One of my favorite authors/pastors is John Ortberg. John is the Sr. Pastor of the Menlo Park Prersbyterian Church in Menlo Park, CA, a bay area church near San Francisco.
I was intrigued by this article. I think he has a lot of good and important things for the Church to hear today as we seek to be faithful to Christ in the 21st Century.
Read on....please :-)
DO THEY KNOW US BY OUR LOVE?
The first casualty of the culture wars is not truth.
by John Ortberg
In the culture wars of the first century, there was a group of activists who came down on the right side of all the values questions. They rejected relativism and secularism. They were unwavering adherents of ethical absolutism. They were committed to the Judaeo-Christian values of monogamy in marriage and chastity outside it. They promoted monotheism against polytheistic Roman paganism. Clearly, the Pharisees were considered the Religious Right of Israel.
But it is interesting that the people who held the "right" values were the ones least responsive to Jesus' message and most likely to receive his reprimands. His message was received with the greatest eagerness by those who came down on the wrong side of all the values issues—the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the religious half-breeds.
To be sure, Jesus frequently occupied the Pharisees' circles as a dinner guest and intellectual companion, and there were even those within the group who embraced him. Nonetheless, most Pharisees could not accept Jesus' radical claims and actions in light of their reading of the Holy Scriptures.
The ironic result of their "rightness" in belief and practice was that they became unable to love—did not want the sick healed on the Sabbath, did not want an adulterous woman to be forgiven, did not want sinners to share fellowship with the righteous. They came to see people they were called to love as "the enemy."
But they are not the only ones. The Inquisition, the Crusades, slavery—all these were entered into by people who believed in ethical absolutism and even defended their actions with the Bible.
This is a common temptation for all of us who take faith seriously. I regularly get fundraising letters from Christian organizations that paint society in conspiratorial "us" versus "them" colors. Although I usually agree with their moral positions, I rarely sense from them a caveat—let alone a consistent tone—acknowledging that love must be the ultimate aim even in disagreement.
It is a dangerous thing on questions of truth and significance to be wrong. But there may be a more dangerous thing: being right and knowing it.
Dallas Willard said once that it is very hard to be right and not hurt anybody with it. Look at schoolchildren—their pleasure in being right is boosted by knowing somebody else is wrong. Indeed, if nobody was wrong, being right would not be so special.
It is possible to be so caught up in the joy of being right, in the thrilling sense of being morally superior to those who are "not right," that you become more wrong than your most degraded opponent. This is why certain Pharisees—who were so careful not to commit adultery or steal or murder—were so deeply offended when Jesus said they were further from the kingdom of God than, say, Hugh Hefner or Madonna.
Occasionally those on the front lines of the culture wars will acknowledge they could be more loving. Usually the unspoken subtext, however, reads: "The main thing is I'm on the right side."
But what if it is at least as important to love as to be right? What if Jesus really meant it when he said the heart of the law is to love God with your entire being and to love your neighbor as yourself? What if Paul really meant it when he said that even if he had all knowledge, even if he got everything right, he was nothing if he didn't have love?
An old saying suggests that the first casualty of war is truth. This is not quite true. The first casualty of war is love. And so it is in emotion-charged culture wars.
The primary task of the church is not to make a powerful apologetic for Christian values in society. It is to participate in, and witness to, the gospel. And the gospel Jesus proclaimed is an invitation to life in the presence and under the reign of God: "The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" (Mark 1:15).
Loving Our Cultural Enemies
Although the cultural warriors who opposed Jesus saw themselves as the defenders of values, Jesus' charge was that their list of values was arbitrary and lacking. They valued, for instance, a rigid adherence to circumcision over the gracious inclusion of Gentiles. They tended to emphasize not those values that were most important, but those values that most readily distinguished themselves from their opponents.
I think this is a failing among many who debate cultural values. In the church where I grew up, for example, I heard many messages on the family and sexual purity. Yet I don't remember hearing a single one on racism or the civil-rights movement that was having an impact on the society of that day. Were those issues less important?
One phrase often used in the culture wars is traditional values. It conveys our deep concern that classic moral values such as marital commitment, stability of the home, and common human courtesy are rapidly eroding. These concerns need to be articulated carefully and thoughtfully, but when we call for a return to "traditional values," we must ask to what tradition we want to return.
