Bullet Points for a Friday

  • Between now and July there are only 2 weeks where I’m in the office for 5 full days. This week I was in DC Monday through Wednesday.
  • I’m gonna be back in the saddle, er, on the bench as a church musician the next couple weeks. Looking forward to it.
  • Pretty dang excited for the concert tickets I bought this week. More on that later.
  • Next week I’m out of office for 3 days for Anwyn’s high school graduation.
  • This means that by next week at this time we’ll have 2 of our 3 kids out of high school. When did we get old?
  • I’ve been helping pick out the hymns for our church services for the past several months, which has been a good way to learn the Episcopal hymnal and also to pick out songs I enjoy singing. Is that self-serving?
  • Obviously I mean that I got old but my beautiful wife is as young and lovely as ever.

Happy Friday, everybody.

I may have become the stereotypical liberal exvangelical.

On a beautiful Sunday morning, I slept in (until 8).

Kicked off the coffeemaker to brew my locally-roasted beans.

Played Wordle. (Got it in 4.)

Read through my email newsletters for the morning. Realized I was long overdue to support A.R. Moxon. Clicked the link and started a monthly donation. By my count, the 5th recovering homeschooled or super-conservative Christian-schooled evangelical-kid-turned-writer I’m supporting. It’s a whole genre.

Made breakfast. Drank coffee. Started reading a book on social science.

I’m now a member of a church where you don’t have to show up at the crack of dawn and stay all morning to prove your devotion to the cause. My wife and kids aren’t going this morning. (My kids don’t usually. My wife has other plans today.) I’ll show up this morning for the 10:15 service and do my part by getting up to read the OT and Psalm. I’ll be home by 11:30. (The Episcopal Church: Where You Can Love Jesus and Your Trans Kid. ™)

After church I’ll probably hit the neighborhood farmer’s market. (First market of the year today!)

Still evangelical enough that there’s a verse in my head to summarize my morning thoughts:

“When the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

I'm not claiming any special prescience, but...

I was cleaning up old blog posts here and found this that I wrote back in 2012:

I think it may take the American evangelical church another decade or so to really realize how closely intertwined they are with the Republican party, but my prayer is that the realization hits sooner rather than later. What compounds the issue is that our view of American exceptionalism makes us prideful enough that we are resistant to learn from our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world on the topic.

Little did I expect that, a decade later, the evangelical church would, see it, realize it, and embrace it. God help us.

Reimagining Orthodoxy

Dr. Chris Green shared part of an essay today on a theology of disagreement. There’s a ton of good stuff in it. For example, early on:

Truth be told, what seem to be theological disagreements very often arise from and are borne along by other conflicts rooted deeply in hidden personal and interpersonal anxieties and ambitions. But at least some of our theological disagreements, I want to insist, are in fact the upshot of the Spirit’s transforming work taking shape in our as-yet-unperfected lives, moving us toward the “fullness of Christ” in which we find shalom.

This represents a beautiful freedom that I never found in my life in the American evangelical church.

But further, I want to commend to your thinking what he says about orthodoxy. In the evangelical and fundamentalist church, “orthodoxy” tends to be a cudgel used to keep unwanted questions and questioners away, and to scare the flock away from being tempted toward theological ideas that stray from the party line. Green, though, quotes Rowan Williams to suggest a different approach:

[W]e must reimagine the nature and purpose of orthodoxy. Instead of conceiving of it as a wholly-realized, already-perfected system of thought, we need to recognize it as a fullness of meaning toward which we strive, knowing full well we cannot master it even when in the End we know as we are known. Because the Church’s integrity is gift, not achievement, we can never know in advance “what will be drawn out of us by the pressure of Christ’s reality, what the full shape of a future orthodoxy might be.”

He continues, quoting Williams further:

Orthodoxy is not a system first and foremost of things you’ve got to believe, things you’ve got to tick off, but is a fullness, a richness of understanding. Orthodox is less an attempt just to make sure everybody thinks the same, and more like an attempt to keep Christian language as rich, as comprehensive as possible. Not comprehensive in the sense of getting everything in somehow, but comprehensive in the sense of keeping a vision of the whole universe in God’s purpose and action together.

