When I was in Seminary back in Kansas City, I used to sneak off to a church called Jacob’s Well on Sunday nights.  I eventually became friends with a few of the pastors on staff and have come to think of it as one of my home churches in many ways.  Even out here on the East Coast I still think about Jacob’s Well and pray for them.  I keep in touch with a few of the people involved there so I feel like I’m still connected in some small way.  Well something happened this week that has really reignited that connection for me.

Last week Kara was in Kansas City for the 2008 Emergent Conversation - “Reclaiming Paul.”  The event was hosted at Jacob’s Well and she brought back a gift for me - the newly released album from the worship band.  Songs From Jacob’s Well by Mike Crawford and his Secret Siblings has brightened by week.  One incredibly powerful song in particular (Words to Build a Life On) that has been a part of my journey the past few years has finally found its way onto a recorded format.  So it’s pretty much been on constant repeat in the car lately.  These songs remind me so much of the time I spent at Jacob’s Well, listening to them half way across the country makes me feel like I’m there again… or at least like I’m still connected with that community.  It doesn’t hurt that the music and lyrics are both works of art.  Not cheesy, cranked through the grinder mush that so much Christian music tends to be these days.

You can get the 2-disc album here.  Coming soon to iTunes.

For a while now one of the big critiques of the emerging church from scholars has been that it lacks a robust or thoughtful engagement with Paul.  And let’s be honest, as postmoderns we really do gravitate towards the narratives of Jesus more than the somewhat more abstract theology of Paul.  In my own ministry I probably preach/teach on Jesus over Paul something like 15:1.  Not that a heavy emphasis on Jesus is bad!  Far from it.  I think we’re long overdue on returning to the teachings of Jesus in many of our churches!  Looking back I would guess that I got a lot more Paul than I did Jesus growing up in the churches where my faith was really formed.  But that being said, we’ve probably let the pendulum swing pretty far towards the gospels and have neglected the writings of Paul… at least I know I have.

I don’t see this as a Jesus vs. Paul kind of thing, but you definitely get different things from each of them (even if Paul is constantly pointing to Jesus).  Maybe it’s just a preference for the concreteness of narrative over the abstractness of Paul’s letters, but as a movement we’d do well to really engage Paul and dig into his Epistles.  To ignore his letters or to teach from them so rarely does a disservice to our people and to our own understanding of the faith.

Some emerging church leaders are taking this critique seriously and along with my Alma Matter they have put together a conference on the emerging church and Paul.  It will be held at a well known church in the emerging church landscape, Jacob’s Well.  Can I just say, way to go NTS!  I’m proud of us.

This is also the 2008 Emegent Village Theological Conversation.  Not to mention that my wife, Kara, will be moderating one of the sessions!  So if you’re in Kansas City next week, check it out, it’s not too late to register.

Brian McLaren recently posted his thoughts on voting, saying that the most important thing to him was what kind of a framing story each candidate lived by. In his book Everything Must Change, McLaren talks about the importance of the kind of framing story we live by. There are a few stories that keep popping up in human culture. Here are a few of the stories Brian mentioned when he visited the Bronx this year…

1. Domaination Story - legitimizes the powers that be.
2. Revolution Story - explains the situation for the oppressed and stirs them to revolt.
3. Scapegoating Story - explains the situation by blaming an outside party.
4. Withdrawl Story - justifies non-participation and isolation, rejecting other stories.

He said that in every one of these cases, Jesus offers a different story. For the domination story, Jesus subsitutes the story of humility and serving others. For the revolution story, Jesus subsitutes reconciliation and loving your enemies. For the scapegoating story Jesus subsitutes taking our own sin more seriously than the others. For the withdrawl story Jesus subsitutes incarnational love that isn’t afraid to get it’s hands dirty.

In Brian’s post he suggests that John McCain is still living by an us/them story, much like the story of Domaination and the Scaptegoating story. In contrast Barack Obama is living out of a reconciliation narrative. Interesting thoughts. Check out the post, I think it’s one of the most thoughtful endorsements of a candidate I’ve encountered.

