Category Archives: Faith

May 13

The dynamic word

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We got into a discussion at Sunday School this morning about a very public issue that has been prominent in both national politics and United Methodist policy in the past couple of weeks (you can probably guess which issue, although this post is going to be about a larger question).

The discussion revealed one of our challenges in living our lives as Christians. On the one hand, Christians, including United Methodists, believe the Bible to be critically important to our faith – one of the primary ways in which God’ will and way are revealed to us. John Wesley, the founder of the “Methodist” part of United Methodism, described what has come to be known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral – scripture, tradition, reason and experience – as the ways in which our faith comes to us. But the Bible is critical to that process.

The trouble is, despite the chest-thumping done in some neighborhoods of Christianity, it only takes about 15 seconds of Bible reading before you realize that our application of the Bible to faith in the 21st Century is a challenge. Even if you summarily dismiss the whole of the Old Testament as inapplicable to the Christian church (you shouldn’t) there are parts of the New Testament that we perceive as being binding on all Christians and others that we perceive as applying only to the particular place and time in which those books were written or which they describe. The next time a fundamentalist tells you he believes in applying every sentence of the Bible, ask him if he and his fellow church members have sold all of their possessions so that they can be distributed to the poor, as described in the book of Acts.

The fact of the matter is, every denomination – in any nook or cranny of the Christian universe – has to judge and interpret exactly how to apply the scripture. The Bible is a complex book, filled with poetry, history, exhortation, teaching, and more. Some of the more horrific Old Testament stories of conquest and genocide seem completely out of character with a just and loving God, so responsible teachers have to explain that they are descriptive, not prescriptive – God didn’t necessarily endorse everything that was being done in God’s name in the books of Joshua or Judges, for example.

When Paul says that he doesn’t allow women to speak in church, what does that mean? Some denominations believe that’s a prescription for all time and that it therefore prohibits women in ordained ministries or, in some cases, even leadership positions of any kind. Others believe that Paul’s command was based on the specific situations he encountered in the specific churches where he ministered at a specific point in history. To apply it today, these other denominations say, would be wrong, especially when we see cases where God’s calling appears to have been placed mightily on specific women. I have to fall in that latter camp; I would not want to be in a church that would deny Aileen Massengale or Diana DeWitt or Cathie Liemenstoll the pulpit, to use three examples of United Methodist pastors who have inspired and influenced me. The Rev. Debra Snellen, who comes from a more charismatic tradition, is the co-founder and executive director of LEAMIS International Ministries, the group with which I’ve taken all my foreign mission trips. Do I believe she was called by God? I think you know the answer to that.

Biblical scholarship, of course, is a key resource in making these calls. What do we know about the society in which a particular book was written? In what context would the original readers have taken it? Are there nuances of language or culture which might cause us to misinterpret what a passage really means? Are there aspects to our modern culture that cause us to misinterpret or miss the point of what was going on when the words were being written?

Bible scholars can assist us with some of those questions. But we have to make sure that scholarship is honest. There’s a tendency sometimes to find what we want to find – to use Bible scholarship to conveniently ignore or deprecate passages we find inconvenient. We have to make sure that we’re listening to what the Bible says, not telling it to say what we want it to say. Jesus did not promise the church a cozy relationship with popular culture; quite the contrary. Sometimes, in our effort to make the church “relevant,” we overlook that.

The best Bible scholarship illuminates God’s word; the worst is an attempt to shield ourselves from the light of that word.

However, even the best Bible scholarship may not be able to get us all the way to God’s will. There are still situations where we aren’t sure how to interpret Bible passages and where the other three legs of Wesley’s quadrilateral – tradition, reason and experience – have to guide us.

In all things, of course, we’re to seek wisdom, and humility, and love. I believe there are right and wrong answers, but I know myself well enough not to think that I have all of the right ones on file. That requires that I treat those with whom I disagree with love and respect, even in cases where it’s important to speak out or take a stand.

Apr 23

‘How God Became King’

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I have preached, on more than one occasion, about the dual nature of Biblical references to God’s kingdom – some of which seem to place it in the future tense, others in the present tense.

