You remember these questions from college roommate surveys or ice-breakers.
1. If you could invite any three people to dinner, fictional or non-fictional, historic or contemporary, who would they be and why?
2. If you were stuck on a desert island and could only have one book, which book would it be and why?
If you're a follower of Jesus Christ, do you have to answer "Jesus" to Question 1 and do you have to answer "The Bible" to Question 2?
My first (reflexive) response is to say, no, being a Christian doesn't mean you have to give Christian answers to survey questions. David Crowder is not my favorite artist, John Piper is not my favorite author, and Facing the Giants is not my favorite movie. I always get annoyed when people have to put "Christian" answers to their preferences. Christ came to set us free, not entrap us in Christian cultural bases.
But my second response is that I'm supposed to be hinging my life, here and eternal, on the fact that Jesus is my first love, creator, best friend, and savior. And the Bible that sits on my shelf is supposed to be the living word of God, a "lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path," the ultimate source of day-to-day truth. If I'm at all serious about any of it, are my honest answers not obligated to be Jesus and the Bible respectively?
If I were given two free tickets to a Caribbean cruise, should I not take my fiancee? Sure, it's my choice in a technical sense, but if I chose anyone other than her, you'd be in the right to smack me and say, "What's the matter with you?"
Monday, February 23, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Coming Up For Air
Interactive experience and Wikipedia research clues me in to the enormous diversity and controversy of opinions surrounding the precedence for practice of baptism. (Fun fact: John 3 records that Jesus went around baptizing while John 4 said it was actually His followers. What a not-straightforward text.) I can't speak with great intelligence on the subject, but at church this Sunday, the pastor's sermon mentioned that one powerful idea associated with baptism is the symbolic act of being dead and buried (as you're immersed in the water) and then resurrected (as you rise back out of the water) as with Christ. Scriptures like Romans 6:3-5 and Colossians 2:11-12 seem to corroborate the theme.
If your imagination runs over this image, it's pretty arresting stuff. Imagine being forcibly held underwater, gasping for air, waves of shock and pain jarring through your nasal cavities, your torso arcing spasmodically. Death is no stasis, no absence of activity, but a terrifying, crushing, inexorable experience. And after the seconds-turned-eternity underwater, you suddenly rise, break over the surface, and gasp in a noisy, ragged breath that restores your lungs to capacity. It's a raw, powerful first breath that shakes you and punches you with the unmistakable miracle that you are now alive, gloriously alive, and free from the asphyxiating waters dripping off your face.
Maybe what I've described was not your baptism experience, but it might hold some bearing on what it means to be dead and then resurrected.
I keep a folded piece of paper in my Bible that reminds me of a figurative baptism I once had. During my freshman year of college, I was taking a computer science course in programming JAVA. Five months after I had taken my final exam, my friend Francis and I received a notice from the Rice University Honor Council that stated that we were being accused of colluding, specifically copying code, on said take-home exam. Never mind that I got an A+ and Francis failed the exam, that the evidence was incredibly circumstantial, and that we didn't cheat. We had a total of three or four successive hearings, spread out over a month-long period, each with the threat of suspension or expulsion with little to no means of appeal. Of course, for us, academic suspension would definitely mean the end of our Naval scholarships, which would mean we couldn't pay for school. During that month, Francis and I were as stressed as we'd ever been. We couldn't sleep at night, and every day was filled with continual worries of our college degrees, Naval careers, and lives swirling indefatigably down the toilet. No school would admit us after we were branded as cheaters. No employer would ever hire us. In a very melodramatic sense, we felt like we were on the verge of being separated from our lives, as good as dead. In a more practical sense, I lost ten pounds from stress and anxiety.
So after a month, we finally got a letter from the Honor Council that read as follows:
Matt Dunn, I am writing to inform you that the Honor Council has reached a decision regarding your case in COMP 201. The Honor Council has found you "Not In Violation" of the Honor Code in COMP 201.
I recall a very tangible, corporeal relief overwhelming me when I read those words of exoneration. Never mind that I was never actually guilty of the sin. In my mind, in some sense, I had considered myself dead and now I saw myself alive, and the best physical parallel was coming up for air after being held underwater.
It's a silly example, in retrospect, and I shouldn't have been so bent out of shape over something like being expelled from college. But the vivid sensation of being alive after my guilt was cleared was unforgettable. Like baptism, the letter physically reminds me of salvation. It has stayed in my Bible for over three years now.
