Mother Teresa and the Crisis of Faith

There has been a lot made of the new book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, that features letters from Mother Teresa exhibiting serious doubts about her faith. There is a recent TIME Magazine article about the book here. She apparently went through long stretches of her ministry in Calcutta feeling an absence of God's presence and even doubting whether God was real. I read one story that said she wanted her letters burned upon her death, a wish that was (obviously) not granted. But I, for one, think that such doubt by a saintly woman is a helpful thing for the rest of us. It shows that "dark nights of the soul" (an experience common to some of the most saintly people in Christian history) can afflict everyone. And what is more, they need not derail us from walking the path of Christian discipleship.

Faith is a deep and multivalent concept. It consists of emotions, of course, but the emotional aspect of faith may be the shallowest level of all. It also consists of intellectual apprehension of spiritual truths, the conformity of the will to God, the embodiment of a certain kind of virtue (what Wesley called holiness of heart and life), and the sustained commitment to Christian action in the world. Allan Bevere has posted about the different ways we come to know God, specifically in response to the Mother Teresa story. It is a very good post.

Mother Teresa certainly had tremendous faith, despite whatever doubts she may have experienced. I have no doubt myself that there were demons constantly tempting her to lose all faith and hope. Who else would Satan go after than one who inspired millions by her utter devotion to Christ? But regardless of how she felt in an interior sense, she exhibited the conformity of her will to God through the faithful ministry she performed over decades. And that is faith. Perhaps it is not the fullness of faith that she desired, but it is faith nonetheless.

Let us also not forget that our Savior himself, in the Gospel of Mark, dies feeling utterly abandoned by God. Through his suffering, he knows our suffering and has taken that suffering unto himself. And that in itself is a great reason for comfort, no matter what doubts we may face in this life.

Top United Methodist Hymns

Here's a really interesting story. Dean McIntyre, Director of Music Resources at the General Board of Discipleship, has compiled a list of the favorite United Methodist hymns and worship songs. In this article, he compares the list he compiled in 2000 with one he did in 2006. There are some changes between the two, including a greater prevalence of both praise & worship songs and Charles Wesley hymns in the 2006 edition.

From my experience as a local church pastor, I can second pretty much all of the ones on this list. Interestingly, at my church we never really sang, "In the Garden," although other favorites of the Greatest Generation crowd like "Old Rugged Cross" and "How Great Thou Art" got plenty of play-time. As an associate pastor, I went to 3 worship services every Sunday: a contemporary service, a traditional service, and a Sunday evening service with a "hymn sing" that featured lots of selections from the Cokesbury hymnal. One of the things I really grew to appreciate was how nice it is to sing a wide selection of praises to God - from praise & worship, to classical, to old time gospel.

Here is the top 10 from the 2006 list:

1. Amazing Grace
2. Here I Am, Lord
3. How Great Thou Art
4. O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing
5. Hymn of Promise
6. In the Garden
7. Great is Thy Faithfulness
8. Holy, Holy, Holy
9. Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee
10. Spirit Song / Blessed Assurance (tie)

There were more praise & worship songs in #'s10-20. It is interesting that most of the praise & worship songs that made the list are older. That is, they aren't exactly what I would call "cutting edge" in contemporary worship music.

So what is your favorite hymn?

Update from Peru

Pastor Pedro Uchuya sent me a couple of e-mails over the weekend. He is upbeat and grateful for the prayers and aid that has been sent to the churches in Peru. He also passed along this website, which is the homepage of his district, the Distrito Costa Sur.

Pedro has successfully received direct aid transfers, which means that money can successfully be wired to him via Western Union. And of course, UMCOR is also working to get aid to the church in Peru through the bishop's offices in Lima.

I posted at more length about earthquake relief efforts here. Please remember our brothers and sisters there in your prayers, and consider contributing to the relief efforts in a tangible way. The overall cleanup and reconstruction process will take a long time, but there is also acute need right now in terms of just getting food and water to the citizens of Chincha, Pisco, and Ica.

Authenticity, not relevance

I have enjoyed the weeks off from writing I have had during my short Gen X Rising sabbatical in the United Methodist Reporter. It has also been nice to read the stuff from the guys who have filled in for me. This week the column is penned by a friend and fellow Th.D. student at Duke, Jeff Conklin-Miller.

Jeff looks at the distinction between relevance and authenticity in the church. We often focus on relevance, wanting to keep up with the culture and compete with what the world has to offer young adults. This is a losing proposition, of course. The church can't really compete with what the world offers, and we shouldn't want to. What the world is offering is a large part of the problem!

