Had lunch a few months back with a good friend and we spent time reflecting on a new ministry opportunity he had been given. He talked about being at a high liturgy church previously and now being at a low liturgy church.

Then he said this:

I think liturgy is like Jazz. You have to learn the rules to break them.

Lifehack.org also has an article called “improvise like a jazz musician” where they say:

Learn the rules so you can break them: Mingus learned to play in the highly structured environment of a classical ensemble; later, he studied the big band compositions of Duke Ellington.  There’s nothing sloppy or naive about his compositions, even when they break all the rules — Mingus knew the rules well enough to know why they had to be broken.

Hmm. That quote and concept has stuck in my head for a few months now.

In seminary we learned the old liturgies, studied how to write our own prayers, figured out collects (you, who, do, through!), and learned the “why is this like this” of the liturgy. Then we go and adapt or implement our understanding of liturgy with our churches or contexts. And sometimes we run into road bumps along the way.

One of the articles we got the biggest pushback from commenters here at HackingChristianity.net was “Seeing Communion Again for the First Time” where I talked about going through the full communion liturgy with all the blood atonement language after 3 years of writing my own liturgy. It was shocking. But the experience (and the comments from my respected friends and at least one now-current DS) showed me how much jazz I had put in my own liturgy and pushed me to move the pendulum closer to historical creeds and litanies rather than striking it out on my own.

But I can’t shake the jazz from the liturgy. I can’t, with integrity, leave liturgy unchanging and, at the risk of offending my Duke friends, sacrosanct. Heck, as my friend John Meunier has explored, even the UMC doesn’t consider their rituals sacrosanct and allow for variety so long as it is “not repugnant to the Word of God.”

I’ve seen this quote by Mary Hunt before: “to sacramentalize is to pay attention. It is what a community does when it names and claims ordinary human experience as holy, connecting them with history and propelling them into the future.” How can we name and claim an experience when we are using language and imagery older than the people in the room? How can we make liturgy truly the “work of the people” when it isn’t work to copy and paste?

Don’t get me wrong: I love the old liturgy. I use hymns as liturgies, I use Book of Worship liturgies regularly. But if I want to present an emancipatory image of God, then I have to use language and concepts that reflect and critique my culture, not perpetuate a foreign culture. It is not emancipatory if it isn’t directly critiquing the context, and while the traditional words are often timeless, my job as liturgist is to know the liturgy, understand its role, and then pull off a jazz rift at just the right moment, which by the grace of God I do.

In short, if liturgy is the work of the people, then does the communion liturgy include the people in it?  When will the sabbath be made for humans, and not humans for the Sabbath?

Thoughts?

“Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.”

attributed to Sir Francis Drake -1577

Matthew Paul Turner of Jesus Needs New PR has a rough story that just rips at my heart. A member of Mars Hill church was confronted about some of his actions by the MH leadership. And what follows is commonplace in rural fundamentalist Calvinistic churches…but I didn’t realize how intrinsic it was to the Neo-Calvinist resurgence.

Part 1 of the story is essentially this: A church member Andrew was engaged with another church member, cheated on her, the relationship ended and Andrew confessed his sin to his accountability group friend. After the church leadership got involved with many meetings, each time Andrew felt more and more ground under their feet. Andrew learned he was “under church discipline” and what that meant:

Something in his spirit told him not to trust them. Something caused him to believe that the men sitting in front of him were far less interested in restoring him than they were in having control, feeling powerful, throwing their spiritual weight around. Beating down a sinner like Andrew.

Andrew says that many of Mars Hill’s men feel beaten down. “Because that’s what happens there, especially when you question a pastor. You get beaten down. Until you submit.”

Andrew was offered a discipline statement to sign. Jesus Needs New PR has it on their blog post, but it entails (edits by MPT, CG = small accountability group):

Andrew will attend XXX’s CG and meet with XXX on a regular basis (define).
Andrew will not be involved in serving at MH.
Andrew will not pursue or date any woman inside or outside of MH.
Andrew will write out in detail his sexual and emotional attachment history withwomen and share it with XXX.
Andrew will write out in detail the chronology of events and sexual/emotional sinwith XXX and share it with XXX and Pastor X.
Andrew will write out a list of all people he has sinned against during this timeframe, either by sexual/emotional sin, lying or deceiving, share it with XXX and develop a plan to confess sin and ask for forgiveness.

So far, this is okay. I’ve done a behavior covenant before with a parishioner who needed it. That’s okay if a individual needs it and in your pastoral concern it would seem helpful. Fine.

