theo|digital

Pope Gregory the Great (540-604 CE) writing a letter to Abbot Mellitus, speaking of the missionary work of Augustine of Canterbury:

After mature deliberation on the condition of the English, [I have] decided upon, namely, that the temples of the idols in that nation should not be destroyed but the idols which are in them should be destroyed. Let holy water be prepared and sprinkled in said temples; then let altars be erected and relics set in place. For if those temples are well built, it is right that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God, that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed may abandon the error in their hearts and know and adore the true God, while still resorting familiarly to the places to which they are accustomed.

And since they have been used to slaughtering many oxen in sacrifices to devils; some solemnity should be substituted for that On the day of dedication, for example, or on the nativities of the holy martyrs whose relics are there deposited,[6] they may build them selves huts of branches of trees around the churches which have been converted to Christian use out of temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting, offering no more beasts to the devil but killing cattle for eating to the praise of God and returning thanks for their food to the Giver of all things, to the end that while some outward pleasures are permitted them they may more readily accept the inward consolations of the grace of God.

 Comments:

• Interesting example in the history of theology (more missiology) and culture.
• Assumes English native religion is of Satan
• But is remarkably accomodating to allowing the architecture and sacrifice practices to remain, but “re-purposed” toward a Christian worldview.
• Issue:  can existing systems of meaning be changed?

James F. White has a great short historical summary of Christian worship practice (A Brief History of Christian Worship).  Speaking of the Reformation period, he quotes Luther radically new views saying “the preaching and teaching of God’s Word is the most important part of divine service.”  Yet White points out,

“This insistence on lessons and sermons is not he pattern of the early Church at all.  Luther probably did not care but other Protestant leaders seriously thought they were restoring primitive practice in making scripture central to a people’s office.”

The youth conference skit of the last few years has been the one featuring Jesus and a troubled girl, set to “Everything” by Lifehouse. It dramatically shows how dark life can feel, and how Jesus intervenes.

And I can’t bring myself to like it.

This is one of the cases where I wonder if my cynicism has gone too far. The LT crew performed this here in Colorado on our first Tuesday night, and though one my new friends poked me and asked if I liked it, I struggled to be positive. It made me feel like a jerk&mdashmy resistance like stiff-arming Jesus himself or something.

Here’s what was going through my mind:

1. It doesn’t feel like a legit art form. Where in culture do you see the pantomime-over-audio-bed-skit except by church drama teams? The “skit” as generally accepted is a piece of comedy (SNL), but I can’t think of applications that are taken seriously (Cirque du soleil maybe?). It’s just not common, and to me has that nobody-does-this-except-us feel that goes with gospel tracts and public hymn sings.

2. The cascading chain of sin. The Lifehouse skit shows a succession of temptations or sins that seems to distract or invade the girl’s life. In order: boyfriend/romance -> cash/money -> alcohol -> beauty/anorexia -> cutting -> suicide. Each of these is profound and serious. But do boyfriends cause money-chasing or does chasing money cause alcohol, etc? I guess the positive way to see this would be as one girl’s story, but the subtle message that these will lead to each other.

3. Oversimplified sins. Romance, money, alcohol, and self-beauty all have God-created elements that can both live with vigor and grace in the Kingdom or be twisted and abused outside the Kingdom. I’m sure the skit format necessarily needs simplification, but I’m not sure Romance/Love is replaced by Jesus as much as it’s replaced by Romance/Love Done Jesus’ Way. Wine Done Jesus Way (Wedding feast of the lamb). Etc. I’m always worried when it feels like we’re throwing out Creation along with the Sin. It’s tough – in our world they are well tangled. But I hope this leads us to complicated conversations about how grace is the Great Unravellor.

4. Her turn-around/conversion is so black & white. One image I love in this skit is the deep struggle that’s portrayed. The clawing and pain under sin. But when Jesus finally dashes in to shield the heroine, she seems instantly free of her ailments, returning to a sense of perfect freedom. Isn’t it a significantly more realistic picture (though much less Happy Ending) to portray a walk that’s near to both Jesus and struggle? This is the Christian life we live. It’s possible, by portraying otherwise, to tell a false story that condemns those that show harsh evidence of their sin struggle their entire life. Hardly difficult to find in the history of the church. Paul shows us a rich picture of grace and sin running in parallel… the final glory established is Next not Now.

