Chris Folmsbee presented in one of the “Super Seminars.” His was all about a narrative approach to youth ministry. As a youth pastor who has been deeply shaped by narrative theology and is in turn beginning to use narrative theology in youth ministry I was naturally drawn to his seminar. That and Chris brought his ministry SonLife to Kansas City and now works with my friend Mike King at YouthFront.

Chris really hit on a lot of the same ground Lauren Winter did in her chastity seminar on the foundational idea that we have to start with the story of God before we ever get to sexual ethics (or whatever).

In a similar vein Chris helped us to see that the foundation of youth ministry is the Story of God. On that foundation is built the next level, Theology, what we say about God based on His story. Then comes the Identity & Calling, or what we can say about ourselves based on the Story and who God is… and the implications of what that calls us to. Then that calling or implication moves towards a Rule of Life, how do we approach life in light of the Story, in light of who God is, in light of who we understand that calls us to be. Then… and only then, can we talk about behaviors and practices in a way that is truly rooted in the gospel.

Chris’s critique of youth ministry is a good one, we have for too long started with the behaviors and practices… what good kids should be like, etc. and then tried to get to the story of God from there. While it’s well intentioned, it gives no context to why of all those behaviors and practices might be important. This was the same point I believe that Lauren Winter was making in her seminar on chastity, we have to do the hard work of weaving the gospel in to the lives of kids before we can start talking about concrete practices of the Christian life.

We need to be honest enough to say that Christian living isn’t just about “common sense.” The stuff we do is weird and odd and while it might seem really wise and good to an older generation the younger generation needs to be brought along to find themselves in the Story of God before we can ask them to live like Christians.

That involves a risk on our part. It means we work harder at weaving the gospel into the lives of our students before we try to instill “Christian ethics” into them, because without the foundation of the Story of God those practices will be rooted in a very shallow soil and inevitably will wash away when they leave “youth ministry” behind.

Phyllis Tickle spoke at the general session the second day of YS. She gave us a brief survey in church history of what she called “rummage sales,” that is those times of major upheaval in the church, usually when something huge in the prevailing culture challenges the church’s assumptions about reality, etc. It seems that these major upheavals happen every 500 years or so. In 70 AD there was the fall of the temple when Christianity became seen as more than just a sect of Judiasm, then there was the decline of Rome between the 400’s and the 500’s, next there was the Great Schism in 1054 between the East and the West in the church dividing Christianity between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. Next would come the Protestant Reformation beginning in 1517 with Martin Luther.

Tickle explained that we are in the beginning stages of one of these great upheavals right now, one she called “The Great Emergence.” Of course she was talking about the shift in our culture from the modern to the postmodern and the church’s response, largely seen in movements like the emerging church. YS is such a diverse gathering, not lacking in anti-emergent types, so when it became obvious where she was going with this I was delighted. Tickle has such a great gift of communication and I was glad to have her explain the emerging church to a crowd that would be full of both full-on emergents and anti-emergents alike. She briefly explained that technology has made our world much smaller, giving us access to so much more of the world than we had during the previous 500 years. Christians are much more aware of (and appreciate) the rest of Christianity in ways they didn’t before. To illustrate this Tickle drew us a diagram which I’ve tried to recreate here.

In the top left quadrant are the Liturgical Christians (Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, etc.) who are starting to look more and more alike in the current landscape of Christianity. In the top right quadrant are the Social Justice Christians (a lot of our mainline churches fall into this category - Presbyterian, Methodist, Christian Church, etc.) and though they come from different theological streams they are beginning to look very similar to one another in the current Christian landscape. In the bottom left are the Renewalists (she equated them with the Pentecostals) and the bottom right are the Evangelicals. I think she tried to give each group a new name to emphasize that these quadrants are not necessarily descriptive of entire denominations, that is, these days you can find fairly Evangelical Presbyterian churches (I work at one, I should know!) or Liturgical Nazarene churches (again, I’ve been in a few of those). Her point was, the landscape is changing and we are becoming more aware of the other quadrants. Not just more aware, but many of us are finding those other quadrants to not only be entirely compatible with our own, but attractive and beautiful.