I checked out How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels through a digital library loan. I’ve heard a lot about N.T. Wright, and read bits and pieces of things he’s written, but this is the first of his actual books I’ve gotten the chance to read. It’s a terrific book, well worth my time, and I believe it would be worth yours. Wright emphasizes the present nature of the kingdom in the light of the gospel story.

Most Christians understand, or believe they understand, the theological significance of the Incarnation and Jesus’ birth. They also understand, or believe they understand, the theological significance of his death and resurrection, and like to think of it as pointing towards their eternal reward. (A college roommate of mine, Darrell Grizzle, once complained about the music he had to play at a southern gospel radio station by inventing the satirical song title, “When Jesus Comes Back and Sends All The Communists To Hell, Won’t It Be Wonderful Up There?”) The material that comes between the birth and the resurrection is the stuff of sermons, but we don’t really incorporate it into our understanding of theology, or (as Wright notes) into our creeds. The Apostles’ Creed jumps right from “born of the Virgin Mary” to “suffered under Pontius Pilate.”

But Wright makes a solid case that the scope of Jesus’ life is vitally important to our understanding of his nature as the Messiah, bringing about God’s promised kingdom. Like the disciples of Jesus’ day, who expected the Messiah to be a military-political revolutionary, we throughout church history have overlooked and misunderstood the true nature of God’s kingdom, the way in which Jesus made it a reality, and our own responsibility for to behave as if we’re subjects of that kingdom in the here and now. Wright breaks down various New Testament passages and the Old Testament prophecies to which they relate, showing the nature of Jesus and his messianic kingdom.

The book is a little imposing at the outset, but once you get into it it’s quite readable and compelling. I had, frankly, forgotten that it was a library book; I’ve plowed through so many Kindle books recently that sometimes I lose track of what was free, what was super-cheap and what was borrowed. I was a little sad when I realized the book was going to have to delete itself from my Kindle, and I may have to take a look at picking it up some time in the future.

Strongly recommended.

Apr 06

Good Friday

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and look me in the face, at least what’s left of it
tell me you still love me just a little bit
or nail me down, break the skin
hard enough to do me in
but don’t leave me hanging
dying and dangling
twisting in the wind

here, touch my side
let doubt be crucified
nailed with your wounded pride
to love’s grim altar
here, taste my flesh
my bloody humanness
i am no phantom guest
no skinless martyr

From “The Twist,”  words by Terry Taylor, Music by Terry Taylor, David Raven, Jerry Chamberlain and Tim Chander
©1988 Broken Songs

Mar 06

One small hop for beer, one giant leap for mankind

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I am not a beer drinker. I’ve had two, maybe three beers in my life, although I occasionally buy a single can of beer for making chili or beer can chicken. (I do enjoy a glass of wine every now and then.)

But when I was scanning the library-affiliated system for borrowing Kindle books, I came across this:

The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World, by Stephen Mansfield.

I’d read something in the past – perhaps it was a review of this book, which was published in 2009 – and I had, scampering around in the back of my head, the notion that Guinness, the legendary Irish brewer, had been founded by a religious man. The description of the book intrigued me, and I decided to give it a look.

I’m so glad I did. This is a fascinating tale, lovingly researched and told, about the history of a business and about the Guinness family, some of whom pursued religious vocation instead of brewing success. I hated to put it down.

The story starts with Arthur Guinness the first, a man heavily influenced by John Wesley, among others. Guinness played a key role in introducing  the Sunday School movement, which had only recently been created in England, to Ireland. While some tales of Guinness seeing his brewery as a divine calling have been overblown, it is clear that Guinness – like many other Christian leaders of his day – may have considered drunkenness a sin but saw beer in moderation as beneficial, even healthful. And, in fact, in Dublin of Arthur Guinness’ day the other choices – disease-ridden water or hard liquor – were both detrimental. Guinness had every reason to believe that he was producing a benign, perhaps even beneficial, product that was completely compatible with his devout Christian faith.

Guinness started his brewery with a 9,000-year lease (!) on a plot of land at St. James’ Gate, a historic entrance to Dublin. The signature used in some of the company’s packaging is Arthur Guinness’s signature from that lease.

Successive generations of the family went in their own separate directions. Some went into banking; others continued to run the beer company; but several went into the ministry.