Part 2 of the story gets REALLY scary: Andrew declined to sign it and told the pastoral leadership that he was leaving the church. The leadership wrote back that he would still be “under discipline” if he left and it would be “escalated.” Andrew had no idea what that would entail: Mars Hill posted on the church’s private social network an extensive letter about Andrew’s sins and how the church parishioners should act with Andrew in public in “permissible” and “impermissible” ways. For example:

What is not permissible? Refrain from associating with Andrew in social settings, such as eating a meal, attending a concert or movie together [Scripture references]. Such disassociation from Christian Community is designed by God to help him realize the seriousness of his sin and need for repentence (gospel shame – 2 Thess 3:14)

Read it all here. Amazing.

While others have written that this type of church discipline is closer to John Wesley than the UMC might be, I’m more interested in the term “gospel shame”

The term “gospel shame” is taken from 2 Thess 3:14 which says in the Common English Bible:

 Take note of anyone who doesn’t obey what we have said in this letter. Don’t associate with them so they will be ashamed of themselves.

But how often do the Church Discipline crafters go on to the next verse 15:

Don’t treat them like enemies, but warn them like you would do for a brother or sister.

As the New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary states:

On the one hand, the larger church has the authority to shame the erring ones because of the latter’s deviation from the writer’s word as given in the letter (v.  14). On the other hand, the parameters of the reform are clearly prescribed: The larger church must not regard the erring ones as enemies, but (as in 1 Thess 5:14) they must “warn” or “admonish” them as believers.

Maybe I’m from the University of Phoenix of religions, but I think that refraining from social contact, posting a warning to other churchgoers about a forsworn former member, always reminding him in every social interaction that he is “unrepentent” sure is treating the individual more like an enemy than a brother or sister.

So…Gospel shame? Is this the Gospel? I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure it’s mainly shame, or the relying on psychological and sociological pressure to enforce biblical rigidity rather than relying on the Gospel and the love of Christ to transform hearts and minds.

I think this is a situation that reminds us all to examine our church disciplinary norms and procedures and see if we are treating the other with love or with rancor, with a twisting of Scripture to exert control.

As MPH closes his blog series with:

When I first read this letter, I was sitting in Starbucks, and I was shaking. Shaking because I was hurting for Andrew. And too, I was shaking because I was so angry that somebody (heck, a lot of somebodies–not just Mark) would use the words and messages of Jesus in such away.

And if this is how they plan to treat Andrew–as an “unbeliever”? How in the world do they treat people who really are non-Christian? (And not to mention the fact that Jesus hung out with Gentiles, tax-collectors, etc.)

Fine. If they don’t want Andrew to be a member of their church, take his name off the list! But this? I mean, seriously, did any of this letter, except for perhaps the “heavy heart”, infer that Mars Hill loves Andrew? Oh I know they think their actions represent love. But really, many of us have experienced firsthand that kind of “love,” and we know very well that it’s an abuse of the term.

I honestly wouldn’t wish this so-called “gospel shame” on Mark Driscoll, let alone somebody I know personally, somebody I’m called to love, somebody I am hoping to help restore.

And you know what’s sad? Many (not all) of Andrew’s friends (from Mars Hill) are “obeying” the advice in this letter. While every one of them has implied that they believe Mars Hill is completely out of line and blowing this out of proportion, they all end up using some variation of the words that Mars Hill told them to say.

Indeed. Thoughts?

I’m trying out a new year’s resolution: listen to a recorded sermon on Sundays so I get the same attempt at spiritual inspiration that my congregation gets with me in the pulpit. My pick this week was MLK Jr.’s sermon “A Knock At Midnight” (mp3link) given in 1957. While listening and puttering around, one section towards the end of the sermon caught my imagination. It was Dr. King saying this:

“The church can die as a result of the judgment of God as a result of refusing to stand up against evil.”

MLK Jr “A Knock At Midnight” 21:00

What poppycock. The church can’t die. Clearly Dr. King hasn’t read the blogs and especially the Call To Action.

• It’s our categorical imperative to sustain the Church and to reverse the Mainline Decline.
• It’s an immoral choice to focus on “side issues” like civil rights when our coffers and our pews are plunging.  What kind of socialist justice-loving church would that be?
• It’s a bad choice at General Conference to talk about distracting “hot topics” when we need to build up “vital congregations.”

Clearly, Dr. King’s priorities were all out of whack. What kind of church would focus on social issues when we need to be focusing on church growth and institutional preservation? We are destined to survive and we know that “God is not finished with us yet.” Right?

Right?

