More blog updates

I've taken a part of the Thanksgiving holiday to finish updating the Archives of Gen-X Rising. Now when you click on the 'UM Reporter Columns' in the left-hand sidebar, you'll find archived columns stretching back through 2005, which covers almost everything I've written in the United Methodist Reporter.

There are a few glitches that I will try to iron out in the coming days. One very strange one is that my archive section doesn't seem to want to post anything from late December in any year from 2005 to 2007. Not sure why that is happening, but it only cuts out about 3 or 4 total columns. Also, the Reporter's website does not appear to have my first two Gen-X Rising columns online, which were entitled, "Get Ready, Church: Here Come Gen Xers" and "Single with cheese: Are we listening?" I'd like to get those up eventually, because they really serve as the introduction to what I've been trying to do with the column since its inception.

Last month, this blog went over 21,000 unique monthly visitors for the first time. Thanks for reading! I hope to continue to provide the kind of content that will make my readers want to come back regularly. The past two-and-a-half years have been a lot of fun, and I appreciate the feedback you all have given me on the site and its content.

In the mean time, enjoy perusing through the archived Reporter columns. My dual focus as a columnist has always been on a) Writing about issues that concern Gen Xers and Milennials in the church, and b) Writing about theology and ministry from the perspective of a Gen X pastor. I hope I have been able to do both consistently.

Peace +
Andrew

Thanks be to God

Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
who wondrous things has done, in whom this world rejoices;
who from our mothers' arms has blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
with ever joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us;
and keep us still in grace, and guide us when perplexed;
and free us from all ills, in this world and the next.

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given;
the Son, and him who reigns with them in highest heaven;
the one eternal God, whom earth and heaven adore;
for thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore.

- by Martin Rinkart (1636); trans. Catherine Winkworth (1858);
The United Methodist Hymnal, 102

O come, O come, Emmanuel

This Sunday we enter the season of Advent, that time of anticipation and expectation when we watch and wait for the birth of the Christ child.

Perhaps now more than any year in recent times, we need Advent. We are living in a world that seems to be situated atop shifting sand. The economy is weakening rapidly. We hear of wars and rumors of wars. And many people are unsure of what the future holds for them.

I reflect on the importance of Advent in my new UM Reporter column, "Advent message needed amid 21st-century fears." At this time of the year, we have the opportunity to pause and reflect on the wonder and mystery of the Incarnation. I think at times we tend to be overly-sentimental about the familiar story of Jesus' birth. While it is good for us to know this story in our very bones, it's also good for us to look afresh on what it means for God to come into the world in human form, so that we might be saved from this world of sin and death.

At my church this Sunday, we will light the first candle in the Advent wreath, sing the great Charles Wesley hymn, "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus," and remember anew the great promise of Christ's coming through the rich liturgy of the church.

He is coming. Hallelujah!

A voice for the voiceless

Last year, I got to know a homeless man in Durham named Nick through a feeding and assistance ministry here called the "15-501 Ministry" (in reference to the highway near where many of the homeless in Durham live). Nick was a veteran who had a history of substance abuse and suffered from a painful back condition. But he was also a leader among the homeless, helping local church and social service folks look after those in need. He also regulated the forest community where many of the homeless pitched their tents, and in that sense, he made their "home" a safer place to live.

Nick died a few days ago in a tragic circumstance. He had finally gotten approval to have his back surgery last summer, and doctors at Duke Hospital worked to repair some of the damage from which he suffered. But he also contracted a staph infection while in the hospital, which eventually claimed his life. Nick worshiped at the church my wife and I attended at the time, and his death has been a real blow to that church community. He is now buried in the church's graveyard.

Nick's witness to us and to those he touched was considerable, and I am thankful for having known him. In his own way, he was a voice for the voiceless in our world - the poor and downtrodden, who are all-too-often forgotten even by the Christians among us.

One of those who got to know Nick wrote the following letter to the editor of the local newspaper. I share it with you, as a way of continuing to help Nick have a voice:

"One of the men who panhandle at 15-501 and I-40 died this month.

