Discontent Disciple

I just came across this letter, and felt the need to share it. The Recipient of the letter describes the scene leading up to it.

In August of 2007, I finally built up the courage to tell my father I was gay. The moment I said it, the phone got quiet and he got off the phone after a few “Okay”s. I decided to give him time to process the news. About a week later, and not long before my birthday, I received the following letter:

This letter is the failure of the father. Not his having a gay son. This letter. Choosing to turn your back on another human, let alone your own son is, without a doubt, one of the most disgusting act’s I’ve ever read. The callous tone and cold-hearted nature of this letter blow my mind.

This is not a Christian reaction to a son being gay. It may in fact be the furthest response from a Biblical one. If we remove the parent aspect of this and consider it as a church discipline issue, this wouldn’t be the correct method either. Matthew 18′s Process:

1. go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you
2. ut if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’
3. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church;
4. if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector

Here’s the key! Tax Collectors and pagans were still welcome in the Church! Just not in positions of authority! Jesus still ate and talked with the Pagans and the Tax Collectors, in fact they were the people he spent the most time with! If you expect God to move in peoples lives, removing them from the presence of people who profess God is not the way!

Sorry for the rant. I hope this letter is as upsetting to you as it was me.

Below a Presentation by a Harvard Undergrad named Matthew Vines. He is without a doubt indebted to several authors I’ve mentioned here before, but presents the arguments in a decently detailed but still concise way.

Give it a view. It’s great for the people who you can’t get to read a book or three. I’ll write in more detail later about the source and depth of his arguments.

I’ve recently come to understand that waiting on God’s timing is the most difficult thing a Christian is tasked with. I arrived at this conclusion as I thought about what I perceive as a major problem within our churches. The church, like it or not, runs on a culture of shame. We talk about sin constantly, heck, we only mention forgiveness as a pretext to talk about sin and our over emphasis on sin and our lack of grace push people away from repentance and towards shame. We are actively encouraging people to feel shame. The community has declared itself judge and there are now sins which instead of resulting in an outpouring of grace, prayer and love from the Church will result in your removal from it. It’s important to note this isn’t usually every sin, just the ones that that congregation, for whatever reason, finds particularly distasteful.

There’s three things that are very wrong with this. First, it turns the Church into the unrepentant sinner. The church has become so prideful that it now tries to take on Jesus’ role as Judge. In so doing, it brings on it’s own condemnation. Second, it proves that the Church has no knowledge of the Gospel, “you will know them by their love” and certainly isn’t passing along the grace they claim to have received. Third, it has driven someone whom God loves further away from Him because that person has been taught to run from God and His people when they fail and sin, rather than running towards them for support, grace, and forgiveness.

All these consequences for a want of patience. God’s timing is not our timing. God will, I repeat, will transform the people He wants to transform and the major way He will do this is by surrounding them with His love and His people. This is the lesson of waiting on God. It’s about being OK with someone you know is going to leave and sin sitting in your pews because you understand there is no place God would rather them be. It’s about being comfortable with incremental progress or even no progress at all rather than instantaneous transformation. It’s about being comfortable that you could be wrong, there may be an action you believe to be sin, but if God obviously works in the life of someone and doesn’t touch that “sin” perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate what you believe about that action.

I’m not trying to suggest here that there is no place for confronting a brother. I think there is, but I think it’s FAR more limited in both circumstance and consequence than we often see practiced. In terms of circumstance, let’s examine Matthew 18′s section on confronting a brother.  Here the additional witnesses as well as the Church already know of the sin. They are not being informed of the sin for the first time, it’s not gossip, it’s something that’s known in the Community already. The local church is supposed to be that involved in each other’s lives, to have those relationships already built that if a brother begins to slip someone can step in, then others, then the community, all of which have a relationship with the sinner. Moreover, the others and the church are not being brought in for humiliation or their opinions, but rather as instruments of grace to pray for and with the sinner and to offer love, support and overwhelming grace. The community is coming together to try and help this person. But if that help is refused, the punishment isn’t ex-communication or dis-fellowship, but removal from authoritative positions.  Sinners of all stripes, pagans, gentiles, tax collectors we’re all welcomed by Jesus. He wanted to preach to them, in fact he came for them! There is no place God would rather a sinner be than at a church. We need to remember that. God would always have us welcome the sinner.

