Month: June 2007

Cultural Perspectives on Faith

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I was recently reminded of a faith encounter i had a number of years ago. When I was a sophomore in high school, my grandfather took the whole family skiing in Utah for Christmas. Being a Texas girl, that happened to be my first “White Christmas.” Since I had never skied before, I needed some sort of instruction. We discovered that there was a Mormon group in Park City that offered free private ski lessons to the handicapped. So taking full advantage of their missional outreach program, I signed up.

My ski instructor was a young college age woman who obviously thought that getting to ski all the time was a great way to fulfill her mission requirement (sounds good to me). She reminded me of most of the zealous Christian youth I knew – excited about her faith, convinced of exclusive rightness of her religion, and generally ignorant about what she actually believed. In our ski lift conversations it became obvious that she wasn’t a really intellectually aware. After discovering I was from Texas she asked me if there were actually cities in Texas and if everyone rode a horse to school. After assuring her that we do drive cars, she asked what books I like to read. I happened to be reading Thomas More’s Utopia for fun over break and started telling her about it. I made the mistake of mentioning the commentary I had read that claimed that the book influenced the founding of Mormonism. She took issue with that, serious issue. God gave them their faith, no human book could ever have influenced it. I was wrong, faith is from God not man. I dropped the conversation and we got back to my pathetic attempts to ski.

Looking back I know that I would have had the same reaction if someone had told me then that there was more of Plato than Patriarchs in my faith. I came from the camp that our 20th century versions of Christianity were the way the faith always had been and always should be practiced (not that such was always explicitly taught, just that the alternatives were never mentioned). To concede cultural influences would signify change over time. I’ve since gone through the process of accepting the subjective nature of interpretation, the necessity for faith, and the cultural influences on my faith. Such things no longer herald the advents of the immanent destruction of my faith’s foundation, but instead are fascinating avenues to be explored as I dig deeper into what I believe. But it scares some people to death. They react like the Mormon girl of the ski lift – denial and dismissal (and sometimes ridicule). It makes for difficult conversation. Not that I am any “better,” I just react differently at this point in my life.

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Feed the Hungry

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Today is Hunger Awareness Day and America’s Second Harvest is teaming up with ConAgra Foods to mark it. The tandem is making it easy as a simple mouse click for you to provide four bags of groceries to those who are in need.

For each click, ConAgra Foods will donate $1 to America’s Second Harvest equivalent to 4 bags of groceries – up to 60,000 bags. It’s never been easier for you to help your neighbors in need! (and yes I know there are environmental and human rights issues with ConAgra, but as I’ve mentioned in other recent posts, I’m going to support justice wherever I can).

Click here –

35.1 million Americans do not know where their next meal is going to come from. One in every five children are born into poverty. Almost half of the low-income families that utilized a food pantry in 2001 were working families with kids.

So click the button to do your part! And then consider doing something more.
(HT – Faithfully Liberal)

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Faith in a Dress

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So I’ve posted about this over at Emerging Women, but I’ll post something here too. Pam Hogeweide and Erin Word are the guest editors for the June issue of the Porpoise Diving Life e-zine (“Picking Up Where Purpose-Driven Peters Out”). This issue is called Progress: Faith in a Dress and is devoted “to the women who have been emerging from the shadows to engage in the fullness of their callings in the 21st century”. A number of women contributed to the e-zine, and the newly created Faith in a Dress blog has a even wider selection of contributions by women on this topic.

I contributed a couple of articles to the issue – The Feminine Side of God and Why I Gave My Daughter a Strong Name. Go check them out along with all the other great articles by the women who contributed to this project.

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Ethical Consumption

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I have spent a very large amount of time this past week surfing the web for sites on ethical consumption. I’m writing a separate piece about the why behind all that, but it has been an interesting adventure. And I’ve found a lot of really cool sites.

