Today, Autumn pictures and an Autumn poem for your contemplation.
Autumn is the glorious falling of the year. Here are a few photos taken recently here in central Indiana. Photography is a way of prayer for me, of paying attention and learning to see with new eyes.
I may post more in days to come, but you are welcome to visit my Flickr page at any time to keep up with what is catching my eye.
Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf How the heart feels a languid grief Laid on it for a covering, And how sleep seems a goodly thing In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
And how the swift beat of the brain Falters because it is in vain, In Autumn at the fall of the leaf Knowest thou not? and how the chief Of joys seems—not to suffer pain?
Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf How the soul feels like a dried sheaf Bound up at length for harvesting, And how death seems a comely thing In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?
I am, however, alive— but it isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Galatians 2:20 is probably my favorite verse about Christian identity in the New Testament. It tells me:
I have died to my old life.
I have been made alive again in Jesus Christ.
The life I live now (here, in this world and in this body) is lived in the context of his faithfulness to me — the loving faithfulness that led him to die for me.
This is “Jesus-shaped spirituality,” as Michael Spencer called it, in a nutshell.
Understanding the context of this verse in Galatians and its background in the Jewish/Gentile debate between Peter and Paul makes the Jesus-shapedness of this text even clearer.
The immediate context in which Galatians 2:20 is a part is 2:15-21.
15We are Jews by birth, not “Gentile sinners.” 16But we know that a person is not declared “righteous” by works of the Jewish law, but through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah. That is why we too believed in the Messiah, Jesus: so that we might be declared “righteous” on the basis of the Messiah’s faithfulness, and not on the basis of works of the Jewish law. On that basis, you see, no creature will be declared “righteous.” 17Well, then; if, in seeking to be declared “righteous” in the Messiah, we ourselves are found to be “sinners,” does that make the Messiah an agent of “sin”? Certainly not! 18If I build up once more the things which I tore down, I demonstrate that I am a lawbreaker. 19Let me explain it like this. Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah. 20I am, however, alive— but it isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21I don’t set aside God’s grace. If “righteousness” comes through the law, then the Messiah died for nothing. (KNT)
And this entire passage is Paul’s response to the story in Galatians 2:11-14:
11But when Cephas came to Antioch, I stood up to him face to face. He was in the wrong. 12Before certain persons came from James, Peter was eating with the Gentiles. But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, because he was afraid of the circumcision-people. 13The rest of the Jews did the same, joining him in this play-acting. Even Barnabas was carried along by their sham. 14But when I saw that they weren’t walking straight down the line of gospel truth, I said to Cephas in front of them all: “Look here: you’re a Jew, but you’ve been living like a Gentile. How can you force Gentiles to become Jews?” (KNT)
Please note: Paul’s rather dense and hard to follow (at least for us) argument in 2:15-21 is not the answer to some abstract or complex theological question or issue that arose among his readers. It is actually a theological answer to a simple question: “Can (should) Jewish and Gentile Christians eat together at the same table?”
Peter’s error and that of the “circumcision-people” he feared, along with other Jewish believers, was that they were not yet fully grasping and living out the truth of the gospel. And that is what Paul explains in 2:15-21, using himself (as a Jewish believer) as the example.
Paul was Jewish by birth.
But Paul came to see that his identity as one of God’s people was based not on his identification with the practices of the Jewish law (as he had thought previously).
Instead, Paul had come to believe that he was one of the “righteous” by virtue of the Messiah’s faithfulness alone.
When he abandoned his Jewish identity as one righteous because marked by the law, he did not take a step backwards and fall into the category of “sinner” along with the sinful Gentile world.
Instead, Paul died to that old identity and took on a new identity that enabled him to “live to God.”
He died to his old life when he put his faith in the Messiah.
He was raised up into a new life in which it is the very life of the Messiah that lives in him.
Now Paul lives (to God), not as one marked righteous because he has the law, but because he lives within the Messiah’s loving faithfulness.
Paul is not about to set aside God’s grace. To go back to the law as that which marks a Jewish Christian’s identity is to do just that, and to say that Jesus’ death was meaningless.
