Category: Longform
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Finished reading: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
I haven’t been posting on every book I’ve read, but wow, this was a good one.
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson is a history of what she calls “America’s great migration” - the movement of African Americans from the south to northern, midwestern, and western urban areas between 1930 and 1970. She follows three primary characters through their journeys from the Jim Crow south to new jobs and lives in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Wilkerson weaves together their stories with the bigger picture of a changing country, where racial discrimination stubbornly persisted (persists?) even in states where the Jim Crow laws didn’t exist.
Given the unrest in the country at present this was a timely read. It struck home more than history often does because its time frame was so close to the present. It’s easy for me to think of even the 1960s as an old, black-and-white time; each of the characters Wilkerson follows, though, live at least into the 1990s… which I remember well.
Our history in this country is short, and this book was a good reminder that the racial tension we have today isn’t far removed from a long history of racism and slavery. We have so much yet to learn.
Finished reading: compendium 4
I’ve hit a bit of a slowdown in my reading as the summer got busy, but have still made some progress on the book pile…
- Porcelain: A Memoir by Moby - Interesting stories, but what a sad trajectory. From the struggling musician trying to make his way in the world to an addict who makes light of being drunk and missing his mother’s funeral, and brags about getting sexual favors from models in strung-out parties. Here’s hoping God has a third act in plan for this guy’s life.
- Shaker by Scott Frank - A not-particularly-memorable detective novel.
- The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes - How awful was the culture around dealing with criminals in the 1700s in England? Awful. Maybe worse. First eye-opening, then disturbing, then almost tiresome… you can only read so much about how horrible things were for everyone (prisoners, guards, and aboriginals alike) without having to just stop.
- Hamilton: The Revolution by Lin-Manuel Miranda - notes and pictures about the Broadway production. Love it.
- The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman - Wanna hate a self-absorbed protagonist? This is the book for you.
- You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K. A. Smith - A lay-level treatment of his big Kingdom book. Makes me want to go join a church that’s serious about catechesis and liturgy.
- Whose Body? (Lord Peter Wimsey series, Book #1) by Dorothy Sayers - I’d never heard of this series before, but a couple librarian friends recommended it, and book 1 was enjoyable. Currently reading book 2.
- Humans of New York: Stories by Brandon Stanton - continues the remarkable Humans of New York photo series, but enhanced with comments and stories from those photographed. A wonderful (and sometimes sobering) celebration of the joyous diversity of the human experience.
- Infomocracy by Malka Ann Older - an interesting little novel postulating a future where an all-reaching Information service drives micro-democracies. As ever, the question is this: who watches the watchers?
In addition to the second Sayers novel, I’m slowly working my way through Volume 1 of Pelikan’s church history series and more quickly devouring Isabel Wilkerson’s excellent The Warmth of Other Suns. More on that later.
On Watching the Tonys for the First Time
Last Sunday night I sat down with my family and watched the Tony Awards ceremony. (The Tonys are given out yearly to award the best in musical and stage theater, similar to the Oscars for film or the Grammys for music.)
I’d never watched the Tonys before. I’m usually an Oscars guy, and every once in a while I’ll watch the Grammys (or at least that year when Arcade Fire was up for a bunch of awards), but the Tonys? Nope.
Then Hamilton came along, and we had an excuse. It’s been a bit of an obsession in our house, so an opportunity to see a performance from the show, and to see if it would win all the awards? Gotta watch it. (How much of an obsession, you ask? In our house, now, if the girls want to know the time, they will precisely ask “what is the time?”, because they know if they ask “what time is it?”, at least one member of the household will reply “showtime!”, which is invariably followed by “like I said…”. Every time.)
In retrospect I’m not sure why I follow the Oscars every year. I follow film (via podcast far more than I watch it. I guess I get a kick out of seeing the celebrities off the big screen, hearing the speeches, being able to discuss the ceremony the next day, whatever. But the Oscars ceremony has a history of being pretty awful. It runs long. The hosts are lame, or wooden, or both. The patter between presenters is forced. Depending on the year you might get a good musical number or two - the song from Selma brought down the house last year - but otherwise… it’s more an event than a great show.
Enter the Tonys. What a fantastic awards show! Host James Corden was funny (and very talented!) without dragging any jokes out too long or being obnoxious. The show moved along at a good clip, full of musical numbers from the nominated musicals. Leading up to commercial breaks, a cast from one of the nominated shows would move to a little outside stage on the street to perform a quick bit from some other classic Broadway show. (This led, charmingly enough, to Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber playing the tambourine to accompany Steve Martin on the banjo for one song. Not bad, Sir Andrew. Not bad.)
