Deliver Us from Me-Ville on quiet time and loud time

My colleague Dave Zimmerman, who shares an office wall with me, just wrote a new book Deliver Us from Me-Ville about escaping self-absorption. (I find it amusing and ironic that the inescapable subject category on the back by the bar code happens to be "Personal Growth.") One part of the book contrasts the traditional Christian emphasis on "quiet time" (personal devotional time with God) with what Dave calls "loud time," which he highlights as "the devotional value of time spent throughout the day in the company of others."

This line jumped out at me: "By privileging solitude - 'quiet time' - over fellowship as a means of identifying God at work, we privilege our own instincts over the instincts of others."

In other words, one of the dangers of personal quiet time is that it's inherently individualistic. Left to our own devices, we risk running astray and subjectively misconstruing our relationship with God in terms that merely benefit our own preconceived ideas. We need community to temper our individualism, to provide a corrective to isolation and self-absorption. Of course, there is a place for both solitude and community. Dave highlights Bonhoeffer's famous quotes on this: "Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. . . . Let him who is not in community beware of being alone."

I suspect that personality differences also play a role in this. I remember when Dave started his Loud Time blog, and I thought it was a cool name and idea, as an alternative to evangelical quiet time. He said something about how Christian spirituality tends to prioritize the contemplative introvert who encounters God in solitude and silence, leaving extroverts at a loss as to how to connect with God in ways that fit them.

So I was interested to see Nancy Reeves's new book Spirituality for Extroverts (And Tips for Those Who Love Them). Reeves says that some of us are Tiggers, and some of us are Owls. Owls are comfortable with silent prayer retreats, while Tiggers might feel unspiritual because they don't connect with God as well that way. Some of us are contemplatives, others of us are activists. We need each other to temper our own tendencies and to keep us in balance.

I've greatly appreciated the literature of the spiritual formation movement (especially of my author David Benner, as well as other books in our Formatio line). But I confess that it does not come naturally to me. I've never had anything remotely approaching a consistent (or even occasional!) daily "quiet time." But I've been glad that even contemplatives understand that spiritual life is sometimes activist and sometimes communal, not just private and personal. There's a place for both quiet time and loud time.

The candidates and our “we”

At the Duke Center for Reconciliation gathering last week, during our closing worship time, a black pastor from Texas challenged us to rethink our “we.” Who is our “we”? Who is our beloved community? And he used the three presidential candidates as illustrations of how society defines the “we.”

John McCain’s age raises questions of generational divides. Is he too old? And do we identify as young or old? Boomer or Xer? Over 65 or under 30? Is that our “we”?

Hillary Clinton’s identity has raised questions of gender. Is the media sexist? And do we identify primarily along gender lines? Is that our “we”?

Barack Obama’s biracial and crosscultural background has raised questions of racial and ethnic identity. Do we identify our community on the basis of race? Is that our “we”?

Obviously all of these factors are significant and unavoidable. But if we are Christians and people of reconciliation, our identities and communities must transcend all of these dimensions and point to a larger reality. Our churches ought to be intergenerational, gender interdependent, and multiethnic and multicultural. Such is the kingdom of God, where the beloved community brings down dividing walls between slave and free, male and female, Jew and Gentile.

Free preview of Andy Crouch's Culture Making

I've just been going over the final pageproofs for the upcoming book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch. This is an amazing book. It has shaped much of my thinking in the past few years as I've been working with Andy on it. It's a paradigm-shifting big-idea book that talks about how we need to move from condemning, critiquing, copying and consuming culture and instead create and cultivate culture. We don't change culture by critiquing it; the only way to change culture is to create culture.

The book is about to go to the printer and will be in print later this summer. In the meantime, you can get a free preview of the book at IVP's website. The first few chapters are available there now, and several more chapters will be released in a few weeks, for a total of the first 100 pages of the book. And we invite you to share the PDF with others.

If you're on Facebook, you can become a fan of the book at the Culture Making page. Here's a note from Andy Crouch that he posted on the page:

The release of Culture Making is just over two months away. It will be really fun to have the book out there to start lots of conversations about how we can become cultivators and creators of culture, not just critics and consumers of it.

But you don't have to wait until this summer to start reading the book and to start those conversations. InterVarsity Press has taken the unusual step of releasing, not just the introduction or the first few pages, but the first 40 pages of the book, online, in PDF form, for free. (Yes, they are awesome--and thanks to John Holland for originally suggesting this.) And in a few weeks we'll release another three chapters.

You can download the PDF from

http://www.ivpress.com/title/exc/3394-sample-1.pdf

Read. Enjoy. But there's one other thing I'd like to ask you to do. Find at least one way to share this PDF with others. Post about it on Facebook. Blog about it. Forward the link--or the whole PDF file--to your small group, your pastor, your six best friends. (Yes, you can do this completely legally--see the last page for the details on what you can and cannot do with this PDF.)

Then, if you don't mind, post on the wall at Culture Making to tell the rest of us what you thought and what your friends thought of these opening pages.

Bon appetit!

Andy

TheHighCalling.org: Service When You're Not Serving

[This is an article I wrote for TheHighCalling.org that posted a few months ago, but I forgot to mention it or link to it here. It was written at the height of the presidential primary season, so the opening paragraphs reflect that context.]

Service When You're Not Serving

by Al Hsu

During presidential election cycles, a field of ambitious, talented candidates vies for attention. They travel endlessly, deliver countless stump speeches, give interviews, raise money, and engage in debates. For months they battle it out in primaries and caucuses until political realities set in and candidates start dropping out. Eventually party nominees are selected, and in the general election, a winner is chosen.

Of course, any number of forces and factors determine elections. But for every person named to high office, dozens of others never make it—even though they may well be every bit as qualified as the eventual officeholders. And the reality is that only a select number of people can be in the most prominent places of leadership. The majority of us find ourselves elsewhere.

What do you do if you aspire to a position of service and get passed over? I found myself asking this question recently when I was one of six nominees for three positions of responsibility. Going by straight probabilities, I had a fifty-fifty chance of selection. Those aren't bad odds, right? But I didn't make the cut. So naturally I questioned my capabilities. Was I not skilled enough? Likeable enough? Was I unfit for service?

I was reminded of a passage from the book of Acts. After Judas Iscariot killed himself, the early church sought to replace him among the twelve apostles. Two candidates emerged—Joseph Barsabbas and Matthias. Both men had been committed disciples of Jesus throughout his earthly ministry, from his baptism to his ascension. That's three years of loyal following. It is likely that both were among the seventy sent out by Jesus in Luke 10. They would have been well-known by the other early church leaders—"networked," by our contemporary parlance. They were both fast-track leadership material.

