Postmodern Christianity: Part I

In a recent conversation with a former church planter, we ran into a bit of a impasse about the place of denominational churches in post-modernity, especially in terms of church planting and newly-developed churches. To shed even more light on the topic, the conversation had implications for me as a future pastor of such a church and the flexibility of the CRC or any denomination with a church order to enfold a church plant as an "organized" member. Of course, there are monumental things at stake here: the accountability of individual churches to a denominational body, the theological cohesion of a new church to the church order of all the other member churches, the ability of self-determination within a congregation, the integrity of the church planter and Elisha pastor and the theology of church splits.

The issue centered around this idea: if a newly-developed church has theological convictions or even polity convictions that are contrary to the receiving denomination, the new church should either override its own convictions for the sake of the denomination or find a new denomination. I understand the concept, at least in theory. For one, most church plants are denominational, meaning that they are funded by a denominational body with set governing rules and creedal or confessional statements. In addition, the argument is put out there that people should join a denomination with which they fit theologically. The rules are there; if you don't like them, find another denomination! There's 25 churches in this zip code, after all! This is the "don't-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out" approach. In fact, it might even have a nice ecumenical face: we're all part of the body of Christ, but this part has its own way of doing things.

I have several objections to this argument laid out by my professor. On the one hand, theological congruency is necessary in practice for the sake of unity. However, theological congruency in theory should not be nearly as absolute. If the above concept of "just find another denomination that fits your beliefs" holds, then we should have never experienced any change to church order, no change to confessional standards, and no change to church structure. In fact, we've experienced each of those to such an extent that we can't even publish a hymnal with the RCA because our confessions look so different. To put a face on this issue, take something like women in office. If you hold to the line of thinking that says "try the church up the street", a change should never have happened in the CRC's interpretation of women in office. It did. Why? Because people believed in the denomination enough that they weren't willing to leave it over one non-salvific issue. Now take an issue like infant baptism. You might be inclined to tell a new church that if they want to dedicate infants instead of baptizing them that they should just find a new denomination, the system is not working. There is a system in place where churches or individuals can appeal to governing bodies, both regional and national, to challenge such a non-salvific issue. That these processes are in place is evidence in and of itself that the system was meant to be elastic. Maybe the challenge is denied. Then that church must make a decision to stay and comply or disagree and go.

In reference to my last post, we also differed on what it meant to be ecumenical. In a way, polite denominationalism is a form of ecumenicity. Their definition includes keeping the status quo and shuffling people into pre-existing categories according to theological conviction. My theory on ecumenicity is a communal one, one that that seeks the combination of denominations, however idealistic. In their mind, they were more ecumenical than I was, and in my mind, I was more ecumenical than they were. We were speaking different languages.

What we acknowledged, as well, is that there is a deeper philosophical difference that we had. Both people on the other side of the table from me were 55 or older and here I was as a (new) 24-year-old. Their mindset is logical and denominational. My mindset is post-modern and communal. As one of the men talked with disgust about the tendency of "emerging" churches to gather together and decide on what direction their body should take, I thought to myself how similar this sounded to my own convictions and how similar it sounded to the church language of creating a vision or mission for our churches. Of course, this concept is dangerous for denominationally-planted groups. While, out of the one side of their mouth they say to join the church that fits them theologically, they have to acknowledge that a denominational church planter who does not tow the party line and allows theological or administrative incongruencies is irresponsible and reprehensible. Why? At the heart its all practical. We commissioned this planter and we paid the bills. They have a point.

Many people ask me why I'm still in the CRC, or in a denomination at all. Why subject yourself to three years of onslaught? Why subject yourself to the pains of Greek and Hebrew exegesis? Why subject yourself to the narrow theological viewpoints of the education at Calvin? Why join and pastor in a denomination where you don't completely agree?

Firstly, I love the Church - the holy catholic and apostolic one. Second, the CRC has faults like any other denomination, but it is one heck of a solid product. I mean, from top to bottom, this is a well thought-out, well organized, efficiently run, perspective-laden, quality and faithful organization. Other than the Mennonites, no one can boast a program like CRWRC. No other denomination can pull off the kind of publishing quality that the CRC does. No other denomination can initiate a version of the Bible that replaced the KJV. No other denomination can survive the kind of split the CRC did in the 90's without missing a step.

And I believe this denomination is elastic enough to endure much more change than it already has. I think that the next 25-50 years in the CRC will bring forth an unprecedented rate of change. I think Christian education will decline on a national level, infant dedications will happen within our denomination, strictness in church polity will be abandoned, theological congruency will be held less high, and that homosexuality will prove to be much more of a non-issue than we previously thought. And I would be surprised in 50 years if we had not joined with the RCA.

Elasticity of theological congruency is a post-modern value and will lead to more and more questioning, more and more re-evaluation of things that had previously been accepted at face value. People shouldn't be surprised that I'm a post-modern thinker and remaining in a denomination. People should realize that the only reason I can remain within a denomination is because I am a post-modern thinker.

Apophaticism (Say what?)

I learned the other day what I am. Theologically, that is. One of my professors put the term "apophatic theology" on a list of terms we should know before we graduate. Initially, I had no clue what it meant, but the more I studied the topic and learned how it functioned in Christianity, I was more able to see that its exactly what I've been grasping for throughout my upbringing in a doctrine-focused denomination and now seminary.

Apophatic theology is based around the idea of describing God in terms of what he is not instead of in terms of what he is. Its closely related to negative theology. For example, instead of saying that God is "good", we would say that God is "not evil". While that sounds stupid, it has profound implications for how we do theology. If you're an avid reader of my blog, you know I've proposed in the past that one of the great weaknesses of the quality theology in the Reformed tradition is its lack of priority when it comes to the issue of the acknowledgment of mystery. Of course, I'm not fully apophatic. I believe, as Reformed theology points out, that there is something called revelation: God showing us something about himself. There's special revelation that we receive in the Scriptures, general revelation which is revelation we receive in nature and one another, and then there's divine accommodation, or God making ultimate principles real to us on our own terms.

So then the question in my mind runs right to percentages, since I have an economics mind. As far as I know, no writer of systematic theology or catechism teacher has ever made a statement like, "We know about 95% of what God is like," but often times that's the way it comes off, if not higher. In all the rigmarole of arguing theological principles (often times even those veiled in mystery), we often completely forget about the part of God that he has not or can not reveal because it is too grand. Its natural, of course, to spend time on the known. We have to, in fact, because we can't have seminary classes where all we do is wonder. Wondering is hard to grade.

But try this on for size. Let's say, apophatically, that we know 3% of who God is and the workings of the universe. Would that be enough for salvation? It has to be, because the Bible says so. Could it be that God is big enough that we only know .0000001%, and that's enough? Of course it is....God's infinite. Now what kind of implications would this have for theology? How much time would you spend on systematics? How much time would you spend in the Word? How much time would you spend in prayer? There's a lot of implications here.

So maybe .00000001% creates a deistic God or an impersonal God. I'll compromise. How about 20%. No? You still want 95%? I think the origin of the earth, the mystery of human choice, and the spark of life at conception should be worth at least 6% on this scale. So no, I won't buy at 95%.

Here's the point: don't promote a theology that explains God 100%. Its an easy trap to fall into. In fact, I would argue that many of the Reformers and the systematic theologians who followed them got stuck trying to explain 100%. What if we acknowledge only 50%? What does that do for church splits? How many denominations would we have? 50% less? Where does that put my discussion of new churches joining denominations?

In many ways, the Reformation was a reaction against the RCC claiming they had too high a percentage. In many ways, the non-denomitional movement and the Emerging Church is a reaction to our assertion that we know too much. You know what? They're probably right.

