Obama: Gen X or not?

In some ways, it's an interesting question. Obama was born in 1961, which by most calculations is at the tail end of the Baby Boom generation.

Susan Ferrechio wrote an article in the Washington D.C. Examiner presenting the point of view that Obama is, indeed, the first Generation X presidential candidate. I actually have a neat connection to this article - I was interviewed for it! And while I'm not 100% sold on the idea that Obama is an X'er, I do find some of Ferrechio's points to be persuasive.

In my own writing on the parameters and characteristics of Generation X (which you can read here, for example), I have suggested that Gen-X really starts at about 1965 and goes until 1982. That allows its beginning to match up with the end of the baby boom (which is, in some sense, a measurable demographic characteristic). But Generation X itself is really more of a cultural concept than a statistical category, so any parameters of its beginning and ending are going to be inexact (Ferrechio, for instance, defines Gen-X as those born between 1961 and 1981, which allows her to include Obama in it).

One way of thinking about Obama's place in Generation X it is to look at his two chief rivals for the presidency - Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and now John McCain in the general election. In some ways, those two are quintessential Baby Boomers from the political left and political right. Clinton swung left after her mid-1960s flirtation with Barry Goldwater; together with husband Bill, she epitomizes the New Democrat of the Baby Boom generation, who consolidated the political and cultural gains of the 1960s and 70s and then moved to the center (particularly on economics) as a strategy to get elected.

McCain, on the other hand, was one of the young men who marched off to Vietnam and had his life determinatively shaped in the process. Regardless of his reputation as a maverick (and his advocacy for such non-conservative policies as campaign finance reform), McCain is more or less a Baby Boomer Republican whose career was largely influenced by Reagan conservatism (i.e., free market economics and a hawkish foreign policy).

As I point out in an earlier blog post, Obama has the distinction of growing up too late to be affected by Vietnam in his formative years. And he was too young for his personality to be forged in the crucible of the Civil Rights struggle as well. His rhetoric is heavy on the language of 'change', even if it's not always clear what he means by that. And he places emphasis on wanting to get past the very partisan divisiveness that the Boomer left and right have been embroiled in for the past several years. So in many ways, Obama's candidacy signals a cultural shift, even if he belongs chronologically to the last few years of the Baby Boomer generation.

A lot of this is just a matter of interpretation. As with all cultural notions, there aren't really any statistics to employ. I'll admit that, if Obama wins in November, his very presidency will undoubtedly have a big impact on how Generation X is defined. At any rate, it's good food for thought during while the Democratic National Convention is going on.

A subtle, faithful witness

I was running at the gym this evening, watching the final few miles of the men's marathon at the Olympics in Beijing. The winning runner was Samuel Wanjiru from Kenya, who finished in a time of 2:06:32. That means he was averaging less than 5 minutes per mile over the entire race! Not only did he win Kenya's first-ever gold in the marathon, but he also set an Olympic record time.

Needless to say, I've never run one mile in less than 5 minutes, let alone over 26 of them. Talk about motivation! There I was, running my 3 miles at a little less than 7 mph on a treadmill. And this guy was winning gold halfway around the world running through the smoggy streets of Beijing at a faster clip than I've ever even dreamed about.

The thing that really struck me about Wanjiru's win was what he did immediately afterward. He dropped to his knees right after he crossed the finish line and put his hands on the ground with his head down. At first I figured he was just collapsing from exhaustion (after all, who could blame him??). But after pausing for a long moment, he started to get up and made the sign of the cross on his chest as he did so. Then it hit me: He was praying. Here's a guy who just set an Olympic record time in the marathon, inside a stadium of screaming fans, with TV cameras all over him. And he take the time to stop and thank God for sustaining him through that grueling race.

Now you might say that Wanjiru doesn't deserve to be praised for doing what he ought to do anyway. But I think stopping to pray at that point took considerable discipline (considering what he had just endured and accomplished) and courage (considering the location, i.e., a country ruled by an atheistic totalitarian government). You'll often see American athletes make a comment about their "personal Lord and Savior" Jesus Christ when they get interviewed after a big win, but the way they do it often strikes me as perfunctory and almost thoughtless. Wanjiru's act, on the other hand, was a prolonged, subtly faithful gesture.

