Ecclesiology

Tue - September 5, 2006

Does it Make me a Bad Person...

...if I think this should really happen?

...if I think the people who made this decision should be forced to memorize the genealogy at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew?

Posted at 12:54 PM |

Wed - July 5, 2006

Putting the Pieces together.

You get a piece here and there from conversations with people, patterns of worship, the structure of meetings, talking to custodial staff, listening to neighbors who aren't members, and even sitting on the furniture.

Learning a new church culture is a bit like putting together a puzzle of a stereogram. You get a piece here and there from conversations with people, patterns of worship, the structure of meetings, talking to custodial staff, listening to neighbors who aren't members, and even sitting on the furniture. You move the puzzle pieces around a bit and stare. Then you do it again. And again. And again.

Eventually you begin to see things, but it takes a lot of focusing and unfocusing. And sometimes you are not sure if you actually see something or if you just think you are seeing something. Here's the thing: I've only been here two and a half weeks. It's going to take a lot of moving the pieces around, and I don't even have most of the pieces yet!

Still, I'm beginning to see ways that I can be useful. I think one of the most useful things I can do at this point is ask good questions.

Posted at 10:32 PM |

Thu - June 29, 2006

Dinner with John Wesley

I was about to say something about it to him when he whipped around to fix me with a sharp look and asked, "do you know why Christians have been so ineffective in transforming the world?"

I was having dinner with John Wesley the other day. We sat in my back yard in the fading daylight. I stretched my legs, slouched in my chair and sighed, feeling full. John was a coiled spring. He leaned forward and seemed ready to leap out of his chair. He had hardly touched his food. He still had a bit of corn stuck in his long gray hair. I began to say something about it to him when he whipped around to fix me with a sharp look and asked, "do you know why Christians have been so ineffective in transforming the world?"

My brain had already slowed down for the evening. I had to work to remember what we had been talking about previously. I stalled.

"Well, I've heard lots of sermons that ask that same question. Preachers always have plentyof opinions on why Christianity is ineffective. Some say the problem is that the church is too exclusive. Others say it's because we are too inclusive. Some say we've been polluted by the secular world. Others say we've made a false distinction between the secular and the religious. Some people say the church has failed because of modernism or postmodernism, stagnation or revolution, apathy or enthusiasm. I don't know John. Is it a spiritual failure? Is it social? Is it political? It could be any and all of those things."

John made a face. "Foolishness. I'll tell you why Christians have been ineffective. It's one word." He stabbed his finger in the air.

"Money."

I rolled my eyes. Here we go again, I thought.

"Christians are stingy," he said. "They are great at earning all they can, pretty good at saving all they can, but lousy at giving all they can. People gladly welcome Jesus into their hearts, but they are reluctant to let him into their wallets."

"Look, JW," I said, "I know that people don't give enough, but surely that's only the symptom of a deeper..."
"Money!" he said, cutting me off by stabbing the air again. "You told me that the Christians of your day give less than 2 per cent of their income to God. Two per cent!" He took a drink of water, then he cocked his head like a bird, looked at me through one eye and asked "Do you tithe?"
"Well, sure, I tithe," I said.
"Ten per cent?"
"Yeah, ten per cent."
He smiled a thin smile, and I saw his crooked teeth. "But only ten per cent."
I held up my hands. "Hey, that's a lot of money!"
He became pastoral again, the way he had been earlier. He put a hand on my arm. "Dear brother," he said, "I know it seems like a good sum of money. But all of your money belongs to God. You live in the most prosperous country in the world yet you cannot let go of more than ten per cent of your income. And you a pastor! You all look for spiritual or political or social reasons for the failure of the church. Look within yourself. I tell you that your money is spiritual, and political, and social. Brother, can you tell me that you earnestly desire to seek first the kingdom of God? Do you sincerely believe that God will supply you with what you need if you seek the Kingdom?"

I should have known better than to expect a quiet evening talking theology with John Wesley. I should have known that he would make it personal.

Posted at 09:15 PM |

Sun - April 16, 2006

Emerging Reporting

But I do think we have lost something when we draw our defining boundaries by whether someone agrees intellectually with two questions about the nature of Jesus and one question about screwing, instead of whether or not someone does the will of my Father in heaven.

A good piece, as usual, from Get Religion.

