First, give yourself a break.  There’s a reason you feel inadequate when it comes to your text.  Chances are, your knowledge of the Bible is, well, inadequate.  This is likely the case even if you have read the Bible all the way through several times.

The Bible is a communal text but we no longer read or experience it communally.  Oh in small bursts we do, but for most of us the Bible is a text we engage individually, which means we don’t have the advantage of the multiple frames or lenses that come from a communal understanding. And if we do share a communal understanding because we’ve grown up in a Bible literate community (increasingly unlikely) such a communal reading is often narrow because each of the Bible-literate tribes that we’ve separated into have their massive blind spots.

So practically speaking, we don’t have the advantage of the multiple connections that come with a communal experience of the Bible: when one text reminds one in the community of another text, and another in the community of another text,  which, through the multiple facets that can only be enlighted by a multifaceted person, sprinkles new light, like fairy dust,  on each and the community feels a thickening in the atmosphere and goes, Wow! God is in the midst of us, speaking!

I mean, when you read through the Bible in a year,  you known darn well that certain books just get a quick skate over.  Leviticus, for example.  You finish that, and congratulate yourself for getting through it.  With all its foreign concepts and concerns.  If you’re wise, you realize you’ve actually absorbed perhaps half a micron from its surface and that, you’ve likely grossly misunderstood.

But you’ve heard that, say, its Rob Bell’s favorite book.  I think it’s my friend Mark Kinzer’s favorite book.  And you think, “What do they see that I don’t see?” and realize that you’ll never know until you know them and can talk it over with them–to feel what they feel, known what they know, see what they see in the thing.  Something you may not even be able to absorb from a good commentary on Leviticus, and how many of us have bothered to engage a good commentary on Leviticus, as a book like that would require to yield even it’s first surface half micron’s worth of inspiration?

Here’s the advice part:

1. Be humble about your Bible knowledge.  It really is inadequate.  When you wander into realms where angels fear to tread, understand that you enter as a very nearsighted, near deaf, olfactory and tactile deficient sensory being.  Just because you know a lot more Bible than the people around you [perhaps one of the easiest things a person can ever achieve] doesn’t mean diddly.

2. Start investing now in the project of engaging the Bible with the realization that the really big rewards for your investment are decades away.  If you can’t operate on that time scale, consider another calling or reckon with the one you’ve got.

3. But here’s something you can DO, now: Start practicing The Divine Hours.  I’ve been at it for close to 10 years running now and it’s been as helpful for my Bible knowledge as any single practice (including reading through the Bible in a year, which, like you, I’ve done several times.)

The Divine Hours is a form of fixed hour prayer using Scripture and the prayers of the church soaked in Scripture.  Fixed hour as in praying with Scripture at short intervals 3-4 times per day.   If you’re in a hurry, might take 12 full minutes out of your day, but you’ll have to carve out 3-4 two minute intervals.  That little discipline, my fellow pastor, may not be easy, but it will be incredibly rewarding, though the rewards will not be evident until the practice is moving close to the habitual threshold. [I've got a chapter on fixed hour prayer in Mystically Wired, which I'd love for you to buy as I've got one last kid in college.]

The Divine Hours is littered with connections that come with a communal experience of the Bible.  Take for example, “The Refrain for the Daily Lessons” from this morning’s office, Saturday closest to Jan. 22: The Lord executes righteousness and judgment for all who are oppressed.

This refrain frames the morning office reading from Luke 6: 27-30, Luke’s mini sermon on the mount with the love your enemies, turn the other cheek bit.

The refrain is a hint from the massive storehouse of communal wisdom: turning the other cheek is the action of an oppressed person empowered by an incredibly powerful God to overcome the hatred of his or her enemy with a love that will outlast the enemy’s hatred.  In your face, enemy!  I’m more powerful than you because my God is with me, loving you! [Of course it ruins it if you say that to the enemy, but it's probably fine to think it.]

