"Let's really skim the surface of this deeply." - Meg's take on "the church has to be new and full of energy" movement.

Pressuring Congress to pass laws --> Civil Religion

I'm on chapter four of Resident Aliens, which hits upon the topic of Christian ethics and therefore also upon the relationship of the church and the government. Hauerwas and Willimon hit the nail on the head when ti comes to Christians trying to legislate morality. It shows a misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of the church as well as a gross misunderstanding of the relationship between church and state. What follows are several quotes from the fourth chapter. (*sheepish grin* OK, so not just several but lots.)

"The way most of us have been conditioned to think about an issue like abortion is to wonder what laws, governmental coercions, and resources would be necessary to support a 'Christian' position on this issue. The first ethical work, from this point of view, is for Christians to devise a position on abortion and then to ask the government to support that position."

"The habit of Constantinian thinking is difficult to break. It leads Christians to judge their ethical positions, not on the basis of what is faithful to our peculiar tradition, but rather on the basis of how much Christian ethics Caesar can be induced to swallow without choking. The tendency therefore is to water down Christian ethics, filtering them through basically secular criteria like 'right to life' or 'freedom of choice,' pushing them on the whole world as universally applicable common sense, and calling them Christian."

"Here is an invitation to a way that strikes hard against what the world already knows, what the world defines as good behavior, what makes sense to everybody. The Sermon [on the Mount], by its announcement and its demands, makes necessary the formation of a colony, not because disciples are those who have a need to be different, but because the Sermon, if believed and lived, makes us different, shows us the world to be alien, an odd place where what makes sense to everybody else is revealed to be opposed to what God is doing among us. Jesus was not crucified for saying or doing what made sense to everyone." 

"Merging one's personal aspirations within the aspirations of the nation, falling into step behind the flag, has long been a popular means of overcoming doubts about the substance of one's own life." 

"Christian community, life in the colony, is not primarily about togetherness. It is about the way of Jesus Christ with those whom he calls to himself. It is about disciplining our wants and needs in congruence with a true story, which gives us the resources to lead truthful lives. In living out the story together, togetherness happens, but only as a by-product of the main project of trying to be faithful to Jesus."

"Yet most modern ethics begin from the Enlightenment presupposition of the isolated, heroic self, the allegedly rational individual who stands alone and decides and chooses. The goal of this ethic is to detach the individual from his or her tradition, parents, stories, community, and history, and thereby allow him or her to stand alone, to decide, to choose, and to act alone.  It is an ethic of great value in our type of society because the corporation needs workers who are suitably detached from communities other than their place of work, people who are willing to move at the beck and call of the corporation."

"The question is, What sort of community would be required to support an ethic of nonviolence, marital fidelity, forgiveness, and hope such as the one sketched by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount?"

"Whenever Christians think that we can support our ethic by simply pressuring Congress to pass laws or to spend tax money, we fail to do justice to the radically communal quality of Christian ethics. In fact, much of what passes for Christian social concern today, of the left or of the right, is the social concern of a church that seems to have despaired of being the church. Unable through our preaching, baptism, and witness to form a visible community of faith, we content ourselves with ersatz Christian ethical activity--lobbying congress to support progressive strategies, asking the culture at large to be a little less racist, a little less promiscuous, a little less violent. Falwall's Moral Majority is little different from any mainline Protestant church that opposes him. Both groups imply that one can practice Christian ethics without being in the Christian community. Both begin with the Constantian assumption that there is no way for the gospel to be present in our world without asking the world to support our convictions through its own social and political institutionalization. The result is the gospel transformed into civil religion." 

"The Sermon on the Mount cares nothing for the European Enlightenment's infatuation with the individual self as the most significant ethical unit. For Christians, the church is the most significant ethical unit."

"We ask ourselves what sort of church we would need to be to enable an ordinary person like her [a pregnant teenager] to be the sort of disciple Jesus calls her to be. More important, her presence in our community offers the church the wonderful opportunity to be the church.... ...we are graciously given the eyes to see her as a gift of God sent to help ordinary people like us to discover the church as the Body of Christ."