What is ethical consumption you might ask. It starts with me the consumer admitting that while I want to avoid rampant materialism, I am not going to be one of those people who move off the grid and have a zero impact year or something (as my last post explored, for most of us ethical living can’t be an all or nothing approach). I will need to buy stuff from time to time. So given that, I want to do so ethically. That means I ask the hard questions – where has this come from? what is its past, present, and future effect on the environment? is it harmful to my physical or psychological health? and were the people who made it treated humanely and paid a fair wage at all stages of the process? It is a lot of stuff to weigh as one makes a purchasing decision and it is a lot harder than the culture of convenience we are used to.

There are many people who think that ethical consumption is not only hard, but that it is impossible economically. That to buy with one’s values contradicts the laws of economics. That’s why the t-shirt displayed above made me laugh as I stumbled across it this past week. My thoughts – One – do the “laws of economics” really matter in light of environmental chaos and injustice? Are people really so callous to favor economic theory above creation care and human rights? (don’t answer that…) and Two – in the law of supply and demand it is the consumer who creates the demand. We demand that we want ethical options (environmentally sustainable, healthy, and fairly traded) and the supply will increase. But it takes us actually doing it, being ethical consumers not just blogging idealists, for that to happen.

One of the cool sites that I discovered this past week that helps make it happen is the New American Dream. They are a great resource site for living ethically. The new dream is to live consciously (feel more alive and aligned with your values), buy wisely (use your power as a consumer to create change) and make a difference (let your actions speak for themselves – then speak up anyways). I’m going to have fun exploring their site and using their resources.

Ways to shop ethically are out there, sometimes it just takes a lot of time and effort to find them. I’m toying with the idea of trying to start a blog or something where people can pool resources about stuff like this. A place to review products, share shopping links, give environmental research updates and other fun stuff. What do you think? Worthwhile? Doable? Wanna help?

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God, Missional Living, and Social Justice

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At our church retreat this past weekend, we explored our conceptions of God. During one small group discussion the topic wandered to how our view of God affects our affinity for personal piety and missional living. Jen mentioned that in a recent class on Spiritual Formation her classmates had shared what activities shape their spiritual lives. In ranking a list of spiritual practices, social justice consistently appeared at the bottom of nearly everyone’s lists. She had recently been reading Gary Haugen (IJM) who claims that God is a God of justice and that if we serve this God we will work for justice. Her question to the group was if God really is a God of justice then why is working for justice such a low priority for Christians? Who is getting it wrong?

There were of course more nuances to her question and I am reporting my perception of it as well, but it led to some good discussion. How we conceive of God – which attributes we deem most important, and which ones we ignore – has a huge affect on how we live. If we don’t think that God cares about the poor (or if such a thought never crosses our radar) then why should we as Christians think that caring for the poor is a spiritual act? If we see God as most concerned with our personal relationship with him, as opposed to God being most concerned about the oppressed that is going to affect how we live. If it is all about our relationship with God, then acts of personal piety (reading our bible, praying, holy living) become most important. But if God’s heart for the oppressed is focused on more then acts of justice (serving the poor, working for social change, lobbying to stop human rights violations) receive more attention. In the evangelical world that I am used to, the personal piety side has received the most attention often to the exclusion of justice issues. In fact, I’ve listened to sermons where the pastor said that God does not care about the poor and we should not be working to help them. But I’ve also heard that there are churches that focus so exclusively on justice issues that personal piety is ignored.

It would be easy to say that all that is needed is balance – equal doses of personal piety and justice – but I’m not convinced that is really the best approach. Neither approach should be ignored, but I continue to see more and more danger in the “it’s all about me” approach to faith. God spoke into cultures and communities, the message of hope is for the world. If we think that we are the most important thing to God, it is a lot harder to get beyond our individualism and help others. But if we focus on God’s compassion for the world, we will grow personally through the discipline of helping others. The personal piety has a place, but is something that I believe should be a natural result of our service to God and others and not the central focus of our faith.

The difficulty occurs in how to convey that message. Changing how we talk about God is a huge step. We also need to examine what cultural assumptions we bring to our interpretations of biblical texts. We can open people’s eyes to themes of justice and God’s compassion for the oppressed through the biblical narrative. Instead of seeing Ruth as the perfect example of the submissive and committed Christian wife (which has its own issues), we can see the sabbath practices that care for the poor being displayed.