To boil it down even more…

Nazarenes are discovering the liturgy and they’re falling in love with it.

Presbyterians are starting to talk about Jesus and having a personal relationship with God.

Pentecostals are buying compact-fluorescent light bulbs and building houses for the poor.

and on and on.

The purple circle are those who are somewhere inbetween in this whole emerging church thing, they’re emergent but they’re not giving up on their particular tradition (the Presbymergents, Emergent Nazarenes, etc.). This is where I find myself.

This phenomenon of blurring the distinctions between one narrow stream of Christianity and another, the borrowing of someone else’s tradition’s gifts and using them as if they belong to the whole church… that describes what’s happening in the Emerging Church. In some ways it’s a (re)discovery of some of the gifts within our Christian faith that we’ve separated ourselves from over the past few hundred years. Denominations are becoming less important. And I pray to God, that the glue that holds this whole Emerging Church thing together is Jesus Christ. At the center of this diagram, the Emerging Church is an experiment of what it might look like to do church as if the denominational boundaries aren’t what hold us together, but Jesus is.

And here’s where the corners of each quadrant are so important. The corners are the reactionary anti-emergent voice within each tradition. They keep us from from falling off the face of the map into “unity for the sake of unity”-ism. Their critique’s may seem harsh and inflexible, and they may call us heretics for embracing (or at least appreciating) what another stream of Christianity has to offer… but they are our roots, that’s where we come from and it’s important to remember where you come from. The hardliners will help the emerging church to articulate its faith by challenging it so much.

Tickle gave a warning and a charge at the end of her talk saying, every time there has been one of these church upheavals Christians have deionized each other and resorted to violence in their disagreements. This time we need to remember that there are Christians all over that map, our tradition does not “own” the only true expression of the Christian faith. We would do well to work out the tumultuous future of our faith with humility and peaceableness.

Mike King led a break out session that covered a lot of the same ground he covered in his book Presence Centered Youth Ministry on Saturday morning. Mike’s calling to those in youth ministry (and to be honest Christians in general) is to take care of our souls and find ways and rhythms in which we connect to God and are fed. This is a much higher priority for the integrity of our ministry than any program or strategy no matter how “effective” they promise to be. So for a little over an hour we explored Christian disciplines that have been life-giving to the Church for thousands of years. There were no programmatic suggestions, or 7 highly-effective strategies to take home to our youth, just Mike’s passion for youth workers to connect with God and to do so in a way that is true to themselves.

This means opening our eyes to the deep well of Christian spirituality. For so long we have been told that Christian spirituality was about 15minute quiet times and praying through a list of wants and needs. Mike explored with us different ways of reading scripture, especially meditatively, through practices like lectio divina or imaginative reading (visualizing the text as a world you can step into and explore). I am especially excited about the contemplative spirit Mike and his team at YouthFront have brought to camp ministry.

Shane Claiborne was tonight’s general session speaker. These speakers are usually the “big guns” and are charismatic, charming, well polished, impressive… you know, the kind of speakers that make you wish you were way better at speaking or preaching. And as we all know Shane Claiborne just wrote a book in the past two years that has just been hugely important for so many of us. It’s turned this little-known servant of Jesus from the rough part of Philly and made him somewhat of a Christian rock-star. People are calling him our generation’s Mother Teresa, etc, etc. I love Shane’s heart, I love his vision, I love what he’s about. And Shane is all about Jesus. Tonight he showed us that, while simultaneously begging the question if we are indeed all about Jesus. You see Shane was flown in here to be tonight’s “big gun speaker” and after about 30 seconds of intro, playing with fire and a joke, Shane just launched into the Sermon on the Mount… and I mean ALL OF IT. Then he ends with “Wow, that was the greatest sermon ever preached. Jesus give us the courage to live it out.”

Done.

Exit stage right.

