What really is the Gospel? [video]
Rob Bell of Nooma
Thoughts?
Glenn Beck declares War on United Methodists
::update 3/14/2010:: followup posts here (Glenn Beck v. UMC, part deux) and here (Welcome UMC.org readers! Let's talk about Justice!)
Again, I don't talk partisan politics on this blog (there's plenty of that on the internets for all of us), but sometimes things are just so egregious and misinformed that they bear discussion.
Last week, conservative talk show host Glenn Beck said the following about churches that preach "social justice."
"I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"So, church websites with "social justice" huh? Glenn Beck declares that social justice is a code word for fascism and communism and everything. And people should leave churches that preach it.
~ Glenn Beck 03/02/2010
If you believe him, then everyone in America better leave the UMC:
The United Methodist Church has a long history of concern for social justice. Its members have often taken forthright positions on controversial issues involving Christian principles. Early Methodists expressed their opposition to the slave trade, to smuggling, and to the cruel treatment of prisoners.And you'd better dig up John Wesley and flay him (h/t Kevin Watson):
~ UMC Social Principles (original in 1908)
Directly opposite to this is the gospel of Christ. Solitary religion is not to be found there. ‘Holy solitaries’ is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than holy adulterers. The gospel of Christ knows of no religion, but social; no holiness but social holiness.
John Wesley, “Preface to 1739 Hymns and Sacred Poems”
There is no holiness but social holiness. Any call to leave a church because of "code words" is laughable, but any call to leave a church because of a commitment to social justice is antithetical to the Gospel and ought be exposed as such. Read more...
There is no such thing as not worshipping
Novelist David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide two years ago, gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. It has this amazing nugget at the tail-end that I find powerful (h/t Andrew Sullivan):
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.Wow.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.
But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."
Thoughts? Read more...
From 'Just War' to 'Just Sexuality'
Today, the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool used his presidential address to seek unity within the fractured Anglican Communion...he did so by way of making an interesting comparison. The Bishop talked about the theory of Just War, a Christian ethic that sought a way of making sense of military service and human casualties of war.
The fact that conscripts and pacifists divided along one moral line does not detract from our admiration now nor deflect us from acknowledging now the moral courage of both. We may sympathise with the soldier yet we can salute the pacifist; we may identify fully with the pacifist yet admire the sacrifice of the soldier. In other words, we can now stand on either side of the moral argument and still be in fellowship despite disagreeing on this the most fundamental ethical issue, the sixth of the Ten Commandments.It's an eye-opening example that I haven't articulated before: in our churches we have people who are pacifist and war hawk, soldiers and hippies, who believe Jesus would condone and condemn violence. We are talking about human lives here! And yet we (predominantly) keep in fellowship and disagree, with the issue so far from home and yet so close to our military families. On an issue of life and death, we choose fellowship over schism, don't we? When it comes to disagreement over the Sixth Commandment (for crying out loud!), we keep together!!
And yet denominations are dividing, churches are fracturing, and caucus groups are raising tons of money over something that doesn't kill people: sexual identity. Incredible.
Over time, Christian denominations and churches have come to accept the full spectrum of Just War theories and pacifistic theories with incredible disagreement but also incredible commitment to covenant faithfulness. And yet in just a few short decades, disagreement over sexual identity, which doesn't kill people, has reduced it to rubble and decreased the Church's social witness (much to the delight of interdenominational caucus groups that seek to blunt Christian social involvement). In short, covenant faithfulness has been left at the door when sexual identity enters the conversation.
Why? Multiple reasons but I think it is because for biblical literalists there is a plethora of Christian and Hebrew scripture to support either side of the just war debate. Neither side can tell the other they are ignoring plain scriptural account, neither side can use their Bible as a weapon. But for sexual identity, there is no clear counterbalance to the eight clobber passages referencing same-gender relations (at least for biblical literalists).
However, such one-sided clarity didn't stop entire denominations from affirming women's pastoral leadership in the face of the Pauline epistles, and didn't stop John Wesley and the entire abolitionist movement from opposing slavery in the face of its passive acceptance in the Bible. Those social movements found scriptural support slowly, creepingly, and ultimately renewed the church when reconciliation came to fruition.