I realize in certain quarters I’ll get an bored high-five on this, but there are other that might wonder why I need to stir the pot. Why bring it up? Because these are big central issues of the way we talk about the gospel, sin, and grace. As fundamental pillars in the Christian worldview, I’m sure they can emerge from my small discussion no worse for the wear.

Sunday haven’t been the easiest day for me, since being up in Chicago.

I haven’t written outlines or something on my personal theology of “sabbath. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a set of experiences that have formed my assumptions. ” (I hear “sabbath” as a warm word, btw, not dark. And a word I don’t think requires a link to “Sunday” – but here I’m using it like that).

I think the sabbath rest has to do with God as my maker and me as the one he made. That he understands that I am surrounded by the opportunity for unlimited work—that my tasks are bigger than I will ever be—and being not only creaturely, but stubbornly opposed to that reality, I’ll try to finish the work anyway.

Sabbath is the idea that there is a rhythm to rest that I need. 1 in 7. A time for work and a time to remember I’m never going to finish the list.

And whatever I call “rest” has to involve freedom from spiritual, emotional, physical weight that naturally accompanies vocational accomplishment. So if I sit in front of TV all day but worry about my coming week – I’m missing it. Same if I ban myself from yard work – if my daily load is a life of reading and writing, physical tasks might be exactly how sabbath rests me.

But that’s not the component I’ve having trouble with.

The second part of Sabbath seems to be community. There’s something to resting with others. This is something that my sister Erika’s church back in Moscow, ID understood well: that sabbath was barely palatable without the table-leaf installed, wine glasses full, prayer and laughter mingled. I loved Sundays in the DawgHaus in Champaign because they involved a lot of we. We’d sleep in. Flop on couches and chat for hours before showering. Make breakfast together. This year down in Champaign, it seems to look like a regular home-cooked meal on Sunday evening with a movie after — actually the way we did it for a long time in DawgHaus 1.0.

But here in Chicago, I wake up to an empty apartment. I’ve don’t have the community of friends that thinks of Sabbath as gathering day, a laughing day. And by myself, it’s much harder to believe the first part: that I should be free of my list. With others: easy. Alone: I’m gonna work. Which is why I spent the morning reading research materials.

It’s just how it’s been. :-7

Dr. Lamin Sanneh, a native of Gambia, is a missiologist at Yale. A quote from his book Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel beyond the West, which he writes as a series of short questions and answers:

Q: What is the significance of the growth of the world Christianity for the West?

A: The West can encounter in the world Christian movement the gospel as it is being embraced by societies that had not been shaped by the Enlightenment, and so gain an insight into the culture that shaped the origins of the NT church. That might bring about a greater appreciation for the NT background of Christianity. It might also shed light on the issues of the early church faced as it moved between the Jewish and Gentile worlds.

—————-
Now playing: Andrew Osenga – The Letter
via FoxyTunes

“It is a great suffering for the church in the United States, for the church in general, and for me personally that this could happen. If I read the histories of these victims, it’s difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betrayed in this way their mission to give healing and to give the love of God to these children. We are deeply ashamed, and we will do all that is possible that this cannot happen in the future.”
…
I would not speak in this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia, [which] is another thing. We will absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry, this is absolutely incompatible. And who is really guilty of being a pedophile cannot be a priest.
…
I know that the bishops and the rectors of seminarians will do all that is possible so that we have a strong discernment, because it’s more important to have good priests than to have many priests.”

Pope Benedict, answering a planned question from reporter John Allen on the papal plane before landing at Andrews Air Force base. The pope’s words on this are significant, and the Pope clearly was aware, because he switched from Italian to English to answer the question. Some have accused him of not adequately addressing the sex abuse scandals of the last years. Read the NY Times article, but see the actual transcript of his words. I think his comments felt human and well done. I wonder what the critical abuse victims in Boston in this NPR story think at this point.

(I’m reading through the Pew Religious Landscape Survey. You can read my other posts on it as well.)

Some data on religious traditions that are passed on well (or not so well).

