Would Anyone Hire Jesus?

Singles Men Unhireable as Evangelical Pastors

In a conversation with a merchant near the church I serve as pastor told me about a recent article in the New York Times [Single and Evangelical?  Good Luck Finding A Job].  The article basically asserts that single pastors, in particular male ones, in the evangelical church network are at the bottom of the hiring heap.  Single women would be too, but I assume that they're not included in the article because the author focused on communities that only ordain men.  They're usually not hired because their is an unspoken assumption that they're either predators, or gay, or something else.

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.

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.

Are iPhones replacing baby-sitters?

I ran across this great article about how many modern toddles are using iPhones easily and often for learning and entertainment. iPhone apps are tempting even to 3 year olds. Ironic as the first thing shouted when I get my children into the car isn't "shot-gun" but "can I have your phone?" Our youngest goes so far as to say that driving in the car without a phone to play with is too boring. Maybe we're entitling our 4 year old, or maybe something is changing in our culture.

My wife and I went for dinner the night before I read this article in Rockridge. The first thing we saw upon entering the restaurant was a 6 year-old-ish girl playing on an iPhone while the adults she was eating with enjoyed the dinner not-yet-half-eaten on their plates, while the child's plate had already been cleaned off. Maybe it's irony, maybe it's confirmation of changes in and around us.

Is Consumerism the Primary Cultural Glue that Holds US Together?

An article on Oakland's diverse ethnic neighborhoods in SF GATE today talks and how the cultural specificity of a particular population group shapes - and reshapes - the geographic urban context that the live in. [How ethnic groups change Oakland neighborhoods] The examples include Oakland's Chinatown in which residents (primarily Chinese) like to have crowded sidewalks in part because it reminds many of them of daily life in China. Another is the Fruitvale District, primarily Latino today, in which walking and biking is highly popular - even when not provided for with adequate space by our city planning. A good read. I found myself wondering how culture impacts the districts of Oakland in which I live, work and have my being: Dimond, Laurel, Maxwell Park, Glenview, Redwood Heights.... Later on in the article is the answer (or at least the answer formulated by this study):

"There are many places in Oakland where one culture does not dominate," Angstadt said. "Piedmont or College avenues for instance. Those neighborhoods have got a different dominant theme going, more of a West Coast small specialty shop vibe. Whatever the dominant theme is that the neighborhood wants to preserve, we want to be aware of that. We also have to be balanced because we're planning for an entire city."

So I wonder is it materialism, shopping and captialistic consumerism - the desire to have good shops to shop at nearby - the cultural bit that defines the dominant West Coast | Bay Area culture? Is that what we have to offer? Is shopping the one thing we have in common when we have either 1) forgotten or not maintained our ethnic cultural particularities? or 2) had our cultural particularities absorbed (either as the oppressor or the oppressee) into dominant American culture today? I don't know. As a white middle-class father I'm troubled if what I'm expected to pass on as a cultural legacy to my children is a love of coffee shops, local food stores, and Target. There has to be more. And yet if you've seen the cover of this week's Newsweek - which seems to affirm - that we are what we buy - or we exist culturally - politically - and socially to consume - you have to wonder.

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?

The effects of Proposition 8 on Community
What is sanctity anyway?

In the past week I've been told that I'm a misogynist, a heretic and that it's too bad I'm no longer a Christian. These three affirmations about my personhood were made by people who had directly, or indirectly, encountered my rantings, ravings and sharings about my view of Proposition 8 as a Christian and as a Pastor, and regarding my vehement support of Obama for President with those same viewpoints. What's interesting is that there was no invitation to dialogue in the (re)definitions that were shared with me of who and how I live by faith. Maybe I thought I'd invited folks to discuss and had merely lauched a mono-logal diatribe. Yet my point was always to enter a discussion, to recognize and affirm (even with my dark humor) that we are community, that we are called to live in community, that such life requires and demands mutual-respect, self-respect, a refusal to embrace verbal violence and degradation, and a commitment to relationship.

I've seen and experienced this online, in the communities in which I live, even in my own family. There are consequences for every action that we take. We can say that something isn't personal, or that we weren't meaning for it to be personal in terms of hurting someone else. But everything is personal to someone.

Yesterday while the worship gathering was finishing at the church I serve the Mormon Temple of Oakland, which is about 10 blocks away, was being besieged by No On 8 Protestors who had gone to put a face on the consequences of the proposition, to forces those that were at the Temple that day to have to encounter those that are no longer legally married, or can't be married, because of Prop 8, which had been in large part (at least in the beginning stages) funded by the Mormon Community. I'm not against Mormons, or do I hold anything against them. Merely it's a story of my context. Here's a news video of the protest, and here's an online article about it.

I heard someone this week advocate stoning (not with joints, but with rocks) all gays and lesbians. Because that's what the Bible (in some parts) says we should do. This person was invoking the sanctity of marraige, while denying or forgetting about what I'd have to call the sanctity of life. My own nuclear family is torn among gay family members who are legally married and those that voted to overturn their marriage in the name of sanctity. That word has been thrown around so much lately, that I'm not sure what we do, or claim, to hold sacred and saintly? We forget that everything and every-issue has a face, a personal narrative, and consequences. I'm not advocating nihilism. Rather it seems that we in our culture completely disconnect. We place blame when we don't want to be connected. Just look at Governor Palin who today blamed George Bush for McCain's defeat, and Yes on 8 forces that blamed Obama (and his large people-of-color turn-out-the-vote apparatus) for the passage of 8. At the root of it all it seems that we - out of fear or something - don't want to recognize the other as subject, and not just object - in our society, in our communities, even in our families.

I got this sarcastic (and what I consider cleverly funny) Funny-or-Die video from someone today talking about Prop 8 and pushing it to the extreme. It seems over the top. Yet is it really that different than what we tend to do on most issues when we neglect the dominant grey reality of life, place blame elsewhere, or judge others in order to make oursevles feel better. Watch it. Then share a comment if any of this has struck you.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Michael Savage - Autism - the Search for Moral Compasses

Watching CNN this morning I heard about yesterday's events around the crass or harsh (depending upon how you look at it) words of Michael Savage about Autism.  On a diatribe about other issues [context context context] he switched into a mode of saying that autism is simply a character flaw compounded by the moral absence of strong fathers in the lives of their children.  A bit harsh.  Totally off base. Yet the public outcry gets me.  Why are people so angry?  His words are unfair and unjust, yet he's not a moral compass, a cultural prophet, intellectual master or spiritual guide for the American people?  So why do we give him so much credit, so much moral authority, assuming that his words are so important and meaning-making in terms of our lives, our collective consciousness, the way our children see each other, and the way that we see ourselves?  He's on radio in order to PROVOKE, so why are we surprised when that's what he does?  

Makes me think of the brouhaha over which presidential candidate best pronounces the word "Nevada".  Is that really how we're going to decide?  It seems to me that we collectively have lost any sort of compass, or even general consensus on who should serve as our cultural compasses.  We look to the radio and Hollywood for guidance that we ourselves should be giving our children and nurturing in our communities and neighborhoods.

You can also see the interesting responses of listeners on youtube HERE.