Pacific Northwest UMC News Blog – The Church Needs More Innovative Pastors like MTV Needs More Twerking
If we are to move forward, what the church really needs are innovative lay people; willing to adopt, suggest, and try new things. When a lay person puts forth a new idea and builds their group of advocates (early adopters), their innovation, particularly if it challenges the church culture, will still hit Moore’s chasm. The difference however is that now the pastor is free to insert their authority and influence to help good ideas to bridge this gap. And when they do so, they also create goodwill and affirm the gifts of their laity to boot.Our churches need, desperately, to become places of change. While the occasional new idea from the pastor can be good modeling, the pastor that innovates continuously sucks the air out of the church and leaves no room for innovation elsewhere. Our churches would be better served by clergy who excelled at creating and nurturing cultures of innovation.
I would expect that some might say that this sentiment is nice but they know, or serve, churches where creating a culture of innovation is impossible. Where we find this to be true we should be quick to lock the doors and shutter the windows. Before we do this however, we should consider that there is a difference between a church that continuously rejects its pastor’s new ideas and one that refuses to create their own when given a chance.
Sermon Podcast: It's Always about Politics
But in this story from Luke Jesus puts the lie to the notion that faith is best expressed in terms of "having a personal relationship with Jesus." This is a story about politics, about the ways we arrange all of our relationships . . . personal and otherwise.
This is a story, not about the lofty things that might otherwise occupy our religious reflection. This is an ordinary story about people, and lunch, and guest lists, and who gets invited, who gets left out, and why.
This is a story about how Jesus turns our world on its head, putting the first class folks at the back of the plane with pretzels and that little over head compartment that only has enough room for a couple of blankets and a fire extinguisher . . . while the folks who spend their lives sitting in the middle seat between the snorer and the salesman from Des Moines get ushered up to the front.
This is a story not just about how big our welcome has to be if we follow Jesus, but about how crazy and unrealistic it's going to appear to the rest of the world when we roll it out.
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When You Run into the Wall of Injustice, I Get Bruises Too
I remember getting my first ministerial call as I prepared to graduate from seminary. Small town in the heart of Appalachia. The church was beautiful, a traditional Protestant downtown county seat kind of church.
The parsonage was nice … big. It had a large yard with an enormous swing set, new landscaping in the front. And to complete the perfect vocational/domestic idyll, the parsonage sat across the street from the fourth tee at the country club—to which the church bought me a membership.
So, back at the seminary I told my buddies about it … saving the country club part for last. Let’s be honest I was bragging. Looking back, I’m not proud of it. I was twenty-six and insensitive in that obnoxious way young people who figure they’ve got the world by the tail can be.
My pride didn’t even make it through that first conversation with my friends at seminary, however. Because after I finished recounting the glories of my new job, complete with the country club audio tour I wanted so badly to share, one of my friends, Marcus, spoke up and said, “Are you going to take that membership?”
I thought surely this must be a rhetorical question, because … really? Are you nuts? Of course, I’m taking it.
“Good for you. But let me ask you something: Can I come visit you at your new church?”
“You’reracis my friend. Of course.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that. Let me ask you another question: If you take me to play golf at your country club, will they let me play? Or will I have to caddy for you?”
Hearing those words hurt my heart. Marcus was my friend. So, it never occurred to me that a country club anywhere, including the South, might accept me but not my African-American friend.
LIke most middle class white kids, it never much occurred to me that a world of injustice exists, one that thrives beneath the horizon of my awareness. I knew about instances of unfairness, but it never occurred to me that those instances were connected on a deeper level.
But what struck me about Marcus’ question—beyond the fact that we still lived in a country where African-Americans could be refused access because of something as uncontrollable as the happenstance of birth—was my casual assumption that if I wasn’t being hurt by it, then nobody was.
For a couple of weeks we’ve watched as the implications of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman fiasco unfold. Without rehashing all the details, it seems clear that Trayvon Martin’s race was more than just a coincidental factor in the confrontation that led to his death.
It would be easy for me to chalk this whole tragedy up to the problem with Stand-your-ground laws, which, as Walter Breuggemann has rightly pointed out, should be unthinkable to Christians—inviting violence as these laws do.
