Beloved Spear

Echoes of Church

2012-01-30T09:29:00.002-05:00

The Cleaners/Oil Distributor/Millinery/Baptist.

As part of a Doctor of Ministry project to explore the history of my congregation, I recently found myself digging through some fascinating background research done a decade or so ago into the history of my 150-plus year old community. It's nifty stuff, because I love the richness of stories that echo from the past.

Part of the research included poring through a listing of all of the historic buildings in the little town of Poolesville, along with pictures and a short blurb about the provenance and use of the buildings. Leafing through the pages, one building in particular caught my eye.

It's a yellow-painted brick building, one that sits to the left of the road as you approach the intersection of the One-Oh-Seven and Elgin from the East-South-East. It houses a dry cleaner now, but according to the historic documents, it was not always a business.

It began as a church.

Poolesville Presbyterian

It was Poolesville's first Baptist Church, built in 1865 or so, about twenty years after the construction of my congregation's sanctuary. It isn't, as best as I've been able to tell, the formal progenitor of the healthy and dynamic Baptist community now thriving in Poolesville.

Having driven past it for nearly four months, I'm amazed I didn't notice the similarity. The front facades are nearly identical, sharing that blocky, built-out-of-Lego stepped appearance. The windows facing the street are in nearly the same position. Peeking in to the glassed in reception area of the cleaners, you can see where the original door into the church was once large...a big church door, one that would have received worshippers before they arrived. The two buildings are close enough in appearance to be sisters.

I couldn't help but wonder about the community that once gathered there, worshipping and praying and singing. Back then, as the glowing ashes of the Civil War settled, these two small fellowships would have been very similar in size and dynamics, if perhaps not in the less-relevant points of theology.

Digging deeper into the history of the community, providence passed a book my way written by one of the keepers of the town lore. I find that the Baptists who built that church began their fellowship as a tenant congregation of Poolesville Presbyterian. When the time came to build a church of their own, they just built a slightly nicer version of the church they'd been worshipping in for a decade.

Poolesville Presbyterian has chugged along for over 150 years. It sputtered and dimmed for a while, closing for a handful of years in the middle of the last century before re-opening.

But for the little sister Baptist church, well, faith didn't stick there long. It ceased to be church, sometime around the turn of the last century. By 1900, it was a millinery. Then a fuel oil distributor. And then a cleaner.

Yet still, if you stand at the front of the building, there are echoes of the faith that must have started her. In the left "eye" of the facade, the topmost window still holds a little flash of color, a little twinkle of stained glass as an echo of the church that once lived and hoped and worshipped there.

Odd, how the faith in buildings can remind you of the faith of people.

Registering Grace

2012-01-27T12:40:00.002-05:00

Nothing gives more opportunities for being graceful than being an idiot. I get more of those opportunities than I'd like.

This last Fall, I donated my aging Yamaha to the Salvation Army. It was time to move on to a newer motorcycle, one with a riding position that didn't overly tax my aging frame. So I did, and did all the requisite paperwork to transfer title. That included notifying the State and the County that I no longer owned my vehicle.

A week or so later, I received a bill from Fairfax County. It was for 2012 Registration for the bike, which, of course, I no longer owned. I assumed things had crossed in the mail. No point in registering a bike that isn't yours, now, is there?

Two months later, I got a past-due notice for the same registration fee, for the 2012 registration for same bike that I no longer owned. I went online, and re-confirmed with the County system that the vehicle had been donated. Yes, they knew I no longer owned it.

And then, with Christmas and doctoral papers and coursework consuming my brain, I completely forgot about it.

This last week, I got notification that because my registration for 2012 was past due, it had been referred to a collections agency, with a modest penalty attached, plus a service fee. A bit of more fervent research revealed that in late 2010, Fairfax County quietly decided that "registration" no longer means "registration." You're not paying a fee so that the county can know you own something, like, say, the registration fee you pay to own a dog. There is no "decal."

You're paying retroactively for the privilege of having owned the vehicle in the previous year. It's called "registration," but what it really is now is a county-level personal property tax on a vehicle. So the law had changed, and I was now on the wrong side of it.

I really hate such things, and they tend to make me a tick irritable, something I'll remember come next election. The payment would just have to be made. But the call also needed to be made to the collections agency, because we all know how much fun those folks can be once their database has got its teeth in you.

I spent a few moments centering myself, getting calm. To do this, I needed to talk with another human being, another soul.

With form in hand, I made the call. On the other end, a young man's voice came on after a brief hold time, by inflection clearly African American. He went through a mandated schpiel about the call being monitored for quality assurance. His voice was guarded and tight. I asked him to confirm the amount, which he did. I asked him to confirm where the check needed to be sent, which he did.

Then, I laughed at what an idiot I'd been, and explained how I'd botched it to him. He "mmm-hhhhmmmed" his way through it, as he could tell payment was about to be made and could be heard typing away on the other end.

I thanked him for his help, and then remarked that he had a totally thankless, stressful job. "I'm sure everyone you talk to is always sooo glad to be talking to you," I said, and he laughed.

"Oh, maaaaaan," he said, and you could hear him relax. "Seriously. Seriously. You have no idea, man."

I told him to hang in, and to have a good one. "You too, man," he replied, voice still smiling, and the call was done.

Venting grace is so much more satisfying than venting anger.

God Fearin'

2012-01-26T12:59:00.001-05:00

In an interesting piece of  bloggery, Carol Howard-Merritt finds herself wrassling with the concept of "fearing God." It is, or so our sacred tradition speaks it, the root of all wisdom. Her struggling with that concept mirrors my own struggling with that concept, which generally takes two tacks.

Tack number one is theological. If God is love, as we Jesus folk consistently and relentlessly insist, then why would we fear God? It seems illogical and emotionally inconsistent.

Tack number two is sociopolitical and anthropological. Within human institutions and cultures, fear of punishment is used to enforce conformity within autocratic cultures and family systems. Do what I say, because you fear that if you do not, I will verbally abuse you and/or hang you, cut out your intestines in front of you, and then pull you apart with horses. Generally, the former is family systems and the latter is...um...hopefully not, although I will grant that some families are worse than others.   If that is the character of the fear we are meant to have of God, then God would be little better than an abusive parent or medieval despot.

So is this a salvageable theological concept?

I tend to think so, with some notable caveats from the Apostle Paul. Here, I'm talking about Paul, the author of the seven letters, not deutero-Paul, the follower of Paul who wrote in his name. In his letter to the churches in both Rome and Galatia, Paul makes it clear that the purpose of Christian faith is not fear. We are not meant to be slaves, living in fear, he tells the Romans. If the Spirit of God lives and moves in us, then our connection to the gracious nature of our Maker frees us from the fear of coercion. Christian faith is antithetical to "power over," both in our relationship to others and in our relationship with our Creator. It is not a vassal/liege arrangement and not a social contract, with all the punishment/protection dynamics that such things entail. That's the heart of the joyous anarchy of grace Paul proclaimed.

Fear of God, then, needs to be decoupled from the idea of social obedience and legalistic interpretations of Christianity.

But when it comes to our encounter with God...those transforming moments that take our faith out of the realm of ritual and abstraction and into the realm of the existential and experiential...fear takes on a different character.

Fear of God arises from the knowledge of God.

First, there is the fear that comes with unbidden theophany. This does not happen often. Being in the presence of the Numinous Other is the sort of thing that causes hair to stand on end, buckles knees, and leaves you unable to speak. I've heard it described as a feeling of vertiginous awe, like looking out over a vast precipice. That's close, but in my experience it's a bit more like that feeling when the railing you're leaning against gives way. You are not observing the vastness from a distance. It is grasping you, utterly present to you.

Fear? Yes. When there is nothing between your face and God's face, yes.

Second, those moments when we feel most frequently connected to our Maker, at least in my experience, are moments of immense grace and calm. We get there through prayer and meditation, through contemplation and self-stilling. Emptied of self, we feel no terror, because we are consumed and suffused with God's Spirit. "Feeling," in the sense of emotional affect, almost disappears in that great radiant wash of peace. As a still fledgling and semi-competent mystic, I cherish those moments. They are the existential anchor points for my faith, just as I'm sure they were for dear brother Paul.

That said, I don't live every moment that way. I get angry. I get confused. I become lustful, and bitter, and impatient.   I get lost.

And in those all-too-frequent moments, I recall that depth of connectedness. The light of that grace is a fearful thing when you are in the thrall of something...else. Seeing how deeply the brokenness in yourself impedes your ability to live into the grace you have come to know is frightening. Loss of that connection, of that grace, of the hope and strength it entails...that is a terrifying thing, because God as Other is a terrifying thing. Not just because you're lost. But because you know how deeply your lostness is incompatible with the grace you have known.

That fear is the root of right action, even in the separation. Feeling the loss, and in the throes of the dark night of the soul, you nonetheless conform yourself to the grace you cannot feel.

And as wisdom is right action, that form of fear is, as I see it, the root of wisdom.

The Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians

2012-01-24T18:26:00.001-05:00

When the Presbyterian Church (USA) recently moved to open the door for the ordination of gays and lesbians, it was inevitable that those for whom this action was a line in the sand would seek ways to distance themselves from the denomination.

So when a gathering of conservative Presbyterians coalesced in Miami, the output of that event seemed inevitable. There was much praying. There was much worshipping and preaching. After it all, to no-one's great surprise, there is now yet another denomination. Or sort of a denomination. A denominish? Denominette? It's a bit difficult to tell yet.

What was formed at the Miami gathering has been called, somewhat opaquely, the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians. This name has the advantage of sounding a bit like the campus ministry at Hogwarts, or better yet, a league of oldline superheroes with a secret subterranean sanctuary. "To the Bat-Nave, Robin!"

For branding purposes, they're going to call themselves ECO. Coupled with an appropriately leafy-growthy logo, it feels rather more contemporary than the blockish and fusty logo of the PC(USA).

Getting into the meat of this movement, though, there are a few telling things. As has been noted by others, there's almost no indication of the "why" of the creation of this entity. For example, as a "covenant order," there is a covenant that you need to affirm. Reading through the covenant, I can see little in it that I wouldn't be able to affirm in both practice and/or principle. Nor, quite frankly, do I see much in it that a practicing, open and married lesbian teaching elder couldn't affirm.

Going more deeply into their theological statements, I'm there with the exception of one or two sentences out of many, many pages. This I can say as someone who stands on the other side of the fence they're in the process of teetering on top of. If your raison-d'etre is the Divine Nyet to gays and abortion, it's a bit odd that this isn't more evident.

This highlights something of a conundrum for the fledgling ECO. They are positioning themselves as a back-to-the-roots conservative movement, one embracing eternal biblical truths while being open to new forms of being church.

But they are not the conservatives who believe that the universe is 6,000 years old. They are also not the conservatives who reject global warming and climate change as a Wiccan/Democrat/Bilderberger plot to contaminate our precious bodily fluids. They are also not the conservatives who reject women's roles in leadership.

ECO is only fundamentalist when it comes to gays and abortion, and those positions are hedged and hidden by indirect language. They'd slide into the denominational continuum to the right of the PC(USA), but just a smidge to the left of the EPC, and several notches more to the left than the PCA.

Further, while ECO seems to be taking on the form of a denomination, that form seems remarkably close to the thing they've just left. Or rather, left-ish. A tremendous amount of depresbyribonucleic acid is still evident in the ECO genome. For example, their constitution includes in its entirety the PC(USA) Book of Confessions. Their materials indicate that a congregation can can be both PC(USA) and ECO at the same time. They focus a great deal on the pensions and benefits for pastors, an odd thing for a movement. I'm fairly sure Luther didn't include a benefits package rate sheet underneath the theses he nailed to the door in Wittenberg.

The challenge for this group would seem to be the Aesop's Bat Conundrum. That classic fable describes the Bat, who claimed himself neither beast nor fowl in a war between air and earth. Are you a bird of the air? Are you a beast of the ground?

As much as I like the via media myself, claiming to be both often gets you neither.

Still and all, I can appreciate the positivity with which ECO seems to be trying to launch. They're not fulminating or raging, which is a welcome thing in our binary, demonizing culture. For those who choose to participate in whatever this new thing proves to be, I'd hope PC(USA) folk will choose to be as gracious as our Master calls us to be towards them as they semi-depart.

Selby's

2012-01-24T09:12:00.001-05:00

Friday afternoon, I popped by our local Bloom grocery, looking to snag some food and supplies for an overnight "man-trip" to West Virginia with some old friends. It's the closest store to us, a seven-minute walk from our home. It has only been in operation for a few years, replacing a frayed Magruders that had been there for just about ever.

To my dismay, the store had signs all over the front of it announcing it's imminent closure. It weren't just our Bloom, neither. The Dutch holding company that owned the brand evidently wasn't making money on it. So they are now, in the BizSpeak of their US CEO, closing all their stores to "solidify our U.S. operations and enable our company to focus on our successful brand strategy repositioning." The success of their brand strategy repositioning comes as a great comfort to the five thousand souls they're laying off, I'm sure. A bummer for them, although only a minor bummer for us, as there's also a Giant, a Safeway, and a Harris Teeter within a two mile radius of our home. Retail density is one of the few advantages of living in an inner suburb, and not out in a small town.

Like, say, my recently adopted bi-weekly church home in Poolesville, which has in living memory only had one grocery store. Poolesville, hermetically sealed away in the growth-restricted Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve, stands as a kind of last redoubt of Small Town America. It is the Helms Deep of denominationalism and the family owned grocer.

From the moment I arrived in Poolesville this last October, I knew the family owned grocer was in trouble.

Selby's was one of the first places I saw and heard about in the little 'burg where my little church lives. As a family-owned and named small town grocery store, it was one of the few remaining examples of a dying breed. It was one of those "hubs" of the community, a place where folks could go to shop, where girl scouts could camp out to hawk cookies to passers-by, and where pastors of local congregations could put up flyers announcing events at their churches.

It was in putting up my very first flyer that I noticed the unmistakable marks of a business on its last legs. Light foot traffic and empty, unstocked shelves mean only one thing. Suppliers are drying up. Credit is short. Restocking can't be done.

It felt a great deal like other businesses I've watched go under. Corporations are not people, not quite, but small businesses die in much the same way human beings die. One system fails, then another, then another, until the cascade makes continuing existence impossible.

The scuttlebutt amongst the folks who actually live in the town was that after a long run, Selby's was finally succumbing to the same cultural and market forces that have taken down Mom-and-Pop stores everywhere. The Walmart in Germantown may be nearly 12 miles away, but what's 12 miles? Your average soccer/ballet/karate mom puts in twice that before breakfast. And the Harris Teeter that recently encamped on the Western front of Darnestown? That's just 8.4 traffic free miles from P-ville.

David sometimes beats Goliath. But if Goliath is wearing powered Chobham ceramic composite armor and wielding a AA-12 Combat Shotgun with Frag-12 rounds, the odds get considerably worse. The greater selection that comes from larger stores, the increased leverage with suppliers that comes from being a Big Box Corporation, and the expectation-meeting advertising and store-design resources that come with brand marketing, those things are just too much.

Now that the going out of business signs are up, though, the challenge for this little community is that with the loss, it will become a slightly less desirable place to live. Not having the option of shopping locally may feel like a minor inconvenience for those used to driving everywhere, but come the next Snowmageddon, not being able to walk to get groceries will be notable. More significantly, it will be more difficult for those for whom driving is an issue.

Where to get groceries, if cash for gas or a car itself is lacking? There's a CVS for milk and eggs. There's a friendly but pricey organic food store run by the local klatch of Buddhists. Whichever way, it's going to be a challenge for those in the community who are struggling to get by. The local pastors are already wrassling with what that will mean.

It is also having an effect of the geist of the town. The closing of Bloom will mean a bit more blight on one of the strips in my native Annandale. But Bloom was a recent and unsuccessful incursion by a faceless multinational corporation.

It's a very different context than the environment in Poolesville. The depth of relationship, the personal knowing and histories of a small town, well...that makes the closing of a place like Selby's more difficult. When it has a face, it's more than just losing a business.

Leading and Following

2012-01-20T09:07:00.003-05:00

A week ago, I sat in a classroom of fellow Doctor of Ministry students, all pastors, all learning more about leadership dynamics in congregations. Leadership studies are the big thing now in both ministry and business circles, a pairing that is somewhat telling. It's useful information, though, and good grist for the book project that will come right after I'm done with the next one in the hopper.

My conversation partner in the one-on-one class conversations was a Baptist pastor, a genial African American woman with a gentle smile and a voice like honey-butter on warm bread. Though we shared about a number of things, one of our moments of reflection still hangs in my memory.

The class was asked to pair up and discuss the assumption, oft repeated in oldline vision statements, that "everyone in the congregation is a minister." We're all empowered. We're all living into our gifts, creative and engaged. The goal of a leader, or so that assumption goes, is to create a congregation that is completely full of folks empowered to be Holy Ghost large and in charge. We're all equal, all masters of our own Jesus domain.

Our conversation wandered a tiny bit off track, as a question stirred in both of us. Is it better to have a congregation that thinks of itself as full of leaders, or a congregation that thinks of itself full of followers? Which of those things should a pastor be most intentional about modeling for a community?

We hate the idea of following. Followers are weak. Followers are, in the parlance of blogosphere trollery, "sheeple," the mindless masses who are utterly incapable of thinking for themselves. In this land of fiercely held individualism, the idea that we'd hand over the keys to our life-direction to another is utterly alien.

We love the idea of leading. Leading is strong. Being the leader means being in front, being empowered, being the captain, being the one behind the wheel. Being the leader means casting a golden vision of glory before the amazed, or coming up with a product that is so magical that everyone who touches it becomes an instant fanboy/girl.

And yet, as was so delightfully illustrated by Derek Sivers in his TED presentation last year, a movement is ultimately not defined by a leader. What makes for a movement is followers. No followers? No movement.

As churches try to articulate Christ into a culture of radical self-absorption, that's a bit of a challenge. On the one hand, we're aware that all of us are gifted with the blessings of the Spirit. All stand equal before our Maker, who is no respecter of persons. Authentic Christian faith rejects all forms of power over others, and in that is as radically egalitarian as you can get. Trotsky and Ron Paul ain't got nuthin' on Jesus folk.

On the other hand, we need to ask ourselves which is healthier: A congregation in which everyone sees themselves as the pastor, or a congregation in which everyone sees themselves as a disciple?

One Up

2012-01-20T08:13:00.004-05:00

Forty three feels, on the surface of it, to be a singularly unremarkable number of years to have been alive.

Forty? A big deal. At forty, you are officially Not Young, no matter how desperately our youth-addled culture wants to push that boundary further and further into the recesses of what used to be called middle age. This was the year I began wearing vests, brown corduroy pants, and bright-white old-man New Balance sneakers with pride.

Forty one? It's a year over forty, that year that nails you into your forty-ness. That counts for something.

Forty two? It's the Hitchhikers Guide Meaning of Life year, and that also counts for something.

But Forty Three? I'm at a loss to see where there's anything to it. I'm just one year older than I was before. The age rolls in like a rental Chrysler Sebring, utterly unremarkable but getting the job done.

As a day, it's been a good one. My eldest son presented me with a hand-drawn framed Skyrim logo for my office, reflecting our shared enjoyment of that game. My youngest made me a mutant birthday dirge in Garageband, culminating in his altered booming voice counting off all 43 years. In the evening, family gathered from all around for beer and wine and delivery Chinese food. Nothing epic. Just basic goodness.

Perhaps that's the point of it. You kick back, look at the day, and realize that you're smack dead center in the middle of your probable lifespan. You're not a bazillionaire. You're not world famous. You are where you are. And if you can be cool with it, well, then that's where you need to be.

Further up and further in!

SOPA Blackouts, Censorship, and Jesus

2012-01-18T08:13:00.001-05:00

Today, a significant chunk of the 'Net is either going dark or protesting a bill wending it's way through Congress. That bill, entitled the Stop Online Piracy Act, or "SOPA," is intended to prevent folks on the web from copying and profiting from content that others have created. It would allow owners of Intellectual Property to sue and/or take other legal action to shut down any site hosting or linking to purloined copyrighted material.

That's the idea, anyway. The reality is different. The reality is that such provisions would paralyze YouTube, Facebook, and Google. It would make the broader functioning of the Net...at least, a net as we know it...impossible.

Having experienced Net censorship myself a few years back, I know how quickly something like that could deteriorate. Having pitched up a bit of gentle YouTube push-back against some neoatheists, someone claimed terms of service violation, and my video was summarily removed. To the credit of the atheist film-maker I was satirizing, he spoke up in favor of leaving the vid up...but no dice. Once the censorship djinn is out of the bottle, things get bad fast.

There are a couple of places you can school yourself about the ramifications of this bill. One of the better ones was pitched out by Gizmodo, and came my way via the net-savvy Vice-Moderator of my denomination. Reading through their description, and following the link to the folks who are supporting SOPA, I encountered something that presses my buttons.

Among the many entertainment industry intellectual property holders that were actively supporting this misbegotten piece of legislation were the following:

Given that I'm reasonably sure that True Religion Brand Jeans isn't actually faith-based, this means that amidst the corporations that put their own profit above a just measure of Net-freedom, and alone among the world's religious traditions, we find Jesus people. Or, to be more accurate, we find representatives of AmeriChrist, Inc.

These are the community of folks that send the letters to churches, pressuring Jesus people into paying for the right to sing songs about Jesus, and honeychild, that has always ticked me off in a Matthew 21 sort of way.

Way I figure it, if you write a song and say you're singing it to the glory of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, you have no right to keep other Christian people from singing it too. None.

Sure, we should pay for your albums and download your stuff from iTunes and not try to sneak in at your big venue events. We should buy your hymnals and songbooks, those few of us who still do that sort of thing. Let the oxen eat what it's treading out, as the Apostle says.

But the moment you tell me that I need to license your song before my choir or praise team can sing it in worship is the moment I know you're not really serious about the whole Jesus thing. The moment you tell me I can't put my rendition of your song about Jesus up onto my congregation's YouTube/Vimeo account as a way of sharing the Good News, well, that's when you're no longer in the Gospel business.

You're just in the entertainment business.

Because the Gospel is always free, brothers and sisters. The Gospel is always free.

