What's the Difference?

Is there a significant difference between Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "God damn America," and what Rev. Billy Graham has often said: "If God does not judge America for its sins, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah."?

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama,Billy Graham,Jeremiah Wright

The Missional Imagination

A while ago I was chatting with a teacher who was talking how difficult it was to teach at the school they were at.  Transience and a almost nomadic existence of the families had a constant turnover of kids and on top of that, many parents were totally disengaged from the education process.  I see that at work and also at home with Mark's friends who have been moved out of his school to another one in the pursuit of cheaper rent, divorce, or eviction.  It isn't the kid's fault but of course they pay the biggest price.

At work I have been studying demographic trends for two projects I am working on.  Part of it is looking closely at the neighborhoods we serve.  I also need some comparison neighborhoods and I have been using Mayfair (where we live), Lawson Heights (where I grew up), Lakeview (where I used to work), Nutana (where I like to go for coffee), and City Park (again, it's the coffee).  I know data interpretation is a science and art and I don't claim to have an understanding of either but when I look at Riversdale/Meadow Green/Pleasant Hill/King George (note to self, take some better photos of these places and upload them to Wikipedia) and compare them to those other neighborhoods, it shows how serious the need is in these neighborhoods.  I was looking at some crime stats the other day and I thought that they were high for the year but they weren't even for the year, they were for the month.  Before I dismissed them, I thought back to the day that Wendy was grabbed in our car while waiting for me outside of work and also the evening I was grabbed by a drunk while walking home from the theatre with Mark.  In Wendy's case, she was okay and in my case, being 6'4" and sober was enough to deal with the situation but looking back at it, there is a lot of violence here.  Of course on top of that there is the poverty, the disintegration of family values (I was talking to one agency where older sisters were pimping out younger ones), rampant drug use, illiteracy, and the gangs.

Now I know this is an academic exercise since almost no one plants churches in poor neighborhoods (why would you where there is wealth in the new suburbs?) but do we ever ask ourselves what is the best way to make an impact on urban communities and could there be a better way to positively make a difference other than hold worship services other than a Sunday?

Of course there is.  When one looks at what is making a difference in most inner cities, they are not churches.  In Saskatoon there is The Bridge, the Friendship Inn, the Saskatoon Food Bank, White Buffalo Youth Lodge, the Salvation Army Community Centre, Egadz, Quint Community Economic Development Corporation (a non-profit organization founded by residents of the five core neighbourhoods in 1995. When a community meeting concluded two years later that affordable housing was key to solving inner city problems, Quint stepped forward with solutions. By 2002 they had helped over 100 low-income families with children become homeowners. These families pay, on average, $33 less on their mortgage payments than they did on their previous rental payments) and other organizations who provide a wide variety of services for the community.  While there are some wonderful churches and cathedrals downtown, they serve a different demographic and are not involved many social justice issues.

My question is what if we started to start ministries and ideas that had the community in mind as opposed to planting another church, what would they look like?  I think of Harambee (I love their history), Urban Rest Stop, a small scale family housing program, third spaces like the Freeway, or the Franktuary (read the story), or places like the Simple Way, Mustard Seed House, or the Hawthorn House. 

My other question is what if we made a commitment to the places abandoned by the empire?  I expressed my frustration before about the 1000 Christians descending on the west side to "clean up the place" for a day.  I guess it gives warm fuzzy's to people who don't actually shop, live, or even visit the lower west side but I am talking about making a long term commitment to a place that are often left behind.  These places aren't just in the inner city either.  I was outside of Ottawa a couple of years ago and some of the rural communities look like the last the good thing that happened to them was during the Diefenbaker years.  I think of what former NHLer Joe Juneau is doing up in northern Quebec. 

When I have shared these discussions previously, one of the questions that comes up is sustainability.  Of course all of the links I have given have shown sustainability over the years in a variety of ways but there is a bigger question that we don't often address and that is the unspoken idea something has to support a salary (often of clergy) to be worthwhile.  Until we figure out a way to fight our addiction to a paycheck from the church, the mission of many churches will be to provide employment for pastors.  Are we courageous enough to take a risk knowing that it probably won't pay off but because it is the right thing to do and do it in some of the poorest neighborhoods where they may be no pay off?

Well, others have and made a big difference.  Real change always starts at the fringes, someone said something or the other about faith and a mustard seed once...

Hawthorn House Internship

This came from Jason Evans today and it will be of interest for some of you.

"But why this starts a new season for us is that these programs commence a new project that we are taking on with the Ecclesia Collective. We are now in the process of developing an internship program. This program would take 3 to 4 young people that would live in the loft, above our home, spending 10 to 12 months as a part of the Hawthorn House community. Interns would spend time with our community, share meals and rhythms with us, work in our garden with us and we would (preferably) connect with a neighborhood non-profit agency or locally owned business for part time work. Brooke and I will meet with the interns every week for guided time to discuss spiritual formation, social engagement and community life among other things. The internships will not start until this coming fall at the earliest. If you are interested, get in touch."

Technorati Tags: Jason Evans,Hawthorn House,internship,Ecclesia Collective

The Church in an Age of Scarcity

A couple of weeks ago Jason Evans started to post about the recession and the church which started me thinking as I was reading Howard Kunstler's excellent book, The Long Emergency (Wikipedia summary - Full text available on at Google Books) for about the third time.  If you haven't read it, you need to.

I don't know if I totally accept all of Kunstler's findings.  While I accept that technology today does not allow us to deal with the problems of living in age of scarcity, technology in a capitalistic society does tend to bridge a lot of gaps when the capital is there for innovation as it will be in the future.  At the same time I accept his statement that the western world as we know it is not based on democracy, Christianity, or the pursuit of liberty, it is based on cheap oil and natural gas.  Of course we are running out of those two commodities...

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the world's second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China's surging industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these places -- the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia -- and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to withdraw back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the world's remaining oil in the process.

We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that "the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary."

Which will mean that we need to make some changes

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Over the years I had a lot of discussions on what this will mean to the church.  Chris Marshall is wondering the same thing

My truck is paid off but the gas prices are killing me. I don't drive that much and its over $300 per month, not including my wife's car. So what does this project to as a national economy? Recession seems inevitable, will it go way beyond that? A nation already ruled by fear and over-spending with no margins by individuals and the government, what will be the consequences?