If your imagination runs over this image, it's pretty arresting stuff. Imagine being forcibly held underwater, gasping for air, waves of shock and pain jarring through your nasal cavities, your torso arcing spasmodically. Death is no stasis, no absence of activity, but a terrifying, crushing, inexorable experience. And after the seconds-turned-eternity underwater, you suddenly rise, break over the surface, and gasp in a noisy, ragged breath that restores your lungs to capacity. It's a raw, powerful first breath that shakes you and punches you with the unmistakable miracle that you are now alive, gloriously alive, and free from the asphyxiating waters dripping off your face.
Maybe what I've described was not your baptism experience, but it might hold some bearing on what it means to be dead and then resurrected.
I keep a folded piece of paper in my Bible that reminds me of a figurative baptism I once had. During my freshman year of college, I was taking a computer science course in programming JAVA. Five months after I had taken my final exam, my friend Francis and I received a notice from the Rice University Honor Council that stated that we were being accused of colluding, specifically copying code, on said take-home exam. Never mind that I got an A+ and Francis failed the exam, that the evidence was incredibly circumstantial, and that we didn't cheat. We had a total of three or four successive hearings, spread out over a month-long period, each with the threat of suspension or expulsion with little to no means of appeal. Of course, for us, academic suspension would definitely mean the end of our Naval scholarships, which would mean we couldn't pay for school. During that month, Francis and I were as stressed as we'd ever been. We couldn't sleep at night, and every day was filled with continual worries of our college degrees, Naval careers, and lives swirling indefatigably down the toilet. No school would admit us after we were branded as cheaters. No employer would ever hire us. In a very melodramatic sense, we felt like we were on the verge of being separated from our lives, as good as dead. In a more practical sense, I lost ten pounds from stress and anxiety.
So after a month, we finally got a letter from the Honor Council that read as follows:
Matt Dunn, I am writing to inform you that the Honor Council has reached a decision regarding your case in COMP 201. The Honor Council has found you "Not In Violation" of the Honor Code in COMP 201.
I recall a very tangible, corporeal relief overwhelming me when I read those words of exoneration. Never mind that I was never actually guilty of the sin. In my mind, in some sense, I had considered myself dead and now I saw myself alive, and the best physical parallel was coming up for air after being held underwater.
It's a silly example, in retrospect, and I shouldn't have been so bent out of shape over something like being expelled from college. But the vivid sensation of being alive after my guilt was cleared was unforgettable. Like baptism, the letter physically reminds me of salvation. It has stayed in my Bible for over three years now.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Stranger than Fiction
The reason I haven't posted in a while, and probably won't for some time, is that I've been recently engrossed in the series Battlestar Galactica. It's been an enormously thought-provoking show whose episodes and developments posit challenging ideas about issues of human nature, purpose, and faith. A large subplot of the series has been about humanity's pursuit of God and the relevance of religious faith to both society and individual decisions. It's been my least favorite subplot, the part where they talk about finding God and what comes of it, and I think I've realized why.
The first reason is that I'm always uncomfortable when I hear fictional representations about God interacting with people. The Left Behind book series. Fireproof. In His Steps. When critics label these books Christian propaganda, it's a little hard for me not to agree with them because I already think that it's treading on dangerous ground to suppose or assume how God would respond to a certain situation. Our Texas high school football team is losing games and quarreling with each other, but once we band together, hold hands, forgive each other, and learn to pray as a team, God rewards us and Joshua 1:9's us and gives us the state championship game? A lot of these stories become moralistic tales and compartmentalize God into some convenient, personified distributor of good karma.
The second reason, a related thought, is that these fictional representations of God are uncomfortable because we often find ourselves representing God in fictitious ways. The parental God who is deeply grieved every time high schoolers make out without having a Define-the-Relationship conversation. The cool God who, if you interacted with Him, would probably be pretty cool and relaxed and have a beer with you because He loves you. The conservative God who preserves the Republican party like it's the new chosen people.
Thirty-nine years ago, the movie Patton came out, where actor George C. Scott gave a legendary acting performance that he felt was true to the character of General Patton. It has since been an odd phenomenon that people at large associate the historical Patton with the movie characterization. Is the movie Patton far off from the historical Patton? Probably not. There's a lot of truth in George C. Scott's representation. But people don't think of the real Patton. And sometimes I'm afraid that could happen with God. It's not that the parental God, or the cool God, or the conservative God are each complete falsehoods, but they're all in some way fictional and a lot of people look to them to see God. Can we presume to represent God so well that our fictions can be considered biographical?
