Let's Be Honest. Some Hymns Are Pretty Weird

For those of you who follow the church calendar, yesterday was All Saints' Sunday (and, of course, if you really care about such things, you know that the actual "All Saints' Day" is November 1st, and this was simply the first Sunday after that, but I digress). In recognition of this event, some churches focus on the legacy of Christians who have lived before us. This may be done in various ways. Some churches focus on the stories of the characters of the Bible. Others focus on Christian leaders throughout history. A church might read off a list of loved ones within that church's family that have passed away within the past year. Perhaps the most commonly shared ritual, however, is the singing of songs dedicated to remembering the saints of all types within the Christian faith.
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Is Our God Too Big?

We evangelicals like to sing about how big and powerful God is. For example, here's the chorus of a recent song (just a couple of years old) that's been popular at our church:

Our God is greater, our God is stronger
God You are higher than any other
Our God is Healer, awesome and power
Our God, Our God...

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Is Your God Boring You?

I've worked in and around Christian environments for pretty much my entire adult life. In quite a few of these settings, I've heard the concern that worship experiences that differ from the experiences of another generation may be influenced by an unhealthy desire to "entertain" audiences. I find this to be a difficult criticism to respond to. It's not that I haven't tried, but rather that the issue is a fairly deep one. If a person "enjoys" a worship experience, are they not entertained by it? Is this a bad thing? Surely we're not trying to argue that people should never enjoy themselves when worshiping God!
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Why Your Pastor Wasn't At Church Yesterday

At worship yesterday morning, our Youth Director filled in for the pastor while giving the welcome to the congregation, saying that he was out of town that day, so it would be "The Staff and Intern Show" that morning.

I wasn't the least bit surprised.

While it's reasonably well-understood that Easter is the most important holiday (read: "holy day") of the Christian faith, I don't know how many Christians grasp just how intense that day—and the week or more leading up to it—can be on the leaders of a local congregation.
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When Death Loses Its Sting

We all know the story by now. The hero won the victory, but at the ultimate personal cost. As his friends stand weeping around the operating table, Optimus Prime dies.

What? You thought I'd be talking about Jesus Christ on Good Friday? Patience, my friend...

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On Religion, Relationships, and Stories

"It's not a religion. It's a relationship."

I don't know about you, but I've heard this particular evangelical talking-point more times than I can count. It "preaches" well (perhaps not least because of the convenient "rel-" alliteration), and on at least one important level, I think it's intended to highlight the central place that Christians, perhaps Evangelical Christians in particular, put on having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ (I almost put that in quotes, too, as those words are used in precisely that way so often). I agree with the essential need for knowing Christ in such a personal way. Something that goes deeper than mere assent to a list of facts about who or what Christ is. Without that relationship, our faith is indeed empty.
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On the Difficulties of Praising God, but not "Him"

For years now, I've kept an informal policy on this blog. When writing about God, I try to avoid using male-specific pronouns such as "he" or "his" in my work. I say that this policy is "informal" not just because I've not made explicit mention of it before now (to the best of my recollection), but because I expect that I slip up every now and again.

I doubt that I'm alone. Last month, when I commented on John Piper's "Masculine Christianity," I suggested that most people—even those who advocate for strict gender roles within Christianity—would not consciously argue for a male God. However, there is little point in denying that if one was asked to draw a picture of God, one would not only draw a male image, but probably one with a flowing white beard. I expect that this is nearly as true for those who are advocates of gender-neutral language as it is for those who see nothing wrong with the usage of "male" terms for God. Although I know that the image of a white-beared male God does not come from the Bible, it is deeply embedded in my understanding of the deity. And if I find it creeping into my consciousness from time to time, it is hardly a surprise that so many others simply take it for granted that God must be male (and certainly not female!), even when and if we know better.
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REPOST: Why You Shouldn't Give Up Facebook for Lent

I'm reposting an article I wrote last year. The main reason for this is that I didn't think to write and post it early enough at the time that anyone who didn't already agree with me could possibly have seen it, since they would actually have been in the middle of the lenten Facebook fast, and the whole point is get people thinking about these issues before making a decision. So I'm reposting the article again this year, a week before Ash Wednesday, in hopes that people can read it before then. Now, in spite of the intentionally provocative title, I understand that people will have different needs. It may well be that, for you, going for a few weeks without Facebook could be a good thing. But I do want to push back against what's become a popular thing for Lenten-observant Christians to do these days, and offer a reason not to just do what others are doing.
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Musical Misdemeanors

I've observed in the past that all churches, even those who don't consider themselves "liturgical," nonetheless do have a liturgy, by which I mean that each church has a set pattern by which that community worships God. A pattern that, if it is disrupted, the disruption is not only noticed, but often resented. I am by no means immune to this observation. I worship with the congregation I do for many reasons, but one of them is that I find myself more or less "in tune" with the patterns of worship there, and when those patterns are disrupted, I don't always like it.
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Parish Politics

A recent conversation has got me thinking about politics in church.