I could very easily look past this case as merely another instance of the breakdown of civility, another rending of the social fabric through an insistence that my life is more important than yours.
But I have dear sisters and brothers who, themselves African-American, see this case as just another illustration of how injustice is embedded in our society. And because they are my sisters and brothers, I have a responsibility to add my voice to theirs in drawing attention to a system that regularly puts a thumb on the scales of justice, disadvantaging people of color.
It doesn’t affect me, though, right? I wasn’t shot. I’m white. I’m generally not in danger of inviting violence because of how I look.
The popular assumption seems to be that we have varieties of injustice, complete with interest and advocacy groups for each. Which interest and advocacy groups dedicate themselves to seeking redress and reform for their particular cause. You take care of your stuff, because I’ve got my hands full taking care of my own.
In such a world, I need not be concerned so much with Trayvon Martin for two reasons: 1) I’m not African-American, so his death doesn’t seem to affect my world, and 2) there are already competent and passionate interest groups taking up his cause.
But beyond the laziness of such casual assumptions about somebody else doing the heavy lifting, the problem with thinking that I don’t have a responsibility to speak out about the racism baked into the American cake is a reality we don’t often name: racism isn’t a thing unto itself, but an expression of the larger problems of injustice and oppression committed by those in power against those who too often don’t have a voice. And that, my friends, affects us all … whether we realize it or not.
“The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you,’” (1 Cor. 12:21) is how Paul says it.
I cannot say to my African-American sisters and brothers, “I have no responsibility for you.”
I cannot say to my Hispanic sisters and brothers, “I know they’re ripping your families apart through deportation; I know they’re slandering your character, calling you unspeakable things for having committed the ‘crime’ of seeking to make a better life for those you love—but you should have thought of that before you crossed the border.”
I cannot say to my LGBT sisters and brothers, “I know you’ve felt like everybody’s favorite punching bag (sometimes literally); I know some of you are living on the streets or dying because you can no longer bear the hateful world we’ve made for you, but I’m straight, so I’ve got no dog in this fight.”
I cannot say to my sisters, “I know many of you live in fear that you’ll attract the unwanted attention of violent men; I know that you have to work harder to find a job that will pay you what you’re worth (or as is the case in my profession, that you’ll find a job at all), but you just need to quit being so ‘sensitive.’”
I cannot say to my sisters and brothers who live in other parts of the world, “I know that many of you cower in your homes, afraid of American bombs falling out of the sky; I know that you shrink behind locked doors, waiting for armed men to come crashing through; but if you’d have been smart enough to have been born in our country, you wouldn’t have to worry about that.”
I cannot say to my sisters and brothers without housing or adequate healthcare, “I know you worry about how you’ll make it through, but you’re just going to have to quit being lazy and get a job.”
It’s not enough for me to look after my own interests. It’s not enough for me to remain ignorant of the pain others experience. We’re connected in ways that make injustice a problem for all of us.
And if you follow Jesus, if you seek to participate in the unfolding reign of God, you don’t get to choose which injustices you care about. Racism, being anti-immigrant, homophobia, sexism, militarism, poverty … these are all presenting symptoms of the much larger disease of injustice that is at odds with what God desires for those whom God created and loves.
Here’s the thing: Since I happen to be an activist for a particular cause, I can too easily forget that I have sisters and brothers suffering from different forms of injustice to whom I need to offer my support. But they ought to be able to count on me to stand by their side … even if the issue doesn’t affect me directly. Because if I claim to follow Jesus, then—all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding—it does.
According to Paul, when you run headlong into the wall of oppression and injustice, I get bruises too.
I think Marcus would agree with me.
Shouting back at hate speech is a moral obligation
Fred Clark writes:
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee proves yet again that the 1980s buzz-phrase “politically correct” still exists only as a disingenuous qualifier to preface an expression of palpable bigotry. It’s just a slightly broader way of saying, “I’m not a racist, but …”
After warning his radio audience last Monday that he was about to say something not “politically correct,” Huckabee said:
Can someone explain to me why it is that we tiptoe around a religion that promotes the most murderous mayhem on the planet in their so-called ‘holiest days,’” Huckabee said. “You know, if you’ve kept up with the Middle East, you know that the most likely time to have an uprising of rock throwing and rioting comes on the day of prayer on Friday. So the Muslims will go to the mosque, and they will have their day of prayer, and they come out of there like uncorked animals — throwing rocks and burning cars.
