Dr Chuck Pearson

May 13, 2008

Davan MacIntire for the WIN

(From Something Positive. As Websnark might have said once upon a time, click on the image for full-sized heathen Davan with a point.)

I am an evangelical. Davan is loosely deist; certainly not anything resembling a Christian anymore (although, as I've mentioned before, Davan does have a history with '80s and '90s evangelical craziness). I should not identify with Davan's pain here as much as I do.

But I do. Oh, how I do.

Hrm, the snarks embedded within the past two posts have a little subtext, don't they? I may have to expand on that in days to come.

Posted by Chuck at 12:54 PM | TrackBack

April 20, 2008

Jericho

(From my Israel journal, 13 March 2008.

I'm typing this in completely unedited. I wrote it in a mode of complete desperation. To be completely honest with you, I've been almost deliberately avoiding re-reading this. I don't know how to deal with this place. I may not know how to deal with this place ever. But I know I have to deal with this place.)

I still don't know how I write about what I saw in Jericho.

First, the checkpoint. The space between the Israeli check and the Palestinian check is a half mile of straight wasteland. Once you reach Jericho, you are...

...it's poverty. I have never known how to deal with poverty. But it's not just poverty, because if it was, we could propose solutions, and establish order. And we try. You see signs for the Palestinian authority, for the UN, for the European Union, even the good ol' U-S-of-A, supporting this or that public works project (your foreign aid dollars at work!). But does that even matter if Israel won't allow industry to grow?

The major industry in Jericho is tourism. The city's major landmark now is the Intercontinental Hotel that rises over the horizon, presumably for someone to come in and stay and see the sights. (The parking lot is not full.) There are random shops, residences with barren gardens...and I can't think of anything to complete that list. (I remember seeing the office door of a dentist. It was gated and locked.)

There are hopeful signs of life - the Catholic school, with children pouring out. Many children had parents waiting on them patiently, seeming to know that this was their hope. But Palestinians have been among the best-educated of the Arab peoples since the early 1900's. Without the opportunity, what then?

We stopped at what was proposed to be the tree that Zacchaeus climbed when Jesus visited Jericho. What appeared to be a Palestinian family, the older men wearing "VENDOR" tags (approved by the Palestinian authority), with young boys in tow, came out of a small building in back, selling souvenirs. You're always told to beware of children in this type of situation - have they been trained to be pickpockets? - but what do you do if you know that's all this family might have to depend on?

(I retreated back to the bus quietly. Afraid? Me? You think?)

As to what happened next, Robert Wallace can tell the story better than I can.

(My writing ends here. However, Robert Wallace has taken to keeping his own blog, and at this point, I can quote him.)

In Jericho, several Palestinians said to each of us, "Please tell the people of America we want peace. Please don't let a few radicals make them think we are all like that." One man whose words will stay with me for a long time said, "How many fingers do you have?" I replied, "Five." Showing me his hand, he said, "Same as me. Please tell them we want peace. We need peace."

Posted by Chuck at 06:08 PM | TrackBack

March 02, 2008

Worship

I hit a strange point in my Christian life very early on, when I started going to a Vineyard church in graduate school. Every young Christian believes that we've going to grow up in the faith forever, and that getting to know God is going to be absolutely wonderful all the time, and is completely mystified when he begins to run into roadblocks and starts to struggle to find people going through the same thing as him, and starts to gradually but surely feel alone - without even God beside him.

And obviously, when I say "he" I really mean "me."

Many people who know me also know that this was also the time my Usenet geekdom was at its peak; several people know me BECAUSE this was the time of my life when my Usenet geekdom was at its peak. And going through some really sweet stuff over the past month brought back to mind an old rec.music.christian thread about worship music - and the exchange between me and a guy named Michael Straight.

My complaint in that thread boiled down to this:

my question, to all the praise and worship types, and to vineyard types in particular, is this: what is the purpose, the vision, or whatever, of those who write vineyard worship music? obviously, the ultimate purpose is to provide songs to worship the Lord with. but a lot of the songs elicit personal responses...to pick examples that i'm familiar with, "light the fire" really doesn't strike me as a worship song at all, but a prayer. (in my mind, at least, there is a SIGNIFICANT difference.) the chorus of "his banner over me" has a line about "we can feel the love of God in this place" (that may not be quite right) which, i feel, is lying to God if you don't feel the love of God in that place. stuff like that. what's the point of putting lines reflecting human emotions that one may or may not feel into a worship song that's supposed to glorify God?

i realize those who write worship songs for the vineyard aren't the only people guilty of this, but vineyard songs are the ones that strike me as having this characteristic most often.

Michael came back with an absolutely gracious response, one of the kindest and sweetest in my long and distinguished history of Usenet bickering, that clobbered me between the eyeballs:

I'm not a Vinyard member, but I went to one of their kinship groups in college and really enjoyed their music. I guess that one could take the attitude that "if I'm not glad to be singing, it's hypocracy to sing a song that says I am" or whatever the emotion is that the song in question talks about. But I always kind of took those songs as a reminder that, no matter how down I might be about life, at rock bottom I do have something to be happy about and it's not hypocracy to be legitimately upset at the bad things happening in my life but also taking some time to celebrate and be happy about what God has done.

Its sort of like my attitude about communion. Someone who comes from a tradition that takes communion infrequently asked me once if I refrain from taking communion some Sundays when my heart isn't right (refering to Paul's admonition in 1Corinthians). I told her that, yes I have refrained once or twice, but I usually see communion as a time to get right with God, not something I can only participate in after I've gotten my life together.

The same goes for worship. There's an old hymn with the line "You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices." If you're not happy, if you're not feeling good about God's love, it's worth some effort to try to be happy and feel good about these things. Sorrow and pain are legitimate emotions to bring to God, but I think sometimes it's good to make an effort to realize and be glad about who God is and what he's done for us.

All that is to say that, for me, I took those songs as expressing what I ought to feel, what I'd like to feel, and what I frequently did feel when I let myself think about who God is and how much I owe him and how it's just right to get excited about him, no matter what's going on in my life.

I honestly wanted to rip Michael to shreds for that post, because I didn't like the idea of pretending to be happy when everybody around me was pretending to be happy and all you fakes can just go away now because I'm the guy here who has the REAL problems and the REAL struggles and there's no way you can tell me that what I'm going through doesn't deserve a hearing...

...but as I read and re-read Michael's words, I began to see that he wasn't talking about any of that. He point-blank said that "sorrow and pain are legitimate emotions to bring to God", but he was proposing something else as well - that it wasn't right to DELIBERATELY CHOOSE to remain in those emotions. God is worthy to be praised. God is worthy to be glorified. God is worthy to have me get over my own stupid self if my own stupid self is getting in the way of him doing his thing.

If you don't feel the words "we can feel the love of God in this place", then SEEK to feel them. God's love is worth it.

There is a lot I've had to be angry about as 2007 has turned into 2008. Instead of deliberately running away from God, though, as I really was trying to do in my younger self, I have begun to seek out God's love in less obvious places, in people I wouldn't ordinarily be in contact with, and focus on God instead of my anger. One of those less obvious places turns into worship with astonishing regularity these days, and it's really sweet.

And we sang a song on Friday night that I haven't been able to stop singing all day.

And - wouldn't you know it - it's a Vineyard song. And it's one that plays more like a prayer than as a worship song - not that the difference is that big of a deal anyway.

It's 14 years late - but thanks, Michael, for bringing the word. I still hear it, and I still need to hear it.

(Permalink for - shock, horror! - a worship video.)

Posted by Chuck at 08:53 AM | TrackBack

February 21, 2008

Okay, this is important.

Brant Hansen has had a couple of really thought-provoking posts lately on a guy who simultaneously claims to be Muslim and Christ-following. Yes, please, by all means read them. But that's not what's important.

What's important is what Brant immediately buried in the comments in response to the first couple of comments back on the latter post (the 21st century version of "burying the lead"). It is something I have heard several times before, but it broke my brain all over again.

This is what's important:

So, this guy walks up to Jesus (stop me if you know this one) and says, "What do I have to do to live forever?"

Jesus says, basically, "Well, what do you think? What's the law say?"

And the guy answers definitively. And Jesus says, "THAT'S IT! You got it. Do that, and you will live."

Ask this question to 100 American evangelicals, and *maybe* one will know the answer. I know this, because I've asked. (It's not the "rich young ruler" story, BTW.)

