Religion

I had the pleasure of being a part of an informational session/conversation on Thursday about Islam. In addition to deepening my understanding of the faith I was reminded me of the things I should have learned in World Religions class if I had been more awake or done more of the readings. Not only that, I also gained an interesting insight about my own faith and chosen religion. The presenter started by asking the question of what a religion was. The purpose of this was to highlight the understanding of the Islamic faith, specifically that Islam is not just about what you believe but is also a product of how you live that faith/belief.

This to me is a great way of looking at Christianity and what we should be emphasizing as well. I do not know enough about other faith traditions, in particular to comment on how well they put their understanding of living out faith into practice, but my experience of Christianity is that end up concerning ourselves too often with orthodoxy (correct thinking) instead of orthopraxy (correct practice). Denominations and individuals fall into the trap of arguing about how the Bible is meant to be understood, read, or what exactly it means. We split hairs, parse out meaning and ultimately do little more than dig ourselves deeper into theological trenches. My worry is simply shifting the conversation to orthopraxy does not fix it. I fear that all that will do is turn the philosphical, analytic cannons of our faith on a new target. Instead of arguing about issues of theology we will end up arguing if using a reusable bag at the grocery store is really a way to live out our faith.

Ulimately it seems to me that problem is not the Doxy or the Praxy, but the Ortho that goes before it. If we stop worrying about getting it exactly right we will have a lot more room for belief and from belief will come action. Religion gets reduced and codify, so we can say if someone is Christian, or Muslim, or Hindu, and know what it means. Instead we should worry more about how people of all faiths live them out in the world. None of this is to say I don't have a sense of both a correct orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Afterall, I need something I think is right in order for me to act, but it is not productive to simply worry about getting everything right, because I will never achieve that. At some point we need to go out and try this whole faith thing out, see what it is like to live our faith in the real world and let our faith define who we are, not just in terms of believe but in terms of action, then we really will be religious.

The Fencing Head Game and the Church

One of the challenges of fencing, as with many sporting competitions is the head game. An athlete can be physical superior to another, but a bad case of nerves, or a poor outlook and things can go bad quickly. For me the hardest part of the head game was the constant comparison with other fencers. In most fencing competitions everyone warms up and gets ready to fence in the same gym they are going to compete in and so it is easy to start the comparisons between athletes before the fencing tournament has even begun. I for one was especially prone to watching others warm up and as I got better and better looking around for the biggest challenges in the room. Rather than looking for helpful tips to fence them, or preparing myself mentally I tended mostly to sort people into two categories, people I thought I could/should beat and those I thought would beat me. The end result was that I was never really sure my head was in the right place when I would start a bout because I was more worried about the expected result than working on making my own desired result.

Today as I was getting my chai and sitting down to think about church business I got caught in the same sort of head game. I overheard a couple of other people in the coffee shop discussing their church and when they added on the chapel and the coffee shop and how many services one of the other congregations in the area had moved to. It was easy to fall into the trap of comparison, competition, and the ineveitable feeling of failure by contrast. For whatever reason it is easy to start treating congregations and churches like competitions, constantly evaluating who is doing well (usually someone else) and what we could be doing better. Certainly some of that is human nature, or at least natural for a lot of us. The effect however is the same, instead of looking at the success of other conregations as a sign of God's work in the area we fall into the trap of feeling they are stealing our members, or the potential members we want.

In the end I end up being of two minds on this. On the one hand, I know that I am not meant to compete with the other churches since we are all on the same side. On the other hand, if I feel called to do the best job I can for the church, some of doing that requires me to be able to judge what sort of job I am doing, and a good measure of that is how well other churches do as a comparison. Maybe the solution is to spend some time with a sports psychologist and get my head straightened out so I can get back in the game and do better. Or maybe I just need to do a better job of letting go of my competive rivalry and trust the prompting of the spirit to tell me when I could be doing more. I guess I could also try and not think of everything in terms of how it relates to fencing, but I know that is not the answer so I will have to keep thinking and musing.

The Radical Root

Last Tuesday in a meeting I had the opportunity to observe one of many amusing and yet perhaps very telling quirks of the English language. As a part of a conversation of how to move forward as a congregation someone observed that what was needed was something radical, they also agreed that what we needed to do was get back to the root of what we had been doing. Now at face value this can almost seem a little contradictory, I mean we tend to think of something radical as far out and different and the root as sort of getting back to the basics. The amusing part of course is the fact that they really mean the same thing. In mathematics, a radical is the square root of something. To be radical is to go back to our roots.

