I finished reading Ron Rolheiser’s excellent book The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality yesterday. Rolheiser is Catholic, a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and is clearly a fan of Henri Nouwen.

Rolheiser begins by making a case for certain essential elements of a Christian spirituality. I didn’t buy everything he said in this section, as some of his points were unsupported assertions that assumed a shared theological background, but I enjoyed his chapters on the roots of spirituality in the incarnation of Christ.

There’s an excellent chapter on social justice, and despite Rolheiser’s celibacy, he has a remarkably insightful and comprehensive perspective on human sexuality in the latter portion of the book. While reminiscent of the writings of Henri Nouwen, The Holy Longing strikes a balance with the average person that Nouwen - who, like Rolheiser, led a deeply contemplative life - never did for me.

The core of Rolheiser’s argument is that spirituality is about channeling our desires, our passions, in life-giving ways. If these desires are either out of control or dampened entirely, inflation or depression - explosion or implosion - inevitably occurs, leading to a fractured self.

In an age when arguments for or against a particular practice on strictly moral grounds seem tired or antiquated, The Holy Longing masterfully links time-honored mores with an insightful analysis of the influence on the self that these practices have. It’s not a book about morals or spiritual disciplines per se, but about nurturing a spiritual life that is truly life-giving.

If you’ve read dozens of books on spiritual disciplines, or are just getting started in the topic, The Holy Longing will be worth your time for its refreshing perspective and readable, almost meditative prose.

Edit - fixed Youtube link.

Wow. This guy is really impressive. Check out this Washington Post article. Snippets:

…[Masoud] said imams who outlawed art and music were misinterpreting their faith. He talked about love and relationships, the need to be compassionate toward homosexuals and tolerant of non-Muslims.

…

Television preaching in the Middle East was once largely limited to elderly scholars in white robes reading holy texts from behind a desk, emphasizing the afterlife over this life, and sometimes inciting violence against nonbelievers. But as TV has evolved from one or two heavily controlled state channels to hundreds of diverse, private satellite offerings, Masoud and perhaps a dozen other young men — plus a few women — have emerged as increasingly popular alternatives. Masoud and others promote “a sweet orthodoxy, which stresses the humane and compassionate” as an alternative to “unthinking rage”

…

As fundamental teachings, Masoud advocates adherence to prayer five times a day, peace toward all and abstinence from alcohol, sex outside of marriage and violence. Beyond those principles, he said, Islam is suffering from a “crisis of interpretation.”
“I’m sure Osama bin Laden knows a lot of the Koran,” he said. “But when a Muslim celebrates when the Twin Towers collapse, you have a big problem.”

This Youtube is also fantastic (minus the cheesy Braveheart music). He appears to have a website, but a lot of the links, including the “English” one, are broken. Also found this - looks like he spoke at a conference in 2005 called “The Radical Middle Way” (Vineyard anyone?).

Conservatives have been calling for more moderate Muslims - hopefully they will give support and encouragement to these emerging voices.

Our church has decided to stop meeting on Sundays, as I mentioned a few days ago. In the past week or so, I’ve been surprised at how there is a general sense among members that this also means the church is ceasing to exist, or that we have now failed in our efforts to plant a church.

We are continuing Film & Spirituality as well as our mid-week book discussion groups, which are currently focusing on How (Not) To Speak of God and The Great Divorce. So SMC is far from gone, and I consider it far from a failure.

However, I did underestimate how much it would feel like a failure to stop having our Sunday “service,” a term I despise because, well, I’m not a big fan of the idea of a weekly worship service. I never assumed we’d have a Sunday service for the long term, yet somehow we ended up with one.

Worship services are not easy for a small, leaderless group to pull off. For a long time, we didn’t really worry too much about the format, since we’re just a fairly small and informal group. A few months ago, though, when we had more people, we developed a liturgy to lend some consistency to our weekly gatherings.

More recently, without enough people to fill all the spots on the liturgy, it became difficult to sustain or see the value in this format, so we decided to stop doing it. While this has been deeply disturbing to our group, I think that’s a good thing, because it’s shaken us up and is forcing us to consider what it really means to be Christians in community. Here are some of my initial thoughts.

First, it’s time to stop doing things just because we always have. There’s no scriptural mandate to have a worship service, and if we’re bad at running it and not getting anything out of it, it’s time to find other ways to spend our time.

Second, it’s time to get beyond the idea of a church, a congregation, as a valid and discrete entity. There is only the church and groups that subdivide it. For too long, we’ve been subdivided but not connected to the other parts of the church in our area. We’ve taken Paul’s metaphor of the church as the body of Christ and shrunken it down so each congregation or gathering is the body, and everything outside that body is either a potential invader or an organ that’s been removed from the body.