Interestingly enough, I've found myself arguing on the other side of the line too. During my sophomore year of college, a very post-modern pastor wrote the Rice Thresher with a letter to the editor, arguing that Jesus did not know He was God, but that His unintended death, a consequence of His bucking Roman authority, opened the way to salvation. She qualified her statements with the question, "How can I presume to know the mind of Christ? I can't." And I thought for a while about this statement, "How can I presume to know the mind of Christ," and on March 26, 2006, I replied,
You wrote that we can't presume to know the mind of Christ. I was reading through 1 Cor 2, and I agree that in our state, we probably won't be able to comprehend fully the "mystery / hidden wisdom which God ordained for the ages for our glory." But we do know that Christ was filled with the Holy Spirit, and also that "we have received...the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God." Would this not extend not only to spiritual gifts, but also to salvation through Jesus? The chapter also ends with the verse, "But we have the mind of Christ." I read that, through submission and filling of the Holy Spirit, God grants us more and more understanding of His nature, which is also that of Jesus, since "I and the Father are one." In that respect, the more we study Scripture under the revelation of the Holy Spirit, the more we can presume to know the mind of Christ.
My contention, at the time, was that we can't claim to know nothing about God or Jesus. God does show us a lot about Himself. To say otherwise in the name of open-mindedness belittles what He did, the time He spent here on earth, the way He's revealed Himself to us over centuries, and the way He interacts with us today. We do know that He said in 2 Chronicles 7:14, "If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land." We do know that in that verse, there is truth about God's compassion and mercy in the face of repentance. But do we know it well enough to proclaim that it will be true in the case of the high school football state championship? We must be careful to tell a true story when people say, "Tell me the story of Jesus."
I seldom know where I'm going with a train of thought, but once again, my post ended up talking about how it's important to avoid ugly extremes on both sides of an issue. Which is how Plato represented ethics and morality: a system of behavior whose ultimate goal is to achieve the golden mean between two wicked extremes. I should probably write about that sometime.
If I had to pick one fictional representation about God and what we know about Him, it would be from C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Mr. Tumnus says something true: "He's not a tame lion, but He is a good lion."
The first reason is that I'm always uncomfortable when I hear fictional representations about God interacting with people. The Left Behind book series. Fireproof. In His Steps. When critics label these books Christian propaganda, it's a little hard for me not to agree with them because I already think that it's treading on dangerous ground to suppose or assume how God would respond to a certain situation. Our Texas high school football team is losing games and quarreling with each other, but once we band together, hold hands, forgive each other, and learn to pray as a team, God rewards us and Joshua 1:9's us and gives us the state championship game? A lot of these stories become moralistic tales and compartmentalize God into some convenient, personified distributor of good karma.
The second reason, a related thought, is that these fictional representations of God are uncomfortable because we often find ourselves representing God in fictitious ways. The parental God who is deeply grieved every time high schoolers make out without having a Define-the-Relationship conversation. The cool God who, if you interacted with Him, would probably be pretty cool and relaxed and have a beer with you because He loves you. The conservative God who preserves the Republican party like it's the new chosen people.
Thirty-nine years ago, the movie Patton came out, where actor George C. Scott gave a legendary acting performance that he felt was true to the character of General Patton. It has since been an odd phenomenon that people at large associate the historical Patton with the movie characterization. Is the movie Patton far off from the historical Patton? Probably not. There's a lot of truth in George C. Scott's representation. But people don't think of the real Patton. And sometimes I'm afraid that could happen with God. It's not that the parental God, or the cool God, or the conservative God are each complete falsehoods, but they're all in some way fictional and a lot of people look to them to see God. Can we presume to represent God so well that our fictions can be considered biographical?
Interestingly enough, I've found myself arguing on the other side of the line too. During my sophomore year of college, a very post-modern pastor wrote the Rice Thresher with a letter to the editor, arguing that Jesus did not know He was God, but that His unintended death, a consequence of His bucking Roman authority, opened the way to salvation. She qualified her statements with the question, "How can I presume to know the mind of Christ? I can't." And I thought for a while about this statement, "How can I presume to know the mind of Christ," and on March 26, 2006, I replied,
You wrote that we can't presume to know the mind of Christ. I was reading through 1 Cor 2, and I agree that in our state, we probably won't be able to comprehend fully the "mystery / hidden wisdom which God ordained for the ages for our glory." But we do know that Christ was filled with the Holy Spirit, and also that "we have received...the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God." Would this not extend not only to spiritual gifts, but also to salvation through Jesus? The chapter also ends with the verse, "But we have the mind of Christ." I read that, through submission and filling of the Holy Spirit, God grants us more and more understanding of His nature, which is also that of Jesus, since "I and the Father are one." In that respect, the more we study Scripture under the revelation of the Holy Spirit, the more we can presume to know the mind of Christ.
