“What if the Church should be less concerned with creating saints than creating a world where we do not need saints? A world where people like Mother Theresa and MLK wold have nothing to do.”

~ Peter Rollins, Insurrection, page 142

In Batman Begins, a reboot of the Batman storyline, we learn that Bruce Wayne’s father Thomas was a philanthropist for the city of Gotham. He built a rail system so that the impoverished could work in the city and be able to travel. In the movie’s flashback to that fateful night when they died, Thomas Wayne explains this decision:

Thomas Wayne: “Gotham’s been good to our family, but the city’s been suffering. People less fortunate than us have been enduring very hard times. So we built a new, cheap, public transportation system to unite the city.”

Both of Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed before those less fortunate had enough time to be bettered by this project. In their memory, the philanthropists in Gotham were “galvanized” into building onto more of the city’s infrastructure and Gotham has “limped on ever since.” It is in this environment that Bruce takes a more direct approach to fighting crime and Batman emerges as a one-man fighting force who gets criminals off the streets and into hospitals…but there’s always more and more, it seems. Indeed, by the second movie, the police officers at a press conference say “things are worse than ever” and even the District Attorney says “the night is darkest before the dawn.” It seems that even though individuals battles are won by Batman, the war to make Gotham better is still ongoing.

In Peter Rollins’ book Insurrection, Rollins writes about this difference between Bruce Wayne and his father Thomas Wayne’s approaches to crime:

In order for Bruce Wayne to fund his high-tech covert military campaign against the criminals of Gotham, he must secretly siphon off vast sums of money from Wayne Industries…one must wonder whether it might not be much more effective if he took that money and spent it on developing a strong educational system within the city, setting up training programs for the unemployed, and helping small businesses develop…

A city without the infrastructure to provide good education and work opportunities simply feeds Joker’s evil schemes by sustaining the conditions that lead to a large underclass unable to find representation in the city. Batman’s archvillains would have a difficult time carrying out their crimes if they did not have an unlimited number of poor and desperate people to prey upon, people who turn to crime in order to survive and find identity. If Batman spent his time and money supporting a life-giving infrastructure, the crime wave in Gotham might be broken.

Insurrection page 141-142

Thus, to Rollins, if Bruce had followed in his father’s footsteps and recommitted himself and all that money to bettering the environment of Gotham, then it would be a better place. It’s similar to the approach against terrorism mapped out in Three Cups of Tea, where the journalist discovers that by educating women they know to not encourage their sons to not go into terrorism and thus they rob terrorists of their needed clientele. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Instead, like any partially-crazy traumatized child would do, Bruce Wayne sought revenge in the form of the Caped Crusader: which made for a much better comic book and movie series, I’ll admit, but perhaps not the best choice to be effective. So who made the right decision? Bruce Wayne or Thomas Wayne? Thomas’s approach obviously didn’t remove all the corruption and crime, even though it kept it from dissolving into anarchy (which was the preference of Batman Begins’ antagonist Ra’s Al Ghul). But it looks like from the teasers of The Dark Knight Rises that anarchy is on its way even against Bruce Wayne’s approach as Batman too.

Rollins concludes with this statement that I find meaning in today:

Bruce Wayne is able to look and feel like he is part of the solution when, in his overall material practices, he is really a part of the problem. It is one thing to beat up a criminal; it’s another to commit oneself to the difficult task of transforming society.

I wonder if we are making discipleship too easy. Being a disciple is easy. Going to church is easy. Reading the bible is easy. Praying is easy. Even implementing biblical principles into your private life is sorta easy. In the grand scheme of things, these are easy practices and sacrifices of time. Half of the United Methodist Church’s mission statement (“To Make Disciples of Jesus Christ…”) is easy.

The second half of that mission statement (“For the Transformation of the World.”) is hard. Speaking up for the oppressed is hard. Choosing to preach on controversial issues that will lose you members is hard. Finding another person to read the bible with is hard. Praying for one’s enemies is hard. Choosing to leave a church that offers you spiritual therapy for another one that galvanizes you is hard.

Obviously, being a Disciple necessarily means a combination of both private devotion and public action, so discipleship really isn’t easy. But it’s amazing how many churches are filled with Superheroes in both the pulpit and the pew who tackle spiritual problems one at a time and who create programs and structures that are dependent on them rather than creating a culture of call and service that can change the world around them. I’ve seen too many churches lose the wind from their sails when one super-layperson dies or becomes disgruntled, too many churches fall when one pastor falls short or suffers from indiscretions. Discipleship in a church context ought be more than reliance on a single person.