If we’re to use Paul’s body metaphor correctly, we need to see the entire church as the body. Jesus’ messages to the seven churches in Revelation address the entire city as if it were one church, not many churches. I don’t know the congregational status of the Christians in these cities, but I’m guessing they didn’t all meet all at once, nor consider themselves separate, isolated congregations.

Third, we need to start seeing the church as a network of Christians in community and in relationship with each other. For the past five years, we’ve done very little networking or connecting with other Christians in our city. This past weekend at Off The Map Live, I got to see and catch up with several church planter friends, many of whom have left the church-planting business. As I spoke with people, I got the sense that, as Dwight Friesen said in a slightly different context, our best days are ahead of us. We’ve got a lot more thinking to do, and that thinking must include further development of trans-congregational ecclesiology.

As I said a few months back, it’s been a long while since I thought seriously about ecclesiology, probably because we’ve been spinning our wheels as a church and were getting to the point where we needed a shakeup. That shakeup as come, and now the thinking is coming fast and furious.

This past Sunday we had the pleasure of visiting The Ohana Project, a church started by some great people several years ago in a manner fairly similar to SMC. They meet in a community center and seem to be growing nicely, though they have observed that many people are not interested in coming every Sunday. Membership is much more fluid, and I think this reflects the network nature of the church as it is developing in Seattle.

I am eager to continue to think about these issues, visit with other Christians, and develop new ways for Seattle Metro Church to serve in our area. I also look forward to the ways we as a faith community and a group of friends can continue to enrich each other’s lives and faith.

The best is yet to come. Love to all.

Now that I’m riding the bus to work again, I’m enjoying the extra (forced) time to read and think. I’m enjoying the great Windows Mobile program Bible With You, which has a free full trial version with NRSV (Google it - links are hard to add via mobile).

I’m also feeling a bit down because it’s getting darker. Actually, it’s probably more that I’m getting up early for work now, so my first waking hours aren’t in full daylight.

Coping with the lack of winter sunlight in the northwest, particularly in rainy Seattle, is a perpetual challenge. It leads to outright depression in many people, a general sense of sadness in others, and at least a time of gloomy introspection in me.

Perhaps it’s good to ponder the fundamental questions of life. Am I living the way I should? Am I happy with my life, the way things are? Am I satisfied with my efforts at improving myself?

It’s also possible for this kind of thinking to lead to despair. I’m not sure if I believe in Satan, but it certainly feels as if there are active forces dragging us down, slipping doubt into the cracks that form in our lives and relationships.

This is a good time to renew a personal focus on spiritual disciplines. I feel very much like I need to do this, so I’m reading the Gospel of John on the bus. I’m taking it slow, taking time to think, not concerned with when I finish.

My bus stop is just ahead, so it’s your turn to talk now.

I’ve long been frightened by a definition I once heard of “practical atheism:” living daily as if God does not exist.

Do I do this? How do I keep God a part of my daily existence?

The obvious answers are to reflect regularly on God, pray continually, and lift my heart to God in worship regularly.

So why is it so easy not to do these things? Why is it so easy to go days at a time without even thinking of God?

God has, strangely, hidden himself so that we must be looking for him in order to find him. Consequently, he’s easy to miss when we get busy or distracted.

Is it enough to live in ways that honor God, without meditating on him daily? Is it enough to simply do the right thing, and only periodically revisit the fact of God? Do we need to practice the presence of God in order to avoid practical atheism?

I should say at this point that I think a good percentage of the meditating on God that happens in the world is really people just thinking to themselves, and has nothing to do with God. It’s introspection, but not prayer or worship.

Why is it so easy to ignore God? What is the solution to this problem? How do we make it harder for ourselves to ignore God, or should we?

Regular worship services are one way people address this problem. If we collectively approach God each week in worship, we’re likely to get refocused on his ordering of the universe. The Monday problem, though, is widely documented - the day after church, when we’re back at work, we tend to quickly forget.

In TV scheduling, there’s a concept called tent-poling, in which a strong show props up ratings for the weaker shows that air before and after it. Is this the way worship functions in the Christian life?

For a lot of people, yes. For an increasing number of people, no. I’ve been a rather vocal opponent on this blog of focusing all our energies on the worship service. If we refuse to subscribe to this ups-and-downs, God-is-only-in-church way of thinking, then the ultimate life would be one unending church service. I don’t think that’s what we were made for.

We were made to work, to build, to accomplish. Sometimes we go too far with this, and allow work itself to become the god we worship. But it needn’t be this way.

