Tag Archives: Church

Lenten Calendar: A Sacrifice of Worship

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As more and more of us worship from home, we are most of us establishing a new discipline. We are loving our neighbor by sacrificing the easy, rhythmic habit of gathering together.

Today’s poem is a reminder that we are the church, worshipping a God who is everywhere present, and “Whose only now is forever.” Whenever we come before God in worship, and however we come before God in worship, we do so along with all the saints everywhere and throughout all of time.

It also plays nicely with this Sunday’s lectionary readings, so I’ll be reading it as our call to worship tomorrow, as I lead worship online for the first time. May it call you into “the deathless truth of [God’s] presence.”

landscape-with-church-spires-and-trees.jpg!Large max weber

Landscape with Church Spires and Trees by Max Weber

i am a little church(no great cathedral) – i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving (finding and losing and laughing and crying)children whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature – i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence (welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

— e.e. cummings

Frederick Buechner on the Church as Family

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Frederick Buechner turns 92 on Wednesday (long may he drive the darkness back), but this is a word best heard gearing up for a Sunday.

“Life is extraordinary, and the extraordinariness of it is what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. The extraordinariness of it is that in the Kingdom of God we all belong to each other the way families do. We are all of us brothers and sisters in it. We are all of us mothers and fathers and children of each other in it because that is that we are being called together as the Church to be. That is what being the Church means. We are called by God to love each other the way Jesus says that God has loved us.

…

Loving each other doesn’t mean loving each other in some sentimental, unrealistic, greeting-card kind of way but the way families love each other even though they may fight tooth and nail and get fed to the teeth with each other and drive each other crazy yet all the time know deep down in their hearts that they belong to each other and need each other and can’t imagine what life would be without each other — even the ones they often wish had never been born.”

— Frederick Buechner

from “The Church” in The Clown in the Belfry (pp. 149-159). San Francisco: Harper, 154.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Florilegium

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“’Speak out for those who cannot speak’ – who in the church today still remembers that this is the very least the Bible asks of us in such times as these?”

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Letter to Erwin Sutz,
11 Sept 1934
in Works, Vol 13, 217.

Has anyone else been thinking about the Confessing Church a lot lately?

In honor of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s birthday today, the good people at The Englewood Review of Books have collected five passages from his writings to help us reflect on what costly discipleship might look like for us in the here and now.

edith-breckwoldt-pruefung

Prüfung (Examination)/ The Ordeal by Edith Breckwoldt. 2004, Mahnmal St. Nikolai, Hamburg

The inscription on the other side reads

No man in the whole world

can change the truth.

One can only look for the truth,

find it and serve it.

The truth is in all places.

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 

 

 

 

 

 

No Fear of the World: The Sequel

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Click here if you missed part 1

Any theology of culture will intertwine with an interpreter’s rational, theological, and ideological characterization of the present condition of humanity. If culture is a uniquely human creation, its status relies on our status. Does the image of God within us validate our good creations? Does our fallen state taint our works indelibly? Does our redemption transfer to the work of our hands and minds? Most theologies of culture cite the incarnation as a model. If Christ took on flesh and lived among us, we cannot follow God in the abstract or love our neighbor in only an otherworldly sense. In fact, the Trinity as a whole, not just the second person, exemplifies God’s commitment to humanity. God created, entered, and remains at large in this world and has commissioned and empowered the Church to walk to the ends of it to communicate that good news. Turning our back on the world is not an option for Christ’s body.

This is not to say that Christians should not be discerning consumers. Discernment is a constant process that constitutes a major portion of the Christian’s job description. This discernment process, however, occurs within the Christian community, not by forcing our vision on those outside of it. Ralph C. Wood advises we become “self-critical citizens of the world as well as self-critical confessors of the Faith.”[1] We learn to critique our cultures because, like it or not, they define a significant portion of our selves. If Christ did not come to condemn the world, why would he send us poor souls to do so? Or, as Paul once put it to the Corinthians, “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?”[2] American Christians need to stop trying to enforce “Christian values”[3] outside of the body of Christ. If we concerned ourselves as much with keeping the Church and our own self-righteous selves on the straight and narrow as we currently do with perfect strangers who happen to act or sing for a living, we might wake up one morning to find we have a credible witness in the world.

When we come to terms with and gratitude for the fact that God has set us in our extended human families for our own good and for theirs, we begin to create within our cultures in order to bless them, rather than to curse. We stop trying to protect our own religious sensibilities and God himself by creating a safe cultural ghetto for ourselves. We can describe all our work in the world the way Tim Foreman of Switchfoot describes his band’s music: “Christian by faith, not by genre.”[4]

The apostle Paul validated what he found valid in the Athenian worldview, but sought to enlarge and inform it.  He served the Corinthians by becoming like them to win them over, for the sake of the gospel.[5]  The Church has traditionally patronized and sponsored the artistic tendencies of high culture.  Christians approve what is excellent, see nature (including human nature, in the form of the conscience) as a source of general revelation, and accept that what is true, beautiful, and good in human life represents God’s pervasive, common grace within all creation.  We can comfortably affirm ennobling tales of self-sacrifice, and the sentimental images, captured in oils, of devoted parents or a glowing sunset as echoes of God’s presence in our everyday lives. But what about Skins, Grand Theft Auto, and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo?  What of the superficial and frivolous, the gaudy and offensive? Should we consume such things? Contribute to their creation?