Curious, isn't it? You'd think everything would ride on that, kids would memorize it, and it would be put to music 15,000 times. But...no.

And this is what breaks my brain even more:

You've read that scripture. Pretty much all of you, if you're reading this post, you know that story full well. But Brant's right. When we're approached needing to know what we need to do to get to this place that we've taken to calling "heaven", we make our answers a WHALE of a lot more complicated than Jesus did.

It's so tempting to call this a game, and see if you can answer the question right, and prove yourself to be the one of the one hundred. But, then again, if you haven't read it lately, you really ought to go read the parable of the Good Samaritan - and the story surrounding it. Because "going and doing likewise" is much more important. For all of us.

Posted by Chuck at 06:40 AM | TrackBack

December 04, 2007

Gold and Silver

One of the things I used to use the ell-jay for was to post song lyrics.

Here's the thing with song lyrics: they're somebody else's words. They're not your own. Lyrics blogs get annoying after a while (he says, having kept a lyrics blog of his own) because they prevent you from getting in the head of the writer, because he's always hiding behind somebody else's words. And the words surely don't apply exactly to the situation at hand, because there's no way that the guy writing the song could have known the circumstances of life you're going through right now.

Here's the other thing about song lyrics: They can hit you between the eyes when you can't put your own feelings into words. They can bring a vague emotion into stark relief, invoke praise, invoke mourning, invoke closure. I don't even discount that they might be the shadow of almighty God, knowing that it's all getting too overwhelming and pointing the focus back towards Himself.

Yesterday was emotional. Yesterday was extremely emotional, so emotional I just had to leave and go home and hide. Even now, I'm more than a little bit numb. And I needed some good punk rawk to listen to while I tried to get work done this morning, which led me to listen to my LAUNCHcast mix (which I've had since 1998, it's fine-tuned for circumstances such as these).

This song came up. This song has hit me between the eyeballs before. But it took on new and different meaning this morning. It's not perfect for the situation. But it asks me all the right questions.

There are prayer requests implied in this. I won't throw the names all over creation. But you can ask, and I'll tell you.

---

You slipped from my arms, I knew you had to go
Such a heavy heart, who could hope to hold
And I know where you're going, and that's the hardest part
No matter where tonight ends, you won't escape your broken heart

Stay a while

Helpless for the words, and it tightens up the air
It's not what you deserve, it's not for lack of care
Inside of me is screaming out, I'm praying for my prayers
Distracting and unworthy of each and every burning tear

Seems insincere

Do I see God in all of this, maybe all along
It's just that we're so small, and simply not as strong
Strong like wings of silver, and feathers made of gold
To carry heavy hearts, to cover all our helpless souls

To cover all of us

Under wings of gold and silver sometimes we have to hide
For shelter from this bitter winter at least tonight

If it were mine to give I'd give you your own time
Turn it back or forward whatever you decide

Stay a while...

(Permalink for "Gold and Silver" by Stavesacre, performed at Cornerstone 2002.)

Posted by Chuck at 10:58 AM | TrackBack

July 06, 2007

Mike Warnke, revisited

Here's my moment of oh-dear-God-I'm-getting-OLD of the day:

Fifteen years ago, Cornerstone Magazine published an expose' on "Christian comedian" Mike Warnke.

That very possibly is not a big deal to you. It's huge to me. As Davan MacIntire puts it (in a comic that I identify way too much with), "I didn't have a lot of options when it came to entertainment during my 'I Love Jesus So Much I Annoy My Christian Parents' stage. It was basically Warnke or Carman, and Warnke was the one who didn't sell $150 tour jackets."

(Apparently, Carman still does good business.)

There's a great deal I could write here for the uninitiated, but I think the best person to tell you about who Warnke was is a just-shy-of-21-year-old USENET poster from 1992, who went by the moniker "clueless chuck":

Mike Warnke is/was a prominent Christian comedian who based his entire ministry on his assertion that he was at one point in time a high priest in a Satanic cult and he turned his life completely over to the Lord. He wrote a book over this "experience" called The Satan Seller (which became a prominent reference text in many circles on how Satanic cults operate) and gave his testimony in many locations over the last 20 or so years, winning many people for the Lord.

It would appear that Mike Warnke's testimony is a lie.

In retrospect, I can totally see how I should have been skeptical of the joker from day one. Let this be known up front: the dude was FUNNY, and funny in ways you had to hear and see to get. He could DELIVER a punch line with perfect timing, tell a brilliant story to capture you, and then (and this is key, I'm finding) turn the story on a dime and go into full-on preach mode. When I was a college-radio DJ and VERY young in my Christian life, Mike Warnke skits and stories were a staple of my radio programs for a time, because they could make you laugh AND make you think. Or, perhaps, manipulate your thoughts.

I think part of why I didn't see through Warnke's act and start asking questions was because I was so young, though. I mean, you can see my youth in my first USENET post about Warnke; I talk about "one of my heroes, Mike Warnke, a Christian comedian who God has built an incredible ministry on over the past few years..." It's so easy to take common American hero-worship and spin the Christianese on it to make it sound like something more profound and important than hero-worship. You can so easily get wrapped up in the larger-than-life preacher or comedian or artist and forget that he's just this guy, and guys screw up. And in American celebrity - even celebrity in the Church - so much of the life they live is behind closed doors, and you have no way of knowing who's straight-up and who's screwed up.

As I think about it, Mike Warnke's downfall was a defining moment in my early Christian walk. It took the dangers of celebrity and placed them front and center in a way I wasn't expecting, and forced me to respond to them.

And it did something else - it put in front of me honest, thinking Christians who were willing to take time to talk to a 20-year-old punk explain to him, in words of one syllable, what exactly they were doing and why, in a way that has never ceased to amaze me.

One of the people who responded to my initial call-for-information on the rec.music.christian newsgroup was Eric Pement, who was at the time editor to Jon Trott and Mike Hertenstein, the authors of the original Cornerstone Magazine article. I immediately struck up an e-mail conversation with Eric, and explained (in very schoolboy ways) why I was skeptical - and he wrote back, and was very gracious in pointing me towards free access to the article, its sidebars, and other documents (and I'm still in awe of the 170 footnotes Cornerstone mag published with the article...the thing was a MASTERPIECE of documentation).

And what really hit me was when I wrote back, after doing all the reading and coming to the conclusion that the Cornerstone article was right, how Eric responded with RIDICULOUS humility. My recollection after 15 years might be bad (it's a bit difficult to save e-mails for that long), but I got the sense that even with that weight of evidence, he'd gladly retract the story the next day if somebody would come forward with concrete evidence that Warnke really had led a coven of 1500, or been ANY level of decadent he'd claimed to be in The Satan Seller, instead of a standard late 60's square.

He was just as much of a skeptic as a scientist was supposed to be, in other words; he had his hypothesis, and he sought out any way that it might be wrong. He was a brilliantly critical journalist. And he was far more theologically sound than anybody I had ever communicated with across the internets.

In retrospect, there's a lot about the type of Christian I've become at this point in my life that was informed by those e-mails with Eric Pement, and I really owe the guy a measure of thanks. (I stumbled across Eric's homepage while typing this up. It's kind of cool for the geek in me.)

There are probably more stories to be told about my former life in USENET, but this has been on my mind all day and pretty much needed to get into words.

Posted by Chuck at 12:08 AM | TrackBack

April 10, 2007

"If only love is done, it is enough"

Text of Shorter College chapel message from April 10th. Many, many thanks to David Roland and Andy McKenzie for support, pre-reading, and sounding-board type takes. All bible quotations are NIV.

There's a lot of topics that ran through my head as I was dealing with the prospect of giving a message here. What has sat front and center for the past couple of weeks has been some kind of take on being a Christian and doing science, since there's a little bit of uniqueness I have to offer there. And there's a lot I could say about the craft of teaching in the context of Christianity as well.

One of the things that I keep in my teaching portfolio is a philosophy of Christian education that I wrote when I was first considering applying for a position at Shorter, and I was trying to figure out why in the world I might want a job at a Christian college in the first place. For whatever reason, I made the decision to build the statement around Matthew 22:37-40, which is Jesus' familiar statement of the Law. You know it well: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” My argument went something like this: Those of us in academia who claim the name of Jesus Christ need to be more diligent in loving God with our minds, because whatever gifts we have received to understand humanity and understand nature come from God. And, whatever we might decide "Christian education" is, Christian education must somehow involve demonstrating love to the students who come to learn from us. They must, in some fashion, become our neighbors.