And the performances. Wow, the performances. Carmen Cusack belting it out in a number from Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s musical Bright Star. Audra McDonald singing and dancing (while 4 or 5 months pregnant!) in Shuffle Along. The big wedding dance number from the revival of Fiddler on the Roof. And The Color Purple. Goodness me, The Color Purple.
Having tuned in to see Hamilton, what I found along with it was a theater full of incredibly talented people who, to all appearances, really love the music and dance, and who even between show casts share a great camaraderie. In contrast to the cool, cynical detachment often seen at the Oscars, the Tonys were enthusiastic, joyous, and intense.
And then there were moments of brilliance like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s acceptance speech, which he provided in the form of a sonnet:
On the night after the horrific mass shooting in an Orlando nightclub, the Tony Awards show both acknowledged the loss and provided, if not some healing, at least a respite from the pain - an embrace saying we are in this together and we will get through it.
And when the Hamilton cast came back on stage for the closing number, and a good chunk of the audience stood up and sang along with them, the joy in their voices, faces, and dancing bodies shouted out that Miranda’s lyrics hold a timeless truth.
“Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”
Worship Pastor as Tour Guide
A couple weeks back I linked to a two hour panel video discussing The Worship Leader as Pastoral Musician. I’ve finally gotten all the way through the video and want to highlight some thoughts from it that stuck out to me. The first one I want to talk about is Worship Pastor as Tour Guide.
This thought comes from Sandra Maria Van Opstal, who after 15 years with InterVarsity currently serves as Executive Pastor of The Grace and Peace Community, a church community associated with the Christian Reform Church on the northwest side of Chicago. She says [around the 25:00 mark in the video]:
The fact that worship leaders are pastors means that we meet people where they are, and we’re responsive to them, but we also lead people to new places where they need to go, and create spaces to introduce people to practices that form them…. It’s like a tour guide. If you come to Chicago and you’re really into sports, I’m going to take you to all the stadiums, and show you all that stuff - I’m not into it, but I’ll take you, because I’m a good tour guide. I’m asking what is on your mind, what is important to you. And then, I’m also gonna take you to places in my city that you don’t even know exist, because they are fundamentally what it means to be in Chicago. You can’t eat deep dish every time you go to Chicago. There is so much other food that exists there. So in the same way we as pastors don’t only meet people where they’re at… we also have to take them somewhere.
Sandra goes on to talk about how this relates to addressing current events and issues, and leading a congregation to lament and open discussion rather than just ignoring the issues.
I also see an application for worship pastors as it relates to music selection and service content. Yes, we need to meet people where they are, to speak in their musical dialect, in the words of Sandra’s metaphor, to show them the places they want to see. But we can’t stop there. We then have to take them to where they need to go in worship and formation.
In my church’s mission statement we talk about coming alongside people as they take their next step toward Jesus. This pastoral “tour guide” activity is placing an arm around their shoulders and helping them head in the right direction as they take that step. What a great picture.
Finished reading: compendium 3
I’ve gotten really bad at blogging through all my reading, mostly because it drives me crazy when all I have on this blog is post after post of ‘here’s what I read’.
Now that I have a few other posts under my belt, here’s a quick list of my more recent reading:
Version Control by Dexter Palmer
Trippy time travel / multiverse novel. Not bad.
Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court’s Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice, edited by Kevin Ring
Scalia’s opinions and wit: fantastic reading. The editor’s heavy-handed, fawning commentary: not so much. Call it a mixed bag.
The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann
A classic, and quite timely.
Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini
Just in case you’d ever wondered if Scientology was really that messed up. Answer: yes.
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
An American classic. Though I can’t read the book now without seeing Javier Bardem’s face as Anton Chigurh.
Orphan X (Evan Smoak, #1) by Gregg Hurwitz
As dime-a-dozen action novels go, not bad.
An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor
A meditation on living a truly embodied faith. Beautiful stuff.
Reading Revelation Responsibly: Uncivil Worship and Witness: Following the Lamb into the New Creation by Michael J. Gorman
I wrote about this one already.
Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes
A friend recommended this one. Premise: Adolf Hitler wakes up in the present day and grapples with modern life and social media. Hitler: YouTube star? Not as crazy as it sounds.
The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908 - 1923 by Sean McMeekin
Filling in a gap in the history I’m familiar with. Very readable account of the end of the Ottoman Empire.
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Oh goodness me I love what McCarthy does with words.