Tmatt says that by asking three questions, you can find out a lot about someone's trajectory in Christian thought:
1. Did the resurrection of Jesus really happen?
2. Is salvation through Jesus alone?
3. Is sex outside the sacrament of marriage a sin?

What seems pretty obvious to me, though, is that for many "emerging" folks, the proper way to answer these questions is with another question.
1. What do you mean by "really?" And is resurrection just about a dead guy coming back to life, or is there some implication for me and how I live my life?
2. What do you mean by salvation? Going to heaven when you die? Or, for an alternative question: do you mean Jesus the Eternal Word of God, The Lamb of God, Slain from the Foundation of the World - or do you mean the blonde-haired blue-eyed Jesus in that picture? Does revelation of Jesus' saving power have to happen through an explication of evangelical theology, or can that revelation happen through some other means (like reading the Bible)? What does the preposition "through" mean? Can you be saved "through" Jesus and not be a Christian?
3. When Isaac took Rebecca into his tent, was it sin? Or was it marriage? Does it matter if the person officiating your wedding did not believe it was a sacrament?

For me, it's pretty simple: yes, yes, and yes. But if you stopped there, you'd be missing a lot. And I guess the thing that really gets up my colon is the big follow up question:

Why these three?

If you look at the history of Christianity, there have been many defining questions. There was a time when the defining question was about where you stood on the nature of the Holy Spirit: did the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son, or just the Son? I've tried to get people upset about this, but it just doesn't seem to happen. It was enough to help provoke a schism between East and West, but people today just don't seem to get their panties in a twist about it. Why is that, do you think?

I recognize it isn't a reporter's job to probe to the level of cultural analysis. We don't ask those kinds of questions because they aren't important to the readers, right? But I would want readers to ask themselves why are these the defining questions? A year ago, in Alabama, taxation of the poor was a defining question for Christians - for some of us. For some reason, lots of so-called Christians don't seem to think it matters how we collectively treat the poor. "It isn't a moral issue," I even heard someone say. I nearly had an aneurism over that one.

It seems pretty clear to me that those three questions speak to the anxiety of evangelical Christians about establishing boundaries. I don't mean "boundaries" in a dismissive way. Boundaries are important. There are some things which are orthodoxy, and some things which are heresy. But I do think we have lost something when we draw our defining boundaries by whether someone agrees intellectually with two questions about the nature of Jesus and one question about screwing, instead of whether or not someone does the will of the Father in heaven. This is because conservative evangelicals have set the terms of the discussion.

I don't deny that the questions can tell us a lot. But I think that they tell us more by how they are asked than how they are answered.

Posted at 10:22 PM |

Thu - February 9, 2006

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

Reverendmommy posted a link to a truly amazing advertisement for a church worship service.

Reverendmommy posted a link to a truly amazing advertisement for a church worship service. I love it!

Her blog is also excellent. And she's a fellow Candlerite. Woohoo!

Posted at 01:42 PM |

Tue - December 6, 2005

Gertrude Fillibuster Writes a Letter to the Editor

Well, if you, like me, find yourself in this situation, you might also find that simply telling all your friends about it on the phone doesn’t quite satisfy your honor. I’ve found that the best thing to do in such a situation is to write the Bishop.

Everyone says, “it will never happen to me. These kinds of things happen to other, less fortunate, less well-bred people. But it will never happen to me.” I thought the same thing, until the day it did happen.

My pastor didn’t shake my hand.

Now, some might excuse it. They might say, “we’re all human, we all make mistakes.” But isn’t a pastor supposed to be a representative of God? Isn’t a pastor supposed to try to be like Jesus, to love everyone?

Well, he was standing right by my pew, and he had just shaken my neighbor’s hand. But then some new people came in the door, and he turned away from me and went to talk to them.

Needless to say, I was shocked, embarrassed, and insulted. That afternoon I called six of my friends to ask them what they thought about it, and of course none of them could believe it.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be so offensive if it weren’t for all the other things this pastor has done, like bringing electric guitars into God’s holy house, and exchanging the Truth of God’s Word in the King James Bible for this “Message” translation that so many lapsed Christians and their heathen friends read.

Well, if you, like me, find yourself in this situation, you might also find that simply telling all your friends about it on the phone doesn’t quite satisfy your honor. I’ve found that the best thing to do in such a situation is to write the Bishop. If the insult is slight, such as waiting until the day after you go into the hospital for surgery on your in-grown toenail to visit you, you might settle for writing his (or, God bless you, her) District Superintendent. For those of you in congregational systems, the same advice will apply to writing your board of deacons or other judicatory body.

