There’s a phrase that strikes me whenever I hear it. It appears every week in the Orthodox liturgy and occasionally in the Catholic one: it is “Father of lights,” as in “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.”
After a lifetime of reading and hearing the Bible, I accept without question and even without thought that God is light. He is the light that we see, and he is the light by which we see. It’s a good image and illustrates God’s nature well. But still, light is abstract, vast, a physical conundrum of molecular particles hurtling through space, composed of all colors or none – I don’t understand it. It blinds me as often as it helps me see.
But the “s” in the phrase “Father of lights” changes the image of God in my mind. Lights – plural – are not vast and incomprehensible but domestic and cozy. Light is something that only Einstein and the great mystics could look at directly; lights, on the other hand, are all around me. They are the uncreated light of God coming down as candle flames, reading lamps, and headlights on the highway.
That little “s” unites the ineffable immensities with our daily experience. It refutes Gnosticism and other dualistic misunderstandings. God is vast and distant, yes, but he is also intimately among us. His brilliance is not lost or tempered in this fallen world. The blessing of light is the same whether in the sun or in a flashlight. As Dante described so beautifully in Paradiso, our capacities to reflect light may vary, but light itself is perfect, the ultimate good thing coming down from above.
If God is the Father of lights, then I see his hand everywhere. It is by his will that water, ruffled by wind, casts reflections of light on the underside of leaves. He ordains that on summer evenings fireflies hover above the farm fields, flickering like phosphorescence on the surface of the sea. He sets the dust motes spinning in the sunbeam and causes the light from evening windows to make a path across the snow. He is in every spider web spangled with dew and every puddle lit by the reflections of neon signs.
He must also have been in this scene: My five-year-old daughter and I were walking home from the bazaar in Kyrgyzstan with our groceries. Our path led us through a field behind an abandoned hotel where the alcoholics hung out at night. The ground was covered in shards of glass from broken vodka bottles. I was picking my way distastefully through the garbage when I heard my daughter gasp, “Look how pretty it is!” I looked up and saw through her eyes the hundreds of lights where the sun caught the broken glass, sparkling like jewels. I had to beat back the impulse to explain to her that no, it wasn’t pretty, it was disgusting. She was right – the Father of lights had created beauty out of trash.
God Has a “Wonderful Plan” for Your Death by Miguel Ruiz
If I hear this one more time, I swear I’m gonna snap. “God has a plan.” Wonderful. And I almost thought that, maybe for just a moment, there was a lapse in omnipotence. Of course He has everything under control! That’s the problem: I’m hurting right now, and He’s sitting on His hands. I don’t like His plan right now, and reminding me that what’s going on in my life was, at the very least, passively allowed by the cosmic micromanager, that don’t cheer me up. Oh, but his plan is “not to do me harm,” eh? You’re not listening. I just said that I’m hurting right now. Somebody or something is doing me harm, so make up your mind: Is this a part of God’s plan, or did He delegate it to somebody else?
God is the one who crushes us. The problems in your life, right now, are His lovely little “gifts,” and anybody who thinks 1 Corinthians 10:13 means we can handle them all hasn’t spent enough time at the end of their rope. Broken bones, the Psalmist says, trembling loins and searing pain. “I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping.” …but don’t worry, I can do all things, right?
“God works all things for good.” It’s nice to consider that at the end of the trial there could be some positive outcomes. But you don’t know that. Sometimes things don’t get better. Sometimes we stay sick. Sometimes we don’t overcome our addictions, emotional issues, or relational problems. Sometimes we walk through loss of loved ones, divorce, or an endless dark night of the soul. Sometimes our life is brutally and violently taken from us. Any good coming from this is most certainly of precious little benefit or comfort to me.
I appreciate you trying. I can feel your good intentions trying to cheer me up. It’s just that what you’re saying has the exact opposite effect. Even if I knew for a fact that things would have a pleasant resolution (we never can), it brings me little relief to think that right now, in the middle of my suffering, God seems absent. How long, oh Lord?
Jesus knew what it was to suffer. He also knew God’s plan. Would you walk up to Him as He is being crucified and offer the same sentiment? “Don’t worry, it’s just three days, you’ll be back and it’ll all be better.” Somehow, I just don’t think that makes the pain of Calvary any less significant. Jesus knew He was rising again. He still felt forsaken. By God. He cried out in anguish. “Hang in there, Jesus!” Uh-huh.
Ultimately, God’s “wonderful plan” is for you to die. Every single person. That and taxes are inevitable, but one is promised you by God Himself, along with trials. Comforting, ain’t it?
“Oh, but then there’s heaven, and every tear will be dried from your eyes!” Ah, yes. The celestial white picket fence. But cancer still hurts. Betrayal still stings. Hard things remain yet before us, and God does not offer us a way around them or an escape from them. We must endure.
Let’s be honest about what that looks like. There may be seven levels of hell before the promised paradise. That hope is easily lost amidst the throes of agony, especially when we begin to wonder why a God who promises such eternal bliss can’t just skip to the happy ending.
