Hacking Christianity

The Third Conversation

I had a follow-up thought on the Mario Bros Discipleship post on meeting people where they are in biblical difficulty.

The evidence for the bible having adaptive multi-faceted learning is evidenced by when an entire church is lectionary-based in its curriculum or studies the same scripture on Sundays. When the children, the youth, the adults, and the worship service all reflect on the same scripture, you get tons of conversations about it.

But then it leads to what I call "the third conversation" when a family drives home. They've talked about the scripture in the Sunday School, they've heard it reflected in church, and then when they drive home they get the third conversation of "how did your class handle it" and all ages are able to participate and consider new things. I wonder what new information and education comes from that third conversation...

Thoughts? Have you done total-church Christian education based on the same scripture?

Mario Bros Discipleship

One of the advances sought after in video gaming is games that respond to a players skill and either increase or decrease the difficulty on the fly. We are used to clicking "Easy, Normal, Hard, Eeeevil" and knowing that we'll get a slightly different experience in the video game. Take Mario Bros as an example. We can always make really sadistic versions of video games like this one (for a really really NSFW obscenities-laden version, watch here...I warned you!) but they do not gradually introduce challenges to us.

What is now being sought after is video games that adapt on the fly, so that if you complete a level with plenty of time to spare, the next level is a bit harder. The newest custom adaptation of Mario Bros (discussed here on Slashdot) not only gives you more enemies (like this video) but also puts holes in the ground and makes your technical skill increase on the fly.

In other words, instead of choosing a difficult path, the game adapts to your skill and increases or decreases difficulty based on your progress.

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts?

There's Got to be a Middle Way

Two extreme views:

(1) Grace is what happens when you are soft on sin. Jon Acuff was accused of being too "soft on sin" in his piece on CNN about Christians being jerks online. Here's his reply:

I wrote a piece for CNN about the two most common ways Christians become jerks online. In it, I argued that we’re called to love our neighbor and that includes people on the Internet. The reader who wrote me and several other people felt that in the article I came across as being “soft on sin.”
Similar to how people will accuse politicians of being “soft on crime,” sometimes Christians accuse each other of being “soft on sin.” The idea is that there needs to be justice and consequences. People have to pay the cost of their actions and learn from their mistakes. When you’re “soft on sin,” you’re giving people too many second chances, you’re not holding people accountable the right way, you’re being too gracious. So people accused me of giving evil a free pass.
...
I’m not soft on sin. I’m not shy about repentance or consequences or hurt or suffering or pain. But when it comes to loving people, our Lord has set an incredibly high bar. So love the people no one else loves. Show grace without end. Give comfort even when it makes no sense.
And as far as the DVD copy of my trip to hell goes? I’m not concerned about emails like that.
“You’re too loving” and “you show too much grace” are insults I will forever accept.

(2) Judgment is what happens when you are rigid on sin. Jonathan Brink posted this video about the destructive nature of judgment:

(3) There's got to be a middle way, hasn't there? A way where we can judge with love, a way we can exhibit tough love, a way we can hold one another accountable with just enough grace and judgment to hold them in a constant state of assurance and uneasiness? A way to not go "as far as" Jesus did, but not act like we are judge and jury, right? Surely we are called to the middle and not the extremes, right?

There's got to be a middle way between grace and judgment.

Or is there just...grace?

Stop Memorizing the Bible

Youth minister Matt Cleaver has a provocative post up called "Against Bible Memorization Programs in Youth Ministry." Here's the bullet point headers:

Memorization does not equal maturity or discipleship.
Memorization elevates certain kinds of students over and above other.
Memorization is not equivalent to “hiding your word in my heart.”
Most memorization programs are reward-driven competitions.
Memorization is not a historical spiritual discipline.
Memorization removes scripture from historical tradition and literary context

To Matt, scripture memorization programs are counter to true discipleship, and I'm in the same boat, having written before about the detriments of competition in "What the Church can Learn from Wikipedia." To be clear, Matt is talking about memorization programs that make a competition or requirement of youth participants to memorize scripture. Memorizing scripture is just fine; just don't make a game or "who can memorize these 10 disconnected out-of-context verses this week?"

I've written before about "The Slow End to Scripture Memory" where knowing where to find scriptural inspiration seems to be replacing actually memorizing what it says. While there are definite advantages to scripture memory, the lack of context or connection often does more harm than good (especially when you use them as weapons against people).

So, what do you think? Is Matt onto something about competition and commodification of Scripture being detrimental to discipleship? Or is memorization and internalization by whatever means necessary for ministry?

Discuss.

Ability as the Basis for Gifts Discernment?

Really old post here (drafted back in August 2008), but I finally got around to getting a complete thought about this video.

Thanks to Blake Huggins' twitter, I was extremely pleased with an interview with former British Parliament member Tony Benn. He is quoted as saying this:

Benn : The thing about a customer is if you haven't any money, you can't be a customer. So the word customer dehumanizes the poor. The people who need homes the most, homeless people on the streets, are not customers because they can't afford a house. So economic language classifies us according to our money and not our need. And I just think that leads unhappiness, revolutions, conflict, struggle...