The refrain repeats (being, after all, a refrain) and then you’re into the morning psalm, which is 59: 5-11 all about God punishing the wicked, showing no mercy to the faithless, evil, snarling dogs.  The refrain, again, is a hint: this prayer is from the Judge who delivers the oppressed, for the oppressed. Of course it sounds obscene when voiced by the powerful who are likely if unwittingly part of the oppressive empire.  Because it ain’t for them, but these others.  We won’t be able to pray this psalm with integrity, perhaps, unless we identify with the oppressed if we aren’t among them.

And so on.

It might take you multiple decades of daily reading through the Bible alone in your study to make a connection like that.

But if you practice a form of prayer like The Divine Hours, you’ll at least have the opportunity, day in and day out, to catch those echoes of a long ago communal conversation between people pickled in this marvelous text, many of whom stepped through the text as though it were a portal into the presence of the living God breathing the text into the clay of words invented by clay-people.

The third largest religious group in America (behind Roman Catholics and Evangelicals) is now “Nones”: those with no affiliation whatsoever.  Very few of the new “Nones” are atheists.  (Only 2 in his sample of over 3,000!) But they have a very negative view of religion.

Oh, and the young: they are dropping out of organized religion at record rates, and the number one reason?  Aversion to the blend of one party politics and faith found in the Religious Right.  The young (18-34) are flocking to the “Nones” like nobody’s business.

Except that it’s your business, young pastor.

Unless what you want is to lead the coolest, hippest, full-service church on the block, drawing from a shrinking pool of believers who want to be yet more fully served.

That’s not what I signed up for, and I’m OLD!

Robert Putnam, though, has a cogent observation.  He says, in effect, don’t count religion out. Someone will figure out how to draw those “Nones” closer to God.  Those “Nones” who are, for lack of a better word, secular.

If Jesus were walking our patch of planet earth today, he would be paying extra special attention to the “Nones.”  They would feel as though he understands them.  His approach to them would make the religious insiders nervous.  Around him, they would feel like insiders, not outsiders.  And soon, they would be loving him.

This may be your task, young pastor–something worth risking for.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the church. I’ve devoted most of my life to the church.  I believe in the church.   Jesus is with the church for better or worse–he’s committed to working through flesh and blood.

The church in the United States does a great deal of good, much of it unsung.  The global relief efforts supported by church based missions around the world are STAGGERING in their scope. The hungry would be hungrier without churches.  The fragile fabric of community in this ever man for himself culture would be torn asunder without churches being churches.

But we’ve managed to shoot ourselves in our gospel-clad feet.  Consider this: the largest Christian institution is wracked by a paedophilia scandal that will be with us for our lifetime.  The most vibrant religious movement in the United States–evangelicalism–has squandered it’s inheritance in exchange for what?  To become a hard-ball political force deeply entwined with with one political-cultural alliance, branding the Jesus faith as pro-war, anti-gay, pro-Israel whether justice is served or not,  anti-environment, anti-science.   The book by the Barna Group, UnChristian, provides the gruesome details.

I’ve been a believer since 1971, and it didn’t use to be this way.  The barriers in the path of those who are in need of some good news are massive. If we are in denial over these things, it’s completely understandable.

Christians have always been, will always be, misunderstood. We claim to follow a guy who who rose from the dead. This will invite skepticism.  But that does not account for the state of things today.

I really do, believe it or not, hesitate to speak like this. But in this post, as in the previous two, I’m writing for fellow pastors.  We cannot afford to candy coat what it is we’re up against. And the responsibility we have to do our small part to change it.

We have a responsibility to understand how outsiders read us.  And the impact their reading has.  Because people don’t read the Bible until they’ve read the readers of the Bible and find in them a story they want to explore further.

Let us take the matter of science that’s been the concern of the previous two posts.

Let’s say you are a non-religious person who is open to believing.  You’ve have never encountered a compelling reason to believe; you’ve never been close to a compelling witness.  But you have a new friend who is also a believer.  Reads the Bible daily.  Gives generously–ten percent of income to the church and more than that for other neighbors in need.  Gives way more than you do to causes you believe in.

But then, your friend starts spouting opinions that you can’t help but regard as crackpot opinions.  I don’t know, say he thinks the moon landing was a hoax, or believes aliens have been abducting people on a regular basis, or is convinced the President of the United States is a Muslim.