…and don’t tell me about the character God is supposedly building in me, James. I didn’t sign up for this terminal self-improvement program. That is a back-handed insult, implying that if I were more godly and spiritual already, God wouldn’t have to put me through this in order to make me grow up. You might as well say with Eliphaz, “Remember: who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?” (The correct answer: Jesus.)
You see, when pointing a person who is suffering to God’s “plan,” you are appealing to His sovereignty for good news at a time when it seems most responsible for bad news. This is what Lutherans call a “theology of glory.” God is good, God is all powerful, cling to this and know that His benevolence will win out in the end. However, pointing to God’s sovereignty as a source of comfort places His goodness on trial. He allowed this into my life. The world is cursed by Him because of sin.
A theology of glory almost always, inevitably, comes down to something YOU can do to help improve your situation. “God’s got a plan” nearly always segues into, “…and you just need to…” Pray more. Believe more strongly. Learn to accept it. Focus on others. Be more satisfied with God. I propose that we do not have as much influence over our life as we often like to think. Sometimes a solution may come from our own striving and the assistance of others, as with cases of addiction. But when the cure is beyond the reach of human effort, were only hurting people to point them there, because now their ongoing pain is also a consequence of their failure. Let’s add some guilt to the equation, shall we?
What then can we say? How do we comfort the broken? I suggest that the encouragement Christians give be something that can only come from Christian faith. I’m talking about the “theology of the cross.”
Martin Luther, in the Heidleburg Disputation, said: “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.” A potentially benevolent Almighty is simply not a Christian encouragement. A Muslim could say that. It is Christ-less, it is cross-less.
When the troubles of life threaten to undo us, Christians can cling with hope to the cross of Christ. Here, and here alone, we see who God truly is for us. And this sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, God-forsaken man is Emmanuel: God with us.
Pieta (after Delacroix), Van Gogh
That is the Christian comfort. In your agony, Jesus suffers with you. When we cry, He shares our tears. When we bleed, He shares our scars. When our life is spent, He says “you are safe in my death.” Though we are healed by His wounds, it is not a completely vicarious healing: we are united to Him in His death, and share with Him in His suffering. God is not twiddling His thumbs while we writhe, waiting for the perfect time to enact His maneuver. He is by your side, walking with you through fire.
Luther goes on to say, “A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the things what it actually is.” Suffering is bad. It is not a means to some higher end, as if whatever didn’t kill you would make you stronger. It will kill you, eventually. We are not called to carry our cross like little spiritual stoics. Sometimes trusting God will include some very dark emotions. We are called to walk with Christ through the valley of the shadow of death, that He might be our light and our life. Let us look to Him in our trials; not to the Father’s power and foresight, which judges the world through the curse, but to the Son, whose promise and presence is the one true balm for every woe. In the cross of Christ we see not a God of “the plan” pulling the strings of the universe, but a God of compassion, who delights in showing mercy.
I understand that for many, a pat on the back and a reminder that God is bigger than their problems is all the encouragement they need to soldier on. But if these problems don’t then go away soon, the silent sovereignty of God looms over them like a threat. It is not in His power (glory) that God comes to save us: It is His weakness (the cross) – where He identifies with our frailty and mortality – that is our salvation, strength, and comfort. We cannot truly see the goodness of God and His love for us apart from the cross, and our hope must not be set on any pretense of positive payoff in this life. Christ does not promise us the instant resolution answers we so often seek; rather, by His death He has won for all believers forgiveness, life, and salvation; a peace that the world cannot give or understand. May these be ever with us as we plod through this vale of tears.
“I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
Note from CM: Internet Monk now has something no other blog has, to my knowledge: our own official Wine Theologian. That’s right, we have given this title to our friend Adam McHugh, who will write regularly on the subject for us (word has it he may branch out to cover beer for us as well, which will make the Lutherans happy). Adam is well qualified to fill this position. He lives in the wine country of the Santa Ynez Valley, where he works as the general manager of a small winery in Lompoc and as a wine specialist at Whole Foods in Santa Barbara. Adam has degrees from Claremont McKenna College and Princeton Seminary. Adam has also received a spiritual direction certification through the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Plus he is a wonderful writer, as you may know from reading his previous posts here at IM.
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Blood from a Stone.
In 2010, inspired by Peter Mayle’s book A Year in Provence, I spent a week in Provence, in the south of France. I was eager to tour the papal palace in the stone-walled, water-wheeled city of Avignon, home to Pope Clement V after he relocated the papacy from Italy to France in the early 14th century.
But let’s not kid ourselves. I didn’t go to Provence for the history. I went for the wine.
A day after the palace tour, things got serious as I stood in the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the “new house of the pope” in honor of the French papal era. There, surrounded by rows of vineyards hanging thousands of clusters of the Grenache grape, are the ruins of the Avignon popes’ vacation home. With the half-collapsed structure in the backdrop, our wine guide explained the unique feature of the soil in the appellation. A layer of large stones sits atop the clay soil, absorbing heat and helping maintain moisture, and the appearance is that the vines sprout miraculously out of rocks. He then said this: “You can now understand the local expression that making wine is like squeezing blood from a stone.”
