The Well Thought-Out Life

Fruitfulness, Driscoll, the English church, and Me

2012-01-31T00:21:00.000-06:00

Mark Driscoll's catastrophic interview with Justin Brierley made waves at my house primarily because of his comments about the church in England. My husband grew up in England and his family is deeply involved in small church plants across the pond.

Driscoll's perception of the weakness of the British church is pretty offensive to us, and Don Carson put words to our objections in his post today.

We must not equate courage with success, or even youth with success. We must avoid ever leaving the impression that these equations are valid. I have spent too much time in places like Japan, or in parts of the Muslim world, where courage is not measured on the world stage, where a single convert is reckoned a mighty trophy of grace. I am grateful beyond words for the multiplication of churches in Acts 29, but I am no less grateful for Baptist ministers like my Dad, men who labored very hard and saw very little fruit for decades in French Canada, many of whom went to prison (their sentences totaled eight years between 1950 and 1952). I find no ground for concluding that the missionaries in Japan in the 20th century were less godly, less courageous, less faithful, than the missionaries in (what became) South Korea, with its congregations of tens of thousands. At the final Great Assize, God will take into account not only all that was and is, but also what might have been under different circumstances (Matt 11:20ff). Just as the widow who gave her mite may be reckoned to have given more than many multi-millionaires, so, I suspect, some ministers in Japan, or Yorkshire, will receive greater praise on that last day than those who served faithfully in a corner of the world where there was more fruit.

As Isaac and I search for a place and ministry overseas, I wrestle with two schools of thought. It was Blackaby in Experiencing God who instilled in me the idea that I should look where God is at work around me and that is where I should join Him. Look to see where the Spirit is moving, and then join Him at work there.

But then to Carson's point, is this a subtle movement towards valuing only outward success in this instead of a long obedience in the same direction? I mean, Jesus really did say that His true followers would bear fruit. On the other hand, the Hebrews 11 faith chapter is filled with the great heroes of the Old Testament and yet, "None of them received what had been promised". I think of Ezekiel's great commissioning, and yet God sends him while also saying that people would not respond or listen. Ezekiel's success was in his obedience, not in the great revival that came through his ministry.

Practically speaking as a young couple looking at the world, do we look for where Christianity is multiplying and go there because that is where the Spirit of God is currently working? Do we go to India, to Africa, to South Asia? Or do we, perhaps, find a place where our giftings can be used to help build the church, and faithfully work there, whether or not there is great response or if it's a popular "cool" spot in the Western church's eyes? How do we balance the command to be fruitful and the command to obey even if there is no response?

Heidi Klum, Seal, and the tragedy of having "grown apart"

2012-01-27T00:14:00.000-06:00

I told Isaac that the Seal and Heidi Klum divorce surprised and saddened me, and he laughed. I suppose he's right. Who would be surprised by the failing of a marriage between a high profile singer with a tumultuous childhood and a famous lingerie model?

I don't know, I guess I just saw small interviews when Heidi gushed about her husband and his eyes sparkled over her. They seemed to delight in each other.

They married two months before Isaac and I did, so I suppose that means I've been married long enough that I now sort of have a leg to stand on when I talk about making marriage last. And then at the same time, how lame is it that only seven years is a leg to stand on in our world?

In their public statement Seal and Klum say, "We have had the deepest respect for one another throughout our relationship and continue to love each other very much, but we have grown apart."

"Grown apart". Isn't that what everyone always says if it's not about affairs or abuse? That was my biggest fear - that I might one day realize that I no longer really knew or was known by my husband. That's the desire so many of us have - to be really known and truly understood. That was my dream too. I love the (sad) Brad Paisley song "Somebody Knows You Now".

You used to say you wanted someone to know you inside out
And as I look back on things well congratulations baby
Somebody knows you now

I got a hundred bucks that says right now your hair's up in a clip
Your socks don't quite match and you're bitin' your lip
I can finish your thoughts or pick the right restaurants
Even order for you 'fore you sit down
Yeah somebody knows you now

Ironic, isn't it, that the song ends with, "Well baby all your mystery like you and me is history, cause somebody knows you now."

All that being known doesn't a relationship make. You can know someone so well and still have "grown apart". That's the problem. We know how to get to know people, their habits and personality and past, but we don't know how to rebuild a loving romantic connection that has dissolved with time and life. We rarely build that connection, we think it just happens because it seems to exist so instinctively and wonderfully when we fall in love. Then when we fall out of love it's painful and we want to make things last, but we have no idea how to build a connection that happened naturally the first time around.

M. Scott Peck talks about this in The Road Less Traveled in his brilliant section on love. He first talks about the experience of falling in love as being a necessarily temporary experience.

Most of us feel our loneliness to be painful and yearn to escape from behind the walls of our individual identities to a condition in which we can be more unified with the world outside of ourselves. The experience of falling in love allows us this escape - temporarily. The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual's ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. The sudden release of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most of us as ecstatic. We and our beloved are one! Loneliness is no more!

And then reality hits, and either the relationship or the marriage gets adjust to a partnership between individuals who are working to love, instead of two people running on the powerful fumes of infatuation.

Sooner or later, in response to the problems of daily living, individual will reasserts itself.... So both of them, in the privacy of their hearts, begin to come to the sickening realization that they are not one with the beloved... One by one, gradually or suddenly, the ego boundaries snap back into place... At this point they begin either to dissolve the ties of their relationship or to initiate the world of real loving.... Real love often occurs in a context in which the feeling of love is lacking, when we act lovingly despite the fact that we don't feel loving....

It's at this point when the ability to build a relationship is key. You have all the hope in the world of building a big, beautiful, life-long love. You have to be willing to do that, though, because it won't just magically fall into place like infatuation.

In summary, then, the temporary loss of ego boundaries involved in falling in love and in sexual intercourse not only leads us to make commitments to other people from which real love may begin but also gives us a foretaste of (and therefore an incentive for) the more lasting mystical ecstasy that can be ours after a lifetime of love. As such, therefore, while falling in love is not love itself, it is a part of the great and mysterious scheme of love.

Who sits in the cube next to you?

2012-01-21T10:20:00.003-06:00

I've been in the full-time work world for nearly seven years now.

Most of those years were spent feeling restless, unfulfilled, and not very useful. Now I am shocked to find out where I really was useful all that time.

There were good reasons for my feelings of being unfulfilled, including positions without enough work, being in positions that weren't suited to my particular skill set, etc. I looked for other jobs and thought about grad school and my purpose in life and envied Isaac's clear sense of direction. I often felt like that fresh-out-of-college kid in contrast to those around me at work who were settled into careers. In my first year or so here in Dallas I also felt intensely new and lonely and fought against my tendency to keep to myself.

So, in light of that, I've been really amazed recently to hear three different people in my office talk about my early years in this office. One guy shook his head and said, "Oh.... Kacie saw me in the years when I was newly back from overseas, feeling useless and angry. Oh the things Kacie saw and talked to me about."

Thing is, this guy is older, he is a leader, and he's a hero to me. And yet, years later, I discover that while I was so busy feeling lonely and useless myself, I was one of the few who witnessed and talked to this man through an extremely difficult time.

Another guy recently told me that the first time he talked to me was the first time after returning to the US that he talked to someone that he felt truly understood what the transition was like and what he and his family were going through. Apparently those conversations about culture shock, transition, etc - meant so much that he's pointed other people to me that he knows that are going through those things.

How odd! From my perspective at the time, this was another older, settled guy who was far beyond me, and it just so happened that I knew something about culture shock and so could carry on a friendly conversation about that common ground. I just never guessed until recently that those conversations I was having were so much more than conversations, and that simply understanding and relating was so needed and refreshing.

I suppose I'm humbled after those years of complaining to Isaac that I was useless. And you know, maybe I needed a change of role in my job. But - even when I was unfulfilled in my actual job, there was ministry all around me to the people, people that I just assumed were stable and just making friendly conversation with the new girl. That's all on top of the fact that every year in a workplace adds to how well you know those people and the organization, which is invaluable.

In Chicago, too, where I knew I was that Christian girl (working in a very secular working environment) that didn't party hard like most others. I assumed that I'd leave that office and hardly speak to anyone again. I felt like I hadn't built deep relationships. Now, mostly thanks to facebook, I'm in touch with most of those co-workers, and those conversations about life continue. It makes me wish I'd taken so much more of an effort to know them.

Lesson learned. My job is always two things. The actual duties of my job description AND the ministry of friendship to those around me. Never take the second for granted, or I could be losing the most important opportunity of all. And now, now when I do actually know the people around me and know what they're going through - do I let the fact that I am now busy at work preempt stopping and really love them?

"It is not our goal to keep our staff from suffering"

2012-01-18T13:24:00.002-06:00

A man I very much admire said this in a meeting I was at yesterday. He was talking about his goal as someone working with member care over people in full-time Christian work.

It is not our goal to keep our staff from suffering. It is our destiny to suffer. We will go to the cross. What we want is to help our staff thrive while they go to the cross.

Mhhm. What insight. When we find ourselves unhappy or suffering I think we often thrash about, looking for a place to put the blame for why we are in pain. The assumption there is that suffering is bad. It's a mindset shift to recognize that pain is real, and deep, and must be recognized and dealt with.... but that it is also part of the life that we are called to here on earth.

Specifically as I think of moving overseas, this is pertinent right now. We can't plan this so that it will be most comfortable and we don't suffer at all. If so, we could arrive there, find things difficult, and simply redirect until we find a place where we are comfortable and useless. As we follow Christ, no matter where we go, we will suffer. The important thing is that we thrive in Him as we suffer and as we experience great joy.

I suppose it applies to parenting too. It is not our goal to keep our children from suffering. It is our goal to help them thrive as they experience suffering and joy.

Still pondering

New Years Resolutions and Insular Lives

2012-01-06T13:11:00.000-06:00

I have been reading post after post on every one's New Years Resolutions, and I have my own. I've been struck - is all of this really any better than the materialism of Christmas that we all complain about?

It's been just all striking me as "ick" right now because of the self-focus. It's about organizing our time and our lives so we can do more of what we want and look how we want and have perfect families. None of those things are bad, it's what is missing in all of it that is striking me. Kurt linked to this Alan Hirsch quote the other day.

For way too long discipleship has been limited to issues relating to our own personal morality and worked out i the context of the four walls of the church with its privatized religion. In doing this, we have severely neglected our biblical mandate to go and “make disciples.” We have narrowed the gospel message to just being about us. Please hear us: we don’t want to neglect issues of personal morality. To strive for holiness and maturity in our own personal lives is extremely important, but it is only half the picture; the other half is our God-given responsibility to the world around us. The fact is that you can’t be a disciple without being a missionary: no mission, no discipleship. It’s as simple as that.

That is what has been pinning me to the wall the past year. Someone told me that as I challenge the high school girls I work with, I should challenge them to go to the teen parties that all the Christian youth group talks tell them to stop going to. They shouldn't be hiding away. They should GO and be a light.

What about me? Sure, I really do want to organize my life better so that I have time for meditation and prayer, I really do need to start to work out, and there are other parts of my life that need developing. But in all of my life organizing, am I simply creating a schedule that looks more and more "good" and has absolutely no time for regular people in the regular world? What I am truly thinking needs to change is that I need to be out there. At a party. With people outside of the holy huddle, doing things that have nothing to do with the holy huddle.

It's such a trap that we keep putting together more activities to keep us even busier in our homes and in our churches, further and further away from the places and people that most need the God that we have.

The Road Less Travelled - Discipline (part 2)

2011-12-15T08:48:00.002-06:00

I wrote about reading and being amazed by M. Scott Peck's book The Road Less Travelled in this post. This is part two of me quoting and reflecting on the book.

The feeling of being valuable - "I am a valuable person" - is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline. It is a direct product of parental love. Such a conviction must be gained in childhood; it is extremely difficult to acquire it during adulthood. conversely, when children have learned through the love of their parents to feel valuable, it is almost impossible for the vicissitudes of adult hood to destroy their spirit

This is why I feel like parents gave me such a massive gift and were such great parents. I have struggled with my own insecurities but there is this innate sense of being valuable and loved that is such a great foundation to stand on and also to grow spiritually. It also means I struggle to understand those who claim Calvinism and the doctrine of total depravity necessitates this sense of being unvaluable. I find my own depravity and my own value to be things that are not mutually exclusive, and I think that is perhaps because I was loved so well in my childhood.

The inclination to ignore problems is one again a simple manifestation of an unwillingness to delay gratification. Confronting problems is, as I have said, painful. To willingly confront a problem early, before we are forced to confront it by circumstances, means to put aside something pleasant or less painful for something more painful. It is choosing to suffer now in the hope of future gratification rather than choosing to continue present gratification in the hope that future suffering will not be necessary.

Many, so many, seek to avoid the pain of their problems by saying to themselves: "This problem was caused me by other people, or by social circumstances beyond my control, and therefore is up to other people or society to solve this problem for me. It is not really my personal problem." The extent to which people will go psychologically to avoid assuming responsibility for personal problems, while always sad, is sometimes almost ludicrous.

Now, even more so than when I read these words months ago, these statements ring so true. I've seen it acted out in front of me. That last sentence..... it really is ridiculous how far people will go to avoid responsibility. Mind-blowing. Relationship-ruining.

The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive. One measure - and perhaps the best measure - of a person's greatness is the capacity for suffering. Yet the great are also joyful. This, then, is the paradox... So if your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek... spiritual evolution.... As you achieve it, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine. Then why desire to evolve at all, you may ask. If you ask this question, perhaps you do not know enough of joy.

I absolutely agree with what Peck says about discipline and going through pain in order to gain discipline and grow. What is frustrating is when people make an extremely narcissistic choice and make it out to be the suffering of personal growth (see also Eat Pray Love and other such rot). Sometimes suffering and pain is a result of your bad choices. Sometimes it's a result of growth. How do we possibly know the truth when we so easily lie to ourselves? Community is the best way to look in the mirror and see the truth. Have people around you that will tell you the truth.

Missional, House Churches, and Me

2011-12-09T13:11:00.001-06:00

In the breaks from my week of meetings, one of the guys has been putting me through the wringer about my ideas and involvement in church, my community group, my high school girls group, the refugees, etc.

I am listening, thinking, and taking it all with the grain of salt. The man I'm talking to is a bit of a legend and a huge advocate for the short-cycle church planting movement and the idea of Train the Trainers (As is written about here:)

I don't fully agree with those movements (though I do agree with some things about them), but I want to learn from them and from him and be challenged where needed. Here are a few ideas that have been thrown out:

Both my community group and my high school girls group should move to considering themselves house churches. My response? Why is there a need for groups to consider themselves churches? If you do all the same things, is there any difference in calling yourself a "church" or not? Him: Perhaps not for the leader, but for the members. If you consider yourself a church, you take ownership in what you're doing, you're intentional, and you should also be more intentional about multiplying.

On that note, multiplication is crucial in all of this. If a group is not growing, it is dying or at least is not obedient to God's ideal. There is no point in continuing on with a group year after year - instead you should be growing, and then dividing in order to grow more.

Me: Well, for high school girls, why call their group a house church when there is no family involvement, it's just for high schoolers? Him: American Evangelicals idolize family, and there is no need to have a church be filled with all ages. Believers should reach out to their peers, and if their peers are their age, then the churches they form will reflect their age, and that's fine.

Another idea he's pushed back against is the idea of discipleship, which ironically is what my last post was about. He thinks that often our ideas about discipleship only contribute to the "holy huddle" of Christians hanging out with Christians and all talking about good things and never actually going out and "making disciples", which is more accurately evangelizing rather than doing Bible Studies. Actually, after I described the demographics of kids in these small groups, he told me I should probably not be involved at all, since it just perpetuates a broken system in their lives (of always only being in a passive Christian environment). He pulled away from the vehemence of that statement later, but what's clear is that he would push me to work not with kids that have grown up in the Church but with kids on the edges, on the margins. The only reason to work with kids in the Church is to push THEM to work with kids on the edges.(my thoughts: the NT has evangelizing, but it also very clearly has people working to shepherd/teach/mature)

On that note, one thing he and I absolutely agree on is that it is a massive problem that these kids are told to "avoid bad influences" and so hang out mostly with people that are also sheltered and comfortably Christian. This means that those that should be salt and light are isolated from those that need Jesus most, and these kids themselves never have their faith stretched or grown by doing what they're called to do - take Jesus to those around them. It's true that Evangelicalism has a holy huddle mentality and it sucks.This guy's statement was to send my girls to the teen clubs. Hah - can you imagine what the parents would say??

I talked about how part of my goal with these girls is to expose them to life outside of their safe bubble world. I mentioned that I wanted them to meet the refugee family I work with. My friend said absoultely no way. This would merely set them up to feel pity for their economic state and would not challenge the girls spiritually. Hmm....

One of my thoughts is - what about considering mega churches a sort of denomination and the small groups within them (like mine) as house churches within that denomination. I for one couldn't do the big church without the small group, but I do actually love having the structure and guidance of the larger church body, and honestly the types of outreach and ministry that we do are so much greater because we network within a larger body. I can't see why there's anything wrong with that.

I have no conclusions here, I just wanted to throw out some of what was thrown at me so that I (and you) can muse over it a little. Do you guys have thoughts?

The thing is, I think some of the presuppositions here point back to the same things fueling a lot of the missional and emerging church movement. There's a lot in there that I agree with, but when I heard Michel Frost (author of several missional movement books along with Alan Hirsch) speak at Dallas Theological Seminary last year, I was put off by how anti-institutional church he was.

In this post, David Fitch analyzes some of Frost and Hirsch's mentality in an absolutely fantastic post that you should all read. First - where we all agree:

We still believe we possess power and influence in our culture “to compel them to come to us.” We organize ourselves into hierarchical business like structures that centralize the church’s operations instead of dispersing it into the world. In order to preserve our own culture, we divide what is sacred (the church) from the secular (the world). It is a power play requiring those who believe to come to church to meet God. As a result, the church is self-enclosed trying to defend its own view of the world. It has not only withdrawn from Mission, it has become antagonistic to it.... In response to this state of affairs, Hirsch and Frost preach a dispersed notion of the church where it inhabits its neighborhoods and contexts of everyday life. Recounting some the core themes of missional thinkers, they unfurl how the church is to live missionally as an extension of the Mission of God in the world (not as a church that does missions as a program).

In all of this, I completely agree. But as Fitch goes on to say, because Hirsch and Frost believe that Christ drives the individual's mission in the world - Christology directly determines Missiology, after which you figure out your Ecclesiology.

Implicit in this formula is that we (anyone) can know/encounter Christ determinately apart from the ongoing form of the church. The continuous forms of the church...are therefore dispensable for Mission. Jesus forms the church directly in Mission....the church carries no continuous form from context to context....

The danger here is that ...we become a bunch of individuals seeking a personal mystical experience of Christ via our own interpretation of the gospels. We become individual worshipers of a self-described Jesus devoid of the means to be immersed in the work of the Triune God in the world.....

The incarnation is more than a principle to be applied as a missiological method – it is a reality extended in and through the church. These practices should not separate us from the world, they should incarnate us as His body in the world... Through these simple ecclesial practices, we are enabled as individuals to submit to and participate in the full Trinitarian Mission of God of which the church has been sent and is a part. In these ways, missiology does not precede ecclesiology, missiology is ecclesiology and vice versa..

That's my unease. I see flaws in in the institutional church, but I am not anti-institution. In fact, I long for it. I love the history, tradition, liturgy, sacraments, the practices, the form. So, both in mission and in ecclesiology, I am pro-institution. I believe that the institution of the church (which looks different in different places - I an not at all against contextualization and variety) IS the form of the mission of God in the world, and so I want to cultivate it, not minimize it. I think that's a key point where I break with my mentor/friend at work. I am convicted about the need for breaking away from the "huddle" and convicted about the need for multiplication and do want to implement all of this However, I want to know how it can be implemented within my local body of believers.

Awkward Teenagers and Making Disicples

2011-11-30T13:06:00.000-06:00

Three years ago I became a co-leader of a group of middle-school girls through my church. They'd already been meeting together for three years.

I don't think I really knew what I was getting into. I was entering into a group of girls raised in the very culture that intimidated and felt foreign to me in my own teen years. There have been times when joining them in their parties felt like being given a second chance - I can join in and dance this time around instead of being a wallflower. Other times I've wondered if I'll ever be able to relate to them. It took a long time to really feel at ease with them.

It's a group of girls who started out in grade school together, but now they are all in different high schools. With that distance and growing up, they know each other less now than they did when they started. Some are less interested in all things religious. Over the years several girls have moved away or just drifted. Last year I wasn't even sure we'd still have a group this year. Hardly any of them come to the youth program at church anymore, but when we gather in their homes in our small group mid-week they still come, because they trust us.

I've seen dramatic things alongside the usual issues with grades, boys, prom dates, and parents.

I've kept going because I feel like I'm in a fight for their souls. They are being pulled on by the appearance and success-oriented culture of North Dallas. The teenage years with all their angst and impulsive tendencies put forward the possibilities of disastrous choices with drugs, guys, and self-abuse when they feel depressed. A middle-class to upper class life characterized by cultural Christianity filled with platitudes and little real depth or truth is the easy future most people expect of them. They ARE at-risk, perhaps just as much as the refugees I work with, just in a very different way.

So I do what I do to fight for something different. I want them to have a place they can be honest, to have people they know who have chosen a different path and who value different things. I want them to know they are loved and valued and that we enjoy being with them. Even if they don't remember a thing we've studied together, if they know they'll always have us two older women that love them to come and talk to to process life and point them to God, we will have succeeded.

After three years of wondering if we were actually having any effect, I'm amazed by what I'm seeing this year. I love them, and we are comfortable together and have FUN.Conversations are real and amazing and they are growing up. Recently one girl stopped another in middle of a story and asked if she could say something. She gave her friend a strong piece of advice, and the other girl listened and responded with, "Thank you SO much, really. Thank you for saying that."

You know how hard we've worked to try to get them to really speak into each other's lives and push each other to make good choices? To see it happen without us guiding it was awesome.

I've seen two girls take bold stands against injustice, and to do so they really had to go against the flow. *fist pump for their awesomeness*. After years of talking about Scripture and trying to encourage them away from assumptions and into reading for themselves and owning their faith, I think right now they really care and are choosing this of their own accord.

Yeah, they are still teenagers, and yeah, all the things most people find awkward about teenagers are still there. I don't care. I think they're great. I just know that I have been commanded to "go and make disciples" and that discipleship is needed in their corner of wealthy Dallas.

Thoughts on The Road Less Traveled - Part 1

2011-11-18T13:14:00.001-06:00

This year I read The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. When I started it I didn't know what it was about - I think I had it confused with The Road by Cormac McCarthy. However, I was captivated by the the first line and the first chapter.

Life is difficult...

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly... about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy....

Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them? Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems...Wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems. Most of us are not so wise. Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, attempt to avoid problems. This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness.... In the succinctly elegant words of Carl Jung, "Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering."

Therefore let us inculcate in ourselves and in our children the means of achieving mental and spiritual health. By this I mean let us teach ourselves and our children the necessity for suffering and the value thereof, the need to face problems directly and experience the pain involved. I have stated that discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems. It will become clear that these tools are the techniques of suffering, means by which we experience the pain problems in such a way as to work them through and solve them successfully, learning and growing in the process. When we teach ourselves and our children discipline.

That is a bit of what struck me and made me think a lot about parenting and discipline and the role of suffering in our children's lives (and mine). It is incredibly profound and so often missing from how we practice psychology - and indeed I realized that Peck is a psychologist, and that this book was a best-seller when it was published in the '70s.Much of the rest of the book is equally profound, and then at points I'd be completely disgusted. Peck is a fascinating guy who was one of the first who is willing to integrate the role of God and faith into emotional well-being. At the time of the writing of the book I believe he was still on a bit of a spiritual journey, and some of what he says is ridiculous spiritual mumbo jumbo. Really a funny mix of mumbo jumbo with profound truth. And, when I look at Peck's life, though he says he eventually became a Christian, he certainly seemed to settle into Orthodox Christianity, and it seems like he never applied the truth in his book to his own life. There is a lack of discipline, a lack of commitment, and quite a bit of sexual irresponsibility. And you know, it's interesting to talk to people about how this book affected them. Isaac was recently talking to a friend of his at seminary who moved from agnosticism to Christianity beginning with reading this book. On the other hand I've also heard of people on whom the book had the opposite effect. I suppose it depends on the presuppositions you come to it with, as it tends to blow your presuppositions. I'm going to do several posts on some of the things I encountered in The Road Less Traveled, because I want to remember what I've read.

Thoughts on Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts

2011-11-15T23:26:00.000-06:00

I finally finished Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts, approximately one month after I was supposed to have it read for a book group. Total fail, I know.

It was interesting. She has the mind and heart of a modern day mystic. She dwells on the small things, the beauty around her. She's a farmer's wife and the mother of five (?) children, and her writing just oozes the picturesque homeliness of rural life. Hard work, raw honesty, family, home-grown faith. The hints of her life story are gritty and raw, and I do love that she's so obviously worked hard to study the scripture and wrap all of her theology and belief in it. It's a contrast to many homemakers who leave personal study to others.

Ann has a really unique writing style. I really still don't know if it drove me crazy or I loved it. It is filled with metaphor and incomplete sentences, but she is consistent and intentional in her style. For instance:

A soap bubble, skin of light and water and space suspended in sphere. Who has time for that?...

The wonder right in the middle of the sink. Looking for it like this. I lay the palm under water and I raise my hand with the membrane of a life span of moments. In the light, the sheerness of bubble shimmers. Bands of garnet, cobalt, flowing luminous....

The bubble in my hand quavers, a rainbow at fringes.

And blind eyes see: it's this sleuthing for the glory that slows a life gloriously. It's plain, bubble straight through: Giving thanks for one thousand things is ultimately an invitation to slow time down with weight of full attention. In this space of time and sphere, I am attentive, aware, accepting the whole of the moment, weighting it down with me all here

The book is sort of a life theology built around gratitude/thankfulness/praise, which she encompasses in the word eucharisteo. It is all a stream of consciousness, beginning with a vivid description of the life and beauty around her as she works, then melding into her thoughts and pondering. In that, it appeals to women like me. Daily life and beauty mixed with theology makes it come alive. She wrestles with the reality of suffering, with the daily grind of life, and how it all relates to grace and love.

I love her passion for beauty, for raw spirituality, for love and truth implemented into the quiet ministry to her family, kids, community. I loved the reminder to worship. I love Ann's heart - it's evident in her blog and in the way other bloggers she encounters are changed and refreshed by her quiet love.

I was skeptical (what? me? skeptical?) at a number of points at the suggestion that the problem with the world and humanity can be summed up in ungratefulness and can be solved with thankfulness. It got deeper than that, and some of what she has to say is quite profound. Still, I think that some of what Voskamp wrestles with throughout the book may not be the same things that others are wrestling with, and so the disciplines that are her solutions really may not hit home with others who struggle in other ways. Personally where I really resonated with her the most was in her wrestling with the reality of suffering and evil in the world.

All in all, interesting book, gorgeous writing, and a stunning heart. I also wrote of my more emotional response to the book here, specifically how her writing reminds me to look and long for beauty.

Dear Sir in the coffee shop 8 years ago

2011-11-11T20:21:00.001-06:00

I sat at a little table in the corner of Seattle's Best in one of those cute old buildings on Chicago Avenue. The view out of the big window in front of me showed off the clouds and the sun shining off of the skyscrapers, hiding the chill that swept the streets and caused me to take refuge with a latte. I sat with my textbooks and my Bible and read and pondered, the way I always did.

The middle aged Caucasian man across from me quietly observed, his curiosity evident.

"Do you really believe all that?"

I stopped and took in his sweeping question that encompassed the scripture in front of me and my evident devotion to it.

I told him I did, and as much as this earnest introverted college student could, told him why, and told him how real it all was to me.

He sighed, his own story obscure to me but obviously weighing on his mind as he responded.

"Yes, but you're young. We'll see. We'll see if you still believe it in a few years."

He didn't say it to be insulting. He was intrigued that I, an educated and intelligent person, would believe. My youth discredited me. I'm sure he thought, "When she is older, when she knows more and has experienced life, she will change. It will fade, this passion." He wasn't skeptical, though. It was evident that he was sad.

If memory serves, it's been eight years from the day I talked to that man in Seattles' Best.

I understand a little more where he's coming from, a man in a city where unbelief is the accepted norm. He's right that I see things differently as an adult, and I am no longer that naive college kid.