How will this impact churches and mortgages and credit lines that can't be fed? As builders pass on who are the committed givers what is left? 1/2 of boomers are there to give and the other 1/2 are driven past their financial margins with consumerism and can't help. Gen X and Millenials have very little value in long term commitments, are all about instant gratification and consumerism is their native language. Commonly this group of up and comers are living on 125-140% of their income taking on exponential debt per year. What will be the result of these decisions having no margins when the shoe drops?

Will American churches go the way of their European counterparts? Becoming really funky coffee houses, restaurants, art galleries and dance clubs. Just things I wonder about.

I know a couple of people who are the boards of Bible colleges and seminaries who talk about getting new projects done in the next couple of years before the builders who give most of the money to churches and institutions pass away.  After that they know that the money will be in far less supply.  On top of that, while churches like to talk about sacrificial giving and committed tithers, most studies show that people give when the economy is good and are more casual tithers.  When faced with higher heating costs, much higher fuel prices, and more money to go to food, will the cash go to paying the churches bills or their own bills?

One thing that economists have been saying for a long time is that our lifestyle is being financed by VISA and when a recession hits, it will hurt those that are carrying debt the most.  In 2004, Maclean's ran this story about Canadian's personal debt being at record levels.

And so this summer Russell Kent and his wife, Mary, joined the legions of other young families in opting to ignore the admonitions they'd heard from their parents and taking the plunge into home ownership. They bought a house in the suburbs north of Toronto - and in the process have run up their debts far above anything they'd ever imagined. The house cost more than the top amount they'd intended to spend. They had to drain much of their savings and load up on personal lines of credit to muster a 25 per cent down payment. In total, they now owe roughly $340,000, spread across a mortgage, three lines of credit and two credit cards. Every month, $920 goes to pay interest on the cards and bank lines, and another $1,460 toward the mortgage. Mary also spends $300 a month to lease her car. Debt payments eat up close to a third of their after-tax income. Russell says making ends meet over the next few years will be "like stretching a gnat's ass over a rain barrel."

If the Kents feel intimidated by the debt challenge ahead of them, they're not alone. Collectively, Canadian consumers now owe $752.1 billion, according to Bank of Canada, up 36 per cent in the past 10 years when adjusted for inflation. Over the same period, personal disposable income, or take-home pay, has risen 15 per cent. In other words, Canadians are piling on debt more than twice as fast as their income is growing.

It is conceivable that many churches in a particular region of the country could find themselves in a horrible financial mess when funds drive up and the demand on church and other social services intensifies.  While many recessions are relatively short lives to the last big one in the 1970s, there are many who are forecasting the next economic meltdown to last much longer.  Of course this will hit the church in a couple of ways.

1. The Church, Powered by VISA.  Several friend who are pastors bring up the point that their churches have some serious debt and if giving goes down then things will be really tough... of course the good news is that banks aren't all that thrilled with foreclosing on banks but have been known to demand spots on church boards as a condition for continued solvency.  For churches who are owing to their denominations, the money that comes from those investments is now tied down which impacts other areas of church life.  Depending on the denomination, it could have a serious impact on church planting/missions or other areas that are dependent on investment income (as if the downtown in the economy won't have a big of enough negative impact).  Even in a church of people committed to tithing (which Barna reminds us is a rarity), 10% of a reduced income is still less.  Add on top of that rising food and fuel costs, we may have a lot less to give above and beyond.
2. Running on Empty| With today's gas price at $1.31, Wendy and I are driving a lot less then we ever have before.  I am walking to work and if Wendy wasn't on medical leave, she recently was transferred down the street to 33rd Street Safeway.  She says that even at -40 degree Celsius she is walking (I'll believe it when I see it) to work.  I was listening to a podcast with Todd Hunter who talked about that at a church he previously pastored, they would track how far people were driving to the church.  At Lakeview, we used to talk about being a city wide church where people used to drive in as far as Borden to attend church there.  Will people drive at $1.50 a litre, $1.75 a litre, $2.00 a litre?  Kunstler talks about a localization of the economy in The Long Emergency and I wonder if that applies to the religion as well.  Will the small Baptist church at the end of the street look more attractive then the regional megachurch on the outskirts of town?  Especially when you can do as Charlie Wear blogs about where he found his sermon to listen to last week on YouTube.  Of course some are going to say, video churches are the answer and they might be if you believe that only dominant alpha males have the right to speak about how to deal with stress in your families for 14 weeks straight.  I personally prefer the idea of local expressions of Christian community throughout the city.
3. Expensive Natural Gas | When natural gas was cheap like borscht (which itself is becoming more expensive) I hated visiting mostly rural churches that lowered their ceilings to save on heating costs.  Now they are looking smarter and I look out of date.  Most churches are really costly to heat and keep functioning for what is still primarily a Sunday event.  Of course you can keep it cold in there during the week and hot during the summer to keep costs down but churches are pretty expensive to run considering many of them aren't used that often compared to other facilities their size.  There are other options that can be used.  Look at how the Freeway uses their space for the community or as I have blogged about forever.  Of course there are a lot of options for making it cheaper to heat but perhaps going the other way and making them useful spaces again is the better option.  I keep thinking to what Steve Collin's did up as his efforts for rebranding the Church of England.  He was re-imagining church interiors as public spaces again in the city, the local church as a third space, a place to work, rest, and pray and being surrounded by spiritual resources as opposed to something that was open from 10:30a to 12:30p on Sunday's.  To answer Chris Marshall's earlier question, maybe the future of the church is to embrace what the Europeans are doing to churches before the churches themselves die off.  Of course the other alternative would be to start weaning ourselves off our addiction to church buildings.  Look at what ReImagine is doing in San Francisco or what the Hawthorn House is doing in San Diego is doing without a traditional church facility. 
4. The one other thing that needs to be addressed is the issue of the Clergy Class.  I don't have a problem with highly educated and well taught clergy but the process to get them to this point is expensive and this is paid for by one of three methods.  1) Rich parents 2) Marry rich (this idea was suggested to me in college) 3) Student loan debt.  All three of these funding options have advantages and drawbacks but the most popular option is often student loans which tends to make hiring clergy expensive.  I am not badmouthing clergy but if we stick with the current method of church leadership, the economics will need to be rethought out and since our current best idea is debt financing, I doubt there is a pile of money out there to fix the issue.  Either we figure out a way to make private education a lot cheaper, we accept the fact that only wealthy churches get qualified church leadership, or we rethink ways to develop leaders.  During the Great Depression, my grandfather's theological education came through correspondence classes.  During the age of YouTube, I am sure we can come up something as least as effective and maybe quite a bit better.

