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]

Pastoral Prayer (on overcoming shame, based on Colossians 2:6-19

Holy God:

We are glad to be in your house and we are thankful that our brothers and sisters surround us with love and grace.  We are thankful for the songs we sing, the Word proclaimed, the closeness of your spirit.  Today is a day of joy and we are grateful that we are each and all enfolded into your presence, your care and your embrace.

Deep in our hearts, you know, Holy God, that each of us has something that we hide from the others, something underneath our smiles and handshakes.  You know, O God, each of our stories, each of our hearts, everything in our pasts, everything in our present.

We pretend, but we know.  And so we temper our passion for you and the joy you call us to because each of us has something for which we are ashamed.  Each of us has a hidden concern that we have not been fully forgiven, that we are not fully authentic, that the others remember something about us that we wish we could erase from the past, or that we might serve you with a full heart only to fail you again.

Teach us to take our eyes off of our own limitations and to place our eyes fully on Jesus, whose resurrection shows that there is no limit to the power he has to make us new, whose crucifixion shows that there is no limit to his compassion for sinners, whose sacrifice is so complete that we know that there is nothing too great that he cannot wash away and renew.

Whether in shame or in arrogance, or even in simple distraction, we forget to measure our lives and to focus our lives entirely on the one who is our life.  So give us fresh vision and a fresh love for you.  Help us to only see Jesus, that the world might see Jesus in us.

Amen.

Progress on Faith and Science Questions

I have found myself playing a role in a conversation that previously has not been of particularly interest to me, the subject of the interaction of faith and science.  At Annual Conference last month, the body rejected several petitions that sought to affirm a young earth creationist viewpoint among United Methodists.

At one time, when I was a child, this conversation seemed very important to me.  In fact, as a preteen, I was the youngest member of the Kansas Creation Science Society.  As my faith matured in teen years, the question of how long God spent creating the earth became unimportant to me and I focused on a very experiential form of Christianity that included a lot of evangelism, loud prayer meetings, missions, and playing Christian worship songs on guitars.  I loved church history and systematic theology during my undergrad years, and plunged into biblical studies. I even spent some time looking into apologetics.  Perhaps I'm a bit too post-modern, but I've never felt that people came to faith through rational argument (that's another blog).  Even at a conservative place like Oral Roberts University, learning genre appropriate means to study scripture helped me see how the Bible can be read faithfully without supporting young earth creationism.  Most of my apologetics have come from people like CS Lewis, whose work has been valuable to me not because it proves Christianity to unbelievers, but because it helps make Christian theology accessible without dumbing it down, which helps me as a teacher of the faith to communicate better.

But, I'm on the committee on resolutions and petitions, so I've had to work on these petitions in committee.  And I'm on the conference board of church and society, which has been asked to provide resources to better study the question.  So I'm reading about faith and science these days.

I've already recommended Lawson Bryan's book and Adam Hamilton's stuff that touches on the subject.

Here are some names of some popular and very thoughtful writers on my reading list:

Alister McGrath.  McGrath is known to many Christian readers through his popular and very good theology textbook.  He's written tons of books and lots of subjects, including a book I read and enjoyed very much on the production of the King James Version.  McGrath holds doctorates in theology and molecular biophysics.  He's written Science and Religion: An Introduction, a book I think everyone who wants to participate in this conversation should be required to read.  It's not difficult.  It's not shallow.  It's a perfect start to an intelligent and faithful conversation on the subject.

Francis Collins.  Francis Collins is the head of the National Institutes of Health and led the team that mapped the human genome.  A former atheist, he came to faith through his study of science.  His The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief was a very popular New York Times bestseller.

John Polkinghorne: Polkinghorne is a recipient of the Templeton Prize (a sort of religious version of the Nobel Prize).  He left his job as chair of mathematical physics at Cambridge University to study for the priesthood.  He is widely recognized as the world's greatest thinker on the interaction of science and religion, and his writings are noted for being written to be accessible to lay people.  He has written more than 25 books on the subject of science and religion.  I don't know where to start, so I've ordered The Polkinghorne Reader as a sampler.

