Getting Kicked Out

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s birthday is this week. He would have been 108. He split from the German state Lutheran Church during Adolf Hitler’s reign, and formed the Confessing Church, because the State Lutheran Church supported Hitler and refused to object to the things he was doing to dissenters, doing to elected officials from other parties, to other nations, to the mentally handicapped, to people of various sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to homosexuals, and especially to Jews. Bonhoeffer objected to the way the Nazis set up the State as higher than God. Eventually Bonhoeffer decided it would be best that Hitler be killed, and he joined in a plot to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer was arrested and hung in a concentration camp shortly before Hitler killed himself at the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Bonhoeffer is lauded today for being one of the bravest and most influential theologians of the 20th century. To do what he did he had to leave his denomination and start something new, opposing the Nazi regime. In 1933 (6 years before the beginning of World War II) the Nazis encouraged the German State Lutheran Church to pass resolutions to remove pastors who did not support the State’s goals, especially Aryan philosophy. In 1934 a group of German Protestants upset by Aryan philosophy and German nationalism in the German Lutheran Church, met and started the movement later to become the Confessing Church.

The evangelical church in America is somewhat similar to the Lutheran State Church in Germany in the sense that the evangelical church in America, compared to other religious groups in America, is the most jingoistically patriotic, the most affirming of the United States military, the most likely to have an American flag on the church podium, the last social group to adopt civil rights that the rest of the nation long ago adopted, the most supportive of the conservative side of the Republican Party and the primary support of the Tea Party.

The crowd was stunned and horrified when gold medalist John Carlos and bronze medalist Tommie Smith gave the black power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games

Only a few years ago we can point to events in the 1960s in most evangelical churches that showed they did not want integration. Even those who wanted integration, had no idea how condescending they were toward blacks, hispanics and other race groups. Many said they wanted integration, as long as there were no black power salutes, no Afro hair styles, no swaying and clapping in church, etc. In other words, “we will barely tolerate you as long as you completely assimilate, completely leave your culture, family and customs behind, and be as white as possible, and as silent as possible.” (I’m listening to an interview of the first athlete to give the black power salute on the podium at the 1968 Olympic games.)

But what I find important is that Bonhoeffer had to start a new denomination in order to oppose Nazism in the church. This is almost a universal principle. The establishment always veers toward the status quo. As one of my pastors said, “Unless there is constant correction, the church always drifts towards being a country club.” What is sad is that all churches, even the confessing church, rapidly get taken over by traditionalists.

So my opinion is that true prophetic leaders are not in established churches. Established churches will always be incompatible with the radical anarchic philosophies of Jesus Christ. When we look for true followers of Jesus, it is a waste of time to look in a particular denomination or sect that seems to us to be doctrinally purer than the rest. True followers of Jesus almost always conflict with their denomination or sect, whatever group they find themselves in. The true church is not an organized denomination or sect with rites and traditions. The true church is not a congregation. Jesus’ church are people who are willing to go against the flow no matter where they are, wherever and whenever we stand up for justice.

Baptism as a Comfort

Most people go to church for comfort. Everything about church is familiar and comforting: the music, the passing of the communion, shaking people’s hands, the prayers, the sermon.

In the tradition in which I grew up sermons on baptism were especially comforting. We had a litany of our favorite baptism passages: John baptized where there was much water,  going down into the water, believe and be baptized, for the remission of sins, baptized into Christ, rise to walk in newness of life, baptism doth also now save us, passages that washed over us like reciting the alphabet in the first grade, or reciting the pledge of allegiance every morning at school. Our nation stood for truth and justice for all, and we were baptized correctly, and nobody else was baptized correctly. That was our comfort.

But why was that comforting? James Fowler, in his book The Stages of Faith, analyzes the underlying motives of each stage of faith.

Roughly the first stage and second stages of faith are “me first” stages: What can I get from God? Oral Roberts used to appeal to this kind of faith by his message of “seed faith”. He would tell the story of a man who put his last dollar in an envelope and mailed it off to Oral Roberts. Then he found ten dollars in a coat pocket. So he mailed that in, too, only to find an old debt repaid to him that day of $100. He promptly mailed that in to Oral Roberts, only to find a check for $1,000 in the mail from an insurance company. Oral Roberts loved to tell that story and comically rued the fact that the man had kept the thousand dollars; Oral Roberts couldn’t help but imagine what God would have done for the man if he had only mailed that check in as well. In the first stage promises from God are literal and concrete, so concrete in fact that one man insisted I re-baptize him because he wasn’t thinking of exactly the right thing when he was first baptized.

