Category Archives: Building community

A new church is emerging post-pandemic: Even in TEC

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Our church is reading an interesting sociology book by Christian Smith: Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. We had a good discussion on Sunday, and I admire my pastor for bringing up what amounts to a delicate subject: your church is obsolete.  We agreed that our church, The Episcopal Church, has, generally, been obsolete for years. If it were not so well endowed we’d be in big trouble.

Nevertheless, we have strengths. Our church, in particular, is a small group of intelligent, hard-working and openly loving people. We’re mostly over 55 — but our pastor is 45 and my wife was having a conversation during coffee hour with a lovely member who is 5.

Two comments are sticking with me

I came away from our dialogue encouraged and stimulated. People said some interesting things.

  • “I belonged to the church for quite a while before I believed.”

In this day, especially, if anyone is going to become part of the church, belonging probably precedes believing.

  • “Why aren’t we writing our own songs instead of rehearsing the past?”

Our pastor noted the present hymn book of TEC was published the year he was born and has not been updated. My wife pointed out that the composers whose songs are in the hymnbook wrote from the zeitgeist and inspiration of their day.  I noted that the 1660 hymn we had just sung that morning probably sounded fresh in its century, but is it sure weird and boring now.

So Smith is helping us get into some good discussion. If anything is overdo in most churches, it is discussing what are we going to do, now, since our model for being the church is obsolete. It may have been misguided to begin with and that is WHY it is obsolete. Regardless, if we want to be the body of Christ with any integrity and purpose, we’d better come up with what were are called to do now.

Further dialogue will meet up with difficulty

I think most dialogue is good, even when it is bad. The fact it can uncover problems on the way to solving them, makes conflict-avoidant folks steer away from it. For instance, I have issues with the book we’re exploring and I feel reticent to share them. I’m not sure I respect Smith’s methods and conclusions. My issues  can be encapsulated in two words: traditional religion. Smith is a 65-year-old Roman Catholic professor at Notre Dame. So when he talks about “traditional religion” (throughout this book) he is smack dab in the middle of one. I think it shows.

1) When he talks about “religion” (like in his book title), he’s actually talking about American faith, which means Christianity. Religion is a modern concept which reinforces the notion people have that “all religions are basically alike.” They think that because European intellectuals “identified” them and put them in the same category: “religions” in the 1800’s – genus and species, etc.

2) When he talks about “traditional” he seems to mean “mainstream” or “what the TV might say about it.” I think that term should have been obsolete a long time ago when it came to describing the church — at least in Christian circles. Now that I have met hundreds and seen thousands of Christians around the world, it is hard to nail down “traditional.” I think stereotypic Christianity, or enculturated Christianity, or hollow Christianity, or modern Christianity might all be obsolete. Jesus, however, is historically and  presently hanging in there.

But the main thing Smith’s book is missing, in my opinion, comes from being so autobiographical. This book appeared in 2025. But he is really talking about what happened during his lifetime – forty years of studying the data. Much of what he is saying follows up on his books in 2000 and 2005 (George Bush). While I admire him for writing about most of the controversial topics of his day, I get the impression his latest book is kind of out of date. It is light on our recent past.

Any inspiration in a spiritual storm is welcome

I’m not prone to “going to church,”  but discussing Smith’s book juiced my normal devotion to building the church. Two things I found missing in his book may be just what we dare not miss as we live out our lives as the body of Christ in the post-Trump era.

  • Transcendence may be the missing element

What people need to to find when they explore faith in Jesus is transcendence and belonging, not sociological data dumps and critical conclusions. Smith’s sociology, itself,  actually sounds a bit obsolete. In an age of mistrust, he asks us to trust his very rational argument.

Experts will not save the church from becoming “obsolete,” which it will never be and is not now. The church in the U.S. Smith is painstakingly criticizing (objectively of course) undoubtedly needed to go as soon as Ronald Reagan pretended to be a part of it and Evangelicals bent the knee anyway. It needed to die when it became about power, not love and service – and martyrdom.

  • All our dialogue needs to consider how people’s lives are pre- and post-pandemic, now.

The pandemic changed everything. It was like the tornado-like storm in our part of town  last weekend — it toppled dead trees that could not stand the wind. The pandemic damaged our societal infrastructure. And it undermined the fragile new growth of the next church.

As soon as Reagan became president, thousands of young people saw the handwriting on the wall and started building a new church; I was among them. They did well. I think I did well and hundreds with me. But we did well before the pandemic. It was amazing what that storm did to all those new expressions. The impact resembles what happened in the Black Plague in 1347 — that year marks the big outbreak of bubonic plague, which hung around for centuries, and you can still get it. People thought strangers caused caused the plague. Europeans said Jews were poisoning the wells. The church abandoned the public roles that made it a mainstay in the culture and people felt alone. Social disparities were exposed: the wealthy could escape to their country places but the poor (essential workers”) had to stay in their roles — just one example of many. The church had been a big part of what glued the society together and it came unglued.

Covid is not the bubonic plague, but the experience sounds quite similar, doesn’t it? The enculturated church fractured with society. I was personally shocked and dismayed at how the new, unenculturated churches started fighting and splitting, not just my own. They threw out great leaders and installed leaders who resembled the powermonger Trump. Good grief, the country elected Trump! (maybe). I  think Smith’s whole book basically leads up to the tragedy of Covid.

He observes how the church is diminishing, mainly tracking membership and attendance over his lifetime. He’s kind of shouting from the deck of the Titanic — for every 100 new Catholics, 800 leave the church. If he evacuated his viewpoint, he could just as easily tracked the groundswell of attention to what is transcendent during his lifetime. The emerging churches were all focused on transcendence and community, just what his studies show the obsolete church is missing. They got knocked out by the pandemic and the subsequent tsunami of social fragmentation caused by the unmasked sociopaths in charge. But that desire is still there.

Even our little group in TEC was saying “emerging things.” Belonging and finding one’s path into transcendence, into an actual, personal experience of the Spirit and eventually into a life in love with God is just what the church, nontraditional, of course, disempowered and marginalized, was doing all along. And that is what it is still doing wherever it gets a chance. It is getting a chance right now, since the previous church that Smith eulogizes is quickly dying out, even if it has an endowment and Pete Hegseth thinks he’s protecting it.

Juneteenth is the better freedom day: Just look at Philly on July 4th

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Fan favorite at the Juneteenth Parade 52nd and Girard

This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

Frederick Douglass ca. 1852

Frederick Douglass could not, in good conscience, celebrate July 4th. He celebrated July 5 as his declaration day instead. July 5 became Emancipation Day in New York State when slavery was officially over. It was the day after everyone completed the gradual process of becoming free in 1827. Douglass was 8 years old when it happened, still 11 years away from escaping slavery in Maryland and landing in New York.

Once liberated, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in New York and Massachusetts. In his iconic July 5 speech, given in 1852 to the  Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, he said:

I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

Douglass is still an inspiration. The U.S. no longer has chattel slavery. But there is a lot left to mourn. So I am leaning into Juneteenth and letting whatever the oligarchs decide to give us for July 4th up to them.

We’ve been whitelashed back into having yearly white supremacy parties on the 4th and I don’t want to be part of it. Even though Philadelphia is right at the center of this year’s celebration, as usual, I’m not feeling it. From what I hear from a lot of people, the whole 250th is sort of “meh.” What country are we talking about and what freedom is likely to be left by #251?

Memorial Hall on opening day

Philadelphia 1876

Philadelphia has always been at the center of major patriotic observances — since 1776, of course. The remnants of the spectacle organized for the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 can still be seen in Fairmount Park.

The remnants of Reconstruction after the Civil War, when freedom was won for everyone,  were already being torn down in favor of “progress” by that year. Though the decade after the Civil War elevated former slaves and empowered black people in general, by 1875 the winds had shifted, and the former enemies from the North and South were ready for reconciliation.

Frederick Douglass was there on the first day of the big event in Philly. He was invited to sit among the dignitaries on the main platform as President Grant spoke about the “Progress of the Age.” He was not invited to speak; the greatest orator of the day was reduced to window dressing. He almost didn’t make it into the event. First, he had to pass through the crowd gathered outside the gates before the exhibition opened. Then, once he got to the entrance, the Philadelphia police refused to admit him. They did not believe that “a n****r” would be allowed among the dignitaries. Senator Conkling of New York spotted him and got him over the line.

A year before, in the summer of 1875 on July 5 in Anacostia, Douglass predicted that day to a crowd of black listeners. He said:

“Men cannot, ought not and will not quarrel and fight forever,”…So sure as the stars shine in the heavens, and the rivers run to the sea, so sure will the white people North and South abandon their quarrel and become friends. The whole American horizon is already fringed with the portents of this coming union. Boston, Lexington and Bunker Hill have already sent forth their silvery notes of peace and unity to the whole nation, and next year Philadelphia, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, will lift to the sky its million voices in one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. of Princeton says: “He understood what was happening: the centennial celebrations would tell a story of the nation that rejoiced in reunion, and that reunion required the erasure of Black people. The event would be a national affair in which the “silvery notes of peace and unity” from sacred places in our national history would render the true cause of the Civil War invisible in a national ritual of disremembering. The country would revel in its technological advancements, as capitalists celebrated America’s economic resolve despite the Panic of 1873, and as white people reasserted the superiority of white Anglo-Saxon blood. An idea of America, alabaster white, would rise from the ashes of war and Reconstruction.”

Does that sound familiar to you, too?

Philadelphia in 1926

The 1926 extravaganza to celebrate the sesquicentennial was also scheduled for Philadelphia. This time the country was still recovering from WW1 and the Spanish Influenza epidemic. What’s more, although holding the event was procured in order to make Philadelphia look less squalid and corrupt, the whole project was squalid and corrupted.