I find that when writing the Bishop, it is best if you try to establish your credentials. Tell him (or her, for you poor souls who struggle under female leadership) how long your family has been a part of this church. If your grandparents were founding members, so much the better! Members of families who have long been part of the church have a special blessing from God, and will get first seating in the Kingdom.

Be sure to tell how much you give to the church every year, and that if you withheld your giving, the church couldn’t possibly continue. This is not a threat, just a statement of fact - you are an important member of the church. While the church might be able to get along without some of its poorer members, it can’t get along without you! Let the Bishop know that you have plenty of treasure stored up in heaven, because you’ve been investing it in the offering plate for a long time. When we get to heaven, you will have many stars in your crown, so it is important that God’s earthly church listen to you carefully - after all, scripture says that we will judge the angels!

If, however, like me, you stopped giving long ago, you can point out that it is offenses like the most recent one that led you to withhold your offering. Still, you have done so much for the church already, and it isn’t right that you don’t get the reward of respect that you so richly deserve.

It is best if, rather than list just one specific complaint, you can point out how this one event was just a string in a long line of incompetence, meanness, and unholy living. In fact, I find it helpful to keep a journal, so that I have a nice long record of wrongs, just in case I find I ever need to refer to it after being slighted in some way. In this way, you can confirm that this one event was not isolated, but is part of a calculated effort to insult and ignore you.

For example, I’ve recorded the number of times the pastor has visited Beulah, my neighbor. Poor Beulah is a shut-in, and can only get out of her house occasionally, such as when she has an appointment at the hairdresser, or when the weeds get high around her mailbox and she has to use the weed-eater. Well, the pastor has only visited her twice. Twice! And yet he takes his friends to the movies all the time. I guess he can’t afford to waste his precious movie-watching time with poor Beulah! He says he is doing “relational evangelism,” but I don’t see much evidence of Jesus about it. Would Jesus spend his time at the movies? Of course not! He would be visiting Beulah, patting her hand and watching Wheel of Fortune.

I also find it helpful, when writing the Bishop, to point out how this pastor’s behavior relates to the moral deterioration of the rest of the world. With pastors like this, is it any wonder our denomination is losing members, while the First Pre-Rapture Church of Jesus the Risen Conqueror is building a new 15,000-seat worship center? Sometimes the Bishop needs to be reminded of these things.

So, friends, if you are unfortunate enough to have one of these young, fresh-out-of-seminary pastors who have not yet learned how we do things in church, heed my advice. If you give the devil an inch, he will take a mile. I don’t know what they teach pastors in seminaries these days.

Sincerely,

Gertrude Fillibuster

Founding Granddaughter of First Methodist Church of Frogbottom, AL

(This parody inspired by the Bishop's weekly message.)

Posted at 03:55 PM |

Fri - December 2, 2005

Pontius Pilate and the (Post) Modern

In the Gospel stories, I can only find one instance where epistemological questions are mentioned. It is when Jesus of Nazareth stands before Pontius Pilate, and the good governor, who represents all the power and might of Rome, who has legions of soldiers armed with the best military technology to do his bidding, looks into the face of a bound and beaten prisoner, and asks, "what is truth?" People in power have the luxury to ask such questions.

(Pic from the Vatican)

Can we please stop talking about epistemology and the evils of postmodernism with reference to how we do church? It is so completely irrelevant that it hurts. There is little further from the purposes of an incarnational, missiological, disciple-making church than discussions about the philosophies of this or that thinker or how we apprehend truth. Rorty, Austin, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, all are very interesting, and I enjoyed discussing them in graduate school. They might even be great topics for a church set in university culture. But they have little to do with disciple-making. Reading Tall Skinny Kiwi today pushed my buttons on this topic (in a good way). Andrew Jones has a series of excellent posts on the Church emerging. Today's is on postmodernism, and he is right on target.

I do think these are important topics. But most of the time, they are mere intellectual acrobatics; red herrings dancing with straw men. It is so much easier to launch into a multisyllabic monologue on the nature of "truth" than to deal with a call to repentance.