Not all the ideals of our culture will reflect our ideals, but our convictions of how things should be should not blind us to how things are. We must become conscious of the forces at work and play in our popular cultures that shape us or attempt to shape us. Being aware of the rules and ethos of Survivor, for example, allows us to recognize and resist social currents that might otherwise carry us along to unthinking engagement in behavior antithetical to the gospel.  While the language of voting people off the island, dismissing the weakest link, and pursuing entirely wrongheaded notions of winning becomes ingrained and normalized in our collective psyche, those in discerning Christian communities remind each other that the people of God are called to live into a different reality. What if Christians created everyday culture that reflected that reality? How can we do that if we’re not familiar with our culture as it actually exists? What if we occasionally took our kids to an “inappropriate” but important movie and talked to them about it instead of forbidding them to go? What if we listened to their music with them instead of insisting they turn it down or investing our energies in keeping them culturally ignorant? Once a week ask them to play you something and help you hear or see why it is significant to them.[6]

We all have different tastes. I’m not suggesting we feign a fondness for Glee where none exists, but do I become a better witness among my neighbors and co-workers by flaunting my complete ignorance of a show that informs and influences their lives?  Dick Staub counsels us to be “serious about faith, savvy about faith and culture, and skilled in relating the two…. Culturally savvy Christians follow the path of neither the cultural glutton nor the cultural anorexic. Instead, they are marked by their discretion and thoughtful discernment.”[7] Discernment is a form of wisdom Christ offers his Church through the Spirit to enable us to walk well in a world full of falling hazards and diversions. It is a gift and a tool that we become more adept at using as we practice it. Much of parenting consists of equipping our children to make good decisions then allowing them the freedom and responsibility to do so. God parents us in much the same way. We need to develop lifestyles of prayerfully listening to the Spirit to rightly and readily discern how to relate to particular aspects of our cultures, but God’s word equips us with some basic principles. Staub summarizes the relevant guidelines in Paul’s letters to the Romans and the Corinthians: all things are lawful, but not all are beneficial. We are not to be controlled by cultural goods or to use them to occasion another’s fall, but rather to do everything we do to the glory of God.[8] We are to remain in conversation with people who do not believe as we do. “Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.”[9] Which response best stimulates that kind of conversation: “I don’t watch that show/ play that game/ listen to that music because I heard it was evil” or “I watched/ played/ listened to that a couple times, but I was so turned off by the glorified violence/ portrayal of women as objects/ the racist-sounding lyrics I just stopped. You obviously follow it more closely than I do, though. What about it appeals to you? What am I missing?”

Sometimes our neighbors and co-workers diversions will be just that: diversions – opportunities to check out from real life. Let’s not read too much into those or pretend we don’t have our own indefensible diversions. People who consistently try to convert others to a favorite movie or band or sport, however, have probably found something that moves them and relates to their desire for more out of life. In Your Neighbor’s Hymnal, Jeff Keuss talks about pop music as one of the many cultural forms in which we may find spiritual solace or expression; chances are our neighbors already have.

“True, there is pop music fandom that draws people into the trivial and mundane just as there are some Christian worship services that celebrate consumer culture more than critique it or provide an alternative. But the drive to find something larger than ourselves and make it public is a starting point – even a shallow faith is better than no faith at all. And in this we are to celebrate rather than too quickly denounce the fanboy faith that permeates the culture around us. Our neighbor’s hymnal is filled with pop songs that are sowing the seeds of faith and pushing for a form of life that is larger than the mundane and points to a transcendence worth paying attention to.”[10]

If we dismiss out of hand the cultural texts and goods that God may use to open our neighbor’s heart to something beyond this world, we squelch the prospect of discovering an addition to our playlist that works similarly on us; worse, we hazard quenching the Spirit, who – as the old song goes – moves in mysterious ways.

[1] Wood, Contending for the Faith: The Church’s Engagement with Culture (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2003), 102.

[2] 1 Corinthians 5:12.

[3] Whatever those are; the fact that Christians can’t agree on them doesn’t bode well for their universal legislation anyway.

[4] qtd. in Andrew Beaujon, Bodypiercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo), 42.

[5] 1 Corinthians 9:9-13

[6] This will be a test, by the way. If they put themselves out to articulate something that matters to them and you only find fault with it, don’t expect them to play along next week. Even if a song or video turns you off completely, listen to your child’s heart and how media speaks to it and affirm that heart. Also, don’t expect their articulation to be particularly articulate or convincing at first. By having these conversations you may be giving them their first lessons in putting their spiritual lives into words; they’re not learning this in school. Listen for opportunities to augment their vocabulary for discussing soul issues without putting words in their mouths.

[7] Staub, The Culturally Savvy Christian: A Manifesto for Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture in an Age of Christianity-Lite (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 1, 151.

[8] ibid. 152-153.

[9] Colossians 4:5-6, TNIV.

[10] Jeffrey F. Keuss, Your Neighbor’s Hymnal: What Popular Music Teaches Us about Faith, Hope, and Love (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2011), 22.

No Fear of the World: Pop Culture in Worship

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“Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”[1]

“Popular culture” is often used as a shorthand reference to the faddish and fleeting. It flouts human wisdom to imagine that the eternal Divine, orchestrator of the heavens, who calls a universe into being with a word, cares about what is on the radio right now. God designed the intricacies of cellular biology from scratch, worked out a mathematical ratio to epitomize beauty and harmony, and built it into the most unexpected places in creation. We keep remarketing American Idol over and over and over again.

Doesn’t pop culture epitomize the world that is passing away and therefore constitute a colossal waste of time?  Following Ken Myers, Andy Crouch defines culture as “what we make of the world. Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else.”[2] What we make of the world that God created has obvious theological import.

Complete retreat from the world is not an option for the Church as a whole. Our churches represent places in which we may “withdraw from the situation, and attack the situation,”[3]  but never places in which we ignore the situation. Even while advocating a radical distinction between the Church and the world Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon remind us that “the church is not out of the world. There is no other place for the church to be than here.”[4] That said, at various times we may find the steps prepared for us leading away from the consumption of certain cultural goods. New believers often feel led to trash their old music collections and start over more circumspectly. When I can’t volunteer to serve a meal to kids on the street because that’s the night my show is on, I realize something’s amiss. If I blew so much money on concerts last month that I can’t pay my rent and my tithe this month, I recognize this as a call to cut back. Regularly taking time away from our societal responsibilities so we can reconsider and reprioritize them in relative quiet reflects a healthy commitment to responsibility, not an abdication of it. Taking a month off from a particular radio station may help correct an over-identification with the rebellious and despondent spirits of the age. I daresay the occasional fast from social media would prove valuable to many of us. We embark on these fasts and retreats, however, not because we despair for our humanity and our world, but rather because of our ultimate hope in what God will accomplish in us in our humanity and in our world. A fast serves to devote time and space to listening and waiting on God, not as a judgment on food.