You can still see remnants of the fairgrounds in FDR Park. The rest is covered by today’s stadiums. If you travel on Vare Ave. to beat the traffic on 76 sometime, remember it is named after Rep. William S. Vare and his brothers who were called the “Dukes of South Philadelphia.” They organized most of the kickbacks and political patronage.

President Calvin Coolidge was there on July 5th, since July 4th was on a Sunday and some people still thought opening the celebration on Sunday was unseemly. He had a prophecy to deliver:

No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp.

Coming later in the year, Mayor Kendrick initially approved a “Klan Weekend” on September 9-11. Thousands of the 250,000 Klan members in PA planned a massive parade down Broad St. and a cross-burning at the fairgrounds. The public outcry was so great they were denied their permit, but they held private meetings and hovered over the city. Inspired, in part,  by the successful film The Birth of a Nation, the Ku Klux Klan had reemerged in 1915 “to unite white male persons, native-born Gentile citizens of the United States…to maintain forever white supremacy…and {the} ideals of pure Americanism.”

Almost 200,000 black people lived in Philadelphia, in 1926. They had lived through the European War over the spoils of colonialism which spent millions of lives to decide which  white nation would rule the world. Imagine your Mayor thinking it was fine if the Klan claimed Broad St and dominated the Nation’s celebration of freedom! W.E.B. Du Bois had named the monster they were up against in 1910 in “The Souls of White Folk:”

It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this role. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred,—making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,—rather a great religion, a world war-cry: Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and particolored mongrel beasts!

Sounds familiar, right?

Parade on the Parkway
July 4th Coalition counter parade through North Philly

Philadelphia 1976

Plans for Bicentennial celebration in Philadelphia did not go completely as planned — but there was a 50,000-pound Sara Lee birthday cake served at Memorial Hall the week before! Plus, there was plenty of ceremony to reassert the nation’s myths.  For instance, on July 3,  six wagon trains totaling 200 wagons, which had traveled for months from all over the nation, converged at the newly-formed Valley Forge National Park in front of a crowd of nearly a half a million people.

On July 4th, a ceremony on the new Independence Mall featured President Gerald Ford — the wounds of Watergate and the evacuation of Saigon still fresh. Governor Milton Shapp and Mayor Frank Rizzo were on the platform. Charlton Heston was master of ceremonies. Following the ceremony there was a five-hour parade featuring floats from every state and 40,000 marchers. An estimated two million visitors came to Philadelphia to attend these events.

Meanwhile, the July 4th Coalition led a counter-parade through North Philly on the same day. Puerto Rican socialists, Vietnam veterans, women’s rights advocates, Black liberation groups like the Black Panthers, and unemployed workers joined into one march that proceeded west along Lehigh Avenue and into Fairmount Park at Oxford Street, ending with a sprawling concert and cookout on the fairgrounds built for the 1876 Centennial. They took issue with the Bicentennial Corporation’s progress narrative and illuminated all the forms of oppression that remained alive and well in the late seventies.

Gil Scott-Heron, “the Godfather of rap,” was formed in the Philadelphia area. Here’s what he had to say about the Bicentennial:

America has got the blues and it’s a bicentennial edition
America has got the blues
It’s got the blues because of partial deification
Of partial accomplishments
Over partial periods of time
Halfway justice
Halfway liberty
Halfway equality
It’s a half-ass year

Here’s the full piece:

It all sounds very familiar, partly because the protest has been the background music of my adulthood and fundamental to my Anabaptist Christianity.

Philadelphia 2026

Now, for the Semiquincentennial, we have Trump putting his name on everything and renaming places — which had just been renamed, after Civil War traitors — again. It has been a hard slog to get some semblance of Declaration-of-Independence-equality for everyone in the U.S. over the country’s history. But even given the progress, it is hard to stomach what the present Administration and Supreme Court have done to reaffirm and protect white supremacy on the eve of the 250th.

Rigging the vote

  • Gutting the Voting Rights Act: The Supreme Court made it significantly harder to challenge discriminatory election maps that dilute the power of minority voters.
  • Race-Conscious Redistricting Limits: The Court struck down maps specifically drawn to address racial imbalances in states like Louisiana, setting off a wave of gerrymandering.

Dumping DEI

  • Banning Systemic Discrimination Tools: The Trump administration aggressively dismantled the use of the “disparate impact” standard—a key tool used for decades to challenge seemingly neutral policies that end up disproportionately harming minority groups in housing, employment, and healthcare.
  • DEI Restrictions: Executive orders have been implemented that severely limit or outright ban diversity and equity training across federal agencies, government contractors, and grant recipients like UPenn. The chilling effect remains.

Sacking safeguards

  • Workplace Equality Enforcement: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was directed to stop investigating certain complaints regarding company policies that inadvertently harm specific demographic groups.
  • Education and Discipline: Civil rights guidance meant to address race- and disability-based discrimination in school discipline policies was rescinded.
  • Limiting Affirmative Action: The Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs at colleges and universities, dismantling decades of precedent aimed at rectifying historical educational inequities.
  • Dismantling Civil Rights Offices: Funding and personnel have been severely reduced across federal civil rights offices, including those in the Departments of Education, Homeland Security, and Justice.
  • Eliminating Inequality Data: The administration has rolled back data-collection efforts previously used to track disparities in environmental hazards, special education, and racial inequality. [For a detailed breakdown of these policy changes, you can explore the ACLU’s Report on Anti-Discrimination Law.]

Whitening citizenship

  • Threats to Birthright Citizenship: Legal challenges and administrative efforts have targeted the 14th Amendment, threatening the automatic citizenship of children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants.
  • Language and Ethnic Profiling: The administration rolled back requirements for language-assistance services for people with limited English proficiency and adopted practices that effectively treat ethnicity and accents as legitimate reasons for immigration stops.

All these actions have been played out with a soundtrack of Trump, Hegseth, and Miller, et al, spouting off reasons the government has had enough of all this whining about equality: “Y’all have freedom because we say so, and we will tell you when you exercise it too much.”

There is a lot more of their wreckage that could be listed, and they are just getting started combing through the nooks and crannies of government and society looking for threats to whiteness. On July 4th (and every day) we are supposed to pretend America is just and good, a beacon of light to the world, and forget about what happens right before our eyes. Such pretending is essential to the national myth that forms our patriotic religion.

So I am focusing on Juneteenth. And I will again say there is no room for slaveholder religion in the Church of Jesus Christ. We’re all poor in the eyes of God and that, if nothing else, is a great equalizer. Whether you believe that or not, Juneteenth, when we all were technically as free as any other citizen, is the real Independence Day for the U.S., at least until it gets to a better one.

U.S. Christians need a new story: Use Columba as an example

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Columba Day was June 9, but I think the famous “apostle to Scotland” needs a few more minutes in the spotlight. He may be even more Christian than we already thought.

His traditional story was passed down to us written within the general framework used for about 9000 years, now; it says the powerful deserve their power and have a right to acquire the excess we produce to use as they see fit, mainly to go to war and protect their own power. But if Columba’s story is retold within a Christian framework where individuals have freedom and communities are places for love and sharing, as we were created to experience, the story can be told more truthfully.

This 12th century drawing may be the oldest depiction.

Several of the famous stories about Columba (like how he stopped the Loch Ness monster) should inspire us to stand up to the monsters impeding the mission required in the present day. It is not just the warriors who “make” history. The community builders and family keepers, like most of us, are much more relevant. Like so many old stories these days, Columba’s story (and yours, probably) begs to be retold truer.

As you will see, how Columba stood up to the power-hoarding, private-property elevating people of his day should inspire us to stand up against the billionaires who are the newest perpetrators of an age-old fraud. In truth, cooperation built the world, not conquest. Columba was living according to his own version of the Jesus-inspired economic bill of rights.

I encourage you to make up your own mind about my retelling, since that is what historians do. They always have a point of view – and you do too, even if you think you have no view at all. The view from which the story of Columba is usually told is about how rulers duke it out to own the most and to keep their positions of dominance — and that’s the way it is. The tired, old story tells us we will be punished if we don’t conform, or at least cause too much trouble. But does it tell the whole truth?

Here is the traditional telling of a famous story about Columba (with bullet points!). It is usually titled:

The first copyright law

In 561, Columba secretly copied a rare, religious book belonging to his former teacher, Finnian. When a king ruled “to every cow its calf, to every book its copy,” war broke out over the stolen copy.

  • The Gift: Columba visited his old teacher, Finnian, in Ireland. Finnian had a beautiful new Psalter (a book of Psalms) which he let Columba use.
  • The Theft: Columba loved the book so much he secretly stayed up late at night in the church, copying it by hand.
  • The Discovery: Finnian caught Columba in the act when he was well on the way toward completion. He demanded that Columba give him the copied book.
  • The Refusal: Columba refused to give him the copy, claiming it belonged to him because his own hard work made it.
  • The Ruling: Both men went to High King Diarmait mac Cerbhiall to settle their dispute. The King made a famous ruling: “To every cow belongs its calf, and to every book belongs its copy.”
  • The War: Columba was very angry about losing his copy. He went back to his home clan and started a war against the King. Thousands of men died in the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne in 561.
  • The Exile: As a punishment for causing so much death, Columba was sent away from Ireland. He sailed to Scotland and started a new church on the Island of Iona, vowing never to return to his home and determined to fulfill the charge by his overseer to convert as many people as died in the battle.

Here is how the story might just as well have happened if the hierarchy had not put itself in charge of writing history. It could be titled:

The word of God belongs to everyone.

