A brother in Christ

In an earlier post, I commented on various ways in which religion intersects with the lives and candidacies of various Democrats and Republicans running for president. There, I mentioned a particular e-mail getting passed around about Sen. Barack Obama. My understanding is that there are actually various versions of this e-mail, but the gist of it is that Sen. Obama may be a closet Muslim and that his church in Chicago advocates a dangerous version of black power.

This all seemed to me like it must be a bunch of hooey, so I started trying to do a little investigating. And I was helped by the fact that my brother - an Episcopal priest - actually attended Sen. Obama's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, last summer. When I mentioned the scurrilous e-mail to him, my brother told me that he had actually used his visit in a sermon. If you'd like to read it, the sermon can be accessed here.

Sen. Obama also did an interview with Christianity Today recently, in which he addresses the e-mail slanders and speaks frankly about his Christian faith. For anyone who believes that one's faith relates to one's character in a deep way (and I do), it is a helpful interview.

This is not an endorsement of Obama's candidacy. I just think that the type of attacks that go on in high-stakes national politics are ugly, and the attacks Obama has been receiving are probably the ugliest of this campaign so far. (If you'd like a good analysis of those attacks, including some recent comments by Bill Clinton, check out Bob Herbert's NY Times column here.) When you see people saying things designed to appeal to our most base nature, it calls for people of good will to speak out.

Plus, Sen. Obama is our brother in Christ. Just like Gov. Mike Huckabee is our brother in Christ, and Sen. Hillary Clinton is our sister in Christ, and so on. We can and should criticize these people for the policy positions we think are wrong, but we should not abide accusations of secret heretical belief that have no basis. It's cruel, and it's wrong. And it is exactly what the e-mail campaign against Obama amounts to.

I don't want to sound too overboard here, but I think this issue boils down to the following: No Christian should accuse another of heresy or apostasy without a solid reason for doing so. And if accusation is made, it should be done publicly and through appropriate ecclesiastical channels. Now the originator(s) of the religious slanders on Obama may not be Christians, but there have been plenty of Christians passing them around as a way to sow doubt in other voters' minds. That's just as wrong as making the accusations in the first place. We should take care to treat one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.

"Healthy Spiritual Consumerism"

Is there such a thing?

Fuller Theological Seminary president Richard Mouw thinks so. In a recent Christianity Today article entitled, "Spiritual Consumerism's Upside: Why church shopping may not be all bad," Dr. Mouw argues that doing a little church shopping isn't such a bad thing. He offers several anecdotal examples of positive church shopping before offering a an analogy that bears further scrutiny: Dr. Mouw argues that church shopping for Protestants is akin to the Roman Catholics discerning a spiritual vocation (to, say, the Jesuits, a Benedictine monastery, the secular priesthood, or some lay ministry).

It is, at best, a thin comparison. Ideally, no Catholic is going to settle on a vocation without serious and in-depth spiritual discernment. Such discernment should involve rigorous spiritual direction with a mentor, prayer and contemplation, and (if entering a religious order) a time spent in some type of novitiate before permanent vows are made.

Your ordinary run-of-the-mill church shopping doesn't really work like that. It relies on the language of getting your spiritual needs fulfilled, which doesn't sound a whole lot different from the kind of "needs" that Wendy's, Wal-Mart, and Macy's want to fill for you. People hop from church to church based on lots of things, and not many of them are good: the quality of programs for their kids, the kickin' praise band they've heard about, or the hot new preacher. Now none of those things are bad taken on their own, but the problem is that they're not taken on their own. They are typically extensions of the mindset that our rapaciously consumerist economy nurtures in us in untold insidious ways everyday. You are the customer and every corporate or institutional body you encounter is put there to serve your felt needs. So when you run into a problem with your kid's youth minister, or when the praise band gets stale, or when the hot new preacher leaves to go minister elsewhere ... well, you kind of drift to the next church you find that can meet those good old "needs" you feel right down to the ground.

The issue Dr. Mouw never addresses in his article is one of permanence: When a Catholic chooses a vocation - especially if that involves either ordination or monastic vows - the idea is that the vocation is a lifelong one. Church shopping isn't lifelong at all. It can recur again and again over the course of a lifetime. And in that environment, the development of real, deeply-committed discipleship is impossible.

There are no solitary Christians. We have to be in a community to know Christ fully. And when we keep bouncing from community to community as spiritual nomads, we end up looking for exactly the wrong thing -- we look for the community that will serve us best, rather than the community where we can best serve Christ.