The second stage is also a bargaining stage: When Jacob dreamed about God as he was fleeing his brother, Esau’s anger, when he stole the blessing of the firstborn, Jacob responded by promising God that if God would go with him and return him safe and sound back home, then Jacob would have Jehovah God as his only God, sort of “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” Promises from God are still literal and concrete.

The third stage is the stage most of the world is in. It is a stage in which we want our group to hold our faith for us. The focus of our faith is our group, our church. If someone asks us what we believe, we will direct them to our church, or our preacher. If we want to convert someone, we will focus on converting them to our group, our church. In this stage we are focussed on people thinking well of us, so we strive to have a good reputation in our group, and we strive to climb the social ladder at church. Most people remain in this stage for the rest of their lives, patriotic and loyal, Mom, the flag and apple pie. Churches love having people in stage three. There is an us-against-them mentality in stage three. The disciples said they had found someone who was healing in the name of Jesus and they stopped him, because he wasn’t one of them. Jesus said to let him heal.

Stage four is a difficult stage; it is a stage that is half in and half out of the group. The person in stage four wants the group to think well of him, but he or she is perturbed by the inconsistencies in the group. So the person argues with his or her group, to persuade them to be more logical, more consistent and to follow the principles completely that they have been saying they follow. The person gets more and more frustrated. At first the church tells them that they are really getting a bad reputation in the group. Since this is a primary motivation for the person in stage three, they think this will be very convincing to the person in stage four. But this only infuriates the person in stage four, and they reiterate that they don’t want to be loyal to a group that is so inconsistent. Finally the church just tries to ignore the person in stage four, until the person in stage four becomes so obnoxious that the church hints or tells the person to leave. The person in stage four leaves in hurt and confusion. Why? What happened? How could they have been so blind all these years?

Stage five is a more peaceful stage. No longer wanting to convert people, or argue with anybody, the person in stage five is curious, wanting to know what other peoples’ faith is like, marveling at what motivates, moves and is transcendent, to each person. Rules fall by the wayside, and are replaced by principles. The person in stage five wants principles to be consistent across all instances. People in stage five also feel a separateness between themselves and others to such an extent that they do not mind worshipping with people with whom they disagree. The person in stage five loves the topic of baptism, but from a totally different perspective from a person in stage three: they want to marvel at how deeply symbolic a ritual can be, and how healing it can be to go through such a profound ritual that binds God to humanity. People in stage five are sought out to share their peace and tranquility, and the stage five person loves to mentor the next generation.

Stage six is a seemingly courageous stage. I say seemingly, because if you ask someone in stage six if they are brave in the face of fear, they usually reply that they don’t feel much fear. It is a stage that is set free from the usual cares and structure of life. It is a time when people are moved to give their entire lives to the underprivileged. They don’t seem to mind if their lives are endangered in the process. If you admire them, they ignore you; not motivated by admiration, they just want to give more to the poor, sick and downtrodden. Whereas those of us in the other stages want to make a donation or spend a two week ministry trip helping out, those in stage six seem to think that all that  matters is to help the downtrodden.

Okay, back to the comfort of sermons about baptism: they are written and performed for those in stage three faith. And everyone shakes the preacher’s hand afterward and congratulates him on such a wonderful lesson, and wish that unsaved so-and-so had been there to hear it, too.

But baptism in the time of Christ was not a comfort. When John came commanding repentance and baptism because the kingdom was at hand, he was not well received by the self-satisfied religious people. Why? Because he was telling them they needed the same cleansing as the uncircumcised Gentiles needed. (When my daughter was baptized in the nearby lake, a hundred feet away a Rabbi was baptizing a convert to Judaism.) What an insult this was to those who thought of themselves as righteous Israelites, faithful to the Lord. Baptism was an essentially humbling experience to them.

But in the tradition in which I grew up we turned it into its opposite. We did it right, nobody else did it right, therefore we were the only ones baptized into Christ. We had turned it into a mark of pride.

Instrumental Music and Nadab and Abihu: The covenant of the Law vs. the Covenant of the Heart

The hard line Churches of Christ, a cappella, believe that the Sunday morning worship service is the most important part of being a Christian. They believe they have found Christianity and all others have lost it. They base this idea on the fact that they can find biblical authority for each act of worship they do on a Sunday morning, and other worshippers do not have such authority. “We speak where the Bible speaks, and are silent where the Bible is silent,” is one of their battle cries.

