Category: Church

Worship Confession

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I was annoyed with the worship wars back in the 90s. All too often they boiled down to younger people demanding that church be done in a language they understood and older people demanding that since they tithed the most church should cater to their whims (and yes I heard the arguments stated that crassly numerous times). These days a theological veneer is imposed on the same arguments (generally by those who accuse those who desire the church to embrace only the cultural idioms of 100 or 300 years ago instead of those of the past fifty years). The arguments typically accuse people of rejecting the forms of church that are the “proper” way of encountering God for the siren call of individualism and novelty. Same wars based on personal preference, just new ways of accusing the other side of being wrong.

As I repeatedly encounter these spats in the church, it forces me to ask the question as to what the purpose of corporate worship is anyway. I fully believe that worship can never be limited to just the rituals of church but involves the actions of serving God in the world. Yet I still see a place for corporate worship. What I hear most often is that the purpose of that event is to unveil God – to make God present and known to those gathered in a particular space. The rituals, the prayers, the songs, the sermon, the well-rehearsed actions of the leaders all work together to bring the congregation into an encounter with God.

But this is where I get uneasy. I keep asking myself – is the point of worship simply to encounter God?

The longer I am part of the Christian faith the more uneasy I get with churches that enact a well-planned performance intended to help people have this encounter with God. Whether it is a timed-to-the-minute contemporary stadium show with a recording-level-quality praise band or a highly orchestrated liturgy with a recording-level-quality choir and organist, I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the affected voice of the church. The manipulative nature of the fact that the religious professionals are staging a show intended for me to consume (as I read or sing as prompted) under the guise of enacting the proper form for how God is to be revealed grates on my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard.

For a long time I thought this was just my preferences regarding worship and was reluctant to jump in the fray of the worship wars culture. But the question kept returning to me – is worship simply about encountering God or should it also involve participating in God? Watching a show and being moved to see God seems like a mere shadow of worship compared to making of ourselves living sacrifices and being caught up in the work of God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. Rehearsing or timing a performance can make for a beautiful experience in the moment, but it leaves me hollow. Maybe it’s because after so many years in the church world I’ve seen too much of the machinations of the men behind the curtain to even be able to see God in such polished performances.

Perhaps that is my failing.

But I’ve reached the point where it is only in the messy and faltering attempts to be the body of Christ -to give of ourselves as we are instead of in a role someone expects of us – that I not only experience God but feel that I am participating in God’s work in the world. It’s often elusive and frequently difficult and uncomfortable to live into worship instead of merely consume it, but it is where I can actually see God at work as of late. But as I am discovering, desiring to worship in such ways makes it very hard to continue to exist in the church world that has formed different habits.

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Responsible Relationships

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I have not had much time to blog recently as I am in the midst of end of the semester craziness, but I thought I’d post this excerpt of a paper I wrote for my ethics class –

A few weeks ago my husband and I arrived home from a rare evening out to see a homeless man camped out in the driveway of the empty house next door. I had seen this man wandering the neighborhood and had taken to referring to him as “the wizard” on account of his pointy beard, the wide-brimmed hat and long duster-coat he wore, and staff he carried with him. My husband went out to offer him some food and ended up having a lengthy conversation with this man who even goes by the very wizardly name Hawkeye. He declined the offer of food and mentioned that he has set himself up as the protector of the neighborhood and had information that the empty house next door needed someone to watch over it that night.

This encounter with Hawkeye served as a reminder that homelessness is not just some abstract issue for which the church needs to develop a response, but that the homeless are real individual people with real stories. Yet all too often in our modern economy it is easy to lose sight of these stories. The message that the culture feeds us is that our highest priority should be pursuing our individual security. We participate in the economy for our own sake, assuming the responsibility of providing for ourselves and protecting that which we manage to obtain. Those that fail to make it are viewed as issues to be dealt with (such as the homeless) and rarely as fellow beings made in the image of God that we are to be in solidarity with. In fact the cultural assertion that we are responsible only unto ourselves has led to our ignoring the stories of others that are suffering often because of our own prosperity.

In contradiction of this cultural trend, the biblical witness and the tradition of the church hold that Christians have a responsibility to care for the needs of all people. This mandate goes beyond simply the giving of alms, but to the ensuring that as people of God the church is expressing righteousness by pursuing justice in all of its relationships. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus in his mission to proclaim the kingdom of God describes his role as one who brings good news to the poor and proclaims release to the captives (Lk 4:18). Earlier in the Gospel Mary described the kingdom of God as a place where the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up (Lk 1: 52) and John declared that to truly follow God “whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise” (Lk 3:10). Jesus also told Zacchaeus that salvation had come to his house once he repented of his economic exploitation of others. To live in the ways of the kingdom of God as revealed in scripture is to be in right relation economically with others.