Mind you, I’m not arguing that the moon landing wasn’t a hoax or that aliens haven’t been abducting people for a long time.  I’m just trying to help you appreciate how jarring it would be, when someone you would otherwise respect, turns out to hold, for lack of a better word, crackpot views.  It makes you wonder if this new friend is someone you want to listen to when it comes to discerning what is real and what is not.

That’s how many normal, moderate, considerate people view those who think science has it all wrong–that the earth is really 10,000 years old, rather than 4,500,000,000 years old, say, or that evolution is a theory in crisis, or that climate science is part of a vast left wing conspiracy to lead us down the primrose path of socialism.

Please, if you hold any of these views, I am not calling you a crackpot.  I  know many very intelligent and thoughtful people who have the aforementioned opinions.  I don’t think of them as crackpots.  But I have the insider information needed to see them differently than others do.

But, pastor, can you place yourself in the position of someone who might perceive these as crackpot opinions? Opinions that would affect your  willingness to trust a person’s ability to bear reliable witness to something you don’t yet see?

I’m using the inflammatory word, “crackpot” so you can appreciate the feelings many people have when, from the outside, they look into the Christian culture.

But you, as a pastor, have a responsibility to face this reality squarely–this missional reality, that is–and decide what to do about it. Is it OK with you that millions of people are reluctant to accept the witness of the church because in their view Christians hold very strange opinions about scientific matters?  As a pastor, do you challenge this reality and seek to change it?  Or do you play along?  Oh, well. This is the way it is.  If it makes people stay away from God, so be it.

The church is the authenticating structure of the gospel, as N.T. Wright says.  People who don’t know whether the gospel is reliable or not, look to the people who organize their lives around the gospel to see how it impacts the community they form around the gospel. Does the community formed  by the gospel taste, feel, seem, like good news?

What is the message of your church culture to the people on the outside of faith looking in, kicking its tires, so to speak?

When people who care deeply about science or who identify culturally with science whether or not they are personally interested in it come to your church, do they go away saying, “These are reliable witnesses, they might be on to something.”  Or do they go away thinking, “Those are some nice people but, but gosh, they have some strange opinions when it comes to science!”

A long, long time ago, a North African Bishop named Augustine, one of the great lights of the later Reformers, said this about the way some believers of his time were reading the first chapter of the book of Genesis:

“It often happens that even a non-Christian knows a thing or two about the earth, the sky, the various elements of the world, about the movement and revolution of the stars and even their size and distance, about the nature of animals, shrubs, rocks, and the like, and maintains this knowledge with sure reason and experience. It is offensive and ruinous, something to be avoided at all cost, for a nonbeliever to hear a Christian talking about these things as though with Christian writings as his source, and yet so nonsensically and with such obvious error that the nonbeliever can hardly keep from laughing.

The trouble is not so much that the erring fellow is laughed at but that our authors are believed by outsiders to have held those same opinions and so are despised and rejected as untutored men, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil…How are they going to believe our books concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven when they think they are filled with fallacious writing about things which they know from experience or sure calculation?

There is no telling how much harm these rash and presumptuous people bring upon their more prudent brethren when they begin to be caught and argued down by those who are not bound by the authority of our Scriptures, and when they then try to defend their flippant, rash, and obviously erroneously statements by quoting a shower of words from those same Sacred Scriptures, even citing from memory those passages which they think support their case, ‘without understanding either what they are saying or things about which they make assertions’ (I Tim. 1:7)” – St. Augustine in The Literal Meaning of Genesis  [By "literal" Augustine means something more like, "literary".]

I know this series of posts on evolution seems like much ado about nothing. A side issue.  But there’s more than science at stake.  The gospel is at stake as well.  That’s the only reason Billy Graham weighed in on evolution, knowing full well he was wading into the swamp on this one.  But Billy Graham was dead on.

Augustine was dead on too.  And we’ve got to face the tough truth he spoke so long ago, again today, together.