I have never heard an African-American Christian use this phrase—and for good reason. The "traditions" of the midtwentieth century included Jim Crow-style segregation and the denial of equal access to housing and education based on race. As a young man, my own grandfather had among his jobs the task of telling any persons of color who came through town that they were not welcome to spend the night there.
Thankfully, part of being a Christian, and in particular a Protestant, is the conviction that all traditions constantly need reform. The gospel is about eschatology, not nostalgia. The values to which we are called are not the values of any past tradition, but the eternal values taught and lived by Jesus and expressed authoritatively in the Bible, which stand over and above every party platform and political agenda.
Beyond Ideology
I am not advocating silence or neutrality on the controversial issues of today. But I do fear that with the current culture wars comes the devaluing of one of the church's primary tasks: discipleship. The reduction of Christianity to an ideology allows people to evade the task of true discipleship. It does not come through holding a certain set of values but by living a certain kind of life. It is far easier to promote values than to live them.
"All men will know that you are my disciples," Jesus said, not "if you promote my agenda" but "if you love one another." A watching world will be persuaded not when our values are promoted but when they are incarnated.
As the wars rage on and the church enters the fray, may we remember that Christ's call is not an invitation to be on the right side; it is an invitation to become the right person
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Self-Care Covenant
Do you have a personal self-care covenant? Optimal health includes mind, body, and spiritual health. I am of the opinion that we need a personal health covenant to help us achieve the optimum level health that we desire.
1. Vacation
1. Vacation
2. Physical Activity -
3. Sleep
4. Mental/emotional health: stress
5. Spiritual health
For each of these, you ask the following questions:
- What? When? How often? Where?
- Benefits of this behavior?
- Barriers of this behavior?
- Action step(s) to deal with these barriers?
- Supports that will help me be accountable?
Think about these things....and remember....
we must have VIM
Vision -- what is the end goal and what does that look like?
Intention -- have you made a decision to live a different life? Have you enacted the will to make for a better life?
Means -- the ways to achieve the goal. i.e. exercise, nutrition, etc.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Young Adults and the Church
Bishop William Willimon is a very prolific writer and, in my opinion, a keen thinker of how to be a faithful follower of Jesus in the 21st Century. I really liked what he had to say about reaching young adults today!
At Chapel Hill, we are trying to figure out how to be more intentional with the 18-30 age group.
We have many from this age group in worship each week. Our challenge is...what do we do to nurture and grow this group.
Here's Bishop Willimon....
The Church and the Conversion of Emerging Adults
One of our Conference priorities is to reach a new generation of Christians. Our focus is upon the 18-30 age group, those who are being called “emerging adults.” If we are to reach this age group—the age group that we have sadly neglected and therefore find absence from our churches—we are going to have to understand them. Fortunately, a number of new books are helpful in that regard.
A major defining characteristic of this age group is their postponement of marriage. In just a couple of decades the average age for women to marry moved from 20-25 years old, and then the average age rose from 22 to 27 years old. Interestingly, this change in marriage began in 1970—about the same year that our church started losing membership and we began losing touch with the next generation.
Studies of the emerging generation seem to agree that the ages of 18-30, that is the threshold of adulthood, has become more complex, disjointed and confusing than in past decades. In his book Emerging Adulthood, Jeffrey J. Arnett (Oxford University Press, 2004) notes that young adults today put a high premium on finding their identity in an uncertain world. They are impressed with economic and political instability and live their lives accordingly. They focus much more on the self and less upon groups, and they tend to be overwhelmed by their sense of possibilities.
This summer I also read James L. Heft’s Passing on the Faith: Transforming Traditions for the Next Generation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Fordam University Press, 2006). Adults, who grew up in the church retain very little of what the church taught them, says Heft. Our churches have not passed on the faith to our children. (The chances that someone who grew up in the United Methodist Church will still be United Methodist by age 30 are something like 1-6. For Episcopalians, Presbyterians and many others, the rate of attrition is even worse.) Jeffrey Arnett agrees with Heft’s gloomy analysis of those who happen to have grown up in the church. Arnett says, “The most interesting and surprising feature of emerging adults’ religious beliefs is how little relationship there is between the religious training they received throughout childhood and the religious beliefs they hold at the time they reach emerging adulthood….” A recent survey showed that today’s young adults attend church less, pray less, are less lik ely to believe in authority of the Bible, more likely to identify themselves as non-religious, and tend to be extremely suspicious of institutions and organized religion.