I immediately thought about what Tertullian talks about in his treatise De Corona, where he refers to spiritual practices in which we engage even though the Bible doesn't specifically command them. He uses the sign of the cross as an example, and says something to the effect that we cross ourselves in all our going out and our coming in. In a way, Wanjiru was doing what his fellow African, Tertullian, had described 1800 years earlier. He was engaging in a tradition-laden, faithful practice that helps to remind him where his life is truly located. And thanks to television, he made a witness to the rest of the world as well.

The saints among us

In my study of John Wesley, one thing that has really stuck out at me is the way that Wesley was so drawn to individual examples of holy living. I write about this in my newest column in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. In a number of different genres of writing - sermons, journaling, and essays - Wesley consistently highlighted examples of sanctified lives as a public witness to others.

The reason Wesley pointed to these living saints was because of the good that viewing their lives could do for others. By seeing the living witness of a holy man or woman, others might be moved by the Spirit to receive God's grace for themselves and be similarly transformed.

Another interesting thing about Wesley's focus on sanctified lives is the diversity of those he focused upon: Henry Lascelles, an immigrant to the colony of Georgia in the 1730s; Jane Cooper and Jane Muncy, both women active in the Methodist revival; the Rev. John Fletcher, an articulate theologian and one of Wesley's ablest allies among the Anglican clergy.

I think Wesley's tendency to look at holy lives can offer us something today. The messages we get are confused, because the sources are so scattered. From friends, to media sources, to so-called "authority" figures, it can be unclear what we can trust and what should be discarded. But what does not fail is the testimony that is offered through demonstrated, holy lives. Their witness to us can be a means of grace in and of themselves.

Gen X'ers unite!

When I posted a few days ago on some changes I had noted in the blogosphere, there was one site I didn't know about at the time but want to mention now. It's Jennifer McCollum's JenX67 blog, which looks at the characteristics of Generation X and some of the peculiar challenges that Gen X'ers face.

I found out about Jen's blog because of a project she has started to locate and highlight 50 Gen X bloggers in all 50 states of the union. She writes this about her project:

"I am on a quest to link to 50 Generation X Bloggers - one for each of the fifty states ... Through this project I hope to facilitate dialogue among a diverse group of Gen Xers, and do my small part to instill pride in my generation. I want to grow our collective courage to live our time. We're long overdue. Onward Gen X."

I'm particularly interested in what Jen is doing because of the Gen X theme of her writing, but even if she was doing something totally different, her site would be well worth visiting just because of the creativity she has put into it. I'll be happily adding it to my favorites.

Language matters: social holiness

In my new column in the Reporter, I focus approaching the Wesleyan meaning of 'social holiness' with reference to our use of language. My sense is that 'social holiness' is usually used in the church to describe the kind of outreach ministries that involve extending Christian love and aid to the poor and disadvantaged. Less often, the term is used to describe social justice efforts that involve changing unjust systems (whether of a legal or a societal/cultural nature).

I am a big supporter of both outreach ministries and social justice efforts, but the point I made in a recent blog post is that, when we use 'social justice' to describe such ministries, we are mis-using the term. Wesley's use of social holiness was in the context of how God sanctifies us; it was his firm belief that sanctification happens in the context of Christian community.

The reason it is important to attend to the language of our tradition is exactly because our Wesleyan understanding of salvation is wrapped up in it. As I write in my column, Practicing discipline in the use of our historical language is important. It could even help the church fulfill its stated mission - to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Because in a Wesleyan sense we have to realize that we won't do any good transforming the world until we ourselves have been transformed from within ... That can happen to each of us through God's grace, and it always happens in community."

Here is Wesley on social holiness:

In the Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems published by the Wesley brothers in 1739, Wesley criticizes writers among the "Mystic Divines" who recommend "an entire seclusion from men, (perhaps for months or years,) in order to purify the soul." He goes on, "For the religion these authors would edify us in, is solitary religion."