"Animals.” Huckabee’s word — a word that is literally dehumanizing. Mike Huckabee doesn’t want you to think he’s a bigot. He just wants you to know that he sees himself as superior to more than a billion people whom he regards as sub-human. Huckabee thinks it would be unfair for you to twist that into making him out to be a bigot.
Continue reading at Slacktivist . . .
Louisville Classical Academy Now Calls DBCC Home!
From the LCA Web site:
We are excited to announce that Louisville Classical Academy has moved to the Highlands and will open on schedule in August, 2013. The new campus is located at 2005 Douglass Boulevard, directly across from Heine Brothers, Graeter's Ice Cream, and North End Cafe. Want to visit? Reach us by email or at (502) 228-7787 to schedule an appointment. We'd love to show off the new space. In the meantime, find us on Facebook!
Staying Busy or Changing the World?
I remember that point in my first ministry when I came to the office, sat down behind my desk prepared to write a sermon and realized I had already said everything I knew to say. I kept going over possible angles for the sermon, and kept running headlong into a brick wall: "Said it. Nope, said it. Said that. Said that too."
I figured my career had reached its conclusion. I was sure that the next sermon would be my valedictory.
Where do ministers go after they've exhausted their knowledge, or perhaps better, when they've lost ways to communicate what they care about? After all, I hadn't really said everything I knew. I just couldn't see the bridges that would take me back to all the knowledge I had accumulated.
Sometimes I still feel that way when I preach or when I write—like whatever good I've had to say has already been said. Not much in front of me from here on out. I start feeling sorry for myself, wondering why inspiration isn't a constant companion.
Some of it is boredom, some of it laziness. You do your thing for a while and you start thinking, "What's next? Surely, there's got to be something that will motivate me."
And do you want to know what usually happens when these thoughts come flitting back through my mind? I eventually think: "I need to get busy doing something . . . something important."
I know that sounds counter-intuitive, in part because what I seem to have lost at these times of depletion is the ability to identify what's important. Perhaps better put: What I've lost is the the belief that I'm no longer able to identify what's important.
There's a difference, because I haven't really forgotten what's important. I'm still able to name the kinds of values I bring to my work. What I've lost is the ambition to discover where those values might be found in the next thing I want to do.
So, my response is to get busy doing something that I think might be important, with the idea that what I value will reveal itself to me soon enough.
Here's how it works in writing. I don't know what to write, so I fiddle. I fiddle until I feel guilty enough about it; then I force myself to write something. Usually, I will start out writing about the first thing that comes to my mind. And if I keep writing, eventually what's important will find me.
But this doing something important isn't just motivational talk. Human beings continually struggle to find meaning in life. However, many of the ways our culture seeks to define that meaning center on quantifiable measurements like money and success. But while money and success are nothing to sneeze at, they don't ultimately provide much in the way of meaning.
According to Harvard Business School Professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, meaning is to be found when we are a part of something that makes a difference. She argues that "everyone regardless of their work situation, [should] have a sense of responsibility for at least one aspect of changing the world."
So, engaging in something important isn't merely a bridge back to the interesting, but a chance to make a difference.
Turns out, I'm not just trying to get motivated; deep down I want to change the world.
Churches, it occurs to me, often experience this same cycle of despair, when there's not a whole lot new going on. Maintenance. If you've been busy, then taking a break can feel pretty good.
After a while, though, somebody notices that "we're not doing anything anymore."
Somebody, often clergy, will respond by saying, "What do you think we should do?"
And like my kids at home during summer vacation—usually sometime in July—the person responds with some sort of variation on: "I don't know. Nothing sounds good."
That's when it's time to get busy doing something important.
"But what should we do?"
It matters less at first what you do than with doing something that aligns with your values, with something you feel will make a difference.
Let me put it another way. What kinds of things have you done in the past as a congregation that you take pride in?
