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But I would buy a ticket right this minute if I could.

It’s been a long winter. Heck, it’s been a long week. Which makes today a particularly happy one: it’s opening day for Major League Baseball. (OK, the Mariners and A’s played two games in Japan a week ago that were officially regular season games, but today is the real opening day.)

I’ve enjoyed baseball since I was a kid, having spent many hours as a teenager listening to the Texas Rangers on the radio. Upon moving to Iowa after college I fell in with a bunch of Chicago Cubs fans and have followed them ever since. We took the kids to Wrigley Field last fall for the first time, and I have some kid-made Cubs fan art hanging in my office that dates back to Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. I won’t be free to sit and watch the Opening Day game with them today – darn workday afternoon games! – but I’m doing my best to pass a love of the game on to the next generation.

Play ball! Oh, and: Go Cubs, Go!

I’m accompanying a local friend who’s a high school senior when he sings for state contest in a couple weeks. I have now had this song he’s singing stuck in my head since last Sunday night. “Vagabond”, with text by Robert Louis Stevenson and music by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

There are worse earworms, I guess, but that little bum-padump-pa-dah signature is starting to wear on me…

I’ve never been particularly a jewelry or fashion guy. I’ve worn a watch inconsistently over the years, usually a cheap digital for running. My wife has made her best attempts a couple times during our 20-some-year relationship to give me nicer watches, and while I did indeed like them, they never really took. Enough dead watch batteries later I finally just gave up and they got relegated to a box in the closet.

A few years ago I got an Apple watch, and then a couple years later an upgraded Apple watch, and while I really liked it for most of what it did, I couldn’t help feeling from time to time that the last thing I really needed was an electronic device literally strapped to me.

Sometime this past winter I started reading about mechanical watches. Which led to me putting one on a gift wish list. Which led to my dear and patient wife buying me this for Valentine’s Day.

This is what the watch community calls an “entry level” watch. A Seiko 5 Sport, it’s fully mechanical – gears, not an electronic quartz-driven mechanism, and automatic, meaning you don’t wind it and it has no battery – it stores kinetic energy from moving around while you wear it.

I’ve worn it most every day for the past six weeks and I’m really enjoying it. I can’t entirely define why, but there’s something inherently enjoyable about having this finely-crafted mechanical device ticking away in the way that timepieces have done for hundreds of years. Now sure, it won’t buzz when I get a text message (though my wrist still feels phantom buzzing from time to time…) or alert me when the Cubs win a baseball game. But it seems like an appropriate level of value vs. distraction; that is to say, it looks good, keeps good time, and otherwise stays out of the way. And while it cost more than a cheap Timex digital, it was still a lot cheaper than the Apple Watch!

I’ve done just enough online reading about mechanical watches to understand that they call this one “entry level” for a reason. I can’t quite envision buying one that looks a lot the same yet costs the same as a decent used car… but at this entry level it doesn’t feel yet like a too dangerous habit.

One of my favorite discoveries as of late has been the new webcomic Strange Planet. Apparently only published via Instagram, artist Nathan W. Pyle explores mundane human activities through the lens of aliens. It’s delightful and odd. A characteristic example:

I don’t know how long Mr. Pyle can sustain this pace and level of observation, but I’m definitely gonna enjoy these as long as they keep coming.

There’s a really good essay by Jacob T. Levy (Professor of Political Theory at McGill University) over at the Niskanen Center today in which he argues that the Republican Party needs to renew its commitment to democracy. “One sign of seriousness” of a post-Trump Republican Party, says Levy, “would be a commitment to building a Republican Party that can win free and fair elections, a Republican Party whose strategy rests on appealing to pluralities or majorities and that can embrace more voters rather than fewer.”

Levy goes on to document how over the past 30 years, both at the federal and state level, Republicans have frequently failed to win a plurality of the popular vote and yet still have held majorities in legislative bodies. The Republican Party, says Levy,

…is now the beneficiary of all the countermajoritarian mechanisms that make it difficult to translate voting pluralities or majorities into electoral wins, including those that were deliberate creations of constitutional design, those that evolved more or less accidentally, and those that were opportunistically engineered in recent decades. It is moreover the beneficiary of actions that selectively suppress voter turnout and eligibility to vote. Democrats more often than not command popular-vote pluralities even though many Democratic-leaning voters are discouraged or prohibited from getting to the ballot box at all.

Levy argues that the longstanding conservative suspicion of majoritarian democracy is based more on the Founders’ understanding of classical, zero-sum Roman economic precedents, and that such a system is poorly equipped to handle modern commercial capitalism. And while that conservative suspicion is often justified by an argument that the mob will just vote for socialism to line their own pocketbook (as if the elites aren’t also voting for their pocketbooks?), Levy argues that position is unjustified by history.