Two candidates for one spot. By straight probabilities, they each had a fifty-fifty chance. We know slightly more about Joseph Barsabbas. Acts 1:23 mentions that he was also known as "Justus," suggesting that he was a man of integrity and honesty. Maybe that would have given him a slight edge. Then came the moment of decision . . .

[For the rest of the article, go here.]

Reconciliation as both gift and work

This week I was at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. This was my first visit to Duke, and it's a beautiful campus, with woods and gardens throughout the university. I was there for a gathering hosted by the Duke Center for Reconciliation. InterVarsity Press is partnering with the Center for a series of small books called Resources for Reconciliation. The first two books in the series release this fall; Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing by Center codirectors Chris Rice and Emmanuel Katongole, and Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness by theologian Stanley Hauerwas and L’Arche founder Jean Vanier.

The vision of the Center is to be a resource for the church in bringing healing and reconciliation to areas of brokenness, whether that’s division across ethnic/racial lines or global conflicts or whatnot. So they convened this gathering to connect leaders from churches, parachurch organizations and the academy, folks who are doing work in racial reconciliation, social justice, urban ministry, community development, disability ministry and the like. Some of the attendees had been part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and it was amazing to hear their stories and get a glimpse of the history they lived through and made happen.

Greg Jones, dean of the divinity school and author of Embodying Forgiveness, made some observations about a sculpture that the divinity school had commissioned that depicts the Luke 15 portrait of the father and his two sons. There is good news of the gospel here – the father’s arm is around the younger brother, in an embrace of welcome and forgiveness. But the posture of the older brother’s resistance indicates that there is yet work to be done, that much brokenness still exists. The task is for us to find ways to heal the brokenness, build bridges and restore shalom.

So reconciliation is both gift and work. It is a gift to be graciously received from God, that we are reconciled to him through the work of Christ. But reconciliation is also a call to be fulfilled, to be reconciled to others and to invite others into the experience of reconciliation, on personal, corporate and global levels.

There was a sense that a new kairos moment of opportunity is happening now. The world is terribly broken and divided, but there are signs of hope and encouragement, especially among a younger generation that is increasingly active in work for justice and peacemaking. I think today's college students and twentysomethings put my own cynical Gen X generation to shame. We Xers may have been somewhat immobilized by the magnitude of the world's problems, but today's upcoming generations, despite their own brokenness (or perhaps because of it) are more motivated and mobilized to be agents of change.

John Piper meets Tony Jones: Two views

What happens when new Calvinists and emergents talk? Collin Hansen and Tony Jones have been having good conversations online at Christianity Today about each other’s respective books and movements. I think it's interesting that John Piper's Bethlehem Baptist Church and Doug Pagitt's Solomon's Porch are just five miles away from each other in Minneapolis. Not long ago I discovered that Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt had actually met with John Piper, and I was fascinated to read their two different accounts of the same meeting.

This is from The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World (ed. John Piper and Justin Taylor):

Justin Taylor: John, you met recently with Tony Jones, who’s the national coordinator for Emergent, and Doug Pagitt, who is also involved in the leadership of Emergent. Is there anything you can tell us about that meeting or anything that would be helpful to share about your time together with them? And how did it come about?

John Piper: Tony and Doug took the initiative to e-mail me and asked if we’d be interested in meeting with them—I think because they read the blurb on this conference and were ticked off by it!

It was a very profitable time for me. I like these guys, by the way. I like them because I think they’re both hotheads, and I think I am too. That was a personal impression. However, my root sense is that ultimately, for Tony and Doug, committed relationships trump truth. They probably would not like the word “trump” but would rather say that committed relationships are an authentic expression of the gospel, and that to ask, “What is the gospel underneath, supporting the relationships?” is a category mistake. And so I just kind of kept going back on my heels, saying I just don’t understand the way these guys think. There are profound epistemological differences—ways of processing reality—that make the conversation almost impossible, as if we were just kind of going by each other. What is the function of knowledge in transformation? What are the goals of transformation? We seem to differ so much in our worldviews and our ways of knowing that I’m not sure how profitable the conversation was or if we could ever get anywhere.

Therefore I can’t make definitive statements about what they believe about almost anything, except for a few strong statements about certain social agendas in which they would clearly come out of their chair on the hatred of human trafficking or something like that. But as far as their beliefs on certain doctrinal issues, I can’t tell, because as I pushed on them, I could tell that their attitude was: “That’s not what we do. That’s not what we do here. We don’t try to get agreement on the nature of the atonement. That is alienating to friendships to try to do that, so we don’t do that.” And because of that, I say, “Well, I don’t even know where to start with you then.” This shows how different we are, because Galatians 1:8 says, “If we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.” And that’s not friendship. Paul insists on establishing the gospel, whether there is a good relationship or not. I came away from our meeting frustrated and wishing it were different but not knowing how to make it different. (The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, pp. 154-55)

And the following is Tony Jones’s take on the same meeting as chronicled in The New Christians:

Tony Jones: When the pastor accepted my invitation to lunch, I was happy, if a bit anxious. This man is the pastor of a large Baptist church, the president of a ministry, and the author of several best-selling books. He sits atop a pyramid of conservative Reformed Christians that has been particularly critical of emergents. I sent him an e-mail after seeing the promotional material for his pastors’ conference, the language of which made it clear that the emergent church movement was one of his targets for criticism. My e-mail was an olive branch: an invitation to lunch and an assurance that we both share a commitment to proclaiming Christ.

The pastor is a gentle-looking man, but his theology is anything but gentle. He believes that God’s anger burns with holy fire against human sin. Words like wrath, hate, and blood peppered his sentences as we dined at the Olive Garden (his choice). Slight of stature, he has a piercing gaze. He brought three of his compatriots, and I brought Doug Pagitt, the pastor of Solomon’s Porch and my best friend. He carried a Bible and a notebook; Doug and I each brought books that we’d written to give as gifts.

The pastor began by admitting that he’d never heard of me before, and that he really didn’t have anything against emergent Christians per se. His beef is with Brian McLaren and Steve Chalke, both emergent authors who have questioned the version of the doctrine of the atonement that he holds dear. Early in the lunch, Doug said that he’s long respected the ministry of the pastor’s church and since we’re in the same town, perhaps we could minister in partnership with one another. “Regardless of our theological differences,” Doug said, “maybe we can find ways to work together.” But as the lunch progressed, it became clear that the pastor felt that the beginning of any partnership was necessarily agreement on a particular doctrine, the atonement, a doctrine that he equates with an understanding of the gospel. To put it conversely, if you don’t understand the atonement as he does, you do not understand the gospel. To put it even more bluntly, he said that if you reject his understanding of the gospel, you are rejecting the gospel in toto, and so, by logical extension, you are not a Christian. (To be fair, he didn’t pass the same sentence on people who have never had the gospel explained to them in this way before, only on those who hear it and outright reject it.)