His name was 'Bulldog.' He had lived in the woods and panhandled at the same interstate ramp for about six years. 'Bulldog' was a former Navy Seal who, ironically, was buried on Veteran's Day.

'Bulldog' died, in part, due to his lack of health insurance. Like most homeless people, 'Bulldog's' health history was complex and his treatment inadequate. He had learned to cope with numerous chronic health problems, but he eventually died from a staph infection that went untreated for too long.

About 35 people attended 'Bulldog's' funeral. some were what 'Bulldog' called 'church people.' They were serious Christians who tried for several years to help 'Bulldog' with his spiritual and physical needs.

The rest were fellow panhandlers who thought of themselves as 'Bulldog's' family. Every person talked about how 'Bulldog' had touched his or her life. They described him as a strong, but troubled person. They talked about him as a 'protector' of fellow panhandlers. They expressed respect for his willingness to protect his community of panhandlers the same way he was willing to protect his country at an earlier point.

'Bulldog' was not a hero, but he was a decent person who was willing to help the people around him. Unfortunately, to most of us who drove past him every day, he was invisible.

His real name was Nick. He died at 49."

Submitted by
Michael Owen
Chapel Hill, NC
November 20, 2008.

Good-bye for now, Nick. May the God of peace give eternal rest to your soul.

What's so common about our era?

Is this the year A.D. 2008, or is it 2008 C.E.?

And what's the difference?

Anyone who has been around academia the past few years has seen the rise of an alternative nomenclature to describe our dating system. The BC ("Before Christ") and AD ("Anno Domini") is being replaced by BCE ("Before the Common Era") and CE ("Common Era").

I saw this new nomenclature explained on a recent visit to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences' exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls (an exhibit I highly recommend if you're in the Raleigh area, by the way. You can find the website here.).

A sign in the middle of the exhibit reads, "BCE means 'Before Common Era' and is the scholarly equivalent to BC, meaning 'Before Christ.' CE means 'Common Era' and is equivalent to AD, meaning 'Anno Domini' or 'Year of Our Lord.' BCE and CE have no religious connotations and are more acceptable to people of all beliefs and backgrounds."

Wikipedia gives a pretty good account of the background of the BCE/CE usage, although its attempts to tie the contemporary scholarly preference for it with previous historical examples are dubious. I encountered the BCE/CE notation for the first time as a divinity student in the late 1990s, ironically enough. And though there may be some parallel examples in previous Jewish and Communist history (as Wikipedia notes), my understanding of the academic use of BCE/CE is that it is very recent and has no real organic connection to past alternative nomenclatures.

The real crux of the issue is not the abbreviations themselves, but the dating system that underlies them. The year A.D. 1 cooresponds exactly with the year 1 C.E., and both of them refer to the traditional date of the birth of Jesus Christ. So regardless of the abbreviation used to describe the year in question, the date still refers to a system based on a Christian ordering of history.

I really have two questions for those who prefer BCE/CE: First, if you are really wanting to get away from a religious connotation to our dating system, why wouldn't you try to change the system itself rather than just the outward terms? And second, what in the heck does "common" refer to in the BCE/CE references?

After the French Revolution, the government of France adopted a completely new numbering system based off of the beginning of the revolution itself. Their system didn't survive as long as Napolean did, but it seems a more logical way of replacing the Christian calendar for those who want to do so. The key is that you need a starting point; for Christians, it is the birth of Jesus, while for the French, it was the beginning of their new republic.

But just changing the outward terms while retaining the system isn't really de-Christianizing the calendar at all. So long as this is the year 2008, we still date world history by the birth date of Jesus Christ.

And that is just how it ought to be.

Holy Communion Online(?)

Here's a question: If you are sitting alone in your living room, with a cracker and a bottle of grape juice, listening to a recording of a pastor saying the Holy Communion liturgy over the Internet, and then you proceed to consume that cracker and grape juice, have you just received the sacrament?

Have you actually taken Holy Communion?

