Pastoral Prayer for 18 Aug 2013 (based on Luke 12:49-56: "I came to bring fire; Do you think I came to bring peace? I came to bring division; etc.")

Holy God:

We thank you for this day, a day full of promise and a day full of beauty.  We thank you for nourishing the earth with the rains, for nourishing our bodies with the bounty of the earth, for nourishing our hearts with your love and the love of family and friends.  

We thank you, Holy God, that we gather here today as a community of disciples, those who have heard and are hearing your call to follow.  We thank you that we are sheep who hear your voice, that we are learning to follow with gladness and joy. We thank you for each and every person who is finding new life, new joy, a new way to live, and a new family through the grace of your Son Jesus Christ.

You have told us that though our journey with you is a journey of joy and love, it is a journey that will not always be easy.  You have told us that if we truly follow you, there will always be resistance and misunderstanding from others.  Too often, we have failed to take you at your word.  We have been surprised, disappointed, and angry when others failed to celebrate your work in our lives and have been less than enthusiastic about the change you are making in us.  From time to time, we have responded in anger, or even given up and gone back to our old life.  

Remind us, O God, of the price that you paid to love us.  Remind us of how our world responded to the love Jesus offered.  Remind us, O Lord, of all that our Savior made possible because he refused to stop loving even to death.  Remind us, O God, of all that is possible when your people follow you in loving each other and the world no matter what.  Empower us to be true disciples, disciples who take in stride the misunderstanding and even persecution that true transformation necessarily invites.  Help us to use even the challenging moments as opportunities to let you love and grace shine forth, to demonstrate that your work in us is true, to show the world that we will not be turned back and that the love of God in Christ is the only thing that matters to us, that we will love as we have been loved no matter the cost.

May your grace and love extend to our community, our families, our friends, our church, our enemies, the nations, the poor, those who are sick, those who are in prison, all who mourn, until all the world has become a community of Christ-followers walking together with you in joy and loving community.  Use our acts of grace and love as your tool to make your Kingdom come.

Amen. 

Taking Responsibility in the UMC

I've had a tremendous privilege in my ministry, especially in recent years, to mentor many young people in vocational ministry.  Mentoring keeps me fresh.  It helps me to continually talk about ministry with folks whose passion has not yet been diminished by the grind of daily church life.  It keeps me talking about theology, calling, new ideas, new books.

The youth pastor at our church is beginning candidacy and applying to seminary.  Like me, he comes from a different tradition.  We talk about Calvinism more than I care to.  We talk about reaching people, organizing for effective ministry, dealing with God's people.  It's a very cool thing.  I hope I never get to a place in ministry that I'm no longer surrounded by people who are just starting out and are constantly asking questions.

He's trying to figure out if he's called to be a United Methodist clergyperson.  Today, we drew a scale on the white board.  We put the pro-UMC stuff on one side and the not-so-pro-UMC on the other side.  One surprise: Itineracy was on the pro-UMC side.  We agreed that our system of sending is apostolic and biblical.  We agreed that it is unpleasant.  We agreed that our issues with itineracy (we all have them) are a matter of struggling to take up the cross.  They are our problems, not the UMC's.

I shared the underside of the itineracy.  Biblically, it makes all the sense in the world that clergy (and all Christians) should lay down their lives and make themselves available to Christ to be sent wherever the mission sends them.

The problem is in practicality.  We all have reasons that we find itineracy inpractical.  Here's mine.

The problem, as I see it, is that our system creates the perfect opportunity for everyone within the system to blame everyone else.

Pastors who are unhappy in their appointments blame the cabinet for sending them where they see little opportunity.  They blame religious politics.  They blame recalcitrant congregation members.

Congregations blame the cabinet for sending them pastors they don't like.  Because they do not choose pastors, they can easily avoid responsibility for making things work.  If they had hired their pastors, they could at least say that they had chosen the pastor and ought to live with their decision.  They can blame the decline of the congregation on the pastor and feel slighted if they feel that they had been overlooked for a better pastor.

Cabinets can blame the pastors and congregations for failing to be effective in reaching their communities.

