The Suburban Christian

Rene Padilla on the Cape Town Lausanne Congress

2010-11-10T08:53:00.000-06:00

Rene Padilla blogged about the Cape Town Lausanne Congress, appraising the future of the movement and offering significant critiques. Very helpful analysis. (The original post is in Spanish, so here's a Google-translated English version.)

The future of the Lausanne Movement

C. Rene Padilla

The figures relating to the Third International Congress on World Evangelization held in Cape Town, South Africa, from 17 to 24 October under the theme "In Christ God was reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Corinthians 5:19) are impressive. There were more than 4,000 participants from 198 countries. In addition, there were about 650 Web sites connected with the Congress in 91 countries and 100,000 "hits" from 185 countries. This means that many thousands of people around the world were able to attend meetings via the Internet. Doug Birdsall, Executive Chairman of the Lausanne Movement, probably right in saying that Cape Town 2010 was "the most representative global evangelical meeting in history." Without doubt, this achievement was largely the result of his long effort to make that happen.

Equally impressive were the many practical arrangements were made before Congress. Besides the difficult process of selecting the speakers for the plenary and for "multiplexes" (elective seminar) and the dialogue sessions, translators and participants from each country represented, there were two tasks that must have involved a lot of work before Congress : The Global Conversation Lausanne to enable people around the world make their comments and interact with others taking advantage of contemporary technological advances, and the drafting of the first part (the theological) of Cape Town Commitment prepared by the Working Group Lausanne Theological directed by Christopher Wright.

A positive assessment of Lausanne III
The best way to check the value of a conference like Lausanne III to analyze the concrete results it produces later in connection with the life and mission of the church. For this reason, this assessment of the conference just held in Cape Town has to be considered merely as a preliminary assessment.
Each of the six-day program (with one day off between the third and fourth) had a theme:
1) Monday: Truth: check the truth of Christ in a pluralistic world of globalization.
2) Tuesday: Reconciliation: Building Peace of Christ in our broken and divided world.
3) Wednesday: World Religions: bearing witness to the love of Christ to people of other religions.
4) Friday: Priorities: discerning the will of God for evangelizing in our century.
5) Saturday: Integrity, call the church to return to humility, integrity and simplicity.
6) Sunday: Partnership: co-participation in the Body of Christ for a new global balance.

Each of these key issues, described as "the greatest challenges to the church in the next decade," was the theme of Bible study and theological reflection each day in the morning. The biblical text that was used in the series entitled "Celebrating the Bible" was the letter to the Ephesians. One of the most positive aspects of the program was the inductive study of the passage of the day in groups, each consisting of six members sitting around a table. This provided the group members the opportunity to learn together and pray for each other, develop new friendships and build alliances for the future. Bible study group was followed by exposure of the Ephesians passage selected for that day. Without minimizing the importance of music, drama, visual arts, stories and performances of "multimedia", a high percentage of participants felt that the time devoted to "Celebrating the Arts" could have been reduced to allow more time "Celebrating the Bible", an activity greatly appreciated.

Special mention should be made of several of the witnesses who gave the plenary sessions in the morning some people whose life experience clearly illustrated the theme of the day. Who that has been there will ever forget, for example, the young Palestinian and Jewish youth who spoke together about the meaning of reconciliation in Christ above racial barriers? Or the American missionary who spoke of witnessing the love of Christ with people of other religions, and told how many Christians, including her husband, a doctor, were killed by Muslims, while returning from a remote village where they had been moved to serve by Christian compassion in Afghanistan?

In the multiplexes and the dialogue sessions each day in the afternoon were explored in depth the practical implications of Bible study and biblical reflection in the morning. Indeed, the most important debate on the various topics are not necessarily carried out within the limits of time allocated in the program but in informal discussions outside the formal agenda. Anyway, the fact that much of the rich reflection on issues related to contemporary global problems occurred in the afternoon sessions. These participatory sessions, which were taken into account the understanding of the diversity of perspectives represented, the contextualization of ideas, models, contacts and materials, and commitment to joint action plans, will be the basis for the second part of Commitment Cape Town. The plan is to publish the document in two parts (the theological and practical) with a study guide at the end of November.

Of the twenty multiplexes that were offered during the Congress, was especially focused three issues that could be considered as the most critical for the Southern Hemisphere: globalization, environmental crisis, and the richness vs. poverty. These three factors are closely linked together and, given the enormous impact they have on millions of people in the world of big majorities, they deserve much more attention than they have received so far by the evangelical movement.

Serious deficiencies
The official definition of its mission, the Lausanne Movement exists to "strengthen, inspire and equip the Church to world evangelization in our generation, and encourage Christians to their duty to participate in public affairs and social." A careful analysis of this definition reflects the dichotomy that has influenced a large segment of the evangelical movement especially in the western world: the dichotomy between evangelism and social responsibility. Because of this dichotomy, closely related to the dichotomy between secular and sacred, the Lausanne Movement aims to "strengthen, inspire and equip the Church for evangelization" but only "encourage Christians" about their social responsibility . The implicit assumption is that the primary mission of the church is evangelism conceived in terms of oral communication of the Gospel, while participation in matters of public interest and social good works by which Christians fulfill their vocation as "Light of the World" for the glory of God (Matthew 5:16) - is a secondary duty for which Christians do not need to be strengthened, inspired and equipped, but only encouraged.

In biblical exposition on Tuesday based on Ephesians 2 (the second day of the Congress) became clear, from the biblical text, that Jesus Christ is our peace (v. 14), made our peace (v. 15) and preached peace (v . 17). In other words, in Christ, being, doing and proclaim peace (shalom, life in abundance) are inseparable. The church is faithful to God's purpose in so far as it extends the mission of Jesus Christ in history stating specifically the reality of the Gospel not only for what it says but also what is and what it does. The whole mission of the church is rooted in the mission of God in Christ, a mission that involves the whole person in community, to all creation and every aspect of life.

Bible exposition based on Ephesians 3 the next day put in relief the urgent need for the Lausanne Movement to clarify theologically the content of the mission of God's people. In contrast to what was said yesterday, the designated speaker for Wednesday said that while the church is concerned about all forms of human suffering, she is particularly concerned with eternal suffering and thus is called to give priority to evangelize the lost.

A serious deficiency of Lausanne III was not giving time for serious reflection on the commitment God expects of its people regarding their mission. Unfortunately, no time to discuss the commitment of Cape Town, on which the Theological Task Force led by Christopher Wright had worked for one year with the intention to circulate at the beginning of Congress. The document was distributed only on Friday night and no action was taken for participants to at least write their personal comments on it before the close of the conference in response to specific questions. According to the Executive Committee, had no time for that! The negative stance taken by the organizers of the program on the recommendation of a group of elderly participants interested in ensuring that all participants see the document as his own not only works against this purpose. It is also a sign that the Lausanne Movement is still very far from achieving the partnership, without which no basis to be considered a global movement.

In contrast to the treatment she received the document produced by the Theological Task Force on Wednesday devoted a full plenary session on the strategy for world evangelization in this generation, a strategy developed in the United States on the basis of a list of "unreached people groups" prepared by the Strategic Working Group in Lausanne. This strategy reflected the obsession with numbers, typical of the market mentality that characterizes a sector of the evangelical movement in the United States. Moreover, according to many participants of the Congress who know first hand the needs of their countries in relation to evangelism, the list of unreached people groups did not do justice to the real situation. Interestingly, the list contained no people group in the United States!

Another shortcoming of Lausanne III was that, as noted by the Special Interest Group on Reconciliation and towards the end of Congress, there was no official mention of the fact that he was performing in a country that until recently was dominated by apartheid and still suffer social injustice resulting from this policy. Indeed, Congress was held at the International Convention Centre was built on land that is claimed to sea with the debris of the Southern District of Cape Town where, in 1950, the district was declared for whites only area. Consequently, about 60,000 black residents were expelled from the area by force and their homes were completely destroyed. However, the organizers of Cape Town 2010 turned a deaf ear to the request of the Special Interest Group on Reconciliation Congress officially rejected "theological heresies that supported the apartheid" and lamented "the socio-economic suffering is this legacy of apartheid. " One wonders how serious the Lausanne Movement leaders in their commitment to the Lausanne Covenant, which stipulates that "the salvation message also contains the message of trial of any form of alienation, oppression and discrimination, and we should not fear denounce evil and injustice wherever they exist "(paragraph 5).

The partnership in mission and future of the Lausanne Movement
A fact now recognized and often mentioned those interested in the life and mission of the church globally is that in recent decades the center of gravity of Christianity has shifted from the North and the South West and the East. Despite that, all too often Christian leaders in North and West, especially in the United States, continue taking it for granted that they are responsible for designing the strategy for the evangelization of the world. As stated on the page about the "Day Six - Partnership" of the book containing the detailed description of the Congress program, "the basis of organizational leadership, control of financial resources and decision-making power of the strategy tends to remain in the north and west. "

Sadly, the biggest obstacle to implementing a true partnership in mission is the wealth of the North and West, the wealth that Jonathan Bonk, in his important book on Missions and Money (Misiones and money) has described as "a Western missionary problem ". If this is so, and if the Lausanne Movement is to contribute significantly to fulfilling the mission of God through his people, it is time that the missionary force connected with this movement, including his strategists, renounce power Money and model of missionary life in the incarnation, earthly ministry and the cross of Jesus Christ.

My Facebook statuses from Cape Town 2010

2010-10-29T08:33:00.001-05:00

I was a delegate at the Cape Town 2010 Lausanne Congress. Here are my compiled Facebook statuses from the Congress from Oct. 16-26:

After 27+ hours of travel time (including 16 hours sitting next to Ron Sider), I'm finally in Cape Town. Whew.

worshipped at St. George's Cathedral, where Desmond Tutu was Archbishop and the site of the 1989 Peace March. A beautiful service in English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans.

heard that part of the reason the Chinese government restricted the Lausanne delegates is because of the Nobel Prize being given to a Chinese dissident. But about 30 Chinese delegates made it to Cape Town, mostly by traveling through other countries.

just experienced the opening ceremonies for the Cape Town Congress, with a welcome from the African church, letters from Billy Graham and John Stott, a celebration of the history of Christianity, singing "Crown Him with Many Crowns" in commemoration of the Edinburgh 1910 conference. A bit overwhelmed at all of this - it feels like a combination of Urbana and the Olympics.

My small group, which includes folks from Malaysia, India, Ethiopia and the UK, has one Al and two Alans.

