We need more neighbors

There’s been a lot of virtual ink spilled in the Christian blogosphere on the gay marriage topic the past couple of weeks after the World Vision U-turn. One of the benefits of not saying anything about it myself is that eventually someone comes along who says things a lot better than I would. Today that person is Jen Hatmaker. (All the emphasis in the quotes below is hers.)

First, she says,

…the reason I’ve always held this conviction [about where she stands on homosexuality] close, inviting only my real friends and family and community in, is because I am loathe to be a pawn in a hateful public war. I refuse to be a point in some win column, used for my influence and lumped into ancillary groupthink I don’t share. I’ve said before that this conversation best belongs in true relationships, around dinner tables, over coffee, in real life, and I still believe that.

And yet for the sake of those following her as a leader, she is willing to lay her cards on the table:

I want you to know that I land on the side of traditional marriage as God’s first and clear design. I believe God’s original creation is how we were crafted to thrive: in marriage, in family, and in community, which has borne out for millennia in Scripture, interpretation, practice, and society (within and without the church).

But wait, she’s not done, and her follow-up point is important.

However, I remain disturbed and pierced at how many Christians have handled the gay community publicly. It is a source of extreme grief. We may share theology, but the application of that truth remains a disconnecting point. While Scripture does command us to “speak the truth in love” (and surely Facebook is the dead worst place to exercise that practice), that is not the end of our biblical responsibility.

She then recounts Jesus’ summing up all the law and the prophets as “love God and love your neighbor”. Powerful stuff. And the man wanted to know “who is my neighbor”? What’s my out? And Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Here’s Jen’s words again:

As I lay in bed, it was instantly and perfectly clear that the gay community has been spiritually beaten, stripped of dignity, robbed of humanity, and left for dead by much of the church. You need only look at the suicide rates, prevalence of self-harm, and the devastating pleas from ostracized gay people and those who love them to see what has plainly transpired. Laying next to them, bloodied and bruised, are believers whose theology affirms homosexuality and allows them to stand alongside their gay friends. (Again, you don’t have to agree with this, but there are tens of thousands of thinking, studied people who hold this conviction.) The spiritual gutting of these brothers and sisters is nothing short of shameful. The mockery and dismissal and vitriol leveled at these folks is disgraceful. Also wounded on the side of the road are Christians who sincerely love God and people and believe homosexuality is a sin, but they’ve been lumped in with the Big Loud Mean Voices unfairly. Painted as hateful intolerants, they are actually kind and loving and are simply trying to be faithful. The paintbrush is too wide, the indictments unfounded.

And then she brings it home:

We don’t get to abandon the theology of love toward people; the end does not justify the means. That is not Christ-like and it is certainly not biblical. As a faith community, it is time we relearn what “speaking the truth in love” means. Something that actually feels like love is a start. If the beginning and end of love is simply pointing out sin, then we are doomed. … I am convinced we need no more soldiers in this war. We need more neighbors.

Thanks, Jen, for a powerful word.

Star Wars music on an amazing pipe organ

OK, this is pretty great. Organist Jelani Eddington performs a suite from the Star Wars soundtrack on a massive pipe organ. The organ was built by Wurlitzer in 1927 for a theater in Omaha, NE, and after restoration has been installed at a museum in the suburbs of Chicago.

A little more about the organ:

Mounted on the wall to the left are the 32’ Diaphone pipes, and to the right are the 32’ Bombarde pipes. A 32-note set of Deagan Tower Bells, the largest of which weighs 426 lb., hang on each side of the room. They are activated by huge solenoids from their own console, the organ console, a roll player, and even the doorbell button. To the rear of the room, the ‘Ethereal’ pipe chamber in the attic echoes softly from the skylight area, while the brass ‘Trumpet Imperial’ and copper ‘Bugle Battaglia’ speak with great authority from the back wall. …


The grand piano connected to the pipe organ is a 9’ Knabe concert grand with an Ampico ‘A’ reproducing player mechanism. To the right of the console is a rare Deagan Piano-Vibraharp, which can be played by its own keyboard or from the organ console. Toward the rear of the room is a Spanish art case Steinway model A.R. Duo-Art reproducing piano, veneered in walnut with boxwood, pear and ebony inlay. A remote Duo-Art Concertola roll changer has been adapted to play Ampico rolls on the Knabe, or Duo-Art rolls on the Steinway, at the touch of a button on its control panel.

Crazy. Anyhow, this video itself is impressive:

Bullet Points for a Tuesday Evening

Because hey, I like this format.