They scare their constituents, and those they evangelize, with the stories from the Hebrew Bible: Nadab and Abihu struck dead for offering strange fire in worship to God at the beginning of the tabernacle worship (Numbers 10). At the inauguration of the tabernacle of worship, instituted by Moses and Aaron in the wilderness as the journeyed out of Egypt toward the land of Canaan, instead of taking coals of fire from the altar of sacrifice, Nadab and Abihu took coals of fire from their own campfires in front of their own tents, and offered incense to God with that fire. Fire from God struck them dead, because they had used unauthorized fire.

This story, and a few similar to it, are used to scare believers into making sure they have authority for all the worship practices they use on a Sunday morning in church.

So this blog addresses these two questions:

1. Do we need specific authority in the New Testament for each act of worship in our worship assembly?
2. Is the Sunday morning worship assembly format the mark of the true Christian?

Nadab and Abihu were the oldest sons of Aaron, the top two priests after the high priest, Aaron. In this story God is portrayed as feeling it was very important to use the fire that God had provided in the altar of sacrifice. The story indicates that the people prayed and God lit the altar of sacrifice, then the people kept the fire going, a metaphor for how God initiates the power of our relationship. Fire is a symbol of the Holy Spirit throughout the wilderness story, from the burning bush through which God spoke to Moses to go free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, to the burning pillar of cloud that led the people through the desert and rested upon the tabernacle. In the new covenant, Jesus’ body and blood is the sacrifice, and all our power as believers, comes from that sacrifice and forgiveness.

Nadab and Abihu, in taking fire from their own fire pits in front of their own tents, were saying, metaphorically, that they didn’t need God’s Holy Spirit, or God’s sacrifice to forgive them, truly a strike at the essence of the message of Jahweh.

In the first weeks after the resurrection of Christ, there is a parallel story. (The books of Luke and Acts consciously parallel the story of the Exodus of Israel.) In the book of Acts the story that parallels the Nadab and Abihu story is the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5. Just as in the Nadab and Abihu story, two worshippers are struck dead, two worshippers are struck dead in the early church. This time, instead of breaking a command, they are guilty of hiding and lying to the Holy Spirit. The people were living communally, selling their property and laying the proceeds at the apostles’ feet.

The death of Ananias by Raphael

Ananias and Sapphira sold some property and laid a portion of the property’s proceeds at the apostles’ feet. Peter confronts both Ananias and Sapphira, on separate occasions, asking each if they were lying to God about the price they had obtained for their property. “It’s the whole thing,” they both replied. Peter said they had a right to keep their property, they had a right to devote a portion of it to the church, if they wished, but they did not have a right to lie to the Holy Spirit in their hearts. Notice the big difference between the first story in the wilderness and the second story in the early church: Nadab and Abihu broke a rule that had a big symbolic meaning; Ananias and Sapphira demonstrated that God could not read their hearts. Wow! What a difference between the two covenants: the first was a set of symbolic rules, the second was a covenant of the heart.

The writer of the book of Hebrews (ch. 8) confirms this picture by quoting from the old prophet Jeremiah:

5 They serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: “See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.” 6 But in fact the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is a mediator superior to the old one, since the new covenant is established on better promises.

7 For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. 8 But God found fault with the people and said:

“The days are coming, declares the Lord,
when I will make a new covenant…
10 I will put my laws in their minds
and write them on their hearts.”

So instead of worrying about getting the worship service right lest we be struck dead, Luke, the writer of Acts, believes we should be worrying about getting our hearts right lest we be worthy of death.

This is the reason there is no instruction in the early church writings about how to conduct a worship service in the church. Yes, there are a few passages, especially I Cor. 11-14 and James 2, which mainly emphasize principles:

“Let everything be done for edification,”

“Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.”

“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love…”

“But the one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouraging and comfort.”

“Since you are eager for gifts of the Spirit, try to excel in those that build up the church.”

“26 What then shall we say, brothers and sisters? When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Everything must be done so that the church may be built up.”

All of these passages point to one principle: encouraging one another to believe that God has moved in our lives through the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

None of the these passages point to rules that we need to stick to in order to show we are the true believers in Jesus. None of these passages indicates that God is remotely interested in the format of our worship services, beyond the principle of what builds up or tears down our faith in the forgiveness of Christ for our wrongs.

