sanctimony baloney

JOLLYBEGGAR DISCLAIMER:

okay, i've been thinking about this for awhile...
especially since we hit the 40-somethingth comment on the 'cruel God' post...
this dialogue is just too rich to shut down.

although i was trying to close off this blog, the conversation kept moving forward. it didn't even surrender to redundency and circle logic... it just kept progressing.

what kind of an idiot would pull the plug on that?
not this kind, anyway.

the challenge has been to either come up with something new to post or change the whole blog. the e-pistles idea was certainly dialogue based, but originally it was a place to put long-winded explorations of things that had sprung from other emails, comment boxes etc. after awhile, the phrase 'but that's a whole nother blog' started to appear whenever it felt like a tangent was developing. the idea of starting a blog that entertained only the tangents started around then...

a blog that allowed ideas to flow like sweet wine.
an oasis that might have five or six posts all going simultaneously in different directions... something for those of us with attention deficits... those of us who are currently reading four or five books at a time and seem to never be finishing any of them in chronological order.

lately, this has been that blog in a way. it's been a great place to talk, and has been, in the comment boxes of the last two official 'posts' changed direction and focus numerous times. it's been awesome in that it has both challenged and affirmed.

so here's what we can do...

every (or most) time(s) a comment takes us in a different direction, i will just copy and paste it as a new post so that we can continue the one thread while recognizing and embracing the new 'tangents' along the way too. this way the blog will grow naturally out of ongoing dialogue like the many tributaries of a morris louis painting, except that instead of convergent streams of paint these are divergent streams of ideas.

that's why the new name and that's why the new look. the same idea stream with a key difference: the topical flow is less restricted and less reliant upon whether yours truly has anything on his mind these days.

what follows is what prompted the last post, and probably the reason why this blog has stalled for so long. see it as a confessional.

***

i remember a conversation that i had with a friend of mine long ago. we were going through a rather 'rocky' period in our relationship, and one day he asked me why we were always fighting. i didn't even have to think... it just came out:

"because we both know we're right."

okay, so i think i'm still figuring some things out.

a few weeks back, on the same listserve that brought us that controversial piece of wisdom from charles spurgeon (don't think i've ever heard spurgeon refered to as controversial! ha ha) about what debates to enter into, there was a post by someone else who holds a very critical and exclusive (dareisay exclusionary?) perspective on postmodernity and the emerging church.

the good thing about a list like this is that it is run essentially by the people who read it (as opposed to being an 'official' company line on anything.) the bad thing is that it features mainly the cerebral meanderings of many people who should probably just start their own blogs and send the address out to the crowd one time. you can hardly even read the 'del' on my delete key anymore.

now at the risk of sounding disunitive (and amidst a fair bit of sanctimony baloney of my own) i have found the sanctimonious nature of the posts by this one writer on this one email list a bit annoying. at my darkest, i read them so that i can be annoyed, but at my brightest, i choose to not read them because they annoy me... not much of a gap there. not much grace.

so much for being mr free-exchange-of-ideas.

anyway, in his post, this guy was extolling the virtues of a certain book that, in his view, all postmoderns and all emergent pastors should read. in the same post, he shared a few tidbits as anticipatory teasers to ready the soil for the seeds of wisdom that he would be sharing in a forthcoming synopsis and review of the book.

reading the teasers caused me to wonder by whom and for whom such a book is written.

it is the same thing. no big deal, the writer just believes he's right. he's found intellectual acquiesence among many, like the fellow posting the review, who subscribe to the same views. i am reminded of the episode of the simpsons where bart gets kicked out of school and, before finally settling on home-schooling, he is briefly enroled by marge in a school that proudly but falsely promises to put "the fun in fundamentalist dogma."

you see, from within rich personal tradition and its ugly twin, ethnocentricity, people who write often write at everyone else who, in this view, is obviously wrong and misguided... not to them.

from this place, a person often thinks that he/she is helping when he/she presumes to advise others... but in trying to acknowledge societal, philosophical, theological or doctrinal change from an unchanging (although not immutable- simply subjected to and strengthened in its resolve by opposing worldviews and new traditions) vantage point, one risks mispresumption on a number of levels. i wonder how often i wear that hat? i'm pretty sure i'm wearing it now, but i'm going to stand in front of the mirror for a few minutes and just see what i look and feel like with it on.

yep- i look and feel like an ass. call me not-so-jolly-beggar- jollybeggar's ugly twin.

riding the wrecking ball

Why are young adults not finding their faith in their parents church?
Brian McLaren asks the question in a recent post.

