Category Archives: Building community

Keep Talking about How Your Mate Is Doing with Jesus

Building community, Marriage and Family, , ,

The biggest impediment to keeping faith with Jesus might be a good man or a good woman — or at least a man or a woman who wants me.

I have often wondered out loud how long it will be before a new follower of Jesus is derailed by a new unbelieving boyfriend or girlfriend. Sometimes it seems like such a person is sent to the newly-faithful to see how faithful they want to be!

Almost everybody wants to love. The newly faithful are good to love. It is ironic that just as they start accessing a deeper way to love, the very thing that faith unleashes is the very thing that can do faith in! Jesus saves a needy person, brings them into community; they get stabilized and processed a bit, and they immediately use their newly softened heart to connect to someone who disconnects them from Jesus! Or if the person is OK with Jesus, in the abstract (in the, “It’s so cute that you are a Christian,” kind of way), they disconnect their sweet believer from the community and mission that is not that cute. This is a significant struggle right now all over our network.

Figuring out how faithful people mate has been a struggle from the beginning. Paul, in particular, talks about it quite a bit in the Bible. He really gets into the subject with the church in Corinth, Greece. He has a lot to say in his letters to his dear friends about how they are relating, and we have been pondering his revelations ever since. This is the group to whom he writes the famous 1 Corinthians 13 about love. This is the part of that chapter which is often excerpted for weddings:  

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

When Jesus frees a person to love like this, they are a very attractive mate! Many people are glad to receive the Jesus-like love of a Jesus follower as long as the lover doesn’t bring Jesus along with His love. And many people who love like Jesus are very hesitant to unhook from a person who doesn’t like Jesus precisely because they have learned to hope and persevere in love like Jesus!

Yoked with your mate

Maybe that is why Paul wrote again in 2 Corinthians 6 about being overly involved with people who are not involved with Jesus. He says not to get “yoked together” with unbelievers, like mismatched farm animals trying to get some plowing done. Animals that are yoked conform to each other’s ways or they constantly chafe under the yoke. When it comes to followers of Jesus connecting with people following something else, it can be a bad situation for both parties. When a Christian is intimate with an unbeliever, it is like inviting someone to defile the “temple of the living God,” Paul teaches, since the Spirit of God resides in His people. Paul is not saying that an unbeliever is all bad or that he or she can’t be loved and redeemed. He’s saying that they don’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into, and they should not be lured into taking it lightly. Likewise, the believer should not try to hide their light so an unbeliever is comfortable in their dark, as if that were possible, anyway. It is not good for either party. Something has to live or something has to die.

Paul has a long discussion about what to do about these situations in 1 Corinthians 7.  The message of Jesus has come to Corinth and there are quite a few marriages and engagements among the new believers that have been impacted, so Paul wants to talk about what to do with your mate. His main advice is that if a person can manage to not get entangled in sex and marriage at all, that’s a good thing. But I don’t think he really thinks that is going to happen for 95% of the people, so he tries to help sort things out. He says that people who are married when they come to faith should stay married. Don’t desert your mate just because they don’t come to faith. But if they leave you, don’t feel bound to them; let yourself move on. To people who aren’t married when they come to faith he says it would be just as well to stay unmarried, because if you get intimate with someone, they are going to hold sway over you – heart, mind and body; who they are is going to make a big difference in who you can be. So if you need to get married (and that is a good thing), make sure that Jesus can live with the person you marry. It is better to stay single than to be yoked to someone who is uncomfortable being yoked to Jesus.

Like Paul feels the need to talk to his loved ones about the specifics of making love relationships, about marriage, and about how they are having sex, we need to keep talking, too. The love of God poured out on us in Jesus is making us whole and setting us free to be our true selves. It is also making us very attractive to people who need our love, and many of them have no clue about the bondage they are in and the false selves to which they are committed. We need to be honest with ourselves about the limits of who we are in Jesus. We need to be honest with our lovers about what relating to us really means. We’re going to love them; that is what we do. But so is Jesus, and they need to let him be in the relationship, since He’s not going anywhere.

What We Dread Is Not Our End

Building community,

On Tuesday of Holy Week, while Art was bringing us into the Lord’s teaching on the last days, I was feeling for our denomination, the Brethren in Christ.

The BIC has had a lot of losses. Last year two of our bishops resigned, including the one for our conference. They resigned under protest and then would not tell us what the protest was about. A financial officer also resigned from our General Church Leaders, which made circumstances even more suspicious; this has also gone unexplained, even in the offical explanation. Now the bishop of the Southeast Conference is retiring, which makes one wonder how those Spanish speakers will relate to English speakers without their mediator. Rumor has it that the Canadian Conference is going to separate, mainly because Canadian and U.S. laws make it hard to stick together; that is a loss, too. Our General Conference Secretary will be gone this summer; the Moderator is leaving early next year. Is this the end of the BIC?

