Summer Camp 2011

We've been at summer camp at Westminster Woods this week, brining children from our church community to camp for the week, and for me to be speaking in the Forest 4th-6th grade camp.  It's nearly the end of the week, and as I walked back from an early morning meeting today I found myself thinking about what constitutes a day in the life this week: the pool, pudding cups for desert, campfire, the craft shack, Robin Hood dueling with the Sheriff, Ro-Sham-Bo about the life cycle of a salmon with Chimi & Changa, Free Time, not taking a shower, new friends, old friends, dumb body tricks, and mosquitos, trying new things, reveling in old favorites, getting a bit homesick, or just plain tired.  That’s what camp is about it.  All of those things in a brief span.  Comfort and challenge, joy and frustration, living with others and learning to stand on your own with your parents not nearby (unless your Dad is the camp speaker).  

Church: 

trying to meet the future 

by doing what we did in the past.

I watched a video on education reform making the rounds on Facebook this afternoon while doing some household chores.  It's a 20 minute clip of Sir Ken Robinson [personal site], a speaker and writer, advisor on education.  It's clever, insightful, concise and potentially disturbing.  He basically makes the point that the world is rapidly changing.  We don't know what life will be like in 30 years (when my kids will be active adults) let alone in 5 years.  And yet we continue to educate children in the same way that we have for over 100 years.  While keep trying to address the paradigms of the 21st century, seeking to educate our children so that they have a sense of cultural identity, so that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while being a part of the process of globalization, with strategies and expectations of the 19th century.  We are continually trying to meet the future by doing what we did in the past.

I'm including the video below.  I found it invigorating thinking about my own children and the near-epic struggle to ensure that that get a life-feeding education.  In my own work as pastor - a teacher alongside a community of faith - I wonder if we aren't doing the same thing. Do we do church in a way that was conceived for the context of the 19th and 20th centuries dominated by the transformational experiences of what we call the Reformation and the Enlightenment?  Maybe our churches have decreasing attendance and increasingly bored members because we are talking about faith in a way that doesn't resonate with our questions of today and the ways in which we process our wonderings about the meaning of life.  Church is focused around a sermon: a passive listening to an expert talk to you about something in an abstract way.  A format that seems to be the least sought after in the ways in which people live, work and communicate today.

If you're game to respond to this post, why do you find church incoherent, out-to-lunch or less than life-giving?

Ungovernable and Broken:

California, The Church and Cows

My cousin Lori, a big paper and web reader, turned me on to an insightful blog article about California and our near-death insolvency.  "There's no budget, but California is all over the foreign cow issue" lifts up some terrifying aspects of the train-wreck we all seem to agree our state has become, a place in which the general population seems to becoming not merely depressed and hopeless, but deeply apathetic and uninterested in solving our problems.  "If we all focus on the budget, then we're going to crash [personally and emotionally]" said a congresswoman.  Maybe that's why so many congress members are up in arms about foreign cows being used in a Happy California Cow commercial.  Maybe that's why the governor went an made a bad cult movie with decrepit action stars [The Expendables | TRAILER] while serving our state in the past year.  Nothing better to do, I guess.  Here's the commercial.  You may need to watch it on the original site: LINK

Can you leave religion & keep Christ?

Leaving the Church:  Anne Rice

For many Ann Rice isn't a name you often associate with the Christian Church.  Wildly famous for her numerous novels about vampires, she rediscovered her Christian Faith, in the Catholic Context, several years back in a time of deep grief.  She then wrote 2 novels in a planned trilogy telling the story of Jesus in the first person.  A challenging endeavor to undertake: Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt; The Road to Cana and a memoir about her spiritual transformation: Called Out of Darkness.

In August she announced that she was leaving the Church, quitting religion, but in no way renouncing Jesus the Christ, nor abandoning her life-path of discipleship.  [Belief Net Blog]  [NY Times Article]  [Christian Science Monitor Article]  The news came out in early August, yet it seems to have gone much un-noticed, being overshadowed by religious comments and conflicts around Glenn Beck [site].  She claims that she could no longer be identified with a group that she feels has little, or no, identifying links to Jesus of Nazareth, his teachings and his life.