I've been going back over that statement, thinking that, in all honesty, it's a bit lame, and I could probably do a bit better with it, and dig a bit deeper theologically. I don't know if all of my faculty peers are like that, but I am.

Over the end of the last week, though, this message wrote itself.

The text of Scripture that I've come back to, both in my quiet times (as rare as they've been lately) and in my preparation for today, has been 1 John 3:11-23, which contains so many of the themes of John's teaching during the later stages of his life. John writes:

This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother's were righteous. Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him.

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.

Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.

Now, hold on to that text for a moment while I go over my Good Friday.

My pastor at Chapel Hill United Methodist keeps a blog. (He dubs himself Chill Pastor. It's a long story.) He keeps it pretty well tied in to what he's talking about in church, with a few pop culture observations as well; he loves to tie in pop songs, and music videos in particular, to his teaching. (After all, we are the MTV generation.) And his wife and daughter have started up their own blogs as well, to put down random thoughts here and there. I've dubbed them BlogFamily.

On Friday, while I was trying to get some odd work done in what should have been the peace of no-students-around-day, I came across this post from Bryan's wife Paige. It started like this:

"Destiny, a friend of my daughter, Laine, committed suicide last night..."

I can't get used to reading words like that. I just can't. There's no way. Ever since I was old enough to realize what suicide was I haven't been able to understand what exactly puts somebody in a place where they are so desperate to just check out of life and shatter everybody around them.

Reading the words of Paige's post, and Laine's after that, didn't get any easier. They were laden in grief, and they were angry. They were tales of rumors, of taunts, of "good kids" showing aggression towards somebody who wasn't like them - pretty much every horror story I've ever imagined about girls in middle school and high school. And that haunts me more than a little bit.

But something else haunts me as well. With graduation around the corner, it's coming up on one year since we learned that Shadow Robinson had taken her own life. That was the first time a student of mine had committed suicide, and given Shadow's outgoing personality, bright face and marvelous laugh, I never saw it coming. Perhaps I should have learned to see deeper than the surface with her, or perhaps if I had tried I wouldn't have been allowed in. I'll never know.

All I know is, when Shadow committed suicide, those nice, trite words about demonstrating love to my students and not treating them as soulless automatons that sit in my teaching philosophy rang very hollow. I can't imagine how many people who had responsibility for Destiny's education are dealing with the same kinds of feelings of guilt and question of "what if...?" right now.

So John's challenge hits hard. Verses 14 and 15 "We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him." When we get around to thinking that the New Testament is full of grace, that the New Testament lets us off the hook if we'll just try to live a half-decent life and Jesus is just some band-aid to patch together our brokenness, we come across writing like that and we're reminded that Jesus' message is hard. John had no understanding for somebody who demonstrated hate, even someone who saw themselves as a "good person." The challenge is to demonstrate that we are worthy of Christ's example, by giving of ourselves completely to our neighbors - to the point where we "lay down our lives for our brothers."

And we do that because Christ laid down his life for us - and if we truly believe that the resurrection really happened, then there's all kinds of power that God has made evident to us. Surely he'd lend us a little bit of that power for us to be able to overcome the human pettiness we have and be able to take this moment and love our neighbors in it, wouldn't he?

If this is true, then why do I have so much trouble showing that kind of love? "Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything."

Is my conscience bothering me? I need to love more. And I don't need to just run my mouth about loving more. I don't need to tell somebody that I love them and then go on as if nothing is different. I need to change. I need to give up of my time. I need to shut down my concern with my position, my income, my reputation, and give that time to my neighbor.

It's pointless to dwell on what has happened in the past, and why it happened, because we have one another now, and the single best weapon we have against our consciences flaring up on us is to take advantage of this time and love now. Can I say I've loved the people around me on this campus in a way to shut down my conscience, and to rest in confidence that God is pleased with how I've treated others? Not really. Lord, PLEASE forgive me. I repent. But what does it mean to repent? It means I'm living different now - it means I have to live different now. I move forward and I love now.

I wrote four years ago, somewhat absent-mindedly, this for that philosophy of education I was talking about earlier: "Christian education, however we define it, must be terribly incomplete without demonstrating love to the students who come to learn from us. We avoid lording our academic position over our students and making unreasonable demands or unfair assessments of them. We treat our students not as soulless automatons whose worth is determined by how well they do or don't complete their work, but as people starting a path that we completed not so long ago, who are struggling with many of the same things we struggled with as students."

And if you are one of my students, to be true to my obligations that I've made to God, I really owe you nothing less than that.

Well, maybe it wasn't so lame.

"Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us."

The ancient writer Jerome tells a story about John, towards the end of his life. John was frail enough that he had helpers to carry him into the synagogues, where believers were gathering to hear this teaching of one of the patriarchs. And all the teaching John would do would be this: "Love one another. Love one another. Love one another." And a few people would get annoyed at this - and I can imagine I would too. After all, this guy was one of the twelve who spent his time with Jesus, and here he is, old and senile, just muttering "Love one another." But when John was challenged on this - "Teacher, don't you have anything else for us?" - John had only this to say:

"What else is there? If only love is done, it is enough."

Posted by Chuck at 01:41 PM | TrackBack

January 07, 2007

In memoriam: Momofuku Ando

Now here's a man to be praised. Momofuku Ando, founder of Nissin Food Products, died yesterday at the ripe old age of 96. He believed in providing low-cost food for those who needed it - "Peace prevails when food suffices" was his watchword. He truly had a vision to change the world.

What was that vision? We can say it in one word.

Ramen.

Of course, I got the word from PhD. You don't think there's a LITTLE affection there?

Posted by Chuck at 09:01 AM | TrackBack

December 09, 2006

"...together with glad and sincere hearts" - December 9, 2006

...and this got us through three trial services. Once again, to everybody who helped: thanks so much.

Keep tabs on what we're doing through the Chapel Hill Saturday Night myspace page - we are going to shoot to launch the service formally in mid-January.

I'm amazed at how well this came together, for how late I started typing up - there were a TON of thoughts and words spinning around my head, honestly...

--BEGIN PEARSON-JABBER HERE--

I think that one of the most frustrating things for me, growing up in the church, was the feeling of being alone.

And it's not that I was actively ignored in my church, as a youth. It's not that I wasn't surrounded by kind, generous and loving people. I think the fact that I didn't actually live in the town that I went to church in did make things more awkward. In part because of that, in part because I was just a terribly different kid from the youth in my UMYF group, I never really felt like I knew anybody there, that I had any true friends that I could lean on.

And socially, loneliness is epidemic in this culture - moreso than ever before. I have referenced in my own blog writing, and Bryan has mentioned from the pulpit here, a study from June of this year from groups at Duke and the University of Arizona that appeared in the American Sociological Review. The study dealt with how connected people are with friends. Their stunning conclusion: The average American has only two confidants outside of their family who they can talk to about serious matters. Over the past twenty years, the number of people who have no confidant whatsoever has grown from 10% - already incredibly high for a civilized country - to an absolutely staggering 25%. We live in a land surrounded by painfully lonely people.

It goes without saying that this is a severe problem, and Something Ought To Be Done. And that I feel this passionately.

But - and here we get right back to my hypocrisy - what do I do with my own life? I fill my life with so many THINGS, so many TASKS and DUTIES, that the time to simply be with others and to enjoy company of others gets drowned out. Even this little exercise, in which I have this so-called awesome vision to provide a place for people to come and to be together, can very quickly turn into an excuse to be Doing Stuff instead of genuinely fighting loneliness.

And, of course, the sole end isn't fighting loneliness. The hope is that we're pointing people to Jesus and pointing people to the transformed life that we know that Jesus Christ provides.

I have to confess something: The scripture I'm pointing to here - Acts 2:42-47 - is a bit of a softball for me. It's one of the scriptures I've studied most in my life, and when I first came across it in graduate school it revealed so much to me about what was right in the times in my life that I was most actively growing in my faith, and what was wrong in the times in my life when I was foundering and failing. It truly was a transformative passage in my life.

The story surrounding the scripture is this: The event that in Christendom we call the Pentecost has just happened. You want to talk about transformative events, this is it. The Holy Spirit comes on the small group of believers who have clung together after Jesus has died, been resurrected, appeared to the disciples, and has left the disciples waiting for his return. These believers find that they're able to speak in different languages, and they pour out of the room they're praying in speaking in these languages, and as people in Jerusalem who hear them speaking in REAL DIFFERENT LANGUAGES recognize, people gather around in shock and stunned amazement. Peter preaches. He convinces. He gives what we'd call an altar call. Three thousand respond. They're all baptized. Basically, that day, the "church" - the whole body of believers in Jesus Christ - grows by about 2000%.