What is the mark of the Christian? Is it the worship format, as the hard line Churches of Christ believe? Is it the organization of the local congregation?

After Jesus took off his robe and washed the disciples’ feet John records him as saying:

34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

James said that if we treat a rich visitor at church differently from a poor visitor, then we are guilty of denying the good news that converted us to Christ: we are freed from all our wrongs as a gift.

So, the format of singing, and worshipping, was of no consequence, per se, to the early church. What was of consequence was the purpose of each act, and the rules that have been written in our hearts by the sacrifice and mercy of Christ.

This concept terrifies people who need an easy touchstone. If we are left to rely on the sacrifice of Jesus, rather than a “Thus saith the Lord…” for our authority in our worship formats, then what will happen? People will run amok? Anything goes? Or not. Maybe we will have to focus on our hearts. Our worship service on Sunday morning, or whatever time or day, will have to focus on encouraging each other to live out the sacrifice and gift of Jesus toward other people. What a concept!

Does instrumental music qualify as strange fire before the Lord? It does not for three reasons:

1. There was no clear transition from the worship with Psalms and early church worship.
2. There was no worship format outlined for the synagogue in the Hebrew Bible.
3. There was no worship format outlined for the early church.

1. The early church was instructed by the apostle Paul to worship by singing the Psalms. The Psalms of David are replete with references to worshipping God with cymbals, trumpets, lutes and lyres (guitars). There are also references to worshiping God with sacrifices. Sacrifices are specifically mentioned in the early church writings as having ceased, stopped and fulfilled in Christ’s sacrifice. No such pronouncement is made about instruments of music.

2. There was no worship format outlined for the synagogue, in fact there is no authority for the synagogue at all. It was a tradition of humans that grew out of the exile in Babylon. The purpose, interestingly enough, was to build up and encourage the Israelites to keep the Law of Moses and to believe in Jahweh.

3. The early church did not have a set worship format. They just followed what they were familiar with, especially the synagogue organization and format. Their format was governed by the apostle Paul’s rule that all things be done to build up the church, specifically to trust in the sacrifice and mercy of Christ.

How Should our Worship Service Look?

What worship format is biblical?

Code of Hamurabbi

In the Law of Moses in the books of Exodus and Leviticus the worship formats outlined by Moses, as commanded by God, were similar to the worship formats in Egypt and the land of Canaan, with some key differences. The Ten Commandments had three basic differences.
1. There was only one God in the Ten Commandments of the Israelites, as opposed to multiple Gods in the animistic cultures around them.
2. There were to be no physical idols to worship, whereas in Egypt and in Canaan there were multiple idols, and the idols were the main point of the worship.
3. For the crime of adultery, both the woman and the man were stoned to death. This was a difference from several surrounding cultures where only the woman was punished. (Later in Deuteronomy the man is required to give the woman a certificate of divorce if he sends her away, to protect her future opportunities to remarry.)

Ashteroth fertility goddess

There were more differences between the Law of Moses and the cultures around them:
4. Even though the altars were similar (the Israelites were to use raw uncut stones, as opposed to the carved stones of pagan altars), and the animal sacrifices were similar (the Israelites used only clean animals–cloven hoof and cud-chewing), the Israelites were forbidden to sacrifice their children. To a small extent the Egyptians and to a greater degree the Canaanites, being agrarian societies, practiced child sacrifice to mollify the fertility gods and goddesses (in Canaan: Baal and Asherah), to make sure their crops grew every year. (The first time we read in the Hebrew Bible of God forbidding child sacrifice is when Abraham was stopped from sacrificing his son, Isaac.)
5. The Canaanites also practiced sexual rites in their worship to the fertility gods, rites which were forbidden for the Israelites.
6. The tabernacle and temple of the Israelites was very similar to temples of the surrounding cultures, however the throne of cherubim above the ark of the covenant had nothing sitting on it, whereas in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures there was always an idol sitting on top of the winged angel throne. The “nothing” was to show that God is a real god, a spirit, that literally sat upon the throne, instead of an inanimate idol.
7. The creation story was very similar to the creation stories in the surrounding cultures, except that God is a good God who cares about his creation.
8. The Garden of Eden story is similar to the first man, woman and serpent stories in the surrounding cultures, except that humanity has a choice to trust a good God.