In the Gospel stories, I can only find one instance where epistemological questions are mentioned. It is when Jesus of Nazareth stands before Pontius Pilate, and the good governor, who represents all the power and might of Rome, who has legions of soldiers armed with the best military technology to do his bidding, looks into the face of a bound and beaten prisoner, and asks, "what is truth?" People in power have the luxury to ask such questions.

What excites me about the Spirit moving through the Church today is that we're beginning to see the absurdity of Pilate's position. The Empire of This World believes it has a monopoly on Reason, Logic, Truth, Religion, Power, Life, and Death. Jesus is its undoing. He represents the alternative Kingdom - the Kingdom of God. Every statement about Jesus that we make: Lord, Savior, Messiah, Shepherd, Word, Way - is a threat to the power of church, academy, and state. Edward Said pointed out that Kant talked about Pure Reason even as slave ships traveled from Africa to the New World. Our church leaders talk about Absolute Truth even as entire continents are decimated by AIDS and as our country pursues disastrous economic and environmental policies. The Church is beginning to see that the Emperor of This World has no clothes, and that its true allegiance belongs to a different Kingdom. At least, that is what I hope is happening.

You can lay discussions of "metanarrative" or "social discourses" over the top of this confrontation, and they will connect or overlap at points. I think that is why discussions about new church movements and postmodernism are so interesting. But to get caught up in them, or to mistake their grammar for the divine conversation actually going on here is a mistake. What you've got is a story, pushing you to a point of crisis. And although we might wonder out loud, with our mouths, about the nature of truth, the real question that bugs us and and that we are afraid to ask is: Am I going to wash my hands of his blood? Are we as the church going to attempt self-absolution and self-justification, allying ourselves with Pilate and the Empire - or are we going to 'fess up and start living radically different lives?

Edit: Another good post on the subject over at Bridget Jones Goes to Seminary. (12-3-2005)

Posted at 02:03 PM |

Mon - October 17, 2005

Does "Praise" Music Deserve its Reputation?

There's an excellent post about the vacuous nature of so much praise music at Pretty Fakes.

I go back and forth on the issue. As I've said before, there is some really lousy "traditional" music as well. There are hymns in the UM hymnal that are basically pointed theological agendas set to music. Someone needs to tell seminary professors that just because they have profound thoughts, they don't need to set those profound thoughts to music.

And I don't think it all boils down to "taste" either. When you have a Christian music industry under the same economic pressures to churn out churchy hits as the pop music industry, it is not surprising that they latch on to certain formulae. Besides, it's way too easy to rhyme "skies" with "eyes."

At the same time, as much as I'd like to see it happen, I don't think Steve Taylor's stuff will ever go over big at most worship services. There is good contemporary Christian music - it's just hard to find among all the dreck.

Posted at 08:12 PM |

Tue - September 20, 2005

WorshipConnection Conference Pics

The Story worship team did a fabulous job, as usual. My second workshop went better than my first, but I think both were useful.

Worship was in Shackford Hall. This is a view from the balcony. We keep the lights low, which is very dramatic, but isn't great for pictures. You can see our simulated campfire there in the middle.

Worshipers visit the candle-lighting station.

Here is a chapel beside Lake Junaluska...

...the acoustics of which make your ears tingle. As they played, the musicians kept hearing other instruments playing with them - an organ, a harmonica, a violin.

We walked the labyrinth outside the chapel. It was a strangely serene moment with a bunch of guys who, just a few minutes earlier, had been riding in the van and making fart jokes.

We were missing a few of our worship team, but these folks managed to rock the house anyway.

Posted at 10:33 PM |

Sat - September 10, 2005

Plug

We order the beeswax tapers we use in our alternative worship service from The Orthodox Monastery of the Glorious Ascension in Resaca, Georgia. Their bookstore can be found here.

We're planning on taking a trip there in the near future.

Posted at 12:23 PM |

Tue - August 30, 2005

More Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Emerging Church

Rod commented on my post on race and the emerging church:
I will say this about the Emergent Conversation (it is still far from a movement and even further from anything that could be called a revolution); it provides one of the few spaces that Christians of diverse backgrounds can come together and talk about more than individual piety, financial blessing, and gay marriage. I see it as a critical piece to a larger movement of God's spirit.

Dave you mentioned that you already see EC becoming co-opted by the principalities and powers. I would like to get you to expound upon that.