But Sir, if I could meet you again in those easy chairs under the Chicago skyline, I would tell you that I still believe. Today I remembered you and I prayed for you, that you with your wistful response would be chased by the Hound of Heaven until you know it too.

Stanley Hauerwas and I on marriage and divorce

2011-11-09T23:04:00.001-06:00

Her.meneutics had an article with thoughts on the Kardashians today. I'm less interested in the Kardashians and more interested in a quote in the article by Stanley Hauerwas on marriage that was quoted in the article.

“The church rightly understands that we no more know the person we marry than we know ourselves. However, that we lack such knowledge in no way renders marriage problematic, at least not marriage between Christians; for to be married as Christians is possible because we understand that we are members of a community more determinative than marriage.

That the church is a more determinative community than a marriage is evidenced by the fact that it requires Christian marriage vows to be made with the church as witness. This is a reminder that we as a church rightfully will hold you to promises you made when you did not and could not fully comprehend what you were promising. How could anyone know what it means to promise life-long monogamous fidelity? From the church’s perspective the question is not whether you know what you are promising; rather, the question is whether you are the kind of person who can be held to a promise you made when you did not know what you were promising. We believe, of course, that baptism creates the condition that makes possible the presumption that we might just be such a people.”

I love this and it resonates right now, when this year for the first time our lives we've experienced close friends going through a divorce. One thing I've learned is that it deeply affects not only the couple themselves but those around them who are friends of the marriage. Though I have grieved and wrestled my way through this process, it's not directly my story to tell so I haven't blogged about it. It has all brought home the reality reflected in the quote above - that no amount of care, wisdom, and advice guarantees the actions of the person you marry. Just as much as you yourself can change, your spouse can change. What you get when you promise "life-long monogamous fidelity" is as unpredictable as the future itself, which is exactly why we have marriage vows that reference for better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness and health. The promise is made to the person in front of you, but it encompasses whoever they might become, which is an immense risk.

I think we do not even begin to take seriously enough the need to recognize that marriage, like communion and baptism, is meant to be done in front of and with the church, our community. In light of this Isaac and I have become intentional in a lot of the way we approach marriage now. It's less of an attitude of "keep your problems private and resolve them behind closed doors" and more honesty with our community about what we're going through and conflicts we're having so that they can encourage us and hold us accountable. I've also taken much more seriously being invited to and being in peoples' weddings. This past summer I was a witness as Rachel's wedding, this upcoming summer I'll be in my sister Jana's wedding. In those roles I am a witness to the promise AND a tool to help make possible that life-long fidelity.

Bart Ehrman vs Daniel Wallace - "Is the text of the New Testament trustworthy?"

2011-10-02T22:59:00.000-05:00

Isaac and I went to a debate on Saturday night between Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace over the topic of "Can we trust the text of the New Testament."

It was SO much fun.

I do realize that thinking a debate about textual criticism is fun officially makes us complete nerds. These are my thoughts after the debate, but I am a lay person. For the thoughts of someone that is himself studying these issues, you can see this blog, which when I stumbled upon it I realized was written by the guy sitting beside me, who I did not talk to. My apologies, sir.

In any case, this debate had a lot of buzz surrounding it and we bought tickets immediately. The first 500 went fast so they moved the debate to the larger auditorium on the campus of SMU. 1,500 people sold out the place. Why? Because of the speakers. Experts in the field of text criticism with opposite conclusions. I put both of their bios on the bottom of the post. In the crowd I saw DTS students, people with "atheist" on their t-shirts, Isaac's professors, church staff, and a couple I know where she is a Christian and he's an atheist.

It was fascinating. Both men were lucid and funny, but it ended up not being a debate so much about the evidence for the New Testament text as it was about presuppositions. I expected Ehrman to attack the text itself, since he is a textual critic and that's what the title of his books hint at. Instead he sort of argued from our points of ignorance - the first 150 years after the texts were originally written before our early fragments and manuscripts. Ehrman granted so many of Wallace's points - that the New Testament has a vast amount more evidence supporting it than any other ancient document. That while there are lots of little variants in the text, the vast majority of them make no difference in the actual meaning, and few if any make any difference to Christian theology. That even without the early documentary evidence that we have, the early church fathers quote the scripture so much that you can almost recreate the entire NT from their quotes alone.

What was his point? The statement he made again and again was that while the evidence for the text was good and actually unparalleled, we don't know for sure. Can we be certain? Is it proven? Wallace kept coming back and pointing out that he wasn't saying that we could absolutely know for sure or that we couldn't know for sure - he was just examining the evidence and saying that based on the mountains of evidence it looks as though we probably have a trustworthy text today.

It was fascinating. Wallace sounded like the scientist, since he was the one following where the evidence led him. Wallace gave loads of evidence, often from Ehrman himself, for the unmatched reliability of the NT text, and for the field of text criticism to help solve the places where there are variants - to get back to the "original" text. Most of it Ehrman didn't disagree with. Ehrman just kept saying that before the earliest fragments begin there's a gap and so we can't know for sure that the text is trustworthy.

It's so interesting that this was Ehrman's point. Can anyone that's read his books tell me if this is his main argument? It doesn't make any sense to me considering that his life's work and expertise is in textual criticism, a field that assumes that you can examine text and if your textual evidence is good enough and you use good textual criticism principles, you can discern the errors in transmission and discern the original. And yet here he is undermining his own field by saying that no matter how excellent your evidence is, essentially if you don't have the original, the readings can't be trusted.

In the Q & A later someone asked Ehrman what sort of manuscript evidence he would need in front of him to convince him of the reliability of the text. He said that he'd want a copy made within the first week of writing and with .01% variance. Really? So essentially he says it's not trustworthy unless it's one step away from the original. Wallace's first and perhaps most necessary point was that there are three paths to take, and Ehrman walks the far left - radical skepticism. Wallace is a moderate. He may be a theological conservative, but his approach to the text is moderate.

And yet later in the Q & A someone asked a ridiculous question about how the New Testament was decided at the Council of Nicaea (a view perpetuated by The DaVinci Code). Ehrman dismissed this as a modern myth. His phrasing caught my ear though. He said something like, "We know what happened at the council, it was written about, and that (deciding the scriptures) didn't happen." Okay, so in Ehrman's standards we have textual evidence enough to "know" about the Council of Nicaea. And yet we have a vast amount MORE textual evidence backing up the New Testament, and yet he said again and again that we "can't know". Why the double standard?

I thought both men did a great job. Of course I'm biased because I agree with Wallace, but he did an excellent job. I've been thinking about what Ehrman's intent was, and I think that more than anything it's to cast doubt into the minds of the conservative Christians who know nothing about how we got the Bible we read today but base their faith on a literal reading of the Bible. For someone who has just assumed that this is the scripture passed from the disciples on down in this exact form, understanding how various letters and manuscripts came to be accepted and passed down in this form can shake up your faith. Indeed, a KJV only person asked a question, and another person asked (accusatorily, as if he might catch Ehrman in his tracks) if in all of his work he'd found any pages or even paragraphs added to the NT text. There were silence and chuckles as Ehrman pointed out a few examples that he'd already used in the presentation and that anyone who has studied the history of the Bible or textual criticism is very familiar with. It's funny to us, but the reality is that there really ARE a lot of Christians that are ignorant about their Bible, and to them Ehrman's message is daunting.

In any case, it was great. The Q & A part of the program exhibited the ignorance of a great many people on either sides of the issue. A number of times someone asked a question angrily as if they were really making a strong point, and the audience would first sit in amazed silence that such a stupid comment was actually just made, and then would collectively burst into laughter. Sort of sad, but really, really deserved. I mean, really deserved. One guy thought he was calling Wallace out by pointing out that the New Testament is about Jesus but Greek doesn't even have a "J". Hah! I mean.... has this guy never learned another language? Or someone else who asked if these scholars that copied scripture were the same that condemned Galileo. What?

The debate was recorded but it isn't accessible yet. I highly recommend you listen to it when it comes out!

Bart Ehrman is a professor and scholar in the field of textual criticism. He literally wrote the book of textual criticism with his own professor, Metzger. Isaac has had his books as textbooks in his graduate studies on textual criticism. He's also become known on the popular level, though, because he came out of fundamentalism to evangelicalism to liberalism to agnosticism (he's a Moody and Wheaton grad). At the moment I'd call him an agnostic evangelist, and that's why he intentionally is willing to do debates like this in the Bible Belt. He wants to engage conservative Christians and directly challenge their beliefs. He's written books like Jesus, Interrupted, Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible, and Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. His work is quite personal to me not only because of his attendance at Moody, but because his writings have drawn my friends away from Christianity.

On the opposite side you have Daniel Wallace. Wallace is also a textual critic, and on the scholarly level has written the textbook on Greek grammar that everyone uses, Harvard, Princeton, etc. He's started the Center for Biblical Manuscripts, which is going around the world doing high quality photography of all of the ancient biblical manuscripts so that they are recorded for history. He's a professor at Isaac's school and has directly engaged the ideas of Ehrman in an essay, "The Gospel According to Bart: A Review Article of Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman." He is an evangelical Christian and one of my husband's professors.

Why homosexuality is personal to my generation

2011-09-26T22:49:00.004-05:00

For my parent's generation if you were white and middle class, it really wouldn't be surprising if you didn't know anyone gay. Not so for my generation.

I've heard people say that the gay community has become mainstream because of a strategic plan to infiltrate the public eye via the media. They say what was once considered deviant behavior is now considered acceptable because kids see it in the news, in the paper, and constantly on sitcoms and in movies.

There may be truth to that, but it's sort of a non-issue for me.What I do know is that the way you perceive any group changes when you know someone in the group personally. And so, particularly for an older generation of Christian who grew up when homosexuality was hidden, you may not know what it's like to be us, a generation who has grown up not only with homosexuality in the media, but much more personally as co-workers, classmates, and friends.

For me, homosexuality was an issue thrown around as an insult, an identity, and an issue in our public grade school and middle school. It became personal in college when I took a job at Blockbuster. Nick was the guy I worked with most often. He was a high school kid, Italian-American with a controlling mother. He was talkative and extroverted and openly gay. He told me he loved to dress in drag for parades on the weekend. He was dramatic. He was also my friend. We talked about his life and mine, about being gay and why I was a Christian.

Many more people followed Nick as gay friends in my life. I worked in event planning and hospitality. Plenty of my fellow servers in college were gay. When I moved into the office three of the very best event planners were gay. Two of them were perhaps the most outwardly stable people in the office and they exuded respect for others and a sweet spirit. They had both also been with their partners longer than most of the marriages in the office. Now I'm in the life stage in which those around me in the evangelical community are starting to come out of the closet. Missionary kids and Bible college students are coming forward with their stories.

So for me when we discuss the theological importance or the biblical position on homosexuality, it isn't an impersonal discussion. It applies to Nick and Brian and Brit and Jessica and Michael and Suzi and Chris and Grant and Igor, and others. What I hope this does to us is make us tread carefully, understanding that what we are saying and analyzing and theologizing over is central to the identity of people, real people that we know and love. We care for their souls first and foremost. All of this doesn't necessarily change what we believe about right and wrong unless what we believed wasn't well thought through in the first place because it wasn't personal yet.

What frustrates me is when I see Christians passing judgement about homosexuality without knowing that their words cut deeply. I find myself wishing that they wouldn't speak until they have a friend that's gay. It's just as if you were having a conversation with your spouse or a close friend and you have to honestly confront them about something. You know they will disagree or be hurt by what you have to say but this doesn't give you the right to slam down your opinion and walk away without caring about the effect of your words. Even when we disagree we are responsible to interact lovingly, honestly, and with a listening and humble ear. That's the effect that having gay friends has on me. I don't think that gaining love and gentleness necessarily means that we have lost our grounding in truth.

When someone needs help.... do they need relief, rehabilitation, or development? (Pt 1)

2011-09-13T22:44:00.000-05:00

Months ago I was reading and blogging through the book When Helping Hurts by Corbett and Fikkert. I stopped reading over the summer but I just picked it back up again. This is actually the question that I mulled over in my head all summer long.

Think about materially poor people in North America who have asked you or your church for immediate financial assistance. Under what conditions do you believe it would be appropriate to give things or money to these people?

The key point that I think WHH makes is that there's a difference in levels and types of need. There's relief - the need for emergency help right away to avert disaster. Then there's rehabilitation, which comes after relief and helps restore stability. Then there's development. That's the ongoing process of change to grow to be healthy and whole in all areas of life.

The question that we have to ask ourselves anytime we're presented with a need is, "Is this a situation that needs immediate relief? Or does it instead need rehabilitation or development?" The response to each of those situations is different, so determining the need is key. A quote from the book: "One of the biggest mistakes that North American churches make - by far- is applying relief in situations in which rehabilitation or development is the appropriate intervention.

With that in mind, today I want to analyze the first situation that came to mind in response to the question above:

Situation 1 - Refugees.
I wrote about this situation last year in a post called When refugees accidentally rack up an $1800 phone bill. Isaac and I mentor a newly arrived refugee family from Burma. We're there to teach English, make friends, and generally be a guide and advocate on anything that comes up in the massive cultural adjustment to living in the USA. So - with this particular family they brought out a phone bill that they didn't understand. Actually, it was a bill from collections - for nearly $2,000. After picking my jaw off the floor, I told them I'd call and try to figure out what was going on. Turns out that having grown up in refugee camps with no electricity, they were taught to use the phone in their Dallas apartment and had no idea that there was a difference between international and local calls. They called family back in Thailand every day and racked up all those fees in ONE month. When they got the bill in the mail they of course didn't pay it, and the phone was shut off immediately. The bill was sent to collections.

So. What is the need in this situation? Relief, rehabilitation, or development?

"If you fail to provide immediate help, will there really be serious, negative consequences? If not, then relief is not the appropriate intervention, for there is time for the person to take action on his own behalf."

My heart just sank when I saw the phone bill because I know the financial pressure on this family is immense. This guy has a minimum wage job as a dishwasher and he supports himself, his wife, his infant daughter, his mother-in-law, and his brother-in-law. He works hard. They didn't get in the situation by mismanaging money - it was a question of cultural ignorance.

Still - if we didn't step in, the consequences wouldn't be disastrous. Perhaps it was a situation of rehabilitation. Their credit would go down, but then again they don't have any credit to begin with. The bill would stay out there until paid, right? I don't have a lot of experience with collections so I'm not sure about that. I just know that while it feels urgent in my head because any debt is urgent in my head, I'm learning that there are times you can't pay a big bill right away (ie - Judah's birth expenses) and paying it out over time is your only option. You have debt. You pay it off. You learn to budget.

On the other hand, though, I don't want them to learn from the outset of their time in the USA that they owe money and can't do anything about it, so just go ahead and live and spent and ignore your debt. Plus, with the bill being in the creditors, their financial situation taking a turn to the worst really could have serious, negative consequences. There was a touch of need for relief.

I think we did the right thing by picking a middle ground. If we had just gathered money from people and paid the bill, they might not have actually learned from the experience and learned to avoid major bill problems next time around. There is a huge financial lesson to be learned here, and in this case with a family brand new to the culture, it's a bit like a college kid managing money for the first time. They need both grace and mercy in order to get through it with hope but still learn from the experience.

First we advocated for them - I called the creditors and the phone company, explained the situation, begged for mercy, and they dropped the bill dramatically and allowed it to be payed out in two months of installments. I told the story on the blog and some friends in real life and in the blog world said they wanted to help. Money came in, enough that the bill was mostly covered and the family just had to pay a couple hundred dollars both months. This was good in that it allowed them to still have to pay their bills and feel financial weight of it themselves, while simultaneously feeling as though the Body of Christ was providing miraculously. There was some relief, there was also rehabilitation.

It's such a fine line. One of the worst things that is done to refugees when they arrive is that church and community groups sweep in and provide a lot of charity money. This means the newly arrived families don't learn to create a budget and live on it themselves, and they quickly are ingrained with this mindset of being the recipient of paternalism. It reinforces our arrogance and their dependence. However, I don't want to be so scared by that prospect that I never help at all. I do, however, want to always help in the context of relationship. I never want to throw money at someone's problem, but I would love to help a friend in need, just as I have been helped (and that, my friends, is a story for the next post on this topic, in which the "need" presented was our own).

Catholics - how do you want a Protestant to encourage other Catholics in their faith?

2011-09-06T15:23:00.000-05:00

I have a question. Some of you newer readers don't know that when I started writing this blog I was intensely wrestling with Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and that is reflected in my early writing. I think many of the Catholics and Orthodox who used to read this are long-gone, having given up on me coming to a conclusion that will satisfy them.

But - for those of you that are still here, I have a question.

Many of you know that Isaac and I volunteer as mentors for newly arrived refugee families - we've been through two families. The second family is just absolutely precious - Tee Reh and Soh Meh and their little girl are a darling couple. Tee Reh is intelligent and hard-working and they are kind and motivated and flexible. I just love them.

So there's the thing. They are Catholic. We are great with that. When they first told us they are Catholic they put it like this, "We are Catholic, not Christian."

So, there is a basic misunderstanding in what "Christian" means and how it relates to "Catholic". They think that "Christian" mean "Protestant" and that Catholicism and Protestantism are at odds with each other. They are right historically, of course.

But really, we are Protestants but we don't care if they are or aren't. As long as they are under the broad "Christian" umbrella, I believe they can know Christ and salvation, and I have no reason to persuade them to join us in our particular camp.

Here is the dilemma. How do we encourage them in their faith without seeming to push them away from their Church? See, I'm nervous that they may not actually understand the Gospel or the faith they verbally adhere to. This is not because they are Catholic, I think it could be just as true if they said they were "Baptist" (as did the first refugee couple - and indeed I think when they got to the US they were merely Christian because that's what their tribe is and had no understanding of scripture or the Gospel). Cultural Christianity is a problem in all areas of the Church. The thing is, if they were Protestants I would feel free to talk to them about their church, their faith, scripture, etc. I would feel free to pray for them, I could go to their church and talk to to the leaders, etc.

Because they are Catholic, though, they think I do not share their faith and so any encouragement I may have about faith would be viewed as suspect. How can a Protestant encourage a Catholic to take their own church and faith seriously? They have told us that they go to a Catholic church and they participate in the rituals but they don't understand what anyone is saying.

So, if you are Catholic - how would you want a Protestant to talk to someone who is culturally Catholic but hasn't yet engaged with the church or their faith very seriously? I do not wish to pull them away - I wish to encourage them to know Christ more and more in the context of the Catholic church.

Thoughts on missions

2011-09-03T23:33:00.000-05:00

I am still contemplating missions.

I grew up in a world of faith-supported missionaries. In other words, they earned no wage and just lived on the gifts of people who wanted to support them and their work or vision.

There are good and bad things to being supported. Shouldn't we all work to earn a wage, the way Paul talks about? Is being faith supported any different than being a charity case that goes around begging for money? It certainly should be. Someone who is living on the support of others for their ministry should only be doing so because they are so passionate about doing something that makes a difference and earns no wage that they believe they should do it regardless and that others can join in the mission through whatever financial support they can give.

It's better, in a way, than the ministries that pay wages. If you are paid, you are working for money, and the temptation is to work for the money and no more. People are drawn to the wage over the passion of the work sometimes. You end up with a institution that is draining of its heart.

But... what about us? We wish to train and counsel. That's pretty basic stuff. It's the kind of stuff you DO earn a wage for in the US. If we go overseas we will most likely not find a place that can pay us, at least not doing what we are most passionate about and what we think is most needed. . I'm distinctly uncomfortable with raising funds from people. What right do I have to take their money? I'd much rather find a normal job overseas that earns a wage and allows us to invest in the people around us simultaneously. That's limited, though. We'd be taken up with our jobs and unable to do the level of training that Isaac would be able to do if his whole career was dedicated to leadership training for the church overseas.

It makes me sit back and really think. Do I believe that where we may be going is in enough need of trained leaders and counseling that a whole lot of people should join in funding our way to go there and fill those needs?

We don't know yet where we'll be going, so I can't answer that question.

I guess I'm struck by two things.

First, instead of simply by default entering the same support-based missions work that I was raised around, we need to investigate innovative options that might allow us to work in "normal" jobs and earn a wage.

Secondly, we better be passionate and sure of our calling and its importance before we decide to ask anyone to take part in our vision financially.

*sigh*. I am loathe to do it even if it does end up being the only way to do what we're called to do.

New Trend? Churches that don't support missionaries.

2011-08-22T23:42:00.000-05:00

I've got a question for you all.

Both our church here and our last church in Chicago haven't had the traditional mission board. Neither one of them really supports missionaries like so many traditional evangelical churches do.

I understand why they don't. They've seen people go overseas just because it's this traditional uber "spiritual" thing to do, and those people often do more harm than good to everyone. They've also seen people come around asking churches to support them, and the church ends up supporting 40 people that they barely know that have been overseas for forever. They've seen congregations feel good about themselves because they support lots of missionaries when no one is engaged in serving in their local community. It's just... a flawed system.

However - both churches still strongly encourage engaging in ministry overseas. They tend to partner with organizations that work on the ground and nurture long-term relationships in certain countries and with certain ministries. They both send short-term teams to do various forms of ministry in those countries.

So far, so good.

Our first problem? There's no potential support for people who are already engaged in ministry who need help. Both sets of our parents worked overseas for nearly all of their adult lives. If they had dropped support and needed to engage a new church supporter, our church simply wouldn't be able to help them. Why? Because they don't support missionaries corporately, only through individual members of the church. However, since our parents are already overseas, it's impossible to get to know the church. Catch-22. Work overseas must be abandoned in order to attempt to build the relationships to gain the support needed to get overseas. Problem.

Second problem? People from within the church that intend to head overseas are left without real church support. We've spent the last four years heavily invested in and involved in this church. We love it, we're so thankful for it, and it's changed us. Everyone we meet in the church heavily encourages the direction we're heading in. However, since the church doesn't support corporately, we're meant to raise support from individuals only (this, by the way, is not considered best practice by most organizations). We're young, though, and the people we know in the church are also young. We'd never be able to raise enough money to go from just our circle of friends. We'd have to go elsewhere to ask for help, and yet if other churches are like our church, they wouldn't even consider supporting us because they don't know us. Other churches that might consider it would question why our own body wasn't helping us - is that a sign that they don't believe in what we're doing? In the end, we may be forced to switch churches just to teach overseas.

Third problem? I think this mentality towards missions really devalues and misses the great need for long-term people that invest their entire lives in a place. Those people learn the language, absorb the culture, and attempt to see what the true needs are and how they can be met in a culturally appropriate way. This is ironic to me, because the church is really trying to value this by partnering with ministries that are already at work on the ground. However, what they're essentially doing is taking advantage of other people that have already become those long-term missionaries while simultaneously not having any way to develop new people like this that might be called from within the body.

So - how does a church solve the problems of the traditional church missions committee and solve the problems that our church is currently facing? We're just beginning to engage in these questions - does anyone have any experience with this with their churches?

Thoughts on Moody, Martyrs, and my Alma Mater

2011-08-08T13:06:00.000-05:00

I just finished the book A Martyr's Grace by Marvin Newell. It's a book filled with the stories of the 20-some Moody Bible Institute graduates that have been martyred.

It was an interesting read. Marv Newell was overseas with my family when we first got the Papua, and his son was the crush of half the girls in my 4th grade class. I didn't see him again until we both started Moody our freshman year of college, and I found out that Marv was (and still is?) a professor in Moody's graduate school.

The book is written simplistically so that kids can read it, but I bought it so that I could read the stories. My sophomore year Bonnie Witherall, a Moody alum, was killed in Lebanon by a Muslim shooter upon entering the clinic in which she was a nurse. It sent shock waves through the student body. Moody is known for being a school with a singular focus on training people to go into full-time Christian ministry and for emphasizing cross cultural Christian work overseas. Since so many of us were planning to go into that sort of work, it was really sobering to realize that for Bonnie it ended in death. Her husband Gary came to Moody a month later and talked in chapel. It was quite an experience to sit and hear his story and his emotion, and there was a strong response from the student body. I was among hundreds who sat in silence and tears and prayer for at least an hour after the chapel ended and we were dismissed.

I was struck reading the book that Bonnie was one of very few of the Moody "martyrs" that are what I think of as a "martyr". She was certainly killed for being a Christian and a representative of Christianity. Most of the people profiled in the book (I would say) were killed for other reasons, often related to their being Americans rather than Christians. They were in China for being a Westerner during the Boxer rebellion or the Communist takeover. They were killed in Africa during anti-colonialist uprisings for being white-skinned and thus associated with colonial power. They were killed in East-Asia for being American during WWII, and killed in Vietnam for being incorrectly associated with anti-Communist forces. Some were just robbed or attacked but not related to their work or identity at all, it just happened to happen while they were doing missionary work.

Not one of them was the classic martyrdom that we think of, in which someone is asked to deny their faith or be killed. Only a few were killed specifically for their work as Christians. One woman was raped, mutilated, and killed for being a part of a mission community that opposed female circumcision in Africa.

All of this is just after being called up by people working on putting together stories about Moody from Moody alum. They asked for stories from my "PCM", which is Practical Christian Ministry. All Moody students are required to be involved in some sort of ministry during their entire time at Moody. I replied with a story and they responded with a call and then an extensive interview. It seems I'll be used in some promotional material.

This has all prompted me to ponder again my thoughts on my alma mater. I've been pretty cynical about Moody Bible Institute in the years since graduation. Part of this was simply my own angst and early 20's questioning and semi-rebellion. Some of it I still agree with - while I was there, Moody was taking steps out of being entrenched in some pretty legalistic lifestyle ideas about what "Christian" colleges and students should do and not do. The rules were contradictory, a hangover from conservative fundamentalism, and ultimately distracted from what WAS good, which was ministry and theological education.

Now that most but not all of those rules have been changed, what do I think about Moody? I am so thankful for the relationships I built there, I still believe I had some absolutely excellent professors, and despite all snarky comments from other folks, I loved the idea and my experience in the PCM program. So, I suppose I appreciate Moody for what it uniquely is - a school attempting to train young adults who want to go into careers that are full-time specifically Christian ministry. This is a very narrow focus and so it isn't useful for most folks, but for those who fit that goal, I think Moody is actually a good school that is getting better and seems to be identifying and fixing its flaws. I hope that continues. I hope that Moody doesn't try to be a Christian bubble shielding itself from the world, but a light, emanating love and truth into the city and world without being defensive or judgmental.

Thoughts on trends in missions

2011-08-01T20:56:00.000-05:00

Two years ago I wrote a post about my trepidation about short-cycle church planting.

I still have a lot of the same questions about this current missions trend. Isaac wants to teach and train church leaders overseas (since there are just about a ba-jillion people ready to train church leaders here in the USA, and since we're not at home here anyways we may as well go where the need is greater). As we look for opportunities to teach overseas it is absolutely amazing to see how many organizations are all doing the exact same thing - moving towards a short-cycle church planting model.

I am okay with that as long as it's done in a balanced and wise way, but too often what we're seeing is that all theological education programs are shut down because they are too institutionalized (fair enough, if they are counter-productive) and nothing is put in their place as all energy is put towards building rapidly multiplying church planting movements.

I find this very short-sighted. If you do manage to be a part of a church growth movement in an area (which is most often actually done through local churches since we Westerners generally suck at evangelism and contextualized church planting), what will you end up with? A whole host of young churches with believers, no idea how to read the Bible, few mature believers, and deep spiritual vulnerability. Training is needed. And training is actually one thing that the West can give the majority world church, though in most other areas I'd say they have far more to teach us!

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next 30 years in the missions world. Changes are here but there are more coming. With the financial troubles of the West, the ability to send money is changing. With the emphasis on CP movements, it'll be interesting to see if there is burn-out when many places do not respond with church growth. The areas that do respond - once a church grows, will we have set the foundation for a mature church? Then of course there is the fact that Global South is sending more missionaries than the West is now - how will that change the missions dynamic?

What does successful poverty alleviation look like?

2011-06-18T13:00:00.001-05:00

I have a hard time thinking about what it looks like to change the situation of someone in poverty without thinking in specifics. Fikkert and Corbett in When Helping Hurts give two specific examples that actually really parallel the kinds of material poverty that I've seen.

