Young Adult no more (?)

At the age of 35, Eric Van Meter reflects on the experience that many Gen Xers are having these days: that of moving past the fabled "young adult" category.

As Eric puts it, he is now in "the border country between young adult and unqualified adult."

His column series in the Reporter began here, and in his new article, he reports that he is more hopeful than ever. He talks about the somewhat strange experience of moving out of that phase of life where everyone is excited about who you are (young, and therefore the hope for the future) but no one wants to listen to you (because you're young, and you don't know anything).

In your 30s, people do start to listen to you. And with that age, you also tend to mellow a little bit. You start to take the less savory and more frustrating parts of your own denomination as an inevitable part of what it means to be in a church that is run by real, broken people.

But - and this is an important but - you still have the desire to work for the change you so ardently hoped for back in the more idealistic days of your 20s. This is probably a common experience of all generations; it's just that Gen Xers are only now beginning to realize it for themselves.

Eric points to the way that the Arkansas Conference Vision Team invited a bunch of Gen X pastors to help think about what it would mean to "youthify" the church in Arkansas. As Eric rightly points out, the willingness of the Vision Team to make such a move is a very positive step. The group Eric took part in did some great brainstorming. Now the annual conference needs to show that it can not only listen but also take action based on what they heard.

In my recent article in Faith & Leadership, I specifically used Eric as an example of one who has navigated the waters of ministry as a young adult and made a positive impact. I also believe he represents a type for hundreds of other young (yes, still young) United Methodist pastors out there. Let's not forget the difference we can make!

Ash Wednesday Meditation

Scripture: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Have you ever noticed that, during election seasons, politicians never fail to remind us what committed Christians they are? In the 2000 presidential debates, candidates were asked about their favorite philosophers. After hearing the responses of his competitors, then-Governor George W. Bush answered, "Jesus Christ." Never mind that Jesus wouldn't have considered himself a philosopher (and no subsequent philosopher would either), Gov. Bush had seen a chance to show his piety in front of a national audience, and he took it. Then, in the 2004 election season, Howard Dean gushed about his "favorite" book of the Bible - Job - which he incorrectly located in the New Testament. Gov. Dean's own piety looked fairly flimsy at that gaffe.

When I heard those comments at the time they were made, I neither admired Bush nor felt sorry for Dean. I simply doubted both of them. The Bushes, Deans, and other luminaries of the political world would be more believable in their piety if the rest of their lives (especially their political lives) bore the fruits of an active faith. Call me cynical, but I think that great power and great faith are just hard to achieve together; we can pursue one or the other, but pursuing both is almost impossible.

"Power corrupts," the British nobleman Lord Acton wrote in an 1887 letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, "and absolute power corrupts absolutely." But don't take his word for it. The Bible has plenty to say about what worldly power does to the viability of faith.

The powers and principalities of the world are, in point of fact, regular bad guys in Scripture. Jesus tells his disciples that the faithful will be forced to "stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them" (Mark 13:9). The Apostle Paul fulfilled that prophecy just a few years later, in his recurring run-ins with earthly authorities. His own life is a testament to the conflict inherent in confessing the lordship of Jesus Christ over that of kings and governors, and not even his powerful preaching was able to make King Herod Agrippa or the Roman governor, Festus, convert to the Christian faith (see Acts 26). Nevertheless, in his letter to the Colossians, Paul tells the church that, through the cross, Jesus "disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it" (Colossians 2:15).

So why would both our Savior and our greatest missionary be so negative toward the rulers of this world? Why would they preach against earthly power instead of backing the candidate who most closely matches their own religious views?

Well, rulers are those who have power. They have say over how tax money gets spent, who gets preferential treatment from the government, and even who lives and dies. Power like that will go to your head. Rulers are apt to make decisions based on where their power comes from and whom they think they have to please. When they think they can get away with it, earthly rulers will even crucify the Son of God (see Pilate, Pontius).