I am a disciple of Thomas Homer-Dixon and I tend to think that there will be an upside of the coming age of scarcity.  I think the church has a tremendous opportunity during this period of change.  Of course a lot of things we think are sacred cows will be turned into black angus burgers but c'mon, it isn't as if we did that well during the age of abundance anyways.  While managing to start a bunch of megachurches, we also managed to usher the church into a very long period of decline and irrelevance and that was after spending billions and billions on church growth.  As we enter into a new age of global warming, scarcity, and perhaps conflict over resources, maybe the church adapt a little better this time.

Also: Alan Creech has posted some more thoughts on his blog

Technorati Tags: The Long Emergency,Thomas Homer-Dixon,Steve Collins

sustainable kingdom, sustainable church

For those of you inside and around San Diego, you may find sustainable kingdom, sustainable church something worth checking out.

What does it mean to be the Church in North America in a postmodern, post-colonial and post-Christendom context? With decreased attendance, how do churches survive? Where do we find authentic community and spiritual formation? How does the Church respond to the growing list of local and global injustices and crisis? If you find yourself wondering about these things, the Ecclesia Collective invites you to join a small group of people in San Diego for a collaborative conversation (kind of like a “skill share”) on May 23 and 24 (little less than a month away) to discuss practices and principles that just might help us find a sustainable way of being the Church within the North American context.

Technorati Tags: San Diego,Ecclessia Collective

A Moving Faithmaps

Stephen Shields is moving Faithmaps back to Blogger.  The new (old) address is faithmaps.blogspot.com.

Technorati Tags: Faithmaps,Blogspot,Blogger,Stephen Shields

Where the money is going

This article in the New York Times caught my eye.

The surging cost of necessities has led to a national belt-tightening among consumers. Figures released on Monday showed that spending on food and gasoline is crowding out other purchases, leaving people with less to spend on furniture, clothing and electronics. Consequently, chains specializing in those goods are proving vulnerable.

The article is about retailers but I assume the above paragraph will have an influence on non-profits who rely in charitable giving and also churches.

Good news from Seabury

For those of you who follow AKMA's blog, we have been reading some bad news about Seabury and it's future.  Today's post makes the future look a little brighter and hopefully Seabury's students and the Episcopal church will see the fruits of Seabury's reimagined future. 

Technorati tags: Seabury, AKMA, Evanston, seminary

Christianity as a Sub-Culture

Scott is writing on Christianity becoming a sub culture far removed from the rest of Canada

It’s easy to talk about religious people reaching out to their communities, or about churches making a difference. There are scads of books being written about “being Christ in your community”. The pathetic reality is though, most don’t really even come close. Neither do churches’ attempts to reach into their communities, neither do outreach driven services. [Emerging] churches do little better.

The problem is that few people are willing to admit that Christianity has become a sub-culture. In many ways it is as foreign to the average Canadian as being a Seik, or Amish. Virtually all church growth strategies still mistakenly assume that the average non-churched person understands the language and culture of evangelical Christianity. The sad fact is, they do not. They don’t use words like “blessings” and they don’t “trust you’ll have a good day”. They are not even marginally interested in hearing some guy talk about an issue that is wholly irrelevant to their lives; let alone in a time slot that is inconvenient with music that they don’t listen to… repeated over and over and over.

I met with a denominational leader this week who admitted that he feels the denomination he belongs to, and the Christian world in general, has lost it’s poignancy and is probably obsolete. This is undoubtedly a hard admission from an individual whose entire career is built on encouraging churches to grow. We wondered together if there was any hope of the church actually connecting on a macro level with its community, based on what is happening now. This denominational head told me he doubted it would happen.

The solution, it seemed at the time, was for the church to finally come to grips with the brutal and almost ugly reality of incarnational living. Jesus Christ was far less mainstream and far more controversial than Christians are willing to be. His lifestyle was well beyond the acceptable range for behavior in your average Baptist or Free Methodist Church. He was accused, apparently in light of some supposed evidence, of living flagrantly and with moral license.

For my entire religious life I have heard the argument that as a Christian I must be careful when playing with fire, morally and culturally speaking, lest I get burned. The unspoken truth of that statement may be that most Christians are so afraid of being burned by the fire that they don’t even come near the heat.

Some of the comments on his post suggested the Christians were supposed to be irrelevant and the church is two worldly already but that isn't really what Scott is getting at (I will say that since we have talked about this for years).  It is a church that is so far out of the world that many congregations have to get consultants in to find out what is going on in their neighborhoods.  How does it get this way?  This is going to make some of you madder than usual but when I read Ron Sider's The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience and see those going to church and professing to be Christians to be no different than anyone else, we know something must not be working. Is it fear of sin or just fear of the world?

Scott mentions incarnational living which is kingdom values and living them out in the world outside the church walls which is difficult when many churches have to hire a consultant to see what their neighborhood is thinking.  In some ways it goes back to the turn of the 20th century with evangelicalism's struggle then to deal with modernity and we secluded ourselves in Christian camps, t-shirts, music, politics, and art.  Also while struggling with engaging culture, we have tossed aside Kingdom values and exchanged them for the values of power, control, and money which even the most committed opponent of the faith will say are the ways of Christ.  As John Wimber wrote, everyone seems to be able to see this except those of us in the church.