As for the brewery, Mansfield tells the story of its remarkable operating principles and charitable efforts, at least in the 1800s and early 1900s. The firm was a leader in how it treated its employees, providing amenities like  on-call doctors and dentists, reading rooms, and expenses-paid vacation trips to the countryside. It spent enormous amounts of money addressing horrific poverty in Dublin and improving living conditions there.

Fans of the recent Ken Burns documentary will be interested in Mansfield’s claim that Prohibition, by shutting off the market for commercially-produced beer and wine, actually drove many Americans to harder forms of alcohol. I was fascinated to hear from Burns that many Americans who supported Prohibition did so under the misapprehension that it would apply only to hard liquor and were shocked when beer and wine were outlawed as well.

Mansfield – who, according to his blog, is not a beer drinker – lays out the story with obvious affection. He goes over the top and gets a little gushy in a few places, rather than letting the facts or the people being quoted speak for themselves. (In most cases, they speak  quite well for themselves, and would do so even more effectively without the gush.) But such excesses are relatively sparse, and seem to come from a deep affection for the subject matter.

You know, St. Patrick’s day is coming up. I’ve never had Guinness before ….

Feb 05

The whole eBible

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I want to put a Bible on my Kindle – I’ve got room for 1,500 books, after all – but I seem to have a dilemma, and it’s a surprising one, given the popularity of the Kindle in the past year or two.

The Bible translations I’d use most often – the New Revised Standard Version, which is used in a lot of official United Methodist literature, or the most recent update of the New International Version – are available for Kindle, but according to the reviews they don’t have e-reader-friendly navigation. There are some other Kindle Bibles that do have good navigation, making it easy to look up a chapter and verse, but they don’t come in any of the translations I like. There are also some specialty NIV Bibles that cost more than I’m looking to spend right now or that are organized in special ways, including the Passages NIV e-Bible that has the readings broken up so that you can follow along with the Daily Audio Bible. As a DAB listener, I may get the Passages Bible eventually, but it’s not what I’m looking for right now.

I have ordered a Holman Christian Standard Bible for free; I’ve heard them use that translation on DAB from time to time, although I’m not too familiar with it otherwise. But I really want HarperCollins or Zondervan to get on the stick and create a great, reasonably-priced NRSV or NIV e-edition.
Jan 13

God in the locker room

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I have an essay on my web site, which I occasionally tweak or update, called “God on the Playlist.” It’s sort of a statement of my personal faith.

Anyway, there’s one segment of this essay that, as a jumping-off point to something else, deals with athletes mentioning their faith. I thought that, in light of all the hubbub about Tim Tebow, it might be worth excerpting here, so as to save you from reading the whole essay:

