an open and affirming community of faith
n open and affirming community where faith is questioned and formed, as relationships are made and upheld.
Rev. Candi Cubbage
Rev. Candi Cubbage is back in the pulpit. Y'all listen up.
This is war, Folks. Am I scaring you? If you came to church this morning to forget about what is happening outside in the street, you’ll be disappointed. This is war, and what is the cause? I’ll sum it up for you in one word. The cause is SIN.
By Derek Penwell
I used to have a recurring nightmare about presenting a paper at a conference. In the dream I would conclude my presentation in front of my colleagues, and then I would do the requisite "Question and Answer."
Invariably, a bespectacled man in a camel hair sport coat and blue jeans would stand up and ask, "So what?"
Panicked, I would stammer, "What do you mean, 'So what?'"
"Well, I guess what you say is sort of interesting, but what turns on it? Why should I think your work is important? In other words, I hear what you're saying, but the first thing I think is, 'So what?'"
The fastest growing religious designation in America over the past five years, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, is "None." While atheism and agnosticism have risen slightly over that time, the biggest increase is among those who, when asked about institutional religion, respond, "Meh."
It strikes me that much of what drives this unenthusiastic response to religion, at least in the case of Christianity, centers on the apparent (at least to observers) unwillingness of Christians to live like Jesus. The "Nones" have heard endlessly about Christianity and how everybody would be better off if the world would just believe the stuff Christians believe:
They've gotten the message, for instance, that being Christian means you believe being gay is a sin -- and not just any sin, but sin in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way. The express-lane-to-Hell kind of sin. Then they read the Gospels about a Jesus who reserves his most stinging indictments not for the folks everybody else has already given up on, but for the stalwarts at the top of the religious and political food chain, the ones who join Rotary, drive Buicks and wear sensible shoes.
They hear the smugness of Christian reproaches against a society that would presume to remove God from public schools (because, you know, God is used to getting kicked around by effete liberals). But we shouldn't be surprised how the "Nones" fail to square the fairly straightforwardly pacifist Jesus of the Gospels with the Libertarian Jesus of some Christians, a Jesus who apparently doesn't have a problem with the idea that school safety can be secured with "God and a loaded gun."
Christians claim to believe in a Jesus, who spent a great deal of time reaching out to, speaking out for, advocating on behalf of "the least of these"; but then some segments of Christianity align themselves with a brand of politics that seems interested in advancing only the interests of the wealthiest among us -- at theexpense of the poor, the hungry, the naked, and the outcast -- which is to say, at the expense of the least of these. What are outsiders to think?
So, here's the thing: Christians can't just believe stuff. People want an answer to the question: "So what?" They want to know what turns on these much-discussed beliefs, what difference these beliefs make in our lives. Do they help us care for the poor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked or welcome the outcast? Or do these beliefs merely represent a golden barrier that offer protection against blame?
In short, people who've lost interest in Christianity might just like to see Christians for whom believing "this stuff" is merely the first step to actually living it out.
And just so we're clear: The call not just to believe in Jesus, but to live like Jesus can't be merely another ploy to attract converts, to roust the "Nones" and get them to think Christianity is "neat"; it has to be a call to do the right thing. People who follow Jesus care for the poor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and welcome the outcast, because that's what Jesus said to do, and they don't know any other way to be. So, if doing the right thing is only an ecclesiastical marketing strategy, people will be justified in continuing to ask, "So what?"
Think about this for a minute, though: What if part of the reason the "Nones" are so underwhelmed by organized religion isn't because they don't find Jesus interesting, but because it appears to them that Christians don't find him sufficiently interesting enough to take seriously?
That's what ought to give Christians nightmares.
Derek with his son, Samuel.
Here’s the thing: All the bumper stickers laid end to end, all the electric guitars and synthesizers stacked to the sky, all the studied beauty of grinning ministers in the world can’t make Jesus cool. Jesus isn’t cool—he’s the embodiment of the God's desires for humanity; 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. And that's the difficult part—being sent like lambs into the midst of wolves makes us vulnerable, it reveals the fact that we're not in charge. It demonstrates that the only control we have is whether or not we're going to live like Jesus said to live.