Folks, the world knows what this is supposed to look like. Years ago in New York City, I got into a taxi cab with an Iranian taxi driver, who could hardly speak English. I tried to explain to him where I wanted to go, and as he was pulling his car out of the parking place, he almost got hit by a van that on its side had a sign reading The Pentecostal Church. He got real upset and said, "That guy’s drunk." I said, "No, he’s a Pentecostal. Drunk in the spirit, maybe, but not with wine." He asked, "Do you know about church?" I said, "Well, I know a little bit about it; what do you know?" It was a long trip from one end of Manhattan to the other, and all the way down he told me one horror story after another that he’d heard about the church. He knew about the pastor that ran off with the choir master's wife, the couple that had burned the church down and collected the insurance—every horrible thing you could imagine. We finally get to where we were going, I paid him, and as we’re standing there on the landing I gave him an extra-large tip. He got a suspicious look in his eyes—he’d been around, you know. I said, "Answer me this one question." Now keep in mind, I’m planning on witnessing to him. "If there was a God and he had a church, what would it be like?" He sat there for awhile making up his mind to play or not. Finally he sighed and said, "Well, if there was a God and he had a church—they would care for the poor, heal the sick, and they wouldn’t charge you money to teach you the Book." I turned around and it was like an explosion in my chest. "Oh, God." I just cried, I couldn’t help it. I thought, "Oh Lord, they know. The world knows what it’s supposed to be like. The only ones that don’t know are the Church."

When you joined the kingdom, you expected to be used of God. I’ve talked to thousands of people, and almost everybody has said, "When I signed up, I knew that caring for the poor was part of it—I just kind of got weaned off of it, because no one else was doing it." Folks, I’m not saying, "Do some-thing heroic." I’m not saying, "Take on some high standard, sell everything you have and go." Now, if Jesus tells you that, that’s different. But I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, participate. Give some portion of what you have—time, energy, money, on a regular basis—to this purpose, to redeeming people, to caring for people. Share your heart and life with somebody that’s not easy to sit in the same car with. Are you hearing me? That’s where you’ll really see the kingdom of God.

Technorati tags: John Wimber, Ron Sider, church growth, Scott Williams

Saints Peter & Paul Ukrainian Catholic Church

View from the side

View from the front

I have been fascinated with Saints Peter & Paul Ukrainian Catholic Church since I first saw it years ago but I had never taken any photos of it until today.  It is a cross shaped church that is similar on each side and the front.  I went looking for this history of the church and the architect information but I couldn't find it which is kind of too bad as it is one of the more unique buildings in Saskatoon.  Some of the other photos I took today can be found here.

Technorati tags: Saint Peter & Paul Church

McChurch

Bill Kinnon has a great post on consumeristic church, something that Eugene Peterson compares to the anti-Christ in The Jesus Way.  Bill is about as blunt as Peterson is.

Consumerism in the church has been a weird topic for me the last little while.  On one hand a lot of church leaders admit to me that they know their church is based on very consumeristic ideas and that is wrong but on the other hand, most don't know what to do about it or fall back on the "good things are still happening" which may be true but it kind of stops the conversation about if another way could produce even more good things or what if the bad things about it are worse than the good things.

Technorati tags: consumerism, Eugene Peterson, anti-Christ

Why God Doesn't Go to Church

From ASBO Jesus.  Also, if church was an airplane.

Collapse of the emerging church?

Kester Brewin has some predictions for 2008. This one stuck out for obvious reasons.

...the collapse of the emerging church as a popular project.

He expands in the comments

It's just a hunch, but I sense that some of the key players are less and less willing to work with that particular language. I think that, whereas a few years ago people were excited by the prospect, people are getting used to/bored/fed up with 'emerging church' as a concept, and will thus leave it behind.

Not that I think that that means 'game over' for all that people like Emergent stand for - far from it actually - but I think people may increasingly assimilate those ideas into their practice without taking the name. (I think for some time this has been foreseen in the collapse in usefulness of the term 'emerging church', which is so tired as a phrase it has begun to mean nothing.)

I think people have become tired of a whole lot of talking, and want to see things actually happen... and when stuff actually happens, it tends to be quieter and create less internet hum than the talking about it.

I agree with what Kester is saying. For some the term, "emerging church" has become meaningless for many reasons. I am both tired of the term "emerging church" which I agree means nothing now to many people but at the same time I am excited about some of the projects that I am a part of but at the same time don't feel the inclination to talk (or blog) about them, partly because we are in the middle of trying to make them happen and many people in the church dismiss anything with the emerging church out of hand. As I am in an environment which includes the old and new, the label "emerging church" carries a lot of baggage (much of it isn't fair or accurate). I think it is also an evolutionary process where one is confronted with new ideas and as time passes we move forward with those ideas which in turn help our ideas evolve further.

As has been said, the term postmodernity is a description of what we are not, not what we are becoming. Even the term, "emerging church" is based partly on the past, not the present or the future. So while the "emerging church" as a phrase is kind of worn, the ideas that are behind it are more and more a factor in how I live and think.

Disclosure: I am a member of the Emergent Coordinating Group and Resonate which means that I am more than a little biased.

Technorati tags: Emergent Village, emergence, Resonate

What right does any church have to exist?

Darryl is engaging with Frank Viola and George Barna's latest book, Pagan Christianity.

I'm pretty much prepared to accept the core of these points with some reservations. They don't always get the history right, and they overstate the case. I accept that many of our practices are non-biblical but "inconsistent with those of the early church" is another matter. But still - they do have a point that some of our practices today can be held sacrosanct when they can and do get in the way.

But it's when you get to today's assertion that, in my view, the wheels fall off. Viola and Barna argue:

• "The church in its contemporary, institutional form neither has a biblical nor a historical right to exist." (p. xx)

Wow! There's a bit of a jump to get to this point, and I'm not sure if I missed a step somewhere. It could be that Viola and Barna are correct, but I don't think they've proved their case. Pointing out problems with a model means that the problems need addressing. It doesn't necessarily mean that the entire model must be scrapped.

The idea of having a right to exist is an interesting one to me and here is a just a quick idea, maybe no churches have a Biblical or historical right to exist based on any structure.  The church is a church when it acts like the church.  The tag of church is as ephemeral as the action that it is taking at that time.  One of the struggles that I have had with Steve Collins' ideas of church is that it sees to fragile and ephemeral.  Maybe structural is completely irrelevant to our actions today and we are the church tomorrow, when we act like the church tomorrow.