William Lane Craig.  Craig has made a name for himself in recent years as a gifted apologist who gives The New Atheists fits in public debates.  He destroyed Christopher Hitchens. Richard Dawkins famously said that he is the one Christian who puts the fear of God in him.  He is not trained as a scientist, but holds doctorates in both theology and philosophy.  His philosophical work was on cosmology, though, and so scientific questions related to origins are central to his expertise.  He's on the conservative side theologically and in terms of social ethics, teaching at Biola and beginning his training at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.  I don't know where to begin with his writings and would love a recommendation.  He's got a good website.

These are some of the top defenders of the Christian faith these days, the folks on the front lines of intellectual debates for the existence of a personal God, believers who engage science in a meaningful way.  Interestingly, none of these feel that evolution is inconsistent with Christian faith or a faithful reading of Bible, and all of them are opposed to young earth creationism and intelligent design.

Those who argue for creationism (not the Apostles' Creed kind, but, as Polinghorne calls it, creationism in "that curious North American sense") and intelligent design often say that there are tons of scientists who are creationists, and people debate about whether they are correct about this.  What's interesting to me is not how difficult it is to find a creationist scientist, but how difficult it is to find a creationist apologist for the Christian faith who also has any reputable scientific training.  The same is true of biblical scholars--it's nearly impossible to find a faithful Christian who teaches the Bible as reputable scholar and who reads the Bible the way the creationists and intelligent design people read it.  I would love to hear from anyone who can offer some good counter examples.  I'm supposed to be providing resources for everyone, so I'm open to getting as much help as possible.

Pastoral Prayer for June 30 (for Independence Day, based on Galatians 5)

Holy God:

We give you thanks and praise for the many blessings of life.  Especially in this season, we who live in this country are grateful for the blessing that the nation in which we are privileged to dwell is a land of political freedom.  We are grateful that we are each free to worship according to the dictates of our own conscience, that our faith is a matter of heart and conviction and not one of external compulsion.  We are grateful that we are gauranteed the right of free expression and that we can freely share our faith in the public sphere.  We are grateful that we are guaranteed the freedom of assembly and that as we gather today to worship you we do so without fear.

So often, we are given to complaining about our leaders, our government, and our culture.  Help us to take some time to be grateful.  Help us to remember that the fact that we can complain means that we have freedoms that most of the world cannot begin to imagine.

We pray for the nation in which we live.  We are citizens first of your kingdom, and citizens of this nation second.  And yet, we love this land, not only for what it is, but also because you have called us to it and you have given us your heart, a heart that loves to world enough that your Son gave his life for its sake.  Help us to remember that we have been placed in this great country not only as a privilege and a blessing, but, more importantly, with a calling and to be a blessing.  

we celebrate freedom, and yet many of us our bound up and imprisoned within.  Set us free on the inside.  Give us true freedom--freedom to live as fully alive, as you designed us to live.  Help us to find the peace, power, joy,  and love that only comes through the Son of God who died and rose again to set us free.  Help us to live an overcoming life through the power of you Spirit, led by your spirit and walking in new life in your spirit.  Give us a kind of freedom that is truly free, no matter what our circumstances may be without.

Amen.

Pastoral Prayer for June 23, 2013 (based on Galatians 3:23-29)

Holy God:

We thank you that your is revealed in this place--in song, in scripture, in symbol, in sacrament.  Most especially, we see your glory in the faces of one another, in the constantly restored image of God reflected through those who have laid aside their lives so that they might be made more and more like him each day.  

So many times, we have sought to understand ourselves, to establish an identity for ourselves.  We wear many labels: rich or poor, black or white, married or single, young or old, outgoing or shy, simple or sophisticated, conservative or liberal, employed, unemployed, retired, Americans, Alabamians, parents, children, grandparents.

But none of these labels and the many, many more that we give to ourselves or others give to us define us or tell the true story of who we are.  So we search.  We search for what we are about, what are lives mean, who we really are.

Help us to find ourselves in you.  You, who made us.  You, who remakes us.  You, who called us from the foundation of the earth, who knit us in our mother’s womb, who has seen every moment of every day of our lives, who has heard our cries in the night and the deepest yearnings of our souls, who will receive us into the arms of your mercy when we take our last breath.  

You have called us to lay down our lives, to be crucified with Christ, to make our lives not about us but about him.  And yet, you have loved us most.  And you have promised that if we would lay aside our lives we would find them.  You have warned us that all we do to find our lives would cause us to lose them. 

We give ourselves to you.  We find ourselves in finding you.  Amen.