The story of Alisa is really familiar. When I moved to Chicago for college, my very first ministry work was in an after school program called Brothas and Sistas United. I believe the program is either defunct or the name has been changed, but to get there we had to take the train and walk through the street and alleys to a renovated warehouse. It was exposed brick, cement floors, and no finishing. The kids came, rambunctious and uncontrolled, all different ethnicities. I didn't realize until the end of my time there that these kids were the children of parents in the homeless shelter that met upstairs. One girl that I talked to was about to enter middle school, and she told her her mom was in a wheelchair. She took care of her mom and her siblings. She'd never known her Dad. Despite having a huge and convoluted extended family, every single male relative she had was in jail.

I worked in three different after school mentoring programs throughout my time in Chicago. That world was filled with people like the character of Alisa in the book. Intact families with one father and one mother and their children are rare. Living on welfare is common. The public school system in the inner city is terrible. Drugs are easy to find, and prime gang recruitment age is 8 years old. Eating healthy is unheard of - kids hardly know what real vegetables are. Grocery stores are few and far between, and how do you shop for all your food when you can only get around by bus and carry a couple bags? The kids live on soda and chips and pizza.

A month or so ago when Isaac's sister and brother-in-law came into town, I got to hear about the work they do through one of the same kids programs that I used to work with in Chicago - my favorite one. It was amazing to realize that they were working with the older kids - the ones that used to be little when I was working with the little kids. Turns out the girl I got to know best, who was in a photo on my wall for years, is still going to the program and being mentored now by my sister-in-law. I love that...

In any case, how do you alleviate poverty in the inner city. It's absolutely possible - there are opportunities. However, after living there and seeing it it feels like the whole system is a trap. When the kids grow up in a world with no examples of people that live outside of the gang and welfare world, how can they possibly see a way to live any differently? Good education isn't given to them, the desire to study isn't passed on from parents, and the vision for a career is never imparted. On the other hand, unwed mothers and drugs ARE the constant example. How can you change that? Pouring money in can keep people from total destitution, but the authors of this book are right. Without a fundamental shift in worldview, change will not happen.

I've seen international poverty too, though some of what people think is poor is simple living a simple life, much different than the Western world. Some of it is poverty, though. The room I lived in for my underclassmen years of high school looked down a slight hill into the village below, a village filled with migrants from interior villages who had come to the city for world. The houses were made of boards and tin or thatched roofs. Pigs and chickens wandered around. I could hear, at times, the keening of mourners, a husband and wife having a fight, or kids screaming. I never entered that society, I only observed it.

A woman who lives there now often blogs about the people she loves in this community, and her writing exposes the deep dysfunction that lies underneath the surface. One recent post talked about the attempted suicide of one young woman, and a followup post about the same woman and some of the local area drunks (some of the drunks in that same area accosted me when I passed them on my motorbike one day in high school).

How do you change that society? Like the Native Americans in the US, that local population feels pushed out of their own land and are rife with social problems, alcoholism, drug use, and unemployment. They've lost their tradition and have no moral grounding to replace it.

The same thing goes, actually, with the emotional, spiritual, and relational poverty I encountered while working with some of the upper crust of Chicago while in the event-planning business. The emptiness, the listlessness, the broken families and angry children and the constant need to distract - be it with sexual dalliances, buying the newest and best thing, wining and dining in the nicest spots.... in the end, though, there were so many deeply lonely and desperate people. They had money, but their poverty was still deep and systematic and hard to change.

Change... real change.... is rare. Throwing money at material poverty doesn't enact change. However, I do still believe we are called to give (and give money) to those who need it. Even if the situation doesn't change. I don't want to act as though that isn't necessary sometimes and even an obligation. It's just that giving money won't necessarily help or change anything. True change requires a shift in worldview. The best and most complete change, I believe, comes from submission to Christ and reorienting ones life around Him.

I did think Fikkert is right on with this thought:

"Poverty alleviation is the ministry of reconciliation: moving people closer to glorifying God by living in right relationship with God, with self, with others, and with the rest of creation."

I agree that that poverty is both systematic and individual, and the system, society, and individual all need to be rewired for true change to take place. Since the next part of the book moves from the framework to practical application, I'm excited to see where they go next.

NPR talks about redefing "personhood"

2011-06-17T13:24:00.000-05:00

As some of you may have noticed, I am an NPR addict. Now that my commute is shorter, my NPR diet is getting a little smaller. Still, I managed to get in on a story on NPR on June 1st that amazed me. They dealt - in detail and nuance, with the issue of personhood.

One of my post popular posts on here is on the issue of personhood and when life begins. Back during the election when I was moving towards supporting Obama, I thought long and hard about the question of abortion, where life begins, what makes a person, and how the government and laws should act in those areas. Out of that came this post: The Beginning of Life, Implantation, and Politics.

I've never seen a secular news source actually deal with all those questions, they usually just focus on the abortion debate, and maybe the beginning of life. NPR's feature dug deeper. They discussed the beginning of life discussion of fertilization vs. implantation:

But while that fertilized egg may or may not signal the beginning of personhood, there's one thing it definitely does not begin. Medically, at least, fertilization does not mark the beginning of pregnancy.

"The medical community has really been quite clear about when pregnancy begins," says Dan Grossman, an obstetrician/gynecologist at the University of California, San Francisco, "and that definition is that pregnancy begins once implantation occurs."

That would be the implantation of the fertilized egg into the woman's uterus. One reason doctors don't consider a woman pregnant until after implantation is a practical one — that's when pregnancy can be detected by hormone changes in her urine.

But there's another reason, Grossman says. "It's really only about half of those fertilized eggs [that] actually result in an ongoing pregnancy."

The rest of the fertilized eggs either never begin dividing or never implant. Or they do implant but spontaneously abort. That can happen so early in pregnancy that the woman never even knows she was pregnant.

They address the point that if you define life as beginning at fertilization, the pill and IUD's should be off market as abortificants.

They also raise the question of ectopic pregnancies and the rights of a fetus if it is legally declared a person:

"Ectopic pregnancies are not viable pregnancies," she says. "And so it is essential an ectopic pregnancy be terminated as soon as possible. But by giving all fertilized eggs legal rights under the law, that calls into question what kind of methods a doctor can actually use to save a woman's life in a situation like this."
And it's not just medical questions raised by personhood laws. Would pregnant women be counted as two people for the purposes of using carpool lanes on the highway? Could fetuses inherit property?

In any case, the NPR piece and my post (and especially the comments pushing back on everything I'd written) talk about an issue that I think very few Protestants or Evangelicals really deal with. We dislike abortion but without defining when life begins, we don't actually know what all IS an abortion. The Catholic perspective might be mocked for being so conservative, but I highly respect it for it's consistency, and after writing that post I decided that I couldn't, in good conscience, keep using the pill, patch, or ring, if I wasn't sure when life begins.

Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable

2011-06-15T21:32:00.001-05:00

As I mentioned in my last post, reading books is a painfully slow process for me right now. However, I did manage read David May's Book Notes on Jean Twenge's book Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before.

I've heard only positive reviews and am very intrigued by the book, and the many quotes I've been pondering are fascinating. Twenge seems like a great counterpart to Wendy Shallit's book Return to Modesty that I reviewed here. I don't think either book is written by a Christian, but their conclusions dovetail with my beliefs. It speaks a lot to both the girls I work with and my own generation.

I was struck with the empty narcissism that has been drilled into my generation.

“The culture of self is our home town.” “We simply take it for granted that we should all feel good about ourselves, we are all special, and we all deserve to follow our dreams.” (49) Most of today’s common sense is focused on the self. Just be yourself. You have to love yourself before you can love someone else. Express yourself. Stand up for yourself. (50)

In the years after 1980, there was a pervasive, society-wide effort to increase children’s self-esteem, to help them feel good about themselves for no particular reason, usually promoting feelings that are actually a lot closer to narcissism, i.e. excessive self-importance. Feeling good is more important than performance. This is a “cotton-candy sense of self with no basis in reality.” (53-4)

The results are young people who can’t take criticism, who are easily hurt, who tend toward whiny defensiveness and little learning, and who become unfriendly, rude, and uncooperative. “They tend to act as though they believe they have worthy and good inner essences, regardless of … how they behave, that they deserve recognition and attention from others, and their unique individual needs should be considered first and foremost.” (65)

One of the most widely accepted cultural aphorism is that you must love yourself before you can love others. Of course many in earlier generations loved their spouses and children even though they never thought about loving themselves. But pop psychology [and much Christian material per dlm] teaches us otherwise. Make sacrifices for yourself. Make yourself happy first. Be there for yourself. This is narcissism—narcissists are people who really love themselves and aren’t very good at getting along with others. (92) “It’s difficult to adapt to another person’s needs when you’re used to putting your own needs first and doing things your way.” (93)

The author’s recommendation: “Forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline. … Self esteem is an outcome, not a cause. … Children develop true self-esteem from behaving well and accomplishing things.” (66)

I was struck that that last sentence sounds like the Tiger Mother theory. I disagree with BOTH sides. I believe a child should be loved and valued regardless of how they behave. However, their behavior matters and should be guided and disciplined. Their self-esteem, though, should not flow from their accomplishments (which means pride) nor should it flow from empty praise or love of self (narcissism).

Chapter 3. You Can Be Anything You Want to Be

“The logical outcome of every kid having high self-esteem is every kid thinking that he can achieve anything.” (78) Work should provide a rich and fulfilling experience as well as make me rich. (80) Of course, this often clashes with reality. “Many twentysomethings struggle with the decision to keep pursuing their dream, or to cut their losses and go home. More and more young people are going to find themselves at 30 without a viable career, a house, or any semblance of stability.” (83)

The most common reason given for tattoos is “self-expression,” to communicate my individuality. For many, adulthood begins at 30 [compared to perhaps 12 or 14 for our great grandparents] and the 20s are a time to move around, try things, and date people. (97)

“Materialism is the most obvious outcome of a straightforward, practical focus on the self: you want more things for yourself. You feel entitled to get the best in life;… you deserve special things.” (100)

Expectations are very high just when good jobs and nice houses are much harder to get. When we are fiercely independent and self-sufficient, our disappointments loom large because we have nothing else to focus on. The result can be crippling anxiety and crushing depression. (109)

Social contacts are slight and superficial. There is a famine of warm relationships. “We’re malnourished from eating a junk-food diet of instant messages, e-mail, and phone calls, rather than the healthy food of live, in-person interaction.” (110) Almost half have divorced parents or have never known their father. “The cycle of meeting someone, falling in love, and breaking up is a formula for anxiety and depression. This often begins in high school.” (111) “Many spend their twenties in pointless dating, uncertain relationships, and painful breakups.” (112) “Even people in unhappy marriages are happier than those who divorce.” (115)

You need a college degree to be where high school graduates were a generation ago. Essentials such as housing and health care are astronomically expensive. “High expectations can be the stuff of inspiration, but more often they set GenMe up for bitter disappointment.” (130)

There will be a full-scale collision between GenMe expectations and the unfortunate realities of life that will lead to a lot of anxiety, depression, and complaining. Young employees will expect job fulfillment and quick promotions. Employers must try to understand GenMe with their high expectations for salary, job flexibility, and duties. They were raised on extensive praise and expect it. They are not motivated by duty. They will be frank and they appreciate directness, but they do not take criticism well. They do not respect authority and will feel free to make suggestions. You have to earn their respect. They will learn best by interaction and doing, not by listening or reading. They are flexible and used to dealing with diversity. They may have to be taught to clean up their attitude and language when talking with older folk. They appreciate independence, flexible schedules, and casual dress code. [Let me know how this all works for you! Dlm]

Indeed! This is completely true of my generation. I feel like we were all taught we could do whatever we wanted, and to pursue our dreams rather than think practically. Now most of my friends are still wrestling with what to do, how to find a job they like, and how to become a self-supporting adult. We're almost 30.We struggle with focus, we find life, relationships, and careers to be generally disappointing and disillusioning.

If I could go back and tell myself some things, I'd encourage a more practical approach to thinking about an actual JOB I'd work, and how to prepare academically for that job, rather than focusing on simply finding a course of study I liked. I also think I'm only just learning that after college you really need to get a job and work. It will be boring, it will feel meaningless, and it probably won't be what you want to do with your life. Suck it up. You are doing it to be productive, make money, learn the working world and how to function in it well. You are learning that life and work will not pander to you, so you must learn to work hard and move toward goals. THAT is what your first years of work are for. Don't quit and be a spaz.

Fascinating stuff, huh? My world of evangelicals is slightly different in that we statistically marry and have children on average at a younger age than the rest of the generation. I think the work dilemmas are the same for us, though.

What is Poverty?

2011-06-14T00:16:00.000-05:00

Guess how long it took me to read When Helping Hurts, chapter 2? Three weeks.

*sigh*

That is my life now. One chapter stretches out interminably as I grab two paragraphs at a time and then life snatches me away again.

I wanted to address the intro question: What is poverty?

I sat and thought about that before I started the chapter. I don't think poverty is completely defined by not having enough money. I'd say it is the inability to meet basic needs. The inability to get food, clean water, shelter, basic medical care.... all of these things mean someone is in poverty on some level. Having money often but not always enables access to these things.

The trouble is that the scale is always different. Whenever people quote stats about how many people around the world live on less than a dollar a day, I'm a little sceptical because there are many places in the world where a dollar a day buys you food and shelter and all your basic needs. I don't feel like we need to elevate everyone to live like the US - we are spoiled over here.

However, that definition is why I think there are plenty of people in the West and specifically the USA who are in poverty despite making so much more money than countries where the GDP is low. US society requires so many things - you can't just pay for four walls and a roof and a loaf of bread. Whether you rent or buy, housing is EXPENSIVE, and you simply must have electric, gas, water, and trash. You pretty much can't live without a phone (even newly arrived refugees have to get phones in order to communicate with employers). In a lot of cities, there's not even a public transport system so you also have to have a car in order to be an employed person... and a car means car insurance. And you have to have health insurance.

Bang. I just described my budget, plus internet and the luxury of eating out once a week and getting netflix delivered to our door. It's amazing how much is required in our society. Do we NEED all of that? No. But you always aren't really allowed to be a functional human being in our society without those things (meaning the former paragraph, not my netflix account!).

So - if you lose your job in the West, you can quickly lose all other things quite quickly. In other countries other needs might be harder to meet but in many places you'll be able to continue to grow your own food and live in your own house long after you've lost access to a job.

The deepest of poverty are those who can't meet any of their needs.

This chapter was great, by the way. I loved the description of the our comprehensive brokenness, and the recognition that any poverty-alleviation efforts that misunderstand or don't address the whole person and community will fail... very challenging.

I also really loved when they described how many charity efforts can just deepen poverty when we invest in a charitable projects as a part of our own god-complexes.

"For many of us North Americans the first step on overcoming our god-complexes is to repent of the health and wealth gospel. At its core, the health and wealth gospel teaches that God rewards increasing levels of faith with greater amounts of wealth....at some level I had implicitly assumed that my economic superiority goes hand in hand with my spiritual superiority."

When I worked for a company in Chicago, the company took great pride in their charity work. There were many times that I went with our office to some sort of charity day, whether it was a breast cancer walk or a day at the children's hospital or throwing events at a local orphanage. I was always conflicted about these days because it felt like we always left feeling SO good about ourselves and sort of sweetly sad about the poor people we'd interacted with. I always questioned - is our work any good at all when the motivation is really to make ourselves feel good about all the good we've done? Surely our resources are still a blessing, but gosh there's still a wall of separation between our lives and those we've interacted with.

That's why the people whose work I most respect have often lost the perspective of seeing themselves as doing charity work. I was at a meeting of a bunch of refugee ministries here in Dallas as they addressed how to comprehensively meet the needs of refugees. They brought in one refugee who'd been in the US for many years now and is a leader in his community. When they asked him what the refugees needed most from Dallasites, he said - your time. He said they most needed people to simply be their friends and walk beside them as they adjusted to the US. I know three families that have moved into the middle of the low-income complexes that house refugees and immigrants. One in Georgia, one in Chicago, one in Indiana. They live among them. That side-by-side ministry is the most powerful of all. Check out Ian and Ruthie here: http://refugeearts.blogspot.com/

Anyways. Great stuff, lots to continue thinking about. I think I may take some time to write simply about the poverty I've encountered around the world and in the US.
.

rooted in everyday life

2011-06-11T13:37:00.000-05:00

Very often the inertia and repugnance which characterize the so-called "spiritual life" of many Christians could perhaps be cured by a simple respect for the concrete realities of ever-day life, for nature, for the body, for one's work, one's friends, one's surrounding, etc.

A false super naturalism which imagines that "the supernatural" is a kind of real of abstract essences (as Plato imagined) that is totally apart form and opposed to the concrete world of nature offers no real support to a genuine life of meditation and prayer. Meditation has no point unless it is firmly rooted in life.

- Thomas Merton

Why Did Jesus Come to Earth and What Is the Purpose of the Church? (When Helping Hurts Part II)

2011-05-23T17:05:00.001-05:00

*** Once again I'm joining Shanda and a group of others at This Grace In Which I Stand in blogging through the book When Helping Hurts.

Well, I am starting this about two minutes before midnight on Sunday, so I'm on time, right? And I write with my bedside table covered in crumpled Kleenexes, the result of a Sunday spent battling a cold. Soooo... we'll see how functional my brain actually is.

So - Corbett and Fikkert took the first chapter to get all theological. To be honest, , it's hard to be

........

That's as far as I got before I decided I was exhausted and needed sleep. So... trying again. Must warn you that I am sick as a dog and not going to read over this before posting. :)

Like I said, Corbett and Fikkert used this chapter to set a theological basis for the centrality of caring the poor. I disagreed with them at several points. That's mostly because they centered it all around two questions - why Jesus came to earth and what the mission of the church is in light of why Jesus came. And see... I read this massive book by Christopher Wright called The Mission of God, and it asks and seems through scripture for the answer to those exact questions. You can read my review of that book here, but in any case, it's sort of reoriented the way I think about those questions. So, I was sort of unsatisfied that they used Jesus' response to John the Baptist in which he in a round-about way reaffirms that he is the Messiah. This passage is great, because Jesus is reflecting back on Messianic passages in the OT, as well as pointing out to John that what he is doing is not political. However, I think the passage shows more of what Jesus is doing and why it points to His identity as messiah rather than really identifying why Jesus came to earth.

Why did Jesus come to earth?
I'd say... Matt. 18: 11
"The Son of Man has come to seek and save that which was lost."
Matt 20: 28
"The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."
John 12:46
"I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes in me will not remain in darkness."

It seems like Fikkert and Corbett are trying to drive home that Jesus was not just about souls to the exclusion of the body. They're identifying the traditional tension between evangelism and social ministries and trying to say that social ministries matter.

And... they do! But the thing is, I think Jesus came to save sinners and reconcile the world to Himself. That was His purpose, and thus it is the purpose of the Church and the purpose of every believer in the Church - to call all men to Christ.

That is NOT to the exclusion of taking care of the body, caring the the poor, taking on injustice. Those things are a natural outflowing of loving people like Jesus does. That's the crux of it, I think. When we act as though injustice and poverty doesn't matter, something is wrong with our hearts, because a true love of God will transform our lives and our churches enough that we will be transformed and will be transforming our communities and the world.Justice and helping the poor are a natural outflowing of the gospel and Jesus in us. However, it is the outflowing... not the gospel itself.

Someone I know that went to the Lausanne Conference told me that one of the highlights for him was hearing John Piper talk about how God cares about the suffering of man, and that includes the eternal suffering of his soul, for which the gospel of Christ is the solution, and the temporal suffering of poverty, sickness, and injustice, which the church is the solution for. For us believers that take on the love of Christ, we are to care about the suffering of those around us.... both kinds of suffering. Not caring about either kind of suffering is a heart problem on our part. See John Piper here:

I just think it's really important that we don't play down the importance of Christ's central purpose for coming to earth, and our purpose because of it.... Honestly, I think caring for the poor is a much easier thing for our generation to do than sharing our faith. We see issues of justice as our responsibility, but sharing our faith makes us feel guilty, like we're infringing on others. For me, it is a much harder thing to keep central.

Like I said above, I think the purpose of the church is to participate with Christ in drawing all men back into relationship with God. Our love for those around us drives us to care for suffering as we live out this mission. That's why, throughout history, true believers have often been those in society that are caring for the "least of these", just as Christ commanded. That's why the "Christian" Ku Klux Klan and Rwandan believers were clearly missing some part of a full-orbed faith, and man, how sobering is the depth of our depravity? My pastor said the same thing to Kenyan pastors the year after the ethnic riots there.

Did I know before reading that one of the reasons Israel was sent into captivity was her failure to care for the poor? Again, I'd say this is missing the point. Israel's neglect for the poor was a symptom of their greater problem - they'd fallen away from their God. Their rituals were empty rituals instead of worship from the heart. The central brokenness was their missing relationship with God. With that restored, care for the poor would flow forth naturally.

To defend their point that Israel's sin was neglect for the poor, that authors quote Isaiah 1 and 58, but Isaiah 1 opens up with the central problem:
"I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me.... they have forsaken the Lord, they have spurned the Holy One of Israel, and turned their back on him."

What about my church? Do they display the mission of God's people explicitly and implicitly? When the poor look at my church, do they see the embodiment of Jesus and His comprehensive healing?
Ahh.. great question.

I have been so so challenged by the heart of the leadership at my church, and how they openly share their faith. I find that I have been ashamed and listened to the excuse that surely everyone around me has already heard the gospel and doesn't want to talk to another crazy Christian. The amount of people that I've met who decided to follow Christ in the last few years after being befriended by someone in our church really humbles me. It's explicit and implicit, really. The question about how the poor see my church is interesting, because when I first stepping into the church I was so intimidated. Beautiful, made-up people, nice clothes, mostly white. Is that attractive to the poor? But you know, I see increasing diversity in our congregation as people come to faith over the years, and often they come because of the "comprehensive" nature of healing offered. There's divorce care, a marriage ministry, a recovery ministry (for any type of addiction)... and so many people start at these ministries because they are broken, and end up at our church. The church actually requires people to be in some form of service in order to be a member. Of course, people are to greater and lesser extents actually plugged into service appropriate to their gifting, but there is great passion and ministries formed for the homeless, poor, those in prison, for orphans, for poverty in Africa.... just take your pick about what you want to actually get involved in.

Some of those things are currently hip to be into, but I also see the attempt to address comprehensive suffering in the small groups of the church. In small groups we've found the brokenness in each other in pain and sin, and we walk together towards healing. Turns out it's hard. I think it's unusual to even get that far together!

**** Final note. I'm sort of critical here. Thing is, I am absolutely for helping the poor and broken. I believe it is central to the Christian life. However, I think if we make it our purpose, we may lose all motivation in the end because we've lost sight of the centrality of the gospel of Christ, out of which flows the love for all men and passion for healing the suffering.

When Helping Hurts... Introduction

2011-05-15T23:36:00.002-05:00

I'm joining a group of people over at This Grace In Which I Stand and blogging our way through the book When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett.

Given that I was gone all weekend and only just got back to blog, this will be unpolished and rather stream-of-consciousness. I did read it earlier and think on it, but I'm only just now writing.

So, apparently each chapter will begin with an exercise to get you thinking and making it personal. I was super intrigued by it.

The tsunami that hit Indonesia in December 2004 wiped out many of the small businesses. These small businesses are owned by poor people and serve as their primary source of income. Most of the shops, equipment, materials, and inventory were destroyed. four months after the tsunami, your church has decided to send a team to assist with the restarting of these small businesses.

Ahh... this was good. Make it personal and practical. It also makes ME look better than I actually am at this sort of thing, because it just so happens that the example here is where I grew up. So... I have a leg up. Isaac and I actually almost quit school that semester and went to help with the relief work after the tsunami, but ended up not being needed. My brother and my parents went, though.

So, lets say this is the situation I'm in, and my church is going. What would I do to plan and prepare for the trip? Well, again, I've got a bit of an advantage here. I would immediately connect with anyone I knew who might know people working in the relief work, and see if they were working on rebuilding and small businesses. Partnering and seeing what's already being done is super important. I'd be immediately in contact with the Indonesian embassy to work on visas and passports and tickets, all of which have to come through before you know if you can even go. I'd be gathering the group or potential group going and holding planning and strategy meetings.

What resources will you bring with you?
Nothing other than what we all need for ourselves. If we have to bring materials from out of the country, the businesses will not be sustainable. Everything has to be available locally for it to be practical. If we were business experts and could start an ongoing business idea, that'd be different. As it is, though, we're restarting businesses that were decimated, so clearly the materials are available. Plus, the area that was decimated in the tsunami was on the coast. If you go back into cities in the center of the island, everything is the same and you'll be helping their businesses by buying materials from them to take to the devastated coast.

Whom will you choose from your church to go on this trip?
Hmm, this was an interesting question. I think the initial response is generally... experts. Business experts, highly educated folks, right? I'd say... no. In actuality, American business is nothing like the small businesses in Indonesia, and forgive me for saying that often the experts are the most spoiled. The people I want to come to a devastated area are the people that are most flexible, patient, and passionate about people. Those are the ones who will do the most good when they end up in sweltering heat, dealing with the Indonesian "rubber time" and discovering that nothing ever happens as you want it to. I'd look for people with international experience, people that have traveled (outside of snazzy hotels) and know what to expect in the developing world. Of course anyone with experience in Indonesia is helpful. In this situation I think people with carpentry and design ingenuity could be very helpful.

What will your team do once it gets there?
This is where I get stuck. In my head as I thought about this, I pictured the small businesses I saw in Indonesia. Small kiosks selling chips and soda and water and candy. Motorcycle taxis. Little carts that are wheeled around town selling snacks, or that will be set up at night and make fresh hot food. How do you restart these businesses? Thing is, we could build the carts and stands and bring in new motorcycles, but what then? How do we know who had these things beforehand? Or... are we intending to simply find those that are deserving and able to run these businesses and thus we'd have to have a filtration process to find the right people? Or are we planning on doing a sort of small loan to those who want to buy these "small businesses"? It's at this point that I start to feel muddled and confused and I'm just not sure what's best.

Four interesting Posts...

2011-05-11T13:23:00.000-05:00

Emerging Mummy wrote a post about self-image... and kids. The story is beautiful, go read it. This struck me, especially as a new mom.:

I battled for years with evil songs set on repeat that sang into my ears "You're fat and ugly...if only you were skinnier....if only you were prettier....if only you weren't so fat...you're disgusting...."

When I gave birth to our daughter, my husband kindly asked me to not say those things in front of her. He didn't want her to grow up hearing her mother say these things about herself, teaching her to be so critical of her own self. He didn't want her hearing words like "I need to go on a diet" and "I'd be pretty if only I'd lose the weight" or "My breasts are just too big" or "I'm so ugly." Which meant that even if I thought it, even if I needed to articulate it later to him or to a friend, could I please just not say it in front of her?

For three years now, I have watched my tongue. I have - even at the heights of pregnancy and high blood pressure induced swelling - managed to keep my songs on a low level of volume. When I sing along, it's quietly and out of earshot.

I do not want her to ever feel that her body, her self, is anything less than just as God intended. She'll have her own battles to wage. And I don't want to send her into battle, already distracted by her mother's songs in her own ears.

Rachel Held Evans wrote a post about submission, and to be honest it was the best post I've read on the issue. I stay away from talk of women's roles and submission, because I do not understand it, it makes me emotional, and it's so... directly related to my identity. This post, though, describes exactly how Isaac and I have worked it, and what I thought as I studied the "submission" passages last year. Read it here, but below are a few thoughts

Didn’t Paul instruct Christians to submit to one another?

I don’t submit to Dan because he is a man and I am a woman. I submit to him because I love him, because I deeply respect him, and because I made a promise to put his needs before my own. I would hope that he would find that more meaningful than if I submitted to him simply because it was my “place.”
...I suspect that both egalitarians and complementarians would agree that an attitude of humility is necessary for true, heartfelt submission. We are to imitate Christ, who “although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant…” (Philippians 2).

The essence of submission, then, is not the absence of power but the voluntary relinquishing of it.
It’s not about sticking to a prescribed hierarchy; it’s about walking in humility.

Dan and I are equals. But for our marriage to thrive, we both have to relinquish our power now and then. Sometimes I submit to Dan, sometimes he submits to me. Sometimes submission is easy, sometimes it’s hard.

But I can only be responsible for my actions. It’s not my job to try and force “mutual submission;” it’s my job to humbly submit.…which may mean watching “Mad Max” instead of “Persepolis” on Netflix Instant Play (not that I’m holding any grudges about that one).