In a culture that encourages its members to look after their own needs first, the equality and other-centeredness of the kingdom of God is generally perceived as a threat to the status quo. Instead of developing an awareness of how our economic practices are perhaps contributing to the oppression or defrauding of others, the culture encourages us to assume that economics is a morally neutral area. But without knowing the stories of others and understanding how our economic practices are actually affecting them, it is impossible to be in right relation with others. Our business, our striving to gain security in this world, must concern itself with the others we do in fact interact with as part of that process. Like Zacchaeus who in engaging in the expected role of a tax-collector had defrauded those he did business with, all of us need to be aware of the ways we harm others in our economic transactions.

We as the consumer of a good or as an investor in a business need to know if the workings of that business serve to uplift the lowly or to keep them down. Were the workers mistreated or paid insufficient wages? Were they given a just price for their product that not only covers their production costs but also pays them fairly for their labor? Were they forced to work under inhumane conditions or treated in ways that disrespected their dignity? All these are questions that need to be addressed if one is to live out the equitable norm of the kingdom of God.

But in a culture that encourages individualism, it is far too easy to ignore not only the stories of others but this responsibility to treat them properly as well. The poor, like the homeless, are not just issues to be dealt with but are real people already intimately connected to our everyday economic actions. To live into the norms of the kingdom of God where the lowly are lifted up requires action on the part of the people of God. Those who claim to follow God must accept both relationship with the neighbors with whom we interact with economically and the subsequent responsibilities such relationship entails. As the biblical narrative attests, this may mean repenting of ways we have cheated others, working to bring good news to the poor, and leveling out economic relationships as the mighty are brought down while the lowly are lifted up.

Yet as biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann comments, “amid the limitless prosperity of the U.S. economy (an expectation when not a fact), it is profoundly problematic to hold to a tradition that features sacrifice for the sake of holiness and justice for the sake of neighbor.” Individualism is the antithesis of self-sacrificial actions that care for the needs of others. Individualism ensures that I not only have enough but all I desire without bothering to ensure if others have enough as well or if I am harming others in amassing the things I want.

To undo such harmful effects of individualism that neglects to care for the real stories of others what is needed is a significant mental shift. Treating homelessness, hunger, and poverty just as issues that need solutions imposed upon them instead of relationships we have that demand us to act responsibly fails to live in the ways of the kingdom of God. For Christians to engage in economics as Christians we must not only listen to the stories of Jesus but also the stories of those we interact with economically.

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Letters to a Future Church

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I had been anticipating the release of the book Letters to a Future Church: Words of Encouragement and Prophetic Appeals (IVP), so I eagerly said that I would participate in a blog tour related to the book. As a collection of letters to the church from both leaders and laity alike, the book lives up to its subtitle as it offers both encouragement and prophetic calls to embrace various ways of being a Christian in the 21st century. What I found most intriguing was that in its intent to address the future church, what this collection provides is a helpful snapshot of the diversity of voices in the North American Evangelical church today. So, for instance, some of the letters uphold right doctrine and culture wars as the path forward for the church and others the embracing of social justice. Some voices both question and mock the perceived problems of the church today while others rejoice in the blessings the body of Christ is offering the world. With authors as diverse as Rachel Held Evans, Tim Challies, Shane Claiborne, and David Fitch these differences are not surprising. At the same time it is immensely encouraging to read these diverse voices coming together under the common vision of imagining what it means to be the church in the years ahead.

While I found a number of the letters personally challenging, the most poignant word for the church (for me at least) was in Peter Rollins’ letter. He writes –

It is not enough for you [the church] to say that you are falling short of your beliefs, for this very confession plays into the idea that there is a difference between your various beliefs and your actions. Rather, if you will permit, I ask you to remember the radical Christian insight that one’s actions reflect one’s beliefs. That you cannot say that you believe in God if you do not commit yourself to what Kierkegaard referred to as the work love.

As part of this blog tour, I was asked to write my own letter to the church which I have found to be more difficult than I thought it would be. There are a million things that I could say to the church, most of which are simply evidence of my own failings and hypocrisy. But as I thought about it over the past few weeks, one theme in particular kept coming to mind which echoed Rollins’ letter in many ways. Hence my letter –

Dear Church,

I’m tired. I just don’t have the ability to keep up with the façade of “church” anymore. Oh, I love Jesus, I am crazy about living into the Kingdom of God, and I desperately want to be with the body of Christ, but I just can no longer keep up with the systems and structures that go along with all of that. I know it’s cliché to talk about wanting to be the church as opposed to merely doing church, but right now all I see are the structural façades and they are overwhelming.