I kept listening as Dr. King railed against churches that freeze up or burn up. Turns out Dr. King was exactly on point with his sermon preached 55 years ago. I couldn’t find a full-text of this sermon, so I transcribed it below from minute 24 to minute 29. Any errors are my own.

We have two types of Negro churches that leave people disappointed at midnight. One freezes up and the other one burns up. The one that freezes up is that church that says it’s a dignified church. Preacher preaches a nice essay on Sunday, he tries to mean it. The choir tries to sing with meaning and power, but they don’t sing negro spirituals or gospel songs because it reminds them of their heritage. They are ashamed they are black and their ancestral home is Africa…They build a church that has no relationship whatsoever with their past…

I see this tendency in the Anglo-centric churches. They are the churches that build college-size campuses and walled gardens away from the neighborhoods. They are the ones who move out of the inner city to plant their church in the suburbs, with the unfortunate effect that homeless people don’t often make the trek out that far. The ones who are ashamed of their wealth (on some level) that they celebrate in semi-private cocoons and create a parallel culture to the one that they are called to serve. I’ve seen these frozen-up churches who have no relationship with their culture around them.

There’s another church that burns up. In this church, the emphasis is on muscle-ality rather than spirituality. In this kind of church, people have more religions in their hands and feet than they have in their hearts and soul. In this church, sometimes even the pastor depends on his voice, on volume not content. And the people leave on Sunday saying “we had a great service today and the preacher just preached this morning” and somebody say “what did he say” “I don’t know what he said, but he preached this morning!” (congregation guffaws)

Now the danger of this kind of church is that people will play with God. The danger of this kind of church is that people will make religion irrelevant, becomes mere emotionalism. Now religion when is real it is emotional, but the danger of this kind of religion is that they will have a zeal of God not according to knowledge. “Not only love the Lord thy God with all thy heart but with all thy mind.”

The other danger of this kind of church is that everybody will become so caught up in the irrelevant that they will not be concerned about the day-to-day problems.

The other kind of church is sadly on the rise in American Anglo churches as well, one that depends “on volume not content.” They are exemplified in either the feel-good sermons of Joel Osteen or the condemning-the-gays-and-women-and-hipster-men rants of Mark Driscoll. The refernce to churches that have a “zeal of God not according to knowledge” is my fear for the UMC as well. I fear we will have those types of churches that have a lack of value for theological education as a side-effect when our church leadership focuses on efficiency not effectiveness. Finally, if you read any of the conversations on the UM Clergy facebook group, you’ll see a perfect example of “being caught up in the irrelevant” fine points of doctrine that are used as weapons to condemn other pastors rather than as important articulations of values. The burned-up church is smoldering and it’s creeping this way.

Finally, in true Dr. King style, we get to the crescendo where the congregation is on its feet. It’s best listened to but here’s the transcript for conversation:

King: It seems that I can hear the God of the Universe saying “Don’t play with me and don’t play with my people.” It seems I can hear the God of the Universe saying to the Negro church and the white church also “People are hungry, they are in need of bread. Don’t play with me and don’t play with them. They come at midnight seeking bread, provide it for them.

“You don’t do that…I won’t hear your beautiful anthem. You can preach your eloquent sermons, you can pray your powerful prayers, but I won’t hear any of it because your hands are full of blood for the things that I am concerned about that you would let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

“If you want to know what it is I require of you, it is simply this: do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.”

The Call To Action wants us to spend the next decade of church resources on navel-gazing, on bettering our churches and worship experience and coffers so that we can reverse the mainline decline. But that is the utter antithesis of King’s writings and sermons, as the Church he envisions is an outward-facing church that wastes its money on the poor and wastes its political capital opposing unjust laws rather than building parallel empires to the culture around us.

A church that doesn’t seek racial justice, that doesn’t provide for the marginalized in society, that doesn’t work for equality of all people regardless of their heritage or biology…that church will be left at the door at midnight, left in the darkness at midnight, left to be a zombie trudging forward with the image of movement but without the life behind it…at midnight.

While our church consultants and renewal groups tell us to stop talking about the hot topics, an echo from the past tells us today that if we aren’t in the business of equality and hot topics, then we are a church that has either burned up or frozen up.

My prayer for our General Conference delegates today is that they heed the call from Dr. King from 55 years ago and keep us as an outward-facing church: one that works on its discipleship, yes, but does so not divorced from the culture around us. Like the burned-up churches that are emotional without connection to intellect, we are in danger of being a spiritual practices church without connection to the practice of spiritual concern for others in both our structure and action.