I wish I could send out mass email to college girls everywhere reminding them that if Christ is our example of leadership, then what they should be looking for are men who are servants. It matters not whether a guy likes to take charge or work behind the scenes or whether his prayer time lasts longer than yours. What matters is that he is willing to put other people’s needs before his own.

Kristie wrote a post about working in Student Ministries... and man... I echo it (except that I am married, have a baby, and am not a stay-at-home mom)!

I'm 28. I want to meet the boy, fall in love, get engaged, plan a wedding, and get married. I want to have babies, be a stay-at-home mom, and have my days dictated by play dates, feeding schedules, and naptimes.

I don't, however, want those babies to grow up to be teenagers.

That's what serving in student ministries has taught me.

Mason wrote a Confession of a Former Homophobe. I echo a lot of his words too.

Do I think I have all the answers to these tough questions of sexuality? No, not anymore. That’s not the point of this post, I have no interest in playing that game on my blog or in my day-to-day life. Easy answers and quick condemnations haven’t gotten us anywhere.

Yes the Bible has things to say about our sexuality, yes we need to take what it says seriously, and yes those things might require a more thoughtful interpretation than we’ve often assumed.
But amid all the questions of hermeneutics and exegesis, one thing I’m sure of is this; we as followers of Jesus are called to love and the way I acted towards the GLBT community was anything but loving.
For that I’m sorry.

And... the Pew Research Center put together a Political Typeology quiz. It's just a few questions, you can be done with it in 5-10 minutes. Take it. I was grouped as Post-Modern, however I'd say changing just an answer or two would have put me in the New Coalition Democrat bucket. This is what they had to say about Post-Moderns.

Post-Moderns
13% of the public
What They Believe
Generally supportive of government, though more conservative on race policies and the safety net
Strongly supportive of regulation and environmental protection
Most (56%) say Wall Street helps the economy more than it hurts
Very liberal on social issues, including same-sex marriage
One of the least religious groups: nearly a third are unaffiliated with any religious tradition
Favor the use of diplomacy rather than force
Who They Are
The youngest of the typology groups: 32% under age 30
A majority are non-Hispanic white and have at least some college experience
Half live in either the Northeast or the West
A majority (58%) live in the suburbs
63% use social networking
One-in-five regularly listen to NPR; 14% regularly watch The Daily Show

Interesting that I am a very "religious" person in the most nonreligious group. I am living in the South but my group is mostly in the Northeast or West. I live in the city instead of the burbs. However, I definitely do use social networking, listen to NPR, and watch the Daily Show.

No, I am not a stay-at-home mother

2011-05-09T00:36:00.001-05:00

Isaac and I have been married for six years. For about, oh.... ALL six of those years, I've been the main breadwinner in our family. Isaac is currently a stay-at-home daddy. That puts us in the minority in America and especially for the evangelical community.

Last week I received four emails via a group of women I'm connected to. The emails all slammed working mothers. Things were said like... the employment rate would go up if women stayed at home. Kids would be off the streets and out of gangs. Women can't really take care of their household and also work. If we weren't so greedy and extravagant women would be able to stay home instead of providing the family with extra money for extra stuff. Women are meant to be caretakers, men are meant to work. We women can't be in submission to our husbands if we are working. Men should be the providers. How can we be fruitful and multiply if we are working outside of the home? .....

I disagree with so much of what was said on so many levels. I fumed over it for days, and finally responded personally because although I don't know the woman, what she was saying was going out to a number of women. Some of them are working too, and some of them have no idea what is actually a Christian way of thinking about motherhood or marital roles and would have no way to really filter what she was saying.

It's gotten to the point where I'm so far from that mentality that it truly sounds crazy to me now. I agree with some things. I agree that children desperately need to cared for and should never just be dumped with any old caretaker and not taught or nurtured by parents. I agree that our society is filled with bad parenting. I agree that my husband and kids need to be my top priority after God. I believe that what God wants for my family needs to override career goals for EITHER a mother or father.

But. I do not believe that the Bible says that women should not work, or that men are meant to work and women to stay at home.

It's simply not in the Bible. Even the quintessential Proverbs 31 woman appears to be a businesswoman.

Actually, it's kind of ironic. The ability for one parent to stay at home while the other supports the family is something the Christian community in America talks about all the time, and yet it's virtually impossible for most of the world. In Indonesia, China... most of the places I've been, many of the women work because they have to. They tend the fields or gardens, they work as maids or factory workers.... because there isn't any other way around it. Our paradigm and what we are saying women need to do is not even on their radar.

Gah. It all annoys me. Balancing work and home IS hard, and our situation right now is not ideal. I am tired... but I'll do it for a while because this arrangement helps Isaac meet his goals, it takes care of Judah, and it keeps the bills paid. I also really like I've spent the first part of our marriage as the provider, and I like that Isaac has experienced and now appreciates the stay-at-home parent thing far more than most dads. Thing is, I'll probably be a stay at home mom one day, and that is totally great. I respect stay-at-home moms. It's a HUGE job. I just hate it that judgement is cast on all working moms as if we are unsubmissive or neglectful.

Visiting Orthodox Pascha

2011-04-30T09:52:00.000-05:00

Ever since I read Frederica Matthews Greene's account of the Orthodox Pascha (Easter) service, I've been intrigued. Earlier this year I visited my first Orthodox service in English, and since I rather like the church and it's close by, I talked Isaac into visiting with me for the Pascha service. He almost backed out last minute since the service starts at 11:30 pm on Saturday night before Easter, but in the end we went with Judah and our house-mate Steph.
I wanted to see Pascha because it's so unique. Holy week is filled with services and ancient liturgy and everything that we saw was a mystery to us and the chanting was soft enough that it was hard to make out the words in the packed church. It took my own research afterwards to understand what I'd see. I think I might have this right... but I may have some details confused.

So... on Friday an "epitaphion" or burial shroud that is (I think) either embroidered with the image of Christ and/or an icon of Christ is brought out and placed in "the grave". This whole set up is brought in a solemn burial procession around the church. This is of course in a service filled with liturgy. I've been to "Dark Friday" service at a Lutheran church and it is powerful and moving, but I haven't been to the Orthodox Friday service. I've pulled photos from a local orthodox photographer's public flikr account - they are all linked directly to his account and you can see more by clicking on any of them. However, you can see the photos of the church we were at by looking at the slideshow here. My husband is actually in the background of one of the pictures.

On Holy Saturday they meet, there are baptisms, liturgy, etc. There is an all-night vigil, which is what was ending when we walked in. A back corner of the church was littered with sleeping bags and children and mothers keeping the fray in check. I absolutely love that the whole family is involved in the celebration.

Shortly before Midnight, the Orthodox community (and some "adventurers" like us) pack out the church for the most important celebration of the whole year. Keep in mind that they've been fasting (essentially a vegan diet) for 40 days, and fasting with nothing to eat this whole day. The Church is darkened and a "Resurrection Nocturn" is chanted. It's all symbolic of that day of hopelessness, when Christ was in the grave and all was dark. When the Nocturn was finished, the church was silent and dark as we waited for midnight, when the priest came out from the alter with a lit candle symbolizing the light of the Risen Christ.

Pascha has begun.

That candle lights other candles until light fills the church, and the icon/burial thingy is brought in a procession of light with the entire congregation walking around the church three times, chanting as they go. In our case it was crazy windy and all the candles were out by the time the procession ended.

They stop at the door and sing a triumphant Paschal hymn, of which we could make out the repeated, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life."

At that point we headed home because we had our own church to attend in a few hours and we have a little alarm clock who keeps us up on his schedule, and we didn't want to keep him out too long. However, the congregation re-entered the church and sang the Paschal Canon. This is a joyous celebration - the clergy's clothes are bright, the candles still lit, and the songs are celebratory. When the liturgy is finished they break fast and head to the Pascal Banquet. While we were there people were bringing in bags of food and setting them aside for the feast.

I was struck by many things. I wondered how many of the congregation were Russian, how many were converts, and how many attend only on Pascha. I wondered how in the world those Russian women wear three-inch heels and stand for hours!

And, as always, I wonder at both the beauty of the ancient liturgy and wonder how often it is ignored because it is so normal to the Orthodox. The liturgy that was being chanted while I was there was supposedly written by St. John of Damascus, who was born in 674 AD. This bit struck me:

He Who redeemed the Children from the furnace, and became man and suffered as mortal, and through suffering clothed mortality with the beauty of incorruption, is the only blessed and most glorious God of our fathers.

Christ is risen from the dead!

We celebrate the death of death, the annihilation of hell, the beginning of another eternal life. And in ecstasy we hymn the Cause, the only blessed and most glorious God of our fathers.

Christ is risen from the dead!

It's all completely different than my mega-church. That's why I love, it actually. I like experiencing both at once, they remind me of different things, but both preach the gospel and bring me to tears.

40 days of fasting and Jesus' temptation

2011-04-22T16:11:00.001-05:00

After spending devotional time this month reading passages about repentance and confession, I went back to think about what Lent is about, and was struck (I'd honestly forgotten) that the 40 days of fasting echoes Jesus being tempted in the wilderness after fasting for 40 days. So, I picked up commentaries and various other resources from Isaac's overly large theological library and started studying the temptation of Jesus.

Wow, what a passage to actually study rather than just read. Sometimes I forget how much we miss because we don't know the Jewish context. I'd never thought before what it would mean to the Jews to hear that Jesus went into the wilderness and wandered for 40 days. Hello.... do you hear the echo of the nation of Israel wandering in the wilderness for 40 years? Israel passed through the waters and were led by the Spirit into the desert, and Jesus is baptized in the waters and then led by the spirit into the desert. And when Satan comes and tells him to make bread for himself, do you see the similarity to the situation in Exodus 16, where the nation of Israel calls out, "You have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger." Every time Jesus responds to the devil it is with scripture pulled directly from the Deuteronomy 6-8 passages of covenant law after the wandering and before they enter the promised land.

It's amazing, actually, what I've missed in previous readings. This happens right after Jesus' baptism, when the voice God speaks from heaven and says, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased."
And then the devil says, "If you are the Son of God..." So here is Satan, immediately taking that newly revealed identity and responding. My commentary says that this version of the word "if" shows that "Satan is not inviting Jesus to doubt his sonship but to reflect on its meaning. Sonship of the living God, he suggested, surely means Jesus has the power and right to satisfy his own needs."

Jesus' response fascinates me in two ways. First, in those wilderness wandering passages that Jesus' experience is reflecting, it says, "And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna... that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every world that comes from the mouth of the Lord."

That's what Jesus quotes to Satan here. It seems like where the nation of Israel failed because they did not
trust God and did not first seek fulfillment in their God (by the way, when manna is given to them God says it is so that they will know that He is God), Jesus is fulfilling this story by being the perfect Son where Israel was imperfect. Satan seeks to mold a Son of God who serves Himself. Jesus, the perfect Servant and Son of God, is fulfilled and submissive to the Father alone.

My small group recently finished a study on the book of John, and over and over and over again in John Jesus says that he doesn't speak his own words, but only the words of the Father. He doesn't do his own thing, he only does what the Father tells him to do. "I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me." (Jn 8:28) The repetition of this idea is striking. That's what it seems like Jesus is doing in response to this temptation. He exists on "every world that comes from the mouth of God."

It's a little hard to relate to it because of course we are human and we need food. The point, though, is that we should be utterly dependent on our Father if we too are children of God. That is part of the Lenten fast - to have our hunger remind us to hunger for and depend on the spiritual food of the Father. Do I exist on every word that comes from the mouth of God?

It's amazing, actually, how the response of Jesus to each temptation is pure scripture. He quotes the Torah, and they are all various renderings of passages from Deuteronomy as the Law is given to the people before they enter the promised land. When Satan offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world if Jesus will just worship him, Jesus quotes from this passage, but the passage as a whole is even more striking to me:

"And when the Lord your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give - with great and good cities that you did not build, and houses full of all good things that you did not fill,... and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. It is the Lord your God you shall fear. Him you shall serve and by his name you shall swear. You shall not go after other gods... for the Lord your God is a jealous God."

What I love about this is that Jesus already, of course, owns the kingdoms of the world. But what Satan offers is that all the kingdoms of the world will be Jesus' without the cross. And... the way that God has chosen is the cross. Death and total sacrifice. So while Jesus is heir to all of the great things and much more than are described in the Deuteronomy passage, if He claims them all for himself then he bypasses the cross. When Jesus claims total submission to the Father and worship of Him alone, He is choosing the cross.

Israel has covenanted with God, but they are too afraid to enter the land. Jesus, the Covenant Son, has obediently entered Earth. Where they complained of hunger, He submits. Where they asked for privilege, He sacrifices all to gain worship for the Father. Where they test God, Jesus gives up his rights.

And so, as I fast, what does this mean for me? It seems that the primary thing to draw out of Jesus' temptation is that He has clearly shown that His that was just proclaimed at His baptism is in total submission and service to the Father. He is on God's mission, and never acting for "self". What of me?

questioning the philosophy behind spanking

2011-04-11T23:06:00.000-05:00

Last year before Judah was born I wrote about my unease with spanking. I am not outright against it, I know many people that I think are good parents that choose to spank (both Isaac and mine included), but what will we choose? Whatever we decide, it needs to be well-reasoned, and I have big questions about the philosophy behind spanking.

First off, let's grant that we're talking about spanking, not beating. There is a difference. My other presupposition is that discipline IS important and it can be implemented without spanking.

So - is spanking needed if there are other methods of discipline? Even if it's not needed, many say it's really something that should be used because it is a good or better form of discipline that is really needed sometimes. Generally when people are explaining this to me they say that other methods of discipline may be good enough most of the time, but spanking is really needed at some times. "It can't be ruled out", because then the child knows that you will never go there and they have that much more power in the relationship.

Thoughts in response to that line of thinking.

1. Power. There is a lot of discussion in evangelical parenting methodology about power and not letting a child win a power play. I agree that as kids grow up they naturally begin to assert their will and want their will to dominate all others - hello terrible twos! I agree that kids need to learn that they don't get to win and do whatever they want to do. However, is the correct response to a kid's power play really to dominate and win? Isn't that sort of just winning their game instead of teaching them the game isn't any good in the first place?

2. If spanking is a last resort or perhaps the most effective form of discipline for the most obstinate of situations, why is that? What makes spanking potentially so much more effective than other forms? The answer is that it uses physical pain to teach a lesson.

Let me think about that for a minute. It's true that physical pain is a powerful motivator. Is this a good motivator, though? My initial response was - of course not, no. Why would we want to cause our children pain? However, I have to pause on that one now. Last year I read The Road Less Traveled by psychologist M. Scott Peck. Peck is not at all a good moral example, but his first chapter on problems and pain really captured my attention. He talked about how much we avoid pain, and we only start to truly grow when the pain of growth appears to be less than the pain of staying as we are. He said:

Therefore let us inculcate in ourselves and in our children the means of achieving mental and spiritual health. By this I mean let us teach ourselves and our children the necessity for suffering and the value thereof, the need to face problems directly and to experience the pain involved. I have stated that discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems. It will become clear that these tools are techniques of suffering, means by which we experience the pain of problems in such a way as to work them through and solve them successfully, learning and growing in the process. When we teach ourselves and our children discipline, we are teaching them and ourselves how to suffer and also how to grow.

That made me think a bit. I perceive causing pain as negative, but shouldn't we teach our kids about pain? Shouldn't pain and suffering (in a very mild way) naturally result from bad decisions? Shouldn't we teach our kids how to learn from that and how to deal with it maturely? Doesn't God allow us to experience pain and suffering?

However, to take it back to spanking... the need to experience and learn to deal maturely with pain and suffering doesn't necessarily mean that should be physical pain. All forms of discipline are some sort of suffering.

I suppose this is my central concern. Spanking is effective because it uses physical pain, and I'm not sure that this a good reason for why spanking is better or needed.

A few comments:
- I am most at ease with spanking when it refers to a little swat or hand smack on a 1-3 year old. In that age, it doesn't have to actually even hurt. It sometimes just startles a kid and/or they somehow understand that it is negative feedback, and this is the age when they learn best by behavioral feedback. It sends a message at an age when they aren't ready for logic. Later on spanking actually has to be painful to be effective, and increasingly the power of the discipline is in pain, control, anger, and/or shame. I am more and more uneasy.
- I think spanking is a very risky thing for parents, perhaps even more so than for kids. Even the parents who have a great philosophy of how to spank (i.e., talk through it with kids, express love, do not spank in anger), end up having a time or two when they did end up being angry when they spanked their child. The risk of crossing the line into beating and the risk of spanking in anger is pretty high. Even if you only do it once.... I honestly think that those experiences often ARE remembered by the child, and remembered with personal hurt.

- I know that discipline should take into account the personality of the child. Within my family we reacted to various punishments in different ways, and varied in our levels of how much we outwardly and openly disobeyed. For a social kid, grounding is brutal. For an active kid, sitting a corner is near maddening. For a reader like me, taking away my books was awful. For a sensitive kid, spanking might just be cruel. For an extra-stubborn kid, it's possible that spanking might be the very best way to send the message. Isaac says he was that kid.

- I definitely think that one thing about discipline is consistency and clarity of expectations. The kid has to know that if they do A, the punishment is B. Kids have a strong sense of justice and fairness, and we need to let them know what the rules are. I also am absolutely in the boat that parents should be of one mind on the discipline thing or else kids will play one parent against the other. That's why I'm writing this... because Isaac and I are talking so much about what we want to do.

Half the Church by Carolyn Custis James - a book review AND giveaway

2011-04-06T18:33:00.000-05:00

I've finished another book, this one called Half the Church, by Carolyn Custis James. The publisher sent me a copy to read and review, but of course there was no requirement that I review the book in any particular way.

They also sent me an additional copy to give away. SO... leave a comment and after a week I'll draw a name and email you to get your address.

So.... here's a youtube promo for the book that gives you some idea of the subject and author's premise.

So... the book.

To be honest, I was pretty cynical at first (no surprise to most of you!). My expectations were definitely boosted when I saw on the back cover and in the introduction that the author was heavily influenced and recommended by Sheryl Wudunn, wife of Nicholas Kristof (one of my very favorite international journalists) and co-author with him in their currently very popular book, Half the Sky (which is about injustice towards woman around the world and is supposedly pretty powerful).

Half the Church seems to be on the one hand examining the role of women in the church, and on the other hand attempting to do this in light of the great injustices done to women around the world. Custis James quotes or refers to Half the Sky about once a page at the beginning of the book, so clearly a lot of the book is written in an attempt to integrate her emotional response to Half the Sky with the theological reflection on women in the church that she has written on in the past.

James moves from the tragedy of injustice against women globally to an examination of women in the creation story, the word "ezer" (traditionally translated "helper"), and the character and role of women like Ruth, Esther, Mary, and others as they are portrayed in scripture. She concludes that the purpose of the male/female creation is a "Blessed Alliance" that we are mostly missing out on because of our "Great Debate" over egalitarian and complementarian roles of women in the church. She calls the church to "wake the sleeping giantess" of women in the church around the world and to utilize the untapped spiritual influence of "half the church".

Some things I liked:

Custis repeatedly points out that in our American evangelical discussion on the role of women, we so often focus on a very suburban, white, middle-class reality of life. She very validly recognizes that the idea of being a stay-at-home mom is completely off the radar and not even possible for most women around the world. Our frame of reference for the entire debate it too narrow.
I also agree with her that sometimes when we focus so much on the homemaker mentality we end up encouraging families and mothers to be internally focused. This is a tragedy, because the family and home is always meant to be outward-focused and participating the mission of God as a family.
Custis James said something that I really should have thought of before but honestly never have. Biblical stories of women are extremely hard for us to grasp because our cultural context is just about as far removed from theirs as it could possibly be. The stories absolutely come alive, though, if you think of the same stories happening in similar cultural contexts around the world today. For instance, what if I picture the story of Ruth happening in the small Pakistani village I visited? DANG. It comes alive. Jesus talking to the woman at the well as if he were speaking to a Papuan Dani woman in Sentani? Wow. So powerful, and the way gender is seen in the story completely changes.

A Few Quotes:

The message we offer is not robust enough to address the opportunities, changes, and extremities of life in a fallen world. It is too small for successful women leaders in the secular world and too weak to restore full meaning and purpose to women who have been trampled. It is not far-reaching enough to encompass every woman's whole life of the variegations that exist within this multicultural, rapidly changing world.

Instead of addressing the wide range of questions and situations women are facing today, we focus mainly on marriage and motherhood, and that within a two-parent, single-income family.

Things I Didn't Like

As I mentioned, James is attempting to integrate the injustice against women around the world with a new way of thinking of the role of women. While she clearly states that goal, the book often felt awkwardly torn between the two topics. She points out how culturally-bound our discussions of the role of women are, but there wasn't a comprehensive vision of what a global view of the role of women is or what we need to do or change to get there. It felt like a complaint was stated but never resolved.
I think James is upset by the limitations of the egalitarian/complementarian debate and therefore wants to avoid it - and I completely understand that desire. However, because that that debate is the context that she's writing from, she can't get away from it and ends up spending a whole chapter recognizing the debate and stating that she won't pick a side. That chapter was counter-productive, because as soon as she starts talking about not taking sides, you can't help but try to pin her down in your mind (and while she may not be a typical egalitarian, she is NOT a completementarian!)

My Thoughts in Response to the Book

The oppression of women didn't come crashing into my world after 9/11 as James expresses happened in her thinking. Growing up overseas and traveling to very patriarchal societies made it really hard for me to understand and empathize with a lot of the emotional shock over injustice that James expressed. I also started out rolling my eyes over the call to recognize the untapped power of women in the Church. It often gets to me when people start talking about empowerment and prejudice. Those things absolutely exist, but often when a group starts advocating for itself I feel like it can be counter productive. The best way to prove that you are a qualified and deserve to be treated as an equal is not to shout or whine about the need to be treated equally but rather to step out and simply BE worthy and show your qualification.

This is where the third-world is ironic. It's true that there is massive injustice against women around the world. However, while I definitely think women in the church in America are still fighting to be treated with respect (I often feel it myself), the reality of the Church around the world is quite different. One mission leader in Central Asia told me that he is attempting to avoid the "women's ministry" conferences that people are trying to bring into the field because it would distract his female church leaders who are already his most successful and passionate leaders without ever having discuss their role or empowerment. In China, where I was this summer, most church leaders are women. That's true in much of the world. There may be injustice against women in those cultures, but they are the leaders of the church.

All that said, the women's role debate is alive and well here in the American church. Even as I did research on James and her husband I came across several websites that passionately denounced her for reasons that I don't at all agree with. That the debate still exists drives me crazy and I avoid the discussion, but just when I feel like it's old news I find that it comes around again and affects my job, my future, my marriage. In fact, it came around emotionally just this week.

So.... I suppose the role of women still has to be talked about sometimes, and it's true that there is often oppression and injustice against women around the world. James is right that as we form a theology of the role and identity of women, we must to do it in a way that makes sense for ALL women, not just the West. I also really appreciated some of her discussion on the identity of women that we can draw from the creation story. I'm just not sure she set up a good path of what and how we change our current context in order to get to where she says we need to be in our thinking.

lectio divina, when scripture soaks the soul

2011-04-03T23:23:00.001-05:00

Today, Sunday, is a feast day during this Lenten fasting season. I have feasted today. It has been fun.

Now I sit here in the quiet of my living room. My baby is on the couch across from me, left to sleep there after his night feeding because I can't be bothered taking him to his crib when he can be out here where I can watch his little chest rise and fall. Now I watch the little baby bundle on my couch and marvel that ... I have a baby on the couch. My baby. Strange and amazing. He startles and draws his knees up to his chest and knits his brows together in sleeping concern, and I can't believe that he is mine, and he's real.

It is a place of peace tonight.

You know, a few weeks ago when I'd just accepted the new position at my work and was inundated by a huge project I didn't expect, I was brought back to my college experience of practicing lectio divina.

It was my senior year of college. I was near the end, but a full semester loomed ahead of me and I was overwhelmed. Four years of low sleep and deadlines and stress and change and intensity had compiled into physical and emotional exhaustion. I was wondering if I'd make it through the semester. Anytime I got a minute I would sleep, and anytime I had to read scripture or pray... I ended up sleeping.

It was in that setting that a class I was in practice lectio divina together with Psalm 23. A passage I know well, and yet I was floored by what I heard as we read it together, and then silently. We prayed, we separated and alone I read it again and again, word by word, verse by verse, meditating on each piece of the whole. I sat in silence, and then later we read it again together.

Back then, in my near burnout, I was floored by this:

He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.

It hit me again in those few weeks of craziness with a newborn and new position at work and huge project due.

Lie down.

Still.

Restore.

He restores my soul.

Those things whisper peace in chaos. Quiet in the midst of the moments when life is overwhelming.

It's amazing what scripture can say to our specific situation when we really sit and listen to it.

This week in the tradition of Lenten repentance, I meditated on Psalm 51. I was struck for the first time not by the repentance or the grace of God (though of course that is so powerful as well), but by the response to the confession and grace.

Then I will teach transgressors your ways so that sinners will turn back to you

my tongue will sing of your righteousness

my mouth will declare your praise...

Is this my reaction to the grace of God in my life? To sing of His praise?

We're behind in science, math, and tech. The answer? Immigration!

2011-03-31T12:46:00.001-05:00

The other day I was listening to an NPR interview, and for the life of my I can't remember who it was with. In any case, they asked the guy (who was some big tech company guy) what he thought needed to be done in order to resolve the fact that the US continues to go down in international standings in our math and science scores (which indicates that we will probably not lead the world for long in terms of tech innovation).

The guy's answer was fascinating, because the usual response is to examine how we educate and test kids. Instead, this guy noted that we still have the very best tech and business programs and schools (on the college and graduate level) in the world. He also identified that over 50% of the students in these programs are internationals, another fact that people generally note with a tone that says, "We're screwed." Instead, this man said that the majority of these students finish their programs and go home, but that most would LOVE to stay in the US, they simply can't because of visa issues. So, the quick solution to upping our innovation and competitiveness in this area is to ease the visa process and offer our top international students the opportunity to stay, become Americans, and help innovate and lead or tech and business sectors?

This, Isaac pointed out, is what we did during WWII when we opened the door for a huge amount of intellectuals and experts that were leaving Europe en mass as Hitler ramped up pressure against the Jews. Lets do it again!

In any case, I found a Foreign Policy article that ran in a similar vein called, "Think Again: Education"

The international distribution of mobile students is clearly changing, reflecting an ever more competitive global higher-education market. But there are many more foreign students in the United States than there were a decade ago -- 149,000 more in 2008 than in 2000, a 31 percent increase..... For international graduate study, American universities are a particularly powerful draw in fields that may directly affect the future competitiveness of a country's economy: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In disciplines such as computer science and engineering, more than six in 10 doctoral students in American programs come from foreign countries.

But that doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about. Although applications from international students to American graduate schools have recovered from their steep post-9/11 decline, the number of foreigners earning science and engineering doctorates at U.S. universities recently dropped for the first time in five years. American schools face mounting competition from universities in other countries, and the United States' less-than-welcoming visa policies may give students from overseas more incentive to go elsewhere. That's a loss for the United States, given the benefits to both its universities and its economy of attracting the best and brightest from around the world.

My thoughts on Libya...

2011-03-29T16:52:00.000-05:00

I've said again and again that a President's most unrestricted and long-lasting power is in the area of foreign policy. I've also said I like President Obama.

So... Obama is now participating in military activity in Libya.

What do I think?

A friend asked me that the day the bombing started, and I said I was VERY hesitantly approving, with a lot of caveats.

Here's a few thoughts.

A) We should not support an uprising just because it's an uprising and we're inspired by movements of the people. There are good movements of the people, and there are bad ones. Is this a violent rebel movement or an inspirational democratic change? Right after I mentioned this to my friend I heard an NPR interview with John Kerry in which they asked him about exactly who the rebels are, what they believe, etc. They pointed out that this is an unusual situation in that we really don't know much about the people we're supporting. Kerry pushed back and said we didn't know who we were supporting when we supported the groups rebelling against the USSR. True. However, we also have a history of supporting coups in the Middle East that just end up instituting new dictators. There is evidence to say that a number of these militants are Muslim militants. Is that who we want to support?

B) We have world influence and tons of power. We are responsible to use that for good, for justice, to protect people. I've heard that Bill Clinton said his greatest regret during his eight years of being President is not going into Rwanda and stopping the bloodshed. Obama's defense of our actions in Libya rely heavily on this NOT being a mission to topple a government and takeover (no one wants another Iraq right now), but an effort to stop mass murder of civilians by an evil leader. If so, that is valid.