It’s not that any one branch of the church is to blame – megachurch, mainline, or housechurch – all seem bogged down with the idea that the church exists for its own sake. The point seems to be to perfect the performance, hone the ritual, grow the structure so that the church can survive and thrive. It’s all (in theory) so that the church can bless its members and be able to serve the world, but all too often it seems like the forms of church become the purpose of church consuming all of our vision and energy. The actions of church don’t reflect the things I claim to believe and yet they demand all our attention. And I just have to confess that right now I am worn out.

I’m not interested in building structures right now. Or defining boundaries or expressing unwavering loyalty to a tribe. Or even in the survival of any group or gathering (even as I respect and cherish the need for such). Instead of constantly shoring up structures, I feel like I need the space to mourn. Not just for my own personal stuff as it seems every structure in the world exists to help me deal with me, but instead to be able to focus less on strengthening particular forms and more on taking the time to lament the fracturing amidst the forms. To listen to the stories of the body that have been kept silent, to hear the groanings of the body that our choruses and chants drown out, to strip away our beautiful facades in favor of sackcloth and ashes. I need the space to hear of the struggles of the body of Christ and the trials of inhabiting God’s Kingdom without the distractions of having to protect a structure.

Jesus said those who mourn will be comforted and that the weary will be given rest, but dear Church, how can we ever find the comfort that comes from mourning or the rest from burdens when we must constantly be working to hold up your façade? So what I simply ask is this – provide space for us, as the church, to mourn; let us please rest.

Your Sister,
Julie

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If you could write a letter to the church what would you say? InterVarsity Press and Patheos would love to hear your thoughts. Now through May the 4th anyone who is interested is invited to submit a letter to the IVP Letters to the Future Church Campaign for a chance to have your letter posted at Patheos and get some of the latest IVP books. So what is the message that you think the church needs to hear?

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Worship and the Other

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In my ethics class in seminary we’ve been discussing the problems of race and racism and the challenge of respecting the dignity of the other. As part of that discussion, my professor mentioned that the diversity task force had discovered that most of the minority students who attended the seminary over the past decade felt like they never truly belong at the seminary – that the culture of the seminary never welcomed them for who they were. I didn’t find this surprising in the least, but one of my classmates seemed rather taken aback by the report. She asked if specific examples of how the seminary was unwelcoming could be shared.

It was one of those really uncomfortable moments for me as just minutes before I had sat there feeling like a completely unwelcome outsider as my fellow classmates joined in on mocking the church tradition I come out of. The banter had been meant in fun, more as a way to make fun of themselves than others, but it had still been an awkward exchange. Per new seminary policy, all the ordination track students had to participate in the seminary’s Triduum services over Easter – a very old-school high-liturgy that consumed their whole weekend. The purpose, as they explained to me, was so that they could be trained in the right way of doing vigils since the parishes they serve will rarely know the correct forms for such things. So as they came off of the Easter frenzy exhausted as classes started again, the joke that morning was that next year they should petition to do the whole thing low-church style. This started everyone in on joking what sorts of appalling low-church stuff they could do – from spending the whole service doing announcements to giving into the congregation’s consumer demands to sing hymns people actually know. It was all meant in fun so I just sat and listened to them mock the cultural church traditions I am used to, but as the only non-Episcopalian in the class it was hard not to feel like an outsider.

And then we started class and the question was raised as to how minorities at the seminary might not feel welcome. It was difficult to not speak up about the discussion before class – . Or to mention that every time I hear my classmates discuss things like Enriching Our Worship (liturgies that include prayers and hymns from other cultures) it is only to mock it. Or the incredulous gossip-like statements of “have you heard, there are some churches that actually use grape juice and crackers for Eucharist?” Or the arguments I’ve heard that only 17th century high-liturgy done with the finest of serviceware available is proper worship. Or that what feminists and blacks do is not true theology, but merely an expression of Christian spirituality. When one form of culture is upheld as the God-ordained norm and everything else mocked, then of course those who differ from that norm are not going to feel welcome.

The seminary is very white and reflects one segment of cultural worship practices of white middle class Americans. I knew as a post-evangelical I was an outsider going into seminary yet even as an outsider I respect the culture forms of worship practice that most of my classmates find meaningful and beautiful. But I struggle when such forms of worship get in the way (even unintentionally) of respecting the dignity of others. It is one thing to choose to participate in a particular cultural form of worship, but quite another to mock the forms of others or expect them to convert to your ways in order to be a proper Christian. This goes far deeper than silly worship wars, but gets at the very core of what it even means to worship God at all.