So what is the point? It seems clear to many that the commands of the Law of Moses were culture specific. They were rules that everyone was familiar with from living in those lands and cultures. But there were key differences, that set the Israelites apart, and as we can see 3,000 years later, contributed to the Israelite religion surviving, and the other religions dying out.

So what happens when Jesus comes along? The gospel of John says that Jesus camped among us. The apostle Paul said Jesus emptied himself and took upon himself all aspects of humanity. Jesus landed in a Jewish land, and he announced he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. So Jesus participated in all of the Jewish rituals and feast days. But he contradicted some of the laws of Moses, especially the law that forbade eating unclean foods, a radical departure from the Law of Moses. He also referred to God as the heavenly Father, also a new concept, found rarely in the Hebrew bible.

Solomon’s porch replica

After Jesus’ ascension and the Day of Pentecost, Jesus’ followers were a Jewish group worshiping on the temple grounds every day in Solomon’s porch. Within 20 years the group became more Gentile. Paul said that circumcision had to be dropped as a requirement for Gentile converts, that Gentile believers should not be restricted to eating clean meats, and that Gentiles should not have to keep the feast days and the Sabbath day. These were radical and painful changes for the Jewish believers, and had to be ratified by the twelve apostles, and the original church eldership in Jerusalem, before they could agree with the apostle Paul.

So the most important rituals in the early church were:

Early Christian depiction of Agape Feast

1. The Lord’s Supper–which many believe was combined with a picnic (others reject the picnic idea because of Paul’s rebuke of the Corinthians’ selfishness). The Lord’s Supper originated at the Passover meal. A few believe the Lord’s Supper was celebrated once a year at the Passover: “As often as you eat this bread..” (the Passover bread.) Others believe it became separated from the Passover meal very quickly.
2. Baptism–Some believe that John’s baptism was taken from the Jewish cleansing baths, especially the baptism of Gentiles when they converted to Judaism. What was radical about John’s baptism was that he baptized Jews, almost as if he were saying the Jews needed to be converted anew to Judaism.

So now here we are 2,000 years later. What should our worship services look like? Honestly? If we were to imitate the Law of Moses and the early Christians, then we would adopt the cultural celebrations around us, and form a worship service that resembles these celebrations, but differs in key points that illustrate we worship one God who cares for us.

When the apostle Paul rebuked churches for worshiping incorrectly, the rebukes always centered around these key principles:
1. Is the practice encouraging to others?
2. Is the practice emblematic of Christ’s sacrifice for others?

So rather than filtering through the New Testament, a set of letters written to early churches in the Roman empire 2,000 years ago, and trying to replicate their worship service exactly, we should be figuring out how to camp among the people to whom God has sent us. How can we relate our worship service to our own culture in the present day? What kind of worship would be most meaningful to the people in your culture? What does your culture expect when they attend a celebration? How can we copy our culture’s celebrations and change key points that will illuminate a belief in one God who loves us?

Organic Church vs GMO Church: or maybe we should appoint someone to be in charge of starting spontaneous singing…

One of the many problems that evangelicalism faces in America today is the disillusionment of a majority of evangelicals. Yes, we, or our parents, believed our local religious radio station playing Dr. Dobson in the 1980s, telling us that if we would listen to his show every day, go to church every Sunday, take our kids to youth group every Friday night, and buy those family devotionals for $21.95 (the family that prays together, stays together), that our children would be drug-free heterosexual virgins, faithfully serving God into the next millennium. They promised.

The fundamentalist sect I was born into had a different list: get baptized correctly, go to church three times a week, plus gospel meetings (called revivals in other cultures), no dancing, no swimming, no gambling, no drinking, no smoking, no mini-skirts. Then you could be guaranteed that your family would stay married, be happy and your kids would be faithful and marry within the sect.

The truth is, of course, very different, as we all found out. Evangelical ministers hit the ministry with idealistic high hopes, and start realizing the lies they have been fed very quickly. Within five years one third of ministers have quit the ministry, seventy-five percent of evangelical ministers are deep into career burn-out, believing they are in bad marriages, 25% considering having an affair, 69% use porn. (But we can buy a book about conquering porn, $18.95, on sale now if you call within the next 15 minutes, written by a conqueror and published by one of the pro-family ministries on the radio.

