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Subscribe to CommentsWell of course you have. Then why did you cringe with the title of this post? Because you probably realize how incredibly daunting the Bible can be–you who wrestle with it week to week to make it sensible to others. Those others can maintain the comfortable fiction that the Bible is a plain and simple text for plain and simple people, as accessible as Chicken Soup for the Soul or The Purpose Driven Life.
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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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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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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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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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Every systematic theology, every air-tight system, every completely consistent view of the bible, every logically constructed and perfectly put together faith, crashes like waves on the shoreline of God. Because the Bible is not the system in written form and the system, once “discovered” (read: invented) is not the solution. The Bible is a living, breathing, personal witness to a living, breathing, personal God, with whom we have to do. This is what drives us crazy about the God revealed in the Bible–a God of mystery, paradox, plain speech, simple commands, subtly, a.k.a. a personal God: a someone with whom we have to do. Directly. Last night I went to sleep dreaming-praying…
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I’ve owed you this post for a while. Yes, I have a pebble in my shoe over the current state of the American evangelical movement of which my tribe, the Vineyard, is a part. Yes, I think Phariseeism is alive and well in evangelicalism. I’d call my own out if I saw it, but others are free to do so in the comments section. And yes, I’m bored by Christians who call out the sins of the world like it’s a worthwhile hobby. Or like it’s news. Been there, done that. Spent fifteen years of my life in that mode, and I guess I got it off my chest. I can imagine being wearied by this–hearing this, reading this– just as I am wearied, but not so much to stop. So the first of a two-parter: evangelicals at our best (to be followed by evangelicals at our worst.)
Well I’ve gone and made a few of you nervous, which means we’ve got a good conversation going about Jesus and Paul and understanding this book that is so important to us or we wouldn’t bother. In some of the comments to my previous post I detected a certain unease about the idea that there might be any difference in the relative weight or significance of various biblical writers or books in the Bible. As if any suggestion of such a difference entailed a rejection of parts of the received text of Scripture.
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Carl Safina, an environmental scientist and science writer of some note, spoke at the Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor two weeks ago. Our first secular scientist as a speaker–a man who professes no Christian faith, but is an admirer of Jesus of Nazareth along with Charles Darwin. He was nervous to be speaking to a congregation in the evangelical wing of American Christianity. He was nervous as one might be who is crossing a minefield without knowing where the mines are located. Would he offend people without even intending to? Would he get me into trouble with congregants by what he might say? I told him not to be nervous: we wanted to hear what he had to say about the oceans and science and the environment. Tell us what you know. But I was nervous too.
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Sola Jesus rather than sola scriptura is the scriptural sola. By asserting Sola Jesus one is honoring, not denigrating Scripture. What is the purpose of Scripture according to Scripture? Careful. The statement of a thing’s purpose sets the trajectory for our understanding of the thing and must be carefully stated. Is the purpose of Scripture simply to lead and guide us, as a text might lead and guide us? To exercise authority over us? We read, agree, and do, as though we were reading an instruction manual for life? Or is the purpose of Scripture to reveal Jesus who leads and guides us?
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