Honey Badgers, Anxiety, and the future of the church

At our conference Orders Event a few weeks ago, we talked a lot about being anxious. The talk was from a systems theory perspective and focused on how pastors need to be non-anxious participants in the system to effectively lead change and help the system to be healthy.

I’m not going to comment on the style of the presentation,  but I realized as the day went on that I am not at all anxious about the future of the church.

Maybe it is because I’m one of those “young adults” who don’t put a lot of stock in the institution itself. (As much as I hate the constant labeling of young adults and the characterization of who they are and what they believe – sometimes the label fits and I’m going to wear it with pride).  The truth is, if it all went upside down tomorrow, I have faith and trust that God would birth something new.

There is a feeling all around us that we need to do something to right this leaning ship… that it is all in danger of capsizing or falling apart. But would that really be so terrible?

Don’t get me wrong… Part of me loves this church.  I know its not perfect.   It is trying to hear God’s call and struggling to answer.  It is broken and beautiful. I see and recognize its flaws, but I love it. I’m still here, aren’t I?

But part of me really doesn’t care if the church is here tomorrow… as long as we are being faithful to the one we claim to worship inside the walls of those fancy buildings.

It is… well, interesting to live in the midst of this both/and situation.  I find myself both working proactively to restructure and revitalize what is present, while I find comfort and solace in small communities of folks who gather to read and discuss and lift up hopes and dreams. You might be able to tell just by how I worded that sentence that the hard proactive work makes me want to tear out my hair more than it bathes me in the hope and joy of the Lord.

But I’m still here.  Still plodding along.  I’m not worried.  I’m going to do what I can.  I’m going to use the best of my resources.  But I’m not anxious.  If our best human efforts fail… if this institution can’t be saved by our hands, so be it.  Maybe then we’ll finally remember the church isn’t a place but a people. Maybe we’ll see a resurrection out of death.  Maybe that’s what the whole gospel is about. Not us, not our attempts… but the love and grace of God that overcomes all.  ALL.  Even the “death tsunami.”

It strikes me that maybe it is exactly my “live or let die” casual spirit about the whole future of the church that keeps getting me invited to those grueling conversations about what we are going to do to save ourselves.  While others worry about this and fret about that and leverage positions and ministries and try this and that… I’m the non-anxious presence in the room.  I can sit and listen.  I can interpret.  I can pray.  I can offer guidance and direction.  But as much as I love this church, I also have the ability to detach myself from its survivability.  I don’t necessarily have a dog in the fight.

As I talk with my other young adult colleagues, we see a completely different church ahead of us.  A church of collaboration and connection, networking and accountability.  We know that there is money in some far off pension fund, but we don’t actually believe we’ll ever see it.  We buy into the system, but we aren’t counting on it to sustain us.  We are just at the beginning of giving 40+ years to the institution… whether or not it is actually around for that long. We love it, but if it all fell apart, we’d pick ourselves up and move on to the new thing God is doing.

But please, don’t take that to mean that we aren’t trying, that we are lazy, or that we are just sitting back waiting for it to die.

What it means is that in the midst of doing this thing called church, we are eagerly looking around to see where God might lead us next.

Anxious?  Nope.  Not in the least.

Honey badger don’t care.

fact checking in an age of T.M.I.

Too Much Information. I’m not entirely sure that is what was envisioned by the framers of amendment one when they gave freedom to the press. I’m not sure that was what was envisioned by the inventors of the internet, or cable tv, or email.

But we are inundated constantly with information. And depending on which sources we use for our information we read completely different “facts.” Even within one publication we can have radically different portrayals of the truth. Or opinion – which has begun to substitute just fine for truth these days.

As a pastor, I face this when I have congregants reading different interpretations of scripture from vastly different sources and theological frameworks. While it provides and opportunity to talk about why these interpretations might be different, do we ever reach back and find out what the truth of the text is? Is there Truth to be found? or is it all a matter of interpretation?

Certainly this isn’t a new problem. That’s why throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition there have always been schools of thought that argued with one another. There is a reason that Jesus had to interact with Pharisees and Sadducees and Zealots and Essenes. They were all holding on to different pieces of the truth, and holding on to them so fast that they became the Truth for each.