But let's not throw stones. Our messy present is no more or less messy than the messiness of other times and places. Power will always be wielded in lots of ways. Governments will rule over their citizens - that's certainly one way. But power is also wielded in families, in relationships, and in the workplace. It simply won't do for Christians to go pointing out the specks in others' eyes while we have a forest of timber in our own. And so the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount can help to serve as a corrective to all our power relationships - whether we happen to be Barack the President or Joe the Plumber.

How should we practice our piety? On the street corners, or babbling with many words? With grandiose demonstrations and pronouncements? As a way to garner power or prestige in the public eye?

Jesus teaches us to practice our religion for the purpose of faith rather than status. He would have us seek humility rather than power - storing up treasures in heaven rather than on earth. And his sacrifice on our behalf shows us why: true status and true power come only from giving of oneself completely for others (Philippians 2). This is what it means to not be conformed by the ways of this world but rather to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12).

Moreover, our teacher is also our pattern. The one who shows us the way is the Way himself. And because of that, power and piety themselves are definitively recast. The world and its problems - in politics, in war, and in the economy - can tempt us to get depressed. But the real reason for depression comes when we start thinking that our ultimate hope is grounded in what party controls the White House or Congress. I don't care if you are a Democrat or a Republican or something else - if you're betting that your party has the right plan for The Future, then you are betting on the wrong horse. If our hope is in those who wield great earthly power, or if our hope is in our own attempts to attain such power, then we are doomed.

"Happy are those ... whose hope is in the LORD their God" (Psalm 146:5). The Apostle Paul writes, "...[W]e have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people" (1 Timothy 4:10).

When our hope is in God, we have no need to act publicly pious, no need to impress others with superficial signs of our faith. We have only to be willing to follow Jesus and learn from him, all the way to his destination, which remains the cross at Calvary.

And that calls us to realize why we would come together as Christians on this one Wednesday of the year at all. Today we begin the season of Lent, when we will prepare for the joy of Easter by walking 40 difficult days with Jesus. He came into the world for us and for our salvation, but the path he took to bring us that gift required everything of him. It required a cross. And Lent calls us to look at the cross first as a symbol of mortality and death. The instrument of our salvation is also an instrument of execution. That should humble us.

Jesus' own example calls us to make our own sacrifices to God - sacrifices of love and discipleship. We do that during Lent, beginning today as we mark our repentance and commitment to him by receiving the ashes on our foreheads. We are all created out of dust, and to the dust we shall return. The only reason why hearing that message today is good news is because we have a Savior who conquered death by dying himself and rising again.

Let us remember that the way of the Christian is not health, wealth, and worldly success. It is being made to be like Christ, who laid down his life to save us. And his command to us is to "love one another as I have loved you" (John 13:34). When we think about how far that love goes, it should humble us indeed. It is the greatest power the world has ever known.

The Earth is Awesome

Creation Care and Ecological Stewardship -- how long have you heard those terms?

My guess is not long, at least in terms of years. But as the fragility of our world becomes more and more apparent, it seems like Christians are finally waking up to our need to be good caretakers of God's creation.

I have a colleague in the Th.D program here at Duke named Presian Burroughs. Presian is interested in the intersection of theology and ecology, and at my suggestion she recently wrote a guest column in the United Methodist Reporter looking at the way the economy and the environment have an impact on one another.

Specifically, Presian is calling for Christians to look at how our levels of consumption impact the world around us. In the article, she asks, "How can the nation promote human justice and health as well ecological justice and health? And the question facing Christians is: How are we to hold in tension the love of neighbor and the command to till and keep the earth, assuring its flourishing (Gen 2:15)?"

As Presian notes, rightly I think, these are crucial questions to consider at a time when the Obama administration is doing everything it can to repair our damaged economy. As we do so, it is necessary to ask how our consumer capitalistic lifestyles use (and abuse) the earth's resources.

I think what Presian has done in this article is significant. People of our generation see stewardship of the earth as a Christian issue in a way that previous generations did not (mostly because they simply didn't have to). But there is a certain lag in the way that commitment is getting expressed in the popular Christian press. I'm glad to see Presian's voice in the Reporter and hope it is the beginning of a trend.