Singing "King of Kings and Lord of Lords" in English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Urdu and Zulu.

Ajith Fernando on Ephesians 1: "The gospel is cosmic in scope and involves everything, the whole universe. Most people come to Christ to meet a personal need, but they stay with Christ when they know that he is the truth. Our challenge is to present God not just as a god who meets needs, but who has a cosmic plan for all of creation."

From US delegates gathering: The gospel has always been spread by exiles, refugees, slaves and immigrants. The dramatic numbers of predominantly Christian immigrants coming to the US may well be God's way of bringing renewal to the North American church.

Tonight's plenary focus: Asia and the persecuted church. Moved to tears by prayers for our Chinese delegates and the testimony of an 18-year-old Korean student who lost her mother to leukemia and her father to imprisonment but still wants to return to bring the gospel and human rights to North Korea.

Ruth Padilla DeBorst on Ephesians 2: Where does God live? God's dwelling place is the church, the transnational, transethnic community woven together into a new humanity.

Hearing from Robert Duncan, archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, on how the Anglicans of the global south brought renewal to North American Anglicanism.

"We're learning how to plant churches the way Nigerians and Ugandans do."

‎"Ours is not an American triumph. It is a story of the global church at its best."

Evening regional focus: The Middle East. In Saudi Arabia 100 years ago, there were 50 known Christians; today there are over a million. In Iran, when Christians are imprisoned, other prisoners become Christians.

Evening topical focus: brokenness, trafficking, HIV/AIDS. Testimony given by my author Princess Kasune Zulu, author of Warrior Princess. Her prayer: that the church would erase stigma, advocate for the HIV-positive, eliminate newborn infection and give hope, love and life to the dying.

John Piper on Ephesians 3: If God had people on other planets, they would have been invited to Lausanne. Because we are not just a global congress on world evangelization - we are a global congress for the cosmic manifestation of the glory of God.

Libby Little, widow of medical worker Tom Little killed in Afghanistan two months ago, shared Tom's last devotional thoughts retrieved from his blood-stained notes: Eph. 2:8-10, we are God's workmanship, created to do good works, and 2 Cor. 2:15, we are the aroma of Christ.

Report from an Indian Christian: 50 members of his family have become Christian and now follow Jesus as their guru. "Jesus died for our karma."

Benjamin Kwashi, archbishop in Jos, Nigeria, repeatedly threatened with death threats, mobs: "Some day I will die. But until then, I have a gospel worth living for, and I have a gospel worth dying for."

Testimony from a Muslim background believer about their contextualized church: "My brother is not the pastor; he is the imam of the church. Muslims come to church thinking it's a mosque, and they stayed."

Re: Islam: Christians can talk about Jesus without arguing against Islam. Muslim background believers respond to Jesus in various ways; some call themselves Christians, others self-identify as Muslim followers of Jesus. Some renounce Muslim identity; others say following Jesus was how they became true Muslims.

Many Muslims come to believe in Jesus through dreams and visions; one man had a dream of Jesus and traveled 1000 km by camel to find someone who could tell him about Jesus.

Lausanne Congress videos are available here, and more are on the way: http://www.vimeo.com/lausanne

Just chatted with Samuel Escobar, a living legend who was one of the key forces at the original '74 Lausanne Congress.

Evening session on megacities (Tim Keller: "So let's go"), diaspora (as 200 million people move around the globe, the gospel moves with them and unreached peoples become reachable) and Latin America (with Rene Padilla and Samuel Escobar giving history and their hopes for the future).

at the Wheaton alumni reception - big crowd here, hearing about Wheaton's influence on Lausanne from Billy Graham to Doug Birdsall. Litfin is talking about Wheaton's plans for a new center on global and experiential learning.

glad to have a day off to rest and do some sightseeing.

had a fantastic adventure all over the Cape Peninsula, from Table Mountain all the way down to Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope. Complete with wild ostriches and baboons in the road. Thanks so much to my local host guides Gabriel and Deborah Kory Fabule!

at the reception for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. So grateful that InterVarsity/USA is part of the larger global family of IFES.

Lindsay Brown: About half of the Lausanne speakers are the fruit of IFES.

Random realization: Holding evangelism and social action together simply affirms what much of the global church already knows - that there is not a false dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical.

Vaughan Roberts on Ephesians 4: Love for those like us is ordinary. Love for those unlike us is extraordinary. Love for those who dislike us is revolutionary.

Vaughan Roberts: When we freeze water, we make ice cubes - all the same. When God freezes water, he makes snowflakes - each one different.

Tonight's focus: Africa. Today's growth of the African church is more from its own evangelism than from foreign mission. Africa is no longer just a missionary-receiving continent; it is a missionary-sending continent, to Europe, the US, elsewhere.

headed to an IJM reception featuring a coffeehouse with music artist Sara Groves.

Calisto Odede on Ephesians 5: If we are not walking in the light, we are blowing vuvuzelas but not playing in the game.

was photographed by an official Lausanne photographer who thought I was reading the Bible on my iPod. I was checking Facebook.

Femi Adeleye: The prosperity gospel is a distortion because instead of giving as an act of worship to God, it becomes an act of investment with an expected return.

Yes, it's true: flushing toilets swirl in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere.

several of us here were discussing this and verifying it with both convention centre toilets and hotel toilets. Most here seem to flush counterclockwise, and we thought most in the US flush clockwise. But it's disputed as to whether this has as much to do with the hemisphere and more to do with the design of the toilets and how the water jets out.

Tonight's focus: the Western world and Eurasia. Heard from Nicky Gumbel on the rationality, power and urgency of the gospel and the balance of word and deed. Also released: part 1 of the Cape Town Commitment.

Ramez Atallah on Ephesians 6: In spiritual warfare with the cosmic powers, we must use God's equipment, not the weapons of the world.

Leslie and Chad Neal Seagraves on men and women in partnership: An Indian couple was trained in outreach; the husband brought 35 to Christ, and the wife brought 315. 1200 women have been trained as church planters and have started over 4100 house churches.

Patrick Fung quoting Chris Wright: The world is in a holistic mess that needs a holistic gospel.

found out that Sara Groves's husband, Troy, is from my hometown of Bloomington, MN, and that we were a year apart at our elementary school and high school.

had a fantastic time at the closing ceremonies of the Cape Town Lausanne Congress. Celebrated communion with members of the global church. Start the long trip home tomorrow.

made it back home to Chicago after 28+ hours of travel. And note to airlines: When you say, "If you have changed seats, please return to your original ticketed seating assignment," we hear that as "We just want to be able to identify your body if we crash."

Evangelical Tribalism: The Big Sort or The Breakfast Club?

2010-08-02T17:05:00.001-05:00

Patheos.com is running a series on the Future of Evangelicalism with a variety of contributors. Here's my essay.

Evangelical Tribalism: The Big Sort or The Breakfast Club?

by Al Hsu

Journalist Bill Bishop and sociologist Robert Cushing's 2008 book The Big Sort describes how people organize themselves geographically to live near politically like-minded people. Conservatives tend to live near other conservatives, and liberals near other liberals. These generally homogeneous communities provide social networks and plausibility structures that reinforce certain worldview perspectives and not others. This self-sorting results in echo chambers where conservatives become more conservative and liberals more liberal, since neither side receives the moderating influence of the other.

Evangelicals may be experiencing a "big sort" of their own, if not geographically then theologically, sociologically, and psychographically, as they gather with like-minded tribes at specific conferences. In April 2010, evangelical Christian institutions or organizations sponsored six separate national conferences: Together for the Gospel, the Wheaton Theology Conference, Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing, North Park University's 4 Days 4 Justice, the new church conference Exponential 10 in Orlando, and the Fermi Project's Q Gathering in Chicago. These six conferences provide a window into how contemporary evangelical Christianity is fragmented and tribalized into distinct subcultures.

Finding Our Tribe
Like-minded people and structures reinforce our subcultural identity. The more we read certain blogs or books by certain authors in a certain community, the more radically invested we become in that tribal identity. Attending conferences with like-minded individuals is a powerful reinforcer of tribal commitments. Since travel and conference costs are a significant investment, conferences serve as external markers of one's dedication to the community. The attendees are not casual dilettantes; they are the true believers. Such conferences reinforce the message: You are not alone in your convictions and your identity. This is your tribe.

The aforementioned six conferences were not the only options available that spring, or even that month. Every year, dozens of conferences are scattered across the evangelical landscape. Some have been held for decades, such as Urbana or the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA); others are relatively new, like Catalyst, Story, or Origins. Most have a particular focus, like Renovare's emphasis on spiritual formation or Passion's focus on worship. A distinctive "brand identity" sets each conference apart from the others.

When individual evangelicals attend conferences such as the ones held in April 2010, they see a larger corporate vision of Christian community. But are such conferences truly a comprehensive picture of the kingdom of God, or only a narrow picture of a particular tribal subculture?

Parallel Universes
Consider the speakers at each of these conferences, the most visible "heroes" and spokespeople for each tribe. Together for the Gospel's speakers included John Piper, Mark Dever, R. C. Sproul, Albert Mohler, John MacArthur, and Joshua Harris. The Wheaton Theology Conference featured N. T. Wright (whose work was the focus of the conference), Kevin Vanhoozer, Jeremy Begbie, Edith Humphrey, Richard Hays, and Markus Bockmuehl. The Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing highlighted Mary Karr, Eugene Peterson, Kate DiCamillo, Stephen Carter, Parker Palmer, Luci Shaw, and Sara Miles. Headlining 4 Days 4 Justice were Soong-Chan Rah, Lisa Sharon Harper, Richard Twiss, Mimi Haddad, Terry LeBlanc, Andrea Smith, and Peter Heltzel. Exponential's speakers included Dave Ferguson, Ken Blanchard, Alan Hirsch, Efrem Smith, Shane Claiborne, Brenda Salter-McNeil, and Francis Chan. On the platform at Q were Tim Keller, Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle, Scot McKnight, Richard Florida, Soledad O'Brien, and David Aikman.

Between these six conferences, at least 209 speakers were featured. Only one person spoke at multiple conferences -- social media consultant Charles Lee, at both Exponential and Q. There tends to be little overlap between the various conference subcultures, and attendees of one are unlikely to hear speakers from others.

Depending on the tribe, a conference might communicate that evangelical Christianity is theologically rigorous and intellectually respectable, or literary and creative, or committed to social justice. No one of these conferences covers everything that the Christian life is all about, but each provides a slice of the overall portrait.