There was an interesting reaction. On the one hand a lot of people are thinking, what?? he got paid the big bucks and got center stage to just go up and read from the bible? I could have done that. Then immediately following those judgmental thoughts came the reflection on just how hyped up we get on “good speakers” and how distant Jesus’ words have become to us when we hear the greatest sermon ever preached and find ourselves thinking we didn’t get what we came for. You could feel the awkwardness rise in the air as people began to wonder to themselves “was that really IT?” and then a reverence fall over the crowd as we realized what we had just thought and how pitiful we can be at times.

National Youth Worker’s Conference is something I’ve wanted to go to for years and this year I am finally here! A bunch of youth staff and shepherds came out from our Church together. We left Allentown at 5am to get on a plane from New Jersey to Atlanta and it’s been non-stop ever since. I wasn’t here 5 minutes before I spotted Mike King and gave him a big hug.

I want to take a moment to highlight some stuff from Lauren F. Winner’s breakout session on teaching chastity to teens. This has been something I struggle with as a teacher/preacher/mentor to teens. As Winter said, the “pragmatic” scare tactics obviously don’t work and they don’t speak to the sacredness of sex in it’s right context. One major mistake we often make in our teaching on sex, Winter pointed out, is that we focus teaching about Chastity on sex itself rather than framing it within the life of discipleship. So chastity becomes a “strategy” to win a good Christian partner or something along those lines. This avoidance of sex as a way to make yourself more sexy to the right person is not chastity.

Winter reminded us that chastity is a Christian discipline, specifically a discipline of restraint (like fasting). And like fasting, Chastity is meant to turn your attention from one thing (like food, or sex in this case) and instead focus on God. By approaching chastity in this way, “not having sex” is not about avoiding disease or attracting the right kind of mate, but is a very important way in which you discipline your body to obey God. Chastity is a practice of surrendering our will and desire to God so that he might rehabilitate our will and our desire. This kind of chastity cannot simply be undertaken by the lone individual but must be lived out in a community that will support such disciplines.

This kind of chastity only makes sense then, to disciples of Christ who are already on the journey towards surrendering their lives to God. This seemed to upset some people in our session who wanted Winter to talk about how to explain this kind of chastity to a non-Christian kid. Her answer was pretty simple, chastity is a Christian spiritual discipline, and you can’t expect a kid to live into that kind of discipleship before they actually connect with God. But we seem to get the cart in front of the horse on this one by trying to conjure up reasons for non-Christian kids to stop having sex, and in so doing we abandon the language of discipleship that is at the very core of what chastity is all about.

For more check out her book, Real Sex: the Truth About Chastity

Last week Kara and I watched the final episode of Arrested Development. We’d stretched watching the three seasons of the show over two years. We felt guilty that we were not among the loyal fans of the show when it was on the air. But like so many people we only came to know of Arrested Development after the fact. How lame is that! COME ON!

Buster, we will miss your one-handed mama’s boy hilarity.

George, we will miss your fanatical drive to stay out of prison even though it was the only place you really belonged.

Lucille, we will miss your pre-lunch vodka rituals.

Gob, we will miss you accidentally spraying lighter fluid on strangers and then explaining how the magic trick should have worked with enough flare to last any normal human being a lifetime.

Lindsey, we will miss your sad attempts at flirting.

Michael, we will miss your constant need to be a better dad than your own… and how you always find a way to mess it up.

George Michael, we will miss you boyish awkwardness (actually we probably won’t because you’re in tons of movies these days reprising that part).

Tobias, we will miss all the ways in which you would unknowingly speak in innuendo.

Maybe, we will miss seeing all of your below average B-movies and their theme park offshoots.

Kara and other PTS students were invited to visit the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. a while back and she signed us up. Earlier this month we got on a bus with other PTS students and took the trip down to D.C.