Everyone can blame seminaries.  Everyone can (and does) blame the general church.  We are a big denomination, so we have factions, so we can scapegoat whoever is not in our camp (liberals, conservatives, minorities, majorities, big churches, small churches, on and on it goes).

I suppose all of us have given into this temptation at one time or another.  I have.  I've had times I've felt passed over.  I've had times I've grumbled inside myself about a congregation, a community, a DS, the ineffectiveness of this or that committee, board, plan, or vote.

It's exhausting.  It's fruitless.  It sucks the life out of ministry.  It makes us bitter.  It's a downward spiral.  It produces no life.

There's nothing more invigorating then deciding that wherever we are is the placed we are called to be. And so we can commit to do whatever we can to leverage the life we have been given to do the very most we can to be a catalyst for the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God.  We can be happy in this system, no matter where we are.  But we have to own where we are, what we are doing, the opportunities around us, the people we have been blessed to serve and serve with.  We cannot let ourselves get lost in what someone else got that we should have gotten, how much more money someone else gets paid, or how this or that group said something that's destroying the denomination.

None of us can do anything about the decline of the UMC.  But we can do a whale of a lot to keep ourselves from declining.  We can do more than we probably realize about the decline of wherever we are serving.  I can't do one thing about anyone else.  I can't change anyone else.  But I can do something about me.  I can let Jesus Christ change me.

The UMC gives us an opportunity to preach the Gospel.  For those of us who are ordained, we are promised a lifetime paycheck and benefits.  The upside is that we are free to live a life of adventure following God's call in places we never would have chosen.  The downside is that our system breeds a sense of entitlement.

I don't believe that the UMC can be saved by a program, a speech, better appointment making, an influx of cash, "systemic change," or anything else.  I do believe that I can reach more people with the grace of Jesus Christ tomorrow than I did today.

If I fail, it's no one's fault but mine.    

Pastoral Prayer for 11 Aug. 2013 (based on Luke 12:32-40)

Holy God:

We thank you for your great love for us, we thank you for the great world you have created.  We thank you for the blessings of life and the opportunity to know and serve you.

We thank you for Jesus, who took flesh and walked among us.  He left the glory of heaven and experienced life as we live it.  We remember that he came proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  We have never quite understood what he meant.  How much he must have seen a broken world and known that things could be different.  He certainly taught us to live differently, to value different things than this world values, to invest our lives in the things this world finds worthless, to find treasure where the world see nothing particularly important.

We are grateful because he gave up everything the world says matters in order to spend his life for the sake of love.  That love has made all the difference for us.

So teach us to see as he saw, to put our whole energy, our greatest joy and our only priority, into things that remain, things of heaven things that matter in God’s eyes.

Give us a divine urgency for love, for grace, for friendship, for forgiveness, for joy, for children, for praise, for prayer, for healing, for the face of God, for the least among us.  All those things that seem like religious words were those things for which you gave your life.  So give us new eyes.  May we give our lives for those things.

Amen.

Thoughts on the Millennials I See Coming to Church

Since Rachel Held Evans recently wrote a blog for CNN on Millennials leaving the church, social media has been full of responses, some positive, most reacting against much of what she shared.  I've decided to weigh in.

I don't know why millennials are leaving "the church."  I know that lots of people of all generations are not going to church anymore.  I don't know all the reasons why.  I'm no sociologist and I don't follow Pew Forum as closely as a probably should.

I do know that lots of millennials are coming to the church I serve today.  At my last church, we had tons of them, too, and I had more than forty of them that came to a college Bible study I led on Wednesday nights.  The congregation I serve now and the last one I served are very different from each other.  One thing they share in common is that neither of them looks much like a church that ought to reach young people, but they both do.  So I've been thinking more about what works in reaching millennials more than what has caused them to leave.

In my mind, there are differences between generations, but people within a generation cannot be painted with a broad brush.  There are differences within the people in all the generations within the church.  I do not believe in shaping the message or the programming of a congregation to suit the whims of any generation.  I think that young people would be repelled by a congregation that seemed too desperate to reach or keep them.  Young people value authenticity.  That's nothing new--young people have always valued authenticity.