Skip Towne opened the door to his office and sat down to check his voice mail. Skip had been youth minister at Central Baptist Church for four years. As associate minister for youth at a large, traditional Baptist church, his life was always busy. Three services on Sunday, visitation on Sunday afternoons and youth group on Sunday and Wednesday nights. Mondays he led a Bible study for small group leaders, Tuesdays he coached an Upwards team. Wednesdays were full of junior high ministry and Thursday was his only night home. Friday night it was football game and open gym afterwards. Saturdays were always some kind of scheduled trip, concert or special event. It was the life of the youth minister he’d always imagined.
Skip’s youth group was one of the largest in the community. There were over a hundred students who were highly involved with the student ministries at Central, and many others who visited. It was sometimes embarrassing to eat lunch with youth ministers from other churches and find out that their attendance had been down because so many of their kids were attending an event at Central Baptist. The church was generous to the youth program. They paid for mission trips, recreation, concerts and new facilities. Skip even got to take in three or four conferences a year. And it was one of those conferences that had Skip checking his email this morning.
Skip wanted to start a coffeehouse, and the speaker at the conference he’d just attended had started a coffeehouse in his community. Skip wanted all the how to’s. After sorting through some spam, there was the letter from Greg. A complete packet of information on how to start a storefront coffeehouse for the community as a way to begin a kind of positive presence, laying the foundation for evangelism.
Greg’s coffeehouse was a presence in the community. It made no demands other than an open door. It was open 5 nights a week in a storefront right in the middle of a neighborhood frequented by students, minorities and young people. Local musicians were invited in to play and the coffeehouse provided a sound system. Volunteers worked the coffee bar, and the sponsoring church paid the rent and kept the operation inexpensive and solvent. The student ministry worked to make the coffeehouse look good and to get the word out about whatever was going on. After two years, the ministry was a success, by Greg’s testimony. The coffeehouse had made a positive impact in the community, provided a place of service for Christians, and given the opportunity for thousands of conversations between Christians and members of the community who would never come to a worship service. The next step was to have a worship time at the coffeehouse on Sunday mornings. It all sounded perfect.
Skip was interested from the first moment he’d heard the story. For a couple of years he’d had moments of looking at his ministry at Central and being unsatisfied. His kids were great, and they needed Christ and the Gospel. But these were church kids. They had grown up in church. Their families were church leaders and workers. These were kids who saw the church as just as much a part of their life as their school and their sports teams.
When the church started “Youth Church” in the new 3 million dollar youth recreation facility, attendance went up, but Skip knew that, despite all his efforts at publicity, those kids in the youth facility were almost entirely church kids from other churches. Only a very few of the students at youth church were kids from outside the church culture of this community. It was another example of something that had bothered Skip more and more: he wasn’t having an effect in the real community. Thousands of students that lived within 3 miles of Central Baptist would never be reached or affected in any way by Skip’s ministry. That was unacceptable.
It felt odd to have such a successful ministry, but to feel like you were a failure. The students, parents and leaders at Central Baptist thought Skip was the best youth minister they ever had. He never lacked for affirmation. Central treated its staff well, and his wife and kids were happy and secure. The coffeehouse idea wasn’t needed because anyone was unhappy. The few people he had mentioned it to seemed intrigued, but then began asking questions about why and how much and how long….and soon the enthusiasm was gone. Just the idea that it was going to simple BE THERE, and not be a concert event or an occasional evening event, seemed to throw cold water on the idea.
What bothered Skip the most was that he knew it was his own approach to ministry that made the coffeehouse idea seem so strange and alien. It wasn’t a good time. It wasn’t fun for Christian students. It wasn’t big numbers or an outing with a t-shirt. It seemed to have no purpose because Skip hadn’t presented a mission that comprehended the purpose of a coffeehouse whose purpose was a place for Christians and non-Christians to meet on common ground, have conversations and develop relationships. He’d been brought in to build a church youth program, and he’d done it. He’d done it so well that a ministry of missional presence, serving the community and asking for nothing, made no sense.
When Skip had talked with the chairman of the parent’s council about the coffeehouse idea, she had listened politely, but immediately wanted to know why Skip didn’t just take the kids out witnessing to students on the streets in that community. When he said that he wasn’t looking for an evangelism project, but a place for relationships to form that might lead to evangelistic conversations, she had shaken her head and said the idea wasn’t a good one.
Skip took a weekend and outlined the entire coffeehouse idea into a presentation. If nothing else, he wanted the senior pastor and the rest of the staff to hear the idea. The pastor always spoke about missions and evangelism, and this was an opportunity to begin to do some of the kinds of missional projects that could change the entire culture of the church itself. Wouldn’t it be great if Central Baptist could one day be known as a church that loved the community enough to open and sustain a coffeehouse as a way to say “We love our community, and we want to show that love in a way that asks you to do nothing, not even come to our building.”
