ken wilson online

Skills, gifts, knowledge, passion, all pale in comparison to the emotional intelligence you’re going to need, young pastor. Of course, there are many other jobs with intense emotional demands–teaching, parenting, medicine, running a business–but this business is surely one of them. The emotional intelligence that’s needed involves the cultivation, simultaneously, of a thick skin along with a tender heart.
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I’ve been reflecting, meditating, prayerfully musing on the six days of creation in Genesis, chapter one–taking one day each day every day for three weeks now. Letting the words exert themselves on me. What powerful words they are. Like Day Five, using the Robert Alter translation: “And God said, ‘Let the waters swarm with the swarm of living creatures and let fowl fly over the earth across the vault of the heavens.’ And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that crawls, which the water had swarmed forth of each kind and the winged fowl of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas and let the fowl multiply in the earth.’ And it was evening and it was morning, fifth day.”
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Writing a book, like having a conversation or putting words to your thoughts in any form, is an exercise in learning what you believe. It’s not just that you believe something and then put it into words. You discover what it is that you believe in the process of putting it into words. You read the book you write, or you hear the words formed by your thoughts in a conversation, for the first time. Like God in Genesis, chapter one, orchestrated the creation, made what he made, and then saw it himself for the first time, pondered it, and said, “It’s good.” Here’s a crack at summarizing what I believe after more than a few decades of organizing my life in fits and starts around Jesus of Nazareth and his path through this world:
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Bob Dylan produced three albums during his openly Jesus-faith period: Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love. Somewhere along the line, something happened and Dylan went icognito with his faith. One can only imagine he overdosed on something–not Jesus most likely but something on the religious landscape burned him bad. There’s a hint, maybe in The Disease of Conceit, recorded after his out there Jesus time. It’s written in the cadence of an old tent revival and it happens to be about the occupational hazard of religion.
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The Jesus movement that swept me into love with Jesus of Nazareth was the one that read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian who led the faith resistance to Hitler and lost his life in the process of gaining it. Bonhoeffer railed against what he called “cheap grace.” In the Lutheran orthodoxy of his day, the proof of orthodoxy was to demonstrate no inclination to lean toward “works”–salvation by faith through grace alone. The easiest way to assure the guardians of orthodoxy that you were safely orthodox was to deny any cost to discipleship–because that was dangerously close to “reliance on works.” You’d have to be Lutheran to understand how this worked. Bonhoeffer called that whole thing, cheap grace. Today in my tribe there’s something similar at work: cheap orthodoxy.
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I traveled down with a van load of Ann Arbor Vineyard friends to speak at the Columbus Vineyard Joshua House–the twenty something Sunday evening service. Found myself speaking to them as an old(er) Jesus freak, seeking to convey something that I’m struggling to put into words. I’ll keep trying till I get it.

All theology is biography ultimately–something we can’t shy away from if our study of God involves the knowing of a truth in person whose first-last-and deepest truth telling begins-ends-continues with the words, “I am.” All of biblical truth is carried on the back of a donkey called story–history, his story, the story that includes and redeems and transforms our story, because a plot likes nothing better than to thicken. And so I find myself struggling to tell my Jesus freak story to this generation that’s filling up the likes of Joshua House.
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My new grandson, Micah Timothy, that is. Born Saturday night, 18 minutes after arrival at the hospital. His dad, my son, had every father’s dream come true: driving the car with horn blasting and lights flashing because momma went from zero to fifty in the labor lane and caught everyone off guard. But now he’s here. The future, that is, with a name and a face. Outfitted, is he, for decades to come that many of us will not see. What are we doing to insure that the world he inherits isn’t too grim a place to inhabit? Not enough right now. Instead, many in my own wider faith tribe are acting as though this talk of looming distress is a load of boo-honkey. We’re betting against the facts, I humbly submit, wagering the likes of Micah’s future.
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