We do this in the church. We do this in politics. We do this in schools. We do this everywhere. Because the idea that we can’t fully grasp the Truth – that it is something that is bigger than us, is scary. We want black and white – truth and falsehood, good guys and bad guys. The in between stuff is a mess and we don’t want to live there.

I chatted with a fellow pastor a while back about how people seem to like morality sermons better than grace sermons. Because with morality and justification sermons the choice is clear – do this, don’t do that. When we talk about love and forgiveness and grace, suddenly we are in the gray area… showing love to a murderer? having compassion for a drug addict? Witnessing someone transform their lives? it’s messy, and hard and challenging, and we would much rather label people as good or bad – even labeling ourselves as good or bad is easier than accepting messy grace.

But the world we live in is not black and white. Reality is dirty and messy and complicated. When we finally dig deep and get to the truth, sometimes we learn that it cannot always be reduced to either/or… sometimes it is both/and.

So what are we to do when we are swimming in a culture of information and mis-information?  How do we know which way to turn?

First, hang out with people who don’t think like you.  One of the best ways to fact-check your information is to compare it with what other people are hearing.  I am involved in both a weekly bible study and a monthly pastoral gathering and one of the things I cherish the most is that we don’t always agree.  We approach theology and scripture from different angles. We place our emphasis on different words.  But in dialogue with one another, we peel back layers of delusion and confusion and we all grow because of the experience.  I also try to listen with patience when I am home visiting my family and the news is on.  While we might not turn to the same sources of information, we can help one another to gain a larger picture of the truth by asking questions, sharing what we have also hear about that situation, and trying to understand the rhetoric behind the news. The key to this piece of advice is that we cannot immediately get defensive.  We must listen and share with grace and love.

Second, seek outside sources of information that you know to be trusted. Not all questions can be answered adequately with a google search, not every website has accurate and honest information. In the midst of the chaos, I’m becoming increasingly grateful for websites like snopes.com. They help sift through lots of information and help to clear up some of the mis-information out there. But they do so in a way that realizes that there is fact and fiction out there. They are willing to say that parts are true and parts aren’t. They show you which is which. They show which items are a matter of interpretation and opinion. They back stuff up with resources. They are indespensible!!!! I am now in the habit of running any email forward I recieve through snopes.com – just to see what’s out there. But I am sad to say that I have had to actually fact check news stories lately as well. While I am not aware of any specific website that does this for theological dilemmas, I am open to suggestions! The biggest rule here is to seek out a source that doesn’t have a dog in the fight.  Look for a source that doesn’t have a financial investment or tie to the information and how it might be used.

Third, get as close to the source of information as you can. If you are trying to study the bible – take some lessons in greek or hebrew.  Carry a dictionary with you and look at what a particular word might mean.  Spend some time studying the context and what is going on in history at the time.  The same principles apply to news stories.  You are going to be much farther from the truth if you are reading a blog responding to an opinion page article about the Super Bowl than if you were there in person.  Reading in-depth sports news articles from the day after adds another layer.  Get as close as possible to the source as you can for the most accurate descriptions.

Fourth, think carefully about “crowd sourcing”. There is an idea in the Wesleyan tradition about Christian Conferencing – that when we gather to discuss and discern with the help of the Holy Spirit we will find God’s will.  We use it to guide important decisions we make (like voting on issues at General Conference) but also in the discernment of truth and what sources of information are important to consider.  I believe God is good and that it is possible to discern the truth among many, so I want to lift this up as an important principle to share.  In scripture study, this might be thought of as communal lectio divina, where we allow the responses of the group inform us.  In today’s networked world, simply asking a question like “How did Whitney Houston die?” on facebook or twitter might get you the right information and from a number of people with a number of different sources. But it could also lead you directly into the midst of mis-information, rumors, speculation and nonsense. Accept “crowd sourced” information with a grain of salt and let it lead you deeper into some of the other principles we have mentioned here, rather than simply being your final stop.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when we try to pretend that this world of information is cut and dry and easy.  When we skew facts and figures, stories, and information, we do so in order to get OUR point across, but in doing so tell only part of the story. It seems like everyone has their own corner on the truth – a news station for just about every perspective you might care to have, a biblical translation that cuts out all liberal or conservative viewpoints. We are so good at owning up to our biases that we actually forget there are other sides of the story to tell. What used to be sources of real news and information have become just another layer of scum you need to dig through in order to gain a smidgen of knowledge.