Perhaps the shift we need to make in discipleship is from being the heroes in our communities whom everyone relies on to being the ones who create the conditions for other heroes to emerge.

Don’t get me wrong: our world needs heroes these days, doesn’t it? In a world where a fear and hatred of enemies as wholly ‘other’ is encouraged; where a psychology of enmity rules; where polarization is lifted up; where a hostile imagination is inflamed; is it not up to us to call for a Hero to emerge? Is it not up to the dreamers, the idealists, people called by God to stoke a heroic imagination in the people, to create the conditions by which a hero might appear, where Jesus might return, where the Spirit might be moving, where love might conquer fear, where Jar-Jar may magically disappear from the Star Wars prequels (can I get an AMEN?)?

From an article on Heroism, is not this description of the heroic imagination a parallel to any ministry context?

“Those who engage their heroic imagination are making themselves aware of opportunities where they can help others in need, and may be more prepared to accept and transcend the consequences associated with the…decision [to help].”

Z.E. Franco, K. Blau, P.G. Zimbardo. “Heroism: A Conceptual Analysis and Differentiation
between Heroic Action and Altruism.” Review of General Psychology. April 11, 2011, page 9.

Perhaps we are called not to be Bruce Wayne but to be Thomas, to create the conditions for a hero to emerge in our contexts, to stoke a heroic imagination in our community that faces down oppression and stands with the marginalized. To tell the stories of liberation, sing songs of freedom, celebrate the Risen Christ triumphant in our midst.

Perhaps we are not called to be individuals with a perfectly crafted relationship with God, but communities seeking perfection in our relationships with each other.  Perhaps we can start with working on our relationships with each other rather than God. Perhaps when we focus on God’s creation rather than our individualistic relationship with God, we can push against the trends of our time towards individualism and modernity.

Will the pastors and lay leaders among us work to create a heroic imagination in your communities? Ones that endure, ones that create the conditions for change, ones that trust in the slow work of God, ones that transform the world? Or will you be content doing everything, getting all the credit for good works in your community, creating programs and churches that rise and fall with the beating of your own heart?

The choice is yours.

Thoughts?

The silence you hear that started this past weekend is due to the newest Legend of Zelda game being released on the Wii.

In coordination with this release, Hacking Christianity has contributed a chapter to the new book The Legend of Zelda and Theology, coming out in a few weeks (you can pre-order it on Amazon.com now). Here’s the teaser of the book:

The level of interactive adventure, exploration, immersion and storytelling The Legend of Zelda brought to television screens across the world was unheard of and it planted an integral seed in the garden that one day would grow into the diverse gaming landscape we know today. Far from stopping there, The Legend of Zelda series has continued to release top-shelf games adored by critics and fans alike.

Zelda, like all of our greatest fairy tales, legends and myths, presents that elusive and exclusive kind of enlightenment that only the fantastic can provide. In this collection, various contributors explore the connections between this cultural zeitgeist and theology.

I grew up playing Legend of Zelda so when a good friend informed me of a pop culture theology book (ala The Matrix and Philosophy or Star Wars and Philosophy) that was centered on the Zelda universe, I jumped at the chance to contribute.

There’s about ten contributing authors to this compilation. My chapter preview is below.

===

As a child, one of my first lessons in ethics came from a chicken in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. In the game, there are chickens called cuccos running around and I would laugh at their cries of fear while swatting them with my sword. One day I was showing my brother this hilarity when, unexpectedly, a hundred cuccos stormed on screen pecking mercilessly at me as they flew by. In an unfortunate coincidence, I was down to one or two hearts of life energy at the time and, to my childhood horror, actually died as a result of my cucco torment. It was a harsh lesson: don’t mess with the cucco…or at least don’t mess with them too much.

It’s also a lesson on ethics because the scenario with the cucco is a question of how to use one’s power. The Zelda universe is primarily a story about good v. evil, of course; but more specifically, it is a story about the use of power. One of the iconic artifacts in the Zelda universe is the Triforce: three interlocked triangles who grant the bearer significant power. The protagonist Link thus embarks on the hero’s journey from powerless to merely underpowered compared to the antagonist Ganon.