I mentioned the billions and billions of people who have lived and died as faithful, albeit not Reformed, Christ followers over the past two millennia, to no avail. Doug mentioned that there are lots of things that our two churches might work together on, like fighting sex trafficking, that have nothing to do with how one sees the atonement, but the pastor didn’t budge. I mentioned that it might be arrogant and a bit deceptive to preach that one of them is the sole and exclusive means of understanding the single greatest event in the history of the cosmos: the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. “What do you tell your congregation about how Christians understood the atonement for the thousand years prior to Anselm?”

The pastor paused, looked at me, and said, “You should never preach.” He went on to state that in this confusing, relativized, and postmodern world, people need “fixed points of doctrine” around which they can orient their lives. In other words, a correct understanding of a particular doctrine is the beginning of all Christian ministry. If you don’t have that, he was saying, you don’t have anything.

Then I tried another tack in explaining emergent Christians. “For you,” I said, “it’s the fixed point of doctrine that is the litmus test of all ministry. But for us, it’s the Apostle Paul’s call to be ambassadors of reconciliation in the world. Everything we do in the emergent church is surrounded by an envelope of friendship, friendship that is based on lives of reconciliation. And it’s within that envelope that we have all sort of discussions and debates about the atonement and sex trafficking and baptism and AIDS in Africa.

“In fact,” I continued, “I’m not sure it’s even possible to be an orthodox Christian if you’re not living a life of reconciliation.” (The New Christians, pp. 76-78)

Grieving a Suicide: A summary

A few months ago I met Christine Scheller, a journalist who has written for Christianity Today and other publications. I was saddened to hear that a few weeks after we met, her son Gabe took his own life. I sent her a copy of my book Grieving a Suicide, and Christine just posted an extensive summary of the book on her blog. I'm reposting it here with her permission.

-------------

Al’s book is dedicated to his father, Terry Tsai-Yuan Hsu, an accomplished electrical engineer who took his own life after a debilitating stroke. Al brings to the topic both a survivor’s understanding and good scholarship.

The book is divided into three parts:

• When Suicide Strikes—Shock, Turmoil, Lament, Relinquishment and Remembrance
• The Lingering Questions—Why Did this Happen? Is Suicide the Unforgivable Sin? Where is God When it Hurts?
• Life After Suicide—The Spirituality of Grief, The Healing Community, The Lessons of Suicide.

In Part I, we learn that “the grief that suicide survivors experience is described by psychologists as ‘complicated grief.’ … Those of us who experience complicated bereavement are actually grappling with two realities, grief and trauma. Grief is normal; trauma is not. The combination of circumstances is like a vicious one-two punch. We are grieving the death of a loved one, and we are reeling from the trauma of suicide. The first is difficult enough; the second may seem unbearable.”

Al categorizes the resultant turmoil as follows:

1. Shock, disbelief and numbness–“‘The immediate response to suicide is total disbelief,’ writes a suicide survivor. ‘The act is so incomprehensible that we enter into a state where we feel unreal and disconnected.’”
2. Distraction—“Friends of survivors may need an extra measure of patience … traumatic grief has caused an inability to focus.”
3. Sorrow and Despair—“Survivors often fall into a state of melancholy and depression … In some ways we may unconsciously identify with the hopelessness that precipitated our loved one’s death.”
4. Rejection and Abandonment—“Suicide feels like a total dismissal, the cruelest possible way a person could tell us that they are leaving us behind … So we feel abandoned. Our sense of self-worth is crippled. All our doubts and insecurities are magnified a hundred-fold.”
5. Failure—“Feelings of failure may surface any time a survivor had a caretaking role … Our feelings of regret and guilt may seem overwhelming, but they eventually subside as we realize the death was not our fault.”
6. Shame—“Beyond the combination of normal grief and traumatic grief, survivors of suicide suffer an additional insult to injury—the societal stigma that surrounds suicide.”
7. Anger, Rage and Hatred—“We may hate our loved one for doing this to our loved one. We grieve the suicide and rage against him simultaneously.”
8. Paralysis—“a simple phone call had triggered an anxiety-filled reaction.”
9. Sleeplessness—“We lie awake, with our thoughts flying in all directions …”
10. Relief–“About half of suicides are at least somewhat expected due to ongoing depression or patterns of self-destructive behavior. In our sadness, we are shocked to discover that we are glad it’s all over.”
11. Self-destructive thoughts and feelings—“One danger of being a suicide survivor is the possibility of falling into suicidal despair.”

In the chapter from Part I on remembrance, Al offers this helpful advice:

“Because of the corrosive, personality-altering nature of suicidal depression, ‘by the time suicide occurs, those who kill themselves may resemble only slightly children or spouses once greatly loved and enjoyed for their company.’ The days, weeks and years following a suicide may be a time of gradually recovering the memories of our loved one, of discovering true and lasting remembrances of their life.”

The chapter I have most marked up is the Why chapter. From our first conversation at 5:00 in the morning after Gabe died, Aaron Kheriaty gently but firmly instructed us that the suicide will never make sense. And yet we try …

Al writes, “We must make a distinction between causes and triggers. Suicide might be triggered by divorce or the loss of a job, but those may not be the actual causes … Suicidal desires run much deeper, and if one event does not trigger the suicide, another might.”

Nonetheless there are some defining characteristics:

1. Medical and biological factors—“Studies show that about two-thirds of suicides had suffered from clinical depression or had a history of chronic mental illness.”
2. Psychological factors—“Psychiatrist Karl Menninger suggested that suicides have three interrelated and unconscious dimensions: a wish to kill (the self), due to some degree of self-hatred; a wish to die, arising out of a sense of hopelessness; and a wish to be killed, coming from a sense of guilt. … The agony of depression is so great that the suicide musters the resolve to do away with the pain, at the expense of his or her own life.”
3. Sociological factors—“In the last quarter-century, society has tilted toward the individual rather than the communal … the glue that holds communities and families together is disappearing … [suicide] rates among the young, more socially alienated generations has tripled … the more socially isolated we become, the higher our risk.”

Al mentions other factors like suicide as philosophical protest, the higher tendency toward depression/suicide in those with artistic temperaments, suicide because of grief (eg. 9/11 survivors) and suicide as atonement.

He says we may be asking the why question when what we really want to know is How could they do this to me? For him, it is helpful to realize that his father “did what he did to end his pain, not to cause pain for me.”

