the parish

Math and Starbucks

Leighton or other math genius reading this,

I am proposing a math challenge. Given the number of Starbucks in the U.S. (domestic only please) and the number of Christians in the U.S. and the propensity of Christians to read their Bibles at Starbucks, please develop a formula that can tell me the exact odds of there being a Christian reading his Bible or a group of Christians doing a Bible study at a Starbucks in America at any given moment. You might need to know something about traffic and peak hours too, so let's say men and youth tend to be there from 6-8 in the morning and women, especially stay-home moms, tend to be there between 10-11:30 in the morning and 1-4 in the afternoon.

Additionally, please develop a corollary to explain with some degree of mathematical certainty why they feel like they must read their Bibles at Starbucks. If you're up to the challenge, you might also try to factor the likelihood that reading at Starbucks helps or hurts their ability to retain information, to hear from the Holy Spirit, to make them feel like they're witnessing, and to improve Christian self-esteem. An intersting side project would be to do separate formulae for different study Bibles: the iron sharpens iron study Bible, the Captivated study Bible, the Xtreme Youth study Bible, and the hungover college student study Bible, for example. I won't know how to use the formulae as I suck at math; I only passed geometry as a junior in high school because our teacher got high with us. (Stu, thanks belatedly for supplying the good weed.) Anyway, I won't be able to understand the formulae, but I'll feel better knowing that someone can decipher this mystery.

Suffering for Jesus, Part Deux (Revised)

Benjamin Coles, a Southern Baptist pastor from Texas, had this letter posted on his blog last week. Since I've been talking about vested interests, I thought Niebuhr's thoughts on the matter might be worth reading.

Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic
By Reinhold Niebuhr

(Entry from 1924)

“Had a letter today informing me that the First ______ church in ______ has called a new pastor. After trying futilely to find the right man, who was to have as much scholarship as his predecessor and more ‘punch,’ they decided to raise the salary to $15,000. I don’t know whether that was the factor which finally solved their problem, but at any rate they have the man they want. I suppose it is not easy to get a combination of Aristotle and Demosthenes, and on the current market, that ought to be worth $15,000. Nevertheless there must be some limit to this matter of oversized salaries.

There ought to be some questioning, too, about the growing tendency of churches to build their congregations around pulpit eloquence. What kind of fundamental ethical question can a man be eloquent about when he draws that much cash, particularly since a Croesus or two usually has to supply an undue proportion of it? I don’t know anything about the prophet of the Lord who accepted this call, but I venture to prophesy that no sinner in that pagan city will quake in his boots in anticipation of his coming.

The idea of a professional good man is difficult enough for all of us who are professionally engaged as teachers of the moral ideal. Of course, ‘a man must live,’ and it is promised that if we seek first the kingdom and its righteousness ‘all these things shall be added unto us.’ But I doubt whether Jesus had a $15,000 salary in mind. If the things that are added become too numerous they distract your attention terribly. To try and keep your eye on the main purpose may only result in making you squint-eyed. I hope the new prophet won’t begin his pastorate with a sermon on the text, ‘I count all things but loss.’”

According to measuringworth.com, that 1924 salary would be worth:

	$171,315.79	using the Consumer Price Index
	$142,468.41	using the GDP deflator
	$386,312.43	using the value of consumer bundle
	$580,788.18	using the unskilled wage
	$828,352.83	using the nominal GDP per capita
	$2,148,786.66	using the relative share of GDP

I don't know enough about math or economics to know what the hell those domestic products and deflators have to do with how you're figuring worth (I'm sure Leighton does.), but it still adds up to a pretty nice sum of money. My first guess is that the numbers are a bit high, but that's just because I don't want to believe that someone in "ministry" would have made a comparable amount of money then, or now. Anyway, just thought I'd let someone besides me have a say about vested interests. Peace.

Post-Christianity, an Explanation of Sorts

Okay, against my better judgment I've decided to clarify some things. A few respondents were actually fair-minded and sincere while bringing up legitimate complaints about the previous post. For their sake, I'll explain what I'm trying to say.