Wesley emphatically rejects this version of sanctification, writing, "Directly opposite to this is the gospel of Christ. Solitary religion is not to be found there. 'Holy solitaries' is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than holy adulterers. The gospel of Christ knows of no religion, but social; no holiness but social holiness."

Wesley's understanding of social holiness is further fleshed out in the 1748 sermon, "Upon our Lord's Sermon on the Mount (IV)," where he writes, "When I say [Christianity] is essentially a social religion, I mean not only that it cannot subsist so well, but that it cannot subsist at all without society, without living and conversing with other men."

I think what he has in mind here is the kind of prudential means of grace represented in the Methodist society and its attendant sub-structures - the band, class meeting, etc. They are the place where 'iron sharpens iron' (Proverbs 27:17) and where shared testimony, mutual accountability, confession, and exhortation help to nurture holiness of heart and life in Christian believers. That, as I understand it, is the nature of social holiness.

That which comes before

I cover the Wesleyan doctrine of prevenient grace in a recent column in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. If you are not a predestinarian - and I am not - then any account of salvation that does not slide into works righteousness has got to take the doctrine of prevenient grace seriously.

I bring this up because of the post I wrote a few days ago about social holiness. In that post, I mentioned an article I was writing for the United Methodist Reporter about the common misinterpretation of Wesley's teaching on social holiness. The article is finished, and I'll post on it tomorrow. But first I wanted to say something about prevenient grace, so that I didn't get ahead of myself with the sanctification stuff.

We clearly live in a 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' culture. This is debilitating on the church, particularly in the way it causes preachers to slip into a self-help style of preaching as opposed to preaching a strong doctrine of salvation. It's not that predestination has fallen out of style. It's actually more popular than ever, except that most predestinarians today are soft universalists. That is, they just assume that salvation comes to all in the end. And the logic of universalism means that the best thing the church can do (and by implication the best thing that preachers can preach) is to help people muddle through until modern medicine fails them and they die.

A common corollary belief that goes along with this train of thought is that we are not really all that messed up by sin. And we're certainly not depraved by it! We make mistakes, sure, but when we're thinking in a clear-headed manner, we can pretty much choose the good in a given situation. Sin is an occasional problem. But basically, I'm okay, and you're okay. Let's go buy more stuff and be happy.

Well, this is all a bunch of cultural hooey and a sign of the anemic state of the American church. Sin is real, and we are absolutely broken by it to the point that we aren't just making sinful choices. We are debilitated. It is a state and we are born into it.

(Hell is real, too - a real, metaphysical, possibly permanent separation from God for all eternity - but that's a complicated topic I'll save for another time. If you want a window into one interesting, traditionally evangelical debate about hell, check out Gordon Atkinson's recent post at Real Live Preacher.)

So salvation is important, and it starts not with sanctification but with prevenient grace. It is a sign of God's gratuitous love for us that, "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). The realization of this fact and the power that it conveys are a gift given to us through God's prevenience. This is the substance of our justification. And through it the door is opened to our new birth and sanctification.

These words are not just high falutin' theological concepts. They are descriptive words about the way of salvation, the via salutis, that God invites us to travel. What becomes crucial is that the manner of our traveling is never alone, but rather always in community.

That's where social holiness comes in. Which I will look at tomorrow.

Individualism: good or bad?

On the Colbert Report tonight, Stephen Colbert's guest was Dick Meyer, who has written the book, Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium.

Colbert's interviews are always funny, but sometimes it is hard to tell exactly what the interviewee is trying to get across because of Colbert's mock attack dog approach. But at one point, when Dick Meyer was trying to distinguish between good and bad outcomes of the era of the 1960s, he said this:

"There's a big difference between individualism and narcissism and selfishness. Individualism is terrific. I mean ... the idea of the self-made man [and] the self-made woman is the idea of America. But there's a difference between individualism and selfism [sic] and selfishness and narcissism. So if you're just in it for yourself and you're not thinking about the person next door, that's not what morality's about."