So keep on working toward justice, Church. Keep on pursuing it for all of God’s creation, even when the church itself tells you that you are wasting your time, that that money won’t count towards being a “vital congregation.” Keep on doing it, and when all is said and done, the churches around you may burn up or freeze up or they may hopefully step up and be on the path towards the land where justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Keep that dream alive today.

Thoughts?

Here’s a bible-geeking out story for you. OpenBible.info has done a “sentiment analysis” of the Biblical record and posted an interesting graph about it (h/t O’Reilly). Here’s their methodology for you academic types:

Sentiment analysis involves algorithmically determining if a piece of text is positive (“I like cheese”) or negative (“I hate cheese”). Think of it as Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes backed by quantitative data.

I ran the Viralheat Sentiment API over several Bible translations to produce a composite sentiment average for each verse. Strictly speaking, the Viralheat API only returns a probability that the given text is positive or negative, not the intensity of the sentiment. For this purpose, however, probability works as a decent proxy for intensity.

The visualization takes a moving average of the data to provide a coherent story.

Click here for the full readable size (there’s also a book-by-book analysis here)

It’s an interesting project and makes me wonder about a few things:

1. The Lectionary would benefit from a sentiment analysis. I would suspect the lectionary would be heavier on the happy sentiments than the darker sentiments (it’s Good News, right? Especially when we self-select out the difficult passages). I wonder then if we are giving a full understanding of the Scripture by excluding the “bogus” chapters.
2. A church’s history would benefit from a sentiment analysis. If a proper history or amalgamation of a church’s writings or committee reports (I know, a huge project), then it could be helpful for a church to understand its history and why certain periods of time seem better than others.

From my day with Leonard Sweet that I blogged about last week, one of his base concepts is that the language of the church is changing. He calls the shift the most important since Gutenberg created the printing press and that indeed the times we are in require a shift in perception and a willingness of the church to learn the language of the culture. The Gutenberg culture thinks in words and verses; the Google culture thinks in stories and narratives. And right at this moment both cultures are getting closer and closer to parity and both need to be taken seriously.

Sweet describes the paradigm shift from the Gutenberg World to the Google World well in this video:

Guiding questions:

1. How is your church learning the language of the culture?
2. How is your ministry context connecting with the images and narratives of the culture?
3. How do you retain the Gutenberg generation while reaching the Google generation?

I think the most important concept is that Missionaries either taught the people English to explain their concepts or they learned the people’s language and re-framed the Christian concepts. In the former, the natives had to translate foreign concepts in an odd tongue. In the latter, the missionaries had to be the agents of translation from an English culture to the native culture.

Is your ministry context providing the translation services or are you expecting the culture to do the translation?

Thoughts?

The lectionary text for this week is Matthew 22:1-14 (CEB/NRSV), the Parable of the Wedding Banquet.

The temptation is to do an allegorical reading, meaning that each character represents a real-life person. The king as God, the king’s son as Jesus, and the unworthy subjects who kill the king’s messengers as those who persecuted and killed prophets, and especially those who persecuted and killed Jesus and his apostles.  This makes sense and it has made sense to most of the commentaries I’ve read, from John Wesley on down.

But I’m with Dylan on this one: I can’t wrap my head around seeing the King as God. And if I can’t do that, then the whole parable becomes something utterly different.

The kings burns buildings down, not just seek justice for the killers, but burns entire cities. This is the God says elsewhere “an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” not “a city for a killed servant.” And the king judges and dismisses a person on sight…this is the God of eternal love and forgiveness who has forgiven me and every reader of this blog…this king represents God?

Why is a story of a God who burns down people’s houses in this bible? We’re used to it in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament a God of fiery wrath and destruction isn’t found anywhere other than Revelation and one or two scenes in a particular Gospel called Matthew.

Maybe I’ve been reading it wrong. Maybe the King isn’t God at all. Maybe the King is a King.

If so, then maybe this isn’t a story of how God deals with backsliders or those who reject God and God burns them in fire. Maybe this is a story of how we ought to resist when the Empire and the World tries to bend us into shapes we do not recognize.

Reversing the Text

Some historical perspective: In the time of Jesus, Israel was occupied territory. Like any occupied nation, it would likely respond to the Empire around it in one of two ways. It would either fight them off by force, or it would try to preserve their values and their customs. Israel did both:  They had zealots who fought the empire with armed resistance, and Pharisees who taught rigid law abiding lessons and kept their culture pure and isolated from the Empire.

Why is this relevant? Look at the text again. When the king came calling, some went away to their homes and businesses and isolated themselves from the king’s wrath. Sound like anyone we’ve just mentioned? And some took and killed the king’s servants…sound like anyone we’ve just mentioned?