Preaching at Christmas, Cophenagen, Avatar 
and Post-Modern Manger Seekers

What's the connection between Christmas, Cophenagen and Avatar?  I went to see Avatar today and here's how I see it.  A close second to the highest money making December premier of a movie, it actually has much to teach the church about post-modernity and in its new-ageish eco-friendliness points to two fundamental aspects of Christian identity that the church would do well to remember and kindle.

How do you spell convergence in Church-ese?

This video, or a similar one, is diffused via youtube at the conclusion of each year. It's a definite eye-opener, albeit super American-centered, in terms of the speed at which aspects of our life together as a society and our deepening dependance upon technological tools are converging to impact the details of every day life. I continue to find myself asking if anyone and who in the church is paying attention.  In Advent we remember and focus upon the promise of the return of Christ, the promise that all is not lost, that there is hope for justice, redemption, wholeness and shalom-peace even in our world today.  It's what the Bible articulates as the hope we wait anxiously for, a waiting in which we're admonished to say awake, to say alert and to be on the lookout.  Maybe in the church we've forgotten that message?  Or maybe we just don't know what we're hoping for and/or waiting for in liberating expectation?

Evangelism: has it seen its day?

This American Life had a recent very interesting interview about evangelism as a scam, a basic bait-and-switch pattern that the church didn't learn from imitating Jesus, but rather shamelessly adopted from corporate America.  The interview with Jim Henderson is interesting and worth a listen [link].

He also has an interesting movement being spearheaded through his site: offthemap.com

and a great video that you can use for your own stuff on vimeo:



The Spiritual Discipline of Serving from Recycle Your Faith on Vimeo.

Thanks to Matt for the connection.

Can Virtual Church Be Literally Fulfilling?

CNN recently posted a breaking news video entitled "Is virtual worship fulfilling?" [LINK to the video report]. [LINK to lifechurch.tv]  Interesting video that asks a question that's been being discussed for several years in certain corners and sub-populations of the church community.

I found striking the commentators remarks towards the beginning.  It's high ceilings, windows and everyone together - those are the things that remind her of church.  In an age of transformation and redefinition of most of our experiences in daily life because of technological advancement, our approach to pluralism and cultural diversity and the global market-place, church - religious community and experience - also needs to be redefined, or does it?

The Church: Freed by an Emerging Culture?

One of my first committee meetings at the church in France that I now serve lifted

up the challenging situation in which all of the church - at least in the Western Industrialized Church of the North - finds itself is the fact that we are a community of faith gathered by the common experience of a once spoken, long-time written Word yet we live in a world that is increasingly image-driven, decentralized and more SMS than manuscript. How do we navigate the challenging waters of emerging forms of communication, failing printing presses and transforming ways of inter- and intra-personal forms of dialog?

The church is based upon the written Word. We read the faith stories and testimonies that together compose what we call the Bible. We listen to a sermon. We sing songs that quote and reflect upon this Word. We experience God both in the natural world, yet in the Protestant culture we emphasize even further the way in which we experience God by hearing the word spoken, we are motivated and invited to action through sermons, homilies, newsletters, and tracts.

How does this work in a world in which classic "paper" newspapers are bleeding money and dying? In which their is no longer one principal authority, or metanarrative: master story, that binds o ur culture together, uniquely shapes our shared worldviews, and frames the way we make meaning in and through our lives? In the USA last year the average person supposedly read 4 books,

while 1 in 4 Americans read none at all. How does that translate to a church-culture based upon reading as the foundation for dialog, community action and faith experience? Sermons are the "main" way folks experience God. I like no more than 10 minutes (even though I usually do 15). Jean Calvinpreached for about 90 minutes. How does that translate in a world of Facebook, Twitter, blogs and SMS - where we're maintaining multiple conversations, that come and go in a more continuos organic way than a stop-everything-else-for-20-minutes way? Maybe it's the death of Christianity? Maybe it's the chance for a new birth, to rise like a pheonix from the ashes of the cultural trappings embraced in the Reformation (which maybe we're a tad too reactionary and extreme)?