Too often Christians have tried to sever themselves from their humanity and human families or cultures for fear of defilement, forgetting that Christ became human to save us from sin and its effects. Jesus taught that sin does not enter through the pores or the mouth. Rubbing up against it does not contaminate us. It’s not a thing we ingest. In pop culture terms, the calls are coming from inside the house. This is why the Church’s experiments at creating separate cultures to compete with those around us have traditionally landed somewhere between rampant abuse and second-rate kitsch. The alternative, however, is not to dissolve indistinguishably into our various cultures, but to become mindful makers within them. Andy Crouch contends that “The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”[5]

[I]f we seek to change culture, we will have to create something new, something that will persuade our neighbors to set aside some existing set of cultural goods for our new proposal. And note well that there are a number of other possible strategies, none of which, by themselves, will have any effect on culture at all.[6]

These strategies include condemning, critiquing, copying and consuming culture.[7] All of these responses are appropriate at times, but they tend to shape us more than the cultures prevailing around us. Only after Christians adopt our rightful postures as cultural creators and cultivators do these other strategies become valid gestures that we can make with freedom and integrity.[8]

Obviously we cannot live in such a way as to remain indistinguishable from the world around us, but our conduct and community should communicate that distinction, not the style of music we listen to or our zip codes. Christ did not wage war on the world to conquer it. He loved, wooed, and transformed it. There is such a thing as loving people too much to leave them where they’re at, but one does not move one’s beloved through damning criticism. If we truly believe Jesus came to make our joy complete, we will find more constructive means of relaying that message of love and joy than indiscriminately trampling the things that make our friends and neighbors happy. Churches must learn to critique the cultures in which they operate without judgment and without relying on false distinctions of us versus them. We all live in cultural contexts and the more deeply we understand them, the better we can envision our proper place as Christians within them.

One way I’ve seen this dynamic play out in our church over the years is in the offertory. Fourteen years ago, my husband and I joined a 10-year-old Gen X church plant that met blocks from the Space Needle and lived by the motto of “real, relevant… and a little bit radical.” We met in a movie theater with reclining seats, cup holders, and no outside light. The smell of popcorn signaled the benediction. We sought to provide an authentic worship experience in a safely neutral worship environment for people who, for whatever reason, couldn’t picture themselves setting foot in a church. We hired professional musicians for the worship band and every Sunday they covered a non-Christian rock song for the offertory that tethered the sermon to relevancy. We reckoned that all truth is God’s truth and we would take it where we found it, even and especially from non-traditional sources. The corollary to this premise was that if no one was singing about it, it wasn’t a pressing enough question to preach on. Sometimes the message of the song and the message of the pastor represented a study in contrasts, underscoring the difference between the wisdom from above and wisdom from below, but it kept us in conversation with the world even in our windowless sanctuary. You listen to a song differently when you hear it in church (lyrics were printed in the bulletin, for easier study) and the process of doing this weekly warped us for life. Over the years we discovered another curious and welcome effect. You’d be shopping or working out or commuting when a song you first or last heard at church would come over the speakers and suddenly it’s like you’re in a worship service.

The offertory format survived the merger with a more traditional church on a different hill. At some point in the process of crafting a “transitional” service for the newly formed church, verbiage crept into the bulletin about how we played these secular songs to listen to “the world’s” take on or longings surrounding today’s theme. The actual phrasing has been lost to time, but it had strong overtones of us and them, with the implication that this portion of our church service had more to do with them than with us. Were we playing this music for people not in the room? I doubt it was the intention, but there was a subtle sense of introducing fallen music into our worship so that it could be preached at and corrected. And yet at the same time we were trending toward somewhat “safer” musical choices, occasionally by Christian artists, that were generally and often perfectly orthodox, which made even less sense. We tweaked the stock explanation a couple of times before changing the format again. At present one of our in-house hipsters contributes a paragraph outlining the band’s relevant biographical details along with doing most of the heavy mental lifting of interpreting and putting the song in context for us. Again, this shifts the focus slightly. The songs tend to correspond more positively with the message so they often serve as a rich set-up for the preaching. Lines from the song may become a refrain in the sermon. For many in our inter-generational congregation it has become a mini-lesson in pop culture rather than an exercise in interpreting the music we would think of as our own. The significance of this signature piece of our Sunday gatherings continues to evolve these many years on, reflecting shifts in our corporate identity, theology and mission.

What practices do you or does your church engage in regularly to keep the conversation going with the culture at large? Have you ever felt or been accused of being “tainted” by them?

[1] Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 91.

[2] Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 23.

[3] Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 212-213

[4] Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 43.

[5] Crouch, 67.

[6] Crouch, 67.

[7] Crouch, 68-73.

[8] Crouch, 98.

Open Mics, Open Doors: Cultivating Culture and Relationships

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“All culture making requires a choice, conscious or unconscious, to take our place in a cultural tradition. We cannot make culture without culture. And this means that creation begins with cultivation – taking care of the good things that culture has already handed on to us. The first responsibility of culture makers is not to make something new but to become fluent in the cultural tradition to which we are responsible. Before we can be culture makers, we must be culture keepers.”[1]

When we start talking about the church acting as a community center or a cultural center, people get understandably nervous. The local church should be much more than a community or cultural center, and those models should not constrain a church’s mission, and yet it must act in those capacities if it is to be both local and the church.

Your neighborhood may be different, but mine has some serious trust issues with “church” in the abstract. Organized Christianity has earned a reputation for bait and switch. Free meals! But I have to listen to someone yell at me about death and hell before I can eat? Welcoming community! Until my work schedule changes and no one notices I’m gone. (Or worse, they do, and hound me to come when I can’t.) Hip music! Followed by half an hour of trying to work through which two-thousand-year-old cultural mores still apply to women. Christians rationalize these kinds of disconnections on a regular basis, but we need to hear these disjointed messages as our visitors do. These scenarios come off as false advertising at best and intentional deceit at worst.

