God talk and Gun control

The Georgia legislature is currently examining a bill to allow people to bring guns into churches and schools. This debate has been going on for a while now, in various contexts and versions. I've gone back and forth over my own position on gun control over the years. At this point, I've come to the point of few answers and one very potent question:

What does it say about God if we bring guns in the church?

I don't want to pass judgement publicly on this issue, but church people cannot pretend that we are not making a statement about God with every action we take.

A little while back, I saw a video from the Vlogbrothers in which the speaker made the claim that most people live their lives in a state of functional nihilism. Which means irrespective of belief we tend to act as if nothing really matters. I have been troubled by this claim largely because I it's truer than I'd like it to be.

What does it say about God if we bring guns in the church?

Because it definitely says something. I think it says something different to each person who engages with the question. Everyone is going to have to come up with a reason for supporting or opposing these policies, or by availing yourself of the opportunity to carry a weapon in a place of worship. I think it's a fantasy to claim that we're saying nothing by our actions. Because people are hearing us whether we think we're talking or not.

What does it say about God if we bring guns in the church?

I asked a youth that question after the church we were a part of screened a documentary on gun violence. I wasn't lobbying for a particular position or another, but I think the question is very important, and should shape our actions. We have got to examine why we act in certain ways, and what kind of belief those actions are showing. Because very few of us believe that nothing matters, so perhaps we should start acting like it.

So, internet, let's wrestle together with that question for a moment:

What does it say about God if we bring guns in the church?

In Defense of Words

Throughout the 2012-2013 school year, I was called to serve as the Pastoral Intern to St. Andrews Presbyterian Church. I myself have been a Presbyterian since the foundation of the world, and recognize and value that we Presbyterians have a long tradition of being a people of the Word, having been born out of a revolution of literacy, and literary availability.

I'm speaking, of course, of the Printing Press and the Reformations of the 14-16th centuries. I won't go into the history right now, but suffice to say that the ability to print information had a direct impact on Reformer's ability to disseminate their ideas. Think Chick Tracts, but with good theology instead of unbridled stupid.

I'm a big fan of Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which basically posits that there are different ways of being smart. Gardner lists seven intelligences in his original framework, which are verbal/linguistic, mathematical/logical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, visual/spacial, musical, and bodily/kinesthetic.

Everybody has some of each of these, and people tend to have a couple in which they are particularly excellent.

Over the last year or so, I've heard a number of people express varying degrees of concern and excitement at the increasing influence of non-verbal ways of communicating. For some people, the future is in imagery, and the internet has made it possible to quickly and easily create and publish visual media.

I'm a big fan of using video and images to engage with people who don't experience the world primarily through reading and speaking. Really any opportunity to further open the doors of the church is one I'm in favor of. Using signs and symbols to cross boundaries and let people engage in their own authentic expressions of worship is one of the tasks of church leadership in my opinion.

However, we cannot simply abandon words. Certainly not in a church that ascribes such weight to scripture as the PC(USA). We can proclaim the word visually, or enact the word through scripture, but we mustn't forget that at some point, we need to be able to read this book that the Holy Spirit has preserved and lifted up for us as a unique and authoritative witness throughout the centuries.

My verbal linguistic intelligence deserves to be addressed just as much as my visual/spacial intelligence. So it's fine if you want to show me a picture that's worth a thousand words, but know that the poem that describes that image and the emotions associate with it is where I want to be. Opening the door to other kinds of expression means a necessary diminishing of what has been the almost exclusive means of expression. But it cannot mean abandoning those historical and foundational elements. Neither should it mean that we intentionally downplay our use of words. Words are still good. God still speaks through them.

Particular ways of expressing Truth are equal to, but never greater than, others ways. So bring on the words, that we may describe our images more fully.

An Introduction to Crowd-Sourced Exegesis.

Linguistics and Commentaries

One of the perks of being a Seminary-type person is that you get to know a lot of really good preachers. Some of them even have blogs! Like my friends Bethany and Stephen, both of whom are excellent writers and preachers.