Granted we have to make sure that all people have access to new forms of communication. Money, class, education, age - they can't be characteristics that determine one's participation or inclusion in a faith community and its ensuing and ongoing dialog. Yet the church seems all too often to let one sub-population, which doesn't or can't embrace an emerging change, hold everyone else back from addressing and assuming it.

In any case the church in Europe is in the same challenging situation as that in America. There isn't one authoritative models to lift up and emulate. There is no purpose-driven e-culture church communication model. Rather there are multiple models, diverse attempts at experimenting where our cultural paradigm shifts, faith experience and congregational traditions\history intersect. Maybe this is the exodus moment the struggling historic church has been waiting for. How do we as an institution empower such experimenting, experience and emergence, when it may seem as if doing so is merely pulling the plug on the life-support system enabling our continuing ecclesiastical institution?

Liberal Left-out in the Outfield

I went to worship today at a Northern California PC(USA) church. Downtown, the historic congregation advertises 2 services online (as well as their 2008 Christmas Eve Service). As I arrived late (I am on vacation - one of my joys "going to church late since I'm not in charge") I discovered that the service was actually a small circle of a dozen folks gathered around the pastor. The sermon was on the text Exodus 20:1-17 (the giving of the 10 commandments), supposedly addressing the them of Sabbath Rest. What I heard of the sermon was actually a droning on about the foolishness of those that advocate creationism and the evils of their stupidity. The handful of faithful huddled around the pastor resembled a half-time gathering around the coach, seeking to reboot the team with verbose and borderline-violent comments about the "other team." I didn't stay. I found myself wanting more than a polarizing speech motivating me to stand tough against the other guys.

I thought about my recent past experiences in church, most notably one that was on the other side of the political spectrum, at which I heard a sermon about the evils of homosexuality and the liberal agenda in the PC(USA), which was supposedly to address prayer. Maybe our church traditions are bankrupt - on both sides of the spectrum? We don't seem to be able to say much besides "the other team is bad", "we've got to stick together," "the church is declining because of those that don't think like us." It sure seems that such half-time huddle talk is easier to reproduce than to dialog about what Jesus taught and how to live it today. (Jesus, who in my reading never actually blamed or simply attacked the other side, but rather invited all participants in the dialog to a new way of being and looking at the world. Those that rejected his inversion of the polarizing fight simply judged themselves.)

I left the church and walked downtown passing cafes filled with people reading the paper, talking about each others' dogs and living in the moment. I passed numerous walkers: out savoring the early morning air and calm with an urban stroll. They all seemed to be more in the moment, addressing the life that they're living, than getting angry about things that happened in the past or were done by the other team. The liberal, as well as the conservative evangelical churches I visited, both seemed to be left out, like a kid playing in the outfield grass while the game is happening in the infield. Maybe that's why our church attendance is actually in decline today? We seem to be much better at preaching politics and/or prosperity than we do participation.

Market Rearch

I recently worshipped at the San Rafael Sunday Farmer's Market.  It was an experience that brought some reflections on Church faith community worship.

At the market diverse people gathered together to search for fantastically fresh food that they hungered for.  The stalls were lined together with a tidal wave splash of multiple-colors, textures, shapes and sizes.  The seating area (pictured above) and located next to a quality espresso-making coffee stand was filled to capacity at 9am.  There wasn't any magical formula per say that maxed out the parking lot at a time when it's becoming increasingly easier to find a spot in most church parking lots.  The merchants offered what people wanted and repeatedly want.  Maybe the market has a lot to teach those of us wanting to help the church to change, to better address the context we live in today.

