Methobloggers, unite!

I am new to the Methoblog community, but I'm learning as fast as I can. A friend of mine in my doctoral program was at the recent UMerging Colloquy at Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City, and he remarked that he saw a lot of the prominent Methobloggers. They are using actual conferences and gatherings to meet in ways a little more physical than cyberspace allows.

Gavin Richardson is putting together one such gathering at the upcoming Congress on Evangelism in January of '07 at Myrtle Beach. I'd love to attend. If you want to find out a little bit about what they are planning (and maybe let Gavin know you are interested), check out the announcement he posted.

The Ministry of Reconciliation

How easy is it for us to feel alienated and out of place in this world? I'd say that many of us carry around such a feeling a lot of the time. The world today only increases the sense of estrangement: Fast-paced, heavy on technology, increasingly individualistic ... is it any wonder that we feel like strangers in a strange land?

The world is a sinful place. There's just no getting around that. Our individual sin drives us away from the healing that relationship with God and neighbor can offer. We willfully seek out our own way, convinced that we know what is best for us (despite the fact that our human will leads us to unhappiness time and time again). In such a situation, Christian people are called to be in the church. We are called away from our isolation and loneliness and into the one covenant community that can truly sustain us.

Emily and I witnessed one such community this past Sunday. I write about it in this week's column in the United Methodist Reporter.

Have you witnessed a community of reconciliation and hope that was particularly powerful? I'd love to hear about it.

Gen X Connection

A friend turned me on to a new blog today, called Endangered Species: Church. It's written by a Gen X clergywoman named Erika Gara. Good stuff. I always like to see another X'er engaging the generation/church/pastor combo.

A blogging District Superintendent??

Who says there's nothing new under the sun?

The name of the D.S. is Susan Cox-Johnson, and she is in the Missouri Conference. She's apparently really interested in emergent church conversations. Check out her blog.

A friend at the United Methodist Reporter gave me the heads up on this. The good folks over at the Reporter have added Susan's blog to their featured blogger page at the UM Portal site.

Ched Myers' sermon

I wrote on Sunday afternoon about the impact Ched Myers' sermon had on me earlier that day. I found out this week that the Duke Chapel makes all Sunday sermons available over the web. There are options for both webcast and podcast forms, so you can hear and/or watch the sermon for yourself it you would like. I highly recommend it. His honest presentation of the gospel has caused me to begin to reevaluate everything about my discipleship, and it has already spawned conversations with colleagues and friends at Duke.

Here's the link.

I would be interested to hear what you think after hearing the sermon. It is powerful.

A difficult, life-giving word from Jesus

This morning, I heard Ched Myers preach in the Duke Chapel. The title of his sermon was "The Kingdom of God as the Discipleship Practice of Commonwealth," and the text was Mark 10:17-31. If you have never read this text, or if you haven't read it in a long time, I suggest turning to it before you read the rest of this blog post.

This is the story of Jesus and the rich young man. I have read this story a hundred times. I have even read commentaries on it that explain how embarrassing it is for the church and how much energy preachers have spent over the years trying to explain it away. But I have never heard it, and I mean really heard it, the way Ched preached on it this morning.

He started by acknowledging what I just wrote, that this text is embarrassing to a church that has never (well, almost never) sought to live it out. He pointed out how theologians have traditionally wanted to interpret it to say that the rich should not be controlled by their possessions. Theologians have done this, Ched said, despite the fact that Jesus specifically rejects the piety of the rich in the text itself. And he said that this type of explanation is particularly dangerous in a country where so many good, upstanding churchgoers are among the wealthy.

He pointed out that the response of Jesus to the rich young man is far away from the typical response of either the liberal or the conservative wings of the contemporary church. Liberals want Jesus to open his arms to the rich man in a big, enfranchising hug of total acceptance (which he does not). Conservatives want Jesus to require assent to a set of doctrinal beliefs from the young man in order to attain eternal life (which he also does not).

Instead, Jesus invites the man into a new way of life. He invites the man into a fellowship where faith, the pursuit of justice, and economic arrangements are all deeply intertwined. I won't attempt to recreate Ched's sermon from this point on. There is no way I can do it justice. But if you want an approximation of it, I suggest that you go back to the text in Mark and read the story two or three times. Try reading it without the superificial spiritualism that the church has always tried to apply to it in order to tone it down. Try to read it on Jesus' terms.

And then ask yourself: Does my discipleship even come close to what Jesus asks of me? Am I still - despite Jesus' constant invitation to freedom - enslaved to the things of this world? How much of my daily routine have I shaped so that I can ignore the call of Jesus upon my life?

For me, the answers to these questions are, "No, Yes, and A whole lot." I have been somewhat unsettled since my wife and I moved to this new place. I have missed my old congregation, and I have felt unsure of my abilities in this program I am in at Duke. But I have been unsettled on a deeper level as well, sure that God is calling me to something that I just can't see yet. I think this morning may be the beginning of a process of lifting the veil from my eyes.