Why are there so many strings attached to the things we do in Jesus’s name? It communicates that we see the gospel as such a tough sell we have to lure people into the salesroom with a gimmick. In the words of R.E.M. “What if we give it away?”[2] What if we fed people simply because Jesus himself invites us to and tells us he’ll be on the receiving end of anything we give? What if we applied our shrewd-stewardly stratagems toward working out how to make the most of our resources to care for others more comprehensively, not how to get more out of them in return? To the degree that our churches have tried to sell and barter the words of life entrusted to us freely, we must own responsibility for the numbers of people who have chosen not to buy in to the churched life.

"Shelter?" by Heidi Estey. This was our poster monster for an outdoor group show in which almost all the pieces were eventually "taken in" by passersby - part of why we now put together our outdoor shows with in-house artists aware of such eventualities.

“Shelter?” by Heidi Estey. This was our poster monster for an outdoor group show in which almost all the pieces were eventually “taken in” by passersby – part of why we now put together our outdoor shows with in-house artists aware of such eventualities.

Considering ourselves, our traditions and our assets to be cultural and community resources would correct our attitudes substantially. A church, building and people, should be a blessing to its parish. The whole Judeo-Christian story we find in scripture is about God forming a people set apart to be agents of blessing to the rest of the world. To be chosen does not mean that we are in with God and the others are out; it means we are the ones called to invite the others in. This has nothing to do with imposing our lifestyle on others and pressuring them to conform to an enlightened Christian culture so they can know God like we do. It has to do with welcoming them in a way that communicates God’s desire to be known by them, creating buffer zones in which to hear that quiet voice, and making room amongst us for those who choose to follow it.

Few of us had any say in the physical design of our meeting places, but the onus is now on us to make them convey welcome. Our church is by far the churchiest looking church I have ever been a part of. Those of us moving in after years of worship in a movie theater and an office building suffered some serious culture shock. It’s an extremely staid and solid red brick and stained glass affair. Approaching from the front all you see are concrete stairs leading to three massive sets of wooden double doors. The view most often seen from the street is of these six immense and eminently closed doors. It’s imposing. I’ve been going to church all my life and I can hear these doors slamming shut just looking at them. The transformation when those doors are all flung open is supernatural, especially at night with warm light and music and voices pouring out onto an otherwise dark street. Suddenly it’s inviting. All the connotations of sanctuary make sense again. Strangers pop in just to say how happy they are to see the doors open.

The openness of our doors has become hugely symbolic for me. The unfortunate reality is that the cavernous open space behind those doors is an absolute bear to heat. In July and August it’s a relief to have the doors open, but almost any other time of year it’s a sacrifice. If you come to worship with us in February you will find one of the six doors propped not quite half open. If you’re fifteen minutes late the only thing holding that door open will be a tripped one-inch-wide deadbolt. We have bass and drums and lots of porous windows so if you walk by you know something’s going on, but it’s hidden behind essentially closed doors. Suffice it to say, I think any excuse to open those doors that’s not antithetical to the gospel is a good excuse. If it’s an activity that blesses our neighbors, meets needs in the community, or helps us fulfill our commission as cultivators of creation and creators of culture, so much the better.

Cultivating culture is different than conserving culture. Whether or not we avail ourselves of them, the Church on the whole has done a fine job of conserving its cultural goods: the writings of the first bishops, medieval mystics and the Scholastics; the stories of Asian martyrs; the paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo and treasured Orthodox icons; the chants heard morning and evening for centuries throughout Europe. If we only conserve culture, though, the Church will function merely as a museum. The Church is a unique institution called both to conserve and create, and as such, must be continuously reinventing the priestly ministry of representing humankind to God and God to humanity while consciously maintaining a tradition that runs back through the apostles and the patriarchs to our creation in the image of the Creator and Ruler of all. We who have historically been at the forefront of movements to recreate and reorder society have abdicated our responsibilities. Neither conservatives who commit to structures simply because they exist nor radicals who reject the very idea of structure that makes creative life sustainable are embodying the image of God or serving as Christ called us.

As cultivators we watch for the new growth peeping up from the earth around us, determine whether it’s the genuine article or a choking weed, and nurture the good growing things around us. We look for the plants in need of particular care, especially those good for food or medicine, and tend to their specific needs. As a Christian and as a poet, when I look around, one area of the garden that I see failing to thrive that I would like to help maintain for my culture is the thoughtful use of words. Dana Gioia wrote a fabulous essay called “Can Poetry Matter” in which he talks about the decay of language and discourse and offers six concrete suggestions for bringing poetry back into our public lives as a corrective to this decay.

I borrowed three of his ideas and distilled them into one event that answers our corporate call to be cultivators of what’s beneficial to our society and serves as yet another reason to have the doors open. Due to an ongoing failure of imagination, we called it a no-mic open-mic community reading, although Literary Potluck might stick eventually. We would call it a read-in, but that makes it sounds like we’re protesting something. Like an open mic, people can sign up ahead of time to read. Based on one of Gioia’s suggestions and our congregational ratio of significantly more readers to writers, we invite people to read either their own work or something they’ve read recently that they would like more people to hear. Open mic audiences tend to consist of writers there to read and close friends of writers there to read. They don’t draw a wide audience and the tenor of the events generally vibrates between ego and nerves. With this format anyone can participate and we all hear a lot of great writing. We also tone down the pressure to perform by removing the actual microphone from the scene. The first time we planned one of these we were a small enough group we could sit in a circle at the back of the church. The next time we set up a small table in the aisle in front of the last few pews. A microphone was not necessary to be heard.

As we held the events on Arts Walk nights we made sure people had easy access so they could sit or stand and listen a while and feel free to leave. Readers have ten-minute slots, but we ask them to keep individual readings to five minutes or less, so there are plenty of opportunities and to slip in and out without walking out on a reading. The Arts Walk is three hours long, so we took frequent breaks for coffee, tea and snacks people from the church brought to share and just to talk, catch up with other and meet anyone who came in during the reading.