While conferences are helpful for defining each tribe's subcultural identity, they may also have the unintended consequence of fragmenting evangelicalism into competing communities that no longer recognize one another as full brothers and sisters in Christ. If conference attendees self-segregate and develop relationships only within their particular tribe, then people find themselves in largely homogeneous communities where their vision is limited to their tribal emphases. We might find others who are like-minded, but we may not hear countervailing perspectives or alternate voices that could serve to correct imbalances.

In fact, it is possible that the tribalizing impulse within evangelicalism creates a situation where people only feel at home within their own particular subculture and do not feel comfortable in evangelicalism or Christianity at large, let alone other tribal subcultures. Fragmentation creates an environment in which the mere presence of people from other contexts makes people suspicious of more trans-cultural, broadly evangelical, or "ecumenical" settings.

An informal survey of April conference-goers found that many attendees were unaware of conferences other than the one they attended. And those who knew of the other conferences described them in ways that were not always positive. One Wheaton Theology attendee's perception of Together for the Gospel was "very conservative, hyper-Calvinist, negative toward women." A Q attendee described Wheaton Theology attendees as "too smart for normal people." A Together for the Gospel attendee perceived the Calvin Festival as "spiritually devoid of theology" and critiqued 4 Days 4 Justice as having "confusion over the Gospel." A Calvin attendee thought Q participants were "elitist."

A More Excellent Way
Yet fragmentation is not the only possible destiny for evangelicals. What may be needed are more pan-evangelical or pan-Christian contexts where people from multiple tribes can rub shoulders and learn from one another. Evangelicalism needs to recover what some have called the "village green," where the members of different tribes can find common ground. This could involve interdenominational movements and events such as the Lausanne Movement and the Cape Town 2010 Congress, or it could be as small as local churches joining together for a shared VBS. In the early 1990s, churches in my college town held a community-wide concert of prayer, and I was amazed and encouraged to see Presbyterians and Pentecostals, mainliners and evangelicals, high-church and low-church Christians alike, all praying together for our city.

Rather than segregate ourselves in the Big Sort, we could pursue the way of The Breakfast Club. The iconic 1984 John Hughes movie featured five teens spending a Saturday in detention in their school library. The five represent high school archetypes: an athlete, a princess, a brain, a druggie, and a countercultural "basket case." Over the course of the day, they get to know each other, and discover out that each is more complex than the stereotype. They have more in common than they realized. As New York Times film critic A. O. Scott put it, "the great, paradoxical insight of The Breakfast Club is that alienation is the norm, that nerds, jocks, stoners, popular girls and weirdos are all, in their own ways, outsiders."

Similarly, members of various evangelical subcultures may feel alienated from mainstream Christianity as a whole. But there is space within evangelicalism to hold together the dialectical tension between particularity and commonality. Within a larger 1 Corinthians 12 ecclesiology, we can discover that the different tribes are not enemy combatants, but rather different parts of the same body -- one body, one faith, one Lord Jesus Christ.

It seems to me that if participants from each of the six April 2010 conferences were put together in a high school library for a day, they might reprise the Breakfast Club experience. They might discover that despite their differences and tribal subcultures, they could indeed build relationships based on a common identity in Christ that transcends their subcultural distinctives. And perhaps they would discover that the future of the church is one in which the Reformed Calvinist, the academic theologian, the literary writer, the social activist, the church planter, and the culture maker all join together as interconnected citizens of the kingdom of God.

Al Hsu is an editor at InterVarsity Press, where he acquires and develops books in church and mission, cultural issues, spiritual formation, and global justice issues. He is the author of several books, including The Suburban Christian and Grieving a Suicide. He will be a delegate at the upcoming Cape Town 2010 Lausanne Congress in October. He and his family live in the Chicago suburbs.

What 'Lost' Taught Us about Dying Well

2010-05-27T07:09:00.005-05:00

[My take on the Lost finale and the whole series was posted online at Christianity Today's website.]

What 'Lost' Taught Us about Dying Well
The meaning behind "live together, die alone."
Al Hsu | posted 5/26/2010 12:08PM

Three episodes before the series finale of Lost, after witnessing the deaths of three beloved main characters, I thought to myself, "Oh, no—they're all going to die." At this point, so few original survivors of Oceanic 815 remained that the hope of anybody leaving the island alive seemed implausible.

I was glad that the finale didn't play out quite the way I had feared. But I was still sort of right: Everybody was going to die. Sometime, whether we saw it on screen or not.

I'm realizing that the entire series can be seen as a six-year meditation on how human beings approach death. In the pilot, death struck unexpectedly with a plane crash on a Pacific island. And every episode to follow dealt in some way with desperate efforts to live and avoid death.

At the beginning, the primary needs were survival. Food, water, shelter. Jack, Kate, Locke, Sawyer, and all the rest worked together to take care of the wounded and to help one another survive the island's threats. The goal was to avoid death and to get home.

Even though many unnamed redshirts and minor characters died in season 1, it wasn't until the first main cast death that viewers realized that not all of these survivors were going to make it off the island. And the Grim Reaper has steadily cut his way through the cast members each season. Some deaths were foreshadowed, like a looming terminal illness. But others came suddenly, without warning. Death is unpredictable.

As the series progressed, we as viewers reacted with all of the common responses of grief. I often found myself in denial. After the heart-wrenching season three finale, I kept hoping, "Maybe he isn't really dead. He survived somehow. We'll find out next season that he's okay." Many fans bargained with the directors to bring back beloved characters (which they did, in post-mortem appearances and flash-sideways).

As the death toll rose, a sense of resignation and inevitability came. The funerals on the beach happened more frequently. Again we'd see someone digging a grave, and again we'd see Hurley's downcast face. At first, there were brief ceremonies of remembrance, a few words spoken. After a while, not many remaining survivors were even left to pay tribute to those who had died.

By the end, all of us, characters and viewers alike, came to some degree of resignation and acceptance. One of the key lines in the finale that made sense of the whole series was "Everybody dies sometime." Death is inevitable. And while we can fight it and stave it off as long as we can, at some point, we recognize that there is nothing we can do to avoid it.

Rob Moll's new book The Art of Dying argues that over the last century or so, Christians have lost the practice of dying well. Christians used to have intentional ways to prepare for one's death, to number one's days. Christians approached death purposefully, making things right between them and God and others. These days, death has been medicalized and partitioned off from everyday life, leaving most of us without the resources to prepare adequately for death, whether one's own or a loved one's. We don't know what to do when death comes.

So a show like Lost can actually help us grapple with the reality of death. The characters' stories have often centered around "unfinished business" from their pre-island lives that needed to be resolved in some way. Moll notes that when Christians practice the art of dying, we learn to reconcile ourselves to God and others before death, saying important things like "Please forgive me," "I forgive you," "Thank you," and "I love you." Some of these very phrases were used in Lost (before and after characters' deaths), as a model to us for our own relationships. Some bloggers commented after the finale that the show had prompted them to cherish their own loved ones now, in this life, before it's too late.

Jack's goal from the beginning of the show was to get his people off the island. He wanted to get everybody home. As more and more people died along the way, it became increasingly clear that this was not going to happen. So I find it entirely appropriate that the series finale demonstrated that if characters could not get off the island literally, they did so spiritually.

Many fans were disappointed that the show did not resolve its vast mysteries and mythology. But at the end, the characters didn't really care about the origin of the island or the nature of the electromagnetic properties of the glowing light or whatever. What mattered most was the community they had formed and the relationships they had built during their time on the island.

At the end of the day, and at the end of our lives, we're not going to care if we understood how the Dharma Initiative fit into the epic confrontation between Jacob and the Man in Black. But we're going to want assurance that we will see our loved ones again, and that our eternal destiny is secure.

C. S. Lewis talked about Sehnsucht as a sense of longing for the eternal. We can view Lost through the lens of Sehnsucht, that deep within each character's heart was an eschatological longing for redemption. If the characters couldn't find that in this life, they would do so in the next life.

Evangelicals naturally critiqued the universalist nature of the finale. But we can also affirm that the show was headed in the right direction. This life is not all there is. Death is not the end.

It's almost certainly intentional that Jack Shephard's number in Lost was 23, evoking Psalm 23, "The Lord is my shepherd." (And the finale aired on May 23.) Jack's father, Christian Shephard, helped him find his way home.

Christian viewers of Lost can have confidence that we too have a Great Shepherd who finds the lost and leads us home. And we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Al Hsu is an editor at InterVarsity Press. He has written more about facing death in his book Grieving a Suicide. Hsu is a former columnist for Christianity Today.

Attention Christian conference-goers: Looking for survey respondents

2010-05-05T07:18:00.007-05:00

I just finished a class on sociology of religion, and I'm now working on a final paper about evangelical Christian conferences. Looking for people's impressions of several specific conferences held in April 2010. If you attended last month's Wheaton Theology Conference, Calvin Festival of Faith & Writing, Together for the Gospel, 4 Days 4 Justice, Exponential 10 or Q Conference, please take this survey!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5GJPBS2

The God Who Recycles

2010-03-19T07:51:00.003-05:00

This morning I took out our recycling and set it out on the curb. Last week our pastor mentioned that taking out the garbage each week can be an analogy for confessing our sin and trash, which is particularly appropriate during this season of Lent. That reminded me of this devotional I wrote a few years ago for My Heart--Christ's Home Through the Year:

The God Who Recycles

He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!" Revelation 21:5

Every Wednesday morning, I take trash cans and recycling bins out to the curb. I feel like I'm purging my home of all its impurities, and I come away feeling cleansed.

There's a lot of garbage in our lives. I'm grateful that God will take away my trash if only I am willing to bring it to him. He forgives my sins, no questions asked, and the trash is taken away as far as the east is from the west.

But I'm even more excited about the recycling. It's somehow thrilling to think about cans, bottles, cereal boxes and newspapers being remade and finding new use. God is the Great Recycler. There are times when I feel used up and worn out. I feel useless, like I'm good for nothing. But God can renew me and restore me and use me for service in surprising ways.

Pray: Spend some time in confession the next time you take out the garbage. And when you take out the recycling, give thanks for the opportunity to begin again.

Al Hsu

Philip Yancey on Christian writing

2010-02-25T08:56:00.003-06:00

Some thoughts from Philip Yancey in his book Open Windows (1982), in an essay called "Pitfalls of Christian Writing":

. . . Christian authors tend to give only the ideas and thoughts, without tracing the personalities involved and the context of how those thoughts developed. Too often religious books are organized and written like sermons, with an outlined structure superimposed on the content.