1. I'm gonna stand by this one. Sorry. Apologetics, as my atheist friend pointed out, is justification of beliefs working backwards. You start with conclusions that militate against your experience of reality and then start back-filling. If it doesn't fit, write it off to the mystery of God or our finite minds.

2. I don't want to be a Christian as it's commonly understood. I think many folks are missing the semantic thing I'm doing here. I don't deny much of what I have long believed about Jesus; I simply deny that the Church does a good job of embodying, communicating, or mediating the grace and the kingdom. The typical response is that it's always been this way and it always will be. Great, so let's just settle for what we have 'til Jesus comes back. Or I hear how arrogant or judgmental or half-cocked I am to believe I've got it figured out. Does it sound like I believe I have it figured out? To paraphrase Yoder again, I don't have to tell you how to fix what is broken just because I've pointed out that it's broken. That is to remove the burden from those who would sustain the traditions and place it upon those who would challenge them. If it's broken, admit it and do something to fix it. Vested interests are powerful things, folks.

3. I am a heretic by the standard evangelical and fundamentalist understandings of the faith. I don't care. I think they are heretics too, if Church history, the Bible and theology are any judge of that. At best they are legalists who have managed, to paraphrase Pascal, to make Christianity something I can participate in that requires I do nothing but believe. Am I talking about all Christians? No. There are plenty of good ones. To isolate that particular issue over against all of what I've said is to ignore the thrust of what I've said and mischaracterize my thoughts in order to discredit them.

4. See point 1. And Mrs. Pilgrim helps make my point by arguing that Christianity is logical. Have you read the Bible?

5. They don't. I still maintain that's a problem. Perhaps I've taken in a little too much anabaptist theology, but it seems like the anabaptists could teach the fundangelical church a thing or two about faith and life and Jesus at this point. Either he's an anthropological model for us or his life is pointless. Just let Herod kill him. He's lived a sinless life as an infant...oh, wait...he has to get baptized to remove the original sin...no...he doesn't have that 'cause it comes from the male...or what did Augustine say. Hell with it.

6. Not much to say here.

7. This is self-evident. The fact that no world religion answers the question is a powerful argument against God. The degree to which Christians misunderstand that is disturbing.

8. I'm no longer Pentecostal. I said that because I saw many things happen growing up that defy rational explanation. Sorry skeptical friends; it remains true. But to say that something happens is not to say that God happens. And to ascribe to God the average things that happen in a day or life is as fair as ascribing them to pixies or faeries if there is no distinguishing mark of God's activity. I happen to believe that the church (my definition, which I've been trying to get to for years on this blog) is to be the embodiment of God. Most fundangelicals believe the embodiment ended and now all we have is salvation in an historic event and salvation and judgment in a future event. Screw embodiment; if I'd been the only one alive on the earth, Jesus would have died just for me...

9. I don't care how you paint eternity. I don't think I want to participate. It's a false notion, and pretty unsupportable Scripturally, that humans are creatures of eternity. That "gift" is bestowed by God; it is not supposed to be part of our nature. People really should read their Bibles. Hell? I've said so much about it, I don't know what else to say. If God designed hell knowing some of us would end up there, I don't know that I care that he/she is God. It's perverse. The degree to which Christians misunderstand this is disturbing (that sounds familiar).

10. It is. Read it. That doesn't mean there is nothing worth reading in it. It means it is what it is: a deeply conflicted view of God, humans, the world, sin, salvation, and some crazy guy that no one takes seriously lest they be forced to love people they hate.

11. You'll notice I said literal reading. I won't apologize for this. It just seems insane. You can't make the thing coherent, so why pretend it is? You can't love and kill, burn in hell and receive mercy, be capricious and abounding in steadfast love, or any of the other hundreds of contradictions.

12. I don't think Jesus did either. If Christians believe Jesus is God, then God did not kill Jesus; Jesus is God. Get it? Oh, forget it. The degree to which...never mind.