As I’ve come to understand it, to commit oneself to ascribing worth-ship to God one must embrace the patterns of life that God deems worthy. As the biblical prophets repeatedly assert, rituals of worship that seek to draw us close to God or that proclaim God’s worth are meaningless if we are not actually living in the ways of God. The purpose of worship is this pursuit of righteousness – being in right relation with God and in relation to all that God has created. As Isaiah declares, this involves more than just fasting or participating in convocations, but engaging in actions that work to right those relationships. We might be strengthened, or shaped, or comforted by our community’s rituals, but those are forms that should never be mistaken for the deeper function of worship. More significantly such forms should never prevent us from engaging in the ways of life God deems worthy. Ritual should never stand in the way of our caring for those in need, of respecting the dignity of others, or loving our neighbors.

It is difficult to see the pain of my classmates who do feel unwelcome at my seminary especially when it is it cultures of worship creating the division. Yet as an outsider myself it is similarly difficult to know how to work to help resolve this tension.

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Dangerous Questions

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In the traditional Jewish service for Passover, it is assumed that children will ask questions about why the family is partaking in a meal of remembrance. The service states that there are four types of children asking questions – the wise child, the wicked child, the innocent child, and the child who does not yet know what to ask. Contrary to what many Christians who are fixated on right doctrine might assume, the wicked child is not the one asking forbidden questions that challenge static absolute truths. The wicked child is instead the one who refuses to ask questions – the one who doesn’t engage and therefore places herself outside the community. It is a poignant reminder that wrestling with the hard aspects of faith and even being consumed with doubts and questions is a far better place to be in than one who has stopped asking questions. Challenging the status quo through engaged reflection on one’s faith implies that one is still on the trajectory of discipleship – seeking to ever discern what it means to follow after God even when it might unsettle the assumptions of the community.

It was this wickedness, this failure to care about what God cares about by challenging the status quo, that Amos witnessed when he came to Jerusalem. A poor herdsman from Judah, Amos was part of a population that was subservient to Israel at the time. Judah therefore bore the brunt of the expenses of Israel, with the poor and needy being trampled to cover the expenditures of those in power. Through the manipulation of debt and credit, the wealthy had amassed more and more of the land at the expense of poor landowners. Some scholars believe that the only thing that would have even brought a poor shepherd like Amos to Jerusalem was the requirement that he pay tribute to those that controlled his lands at an official festival. But what a struggling working class man saw in Jerusalem was a population that not only lived in extravagance, but one that had stopped asking questions about if they were living in the ways of the Lord. In fact they not only had stopped asking questions about whether their lifestyles based on the oppression of the poor reflected God’s desires, they had been told by the powers that be that it was not proper (or permitted) to ask questions that challenged the ways of Israel.

Seeing this abandonment of the faith in the guise of apathy moved Amos, who was not a religious professional, to speak the word of the Lord to Israel. Although the governing religious hierarchy told him to not prophecy against the ways of Israel, Amos knew he could not remain silent about the injustices he saw. He saw the people doing religion as normal while the poor were exploited on their behalf and knew they had rejected their God. So the message he was given to deliver on the streets of Jerusalem was that God hates their worship gatherings and the noise of their praise songs because they have given up on caring about what it actually means to be God’s people. Amos tells them –

Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches,… who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise on instruments of music; who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” 

Not caring about how their lives and not just their ritual gatherings are caught up in following God had turned Israel into the wicked child at Passover. They enjoyed the prosperity injustice allowed them and therefore had accepted the injunction against questioning the practices of the government and economic system. They went through the motions of liturgy without doing the actual work of wrestling with the questions of the faithful. Amos called them to instead to stop exploiting the poor and let justice roll across the land. He begged them to ask the hard questions of themselves and of their rulers – to be disciples despite the cost.

But questioning the status quo is dangerous. Jerusalem had no interest in hearing the word of the Lord that challenged their economic prosperity. The powers that be moved to silence his prophecy and evicted Amos from Jerusalem.

And yet his witness stands as scripture. Thanks be to God.

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He Has No Power?

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At a conference I attended recently we sang a worship song one evening with the repeated refrain “He has no power.” The song was a South African freedom song and the cantor explained that the “he” in the song refers to Satan. Knowing how songs of liberation work, the reference to the oppressor Satan here serves as a place-holder for the actually physical oppressors which in this situation would be the white Apartheid government (for more on this in songs see James Cone’s work). In instances of such extreme oppression, it is safe to sing hymns about freedom from Satan, but not so safe to sing openly about the desire to be liberated from the racist forces of the white government.