Many successful evangelical authors are not authors at all; they are speakers who make their living by speaking at churches and conferences. One can hardly blame them for organizing their written material in the same way as their spoken material, and often it sells well. But speakers who write books in the same style defy the basic rules of communication. Writers cannot merely list facts and hope to penetrate readers’ brains. They must take readers on an emotional journey to hold their attention. People do not read the same way they listen, and a book-speech is effective only among an audience previously committed to agree with the material. It cannot reach out to a noncaptive audience such as a world skeptical of Christian ideas. That requires books created according to the rules of written communication.

An author cannot captivate an audience with his or her own personal magnetism as a speaker can. Authors must use such techniques as a gripping narrative style, well-placed anecdotes, suspense, and a structure that compels a reader to follow the train of thought. To a diverse audience, ideas come across best when they are embodied and live within a visual, imaginable context.

At Urbana 09

2009-12-29T15:23:00.000-06:00

I'm at the Urbana 09 student missions convention in St. Louis, and there's a lot of great stuff going on both in the program and in the bookstore. If you want to watch, you can see many of the plenary sessions online at the free webcast page of the Urbana 09 website. Check out the amazing 15-minute Welcome to Urbana tap dance/spoken word presentation of John 1, Ruth Padilla DeBorst's talk on the movement of peoples, York Moore's abolitionist testimony, the Rahab dramatic monologue and the video clips on the state of Christianity and on human trafficking. Powerful, moving stuff.

My job this Urbana, as at previous conventions in 03 and 06, is to manage the book info booths in our bookstore. That means I roam the floor in a bright orange Home Depot-like vest answering questions and helping people find the books they're looking for (and didn't know they were looking for). We get questions like "Do you have books by Paul Bunyan?" or "What is the best book ever?" or "Um, I have a friend who is wondering if you have any books about how to meet girls." What's always so exciting is to see hundreds and thousands of college students with armfuls of IVP books. Urbana delegates are some of the most motivated, activist, missional, globally minded Christians, and it's fun to see them recommending books to one another and hear them talk about how certain books have changed their lives.

New this year is that we're having author signings in the bookstore and author interviews at our morning bookstore team meetings. Yesterday we heard from Julie Clawson, author of Everyday Justice, and this morning we chatted with Steve Hoke and Bill Taylor, authors of Global Mission Handbook. So far we've had signings with Scott Bessenecker (How to Inherit the Earth), Andy Marin (Love Is an Orientation), and we just had huge crowds for Shane Claiborne (Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers) and John Perkins (Welcoming Justice).

One of the featured books of the day is James Choung's True Story, and as they were making the book plug from the platform, James overheard a student telling her friend, "I reconverted to Christianity because of that book!" James told her, "I wrote that book!" And I was encouraged to hear that this book that I had acquired and edited had been helpful to her and many others in their spiritual journeys. Much of my work is with manuscripts and Word docs as books are being developed, so it's fun to come to conventions like these and see how our books are changing the lives of real readers.

Josiah quotes, 2009

2009-12-22T09:16:00.002-06:00

I just discovered a Facebook app called My Year in Status that lets you make a collage out of your Facebook statuses. You can customize it to select your favorite statuses from the past year. I used it to copy and paste all my statuses into one document (over 400 in 2009!), which serves as a nice snapshot and record of my thoughts and doings over the year. And I've been meaning to collect my statuses about funny things my older son, Josiah, has said, but haven't wanted to fuss with scrolling back through my actual Facebook wall. So this app let me pull all my statuses together, and I just searched for Josiah-related ones. Here are things my 7/8-year-old son said this past calendar year:

Wrote: "I, Josiah Hsu, will try to help my family by cleaning my room, help cook the food, warn them when Elijah poops all over the downstairs floor."

Ellen said, "Josiah, go brush your teeth." Josiah replied, "La la la la la - I can't hear you! La la la la la - I'm not listening!"

Josiah said, "I didn't mean to bump Elijah's head on the bed. I meant to drop him on the floor."

Josiah and I went out for donuts yesterday morning. At bedtime last night, Josiah prayed, "I pray for donuts. Ask and you will receive."

Got fettucine alfredo for dinner a few nights ago, and the pan and receipt both said "FETT." I showed Josiah, and he said, "Boba Fett pasta?"

Josiah: "I wish we had a tambourine." Ellen: "We have a tambourine." Josiah: "That you can jump on?"

"Mommy tickles better than you do. But nice try."

Al: "Free pizza! Wahoo!" Josiah said, "You shouldn't be so happy about it, Papa. Somebody had to pay for it."

Al: "When I was a kid, we didn't have goody bags at birthday parties." Josiah: "Was that back in the olden days?"

On 4th of July, asked Josiah, "Want to walk down to Starbucks?" Josiah said, "I think you've spent enough money for today."

Al: "I got some sourdough bread from Trader Joe's for you." Josiah: "That's the kind of parent I like!"

On our fridge is a guide to help kids if they ever need to call 911. It currently reads: "My name is: Josiah. My address is: stupid. I need help because: chickin on the loose."

Josiah, trying to get back to sleep: "Sheep have no effect."

Josiah's letter from history camp: "I feel crazy being in the army. I'm only doing this for money. We played baseball and screeeaaamed. See you in a few days. Bye!"

It's Wave Wednesday of Hawaiian Week at Josiah's day camp, so we suggested that he wear a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. He said, "No way. I am definitely not wearing those dorky shorts."

Josiah: "Either I need to get fatter or I need a belt."

Josiah: "Can we get some of the sizzling grape juice?"

Asked Josiah, "Did they talk about September 11th at school today?" He said, "Yes, it's a sad holiday. Two planes crashed into the Sears Tower and another one hit the Hexagon Tower."

Josiah said, "My rib hurts. Maybe I'm having a girl."

Josiah went to the mailbox in anticipation of getting a new video game. While opening the package, he said, "It better not be a book."

Told Josiah that Rio got the Olympics instead of Chicago. He asked, "Can we move to South America?"

Was playing ping pong with Josiah at a friends' house. He was retrieving a ball and bonked his head on a bar. I asked, "Are you okay?" Josiah responded, "I think I'm going to live."

Gave Josiah applesauce and goldfish crackers (in two separate bowls). After a while, he said, "I don't want applesauce anymore. I keep dipping my fingers in there when I want goldfish."

Josiah, talking about his Narnia videogame: "There's a phonics attack." Me: "What's a phonics attack?" Josiah: "You know, a phonics. The bird that breathes fire."

Josiah: "I want to make a flip book of a chicken dying." Ellen: "How about a butterfly flying?" Josiah: "Okay, a butterfly flying into a window and dying."

Ellen brought back German, Swiss and Russian chocolate. Josiah: "Does it have crickets in it?"

Al has a germy son who says, "Beware the fingers of doom."

Me: "What's leprosy?" Josiah: "When a leopard bites you."

Josiah: "I learned a new phrase from Charlie Brown: 'Great scott!'" Me: "What does that mean?" Josiah: "It means Scott is great."

"It's 32 degrees. It's a water-freezing day."

Josiah: "Do you want a snack?" Danny: "No, we're scientists doing experiments." Josiah: "Scientists need food too. We can't just drink potions."

Got donuts with Josiah. Me: "So if it's $4.00 for a dozen donuts, how much does each donut cost?" Josiah: "Dude, it's winter break. I don't want to do math."

If Facebook statuses were really honest

2009-12-08T15:20:00.001-06:00

A lot of Facebook statuses are fairly innocuous – observations about life, work, daily activities, current events. Most folks are self-conscious and careful about not disclosing things that are too personal, especially anything that casts them in a negative light. There’s rarely any confession of wrongdoing other than “Jenny is stealing her kids’ Halloween candy.” But what if people really said what was really going on? Then instead of a status like “Mark is hiking the Appalachian Trail” you’d see “Mark is ditching his family and job to rendezvous with his Argentinian soulmate.”

A few years ago I heard about the concept of the Johari window, which organizes people's interpersonal interactions in different categories of people’s self-perceptions and perceptions by others. One category is the “arena,” that which is known to oneself and publicly made known to others, that we see and that others also see. Most Facebook statuses probably fall into this category, stuff that people feel comfortable making public about themselves.

Another category is the “facade” – that which we know about ourselves but is not seen by others. We are selective about what we disclose and edit out the naughty bits. So if we were to pull back the facade, our statuses might say things like “Wally is looking at porn,” "Eliot is visiting a prostitute" or “Carrie just slapped her daughter.”

Even more interesting is the category of the “blind spot” – that which others know about us but that we don’t know about ourselves. It’s hard for us to get clued in on things in this category unless we have trusted friends that let us know what's going on, but this might be something like "Michael is offending coworkers left and right" or "Dwight is totally staring at Pam's chest and is completely creeping her out."

The fourth category is "mystery," that which is unknown to both ourselves and others around us. This might be something like "Britney is acting out because of childhood issues" or "Ted is in serious denial about being gay."

It's interesting to think about Facebook statuses through the lens of the Johari window. Is that status really real or just a facade? What's not being said in a status that might reflect a blind spot or an area of mystery? Integrity, many have said, is who you are when no one's looking. In an age of Facebook, integrity might be having your Facebook status really reflect who you are and not just how you want people to think about you.

(P.S. Just found an interactive Johari window online, but I'm scared to try it.)

Encouragement for aspiring writers

2009-12-04T08:05:00.003-06:00

Yesterday morning I was at Wheaton College to talk to English majors and writing students about editing and publishing work. Had a great time interacting with folks and answering questions about the writing and publishing process. One of the handouts I distributed contained the following quotes:

“First of all, if you want to write, write. And second, don’t do it. It’s the loneliest, most depressing work you can do.” Walker Percy

“Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” Gene Fowler

“Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.” Jessamyn West

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Red Smith

“It should surprise no one that the life of the writer – such as it is – is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author’s childhood. A writer’s childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience.” Annie Dillard

“In general, very little happens to a writer. Now do you understand why we put so much emphasis on artificial reality? Our actual reality is insufferably dull. A Federal Express delivery is far and away the most dramatic event in my day.” Philip Yancey

“I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.” Philip Roth

“Every writer I know has trouble writing.” Joseph Heller

“The first draft of anything is [poop].” Ernest Hemingway

“Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you’re going to say.” Francoise Sagan

“Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself – it is the occurring which is difficult.” Stephen Leacock

“Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.” Graham Greene

“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing a new way or to say a new thing an old way.” Richard Harding Davis

Win a free mission trip to Haiti

2009-11-23T13:19:00.002-06:00

IVP is cosponsoring a contest to win a free mission trip to Haiti with Kent Annan, codirector of Haiti Partners and author of the new book Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle: Living Fully, Loving Dangerously. Six people will be chosen to receive an all-expenses-paid 5-day mission trip to Haiti from May 20-24, 2010. To enter, answer this question:

How are you personally challenged by Jesus' invitation to live more fully and love dangerously, and how could this trip be part of that?

with either a 300-400-word essay or a 2-to-3-minute video posted to YouTube. Entries must be submitted by Feb. 15, 2010. The first 50 entries will win a free copy of the book. See contest rules and entry form.