In Part III of Grieving a Suicide, Al talks about life after suicide. In the chapter on the healing community, he gives good advice on the language we use to describe suicide. Instead of saying someone “committed suicide” as if the victim were a criminal, we can say they died by suicide or they took their own life.

The final chapter offers five lessons we can learn from suicide:

1. Suicide reminds us that we live in a fallen world.
2. Suicide teaches us that life is uncertain.
3. Suicide reminds us of our mortality.
4. Suicide shows us the interconnectedness of humanity. Al was surprised to discover how well regarded his father was by his peers and what a profound impact his good gifts had on them. He and his family were comforted by the outpouring of support they received. We’ve had these experiences as well.
5. Suicide demonstrates the necessity of hope. Amen and amen.

Our family has been mercifully spared much insensitivity and ignorance in the wake of this tragedy. I can’t imagine going through this without the wise counsel of those who’ve walked the road before. Grieving a Suicide is a book I don’t ever want to recommend again because doing so would mean someone else enduring this type of senseless tragedy. And yet, a suicide occurs every 17 minutes in the United States.

If you are a pastor or lay minister, prepare yourself with knowledge before you try to minister to the grieving and confused. This book will help you do that; it includes a helpful appendix of suicide prevention/survival resources. If you are a survivor, it will be a balm to your soul. - Christine Scheller

Consumerism is dehumanizing, and not just about stuff

I'm in the midst of guest teaching a six-week Sunday school class on my book at a local church, and just this morning I came across this blog post by someone who is also in a class about the book at her church in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Here are some of her thoughts about their discussion on consumerism:

Yesterday we discussed the first of two chapters on consumerism. While we all must in some form or fashion consume stuff, the author, Albert Hsu, is speaking about the “-ism” that is an ideology, a way of defining self and understanding the world around us. This understanding of the world makes everything a commodity and we, the consumer, the master who determines the worth of one commodity over against the other. On page 78, Hsu writes, “Consumer commodification enthrones us - the consumer - and makes everything a function of our own choosing.” Everything becomes about “me”, what “I” want, and how something can serve or satisfy “me”. It kind of strikes me as self-worship - I am the most important person, and must be satisfied at all times.

One of the points made in class this morning was the fact that this particular way of looking at life is dehumanizing. People are no longer seen as men and women made in the image of God, but as slaves to the desires of the self, important or valued only the extent that they satisfy these desires. In particular, anyone who stands in the way of my desires ceases to be human in my eyes, and are instead an obstacle that must be removed by whatever means so that my desire can be gratified.

The point from Sunday’s class that I seem to be parking on right now is the idea that consumption is not just about material stuff. When we think of consumerism, we instantly think of malls, brand names, the next new techy gadget that must be bought. But there are many things we can “consume” - knowledge, music, TV, movies, news, the Internet, blogs (*gulp*), books. We “consume” quantities of all of these things - to what extent does that consumption define who we are? And how does our consumption of such things affect our relationships with one another, and the Lord?

How many countries can you name in five minutes?

How many countries can you name in five minutes? I've tried this a few times, and this is as high as I can get:

105

The time pressure makes you blank out and miss really obvious countries. I might be thinking my way around a continent, trying to remember how to spell Liechtenstein, and then realize afterward that I forgot something like France or Japan. Go figure. And it's a little annoying because you don't know if it's looking for "England" or "Great Britain" or "United Kingdom" and you have to retype things a few times to figure out which one is acceptable. Strategy tip - knock off the short-named countries first, like Iraq or Cuba, since they're faster to type, and that will give you more time when you're trying to spell Kazakhstan.

It's a humbling exercise, to be reminded of how little we as American Christians actually know about the world. At any rate, if you've not yet taken this quiz, give it a try, and then let this be a prayer trigger to help you pray for the global church and the world at large.

Typologies of renewal: Three routes, four models, five streams

This is something of a follow-up to my previous post on emergents and new Calvinists. In the comments, Claytonius linked to a post he'd written last year about three routes of escape from the pragmatic evangelical church. He observed that many young adults who leave evangelical churches tend to head to three other places (bulleted text are his words):

• Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican churches. "Obviously, these are three fairly different groups when it comes to theology, practice, and culture. But, for the young, former pragmatic evangelical, they are the same. They are high church. They are rooted in tradition. They are sacramental."


• Emerging Churches. "Again, there are lots of varieties to emerging churches, but to the former evangelical, they have a certain unifying quality to them. They are culturally-embodied. They are experiential. They are communally-oriented. They are concerned with social justice and the arts. They are open to question and change."


• Reformed Churches. "This group of Christians, obviously, could be considered evangelical (as could many emerging and Anglican groups). But, to the children of the pragmatic evangelicals, it is a big difference. They are much more overtly theological. They are God-centered. They focus on glory and sovereignty. They also have a sense of history, at least in the Reformation era. They value the life of the mind in a way the more pragmatic side of Evangelicalism doesn’t."

I really like Clayton's typology here. I like typologies in general, because I like mapping out a landscape, organizing subcultures and seeing where people fit. And these three groups ring true to me; I myself find myself identifying to some degree with all of them, but mostly with the first, as an ancient-future evangelical Anglican. I posted earlier about evangelicalism being where the action is in comparison to other religious traditions. We could also talk about these three phenomena as drilling down into what actually is happening among evangelicals/former evangelicals.

"Pragmatic evangelicalism" is itself part of a typology that Bob Webber used in his book The Younger Evangelicals, with the traditional evangelicalism of 1950-75 (like Billy Graham), the pragmatic evangelicalism of 1975-2000 (like Bill Hybels) and the younger evangelicalism of 2000 and later. The complexity of the younger evangelicalism is that it is nowhere near as monolithic as traditional or pragmatic evangelicalism. It is far more fragmented into multiple subcultures. And several folks are trying to map out these different subcultures.

Earlier this year Wess Daniels posted "Four Models of Emerging Churches." Here's an abridged summary of his typology:

1. Deconstructionist. Influenced mainly by deconstruction, Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault and Caputo. Much of the focus is on adopting postmodernity, and contextualizing the Gospel accordingly. Daniels places Peter Rollins, Tony Jones and Brian McLaren here.
   


2. Pre-modern/Augustinian Model. Leans more towards a Renaissance-styled post-modernism that harkens back to pre-modernism, influenced by St. Augustine and St. Thomas. Includes the Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank and James K. A. Smith.
   


3. Emerging Peace Church Model (or Open Anabaptism). Focuses on non-violence, love of enemy and caring for the poor. Influenced by Wittgenstein, Barth, Bonhoeffer, John H. Yoder, McClendon and Nancey Murphy. Includes the new monasticism, Jarrod McKenna and the Peace Tree, Shane Claiborne, some Mennonites, Rob Bell’s Mars Hill, Submergent, Jesus Radical and convergent Friends.
   