Success, Failure, and Tebow

2012-01-17T15:33:00.001-05:00

I am painfully oblivious to sports.

There was a period when I was not, back when I was a youngling. While living in England, I was an earnest supporter of Aston Villa, for the sole reason that my youth league team wore their colors and coopted their name. During my teen years, I was briefly into the Redskins, until I realized that I did not enjoy the psychological anguish that inflicted nearly every Sunday. Life serves up enough pain as it is without being a 'Skins fan.

And so, gradually, I drifted into this place where sports are just part of the background noise of culture, part of the chatter, as immaterial to me as fashion trends or the behavior of B-list celebrities. Still, it serves up some interesting stuff now and again, and the phenomenon of Tim Tebow has enough resonance with my actual interests that I can't help notice it.

Tebow is the goalie for the Denver Nuggets, and...wait...hold on. Let me wiki that for a second. Oops. Start again.

Tebow is the quarterback for the Denver Broncos. He is, best I can tell, an average-ish QB by the standards of the National Football League. Winning the Heisman Trophy is not the mark of an average college ball player, and he did indeed win it while playing for the Florida Gators. Pro ball does have a tendency to chew up and spit out Heisman winners, in my recollection, but Tebow has hung in there. His physical gifts are enough to make him competitive, and while he's far from the best in the league, he's a young professional player with acceptable talents.

That, of course, is not what has made Tebow such an iconic figure. He's a conservative evangelical Christian, home-schooled by missionary parents. As such, he views the world through the lenses of that faith community. He prays a great deal. He is earnest, and wears his faith on his sleeve. Interviews almost invariably begin with him thanking his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and then thanking his team. He makes a habit of kneeling to give thanks to his aforementioned Lord and Savior frequently, so frequently the action has become known as "Tebowing," and is effusively thankful to Jesus after a win.

This bugs people. As a progressive Christian, I understand this. Despite what is mistakenly taught to many young evangelicals, folks who are all up in yo bidness with their faith can be annoying.

Last week, as the New England Patriots were in the process of delivering a monstrous shellacking to the Broncos, I logged in to Twitter for a while, searching for hashtag #Tebow. The game? Meh. Not my thing. I was more interested in observing the overflowing cup of 140-character hateration on Twitter. It did not disappoint.

Almost without exception, tweeps were gleefully rejoicing in Tebow's comeuppance. Quip after quip poured from the Twitterverse, mocking him for his expressions of faith. While I'm cut from very different theological cloth than Tebow, I confess to have found it really rather unpleasant.

Sure, God doesn't care who wins football games. It's just a game, dagflabbit. God is no more vested in the outcome of an NFL game than God is vested in a multiplayer round of Call of Duty, or in a really bare-knuckle game of Canasta. In the broad scheme of things, it doesn't matter in the slightest. This is why folks like Jimmy Fallon are so eager to creatively poke fun at Tebow. How stupid of him to pray about it! What a dumb-dumb-head he is! Or words to that effect.

But as easy as it would be to go that route, I can't. Why?

First, Tebow shows no signs of being a smug, self-righteous human being. Yeah, he's got a bit of Jesus-Turettes in his speech patterns, but what sort of person does that make him? By all accounts, his team members really like him. In the locker room, he's patient and supportive and kind. In interviews, he comes across as gentle-hearted and soft-spoken. He is, best I can tell, a bit like a larger, beefier Ned Flanders. I've known folks...conservative, Bible-believing...who were unbelievably giving, kind, and gracious because of their simple faith. Mocking such a soul serves no purpose.

Second, Tebow is a football player. That is what he does. Football is a game, true. But how much less meaningful is it, honestly, than any other human activity? If I manage a small IT consulting business, is that really more meaningful? From his faith, he chooses to pray and be grounded in his Maker on a regular basis as he goes about what he does. That seems well within the bounds of the acceptable. The question is: what sort of football player does it make him? The answer seems to be similar to the above: a well-liked, supportive, good-hearted one. If he wins, he's thankful and humble about it. If he loses? He's gracious.

That, boys and girls, is the point and purpose of prayer. It is not magic that bends the universe to your will. It is, instead, the magic that allows you to maintain your integrity as a soul in the face of whatever comes your way. I just can't see the problem.

With the season close to done, and the one football game I watch annually coming up, I do find myself wondering if the hum and crackle around Tebow will continue next season.

Burning the Bible

2012-01-13T16:54:00.000-05:00

Over the last two weeks, in the midst of absorbing about 50 hours of nonstop doctoral coursework in seminary, I popped into the bookstore. Using a gift card given to me by some of the saints of my former congregation, I bought myself a spanky new bible. It was a Harper Collins Study Bible, functionally identical to the bible I've been using since 1996, when I first went to seminary.

This is far and away my preferred text for study purposes. Yeah, the NRSV is a bit relentless on the gender-neutral language thing, to the point of not really accurately reflecting the meaning of the original text on occasion. But the translation is otherwise sound, and better yet, it has exceptionally good footnotes. Seriously. The footnotes alone are worth the price of admission.

In many "study" bibles, the footnotes tell you what you are supposed to believe about the text. They do the interpreting for you. Given that the whole point of the Reformation was that we were to be set free to explore the texts on our own, this is a nontrivial thing. Rule of thumb about scriptural study tools: You should wield them, not the other way around. In the Harper Collins, they give you historical context, details about variances in translation, and provide clear linkages to other relevant passages.

This left me in a bit of a conundrum. My old Bible was dead in the water. Repeated applications of clear packing tape, made necessary through daily use over a decade and a half, had finally failed. The inner binding had come apart, to the point at which I could no longer use it in worship or study. Books would just fall out of it, which isn't great in a class and even worse when you're up leading a service. It was spent, a ruin of a book.

So it was time to...what? Just leave it lying around? No. I despise clutter, perhaps because I'm so prone to it. If a thing is broken and past its use, I'm not going to cling to it like a hoarder. That kind of grasping thing-orientation is one of the more persistent demons of our culture.

Throw it in the trash? I couldn't see doing that. Here was a book that had been by my side through seminary. It had rested in my hands during literally hundreds of important conversations and sacred moments. Dumping it in with the coffee grounds just didn't feel right.

Neither, quite frankly, could I bring myself to recycle it. Stuffing it into the pile of old newspapers and stacks of Best Buy and K-Mart advertising just didn't feel right either.

So, in a moment of willful ritual carbon positivity, I decided to burn it.

I made a little stack of wood in our fireplace, nestled the bible on top of it, open to Isaiah, and lit the pyre. It took a bit to catch, but when it did, those thousands of pages burned long, hot and bright. For about forty minutes, I sat by the flames, intermittently turning the pages with a poker, opening the book so that fire could dance in and devour the text.

Words would appear, here and there. I saw Micah consumed, and a chapter on Hezekiah the king. My face and chest burned, as the room grew hot with the heat of it.

As the burning tongues licked text after text to ashen nothing, I remembered the feel of the book in my hand, the many times I'd sat with it preparing a sermon, or trying to open the gracious traditions of our faith to those who knew only enough about it to get themselves into trouble.

I reflected on the importance of those words, as bearers of concepts that have the power to change the direction of a human life. I reflected on how far the Bible is from being a book of magic, as much as we want it to be.

It's just ink and paper, text on media, no more infused with sacred power than the air we breathe or the light that plays across a room. The message it conveys draws truth from a place beyond the pages and the language we print upon them. Burning it does not destroy anything of what matters about it. It's good to have a sacred text like that, I think.

And then the flames faded, and all that remained was ash and a faint sense of reverence.

Resolution 2012

2012-01-10T20:48:00.002-05:00

Last year, I rolled into 2011 promising myself that I would do a range of things. There was the usual weight loss/fitness yearning, of course...but I've found that's a commitment best made continually. Linking it to the New Year has just never quite worked out for me. Instead, I pledged myself to e-publishing a book I'd written in college. That was done, thank the Maker.

This year, the creative project that's sitting on the back burner is an exploration of M-Theory, multiverse cosmology, and the Biblical narrative. It's tentatively titled, "New Heavens, New Earth," but I'm thinkin' that feels a bit grandiose. Ah well. A better title will come.

It has sat untouched on this laptop and my backup drive for a few months, crowded from my day-to-day by the demands of kids and work and my D.Min. program. But I'm 20,000 words in, almost half a book. I'm still hoping to get it finished. It's still interesting to me, dagnabbit, and even if it goes nowhere, I want to get 'er done.

So...that's the resolution. I'll get this manuscript done by the end of August, hopefully well before the Mayan universe comes to a crashing end in December.

To stir my discipline in getting it done, I'm also hoping to make it an independent study elective for my doctoral work. Structures of accountability are remarkably efficacious in getting yourself motivated to do the things you know you really need to do.

Shepherd Leadership: Wisdom for Leaders from Psalm 23

2011-12-31T17:00:00.001-05:00

As I come to the conclusion of my reading for my upcoming D.Min. Coursework, the last book in the rotation is Shepherd Leadership, a slender tome dedicated to squeezing every last little bit of leadershippyness out of the six verses of the 23rd Psalm. It's put together by two professors, neither of whom is a bible scholar or a theologian. One is from the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor and the other a professor of public policy and law at Pepperdine.

I'll be honest. In reading this book, it was a little difficult retaining an entirely open mind. It just feels...well...like product. Leadership books are sellers, and the 23rd Psalm is one of the few bits of the Psalter that are still well known in our culture. The agent's elevator pitch to the folks at Jossey Bass is just too easy to hear. "We take the 23rd Psalm, you know, the Lord is My Shepherd, yadda yadda, then we mix in some movie references, a few anecdotes about leaders, a Max Lucado endorsement on back, and bam, I'm telling you, we'll nail the 30-40 Christian business demographic with this baby."

This feeling, unfortunately, was coupled with the fact that the 23rd Psalm is not, at its core, about leadership. Not human leadership, anyway.

Pretty much the entire book, all 126 pages of it, are keying off off of the image of "shepherd." This just...well...it felt forced, in the way that one of those late 90's Saturday Night Live skit-movies felt forced. Five minutes building off of one premise can be funny. An hour and a half with one premise? Not so much. Adam Sandler still does not get this, unfortunately. I reached the point in the book when I actually found myself laughing at the sheer absurdity of it. Take this passage, where we hear about the affection a shepherd has for sheep:

"...shepherding was a high touch activity, and the good shepherd had a name for every one of his sheep...some names, like "Big Boy" or "Little One" referred to the size of the sheep. Other names like "Hop-Along" or "One Ear" were rooted in something abnormal about the sheep. Still others, like "Scruffy" or "Feisty" were rooted in the unique personality traits of the sheep."

Beyond the silliness of the whole thing, I found myself wondering how this might work as a means of showing care for a congregation. I'm sure members of a church would feel the love behind being called "Scruffy" and "Hop-Along." It was at this point that I started getting the giggles imagining various different names one might also use. Those giggles were magnified a few pages later by the following graphic:

The idea behind it was not so terrible--view every business-attired being as an immortal soul--but I found myself having difficulty taking the book seriously.

So I set it down, got a nice night's sleep, and started up again.

I realized, after having a chance to reflect on it further, that the primary problem I was having with the book was that I was mistakenly assuming it was a work of theology. It is not. It is a work of general management advice, loosely framed by this familiar Psalm. Within the framework of those limitations, I unclenched a little bit, and tried to encounter it with a more open heart and mind.

As I read deeper into the book, some of the essential wisdom being presented by McCormick and Davenport came more to the forefront. The section on transforming conflict, particularly what they term “destructive interpersonal conflict,” (p. 72) was valuable as it laid out a series of conceptual tools and practical approaches to managing conflict. While the use of the term “shepherd” was more metaphorical and less theological, it was nonetheless sound advice that could be used in any organizational context. Having recently come out of a deeply conflicted congregation, I found myself strongly resonating with the ways in which they laid out some of the essential principles to managing conflict. While negotiating such a conflict and delimiting it’s impact would require more tools than provided in this short work, the basic principles presented were sound.

The discussion of the core purposes of congregational vision work on pages 101-103 was similarly helpful. The future-oriented/positive/simple principles for vision development established as a baseline for creating a vision were not bad as baselines, and mirrored some of the intent behind the visioning work I had the pleasure of undertaking with my prior community. Again, while there wasn't enough detail to really guide a pastor through a visioning process, the principles were sound.

Ultimately, I think the limitations of this work theologically and the somewhat simplistic manner in which the material was presented were simply too great for me to find strong personal resonance with it. That said, it wasn’t terrible or organizationally inaccurate.

Passionate Visionary: Leadership Lessons from the Apostle Paul

2011-12-30T17:07:00.001-05:00

Having worked through books about David, Saul, and Moses as models for organizational leadership, I find myself now chugging my way through an assessment of the leadership style and approach of the Apostle Paul. The book, entitled Passionate Visionary: Leadership Lessons from the Apostle Paul, was written by Dr. Richard Ascough and Dr. Charles Cotton, respectively a Professor of New Testament and a leadership consultant hailing from Canada's Royal Military College.

Entering into the book, the concern puttering about in the recesses of my subconscious was that it would shoehorn Paul into a box of current leadership literature, or misrepresent the core of authentic Pauline theology. Neither of those fears proved justified. With the input of both authors, the book moved seamlessly between the world of contemporary organizational dynamics and Paul's teaching and sociocultural context.

I particularly appreciated the decision of the authors to focus on the seven undisputed letters of Paul, and to leave the pastorals and the other deutero-Pauline letters out of the assessment of Paul's impact on the Jesus movement. In doing so, Ascough and Cotton present a more accurately nuanced picture of Paul in all his bright, ferocious complexity.

In reading through this well-structured and conceptualized book, a few key features leapt out.

The end of chapter "questions for reflection" were actually rather engaging. This is not always the case in but I found myself consistently meditating on how and in what ways my own experience of leadership were reflected in the themes from the chapter. In chapter fifteen, for instance, the reflections on the honor/shame dynamics that can stifle authentic conversation in communities resonated strongly. Having recently left a ministry that was deeply influenced by the honor/shame dynamics of Korean culture, I found the assessment of those influences (standing in opposition to the Christ-centered freedom encouraged by Paul) to be accurate.

I found myself powerfully resonating to the chapter on the "bottom line" for Paul. Keying off of the soaring hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13, and echoing off of other core Pauline texts, the authors accurately present love of other as absolutely central to Pauline theology. By extension, this is also the bottom line in Paul's approach to leadership, and the core measure by which anyone in leadership needs to be assessed. As Ascough and Cotton put it:

Vision counts for nothing without compassion, charisma fades without it, and all the spin doctors in the world produce meaningless words if the leader does not connect with followers in a caring, compassionate way. (p.146)

This measure, I think, gets to the core of what is most vital and life-giving in organizational leadership, whether it be in a congregational context or, quite frankly, in any gathering of human beings.

Finally, the emphasis on Pauline "chaordic" leadership...meaning leadership that embraces, directs, and empowers the generative character of human communities...was also resonant, although it was not clear as I was reading it whether or not this was simply because I grok to this approach.

Ultimately, this was a solid, well-developed, and readable work, rooted strongly in both organizational literature and the theology of one of the most influential individuals in the Christian faith tradition. It's a fine read, both for pastors and for any Jesus folk struggling to see how they might apply some of the core principles of our faith to their life out there in the world.

Moses and the Journey to Leadership

2011-12-28T11:45:00.000-05:00

The second in the sequence of books for my D.Min. program is Moses and the Journey to Leadership: Timeless Lessons of Effective Management from the Bible and Today's Leaders, by Dr. Norman J. Cohen. Dr. Cohen is a Professor of Midrash at Hebrew Union College, and it shows.

The book is layered through with tellings and retellings of Torah, both from the primary narrative and from the secondary/legendary traditions of Midrash. Dr. Cohen continually drops into a patois of blended Hebrew and English, peppering transliterated words into the flow of the narrative both for flavor and to engage in impromptu word-study. It's a pretty standard rabbinic schtick, one that made reading through the book reminiscent of listening to the rabbi expound on Torah at my family's synagogue during the High Holy Days.

In reacting to the text, I had several challenges as I schlepped my way through the reading.

The first was that it seemed somewhat removed from the actual practice of leadership. Given the scholarly/rabbinic character of the work, this is perhaps not surprising. In an effort to relate the leadership of Moses to leadership dynamics in government and business, the text is smattered with pull-out boxes that describe semi-related leadership approaches in both government and business. This was intended to give context, but after about the tenth pullout telling us, again, that Ernest Shackleton was a collaborative and positive leader, we get it already. The general points were fine...be an inclusive leader, be sure of yourself, don't overfunction, involve and empower others...but they felt generic, underdeveloped, and cribbed from another primary source.

The style and dynamics of rabbinic explication also ended up feeling like a distraction. The extensive and repeated explorations of the root meanings of words were fine in and of themselves, but felt a bit aimless in that meandering academic way. In explaining the significance of the word rephidim, for instance, we are on page 79 told that it derives from the Hebrew term rafeh yadayim, meaning "weak hands." Because the people squabble with God, their hands are weak. But five pages later, we're told that rephidim derives from raphad, meaning "chair" or "support," because Moses needed the support of Aaron and Hur. Recognizing that the rabbinic tradition is filled with such etymological exploration, and that the Hebrew language lends itself to polyvalent word-root speculation, it feels distractingly inconsistent. Or perhaps just like an entertaining late night bull session at yeshiva.

I also stumbled over some of the interpretive work, particularly the efforts to reclaim and validate the Biblical injunction against being an Amalekite. Or a breathing one, at least. Where Cohen suggests that we should just understand Amalekites as symbolic representations of all that is evil in the world (p. 87), I just can't get there. It's just an ugly bit of unpleasantness, if we're honest about it. Not being a literalist, I see no need to read those passages as anything other than an unpleasant historical echo of ethnic tension that has been theologically spun.

Certain sections were more resonant, like the chapter exploring the need to empower individuals who support the vision laid out by the leader (ch. 9) and the last chapter, which dealt with the need for leaders to manage the inevitable transition to another leader.

The call and leadership struggles of Moses are a particularly powerful and resonant narrative for those who've been called to lead the church, and Cohen's exploration of that dynamic did have potential. Ultimately, though, it felt disconnected from both a foundation in organizational praxis and in tenuous relationship with secular research on leadership effectiveness.

Ducking Spears, Dancing Madly

2011-12-27T10:51:00.004-05:00

Having been asked to reflect on four books for my upcoming D.Min. coursework, the first I'll be reviewing here was written by two folks at Wesley Theological Seminary, one the Director of the D.Min. Program and the other a recently retired professor of Old Testament.

Ducking Spears, Dancing Madly explores the dynamics of leadership, and particularly church leadership, through the lenses of the stories to be found in 1 and 2 Samuel. Those two books of the bible, in the event you aren't familiar with them, explore the history and theology of the rise of the monarchy in Israel. They lay out the narrative arc of transition from the time of "judges," those leaders of necessity who rose up out of the tribes in times of crisis, to the more structural, institutional, and centralized power structures of the Davidic/Solomonic royal lineage.

The book gets its title from two visual images from the rise of David in Israel. The first is David dodging the spears that Saul would chuck at him when he was in one of his, you know, moods. The second is the image of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant, right after Indy got it back from the Nazis. No. Wait.

As I read through this generally engaging book, I found myself having a series of reactions.

First, Birch and Parks make a point of resisting business-leadership hagiography. 1 and 2 Samuel are a realistic and clear eyed account of the struggles and foibles of the first kings of Israel. Unlike the rose-colored theological glasses worn by the author of the books of Chronicles, these books include a "prophetic criticism of institutional forms." (p. 25) What gives them value is that they do not present leaders as flawless paragons, but serve up the stories of Saul and David that portray them in nuanced human beings. It's a useful reminder that leadership in any institutional structure isn't populated by perfect souls. This is particularly useful in the church, where charismatic leadership is often assumed to be without flaw. That assumption is dangerous both for congregations and for the leadership, as it traps both in a nonconstructive, delusional expectation.

Second, the book makes an aggressive point of exploring the theology of call. Oldline denominations are great at establishing "gatekeeping" structures, the hoops and requirements and committees that stand between those seeking ministry and congregations. But call itself is a more dynamic and unpredictable thing, one that has almost nothing to do with the self-sustaining demands of institutions. It is less about establishing protocols, and more about listening for God's voice in unexpected circumstances. (p. 43)

Third, the book spends the entirety of the fourth chapter dealing with "call-envy," using the fierce/psychopathic jealousy of Saul as a framing narrative. Call envy is that tendency of pastors to look at their vocation not in terms of God's claim on their lives, but in terms of whether they're in a more prestigious/larger/better paying "call" than their cohorts. This is placed in terms of the story of Saul's relationship to David in 1 Samuel 18. While most pastors don't lob pointy objects at those whose worldly attainment exceeds their own, there is plenty of bitterness and grumbling out there. Just spend a moment or two on the Presbytery floor during the meeting when the comparative salary report is released...

Finally, I did find myself occasionally wishing that Ducking Spears, Dancing Madly had gone beyond the Saul/David narrative. As rich a story as it is, and as full of characters as it is, the story of call and leadership in Israel and Judah is continued through 1 and 2 Kings. That arc of the rise and fall of the Hebrew monarchy includes a great array of similarly illustrative leadership teachings, and might have added some additional depth and richness to this exploration of Biblical leadership. Perhaps in their next book...

As it was, though, Ducking Spears, Dancing Madly is a tight little book, and worthy reading for anyone who has been called to congregational leadership.

Going to Church on Christmas Morning

2011-12-25T11:10:00.000-05:00

This morning, I awoke early, as the earliest light of dawn was just beginning to crowd the stars from the sky. After starting the coffee, I snapped the leash on the dog, and stepped out into the crunchy crispness of the day. With the pup snuffing and meandering along with me, I walked the sidewalks of the very quiet neighborhood.

The lighted electronic diodes that shone from every other house were bright in the silence, but what caught my eye more was the subtle sparkle from the grass. With the streetlights playing across the morning's frost fall, the little suburban lawns of my neighborhood glistened like windblown tinsel. It was rather lovely, if you were lucky enough to be awake to see it.