  • Just when you think spring was here, we get snow. The ground and roads were covered this morning. Ick. At least it’s melted off by this afternoon.
  • There’s a 60 degree day in the forecast. I’ll believe it when I see it.
  • Of course, next week I’ll be in Florida for work where the highs are supposed to be in the low 80’s every day.
  • You aren’t reading this just to get Chris’s thoughts on the weather, are you?
  • I just submitted a big proposal at work this afternoon. Praying that it is looked upon favorably.
  • I desperately need some other music to get rid of the Frozen soundtrack earworm that’s plagued me the past week. The girls have been singing “Do you want to build a snowman?” incessantly.
  • I did something this morning I haven’t done in ages - turned off my alarm w/o realizing it and overslept past something on my calendar, in this case my Tuesday morning Bible study. Oops.
  • I have fresh brownies on the stove and a chapter of The Hobbit to read to the girls, so this will be my last bullet.

On Being Allowed to Grow Up

There’s a fascinating article on The Atlantic site that’s been making the rounds recently, and it’s well worth a read. Author Hanna Rosin, in her article “The Overprotected Kid”, examines how attitudes toward children and risk have changed in the past few decades. Where in the 70s parents would’ve just turned kids loose, kids are now more frequently monitored, reined in, and protected. She tells about a playground experiment in Britain where they’ve gone the other direction - removing the rubberized, “safe” equipment in favor of lots of raw material, limited adult intervention, and very few rules. Fascinating stuff.

Now, the article is well worth considering from the sociological and parenting angles, but this bit stuck out at me from a faith angle as well:

One common concern of parents these days is that children grow up too fast. But sometimes it seems as if children don’t get the space to grow up at all; they just become adept at mimicking the habits of adulthood. As Hart’s research shows, children used to gradually take on responsibilities, year by year. They crossed the road, went to the store; eventually some of them got small neighborhood jobs. Their pride was wrapped up in competence and independence, which grew as they tried and mastered activities they hadn’t known how to do the previous year. But these days, middle-class children, at least, skip these milestones. They spend a lot of time in the company of adults, so they can talk and think like them, but they never build up the confidence to be truly independent and self-reliant.

Now I’m shooting from the hip here, so feel free to jump in and set me straight in the comments if you want, but from my experience in the evangelical church it seems that we might be treating our children in the faith the same way. Let me tease that out a bit.

Are our children in the faith, whether new adult converts or children who have been raised in the church, really given the space to grow up in the faith? Or have we simply encouraged an environment that is the spiritualized equivalent of “let me walk you to school” and “stay away from that creek, you might get wet!”?

In our desire to protect young believers, are we unhealthily protecting them from the spiritual bumps and bruises that come from healthy exploration? Rather than wrapping protective material around any potentially difficult or painful spiritual point, should we instead be encouraging exploration, learning, and growth?

In a related vein, Peter Enns notes today that

If you ask me, one reason God might have for different denominations and traditions is they they reflect different stages of the spiritual journey.

Then, quoting psychologist David G. Benner, he reminds us that

…communities exist for the support of others, not their control. Like enmeshed familes or codependent marriages and partnerships, [unhealthy] communities fail to see the other as separate from themselves and to celebrate this fact and then help people achieve this differentiation in a healthy manner.

So, allowing room for exploration and real growth (as opposed to just learning imitation) allows us to celebrate individuals as they grow into their own identity. Certainly gives me things to think on as a parent; there may be a lesson there for pastors and church leaders, too.

[photo credit: stweedy via photopin cc]

The difference a decade makes

On the left, my passport photo from 2004. On the right, my passport photo from last week.

Not everything that calls itself a church is really a church.

My friend Randy posted a nice little bit of self-observation today that resonates with me:

Q – Randy, are you a heretic or something? What is wrong with you? First, am I a heretic?
No. I hold to the commonly shared beliefs of the church universal without exception. What I am is a critic of the evangelical church in the USA in our era. This church has lost its focus on Jesus and has become some kind of leisure time entertainment/marketing organization. Not that there is anything wrong with that; but of course, there is something wrong with that. Some people fail to distinguish between a local manifestation of the idea of the church and the church itself. If you fail to distinguish those two things, you might see me as destructive rather than constructive. You’ll have to believe me when I say that I love the church. But not everything that calls itself a church is really a church. … Second, what is wrong with me? Lots and lots of stuff.

I love this guy and give him an understanding nod and smile on this Friday.

My Swedish Doppelganger

When my wife’s sister and her husband recently visited Chile, they found this picture in a museum somewhere and sent it to my wife, noting that they’d found my doppelganger. I have to admit, I do see the resemblance. (Click on it to see the big version.)