I love theology, I really do. I wouldn't be at seminary if I didn't. I wouldn't write in this blog if I didn't. But I want to give theological discussions and catechisms and treatises and even (gasp) the Bible a perspective check. Where do you fall on how much you think we know about God and the way things are? 10%? 98%? 40%? Where does your church (to an outsider) stand?

Let's roll.

Experiencing God Diffently in Worship

This past weekend was the General Assembly of the Church of God in Michigan, and I served my role as a delegate. This is my second year going, and so I'm more free to notice things rather than try to remember everyone's names and network with lots of new people.

I had a sort of epiphany during our closing worship service. Our worship leader was an African-American woman who I thought looked like Condoleeza Rice and her TV anchorman husband on the bass guitar. She had lots of energy and was a great worship leader....for her context. I was sitting up in the front corner, so I got a chance to observe almost everyone in the place. First of all, I noticed her own son, with his head on the table, probably napping-clearly uninterested sitting at the table next to me. Next I noticed the large contingent of African-American leaders in the group experiencing worship like they had been all weekend - fists pumping, amen-ing, mmhmm-ing, raising hands, etc. Then I noticed a large contingent of middle-aged white people: a little milder than their African-American cohorts, but still with hands raised, swaying, pointing to heaven, etc. I noticed the few people in my age group (20-30), mostly youth pastors, interacting with the music but not selling out. Finally, I noticed my table, good stone-faced Danish people from my church, similar to the Dutch ones I'd grown up with.

All this got me to thinking: how do I experience God, and do I look down on other people if they experience Him differently? I'm met with this constantly in Detroit at Sinai-Grace Hospital. Often times, the God of the African-American Baptist people I talk with seems so much different than my own that I feel like I have more coherence with my Orthodox Rabbi professor. In that case, it may just be that my Rabbi is used to putting his theology into logical categories, like I am. In worship, I'd probably place myself between the arm-folded Danes and the charismatic middle age types.

I think one of the ways that this really rears its head is worship style. The truth of the matter is that those of us who are worship leaders have all drank the "experiential" kool-aid to some extent. We have to because its undeniable. What's interesting for us as is that our jobs, by their very nature, seem to require us to pander to whatever the current generation is because we're at a point in time where the way people experience God has changed drastically and distinctly in the last 50 years. We still have people in our benches that experience God best through straight-up organ hymns. Then, even though the CRC seems to completely have missed this step, there is an entire generation of "big worship" people. This is the classy-suited-big-haired-mega-church style people who sing all songs that were popular from about 1985-1993 (Majesty & Thy Word are classics and, interestingly, not that dissimilar). There's a surprisingly large amount of these people - they're Wimber's folks - raising hands, yelling amens, but still very skeptical of modern worship or emerging church stuff. Finally, there's this whole generation coming up now that identifies with the emerging style of worship or the Chris-Tomlin-modern style of worship. Add into that a fairly consistent worship African-American gospel style, and you've got 4 different kinds of oil being thrown into water.

So, is it okay to say one way is preferable to another, or do we have to acknowledge all as equally good, in true politically-correct style? Now, I regularly get disgusted when I watch Christian cable television, even though I know many churches in the South that eat that stuff up. I find the theology of many of the patients (and the pastors) I meet in Detroit poorly-formed and illogical (not just because I disagree, but I objectively think its illogical). You can really take this argument a long way. If your experience of God is co-equal with everyone else's (as my CPE program tells me it is), then you have zero basis for questioning an experience that is Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, or Hindu. These are just different experiences of God, be they in other faiths, or in other theologies (ways of talking about God).

Ultimately, someone has to make some sort of qualitative statement, so here goes one try: I think that emerging/modern worship is more seeker-friendly than "big worship" or organ-based hymns. Now that might evoke a "duh" out of you because you know there's no churchplant in any denomination that has ported in a pipe organ in the last 10 years, but really, that's a judgmental statement. Do I think there's a place for other experiences of God? Yes. But I think we have to be realists here. Churches that have not gotten modern, emerging or experiential in their worship have shrunk, as a general rule. Now, there are churches that do traditional worship REALLY well that manage to grow, but I would offer that quality tradition is simply a better prescription for delay of the inevitable than others have found.

So try this on for size: I felt uncomfortable in our GA's worship service today because of all the amen-ing, hand-raising, fist-pumping, liturgical-dancing, and old-people-that-can't-clap-on-the-beat. And, for a while, I felt guilty for being uncomfortable. After all, I'm a worship pastor, I should be able to "get into" all sorts of worship, and usually I can. But I couldn't help thinking to myself: if I took a non-Christian in here right now, they would be scared shitless and think we are crazy. Now, some might say its because the Spirit was moving. But last I checked, the Spirit also empowered mission and God is not in conflict with Himself. I don't have a good answer for this question, but I do know that I can be most faithful to my calling by playing coffee-house-style-white-20-something worship music in my context and its growing the Kingdom. By their fruits shall you know them. Can we be evaluative of people's ways of experiencing God, or is that just politically incorrect?

Alcohol & Holiness

This Thursday, our Seminary community will take up what will undoubtedly be one of the most controversial topics ever addressed, let women in office: alcohol consumption by Christians. I've never quite known what to think about this subject, and I'll be the first to admit that my defenses for not drinking have changed over the years. In that light, it might be possible to say that I'm predisposed against alcohol consumption and therefore any argument I try and present is tainted because its simply a new sheath for an old sword. While that might be true, I've found lots of congruency in the holiness movement, understanding their approach to issues of social morality such as this, and I think its a helpful point to consider as I approach the town hall meeting on Thursday.

We have always been taught in Reformed circles that there are two types of people: those who try to earn their salvation (Catholics & holiness types) and those who rest in the election and consequent freedom of God's grace (Calvinists & Lutherans). Those are pretty distinct lines to draw. For one, there's no way that either tradition could totally rest in those categories and have any sort of relevancy. If Catholics and holiness traditions truly had no other purpose in theology than to try and achieve perfection, the movement would have fallen apart. Same with Calvinists/Lutherans: there has to be some moral and social conscience to temper Christian freedom (Paul's admission that all things are permissible for him is grossly expanded here).

I think both sides have their positives and negatives, but in the interest of space and time, I'm going to make an argument for the holiness side in the issue of alcohol consumption because I think it is more legitimate than my Calvinist colleagues are willing to admit.

First of all, we need a redefinition of "Christian freedom" from a holiness perspective. After all, they don't deny Christian freedom, but simply recategorize it. Instead of saying that Christian freedom is the right to do anything God doesn't specifically prohibit, it instead lays the doctrine at the feet of Jesus, saying that Christian freedom is the right to follow Christ more closely. See the difference? One is scouring the Bible for loopholes, while the other is giving the Bible the benefit of the doubt and filling in those cracks. Rather than not doing what the Bible doesn't say we can't do, holiness attempts to do more fully that which the Bible says we should do.

Secondly, the very definition of holiness has its roots in sanctification. Yes, John Wesley went to far at the end of his life, as others have, to promote a perfectionist doctrine. However, if you look at the roots of sanctification, its not pharisitical at all.....its the the same continuing sanctification Calvinists & Lutherans talk about. So if the rule of holiness is sanctification, then there is, at the very core of holiness, a concept of being "set apart". Yes, God sets us apart by dividing us from unbelievers at the last day, but lets think harder about this. How are we "set apart" during the week? Of course, this looks different for all of us. But in some way, we are all attempting to set ourselves apart from the world through moral action as the continuing work of sanctification is applied by the Holy Spirit. Paul continually calls us to a life that is different, a life that is "beyond reproach". In an age where alcohol has become the common currency of our culture, a legal drug, isn't it worth considering that maybe it is worth setting ourselves apart in this area - not in condemnation, but in faithful submission?