Then it was homeward, to breakfast, and to tweak the Christmas Day sermon. After cereal, then coffee, and then some more coffee, I began getting dressed to go to church. The layers went on, one after another. The socks. Then another pair of socks. Then long johns. Then corduroy pants and my clerical shirt and collar. Then armored boots. Then my Kanetsu wind blocking electrically heated jacket. Then my Roadcrafter viscoelastic-armored riding suit. Then armored gloves. Then over-gloves. Then a wind-triangle to protect my neck from the subfreezing winds. Funny, given how I used to hate having to get "dressed up" for church as a kid.

Then, having conveyed Christmas wishes to wife and lads, the helmet.

And I was off, motoring out of our neighborhood, on to a warm and cozy service on Christmas morning.

I was glad of it, and remembered to be thankful as I prepped.

Last year, I did not know yet what this day would be like. Would I be preaching or leading worship? Or just job-seeking? Or just sitting in my basement frittering away meaningless hours on my PS3?

It was a void. All of the traditions and expectations of the prior seven years were coming to an end, and there was no certainty. In 2010, the where and the how of Christmas 2011 were hidden from me, still shrouded in the creative potential of our Maker.

I could not have anticipated where I am now. Looking back across the span of my memory, I know I did not.

To the anxieties that would occasionally rise in that former self, I wish I could whisper a quiet word of encouragement. It's going to be fine. You'll like it.

Hope is such a good thing to remember, particularly this time of year. As much as it can be obscured by consumerism and "Christmas Wars," that is kind of the point of the season, after all.

Christmastime with the Cultists

2011-12-24T16:06:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, with friends and family in tow, we went a-wandering over to a restaurant that's been opened up in my parent's neighborhood. For decades, the place was my families' primary haunt for pizza, a little place run by a couple of Greeks.

The day I went to see the first Star Wars movie with my parents, we ate out at Prima Pizza. We were regulars. My folks got to know the owners and the waitresses. It was pleasant.

But then it closed, as businesses do. It sat empty for years.

A year or two ago, a little vegan place opened up there. It's a Loving Hut, one of several hundred franchises around the world run by...well...a cult. It's the Cult of Supreme Master Ching Hai, who is apparently always referred to as SupremeMasterChingHai, all one word. She's a bleached-blonde Vietnamese lady who is really into enlightenment, animals, and a vegan diet, and who apparently has gathered quite the following.

In order to run one of the franchises, you need to be a member in good standing of suprememasterchinghai-ism, or whatever it is they call it.

But vegetarian food is vegetarian food, so we went to check it out. Prima Pizzeria was once again a restaurant, basically, although a bit different. The decor was spare, and there was a big screen TV on one wall presenting Supreme Master Television, a chirrupy 24 hour channel of positive thinking, happy animals, vegetarian boosterism, and teaching of Supreme Master Ching Hai.

Outside of that, it was surprisingly innocuous. And the food was really rather tasty.

Most striking to me, though, was what the cultists were playing in the background.

It wasn't a droning, barely audible repetition of the words "Ching Hai is your master, you love Ching Hai, you love vegetables and puppies and kittens, Ching Hai is the Supreme Master..."

It was a medley of Christmas music. O Holy Night, in particular, seemed to be a favorite.

There really is no escaping Christmas music this time of year.

The Parable of the Bad Job Creators

2011-12-22T10:11:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, there was a couple who ran a mid-sized business in a small town. They just couldn't get along, and spent their days arguing about anything and everything. Business was not good, as their workforce was dispirited and their clients were drifting away.

One day, after a particularly heated argument, one of their managers came to them and let them know that the morale had gotten so bad that most of the employees were likely going to quit. "Our salaries have been stagnant for five years," said the manager. "And we all hate working here. The whole town knows how crappy it is to work here. If you don't do something, we'll walk."

The couple went back into their office, realizing that if they didn't act, they'd lose all of their employees, and would have trouble finding new ones. They argued quietly but productively, and then came up with a solution.

They needed to give their employees a raise. But how? They didn't have enough liquidity in their bank accounts, and their credit was nearly tapped out. Suddenly, each of them had a solution.

We could take money they've contributed into the company-managed retirement fund, said she. It's struggling anyway.

Sure, said he!

And we could also take money they've put into the charitable fund, the one we use to do giving to those two local nonprofits that provide care to the indigent elderly and the disabled and the orphans.

So long as people were getting a raise, what did it matter where it came from? The employees would be happy. The couple agreed.

Then, of course, they began to argue about how large the "raise" should be. Their voices grew louder.

When the employees heard the arguing, they were angrier, and argued among themselves.

How dare they argue about the size of the raise! It should be as big as possible!

And the couple heard them, and smiled.

The Creche Wars: A Pax on Both Your Houses

2011-12-17T08:59:00.000-05:00

In my neck of the woods, there's a bit of disagreement about seasonal displays going on. Deep in the Virginia exurbs, the mighty metropolis of Leesburg sits in all its strip-mall, big box glory. But before Leesburg was an exurb, it was a modestly-sized town, one that had a long-standing tradition of having a Christmas tree and displaying Nativity scenes on the courthouse lawn celebrating the Christmas season.

Back in 2009, following concerns that this might violate the separation of church and state, the tradition was shut down. Both the Christian Nativity and the...um...pagan solstice display...were removed. There was outcry, of course, and much concern in the community that a beloved symbol had disappeared.

So the tradition was reinstated last year, with a caveat: anyone could display whatever they wanted, on a first come, first served basis.

And so there were displays put up. Some were creches and nativities. Others, though? The Pastafarians came out with a repurposed creche image, in which the Infant Flying Spaghetti Monster was featured prominently, along with garden gnomes and other absurdist miscellany. There was a Luke Skywalker display, put up by those who celebrate Life Day, I guess. Atheists put up their own tree, upon which affirmations of vigorous godlessness and condemnations of the general stupidity of the faithful were placed.

This year, the conflict continued. There was a display by a local artist, of a crucified skeleton Santa--a symbol of the way in which consumerism has consumed the season, or so the artist declared. Many locals were troubled by these things, to the point that the skeleton Santa was pulled down a few times by Angry People.

Hearing about this squabbling, I find myself wishing that the Christians were being more Christian, and the atheists were being more rational.

For the Jesus folk, Brothers and Sisters, take a deep breath. Particularly with the Skywalker stuff and the Pastafarians. I mean, c'mon. Some folks are just silly, and struggle with the hyper-seriousness that can pervade this season. Christianity is a powerful, robust, and millennia-old faith, and is not going to be undone by some goofballs being random. The most gracious response to this is...grace. Smile. Show that you aren't spiritually shallow and easily aggrieved. Those are not the marks of one who is governed by the Spirit of the Living God. Show that we can handle it.

And the artist guy with the Skeleton Santa? Ask him what he means. Be open to listening. If his beef is with the consumerism that has sunk its undead fangs into the joy of this season, then maybe he's not a bad guy. And he might be under the impression that Christians are angry, bitter people.

Disabuse him of that notion. We best teach Christ by living Christ, after all.

For the atheists? I know, I'm not on the Team, but consider the season. This is the time to open up the critical thinking skills, and show that you understand context and perception. It's the time to show that you grasp the spirit of the season. You don't have to sing Silent Night if you don't want to, and you have every right to present your opinion in the public square.

But if you want that opinion to be heard, consider presenting the following slogans: "Just Love People. How Hard is That?" "Be Kind, Because It is the Way To Be." "Care for Everyone." "Every Human Being Has Value." Slap your atheist logo under those, and maybe folks will be a little bit more willing to listen to the rest of what you have to say. They may not be persuaded, but they'll be more willing to listen.

As stressed as we all can be this season, and as easily as tempers can fray, that's not the point of this time of year. So...give it a go, y'all. Get along, eh?

It's both the Christian and reasonable thing to do.

Finding Your Best True Self

2011-12-16T17:31:00.003-05:00

Over the last few days, I've punched down two more of the eight books I've got to read by the end of the month for my D.Min. program. They were pretty radically different, on the surface of it. One was called Primal Leadership. Despite the title, this did not recommend whacking folks over the head with wildebeest femurs, although I do find that gets folks more quickly to consensus. It was sustained argument for social/emotional awareness in leadership, written by some Harvard Business School types. The other, entitled Open Hearted Ministry, was an exploration of reclaiming a sense of play in ministry. It was written by the professor who'll be teaching the course.

That second one? By my...ahem...professor? Um. It was better than Cats. I will read it again and again.

One theme that was shared between the two books was the concept of seeking your "Best Self" or your "True Self." For the Harvard Guys, this was something that leaders of organizations should accomplish as a way of finding their identity as a visionary leader. They had a multi-step process and exercises for true-self identification, which included things like visualizing where you'd most like to be in 15 years. I did some of that, although I still hang up a bit when it comes to figuring out where I'll get that robot army.

For the play-theory professor, your true self is found...surprise surprise...through play. I'm pleased to hear this, although I'm a bit surprised to discover that my true self is currently a level 18 Orc, who aimlessly wanders the land of Skyrim with his common-law witch wife, crunching bandits with a massive enchanted warhammer.

The "seek your true self" concept is a familiar one. In the writings of Scottish mystic George MacDonald, the idea of being defined by the pursuit of that optimally joyous aspect of your own identity is a strong and recurring theme. He describes it as seeking the White Stone, upon which is written the "name" that God has given you. The pursuit of that name and the ordering of your life around living into that identity is the purpose of faith.

The challenge in this concept, as I see it, is in how we get around to defining "Best." Who is that person that we direct ourselves towards? How do we get to that sense of identity?

For the well meaning soul bent on Being The Best They Can Be, there are real pitfalls in orienting yourself towards who you think you should be. The first and most obvious lies in the external forces that can shape who we think we should be. Our vision of our "best self" can be defined by all manner of cultural inputs, which place higher value on certain vocations/identities/careers. We're convinced we need to be Lil' Wayne, or that we need to be the best in the world at the sport of our choosing, or that we're meant to aspire to being one of the countless lights in the reality television universe. This makes for a rather sad life for countless thousands, who overlook who they are in favor of what they are told they should be.

Our image of our best self is so colored by the values of our culture....but is that "best?" When we're told to live our best life now, does that necessarily mean that we're making the choices that will shower us with material wealth and the acclaim and adulation of others?

There are, after all, competing sets of values that claim to establish purpose and value in our lives.

Best can mean pursuing whatever is most gratifying in the right now, whatever activates our lizard brain to give the most pleasure in this very instant. That ends badly. You don't always find yourself toothless in the fleshpots of Bangkok, but it does always end badly.

According to Joel Osteen, our Best Life Now involves getting what we want, because faith is the thing that brings us big houses and gets us choice parking spaces at the mall during the Getmas Season. Our best self is our shiniest golden consumer self, by the marketized metric of the Name-It-And-Claim-It Gospel.

"Best" can mean most ferociously nationalistic, or most rigorously devoted to an absolutist understanding of a religious tradition. Or, as in the case of Michelle Bachmann/Mahmoud Ahmedinajad, both at the same time. Those two need to just get a room already.

If we step back, though, allowing ourselves to transcend our personal and collective hungers for power, the shine falls off these values. The pursuit of me-oriented competitive consumption leads to a world out of balance and impoverished, best for a tiny minority, and a grasping, struggling hell for the rest. Nationalism and fundamentalism? They lead to the same place they have always lead over the thousands of years of human history. To war and hatred, as they blind us to the Other.

Which is why faith and the core teachings of our Rabbi guide us to a place where "best" is not defined by individual selfishness, or the selfishness of collectives, but by the selfless love that burns like a fire at the heart of all things.

That is, without question, what is best in life.

Defending Marriage

2011-12-15T09:19:00.001-05:00

A letter came acros't me pastoral desk the other day, one from a group of well-meaning local Presbyterian folk who are deeply struggling with the transitions in our culture. They are eager to set themselves as a bulwark against the gradual unravelling of the social bonds that keep our life together from descending into total gnawing entropic madness.

They are doing so by affirming what they view as the central tenets of our faith, and are making a point of highlighting one of the central teachings of our ancient tradition: marriage between one man and one woman. This is just as Jesus taught it, and Paul taught it. Right?

I think, rather obviously, that both their diagnosis and methodology are a wee bit off, but I am willing to agree on one significant point. Those social bonds are increasingly frayed, and that's not a good thing. In particular, the bonds of sustained, committed, lifelong relationships...marriage...are reaching the tipping point.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center shows that marriage is right on the cusp of being a minority position among American adults. It's a growing and deepening trend, and one that is entirely comprehensible from a sociological/psychological standpoint.

Psychologically, it's understandable that the last several generations, who have watched divorce rend apart marriage after marriage, might not view it as quite the bedrock foundation of our culture.

Sociologically, there are several factors driving the fading of marriage as an institution. First, there's the unwillingness to shun those who have experienced divorce, or to belittle and devalue those who aren't married. This, quite frankly, is a Good Thing. Yeah, sure, there are plenty of Pastor Mark Q. JudgeyPants out there still, willing to tell you how pathetic you are if you're not married or if you're struggling with challenges in relationships. But there've always been Pharisees with well-weighted stones in hand, and diminishing the power of their voices in culture is welcome.

Second, and this is Not A Good Thing, there are powerful social pressures coming from our culture that tend to break apart relationships. There's increasing social isolation and fragmentation, which makes commitment more and more challenging. There's the radical cult of the self, driven by consumerism, which makes life about the Me and the lizard-brain-immediate, and not about the Us and grace-filled relationship. We're taught to believe that our value as persons can be measured independently of the way we relate to others, to Creation, and to our Maker. This is not true. It leads us to very unpleasant places, personally, socially, and spiritually.

Ultimately, the faithful response is to counterculturally resist those powers. Where folks of a more progressive bent can find commonality with our more conservative brethren and sistren is in affirming that there is, in fact, value in sustained, committed human relationships.

Loving relationships and caring, connected communities are blessings from our Creator, and they are well worth encouraging, supporting, and defending.

Gay Marriage and Skyrim: Conservatism Takes an Arrow in the Knee

2011-12-13T18:49:00.001-05:00

Imagine, for a moment, that a fantasy novel had recently been released. The book gets tremendous praise in popular media, and is driven by a successful ad campaign...some paid and in the mass media, the rest generated by an eager fan base.   It was a barnstorming, raging success, selling three-and-a-half million copies in its first two months. It was such a success, in fact, that it was spawning internet memes and fan videos.   Not only that, but it's the kind of book that trickles down to kids, so that many tweens and teens are reading it.

Now think, for a moment, about the reaction of certain elements in American conservatism once they discovered that in this book, same-sex marriage was tacitly endorsed.

One would expect the usual response, the sort of silliness that was leveled against the really-actually-very-Christian Harry Potter books.    Some blogger, somewhere, would get mad about it. Pat Robertson would say something. I mean, Pat never misses an opportunity, right? The Family Research Council would surely issue a stern missive.

But there's been nothing. Nothing at all.

That's been the response, best I can tell it, to the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the recent multi-million-dollar blockbuster game from Bethesda Softworks.   It's a great, great game, exactly what I'd expect from the folks at Bethesda. It is deep and complex and beautiful, and after forty hours in, I'm still marveling at how wonderfully and fully realized their vision of this land is.

As part of creating an immersive realistic world, you can, if you so choose, get married.

If you do, you get all sorts of pleasant little perks, none of which are even remotely R rated. Your spouse will cook for you if you ask nicely, making meals that restore your health and stamina.   They'll come live with you, assuming you've got a house of your own. They'll sleep in the same bed you, which accrues bonuses to your well being and ability to learn new things. It's not called the Cozy Spooning Bonus, but I'm familiar with that effect in the real world.

And you can marry someone of the same gender.

As Bethesda Softworks sees it, this is not a big deal. This is, after all, a world in which you could also marry an Orc. Or one of the catlike Khajit, or...although this seems non-conducive to connubial spooning bonuses...a horned, reptilian Argonian. Not to mention that marrying a lizard would represent a significant escalation in the spousal thermostat wars.

Perhaps the lack of response is because it's not a big deal.

That there are same-sex marriages in Tamriel has no impact on my marriage.   I know they're virtually happening, sure. But my relationship with my wife is utterly unaffected by hearing about unions outside of our own. There are factors...like work stress and kid stress and financial stress and the siren song of self-indulgence that pours from our me-centered culture...that can have an impact. Those need to be called out and resisted, because they do pose real threats to marriage and the deep, covenant relationships that are a blessing from our Creator.

But hearing stories about virtual unions? It has no effect on my heterosexuality, or on that of my wife. It does not effect us, or our relationship. Or on yours.

If you're defending marriage, there are better things to do than worry about what Bosmer and Altmer choose to do. It just doesn't really change anything. So I guess folks have just decided to let this one slide.

A pity those same folks don't realize that's the case outside of the virtual world, too.

Why Vultures Gather

2011-12-13T09:01:00.001-05:00

In between the second service and the Christmas Potluck this last Sunday, I found myself in need of pickin' some stuff up for the evening event. One of the disadvantages of riding a motorcycle wherever you go is that it makes bringing along a casserole somewhat challenging. Bungee cords and casseroles aren't the best mix. Particularly when it's 24 degrees out, or negative 18 when you factor in the windchill at highway speeds.

I'm not sure "frozen casserole hunks" makes the best potluck offering.

So as the afternoon wore on, I wandered through the little town to the grocery store to buy some bread for the meal. This is the only place to buy affordable groceries and produce in all of Poolesville. It's been a long-standing institution, run by a local family, but the arrival of Walmart and Costco and a Harris Teeter in the larger towns nearby has bitten deep into their business. The life-pattern of soccer moms and commuters lends itself to driving distance to buy in bulk, which bodes ill for the small town grocer.

They aren't going to make it through the next year, as humming rumor and their increasingly empty shelves tell it. It'll be a loss for the community.

So I made a point of getting my bread there. I walked, of course, because it's good for human beings to use their legs for something other than pressing pedals. As I walked, and the cold gentle breeze of the December day nibbled at my face, I noticed a gathering off just to the north-east of the store, on the other side of the One Oh Seven.

At the top of several trees was a large mixed committee of turkey vultures and black vultures. These are the same critters that can be seen regularly prowling the skies around Poolesville in search of roadkill and children who haven't been good this year. It was impressive, as the setting sun of the winter day cast their great dark figures into stark relief against the dimming blue sky.

It reminded me, as things so often do, of a passage from the Bible. It's a little popular saying from the first century, offered up by Jesus as a way of explaining how we'll know the Kingdom is near at hand:

"Wherever the carcass is, there the vultures will gather."

Anyone who sees a batch of vultures circling knows what that means. Something is dead. The saying tells the listener: you'll know. You'll see the signs. You'll be able to tell.

But gathered buzzards can mean other things.

On a cold winter day, that mass of ominous figures peering down from the treetops at sunfall does not mean they're waiting to swoop down and snap up that nearby retail property. It means they're catching the last little trickle of star-heat coming over the edge of the world, to warm their bodies at the end of the day.

And other times, when they circle upward in great spiraling columns, it means that they've found one of the thermals that rise at the end of a day as the earth cools, hitching a free ride skyward.

If you know vultures, you'll know these things. But if we're unprepared, or serially inattentive, or unwilling to learn, any sign...even the most seemingly obvious...can be misinterpreted. We Jesus folk have proven remarkably good at that over the last two millennia.

A Crisis of Expectations

2011-12-11T14:57:00.001-05:00

What We're Looking for Often Doesn't Look the Way We'd Expect

In a recent post on her Christian Century blog, Carol Howard Merritt raised some interesting questions about the significant challenges facing younger clergy seeking congregations in our denomination.

Long and short of it?

You come out of undergrad, all bright eyed and bushy-tailed for Jesus. You crank your way through seminary, eagerly sopping up the latest and most cutting edge scholarship while racking up three more years worth of student debt. You heave your way through countless Committee for Preparation for Ministry meetings, take those dagflabbing Ords, retake them, and then then drop your PIF out there into the world.

You're not asking for much...just a salary sufficient to support a new small family. Oh, and a diverse, urban congregation that reflects your passion for liberation theology and/or LBGTQ justice. And it should be near public transportation. And willing to try exciting new emergent-ish worship. And able to get you a new super fast 3G smartphone as part of your reimbursables.

There are a few wonderful, perfectly-primed for seminarian-dreams churches like this. Seminarians have no hope of getting them. Ain't gonna happen, kids. That church will go to someone with fifteen years of experience and a doctorate. Ninety-nine-point-nine-seven-five percent of the time, your PIF won't even make the B pile.

Instead, you'll be tracked into Youth Ministry, because that's the place the Good Lord calls everyone under 40. What? Not called to Youth Ministry? Not under 40? Hmmm. That could be problematic.

It isn't that there aren't plenty of churches out there that could use a pastor. There are plenty of vacant pulpits, churches that would be happy to have you. But they are, for the most part, in rural and small town churches that often can't afford to support a full-time pastor.

Sort of like mine.

My church is an awesome little congregation. It's welcoming, multigenerational, and warm. It laughs, is supportive, and loves music. But what it isn't is large and well-off. We're the fifth largest church in our modest town, and our town has five churches. Size matters not in matters of Force and the Spirit, of course, but there are implications.

It does what it can with what it has, and knows how to make do. But I see the giving figures, which are great given the size of the community and the real impacts of our sustained economic downturn. Even with people committing amounts that reflect their deep care for the church, a full-timer just isn't an option. It doesn't reflect the reality on the ground.

There are thousands of churches like this, in all of the oldline denominations. They are not bad churches. Some are amazing. But from the demand side, they just can't meet the expectations of most seminary graduates. Many could support a single person, living a neomonastic life. But a family? No, not unless you teach the kids to photosynthesize.

If that is the reality, scope and actuality of things, then what must change?

The Payroll Tax Holiday

2011-12-08T08:02:00.001-05:00

I am, once again, completely unable to process the goings on in my own home town. Here in Washington, there's sustained conversation about how to continue what has been called the "payroll tax holiday." Americans, after all, don't like taxes. Taxes are bad. And we like holidays! Holidays are good! And if it's a tax holiday...well, golly! We can take that money, which should be ours anyway, and use it to buy stuff to create jobs and get our economy moving and yadda yadda yadda. No tax? A holiday? Buy stuff? What's not to like?