Perhaps we are at the same junction that war, women in ministry, and abolitionism was at. The Bishop seems to think so as he crescendos into a call for unity:
Just as the church over the last 2000 years has come to allow a variety of ethical conviction about the taking of life and the application of the sixth Commandment so I believe that in this period it is also moving towards allowing a variety of ethical conviction about people of the same gender loving each other fully. Just as Christian pacifists and Christian soldiers profoundly disagree with one another yet in their disagreement continue to drink from the same cup because they share in the one body so too I believe the day is coming when Christians who equally profoundly disagree about the consonancy of same gender love with the discipleship of Christ will in spite of their disagreement drink openly from the same cup of salvation.The Bishop concludes with a renewed drive to fellowship with one another:
If on this subject of sexuality the traditionalists are ultimately right and those who advocate the acceptance of stable and faithful gay relationships are wrong what will their sin be? That in a world of such little love two people sought to express a love that no other relationship could offer them? And if those advocating the acceptance of gay relationship are right and the traditionalists are wrong what will their sin be? That in a church that has forever wrestled with interpreting and applying Scripture they missed the principle in the application of the literal text? Do these two thoughts not of themselves enlarge the arena in which to do our ethical exploration?I think this is fascinating because the Bishop is a believer in traditional Christian sexual relations and would be gladly welcomed into the most homophobic of church circles. But this Bishop can see people holding differing views on killing people share the common cup, so why not sexual identity disagreements as well? It's a powerful witness.
I believe that to have “diversity without enmity”, as the Dean put it at the Bishop’s Council, provides a safe and a spiritually and emotionally healthy place for Christians of differing convictions to discern the will of God for our lives. To know and to do God’s will is our calling. The place for that discernment is the Body of Christ where the different members, differentiated by the diversity of our graces, gifts and experiences, are called to be in harmony and love with one another.
Perhaps it is time to move towards an embrace of Just Sexuality, or the acknowledgement of a sexual ethic that seeks wholeness in relationships, justice in ways & means, with biblical foundations. With such an ethic the church can more clearly and forcefully witness to a culture that embraces life-sucking forms of sexuality at every second of media depiction. Do we have such an ethic already? Sure. But just as the Just War theory took twists and turns over time (Aquinas in the 1200s changed it significantly), perhaps we also can develop a more nuanced ethic for the modern age.
Just War has been around for 1600 years. For 1600 years, Christians have disagreed over the taking of human lives...and yet they stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the pews singing together. And they will for the next 1600 years, I guarantee! So for the next 1600 years, why can't we continue to stand together with each other in disagreement over Just Sexuality and instead seek an ethic together that satisfies no one fully but places our trust in God, turning our energies outward to heal the world in its brokenness, and replaces self-serving calls for schism with renewed dedication to life together?
I think we can...at the molecular level of the church, starting with my pew, and your pew, and the pew behind and in front, until entire churches respect a diversity of belief and commit to keeping in fellowship with one another. There will be casualties, there will be crises of faith, but there will also be a grace that calls us to diversity without enmity for the sake of the shared mission of the body of Christ.
Thoughts? Read more...
The Tyranny of the SEO Church, Revisited
A year ago on this blog, we wrote The Tyranny of the SEO Church where we examined how search engine optimization is becoming more and more critical for church outreach, but also cedes power to persons other than the church to answer questions. Read it here. Here's the basic premise:
What it means to me is that any theological viewpoint that receives strong SEO (search engine optimization) can become the new "truth." If you can get that viewpoint to the top of google searches, or better to cover the majority of the first page of results, then that becomes more and more "truth." And this alliance between Wikipeda and Google can perpetuate this narrow viewpoint and bury (send to a lower ranking) theological viewpoints that do not agree with the SEO viewpoint.Today we're revisiting the issue with new information: Richard Beck has correlated church attendance and mobile computing usage. Read it here. It shows that as mobile computing spirals up, church attendance goes down. In other words, Facebook Mobile has killed the church (in Beck's words) by replacing the advantages of social interaction and connections found at church. So why not go where the people are...their phones and search results and the Google?
To that end, Kent Shaffer wonders the same thing we did a year ago: is SEO the future of evangelism? As more and more people turn to their computers for answers, does the church with the best SEO win hearts and minds? I'll let him explain:
I think the future of evangelism is search engine optimized (SEO) online content. By no means, will this replace face-to-face evangelism or other methods. However, online behavior is opening doors of opportunity that will only increase with time.So, we're revisiting the topic. Any thoughts? Is it the future of evangelism to do SEO and offer the best results and the most strategic viewpoint for people to search and find hope in Christ?
Optimizing your ministry for search engines is more than trying to show up in the top 10 search results for “your church name” or “churches in your city.” Using Google to answer life’s questions is normal for those with Internet access. Imagine what your church could accomplish if it provided relevant answers in these moments when people are more open-minded and seeking truth.
Discuss. Read more...
A New Law
I'm about two years late to the Derek Webb party, but I'm really digging this video set to his song "A New Law." Using it for bible study tonight to talk about the Hebrews desire to return to slavery. Hope you like it:
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