"This is the good news," Ched finally said to us, "that Jesus loves us so much that he speaks the truth to us."

The truth is difficult to hear. But I heard it today, and I am going to do what I can to respond. That begins with repentance: a personal repentance and commitment to walk in a new way of life. And after that, the walking begins.

Anyone care to join me?

Do churches welcome the stranger?

Since Emily and I moved to Durham, we have visited several churches in the Raleigh-Durham area just to get a feel of the religious life here. After serving as a pastor for the past few years, I have really looked forward to getting the chance to worship in different settings and different congregations.

One of the aspects I have been especially attuned to in the past three months has been the different ways churches go about welcoming strangers through their greeting and hospitality ministries. As you can imagine, the approaches range from the "highly effective" to the "virtually non-existent."

For instance, we noticed one church near our neighborhood right after we arrived in town, but we could never figure out when worship services were held. The church did not list its worship times, phone number, or website on the marquee out front. I actually stopped one day to inquire inside, but the church was locked up tight and there was no information printed on any of the exterior doors. When we finally just showed up at the 11:00 hour on a Sunday morning, we were treated with a friendly-but-awkward attitude that said, "We know you are strangers, and we have no idea what to do with you!" Not surprisingly, their poor approach to hospitality was mirrored by lots and lots of empty pews in the sanctuary.

I write more about the issue of welcoming the stranger in my U.M. Reporter column this week. If you have observations or thoughts on the role of hospitality in a church's ministries, I would be interested to hear them.

Greater love has no one than this...

It was one week ago today that a milk truck driver named Charles Carl Roberts walked into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and shot 10 Amish schoolgirls between the ages of 6 and 13. He killed 5 of them and himself. The horrifying and senseless nature of the crime has been placed in bold relief by the reaction of the Amish community, which has both forgiven Roberts and reached out to his widow and children.

Those terrible few minutes in the schoolhouse were also witness to an incredibly powerful act of Christian self-giving. A recent CNN story reports that Marian Fisher, one of the murdered schoolgirls, asked Roberts that she be shot first because she thought it might serve to save some of the younger girls. Her younger sister Barbie, who was seriously wounded but survived, has related the story to adults.

Think about that for a second. Could you make such a sacrifice? Could I?

That 13-year old girl could, and she did. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

This is love as Jesus taught it. It wastes no energy on sentimentality or ephemeral "feelings." It is grounded in a disposition of self-giving and expressed in acts of self-sacrifice. It is the love that all Christians are called to receive and express, however imperfectly.

Faced with monstrous evil, Marian Fisher responded in the most sublime way possible for a Christian - she offered her life for the lives of her sisters.

Best Gen X Movie Ever

And the Oscar goes to ...

Hands down, it's Kicking and Screaming, Noah Baumbach's 1995 film about the lives of a group of friends in the year after they all graduate from college. The movie's title refers to the manner in which they are entering the "real world," and the plot revolves around each of their individual struggles. The central plotline concerns the main character, Grover (played by Josh Hamilton), who is trapped in a sort of emotional limbo after his girlfriend Jane (Olivia D'Abo) moves to Prague.

I know there are other movies that aspire to the title of greatest Gen X film. Probably the first one that was talked about in this way (or at least the first one I remember) was Reality Bites. Not even close, in my book. Reality Bites came out the year I graduated from high school (1994), at exactly the age I should have liked a movie like that. But even then I remember thinking that it seemed contrived. It felt like a movie that was self-consciously trying to evoke the experience of a generation, like St. Elmo's Fire for people ten years younger (only not nearly as good).

Another truly good Gen X movie is the more recent Garden State (2004),written and directed by Zach Braff (who, like Baumbach in Kicking and Screaming, was making his first movie). I liked Garden State. I even heard a Baby Boomer bishop (Scott Jones) refer to it in a speech at annual conference a couple of years back, as a good movie for boomers to watch if they want to get a handle on the emotional paralysis and spiritual emptiness that many Gen X'ers experience. But for me, Garden State came a little too late. By the time I saw it on DVD, I had already come through the woods of that mid-20s identity crisis that so many of us go through.

On the other hand, I watched Kicking and Screaming during the summer after I graduated from college in 1998. Talk about timing. I've been told that it is a "guys' movie," and that is probably true. But it's still a good flick.

Anyway, check it out. It became available recently in a Criterion Collection edition, which you can order from Amazon. There are some great extras on the DVD, with the best being a series of 2006 interviews between Baumbach and many of the principals in the cast as they look back on the experience of making the movie. I think Baumbach must have answered a lot of questions about his film as embodying the Generation X experience, because he alludes to Gen X stuff several times in the interviews (often seeming a little uncomfortable with the connection).

Ultimately, it is just a really good movie with a really good cast. It is dialogue-driven, but the script is good enough to keep the movie going without getting bogged down in wordiness. It has some genuinely funny moments. And like I said, for Gen X'ers an awful lot of it will hit close to home.

(Warning: This post refers to a movie that is rated "R," so viewers should be aware of that. Sorry, I should have mentioned that before.)