4. Foundationalist Model. More conservative in their reading of Scripture and modern approaches to ecclesiology while seeking to be innovative in their approaches to evangelism. Influenced by Millard J. Erickson or D.A. Carson. Includes Mark Driscoll, Dan Kimball, Erwin McManus and many “emerging services” within megachurches.
   

Another four-fold typology is found in Tom Sine's The New Conspirators. His four streams are:

eMerging: Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt of Solomon’s Porch, Ecclesia in Houston, Mars Hill in Grandville, Michigan, Dan Kimball of Vintage Faith in Santa Cruz, California, Karen Ward of Fremont Abbey in Seattle, Rachelle Mee Chapman of Monkfish Abbey in Seattle, Mark Scandrette of the Jesus Dojo in San Francisco, Sally Morgenthaler, Chris Seay, Emergent Village led by Tony Jones, The Ooze led by Spencer Burke

Missional: The Gospel and Culture Network, the late Lesslie Newbigin, Darrell Guder, Alan Hirsch, Alan Roxburgh, Fuller Seminary, Biblical Seminary

Mosaic (or multicultural): David Park, Efrem Smith, Phil Jackson, Julie Clawson/Emerging Women, Christian Community Development Association, John Perkins, Urbana, second generation Asian churches, Eugene Cho/Quest, Mosaic

Monastic: Shane Claiborne, The Simple Way, Rutba House, InnerChange, Karen Sloan, Order of Mission, Order of the Mustard Seed, Servant Partners, Urban Neighbors of Hope, Word Made Flesh, Scott Bessenecker's The New Friars, Global Urban Trek, Mission Year

And if all that isn't enough, Scot McKnight also identified five streams of the emerging church: Prophetic/provocative, Postmodern, Praxis-oriented, Post-evangelical and Political. I won't bother to summarize the article because everybody should read it. (I think Scot is also working on a book on this topic.)

All of this is encouraging. All of these movements and ministry efforts are contemporary expressions of the church's ongoing work of reformation and renewal. Evangelical Christianity is widely diverse, with fascinating things happening in various corners, tribes and subcultures. And in an overall 1 Corinthians 12 ecclesiology, all of them are important parts of the body, doing different things to help the church be what it's supposed to be. Thanks be to God.

What do emergents and new Calvinists have in common?

I just read Collin Hansen's new book Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists, which grew out of his 2006 Christianity Today article on the phenomenon. He opens the book by talking about how when he started at CT, the emerging church was all the rage, but he found himself noticing a different kind of young movement that paralleled it but offered a distinctive counterpoint. So Collin chronicled the emergence of the neo-Calvinists, a generation of young adults who are passionate about Reformed theology and avid followers of John Piper, Albert Mohler, Mark Driscoll and the like.

What's interesting to me about Collin's book is that despite the fact that the new Calvinists and emergent folks might seem poles apart in many ways, they do share a common concern - that contemporary evangelicalism is not what it ought to be. Both critique evangelical Christianity for being shallow, ahistorical, more focused on pragmatic issues than authentic spirituality and transformation. Both communities are calling the church to recover its heritage, the depth and breadth of Christian theology and worship, with a keen eye to missional ministry in this postmodern world, to the glory of God.

Of course, John Piper and Doug Pagitt, while both Minnesotan pastors, have somewhat different visions for the church. And Mars Hill (Seattle, Mark Driscoll) is a different kind of church from Mars Hill (Grand Rapids, Rob Bell). But for all the differences, I think folks on all sides can charitably affirm that everybody wants Christianity to be more faithful, more vibrant, more missional than it currently is.

What's also interesting to me is that both communities claim underdog status. Many emergent Christians feel like persecuted minorities in their churches or denominations. And new Calvinists often think of themselves as the righteous remnant in a morass of nominal Christianity. I was fascinated by Collin's chapter on Calvinism among the Southern Baptists. I don't move in Southern Baptist circles much, so it was news to me that Southern Baptist churches are splitting over the issue of Calvinism, which many Baptists see as wrongheaded. New Calvinists are actually experiencing criticism similar to what emergents are getting from non-emergents, being labeled as heretics and having their theology ruled out of bounds. It seems that emergents and new Calvinists would be sympathetic to each other's challenges!

So here's my question - are these different tribes and subcultures just doing different things in different corners of the church, and never the twain shall meet (except to denounce each other every once in a while), or are there opportunities for fruitful collaboration between the two, for the benefit of evangelical Christianity overall? At risk of making gross overgeneralizations, it seems to me that different groups bring different things to the table. Emergents are great at asking questions and challenging the way things have been done. They're willing to reexamine everything in pursuit of a better way. New Calvinists have a passionate zeal for knowing God, understanding Scripture, and a particular appreciation for historical theology. Emergents can help new Calvinists temper their zeal with a bit of epistemic humility. New Calvinists can help emergents to appreciate the historical tradition and not reinvent the wheel.

Maybe both communities will blast me for this post (people in the middle get shot at by both sides), but as a moderate centrist evangelical who reads both Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog and Justin Taylor's Between Two Worlds blog, I have to think that there are others like me that would like to see more fruitful collaboration and dialogue on all sides.

Radical idea: Buying only what you need

Somehow this makes news: "Consumers are buying what they need." Here's a summary report:

General retail sales in March were the worst in 13 years as consumers concentrated on "buying what they need," as Jennifer Black, head of an eponymous equity research company told the New York Times.

Reflecting a focus on the basics and low prices, sales at Costco and Wal-Mart stores open at least a year rose 7% and 0.7%, respectively, while most other stores reported declines. For example, comp-store sales at Target were off 4.4%, at Penney down 12.3% and at Kohl's off 15.5%. Even some higher-end retailers were down: Saks was off 2.9% and Nordstrom fell 9.1%.

So what happens if people only buy what they actually need? The economy collapses, because it's based on us all buying unnecessary stuff? So sad.

Wheaton Theology Conference: Kevin Vanhoozer on the Trinity and Scripture

I was at the Wheaton Theology Conference last week, and this year's theme was "Rediscovering the Trinity: Classic Doctrine and Contemporary Ministry." As usual, there was a wide range of interesting presentations. Keynoting this year was Kevin Vanhoozer, who took up the task of relating the two components of the Evangelical Theological Society's doctrinal basis, that God is Trinity and that Scripture is inerrant. Vanhoozer argued that though these two foundations might seem disparate at first glance, in actuality, a trinitarian theology of "Scripture as triune discourse" is the best way of understanding the truth of Scripture.