I'm also a preacher (defined here as "one who preaches" even though I'm not ordained). And over the last couple of years I've done a series called "Crowd-Sourced Exegesis." Where I ask the internet with help writing my sermons. I've had moderate success with it, but have found that the people who do contribute to the discussion are wonderful and have brilliant insights.

Although I no longer have a regular preaching gig, I still think that the discussions we have are beneficial to me, and to those who participate. So internet, you and I are going to do a video-commentary series together.

Each Tuesday, I'm going to post a video of myself reading a scripture passage, following the Revised Common Lectionary. It will usually be the Gospel Passage, but may change from time to time. I'll read it out loud, give a few thoughts to start the discussion, and then turn y'all loose in the comment section.

In order to give time for good discussion to happen, I'm going to stay a week ahead of the lectionary. That way preachers who are fervently searching for ideas in the days before they preach will get to see a fully-fleshed out discussion.

It'll be like a homiletical Idea Channel!

Means and Ends

Perhaps the biggest problem facing the Church today is the assumption that it is an end to be pursued and preserved.

The Church is a means, not an end.

There a lot of debate going on right now about the future of the Church as an institution, some argue that its time has passed into irrelevancy, and it will die. Others are quite hopeful, saying that the church is going to change before our very eyes into something new that will be an agent of faithful change in the world. Still others say that the church stands apart from the rest of culture, willing and able to be a beacon for a different kind of life, even if that means that those who are less faithful will fall away.

This post does not enter into which of those views I think is most accurate. All of those views assume that the Church is a goal, a stronger church, a better church, a more engaged church, some version of church as an end.

The Church is a means, not an end.

The study of "Church," or "ecclesiology," is not a new field, it goes back basically as long as there has been a church. There are plenty of books and articles one can read, plenty of talks one can attend, but I am of the opinion that we need to remember to whom churches belong. (Spoiler Alert!: It's not the Church.)

We belong to God.

Now for any readers out there who are not Presbyterian, Protestant, or even Christian, don't worry, you belong to God too, it's a sovereignty thing. You don't have to be a part of my Church (or any church) to belong to God.

The Church is a means, not an end.

The end is God, to whom we belong. The primary goal of life, according to my faith tradition (read:the right one) is to reveal the magnificence of God and to enjoy him forever. There's your meaning of life, Philosophy Majors. Problem solved, you're welcome. Now, like finding the question to the ultimate answer, we get to figure out exactly how we "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

The Church is a means, not an end.

The Church is one way that people have, for centuries, done exactly that. It is not (gasp) the only way, neither will I claim that it is the best way for each individual, but it has been the best way for billions of people over hundreds of years.

"The Church is to be a community of faith, entrusting itself to God alone, even at the risk of losing its own life."

It's not a political institution, it's not a country club, it's not something that needs to be protected from outside threats. The Church is not an end to be sought, it's a way that we enact the chief end of humanity. As long as people find it a good way (and please hear me, it really is,) to reveal the magnificence of God and enjoy God forever, the rest will fall into place. If it doesn't do that, then perhaps God is doing a new thing in our midst?

The Church is a means, not an end.

Choosing to die?

Listen up churches,

You have the option, and it's not one I'm going to choose on your behalf. You may choose to die. But if that is the option you have chosen, don't pretend, be honest about it. There's no shame in answering the call to death so that new life may spring up.

But don't pretend that you're interested in growth if you're not willing to change.

Growth is a kind of change.

When churches change, one of the complaints that ministers often here is that "This doesn't feel like my church anymore." Here's my response:

Was it ever yours to begin with? Or is does the church belong to Jesus Christ?

A church with whom I used to be associated has recently realized that their old members keep getting older, and new members are not replacing them. The result has been that they are trying to grow those young families, they say they want them, and are implementing programs to gather them in.

But they're not willing to actually change anything. It's like they're looking for young families who are already the same as they already are.