Hmmm. Let's see.

What is the "payroll tax?" If it's a tax, it must be bad, right? Well, let's break it down.

The payroll tax is better known as the Federal Insurance Contributions Act, or FICA. It exists for a particular purpose. Well, several, actually. Let's break 'em down, why don't we?

The first purpose is Social Security. Yeah, I know, Social Security is doomed, or so we've been carefully taught. But what Social Security actually does is pretty straightforward. It supports those who are elderly, or unable to work, and in need of basic income to insure their survival.

I encounter those folks a couple of times a month, as I go to a nearby Baptist church, and then drive from home to home in my community delivering food for Meals on Wheels. These are not the millionaires and scammers that Fox News will drop meaningless and unrepresentative anecdotes about. They are people who need that check to survive. It is light and heat for them. It keeps them in their homes.

Social Security also supports families who have lost a wage earner. When your husband or wife dies, leaving you without income? It insures that your kids will have food, and you'll have a roof over your head. It won't bring your loved one back, but it will make sure that widows and orphans are not forgotten and destitute. If you're injured, and unable to work? It does the same thing. I've had friends who have lost spouses, and who've relied on Social Security to make ends meet for their kids. It's a real thing.

The second purpose? Medicaid. Yeah, I know, Medicaid is terrible and we all hate it because the care is lousy and there's all this waste/fraud/abuse that, again, the media of the right wing is happy to share with us. But when those who have nothing fall ill, it helps keep them from being frozen corpses by the roadside. It helps get them care. That is what it does. As a pastor, I've seen it at work. Could it be better? It could be a whole lot better. But it's something.

So here we are. It's Advent. It's the season before Christmas. What are both political parties and the president talking about?

They aren't talking about insuring that those who are vulnerable are cared for and protected, the hallmark of justice in a nation since nations were first invented.

Instead, they're engaged in a political dance to see who can take the most money from our Treasury. Specifically, they want to take it from the part set aside for widows, orphans, cripples, the elderly, and the desperately poor, so that Americans can go shopping.

Happy Holiday.

Books

2011-12-06T20:11:00.001-05:00

My house is chock full of books.

There are cookbooks in the kitchen. There's a bookshelf...but no television...in our living room. Every one of the bedrooms has a shelf or three laden with books. Our rec-room?

That 56" television gets plenty of use, but it isn't the dominant visual presence in room. Instead, it's hardbacks and paperbacks, graphic novels and manga, neatly linear, row upon row, against three of the four walls.

My study? There's an entire wall of commentaries and works of philosophy and history and poetry and theology.

Yet things are shifting. Though my latest round of reading for my doctoral program arrived in paperback form on my doorstep today, I can feel the era of print waning all about me.

I read my first full book on Kindle recently, cranking my way through George MacDonald's Lilith on my wife's iPad.

It was still the same strangely compelling story it would have been had it been on processed wood pulp. The words still had power. It still messed with my dreams in interesting ways, as MacDonald always does. And yet that tactile presence is not in our home, not now that I'm done.

My older son encountered the spreading death of print this week when he got this month's Shonen Jump, the grand dame of all manga. They're discontinuing their magazine, and going entirely electronic. And he's bummed. Sure, he can now get the instant gratification of the instant download. But a significant part of the joy of Shonen Jump has been its arrival, thickening the mailbox with bold ink and adolescent emotion.

I wonder...do I want to imagine a house without books, shelves full of books lining the walls with silent knowledge? Will there come a time when the only time you take a book off of a shelf to read is in some virtual world that reimagines a mythic place when people did such things?

English, Dragonish, and the Problem with Fundamentalism

2011-12-06T07:57:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, as I bumbled my way through a reasonably productive Monday, I encountered two things that got me thinking about faith and language. The first of those two things was the video below, which was pitched out onto Facebook by the former head of the religious school at my family's synagogue. It's a pleasant little bit of history, the history of the English language, presented by the inimitable Open University. The Open University, in the event you haven't heard of it, is a British institution, one that allows easy access to quality, college-level coursework to anyone who has the desire to partake of it. Back then I lived there in the late 70s, much British daytime programming during the day on one of the three television channels was dedicated to Open University lectures and course preparation. Those wacky socialists and their educations! Anyhoo, here it is, ready to sop up 10 minutes of your life. It's a bit naughty in that wry British way, so thou art forewarned:

After this little excursus into the organic evolution of the English language, I took a break from FB and blogging, did a few chores, and then settled in for a bit of day-off gaming. I'm playing my way through Skyrim on the PS3, and it's a remarkably entertaining, deep, and well-constructed game. One of the elements that Bethesda Softworks has really nailed in both this game and others is a well-crafted soundtrack. It's a contextual soundtrack, meaning the music shifts and varies depending on location, time of day, and whether or not you're blowing up zombies with balls of magical fire.

As I settled in with my controller yesterday, though, something caught my attention. At the beginning of the game, during the initial load screen, there's a song. It's a big bellowy hoo-hah song, all pomp and bombast, the sort of music that stirs the small Viking fragment of my genetic heritage. In the midst of drums and blaring brass, a big male voice choir grunts and vocalizes, and then starts yarping gibberish in an MMA-meets-Glee testosterama.

When the yarping began, I realized, suddenly, that they weren't singing nonsense words at all. For the purposes of verisimilitude, the game has a language that was made for it, a language spoken by dragons. The words in that tongue are spoken throughout the game, and in a moment of geekish epiphany, I recognized dovakiin, the Dragonish word for "dragon-born." And then the word Anduin, the name of the great dragon who brings about the end of time. It was a bit like that time I first attended a synagogue service after learning Hebrew. Only geekier.

I went online, and found the...cough...English "translation," which goes like this:

So here's a language, or the framework of one, that exists solely in-game. I'm not sure there's enough there there for the American Bible Society to attempt a translation into Dragonish, but I figure if you can translate the Bible into Klingon, anything is fair game.

Twice in one day, then, there came the reminder of the ephemeral character of human language. It's one of the reasons I find fundamentalist literalism so completely bizarre.

Sure, the nature of God is unchanging, and the nature of the Being that God speaks is boundlessly, deeply real. But words? As much as I love 'em, words in human tongues aren't the thing itself. They can evoke. They can suggest. They can point to, and lead to, the Holy. But they are not the Real that rises from our Maker.

Perhaps that's why we find it so easy to fight over them. As MacDonald puts it:

God has not cared that we should anywhere have assurance of His very words; and that not merely perhaps, because of the tendency in His children to word-worship, false logic, and corruption of the truth, but because He would not have them oppressed by words...even He must depend for being understood upon the spirit of His disciple.

Viva la Neoreformacion!

Door To Door

2011-12-05T07:35:00.001-05:00

I've never been comfortable with door-to-door sales. Years and years ago, back when my hair was long and my belly was concave, I spent a couple of days doing the door-knockin' thing as a canvasser for Greenpeace. It was one in a series of attempts to get a job that summer, and it was profoundly disappointing. Instead of rallying interest in environmentalism, or stirring the passions of a movement, we were taught a sales pitch. The goal: money for the organization, from which we could take a wee percentage. That lasted not long at all. Nothing sucks idealism out of the young like working on commission.

Perhaps even lower on the karmic totem pole are the folks who show up at your door seeking to convert you. Despite what Ray Comfort pitches out there, fewer things are less welcome than someone coming at you with a prepackaged conversion script.

I've never minded, of course. Most days, I'm perfectly happy to chat with the pairs of earnest fresh-faced young Mormons who arrive with books and name tags. I don't mind the Jehovah's Witnesses either, though if they push too hard, they'll get themselves a theological whuppin'. Nothing like referencing the Cappadocian Fathers to make a Witness flee in terror. Then again, referencing the Cappadocian Fathers has the same effect on most people.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself yesterday walking about the neighborhoods of the little town in which my little church is located, church-literature in hand. This is, quite frankly, not something that Presbyterians tend to do. The arrival of Presbyterians at your doorstep bearing tracts is, some scholars argue, one of the sure signs of the end times.

That's the key to the Sixth Seal, I think, the one right before the Final Seal, the one that can only be unlocked by the words: "I, Newt Gingrich, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States..."

What surprised me even more was how pleasant it was. That the afternoon was clear and crisp and gorgeous was a plus. I and the congregation's evangelism elder spent most of the time walking and chatting about anything and everything, which was actually kind of fun. I'm not sure how many Jehovah's Witnesses get into sub-conversations about whether or not droids are connected to the Force as they walk.

As for the door-to-door part, well, it was fine. Surprisingly fine. This is, in part, because we rolled it Presbyterian style.

Our entire "pitch," such as it was, was to tell people that we were from the little historic country church up the road. We then shared our names, handed over a postcard telling folks where we were and what's up for our Advent Season, and welcomed them to join us if they'd like...and that was that. Oh, and we'd wish them a good afternoon.

For most, that was as far as it went. Sunday afternoon is loaf-around-in-comfypants time for most Americans, and we don't want to mess with that.

At about a half-dozen houses, conversation went a bit further. Like, say, at the house where the resident opened the door quickly, a wad of bills in her hand, thinking we were the pizza guy. This, we all found amusing. Or the houses where we knew someone, or where the person clearly wanted to have a conversation. There, we chatted, for as long as the other person felt like it. In at least one instance, we were invited in, and things did get theological, which was cool. I'm always up for that.

As we walked, there were a few things we made a point of doing. Governing principle number one of our reaching out was to respect the integrity of the person we were speaking with, while letting them know that we were there. Getting all up into folks bidness? That's actively counterproductive. Way I figure it, this isn't the first century. Ain't nobody in the You Ess of Ay not heard tell of this guy named Jesus. As the Apostle Paul put it, you got to be cool, bro.

Governing principle number two was related. For the folks we encountered who let us know they already had an affiliation with a faith community, our response was, "Well, great! Good for you! Say hi to [insert name of pastor/spiritual leader here] for me." This seemed somewhat surprising to folks, but again, our task is not to wrest Catholics and Methodists from their congregations so that they can be Presbyterian just the way the Good Lord wants them to be. We're just letting y'all know we're here.

The other governing principle was, of course, that communities of Jesus folk are and will always be responsible for letting people know they exist. We can't be hunkered down, hidden away behind the walls of our buildings and meetings and polity and the tightly-knit circles of the Us. A healthy church exists outwardly, connected to and engaged with the community full of human beings around it. That needs to be particularly and especially true for congregations that are open-minded and open-hearted.

So, amazement of amazement, I actually find myself looking forward to the next time I get to go door to door. Particularly if it's a sweet spring day.

Competing Ads, Washington Style

2011-12-01T15:20:00.001-05:00

DC, as I've noted numerous times in the past, is a rather idiosyncratic little town.

That particular truth was reinforced to me this last week in a couple of advertising circulars that came inserted into our Washington Post.

Yeah, we got the half-ton of Getmas sale catalogs, reminding us to be about our Sweet Lord Mammon's bidness. Most of the ads are in flagrant competition with one another. Best Buy or H.H. Gregg? Giant or Safeway? Each trumpets its superiority over the other.

But y'all get those no matter where you are. In Dee See, we do things differently.

What was different this week was a great big ol' advertising section...formatted like a newspaper...from the China Daily, the official English language mouthpiece of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China. It trumpeted, in language produced by Chinese Communist writers and then massaged out of Chinglish by well paid expatriate editorial staff, the vital importance of China to the business community.

Without China, the global economy would suffer! China, the key to recovery and prosperity!

There's a reason for this appearing. In the midst of our being distracted by all manner of silly things in this silly political season, America is semi-quietly pre-positioning itself in the Pacific Theatre. We're putting bases in Australia, for the first time ever. We're making overtures to Burma, whose military dictatorship is suddenly compliant. Why? Because as China grows in strength and flexes its muscles, its neighbors are getting skittish. Suddenly, being allied with the predominant military power in the world seems, well, prudent.

And so we get a "look how nice and important and business-friendly we are" insert from the world's dominant Communist nation. Right there in the Washington Post, where lawmakers and lobbyists can read it.

The next day, the insert was from the competition.

It was an equally glossy, equally pretending-to-be-news advertising insert. This one was produced, apparently, by a coalition of military-industrial corporations. It pitched the necessity of maintaining naval power at current levels, and of simultaneously investing in new drone technology for seaborne operations. We can't cut our force-projection capacity in these uncertain times! There were big patriotic shots of F-18 Hornets flying in tight formation over aircraft carriers, advertising the wares of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and several major naval shipyards.

The threat? The reason for maintaining dominance? To insure that we remain ahead of a resurgent China.

I'm going to guess that if you're not a DC Denizen, you didn't get these competing ads.

Mine is an odd little town.

Positive Thinking Gets Stranded at the Drive In

2011-11-30T08:13:00.001-05:00

This last month marked the final gasp of one of the larger and most shiny shiny congregations of the 20th century. The legendary Crystal Cathedral, home of the ministries of Robert Schuller and the Hour of Power, has been sold off to the Catholic Church.

The collapse of that congregation was, perhaps, inevitable. The church soared to amazing heights back in the boom days of California, as Schuller's message of prosperity and positivity resonated with the community. First he established a drive-in church....yes, a drive-in, just like that theatre in Grease, only with Jesus instead of schlocky horror flicks, bobbysocks, and popcorn.

This was the early 1960s California, before the car had become America's curse and burden, and so folks flocked to that ministry. From that success, Schuller built the facility that would define his ministry. The church soared in size, growing to around 10,000 members, with a significantly greater reach through the media.

That sanctuary...well...what to say about that sanctuary? Honestly, though it is impossibly over-huge, I find it...well...aesthetically pleasing. I'll admit it. I really like the Crystal Cathedral. It's kind of awesome, sleek and vast and graceful, in a light filled futuristic way. It'd be at home on Coruscant. Utterly impractical, and impossibly over-pricey to cool and heat, but but then again, I'm thinking as an Easterner. This is SoCal, where the weather is utterly fine, all the time. It's a lovely building, and I can see why the diocese was so eager to snag it.

Then, of course, came the problem of succession. When a ministry is built on a single personality, and that personality ain't Jesus, it's in real trouble. Schuller knew this, of course, but succession in the Big Parking Lot Churches is a tricky thing. The temptation is to keep the name, to cling to the brand, and that temptation was not overcome. The church was passed first to his son, and then...when his son proved too much of a fundamentalist and started driving away the masses by seeming, well, mean...on to his daughter.

Even with several thousand members, even with a vast congregation by any standard, it had become too facility and staff-heavy. By the time the ministry filed for bankruptcy last year, they were fifty million dollars in debt. And so a multi-thousand member church, a church that musters exponentially more resources than my own sweet little ministry, fails.

They'd overreached, assumed things were going to be the same forever, and were so caught up in their own belief that God will provide and that everything will work out for the best that...well...they just kept on trucking down that path to collapse. Heck, they're still banking on a miracle, even past the twelfth hour.

That, well, that pretty much never works out. Ever.

And saying so does not reflect a lack of trust in God, or a lack of faith. Maintaining a positive attitude is absolutely essential in life. I say this as a compulsive worrier and a pessimist, traits the Spirit works on. We do best when we are hopeful and bright with joy.

But there are significant and real boundaries to how that works. If our hope wanders too far from the best probable grace, then we're not hoping and trusting in our Creator. We are, instead, making demands of God.

We are saying, Lord, we know we've continually made decisions that fly in the face of how your creation works. We've been profligate and unwise and lost in our own dreams. We've listened to that nice man who said the angels would protect us, and stepped right off the edge of that tower in Jerusalem. Now we're plummeting down, and as the ground rises scary fast to meet us, could You...just for us, because we're so awesome and You love us nearly as much as we love ourselves...tweak gravity a teensy bit for a moment?

That's not faith. That's not positive thinking. That's magical thinking. That gets you branded a fool, right before things get wet and messy.

Positive thinking is different. It embraces reality, and allows reality to be suffused with grace, no matter what that reality might be. Positive thinking finds abundance in less, finds places for joy in struggle, and finds ways to speak grace into sorrow.

The Oldline and Occupy: Separated at Birth?

2011-11-29T10:06:00.001-05:00

We love meetings. We do.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, my attention was drawn to an interesting interchange between the church in which I grew up and the Occupy movement.

I'm a child of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in downtown DC. My parents were married there. I was baptized there. I ran and played with other kids through the five-ish stories of the building. I got confirmed there. It was there that I watched my very first nasty church fight, which soured me on church as an institution when I was a teen. It was there that, despite the fight, I learned the value of Christian service as a way to shatter the self-absorption of adolescence. It was there that I returned to serve those in need as an adult, and where I reclaimed my faith.

She's a grand old progressive dame of a church, and just a short walk to the White House. The pew in which Abraham Lincoln sat to worship still holds a place of honor in the sanctuary, and the original copy of the Emancipation Proclamation sits in one of the many parlors. Martin Luther King Jr. preached from the pulpit, and the church was deeply active in the civil rights movement.

So it's been fun and not-surprising to see the folks who Occupy nearby using the church as a base for occasional meetings. The church, being the flagrantly and unrepentantly liberal gathering it is, has also reached out to the Occupy folks.

That took most recent form as the congregation opened its doors for a Thanksgiving feast, one that gave the Occupy folks a chance to eat and celebrate together. It sounds, by all accounts, to have been a joyful occasion, attended by hundreds who had the opportunity to give thanks together.

What struck me, though, was the process by which the whole thing came about. That process was outlined in an article in the WaPo. You have to subscribe/link up via FB if you want access to it, so follow this link forewarned.

Here's how it rolled: An organizer from an interfaith coalition approaches Occupy to ask them to dinner. He is told that any invitation must be handled as an announcement to the General Assembly, the Occupy decision-making body. There are protocols to follow, though, and such announcements need to be handled by the outreach committee.

The announcement is made, and there's discussion, but it goes nowhere.

There's another meeting the next day. Having worked its way through the proper committee channels to General Assembly this time out, the second attempt at the announcement was well received, and approved by consensus vote. The decision was made, although the outcome was not entirely clear.

I read this, and I think to myself:

Sweet Mary and Joseph, these people are Presbyterian.

We say aye and nay. They do jazz-hands up or down. But dang. Toe-May-Toe, Toe-Mah-Toe. The similarities are uncanny.

And a bit worrisome, if Occupy hopes to avoid sliding off the same cliff of cultural irrelevance that the old-line has.

One of the aspects of the old-line denominations that makes us so challenged in the face of more aggressive, corporately structured non-denominational churches is the incredibly high transaction costs within our polity. Yeah, I'll unpack that.

As a community, the way we approach decision making is immensely demanding. Committees are layered on committees, and the processes of getting anywhere requires negotiating all manner of well-meaning procedural hoops.

Which means getting things done can frequently be an exercise in frustration, and what does get done is so filtered through competing agendas that it frequently reflects no direction at all. More importantly, a huge amount of effort is poured into managing the complex dynamics of community life. Those energies can make for strong and mutually accountable communities, but they also are energies being poured inward.

And if you pour your energies inward, you do not build a church. Or a movement. You simply don't have the time, or the sustained sense of purpose. This is the profoundly ironic reality of anarchist gatherings. There are few structures more convoluted and time-consuming than the complex political dance of a collective.

Or a presbytery, for that matter.

Freedom, Faith, and the Jefferson Bible

2011-11-27T07:29:00.001-05:00

The original text, handmade by Thomas Jefferson.

Yesterday, the boys, the missus and me decided to head out of the house and roll into downtown DC to do a little museum hopping. We're remarkably blessed to live so close to the Smithsonian museums that line the National Mall, which are 1) an amazing resource open to the American people and 2) free. Gotta love you some "free."

There were a couple of exhibits that struck our fancy. The little guy was big into hitting an exhibit of American military history. The big guy, while feigning early-teen disdain, called our attention to a display of art based on the photoluminescent creatures that live in the ocean's depths. My wife was looking forward to an interactive display, in which you could blend your facial features with that of a proto-human. I will not share that picture, although it was amusing, for reasons having to do with wanting to sleep in my own bed tonight.

The two donor Bibles.

Me? Well, I wanted to see what is popularly known as the Jefferson Bible.

As a religious studies graduate of Mr. Jefferson's University, this little tome has some iconic power for me, and seeing the thing itself, right there in the case, well, that was cool.

In the event you've not been aware of it, the Jefferson Bible is Jefferson's fairly straightforward attempt to create a text that he found amenable to his Enlightenment Deist sensibilities.   Jefferson, being an eminently rational and philosophical soul, well, he had some trouble with the Bible generally.   His faith...and he was a faithful person, in his own way...really did not extend to being able to embrace the more supernatural elements of the Christian faith. Miracles? Angels you could hear on high? Ancient legal and purity codes?   He just couldn't get there.

Still, he'd been impressed enough with what he had learned about the teachings of Jesus to feel they were worth reading and studying.   So he created his own "Bible," entitled "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth."

He did not do so by engaging in a careful scholarly re-translation from the most ancient and reliable of texts. Nope.   Instead, he took a couple of bibles. Then, he cut out the parts he liked, and pasted them into another book.   That's it. Hey presto, Jefferson's "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth."

It's striking for a variety of reasons.

First, given the context, it was a relatively...um...bold thing to do. There were plenty of proto-Americans who would have looked rather unfavorably on slicing up a Bible. There are some even today, although if they've ever cut and pasted a verse into a document, really, honey, it's the same thing. And you don't get that "Founding Father" status unless you're willing to stand up boldly for what you believe in.

Second, I was struck yesterday at how Ol' Tee Jay managed to inadvertently create a document that looks remarkably like the "Q" source proposed by redaction criticism, that collection of sayings and teachings that both Matthew and Luke most likely had in common, but which has been lost to history.   That was, of course, not his intent.   Jefferson couldn't have cared less about the connection to prophetic literature or to Torah. He was a busy man, what with a nation to create and all. He was just pickin' the stuff he liked, without really focusing on the way that the text linked to other texts.

Third, in creating this document, Jefferson was doing what most Bible readers do anyway. We read the bits we like, and focus on the bits we like, and ignore the rest. We may not go all kindergarten on it with our scissors and paste, but we're perfectly capable of doing that in our minds.   And Lord knows, we do plenty of it, constructing our own understanding of what is valuable and what is not.