The religious traditions most heavily comprised of people who have switched affiliation include the unaffiliated [they're incorporating this as a category], Buddhists, Jehovah Witnesses, members of “other faiths” category (e.g. Unitarians, members of New Age groups and members of Native American religions) and members of the “other Christian” tradition (including metaphysical Christians). (p27)
This definitely seems to reflect that American propensity to seek something out very different as a self-defining element to replace the original religious category. It obviously also speaks to something about how religious traditions as passed down in families. Like, why do kids with parents who are Jehovah’s Witness rarely follow them?

Well, last month I mentioned the release of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey released by one of the Washington DC’s Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. It’s one of the most extensive of its kind in long time—they did in-depth interviews with 35,000 people. The initial report is 138 pages.

Because I’ve only been having short periods of time to look through it (the entire report is available online, but I actually killed some trees so I could mark it up), I’ve decided to start dropping in quotes and numbers as I find them interesting.

“Constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace as every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents. Those that are growing as a result of religious change are simply gaining new members at a faster rate than they are losing members.” (p7)
“constant movement” sounds right.
Interesting they chose to use the marketplace metaphor.


“Despite predictions that the United States would follow Europe’s path toward widespread secularization, the US population remains highly religious in its beliefs and practices…” (p1)
I wonder – is this still coming? How many years do we tend to lag behind them culturally? Or are there factors that really make us very different?

“People moving into the ‘unaffiliated’ category outnumber those moving out of ‘unaffiliated’ group by more than a three-to-one margin.” (p7)

On 24 Feb ’08, Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church (Seattle) spoke on the topic of the emerging church. Mark is often quoted — especially by general-audience news media (doing feature articles in the religion section) — as an “emerging church leader,” though I don’t think I’d agree (despite the wide breadth the term covers). Really he’s simply a younger conservative evangelical pastor who wears Urban Outfitter t-shirts.

But he does have a past association with Emergent Village types, which he can be pretty negative towards. Because I wanted to look more closely at what he had to say, I went ahead and transcribed his entire talk. The audio and video of his talk were already publicly available, but sometimes it’s easier to read it. I did it for myself but then figured others might want it as well. So here it is, the full transcript of his talk. It was part of a sermon series entitled Religion Saves & Nine Other Misconceptions.

Full Transcript (pdf – 379kb) Mark Driscoll Ask Anything Question 2: Emerging Church

The above is my unmarked transcript of his talk. If you’d like to see the copy I was using to mark up, including my personal (biased) comments, you can download that instead. Maybe I’ll be able to get back around and put up some quotes later.

One idea that comes up in missional church planting is the idea of “bounded set” vs. “centered set” church philosophy. The idea is often credited to social systems theory (not talking about math here), although if you google for it, you’ll get more hits on church blogs than anything else. It’s buzzy right now, I guess.

First, what’s the difference? Bounded set communities seem to describe most churches. Membership in a group is defined by an assent to a shared set of beliefs and behaviors. The mission of members is to ask people to belong by conforming. By contrast centered set thinking defines a group by its center. In this case, placing Jesus at the center, and allowing for the fact that all humans are at various distances from that center. The role of the group becomes to draw people closer to the center, not to define who is in or out.

The problem is, I still can’t decide whether it is Biblical or not.

Alan Hirsch’s wife Deb, was presenting this model at the Ecclesia gathering in DC, and asked “which of these in more Biblical?” loudly with the implied answer of “centered-set.” It was too simplistic for me.

The centered set is very attractive to me, and fits with my consistent idea that discipleship and evangelism are really very much the same thing – taking people closer to Jesus no matter where they are. And the Graham Tomlin (The Provocative Church) idea that a leader is to “keep the center hot not guard the edges” has rung true for me for years.

Yet don’t the sacraments – baptism and the Lord’s Supper – have a mandated? role of helping define who is in and out? Committed or not? Don’t they provide a boundary marker for who is in the family? (clearly Hirsch wouldn’t think so – but he’s anti-sacramental on the grounds they de-sacralize all of life. I disagree here).

And as much as Hirsch likes to cite early church example, wasn’t the catechical process for training and admitting new believers a long period of time? Three months? As long as a year sometimes? Weren’t they not allowed to enter the church proper until the process was complete? Talk about “in and out.”

So I’m torn.