If you were an original hearer of this story, that might be the immediate connection. Some isolate from the king and make their places pure, some do violence to the king and are destroyed. Israel did both but now the Zealots have been killed. The Pharisees are losing by attrition the number of impure people they exclude to keep the holy pure. So what’s the better option?

Luckily there’s a third option. Remember the end of the story? The countryside is in flames from the king’s wrath. People are gathered probably awkwardly at the king’s banquet (hello your majesty, thanks for burning my city down, where’s the wedding cake?), and in their midst stands a garmentless man. Not just a poor man for history tells us that at a wedding, robes were given to the attendants at the door, so this man intentionally did not wear the robe. The king is enraged, angry, asking why the man has no garment, no wedding robe. The man is silent and is thrown into the darkness.

Now wait-a-minute, thrown into the darkness and is silent before a king. If I was a first-century Jew, that would spark a memory of Isaiah 52-53, the suffering servant. The one whose suffering will ease the pain of a nation. The one who is silent before kings. The King reacted in the only way he knew how: violence.

For us today, do we know anyone else who was silent before his accusors, was bound at his hands and feet, and thrown into darkness? A few chapters later Jesus is in front of his accusors, first the judean leaders, then Herod, then Pilate himself. He is crucified at the outer edges of town where the lights do not play. He was bound at his hands and feet, and the words of the Centurian “this ought not have happened”

When the world comes knocking at your door, demanding your allegiance, demanding you trade your values for its values, you can fight, you can flee, or like Jesus you can participate in your world but not be conformed by it, not be bent and unrecognizable by it.

Reshaping The Message

The story starts with a king knocking at people’s doors and getting them to do what he tells them to do.
Maybe this isn’t a story of how God deals with backsliders or those who reject God and God burns them in fire.
Maybe this is a story of how we respond when the world comes knocking and tries to bend us into a shape that we don’t want to be in.

We know a bit about this, don’t we? We’ve been bent into a shape of a mom who gives all her time to her kids and takes none for herself.
The shape of a dad who was is demeaned at work so he can put food on the table.
The shape of an elder parent moving in with their daughter when they lose their home to foreclosure.
The shape of a youth who starves herself to fit into skinny jeans.
The shape of a boy who doesn’t want to play sports but is forced to to be accepted.
Many of us have been bent into shapes that we wouldn’t have thought of being in years ago.
If you think back to years ago, would you have expected to be in the shape you are in today?

We are all being bent by the world, and we come to this text today not to be guilted into confessing God is king, but to see what help we can have when we have to respond to the world around us.

Remember that Jesus is the one telling this parable. In utter contrast to the worldly king, Jesus will give His life rather than take life. A few chapters back in Matthew 11:22, Jesus says “from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of God has suffered violence and the violent take it by force.” If we isolate ourselves and seek purity, kicking out non-conformity, then the kingdom burns, and our only hope is a man who refuses to bow down to any king other than the one who sent him. The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, it is not delivered from it.

You are invited to build the kingdom, a kingdom opposed to all other kingdoms who rule through violence and force. If we are called to be kingdom builders, we will have to make the same choice. We can flee from responsibility, we can react in violent and unhealthy ways, or we can suffer together through the rough patches and emerge the other side wounded, bent, broken, but a little patch of the kingdom is redeemed.

We started this conversation because we were uncomfortable with the image of God as an unrighteous king. We will always be tempted not only by a kingly God, but that we can be kings too. Jesus sets us free from this temptation to become kings and rule our kingdoms with harsh judgment. As long as we feel personally charged with deciding who should pay for their sins and how, there will be no rest for us — not only because there is always some crime which we might feel charged to avenge, but also (and perhaps more importantly) because when we’re caught up in the vengeance cycle, those dark places we see and lash out at in others are bound to be projections of unacknowledged and therefore unhealed dark places in ourselves. In other words, people seeking vengeance are “treating” something that isn’t the wound, leaving the real wound to fester.

Jesus is the suffering servant. And I’m convicted that he invites you to resist the temptation to judge, try, and convict others today, and instead find new ways to suffer together when the world tries to bend us out of shape. And when we struggle together, there in our midst is a garmentless man, taking the brunt of the world’s force, taking the edge of the knife, taking our sins and rendering them powerless over us, if we only trust him to do so.

May all your images of God as a harsh judge be replaced by a God who sent God’s son to redeem the world.
May all the moments when you suffer violence for the kingdom be helped by knowing our Lord Jesus Christ suffered violence but was not overcome by it.
May when you look at your life and see it bent out of shape, do not be afraid. Our God is with you, and you can hide, or you can protest, or you can stand in silent refusal. And whatever you choose, God will never ever leave you alone.