Young pastor, help make a church that would make Augustine proud. Even it means stirring the pot a little.  Billy Graham has done the heavy lifting for you. The Bible is not a book of science.  God could easily work through an evolutionary process his wonders to perform. You love your Bible?  Billy loves his Bible too.

And there are many others who would read the thing, if we just got out of their way.

There’s something in this descriptor that touches the heart of God. God is evangelical–in the sense that God has a heart for the outsider and seeks to bring the outsider good (to them) news.  (The term is from a N.T. Greek word that refers to the announcing or proclaiming of news.)

So if you are a young pastor wrestling with the word, evangelical, allow me to recommend that you care less about the marketing albatross that we’d all love to jettison, and wrestle instead with God, like Jacob at Jabok.  Over His evangelicalism that is. Over His  affection for the outsider.

To be evangelical is to care as much for the outsider as the insider.  Do you realize how difficult a thing that is?  Especially if you are a pastor?

Who pays the bills: insiders or outsiders?  Who has more power over you, pastor: insiders or outsiders?  Who do you spend more time with, day in-day out: insiders or outsiders?

I thought so.

This means that, all else being equal, your heart is more inclined toward the insiders.  That’s an inescapable sociological, psychological, and spiritual reality.

Many years ago, I read “On the Religious Affections” by Jonathan Edwards.  I was convicted by that book that my heart had grown hard, as Edwards defined the condition. My heart was suffering from a dearth of “fleshiness” and a surfeit of “stoniness.”  You’ll have to read the book to catch the gist of Edwards on this.  (Besides the Bible itself, this book has affected me more than any other.)

It was deeply disturbing, this realization.   It drove me to a kind of desperate praying, which over time, led to extended periods of weeping, a most uncommon occurrence in one with a stony heart.   The weeping was of a most peculiar sort.  It was, for lack of a better word, empathetic.  As if my mirror neurons were responding to God’s heart for outsiders.   It felt as though I were feeling what God feels toward those on the outside of faith looking in.  What Jesus feels for them.  Remembering myself as one of them.

It was, and is, the tenderest feeling.  The most ferociously gentle affection. The most scandalously sympathetic disposition.

During this time, I think I became more truly evangelical.

Over the years since then, I find myself increasingly in tension with my evangelical tribe. Perhaps you’ve noticed.

Why do evangelicals who go by the motto “love the sinner but hate the sin” have such a difficult time convincing the sinners of their love?   Why do environmentalists, secular scientists (especially biologists) feel the prickliness of our tribe?

What kind of evangelical was Jesus?  He was the sort of evangelical beloved by the tax collectors, the sexual outcasts, the party throwing riff-raff of Israel, the people who were on the outside of Israel’s faith, looking in.

The fact that these people so delighted in Jesus led many in his own religious community to accuse him of compromise. His view of Scripture was  suspect. He failed the orthodoxy litmus tests applied to him by the litmus testers.

If we’re following Jesus, shouldn’t we be accused of the same things he was accused of? At least every now and then? Unless we’re not guilty of following him.

For that matter, what kind of evangelical was Paul? The kind considered too accommodating to Gentiles, playing it fast and loose with the Law, a Scripture-fracturer.

Which brings me to Billy Graham and his comments about Scripture and evolution.

Young pastor, are you deeply affected by insiders who think evolution is a threat to Christianity?  Are you reluctant to poke this topic for fear that you will disturb your fellows who bristle at the word?  I was.

If you live in a culturally conservative community–in which even those who don’t attend church think the world was created 10,000 years ago in six, 24 hour days–then you’re off the hook.   Don’t waste your time on these matters. Life is too short and the kingdom is a coming.

But if you’re in a major metropolitan area, and certainly if you have a major University in your town, you’re stuck with this thing.

Your fear of the insiders may be hindering you from making the gospel known to outsiders. I know fear may not be something you’re willing to cop to, so let’s call it instead the inclination to please or the disinclination to displease.

It may affect what you read, what you question, what you assume.   David Brooks says it well: “We have confirmation bias: we pick out evidence that supports our views. We are cognitive misers; we try to think as little as possible and conform our perceptions to fit in with the group.”

Like most pastors, you’re not looking for more conflict to manage.

