Alcoholics Anonymous vs. the Church

http://stevieg.typepad.com/trudging_the_road_of_happ/addiction/
This is a series of posts in which Steve (a fella I met waaay back in college) goes through the 12 steps of AA (he's gotten through 8 so far) and first explains how they work within AA and then what the church might look like if it took the same rule/step to heart. I think his posts have been provocative so far and would recommend them as a means of thinking through the nature and purpose of the church.

The link takes you to the series of posts specifically on this topic and works just like viewing a tag here works -- which means the posts are going to show up in reverse chronological order when you click through. So scroll to the bottom of the page to start reading.

(For those of you viewing this post via Facebook, you might need to click through to Multiply in order to grab the link to Steve's page. To be honest, I don't remember how Multiply links render when they're cross-posted to FB.)

The fruit of the Spirit - with a place to practice

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law." -- Galatians 5:22-23

New Year's resolutions can probably all be boiled down to: "In the upcoming year, I want to be a better person."  That might mean eating differently, exercising more, spending more time with family, or not kicking the cat. But the end goal is to somehow improve your life in some way. Often times it's hard to stick to those goals. Without outside encouragement or accountability, it's easy to let things slide.

This is certainly true for Christians, and not just at the New Year.  Exhorted by the Bible to love our neighbor as ourselves, to be loving, patient, gentle, self-controlled, etc. we are constantly encouraged to better ourselves (not so that we might achieve our salvation since that was the whole point of Jesus' coming after all, but so that we might be people of integrity who mirror the characteristics of our messiah.) But just because I read that I should be loving doesn't make me loving.  And just because I'm told that I should be gentle doesn't make me gentle. It takes practice. And that's where church should come in.

Church should be a safe place where I can practice forgiving, or asking for forgiveness, or being loving when someone annoys or upsets me, or being patient. And I should be safer there because the people are of the same body. It's to their benefit for me to improve myself, just as it's to my benefit as they improve themselves. So when I "try" to be patient and end up screwing up royally, it's the church (meaning members of that same body) that should come alongside me, help me to calm down, encourage me to continue trying to be patient and perhaps even step in if my impatience is harming another. And this should all be done, not in judgment, but in brotherly love.

Of course, I keep saying the church "should" do this because it is, by definition, made up of a bunch of screwed up individuals who aren't always going to be patient and loving and kind with each other. But as our savior has forgiven us, he has enabled us to forgive others. Yes, we'll keep messing up, but we also need to keep forgiving, keep moving forward, keep encouraging, keep loving. Church should be like family -- a group of people who accept us even when we've messed up and who encourage us to do better next time.

So why don't you leave?

A few weeks back a friend of mine asked how our church was doing. She knew we had a new pastor (Well, he's been around for over a year now.) and so she thought she'd check in and see how that was going. I replied that though things were OK, I didn't feel like I was really being challenged and we were still struggling to grow in size.  (Not that I think numerical growth is a big issue in general, but our little congregation is so small, that we really do need to grow a bit just to get back to a respectable size.)  She looked at me in consternation and asked, "So why don't you just leave?"

To be honest, I was kinda floored by that. I know that other people wander from church to church looking for... I don't even know what. But I see church as a body (or a family). Romans 12:5 says, "we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others." Leaving would feel like chopping off my arm and casting it aside. (Only, in this analogy, I'm the arm, not the body. They'd be injured, but whole enough to carry on. I'd just be an arm lying on the ground unable to do a whole lot.) 

This (and a subsequent discussion on "church" with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law) got me to thinking more on the topic of leaving a church/what is church/how do we "do" church. It's something I've thought a lot about in the past, so this is nothing new. But I thought it would be worthwhile to articulate my thoughts this time around. 

1) Church is not about what you get out of it. It's about who we are. To leave is akin to dismemberment, or perhaps some form of elective surgery. (There are times when we have to move, such as for work or school. But if you were actually part of a body, then you'll feel the tear when you leave.)  

The chief exception to this, I think, is when there are "churches" that behave more like a social club than the living organism that they should be (according to my reading of the Bible, at least). I've attended a social-club-esque church where the chief goals seemed to be finding a mate or a business partner, playing church, and talking a whole lot about community but then blaming the not-actually-doing-it on living in a transient society. Churches like this are very easy to join as well as to leave, in my opinion. They don't function like a body, therefore there's no (or little) pain when someone walks away. 

2) I've been a member of our current church since we moved to the area 8 years ago and from the get-go, I had the impression that the people in this congregation understand what I just said back in #1, even if they've never studied a single book on it, heard a single sermon on it, or ever bothered to articulate it. After having attended several churches in a row that talked a whole lot about community, it was almost stunning to end up in one that never once talked about it, but that seemed to understand and live it at a foundational level. Not only that, but we arrived just after several members had left and though some churches would blithely carry on after something like that, this church bled. Social clubs don't bleed. Bodies do. 

So, yeah, I'm not totally excited about where our body is right now.  I had high hopes as the new pastor was coming in that we'd really start growing. I suppose it's like the excitement you have at the beginning of the new year when you've made a resolution to work out every day. You're excited about what the all-new-you is going to be like. But then mid-January rolls around and you start to realize that though you might have done a little extra exercise the first week, you rolled right back into business as usual by the second. But just because I'm disappointed doesn't mean I'm going to chuck it all. You don't start cutting yourself just because you didn't exercise.  Instead, I think it's time to step back and recheck goals, rethink strategies, find partners who can help you to keep that New Years resolution, and continue to aim in the right direction even though you now realize it's not going to be as easy as you had once hoped. I'm still wrestling with what that means in terms of our relationship to our church. But it's worth wrestling with.  When you have a good thing, it's worth taking time to think out how it could be better, rather than chucking it in the trash. 