Thirdly, this is a different question for those in leadership or in future leadership than it is for laity. Sorry, but its true. In my current charge, my contract specifically states that neither my wife nor I are to drink any alcohol while employed by the church. My wife initially bucked this, not because she's a raging alcoholic (she's mostly given up alcohol for my sake), but because it violated her definition of Christian freedom. The church doesn't have a right to take that away! Well, thankfully, I've found a community that, like I, has chosen to use abstinence from alcohol as one way of "setting themselves apart". Its a very practical one in our congregation - we have several recovered alcoholics, several people with relatives who were victims of alcohol-related deaths, and people who are stuck with alcohol-related birth defects. Our community drinks their problems away - we do not. Now take this seriously, pastors and leadership in churches: you are held to a higher standard. Why are you willing to subject yourself to a suit & tie standard, a living-in-a-stinky-parsonage standard, a roast-pastor standard, a church polity standard, but not an alcohol-free standard? There's lots of things I don't do now that I'm a pastor that I might have done as a Christian in laity: TV shows, language, cigars, reckless driving, being a funny nuisance, playing pranks on Wal-Mart employees....all things I might not consider sinful, but also don't consider to reflect well on my church, reflect well on my congregation. Hanging out in a bar (and I would argue drinking at all) is one of those things.

Finally, there is the issue of the weaker brother. You may have been biting your tongue the entire time you read this, but now want to scream: "Why can't Christians reclaim alcohol for the Kingdom of God? Why can't we model a faithful use of alcohol?" While this is the one point at which I'm usually willing to yield the floor, I have continually been bombarded at the denominational seminary by drunkenness and pressure to drink. To this, I simply have to shake my head. My wife doesn't like it when I smoke cigars every once in a while. What would happen if I smoked them a lot and then blew the smoke in her face? You know. Well, I've got news for you, "Christian reclaimers of alcohol": don't blow smoke in our face. I'll stand with several of my respected colleagues and students who have consciously chosen not to drink for a variety of reasons: mine just so happens not to even be a moral objection. Additionally, Asian students, which comprise an ever-increasing chunk of our seminary community, are more offended by this than I am. There are constantly jokes made in classes and daily conversations at school about how commonplace alcohol is in social settings at our school. After many social invites comes a BYOB or a snicker about getting sloshed. Give me a break. Use that classis money with a little bit more dignity than blowing it on booze and then showing up at our school's food pantry to ask for food you can't afford. I am sad to say that I've had professors, staff people, graduated (& ordained) pastors, and students all joke about alcohol with me - with no acknowledgment that it might be offensive. Luckily, I'm past the point where open comments and joking about alcohol abuse offends me - heck, I'm a hockey player. What I don't like being told is that I would drink if I fully understood Christian freedom, especially when its slurred.

I guess at the end of day, I want for this topic what I want for all topics I post on this blog: recognize that there might just be two legitimate sides to every coin and perhaps we can show more tact and consideration for those who might suffer from alcoholism, have been affected by alcohol-related deaths/problems and those who choose not to drink out of conscientious objection. Are we able to have this debate as people who don't feel like we already know it all? I hope so, but I more so hope that we can have this debate sober.

Ecumenicity: The U.N. of the Church

Once again, my apologies for limited postings. This is a rough quarter for me, but I promise I'll get back at it. Its my last year at seminary, so there's lots of things to consider. And maybe sometime, like Ryan, I'll have to shut down my blog so I'm more marketable :) Until then, read on.

One of the blessings of my current job is that I've gotten the opportunity to dip my feet into the waters of ecumenism like never before. I've had experiences in the past of bi-lateral ecumenical projects, working with one or (at the most) two churches on a mutual interest. The sadness of the Greenville situation is that, with churches feeling the inevitable pocketbook pinch the parishoners are feeling, staff and programs are being cut at such an alarming rate that our only choice is to link up on things. Its a blessing in disguise.

I've gotten the opportunity most recently to be involved with a couple different community-wide youth ministry groups. What I find interesting is that when senior pastors get together, they often meet at a fancy restaurant and function largely as a social support group. Of course, that's needed, but what's been great about the youth groups is that they're very much action-oriented. It makes sense, after all, that we plan events together if our kids all go to the same schools and are faced by the same issues in the community. We get to pool our expertise and get to pool our knowledge.

Theoretically, this works, and, for the most part, I'm appreciative of them, like I said. But like anything, there's pitfalls. So, for as apt as I am to paint rosy pictures of ecumenicity, here goes some ventures of critique.

My main thesis is what my title says: ecumenical bodies look like and function like the U.N. Now why is that bad, you say? My wife will tell me that the U.N. is the greatest thing ever to happen to the world, and I'll agree to a point. The problem, of course, is two-fold. On the one hand, the U.N. gets held captive by the reluctant and the crazy and the rich (or some combination of the three). On the other hand, because the U.N. has the interests of everybody in mind, it really has the interests of nobody in mind. Its very similar in community ecumenical groups. When the senior pastor group runs a community dinner for poor people, the rich people foot the bill, the church with the most volunteers hold the most influence, and the few crazies in the group are the loudest ones of all, wagging their fingers at people, telling them they'll go to hell if they don't repent over their mashed potatoes. When the local ultra-fundamentalist church puts in their bulletin the following Sunday that 25 people "got saved" through the free turkey give-away, and the Methodist Church can't recall anyone coming to faith, you see the heart of the matter. Or consider the other scenario: the community youth pastors band together to host "insert-crazy-youth-event-here". Many kids come, but have no clue who put it on or how to move along in this new fascination they've found. If you allow one youth pastor to hand out business cards, you open the floodgates for crazy recruitment fairs instead of sensitive youth events.

Like everything, the answer has to be somewhere in the middle. If you read my blog a lot, you'll remember my comparison of the CRC folk and the Amish in our community. That's not a good alternative, but polite hand-shaking community events aren't the answer either. I've more and more been leaning on what Steve Anthony is doing in Toledo, OH. He runs an organization which unifies local churches like a denomination.....not based around doctrine, but based around common interests (ie, local poverty, local schools, gospel missions, shelters, etc.). So, you set up an administrator for the "ministry shares" to be dispensed instead of each church fighting the daily barrage of people asking for electric bill payments (my daily exercise of answering machine cleaning). In addition, the churches participate in mutual agreements about encouraging Christian accountability by fighting church shoppers. Each church agrees to not receive members (or even deter visitors) who have not made peace with their former congregation and been "released" by their council/board. Its radical, but its realistic and effective.

In the end, the needs will inform the means. If you're in a community like ours where needs are so great, then a coordinated effort of Anthony's model is about the best thing one can think of. In other scenarios, the needs may be different and so should the means. What this requires is a great degree of trust and a great deal of theological humility. To be sure, we in the CRC can take this lesson to heart, but its just as true of conservative Lutherans or Baptists, as well. We often practice what Pope Benedict preaches: our church is the only true church and the others are a nice try. Make the starting point "The Church" not, "our church" and maybe we'll start getting somewhere.

Professional Jesus People

Somewhere down the road (although it scares me), I may wind up as a senior pastor or even a solo pastor at a church. At some points, this is really exciting....something I really look forward to. At other times, I think I'd like to keep the job I have forever.....hanging out with teenagers and playing my guitar for a living.

What perhaps frustrates me most about being a pastor are some of my future colleagues. To be sure, this is no slam against my senior pastor, who is one of the most laid back and socially adequate pastors I've ever met. What drives me crazy, however, is the constant flow of pastors who come back to my seminary classes and try to impress the professor or us as seminarians with their large storehouse of knowledge. A couple semesters ago, we had this guy in one of our classes who we called "Professor Student". He was obsessed with sharing every bit of knowledge he had ever acquired and pumping up his own abilities in Greek and constantly reminding us how we were still in seminary and "not there yet". Yesterday, one of these guys just reeled off four sentences in Hebrew while he talked about how he uses it so effectively in his ministry.