C). My very hesitant support was bolstered by the international support of this movement. I was surprised to see that nations that resisted our actions in Iraq were voting "yes" on the no-fly zone. We have given our support after NATO agreed to the no-fly-zone. And finally (and really surprisingly), even the Arab League agreed to it. This makes it look much less like a bullying US move and more like international action to stop a slaughter.

So. I'm cautiously supporting. I REALLY hope Obama sticks to his words and we don't take in ground troops. This is a Libyan civil war. We might not like Quadaffi, but I don't know that we have the right or if it would be wise to fully support the other side either. And besides.... we can't afford it.

Oh an also, the news is all over Obama for not consulting Congress. Well... he's the President. They weren't in session, NATO needed an immediate response in order to stop what was happening THAT weekend, and legally Obama was acting within in power and right. He need to continue to explain and support his decisions to both the American people and Congress, but he wasn't legally out of line.

happiness vs. self-sacrifice

2011-03-14T12:21:00.000-05:00

Today I was faced with the reality of someone saying about my little brother, "If it were me, I would have had an abortion."

...How I am supposed to feel about this statement? I am a swirl of emotions. It's about the very existence, the very life vs. death of my brother, one of the people I love most in the world. It reminds me that his very existence is something of a miracle, that defies the statistics.

I'll be honest and say the immediate emotion is shock and anger.

But... let me pull back a bit. The reality is that while most people would never say that to my face, obviously a great many people think it, given the statistic that over 80% of babies diagnosed with Downs Syndrome are aborted (this makes my heart hurt). It is an honest statement. And ... a good number of you, dear readers, may have thought the same thing. It makes me wonder.... how many people find out a diagnosis with Downs Syndrome and have an abortion and tell people they've miscarried?

And... I do at least understand the reasoning there. This past year while I was pregnant with Judah, I weighed my options on the levels of testing I could do. I know that raising and parenting a child with Downs Syndrome (or any other disability that makes someone "abnormal" in the eyes of society) is often difficult and takes great self-sacrifice. I remember my own parents struggling and processing after Matt was born. I thought that if my baby was disabled, I at least wanted to know before he or she was born so that I could begin to grapple with it and adjust my expectations. Turns out, though, that most of the tests that have any decent rate of accuracy all put the baby in some degree of danger... and that was not worth it to me. So... Isaac and I decided that since knowing ahead of time would only be a psychological help and wouldn't change our decision to carry through with the pregnancy, we would skip the tests.

So yeah... I understand the fears. I understand that it's hard. I understand why you wouldn't choose that life for yourself. Who chooses anything difficult when there is an easier, prettier option?

That's what it comes down to, actually. In our society, in fact I'll go ahead and say in the prevailing faith and world-view of our society (because THAT is what we're really talking about here)... comfort and personal happiness is our god. It is to be obtained at any cost, be it your marriage, the life of a child, your family, personal integrity, etc. Raising a child with Downs Syndrome could potentially be hard and it could mean that you would have to give up some elements of your plan for your life. Thus... most people are willing to abort the child. They don't WANT to. They aren't outwardly cruel and heartless people, they are actually quite normal (because you know, I believe that the depravity of man is the norm when it comes to humanity). When the scale is weighted between the sacrifice it would take to commit to raising a child or the freedom to continue as you are.... personal happiness and freedom is more valuable, and thus the 80+ percentage. It isn't seen as: kill a baby vs. have a child. It's seen as spend the rest of my life caring for a disabled kid vs. carrying on with a normal life.

And that, dear friends, is where my worldview is diametrically opposed to that of the world I live in.

My happiness is valuable to me. I still pursue it, and I do believe that happiness is good.

But, when faced with the same scale of personal happiness versus great personal sacrifice, the Christian, if they are obedient, sees this:

A child, a child who will make your life difficult and complicated, cost you money and forfeit a lot of your plans..... but a CHILD nonetheless, a beautiful child, made in the image of God. And thus, because he is made in the image of God, we have no choice at all but to love him.

Let me insert here that sometimes perhaps loving him means giving him up for adoption if you know that you really won't be able to care for him well. And let me also insert that by no means are all Christians actually acting on and obeying these beliefs. And sometimes loving is hard, and it's okay that it's hard because we're not perfect people for whom self-sacrifice is easy.

This is one reason why I struggle to have any amount of respect for the ideals of an atheist. Their world-view is unable to come up with any value for anyone that isn't progressive and intelligent. The ideal is human success, and if that is your ideal, then there is no value to the disabled. An atheist may be very personally compassionate and they may care for the disabled, but this compassion is really in conflict with their world view.

But really, this is just one thing, one thing that is extremely personal for me. It is much bigger than this. If we truly believe that all souls are sacred because they are made in the image of God.... and if we are committed to obeying Him..... then counter-cultural self-sacrifice will have to define our lives. Things that are acceptable in our culture are not even up for debate. Things like... giving up paternity rights because a child was fathered accidentally and you just don't have time or money to take responsibility. Walking away from your spouse because they're infringing on your personal happiness and you just don't feel love anymore. Aborting a child because they are an inconvenience or because the child they will be is not the child you wanted. Walking away from a parent or a spouse who, for whatever reason, is suddenly disabled and requires your care. In all of these the core issue is self-sacrificial obedience vs. immediate personal happiness.

We are a flawed and broken world, and even the Christians living in it are flawed and broken people. We make bad decisions. We chose self. And... the greater miracle is that we, as people that are as spiritually flawed and broken as a Downs Syndrome person may be mentally flawed.... God still loves us, even in our sin. And He has extended grace... even in our sin.

And... it is glory when some , because of His great love, obey, die to self, and choose to love and serve.

Make no mistake, it isn't easy.
But it turns out it's so beautiful....

Remember that you are dust.... Thoughts on Lent

2011-03-11T08:58:00.000-06:00

Kneeling as the priest intoned, "Remember that thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return," during my very first Ash Wednesday service felt rather real to me. The ashes and the symbol of the cross on the forehead are meant to remind us of our mortality and our need to confess and repent before God. It just so happened that just before the service I had replied to a friend who wrote me all about a mutual friend of ours who passed away all too recently. I was holding Judah, the baby who in the past year was formed from seemingly nothing. The reality that we are just dust is strong.

I posted last year about learning about Lent, really for the first time. Baptists and Bible churches don't really do the church calendar and Lent, but among my post-Bible College circles, becoming sort of pseudo-liturgical is the thing to do, and observing Lent is definitely in. It FEELS super spiritual (I mean that in a genuine sense), and then sometimes it feels faux-spiritual. Last year I felt like so many people around me were giving up facebook or blogging or coffee or TV or something of that sort, and I wanted to join them but felt like I couldn't because I didn't yet really understand what Lent or a Lenten fast of any kind was truly for, and I do believe that tradition devoid of meaning makes the tradition pointless.

This year I am observing Lent for the first time. Isaac pointed out that when he asked some friends at seminary why they gave something up for Lent, very few people had an answer for that question. He fired the same question at me. What is a Lenten fast for? I've asked the same question. Is it to become more holy? Is it to rid our lives of evil and sin? Is it to practice a spiritual discipline? Is it to sacrifice something in order to identify with the sufferings of Christ? There's lots of options for how you can use a fast well, but what is the real purpose?

I made my decisions after attending my first Ash Wednesday service. I took Judah and it was actually a really sweet thing to kneel while holding him at the imposition of the ashes and have him look wonderingly at the priest. The church is an Episcopalian church down the road from our current apartment and I was definitely the youngest person there - almost everyone was a good bit over middle aged. The building is stone and has high arches and old pews with kneelers and it all felt like my experiences of the high church in England. I was thankful that Judah was quiet and watched the stained glass and listened to the choral singing with wonder.

In any case, I found the liturgy really helpful in guiding me. This is what it called the congregation to:

...I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word. And, to make a right beginning of repentance, and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now kneel before the Lord, or maker and redeemer.

So, in light of that, I see Lent as being a great many things, but is a corporate and individual practice of confessing our sin and coming back to God. It is experiencing the reality of Good Friday in some small way. So, I am instituting confession in my own life these 40 days. I've also chosen a fast, and I think the purpose of the fast is to sacrifice something in order to make space in my life and dedicate that space to seeking Him.

The Ash Wednesday service was mostly filled with corporate confession, and I've taken the liturgy home and am processing one line of the confession each day in my morning prayer and scripture reading. This was the first section:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against thy holy laws, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.

We have not loved thee with our whole heart, and mind, and strength. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not forgiven others, as we have been forgiven. Lord, have mercy upon us.

Taking that and writing a prayer of confession of each element and how it plays out in my own life was really like a slap in the face. I am a person of pride, and I see myself as good person. This is a good exercise to remember and root out the sin that entangles me that I am too often blinded to.

By the way, I love that all of this is happening as the flowers are beginning to bloom in Dallas. These flowers (below - gorgeous, right?!) are blooming right outside of our parking garage, and every day as I drive past in the morning and evening I am struck again by their beauty and how they are blooming while still surrounded by the clinging dead leaves and seed pods from the Autumn. It is vividly a picture of death and new life, and is so fitting for the arrival of Good Friday and Easter.

Anyways, it will be good to walk with the Church in these practices. Am I just an evangelical trying to feel all spiritual by joining into old practices I don't really understand? Maybe. May God work in my heart anyways as I remember His death for us.

Struggling to Find Balance Between Judgement and Truth

2011-03-01T23:46:00.000-06:00

I think I may be processing something that will be rather transformational for me, because I am already pretty deeply convicted.

I'm really wrestling with the difference between encouraging and expecting holiness and godliness from God's people.... and legalism and judgementalism.

As I think about all of it, I'm really feeling like I'm realizing some of my own judgement for the first time.

I suppose I've felt like I'm open-minded. After all, I grew up in a conservative missions community, but we were never the people that demanded that the school not allow dancing. I wasn't someone that thought you should only court, not date. My family didn't usually come down hard on any particular side of most doctrinal issues, and they were okay with alcohol in moderation. After high school I went to a conservative Bible College and met even more conservative people with even more conservative backgrounds. At times I even looked liberal. I certainly didn't agree with KJV-only people, I could hardly believe there were still people that existed in the evangelical church that believed women shouldn't wear pants and that you shouldn't see movies in the theater. And as time went on I moved further away from conservatism.

So. All in all, in comparison to most Christians I've hung out with, I tend to be more .... uhh... well, some would say open-minded. Some would say liberal. I mean geez, I voted for Obama.

I actually think it's processing ideas about marriage and sexuality that is really making me dig into these questions in a new way. I remember not so long ago when I was looking into potential hires for a missions job and helping pull out the best candidates. I pointed out to my then-boss that a few of them were divorced, knowing that a lot of missions don't allow divorcees to serve as missionaries. My boss said he had no such policy. I was sort of surprised... first to realize that he was different, and then to realize my own assumption about the checked box marked "divorced".

The organization I work for has challenged me again and again... they continue to hire and work with people that, in my background, would have brought on quite a bit of questioning about their spiritual strength because of their divorces, marriage struggles, rebellious kids (or even kids in jail), ongoing depression... you know. Those kinds of things.

And you know, I have been so humbled and convicted that all of those things are not so much signs of a faith that isn't strong enough or a lack of sanctification (how lame does that sound written out?!) so much as they are simply signs of a broken and sinful in-process person JUST LIKE ME who happens to have their brokenness marked in outward ways that everyone can see rather than inside and carefully hidden. Now I absolutely love that the organization I work avoids judging outward mistakes, and I'm realizing that it's really rare. My initial assumptions about those sorts of things shows the judgementalism in my heart... echoing the prayer of the Pharisee, "I thank God that I am not like other men"...

I'm convicted that I've ranked some things as being worse than others. I'm still wrestling with this. Sex before marriage - huge taboo in my background. Divorce.... ugly and awful.

And you know... lets just take divorce as an example. I feel torn. I am totally convicted that divorce is just one of a great many things that will still happen in the church because guess what... we're all still broken people and so guess what, we're bound to still struggle. Divorce will be one of those struggles. Thus I can't judge a divorcee point blank because they are really just like me - someone struggling to be holy and/or sometimes the victim of someone else's sin.

BUT... I still hate divorce. I still think it's a tragedy. I still want to fight for marriage. I want to teach people to fight for marriage and tell them that divorce is wrong and not God's plan for His people... because that is what I believe. I still want to fight for my own marriage.

How do you balance that with grace?

All I know is that I tend to be the older brother to the prodigal son, the pharisee to the praying tax collector, and the Martha to the Mary at Jesus' feet.

I have no quick answers, I'm just writing the thoughts I've been processing over the past few weeks. I feel a little vulnerable using divorce as an example, because it cuts so close to the heart of so many people who feel judged for their own divorces... so here I am admitting that I'm struggling to find how to think about these things. Help?

Thoughts on the events in Egypt

2011-02-11T23:00:00.000-06:00

The craziness in Egypt has been fascinating. This morning while I was working from home attempting to juggle the baby and frantic emails from work, I got an email from Isaac telling me to check the headlines because Mubarak left Cairo.

I clicked on the ccn.com headline three times and the link kept failing, until finally the page reloaded with brand new news... Mubarak had resigned and Tahrir Square was going nuts with excitement. The video of the translator dubbed over Mubarak's announcement started normally until the actual line announcing the resignation happened, at which point the translator paused, realized the huge news he was about to translate, and suddenly the tone of his voice rose to high excitement.

We're watching history happen.

I don't know what to think. It's amazing on one hand. It was a (mostly) nonviolent movement of the people that effectively turned over the government. They continued to press their point until the power of their collective voice took down a dictator. That... is so amazing.

On the other hand... where are they now? This is such a huge question. When I commented on the situation on facebook I received a number of super happy responses, and I don't think we're quite at the point of celebration. This could be great... but it could also be even worse than before. There's a rise in Muslim extremism all around the world, and the Muslim brotherhood is a huge voice in the chaos right now. Extreme viewpoints often find the chance to take hold when there is great social instability (see also - the Taliban in Afghanistan). I really worry about that potential. Even if they run a democratic vote, there is a huge chance that an awful person could be democratically elected (see also Hamas in Palestine)

Even if that doesn't happen, all Egypt currently has is a military-run country in a state of martial law. Is this a great setting for the rise of democracy? Indonesia pressured their first dictator/President out of office after 40 years of rule in the midst of protests, with the military finally exerting enough influence that one of their own stepped in and took over. Similar story to Egypt. 40 years later Suharto was pressured out of office in nearly the same way, and though the entire 80 years of the country's history was "democratic", they had never really had freedom of the press or a truly healthy government. Just because you turn over the government and elect someone new doesn't mean you've done away with your problems. Corruption tends to be endemic in society, not merely put in place by the current government.

Where does this leave Egypt? I'd say it leaves them with nearly a blank slate. It could be filled with awful or great things. It may mostly depend on the leaders that step in and exert their influence at this time of great change.

What Billy Graham would do differently...

2011-01-31T22:01:00.000-06:00

Christianity Today asked Billy Graham in a recent interview what he would do differently if he could do it over again.

I'd spend more time at home with my family, and I'd study more and preach less. I wouldn't have taken so many speaking engagements, including some of the things I did over the years that I probably didn't really need to do—weddings and funerals and building dedications, things like that.

Seems like everyone says they'd spend more time with their families. Ironic to read that on the first day I found it hard to be at work and away from my baby. I just put Judah down from spending 30 minutes with him sleeping in my arms, with his head nestled under my chin, his little sighs felt against my heart. Billy's other response, that he'd study more and preach less... that I find interesting. I'm currently around a bunch of guys that act as though studying is a waste of time by overly intellectual Westerners, and we've got to just get out and preach. Billy's perspective that more study would have been beneficial is really interesting.

In any case, CT also asked Billy what he thinks the most pressing issues are in Evangelicalism today. His answer?

...The most important issue we face today is the same the church has faced in every century: Will we reach our world for Christ? In other words, will we give priority to Christ's command to go into all the world and preach the gospel? Or will we turn increasingly inward, caught up in our own internal affairs or controversies, or simply becoming more and more comfortable with the status quo? Will we become inner-directed or outer-directed? The central issues of our time aren't economic or political or social, important as these are. The central issues of our time are moral and spiritual in nature, and our calling is to declare Christ's forgiveness and hope and transforming power to a world that does not know him or follow him. May we never forget this.

Taking Down Anonymous Commenting

2011-01-29T13:28:00.000-06:00

Because I'm getting spammed. I'll put it back up eventually...

On Candlelight Services and Forgotten Corners of the Earth

2011-01-28T20:25:00.002-06:00

Candlelight services seem like a sort of evangelical liturgy, don't they? Most evangelical churches do them, and yet there isn't any inherent meaning. Is it just because of the beauty of candles? I'm not against doing something for beauty's sake, but it is a little odd.

Regardless, Christmas Eve candlelight services have drawn tears to my eyes many times. This year, our new baby and nearly my whole family (my grandparents on both sides included) were at my church's Christmas Eve candlelight service. My grampa muttered a "holy cow" upon walking into our massive church, and I was thankful for the mix of the classic hymns and some beautiful new songs that I knew would be unfamiliar to my family. The service was good, and it really was beautiful to think of the "light" that was lit on stage, symbolizing the light that came into the world with the birth of Christ.

Like I said, our church is huge, and had the ground floor, and then theater style seating around the back, and then a separate balcony at the top. We were in the balcony and had a clear view of the candle being lit in the front, and the three people that went to the three ground floor sections and began walking up the aisles, lighting the candles of the people in the aisle seats as they went. We sang "Silent Night" as the light spread through the sanctuary like a puddle of water, and it was beautiful. When the light reached the back of the ground floor, there was a pause, but then some people made their way out of their seats and went back to those in the theater style seating and the light spread further, all the way up and back...

Except, once it reached the end of that section, it ended. Our balcony wasn't just a wide aisle away, we were a stairwell away. And so we held our candles in the dark, admiring the glittering auditorium as the song ended. It felt... awkward. I saw my mom look around in wonder and I knew what she was thinking as she leaned over and whispered to my dad.

My pastor voiced the thought when he came back on stage, pointing out the unintended poignant symbolism of an auditorium filled with light and wonder, and a corner left alone, too difficult to reach and forgotten as the crowd was swept into the beauty of their own experience. We waited and watched them, but couldn't join in. Isn't this so often what the Church does? For my mom, especially, this is a powerful picture, since they have spent nearly 25 years working in the Muslim world. Especially where they are now, it's easy to feel like the part of the world they're in has been simply deemed too hard, too far away. The percentage of money and ministry spent in the Muslim world is comparatively minuscule to what we in the West spend on those right next door.

Next door is important. It is amazing to see light spread across the auditorium, person to person. But what a shame it is if the auditorium is lit and we decide to look away from the dark corner that is too hard to reach and requires getting out of our seats.

I know it's been a month since Christmas Eve, so why is this on my mind? I think of this now as I watch my parents deal with their own futures. For my brother's sake, they eventually have to come back to the US and settle down so that they can help him move into a semi-independent lifestyle as a Down Syndrome adult. It's solemn for me to observe my parent's love and passion for the people of that country, people, and part of the world. I know their heart and the reason they moved over there. As they come back, do others care to go? I'm reminded of the service and my mom's reaction to that picture of the light and the darkness.

Phillip Yancey's Soul Survivor - A New Favorite

2010-12-29T16:33:00.000-06:00

I loved Phillip Yancey's book Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church.

It's ironic, really, because for years I've heard Yancey's name and never paid attention, just sweeping him into a lump with all the other popular evangelical authors. Sometime this year I heard a rave review of this book and thought it sounded like something that someone like me (someone who'd walked through deep cynicism about the church) would like. Turns out that among Yancey's "thirteen mentors" are some obscure people who also have spoken to me, including Japanese author Shusaku Endo, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, John Donne, etc. He speaks of how growing up mired in fundamentalism (and some really truly racist, messed up fundamentalism at that) and how each of these people (some of them not even Christians) changed him and his beliefs or world view in some way. Although the book is from his perspective, the majority of the book is about these 13 amazing men and women, and I LOVED IT. It mirrors what I have really rejoiced in over the past couple of years - discovering people who are passionately living out some profound truth of their faith. It's immensely healing, I think. At the same time it's striking that each hero is so flawed in some way... this in and of itself is a profound truth that makes it way through Yancey's work - that true heroes are much like our biblical heroes and are very human, saved by grace.

Over the holidays when I mentioned the book to my family, my dad told me he'd loved it, and that he'd read it after hearing my grandmother (who died nine years ago) talk about how deeply the book spoke to her. I wish she were here so that I could ask her how the book spoke to her, and I think it's really interesting that three generations of my family loved the book so much. It turns out I relate to much of Yancey's life story, including his experience in Bible college, his life in inner-city Chicago (he lived in my neighborhood!) attempting to avoid suburbia, and then his move to Colorado and the mountains (where my family lived).

This is from the amazon publishers review:

In some ways, it is his darkest work ever, chronicling his own lover's quarrel with the institutional church specifically, the church of his childhood that promulgated racism and practiced a pharisaic legalism. In other ways, this book is one of his most hopeful, for in it he charts a spiritual path through all of the muck made by organized religion. As guides, he looks to "a baker's dozen" of thinkers, writers, doctors and activists who have taught him about Christianity. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life shamed Yancey into confronting his own racism and then helped his heart be transformed by Christ's love. Leo Tolstoy taught him self-forgiveness, while Fyodor Dostoevsky modeled grace as a lived reality. John Donne taught him to wrestle with the ultimate enemy, death; Annie Dillard demonstrated ways to appreciate God in creation; Mahatma Gandhi showed him the power of one individual to change the course of history. The most moving chapter is perhaps the tribute to Paul Brand, an orthopedic surgeon whose work on leprosy helped Yancey to understand how pain can become a gift from God. It's not a perfect book; the chapter on G.K. Chesterton is too short, and the essay on former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop seems superficial in a book with such theological depth. Despite these minor flaws, this multibiography is a much-needed signpost, stubbornly pointing to the life of faith.

why my posting has slowed...

2010-12-10T20:04:00.000-06:00

My posting on here is always a bit erratic and dependant on the busyness of life and exactly how much I've been spending time discussing and reading insightful things.

Right now, though, there is a really good reasong for my absense from this blog, and that is that I had a baby this week, which you can read about on my personal blog here.

Have no fear, I expect to be back, but I also expect that for a few weeks my brain will be entirely taken up with diapers, baby snuggles, and maternal hormone swings. You can read about those things on the other blog if you like, otherwise, see you back here when life has stabilized some!

Remembering the impact of the book Passion and Purity on my teen years

2010-11-30T17:57:00.000-06:00

Until the will and affections are brought under the authority of Christ, we have not begun to understand, let alone to accept, His lordship. The Cross, as it enters the love life, will reveal the heart's truth. My heart, I knew, would be forever a lonely hunter unless settled "where true joys are to be found."

In the midst of sorting my bookshelves this year, I pulled out the book Passion and Purity by Elisabeth Elliot, which I believe I stole from my parent's bookshelf in high school, read, and have carried with me ever since.

In high school I read a lot of dating and purity books. I considered jumping on the courtship bandwagon (I did choose not to date in high school) and read Josh Harris's book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, but it never really seemed practical in a world where my family was generally across the country or the ocean. Most of the books were okay, but often cheesy, and really none of them hit me like Passion and Purity.

It was interesting to skim through it again years later and to see in it so many of the thoughts that became the foundation of how I viewed dating, romance, and marriage. I kept some of those quotes on my wall or desk for nearly 10 years after reading the book. Yes, it can be quite old-fashioned and Elisabeth and Jim (the Jim Elliot who was killed by the Auca Indians several years after their marriage) were certainly straight-laced (though simultaneously deeply passionate) in their relationship and a lot of people would view them as extreme. I guess I never felt like Elisabeth was telling readers to be like her, she was simply laying out principles. AND she writes beautifully and quotes beautiful things. AND their own love story is a pretty riveting and interesting tale in and of itself.

I love the unruly manliness of Jim Elliot in their story. I love that she likes him from afar but has no idea that he likes her back until he suddenly confronts her about their need to deal with their mutual affections, at which point he proclaims his love for her (note... yes, it moves straight to love at first declaration) but says he probably will never marry because it's best to be single when he's headed overseas, and thus they have no future together. Hah.. so black and white, so passionate in the face of her quiet carefulness. I love that through the years that they move forward without a relationship, he proclaims his love for her and there is no question in his mind that if he ever marries, it will be HER, she has his entire commitment and yet no commitment at all because for literally years he moves ahead with plans to go overseas and never marry.

Brutal. I love his personality because it's the kind of guy I was always attracted to (and married!). Blunt, all in or all out, passionate. I love reading her musings because she, like me, is carried away by romance but always, always comes down to practicality in the midst of her dreaming. She questions, sometimes even too much, and is extremely self-disciplined. That's the central theme of their story, actually. Sacrifice and self-discipline. This stuck with me - the idea that what I really want must come from somewhere other than my initial will and emotions when it came to relationships. This is a conversation Ms. Elliot had with a reader:

"I've prayed for His will, and I've prayed for a....husband, and that's what I'm going to get, because Jesus loves me and Jesus wants me to be happy."
"So if you don't get him, will that prove that God doesn't love you?"
"Doesn't He want me to be happy?"
"He wants you most to be holy.... The problem stars when we make up our minds what will give us happiness and then decide, if we don't get exactly that, that God doesn't love us. We slither into a slough of God-hates-me-self-pity."

And yet, in the midst of Jim and Betty's self-discipline she's honest about the beauty of both emotional passion and physical desire. She quotes him, "I'm hungry for you, Bett. We're alike in our desire for God. I'm glad for that. But we're different too. I've got the body of a man, and you've got the body of a woman, and frankly, I want you. But you're not mine."

There is great passion in their writing, their story. Great passion amidst restraint. I think so often people looking in on those that chose to take intimacy in small increments (both in what was said and in physical touch) can perceive a lack of intimacy. On the contrary, for me sometimes the reserve held back such a flood of emotion, passion, things unspoken and undone but longed for and felt. It isn't easy or fun and I don't think you choose to wait on things simply for the waiting's sake. I learned from the Elliots, though.... that the greater the good, the greater the potential for evil as well. In this great passion is the potential for great mistakes, and so you build a guard and take great care to give worth to the love that is being built.

There are those who recognize something far greater than their own passions, even though for the world at large there seems to be nothing else of any consequence. The majority will sacrifice anything - security, honor, self-respect, the welfare of people they love, obedience to God - to passion. They will... congratulate themselves for being so free, so released, so courageous, so honest, and "up front." The greater the potential for good, the greater the potential for evil. That is what Jim and I found in the force of the love we bore for each other. A good and perfect gift, these desires. But so much the more necessary that they be restrained, controlled, corrected... that they might be reborn in power and purity for God.

She writes this right after her first date with Jim:

The Lord told King David to set up an alter on the threshing floor that belonged to Araunah the Jebusite. When the king asked Araunah if he might buy it, Araunah begged him to take it, as a gift, along with his oxen for an offering and the threshing sledges for fuel. "No," said the king, ".... I will not offer the Lord my God whole-offerings that have cost me nothing..."
Lord, I said, here's my heart.

I like that this book doesn't lay out a specific plan for exactly what a relationship should look like. Instead it directs the reader to the centrality of submission to Christ, of Him being the central pursuit in the midst of the great beauty of romance.

the problem of pleasure

2010-11-22T06:00:00.001-06:00

I'm currently reading and loving Phillip Yancey's book Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church.

I highly recommend it. As someone that has wrestled with cynicism and whether I am obligated to the church or not, I resonate with most of what he says and with what he's learned from such great people/authors.

Quote from my reading today, which is from his chapter on the impact that G.K. Chesterton's writings had on him:

It struck me, after reading my umpteenth book on the problem of pain, that I have never even seen a book on "the problem of pleasure." Nor have I met a philosopher who goes around shaking his or her head in perplexity over the question of why we experience pleasure. Yet it looms as a huge question: the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians. On the issue of pleasure, Christians can breathe easier. A good and loving God would naturally want his creatures to experience delight, joy, and personal fulfillment. Christians start from that assumption and then look for ways to explain the origin of suffering. But should not atheists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure in a world of randomness and meaninglessness?

And he follows this with a great quote from Chesterton himself:

I felt in my bones, first that this world does not explain itself... Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art... Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, despite its defects... Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restrain: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them... and last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man has saved his good as [Robinson] Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck.