Communication is death-defying

Let’s talk about it. The essence of being a human who is not independent of God is communication. God calls us and we respond. God reveals and we see and listen. God is a mutually-intending trinity who is in a dialogue that defines each member as they relate. People and institutions who are made in God’s image have a character that reflects God, in that they speak the truth in love as a core feature of who they are. Conversely, systems that communicate in monologue and avoid dialogue are oppressive and destined for death.

At our recent regional conference, to which I was not able to go, those who represented Circle of Hope came away uniformly aghast. A consultant was hired to give a speech that was so strangely coercive they could not figure out what he was doing. He was calling for courage in suffering and for a willingness to forgive, and he cried three times while he was calling for it!

But our delegates could not figure out what he was talking about. We haven’t been told yet what we are suffering or what we should forgive!! There was a whopping fifteen minutes allotted for discussing the major changes that have been going on. Our new bishop and the General Secretary were there and stonewalled the whole process. They apparently had a deal to give no information at all! Someone stood up to ask why our bishop resigned and they received no answer. Someone told me they heard that the practice of denuding the conference landscape of dialogue is mainly a BIC Atlantic Conference habit; other conferences actually confer at their conferences. Our contingent was so visibly distressed at the behavior of the conference leaders that a kind heart decided to take them out to lunch to cheer them up! Is this the end of the BIC?

The glory of God will be revealed

We’ll see. At the beginning of Lent, Circle of Hope Broad and Washington explored the healing of the man blind from birth. People asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “This happened so that the glory of God would be shown.” That was a good answer, Lord! Thanks! When we ask the question, out of our despair and confusion, “Who caused the blindness of the BIC? Is this the end of the BIC?” We may want to get an answer.  But, ultimately, Jesus is probably going to answer the same way he answered other short-sighted followers in the past: “I don’t need great circumstances to show God’s glory. Don’t get stuck in your interpretation of the present situation.”

He was saying similar things to us during Holy Week. On Tuesday, Art taught us, in Jesus’  stead, that the “end we dread is not our end.” Jesus has opened a new way. We need to watch, not fear. On the night Art was leading us I was thinking about the BIC. We love the BIC and we dread the end our leaders seem to be making of it. Most of us have never experienced such persistent lack of wisdom — or whatever it is that may be happening once we become privy to it. We have surely not experienced asking direct questions to our leaders and discovering that they have a mutual commitment to not trust us with the truth. It is astounding.

If God wants it all to end, it will end. But it is probably just a time to change. It is time to move with what the Spirit is doing next.  It is a time to see God’s glory displayed in another surprising way. I take heart in what happened last week. On Tuesday things looked confusing and dark. Jesus revealed mysterious prophecies. On Sunday He rose from the dead.

I dread the end of the BIC. But what I dread is not my end.

Why I Still Read Email

Building community, Leadership, Music, , , , ,

Some days the distance between us as the church is palpable. We are getting forced apart by choices to connect at minimal levels with quick, minimal devices. We keep talking about this, as a church, because we are fully adapted to the devices and the “social networks” that dominate them, and we are wondering if they will quench the Spirit, if they haven’t already.

Technology ambivalence

Some people among Circle of Hope advocate severely restricting all use of machines to interact. I am not judging them when I note, “There are Amish in every age of the church.” Newness is always suspicious. The newest form of the same old evil can be more easily seen than the old evil to which we already conformed. For instance, the fact that the Amish use old school farming practices befouls the Chesapeake Bay watershed. They might feel righteous for not adapting to new ways, but their old ways had some evil in them too.

I am usually more on the other side of the argument. I want the latest technology with which to communicate and work. I can’t get it fast enough. I want to discern what evil it carries and resist it. But I also want to use the opportunity it gives me and use that. As a church, talking about technology is an overwhelming subject. We have been talking about coming up with our “theology of technology” for a couple of years, now; we’ve been totally unable to do it. I think there are two big reasons we can’t develop some lore:

1) We’re too busy mastering the changing technology to think we have anything to say about it. That’s pretty scary since it means that the technology already runs us, we don’t run it.
2) We are too small minded to have a group project like that. We are doing very individualized stuff and don’t see group thinking as possible. Our thoughts can be as small as our screens.

A 25-yearold blogger from the East Village seems to agree with me. He writes about seven things a twentysomething can’t do. Six of his seven things have to do with building decent relationships, mostly communicating. Twentysomethings, in particular, need good ways to connect. They want to do it. The many devices we are being sold to communicate could increase our ability to connect, and in some great ways, they have. For instance, I really like texting about where I am and when we are meeting, and about what laundry detergent to buy. But, my experience is that people who fully commit to the phone screen for communicating are too small to really do it.