Not too long ago the church could count on a return to church by young adults when they had their first children. That appears not to be a pattern for today’s young adults. Because they are postponing marriage, the church can expect at least a 20 year gap between young adults leaving the church and returning. In her book, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young American’s are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled, and More Miserable than Ever Before, Janet Twenge(Free Press, 2006) depicts this generation of young adults as extraordinarily self-absorbed and narcissistic. Twenge thinks that we parents made a mistake in fostering in our children an aura of self-esteem, but did not give them realistic assessments of how challenging the adult world would be.
Today’s young adults are documented as having a great love of God, but less commitment to a particular religious tradition. When it comes to religion many of them are “dabblers and deferrers.” I believe that this is not only one of the most important challenges facing the church with this age group, but also one of our most difficult challenges as United Methodists.
Fortunately, we Wesleyans believe in conversion. We need to know more about what young adults need to be converted from and to. We also must set higher priorities on reaching today’s young adults. Young Christians are not a priority for us until every pastor spends as much time with this generation as with older generations, until each congregation shows in its staff, its budget, and its energies that it is really taking seriously our mandate to reach this generation for Christ. With God’s help, we can.
William H. Willimon
At Chapel Hill, we are trying to figure out how to be more intentional with the 18-30 age group.
We have many from this age group in worship each week. Our challenge is...what do we do to nurture and grow this group.
Here's Bishop Willimon....
The Church and the Conversion of Emerging Adults
One of our Conference priorities is to reach a new generation of Christians. Our focus is upon the 18-30 age group, those who are being called “emerging adults.” If we are to reach this age group—the age group that we have sadly neglected and therefore find absence from our churches—we are going to have to understand them. Fortunately, a number of new books are helpful in that regard.
A major defining characteristic of this age group is their postponement of marriage. In just a couple of decades the average age for women to marry moved from 20-25 years old, and then the average age rose from 22 to 27 years old. Interestingly, this change in marriage began in 1970—about the same year that our church started losing membership and we began losing touch with the next generation.
Studies of the emerging generation seem to agree that the ages of 18-30, that is the threshold of adulthood, has become more complex, disjointed and confusing than in past decades. In his book Emerging Adulthood, Jeffrey J. Arnett (Oxford University Press, 2004) notes that young adults today put a high premium on finding their identity in an uncertain world. They are impressed with economic and political instability and live their lives accordingly. They focus much more on the self and less upon groups, and they tend to be overwhelmed by their sense of possibilities.
This summer I also read James L. Heft’s Passing on the Faith: Transforming Traditions for the Next Generation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Fordam University Press, 2006). Adults, who grew up in the church retain very little of what the church taught them, says Heft. Our churches have not passed on the faith to our children. (The chances that someone who grew up in the United Methodist Church will still be United Methodist by age 30 are something like 1-6. For Episcopalians, Presbyterians and many others, the rate of attrition is even worse.) Jeffrey Arnett agrees with Heft’s gloomy analysis of those who happen to have grown up in the church. Arnett says, “The most interesting and surprising feature of emerging adults’ religious beliefs is how little relationship there is between the religious training they received throughout childhood and the religious beliefs they hold at the time they reach emerging adulthood….” A recent survey showed that today’s young adults attend church less, pray less, are less lik ely to believe in authority of the Bible, more likely to identify themselves as non-religious, and tend to be extremely suspicious of institutions and organized religion.
Not too long ago the church could count on a return to church by young adults when they had their first children. That appears not to be a pattern for today’s young adults. Because they are postponing marriage, the church can expect at least a 20 year gap between young adults leaving the church and returning. In her book, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young American’s are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled, and More Miserable than Ever Before, Janet Twenge(Free Press, 2006) depicts this generation of young adults as extraordinarily self-absorbed and narcissistic. Twenge thinks that we parents made a mistake in fostering in our children an aura of self-esteem, but did not give them realistic assessments of how challenging the adult world would be.
Today’s young adults are documented as having a great love of God, but less commitment to a particular religious tradition. When it comes to religion many of them are “dabblers and deferrers.” I believe that this is not only one of the most important challenges facing the church with this age group, but also one of our most difficult challenges as United Methodists.