I'm not advocating that the church such do whatever our cultural context dictates, yet it does provide some avenues for action.  In the market aesthetics were important.  They didn't replace the quality of the goods for sale.  Yet they enticed people to leave the school-like stream of market shoppers swimming through the isles to pause and linger at a given stall and potentially make a purchase.  It was the same thing, nearly a ritual, that occurs every Sunday - yet an attention to aesthetics: appearance, color, space, smell, light made a difference.  I mean how much can you doll up a tomato?  And yet I was taken aback by the colors and shapes that were present.  Maybe that in part is something we're lacking, maybe through our deeply grounded and vital roots in the reformation traditions of our ancestors we through the baby out with the bath water.  We do need aesthetics to fathom and contemplate the divine.  We do want quality, to not just be told what to buy - or do - but to discover for ourselves, to be empowered to become full participants.  In the market that might be a seller sharing a recipe, or giving tips on what to do with food that's bought.  Maybe in the church we need to do more teaching, or empowering in terms of spiritual disciplines: ways in which the common person can be involved, creatively responding by faith to the world as opposed to passively listening to a sermon.  At this fish stand I heard such conversations emerging while I lingered for a few minutes.  Unfortunately my last Sunday worship experiences haven't included any sort of similar dialogs.

There were so many young families at the Market.  None seemed to be rushing off for church.  Maybe that's Southern Marin for you.  And maybe it's a lesson for the church: a school room for us to attend to in view of catching a glimpse of how the church might re-become more relevant for our culture and context.

Summer Camp Memories

Now that I've stopped working I finally have the time to finish some past work projects. I guess that's the irony of work. We came with the youth of our church to Central Camp week 2 at Westminster Woods earlier this summer. It was great fun and here's a quick video that highlights some of what we experienced together.

Untitled from Monte McClain on Vimeo.

Religion: appealing to the faithful or faithless?

I've been thinking all week about a recent church experience and the division that is so dominant in our church system. A friend was interviewed for a pastor job and recently asked can you work with both "pro-gay and anti-gay" people. Hmmm. What a question? And maybe it's actually going in the direction we most often avoid. We tend to always polarize, preaching to our choir: those that support our views, as opposed to dialoging with the larger community. When I encounter Jesus of Nazareth in the gospels he seems to be more about the larger inviting dialog to a new counter-cultural life-transforming community than recementing existing divisions and lines in the sand.

Newsweek ran an article entitled "losing their religion" this past week talking about the challenges of portraying faith on tv. Executives feel the pressure to either create entertainment that appeals to the faithful by maintaining some sort of orthodox context and lose the faithless, or work towards the faithless in creative new stories and incur the wrath of the fearful faithful. Maybe that's the tension the church should be in more. Maybe if we were in our leadership, teaching and community hospitality Christian worship could become more of a crossroads of beliefs and growth than an impasse of doctrine rigidity and moral certainty, all while professing and deepening faith. I know that's the sort of church/faith community I'd want to be part of.

My favorite show these days (The Wire) has a church character [the Deacon] addressing the problems of inner city Baltimore that recently summoned his vocation in a conversation with an inner city cop: "Church folks got to be all up in everybody's shit." The Deacon meant that it's his duty to be involved in other lives, knowing what's going on in order to empower collaboration through invitation to working together in integrative contexts. Maybe that's gospel for us today: living out a call to be with other (and maybe even everyone), rather than merely defining ourselves by what we're against.

Preaching Polarization: the easy way out

My family and I went to worship at the church I grew up in yesterday to say goodbye and be commissioned. It's a faith community that has chosen to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA) to join the Evangelical Presbyterian Church because of a disagreement over doctrine, specifically in terms of stances regarding sexuality, ordination and how to articulate and profess Christian faith in a pluralistic world. While I haven't made the same doctrinal choice and relational position in terms of the church denomination that I've grown up in, I still can call that church home. I was overwhelmed by the greetings of folks whose children I grew up with, the support and the genuine enthusiasm for our family and the way in which we are choosing to follow Jesus by moving to France. I was struck during a commissioning prayer time by the reality that life isn't black or white, that relationships are confusing and messy (that's what makes them so rich) and that life is much more a labyrinth sort of road composed of twists and turns, then a road with a fork that either has a "good" or "wrong" path to follow. A dimension of my perspective on that is well articulated by an article in today's SF Gate on the Labyrinth at Grace Cathedral.