Deadly Viper authors and publisher retract book

2009-11-20T07:28:00.000-06:00

In the past few weeks, Asian American Christians have been protesting the release of the Zondervan book Deadly Viper Character Assassins for its insensitive use and stereotypical appropriation of Asian and Asian American images and themes. The charge has been led by several of my authors, primarily Soong-Chan Rah (see key posts here, here and here) as well as Kathy Khang and Ken Fong, and many others (Asian and not) have been involved. I have weighed in here and there but have not said anything yet on this blog because as an editor at another publishing house, I did not want to be seen as taking potshots at a competitor. However, I am thrilled that I can now pass along the official news that Zondervan has issued a public apology and is pulling the Deadly Viper book from publication and distribution. Reposted from Soong-Chan Rah's blog:

Zondervan Statement Regarding Concerns Voiced About “Deadly Viper: Character Assassins”

From Moe Girkins, President and CEO

Hello and thanks for your patience.

On behalf of Zondervan, I apologize for publishing Deadly Viper: Character Assassins. It is our mission to offer products that glorify Jesus Christ. This book’s characterizations and visual representations are offensive to many people despite its otherwise solid message.

There is no need for debate on this subject. We are pulling the book and the curriculum in their current forms from stores permanently.

We have taken the criticism and advice we have received to heart. In order to avoid similar episodes in the future, last week I named Stan Gundry as our Editor-in-Chief of all Zondervan products. He will be responsible for making the necessary changes at Zondervan to prevent editorial mistakes like this going forward. We already have begun a dialogue with Christian colleagues in the Asian-American community to deepen our cultural awareness and sensitivity.

Zondervan is committed to publishing Christian content and resources that uplift God and see humanity in its proper perspective in relation to God. We take seriously our call to provide resources that encourage spiritual growth. And, we know there is more to learn by always listening to our critics as well as our advocates.

It would be unfair to take these actions without expressing our love and support for the authors of this book, Mike Foster and Jud Wilhite. Both gentlemen are gifted writers and passionate about their ministry. We do believe their message is valuable and plan to work with the authors to come up with a better presentation of that message. We will jointly ensure we do our due diligence on the appropriateness of the creative side. This will include reaching out to a broad spectrum of cultural experts.

Finally, I want to personally thank Professor Rah, Ken Fong, Eugene Cho and Kathy Khang for their input and prayers during this discussion. We appreciate everyone’s concern and effort and look forward to working together for God’s kingdom.

Warmly,

Moe

And the authors of Deadly Viper have removed all previous materials from their website and posted this apology:

To our Friends and Family:

Due to an unfortunate conflict that arose around our use of Asian American themes, we have decided to close this chapter of Deadly Viper Character Assassins. This decision has been a very difficult one for us and one that we did not take lightly.

For the past 2 years we have had the honor to be part of an incredible movement of advocating for radical integrity and grace. We have been deeply humbled hearing your stories of how Deadly Viper has impacted your life, family, and relationships.

We and our team will continue to commit our lives to the message of integrity, grace, and most of all becoming People Of The Second Chance.

We thank you for your prayers, support, and kindness through this season.

We love you.

Mike Foster and Jud Wilhite

I heartily commend Zondervan and the authors for this action and am glad for this result. It is stunning to see authors willing to give up an invested brand identity in order to make things right. I am grateful for the dialogue that has taken place and that people in positions of power were willing to listen and learn.

Takeaway for the church overall: This is how it's done. This is The Next Evangelicalism that Soong-Chan writes about - a church that is stronger, more authentic and has more integrity in its witness when all members of the body are honored and respected. The church is becoming more global, more diverse, and the future of the North American church will depend on how readily it incarnates the totality of the body in all its ethnic and cultural dimensions.

Takeaway for Asian American Christians in particular: As I've said before, Asian Americans have an opportunity to become culture makers. It's not enough to protest when injustice occurs (as important as that is) - we must also be contributing to the conversation and involved in the business of creating cultural artifacts that shape society. We need Asian Americans (and people of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds!) as authors, editors, marketers, designers, journalists, bloggers, publishing executives. It's likely that this Deadly Viper incident would not have happened if Zondervan had had more Asian Americans on staff. So Asian American community, as Paul Tokunaga says in Invitation to Lead, it's time to step up. Write books. Apply for jobs at Zondervan (and other Christian publishers). Get in the game.

Find Work That Fits You

2009-11-17T08:36:00.002-06:00

[This is part of an article I wrote for TheHighCalling.org that was posted a few months ago.]

My high school friends were a microcosm of school society. Eric was a photographer and yearbook editor. Ann was a leader in the marching band. Bill was the lead actor in theatre productions. Laura was in the dance line. Jeff was co-captain of the track team. Carol was co-captain of volleyball and synchronized swimming. Dan was in speech and debate.

Me? I lettered in debate and theatre, and I ran track for a while. I also participated in things like academic decathlon and science olympiad. But my senior year, my primary involvement and identity was as an editor for the school newspaper. I had published a poem back in first grade in our school district's poetry compendium, and I had always loved reading and writing. So the school paper became my niche.

Why did my friends and I gravitate to certain interests and not others?

Some of it was parental influence. Teachers and coaches may have encouraged us to try out for certain activities. And, of course, peers had something to do with it. I never would have run track if my friends had not also been on the team. But to a large extent, we all had certain gifts and talents that geared us in some directions rather than others.

Some people distinguish between gifts and talents. They say that gifts are those natural, innate, God-given abilities to excel in certain areas, whether intellectual, artistic, or athletic. And talents might be thought of as skills that can be acquired and learned, regardless of inherent ability. I'm not sure it's quite that clear cut, but I do recognize that people have different gifts and talents.

This seems to have been the case from the very beginning. Genesis 4:2 says that Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain a tiller of the ground. We don't know why they differentiated as they did; perhaps Adam and Eve assigned them these tasks arbitrarily, and they learned to do them. Or maybe as children Abel always loved animals, while Cain was a budding agriculturalist. We have no idea. But either way, they were shaped and formed to particular vocations.

[Continue reading the article here.]

On checking Amazon sales rankings

2009-11-10T12:16:00.000-06:00

"...he found himself checking Amazon every ten minutes or so to see how his crossword books were selling. They always had depressing numbers like 673,082 or 822,457. Once his latest had made it up to 9,326. It had given him a happy afternoon, until he logged on before going to bed and found it at 787,333." - Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry, p. 49

"The Day We Let Our Son Live"

2009-11-04T08:35:00.002-06:00

My wife, Ellen, wrote a blog entry about our son, Elijah, that has been reposted on Christianity Today's Her.meneutics blog. (The opening paragraphs below are by editor Katelyn Beaty; Ellen's material follows.)

The Day We Let Our Son Live

It ended up being the most important day of my life.

Ellen Hsu, guest blogger

When it comes to the chance for those with genetic defects to live, the news has not been good on either side of the Atlantic. Last week’s Telegraph reported that of all women in the U.K. who find out through prenatal testing that their baby will have Down syndrome, about 90 percent choose to have an abortion. And yesterday, ABC News reported a near-identical rate among women in the U.S.: 92 percent of those who find out their child will have the chromosomal defect decide to abort. One geneticist at Children’s Hospital Boston found that, without prenatal testing, the number of Down syndrome births would have increased by 34 percent between 1989 and 2005. Instead, the number of Down syndrome births has dropped by 15 percent over that time.

Upon hearing such news, I remembered Ellen and Al Hsu (pronounced shee), a Christian couple who works at InterVarsity Press in Downers Grove, Illinois, and who faced the same situation as the women above. This is Ellen’s story of Elijah, their 4-year-old with Down syndrome, as originally told on their family blog, Team Hsu.

--/

I gazed in wonder at the blurry form on the screen. “Hi, Baby,” I whispered. The image of our baby was much clearer on the level-two ultrasound. The technician rolled the ultrasound wand over my growing abdomen, and I marveled as I watched our son squirm and suck his thumb. A new life forming within me.

Our OB/GYN had referred us for a level-two ultrasound after he noticed choroid plexus cysts on our baby’s brain during the standard 20-week ultrasound. I was anxious about what the maternal health specialist might find. We knew a couple whose ultrasound also had showed choroids plexus cysts, but whose baby was perfectly fine when he was born. We had spent the past week praying for our baby and hoping for the best.

Al walked into the exam room as the technician was finishing up. She hadn’t said much and explained that the doctor would be in to take a look for himself and to explain what he found. Al and I chatted quietly while we waited. I was relieved that he had made it before the doctor came in. Little did I know how much I would need him.

The doctor came in and began his exam. I was delighted at the chance to see more images of our baby. But my world was shaken when the doctor finally began explaining what he saw. “Something is very wrong with this baby.”

He continued to roll the wand over my tummy as he pointed to various spots on the screen and began listing all the “abnormalities”: larger than usual nuchal folds; clenched fists; possible club feet; something wrong with the liver; enlarged ventricles in the brain; possibly no stomach. My tears flowed as his list grew longer. My delight at the new life within me turned to icy fear, and I clutched Al’s hand tightly.

The doctor suspected a chromosomal problem, possibly Trisomy 13 or 18, birth defects caused by an extra 13th or 18th chromosome. He explained that both of these conditions are generally “incompatible with life.” We were told that if our baby was born alive, he was likely to die within a day. If we were lucky, he might survive for 6 to 12 months. We wondered if we should begin preparing for death instead of life.

Continue reading The Day We Let Our Son Live...