N.T. Wright comments:
Paul’s answer to the question [raised in 2:11-14] is complex and dense, but its heart is simple. Because he, and all Jewish Christians, have “died to the law” through sharing the messianic death of Jesus, their identity now is not defined by or in terms of the Jewish law, but rather in terms of the risen life of the Messiah. The boundary marker of this messianic community is therefore not the set of observances that mark out Jews from Gentiles, but rather Jesus the Messiah, the faithful one, himself; and the way in which one is known as a member of this messianic community is thus neither more nor less than (Christian) faith.
. . . the point of justification by faith, in this context, is not to stress this soteriological aspect, but to insist that all those who share this Christian faith are members of the same single family of God in Christ and therefore belong at the same table. This is the definite, positive, and of course deeply polemical thrust of the first-ever exposition of the Christian doctrine of justification by faith. (The Letter to the Galatians: Exegesis and Theology)
So then, Paul was not trying to win a theological or doctrinal argument with this intensely theological passage. He was trying to win his Gentile friends a seat at the table. He was trying to help Peter and the Galatians and everyone else who was listening understand: What makes us Christians, and what makes us one, is Jesus and his loving, faithful work on our behalf. The grace of God. Trusting and living in the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.
And he was trying to help them grasp this primarily to promote love and unity, fellowship and partnership between Christians who struggled to connect and mesh with one another because of their different backgrounds.
If Paul, who described himself as: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Phil. 3:5-6) — if Paul, a Jew’s Jew if there ever was one, could say, “My identity is no longer defined by observing a law that distinguishes me from those who don’t have it, but by the Messiah,” if he could make that shift and live for God by living “within the faithfulness of the Messiah,” welcoming all who trusted Jesus as his brothers and sisters, then how can I not do the same?
Isn’t it time we all kept this “life we live in the flesh” about Jesus and what he has done for us?
Trinity is the most comprehensive and integrative framework that we have for understanding and participating in the Christian life. Early on in our history, our pastors and teachers formulated the Trinity to express what is distinctive in the revelation of God in Christ. This theology provides an immense horizon against which we can understand and practice the Christian life largely and comprehensively. Without an adequately imagined theology, spirituality gets reduced to the cramped world reported by journalists or the flat world studied by scientists. Trinity reveals the immense world of God creating, saving, and blessing in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with immediate and lived implications for the way we live, for our spirituality. Trinity is the church’s attempt to understand God’s revelation of Godself in all its parts and relationships. And a most useful work it has been. At a most practical level it provides a way of understanding and responding to God who enters into all the day-to-day issues that we face as persons and churches and communities from the time we get out of bed in the morning until we fall asleep at night, and reaches out to bring us into participation on God’s terms, that is, on Trinitarian terms. It prevents us from getting involved in highly religious but soul-destroying ways of going about living the Christian life.
Trinity understand God as three-personed: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God in community, each “person” in active communion with the others. We are given an understanding of God that is most emphatically personal and interpersonal. God is nothing if not personal. If God is revealed as personal, the only way that God can be known is in personal response. We need to know this. It is the easiest thing in the world to use words as a kind of abstract truth or principle, to deal with the gospel as information. Trinity prevents us from doing this. We can never get away with depersonalizing the gospel or the truth to make it easier, simpler, more convenient. Knowing God through impersonal abstractions is ruled out, knowing God through programmatic projects is abandoned, knowing God in solitary isolation is forbidden. Trinity insists that God is not an idea or a force or a private experience but personal and known only in personal response and engagement.
Trinity also prevents us from reducing God to what we can understand or need at any one time. There is a lot going on in us and in this world, far exceeding what we are capable of taking in. In dealing with God, we are dealing in mystery, in what we do not know, what we cannot control or deal with on our terms. We need to know this, for we live in a world that over-respects the practical. We want God to be “relevant” to our lifestyle. We want what we can, as we say, “get a handle on.” There is immense peer pressure to reduce God to fit immediate needs and expectations. But God is never a commodity to use. In a functionalized world in which we are all trained to understand ourselves in terms of what we can do, we are faced with a reality we cannot control. And so we cultivate reverence. . . . Trinity keeps pulling us into a far larger world than we can imagine on our own.
And Trinity is a steady call and invitation to participate in the energetically active life of God — the image of the dance [perichoresis] again. It is the participation in the Trinity (God as he has revealed himself to us) that makes things and people particularly and distinctively who they are. We are not spectators to God; there is always a hand reaching out to pull us into the Trinitarian actions of holy creation, holy salvation, and holy community. . . .