As the service went on and the preaching began I was overwhelmed. The sermon was intended to be upon prayer, how to, why and what for. Yet it proceeded to be an enthusiastic encouragement to pray and to do so often [to which I say amen!] that was brought to a climactic conclusion by a sudden polarizing proclamation that the PC(USA) is evil for its stance in terms of working towards the ordination of gay and lesbian followers of Jesus and for some of non-black-and-white articulations of Christian faith in a pluralistic world. I respect the difference of opinion, and actually believe I'm pushed to deeper faith and more thoughtful world-view perspective through the dialog in diverse understandings of the teachings of Jesus and the "Christian tradition". Yet I was disappointed for the sermon on prayer slipped into a polarizing war-crime, or rally around the pole speech about how the PC(USA) is evil and God-rejecting liberals who blow with the wind as opposed to the morally righteous and justified ones that have left that behind. I felt personally attacked as what I believe was lifted up as anti-Christian, and almost evil. I wondered what that had to do with prayer? I wondered how such polarizing talk of good versus evil can lead us to a deeper understanding and experience of community as followers of Jesus. I don't think that it can or does.

I probably make a similar more, on the other side of the spectrum. And I wonder do we have to rally the troops against someone else, or the "opposing side" or is there not anything deeper in the teachings of Jesus that push us towards a both/and understanding of the implications of his ethical teachings and spiritual guidance which we often embody in our moral choices and political actions? It seems like such finger-pointing is simply the easy way out, denying that the world in which we live, and navigate as people of faith is more like the twisty turns of a labyrinth than the straight lines and black-and-white choices of a forking road.

10 Things I Learned over the past 7 Years

Yesterday was my last day as pastor of the church I've served for the past 7 years.  In preparing to leave and than actually gearing up to do so in conversations, letters, emails, dialog and a goodbye Sunday celebration, I've been flooded by memories and reflected on the time.  As therapy I thought I'd compose a top 10 list of what I learned as pastor in a 21st century, urban Presbyterian church:

1.  We all are broken in one way or another, looking for, and needing wholeness.  The Bible writers call this sin. I like the word broken (which means the same thing I guess as "sin" literally means "missing the mark you're aiming for."

2.  A mentor told me long ago that the people of the church will teach you how to be a pastor.  A wise truth that we ignore in a church based upon the theory of lay leadership among equals, yet which in practice lifts up the seminary-trained people as "superior."

3.  People don't want someone to tell them about God, but rather to be empowered to experience God.  They don't necessarily want someone to tell them how to live faith, as much as someone who can empower them to articulate their faith and equip them to practice it in their daily life.  In general we're trained to lead worship basically as a spectator-sport or "info-mercial" about God (and most of us our so used to it that we settle for it), when what we really want to do is participate in worship, claiming faith for ourselves, articulating our spirituality in a common gathering|ritual|celebration.

4.  The church hierarchy tends to honor tradition and loyalty, often promoting almost-retired leadership to open parish positions, because they're almost retired and need a job, as opposed to looking at the crucial culture-changing needs of a local parish and letting them experiment boldly.  People in the church, or maybe just the one I served, in general are more attracted to and by creativity, really radically going for trying to be the church, than simply doing the same old thing with the Book of Common Worship, 3 point sermons and committee structures for report making.

5.  Children should be heard not just seen, invited as full-participants in worship, for at times they articulate faith more clearly than adults can.

6.  Brevity is always more effective than long-windedness:  we over-complicate with incoherent theologizing, instead of speaking authentically and personally about faith/theology in daily life. (Of course in a sense that what we're taught in seminary).