In 561, Columba set out to copy a psalter Finnian had locked away from the community-at-large — Finnian being like Gollum protecting his “Precious.” Columba discerned that such a book should belong to everyone, especially since books were scarce and literacy was the key to opening up new worlds. Finnian brought him before the authorities for stealing his book. When Columba lost the legal battle before the corrupt court, his clan rushed to his rescue. He escaped. Ashamed of the bloodshed he had caused, he exiled himself and gave his life to saving as many people in Jesus’ name as had been killed in his.

  • The Precious: As a trusted graduate of Finnian’s school, Columba was given access to a beautiful Psalter Finnian prized and kept away from the general public.
  • The Plan: Columba did not think the book should remain locked away and owned by Finnian. He wanted a copy to learn from and to share. So he secretly stayed up late at night copying it by hand.
  • The Discovery: Finnian caught Columba in the act. He demanded that Columba give him the copied book.
  • The Refusal: Columba refused, claiming the copy belonged to him because his own hard work made it, just like the Psalms belonged to everyone to whom God gave them, as well as to all the scribes, scrolls makers and teachers who passed them down through generations. Finnian’s position did not give him the right to own the Psalms.
  • The Ruling: Instead of resorting to violence, the men went to High King Diarmait mac Cerbhiall to settle their dispute. The King made a famous ruling: “To every cow belongs its calf, and to every book belongs its copy.” In this case that meant: “If you own the means of production, you control everything it produces. If you copy the book, you essentially work for the owner.” Note that Finnian did not author the book, he just owned it, a bit like A.I. collecting all the works of history (including this little piece of writing) and then charging you to access and use it.
  • Yet another battle: Columba was upset about losing his copy. He was also angry that he and others who needed the book were restricted to whatever pieces Finnian wanted to give them. He went back to his home clan in a rage and they jumped to his defense without being asked, since that has always been how nonbelievers settle problems, and since it was an excuse to take power from the king. Thousands of men died in the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne.
  • Leaving home: As usual, whoever stands up against the status quo is shamed and scapegoated. Columba was made an outcast for being disobedient and causing conflict. So he determined to leave his homeland. A substantial group of men discerned what was really going on and set sail with him for parts unknown. They shook the dust of Ireland off their feet and went to build something new. Columba was ashamed his clan’s warfare, sad to be labeled as an unrepentant rebel, and lonely for his devoted family, but he went off to discover the fullness of what God had been doing when he first dared to quench his thirst for the psalter.

Columba’s new way

Click the picture to learn about a voyage that replicated Columba’s

When the band got to Iona they built a new kind of settlement on the rocky little island. It set the character of what would influence the whole area from then on (and until now!) – a community in mission, open and expansive, full of beauty, not closed and controlling. Iona became the “cradle of Christianity” in Scotland. It also served as a great lighthouse of learning.

It is telling that one of the most famous accounts of their mission includes Columba stopping the Loch Ness monster from devouring one of his comrades. He’s another hero travelling in a band like Frodo, who overcame the temptation of the ring of power, who did not become a new version of Gollum. The symbolic monsters of the past, like dragons, resemble the monsters of today, which guard their territory with fire from above or terrors from the deep and hoard gold.

The new community on Iona built a strong center for education. They copied rare religious and historical books by hand. Their beautiful writing and art changed early European history. By 800, the community began creating their masterpiece: the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript containing the four Gospels. It is still regarded as one of Ireland’s national treasures, celebrated for its intricate Celtic knotwork, vibrant colors, and inspired drawings. The book was moved from Iona to the Abbey of Kells in County Meath, Ireland, to protect it from Viking raids around 806. In 1661 it was presented to Trinity College in Dublin for safekeeping where it still remains and where I saw it.

It is telling that the mission which was sparked by a book became famous for a book. It is also telling that Trinity College has monetized their possession of the book by providing an “experience” which gives tourists a way to pay for as little time as possible with books and focus on their feelings about them. The College resemble Finnian. As usual, normal people get the sizzle while the owners get the steak.

The main characteristic that made Columba’s community distinct was their Celtic way of clan life enriched by the radical sharing demonstrated in the New Testament [An Anglican bishop considers how to make it work now]. Iona was egalitarian and planted new communities like itself. These days, “successful” churches, in general have no practical connection to its locale. It is a destination, a program, a product, not a collection of people who live and work together. The community on Iona was different. The missionaries did not conquer the Picts; they moved in with them, became friends, and shared their lives.

Columba is a leader like people in a long line stretching back to Jesus who refuse to live according to the rules of the domination system and the myth of redemptive violence.  Constantine may have co-opted the church, the early medieval church may have adopted the Roman model of governance and hierarchy and conquered the Celtic church in its name, but there are always people who see through the lies.

Trump may have co-opted the Evangelicals with the promise they will rule with him, but that unfulfilled promise is already part of the collapse of the latest regime, perpetrating the old fraud. I pray we replace it with a government which functions within a true economy, as a means to distribute the excess we create in an equitable and mutually beneficial way, a government inspired by the truth and love in Jesus and wherever else it can be found, not infected with the repetitive and damned self-destruction perpetrated by would-be kings. We all need a truer story to live by.

What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?

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It is hard to know “what to do” with anyone, of course. But we are going to do something, regardless. So we should get it as right as we can.

When it comes to what we’re going to do with corrupt leaders, and I can name a few, there are many wrong ways to go. But every way makes a difference. You matter. And if this is how you think about that: unfortunately, you matter.

I think the last sixteen months have been a whirlwind of wrongness. So I am writing to add to the opprobrium which is daily launched in the direction of wrongdoers. We all might be a little wrong; but don’t worry, the Bible will help you.

Prophesying to the drivers in Ardmore

The first answer to “What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?” should probably come from Jeremiah: TELL THE TRUTH, as in PROPHESY!

This is a part of the Bible that especially inspired me last week:

The wise shall be put to shame;
    they shall be dismayed and taken;
since they have rejected the word of the Lord,
    what wisdom is in them?
Therefore I will give their wives to others
    and their fields to conquerors,
because from the least to the greatest
    everyone is greedy for unjust gain;
from prophet to priest,
    everyone deals falsely.
They have treated the wound of the daughter of my people carelessly,
    saying, “Peace, peace,”
    when there is no peace.
They acted shamefully; they committed abomination,
    yet they were not at all ashamed;
    they did not know how to blush.
Therefore they shall fall among those who fall;
    at the time when I punish them, they shall be overthrown,
            says the Lord. — Jeremiah 8:9-12

The first answer to the question presumes people who follow Jesus would not take corruption lightly any more than Jesus did. He was especially direct with the Pharisees, who thought they were “conservative.”

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and of the plate, so that the outside also may become clean.”

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of uncleanness. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” — Matthew 23:25-8

But we can’t presume most of the Christians in the U.S. will take corruption seriously, can we? They seem to think they are serious about the Bible but they are taking Trump’s corruption very lightly, even encouraging it as a means to return the country to “greatness.”

So when we ask “What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?” we have to start with:

They regularly follow them

They sing “It is well with my soul” – the corrupt leader is restoring order in the name of Jesus. And if that order makes me richer and corrals people I secretly hate, all the better.

What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?

They pretend they do not exist

I think this is more prevalent. American Christians, by and large, retreated into having a private faith a long time ago. They are not Jeremiahs!

They sing: “It is well with my soul” —  My faith is a soul matter, not a public matter. I don’t get involved with politics.

To be clear, as American Christians are pretending, by and large, they are swallowing a boatload or corruption. Pretending is not inaction, it takes quite an effort to quash reality!

  • The most damning Epstein files are still hidden.
  • J.D. Vance is fronting a push to combat fraud in public services by illegally withholding $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments from California.
  • Trump has fired or demoted twenty inspectors general during his terms—the people who are key to oversight. In 2024 alone the people he has since fired or sidelined identified more than $50 billion in waste and abuse.
  • Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 70 donors or allies who were convicted of fraud. One, Philip Esformes, was convicted of stealing $1.3 billion from Medicare.
  • The Trump family has pocketed over $600 million through cryptocurrency enterprises this year.
  • Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr. have invested in a drone manufacturer that is trying to sell weapons to Persian Gulf countries currently at risk from the war their father started in Iran.
  • The Pentagon recently awarded a $24 million contract to a robotics startup for which Eric is the “chief strategy advisor.”
  • Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has acted as a chief negotiator for the U.S. in the Middle East. at the same time he has been trying to raise $5 billion from investors there for his investment firm.
  • Corporations and billionaires have dropped millions of dollars in donations for Trump’s ballroom where the East Wing used to be and his proposed presidential library in Miami.
  • Trump had raked in more than $2 billion for his projects or causes, more than half a billion of it from 346 people who each gave at least $250,000. Some of those people have received presidential pardons, others have been given jobs, and all have received access to the president.
  • Trump is using the planned Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event to be held on his birthday on the White House lawn as a new way for donors to funnel money to him. Ringside seats have been selling for $1 million or more. Neither the White House nor the UFC will comment on where the money is going.
  • Trump took seventeen CEOs with him to China, along with his son Eric, who runs the family business. Paul Krugman said, “He might as well have been walking around Beijing with a sign that says—in block capitals, of course, this is Trump—BRIBE ME.”
  • Miami residents are suing Trump and others to stop the construction of Trump’s presidential library, charging that state officials violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause when they transferred almost three acres of prime waterfront land, worth between $67 million and $300 million, to Trump’s library foundation for $10. Trump has already said he wants to build a hotel on the site rather than a traditional library.
  • The Department of Justice was working with Trump to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) after a contractor during Trump’s first term leaked tax returns from thousands of wealthy individuals to the media. They want to settle before it goes to court, where he will probably lose
  • Trump offered to drop the lawsuit in exchange for the government’s establishing a $1.7 billion fund to compensate his allies who claim they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the DOJ —  this includes nearly 1,600 people convicted of committing crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, people Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of shortly after he took office in January 2025.