Instead, we should be focusing on living authentic Christian lives, as Jeff suggests. And we should be moving the church toward more authentic witness to the world. If we do that, the world might just realize that the true relevance it should be striving after is authenticity to the gospel. This is what God's children need to hear.

Peru Earthquake Relief

The earthquake that struck the coast of Peru on Wednesday, August 15, actually hit the towns that I have visited over the course of several mission trips since 2001. Though the epicenter was a little ways out into the Pacific Ocean, the cities of Ica, Pisco, and Chincha were all severely affected.

My main connection is with the Rev. Pedro Uchuya and the Methodist churches around Chincha. These churches are truly Wesleyan in spirit, believing in personal and social holiness, as well as deeply committed to ministry with the poor and with children. The quakes killed over 500 Peruvians; fortunately, none of the congregation were among the victims. But both chuches and homes have been seriously damaged. I spoke with Pedro on the phone a couple of nights ago, and he said the biggest challenge right now is just getting safe drinking water to everyone. Because water and sewer lines were disrupted by the quake, there is no potable water available.

It's a sign of the times that this disaster is already off the radar screen of the major news organizations. The latest English-language articles I've seen are these two from Monday - one from the BBC and one from CNN - detailing relief and rescue efforts, as well as this one from Fox News on Tuesday telling about the disruption to the region's important fishing industry.

UMCOR - the United Methodist Committee on Relief - is gearing up to bring relief supplies to the affected areas. If you'd like to make a tax-deductible donation to the Peru relief efforts, click on this link. It gives you the "Advance number" that you'll need to designate your gift for Peru.

In the past few days, I have also been helping to connect people who have been on missions to Peru directly to Pastor Pedro. It is possible to send monetary aid directly to him via a Western Union wire transfer. He is using that money to obtain food and water for the Methodist congregations, as well as any other people he is able to help. If you are interested in sending aid directly to Pastor Pedro, send me an e-mail. These donations are not tax deductible of course, but they have the advantage of being put to immediate use in relieving the suffering that is ongoing.

Eventually, our brothers and sisters down there are going to need serious help in rebuilding homes, churches, and schools. Sending aid down to them will help in that, and in the coming months I have no doubt that there will be ample mission opportunities.

Blogging about ordination

In the past week, there have been several blog posts about the issue of the candidacy and the ordination process in the UMC. If you are interested in what has been said elsewhere, check out:

-- This Methoblog post that I wrote on Friday, basically summarizing what I said a couple of days earlier on Gen-X Rising.

-- This impassioned and poignant post from Gavin Richardson (who, by the way, may be the hardest working blogger in show business). Gavin offers a few good examples of how bad candidacy can really be. It wasn't nearly this bad in my own experience, but I have certainly heard stories of the kind Gavin shares.

-- This post on the United Methodist Reporter's new blog, written by Amy Forbus. Amy mentions on the Reporter post that Rebekah Miles' op-ed piece is going to come out in the Aug. 31st edition of the Reporter. Keep an eye out for that. The Reporter's general website address is here.

I will link to Dr. Miles' Reporter article when it appears. In the mean time, you might be interested in seeing this report on clergy age trends, compiled by the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary: youngumclergy.pdf. It is filled with fascinating and shocking statistics, most of which are related to the aging of United Methodist clergy. For instance, did you know that in 1985, over 15% of clergy were under the age of 35?

Want to take a guess what it is now? Try 4.69%.

Correlation does not prove causation, as psychologists like to tell us. And I have no doubt that there are many reasons why younger folks are not answering God's call to ordained ministry in nearly as high numbers as they once did. But I also do not doubt that the length and complexity of our candidacy process does not help.

Ordination problems ... uh, process

I was on an e-mail list that received a request from Dr. Rebekah Miles at Perkins School of Theology, about a piece she is working on related to ordination candidacy and the probationary process. The problems with candidacy are felt pretty universally across the church, I think, which is demonstrated every four years when the General Conference tweaks the Book of Discipline to try to improve it.

Dr. Miles is trying to gather opinions from recently ordained clergy for the project she is working on. As I was writing my own thoughts, it made me want to hear the thoughts of others. So to any of you probationary deacons and elders (and recently ordained clergy) what was the best and worst of your experience with candidacy?

My main concern with the ordination process is that we've allowed the whole thing to take on too much of a bureaucratic feel. We've created this system that, in theory, is supposed to aim toward good ends: making sure that candidates are qualified, that they are truly called to ministry, and that candidates with 'red flags' get weeded our before they reach ordination. But the net result of all of it is that we have handed over too much of the candidacy process to the process itself and distanced candidates from the real human nurturing and formation that should be a part of bringing someone into the clergy. We've all experienced this bureaucratic aspect with the seemingly endless checklists, forms, and tests that have to be completed and sent in to Nashville, the D.S., the DCOM, the Board of Ordained Ministry, etc. It also greatly increases the time it takes from the beginning of candidacy to actual ordination (for me, it was about six years, and I think I did it much faster than some).