Skip finished the presentation, printed it up, and sent it to the staff, complete with a PowerPoint detailing everything necessary for the first year of the project. He asked if he could have 30 minutes of the next staff meeting to present and discuss the idea.
Hello friends and happy Saturday. Chaplain Mike here. For once I’ve dragged my lazy butt out of bed on a Saturday morning to be with you all.
I’ve enjoyed writing about the Slow Church book this week, but today I’m ready to spread my wings and ramble. Our regular Rambler, the renowned Pastor Dan, is visiting the Promised Land in Arizona this weekend to wish his mom a happy 80th birthday. So while he rambles for real, we’ll do our weekly tour of the good, the bad, and the ugly from cyberspace. And today we go video style.
We begin with a story that Pastor Dan will love.
Dan’s family used to run a restaurant at the base of Mt. Rushmore, and our gastronomically gifted pastor grew up working there in the presence of those iconic images. Well, in honor of “National Jerky Day” this past Thursday, June 12, Jack Link’s Jerky company built a replica of Mt. Rushmore covered with beef jerky. That’s right, they made Meat Rushmore, and they did it “to celebrate our nation’s longstanding relationship with meat snacks.”
Roll the video —
Second, before I start getting hate mail, I owe you an apology. We’ve been discussing a variety of religious issues here at Internet Monk over the years, but apparently we missed one of the most significant matters of our time. However, thanks be to God and to Martyn Ballestero, someone has finally displayed the courage to confront what may the most destructive practice the church has ever known.
We interrupt our regular programming with a dispatch from our resident Canadian reporter, Mike Bell, who gives us his thoughts on the Provincial Election in Ontario Canada…
I voted tonight.
Why tonight? Well in Canada, while many jurisdictions have fixed election date legislation in place, there are multiple parties that can win seats, and so minority governments are becoming common place. Elections end up being called when the minority government no longer has the support of the majority of votes in the house. In Ontario, this happened recently, and so we had an election today.
We had the worst election choices that I have ever experienced.
I have voted in nine Federal elections and nine provincial elections and this was the only one where I heard a number of friends talking about declining their ballot. The editorial board of my local newspaper even said there was no one worthy of endorsing. The Progressive Conservative party decided to ditch the progressive label and took a hard right turn. The scandal plagued Liberal government who have shown that they can’t be trusted with the taxpayers money, moved left (albeit they now have a new leader). The party of the far left, the New Democratic Party, moved right, but ran a horribly inept campaign.
Face with not knowing who to vote for, I made a very interesting decision, which I announced on my facebook page.
Here are my election voting thoughts. This is largely aimed at so many of my friends who say that there are no acceptable options in this election. I am a moderate, and agree that there are no acceptable moderate choices (for me) in this election. If the Conservatives get elected we will likely have the same choices next election. If the Liberals get elected, the Conservatives will be replacing their leader, and I am likely to have a better set of choices in the next election. So… I will be voting Liberal.
One friend responded…
Are you crazy! Any vote is better. You are a Christian and you are going to tell the Liberals that it is okay to LIE and BUY votes anyway they can. If you can vote Liberal with a clear conscience then by all means do so.
To give a little context to her statement. Leading up to the previous election the Liberals were facing defeat in a couple of ridings over some unpopular gas powered generating plants that were being built. They cancelled the contract on both the plants which will end up costing taxpayers in excess of one billion dollars.
The alternative was the conservatives who were planning to create one million jobs (though the math was problematic), but were going to start by firing 100,000 civil servants. I agree that fiscal restraint is needed, but the Conservative leader, Tim Hudak, was not someone I would trust to do the job.
Anyway, the election is now over and the people have spoken. The Liberals were elected with a majority government, but with only 38% of the popular vote.
As the Liberals are no longer beholden to any other party, they are likely to govern more from the political center. The Conservatives will likely dump Tim Hudak and hopefully they have learned their lesson and will replace him with a more moderate leader.
I got the election results that I wanted. Ironically it is not the government that I wanted, but I hope that it will lead to better options when the next election comes around.
On a side note check out this interesting electoral map.
The Orange represents the New Democratic Party. Their strength is in the North and in highly unionized parts of the country. They win the geographical vote. The Conservatives are blue and the Liberal red. (Yes, they are the opposite colors from the American parties.) The Conservatives won the rural vote, and the Liberals won the city vote. So, while there is almost no red on the map, the Liberals did in fact win. It will be an interesting next four years as most of the province, both geographically and numerically will have a government that they did not want.
What do you think of my decision making process here? Is my friend right? Am I crazy? What should be important to Christians as we seek to fulfill our rights and responsibilities as voters. One more thing: If you want to see how your own ideologies stack up against the various political parties in Ontario you can take this short survey. I would be interested in knowing how the Internet Monk audience would typically vote in a Canadian context. Your thoughts and comments are welcome.