Vanhoozer explored how all three persons of the Trinity are at work in Scripture. He unpacked Scripture as divine rhetoric, that the classical components of rhetorical communication (ethos, logos, pathos) correspond with Father, Son and Spirit. Ethos is the divine character of Scripture. Logos is the covenantal content of Scripture. Pathos is the persuasive power of Scripture rightly interpreted.

Vanhoozer used a baseball analogy (as did Tony Jones last year). What provides "home run power" - is it the bat, or the batter's swing? Both, of course. Vanhoozer likens Scripture, the written Word of God, as the bat, and the triune God speaking through it as the batter. So the statements "Scripture is true" and "the living God speaks truly through Scripture" are not necessarily equivalent statements. The first focuses on the bat, whereas the second focuses on the batter.

In Q&A, someone asked Vanhoozer whether the word "inerrant" is still useful, or if we should prefer to simply speak of the "truth" of Scripture rather than its "inerrancy." (As folks like Roger Olson have argued elsewhere, the terms "inerrant" and "inerrancy" are often problematic and more confusing than helpful.) Vanhoozer had a nice response, pointing out that yes, "inerrancy" was a term used that was particularly meaningful in the various debates of the 1940s and 50s, and that it is still valuable for affirming Scripture by what it negates (just as the word "infinite" affirms a characteristic by what it negates, that it is "not finite"). And Vanhoozer said something to the effect of how instead of automatically affirming (or denying) the use of the word "inerrancy," it's usually better to find out what people mean (or don't mean) by it first.

This is pretty sensible, but I personally think it's better to simply say that Scripture is true and to let truth be the guiding understanding of Scripture. Especially since "inerrant" isn't a biblical word. We can be fully biblical in describing Scripture with terms that Scripture itself uses, like "God-breathed" or "living and active" or "cannot be broken" and the like. But "inerrant" seems to claim something about Scripture that Scripture does not necessarily claim about itself, especially in how folks tend to use it or perceive the term today.

At any rate, Vanhoozer argued that "the Trinity is our Scripture principle," and offered these three theses:

- On the nature of Scripture: The Bible is a gracious word, a self-communicating work of triune love.
- On the authority of Scipture: The Bible is a truthful word, a knowledge-giving work of triune light.
- On the interpretation of Scripture: The Bible is a sanctifying word, a freeing work of triune life.

I really like these, and how they connect the work of Father, Son and Spirit to different aspects of what Scripture is and does. I like that this moves beyond a discussion of Scripture as "inerrant" (as if it's simply some static artifact) but instead looks at God's dynamic work in Scripture, in grace, truth and sanctification. Yes, Scripture is "inerrant," if you still want to use the term - but it's so much more. It's a gracious, truthful, sanctifying Word of the triune Father, Son and Spirit.

By the way, the proceedings from last year's conference are now in print in the book Ancient Faith for the Church's Future (IVP, naturally). While all of the essays are valuable and should be of interest to various folks, I particularly recommend Jason Byassee's chapter "Emerging from What, Going Where? Emerging Churches and Ancient Christianity," which provides a thoughtful analysis and balanced critique of contemporary emerging/Emergent folks from Mark Driscoll's "neo-fundamentalism" to Doug Pagitt (who Byassee notes as presenting a "surprisingly modern" approach and "confidence in modern progress" despite self-describing as "post-Protestant" and aligning with postmodern sensibilities). I highly commend the essay and the whole book.

Suburbia's midlife crisis

A commenter pointed me to this recent Boston Review article which, interestingly enough, starts out talking about my home county of DuPage County here in the western Chicago suburbs. He writes that "urban decline moves to the suburbs":

A few months ago, about 125 leaders from religious institutions, civic organizations, and social service groups met at Etz Chaim synagogue in the town of Lombard, in DuPage County, to wrestle with a new reality: a budget crisis. Budget crises are not supposed to happen in places like west suburban DuPage. It is home to nearly one million souls and more than 600,000 private sector jobs. It boasts a median income of $70,000, one of the highest in the nation. And yet the county, strapped for cash, was threatening to cut convalescent services, veterans’ services, housing assistance, breast cancer screening, and many other essential public functions.

. . . DuPage is not alone, of course. In Nassau and Suffolk Counties in New York, in Montgomery and Baltimore Counties in Maryland, in Bergen and Essex and Middlesex Counties in New Jersey, in almost every mature suburb in the northeast and Midwest and mid south, families face these same conditions. A Roman Catholic pastor I met in Nassau County described it as suburbia’s midlife crisis. It may be part of America’s midlife crisis as well.

This says something about how current economic conditions are affecting our suburban context. It has been over half a century since the initial mid-20th-century suburban boom, so while newest suburbs continue to grow and expand, older suburbs are hitting midlife crisis and decline. For many decades, counties like DuPage have had high levels of development, investment and prosperity. Counties have gotten used to certain amounts of growth and income. But now things are tapering off because counties are running out of land for new development, and previous levels of investment, income and spending are becoming unsustainable. As new suburbs/exurbs become new cities, old suburbs become old cities, with similar challenges of adapting to new economic realities.

So as local governments face increasing costs, expect to see more budget cuts of various services that may make life more difficult for our suburban neighbors, especially the most vulnerable. This may well become an opportunity for the church to partner with the nonprofit sector, as churches find ways to meet needs and minister to people that are falling through the cracks.

Kingdom Sightings: A Multifaceted Gospel

My column for the April 2008 issue of Christianity Today is now available online. It has already received a number of comments, both pro and con. And the back-and-forth between commenters is also very interesting, as it highlights how people have very different perspectives on this.

I chose to write on this topic as something of an unofficial tie-in to this year's Christian Vision Project theme on the gospel, which poses the simple question, "Is our gospel too small?" The project has already generated some thoughtful reflections from Richard Mouw, Scot McKnight and others. Check them out. At any rate, here's part of my article:

A Multifaceted Gospel

Why evangelicals shouldn't be threatened by new tellings of the Good News.

At the 2006 Ancient Evangelical Future conference, historian Martin Marty commented briefly on the Atonement theories proposed by the early church. Did the church fathers hold to penal substitution, Christus Victor, or Anselm's view of the Atonement? Yes. All of the above.

Panelists pressed Marty to declare one view or another the "right" one. Whatever one thinks, he responded, the reality is that the church held to multiple versions.

The same is true today, in evangelical thinking about the nature of the gospel. . . . Some focus on a change of heart, mind, or direction; others major on judgment or conviction of sin. Some speak about the promise of new life, now and eternally; others stress individual transformation or societal and cosmic renewal. We need all of the above.

[The full article is available here. And by the way, I blogged some time ago about the Martin Marty talk that I reference in the column; that post is available here, and it unpacks further what Marty said at the conference and my own take and application of it.]