What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?

They manage them

They take a lot of responsibility for the world. So Christians work very hard to make sure Jesus is not shown up to be powerless and make sure they don’t get in trouble for doing a bad job. People with a narcissistic wound control or manipulate others to protect their fragile egos and avoid their shame — they manage them, all the time. There is an epidemic of such woundedness in the church.

They sing: “It is well with my soul” – I can make others well like I should be.  I need to keep things under control. Everyone needs to stay safe.

This grandiosity regularly falls apart. Since there are too many plates to keep spinning and they are the only ones they trust to spin. Besides, the corrupt people often have no conscience, so managing them is more like feeding them your power.

What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?

They undermine them

They sing “It is well with my soul” – I am on the frontline of justice

I don’t think justice is the solution to all the earth’s problems. But without that first step, it is hard to get anywhere else. Our efforts need to be as endless as God’s.

But we need to be honest, people wrestling for power, even in the name of justice, never have rest for their souls. Feeling unwell about something can be addctive. Just witness the work of Climate Defiance, one of my favorites activist groups. This is from last week’s newsletter:

We absolutely NAILED Xavier Becerra. We ruined his whole event. It was so beautiful and so brutal all at once. It was so necessary. You must watch. You can see it here.

Our protest was not just an act of public humiliation. It was an act of JUSTICE.

If you’re just tuning in, Big Oil Becerra is the front-runner for Governor of California. He wants the prestige. He wants the power. We must stop him. Here’s why:

He took $39,000 from Chevron – the maximum contribution. It’s their first time getting involved in the governor’s race there in a decade. Then he defended the legalized bribe, proclaiming, verbatim “they’re not the bad guy.”

Are you serious?

Is it giving kids asthma that he’s ok with? Or spreading climate misinformation? Or searching for new oil reserves when current ones contain enough carbon to make earth unlivable? Which of these things specifically is he ok with? I would like to know.

He then doubled down. He said: “Does everybody here drive an electric vehicle? You need Chevron, I need Chevron, my people of the state of California need Chevron.”

Jesus. Electric vehicles were invented in the 1800s. Companies like Chevron are the main REASON we are not driving them. They have poisoned our political system and blocked the transition.

What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?

They overthrow them

It started with the Roman Empire and kept going in response to every empire-builder since. Yes, so-called Christians have often been on the wrong side. We get sucked into power struggles, too. But wherever there is prayer and community, Jesus-followers are a burr under the saddle of corrupt rulers.

They sing: “It is well with my soul” – I am well and I feel it. You can’t keep me from the love of Jesus no matter what you do. Being well with Jesus allows me to turn my cheek and so turn the world upside down.

Tennessee Democrats locked arms on the House floor in protest of a the redistricting vote that split the state’s only majority-Black Democrat Congressional district on May 7, 2026, in Nashville, Tennessee.

I suspect most of the Tennessee reps protesting the racial gerrymander of Tennessee voting districts are church people. Their two outspoken young leaders, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones were immediately juxtaposed with pictures of Martin Luther King on social media when they got carted off the statehouse floor . They were just saying, “Since the Confederates rule in Washington right now and they say there is no racial discrimination under the law, regardless of the Voting Rights laws that have ruled since the 1960’s, we cannot be silent.” In the picture, Jones’ sign says it all.

What do Christians do with corrupt leaders?

They are a resistant alternative to them

They sing: “It is well with my soul” – Life is worth living and Jesus says I am worthy of living it. We are made to make something which is fit for Jesus and which can withstand the tribulations of the present. I’m referencing Ephesians 4 and 5:

Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes on those who are disobedient. Therefore do not be associated with them, for once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly,  but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,

“Sleeper, awake!
Rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”

Be careful, then, how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil — Ephesians 5:6-16

I am astounded that Canticle: A Novel by Janet Rich Edwards has actually been a NY Times editors choice. I enjoyed reading it for another look at one of my favorite centuries: the 13th and one of my favorites places: Bruges. What’s more it centers on some of my favorite Christians; the Beguines.

I was encouraged by the book, but even more encouraged that people were talking about  it and what it means to know God and live life as a member of his people. The grassroots devotion of the Beguines and their male counterparts, the Beghards upended their society and the corrupt church ruling it. Over and over again, the Holy Spirit has stubbornly inspired Jesus followers to risk losing their place in the corrupt system which corrupt men  made for them and risk following Jesus with all they’ve got. We create an alternative society to the passing away world.

This coming Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, the most radical Sunday of the year. It should launch us into planting seeds of hope whether the soil is rocky or not because one of those seeds is very likely to take root anyway. Pentecost should cause us to look at our lives and our church and reimagine them in the light God sees us, full of love and potential, poised for creation. Pentecost, at the very least, should wake us up from the stupor-inducing rule of the present oligarchs.

You don’t know how much you need to trust God until you need to.

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The now infamous Tilly

We endured the 20+ hours it took to get home from our wonderful trip. Then we walked in the door.  A big fat snow storm. A frozen pipe oozing water down the back wall and creating  nasty ice sculpture. An innovative toilet not functioning and bilge puddling from between the basement tiles. Trash and mail piled up. And, of course, there was the love-starved cat.

Once we returned, the cat stuck to us like glue all night and day. So I thought she was sticking when I took out the trash. But she darted out the door and into the frigid night and falling snow unbeknownst to me. I suppose I was less careful since, “What cat would go out in a blizzard?” We were cuddled up in our blankets for a long time until we noticed there was no longer a cat on top of us.

I guess you don’t know how much you need to trust God until you need to. We were beside ourselves. We love the cat almost as much as she loves us. We looked through every nook and cranny of our new, little house and could not find her. She had fooled us before, so we waited for her to appear from out of nowhere. Then we looked outside. Then we tried to go to sleep and wait for her to come out. I said, “We’ll just have to give her to God.” I admit I was not completely satisfied with that prayer. But where else can you go when you have nowhere else to go?

The angel

I tried to go to sleep but it did not work out. So I got up to do some more post-trip sorting out. About 2am, while I was typing, I heard someone shout at me from our back alley, which had never happened before. It looked like our neighbor, so I went out in the falling snow in my robe. “I’m looking for your cat,” he said. I had texted his roommate and everyone else in range, to sound the alarm. He went on to say, “I’m kind of the neighborhood ‘cat shepherd’ and I don’t want to lose another one.”

So we all started looking as the snow poured down – all around our block, under cars, behind bushes. Nothing. I went back to our porch to start over for the umpteenth time and I heard a cat. It was ours. She was settled into a cat shelter the neighbor had made out of a storage container. He was overjoyed and began to cry and admitted he was a little drunk.

So when I gave the cat to God, did that result in the arrival of a drunk angel to connect me with my beloved? My answer is “Yes.” You decide for yourself. You decide if it was right for me to feel like I  was George on the bridge meeting the semi-competent Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life. 

Angels in any condition are needed

The whole experience made me think we’d all better become adept at turning to God when we are desperate. Troubling times keep troubling up, after all.

A woman in Northeast Philly captured the moment on her security camera when she was walking her dog and her neighbor unwittingly unleashed three pit bulls from his house. They attacked her dog and bit her mercilessly. I don’t know whether she called Top Dog to save her (link in case you don’t live in Philly). But even if she did, she’ll need deeper healing and help than any lawyer can provide.

When Liam Arias and his father, Adrian were whisked out of Minnesota and locked up in Dilly, Texas, all sorts of angels appeared. Representative Juan Castro personally escorted them home when a judge ruled against the “perfidious” power-grabbing ICE keeps acting out. Having met a few refugees, I can tell you they have to trust God because they have so little hope.

Every day in this terrible time the cat is out in the snow, the dogs are out of their cages and armed men might appear in the neighborhood without a moment’s notice. Most of us are desperate enough to ask for help. Let’s start there with trust, not just end up there when there is nowhere else to go.

You may not believe God will help you or believe God is with you even if there is no hope for you. But it is still true: Jesus will be there and is there. Before I was even able to wonder why I was doing it, my Sunday school teacher got me to memorize how Jesus said, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.” I did not get the “Lo” or the “end of the age” or even “unto.” But I somehow understood “I am with you always.” And I have never forgotten.

I admit I often think I am responsible or to blame for a lot of the bad things that happen to me and I get frustrated because I don’t know how I am going to fix the war in Ukraine. But when I am afraid my loving cat is going to freeze to death, my thoughts naturally turn to God. And there God was in my drunk neighbor. I’ll concede that actual angels may have been helping too. But until Gabriel, or whoever, appears to me, I’ll take an angelic human or whatever goodness God shares with me next. I think we all have some angel in us. We should be quite useful to each other in desperate times.

Understanding and responding to a “sociopath”

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At the CAPS East Conference last week, I presented my research on sociopaths. I have been collecting it all year. If you follow this blog (thank you!), you have probably run into some of what I have learned. If  you want to get into the finished product with me (and I wish you would), I have put links to my previous posts at the end of this one, along with a link to the powerpoint I used in my presentation, which includes the reference list.

It all started with Trump’s portrait.

Like I keep saying, when I first saw Donald Trump’s “official portrait” I marveled at the audacious grandiosity of it. There is no hint of humility or welcome in it. It is designed to intimidate. It matches his endless talk about “winning.”  I admit I ignored it. I laughed it off.

But after his re-election, I decided I needed to turn back and face what we are all facing in that face. Now we know how disorienting and frightening it is to be dominated by a sociopathic president. When I started researching it, I mostly knew the stereotypes associated with sociopathy — which I just learned how to pronounce properly after church a couple of weeks ago during the coffee hour. I think I began by googling, “what is the go-to book about sociopaths?”