I know the church he comes from...its floundering. Maybe try some English.

There's a catch 22 here. Having feet in two denominations has opened my eyes about the necessity of seminary education. Its obvious that certain pastors and leaders in my current denomination would have benefited (some just a little, but some huge amounts) from a mandatory seminary education. Firstly, the Biblical knowledge and theological perspective would help. However, exposure to ministry in different settings and the cross-fertilization of ideas would benefit them greatly. On the other side, ministry in the CRC seems to be defined by intellectuality, and it drives me crazy! When churches want to call you as a pastor, they want to hear your sermon tapes, as if sermons are the only thing you do. In order to get my license to preach in CRC churches, I have to promise to preach Christian Education and Heidelberg Catechism. Never mind relevance. I've taken multiple "exegesis" classes, learning how to interpret the scriptures for preaching and teaching. What did we do? Memorize the original languages. Argh. Today we discussed how we would teach about the Hebrew language and applications of the Jewish mishnah in adult bible study classes by lecturing. Wow.

One of the things that really cracks me up is the pride that pastors take in programmatic development and how closely its success is related to themselves. I addressed this in my most recent sermon. We always view ourselves so highly, as if our churches would become a hole in the ground if we would leave or somehow the passing down of the gospel will cease if I am not the facilitator. Shame on us.

My greatest concern when I go to fill pulpit supply now is not how prepared my sermon is, or how well I can announce songs (because everyone knows hymns are the only music we use), but whether or not I'll get a swift kick for not wearing a suit. If being a preacher means wearing a suit on Sundays, dressing up like a bank owner during the week, trying to dispense knowledge at every turn, and enjoying the sound of my own voice, then I'll stick with plucking my guitar.

Minutes from the Red Hat Society Meeting, August 8

I was at our local coffee shop writing a sermon, when a group of 80 year old women stopped by and had a meeting. They were all wearing red hats, so they might be part of that Red Hat Society thing. Either way it was hilarious. Here's the notes (verbatim) that I took from across the room, with my own topical headings:

Race Relations
My granddaughter is married to a black man. Do they have troubles? No, its a good marriage, but everyone has troubles. Her kids are the cutest things. Mulatto, I guess you would call them. When they have birthday parties, they can only invite two friends, and they never invite white kids. Why can't more people be like that? Her daughter can't get a boyfriend. The two boys both have girlfriends, but nobody will date the girl. When she was younger, the school wouldn't believe she was bi-racial because she looks so white, but she has nappies in her hair. One time, her teacher told her to prove she was bi-racial, so she said, look at the nappies in my hair! Have you heard about that Klu-Klux-Clan in Indiana? Yeah, I've heard about that. That's terrible, people shouldn't discriminate.

Politics
I think Barack Obama would make a great president. Have you read his book? No. You should, its fantastic. I don't think Hillary would make a very good president. No, I don't think so either.
All I know is that either would be better than President Bush. I don't blame him, I blame his cabinet: they run him. They have no clue what they're doing.

Air Travel
I found out the hard way that you can't fit two people in an airplane bathroom. Did you drop something heavy in there? (Laughter) Well, my friend is married and her husband lives in Arizona and she lives in Grand Rapids: that's one way to keep a marriage working. Pilots aren't allowed to fly as much as they want. If you think you have to run from flight to flight, you should see pilots. They get off one flight and have to run to the next. Did you see NASA pilots were flying drunk? Its their own lives they're taking in their hands. Its just like people who get in cars and drive drunk. You have to be down to Grand Rapids two hours before a flight, then they put cancels on, and then you run around for a day and a half looking for a flight. My son had that. He yelled at the airport attendant because he needed to be at a wedding in Grand Rapids from La Guardia. He got on the flight, but they lost all of his luggage. He'll never find it back. My daughter says I need all my flight things in black and white. She bosses me around when I fly. I don't even know why I get the ticket. She bosses right up the counter and bla bla bla bla, and somehow we take off 10 minutes earlier on some other airline. All I get is a wad of paper and get on the plane. I don't even know why she lets me have any say in it. We never went anywhere that was actually on my tickets. Instead of driving, I fly to Milwaukee now. They shoot you across on a rubber band, I think. Its a World War II plane. Never do they get my luggage to my airport. One time we got all our luggage lost, so the pilot drove us to Wal-Mart to buy underwear. One time my grandson, who is a musician, lost all his luggage and someone drove him to Wal-Mart to get underwear, but his rental car broke down.

Auto Industry
There are so many recalls these days. What do you drive? Horse & buggy? (Laughter). I took my car in to get the oil changed, and the mechanic yelled at me. He said if I wait 3,000 miles to get my oil changed, I'd be dead before then. He said to change your oil according to the weather. If I let it keep going, all the oil would be on the floor and fill up my garage.

Air Conditioning
I very seldom turn my air conditioner on unless someone is with me. There are some places I can't go because its too cold. I was in Wal-Mart yesterday and it was way too cold. Marylou turns the air way up, but I can't handle it. I got pneumonia from the fourth car I had from the air conditioner. I tried sitting in the backseat and it didn't matter. Marylou liked it.

Animal Rights
What's that? An ant farm. Did you know they're illegal? They're illegal because they can carry things. My kids had those. Those are coffee beans! You can't watch ants doing their thing now. The humane society put a stop to ant farms. We used to sit their mesmorized watching them. My son wouldn't be quiet, wouldn't take a nap, until I got him an ant farm.

Submitted respectfully.

Public Apology

Just a memo to all Church outsiders in the world: we're sorry.

Let's face a simple fact here: the way Christianity is presented to the world through many different outlets is idiotic and ridiculous. Sometimes when I make my commute into Grand Rapids, I feel self-conscious if I pass someone going 65 because I'm afraid they'll see the Christian fish on the back of my car and assume all Christians are law-breaking vigilantes. But that doesn't compare to the ridiculousness of the face that Christianity presents to the world in many different ways. If I were an outsider, I would think Christians are the most backward, bigoted people in the whole world.

Of course, this isn't true in all areas. Certainly, there are many churches who present a socially conscious self-respecting message to the world without sacrificing the truths we all stand for. But I think this is even more true in the very places the gospel needs to have more relevance: smalltown America.

For example, we've got a fundamentalist church that is positioned right on the main entrance to town that somehow got their hands on a lighted-up sign. Of course, they use that sign to do the Lord's work, like condemning the NIV, associating tattoos with Satan, associating body piercings with hell and telling everyone who drinks that Jesus would disown them.

Come on.

I went to a rummage sale last week where a nice, well-meaning Christian man sold me an entertainment stand for our youth room for $1. He was selling his possessions from his trailer park home so that he could go on the mission field for two years. Even though he knew I was a pastor, he still handed me a tract. As I was leaving, I overheard him trying to "evangelistically" speak to some Harley bikers in a beat-up pickup truck. When he saw one of them wearing army pants, he used this keen line: "You're in the army, huh? Well I'm in the Lord's army!"

Nice. And our numbers are dropping?

And how about that Christian TV. Strong showing for Christianity there. Whether its poorly produced "extreme sports evangelism" or Biblical "health supplements", somehow we've managed to put our least relevant foot forward as a Christian community. Why is it that the only relevant Christian message on television is spoken by vegetables? I was watching South Park the other night on Comedy Central do a caricature of the 700 Club, and it was probably the most accurate thing I've ever seen. If you want to check it out, its episode #311: Starvin Marvin in Space.