The Christian community is interested in spirituality because it is interested in living. We give careful attention to spirituality because we know, from long experience, how easy it is to get interested in ideas of God and projects for God and gradually lose interest in God alive, deadening our lives with ideas and the projects. This happens a lot. Because the ideas and projects have the name of God attached to them, it is easy to assume that we are involved with God. It is the devil’s work to get us worked up thinking and acting for God and then subtly detach us from a relational obedience and adoration of God, substituting our selves, our godlike egos, in the place originally occupied by God.
Jesus is the name that keeps us attentive to the God-defined, God-revealed life. The amorphous limpness so often associated with “spirituality” is given skeleton, sinews, definition, shape, and energy by the term “Jesus.” Jesus is the personal name of a person who lived at a datable time in an actual land that has mountains we can still climb, wildflowers that can be photographed, cities in which we can still buy dates and pomegranates, and water which we can drink and in which we can be baptized. As such the name counters the abstraction that plagues “spirituality.”
Jesus is the central and defining figure in the spiritual life. His life is, precisely, revelation. He brings out into the open what we could never have figured out for ourselves, never guessed in a million years. He is God among us: God speaking, acting healing, helping. “Salvation” is the big word into which all these words fit. The name Jesus means “God saves” — God present and at work saving in our language and in our history.
The four Gospel writers, backed up by the comprehensive context provided by Israel’s prophets and poets, tell us everything we need to know about Jesus. And Jesus tells us everything we need to know about God. As we read, ponder, study, believe, and pray these Gospels we find both the entire Scriptures and the entirety of the spiritual life accessible and in focus before us in the inviting presence of Jesus of Nazareth, the Word made flesh.
Note from CM: Thank you all so much for sharing your stories and experiences. As thankless as it may seem some time, caregivers are doing God’s work, the “cup of water” work that Jesus assures us our Father sees and rewards.
• • •
Calling all caregivers!
I am currently working on the third book in a series of three related to end of life matters.
This third one is directed toward caregivers, especially those who are caring for the elderly and terminally ill. That might mean medical professionals, particularly nurses and CNAs, but certainly includes family members, guardians, and friends who have devoted their lives to providing care and support to loved ones in the final season of life.
I want it to be helpful, hopeful, and encouraging because these are some of the hardest-working, least understood and appreciated people in the world.
In my work as a hospice chaplain, our team always stresses that we are there to support the family as well as the patient, and I’m hoping this small book will be something we can put in their hands to help them.
Today, I solicit your input on this subject.
I would like to hear from anyone and everyone who has experience in a caregiving setting. Here are a few questions you might consider (don’t feel like you have to answer them explicitly, they are here to prime the pump).
Tell me the basic parameters of your situation(s). No need to compromise anyone’s privacy here — just outline the situation for me.
I want to know about the personal challenges that have been most profound for you, lessons you have learned, mistakes you have made, and things that went well.
I’d like to hear how you have been helped by your faith and faith community. If your faith community has let you down, relied on cliches rather than true support, or simply hasn’t been available when you need them, I’d like to hear that too (again, no need to share names and exact details).
What faith resources have been most nurturing to you, giving you strength and perspective? Are there particular scriptures, prayers, or practices that sustain you?
What “natural” resources have helped you to remain healthy as you give care (e.g. humor, rest, diet and exercise, delegating, etc.)?
What are some of the most helpful things others have done that made your caregiving experience better?
What are some of the most unhelpful things others have said or done that have made your caregiving experience worse?
Where do you see Jesus and the gospel in the midst of your caregiving experience?
Thanks so much for participating.
The Messiah . . . is sitting among the poor, binding his [own] wounds one at a time, waiting for the moment when he will be needed. So it is too with the minister. Since it is his task to make visible the first vestiges of liberation for others, he must bind his own wounds carefully in anticipation of the moment when he will be needed. He is called to be the wounded healer, the one who must look after his own wounds but at the same time be prepared to heal the wounds of others.
You don’t write catechisms. Or Systematic Theologies. Or critiques of someone’s theology or refutations of their catechism.
You don’t have a blog.
You don’t moderate debates.
You are the bread of life who gives himself for the salvation of the world. You are the one mediator between God and man. You are the bridegroom who loves his bride. You’re raising all of us like Lazurus. You’re healing all of us, casting demons out of all of us, calling all of us out of the un-real into the real.