Rod, I think the emergent conversation (which I think is a good way of putting it) is a breath of fresh air - where "breath" is, as you say, part of the Spirit's doing. I don't mean to sound negative - it is actually a relief to find that, without realizing it, many of us have been thinking and believing similar things about a new way to be the church together. Or maybe not "new," but definitely an alternative to the established Way of Doing Church and Thinking About God.

I think my fear of the principalities and powers stems from the media outlets who have a tendency to talk about things like The Biblical Worldview. I posted about that back in April, but I wasn't really any clearer there. Maybe it is just that Christian Culture Industries latch on to anything that they think will make them hip and relevant, while failing to recognize that there is more going on here than can be separated into "medium" and "message." I don't think they realize this is not the same old evangelical message wrapped up in a different package (which is a very modernist way of looking at communication anyway).

I hope the conversation stays a conversation - and not a monologue or a creedal statement by emergent church "leaders" (as the article I referenced in the April post describes it). I hope it stays grassroots. I hope books published about it or to encourage it find other outlets besides Youth Specialties and Zondervan. (Not to pick on those publishers, which have done a good job with titles like A Generous Orthodoxy and others. Though if your language tends to be more like Anne Lamott, you'll have to go to a "secular" publisher.)

I definitely think that the emergent conversation has the right people worried. And I'm not so sure that we aren't in the middle of a revolution, though it might have to do with forces beyond the E.C. - a spiritual revolution, perhaps. Heck, even Newsweek noticed that something big is going on.

Posted at 08:47 PM |

Tue - July 12, 2005

"You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means."

I've been sorting out in my head two things:
1. exactly where I am with regard to the label "evangelical."
2. the ethical imperative of faith-sharing.

1. First, the "evangelical" thing. "Evangel" comes from the roots "eu," meaning "good" (like euthanasia - "good death") and "angel" meaning "messenger" or "herald." Evangelism is supposed to be the telling of good news.

"Evangelical," on the other hand, has come to mean a particular subculture of Christianity, with all the political and ideological baggage that goes along with it. It has also come to be associated with "fundamentalism." And fundamentalism has come to be associated with conservatism (although there is such a thing as liberal fundamentalism). All of these terms are very slippery. I'm not always precise with my terms, so I'm part of the problem.

I think many non-evangelicals would say that evangelicals (meaning those in the Christian subculture) do not tell Good News. They tell Bad News. For a while I played with the idea of calling myself "evangelistic" to escape the negative connotations "evangelical" has acquired, but I don't think that really solves anything. I've been pleased that a wider variety of folks are claiming to be evangelical. Tony Campolo has always been a very outspoken "liberal" evangelical (though I'd argue about the liberal part). Andrew Jones is evangelical. And then I remembered I'm a member of a denomination, part of which used to be called the "Evangelical Brethren." So I think the answer to the misuse of the word "evangelical" is to reclaim it and transform it by the way I live my life and the way I do evangelism.

"Evangelical" is also used contra "mainstream" denominations. I do not think this is a distinction that helps, either. Methodism is mainstream, and used to be a good deal more evangelical. Peter Cartwright was certainly "evangelical."

2. Which begins to get me to the second part. The Good News I tell has to do with the abundant-eternal life offered by Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God. Now, right here is where my understanding of salvation and sin, sonship and God, begin to part ways with the evangelical subculture.

Heaven ain't just where you go when you die. I've been pleased to see this idea emerging more and more among post-Christian evangelicals. Salvation is more than being saved from hellfire. We use metaphors for it - being "saved," "made whole," "healed." Salvation itself is a healing metaphor - salve - ation. Justification is a metaphor. Sanctification is a metaphor. Salvation is a mystery. It isn't something you can put in your suitcase.

(In fact, even the word "literal" is a metaphor - "written" as opposed to "spoken." Since you can always believe what you read, I guess...)

So how does that affect faith-sharing? If you think that salvation is primarily about going to heaven after you die, and that people's disembodied souls need to be rescued from a literal lake of burning sulfur, then you feel an obligation to convert people. Unfortunately, this kind of heroic evangelism has little to do with actually loving people. At least, with the kind of love demonstrated by the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. It has more to do with the goals of the Emperor Constantine.