Fortunately, we Wesleyans believe in conversion. We need to know more about what young adults need to be converted from and to. We also must set higher priorities on reaching today’s young adults. Young Christians are not a priority for us until every pastor spends as much time with this generation as with older generations, until each congregation shows in its staff, its budget, and its energies that it is really taking seriously our mandate to reach this generation for Christ. With God’s help, we can.
William H. Willimon
Monday, October 6, 2008
What is your image of God?
I am convinced that the "bottom line" for one's spirituality is....what is your image of God? How do you view God?
According to a 2006 Baylor University survey, Americans tend to have one of our four images of God.
1. An authoritarian God angry at us for our sins.
2. A benevolent God who primarily forgives.
3. A critical God who views us disapprovingly but nevertheless does not intervene
4. A distant God who "launched the world" but is "detached from and uninvolved in daily events."
Our view of God determines just about everyting. i.e. our politics, our behavior, our disposition, our attitudes, our theology, even our religion!
Which of the most do you most readily identify with? Why? How did you get to where you are?
If you need to work on your image of God, I recommend Good Goats by Dennis and Matthew Linn and Sheila Fabricant. It is a great beginning to healing your image of God.
According to a 2006 Baylor University survey, Americans tend to have one of our four images of God.
1. An authoritarian God angry at us for our sins.
2. A benevolent God who primarily forgives.
3. A critical God who views us disapprovingly but nevertheless does not intervene
4. A distant God who "launched the world" but is "detached from and uninvolved in daily events."
Our view of God determines just about everyting. i.e. our politics, our behavior, our disposition, our attitudes, our theology, even our religion!
Which of the most do you most readily identify with? Why? How did you get to where you are?
If you need to work on your image of God, I recommend Good Goats by Dennis and Matthew Linn and Sheila Fabricant. It is a great beginning to healing your image of God.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Christians and Environmentalism
In the Roman Catholic tradition, the Jesuits are the intellectual leaders. To be a Jesuit, you are required to have a Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy) is some field. It used to be that you had to have 3 doctorates to be a Jesuit. Even the Jesuits are lowering the bar, thank the Lord! :-)
Patrick McCormick, professor of Christian ethics at the Jesuit run Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, (a place I visited twice in one week this summer...the campus is extremely beautiful) has written an article titled, "Message in a bottle...while poor nations are struggling with scarce water supplies, Americans are spending billions a year on something that is plentiful and practically free."
He wrote this article in response to a book titled, "BottlemaniaL How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It," by Elizabeth Royte. She says that in the 1970's marketers for Perrier began to persuade Americans that bottled water was classier and tastier than plain old tap water, leading millions of upscale consumers to shop for a private brand of drinking water. By 1987 the average American was drinking more than 5 gallons of bottled water a year, and by 2006 the number had jumped to more than 25 gallons.
Today, Royte says, in a country where more than 89% of tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations, regularly wins in blind taste tests against name brand waters and costs 240 to 10,000 times less than bottled water, customers buy about 1 billion bottles of water each week. Americans spend more on bottled water than on milk, beer, or coffee. Believe it or not!
This is an obvious problem for many reasons:
1. Bottled water is no cleaner or safer than tap water. More than 40% of bottled water brands are drawn from municipal reservoirs or taps.
2. It takes 17 million barrels of oil a year to produce all of the plastic bottles. This does not include the oil needed to fuel the trucks for delivery.
3. The environmental impact of discarded plastic bottles that are not recycled!
There are more issues around bottled water...I'll get into those next week.
But for now, does Christianity have anything to say about the current reality of bottled water?
The Scripture says, "The earth is the Lord's and all that is within it." (Psalm 24:1)
Is there a place of intersection between the current reality of our bottled water industry and the current reality of Sacred Scripture?
Oh, by the way, I am going back to the tap....I hope you will too.
Blessings,
Jeff
Patrick McCormick, professor of Christian ethics at the Jesuit run Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, (a place I visited twice in one week this summer...the campus is extremely beautiful) has written an article titled, "Message in a bottle...while poor nations are struggling with scarce water supplies, Americans are spending billions a year on something that is plentiful and practically free."