Christian practice in matters of spiritual formation goes badly astray when it attempts to construct or organize ways of spirituality apart from the ordinariness of life. And there is nothing more ordinary than a meal. Abstract principles — the mainstay of so much of what is provided for us in contemporary church culture — do not originate in the biblical revelation.
Breakfast and supper. Fish and bread. The home in Emmaus and the beach in Galilee. These provide the conditions and materials for formation-by-resurrection.
Two primary stories about how the first Christians experienced the risen Christ involve meals and conversations.
The first is told by Luke, a tale about two grieving disciples heading home from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus after their hopes had been dashed by Jesus’ crucifixion (Luke 24:13:35). A stranger they do not recognize joins them on the road, inquires about their sadness, and teaches them some things they had missed in God’s Story and what it anticipated with regard to the Messiah. Arriving at their home, they invite the stranger in for a meal. At the table, he breaks the bread, their eyes are opened, their guest vanishes, and they realize they have been in the presence of the risen and living Christ.
John tells the second tale, which follows a similar pattern. Peter and his friends, forlorn after losing Jesus, decide to go fishing (John 21). They fish all night without so much as a bite. In the hazy early morning light, they see a stranger on the shore who directs them to place their nets on the other side of the boat. When they do, a great catch of fish! Peter recognizes the Lord and splashes to shore. All of them join Jesus around a campfire for a meal of fresh cooked fish. The risen Christ holds conversations with them, and in his words they experience restoration, healing, guidance and wisdom for the days to come.
The pattern is set.
The followers of the risen Lord meet him at the table, sharing food and drink and redemptive, transforming conversation. They are the church of the table and the word.
These meals remind Jesus’ disciples of all the meals and all the conversations he shared with them and with people throughout the land during his ministry. He ate with them in homes, on the road, around campfires, at banquets given in his honor, on mountainsides and by lakes. Jesus’ ministry centered around table fellowship.
Everywhere he went and with everyone he met, he also shared words about the dawning Kingdom of God. He spoke in sayings, parables, stories, instructions, and teachings. People asked him questions and he responded. He asked them questions and made them wonder. They discovered that he had the words of eternal life.
The traditional liturgy of the church is designed to reenact these meetings with the risen Lord. The liturgy is structured around the word and the table. We hear the life-giving words of God in Scripture, and speak our words to God in prayer and praise. We “speak to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” We come to the table where the bread is broken and wine is poured out once more as a new covenant. In the shape of the liturgy not only are the body and blood of Christ given to us that we might live, but we also, God’s people, are taken, blessed, and broken so that we might be distributed to our neighbors as bread for the hungry when we leave the sanctuary.
Slow Church does not talk about the liturgy like this. Its authors are not members of liturgical churches. Nevertheless, they catch the ethos and significance of the New Testament resurrection and early church narratives with great insight.
In the final chapter of the book Smith and Pattison speak of the table and the word as the primary locus for congregations in their life together. They encourage churches to share meals together and to have what they call regular eucharistic conversations with one another that involve worship, the Bible, our Christian journeys, our relationships with one another and our neighbors, congregational decision-making, and a whole host of matters related to our common life in Christ. “Around the table,” they say, “we live into our common identity as brothers and sisters in Christ” (p. 215).
They encourage our congregations to become conversational in nature, joining together regularly in such ordinary settings as meals so that we might experience the risen Lord in our midst and learn to be led together by him.
Sharing meals, developing common postures and practices, and forging common convictions build trust and intimacy that we believe will ripple outward from the table and find their way into every aspect of our lives.
Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, “the least of these my brethren.”
I walked around the small sanctuary. The concrete floor was bare and dusty. Plain wooden beams and posts held up a metal roof overhead. The seats were simple metal folding chairs. Windows of plain glass had been propped open to let the cooling breezes flow through the room. In front, a handmade wooden lectern marked with a cross stood on a slightly raised platform. On the floor before the lectern sat a large wicker basket. When I inquired about it, my host said that this was where people brought food, clothing, small goods, money, and other belongings to the services to share with “the poor.” The other night a neighbor who’d had a little too much to drink brought a live chicken and tried to put it in the basket. That brought some enthusiasm into the meeting!
The room probably held thirty or forty people, more if they stood in the doorways or sat on the window sills, which they were prone to do if outsiders like me were visiting. My host let me wander while he attended to other matters, and I walked over to a wall where a half dozen pictures were displayed on a cork board. Even with my poor comprehension of Portugese I could see immediately that this was the congregation’s missionary display. I was standing in the humble meeting place of a young church plant in one of the poorest villages in that region of Brazil — and they were already supporting six missionaries! They were also providing support so that a pastor might teach them. And each week they were bringing offerings of money and goods to their worship gatherings to share with “the poor.”
Tears welled up in my eyes. There is nothing so beautiful, so Christlike as grateful, generous love.
In Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, Chris Smith and John Pattison call this kind of trust in God’s provision, this spirit of gratitude, this overflowing practice of hospitality and generosity the economy of the Slow Church perspective. In an age when many churches are run like businesses in a competitive marketplace, operating with an illusion of scarcity that generates constant anxiety about what we must do to survive and grow in the future, the authors instead call us to form congregations that simply trust in the abundance of God and learn to live with open hands toward one another and our neighbors.