See how difficult a thing this is?

Pastoring is already messy business, who is looking for more mess to muck about in?

I don’t know what to say except that you might have thought of that before you got into this line of work at this particular time in history.

So what’s to be done?

Perhaps you could go friend-making. Find some people with graduate degrees in science–people who are not socialized in the American evangelical milieu.  People who read Scientific American or Discover or Nature.  Who prefer N.P.R. to A(ngry) M(an) radio.  Even those who simply enjoy science,  whose eyes don’t glaze over when the Big Bang comes up, will do.

It’s not a huge group, this science loving crowd, but it’s the inner circle of a much larger community of people who are not the church going type–the people for whom science is an accepted authority.

Chances are you are not reaching these people, not with your church as it is.   Even though yours is a hip-contemporary-emergo-not-your-father’s Oldsmobile church.  These are the people who stay away from church for fear of meeting people who think their views of science are deeply mistaken; they are the people who don’t bother going because they assume that Scripture and science–as they know science–are necessarily at odds with each other.

Go find some people like that and get to know them.  Listen to their thoughts about science. Ask questions in the hopes of hearing even more.  Seek to understand what you hear.

Do whatever it takes for as long as it takes until your  heart leans toward them sympathetically.

And pray and read and pray some more to see if you can imagine a bridge from the Bible to them.  Even if it feels a little daring or daunting to imagine such a bridge.

Later in life, when Billy Graham said what he said to David Frost about Genesis 1-3 not being science, he revealed his evangelical heart.  I’m guessing he had you in mind when he said such a thing, hoping you would have ears to hear.

Like this, on evolution: “I don’t think there’s any conflict at all between Science today and the Scriptures. I think we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we’ve tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren’t meant to say. I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course, I accept the Creation story.  I believe that God did create the universe.  I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man….whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man’s relationship to God.”  (Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man, by David Frost and Fred Bauer)

Yes, that’s Billy Graham saying the Bible is not a book of science and that it is not incompatible with evolution.  Let me restate that for clarity: Billy Graham says evolution and Scripture are compatible. We all know that in many churches, were a pastor say such a thing from the pulpit, he might be looking for a different job.

All over the nation pastors who see it as Billy Graham sees it stay quiet about it, because pastors do not enjoy stirring up conflict.  And this, of course, is at the expense of the gospel finding a hearing among the many people outside of faith who don’t have a gripe with evolutionary science.  Which is to say, modern science.

I’m guessing that Billy Graham hasn’t written books on this topic.  It came up in an interview late in his life.  He has so much credibility that no one is going to cancel a Billy Graham crusade because of this quote.

The challenge in pastoral ministry is always to gain and maintain Billy Graham’s heart for the gospel; that is to say his heart for people hearing the gospel who have not had access to it.  If you don’t lean toward the outsider, the church won’t.  And if you do, you may have a more difficult job in the church.

So this will test your mettle.  And it’s only one of the radioactive issues you will have to wrestle with.

By wrestle, I mean study.  Read books that are outside your comfort zone.  All the major issues facing the church today–the hot button issues, the culture war issues–have a strong science component.  Are you willing to read some science?  I mean science written by scientists, not Christians leaders, pastors, or lobbyists, who are critiquing the scientists.

I’m guessing you didn’t go into pastoral ministry because you love science.  You probably preferred religion classes in your college days. But John Wesley exhorted the circuit riders to read books, lots of them, and to include science in their reading.

If you don’t study up on this issue, you will be subject to the prevailing winds of the culture, especially the church culture.  The loudest voices will prevail, at the expense of the gospel.

If previous posts in this blog are any indication, the angst will be evident in the comments. Reading the comments you might say to yourself, “Why would I want to step into this hornet’s nest?”   You should have considered that before becoming a pastor.  Unless your heart beats like Billy Graham’s heart beats, you might want to consider a change in your line of work.

Y’all, I heard it every day, many times over.  Server at the restaurant said “y’all” 4 times in 30 seconds. Favorite iteration, “How are all y’all doin’?”

Boom, it hit me: these people have a plural form of the word “you.”  We need to stop, drop, roll, and adopt this.  We need a Thomas Nelson “The Y’All Bible Translation.”