The community that matters to you isn’t sitting behind some church sign. It’s not running around with some ridiculous label.
You aren’t submitting yourself to the teams built by men for their games with one another.
Jesus, you love the world. And you love those who are in fellowship with you. Not more or even in a different way than you love other persons, but only in a way that can be enjoyed and celebrated by all of us who are feasting at the same table.
You don’t have a database of membership. You don’t have 20 questions for me to answer. You are standing there before me, and your love is inviting me inviting me inviting me over and over and enabling me enabling me enabling me over and over. You’re taking me from where I’ve wandered, throwing me on your shoulders and beginning again. And again. And again. With all of us.
Jesus, you’re making crazy demands about trusting the Father. You’re saying ridiculous things about money and forgiveness. Jesus, you’re asking me to do things that are impossible.
You want me to trust you with the people I want to control. You’ve taken my prayers to change things and handed them back to me as the opportunity to let you love persons you love far, far more than I can imagine in ways I could never approach. Trusting you, by the way, is very difficult sometimes, but you never do quit asking, do you?
I’d rather theologize. I’d rather debate and score points.
I’d rather take care of me, do things my way and refer to you as my sponsor. I want you to be the god who makes my life work out; the god who makes my relationships “work.” You are the God who loves me, and loves all the people I pretend to love, with a love that’s overwhelming.
You want me to live my life in you. Not just quote the verse, but jump into the deep end of the pool with you there to catch me. You want me out of the boat, with you on the water. You want me to believe that you will never leave me or forsake me.
You want me. You’re very fond of me.
This kind of simplicity is very frightening. You are taking too much away. You are replacing it all with yourself.
Jesus, I need you a thousand ways. I can’t list them all, but I feel them, one by one by one, taking hold of me and pulling me away from you. I want that to end, and I want to hand all of my life to you, freely, in childlike trust and joy.
My emotions are following my perceptions and my perceptions are following my paradigm. I need you to take over all of it. All of it.
Jesus, you said you are the way, the truth and the life…and I told people I believed it. I didn’t believe it very much. I think I lie about these things a lot. But I want you to be the way, the truth and the life.
I’m afraid for it all to come down to just the two of us, but that’s the way it is, isn’t it? It’s the moment we all hear you, feel your gaze, realize you have singled us out for the Kingdom….but everything else must go: parents, wife, children, family, reputation, houses, lands, applause, security, health, normality. All of it goes, and you want the entire bet placed on you.
Lord Jesus Christ, Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on me.
This may be the peak leaf-peeper weekend in central Indiana, so I suggest we jump in our sleek little Metropolitan and ramble. Ready?
The Democrats held their first presidential debate on Tuesday night, pitting Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders and three unnamed guys they pulled in from the neighborhood.
I have no opinion. You see, there was this ballgame on Tuesday night . . .
Chicago Cubs rookie Kyle Schwarber is gaining a reputation for hitting monster home runs. Last week in Pittsburgh he hit one out of the stadium and into the Allegheny River. On Tuesday night at Wrigley Field in Chicago, he hit a majestic shot that landed on top of the new video scoreboard in right field.
Actually, when he hit it, no one was quite sure where it went. People assumed it went out of the park and landed on Sheffield Ave. But no one claimed to have retrieved it. Video and Twitter photos began to surface Tuesday night of a ball on top of the video board, underneath the small ‘I’ in the Budweiser sign, and the Cubs sent an employee up to confirm it Wednesday through the ball’s special MLB postseason markings. Yep, there it was.
It will stay up there, too, until the postseason is complete. The Cubs decided to do something really cool and fun, enshrining the ball on the scoreboard,placing it on a stand under a plexiglass case to preserve it from the elements. A security guard will escort anyone going up to the top of the video board to service it so it won’t be stolen, but there will be no 24-hour security. The Cubs will decide what to do with the ball after the season
And now, the home run has been immortalized in a flipbook, courtesy of The Flippist. Entitled “A ‘Holy Cow! Home Run,” this has everything you could ask for in a Kyle Schwarber flipbook: The swing, the moonshot, the plexiglass cover and, just for fun, some Harry Caray.