Thoughts?

(Photo credit: “wedding banquet” by Andrew Juren, used by Creative Commons license)

Consider this post a call for rebellion against the church metrics movement.

First, you should know the worst part about being a preacher is that we tend to be critical of other preacher’s sermons. When I was in seminary, I heard a sermon on Mark 14 (CEB) where a woman breaks a jar of expensive perfume and pours it over Jesus’ head, and the . The preacher talked about Jesus’ love being extravagant, overflowing, without regard for other people. I remember thinking “Who cares that it’s extravagant? We get it. Jesus loved everyone. Grace loves everyone. Can we talk about the misogyny or the reversal of condemnation or something more relevant, please?”

It’s been in recent months that I’ve began to better realize the importance of emphasizing how extravagant grace really is.

A few weeks back, I learned a new word when I was in close proximity to Amy Laura Hall, a Duke Divinity professor and UM Elder. Her blog and twitter account are named “Profligate Grace” which was a new word for me, worth 4000 points in Scrabble (or if you are under 25, Words with Friends).

Profligate means:

recklessly prodigal or extravagant

And “profligate grace” means to Rev. Hall:

I resist the market-driven, cheesy business-model ways of the United Methodist Church these days in part because both parents taught me that there is no way to “count” people and the means or effects of grace.  Each life is a gift, a joy, and incalculably treasured by God.  So, I am against applying quantified, count-the-numbers methods in public school and church, in organizing and in parenting.

[Profligate Grace] is just a fancy way to say that grace may be hard-won, but it is also not measurable.  Solidarity, growth, and human flourishing require thought and care and tending, but that work withers when the results are put to a quantified test.

These quotes really started me thinking about “what are we measuring in the church?”

In a sermon by my Bishop a month ago at a clergy meeting, my Bishop clued us into Jim Noble’s “The King’s Kitchen” which is a not-for-profit restaurant that donates all its profits to charity–$50k last year! Plus it offers on-the-job training and skillset enhancement for homeless or transitional people. Awesome sauce.

Here’s a quick blog post with a CNN video that has the following quote that the Bishop used in his sermon:

Sometimes in life you have to make a distinction between success and significance.

Jim Noble

It is exactly this distinction that makes me wary of the Call to Action and the Vital Congregations movement of church metrics. It’s easy to measure success with dashboards, metrics, comparisons of budget. If the numbers go up, you are successful. If the numbers for a program go down, it needs retooling or scrapping.

The problem is measuring significance. As Rev. Hall emphasizes and the woman with the perfume exhibits, grace is profligate.

• It is not measurable. It flows out without regard for the boundaries.
• It is slow and quiet, immeasurable, trusting in the slow work of God.
• It is extravagant like the woman pouring expensive perfume on Jesus’ head. The church leadership of Jesus’ day (oh *SNAP* yes I went there!) criticized the quantitative success of the perfume but couldn’t measure the significance of the action.

When the emphasis is on success not significance, we lose sight of what we are really called to do. And if we focus on success, we could miss out on being significant.

Last story:

I was talking with a clergy mentor and told her about a pastoral situation where I offered grace and help to a youth in the midst of a rural Bible Belt culture that offers neither grace nor help for the situation. I can’t be more specific than that in this public blog post. The mentor’s response?

“You can know what you said is more significant to that youth than anything you’ve done up until now in ministry.”

Boom.

Here it is:

The Hacking Christianity Call to Action.

Rebel.

Tell the stories of significance in your community, of how you changed lives. Forget the financial report for the missions committee, tell about who you helped and how it changed you. Get rid of the Year To Date report in the bulletin and include a story of how faithful giving changed someone’s life. Let the only money talked about is how the Pastor emptied her Discretionary account helping the poor. This isn’t an ostrich sticking your head in the sand, it is focusing on significance not success.

Rebel.

Talk about the social holiness work you’ve done, holiness which resists metrics. Tell stories of how you extravagantly wasted money on helping people, kicked out big givers who were poisonous to the body, ended successful programs because they were just rote actions, and stayed in ministry with people who could never pay it back.

Rebel.

Seek life in the face of death. You can watch that video of the declining UMC and listen to the heartbeat machine on the Vital Congregations website (ick!). Or you can preach relevant hope to the difficult situation. Yes, we should downsize and prioritize and we have to face reality. But even if we are close to closing our doors, we can still be significant to people in our community. If numerical success does not come, the church doors can be closed in celebration of significant ministry rather than lament of a fallen church.

Rebel.

Seek significance rather than success.