Brian McLaren was in town last night speaking about his new book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. It was an excellent presentation, one of those “big idea” kinds of presentations that just build and build. I thought he did a great job of packing all of these concepts into a 1 1/2 hour presentation. While I felt like I was keeping up with him, tracking with where he was going, I still left with my head spinning. There was just so much that he covered and the implications are innumerable.

Later in the evening Brian joined us at the Princeton Emergent Cohort and we were also joined by the North Jersey Emergent Cohort. We packed 20+ people into a small corner of the Yankee Doodle Tap Room. It was a great time of informal conversation and we picked Brian’s brain about Narrative Theology, Stanley Hauerwas, Radical Orthodoxy, global economies and local economic practices, Wendell Barry, Plato, eschatology, N.T. Wright, Andrew Perriman, terrorism, the presidential election, pastoral care, dealing with conflict in the local church and the writing process. It was a great conversation with a great thinker.

I’ve loved all of Brian’s books that I’ve read so far but I had Everything Must Change on the backburner. No more. After last night I want to dig deeper into what Brian’s getting at in this book because I think it’s going to be incredibly important for the church as we quit playing “intramural games” as he put it, and start addressing how the Gospel frames and narrates our lives in such a way that we are sent into the world in a posture of serving, reconciling, compassion and healing.

If this stuff excites you like it does me, be sure to check out the Deep Shift tour. Brian will be in the Bronx May 2-3rd. If you can’t make it to the tour be sure to check out everythingmustchange.org where people are contributing and dreaming of ways to change the world one act at a time.

As I’ve been preparing for an upcoming series on sexuality in our High School ministry I’ve been trying to read some fresh stuff that engages sexuality from a theological point of view with special attention towards discipleship. I’ve been pretty underwhelmed by so much of the church’s teaching on sexuality for so long. I’ve used curriculum that I felt went straight for the “what’s over the line” question and felt schizophrenic in it’s mixture of guilt and affirmation of sex. As I teach on sex I wanted to really do an excellent job of engaging sexuality, theology and discipleship this time around. So two books immediately hit the top of my “must read” list. 1. Rob Bell’s Sex God and 2. Lauren F. Winner’s Real Sex. I’ve heard Winner speak on the topic of chastity in a break out session at Youth Specialties this past year and she was great.

I’m really glad I took the time to read Bell’s book before engaging this subject with the youth at our church. Bell’s style of writing is so conversational that it belies the deep theological work he’s doing in this book. Bell’s catch phrase quickly becomes “this is really about that.” And over and over again he makes connections between sexuality and spirituality and about how “this” is really all about “that.” Bell’s definition of sexuality alone was extremely helpful.

“For many, sexuality is simply what happens between two people involving physical pleasure. But that’s only a small percentage of what sexuality is. Our sexuality is all of the ways we strive to reconnect with our world, with each other, and with God (42).”

Hmm, sexuality is all the ways we try to reconnect? That means that even the celibate can practice and express their sexuality. And on the very next page Bell makes this point saying,

“Some of the most sexual people I know are celibate.

They sleep alone.

They have chosen to give themselves to lots of people, to serve and give and connect their lives with beautiful and worthy causes (43).”

Bell takes this understanding of sexuality to deconstruct our culture’s definition of sexuality. Some of the most overt expressions of “sexuality” in our world are the exact opposite of real sexuality. To illustrate this Bell describes the infamous “Red Light District” in Amsterdam where women sit in store front windows advertising themselves for prostitution. The transaction that happens between a man who goes to one of these prostitutes and the woman herself is just that, a transaction. Physical sex happens, but there is no reconnection. Indeed this kind of sex only serves to further divide and isolate the two parties. The man uses the woman for his own physical gratification and the woman falls deeper into the darkness of her situation. This is the exact opposite of two human beings reconnecting, and we still call it sex.

Bell’s treatment of pre-marital sex is good. As far as I remember he never even used the term “pre-marital sex.” Instead Bell contrasts “taking your clothes off” and “getting naked.” Anyone can take their clothes off and have sex, but in the end this is not true reconnection. Real reconnection happens in physical sex when both parties can be naked with one another. Being naked is about way more than taking off clothes, it’s about trust, it’s about security, it’s about accepting the other person with all their faults and still loving them. It’s about being willing to die for the other person and the promise to remain faithful. Getting naked requires the commitment of marriage, the commitment to serve one another as Christ did the church. As always, “this” is really about “that.”

