Living in History

Occasionally I imagine how the future generations will view our time in history. History had always been somewhat interesting to me, particularly because I like learning stories, but it really became important when studying the person of Christ and the Incarnation. I became convinced that history was important to God. Through the Incarnation, he came and became bound by time and a particular culture and place in history… to be more like us. So time is important. Humans are necessarily time-bound beings. Which is to say, humans are historical.

So, that begs the question, what will our time in history look like when it is the past? We are able to look at the centuries that have come before us and analyze them… how will we be analyzed? I don’t think most people go around living their life in terms of how they will be analyzed in the future… ocassionally, perhaps, but people are much more concerned with living in the present. I don’t think Martin Luther wondered what a college student in 2008 would think about his 95 Theses… he was much more concerned with the current state of affairs.

So in light of these thoughts, I thought it worthwhile to read Frank Viola’s assessment of the Emergent Church movement. he writes it as one who is thinking historically; who has looked at phenomena that are just as reactionary, and how most people don’t acknowledge the flaws until it is too late to change them. Here is a call to change the emergent church before it is too late. This article is a bit dated, but still interesting. His bias is quite clear in that he supports house churches, which undoubtedly have their own problems, but still is a really good article for explaining some of the main components of what Emergent churches tend to look like, and what those flaws are.

Notes on Journalism… and unrelatedly, the Emerging Church

My brief experience with journalism last year taught me something. I don’t like fast-paced deadlines. I think it would be fine if an article or two was the only thing I was working on, that way I could devote my whole attention through organizing interviews and actually writing the thing. But when I do it as an added on thing, on top of my schoolwork, I always end up feeling frustrated. That happened again this week. Part of it was that I had no idea what I was writing about. All I heard was there was some sort of meeting with all these different student groups that have acronyms that I hadn’t quite figured out yet. So I went in to my first couple interviews having one idea of what the article would be, and then it ended up being something quite different.

It was an exciting topic I realized afterwards… but another frustration was that I’m supposed to pretend to be objective. I don’t think there is any such thing as being objective, and pretending to be so is useless. The words I choose to use, the lines I quote, the organization… all these things are very subjective, and would have been different if someone else wrote them. I would much rather be more open with my own role in the process of writing, not in an overbearing way, but in a natural, here’s what I think, sort of way.

Another thing, to switch topics real quick… I don’t really know what to say about the emerging church-bashing that’s going on. I’ve always been a bit skeptical, thinking that they are appealing too much to how people are now instead of expecting them to change, but that can be said of many movements. I haven’t had any real intimate aquaintance with anyone in this movement, so in that respect I don’t know how they would feel about this… but I do think the movement has gotten so broad that you can label just about anything “emerging” and you’d be fine. It also goes hand in hand with the term “postmodern” church.

Maybe, for the sake of having precise language, it would be good to change the name. but I don’t know if that is going to cause the individual churches to change at all. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Emergent Churches…. not emerging anymore?

How long have we been hearing the term emergent/emerging? I am a younger student, so I have not really been following the line of thought from the get-go, but I’ve been hearing it for about two years. I would guess the movement could trace its beginnings to about ten years ago in the late 90s. There have always been those who disagree, of course, but from my point of view emerging churches seemed pretty popular, Brian McLaren and his cohorts especially. Now all of a sudden I keep hearing really negative things about it. Now the “cool” thing to do is to not be emergent. I’m so confused! Has our postmodern society become so distractable that the most any movement can last is ten years? Or was it the emergent/emerging church itself that was the problem, that its particular characteristics are what marked its imminent demise?

Here’s a few links. Hopefully I’ll follow up with more precise comments.

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/outofur/archives/2008/09/rip_emerging_ch.html

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/september/39.62.html?start=1

Silly Rabbit, Trix are for Kids!

John Piper would rephrase that, “Silly women, Church is for men!”

The assumptions this video makes about women is astounding. It wouldn’t be enough to simply say, “The Bible says women can’t be in leadership, so women I think your ministry is going to be defined in some other way.” That is erroneous, but respectable at some level. Yet Piper does not say that. Instead, he tells women to pray for leadership, to pray their children into leadership, to not waste their life on soaps or feel overwhelmed at a stage in their life when they have three (or was it six?) kids under the age of six. Does Piper believe that women are good for anything except praying and popping out babies? The more kids you have, the more likely it is that at least one of them will be a boy!

Piper’s advice assumes a clearly subordinate view of women, which is lucky for him, since he happens to be a man. Women are supposed to love their leadership, and help that leadership with their gifts. Which is certainly true. But Piper does not acknowledge the submission goes both ways. He seems to think women don’t have any gifts, and would prefer to watch soaps than be involved in the church, or if they do happen to be creative and articulate, that creativity and articulateness needs to be limited to prayer. Has Piper ever actually talked to a woman?

Piper has a death-grip on control. His fear-based language is apparent when he says that there are some women-dominated churches that have driven men away. Well, maybe it shouldn’t be put at the blame of the woman (weird, does that sound familiar? “That woman you put here with me…”) but recognized as a way in which the church has conformed to the men-dominated culture. The culture was able to be dominated by men because they defined power as physical strength. Does Christianity claim the same thing? If so, if the strong are powerful, then it would make sense for men to be in leadership. Yet Christ’s gospel tends to be a gospel of reversals– the weak are strong in the picture of the church.

It is a pity that many women would be certainly fine with Piper’s assessment of them. It is the church’s role to bring women up to their full potential (the same goes for men), not subordinate them.

The Shack: A Book Review

I have always had an instant, gut reaction against the word “Papa.” So when I received a copy of The Shack for my birthday, and the note on the inside said, “Spend much time with Papa,” I had to mentally coach myself to accept the frame of mind behind the statement, even if I disliked the word for “God” my friend had used. I figured it was just a pet name that the giver of the gift used, and chose to share with me. Well, no thank you, I thought, I’ll call God something else, thanks.