While there have been deeply despotic socialist regimes in modernity, these have almost never come about through the domestic subversion of democratic governments; they have been imposed by external military domination or else have replaced domestic oligarchic autocracies of one type or another. The fear of the redistributionist mob exercises a powerful hold on the conservative imagination, and has often served as an excuse for repression and constitutional violation. But we should understand that excuse as an excuse.

It’s a long essay and worth reading in its entirety. While I’m not personally likely to support most of the Republican Party ideals regardless of their political strategy, I’m fully on board w/ Levy’s conclusion:

It would be good, in other words, to have a competition in the direction of freer, fairer, and more open-access elections, with competing ideas about what that means and what to prioritize. That’s compatible with making an issue out of instances of Democratic misconduct that themselves call for future-oriented, general, rule-governed remedies. But it means not an agenda based on fake panic about nonexistent undocumented-immigrant voting or almost nonexistent voter fraud, not an agenda about dressing up restriction as reform. I am not sure that there are currently any powerful Republicans who are willing to try to take part in those debates, Republicans who are willing to embrace the goal of building a party that can win pluralities and majorities of freer and more open elections. I am sure that it will be a good sign when there are.

There are a few big stories rattling around the American evangelical church community lately that I see as being related. I’m not sure that there’s a single root cause, but there are some common symptoms and conditions that contribute to them all.

There have been barrels of ink used to write on these issues already. I’m primarily thinking about:

Recognition of a broad historical pattern of misogyny within the church.

• Read Beth Moore’s Letter to My Brothers

The #ChurchToo movement, recognizing a long pattern of cover up of sexual abuse and assault in the name of protecting church leaders and “the church’s witness”.

• Read Jane’s story of sexual assault cover-up at The Masters College or about
• The abuse scandal at Sovereign Grace Churches, or about
• Paige Patterson getting the boot from Southwestern Baptist Seminary, or about
• The abuse mess at Southern Baptist churches that the Houston Chronicle has been reporting on this week.

The disgrace of several multi-site megachurch pastors.

• Mark Driscoll built and then destroyed the Mars Hill empire.
• Bill Hybels at Willow Creek was revealed to have a long unchecked history of sexual misconduct which ended up with the resignation of both of his replacement pastors and the Willow elder board.
• Just this week James MacDonald was fired by Harvest Bible Chapel after suing journalists who had been investigating abuse coverups at HBC, including a bizarre recording of MacDonald talking with a Chicago radio host about trying to put illegal porn on the computer of the CEO of Christianity Today.

Reeling yet? That’s all just within the past five years or so. And there are undoubtedly more revelations to come.

Common threads

A few decades from now I’m sure there will be analyses with better perspective on this stuff, but right here in the middle of it I want to suggest two common threads in all of these.

Powerful, unaccountable men.
Whether at the megachurch level or the independent Southern Baptist Church level, men craving power find ways to set up systems that will keep them from accountability. They hand-pick their elder boards. They re-write church bylaws and membership agreements to ensure that they have all the control.

Systemic silencing and ignoring of women
If you haven’t read Beth Moore’s post yet, go read it. She’s just one of many, but expresses the issue well. In complementarian churches, women who are themselves fully committed to the idea that they shouldn’t be elders or teachers too often find themselves pushed out of any role that smacks of leadership. Tim Challies, no flaming outlier in the neo-Reformed camp, restricts women from publicly reading Scripture in a worship service. John Piper says that women shouldn’t be police officers because they ought not to be “giving directives” to men. I could go on.

Practical steps going forward

It’s not enough to lament. Real repentance includes taking real steps toward change.

When the doctor tells you that you’ve got heart failure and high blood pressure and are going to die very prematurely if you don’t make some changes, you don’t just say “thanks, doc” and then keep your old lifestyle. You re-evaluate your priorities. Sure, you believed strongly in desserts and cheeseburgers and lots of Netflix time. But if you want to be healthy, you may find that a belief in vegetables and desserts in moderation and regular exercise are also acceptable life choices and will allow you to flourish in a way you wouldn’t otherwise.

Similarly, the evangelical church needs to look at its “life choices” and tightly-held doctrinal distinctives and the fruit that has resulted and make decisions accordingly. How serious are we about repentance?

Accountability
Pastors and leaders need real, tangible accountability. For denominations that are structured with congregational autonomy, there should be elder boards that can call pastors on the carpet when need be. We need to take the qualifications for eldership seriously. Not argumentative? Not greedy? Heck, we need to take the fruit of the Spirit seriously. Peace? Patience? Kindness? Self-control? A lot of this stuff is obvious and just needs to be followed.

Additionally, stronger denominational oversight, even an accountability hierarchy, may be appropriate. It’s not a silver bullet – the Roman Catholic church is the largest religious bureaucracy in the world and has its own accountability issues – but something needs to be done. If congregational autonomy is so important that it precludes churches from reporting and protecting other churches from known sex offenders, congregational autonomy is an idol that should be done away with.

