ken wilson online

Headline: “In the Latest Religious Battle, A Call to Arms for Mother Theresa.”  Some Christians wanted the Empire State building to honor Mother Theresa’s 100th birthday by displaying white and blue lights on the building.  The building managers said, “We don’t do that for religious figures.”  The Catholic Anti-Defamation League called for a public protest. And this honored Mother Theresa?  Shall we get a grip? It’s time to move beyond the communal instinct to “defend the faith” against the “attacks” of outsiders, and humbly consider what we’re doing to besmirch the gospel.  What are we doing to place a millstone ’round the neck of those who might otherwise find their way to faith?
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Like many of you, I’d just as soon replace the word, “evangelical” with something else.  Not because it isn’t a perfectly fine word, but for the response it evokes, thanks to the culture war tactics of so many American evangelicals in the last thirty years.  But the fact is, labels are difficult to shed, and the labeled are not consulted about their moniker preferences. (My parents didn’t seek my permission to name me and “Christians” were so named by the people of Antioch who were not believers.)  And I wonder if the hand of God isn’t behind this label’s stickiness.  Like God himself may be holding it in place on us until we understand what it means.
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If you’re a young pastor in the United States, you’ve grown up with the culture wars.  You may be sick to death of them, but you may also find them hard to shake.  In the middle of the noise, let me offer this counsel: don’t let the loudest voices intimidate you.  Do the work of an evangelist.  Keep your heart open to the heart of God for those who are the outside of faith looking in.  Like Billy Graham, in fact, who in his later years has had some pretty surprising things to say.
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Just got back from a sweet time in Sugar Land, Texas, home to the Sugar Land Vineyard and the headquarters of Vineyard: A Community of Churches.  It’s the deep South.  Tom DeLay’s old congressional district.  Senior Pastor of the Sugar Land Vineyard is Reagan Waggoner, named after you know who.  A talented younger pastor who has the Jesus nerve to teach on social justice.  A church I’d gladly attend every Sunday.  And a place I learned the wisdom of that Southern phrase, “y’all.”
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If you’re a young pastor, chances are you’re electronically connected: emailing, text messaging, Facebook, all the day long.  And you know this has an addictive quality. The brain is wired to be alert and curious about any new information.  And electronic media delivers!  We consume triple the daily information that we did (er, I did) in 1960.  While new media brings myriad advantages, you know in your bones that it’s also a curse: a steady stream of white noise that leaves you feeling a mile wide and an inch deep.
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Your job, young pastor, is to maintain a non-anxious presence within the church you pastor.  Knowing that we live in a time when anxiety is everywhere–a time when religion, in particular, has been whipped into a paralyzing frenzy of anxiety by those who are served by fear.  Easier said than done, maintaining a non-anxious presence.  Where to begin?  Befriend the book of Psalms.
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Here’s a myth about pastoring that will crush you if you mistake it for truth: when a pastor is doing his or her job, the church will be calm. Like any myth, this one endures because it distorts a truth: that good pastoring helps a church manage conflict, tension, and turmoil better than bad pastoring. (And that bad pastoring can generate enormous turmoil in a church.)  The myth hides the reality that we pastor now in an age of very high anxiety, owing to a rapid pace of change all around us.
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Advice to young pastors: When someone with a major media platform like Pat Roberston asserts that Haiti’s founders made a pact with the devil, we’re not supposed to just swallow the assertion whole.  It’s an extraordinary assertion, composed of four extraordinary necessities:  1.) that such a pact was actually made;  2.)  that those who made it were authorized to act on behalf of the entire nation;  3.) that it’s being made by those authorized to enter into such a pact actually bound Haiti spiritually for the next 200 years (at least); 4.) that it had anything whatsoever to do with the recent earthquake.   So far as I know, there’s no historical evidence that such a pact was made in the first place.  A Haitian pastor with the Church of God, Jean R. Gelin, Ph.D, did his homework and could  not come up with any credible historical source for the claim.  And that’s just the first first of the four necessities.   Why do we fall for these things?  
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You’ve already heard what he said: the earthquake in Haiti is the outworking of a spiritual, not a geologic history.  A supposed pact made with the devil around the time of Haiti’s birth as an independent nation. The wrong thing to say at the wrong time for so many reasons.  But let me just point out one of those reasons: laziness.  Robertson was cherry picking historical factoids.
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In case you haven’t noticed, your brain is wired to pay special attention to criticism.  And it doesn’t matter that you are your own harshest critic, now that email makes it emotionally painless to offer correction (don’t you love the anonymous “propetic” emails?), you will have plenty of opportunity to focus on your shortcomings.  So when the encouraging words come, hold on to them.  Yesterday I had doozy, and I aim to savor this one.
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