My contention, at the time, was that we can't claim to know nothing about God or Jesus. God does show us a lot about Himself. To say otherwise in the name of open-mindedness belittles what He did, the time He spent here on earth, the way He's revealed Himself to us over centuries, and the way He interacts with us today. We do know that He said in 2 Chronicles 7:14, "If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land." We do know that in that verse, there is truth about God's compassion and mercy in the face of repentance. But do we know it well enough to proclaim that it will be true in the case of the high school football state championship? We must be careful to tell a true story when people say, "Tell me the story of Jesus."
I seldom know where I'm going with a train of thought, but once again, my post ended up talking about how it's important to avoid ugly extremes on both sides of an issue. Which is how Plato represented ethics and morality: a system of behavior whose ultimate goal is to achieve the golden mean between two wicked extremes. I should probably write about that sometime.
If I had to pick one fictional representation about God and what we know about Him, it would be from C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Mr. Tumnus says something true: "He's not a tame lion, but He is a good lion."
Saturday, January 31, 2009
To Be Honest
My opening remarks on this blog were that I would not always be right, but I would always be honest. I think the word "honest" means different things to different people, and it's usually some variation on a theme of transparency.
The reason I usually don't like most blogs is because they are too "honest." I used to write blogs in high school that were like that; my friend Jimmy calls them "verbal masturbation," which is a gross but strikingly accurate summary. Every nasty thought about someone you ran across today or every insignificant thing that annoyed you or every temporary panic attack over misplacing your cell phone or keys.
People need to be straight with each other and we have to be willing to be vulnerable, but does that mean we need to be so utterly transparent?
Blue Like Jazz has this revolutionary idea where a bunch of Christians get together during an all-campus festival of debauchery and drunkenness and set up what they call a confession booth. The trick was that they were confessing to the students at Reed the sins and shortcomings of the church: the failure to be open and loving, the failure to feed the poor and comfort widows, and so on. And it wasn't a gimmick to trick the student body: it was a legitimate attempt to be candid, sincere, and transparent. Was it refreshingly honest or was it a misplaced endeavor?
I went to a campus ministry winter conference seminar where the speaker posed the question of what the consequences would be if all of our sins were broadcast on the campus radio every morning. I don't remember where the thought was going because I was stuck thinking about that idea. At the time, I thought it was the most incredible idea I'd ever heard. And really, when you talk about honesty in terms and scenarios like these, you have to consider the effects for two parties: yourself and the audience. For myself, I thought how humbling and convicting it would be to be held accountable not only by the people I chose to confide in, but by the attention of the campus at large. And how it would instantly negate my precarious hold on silly things like reputation and cool factor. And for the people who would hear it, well! They would hear and understand that I was also privy to sin and failure, but that I was also redeemed by the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ! Isn't that why God chose to use us broken people as His ambassadors? Clearly, the only thing holding back the body of Christ at large from using this transparent approach was utter cowardice!
I used to be a member of an evangelism team, constituted by a committee of five or six upperclassmen at Rice. The goal was to optimize how our students and resources were being used to reach the campus at large for Christ, and our meetings would have a lot of heated back-and-forth discussions about a number of fiery issues. At one point, I thought, wouldn't it be great if any given student could sit in on these private meetings? They could hold us accountable if we had an irrelevant idea or notion. They would see how much we cared about and labored towards their salvation and see our faith in a God who would make it so.
I'm no longer convinced that utter transparency is a good thing, for us or for the audience.
We were naked once upon a time, but in this fallen world, God ordained that we cover up our privates.
I think back to when I first learned the term honesty, around first grade or so, and the teacher or my mom said that to be honest is to tell the truth.
When you look at a blog rife with the messiness of petty details, unfounded conceptions, and desultory emotions, you may think of transparency, but you don't think of truth.
Jesus calls Himself the Truth. He speaks definitively of Light that shines and pierces through darkness. He declares that when men know the truth, the truth shall set them free.