Christmas Quiz

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/quiz?id=PQBQS
This is from the Christian History Magazine folks. I only got 6 out of 10 right. (And most of the ones I got right I had guessed on.)

Whew! Does this mean I should expect a lump of coal in my stocking? (Or is Santa handing out Carbon Offset Credits this year instead of coal?)

How December 25 Became Christmas - Biblical Archaeology Review

http://www.bib-arch.org/e-features/christmas.asp
Here's an interesting take on how December 25th was chosen as the date to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Rather than attributing the date selection to a holiday makeover of pagan holidays, the author argues that it might rather be based upon the time of Jesus' conception.

Still sounds kinda odd to me, but it might be worth giving a "hmmm" to.

Thanks to Don for the link.

Planting a tree when you're 70 years old...

Sojourners' email newsletter today included the following quote:

You must take living so seriously that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees -- and not for your children, either, but because although you fear death you don't believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier.- Nazim Hikmet, Turkish poet, persecuted during the Cold War for his communist views (1901-1963)

I have two questions:
1) What do you think of his reason for planting a tree.  Do you think that living weighs heavier than death? and
2) Would you plant a tree when you're 70?

This pretty much sums up why we don't have a Christmas tree

There's lots of possible excuses I could use on why we don't have a Christmas tree:
* It's a Germanic pagan tradition and I'm not a Germanic pagan.
* They drop needles and make a mess and I don't want to deal with it.
* Trees often represent fertility and the last thing I need in this house after having had twins before my firstborn was even 2 is more fertility.

But none of those are really the real reason why we don't have a tree. The real reason is that I just can't get past this idea that we're celebrating life by killing something and then enshrining its dying carcass, as wonderful as it might smell, in our house. It just feels all wrong to me.

I have nothing against people doing Christmas trees. But I just find that year after year, even when the kids beg, I can't make myself do it. The last time we had a tree was in 2001 when I bought a live one in a pot. It was only a few feet tall, cost an arm and a leg, and then we were stuck with finding a place to plant it afterwards. (It now lives somewhere out on the plains with my brother-in-law's parents and is apparently doing well.)

This year my mom took pity on the kids and gave them a little plastic tree that they've set out front next to the Christmas cactus that I told them they could put the presents under. They seem OK with that. Then I showed them this cartoon. With my girls, cartoons speak louder than words. I'll be curious to see if they beg for a tree next year or not. To be honest, their begging has always seemed a little half-hearted.

(Click on the picture to enlarge it.)

The beginning of wisdom

A friend of mine just retweeted this:

RT @JohnPiper The beginning of wisdom is that I have absolutely no say in how God should run the world, and I am peaceful with that.

It seemed to fit in with our previous discussion in which I used a gardener and ant analogy, so I thought I'd share it here.

10 strangest Jesus sightings of 2009

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2009/12/top-10-places-jesus-revealed-himself-this-year.html
I can't see Jesus on Mars or on the toilet, can you?

He's plain as day on this candy bar, though, eh?

Majesty

"On Maui, one November, Hugh and I went swimming, and turned to find a gigantic sea turtle coming up between us. As gentle as a cow she was, and with a cow's dopey, almost lovesick expression on her face.  That, to me, was worth the entire trip, worth my entire life, practically.  For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it--isn't that what we've all been waiting for?" -- David Sedaris, in his article Loggerheads: Sea turtles and me which was included in the January 7th, 2009 edition of The New Yorker.

God's noblest work

I'm reading a book called Revelations: Diaries of Women which includes excerpts from a wide variety of women including the wife of Tolstoy, the wife of Dostoevsky, Anne Frank, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Many of the women that I have read so far appear to adore some man or other (often husbands, but Dorothy Wordsworth adored her brother, William.) It was getting to a point that I honestly started to wonder if men were different or better or some such back in the day. (Or perhaps the women led more pathetic lives?)

But then I got to a quote by Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women.  When she was 10 years old she wrote the following in her diary:

Father asked us what was God's noblest work.  Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad; babies never are.

I had to laugh at that.

So what would you say is God's noblest work?  (Atheists can play along by deferring to the God part for the moment and focusing on the noblest work bit.) I'm tempted to pick something mushy like "love" or "community." But I think the theme of the quote involves tangible objects. Chocolate jumps to mind, but that might be a bit of a silly answer.

I suppose a question like this calls to mind another question, "What does it mean to be noble?"

I guess I'm going to go with "People" as my answer for now. We're such complex creatures that I think that makes us pretty impressive. But noble?  See, I'm not sure if we fit that part. I'll have to keep thinking on this.

The Living Nativity « The Skit Guys

Link

Hmmm, I haven't used this share into Multiply feature before.  Even though the link under the video says "watch preview" I think you still end up seeing the whole thing.

The blurb under the vid. describes it as: "A hilarious and heartwarming mockumentary that tells the story of an actor performing in a living nativity who takes his role way too seriously."