According to United Methodist doctrine, the answer is no. According to our church's sacramental teaching, as contained at various points in our Book of Discipline, Book of Resolutions (i.e., the "This Holy Mystery" statement), and the Book of Worship, that kind of exercise does not rise to the level of Eucharist.

I could sketch out the reasons why this is the case, but if you don't know them already, I would simply say to go to the relevant places in our doctrine and read them for yourselves. Our sacramental doctrine (like a lot of our church's doctrinal positions) could use some development. But what we've got is good, and it expresses a deep sense of the power of the grace of Jesus Christ active in the community of believers through the church's liturgy.

What we do not allow are interpretations of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper that are so far out of bounds that they do damage to the church's historic understanding of the sacramental meal and endanger the laity's reception of the gospel message of salvation.

Why am I stressing this so much? Well, a couple of weeks ago, my wife showed me this article in Newsweek, which highlights a new movement sometimes called "Virtual Communion." It involves pastors and churches inviting people to "celebrate" Holy Communion from the comfort of their couches, while viewing websites where Eucharistic worship services are shown or the liturgy is recited.

One of the Newsweek's articles featured websites is this one, which calls itself "A United Methodist Celebration of Holy Communion." In the name of inclusivity (the term always used to advocate for radical individualism in the church), the site provides web surfers the opportunity to receive the Lord's Supper with no other companion than a disembodied, previously recorded voice while they participate from their sofas.

I wrote a column in the United Methodist Reporter about this phenomenon last week, which you can read here. I hesitated to put my thoughts on paper, because the creator of the site (a retired UM local pastor) clearly believes he is doing the church a good service. But good intentions are simply not enough. This website represents something not just mistaken; it is dangerous. And in such a situation the Lord's Supper must be defended.

Not long ago, I posted a satire called "Winnie-the-Poohcharist" (in two installments, which you can read here and here) about the ridiculous attempts of some churches to make the sacrament more "relevant" by employing cheap gimmicks from pop culture. I now wonder if I should even have written that satire, because of the danger that it would be misunderstood (as, indeed, it was in some of the comments left on the blog posts).

So let me be clear: The sacrament of Holy Communion is the single most important act of worship in which we, as disciples of the Incarnate God, can engage. It should not be abused, maltreated, or deformed in its character. It requires sound teaching for it to be understood and celebrated with fidelity. The Eucharist is the very vehicle of God's salvation of us. It is difficult to over-exaggerate its importance. It is not to be changed to suit our consumerist tastes, but rather to be understood in the great mystery of grace that it offers us.

If you are interested in reading another interpretation of this same issue, check out Kevin Baker's blog here.

[Update: The website dealt with on this blog post and the linked UM Reporter column was also highlighted in the "Century Marks" section of the December 2, 2008, issue of The Christian Century. As of this update on January 11, 2009, the Holy Communion Online website was still deactivated.]

"We're in a recession"

Those words, spoken by Robert Brusca, an economist at FAO Economics, say what we all pretty much know to be true. Politicians tend to want to spin the news on the economy in the best way possible, so you'll almost never hear them use the "r" word. But the most recent news out about the economy - 240,000 more jobs lost in October and an unemployment rate up to 6.5% - shows an economy that is sputtering, at best.

The job loss in October brings the yearly total up to 1.2 million, and more than half of those have been lost in the last three months alone. The unemployment rate of 6.5% is the highest it has been since 1994. One of the most distressing aspects of the current economic downturn is the pessimistic tone of the economists that are being interviewed for stories like this one in the New York Times and this one for CNN Money.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that the country's economic woes are going to cause Christians to have to really pay attention to how we are caring for one another. When we see our brothers and sisters around us suffering - whether through job loss, drop-off in business, or layoff - it should call us to reach out our hands in love and support. This is exactly what the church is called to do, and there ain't no shame in it. In my own church, we have begun to help more families with grocery needs and gas cards. We haven't seen anything really devastating yet (such as job loss by a family's primary breadwinner), but I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen soon.

Have you seen the effects of the economic downturn in your own community? What is your church doing to meet the needs that you are seeing?