13. If living a kingdom life irrespective of what you think about Jesus keeps you out of heaven, it's not a place you want to be. If Jesus worries more about what people think about him than how they treat each other, the Bible is deeply wrong about who Jesus is, and he's not someone you ought to trust your life to.

14. Except I do. I just don't believe much Christian stuff anymore. And I believe the Church as institution is beyond salvage. Better to start over with a community of friends who attempt to embody the life and teachings of Jesus. What a foolish notion! What would we do with our buildings, M.Divs, district superintendents' salaries (not to mention the Lincolns they drive), the bishops' mansions, the bookstores and publishers, the conventions and cd's and purpose driven lives and multi-site satellite equiment? Here's the problem, nearly every argument for the continuation of the Church as institution comes from within the Church as institution. How can you make an honest argument when so much of your life, livelihood, and understanding of the faith is tied to a particular definition of church? How can you tear down that much and start over?

Peace.

Post-Christian Parish?

I think I'm almost there, folks. I've been talking to a few people about faith and life and church lately in ways that make them scratch their heads and ask me if I'm a Christian. I'm used to that from fundangelicals, but these folks run the spectrum from non-Christian to theologically conservative/socially moderate Christian. Here are some random observations, NOT posted to ask you to refute them and thereby bring me once again into the fold:

1. I can no longer do the apologetics necessary to keep me believing most of what Christians proclaim.

2. I find myself repeatedly bogged down in conversations with people who insist that I can't believe what I believe and still be Christian. (Deal.)

3. I no longer have anything that looks like faith in God as he/she is conceived by Christianity as it's been constructed in fundangelical, liberal, or emerging churches. I am, in short, a heretic at best.

4. The arguments about faith and church and God are no longer compelling as they are framed by Christians. I know the arguments before they make them, and I can't go back someplace I've already been.

5. The overwhelming majority of Christians don't practice anything that looks remotely like Jesus. That is a problem, people, and appeals to substitutionary atonement don't add up to shit when people are watching and asking what is distinctive about Christianity. If substitutionary atonement is the distinguishing factor, then God should have created a species of sociopaths for all the good SA does.

6. I don't practice it either, nor can I make myself want to anymore.

7. There is not and can't be a good theodic response to natural evil.

8. If God is active in the world, he's the best disguised force in existence. This from someone who grew up Pentecostal.

9. Heaven is someplace I don't want to be. Hell is perverse and unthinkable. I don't want to live forever. I'm tired already, and I'm only 42.

10. People who have actually read the Bible know it is one of the most schizophrenic, neurotic, racist, xenophobic, sexist compilations of stories ever assembled.

11. People who order their lives according to a literal reading of a 2000-year old book are one step above insane. Just one. The rest of us can't decide which parts ought to be canon and which ought to be jettisoned.

12. I don't like violence. I don't like the myth of redemptive violence.

13. If Gandhi and Mother Teresa aren't Christians, it's a club I don't want to be a part of.

14. I simply don't believe much anymore.

All that being said, I am overwhelmed by this story of Jesus. I'm captivated, sorry Mr. Eldredge, by this borderline lunatic, this fringe-dwelling hippy, this painfully human man, this visionary who believed we are capable of being better than we are. I can't help it. So, in answer to several questions about Jesus I've received lately. I can't help but believe that he was something more than us, and I can't help but believe that he rose from the dead, and I can't help but believe he did something cosmic on the cross in terms of exposing and overcoming the powers. That requires I believe in resurrection and in God. It does not, however, require that I believe the Church is what he came to start or that it has been the best medium for the transmission of that message or that it has embodied an ethic that looks anything like Jesus. In fact, I'm convinced that more often than not, the church has been and continues to be antichrist. So, call me a post-Christian. But I can't let go of that guy. And there is an experience I will tell you about next time. Peace.

Me Droogs

If you understand the title reference, give yourself five film genius points.

