ken wilson online

It happened again a few nights ago.  A news story on ABC World News Tonight.  Lead in video montage of a woman with eyes closed and hands raised in worship, cut to a group of three Southern Baptists standing outside of a SBC seminary: a white man, a youngish woman and a youngish African American man, all dressed up as if for church.  So they were trying to put a positive face on these Southern Baptists. The interviewer asked them all: “Do you think Sarah Palin is ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?”  They all nodded enthusiastically.  Then the follow up: “How would you feel about a woman serving as a pastor?” They all frowned and shook their head, no.  Somehow, according to their reading of the Bible, it was just fine for a woman to command the most powerful military the world has ever known, with a enough firepower to wipe out humankind, but it was not fine, and decidedly so, for a woman to pastor a church.  Despite Deborah, despite Priscilla, despite a woman being first witness to the risen Jesus, commissioned by him to take the message of his rising back to the other apostles, making her the apostle to the apostles. Throwing his lot and the lot of his religion in with a woman from the get go–entrusting her with the most authoritative message ever delivered by a member of humankind to humankind.

The views of the three Southern Baptists are representative of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, second in size only to Roman Catholicism (which similarly prohibits women from serving as pastors), and more to my point, the church home of the leading evangelical of our time, Billy Graham.  I ask you, if you were a thoughtful and inquiring young woman who had not been raised with any particular Christian convictions, how would you feel about attending an evangelical church in the hopes of learning more about the founder of Christianity?   Houston, we have a problem. 
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This is what I’ve learned to love about my hometown. Coming out of the Little Caesar’s Pizzeria with my hot & ready, and there in the parking lot is a lady–soccer mom kind of look–stepping into her Volvo with a bumper sticker, just one, carefully placed, black background, white letters: i’m already against the next war. I could drive through other cities, maybe even states and never find a bumper sticker like that. And I could drive through yet other cities and yet other states and find ‘em pretty easily. Places are particular. And if you happen to be a pastor in a particular place–which I personally think is the best kind of pastor to be rather than a roving one–it’s good, I think, to learn to love the particularities of your city. Even if maybe there are things about those particularities that rankle, I think it’s a good discipline to talk yourself into seeing the best in those things.
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Paul, the old guy, advises Timothy, the younger guy, to be careful about empowering “new converts” too much too fast in the leadership department because they are more prone to “conceit.”  As Bob Dylan sang, “there’s a whole lot of people dying tonight, from the disease of conceit.”  Defined as “a high opinion of your own qualities or abilities, especially one that is not justified.”  And there’s the rub, right?  When we’re young, we’re worried about our qualities and abilities.  We fear that our qualities and abilities are inadequate for the pastoring task. Which means we crave confident assurance that we’re wrong about our fears regarding ourselves.
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“The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.” — Dave Barry

That is word for word perfect.  And it’s the reason many, many, and might I add an increasing number of many people are keeping their distance from things like, oh, say, churches.  Because they know this to be true or at least true enough, which is, to say the least, too true.
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Time arrived with this cover copy a while back: How to Win the War on Global Warming. Shall we confront a brutal fact in evangelical perspective? The thoughtful person on the outside of American Christianity looking in at its dominant form (evangelicalism) has every right to think: Evangelicals have been among the most dismissive of the effort to address global warming. If I am considering the Christian message, I should take this into account. If I support efforts to address climate change now for the sake of the vulnerable poor and future generations, I will be viewed as one of those environmental whackos by evangelicals. Life is stressful enough. I think I’ll get my spirituality on the golf course instead.
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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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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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