The ethical considerations of the use of power are a persistent theme in the Zelda series, in general, and Link to the Past, in particular. In engaging this topic, LttP contains numerous references to the Christian journey and the role of power in our everyday lives. Much of Christian theology is about good and evil, certainly, but also the use of power: the power of Christ to break the chains of sin, the power of Christians to overcome injustice and oppression, the restrictions placed on Christians in authority, etc.

Through examining the hero’s journey in this story, the role of power comes to the forefront: what does power do to corrupt or purify one’s desires? We will outline three problems of this particular world that serve as lenses to our own ethical behavior in the analog world.

===

So check out the book (sadly, no kindle version yet) and I’ll post a review of some of my co-contributor’s chapters…once I actually see them! Ha!

When hackers get mad with corporations, they get even and attempt to knock their websites offline.

One of their tactics is a DDoS attack: Distributed Denial of Service attack. They hack into and take over computers of unsuspecting people and cause them to all try to load a target website at the same time. Like a million people hitting “refresh” at the same time, the traffic overwhelms most websites and they go offline, causing embarrassment and disruption of business to those corporations.

Last year, hackers tried to take down Amazon.com. They failed. Why? Amazon basically suffers a month-long DDoS attack during the heavy Christmas season so they’ve done lots of work on their systems making them handle all the traffic. From the article:

Amazon has spent years creating and refining an “elastic” infrastructure, called EC2, designed to automatically scale to handle giant traffic spikes. The company has so much spare server capacity, in fact, that it runs a sideline business hosting other websites.

Indeed they do host lots of websites: Amazon hosts all the images and large files of this website. So I never have to worry because I trust in the network’s ability to avoid being overwhelmed.

I wonder if theology functions like Amazon.com.

Theology (thinking about God) is what helps us engage the world around us in all its immense complexity and still be able to believe in God despite a world that seeks on every level to overwhelm us.

Bruce Epperly has this great description of theology in the beginning pages of Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed:

An accessible and insightful theology responds to the perplexities of life that threaten to overwhelm us intellectually, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually as we face…the unfixable events of life. (Page 3)

We are overwhelmed in our world, aren’t we?

• When bad things happen to good people, our sense of a God who is fair gets knocked offline.
• When tragedy happens and we wonder why God didn’t stop it, our sense of God’s omnipotence and care gets knocked offline.
• When church members are mean and hateful, our sense of what Christians should be gets knocked offline.
• When our pastor preaches something that challenges us, our sense of “No, I’m right” gets activated and takes “reasonableness” offline.

The worst part is that often websites that are targets of DDoS attacks don’t fail on their own…their owners take them offline, removing them from the situation. We do the same thing. We check out, we disengage, we avoid conversations and move deeper and deeper into our echo chambers.

What’s the good news? The good news is that it’s okay to be in flux.

Good network administrators redirect traffic when it gets overwhelming, they don’t abandon the site. They spread out the traffic among more host computers, they start identifying the toxic computers and disable their access, they sometimes bring up the backup site and direct good traffic there and bad traffic to honeypots. They allow their system to adapt, not break.

So it is with us. We can allow our systems to change, to respond. We keep solid with the foundations and the essentials, but perhaps find new (for us) ways of ordering them. We create an elastic theological framework like Amazon’s that distributes dissonance, trauma, pain and world tragedy over many theological positions rather than overwhelming one.

This is what we’re doing at HackingChristianity. We’re putting our theological systems up for review, finding new ways to adapt to our theological problems, and guiding people in opening up our systems when they are obviously unable to respond to the complexities of the world. When people’s systems crash, we help pick up the pieces and seek out a better way of putting it all back together.

(Photo Credit: “Overflow” by opyh on Flickr, shared under Creative Commons)

I got to spend yesterday with author Dr. Leonard Sweet as he did a seminar on social media culture and the church. I live-tweeted some choice bits on my twitter so check those out. But he had one message that works totally with the Hacking Christianity crowd so I’m sharing it below.

In Star Trek, the first command given is General Order #1, “Do Not Interfere” which states that Starfleet personnel are not to interfere with the cultures of the planets they visit, or make allusions to space travel for cultures who haven’t gotten off the ground yet. Even though they fall short dozens of times (Memory-Alpha has a long list of violations, often due to Captain Kirk’s libido), the Prime Directive is one of the most important tenets of the Star Trek universe that is wrestled with in many episodes.

Reading the Bible, Leonard Sweet wondered what the first command given by God is. What is God’s “Prime Directive” for us?