A small suggestion. Take the time to read your email

The powers are determined to make us all rats in their cages. They dominate the devices and conform them to proper rat-usage. SO, I think we should sit down and read our email. I don’t mean from all the scammers. I mean sorting out the love.

I admit, I don’t seem to know how to have this discussion yet. The last time the Coordinators talked about it, they had what, for them, amounts to a spat. I said that I need to read my email on a big screen, which gives more honor to the writer and their art. I don’t think we should do major communicating as the body while we have ten seconds at a stoplight to scan an email or blog post. (Maybe the devices would say, “You are so 29 seconds ago.”)

Being behind would not be surprising. Nevertheless, right now, part of my discipline of communicating is to read my properly filtered email, daily. As you know, I send quite a bit of it, as well. Circle of Hope is a major inbox loader. Some people unsubscribe from the Dialogue List because they count it as clutter. Some of the cell leaders don’t even read their weekly info email from their pastor each week, or all the way through. Some of the Leadership Team don’t even take time to read the working agenda email they are using to lead the church with some integrity and vision. It is a challenge to be that disciplined and committed, but it makes a difference as to whether we are knit together meaningfully.

These are four reasons I still read email and don’t  encourage people to use my cell phone for texting, even when I give them the number, unless it is a texting subject (like “tacos or pho?”).

1) I’m trying to communicate.

To me, communicating is about relating, not just data. I want to say something I actually thought about and receive a thoughtful reply. That seems like love is growing in the world. I don’t want to merely pass out info and have data hogs sniff around to see if it is something they want to consume. Dialogue creates deeper community. When we can’t be face to face, heartfelt writing can be a decent replacement.

2) I want to hear more.

It is hard to keep up with my email. I would rather talk face to face or in a meeting or even over the phone (although I’m not always that great over the phone). But those ways of communicating are hard to keep up with too. Communicating is hard. But I still want to hear more and connect more with more people. To be the church, we need to listen to one another and listen to Spirit in one another. That takes quite a bit of listening in quite a few ways.

[The opposite is also true, of course. If you are addicted to checking email because you think some life-altering message is in you inbox, that’s not good. More is usually the enemy of something. Checking email more does not necessarily mean you are listening more. Here’s a link for the addicts.]

3) It is good to slow down and connect.

It sounds kind of strange, I guess, coming from a person who was there for the original email to be sent back in the 70’s. It was so amazingly fast then! Now, sitting down in front of a screen and composing something thoughtful and loving seems like it is kind of old fashioned. Maybe this is my nod to the “Amish” types. The new Amish-types are often people who still know how to write in a language other than textese.

Being alone, concentrating, and writing, are all good, meditative ways to be who we are in Christ and live a life of love. I am writing this with love, too. It takes time. Even as I write, I am facing the cost of acting this way, there seems to be so much to do. But the writing is helping me to be. The way you pause to read and respond is helping you to be, as well, I hope.

4) I am committed to good infrastructure that extends the kingdom.

At this point, email has been a great way to connect the disparate elements of Circle of Hope. Every year, as we grow larger and add more congregations, we have a big challenge to be one church. We are always pushed to be smaller units, if not just random individuals. Holding together by speaking the truth in love is a major counterattack on the powers that want to dominate us. Our cells and PMs are the major ways we express our commitment to being an incarnation of Jesus. But by the time they are over they are “so 29 seconds ago.” We need a daily means of togetherness. Our computers and email help us.

Hey, if you got this far in this blog post, I feel loved. Thanks. You honor me, like I have tried to honor you with my time and thinking. That is splendidly weird and Jesus-like, and it won’t be done for nothing.

We are called to develop a trust system.

Building community, Leadership, , , ,

Like I was saying last night, relationships in the community, whether it is the church community or the city community take trust if they are to flourish. The proverb says:

One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin,
but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. (18:24 NIV)

On the one hand, there is wickedness and superficial gunk that is messing up the togetherness we’d like to experience. There are friends who pretend to be friends. There are companions who do nothing but chatter; they fill up time but not your heart. There are acquaintances who remain superficial; they never attempt mutuality or sacrificially give. There are a lot of people who are fine for sharing a drink in a noisy bar, but they don’t bind themselves.

On the other hand, there is a friend who is worthy of the title — it is possible! There are people who will go deep, who will connect, who are real, who can be relied upon. Those are the kindred souls with whom we feel bound our whole lives. We want that.

Jesus is that kind of friend who sticks “closer than a brother.” And Jesus is moving into the world to make friends and make more friends like himself. We’re moving with him when we  dare to look at what the world is really like (and ourselves!) and try to figure out how to be like brothers and sisters in the world.

The antidote to violence

I think the Inquirer did an OK job of lamenting the state of relationships in the Philadelphia region last week. They made a graphic that served to highlight the level of mistrust in Philadelphia and Camden. It is at the left. Since 2003 in Philadelphia and Camden, the number of murders almost equaled the number of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq during the course of the war. That is a shocking comparison.