No, I'm not talking about the recent Iowa caucuses, nor about how some preachers might tell people in their churches how to vote. Rather, I'm thinking about the ways in which different personalities play off of each other in getting the work of the church done.
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An Advent Reflection

For those of you who follow the Christian calendar, you'll already know that yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent. In keeping with what has become a tradition at my church for several years now, we released an Advent Devotional booklet for our members, with a different reflection written by members of our community for each day from now until Christmas. Upon volunteering to write such a reflection for this year's booklet, I was asked to work with Isaiah 49:1-7. The following was edited slightly^* and included in the book for December 10th, but I'm going to go ahead and post it here today to kick off the season.
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Not a God of Unconditional Apathy

It has been said that the opposite of love is not hate, as is commonly supposed, but rather apathy. While I've heard this for a long while, I was nonetheless surprised by something said in a sermon I was listening to recently (but which was recorded a couple of years ago) that gave it a twist I'd never heard before.
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Sacred Place

A couple of weeks ago, the pastor at my church preached a message drawing from Genesis 22, where Jacob has a vision of God at Bethel. In it, the pastor pointed out how the passage took care to mention several times that Jacob was in "a certain place," and how Jacob marked that place after his experience there. The pastor then talked about the ways that God is experienced in certain places in our own lives. While he was careful to acknowledge that God can be experienced in any place, the pastor paid attention to the ways in which the biblical narrative calls out specific places as having special meaning to God's people, as was the case for Jacob at Bethel. We were invited to think of those places in which we experienced God, and although I ultimately was able to come up with several, the first location that came to mind was Montreat.
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Sweets, Self-Control, and Spirituality

I guess I've had marshmallows on the brain lately.

Shortly after making a batch over the Labor Day weekend (seen at left. They turned out really good, if I say so myself), I was reminded of a classic study in delayed gratification, involving marshmallows, that was conducted some 40 years ago.
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Attending Fuller's 2011 Faculty and Staff Welcome Event

Yesterday, Fuller celebrated its annual Faculty and Staff Welcome event, which meant that I not only got a free breakfast, but got to see what theme the administration has chosen for the seminary for the coming year. This year's theme was drawn from Philippians 3:10-14, where Christians are encouraged to "pursue the goal" that God has for us. In this vein, our tables were decorated with trophies and supplies to make medals (perhaps in keeping with the biblical illustration of running a race, found more explicitly in 1 Corinthians or maybe 2 Timothy, both also attributed to the Apostle Paul).
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Regarding The Wrath of God

I passed by this church the other day (identifying marks removed from the photo to protect the guilty). In case you haven't clicked on the image to read the sign, it says "911 Destruction - Forecast of a Greater Wrath Predicted."

Now, I expect that a great many churches will choose to recognize the 10-year anniversary of the tragic events in New York and elsewhere. It's become so much a part of our cultural fabric that it's hard to imagine not saying something about it. Even so, surely this is not the way to go about it!
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Attempting to Define "Spiritual, but Not Religious"

The phrase has been around for years, but for some reason, I've stumbled across a couple of posts discussing people who define themselves as "spiritual, but not religious" in recent days. I'll let the folks who wrote those posts speak for themselves, but thing that strikes me as I revisit the term is how the definitions of the terms "spiritual" and "religious" seem to be assumed, rather than clearly defined. I suspect that people may be talking at cross-purposes when they set these terms against each other.
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The Worship Curmudgeon: Prayers of the People

I'm trying a bit of an experiment here, and it might fall flat on its face. I'm riffing on a theme occasionally used by commentator Frank Deford featuring what he calls "the Sports Curmudgeon." This admittedly grouchy alter-ego gives Deford freedom to make observations on things going on in the realm of his expertise (i.e., sports) that are undeniably sharper and more potentially offensive than he would usually do, in the hopes of achieving a humorous commentary in which legitimate observations may still be found while being over-the-top enough to blunt any actual offense. I don't know whether or not I'll be able to successfully apply this model to the realm of worship, but I'm going to give it a shot. Please bear with me.
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Fuller Prayer Garden Update

About four years ago, I suggested that the Fuller Prayer Garden was going to go away soon. As this picture demonstrates, I was wrong. It's still here, and in fact the area around it was landscaped earlier this year to provide additional prayer space. I also commented back then, as well as when my old apartment building (which was just behind the Prayer Garden) was being taken away, that Fuller was intending to use the site for a new worship center/chapel. Those plans are, I think it's safe to say, on hold for now, having been delayed by multiple factors, not the least of which being the financial difficulty that pretty much everyone has been dealing with for years now.
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Is Our Relationship with God "Real"?

Yesterday, on the Fourth of July holiday, David LaMotte posted an entry titled "Interdependence Day" in which he reflected on the 8th anniversary of his engagement to his wife (I seem to have forgotten that he got engaged shortly before my own wife and I got married, but I digress).  Although the whole thing is worth reading, I want to highlight the following insight:

Chewing on the reality of our relationship makes me think of a great story that my friend Hugh Hollowell tells.  Hugh is a big Johnny Cash fan, and claims to know all the words to all of his songs. He loves Johnny Cash. And he also loves his wife. “But,” he explains, “Johnny and me never have a bad day.” That’s because the relationship with Johnny Cash is an imagined one.  He has a relationship with the idea of Johnny Cash, not with Johnny. Real relationships are harder than that, and also much, much richer.

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