Bigger is not better
Can we all just agree at this point that big multi-site churches with charismatic preachers streaming in over video are a really, really bad idea? How many more Driscolls and MacDonalds do we need to build and then destroy these empires before we’re willing to acknowledge that this model is unhealthy, produces unhealthy churches, and causes serious hurt to thousands of believers who were a part of those churches? Give me an army of Eugene Petersons ministering in little neighborhood churches rather than a Mark Driscoll or James MacDonald or (dare I even say it) Matt Chandler projected larger than life on a video screen at campuses across the country.

Listen to women and believe their testimony
When women and young people come forward with allegations of abuse, we must take them seriously. We must have good processes and training in place at our churches to make sure that children and young people are protected. And we need to be willing to expose abuse if it happens, and learn from it, and improve. This is non-negotiable.

Bring women into leadership
It seems obvious that if women were included in the leadership of these churches, and if they were listened to and had power such that they could take action, we would not have the systemic ongoing issues with abuse that we have today. (Again, not a silver bullet – Willow Creek has women in leadership – but still…)

I don’t want to add another thousand words to this post to stake out a position on complementarianism vs. egalitarianism. (OK, so I want to, but that’s another post.) But even pragmatically, if people like Scot McKnight and N. T. Wright – neither of whom can reasonably be accused of being wild-eyed progressives – can find a Scriptural basis for women being ordained into ministry leadership, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether complementarianism is a second- or third-level doctrine that deserves another look.

Finally

Repentance requires action. Repentance for particularly painful, systemic sin probably requires painful, systemic action. Whether the evangelical church in America will be willing to broadly repent remains to be seen. I pray that it will, and commit to doing what I can in my own congregation to act out that repentance.

Justice is inherent in justification.

This understanding of justification will have enormous effects on the church’s understanding of mission. Like Paul, the church that lives by this account of justification will not merely be trying to “save souls” but will want to be God’s agent in the creation of a justified and just people – transformed and participating in Christ and his current work in and through the church.

Evangelism – sharing the good news – will be a message about liberation from all sorts of sin, including hatred and violence and injustice, and into a new life. Centrifugal activity, or outreach – embodying the good news in the public square – will mean siding with those who are neglected and mistreated, whether in the neighborhood or in another part of the world. In fact, the differences between terms like “evangelism” and “outreach” will in part collapse, not because Jesus is being replaced with justice, understood in some generic, secular way, but because Jesus is justice, the justice of God incarnate. The result will be a deeper spirituality, not a lesser one, a closer walk with God (the God of justice), not a more distant one. In fact, the result will be a passion for Jesus and for justice.

— Michael J. Gorman, from Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission

Time for a quick recap of my 2018 reading. I’ve done several reading posts through the year so this can just be a summary.

Thanks to Goodreads I can report I read 71 books in 2018. 33 of those were fiction, the remaining 38 were mostly history and theology, with a few biographies thrown in. Though I have a large virtual stack of unread books in my Kindle app, most of my reading this year was still dead tree books. (Maybe this year I can start plowing through the electronic ones…)

A few notable favorites for the year:

Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope, and the New Jerusalem by Bradley Jersak
Meeting Brad Jersak and hearing him teach this past summer at the Water to Wine Gathering was a highlight of my year. In this book Brad sketches a truly hopeful view of final things, of an eternal city whose gates are always open and inviting. I need to go re-read this one.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone
I’m sure I wasn’t ready to read this one when it was published back in 2011. But to pick it up in late 2018 and read Dr. Cone’s insightful parallels between the cross on which Jesus suffered and the trees on which so many black people were lynched throughout American history was a powerful thing. I was struct by how the Bible is adaptable and interpretable (a more palatable word to some might be “relevant”) to such diverse swaths of the human experience.

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
This one is a sort of alt-history crossed with Hidden Figures written from a strongly feminist viewpoint. Loved it. Next to pass it on to my daughters.

They weren’t all awesome.

Generally if I start in and after 40-50 pages I’m significantly unimpressed, I just put the book back on the return-to-library pile and pick up another one. Life’s too short to stick it out through bad books. There were a few clunkers, though, that I did manage to get all the way through and wouldn’t recommend. Two that stick out are Street Freaks by Terry Brooks (sci-fi writer trying cyber-punk and abusing every cliche in the genre) and The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey, which I wrote about earlier.

On to 2019!

I started the year thinking that I needed to burn through my Kindle and purchased book backlog. Then a week later I went to the library and borrwed four more books. Maybe I have a problem… but I guess it’s a good sort of problem to have.

If you are entrusted with a certain gift, most of the people around you won’t be similarly gifted. They won’t be able to see as clearly because God has not equipped them to. But being gifted with discernment does not give you permission to be spiteful, arrogant, or judgmental toward them. It is your responsibility to help the community by raising uncomfortable questions and then waiting patiently while it struggles with them. And more than likely, you’ll have to wait much longer than you want.

— Hannah Anderson, from All That’s Good: Recovering the Lost Art of Discernment