Truth is not easy to find.  It will take work. It will take some self-awareness to see outside of the fishbowl we are swimming in.  But in this world of far too much information, it is work that we must do.

postmodern holiness

I have been having a discussion with some colleagues about what it means to be disciples and pastors in the world today.

The question was raised about what it means to be holy and to seek after God’s holiness… especially in the context of the postmodern world we live and move in.

Some of us find the dichotomy of holy/unholy something of a misnomer.  Modernism tended to place these things at opposite ends of a spectrum.   We could easily categorize something as good and bad, holy and unholy, do this and don’t do that.

Yet I think that postmodernism has helped us realize that this is a much more complex question.  Holiness and unholiness are not matters of morals, nor are they black and white categories.

What is it that makes something holy?

Holiness comes about because something is set apart by and for God.

We typically use that to mean that as pastors, we set ourselves apart from the ways of the world and demonstrate a certain way of being. In the modern era, this meant things like don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t lie or cheat, don’t swear. Do wear suits and ties and below the knee skirts (for us women pastors out there).  Holiness becomes a check-list, standards for living, high expectations, a list of places you should not go.

But is that what biblical holiness is all about?

Didn’t Jesus do crazy things like turn water into wine and eat with sinners and touch the unclean?  Didn’t he get down and dirty and messy with his disciples?  Didn’t he preach the good news in every day language and use images that ordinary people would understand?

Which brings me back to the question.  What makes something holy? Does our answer change in this post modern world?  Who decides the answer to that question? What if holiness in a postmodern world is more about how we use and redeem the things of this world, where they are, in order to speak the good news of God?

I have been reading Elaine Heath’s Mystic Way of Evangelism.  She shares the http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=amomono&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=080103325X&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr stories and experiences of these amazing saints of the faith who have shared their faith through deepening their relationship with God.  One of those people is Phoebe Palmer, who realized that

holiness is about a life given irrevocably to God, which then in union with Christ the Sanctifier is empowered to be in God’s redemptive mission in the world… Christ is the altar, and whatever touches the altar is made holy

When things are given over to him.  When they are set apart, surrendered, turned over to our Lord, they become holy.  It is about God working in the midst of these things, not about us or the things themselves.

I did a funeral a little while ago and the family was not wanting to stand and speak, but had a few words they wanted me to share on their behalf.

They especially wanted to include the phrase – “He may have been an asshole, but he was OUR asshole.”

I wrestled with what to do.

If I’m completely honest with God and everyone, cuss words do occasionally come out of my mouth. Usually in the heat of the moment on the disc golf course when a drive goes about 5 feet and then hits a tree.

Things that are said on the disc golf course are different from things said in the middle of the church sanctuary from the pulpit. Maybe this is a false dichotomy. Maybe as a pastor I shouldn’t say those words even on the disc golf course… but I do.

If the me that God loves says those things out in open spaces… and if this family felt like they needed to say those words about their loved one… then I felt like I could take that language to God and make it a part of that time of worship and celebration.

So I said it.

I didn’t leave it there, however. I used that phrase to talk about how we are not perfect people and a funeral is not a time to paint a rosy picture of someone’s life – but to be honest and to celebrate who that person was in all of their fullness… and also to celebrate that God comes to each of us in our imperfection and loves us enough to save us.

Like Jesus, I met them where they were. I also found an opportunity to transform the language they were familiar with and the experience we all had that day – to use their expression in order to speak the gospel.

It has taken me a while to write about that day, in part because I’m never quite sure what others might think.  But this week in conversations about holiness and being a pastor, I had to admit that it was one of the most powerful experiences of community and ministry I have experienced. And that means that it needs to be shared and celebrated and lifted up.

Holiness is not something that I can pretend to have attained.  I am far from perfect, although I seek to be more Christ-like each and every day.

In the same book mentioned above, Bonaventure’s understanding of the imago dei is lifted up.  He believes that

humanity is uniquely charged to image the second person of the Trinity, in that humans should mirror God as Jesus mirrors God, as beloved children of God.

I pray continually that through God’s grace I might love as Jesus loved and who Jesus loved: the hurting, the broken, the alienated, the unclean, the grieving, the joyful, the sinners, the saints.