The Holocaust museum experience was very different than what I was expecting. On the first hand I thought that it would be a lot more macabre than it actually was, but either way I thought that being faced with the horror of it all that I wouldn’t be able to make it out without breaking down and crying. This was not the case, indeed I didn’t see a tear shed by anyone there. Instead the overwhelming brutality and evil you see in the museum for hours and hours on end just seemed to cause us all to shut down. I for one went into a kind of emotional turtle-shell, being so shocked by an all-day exposure to the Holocaust. The museum takes you through the rise of the Nazi party on the top floor, down into the persecution of Jews and removal to ghettos on the next floor down and finally to the “final solution” on the lower floor. You literally spiral downward as you follow the time line of the Holocaust. The transition from the middle floor to the last floor is a transition of “How could people be so racist and oppressive” to “How could human beings do these unspeakable things to other human beings.” It is silent. It is intensely horrifying. Kara and I sat in a room listening to audio recordings of survivors telling about their experiences during the Holocaust. Part way through one of our guides came in to sit and listen as well. He was a Holocaust survivor. I can only describe that moment as being a mix of the most reverent sacredness and the a gut-wrenching disgust.

The second (and I think regrettable) thing I wasn’t expecting were the several instances in which I overheard conversations about the current violence in Israel between Israelis and Palestinians, conversation that was itself tinted with racism. In one conversation in particular a woman even shamed “the liberal media” for ever taking pictures of Israeli soldiers shooting at kids with rocks. All the while I’m thinking, “those journalists are being a witness to the lopsided violence happening in Israel, how can you honor people who had the courage to be a witnesses and tell the world of the Holocaust but demean the people who would be witnesses against your own tribe.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. As I looked around at this museum full of the testimony of some of the worst racism and suppression ever directed at one people and saw the consequences of that I was saddened to learn that not everyone there had apparently learned the same lesson.

This morning I was flipping through the channels and came across TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network). TBN has a special place in my heart, ever since two summers ago when I was living with Brian Schafer in a pre-cable tv apartment and one of the only over-the-air channels we got was TBN. It was so much fun to watch because it was always so incredibly bad. It was like watching The Colbert Report… for Christians. I highly recommend this by the way, watch TBN, but don’t get all riled up and take it seriously. Instead, pretend it’s religious satire (a la The Door) and you’ll have a hoot.

Okay, back to my story. I come across TBN and pause just long enough to see that Ann Coulter is on “Behind the Scenes” talking about her new book. I’ve posted a section of the interview at the bottom of this post. At one point the interviewer asks about her own background in the church. She talks about growing up in a Presbyterian church in Connecticut and how her mom didn’t like the “political” sermons her pastor would preach against Vietnam. They would later leave the church later in favor of one that wasn’t “political.” Coulter’s critique of her “political” pastor was simply, “that’s not what most Christians want.” The way she talks about it her mother wanted a church that would offer some kind of benign emotional therapy and nice singing, but never denounce a war. Apparently Coulter has been critiqued by some bloggers for not actually going to church, she responded by saying that 1. She does go to church but that 2. liberals are so “biblically ignorant” that they don’t realize that Christians don’t have to go to church. We don’t have to go to church, Coulter contends, because Christ died for our sins.

What I found so surprising was just how mainstream Coulter was for a few seconds there. Coulter’s understanding of the Gospel is so shaped by an American Civil Religion (coming out of… liberalism!) that God’s concern is just about him and you. God doesn’t get involved in politics unless we invoke him for our own cause, and there really is no need for the church since it’s all about you and God to begin with. These two theological commitments I think a great deal of American Christians share with Ann Coulter.

For all of Coulter’s talk of “being biblically literate” she apparently doesn’t pick up on the Missio Dei (Mission of God) to renew all of creation, to redeem the world (not just you). The redemption of the world being an incredibly political kind of thing, especially because God says this redemption will take place in the life, death and resurrection of his Son and not through the war on terrorism, state welfare, the United Nations or even “taking back our Country for God.” Secondly, Coulter apparently misses large swaths of scripture where God calls a people (plural) into covenant to follow him, to be a blessing to the world, and to be the vehicle for God to come and dwell among us. As the church we are the body of Christ on earth, we live in continuity with Israel as we live out the mission of God in the world. Just one reason why it is important for Christians to be a part of the church. To be a part of the church means that people like Ann would have to take communion with “liberals.” Church is the place where God destroys the walls we put up between each other and since Ann’s primary goal in life seems to be building those walls, it’s just more convenient for her to take the “just me and God” route.