Because we often read the Bible falsely.  “Christ in you, the hope of glory” we read, hearing “Christ in you [singular you, as in me, myself, and I] the hope of glory.”  So that one of our contemporary worship songs makes it “Christ in me, Christ in me, Christ in me, the hope of glory.”

But the “you” is a plural you, y’all.  Christ in y’all, the hope of glory.  Christ in the gathered you, Christ in the communal you, Christ in the networked you, the hope of glory.

And this happens often when we read the Bible.  The “you” in English can be singular or plural.  But with our individualism lenses on, we almost always hear it as singular.

Can you imagine a more pernicious confusion?

Wonder why we have an I, me, my Christianity?  A consumer Christianity? A “What have you done for me lately?” Christianity? A church conceived of and engaged in as though it were a collection of individuals?

The South is a more communal culture for its use of “y’all.” And it’s no surprise that the South is also a more mystical culture. Because the mystical parts of the brain are the ones that connect the self to the beyond-the-self, as though the self in itself is perhaps the first hint of hell, and the self connected to the beyond-the-self is the first taste of heaven.

So pastors, when you’re reading the Bible or teaching from the Bible, get your bearings straight on the meaning of the yous.  When the you is plural, specify that it is. Adopt the y’all, y’all.  And see if it doesn’t change everything.

No, you don’t have to get off the grid to escape. Though the occasional day long (or longer) media fast, come to think of it, is a great idea.  I’m sure I’m less connected than you are, but here’s what I do to make a little more space for whatever it is that happens when I’m not checking email.  I’m working the art of sacred disconnection points through the day.  Training my brain to let me unplug from the digital machine.

1. No emails an hour before bedtime. Most of my anxiety producing communication happens through email.  You know the story–the tone, the freedom to speak one’s mind without regard for the emotions of the receiver, etc.  Train your brain, by repetition, over and over, until it’s habitual, not to check email an hour before bedtime.

2. Set up an electronic media free zone. A prayer chair in a prayer corner, perhaps.  A place you go to get off the the information highway.  Whatever you do in that chair, don’t have anything to do with anything that depends on binary code there.

3. Practice prayer at intervals through the day. Morning and night is an interval.  But the real  benefits come when you add a mid-day interruption–a pause in the action to duck in for a few minutes of prayer somewhere.  I use The Divine Hours, by Phyllis Tickle.  And yes, it feels at first like extracting a tooth–pulling yourself away from whatever it is that is occupying your thoughts.   But it gets easier with repetition and the act of pulling yourself away trains your brain to refocus.  And if your brain is not able to do that, my fellow pastor, you will be a sucker for any enslavement.

4. Practice a focusing prayer–like the Jesus Prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.”  First part on the inhale, second part on the exhale.  Over and over, meditatively, for oh, say, a minute or two–better yet five or ten.  Yes, your mind will rebel at first, running riot like a toddler past his nap time.  But every time it tries to focus on anything other than the prayer, you just gently and non-judgmentally turn your attention back to the words of the prayer.

Add these practices one at a time over time as you are able.  Pick one and insist on it with yourself.  Meaning, keep returning to it after forgetting until it’s habitual.  You know, habitual, like checking email when you’ve got a spare moment, or taking at peek at what’s happening on the Twitternet from your iPhone.

I know, it’s probably not called the Twitternet. But, hey! I’m a boomer, and at least I’m trying, so give me credit for that.

[What's a good book to help with this sort of thing,  you might ask?  Funny you should ask.]

Yes, I know we all have favorite books of the Bible to which we turn in a pinch and to which we return often. And yours may not be the book of Psalms.  But I’m going to dare say that you’re going to need this friend whether you’re drawn to him or not.

Pastoring is an immersion in the human–your own and others.

Jesus immersed himself in humanity by virtue of being born a human, by virtue of his stepping into the waters of baptism–a baptism of repentance for sinners, no less–and by making friends with the book of Psalms.