Right before our eyes

The English language has changed right before our eyes.

The fact of change is no surprise. Anyone who has tried to read a line or two of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (which dates from a little less than 700 years ago) knows that the English we speak today is markedly different than that of our ancestors.

But what is striking to me is that there is one very interesting example of linguistic change that is going on right now, and which has its roots in cultural shifts of the last 40 years.

Now, I've never studied linguistics, and I'm not even particularly good at foreign languages. But I think the history of language is one of the most fascinating of all academic subjects, and I often wish I had encountered it earlier on in life. My first real exposure to it was a few years ago, when I listened to Prof. Seth Lerer's course through the Teaching Company, entitled, "History of the English Language."

One of the things that Prof. Lerer points out in that series of lectures is that the vocabulary and grammar of a language evolve over time. Anyone who has studied both Latin and one of the modern Romance languages (which are direct descendants of Latin) can see this easily. Latin is a highly inflected language, which can do without such grammatical features as articles and prepositions. Word order in a Latin sentence is only minimally important. For a language like French or Spanish, on the other hand, there are lots of articles and prepositions. And while both those languages are much more inflected than modern English, for instance, the grammatical sense of a sentence is still heavily dependent on word order.

I'm not entirely sure why such feaures as morphology (the way words are formed) and syntax (the way sentences are constructed) change in the way they do. Certainly, geographic and political pressures play a role. For instance, one of the reasons English has evolved in the way that it has is because of the competing pressures of Anglo-Saxon, French, and Danish during the Middle Ages (when groups of speakers of those various languages all vied for political control of England, the winners being the Norman French after the Battle of Hastings in 1066). But there are some shifts that I've never heard a linguist explain with any satisfaction. For instance, why the heck did the "Great Vowel Shift" occur in the 15th and 16th centuries in Great Britain, such that English-speakers now pronounce our vowels with 'long' and 'short' sounds in a way different from other European languages? Have you ever thought about how strange that is?

But enough of that. Here's the point of this post: In the past 40 years or so, English has begun to use its third-person plural pronoun in a way never before seen. We have gender-specific singular third-person pronouns (he, his, him; she, hers, her), while our plural third-person pronoun (they, theirs, them) is neuter. This means that you would say, "If Andrew wants to go to the ballgame, he will have to purchase a ticket." Or, "I gave Sally the book that belongs to her." Or, "David and Amanda need to wash their car."

The problem that leaves is what to do with a hypothetical individual whose gender is not known. In the past, the grammatical custom (and I use 'custom' because I am unsure whether we should ever talk about grammatical 'rules') has been to assume the masculine. So, a proper sentence would read as follows: "If someone wants to eat lunch, he will have to pay for it." Or, "Everyone will want his own seat."

This raises obvious problems in our current culture, where assuming the masculine in a grammatical sense is seen as prejudicial and unfair. We view gender in starker terms than speakers of other languages do, I think. For instance, note that we do not make a distinction between grammatical gender and biological gender (as is the case in many European languages). In Spanish, the house is la casa, even though a house is not a female. And the cat is el gato, even if the particular cat in question is female! But in English, the house is the house, and the cat is the cat. Our nouns are all, essentially, neuter (with a few limited exceptions). Only nouns pointing to a biologically gendered subject receive grammatical gender.

Now I'm not sure whether this is the case, but my guess is that our lack of grammatical gender in modern English has made us less tolerant of assuming biological gender in our sentence construction when the actual subject in question is hypothetical. In speaking, if I constantly said, "Anyone who wants a good grade will have to do his best work," I can assure you that it would be noticed with disapproval by my hearers.

So what is the solution? Well, the fascinating thing about language is that new rules are never planned and implemented in a programmatic way. They almost always arise due to some pressure and result in changed customs of usage. So a few years ago, you might hear something like this: "Anyone who wants a good grade will have to do his or her best work." To be sensitive to the females in any mixed gender assembly, the "his or her" would be employed to show that the females were duly noted and valued. But the problem is that saying "his or her" (or "he or she") every time a situation like that comes up is cumbersome - particularly in spoken English.