Introverts in the Church by Adam McHugh

2009-11-02T16:23:00.001-06:00

Now that I've gotten some books off to the printer, I have a little more breathing space to announce books that have just been published. One that I'm excited about is Adam McHugh's Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture. (You can download free PDFs of the introduction and the first chapter.) I'm not an introvert myself, but I'm married to one, and I've found myself becoming somewhat more introverted in my rhythms over the years. Adam's book is a groundbreaking work that validates introverts' identity and temperament and lifts out the value and place of introverts' contributions to Christian life and community.

Adam wrote the book because much of the contemporary evangelical church tends to be extroverted in temperament and style, leaving less place for introverts as well as for practices like contemplation and reflection. So the book is a healthy corrective that highlights how the church needs introverts and extroverts alike to fully be the body God intends it to be. (I've thought for years that every wacky extroverted youth pastor out there needs to partner with introverted youth workers that can connect with the quiet kids who would never open up to the extrovert.) Adam has some fascinating insights into how the introverted mind and temperament work. Neuroscience shows that introverts' brains are wired differently and process information differently. I was particularly interested to learn that introverts tend to need more sleep in order to recover from a full day of interaction.

The book suggests practical ways for introverts to navigate extroverted Christian subcultures and to practice introvert-friendly ways of doing community, spirituality, leadership, evangelism, worship, preaching and more. If you've ever left church early to avoid the coffee fellowship time, this book is for you. If you have ever been frustrated with church culture that seems to equate being more extroverted with being more spiritual, this book is for you. And if you are an extrovert who wants to better understand the introverts in your life or welcome introverts to your church, you must read this book.

It was fun to get some nice endorsements for the book from introverts like Dan Kimball, Don Everts and Lauren Winner, who says, "Introverts, take heart! As an introvert myself--an off-the-chart 'I' on the Myers-Briggs--I find certain aspects of church life, like speaking to other human beings every Sunday, really taxing. McHugh thoughtfully explores the gifts introverts bring to the church, and he considers both how introverts can live well in the church and how churches can be more hospitable to us."

Adam blogs at IntrovertedChurch.com, and you can become a fan of his book on Facebook here.

Ted Ward, Groundhog Day and cultural impact

2009-10-31T13:50:00.003-05:00

As part of my PhD program, I have the opportunity to meet with veteran educator Ted Ward, who played a key role in developing Trinity's PhD programs in educational studies and intercultural studies. Over lunch today, he told our group of doctoral students that back in the 1930s his father was a publicist for the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Many towns in the area also featured groundhogs, but Ward's father helped establish their town as the groundhog capital. The result is what we know today as Groundhog Day.

This was fascinating to me because any of those Pennsylvania towns could have done something with groundhogs, but Ward's father did something intentional to brand their town and create a cultural phenomenon with lasting impact. This seems analogous to Ted Ward's own influence in educating a generation of leaders in missiology and Christian education. Many current professors and church leaders did their doctoral work under Ted, including Compassion International president Wesley Stafford, TEDS president Craig Williford, Wheaton missions prof Evvy Campbell, Biola prof Klaus Issler, and several of my IVP authors, including Duane Elmer, Steve Hoke (coauthor of the recently released Global Mission Handbook) and Jim Plueddemann, whose new book Leading Across Cultures just came in from the printer yesterday.

Every February 2, and every time someone watches the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day, we experience something of the cultural legacy of Ted Ward's father. And every student or reader of Ted Ward's students continues to experience the effects of Ted's educational thinking and influence, even two or three generations afterward. I'm grateful for the chance to learn from Ted and have him speak into my thinking, and I'm challenged to contribute to the shaping of lives in ways that will influence not just the present but also generations to come.

The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose

2009-10-14T13:21:00.001-05:00

A couple of years ago I read A. J. Jacobs's book The Year of Living Biblically, which I enjoyed but critiqued as being a rather individualistic exercise rather than rooted in actual communities of spiritual practice. Well, I just read a book that follows Jacobs's lead but ups the ante. Kevin Roose, who was a research assistant for Jacobs on Year of Living Biblically, left his liberal Ivy League college to spend a semester at the fundamentalist/evangelical Liberty University, exploring how life is lived and faith is practiced at Jerry Falwell's school. The result is The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University.

I loved this book. It was a delight to read, laugh-out-loud hilarious at points, poignant and thought-provoking at others. A nominal Quaker who does not self-identify as "born again," Roose is tremendously fair to the folks at Liberty, as he finds himself slowly becoming acculturated to the conservative Christian subculture. He discovers that students at Liberty are not all the religious wingnut stereotypes many outsiders imagine them to be; they're just people, with all of the complexities and foibles that mark the human condition.

What's fascinating is that Roose enters into regular rhythms of Christian practice such as prayer, reading Scripture, participating in worship services and sharing in small groups. The result is that he starts to see things from the point of view of his Liberty classmates, so much so that when he visits his secular relatives he feels odd not praying before dinner and wonders if people he sees are saved or not. He becomes far more understanding of Christian belief and even becomes sympathetic to Falwell himself, despite disagreeing strongly with him on many issues. Roose is a model of civility, and his participant-observer exercise in undercover journalism should help believers and unbelievers alike understand each other better.

I have been noticing in recent years that most arguments in religion or theology, as well as many attempts in evangelism and witness, go nowhere because people on different sides have different "plausibility structures" that make certain beliefs possible or impossible. In many ways, we are socialized into or out of our beliefs; we find ourselves in communities that support or reject our thinking, and we find new ideas more plausible when we are in subcultures or contexts where such beliefs are the norm. Kevin Roose dared to leave his previous context to immerse himself in a conservative evangelical world that his friends and families thought outrageous and even dangerous. The result was a certain degree of change in belief. It wasn't a dramatic Damascus-road conversion from 1 to 10, but perhaps more of a subtle shift from maybe a 3 to a 5 or 6.

I don't consider Liberty or Falwell my particular tribe; I find them to be more conservative than the moderate evangelical circles I usually move in. But Roose's book helped me see the Liberty community as real people and not just caricatures. And Roose himself is honest about his own doubts, objections and questions, giving Christian readers keen insights into how non-evangelicals hear and perceive evangelicals. This would be a great book for Christian and non-Christian friends to read and discuss together.

Part of me thinks this book should be made into a movie, though another part of me thinks that a Hollywood treatment would probably ruin the experience. Reading this book was an engrossing, immersive experience, one that evoked memories of my own undergrad years at a conservative Christian college. The Unlikely Disciple is a gripping narrative, and not just because you want to find out if he ends up with the cute evangelical Tina Fey-lookalike girl. This book is probably the closest that many folks will ever get to attending a school like Liberty, and it's amazing how Kevin Roose makes you wish the semester wouldn't fly by so quickly.

The Urbana experience

2009-10-09T11:01:00.005-05:00

This December 27-31 is Urbana 09, InterVarsity's 22nd student missions conference. So right now I'm in the midst of sending a slew of Urbana-related books to the printer and helping to plan things for the onsite bookstore. If you're thinking of attending, registration fees bump up on Oct. 17, so now is a good time to register. Urbana is an amazing, life-changing experience. Below is a testimony I shared with my IVP colleagues in 2003 in anticipation of Urbana 03, reflecting on my experiences at Urbana 93:

I went to Urbana 93 as a senior in college, and it was a defining experience in my life. I got scholarships from my InterVarsity chapter, college and church, which combined was enough to cover all the convention fees and travel costs! So I knew God wanted me there.

Here’s an excerpt from my journal entry for Monday, Dec. 27, 1993: “The auditorium was packed to the hilt with over 18,000 students singing ‘O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.’ The worship experience brought me to tears. The theme for this year’s Urbana is ‘God So Loves the World,’ with the focus being on God’s extravagant love for us. And wow, I was overwhelmed with a tangible sense of the power of God’s ultimate, infinite love. All of the thousands of us joined hands in prayer for us to know the love of God, for it to be infused into our lives, and for it to empower us to minister to this world. It was just awesome.” And then I note, “Afterward I picked up a packet of books.”

The next day I discovered the IVP bookstore. I was already an IVP Book Club member and literature coordinator for my IV chapter, so I already had lots of IVP books. But a whole store of IVP books! And all these bargains and specials and packages! Kid in a candy store. My journal entry from Dec. 28 says, “After lunch I journeyed to the Armory, where exhibits of mission agencies and organizations were set up, and the awesome coolest thing was a huge IVP bookstore with thousands upon thousands of IVP books on dozens of shelves. I was in IVP heaven. I bought over 30 IVP books for $93.50. I just went nuts and hauled back a huge box full of IVP books. It was awesome cool.” And my journal says that I didn’t make it to any seminars that day because I spent all afternoon in the Armory. And that was just the first day. The bookstore was selling the BSTs with the old covers at clearance prices. I bought them all. I bought every bargain book available. And this was the year that the books of the day were these shrink-wrapped packages with four books and a video. I bought every package. You know how they say that Urbana is like drinking from a firehose? In my case, it was a firehose that was spewing IVP books. All the money that the scholarships saved me? It went to IVP.

Then there was the convention program itself. Several things hit me during the plenary sessions. First, a tentmaking missionary in China talked about how she had gone to the most isolated village in China. They had gone as far as the train would go, then by car as far as the road would go, then on foot as far as they could go to this totally remote place. When they got to this village, the kids came running up and said, “Americans! Are you Americans? Do you have Coca-Cola?” And they said, “No, we don’t have Coca-Cola. We’re here to tell you about Jesus. Do you know who Jesus is?” They shook their heads and said no, we don’t know who Jesus is. Then the missionary said, we were in the remotest part of the world, and people had heard the name of Coca-Cola, but they had never heard the name of Jesus Christ. Wow.

Then on Thursday the 30th, there was an offering for IFES. The person leading the offering time challenged the delegates by saying, “Many of you have bought things for yourselves this week. We challenge you give as much to this offering for others as you have spent on yourself.” At that point, I had spent over $150 just on IVP books and a sweatshirt. So I wrote a check for $150 for IFES.

A few more journal entries. Dec. 31. “I went to a seminar by Dr. James Sire, whose IVP books I have a lot of. But I was just so drained, I fell asleep during the session.”

Jan. 1, 1994. “I just celebrated the new year and the end of Urbana with 18,000 people! Tonight’s worship closing session was absolutely awesome. Thousands have committed themselves to lives of Christian ministry, service and mission, across the country and around the world, on campuses, to students, to children, to Muslims, Arabs, homeless, poor, urban centers, Buddhists, everything imaginable. It’s just staggering to think about what kind of impact these 18,000 people can have on this world and for the kingdom of God.”