So there I was in a room full of a few hundred older, very reserved, and 99.9% white Christians who were singing a South African freedom song as if it were a 17th century hymn. It was in the middle of singing the song that I was stopped short by the thought that what we were doing there was the exact opposite of what we were proclaiming in song. How could we truly believe that the powers of oppression have no power if we weren’t embodying any visible sign of it? Beyond the oddity of having someone conduct our singing about freedom so as to ensure we hit the right pitches, the dissonance of the entire situation was unsettling. I couldn’t help but wonder if the act of appropriating a song of liberation from another culture and subduing and anglicizing it was not in itself an act of oppression of the song’s very power all for the sake of allowing us to feel multicultural an affirming of the “other.” Where were the acts of liberation? Where were the faces and voices of those others? Where in our midst was the struggle to turn the world upside-down, destroy the segregation of our churches, and humbly sacrifice our vision of how a worship service must function in order to make room for the hallelujahs of others?

These thoughts stopped my voice in the moment; I couldn’t finish singing the song. I did hear others grumbling about the song after the service. Either they had missed the explanations of the “he” referring to Satan and were upset that we would dare sing that God had no power. Or they were upset that they had to sing about the person of Satan since we all know he doesn’t actually exist. But I was met with blank stares when I suggested that I was uneasy singing a song of liberation in an unliberated space.

I am fully aware that no one there, especially not those who planned that liturgy, had such motives in mind in choosing that song. In fact I am sure they assumed that the choice was one for diversity and inclusion that challenged assumptions about what constitutes proper hymns. But as I reflected on the moment my unease remained. It made me wonder how often in the church we make that promise of freedom into a hollow platitude. Like when we spiritualize the call to release the oppressed and free the prisoners into being simply about overcoming our personal demons. Or twist the call to love our neighbor as ourselves to really be about just loving ourselves. Or preach that Christians shouldn’t be distracted by politics, or economics, or corporate greed (since addressing those issues might require us to live counter-culturally…). We speak of liberation and freedom as if they are facades. They make us look great on the outside, but are so impotent of concepts in our theologies that they do nothing to affect who we actually are. But the veneer of liberation only serves to further hide away the oppression still inside. The most empowering thing for racism is for people to believe it has been dealt with. But that isn’t true freedom.

Liberation cannot be just a guise. Inclusion cannot be trivial. Freedom from oppression cannot be spiritualized away. I had to stop singing because I felt like I was participating in the very act I was claiming to have overcome. There were voices missing in that space and I knew I couldn’t say Satan had no power in the midst of that absence. But even so, all I could do was not sing.

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Embodied Theology

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Earlier this summer I attended a church service where the pastor, a man struggling with what appears to be his final bout with cancer, preached about the hope that Jesus promises to those who trust in him. After describing the returning Jesus brandishing a sword and dripping with the blood of all our vanquished enemies, he invited the audience to share what they saw as the hope that this Jesus promises. The responses ranged from no cancer, to no pain, to no worries about paying the bills, to the promise of an upgraded body – all of course in heaven someday after we die. The congregation was encouraged to find contentment in the present from the possibility of realizing these promises someday. Our souls are what matter; the body just has to endure until our souls reach heaven. No mention of help with how to pay this month’s rent or what it means for a cancer-ridden body to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, just the spiritual promise that someday all will be well.

That sort of denial of the created world in favor of escaping it all someday was difficult to hear, but it wasn’t surprising. As much as a few more moderate evangelicals attempt to deny that such “pie-in-the-sky-when-we-die” theology is still around, it still shapes the faith experience of the typical evangelical church most Sundays. What has surprised me recently is hearing similar dualism preached in churches that would never self-identity as being anywhere near such evangelicals theologically. But despite having disparate views on the Bible, justification, and inclusiveness, the outcome of such dualism in those churches is the same – a disparaging of the body and elevation of the soul. Be the roots a shallow neo-Gnosticism or popular Buddhism or simply a theology that starts with the Fall instead of creation, what get preached is that we are not our bodies.

It’s a way of viewing the world that makes that bumper sticker, “We are spiritual beings having a physical experience,” so popular. What gets valued is not the actions of faith – caring for others, studying the word, serving the poor, tending to creation, feeding the hungry – but finding spiritual contentment deep down in one’s soul. While evangelicals admit that life now is messed-up and so look forward to escaping it all someday, progressive dualists want to escape it now through meditating, unplugging, and letting-go of any obligation to help build a better world.