I'm tolerant, I really am. We played church league softball a couple weeks back against a team where all the girls wore skirts during the game. But they're socially adjusted! Good Ghandi. Lets just throw in the towel if we really think talking in old English, condemning piercings, or even clinging to Christian education are the kinds of things we need to cling to so Christianity is Christianity. I'm not one of these argumentative emerging-church-only types. I just don't like it when I work all day long to help my church do legitimate ministry as Christ would and we're simply trumped by the louder, prouder arm of the Church that has lost complete touch with their own culture. Like it or not, marketing is part of evangelism, and we suck at it. Some people just need to be shook.

Or maybe I'll just drive the speed limit.

Letters from Arminia

Once upon a time, there was me. Me, being a good little Reformed boy knew the Heidelberg Catechism like the back of my hand. For fun, I used to page through the tune name index of the gray hymnal and looking for congruences between the Canons of Dort and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Now I find myself in a place where none of that really matters, where we daily walk the line between the Church falling apart and staying together, and where I learn lessons everyday about how the majority of Christendom operates. This is Arminia.

Not very many towns in America are absent of some sort of Presbyterian Church. The ones that are usually have some sort of UCC or Reformed presence somewhere in their midst. Rarely, especially in Michigan, do you find a town where there is not a Reformed soul to be found. A town where the Lutherans are almost ready to close the last of their 3 churches, the baptists welcome people to town with condemning phrases from the KJV, and the Christian minority is almost entirely Catholic, Congregationalist or Wesleyan. Welcome to Greenville.

I wouldn't be surprised if I was the first Calvin Seminary student/graduate every to work in this town, of if I was the first commuter to the Calvin campus in the city's long history. Reformed thought is irrelevant here, it would seem.

Ironically, however, I would like to dissuade people from believing that Arminians are inevitably bent on their own personal choice to the exclusion of all else, that they baptize every congregant every Sunday, and that a Reformed person can get chewed up and spit out within a few Wesleyan sermons. I believe that this is untrue just as much as I believe its untrue that election is a core belief in many of our Reformed communities in this country. The Church is a melting pot, just like the US, and that might just be okay.

People often ask me how I can exist at an Arminian church. How can you reconcile your beliefs with theirs? How can you sit through a worship service, a sermon, an altar call? How do you deal with perfectionism and the like?

Many people describe my senior pastor and I as people who have "agreed to disagree" on some theological topics, and since we get along well, you might think that. However, I think the greater truth is that we both acknowledge what I wrote about in my previous blog. Calvinism and Arminianism, while both eloquent and well defended against one another, are simply a peephole into the grandness and wondrousness that is the actual theology of God, or that which God knows about himself. How we speak about God, our theology, is but a speck of dust compared to God's theology, or how he speaks about himself. If any theologian would deny that to me, I think I might have to pop him in the face.

My senior pastor, Dave, is not an hard-core Arminian. He does not believe that people can achieve perfection this side of glory, as Wesley hinted at in his later years. He's offended by determinism and fatalism, the flaws that he sees in Reformed thought, especially hyper-Calvinism. But then again, so am I. I shudder at the thought that we're just stagnated linemen on some cosmic foosball table, and I don't think its Biblical either. I like theologians, like Aquinas, who give me a way out here. They identify God as the primary actor, but do not push the ideas of election/predestination/etc. While I might confess those if you held a sword to my neck, its not necessary for my daily ministry that I push those on my laity. In fact, I think Dave and I would both say quite openly that while we're comfortable in our own theological recliners, neither of us would be surprised if, at the end of time, Jesus lays out a far different theology than anything Calvin, Wesley, Aquinas, Augustine, Luther, Chrysostom, or anyone else has laid out. Why? They're not God.

While we've come a long way from the way Calvin treated Servetus and how the Reformers treated the Anabaptists, its sad that we really still just don't get it. In communities around the world, ecumenism is broken down by theological cockiness. There are a lot of pastors and churches that just plain weird me out. Some of them are Arminian, some of them are Reformed, and some of them are so "out there" that I can't identify them. Recognize the affinity that you have with people across denominational lines because they, like you, hold up the primacy of Scripture, which is so trampled in today's world and because learn from the things they do better than you. Our church's worship library is now a fully-integrated Reformed/Wesleyan resource, and I hope the same would be true if I find myself in a Reformed congregation someday.

Few Reformed people get the opportunity that I get to see the inner workings of a solid, comparable, Arminian denomination from as up close and personal as you can get. I continue to urge as many people from both sides of the table to sit down and talk....sit down and cooperate. Often times, you will have far more in common than you think. And remember, no matter how big your allegiance to Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, or Wesley is, your greater allegiance is to the Lamb of God, who is not a follower of any of those four. Let God's theology of Himself and His Church increase as your theology of God and His Church decreases. And let all churches, Calvinistic and Arminian alike, ascent "soli deo gloria."

Baptizing at 150

First a couple of much-needed apologies:
1. To those of you who have been crazy enough to keep up with my blog over the past year, you were likely stunned when I stopped spouting off for a good while. Sorry about that. Rest assured, I'm back on track, and I'll be able to see who has an RSS Feed on my account when only a few people check in on this post.
2. Normally, I don't comment on proceedings in either of my denominations particularly, but this post will be as much relevant to some of my Arminian friends as it is to my Reformed ones, I promise :)
3. I'm getting a C.S. Lewis complex, even though I could never hope to author the kinds of works he did. I've gotten myself a leather chair and footstool for my office, purchased a "pipe rack" with six wonderful pipes, and even started in on a book, although I don't know what will become of it, so don't get your hopes up.

Belaboring my Point

If you were one of the lucky ones to attend the 150 celebration at Van Andel for the Christian Reformed Church a Sunday back, you may have run across my name in the worship booklet right around the centerfold (If you weren't, you can check it out here). The intuitive CRC person would recognize right away that a CRC contributer from Greenville is strange because there's no CRC in this city. Luckily, they didn't list home churches, or there may have been some real feathers flying.

I had all but forgotten writing this quote sometime back in the spring, but was amazed to see how accurately it reflected my vision not only for the CRC, but for the Church in general. It addresses a few problems with the denominations of which I've been a part. First, we suck at going into cities. We can minister really well to farmers and housewives, but we're particularly bad at ministering to urban and even suburban settings, which explains why our membership has been so stagnant over the years. Passion, yes. Humility, yes.

BUT, the major point of my theology that drives my professors nuts at seminary is shackled at the end of this quotation: "that our greatest theology is dwarfed by the richness of the mystery and transcendence of our holy God." If you want to package the Mark Hilbelink theology in one phrase, that's it. Look, I love theological discussion and debate. In fact, my seminary friends and I had a "Synod Party" to do just that around meat. But, every systematics class I take seems to assume that we know about 95% about God and 5% is left to mystery (give or take). There is the argument given that God has made himself sufficiently known to all creation for the purposes of salvation. Absolutely! But I would like to make the case that we worship a God that is so unfathomable and incomprehensible that 5% might just get us by with sufficient knowledge for salvation. In that sense, I wish that every systematic theologian from Aquinas to Wesley would have started their theologies by acknowledging that we are arguing and debating strictly the revealed part of God, which may be only a touching of the outer cloak of who God is. The reason they can't? It makes their own theologies less important. Bummer.

Dedicating our Children

For those of you who know me well, you'll know that I was watching this past CRC Synod on tiptoes waiting to see what it would do with the Alberta classis' overture for a committee to study the practice of infant dedication in the CRC and what that might mean for its future. I have long held the belief that infant dedication can be just as illegitimate a form of committing a child to the Lord as infant baptism within the Reformed context. Also, I like to ask the question: which of these seems more plausible: 1)That the apostles intended that baptism be a replacement for covenantal circumcision OR 2)That the Reformers maintained infant baptism from the Catholic Church in the Reformation because it would have rocked the boat too much to propose anything else.