Truth is more than you find in the average daily blog post, and it's a better thing than you would hear if my sins were broadcast daily over the radio. Because all you would hear then is a partial truth (that I'm a sinful person) and not the rest of it (the truth of Jesus's mysterious grace and salvation).
When Darth Vader tells Luke, "Search your feelings, you know it be true," it seems like Luke's confused, pained feelings are the worst place to search for truth.
And the truth is that when you ralph up a confession of your dirty laundry and innermost thoughts to most people, they're not going to respond well. They're going to say, why did you think it would be a good idea to tell me that nonsense?
The truth isn't what you're feeling at a particular point in time. The truth is unshakably Jesus. So we should add discernment and discretion to temper our notions of honesty and transparency. How many proverbs can you find where it tells you to keep your mouth shut?
I do think that most people should be more honest and more vulnerable. We do need to connect with people heart to heart, and we do need to reflect God's redemption in a meaningful, sincere way. We shouldn't pose or hide. We don't need to pretend that we don't have dirty laundry, but decidedly, we should be professors (we should profess) of Jesus's purifying love.
The reason I usually don't like most blogs is because they are too "honest." I used to write blogs in high school that were like that; my friend Jimmy calls them "verbal masturbation," which is a gross but strikingly accurate summary. Every nasty thought about someone you ran across today or every insignificant thing that annoyed you or every temporary panic attack over misplacing your cell phone or keys.
People need to be straight with each other and we have to be willing to be vulnerable, but does that mean we need to be so utterly transparent?
Blue Like Jazz has this revolutionary idea where a bunch of Christians get together during an all-campus festival of debauchery and drunkenness and set up what they call a confession booth. The trick was that they were confessing to the students at Reed the sins and shortcomings of the church: the failure to be open and loving, the failure to feed the poor and comfort widows, and so on. And it wasn't a gimmick to trick the student body: it was a legitimate attempt to be candid, sincere, and transparent. Was it refreshingly honest or was it a misplaced endeavor?
I went to a campus ministry winter conference seminar where the speaker posed the question of what the consequences would be if all of our sins were broadcast on the campus radio every morning. I don't remember where the thought was going because I was stuck thinking about that idea. At the time, I thought it was the most incredible idea I'd ever heard. And really, when you talk about honesty in terms and scenarios like these, you have to consider the effects for two parties: yourself and the audience. For myself, I thought how humbling and convicting it would be to be held accountable not only by the people I chose to confide in, but by the attention of the campus at large. And how it would instantly negate my precarious hold on silly things like reputation and cool factor. And for the people who would hear it, well! They would hear and understand that I was also privy to sin and failure, but that I was also redeemed by the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ! Isn't that why God chose to use us broken people as His ambassadors? Clearly, the only thing holding back the body of Christ at large from using this transparent approach was utter cowardice!
I used to be a member of an evangelism team, constituted by a committee of five or six upperclassmen at Rice. The goal was to optimize how our students and resources were being used to reach the campus at large for Christ, and our meetings would have a lot of heated back-and-forth discussions about a number of fiery issues. At one point, I thought, wouldn't it be great if any given student could sit in on these private meetings? They could hold us accountable if we had an irrelevant idea or notion. They would see how much we cared about and labored towards their salvation and see our faith in a God who would make it so.
I'm no longer convinced that utter transparency is a good thing, for us or for the audience.
We were naked once upon a time, but in this fallen world, God ordained that we cover up our privates.
I think back to when I first learned the term honesty, around first grade or so, and the teacher or my mom said that to be honest is to tell the truth.
When you look at a blog rife with the messiness of petty details, unfounded conceptions, and desultory emotions, you may think of transparency, but you don't think of truth.
Jesus calls Himself the Truth. He speaks definitively of Light that shines and pierces through darkness. He declares that when men know the truth, the truth shall set them free.
Truth is more than you find in the average daily blog post, and it's a better thing than you would hear if my sins were broadcast daily over the radio. Because all you would hear then is a partial truth (that I'm a sinful person) and not the rest of it (the truth of Jesus's mysterious grace and salvation).
When Darth Vader tells Luke, "Search your feelings, you know it be true," it seems like Luke's confused, pained feelings are the worst place to search for truth.
And the truth is that when you ralph up a confession of your dirty laundry and innermost thoughts to most people, they're not going to respond well. They're going to say, why did you think it would be a good idea to tell me that nonsense?