That's radical growth for ANY church.

Now, that's a whole lot of people to come in the door and to want to have something to do with Jesus. There had to be plenty of people there who, just before, had nothing whatsoever in common, and now suddenly have everything in common and are thrust together. And whatever they did, it obviously worked, because here we are today heirs to the legacy that they started more than two thousand years ago. So what they did is worth studying.

Eugene Peterson's paraphrase, The Message, puts what happened next this way. Starting with verse 42 of Acts 2:

They committed themselves to the teaching of the apostles, the life together, the common meal, and the prayers. Everyone around was in awe—all those wonders and signs done through the apostles! And all the believers lived in a wonderful harmony, holding everything in common. They sold whatever they owned and pooled their resources so that each person's need was met. They followed a daily discipline of worship in the Temple followed by meals at home, every meal a celebration, exuberant and joyful, as they praised God. People in general liked what they saw. Every day their number grew as God added those who were saved.

Honestly, this is a really radical vision for what a church should look like. It's a vision built for another time, when people did live closer together, when we felt less trapped by our property and our things, when people didn't have to hop in the car every morning to go to work or school. It's not a vision that we're going to be able to turn and meet tomorrow. Nonetheless, there are priorities here that we can set for ourselves.

Now, I'm going to be an obnoxious teacher here and pull out three take-home lessons. They're hopefully very straightforward.

We need to have a discipline of worship. I believe the Sunday morning worship service is laden with baggage for people of my generation. It's hard to get up on the Sabbath morning. The music style turns them off immediately. The sermon is too long. We could go on. But the reason it has sustained - and the reason something of that sort needs to sustain - is because it provides a central meeting place, and a central point of organization for the church. When I have avoided the church in my life and pretended that I can worship God on my own, in my life, that's been where I've seen spiritual deadness set in. And if the service is taken with the right spirit - how can I see God and touch God in this time I'm here? - then even the most high-church, ancient-music worship service can be relevant and renewing.

We need to be dedicated and determined to worship God together. But simply having a discipline of worship doesn't do the job.

We need to share life together beyond the worship service. So many Christians have their "friends" in the church that they only see on Sunday mornings (or even on Saturday nights). They're warm and engaging at the one time during the week, and then they don't have another thought of one another in the intervening week. Or, alternately, they exchange shallow e-mails or swap phone calls on church business during the week. There's nothing shared in their lives together beyond that.

We've always heard it said that "the way to a man's heart is through his stomach." That might be why I've always found it so compelling that the NIV says in verse 46 "they broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts." Sharing meals together is a clear entryway into shared lives. Why else have we historically considered the family meal such an important time in our culture? And why not take the next step, and share meals together as a church family?

And it's not just time spent together over food, but time spent talking and sharing who we are, and as we get to know one another better, being able to share with one another where we are weak and where we are strong. It takes a serious amount of work to take our conversation from a surface level to real depth and accountability to one another. But that work pays off.

We need to share our possessions. There is a great deal of teaching in the church about the tithe, to the point of legalism in some places - you're obviously not a good believer if you aren't giving your 10 percent. And in all that teaching, a larger point is lost - it is considered important, in the Judeo-Christian ethic, to give a substantial sum of your possessions to something bigger than yourself. If there are others in the community who have need, they can pull from those monies. And all that community money put together can do bigger things than if we just tried to do good works with our money on our own.

It is sacrifice to look at the money that we've earned, that we've worked hard for, and then say "others need this more." But that's part of our calling.

The first believers didn't see their numbers grow just because of the amazing teaching of the apostles or because of the wonderful worship singing and playing. We won't see our numbers grow for those reasons either. We will grow because there will be something in the life we share together that smacks people upside the head and says "This is different. This is new. This lifestyle works." The NIV translates verse 47 notably - the believers were "praising God and enjoying the favor of all of the people." Can we put together a church community that is not only transformative, but is respected - both among those who believe and those who don't?

--END PEARSON-JABBER HERE--

Posted by Chuck at 08:49 PM | TrackBack

December 02, 2006

"Zaccheus Wanted To See Jesus" - December 2, 2006

Result from round two: why, yes, it DOES work when you only prepare two pages' of text, instead of three-and-a-half.

Thanks to those of you who came out tonight! It REALLY did my heart good to see you there. Please, if you haven't already done so (or if you don't completely forsake teh MySpace) add the Chapel Hill Saturday Night page as a friend and help support us!

And we go again next Saturday night, same time - when I'm no longer so mental over finals.

Here's my text...

--BEGIN PEARSON-JABBER HERE--

So, let me tell a story.

You can find the story in your bible (around Luke, chapter 19) but forgive me if I don't read it straight out. Many of you have heard many of these words repeated many times. I want to look at the story fresh.

The story is of a little guy by the name of Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus was a tax collector by trade, in a day when tax collectors are even more hated than we hate the IRS. All things considered, we have a grudging trust for the IRS - we have a half-decent sense that the money we actually give to the government will go there. But Zacchaeus was taking taxes in a place where he wasn't claiming taxes for the local government - he was claiming taxes for Rome, and Rome was not investing the money back in Jericho, let's put it that way.

Zacchaeus was also rich in a place where he was surrounded by poor people. And this led to a pretty massive amount of hatred, and it was easy to suspect where Zacchaeus might have gotten his money from. Heck, it would be very easily to justify hatred of Zacchaeus - if he's got all this money, and Jericho doesn't have all this money, and Zacchaeus is a tax collector, well, the guy must be skimming it off the top. Zacchaeus is the quintessential villain, the mandatory bad guy every story needs.

And evidently he's heard a good bit about Jesus. Because Jesus comes to Jericho. And Zacchaeus absolutely, positively has to go see him.

Now, this next part of the story is what's familiar to every child who grew up in Sunday school. I meant "little guy" literally earlier; Zacchaeus is quite short. Zacchaeus goes out to see Jesus and sees him basically walking a parade route, and the streets are lined with people. Of course, Zacchaeus can't see over the crowds, and every attempt for him to get a place where he can see out fails. Maybe there were some people who saw him coming, crowded him out, nudged him out of the way. More likely, the people were just so enraptured with the chance to see Jesus that they didn't see Zacchaeus trying to get his place.

Finally, Zacchaeus comes upon a sycamore tree. Perfect. Shamelessly, Zacchaeus climbs up.

Jesus comes through to a rock star's reception, of course. After all, this is the same Jesus who has championed society's rejected, its poor, people of ill repute, people of different races, and in the eyes of the people on the street, he's leading a populist crusade. We don't know what Jesus thought of this particular reception, and quite frankly, Jesus probably had other things on his mind.

Like Zacchaeus.

Jesus surveys the gathered people, sees Zacchaeus, and to the crowd's amazement, makes a beeline for the sycamore tree. To the crowd's utter horror, the following words are the first they hear Jesus say: "Zacchaeus, hurry down. Today is my day to be a guest in your home."

This doesn't work. This does not fit with our expectation of Jesus. This guy might be the richest guy in town - and ill-gotten riches, at that! This is the guy Jesus is supposed to explode at, to accuse forcefully of all the poverty in Jericho - after all, obviously Zacchaeus has profited at this town's expense! This is the bad guy! And here Zacchaeus is, bounding out of the tree, making all nice with the guy who's supposed to be on our side! What's Jesus doing with him? "What business does Jesus have getting cozy with this crook?"

Well, that's one way to kill your rock-star status. Jesus must not have cared about his popularity with the people all that much. He must have been after something more important.

Like Zacchaeus.

Listen to the exchange between Zacchaeus and Jesus:

"Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount."

"Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost."

Now, if the mere thought of Jesus associating with Zacchaeus was galling, the idea of Jesus calling Zacchaeus "a son of Abraham" - a member of the most heralded family of the faith - had to send them completely over the edge. What exactly was Jesus seeing that they weren't?

I think it's very straightforward. Jesus was seeing Zacchaeus' humanity.

It's one thing to say that we're good, moral, God-seeking church people, doing exactly what we're supposed to be doing while in our own little enclave. But when Jesus breaks through, he sees beyond who we are. He sees the people outside our walls who want a glimpse in, and who find themselves blocked out.