Thus, the culture is arriving at what will probably become a new standard usage. And significantly, it involves a change in English syntax that results in a truly new meaning for our third person plural pronoun. It looks like this:

"Everyone wants to own their own home."

"If someone wants to go to the game, they will have to buy their own ticket."

"Anybody can write a book, but it takes a good author to have their first book published."

You see what's happening here? All those subjects - everyone, someone, anybody, and author - are all singular and of unknown gender. But whereas past usage would dictate that you use the corresponding masculine pronouns - his, he, his, and his - the language is changing to privilege the only neuter third-person pronoun available. And ironically, it is plural.

This is fascinating. 'It' and 'its' at first glance seem to be a better choice than 'they' and 'theirs,' but our singular neuter third-person pronouns don't ever work in English to describe human beings. So because of a changing political culture that values women in different ways (which, some would say, means that it values them at all in the public sphere), we are changing our language such that a formerly plural pronoun can now be correctly used as either singular or plural.

If you've read this far, I would suggest that you perk up your ears and listen for the way this new syntax gets used in daily speech. I've been doing it for the past few weeks, and I can tell you that it is nearly universal. In the past few days, I've heard it used in a sermon, multiple public lectures, and casual conversation.

So is this good or bad? Well, it's neither. Grammar is morally neutral, and it shifts so that human beings can better communicate with one another. Our culture has achieved something of a consensus in deciding that hypothetical subjects of unknown gender in a sentence should no longer be assumed to be male. And since we lack an appropriate singular third-person pronoun to represent ambiguous gender, we've simply taken a neuter (plural) pronoun and pressed it into service.

The English language has changed.

Right before our eyes.

Signs of Spring

It's 65 degrees in Durham today. On February 13th, that is. Not sure if that's supposed to happen, but it did allow for these flowers to pop their heads up and say hello this morning.

Seeing nature in bloom gave a real boost to my spirits this morning. It brought to mind the great psalm of creation:

These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face, they are terrified;
when you take away their breath, they die
and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit, they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth.
- Psalm 104:27-30

Spring is on the way!

(And by the way, what's the name of those little guys growing in my backyard?)

Church: Community or Institution?

The church's future depends on our ability to hold two key ecclesial concepts together: community and institution.

I make the case for this claim in a new article - which you can find here - where I look at the reality of the church as both a community of Jesus' followers and an institution complete with church hierarchy, bureaucracy, and connectional structure.

In my experience, Gen Xers tend to gravitate toward the notion of the church as a community. We are skeptical of the 'big institution' approach of our forebears in the Builder Generation, but we're also turned off by the 'save the world' idealism of the Baby Boomers. So we tend to retreat into the local, focusing on our own immediate communities and their surrounding environment.

Don't get me wrong: I think the localism of the Xers is one of their best qualities. It means that we are asking tough questions about the character of the church. As a disciplined community of Jesus' followers, the church must not be a place where cheap grace is preached and practiced. I don't think it's any coincidence that Xers in general tend to be turned off by the "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors" marketing campaign of the larger church. It's not that we don't have open hearts; it's just that we don't want the gospel watered down to some nebulous slogan just for the purpose of trying to make ourselves seem more likable.

On the other hand, the same local focus that helps Xers to think seriously about matters of personal and communal discipleship can sometimes hinder them when it comes to thinking about their responsibility to the institutional church. We tend to neglect the larger church because we don't see what good it does for us and our communities. (Shane Claiborne, who I posted about positively last week, is an interesting example of this trend. Shane grew up in the UMC, but the radical discipleship he practices now is essentially in a free church evangelical context. When he came to speak at Duke a few weeks ago, he made several contradictory statements that made me want to ask him about his understanding of ecclesial authority. Alas, I didn't get the chance.)

