what is church?

“Church” is an interesting word. It is multi-valent, multi-layered, and carries many meanings. It is a building, where something pertaining to religious practice takes place. It is a doctrine in the Christian faith. It is where Jesus is when “two or three are gathered”. It is an institution. It is a practice. It is a divinely-ordered way of being. It is a way of seeing the world.

There have been a myriad of examples over time of what church can look like. It’s a few people meeting regularly in a home to share meals and tell stories. It’s a “righteous” few who believe particular things in particular ways. It’s a place people go on Sunday morning because they think they “should” go, or are afraid of what people might think about them if they didn’t go. It is a community of people who share each other’s joys and sorrows and do their best to be present for one another. It is people who plant gardens in vacant lots. It is a place people go for a hot meal and a warm bed.

I’ve come to understand church to be one of the most complicated doctrines in Christian theology because it is so loaded – it is an institution, and yet it is so much bigger than what we understand institutions to be, it is noble ideas and lofty goals and it is also destructive and can bring out the worst in people.

I believe that Christian discipleship must be lived out in community, as the ability to live in peace with others is fundamental to what it means to be a disciple. I also know, however, that we often fall short of actually supporting one another in our discipleship.

I’ve been working with a committee on writing a statement about ecclesiology – the theological word for what we believe about church. It’s a hard task, really hard. And yet I hope that this struggle and difficulty means that we are actually perhaps getting at some truth about what church is about.

The picture at the top of this post is of an art piece that used to be in a public park here in Vancouver, the sculpture is entitled “Device to Root Out Evil”. When I first saw this piece I gasped in excitement at the novelty of an upside-down church, as there are definitely days when I feel like the church ought to be turned upside-down. When I learned the title, I was even more in awe of it, realizing what a critique it poses to all churches. Christianity has thought of itself as such a device for far too long. What if what church is about is not rooting-out evil, but cultivating goodness and flourishing? What would that look like?

I think this question of how the church ought to view it’s task and what that is is a question of utmost importance. All Christians should be engaged in the task of exploring how best they can live out their discipleship in community – in church. This may not look quite the same as it has in the past – in fact, it probably shouldn’t look at all like it used to – and that’s a good thing, because God is always doing new things and calling us into new life. How will you contribute to this exciting discernment of community?

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jazzlawyer/59200450/
The photo above is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

the gospel is political

I overheard an interesting conversation while grading papers at a cafe this afternoon.

Two well-dressed businessmen are having coffee, my ears perk up (involuntarily! what is it about people talking about faith in public places that always draws my attention?) when one tells the other that he is Catholic and his wife regularly attends a Catholic church. He says he would too “if there was a good priest. But this one,” he lowers his voice and surreptitiously looks around, “this one is a homosexual, a blatant homosexual. And he’s always going on about how we should be on the side of the immigrants, always so political! He’s always preaching politics, which have no place in the pulpit.”

He sees me looking at him (I can’t help but look!) and lowers his voice further, I look away, pretending not to have heard. Later on I hear him say “You know, a good priest is worth his weight in gold.” I repress my desire to say “The priest you’re talking about sounds like a very good priest to me.”

How interesting that people have such set-in-stone views about the role of church, what it is about, what it means to preach “good news,” the gospel. I wonder sometimes if these people have actually ever read the Bible, have actually ever realized how political the gospels are. There really is no getting around the fact that Jesus’ admonitions that we feed the poor, liberate the oppressed, free the captives, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, aid our neighbour – even if that neighbour is very different from us, are all actions that carry political weight these days. To be on the side of those who most need help is political, no matter how you try to frame it.

To be clear, I’m not saying that we ought to do-away with the separation of church and state or anything like that, what I am saying is that to call oneself Christian is to recognize that there are certain issues one ought to take a very political stance on. I’m also not advocating blindly following every political assertion a minister makes from a pulpit – I say this as a minister who regularly stands behind a pulpit – but I do encourage everyone to think critically about how what you believe relates to how you live your life, in all of it’s aspects, personal, political, and banal included.

kind stranger sighting

Kind stranger sighting: I think this will be the third time I’ve written about this sort of thing. I can’t help but want to share when I see strangers doing caring things for other strangers, these situations make my heart leap and give me immense hope.

This is short and simple but lovely:

When I was climbing up the stairs from the train platform to the street on my way home last night I saw a man in a business suit helping an elderly women carry her personal grocery cart (one of those tall cloth bags on two wheels) up the stairs. It was so very touching. They parted ways at the top of the stairs, but I can’t help but think there was a taste of the kin-dom, a taste of salvation in that moment, both for them and for me.

eschatological hope

At the end of January I finished-up the bulk of my theology teaching gig (still have plenty of grading to do yet) and closed out my final lecture with the clip above. My final lecture was on, of course, “final things”, the big theological word for this being “eschatology”. This area of theology is a rather interesting one, a bit unwieldy and sometimes frightening even, the ways that it has been used and misused are not always pretty or helpful. Fears of a neo-apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario are cultivated by bad eschatologies. Paralysis about any influence we might be able to have over the state of our environment is triggered by bad eschatologies. An exclusively “me and Jesus” faith with no accountability to one’s fellow human beings can be perpetuated by bad eschatologies.