Well if you're not attracting new members, perhaps that oppressive sameness is the reason? Each generation has its own needs, its own issues, and for a church to fail to deal with them ignores their existence and doesn't feed the hunger that each group has. You may as well have worship in a different language!

If you are choosing not to change how you do things, you are choosing to die as an institution. Which is absolutely ok. If God is calling you as a church to minister to congregation as it declines and dies, we believe in the resurrection, and if God so wills it, a new church will rise up.

But don't pretend you want new people if you're not willing to change to accommodate them. The holy spirit is active in every time and place, and "that's the way we've always done it" is not a good enough reason.

Crowd-Sourced Exegesis: Why do this?

I have long said that if there is a specificity to my calling, I believe it is preaching. In my preaching class at Columbia Theological Seminary, the professors encouraged us to get input on our sermons from as many different sources as possible. This practice serves a two-fold purpose, it guards against our own biases and potential cultural insensitivity, and it gives us new perspectives on the text which makes for better preaching.

 So last April, I was preaching on a text that had me stumped. So I decided, as I often do, to ask the internet.

 Crowd-Sourcing has been shown time and again to come up with better solutions to almost any problem placed before it. And yet the image people have of sermon writing is that a preacher locks herself in her study for six hours and comes out with a brilliant (or not) sermon ready for Sunday morning. The problem with this model is that only the preacher gets to have that relationship with the text.

I'm not satisfied with that.

I think the body of Christ should all be intimately involved with the scripture that we have held up as a unique and authoritative witness. I want to train people to think about scripture and to relate it to their own lives.

While it is certainly important for me, as a preacher, to maintain that relationship as well and to model that for congregants, the best way to teach this kind of skill is to ask people to do it.

Also, it makes for a better sermon. Because the sermon is not about me. It's about God. And the Holy Spirit, ideally, is moving through me in the preaching moment, and in the sermon writing. But I firmly believe that the Holy Spirit speaks through those around us, so this crowd-sourced exegesis asks for exactly that.

So help my write my sermons. Not because I am out of ideas, but because I firmly believe that you have something to say. Here's a place to say it.

The Time is at Hand...Again!

Well I had an interesting experience this morning.

You see, there's this mythology that gets passed around between preachers, stories that either make good sermon illustrations, or are particular to the experience of those who regularly lead worship. As a Pastoral Intern at a church in Tucker, GA, I'm one of those worship-leader types of people.

One of the stories that gets passed around is the tale of of the visiting preacher, who is recognized by the standard preacher and asked to "Bring a Word to us this morning."Invariably, the story stars a preacher who is unprepared and is horrified to have to come up with something brilliant on the spot.

I don't know how often this actually comes up though. I've not seen it happen, mostly because my tradition, called Presbyterian, is not only people of the Word, but also people of the calendar. We've got ourselves scheduled out as far as we can see, texts selected years in advance, sermon titles months in advance, and hymns picked weeks out. So when one walks into a Presbyterian church, one is pretty sure of who is preaching that morning.

Most of the time.

My regular readers will know that this blog has been primarily a repository for my sermons, and a forum for their composition. This post is tangential to that usage. This morning, I preached this sermon for a second (and a third time).

It is fitting that we would call an audible like this during football season, and what enabled me to do it was the fact that having heard the myth of the surprised preacher, I have started storing my sermons on my Kindle. When it became apparent that I might be called on to preach, it was already too late to write a fresh sermon, and there was a time when it may have been appropriate to pull an old sermon out of a file cabinet, or print it off a computer. Having a handful of sermons on my kindle is the technological equivalent of having old sermons stuffed in one's bible, but takes up less space.

So today I took another step into the virtual church, I preached from an e-reader for the first time. What was wonderful is that, true to the nature of the body of Christ, I did not step out over that chasm alone, the Old Testament reader at the early service used an iPad for his reading, and during the second service, a visitor live-tweeted my sermon.

The Holy Spirit is truly active in every time and place.