I had an interesting conversation with the associate pastor from my home church in Iowa last Tuesday, who was, incidentally, a Synodical delegate. He had attended Mars Hill Church in Grandville the Sunday before and heard Bell's explanation of the baptism/dedication debate. While he affirms infant baptism wholeheartedly, he agreed with me that you could easily hold non-infant baptism position faithfully within the Reformed tradition. However, his argument, admittedly influenced by Bell, was that if you held that position, dedication was not necessary since its even less Biblically-based than infant baptism. My argument on the other side was that implementation of infant dedication within any Reformed tradition would have to include some sort of dedication, not as a sacrament, but as a commitment of the parents and Church family to maintain their covenantal responsibilities. I compared it to the laying on of hands, which is a very Biblical concept, seldom practiced in Reformed faith communities.

If we agree that baptism as a sacrament is nothing hokus pokus nor salvific, then it seems to me the sign should be a confirmation of election, as it described in the Bible, as Romans 8 says, "creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed". Instead, they continue to baptize infants based on the faith of their parents than on the power of the Spirit to raise up the elect.

That being said, I can stomach the Reformed position on infant baptism because I see virtually no practical difference between baptism/confirmation and dedication/baptism, but I wish the CRC would have taken the opportunity at 150 to let a committee seriously study this concept and its theological implications.

Prank Calls

Being a seminarian gets you introduced to lots of buzz words. Some of these are distinctly Reformed, but some are buzz words across the denominational lines, and most of them bug me like heck. Having attended two Lilly-funded institutions and having a mom who works for a third, I've certainly gotten my share of rhetoric about "discovering your calling". I used to think this idea of calling was pretty profound, maybe even Biblical. After all, Lilly sent me to Turkey for a sight-seeing trip to "discover my calling". However, after sitting through a nauseating presentation today where three people were put in front of a group for a mass group counselling session, I have to ask myself: do we have any idea what we're talking about when it comes to calling?

My initial thought is no. Let's start with something simple. Is "my call" something I get because I'm in ministry, but that my friend Jon doesn't get because he's in architecture? Absolutely not, chime in Dordt & Calvin, but why are seminarians pigeon-holed for this type of self-discovery? No one asks my friend Mick if he's really "called" to be an insurance salesman, but God help my soul if I'm not really called to be a pastor. Now sure, I've been taught to tell my calling story, and its pretty impressive how God has worked in my life and made me fit to be a minister in the church. What I've been taught to do is tell about things that have any hint of pastor-like situational benefit and anoint each one to be one of those big lighted signs with the arrows on top that led me into the ministry. To be left out: being a pastor is a legitamite career, pastors make more money than their average congregant, pastors get to count coffee and golf as ministry expenses, working at a particular church because it was situationally helpful.

Conveniently, the CRC believes its every pastor's calling to go to seminary for three (cough, four) years, or at least Calvin for a quarter. Well, senior pastors at least. That's not how evangelists or youth pastors are called, apparently. Kudos to God for consulting with our denomination about that first, when He sees perfectly fit to "call" other people to ministry through monestaries, one year of seminary, or no seminary at all. That's cool, though, because God has a different set of standards for calling Methodists and Catholics.

After all, becoming a pastor is contingent on "getting called" by a church. Notice, though, how if a church needs a secretary, custodian, youth pastor, or organist, they don't "call" one of those. Those jobs only warrant a newspaper ad and the submission of a resume. See those people running towards the janitor? Yeah, they're the Christian scholars coming to baptize his hiring as "discovering his calling". However, it'll be those same people at the council meeting two years from now deciding that janitoring is, in fact, not his calling because he doesn't know how to make toilets shine.

Now, theoretically, if three faithful churches call you as a senior pastor, what the heck are you supposed to think? Obviously 2, or maybe 3 of those churches are just crappy at "discovering God's call" for them, just like they were 2 years ago when they hired the "man of God's leading" and had him leave over allegations of sexual misconduct. Kind of sounds like a stereotype of election, doesn't it? People in the Church are elect forever and ever....that is, until they leave the Church and then they never were elect to start with or they're still somehow elect and in denial.

What this really all reminds me of is my high school relationships. Since I hung out with a good group of Christian youth-group-attending girls, my dating life had great overtones of providence. Those of us who were most pious would say things like "I think its God's will that you date me" or "I need to break up with you because its not what God wills". Possible. Maybe. Laughable? Absolutely. The truth is that while we can sometimes hear that "still small voice" in our heads, its often our own subconscious. We are also adept at getting "confirmation" from our like-minded friends.

Oh brother.

Here's what I think. Somehow the pundits have found a mystical union between the idea of calling as both prescriptive and descriptive. We know how the prescriptive extreme works: God decides before we're born what our calling is and we just live that out. Yay for fatalism! On the other hand, descriptive calling seems only like subjective nostalgic interpretation: God did this in my life, and this, and this and it was because he wanted me to be a pastor (oh, and I recently graduated from a Christian liberal arts school with no direction plus the pastors have uber job security).

Maybe I'm off my rocker here, and its not to say that I think retelling the action of God in our lives is a bad thing. But lets stop telling high school and college kids to wait for some mystical "calling" that is just as much descriptive as it is prescriptive. One of the major problems that our seminary's high school calling discernment program has had is that kids who get rejected from participation feel that they might not be called to ministry. The year after I participated, they opened the field up to 50 participants from 35 for particularly that reason. What kind of monster have we created this "calling" to be? Can't we just focus on grateful, faithful Christian living instead of passing around ideas about a non-graspable, individualistic buzz word?

The Opportunity Cost of Service

There's been two growing strains within the North American Church within the last couple of years regarding service trips. If you've ever been on one, then you've undoubtedly come into contact with this debate in an implicit or explicit way. The reality of this situation is that we have litereally thousands of churches in the US who are sending kids and adults away on service trips around the corner and around the world to do service for people around them.

There are a lot of people who are very quick to jump up and say "Amen" at this proposition. Most of these are the "nodders" from the congregation who think sending as many of our own congregants to do service projects is the definition of what Jesus commands us to do. Another group who has a similar reaction to service trips are those who have gone on a trip that they really enjoyed because they liked what they did, liked the people they went with and liked how they felt about themselves when they came back.

Modern liberal Christian thought has told us this is wrong. In many ways, they've hit a good nerve. Many churches and schools spend literally thousands of dollars per person to send laity overseas for a week at a time. They come back with the impression that they've changed the world, ebbed closer to their salvation and gained the right to tell every person within five feet of them about every aspect of the trip. The reality, as the pundits point out, is that often times these people do little to no good, sometimes even hurting the ministry that they go to help because of something an immature Christian says, displaying an inconsistent lifestyle and simply acting on general bias with an imperialistic notion. Hey! We're the cocky Americans here to help you because you're mostly worthless, on our own terms. People generally get indignant or repentant when shown the errors of their ways here. Okay, we're the bad guys, we get it.

Lets consider the other side of this for just a minute. On the one hand, yes, ministry would be FAR more effective if we took all the money we spent on our own lavish service/vacation projects as North Americans and gave it to indigenous missionaries/aid workers who are culturally sensitive and work for lasting change without bigot abrasiveness we often bring. However, if you think that indigenous missionaries would automatically get the same amount of cash as teenagers doing a carwash to go themselves, you're wrong. People give for various reasons. Among them are good things like a heart for missions, a care for others and a servant spirit, but also among them are things like reactions to a real and present service team, emotional first-person reports afterwards, and a general guilt about not helping out the service trip as much as everyone else in the pew around you.