It reminds me of a couple of quotes by Karl Barth

“No, the church’s existence does not always have to possess the same form in the future that it possessed in the past as though this were the only possible pattern.
“No, the continuance and victory of the cause of God which the Christian Church is to serve with her witness, is not unconditionally linked with the forms of existence which it has had until now.
“Yes, the hour may strike, and perhaps has already struck when God, to our discomfiture, but to his glory and for the salvation of mankind, will put an end to this mode of existence because it lacks integrity.
“Yes, it could be our duty to free ourselves inwardly from our dependency on that mode of existence even while it still lasts. Indeed, on the assumption that it may one day entirely disappear, we should look about us for new ventures in new directions.
“Yes, as the Church of God we may depend on it that if only we are attentive, God will show us such new ways as we can hardly anticipate now. And as the people who are bound to God, we may even now claim unconquerably security for ourselves through him. For his name is above all names…”

He also mentions this in Evangelical Theology

Theological work is distinguished from other kinds of work by the fact that anyone who desires to do this work cannot proceed by building with complete confidence on the foundation of questions that are already settled, results that are already achieved, or conclusions that are already arrived at. He cannot continue to build today in any way on foundations that were laid yesterday by himself and he cannot live today in any way on the interest from a capital amassed yesterday. His only possible procedure, every day, in fact every hour, is to begin anew at the beginning... Yesterday's memories can be comforting and encouraging for such work only if they are identical with the recollected that this work, even yesterday, had to begin at the beginning and, it has to be hoped, actually began there. In theological science, continuation always means "beginning once again at the beginning".

I think that any church that is living out the Gospel is the church.  I think most churches (or at least their leadership) knows when they are just going through the motions whether because they are more interested in institutional survival or are more interested in being cool, we know we are faking it.  It may not be apparent right away but eventually the truth comes out and it is either a vibrant community or just another social organization.

Technorati tags: Karl Barth, church, change, Frank Viola, George Barna, Pagan Christianity, Darryl Dash, Christianity, theology

My Favorite Contextless Links of 2007

Another year down which means there was a lot of contextless links to post.  I went back over the last year and re-read them all and posted some of my favorite links here. Enjoy

• 1 out of 400 Americans is homeless :: In January 2005, an estimated 744,313 people experienced homelessness.
  56 percent of homeless people counted were living in shelters and transitional housing and, shockingly, 44 percent were unsheltered. 59 percent of homeless people counted were single adults and 41 percent were persons living in families.   23 percent of homeless people were reported as chronically homeless, which, according to HUD’s definition, means that they are homeless for long periods or repeatedly and have a disability.
• My starship is bigger than your starship
• Star Wars: Episode IV as seen through Episodes I-III :: Much of Obi-Wan's behaviour in this film, and Yoda's in the next, can best be understood if they are frankly scared to death of what Luke might become.
• How budget sneaker makers have the full court press on Nike
• How to pick out a good red wine :: Even a superficial inspection of wine bottles can help you narrow your selection. For example, make it a policy to avoid wine with any of the following on its label: Typos, particularly in the spelling of “wine”.  Any cartoon likeness of a shark, monkey, Dracula wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses, or a drunk Frenchman urinating into a wooden barrel.  Endorsements like “From the creators of Robocop”.  Scratch-and-sniff technology.  Instructions to “Shake Well” or “Keep Away From Eyes, Skin, and Magnets”. Claims such as “No Trans Fats” or “Contains 30% Real Wine”. A vintage date that is a year in the future.
• Roman Catholic diocese closes parishes after they dwindle to 400 people :: In Canada we call "small churches" like that, megachurches.
• Dan Wetzel on how Gary Bettman is the worst commissioner in professional sports and has ruined the game of hockey
• Seth Godin on how you can STOP making the horrible PowerPoint presentations that you are all known for

• Steve Taylor addresses the issue of alt.worship and the poor

• You think your favorite team is messed up?  Outside of the Oakland Raiders and the L.A. Clippers, is there a worse run franchise in pro sports than the New York Knicks.  Sports Illustrated goes deep into the mind of Knickerbocker's owner, Jim Dolan and it isn't pretty.
• The Disseminary has some wonderful early church theologian trading cards online
• An innovative way to keep homeless people away from your megachurch/private members club.
• Wendy is writing about sex in the snow and no she isn't referring to the book
• Winner of the 2007 World Press Photo contest of a badly wounded Iraq war vet returning home to marry his sweetheart:: Their story is here.  More photos of the couple here. via
• Beware of wolves eating guys with GIANT hands
• Burlington is famous for more than the Coat Factory.  It is also home to the famous Windows XP autum theme
• California pastor stole the entire church
• 16 million Americans live in "severe poverty" :: Under $5,080 a year. via
• The world likes Canadians :: The survey for the British Broadcasting Corp.'s World Service asked more than 28,000 people to rate 12 countries - Britain, Canada, China, France, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Russia, the United States and Venezuela - as having a positive or negative influence on the world.  Israel was viewed negatively by 56 percent of respondents and positively by 17 percent; for Iran, the figures were 54 percent and 18 percent. The United States had the third-highest negative ranking, with 51 percent citing it as a bad influence and 30 percent as a good one. Next was North Korea, which was viewed negatively by 48 percent and positively by 19 percent.  Canada had the most positive rating in the survey, with 54 percent viewing it positively and 14 percent negatively. It was followed by Japan and France.
• George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford is off the grid.
• Why does home ownership cause unemployment? :: Wherever people seem particularly keen to own their own homes—as in the United Kingdom, Spain, and some U.S. states—employment suffers as a result. English economist Andrew Oswald has shown that across European countries, and across U.S. states, high levels of home ownership are correlated with high levels of unemployment. More conventional factors such as generous welfare benefits or high levels of unionization don't explain unemployment nearly as well as the tendency to own houses. Renting your home and staying flexible do wonders for your chances of always finding an interesting job to do.
• How Southwest (and others) out innovated their competitors :: Southwest pioneered the change from the hub-and-spoke model, which made sense in a highly regulated environment, to a point-to-point model which highly utilizes the expensive aircraft. Its not that the incumbents didn't understand how Southwest was doing it, its just that for a number of reasons, from their inflexible labor policies to their addiction to long-haul revenue, they couldn't match the Southwest model. As a result, Southwest has been able to generate more profits over the last 30 years than all of its incumbent competitors combined.
• Chuck Norris Action Jeans :: They are pants specifically designed to be worn while you are kicking people in the face. And they retail for less than twenty dollars.
• Governor of Oregon to live on food stamps for a week :: Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski and his wife, Mary Oberst, are used to eating the best their state has to offer: salmon, huckleberries and mushrooms foraged from the Cascade mountains. The coming week will be different. They will spend just $3 a day each on their meals, $42 in all, to match the amount spent by the average food stamp recipient in Oregon. Mr. Kulongoski, a Democrat, and Ms. Oberst are the most prominent people yet to take part in a “food stamp challenge,” a trend sponsored by religious groups, community activists and food pantries across the country. Those who have done the challenge say shopping on such a tight budget requires plenty of planning, a reliance on inexpensive staples like legumes, beans, rice and peanut butter and a lack of more expensive protein and fresh fruits and vegetables.
• Vatican City goes green
• Imagine earth without people :: "The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?
• George W. Bush reflects on his failed presidency: "The reality has been daunting by any account. No modern president has experienced such a sustained rejection by the American public."  What a sad, sad article.
• Life in a glass house
• How ESPN is killing hockey
• An interesting post on the Fast Company blog: What happens when people have great ideas but have no one to tell? Corel is trying to fix that.
• Seth Godin has some legit complaints about business card design
• Why Do Democrats Lose So Often? They appeal to the rational part of the brain. You can imagine how this was reviewed in the New York Times.
• How luxury has lost it's luster :: Paradoxically, as craftsmanship has waned, consumer appetite has grown — and not just among luxury’s original, elite clientele. The vast reach of contemporary advertising, distribution and product-placement efforts has effectively democratized luxury, making once exclusive brands available, if only in the form of logo-covered sneakers or sunglasses, to middle-market customers the world over. “Luxury-brand logos convey wealth, status and chic,” Thomas explains, “even if the bearer of the logo-ed product is a middle-market suburban housewife who bought it on credit.”
• Facebook for old people
• J. Edgar Hoover had plans in 1950 of arresting 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty :: Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis

One of the books I received for Christmas was The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis, a book where one of my favorite authors tackles my favorite sport. In the 1980s rushing linebackers, specifically Lawrence Taylor, became a bigger part of the defensive scheme (at about the same time Bill Walsh was reinventing offensives to make the quarterback more important) This created a problem for the offensive line: protect the valuable & fragile quarterback from the huge, fast outside linebackers like Lawrence Taylor, who you may have seen snap Joe Theismann's leg before. To stop the unstoppable, you need giant-handed men the size of houses who move like ballerinas to protect the blind side of the quarterback. Thus has the left tackle position become the second-highest paid position in the league behind the quarterbacks themselves.

The book is the story of Michael Oher, a kid from the ghettos of Memphis who somehow ends up at a private Christian school and is taken under the wings of a wealthy family and almost accidentally discovers football (his passion is basketball) and whose combination of strength, size, agility, and speed makes him the kind of left tackle that colleges and the NFL fantasize about. As a confessed NFL-aholic, I have to admit that I loved the X and O's in the book but in many ways the book is a story of living out the faith.

A big part of the story is about the Tuohy's. Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy were wealthy white evangelical Christians from the south. They were Republicans and had a daughter in a prestigious private Christian school not known for having a lot of blacks. After Sean initially made sure Michael's lunches were paid for (lunch isn't free at private schools), the got more and more involved until on Lee Anne's initiative they took a 16 year old kid who would not speak, had no social skills and in many ways had no hope into their home. There are a couple of memorable lines from this transition.

The next day in the afternoon, Leigh Anne left her business — she had her own interior-decorating firm — turned up at Briarcrest, picked up Michael and took off with him. A few hours later, Sean’s cellphone rang. His wife was on the other end.

“Do you know how big a 58-long jacket is?” she asked.

“How big?”

“Not big enough.”

Leigh Anne Tuohy grew up with a firm set of beliefs about black people but shed them for another — and could not tell you exactly how it happened, except to say, “I married a man who doesn’t know his own color.” Her father, a United States marshal based in Memphis, raised her to fear and loathe blacks as much as he did. The moment the courts ordered the Memphis City Schools integrated in 1973, he pulled her out of public school and put her into the newly founded Briarcrest Christian School, where she became a student in its first year. “I was raised in a very racist household,” she says. Yet by the time Michael Oher arrived at Briarcrest, Leigh Anne Tuohy didn’t see anything odd or even awkward in taking him in hand. This child was new; he had no clothes; he had no warm place to stay over Thanksgiving. For Lord’s sake, he was walking to school in the snow in shorts, when school was out of session, on the off chance he could get into the gym and keep warm. Of course she took him out and bought him some clothes. It struck others as perhaps a bit aggressively philanthropic; for Leigh Anne, clothing a child was just what you did if you had the resources. She had done this sort of thing before and would do it again. “God gives people money to see how you’re going to handle it,” she says. And she intended to prove she knew how to handle it.

After the Tuohy's decided that Michael would be moving in with them, there was one big problem where do you put a guy who a fifty-eight long is too small for.

As she organized his clothing, Leigh Anne stewed on where to put this huge human being. The sofa clearly would not do--"it was ruining my ten-thousand-dollar couch"--but she was worried that no ordinary bed would hold him, or, if it did, it might collapse during the middle of the night and he and it would come hurtling through the ceiling. Sean had mentioned that he recalled some of the larger football players at Ole Miss sleeping on futons. That day Leigh Anne went out and bought a futon and a dresser. The day the futon arrived,s he showed it to Michael and said, "That's your bed." And he said, "That's my bed?" And she said, "That's your bed." And he just stared at it a bit and said, "This is the first time I ever had my own bed."

This line kind of blew me away.

From the moment Michael moved in with them, Sean began to stew on his future. ("Because I figured I was going to have to pay for it.") Michael was approaching the end of his junior year in high school, and while they hadn't seen his transcripts, they knew his grades were poor. Since Myrtle Beach he'd been good enough of the basketball team that Sean thought he might be able to play at a small college. "And if I figured if he wasn't, I could make him good enough," said Sean.

Of course the next year he discovered football and became dominant but his marks were too poor to get into college. That didn't stop Sean or Lee Anne.