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I write this in protest of the church metrics movement that I don’t believe gives a mission or hope to congregations who WILL most likely close. Stop beating them down and give them something to live for even in their twilight years.

I write this from a place of privilege, as I’m in a successful church and have had a great year in terms of giving, professions of faith, and new disciples in our youth group.

But know that when I’m filling out my end of year reports, my charge conference numbers…I will talk about the significance of our ministry rather than the success.

But the church metrics movement…when we get right down to its emphasis and what the websites report…will really only care about one.

Which one will you?

Discuss.

Recently, Hacking Christianity’s favorite Mark Driscoll instructed the media to no longer refer to his church’s multiple campuses as…oops…campuses. Instead, they are to be called churches. Here’s one of their pastors Jamie Munson explaining:

During our June meeting, the Mars Hill Board of Directors agreed to replace “Mars Hill campuses” with “Mars Hill churches.” This is more than a shift in semantics…Referring to our locations as churches rather than campuses helps articulate our theology (what we believe about God and his Word), our ecclesiology (what we believe about church), our ministry, and our mission.

In other words, instead of describing Mars Hill as “one church, many locations, one message” they now refer to them as “many churches, many locations, one message.” One message is broadcast to many sites, but each site should be seen as its own church even though the most distinctive part of it being a church is the same across the board.

But here’s the question: is a local congregation its own church if its sermon is outsourced to an outside entity?

Like most Wal-Mart or Franchise Churches (discussed on this blog previously), video broadcast allows the local parishes to have local pastors or “lead pastors” with local laity…but the Sunday message is most-often given over to the mothership church.  This phenomenon is not limited to churches that expand their roots, it also encompasses churches that absorb other churches or take over the message at other churches.

Andrew Conard recently posted on his blog that Church of the Resurrection, the largest UMC church in America, was looking for a few good men, er, a few student or lay pastors who would be willing to hand over their sermon time to Resurrection. He writes:

I am on a strategic project team at Resurrection that is looking for three small churches, currently led by lay speakers, local pastors, or student local pastors, who would be interested in testing a new model for ministry – these churches would, for one year, become a part of a multi-point circuit with Resurrection. The aim is to see what we might do together to strengthen small churches. Resurrection would provide 36 weeks of sermons via video, coaching, and other resources.

Senior Pastor Adam Hamilton’s brief writeup is similar:

There are over 15,000 United Methodist Churches with less than 50 people in worship each week. Many are vital and vibrant faith churches; others are struggling. We’ve wondered what might happen if large churches partner with smaller churches in a model that looks something like what happens with our campuses, though, under this new model, each smaller church remains its own congregation. We would provide coaching, marketing resources; training and Resurrection’s sermons would be used in these churches via video 75% of the time. We’re testing this with three churches in the next year. If it is successful, we’ll offer this model to other large and small churches to look at creating similar partnerships called “circuits.”

My comment (unresponded to as of this writing) is thus:

• Firstly, I’m personally opposed to franchising a particular church and for local churches to cede their message to people outside their community. I will watch with interest the ways how COR’s partner churches reflect on this experience.
• Secondly, with franchised churches (at least the half-dozen case studies I’ve seen) the predominant number of people you get are not converts but disenfranchised Christians from other churches. So I wonder what CoR’s goal is in offering a franchise to a local church?
• Finally, I’m particularly shocked at an outright desire to “take over” the message of student, local, and lay pastors…the ones most likely to need coaching, yes, but also the most vulnerable to the temptation to cede the message. I’m honestly concerned at why CoR is targeting not troubled churches but vulnerable pastors?

Having said all that, I don’t expect Rev. Conard to respond, given that he’s leaving his oversight of this project to go to Resurrection West this week (congrats by the way!), but these are still relevant questions, particularly why they are focusing on churches without full clergy at them. Odd.

Regardless, the rising phenomenon now is to outsource the message of a local church to outsiders so that clergy can focus on other aspects of ministry. We’ve talked about this before in a previous blog conversation, which included an intern and a staff person at CoR, so read more there.

But the question still remains: if the Gospel of Jesus Christ is preached from afar, not informed by the receiver, is that congregation an individual church or is it an extension of a mother church? If the sermons come from the top-down and community comes from the bottom-up, are they their own churches or the same church in different contexts?

Discuss.

It’s been raining for two days straight in rural Oklahoma. For a plains state used to abundant sunshine, it can wear on the soul. But from the rain also springs a very particular memory that is informing my sermon and lectionary musings for this Sunday.