[1] Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 74-75.

[2] Mike Mills, William Berry, Peter Buck and Michael Stipe, “What If We Give It Away?” Life’s Rich Pageant (I.R.S., 1986). From the first verse and chorus:

On the outside underneath the wall

All the money couldn’t buy

You’re mistaken no one’s standing there

For the record no one tried

Oh I try to…

What if we give it away?

For years this chorus would begin to play spontaneously and, as it turns out, prophetically in my head as a response to that hard sell mentality. Our first outdoor gallery initially felt like a bust. It was the only time we issued a call for submissions and got nothing of artistic merit from the outside world. It was raining so hard we almost cancelled the show because it was so miserable to install. Then a friend of one of our artists showed up with a couple of nice pieces. It lightened to a typical Seattle drizzle by the time the Arts Walk started and we had a good time hanging out on the sidewalk with our umbrellas and loaning them out so people could peruse our quirky little installation called Shelter. Half the pieces disappeared over the weekend. An editor of a local arts magazine happened on it during that time and mentioned to a mutual friend that he was debating whether or not to take a piece home as well, and an important conversation about public art, gift culture, and the church ensued. My friend referenced that same line (“What if we give it away?”) when he emailed me to say it sounded like the church was doing something right.

Holy Days are Here Again: Christmas Edition

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 “In recent years the church itself has become the target of a good deal of criticism and, for many, has simply been dismissed as a meaningful player in contemporary culture. And yet, all the while, as we have seen, there is an increasingly urgent desire for images that capture something of the depth and beauty of life, for practices that can structure one’s life and spark affection. Religion has always been the custodian of such symbols, and they were the center of the church’s life from the beginning. Yet the sad fact is that few people turn to the church for such symbols today.”[1]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously claimed that “the church is only the church when it exists for others.”[2] That means the things we do in and as a church are deeply motivated by the people outside of the church. This kind of talk sometimes devolves into a sense that we should warp all the things we do in support of our own spiritual walks and lives to accommodate a random, idealized person who is not yet interesting in living a Christian life. That’s the sort of thing that ends in worship services where we don’t talk about Jesus for fear of alienating someone not in the room. That is not what it means to be the church for others.

In order to be the church for others we must first be the Church. There must be something going on in our midst for the seeker to find. It is both considerate and constructive to consider often what others interested but uninitiated in our language and practices would take away from observing them. Do they extend the welcome of Christ? The Church talking about how best to minister to people where they’re at is one of the most Christ-like things we could be doing. The conversation about whether we do certain things or talk amongst ourselves in certain ways because they’re “churchy” or because they’re significant to us and to living out our faith should be ongoing. The best way to be sensitive to people who have not completely bought into our community’s vision of God, however, is not to make it blander and presumably more palatable, but rather to offer sacrificial hospitality, complete translucence, and the richest of fare to the best of our abilities.[3] People don’t go on spiritual quests looking for superficiality, but depth. It’s worth discussing what might make people think to include our church on their quest and what offputtingly shallow practices, attitudes, and lingo they might encounter here if they do.

Bigga Gonzalez with the mural he painted during worship for Advent 2010. Each week the sermon and music focused on a different character in the Christmas story and so did the painting. Photograph by Jenn Cavanaugh.

Bigga Gonzalez with the mural he painted during worship for Advent 2010. Each week the sermon and music focused on a different character in the Christmas story and so did the painting. Photograph by Jenn Cavanaugh.

We often talk like we expect people to just wander in off the street in search of a place to encounter God. Remarkably, that does happen almost every time we open our doors, but it’s more of a symptom of desperate spiritual starvation than an indicator that they’re ready to throw in their lot with us on this journey. Consider the kind of confidence and trust we’re asking of people: to lose themselves in the worship of God in the company of strangers. Perhaps some word-of-mouth or outward sign will mark it as a place that is safe and trustworthy enough to enter, but increasingly the church building itself is not a sufficient sign of such. It may be that the sights, sounds and actions of our worship, ministry and community, visible from street level, audible through the open doors and perceptible in our neighbors’ daily lives could serve as such signs. Even then – even if people wander in for the music or the art or the safety itself – there’s no guarantee you have drawn them into worship. On the other hand, the symbolic act of walking into a church may be for them a greater step toward acknowledging God as God than most of your regular attenders take on an average Sunday.

Holy days are prime opportunities to be church for the world. It seems that people who do not normally attend church feel freer to come by. They are also the best times to revisit, and occasionally reinvent, our most significant traditions. It honors and blesses visitors and regulars alike to take breaks from our regular programming to dive deep into the festivals of the Christian year. What if Christmas in the church were as cozy and low-key as the secular versions most of us remember fondly as the best Christmas ever, the one that restored our souls and fostered our sense of family?

Homemade Christmas

The holidays wreak havoc on schedules. The churchy modus operandi entails planning extra, elaborate, once-a-year activities and services with only a skeleton crew to run them. Under these conditions, most proposed new traditions happen exactly once. Here’s an idea for a new tradition that may be more significant for the community, but probably less work for any one person than anything else you’ve done for Christmases past.

Sometime before Thanksgiving recruit nine volunteers who know they will be in town for Christmas Eve. Try to include a good cross-section of the church: young and old, male and female, starving artists and software engineers, different ethnicities. Assign them each a passage of scripture for a traditional lessons and carols service . Let them each plan a “lesson and carol” movement with a talk or a reading or an interpreted work of art and a song or activity for the congregation to respond with. Make sure you have at least one musician at their disposal for the singing. They each need to have their plans in writing a week prior to Christmas Eve so you can be sure not everyone is planning to sing Away in a Manger. Nine people who may not normally have much of a voice in church will have just blessed your congregation and twice-a-year visitors and made them feel like family.

To file in the "not less work, but great fun" category: the Christmas Arts & Crafts Bazaar. In recent years we've taken a break from making it so sales focused and simply spent the day making art together.