I have read a little bit about a relatively new sub-discipline in psychology called "Positive Psychology". It advocates doing good for others because of the positive effects it will have on an individual's personal sense of well-being and self-worth, which is really just a way of co-opting altruism into a supporting pillar of selfish individualism. By advocating the view that the real value in the doing of good deeds lies in the way they ultimately benefit the individual, it relates everything back to self in a kind of enlightened narcissism.

I'm curious if that is what Meyer is espousing without realizing it (or maybe he is realizing it entirely; I haven't read his book). I have no firm answers myself, but my question for us is this:

Is it possible to embrace a robust understanding of individualism without that including narcissism or selfishness as well?

And if not, doesn't that present an enormous problem for the church when it is forced to exist in a consumer culture like the one we've got in America?

Some blogging changes

A few changes to the Methodist blogging world...

Shane Raynor, who once wrote the highly popular Wesley Blog, has announced that he will be back in September with a new blog called the Wesley Report. Shane's blog did probably more than anything to bring the Methoblogosphere into existence. It's good to see that he'll be back and blogging again.

My friend David Hollis is interested in Christian stewardship as it relates to our use of the environment. In addition to his regular blog, David has started a blog called Going Green for God, where he looks at issues related to consumption, recycling, and the American lifestyle.

Duke divinity folks Tom Arthur, Craig Uffman, and Kevin Poorman have recently started a blog called Worship Review, where he reviews hymns and praise songs for their theological content. I think this blog has a lot of creative potential in an area that is underrepresented in the Methoblogosphere. Check it out.

Also, this isn't exactly brand new, but it's worth a mention. A group of young adult clergy in the North Alabama Conference have started Young Clergy Blog, which discusses issues of ministry as they relate to young clergy. It would be good for them to post a bit more frequently, but if they start doing that this blog has a lot of potential to be a place for needed debate and discussion.

Any other new blog ventures out there? Let me know. I'd like to highlight them for others to know.

"... no holiness but social holiness"

Are you familiar with that phrase?

If you are a Methodist, you can probably identify it as coming from the pen of John Wesley. But do you know what it means?

If blogs, newsletters, sermons, and periodicals from the Methodist world are any indication, most people assume that, by "social holiness", Wesley meant something along the lines of what we mean by social justice or social outreach ministries.

That's just plain wrong.

A few days ago, as part of a series of posts reviewing Paul Chilcote's Recapturing the Wesleys' Vision, Guy Williams over at Gen-X Missional Wesleyan brought up the issue of social holiness. (Guy uses the term correctly, and you can read his post here.)

I commented on that post, which got my mind buzzing on this subject and particularly on how it is so often misused ... which really stuck in my craw, which connected to a paper I'm writing currently on the practical theology of the class meeting, which led me then to call Dr. Randy Maddox to discuss the issue, which led me finally to start writing a column on it for the United Methodist Reporter that I'm tentatively calling "Language Matters".

Some people might say that I'm splitting hairs - that Wesley really did care about what we would call social justice and that, since he uses the phrase social holiness in other contexts and it seems to fit our purposes, we can just allow it to do double duty.

But that's the kind of undisciplined use of language that just drives me nuts. Look, for instance, in the United Methodist Hymnal from pages 425-450, which are the hymns and prayers under the section, "SOCIAL HOLINESS". These are not social holiness hymns in the Wesleyan sense of the term; they are rather for various forms of social outreach, social justice, and world peace.

So why can't we just reorient the term to the way we see fit? Here's why: If we don't practice and preach a strong doctrine of sanctification, then we tend to fall into the typical Enlightenment mistake that we are born with our reason and will already in good shape, and that all we have to do is employ our reason to see what good needs to be done in the world to make it a better place.

But we Methodists believe in the reality of the depravity that comes from Original Sin, and we believe that it is only through God's grace that our reason and will can be restored enough to the point where we can recognize the good and pursue it in the world. We become healed of the presence and power sin through the process of sanctification.

And that happens through social holiness. Real social holiness.

When we use language loosely, because of the desire to sound Wesleyan (even when we don't know what that means), then we start messing with our entire doctrinal structure. And that's a bad idea. Besides, using Wesley to justify our own ideas because his name has authority is a lazy practice, which can approach intellectual dishonesty. If we want to invoke our founder's name and ideas, we should make sure we know what we are talking about.