The translation of the text with the photo (thanks, Google translate!):

CARL SKOTTSBERG aboard the ANTARCTIC A student of philosophy and botany of the Nordenskjold expedition. Was 21 years and was one of the last to leave the ship when it sank in the Weddell Sea. After being rescued by the corvette Uruguay, Skottsberg continued his career as a botanist and performed numerous trips. He was the founder of the Goteborg Botanical Garden whose main street that borders bears his name.

It turns out that Carl Skottsberg was indeed a Swedish botanist and explorer. It would appear that later in life his appearance and mine diverged a bit. (However, if anybody that’s handy with Photoshop wants to mock-up what this guy would look like with a shaved head and goatee… be my guest!)

For a moment in our 20s, though, we might have been brothers.

To be a Christian is to believe that all political ideologies are suspect.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry nails it:

To be a Christian is to believe that all political ideologies are suspect. And wrong. It doesn’t mean that Christians should retreat from all political ideologies — as that would also be a political ideology, and also wrong. By all means, be a Christian liberal. Be a Christian conservative. But if you are a Christian liberal, if you are a Christian conservative, then by definition there will be tensions between your Christianity and your political ideology. It’s axiomatic. And if you are a Christian first and an ideologue second, you should confront those tensions instead of papering over them.

The whole post is worth a read.

A couple thoughts about Christian celebrity

There’s been a lot of talk about Christian celebrity the past several days, but Richard Beck hits on something important this morning by making the distinction between being popular and being a celebrity.

In short, the diagnostic test that you are dealing with a Christian celebrity isn’t the fact that the person is in a spotlight speaking to thousands. Because that might just be a talented and popular person up there. And there’s no shame or elitism in that. What makes the person a celebrity or not isn’t the size of the crowd. What makes the person a celebrity is where the person is before and after the talk. Let me repeat that. The test of Christian celebrity is where the person is before and after the talk. If the person giving the talk is in the audience before and/or after the talk then that’s not a Christian celebrity. That’s just a talented and popular speaker. By coming “down from the stage” to be with the crowd–it’s an Incarnational move here–the speaker is erasing any elite distance or distinction between themselves and their audience. Connecting with the crowd before and after is an act of solidarity, hospitality, humility and service. The speaker is making themselves available. And that availability is the exact opposite of celebrity.

This is a very helpful distinction. I remember attending a Desiring God pastors conference probably a decade ago and seeing Mark Driscoll ushered in by security after everyone else had already been seated, and quickly ushered out after he had spoken and before anyone else could get up to leave. That gives one sort of impression.

On the other hand, two years ago I went to Nashville to a small event where N. T. Wright was speaking. Dr. (Bishop? Rev.? not sure what title he prefers) Wright had just flown in from England that day. While clearly the focus of the event, he spent the first hour of the evening sitting in the crowd enjoying the local musicians who were there to sing, then after speaking for an hour spent at least another 90 minutes patiently signing books, taking pictures, and talking to a long line of folks. Popular? Yeah. Celebrity? Not that day.

The discussion also reminds me of this picture which I saw recently in the news:

Here’s the Pope, on a Lenten retreat, just another priest in a pew. Now, granted, Pope Francis is a celebrity by about any definition; but it seems clear to me that he’s trying as hard as he can to not be a celebrity; to be personal, real, accessible, and pastoral even in the most visible religious role in the world.

Even us non-celebrity (and even non-popular) folks could learn a lesson or two from the good Bishops of Durham and Rome..

How can suburban churches minister to urban areas?

Some challenging thoughts from Christina Cleveland today:

If we truly saw ourselves as an interdependent body with a shared Head, resources, blood, and life, then suburban churches that want to love on a city wouldn’t do it by expanding their empires across city lines. They would do it by truly sharing their resources, blood and life in service to the Head. Why build a new church building in the city when you can build one for an urban church – in desperate need of a new building– that is already there doing great work? Why hire a new pastor to work at your new urban church plant, when you can give an urban church the resources to make their long-suffering bi-vocational pastor full-time? Why fund a new urban service project when you can fund the urban service projects that people of color have been running tirelessly and effectively on a shoe-string budget for years? The empire says that our church needs to be present in every community, our church has the answers, and our church’s resources are our resources alone. If we follow this path, power dynamics remain unchanged and urban church plantations ensue. The better, more honoring path requires equity – which is costly. Just ask the rich, young ruler. Jesus asked him to reject his empire approach to life, stop being so possessive about his possessions, and join the interdependent family of God.

Powerful stuff.