The truth isn't what you're feeling at a particular point in time. The truth is unshakably Jesus. So we should add discernment and discretion to temper our notions of honesty and transparency. How many proverbs can you find where it tells you to keep your mouth shut?
I do think that most people should be more honest and more vulnerable. We do need to connect with people heart to heart, and we do need to reflect God's redemption in a meaningful, sincere way. We shouldn't pose or hide. We don't need to pretend that we don't have dirty laundry, but decidedly, we should be professors (we should profess) of Jesus's purifying love.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
The Search for a Church
Every new Christian, and especially those who come to faith after a certain mature age, comes to a point where they question why we worship communally if this Christian life is supposed to be about an individual's personal relationship with God. If in the end, this Christian walk is about me and God, then why the integral role of other people? What can I gain from going to church, when in this information age, I can access sermons and hymns and concordance references instantaneously from my own living room? We preach that God pursues our hearts, that He abhors legalism and that at the end of days, He won't be touting the statistics of our church attendance or whether we wore a tie on Sundays. And if we really believe that, shouldn't zero church attendance be a legitimate option?
We certainly can't spend life in a vacuum. Our growth will be stunted. We will not have the opportunity to love and be loved, and all that Scripture and its truth will remain an abstract and a nice set of ideas if we don't spend our lives around people, dealing with the messiness and vulnerability and beauty of life in Christ. That's why most of the commandments and guidance we get from the Bible is about how to deal with other people. Spending our lives studying Scripture by ourselves is about as safe, confining, and lonely as it sounds. So much for the living room Christian community of one.
By and large, I didn't go to church throughout my undergraduate years. My rationale was that I had everything a church could offer with my campus ministry. I was being fed spiritually, and I had a role where I was feeding others. I had strong fellowship with other believers, in a Christ-centered community of college students. I had a weekly opportunity to worship and pray corporately, and different ministry opportunities that more or less encompassed what I could've done at a church. I connected with my brothers and sisters in Christ: they encouraged me to grow in the Lord, and I did the same, and I think that's what church is all about.
People kept telling me I needed to join an actual church, but I never saw the reason why, and I still really don't see that I should have. But it might've made it easier for the hereafter.
I've been church-shopping for several months now without finding one that I've really liked. And it's made me stop and wonder whether I just haven't found it yet or whether I need to revise my search criteria. What church really is supposed to be.
I've never liked people who put a lot of meaningless criteria on what makes an acceptable church. "I can't go to a church that plays that contemporary Christian music." "Oh, I really don't like large churches. They're so impersonal and they don't care about you at all." "I don't like the way they elect their deacons." "Why don't they have a homeless ministry?" In the end, I like to think that what I'm looking for is a first: a good, strong, loving, encouraging community who is in love with Christ and who love other people well, and second: solid, challenging, relevant Biblical teaching. I like to think that I'm not picky or partial about the other trivialities of whether they make you wear a tie or whether they prefer King James to NIV.
It's hard to tell whether the places I've found have fallen short of those criteria or whether I've inadvertently appended other criteria to my list of two.
I haven't found a place where I've felt the teaching is intelligent, challenging, and solidly Biblically based. I suspect that the Baptist churches I've mostly been attending have strong roots in storytelling rhetoric in sermons, and a lot of their stories have made no sense or don't really follow from the passages at hand. I think I really just want a pastor whom I think is smarter than me. It might relate to why I skipped so many classes in college.
I haven't found a place where most of the congregants are under the age of sixty. Is this concern legitimate because I haven't found people I can really relate to or is it trivial because I'm concerned with the comfort zone of people in their 20's?
I haven't found a place where everyone didn't love the acting of Kirk Cameron, especially in Fireproof. I saw Left Behind. As much as I would love to root for evangelical film, it was excruciatingly bad. I know it's a picky little thing, but I really want to find people who agree with the obvious reality that he is not a good actor.
I'm sure in some respects, it's like a relationship, where after a certain point, you have to grow to love something for its beauty in spite of some misgivings and flaws. "The church is a whore, but she's my mother," right, Augustine?
In short, I haven't found a place I want to return to, and I'm wondering if I'm looking in the wrong places or if I'm looking wrongly at places.
I think back to the books in the New Testament, of the early days of church-founding, where former fishermen and tax collectors traveled itinerant from community to community founding congregations that were hungry for Jesus and struggling to come up with some sort of order and discipline for their corporate faith. I imagine that a believer back then would have had to settle for his local Christian community, made up of widows and orphans and beggars and scholars and masons and carpenters. I imagine that they rejoiced in the love of the Father and in each other.