In elementary school, my generation more than likely had a particular science fiction story in our textbook compilation of short stories: “All Summer in a Day” (IMDB) by Ray Bradbury. The story can be read here (only four pages. Go ahead!) or the 1980s PBS episode of it can be viewed here. Briefly, the story is of a girl Margot who is new-ish to a space outpost on Venus where it rains constantly and the sun only shines for two hours every seven years. All her nine-year-old classmates in the school cannot remember the last sunshine, but Margot has moved here from Earth more recently and remembers the warmth of the sun. The other children torment her mercilessly because she refuses to play games with them and insists that she remembers the Sun.

Finally, the day arrives and the children say that the Sun must be a myth, a joke, and in their childhood torment they lock Margot in a closet. Suddenly, the sun comes out, and the children play for 2 hours in a bright, green, beautiful world…then the rain starts back, and the children suddenly remember Margot locked in a closet. The book ends with them opening the door in shame; the video ends with the children giving Margot their flowers as atonement for their sins.

The Lectionary reading for this week is Doubting Thomas (John 20). In the story, Jesus has appeared to the Disciples and spoken to them. Thomas arrives after this encounter and, contrary to the other 10 assertions, refuses to believe that Jesus had reappeared. He holds onto this for a week, then the text says that Thomas and the Disciples are together in the house and Jesus appears. Thomas believes again, and Jesus concludes “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

What struck me about these two stories is twofold.

First, the treatment of the one who differs by the community. In “All Summer” Margot is ridiculed, tormented, and locked in a closet on the cusp of her belief in the Sun being proven true. In “Doubting Thomas” Thomas differs with the Disciples but remains in their presence, seemingly for the whole week after Jesus had appeared. Thomas does not appear to have been expelled from the community for his disbelief in the Son. In one story the believer is punished by the community; in the other, the disbeliever remains in relationship with the community.

Second, the participation of the one who differs in community. In “All Summer” Margot isolates herself from the children, refuses to participate in their games, and emphasizes the one thing she has over them: her experience of the Sun. In the end, her refusal to participate got her dream stolen from her, though that does not excuse the violators. In “Doubting Thomas” Thomas stays with the Disciples, engages them, holds tight to his belief but does not isolate himself (at least nothing in the text indicates that). In the end, John’s beliefs are changed by Jesus but he is not excluded from the community and indeed apocryphally expands it further than any other Apostle.

From these experiences, I am feeling an inclination to focus on how we deal with the detractors, the contrarians, those who differ in our midst.

• Do we ridicule them, avoid them, hit them when it hurts the most, drive them away?
• Do we accept them, embrace them without unthinking concessions to their beliefs, remain in relationship even if they try to drive us away?

We have in our communities examples of how not to differ. Churches that exclude sexual minorities. Pastors who preach hot topics and get burned. Schismatic churches that leave their denominations because they cannot handle being identified with differing majority. What do we do to avoid these high-stress situations but also acknowledge that we are not of one mind in our contexts?

On the one hand, we have a responsibility to be a community that accepts difference. We all have those people in our lives. As a clergyperson, it is incredibly difficult to look at my congregation and not wish they all agreed with me. And yet it is usually the people who think differently than me that I learn the most from. Not from reinforcing my own beliefs like an echo chamber but from introducing dissonance that helps me better form, alter, and perhaps present the topics in a more holistic way. Thankfully my parish allows for this dissonance, not in all forms, but for the most part. I’m sure there are people who would feel differently that my parish is not a place for their particular form of dissent, but that’s to be expected in any diverse setting. What matters is how we treat one another on that journey, from the worst to the best.

On the flipside, we who differ have a responsibility to differ in healthy ways. I ran an online religion forum for years that had an incredible amount of disagreements. The members who were the most respected did not believe alike but were able to put aside hot passions and disagree helpfully. Even when hotheads prevailed, the community held together. I saw many passionate posters come and go because they couldn’t disagree with people helpfully…and banned many people who were unable to keep their spite to themselves. Similarly, when I find myself in a theological or social minority, I have to carry myself in a fashion that garners respect even from diehard opponents. I definitely don’t always succeed, and my comments on other people’s blogs may not reflect my best. But the goal is to disagree faithfully like Thomas and not like Margot (not blaming her…she acted exactly as a nine-year-old would, of course).

So in my lectionary musing for sermonizing this week, I’m intrigued by the idea of a differing ethic: what a community does with those who differ, and what differing individuals do within a community. What might that look like, informed by Doubting Thomas?

Thoughts? How do you deal with difference? What experiences do you have (healthy or unhealthy) in being the minority in a party? Other thoughts on the Doubting Thomas lectionary?

Discuss.