I found the book and started with it: The Sociopath Next Door. Martha Stout’s classic from 2005 reads like a prophecy these days. It is academic enough. But its strongest point is its collection of case studies which prove her point: you might run into a sociopath next door and there are responses you should have ready when you do.

Barry Goldwater, Mary Trump’s Book, Anton Ashcroft

Can you diagnose someone you’ve never met?

I just suggested Trump is a sociopath. People asked me if I were afraid I had offended someone when I did the same at the conference. The president already has us scared to exercise our consciences in the face of the uncertainty of what my happen to us! I was not afraid to present my arrangement of evidence-based psychological study integrated with my Christian practice.

The most arguable thing I did was suggest Trump fit the definition. Because I agree that a professional cannot effectively diagnose someone they have never met. At the same time I also agree with people who say that diagnoses, in general, are rather suggestive and subjective even when one does know a person. I also agree with thoughtful people who say the ethics about diagnosing public figures may be outdated.

The APA formally added the Goldwater Rule to the ethics code in 1973, some time after Barry Goldwater won his libel case against Fact Magazine. Fact  published a survey of psychiatrists regarding his mental fitness to be president. He was not found to be fit. He lost by a landslide in 1964.

Like many ethics rules, the Goldwater Rule is roundly debated, especially when it is seen in light of a psychotherapist’s general duty to give warning when they know or even suspect sexual predators and murderous people are likely to act.  With A.I. and years of constant exposure,  writings, and history we can access about people like Donald Trump, things may be different than in 1973. Unlike most people on the Anti-social Personality Disorder spectrum, Trump does all his sinning brazenly, like tearing down the East Wing of the White House last week.

We have a lot of evidence for Trump’s sociopathy. For instance, Trump’s niece, Mary, a clinical psychologist, wrote the book (pictured above). She and Michael D’Antonio, a biographer, provide quite a bit of evidence for Trump being a sociopath. For instance, his mother was sick for a year when he was 2. His father Fred trained his sons to be “killers,” no empathy or vulnerability allowed. In the Art of the Deal Trump recalls giving his music teacher a black eye as an elementary kid. He was banished to military school at 13 where he was a loud-mouthed bully. George Conway put all the evidence together in an ad sponsored by his Anti-Psychopath Pac. (Access via Bing. I think he is banned on Google).

Anton Ashcroft (seen above), working in forensic psychology in 2016,  wrote Donald Trump: Narcissist, Psychopath or representative of the people? He claims, though he has never met Trump, it is his duty to warn people before they normalize his behavior. Your conscience will have to be your guide when his evidence calls for your conclusion.

2016 seems like a long time ago, now that Trump is fomenting a war with Venezuela and Mike Johnson refuses to let the House of Representatives convene. Ashcroft’s resistance is to a bygone ethics which presume an orderly set of institutions and common assumptions about propriety. Those presumptions are gone, it seems. So his diagnosis may be more relevant than ever, now that the traits of 4% of the population, many of whom are in prison (unless Trump has pardoned them), are being worked into the government, into world society, and into our individual lives.

No one has ever known what to do when the people on the sociopath spectrum — the People of the Lie as M. Scott Peck named them, get into power (which they normally don’t). People either try to avoid them or kill them. But killing them is not an immediate option for me. So I have been trying to understand them, at least, and discerning the most helpful responses God can suggest.

The research leads to the right questions

Martha Stout’s book is a plea to people of conscience to recognize and resist the ruthless among them. Her book formed the heart of my presentation. She helped me learn how NPD, ASPD, sociopathy and psychopathy form a spectrum of disorders coming into prominence in this “age of monsters.”

Counselors and educators can provide a truth-telling service to the unsuspecting society who cannot fathom the lack of conscience and single-minded will to power this 4% of the population suffers under.

We need to clarify what we are dealing with.

  • The definition of these people has become a bit muddy.
  • Is there really no cure for Anti-social Personality Disorder?
  • The idea of conscience needs to be clearer.
  • Are the assumptions about conscience fading with the diminishing influence of Judeo-Christian morality?
  • The factors, other than immorality, which cause sociopathy, need to be better researched and known.
  • Treatment options and interventions need to be more available to therapists, parents and law enforcement.

How do we respond to a person who has no guilt or shame, even biologically? I offered eight ways to respond and zeroed in on protecting our individual and societal consciences. I also highlighted the increasingly prevalent strategy of domination people on the ASPD spectrum use called DARVO — V.P. Vance has become as expert.

The definition of “sociopath”

I use the term “sociopath,” even though “psychopath” might work just as well. Neither term has a well-differentiated definition and neither appears in APA’s DSM – the repository of approved definitions for psychotherapists and researchers. But both terms are titles for ongoing study on the disorder. The American Psychological Association (APA) developed the term Anti-social Personality Disorder (ASPD)  because the terms sociopath and psychopath stigmatized people who got labeled that way.

Here are the criteria for ASPD:  1) failure to conform to social norms, 2) deceitfulness, manipulativeness, 3) impulsivity, failure to plan ahead, 4) irritability, aggressiveness, 5) reckless disregard for the safety of self or others, 6) consistent irresponsibility, 7) lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person.

Martha Stout adds color to the list to make it clearer: 1) sociopathic charisma, 2) a grandiose sense of self worth, 3) the need for stimulation, risk taking, 4) pathological lying, defrauding, 5) callousness, no empathy, the inability to bond.

What do we do with a sociopath?

I say we have one planted in the White House and he must be removed before the weed comes to its inevitably rotten fruit. He is shamelessly pasting his picture over our lives. He would like to carve himself in Mt. Rushmore, put a Trump Arch in Washington DC and receive a Nobel Peace prize for settling conflicts he did not settle, even as he creates conflict that makes the whole world unsettled. His lies have a Wikipedia page. 

When we encounter people on the ASPD spectrum in our daily lives, even if we are not certain, we must do our best to discern the motivation behind their behavior and respond to them as they are, not according to their deceptions or our idealizations. We must attend to our personal health and the health of society. We might not have all the solutions or have the power to effect the necessary changes — but our voices matter; our responses matter. Having a clear conscience before God and others matters.

We can have some empathy for the conscienceless and imagine the horror they would experience, if they had the capacity to do so. Martha Stout says:

Imagine — if you can — not having a conscience, none at all,
no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do,
no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members.
Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken…
You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered.
How will you live your life?
What will you do with your huge and secret advantage?

We can love sociopaths with everlasting love. We might be able to help them. But don’t offer sociopaths pity and don’t waste your time shaming them (which is essentially negative pity). Never assume they are like you, with your guilt, shame and doubts; they are not. Keep asking, “What are they doing with their huge, secret advantage?” And tell the truth about your answers — to yourself and to everyone who will listen.

My previous blog posts on this subject. 

Say “No” now: It won’t get better. (April 7, 2025)

Is a sociopath training you for evil?: 8 ways to spot one and survive them. (May 12, 2025)

Recognizing DARVO is the first step to freedom: 5 practical responses. (August 25, 2025)

Your conscience is in danger: The Bible can help.  (October 20, 2025)

The slides for my presentation, which include the references are here: Google Slides

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Today is Kolano Sabia Day! As a person among the royal families leading the “Spice Islands” he represents a fascinating story of colonial evangelism — its sordid beginnings and its lasting impact.  Get the story at The Transhistorical Body. 

Your conscience is in danger: The Bible can help

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I was energized as I walked along Market St. on a beautiful day last Saturday. We periodically shouted “No Kings!” and “This is what democracy looks like,” and it felt good to hear my voice right out loud — there in public, and all. At one point we caught up with a couple of people in blow-up unicorn outfits. It looked like they might be young parents on a date — instead of the baby, their stroller carried a boombox. It was nice.

As we exercised our bodies we were exercising our consciences. Both have a tendency to get flabby. The latter desperately needs the restoration of a daily exercise routine before it gets burned out completely by the conflagration of kooks and crooks dominating our lives right now.

The dark side of conscience

I have spent quite a bit of time studying sociopath spectrum of humanity in the last few months. These are the people, probably not more than 5% of us, who either have a broken or missing conscience.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) collects these folks under the description “Anti-social Personality Disorder” (ASPD). The ASPD person has a severely wounded, inactive, broken or absent conscience. Conscienceless behavior is their distinctive across the spectrum. They are shameless.

The TV loves these people. You’d think they are around every corner, mostly carrying knives — they are not. But they make for good stories because they are strange and frightening. And we all know we might meet one and suspect we share some of their traits. Think Joe Goldberg in You, Dexter Morgan in Dexter, Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish in Game of Thrones and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, to name a few. Eric Cartman fits the description, too. They are more generally men, it seems, but women demonstrate the behavior, too. They are conscience-challenged, to say the least.

A conscience is the inner sense or faculty that allows a person to distinguish between right and wrong and guides their moral decisions. It acts as a moral compass, influencing behavior and causing feelings of guilt or pleasure based on whether actions align with one’s values and, importantly, fit in with one’s relationships. Hindus see this capacity as a seventh sense, beyond our five physical senses and beyond our ordinary awareness; it is “higher consciousness.” Contemplative Christians see it as spiritual awareness, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the place of intimacy with God and personal transformation.

Sociopath training

Conscience is considered a universal human ability, though its judgment can be shaped by experience and upbringing. It is what is happening in the deepest part of us, but not just that. Conscience needs a bond to form and to stay strong. That’s why many observers right now are wondering if we can fight off totalitarianism, since the opposition cannot unite. Postmodern, technology-isolated people have bonding issues.