He wrote this article in response to a book titled, "BottlemaniaL How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It," by Elizabeth Royte. She says that in the 1970's marketers for Perrier began to persuade Americans that bottled water was classier and tastier than plain old tap water, leading millions of upscale consumers to shop for a private brand of drinking water. By 1987 the average American was drinking more than 5 gallons of bottled water a year, and by 2006 the number had jumped to more than 25 gallons.
Today, Royte says, in a country where more than 89% of tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations, regularly wins in blind taste tests against name brand waters and costs 240 to 10,000 times less than bottled water, customers buy about 1 billion bottles of water each week. Americans spend more on bottled water than on milk, beer, or coffee. Believe it or not!
This is an obvious problem for many reasons:
1. Bottled water is no cleaner or safer than tap water. More than 40% of bottled water brands are drawn from municipal reservoirs or taps.
2. It takes 17 million barrels of oil a year to produce all of the plastic bottles. This does not include the oil needed to fuel the trucks for delivery.
3. The environmental impact of discarded plastic bottles that are not recycled!
There are more issues around bottled water...I'll get into those next week.
But for now, does Christianity have anything to say about the current reality of bottled water?
The Scripture says, "The earth is the Lord's and all that is within it." (Psalm 24:1)
Is there a place of intersection between the current reality of our bottled water industry and the current reality of Sacred Scripture?
Oh, by the way, I am going back to the tap....I hope you will too.
Blessings,
Jeff
Thursday, September 18, 2008
The Mystery of Suffering and Pain
Some of you know that I really like the writings of Ron Rohlheiser, who is president of a seminary, in San Antonio. Tell me what you think.
How can there be an all-loving and an all-powerful God if there is so much suffering and evil in our world? Perhaps that is the most difficult religious question of all time. Why does God not act in the face of suffering? Why do bad things happen with seemingly no response from God? In a famous book, After Auschwitz, Richard Rubenstein asks how it is even possible for a Jew to believe in God after the holocaust. How can we believe in God in the face of God's seeming inaction in the face of suffering and evil?There have been countless attempts to answer this question, not least inside the tortured experience of those who are suffering. There have also been many attempts at offering some kind of acceptable theoretical explanation.For example, Harold Kushner (When Bad Things Happen to Good People), writing as a Jewish rabbi, tries to answer the question by defending God's love and goodness at the expense of his power. Essentially, God would help us if He could, Kushner believes, but God isn't all-powerful. Innocent suffering exists not because God cannot stop it. Inside of Christian theology, Peter Kreeft, C.S. Lewis, and Teilhard de Chardin, among others, have written insightful books on this question. Christians believe that what is ultimately at stake is human freedom and God's respect for it. God gives us freedom and (unlike most everyone else) refuses to violate it, even when it would seem beneficial to do so. That leaves us in a lot of pain at times, but, as Jesus reveals, God is not so much a rescuing God as a redeeming one. God does not protect us from pain, but instead enters it and ultimately redeems it. That might sound simplistic in the face of real death and evil, but it is not. We see a powerful illustration of this in Jesus' reaction to the death of Lazarus. In essence, this is how the Gospels tell that story: The sisters of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, send a message to Jesus telling him that "the man you love" is gravely ill. Curiously though Jesus does not immediately rush off to see Lazarus. Instead he stays where he is for two more days, until Lazarus is dead, and then sets off to see him. When he arrives near the house, he is met by Martha who says to him: "If you had been here, my brother would not have died!" Basically her question is: "Where were you? Why didn't you come and heal him?" Jesus does not answer her question but instead assures her that Lazarus will live in some deeper way. Martha then goes and calls her sister, Mary. When Mary arrives she repeats the identical words to Jesus that Martha had spoken: "If you had been here my brother would not have died!" However, coming out of Mary's mouth, these words mean something else, something deeper. Mary is asking the universal, timeless question about suffering and God's seeming absence. Her query ("Where were you when my brother died?") asks that question for everyone: Where is God when innocent people suffer? Where was God during the holocaust? Where is God when anyone's brother dies?But, curiously, Jesus does not engage the question in theory; instead he becomes distressed and asks: "Where have you put him?" And when they offer to show him, he begins to weep. His answer to suffering: He enters into peoples' helplessness and pain. Afterwards, he raises Lazarus from the dead.And what we see here will occur in the same way between Jesus and his Father. The Father does not save Jesus from death on the cross even when he is jeered and mocked there. Instead the Father allows him to die on the cross and then raises him up afterwards.The lesson in both these deaths and raisings might be put this way: The God we believe in doesn't necessarily intervene and rescue us from suffering and death (although we are invited to pray for that). Instead he redeems our suffering afterwards. God's seeming indifference to suffering is not so much a mystery that leaves the mind befuddled as a mystery that makes sense only if you give yourself over in a certain level of trust. Forgiveness and faith work the same. You have to roll the dice in trust. Nothing else can give you an answer.And I do not say this glibly. I know too many people who have been hurt, brutally and unfairly, in ways that make it difficult for them to accept that there is an all-powerful God who cares. But sometimes the only answer to the question of suffering and evil is the one Jesus gave to Mary and Martha - shared helplessness, shared distress, and shared tears, with no attempt to try to explain God's seeming absence, but rather a trusting that, because God is all-loving and all-powerful, in the end all will be well and our pain will someday be redeemed in God's embrace.