Worlds enough and time

The death of 28-year old actor Heath Ledger took many by surprise yesterday. (See the NY Times article here.) While there is no official cause of death, the apparent condition in which Ledger was found suggests that he overdosed on pills. There are plenty of actors and actresses in Hollywood whose death wouldn't surprise much of anyone, but Ledger was not one of those. He was a fairly low-key actor, who didn't seek the limelight and chose to live in Brooklyn rather than on the West Coast.

I'll never forget the first time I saw "A Knight's Tale." I had heard that the movie inserted rock music in a lot of the jousting sequences, and I expected to hate it. To my surprise, I found myself laughing from start to finish. It was one of Ledger's first starring roles, and he did a superb job.

I have a friend whose pet peeve is the petty bickering that often goes on in the church and distracts congregations from what they ought to be doing. Whenever he hears about a church fighting over the parlor furniture or the hymn selection in worship, he is fond of remarking, "Those people have way too much time on their hands." And by and large, I think he's right. Most United Methodist churches in this country are fairly affluent by the world's standards, and they often find themselves fighting over things that don't matter a whole lot. They've got money, they've got time, and they're bored.

You could say the same thing for a whole lot of people in Generation X. They don't have the kind of needs that most of the world has to worry about - food, water, shelter, security, etc. So they find ways to keep themselves distracted from the pervasive boredom that creeps in when basic needs are met and there is no clear sense of what to do next. Often, that comes in the form of substance abuse.

Wouldn't it be great if the church was really able to shape people in such a way that they understood service to Christ as the defining call in their lives? If they sought out their own salvation rather than seeking a fight with a fellow church member over a careless comment in Sunday school? If they committed their lives to serving the poor in Christ's name rather than committing the sin of speaking ill of their neighbor?

And wouldn't it be great if Gen X'ers were the ones to help make the church a place where that happens?

Every time I hear about another prominent member of my generation lost to the toxic combination of money, boredom, and the ready availability of drugs, it grieves me that the church is failing in its mission to proclaim the good news that there is another way. It is not about pointing fingers at a certain type of lifestyle; it is, instead, about offering a kind of lifestyle constitutive of values deeper than fleeting high of intoxication.

Heath Ledger left behind a 2-year old daughter named Matilda.

Intersection of faith and politics

In a recent column, Charles Krauthammer writes, "The God of the Founders, the God on the coinage, the God for whom Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving day is the ineffable, ecumenical, nonsectarian Providence of the American civil religion whose relation to this blessed land is without appeal to any particular testament or ritual."

That's a fine statement, for a Deistic view of the Creator of the universe. As Krauthammer rightly notes, it has indeed been held by many politicians since the 18th century as a way to unite diverse populations into one body politic. But it contains an insidious underside, because what it really attempts to do is to convince people to give up their confessional belief in a God with particular attributes in favor of another god - that of the nation-state.

Liberal democracy instinctively insists that accepting the lordship of nation is a necessity if the population in question is extremely diverse (i.e., comprised of a large variety of ethnicities and confessional traditions). But what of the confessional traditions themselves? For instance, are Christians to accept that the way of life called for by the triune God can be simply circumscribed so that it fits neatly into the cultural and political expectations of a secular state?

This is a troubling problem, and it cannot be solved by the insistence on the part of many in the church that "this is a Christian nation" or that anything the state calls on us to do is simply to be accepted. I write more about this in my current column in the United Methodist Reporter. I would welcome your thoughts.

Religion in Politics #2

President George W. Bush has been touring the Middle East recently, attempting to bring peace to one of the most troubled regions in the world. He seems particularly interested in helping to broker some type of breakthrough deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, admitting that he would particularly like to get something substantive done in his last 12 months in office. That comment in the media made me perk up my ears; if Bush does, indeed, make a concerted effort to broker a peace, it will mirror exactly what President Bill Clinton attempted to do during his own waning months in office. Time will tell whether Bush the Younger is able to accomplish anything longer-lasting than Clinton the Husband did.

There was one ironic moment in President Bush's visit to Israel that seemed so bizarrely out-of-step with the philosophy that his entire administration has been built upon that it has to be mentioned. As a backdrop it is important to remember that the Bush administration is absolutely against a partitioning of Iraq that would give the north of the country to Kurds, a central region to Sunnis, and the rest to Shiites. In that instance, his administration seems to view Iraq the way they (and the rest of America) view the good ol' U.S.A. That view, of course, is that a liberal democracy should be based on an agreed-upon constitution - a political compact that ensures the rule of law, where all individuals have certain rights that are universal across the body politic, and in which political principles serve as the glue that holds all the parts together. It is a political notion that arises straight out of the Enlightenment, and it is absolutely opposed to the notion that nations should be constituted as tribes-writ-large. Seeing one's primary allegiance as to a racial, ethnic, or (heaven forbid) religious group is not just wrong; it is dangerous to the cohesion of the democracy.