"Well, we did that back-to-school backpack thing that one summer for the children of undocumented workers in the area. That was pretty great?"
Why did you do it?
"The kids needed backpacks."
A lot of kids need backpacks. Why these kids?
"Well, somebody in the congregation heard that this group of people are often paid so little that their children go to school under-equipped. So, we thought that we could do something tangible to help."
Why'd you stop?
"It was just a one time thing."
Why?
"I don't know, now that you mention it. But it sure did feel good to be able to help. It was a lot of work, but it felt right."
What's going on with those kids now?
"I don't know."
Why don't you find out? Call the people you worked with last time and see what they're up to, what their needs are.
Pro tip: Why not find out what it is about the system as it now stands that continues to under-pay workers, and get involved in that?
Look, here's the thing: Being a Christian (or a writer, or a software designer, or a seamstress, or a golf cart salesperson) is almost always more about intentionality than inspiration.
Get to work doing something, and the important stuff will find you . . . if important stuff is what you want to find, and not just looking to stay busy.
You follow Jesus. You shouldn't be worried about trying to stay busy. You should be worried about trying to change the world.
Sermon Podcast: Teach Us to Pray
"That is not to say, however, that God doesn’t change the world through our prayers—God can feed the hungry, bring peace and justice to the strife-torn and the oppressed, heal the sick. God can even raise the dead. God’s proven all of that time and time again.
"But perhaps it’s easier to believe that God will magically make food for the hungry, bring peace and justice to the downtrodden, and heal the sick than to expect myself to become the kind of person that God could use to feed the hungry, bring peace and justice to the downtrodden, and heal the sick.
"God could change the world without us, I suppose, but God wants to do it through us."
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Sermon Podcast: No Telling What God Could Do
"But God we’re afraid. We’ve worked long and hard—us and the generations that came before us—and we don’t know where this is heading. We’re worried about what will become of us. We’re afraid that one day we’ll wake up and we won’t recognize the church we’ve known and loved.
"God whispers gently to us, 'I know. I know of your service, your dedication. I hold you and your work close to my heart. But there are even more people out there I want to hold close to my heart, and calling them to come home will require perhaps some different work than what you’ve done before. But don’t worry, my family is held together by my love—and not by anybody’s work (no matter how good).'”
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Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Passes Historic Resolution on Welcome of LGBT People
On Tuesday, July 16, as part of its biennial General Assembly, the Protestant mainline denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) voted to "to affirm the faith, baptism and spiritual gifts of all Christians regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity," declaring "that neither is grounds for exclusion from fellowship or service within the church." The resolution passed with over 75% of the vote.
Rev. Derek Penwell, pastor of Douglass Blvd. Christian Church in Louisville, was the resolution's primary author and DBCC served as the resolution's original sponsor. While this resolution does not speak directly either to the question of the same gender marriage or to standards for ordination, it attempts to say a positive word of grace and welcome to those people who, because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, have historically felt unrecognized and unwelcome by the churc.h"
Rev. Penwell said, "We know that the church has harmed countless LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, BiSexual, and Transgender) people in the past. Many churches continue to hurt today. This was a chance for Disciples to say publicly 'enough.' It was our chance to say that many Christians wnat to be a part of the solution of welcoming everyone, instead of the part of the problem."
The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), based in Indianapolis, Indiana, and part of an indigenous American religious movement that arose at the beginning of the 1800s, is today considered a Protestant mainline denomination with a historic concern for the pursuit of ecumenical unity, social justice, and freedom of Biblical interpretation.
For more information on the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), visit http://www.disciples.org.
Douglass Boulevard Christian Church, founded in 1846, has historically been committed to the pursuit of justice for all people, offering leadership in trying to live out the message of love and hospitality embodied by Jesus. In 2008, Douglass Boulevard Christian Church voted to become an Open and Affirming Community of Faith.
Douglass Boulevard Christian Church is located at 2005 Douglass Boulevard in the Highlands near Douglass Loop. For more information on the church, visit http://douglassblvdcc.com.
For more information on Rev. Derek Penwell, visit http://derekpenwell.net.
Rev. Penwell handing out certificates to over 19 new Open & Affirming congregations.