Maybe in this postmodern world the question to ask about holiness is not: is it in the rules for me to do this or not?  But will this better help me to love and serve this person?  Can this language/experience/person be brought to the altar of Christ? Is there an opportunity for the gospel to be heard right here and now?

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

The world we live in today has radically changed.

The people in the world have changed.

And we haven’t quite figured out what that means… yet.

At the risk of sounding like an old, worn out, cranky person, I can’t figure out what is wrong with kids these days.

That’s at least where this post starts from.  A frustration with the young people I work with week to week in youth group.  They are energetic, quick to pick fights, easily berate and offend one another, like to have fun, push buttons, and exhaust me on Wednesday nights.

I’m not trained to be a youth minister.  And the lack of respect for us as leaders and for one another as peers really drains and frustrates me.  I’m not sure how to respond, how to build the trust that leads to respect, how to encourage them to think about what another person is going through.  I’m stuck.  But I love these kids and I’m going to keep at it.

What I have realized however, is that this is not just a problem I’m having with one particular group of kids.

Lack of respect is a larger societal problem.

And I think it has everything to do with authority.

I had read Carol Howard Merritt’s Reframing Hope: Vital Ministry in a New Generation a couple of months ago.  In her book, she talks about the diffusion of authority, the growth of grassroots and networked communities.

I love this reality.  I love the fact that more people have a voice and power and the ability to determine their own destiny.

Yet at the same time, I live in institutional structures that depend on authority and respect in order to work.

The role of the pastor used to carry with it respect and authority.  The pastor was a leader in the community and people listened to what the pastor said.  That is not the case, today, as people double check what their pastor says with what the latest television evangelist or popular religion book says.  On the one hand, I applaud these efforts.  But it makes it awfully hard to encourage my church to think in a new way when they keep hearing different messages from other places.

But not only pastors have this problem.  So do teachers.  So do medical professionals.  So do scientists.  So do community leaders.  As power is distributed and shared, as knowledge is filtered downward, everyone thinks they know it all… or at the very least have access to the information.

Take the field of medicine for example.  I’m not feeling well and so I check some online database and think I know what I have.  So I go to my doctor and present my symptoms and now I have colored my answers with what I think I have.  If my doctor suggest something else or running tests, I look for a second opinion.  My doctor has to worry about me suing them or governmental laws and regulations and their own paychecks.

The fact that we all have power means that we no longer trust and respect one another.  We are quick to assume the worst.  We are not willing to see another person as our partner, but as a threat to what we know and believe and hold to be true.
We are living in this strange “inbetween” place. The postmodern diffusion of authority is a good thing… but our society has not yet fully adapted and been transformed to this new reality. We are living with feet in both worlds – one in which we have power and knowledge and another where there are experts in their field who have answers we need.
The simple truth is… we need experts.  We need people who truly focus and go deep in certain areas of knowledge to ask questions you can only ask and answer if you live in that field.
I cannot spend my lifetime becoming proficient in Greek and weather patterns and geometry and quantum mechanics and the policy implications of petroleum based energy.

But for the decisions I make in my daily life, I might need access to that knowledge.

So, we need conversation.  We need a two-way path between those who know things and those who have questions and insights from another perspective.
That cannot happen unless we respect one another.  Unless we can ask questions without demonizing.  Unless we can see the person sitting next to us as a human being who has just as much claim and voice and power as we do . Unless we are willing to assume that someone else just might have our best interests in mind. And unless we are ourselves willing to learn, to be taught, and to work for the common good.

What does all of this mean for postmodern youth ministry?

I think first of all it means that I have to respect the experiences and struggles that my youth are experiencing.  I need to hear what they say and make sure they have a voice and are heard.
This entails not only personally listening, but also making sure that they are heard and respected by one another.  The “how” of this first point is something I’m still working out.  It works much better in smaller groups, but we just don’t have the number of adults needed to have small groups.
This has practical implications for how we plan our activities, the kind of ownership we give to our youth, and the rules/covenant we make with one another.

Second, as adults, we have to build our own trust with the youth from scratch.  It doesn’t just come with the job.  Just because I am 10-15 years older than they are and I’m a pastor does not mean they will listen to me. And every mistake, every slip up, will set us back all the way to the beginning.