There's both necessity and danger in that, of course. If we get our sorting right, we end up focusing on the parts of the Bible that should be most radically defining.   If we get it wrong? Well, that can take us into all sorts of odd and delusional places.   But Mistah Jeffahson was discerning enough that he caught most of the good stuff.

Finally, staring at this Jesus mashup cobbled together by a bright soul nearly 200 years ago, I found myself being thankful for the country that he helped form, a country in which we're free to believe as we wish, and where no human being can force belief upon any other human being.   We can persuade and argue and debate. But we remain, within those boundaries, wholly free.

On this Thanksgiving week, that's a vital and real blessing to remember.

Information for Consumptive People

2011-11-26T10:36:00.001-05:00

After watching the long, long lines of eager shoppers who were completely happy to ditch Thanksgiving/rest/family to line up for hours for bargains, I started looking around for some way to wrap my head around that level of consumer motivation.

It...um...doesn't seem healthy.

Then I remembered something. Consumption? Wasn't consumption once a disease?

And lo and behold, I found this handy-dandy poster. It reminds us that consumption is an infection, and provides some interesting but somewhat dated suggestions for preventing the spread of consumption in our culture.

For the current version of that plague, I'm not sure that we've got to worry quite as much about the disposal of spittle. But some of the suggestions still hold.

Like, say, the reminder that intemperance...that means living out of balance, as I read it...is one major cause of consumption. Living in dark dwellings, particularly those illuminated only by the light of cable TV or the glow of your laptop? That's got to be a contributing factor.

I like this recommendation, too:

REMEMBER that FRESH AIR and SUNSHINE are the greatest enemies of consumption and will often cure it when not too far advanced.

That would get you away from the ads and the market propaganda for a while.

You know, I think that just might work. Assuming we're not all too far gone.

Black Thursday

2011-11-23T10:34:00.000-05:00

As we count down the days to Getmas, the biggest festival day of consumer engorgement in America's ritual year is approaching. That day, of course, is Black Friday. It's the day set aside for shopping, when most Americans are available to get out there and buy, buy, buy.

If you're working retail, Black Friday is the day you hope to hit profitability for the year. It's the day when the shoppers come out in droves, and so, well, it's a work day for many, many Americans.

Given how important this day is to our economy, the job creators have over the years gradually tweaked it and expanded it a bit. A few years ago, we were introduced to the idea of Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday is that day three days after Black Friday when agoraphobes and those of us who get the heebie jeebies at the very thought of being trapped in traffic in the mall parking lot can all do our shopping online.

This year, we've seen two new spins from the minds of those who are most concerned about making jobs. There's "Small Business Saturday," when we're supposed to go shopping at small local businesses with whatever money we have left after hitting the Big Boxes on Black Friday.

And then, of course, there's tomorrow. It's Black Thursday! Yes, Black Thursday.

Tomorrow is the day right before Black Friday, when most Americans are given a pre-Black Friday vacation day to prepare themselves for shopping. It's been neglected as a day when consumers could be doing their consuming, and that needs to change.

Yes, I know, this was the day we were supposed to be making lists and reviewing the catalogs that make up 95% of our mail. But honestly, American shoppers have been wasting this time allocated for Black Friday preparation.

Instead, they've been just sitting around pointlessly at home arguing with their families, eating too much to compensate, and then zoning out unproductively in front of their completely inadequate 42 inch television. They're often so wacked out on triptophan that they're not even awake to see the ads so carefully placed in the game. Because of this, we're totally wasting their potential as the engines of our economic recovery. This year, many of our retail giants have noticed this glaring omission, and are doing what they can to correct it.

Best Buy, Target, and Macys are all bumping their Black Friday start times right up against the border of Black Thursday. They'll be opening their doors at midnight on Black Thursday, for the shopping convenience of every American.

Walmart, which always has the interests of consumers at heart, will be opening up at 10:00 PM on Black Thursday. The official announcement from Walmart is:

By sharing our Black Friday specials earlier than ever, we hope to make buying decisions easier for parents working hard to give their families the Christmas they deserve.

Not to be outdone, ToysRUs will be opening at 9:00 PM on Black Thursday.

Of course, some people have whined about this. You always have some whiners, who are just lazy and unaware of how generous and beneficent our job creators are. They even got a petition going, which, fortunately, does not have to be paid any attention. It'll be drowned in the endless sea of catalogs and Kardashian coverage.

So remember, my fellow consumers: This year, forget about that wasteful, pointless time with your families. Set aside that unAmerican failure to bump out against the backstops of the credit you've been extended. Be in touch with the knowledge that your children and your spouse and your friends will not love you unless their market-driven expectations are met. Get out of your house, put your nose to the shopping grindstone, and do what you've been told to do.

For that, the job creators will be truly thankful.

Keeping Myself Occupied

2011-11-21T08:49:00.001-05:00

One of the things I enjoy most about my new ecclesiastical digs out in P-ville is the depth to which my wee kirk is engaged with direct service ministry. From its active and invaluable engagement with the local direct service ministry to youth-lead engagement with kids in West Africa, this is a church that is actively living out the demand to serve the last and the least and the lost. Is it perfect? Nah. But it's still pretty cool.

That balancing out of theology and service can be a tricky wicket for some congregations. On the one hand, you've got folks who fixate on theology. These congregations can be gentle and quietistic. Or they can be filled with very earnest hard-eyed folks who are more than happy to tell you that they have the answer, and why you really don't understand exactly how You Need To Be Just Like Them. These congregations can be mean, mean places.

Then there are congregations that flip that, and which are so earnestly focused on fixing injustice that they never quite get around to telling people why they do it. These congregations are perfectly nice, but they're lousy at adding to their number. It's easy for them to spiral into isolated grumbling about how things used to be, and how no-one cares any more, as they trudge about wearily resenting the rest of the planet for not getting it together.

I've always been most personally and spiritually content when I'm balancing the two, by which I don't mean being both mean and resentful. I mean living in the balance between orthodoxy and orthopraxis, between faith and the works that are faith's fruit.

If it's all worship and God-chatter, then I feel dissatisfied. It's not so much that I feel obligated to engage in service, but rather that when I'm not doing it, I feel listless and frustrated. If I'm hearing and speaking of the Reign of God, then I naturally yearn to feel that Kingdom dirt between my fingers. It's what is asked of us, after all.

The challenge is, of course, that I'm just too dag-blanged far away from the teeming metropolis of Poolesville to get deeply engaged in the good work my congregation is doing there. Some of it? Sure. I'm going to be on it if I'm there. But otherwise, I just cain't do the hour-each-way-with-no-traffic schlep every day and keep my life in balance. The physical distance is too great.

Plus, I'm only half-time-ish now, and need to respect that. Some might say I'm underemployed, though I don't feel it.

So this last month, I decided to do what my church does. To act in solidarity within my own community, so to speak. From the heart of my "underemployment," I started up working with something called Annandale Christian Community for Action. It's a direct service ministry right here in my community, and what I'm doing is some grunt work for the Meals on Wheels program. Meaning I'm now part of the volunteer cadre that drives hot meals to elderly shut-ins in my own neck of the woods. It's good solid, roots-rock justice n' service stuff.

Unfortunately, those programs have really suffered over the last decade. It's not that the need isn't there. The need continues. But, rather, it's that the culture around us has changed.

If everyone is obligated to work until they're eighty, or engaged in the endless demands of managing children's schedules, then there is no time to dedicate to the needs of those around us. The deep bonds of voluntarism and neighborly care that are the lifeblood of healthy communities become frayed.

So if you...like me...find yourself with a little bit of extra time on your hands, and the "job creators" haven't found a way to consume your every last waking moment with low-paying labor, consider what you might be able to do with your fallow time.

Perhaps you're called to go camp out in a park. If so, bless you, my child. Try to stay warm, and remember to stay focused on why you're there.

If you prefer things to be a bit more hands on, just spend a moment or two on Google. Start typing the words "Volunteer Opportunities," and the Goog will autofill the places within your area that you might find some meaning and purpose. There are countless opportunities for action that fulfills the meaning of our day to day.

Church Growth, Presbyterian Style

2011-11-17T08:00:00.001-05:00

The goal of every pastor, pretty much without exception these days, is to "grow your congregation." We train and attend seminars and pray earnestly that the Good Lord will see to bless our efforts with an abundant harvest of eager new pledge uni...I mean, disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. We talk about new buildings, and salivate over that great plump bunch of unchurched bipeds that seems to dangle ever beyond our reach, like we're Tantalus in Church Planting Hell.

Well, that's the case for pastors outside of the oldline churches, at least. Y'all either have nice new buildings radiant with big screens and parking and a great honking mortgage, or you're renting and dreaming about it, or you're still flailing away with the same dozen folks in that Bible study/praise circle that was supposed to be a megachurch already, dagflabbit.

In older churches, there is yearning for more folks, but less earnest entrepreneurial evangelism.

And we Presbyterians, we're, well, older. We've been around longer. We move at our own pace, sonny.

Yesterday, I gave a group of local pastors a brief tour through my rumpled, comfortable, and well-worn church. I showed them our warm little sanctuary, built in 1847, which is easily the smallest church building in our small town. I walked them through the building containing my office and the classrooms. That aging structure was built in 1827, and feels every one of those years.

One of the pastors, the Baptist, noticed the glassed-in bookcase in my office. "Wow," he said, perusing the ancient tomes. "Look at this! These are really, really old catechisms!" I told him I'd been meaning to look at them, but the case appeared to be locked.

After they left, I decided to explore the case further. I fiddled with the lock for a moment, then realized the bookshelf wasn't locked at all, but held closed with an interior clasp. I gave it a bit of a tug, and the door opened. The smell of dust and must was strong, but I began to peruse the objects within.

They were, almost without exception, ancient. There was a silver bell, undoubtedly used to bring a classroom or meeting to order, that still sounded a tone so bright and clear and sustained that I half expected to look around and find myself in Narnia. Many were old hymnals from the first decade of the 20th century. Many more were books that had once been part of a Sunday School, readers and stories and collections of lessons that little groups of children would have had to memorize and recite.

There was, as seen above, a neatly maintained roll book for the Poolesville Presbyterian Sunday School. Lists showed the names of every child who'd attended school, and whether they'd completed their assignments, and whether or not they'd checked a book out of the library. It covered the years 1883 through 1885.

At the top of the case, I found a book of Session minutes. The Session, for if you're blissfully unaware of Presbyterianese, is the group of Elders who are charged with gettin' the work of the church done. Our board, basically. As I had a Session meeting coming up in the evening, what better time to peruse Session minutes? I wiped the dust off off the cover, dust that had gathered over what had clearly been many years, and cracked open the book.

Inside, the minutes began with a record of a meeting of the Session of Poolesville Presbyterian Church on July 12, 1885. It was written in ink, possibly with a quill, and was in a neatly angled handwritten cursive, precise and meticulous. This clerk of session---that's the person charged with maintaining the records---really cared about his work.

He chronicled the decisions of the church, the folks who were seeking to join, and the activities of the pastor, who barely missed a day, except when the weather was most severe or he was called to preach the Gospel elsewhere. He noted, in a reflection section, that Poolesville Presbyterian Church was not prone to outbursts of the Spirit, as were so many others, or prone to manifesting charismatic gifts. But they were nonetheless, he mused, doing just fine. Sounds oddly familiar.

As I read, my curiosity was piqued. If this was a Session book...of a Presbyterian Church...then it would have the statistical records and accounting. It would tell me just how big my church was back then. I flipped through to where that would be in a current book, and lo and behold, there it was.

Total membership of Poolesville Presbyterian Church, one hundred and twenty six years ago?

Seventy One.

Our current membership lies at around eighty-four.

I guess that means we're growing, by, hmm, what is that, almost 20% every one hundred years.

So we're on track to be a thousand member church by, hold on, let's do the extrapolation, the Year of Our Lord Thirty Four Hundred and Two.

All part of the plan, my friends. All part of the plan.

A Very Starbucks Christmas

2011-11-16T11:39:00.001-05:00

Last night, as I chugged a thousand words closer to the manuscript I'm currently working on, I did so whilst ensconced in one of the thirty-seven Starbucks within a five mile radius of my home. I'm there regularly for a few hours on Tuesdays, while my little guy rocks out at the School of Rock for a three hour band practice.

This last week, it being a whole week before Thanksgiving, Starbucks did its Christmas morph, going from being pumpkin-orange and Fallish to being full-throttle red and white Lil' Baby Jesus cheer. Yeah, it's not Thanksgiving yet, but given the failure of the Salted Mocha Caramel Turkeychino last year, I guess the guys at corporate just assume that they may as well go with Christmas.

Take note, O ye who fret about the War on Christmas: there was plenty of Christmas on display at Starbucks. It's the Christmas Blend, not the Holiday Blend, so our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ may be honored by the "signature blend of aged Sumatran coffee and other Asia/Pacific and Latin American beans" that most fully gives Him the Glory.

The background music piped in wasn't just Jingle Bells and other unacceptably pagan accretions. It included indy-lite palatable versions of the Little Drummer Boy, and then a full on version of Silent Night. As the sound system cooed about the Holy Infant So Tender and Mild, I found myself wondering why it was bugging me so.

The rendition wasn't a bad one, but Silent Night is a sacred song, one that evokes candlelight and gentle reverence. As marketplace muzak, it felt misused. Desacralized.

The three twenty-something baristas working there seemed to be struggling a bit with the music, too, although for a totally different reason. One commented to another that he wasn't sure he could live with hearing this music, over and over again, for the next two months.

I chimed in, asking how long they'd been playing it, and asking if they could survive another month of it. Another barista responded that it was going to go longer, out 'till mid-January, to squeeze every last drop of Christmas out of the season. He groaned. It was clear that they'd be totally sick of all of these songs by the time they were finally given permission not to play them any more.

Twenty minutes later, as I was the only patron in the store, the assistant manager asked me if I'd mind if they changed it over to blues for a bit.

Whatever's going to keep you sane, I replied.

So blues it was.

I don't think Jesus minded the switch.

Occupy Targeting

2011-11-15T07:47:00.001-05:00

Stay on target. Stay on target.

With a tiny bit of free time on my hands this last week, and my flighty muse temporarily disinterested in the book I'm chugging away on, I found myself doing a little bit of research.

With the days growing short and the winter coming on, the Occupy Movement here in DC is going to be facing a conundrum of sorts. The long history of sustained camping-demonstrations here in the Nation's Capital combined with a moderate-to-progressive local ethos may not yield the sort of forcible removals we've been seeing in city after city this last week, but one never knows. It didn't stop the aggressive action to clear out Zuccotti Park last night in New York, at the heart of where the Occupy movement began. There, the response of the Movement was mostly what it needed to be. Just clear out. Just pick up peaceably, smile at the nice officers and tell them you love them, move, and then settle back in the next morning, like the murmuration you are.

Still, time is short. The Death Star is clearing Yavin. It is important to stay on target.

The larger challenge will come, in DC at least, in reinforcing identity and in spreading popular support for the movement among Americans generally. To do this, I would ask that Occupy K St and Occupy DC consider direct action that reflects the actuality on the ground. Having gotten the satire out of my system on that subject, here's a simple proposal for consideration by the General Assemblies in question:

As the political system is not, not yet, the focus of Occupy, focus on the ground you inhabit. Call out those places of power that are not accountable. What troubles most Americans is the control over our political system by powerful, entrenched, and moneyed interests. The One Percent, as they say. These are the lobbyists, the potent influence-shops that employ our politicians and politicos after they've left office. This is where corporate money buys the direction of our culture, and where the good of the country is taken out of the hands of voters and citizens. This is the heart of injustice. The political leaders from either of the two parties we're permitted to choose from do not speak against these places, and they will not. Not ever. It's where their campaign staffers go to work, and where they themselves hope to pad the nest for their retirements.

Resisting those places would have purchase, deep purchase. If America hears you are doing this, Honeychild, ninety-nine percent of them will wave their hands in the air and say AMEN. Even the Tea Party will acknowledge the excellence of your kung fu.

Here in the District of Columbia, there are plenty of office-fronts where a few hundred souls with signs making noise could light up, in a prophetic way, those places of unaccountable power. These are not places known to most citizens, but as I'm a DC townie who likes to do research, I know 'em. The next time you're considering a nonviolent Guy Fawkes-masked march or an impromptu resistance dance party, consider these as destinations:

The Podesta Group. Akin Gump. Patton Boggs. I have selected these three against two primary criteria: 1) they need to be in easy walking distance of your encampments, and 2) they need to perfectly represent the essential power you oppose.

Let me light 'em up a little for ya.

The Podesta Group is a good place to start. They're at 1001 G Street, NW, Suite 900. They are, according to opensecrets, the number three lobbying shop in DC this year, pulling in over twenty million dollars from their clients in 2011 alone. And oh, what lovely clients they have. They've pushed the interests of BP, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Bank of America, and various Big Pharma corporations, and that's just this year.

If you're having a Pavlovian response to Podesta, well, that's because it is just so very tasty.

Akin Gump is a DC powerhouse, and has been for decades. I used to work in the same building they inhabit, at 1333 New Hampshire Avenue, NW. I watched former lawmakers and power-players go in and out, in and out. The guy who advised Clinton to hush up the Lewinsky thing? He worked there. They represent, among many others, Chinese interests, Big Oil, Boeing, and casinos. It's a short walk, right next to Dupont Circle, and if you want to stop in for a beer at the Front Page afterwards, it's right there. They're number two on the list of 2011 lobbying firms, at twenty-five million in receipts in 2011.

Finally, there's Patton Boggs, the big boy on the block. They're looking at nearly thirty million in client money for 2011. Their huge client list includes various large big Pharma players and Walmart. They are also in the notable employ of several big-ticket investment and financial interests, who are their largest dollar amount clients.

Meaning, my friends, that they work for Wall Street. This is where the power of Wall Street reaches into the halls of governance, kids. This is where the social connections of power are leveraged, bought, traded, and sold. This is why you're here, and it's only a 25 minute walk from McPherson Square, at 2550 M Street, NW.

So I will leave this in your hands, to do with what you will. Be peaceful. Be loud. Be gracious. Be bold.

Descending Into Hell

2011-11-14T07:53:00.001-05:00

After two great worship services, a meeting or two, and some prep-work for this week's session meeting, I clocked out of Poolesville at about 2:15 PM yesterday. My pastorly duties were done for the day, but I wasn't finished being a Christian.

I donned my riding gear, threw a leg over the 'Strom, and hopped on the One-Oh-Seven heading back towards Dee See. My destination was about 45 minutes away, at a local hospital, where one of the members of my former congregation has been for the last month.

This is, let me note, not my job anymore. I know this. I do. But that isn't really what matters, not ultimately.

He never really quite fit in at my old church. He was an older man, big and vigorous and musical, but could be completely oblivious to others. He also had an unfortunate semi-adolescent forwardness around women, one that required me, with others, to sit on him a little bit. But my talks with him, which were frank and direct, both yielded a cessation in behavior and a knowledge on his part that I was looking out for his well-being spiritually.

He never married. He has no kids. His relationship to his family was, where it existed, only marginally functional. His approach to finances was not wise. And his health, over the last year, began to collapse, in that cascading way that bodes ill for life.

It was never quite clear what his diagnosis was, or, at least, he was never clear on it. Weakness begat weakness, and his life spiraled downward into hospitalization, being sent home, and then being re-hospitalized, after which he'd be sent home again, too weak to care for himself. His home descended into squalor. I'd visit, and even though there were provisions for in home care, he'd have not eaten in days.

He had a stroke just after I moved on from my Bethesda church, and I'd visited him. Then the word came that people thought...thought...he was in a coma following a surgery. No-one was quite sure.

So of course, I had to visit. Not because I was his pastor, but because I am the only person who visits him. I got the hospital to confirm that he was there. No other information provided, of course, HIPAA be damned to the hell it inadvertently creates.

I wish he'd been in a coma.

He was, instead, intubated. He was also being fed through a tube. He was catheterized. And he was, despite being too weak to move his arms and unable to speak because of the breathing tube, aware, and in considerable discomfort.

I struggled to find a way to communicate. My ability to lip-read is marginal, and as he tried futilely to speak, I ascertained that wasn't going to work. A few simple questions indicated that no-one had been to see him for a while. I talked for a little bit myself, spinning a simple wordspell of calm, of a beautiful fall and bright crisp days and little country churches that sang the old, old songs. That helped, for a moment or two.

But he again grew agitated, and asked for the writing pad that the nurses had tried to use to reach him. I saw it covered with meaningless chicken scratches. He tried, he really did, to write. But he couldn't. He was simply too weak.

I simply could not understand him. I tried to get him to sound out the letters of what he was trying to tell me. After a minute, only one word: AGENDA.

Is that what you mean, I asked. He nodded. This was what he meant to say. I am still not quite sure what that means.

He began to mouth things animatedly, but I couldn't get most of what he was saying.

Before I left him, I held his hand, and we prayed together. It seemed to help him a bit, and there was little else I could do.

I could not ask after his prognosis at the nurses station, because they are legally mandated not to tell me anything. I could not ask the doctors what the goal of their treatment regimen was, of whether they thought that the tubes and the indignity served any ultimate purpose other than sustaining the organic process of human suffering. I could not ask their agenda.

Though I was his pastor, and am still his friend and his brother in Christ, and he is otherwise alone in the world, that means very little in the American medical system and the laws that now govern it.

HIPAA does not recognize those things as valid categories.

I wonder just how many more souls like him there are, hidden away in the great warehouses for the broken and the alone we have created.

Abortion, Mississippi, and Personhood

2011-11-11T08:04:00.001-05:00

One of the more surprising outcomes from this week's electoral event was the solid defeat of the "Personhood" amendment in Mississippi. That amendment, in the event that you're not aware of it, would have changed the Constitution of the Magnolia State to include the following language:

"The term person or persons shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof."

The purpose of that amendment was simple. If a human being becomes a person at the moment of fertilization, then abortion involves terminating the life of a person. If that is the case, then abortion is not permissible under any circumstances, as it would be killing a person in the eyes of the law. That approach reinforces the understanding, commonly presented in anti-abortion circles, that abortion...at any stage...is murder.