We made it back from Mexico! And oh what a trip it was. As is tradition, we all give a bit of a reflection about our experiences from a prompt:
What did you give, and what were you given?
We had some really special responses.
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Derek and his son, Dominic.
Rather than be a home for the homeless, the church has too often been a collection of like-minded individuals committed to the idea of its own moral superiority. The church has done great harm to people because they’ve been deemed different, rather than extend the open arms of welcome and embrace.
But we follow Jesus, the one who left behind the safety of convention and received the gift given by a woman whom everybody else was convinced should be forgotten. We don’t get to stand on a mountaintop looking down on everyone else and say, 'You, you, and you . . . you all make it. But you . . . there’s no hope for you.'
The whole point of following Jesus is that we who’ve been shown love and acceptance are in the best possible position to know how badly others need it—how badly we still need it.
A bit of the scripture was lost. Apologies. If you'd like, you can read it in full.
By Derek Penwell
I’m a minister. Which is to say, I work as a minister . . . in a church.
Historically, I’ve found myself reluctant to offer that bit of information in casual conversation, not because ministry occupies a position inherently more shameful than a host of other vocational options, but because when people find out that I’m a minister they either want me to answer their questions about whether I watch TBN, or they want to impart some theological nugget they’ve mined from Franklin Graham or The Left Behind series.
Please don’t misunderstand—I like questions. In fact I entered the ministry because of some of the questions I had about life and its ultimate meaning. My problem lies not in questions in themselves, but in questions about whether or not I believe that the World Council of Churches, Democratic politicians, and LGTBTQ and #BlackLivesMatter activists form a shady cabal intent on ushering in the anti-Christ and a one-world government—complete with standard issue UPC codes emblazoned on everyone’s forehead, or whether I’ve finally come to my senses and realized that mega-churches are the goal of God’s reign here on earth.
The fact is I like being a minister, in large part, because of the conversations that attach to a life spent following such a strange, quixotic, compelling character as Jesus. The conversations, however, that seem to me to be important to have center on questions of justice, non-violence, grace, faithfulness, friendship, and devotion, rather than the sort of mass-produced fare provided by a popular religious culture that asks nothing more of Christians than that they act nice, refrain from swearing in public, and oppose any effort to normalize LGBTQ people as rightful participants in our religio-politico-cultural life.
To put a finer point on it, I like being a minister at Douglass Boulevard Christian Church. I’m blessed to belong to a community of faith that takes seriously our call to live out the example of Jesus in the best way we know how. DBCC is a community unafraid to take a chance on following Jesus down a dark alley. I like that. I like the sense of adventure I find in a church like that, as well as the adventurous thoughts I have when I think about what we can do together.
I guess this is all a long way of saying that my thoughts about ministry have evolved since coming to Douglass. Many of the things I do don’t even feel particularly like work.
In fact, now when I’m asked what I do, I tell people I’m a minister at this really great church that seeks justice for the marginalized, that provides embrace for those who’ve been excluded, that looks into the eyes of the forgotten and says, “You’re welcome here.”
Though we’re not perfect, we are constantly looking for ways to grow and be better.
I’m a minister. I just thought you should know. I never thought I’d say that.
Derek and his son Dominic
Jesus knocks down the walls of death, all right—but the death he conquers is bigger than just human morbidity. He conquers the death that enslaves the folks most of us don’t ever even have to look at—safe as we are in the illusion of our own security.
And we who follow Jesus, we have a responsibility—if not to raise dead bodies, then to go into the heart of a world filled with the living dead, and bring life and hope, announcing to them that death no longer calls the shots.
As you know, we're having a 'Fancy Dinner' to raise money for Casa Hogar de San Juan, where our youth group and others are headed in a few short weeks.
Along with that dinner, there will be a silent auction, where lots of cool stuff has been donated from a number of awesome, local businesses.
Among gifts from the aforementioned, we also have: An estate planning package for two, a pie making class, Churchill Downs Clubhouse box tickets, a basket of fancy teas & tea accessories, and two paintings.
Thanks to all these rad places for their gracious support. Come out and get in on the action!