Speaking of the Cubs, a lot of folks have noticed that back in 1989 the movie “Back to the Future II” made a bunch of predictions about the year 2015, and one of them was that the Cubs would win the World Series. If they do, yet another crazy detail of Cubs lore will be established.
And Toyota will release a video this Wednesday — the date when Marty McFly went to the future — showing stars Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd discussing its predictions. Here’s a sneak preview:
The Church of England is having to make some hard decisions.
As the CoE struggles with the financial burden of preserving its properties in the face of declining congregations, an increasing number of churches are likely to operate only at Christmas, Easter and on other holy days. This notion of “festival churches” is gaining currency, especially in rural areas where many congregations are trying to maintain historic buildings while serving congregations of as few as ten people. There is also a shortage of both clergy and lay officials to provide leadership in these churches. For the past twenty years, twenty to twenty-five churches have closed each year.
A recent CoE report states: “The long-term decrease in church attendance and increasing age profile of church congregations poses an urgent challenge to the Church of England if it is to be faithful to its vocation to proclaim the gospel afresh in each generation and maintain a Christian presence in every community.”
The report says more churches will need to restrict their use to big occasions to avert a “sharp upturn” in the number of closures.
Hey, maybe this is really what the four “blood moons” were trying to tell us!
Thom Rainer, whose article we critiqued the other day, has another piece on his blog about how churches tend to lag behind the times.
He gives eight reasons that churches are still living in the 1980s. I was a pastor back then, and I think his observations are pretty accurate.
They were trying to shelter themselves from culture.
Programs were easy answers.
Churches largely catered to the needs of church members.
Change was more incremental.
Church growth was easier.
Denominations provided solutions.
Others did the evangelism for the members.
It was more comfortable.
The 1980s were the heyday of evangelical Christian culture — the Reagan years, the “Christian retail industrial complex” of publishing and media, the rise of the seeker-sensitive movement (ala Willow Creek) and the establishment of the megachurch as the model for attractional ministry, and the growing voice of the Christian Right in the culture wars. Rainer may be right that some churches and pastors today are looking back to the 1980s in the same way that churches used to look back to the 1950s and long for “the good old days.”
What do you think? Discuss.
You know it’s been a great week when the phrase “alien megastructures” gets tossed around seriously.
In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.”
Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.
. . . The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.
But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.
It appears to be mature.
And yet, there is this mess of objects circling it. A mess big enough to block a substantial number of photons that would have otherwise beamed into the tube of the Kepler Space Telescope. If blind nature deposited this mess around the star, it must have done so recently. Otherwise, it would be gone by now. Gravity would have consolidated it, or it would have been sucked into the star and swallowed, after a brief fiery splash.
This unusual light pattern doesn’t show up anywhere else that scientists have seen. Something strange is going on. But what? Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University, is exploring various hypotheses, including “alien megastructures.” When asked about this, Wright commented, “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”
Finally, this week in music history, Grace Slick replaced expectant mother and frontwoman Signe Anderson in The Jefferson Airplane. Slick left her band Great Society and brought JA two songs that would soon be at the forefront of the San Francisco music scene—“Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.”
Here’s Slick and JA on American Bandstand, 1967. Only in the 1960s could you have a band as countercultural and subversive as Jefferson Airplane on a whitebread show like Bandstand.
I’ve noticed an interesting psychological phenomenon, in the words of the immortal Andrew Steyne in The Gods Must Be Crazy. I first came across it some years ago in a Sunday school class I taught and more recently in some commentary on gender roles in Disney movies.
First the Sunday school class. I was a guest teacher, visiting as part of fund-raising for mission work. I didn’t know the adults in the class, but their reactions were identical to those of everyone else I’ve discussed this with (and to mine, initially). The story was Jesus’ parable of the workers paid the same amount regardless of the time of day they were hired. I suppose the chief message of the parable concerns God’s sovereignty and his graciousness in extending salvation to nations other than Israel. True enough: but the most striking thing about the story is that we all assume we are the workers who have been at it since the beginning of the day.
This is evident in the indignation or bafflement of almost all who read the parable. It doesn’t seem just, we say. Those guys worked all day. Paying the same to someone who only worked an hour simply isn’t fair. (Among children, at least, “That’s not fair!” is always the complaint of the one who feels unfairly done by, not a plea by the recipient of the blessing for impartial justice.) The latecomers, on the other hand, generally don’t complain; they’re just grateful for whatever they’ve been given.