And therein lies the problem. When faith is all about a dualistic escapism, it sadly allows no room for mercy. Evangelicals often mock calls to work to save the environment or end extreme poverty because this world is not our home and is all going to burn anyway. Progressive dualists similarly mock calls to work for justice as imposing unnecessary shoulds upon them that get in the way of them being present with their souls. Both forms of denying our embodiment in this world provide convenient excuses for ignoring the needs of others as individuals are allowed to focus solely on their own personal spiritual needs. It’s easier to opt out of loving one’s neighbor when one’s theology is built around such a hierarchical view of creation that not only divides our body and souls, but privileges the one over the other. And with such views held by those in power, the bodies of the marginalized (women, the poor, the racially other, the queer, the old, the disabled) continue to be oppressed and ignored by those whose theologies assume they aren’t worth being bothered about.

These are theologies that I can’t reconcile with the way of Christ. With the story of a God who, challenging the dualist religious assumptions of the time, became flesh and dwelled among us. Who broke bread, healed bodies, and suffered on the cross. Who says he despises our religious gatherings if all we do is pray and worship and neglect caring for the bodies of the hungry and the oppressed. I have to affirm creation in its wholeness – undivided body and soul included. My theology is embodied because spirituality encompasses all creation, not just the parts I happen to prefer. I think Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel phased it best as she described what it means to live out this embodied theology –

Disembodiment is lovelessness. Insecurity, coldness, power and weariness are hidden behind abstraction. A theology of embodiment mistrusts all self-made fantasies of the beyond which are engaged in at the expense of the healing of people here and the realization of the kingdom of God on this earth. It is committed to a this-worldly expectation which here already looks for full, complete life, for wide spaces for women and men, and from this work derives the hope that nothing can separate us from the life and love of God.

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Speculative Fiction, the Church, and Hope

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So NPR just released the results of their survey for the Top 100 Science-fiction and Fantasy Books. It’s a great list with some of my all-time favorite books on it (although I disagree with their decision not to include young adult books on the list, but that’s just me). Some 5,000 books were nominated for the list, but the ones that made the top 100 were mostly ones that were more than just entertaining stories; they are the stories that mean something. Stories that through their imaginings of alternative worlds tap into the power of the prophetic to deliver the message that our world too is not absolute, but imagined and therefore capable of change.

Now while I have complained in the past about why imaginative challenges to oppressive orders in our world only seem to happen in speculative fictions, the genre still remains my favorite – often for that very reason. As this recent comparison of women of sci-fi vs. women of prime time shows, there are just so many more substantial ways of being in the world than the status quo generally allows for. Speculative fictions not only present the possibility that the dreams we struggle for now could someday actually be realities, they are also the prophetic voice calling us into that world.

In many ways these fictions take up the task that the church has nearly completely abdicated. Churches don’t use their collective voice and energy to challenge the existence of a world where God’s ways are not allowed to reign. Oh, churches fight for their rights, but rarely are the ones helping build a better world for all. Churches instead help people feel fulfilled, spiritually connected, and generally as comfortable as they can. The church is often nothing more than a support group or vendor of experiences to help us feel like we belong. God is tacked-on to make our experiences feel meaningful, but not to challenge us to subvert the constraints to the sovereignty of the Kingdom of God. So we go to church to feel connected to a tradition, we go to get an “I’m okay, you’re okay” affirmation, we go to hear why we are right and everyone else is wrong, we go to feel safe and secure amidst likeminded people – but rarely do we go to imagine how everything could be different. Dreaming of better world is apparently only for those sci-fi/fantasy geeks.

But it was the role of the biblical prophet to imagine alternative ways of living in this world that reflected the ways of God. As Walter Brueggemann wrote about the prophetic, it is “an assault on public imagination, aimed at showing that the present presumed world is not absolute, but that a thinkable alternative can be imagined, characterized, and lived in. … Thus, the prophetic is an alternative to a positivism that is incapable of alternative, uneasy with critique, and so inclined to conformity.”
Churches are inclined to comfort and emotional well-being, and so therefore to conformity (read a fantastic article about that here). Prophetic voices are dismissed as too political, too extreme, or just a quirk of personality. Heck, in many churches even science-fiction and fantasy are banned because they are too subversive. Churches don’t bother imagining a better world where God’s ways of compassion and justice reign because we are too comfortable with the world we have now. We don’t want a prophet to challenge our comfort, or force us to look outside ourselves, or (heaven-forbid) start caring about the things God cares about.

The church has shut the door on imagination.

Which is why so many of us are desperate for the hopeful imaginings offered in speculative fictions.