Or better yet, we could have the author come and speak, $2,250, and kick it off with a survey of the congregation that shows that 69% of the men are using porn right now. Add to that a book about how to put our marriages back together after an affair, $22.95, written by a forgiving spouse, and those bases are covered.) Yet these disillusioned pastors have to get up every Sunday and repeat the assurances to the hopeful flock: your marriages will survive the endless hours of TV and malls and be loving (and even sexy), your kids, despite the constant texting, will be peaceful, safe and responsible, like a re-run show from the 1960s.

The base not covered is the sinking feeling that rather than our faith being built on rock, as we sang in Sunday school, but built on polyethylene, sort of like an angel statuette bought at the local Christian book store in the 1980s (before the internet put book stores out of business). To call the local Christian book store a “book” store was to accept the ongoing evangelical practice of lying to ourselves. Yes, they displayed two shelves of the current bestsellers, but the rest of the store was devoted to lacy beribboned polystyrene kitsch that reassured the purchasers they were Christians, or advertised to the neighbors to stay away, because these people were hard core.

The evangelical church is on a never-ending treadmill of revamping and revising: Perhaps we should have spontaneous singing at the beginning of worship. What about adding djembe drums? The sound system is inadequate, and the projector has to be replaced. We’re showing a new video series complete with workbooks and small group leader guides. The pastoral committee is interviewing a new dynamic tattooed minister. The ministry on Thursday nights for the divorced is going well, but we’re having to ask the ex-gay ministry to meet in the library to make room for them. The parking lot was just repaved, and we’re one third of our way to meeting our financial goal to build a gym (Would you be willing to give sacrificially?). The biggest challenge facing our church? Keeping the nursery staffed with volunteers who have filled out the security check.

Would you like a helping of faith with those fries? Our spiritual fellowship package is on sale today.

If I don’t expect fellowship or nutrition at a fast food enterprise that ships in frozen food from a warehouse and pays its workers minimum wage to smile at me, why would I expect fellowship or spiritual nutrition from a traditional evangelical church?

Fifty percent of believers do not attend church. We have voted with our feet. We could call this a lack of faith or commitment, but I prefer to call it a lack of church, broken promises, a thin understanding of God portrayed by our churches.

For some believers, this is an easy transition: church did not work, so they quit attending. They continue to pray and think about God daily. For others it is a difficult transition: they believed in the traditional church system whole-heartedly, they trusted evangelicalism deeply, they were horribly disappointed, and now they are angry at the liars who entrapped them.

Whenever I write a rant like this people ask me: Then where do you worship or fellowship? My answer is three-fold:

1. First of all, I haven’t finished ranting, so I don’t know where I’ll land.

2. I have a Shape Note club I attend on Tuesday nights that sings a cappella from the Sacred Harp, a hymnal, circa 1770-1870. The group is made up of ages 18 to 87, mostly atheist/agnostic, 30% Jewish, several Buddhists, 4% evangelical. We sing for two hours, then we go to a local pub and talk for another 90 minutes, at which we have had many spiritual conversations: Were the gospels all written or influenced by the apostle Paul? Did Jesus literally rise from the dead? Can Christianity be separated from its medieval political history? Why do fundamentalists collect guns? Why do conservative churches vote against helping the poor through Medicaid? How to forgive people who beep at me in traffic. How to stay married.
These are not conversations that the evangelical 4% in the group start. These are organic conversations without a hidden agenda. The Shape Note club has no leader, except someone who volunteers to relay email announcements, and someone else who brings the loaner song books. It has no organization, except for finding meeting space. When a member of the group has a death in the family, many members show up at the funeral.

3. I don’t need a designated group in order to be worshiping and fellowshipping. I am “at church” all the time. Tony Campolo said, “I don’t have to do sex, I am sex.” I say much the same thing: “I don’t have to do church, I am church.” Everywhere I go I am connecting and fellowshipping and encouraging, to a lesser or greater extent, successfully or unsuccessfully. No, the Shape Note club does not meet all of my worship and fellowship needs. It just meets more of them than any GMO traditional church I have been a member of.

How was Jesus Inspired?

I was raised to believe that Jesus had a perfect memory of heaven while he was on earth, that his faith was not faith, but knowledge, and that he didn’t have to figure anything out. In other words: he didn’t have to struggle with any doubts or ignorance we struggle with, he cheated. 

But that’s not the story we are given in the gospels. In the gospels Jesus “grows in wisdom and stature“, after studying with the elders in the temple at age 12. A person cannot grow in wisdom unless they have less wisdom than they end up with.