And after I got home, Jan. 2. “I showed Ellen my Urbana stuff and gave her an Urbana NRSV Bible, an Operation World, and an IVP book on dating that I also got for myself. I figured it might be nice for both of us to have. I showed her the Urbana summary video and told her all about the week.”

On my commitment card, I’d committed to getting missions training and reading books on missions. All week I wrestled with how God might use me in missions. Little did I know that three years later, my job would be to help plan the IVP bookstore at Urbana 96! God is good.

Reflections of a Chicago 2016 volunteer

2009-10-02T13:21:00.002-05:00

I've loved the Olympics ever since I was a kid. I had a knit cap with the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Games logo, and I remember watching the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games, especially a closing montage set to Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." My grandfather lived in LA at the time, and he went to the Olympics and brought me my first Olympic pins and flags and other memorabilia. I've wanted to attend an Olympics ever since. But they've always seemed so geographically and economically out of reach. Until I heard that Chicago was a candidate city for the 2016 Summer Games. A chance to have the Olympics in my metropolitan backyard!

So over the last year or so, I've been an occasional volunteer for the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid. My son and I held up signs and flags in the rain during an IOC evaluation visit and handed out wristbands at pro soccer games. I distributed literature and helped out with some demos of Olympic and Paralympic sports at events. I've been an enthusiastic backer of the bid, even though I'm fully aware of the financial and infrastructure challenges they would likely bring to the region. My sense was that they'd be a mixed bag of pros and cons, but on the whole I felt like it would be a net benefit to the Chicagoland area. I liked volunteering for the 2016 bid in that it got me outside of my usual circles and activities and let me be part of a larger community with a common vision and interest.

Like many Chicagoans, I was disappointed with the news this morning that Chicago was eliminated in the first round of voting. But that's okay - Chicagoans are used to disappointment, as any Cubs fan will say. On the other hand, I'm thrilled for Rio de Janeiro and for what the decision represents. It's the first time the Olympics will be held in South America. Brazil was the only country of the top ten global economies never to have hosted a Games. This selection seems to be another indicator of the spotlight shifting away from the U.S. and toward the global south. North Americans should get used to this shift. The future of international business, geopolitics and the church is increasingly globalizing. The global south, the BRIC countries, the emerging economies of the world are no longer just potential consumers of Western goods or the objects of North American missionaries; they are subjects in their own right and mutual partners in global commerce and mission.

As I wrote in a CT column last year, I love the Olympics for its peaceful international celebration and cooperation, which seems to me a sign of the kingdom of God. Of course, the actual preparations for the Games are fraught with potential problems and injustices, such as the displacement of the poor. Julie Clawson, author of our new book Everyday Justice, blogged a while ago that Chicago may have been less problematic than the other candidate cities and that death squads in Rio may be used to clear out unwanted populations. Here's to hoping that Rio will take the 2016 Games as an opportunity to protect its people and to develop a more just society.

And in the meantime, I will recalibrate my own hopes of seeing an Olympics in person someday. Now Vancouver 2010 feels a little closer and doable than London 2012 or Sochi 2014, but still much more difficult to get to than a Chicago Olympics would have been. My wife, who works with Brazilian publishers, would love to go to Rio 2016. We can always dream, but if not, we'll at least get to watch the Games on TV.

William Safire's rules for writing

2009-09-28T08:50:00.002-05:00

In memory of William Safire, I'm reposting his famous rules for writing:

Remember to never split an infinitive.
The passive voice should never be used.
Do not put statements in the negative form.
Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
A writer must not shift your point of view.
And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!!
Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more, to their antecedents.
Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
Always pick on the correct idiom.
The adverb always follows the verb.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

Kids don't walk because parents drive

2009-09-15T06:42:00.002-05:00

Our sons usually take the bus to and from school, but last week my wife and I picked our older son up at the end of the school day for an event. Ellen said that we should get there about ten, fifteen minutes early to get a good place in line; otherwise we'd have to wait a long time to get out. I thought that was odd, but we did, and we were the third car in line. Pretty soon there were several dozen cars lined up behind us, clogging up the parking lot. I said to Ellen, "I don't remember so many parents picking up their kids like this when I was in elementary school. Everybody walked or took the bus."

Well, a recent New York Times article describes how kids no longer walk to school because parents usually drive them. A major factor: fear of abduction, heightened again by the Jaycee Dugard case. As a result, parents sit with their kids in cars at the end of driveways before the bus comes, and parents drive kids to school two blocks away. But those fears seem to be vastly disproportionate. The article reports that about 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, while 250,000 kids are injured in car accidents. Which is the greater danger - walking or driving?

Also: In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did. During the same period, children either being driven or driving themselves to school rose from 20 percent to 55 percent. More than half! No wonder my kids' buses seem so empty.

The result? Kids don't get as much exercise, there's more traffic clogging school areas (with the increased risk of car accidents) and we use way more gas than we used to. Protective parents don't let kids play unsupervised, even in their own neighborhoods. And kids lose out on certain aspects of unstructured, exploratory play.

It seems to have become a cultural expectation that kids should not walk alone. The article mentions a 10-year-old who was walking to soccer practice (about a mile), and people who saw him walking alone called 911. A policeman picked him up, drove him the rest of the way, and reprimanded the mother.

I think this article highlights how much commuter culture has shaped our modern practices. The geography of our neighborhoods, especially in the suburbs, is designed for cars, so our default setting is to drive everywhere. We don't even think of walking anymore. Now it has become a countercultural act to let our kids to walk to school.

Kids and race awareness, and why parents don't talk about it

2009-09-11T06:51:00.003-05:00

The cover story of this week's issue of Newsweek is "See Baby Discriminate: Kids as young as 6 months judge others based on skin color. What's a parent to do?" The article highlights that kids are aware of racial differences far earlier than most parents think, and parents generally don't know how to talk about them. Some key points:

- While most parents think of themselves as multicultural and colorblind, their kids pick up on unspoken racial attitudes. When asked "Do your parents like black people?" 14 percent said, "No, my parents don't like black people" and 38 percent said "I don't know."

- Parents avoid talking about race because they don't know what to say and are worried about saying the wrong thing. Parents worry that calling attention to race, even with a positive statement ("It's wonderful that a black person can be president") still encourages a child to see divisions within society.

- In a 2007 study of 17,000 families with kindergartners, nonwhite parents are about three times more likely to discuss race than white parents; 75 percent of white parents never or almost never talk about race.

- Kids are developmentally prone to in-group favoritism. Four- and five-year-olds randomly given red and blue T-shirts didn't segregate by behavior, but when asked which color team was better or might win a race, they chose their own color. When Reds were asked how many Reds were nice, they'd answer, "All of us." Asked how many Blues were nice, they'd answer, "Some."

- Three-year-olds shown pictures of other kids were asked to choose whom they'd like to have as friends. 86 percent of white kids picked whites. At ages 5 and 6, the kids were asked to sort cards into two piles however they wanted. Only 16 percent sorted by gender; 68 percent sorted by race.

- Researchers have found that the more diverse the environment, the more kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity, and the likelihood that any two kids of different races have a friendship goes down.

- In junior high and high school, kids in diverse schools experience two completely contrasting situations: many students have a friend of another race, but more kids just like to hang with their own.

- The odds of a white high-schooler in America having a best friend of another race is only 8 percent. 85 percent of black kids' best friends are also black.

- Parents are generally very comfortable talking about gender stereotypes ("Mommies can be doctors just like daddies"), and this can be a model for how parents talk about race.

This article was quite insightful and thought-provoking, and it reminded me of times like when my older son mentioned classmate who was "dark," and I didn't know quite how to explain terminology like "black" or "African American." Because our kids are biracial, we have occasion to talk about ethnic identity and cultural distinctives. When at buffet restaurants with self-serve ice cream machines, we've used the analogy of the twist cone - there's vanilla, there's chocolate, and there's both. It's hard to tell how much they understand or care at this point, but we're working on it.

Deep Church

2009-09-02T07:44:00.004-05:00

I blogged awhile ago about what emergents and neo-Calvinists have in common, and I wondered if Christians from different wings could meet together and learn from each other. Well, IVP just published a book that aims to do just that. Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional by church planter and pastor Jim Belcher is now in print (PDFs of the introduction and first chapter are available for free). Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

This book is written for those who are caught in between. They are unhappy with the present state of the evangelical church but are not sure where to turn for an answer. They like some of what the emerging and traditional camps offer, but they are not completely at ease with either. The public conflict makes this anxiety worse, and these people don’t know who to trust or believe. What if both are off target? Is there a third option, a via media? I believe there is a third way. It is what C. S. Lewis called “the Deep Church.” Deep church is a term taken from Lewis’s 1952 letter to the Church Times in which he defended supernatural revelation against the modernist movement. He wrote, “Perhaps the trouble is that as supernaturalists, whether ‘Low’ or ‘High’ Church, thus taken together, they lack a name. May I suggest ‘Deep Church’; or, if that fails in humility, Baxter’s ‘mere Christians?’ ”

Second, this book is written for those on the outside who want to understand the debate. They are new to the conversation and want to understand what all the fuss is about. They have heard of the emerging church but have no idea what the term stands for or what it is advocating. The whole conversation seems foreign and is outside their church reality. Why is this debate important? How does it affect their church world? Should it concern them? This book will explain the contours of the conversation, what the emerging church is and desires, and why it has created such a strong pushback from the traditional church.

Third, this book is written for seminarians, those who are attempting to work out their ecclesiology—their theological view of the church, its purpose, structure and goals. Seminary is a great time to test inherited beliefs, dig deeper and then slowly work out in greater depth biblical convictions about ministry. This book lays out the options, the two sides of the debate, so seminarians can get a handle on what they believe Christianity and the church is all about.

Finally, this book is for pastors who have been in the ministry for a while and have begun to question how ministry is practiced in their context. Many pastors who reach this midlife ministry crisis end up burning out and even leaving the ministry. I don’t want to see this happen. Some pastors are disillusioned with aspects of evangelicalism. They are searching for pastoral models that can refire their ministry, their calling and their church. Though they may not know how to achieve it, they know they want a deep church, one that is profoundly meaningful to them and their community, and brings glory to God. This book is for them.

Still thinking about death

2009-08-27T07:11:00.000-05:00

I can't seem to avoid this topic. Besides Senator Ted Kennedy, the news has also highlighted the recent passing of South Korean president and Nobel laureate Kim Dae-jung, author Dominick Dunne, 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt, columnist Robert Novak, theologian Geoffrey Bromiley . . . the list goes on and on. A couple days ago I remembered what would have been my father's 70th birthday, had he not died in 1998. He has been gone now for almost a third of my life, and I still grieve his absence. And just last night I learned that a high school classmate had been killed in a car accident this past weekend, leaving behind her husband, daughter and son. So sad.