This is part of the reality of our “inbetween times.”  We simply wait for authority to rub us the wrong way and their cred is completely gone.  Discounted.  Done. If a teacher makes one mistake, they are colored that way forever.  If a pastor says something you don’t like or agree with, you are out the door or stop giving. If a doctor makes one mistake, the patient goes elsewhere. There is no room for grace with the limited authority figures we do have.

Third, we need a structure and a covenant to get us through this. Respect is not going to be the first impulse of our relationships with one another and so we need to find ways of holding one another accountable.  At the beginning of this school year, we worked hard to make a list of five things we would all agree to do in our life together.

But it has to stick.  Our kids have to believe in what those things say.  We as adults have to live by those rules ourselves.  And we need to revisit it on a regular basis to remind ourselves of who we are and why we are here.
I don’t have the answers to this problem.  Part of me wants to start from scratch, because what we are currently doing in our programs and relationship building is not working.  All I do know is that our respect for one another, our ability to honor the authority each person brings, has to be the foundation for any work we do with one another.

a strange beauty… #reverb10

A few days ago, I happened to catch an interview with Simone Dinnerstein on NPR.  She has come out with an album that is an interpretation of Bach masterpieces for piano called “A Strange Beauty.” The pieces themselves are wondrous and in the interview she talked about how she almost invisions them as jazz compositions.  The voices shift, there are notes that speak to her that are not a part of the melody, the little discrepencies that truly make these pieces different.

In the album notes, she quotes the scientist Sir Francis Bacon: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” The most beautiful things are not those that are symmetrical and perfect, but that draw our attention, make us slightly uncomfortable until we settle within it, creates a holy and beautiful disturbance in our souls.

December 8 – Beautifully Different. Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you’ll find they’re what make you beautiful. (Author: Karen Walrond)

So what is that about me?  What makes me a strange beauty?  What are the qualities that stick out like a sore thumb, and yet are the reason people draw close?

It is a hard question to think about. I often want to leave these qualities for someone else to name, but this whole process is about self-reflection, about seeing ourselves the way others see us.  So here is a list of what I have come up with:

My eagerness – foolish, naive, excited, passionate, unafraid.  I’m willing to dive in, raise my hand, say yes before I have a chance to think about it.  Part of this is my youth, but I think my congregation loves it in me because I inspire them to take chances as well.

My shoes – I have always loved shoes.  I remember these platform mary janes I had in high school.  Now, it is the red flats, the pointy toed, high heeled boots, the slip on suede privos… they share my personality for the day and are a conversation piece.

My inquisitive side – I always have questions. I always want to know more.  Maybe this makes me strangely annoying rather than strangely beautiful.

My ability to see gray areas – I find myself straddling the line between positions.  I see the pros and cons, but more than that, the passion and emotions with which people make their arguments.  I am a peacemaker, a negotiator, and because of this, I almost never have “the answer.”  It is not for a lack of confidence in my position, rather my love and passion for the process that has led others to their own.

My voice that developed very late – I was never a good singer growing up.  My mom told me once that I was off key as we sang aloud in the car on a trip.  I’m not sure I quite got over the sting of that until I was much older… I loved to sing out loud, whether I was good at it or not.  In high school I took voice lessons, sang at competition, and never did well.  My upper range had not developed and I was a very sad second alto because my very lower range wasn’t the best either.  Sometime in college/seminary, I found my voice.  This past year, I have sung solos twice in church.  I have found a confidence and a passion in my voice I never knew I had.  And I think the confidence is what makes my voice beautiful. I’m not afraid for people to hear me sing anymore.

pause button

I know, its been a while since I posted last.  I have five posts lined up in the queue waiting to go, but I haven’t had time to work on them.

The next installment of the “Postmodern Church and the Farmlands of Iowa” is what is holding everything up.  One book needs to be read and digested before that post can go live.  Keep checking back!!!

Postmodern Church and the Farmlands of Iowa… Part 3

In this installment, I want to talk about some of the “best practices” that I see coming out of emerging, missional, and postmodern churches. Some of these practices are mentioned in Diana Butler Bass’ book, Christianity for the Rest of Us, but they also come from Kester Brewin’s, Signs of Emergence. A few of the “best practices” are ones that I have been introduced to as I have been in conversation with pastors across the country.

