Maxey’s request for our impressions of where the Stone/Campbell 

movement is heading caught me squarely in the middle of a season of 

life during which I have been considering this very set of questions.

(I must admit up front that much of my extrabiblical reading over the last 

couple of years has been narrowly focused -- D. Willard, E. Peterson, 

P. Kenneson, S. Hauerwas -- so you might wish to take this with a grain of 

salt for its inevitable bias.)

I see a schism coming, but not one like the Constantinian one or the

Reformation, or even the CoC/ICC/DoC split of the 1800s.  This soft

schism will be more of what you might call a "retrenchment," which will

result from and be guided and energized by a few key, related factors:

1.  Growing disillusionment with the megachurch and its big-box,

program-oriented, "seeker-sensitive," least-common-denominator,

consumerist religion;

2.  Growing disillusionment with the cults of executive/pulpit

personality that the megachurches have spawned;

3.  A growing realization that salvation and serious, self-denying

discipleship to Jesus are intimately intertwined;

4.  Within the Stone/Campbell movement especially, a broad sense of

boredom, emptiness and even exhaustion concerning the peripheral issues

that have so frequently and persistently provided flash points for

division over the past 30 years (that is:  "C'mon, I'm through worrying

about those issues; let's get on with the serious, difficult,

significant business of making disciples and quit fighting old, stale,

broken-record battles over pitch pipes and guitars and Bible schools

etc.");

5.  A growing appreciation for how remarkably irrelevant the question

of "traditional vs. contemporary worship styles" really is - especially

compared to the need for sustained, personal, spiritual discipline(s) -

for a deeply invested community of faith trying to make disciples

throughout the 165 hours per week we are not in the assembly; and

6.  A more critical persuasion that in order to preserve our prophetic

voice in the world, we must reject and resist identifying with

political entities on either the right or the left, opting instead to

focus our energies on the substantive inbreaking of the kingdom of God

among us, even when God's kingdom has clearly political dimensions for

the issue under consideration.  (Maybe a shorter way of saying this is:

 We will recognize that being coopted by any political party is an

abuse of God's church, and we will run from it.)

I think we face an era in which we will become "leaner and meaner," so

to speak, as we lay aside some of the major pieces of baggage that have

hindered our prophetic witness, our spiritual depth and the quality of

our discipleship.  I certainly hope so.  

One of the most important implications of this is:  it will be a bumpy

ride that will require that we raise up dedicated, humble shepherds who

can stand against the cultural forces arrayed against (and even

within!) us.

Kirk Couloir Memories - I Think I'm Gonna Be Sick

By a fluke of the Web, I just happened upon the tragedy of Douglas Beach, a firefighter from Cheyenne, WY, who died on June 11th of this year after falling on an ill-advised descent of the Kirk Couloir, which drops from the saddle between Challenger Point and Kit Carson Mountain on the north side of that connecting ridge.

On June 25th, 2002, I took that very same, ill-advised descent route to avoid having to return over the top of Challenger Point to my camp at Willow Lake. I knew when I got down to the snowfield fingers that poke up through the rocky bluffs that I had made a terrible, terrible mistake; my ice axe was back in the pickup at the Crestone trailhead. But once I had committed, I had to see it through, and it was terrifying. By the time I lost my footing, I was - thank God - over the part of the big snowfield to the west that just ran out into the rocks, rather uneventfully. My attempt at arresting my slide was laughable - a silly little nickel-plated latrine shovel or garden trowel.

Douglas and his five children and his wife paid for his mistake with his life. I walked away with ice burns on my forearms, knees that knocked for the next 48 hours, and a severely chastened spirit for almost having left my three boys fatherless.

To whoever found my North Face shell halfway up that snowfield back in '02: keep it. I never want to see it again.

qb

A Different Kind of Sermon?

Big Mike’s rhetorical question about “a different kind of sermon� rings truly with me.

(See Big Mike Lewis' comment at http://www.preachermike.com/2006/06/14/training-for-professionalism#comments)

I’m not really sure that when Jesus sat down and started to teach on the hillside, he prefaced his remarks by saying, “the sermon starts here; I’ll let you know when I’m done.� The sermons of Acts 17, Acts 2, Acts 8 and elsewhere just aren’t that awfully long, and they seem to fit more squarely into a model-less model, a context that Willard seems to hint at with his renaming of the “discourse on the hill.� They were ad-hoc remarks that jump-started a dialogue, in other words, instead of standing on their own as one-way sermons. The one-way sermon model seems to lend itself to perpetuating and being perpetuated by the anthropocentrism, preachercentrism, “you da man� culture that pervades the contemporary church across all denominational strata.

The passage that lurks in the back of my mind here is I Corinthians 14, in which Paul makes it pretty plain that he wishes all of the church “members� or “body parts� would prophesy. Similarly to Moses (Numbers 11?), Paul was not interested, apparently, in being considered the ultimate prophetic authority within a group of Christians. He wanted that gift to be dispersed among all who aspired to it, had been gifted by the Holy Spirit “just as he wills� and had the humble temperament required to exercise it faithfully.

qb

A Small Victory for Federalism

"Voters will have the final say on South Dakota's tough new law that bans almost all abortions."