And only in America today do I have this vast array of churches from which to choose. It wouldn't even be an issue in Zimbabwe or Myanmar. But I do live here and now. I do have a vast array of options before me, and that means I should take the decision seriously. The very phrase "church-shopping" makes the holy Bride of Christ sound like an automobile with various features I can choose by preference. I hate the caprice and irreverence of my approach. My search may change direction, and it continues.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
We certainly can't spend life in a vacuum. Our growth will be stunted. We will not have the opportunity to love and be loved, and all that Scripture and its truth will remain an abstract and a nice set of ideas if we don't spend our lives around people, dealing with the messiness and vulnerability and beauty of life in Christ. That's why most of the commandments and guidance we get from the Bible is about how to deal with other people. Spending our lives studying Scripture by ourselves is about as safe, confining, and lonely as it sounds. So much for the living room Christian community of one.
By and large, I didn't go to church throughout my undergraduate years. My rationale was that I had everything a church could offer with my campus ministry. I was being fed spiritually, and I had a role where I was feeding others. I had strong fellowship with other believers, in a Christ-centered community of college students. I had a weekly opportunity to worship and pray corporately, and different ministry opportunities that more or less encompassed what I could've done at a church. I connected with my brothers and sisters in Christ: they encouraged me to grow in the Lord, and I did the same, and I think that's what church is all about.
People kept telling me I needed to join an actual church, but I never saw the reason why, and I still really don't see that I should have. But it might've made it easier for the hereafter.
I've been church-shopping for several months now without finding one that I've really liked. And it's made me stop and wonder whether I just haven't found it yet or whether I need to revise my search criteria. What church really is supposed to be.
I've never liked people who put a lot of meaningless criteria on what makes an acceptable church. "I can't go to a church that plays that contemporary Christian music." "Oh, I really don't like large churches. They're so impersonal and they don't care about you at all." "I don't like the way they elect their deacons." "Why don't they have a homeless ministry?" In the end, I like to think that what I'm looking for is a first: a good, strong, loving, encouraging community who is in love with Christ and who love other people well, and second: solid, challenging, relevant Biblical teaching. I like to think that I'm not picky or partial about the other trivialities of whether they make you wear a tie or whether they prefer King James to NIV.
It's hard to tell whether the places I've found have fallen short of those criteria or whether I've inadvertently appended other criteria to my list of two.
I haven't found a place where I've felt the teaching is intelligent, challenging, and solidly Biblically based. I suspect that the Baptist churches I've mostly been attending have strong roots in storytelling rhetoric in sermons, and a lot of their stories have made no sense or don't really follow from the passages at hand. I think I really just want a pastor whom I think is smarter than me. It might relate to why I skipped so many classes in college.
I haven't found a place where most of the congregants are under the age of sixty. Is this concern legitimate because I haven't found people I can really relate to or is it trivial because I'm concerned with the comfort zone of people in their 20's?
I haven't found a place where everyone didn't love the acting of Kirk Cameron, especially in Fireproof. I saw Left Behind. As much as I would love to root for evangelical film, it was excruciatingly bad. I know it's a picky little thing, but I really want to find people who agree with the obvious reality that he is not a good actor.
I'm sure in some respects, it's like a relationship, where after a certain point, you have to grow to love something for its beauty in spite of some misgivings and flaws. "The church is a whore, but she's my mother," right, Augustine?
In short, I haven't found a place I want to return to, and I'm wondering if I'm looking in the wrong places or if I'm looking wrongly at places.
I think back to the books in the New Testament, of the early days of church-founding, where former fishermen and tax collectors traveled itinerant from community to community founding congregations that were hungry for Jesus and struggling to come up with some sort of order and discipline for their corporate faith. I imagine that a believer back then would have had to settle for his local Christian community, made up of widows and orphans and beggars and scholars and masons and carpenters. I imagine that they rejoiced in the love of the Father and in each other.
And only in America today do I have this vast array of churches from which to choose. It wouldn't even be an issue in Zimbabwe or Myanmar. But I do live here and now. I do have a vast array of options before me, and that means I should take the decision seriously. The very phrase "church-shopping" makes the holy Bride of Christ sound like an automobile with various features I can choose by preference. I hate the caprice and irreverence of my approach. My search may change direction, and it continues.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Pre-Marital Counseling
Grace Bible Church's pre-marital counseling questionnaire form is 13 pages long, and that's just the questions. So it's been a long process filling out this incredibly long form with very introspective and profound questions. After a while, I started having fun and being myself again:
What brought you to the decision to want to be married? I want a male heir and she by all accounts is fertile and of child-bearing age.