Musings on Suffering and Change

2010-11-21T06:00:00.000-06:00

One of the things I was most struck by in my course about how people change was the discussion of suffering. Tripp and Lane based this chapter around James 1, so it really shouldn’t have hit me the way it did because I’ve loved this passage since I memorized it as a high-schooler, and some of my very favorite professors in college were those that taught classes on the theology of suffering and were deeply affected by suffering that has resulted in the death and in some cases suicides of family members.

But still… it hit home for me, both for myself and because I am walking with a dear friend through dark days within her marriage.

God never promises that his children would escape a fallen world. In his wisdom, he has chosen for us to live in the middle of its brokenness…. James wants to protect his congregation from the painful shock of surprise. He wants them to live with a healthy biblical realism. … we live in a world where trials are a normal part of life. They are not an exception to the order of things; they are the rule.

Do you expect an ordered, predictable calm where your plans are unobstructed? Do you assume that people will agree with you and affirm your choices? Do you believe you can plan your way out of stress and avoid situations where you feel overwhelmed. Our experience becomes more difficult when we carry unbiblical, and therefore unrealistic, expectations into them. …

The truth is that I think I often answer this question as a "yes". I am surprised when I find myself suffering. I seem to have bought into the mentality that if I just do the right thing and believe the right thing, I will avoid pain and tough times. There is both pride and naivete in my answer. I have spent a lot of time musing on the purpose of suffering in my life, and what the real meaning of James' statement is, "consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds..."

A second thing struck me. The authors muse on James' treatment of trials coming from two areas - difficulty or blessing. We don't usually think of good things as being trials, but if our response to them is wrong, they become trials and temptations in our life, just as a positive response to trials can actually make them a blessing.

The key is not the situation, but the response.

Do we really believe what James is saying about trials and how we respond to them? For example, someone might say, “Jim makes me so angry!” In that statement, Jim is responsible for the anger that person is expressing…. Here is the humbling truth: Trials do not cause us to be what we have not been; rather, they reveal what we have been all along. The harvest the trial produces is the roots already in our hearts.

Since walking through this time with my friend makes it all too easy to apply things to her and forget to apply them to my own life, I sat down and thought about moving to Dallas and how hard that was for me. I expected it to be difficult to say goodbye to Chicago, but I figured I'd be able to settle down okay. The loneliness and long transition really took me off guard, and I had a really hard first year. Initially that was an outward, morally neutral trial. It is okay to struggle with loneliness, okay to be sad when things are hard. There were real reasons why it was tough to adjust to Dallas (no car to allow me to get involved in things, no church home for a while, new culture).

On the other hand, I then had the choice of how to respond to the suffering I was going through. I don't think it would have been good to stuff the emotions, to pretend I was okay, to attempt to avoid all tough emotions. However, looked back I can see that I often chose to isolate and pull away from people instead of open myself up. I felt sorry for myself and compared "back then" to my present in a way that became unhealthy at times.

The initial suffering was neutral. Eventually how I was doing was my own fault, though, because I was choosing to respond in a way I shouldn't have.

Don't think I'm being too self-critical here, real analysis is good and I'm definitely one to excuse my own flaws rather than be too hard on myself most of the time.

It also made me think ahead to this upcoming year with a new baby. I know new babies are an incredible gift and I really am so excited, but it is tempered by the awareness that the first year as a mother has been incredibly difficult for a number of my friends. How will I respond? Especially considering I will be attempting to balance work and new-motherhood, and Isaac will attempt to balance work, school, and taking care of the baby while I work. We'll likely be exhausted, as well as financially stretched and adjusting to the change of life and the constant needs of a baby.

It could be that we're the lucky ones who find the newborn stage easy. That'd be nice. But if this year is painful for us, how will we respond? How will I respond? It's OKAY to find it hard. But how I respond to the difficulty is my responsibility. Do I feel sorry for myself, wallow in self-pity, complain, allow myself to sink into resentment or be carried away by hopelessness?

That's just something I'm thinking about and wanting to be prepared for. Since the presence of suffering in our lives is not a surprise, it's good if I'm prepared for it and am ready to face it.

"Today You have placed Your Word into my hands"

2010-11-20T13:01:00.000-06:00

Kimyal New Testament launch in Indonesia from United Bible Societies on Vimeo.

I watched this video today - of the dedication of the New Testament into this particular language near where I grew up. I love the video - I got to be a witness to a ceremony like this at my best friend's village when I was a senior in high school, and to watch the aged church leaders accept these books in tears was incredibly humbling, and watching the people dance and chant and sing was like seeing a modern reflection of Old Testament celebration.

Actually, this particular village and dedication (in this video) is perhaps even more significant, because the first man who came to live and translate and preach was martyred, as told in the book Lords of the Earth by Don Richardson. To see, years later, the Papuans accept the scripture and to see what it means to them... it's incredible.

The pastor's prayer is beautiful:

Oh God, the plan which you had from the beginning regarding your Kimyals, which already existed in Your Spirit, the month that you had set, the day that you had set has come to pass today. Oh my Father, my Father, the promise that You gave Simeon that He would see Jesus Christ and hold Him in his arms before he died, I also have been waiting under that promise, oh God. You looked at all the different languages and chose which ones would be put into Your Word. You thought that we should see Your Word in our language. Today, the day You had chosen for this to be fulfilled has come to pass. Oh God, today You have placed Your Word into my hands, just like You promised. You have placed it here in our land. And for all this, Oh God, I give You praise.

Thoughts on the dilemma of change and suffering

2010-11-18T06:00:00.000-06:00

I just finished a class about how people change. This sounds incredibly boring, but I've been so intrigued by this topic. We easily identify our struggles, tendencies, and neuroses, but real change is very rare. I'm also at a stage of life where my friends and I are wrestling with these questions. We see struggles, and sometimes wonder if it's possible to actually change behaviors or to heal wounds?

In any case, the seminary offered a lay class (ie - not for credit) about change, and I decided to try it out. I have loved one of the books we've read: How People Change by Lane and Tripp. Not so much the other books. I'll be writing a bit more about some things that really jumped out at me from the book, but I also have wrestled with the implications of all of this for someone who wants to do counseling as a career, formally and informally. The thing is, the book and the class are coming from the perspective that true change happens only with a step towards God. The teacher's line has been that true change only happens when we change the direction of our worship in one area of life or another.

And the thing is that I agree with that for the most part because I don't think anger, lust, pride, etc, etc are ever really beaten without having really changed something spiritually. BUT.... what does that mean as I work with people that are not Christians? There is great pain and dysfunction there too, and I want to help and work with them. Is it possible to change, really change, without having submitted your life to God? Or is it all just a bandaid covering the greater pain and greater sin? If real change isn't possible, what's the goal of a Christian counselor that works with non-believers?

I asked that question this past week and we had an interesting discussion, and some of the conclusion corresponded with something that I heard John Piper talked about at the Lausanne Conference last month. Christian organizations always wrestle with the balance between the call to evangelism and the call to humanitarian aid. What is the relationship between these things? What is truly important? Piper talked about it all being a part of the broad issue of Human Suffering. Humanitarian aid and social justice causes address the issue of physical and social human suffering today. Evangelization addresses the issue of eternal human suffering. If we miss one or the other, we have a problem. If you miss the eternal suffering part, you've got a theological problem on your hands. If you miss the present suffering then you have a problem with your heart.

I think that's true in counseling as well. Of course, our ultimate goal is to be like Jesus, and the those who know Him should continue to be transformed to His likeness. I do believe that real change is possible, that ingrained patterns of behavior and generational tendencies CAN be broken. But for those who do not know Christ and do not (yet) want to know Him, there is immense present suffering that I will care about just as much as a doctor cares for the present suffering of his patients. I am, essentially, intending to be a doctor for the soul and spirit and emotions. Where there is suffering, I wish to do what I can to help heal and grow.

This still leaves the issue of eternal suffering for these same people, and of course it will be my hope and prayer that this suffering is also alleviated in them, and hopefully truth and healing does point that direction. The choice for ultimate Hope, though, is theirs alone and I cannot force that as I address their present suffering. It will be my greatest joy when present suffering and eternal suffering are both addressed at once.

Ahmed Rashid's prophetic book about the Taliban

2010-11-16T16:13:00.001-06:00

I just finished reading this amazing book by Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia.

This book came highly recommended, so I picked it up, not realizing that it was actually published in 2001 before September 11th. That makes everything he says so stunning, knowing it's all analysis of things that the US was really overlooking and should have been taking more seriously, things that would very quickly affect our nation in a huge way.

*** A few points of clarification first to clear up some common misconceptions (some of which I also held). The Mujaheddin that the US funded to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan are not the same as the Taliban. The Mujaheddin were guerrilla warlords, and the Taliban developed from a rootless, floating refugee population on the border of Pakistan (where we are STILL fighting) who were uneducated and found an identity in the fundamentalist Islamic madrassas that eventually recruited them all to join into a Pashtun religious student fighting force... the Taliban. The Soviets eventually withdrew, the Mujaheddin were mired in infighting, and the Taliban ended up taking over Afghanistan... until the US invaded.

Also, the Al Quaeda/Bin Ladin and the Taliban are not the same thing. The Taliban is the conservative Islamic group that took over Afghanistan. The US actually was diplomatically friendly with the Taliban at first, and we distanced ourselves as the reality of just how extreme their policies toward women were, and then finally when they insisted on providing shelter for Bin Laden. Bin Laden came out of Saudi Arabia, developed a conservative and militant Islam and a fighting force of other militant Muslims from around the world (more on that in a minute). When he started claiming international terrorist actions, he was pushed out of most countries and found sanctuary in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

The chapter on Bin Laden was the most stunning, considering that when it was written we considered him a terrorist but within months we were willing to invade and take over a country to go after the man. It's also the most painfully embarrassing part of the story to the US. It's worth an extended quote here:

[The USA] committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI (Pakistani Secret Service) initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin...... [No one] reckoned on these volunteers having their own agendas, which would eventually turn their hatred against the Soviets on their own regimes and the Americans.

Pakistan already had standing instructions to all its embassies abroad to give visas, with no questions asked, to anyone wanting to come and fight with the Mujaheddin.... Between 1982 and 1992 some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan Mujaheddin... Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad. In camps near Peshawar and in Afghanistan, these radicals met each other for the first time and studied, trained, and fought together. It was the first opportunity for most of them to learn about Islamic movements in other countries and they forged tactical and ideological links that would serve them well in the future. The camps became virtual universities for future Islamic radicalism. None of the intelligence agencies involved wanted to consider the consequences of bringing together thousands of Islamic radicals from all over the world. "What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of the Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" said Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US National Security Advisor.

'The war,' wrote Samuel Huntington, 'left behind an uneasy coalition of Islamist organizations intent on promoting Islam against all non-Muslim forces. It also left a legacy of expert and experienced fighters, training camps and logistical facilities, elaborate trans-Islam networks of personal and organization relationships, a substantial amount of military equipment including 200 to 500 unaccounted for Stinger missiles, and, most important, a heady sense of power and self-confidence over what had been achieved and a driving desire to to move on to other victories.

Isn't that just.... amazing? Ludicrous? We helped fund and trained Bin Laden and the growth of fundamentalist, militaristic Islam. Did we ever stop to examine their worldview and ideology? Are we so short-sighted that we thought anything anti-communist would help us? *shakes head*. Maybe it WAS worth it. Maybe the war in Afghanistan weakened the USSR enough that without the war they would have continued to expand and take over, and maybe they would have been worse than militant Islam. Maybe? Or maybe not. It's hard to say what's worse.

It was really useful to read more about Bin Laden himself as well. Did you know he's 6'5"? Or that he's child number 17 of 57? Daaaaaang. His father had more than one wife, of course.

In any case, the book also goes over the politics of oil and how that played out in Central Asia and Afghanistan, and how Saudi, Pakistani, and Iranian negotiations played out in the region. Really interesting... but just so ironic in the end. This quote below refers to the "war in Afghanistan" and it means the war between the Taliban and the anti-Taliban alliance. Ironically we could say it today about OUR war in Afghanistan, and some of it has already come true.

If the war in Afghanistan continues to be ignored we can only expect the worst. Pakistan will face a Taliban-style Islamic revolution which will further destabilize it and the entire region. Iran will remain on the periphery of the world community and its eastern borders will continue to be wracked by instability. The Central Asian states will not be able to deliver their energy and mineral exports by the shortest routes and as their economies crash, they will face an Islamic upsurge and instability. Russia will continue to bristle with hegemonic aims in Central Asia even as its own society and economy crumbles. The stakes are extremely high.

The thing is, I feel like although we did invade Afghanistan, we did continue to ignore the war there in some ways. We took political control but then dropped our troop levels, funding, and humanitarian aid and focused almost completely on Iraq. In doing so, we let the Taliban thrive in resistance, Bin Laden and his cohorts spread around the world, and all of the things described above continued to develop. Here's another quote that describes our abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet's pulled out, and yet it also describes Afghanistan after we got distracted by Iraq.

By walking away from Afghanistan as early as it did, the USA faced within a few years dead diplomats, destroyed embassies, bombs in New York and cheap heroin on its streets, as Afghanistan became a sanctuary for international terrorism and drugs mafia. Afghans today remain deeply bitter about their abandonment by the USA, for whom they fought the Cold War. In the 1980's the USA was prepared 'to fight till the last Afghan' to get even with the Soviet Union, but when the Soviets left, Washington was not prepared to help bring peace or feed a hungry people.

You'd think we'd learn our lesson. I do so hope that we help rebuild Afghan society THROUGH the Afghans as much as possible, instead of simply focusing on our military efforts there.

"Biblical Womanhood" in the New York Times

2010-11-15T16:41:00.002-06:00

So.... there was an amazing in the New York Times on Sunday that I just stumbled across titled "Housewives of God". The article examines the evangelical debate between a complementarian and egalitarian view of the role of women. Considering the evangelical world is a mystery to most people and the distinction between those two viewpoints can be super confusing, the article did a great job at just examining the culture and both sides in a clear way.

The author based the discussion around the person of Priscilla Shirer, a popular female speaker/preacher who takes the conservative complementarian viewpoint and yet has a life and marriage that practically speaking looks pretty much like a feminist career woman. It's fantastic, you all should really read it.

It's timely for me, too. Isaac has a seminary class discussing the issue right now (incidentally, his seminary and various professor's viewpoints on the issue were discussed in the article), and he's reading a book on the topic. Also, some of my favorite bloggers, Rachel Held Evans and Elizabeth Esther have both talked about "biblical womanhood" recently.

It's something I've never really blogged much about, because unlike most topics, I have a hard time approaching it objectively. Usually I can take a topic I'm wrestling with, look into it deeply from a variety of angles, and come to a conclusion. On this one every time I face the topic I get really emotional, which is really unlike me. I don't get and don't like the topic of submission, biblical womanhood, the role of wives and husbands, etc. It has been discussed in classes, I've read about it, I've been through church studies on the topic.... even presentations that other people love on the topic have resulted in me walking away and crying to Isaac...

Like I said, that's pretty unlike me. Even just the other night as Isaac was trying to describe some things presented in the book he's reading, I couldn't respond in discussion because I got teary as soon as I tried to talk because of my emotional gut reaction. Isaac asked me why I respond so emotionally, particularly when the question of submission or our roles within our marriage has NEVER been a point of conflict. I told him that it feels like there is no other theological question that is so central to my identity. That's not true, but I suppose it's the only unsettled theological question that I have that is so central to my identity. In every way. How I act in the church, how I relate to friends, how I live and act and who I am in my marraige.... the question of roles and biblical womanhood directly affects every single one of those areas.

So no, I find I can't approach the whole thing very objectively. Mostly I just avoid it, and hope that a life lived with love and respect avoids the question.... *sigh*...

I voted for Obama and I do not regret it.... and this is why

2010-11-05T23:15:00.000-05:00

It bothers me when people say they regret voting for Obama or expect me to regret my vote. Why would I regret it? I didn't vote for him because I expected him to transform the country or the world or because I bought the media hype. I voted for him because I appreciated most of his policies and his reasoned approach to politics.

When people say they regret voting for him because of what he's done while in office, I ask them why they voted for him in the first place, because he's pretty much only done what he said he was going to do. Did you listen to his policies when he was running?

There's also a lot of empty rhetoric against him now, just as there was a lot of empty rhetoric for him when he was running. Some people say he hasn't gotten anything done. The other half shake their heads in despair and say they can't believe how much damage he's done during the time he's been in office. Which is it?

Here are some things he HAS done. There are a couple I dislike, but most I support.

- The Recovery Act/ Stimulus
Spending government money to stimulate spending, investment, and job creation during an economic recession in order to prevent a depression. People who dislike government spending can blame this on Obama, but this was a House and Senate initiative that between the House and Senate only a grand total of three Republicans voted against. Obama signed into law what was, unfortunately, apparently a needed initiative for our time. You can read a breakdown of the areas that the stimulus spending went to on the wikipedia page. Some of that is flat spending and some of it is planned to recoup itself over time, and so it will take a few years to truly estimate how much was spent and how much good it did.

- Wall Street Bailout
Are we a thriving economy at the moment? No. However, we haven't continued to spiral down. Our major Wall Street Corporations didn't fail. Economic and financial investment reform is on the table. Accountability is important and being talked about. I think Obama struck the balance between saving from crisis and simultaneously demanding change in a flawed system.When people criticize this one I point them to the fact that this bailout is effectively being paid back. I recently listened to an NPR report on it and other analysis also point to over half of the bailout money already having been returned. That is huge.

- Automotive Industry Bailout.
This is the most frustrating of the bailouts for me, because these automotive companies were failing, sometimes companies should be allowed to fail because they suck, and lets face it, most American cars suck. This may be true, but the failure of several huge companies at once in an already floundering economy could have been devastating. As it is, again the companies did not fail and they were forced to restructure before being provided with bailout money. It's my hope that this was ultimately a good thing for our economy and that it will drive US automakers to creativity, sustainability, and quality. We'll see. Like I said, this is one I was quite skeptical about.

Ended the Iraq war and refocused the Afganistan war
I believe that foreign policy is where the President has the most power, since in most other areas the legislature is just as much if not more responsible for things than the President. Obama set out a time-table for the exit of Iraq and shifted the focus to Afghanistan, instituting a troop-surge. I have always been uneasy about the war in Iraq and was aghast that we pulled our focus and troops away from Aghanistan. I'm glad that Bush pushed the Iraq war through to a more peaceful ending, I'm glad Obama finished it out, and I'm very glad that Obama isn't so anti-war that he's unwilling to fight where it's needed. He was also willing to respect Bush enough to recognize his best general and move him to Afghanistan in the hopes that similar results will happen there. There's still work to be done in Afghanistan. It seems Obama has been strategic and fair there.

Reasonable Diplomacy
Obama has been an international head of state that chooses dialogue and doesn't exacerbate tensions. He's talked to Iran, worked with Russia, intentionally reached out the Muslim community, etc. Obama was a bit of a symbol to the world, though it wasn't particularly due to himself but just what he stood for on an international scale. Does that mean all political tensions are solved? No, of course not. But dialogue and and talk DOES help at times, and I think Obama has done a marvelous job of attempting to be reasonable and calm on this front, show respect for other cultures, countries, heads of state, etc.

Ordered the closure of Guatanamo Bay
Obama signed the order to close Guatanamo Bay and ended the US policy on torture. There's more to do here, but he's headed the right direction. His push is for openness and agreement with the Geneva policies on prisoner treatment. Yay.

Proposed, Modified, and Signed the Health Care Bill
Yeah, a lot of people HATE this, but I think a lot of people also have no idea what the bill actually contains. I hope for more change, but this is a start. At least when the policy is fully implemented kids can stay on their parent's insurance longer, you can't be dropped for preexisting conditions, lifetime coverage limits are eliminated and annual limits are restricted. He hasn't created a government funded health care system that everyone was so afraid of - instead he attempts to regulate and provide accountability for the employer funded system (and provided a tax credit for small businesses to help provide coverage for workers). Now I'm just advocating creating a more competitive, informed environment between insurance companies and consumers. I think there is much more to be done, but I don't want to undo the progress that has been made.

Refused to support Israel when they acted aggressively... and encouraged both sides of the Palestinian conflict to begin peace talks again. Our unequivocal support of Israel was never a good thing. Support, yes, but not unequivocal support.

Did not intervene in the oil spill
This perhaps isn't something he has DONE, but I find it quite important considering the immense pressure on him to DO something and show he was more active than Bush was in Katrina. The oil spill was a private mistake by a private company. It needed to be stopped and cleaned up and the government did offer help where it was needed, but it is not the role of the President to take over BP's operations on the issue. That would have been a breach of power and control. Instead he made sure they were doing their best to stop the spill and clean up the damage, and didn't roll in and take over. He took some flack for not doing enough, and I was proud that he didn't bow to it.

Appointed Kagan and Sotomayer to the Supreme Court
I liked Sotomayer and liked Kagan a lot less, but neither of them were awful appointments. I also don't think either of them appears to be a pure, unthinking liberal who judges based on old party politics. We'll see.

Took on Somali Pirates
In a sweet Hollywood-like move, Navy SEALS took out the pirates holding a US captain and began increased patrols in Somali waters. That's the kind of international activity that the world can appreciate.

Signed Credit Card Reform
Needed. Credit cards have been scarily unregulated. New reforms institute accountability and laws on disclosure to credit car users that should help with credit card debt problems.

Defended the right to build an Islamic Center near Ground Zero
I abosolutely thought Obama's words on the Center were called for and appropriate. Islamophobia has been getting out of hand and people were calling for an infringement on constitutional rights, and Obama publically opposed such an infringement. It's a civil rights issue.

Tax Credits to First Time Homebuyers
If you're stimulating the economy and dealing with a floundering housing market, why not encourage home-buying? Of five couples in our community group, three bought homes under this tax credit.

Attempted to push forward embryonic stem cell research
Dislike. I'm not down with this one, and disagree with Obama's position on abortion and stem-cell research. However, he was stopped in his tracks by a court case, which I believe is still in play, which is awesome. Hey, cord blood stem cell research is an awesome option ... lets go for that instead of embryonic stell cell research.

“Cash for clunkers”
This program offered vouchers to trade in fuel inefficient, polluting old cars for new cars; stimulates auto sales.

And a few more:
Attractive tax write-offs for those who buy hybrid automobiles
Ended media “blackout” on war casualties; reporting full information
Ended previous policy of awarding no-bid defense contracts

So there we go. I disagreed with him a few times, where I pretty much knew I would. I have appreciated most of his foreign policy moves. I have appreciated his calm, reasoned approach, and have appreciated how often his financial moves are actually very business-friendly instead of anti-business.

No, I don't regret voting for Barack Obama.

No, Muslims are not taking over Europe by having lots of babies

2010-11-02T16:55:00.001-05:00

Have I mentioned how annoying the current US Islamophobia is? Of course, not everyone is Islamophobic,but when it does show up it's frustrating.

Last year this video was forwarded around by a bunch of friends, and it made me cringe and roll my eyes.

Well, as the office researcher, I was asked yesterday to look up a variety of things, and one of those things was the information in this video. Someone is doing a talk about demographic changes around the world and they remembered seeing this video and wanted me to look into it. I internally groaned, because the message of the video is so fear-mongering and I did not want to play any part in spreading this message. And even if it IS true, please, once again lets not play victim here.

Ahh... but this is when I love my job. As a researcher, I get to look for the truth, debunk bad sources, and find out all sorts of interesting things.

1. The video is almost completely unsourced, misquoted, and mostly untrue. Yay for debunking the ridiculous.

2. It's true that most population growth in the EU is from immigration and the the birth rate in Europe has fallen. It IS true that there are about 52 million Muslims in Europe, somewhere around 4-5% of the population. It IS true that the Muslim population in Europe is growing and will continue to grow, though not at the rates suggested in the video. None of that was surprising to me, and it's true that Europe has to continue to wrestle with their increasing cultural diversity.

3. Here's where it got interesting. Actually, the birth rate in most Muslim countries is falling, and the only places where it remains significantly high is Yemen and the Palestinian Territories. I wonder why this is? The birth rate among Muslim immigrants to Europe is dropping, which is typical because the birth rate among all immigrants to wealthier countries drops in a generation as they adjust to the different culture and lifestyle standards.

4. The birth rate for Northern Europe and the US is actually on the rise, and not just because of immigration. I wonder why that is? However, the birth rate in Eastern Europe is extremely low (not even at replacement level), and in Russia they're losing population as quickly as countries in the middle of a war. The birth rate is rising most dramatically in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's rising so quickly that unless something changes (war, disease, famine, etc.), it will " by the end of this century ...be home to one-third of the human race."

5. Given the extreme population growth in sub-Saharan Africa, it will soon be the demographic center of Islam. However, the population is also significantly Christian, and if the growth continues it will have as many Christians as South America, and by 2050 Africa will hold most of the world's Christians as well. This is fascinating and won't necessarily happen as currently demographics reflect, but if it DOES I sure hope those Christians and Muslims find a way to live in peace, or the place is going to be a tinderbox of religious hostility.

6. Also, when you combine the one-child policy of China with their rising affluence (which generally drops the birth rate), India is quickly on its way to overtake China in terms of population, making India the largest country in the world.

Here's a few quotes from the articles and studies I referenced (articles and studies listed at the bottom).

In some Muslim countries—Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Lebanon—fertility rates have already fallen to near-European levels. Algeria and Morocco, each with a fertility rate of 2.4, are both dropping fast toward such levels. Turkey is experiencing a similar trend.

Iran is experiencing what may be one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in human history. Thirty years ago, after the shah had been driven into exile and the Islamic Republic was being established, the fertility rate was 6.5. By the turn of the century, it had dropped to 2.2. Today, at 1.7, it has collapsed to European levels.

Something dramatic has happened to the world’s birthrates. Defying predictions of demographic decline, northern Europeans have started having more babies. Britain and France are now projecting steady population growth through the middle of the century. In North America, the trends are similar. In 2050, according to United Nations projections, it is possible that nearly as many babies will be born in the United States as in China. Indeed, the population of the world’s current demographic colossus will be shrinking. And China is but one particularly sharp example of a widespread fall in birthrates that is occurring across most of the developing world, including much of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The one glaring exception to this trend is sub-Saharan Africa, which by the end of this century may be home to one-third of the human race.

By midcentury, sub-Saharan Africa is likely to be the demographic center of Islam, home to as many Muslims as Asia and to far more than inhabit the Middle East. The non-Arab Muslim countries of Africa—Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Senegal—constitute the one region of the Islamic world where birthrates remain high. In several of these countries, the average woman will have upward of five children in her lifetime.
Christianity will also feel the effects of Africa’s growth. By 2025, there will be as many Christians in sub-Saharan Africa—some 640 million—as in South America. By 2050, it is almost certain that most of the world’s Christians will live in Africa. As Kenyan scholar John Mbiti writes, “The centers of the church’s universality [are] no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, New York, but Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa, and Manila."

Sources:

A BBC news report about the video: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8189231.stm

Wilson Quarterly Demographic Analysis: http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?aid=1408

“A Muslim Europe?”: The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/01/a-muslim-europe/3700/

“Eurabian Follies” by Foreign Policy Magazine: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/eurabian_follies?page=0,2

How I Got Over My Cynicism About The Church

2010-10-30T23:07:00.000-05:00

My roommate Steph asked me a week or so ago how I got over my cynicism at the church and Christians, and I decided I wanted to write about that.

I think some of my cynicism was a natural part of just growing up and making my faith my own - a part of the developmental process. I grew up in a pretty conservative and sheltered missions community overseas, and even though my years in the US were spent in public schools, I was still very much the "good girl" that never rebelled and was very much within one kind of very emotional and passionate and pious kind of spirituality. It wasn't bad.... in fact I'd say it was good.... but it was one-sided and needed deepening.

Arriving at Bible College was not a shock to my system as it was to some because I'd always been someone that loved to grapple with questions about faith and theology and I'd had great teachers of theology at our school overseas as well as some friends (Rach, Jared, Jake :)) who would passionately debate with me over issues. So I wasn't taken aback that there was more than one way of thinking, or that the church had problems and had developed... etc.