7.  A few bad apples do indeed spoil the bunch.  We tend not to confront trouble-makers and bad-energy-vibe-producing people (we all know who they are in our respective communities) because we don't want to be mean, gang up on someone, or nit-picky.  Yet the bad apples repeatedly set the tone, divide community from its focus, and spoil the whole bunch with their negativity.  Jesus was about confronting the bad apples he encountered, to invite them to redemptive wholeness, where did we begin to think that doing so in love is un-Christian?

8.  Sometimes folks who are "outside" the church are actually more for the church than those in them.  Instead of looking at a congregation as the community of faith, maybe we should consider the neighborhood or parish as the larger community of faith of which our congregation is but one part.  I'm not just talking about other religious groups. I also mean that there is community to develop through blogging, local social networks, community organizing, online social networking, and just plain-old hanging out at the "hang out spots" like Peet's or World Grounds.

9.  Urban people are more interested in faith and the teachings of Jesus than the Media, or our entrenched modernist church-planting perspectives lead us to believe.  They just don't want to believe in the God that they experienced in their journeys (mostly in churchs that ran from culture in the 60s and 70s).

10.  Empowering people to be disciples, to be and become leaders of and by faith, is what the work of pastoring should be, and is about.  Unfortunately we're often to distracted by people-pleasing and preserving existing traditions (that no one understands any more in general) than addressing the pressing, organically-emerging issues of following Jesus right here and now.

10b. (ok - couldn't do it).  In all the hard times, personal attacks, celebrations, joys and gratitude...I must admit that I love being a pastor.  As much as I might complain about it, it's amazing.  My favorite things about it include being present at deaths or alongside hospital beds, present in the moments of life that are so filled with meaning.

Goodbye Fruitvale Church

Today was the last Sunday that I served as pastor of Fruitvale Presbyterian Church. We gathered for a service of celebration, celebrating the past, giving thanks for today and hintingly pointing towards the future.  Several members gave personal reflections about the past seven years together.

I've been wondering the past weeks about what to say at this last Sunday gathering together.  How do you sum up so many times, so many events, conversations, words exchanged, words received?  How do you reflect upon the meaning of and the meaning-making experiences of community, including both the good and the bad, the encouraging and the existentially challenging?

I chose to attempt to sing a song that makes great meaning for me: "For Good" from the musical  Wicked.  Realizing that I can't quite sing the octave range that Kristin Chenoweth can, I opted to simply quote the lyrics of the song: "Because of you, I have been changed for good." [the whole song is below]

In the end isn't the unequivocable truth of human existence the paradox of mutuality?  We're inter-twined, inter-connected, inter-dependent.  I think that is what in large part the Christian faith points to, invites us to live, and challenges us to embrace.

Orientation & Ordination:
orienting our vision of spiritual authority

Today is the day that the California State Supreme Court pronounces its decision regarding Proposition 8 and the stance on Marriage and its parameters. At the same time the Church of Scotland appointed by vote its first openly gay minister on Saturday [BBC video report]. At the same time this same General Assembly then voted to no longer ordain anyone who is openly gay and not yet ordained for 2 years, until 2011, thus avoiding having to deal with the problem that they just addressed on Saturday [BBC article].

I think most people in the church (and maybe outside of it too) are tired of this debate, and unsure how much longer the church can handle discussing, debating and being divided by it. Ironically a blog I read had an entry about the surprising fact that most clergy support gay marriage. I finished reading a book this weekend [The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle] that talks about the changes we're going through culturally/politically/socially/religiously and the consequential transformations it will bring to the church.