There’s something interesting about the sacraments we practice together as a community. Within the Protestant church they are typically limited to Marriage, Baptism and Communion, so those are the three I’m going to focus on here, but I acknowledge that my Catholic brothers and sisters have several other important ones as well. What’s interesting about these practices is that they all involve an element of communal bonding that has been neglected, at least to some degree, within the modern church environment.

In the Marriage ceremony all parties in attendance are actually making a commitment regarding the relationship being celebrated. The Bride and Groom are making their commitment to each other obviously, but additionally they are making a commitment to God, the congregation, the Pastor(Priest), and the Church at large (represented by this particular congregation) to love one another until death. But the people in attendance are also making a commitment, to support the Bride and the Groom and hold them to the vows they just took. We are a society that often shirks this responsibility, I know I’ve been to plenty of wedding for people I don’t even talk to anymore, let alone stay involved enough in their life to stay abreast of the health of their relationship. But I think we as a Church should work on changing this.

The weird part about this is that we know the marriage is a great thing, something we should celebrate, but we are quick to turn our backs and allow it to fail instead of acknowledging the commitments the couple and we made on their wedding day, we stand back and watch a union God blessed fall to pieces. While I don’t want to suggest people call old friends they haven’t seen in 20 years to find out how their marriage is going without warning (if you have a good relationship though, do it!), I do want to suggest that as we attend weddings in the future and perhaps even plan our own, recognize that the guest list is people who are making a pretty serious commitment to The Bride and Groom as well as the Church and God.

Baptism has a similar commitment. The people in attendance who are there with the believer professing their faith are agreeing to walk with the person being dunked/sprinkled. As “older” siblings in Christ we’re agreeing to live life with the person being baptized. We’re celebrating their death and new life, why would we care about their new life unless we were expected to live it with them! So keep that in mind next time you get asked to attend a baptism for someone you barely know. By all means, Go. But you better make sure you are working on that relationship going forward and trying to develop it and live the commitment you just made!

Lastly, Communion has a similar communal commitment. When we practice communion, we remember, as a community that God came to earth, took on a body, lived, and Died for us. We remind ourselves that we are to live in that death. To love our enemies, to resist sin, to humble ourselves before God, to sharpen each other, to love the Lord with all our heart, body, soul and mind, and to Love our neighbor as ourselves. We accomplish these things by sharing in the body and blood of Christ. God’s grace and the work of Christ as sufficient for all present. We are all covered completely by His blood and as the Church as a whole celebrates, they all draw grace for the same unending source. This act binds the church together. We are bound to one another, we are called by the sharing of the bread and the juice (wine) to recognize we are all similarly fallen and sinful and to love and support one another. In taking communion we acknowledge our faults are just as hell-worth as everyone else’s and commit to look past the faults of others and see only the child of God whom Jesus loves and we are to love also.

So next “Communion Sunday” or next wedding you attend, give some thought to the commitment you’re making and pray for God’s grace in fulfilling it.

Maybe it’s not Millennials who’ve left the church, so much as that the church has left Jesus–and Millennials are the only ones brave enough to recognize that the emperor has been parading about without the benefit of clothes. If that’s the case, the church would do well to quit worrying so much about whether Millennials are leaving the church, and start investing time and effort and resources into looking more like Jesus. Then Millennials might finally see something for which it would be worth sticking around.

Full Article Here. Check it out.

One of the churches that I attend is an United Church of Christ in Riverside, CA Pastored by a wonderfully kind woman, Jane Quandt. If you’re interested, the website is http://www.fccriverside.org/ . But I wanted to share with you the prayer of Invocation and Confession from this this week, as it was excellent.

O God of grace and mercy, who knows us better than we know ourselves, forgive us. For, You come to us in the spring of hope, but we are frozen in the winder of unbelief. You shatter the calm of our night with a burst of angel song, but we bury our faces and whine about needing sleep. Your Word explodes on the world, a sunburst of hope that evaporates the fog of doubt, but we run and hide in our little sanctuaries, embracing the illusion that the familiar and customary can save us. Yet and still we pray that you would come. Shatter our defenses, overwhelm our reluctance, and fire our imaginations. Then shall we, like stunned shepherds, gain the courage to look up and see, to listen and come finally to the manger, where flesh is made holy and humanity is redeemed.

Amen.

Just thought I’d share!

One of the many books I’m currently reading has an essay in it by Ken Sehested, He’s a Baptist and founder of the “Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America.” He wrote something particularly profound that I want to share with all of you. He said this:

Non Violence is more than just refusing to shoot someone. It is not to be confused with passivity or with sectarian withdrawal (in the name of moral purity). Rather it involves a commitment to willingly enter a situation of conflict, to absorb the assault without resort to revenge, to listen with empathy to the “enemy” which involves the willingness to have your mind changed.