Sermon Podcast: The Kingdom of Heaven has Come Near
Here’s the thing: All the bumper stickers laid end to end, all the Christian aerobics rooms stacked to the sky, all the handsome, grinning ministers in the world can’t make Jesus cool. Jesus isn’t cool—he’s God; the church’s job isn’t to sell him—it’s to live like him.
The gospel is pretty clear: Some will respond; some won’t.
Is it our job to help Jesus out so that more people will buy, so that we’ll get the results we think the gospel deserves?
No. Our job is to be a community capable of providing the resources necessary to equip disciples for the reign of God.
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The Iconoclasm of Washing the Wrong Feet
On Holy Thursday newly elected Pope, Francis I, stunned traditionalists by washing the feet of the wrong people. Yes, they were prisoners. Yes, one was Muslim. But that fact failed to raise any eyebrows. What really chapped the backsides of the keepers of the ecclesiastical keys was the fact that Pope Francis washed the feet of two teenage girls.
The scandal wasn't that they were teenagers either (a completely different article), but that they were female. Because, you know . . . they weren't men. Jesus, "on the night he was betrayed," washed the feet of those who enjoyed the comfy advantage of having been blessed at birth with the correct anatomical equipment.
Vatican observers with a commitment to the reforms instituted by Pope Benedict—reforms that called Catholics back to traditional liturgical and social concerns—blanched at the thought that Francis may be opening the door to innovation.
Innovation, to those who care about the unswerving devotion to a particular legacy, is not merely a lousy idea, but a potential threat to the faith. You can't have people walking around chucking the old stuff, adopting new practices higgledy-piggledy. That's a recipe for anarchy—or, if not anarchy, then potentially a state of affairs less than satisfactory to those used to calling the shots.
But then again, churches of all times and places have had to balance the competing impulses to stay the course or to strike out in a new direction. It's easy for new (read: young) people to come in and seek to turn over—at least in the estimation of the reformers—the tables of the ecclesiastical money changers. Self-righteousness, when it comes to seeing the failures of your forbears, is easy. They've made many mistakes.
However, we should probably begin with the generosity of spirit necessary for reform by pointing out that many of those mistakes in building a legacy were made in good faith. That is to say, for example, the institutional behemoth of mid-twentieth century mainline Protestantism didn't start out to build monuments to its own cultural domination. On the contrary, I take it as read that church leaders in the 1950s and 60s were overwhelmed by the pressures of trying to make enough space for all the people that came pouring in as the effects of the post-World War II baby boom began to emerge.
Young families were all there were. (Hyperbole: Don't email me.) It was like the curse of the Midas touch. Not necessarily through any special genius on the part of existing leadership, everything churches touched turned into 2.4 children. Pretty soon, churches didn't have room for them all. So, they built bigger and better sanctuaries to accommodate the inflow.
What the average minister didn't necessarily feel the need to build, however, was an ecclesiological or theological foundation upon which to ground this new cultural supremacy. It came to feel almost like a birthright.
"People will come because we're the church," these new cultural brahmins surely thought. Church leaders didn't often stop to ask the question about whether this growth was undergirded by anything more solid than the behavioral expectations of the culture, or if it was even healthy.[^1]
[^1]:I mean not all metastatic growth is good, right? Ask an oncologist. I'm just saying. Don't email me.
Why not?
If you're in a lucite booth that's blowing $20 bills, you don't stop to ask why somebody let you in there in the first place or whether the blower's going to turn off at some point, you just grab the money. And when you don't have enough room to stuff all the cash, you start looking for bigger, more efficient ways to reap the harvest of legal tender.
Unfortunately, apparently good fortune left the church with amazingly deep and well designed pockets, as well as the expectation that those pockets would always be full. So, when the air started to thin out from the flurry of $20 dollar bills, the conventional wisdom held that what was needed was not so much to figure out what to do with the $20 bills already there, but to come up with ever more ingenious ways to mimic the air circulation produced by the fan. Because the thinking appears to have been that the fan created the currency, rather than just blowing it about.