I've gone out on a limb and said Christianity doesn't need these things we currently call churches (and really aren't or are just bad at being) to function. Rather, I've said Christianity is best conceived as redemptive friendship--and I know that's not an original idea. I've also said small groups as practiced by most churches with a yearning to grow are terrible at producing friendships. Big Mike then asked the obvious question: since I'm so anal about linguistic analysis most of the time, what does friend really mean? Fair and good question.

Several years ago while pastoring a small church, several parishioners and I were having an informal conversation about friendship. They had asked me who my "best friend" was at the time, and after explaining that I think the idea of best friend is a little junior high, if not elementary school, the person I most trusted and was most honest with was a female member of our church, one of my elders, and married with a couple kids. This came as a shock to a couple of the people in the room for two reasons: 1. I shouldn't be that close to a woman who is not my wife (a subject of another post please); and, 2. At least one person in the room thought I'd say he was my best friend. On what criteria? We had lunch about once a week, we'd known each other for about two years, and we saw each other every Sunday.

I think what I mean by friend is different than what many people mean by friend, and I think evangelical Christianity has created part of the problem here with this nonsense talk about relationship with Jesus. If Jesus can be my best friend, despite his never actually talking to me, then the standard for being a best friend is quite low. If Jesus is with me through everything, although he never really seems to do the thing I need him to do to make the shit stop, and I can't hear him when I'm buried in shit, and his actually being there means some sort of spiritual hoo-doo voo-doo nonsense about presence without activity, then the standard for friendship is very low. If someone you called friend didn't talk to you but led you to believe that talking to him made you a better person, and if he was completely absent when your kid was sick or your mom died or your wife got cancer, and if being with you in crisis meant he was there in spirit but was never actually physically with you to hug you or listen to you or let you curse and scream and call God bad names, then you probably wouldn't consider this person a good friend.

My notion of friendship is a little skewed for two reasons: 1. I grew up an Army brat, so we moved almost yearly, at which time I'd have to trade in friends for new ones; and, 2. I survived prison with a friend who occasionally meant the difference between things going well and things not going well. That means that friendship for me is more than just casual conversations once a week in a "home group," and it's more than lunch once a week where "iron sharpens iron," and it's certainly more than whatever nebulous definition of relationship to which fundangelicals currently subscribe. Moving from place to place on a regular basis made me superficially friendly; that's how you get along when you move every year to different American public schools, because they are evil places full of perverse dickweeds that thrill at making new kids' lives miserable. That has led to people believing they know far more about me than they actually do; friendly is not openness or vulnerability, friendship is.

So, to answer the question as succinctly as possible, a friend is someone who loves you in spite of you, who endures your faults but not without criticism, who encourages you to be a better person and actually helps in the process, who you've known long enough that they remember what you used to be and realize what you have become, who would watch your back in prison even at great personal risk, and who would, well, I think the Bible says "lay down his life for you." Hmm... I've been to tons of home groups, and I've yet to find someone who'd take a shank for me in prison in one of those groups. You can't get those bastards to babysit the damn kids. Peace.

Stranger than Fiction

Finally got to watch Zach Helm's brilliant story. I was nearly overcome at the end. What a powerful, wonderful, creative movie. It was like Charlie Kaufman with heart. Sure, it has some weaknesses in terms of being a little too self-referential, but you can forgive that, surely. I'm not sure who decided to cast Will Ferrell as Harold, but it was a brilliant stroke. Who would have noticed how everyman-ish his face was without this movie? Who else can be so credulous? Ferrell has always exuded naivete and vulnerability, but take away the comic escape and he is left to suffer in that vulnerability, to blend into the everyman role so that we can visualize ourselves deciding whether or not to eat the cookie. Dustin Hoffman doesn't over-act for a change. Emma Thompson is delightfully neurotic. Queen Latifah is elegant and understated. Tony Hale of Arrested Development proves once again that he's one of the best method actors around right now. And who can say enough about Maggie Gyllenhaal? (With this role and Sherry Baby, she may have been the best there was last year.) She and Mary Louise Parker now occupy the exception slots in my life.