That's a great rallying cry, a marvelously Alinskian way to motivate and stir the passions of a movement. The primary problem with it, of course, is that it has no connection to reality. It is an axiom utterly ungrounded in both human biology and the ethics of Scripture. I say this as someone who does not embrace abortion as a means of birth control. Abortion is plain ol' kind of horrible. My views on it reflect what I see to be the actuality of abortion, which is that it exists in a difficult area of ethical greyscale. The application of a binary worldview to this issue is both misguided and destructive. Sure, it's easy. But some things are just hard.

From a biological standpoint, fertilization can hardly be considered the moment at which life qua life begins. The joining of egg and sperm does begin *something*, but having actually taken biology coursework, I know that this *something* very often amounts to nothing.

Damaged or non-viable embryos typically self-abort. Many years ago, my wife and I went through this when we were trying to conceive for the first time. She had an early miscarriage while we were on vacation, and while it was really no fun at all, we didn't feel we'd lost a child. "Missed Abortions," as they are called, are surprisingly common. They are completely different than a late term miscarriage, which is a wholly different and far more tragic thing.

But according to the axiom of the personhood supporters, there is no difference. Allowing for difference would require watering down the rhetoric. Unfortunately, sticking with that rhetoric and codifying it into law means that many common means of birth control (the pill, IUDs) would be impacted, as would many of the techniques medical science has developed to help couples overcome infertility.

Mississippi, even though it is deeply and essentially conservative, was able to see through the falseness of that reflexive and dualistic approach to being a person.

What's interesting to me here is that in refusing to support this amendment, Bible-Belt Mississippi has actually taken the Biblical road on the subject. The ethics of Torah, Wisdom and the Prophets do not assume personhood for an early term embryo, but instead assume that it inhabits an in-between-place. The Bible indicates that it is not nothing, to be thrown out or discarded without a thought. But neither is it fully human, as you or I are human.

Rhetoric that argues otherwise cannot claim to be Biblical. I'm not sure if that makes its way into most Mississippi sermons, unless its the one on the last Sunday before the pastor is encouraged to consider a career in retail.

But perhaps the practical wisdom of a conservative people means a significant majority get it anyway.

The One Percent Commute

2011-11-09T14:43:00.000-05:00

For sale! Price? $4.8 million. That's $18,000 a month, kids.

It's my commute every day now, this journey up River Road, northward to my little church in the little town of Poolesville. I depart my modest brick rambler, located in an inside the Beltway Virginia suburb, in a neighborhood inhabited by federal workers and military officers. These are not inexpensive homes, because nothing around DC is inexpensive.

But they are also utterly average, in fact, smaller than average. It's a nice neighborhood, but it is not rich, at least not yet, not by the standards we so desperately cling to as we feel them slipping through our fingers.

I motor onto the Beltway, slog through traffic, cross the Potomac on the American Legion Bridge, and then take Exit 39 onto River, headed west north west, through an area called Potomac, Maryland.

I have often commented in blog-passing about the homes on this road, about their size and ostentation. Today, I thought I'd share a representative sample of them with you, a picture being worth a thousand words and all. So I stopped the bike, here and there, and took some snapshots.

A nice little driveway.

Understand this: there is no significant industrial base in and around DC. It is not a major financial center. It is a government town, and I am not overreaching when I state that these homes are built on the foundation of our tax dollars and/or the good faith and credit of the United States.

They are not, of course, the homes of federal workers, those "wasteful bureaucrats" who exist primarily in the minds of those who buy what the right-wing corporate-funded media sells them. You can live comfortably on a federal government income, but even people who've climbed the ladder all the way into senior executive service do not live in homes like this.

These are the homes of high powered lawyers, and lobbyists, and contractors. These are the homes of those who live and work in the private sector, and who make their money off of government. These are the homes of those with the power that comes with wealth.

A quaint little residence.

Now, some of the residents of these homes are perfectly pleasant people, I have no doubt. I also don't doubt that many..if not all..of them are educated, hardworking, and driven. Some may be quite charming. Some of them may well have created interesting new products or services. Some may be foreign dignitaries, here to schmooze and wine and dine. I cannot speak to the particular merits of the souls in residence at these places, nor would I presume to.

But I can note, because it is hard to miss, that the row upon row of vast homes and estates out on the periphery of the nation's capital seem strangely incongruous in a time of concern about governmental efficiency and stifling debt.

A personal favorite, for it's tackiness and eagle-based decor.

Driving a road upon which one passes one vast mansion after another after another, it's hard to see just quite how the ethic that builds these homes meshes with the economic worries that consume the nation whose wealth went into building them. It's hard to see how these homes, which present like the estates of Venetian gentry or the dachas of Soviet commissars, mesh with the values of our republic as it struggles to find its feet again.

Though I've been riding this road for months, it still feels vaguely unseemly and unsettling as I pass through them.

Fortunately, River Road continues on, and the homes grow more modest. By the time I've reached my destination, the surroundings are small town humble, surrounded by farmland and cattle and horses, large working plots of land with well-kempt but relatively modest homes.

It feels like America again.

Virginia, Government, and the Golden Egg

2011-11-08T19:40:00.001-05:00

This morning, I went to vote in a local election here in the great state of Virginny. The wife and I motored the several hundred yards to the local Episcopalian church, which has served as our polling place since we first moved into the area. There, we...um...fought our way through the crowds...ahem...to cast our votes.

Not really, of course. It being a state and local election only, the turnout was marginal. I wait longer in line at Chipotle than I did this morning to vote. If you hit Politico's website, you've got to dig through the Herman Cain psychodrama for a ways before you even discover there was an election today. We Americans are remarkably good at announcing how wonderful our democracy is, and completely wretched at participating in it.

The polls were empty, but for once, it wasn't for a lack of sound and fury at the local level. This is the first time I've ever, ever gotten an attack-text, for instance, sent from an anonymous number and insinuating that a school board member (a Democrat) was responsible for the misuse of funds. Conservatives are taking local elections seriously, and it's going to pay dividends.

It's looking to be a bad day for the Democratic party in the state, which has a strong chance to lose the Virginia Senate, leaving Richmond entirely controlled by the GOP. This sets up a rather odd dynamic.

The VA GOP, like the GOP across the country, is vigorously anti-Washington. Government is the enemy, and business is the source of all things good. So the rhetoric here is radically anti-regulation, anti-tax, and anti-federal government. That's why Virginia is now frequently rated as the most business-friendly state in the Union.

Here's the odd thing. If you look at Virginia's economic base, our business community is in fact thriving. But the primary pillar supporting of the Virginia business economy is the federal government.

Heck, the primary business of Virginia IS government. Not just federal civilian employees and members of the armed services, mind you, although there are plenty of 'em.

Federal contractors, defense contractors, government-funded research, and Navy shipyards are the meat and potatoes of what Virginia's business sector does to make money. Given that the state can no longer fall back on good ol' standbys like tobacco and slavery, the gutting of the federal government...the killing of the beast that has been the quest of conservatism for a generation...will smash a huge hole in the economic health of our region.

The collateral Virginian economy, meaning retail, construction, real-estate, and services, all of that relies on the tax dollars and deficit-spending that the GOP so vigorously opposes. Remove that base and the difference between the economy of Virginia and the economy of West Virginia is reduced in ways that I think most Virginians probably aren't eager to see.

The success of a pro-business, anti-Washington, pro-austerity GOP agenda means significant pain for much of the Virginia economy. The GOP in the state has gone hard into that national level focus, which would seem to fly radically against the actual self-interest of most of their constituents. And yet, here we are.

Whereever you stand on the role of government, it's an odd irony.

Re: The Occupy K Street Account

2011-11-07T08:31:00.001-05:00

The following represents a privileged client communication of Ferguson and Cohen, LLC as defined by federal law, SEC Section C642.h - C645r, 1992. Any unauthorized distribution of this material represents a violation of the aforementioned statute, and will be subject to felony prosecution and penalties.

CONFIDENTIAL
DATE: 10.28.11
TO: R. Cohen, D. Ferguson
FROM: J. C. Morgenstern
RE: Occupy K Street Account Development Strategy Session

Following our new client development strategy session last month, I and my staff were tasked with doing an initial development FTF with Occupy K Street.

As the management team discussed during our September 17 planning meeting, the Occupy movement has increasing brand visibility, with all media-market metrics since brand incept showing explosive and exponential growth. This growth is coupled with a strikingly positive brand-identity in broad and multiply replicable public survey data, a yield that is verified by our own internal assessments.

Our review of recent contract-chatter through informal professional social networks indicated that, amazingly, neither Occupy Wall Street nor its subsidiary Occupy K Street have retained the services of brand management and strategic planning consultants. Clearly, this represented an opportunity for F&C to expand our client base into a new and growing market.

Our New York office was charged with initial contact with Occupy Wall Street, and I and my team began preliminary work on potential front-end deliverables for the K Street subsidiary.

To that end, my client development staff conceptualized some preliminary Six Sigma/POLIS Delta protocols for the movement, which we felt would clearly represent the value-added of engagement with F&C's branding team. The two most promising POLIS/Delta yields:

1) Increased Drilldown on Brand-Specific Marketing Events: In our assessment, Occupy K Street has the potential to be the most viable of the Occupy subsidiaries, particularly given its location at the nexus between corporate power and the American political system. Its primary location is within several hundred yards of some of the most influential and well funded corporate lobbying firms. To date, however, it has failed to leverage that synergy to any discernable advantage.

Instead, it appears primarily focused on impromptu dance parties in intersections, making cardboard signage, intense respectful discussions, and drum circles, none of which are recognized as mission critical functions in our Six Sigma protocols. It has also diluted brand-identity by engaging in non-productive partnerships with previously established brands, such as FreeTibet LLC and GazaCorp.

Our value-added on this front would be to identify individual lobbying firms, their partners, and their office locations. Focusing media events on the entities that define K Street in the public eye would, in our assessment, yield a positive and predictable process result. It would also expand brand appeal into the fragmenting Tea Party market.

2) Improve Social Media Messaging Brand Protocols: A review of social media outputs indicated considerable potential for improvement in messaging strategy. The primary twitter feed, for example, seems primarily used to say there isn't enough water/shelter/pizza, or to fret about the cops, or to talk about interpersonal disagreements. As messaging goes, this could use some refinement. A market-identity that is hungry/thirsty/cold is unlikely to draw significant support in the key 18-34 young urban demographic, and while highlighting interpersonal drama works well within the reality television marketplace, it has been shown to be less effective as a tool for mass movement mobilization.

Refocusing primary social media messaging away from damage control, in-house-chatter, and development efforts and towards the aforementioned Brand-Specific Marketing Events would increase the visibility of the Occupy K St movement. Those functions could be dealt with by secondary outlets.

With these two primary yields, our team endeavored to approach senior management at Occupy K Street to establish the front-end relationships necessary for proposal negotiations. Background research indicated that the management structure at all Occupy subsidiaries is a carefully guarded corporate secret, and our experience onsite confirmed this research. Each initial contact insisted they had no knowledge of senior management. Most seemed unwilling to admit to any knowledge of CoC structure, and would stay messaging-consistent, insisting that there was no such thing. Despite this considerable and impressive control over management access, we persisted.

Our eventual on-site FTF came following a chance encounter with an individual named Johnny Justice Muffin, who admitted that he was, in his own words, "The Supreme High CEO of All This [Fornicating] [Excrement], Bro." CEO Justice-Muffin indicated that there is some distance between our anticipated front-end billables (150 hours at a staff-average $100/hr, plus 35% overhead) and their fiscal year 2012 budget for management consulting (a previously used tarp, two hand-made free-range squirrel-fur caps, and a package of what was described as "some seriously kind [stuff], it only looks like shake, man.")

Given this hard-line approach to contract negotiations, it is our recommendation that next-stage conversations be subcontracted to our contract development specialist team. I will look forward to further conversations on that front, and to responding to your questions, at this next months client development strategy session.

JCM

Oakland, The Black Block, and the Ethics of Anarchy

2011-11-04T08:20:00.001-05:00

Given the absence of any membership fee for the Occupy Movement, it was perhaps inevitable that there'd be the kind of unpleasantness that was seen in Oakland this last week. Yesterday, the reportage of the actions of a few non-representative human beings was extensive, as the seemingly inevitable masked and black-clad young men smashing things made their always-welcome appearance.

Their actions diluted and distracted from what appears to have been an entire day of nonviolent direct action, as large crowds of demonstrators...families, kids, veterans, young people, blue-collar workers, and folks of all races and creeds...loudly but peaceably expressed their resistance to the structures of consumer culture that have cast our society out of balance.

Many media outlets identified the window-smashers and rock throwers as representing the actions of anarchists. They're wearing black? They're smashing things? Must be anarchists.

Here, though, I must demur.

There were anarchists present in Oakland that day. The anarchists, however, were the ones who showed up during the daylight hours. They were the the students and moms and the kids and the workers. They were the peaceful ones, the players of music, the chanters of slogans. The smashers and throwers and breakers of [stuff]? Not anarchists, not really.

Why not? Aren't they the archetype of the anarchist, so definitive that they might show up in a children's picture book, under "A is for Anarchist?"

Anarchy, as I have and will continue to assert, is the fundamental ethical refutation of coercive power. "No-power-over" is, after all, what that word means. It stands in radical contrast to the power of the state and the subsidiary but related power of the marketplace. It is not a system of government, but instead an ethic, a worldview that defines the actions of a human being no matter what the structural context in which they find themselves.

From that as a conceptual foundation, engaging in violence means that you haven't grasped or internalized the ethic you purport to live by. Violence is, after all, the application of coercive power. If you claim to reject coercion as inherently destructive to the integrity of human beings, and yet inflict direct and material harm on others to get what you want, then you have not internalized the slogans you wear on your black t-shirts.

You aren't an anarchist. You're a hypocrite.

There is more to anarchy than saying "I can do anything I want, and no-one's the boss of me." That is the ethic of solipsism, the delusional assumption that the entire universe revolves around you and your needs. That ethic gets along just fine with consumerism.

Anarchy goes deeper, requiring an individual's rejection of violence even as a means of achieving their own needs. For that, an anarchist turns to nonviolence, expressing their will while intentionally refusing to allow the ethos of violence to define them.

The folks who smashed and burned are no more anarchists than those men who recently attacked and cut the beards and hair of peaceable Amish-folk are Amish.

If you yield to the ethics and instruments of the Enemy, you serve the purposes of the Enemy.

Mysticism, Liberalism, and Post Modernity

2011-11-03T09:15:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, as I walked to get dinner on a clear and beautiful Fall evening, I found myself inexplicably musing on a tension that exists between my own strain of flagrant and unrepentant liberalism and the liberalism of post-modernity.

I'm unquestionably a liberal, by any meaningful definition of that term. I think the first response that any sentient being needs to have to an encounter with the new or the different needs to be openness, consideration, and forbearance. That leads me to be open to gays and lesbians, open to people of other faiths, and open to individuals of varying political philosophies. It doesn't extend to tolerance of intolerance, violence, and hatred, of course, but otherwise, we cool.

Underlying that worldview is a rather fundamentally mystic view of the nature of existence. I believe that all things are interconnected, that I and you and everything are woven together in ways that we understand only through a glass dimly. That sense of interconnectedness is itself undergirded and founded on my Christian faith, as I see my Creator's work all around me, and the potential grace of the Nazarene and the light of the Spirit in every human being I encounter.

Here, though, if I am honest, I think my foundation for liberalism diverges from that of secular post-modernity.

As I grasp that worldview, the underlying assumption is that all meaning is socially-mediated or derived from particular individual contexts. There is no "truth," at least not with a capital "T", beyond those truths that we fabricate for ourselves. What is good is what we individually say is good, and it is not possible to make any assertion of the good that extends beyond individual preference.

Within the context of that radically individualistic and particularistic worldview, tolerance of other perspectives arises from the assertion that if no perspective is normative for all, then no perspective is invalid. We must accept all perspectives, because our own is just ours.

While both can yield acceptance of the stranger, one is an ethos of separation and difference, another, the ethos of interconnectness and union.

This, I think, may be one of the more significant distinctives between being a progressive person of faith and a secular progressive.

Google+ and the Integrated Person

2011-11-02T08:34:00.000-05:00

I had a short exchange on Google+ today, with someone who'd suggested in a comment that a recent blog post of mine was "manufactured" and "irresponsible." It was interesting, in that it represented the first time I've ever had any sort of interaction on that new-ish social network.

About two months ago, I plopped into Google+, along with everyone else. This was, in the event you've forgotten, supposed to be a very big deal. Here, finally, was a threat to Facebook's total dominance of the social network marketplace. The "pitch" for this new network was that it would revolutionize social media. Now, finally, there was a way to insure that your mom wasn't going to see you tagged in that picture backin' up and/or gettin' freaky on that skeeve while clubbing at 2:32 am Sunday morning.

"But honey, didn't you say you couldn't make it to church because you had the flu?"

Having been kept outside with the rest of the rabble by the virtual bouncers at the gate as the hip and the powerful were admitted, I expected something different. When I arrived on Google+, I expected to experience the humming chatter of eager first-adopters, as the net-elite filled the new network with their radiant, connected savvy.

Instead, it was like going back and visiting my MySpace page. It was dead as a doornail, as stale as canned laughter. There was nothing going on.

So I got to wondering why.

Part of it, I'm sure, is social network fatigue. Those friends on Facebook haven't all migrated over, nor has everyone who follows you on Twitter. Managing all of it is undoubtedly too much, and once you're invested in several online communities, you're probably at your saturation point. There's only so scattered we can get, after all.

But I did wonder if perhaps...perhaps...the whole "Circles" thing is part of the reason that Google+ has proven so anticlimactic. I've never seen any reason to break my online presence out into discrete and separate demographic groups. It becomes yet another thing to manage, and Lord knows we don't need that.

There's something else, though. Something more important. If I post something on Facebook, or write something here, I don't care who sees it. If you're an evangelical Christian or an atheist, a friend or a troll or my mom, you're welcome to see what I put out there.

Rule of thumb, in the online world? Never write or say anything that you're not willing to have everyone see. That includes your aforementioned mother and the gentle-spirited eight year old child of the person whose web-site you're trolling. Think and try to be discerning before you hit return or click post.

It's not a bad rule in life, actually. For despite the unreflective self-indulgent me-ness of this era, self-editing is not dishonest. It's the hallmark of both wisdom and personal integrity. So what I say all represents me.

Well, not entirely all. There's stuff I do and think that I don't put online. There are things in my life that are intimate, and things in my life that I occasionally struggle with, that I'm not going to disclose in a long rambly post or a TMI moment on Facebook.

For those things, I talk to other people. Face to face. Person to person. There, I don't really need another circle, nor do I need a mediating structure to help me connect with it. That circle already exists, and is woven out of the flesh and faces of friends and family.

Maybe Google+ will survive. But does it need to? I don't think I'd even notice if it was gone.

Occupy Church

2011-11-01T08:44:00.000-05:00

Over the past week, one particular image has made the rounds through my social network. My corner of the twitterverse and my Facebook neighborhood is unsurprisingly inhabited by a fair number of progressive Christians, most of whom feel considerable solidarity towards the Occupy movement. The image that's been passed along and shared by at least a dozen folks from within that self-selected group is apparently either a Keynote or a Powerpoint slide, converted into an image file. OCCUPY CHURCH, it proclaims, followed by a list of demands.

It's got a slightly casual font, the requisite bullet points, and a picture of the inside of a very traditional church. Somewhere, some leftist pastor talked this one out in front of a group, before pitching it out to their social network. I considered reposting it on several occasions, but just couldn't bring myself to do it. Why? Because it's not quite where it needs to be if it is to be OCCUPY CHURCH. It's not bad, mind you. But it's not there yet. Let me elucidate:

First, it's not got the lingo down. Yeah, the language might warm the cockles of the hearts of progressives, but it's too generic and secular. There's not a single thing in the entire list of demands that would identify this as being pertinent to faith in the Nazarene. Yes, you can get to every single one of those principles from the teachings of Yeshua Ben Yahweh. That's certainly how I get there. But the slide itself seems oblivious to the context into which it needs to speak. Change the picture and the word "church," and this could easily be the list of demands from the Governing Central Council of Occupy Boise. That dog don't hunt, people. If you want to speak into a faith context, then respect the language of that community, and the faith ethos that defines it.

Second, it's a list of demands. As such, it comes across as disconnected from the community into which and for which it presumes to speak. Honestly, it's a tich reminiscent of the Judean People's Front. Sorry...that's the People's Front of Judea. If you want to make demands of church, then, brothers and sisters, you first need to be church. And if you are church, meaning you speak as a person who is living into the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, then, dagnabbit, include yourself into those demands. It's not an "I demand that you." It's a "Christ demands that we." If it isn't a "we?" Then it's culturally imperialistic.

Third, if you're going to Occupy Church, then you need to be willing to get people into church. The oldline pews in that slide are notably empty, eh? That means...and I know this is a hard one for progressives...that you have to be evangelical about it. Yes, EEE-van-Jell-ickle. That word means good news, after all, and when Jesus talked good news, it was first and foremost to the poor, the struggling, and the disenfranchised.

You don't need to be a self-righteous, judgmental New Pharisee. You don't need to spew fear and Hellfire and Brimstone at gays and women and Democrats. But you do need to tell people about the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in such a way that they feel it's worth listening and joining in. Otherwise, you're just blowing smoke.

So, in the interests of not just complaining and actually doing, I've reworked the slide a teensy bit. That reworking is above. The symbolically imperfect six bullet points have been replaced with a perfect seven. The demands are the same, but inclusive and participatory, and clearly rooted in our sacred tradition. References are included, because for many Jesus people, that's kind of important. And it does talk about encouraging others to join in. Because if you don't do that, you don't have a movement, now, do you?

Feel free to share it, if it works for ya.

The Ethics of Apple

2011-10-31T07:56:00.000-05:00

I spend a fair chunk of time in Bethesda, even now that I don't work there. Many Saturdays, I snag some New-York-worthy bagels at Bethesda Bagel. This last weekend, I chilled with the missus in Barnes and Noble, she reviewing materials for an upcoming conference, me finalizing my sermon.