But it's important for Xers to remember that the church is bigger than the local congregation. Just as we are individual members of the one body, so too are our congregations individual members of the body of Christ. We live in an age skeptical of big institutions or not, it is true. But in my mind, that gives us all the more reason to reform our own institution so that it better reflects the church God would have it be.

The article, by the way, was published by Faith & Leadership, a new venture of Leadership Education program at Duke Divinity School. It is a kind of cross between an online magazine, a blog, and an all-purpose resource center for church leadership. The site went online a couple of weeks ago, and they've already featured some really insightful articles and commentaries.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this issue of community vs. institution, particularly if you have time to read the article. I consider it to be crucial to our leadership of the church over the next few decades.

Shane Claiborne's Christianity

Shane Claiborne is changing our understanding of Christian discipleship.

In a gentle yet relentless sort of way, his writing and speaking are calling Christians to account for the way we go about following Jesus. If you don't know what I'm talking about, pick up a copy of Shane's Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. Part memoir and part call to action, this book gives an overview of Shane and his vision for discipleship.

Shane came to Duke to speak a couple of weeks ago, and his visit prompted me to pen a column about him in the current issue of the United Methodist Reporter. As I point out in the article, when you try to tell someone about Shane's message, it all sounds like Sunday School 101: love the poor, don't give in to violence, share your possessions, go out and make disciples, faith in Jesus means acting in addition to believing.

But of course, with Shane it goes much deeper than Sunday school. As he points out in his warm and funny way, most of us fall way short of what Jesus would have us do. We get so caught up in our lives and so shaped by the culture that our Christianity ends up pretty superficial. Shane's message is that it doesn't have to be that way; we really can live gospel-formed lives if we are willing to take the Jesus we find in the Bible seriously.

I think Shane's message has a special relevance for folks like me who are part of large denominational church bodies. We tend to look for 'macro' fixes to our problems - the kind you get by passing legislation at General Conference. Shane's tack is very much a 'micro' approach to discipleship. You change the church by changing individual lives. You engage in your own neighborhood, and you love your neighbors. In Irresistible Revolution, Shane describes describes faithful Christians as "people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about." That sounds simple, but it is not the pattern of discipleship we practice most of the time.

If you haven't read Shane, pick up a copy of one of his books. But be prepared for him to shake you down to the foundations.

[For those who are interested, here's a link to The Simple Way in Philadelphia, the intentional community that Shane helped to found and where he currently lives.]

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

So it's a little off-script for me, but I wanted to point you to this NY Times story about the upcoming movie, Watchmen. It does a wonderful job relating the challenges of bringing the original Watchmen graphic novel to the screen, focusing largely on the balancing act played by director Zack Snyder (who had to appease studio heads and fans alike, all while trying to condense an extremely complex story down to movie-size).

If the trailers are any indication (available at the Watchmen homepage), this movie is gonna rock. I grew up reading comics by the ton, but somehow I never managed to read Watchmen when it was originally released in serial form. I picked it up last summer on the advice of my two older brothers, and I was astounded. It simply operates on more levels than any comic I've ever come across.

Can there really be such a thing as a hero in this day and age? And have we all become so utilitarian that we can always make the ends justify the means in our actions and lives? Is there no such thing as a concept of a life well-lived, anymore? And do we have no common good? Watchmen take up all these questions, and it provides no easy answers. For those of you who think of comic book stories in the relatively two-dimensional mode of Superman, prepare to be surprised.

The movie reportedly clocks in at 2 hours and 40 minutes. In the Times article, Snyder acts as if he went to great pains to stay faithful to the original story, which is a good thing. That, combined with the CGI technology that will allow them to do justice to Dr. Manhattan, means this could be a really good film adaptation. Go see it, but read the graphic novel first. Watchmen opens in theaters on March 6.

[Update: Nick Hunt of CNN.com has a good story on the upcoming release of Watchmen, which you can find here.]

[Update: A.O. Scott of the New York Times published a review of Watchmen on March 6, 2009, which you can read here.]