To file in the “not less work, but great fun” category: the Christmas Arts & Crafts Bazaar. In recent years we’ve taken a break from making it so sales focused and simply spent the day making art together.

[1] William A. Dyrness, Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2011), 220.

[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 1997, 1953:282 [Ethics]

[3] One of the most powerful forms of translucence is acknowledging the limit of our powers and abilities. Instead of presenting our efforts as the end-all-be-all, what if we offered them as offerings and articulated whenever asked our experience that there is more and greater than we can do or say? This allows us to work toward God’s will being done without limiting God in others’ minds.

The Creative Local Church

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Our ministry began by including the arts in existing programs—from mission to worship to education. The results were remarkable, for we found that the arts touched us in all aspects of our community life: they engaged our senses, helped us build relationships among ourselves, and helped us respond to wider community needs; they expanded our theological vision, stirred our imaginations, and brought us to places where we experienced God in moving and profound ways.

       – Alice Z. Anderman “On the Cusp of a Great Adventure: One Church’s Ministry with the Arts.” ARTS 19:1

Now that we’re the better of part of a year into this blog, maybe it’s time some introductions of the bigger ideas motivating it were made. Homespun seeks to provide resources for the creative life of the local church. The idea that your local church requires a creative life may be a no-brainer or an entirely new concept for you. It may conjure up a precise image of what that could look like for your church or leave you feeling lost in abstraction. This blog is for people in the church who have an idea whose time has come and are looking for creative ways to live it into reality. It is for those who believe (or are willing to be subtly persuaded) that our churches should, by their very nature, foster creativity and beauty and who want some resources and ideas for getting started or going deeper. More fundamentally, it is for those who, in whatever capacity, feel called to help the church be the church and sense that this will require new ways of being and doing to bubble up amongst us.

Many posts on this blog will touch on the arts and worship because these are fundamental to creativity and church life, but the church’s creativity is neither tied to nor limited to “using the arts in worship.” In fact, I personally avoid the phrase, because I think that “using” the arts defeats their purpose. Artistic goods can be offered in worship by their creators, reflecting on art may assist us in presenting our whole selves before God, but “using the arts” sounds like appropriating something abstract out of context for our own ends. If you have ever been in a worship service where someone tried to use an artful good to do something it was never intended to do, then you know what I mean. Both true art and true worship resist this kind of hijacking and misuse. They work on us as we submit ourselves voluntarily to the other/ Other; they do not work for us on others. Semantics, some might say, but how we talk about what we are doing is indicative of the spirit of what we are doing. I understand the temptation to defend the inclusion and importance of the creative arts in the church by virtue of their utility, but the real reason we need the creative arts in the church is because of their power over us rather than our power over them.

Church by Hense

When creativity and artistic expression infuse the whole life of the church, not just worship, they move us toward wholeness and a holistic faith. I’ve avoided breaking down worship, spiritual formation, witness, and ministry into separate sections on separate topics on this blog, because I believe they’re not meant to be separated. Who can define the exact point where discipleship becomes Christian service? We strive to focus on God rather than ourselves in worship, and yet conversion and sanctification and all kinds of other terms we use for human transformation are natural consequences of our worship experiences. Our most mundane and non-musical ministries are tinged with worship if they’re done to the glory of God. Non-verbal actions carried out in Jesus’ name may be more evangelistic than preachments and crusades. The bane of the church’s institutional existence is that the more our activities precursor the realm of heaven, the less they’ll fit into tidy categories. They will grow like the kingdom to become more rangy and more overarching, defying definitions and requiring parables to describe. Order is by no means the enemy of originality, but isn’t it interesting that we tend to organize ourselves by dividing ourselves up when God’s hope seems to be bringing us all together? Creativity consists essentially of making new connections. Artistic expression necessarily involves mindful and heartfelt communication. Imagine a church known for the beauty of its internal and external connections and communication! Artists and their art instinctively work to dissolve false divisions which impede the coherent and creative life of the church and its members. Works of art, music, poetry, fiction and film all refuse to speak to us on only one level. They don’t work on just the emotional, rational, or spiritual side of us. We all wear many hats, but art doesn’t speak to us as roles, titles, or labels – only as complex persons. If you approach a piece of music and say “I would like to understand you… as a facilities administrator” or “…as an addict,” it will elude you until you take off all your funny hats and listen as a human being.

Creativity is not only about making art, not is it the sole purview of the practicing artist. As creatures created in the image of the Creator, we all have creative capacities, and we are not designed to function without them. Artists and artisans help the congregation by valuing and modeling the creative life, but they can’t do all the creative work of the church for us. For the church to be the church as Christ intended will require us all to walk in newness of life. Worship curator Mark Pierson describes creativity as a product of the tension between reality and desire, of dissatisfaction with what we see in light of a higher vision. I believe God does the best work on us in that tension and that we all need it to be a regular part of our lives, both individually and corporately, to fulfill our calling as the body of Christ. As we develop our creative faculties together we encourage and equip one another to respond faithfully to the realities around us with imagination rather than pretending that they fit into ideologies too rigid to accommodate them. Both the local church and the Church universal will be marked by creativity as they are empowered by God’s Spirit to act as the body of the One who is making all things new.

The Apostle’s Creed proclaims that the Church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. That means God’s people are united in Christ (whether we acknowledge it or not), set apart for God’s purposes (whether we live into them or not), ultimately to be found in all times and cultures (i.e., “catholic,” whether Roman Catholic or not), and part of a tradition (whether we like it or not). Just as we are called individually to be members of a local body, all these local bodies are called to be members of the larger Body of Christ. As we discern and pursue our own callings within our local churches, our churches grow faithfully into their particular creative roles to do their part to help the Church body function properly as Christ’s representative throughout the whole world.

