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Still on this theme.  Isaiah being a prophet is the master of the obvious when he says in God’s name, “My thoughts are not your thoughts.”  Which means that the task of a disciple is to be willing to think thoughts that are outside the realm of one’s ordinary thoughts.  Which is not an easy thing to do, neurologically. I read recently that 95% of our neurological activity is “automatic,” that is, while it involves our brain, it doesn’t require our active intention (so reading is automatic, but deciding to read involves active intention.)  And that the 5% of non-automatic activity is very tiring.  Like intending to think a thought that doesn’t come from within one’s normal realm of thinking.  So people of faith have adopted, or many of them (us) have, to view thoughts labeled “liberal” as either faithful or unfaithful to God, and thought labeled “conservative” the same.   In my neck of the religious landscape, liberal thoughts are “unfaithful to God” thoughts.  So let’s do a little thought experiment regarding the hot topic issue of abortion (ha! I’ve got your attention!) Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve known it for a long time, but it’s another thing to face it. A massive shift is underway that is profoundly reshaping the spiritual/cultural/religious landscape of American Christianity. Everything that can be shaken is being shaken it seems in the life and perspective of the church. Missionaries are grappling with deep theological issues raised by the efforts to bring the gospel into an Islamic context (how to understand Islam? who is Allah in relation to the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob and our Lord Jesus Christ?). Worship is shifting–and I mean contemporary worship. When Vineyard was forging a new way forward in contemporary worship there was a cultural consensus regarding contemporary music–pop/rock was king and had a vast following. But that’s changed with the internet and itunes and the millenial generation whose musical tastes are nothing if not eclectic. Read the rest of this entry »

Something’s come over me. Or came over me. Last Sunday, second service, and I stepped into a little wormhole or inspiration breeze, you don’t always know for sure. Touching the issue of warning against the adoption of the “liberal-conservative” category as a short-hand for “unfaithful-faithful” in matters of faith. I mean there in the sermon–what was a side-bar in the notes became a full stop, talk straight kind of thing. A little flushing or warmth around the ears kind of thing. Sounding like my brother in law Bill, here, I know. It was almost like feeling the thing itself–the category, I mean–bristling back, annoyed. I know this sounds charismatic or egomaniacal. I told you, something came over me. Read the rest of this entry »

Why has it taken me so long to see it this clearly? I believe the Spirit is calling the church to ditch, leave behind, renounce as centrally valid, the imbedded assumption that liberal/conservative is a valid category for discerning matters of faith. Better said, individual believers are being called, I believe, to examine, discern, consider thoughtfully and prayerfully the validity of this category as something that guides their response to matters related to their belief, their understanding of what constitutes faithfulness to Jesus and what doesn’t, what’s good for the church and what isn’t, what’s of the Spirit and what’s not of the Spirit. This is going to take time and thought and attention and prayer, but I think it’s actually a kind of spiritual warfare, to use that language, meaning that’s it’s part of the struggle between spiritual powers contending for our hearts. Read the rest of this entry »

A thick skin and a tender heart, that’s what you need if you’re serious about the pastor business. The thick skin will come with time and criticism. Either that, or you’ll find a different line of work. But the tender heart, oh my, that’s the one to pay attention to. I’m afraid that my deepest regrets in pastoring have to do with that. Especially in this environment where faithfulness to God is viewed through the false lens of “liberal vs. conservative.” Under this rubric the liberals are the moral softies, which means the conservatives are the hard-nosed (or posteriored) ones. But take a lesson from Billy Graham.

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Spent this past weekend with Charles Park, who is in the process of planting a church in Manhattan, near Wall Street. Charles has a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T. He talks about the need for churches to move into what the economists call “blue ocean,” the places where churches don’t thrive because the current approaches to Christianity aren’t working. Like Manhattan, where .05% of residents below, say, 95th Street (below Harlem) attend church. And 99.5% of residents don’t.

Blue ocean, in the world of economics, is where there aren’t any current viable business models. It’s contrasted with “red ocean” where a business model is working, where the sharks are feeding, so to speak, and typically, once a business model begins to work, other businesses flock to the same area to feed. Read the rest of this entry »

Been reading up on the brain and one of the things the human brain seems to be wired for is doing quick and dirty sorts on the overwhelming flood of data coming it’s way. To make our way through the world our brains simplify, simplify, simplify. Binary thinking is one such way: up-down, left-right, forward-backward, friend-foe, people who divide the world in two and those who don’t….. We do this for good reason: it’s necessary for survival–quick judgments required on new situations: safe or dangerous? The brain that can do this well–meaning quickly and with some degree of accuracy–lives to think another day. Because it’s such a powerful brain tendency, this binary thinking business, it’s important that we be careful about which binary categories we adopt as valid ones. Liberal-conservative is one that has outlived it’s usefulness for categorizing God truth, God experience, Jesus, the church, faith, Christianity, spirituality. Read the rest of this entry »

The older I get the more thankful I am for my earliest exposure to Christianity as an “adult” (age 18-19, but married.) My earliest teachers were reading the gospels primarily, with Paul as commentary (not the reverse) and writers like C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Soren Kierkegard and Karl Barth. Hope I spelled those correctly. I don’t recall hearing the words “evangelical” or “conservative” as faith categories from the mother ducks upon whom I, a brand new believer duckling imprinted.

One of my first teachers was a guy named Haskell Stone, a Jewish believer who studied under George Eldon Ladd at Fuller Theological Seminary back in the day. My earliest memory of the man is sitting in the backyard of a modest home in Detroit, with maybe 60 kids my age or thereabouts, watching him teach from the gospels from a seated position in a lawn chair, smoking a cigarette in a holder like FDR and thinking nothing of it. I assumed this was normal. Read the rest of this entry »