The worship leader as pastoral musician
Zac Hicks shared this video last week - it’s a two-hour long panel discussion at Calvin College on the topic of “The Worship Leader as Pastoral Musician”. The panel includes worship pastors from a wide variety of backgrounds and an academic who has made a study of evangelical church music.
I’m only 30 minutes into it so far but I’ve already noted several timestamps that I want to go back and transcribe and write more about… this is a really good discussion. Worth two hours if you’ve got them.
Reading Revelation Responsibly by Michael J. Gorman
We’ve been in a sermon series on Revelation at church, so when a couple recommendations for Reading Revelation Responsibly came across Twitter, I had to pick up a copy. Dr. Michael J. Gorman, the author, is a United Methodist professor of Biblical Studies and Theology at the very Roman Catholic St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Gorman makes the case that the book of Revelation is a book of prophecy, but, he says,
prophecy, in the biblical tradition, is not exclusively or even primarily about making pronouncements and predictions concerning the future. Rather, prophecy is speaking words of comfort and/or challenge, on behalf of God, to the people of God in their concrete historical situation.
Gorman suggests that Revelation encourages the church to resist the allure and pressure of un-sacred civil religion.
Calling Revelation “resistance literature” is appropriate because one of the primary prophetic purposes of Revelation is to remind the church, both then and now, not to give in to the demands or practices of a system that is already judged by God and is about to come to its demise.
One is reminded of N. T. Wright’s line that saying ‘Jesus is Lord’ was (is) a political statement, because if Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not. Gorman argues that this un-sacred civil religion is similarly prevalent in modern America as it was in ancient Rome. As such, he says, the lesson for the church today is to resist the call of our civil (political) religion, because it will undoubtedly conflict with our call to follow Jesus.
The early church had a natural suspicion of Roman civil religion because it was so blatantly pagan and idolatrous—though even it could be appealing. Contemporary Christians can much more easily assume that Christian, or quasi-Christian, ideas, language, and practices are benign and even divinely sanctioned. This makes American civil religion all the more attractive—that is, all the more seductive and dangerous. Its fundamentally pagan character is masked by its Christian veneer.
What becomes clear from Gorman is how timely the message of Revelation is for us today. Not because it is giving us some sort of end-of-days timeline, as the popular dispensational position would claim, but because it calls us to recognize the danger of buying in to any empire or lord except Jesus and His kingdom. Our systems of government and power today are modern representations of Babylon.
Babylon makes promises, demands, and claims that are appropriate only for God to make. It sacralizes, even divinizes, its own power, and then it requires absolute allegiance to that power. The progression of this course, as Revelation 18 makes especially clear, is the pursuit of luxury and the neglect of the poor, first by Babylon itself, then by its clients, then by its everyday citizens. One inevitable result is the treatment of certain human beings as goods to be traded (18:13), and the elimination of others for their failure to offer absolute allegiance. Another is violence and war, death and destruction, hunger and famine (ch. 6). The final inevitable result is the destruction of the earth without fear of consequences, temporal or eternal (11:18).
(I think Gorman has also probably read his Stringfellow - I’m reminded of reading An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens In a Strange Land a few years back.
I’d highly recommend Reading Revelation Responsibly for anyone who wants to give Revelation serious consideration. It’s not a difficult book - 10 chapters, and written at what might be considered just a slightly advanced popular level. It’s an insightful, encouraging volume that’s worth the time.
Thoughts on Brian Zahnd and Word of Life Church
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Prayer School I wanted to spend a little bit of time discussing Pastor Brian and Word of Life Church (WOLC) directly. As someone who has really enjoyed Brian’s teaching via podcast, one of the questions I went in to the weekend asking myself was “If I lived in St. Joseph, could I find myself attending this church?” And right behind it was asking like I have about many guys I’ve listened to in podcasts: “is this guy and his ministry legit?”
So, about the church
I had a couple opportunities over the weekend to get insight into the church. At the lunch hour on Friday we were invited to take a tour of the building. Then on Friday night we had the opportunity to attend their regular Friday night service.
The building itself seems to speak to the history of Zahnd and WOLC. The auditorium is huge - it seats somewhere north of 2000 people - and there is a separate multi-purpose auditorium where they hold Friday night worship. The other notable feature is “The Upper Room”, a (ground-level) prayer chapel made of Jerusalem limestone that seats about 50. (This is where the prayer school was held.)