The psalms are an exploration of what it means to be a human being before God: the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful and everything in between.  Angry human, fearful human, crowing human, vulnerable human, righteous human, thankful human,  sinful human, happy human, complaining human, praising human.  Because God wants to be near all of it, and it’s a good thing that he does, because it’s the only way the likes of us will ever be near God.

But you, as a pastor, will be tempted to be other than what you are.  You will be tempted to be what your are supposed to be before God, or what your fellow believers want you to be before God.  Which means that you will often be missing from God, hiding behind one of these personas.

The psalms, over time, will break you of that habit.  When you wish to be refined, a psalm will be vulgar–in it’s brazen hostility toward others, for example, or in its willingness to complain loudly.  Most of the time, the psalms will be more human than you are, or wish to be before God.

I spent a great deal of time arguing with the psalms and the tone they adopt, but I’ve given that up mostly and just accept the reality that they represent me better than I might wish to be represented.  It’s a humbling thing to realize that you need to enter the prayers of someone else to learn how to be yourself.

Over time, the psalms train us to accept our humanity as God apparently does. Which means they train us, over time, to accept people as they are, including ourselves.  And they lead us into the posture that Jesus had toward us fellow human beings: sympathy.

If we can only learn to be our human selves before God as the psalmists learned to be their human selves before God, we can begin to maintain a non-anxious presence before God.  We can learn to accept ourselves, in other words.  And there’s no maintaining an non-anxious presence before others without that.

I’ve found a wonderful way to cozy up to the psalms.  It’s called The Paraclete Psalter.  O my goodness, stop, drop and buy this thing.  It’s only thirteen bucks on Amazon– thin and leather bound, too.  It’s the product of an ecumenical community called The Jesus Community—survivors [Yes! Survivors!] of the Jesus movement that began in the late 1960’s.  When you can find a group, an organized group of Jesus freaks who have survived the turmoil that we baby boomers imposed on the Jesus movement, you know you have found something worth noticing.  These men and women have been praying the psalms daily for a long time and the psalms have become embedded in their spirituality, and this Psalter [collection of psalms] is the by-product.

I’ve been using this for the past month instead of The Divine Hours–the most accessible form of fixed hour prayer available.  I’ll go back to using The Divine Hours, but I’ll also return to this Psalter for a month at a time–or who knows, maybe I’ll just stick with it and The Divine Hours.

There’s just something about pausing to use these prayers of the insistently-human-before-God through the day, when you’re actually going about your can’t-be-anything-but-human business, that makes you realize God might want to be near this mess.

Step back from the trees to see the forest. The chart of global population looks like a hockey stick.  Many of you were born when the population of the earth was 6 billion and by the time you die it will be 9 billion.

Layer over this, the rate of technological change.  The speed of computing doubles every 18 months.

Or hear the witness of an old guy. When I started out as a pastor, I had to respond to three forms of communication: face to face conversation, land-line telephone conversations (before answering machines were commonplace–so no one could leave a message), and letters delivered by the U.S. Postal Service five days a week.  Yes, in my lifetime.

Now we have to keep track of communications from all of the above plus cell phones on our person, email, and text messages  (not to mention Facebook and the rest.)  Imagine how peaceful your life would be if you didn’t have to deal with phone messages, cell phones, and e-mail.  I remember sitting in my office thirty years ago, having completed all of my tasks and wondering what to do next.  I kid you not, I actually that experience now and again.

With the increased communication comes increased activity between and among people and increased expectations–all of which adds enormous anxiety to the system.

Thirty years ago, most Christianity was practiced within the context of relatively old institutions.  Doctrine was relatively static and institutionally defined. Clergy were trained in institutionally coherent seminaries and pastors were people who managed relatively well defined and stable systems.

All that has changed as we have entered the post-denominational era.  Church institutions have weakened enormously, placing much greater pressure on local churches to deal with virtually all of the big issues.

I entered pastoral ministry at the beginning of the post-denominational era, without seminary training or a solid institutional framework.  The church I pastored had to figure out the big issues more or less on its own.

