ken wilson online

I’d like to say more about bounded sets before moving on to other approaches to church.  Picture a bounded set approach to church as a circle in the form of a ring. Members of the group fulfill certain criteria and become members of the group thereby.  It’s pretty clear who is a member of the group and who isn’t.  People are either “all in” or “all out.”  The boundary is comprised of whatever beliefs and behaviors are viewed by the church in question as essential for membership in the group.  Keep in mind that boundaries like this include both formal statements (like creeds and defined positions on various moral-behavioral issues), cultural factors (as is the case with ethnic churches of many kinds) and other informally enforced boundaries (things which are accepted or rejected by group members through various forms of social sanction or pressure).
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When Jesus appears vividly and visually in your prayers–not like he stood before Saul of Tarsus, perhaps, but like he can surprise us when we slip into a silence that comes alive visually–well, you take notice.  I’ve been praying for over thirty years as a Jesus follower and I can only think of three times that this happened.  Each one feels as real or more real than ordinary reality and each one is seared into my memory. Each has taken me years to digest. Thank God he doesn’t show up this way more often.  I’d be on overload.
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How did we, the friends of the friend of sinners get to this place?  Jesus was known as the friend of sinners.  He took a lot of guff for being the friend of sinners.  These “sinners” were a social class, not simply a theological category.  They were people on the outside of Israel’s accepted circle for a host of reasons. They were not mobsters or murderers or notorious offenders.  (You notice that “tax collectors” and “prostitutes” were often given a distinct designation alongside “sinners” in the gospels.)   Jesus so identified with “sinners” as to bring upon himself the judgment of the religiously self-righteous.  He expects us to be the friend of sinners, which means our righteousness has to exceed that of the Pharisees; it has to be a righteousness of pure sermon-on-the-mount love, not a righteousness that depends on harsh condemnations and judgment of others–the “business as usual” approach to sinners.  We need to get our gentle back.
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So you’re a young pastor.  Have you noticed that people sin?  Yes, they do bad things.  Some they do to you–complain about you to others for example because they are afraid to speak with you directly.  Oh that’s galling.  So you will be tempted to focus on those sins because they make an impression on you.  But that’s not what the poor sinners need so much.  They need someone to talk to about the struggles in their lives which often involves sins–the sins of others or their own or the communal sins that affect them.  As you are sitting there listening to a poor sinner, you will be tempted to assume the posture of the expert.
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Good pastors are about empowering people to do the Jesus stuff.  So there is a great need for pastors who can learn to trust others to do things better than themselves.  Clericalism, the view that pastors are the Christian professionals who can do Christianity better than anyone else is boo-honkey.

But it’s my belief that many pastors have been too passive in their leadership.  We’ve allowed ourselves to be cow-towed by other voices within the wider Christian community.  We let them take the lead because they have the biggest media megaphones, or the biggest mailing lists or they have somehow gained the ear of many people.  Which is fine.  It’s good to have a mix of voices in any movement.  But we’ve given too much of our pastoral leadership task away to some voices.
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Man, do I feel optimistic lately.  Why?  Because of my kids.  They have a different take on the world, and it’s a take the world is due.  We baby boomers have taken things as far as we can with our current Oldsmobile. Our battles lines are firmly fixed, but from their perspective, wearing thin.  Now it’s time for us to listen to their take on the world as much as we’ve been yammering on about ours.  Then, having listened and learned, we’ll be able to see what we’ve been through in a new light and offer, not more information (they can get it faster than we can generate it)  but what they actually crave from us: wisdom, the one thing it takes time and experience and trial and error to gain.

The culture wars are boomer wars.  We inherited them from our fathers who lived in a binary world of good and evil neatly separated by geographic boundaries.  The evil empire was over there, far away from our fields of presumed good. I actually played cowboys and Indians assuming the cowboys were the good guys.  Pick up sides and duke it out; we boomers did it every day all summer long playing baseball in the streets.  May the best side win.  One side fits all.  Side in. Side out.  Are you on our side or the side of our enemies?  Neither, says this newer take on the world before us.  Maybe it’s time for us boomers to sit down, shut up,  and take off our shoes.
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