Going backpacking. See you Sunday or Monday.

I try to go backpacking with friends at least once or twice a year. It’s always a blast, even if it is strenuous.

While I’m gone, feel free to start a silly meme or game in the comments or with trackbacks.

We will be here.

…suck. That’s all I have to say.

A far greater thinker than I wrote this:

There was a time when the church was very powerful, in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an arch-defender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world.

Without Googling it, do you know who the author is? If so, leave a comment, but make sure the first 7 words of your comment don’t contain the answer (so it won’t show up in the sidebar and give it away).

Reactions? Guesses?

While I was reading my obscenely expensive Adolescent Psychology textbook for a grad class, I came across some things that I found informative because they came from an educational psychology perspective, but apply to Christianity in significant ways.

First, Santrock identifies some characteristics of cults:

• Cults exist primarily for their own good. They are inward-focused, and not concerned with the good of the world or even necessarily of the individual members, but only the group and its leader.
• Cults try to separate the individual from his/her previous identity, family, and friends
• Cults try to eliminate freedom of thought
• Cults often demand excessive money and time commitments, even to the point of relocating

These are to some extent true of most churches, and it’s only together that they give a clear indicator that a group is a cult. But I think it’s worth taking warning, and making sure what we do doesn’t come close to these things. Aside from the obvious negative consequences of being associated with a cult, these aren’t good ideas to be promoting anyway.

Second, an interesting paradigm is James Fowler’s Stage Theory of Religious Development, which has six stages. Stages one and two are what you’d call childlike faith. Stages three and four are characteristic of the faith of many modern evangelicals. Stage five is the questioning, paradox-accepting approach that you find among us emerging types.

So what’s the highest level of faith development, according to Fowler? “Transcending specific belief systems to achieve a sense of oneness with all being and a commitment to breaking down the barriers that are divisive to peole on this planet.” In other words, become Buddhist, Hindu, or Unitarian Universalist. He says Gandhi, MLK, and Mother Teresa have been among the few people who reach this stage.

I wonder what Fowler believed. I think it’s worth respecting other people’s beliefs enough that you do not simply place your own at the top of a developmental stage ladder. Especially if you are a researcher whose work will be respected and studied for years to come. Santrock points out that Fowler’s paradigm hasn’t received a lot of support from subsequent research, and understandably so since it sounds like a matter of opinion which type of faith is “higher” than the others.

Arnold Schwarzezenegger, the governator of California, has been doing weekly radio announcements for a while now, and they’re available via podcast (RSS feed).

He’s not Adam Curry or Father Roderick, but it’s cool that he’s taking advantage of the medium.

(not sure this is necessary, but Maria Shriver, the First Ladynator of Cali, also has a .ca.gov site)

This has been a long time in coming, ever since it was noticed that the job of Senior Pastor at Brian McLaren’s church was open. McLaren spends a great deal of time traveling to teach and speak around the country, explaining what all of us crazy emerging people are up to, and trying to provide some much-needed guidance. No sane human could do that full-time and pastor a congregation, so McLaren is formally taking the step into consulting while leaving his congregation in good hands.

McLaren and some of his associates from Cedar Ridge (and perhaps elsewhere) have formed a consulting company called In Liminal Space Coaching & Consulting, with the goal of helping churches make the transition that McLaren describes in Church on the Other Side. Their website is heavy on explanation and light on slogans, so it’s hard to give you something representative - just check it out and you’ll see what I mean.

The application for consulting services is three pages long, mostly essay questions, and no prices are listed anywhere. This communicates “We’re serious. Don’t waste your time if you’re not serious about this.”

I’m glad to see this becoming a formal step, and I’m glad the website is not the crass “WE CAN SAVE YOUR CHURCH NOW!!! CALL OUR SPIKY-HAIRED DUDE TODAY!” stuff you sometimes see on consultants’ websites. However, I think the website needs a little work in the way of navigation - it’s sort of like a news site, with teasers for each page, but since the pages are written in longhand-like prose, you can’t always tell what the page is about from the teaser.

Reactions?

Via Brian’s decidedly un-bloggy A New Kind of Christian dot com (“Subverting our RSS feed generator since 2003″)

Alan Hirsch has been kind enough to spend some time in the comments here clarifying some of the ideas presented in the paper on Forge and Emergent, which I also discussed here.

Van S (here) and Daniel (via email) wanted a little more on how missiology comes first. Daniel said:

essentially, that you can’t contextualise spirituality/theology without first an active missiological engagement. Perhaps some of the lines between the two don’t need to be made so distinct. I think of the desert hermits or other monastic movements; sometimes spirituality does take preeminence over missiology - often in the past a “revival” movement is born out of a “renewal” movement. Think of Acts 2: Christ told the disciples to wait until they had received power, then the commission to “Go into all the world,” a case of spirituality before missiology.

In response to this request, Alan sent me this diagram from his forthcoming book:

Thoughts?

Every once in a while you find a teacher you just can’t stop listening to. For me in recent years, that teacher has been the Anglican Bishop of Durham, better known as N.T. Wright. I mean, the guy’s initials are the same as the Bible’s, so he’s got to have some credibility. From Wright’s recent speech “Shipwreck and Kingdom”:

It is sometimes proposed today that in order to grasp the political meaning of the New Testament, you have to downgrade the theology; as though, for instance, a high Christology would lead you off in the direction of ‘religion’ rather than politics, or as though talk of the bodily resurrection would project you out into the world of ‘pie in the sky when you die’ rather than the hard, real world in which we are called to work for justice and peace.

In fact, as Paul or Revelation would make just as clear as Luke, the opposite is the case. It is because Jesus is bodily risen from the dead, because Jesus is Israel’s Messiah, because he is the one and only Lord of the world, that the Sadducees are worried, Herod is worried, the Athenians are worried, the idol-makers of Ephesus are furious, and ultimately, if he knew his business, Caesar should be making his will.

The point about Jesus going to heaven is not that we’ll go there to be with him one day, away from this wicked old world at last. The point is that from heaven he is ruling the world, ruling it through the faithful lives, the suffering and the witness of his Spirit-driven apostolic followers, calling it to account, demonstrating that there is a new way of living, a way which upstages all Caesar’s pretensions to have saved the world, or united it, or brought it genuine justice, freedom and peace. (All those claims, by the way, are the standard things that all empires have claimed, whether in the first century or the twenty-first.)

It is rare these days that articles I find on the web bring tears to my eyes. It is rare to hear such language of devotion spoken with eloquence and not cheesiness, with scholarship and not narrow-mindedness.

Wright is often regarded as a liberal by Evangelicals in the US, but I have not found a more satisfyingly “conservative” theologian anywhere. I put the c-word in quotes because it’s not quite fair to categorize Wright that way simply because of his strong emphasis on the historical truth of the Christian claims about Jesus; he could also be called a “liberal” because of his emphasis on how Jesus’ kingship and lordship have critical implications for the way we treat the world around us.

If Don Carson and others are looking for a theology to critize, they should leave McLaren and Tony Jones alone and spend a year or two reading Wright’s work (he is prolific enough that it would take that long). Wright is our theologian, and I will sit at his feet as often as I have the opportunity. I think there is a reason they are not attacking Wright’s theology - they know he is out of their league. This is the theology that “funds” the emerging church, and the EC’s critics would do well to spend some time in it.