It is worth being shocked about, but I have to point out that it is a false comparison. We have enough self-esteem issues without the Inquirer making it worse with misleading graphics! The highest number of soldiers in Iraq was in 2008 when there were about 158,000. That is less than one-tenth the number of people in Philly/Camden. What’s more, the comparison is grossly misleading because upwards to 127,000 Iraqi civilians have been documented casualties of the war. In case you are bad at math, that’s nearly thirty-seven times the number of U.S. soldiers killed, and it is also just the number of documented casualties. So it was actually much, much safer to live in Philly during the Iraq war.

Nevertheless, such violence from your neighbor: a teenager or mentally unglued person with a gun no one will regulate, a drug dealer with an automatic weapon, a soldier or insurgent with bombs and weapons in your neighborhood, a super-rich country flying drones overhead, none of it makes for trusting relationships. The proverbs note this.

A violent person entices their neighbor
and leads them down a path that is not good. (16:29)

The Inquirer made us feel like we are terrible (again). I think it was important for them to tell the truth. They tried. They also pointed out the valiant people who have been trying to undo the violence every year since 2003 and beyond. Someone in the organization either procured or made a map of every homicide in the city. Here are the murders in the immediate area of our building at Broad and Washington since Circle of Hope began in 1997.

Many people have been “lead down a path that is not good.” We are called to be the antidote, along with good people who would painstakingly make a murder map so we can see what is going on. The proverbs invite us to trust those who can be seen to deserve it, because they are the cement of society. Jesus invites us to be the cement of society. We can start by being trustworthy and daring to trust another. We can build cells, teams, congregations, and a network that is devoted to building a trust system. The Circle of Hope proverb in the title says we are convicted to do just that.

I need to build. I need to care. I need to build with care.

Building community, , ,

For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.
By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder,
and someone else is building on it.
But each one should build with care. 1 Corinthians 3:9-10

The reason we do some things and don’t do other things isn’t always to satisfy some abstract sense of rightness or to avoid the repercussions of being wrong. We do or we don’t because we are building with care.

Let me try to say it again: It is not worthy of us to make decisions based merely on desire or out of our survival instinct. We are building something with God that is greater than trying to stay alive and pass on our genes.

Let me try it another way: It is beneath us, as Jesus-followers to always live off what other people do, we need to do — God needs us to build something next.

I am God’s co-worker

Am I wrong, or is that what is behind what Paul is teaching the Corinthians? He is answering the important questions.

Who am I? I am God’s co-worker. Not because I am a dominated slave who better do  something right or I will get fired (literally), but because I am remade for being redemptive and creative like God.

Who am I? I am God’s field, God’s building. Obviously, I am not an inanimate object, but in the same way one can understand working in the field, or constructing a building, I am tended and strengthened for my purpose by God-the-one-who-cares-for-me. What an honor!

What do I do? Now that grace is at work in me, I also create. I am farmed to farm, built to build. Individuals and congregations are like farms — they either produce fruit or death ensues. They are like temples that are built to house our deepest honor; they are like houses built to provide a safe place in which we thrive and from which we explore.

There are certainly entrepreneurs around.

But they are often repackaging the fruit from someone else’s farm. Doesn’t our whole “economy” work like that these days? U.S. people are best at advertising what other people do. [I am certainly hoping to be proven wrong, here, so let me know]. We often experience this lack of creative initiative in Circle of Hope whenever we talk about building relationships. People have so many reasons why they just don’t have the time and energy to do that.

For instance, we were talking about people in Shalom House starting a cell and someone said, “The housemates might like to be in a cell with someone else so they could talk about the people in Shalom House!” It was like they were protecting them from too much demanding relational work. “Surely you wouldn’t ask someone to build an intentional community for two years and love the people in it every day in the pursuit of making  peace! It might kill them! They would quit over the stress. They would feel unhappy that they had to focus and could not follow their free-range desires leading them ‘wherever!'”

If someone asks you to build a relationship from scratch according to how God might like to build one, surely you won’t be at a loss, will you? If the relationship does not fall into your lap fully-formed and functional, surely you won’t be distress, will you?

There are certainly radicals around.

But they are often just talking about things instead of actually building something that does something. Doesn’t the educational system generally work this way? My whole doctorate might be mainly devoted to re-quoting scholars quoting other scholars rather than learning how to produce the fruit of creativity.

For instance, we loved Jesus, Bombs and Ice Cream the other night. I even ate my annual hamburger with lovely people I rarely see, so I was even more pleased. But one of my friends said, “That was nice, but what was it for?” I told them I thought the whole thing was designed to be good communication. There was no illusion that anything but informed and changed minds should result (at least as far as I could tell). That happened. But it was a good question: “Now what? So what?” Circle of Hope often gets stalled out at the talking stage, too. We have the best theology! But what are we going to do? I think God wants to have a building that is built on rock that not only withstands the weather of this evil age, but actually shines an effective, transformative light on it in such a way that people can take the next steps they need to take.