What did happen, though, is that I faced an evangelical atmosphere that was even more conservative than that I'd grown up in. At that time the school had pretty conservative lifestyle rules, many of which had nothing to do with anything scriptural or theological, they were just hangovers from the fundamentalism of evangelicalism in the US that I'd never really encountered before. I (along with half the other students) reacted and pushed back against (and broke) the rules. A lot of people push back against evangelicalism after studying church history. For me, early church history may have been what actually helped in the end! It was the study of the development of evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and the general Protestant church in America specifically that disillusioned me. I could see things that I disliked and could pretty quickly throw out theologically - and yet their affect was all around me still, in church practices, the social norms in Christian bubbles, the way we talked, the rules of the school....

By the time I graduated from school I'd become pretty quick to judge evangelicals and American Christianity, and I was pushing away from it. Luckily I had an unconventional church that didn't look cheesy and conservative to me. Those years after graduation were interesting. I was in a secular workplace but didn't like associating myself with Christians because I disliked the same things about Christians that my co-workers did. I had a hard time being around anything churchy because the lingo drove me crazy - I over analyzed everything and saw it as all being SO culturally evangelical rather than essentially Christian. I questioned how the Church could look SO unlike Jesus... and wondered if it was even worth it to stay in at all. I TRIED to be reasonable but I know some of you who read my blog back then got pretty tired of my cynicism, with good reason. I think I probably offended some of my old teachers and friends too, and I have apologized to some.

So back to my roommate's question. How did I get over it?

In some ways I didn't, I suppose. It's not like I just love evangelicalism now. Most of my intellectual opinions about things are the same... I still push back against a lot of the same things.

What IS different is that I am (most of the time) not bitter about it anymore, and it doesn't push me away from Christians or the Church. Why not?

Because at that crucial point when I saw the church as SO broken and so unlike Christ and I questioned whether it was even worth staying in a body that was far from it's Master, I was driven to look through scripture and find out if I really was obligated to the Church. So, as I do, I set about reading the New Testament in light of this question - what did Jesus and the apostles expect of the Church?

I was convicted quickly, the message was consistent everywhere. Christ died.... not just for us as individuals but for the Church as a body.

Eph 5:25
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

This slaps me in the face, because it's not as if Christ didn't know what His people would become. He KNEW what we would be, He knew what we would do, He knew how flawed His people and His Church would be, and yet.... and yet his death was "for her, that he might sanctify her." So Christ's death and love for the church is IN SPITE of her great flaws, and she is holy not because of her own holiness but because of His redemption. I understood this on a personal salvation level but hadn't ever applied to to the continued flaws of the Church as a whole.

The convicting conclusion I came to is that the Lord that I serve and love has a great love, and it is the Church. Those who love Him will love what He loves. If the sin and flaws of the Church do not drive away a perfect, sinless Father, they have no right to drive me (a flawed sinner) away.

Eph 1:22
And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fillsall in all.

It was evident as I read on that the call of Christ on those who follow Him was to always love and serve the Church. From His words to Peter on the beach of "Do you love Me? Then feed my lambs" to Paul's willingness to be "poured out like a drink offering" in his service to the growth of the church, the NT clearly reflects a deep care for the Church as a body, even when it is flawed and broken (which it already was, even at that time).

Let me quote Tony Campolo here:

It is certainly true that our congregations have, at times compromised the radical requirements of discipleship prescribed by Christ, and you may find yourself put off by the church because of its failure to be faithful to his teachings. But I would urge you to consider this fully, and to think about the words of St. Augustine: "The church is a whore, but she's my mother." That statement brilliantly conveys how I feel about church. It is easy for me, like so many of the young Evangelicals I know, to note the ways the church been unfaithful as the bride of Christ. ....Why, then, do I encourage you to participate in organized religion and commit yourself to a specific local congregation? Because, as Augustine made clear, the church is still your mother. It is she who taught you about Jesus. I want you to remember that the Bible teaches that Christ loves the church and gave himself for it (Ephesians 5:25). That's a preeminent reason why you dare not decide that you don't need the church. Christ's church is called his bride (11 Con 11:2), and his love for her makes him faithful to her even when she is not faithful to him....Young people often tell me that they are wary of the institutional church because they believe it is filled with hypocrites. Well, it is. What these people fail to understand, however, is that it is because the church is filled with hypocrites that they'll be right at home in it.... We believe that everyone is a hypocrite, if by "hypocrite" we mean someone who does not live up to his or her declared ideals and does not practice what he or she preaches. Most of us in the church recognize that we fall short of our goals, but we acknowledge our shortcomings and have come together to help one another overcome our failures.

This is the central truth that has lessened my cynicism. It didn't happen in a moment, but after coming to the conclusion that Christ loves the Church and thus I am called to love it too... from that point on all the flaws I see may rankle me but they don't cause me to give up. I suppose some of it is simply coming to agree with what Tony says.... I understand that as a very flawed human being, I am a part of a broken group of people with no room to stand outside judging as though I am any different. As the years go on I find myself more able to love the beautiful things about the Church instead of simply being aghast at what is imperfect.

I still push back against some ridiculous evangelical things and of course I don't believe we should just put up with flaws but work to change them. I find relief in church history, in understanding the development of things. I find relief in liturgy and creeds, in things that are ancient instead of tied to my current culture. I find relief in understanding the real people and faces that are a part of that flawed church - they are imperfect but they are beautiful, and I love them, and they have loved me.

Soo... perhaps I am not over my cynicism, and perhaps I never will be. I am less bitter, though, because in some ways the things that cause cynicism only show that the love and grace of our God to love a people like us is greater than I can comprehend.

John Adams Says Happiness is the Purpose of Government and the Individual

2010-10-27T16:48:00.000-05:00

A while ago I was in a discussion about politics that set me off researching the opinions of the founding fathers on the basic purpose of government. A lot of things are thrown out there these days about what our founding fathers thought, and a lot of it .... is wrong. There are a lot of misplaced quotes, over-generalizations, and misunderstandings of the role of philosophy and religion among the men that drafted our constitution and started the United States of America.

In any case, I happened on this letter written by John Adams to a friend that asked him to draft a model of government that could be used. It's a fascinating letter because Adams outlines his basic principles of a federal government with a judicial, legislative, and executive department set in place with checks and balances..... which is of course the model of government that we still live in. That was all fascinating to read, but some of his less expected comments really caught my eye. For instance:

We ought to consider what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.

Wow.... now that is interesting. He says happiness is our purpose as individuals and a happy society is the purpose of government.

Do you think this is a philosophical idea that our society is based on? I'd say so. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are at the core of our country. That is nice enough, I mean, I'm quite happy to be happy.... but I do think that as a Christian happiness should not be my purpose or pursuit. A government that allows happiness is a blessing, but is it possible that a government to whom happiness is a priority can trample on other things that are MORE important to us believers?

To Mr. Adam's credit, he may define happiness a little differently than we do:

All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue. Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, Mahomet, not to mention authorities really sacred, have agreed in this.... If there is a form of government, then, whose principle and foundation is virtue, will not every sober man acknowledge it better calculated to promote the general happiness than any other form?

Interesting, huh. Happiness consists in virtue, which I take to mean morality. Generally these days we don't link happiness and good morals, but I appreciate the wisdom of this coming from Adams.

A few other things struck me as well, although they're pretty unrelated to the whole happiness thing. Adams advocates for yearly elections of the highest officials in the nation, for "Where annual elections end, there slavery begins." Well.... so much for that. Hah! He is absolutely for public education:

Laws for liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.

Libertarians will like his definition of the responsibilities of the federal government:

If a continental constitution should be formed, it should be a congress, containing a fair and adequate representation of the colonies, and its authority should sacredly be confined to those cases, namely, war, trade, disputes between colony and colony, the post-office, and the unappropriated lands of the crown, as they used to be called.

Interesting, right? John Adams fascinates me and I loved the TV series that came out where Paul Giamatti played him and Laura Linney was Abigail Adams. Since reading this letter I've done a bit of thinking about the implications of a society built on the pursuit of happiness. I can recognize how it benefits the individual, but what does it mean for us as believers, and before God, and for the morality of society as a whole? Something in me says that this pursuit of happiness is a rather empty goal, and I think about that book Amusing Ourselves to Death that I reviewed a while back. Are we now in America able to entertain ourselves into passive "happiness" more so now than ever before? Now that we've reached this point doesn't it seem empty and shallow, rather like C.S. Lewis's children playing with mud-pies in the slums when there's a holiday at the beach to be had?

All quotes from :
Adams, John. Philadelphia: Pamphlet printed by John Dunlap, 1776. Boston: re-printed by John Gill, in Queen-Street, 1776.

Ayn Rand, Libertarians, and the Financial Crisis

2010-10-25T21:53:00.000-05:00

I've been carrying around the latest copy of Christianity Today for weeks, trying to find time to work through the articles that caught my eye. Today I finally read, "Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Great Recession: Why Christians Should Be Wary Of The Late Pop Philosopher And Her Disciples"

What the title doesn't tell you is that in the phrase "her disciples", the author points a finger at Alan Greenspan, libertarians, and those that he believes are responsible for the current American recession.

This interests me for two big reasons. First, I read Ayn Rand's tome Atlas Shrugged three and a half years ago just before I left Chicago. I LOVED it, and it is near the top of my favorite books ever list now. This shocked some of my friends, since Rand is known for being a heartless anti-Christian capitalist. She is that and I don't deny it, but she wrote a helluva novel and managed to weave her philosophy and economic theories all the way through it masterfully. I think she's a genius. A depraved genius, but really... that's what most of our geniuses are, right? I don't follow her philosophy but she fascinates me.

Secondly, I care about the state of the economy in this country. I care about politics. I really am not very good at understanding economics, though, so I mostly keep quiet in house discussions between my passionately capitalist husband and our roommate (who Isaac accuses of being socialist or communist or whatever other teasing insult he feels like throwing around on that particular day). However, I do know that most of the conservatives around me point their fingers at big government spending as the reason for our current recession, and this article disagrees with that idea BUT is written by a man who claims to be a fiscal conservative. I was fascinated.

The article's essential point is that Ayn Rand advocated pure selfishness, we/America have followed her in advocating that people and businessmen should rightfully act on that selfishness and always unequivocally pursue profit, and that this is what has led to the unmitigated greed on Wall Street that led to the financial crash we are currently experiencing.

The Economist's Good Guru Guide says, "Ayn Rand—the heroine of America's libertarian right—described her philosophy as 'the concept of man as a noble being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." This is, of course, in line with pure capitalism, and that is exactly why many evangelicals in the US say our system is best and it works, because it is reliant on people acting in line with what evangelicals believe is the nature of man. In the end, man will always be selfish and greedy. So, if you build an economic system in which people are motivated to work within the system because of their own greed and selfishness, the nature of man perpetuates the system.

In a way, evangelicals, Greenspan, and Rand are on the same page, because they all tend to believe that our system is and should be driven by selfishness. Rand glorifies selfishness above all else in a rather shocking way. Greenspan simply glories in the system. Evangelicals don't believe selfishness is good, but they believe the system works because it is based on their own beliefs in the nature of man,, and thus the system is good because it is functional.

The author lays the blame for the current financial crisis not on selfish big government and uncontrolled spending, but on a corporate world of big business that has given in fully to the Randian philosophy of pure selfishness. Like I said, I'm an economic ignoramus, but if it's right that the financial crash is the fault of business and Wall Street and NOT the growing federal debt and spending, then it really does fly in the face of what libertarians are currently claiming and it means we need to rethink the solutions we're throwing out there. He seems to think that we appropriately recognize the great power and potential evil of uncontrolled government but says that the US, evangelicals, and Rand's economic devotees have lost sight of the equally great potential evil within unfettered business. He says:

In Rand's utopia, demons exist almost exclusively in government and religion. Her one-eyed perspective could not see Adam Smith's insight that people of the same trade rarely get together without conspiring against the public. So she, and Greenspan, would never have imagined the CEOs of mortgage companies marketing liar loans to selfish but naive home buyers, while the CEOs of investment firms and irresponsible ratings agencies packaged these junk mortgages as AAA-rated securities to dump into our pension funds. She would blame that entirely on "bureaucrats and do-gooders." Had she and Greenspan only understood what fallen humans will do for 30 pieces of silver.

He says that when we push for business to be without social responsibility, business is demoralized, and that business should never be amoral. He points to our evangelical alliance to pure Randian capitalism and calls it syncretism. He says that we have an obligation to conduct business in light of our faith - with responsible investing, care for our investors and consumers, and care for the poor. He quotes his mentor Sir John Templeton as saying, "My counsel to a school of business management is to teach the business person to give unlimited love, and or she will be more successful." I rather liked this quote:

As a Christian, I believe we have a moral responsibility to act in a socially responsible manner toward the poor and fellow taxpayers who are now on the hook for Wall Street's greed. So I was startled to discover that one outspoken evangelical money manager who claims to "invest as Jesus would"—by which he means focusing on sexual issues—was invested in AIG and Goldman Sachs. Evidently, homosexuality and promiscuity have replaced greed as the root of all evil.

Recognizing that some people will say he is a socialist, he claims to be a capitalist and fiscal conservative and says:

The Financial Times recently published an article titled, "A social vision for the world after socialism." It concluded, "Active empathy is not socialism, but it is social. It does not assume that a statist economy will replace capitalism, but it does point to stewardship replacing ownership."

Fascinating, right? I don't know if he's right in his diagnosis of the problems in our economy, but I absolutely agree that ownership should equal stewardship, and that social responsibility IS more important than many libertarians are currently saying.

Living out the buzzword "community"

2010-10-20T17:58:00.000-05:00

I go to an evangelical mega-church. It's big. You Catholics and Orthodox would cringe upon entering, noting the excessive amount of overly trendy high heels and perfect hair and faded jeans and tshirts. The "worship" would feel like a concert. You'd probably appreciate my pastor's sermons, but you'd likely leave thankful for your small congregation and the beauty of traditional sacraments.

And... actually... those are many of the same things I thought on my first visit. And yet... we stayed. We stayed for several reasons, and one of them has been perhaps the most remarkable thing I've experienced through my time at this church. Intentional community.

In our first weeks of attending we saw that there was a quick way to attend a connecting meeting and be placed in a small group with other couples. There was a lot of talk about the importance of community in being truly known, being held accountable, truly growing and changing instead of just attending church on Sunday. Those are things we believed were marks of a true disciple and a healthy church, and so despite the size of the church we thought maybe, just maybe, this would be place where we could truly get to know some people. That's something we'd struggled with in our previous church... relationship building.

So, we started into something new for us. We'd both been in small groups before, and I'd been in some fantastic small groups with dear friends before, but that's exactly what made it different. Always before a group had been formed after the friendships were already in place, and the group commitment simply deepened those friendships. This time we were arbitrarily placed with four other couples that we'd never met before and we began meeting weekly.

It was not easy to get to know each other. We found we were from a wide variety of backgrounds, had very different interests, and in some cases we had very little in common. For a long time we met weekly with an older mentor couple and did some studies about marriage, and at the end of that I still felt like I was meeting with strangers with familiar faces that I liked but didn't know. Us girls have a number of introverts among us, so we've had to work towards intentionality and bonding. But we did have something in common - a real desire for friendship and authenticity. It's because of that, I think, that what we have now is really remarkable. It didn't come easily - we fought for it.

The guys have something really unusual in the level of honesty and accountability they hold each other to weekly. They have a series of questions about God, their marriages, sexuality, etc. that they ask each other. I've watched Isaac just thrive in this situation of being truly known by a group of fun guys. It's cool to see such honesty between men. I've mentioned before that Isaac and I live with another couple - and that relationship came out of this community group. As a group we've persevered through some pretty big marital struggles, clinical depression, job loss, and financial struggles. I've watched the whole group transition from a vague desire to daily seek the Lord to a personal push by each person to own a daily quiet time of some sort. We know each others' finances and debt and giving- rare in our society. We challenge each other on the way we treat our spouses and the things we have conflict over. We look for ways to serve our church and our society as a group. We struggle to find truth for each situation in God's Word.

For me, it's living out what I see commanded all through the New Testament. We try to bear each others' burdens. Hebrew 10 says, "Let us consider how to stimulate one another and to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near." There are verses about confessing to each other, worshiping together, praying together, challenging each other, mourning together... always together. In a fractured society, it's easy to have a lot of people that you know but no one that you commune with on a soul level. And even if you do have people that know you well, it's rare to have people who are committed to do so as a church, as a body of believers, with the final purpose of worshiping and knowing Christ.

Like I said, it hasn't been easy. It'd be awesome if we always met weekly and it was natural and easy and filled with warm fuzzies. That hasn't been the case for us, but the work we've put into our commitment to each other and to true community has been worth it, because I know I am without excuse before them in my challenge to love people, to love Isaac, and to pursue God. When I start to hide away and feel sorry for myself, I known they can see that, even if I'm glossing it over. They've also been there for us personally in the midst of our summer financial chaos and the adjustment to being pregnant. They've loaned cars, given money, thrown a baby shower, and just... been friends. And that's the biggest thing of all to me.

So... do I go to a mega-church? Yes. But in some ways I also go to a very small house church that meets weekly on Sunday at lunch time in some one's living room. Our little small group community is something I am so thankful for.

Feasting with God

2010-10-14T17:52:00.000-05:00

The Rabbit Room always has artsy, interesting posts. This past week there was a post I loved about one person's experience of getting so wrapped up in their grappling with God intellectually that they'd missed the experience of the Person of God.

God, I finally realized, is not merely a thought I must think, or a proposition I must know. For the first time in weeks, I had tasted good food and rested. I had spent time in the fresh, green glory of the garden, seen the myriad colors, tasted the fresh, fresh air. For almost the first time that summer, I’d had a personal conversation, I had exchanged stories, doubts even, with a friend. And I’d been still. Quiet finally had a chance to still the frenzy of my thoughts.

Sitting there in the moonlight, I came to the knowledge I had so hungered to find. God is the lover and maker, the friend and creator. He reveals his goodness in the tastable, touchable wonder of his world. His love is felt in the fellowship of his people. His joy is what sings in the wind and spices the best wine, and glimmers in the gold of sunset. In the savor of feasts, the cadence of seasons, in apples crunched and friends touched, God is known for the eternal Good that he is.

But I had lived apart from that goodness all summer. I had tried to know God by thinking about him. By working for him. By saying the right things about him. All the while, I ignored the earth and people God made so that I might know his soul. To grasp truth is vital, and I know it is something that must be taught in an age of such spiritual confusion. But truth must be enfleshed by love and beauty, or it will ring empty to the soul. Beauty known and people loved are the great ways that God offers his hands to us while we sojourn here in the earth. By loving, by feasting, by touching his beauty, we grasp him back and let him fill our hearts with joy. Two months of study couldn’t give me what one night of feasting could, because I was made to touch and taste and see the goodness of God.

I love that. I am a high "F", a feeler on the Myers-Briggs scale. So, sometimes, this is easy for me. A dear friend once asked why God isn't found at the bottom of a bottle of fine wine, and I exclaimed, "He is!" I think what is beautiful and good is a reflection of our God, and when we correctly see them as the character and creativity of our God lavished on our world, that is when we are able to most appreciate those things. And oh, how our tired souls are lifted when we relish what is good in life.

Sometimes I can be too tied to logic and analysis and intellectual understanding. Sometimes those things can bring you to worship too, though. Sometimes it's difficult to grasp the beauty of God at all, when we are worn or sick or walking in darkness.

I wish to be someone that revels in the love of God, and that pushes me to revel in the beauty shown in life and love as well.

The House Church of China represented at the Lausanne Congress

2010-10-08T17:21:00.000-05:00

The Lausanne Congress gathers in a couple of weeks in South Africa. It's a worldwide gathering of evangelical leaders. This is the third congress that's been held since they were started in the 70's. Around 4,000 people will attend from 200 countries around the world.

The other day a news article popped up talking about the Chinese house church participation in the conference. This is a big deal - the house church has never been represented before. The growth of the Christian Church in China is probably something that will go on the timeline of major events in Christian history through all time. In 1949 missionaries were expelled from China, leaving behind about 500,000 believers, most of them Catholic. This stat alone is a bit shocking - generations of foreign missions of all types really made very little headway when you consider the size of China. The church had entered China and died twice before. By the 60's the West though the church in China was dead again, and it does indeed seem that most of the tradition of the missionaries died in the communist clampdown.

However, in the 60's something inexplicable happened that I suppose you could only attribute to God because you really can't attribute it to foreign missions, who were effectively shut out of the country. There are crazy stories of how people discovered the Christian faith and began preaching and forming churches, and then mass conversions of stunning proportions followed despite intense persecution from Mao's government. Most of this was happening without Western awareness. Now, 40 years later, the church has grown rather organically from essentially nothing to somewhere between 40 and 100 million professing Christian believers (hard to track when they're still mostly hiding from the government). This is the largest and fastest church growth in the history of Christianity, and it gives China one of the largest populations of Christians in the world.

In any case, as I said, this is the first time that members of those underground house churches have been present at the Lausanne Congress, and check out this news about their presence there:

Lausanne committee of China has shared before that “after praying together, China’s pastors have decided to be responsible for their own expenses and won’t accept any foreign financial support in order to express their gratitude towards the overseas members who have supported them in the past. In addition, they also will fund-raise the traveling expenses for 100 pastors in the less-fortunate and neighboring countries.” “Of the 200 participating nations, (initially) only the U.S. and China did not apply for support from Lausanne International, then India and Sri Lanka were challenged from seeing China’s churches, so they also raised their point of not accepting any foreign supports.”

How cool is that? It's not like Chinese house churches are rolling in dough, and yet they came up with this idea themselves - to pay their own way and then to pay for others.

My trip to China this past summer did not touch the house church movement, and yet some students would quietly mention that they believed Jesus or read the Bible. Other students were always surprised - they assume their world is filled with atheists and Buddhists. Friends and family that have come in contact with house church networks come back incredibly humbled by the quiet and unrecognized faith and leadership they found there. The older believers often came to faith miraculously and often were imprisoned for it. Amazing. We're watching history happen.

*For more info on the growth of the church in China, read the former Beijing Bureau Chief for TIME Magazine's book, Jesus in Beijing. Or just read an article from The Guardian on the topic this week.

How should Christians act when they are the majority?

2010-09-14T17:40:00.000-05:00

What is the unique responsibility of the church in America given that we Christians are the majority in our society?

Christians in America sometimes act like they're this horribly under siege minority that is rapidly losing our freedoms. We are fearful, defensive, and angry at those we perceive as a threat.

I think we're kidding ourselves. I'm not saying this can never happen, it can and probably will at some point, but really our goal isn't to be free, our goal is to serve God, yeah? In any case, it is ridiculous for us to act as though we're under siege when we are some of the most powerful and privileged people in one of the most powerful and privileged nations in the history of the world.

Given that... what is our unique responsibility as the cultural majority? I read a blog (Pond Parleys) that usually writes funny comparison posts about life in the US and life in Britain. Last week they discussed a more serious issue - American religiosity and British secularism. Both the American in Britain and the Brit in the US that write the blog are not Christians. The American quips that she ironically fled the US to Britain to escape religious tyranny. Of course this is an exaggeration, but this is her point:

When I see things like this on American street corners and someone like this on American TV screens -- spouting hate, ignorance and vitriol night after night, in the name of religion, patriotism and the aggrandized sense of moral superiority that accompanies both -- I do feel that I’ve escaped a way of life that, if I’d stayed, I would have undoubtedly struggled with and against. As an agnostic and then an atheist, I have always felt uncomfortable with the pervasiveness of organised religion in my home country and thought it ironic that a nation founded on principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state could be so dominated and divided by that mythical man in the sky.

And then, the Brit in America:

I had a taste of the religious element as soon as moved here in 1990. Most people (in Dallas) were heavily involved in their (mostly Protestant) churches and were almost aghast when I confessed my non-attendance. Many offered to take me along to their church, never for a moment thinking that I had no intention of joining any church at any time. Even in Chicago (lots of Catholics, of which I am the lapsed variety) there's a much bigger percentage of church goers than in the UK.

All this I can live with however. I respect a person's right to practise a religion as long as my right to take a pass is respected in return.

A Christian in Canada (at Emerging Mummy blog) wrote about her incredulity at American Christian politics recently:

The lack of civility has been the biggest concern for me, as I've mentioned before, even more than the lack of common sense or decency I often see portrayed. From the standpoint of an outsider, an observer, my heart is grieved. Not for America as a whole (after all, hardly any of us see America as the hope of the world. Last time I checked that was Jesus.) but rather for those Christian brothers and sisters, the ones that somehow are taking part in this like it's right or good or indicative of their faith in Jesus.
I have always struggled with the ease that Americans seem to have with cloaking their politics, their economics, their prism for looking at "The Other" with their faith. The easy assumption that God is on their side and so take up their causes (often against their own self-interest or against the traditionally Christian ideals) is a passion more akin to the Crusades than the passion of Christ. The patriotism reminds me of worship of the nation-state over and above the allegiance to the Kingdom of God.

I appreciate their honesty. When I moved from Chicago to Texas I was absolutely floored by the blatant religiosity of life in Dallas. Even AS a Christian, I felt uncomfortable with the omnipresence of a sort of civil religion around here. I remember reading an interview with an atheist in a nearby wealthy neighborhood who said she and her husband had decided simply to masquerade as Christians in order to be able to fit in to their community and not be bothered for their lack of faith. Somehow I'm more comfortable with how it was in Chicago - over there my identity as a Christian was different than most of those around me and thus I wasn't painted with a broad cultural stroke as being just like all the other Christians. I got to sort of be a living example of what it actually meant to be a Christian, since only a few people around me also lived out that lifestyle seriously.

This week a blog post on another blog, An American Housewife in London, followed up the post on Pond Parleys. She is a conservative in London, and had this to say:

The too-obvious-to-argue assumption among most Europeans (and many Americans, too) is that America, especially the South and West, is full of religious, intolerant bigots. Everyone can see the horrible protest signs. Everyone has heard similar stories, including the new big story, the Koran burning threat. Obviously Americans are a bunch of bigots, right? Well, there certainly are some bigots, those guys holding the signs aren't mannequins, but they number far fewer than it seems.

She is right that those that make the news are usually the exception rather than the rule. It's true that while the pastor threatening Koran burning is a real guy, he's been universally denounced by everyone I've talked to, and I know some pretty extreme conservatives.

But still, this all makes me ponder. What do we do as the cultural majority in a society? Isaac has worked with pastors in a place where most forms of Christianity are illegal, and for them understanding the persecution talked about so often in the New Testament is easy - it is their life as well. We are different - we live as believers did after Constantine legalized Christianity - when the church gains wealth and power, when it is the culturally acceptable thing to do and what it it means to be distinct is debated.

I'd expect that just as much as we expect moderate Muslims to firmly counteract the extremist, ridiculous elements on the fringe, it's our responsibility to denounce the actions of those who misrepresent Christianity. I would expect us not to cling to our privilege and power fearfully but to lay it down as unimportant in comparison to serving the poor and broken and worshipping our God honestly.

I do think, though, that sometimes the presence of a Christian will make others uncomfortable. Anytime you're with someone with a worldview strikingly different than your own, it is uncomfortable. If a pious Buddhist is made to interact with passionate Muslims, that can be friendly, but the differences still separate. This is true of a passionate Christian when we interact with anyone of a different faith or worldview, be it Islam, agnosticism, or simply secular humanism. It's ridiculous to act as though we are all the same - we shouldn't NEED to be the same. The differences will always be there - however, I think it's key that we aren't so absorbed into a majority Christian culture that we unable to interact lovingly with those that are different than us. In fact, I do believe that if we are fully absorbed into a Christian a Christian culture, something is wrong with this picture. We weren't never meant to be an internally focused people - we were always meant to be a people focused on the world rather than retreating from it. We were always meant to be a people so characterized by love that, like Jesus, sinners are drawn to our grace and the self-righteous are put off.

Christopher Wright - The Mission of God

2010-09-06T20:37:00.001-05:00

Two and a half years ago I audited a night class with Isaac at his seminary. The teacher was great and we always loved driving home together afterwards, intensely discussing whatever had been brought up in class. On one ride home I asked a question that had nothing to do with anything we'd discussed in class. "What is the purpose of the Church?"

It was a broad question but I asked it insistently and I kept asking it of others too. It was driven from my own struggles with feeling purposeless and searching for a career path and future plan. I could have picked something out of my bag of things that seemed fun, but I really felt a need to have a reason for my choices instead of a random frantic search for fulfillment. I also believe that God is working intentionally in the world and that the Grand Narrative that we see played out through scripture tells of His work. He works in different ways at different times too - I am a part of the Church, set in place by God to do His work on earth in this period of history. What is that purpose and work? If I could find clarity on that then I could fit my life to this purpose in one small way.