"Our ethics do involve individual transformation, not as a subjective, inner, personal experience, but rather as the work of a transformed people who have adopted us, supported us, disciplined us, and enabled us to be transformed. The most interesting, creative, political solutions we Christians have to offer our troubled society are not new laws, advice to Congress, or increased funding for social programs--although we may find ourselves supporting such national efforts. The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

"The Christian faith recognizes that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures who cannot reason our will our way out of our mortality. So the gospel begins, not with the assertion that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures, but with the pledge that, if we offer ourselves to a truthful story and the community formed by listening to and enacting that story in the church, we will be transformed into people more significant than we could ever have been on our own.

"As Barth says, '[The Church] exists... to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to [the world's] own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise' (Church Dogmatics, 4.3.2)" [Brackets in this quote are from the authors.]

"Ethically speaking, it should interest us that, in beginning the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes, Jesus does not ask disciplines [sic] to do anything. The Beatitudes are in the indicative, not the imperative, mood. First we are told what God has done before anything is suggested about what we are to do." [emphasis theirs]

The Sermon on the Mount "is morality pushed to the limits, not so much in the immediate service of morality, but rather to help us see something so new, so against what we have always heard said, that we cannot rely on our older images of what is and what is not."

"We are forever getting confused into thinking that scripture is mainly about what we are supposed to do rather than a picture of who God is." [emphasis theirs]

Turning the other cheek "is not a stratagem for getting what we want but the only manner of life available, now that, in Jesus, we have seen what God wants. We seek reconciliation with the neighbor, not because we will feel so much better afterward, but because reconciliation is what God is doing in the world in the Christ."

"Therefore, Christians begin our ethics, not with anxious, self-serving questions of what we ought to do as individuals to make history come out right, because, in Christ, God has already made history come out right. The Sermon is the inauguration manifesto of how the world looks now that God in Christ has taken matters in hand. And essential to the way that God has taken matters in hand is an invitation to all people to become citizens of a new Kingdom, a messianic community where the world God is creating takes visible, practical form."

Whew! I still have a few pages of the chapter to go, but I thought these quotes were all so meaty that I wanted to share them here. 

Some Grey Bloke gives some helpful tips for those being raptured tomorrow

He's got a good point about the time zone issue. 

"I understand that you're excited about going to heaven, but you shouldn't be making things difficult for those let behind. They already have the tribulation to deal with. They don't need to go out to your house carrying the Sunday supplements as well." lol!

Would you chain yourself to a tree to save it? Here, have a cheap bracelet.

In the world of religiosity, there are levels, or perhaps they're Dantéan spheres, of holiness. Those within each sphere look very similar to each other no matter which god they've chosen to follow: the Omnipotent God, the Mother Earth, or the Perfect Man. Among the grandest sphere you'll find mystics, monks and priests. Beneath them the religious -- they attend the right meetings, read the right books, and make decisions based on their beliefs. In the level below that fall those who are really more nominal about their beliefs, talking the talk now and then, but walking the walk only when it suits their needs. The bulk of people fall here. They may follow one system of beliefs while paying lip service to an entirely different religion. The worst of these we call hypocrites. The rest are just how people are, we might say with a shrug. There is no sphere for those who are against a set of beliefs, because the very act of being against something gives this group of people a distinct set of beliefs of their own, and therefore would relegate them to one of the spheres already mentioned. The goal of the leadership of any movement is to draw people from that outer sphere to one of the inner ones. But I wonder, sometimes, whether their tactics don't really just draw people from one part of the outer circle to a different part of the outer circle, all the while lining the pockets, or stroking the egos, of those in the center -- opiating the masses for the self-gratification of the greedy shepherds.

A few weeks back I received an invitation from the Sierra Club in the mail. For anyone unfamiliar with the Sierra Club, they are (according to their website) "the largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States." One of the leaflets in the invitation asked me, "Would you chain yourself to a tree to save it?" In other words, what they were saying was, "Would you be willing to move to the in-most circle -- the realm of mystics, monks and priests -- to show your total dedication to the cause?" It was an evangelical call, one that was crafted to stir my blood and give me hope that I, too, could be radical and cool in my religion of environmentalism. It was designed to strike a cord within me that I could be great. I could be radical. Or, if I would just join the Sierra Club, I could at least be associated with such greatness. I could wear a backpack and bracelet that would mark me as a fanatic who's willing to go all out for the cause -- nevermind the fact that the backpack and bracelet are really tools of evangelism that ultimately undermine the cause. (The bracelet is shown on the right in the photo and the offer for the backpack is in the lower left. The bracelet is the tease, the backpack is the hook.) 