But it has to be more than a matter of perspective. We need to stop living on the extremes. I know this approach will anger some, but I think we need to stop presenting everything as an all or nothing. Too often when faith groups talk about seeking justice they land on the “sell everything and give it to the poor” stance. We present the Shane Claibornes and Mother Teresas as our examples. And the choice becomes to either care and utterly and drastically change one’s lifestyle, or to do nothing at all. The choice is so extreme that most people give up without doing anything. So while I know that there is needed discussion as to whether one can really live the American Dream and truly be seeking justice, why would doing nothing be preferable to helping people do what they can where they can? Baby steps right? So instead of telling people how evil American Idol is and telling us that we are messed up for caring more about it than the number of troops who die in Iraq (all of which may be true), I’m going to support efforts like “Idol Gives Back” that helps raise awareness and gets people doing something.

And I know this post has rambled all over the place, but I think that changing the perception of the evangelical church from a “me” centered faith to a “God/other” centered faith is a necessary step. Its a huge step that means changing our perception of who God is and changing the way we live. Missional living should be the goal, but it needs to be presented in ways that are comprehensible and doable for the average church-goer.

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Watch Your Mouth? Offensive Language and Christianity

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Andrew Jones has an interesting post up about offensive language. He writes about recent offense that has been taken by the usage of certain words and then delves into the history of what offends. He proposes that in premodern times people were offended by words that were “excommunicatory in nature – offensive words were religious terms that threatened punishment and damnation.” In modern times it was “words that cause most offense affront our personal and private sensibilities. These offensive words are normally associated with private body parts, bodily functions of a toilet nature, and sexual relations.” In our postmodern times “it is exclusionary language that causes most offence. Marginalizing people due to their race, gender, disability or status is about the most offensive thing you can say.” He then mentions the bible passages that refer to offensive language including “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” Eph 4:29.

Call me a stereotypical postmodern, but I understand the pre- and postmodern views on offensive language, but just can’t justify the modern. Biblically if the point is not to use the Lord’s name in vain (which referred to making flippant curses or oaths) or not to tear anyone down, the modern sensibility just doesn’t fit. In fact the modern approach does just the opposite – instead of building people up, modern bans of “offensive language” exist to exclude and ridicule. Most of the language that is offensive under the modern sensibilities (bodily and sexual references) is called vulgar. While we have come to perceive of “vulgar” as anything bad, dirty, and lower, it was originally just a term of derision used for the lower classes. So anything associated with the poor, uneducated masses (including their language) was considered vulgar and inappropriate for civilized folk.

So usage of terms that implied that one didn’t subscribe to classism, racism and the like became taboo. Proper people don’t use the germanic/anglo language of the poor (shit, fuck) they use the latinate language of the rich and powerful (excrement, fornicate). Over time the taboo took on mythic dimensions. Certain words came to hold almost magical powers. Say a certain word (incant this spell) and you have sinned (cursed yourself to hell). I doubt that most Christians actually stop to think about what sort of theology they are promoting when they insist that just saying “fuck” is a sin.

The fact that for most Christians it’s okay to use language of hate and derision (making fun of homosexuals, women, and other religions), but its sinful to say certain “vulgar” words displays a seriously messed up theology in my opinion. We are told to build others up with our language and encouraging language of hate while forbidding the language of the poor achieves the exact opposite. So label me as just being postmodern, but I see the more constructive (and biblical) option to be to avoid language that excludes, tears down, and ridicules. So I really don’t care if someone drops the “f-bomb” but I won’t abide “you throw like a girl.”

So it has nothing to do with wanting to be hip and cool or selling out to the culture if I choose to use a word that for a certain period of English history was considered taboo. It has more to do with actually considering my theology of sin, understanding the call to love my neighbor, and living accordingly. But that just pushes the walls of the box a little too far for most people…

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