But then, of course, there was President Bush, meeting with both Israeli and Palestinian officials and singing the praises of the two-state solution. In a memorable comment that was picked up by every major news outlet (including the NY Times here and CNN here), President Bush said that any peace agreement "must establish a Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people, just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people."

So much for liberal democracy.

The story caused me to reflect on an issue that I often do when the country's political conversation gets ramped up (like, oh, I don't know, during a presidential campaign?). And that is the issue of allegiance. Every person on earth is the member of some type of larger political body that calls for (and in some sense deserves) allegiance. For many of us, that means belonging to a nation-state that is constituted by, and operates according to, the same liberal democratic principles mentioned above. And a whole bunch of us enjoy that. I pay taxes and vote, which I take to be the baseline obligations that a citizen of a nation-state owes to the larger political community. But I also have a dad who was a local politician for 20 years, and a brother who is an active politician right now. I was raised in a political family, and I love chewing the fat about politics over supper. Heck, I even showed up at a Durham County Board of Commissioners meeting earlier this week in an attempt to keep the commissioners from criminalizing homeless people's begging for alms (not surprisingly, the homeless people lost).

But then, Christians also have to face up to another allegiance they have - the one to Jesus Christ and his Church. And it is inevitable that many times in our lives our allegiance to Christ is going to come into conflict with our allegiance to our nation-state, wherever we happen to live. Interestingly enough, Christians embody a peoplehood that is both like liberal democracy and like the Palestinians and Israelis. We are like the latter because we are a tribe, of sorts. As 1 Peter 2 says, we are a "chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation," and although once we were no people, now we are God's people. We are bound by ties of kinship - the brotherhood and sisterhood brought about through the power of the Holy Spirit. And we have a very specific place we belong (the church) and a vision of what the future will hold when our people's destiny comes into fulfillment (the Kingdom of God).

Of course, we are a bit like a liberal democracy as well, in the sense that anyone can become a part of this people. (Of course, it might better be said that liberal democracy is a bit like the church, since that's the way the historical progression came about.) There is no requirement of pedigree, no racial litmus test, no necessary language that must be known. There is only the desire to be a part of this people and to believe in and embody the truths to which they witness. Christians are a tribe, but they want everyone to join them.

All that is just to say that I think it is important, when we watch our leaders globetrotting around and making philosophically muddled statements about the direction our world should take, that we remember that no nation on earth can lay the same claims on us that the Kingdom of God lays on us. If we want to be faithful to God's calling on our lives, which we accepted and responded to through our baptisms, we will remember that and orient our lives accordingly.

Religion in politics #1

I'm gonna break with tradition a little bit in the next couple o' posts.

I like to follow politics, and I particularly like to read the columns of a few national columnists that I find to have good insight into issues both foreign and domestic. But I rarely comment on politics in either this blog or my UM Reporter column, because I think it can obscure my real purpose in writing in each of those forums, which is to discuss issues of importance to Generation X and the church. It's not that politics isn't of importance to Christians; of course we should be concerned (and we are affected) by the political happenings of our local, state, and national communities. But our country is in such a divided state right now, with people embracing so many knee-jerk liberal or conservative positions, that commenting on any one issue is to run the risk of getting labeled.

It's difficult to resist in a season such as this one, though, when the presidential campaign is heating up and seems to be dominating the headlines everyday. I admit, I find it all really exciting! And what's more, the intersection of religion and politics has been particularly central to this campaign. Just think about so many of the story lines we've seen connected to the major presidential candidates:

-- Rudy Giuliani - Should the disconnect between his social positions and those of the Roman Catholic Church make a difference to voters? How do the GOP's conservative Christian voters view the fact that Giuliani is on his third wife? Giuliani's candidacy is fading faster than Britney Spears' celebrity, but it's unclear whether that's because of religious issues or because his terrorism-related fear mongering seems so monotone.

-- Barack Obama - Why do these bizarre rumors about Islam keep surfacing? (Gotten one over e-mail?) Is this some kind of crypto-racism designed to sow doubts in the minds of voters? For the record, Obama is a baptized Christian and a member of a UCC church in Chicago.

-- Mike Huckabee - The former Baptist preacher (and former governor of my home state of Arkansas) excites opinion among everybody in the Republican party, from those who think he is the only candidate with legitimate social conservative credentials to those who think his faith-influenced concern for the poor and the incarcerated is downright irresponsible.