I think salvation is about discovering and practicing abundant life, resurrected life, now. Resurrected life is life-overcoming-death, the inversion of folly and wisdom or strength and weakness, joy in the midst of suffering. It is reimagining this world and this life according to the Kingdom of God, and pointing out where God is working now in this world and in this life. Resurrected life is what happens to you when you realize that God has overcome all the static, dead abstractions about God by becoming a human, and by living and suffering and dying with us. The powers of this world - money, exploitative sex, war, slavery - are all being overcome by the Kingdom and by this Jesus who won't stay dead the way he's supposed to.

Hell also begins right now. People live in hell all the time, and in fact they often prefer the hell they know to the Resurrection they do not. Many fundamentalist evangelicals who preach heaven are stuck in hell. What else do you call a state of being where God uses the powers of this world to maintain religious order? There are demonic forces that benefit from others being stuck in hell. Some of those demonic forces wear "Christian" labels.

Churches are places where the forces of heaven and hell struggle against each other. So I feel perfectly at home with Wesley when he says that Methodists are those who have decided to band together to "flee from the wrath to come."

I've described my beliefs about resurrection and salvation before, and been accused of believing in a social gospel, that I was "demythologizing" the words. I think that's a simplistic reaction to any alternative view of the gospel that takes social holiness seriously. The social and personal are directly related. It plays out in the familiar conversion stories you hear at revivals - stories about new life overcoming drug addiction, financial ruin, sexual promiscuity. It plays out in how we relate to other people, family and friends. Yes, I think Jesus does care about my life. I think it matters to God how I live, what I eat, when and how I pray, who I love, how I use my sexuality, my finances, my time, my words. How is this a "social gospel?" How can God be personal and not be social? How can God be personal and not care about the fact that lots of the people God knows personally don't have access to health care or clean drinking water?

Moreover, how can God be personal and not be communal? Any relationship is complicated and enriched by other relationships. We are in webs of relationships. Introducing Jesus into the mix reorients the community. My relationship with God isn't just about us. It's about all of us. And it isn't just about us, but also the world - God's world.

To me, faith-sharing of this sort is more imperative than if heaven is just in the by and by. We're wasting time! We could be living! Flee from the wrath to come!

At the same time, I want to guard against negative proselytizing. Any evangelism which is coercive or manipulative automatically becomes Bad News. Faith-sharing that does not respect the person shared with is sinful. I'd like to see the church - our church - become more evangelistic. But I think in order for that to happen we are going to have to start actually caring about people. I think when Christians don't care about people, they make two mistakes with regard to evangelizing: either they fail to evangelize, or they become coercive and manipulative. There should be a third way.

Posted at 01:08 PM |

Sat - June 25, 2005

Methodism and Evangelism

I found this article at Touchstone both inspiring and frustrating. I know it was written five years ago. But it sounds so much like recent conversations I've had that I sometimes wonder if we are making any headway.

Frustrating because, from the outset, Mark Tooley adopts the generally superior air of an academic who is far above the skits and praise choruses that mark contemporary worship. His attitude bothers me in part because I have often felt the same. What makes me critical of my own prejudices is the recognition that skits and praise choruses are an ancient way of understanding the message. Morality and mystery plays were part of medieval Easter and Christmas celebrations. And "repetitive" praise choruses somehow become acceptable when they are in Latin or sung responsively, but are considered childish and trendy when accompanied by a guitar and sung in contemporary English. After I learned to put my classist notions of taste in historical perspective, I found that not only could I enjoy contemporary worship but also grow spiritually.

Inspiring because he identifies historic Methodism as important. The further we move into this emerging church / post-Christian church thing, the more I draw strength from evangelical Wesleyanism. Small covenant discipleship groups. The importance of the sacraments. An equal emphasis on social justice and personal holiness. I don't believe in collapsing denominational distinctions. I don't think it helps anybody. Anabaptists were drowned by mobs for belief in adult immersion. Methodists were chased out of town with rocks for their opposition to slavery and witness against alcoholism. So I agree with Tooley that losing our history in favor of a generic evangelism would be terrible.

Thing is, I think Wesley would have been all over contemporary worship. I wish we Methodists would "resolve to be more vile," the way JW did when he took preaching outdoors and into the fields and highways. I wish we could find and commission some Chuck Wesleys to write good modern music - so much of the stuff we have in our hymnal sounds, as one of my friends put it, as if it were "written by a committee or to please a particular academic constituency."