I believe to fulfill its task within the larger mission of God, each church needs freedom to embrace a unique corporate personality. This doesn’t mean forcing people into a hipper or holier-than-thou persona. It means pursuing ministry based on the gifts of all of those who have aligned themselves with our congregations. It assumes everyone in our midst is called to be a minister, but makes fewer assumptions about what ministry needs to look like to be called such. It doesn’t mean targeting your outreach and message to a narrow demographic and further dividing the Church along lines of race, gender, political leanings, age and income. It means you discern who you are as a congregation and what you’re to be about in fleshing out the realm of heaven together for your parishioners – the ones that attend your church and the ones who don’t. It means my church’s worship band has drum solos, yours has a clarinet and viola, our friend’s is alternating Youth Sunday with Old Fogey Sunday so they learn their hymns and give the organ a monthly workout, and another congregation is going a cappella for Lent. We can count on the Spirit working in and through any given church in common and disparate ways from the church down the street. Christ bids all incarnations of the Church to extend hospitality to all comers and make room for everyone who responds to what the Spirit is doing in our midst, but each of our churches will have different strangers to welcome in unique ways based on our resources and cultures. Our resultant personalities must be evolving and inclusive rather than exclusive and set in stone. The creative life is both constructive and playful. When we pursue it together we come to know one another more truly as we were created to be. Weaving creative practices into our common lives helps us know who we are together, equips us to regularly reimagine our communities for the sake of others, and keeps us all growing in and toward faith.

 

A Missional Ministerial Gifts Assessment

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based on Creating a Missional Culture: Equipping the Church for the Sake of the World

by JR Woodward

(Completely Unauthorized

and Hopelessly Slanted by Yours Truly So Just Figure Anything You Don’t Like is My Bad )

1———————2———————3————————-4———————5

Never             Rarely              Sometimes                Usually                Always

Using the scale above, write your answers to these questions on the lines provided at the end.

1. I am a big-picture person

2. I am sensitive to the Holy Spirit

3. My heart breaks for those who don’t know Jesus

4. I think we need to focus more on the spiritual healing and formation of the congregation

5. When I read the Bible I expect to gain fresh insight

6. I can get wrapped up in projects and achievement at the expense of my relationships with God and others

7. My heart breaks for the poor and oppressed

8. I think the church should be more outwardly focused

9. I am a peacemaker

10. I prioritize my own learning

11. The church is the best place for people to actively discern and from which to pursue their purposes in life

12. I may come across as inconsiderate or inflexible

13. I consider my job a vocation and an opportunity to be a good witness

14. I look for ways to move our church toward being a family

15. The more knowledgeable we are of Scripture and how to apply it, the more faithful we will be

16. When I invite people to try something new they at least consider it

17. I tend to include the outsiders

18. I err on the side of going along with my cultural context rather than critiquing it

19. My heart breaks for those who have deep emotional wounds and I want to help them move forward

20. I am good at explaining things clearly

21. I bring people together to turn ideas into reality

22. I believe in the power of the Spirit and spiritual practices and I want others to as well

23. I’m a good storyteller

24. When someone I care about is hurting I cannot view the situation objectively

25. I get frustrated when people don’t use the sense God gave them

26. I have a profound sense of being part of God’s mission in the world

27. People are better off facing reality head-on, without illusions

28. I try to preach the gospel at all times and, if necessary, use words

29. I create opportunities for people to play together

30. I can content myself with having the right answer on an issue or question without acting on it

31. I am realistic in starting new ventures, but I don’t particularly fear failure

32. I get involved in justice issues and invite others to do so as well

33. I see opportunities for the church to live into and express the kingdom in ways specific to our context

34. I instinctively grieve with those who grieve and rejoice with those who rejoice

35. The church’s highest priorities should be the study of the Word and fruitful theological discussion

1———————2———————3————————-4———————5

Never             Rarely              Sometimes                Usually                Always

1.  ______           2.  ______           3.  ______           4.  ______           5.  ______

6.  ______           7.  ______           8.  ______           9.  ______           10.  _____

11. _____            12. _____            13. _____            14. _____            15. _____

16. _____            17. _____            18. _____            19. _____            20. _____

21. _____            22. _____            23. _____            24. _____            25. _____

26. _____            27. _____            28. _____            29. _____            30. _____

31. _____            32. _____            33. _____            34. _____            35. _____

Add up the columns here (higher numbers indicate greater relative strength):

__________         __________         __________         __________         __________

Apostle                   Prophet             Evangelist               Pastor                   Teacher

Hooray, I’m gifted, now what?

Employ your unique combination of gifts to increase the unity, maturity and ministry of the church (Ephesians 4). This sounds simple until you try it. God is asking us to use the ways in which we fundamentally diverge in our mental, emotional, and stylistic approaches to ministry to minister together. Each gift comes with its own biblical slants on humanity, the church, the faith and the world. The key here is to recognize and value the gifts and accompanying assumptions of others even though you will find them occasionally incomprehensible. The degree to which they mystify you is the degree to which you need someone else there representing them. They help make whole the mission of God. Maturity comes when these closely held and thoroughly biblical definitions and assumptions rub off on each other to expand our understanding of God and Christ-likeness. Unity comes of remembering throughout the process that we all claim Christ as Lord and are accepted by Him.

It also helps not to let these roles we’re called on to play define your identity overmuch – you are first and foremost a child of God. They are words to help us articulate our God-given strengths in blessing others. It does not constitute an excuse for self-importance or an exemption to caring for others in ways that don’t come as naturally to us. You’ll notice this list of gifts indicates less what exactly you should do in the church than how you’ll likely go about it. Nothing here dictates that you be or not be a preacher, an elder, a deacon, a Sunday school superintendent, a member of the outreach team or a worship leader.  An apostolically gifted arts pastor will have a different m.o. than one gifted in teaching, and so on.

Um, am I supposed to know what an apostle does?

Read back through the relevant questions to get a rough, composite sketch of each kind of “equipper,” as Woodward calls them. Even better, read his book. Or leave a comment and we can talk. I’d welcome any feedback or results. Was anyone else surprised by being more “evangelistic” (or “prophetic” or “apostolic,” etc.) than you thought of yourself as? If so, does that seem to be a symptom of my utter lack of training in assessment preparation, an indicator of some different assumptions about how these gifts operate in a missional church, or a sign that another leader is rubbing off on you?