The whole congregation of believers was united as one—one heart, one mind! They didn’t even claim ownership of their own possessions. No one said, “That’s mine; you can’t have it.” They shared everything. The apostles gave powerful witness to the resurrection of the Master Jesus, and grace was on all of them.
And so it turned out that not a person among them was needy. Those who owned fields or houses sold them and brought the price of the sale to the apostles and made an offering of it. The apostles then distributed it according to each person’s need.
– Acts 4:32-35, MSG
“Grace was on all of them” — and therefore they found themselves grateful. Out of that they became generous, hospitable, open-handed, kind, caring, and sacrificial in their love for others. Living in the abundance of God in Christ, they didn’t cling to anything but the opportunity to bless and help others.
I’m not going to analyze this section of the book or pontificate on its message. I believe its message is better “felt” than “tell’t.”
To do that, I would like to introduce you to another church, one here in the U.S. that exemplifies the same spirit as that little Brazilian congregation I described above. Chris Smith’s home church is Englewood Christian Church, here in Indianapolis. The following excerpt about the congregation is from an article by Robert King in the Indianapolis Star (Dec. 25, 2013) called, “Englewood Christian Church, by being a good neighbor first, tries to live its faith.”
Englewood looks at its mission as one of almost communal living with its surroundings. The church’s focus has morphed into improving neighborhood quality of life — providing housing, offering quality child care, creating jobs. . . .
. . . Where Englewood is right now is more firmly tied than ever before to the Near Eastside, an area that has been decimated by factory closings in the past 40 years and the abandoned houses that followed, a place where many residents still struggle to get by in an area where crime is always a looming concern.
Over the past 15 years, Englewood — through a nonprofit community development corporation it created — has fully remodeled 40 homes in the neighborhood and repaired an additional 200. Much of the work early on was aimed at struggling church members. Over time, that expanded to others from its neighborhood.
In 1996, the church expanded its humble preschool into what has become one of the highest-rated child cares in the city, with 75 children from diverse economic backgrounds and plans to grow further. Despite the light regulation of ministry child cares, DayStar Child Care is striving to surpass the standards set for fully licensed day cares.
In 2012, the church took the gift of a nearby building that was once Indianapolis Public School 3. Englewood converted it into a 32-unit apartment building that now serves an eclectic mix of residents: a Butler University professor, a Lilly engineer and others who pay market rates, but also low-income people who pay below market rents, and people in 10 other units whose last home was on the streets.
Along the way, Englewood has tried to breathe economic vitality into the Near Eastside and create jobs. It was heavily involved in getting the Pogue’s Run Grocer food co-op off the ground on East 10th Street, and bought and restored a vacant building across the street that it now leases to Little Green Bean Boutique. It has begun to do similar work on East Washington Street, funding micro-businesses such as the Tlaolli tamale shop and planning a bigger project that would include a senior living facility, a charter school and new storefronts.
Friends, not saviors
Yet, to highlight these bullet points of success makes leaders and church members at Englewood a bit uncomfortable. They point to other community organizations on the Near Eastside that were part of the effort. Mostly, they don’t want to be seen as saviors on a white horse. They much prefer to be thought of as the helpful neighbors next door.
“There are plenty of things wrong with our neighborhood,” said Chris Smith, who moved into the Englewood neighborhood in 2004 to be closer to the church and edits the church’s quarterly book review. “But we’re not here to save it. We are here to be friends.”
That’s true in a very literal sense. Of the 180 or so people who attend services weekly, church leaders estimate 75 percent live in the Englewood neighborhood, most within a couple of blocks of the church.
Some are church members who needed decent housing and were helped into nearby homes or the apartment building. Others, maybe 15 to 20, were suburbanites who intentionally moved within a couple of blocks of the church to build a critical mass of church members in what has become, essentially, a Protestant parish on the Near Eastside.
But the most common analogy is appropriate to the Christmas story, which speaks to God becoming man and entering the world. One passage from the Bible says: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”
The Englewood translation, as proclaimed from a sign above the desk of church secretary Loretta Benjamin, states: “And the Word became flesh, and moved into the neighborhood.”
“I believe the church is Jesus in the flesh in the neighborhood,” Benjamin said. “We are the hands and feet and the voice of Jesus… in the neighborhood. That’s our mission.”
I encourage you to click on the link above and read more about this congregation, and especially some of the specific stories of people they have loved and been loved by over the years. You’ll learn a lot about one particular parcel of soil out of which this whole thing called “Slow Church” has grown. You’ll be impressed by the grace of God at work, and how it overflows through the grateful living of Englewood’s members.
And please take note, this is a church with 180 members in the inner city, not a megachurch, not a rich church. It is God’s abundance to which they testify, and by which some pretty amazing work has been done for God’s glory and the good of others.