Maybe we see a person outside our walls that for whatever reason - because of their poverty or because of their wealth, because of their looks and dress and number of tattoos, maybe because of their race - we don't want to let in. That may be true for some of us, but for most of us I'll wager we don't think that clearly. I'll bet that we don't let somebody who wants to see Jesus in because we get so enraptured in the church, we get so enraptured with our worship style, we get so enraptured by this good thing we have ourselves - we get so enraptured that we forget that there are people outside of these walls.

But there are. And when Jesus finds them, and when Jesus starts to work on them, we should not reject them. In fact, we should be prepared for transformation to be already happening to them.

There are any number of statistics I can point to that speak to the state of our own denomination in terms of bringing in people from the outside - and I commend to you a quick scan of the United Methodist News Service at UMC.org for plenty of those. But - as much as I cherish this denomination and want to remain in the Methodist Church - this denomination is dying. There are churches in this denomination today that might not even exist in twenty years, ten years, even five years. And there are plenty of churches in other denominations that are in equally ill health. Those of us in these churches, we have to honestly ask ourselves if we are doing everything we can, not merely to try to make our church survive, but to begin to legitimately demonstrate Christ outside our walls for this generation and for generations to come.

And if we see people being transformed by Jesus outside of these walls, we need to welcome them, not condemn them and condemn those who reached out to them. While we play "church", Jesus is at work. We need to pay attention. We need to see what we can learn.

--END PEARSON-JABBER HERE--

Posted by Chuck at 08:14 PM | TrackBack

November 19, 2006

"I Am A Hypocrite" - November 18, 2006

As part of this whole Saturday night worship thing that I'm leading, I thought something of a cool experiment would be to type out the text that I would be going through, to organize my thoughts better, to give myself something to fall back on should I get nervous, and to get a feel for the timing.

For that reason, I didn't even come close to saying the amount of stuff I'd typed after the jump. I wanted to limit myself to 20 minutes' worth of jabbering. It came closer to 22. If I'd have gone through all of the below, I would have hit 30 minutes easily.

This is a very good thing to know. For future reference: go for two pages on the OpenOffice document, not three and a half.

I still think this is probably the best start I could have hoped for, in terms of having a message, for the circumstances we're trying to build under right now. Next shot: December 2nd.

START PEARSON-JABBER HERE

Many of you have heard the news about the now-former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard. For those of you who don't know the name, Haggard was a pastor who built a megachurch named New Life in Denver, and whose progressive evangelical preaching brought him to the forefront of his movement. He was the classic pastor-who-had-it-all – his church hit a peak membership clear of 10,000, he had the tight relationship with the other Colorado elites of the Christian right, he had the weekly teleconference with President Bush, he had the beautiful wife and the five kids, including an eldest son who was starting ministry in his own church, and he had the bully pulpit to get his ideas in front of people.

He has also been, for the past three years, keeping the company of a male escort.

On the morning of November 1, the guy in question said that he had maintained a sexual business relationship with an unnamed national religious leader. Haggard, on Thursday, while maintaining that “he was steady with his wife”, resigned the NAE and placed himself on administrative leave. By Friday, he was confessing that he knew the guy, but saying only some of the allegations were true. By Saturday, he had resigned everything. On Sunday morning, a letter was read to the congregation at New Life where Haggard said “I am a deceiver and a liar.”

Clearly, the guy was having a little bit of trouble dealing with the fact that he was a hypocrite.

One of my best friends said it far better than I could: “If you're going to fight against gay marriage day in and day out, y'know...Please try to avoid the hot man lovin'.” The idea that a guy could so dramatically say one thing and do another simply is galling to our sensibilities. And it's even more galling when that guy is an influential pastor and Christian leader.

In my day, the guy in question was Jim Bakker. He was the televangelist who built the PTL Network pretty much from scratch, and constructed a massive Christian theme park in Charlotte. Televangelist ministries in those days were very heavily dependent on the investment of their viewers, and as the 1980's went forward, the ministries went increasingly seedy in how they made their pitches. Bakker's ultimate pitch was the “lifetime memberships” that he wanted to sell – for a donation clear of $1,000 to PTL, you could get a three-night stay at a luxury hotel that would soon be built at Heritage USA. These pitches were more than a bit popular – PTL had more than 20,000 “lifetime members”. But Heritage USA only completed one 500-room hotel before the ministry collapsed in 1987, and the allegations of financial impropriety flew fast and furious – all the more so when the opulence in which the Bakkers lived came to light. (And the fact that Bakker resigned from PTL for a dalliance with one Jessica Hahn didn't help matters one bit.) Jim Bakker went to prison for fraud, racketeeing, and tax evasion in 1989.

Well, it's easier for televangelists to preach a prosperity gospel when they're lining their own pockets.

I read a very interesting take on the Haggard affair this week. I really wasn't sure what I thought about it when I first read it. It was written in the blog of the religion and culture journal “First Things” by a Villanova law professor, Robert Miller. He made the argument that what Haggard did fell along the lines of the wrongdoing that Bill Clinton engaged in with Monica Lewinsky, and his argument can be summarized by: “Wrongdoing like that ... is not hypocrisy because it flows from weakness, not malice. Contrary to our sincere intentions and wishes, we sometimes do things we know to be wrong. Immediately after doing them, we acknowledge, at least to ourselves, that we have done wrong...Hypocrisy is a much worse form of moral wrongdoing.” In other words, if you know what you're doing is wrong, and you struggle to avoid doing wrong, but you do it anyway, that's not as bad as it is if you “consciously and intentionally” lie about what you're doing and why, with the hopes of gaining from your lie – the way that we might think that Jim Bakker lied.

I put a lot of thought into that argument; I was even asking the guys I share Bible study with yesterday morning about that argument. And the more that I stewed on that, the more I came to my highly nuanced theological conclusion about it, which boiled down to “Thinking that one type of lying is worse than another is stupid.” Why in the world define hypocrisy as anything else as “to say one thing but do another”? We can be far too clever in how we talk about this kind of wrong, or that kind of wrong – but we miss the point that it's still wrong. When we say one thing and do another, for whatever reason, we do wrong.

The single best theological argument in the Bible is found in Paul's letter to the Romans. When Paul wrote this letter, his aim was to convince its hearers and readers of their need – all men's need – for a Savior, in the person of Jesus Christ. He started his argument in the very first chapter, by pounding on (in Romans 1:18) “the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” Paul preaches, and he preaches pretty hard, on how the world is going to pot. Yes, he beats on the “shameful lusts” of men. He also complains about the idolatry of the world. He also complains about the depravity of the human condition in his time, and he rattles off sin after sin (verses 29-31): “They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”

Now, I don't know about you, but I can imagine the pious believer hearing all of this and knowing exactly the guys he didn't want to be like. He hears this preaching, he hears this pounding, he hears all of the “they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death” (verse 32), and he thinks to himself “yeah, Paul, tell 'em! Preach it! All those guys are full of sin! All those guys need to get right with God! All those guys are goin' to hell if they don't stop right now!”

And that's the point where Paul gets us. Turn the page to the second chapter, and you read:

You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. Now we know that God's judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God's judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God's kindness leads you toward repentance?

In other words: You point the finger everywhere else. Eventually, you find the finger pointing back at you.

Look, I teach college for a living, at a Baptist school, in the heart of Bible-belt culture. When, in those conversations I have in my office, I come across students who don't want to have anything to do with God, nine times out of ten, it's because of damage that's been done in the church. It could be something as treacherous as sexual abuse. It could be something as simple as a hateful word said by someone in a single moment of weakness. More often than not, it's something like gossip, or cliquishness. It's a bunch of people in a church proclaiming that they truly love everybody, and then not thinking about those proclamations when they deal with people that ask the wrong questions, or listen to the wrong kind of music, or when they dress the wrong way, or when they simply don't act the way that a “church person” is supposed to act.

And maybe there's malice behind that – maybe someone truly does want to run a person who isn't the right sort out of a church. Or maybe that damage has been done by someone who really doesn't know how to deal with people not like them. I'm sure that I've done that sort of damage myself.

My point is this: I will stand up before you and tell you I'm a hypocrite. I will preach about being welcoming. I will tell you how important that it is to love one another. And then I will completely blow you off in conversation, or I'll talk to somebody else about you behind your back, or I'll do something else to verbally damage you. I simply can't be trusted to treat another person the right way. Those of you who know me might think that I'm better than that, and I might have been better than that to you, but I'm not better than that all the time.

And I'm not the only one.