To get into the N.F.L., Michael Oher needed to first get into college. And to get into college, he needed to meet the academic standards prescribed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The N.C.A.A. had a sliding scale of ACT scores and grade-point averages; the higher the ACT, the lower the required G.P.A. Given Michael’s best ACT score, to play college football he would need a 2.65 overall G.P.A. He had finished his sophomore year with a 0.9. A better performance at the back end of his junior year, when he moved into the Tuohy home, raised his cumulative average to 1.564. That’s when Leigh Anne took over more completely. Before Michael’s senior year, she called all his teachers at Briarcrest and asked them to tell her exactly what Michael had to do to earn at least a B in their classes. She didn’t expect them to just hand Michael a grade — though she wouldn’t have complained if they did. But to her way of thinking, a B was the fair minimum to give any normal person willing to take the simple steps. She would hound Michael until he took those steps. Just give me the list of things he needs to do, she told the teachers, and he will do them.

Two days into his senior year, he came home, dropped his massive backpack onto the kitchen table and said, “I can’t do this.” Leigh Anne thought he was about to cry. The next morning, she told him to suck it up and pushed him right back out the door. But that’s when Leigh Anne brought in Sue Mitchell, whom she met at a sorority function.

As a tool for overhauling the grade-point average of Michael Oher, as well as for broadening his experience of white people, Sue Mitchell had a number of things to recommend her. In her 35-year career she taught at several Memphis-area public schools. At Bartlett High School, just outside Memphis, she took over the cheerleading squad and whipped it into five-time national champions. She applied to work at the Briarcrest Christian School, but Briarcrest rejected her out of hand because though Mitchell said she believed in God, she had trouble proving it. (“The application did not have one question about education,” Mitchell says. “It was all about religion and what I thought about homosexuality and drinking and smoking.”) She wasn’t born again, and she didn’t often go to church. She also advertised herself as a liberal. When Sean heard that, he hooted at her, “We had a black son before we had a Democrat friend!”

Still, in spite of these presumed defects, Mitchell was relentless and effusive — the sort of woman who wants everything to be just great between her and the rest of the world but, if it isn’t, can adjust and go to war. And that’s what she did. She worked five nights a week, four hours each night, free, to help get Michael Oher into Ole Miss, her alma mater. The Tuohy family looked on with interest. “There were days when he was just overwhelmed,” says Collins, who saw the academic drama unfold both at school and at home. “He’d just close his book and say, ‘I’m done.”’ When he did this, Mitchell opened the book for him. She didn’t care much about football, but she fairly quickly became attached to Michael. There was just something about him that made you want to help him. He tried so hard and for so little return. “One night it wasn’t going so well, and I got frustrated,” Mitchell says, “and he said to me, ‘Miss Sue, you have to remember I’ve only been going to school for two years.”’

His senior year he made all A’s and B’s. It nearly killed him, but he did it. The Briarcrest academic marathon, in which Michael started out a distant last and had instantly fallen farther behind, came to a surprising end: in a class of 157 students, he finished 154th. He had caught up to and passed three of his classmates. When Sean saw the final report card, he turned to Michael with a straight face and said, “You didn’t lose; you just ran out of time.”

A lot of people would have given up at that point.

Now it was Sean’s turn to intervene.

From a friend, Sean learned about the Internet courses offered by Brigham Young University. The B.Y.U. courses had magical properties: a grade took a mere 10 days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semester on a high-school transcript. Pick the courses shrewdly and work quickly, and the most tawdry academic record could be renovated in a single summer. Sean scanned the B.Y.U. catalog and found a promising series. It was called “Character Education.” All you had to do in such a “character course” was to read a few brief passages from famous works — a speech by Lou Gehrig here, a letter by Abraham Lincoln there — and then answer five questions about it. How hard could it be? The A’s earned from character courses could be used to replace F’s earned in high-school English classes. And Michael never needed to leave the house!

The book is about football but it is also a story on what the Christian faith looks like in practice. I think many people would look at a Michael Oher when he was 16 and think twice about talking to him let alone adopting him. As Lewis writes the story, it isn't just his salvation that Tuohy's were interested in, it was about helping a person for the sake of doing the right thing (something they had a history of doing according to book).

A combination of work, the holiday season, and the book has had me thinking about how to tackle bigger societal problems. I understand what Sojourners is trying to do and I am a liberal and believe that the government has a role in the solution (and helps create problems as well) but I am under no illusions that by fixing the system, one can solve societal problems.

I grew up going to good schools and while there were many idiots there, everyone knew how to read and write. They had learned to learn over the years and while some chose not to, it was their choice. Working at the shelter, I found myself amongst many people who are not in the rat race but are simply struggling to eat and stay warm. That's it. The system keeps them going one day more at a time and for many that is it for their entire life. Poverty has become a life sentence. Maybe it was caused by fetal alcohol syndrome, untreated mental health issues, abuse, or generations of indifferent parenting but it is going to take a long term effort to work itself out.

For FAS victims alone, they many experience secondary disabilities on top of the FAS.

• Mental health problems — Diagnosed with ADHD, Clinical Depression, or other mental illness, experienced by over 90% of the subjects
• Disrupted school experience — Suspended or expelled from school or dropped out of school, experienced by 60% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
• Trouble with the law — Charged or convicted with a crime, experienced by 60% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
• Confinement — For inpatient psychiatric care, inpatient chemical dependency care, or incarcerated for a crime, experienced by about 50% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
• Inappropriate sexual behavior — Sexual advances, sexual touching, or promiscuity, experienced by about 50% of the subjects (age 12 and older)
• Alcohol and drug problems — Abuse or dependency, experienced by 35% of the subjects (age 12 and older)

All of these make it extremely function within society which is combined with a relatively low income earning potential. So whose responsibility are those that can not function well in society? Canadians tend to default to the government (our social safety nets) but that only helps a certain percentage. Social workers tend to be overwhelmed since the budget cuts in social services in the mid-90s. Several churches I know have really tried to make a difference but many efforts are programs where the end result is the distribution of goods on a limited scale which can be a good thing but as David Fitch argues effectively in his book, The Great Giveaway it isn't justice we are performing. We aren't changing lives (although it is important to help a person continue on until help can be had). The solution isn't to not help but rather go further and get more involved and work towards something better in community. Of course that sounds a lot easier than what it is to do which explains why it doesn't happen more.