I could go on and on… needless to say, I thought it was a great book.

A few days ago I finished Jesus for President and I’ve already lent it out to the first person on the growing waiting list. What a magnificent book! If you went to seminary and constantly had your nose stuck in a Hauerwas or Yoder book but wished you could lend a more accessible version to someone… this is that book. It isn’t dumbed down, let me be clear about that, it’s just that this book was really written for the church. This isn’t the kind of conversation that takes place in the ethereal upper layers of academia, this is the best Kingdom-of-God theology taken to the streets. And what would we expect? Shane & Co aren’t professors, they’re subversive prophets living in the abandoned places of the empire. Making their own clothes, living with the poor, dumpster diving for food… always pointing to Jesus. They are living at the margins pointing us to Jesus. They are shouting with their lives (and this book) that the America we live in is a pitiful and fallen Kingdom not worth our allegiance.

The Eagle is fake, the Eagle is dead.

Follow the Lamb!

Last week I picked up a book that I’ve been looking forward to reading for several months now. I didn’t even know that it had been released until I was wondering the isles of my local Barnes & Noble and bumped into the display for Shane Claiborne & Chris Haw’s new book Jesus For President. I’m about a third of the way through it now and it’s everything I was hoping it would be. Claiborne & Co have taken theologians and biblical scholars close to my own heart and made them scandalously accessible to an general audience. The book (so far) is tackling our own ideas about empire by taking a look at God and the people of God and their relationship to empire. The book is a creative mish-mash of art and prose and Kingdom Propaganda. This book provokes us towards a Christian imagination of politics and calls us to seriously rethink where our hope and allegiance really lay. Go pick it up now!

A few weeks ago we hosted a youth worker training night for the Middle School and High School shepherds at our church. Mike King was gracious enough to come facilitate the training for us. Mike is the President of YouthFront, an interdenominational youth ministry assisting organization. They put on a lot of concerts, community service events, camps, prayer retreats and the like to be a service to youth ministries in the Kansas City area. But another focus of YouthFront is training youth workers and that happens all over North America, primarily through their branch called SonLife. Both Mike and the President of SonLife, Chris Folmsbee, have recently written some amazing books for youth ministry, Presence Centered Youth Ministry and A New Kind of Youth Ministry respectively.

What’s funny is that I didn’t meet Mike during some big youth event or camp while I was in Kansas City, I met him at Seminary. Mike’s in his 50’s, he’s the President and CEO of an incredibly successful youth ministry organization but he still has a passion for learning and thinking theologically about ministry. If you pick up his book you’ll see what I mean. So it was a pleasure to have Mike come and do some training with our youth shepherds. He was very encouraging and affirming about the work that’s happening in our church. It’s always good to be with friends. Later Mike had breakfast with some of our staff at the Princetonian Diner and after that he and I went to Small World Coffeehouse to hang out until he got picked up on his way to visit Ian Cron and the youth workers at Trinity in Greenwich, CT.

What a great week.

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.

Several months ago I incorporated something new into my devotional life… a podcast. That wonderful group of Catholics called the Jesuits have been doing a daily (during the week) scripture meditation called Pray-As-You-Go. It’s really very similar to Lectio Divina. The podcast begins with some contemplative music ranging anywhere from monks chanting to solo guitarists singing in Spanish. Scripture is then read and there is a long time for prayer over the scripture passage, then the scripture is repeated and more time is given for prayer. There are usually some questions to think about during the prayer times. As the Jesuits say, it’s really more of a framework for your own prayer than a sermon, etc. They usually last anywhere from 9 to 12 minutes long and are always keen to observe the Christian calendar. In the spirit of Mike King any many other wise people, I wanted to practice this and actually have incorporated it into my life before I went and started recommending it to others. That being said, it has been a blessing in my own life and has given structure to my own prayer time that I think many of you might find helpful.