Bad eschatology bothers me because it often leaves people hopeless, which is the complete opposite of what a good eschatology should do for people. Eschatology can inspire people to be their best selves, to believe in the value of this earth our home (the only home we have), to see their interrelatedness to all other people, to believe in the inherent worth of others, and to believe in their own inherent worth. Eschatological hope is hope in not just the possibility but the probability of new life available for all of creation (that includes us humans!), throughout creation, all the time. This probability lies even at the heart of apocalypse – which I argue, if you look at the breadth of apocalyptic literature in the Judeo-Christian tradition, has nothing to do with the end of the world and everything to do with the destruction of that which is not life-giving in order to make way for the flourishing of life.

Eschatological hope is not pie-in-the-sky “Polyanna” hope – though I do think poor Polyanna gets an undeservedly bad rap for her hopefulness, if more people had that type of optimism, I think the world would be a better place… but I digress. Not pie-in-the-sky hope but hope with teeth, with muscles, with grit, hope that is willing to sweat a bit, hope that knows that hopefulness can be painful, can be dangerous and even deadly. Yet hope still must live on, for without it, why then should we live?

This gritty eschatological hope is what I think Martin Luther King Jr. is talking about in the clip above. It’s about the hope for a better future that both Moses and King had even as the faced their own impending deaths. This is Christian hope: audacious, unyielding, foolish, and unabashed. It is the kind of hope that comes from truly loving God and neighbour – the ultimate goals of Christian discipleship. It is this hope that overcomes even death to say that life will flourish despite all that would say otherwise. It is hope that defies fear and strengthens us for an uncertain future – which is always how the future stretches out before us, open, uncertain, and therefore full of possibility.

My prayer for us all: that we might be strengthened and strengthen one another in our hope, for it is our surest ally in promoting the flourishing of life for all of us and indeed the whole creation. Dare to be foolish, dare to hope.

i believe

I believe in the sun
though it is late in rising.

I believe in love
though it is absent.

I believe in God
though He is silent.

-anonymous holocaust survivor – cologne, germany

2008, epic year

So as I was browsing friends’ facebook statuses the other day I noticed a few who were musing about how 2008 has treated them. This got me thinking about my own life and how 2008 has treated me. My main conclusion: 2008 has been an epic year for me.

The hugeness of 2008 started when I decided to take a leave of absence from school, and then began filling that time with other things: becoming pastor, starting a new job, leaving a job I’d had for nearly 5 years, and taking on several other new challenges. I also ended up moving into my own apartment, and except for a taking a sort of summer hiatus from dating, all year I was questing for a meaningful romantic relationship.

September 2008 was the first time in 24 years that I didn’t go back to school. It was a little weird but good. It is good because I have realized that I do want to go back to school and keep working on my goal of being a theology professor. I’ve been saying that I want to do that in the fastest, easiest way possible, and am slowly coming to terms with the fact that I may just have to take my time with it, I think I can be patient.

This fall was also epic in other ways. In September my parents were in a terrible car accident where they rolled their car off the freeway, very scary, I am still feeling so grateful that they are still here. In October I lost my maternal grandmother, Jean, who was an amazing woman and I miss her dearly.

And to end the year off nicely, after several failed attempts at trying to find a romantic relationship, I finally have found someone I can be completely myself around, who seems to understand me so well, who I am shockingly perfectly compatible with, and who I can trust – not to mention the bonus that for the first time in awhile I actually know that he likes me back, how awesome is that?!

So as 2009 brings in more new adventures – I’ll be teaching a grad school course for the first time for the first three full weeks of January – I find myself trying to catch my breath from a whirlwind year of change and risk. I look forward to more opportunities to learn to trust the chaos of life and the possibility for salvation in every moment.

trust

“Trust is, like, life man.”
-Random quote from the movie Good Will Hunting.

I’m thinking about trust these days. Trusting myself, trusting others, trusting life, trusting G-d. Life is full of so much uncertainty and chaos that certainty, stability, predictability all seem completely absent. Funny thing is that in our universe, which may seem chaotic and unpredictable, organization and predictability are actually abundant. I would have never guessed that some of the areas in my life where I’ve found order lately would have ever emerged, but lo and behold, there it is, order emerging from chaos.

As pastor of a church I see this ordering of chaos happen a lot. There are lots of people and lots of ideas and lots of crises and it amazes me how so often the right people line up with the right project at the right time and everything falls into place.

I’ve also seen this in my dating life, a chaotic mix of sites and people and dates and suddenly I find myself face-to-face with someone who actually matches up with my personality and interests and I am shocked at how amazingly well we connect.

I believe in and trust in a G-d and a universe that conspire using friendly chaos to constantly shake us up and re-settle us into new patterns of life and flourishing. Trusting is about learning to see the potential in even the most chaotic of situations for even that chaos to be redeemed and made new.