The church does get bashed unfairly at times because in many ways the inner city ministries and churches that are the most closely situated to the problem often have the fewest resources for dealing with this. Those that have the resources are often a long way removed intellectually and world view from those that have the need. That may make what happened in the book all the more remarkable, someone moved out of their comfort zone and at risk to their family and themselves and became intimately involved in that person's life. Churches are often hindered by a classroom/lecture style of discipleship (the sermon and class) that is ineffective with people who have never been taught that style of learning (Saskatoon has around 1500 truant school kids according to several reports and when they grow up, I would imagine they would be very similar to Michael Oher and very hard to teach).

I don't know in the end what to make that part of the book. It is an issue I wrestle with and wonder what I need to be doing to make a bigger difference in more lives. I see an awful lot of pain and suffering and my prayer every morning is that I make some positive difference in the lives I cross at the shelter and at home.

Technorati tags: The Blind Side, Michael Oher, Big Mike, Ole Miss, Briarcrest Christian School

Contextless Links

• What happened to the Denver Broncos this year?  Injuries, injuries, injuries :: "Oh, it's the hardest season I've had since I've been coaching, there's no question about that," Shanahan said Wednesday as the Broncos began preparing for their season finale against Minnesota.  What makes this harder than eight years ago, when the two-time defending Super Bowl champs went 6-10 in Shanahan's only other losing season during his 13-year tenure?  "Because we're a better football team this year than we were in '99," Shanahan said.
• Is waterboarding torture?  One man decided to try it himself :: I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it's too late. Involuntary and total panic. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye. At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved. I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger. And I understood. ::  I know the current American administration disagrees but I would say it is in violation of the Geneva conventions.
• AKMA did talk about this years ago but Dave Winer brings up the issue of what happens to our digital world when we pass away.
• Fed up with the airlines?  Employees are as well. :: Airline employees are fed up, too — with pay cuts, increased workloads and management’s miserly ways, which leave workers to explain to often-enraged passengers why flying has become such a miserable experience.  A rich record of the employee discontent emerges from regular question-and-answer sessions held at US Airways, which is both the worst-performing big airline in the country and a company that encourages its 36,000 workers to direct tough questions at its chief executive, W. Douglas Parker.  “Doug, I watched you on CNBC today,” said one e-mail message from a worker, sent on Oct. 25. “And I hate to tell you but the interiors of our plans [sic] smell bad and they are filthy. As an employee I am embarrassed to admit working for US Airways. When are you going to quit talking and do something about it?”
• As India modernizes, the profession of the "letter writer" slowly fades
• The best science and idea books of 2007
• Buildings made from business cards
• Emerging Church.info is down.  Anyone know what is up with the site?
• My experiences with Vista were similar to Adam's.   I need a new computer but am not sure if I want to get a Mac but let's be honest, Vista is a big step backwards from XP
• Willowcreek disagrees with me about Christmas pageants :: "In today's world, the church must compete with movies and even restaurants for audiences. Everybody wants to be entertained," said Susan DeLay, who handles public relations for Willow Creek. "People who might not go to church might come to see a Christmas pageant, and if we can share Christ through this, then yeah!"
• The Story of Stuff :: via
• The State of the Church in England (from 2000 - 2007) :: Wow, Anglican church attendance down 20%, Methodists are down 25%, Baptists are down 7% while Pentecostal attendance is up 23%.  Church attendance is down to 2.x - 3.x % in a variety of places in England.

So how does one make a difference?

I was reading some comments, IM, and e-mail in response to my last post.  Instead of editing my post, I am going to offer up some further thoughts.

I grew up in the church and therefore Christmas productions.  It was a lot of rehearsals and time that I could have been playing road hockey and in the end I was glad when it was over but I also admit it was kind of fun.  It taught me some great truths, mostly about how important it was to learn my lines and sing in a choir (yes, I sang in a choir off and on into my teen years).  It also taught me that it was okay for people to yell at one another and cry if they were musical.  The community came, drank apple cider, and engaged for that season with our community.  For the most part it was people connected to the performers (either kids or adults) or people looking for a nostalgic Christmas experience or other Christians looking to soak up as much Christmas as possible over the holidays (Christmas-holics?)  I am sure there is some value in it and I am sure many people love it but come January, whatever changes in church attendance went back down to previous levels.  Even if you are part of a church where a bunch of people come twice a year (Christmas and Easter), whatever is being done at Christmas isn't bringing them back very soon.

Now what could be done with a couple thousand volunteer hours in the community?  Servant Evangelism has a plethora of ideas to do over the holidays locally.  Every day at work we have people asking for warm winter gear (thanks to all those who have donated).  Globally there is the Advent Conspiracy where churches have come together to raise money for fresh drinking water in Africa or as they put it, "Advent Conspiracy is an international movement restoring the scandal of Christmas by worshipping Jesus through compassion, not consumption".   Other churches like Ginghamsburg have committed to confront with the crisis in Sudan.  As a worship event, instead of the big event, how about stealing an idea from Grace and give people a "time out" during Advent.

I am trashing Christmas traditions and maybe there is some value in dusting off the Maranatha Christmas books but if the aim is to be a missional community, I think there may be some better options.

I had a couple of IM conversations with friends who commented on the past as saying that part of the problem is that in the suburbs, you don't see that much need... especially in communities where the homeless problem is invisible and as one friend said, "People in my church don't have very many friends who are not Christians."  I wonder if this the result of the church doing what Dallas Willard talks about when we take people out of the regular communities and keep them in church communities.  Not only does the church deprive a community of ones redemptive potential but at the same time we lose touch of the community we live in. 

It got me thinking of the Christmas ads the Salvation Army runs.  Click on the ad for a full sized version.  Partly because I can see a crack house while typing this blog entry out and where I work, the need is pretty obvious for me.  Guys need warm winter clothes, many single parents who were on a losing strike at the University have very little for Christmas, there are even those who are trying to sleep outside in this weather (which makes the graphic there a little haunting to me).  Today in a meeting arose the need for more programs for people with full blown AIDS and of course low income housing is a big issue with occupancy rates as low as 1% in the city.

There are a lot of materialistic choices to be made this winter (I have even linked to some for you) but as I said before, there are a lot of things we can do that can make a big difference for others this winter.  Maybe my definition of "making a difference" is different than yours but I still think the church can do better than a Christmas cantata.

Technorati tags: Advent Conspiracy, Sudan, Advent, Christmas