First, I think in emergent churches there is a deep shift towards becoming a community of practitioners. Rather than offering services to be consumed, these congregations invite individuals to become a part of a communal pilgrimage. Or as Dan Kimball claims, the emerging church will have to teach people “that they are the church and that they don’t simply attend or go to one.”

Faith becomes “a craft learned over time in community,” according to Bass, as she describes the Seattle Church of the Apostles which takes seriously this communal pilgrimage. Realizing that many in the community had no experience whatsoever with Christianity, they developed a process called The WAY, focused on creating pilgrims rather than members. In the year long journey, “the goal is to help them at their own pace to come into a living relationship with Jesus Christ that takes over the center of their life.”

As I have seen this lived out, on the ground, many emergent faith communities are actually small groups that are connected to more institutional churches.  In some ways, I think of them as that magic 10% of the people who get it and who really want to live out their faith.  As Taylor Burton Edwards has talked about Wesleyan missional groups and accountability groups and class meetings – in some ways he has encouraged people to focus on those people who want to take the deeper plunge. Their journey and witness can become a catalyst for other transformations in the lives of your congregation members and in people completely unconnected to the church. Praxis rather than doctrine rules this shift.
Another “best practice” is that these churches take seriously their location. Kester Brewin describes these churches as adaptable systems that resist standardization. While the modern scientific perspective took something from one context and directly applied it to another, the postmodern realizes that cookie cutter ministry will not work and that each church needs to be authentic to its own location.

For example, Bass describes an Episcopal church that began a Hispanic congregation for new immigrants. In their worship practices, and especially in communion, they felt they needed to pay attention to what it means to be “home”:

Think of the joy of going home to the house you grew up in, with the smell of your mother’s cooking in the kitchen, the tastes of food, the sounds of family. Here, like your mother’s table, the Lord’s table welcomes you home. Here we are an extended family in the Spirit through communion. You are all members of God’s house.

That might seem comforting to us who fondly remember what it is like to be gathered around a parent’s dinner table.  But how much more welcoming is it for a community of people who are far from the homes they grew up in.  How much more inviting is that statement for a people who are creating a new home in unfamiliar territory.  When you are disoriented and alone, the reminder that God welcomes us into a wider family is powerful.  The goal is not to market to a specific audience or offer a product; rather the church must look seriously at how the gospel comes alive within the experiences of the people.

In Indianapolis last year, I was able to immerse myself in the Earth House Collective and Lockerbie Central United Methodist Church.  They recognized that their neighborhood was quickly changing and that their dying congregation needed to adapt.  So they transformed their basement into a restaurant and their fellowship space into a coffee shop and they tore out the pews and in addition to Sunday night worship, they host plays, dance performances, movies, and concerts.  Their church became a community center and thousands of people come in through their doors each year. That is not something that I can just transplant into a rural community – but it authentically came from their location near the Indy arts district.

The third thing that I find imporant in these churches is their spirit of discernment. Brewin describes this as creative waiting:

So against our hasty judgment, and in God’s scientific wisdom, before we can experience the transformation that is vital to our survival, we will be required to wait. To be acted on gently, gracefully, and peacefully. Shaped, not crushed; guided, not dragged.

The Church of the Epiphany in Washington, D.C. has adopted the more traditional Quaker practice of open worship.  They are asking what God wants for them as a church by listening together in small groups. They gather to hear the truthfulness of God. There are no speeches, no panel discussions, and no debates here, only the deeply countercultural act of silence… When ready, someone shares… the speaker, who is never interrupted by the group, tries to focus the presentation on God’s presence in the midst of these concerns.

This practice is about deep openness to change rather than the modern church’s resistance to it. Just imagine if a congregation was able to say, “just because we’ve never done it that way before, doesn’t mean we can’t.” Bass reminds us that the Christian story is about metanoia or “the change of heart that happens when we meet God face-to-face.” To deny this, is to deny our calling.

Finally, these congregations live with “both/and.” This is the postmodern notion of being comfortable with paradox and contradiction, yet it is also deeply Christian. When asked what he had learned during his long life about the Christian journey, Elton Trueblood responded with the word “and”:

It is good and bad; it is made up of life and death; it is being close to God and sometimes distant… It is the task of the Christian to live in the ‘and,’ in the ambivalence of life.