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Crazy, Holy, Hungry Ones – My Wild Goose Reflection

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I went to the Wild Goose Festival for the community. Meeting for the first time this year in the hills of beautiful North Carolina, Wild Goose was a gathering focused on arts, justice, and faith. I went eager to reunite with old friends and to finally translate a few virtual relationships into reality. Oh, I was excited to hear David Wilcox and Jennifer Knapp and learn from respected Christian leaders, but it was the gathering of friends that drew me and my family to the fest. And while it was the community that brought me there, it was the communal experience of commitment that defined my time there. Those lines posted above from Carrie Newcomer’s song “Where You Been,” sum up perfectly the experience that was the Wild Goose Festival.

If anything, Wild Goose was a gathering of those who dream of a better way. A better way to be human, a better way to be the church. Not in a “we want to be better than you” sort of way, but more of a deep felt recognition that the world is not as it should be. It was that wrestling with trying to live into the lives God created us to live that became the conversation at Wild Goose. As part of that, one theme that kept resurfacing in the talks I heard was that of learning to be open to the full range of human emotions and experiences in the world. The typical Christian impulse in our country is to dwell upon the joyful aspects of life and faith. We put on the mask of pretending all is fine to the world. We hold church services oriented around worship, praise, and the uplifting parts of scripture. While there is nothing wrong with doing those things, they don’t allow the faithful to reflect the fullness of reality. As the great civil rights activist Vincent Harding pointed out in his talk, there is pain and suffering in the church. Institutional and social evils such as racism and the inequalities it produces affect the body of Christ – harming both those who commit and who suffer those sins. To pretend that all is well when all is obviously not well is to pretend at joy – not to experience it in reality. As Harding commented, to ever be able to truly laugh, one must also be allowed to honestly weep for all the pain and suffering. Pretending that all is well or to deny that the suffering exists harms our souls, preventing us from being whole healthy people. In his talk Soong-Chan Rah also called for the need to remember the words of lamentations in our churches. The Western church has exorcised such biblical passages of lament from our services, lectionaries, and prayer books, and we would do well to be reminded from the global church (that knows far more about experiencing suffering) that recognizing and lamenting our sins and pain is part of what it means to follow God.

While the church of course has a long way to go in regards to becoming balanced and healthy in such ways, it was encouraging to get a small taste of what that might look like at the Wild Goose Festival. I can’t speak for everyone there, but from the conversations I was a part of it truly did seem to be a gathering of folks who deeply dreamed of a better way. People who desired for our faith to mean something tangible. People, who, as Richard Rohr said there, don’t want to settle for the easy shallow faith of merely worshiping God – putting God on an idealized but distant pedestal to be admired but not known. They want to follow God in ways that transform their lives and therefore the lives of others as well. People who desire to follow God in ways that bring about justice, that seek to restore broken relationships, that always orient around caring about the needs of others. But also people who don’t trust in their own strength to do such things, who know the world and the church are messy, and that we need time for lament and repentance as part of our experience of following Jesus.

It can be easy to talk about such things, and I know I’ve done my fair share of talking before. But what I appreciated about the Wild Goose festival was that it forced us past the point of posturing to a place of transparent honesty. At most of our church gatherings, conferences, or cohorts we can easily erect a façade of self and allow others to see only what we desire them to see of who we are. We can talk grand ideas, look as pious/hip/committed as we desire, and then escape back into our solitary lives without anyone glimpsing our rough edges. But there is something about camping in close proximity in sweltering weather in fields crawling with ants and ticks, where the nearest water is a spigot several fields away, with your communal shit stinking up the port-a-potties and your children sleep-deprived from the excitement of camping and the loud bands that play into the wee small hours of the night that violently rips away any façade one might have attempted to hide behind. Everyone sees you crawling disheveled out of your tent in the morning desperate to concoct a coffee-like-substance over your tiny camp stove. Everyone hears you yelling at your kids to stop (literally) bouncing off the tent walls and go to sleep. And I’m pretty sure half the people there witnessed my tired, hot, and hungry children having a grand royal meltdown in the food area one day at lunch. It was just a few days, but it was real.

So when we came to worship together and share our passion for following God in transforming ways in this raw state of discomfort and exhaustion, it was more than just talk. We were those crazy, holy, hungry ones who believe in something better. It was a glimpse of the Kingdom of God that went far beyond just friends gathering to have fun together at a festival or to posture at caring for others. It was a gathering of the most committed Christians I know – those who long to follow God wholly. And that gave me great hope for the church. I had to laugh when I read after the festival that some opponents were deriding the festival, questioning our faith and referring to the event as Apostate-palooza (because *obviously* anything to do with art, camping, and justice can’t possibly be Christian). Yet I realized that they were right in a way. This was a gathering of apostates of the church as it has become – a often meaningless and impotent entity beholden to civil structures of culture and politics that cares more about power and privilege and shoring up hollow rituals and traditions than it does about loving others and believing in God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Wild Goose was a gathering of those crazy folks who are committed to a better way. We are apostates of meaningless religion, ready to strip away the facades and get at the real work of following God.