Why is it that we identify ourselves with the hard workers and not with the latecomers? Do we really think we have achieved enough through our efforts to dictate to God how he should reward everyone? I wonder why it takes so long to occur to most of us that we are really the ones who deserve nothing and are rewarded with grace.
I pondered that reaction off and on over the years; then last week I watched the Disney gender roles commentary for the children’s literature class I’m teaching. It began with the inevitable – and largely correct – points about how sexualized females (of any species) are in Disney movies. It went on to the inevitable – and probably less correct – worry that young girls are irreparably damaged by these images. Then a psychologist addressed Beauty and the Beast particularly. This psychologist works with abused children, so she has an insight I respect, but I still think her view of the story is too narrow. She sees Beauty and the Beast as a story that glorifies abuse and counsels women to stay in an abusive environment; consequently, she thinks it is pernicious and not appropriate fare for children. I can see what she means, of course: Belle is imprisoned, threatened with starvation, and yelled at, yet she becomes convinced that there is something sweet under the hairy exterior of the Beast. That is painfully like the thinking that can go on in an abusive relationship, and any abused person needs to get free from both the relationship and the mindset.
But this is a fairy tale, not a mirror of real life, and once again it comes down to the same question: Who are we in this story? Are we Belle, beautiful, special, brave, patient, and abused? The psychologist thinks that children always will identify with Belle, and that it’s right that they – and we – should do so. But what if we’re the character whose anger and selfishness drive people away, who despairs of being saved before the transformation into total bestiality is complete? What if we’re really the Beast?
We think of fairy tales as simple children’s tales, but they are neither simple nor exclusively for children. They can’t be read or heard on only one level, any more than the Bible can. Yes, Beauty and the Beast is a happy-ever-after tale of the triumph of a brave young woman. However, we can also step into this tale in the skin of the Beast; then it becomes a story of redemption, of the power of love and patience, of despair healed and self-loathing wiped away with a kiss. It is a story not of internal achievement but of external grace.
The psychologist who works with abused children will and should make her own decisions about what is beneficial for her clients. That doesn’t mean that I accept her condemnation of fairy tales as literature or as windows into the human condition. We just need to know how to read them, and, most importantly, who we are in the story.
Evidently the humility with which we approach a tale (or life, the universe, and everything) determines whether we see it as good news or bad. Jesus’ parable, though annoying to the already righteous and hard-working, is wonderful news to those chosen last. Beauty and the Beast is good news to those who know they are unlovely distortions of who they should be and lack the power to change themselves.
Jesus says the entrance into the kingdom of heaven is narrow; perhaps it is also low. We may have to bend our heads and come in on our knees if we want to marry the prince and live happily ever after.
Swimming against a Tide
Ways I’ve changed in my evangelical faith Pastoral Ministry
This week I want to push back against some articles written by others — not because I have a chip on my shoulder or animus toward any particular writers, but simply to try and express some of the ways I have changed paths in my own journey of faith.
• • •
I knew that my leadership role was to let Jesus Christ lead the churches.
Thom Rainer is the president and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources. Prior to LifeWay, he served at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for twelve years where he was the founding dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism. For fifteen years he led a church and denominational consulting group. Recently, on his blog, Rainer wrote a post called, “Ten Signs a Pastor Is Becoming a Chaplain.”
Having been both, I thought I might respond to it today.
I have written often about my distaste for the American evangelical approach to pastoral ministry. Since I was awakened as a Christian in my late teens, my adult journey has coincided with the “Church Growth” movement. Among some of the other problems I see in this movement (see for example, here), the role of pastor in American evangelical churches has become transformed. The minister, particularly the “senior minister” must now be a “rancher” not a “shepherd,” a “visionary,” not just one who faithfully dispenses the word and sacraments, a “CEO” with organizational “leadership” skills, not simply a spiritual guide or servant.
Thom Rainer’s article, in my opinion, is just another way of stating these and other church growth assumptions. For Rainer, a minister must be a “leader” not just a “chaplain.” As a chaplain myself, I find his use of the word condescending. As though all a “chaplain” does is live at the beck and call of the “needy.”
Well, you decide for yourself. Here are Rainer’s ten signs a pastor is becoming a chaplain:
One. The pastor is not equipping others. Church members expect the pastor to do most of the ministry, and the pastor fulfills those unbiblical expectations.