Our bonding issues may have made us ripe for sociopathic manipulation. I think the  sociopaths are shaping our behaviors right now. The president is their leader. The innumerable lawsuits being filed are all about combatting behavior on the ASPD spectrum.

A sociopath cannot bond, most of the time. According to Martha Stout (The Sociopath Next Door),  leaders with no seventh sense, no inner awareness, no gut instinct for good, no spiritual connection can hypnotize the group conscience which leads to catastrophe.

ASPD leaders and ASPD-influenced systems make enemies “its,” not people, and see them as mere impediments to what is good, threats to safety and prosperity — and they find people to hate these “its” with them. Stephen Miller regularly strokes this proclivity in humanity. At Charlie Kirk’s funeral he said:

The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil, We will defeat the forces of darkness and evil. And we will stand every day for what is true, what is beautiful, what is good….

And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.

Why don’t we follow our individual consciences and follow sociopaths instead? Stout says we are programmed to obey authority even against our own consciences. Our basic instinct to bond and be acceptable in community can be turned bad. This has been demonstrated repeatedly, beginning with Stanley Milgram’s experiment to see if he could get college students to shock other undergrads who were getting wrong answers. They gave up their power to the authorities and shocked! A sociopath knows this tendency and plays it. Bullying works.

Protecting your conscience

If you are a Christian, you probably agree with the New Testament writers who teach that our consciences can be injured, and blunted — and if you develop a “hardened heart,” it can wreck your all-important bond with God. There is a lot of healthy discussion in the Bible about maintaining a conscience that resembles Jesus’ and stays open to the Spirit of God. But let me give you the teaching in just one little book: 1 Timothy.

But the aim of such instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith. Some people have deviated from these and turned to meaningless talk, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make assertions. (1:5-7)

The antidote to sociopath leaders may be as simple as dancing down the street in a unicorn costume — exercising stubborn joy (which, Jesus says, no one can take away from us), in the face of domination.

Paul reminds Timothy of heart, mind and soul — his spiritual awareness: pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith, as he stokes his courage to keep teaching the gospel. Timothy needs a strong inner life. Because it seems like he was up against some shameless, ASPD-type people who won’t stop talking nonsense and people are believing them.

This charge I commit to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies made earlier about you, so that by following them you may fight the good fight, having faith and a good conscience. By rejecting conscience, certain persons have suffered shipwreck in the faith; among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have turned over to Satan, so that they may be taught not to blaspheme. (1:18-20)

One’s conscience is in danger if it is not in good shape. The speaker at our beginning rally before the march chided us for being spiritually flabby, essentially. I took exception since I was, after all, in attendance. But she knew that one protest does not make a transformation. Sociopaths never rest. For instance, last week the White House hired Kurt Olsen, the Stop the Steal lawyer, to investigate the 2020 election (!). The resistance cannot rest, either.

It is possible that Hymenaeus and Alexander did not completely reject conscience out of some evil agency. They may have been born without the capacity to have a conscience because of amygdala defects, or their environment was so traumatizing it made them shameless in order to survive — and ASPD appears to be heritable, too.

When Paul “turned them over to Satan” he did not condemn them to hell. He just recognized their intractability. They needed something more than regular church community to teach them.

The word blaspheme, here and many places in the New Testament,  is a direct transliteration from Greek. It means slander, defamation, or reviling, especially against God, and includes speech that defames others. Hymenaeus and Alexander were not just impious, they were bond breakers, dividers, loveless.

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. (4:1-2)

When the Spirit “expressly says” something we primarily hear it with the seventh sense, which is the main reason we should keep it in shape. The message is mainly tested in community, which is why we need to stay connected to discerning believers. That sense can be dulled. A conscience can even be cauterized so it becomes impermeable to grace, joy and love.

Lies are the poison of conscience. Donald Trump’s lies have their own Wikipedia page. They are the main tool of sociopaths who only care about “winning.” Jesus calls liars children of the devil. The capacity of A.I. and our media in general to spread lies is breathtaking. Hopefully you have some children whose consciences are not seared who can build a new society in the wild years ahead.

If you feel like you must be living in the “later times,” you might be right. Pundits, protesters, prophets and preachers are working overtime to stand against the present “hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron.” I thank God for that. We need all the help we can get. Because, as Paul teaches Timothy, having a living relationship with God, which keeps our consciences soft and clear, is the daily, fundamental step, not just in our self-care but in the formation of a society worth living in.

Time to perfect resistance

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Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — key bros in the “PayPal Mafia” who went on to lucrative projects after PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, have now gone on to government-breaking so they can perfect their power-grabbing. Thank God people are talking about Palantir all the time!

The unexpected consequences of the bros’ brazen tech-authoritarianism is an outbreak of creativity on the part of the resistance. For instance, Governor Newsome’s Trumpesque Tweets are a hilarious and creative way of asserting California’s right to exist without thugs in their faces (as they experienced when Newsome spoke about redistricting the other day). Old ladies fomenting “Be Brave Day” last Friday is anther version of resistance; they were saying “No! We exist.” The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church titled his Fourth of July message: “Once the church of presidents, The Episcopal Church must now be an engine of resistance.” That’s unexpected!

There are a lot of smart, energetic people out there creatively resisting! They are not shutting up (even though you can get fired for saying the wrong thing — like my friend was fired from her job last month for being outspoken about starving Gazans). For instance, two months ago Tad Stoermer decided to speak up and made this video about the difference between protest and resistance. It finally caught up with me as it wound its way through the algorithm. He insists the present broken time is not calling for reform but for creative transformation.

Existence is resistance

Back in 2011, “existence is resistance” became my new favorite phrase. I learned it from Palestinians, like those from Stop the Wall, and from the Christian Peacemaker Teams in At-Tuwani, south of Hebron. They were creatively resisting. They certainly did not expect Israel to reform (and it did not!); their only hope was transformation. And that begins with their insistent existence. Their continual “No!”

In At-Tuwani, our MCC Learning Tour delegation met a woman from Switzerland who had been living in the village for six years as part of CPT’s work of support. That’s committed resistance. She was about ready to return to Europe, since the villagers were organized enough to do without the protection of witnesses from the U.S. or Europe.

At-Tuwani was in “Area C” of the apartheid system Israel was perfecting in its occupied territories. That means the village was under direct military control. Living in Area C meant that almost anything could happen to a Palestinian for “security” reasons (some say the U.S. is following the Israeli model now). It meant one’s rights were adjudicated by military justice. Practically, it meant one’s land was subject to seizure and the housing developments being planted on your grazing and farm land could supplant your long-held practices – and would be protected by the military (which, by the way, is still protected by the United States). The village was something of a showcase for people devoted to nonviolent resistance. They have been dedicated to the proposition that existence is resistance (and they are still hanging in there).

at-Tuwani 2011

We listened to one of the village’s activists talk about the awakening that caused him to be a leader in direct nonviolent action. When the nearby Israeli settlement was built, it disrupted all the village’s ways. The “settlers” commandeered farmland and claimed grazing areas for their use. One day they beat the man’s mother when she dared to graze sheep in land they were trying to control. As we looked over the village he described how he had participated in securing its ongoing existence against the constant pressure and harassment of the Israeli settlers, military and bureaucracy. Their existence is resistance.

Slaves of Christ

It seems like the Church is usually in need of a refresher course on being an engine of resistance. It is usually the oppressed of the world who can provide the seminar.

In 2017 our old church did some refreshing theology. As I look back on our work from the era of Trump 2.0, I like our thinking even more. Our work came to some truth about our calling to resist antichrist powers — which the Church had been downplaying right down to the way it translated the Bible!

We were concentrating on Paul’s “two-tiered” theology applied to our “social action.” You can see my treatment here in this article.

One of the places where we could see Paul’s thinking was when he related to slaves. In our day, when people are into the idolatry Trump preaches, in which young people are chained to their survival jobs and debt, when white supremacists are trying to re-enslave African Americans, and in which we are all tempted to bow in fear before the Tweeter-in-chief, we may need to think about freeing the slaves more consciously than ever.

Be small

First, if we want to get anything out of Paul’s thoughts on slavery, we have to remember that when he speaks to women, Gentiles and slaves seriously as members of the church, his respect is subversive. Some of us forget, as we turn our “imperial gaze” on the “others” who are so-called “minorities” and so marginalized, that Paul is writing as one of those “others.” He and his little groups of persecuted misfits who are beginning to infect the Roman Empire are not speaking from a position of privilege and power. His view is small; he has become small; the people in his church plants are the “others” in their towns and villages. So he writes from “under” not “over.”

One of the first tasks in understanding him is to let go of any imperial outlook, the supposed privileges of being an American citizen, the protection of the huge military apparatus, even the exceptionalism of being a better Christian than others, and become small enough to need a Savior, to act as a slave of Christ.

Bible translators during the Reformation. And subsequently,  undermined our understanding when they decided that rendering the common Greek word for “slave” as slave was too demeaning, so they tidied things up by using the word servant, instead (which is a big difference). Philippians 2:7 in the KJV is a good example. There Paul describes Jesus as taking on the condition of a slave. But the KJV calls him a servant. I think Paul meant what he wrote. It is much more realistic, to see how humankind oppresses Jesus than to see Jesus as serving up salvation to us as we decide whether we want it or not. In order to hear what Paul, the slave of Jesus, is teaching, we’ll have to get into his slavish shoes.

Practice slaving

Once in Paul’s shoes, we can see what he is talking about. His thoughts are a lot bigger than whether a person is going to gain social or political freedom. That achievement would be frosting on his hope cake. The cake is being freed from the need to be freed from what humans do to you and being a grateful slave to the salvation that Jesus is working into us. Here’s just one example of how he thinks:

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving” – Colossians 3:23-4.