Blessings of grace and peace to you,
Jeff
How can there be an all-loving and an all-powerful God if there is so much suffering and evil in our world? Perhaps that is the most difficult religious question of all time. Why does God not act in the face of suffering? Why do bad things happen with seemingly no response from God? In a famous book, After Auschwitz, Richard Rubenstein asks how it is even possible for a Jew to believe in God after the holocaust. How can we believe in God in the face of God's seeming inaction in the face of suffering and evil?There have been countless attempts to answer this question, not least inside the tortured experience of those who are suffering. There have also been many attempts at offering some kind of acceptable theoretical explanation.For example, Harold Kushner (When Bad Things Happen to Good People), writing as a Jewish rabbi, tries to answer the question by defending God's love and goodness at the expense of his power. Essentially, God would help us if He could, Kushner believes, but God isn't all-powerful. Innocent suffering exists not because God cannot stop it. Inside of Christian theology, Peter Kreeft, C.S. Lewis, and Teilhard de Chardin, among others, have written insightful books on this question. Christians believe that what is ultimately at stake is human freedom and God's respect for it. God gives us freedom and (unlike most everyone else) refuses to violate it, even when it would seem beneficial to do so. That leaves us in a lot of pain at times, but, as Jesus reveals, God is not so much a rescuing God as a redeeming one. God does not protect us from pain, but instead enters it and ultimately redeems it. That might sound simplistic in the face of real death and evil, but it is not. We see a powerful illustration of this in Jesus' reaction to the death of Lazarus. In essence, this is how the Gospels tell that story: The sisters of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, send a message to Jesus telling him that "the man you love" is gravely ill. Curiously though Jesus does not immediately rush off to see Lazarus. Instead he stays where he is for two more days, until Lazarus is dead, and then sets off to see him. When he arrives near the house, he is met by Martha who says to him: "If you had been here, my brother would not have died!" Basically her question is: "Where were you? Why didn't you come and heal him?" Jesus does not answer her question but instead assures her that Lazarus will live in some deeper way. Martha then goes and calls her sister, Mary. When Mary arrives she repeats the identical words to Jesus that Martha had spoken: "If you had been here my brother would not have died!" However, coming out of Mary's mouth, these words mean something else, something deeper. Mary is asking the universal, timeless question about suffering and God's seeming absence. Her query ("Where were you when my brother died?") asks that question for everyone: Where is God when innocent people suffer? Where was God during the holocaust? Where is God when anyone's brother dies?But, curiously, Jesus does not engage the question in theory; instead he becomes distressed and asks: "Where have you put him?" And when they offer to show him, he begins to weep. His answer to suffering: He enters into peoples' helplessness and pain. Afterwards, he raises Lazarus from the dead.And what we see here will occur in the same way between Jesus and his Father. The Father does not save Jesus from death on the cross even when he is jeered and mocked there. Instead the Father allows him to die on the cross and then raises him up afterwards.The lesson in both these deaths and raisings might be put this way: The God we believe in doesn't necessarily intervene and rescue us from suffering and death (although we are invited to pray for that). Instead he redeems our suffering afterwards. God's seeming indifference to suffering is not so much a mystery that leaves the mind befuddled as a mystery that makes sense only if you give yourself over in a certain level of trust. Forgiveness and faith work the same. You have to roll the dice in trust. Nothing else can give you an answer.And I do not say this glibly. I know too many people who have been hurt, brutally and unfairly, in ways that make it difficult for them to accept that there is an all-powerful God who cares. But sometimes the only answer to the question of suffering and evil is the one Jesus gave to Mary and Martha - shared helplessness, shared distress, and shared tears, with no attempt to try to explain God's seeming absence, but rather a trusting that, because God is all-loving and all-powerful, in the end all will be well and our pain will someday be redeemed in God's embrace.