We were made to live fully, deeply, generously. We were made to encounter, to love, to suffer, to help, to care. God is there, in that connection.

God, save us from forgetting. Remind us of you, and let us live with a constant awareness of your purposes.

By John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

I picked up a copy of Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches: Five Perspectives at the library recently. It’s one of those point/counterpoint books, in which five church leaders (Mark Driscoll, John Burke, Dan Kimball, Doug Pagitt, and Karen Ward) each write a chapter on what they believe about the church’s role, and the other four authors all make a short response/rebuttal.

The first chapter, called “The Emerging Church and Biblicist Theology”, is by Seattle’s own Mark Driscoll - pastor of the Calvinist hipster megachurch Mars Hill Church, blogger at TheResurgence, and all-around bad-boy of the conservative evangelical subculture (Donald Miller’s famously referred to him in Blue Like Jazz as “Mark the cussing pastor”). Mark’s main objective in his chapter, as evidenced by the 700 (!) Scripture verses he references in the endnotes, is “to defend the traditional Protestant doctrines of scriptural authority, the Trinitarian nature of God, and the substitutionary atonement” (p.16, from the introduction by Robert Webber).

Mark represents a passionate adherence to the particulars of a Reformed evangelical theology, and in that sense, is not typically emerging. He is a theological traditionalist leading a cutting-edge church that ministers primarily to the new emerging generation. (ibid.)

I think that his perspective is valid, and I understand the concern of [some] theological “conservatives” that some doctrinal essentials are being overlooked or ignored [by some] in the “emerging conversation”. With that said, however, I think that Mark setting himself up as the arbiter of truth is a bit disingenuous. “This chapter is my attempt to address three of the hottest theological issues in our day and to correct emerging error with biblical orthodoxy” (p.21). I get the impression that he thinks that he’s the only one that does theology; that if everyone else would just read the Bible and take it seriously, they would come to the same conclusions that he has.

The following lengthy quote is from pages 34-35. It’s the climax of his chapter, in which he defines and defends his position on hell:

The following Old Testament truths about hell are worthy of note:

• Hell is unending, conscious, loathsome torment.¹⁵⁹
• Heaven and hell will have people in them forever.¹⁶⁰

Also, Jesus had much to say about hell, including the following:

• The pain in hell will be excruciating, causing “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”¹⁶¹
• The torture in hell comes from Jesus.¹⁶²
• Jesus is coming to throw people into the fiery furnace of hell.¹⁶³
• The physical pain of hell is like being burned in a fire.¹⁶⁴
• Unrepentant sinners will be thrown into a fiery hell.¹⁶⁵
• Hypocrites will be butchered and spend eternity in pain.¹⁶⁶
• God will send unbelievers to the same fate as Satan and demons.¹⁶⁷
• Jesus said the eternal torment of Isaiah 66:22-24 is literally coming.¹⁶⁸
• The punishment of hell is like a painful beating.¹⁶⁹
• Hell is a place of unending torment.¹⁷⁰

Lastly, the apostles also speak of hell in the following terms:

• Jesus will repay unrepentant sinners with everlasting destruction.¹⁷¹
• Jesus today holds the unrighteous in punishment.¹⁷²
• Jesus will rule over hell as well as heaven.¹⁷³
• Hell is like spending eternity in a fiery lake of burning sulfur.¹⁷⁴

---

Footnotes:
¹⁵⁹ Is 66.22-24
¹⁶⁰ Dn 12.1-2
¹⁶¹ Mt 8.11-12; 13.40-42, 49-50; 22.13; 24.50-51; 25.30; Lk 13.27-28
¹⁶² Mt 8.29; Mk 1.24; 5.7
¹⁶³ Mt 13.40-42, 49-50; 22.13; 25.30
¹⁶⁴ Mt 13.49-50; 18.8-9; 25.41; Mk 9.43-48; Lk 16.19-31
¹⁶⁵ Mt 18.8-9; Mk 9.43-48
¹⁶⁶ Mt 24.50-51
¹⁶⁷ Mt 25.41
¹⁶⁸ Mk 9.43-48
¹⁶⁹ Lk 12.46-48
¹⁷⁰ Lk 16.19-31
¹⁷¹ 2Th 1.6-9
¹⁷² 2Pt 2.9
¹⁷³ Rv 14.9-11
¹⁷⁴ Rv 19.20; 20.10-15; 21.8

Honestly, this section has me fuming. To my reading, Mark’s tone seems to be giddy to “correct [this] emerging error”. I can understand and respect that people hold to the traditional doctrine of hell as “eternal, conscious torment”, but I just can’t deal with the smugness, superiority and presumption that he exudes here.