That last clause could better read: “It is for the Lord (master) Christ you are slaving.” That is his first-tier thinking. He knows a truth, the Truth, the world does not know and he is living in it, no matter who he is in the eyes of the world or according to its ways.

Everyone who is thoroughly trained in democratic equality and the centrality of human choice (the general God-free zone of Western thought these days) is likely to think those lines are heresy; it might even feel icky to read them, taboo. Slaving?! Paul has none of those qualms. He finds it an honor to be a slave in Christ’s house as opposed to being a ruler in a house of lies. God is a “master” beyond anything Hobbes, Rousseau or Ayn Rand could imagine. You can see that he is not interested in reformation, he’s experiencing transformation.

So when Paul goes on to talk to slaves, getting into the matters of their everyday lives, as they are locked in their situation with masters, benign or despotic, he has a variety of options for them. His first tier thinking makes them completely free to do the best they can with what they’ve got in the day-to-day, passing-away, fallen world. So he says to his brothers and sisters in Colossae:

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord…. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism.” — Colossians 3:22, 25

Note that Paul is likely writing his letter to Colossae from house arrest in Rome. His slavery to Jesus has resulted in becoming enslaved by the Romans. So he can write from personal understanding. Basically, being a good slave who resists the master by obeying out of love and freedom instead of fear is good Christianity. It is possible to exude “no” when you are doing a submissive “yes” according to Jesus. Elsewhere, of course, Paul advises slaves to get free if they can. And he tells Philemon to treat his runaway slave as a brother, or just charge him whatever it costs to set him free.

There are no disempowered people in Christ, even our suffering has the power of grace and love in it. A slave in the world is God’s free person. A free person in the world is God’s slave. This is hard to translate for people who believe the delusion that law makes them free and rational rules and education will prevent suffering. Paul might respond to such ideas, as he did, and say, “Though I am blameless before the law, I am God’s prisoner, a lifelong felon freed by grace.” Similarly, no Jesus followers merely work for human masters, we do whatever we do with the Lord. Even when oppressed, we experience the hope that we will have our reward and the oppressors will get theirs.

How do we take action?

So what do we do in the face of the oppressive masters beating down on us and the world? Pray harder, safe in our salvation? Absolutely. But that is not all. You’re probably taking action in many creative ways.

Our old church summarized what we do in our statement of our mission and put it on a t-shirt:

Loving the thirsty people of our fractured region,
we keep generating a new expression of the church
to resist and restore with those moved by the Holy Spirit.

We resist. I am Christ’s slave. That is a defiant statement of resistance. My existence is resistance. I will never be a slave to a human, no matter what one does to me: buy me, imprison me, or take away my livelihood. I will always belong to the Lord, forever. And, as he demonstrates, in a very real sense, Jesus will always belong to me, forever. He has made Himself our slave.

We restore. I am an obedient slave. My work is well-ordered. Jesus is the Lord of all and we are making that known and effective, day by day. We restore by reorienting people’s identities to align with their salvation. We restore by relentlessly loving in the face of hate and indifference. We restore by telling the truth in the face of lies. We restore by sharing our resources and making peace. And, I think most important, we restore by practicing the kind of mutuality that creates an alternative community that is not allied with the powers that dig up the world and destroy connections between God and people like hurricanes blasting through our village.

Our existence is the foundation of our resistance. We can only hope that the country will be put to right soon. But even if it isn’t, we know who we are and what to do.  Being knit together in the love of Jesus is more important than ever, isn’t it! Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are intent on taking over the world and believe they deserve to! What else would we do but resist?

Your small group in the church: Key to thriving?

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In a new survey, the Gallup organization interviewed people across 142 countries and asked them a series of questions to determine whether they felt they were thriving in their lives or struggling or, worst of all, suffering.  It reminded me of a presentation I made in 2016 to small group novices about how the church could be a place to help people thrive.

Last week David Brooks interpreted the Gallup findings for us in the New York Times:

The number of people who say they are thriving has been rising steadily for a decade. The number of people who say they are suffering is down to 7 percent globally, tying with the lowest level since 2007. This trend is truly worldwide, with strong gains in well-being in countries as far-flung as Kosovo, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Paraguay.

Unfortunately, there is a little bad news. Some people reported sharp declines in well-being. That would be us. The share of the population that is thriving is falling in America, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In 2007, 67 percent of Americans and Canadians said they were thriving. Now it’s down to 49 percent….

People thrive when they live in societies with rising standards of living and dense networks of relationships, and where they feel their lives have a clear sense of purpose and meaning. That holy trinity undergirds any healthy society. It’s economic, social and spiritual.

I spoke with Dan Witters of Gallup, who broke down some of the contributors to social and spiritual health. People who are thriving are more likely to feel a strong attachment to their community. They feel proud of where they live. People are more likely to experience greater well-being when they join congregations and regularly attend religious services. Feeling your life has purpose and meaning, he adds, is a strong driver of where you think you are going to be five years from now.

The sociopath president Trump is terrible fruit of this awful decline of  economic well-being, relationships and meaning. He’s bankrupting us, dividing us, and doesn’t mean a thing he says, much less attends to deep meaning.

The young people in the West are the hardest hit by the decline in thriving. So my wife and I decided our basic reaction to Trump had to include starting a small group. Our first try has not totally failed yet. But we quickly found out just how hard it is these days to get people together who don’t know a lot about getting together.

The small group is the basic unit of the Church.

In the U.S. we Jesus followers might think the individual is the basic unit of the Church. If we are moral, we might think it is the family. But I think the Bible and common sense tells us it is a small group which is the basic unit. Many church people call that small group a cell, a construct within the Body of Christ held together by the Spirit of in love — not born of flesh but of God.

In Acts 20:20 Paul notes how he has been teaching the church in Ephesus in public, like most churches do on Sunday morning, and from house to house — or in all the places where they are gathered to love or serve as a small group. The house to house groupings were like cells in the body of Christ.

The towns and cities Paul visited were relatively small. The churches in them were small in number, too. His teaching assumes people know each another. He’s not writing for the internet. We say “it takes a village to raise a child” because we need to remind ourselves  we are that village. If we did not reinforce our relationships, we might be swallowed up in the huge media machine that makes sameness a substitute for connection. Being the church might become attending a Sunday event featuring Joel Osteen, thinking our common experience or common connection with the person on the screen is connection with each other.

We can lose the essence of what Paul is teaching house to house — to people who are supposed to love each other like family in practical ways, even though they are only family because of Jesus. If we are not a vital part of the basic units of the church, we not only lose the redemption inherent in those relationships, we lose the psychological development inherent in struggling to build them and we remain unfaithful and unhealed.

What do you think of that? Do you have a place in your church where you are the body of Christ? Where you can be healed and be a healer? Where you learn to love? Where you can have healthy conflict that convinces you the process of facing difficult things is not so scary?

Creating groups

I have spent my whole adult life trying to create a place where people can receive what Paul is talking about. So often church people have been in class where they are thinking about doing what Paul is talking about sometime after class! Then they go to the service, which is often another lecture and mainly individuals consuming a religious product.

When Jesus was walking around with his disciples, he was demonstrating the basic wisdom of living as a small group. People caught stuff as they went along. They found some people they could follow and discovered who was a betrayer. They fought over who was the greatest. They were indecisive and unsure. But Jesus was in the midst and they figured stuff out together. They learned self-giving love, they learned how to doubt and be restored, to grumble and be corrected, to ponder and come to agreement. They got a chance to earn a secure attachment, differentiate from their past, learn a new script and act it out in a safe place. In a lot of places the church has deprived people of a chance to mature in Christ, so twentysomethings want to go to therapy when they are mildly anxious – their therapists end up being substitute friends and spiritual guides.

The paradigm we came up with in my former church was simply designed to fly on two wings: a large group wing and a small group wing, everyone energizing our movement. Everything we did was done in groups. Even the pastors of the 4-5 congregations did most of what they did as a team. I think this is so important because the essence of what we do is love. We are meant to be together as surely as the godhead forms a small group – father, son and Holy Spirit.

In the early years, I had some interesting and sometimes wild cells.

In one new cell, we had multiplied from another one that got too big to be face to face enough. Our core group included a somewhat shy Asian architect, our host, a loud South Philly guy who had a coke habit he was trying to kick and his longsuffering wife, and a woman who had just come off heroin and had wandered into the church for a meeting because she saw “hope” on the door — a genuine borderline personality. There were a couple of others who were not so comfortable and me. I did not have my doctorate yet, but I was beginning to earn one practically through my work with this little system. It was a very dysfunctional system I remember fondly. The couple  would continue arguments in the group. The recently-clean woman was an expert at pointing out the vulnerabilities in everyone. The architect wondered why she had ever allowed these people to meet in her apartment, since she had mainly done it to get some friends, not experience this challenge.

Needless to say, this was not a cell that worked out for long. It died. Some groups must die a natural death, otherwise it is hard to get one to live.

Even though we did not thrive, I learned a lot about how to nurture a small group and help people live in them.

  • The couple needed marriage counseling, so my wife was already inventing Circle Counseling, since you can’t solve every problem in the small group, especially when it is not professionally led. This is often the problem with church groups – they are not porous, their “holiness” requires them to have all the answers so no one can admit they don’t have the answers.
White corpuscles gathering around the injured or unincorporated mass
  • Plus I began to think about how some situations, like a couple having conflict or a person addicted to cocaine, might need to get some space in a relational container to heal — a small group with a purpose, like white corpuscles rushing to wounds.
  • And I had my second chance to make a treatment plan for a borderline person to be part of the church. It would not be my last.