All the vital congregations Bass studied lived in this tension. They were “creative and traditional, risk-taking and grounded, confident and humble, open and orthodox.” The church I interned with in Nashville, Tennessee was large enough that some of those tensions were felt.  We were a fairly diverse group of folks – liberal and conservative, traditional and yet also willing to try new things.  A small and powerful worship service began on the fourth floor of the building in an old theater space and I think for a year and a half – the folks who gathered there really lived in that tension of the “both/and.”

These four characteristics are what have inspired me about the praxis and theology of the emergent church.  I find in each of them deep biblical roots and have seen the transformation that occurs when they are allowed to take center stage in communities and congregations. But for the most part – that happened in urban contexts, in population centers, with resources like money and talent and time to help foster them.

What happens when the theology and practice are transported to a small county seat town in Iowa?  Stay tuned…

Postmodern Church and the Farmlands of Iowa… Part 2

So, the first thing I want to tackle is some semblance of a definition.  What on earth are we talking about when we say “postmodern” and “emergent.”

The simple answer is that there isn’t a simple answer.

In The Emerging Church, Dan Kimball describes the post modern world as:

An emerging and developing worldview and culture pursuing what is beyond modernity. It holds there is no single universal worldview. Therefore, truth is not absolute and many of the qualities embraced by modernism no longer hold the value or influence they once did. It can still be defined as we like, since it is still forming and developing. (The Emerging Church, 58)

Fundamentally, postmodernism is a reaction to the modern world.  And the modern world was itself a response to a premodern world (something we quickly forget). The main thing we want to consider is the idea that the modern person believes that reason leads to universal truths and that power and faith can be placed in both reason and science. Now, the words reason and science don’t sound like terms we throw around a lot in rural congregations… but the fact that we organize our thoughts into universal truths absolutely appears.

The main way that modern people do this is through metanarratives, a term coined by Jean-Francois Lyotard. These are overarching stories that make sense of the world and place everything in context. Whether this is the notion of Progress or Communism, Democracy or Christianity, these narratives claim to be objectively true for all people.

That sounds mighty nice.  But the problem, as Heath White points out is:

Modernism, with its emphasis on reason, insists on resolving or eliminating the differences between people. But this leads eventually to coercion, oppression, domination, cruelty, and abuse of one form or another. Anyone who believes in One True Culture – one right way of doing things – is, knowingly or not, a closet tyrant. (Postmodernism 101 , 43.)

The postmodern person is someone who has lost faith and trust in reason and these metanarratives precisely because they have failed. They have become aware that these conflicting metanarratives cannot all be “True” (note, that was with a capital “T”) and they recognize that other narratives, cultures and peoples have been suppressed by them. Thus, postmodernism is the rejection of absolute, objective moral, social and political claims.

A great example of this is the theory that claims if we spread democracy abroad, then conflicts in areas like the Middle East will be solved.  However, we fail to take into account that democracy evolved out of a specific Western religious and cultural context.  Simply implanting that metanarrative onto another context has proved to be next to impossible. And that doesn’t even get into the question of whether it is moral or ethical to impose one way of doing government onto another people.

The problem for people of faith is that the Judeo-Christian worldview is precisely one of the metanarratives that is called into question through this deconstruction of modern thought. And here the church folk run screaming away from anything labeled “post-.”  What we have to remember, however,  is that this critique of metanarratives does not mean that we are flat out rejecting God or the faith that we have carried.  Instead, what the postmodern Christian is aware of is that their narrative is not alone in the world, nor does it have a monopoly on the truth, nor is there a single, universal way of being Christian in the world.
Of course, the first obstacle that pops up into my mind, and the first response of my folks in the pews is: What about Jesus – doesn’t he say he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life?
Yes, Jesus does.  But what it means for Christ to be “the truth”… that’s exactly what we are trying to figure out. Is it capital “T” Truth?  Is it truth for me?  Is it a rational truth that I must assent to or a truth about a way to live my life? Is it the only truth? Are there other truths? And if so, is Jesus a part of them, also?  (If you have ever heard the story of the five blind men and the elephant… you get the idea of where this can go)

While, in the modern world, symbols pointed to exactly what they represented and had one meaning, in a postmodern worldview symbols, language, and culture are all deconstructed. Postmoderns are comfortable with paradox and look for inherent contradictions, something Heath White describes as irony. Or as Dave Tomlinson puts it:

image and reality are so deeply intertwined that it is difficult to draw the line between the two. (The Post Evangelical, 75 )

What is symbolic?  What is reality?  Can we change the symbols and convey the same truth? In another culture will the same symbol carry a completely different meaning? And with this slew of questions, we look around and find Santa on a cross, Garth Brooks doing pop music, and Buddhist-Christians. Or perhaps, in the more common manifestations, we have a lack of denominational loyalty, church shopping, spiritual but not religious folks, and self-help preaching masquerading as the gospel.