Let me go one other place in Romans – when we put together the flyers for tonight, this is the scripture I referenced on them. Remember, this was written by Paul. Paul was the single most important missionary of the early church – the number of adherents to Christianity multiplied manyfold simply because of Paul's influence. Nobody is going to question that Paul did right, as God wanted him to do. And so what does Paul say about himself? Romans 7:15-25:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

I don't cite this scripture to encourage self-loathing, OK? I don't bring this out to make you hate yourself. I bring this out to make this point: Even the greatest Christian missionary of all time, the so-called “superapostle”, felt he was a hypocrite. If Paul was a hypocrite, then being a hypocrite is a fundamental part of the Christian experience. It's a fundamental part of the human experience.

The bad news is, we're all hypocrites. But the good news is, we're all hypocrites. If you say one thing and do another, it doesn't mean you're some horrible kind of sinner. It means you're sitting in the same boat as every other of us.

The church is full of hypocrites? Absolutely. So is the rest of the world. “Come on in; there's room for one more.”

Now, those of us who sit in this place who take the name of Jesus Christ, we have an obligation. It is critical for us that we eliminate our hypocrisy, as much as we are able to do so. We have to find ways to end this struggle and to actually do the things that we preach about, so that we are above reproach. This is the way we make the power of Christ evident to the world; in fact, we cannot be above reproach without the power of Jesus Christ, and we can't pretend otherwise. Paul asks, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” He doesn't say himself. He doesn't say the church. He doesn't pinpoint any of the other leaders of the church at the time. He points solely to God, through Jesus Christ. If Paul could not be saved, and could not be made whole, without the power of Christ, who are we to think we can make ourselves right by ourselves?

But we also need to make sure it's clear to the rest of the world that they are welcome here, warts and all. And if you are here tonight and this has never been made clear to you before, it needs to be made clear to you now: You are surrounded by people like you. We are all on the same ground, with the same neediness. We need all need God to rescue us just as badly.

As you see men and women struggle and fail around us, as you see hypocrites exposed and shamed, understand this about them. Pray for them, even. In this world, at this time, they need God to rescue them just as badly.

END PEARSON-JABBER HERE

Posted by Chuck at 10:11 AM | TrackBack

November 13, 2006

It's happening.

I've been wanting this Saturday service to happen for a very long time - and now we are officially on the brink.

I'm excited, nervous, neurotic, scared, and congested all at the same time.

(Yes, congested. Stupid sinuses.)

If you use the MySpace thing: please feel free, feel encouraged, to add us as a friend.

UPDATE: Try it now. I tried to be cute and set the MySpace page's birthdate to the birthdate of the church, but apparently for some weird reason MySpace automatically sets the pages of all 15-year-old girls to private.

Why is the church female? Come on. That should be scripturally self-evident.

Posted by Chuck at 10:12 PM | TrackBack

November 06, 2006

A WesleyBummer to be praised

I'm going to have to pull down a link from the blogroll in a while. Shane Raynor lost his domain, took that as a sign that his youth ministry stuff was where his attention needed to be, and this means that Wesley Blog as we have known it is no more (although it's still being mirrored at typepad.com if you like reading his posts).

Shane, from one tiny little corner of the blogosphere: well done. I hope to see your writing again, you'll be missed for now, but above all else keep them kids fired up.

And I find it very interesting that what will be, in all likelihood, Shane's last substantial blogpost was entitled "It's Great To Be A United Methodist". And I agree with him:

The joke goes that Methodists are "too Baptist for the Catholics and too Catholic for the Baptists". That's our biggest strength if you ask me. Many people in my congregation have a Catholic background. Some even call the worship service "mass". Then there are those who could easily be in Baptist or Pentecostal churches, but for some reason, they made their church home with us. We have a "blended" service that makes everyone happy some weeks and no one happy other weeks, which I suppose is fitting since worship isn't really about satisfying us in the first place. But we've managed to carve out a niche right in the middle of the worship spectrum. Liturgical lite if you will.

If we embrace our heritage (and hopefully all UMC's will do this) we'll find that we're thinking evangelicals. We stress the importance of conversion, yet we still have rites of passage like confirmation. We baptize babies, but we do it with the hope (even expectation) that this faith will be fully owned by those infants someday. And if people weren't baptized as infants, we'll do it later. We can even dunk 'em if we want. You see, Methodists have lots of options...

..."Come close to God, and he will come close to you" (James 4:8a GWT). We have that promise no matter what part of the body we worship in, whether high church liturgical or free charismatic. If we come close to God, he will come close to us. Our Wesleyan heritage confirms this.

I love being a United Methodist.

Posted by Chuck at 09:55 PM | TrackBack

October 31, 2006

"People always focus on the loud minority who ruins everything"

There's a webcomic I read a great deal called Something Positive, drawn by Randy Milholland.

It's not a webcomic I will recommend to the broader populace. It's really not "positive." It might well be the most misanthropic story ever told, and it has been since the very first comic. It is about a comprehensive, equal opportunity offender (not to mention, from time to time, hideously obscene and vulgar - the comic I link above is one of the mildest ones, honestly).

But at the center of the story is a Southern Baptist patriarch - Fred MacIntire - who can be a curmudgeon, a bitter soul, potty-mouthed, who has never had as much interest in church as his late wife - but who genuinely believes and has shown grace to the most unexpected people at the most unexpected times. I first really started to get Fred's character in the midst of this story about the MacIntire's church getting taken over by a money-woman - one of the most moving drawings I have ever seen was the couple sitting quietly in the church despite the damage they'd taken. (It's even more moving knowing that Fred had less than a year with his wife left at that point - and that Fred has Alzheimer's and never got up the nerve to tell Faye. Warning - that last comic involves Fred's son Davan, and is therefore VERY potty-mouthed).

So that brings us to the current story. The widower Fred, now shaking off the shackles of his overprotective daughter, is going to a Haunted House. Only this isn't just any Haunted House.

If you dare, read forward from there. The story has ten parts. Part 6 is especially devastating - and I'm pretty sure seeing something like that would send me over the edge too. Obviously, there's more than a bit of gleeful ripping on fundamentalism here.

But this is the most devastating part: At the point where everybody is doing their "oh that was awful let's go somewhere and have fun", Fred stands up and witnesses. And he gets stunned at the response.

It strikes me that this foul-mouthed and misanthropic webcomic drawer has drawn, quite simply, the most believable Christian I've ever seen in any media, sacred or secular.

And then I read the newspost below. And it's pretty troubling.

...to my Christian readers: I am sorry. I am sorry many of you do get stereotyped or find yourself having to defend your faith against those who've been jaded by the [crazy-as-a-bat] insane. More than a couple of you (and one or two people who'd never read my comic before and only read enough of the archives to justify feelings of persecution without realizing I attack pretty much everything, but to you I don't apologize - to you I offer [something I won't bother to mention on a family blog]) felt this storyline was portraying Christians as the likes of Phelps. This was not my intent. However, I have some awful news for you.

The problem of being lumped with them won't go away until you become more vocal.

People assume most Christians are heavy-handed, pushy, intolerant bigots bent of dominating any other culture or idea and supplanting it with their own whims because, for the most part, the ones who speak up the most ARE heavy-handed, pushy, intolerant bigots bent on dominating any other culture or idea and supplanting it with their own whims. It sucks. It's horrible. And it's the what everyone of any faith, political idea, or lifestyle has to deal with. People always focus on the loud minority who ruins everything. And like any other group, the only way you can combat this is making your views and, in this case, your kindness and actual testimony louder than the hateful prattle of those hurting your beliefs.

I could go on about my history with Christianity (yes, I was once a Christian. I even, as a teenager, drew comics for a Christian Magazine called TeenQuest - TQ - published by Shepherd Ministries)- but I have a date tonight and it's Halloween. Maybe another time.

I'm not going to stand here and tell you that I'm something I'm not, here. I am an evangelical. I buy into the Great Commission. I believe in making disciples, not just of this nation but of all nations.

But: You're reading the words of somebody who once believed, and who no longer believes, and who you can be pretty confident no longer believes in part because he became embarassed to be associated with all the blowhards around him who believed.

Christianity is about Jesus first and foremost. But we remain the body - the Bride - of Christ. And we have an obligation to represent Jesus as best we can. And I simply can't shake the feeling that, in this day and age, we do a flat-out horrible job of it.

And why do I need a foul-mouthed comic to remind me of this?