Derek and Dominic
There once was a time when the whole world had played out its hand, humanity’s isolation was real and without hope. God heard the cry of despair from under the broom tree, and instead of magically fixing it, or even taking humanity out of the world, God came near.
God heard our cry and came to us, a Jewish carpenter, abandoned by virtually everyone in the end and nailed to a tree—all in the name of political expediency. That’s God’s idea of fixing things.
You're invited to a Fancy Dinner brought to you by the youth group!
We'll kick the evening off at 7pm with wine, appetizers, and some good ol' fashioned mingling. Dinner will be served at 7:30.
A $20 suggested donation will go to the mission trip to Mexico, and the silent auction will be full of gems so be ready to bid! Feel free to submit your donation through Eventbrite or in person on the night of the event. Any checks should be made out to DBCC with "Fancy Dinner" as the memo.
Proceeds will go toward supplies, projects, and general donation for Casa Hogar de San Juan.
When we were determined to be at war with God, when we’d set our minds on settling for the suffering, God proved God’s love for us in that while we were content to be separated from God, God made a way through Christ to be reconciled to us.
When we were yet isolated and alone, surrendering to the suffering of maintaining hostilities with God, God came to us in the person of Jesus. God has a history of showing up when the going gets roughest—not to pull us out of our suffering, but to give us the courage and strength to stand up under it—to look it straight in the eye not as a failure of our competence, but as an opportunity to see that God doesn't need our competence to change the world.
Preaching isn’t just about trying to get us to think differently; preaching is about trying to get us to live differently. If what we say and do in here doesn’t translate into our business dealings, our friendships, our families, our support for those who’ve been kicked to the sidelines, an increased commitment to advocating for peace and justice in a rigged world, then no matter how interesting it is, it isn’t the gospel.
By Derek Penwell
Boy, howdy, do I get cranky on the first day of vacation!
For months I look forward to the time off. I do all that pre-vacation planning, thinking about how long we’ll drive each day, where we’ll stop to eat, the kind of hotel that can accommodate five people. I like the planning.
The packing, though? I don’t like the packing. In particular, I don’t like the “getting-out-of-the-house” part. It always takes exactly two hours longer to leave than I planned. There invariably seems to be one more thing that, if it gets left behind, will mean certain calamity—medicine, power cords, the five year-old’s nebulizer.
And I tend to take out my frustrations on my family. For the first hour in the car I’m a sullen jerk. I don’t want to be a jerk. Nobody wants me to be a jerk. But there I am privately (or if you ask my family, not so privately) seething about the fact that now we’re two hours behind my meticulously thought out schedule.
Except it’s not that meticulously thought out, is it? I never seem to factor in the two extra hours that, no matter how much we’ve packed and prepared the night before, it takes to get on the road. So, either because of my poor planning or my bad memory (or more likely, some combination of the two) my family has to start its time together with a Dad who blames everybody but himself for the late start and the bad mood he’s in.
It strikes me that often churches also start new journeys with much of the same kind of crankiness. Churches plan. The good ones plan some more. And the really good ones try to anticipate in advance the problems they’re sure to encounter along the way.
The problem, though, is that you can never anticipate all the wrinkles that will inevitably throw off your scrupulous preparations. No matter how methodical you are, you’re still going to leave your contact case behind.
Call it Penwell’s Law of Travel: No matter how hard you plan, you’re still going to leave something important behind, still going to wind up with a bad radiator thirty miles outside of Des Moines, still going to find yourself in a smoking room at the Holiday Inn Express (when you very clearly told the reservations manager that you have kids with asthma, and so cannot possibly take a smoking room).
A version of the same law applies to churches: No matter how hard you plan, you’re still going to have someone forget to remind the AA group that they can’t have the fellowship hall on Friday night when you launch your soup kitchen, still going to wind up forgetting to make sure that the heat gets turned up in plenty of time before the attendees show up for the new adult day care center and start complaining about how “it feels like a meat-locker in here,” still going to find yourself playing host to a surly group of young adults who are pretty sure somebody promised there’d be beer at the Bible study kick-off.
So, the question isn’t “Will something go wrong?” The question is “How are you going to respond when something goes wrong?”