Wuthnow on twentysomething life: Young adults lack support systems

The April 2008 issue of Martin Marty's Context newsletter has this thought-provoking excerpt from Robert Wuthnow's important new book After the Baby-Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion:

"The evidence suggests overwhelmingly that young adulthood is a time when other social institutions fail to be of much help. . . . [As a culture] we provide day care centers, schools, welfare programs, and even detention centers as a kind of institutional surround-sound until young adults reach age 21, and then we provide nothing. Schooling stops for the vast majority, parents provide some financial assistance and babysitting but largely keep their distance, and even the best congregation-based youth groups or campus ministries no longer apply. Yet nearly all . . . decisions a person has to make about marriage, child-rearing, and work happen after these support systems have ceased to function.

"This is not a good way to run a society. No wonder young adults experience stress and confusion, worry that they are not yet capable of behaving like adults, delay settling down, and often make bad decisions about jobs and money. This is not a criticism of young adults themselves. They do the best they can in the absence of much assistance or support.

"We cannot hope to be a strong society if we invest resources in our young people until they are 18 or 20 and then turn them out to find their way entirely on their own. The bits and pieces of support are already there--in family networks, among groups of friends, at singles bars, in day care centers, and even in the workplace. But we have not even begun to recognize the challenges that need to be met."

Perceptive observations, and I think they ring true. This is part of the reason I went on to grad school after graduating from college - I couldn't imagine life outside an educational setting! And I was shellshocked to discover that grad school was completely different from college life, that it lacked the kind of community and relationships that I had experienced in college. It wasn't until I got plugged in to a church singles group in the spring of that first school year that I really started adjusting to life after college. And I fear that too many of our peers never find that kind of community.

I wrote about this briefly in my singles book in my chapter on loneliness and solitude. Many of us experience a quarterlife crisis or what Douglas Coupland called a "mid-twenties breakdown," defined as "a period of mental collapse occurring in one's twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one's essential aloneness in the world." We typically don't fully understand or grieve the losses of exiting college because we're thrown into the "real world," and a lot of folks end up adrift, without community to help them find their way. (I wonder if the success of Facebook is partially due to a sociological need to preserve some virtual sense of collegiate community as folks navigate the real world.)

In the last lines of the above block quote, I find it telling that Wuthnow did not mention the local church in his list. Ministering to recent college graduates and twenty/thirtysomethings is both a challenge and an opportunity, especially for churches in suburban/exurban areas that have an influx of young workers. Many folks who gravitate toward nontraditional churches or leave church entirely do so out of frustration that traditional churches have little in place for young adults. We want to create viable community and support systems for them/us. But the sad thing is not merely that if the church doesn't, other things will fill the vacuum. What's even more sobering is that other social support systems aren't really there, and a whole generation may drift for years as a result.

Some upcoming events: Envision '08, suburban seminar

I'm about to begin a round of spring teaching at some local churches and Sunday school classes, and this reminded me to highlight a few upcoming events that I'm speaking at this summer.

This June 8-10 is Envision '08: The Gospel, Politics and the Future, held at Princeton in New Jersey. The conference is described as being "about the power of the gospel to transform the public square. It’s about Jesus and justice, evangelical history and heritage, and practiced theology. It’s about the next one hundred years of the church and its impact on the common good." It has an amazing lineup of speakers, with Miroslav Volf, Randall Balmer, Brenda Salter McNeil, Shane Claiborne, John Perkins, Jim Wallis, Kay Warren, Brian McLaren, Richard Cizik and many more. There are tracks on issues like consumerism, poverty, immigration, earth care and human trafficking. It looks like a great event - they're planning on a thousand people, and registration is just $49 for the first 200 to sign up. (I'm part of a group presentation/panel discussion on the future of the church.)

August 8-9, I'll be in Philadelphia to do a seminar on "The Church and Suburbia." I was invited by Todd Hiestand, pastor at The Well and author of the paper "The Gospel and the God-Forsaken: The Challange of the Missional Church in Suburban America." Todd is passionate about suburban mission and just reserved the domain name for missionalinsuburbia.com. He describes the seminar this way:

“God always shows up in the most God-forsaken places.”
Alan Roxburgh

In some ways, it doesn’t get any more God-forsaken than suburban America. This seminar will take a look at two important topics: Suburbia and the Church. For some people, there is a sentiment that its impossible to really be the church in the ‘burbs. But for others, we believe that this is the place that God has called us. If we are going to stay, we need to ask what it means to “be the church” in a culture that is defined by comfort, consumerism, isolation, wealth, strip malls and hidden poverty.

This one day seminar will focus on the development and culture of suburbia and the opportunities and challenges that this context presents the Church.

So if you're in the Philadelphia area, you can register here; it's just $25. Should be a good time - hope to see some of you there!

In Memoriam: Jon Hassler, 1933-2008

I learned last week that one of my favorite authors, Minnesotan novelist Jon Hassler, has died. He was hailed as "the best novelist we've had of ordinary life in Minnesota," and the New York Times lauded him as "Minnesota’s most engaging cultural export.”

One of my high school English teachers recommended him to us, but it was not until college that I actually started reading his work, beginning with his contemporary classic Staggerford. He provided a far more realistic portrait of small-town Minnesotan life than anything by Garrison Keillor. Furthermore, Hassler was a committed Catholic and wrote with a profound sense of morality and integrity. His characters, while flawed, wrestled seriously with life, faith, right and wrong. One of his most perceptive novels was North of Hope, in which he explores a priest's vocation and relationship with a girl he almost dated back in high school. He also offered a wonderful coming-of-age story in Grand Opening, and a complex love triangle in The Love Hunter. He poked fun at academia in Rookery Blues and The Dean's List, and he meditated deeply on aging in novels like Simon's Night and his latest book, The New Woman. (Hassler just completed a final novel, Jay O'Malley, shortly before his death.)

I met Jon Hassler once at a booksigning at a Twin Cities bookstore some years back. He read from his latest novel and graciously signed several books for me. I now own his complete works, mostly first editions, including his young adult novels, essays and short story collections. He is a treasure, and one of the finest Midwestern novelists of the latter part of the 20th century.

The following are some comments I posted back in 1997 about The Dean's List:

As a displaced Minnesotan, I always enjoy revisiting my home state via the novels of Jon Hassler. Like coming home for the holidays, this book evokes the mixed emotions of anticipation and disappointment, the joy and frustration of renewing relationships with the relatives, and the uncomfortable reality that time takes its toll on the ones we love.