Posted by Chuck at 09:32 PM | TrackBack

September 30, 2006

Talk about...pop music

Rambling, late-night post alert. I think I'm going somewhere useful, stay with me.

Let's start with Mark Batterson, from about a week ago (and yes, all of the emphasis is his - Batterson writes like that):

Listen. We shouldn't be different for difference sake. We shouldn't try to make news to make news. We better do the right things for the right reasons or they will implode and backfire. But we need to buzz.

In the words of Jesus: "Compel them to come in so my house will be full."

Churches that are serious about incarnation need to leverage culture. How do we use the emotional response to music? How do we use redemptive themes in movies?...

Using pop culture isn't pop gospel. Let's call it what it is: incarnation. One of our core values is: irrelevance is irreverence! Jesus used agrarian metaphors. We need to use news, songs, movies, TV shows, etc.

We think of langauge in terms of English, Greek, and Hebrew. But the language of today is pop culture. The language of today is felt need.

I'm up late tonight listening to music with my daughter. It's strange how our musical tastes dovetail. She has no problem with U2. I have no problem with Switchfoot. We're listening to Evanescence right now. Yeah, there are things that one likes that the other doesn't, but there's far more common ground than you'd expect to find in the standard father/daughter musical relationship.

And the fact that we found a lot of this common ground while listening to Trinity United Methodist's "The Power of Love" musical really makes it a powerful tool for us to talk about life. Most musicals that Trinity does takes a good number of popular songs - eight to ten, say - and puts theological context to them. "The Power of Love" would, obviously, be songs about love - how we hear love in the pop culture, how love ought to be, how love can truly change the world. And Amelia has a whole list of new favorite songs from that musical.

I tell you honestly, if you had told me ten years ago that my daughter and I would be having theological conversations over Dishwalla's "Counting Blue Cars", I would have told you that you were nuts.

My pastor is blogging now. You'll find him over there at the right, under the "BlogKid" heading. (I think this is fair, since I'm Jeff Eaton's blog-kid.) (There is actually a very good reason he considers himself "Chill Pastor".)

After a couple of weeks of testing the waters, he's issued what I think is a very clear statement of intent. I'm right there with him - I grew up on MTV (back when MTV played videos) the same way he did. And I will mock his taste in music, and he will mock mine right back, but he and I are both looking at pop culture and seeing that "felt need" that Batterson was talking about up there. There are so many hearts that, in so many ways, are looking for something deeper from life.

Sometimes the artist knows exactly what they're going for, and understands why they're putting the theology in the song that they are. Sometimes the artist doesn't have a clue how they're getting used by God - all they know is that they feel something passionately, and that passion has to come out in the music. But music - all music, even the cheesiest popular music imaginable - is ultimately God's creation, not ours. And he has all the music we hear in place for a purpose, a purpose in our lives and a purpose in the lives of people around us. If we don't listen and look for God in it, we miss the point.

When I was in high school, one of the first bands I went completely bonkers over was Mr. Mister. And although Welcome To The Real World was the big smash hit album and "Kyrie" and "Broken Wings" were all over the radio, I didn't really connect with that album until later. But when I heard a song called "Something Real" played on my favorite pop radio station, I had to have that album. Absolutely had to have it.

The album is called Go On.... I wore out the tape completely. I found the CD a few years ago. It's on my desk at school. I still cherish that album as much now as I did in 1988. I really have a hard time imagining that it's nearly 20 years old - other music I have from that era sounds completely dated, but that album does not.

(Even if the video effects from "Something Real" are, well, horribly dated. Trust me, in 1988, my brain was breaking at how cutting-edge that video was.)

I didn't love the album because it was the most popular - compared to Welcome To The Real World, Go On... crashed and burned. I didn't love the album because the music was tight - although it was. I didn't even love that album because Richard Page turned out to be a Christian - in 1988, I wasn't sure how good of a thing that was.

I loved that album because it let me know that I was not the only person searching.

Nearly 20 years on, I see so many others searching for the same things.

Everyone's looking for something real
Everyone's taking all they can steal
Brother to sister, look at each other face-to-face
There's something missing here in this human race...

Brother to sister, hold on to each other with all we've got
Our time is coming if you're ready or not, if you're ready or not

(YouTube permalink for "Something Real".)

Posted by Chuck at 12:41 AM | TrackBack

September 14, 2006

I find it very difficult...

...to deal with this fundamental truth.

(Hat tip to Hal McCleskey.)

Posted by Chuck at 06:58 AM | TrackBack

August 26, 2006

Um, good Sunday School teachers don't grow on trees

News item: Church Fires Sunday School Teacher For Being Female.

For 60 years, Mary Lambert has worshipped at Watertown's First Baptist Church.

She has served on numerous church boards and taught Sunday school there for 54 years. She was married - twice - in the sanctuary of the gray stone building at the edge of the city's Public Square, and her three children were baptized in the church's pool.

Two weeks ago, Lambert received a letter informing her the church had fired her from a volunteer teaching position because of her gender. Her last day teaching an adult Sunday school class was Aug. 6. She hasn't been at the church since.

The Rev. Timothy LaBouf, pastor of the American Baptist congregation, said Lambert is welcome at church, but not as a Sunday school teacher.

Fifteen elected leaders at Watertown's First Baptist Church unanimously voted Aug. 9 to formally accept an interpretation of an excerpt from the Bible that says women should remain silent and have no authority over men.

I offer hat tips to Charles Pierce at Tapped (nice name, BTW) and Ed Kilgore, the New Donkey for their links. Pierce responds, in anger, that it's time to "run St. Paul's sorry ass out of the New Testament the way they snuffed the Gospel of Thomas." Kilgore responds with a relatively nuanced attack on inerrancy (I hate it when that word comes up, it always hacks more people off than it enlightens) cloaked as a defense of Paul.

I propose both men are missing the point, at least where the Church is concerned.

The point is: IT'S DADGUM HARD ENOUGH TO GET GOOD PEOPLE TO TEACH DADGUM SUNDAY SCHOOL WITHOUT TOOLS LIKE THIS LABOUF DORK AND HIS HATCHET MEN AT WATERTOWN GIVING THE REST OF US CHURCH LEADERS A BAD NAME.

I mean, come on! Let's just assume the BEST scenario here, that you're a young pastor eager to leave your imprint on a congregation and get it on the theological straight-and-narrow, as you see the theological straight-and-narrow. Let's just ASSUME that this move is simply built out of concern that there is a tradition-laden group in your congregation that simply wants things to be the way they've always been, to never change, and you are forcing the church to take scripture more seriously by making an example out of one woman (whatever benefit you get out of "making an example", I'm not sure, but let's go here just for argument).

And so you SEND A LETTER. You DON'T EVEN HAVE THE BRASS ONES TO DO THIS FACE TO FACE. FIFTY-FOUR YEARS, AND YOU SEND A LETTER.

Congratulations. You have made the nation aware of two things.

• You are a young, fiery pastor eager to bolster your conservative credentials.
• You are a horrible, horrible human being.

And who will want to take up this gig? Will they have running around in the back of their minds the next theological fine point that will become your crusade? Once you've beat on the fine letter of the law on this point, which point will be the focus of your next vendetta? And won't they know that you'll engage in whatever tactics necessary to prove your next point?

I'm sorry, this makes me absolutely furious. I know too many women of that generation who are absolutely PASSIONATE about their study of scripture, who take it far more seriously than I ever have. They don't presume that they have anything to say to a larger group, but they do. They are a rich, rich asset that most churches do not employ anywhere near as successfully as they should.

And if somebody wants to throw one or two of Paul's passages about how women shouldn't be allowed to hold authority (while quite conveniently ignoring the massive laundry list of passages about women who had absolutely vital roles to play in the development of the faith), then I'm going to throw a note from a slightly more authoritative figure back:

Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field."

And you just told one worker with 54 years' experience that what she had to offer wasn't good enough.

Nicely done.

(UPDATE: After a little thought, there is probably a role for fairness here, especially since the church insists that other issues were in play and "scriptural rules concerning women teaching men in a church setting was only a small aspect of that decision" (never mind that, if they do admit that they considered 1 Timothy 2:12, that pretty much undermines every other argument they're trying to make). If you'd like to investigate this more fully, visit the church's website.)

Posted by Chuck at 09:31 AM | TrackBack

August 19, 2006

EPIC. (I mean, literally.)