By the way, if you are interested in reading about Wesley's understanding of social holiness, the two primary sources are the Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), which can be found in volume 14 of the Jackson edition of Wesley's Works, pp. 319-322, and the sermon, "Upon Our Lord's Sermon on the Mount (IV)," which can be found lots of places, including online.

The search for discipline

My current column in the UM Reporter - which you can read here - arose out of the confluence of a number of things going on in my life. The most immediate was the Duke Youth Academy and a documentary I previewed so we could show it to our students. That film, Philip Groning's Into Great Silence, chronicles the Carthusian monastic community at the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. Groning wrote to the monks back in the mid-1980s to see if they would allow him to visit them and film their lives. They told him they would get back to him, which they did ... 16 years later. They allowed Groning to stay with them for around 6 months, but he had to come alone, he had to agree not to use artificial lighting, and he had to agree not to use any narrative voice-overs in the editing of the film. The actual speaking in the film is extremely limited, confined to the chanting of worship and a couple of other scenes.

The Carthusians, founded in the late 11th century, are known as one of the most austere of Catholic religious orders. Among their other vows, they take a vow of silence, so that except for one afternoon per week, their only speaking comes in the form of chanted prayers. The rigorous lifestyle they lead of prayer, study, worship, and work is not designed to be a mass movement, and currently there are less than 500 Carthusian monks and nuns in the whole of the Catholic Church.

Watching this documentary was deeply affecting for me. Like most folks, I will never begin to approach to intensity of Carthusian spirituality in my own daily discipleship. But I have begun to start to try and develop greater disciplines in my life, from diet and exercise to Bible study and prayer. A lot of this has included not just adopting new practices, but also trying to stop engaging in old, unhelpful ones. Some of this stuff, like TV watching, obsessive e-mail checking, and the tendency not to eat or pray very mindfully, may sound like small potatoes. But it all has to do with my daily habits, and I think rearranging them to lose some bad ones and gain some positive ones can have a big long-term impact on the kind of disciple I will be. I'm not lacking in God's grace; it's just a matter of how I am responding to it.

The documentary and its connections with my own spiritual struggles made me reflect a lot on the good of discipline. That, in turn, made me think about a third angle on all of this, which is the cultural predicament in which Gen X'ers and Millennials find themselves. This is just not a very conducive world for developing healthy spiritual disciplines. We eat on the run, work too much, and spend much of our days in the virtual world of digital media. And yet, you hear all the time about people of our generation craving for a more grounded, disciplined life. It is as if we feel like our houses are built on shifting sand, and all the while our deepest desire is to be planted firmly on the rock.

So I wrote my column, both for me and for us.

And by the way, if you get a chance, pick up a copy of Into Great Silence. It is remarkable.

A new chapter begins

Today was my first official day as the pastor of Mt. Carmel United Methodist Church in Henderson, NC. This wonderful little congregation was organized in 1857, and the church they built that year was the very church I preached in this morning. The patched-up hole where the pipe for the pot belly stove used to extend up to the chimney is still visible in the ceiling of the sanctuary. The original deed to the property still hangs on the wall next to the pulpit, listing the names of the 7 women and men who founded the church. (Interestingly, it was a part of the Granville Circuit of the Methodist Protestant Church back then, not the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. I would love to know more of the history of that.)

I have no doubt that the same loving spirit the folks showed Emily and me today was the spirit that has passed down from the original 7 members. They fed us at a 'Dinner on the Grounds' following worship until I thought they were going to have to roll me out to the car.

I went off lectionary this morning to preach on the renewal of the Covenant at Shechem in Joshua 24. The reason for that had to do with story and what it means as the primary constituting factor in our lives and our faith. What strikes me about this chapter is that, when Joshua prepared the people to renew their covenant with God, he didn't start off by telling them what an all-powerful and almighty God they had who would strike them down if they went astray. Such an approach would only cause Israel to cower in fear at the power of a distant and frightening deity.