One of the challenges in our world seems to be this tendency to bury and forget about the root. Instead we focus on the huge plant that springs forth from it. The root, the base, the foundation is lost in the midst of the edifice around it. In the end going back to the root, back the base, to what everything is built on is something radical, something exceptional.

Maybe Jesus was a radical because he did just that, point us back to the root, to God. He did not get caught up in the legalisms of the day, but went back to the root, to something truly radical. have we in the church gotten caught in the legalism, the bureaucracy, the edifice that is the Church and forgotten the root? It is a serious question, one that countless others have raised and hopefully many churches and even denominations are considering. As the United Methodist Church begins its campaign to rethink church maybe we need to rethink church mathematical, and find that radical root that got us started, that careful harmony that John Wesley had between personal piety and social action. Or go even further back, to that life with Christ, that reminder that Christ is meant to be the center of what we do, of who we are.

Maybe it is stretching the mathematical imagery further than it should be taken, but I see a striking difference between the search for the radical root and fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is based on around certain core principles, getting back to the basics, and yet fundamentalism stops short of getting to that radical root. It stops with whole numbers, easy integers. Getting to the radical root goes a step further, if you keep taking the root of an integer eventually you get to one whose root is no longer rational, but irrational. The root of 81 is 9, the root of 9 is 3, but the root of 3 cannot be expressed with integers, it is irrational. To me that seems that when you get to the root of Christ, you are looking at that irrational number, the square root of 3, inexpressible with simply integers, irrational. Christ is the quintessential irrational, 3=1, the square root of 3. What is really radical about root is in the end we recognize that at the source of the church is something highly irrational, our root cannot be defined in simple integers, a God who will walk among us as a man, will die for us, and will free us all from the power of death. The to me is the radical root.

The heart of USA

Today a lot of news coverage is being given to the auto industry. President Obama has been emphasizing the need to continue to support this crucial industry to the US. One of his claims and one of others as well is that the auto industry is an important symbol of capitalism and of our country. On the one hand the auto industry has done a lot to transform the middle class, build up our country and to transform the way we live and travel. While I agree there will be economic ramifications if the industry fails I do not think it is as essential to what it means to be American as we are sometimes led to believe. I really question if making cars and in turn making money is really what the US is all about. Certainly part of what has made this country the great melting pot is people seeking a better life, seeking their fortune. This country was also founded by and continues to be infused with people seeking a freer life, a life where they can just be. Some of that freedom is economic freedom but it is also religious and political freedom.

Is capitialism and industry what makes this country great, or is it something more. Is capitialism simply a means to an end or has it become and end in and of itself? Now maybe more so than ever we have a chance to make a statement about what is really important to this country. Many people are concerned, and probably legitmately so about the increased government control of different industries, especially the financial sector. They worry that we are sliding slowly towards communism or socialism. Whether or not that is true I would raise this question, has our capitialistic system with its emphasis on the bottom line and making as much money as possible really faired better? I mean, financial institutions of all sorts have shown a clear desire and emphasis on how much money they can make for their shareholders, but they have done so at the expense of our communities. Homes lie empty because of poor lending practices and taxpayers are paying the price in the form of bailouts and other financial reprecutions.

I am not saying cut the auto industry lose, or let the banks fail, nor am I saying that we need the government to step in and make changes, what I am saying that we as citizens need to remember that money is not everything, that what makes this country, or any country great is something more. In the end, we are the shareholders, we, or people like us are the ones these companies are trying to make money for. If we take seriously shifting our priorities we can make a difference. We can send a message that capitialism is not the end, but simply a means to something great, something that makes this country great, freedom.

Regular worship?

Two interesting pieces of information have come to my attention in the last couple of months and I am finally at a point where I want to blog about them. Recently I learned that collective worship attendance in the US is down and yet at the same time participation is up. It seems to be one more piece of information that confirms the theory that people are looking for something more than worship in their church connection. The supporting piece of information and yet fascinating bit to me is the demographic information I found for Baxter, that 18% of the people say their faith is really important to them, that 41% identify as Conservative Evangelical Christian and 17% consider it important to attend religious services. 48% of the population considers it self to be spiritual, which is good to know but at the same two of those numbers really jump out at me, especially in comparison to the others. I would say a strong faith i a key attribute of a person who identifies as a conservative evangelical Christian, after all, the whole notion of these group of people is that they vote their faith. yet at best about 40% of the of CEC's consider their faith is really important to them, and that is assuming that no one else does, which we know is not true. Equally surprising to me is the fact that a similar percentage at best consider it important to attend religious services. Given those numbers it is no wonder that worship attendance is on the decline.