Of course, there are simple things that we can do to communicate in a relevant way with emerging generations.  Social media is helpful.  Web is helpful.  Fresh music can be helpful.  This has always been true--Christians have always used the newest forms of communication available to them.  Early Christianity grew quickly for many reasons, but one of the reasons is that the first Christians were some of the first religious people to use a codex as a medium for sacred text and therefore had a portable tool for sharing their scriptures.  The Christians with the good music have reached people effectively in every era of the Christian faith.  These things are not new, either.

I agree with Evans that many millennials are put off by the religious right and that many kids who were raised in conservative evangelical homes during the era of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition have walked away from their churches as soon as they could.  It's also true that people of every generation have been put off by religious political entanglements of every kind in every time and place.

I disagree with her that the answer is to replace conservative religious politics with liberal religious politics.  There is no life in subjugating the heart of the Gospel to any political agenda.

Any time Christians have tried to force society to act like society is Christian rather than sharing the Gospel in love, the power of the cross has been set aside for the sake of an earthly form of power and the church has become impotent and astray from its only true power: the crossly, shameful, powerless power of the crucified Lord.

Is anything new these days?  I think so.  What's new is that a tipping point is being reached in American culture as a whole.  We are no longer culturally Christian.  To my mind, this means that we can no longer expect that people will come to church because it's considered a good thing to do.  Americans don't have to go to church to be considered good citizens anymore.

Then what should we do?  There's only one thing to do.  It has nothing to do with strategizing to reach millennials (though an exodus of millennials might make us finally willing to get back to fundamentals).  Millennials, like all sinners, need the Gospel.  They need Jesus.  They will come (better, they will respond when we come to them) when we talk about Jesus, as long as we refuse to add anything to our message of Jesus.  They will journey with us if we will walk as true disciples.

I don't believe that millennials want coffee bars, candles, light shows, skinny jeans, or progressive activism at church.  Some do, but those who are put off by church won't return for that stuff.  They can get that stuff somewhere else.

I do believe that if we offer Jesus, if we genuinely share the love of Jesus by listening to people, if we build relationships oriented around the love of Christ, if we share Christ's love in our community and world in tangible ways, if we proclaim the message that Jesus loved people enough to live and die and rise again for them, if we offer the life that comes from walking with Jesus, then the Spirit will bring life to all people.  It works with millennials.  It works with everyone.  It's working at our church.

It's helpful, of course, not to put an unnecessary burden of an unscientific worldview, the burden of a political agenda, the burden of intractable forms of worship and church programming, the burden of legalistic moralism, the burden of anything but Jesus alone to the call of the Gospel.  That's always been true, as it was true when the Gentiles shocked the first Christians by receiving the Spirit in the book of Acts.

At my church, we talk about Jesus.  We talk about Jesus a lot.  The people offer true hospitality in the Spirit of Christ.  They reach out in Christ's love when people have been broken by life.  They care about everyone, no matter their age.  They want young people, but they also want people of all ages, not to build the church, but to build the people Jesus loves.   They love peoples' children.

We are not a cool church.  We have Folgers coffee.  We have organ music.  Our contemporary worship service is in a metal building.  We're working on it.  But I don't think we will ever make the cover of Relevant magazine.  I wear suits.  I'm not ever going to wear a pair of skinny jeans.  None of these things matter.  Not really.

I'm blessed beyond measure to be in a church where people are coming into relationship with Christ and connecting with a community of fellow disciples.  Many of them are millennials.  I have come to believe that there is no magic formula, no program, no system, no fad, no worship style that works.  I believe that the the love of Jesus works.  I believe that there is no substitute for laboring passionately to share Christ's love in creative and even desperate ways.  I believe that when it focuses on Christ and focuses on being the church, the church works.

New Science and Religion Stuff, or, Learning to be a Truly Biblical Creationist

Once again, I have resources to offer on science and religion.

First off, I have discovered that the very best and most concise discussion of creationism and intelligent design can be found in chapters 8 and 9 of Francis Collins' The Language of God.  For those of you who heard Dr. Wesley Wachob's speech at Annual Conference, many of the arguments will be very similar.  Collins helps explains both the scientific and theological reasons that creationism and intelligent design are not only unhelpful but also dangerous to both faith and science.  I wish we could read those chapters aloud from the floor of Annual Conference.