Most people who have BPD suffer from:

      • Problems with regulating emotions and thoughts
      • Impulsive and reckless behavior
      • Unstable relationships with other people.

People with this disorder also have high rates of co-occurring disorders, such as depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and eating disorders, along with self-harm, suicidal behaviors, and completed suicides. The malady can be inherited. Is likely trauma-based or family-induced.

Borderline people are attracted to groups in the church but they often kill them. They desire stable people to balance their instability. Unfortunately, they like the ready “hosts” loving people are to feed their insatiable neediness.

Growth requires risk

The needy woman got better and ended up in her own apartment. Her growth required risk — hers and ours. I am amazed that a good third of the Christians in the country are obsessed with their own safety and are filled with fear. We should be the ones safe to risk our utmost and undermost for God’s highest.

A lot of small groups create a nice homeostasis that feels like mother’s milk but often curdles. Groups centered on Jesus need to keep moving with the Spirit, keep growing and renewing, to be healthy. Some churches have Sunday school classes that began when the members were the “young married” class and they are still together in their sixties!

Church leaders need to keep things flexible and changeable, as various and unpredictable as are the members. One reason for this is that spiritual and psychological growth takes risk.

Personal growth requires the interacting flows of relationship building and faith development. Healthy small groups have these complementary flows swirling around in them. That flow makes them good delivery systems for the spiritual food we need to grow and act. It’s a bit like I need to keep the air moving in my basement so the water that recently flooded it does not stay there long enough to grow toxins.

Small group leaders attempt to maximize the positive impact of the movement while minimizing the impact of the inevitable perils. They are always gently helping people to take the risks they need to take.

Making a relationship with a Christian, listening to the story of Jesus, entering a small group meeting, telling one’s story, listening to others, daring to express thoughts and gifts, praying with others, taking responsibility for others and the cell, bringing another person to Christ and the small group, joining in the Sunday meeting, taking action to serve others, making a covenant with the others in the church, giving birth a new cell — there are many risks along the way.

Here are some examples of the elements of each flow that we can encourage, and the risks we can learn to encounter with wisdom:

Do you have any experiences in small groups in the church that just didn’t work out well? Or just felt too risky to you?

Many times the risk reaps benefits

Not long after that other cell died, I formed a cell with a couple of bike messengers and their girlfriends. They all knew “A,” who was a sweet, but not-too-Christian guy in the church. This time the experience was electric and formative. These people became so close they met quite a bit outside the meeting. Some of them eventually became roommates and four of them became two married couples. They loved the opportunity to grow deep in love and to tackle the hard questions of faith and justice together. The group got so large that we multiplied it three ways and they sent me out to make another one from scratch.

What was so different about this one?

  • Groups like their homeostasis and if they can’t form it, they do not cohere. This one became a safe place.
  • Leadership. They liked “A” a lot and me enough. I was a lot older than them, but since they all came from relatively unstable families, I provided some parent power. If you therapists have twentysomething clients you are probably doing that, too.
  • Youth. They were pliable. I think groups are especially important for young people because they have so much to learn about having relationships. And do we really want to send people out into the world thinking that they can or must face all the huge issues of our day and the huge organizations that run it by themselves with only their hand held computer?
  • They wanted what the group offered. At least enough of them did so the others either went with it or kept their criticisms quiet.

Have you ever been in a group that worked out well? What was the best thing about it for you, personally?

A few main themes for training leaders

My presentation was mainly to leaders who were training leaders. So we concentrated on that quite a bit. Training small group  leaders is a lot like training group-therapy leaders. The big difference is the church’s twin flows of real relating and real-time experience of God’s presence.

Regardless of the flow, it is a major temptation to turn an expansive cell into a closed therapy group. People love therapy groups. Once they have been vulnerable with a small group, they don’t really want to repeat the initial risks of forming more relationships.  But it is just that risk which makes them alive and valuable.

Leaders who catalyze the growth we all need to keep experiencing are precious. Here are a few of the important things they must help us do to form life-giving small groups:

  • Learn how to listen and teach people to listen, to God and each other. — Everyone is writing their story, day by day, and they need to tell it.
  • Create an environment of safety. Leaders always need to wonder if they are controlling things out of their own fears and needs or effectively shepherding people along their uncertain, God-directed way of love and truth.
  • Encourage the dance of the big and small. The individual and group both matter. The promise of freedom and our deep need for covenant are dancing. We must honor uniqueness and promote mutuality.
  • Protect the EGR – There is always and extra-grace-required person — at least it will feel that way to people who are not good at relating. The leader protects that person from the group and protects the group from that person. We are all moving somewhere deeper and fuller. We are unfinished. Our present weaknesses and sins have hurtful consequences. That’s a given the leader monitors.
  • Embrace before people believe or behave. One does not have to believe to belong. A small group is like meeting Jesus along the way — therapists might call it “client-driven.” Implying that someone is not “doing the group right” probably won’t help them face the risks they must take to connect with God and their true selves.
  • Don’t deprive people of reproductive rights.  If a church expects their small groups to grow and change, we all learn there is enough love to go around. Love grows as big as it needs to be. We are always changing which always feels risky. When we give birth to the next basic unit of the church, we all get the thrill of bringing new love into the world.

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Today is Clare of Assisi Day! Celebrate her at The Transhistorical Body.

 

 

Mutualism: Creation keeps speaking the truth in love

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The little back plot of land behind our new house needed to be reclaimed. Some kind of bamboo-like shrubs had overtaken it over 15-or-so years of neglect. We could not dig them up by ourselves, so our GC found Anthony from the Northeast who came in with his backhoe. He arrived later than promised, since he tried to get his too-tall trailer under a bridge and had to back it out of a single-lane road full of honkers. He had a long day.

Nevertheless, he worked hard. And we had a nice time getting to know each other. He was happy I guessed his unpronounceable last name was Polish. Similarly, the man from Guinea who had been working that morning on our cul-de-sac garden out front was happy I thought he might be from Conakry, which he was. The whole strange day felt like an island of mutuality in an ocean of polarization. My neighbor came out to explore gardening with me. The father groundhog came out at dusk to see what became of his wilderness. The first bird came to the new feeder. We were all in it together.

While Trump vainly tries to reignite the smoking heap of the Reagan Revolution, even as his past with Jeffrey Epstein nips as his backside, we all seem to be wishing for togetherness more and more. Last week lots of us were out in the street on John Lewis’s death day remembering how much we want to live in community. We really like mutual respect and we do not like diseased predators. The burgeoning protests are a natural reaction to the unnatural, survival-of- the-fittest heresy perpetrated by Eurocentric colonizers who still think their ill-gotten gains make them the fittest to rule.

Mutualism

Contrary to the new Darwinism-by-keyboard we face, there is a small backlash of mutualism that lapped on my doorstep last week and then kept reappearing when I got outside my living room and into my new neighborhood.

For instance, I learned in biology, when a symbiotic relationship between two different species is mutually beneficial, it is called a “mutualism.” This month, scientists studying ant plants in Fiji discovered a variation on mutualism. In a particular ant plant, two normally-antagonist breeds of ants were housed in adjoining chambers of the plant’s reproductive chamber. The ants were fed, the plant was fertilized, warfare was averted. The discovery took the biological study of mutualism to a new level [Phys.org]. Christian skeptics of Darwin’s natural selection theory of evolution, based on competition, quickly noted how his theory falls apart if animals and plants of different species are cooperating [UCG Canada].

The original sin may, in fact, be competition. The major achievement of mental and spiritual health may , in fact, be mutualism – a return to nature as built by the Creator for the way of love. As a marriage and family therapist I can give witness to the reality that competition for scarce resources of grace and hope (and the less-useful justice) can destroy one of the main factories of mutualism in the world: marriage.

My testimony this week is a paean to mutuality, again. I may have failed to bring about a golden age of togetherness through the church, as I intended to do. But every day is a new opportunity to be a true self, reflecting the glory of Jesus, who is the ultimate example of mutualism, becoming one with humanity and so teaching truth and love. From Guineans to groundhogs, we are designed to live in harmony. The more survival-of-the-fittest, the less fit we all are.

Three contrary things mutualism teaches

Christians need to outthink this era like they did for the first three hundred years of church history. So Morton Kelsey said when he took one look at Reagan. At the protests, I take heart when I see people outthinking the fraudulent leaders we have in the U.S. You can see their genius in their signs (well, not mine, usually). For example, my favorite sign last Thursday was this lovely piece of 3D art depicting the despicable Stephen Miller as a puppeteer. I wove my way through the crowd to get a close up picture. People who are carrying the weight of art and literature now are important.

Every scrap of community needs to be nurtured. Tony the backhoe man usually takes one-half down, these days, before he gets started because people don’t pay him. He told me he once took a sealed envelope from a business owner he respected and assumed the $8700 in cash he was owed was in it. He did not want to look disrespectful by opening it up and counting it. When he got home it was $8200. He went back in the morning and the guy said, “Get off my property. You should have counted it before you left.” Nevertheless, he took the risk to trust me. Some people never learn how to be bad. I gave him a tip.

Hope will not disappoint us. Ants look for food all day and ferry it back to their queen and the next generation. They are tempted to fight for it. Then an ant plant adapts to their differences and provides a way for both needy groups to get what they desire and provide what they can. It feels miraculous. We wander into goodness all the time, as well; we’re surrounded by it. For instance, we finally got our new backyard to square one by the surprising efforts of someone who went through hell to get to us and was suspicious we might not pay him, but who hoped it would all work out.

If we don’t find our way into Creation’s mutualism we will likely compete ourselves to death, saying that “selfishness is natural” on our way to the grave. If we keep hoping that love will find a way, we might be surprised that the best we could do to help it along, even though we are just one plant in a forest, is more than enough.