When we got a tour, we got the full tour. We saw backstage areas, back hallways, tech rooms, utility closets, the pastor’s study - pretty much everything. We were told they have built the church in several sections over the years. The building has a quality of fading opulence which likely reflects Zahnd’s own personal move from a sort of flashier Pentecostalism (a role which you can easily enough picture him in) to a more eclectic Anabaptism. The tech room holds the same message - full of video production equipment that was state-of-the-art in the early 90’s and basically obsolete today. (At one point the church’s Sunday services were produced for cable TV - that was discontinued some years ago due to the cost.) It seems clear that Zahnd’s new focus and approach likely caused a significant drop in attendance and budget, and WOLC has had to do a sort of fiscal reset to go in the new direction.
About the man
With the rise and fall of so many celebrity preachers, I came in wondering whether Zahnd might be falling into the celebrity trap, too. On this count I was encouraged. On one hand, WOLC is clearly his church. He planted it over 30 years ago and continues to pastor it today. On the other hand, the other church leaders and members didn’t seem to have him on a pedestal. He comfortably mingled with the prayer school attendees during breaks and answered questions. He could seem aloof from time to time, but I’m going to attribute that to personality and the burden of teaching all weekend. (Two sessions Friday, sermon Friday night, session Saturday morning, different sermon on Sunday morning… I’d be tired, too!) While I didn’t have more than a passing conversation with him, I did have a lengthy talk with associate pastor Derek Vreeland, an energetic and slightly younger guy (probably mid 40s) who seemed to be very much his own man and not in Zahnd’s shadow.
The one place that made me just a bit uneasy was the pastor’s study. Compared to the rest of the staff offices that are nice but not fancy, Zahnd’s study is plush. Two rooms, fireplace, leather chairs, built-in bookshelves from floor to ceiling, fancy rug on the floor… don’t get me wrong, I was a little jealous, but it did seem somewhat out of character with the rest of the building. I’m guessing that it, too, is a relic of WOLC’s Pentecostal incarnation and maybe not reflective of their current priorities.
Could I worship there?
I recognize this is a very subjective question. I really appreciated the fact that they scheduled the prayer school so that attendees could also attend the Friday night service. (Many came from several hours away and stayed for the full weekend, attending the Sunday service as well.) It was, as Brian said, a chance to get “the full WOLC experience”.
The structure of the Friday night service wasn’t unfamiliar to me - the same sort of songs, announcements, greeting, and offering that you’d find in any typical evangelical church service. Sprinkled into the service, though, were some more ancient elements of liturgy - use of the Lord’s Prayer, a longer Gospel reading, a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer, and corporate confession before Communion.
The music was pretty loud and the congregation still fairly charismatic - lots of hands in the air and people bouncing on the balls of their feet, clapping between songs. The songs themselves were (save for one) unfamiliar to me - I’m guessing they are original songs by the church worship leader. The content of the songs was really good, though focused differently than I’m used to. To say that Zahnd is not a fan of penal substitutionary atonement is an understatement, so you won’t find songs here about Jesus’ blood paying for your sins. There were many, though, about God’s love and mercy, and His desire for righteousness and justice. The songs were good, just different than what I’m used to.
The highlight of the service was the invitation to the Lord’s Supper after the sermon. Zahnd’s usual pattern is to wrap the sermon up in a way that leads to the table. He leads the congregation in corporate confession (straight from the BCP) and then invites the congregation to come forward and partake. There was one serving team for each section of seats, and ushers dismissed by rows to provide some order. I appreciated the egalitarian focus in the teams serving - for each seating section there was a man and a woman serving. In the middle section where I was seated, Pastor Brian’s wife Peri served the bread (“the body of Christ, broken for you”) and Brian held the cup (“the blood of Christ shed for you”). I’m also a huge fan of communion taken by congregants going forward rather than trays being served, both for the communal experience of going forward and for the powerful moment where someone looks you in the eye and reminds you that Christ’s body was broken for you.
So, could I attend WOLC? I don’t know. If I lived there and it were just me, I probably would. I’m not sure my wife would be a big fan, and have no idea what all they have for children’s ministries and the like. But just on the basis of the worship service? Yep.
Is this guy legit?
On one hand it seems arrogant of me to ask and answer this question. But I’m going to try to do so from a posture of humility, with the goal being to encourage those others who have become fans of Zahnd from afar and may have similar questions. Happily, I can report that from my (admittedly brief) experience at WOLC, Pastor Brian’s ministry appears to be legit and healthy. (To still be the pastor after 35 years and a major theological shift, he must be doing something right!) While the building itself holds vestiges of obsolete ministry priorities, the new ministry priorities seem well focused on important topics.
All in all, I was very encouraged by my weekend at Word of Life Church, and would love to go back sometime. Meanwhile, I’m going to keep Zahnd’s sermons cued up in my podcast app.