This is one of the simplest ways I’ve even seen Christian non-violence expressed. I often feel the need to over explain the concept, citing Jesus as the originator, showing historical evidence of God’s provision in the lamb for Abraham, or wanting to give other examples I know of in History or the modern news to explain this concept, when really, it can be put so much more plainly. The primary Christian ethic is one in which the self is lost and God is moved to the forefront, the result of this paradigm shift is that one begins to be endowed with the fruits of the spirit. When God is more important than the self, we can begin to recognize that the “other” doesn’t exist in the way we thought it did, that people are all children of God and we can begin to treat them as such as we view them the way God does. That is why Christian Non-Violence works.

The interesting implications of this definition are that is goes beyond physical violence. This definition expresses the need for Christians to intervene and shelter others in situations which might otherwise make us uncomfortable. When I read this, I think of two groups of people that have been trampled underfoot by the very group that should be protecting them, and those are 1) women who have had abortions 2) gay people. If we intend to apply the Christian ethic we have a lot of vitriol to absorb for these people, and the ironic part is it’s coming from within our churches.

I would argue the first step is for the Church to start absorbing it. That is, prevent it from impacting it’s intended targets, if we can do that by say, encouraging the pastor to watch his language when speaking about issues that affect these groups, then that’s a start! Second, is to show these people that they have support within the church, even if it’s not yet from the top down. If you’re in a conservative church, but you support gay rights, Join the Rainbow Delegation in wearing a wrist band to express your support for LGBT people, and show that some in the Church regard all people as worthy of love and respect. Similarly, get involved in helping women who’ve undergone something traumatic begin to heal by volunteering at a support group or walking women to and from the clinic through the protesters. The call to Christian Non-Violence is a big deal, and I think all too often, the loud conservative end of the Church bashes Children of God while the end that recognizes those victims as Children of God sits passively in the corner. It’s time for the members of the Church that value all people to stand up and affirm the humanity of those that other’s dehumanize; let us stand with the marginalized and take the salvo on their behalf. Let those who are attacking consider us among the sinners, God knows the Phrases thought that of Jesus.

Lastly, Let’s pray for the Church. The church now is more fragmented than it has ever been. Humanity has largely rejected the meta-narratives of Christianity, instead favoring strict interpretations that ignore the greater concepts expressed within the Bible and using disagreements over obscure doctrine to split God’s church. As we practice Christian non-violence and we accept a barrage of violence from our fellow Christians, let us seek to challenge them and let us allow ourselves to be used in a way that can unify the church around commonalities. While it is not an easy task to disrupt violence while convincing the perpetrator of that to act peacefully, the call to be a peacemaker was never described as easy. Let us accept the burden which we have been given, seek God’s strength and wisdom as we try to carry it out, and never stop pushing for the renewing of all minds. Amen.

Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations with various pastors about a rather significant and divisive issue within the Church. It’s been a bit of a wild ride as far as the responses go. But one thing has caught me off guard and that is the willingness of some members of Church leadership to use the text as a weapon. I don’t think they are aware of how violent their writing and use of the text is but the fact remains, that when I ask in a casual email what the Church’s position on a topic is and get a 6 page, annotated, cited, and Biblically referenced paper back as an attachment to an otherwise blank email and that paper has no interest in addressing the people concerned with that topic, but instead is only interested in making a topic as black and white as possible while standing firmly on one side, that ladies and gentlemen is violence.

Violence is defined as an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power and also rough or immoderate vehemence and these are exactly what this position paper I got from this church was. In case this was unclear, these conversations have been about homosexuality within the Church. I’ve become convinced that Jesus would be more interested in Justice for gay people than He is in what happens within the bedroom of a married gay couple. I’m not writing this post to have the discussion of how I arrived at this view however, there are tons and tons of great books on the topic (This being a good one). Instead, I just want to suggest, whatever your view on the topic, you seriously consider how you share that view with others. Straight, gay or otherwise, no one should be subject to the Bible being used against them as a weapon. In the past the Bible has been used as a tool of oppression against various people groups and we should recognize that it’s ultimately a book about liberation not oppression so to use it in that context is horrifying.