What does this mean for those of us in the business? Do we simply disregard the census data? Do we brush it off by saying that the terminology confuses people ... they may not think of worship as being the same as a religious service. If the data is accurate what does this really say about the population ... which is about on par with the rest of the country. I would believe that only 17% of the country is in worship on a given week but part of me hopes at least another 10% is feeling guilty about not being there and believes that religious services are still important to be at.

Coupled with all of this is really a central question to me ... are pastors like me right in our belief that worship is a good thing and a key aspect of growing in faith AND if that is true, what do we do to start changing that perception in the rest of the community. What have we been doing wrong that the demographic polling data has shown such a shift in public perception. What do we need to do to make worship something that people miss, something that people believe is valuable to their life. The other possibility is to take seriously the Wesleyan notion of taking God to the people. If worship is only important for 17% of the population and even 40% of Christians what are we doing to reach the other 83%, the other 60%. How do we help people answer yes to faith being important in their lives? How do we help people answer yes to being spiritual, yes to the belief that worship is important ... even if they are too busy with hockey this week to go.

Ahh to Be Old ...

Now I am well aware that at the tender age of 28 I am only old to kids ... some of whom think I am 99, or at least older than their parents, but to the rest of the world I am still young. So today, basking in my youngness I will pause for a minute to look forward to a privilege that seems to come with age ... telling the younger generation what is good for them and what is not. To me perhaps the quintessential example of that right now is Internet social networking. Time and time again I hear people dismissing Facebook and Twitter as ways to waste time and things that act as substitutes for real friends and real relationships. Internet dating and sites like eHarmony and Match.com are often looked down upon as ways to meet a person. Now, I have seen the negative powers of the Internet, the ways it can waste time, the ways that it can hinder rather than enhance communication, however there are benefits to it to and it oftens seems like there is a cadre of older people who are quick to point out the faults and not the benefits. The reality seems to be that as the world and society change, generations have different ways of doing things and the hardest thing is to step into another person's shoes and see it their way. I read an article recently that talke about the need for face-to-face human interaction and that hinted that things like Facebook hindered that. On the one hand, I would agree, simply spending all your time online instead of going out and seeing people is a bad thing, however I don't think that Facebook is meant to be designed as deliberate substitute for face time, it is there because face time is impossible. Last night I posted on Facebook that I was not happy about how my previous week had gone. In the course of an hour I had recieved to affirming comments, from my wife's cousin and from a high school best friend's sister. Now, I have people who are immediately supportive in my life, such as my wife, close friends, etc, but it was nice to have two people I would probably never talk to about something be supportive, it was nice to have more connections. So what is the point of all this ... it is not simply to try and show how great social networking sites are and how right my generation is as compared to previous generations ... I mean both of those go without saying! What it reminds me of is the value of perspective and in particular multiple perspectives. Differing generational views can increase the wisdom of everyone, older people can gain some perspective by hearing from younger peole how new technology is helping relationships and increasing connections. Younger people can learn from older people about how society used to create those connections in different ways. It is easy to get stuck in the unintentional rut of thinking our way is the best way, that we have to be doing it right because that is the way we are doing. Other people can give us perspective from outside the rut and can sometimes see the pitfalls in the rut. The challenge is for everyone to realize that we do not know it all, that we are not completely right on something and to continue to value the different views of others, knowing that their critics increase our understanding of the situation, just as we can help increase theirs. That being said, I still look forward to being older when I can sit in judgement on those younger than me and the foolish ways they live their lives.

Rethink church?

The United Methodist Church is launching a campaign to rethink church. At the same time my own congregation is in a position where it needs to rethink what our church is called to be. In the process of all this thinking I talked to one of my members who was working at a Bridal Fair over the weekend. In talking with her it occurred to me that part of rethinking church is thinking about where the church is present and where it is not present and if some of that is what needs to change. One of the things that I realized is that places like wedding fairs are somewhere churches really could and arguably should be. We should be there not because weddings are a big business for churches but because a wedding is a time where people should be thinking about church and we do not help them any if we are not present.

Where do people expect the church to be?

Where do people need the church to be?

I read an interesting article which talked about the decline in worship attendance in the US but commented at the same time that church participation is up. Worship is not the end-all-be-all for the church. As we are rethinking church some of the question is not just where, but what. What does the church need to be doing today to continue to meet the spiritual needs of the society AND to continue to serve as a prophetic voice to society. How do find new places to be the church and new ways to do church. Maybe the hardest question of all is how do we do this without creating a disconnect for the people already in church, who are happy with how church already is.