Have you in the past or are you now living with your fiancée? She lives in my heart.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm too irreverent for my own good, but I never wonder about that very seriously.
What brought you to the decision to want to be married? I want a male heir and she by all accounts is fertile and of child-bearing age.
Have you in the past or are you now living with your fiancée? She lives in my heart.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm too irreverent for my own good, but I never wonder about that very seriously.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Shalom Yerushalayim
I think we're all losing the war in Israel.
900 Palestinians and 13 Israelis killed so far. Some of them civilians, some of them children.
In Iran, the Ayatollah has promised heavenly rewards to anyone killed fighting on the Palestinian side. They've also started burning effigies of Obama before he even takes office. Many Iranians blame the United States for not intervening. But if you're going to blame the cops for not protecting you, aren't you recognizing the moral and practical authority of the cops, and if you recognize that, shouldn't you stop burning pictures of them?
It's hard to form an informed opinion because it's hard to know what information and statistics to trust. Reports from Gaza? Whose reports? A Western journalist? An Israeli doctor? A local community leader?
Obama makes a good point: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything in my power to stop that."
It's also a significant point because both sides are launching missiles right now.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't be concerned with who is right and who is wrong, and who started it and who should end it. That's important. Most of my friends support Israel, both from patriotic and religious loyalties, and I agree that God has always loved Israel, ever since the faithfulness of Abraham. But supporting Israel doesn't mean that everything her government does is morally defensible or God's will. It doesn't mean that war isn't terrible. And the fact that Palestinian rockets have devastated Israeli homes doesn't mean we shouldn't weep for the death of Palestinian children any more than Israeli missile strikes preclude us from praying for the peace of Jerusalem.
My point is that even if we're called to stand by Israel, we don't have to give up the cause of humanity. Humanity is God's cause, His magnum opus, the apple of His eye. The attack on His people surely must anger God, and surely there is a cause of holiness and righteousness that accompanies a necessary war, but the result of our sin, the ensuing war, must surely grieve His heart with each death of a beloved creation.
I'm not a pacifist. I believe that sometimes you have to kill people and break their things. But it's still a terrible thing.
The problem isn't Palestinians, and it isn't Israelis. This conflict is just a local manifestation of the fact that in the bigger picture of creation and sin and consequences, the problem is us, you and I.
900 Palestinians and 13 Israelis killed so far. Some of them civilians, some of them children.
In Iran, the Ayatollah has promised heavenly rewards to anyone killed fighting on the Palestinian side. They've also started burning effigies of Obama before he even takes office. Many Iranians blame the United States for not intervening. But if you're going to blame the cops for not protecting you, aren't you recognizing the moral and practical authority of the cops, and if you recognize that, shouldn't you stop burning pictures of them?
It's hard to form an informed opinion because it's hard to know what information and statistics to trust. Reports from Gaza? Whose reports? A Western journalist? An Israeli doctor? A local community leader?
Obama makes a good point: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything in my power to stop that."
It's also a significant point because both sides are launching missiles right now.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't be concerned with who is right and who is wrong, and who started it and who should end it. That's important. Most of my friends support Israel, both from patriotic and religious loyalties, and I agree that God has always loved Israel, ever since the faithfulness of Abraham. But supporting Israel doesn't mean that everything her government does is morally defensible or God's will. It doesn't mean that war isn't terrible. And the fact that Palestinian rockets have devastated Israeli homes doesn't mean we shouldn't weep for the death of Palestinian children any more than Israeli missile strikes preclude us from praying for the peace of Jerusalem.
My point is that even if we're called to stand by Israel, we don't have to give up the cause of humanity. Humanity is God's cause, His magnum opus, the apple of His eye. The attack on His people surely must anger God, and surely there is a cause of holiness and righteousness that accompanies a necessary war, but the result of our sin, the ensuing war, must surely grieve His heart with each death of a beloved creation.
I'm not a pacifist. I believe that sometimes you have to kill people and break their things. But it's still a terrible thing.
The problem isn't Palestinians, and it isn't Israelis. This conflict is just a local manifestation of the fact that in the bigger picture of creation and sin and consequences, the problem is us, you and I.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