And there were big issues to resolve.  The church that began in my living room in the 1970’s was composed exclusively of people under the age of 25.  Few were married.  None had been divorced.  We expected that every marriage would be lifelong and there was no reason a Christian would need to get divorced.  I realize how naive that sounds.  But it means that we had to decide ourselves, with the Bible, and the Spirit, and reason, and experience (which was, for along time, in short supply) how to respond to divorce and remarriage.

We had to process the tsunami of the feminism (it was a movement back then) and decide whether the pastorate should remain a men-only club or not.  And we had to engage this almost exclusively within the resources of the local church.

Now we face issues just as controversial as these (f you’re a young pastor, you probably can’t imagine that these old issues were controversial.) But we have to do so with more anxiety in the system than we had back then, owing to the unrelenting pace of change. To simply engage these issues–ask open-ended questions, for example–raises the collective blood pressure.

Think about it: There was no Religious Right or its equivalent when I got into pastoring.  Evangelicals elected Jimmy Carter, a pro-choice Democrat.  No one identified Christianity with one political party.   No a.m. talk shows organized around politics, no cable news networks, nothing like the news-entertainment-radical political brew that saturates the airwaves today. Oh, and no Internet access either.  No forwarded emails from prophetic ministries before Presidential elections pronouncing prophetic curses on those who don’t toe some party line.

Edwin Friedman, in A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, says that pastors and rabbis are facing incredible levels of anxiety within their congregations because we live in an age of anxiety.  The system is saturated with anxiety.

To lead in such a time requires leaders who can maintain a non-anxious presence in an anxious system.

Let that sink in, young pastor.

The key to leadership in an age of anxiety goes deeper than anything you can ever learn in a book on leadership methods. It goes beyond any data driven decisions you can generate.  It goes beyond leadership techniques, or organizational models.

It presses into the sanctuary of your inner life: your capacity to be at peace in a swirl of turmoil.

More on this in future posts….

Because we’re lazy; because we’re frightened by earthquakes and want to assure ourselves that it won’t happen where we live; and because there is a power of evil at work in the world who wants to cover up his/its real work.

We’re lazy. We prefer simple answers that we can grasp easily that seem to explain everything. This devil pact is a doozy on that front: why is Haiti in such a mess?  Because it was founded on a pact with the devil. What could be simpler? What could require less mental effort to grasp?

And we’re afraid.  To be going about your business one moment only to have the ground beneath your feet give way the next is a terrifying prospect.  If it could happen there, it could happen here. Fortunately, there’s a reason it happened there: a pact was made with the devil by the nation’s founders.  Our nation, by contrast, had a solid foundation. We’ve got The American Patriot’s Study Bible to prove it.  I kid you not.  Read it and learn how the second amendment was rooted in the book of Genesis.

And because there is a power of evil who likes nothing more than to cover up evil.  Haiti was subjected to the most brutal, cruel slavery by a Christian nation, France.  After the slaves overthrew the French, the developed nations of the time, ours included, made sure that Haiti paid reparations to their French oppressors, for about a hundred years–a crushing debt.   This is all conveniently obscured by the story of some Haitian slaves making a pact with the devil.

And lets not forget our hankering for cheap thrills. How thrilling it is to be let in on a secret.  Most people have a very difficult time explaining why these horrific things happen: an earthquake that costs 150,000 lives (and counting) and leaves a nation devastated.  Ah, but we have a juicy tidbit of insider information: the founders of Haiti made a pact with the devil in a back room somewhere on January 1, 1804, or whenever it wasn’t.

Don’t fall for this stuff.

Instead, do something immediately to help the Haitian people.  For starters, figure out how much money you make in a single day’s work, and give that amount to an organization involved in bringing relief to Haiti.  If you make 100,000 a year that’s, what? $400.  If you make 25,000 a year, it’s $100.

There is a universal gesture when confronted with staggering tragedy: we cover our mouths.  This is wisdom at work:  there are no explanations for these things.  The Bible bears witness to the reality of evil. The Bible reveals humans engaged in a struggle with evil.   The Bible, amazingly, reveals a God both sovereign over evil and affected, touched, bruised, bloodied by it himself.  The one thing the Bible doesn’t try to do when it comes to evil is explain it.  Neither should we.