-- Mitt Romney - The only Mormon candidate in either party's field faces steep skepticism by evangelical Republicans, who aren't willing to vote for a candidate they regard as a member of a growing, non-Christian faith that threatens the church. And so many of the talking heads simply misunderstand this point; in a recent column, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post hypothetically compared objection to Romney with possible objection to a figure like Joe Lieberman, who is Jewish. Krauthammer rightly observes that the kind of veiled criticisms that Huckabee lobs at Romney would be regarded as outright bigotry if lobbed at a figure like Liberman. That may be true, but the point for evangelical voters, I am almost positive, is not the fact that Romney is not an evangelical Christian. Mormons, after all, are every bit as socially conservative as Southern Baptists. But evangelicals look at the entrepenuerial, expanding faith of the LDS Church and see it as a threat to Christian orthodoxy (in a way they do not when it comes to Judaism). It is not about Mormonism being "cultic" which is the word that keeps coming up in the national news. It is rather that evangelicals don't want a president who represents what they see as a very real threat to orthodox Christianity. And if you don't think that is a legitimate Christian concern, go read any of the early church fathers' writings against Judaizers, Gnostics, Marcionites, Arians, etc.

-- Hilary Clinton - Okay, so I've already written a post that touched on Hilary Clinton and faith, although it was really more about the public perception of Methodism. But Hilary's faith is an interesting issue, because so many people seem to want to view her as areligious. But regardless of what you think about her political views, she is a lifelong Christian (much more religious than some of the other candidates. See: Thompson, Fred). I think many evangelicals view liberal political convictions as incompatible with Christian faith (predominantly on the issue of abortion), and that has more than anything to do with Hilary's perceived religiosity (or lack thereof).

Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into a political blog. But it may take another post or two to get the political bug out of my system!

Wish list for 2008

My New Year's resolution for this year is to live more into a life of holiness. I'm in a Covenant Discipleship Group with four other guys, and I know that will be a great source of strength for me. I'm trying to look more at holiness in an integrated way, encompassing my mind, body, and spirit. After all, God wants to transform all of me, not just one part!

But beyond that resolution, I also spent some time a few days ago thinking about what I would like for our church in the coming year. I put those thoughts to paper and shaped them into a my first United Methodist Reporter column for the new year. You can find that column here. Here's a short version:

1) One of the most pressing concerns, I believe, is in helping our young hear the voice of God - and this goes for both laity and clergy. We have declining numbers of both, and the reasons why are complex. My suspicion is that the greatest reason is that families no longer see the church as the center of their lives, but rather one among a laundry list of extracurricular activities. And if that's the case, it is not just a failure of the church reaching the young, but of the failure of the church to nurture God's people overall. That will only change when we once again understand the church as the only community where we can know true life.

2) My greatest hope in the area of worship is that the church experiences a renewal of the celebration of the Lord's Supper. I believe that Holy Communion is the chief means of grace available to us, and if that's the case, we ought to put it at the center of worship! That doesn't mean we have to shortchange preaching, but we should rather understand preaching as a proclamation which finds its fullest embodiment in the sacrament. If the church is about sharing the word of God, we should be eating the sacred meal together at every opportunity.

3) General Conference needs to be clothed in prayer. If you have any questions about that, see General Conference of 2004, General Conference of 2000, etc.

4) I hope that a part of our growing reclamation of our Wesleyan heritage will be a greater understanding of the unity of holiness and compassion. There can finally be no separation between works of piety and works of mercy. We are called to love God and neighbor, and focusing only on one to the neglect of the other produces a thin faith. Lord, give us both!

Leadership from the Ground Up

Jay Voorhees, pastor and Methoblogger, has a great commentary in the current United Methodist Reporter. He looks at styles of pastoral leadership, and he emphasizes the necessity of both empowering laity for ministry and modeling leadership by being willing to take on grunt work. Read his article here.

I think Jay makes some great observations in this piece. The pressure of ministry often causes pastors to want to focus on the things they are absolutely expected to do: preach, lead worship, visit the sick, lead committees, etc. But the top-down approach to ministry can cause a pastor to get detached from the basis of ministry, which is about relationships. Jay uses the example of mopping up after a church event. Let your church members see you being willing to do that, and it can make all sorts of impressions that a dozen great sermons won't.

I've read a critique lately of the UMC's decision to abandon the age-old metaphor of "representative ministry" in favor of the "servant-leader" metaphor. While I understand the worries, I think Jay's article shows why servant-leadership is such a powerful model. Ultimately, the church is a community of Jesus' friends. It is not heavenly filling station for getting your spiritual gas tank topped off each week. It is not some magical place where sacraments mediate grace that you can't get anywhere else. It is, instead, a place where grace is available precisely because of the community that is present. And the pastor should recognize that his place is within the community rather than above it.