nakedpastor

Thinking about freedom, I read Oswald Chambers, again in MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST::
“Our Lord never insists on having authority; he never says, Thou shalt! He leaves us perfectly free—so free that we can spit in his face, as men did; so free that we can put him to death, as men did; and he will never say a word.”
I am convinced that we need to provide this same kind of freedom to people, including church people. It has actually been my experience in ministry that I have witnessed people come to a place of realizing that they don’t really believe the way they thought they did, that they don’t subscribe to the platitudes, principles or practices that they inherited and thoughtlessly adopted. I am not excusing bad ministry. I realize I’ve made mistakes, even grave ones. I am responsible for that. But Jesus allowed people to make a decision and follow him, or make a decision and reject him.
I think this attitude is necessary in order to maintain our own integrity, to speak truth, and to be free ourselves.

The Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel, in conversation with the monk Thomas Merton, said that the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me”, is first because it is the root of all sin (Merton, A VOW OF CONVERSATION: JOURNALS 1964-1965).

So, I’m thinking that idols aren’t so much about worshiping and serving a different god, but about over-emphasizing just one aspect of the one true God, creating a whole new god out of that one feature. God is the god of all gods, king of kings and lord of lords (Deuteronomy 10:17), the God of Baal, Ashtoreth, Molech, Beelzebub and Mammon. All the gods of the bible emphasize one aspect of God. For instance, Baal was the god of success in war and weather: it was important for the Israelites to win their battles and to have good weather to have healthy crops, herds and flocks. Ashtoreth was the god of fertility: it was important for the Israelites that they be fertile and have children. Mammon was the god of wealth and prosperity, simply, money: it is good to have money and to succeed in life. It becomes idolatry when we look to just one aspect of God: we worship a god who always promises success in war; a god who always promises success in agriculture; a god who always promises success in fertility; a god who always promises success with money. The God of the bible is God over all things. He brings success and failure; good weather and bad; fertility and infertility; prosperity and ruin (just read Isaiah 45:7, a book devoted to the decimation of idolatry!).

This is why I oppose the kinds of theologies that insist God always promises success, prosperity, ease, health, and every other good thing. This is only a part of who God is. This is idolatry, and this is where churches get in trouble. God is Lord over all, even failure, poverty, tribulation, suffering, and sickness. I have to believe this because of the scriptures, but also because this is the only possible way to have any hope for justice in this world!

Morning! In my efforts to improve my own blog, I’ve been doing some research online. I came across ProBlogger, Darren Rowse’s personal blog, LivingRoom. This is his own description of his site:
“Welcome to LivingRoom! Pull up a bean bag, grab a coffee and chat with us for a while about Emerging Church, Blogging, Faith and other General Silliness from South of the Equator.”
I identify with much of what he says in terms of what the church and ministry are. Read his own blog post, “Thinking About ‘Ministry’”. I found it quite interesting and strangely familiar.

Thanks John for your thoughtful comment on today’s earlier blog. On our way to Kansas City for the conference I wrote about in yesterday’s blog, I bought the book LINCOLN by David Herbert Donald. When I read the following passage, it timely grooved with the insight I received upon hearing from the Cambodian pastor:
“From his earliest days Lincoln had a sense that his destiny was controlled by some larger force, some Higher Power. Turning away from orthodox Christianity because of the emotional excesses of frontier evangelism, he found it easier as a young man to accept what was called the Doctrine of Necessity, which he defined as the belief ‘that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.’ Later, he frequently quoted to his partner, William H. Herndon, the lines for Hamlet:
‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
rough –hew them how he will.’
“From Lincoln’s fatalism derived some of his most lovable traits: his compassion, his tolerance, his willingness to overlook mistakes. That belief did not, of course, lend him to lethargy or dissipation. Like thousands of Calvinists who believed in predestination, he worked indefatigably for a better world—for himself, for his family, and for his nation. But it helped to buffer the many reverses that he experienced and enabled him to continue a strenuous life of aspiration.
“It also made for a pragmatic approach to problems, a recognition that if one solution as fated not to work another could be tried. ‘My policy is to have no policy’ became a kind of motto from Lincoln—a motto that infuriated the sober, doctrinaire people around him who were inclined to think that the President had no principals either. He might have offended his critics less if he had more often used the analogy he gave James G. Blaine when explaining his course on Reconstruction: ‘The pilots on our Western rivers steer from point to point as they call it—setting the course of the boat no further than they can see; and that is all I propose to myself in this great problem.’
“Both statements suggest Lincoln’s reluctance to take the initiative and make bold plans; he preferred to respond to the actions of others. They also show why Lincoln in his own distinctively American way had the quality John Keats defined as forming ‘ a Man of Achievement’, that quality ‘which Shakespeare possessed so enormously… Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’” (p.15)