What Englewood is doing, and what Smith and Pattison are encouraging our churches to do is:
To “embody the abundance of God’s kingdom in our local congregations” (p. 168).
To practice gratitude (not just “give thanks”) by looking at the world through the eyes of God’s abundant grace and seeking to make the most of the gifts that are present and available all around us, though they may be disguised and we find it hard to recognize them.
To build communities characterized primarily by belonging and sharing (Jean Vanier). To practice a “hospitality” that is not the modern, “McDonaldized” industry version, which is transactional and impersonal (though made to feel as personal as possible). Rather, it means truly becoming a neighbor, sharing a common life, welcoming others to sit down with you at a real table and hearing each others’ stories, rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep.
Wonder is the only adequate launching pad for exploring a spirituality of creation, keeping us open-eyed, expectant, alive to life that is always more than we can account for, that always exceeds our calculations, that is always beyond anything we can make.
The second course offered us in Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus is a hearty one that requires taking our time, chewing slowly, savoring each bite, considering the complex textures and tastes before us on our plates. Part two is about the ecology of Slow Church. Chris Smith and John Pattison here describe what they mean by that:
God who is triune — three distinct persons and yet a united whole — created many distinct forms, living and nonliving, that are united in an interconnected whole we call creation. . . .
. . . Not only is creation an interdependent whole, all of creation has already been reconciled in the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Christ. Even now, God is at work orchestrating the fulfillment of this reconciliation. “In [Christ,]” the apostle Paul says, “all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible . . . all things have been created through him and for him. . . . And through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether in heaven or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross” (Col. 1:16, 20).
. . . As the people of God we locate ourselves in the ecological story of God reconciling an interconnected creation.
– p. 101f
The chapters in this second section of Slow Church brought to my mind the ancient rule of the monastics, perhaps best known through St. Benedict’s Rule: ora et labora — prayer and labor. This part of the book encourages us to contemplate deep mysteries and important themes which dwell at the heart of God’s created and redeemed world and to act on them with faith, simplicity, and integrity, both as individuals and as communities.
They call us to ponder what shalom means, the wholeness God intends for all creation through the redeeming work of Christ.
They challenge us to embrace our daily work as vocation, the privilege of cooperating with God in his work of healing and repairing the world.
They invite us to participate in Sabbath, to enter God’s rest in Christ and practice the ethics of “abundance, self-restraint, and solidarity” (p. 141).
In other words, Smith and Pattison are calling congregations of Christ-followers to slow down in order that we may become a contemplative church, taking the time to listen to the Spirit and one another, taking the time to consider our lives and what we are creating with them, and taking the time to rest, while relishing God’s goodness, relinquishing control, and enjoying God’s gifts.
Needless to say, “contemplative” does not describe the character of many churches. Nor do the particular themes of this section make it to the top of a lot of churches’ mission and vision statements.
Our congregations often contribute to the fragmentation of life and human relationships rather than to promoting shalom.
Christians’ daily work is often downplayed as a necessary evil rather than as a means of God showing his love to the world in the “ordinary” contributions we make through the labor of our hands.
Sabbath rest has been pushed out by a cultural attitude that “prides itself on busyness, scorns leisure as laziness and boasts that we’ll sleep when we’re dead” (p. 141).
How might this contemplative spirit emphasizing shalom, vocation, and Sabbath work out in practice in a congregation?
First, it seems to me that shalom will only become a raison d’être in our congregations when we begin to practice hospitality to those in our communities who are different than we are, ecumenicity toward other Christian traditions, joining with them in mutual conversation and ministry, and when we steadfastly refuse to promote divisive ideas such as partisan political positions but encourage and facilitate ongoing interactions among people of different viewpoints with an emphasis on trying to seek the common good. If shalom is all about bringing a fragmented world back to wholeness, then how can we continue to withdraw and remain aloof from those with whom we disagree?
Second, we can only give more honor to our daily vocations if we stop emphasizing “church work” over “the work of the church” in the world. The Lutheran church I’ve attended, for example, has in past years devoted an entire month every year to honoring what people do in their daily work. It becomes part of the liturgy and teaching for four Sundays. We invite people from our community — teachers, firefighters, police, business owners, etc. — to come to our services that we might recognize their contributions and thank God for them. We pray for them and for everyone in his or her work and then we are sent out to be the “masks of God” in our world each day.
Third, the word “Sabbath” means “to cease,” “to stop.” There is no other way to experience Sabbath than to stop working. Period. Total time out. Congregations, pastors, please find the imagination to incorporate this in your church “program.” Give the gift of time and space to people to do nothing but rest and enjoy God’s gifts. No agenda. No mission. Relinquish pride and control — God will work without us for awhile. Reflect on radical grace — In reality, none of us has ever earned a thing; it has all been a gift.
The world is busy, distracted. Life is fast and focused on production. A world on the move, and where are we going?
Shouldn’t the church be offering something different?
The ways employed in our North American culture are conspicuously impersonal: programs, organizations, techniques, general guidelines, information detached from place. In matters of ways and means, the vocabulary of numbers is preferred over names, ideologies crowd out ideas, the gray fog of abstraction absorbs the sharp particularities of the recognizable face and the familiar street.