How did Methodism become mainstream? One of the groups that become United Methodists was the Evangelical Brethren. Why have we allowed the "Evangelical" part to fade from our heritage and to be co-opted by fundamentalists?

Posted at 09:02 AM |

Fri - June 3, 2005

Race and the Emerging Church

Musings of a Postmodern Emergent Negro has a good post on race and the emerging church, which is a response to this post at Charile Wear's site.

I tend to avoid being drawn into discussions about the emerging church movement (if there is such a thing). I do find the awakening of real Christian spirituality exciting, and I enjoy seeing a growing alternative to "Christianism" and political fundamentalism. But as I have said before, I am deeply suspicious that the powers and principalities have already begun to co-opt the revolution.

I have been relieved to see people actually talking about race. Christians should be on the forefront of dismantling the social construction of race, not perpetuating it. We should be talking about the fluidity of culture, the relativity of ethnicity, and not allowing the distinction between "white church" and "black church" to stand. It's God's church. Not my church.

Anyway, MPEN said:

...the reason why there is a white church and a black church is because of racist white Christians. White Christian racism created the dichotomy between black and white churches. As a matter of fact there is no such social designation named "white" or "black" church prior to the peculiar way race played out here in America. White racism created the black church. The black church was a reaction to white idolatry of race.

Which is absolutely correct, I think. The story of Richard Allen is just one example of how white racism created the black church. Even after being segregated to the balcony, he and his friends were physically dragged from their knees in the middle of prayer. But what perpetuates 11:00 on Sunday as the most segregated hour of the week? And how does that play into conversations about "the emerging church" which generally values diversity, inclusiveness, and embodying the reconciling love of Jesus?

Here's my comment:

I do think there is one possible (dangerous) tendency of emerging church thinking that ties into White-American ways of thinking. It's the assimilation of other cultures as exotic or new. We turn the Other into a style or a fashion accessory. I worry a bit that once an ancient spiritual practice or cultural import becomes mainstream that it will cease to be hip and we will be off looking for another practice or aesthetic to adopt, commodify, shrinkwrap, and sell in Christian bookstores.

The appropriate response to that kind of paternalism might be resistance. I know that smaller churches often feel reluctant to join with larger churches in ministry for fear that they will lose their identity. It isn't so much about turf or style as it is a desire to preserve one's own distinctiveness. I would not be surprised if something similar happens on a larger scale between black and white perspectives on the emerging church.

But I think you are right to point to the Eucharist as the point at which our identity as a single (broken and resurrected) body overcomes our fear of losing our personal or cultural identity. When I envision the banquet in the Kingdom of Heaven I see people of all different shapes, shades, and sizes eating, laughing, and singing.

Some further thoughts:
I don't mean to imply that the black church avoids the emergent conversation out of fear of assimilation. I just don't see much reason the black church would want to join in.

Many church leaders try to be apolitical. I've heard social justice discussed in the abstract, but so far it has come off as very touchy-feely. What would emerging church leaders march for? What would they face riot police for? I don't think it would be incense and ambient music.

The Church has to mobilize and actively resist being co-opted by the religious right. Let's not pretend that we can say "God is not a Republican or a Democrat" without knowing who exactly we are saying it to. If the day comes when the Social Gospel actually threatens to distort the Gospel of Jesus, then we can turn around and say it to the religious left - but I don't see that happening any time soon. In our culture of single-dimension continua (right or left, Republican or Democrat, pro-life or pro-choice), it is very difficult to present a third option.

When Alabama had a chance to pass tax reform, I preached about it on Sunday morning. I got some heavy criticism for that - you don't speak out against the Christian Coalition, ALFA, and the timber industries here without making people annoyed. But I didn't hear a rallying cry across the country. We are still too tied to our money and our class power. We good Methodists need to go back and read John Wesley's sermon on the Inefficacy of Christianity.

Until the Church - emergent, fundagelical, or otherwise - addresses the Unholy Trinity of Class, Race, and Power, we will continue to be unreconciled. You have to confess your sin before there can be healing and reconciliation. I don't think we can confess racism without also dealing with class and power. We may have to be radical. We may have to alienate some people.

But I have hope. I do think it is more than coincidence that the emerging church is emerging at the same time as a growing group of people who are fed up with the politics of fundamentalist evangelicals. It's a rejection of Christianism. I hope it can also be a reclamation of the name and character of Jesus.

Posted at 12:06 PM |