Marc Forster proved he can handle sensitive material without sliding into crass sentimentality with Finding Neverland, although I still fault him for directing the white guy exploitation fantasy Monster's Ball. (I still have no idea what Halle Berry was thinking, despite the Oscar.) This movie could easily have become overly sentimental, but Forster's directing managed to keep the drama and uncertainty alive so that the ending feels perfect, not sappy. For people who grew up loving "Choose Your Own Adventure," this movie is a perfect parable. Enough though. Just see it if you haven't.

My Small Group is Better than Your Wesley Class Meeting

I think the question needs to be asked about the actual usefulness or efficacy of small groups. I have several small groups in my life and they have some strange similarities: they are voluntary for the most part; they are redemptive to the degree that I allow it; and they are based on incremental levels of trust extended. These similarities apply to my three favorite bars as well as my friends outside and from the church.

The idea behind small groups didn't really originate with Wesley, but he certainly helped develop a model that was workable in his context. I believe the Wesleyan model could work in our context as well, but the model requires intentional commitment on the part of individuals to progressive levels of holiness. The very size of churches and the splintering of concepts like neighborhood and parish makes the Wesleyan system nearly impossible inasmuch as strangers do not share their lives with each other, and when churches reach 1500, 5000, 15,000 and 30,000, you have a fellowship of strangers. The dynamics that made Wesley's system workable are completely absent in suburban and exurban ministry: neighborhood, parish, extended family, shared culture, shared lives.

That means for the Wesleyan model to work, it would need to function outside the context of a large institutional church--which, quite frankly, is how it worked in Wesley's day. Most small group experiments in churches are based on one of three factors: location in a city, age group, or shared interests. All of these are artificial and based on a certain wrong-headedness about how friendship actually works. My friends aren't all like me. They don't all live near me. They range in age from teens to sixties. I trust them and they trust me to the degree that we do because we've had dozens or hundreds of very natural, very organic, very spontaneous conversations, not because we were thrown together with a list of questions based on a sermon or a text.

Some will say, and my friend Jon has, can't we put dissimilar people together because there is little chance that most church folk will seriously interact with "the other" in the course of a week? Yes, we can, but I suspect it won't work for various reasons: it's artificial, the expectations militate against genuine friendship (we're here for discipling, after all), no one wants to do childcare, there's always at least one asshole and one person who thinks he knows far more than he does. Additionally, if we're being put together because of our differences, then our relationship doesn't grow naturally out of some shared experience that happened in spite of our differences. Our differences are placed front and center, and then we're asked to move past them.

The institution will continue to look for institutional solutions, but friendship has never been an institution and it's happened naturally wherever it happens, not artificially and not according to a script with a suggested outline xeroxed and handed out before the relationship starts.

Second Verse, Same as the First

So we're sitting at lunch today in one of those booths that is nominally divided from an adjoining booth by a half-wall and a few panes of glass. Two gentlemen, 50-ish, were sitting in the adjacent booth. One of them said loud enough for us to hear without eavesdropping: "Churches grow because of systems; that's how every church grows--a system." Okay. Sure. Why not? I think by system he means some intentional, organized effort. (These two guys are SBC, I think, because nearly every example they give is of a local, Baptist church.) Then he goes on to say something along the lines of "we're not growing because we have competing systems. They work against each other." By this he means that Sunday School is competing with children's ministry or worship team. I see at least one problem with this theory. People don't work in children's ministry because it sucks, not because they're busy elsewhere. Second, I'm not sure how people being involved in various ministries keeps the church from growing, but he attempts an explanation with this piece of brilliance: we're trying to figure out how we get people from the world converted and then "serving" in the church.

Can I tell you that if you're still talking about getting people from "the world" saved, you probably haven't spent any transformative or enlightening time with a non-Christian in quite some time? In fact, you're probably so deeply buried in an outdated paradigm that there is little hope you'll ever "save" anyone. Also, if your idea of ministry is to get these formerly worldly people involved with children's ministry or choir or small groups, your understanding of ministry is so skewed that you actually believe that giving the system a handjob is ministry. Those folks might be involved with the church, but let's at least be honest and admit that what they're really doing is supporting the institution. That might be a good thing; it might not. But it certainly helps explain the increasing marginalization of the Church. People in leadership still believe choir and children's ministry and usher matter more than giving people a place to belong so that they can participate in the redemption of the world through acts of mercy, compassion and charity.