Oh my, that is a lot of work! Talking about it, having the right DVDs for my kids, reading the Bible some times, listening to speeches, etc. is a lot easier than building an alternative  community that demonstrates the love and truth of Jesus in every way it is gifted to do so. We can process information, but can we produce what the info calls for?

Even with all my suspicions that we have lost the know-how, I certainly think we are trying!

But I think we might have more productive farms and stronger buildings in the Spirit if we would admit that we might need some new capabilities when it comes to getting some work done.

Let me say it again: We need to remember who we are as co-builders with God. That identity might inspire some action. Good trees bear good fruit.

One more time: We need to not only be wise in how we build, we need to build the wisdom of God right back into our environment in completely practical ways, like building the alternative called Circle of Hope.

“Each one should build with care,” Paul says. I agree. I need to build. I need to care. I need to build with care.

The Hurricane, the Nanny State and Katniss Everdeen

Building community, Film/TV, , ,
Irene coming to N.C.

I know I could have turned off the TV, but I was a bit concerned about Hurricane Irene. Mayor Nutter said we might lose power for two weeks! Mayor Bloomberg shut down New York! It certainly sounded serious. And, of course, for some people it was extremely serious. David’s sister’s house in the mountains is by a little stream they never expected to pour through their first floor windows!

But, overall, don’t you think the coverage was a bit much? Aren’t we being overseen and instructed a bit too much? I don’t usually agree with right wingers, but it does seem like we have a lot of regulations just waiting to be applied in Philadelphia. We might actually have a “nanny state” already. A couple of girls were caught on TV walking down Main Street in flooded Manayunk yesterday and were also caught on TV being given a citation for doing it! Whatever you do, don’t overtax the “first responders” by being a fool! They are going to overtax themselves by giving you a ticket for violating some statute you never imagined existed. My rule in Philadelphia is, “Don’t forget. Everything is illegal if they want it to be, especially if you are a homeless or unlicensed human.”

Nanny state

We are definitely going the direction of Suzanne Collins’ picture of a super nanny state based on the ever-broadcasting tube in her very popular books for teenagers: The Hunger Games. The trilogy is a very inventive and subversive look at where we are going. I said on my personal Goodreads site: “[The Hunger Games] is an entertaining primer on how to react to a dystopia dominated by manipulative media and a huge military-industrial complex. To no one’s surprise the lessons are: be a superhuman survivor, be super individualistic, be superviolent but moral and, when you are completely burned, be super in love and start over in Eden/home/the wilderness.” (Here is the Circle of Hope Pastors site).

Katniss really does not like to do what she is told. The big problem for the authorities is, every time they try to kill her, she manages to incite a revolution. Plus, she is very good with a bow and arrow – a Rambo for the 2010s. It is a big problem for her oppressors when Katniss’s resistance is televised by the nanny state or televised by the rebels who take over the airwaves — it disrupts their programming schedule! The other day, I found myself wishing that one of my hacker friends had discovered how to hack an alternative feed into CNN and could broadcast a huge crowd of us shouting, “Will you please shut up, already!” We need the info, but not the constant, irrelevant making-news-out-of-nothing that programs us to buy every battery in Target! (I know. I could have  never turned it on. But I did.)

Live out our alternative

What are Jesus-followers to do? We could just do whatever the nanny tells us. Within that constant blather are seeds of actual information, after all, and we like being supportive and nice-looking. We could do like Katniss and find ways to get over the electric fence around our lives and murder our opponents – we like being judgmental, superior and holy-looking, too. I never think either of those solutions is adequate, no matter how many times the myth is replayed in the media. I still think we need to painstakingly work on living as an incarnation of the kingdom of God in the here and now. I think we need to take ourselves seriously as people entrusted with the Holy Spirit and live out an alternative that not only undermines, but transforms the  self-destructing status quo.

When the BW men met last night, their topic was “What do we do in a disaster?” (Timely, eh?) One of the conclusions voiced was that our connection with one another was possibly too weak to survive a disaster. We were either reliant on the government or reliant on ourselves. We agreed that our meeting was a great way to start something. But it was not enough to build the trust that would make one’s brother or sister reliable in a disaster. We don’t want to rely on the TV for our communication and we don’t want to be left alone on the other side of the fence. We really do need each other. To form an alternative community that allows us to be our full selves in the face of the powers that be we need to remember a basic truth Mike and Mimi scripted into  their wedding on Saturday: “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.” (Romans 12:9-10)

I may be too optimistic, but I think both the nanny state and Katniss Everdeen are shooting (sometimes literally) for those goals listed in Romans. They just can’t get there without Jesus, and it is hard enough with him.  We need to keep at it with true devotion on behalf of us all.