Instead, Joshua retold them their story with this God, beginning with Abraham and going right down to that very day. Joshua reasoned with the people, reminding them that God had saved them from the Egyptians, led them through the Wilderness, and carried them into the Promised Land - where they were given cities that they did not build and vineyards that they did not plant. They were called to respond to this God in faithfulness because of their history with this God - the story of their lives and the lives of their ancestors sustained through good times and bad by this God. This is a kind of prophetic leadership that happens all over the Bible, from Moses in Deuteronomy to Stephen in Acts. Here, of course, it climaxes when Joshua utters the famous words, "Choose this day who you will serve ... But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD."

The passage from Joshua kept coming back to my mind after Emily and I went with the district superintendent up to Henderson to meet with the P/PR Committee at the church in June. When our D.S., Gray Southern, asked the members of the committee to talk to us a little bit about the church's life and hopes for the future, they came back and kept sharing bits of their story with us. It was a story of a people whose faith had sustained them for over 150 years, expressing a deep desire to live in covenant faithfulness with God here in the present. I don't know that there is anything more awe-inspiring on this earth than that.

So I went home, worked at the Duke Youth Academy during June, and thought about Joshua and Mt. Carmel. It seemed like they were giving me the answer the Israelites gave to Joshua - they were wanting to renew their faith and follow God. This is something Emily and I deeply want for our own lives as well, such that I felt like the desire of this prospective new congregation was the deepest desire of my own heart as well. As I meditated on what my first sermon would be, I kept connecting Joshua 24 with 1 Peter 2 in my mind, where we are told that whereas once we were no people, now we are God's people.

And why? Because God has written us into the story. We have been claimed, and we have been redeemed. The stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone, and we have all been incorporated as living stones into that great spiritual house that God is building. Thanks be to Jesus Christ for his indescribable gift.

So the sermon pretty much wrote itself. And preaching it before that congregation this morning, I was filled with a great joy.

For Emily and me, the story continues. The same is true for the congregation at Mt. Carmel. But at least for this present chapter, our stories will be written together. May God grant us all faith.

A new look at Youth Ministry

A few days ago, I wrote a post on the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation, which took place on the campus of Duke University in July. DYA draws kids from all over the country (and this year, Haiti as well) so that they can experience two weeks of intentional Christian community and theological study. Many of the kids who attend are already discerning a calling to some form of ministry. The focus of DYA is on the practices of the Christian life in the areas of Scripture, Baptism, Holy Communion, and the Prayerful Patterning of Time.

DYA faculty director Fred Edie takes those four essential elements of the Christian life and examines them in relation to youth ministry in his new book, Book, Bath, Table, and Time: Christian Worship as Source and Resource for Youth Ministry. I read this book in preparation for my own work as a Ministry Coordinator at DYA this year, and I've got to tell you, it's one of the best practical theology-oriented books that I've read in years. I just published a review of Dr. Edie's book, which you can find here if you'd like to read it.

Dr. Edie's work takes dead aim at a lot of the market-driven, highly individualistic, experience-heavy approaches to youth ministry that are so fashionable today. (I had never thought about how problematic youth ski trips could be; the first few pages of the book offer a devastating critique of them.) He suggests that teen fashion bibles like Revolve are exactly where the market approach to youth formation is going, and he wants the church to step in and say, "Wait!" Dr. Edie calls on the church to realize that it already has the resources it needs to form youth into mature Christians, and these resources are found exactly in those sacred gifts that the Holy Spirit is constantly offering the church: its book (Scripture), bath (Baptism), table (the Lord's Supper), and time (a form of life patterned by worship and prayer).

Don't be mistaken. This is not a book that's going to offer you the 10 Hottest New Ideas in Youth Ministry. But it's going to do something much better. It's going to engage you in thinking about how we form (or fail to form) our youth in truly theological ways. It's going to help you realize how new the oldest practices of the church can be, exactly because we haven't been using them with our very own children and youth. And it's going to suggest that it is really possible to integrate youth ministry into the full life of the church, instead of treating it like some odd appendage on the body of Christ that no one is sure what to do with.

This is a great book not just for youth ministers, but for pastors as well. Dr. Edie is an engaging, witty, and theologically insightful writer. Check it out.