I question our modern fascination with visions and goals and strategies to get there, especially when it comes to the individual and to the church.

This post is in response to a few comments made on some previous posts. Comments like I am a church-basher, a cynic, overwhelmingly negative, and a deconstructionist.

I am very, very grateful for the variety of comments being made, and I invite more. In fact, I am going to launch a contest soon in which all those who comment on one of my posts will be entered into a draw to win one of my original paintings! Stay tuned.

Here’s an apology in my defense: I decided long ago that the problem with the church isn’t finding a way forward, or alternatives or revisions or renovations. In my opinion, the church doesn’t need a destination, a goal, or a way forward, any more than a family does! I decided that my ministry is about the removal of all these obstacles. Jesus was highly critical of those who kept heaping more and more expectations, laws, requirements, mores, and guilt upon people. He saw them as harmful burdens. He invited people to follow him because his burden was light. So, I am convinced that my ministry’s mandate is to strip people of all burdens, and to pare the church down, seriously, to practically nothing. It looks like church-bashing and deconstruction because we tend to equate all the unnecessary extras with the church.

Hey, if you want to read a man who was a severe critic of the church while being a committed part of it, read William Stringfellow’s AN ETHIC FOR CHRISTIANS AND OTHER ALIENS IN A STRANGE LAND!

I believe in the gift of absolute liberty of the human being, and the real fellowship we all share in Christ. That’s the church. Simple as that!

What’d’ya think?

In 1997, my wife and I went to a conference in Kansas City, Missouri. During a pastor’s luncheon, the host introduced a pastor who was visiting from Cambodia. The pastor had just heard that his church elders had been lined up and shot by a death-squad. Now he was desperate to hear from his family. Could we please pray for him and his family? I watched the pastor. I was so impressed by this man’s austere faith that it triggered a line of thinking in me that I’ve never been able to shake.

And it is this: I wanted what he had. Somehow, deep, deep down, I realized that I had to pare down my ministry, my teaching, to this utter simplicity. This man and his congregation were stripped down to a profound basic. They wouldn’t be impressed with my fluffy superficialities. They wouldn’t only see them as unnecessary, but dangerous. I figured right then: my faith has to be the kind of faith that can live in the worst of conditions. If I need luxury, magic, prosperity, public opinion, government sanctions, or whatever else I can think of, for my faith to survive, then there’s something wrong. Do I have the kind of faith that can take up the cross and not take the offered narcotic (Matthew 27:34)?

Around then I read Nien Cheng’s book, LIFE AND DEATH IN SHANGHAI. You MUST read this book! She was put in solitary confinement during Mao Tse Tung’s reign. She wrote:
“Throughout the years of my imprisonment, I had turned to God often and felt his presence. In the drab surroundings of the gray cell, I had known magic moments of transcendence that I had not experienced in the ease and comfort of my normal life. My belief in the ultimate triumph of truth and goodness had been restored, and I had renewed courage to fight on. My faith had sustained me in these darkest hours of my life and brought me safely through privation, sickness, and torture. At the same time, my sufferings had strengthened my faith and made me realize that God was always there. It was up to me to come to Him”(p. 346).

I had to admit right then that there was a lot of silliness around, in modern, western Christianity, my church, and my faith. But in the presence of this Cambodian pastor, it looked REALLY silly!