A lot to chew on there, but I love the vision of orthodoxy as a commitment to keeping a vision for God’s continuing purpose and action to which we are only slowly understanding. Beautiful stuff.

Did the Emerging Church Fail?

Richard Beck has a series going right now in which he asserts that the Emerging Church movement failed. I’m usually pretty aligned with Beck but I’m not so sure this time.

He defines the Emerging Church by some familiar characteristics:

  • Engagement with post-modernism
  • Struggle with evangelical doctrinal positions, leading to epistemic humility
  • New awareness of liturgy
  • An “aesthetic component”, including skinny jeans and a “coffee shop vibe”

That group, Beck argues, “never was able to establish a broad network of churches”, and eventually failed because “evangelism became deconstruction”, and, says Beck, “You can’t build churches upon deconstruction.”

I think Beck is setting up a bit of a straw man here to try to make point he wants to make against deconstruction. But I think there’s an alternate history to Beck’s that comes to a different conclusion.

I think we can see two developments from the Emergent Church of the early 2000s.

First, It’s easy to forget that along with Brian McLaren and Rob Bell, people like Mark Driscoll also came along under the Emergent label. The part of Emergent that went the way of Driscoll took an aggressive posture in their engagement with post-modernism, and rejected epistemic humility, but took up at least some pieces of a new liturgy, and were the exemplars of Beck’s skinny jeans-wearing, beer-drinking, coffee shop vibing “aesthetic component”. In short order they would reject McLaren and Bell’s post-modernism and fall into doctrinal fundamentalism, but they didn’t just disappear as Beck asserts.

Second, Beck severely underplays the movement of many in the Emergent Church into mainstream denominations. Rachel Held Evans famously wrote about “going Episcopal”. Nadia Bolz Weber is ELCA. Scot McKnight became Anglican. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan monk, is the patron saint of the whole movement. Anecdotally, at the less-famous level, I see a steady stream of exvangelicals deconstructing, embracing epistemic humility, rediscovering the historic liturgy, and embracing a more traditional “aesthetic component” by joining high church mainline traditions.

So did the Emerging Church “fail” as Beck suggests? Maybe, if you construct your definitions as narrowly as he does. But look just a little more broadly and you can trace a path from the Emergent deconstructionists of the early 2000s to the exvangelicals of the 2010s and 2020s and into the pews of the mainline. Whether we will bring the mainline to a resurgence or only forestall its demise by a few more decades remains to be seen.

We have attended an Episcopal church now for a few months, enough times at least to get sucked into volunteering for small roles on a Sunday morning. A month ago Becky and I served as greeters/ushers for the service, which she noted might be the first time we’ve ever signed up for a service task that we did together. (Usually I’m the musician and she’s working in the kitchen somewhere.)

Then a couple weeks ago I did the musician thing and played the piano for a service. But we have a regular pianist on the payroll who’s not me (which is a good thing!) so this upcoming Sunday I’m trying something else: I’m gonna be a reader.

I have been assigned the Old Testament reading and the Psalm. I will be practicing ahead of time so that we can avoid any “banana” moments.

A Hymn Aptly Chosen

One of the fun things about attending a church in a new and unfamiliar tradition is that things that may be common, old hat, or even tiredly predictable to lifelong participants in the tradition are new and can bring delight to us newbs.

Current example: yesterday morning I thumbed through the worship booklet before the service and saw that the gospel hymn was familiar: Eternal Father, Strong to Save. I know this one primarily as “The Navy Hymn”, could probably sing the first verse from memory, but I’m not sure I’ve ever sung it in church before. A bit of an odd choice, I thought, but it’s at least fun to sing.

And it was, indeed, fun to sing. It’s in a good range, it’s got some fun harmonic progressions, and for being a small and older congregation, there are still some good harmony singers belting it out.

Then the deacon started into the gospel reading and suddenly the reason for the song selection became very clear.

Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Matthew 14:22-33

Well played, Father Brian. Well played.

Playing the Jeremiah 17:9 Card

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?” – Jeremiah 17:9, NKJV

I had someone play the Jeremiah 17:9 card on me the other day. We were winding up a long email conversation wherein I finally was able to make clear that the standard evangelical hermeneutical approach to the Scriptures isn’t particularly appealing to me any more - that there are other approaches I find more compelling. (Brian Zahnd’s post Jesus Is What God Has To Say captures it pretty well for me right now at a high level.)