Blessings of grace and peace to you,
Jeff
Monday, September 8, 2008
Bishop Willimon's Blog
Finally, I am blogging again! :-)
I read a lot of different blogs. I receive this blog from Bishop Willimon every Monday.
What are your thoughts about his blog?
Do you agree or not?
TEACHING CHURCH
Early Methodism was organized by Wesley and Asbury on the basis of a series of questions. Wesley believed that the leader led by putting two questions to the church, and the church lived by responding to the leader’s questions.
Don’t you find it significant that the key questions with which Methodism’s first conferences opened were these three: 1. What to teach? 2. How to teach; and 3. What to do; that is how to regulate our doctrine, discipline and practice (Doctrine and Disciplines, 1798, Pg. 18). Notice the very first question – What to teach? Wesley was convinced that Christians must be intellectual equipped to follow Jesus. The demands of discipleship are too great not to have the whole person engaged by the claims of Christ including a person’s intellect. Wesley believed that preachers were primarily guardians of doctrine. They not only preached in such a way that won people to Christ, but to make sure they were winning people to Christ!
This past year I have had a number of experiences as bishop that have confirmed my sense that Wesley was right. The day we spent at ClearBranch pondering the Methodist Christian way of believing, including the follow-up sessions in numerous churches, the Conference-wide discussions on War and the War in Iraq, as well as the teaching experiences I have had in dozens of Alabama churches, have all convinced me that Methodist people want to be taught. They long to grow in their faith. They expect their church to offer meetings whereby they grow as disciples.
The Wesley movement was distinguished principally by its determination not only to win people for Christ but also to grow people into Christ. Notice that our Conference mission statement explicitly states our intention to “Grow More Disciples” for Jesus Christ. A primary way we grow in our faith is by continuing to be informed about our faith, to explore the richness of Christian believing and to learn more about Jesus and his way.
I am therefore impressed that any growing must also be a teaching congregation, where the chief teacher is the pastor. In congregations that are successful in reaching new disciples, the need for teaching and Christian formation is even greater. We not only want to reach people for Christ we want to teach people for Christ. Every pastor ought to be able to identify a setting, other than the pulpit, in which that pastor is teaching people for Christ.
Woe to any pastor or congregation that gets preoccupied with merely caring for the congregation, managing and maintaining the organizational machinery of the congregation and neglect the duty to teach the faith.
One of the most appealing aspects of the younger generation that we are trying to reach is that they appear to have a wonderfully “teachable spirit.” They realize that they have not been well informed about the faith, and they appear to be grateful to, and attracted to a church that takes the teaching office seriously.
What to teach – the substance of the Christian faith, its most important convictions – how to teach – how to let the Holy Spirit energize a new generation of disciples – note that this comes before any of our righteous work, our regulative responsibilities and our organizational forms.
Someone has said that the primary work of leadership is asking the right questions. It is up to the leader to ask good questions; and it up to the congregation to give appropriate answers. Thank you Wesley and Asbury for teaching us to ask the right questions!
William H. Willimon
Jeff's response....Bishop Willimon is a profound writer. He makes me think. He stretches me in a lot of ways. I am grateful for that. But, as important as the content of his blog is for the living of our days, at the end of the day, I am not saved by what I know. I am saved because I am known. I am not saved because my doctrine is exactly right. I am saved because God's grace is greater than all my sin. Bishop Willimon seems to be focused on institutional preservation. I have very little interest in preserving the institution for the sake of job security for bishops or clergy. I am not motivated to serve the institution. I wake up with joy and excitement because of the privilege of serving the people of God and trust that the Spirit of the Living God will lead me to the right people at the right time in the right way to serve in the right spirit and right relationship with God and with all of God's people is all that matters as far as I am concerned. Amazingly, the people to whom I am led really don't care how much I know...they want to know how much I care!