In this postmodern and post-Christian climate, it is no wonder people are confused.  As he describes the effects of such cafeteria style choices, White writes:

All this borrowing, stealing, adding, subtracting, grafting, and splicing of traditions leave postmoderns without ‘roots’ in the sense that anyone raised in a premodern culture might have had them. There is no all-embracing, unquestioned and unquestionable cultural envelope that keeps them secure in one way of doing things. They have traded roots for freedom and choice because, after all, deep roots keep you stuck in one place. (White, 129)

Diana Butler Bass also describes this sense of rootlessness, using phrases like “spiritual nomads” or “strangers in a strange land.” (Christianity for the Rest of Us, 22-23.)

Okay, so we have this background of metanarratives being dismantled and people feeling rootless and not knowing quite where to turn… and we have (I fear) a church that is still stuck in a modern mindset. We are still trying to fit people into molds, we are still proclaiming metanarratives, we have five-point plans of salvation. EEEK!

This might be where some many most churches are… but this is also where the “emergent church” movement comes in. There are so many books and blogs and youtube videos out there, but one resource that really stuck out to me was the book Christianity for the Rest of Us.  In it, Diana Butler Bass points us toward the reclaimed role of the church.

Rather than proclaim a new metanarrative, she believes we are to invite one another into the life of the Christian faith. For White, we can do so through sharing and experiencing the promises we have received from God – not hoping that things will get better through natural progress (aha – there science and reason poke their heads in again), but trusting that “in the face of death, we have the promise of resurrection” (White, 155).

I stumbled across a blog post today (after this had been up for a bit) by Tom Sherwood about the postmodern critique of Christianity, which is entirely fascinating.  This section in particular caught my eye:

One of the distinct differences between the Bible and the other metanarratives mentioned that Lyotard rejects, is that the Bible is based on faith, not universal reason… It is this appeal to faith, along with the liberative character of the narrative that allows the Bible and Christianity to rise above the critique of incredulity toward metanarratives. When the Bible and Christianity become oppressive, or rely too heavily on universal reason, Lyotard’s incredulity towards metanarratives applies…

Correctly understood, the Bible is not a metanarrative. Lyotard would not reject it as a metanarrative, as it is neither inherently oppressive or self-legitimating using universal reason. Instead it is the story of how God works in communities and the history of the Christian story. The Biblical narrative is extremely important to Christianity, but Christians need to take a step back from modernism and look at what can be learned from the ancient Christians. The Bible is a story of faith, it does not rely on universal reason to prove what it says. Instead, the stories are proven true by the people that live out the continuation of the story.

For Bass, that is exactly the role of the church: to transform lost spiritual nomads into Christian pilgrims.

In order to do so, the church must hold together tradition, practices and wisdom with a keen self-awareness. It must remember Barth’s claim that the church takes no one social form and that “every institution is affected by the culture in which it lives and especially the culture in which it was born” (White, 14). The church must allow its style, practices and doctrines to change as it attempts to be faithful to God in particular contexts and  among particular peoples.

Doug Pagitt has a new book out called Church in the Inventive Age that I need to get my hands on.

He would change that list I made above of style, practices and doctrine and talk instead about our cognitive beliefs, our values, our tools/structures, and our aesthetics. He rightly points out that when you start to mess with any one of those, folks get downright uncomfortable.  But I think in some ways, he is pointing to the fact that our doctrines, our values, our styles and our structures themselves become idols.

What I am interested in are the congregations that have discovered ways to acknowledge this postmodern shift within their churches and by doing so they are not only thriving, but are transforming lives as they attempt to be faithful to the gospel. In part 3, we will look at some of what we can learn from some of the churches that “get it.”