But as I began reading the book, I realized the use of the word “Papa” was not an arbitrary matter of opinion. The word is intrinsic to the narrative of the story. Because my reaction to the word was very similar to the main character, Mack’s reaction, and he too had a close friend, his wife, who used the word regularly.

So I was forced to interact with my disdain for the word. I have no problems viewing God as “Father,” and even “Abba” is foreign enough that even though people have translated it as “Papa,” I can appreciate the ancientness of it and the intimacy of it. However, the word Papa brings to mind too many Laura Ingalls Wilder books, books that pictured a perfect family atmosphere, with loving parents and adoring brothers and sisters (despite the hardships of the setting around them). That picture always brings to head bitterness and envy that I direct at anyone who ever had the gift of calling their father “Papa.”

But as I read the book, my friend’s exhortation rang true for me. Spend time with Papa. Because, despite the logical inconsistencies of the situation, that is exactly what Mackanzie Allen Phillips sets out to do. Putting aside his anger and frustration at the unimaginable pain he was experiencing, pain that he projected on the God he knew to be all-powerful, he relinquishes control of his pride and enters a place of deep sorrow, guilt, anger, and hate, a place where his lack of control is epitomized. And he is met by God there. His leap of faith is definitely rewarded in totally unexpected ways. My traditional Christian language that I’m using to describe the situation seems inadequate in the face of how surreal the situation described was.

And as the narrative progresses, the distinction between Mack and myself slowly disappeared. Even though I was surrounded by noise and distractions as I read it, I could put all my surroundings aside and find myself in the shack with God, a God I didn’t want to imagine, a God who wasn’t safe, who didn’t fit into my preconceived notions and who didn’t let me control our interactions so I didn’t get hurt. This God invited me to let go of everything and seek relationship and love with him, the triune God who modeled love so completely in the persons of God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

This book might not be something I intellectually grasp my head around, or even agree with, but that’s not the point. The point is that God is there, always, waiting for me to seek relationship with him, to model my life after his, and to love him and his children. And even if situations like the ones described by Mack are at the least few and far between, an act of humility would be for us to realize that we can not see everything. There is a real that exists to be seen, but it can only be glimpsed the closer we get to Christ.

Can You See the Matrix?

“While the voices of blockbuster movies and pop culture cry out for a life outside the matrix of numb efficiency… thankfully there is a movement of ordinary radicals sweeping the land, and ordinary people are choosing to live in radical new ways.”

A friend of mine wrote a blog about Shane Claiborne’s book “Irresistible Revolution.” I started to leave a comment, but it was getting to be just as long as the post itself, so I decided to write a blog in response to his.

http://reverenceofthemysterious.blogspot.com/
2008/04/first-century-christianity-brought-to.html

Shane Claiborne is definitely someone who backs up his writing with actions. He’s not just promoting this sort of life-style; he’s living it. As a pseudo-Portlander, I was interested to note that an emerging church here in Portland, Imago Dei, was supported by the proceeds of his book.

One of the (many) definitions of Postmodernism is “Late-capitalism.” Everything is infiltrated with the capitalist mindset. I went to the Portland Art Museum today with some 9th graders, and I couldn’t tell you how many times they suggested to one another that they should become an artist, because they could make millions! Especially attractive to them was the ease with which they could do it. Work is not valued, in and of itself; only as a means of making capital.

Seeing how money is really only illusionary and symbolic, it seems like a shaky ground to base one’s potential happiness on. However, the real troubling aspect is that we not only judge inanimate objects within the capitalistic mindset, our fellow human beings. When we meet someone, one of the first questions we ask is “What do you do?” which is secretly the question, “How much money do you make?” Depending on their answer we know how much society values them based on the sort of work they do, a.k.a we’ll have much more respect for a doctor than a janitor, since they make more money. Even our houses and cars are structured around appearances, trying to make them look as expensive as possible to get people to think that we are well-valued in society. From what little I know of Foucault, he would see that as a power struggle; the more societal value we have, the more power. Having just read Karl Marx’s, “The Communist Manifesto,” his criticisms are particularly notable in light of this conversation.

And perhaps that is one thing Christianity can take from Marx. Not just his criticism of capitalism, but perhaps even his alternative lifestyle. As Victor alluded to in his blog, politically communism has failed miserably and it would be foolish to say that it is flawless. But in the context of the Church, should our communities be somewhat communistic? The Anabaptists seemed to think so, abolishing private property and private capital, etc.

The New Monastics, which Claiborne and some of his fellow brothers are sometimes being called, seem to value this sort of counter-cultural lifestyle as well. One could argue that we need to realize that we live by a different paradigm of reality; what the world tells us is “real” is really an allusion; a matrix we are stuck in. However, it is possible to recognize the matrix and have a rebirth (not unlike Neo’s– full of lots of pain) and to see the world as it really is. Rodney Clapp wrote a book called “A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian World.” While Neibuhr’s renowned “Christ and Culture” was profoundly important, Clapp’s criticism of it is that he addresses “culture” as this monolithic thing; Clapp recognizes that we live in a multi-cultural society, and that the church itself should be one of those cultures. And as its own culture, Christianity has a lot of practices (liturgy) that operates under a different way of thinking that reveals itself differently, and perhaps even counter-cultural (or, my favorite word, subversive). The New Monastics practice this liturgy in a profound way; but that is not to diminish the subversiveness of the “normal” Christian practices. Even getting up and going to church is itself a counter-cultural act; “time is money” capitalism says, and as such we should spend every minute we can trying to increase our capital. There is no way to “make money” at church (unless you’re the pastor?), but more than that, it is saying there is something much more valuable than money.