I would think that an environmental organization would, as one of its standard modes of operation, reduce, reuse and recycle, and encourage others to do the same. And yet here they've not only wasted some trees to generate the paper the evangelical call was printed on, but they've included a ridiculously cheap bracelet in the letter that, if tossed into the recycling bin without first being removed from the envelope, could muck up an entire load of paper recycling. I can't imagine anyone over the age of 5 or 6 being thrilled with such a bracelet, so for those that caught the fact it was in the envelope before they tossed the paper into recycling are now left with the choice of throwing it away (Rather than reducing their trash, the Sierra Club has just helped them to increase it.) or donating it to charity (where it'll most likely get thrown out as too cheap to sell). 

And that's just the bracelet. If you join now at the low introductory rate of $15, you'll receive an official Sierra Club 1892 Rucksack in the same style as the one used so long ago by John Muir, the founder of the club. It might be in the same style, but I'd bet money that not only is it made of very different material (something petroleum based?) but it was also probably made in China. There's no way they could make anything even remotely the same quality as John Muir's original rucksack for under $15, so not only are you contributing to environmental problems by procuring this petroleum based product that had to travel half way around the world to get to you and that was most likely made under lax environmental regulations, thereby contributing to the pollution of another nation, but it's not going to last long and will soon be yet another item you can add to the land fill. 

Why would the Sierra Club so brashly invalidate its own message by marketing in this way? Well, it takes a lot of work to become the "largest and most influential" environmental organization in the United States. Sometimes you have to do things that don't quite fit your message in order to further spread your message. In fact, sometimes you have to do things that argue directly against your message... in order to further spread your message. 

It's a philosophy that I see used not just by organizations like the Sierra Club, but within church circles as well. If the message is only spread through numerical growth, the argument goes, then numerical growth is of key importance. So services, programs, style and focus all need to be such that they will create the largest numerical growth possible within the congregation. And what draws people to an organization? A sense that perhaps they can be, if not the fanatic in the center circle, at least closely associated with the inner circle through being a part of a church that: (choose all that apply) is cool, is happening, is growing, is "authentic" (whatever that means), is exciting, is deep, that makes me feel good, that makes me feel like I get it and the rest of the world doesn't, that makes me feel special.

There's a common belief in many Christian circles that bigger is better. Quick growth is better. Younger is better. Newer is better. And if your congregation isn't young, energetic and growing by leaps and bounds numerically, then the opposite must be true. The converse of the belief is that if an organization is not growing, then it is ineffective at accomplishing its goal. Such congregations are just old and dried up and outdated. But what is most egregious, I find, is that the mentality, then, is to grow at all costs. Can you truly convey a message by contradicting it? And why do we buy that when it's a lie. It's a lie that we're quick to believe no matter which congregation we're in, the large or small, the energetic or the faithfully plodding along.

I'm not saying that growth is bad and stagnation is good. Far from it. What I'm saying is that the church has a message. It has been called not only to share the message, but to live it. When we decide that sharing the message is so important that we can stop living it in order to share it better, then "we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." (ripped from 1 John 1:8) Part of the message is perseverance. Part of the message is faithfulness. When we criticize those who have faithfully persevered even through difficult times we are criticizing them for taking the message of the gospel to heart and living it out. We are undermining our own ability to share the message by condemning our own brethren for holding true to the message. We may look or sound very incredibly cool. We may get people in that outer circle to stop and think, "I want to be in that inner circle. I want to be radical for Jesus." But what kind of radicality do we call them to? If they buy the t-shirts and raise their hands at the meetings and go our for a beer with their small group, have they really moved from the outer circle to an inner circle? If their choice to follow God depends primarily upon their own need to feel like they're a part of something or they like the energized feeling they get after a service or they need to be "fed," are they really following God, or are they submitting to a message of consumerism, or me-ism, or coolness? If you follow God for the buzz, are you following God or the buzz?

Are we calling people to Jesus? Or are we just encouraging them to move around in the nominal circle they were already a part of in order to make ourselves look more important?

Shallow Small Group

Gotta admit, this is pretty funny.