Churches in decline tend to obsess over the accidents, the mistakes, the unforeseen misadventures. In fact, so afraid are they of mistakes, so undone are they by accidents that they will use the memories of those things as an excuse for never launching out into the unknown again.
Mistakes, to struggling churches, are viewed as an enemy and accidents as a moral failure of planning. The problem with undertaking a journey with these prejudices is that it fails to take into account Penwell’s law: something is going to go wrong, be forgotten, get busted, remain unappreciated. If you keep living as though it won’t, you set your self up for frustration and crankiness.
Make peace with the fact that on any new journey, any new initiative someone or something will screw up in ways you failed to anticipate. Figure that into your planning—or at least your mental preparations—so that when it does happen you’re not thrown by it. Or worse, you’re scared out of packing up and taking the family someplace next time.
Indeed, you’ll never know success unless you learn to understand mistakes as a necessary part of the information gathering process. If you want to succeed, you have to be prepared for failure. It’s the law.
Look, nobody wants to travel with a sullen jerk. Even sullen jerks don’t like it that much. I know.
Apocalyptic literature can serve an important function. Because people who are in real trouble know what we who live in relative comfort cannot know—that in order to keep your head above water, you’ve got to believe there’s something worth keeping your head above water for, something not yet apparent to everyone else, but something just over the horizon that is even now breaking in upon us. And a little glimpse of that can transform your life, or at least give you a reason to hang on for a little while longer.
Come join us for Beer with Jesus at the North End Cafe (across from the church) on the patio tonight at 6:00.
And that’s the thing: The world, as chaotic and torn as it is right now, needs a little resurrection—needs people like you and me to get up and bring new life to folks who feel like everybody else has given up on them.
LGBT kids are dying, waiting for someone to care about them. Traumatized refugees are languishing in camps, waiting for someone to notice them. African Americans are literally dying in jail, waiting for someone to realize that we seem to live in a system designed not to deliver but to thwart justice. Single parents are trapped in low paying jobs, waiting for a few people to stand up with them and say that you can’t live on $7.25 an hour. Muslims, who live right next to us in fear, are waiting for people like you and me to wrap our arms around them and treat them like sisters and brothers.
Too often I settle for a cheap, painless version of Christianity. As long as my faith doesn’t cost me anything, I’m cool with sticking it out. But as soon as I’m called to stand up and begin to love the people I’ve always been so sure God doesn’t approve of, it’s easier to fade away.
Our lives, our words mean something . . . and not just for one light-filled moment on the Damascus road. How can we remain the same after the lives we thought we lost have been given back to us?
By Derek Penwell
Judgmentalism. It's one of the things Christians do best according to those outside the church.
Unfortunately for the church, emerging generations find any kind of judgmentalism off-putting. Consequently, they tend to seek the broadest possible parameters for what previous generations would call orthodoxy.
Now, let me just say that some of what passes for non-judgmentalism is simply an unspoken social contract in which I promise to keep my nose out of your business if you agree to keep your nose out of mine. I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting Christians should approach faith and morality as a laissez-faire proposition—in which the church, to avoid appearing judgmental, agrees to keep its mouth shut about important matters.
What I am suggesting, however, is that no matter how the church feels about being labeled judgmental, it would benefit mainline churches to think carefully about the way they come across.
Growing up as a religious conservative (an Evangelical, I would have said) I took it as an article of faith that salvation was like an obstacle course. Once you began to move toward the goal, you couldn’t go back, and every step was a potential hazard, threatening to disqualify you from finishing.
I was convinced that having the right beliefs about God was of equal importance with doing the right thing. In fact, having the wrong belief might be even more problematic than doing something wrong.
If you screwed up and said “Dammit!” because you bent your dad’s driver trying to hit rocks in the back yard, you could always repent and ask forgiveness.
Wrong belief, on the other hand, assumed a kind of intentionality, a willfulness that was much more difficult to recover from. You couldn’t accidentally believe in evolution or that the Bible might contain some mistakes in it.