I found most people answered my question about the purpose of the church something along the lines of missions or evangelism, which I found myself pushing back against quite strongly. Despite or perhaps because of growing up in a community of missionaries, I felt like this was one-sided. Is the purpose of all believers in this era the Great Commission - a command given to the disciples? It's even a debate as to whether it applies only to the disciples or also to the rest of the church as history progressed? It's a few verses in the midst of a massive Bible, and yet we say it is our central purpose?

I was unsatisfied, and in my discussions I happened upon a new book by Christopher Wright called The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative. The title was exactly what I was looking for, and I asked for it for Christmas. That was two years ago. Hah. Lets just say that while this book completely transformed my thinking, it was not an easy nearly 600 page slog! It's really for scholars, and to Wright's credit he doesn't simply say what he thinks. He walks intensively particularly through the Old Testament, which is really nice considering usually we only address the New Testament when it comes to the purpose of the Church. His book is very comprehensive. So... sometimes I wished I was reading a summary. :) Nonetheless, now that I'm finally finished, I can look back in awe at the scripture I've read through about God's mission in the world.

It turns out that Christopher Wright's motivation for studying and writing this book was somewhat similar to my own in some ways:

It was a question about the validity of using a missiological framework as a hermeneutical approach to reading the Bible. Is it possible, is it legitimate, is it helpful for Christians to read the whole Bible from the angle of mission? The immediate challenge that bounced back was: it all depends on whose mission you mean. If by "mission" we are thinking of "missions," and the great and laudable efforts of cross cultural missionaries, then we would be struggling to defend an affirmative answer to the first question. While our human missionary endeavor can find ample justification and explicit textual imperative in the Bible, it would be a distorted and exaggerated hermeneutic, in my view, that tried to argue that the whole Bible was "about" mission in the narrowly defined sense of human missionary activities.

I agreed with him there (in the first chapter) so I eagerly read on and was thrilled by paragraphs like this one:

The Bible renders and reveals to us the God whose creative and redemptive work is permeated from beginning to end with God's own great mission, his purposeful, sovereign intentionality. All mission or missions which we initiate, or into which we invest our own vocation, gifts and energies, flow from the prior and larger reality of the mission of God. God is on a mission, and we, in that wonderful phrase of Paul, are "co-workers with God"....

I was really struck by the presence throughout scripture, from Adam to Abraham through the Covenants with Israel, through the Psalms, the Prophets... everywhere is the strong revelation of a God who has created a people to know Him and be His. There is this driving purpose of God for humanity to be in a knowing relationship with Himself. The consistency of this message and the universality of it (not just to Israel, though Israel was chosen for an intimate covenant relationship) was really striking to me.

You are my witnesses, declares the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me, and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me. I, even I, am the Lord, and apart from me there is no savior. I have revealed and saved and proclaimed - I, and not some foreign god among you. You are my witnesses," declares the Lord, "that I am God." - Isaiah 43: 10-12

Wright says:

Yahweh presents himself as the God who will to be known. This self-communicating drive is involved in everything God does in creation, revelation, salvation and judgment. Human beings therefore are summoned to know Yahweh as God, on the clear assumption that they can know him and that God wills that they should know him.

When we grasp that the whole Bible constitutes the coherent revelation of the mission of God, when we see this as the key that unlocks the driving purposefulness of the whole grand narrative, then we find our whole worldview impacted by this vision. So what does it mean to live out this story? Here is The Story, the grand universal narrative that stretches from creation to the new creation, and accounts for everything in between. This is The Story that tells us where we have come from, how we got to be here, who we are, why the world is in the mess it is, how it can be (and has been) changed, and where we are ultimately going... It is the story of the mission of God, of this God and no other.
Now such an understanding of the mission of God as the very heartbeat of all reality, all creation, all history and all that yet lies ahead of us generates a distinctive worldview that is radically and transformingly God-centered. This worldview, constituted by putting the mission of God at the very center of all existence, is disturbingly subversive and it uncomfortably relativizes one's own place in the great scheme of things.

We ask, "Where does God fit into the story of my life?" when the real question is where does my little life fit into this great story of God's mission. ....

We want to be driven by a purpose that has been tailored just right for our own individual lives... when we should be seeing the purpose of all life, including our own, wrapped up in the great mission of God for the whole of creation. ....

We argue about what can legitimately be included in the misison God expects from the church, when we should ask what kind of church God expects for his mission. ...

I'm summarizing Wright's thoughts and my reactions in a big way, but I find myself using the phrase "the mission of God" a lot these days. It has given me peace with evangelical missions as well. Sometimes the motivations we have are bad - when we wish to see numerical results, emotional highs, salvation experiences, or personal respect and fulfillment. However, when missions is for the purpose of God's mission - of telling of this God who calls all people to Himself through Jesus.... that is the grand mission of the Church, and knowing God is the fulfillment of our humanity itself.

It helps me reorient my life, and my response to church and Christians. What is my purpose? Well, it's quite flexible, as long as it participates in this grand Mission of God.

It turns out Christopher Wright is about to put out a new book that may summarize his thoughts a little better and a little more manageably than The Mission of God does, and it also deals more with the New Testament. It's called The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church's Mission. I really loved Wright's work and thinking, and it sounds like this will be a more manageable summary. Ya'll should read it!

A few political rants that I can hold back no longer...

2010-09-01T16:44:00.001-05:00

1. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over. I know someone in the military who also grew up over in Indonesia like I did, and she wrote about the ultimate outcome of the war. Coming from someone who has been in Iraq and asked Iraqis what they think of it all, I found her post awesomely insightful. Check it out here: http://manjamanis.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/the-ending-of-a-saga/

It just so happens that Isaac and I have very different opinions on the Iraq war and always have. The invasion happened when we were newly dating, and I was looking into American politics for myself for the first time. The passionate debate over the war among our friends got to me and I started doing research on the history of Iraqi sanctions by the US and the UN, the progression to the point of nearly invading, etc. I ended up being quite passionate that the US should NOT invade Iraq and I was deeply disappointed when we did. Isaac felt differently. To this very day we still have the same debate over and over again. Isaac says we can't know if it was justified or not because they quite likely had WMD's. I say, again and again, that the potential presence of something does not justify invasion of a sovereign nation, and our evidence was and is lacking. Years later, we finally end the operation. Was it worth it? Is Iraq better off on this side of things? Gosh, for our sake I hope so, but I have my doubts. I also think the Iraq war distracted from the war that we were actually meant to fight - against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Thus.... here we are today, still fighting in Afgh. and with no end in sight.

2. Last week for the first time I talked to a very liberal friend who passionately supported Obama and now regrets it. For my friend, Obama hasn't been liberal enough, and he idealized what Obama could do in office. I've also seen a number of signs and bumper stickers saying things like, "Voted Obama? Embarrassed Yet?" or something similar. My answer? No. He has pretty much done exactly what I expected him to do to, and I am satisfied. I don't always agree with him, but I didn't expect to. On several things I'm quite pleased with his policies and reactions. On the areas where we disagree he usually has limited power anyways, and Congress holds a greater amount of responsibility. I hold to my main argument during the election, which is the President's largest area of power and influence is in our foreign policy, and in that I quite like Barack Obama.

3. Another friend, Sara, posted about a Mormon friend sort of using their friendship in hopes of drawing her into the Mormon church (read it here). This paragraph from her post was great:

This is how “non-Christians” feel when we only invite them to church events. No wonder they don’t come! Nobody wants to be a project! I’ve never felt like the potential convert–I didn’t know what it meant to be on this side of the fence, and you know, I didn’t like it! Leave me alone, let me follow Jesus and if you want to be my friend that had better entail a lot more than just religious excursions. Because if it doesn’t then you really aren’t interested in friendship and I am out.

4. Speaking of interactions with people from another faith, yesterday I had the privilege of attending an event for Dallas Christians in which a Muslim mullah presented basic Islam, including what the Koran teaches about Jesus. It was great. One Christian stood up during the question and answer time and asked an aggressive and confrontational question, and I was relieved when he was told that this was a friendly interaction and not a time for debate. It's amazing how often we try to be combative with people who believe differently than we do - what do we think this will help? No one is ever converted by angry debate, and they already know our differences.

I am amazed by the fear in our culture at the moment about Islam. Among the Christian community it is deep-seated and tied in with eschatological misconceptions and end-times theories. It extends to such small things, like people being afraid to refer to God as "Allah", because it is a "Muslim" word. This is all a bit strange to me, considering Allah is the Indonesian word for "God" and fills the Christian Bible and Indonesian worship songs.

5. If we are afraid to associate ourselves with anyone Muslim because of our fundamental differences, then it is ridiculous that we are willing to march with Glenn Beck in his call to bring America back to God. I understand aligning yourself with someone because of similar political convictions, but when your political convictions are based on returning to religious principles, it makes no sense to follow someone who doesn't even agree with you on the basics of God and faith. It boggles the mind, I tell you. The rationale evangelicals use against Muslims and for Glen Beck is completely contradictory.

Okay, did I just bother just about everyone that reads my blog because you almost all disagree with me politically? Sorry 'bout that.... ;)

Entertaining Ourselves to Death.... with the internet?

2010-08-28T22:56:00.001-05:00

I just finished Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death. It was first talked about by my favorite Lit proff in college, and since then so many people have referenced the book that I knew I had to read it and finally got around to it this summer.

It IS a fascinating read. It's written in the mid-80's mainly about the dangers of television. The main arguement is that the way we communicate changes our culture and even what is being communicated. The medium DOES matter. And.... he thinks that television is changing every aspect of our culture negatively, and because we mostly passively accept TV as a medium and rather say what is good or bad on TV, we are being swept away passively.

It's interesting reading his book 25 years later. Some of what he predicts happening I believe really has happened, particularly as he identifies specifics of how the medium of TV affects our children's education, religion, and politics. It's true that it has become super important for our politicians to be resonably attractive and entertaining people that can stand up on John Stewart's show and make us feel like they are confident, easy-going, and funny. Most likely Lincoln and Washington wouldn't have passed such a test. It's true that passionate, emotionally persuasive people have become the most prominant voices in religious circles - the same types that match the TV host personality that we have learned to like and be entertained by. It's true that by teaching our kids using programs like Sesame Street and Barney, they learn that education should be entertaining and have a low tolerance for the mundane.

What I think is profound about Postman's thoughts is that he identifies how dangerous it is when we let ourselves be overly entertained. Back in Postman's day and before it, people were worried by the Communist scare and were afraid of a totalitarian government domination. Postman says:

For all his perspicacity, George Orwell would have been stymied by this situation; there is nothing "Orwellian" about it. The President does not have the press under his thumb. The New York Times and The Washington Post are not Pravda; the Associated Press is not Tass. And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference... it is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled.

I find TV and the rise of an entertainment culture to be dangerous for the same reasons. As a kid we rarely had TV and when we did our time watching it was strongly limited. It's not that my parents hated TV.... in fact, when a TV is on my Dad is drawn to it and can't pay attention to anything else. That's part of why they limited it - they recognized the power and draw of it. After we watched a movie my parents always made us analyze what the movie was teaching. I so appreciate that they never let us be passive recipients of entertainment.

Postman again here:

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first - the Orwellian - culture becomes a prison. In the second - the Huxleyan - culture becomes a burlesque... What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.... When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

However, Postman writes in a world not yet inundated with the internet. Considering how strong Postman is on the fact that changes in the medium of communication changes the message and the culture, I'd be interested to see how the internet changes things from the TV age. TV is still important, but I'd say I am more influenced by the internet. I spend far more time on the net. I don't get my news via TV, I read internet news articles, so in some ways we are taken back to a print age.

However, the internet still fascilitates information in "blurb" form rather than detailed analysis like you can find in books. The internet somewhat lessens the importance of the "entertainer" factor that is so important in the faces that lead TV. Bloggers, Web editors, etc., do not have to be charismatic in person. However, it does have the effect of leveling the playing field because anyone can write for the public eye. We hear less from truly educated experts and more from just public opinion. It also increasingly inundates us with information so that we have almost all information at our fingertips, but very little system to incorporate all of this trivia into. Postman identified some of this in the TV world:

The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. I say this in the face of the popular conceit that television, as a window to the world, has made Americans exceedingly well-informed. Much depends here, of course, on what is meant by being informed... in America everyone is entitled to an opinion... but these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth or nineteenth century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week.

I think in some ways the internet improves on television. It requires more personal initiative, it reduces the role of pure entertainment, and it can connect you with people instead of just a tube showing strangers. However, it can still be trivial, it still can distract us from meaninful interaction with people, and it still doesn't encourage in depth learning.

Interesting. I wish I could read Postman's thoughts on the Internet Age.

Smashing My Idol of Self-Sufficiency (and taking Dave Ramsey down with me?)

2010-08-25T13:50:00.002-05:00

It's been quite a summer. I mentioned a few posts ago that there have been such moments of great awe and moments of deep discouragement... and a lot of the deep discouragement has had to do with ending up in the toughest financial situation we've faced in our marriage so far.

I wrote this to my closest girlfriends when I described what I've gone through:

Here we are, struggling with debt from emergency bills and not having enough. I wonder... is this our fault? Have we done something wrong? I feel ashamed of our situation... do I need to take this situation and find where Isaac and I have been irresponsible and learn from it? Especially with a baby coming - everyone in this culture expects your life to be SO stable before you have children, and I have cried out to God that I will love this child when it comes but I find it very frightening to be carrying a child while having no idea how we will pay our bills....Dave Ramsey, the Christian financial guru, thinks you should have about six months of money saved up to live off (on top of retirement funds) so that you're never stuck in an emergency. I feel that kind of pressure - to have a deep stability financially.

There is a long emotional journey that goes along with all of this, but before I knew how to react to my emotions, I really needed to process the actual theology behind the issues I was emoting about.

Here's the thing. Dave Ramsey and other Christian financial programs work to counteract our culture of excess. They work to get people out of debt.... this is good. They work to keep people from spending without any discipline... this is good. They encourage using money wisely and also giving generously. These are also good things.So - don't take the critique I'm about to make and think that I'm dismissing everything these guys teach.

There is something subtle about the cultural mindset behind these programs, though, that I think can be very negative.

For instance, this is the description of Dave Ramsey's book Total Money Makeover from his website:

With The Total Money Makeover, you'll be able to:

•Design a sure-fire plan for paying off ALL debt
•Recognize the 10 most dangerous money myths
•Secure a big, fat nest egg for emergencies and retirement
•Positively change your life and your family tree!

Some of this is fine, and the marketing lingo is annoying but not bad. What I've put in bold is what I think can be bad. The publisher says, " Ramsey offers a bold, no-nonsense approach to money matters, providing not only the how-to but also a grounded and uplifting hope for getting out of debt and achieving total financial health."

Here's the question. Getting out of debt is clearly biblical. But what is "financial health?" Is achieving that goal necessarily good? Is securing a big fat nest egg biblical? I don't think having a nest egg or having a very healthy bank account is BAD, but if it is what is spiritually desirable, then the financial struggles Isaac and I were going through were a spiritual issue.

Don't get me wrong. I think Christian financial programs are super helpful for people struggling to get a handle on the budget. It's the cultural idol BEHIND all of this that I'm concerned about here. I really appreciate these thoughts:

For Ramsey, up is up and you save your life by saving your life. In the gospel, the way up is down and you save your life by losing it. Ramsey’s goal is never to have to worry about money again. The gospel way is to be willing to have your needs met day by day. Ramsey’s way is to be self-sufficient, relying only on your financial foresight, savvy and accumulated wealth. The gospel way, regardless of how much money one possesses, is to be utterly dependent upon God for everything. Ramsey’s way is one of increasing wealth which is a way to escape suffering and need. The gospel way is to expect suffering in this life and to be increasingly needy and dependent. Ramsey cannot conceive of failing to tear down one’s barns and building greater. The gospel cannot conceive of even taking a staff on the journey, but to trust that God will provide whatever is needed. (from Mark Farnham)

That is it exactly.

To follow Christ, I am expected to be financially responsible to God. For Isaac and I, our lives and our money are His. We seek to obey. My question should not be, "Are we financially stable?" but rather, "Are we obeying and living to the glory of God?"

This path of obedience does not garuntee financial stability. Thus, financial instability need not cause shame UNLESS it stems from our own financial irresponsibility - extravagent spending beyond our means, etc.

1 Timothy 6:17
Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.

Luke 12:33
Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Philippians 4:11
I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. 12I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

Luke 12: 29-30
...Do not worry about it. 30For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. 31But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.

Actually, the scripture on money is overwhelmingly counter cultural (and there's a lot of it). That last one is the one I read in my own devotions this summer, and the one I was convicted by. I have worried about finances. I have never been someone who idolized wealth, but I think I have made financial stability (self-sufficiency) into an idol - maybe just because the culture around me idolizes it and I don't want to be looked down on, but even still that is indirectly accepting a cultural idol. My goal should be the kingdom of God and His glory.

And so, in light of that, Isaac and I went back and asked ourselves a few questions.

Is our life direction right now in obedience to and in service to the Kingdom of God and for His glory?
Secondly, assuming our life direction is set directly, are we managing the money we're given well? Is our spending disciplined, are we living within our means?
Thirdly - since we analyze and answer a hesitant yes to both of those questions but recognize our ability to self-deceive, have we opened up our lives and finances to our church body so they can advise us? Thank you, dear community group, for your loving support, advice, encouragement, and gifts to us!

And then, since I hesitantly answer yes to those questions, I am then expected to walk forward in obedience, without shame, not surprised by suddenly "living in want" when emergency car and medical bills hit us, and in belief that God takes care of those who follow Him.

That is where I am entirely humbled, because at the very time I was wrestling with these things, our finances were amazingly, incredibly provided for. It wouldn't have been bad if we'd had to work our way through these bills for the next year, but oh it has felt as if God has so clearly spoken in the midst of my struggle to work through all of this and said, "See? You follow Me. I will take care of you in My way, in My time, but don't expect for it to be stable."

These are the good lessons - the ones that include an emotional journey and stick with you as solid biblical, theological truth. It's good to recognize how tempting I find our cultural idol of self-sufficiency and to push to say that our stability is never the goal... my obedience and His glory is.

And let me just say one more time that Christian financial plans, including Dave Ramsey, are awesome and I have nothing against them, except when they or we are motivated by the desire for control and self-sufficiency or prosperity instead of just responsibility with what we've been given. And... on the same line as everything I'm saying here, a word from Francis Chan:

The "Ground Zero Mosque" and our constitutional rights

2010-08-17T08:30:00.000-05:00

When I first saw an article about the "Ground Zero Mosque" when the whole thing was first hitting the airwaves, I skimmed the article and thought, "Wow, slow news day. They're trying to make something controversial out of something that is clearly not controversial."

So much for that idea.

I think the traction this story is getting is ridiculous. It's all about a political battle now, and the original story is virtually impossible to see. This morning I heard some guy on conservative radio talking about how we can clearly see that this mosque is being funded by the VERY imam who planned the 9/11 attacks.

Really?

Okay, let's just review. We're talking about New York here. It's a city filled with refugees, immigrants, and internationals. It is is an international city. There are many Muslims there, just like in Chicago. There are already two mosques near ground zero - Masjid Manhattan four blocks away and Masjid Al-Farah ten blocks away. They are small one-room mosques, but the immigrant communities they serve are large, and there's a need for another mosque in the area. So, an imam from Al-Farah starts leading prayer in a vacant space that used to be a Burlington Coat Factory that is two blocks from Ground Zero. That community plans to turn their empty storefront into a community center and mosque.

I think a few points are important to note here.
1. It's their space. I believe they own it. It's private property, not government land.
2. It's not on Ground Zero.
3. There are already other mosques in the area.
4. There's a Muslim community looking for a place to worship.

What is the issue here? It's not a mosque being built on Ground Zero in a twisted attempt to make a religious point. It's someone developing private property to meet a need in a local religious community.

It seems like we're reacting in a similar way to McCarthy during the Red Scare of the Cold War. Someone mentions socialism or communism and we're willing to undo the established rights and freedoms of our country because we're afraid of the current world political issue.

Some people say this is an intentional provocation. It seems like initially it was not meant to be a provocation, but I could be wrong. Regardless, now that the issue is politicized, if pressure forces them to build elsewhere, it will be making a point. If they choose to build right where they are, it'll seem like an in-your-face point as well. It's a lose-lose situation.

It's possible that they are being backed and funded by strong Muslim organizations (though I think that is jumping to conclusions that are against the evidence about the imam that can be seen from his own background).

Would it matter?

The constitution set in place our right to worship freely and build our own places of worship. Since this is a planned building of a private place of worship, they have the clear right to build it. That's just constitutional. We should be defending their constitutional rights if we want to keep ours.

If Israel threatened to shut down churches because of the history of the Crusades that put bad blood between Jews and Christians, we'd be mad, right? After all, we think Christians should have the right to build and worship in Israel. In Indonesia, where I grew up, I sure hope that they'll allow people to build churches in Ambon despite the religious riots that took place there a few years ago. So. I think a Muslim community should be allowed to build a mosque in New York, regardless of 9/11.

Actually, someone is building a Muslim Community Center literally right across the street from where I sit now. It's big. It's in the heart of conservative Texas and the Bible Belt. I'm a Christian. Still, I absolutely defend their right to build there.

Sources:
Article and Video News Report, KTLA: Landmark Status Denial Paves Way For Ground Zero Mosque
Article, New York Times: In Lower Manhattan, 2 Mosques have Firm Roots
Editorial, Economist: Build that Mosque
Article, Newsweek: War Over Ground Zero
Article, Wall Street Journal: Sides Dig In Over Ground Zero Mosque (this one has a photo of the space)

Favorite devotions meme

2010-08-16T19:11:00.001-05:00

Cheeky Pink Girl tagged me in a meme about favorite devotions. She's a conservative Catholic blogger who writes very honestly and sometimes stridently. The meme she tagged me in isn't something I would usually think of writing about myself, but she commented that she was interested to hear how a Protestant would answer the question.

So, in the light of perhaps comparing just one Protestant's devotional practices with others, I'll answer.

What are my favorite devotions?
I'm going to modify the question a little a walk you through a few devotional materials I've used over the years and my thoughts on them. My thoughts have often changed from when I first used these materials!

Oswald Chambers - My Utmost For His Highest

Ah, good 'ol Mr. Chambers. This has been huge in evangelical circles, so I asked for it in high school and used it for a few years. There's a little page of devotional thoughts for each day of the year. Like other similar devotions, it has profound moments that can be convicting and thought provoking. I still think they can be valuable, but I stopped using this type of one-page devotional when I grew so cynical about evangelical culture. At that point I didn't want to hear one man or woman's devotional thoughts - those can be so arbitrary.

Beth Moore Bible Studies

Bible studies of various sorts are huge in the evangelical world. I have really appreciated a few of them. When I was in high school I enjoyed the study "Experiencing God" by Blackaby, and in college I joined the floods of women doing Beth Moore Bible studies. These studies allowed me to dig deeper or perhaps get a broader perspective on the text then I would have been able to in my own limited knowledge. On the other hand, they can take a lot of time and, while being rooted in scripture, still reflect the culture of the author. Beth Moore is so girly, and so Southern, and sometimes I feel like she's from a whole different world than my mk self. I find it pretty difficult to get into these types of studies now.

Prayer Journaling and Walking
I used to be a champion journaler. I would journal daily, I would journal about everything, and I filled books. I express myself in writing and so as I talked to God I did so best through journaling prayers. In high school and college this was wonderful - I could pour out my heart and feel like I was truly communicating with God. I also used to take long walks, especially in high school but also often in college. I worship in the context of nature, and being able to pray while surrounded by the mountains, the flowers, the fresh air, the beach.... somehow I feel the presence of God and great joy when I simply walk and pray (and sometimes sing!). These days I journal less, mostly because the emotions of my teenage years have faded and I do see how narcissistic and shallow this can be if it is my own devotional practice - so focused on self and never moving outside of my own thoughts and emotions. I still think there is a great place for it, but it isn't my primary form of devotional exercise. As for walking, unfortunately Dallas isn't a great walking city. Maybe one day I'll get this back!

The Valley of Vision - Puritan Prayers
I have two books that I've been given over the last few years that are just prayers. The first is shown here, The Valley of Vision. It's a collection of prayers from the Puritans. Sometimes their language is quite different from what we use today, but sometimes the shock value of that is really good for me, because it really makes me think about what I'm praying. I also have A Handbook to Prayer - Praying Scripture Back to God by Kenneth Boa. This is simply scripture put into the form of prayer. I have really enjoyed using these books to guide prayer that is not my own narcissistic thoughts and words.

Ancient Christian Devotional: A Year of Weekly Readings by Thomas Oden
Reading the Church Fathers and Church liturgy is something that I've picked up since college and my disillusionment with evangelicalism. I longed for a connection with the early church, with the church throughout history, and with the church outside of my culture. This devotional is one option I have in that arena. It takes readings from the church lectionary for each week and pairs them with observations on the passages from the Fathers. Your time is begun and concluded by an ancient creed or prayer. I find some of this deeply meaningful. However, a little paragraph or two taken from the Fathers out of context doesn't necessarily offer much - I think to truly gain from them you would need to read more.

Scripture Reading
Despite all of the great and perhaps not as great resources I've listed above, I am totally a Protestant Evangelical, I suppose, because the vast majority of my devotional time past and present is spent simply reading scripture. I pick a book and walk through it. If a section really intrigues or stumps me, I pull out commentaries and read more or discuss with Isaac. If something is very powerful or applicable, I'll read it several days in a row and journal about it. I generally intersperse a Psalm or a few Proverbs whatever book I am also reading. I know reading scripture in a void can lead to misinterpretation, but that danger is minimized when you read scripture in the context of your church, your Christian community, and the church throughout history (which is why the Fathers are so valuable!). I don't always find that scripture hits me deeply, but I do love it. It guides my praise, engages my mind, challenges my life... and is new all the time, despite reading it my whole life.

"Patristic Fundamentalism"

2010-08-10T16:42:00.000-05:00

I've been neglecting this blog.
First it was because I was traveling.
Now I'm home, but whenever I start to blog I do what's easiest - post stories and reflections from my trip to China. So... if you want to know what's been on my mind... head over here and read my China stories!

There are things stirring to post about, though. I wanted to mention this brilliant post on Fr. Ted's blog about what he refers to as patristic fundamentalism. He is reflecting on and quoting from an article by Dr. Pantelis Kalaitzidis.

Really, he pinpoints one of the things I am most uncomfortable with in the Eastern Orthodox church, despite being very drawn to many other things.

Orthodoxy’s efforts to define itself by adopting an absolutist and oppositional attitude Western Christianity has caused the Orthodox to become exclusivist and even sectarian, despite proclaiming in the creed a belief in a universal/catholic church.

Thing is, the respect and emphasis on the historical continuity from the early church is one of the things that my husband and I love most about the Orthodox Church. However, if you treat the Fathers wrongly, you can end up with patristic fundamentalism. Kalaitzidis says:

The consequences of this ‘return to the Fathers’ and the subsequent overemphasis on patristic studies were, among other things: (1) the neglect and devaluation of biblical studies; (2) an ahistorical approach to patristic theology and a subsequent exaltation of traditionalism;(3) a tendency toward introversion and Orthodox theology’s near total absence from the major theological developments and trends of the 20th century; (4) the polarization of East and West, and the cultivation and consolidation of an anti-western and anti-ecumenical spirit; and (5) a weak theological response to the challenges posed by the modern world and; more generally, the unresolved theological issues still remaining in the relationship between Orthodoxy and modernity.

Fr. Ted's conclusion was really encouraging to me. If people within Orthodoxy are identifying this and are willing to fight it, it says to me that there is a place for others who are uncomfortable with this tendancy, and that you can question adn wrestle with things within Orthodoxy:

The end result of this process is that the Orthodox by invoking the Fathers for every problem we face has simply created a “patristic fundamentalism” exactly like the biblical fundamentalism Orthodox reject, including an endless proof texting of the Fathers. Passages and quotes are totally removed from their context and put in collections of sayings that are treated like magic. No longer do the Orthodox feel the need to study, wrestle with or interpret the Scriptures for now all they have to do is read quotes from the Fathers which become the Scriptures for Orthodox. Orthodoxy today sometimes behaves as if it is a house which must keep its doors shut and blinds drawn on its windows so as not to see the world, yet somehow hoping the world will be attracted to the house by its strangeness.

If these problems are identified and fought against, there is great hope for growth.