That was my Wild Goose experience – leaving me raw and tired and strangely full of hope.

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Acedia and the Church

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I was at the pool with the kids recently and couldn’t help but overhear a very loud and opinionated conversation happening near me. Apparently two families were just meeting as their kids splashed together in the water and they were doing the whole share about their lives thing. One woman shared about how they make money from poker tournaments and so can spend most of their time out on their boat. It was just a few minutes later that she started going off on all the idiots in America who don’t understand the value of money and so want to force people to give it away to undeserving poor people. She ranted for quite some time about how those liberals are ruining our country and teaching our children that you don’t have to work to get money. At one point she even threw in that she goes to church and knows that only the people who deserve healing should be given help.

I listened incredulous to this conversation (which was loud enough that everyone at the pool couldn’t help but hear) and finally just left because the hate speech was escalating to the point that I would rather not expose my kids to such things. Listening to her rants though made me think of a talk I had just heard about the dangers of acedia. The term is most often associated these days with the sin of sloth (one of the seven deadly sins), but it goes much deeper than mere laziness to describe the state of not caring or being concerned with one’s position or condition in the world. It’s a spiritual apathy that turns one inward instead of outward in a life oriented around loving others. In the talk I heard, it was compared to compassion fatigue – not having the spiritual resources to care anymore. In the talk I heard the advice that was given to combat acedia was to focus on my own relationship with God – which was defined as incorporating rituals of prayer and reflection into my days and disconnecting from the electronic world.

That’s advice I’m hearing a lot in the American church these days. Feeling overwhelmed and far from God? Then do more for yourself – reconnect (or disconnect as needed), get healthy, then you will have something to give back. Another talk I heard recently advised people to never do anything because they think they should. It’s okay not to care about poverty or kids dying in Africa if those aren’t the passions God has given you. God gave us gifts and passions so we should spend our time on only the things that fill us with joy. In other words – my relationship with God is all about me. I as an individual must be happy, healthy, and whole – that is why I was created and that is how I am to live. I must not feel guilty about not serving God or others if such things don’t make me happy, I should only do the things that feel comfortable to me.

I hear this kind of stuff over and over with reminders that the Christian life cannot be just about action and service but must contain contemplation to be balanced. I agree with that, but every time I hear that line I have to ask if there really is such a dire and pressing danger that the church in America is focusing so much on action and service that we are neglecting contemplation? In truth, I see exactly the opposite at work. We are instead so concerned with our own individual spirituality that we rarely if ever engage in serving others. We like hearing talks that tell us to think more about ourselves and not feel guilty about not serving others. At my church recently there even was an audible collective sigh of relief when the pastor explained that while “blessed are the poor” can refer to the physically poor, it also refers to the poor in spirit which includes our own spiritual needs and struggles. It’s far easier to care for ourselves than others.

Maybe most of the church isn’t so caught up in themselves that like the woman I heard at the pool they argue for not helping others at all (although that is a becoming a common response these days), but it seems like the greatest commandments these days are “love myself then love God” instead of “love God, love others.” But in reality, our acedia, our spiritual fatigue, isn’t to blame on us not pampering ourselves with enough quiet times or devotional moments, but on our rampant self-absorption. Constantly hearing that we need to focus more time on ourselves simply adds to the problem. It’s not that I don’t see tremendous value in contemplation or think that we all need to practice self-care, but that perhaps we need to alter the most basic ways we view ourselves in the world. We are not rugged individuals dependent on getting our own relationship with God right; we are members of the body of Christ, existing in relationship with God and others at all times. Our gifts are meant to be shared eucharistically in community. It is a way of living that the philosophy of Ubuntu that Desmond Tutu writes about refers to. It is living not for oneself, but as a member of a community where one is “open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.”

The last thing the American church needs are more messages telling us to focus on ourselves. Guilt trips and shoulds don’t help much either for our “it’s all about me” mentality knows how to resist anything that makes demands on our self. It will take a drastic change in mindset to move us past our “I think therefore I don’t give a crap about anyone but myself” operating system. But I think for the church to not only get over this plague of acedia, but to survive, we must start thinking communally. As Ubuntu thought states, “I am because we are.” We belong to God which means we belong to each other – embracing that relational identity may perhaps be our only hope.

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