That critique started me thinking a bit about how we regard volunteers in the church. How often do we classify volunteers according to their ability instead of their need?

In the video, only the people who reach a certain economic level are considered customers. Only when you are able to buy a house or a car are you considered a customer.
In the Church, oftentimes it is only the people who are able to offer skills or service are asked to volunteer. Only when it becomes known that you are able to perform a service are you asked to volunteer.

This doesn't seem like a fair parallel at first. Of course we accept anyone to do volunteer work...oftentimes it is just looking for a warm body! But in subtle ways, we classify people according to their ability when we link volunteering and gifts.

Consider the typical workshop on Discovering Your Gifts. The pastor or workshop leader waxes on about "there is one body with many parts," you sing "Many Gifts, One Spirit," there are times of discernment, then there are inventories that help us discover our gifts...and finally a church committee or mission team signup! Or perhaps it is less intentional: the pastor or chairperson simply says "they are looking for people with gifts" to do the job. This process works...matching gifts with ministry can yield tremendous fruits! But like Benn outlines above, we are treating people like customers who have the ability to serve, not the need.

I started thinking about "ability v. need" recently. In my local church, we have some gifted people at organizing and running an event. The suggestion was made that instead of asking for baked goods from congregants for an event that we ask for money instead and the gifted and talented people can buy the food and arrange it professionally. Simple, clean, and well done! While it sounds like a good idea, it was classifying the organizer's ability over the congregant's need.

A homebound member needs to be asked to bake brownies so that they feel connected to the church.
A senior needs to be asked to bake cookies so they have an afternoon project to pass the time.
A child needs to be asked to bake a cake so they and their parent have a family-building project together.

Needless to say, we kept the homemade goods at the event and celebrated their uniqueness and non-uniformity.

Perhaps it is time to see how your church programs relate to people according to their ability, and not according to their needs. To see how we relegate some responsibilities to people who have the ability, but there are people with needs in the wings waiting to be asked.

Thoughts?

Stop De-Baptizing Jesus

While clearly a joke at an atheist meeting, this video of a "de-baptism" moment actually made me chuckle...then stop and think.

Did you watch the young girl? When the "de-baptism" via a hairdryer was over she raised up her hands and said "I can see!" The people laughed at her clever correlation between baptism and healing miracles.

I laughed too, even at my chosen religion's expense. But as I laughed, I realized something powerful: remembering our baptisms is to reaffirm a God who heals us. I think like this video, many of us de-baptize Jesus and do not see what Jesus' baptism really was. If we connect healing and baptisms, then we fully understand what Jesus' baptism really was.

When we talk about healing, we often conflate two terms: disease and illness. In Arthur Kleinman's 1980s book Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, we have a clarification between the two:

Disease refers to a malfunctioning of biological and/or psychological processes, while the term illness refers to the psychosocial experience and meaning of the perceived disease...Viewed from this perspective, illness is the shaping of disease into behavior and experience. It is created by personal, social, and cultural reactions to disease. (pg. 72)

As John Crossan comments on the above passage in his book God and Empire,

Thus, diseases are cured, while illnesses are healed. Sometimes a disease can be cured, but very often the best that can be done is to heal the illness that surrounds it.

Crossan goes on to talk about the movie Philadelphia, starring Tom Cruise as Beckett, a gay lawyer with AIDS. He concludes with this connection:

My students all understood that Beckett's disease cannot be cured, but they could also see eventually that his illness is being healed by the support of his partner, his family...Curing is not available, but healing is still possible.

Seen in this light, the healing power of Jesus Christ may not come in wild moments when the blind can see, but comes in the constant care and concern given to healing the illness, the walking and coping that we struggle with daily. When we offer love and care to those who find themselves unloveable, we are co-healing their illness with Christ. Their disease is in the hands of God and of Science, but we can do something about their illness.

I have done one too many funerals for people that have passed away too early in life from cancer. A God who heals disease is not my understanding of God, though I certainly leave room for God to act as God will. However, a God who heals illness, who offers us pathways and possibilities that lead to a healing of the illness surrounding a disease and perhaps leading to a regression and healing of the disease...that's a God I believe in and that's the call to nurturing and healing that I understand to be part of Christian mission and ministry.

In summary, healing can be understood as more than a one-time healing of a disease, but as a process of coming to terms with an illness in helpful ways that bring forth the Spirit in another.

Same with Baptism. I don't understand baptism as the washing away of a disease or the cleansing of Original Sin. God has already done that with God's grace (prevenient, for the Methodists taking score at home). Baptism is not a one-time event where the clouds part and a dove come down. Rather, Baptism is a process that establishes the baseline and every moment after that is steps that remind us to seek personal holiness in our lives: to deal with the "illness" so to speak. As my friend Will Green wrote yesterday:

Sometimes it feels that baptism is an act of entering a church and becoming a member. Sometimes people think that baptism is a necessary precursor to being saved. Sometimes it is seen as a promise to be a good parent. Sometimes baptism is thought to be an expression of mercy to children and newborns.