Bethesda's business district is a pretty upscale place, filled with high-end boutiques and nice restaurants. And, of course, an Apple Store. Their Apple store has been through two iterations, as the first one proved just too small to manage the mobs of iProduct-obsessed Bethesdans. The new one is plenty big and spacious, with the usual array of t-shirt clad geniuses and shiny shiny toys set out to play. I've bought stuff there. It's a nicely run business.

Sitting right next to the Apple store is a little boutique that sells yoga-related products. It's called Lululemon. On the March weekend earlier this year the iPad 2 was released, things were undoubtedly crazy hopping busy at the Bethesda Apple store.

Next door, at Lululemon, things were more crazy, in the worst possible meaning of the word. On that Friday night, one of the employees of Lululemon murdered her co-worker, after the co-worker apparently discovered some thefts from the store. The killing took a while, as the victim was beaten to death.

After a failed effort to make it look like a botched robbery and sexual assault, the murderer's clumsy and inconsistent story fell apart, and she's now going to trial. I've been following that trial.

As it happens, there were witnesses to the killing, who are currently testifying. Employees of the Apple store heard the whole thing while they were closing up. All of it. The screaming. The cries to "please stop." The sounds of violence, followed by moans for help, followed by more sounds of violence. It wasn't short. The victim, according to forensic analysis, suffered over 300 wounds. And it wasn't just one employee who heard it.

Did the human beings working in the Apple Store take a break from what they were doing to investigate what was happening right next door? No. Did they take a moment to call the police? No. The body of the victim was not found until the next morning. Although they clearly and evidently knew something was terribly wrong, in the worst possible way that things can go wrong, they did nothing about it.

It was a product launch weekend. They were closing. They listened until the noises stopped.

Then they apparently went about their business, which, as reflected in Apple's laser-like corporate focus, is not looking out for neighbors or community. It's producing and selling highly desirable Apple products.

As I recall, that launch weekend was very successful.

Denoms, NonDenoms, and Accountability

2011-10-27T08:41:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks back, I spent nearly the entirety of a Friday sitting in a long training. This was the mandated training for Presbyterian pastors on sexual misconduct and malfeasance avoidance, one which we've got to attend every couple of years or so to maintain our good standing within the denomination.

I'd done it before, of course. Multiple times, both in seminary and through the local Presbytery. But there I was yet again, watching videos, talking with small groups, and sharing as a whole. It was a familiar dance, so familiar, in fact, that it would have been easy to dismiss it as just another pointless hoop inflicted on us by the Woman. 'Cause you know, you just can't call it Da Man if you're PC(USA), 'cause it ain't.

Thing is, it wasn't pointless. It wasn't a hoop.

I wish I'd never had to use my prior misconduct training, but the painful reality is that the awareness it provided me has come in handy over the years. Encountering the reminders about warning signs to look for in a faith community, I see them now for what they are...the swords of cherubim, protecting the integrity of the church from those who would use it as a place of sexual predation. Take that metaphorically if you must, but whichever way, that knowledge is important.

It's not about legal liability, either. It's about insuring that church is a safe, gracious, and truly welcoming place, truly reflective of our Master and Friend.

The training also provided a reminder to the not-predatory-but-flawed human beings who pastor churches that human beings...if they are stressed, isolated, and spiritually out of balance...can make decisions that shatter their integrity, and leave former Christ followers cynical and broken and bitter. We all need that reminder, all of us, and the tools that the wisdom of others can provide.

Here, though, I wonder about how that plays into the dynamics of the nondenominational world. Having cast themselves free of the yoke of denominational affiliation, every nondenominational church is free to be itself. The nondenominational pastor is accountable to no-one but himself, Christ, and the circle that has gathered around him. And that is a problem.

Why?

Because in the absence of the discipline of denominational accountability, pastors can more easily wander afield. You are the brand-made-flesh of your entire community. The church exists because of you. Your flock, who adore you, are unlikely to be willing to see you weakening, unlikely to admit to themselves that your behavior is critically compromising you. In the absence of the insights of those who have resisted or endured that form of human brokenness, those pesky demons are likely to have far more play. In the absence of the oversight and the training, and freely submitting yourself to a discipline that can guide and inform your struggle, your ability to maintain yourself in Christ is weakened.

And when we are weak, ugly things can happen.

That's not to say that denominations don't have a problem with malfeasance. Of course we do. But we know we have a problem, and together, we work to deal with it.

In those admittedly clumsy structures of our connection, we are doing something about it, and can hold each other to standards that honor the intent of our Teacher. Across the many churches of a denominational community, the institutional memory of the damage done remains strong, and those stories act as a reminder and a caution to those fool enough to imagine that It Could Never Happen Here.

But if you are free, free of that discipline, then those stories are not in your ears. If you are disconnected, and free of the collective reinforcement that comes from denominational affiliation, you are also free to wander deep into dark places. You are free, should you so choose, to use your power and your charisma and the adoration of those who follow you to follow your every hunger.

Advantage? Denominations.

Denoms, NonDenoms, and Disagreement

2011-10-26T07:37:00.001-05:00

One of the favorite themes among nondenominational folks of all stripes is the essential failure of the denominational systems of church governance. The Oldline churches are trapped in endless political squabbling, bickering about sexuality and ordination and the authority of the Bible. Independent churches are free of all such nonsense, and can thus better grow into the vast sprawling parking lot Jesus MegaCenters that are the clear sign of God's favor on earth. For as the Apostle Paul once wrote: "How can they know if they have not heard? And how can they hear if they cannot park?" (Romans 1:14-15, The Church Shopper's Bible)

Much of the success of the nondenoms, I think, comes from their ability to be in sync with the corporate/consumer ethos of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.   If the ethos is growth, then you're more likely to grow if you have a clear and definable brand. Denominations, which are structured like governments, well, they're more prone to manifesting politics and bureaucracy. If you're trying to be a self-governing community of communities, there are always going to be tensions and disagreements.

But if you're structured like a business, with an iconic founder/CEO/Senior Pastor, then there is less potential for disagreement. The board? They'll support the person who's the reason they're there. The flock? They'll follow the shepherd, whose face beams down upon them from the Jumbotron every Sunday like the great and powerful Oz. And so the brand is clear and unsullied by difference, the message is clear, and the laserlike clarity of brand identity stands as a beacon in a world that yearns for neatly packaged certainty.

Until the pastor dies or retires or is caught in a motel room with three strippers and an array of assorted livestock. Then? Well, then things get a bit trickier.

The process by which big independent nondenominational churches do leadership transition often has all the grace of the choosing of a new patriarch for the Borgia family. Or, to be more biblical about it, the process by which Judah often selected her kings. Things can get ugly and political, because all of that politics we denoms do on the front end just sits, repressed and unexpressed, under the iron thumb of the Brand, until BLLLANG! It's a bit like Yugoslavia after Tito.   You remember, right? Tito? That whole mess with Bosnia and Serbia in the 1990s? Sigh.

Take the recent ugliness at Jericho City of Praise, a big sprawling nondenom in my area. Once the iconic founding pastor and his pastor wife passed, suddenly the board and the son were fighting it out in court over control of this huge 19,000 member Jeeza-hemoth.   Court, mind you, because if you're an island in and of yourself, when disagreement strikes, there's nothing left to do but take things to the law. Settling things in-house becomes impossible, and as there's no authoritative external connection outside of the brand, the only recourse is the government and the services of highly paid counsel.

Strange irony, that.

Advantage: Denominations.

Paul, Powers, and Principalities

2011-10-25T09:04:00.000-05:00

Poring over the slate of GOP candidates, I find myself compelled to admit: I like Ron Paul. I really do. Perhaps that's a factor of the odd way in which right-leaning libertarians and left leaning anarchists come right back around to being essentially the same critter. Paul is admirably consistent, and seems to be that rare politician with considerable integrity.

But though I'm theologically quasi-anarchic, and very much in favor of limiting the scope of governmental intervention in individual life, I just can't quite bring myself to consider voting for him. Why?

Because I think weakening the state in our democratic republic would have a negative impact on individual liberty.

What is the role of the state? A good and well-run state balances the interests of constituent members of a culture, insuring that the liberty of one does not impinge on the liberty of others. That is the essence of justice within the realm of human societies.

The reality, though, is that as cultures become more complex than the local or the tribal, the requirement for the state to maintain balance becomes more challenging. You are no longer balancing individual rights with other individual rights. You're dealing with collective and transpersonal entities, whose power is considerably greater than that of individuals.

Our society, for good or for ill, has decided to treat most corporations as if they were individuals. Those "persons" bring considerably more weight to the table than a single individual. Their interests, driven by the amassed wealth and resources that these "immortal beings" bring to the table, are difficult to counterbalance if you are just a single human being. My ability to influence the direction of culture is considerably smaller than that of NewsCorp, for example. The same is true for ExxonMobil, or NorthropGrumman, or ConAgra. If they want something, they're likely to get it. They control both the means of production and, increasingly, the media through which we communicate.

If it is truly representing the people, government provides a counterbalance to the power that corporate entities wield in a culture. It can break up organizations that are too potent. It can regulate those corporation's activities...and what are regulations but laws governing the behavior of these odd semi-human leviathans? And the behavior of corporations needs to be governed, because they could otherwise easily become the lords, barons, and dukes of a new feudalism.

Assuming they are not already.

In the absence of that counterbalance, those entities will pursue power and profit above all other things. That's their purpose, and that's the biggest challenge facing both anarchists and libertarians. Maintaining individual freedom and liberty in the face of those very real and active powers seems to demand both an engaged citizenry and a government that is empowered to act on the behalf of the individual.

Given the Corporate Colossi that now tromp and rumble through our world, we each need all the help we can get.

Teleprompters and Illiteratocracy

2011-10-20T09:57:00.000-05:00

The latest line of attack against the current President among the mosh-pit gaggle of Grand Old Party candidates appears to be a resurfacing of an old thread. The issue: Obama uses a teleprompter.

What that means, according to those seeking to defeat Obama in 2012, is two things. First, that he lacks a solid grasp of the issues.   Why should he need a teleprompter if he knew what he was talking about? Second, it means that he is inauthentic. Why not just speak from the heart? Is he afraid he might reveal that he's really a socialist nazi communist in league with big banks and business?

Hearing this unusual line of invective from Bachmann, Perry, and Cain, it rings somewhat familiar in my ears. I think, in fact, I might know where they got it.

They got it from their pastors. Or, if you're Herman Cain, you got it from yourself, him being an Associate Pastor and all.   Ain't just the Godfather of Godfather's, kids.

In much of the evangelical world, you see, presenting a sermon from a written text is often interpreted as a sign of inauthenticity. The best sermon, according to the charismatic/evangelical understanding of preaching, is one that pours out from that moment.   Or from the outline you prepared that morning, or, if you're leading a big-parking-lot church, from the Powerpoint your AV team prepared.

If you write it out, then you're clearly not authentically moved by the Holy Spirit. Working from a written text is just a sign of artifice, a crutch for the spiritually inert.

As someone who's preached from texts, from presentation software, from outlines, and off-the-cuff, I can say this: this line of reasoning is plain ol' wrong. Why? Well, there are several reasons.

First, writing things out makes sense if what you say matters. If you're dealing with the complexities of geopolitics, and you're tired and you have a bad cold, you don't want to say something that will cause a shooting war in the Taiwan Strait. That important if you're the POTUS.   It is also, I would contend, important if you're a pastor. If you're trying to authentically interpret a sacred text, and to teach that interpretation, then writing it out gives you an opportunity to prayerfully consider whether you are preaching the Gospel, or just pitching out veiled digs at that Deacon who's been a thorn in your side. It's the difference between being deliberate, and being impulsive. Measuring your words is a mark of wisdom, after all. There must not be much preaching from the book of Proverbs in Red State congregations these days.

Second, writing something out before speaking means you have a record of what has been spoken. It's right there. You can repeat it as needed, or tweak it, or edit it for other uses.   That is, in fact, the point of writing.

Third, I'm a bit berfuddlepated that the folks pitching this line of attack are almost uniformly evangelicals. So you are telling me, Representative Bachmann, that writing something down makes it less trustworthy? That the process of creating a text is not as valid as just speaking?   Should we not believe anything in your books? More pointedly, how does this relate to a Bible-based faith? That book of books wasn't just spoken directly onto the audiobook version you listen to on your campaign bus, dear sister. It was written down. And then edited. And translated. And re-edited. Is the Bible inauthentic?   You really want to go there? No, of course not.

Lord have mercy.

In a culture that is increasingly post-literate, I suppose we deserve this.

The Stories We Never Write

2011-10-19T07:35:00.000-05:00

This morning's Washington Post contained a book review that was somewhat painful. It was for a book entitled Zone One, by MacArthur Foundation "genius" Colson Whitehead. It's a book about...well...it's about zombies. More interestingly, it's about someone charged with eliminating the nonviolent zombies, the ones that just go about their mindless, day-to-day lives, oblivious to the fact that they are no longer alive. It's an existential commentary on the sad pointlessness of most human existence, writ in the reanimated flesh of zombie-chic.

It looks to be a good book. It'll sell well, and is winning accolades for it's already well-regarded author.

And I had pretty much the same core idea...with some minor variances...a couple of years ago. But there was no time to write it. I'm not a certified genius, of course, and I'm also occupied with other things. But it's always funny seeing an idea you've never seen before and seems to have sprung freely from your mind surfacing in the mind of another.

One could get resentful, of course. You could be filled with accusations, as Newton was with Leibnitz over who came up with the ideas behind calculus. Or you could be filled with regret.

There's no point in that. Things are as they are, and I wasn't planning on writing that book anyway. It's kind of fun seeing the concept surface elsewhere.

And fortunately, I had a much better idea for a chilling, groundbreaking, redolent-with-human-meaning zombie script yesterday afternoon. And no, Colson, I'm not sharing this one yet.

Gotta love that zombie muse. She just keeps moaning incoherently in my ear.

Living To Ride

2011-10-18T19:20:00.001-05:00

Today was a bustling errand day, and it felt it.

Beyond the various and sundry folks we had come into our home to repair and maintain, there were checks to deposit at the bank. There were socks to be purchased for a youngling who burns through them like Bogey going through a pack of unfiltered Camels.   There was swim gear to be purchased, and books to be returned to the library, all scattered across the sprawling suburban wasteland that is Northern Virginia.

It was also a lovely Fall day, and so rather than trundle about in our utilitarian but inefficient minivan, I ran the Dad-errands on the 'Strom. It's got a nice big lockable top-box, perfect for fat bags of factory-extruded socks from K-Mart, and for stowing library books.

The swim flippers and for my increasingly immense 13 year-old were another thing altogether, too odd shaped for the onboard storage. But being a nicely designed piece of kit, the top box pops off neatly, leaving a nice big flat space for bungeeing things.

The day's errands concluded with the pick up of the big guy from his rehearsal.   He loped from the entrance of the middle school, past the lines of idling soccer mom minivans and SUVs to the bright yellow motorcycle, tossed his backpack into the top-box, and got on the helmet without assistance.

As he hopped up into the pillion, I flashed back to those first few rides I gave him on the old bike, oh so many summers ago, back when his little feet first hit the pegs.   He was so small, barely a presence on the bike at all, nestled in tight and clinging to Daddy's back.

A man after my own heart.

Now? It feels more like those times I would ride two-up to Skyline Drive with a fraternity brother riding pillion. There's a man sitting back there. As he leans back easy against that ever useful topbox, he fills the back of the bike. His mass and size are palpable, shifting the dynamics and the balance. But he sits calm and relaxed, an old hand at this, and we shout out our father son chatter as we burble down Columbia Pike.

And so, for most of my dayful of suburban parental-unit schlepping, I make do with two wheels, racking up three times as many miles per gallon of go-juice, and taking pleasure in the tasks and the day.

It's good to be the Dad. But it's better to be the Dad on the bike.

Percentiles

2011-10-17T10:22:00.000-05:00

As the Occupy movement continues to camp out in the downtowns of major metropolitan areas, I find myself wondering about the position of those of us who occupy the upper percentages of the income scale.

I'm one of the rich, you see.

That might be hard to discern from observation of my day to day life. My home is nothing much to look at, a squat, rumpled, ivy-covered suburban hobbit hole, nestled in trees. It's about half the size of the average new home in America, but it's perfectly comfy for the four of us and the dog. We drive efficient and unsplashy vehicles. Our kids go to public schools. I wear clothes that look like they're older than my middle-school age children, which is because many of them are. We've spent most of our lives saving and scrimping.

My own modest annual income places me pretty much dead center for individual incomes in the United States. I'm fifty-third percentile, just like that grim and defiant young reactionary whose image has been making the rounds lately. But my wife, driven and smart and competent woman that she is, well, she's done well lately. Her recent job transitions and career progression have tossed us up into an entirely different income category.

And for the first time in our respective lives, we can't accurately describe ourselves as middle class. We're not. We're somewhere between 95th and 96th percentile, and that, I fear, puts us squarely into the upper quartile of the upper class in the United States.

Does that make us better of more "blessed" than those in the lowest quartile of the bottom thirty percent? No, not in any meaningful way, no matter what Joel Osteen says. It does mean our lives are easier, both in the ways that make sense and in the ways the system in which we operate favors the wealthy. We have no trouble getting credit, which we use sparingly. Having walked alongside folks who desperately needed credit, but couldn't get it, this is a nontrivial thing. We have enough of a buffer of amassed savings that we don't face uncertainty week to week or month to month, and there are many in our culture who do not have that luxury. At the moment, my family does not worry about money. This is utterly untrue for a substantial portion of Americans.

That doesn't even begin to factor in the many billions of human beings on this planet who live at levels so far below the US poverty line that we Americans don't really grasp just how immensely challenging the simple task of their existence is.

Should I anguish over where I find myself? Should I wallow in guilt? No, I don't think so, and I don't.

What I must not do, though, is allow my families' relative comfort right now to seduce me into believing that everything is just fine with the world. It's not. Not at all, and letting material comfort blind me to the struggles and suffering of others gets me into significant trouble with my Boss. Not to mention that wealth and material power aren't anywhere near to being one of the metrics He uses to assess the value of my existence.

It's a tricky wicket.

Occupied K Street

2011-10-12T08:37:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, after doing some church stuff in the morning and some housekeeping in the later morning, I seized my one open window during the day, hopped on the bike and motored downtown.

The day was drab and overcast, although not too chilly, and the hum into town on Fifty was smooth and devoid of traffic.

From my inside-the-Beltway suburb, it's an easy run to the center of DC on a motorcycle. I loafed over the Roosevelt bridge, did a few zigs and zags, and found myself cruising my target street.

K Street.

It's a bustling central artery in the Northwest quadrant of our nation's capital, and the symbolic heart of lobbying in America. It's lined with shining office buildings that all abruptly end at the same height. Regulations, dontcha know, but the net effect isn't unpleasant, as you don't get that dizzying concrete canyon feeling. At about one thirty in the post meridian, K Street was a purposeful whirl of humanity, and most of that humanity was on foot. Trim young business-casual and suited professionals moved in clusters, coming back from lunch or finally getting outside. Tall lawyerly types walked and talked intently into their smartphones.

The sidewalks were crowded with folks on foot, as they are on most days in DC. DC is a place where you walk, unless you enjoy sitting, burning carbon, and amassing adipose cells in your posterior. It's why DC workers are...well...not quite as...um...expansive...as most Americans. That was true at the intersection of K and Connecticut, where Farragut Park was filled with fit lunching wonks and office workers. It was true at the intersection of K and 16th, where the stream of humanity crossing in front of my bike was young and on the go. The sense was of energy, of dynamism, of purpose. It's that way every day.

I reached the bike lot at K and Franklin Park, and lo and behold, DC had left a parking meter unrepaired. Schweet. Gotta love that free city parking. I stowed my helmet and my gear, and doubled back to McPherson Square, where I wanted to get a feel for the Occupy K Street protests.

At McPherson Square, things were a little...sleepier...at mid-day than they were on the rest of K Street. The encampment took up the Northwestern section of the Square. It was a modest smattering of tents and a sprawl of sleeping gear, occupying a space roughly equivalent to the back yard of my unassuming suburban home. In that space, small clusters of protestors sat or moved about quietly.

J. Birdseye McPherson

Around the statue of Major General James Birdseye McPherson, a circlet of handmade cardboard signs sat out on display. Circling the circlet were a few passersby, their smartphones out, taking pictures, taking video. I joined the dance for a few minutes, carefully perusing the signs, and taking my own pictures.

No one spoke to me. No one was minding the display.

Moving a few paces to the southwest, a little klatch of protestors were having a meeting of some sort. All were sitting, talking quietly and earnestly, and as I watched, they communed inaudibly within their closed circle. Apparently, one of their collectively determined meeting protocols was "jazz hands," which must have meant something for group process. "We have a quorum?" "I second the motion?" "May I go to the bathroom?" I couldn't tell.

I meandered back into the encampment, and had to work hard to resist the temptation to tidy up a bit. It's hard to turn off that parent switch, but I managed. I looked around for a center, or a place to get information. There wasn't anything or anyone I could see. Just cardboard signs.

Having determined that the one person I might have known there was not present, I drifted about for a bit. Someone shouted that food was available at the mess tent. Animated chatter came from table filled with laptops. A middle-aged woman talked flutteringly with a passing lawyer-type, asserting her strong desire to try both Bush senior and Dubya for war crimes. He seemed gently bemused. A barefoot young woman sat in a softly speaking group, and absent-mindedly picked her toes. A boy, perhaps six or seven, padded past in footie pajamas, holding a sign. A TV crew that apparently came from some land where the women are all blonde drifted about, talking with people.

Across the street, catty-corner to the Northwest, a cluster of a half-dozen young, entirely African American DC cops milled about. They talked animatedly, and were clearly there to manage the demonstration...but nothing was happening, and they seemed bored and listless.

After half an hour, I'd seen all I could see. I moved back up K Street, through a trickle of pedestrians. I tossed a leg over my bike, and rolled on out of there, through the busy streets of Northwest, out to 395, and home.

Centerstands

2011-10-11T10:37:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, as my family chilled our way through a Monday off, I found that it was time for a bit of routine motorcycle maintenance. The shiny yellow 'Strom was slightly less shiny following a few sustained jaunts through driving forty-degree rain, and while spatter and road grit add character to a bike, they really don't do much for your drive chain.