But, there are also ministry opportunities where outsiders can do the work more effectively and more efficiently than the local staff. Take the current situation in the Gulf Coast region. There are many, many opportunities for work, and nearly no one who is willing to put their hands to work. Those who are there are overwhelmed, untrained, and hopeless about their situation. The cost of labor for bringing in a contractor paid for by a church in Kansas IS less effective than bringing in a team that can and will do the work of drywalling, stilt-setting, roofing and painting (granted, this does not refer to the inevitable tendency of high schoolers to paint eachother during service trips...ugh). The fact is that you can put a team down there, including travel costs, for cheaper than the cost of bringing in a contractor, plumber, painter, roofer, drywaller, etc.

This is a basic economics concept known as opportunity cost. It refers to what one has to give up in order to accomplish a goal. This could be money, but it could also refer to time and other resources.

A month ago at a fundraiser, a random homeless guy showed up at our church who had been hitchhiking around the country and read about our fundraiser in the paper. He came just to encourage in what we were doing because "kids need to see what is out there". I can stomache that. What's harder for me to stomache is everyone who says that we need to give people a "heart for missions", which means that we turn them in to mission trip addicts, often ones that need to get bigger and better every year to feed this "heart". What would the church's mission program concept look like if we considered the opportunity cost of what we do before going in on a trip rather than going "because it sounds fun" or "because we can help other people (as if they're the main beneficiaries of our trips". And when we realize that cost, are we willing to be efficient, responsible servants in our mission trip planning?

Points of Contact

I've had an increasing number of conversations in the past couple weeks about the fact that there is a difficult balance in churches between creating a community within a congregation (or tradition) and making that a gated community. There's two particular situations which have come to my attention because of my current position, which has both led me to see things in the denomination I currently serve and, for the first time, being an outsider of my other denomination within an observable distance. Its also come from conversations with pastors, parishoners, class discussions, and other observations. What I don't mean to do is call anyone out or be abrasive, for all of the communities I will talk about are communities which I have grown to love.

A Tale of Two Islands
The town which I live in has various ministry opportunities and challenges which I've addressed previously, but our community is one that encompasses a large portion of rural community surrounding it because we're the last outpost with retail/restaurants before the dead expanse which is central Michigan. For this reason, our church draws from not just one community, but rather four or five within 20 miles of the city. Throughout my travels and interactions thus far, I have been able to profile other churches in our community, for good or for ill. We have two faith communities in our larger geographic area which stand out to me as similar: the Amish community to the north, and the Christian Reformed community to the south. At first glance, my CRC readers will wonder at this comparison, but that's intended. The similarity? Both communities have few points of contact with the community at large. In my interactions with community church groups, shopping, eating out, etc., I've never once run into a CRC person, although I often meet Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, and Congregationalists. Of course, the Amish shoot for this "set-apart"-ness, but what causes CRC folk to be like that? The first and most obvious thing to me is Christian school/public school dynamic. I attend public school events weekly (sometimes more often) such as sporting events, concerts, etc. There I meet members of other churches and non-believers. People care passionately about their local school system, often even more than their own church. I would suspect that if one of my parishoners were to try and establish a friendship with a family who sent their kids to the Christian school (which is sequestered out in the country, just like the Amish school), their conversations would not go all that far because the experience is not common enough. For the Amish and the CRC, both churches lie about five miles out of town, and this symbolic non-presence in the community is not overcome easily because its practical effects are far-reaching. The second is a class issue. The local CRC's in our area are suspected by people of being upper middle class. Once again, having expendable income for Christian education is not something most of our parishoners can understand. Upper middle class people often have a much higher liturgical preference, as well. We've discussed this with other churches in our town, which is progressively becoming lower class. People don't want academically-driven preaching and high liturgy. That was hard for me to swallow as a worship planner/preacher, but its true. This was reinforced by a CRC pastor I met with who ministers in inner city Grand Rapids. Even though his people live in close proximity to the church (which is rare for the inner part of GR), they can't make inroads into the community for the same two reasons: kids are in different schools and class issues. Schools are the centers of community life, often, and if those communities are different than the larger community, points of contact are diminished greatly. Five years ago, I might have resonated with this concept, but I see it now much more clearly: I want you to join my church, but I won't invest my time or children into your schools, and you should worship on my terms. Don't take me as nay-saying Christian education or the CRC, or even our local one (they do a great community pre-school). Plus, Christian schools paid the bill for our house for the first 18 years of my life. However, if we are going to willingly forfeit huge quantities of points of contact with our communities, then it would be an offense to the Great Commission if we don't put programs and attitudes in place to counteract these effects. The

Plank in Our Own Eye
I would be remiss to cast stones at the Amish and CRC here if I'm not willing to look at the denomination I currently serve as well. If we're talking about created communities without gating them, its important to identify where our possible gates might go up. For the last two examples, its physical distance from the community, schooling choices, liturgical preference, class limitations, etc. For the Church of God, at least one of these is denominational association. I have had multiple people come talk to me about how greatful they are that I've come in from another tradition because I don't speak Church of God-ese. This denomination has such great ministries, a great intellectual tradition, great inter-connections. All these things are great, and we gain great benefit from them. However, when an outsider who comes in, its often difficult to learn that denominational language. What's Anderson? Why are adults going to camp? Who is considered Youth? What is State? I thought St. Louis was in Missouri. What are heritage songs? What's a Jesus Birthday Offering? What's the difference between SYC, IYC, ISL, ATL and YISL? Good questions! I've finally figured some of them out, but these types of things are big hinderances to someone coming in from the outside. My wife and I were talking the other day about how learning this Church of God language helps us reflect upon similar community gating in our denomination of origin. Most notable among these is Christian education, but liturgical inaccessibility and theological snobbery/preoccupation are other major concerns as we observe the CRC from the outside.

Ungating the Community
If there's any sort of conclusion to be made, I think that all churches and denominations face these kinds of issues, but it is the responsibility of the particular group to counteract the effects of their potential community gating. Christian education and denominational community are both good things, but can become pitfalls if they become the major concern of the given body. Counteracting these will hopefully give us the points of contact with our communities that lend themselves to reaching out to others in the name of Jesus.

Youth Ministry to the Detriment of the Church

There's something that they don't often teach you in Youth Ministry in college, and something most youth ministry people don't like to think about. Its the dark side of youth ministry which often causes more problems than good. Statistically speaking, youth ministry is one of the most unsuccessful ventures the Church has ever embarked on, and yet it has caused nearly the same amount of turmoil where absent as Contemporary Christian Music has. Half my income comes from youth ministry, so I'm not about to advocate the removal of it from churches across the country, but I think that we would be wise to consider the ramifications of this beast we've created.

The thought started in the late 80's and early 90's that high school students needed their own staff member at churches. It would be helpful, at this point, to notice that this movement came from an internal outcry of young people, which was not alone, but simply louder than that of other age groups. For instance, there were hardly any churches at this point with paid Worship Pastors, Congregational Life Pastors, Evangelism Pastors, Children's Pastors, etc. We should immediately recognize what effect a staff member with a targeted age group has on a church. The positive is that the group is usually blest by this person and therefore enjoys the addition. In the case of youth pastors, parents were also pleased because their kids were receiving a greater deal of attention while paranoia ran rampant that our kids were being marched off by a secular pied piper wholesale. What was lying in the background of these hirings, however, were the host of people who had little or nothing to gain from a teenager-focused staff member. Children, young couples, middle-aged adults, older adults, and sometimes even parents were told that they were less important in the church's eyes, not by a word off the pulpit, but by the church's checkbook. This was evident not only in the hiring of youth pastors, but in the program funding that would inevitably blossom.