I have been fascinated by my initial perusal of The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism, by Ronald L. Numbers.  We are often given the idea that all Christians, and all people in the West generally, thought of creation like the scientific creationists do, until Darwin came along with his idea of evolution, which was rejected and continues to be rejected by true Christians except the liberal, Bible modifying kind.  This characterization is completely inaccurate.  Young earth creationism with a pseudo-scientific view of Genesis 1-2 is a very new phenomenon.  Even William Jennings Bryant, some of the authors of The Fundamentals (the series of pamphlets on fundamental conservative Christian beliefs from which the term "fundamentalism" arose), and conservative Presbyterian Princeton theologian Benjamin Warfield believed in some forms of evolution and read Genesis 1-2 in a theological manner.  Modern scientific creationism dates to the publication of Henry Morris's The Genesis Flood in 1961 and the subsequent development of Creation Science societies (I read The Genesis Flood when I was a child and at one time, I was the youngest member of the Kansas Creation Science Society!).  This relatively recent way of looking at the Bible and the fossil record has influenced state law on science education and has brought us to the current conversation in our Annual Conference.

I've said before that all Christians affirm the Apostles' Creed's statement that "I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth," and so we are all creationists in one sense.  We may be faithful Christians and have varying views on the way that God has created and is creating.

Unfortunately, arguments about creationism and differing views on the interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 tend to flatten out the doctrine of creation.  Whatever we think of the science around creation, the doctrine of creation is rich and central to our faith.  It has implications in the world that are much more important than how science is taught in the classroom--it has everything to do with how God views the world he created and called good and how we, the pinnacle of God's creation, will live out the first thing he commanded us to do, to tend the garden.  As Wesleyans, we believe in "The Great Salvation," that God saves souls first and foremost, but that his salvation extends to all things and that even the cosmos is redeemed by the salvific work of Christ.  When we limit our doctrine of creation to a conversation about God making the earth in six days or six thousand years or whatever, it gets awfully difficult to think about salvation in those grand and cosmic terms.

I think a robust conversation on the doctrine of creation would help us have a much more meaningful conversation about science and religion than we currently are.  Here are a few resources that might serve as helpful conversation partners:

Dorothy Soelle.  To Work and To Love: A Theology of Creation. More accessible than Moltman, Soelle explores how the doctrine of creation impacts all kinds of contemporary issues.  The average reader from our part of the world will likely disagree with her on many of her conclusions, but she serves as a great conversation partner to get a sense of how a genuinely orthodox understanding of creation causes us to consider how God is working in the world in ways we often dismiss.

Jurgen Moltmann. God in Creation.  Moltmann is always incredibly good and rich.  He's always pretty difficult to read, too.  This book is complete on the doctrine of creation, and has terrific interaction with Karl Barth's volumes on creation in Church Dogmatics.  A serious reader of this book would walk away with a rich theological understanding of creation and God's interaction with the material world.

Deitrich Bonhoeffer.  Creation and Fall.  Bonheoffer's work tends to be short, accessible, and incredibly meaningful to both laypersons and scholars.  Creation and Fall is based on Bonheoffer's lectures on Genesis 1-3.  It's a wonderful example of the kind of amazing insight into God's world, humanity, and the relationship between God and people available to us through these texts.  So often, when our conversations about these texts turns to fighting evolution, the ability to learn these kinds of insights from God word is lost.  Genesis is not a science textbook.  Even if the young earth creationist are right, they are using Genesis for a different purpose than God intended for it.  This book points us back to what Genesis 1-3 was intended to teach us.

Eugene Peterson.  Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places.  Read section 1, entitled, Christ Plays in Creation.  Read the whole thing.  Peterson writes beautifully and worshipfully, as a person who has taken the glory of God seriously.  Our conversation on these matters often veers far from worship.  Peterson helps brings us back.  Remember--conversation about creation and worship are inseparable in scripture, particularly in the Psalms and wisdom literature.  Maybe worship is what Genesis 1 is about, too, and if we are fighting about science, we may very well have missed the whole point.  It might be time to direct our hearts back to God rather than the directions these debates point us.

Well, that's all for now.  More to come.  [But probably not much more]