Additionally, I believed that among the barriers Christians must negotiate on the obstacle course of salvation the need to “save” other people was a high priority:
If you observe a toddler wandering into the middle of a busy intersection, you have a responsibility to try to protect the child from being hit by a bus. Looking the other way is sin of omission. In the same way, if you see someone boarding the express train to perdition, you have a responsibility to help jerk them back onto the platform. Not to do so is to have saddled yourself with the responsibility for someone else’s damnation. You get enough of those lost souls in your column and the sheer weight of them might just drag you down, too.
Now, I’m willing to admit that my description of my childhood beliefs doesn’t necessarily represent all of Evangelical Christianity. However, they were my beliefs, and they are often the same things I hear people describe as “what Christians believe.” It’s important to name the reality that “Evangelical Christianity” has largely become a placeholder for “Christianity” in our culture.
That Christianity has become known by many people more for its beliefs than for what it actually does is problematic for the church in an emerging world. Part of the way I read the common charge against the church as “judgmental” has to do with the conviction on the part of emerging generations that Christians tend to believe more than they actually live.
That fact, turned back upon the individual is hypocrisy (another post) —that is, “I believe this, but I don’t think that means I actually have to make it a part of my life.”
Turned outward, however, that conviction about believing more than you’re willing to live, often expresses itself as judgmentalism—that is, “I believe this (and I’m right); and therefore, I’m holding you responsible for living up to my expectations.”
Hint: The combination of hypocrisy and judgmentalism is deadly for the church, since it communicates an inordinately high opinion of oneself and one’s abilities to determine what’s right—an opinion of oneself that isn’t mapped onto reality, and therefore, need not be taken seriously by the individual.
At the heart of the criticism of judgmentalism lies an accusation that Christians feel themselves superior. In other words, when people look at the church what they see is a collection of overweening know-it-alls who assume that everyone is breathlessly awaiting a word about how to improve themselves. Any deviation from “Christian expectations,” these observers believe, cannot but be met with moralizing opprobrium from those who “know the mind of God.” Christians, on this reading, have nothing better to do than to think up rules for everybody else to follow—then set about in earnest being exceedingly disappointed in everyone else when the moral revival doesn’t take shape.
“That’s not fair. I think people ought to live right, but I’m not the judgmental person you so sarcastically describe.”
In the absence of information to the contrary, I’m perfectly willing to concede that that’s not a fair description of you. I don’t even know you, after all. That’s not the point, though. The people who believe you’re judgmental, probably don’t know you either. As far as they’re concerned, if you’re a Christian, they already know as much as they need to know about you.
Among emerging generations, “Christian” is metonymous with “judgmental.” That is to say, for many people the sentence, “Derek is a Christian,” is a shorthand way of communicating that “Derek is judgmental,” since “Christian” is merely a placeholder for “judgmental.” Whether it’s true or not, the perception is, for my purposes, what matters.
Why is it the perception that matters? Because, as a very wise man once told me: “The difference between reality and perception is that reality changes.” If you want perception to change, you must work not only on the reality, but also on the perception.
Not only must the church adopt a positive understanding that it is called to be something for the world not just believe something about the world, but it must do so in a way that communicates its own humility.
After all, in our culture judgmentalism is the new heresy.
And for Christians used to occupying the role of heresy hunters, being the target of the new hunters of heresy is going to be extraordinarily uncomfortable.
We're Christians, and technically we don't believe in karma . . . but, dang!
Having shalom be the first word uttered to the disciples in the locked room puts a name to the kind of reign God established on Easter.
Shalom foresees a world in which violence is no longer a reality, to be sure. But what's more shalom offers a vision of a world in which just systems ensure that everyone has enough—enough food, enough to care for their families—where all people, have access to the goodness of God’s blessings; in other words, a world in which the need for violence has been obviated.
Rev. Derek Penwell
We talk a lot around here about how the faithfulness of just of few people can change the world. Most of the time it can sound like high blown rhetoric from a bunch of misty-eyed idealists. But what if it’s not?
What if there’s a whole world out there just waiting to see a glimpse of the world they hear Jesus talking about? What if part of what Easter means is Jesus raised to life in us for the whole world to see? The way you and I live our lives—full of peace and justice and love—may just be the only way they ever have of truly knowing about Jesus.