A Mother’s Day Festivus for the Rest of Us: Some Inclusive Alternatives for Church Observance

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Most reflective congregations will already be aware of the dividing walls between those settled in “traditional” families and those who are not. Do we want to religiously observe a day that builds up those walls or one that breaks them down and builds us all up together? I believe the Church does her best work when we regard one another primarily as brothers and sisters and act together as children of God. The Church is the family into which God has set each one of us. How might some different approaches to Mother’s Day establish rather than undermine that truth in our midst? Motherhood is one role/ ministry/ calling among many. As such, it should be honored within the Church, but not above or at the expense of other roles, ministries, and callings. How might we affirm, support, and challenge each other on Mother’s Day?

1. Skip it.

Everyone knows that it’s Mother’s Day. Multiple industries are working day and night to ensure this is known. Honoring mothers is a fine thing (honoring one another at any time is a fine thing), but churches are in no way required to drop everything to issue a statement on the subject of motherhood this morning in particular. This can be an emotionally charged day for people, but it is not a national crisis and needn’t override regularly scheduled programming.

Being asked to stand is not such a significant a form of recognition that anyone with a mother’s heart wouldn’t willingly give it up to spare her single-and-hating-it sister pain. None of us wants to win a potted plant for having the most children if it means another woman in the room is forced to wonder if her miscarried or stillborn or aborted or adopted out children “count.” Does she still “have” the child if he died or disowned her or if her parental or custodial rights were terminated? No one needs an African violet that badly.

Allow the congregation to relate to one another organically and appropriately during the natural times of greeting before, during, and after the service. Trust that your people will recognize and rejoice with any woman in your midst beaming with a pregnancy-rounded glow, or distracted by devotion to her newborn, or visibly chuffed in the company of her adult children who don’t normally join her in the pews. By not directing these times the congregation will also have the freedom to support the women around them for whom this day represents loss, whether that’s through a hug in silent acknowledgement of a mother’s recent passing or a more private grief, or by checking in with offers of practical support for those caring for mothers who are fading away, or by directing the conversation toward rousing speculation about the NBA draft because this marks another year that this day must simply be borne, and not celebrated.

If the fancy hat brigade asks why you "skipped" Mother's Day, tell them. They're moms. They'll understand

If the fancy hat brigade asks why you “skipped” Mother’s Day, tell them. They’re moms. They’ll understand

2. Address it.

Just know that it can’t be a one-size-fits-all gloss. Build language into your corporate prayer time in the service that contends with the struggles of the day as well as the joys. There is an excellent example here along with some potentially relevant editorial suggestions immediately following in the comments section and a lovely follow-up here.

As a matter of personal taste, I would reframe it as a prayer rather than a message, as a time of coming before God as one people with all these experiences. But then, I like to think that everyone in the church already knows they’re welcome there. If you preceive the message that we are all in this together needs to be heard, say it loud and clear.

3. Preach it.

But please, no sermons about following Jesus while raising children, especially if it’s romanticized as some greatest calling, and even if it’s gritty as all get out. As gratifying as it can be to hear someone publicly recognize the difficulty of maintaining a spiritual life while housebreaking small humans, I reckon doctors have to pray while surrounded by others’ bodily fluids as much or more than most mothers, and I know my friends in customer service and corporate America get pooped on more times in a week than I do. What other week of the year – besides Father’s Day, of course – do we choose to preach to a fraction of the congregation? If there are any families in your church you probably have better and more meaningful ways of supporting them that aren’t potentially heart-rending to the rest of your congregants. I don’t need my church to honor me for my fertility, especially when dear friends who I know to the core of my being would make better mothers than I am are struggling to conceive or adopt. I don’t want to be honored as a mother on general principle by someone who, chances are, has no idea how I’ve interacted with my kids over the last week. Give me an exhortingly honest contingent of other parents and friends privy to the sordid details over hollow praise any day. Parents need more support than an annual sermon, and non-parents need to know they are integral to the life of the church every week of the year.

If you choose to preach a Mother’s Day sermon, preach about the inconvenient and unifying fact that we all have mothers and talk about the work of relating to our universally messed-up families of origin in all their weird permutations and uncannily entrenched patterns. Preach the texts in which God longs to mother us, gathering us up, teaching us to walk, modeling flight and catching us when we fall, then tie in the physical impossibility of forgetting the children one has borne. Help us all see God as a loving mama with our names tattooed on her hands, who will always get a little misty-eyed thinking of us when we’re far away, even if it’s because we’re in juvie or run-off with a bad crowd. Who always has a room for us even when we call her names and can’t make the token $100 she charges us in rent. Who swells with pride for our every little achievement even when we have convinced ourselves we have done well in spite of our upbringing. If your congregation is into carnations give everyone a red one on the way out as a reminder that we all have a loving and living Mother who would rather die than see us hurt.

4. Re-radicalize it.

Mother’s Day in America only goes back a hundred years or so, and most of its early supporters envisioned a day that had more to do with community organizing and peace-making than with thanking women for having children. When it became a national holiday it was to honor women who had lost children to war. “Decorative” clay handprints and poorly executed breakfasts in bed were not the original intent. What if Mother’s Day became a rallying cry for fighting for everyone’s children? Revving up the fierce side of our collective maternal instinct and living into that day when war will no longer be taught by declaring that day begins now? Something along the lines of Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation?

Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.

Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for carresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

Identify the social ill that breaks the hearts of your congregants and go at it like a mother protecting her young. Unleash your church’s inner mama bear on planning a clothes drive or activity for foster kids. Fund additional shelter beds in your town because everybody’s somebody’s baby. Scour the local middle school bathroom stalls and desks of cell numbers to call for a good time.

Mother’s Day was originally a day to mourn with those who mourn, but it is so much easier to rejoice with those who rejoice. How do we do both? What is your church doing for Mother’s Day? What ideas do you have?