Related articles

Thoughts on Unmet Relationship Expectations

Building community,

But to the one who had told him this, Jesus* replied, ‘Who is my mother, and who are
my brothers?’ And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’ Matthew 12:48-50

A lot of commentators have a lot of reasons why Jesus appears to be so cold to his family when they show up outside the house where he is teaching. But let’s be honest, the main reason for this awkward scene is that Jesus is a very difficult child and a puzzling brother. Like so many of our loved ones, Jesus does the unexpected – or he keeps doing what we have come to expect and we still don’t like it. Like I had to quit in the middle of that last sentence because Nat, in the next room, started having his predictable one-year-old issues – predictable, but still not what I had in mind.

I just spent the weekend with a house full of my children and their children and three grandchildren have come home with me; so I know what I am talking about. During our nice time together, we were all kind of difficult in our own way, because we are all kind of difficult in our own way. According to my siblings, I was  a spectacularly weird part of their family (and I get the idea that they are being kind to talk about things in the past tense).

So let me reiterate what I think Jesus was getting at, as he was being difficult: If you are looking to your relationships, even your blood relationships, to get you through, you are probably in trouble. If you are going to spend your whole life waiting for loved ones to do what is expected or to fulfill what you need, you will be waiting a long time. Mary’s son and her children’s brother was God-with-us and they could not rely on him to fulfill their expectations! If you are looking to your friends and family to sustain you, you are probably disappointed right now. Who knows? Maybe we are friends and I am disappointing you as I write this sentence!

Even your dear friends and family need to get their worth from God, same as you, if
the relationships are going to be sustainable. Their worth cannot be in the quality of the relationship. Their value cannot be merely in what they mean to you. No matter how many times the movies tell us that all we need is family and friends to get by, we don’t get by that well even when we have the family and friends. Someone is always in the next room complaining about what they aren’t getting as quickly or as completely as they think they need.

My lesson: If I desire wonderful relationships (and I do) I need to keep my eyes on my primary relationship with Jesus. My desires, my neediness, my unfinished stuff, my general weirdness clutters up my relationships until all they feel like is inadequate. And the same thing is happening on the other side of each relationship! Being a brother to Jesus, is my deepest hope for my other relationships, as well.

When Jesus asks, “Who is my family?” I intend to say, “Me!” That is my first step in
realigning myself with God. If any other unaligned pieces are to come into place, like all those wonderful relationships I cherish, answering “Me!” daily is my best hope of making that happen.

That seems very simple, until the baby starts crying, or the spouse starts complaining, or the friend moves away. Jesus can end up in the middle of our “house,” where everyone is clamoring after what they need or what they think should happen and end up wondering out loud, “Who are my mother and brothers?” He is difficult like that, thank God!

Monica and the New Marriage

Building community, , , , , ,

The statistics are in a duel when it comes to whether living together before marriage results in a higher rate of divorce. Around here we tend to call cohabitation “faux marriage” and one does not have to be “living together” to be in one. But that is beside the point (already!). Some statistics keepers say 45% of cohabiters breakup before they get married.  “67 percent of cohabitating couples who marry eventually divorce, compared to 45 percent of all first marriages,” claims Michael Foust.  Others are very skeptical about how the numbers are crunched, like Catherine Harris, who says that her sense of the stats is that cohabitation isn’t that big of an indicator of marital success. So many PhDs! Such a big internet to argue on!

Moral choices about marriage

Marital “success” is nice. But people are not consulting the stats before they decide whether to cohabit or marry, are they? “Success” is not a very convincing moral argument for a moral decision. Success is not even moral – or is that all we’ve got, now? Moral is still a discussion of right conduct, right and wrong according to one’s principles, or, in my case, how I should live in response to the way of life revealed by God, primarily in Jesus, and persistently informed by the Holy Spirit. Getting married is a significant place where we get to decide, “What is best for me to do? What is best for the person I love?” and also, “What does my community think is the right way to go about this?”

An awful lot of us seem to be floating around in the rudderless ship of our personal decision on the ocean of our undefined thinking when it comes to moral choices about marriage. Many of us are not in a family system with any strength to guide us and most of
us are not part of a community we respect to inform us. The new marriage is a personal expression of “whatever.”

The new “marriage”

Monica Mandell appears to be an evangelist for the new marriage. I ran into her in the latest edition of Philadelphia Magazine. In the online version she gushes “Living together is a phenomenon previous generations did not experience. Although the divorce statistics show that it does not matter if you rush into marriage, marry your high school sweetheart or live with your future spouse, it must make things a lot easier to actually know the person you are marrying. Not only are women in the workplace today, but  they are also having premarital sex! Can you imagine being with your partner for the first time on your wedding night? It is a miracle that so many unions lasted from that generation!”