• In Genesis 1, the first command is “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (1:28, NRSV).
• In Genesis 2, the other Creation story, the Human is put in the garden and told to “till and keep it” with the first command being “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden” (2:15-16, NRSV).

In light of the Prime Directive, God’s General Order #1 for us is “Do Interfere“: Do fill the earth with God’s goodness, Do bring order to the chaos, Do care for that which gives life and beauty, Do freely enjoy all of God’s Creation that we should.

As Leonard Sweet said, the Prime Directive of God is not a NO but a YES! Do Interfere, Do get your hands dirty, Do put yourself out there, Do seek justice, Do offer grace, Do all these things.

Perhaps then Holiness, or the pursuit of God’s desires for us, isn’t keeping in our ivory towers or behind clean altar rails in the church. Perhaps holiness is getting our hands dirty in the soil, getting out there, reaching out to the disordered and bringing something more to them. Perhaps holiness is reflecting on how we might best interfere with whatever our garden is. Perhaps our offer of God isn’t in the NOs but in the YESes, in the offer of God’s grace to all.

One final point: This is why I can’t stand the theology behind Praise and Worship Music. The song “Give us Clean Hands?”…I don’t think so.

I think that when we stand before God on our Judgment Day…the dirtier our hands, the better.

In what ways have you followed the command “Do Interfere” today?

Thoughts?

(Image credit: “Star Trek” by Flickr user xtopalopaquetl, used by Creative Commons share)

The People of the Second Chance has a relevant campaign ad above (via Mason). From their rationale:

In Hollywood history, Darth Vader is ranked as one of the biggest bad guys of all time. There has never been a more cold-blooded killer. This guy didn’t even blink when deciding to destroy the entire planet of Alderaan and its inhabitants with the Death Star.

And yet, even Vader found redemption. Why? Because Luke Skywalker believed that there was something more than just hatred behind that black mask and respirator.

I’m gonna go all-out Star Wars fanboy on you and say that this campaign is close but let’s take it a bit further. From the Return of the Jedi:

VADER: The Emperor has been expecting you.
LUKE: I know, father.
VADER: So, you have accepted the truth.
LUKE: I’ve accepted the truth that you were once Anakin Skywalker, my father.
VADER (turning to face him): That name no longer has any meaning for me.
LUKE: It is the name of your true self. You’ve only forgotten. I know there is good in you. The Emperor hasn’t driven it from you fully. That is why you couldn’t destroy me. That’s why you won’t bring me to your Emperor now.

When we see the backstory of Episodes 1-3, we become sympathetic to Vader, see the humanity behind the mask and respirator…that is true. We see him as a slave child, losing his mentor, having his mother die in his arms, and the guilt that plagues Anakin becomes malignant. We see Anakin rise up because of his power and ferocity who destroys entire planets and societies, and after this scene hands over his own son to the Emperor. We celebrate his redemption, how he embraced the second chance his son Luke gave him, and as his last act removed the source of evil from the galaxy. Why? Because Luke gave him a second chance. Boom. Poster campaign.

However, Redemption is more than personal. Redemption is about uncovering the source that caused us to go astray, and removing its effect on individuals and societies so that none other have to live the life you did.

Marjorie Suchocki in God Christ Church talks about Original Sin as social: one is born into sin. Teens on the streets of NYC see violence as liberative, women in fundamentalist households see subservience as preferred, and a slave boy on Tatooine sees “saving people” as his calling, no matter what the cost. This slave boy is in the grip of sin that he did not choose, it chose him. Eventually Anakin will be in the grip of the Emperor, a being more powerful who offers a power so seductive it preys on Anakin’s emotions and turns him into Vader.

Anakin’s story humanizes him and explains redemption, but also shows the power of dehumanizing sin in our lives that needs to be removed not redeemed.

I used to be slightly worried that the normally pacifistic Jedi would kill the Sith. Pretty mean. But when I metaphorized (is that a word?) it, I also want to remove sin from society. Sins of racism, sexism, abuse of LGBT people, marginalizing of the poor, domestic abuse, substance abuse, and sinful aspects of society’s structures from the government and the Church on down. The list is long. And while people can be redeemed, society healed, and the environment rebounded (hopefully), the sin is not necessary. It is not necessary that people be born into sin to be redeemed…we have enough to deal with on our own, thank you. And we are called to help others toward redemption even as we seek to remove the sin that leaves broken people in its wake.