(See http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/ABORTION_SOUTH_DAKOTA?SITE=7219&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2006-06-19-21-44-19)

SD legislature passed a tough anti-abortion law last year, but instead of trying to fight in court, abortion-rights advocates collected signatures to put the law to a referendum. They got the necessary signatures.

That seems, to me, to be a hopeful sign...getting the courts out of the business of splitting moral hairs and inventing new law, reserving their efforts for interpreting laws already on the books written by legislators who are accountable to the people. Short of a benign dictatorship, this seems to be the best way of resolving our national dilemma: let the individual states decide what they're going to do.

qb

Addition by Subtraction? A contrary view

In responding to a recent blog by Mike Cope (www.preachermike.com), "Addition by Subtraction," a brother or sister with pseudonym CB wondered whether that whole notion meant that "our family wants us to leave, or is just indifferent to our staying." CB, I'm inclined to share your apparent distaste for the whole idea. (That does not mean, of course, that I am attacking Mike. My desire is to add to the conversation, not to condemn a man who has amply demonstrated his compassion for and devotion to the saints of God.) The context of Mike's post was a shift in a local church toward a "missional" posture, and the discomfort that would inevitably result among some in the rank-and-file.

The whole notion of “addition by subtraction� seems tainted by an elitist point of view unless it is applied to the situations to which Jesus Himself applied it:

1. In the matter of church discipline for public sin (Matthew 18)
2. In the matter of choosing whether to serve Jesus or not (Luke 14)

We are clearly shown that these weighty matters justify the separation of believers; even if it’s painful, it must be done. But is it equally justified in the matter of choosing what our evangelistic strategy is going to be? That seems to be a stretch, a nod to efficiency, a desire not to be held back by “those recalcitrants,� a form of pin-your-ears-back urgency that neither the Gospels nor the Epistles seems to convey to us.

In musing over this whole idea, the thought occurred to me that no shepherd in Jesus’ mold would be content simply to let some sheep wander off to God-knows-where (Luke 15) without some bona fide effort to reach them, communicate with them, listen to their hearts. “Addition by subtraction� is euphemistic language for, “we’re probably better off without you anyway.�

Of course, no shepherd has standing to prohibit someone from moving on if that is his/her conviction and intention. But simply to let him/her go without challenging his/her decision with a pastoral heart just seems contrary to the spirit of John 10:1ff, Luke 15 etc.

qb

Iran's got us over a barrel - a few uneducated musings

As it is, they can yank our chains anytime they want, almost without impunity. If we slap worldwide sanctions on them, then they've got nothing to lose, so they pull their oil off the market, and we end up in a bidding war with China, India, Europe and Japan for the rest of the oil on the market, followed hard by political upheaval here when Sadie Q. Public has to cancel her trip to Los Cabos and the truckers across the country revolt (see also, "France.") Maybe we win that bidding war, but at what price? $100/barrel? What Bin Laden was unable to do on 9/11, Iran can do almost at will, at least as far as major, irreversible body shots to our economy. And they don't have to fire a bullet to do it; it's all economic policy stuff. It stands to reason, though, that when Iran pulls its oil off the market, the cost of our war in Iraq goes up immediately, which means more domestic pressure to pull out, not less. That nutcase in Tehran is crazy...like a fox.

Krauthammer said it right (although he had the wrong solution): "we are criminally unserious about energy policy." OPEC has us by the short hairs, and all it takes is one serious player to bring us to our knees. Saudi Arabia may be trying to help us right now, but their fields are in decline, and their claimed reserves may not be real. Canada's tar sands have everybody licking their chops, but how much oil does one have to burn to extract a barrel's worth of oil from those super-gummy reservoirs? Ethanol's all well and good, but how many acres of cattle feed (corn and sorghum) have to be redirected to grow corn for ethanol, and how are our beef-eating citizens going to like it when their double-meat McSlams end up doubling in price because feed costs have doubled...or when we start buying more Argentine beef to compensate for the higher livestock production costs here at home? It's a monstrously complicated picture, but I can't think of any scenarios under which to be terribly optimistic.

So I dunno, but I wouldn't get too wrapped around the axle about an Exxon exec's $400 million parachute. That retirement plan doesn't even cause a blip on the economic implications of Iran's upcoming decisions.

Who knows? We might be forced to view an Iranian move to take its oil off the market as an act of war. Lampooning the Iraq conflict as a "war for oil" misses the point: From here on out, every war is a war for oil, until we can figure out how to reduce our dependence on it. We dare not waste our strategic reserve just to keep Sadie comfortably in First Class on her way to Cabo.

In the meantime, some trust in horses, and some trust in chariots. How do I raise my boys in such a way that they will trust in God instead? America's had a great run for 200 years, but the party hostess is starting to bus the tables.

Elders as a "Board of Directors?"

I guess I just don't get it these days. Since when did the primary function of elders become "to meet and make decisions," with a secondary function of "setting congregational policy?" Ugh. I'm having one of those moments. Ezekiel (see Chapter 34) didn't excoriate the elders of Israel for being "insufficiently nimble in their administration" or "insufficiently responsive to the directives of the CEO, aka the 'senior pastor.'" But that's what we're left with these days, or so it seems in the modern church that aspires to megachurch status.

*sigh*

qb