I took just a cursory look at the stats and there is no way one can say that it does not matter how you marry or whether you don’t marry. Of course it matters, unless nothing matters. One stat that I found most stat keepers agreeing on is that people who value marriage are more likely to stay married.

What’s more, let me be amazed at how Dr. Mandell breezily dismisses virginity with a “Can you imagine?!” I am surprised she did not include the implied “OMG!” Yes, Monica, I can imagine being with my partner for the first time on my wedding night. I don’t think marriages automatically die from lack of virginity. But I don’t think they are worse off with it, not by a long shot. The couples I counsel put a lot of stress on their love and they undermine the development of their commitment by never having any thresholds to cross — like a wedding and wedding night. Forming a healthy relationship that contributes to one’s spiritual health is not a light matter.

Monica’s shallow pool

She goes on, “Modern women should be seeking to balance good marriages with good jobs. Happy, productive parents breed happy, productive children. Having weekly mahjong sessions, lunches and shopping might have been considered fun as a standing operating procedure in the past, but the 1950s are over. Marriage is a partnership. Women who are not using their brains to full potential are selling themselves short.”

First of all, the 50’s were 60 years ago and the stereotype of the TV fifties never existed. That being said, I think Monica means that “postmodern” women “should” be doing the
balancing act she describes. They are more likely than modern women to see themselves as the defining factor in what should happen.

Secondly, families are built in a context and they are not just about happy productive parents (who apparently get their happiness from their marriages and jobs). Marriages happen in the world and “successful marriages” happen in community – hopefully in an extended family, ideally, in the church.

Thirdly, mahjong is not that easy. Using one’s brains as an economic tool is not always that satisfying, either.

I’ve got a feeling that Monica Mandell’s sense of what is good is mainly derived from economics. Looking for love aside, the lookers for love, these days, cohabit because they are shopping. “Getting what one wants” is the principle, shopping is the moral act. Monica’s byline names her: “Director of the Philadelphia office of Selective Search, the premiere (off-line) upscale matchmaking firm for the most eligible singles.”

From what I can tell from the website, Monica is a personal mate shopper. This is what her
website promises the men: “Selective Search Clients are single because they’re selective and don’t want to settle. We honor our Client’s preferences and don’t judge them, regardless of their criteria. In fact, we don’t consider having preferences like age, religion, and physical or personality type as being ‘picky’. We think it’s about knowing who and what you want and being selective….It’s our goal to introduce to you to that ‘needle in the haystack’ – a high caliber woman who will make you happy and fulfilled.” For a “premium fee” the website says, she will find you a premium selection.

Perhaps she “should” have added: Can you imagine the best possible, potential mate to try out in your very own bedroom? We deliver! Marriage as a commodity sounds like a perfect adaptation to a society that is all about economics, now that we have hollowed out its soul and forbidden God to influence it. I am not saying that everyone cohabiting is that shallow. But I am saying that they are wading in a shallow pool.

Err on the Side of Singing

Building community, Music, , , ,

Like a broken tooth or a lame foot
is reliance on the unfaithful in a time of trouble.
Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day,
or like vinegar poured on a wound,
is one who sings songs to a heavy heart. Proverbs 25:19-20

In light of this proverb, my aspirations for the day:

1) When you use me to bite down on an apple, I will not fall out of your mouth (metaphorically, at least).
2) When we need to get away from the bad guys, I will not turn up lame (I am working on not being lame).
3) When it is cold, I will not have left the coat I said I’d bring for you in the closet. (Sorry Gwen).
4) When you are wounded, I will not pour vinegar on your wound. (But then, why would anyone but a psychopath do this?) 

But I might sing. 

I love this proverb and I hate it. I guess that is what the Proverbs are all about — to get me thinking. The translation of this one even gets argues about which makes it even more interesting. Of course, it is hard to know how the language even worked in 700-400BC, or whenever the sayings were written. But there is an alternative version of pouring vinegar on a “wound” — some translators say it is pouring vinegar on “soda” and causing an irritating chemical reaction that neutralizes and spoils the soda. Regardless, it is a proverb about doing all the wrong things when someone is sad — like singing.

Honestly, Solomon seems kind of crabby, to me. If he’s like me, if I don’t want to be cheered up, nothing is good enough. So why blame someone for bothering you when everything bothers you? I know plenty of people who think everyone is lame like it is a conviction, like it is their declaration of independence from the pressure to be happy. You don’t need to take away their garment, they have already walked over in the rain without one on purpose.