If your church has position papers on hard topics, I encourage you to consider re-writing them with the heart of the person reading them in mind, rather than aiming for academic clarity alone, try to be clear, loving, and graceful, as God is graceful to us. Even if you believe very strongly that the topic in the paper is clearly covered in the Bible and want to simply shut down opposition to your view, recognize that in some cases on some topics you may be trying to shut down a person, rather than a position, and that’s clearly not something Jesus would have a part in.

I’ve recently finished reading a book by Hauerwas and Vanier called “Living Gently in a Violent World” in which they suggest a radically new view of life and gentleness. The book is primarily about Vanier’s organization called “L’Arche” which brings people together to live in community with the mentally disabled. They are not there only as caretakers, but to actually join in the lives of the people they live with, disabled and non-disabled alike. Hauerwas sees this community as an example of gentleness in the world, and in doing so uses the following definition of gentleness:

Gentleness requires that we learn to see that the other person is “given” to us in the sense that, prior to rules and principles of social morality, the presence of the other in our lives constitutes our responsibility. Moral responsibility arises neither from contractual relationships nor from the cooperative exchange between independent individuals. Instead it arises from the nature of the moral self that discovers itself within a network of social relationships…The benefits bestowed by love and friendship are consequential rather than conditional, which explains why human life that is constituted by these relationships is appropriately experienced as a gift.

The authors successfully reframe our lives as gifts to be experienced and received, rather than objects to be controlled. We are, like it or not, part of a grand story and our participation in that store is not optional. How we respond to the other characters in the story, able or disabled, is what Jesus is teaching about in the Sermon on the Mount. The Authors conclude:

“L’Arche reminds us that time is not simply a commodity to be wasted, spent, saved or used but is rather a gift given to us so that we might pursue the things of the Kingdom.”

So how are you spending your time? And do you view your relationships, even the difficult ones, as gifts? I know I need to work on it!

In the past on this blog I’ve spoken about different leadership styles for churches, but something I’ve been thinking about lately is what a church holds as it’s “central tenants” that a person must agree with to qualify for a “leadership” position in the Church. Which position exactly isn’t relevant, I think there may be higher bars for Elders than pre-k leadership, but I think every church likely has an idea of what they think a leader should believe in order to be eligible for leadership. Now obviously, there are some character and lifestyle traits laid out in Scripture, but I want to know about what they need to believe. What Doctrines so define your community that anyone in leadership must share them? And additionally, even if they acknowledge those doctrines are true, how seriously should that truth impact their life?

What got me thinking of this topic was a conversation I had with a pastor about what positions a gay person could hold in the Church he works for.  He acknowledged that they could be members, be baptized and would be welcome in the community, but stopped short of allowing non-celibate gay people, even ones in committed monogamous (marriage) relationships, into positions of authority. And I’m not picking on him at all, he has a well thought out, I think sensitive approach to a difficult topic. Mike was nothing but graceful in our conversation and I don’t want to come off as anything but grateful for his time and the opportunity to sit down with him, but I wonder, if the standard for leadership involves 1) believing the biblical view of homosexuality is sin and 2) being biblically repentant (ceasing it’s practice) of that sin how does that apply to other sins, or is it applied to other sins as well?

For example, if the CEO of Nike was a regular attendee of your church and wanted to get involved in leading ministry, would he have to 1) believe that the unfair exploitation of people in extreme poverty was a sin? 2) would he have to repent of it, and repent in the Biblical sense by ceasing the behavior? Nike shareholders wouldn’t be a big fan of the company going fair trade, but would we ask that of him/her? Clearly Jesus believes that economic exploitation is sinful, Jesus doesn’t even really talk about sex, but talks about money more than ANY OTHER TOPIC. So I don’t think the Christian stance on this topic is hard to understand, so what is our response? Do we tell the guy not until he steps down as CEO? or Until he begins paying a “fair” wage (assuming we can determine that)?  I have a hard time conceiving of a church denying this man leadership, let alone the disciple often subject people who are gay within a church.

Now, obviously if the church believes something differently than the congregant in leadership, perhaps they should refrain from speaking on that topic, or make every attempt to address multiple viewpoints (which they should do anyway) when teaching it, so the church’s official position is at least given a voice, but I think we should allow these people to serve in leadership.

For me at least, and keep in mind I don’t lead a Church, the Doctrines that would be required for leadership are those at the Core of the Christian faith. That list would look something like:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and the Son], who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Now, apart from those issues, I don’t really care what they believe, so long as they are responsible in their presentations of information and considerate of the Church’s established view point when teaching. Does anyone else see my point, or do you think there is merit in keeping the theology of a specific church very homogeneous? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Greg