I don't know how to untangle this knot. But for starters, if a candidate's bishop, district superintendent, and clergy mentor were trained to understand their roles in the ordination process differently, perhaps the whole thing could be 'humanized' or 'personalized' to a greater degree. That would seem to get us closer to the supremely important spiritual formation aspects that need to be a greater part of our ordination process in general. I am a clergy mentor to an elder candidate right now, and I am trying to be as 'hands on' and supportive as I can. Of course, all mentors, bishops, and district superintendents have to do their best to work in the present (dysfunctional) system.

As a sidenote, I have always suspected that our fears of being personally responsible for telling anyone 'no' has led to our willingness to hand over the ordination process to a bureaucratic system. Our present American conception of individual liberty has led us to never want to presume to tell anyone 'no' in any instance. That is particularly the case when it comes to discerning a calling from God, which each 'called' person believes is authentic. So by handing over ordination to a bureaucratic system, we can be relieved that we don't have to ever say 'no' and hope the 'problem candidates' get weeded out in an impersonal way. This is, I believe, exactly an area in which we need to be countercultural. We have a responsibility to God & the church to say 'no' when 'no' needs to be said, and ultimately that is a much more pastoral attitude to have toward candidates anyway.

Asking the right questions

I'm on a short summer sabbatical from writing my Gen X Rising column for the United Methodist Reporter, so a couple of guest columnists are filling in over the next few weeks. This week's columnist is the Rev. Eric Van Meter, campus minister at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, Ark.

Eric has written a really insightful piece on how we, as the church, need to re-examine the questions we are asking about our future. Too often, Eric says, we get caught up trying to figure out the same old, predictable set of questions about our church's health. Stop me if you've heard these before: Where are our young people? Why are our numbers declining? Etc., etc.

What we need to do instead, Eric argues, is to ask different questions: What does it mean to live in an authentic Christian community? What characteristics do we need to embody as the church? How do we remain faithfully Wesleyan without using that term as a nostalgic desire to return to the glory of yesteryear?

These questions that he is raising drive to the core of who we are called to be as Methodists. Preoccupation with issues of numbers and decline is like trying to apply a band-aid to a gunshot wound. It just doesn't get at the root of the problem. So, Eric is saying, let's start to ask the questions that really matter. And they are questions of how we are called to be faithful in our present circumstances and time.

From my own conversations with Eric, I know that he is a person who has a deep sense of fidelity to Scripture, a deep love of the tradition, and a deep desire to seek out how to live faithfully in a contemporary context. He is part of a growing movement among young clergy in the Arkansas Annual Conference who have begun gathering to engage in fellowship and conversation around just these issues. That's good news. If more people across the connection will be willing to raise these questions and really seek out ways to answer them in community with one another, we may yet see the way forward in faith.

Oh, and thanks for the column, Eric. It's great!

Problems with pacifism

So I've concluded my summer of reading John Howard Yoder as a part of a seminar led by Prof. Stanley Hauerwas. It was one of the most enjoyable aspects of my Th.D. program so far. Yoder's thought, combined with the insight of Dr. Hauerwas and the conversation with friends who were in the seminar, has made it a superb experience.

Yoder has some themes that he returns to time and again, and perhaps the one that is most consistent (and the one he is most known for) is his pacifism. I wrote on that issue in this blog post back in June. Unlike some streams of Mennonite thought, which are content to argue that pacifism is a Mennonite tenet of faith, Yoder argues that pacifism should be a tenet of faith for all Christians. Because of the tightness of his argumentation and the closeness of his biblical reading, he makes a compelling case. (See his position on pacifism in The Politics of Jesus, The Original Revolution, or He Came Preaching Peace; for fair treatments of different types of pacifism, check out Nevertheless; for a generous treatment of the just war tradition, see When War is Unjust.)

Yoder's Christology is wrapped up in the notion that a non-violent Son of God calls us to a life lived in the context of a community defined by that love. And since that love is one of sacrificial servanthood, our community (the church) must also be of a sacrificial and servant character. No room for violence there.

But despite the strength of Yoder's argumentation (and Prof. Hauerwas' own pacifism, which, he admits, is largely the result of Yoder's influence on him), I find myself unable to fully commit to Christian pacifism as a way of life. Here's why:

The Bible is consistent in its injunctions to protect the widow, the orphan, and the alien (Exod 22:21-22, Deut 10:17-19). We are called to a special care for the weak in this way, because we know their experience from our time as Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt. So Psalm 82:3-4 says, "Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked."