If Jesus had to grow in wisdom, then what did he start with? The apostle Paul says “he emptied himself” to become a man, and another writer says that he “was tempted in all points as we are“, meaning there had to be doubt. In fact one of the first stories we have about Jesus is that he was tempted to doubt who he was in relationship to God, the father, just after he was baptized by John, and then went out in the wilderness, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, to be tempted by the devil. All three of his temptations had to do with doubting his relationship with the father, and doubting the story his mother had taught him: that he was born to be the Messiah.

That’s the starting point for Jesus: his mother told him that he was born to be the Messiah. From that catalyst he had to figure out what that meant, and what to do about it.

Until one day he goes to find his cousin, John, preaching repentance because “the kingdom” is coming soon. Jesus is baptized and a voice from the sky says, “This is my beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased.” The Spirit in the form of a dove descends upon him.  What if that was the first time the father spoke to Jesus? If it was, then that was the power Jesus operated on for the rest of his life. It puts the temptations he went through in the wilderness into context: “If you think you heard God, the father, speaking to you, then who are you? You need to test it, figure it out, make sure.”

Most of the things Jesus taught were big picture lessons from the Law of Moses. Jesus started, not with the Law, but with the creation story, and from that overview pointed out inconsistencies he saw in the interpretations of the Law of Moses by the teachers of his day.  Perhaps one of the bravest of those times is when he said, “It is not what goes into a person’s mouth that defiles him, it is what comes out of his mouth.” Jesus had never eaten pork, always eaten kosher, but he had observed in his daily life that some of the Gentiles were less defiled in their hearts than his Jewish brethren that never defiled themselves with unclean food. Yet Jesus wipes that all away with one sweep, contradicting the Law of Moses itself, not just the traditions and interpretations of the teachers of his day. If Jesus was relying on his growth in wisdom, then this was a very brave thing for him to say.

Another brave time is when he cleansed the temple of the “den of thieves” that had taken over and was extorting money from the people who wanted to worship God.

There are very few times he went beyond just interpreting Moses. When he talked about himself as the Messiah and the kingdom coming soon he went farther than just pointing out inconsistencies, and relied upon his mother’s story of his birth.

So what is inspiration by the Holy Spirit? My tradition would have us believe that it is the unmistakable urge of the Holy Spirit to give one of the early church prophets infallible knowledge of God’s will on a particular subject. This is not the record we have in the New Testament writings, where Paul insisted that prophets had to be in submission to other prophets who would pass judgment on their prophecies as to whether they were accurate renditions of God’s will or not. Inspiration of the Holy Spirit was a communal work, the group discussing and figuring out who was telling them the truth and who was not. This communal work extended to the canon of the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Bible. The community kept on discussing which writings were inspired by God, and which writings were not, even discussing which books were more inspired than others.

Have you ever thought that you had a moment of inspiration from the Holy Spirit? A moment when you clearly saw that you needed to say to a friend that God wanted him to stay alive, or a moment when God wanted you to look in the eyes of someone and tell them you saw a clear gift from God in their abilities? Was this moment an educated moment, something you had grown in wisdom about, and your life experience had built toward?

I hate Evangelism

My daughter found a fascinating website that chronicles the most popular girl baby names since 1961 in the United States. Since I live in Vermont, I was interested to see how often Vermont or New England set the trend for baby names.

New England has been setting the trend for the United States since before the states were united. Currently we would have to say that the Atlantic states: California, Washington and Oregon, and New England are setting the social trends for the United States. For instance, Vermont was the first state to embrace civil unions for gay couples in 2000, and most of the rest of the nation quickly followed. We in Vermont remember how emotional the arguments were and how many hours of testimony the statehouse listened to. But now it is old hat in Vermont; nobody discusses gay marriage anymore. The precursor to gay marriage in Vermont was the closing of the two gay bars five years earlier in Vermont’s largest city: Burlington. The reason for the gay bars closing? Firstly, nobody cared if you were gay or not; gay people were welcome in any bar in town, and secondly, if you wanted to meet other gay people, you could do so online.

States with some kind of gay marriage or civil union

 

Many states are still embroiled in the gay marriage debate, which is mildly puzzling to Vermonters. And which brings me to the topic of this blog: Evangelism in New England.