… There has been a thread in popular culture that tends toward annoyance with anyone who talks about their faith. For example, any athlete who is open about his or her faith in locker room interviews opens the door for legions of scoffers.
“As if God cared who wins a football game!” they say. “Doesn’t God – if God even exists – have better things to worry about?”
I have a couple of responses to that.
When I first posted this essay, I wrote that I personally did not recall ever seeing an athlete claim that God wanted his or her team to win and the other team to lose. I have seen many athletes praise God for their athletic success – which is not the same thing.
Since that time, there has been at least one high-profile case in which an athlete seemed to imply that he or his team had God’s blessing. But I stand by my original argument that the vast majority of athletes who mention their faith in locker room interviews are saying nothing of the sort.
It is always appropriate, for anyone in any line of work, to thank God at all times and in all situations. If I had a good day at my chosen profession (or, in the case of amateur athletes, my chosen avocation), I would make no apologies for praising God and expressing my gratitude. That does not mean that I am deluded enough to assume that God prefers my sports team to the other team or prefers me to my individual competitors.
Tennis star Michael Chang put it this way, in another story at the CNN web site written by Blake: “Chang won the French Open in 1989 as a 17-year-old underdog. He was booed by a Parisian crowd when he thanked Jesus for his victory at the tournament’s trophy presentation.
“Chang, who now helps runs a Christian Sports League in California, says he thanked Jesus not to gloat, but to show gratitude.
“‘When I go out there and share my faith, I’m not saying God is on my side and he’s not on your side,’ Chang says. ‘The Lord loves everybody, and the Lord is on everyone’s side.’”
In fact, at many NFL games, Christian players from opposing teams meet on the field following the game for a quick celebratory prayer. These huddles are seldom shown on television – because of this same irrational attitude that any expression of personal faith is somehow tantamount to shoving Jesus down people’s throats. (To be fair, I’m sure the network would be even less likely to show such interaction between Muslim players.)
It is self-evident that these huddles, involving opponents praying together, are not based on the idea that God prefers one team to another. They are based on the idea that praise and gratitude are Christian virtues and Biblical commandments.
Objections to faith in locker-room interviews often include either a direct statement or an implication that “God has better things to worry about than a football game.” At first glance, this is quite a reasonable statement. But the extended implications of it disturb me, and I hear it even from Christians who should know better. The Bible makes it clear that God is aware of, and concerned with, not only the great matters of cosmology but with the most intimate details of earthly existence. The Bible explicitly tells us that God knows about each sparrow that falls from the sky and that God knows how many hairs are on your head.
It may be true that the CEO of McDonald’s does not know whether you ordered a large fries or a medium fries, or whether there’s toilet paper in the men’s restroom at your local McDonald’s. The CEO of McDonald’s would drive himself crazy if he had to micromanage each of the thousands of locations the chain operates around the world. But God is not a CEO. God is deity. There’s a difference. God is capable of attending to both the infinite and the intimate.
God has encouraged us to lift up all our concerns in prayer – anything that is important to us. Some of the things we pray about seem petty, and selfish, and beneath God’s purpose. Some of them are. But the funny thing about prayer is that, ideally, it becomes a dialogue. The more we pray, the better we get at it, and over time our priorities change. The dialogue must start with honesty, and I think that’s why God instructs us to bring all our cares and concerns to the holy throne.
Here’s another way of looking at it: a five-year-old may ask her daddy for a candy bar one day, a pony the next. A sixteen-year-old may ask for permission to stay out late. A woman who’s about to be married may ask for advice, some reassurance that she’s doing the right thing. Those are very different requests, with very different levels of importance. When the daughter is a child, the father may have to say “no” and may not have the chance to make the child understand why. But each request is special to the father, and the father will treasure those requests as precious memories.
The God we learn about in the Bible is infinite enough to have created the universe, but also intimate enough to have a relationship with each one of us, and to care about each of our struggles. As we grow in our faith, and our understanding of God’s plan, we may learn to ask God for more important things than our missing car keys. But God welcomes, and listens to, every request, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant.

Jan 10

Jazz doesn’t resolve

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There are some books I read, and get very excited about, but they don’t necessarily stick with me.

“Blue Like Jazz” has stuck with me. After reading it, I suggested it as curriculum for the Sunday School class I was attending at the time. I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be to it – it’s quite frank, and even includes a little bit of profanity – but I think it was well-received, despite my lack of abilities as a teacher.

The book, published with the subtitle “Nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality,” is a memoir – not a linear sort of memoir, but something more poetic – by Donald Miller, focused on his experiences at Reed College in Oregon. Reed is one of the most intellectual universities in the nation, and also one of the most hostile towards religion. Miller went into that environment as a Christian, but also as someone troubled by the fundamentalist version of Christianity in which he was raised. He ends up finding a circle of friends, who are at various stages in their approach to Christianity. They end up recognizing their own failures and shortcomings, and the ways in which they hinder dicsussion about faith with the already-hostile student body at Reed.

The first thing I read from the book was an excerpt published in “Christianity Today” in which Don and his friends participate in the school’s over-the-top festival of debauchery, Ren Fayre by building a confession booth – and doing something quite different with it than anyone would have expected.

It’s a beautifully-written book, and one that stays with you for some time.

I was a little skeptical – and in some ways, I still am – when I heard it was going to be turned into a movie. The movie is being directed by Steve Taylor, who in an earlier life (when I was at college) was one of my favorite singer-songwriters. He later went on to found the crossover band Chagall Guevara before becoming a record company executive, responsible for making Sixpence None The Richer a success.

Along the way, he directed music videos, both his own and for Sixpence. And eventually, he wanted to try his hand at a feature film.