These families share something in common: their young adult kids are not easily finding their places in the church of their parents. The problem is widespread. I have been in two groups of pastors lately where someone asked how many of our post-high-school kids were actively involved in the church. No pastor in either group had a majority of his kids involved in the church; most had no kids actively involved.

Mike Sares replies that it is the drive for “excellence” is driving young adults from the church

Today’s young adults see a generation of baby-boomer Christians that has striven for "excellence" in every part of church life. Boomers proclaimed in the 1980s that image is everything, and their churches have reflected that cultural trend. The nurseries have got to be sparkling clean, the church buildings are marvelously functional as opposed to artistic, the music is as close to FM radio quality as possible (even if they must hire a band), the Sunday services are seamless with perfect transitions (just like television), the preaching is entertaining and informative (but not so deep as to offend visitors), and the plants on stage are beautiful (but artificial).

As a result, according to Dieter Zander, the next generation has concluded that "everything is image," and therefore nothing can be trusted. Church is too slick, too good, too polished to be real. And the twenty-something hunger for raw authenticity just doesn’t fit in.
(posted aug 27 http://www.jordoncooper.com/)
***

on a 'day off' while on mission in sri lanka, i was talking with a twenty-something (whatever that means) friend of mine about this phenomenon.

in the late 80's and on into the 90's, the quest for quality became the new (or not so new) idolatry... at the expense of relationships. as part of this battle for a culturally relevant environment in reaction to the christian counterculture that had risen up with its own radio and television stations, its own celebrities, colloquialisms and inside jokes, the family of God became institutional with a capital I. although there was a real drive to, by means of a quality production, reach those who had yet to hear and respond to the gospel, the whole relational element of evangelism and discipleship became almost secondary to the correcting of the mistakes of the church's forefathers and, with boomers at the helm, the assembled church became this thing that was the anithesis of everything the they had restlessly sat through growing up.

and so now the next generation of pastors and worshipers slowly (or not so slowly) moves into position to take hold of the wheel and turn this thing off of the superhighway and into the bush where their adventure is.

great. boomers, step back.

here's the thing, though. within every new reactionary method, there is wisdom and there is folly. just as the pursuit of 'quality' was great for reminding us that our best was important to give to God, it also belched out a bi-product of mass spectatorship. people started inviting their friends to church because of the programming, the music, the yada yada yada and stopped inviting them to Jesus. it was possible in this environment for one to be in active ministry, having perfect church service attendance for a decade or more without ever actually connecting with God one-on-one.

with gatherings so well-produced and facilities so shiny-looking, it was easy for many to slide back into consumer-mode simply because they felt somehow unworthy to serve in the upfront stuff and were mildly unaware of (or, let's face it, disinterested in) the behind the scenes stuff. social marginalization took place in the church and one of the key groups that felt marginalized, as cited above in the observations of brian d. mclaren and dieter zander, was the group of younger people that would grow up to eventually inherit this monstrosity.

it wasn't, in our church's case anyway, that the youth and younger adults were excluded from invitations to serve. it was simply that the time commitment implied by involvement in many of the ministries, what with some pretty intense type-A leadership styles and over-achieving work ethics, left little room for a life. it became quite common for everyone to be about reaching a hypothetical crowd with the gospel, since very few of us actually had any time left in our lives to develop relationships with those who weren't doing the same ministries, much less with those who didn't know Jesus.

so many of the prodigal heirs left home without their inheritance.

they were not abandoning their faith as such... they were simply checking out of the infrastructure before they got stuck trying to maintain something that they didn't believe in- something that had air so conditioned that they were left feeling a bit chilly, daydreaming of the beach.

house-churches and alternative services now rise up to attend to all the failings of the I-Me-Mine church. fair enough. in the tradition of their fathers, a new generation of church leaders moves into position to have a go at seeing the great commission realized.

i only hope that new approaches to authenticity in faith and fellowship result in a deeper walk for all generations, not just in producing environments where the children growing up in these emerging churches 'fix it all' again when they come of age by returning to the hard wooden pews, hellfire and brimstone homilies and eloquent hymnals of their grandparents' worship experience and tradition. otherwise we're just riding a generational wrecking ball back and forth as it destroys worship environments to the left and to the right in a forty-year arch.