Once I got that message across, the message from my conversation partner was simple: beware your motives and understanding, because, after all, the heart is deceitful above all things!

In the evangelical circles I’ve spent my life in, Jeremiah 17:9 is used as a sort of ultimate trump card. If a discussion starts to go sideways, if someone comes to a logical conclusion that something they’ve been taught just can’t be correct, if someone questions how God could possibly be in the right for, say, ordering the murder of innocent children, this is the fallback. Of course your heart rebels against that thought. Your heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked! You need to accept that what we are teaching you is correct and ignore any prompting inside you that says otherwise!

There are problems, thought, with the Jeremiah 17:9 card.

Logical Coherence

First: playing the Jeremiah 17:9 card is logically incoherent. How did the card player become convinced of the rightness of their position in the first place? Undoubtedly through some combination of study, reasoning, and internal desire (even if subconscious) to hold that position. So how does the card player know that it isn’t his own heart that is deceiving him rather than yours deceiving you? If our heart (i.e. our reasoning as supplemented and powered by our instincts) is deceitful, what basis do you have for claiming that yours is so much less deceitful than mine that your conclusion is right and mine is wrong?

Other Bible Verses

I don’t recommend pulling single verses from their context and using them to justify positions. It’s a bad way to understand the Bible. But if you’re going to play that game, there is a broad selection of other verses about the heart that might provide an alternative perspective to Jeremiah 17:9.

Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” - This sounds like your heart has something good in it that needs to be protected!

Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” - The psalmist sure seems to think that purity of heart is a goal worth asking for and attaining to.

Proverbs 3:3: “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.” - We can have love and faithfulness written on our heart!

Ezekiel 36:26: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” - If God gives me a new heart and a new spirit, maybe that new heart is good?

2 Corinthians 9:7: “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” - This one is kinda fun… decide in your heart what to give! God will be happy with this!

Psalm 119:11: “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.” - This one speaks directly to the effects of discipleship upon the heart - the heart is improved and the result is less sinning!

Hebrews 3:12: “See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.” - The existence of a “sinful, unbelieving heart” implies the existence of a holy, believing heart that is turned toward God.

Proverbs 23:15: “My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad indeed.” - Solomon suggests that a heart can be wise!

I hope the point here is clear - if you want to play the game of cherry picking to proof-text your point, why is the Jeremiah 17:9 card a more valid and applicable cherry than any of these verses?

Potential for Gaslighting and Abuse

Gaslighting is a strategy in which a perpetrator bends another person’s sense of reality and belief system, making that person second-guess themselves in a way that is beneficial to the perpetrator. Typical gaslighting phrases include things like this:

  • “Do you really think I’d make that up?”

  • “I did that because I love you.”

  • “You’re too sensitive.”

  • “It’s not that bad. Other people have it much worse.”

  • “I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of this.”

It’s not hard to see how “the heart is deceitful above all things” could fit right in to a gaslighting strategy. A spiritual leader abuses a person in some way. That person responds with a concern. This doesn’t feel right. Something is off here. The leader points right to Jeremiah. Your heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. Don’t trust it. And the abuse continues as the victim is further confused between the truth of the matter clear to their conscience and the deception and malpractice of their abuser.

Finally

A robust examination of discernment - how it works, how we integrate our instinctual “gut feelings”, how we experience the influence of the Holy Spirit, how we come to understand God’s Word and leading through the wisdom of community - would require far more words than I could write here. Whatever discernment is, though, it’s certainly not so simply summed up as “your heart is deceitful, don’t trust it”.

Instead of living in a constant spirit of fear, Christians should live in a spirit of confidence that God is guiding them. If you’ve made it this far, you’ll forgive me one proof-text for this that also suggests God wants us to use our minds, too.

For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV

_Playing card illustration via the Redemption CCG Fandom wiki._

Easter 2022

Christ is risen! Alleluia!

This morning Becky and I attended church in person for the first time since COVID struck. It’s been more than two years. It was our first time at this church—we left our last one during the pandemic. Even having watched services from this new place many times online, it felt odd to attend in person.