Rather than proclaim a doomsday apocalypse for the "faith-full" (however they define themselves), Tickle believes that we are approaching and beginning to articulate a cyclical re-formation or re-traditioning of the church that will actually lead to more vibrant faith community and experience as opposed to death and destruction. In her analysis the main question of the changes we're going through is the one of authority: who has it? a group of scholars, clergy, scripture; or is it experience, community (local, national, global); or even a dialog between multiple of theses factors. She argues that the discussion about homosexuality will be one of the keys in the conversation of church conversion:

To approach any of the arguments and questions surrounding homosexuality in the closing years of the twentieth century and the opening ones of the twenty-first is to approach a battle to the death. When it is all resolved - and it most surely will be - the Reformation's understanding of Scripture as it had been taught by Protestantism for almost five centuries will be dead. That is not to say that Scripture as the base of authority is dead. Rather it is to say that what the Protestant tradition has taught about the nature of that authority will be either dead or in mortal need of reconfiguration. And that kind of summation is agonizing fo the surrounding culture in general. In particular, it is agonizing for the individual lives that have been built upon it. Such an ending is to be staved off with every means available and resisted with every bit of energy that can be mustered. Of all the fights, the gay one must be - has to be - the bitterest, because once it is lost, there are no more fights to be had. It is finished. Where now is the authority? (p. 101)

So as I start the day I wonder what today's California State Supreme Court decision will have as an impact on this ongoing "fight."

becoming church outside of the Church

The Indigo Girls' concert I experienced last night at the Crest Theatre in Sacramento was maybe the closest thing to church I've experienced in a while. Surrounded by throngs of people singing along with lyrics that often times talked about faith, invoked Jesus and invited listeners to active participation in social action, I was in the minority in terms of gender, age and orientation. The majority of concert goers seem to be down with the themes of grace, faith, social responsibility, ethical actions, and solidarity in the name of something bigger than ourselves. Yet they also shared in the lyrics sung by the Indigo Girls (and opener Matt Morris) covering topics such as criticism of the institutional church for hierarchical actions, immigration reform, exclusion, making meaning in modern life, love, social action, generosity, overcoming evil with goodness, community, the paradox of human life. As I sang, reflected, and sang along some more I realized that it was the evening included several elements of church experience: community greetings, sacred texts being interpreted, invoking the life-example and teachings of Jesus, a benediction and exhortation which climaxed in a crowd-rushing-to-the-front-of-the-auditorium altar call to the song addressing the ills of modern American views of Immigration, "Shame on You" [music | lyrics], including the phrase "My friend Tanner she says you know me and Jesus we're of the same heart The only thing that keeps us distant is that I keep fuckin up".

Maybe this was more church than church often is? Someone in my life, a faith-full person, recently told me that they had pretty much given up on the community of the church - in the institutional sense - because it seems to be more about self-preservation at the cost of the excluded, marginalized and those without a voice, instead of following Jesus' words, actions and purpose in today's world. Isn't that what church - being called to community both in and for faith - is all about? Emily Saliers, one of the Indigo Girls, wrote a book [A Song to Sing: A Life to Live] with her father: a famous church organist, in which she basically affirms this through her personal experience of Christian faith, church participation and her experience of concerts often become more "church" than church is [my words]. Maybe the church is shrinking in attendance and participation because it's given up its purpose and passion to others in the name of holding fast to the traditions of credal orthodoxy, doctrine and dogma over people, the world and God's presence?

Killing the Church with Tradition

Easter has come and gone. I've found in my shorter existence as a pastor, and longer one as an active church participant, that now is the season in which there is often tensions and conflicts about the ways we are doing church and the ways we should be doing it. The high feast days have come and gone. In the coming-down-from-the-high something happen in the vortex of community that pushes some to want to blame others for their unmet expectations, un-articulated demands and possibly their unconscious essential tenants. It's not about being a killjoy as much as it seems to be a cyclical pattern of rejection and condemnation before a fear-full minority receives the rejection that they fear is coming.

This is true in my own life in the past weeks with claims that I am hiding, or embezzling money, as well as an anonymous critical comment left for me in the offering plate this past Sunday. (see image: click on it to expand it).