An election day story

Gertrude Baines voted for Barack Obama yesterday, just like more than 63 million other Americans. No big deal, right?

Well, it's no big deal except that Gertrude is 114 years old.

She's the third-oldest person in the world, born during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. An African-American, Gertrude is actually the daughter of freed slaves. The significance of her vote, perhaps more than any other cast in the nation yesterday, should not escape us.

The Los Angeles Times tells the story of Gertrude's vote in this story. Check it out. Great stuff.

Hey, Arkansas: Just Say No

Say no to the lottery amendment today, that is!

This is my one piece of direct political advocacy for the election today, largely because for Christians I think this is a completely unambiguous issue.

Lt. Gov. Bill Halter has been pushing for this amendment as a way to fund education. Halter has been trying to dupe Arkansans in the same way that lotteries do: telling them that it is possible to get rich quickly and painlessly, solving all your problems. For Halter, the issue is state-funded education. For lotteries, the issue is life in general.

But lotteries are a bad, bad idea. Here are some reasons why:

1) Lotteries are equivalent to a regressive tax on the poor, who buy them in inordinate quantities relative to the wealthy. I see this everyday in gas stations in North Carolina, and it is depressing.

2) Lotteries hold out a false sense of hope and teach a poor work ethic. It is a terrible lesson for the children of our society, and it teaches the foolishness that you can 'get something for nothing.'

3) Lotteries crack the door open for other types of legalized gambling. And with expanded legalized gambling comes organized drime, drug trafficking, alcoholism, and other social problems.

4) The United Methodist Church holds a sensible anti-gambling position. Here it is from Paragraph 163G of The United Methodist Book of Discipline:

"Gambling is a menace to society, deadly to the best interests of moral, social, economic, and spiritual life and destructive of good government. As an act of faith and concern, Christians should abstain from gambling and should strive to minister to those victimized by the practice. Where gambling has become addictive, the Church will encourage such individuals to receive therapeutic assistance so that the individual's energies may be redirected into positive and constructive ends. The Church should promote standards and personal lifestyles that would make unneccessary and undesirable the resort to commercial gambling - including public lotteries - as a recreation, as an escape, or as a means of producing public revenue or funds for support of charities or government."

Ultimately, lotteries are ways for cowardly politicians to try to solve difficult problems that they don't want to solve through either a)tax increases or b)budget cuts. So their answer is to introduce a societal practice that has been shown to have ill effects on many different levels while often not solving the very problems they were designed to solve in the first place. Politicians like Halter need to be rewarded for their poor leadership by being voted out of office at the next opportunity. But first, their bad ideas have to be voted down.

If you are a resident of the state of Arkansas, please vote 'no' to the lottery measure and encourage others to do the same.

Is 'mainline' Wesleyan?

Scott Kisker, a professor at Wesley Theological Seminary, recent published a book entitled, Mainline or Methodist? Rediscovering Our Evangelistic Mission.

I review this book in the current issue of the United Methodist Reporter.

Considering that many United Methodists take pride in the description of their church as "mainline," Dr. Kisker's thesis is a bold one. He argues that our claim of mainline identity is deeply connected to our sense of wanting to be acceptable to the broader American culture. And in that sense, it is un-Wesleyan and un-Methodist.

Dr. Kisker has done a good job in several ways through this book, which is published by Discipleship Resources and is intended largely for a lay reading audience.

He writes about both early Methodist history and Wesleyan theology in a style designed to be accessible to the general church. And he attempts to explain how very counter-cultural the original Methodists tried to be. They weren't trying to 'fit in.' They were seeking passionately after salvation, a reality that is often dependent on not fitting in with what the broader world says is the way we should live and relate to one another. And a large part of their mission was to offer a different way of life to others, which can only come about when discipleship is not treated as equivalent with cultural conformity.

This is a timely book, not least because the church still tries desperately to be treated as acceptable to the broader culture in so many ways. And when we do that, our gospel is rendered tame and our discipleship is rendered toothless. Dr. Kisker is simply trying the church to look around and realize how far we have strayed from our original mission.

It is a message we would do well to heed.