2006 church attendance

Each year about ten new evangelical churches are planted in Chittenden County, the most populous county in the sparsely populated state of Vermont, the least church-attending state in the nation.  Fifteen years ago Vermont claimed to have a 14% evangelical population. The missionaries who come here are idealists from Bible belt states. The last evangelical church plant I was a member of had a pastor from Michigan. (Although Michigan is sometimes categorized with New England politically and socially, religiously it is much more like Greater Appalachia and the Midlands, dominated by evangelical churches and Christian Reformed churches, even hosting one of the largest evangelical book publishers in the nation.) The latest, hippest new evangelical church in Vermont has a pastor from Mississippi (the most church-attending state in the nation). Both of these pastors have a “This American Life” style of talking, and are interested in the hippest topics: one pastor is studying for his MFA in writing and started a writers’ club, his wife is a psychotherapist, the other pastor opened an art gallery and performance space in the coolest section of town.

The writing pastor from Michigan started his church 6 years ago, and it attracted young evangelicals who were frustrated with the stodgy evangelical churches in town. One of his focuses was the environment, and the nasty way food is grown and distributed in the world. Less church affiliated people who were converted lasted until they realized that there were several disconnects: one of which was that gay people were welcome, but not welcome. Gay people never served on the board, and never got married in this church. This wasn’t a hip church, it was a staid and stodgy church in hip disguise. Rightly or wrongly, these people did not stay around for a discussion of gay issues and the scriptures. That discussion was too far off limits, too close to being like the KuKluxKlan, an issue already decided. They grew up in schools where anti-gay language was forbidden, just like racist language.

There was also another disconnect: the ratio of native Vermonters in the congregation was about 5% (native Vermonters make up 54% of the city). So the people that were being converted, or at least who were attending, were the same people who would be attending in another more religious state. And the people who were not attending were the Vermonters. The new church plants were not having an impact on the state’s non-religiousness at all. Why not?

It wasn’t really the gay issue. (The church was careful never to talk about homosexuality, and when asked, the pastor said he was undecided.) The real issue was that the church had a mindset that didn’t click with Vermonters or New Englanders. The church wanted to discuss (or assumed) issues that Vermonters had moved on from and were no longer interested in: the concept of a personal God, the superiority of Christianity, and conservative sexual morals. The pastor was asking Vermonters to step back 20 years and talk about hot topics way back then. It was exactly like the fundamentalist churches I grew up in that insisted on talking about mini-skirts, evolution and dancing in the 1980s. As long as my pastor talked about current burning issues in Vermonters’ minds, he had an audience (of four or five). But as soon as he went back to burning issues in his mind (from church-attending Michigan), he lost them. So he finally focussed on his thriving church of out-of-staters and forgot about the Vermonters.

This illustrates one of my huge beefs about evangelism: it does not address the issues our society is concerned about.

First rule of evangelical evangelism: Ignore the open doors: preach about the things nobody is discussing anymore.

Second rule of evangelical evangelism: Assume people want to go backwards sociologically to the hot button issues of 30 years ago. Did Jesus or the apostle Paul talk about issues their audiences could not relate to?

Third rule: start a church (but that’s a topic for another blog). If Jesus came to Burlington, Vermont, he would not start an evangelical church.

Fourth rule: beg for money.

Take a look at Europe (from whence most Americans trace their heritage). Europeans don’t go to church.

Europeans who believe in God

Maybe 5% of Europe attends church per week, if that. That is where we are going, whether we like it or not. The oldest part of the United States (in terms of our current culture) is New England. Vermont has only 14% church-goers and most of those are over the age of 65. Within 20 years the rest of the United States will not be attending church. Nobody is going backwards. The hot debates that we have in our evangelical minds are not on the minds of anyone else in the United States. Think about the issues your grandparents were concerned about: birth control, abortion, patriotism, communism, unions, divorce–things that are no longer (or seldom) discussed.

So when we go to church and sing songs that are 20 or 40 years old, composed by people who grew up in religious households, we are enacting a ritual that cannot be connected with by people who have moved on (rightly or wrongly) and are wrestling with more current issues. Rather than worshiping God in the here and now we are just engaging in an exercise in nostalgia: Wasn’t it great when God answered our old questions for us?

So what are Vermonters interested in and concerned about? Rightly or wrongly: Marijuana will soon be legalized in Vermont, they are concerned about the overuse of petroleum, the environment (Vermonters have had weekly recycling pickups for the last 20 years), Buddhist philosophy, meditation, anarchy, small government vs. big government, the use of torture by the military, American imperialism, alternative communities, co-operative housing, alternative music, old musical traditions from various nations, empowering poor people, feeding the hungry, health care reform, and alternative education.