Two. Pastoral care of members is increasing. As a consequence, the pastor has less time to lead the congregation to reach beyond its walls.
Three. The pastor does not take time to connect with non-members and non-Christians. Simply stated, there is no outwardly focused Great Commission leadership.
Four. The pastor deals with members’ complaints at an increasing rate. Once members get accustomed to the pastor being their on-call chaplain, they are likely to become irritated and frustrated when the pastor is not omnipresent and omniscient for their every need.
Five. The pastor worries more about the next phone call, conversation, or email. Such is the tendency of the pastor-chaplain who knows there will always be complaints about needs not getting met.
Six. The pastor experiences greater family interference time. Many pastor-chaplains are fearful of protecting family time lest they not be highly responsive to church members. Some of these pastors have lost their families as a consequence.
Seven. The pastor is reticent to take vacation time or days off. Pastor-chaplains would rather have no time off than worry about what they may miss while they are away from the church.
Eight. The pastor is reticent to take new initiatives. There are two reasons for this response. First, the pastor-chaplain does not want to upset the members with change. Second, the pastor-chaplain does not have time for new ideas because of the time demands of members.
Nine. The pastor has no vision for the future. The pastor-chaplain is too busy taking care of current member demands. Little time is available for visionary thinking and leadership.
Ten. The pastor has lost the joy of ministry. Of course, this unfortunate development should be expected. There is no joy in dealing with unreasonable expectations and constant streams of criticisms, or with a ministry that has no evangelistic fruit.
Gosh, all of a sudden I hate my job.
I’ve got news for Thom Rainer. I can answer every one of his points.
Chaplains like me serve on teams, play a specific role, and participate in equipping others. It’s an excellent model for church leadership.
Chaplains, like people in any other ministry, have to set boundaries on how much they can handle and share the load with others.
Chaplains take initiative to reach out to people and do not just respond to complaints.
Chaplains do not sit by the phone worrying about complaints.
Chaplains are just like everyone else in having to protect family time. Does Rainer seriously think “leaders” don’t struggle with balancing family and ministry? Give me a break.
Chaplains take vacations like other people, and we do it knowing that others will fill in for us while we’re gone. It’s usually the CEOs who can’t relax because the whole shebang is on their shoulders.
Chaplain initiate new ideas with people all the time.
Chaplains seek God for new “visions” of how to help people better.
Losing joy has nothing to do with what job you’re doing, but with your own life and how you are living it.
If you ask me, we need more pastor/chaplains in evangelicalism, not fewer. I visit people all the time whose pastors have forgotten them in their illness or old age, whose large churches have no effective pastoral care systems in place, whose staff members think it’s someone else’s job to visit people in the hospital, whose ministers — plain and simple — don’t have time for people. They are too busy preparing that next visionary message or micromanaging the other staff or programs.
I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat myself here: if you have the word “pastor” in your title, your main job is being with people and caring for people, in one way or another. If you see your job as “building the church,” you’re a businessperson, not a pastor. (Not that there’s no place for that, but that’s the subject of another post.)
In my view, the main difference between the “leader” I see in many evangelical churches and the “pastor/chaplain” is that leaders get focused on the business, while chaplains focus on people.
Now, I will admit that there is a danger that pastor/chaplains will become imbalanced and not give attention to the organizational aspects of ministry. But if a minister is not gifted or interested in that side of things, why can’t that be led by other people with the appropriate gifts and experience? Eugene Peterson famously told his board that he did not get into ministry to “run a church.” And they said, “Okay, then don’t. We will.” He had earned their trust that he was there to fulfill his ministry with the gifts God had given him. And this earned him their partnership.
David Hansen, who is quoted at the outset of this post, wrote one of the best books available on pastoral ministry, called The Art of Pastoring: Ministry Without All the Answers. In his chapter on leadership, he writes:
Looking back objectively at twenty years of church work, from youth work to pastoral ministry, I see that some of my best work has been my leadership. But I don’t know what I’ve done, and I don’t really know how to be a leader. I often begin a day by saying to myself, “Today I need to prepare a sermon,” or “Today I need to go off and pray,” but I never start any day saying, “Today I need to be a leader.” I wouldn’t know what to do if I were trying to be a leader. The best I can figure is that leadership is something I do while I am doing everything else. (p. 149f)
And, in my humble opinion, some of the best “everything else” stuff a pastor can do involves fulfilling the work of a chaplain in his congregation.