Maybe redemption is equal parts Anakin and the Emperor. Redemption is more than mercy towards a sinner. It is about justice to the source of sin. Both are necessary, but it is the latter that changes more than the individual and can change society as well.

Redemption is more than personal. It is interpersonal and social, unlocking the grip of sin, destructiveness, and death on a society. We are a people of the second chance, absolutely, but also ones that don’t want anyone behind us to need a second chance like ours.

May God guide us to offer redemption to people and justice to the Empire around us.

Thoughts?

Caption reads: “Got Bad Lag? Me Too. Took me 3 days to respawn”

Surely there is at least one other gamer out there who reads this blog and gets it. Gimme a shout-out so I know I’m not alone…

I know, not theologically correct given resuscitation v. resurrection and how Jesus was/wasn’t resurrected back into his physical body. But still funny. It’s Monday.

For today’s apps on iPhone and Android, some of the more innovative programs utilize “augmented reality” meaning that you hold up  your phone and you see through the camera, but in real-time information is added over it (kinda like the Terminator).

• For instance, Yelp identifies restaurants and gives starred reviews overlaid them as you are walking downtown.
• Google Goggles will auto-translate some signs and texts into English.
• Here’s a list of 37 ones on the iPhone alone and here’s a presentation in html format on its usage. Wild, huh?

I’ve always wondered if Jesus had an augmented reality set. Like when he encountered the woman at the well in john 4, he saw through her and knew her name and knew her past and knew her struggles and knew everything about her. If Jesus had a HUD, all that information would have popped up in a heads-up display describing her.

From the facebook feed, I ran across this video that shows what Christ’s augmented reality might be. The video is from a church so it is not as cinematic but once it hits the halfway mark things pick up. Stick with it, it will stick with you.

For me, the video is a reminder that we lack Jesus’ HUD and ability to augment reality so that he sees through people into their hearts. We lack that vision. But we do not lack in compassion that we can show each person so that regardless of what they are struggling with, they can experience a word or act of grace. We love out of our ignorance of the other person, not because we think they need it or want it. We love more to supplement our own deficiencies rather than treat or help others with theirs. Does that reversal make sense?

Thoughts?

The worldwide population of the United Methodist Church is ~12 million people (at least in 2007). Last month, the population of the online role playing game (RPG) World of Warcraft reached 12 million people. This isn’t some recent phenomenon: the game is six years old. Truly, online role playing games are a force to be reckoned with if their active population (each of which pays a monthly subscription) equals or exceeds the population of the UMC.

Perhaps the popularity of online games is not about the specific success of particular games but about the gamification of our culture: if we make something a game, then it changes our habits.  This is becoming more and more part of our culture. For example, two years ago Weight Watchers launched an online tool to better track the point-value of foods and seemed to turn it into a game.

Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers’ points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you’ve used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren’t apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I’ll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat! [boingboing.net]

For some people if you make something a game, then it becomes easier. I know this because I had a problem of driving too fast and accelerating too fast. But then our family got a Prius (blog post: Pastor in a Prius) and my miles per gallon would go down if I did those gas-guzzling tactics. Every 5 minutes I could see if I was saving money or losing it. And it changed the way I drove: because it became a game to sustain 50mpg.

From gamifying homework to turning work into play to iPhone apps that make to-do lists into an RPG, it is clear that gaming (and especially social gaming) has started to creep into the mundane parts of our lives as a form of motivation. This isn’t just a distraction from the world’s problems ala ancient Rome’s use of Gladiator games, but is about fusing work and play so that we work harder and longer for tiered rewards. The question remains: should we?

Kotaku dived into this conversation with a great titled article (Video Games Keep Us Doing Things We Loathe) and contributed this thoughtful quote:

But “gamification” is a concept that’s here to stay; the positive view is that applying proven game design concepts to some of our least-favorite or most tedious life tasks can make us more productive and help us have fun doing it. The negative view is that we’ve become so dependent on designed interaction, compulsion loops and receiving positive feedback for everything that we can’t just exist spontaneously, that we need to be “tricked” into achieving. [kotaku.com]

That last line is clearly a social force that works against the church. The temptation to trick people into participation or lure people to participate with rewards is tedious territory. Of course when one serves in a mission project or attends church they get a “we are thankful you are here” which feels great. When a youth helps serve a dinner because the workers get to go bowling afterwards, they are being rewarded. The question is are there ways to use gaming concepts in the church or are the church and gamification incompatible?