Then there was the statement "we have to emphasize small groups. I mean, why do we have to have a class? What can't we have a small group?" Uhm...has it occurred to anyone that a class is a small group? Carl George came up with this definition of small groups a long time ago: any small group in the church is a small group. Any group. Any small group. Choir. Women's ministry. Ushers. Greeters. Small groups, all of them. The difference is in how you implement the group. Do they exist to meet a specific need and not see themselves as a place of support and communion? If so, you have a problem. All that aside though, the real problem with the philosophy of the church is that there seems to be an incredible inability to see the obvious coupled with a love affair with the same old tired answers that haven't worked well yet. It was absolutely painful to sit there and listen to the minister of a church talk about small groups as if he'd just discovered the idea and as if they were the solution (read "system") to make his church grow. Same wrong-headed observations; same worthless answers. Call me post-congregational for this and many other reasons. Peace.

To Clarify

I've been asked two questions lately, three actually, that are worthy of a response. First, Dino asks about worship, as did Dr. Vaden. No, I don't think social justice is the only form of worship. I do think that the idea of singing songs is rather silly when it comes to singing them to God, but if people are doing that in some sort of gratitude, then I reckon that's worship of a sort. It just seems that the part about singing songs has been elevated beyond any reasonable measure and has, in many churches, become synonymous with worship. That is a particularly fundangelical mistake, and I don't know how far to push back to say that social justice is important, but I'm thinking two things: saving a life or feeding someone ought to be at least a hair more important than singing a song, and throughout history when men or women have insisted we write and sing songs to them, we've called them egomaniacal, megalomaniacal, crazy, emperor/empress, caesar, deluded, arrogant, insecure, deficient, and a whole host of other adjectives that I'd just as soon not attribute to God. So, sure, sing away, but let's not act like anything terribly important is happening. And as for Marva Dawn and the "royal waste of time" stuff, I liked that book, I like her (I've met her a couple times and talked to her at a conference once, and she was wonderfully gracious and engaging and brilliant and human.), I like the idea that worship shapes us to be a certain kind of people, but I don't know that I want to rank being shaped to be a singer of songs ahead of a feeder of people. Sorry to rank worship priorities, but it does seem a bit sensible.

Question 2: have you gotten to the point that you think only the Gospels have authority? Good question. No. I think the Gospels have more authority inasmuch as they purport to be a record of the actual words of Jesus, who, standing in the line of the prophets, continued and corrected the image of God as communicated via the prophets and stands somehow as the final and complete revelation of who God is. That means I take some of the prophetic literature very seriously, followed by some of the epistolary stuff, followed by the history, followed by the law, followed by the poetic books, etc. In other words, the farther you get from Jesus, the less inclined I am to assign the book more authority than a Gospel text, so if there is a conflict (and there are plenty), then I'm going to side with the Gospel text. The Gospels are secondary revelation about God, and technically, they function as tertiary for us since we can't guarantee the accuracy or transmission process. That makes the epistles tertiary at best, and the second generation epistles (Pauline school, I and II Peter, Jude, Hebrews) are so far from the original material and source that I find it hard to take them seriously at all, except as interesting statements on the trajectory of first and second century Chrisitianity, especially in light of a restored patriarchalism and priesthood.

Third question: If a girl is hot and she mentions liking Joel Osteen and attending Lifechurch.tv on the first date, should I have a second date with her? Great question. I will defer this one to the gallery before giving my admittedly sexist response, for which Kristen McCarty is going to castigate (that's c-a-s-t-i-g-a-t-e) me for a week or more.

Name the Little Bastard After Me

Thanks to Brandon at badchristian.com I now have a wikipedia entry named for me. If you want to name something else after me, let me know first, and if it's a child, I just don't want to be financially responsible for the little bastard.