I still have never seen Steve’s first movie, “The Second Chance,” even though I was present for the filming of one scene. I gather, from some things I’ve heard, that it was a little more mundane than I would have expected from Taylor, who delighted in the sharp and satirical as a recording artist.

But when I heard Steve was trying to film “Blue Like Jazz,” I was intrigued. The film was about to go into production when it suffered budget troubles, and a widely-publicized Kickstarter campaign raised more than enough to finish it, and demonstrated just how much the book had meant to so many. I should have given something myself, but money was tight at the time and I really didn’t have it to spare. Actually, that last sentence sounds a lot like an argument Donald has with his pastor in a chapter late in the book.

Well, the money was raised, the movie was completed, and there’s now a teaser trailer:

I think it looks promising, although there are a couple of line readings in the trailer that are a little clunky. I really, really don’t want this to be a typical “Christian movie.” I really, really want this to convey the complexity and nuance that make the book so wonderful.

Jan 02

Which one’s the real world?

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This is the last (I think) in a series of posts about Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program. Look at the bottom of this post for links to the previous installments. In another day or two, I’ll make one last post with links to all of the installments in order, or perhaps I’ll set it up as a standing page on my web site. By the way, I did not do a separate post for Quest, the newest ministry within the AIM program, because I’ve not had the chance to experience it yet and thus really didn’t have much to say about it beyond the summary in my original post. If anyone who’s been to Quest would like to write a guest post about it, I’d gladly put it up and link to it as part of the series.

I sometimes say that my participation in short-term missions trips is a selfish hobby because I get out of my trips far more than I put into them. There’s something about being in intense Christian community — whether on a short-term mission trip, an Emmaus walk, or certain types of retreats — that’s difficult to explain or describe if you’ve not experienced it. In an earlier post, I quoted Mountain T.O.P. founder George Bass as saying that trying to describe Mountain T.O.P. to someone was like trying to explain what a banana tastes like to someone who’s never had one.

In many ways, a Mountain T.O.P. community is a safe place for me, a place where I know I’m among friends, where I could ask someone for a neck rub without being thought creepy, where I can write and receive notes of encouragement, where I’m free to try things outside my comfort zone and know that it will all work out somehow — and if it doesn’t, that will be OK too.

A day at AIM begins with a group morning devotion, led by one of the campers. I am almost always privileged to be asked to lead one of these when I’m at AIM. Last summer, I went to two different AIM weeks; I led a devotion at one but not the other. That made perfect sense — why call on someone a second time when there are plenty of others willing to share? — but I tried to think back to the last time I had been at AIM without doing a morning devotion. I’m sure there must have been at least one other time, but I couldn’t think of it. Even at my first AIM event I led a devotion — which I’ll mention again in a little bit.
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Dec 31

The blind leading the unwilling

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Part of a series of posts about Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program. For links to previous installments, see the bottom of this one.

In the spring of 1993, I was an unofficial member of the Singles Council of the Tennessee Conference of the United Methdodist Church, working on a newsletter which was published at that time.

We had a meeting at Brentwood United Methodist Church, and there to speak to us were George Bass and Gail Drake (now Gail Castle). George was the founder and executive director of Mountain T.O.P., and Gail was director of adult ministries. At the time, Mountain T.O.P. was trying to promote one week of the Adults In Ministry program as “singles week,” an idea that was later scrapped. In any case, they wanted our help in letting our constituents know about the AIM program. I had little if any idea what Mountain T.O.P. was all about; my only connection to it was Mary Jane Tucker,  whom I knew through the conference singles retreats who served on the Mountain T.O.P. board at the time.

At the time, AIM weeks offered only Major Home Repair or Summer Plus. Kaleidoscope wouldn’t be offered until a couple of years later, and the Quest program didn’t start until recently. As Gail described the Summer Plus program – enrichment workshops for teens from mountain communities – she listed some possible workshop topics. One of them was “creative writing.”

I had no experience teaching or working with teenagers, but I am a writer, and I started thinking that it might be fun to teach creative writing. And I thought that Mountain T.O.P. might offer the same kind of Christian community that I had come to enjoy at the time through the conference singles retreats. So I signed up for the third AIM week of the summer, in early August.