So out onto the driveway I went, and for about 45 minutes, I performed the necessary ablutions and applications of solvents and lubricant. For the first time in almost twenty years, I found myself hiking a bike up onto a centerstand. Not since my first ride, a '72 Honda CB750 purchased way back in my late teen years, have I had a centerstand.

I've missed it. My last two rides were a bitty little cruiserlet and a sportbike, and both cruisers and sportbikes don't have centerstands. The reason varies, depending on the type of bike. A centerstand is a great big dangly thing, a mass of steel that snugs up under the chassis. It ain't purty.

And cruisers are purty bikes. Purty is their raison d'etre. They're all rumble and chrome and glossy shine, with elemental lines that catch the eye as you style on by in your do-rag and chaps. Centerstands work for that aesthetic about as well as a life vest on a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.

Sportbikes are bellisima bikes too, but they're also shrouded in many thousands of dollars worth of plastic for the purposes of aerodynamics and attitude, and that leaves no room for a stand. A centerstand cuts deep into lean angles on a low bike, so that's strike two. Sportbike designers are also as obsessed with weight as a high-school wrestler, which is strike three, and means that big hunk of steel has to go.

But on the 'Strom, tall and lean and rangey as a Masai warrior, it works perfectly. It means that I don't have to stash a paddock stand somewhere in my cluttered home. It means I can maintain my chain and work on the bike anywhere I can find a bit of flat ground. It's just so deliciously practical.

Almost no bikes in the United States have them any more, of course. Bikes aren't meant to be practical things here. America has become a binary land of sportbikes and cruisers, and gas is still cheap, and our bikes aren't transportation. They're lifestyle statements that spend most of their lives pampered and polished and gleaming.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. But for four season, rain or shine, day in day out riding, you just can't beat a bike with a centerstand.

I'm glad to have it back.

Flip Flops

2011-10-10T19:36:00.000-05:00

As the campaign season gets closer and closer and...wait, did it ever stop? I'm not sure it did.

Anyway, I've started to see a recurrence of one of the things I find most profoundly irritating in current political discourse.

That thing is the term "flip-flopper," which surfaced first in the 2004 election, and just kept on trucking through the 2008 season.

The concept behind this attack is simple, as simple as the binary operation of a microprocessor. Either yer fer sumthin', or yer agin it. And if you were fer sumthin', then changed yer mind? That makes you a flip-flopper.

A flip-flopper must be someone who lacks integrity. A flip-flopper must be governed by political expediency. A flip-flopper can't be trusted. They are not a true believer.

Let's take a look out there. There's a site devoted to Mitt Romney's flip flops. Rick Perry is a flip flopper. Herman Cain is a flip flopper. Michele Bachmann? A flip flopper. Ron Paul? Amazingly enough, even the eternally consistent, never-varies or wavers, teeth sunk into libertarianism like a bulldog with a grudge Ron Paul, even he is accused of flip flopping.

And I'm not even going to get started googling Obama.

But here's the rub. Flip flopping means two things. First, it can mean the willingness to compromise, to move towards consensus and a middle path with someone who disagrees with you about how to attain a goal. In that sense, what the blogosphere and talk-radio shoutocracy proclaims as flippity-flopping is absolutely necessary to the functioning of a democratic republic.

Second, and more significantly, it's the willingness to change your mind based on new evidence, or the persuasiveness of another's position. If you can't ever change your mind, and cannot be persuaded to modify or evolve or adjust your thinking, then you aren't being consistent. You're being inert, unaware, and intellectually lazy. You barely qualify as a sentient being, let alone the enlightened, thoughtful citizen you need to be to participate in a pluralist democracy.

That bothers me as a citizen who cares about the future of our republic.

But it bothers me more as a Christian.

One of the central concepts underlying the Christian faith is the idea of repentance. You do something. You realize that something is not the thing you should be doing. You change your mind, and you change your life. Repentance is, for many Jesus people, a way of life. You don't just fix yourself once and be done with it. You are continually correcting, as you miss the mark and turn your being back on the course towards grace.

You can't once be lost, and now be found, be blind and now you see, without flip-flopping.

Sigh. I'll just have to grit my teeth and bear it, I suppose.

Occupy What?

2011-10-07T08:31:00.000-05:00

So as the Occupy Wall Street protests spread into the fertile soil of unemployed and underemployed America, I find myself looking at the gatherings that are stirring here in DC and thinking about what they're called.

Occupy DC may have been the first choice, but I wonder about that. I know, I know, Washington is everything that is wrong with America, but honestly, this ain't the Tea Party. This is not a wild yawp from the conservative lumpenproletariat, who are and have always been easily distracted from systemic issues by waving flags and reflexive nationalism. It's smarter, more organic, and less easily hijacked by self-promoting blowhards working for conservative media conglomerates.

Occupy DC? What does that mean? DC isn't monolithic, any more than New York is monolithic. Protesters in New York knew that you needed the right focus. Would you occupy Queens? Would you Occupy Times Square or Occupy Soho or Occupy Chinatown? Of course not. That's not the part of town that counts, unless you're mad about this season on Broadway or harbor a compulsive dislike for Peking Duck.

It had to be Occupy Wall Street. Just had to be.

DC is similarly diverse. Are you going to Occupy SouthEast? Honey, they may be hurting because of the mess we're in, but they're not the problem. Are you going to Occupy Adams Morgan? Maybe at night, because it's cool, but again, that's not the issue.

If the movement is to resonate in solidarity with the New York demonstrations, the focus needs to be K Street. K Street, O my brothers and sisters, is the symbolic heart of American corporate lobbying and its influence over our political system. That's where the connection is, where the golden cord of power and influence and wealth binds the two streets together.

It's already rolling that way, but it needs to be clearly laid out. If there are to be cries of protest at what is happening in our nation, if we want power to know that we're finally paying attention and see the connections, they should be at the intersection of Wall and K streets.

Product and Service

2011-10-07T08:07:00.001-05:00

I'm typing this on an iMac, which is unsurprising, because my house is littered with Apple products.

The wife and I both have iPhone 4s. That's 4s, plural, not Four - Esses, which we probably won't get. My Four is the fourth iPhone I've owned, as the first two met untimely demises at my clumsy hands, and the last one got handed down to my son.

The boys both have old nanos, which see intermittent use. One has a Touch, which is his camera and primary portable gaming platform. The other has that repurposed, de-simmed iPhone 3GS, which is serving the same function. To replace our recently flamed-out first-gen Intel Macbook Pro, we acquired an Air, which is a lovely piece of kit. Oh, and my wife has a 3G iPad, first gen.

If you've invested in Apple over the years, our family has done our part to insure that your investment yielded handsome returns.

The legacy of Steve Jobs is, without question, those exceptionally well-designed products. His legendary precision and unrelenting focus on product excellence was what made him such a competent CEO. The bottom line, if you are making something to sell in the marketplace, is to make that product as well-designed and constructed as possible. That was always Job's focus, which meant that he had absolutely no tolerance for mediocrity. He was an absolutely legendary perfectionist, and had an unerring sense of what makes for a solid product.

That, frankly, is what guarantees the profitability of a corporation. If you focus on making an excellent product, and price it fairly, you will succeed. If you focus on profit above all else, you will become distracted from that primary goal. You will start making Chevy Vegas, and you will fail.

In that, Jobs knew and lived out what it takes to be successful in business.

But in the thickets of hagiography for this profoundly accomplished entrepreneur and businessman, I hazard to ask: is that what matters?

Jobs created great, innovative, well-designed products. But do they make the world a better place? I remember what it was to be alive in the pre-iMac era, and a time when Apple was not my preferred provider of quality electronic devices.

Honestly? It makes no difference. What has been created is ethically neutral.

Sure, I can use that iPhone to open up new lines of communication with a deaf shut-in, or help a lost stranger find his way. But that same tech allows that guy down the street to video-sext with his lover while "working late" in his upstairs office while his wife sits alone in their bedroom, or your 15 year old daughter to send NSFW pictures to her manipulative 18 year old boyfriend. Sure, I can use my Air or my iMac to blog about justice and grace, or to drop a supportive comment on the Facebook page of someone in need of prayer or kindness. But I could also use them to spew anonymous hatred as the stalker-troll on some other human being's online presence.

The world is shinier and faster and more elegant. But better? To speak true, it does not feel so.

As I consider Jobs' life, I wonder at the meaningfulness of a life driven by perfectionism. Having worked in the field of philanthropy for a while myself, I know that unlike many leaders in industry, Jobs had no interest in charity. It simply didn't process. He had no time for it. He was far too busy and far too focused on product. Unlike Bill Gates, who has poured his wealth into fighting diseases, or Warren Buffett, who has used the fruits of his business acumen to support Gates in that effort, or countless other leaders in the business sector, Jobs did not use his wealth...or the wealth of Apple...towards any end other than the improvement of Apple products.

Though the products are desirable, and exceptionally well crafted, they are just that. Products.

And I wonder...is perfectionism what makes for a worthy existence?

And I wonder...is creating profitable and elegantly-designed products what merits a "that'll do, pig, that'll do" at the completion of this life?

I respect Jobs ferocity of purpose, and his creativity, and his intelligence, and his showmanship. There was much to admire in his life. I'm just not sure I'd want to live it.

What They're Looking For

2011-10-06T15:51:00.001-05:00

"It is not a person's fault because they succeeded. It is a person's fault if they failed. And so this is why I don't understand these demonstrations and what is it that they're looking for."

GOP Presidential Candidate Herman Cain, Wall Street Journal, 10/05/11

He is right.

It is our fault.

We have failed.

We have failed to grasp that human beings do not exist in isolation. While we are created with the blessing of liberty, we are not created alone. With the freedom given to us by our Creator, we can choose to move graciously in relation to one another, moving mindfully and righteously and kindly. That is the purpose for which we exist.

But we are free. Freedom is a part of our nature. From that freedom, we can also choose to tear at each other, seeking power and material wealth at the expense of the other. In this generation, we have chosen the latter.

Our choice to walk the path of self-seeking power and the concentration of wealth is not a new choice. It is an ancient one, a mistake we have repeated over and over and over again throughout our blighted history as a species. Within the sacred narratives of the tradition from which I spring, that casting-out-of-balance has happened again and again.

We who keep and teach that story remember it.

Two and a half milennia ago, it happened just as it happens now. Seeking power over other nations, the people cried out for a king. The prophet warned them: the king will amass wealth, taking more and more for himself, until everything you have belongs to him. All will fall out of balance. And yet the people ignored the voice of the one who spoke for our Maker.

And things fell apart. Wealth yearns for wealth, as power yearns for power. The son of the first King began it, gathering in the gold and the fruit of the land, and placing the great golden bulls on the altar of the shining temple he built. The son of the son of the first King, the taste of gold in his mouth, doubled and redoubled his demands upon the people, wealth seeking wealth, power seeking power. And the kingdom fell apart.

When finally a wiser king sat on the throne, the Sacred Law was rediscovered. Written into the Sacred Law given to the people was the demand: keep things in balance. Never let the wealth of the people become fixed forever in the hands of the powerful. The purpose of this law was simple. When things fall out of balance, if you do not make an effort to set things back in balance, covenant fails. Community collapses. The people will no longer be at one, standing equal before their God as is their Creator's desire, but will be slave and master.

Following the death of the wise king, things collapsed again and again, as the centers of power drew in and sought more power and wealth. Prophets spoke against it, reminding those in power of the purpose of the Creator. Sometimes they were heard. More often, the siren song of wealth rang too strong in the ears of the wealthy.

And so the story has gone, telling itself over and over again.

So to answer Herman Cain, what are these demonstrators looking for? Many things. So many things. But many things are broken.

Mostly, they are crying out that things are out of balance. There are words for what they want, words I know well. Justice is one such word. Though most of the protesters would not name it as such, from the old, old story comes the word Jubilee, the year of setting things right.

When things fall out of balance, that becomes the yearning of the people.

It's a yearning and a message I know well. I teach it every Sunday.

Pity so few of our leaders seem to have been exposed to it.

The Consumer Gospel

2011-10-05T09:05:00.003-05:00

This morning as I bustled around preparing for my day, I found myself thinking about the prosperity gospel, likely an echo of some social network chatter and mass media articles over the last few days.

That gospel..the name-it-and-claim-it, Word Faith, to-meet-your-need-gotta-plant-a-seed movement...is perhaps best known for it's tendency to emphasize material rewards as the fruits of faith. If you have faith, you will prosper. Your car will be large. Your shoes will be fancy. You will have all the best toys.

That emphasis is, of course, utterly alien to the teachings of Jesus. But that doesn't stop folks from pitching it out there, because it resonates with a pretty basic primate desire. We want the tastiest fruit for our young. We want that female to be so awed by our abundantly padded nest that she can't help but approach us with the cooing sounds that mean we're going to get some serious...nitpicking...on. Ooooh. Yeah. Right there...

That desire is strong enough that it has spawned functionally identical versions of the prosperity gospel across world religious traditions. It exists in basically the same form and with entirely the same purpose in Buddhism, Hinduism, and all manner of pagan and neopagan traditions.

Over the past few years, as the health-and-wealth stream has grown and swollen, I've heard some folks defend it as the 21st Century variant of the Protestant work ethic. It encourages work, they say. It's good for pulling people out of poverty, and getting them focused on remaking themselves.

This morning, it occurred to me that this is entirely and completely hooey.

The Protestant work ethic focused on worldly labor as an expression of God's purpose in your life. It was oriented towards vocation, the utilization of our gifts and talents in labor as a sign of blessing and grace in life. To fulfill your created purpose involved actions and a life lived towards that purpose. That wasn't a guarantee of prosperity, or of material blessing, or of escape from hardship. But it was the mark of a faithful, meaningful life. As John Calvin put it:

It will also be no small alleviation of his cares, labours, troubles, and other burdens, when a man knows that in all these things he has God for his guide. The magistrate will execute his office with greater pleasure, the father of a family will confine himself to his duty with more satisfaction, and all, in their respective spheres of life, will bear and surmount the inconveniences, cares, disappointments, and anxieties which befall them, when they shall be persuaded that every individual has his burden laid upon him by God. Hence also will arise peculiar consolation, since there will be no employment so mean and sordid (provided we follow our vocation) as not to appear truly respectable, and be deemed h'ghly important in the sight of God"

This is not the Prosperity Gospel. The prosperity gospel is not about vocation, or "inconveniences, cares, disappointments, and anxieties." It's not about production.

It's about consumption. It's about instant gratification. It's not about giving, unless that giving happens to be either 1) to your megachurch so's Pastor can be blessed with another Lexus or 2) to your credit card company, at 21.5% interest, compounded 'till Jesus returns. It's about taking, about devouring, about seeking the needs of the self-flesh above all else.

It's the consumer gospel. It's the gospel of debt. It's the gospel of endless hungers.

If this is our faith, then no wonder things are such a mess.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday

2011-10-03T08:40:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was my first Sunday as the pastor at Poolesville Presbyterian Church, and it was a remarkably pleasant day. Not perfect, of course, but no Sunday ever is.

But though I forgot to hike up the robe I haven't worn in years before ascending the pulpit, I managed to only stumble slightly after stepping on the hem, rather than doing the full failblog-worthy pastor-tumble into the side of the organ.    Though I mistakenly assumed there was only one tray of bread for communion at the second service, I managed not to dump the lower one all over myself, catching it at the last moment. "This is my Body, Fumbled Unceremoniously on the Floor for Thee" is just not how that goes. Though I forgot that eating a big slice of the lovely welcoming cake and then eating a big hunk of delicious watermelon might not be the best thing to put on a first-day-nervous stomach, I managed not to do the Linda Blair exorcist projectile vomiting thing during the scripture reading. Which was for the best, given the target-rich environment in the cozy little sanctuary.   All in all, things worked as well as I could have hoped. I could not have been made to feel more welcome.

And I preached on Philippians, because it was the lectionary text that seemed to best speak to a First Sunday in a pulpit. I didn't manage to do the World Communion thing. But though I was free to preach as I chose, I didn't participate in Pulpit Freedom Sunday.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday was, in the event you hadn't heard of this effort, a movement on the part of some right-wing pastors to challenge the Internal Revenue Service restrictions on endorsing candidates from the pulpit.   According to current regulations, pastors are legally bound not to use their pulpits to actively support political candidates. This is partially a separation of church and state thing, but mostly it has to do with the nonprofit status of churches. As tax-exempt 501(c)3 organizations, congregations receive certain benefits...like deductability of giving, exemption from property and sales taxes, and the like. This is as opposed to political parties, which are 527 organizations. They are exempt from corporate taxation, but must pay property and sales tax, and you can't deduct what you give to them, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Because churches are (c)3 and not 527 organizations, pastors are told they can't use their pulpits to advance the cause of particular political candidates. Can we preach on issues? Sure. That's never, ever, ever been an issue. Does our engagement with and proclamation of the Gospel have ramifications for our lives as citizens? Absosmurfly. When I preach about loving the stranger and the alien, being good stewards of creation, and being wary of the siren songs of hatred and extremism, that has direct political implications. It just does.

But once you start using a church/nonprofit organization to actively and explicitly support a political party...what's the difference between you and that party? Things get mighty murky, mighty quick. Which master do you serve?

For the big-parking-lot pastors who seem to be driving this initiative, this restriction is seen as a violation of their religious freedom. Why can't I endorse from the pulpit!? Don't you tell me what to do! How dare the state restrict my beliefs! I am the master of my megachurch domain! I rule here!

Here, though, what I can't quite grasp is why those pastors don't see the slippery slope they're sliding down. Pastor James Garlow, one of the more vocal proponents of this movement, seems utterly incensed at what he describes as "...government intrusion in the pulpit."   So in defiance of the intrusion of government into matters of faith, standing on his religious freedom and his rights under the separation of church and state in our republic, he wants to...put...politics...into...the pulpit.

Explicitly.

Am I the only one who sees the incongruity here? Or that in seeking "freedom," what is really being sought is the right to be loosed from the yoke of preaching and teaching the Gospel, and to dabble in the power that comes from being able to deliver voters?

Power Supply

2011-09-29T21:34:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning, I motored my way from my home in Annandale, Virginia out to the congregation I'll soon be serving part-time in Poolesville, Maryland. I had an 11:00 AM meeting scheduled with the clerk of session of the wee kirk there, to sign my first contract and talk about how things at Poolesville Presbyterian work.

I left early, concerned that the ever unpredictable steel and asphalt maelstrom on the Capital Beltway might slow things down on a rainy morning. There were storms all about, deep rumbling clouds fat with rain, which made my ride out there on the bike just a tiny bit on the damp side. Only a tiny bit, though. The 'Zook acquitted itself admirably protecting me from the elements, although I noticed an odd side effect of the aerodynamic bubble behind my extended GIVI screen. In really heavy rain, the vacuum behind the windscreen creates swirling back pressure. The water beading on my helmet visor leaps forward into that vacuum in bright shining droplets, like I'm casting diamonds and pearls at the road from my face as I ride.   Rather pretty, although a bit distracting. Not nearly as distracting as it might be if it happened in meetings, but so it goes.

Whichever way, I made it to my meeting on time, and the contract was signed, and badda boom, badda bing, I'm the pastor at Poolesville. And, well, that's an unusual thing for a Presbyterian. In fact, it's a huge thing, or would be if folks in my denomination thought about it.

Understand this, O my Presbyterian Brothers and Sisters: In June of the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, a PC(USA) congregation said a fond farewell to a long-term and well-liked pastor.

Within three months, they had lined up a new pastor.

July. August. September. And lo and behold, that's their transition. That's the total amount of limbo and liminal time they'll have to endure. Three. Months. How does this compare to your last transition?

This is not an unusual occurrence in smaller congregations, congregations that are used to having temporary supply pastors, which is what I'm going to become starting October 1.   That means, in PresbyParlance, that I'm not "called and installed." I'm just under contract on an annual basis. That means every year, I need to sign a new contract to reaffirm my relationship with the congregation. If things are working, then we're copacetic. If either party is ready to move on, well, then it's time to go. Have robe, will travel, as they say.

Called pastors, well, they're there as long as they want to be. Of course, they renegotiate their "terms of call" on an annual basis. And if either party wants to move on, well, then it's time to go.

It's the same thing, kids.

Functionally, there is no difference between being a called and installed pastor and a temporary supply pastor. You preach. You teach. You meet. You greet. You pray. You care.   And honey child? Both positions are temporary.   There ain't no such thing as a permanent pastor, unless you attend the First Presbyterian Church of Transylvania, and Pastor Edward has only been there 350 years. Not like Pastor Vlad, who was there 735 years, and left only after that well intentioned but poorly thought out sunrise service.

And yet most congregations that aren't teeny tiny don't call supply pastors. Supply pastors are for little bitty bucolic family churches out in rolling fields, or for struggling churches that can't afford competitive salaries. To which I ask: Why? Is it just congregational ego?

Why couldn't a 200+ member, thriving, successful Presbyterian congregation choose to sidestep our agonizingly slow and convoluted call process? Don't complain about it. Don't fret about it. Just go supply, and simply write a position description, advertise for and locate a qualified pastor who would then pick up and carry on. You'd have a trained, ordained, tested, and proven Presbyterian pastor. As a "temporary supply." With contracts to be signed on an annual basis.

Not just why "couldn't." Why "wouldn't?"

Given the choice, why would you inflict the call process on yourself if you didn't have to? The way we connect pastors with churches now is institutional quicksand, a source of frustration and anxiety for both pastors and pastor nominating committees alike. If the results were demonstrably better than any other system, it might be justifiable. But the results are not.   Instead, it means that those charged with calling pastors approach the task with fear and trembling, but for all the wrong reasons.

Our process as it stands now is orderly, but indecent. A congregation's energies would be better spent on outreach, or service ministry, or ministries of justice, or on just about anything so long as it got us out in our communities living and spreading the Good News. Instead, we pour our energies inward, into processes that make us feel like we're doing something but that come perilously close to institutional onanism.

So to you pastors contemplating a move? Perhaps you should suggest going supply to your big steeple church. You elders who have suddenly found yourselves chairing the PNC? Maybe it's time to think outside the box a bit, and to make that known to your General Presbyter.

Why should little churches be the only ones getting it right?