So why should I feel bad about singing, just because misery loves company? (Let me slip in one of the most absurdly amusing renditions of misappropriated religion ever, here, in case you aren’t feeling too well. It might cheer you up: 

I choose to interpret this proverb as not against singing in some universal, anti-Jackson Five kind of way. It must be talking about singing just to be mean. It is against singing with a snaggle-toothed leer, singing like it is hiding your coat, singing like it is pouring salt in your wound. It must be talking about the time my sister was sick of traveling across Colorado from Amarillo and she wouldn’t stop singing a little song she had made up: “I long to see the beauty of the Colorado Springs.” The tune still is stuck in my mind and I still feel like killing her, since the car did not have air conditioning, either, and mom was conserving snacks.

So let’s make a promise to each other today: “I will not be that irritating, just because I am miserable, or because I am prone to being irritating.”

But go ahead and sing. If you fear someone will think you are like a bad tooth, I think it is OK to ask them, “If I sing you this song (link), will you think I am like a bad tooth?” They will let you know. Better to err on the side of singing, in my opinion.

Admiring Menno Simons

Building community, ,

It is Menno Simons Day. If you would like the 90-second recap, you can find one here. (I love the tone of the narration!)

Some people say that the amount we encounter in a week of the 2010s is like what we might have experienced in a year of time past. For instance, Hilary Clinton felt the need to call unprecedented meeting of all her ambassadors this week to try to get a handle on the U.S. response to the upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa — things are changing fast. On Menno Simons day (died Jan 31, 1561), it is good to remember that many years in the  1500’s were like last week in Egypt. Without social media and technology, change took longer to take hold in the past, but it was no less earthshaking. Menno Simons struggled for many years with how to respond to the new opportunities for faith and action that came to him as a priest in the crumbling Catholic Church of the Netherlands.

A delegation of Jesus-followers who wanted a radical way of life, came to Mennon Simons and asked him to be their leader.  He became a leader in the Anabaptist movement upon request. The delegation came while the memory of  Munster was fresh. Radical reformers took over that city and tried to usher in the second coming by force. Simons had a more reasoned and gentle way, and he promoted that way the rest of his life. Get the whole story here.

He told the delegation who asked him to lead the scattered Anabaptists that he would pray about the matter of his leadership. When they came again, as he says in his writings, that he surrendered his “soul and body to the Lord … and commenced in due time … to teach and to baptize, to till the vineyard of the Lord,… to build up His holy city and temple and to repair the tumble-down walls.”  He was re-baptized soon after his withdrawal from the Catholic Church in 1536. By December 7, 1542, one hundred guilders were offered by the authorities of Leeuwarden for the apprehension of Menno, who appeared by night at different places to preach and baptize.

Menno Simons turned away from mere tradition and became Bible-centered in all his beliefs and practices. Once he had turned to the Bible, he took it for the Word of God and made it the cornerstone of all his work. His writings are filled with Bible quotations. His approach to the Bible differs from that of other church-reformers in the 1500s. For Simons, everything is, above all, Christ-centered. Every book and every little pamphlet he wrote has this motto on the front page: “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11). Christ-centeredness marks his theology and the practices he derived from the Bible. Discipleship, or a fruitful Christian, life was very strongly emphasized.

Also emphasized was the fact that discipleship does not take place in a vacuum or as a matter merely between the individual and his God, but rather within the congregation, the church of Christ. Menno’s faith is therefore not only Christ-centered but also church-centered. His chief concern was the living in  the true body of Christ. Again and again he refers to 1 Corinthians 12:13, 25-27, and Colossians 1:18-24. The prerequisites for being part of the church according to Menno are regeneration and willingness to bear the cross of Christ. These two are inseparable. Discipline was as natural in the church of Menno Simons as any normal function of the healthy body.

Menno Simons was one of my heroes of the faith when I was first becoming a Christian as a history major in college —  I ended up being a history-of-Christianity major! As I met my ancestors in the faith, I kept meeting people in every era who seemed to “get it.” The majority of the church might be adapting to whatever political or philosophical emphasis dominated the world, but God always had someone who notably kept the true faith and fed his or her era with it. Menno Simons was one of these people.

Today, among the many things he has left us in our inheritance from him, I offer four exhortations that match his convictions:

  • Pay attention to how the Lord wants us to respond to the times. Be afraid, if you must, but don’t let fear stop you from obeying your heavenly vision.
  • Take the lead. Simons did not think he had it in him, either. True leadership may be less about charisma and more about consistently doing what needs to be done.
  • Be Christ-centered. As the Egyptians are demonstrating, regimes and ideas come and go. What we can demonstrate is that the word of Jesus is everlasting. The word is not about “god” or “values” it is about the Lord.
  • Build a real church. This is the Anabaptist genius that I appreciate the most. The majority of the reformers in the 1500’s either cleaned out the Catholic church and kept the framework, or made up an alternative wedding between state and church with better theology. The Anabaptists took the reform movement to its radical basis and tried to live it out. I’m still impressed that they were so much the church that the authorities wanted to arrest them! May our authorities see us as that real and so not them that we pose a threat.