One final thought...since I am on a roll :-).... some of the people that are closest to God are not intellectually able to articulate anything about God or the revelation of God in and through the person of Jesus Christ. I rejoice that I am known by God in Christ. I don't lean on my own understanding about the Christian faith very much at all...On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand! Pax, Jeff
I read a lot of different blogs. I receive this blog from Bishop Willimon every Monday.
What are your thoughts about his blog?
Do you agree or not?
TEACHING CHURCH
Early Methodism was organized by Wesley and Asbury on the basis of a series of questions. Wesley believed that the leader led by putting two questions to the church, and the church lived by responding to the leader’s questions.
Don’t you find it significant that the key questions with which Methodism’s first conferences opened were these three: 1. What to teach? 2. How to teach; and 3. What to do; that is how to regulate our doctrine, discipline and practice (Doctrine and Disciplines, 1798, Pg. 18). Notice the very first question – What to teach? Wesley was convinced that Christians must be intellectual equipped to follow Jesus. The demands of discipleship are too great not to have the whole person engaged by the claims of Christ including a person’s intellect. Wesley believed that preachers were primarily guardians of doctrine. They not only preached in such a way that won people to Christ, but to make sure they were winning people to Christ!
This past year I have had a number of experiences as bishop that have confirmed my sense that Wesley was right. The day we spent at ClearBranch pondering the Methodist Christian way of believing, including the follow-up sessions in numerous churches, the Conference-wide discussions on War and the War in Iraq, as well as the teaching experiences I have had in dozens of Alabama churches, have all convinced me that Methodist people want to be taught. They long to grow in their faith. They expect their church to offer meetings whereby they grow as disciples.
The Wesley movement was distinguished principally by its determination not only to win people for Christ but also to grow people into Christ. Notice that our Conference mission statement explicitly states our intention to “Grow More Disciples” for Jesus Christ. A primary way we grow in our faith is by continuing to be informed about our faith, to explore the richness of Christian believing and to learn more about Jesus and his way.
I am therefore impressed that any growing must also be a teaching congregation, where the chief teacher is the pastor. In congregations that are successful in reaching new disciples, the need for teaching and Christian formation is even greater. We not only want to reach people for Christ we want to teach people for Christ. Every pastor ought to be able to identify a setting, other than the pulpit, in which that pastor is teaching people for Christ.
Woe to any pastor or congregation that gets preoccupied with merely caring for the congregation, managing and maintaining the organizational machinery of the congregation and neglect the duty to teach the faith.
One of the most appealing aspects of the younger generation that we are trying to reach is that they appear to have a wonderfully “teachable spirit.” They realize that they have not been well informed about the faith, and they appear to be grateful to, and attracted to a church that takes the teaching office seriously.
What to teach – the substance of the Christian faith, its most important convictions – how to teach – how to let the Holy Spirit energize a new generation of disciples – note that this comes before any of our righteous work, our regulative responsibilities and our organizational forms.
Someone has said that the primary work of leadership is asking the right questions. It is up to the leader to ask good questions; and it up to the congregation to give appropriate answers. Thank you Wesley and Asbury for teaching us to ask the right questions!
William H. Willimon
Jeff's response....Bishop Willimon is a profound writer. He makes me think. He stretches me in a lot of ways. I am grateful for that. But, as important as the content of his blog is for the living of our days, at the end of the day, I am not saved by what I know. I am saved because I am known. I am not saved because my doctrine is exactly right. I am saved because God's grace is greater than all my sin. Bishop Willimon seems to be focused on institutional preservation. I have very little interest in preserving the institution for the sake of job security for bishops or clergy. I am not motivated to serve the institution. I wake up with joy and excitement because of the privilege of serving the people of God and trust that the Spirit of the Living God will lead me to the right people at the right time in the right way to serve in the right spirit and right relationship with God and with all of God's people is all that matters as far as I am concerned. Amazingly, the people to whom I am led really don't care how much I know...they want to know how much I care!
One final thought...since I am on a roll :-).... some of the people that are closest to God are not intellectually able to articulate anything about God or the revelation of God in and through the person of Jesus Christ. I rejoice that I am known by God in Christ. I don't lean on my own understanding about the Christian faith very much at all...On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand! Pax, Jeff
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