At the time, Mountain T.O.P. had a much larger geographic footprint by renting various camp facilities across the Cumberland Plateau, from Jamestown in the north to Jasper in the south. My first AIM event was at Camp Overton, in the little town of Campaign, Tenn., between McMinnville and Sparta and close to Rock Island State Park.

It turned out to be a quite atypical AIM week, for reasons I’ll get into, and yet it was quite sufficient to get me completely hooked on the Mountain T.O.P. program.

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Dec 27

The spoken Word

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A year ago, around this time, I started thinking to myself that I ought to be more disciplined in reading my Bible. But New Year’s Day came and went, and it wasn’t until the second or third of January that I noticed a Facebook post from my friend Sonja Goold about the Daily Audio Bible.

I started listening every day, and I think it’s been a good experience. I wrote about it in my Times-Gazette tech column a while back, but I thought  it would be timely to mention it here this week, at a time when a lot of people are making resolutions or taking stock.

Spoken-word versions of the Bible have been around for years, of course, on cassette and then on CD. But the Daily Audio Bible (DAB) is a free podcast. You can listen to it online by going to their web site; you can automatically download the podcast by subscribing to it from iTunes or your favorite podcast management software; or you can install iOS or Android apps on your phone or tablet which will take care of retrieving each day’s podcast whenever you want it.

DAB is based in Spring Hill, which is not that far from Shelbyville as the crow flies but due to the way the highways run it’s about an hour’s drive away. One of these days, I’m going to make a field trip to see the Wind Farm Café, a coffeehouse affiliated with the ministry.

The DAB is run by a fellow named Brian Hardin. Many of the Bible-on-CD products rely on narrators with deep, dramatic voices; I think Charlton Heston narrated one successful version. Brian’s is more of a friendly, welcoming voice.

He rotates among different Bible versions from week to week, although that almost changed for the upcoming year (more on that in a second). The readings take you through the entire Bible in a year’s time. There’s an Old Testament reading, a New Testament reading, a reading from Psalms and a reading from Proverbs. Each goes in order; the Old Testament reading starts with Genesis 1 on New Year’s Day and winds up in Malachi on the following New Year’s Eve. The New Testament runs from Matthew through to Revelations in a year’s time, and so on.

If Brian is starting a new book of the Bible, he’ll usually make a couple of brief remarks beforehand about the book’s setting, presumed authorship and theme. After the readings, he will sometimes make a few brief remarks about one of the passages and then will lead a prayer. Then, he’ll usually talk a little bit about something related to the DAB ministry – his own travels to speaking engagements or conferences, the Wind Farm Café or what have you. The podcast usually ends by playing prayer requests recorded from a 24-hour prayer line.

If you wanted to, or were pressed for time, you could stop listening right after the Bible passage, of course.

The web site tries to foster a community around the podcast. There are discussion forums and what have you.

The website also offers a daily Bible podcast for children and several foreign-language versions of DAB.

This year, in particular, the DAB ministry is poised for change and growth. Brian has released a new book, Passages: How Reading the Bible in a Year Will Change Everything for You, along with a companion edition New International Version Bible with readings broken up according to the DAB schedule. A couple of months ago, Brian proposed that in 2012, he use only the NIV, instead of changing versions from week to week, so that those who owned the new companion Bible could read along. I was in favor of this idea, in part because some of the paraphrases in the DAB rotation leave me unimpressed. The NIV, on the other hand, is readable, relatively acceptable to a wide variety of denominational backgrounds, and it’s a translation rather than a paraphrase, meaning it was worked on by a team of scholars and is geared towards accuracy. But Brian put the question to a vote of the listeners, and the listeners voted to keep the current system of rotating from version to version each week.

I think that my first year with DAB has been a good one – although not always an easy one. Some of the early Old Testament passages are challenging, and a regular schedule for listening to them forces you to think hard about what  you believe. What parts of the Bible are meant as prescriptive for our lives today? What parts are meant to be taken literally, and what parts are meant to be taken allegorically? What principles are eternal, and what principles are meant to apply to a given culture or situation? I think forcing yourself to take in all of the Bible, as opposed to just the warm and fuzzy parts, is an important process. In 2012, I’d like to be more disciplined about listening intently to the readings, not getting distracted or letting my mind wander.

I would heartily recommend the DAB to anyone interested in a closer relationship with the Bible.