Additionally, I think that his over-eagerness to stand up for orthodoxy causes him to overstate his arguments. I didn’t have the time or energy to investigate all the verses he cited, but two of the claims struck me as preposterous, if not disgusting - and here I find his exegesis dubious at best:

• The torture in hell comes from Jesus
  Mt 8.29 - “What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”
  Mk 1.24 - “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”
  Mk 5.7 - He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!”
  So, some demons ask Jesus not to torture them, and Mark sees this as saying that Jesus does torture? That’s just wrong - not to mention that even if it were a valid argument, the passages in question are about demons, not people.
• Jesus is coming to throw people into the fiery furnace of hell
  Mt 13.40-42, 49-50; 22.13; 25.30 - all variations on The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
  Quite simply, these verses do not say what Driscoll says they say.

I’m done. If anyone wants to evaluate the rest of his claims, that’s fine; I think I’m going to wash my hands of this whole thing. It’s neither useful nor helpful in living an authentic, spiritual life - rather, it seems to be only concerned with defining the boundary markers of acceptable belief, in order to decide who’s in and who’s out. I’m tired of it.

I am starting a series called The Future of Our Faith, and rather than start with Part 1, I thought I would start with some random thoughts I wrote after church a few months ago.

mysqldump --user=Justin --database=brain

I’m not sure what the future of religion will be like; it will probably be increasingly politicized and fundamentalist. There are liberal fundamentalists too, of course; both types of fundamentalists are interested in control and power, to further their agendas. I want nothing to do with this.

The kind of Christianity I want to see and live is the kind that gives, that makes things better rather than making things go our way. Is our faith good to those who do not practice it? Is it even better for those who do? Is it best for those who throw their whole lives into it? Do those most invested in our faith make the biggest contribution to our world? I hope so, and I don’t see any reason to accept an alternative.

I feel like I’m still missing some of the bigger messages of faith, community, grace, forgiveness, love, hope. I’m wrapped up in daily life, and when I think about faith, I think about ecclesiology or whatever topic is up for discussion in the blogosphere.

I don’t think it will do to simply leave historical Christianity behind. We cannot simply separate ourselves from our forebears, as much as we might be embarrased by things they did and want to distance ourselves from them and their reputations.

I don’t think the solution is to simply make Christianity more appealing to people as they are today. We’ve tried that for decades, and it’s a constant game of catch-up, because people are fickle and change all the time. We end up looking like unprofessional, lame marketers, and we waste a ton of money, only to reinforce the notion that Christianity is perpetually out of date.

I think we need to be much less concerned with relevance, much less concerned with “what people are looking for” in the marketing sense. However, we do need to be aware of our culture. How to people define “good”? What do people value, and does that contradict the teaching of scripture? The discernment of cultural vs. universal matters is difficult, but needs to be ongoing.

None of this can be allowed to distract us from vibrant, personal faith.

I believe in karma, God’s justice, the interconnectedness of our actions, our hearts, and our external experiences. However, it’s foolish to judge other people and attribute their misfortune to their actions; I wouldn’t want that to be done to me. But the universe is a decidedly moral and ethical system.

I want a faith that takes seriously beauty and pain, art and the human condition.

I want a faith that takes what Jesus and the biblical writers said seriously - recognizing their cultural context, but not imprisoning them within it.

I reject the “spirituality vs religion” dichotomy as overly simplistic. There are great things about religion, and terrible things about individualistic spirituality, and vice versa. The goal is not to have one instead of the other, but to have a faith that is good by other measures than how spiritual or religious it is.

Personally, I don’t have much use for the “therapy, crystals, and psychology” view of spirituality.

I believe that all truth is God’s truth. However, some ideas aren’t true - they are a load of garbage, and should be treated as such.

I think faddishness has created a huge credibility problem for the church, and for all progressive or open-minded people of faith.

So much changes all the time, and these changes make us forget a few core things: Love God; love people. Be a person of peace. Pursue integrity and righteousness. Forgive. Work hard. Be humble - consider others better than yourselves.

I believe the church needs to divest itself of assets and power. We need to recognize the place of NGOs in doing good in our world, and commit to making a contribution to their work. The church, however, needs to distance itself from accumulation and power.

I believe we need to mobilize the average person. There is so much potential lying dormant in the people who don’t currently see themselves as leaders.

I don’t think public worship will be very important for the future of the church. In fact, it may get in the way. Christians must and will continue to gather together, but the “service” may disappear, and that will be a good thing.

I believe we are living in “in-between” times, in which ambiguity and loss are regular and unavoidable sensations. I believe new clarity will emerge for our direction, but probably not for a long time.

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