I think that baptism is way to claim the power of the Holy Spirit in one's life. Living as a disciple of Jesus Christ connects us to God and being connected to God affects our life.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus speaks of his two baptisms. Really. His first was in the river with John, yes. But Jesus seems to speak of a second baptism in Mark 10:38. The disciples ask to be on the left and right of him...not knowing that Jesus would be crucified between two criminals! Jesus speaks of a cup from which he must drink, and a baptism with which he must be baptized. Everything in this passage is prophesying his death and the most-likely end of anyone who wants to emulate Jesus.

I take from this passage what Marjorie Suchocki took from it in God, Christ, Church: that the baptism of Jesus began in the river with John and concluded in the rain on Golgotha. His three-year baptism is his anointing as the Christ and it is in his life and death that we are made one with Christ. It was not a one-time event but a process of discovery, faith, and fidelity to the God who walks with us.

So it is with us. We are not baptized, dunked, made into cookie-cutter Christians and God is happy. As Peter Rollins writes in How to (not) Speak of God, that's like giving a lover of nuts a thousand nuts without any center: giving to God the "saved" bodies of baptized Christians without the fearsome spirit of charity and missions that comes from a lifetime of identifying with Christ. Our baptism must be understood as a process that nurtures, heals, and forgives us for a lifetime, and it is powerful to remember. If God who acts in our lives acts in process not phenomena, then our baptism is not a one-time phenomena but a process of seeking personal holiness.

Do you see the connection? Baptism is not the healing of a disease, but the coping with an illness: the power of the Holy Spirit given to us to help us cope with our troubles and feel connected to a God who is beyond our knowledge. Because it is a process, the presence of a congregation affirming a baptism is necessary to say that "we will walk through this healing with you and be accountable to you and you to us."
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This Sunday is liturgically the Baptism of Jesus Sunday. Let's not give into the temptation to say that it happened as a historical event and be done with it. Remember that Jesus's baptism sustained a life of struggle, healing, teaching, and power. Let us all remember our own baptisms and the waysin which we can live out ministries of healing, nurturing, and struggling for justice. In doing so, we resist the temptation to De-Baptize Jesus and relegate his baptism to a one-time event, but instead fully recognize his baptism that carried him from the river to the cross and will carry us from whatever pits of despair we are in to the left and right sides of Jesus, our Christ.

Whew. That was two hours of writing I didn't expect. Time for bed. Thoughts?

The Overheard Gospel

There's a book called "Overheard in New York" which details overheard everyday conversations. Most of it is salty language, but there's some gems in it. From the website:

20-something tall black bellhop: I challenge you, right now, to a salsa dance-off.
70-year-old short Latino bellhop: Go get a radio.

Father to little daughter: You are the most beautiful girl in this photo... and I'm not biased. (daughter smiles)
Father: Do you know what "biased" means?
Daughter (rolling her eyes): Yes, it means that you like both boys and girls.

Little tourist boy: Mommy! Look, that lady is a Nazi!
Frazzled tourist mom: What? Oh... Honey, that nice lady is hailing a cab, not Hitler.

The voyeuristic pleasure we get from these conversations is not only their hilarity, but the fact that they were situational, meant to flitter away like bubbles in the park. The participants never expected anyone to write them down and immortalize them on the Internets.

This started me thinking on the overheard Gospel. Often at coffeeshops (where I used to write my seminary papers), my ears would perk up whenever I heard a theological conversation. I listened to marital counseling, anti-mormon tirades, and agnostic ponderings. Occasionally I joined in. I wouldn't have written down the conversations, and the discussants never intended to either.

Until the internet came. C. Scott Andreas expounds:

Unlike conversations over coffee that pass into the air, dialogue in the blogosphere can be searched and referenced by others in the future.

"A Networked E-cclesia" in Wikiklesia: Volume One

The ripple effect of our words and our proclamation of the Gospel is much wider than before. What is said locally on the streets of New York becomes a global-selling book. What we say on one blog can be referenced by another blog on the other side of the globe. Indeed, before a person is told of the Good News of Christ...chances are that she has overheard the Gospel already!

The lesson here? We must act in Christlike ways at all times. In all our actions, we are to speak the truth in appropriate ways. When I was struggling with this blog with a pastor colleague, my colleague said to me "Whenever I post, I make certain that I would be comfortable saying this publicly to anyone." And it is good advice: because ANYONE can READ THE BLOG!

While we laugh when a risque photo causes a supermodel to lose her crown, or when John McCain hates bloggers, or over the conversations of New Yorkers...we must remember that the Overheard Gospel is just as immortalized on the internets. Google indexes everything. Even your blog posts. I read my old ones from 6 years ago and am aghast at how I worded things...I was really mean!

There's the quote "You may be the only Bible the person you meet today ever reads."
I think there's an internet-age addendum: "You may be the only Bible the person you don't meet today ever reads."

So in all things, allow peaceful language and powerful encouragement to fall from your fingers onto the screen. A random google search may bring someone to them in a time of need, and what you say may forever impact them. What possibility in such few words!

Thoughts? How has the much longer lasting ripples of the internet affected the way you do ministry or talk about God/politics/hamsters?