As I have talked with friends throughout this year, I’ve noted that we’ve been using a phrase regularly: “This is the life God is in.”
OK, it could be better grammatically, but it’s punchy and makes a clear point.
So many of us think our life and circumstances must change in order for God to inhabit them. We think we must purge out all sin to make a place for God to dwell in our midst. And we certainly can’t imagine God being there when we have to deal with people who deny him, habitually act in ways that transgress his laws, and generally make a mess of their lives.
Or when we make a mess of our lives.
A friend recently told me he had been struggling with what was truly happening when he was having a rough time of things. Somehow, he could not get past interpreting trials and difficulties in terms of something being wrong in his life, causing God to turn his back on him. That led my friend to think he must do something to work himself out of the mess into which he had gotten himself so that God and his blessing would return to his life. Thankfully, he said he was beginning to realize that God might actually be present, right there in the middle of the mess and the pain, and that his calling is to trust in the God who is there rather than to do cartwheels to attract God back to him.
God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble. (Ps 46.1, NRSV)
This is the life God is in. There is no other.
Christians have a real advantage here — or we should. We confess a Savior who became incarnate, took on our flesh and blood, and walked among us. Born in humble circumstances to an unwed mother, persecuted by the powerful and forced to flee from his land, his family returned and settled in a place not known for its piety. He received his certification for ministry at the hands of a kooky prophet standing in the middle of the Jordan River, and began calling ordinary working-class people to travel with him as disciples. He made a special effort to go to the sick, the demon-possessed, the poor, and those with tarnished moral and religious reputations. He was mocked as a “friend of sinners.” When he did get opportunities to dine with the elite, he usually offended them and got in trouble because he pulled back the curtain on the messes in their lives and exposed them for being sinners just like everyone else. He just couldn’t get away from the mess. He spent nearly all his time smack dab in the midst of it.
That is Jesus — the God/Man in the midst of sinners.
He has always been in the midst of sinners. He remains in the midst of sinners. If he is present in this world, where else would he be?
So, maybe you are beset by problems and troubles right now. God has not abandoned you. He is there. This is the life he is in.
Perhaps you are having conflicts in your marriage that seem unresolvable, or children who are breaking your heart. You don’t need to straighten it all out first in order to find God. He’s right there, available to you in the midst of it all.
You don’t need to create a spotless space for Jesus to inhabit. You don’t need to dust and sweep the room before he will walk through the door. He’s not put out because you’re so angry you can’t think straight. He won’t slam down the phone if you yell and scream and curse. He’s not waiting for you to make your heart pure, to stop worrying, or to start jumping through the right religious hoops.
Jesus is there — in the midst of your messy, sinful, out of control life. This is the life he’s in. You don’t have to leave that life to find him. You don’t have clean it up or dress it up for him to be attracted to you.
The ultimate evidence of this is the Cross. Luther called Jesus, “The Crucified God.” There he hung, between two guilty, convicted thieves, in the midst of all the ugliness, corruption, injustice, and hatred the world, flesh, and devil could muster. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” was what he said.
This is the life God is in. Right here, in the midst of the mess, and right now, at what may seem like the most hopeless moment, you can seek and find him here, for “he is not far from any one of us.”
Trinity is the most comprehensive and integrative framework that we have for understanding and participating in the Christian life. Early on in our history, our pastors and teachers formulated the Trinity to express what is distinctive in the revelation of God in Christ. This theology provides an immense horizon against which we can understand and practice the Christian life largely and comprehensively. Without an adequately imagined theology, spirituality gets reduced to the cramped world reported by journalists or the flat world studied by scientists. Trinity reveals the immense world of God creating, saving, and blessing in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with immediate and lived implications for the way we live, for our spirituality. Trinity is the church’s attempt to understand God’s revelation of Godself in all its parts and relationships. And a most useful work it has been. At a most practical level it provides a way of understanding and responding to God who enters into all the day-to-day issues that we face as persons and churches and communities from the time we get out of bed in the morning until we fall asleep at night, and reaches out to bring us into participation on God’s terms, that is, on Trinitarian terms. It prevents us from getting involved in highly religious but soul-destroying ways of going about living the Christian life.
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