Ok. Let's not torture that metaphor any longer. However, we should be reminded that the cultural game that brought so many people to mainline churches in the middle of the last century, wasn't a game designed by the church. That churches adjusted their expectations and building habits to adapt to the sudden rush of suburbanites is understandable. They had to do something. We can argue about whether, in retrospect, it was the right thing; but to the extent it was an error, it was an error prompted by the need to act quickly.
Let's torture another metaphor: The problem wasn't that the ecclesiastical behemoth of the last century was guilty of trying to drink from a fire hose, but that it expected the fire hose would always be turned on full blast, and that its job going forward was to figure out both how to control the water pressure, as well as to figure out ever more efficient programmatic strategies for swallowing all that water.
In short, our criticism of the kingdom building taken on by previous generations of mainliners should be tempered by an understanding that they were reacting to a quickly changing cultural landscape. The issue we need to evaluate is any assertion that the ongoing maintenance of those kingdoms is a necessary function of living the way Jesus said to live.
Back to Pope Francis. What I find refreshing about—at least at this early stage of his papacy—his apparent pastoral presence is his determination to concern himself with the kinds of things with which Jesus concerned himself: Compassion for those on the margins—the poor, the powerless, the outcast, and the prisoner. Moreover, Francis' compassion is suitably dressed in a humility that refuses to take advantage of advantage—that is, the perquisites associated with papal power.
Setting aside for a moment the (always satisfying) thumb in the eye of overly protective traditionalists as a worthwhile end in itself, the attractive thing about what Pope Francis seems to be signaling is a commitment to following Jesus down the dark alleys of the human journey, in spite of the fact that most of the rest of the religious world appears too busy protecting the sixteen lane super highways we built to accommodate the increase in traffic. Which protection, unfortunately and to our lasting shame, often has little to do with making sure that the last, the least, the lost, and the dying feel the hands of mercy washing their feet.
The thing is, mainline churches ought to take a cue from Pope Francis and start turning over tables that keep us from the truly important things—that is, ministry to the people the religious bigwigs have always considered at best, a distraction, and at worst, a threat to stability. In other words, we should be out in search of people who desperately need their feet washed, instead of spending our resources building elaborate foot washing stations for people convinced the only thing they really need is a pedicure.
Iconoclasm, though it makes for good cable news, isn't worth much if the wrong folks don't get their feet washed.
[Derek]
Bluegrass Sunday—I'll Fly Away
Chris Stewart, Barry Smith, and Sam Miller
Bluegrass Sunday—Shall We Gather at the River?
Chris Stewart, Barry Smith, and Sam Miller
Bluegrass Sunday—Amazing Grace
Chris Stewart, Barry Smith, and Sam Miller
Bluegrass Sunday—Do Lord
Chris Stewart, Barry Smith, and Sam Miller
Bluegrass Sunday—The Old Rugged Cross
Chris Stewart, Barry Smith, and Sam Miller
Bluegrass Sunday—Have Thine Own Way, Lord
Chris Stewart, Barry Smith, Sam Miller
Bluegrass Sunday—What a Friend We Have in Jesus
Chris Stewart, Barry Smith, and Sam Miller
Yeah, this happened at Douglass today. It was brilliant! Thank you to our friend, Barry Smith, and our new friends, Chris Stewart and Sam Miller!
Sermon Podcast: Crossing Borders
Where is Legion today and what responsibility do we have when we hear Legion’s voice? Where are those who’ve been held in bondage by the powers and principalities, those who need to hear the voice of Jesus and to be set free from the chains that tie them to the tombstone society has made for them?
Because Legion still runs the graveyard wherever people’s race, or immigration status, or sexual orientation, or gender identity, or physical or mental capabilities prevent them from flourishing the way God intended.
Legion’s still in power wherever the poor are kept in their poverty by those who believe they have everything to gain and nothing to lose, wherever children are bullied, and the elderly are forgotten.
Legion still lives wherever people are made to believe that the way they have been created by God is not good enough—either for God or for us.
So, here’s what I think: I think that we who would be like Jesus, we need to take the risk and cross the borders to go looking for the people Jesus himself went out in search of, and to speak the words and do the work necessary to see them free.
We need to brave the wasteland and go into the graveyards that house so many, and find ways to break the chains that keep them in bondage.
We can’t afford to wait and let them come to us.
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