As I reflect on these encounters, past experiences and current theological reading I have to wonder if maybe the church is dying in our country - or at least struggling in a major Code BLUE way because we are so intent at any cost to not just hold on to tradition, but to be dominated by it. I'm not talking just about the little old ladies who only want to sing familiar hymns, nor about those that demand that a pastor/priest wear appropriate clerical uniforms. It's not just generational, geriatric or ageist. It's bigger. There is a strong surge, maybe a desperate plea for help, that rallies around the flagpole of tradition, even affirming negative aspects of our tradition out of fear or modernity and the increasingly obligatory need to adapt. Some examples include the continuation of destructive highly-hierarchical ways of relating to one another versus liberating and empowering forms of egalitarian collaboration, observation over participation, critical comment making over involved personal effort to bring about a change, cries of dogmatic and doctrinal heresy as opposed to thoughtful and time-consuming engagement of new ideas and reflection on past traditions, and the fight or flight response to emerging culture that pushes the church community to often feel the obligation to choose between total accomodation and dissipation in our pluralistic postmodern world or retreat back into the glory days of the 50s when churches were full and we were happy. [Another example is a recent article on President Obama's speech to the government of Turkey on the blog religious dispatches]

In my experience of the church I think we often don't recognize or welcome the growth, revitalization and "younger folks in the pews" that we desperately claim to want because we are addicted to the crack of the past, letting the hands of tradition so strenously wrap and hold themsleves around our necks that we can't inhale the fresh ideas, paradigms and air that is all around us. For the past years both in California and in France, I've worked with and for the transformation or revitalization of church communities (specifically in the PCUSA and the Eglise Reformee de France), maybe their is not an appropriate way to bring transformation, no peace-able way to bring change when it's perceived as possible only at the cost of throwing out all tradition.

Can Only White Men Be Christian?

Lunar New Year Reflections

The above question may seem idiotic or silly to you. Of course it's not true. Anyone can believe anything that they chose to commit to and orient their life around. Yet in terms of the Christian Church I'm not convinced that our regular, at least historically so in the particular context of this country, actions reflect that belief.

We celebrated Lunar New Year in our worship gathering this past week. We tried, as we have done so in the past few years, to go beyond the token/stereotypical celebration which affirms cultural specificities and particularities by sharing a meal of what some might call "ethnic" or cultural-specific food. This year our children again learned in Sunday School how to make some of that food, actually helping to prepare our Chinese feast. We also have a longer presentation with media clips and photos of past experiences of the speakers growing up in a Chinese Church in Chinatown, learning that being Chinese is bad in terms of being Christian: in a sense that they had to choose being Christian over their identity as Chinese-Americans. The presentation, seeking to engage the audience in participation, lifted that ironic and painful evangelistic and effacing approach to cultural diversity and the culture of the church. I was struck again by the multicultural nature, since birth, of the community of those that follow Jesus: or the church. Begun in a land dominated by at least 4 languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin) it grew quickly (within 300 years) to take in and "take over" the immensely diverse Roman Empire. Where along the line did it start to become a mono-cultural entity, erasing cultural diversity in the name of orthodoxy and even into a triumphalist power that legitimized imperialistic oppression and the cultural destruction of colonialism? Good question. Are those tragedies consequences of aspects inherent and innate to the Christian worldview/doctrine/experience? I hope not. I don't think so. So are they then merely logical consequences and developments from the broken nature of the human condition? Hmmm.

I do know that historically the Church grew rapidly [in particular places like ancient Scotland and Ireland, not in those such as enslaved colonial Brazil] because it engulfed and embraced diverse cultural aspects in its evangelistic endeavors, pointing to the "Christian" which actually lies underneath the previous/ancients practices. Sunday our speakers made this great insert breaking down similarities they see between Chinese cultural celebrations and Christian meaning-making holy days/liturgical seasons, in particular comparing Lunar New Year to Advent. Here's a jpeg of it.

I'm well past starting to go off, and still struck by the comment by a speaker on Sunday. "I grew up thinking that being Chinese was bad, that I couldn't be both Chinese and Christian." What pain did that teaching (whether conscious or unconscious) cause and does it still cause? And how much more pain is there like that both inside and outside the church?