Because of the brokenness of this world, and because of the sin of human beings, I take it as a sad fact of our existence that sometimes the protection of the weak will have to be done with force, even violent force. If the greatest love we can have is in following the new commandment of Jesus, which is to love one another (the mandatum novum), then our present condition suggests that such love will sometimes have to involve the protection of the weak through forcibly stopping their oppressors.

My struggles with this issue are due to the fact that I take Yoder (and Hauerwas) very seriously. And of course, even if I cannot commit to absolute pacifism, the extent of Jesus' commands to love have a profound and far-reaching impact on how violence can be used. Pacifist or not, Christians are called to think about violence differently.

As a sidenote: Yoder used to include some version of the line, "Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur," in his writings. It translates, "Our lamb has conquered, let us follow him." Since taking Latin has been the other main preoccupation of my summer (besides reading Yoder), that phrase has stuck with me. What a beautiful statement, and a beautiful challenge.

How do we define Openness?

My post a few days ago about the Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors advertising campaign drew a surprising amount of feedback (You can see it here). At a basic level, I think everyone probably agrees that 'openness' is a gospel imperative. Jesus invites all to come into his fellowship, and as his church, we echo that same open attitude because we believe that God's redemptive love is intended for his whole creation.

I came across a passage in Augustine's Confessions that made me think about this yesterday, when he says in Book IV, "Blessed is he who loves you, and loves his friend in you and his enemy for your sake. He alone loses no one dear to him, to whom all are dear in the One who is never lost ... No one loses you unless he tries to get rid of you." We actually have to run away from God, intentionally rejecting his grace, in order to lose communion with him. That's the nature of his overwhelming love.

The issue for us, then, is in how we express that love through the fellowship of the church. And that seems to be the root of where the disagreement was coming from in my previous post. I am convinced that God's desire for us is a desire for transformation of our bodies and souls. This seems to me to be a universal message of the New Testament; see, for example, Romans 12:1-2; 1 Thess 1:9-10; Colossians 1:15-23; and perhaps especially Hebrews 12:3-11.

The expectation that the Christian life involves sanctification is not a denial of the church's openness; it is rather, the path that Jesus calls us to walk upon once we accept the grace that has been offered to us. To one of the comments on that previous post who brought up Jesus' acceptance of the woman caught in adultery, I would say, "Yes, but he also told that woman to go and sin no more" (see John 8:11). Jesus' call for all to come to him (Matthew 11:28-30) is not a call to open fellowship and no more; it is a call to discipleship, the very root of which is the Latin word for "to learn" (disco, discere).

So how does this relate to Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors? Though I accept my critics' warnings that an outright dismissal of the slogan runs the risk of sending the wrong invitational message to nonbelievers, I continue to hold that the slogan shortchanges the totality of the gospel message, which is one of transformation. Some apparently thought my comment that the Open Hearts campaign was was false advertising was a bit snarky. Perhaps, but I made it with the firm belief that it does, in fact, send the wrong message exactly because it does not show the full grace offered in Jesus' invitation. It is not an invitation to the kind of individualistic liberty contained in popular notions of "freedom," but rather an invitation to a particular form of community shaped by Jesus' own sacrificial love.

H.R. Niebuhr sums up what I'm talking about in his work, The Kingdom of God in America, written in the 1930s. He criticized that watered-down form of faith in which, "A God without wrath brought [a people] without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." If anything, our weakened notion of discipleship today tends even more in this direction.

I started this post with the intent of talking about baptism and what a rigorous form of discipleship means for that holy sacrament. I fear I've gone on way too long now. But I am beginning to believe that baptism should require a process of serious formation before it is allowed in the church. Right now, United Methodist churches often offer 'baptism on demand,' with little or no counsel about what it means. Is that something we should be doing? I would say no. I'll try to expand my thoughts on this issue in another post.

New additions to the blogosphere

David Hollis, a friend of mine, has recently started a blog. David just graduated from Duke with his M.Div, but I have known him since we were both at Lambuth University a few years ago (where he was a student and I was the assoc. chaplain). Our paths have crossed in two significant ways now (Lambuth and Duke) and we've been to Peru a couple of times on mission trips. Now David is serving a rural three-point charge in Opelika, Alabama, and the folks there are lucky to have him. The folks there are lucky to have him.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Gentle Dave. May it be a wonderland of fun for your blogging pleasure.

Also of note: The United Methodist Reporter, home of my Gen X Rising column, has recently begun a blog as well. You can access it here.