One approach is to embrace gamification: a church can put into place practices and policies that put the carrot before the horse so we will pull the cart.  There is little doubt that discipleship can be made into a game. While this can be done well, I have mostly memories of negative attempts. For example:

• When I was in Sunday School, gold stars that track attendance and participation reward the kids whose parents love them enough to attend the most. [/snarky, sorry]
• When I was in college and worked in a Youth Program, the youth minister used Doug Fields‘ H.A.B.I.T.S. curriculum that encourages tiers of success in the areas of spiritual disciplines that students could check-off if they were “spiritual” that week in that area before they move onto the next.
• Now in the church, we have people who believe that if they give enough money or attend enough meetings or worship that they will be “rewarded” with committee chairmanships or leadership roles. (Sadly, this often does occur, but when it doesn’t, there are emotional wonderings of why the “game” didn’t work out for them.)

The other approach is to reject gamification. For United Methodists, there’s a strong Wesleyan basis for rejecting this type of evaluation and persuasion: we believe in Prevenient Grace. This means that God has already rewarded us with God’s unmerited love! We have already saved the Princess, we’ve already found the Triforce, we’ve already become a level 99 elf-lord. All that remains is to acknowledge the gift, believe in Jesus Christ, and then do good works that flow from that faith. At its core, Wesleyan Grace is antithetical to gamification, because the horse already has the carrot and pulls the cart anyway out of gratitude.

By preaching and building this understanding of how God recognizes humanity into the church structure and teaching (and for goodness sake, stop the gold stars in the classrooms already!), one has planted the seeds to resist a gamification of the church.At the essence of a gamed sense of discipleship is that by undertaking unpleasant actions one can achieve greater merits, be it a chairmanship, classroom teacher, spousal approval, on up to Eternal Life. But we have already achieved the reward, and now the goal is to do works with an unwavering sense of joy fused with the action. So at their essence, gamed discipleship is not Wesleyan discipleship.

In closing, Kotaku had this other paragraph that bears mention:

It’s a funny principle that keeps us driving at thankless tasks for long-term payoffs. The motivator there is perpetual dissatisfaction – you want more than what you have, you want to be better than what you are, and if you focus and work hard, you’ll reach incremental payoffs on your way to that goal. But I often wonder if that’s genuinely meaningful. People have used the heavy word “addiction” to describe the compulsion to keep checking off little tasks in games like World of Warcraft or Farmville. Comparing games to drugs may be heavy-handed and flawed, it’s true that many gamers have found themselves unable to put a game down even when they can’t identify that they’re enjoying themselves. Isn’t that a dark thought? [kotaku.com]

Perhaps the moment for each one of us to consider is when one can’t identify why they are not enjoying themselves. Why can’t I get up for church? Why can’t I seem to connect with our evangelism campaign? Why is it hard for me to get motivated to attend choir practice? Perhaps the problem isn’t really in any of those flawed institutions, but in our own sense of “why isn’t a gaming tenet of being rewarded for work doing it for me?” Being reminded that we already have the reward and figuring out how to fuse that joy with the works we perform is a conversation that might need to be had.

At our best, we are not a people driven by perpetual dissatisfaction. We are a people driven by knowledge that God loves us and wants the best for us, including a firm desire to serve God and neighbor. Gaming may have its place in transitioning people from a gaming culture to an authentic faith, that’s not in question. But to encourage a gamed sense of discipleship, of achieving rewards, at the highest levels of the church, from the pulpit to the pew, I think that’s the road to perpetual dissatisfaction.

Your turn:

• What elements of gaming do you see in your church or ministry context? Are they helpful or not?
• Do you think gaming and discipleship are compatible? Why or why not?

Thoughts? Discuss.

Adam Savage from Mythbusters is famous for a particular quote: “I reject your reality and substitute my own.” He first said it when he was told that something he said on camera was not remembered correctly and when confronted with it, he said the above quote.

Such a statement is a reflection of belief: I reject your belief and substitute my own…even if the reality completely negates the belief. Beliefs have an immense inertia: they are often a rejection of the world around us and a substitution of a concept that makes sense.

‘Firefly’ | ‘Serenity’

In the 2005 movie Serenity the bad guys are the Alliance, a militaristic galactic empire shrouded in democracy. Their narrative is that they are creating a better world:

Operative: I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.