This is not to say that hiring youth pastors often makes a church angry. Many of the people in the congregation get a martyr-like attitude with respect to youth. One of the classic lines I hear over and over again in churches is: "We need to lay aside our preferences because they are the Church of tomorrow!" I suppose there is some noble truth to that statement, but suddnely you have entire generations of passive Christians that believe their non-involvement and the lack of ministry to their age group has a direct correlation to super-fueled ministry to teens.

In fact, passivitiy is one of the harshest drawbacks to the hiring of any staff members at any position. Teachers feel teaching is covered, singers feel worship is covered, youth leaders feel youth ministry is covered, but the passivity of the "sacrificial lambs" in the congregation is perhaps the greatest loss. While we often complain about those who only want things their way, we often also lose those who don't feel hip or with it and are just fine with clamming up. All of this is often a direct result of any pastor who is a "do-er" and not an "enabler".

The other thing that we as youth ministers often like to forget is the simple fact that youth ministry is very rarely effective. Ouch! Of course, my more careful colleagues will be quick to point out to me that "effective" is not a good word to use in ministry. After all, ministry should not be results-driven, but might simply be God planting seeds in the hearts of kids. Given, but those who take a quick inventory of kids they graduated five years ago from their programs are often very, very humbled by the fact that many of those have wandered to other churches or often from the faith completely. If our goal as youth pastors is to keep our kids in the pews from cradle to grave, then most of us would admit that we are failing greatly.

One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that youth ministry has been a narrow-scoped concept from the very beginning. The Church as a whole was losing people to the world at a near-record pace and we needed to do something. The most logical something was to stop the obvious bleeding - our teenagers who were uninterested in church and rebelling because, well, they're teenagers. What youth ministry has accomplished in that respect is a delayed exodus, with the Church now maintaining huge numbers of high school students, but losing huge percentages in the first couple years following graduation. Those who even dare attempt college-aged ministries are frustrated by kids that are uninterested in developing their faith past the music-festival experiences of their local youth group.

Another reason that the scope should be considered narrow is that science does not support our most common conviction: that high school is the most formative time in a person's life with regard to faith commitment. Psychology and research clearly indicate that the most formative time for faith development and commitment, for whatever reason, is much earlier. To this end, ministry focuses have continued to get younger-reaching. Many churches have developed Jr. High ministries, and many churches have hired Children's pastors. Research indicates that the largest percentage of people make a faith commitment in the 4th-6th grade range and the percentage gets exponentially less each year after that. We missed the target.

Churches that do have successful educational programs outside of Sunday morning worship are churches that do not gap their ministries. While this is true for the developmental ages we've just talked about, it is just as true for adult ministries which are often lacking or non-existent in many churches. Some black eyes that many churches don't want people to see: junior high ministry, post-high/college-aged ministry, singles ministry, new believers ministry. All of us should do a self-inspection to see that our overall ministries do not suffer because of one ministry. A wise speaker I once heard commented that the devil can use church programming by setting one program against another or creating an idolatry in one program or another. For instance, if hiring a full-time youth pastor means cutting three other ministries, perhaps the motivation is poorly founded. This is true not only in your local church, but in denominational programming, funding and ciriculum development, as well as other tell-tale signs. We in youth ministry need a slice of humble pie, sometimes, as we drain our congregations of volunteer hours and resources that could be used for other purposes. How can we promote holism in our churches which promotes the good of the community for the benefit of everyone?

A Foot-Washing Hierarchy

I haven't been on the job very long at my new Church of God family in Greenville, but the entirety of my two months in this denomination has taught me vast things about differences and similarities between it and my previous two denominational experiences (Christian Reformed and PCUSA).

First and foremost, my experience thus far has further engrained in me the utter silliness of denominational differences. Some people find me to be wacky, unorthodox or impractical when I make statements like that, but its the truth. Greenville is very similar to Salem, NY, the city I served in a couple years ago, and similar to many cities in this nation right now, from many accounts. The fact of the matter is that the Church is in the dying minority in so many cities across our nation, whether we will admit it or not. Some of these cities, like Salem and Greenville, have this to a more advanced extent than others. Its hard to believe that a city 30 minutes from Grand Rapids could have such a small population of Christians, but my initial estimates put this city at about 1 in 15 weekly attending Christians.

1 in 15.

What that means, in conjunction with the massive poverty and job loss in our community, is that we have no choice but to bond together. Unfortunately, it is often the tough times that cause our bonding, but it is bonding nonetheless. I meet monthly with a group of youth pastors who span Lutheran, Catholic, Congregational, Orthodox Presbyterian, Non-Denominational, and myself from the Church of God. Our pastor is involved in similar groups which do similar sorts of ecumenical ministry. We need eachother and the rest of the denominational world will figure that out at some point, I know. One more point for comparison. Having been intimately involved with my past 3 congregations, West Hebron, Calvary, and Greenville First, I am willing to make the bold statement that, minus infant baptism & Catechism references, the worship, the confession, the committee structures, and even the sermons would be interchangeable at face value. That's quite a statement in and of itself - and its not one I made, rather it is one they are each making to the world, implictly ecumenical if not explicity.

Enough of a prologue. The real point of this blog is to affirm something in the Church of God that I am both fascinated with and covet for my own faith tradition in the Reformed faith: hierarchy. If you are a good modern Calvinist, you'll regard what I just said as a cuss word. After all, that's what we split from! We hated the corruption that Catholic hierarchy brought. We were even disdained at Luther's holdover, and more recently, the Anglicans/Episcopalians. However, what we gained by eliminating that hierarchy is burning out pastors today at an alarming rate not only in the CRC, but in others like her who leave pastors of churches as lone rangers.

A contrast is helpful. Church groups in the Church of God in the US are done by state. It helps to have a large enough denomination to do this, but its the geographical thought that counts. So far, there's an analogy in the classical system of the CRC. As opposed to the typical classis, however, whose meetings last for a morning on a Saturday, State General Assembly meetings are a two-day event with live worship, fellowship and pastoral education. The state affiliation goes far beyond this two-day event, however. The state hires its own staff. We have a state pastor, a state youth pastor, and numerous other employees that facilitate the work of the individual congregations. Underneath the state pastor are several regional pastors who look after and mind pastors at churches as well as serving their own.

One of the key benefits of this system is that pastors are not left out to dry. Most pastors start as associate pastors with a bachelor's degree working under an experienced pastor. Some go to seminary, but some move straight on to ordination. Whoa! People need seminary! Really? How much do you know about St. Augustine or others in the middle ages who became pastors by mentorship or apprenticing. Just a conspiracy theory to try on for size: Could it be that non-hierarchical traditions need seminaries as a buffer because toughness is essential since once these students achieve ordination they are on their own? A seminary student is now judged ready for ministry by a psychologist's recommendations, rather than an apprenticeship. Calvin Seminary recently abandoned its traditional 2 concurrent years and 1 year internship field education requirements for a Lilly-dictated 15 weeks of real pastoral experience before ordination. 15 weeks before we set pastors loose in the church!

15 weeks.

This is not to say the CRC isn't making moves in this direction. It has to. In my estimation, that need will grow if we refuse to apprentice our young pastors with different levels of readiness. The CRC has created a Pastor-Church Relations office and an initiative called Sustaining Pastoral Excellence which provides opportunities for mentorship, peer learning, and continuing education. Unfortunately, these are still very optional. My home classis recently hired a part-time classical youth coordinator, which is an inspired move for a classis of small churches. We must acknowledge the benefits of regionalization and localization of ministries within the denomination. We're beginning to see it, but I want to point out the beauty of the Church of God's structure. No pastor is a lone ranger: they cannot be. I am thankful to be a part of both traditions during formative years as a young pastor. May our future pastors be open to this kind of molding.

U2charist