Hassler fans will find in The Dean's List another enjoyable trip to the now-familiar small town of Rookery. But this book is unlike its predecessors in that it may be Hassler's last outing to the Badbattle River valley. Readers may not know that Hassler has Parkinson's disease. And the awareness of his mortality seeps through the pages of this book.

While all of his books are to some degree autobiographical, we see in The Dean's List a greater sense of authorial self-revelation. Leland Edwards, the Icejam Quintet alumnus and now dean of the college, is a frustrated academic-turned-administrator struggling to keep his school above water. He encounters his hero, Richard Falcon, a Frost-esque poet working on his magnum opus. Edwards decides to revitalize the good name of Rookery State by bringing the esteemed poet to campus for a rare reading.

Little does Edwards know that Falcon has his own struggles, not the least of which is the onset of Parkinson's disease. And in these two characters we get a glimpse of Jon Hassler's own plight. Both Edwards and Falcon--and Hassler himself, we might surmise--are fighting to achieve a sense of purpose, meaning, accomplishment and lasting significance at a point in their lives where the clock is ticking and the odds are against them. Will they achieve their goals? Will they complete the tasks that lie before them? And will they be remembered when they are gone?

It is these elements that make this novel an intriguing read. True, it lacks some of the power and beauty of his earlier novels--but this too, is illustrative of the trauma we experience as we approach the end of life. Can we find meaning and significance in our midlife and waning years? This novel provides insights well worth contemplating, from one who well knows what it feels like to be there.

Thanks for all your writing, Jon. I'm glad that your characters will live on through your books, and that you shared the hope of Christian resurrection.

Puritans and pornographers

I came across a striking observation in Os Guinness's The Case for Civility. He cites sociologist Peter Berger as commenting that "America is paradoxically viewed in many parts of the world as a nation of 'Puritans and pornographers.'" Compared to secularized countries like France or other European nations, America seems to be overly religious and moralistic. On the other hand, in the eyes of the Middle East and many traditional cultures, America is hopelessly decadent and immoral. Some see us as sexually repressed, and others see us as sexually obsessed. Both perspectives are probably simultaneously true!

This reminds me of something I heard John Stott say some years back about the human paradox - we are created in God's image and thus have tremendous value, worth and capacity, yet we are thoroughly fallen and corrupt at the same time. Sometimes Christians err on one side or the other, either saying that we are basically pretty good or that we are completely worthless. Stott would have us hold the two in tension and not overemphasize either our value or our depravity. As Luther put it, we are simul justus et peccator - simultaneously saint and sinner. That's not just abstract theological truth. It corresponds pretty well with reality and lived experience.

So it's not merely that American society is divided between different tribes, that some are Puritans and others are pornographers and that these camps are locked in a culture war against each other. No, the truth is more significant than that. It's more that each of us is a mix of Puritan and pornographer. Created in God's image, we really do yearn for holiness and transcendence. And as fallen people, we also all too easily gravitate toward temptation and sin. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it, "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."

The New Suburbanists

In recent years, there have been all sorts of new things percolating, from the new monasticism of Shane Claiborne to The New Friars by Scott Bessenecker and The New Conspirators by Tom Sine. Tony Jones has just released The New Christians, which describes different kinds of approaches to Christianity, and there's also something of a neo-Reformed/New Calvinists movement afoot. In counterpoint, the "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have been increasingly vocal.

In a completely different realm, for some years now the New Urbanist movement has called for a more sustainable approach to urban planning and land development, with walkable neighborhoods that minimize automobile use and facilitate community and human interaction. Principles of the new urbanism have been applied in suburban contexts, with efforts toward a "new suburbanism" and work being done on "sustainable suburbs."

Well, I seem to be sitting at the convergence of these different worlds. I've been invited to be part of a project that is working toward a new Christian vision for suburbia, both in terms of how the church lives out its faith and practice, as well as how the suburban landscape itself is configured. There's a growing movement of suburban Christians who are dissatisfied with how things are and are thinking creatively about how we can live differently.

At this early stage, there's nothing concrete to announce yet, partly because we haven't quite settled on a good name for all of this. "New Suburbans" sounds like a bunch of new SUVs. "New Suburbanites" is slightly better but a bit generic. "New Suburbanists" has the advantage of paralleling the "New Urbanists," but it lacks any distinctively Christian content.

So we've also been playing around with things that might tie in to the various emerging church movements. "Suburgent" is an interesting possibility because it evokes things like Presbymergent and Anglimergent, and I like that "urgent" is part of the word and adds a sense of urgency to the idea. But the suburban part of it isn't quite as clear, and it could be confused with the already-existing Submergent community. It also sounds like an ad for Subway: "Be suburgent - eat subs now!" Another possibility is "Suburbant" but that struck me as blah - suburban ants? And there was also "Suburbent," which looks misspelled, or like it's about suburban ents, or that the suburbs are bent (which is interesting, but do we want to self-identify as bent?).

It's really hard to come up with a good name! I really like the phrase Missio Dei Suburbia, but that's taken. It might be better to go with something straightforward like "Missional Suburban Christians," but that's a mouthful, and who knows if "missional" will still mean anything in three years?

Another possibility is "post-" something, since there are all these postconservative, postliberal, postmodern, postevangelical things happening. (I'm waiting for the post-emerging/postmergent community to emerge, or demerge, or something.) Is it accurate to call ourselves "post-suburban"? That doesn't seem quite right, because we're still suburban, though we're looking toward a different kind of suburbia. And it would be weird for me to self-identify as a post-suburban Christian - I'd have to change my book title and blog name.

At any rate, interesting things are afoot! If anybody out there has a suggestion for a good name for this movement, let me know - we're very open to ideas. And we hope you'll come and join us!

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee

Last week I finished reading Jennifer 8. Lee's fantastic book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. In it Lee searches out the origins of various aspects of Chinese food, to discover that many of them are American inventions. Chop suey is unknown in China, and was likely invented here in the States and described as "bits and pieces" of stuff. (Leftovers!) General Tso's chicken has also been radically Americanized. Lee visited Tso's hometown in China, and found that it was unheard of there. The Chinese chef who created the dish was shocked to see how it had been changed. "The dish can't be sweet," Chef Peng said. "That isn't the taste of Hunan cuisine. The taste of Hunan cuisine is not sweet."

The white cardboard takeout boxes are also an American invention, originally used for various kinds of restaurants but quickly became associated with Chinese takeout. Much soy sauce made by American companies is not made from soybeans and is little more than salted water with vegetable proteins. And the "P. F." in the name of the P. F. Chang's China Bistro restaurant chain stands for founder Paul Fleming, who also cocreated Outback Steakhouse.

Fortune cookies, too, have an interesting history - they're originally Japanese and can still be found made by hand in Japan. How did they become Chinese? During WWII,