These characteristics, write Chris Smith and John Pattison, form the ethics of Slow Church. This is how congregations of Christians become, “faithfully and well, the embodiment of Christ in a particular place” (p. 16).
Place
A careful reading of the New Testament shows how differently the apostles addressed the various congregations to whom they wrote. In their epistles, Paul and the other authors used terms and metaphors that grew out of the local history, culture, and experiences of each faith community. This reminds us that, although the gospel is for the whole world, it comes to people incarnated into their own peculiar contexts.
The authors of Slow Church agree — “You can’t franchise the kingdom of God” (p. 41). In contrast to the supra-cultural “taste” of franchise businesses and restaurants, where you know what you’re going to get no matter where you are in the world, Slow Church emphasizes that each community is a “distinctively local expression of the global body of Christ” (p. 43) that complements the character and seeks the good of the particular place in which it is planted.
The authors contrast this with the principles and methods of the church growth movement and the sociological characteristics of “McDonaldization” that we listed in yesterday’s post. The franchise approaches offer “tastes” that are general and bland. They aim for a universal consistency that eliminates the contours of local particularities. “One-size-fits-all success models rarely allow time to discover the assets, needs, history, diversity, traditions and values of a community” (p. 52).
A Slow Church perspective thinks this mentality fails to communicate the message of the incarnate Christ in its fullness. If we don’t settle down, slow down, and sit down at the table with our neighbors, what Jesus are we presenting to them?
Stability
“It is difficult for us to bear witness together to the patient and delectable way of Jesus when people are cycling rapidly into and out of our churches” (p. 62). Our society’s individualism and mobility often works against the call to remain faithful over time in our communities, to develop deep relationships of love and partnership within God’s family, and to bear witness to our neighbors about the constancy and reliability of God and God’s promises.
In a post called “Moving” that I wrote a couple of years ago, I reflected upon my own story of relocating regularly and what that has done to my psyche:
Like many who move often, my memories are compartmentalized, like separate chapters in a storybook that have little relation to one another. . . . As one who has moved a lot throughout my life, I’ve developed an ongoing, nagging sense of “What’s next?” My life has not so much been a novel as it has been a book of short stories, each with a definite beginning, middle, and ending.
In a society and economy like ours, this is inevitable. Nevertheless, a great deal of the movement that takes place in and out of communities and churches boils down to the freedom we have in our day to choose alternatives. This is not intrinsically problematic, but it can militate against stability, faithfulness, enduring through difficulty, reconciling conflicts, and learning to put up with others (the biblical virtue of “forbearance”).
I have seen this in myself much more than I would like, and as a pastor, few things grieved my heart more than seeing people decide to leave a church because they weren’t willing to take on the hard work of love. I take it that the authors of Slow Church are encouraging us, wherever we are and for how long, to be fully present in that place and with those people. Get to know that place. Give those particular relationships the attention they deserve.
On the other hand, Smith and Pattison rightly acknowledge that rootedness does not necessarily equal godliness. Stability can degenerate into entrenchment. Commitment to “local” can devolve into parochialism. Outsiders and those who don’t fit the mold may be distrusted and made to feel unwelcome or worse.
God has a worldwide family, and local communities of believers are called to have a heart not only for home, but also for the world. I like the idea of our neighborhood congregations forming partnerships with churches and missions in different settings. Maintaining vital, active relationships with them just might help keep us from thinking the world revolves around us and our ways.
Patience
Instant gratification = instant dissatisfaction. Western culture is built on impatience. Few would argue against the fact that this has allowed us to be productive in unprecedented ways, which has led to many benefits. Impatience and its corollaries of ambition, competition, and drive have fueled much salutary progress.
However, we have not always counted the cost of the threats such impatience poses to human flourishing or the health of our planet. Though we rejoice wherever progress has made life better, progress will not redeem the world, put it to rights, or bring in a new creation. It always yields unintended consequences. We are not ultimately in control.
Nor can the impatience to advance create communities of faith, hope, and love. It does not equip us to suffer or bear the burdens of others. Virtues like forbearance and longsuffering are not its forte. It aims for the glory of the next big thing while despising the way of the cross.
As a witness to the longsuffering of God and the patience of Christ in his sufferings, the church embodies a more patient way: a way of daily dying and rising again, of daily immersion in and contemplation of the works and actions of Jesus, of regular ongoing conversations with one another and with our neighbors, of faithful actions designed to help our local communities flourish, of not growing weary in prayer and doing good.
Miles Stanford once wrote about a professor who gave an impatient student advice. The student wanted to take a shorter course, but the teacher said, “When God wants to make an oak, He takes a hundred years, but when He wants to make a squash, He takes six months.”
Chris Smith and John Pattison are calling for more Christians and more congregations to be planted as oak trees in their communities, patiently growing and making their neighborhoods more lovely and welcoming as the years go by.
Blood from a Stone.
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