The oddest thing for me, though, was that I was only attending, not leading in some way. Absent from Easter for the first time in my adult life was any music rehearsal. I didn’t show up 90 minutes early. I didn’t play music for 3 services. I came, worshipped, shook the pastor’s hand on the way out, and was back home before 9:30.

Reporting my attendance back to friends on Twitter, I asked rhetorically: is it even Easter if I haven’t rehearsed and played music at 3 services?

That question led to a more sober line of questioning. How much of my understanding of service and worship has been formed, or malformed, by a lifetime of working somehow at church every time the door was open?

Every pastor will affirm that ministry is work. I can’t help but think, though, that something is broken when I leave church thinking was it even really worship if I’m not exhausted on the way out?

Two years of church non-attendance have led me to reconsider what faithfulness in the way of Jesus looks like in daily life. Restarting attendance now prompts a new exploration: what it looks like to meaningfully participate in a church without it regularly leading to exhaustion.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. — Jesus

Ten Years

Note: I originally wrote this post in January 2019. 18 months later we made the decision to leave this church. It feels like now it’s time to let this post see the light of day.

We were ten years at our first church out of college.

After those ten years we recognized that we had poured ourselves into the church to the point of exhaustion. I was leading the worship ministry; my wife was leading behind the scenes doing meals, funerals, kitchen stuff - the practical glue that holds a small church together. We had two kids and a third on the way. I had a full-time job outside of the church. It was just too much.

We went around and around trying to figure out how to lighten the ministry load without throwing it off altogether. When I tried to shed tasks my pastor would tell me that he sympathized, but that the church just needed me, that I was almost indispensable, and that they would be in a bad place if I quit.

We watched our handful of real friends at church move out of town or to other churches. When we finally decided the only way to get out was to, well, get out, I found that the pastor who I thought was my friend really cared more about the ministry than about me. The day he called to ask how it was going and I told him that I was leaving the church, he said he wanted to sit down and talk about it… but he didn’t have time in his schedule until two weeks later. Maybe he was just cutting his losses.

We landed at another church, a bigger one this time, where it’d be harder for us to become indispensable. Our new church had a full-time worship pastor. He listened to my tale of burnout and was protective of my schedule. We developed what felt like a friendship - at least, we’d meet for lunches semi-regularly where we talked about life and ministry for 2 - 3 hours at a go. (Is that what passes for friendship when you’re an adult?)

18 months ago the creative and philosophical differences between the worship pastor and me got great enough that, no matter how much we discussed them, I just couldn’t stay on board. So, I documented my issues, sent my regrets, and bowed out as gracefully as I knew how. And once again, a pastor who I thought was my friend cut his losses, told me we should do lunch sometime, and then never talked to me again. (Note: six months after originally writing this, that pastor did get in touch and we met for an hour so he could get clarification on some things I said. It was a weird and awkward meeting. We haven’t talked again.)

Three months after I left the worship ministry, that worship pastor left our church to serve in another ministry and I got asked to be the interim worship ministry leader. I’ve been doing that a year now, with probably at least another year to go before we get someone back on staff to lead it up. Nobody’s yet told me that I’m indispensable, but if I were to bail, the next guy in line who’d pick up the slack would end up just that much closer to burning out, too.

We’ve been ten years now at our current church.

It feels like a familiar path. My wife is back to organizing the kitchen, doing luncheons for funerals, quietly helping hold things together. I’m leading the worship ministry. One by one the handful of people we counted as friends have moved out of town or to other churches. And I’m sensing the exhaustion start to creep back in.

At this point I start to wonder - what am I doing wrong? Or, more painfully, what’s wrong with me? Is this just some sort of built-in ten year cycle, and it’s time to go find a different church? Does that mean that ten years from now I’ll be 50, an empty nester, and starting to look for yet another church? I don’t think I really want that.

But then what’s the lesson? Never befriend pastors? Never agree to lead a ministry? Follow your friends to their new churches? Resign myself to the idea of serving because I can and assuming that this sort of lonely weariness is just what God has for me?

It’s a hard decision to even start considering, with kids involved in student ministries and investment in the current people and church efforts and the difficulty of finding and fitting in someplace else. But how much longer should we wait? It’s been ten years.