I have come to learn that questions are more about the questioner than the questioned. I remember back when our church went through a major church-split in 1997, I started allowing interaction during my teaching sessions and as well as discussion. Much to the chagrin of my friends, many of the questions were obviously adversarial, exposing the anger of those asking the questions, as well as their disdain for me. It then became so clear to me that questions are usually personal dogmatic statements with a question mark tacked on to the end.

About that time, a spiritual mentor of mine advised that I learn more about the art of asking the right question. Those who questioned Jesus were trying to catch him in their theological trap. His opponent’s questions were actually dogmatic proclamations of their own hardened theological positions. Jesus, understanding this, would throw a trap-question right back at them.

The truth is, most people don’t really want to learn because we really don’t want to change. We want to be affirmed in what we already believe. So, as a result, many of our “sincere” questions are really proud assertions of what we believe and want further confirmation on. One of my favorite philosophical/ spiritual teachers, Krishnamurti, believed that the question, which is usually a form of defense or escape, if rightly put, can bring true awareness and change (THE URGENCY OF CHANGE).

More on this to come!

“I am done with Great things and Big things, with Great institutions and Big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular forces, that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, but which, give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of men’s pride” (William James, VARIEITIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE; quoted in Eugene Peterson’s, LIKE DEW YOUR YOUTH, p. 34… an awesome book for insight into raising adolescents, by the way!).

This pretty much sums it up for me. Numbers no longer impress me. Well, okay, they impress me, but not enough for me to walk away from what I believe to be true. Numbers of people, amount of money, or the size of the facilities do not reveal the quality of the content. I constantly have to compare my methods, me as a pastor and we as a church, with what I believe to be in the character of Jesus as he lived in this world. He didn’t curry favor with the crowds, didn’t try to impress investors, didn’t care about popular opinion, and pressed on in spite of incredible opposition and ridicule. He lived what he believed at incredible cost. He didn’t compromise to attain critical mass!

Oswald Chambers, in MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST, said in today’s devotional reading:
“The real fasting of the preacher is not from food, but rather from eloquence, from impressiveness and exquisite diction, from everything that might hinder the gospel of God being presented.” I think this must be applied to church life in general, and ministry in particular.

I’m up early drinking coffee and getting my message ready to teach at our church. I’m teaching from Psalm 142. As Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” That touches on the theme this morning.

Here’s a painting I did recently, which is available in my EBAY STORE. This is the kind of art I’m doing right now. My art is about space, room, unclutteredness, distance, perspective, and freedom. I’m beginning to realize that this one word, “freedom”, is THE operative word for me and rather central to everything I do. Even my music has been accused of having to much “space” in it. But this is what I’m about, without apology. This is what captivates me (excuse the bad pun, especially in reference to freedom), motivates me, and guides me in almost everything I do. As a pastor, this is what I believe is my driving force. I love seeing people liberated from the religious spirit and brought out into a spacious place. So, take a look!

One of my mottos, (I believe I invented it?), is “authenticity with accountability”. This is something that I try to practice in my life, and especially in how I pastor a church. I love authenticity in people, and I believe my most intense passion is to see people set free to be authentically who they are. I love watching people liberated, especially from the oppressive bonds of religion and the religious spirit. In fact, I think this is the most important part of my job description. Jesus came, he himself believed and proclaimed, first to the house of Israel. His mission, if he chose to accept it, was to set prisoners free, and I think this refers to those who were hopelessly oppressed under the heavy burden of religion.

Accountability, though, is just as necessary. Releasing people into authenticity is difficult in itself. But challenging people to be accountable in their authenticity is even more difficult. That’s been my experience and observation. This is how it looks: if your authenticity is harmful to others, then you need to do some serious introspection and perhaps some changing. Now, I’m not talking about how my authenticity can hurt someone else’s feelings. In that case, we’d never reach independence or inter-dependence, which is the goal. We are invited to authenticity, but not at the expense of others. Freedom leads to responsibility. And that’s the catch.

William Stringfellow said that freedom isn’t just for the sake of Christians or the church or God: “Rather, it is given in order that the world and all therein may recover wholeness and completion of life” (A Private and Public Faith, p. 76). This is personal and corporate wholeness and completion.