To the Alliance, the ends justify the means: in this case, horrific means of assassination, cutting off food supplies to colonies, and genocide via a planetary sedative. Their narrative leads them to do anything to justify their goals, and go to the point of sedating people so they follow the scripts given to them.

On the other side of the conflict are the good guys led by Captain Mal Reynolds. Their basic narrative is summed up by River succinctly:

River Tam: People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.

Mal exemplifies this as he travels the galaxy on the wrong side of the law, just looking to keep his ship running, but he keeps on conflicting with the Alliance as they seek to bring planets under their control and imprison people they think they own. The entire series Firefly shows this narrative clearly.

In the movie, when their narratives clash, Mal’s speech to the ragtag group of rebels to join on the most ridiculous plan to stop the Alliance echos the Mythbusters quote:

Malcolm Reynolds: Sure as I know anything, I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin’. I aim to misbehave.

Mal has succinctly identified the shortfalls of the other side’s narrative and substituted his own. His narrative gives him drive to combat not only the people who are arrayed against him but their entire worldview. His conviction drives him to seek justice and give voice to the voiceless, even at great expense to himself. He rejects their narrative and substitutes his own.

Application

When people are in AA, the first thing they do is stand up and say “I am an alcoholic.” They are removing their own narrative of “I can quit any time” and “I’m fine” and replacing it with a new narrative that says the reality. And by doing so, they open themselves up to transformation.

While we may not be in a 12 step program, we are suffering from a script. Walter Brueggemann gave a talk where he outlined 19 Theses about the clash of the world’s and the church’s narratives. Here’s the first few:

1.     Everybody lives by a script. The script may be implicit or explicit. It may be recognized or unrecognized, but everybody has a script.

2.     We get scripted. All of us get scripted through the process of nurture and formation and socialization, and it happens to us without our knowing it.

3.      The dominant scripting in our society is a script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism that socializes us all, liberal and conservative.

4.     That script (technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism) enacted through advertising and propaganda and ideology, especially on the liturgies of television, promises to make us safe and to make us happy.

5.     That script has failed. That script of military consumerism cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy. We may be the unhappiest society in the world.

6.     Health for our society depends upon disengagement from and relinquishment of that script of military consumerism. This is a disengagement and relinquishment that we mostly resist and about which we are profoundly ambiguous.

7.     It is the task of ministry to de-script that script among us. That is, too enable persons to relinquish a world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.

Read the rest here.

In the church, we reject others’ reality and replace it with our own. Sometimes to a fault, to the point where we reject evolution, fail to see the movement of the Spirit to include the lepers, and think that we are to rule this world through force of law and not the law of love. We do fall short. But true Christianity rejects the scripts, rejects the narratives that are counter to the Gospel and counter to the dignity of every human being.

The most important part is that we are writing our own narrative and perhaps writing it alongside the Scripture’s story. If we believe something, we will no longer be buffeted by the world that tells us that we aren’t pretty enough, skinny enough, smart enough, drugged up enough. We can prevail, we can reject that reality and substitute our own.

We close with the final words of the priest in the Firefly series:

Shepherd Book: I don’t care what you believe in, just believe in it.

May it be with us.

Thoughts?

It strikes me that our own discipleship is the same way. It is a sad few of us want a hard bible study or Sunday School curriculum early in our discipleship or even late in it. I’ve seen Sunday School classes empty when a challenging series is began, reinforcing the UM Country Club status even more.

Perhaps what we want is a study or topic that meets us where we are and then presents us with growing questions. And we are sold study after study that purports to do just that.

While I’ve read and seen more curriculums and studies than I can count, there’s only one that does this well: I’ve found that the Bible itself is the perfect incarnation of Mario Bros on-the-fly difficulty. Reading my marked-up bible and seeing my thoughts and comments from days of yore (especially as a youth) are really interesting and cause me to reconsider my own discipleship and thoughts. Skimming gets me one lesson, deep reading gets me another, reading a commentary gets me another, and then reading it alone lectio-divina style gets me another. No matter where I am in my discipleship, I get something out of it.

Perhaps if you are a Sunday School teacher and frustrated with challenging curriculum, take a cue from a parishioner of mine who is a Sunday School teacher 40 year veteran: just start reading the bible with the class. There’s always something there, and when interest is piqued, then you know where to start deeper study.

You don’t have to click “Easy Medium Hard.” No one else has to know which difficulty you are at.  All you have to do is start the game, and the challenges will come your way. Show up, play the game, and let the lessons come to you.

Thoughts?