I've been looking for pastors other than this guy with takes and ideas that I could learn from, so that at the point where I start actively teaching, I won't sound like repetitive ho-hum boy. And if I can get more pastor's blogs (or, even better, loudmouthed lay leadership blogs, since loudmouthed lay leadership really is what I do) over there to ther right, that would rock even more.

Bryan has been trying to turn me on to Ben Arment for a while; I'm not sure I totally get Arment and what he's trying to communicate with his very random blog (maybe it makes me uncomfortable to see somebody whose attention span is as short as my own!), but there's enough there that I'll read every now and again.

In all the random, I read a hammer-to-head statement in there this morning:

Talked with my good friend Robb Overholt this morning. He made a powerful statement about church outreach ~ "Half the battle is helping our people talk positively about their church." Eurkea. That's it.

And I think I see something about the power of Arment's style of blogging. That's the statement. That's all that's said. The challenge to dig deeper is placed on you, the reader. You have to look at your own church situations. You have to question where you stand and why you walk in the door of your church week in and week out and how you talk up that blessing that you get from your church to others. (And, if you aren't getting blessed where you're at, if it really does make you feel that low and that beaten down, why are you still there?)

Nice one.

Hrm, what about this Robb Overholt guy?

He seems to lead this joint called Epic City Church in Virginia Beach. (It meets in a theatre. What is it about churches meeting in theatres lately?)

Online sermons. Quality. (He doesn't call 'em sermons. Even better.) Of course, because I'm blogger boy, the moment I read this message description...

"Getting connected." These are words that just about all of us are familiar with now. Be it via IM, MySpace, a BlackBerry, or even an old-fashioned Cellular. Within the context of this culture, it would seem that we are constantly exploring and discovering new and improved ways to connect with one another faster than ever before. So why does it seem so difficult to connect with our Creator?

...oh, I am so there.

If I can find a way to get that kind of atmosphere in anything in the church that I'm a part of...yeah. wow.

Of course, Overholt also mentioned Blue Like Jazz in that message and triggered a whole new round of DANG IT I KNOW I HAVEN'T GOTTEN THE BLAME BOOK YET AND I STILL NEED TO READ IT STOP REMINDING ME.

sigh

Posted by Chuck at 11:14 AM | TrackBack

August 12, 2006

Christian Higher Education

I never clean up well, because I always find things while cleaning up and wind up thinking. Thinking and cleaning up do NOT go hand in hand.

What I found on this round of cleaning out the office is an essay I printed out a year ago, and that is slapping me upside the head all over again. It's called Christian Academe vs. Christians in Academe, by Kenneth Elzinga, who teaches economics at the University of Virginia, of all places. It was thoroughly exciting to find it now because I've been getting comments lately about what it means for Shorter to be a Chrsitian school. It's a good question, honestly. It's a question that demands asking.

If you are interested in how Christians and education come together, you need to read the whole thing. It's not an argument that I can pull little bits here and there out and have them stand on their own; the whole thing is the argument. (Which is why I printed it out but never posted it anywhere. I couldn't post it without posting seven pages' worth!) But let me pull out two takes in particular.

First, I've gotten a lot of people grumbling around me about the morality of the students around them, and marveling that some students 'round here don't even go to church and believe, and what's up with that?

Elzinga tells you exactly what's up with that:

Christian higher education does not start with Christian students. That may surprise you. But I would hope Christian institutions do not have a Christian litmus test for students.

If students want to be a part of Christian higher education, they should be welcome. The Christian faith is defensible; the Christian faith is compelling; the Christian faith is true. So let unbelievers live and learn in the environment of Christian higher education and test the faith.

Jesus did not throw out Doubting Thomas. Christian higher education should be a place that welcomes Doubting Thomases, as students.

But Christian higher education should be dominated by a faculty who are followers of Jesus. The majority of faculty at a school of Christian higher education should be Christians. The institution makes no sense if that is not the case. Students are transients; they come and go. Christian higher education is defined by a core of faculty who believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:16), that every thought is to be made captive to Him and they are not ashamed of the gospel.

And second, if you were to ask me the one thing that I am proudest of in being at Shorter, it's that I see so much tangible evidence that we fulfill a vision of this sort:

I would expect Christian higher education to be full of professors who mentor students. Not just teach them chemistry and accounting; not just teach them biology and Spanish; but model out for them how to walk with Jesus. Not because these faculty members have mastered how to do this, but because they have been pilgrims longer, because they have experienced more often the consequences of sin and redemption.

I have been surprised, in my travels, at how few faculty members in Christian higher education mentor students. When I have asked why, the answer I have heard is: well, that’s for the Dean of the Chapel to do, or that’s the job of the Dean of Students office.

I am an economist, so I appreciate that answer. It is right out of Adam Smith; it appeals to what Adam Smith called the specialization and division of labor.

But I can restrain my enthusiasm for the answer. To me, it means that Christian higher education has professors who are not investing in the lives of students beyond teaching them chemistry and accounting and biology and Spanish.

But you can learn chemistry and accounting and biology and Spanish anywhere; and probably at less cost than in Christian higher education.

The implied answer, of course, is that some things are way more important than money. And may my own priority set never change.

Posted by Chuck at 01:57 PM | TrackBack

August 06, 2006

Once more, with feeling

I don't know about these other guys
There's something in the back of their eyes
But Billy, you're the man
Who don't use sleight of hand
Ain't wearin' no disguise
I love you, Billy

I love the simple things you say
You never seem to get in the way
No one is quite like you
Passionate and true
Just as I am, I say
I love you, Billy

- Terry Scott Taylor, 1990

(Second in a series.)

Posted by Chuck at 01:40 PM | TrackBack

July 04, 2006

Why I hate "worship music"

Interview content from Christianity Today - with one of the old-school inspirational songwriters, Michael Card - submitted with only the above comment.

How does someone "worship God with their wounds," like you sing in "Come Lift up Your Sorrows"?

Card: We can't worship God without recognizing our woundedness. We have a worship revolution going on in the U.S., but we're not worshiping. There is no woundedness in it. True worship celebrates God's worth, and without experiencing woundedness, you don't know his worth. You don't have that experience of God's presence over God's provision. You experience his worth in the wilderness, not in the picnic grounds. "Amazing Grace" says, "I once was lost, but now am found." Without that acknowledgment of loss, what do you have to worship him for, unless you're just worshiping feeling good? Lament is the lost language of worship.

What do you think of today's worship music?

Card: Many people are doing good work and trying to listen to the Scriptures and to where people's needs are, but the majority of worship music is an industrial response to a trend.

The insights you give in this album are rare in Christian music. Why don't we hear more lyrics like this?

Card: When an industry, rather than a community, creates music, it will lean toward what sells best. Many people are writing great stuff, but we won't ever hear it because of the industry. The early Jesus music came out of community. John Michael Talbot says there was a holiness to Christian music back then that it doesn't tend to have now. That's not to say God can't use the Christian music industry, because he does.

An overemphasis on music, rather than lyrics, is part of it. Many songwriters are very young, too. You have to look harder to find what your heart resonates with, but you can find it. Andrew Petersen is one of the greatest writers today. Yet, nobody had ever recorded one of his songs before. "The Silence of God," which is on my record, is his. Sara Groves is a great writer. People like them need more support from the industry.

Posted by Chuck at 12:32 AM | TrackBack

June 12, 2006

Christian television, useful and otherwise

I read this story on Christians and media from Saturday's Washington Post with a small amount of interest:

Evangelical Christians are on the front lines in the battle over indecency on cable television, calling for a pick-and-choose pricing plan that would allow viewers to keep certain channels out of their homes.

But on the opposite end of the battlefield is an opponent familiar to and even respected by evangelicals: Christian cable stations.

The fear among Christian broadcasters is that a proposal to allow consumers to reject MTV or Comedy Central would also allow them to drop the Trinity Broadcasting Network or Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. Cutting off that access could hurt religious broadcasters.

"We do not believe that 'a la carte' is the cure for the disease," said Colby May, attorney for the Faith and Family Broadcasting Coalition, which represents Trinity and CBN, in addition to other stations. "In fact, it is a cure that may very well kill the patient."

Evangelical and family groups support the concept of "a la carte" cable legislation, which would allow cable users to subscribe only to the networks of their choice.

It goes on from there. I do like the idea of "a la carte", not from the sole perspective of decency but from the perspective of paying for what we actually watch. And I don't watch the standard fare. Yes, I pay attention to the ESPNs, but I also watch Fox Soccer Channel and GolTV. The cable news networks are useless, I get far more practical news from CNBC. I hate