I read a lot of the Kennedy coverage yesterday, and the article that jumped out at me most was this one in the New York Times, because it gives insight into how Kennedy prepared to die. He was a "man who in his final months was at peace with the end of his life and grateful for the chance to savor the salty air and the company of loved ones." He spent time with family at dinners and singalongs, and he told friends, "Every day is a gift" and "I've had a wonderful life." He ate ice cream and watched James Bond movies and 24 episodes. The article makes brief mention of Kennedy's growing reliance on his faith in his later years. He was described as "someone who had a fierce determination to live, but who was not afraid to die."

All this reflection on death makes me wonder if I'm ready to die, or if I really live my life like I could die anytime. I don't mean that I'm afraid to die, but I feel like I should be thinking more strategically, more intentionally, about everything I want to do before I die and focus on that. Do I spend too much time on stuff that doesn't really matter and that I should just quit doing? What should I be doing that has eternal value?

I'm reminded that Henri Nouwen wrote somewhere that death brings us into solidarity with all humanity. All of us are part of the same human community that journeys this earthly life together. All of us are mortal, and our time here is brief. I was reading Facebook comments about our classmate, and one of the things that struck me is that even though many of us didn't know her well in high school, all of us feel a sense of loss. It doesn't matter if we perceived each other back then as jocks or nerds or partiers or outcasts - nineteen years later, we're just people, all aware of our own mortality. John Dunne wrote, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind." So we grieve our classmate, and we are reminded of our connections with each other. And we pray for one another for comfort and hope.

Thinking about death

2009-08-17T06:48:00.001-05:00

There have been quite a number of prominent deaths this summer, and not just Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. TV host Ed McMahon. Veteran news anchor Walter Cronkite. Vietnam War-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Former Philippines president Corazon Aquino. ’80s filmmaker John Hughes. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics. Memoirist Frank McCourt. And in the Christian publishing world, Robert Short, author of The Gospel According to Peanuts, and Marie Little, wife of IVP author Paul Little. All of these passed in just the last few months.

I just looked up some of these and discovered that Wikipedia has running entries like “Deaths in 2009” or month-by-month listings like “Deaths in July 2009." Reading these entries is sobering, as you see the lives of the famous and the not-so-famous summarized in a single sentence, often with the cause of death - colon cancer, heart attack, car accident, hanging, brain aneurysm. Regardless of the individual's notoriety, fame, wealth or power, death comes to us all.

I'm certainly familiar with death; I've already lost my father, a cousin, an aunt, an uncle and all four of my grandparents. But it feels like there have been several recent reminders of death close to home; my wife's aunt died of cancer earlier this summer, and a publishing industry friend lost his wife. It's scary when people of our own age or generation start to die. It's my twenty-year high school reunion next year, and I'm nervous about finding out if any of my classmates are gone.

So how do we live in light of the presence of death? As I get a little farther along in my mid-to-late 30s, I find myself a little more aware of my own health. I get worried that aches and pains could be more serious. A friend from church found a benign tumor a few months ago. What if that shoulder or back pain isn't just a muscle or joint thing, but cancer?

I've been thinking about all this partly because I'm the editor for a forthcoming book by Rob Moll on The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come (releasing spring 2010). I was reviewing an early draft of the manuscript as my wife's aunt was in the final stages of cancer. And what struck me most about Rob's book is that throughout most of church history, Christians have practiced the spiritual discipline of dying well, of anticipating one's own death. It had been an intentional practice of numbering one's days, of reckoning with one's own mortality.

These days people often say that they hope to die quickly, in a sudden accident or something. But Christians throughout history usually preferred to have time to prepare and anticipate one's death, to make peace with God and others. One's approaching death was a time of saying the important things, like sorry, thank you, forgive me, I love you. The reality of death often jolts us into living more meaningfully.

I remember after events like Columbine and 9/11, one significant result and response was that people hugged their kids and had significant conversations with their loved ones. It seems to me that every new celebrity death in the news could be a trigger to remind us to do the same.

How John Hughes's movies shaped Generation X

2009-08-13T06:23:00.003-05:00

[I wrote an article on the impact of John Hughes's movies that was posted online yesterday at ChristianityTodayMovies.com. My working title was "Don't You. Forget About Us." Here's part of the article.]

Shaping a Generation
Looking for love, friendship, and community: How the movies of John Hughes shaped Gen X's ecclesiology.
Al Hsu

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

In the 1980s, when the generation yet-to-be-tagged-as-X were still known as "baby busters," a series of John Hughes movies depicted what it meant to be a teenager in America. Sixteen Candles. The Breakfast Club. Pretty in Pink. Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Some Kind of Wonderful. Long before Napoleon Dynamite, Juno or High School Musical, Hughes's films captured the particulars of teen angst and relationships.

Hughes died last week of a heart attack at the age of 59. His funeral was held yesterday in the Chicago suburbs where so many of his movies were filmed. Ben Stein, a longtime friend and one of the Ferris Bueller stars, said Hughes "was the Wordsworth of the suburban America post-war generation."

Hughes's movies are more than a time capsule of '80s music, fashion and hair. They were formational for the worldview of many Gen Xers and shaped how we view friendship and community. By extension, they offer a glimpse into what Christian Gen Xers yearn for in the church.

Another movie of the late '80s, Dead Poets Society, exhorted viewers to carpe diem, seize the day. But what would we actually do if we were to seize that day? Ferris Bueller's answer was to take the day off with his best friend and girlfriend and hit the city. The average suburban teen moviegoer could relate more to catching a Cubs game than reciting candlelit poetry and that barbaric yawp stuff.

But the overarching theme of Ferris Bueller's Day Off is not merely "follow your heart" or "skip school." It's friendship. While Ferris is the focus of the movie, viewers do not generally identify with him. He's too singular, too unconventional. His best friend, Cameron, is the Everyman character. We all know what it's like to want to stay in bed and hide from the world. And every Cameron out there needs a friend like Ferris—someone who does unimaginable things to challenge us in ways we would never expect.

Similarly, the female protagonist is not really Ferris's girlfriend, Sloane, who is little more than eye candy. The most important female character is Ferris's sister, Jeanie, struggling with sibling rivalry and family dynamics while searching for her own identity. She too is on a journey from alienation to significance, and she finds some degree of connection to others even as she becomes more comfortable with who she is.

Yearning for community

Likewise, The Breakfast Club is about an alienated generation's yearning for friendship and community. The movie featured one of the first true ensemble casts, presaging TV shows like Friends or Lost where no one character is the lead. All of the Breakfast Club members are equally necessary for the dynamic of the movie to work. It was not just a Molly Ringwald vehicle with a supporting cast. And all of us watching longed for a community of peers where we could have equal billing and our share of the stage, not just be a sidekick to someone else's lead.

The Breakfast Club identified teen archetypes but then transcended them. On one level, the takeaway message is the familiar refrain that "we're more alike than different," looking beyond the stereotypes to show that these five seemingly diverse teenagers have more in common than not. But on another level, the movie worked to hold individuality and community in dialectical tension. Each of the five protagonists remained their own distinctive character, even as they grappled with their particular problems in the context of a larger community.

A. O. Scott of the New York Times, in his appreciative remembrance of Hughes's movies, noted that "the great, paradoxical insight of The Breakfast Club is that alienation is the norm, that nerds, jocks, stoners, popular girls and weirdos are all, in their own ways, outsiders." As a high schooler, it was a shock to my system to realize that the popular kids had their own insecurities just like the freaks and geeks did.

A movie like The Breakfast Club is intended to be viewed with friends and then discussed afterward in community, as my high school friends did on many occasions in those late '80s. We asked ourselves, "So which one do you identify with?" And we'd surprise ourselves when we found that the athlete related more with the stoner or nerd than the archetypal jock.

My sophomore year of high school, I wrote some short stories with my classmates as characters. At first they were indiscriminate, with my entire honors English class as the cast. But they gradually centered on a smaller group of friends in an attempt to define a brat pack of our own. I wanted to bring together disparate individuals from different spheres and create a Breakfast Club-like community. But I learned that community could not be artificially orchestrated, and I was often surprised with friends I would not have expected or chosen.

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

Refrigerator rights

2009-07-31T07:14:00.001-05:00

I recently got a call from one of my best friends from high school, who happened to be back at his parents’ house and was remembering times we had spent together hanging out there. We caught up and talked about mutual friends and whatnot, and we recalled all the significant late night conversations that took place around their kitchen table. I mentioned to him that awhile ago I had come across the book Refrigerator Rights, which talks about how real community, friendship and hospitality can be measured by the degree that friends have "refrigerator rights," the comfort level and freedom to just open up the fridge and feel welcome to use things there without asking.

My friend's parents really modeled this for us. They would insist that any of us high schoolers should feel free to get pop or juice from the fridge and snack on whatever was around. This seemed odd at first, but soon became normal for us. And much of our friendship and community was facilitated by the food and hospitality symbolized by open access to that refrigerator.

It seems to me that one easy way to offer refrigerator rights is that the next time you have people over, in addition to asking, "Can I get you anything?" you could also say, "Feel free to get whatever you need from the fridge." And don't get freaked out if people take you up on it!

Success is a lousy teacher

2009-07-27T07:36:00.002-05:00

"Once we reach the age of thirty, success has nothing to teach us. Success is fun and rewarding, but we don't learn anything new from it. It's not a bad friend; it's just a lousy teacher. The only thing that can teach us, that can get through to us and profoundly change us, is suffering, failure, loss and wounds." - Richard Rohr, cited in The Folly of Prayer by Matt Woodley, p. 132

Redefining attitude

2009-07-21T15:44:00.002-05:00

I'm an occasional contributor to the Christian business/marketplace ministry site TheHighCalling.org, but I often forget to highlight my articles because of the time lag between writing and publication. So here's part of an article I wrote on "Redefining Attitude" that was posted a few months ago:

In the business world, "attitude" is a bit of a buzzword. One's mental attitude, whether positive or negative, healthy or unhealthy, is said to be a key factor in the success of our work projects and professional relationships. You've seen the motivational posters:

• "A positive attitude causes a chain reaction of positive thoughts, events, and outcomes."
• "A positive attitude is a powerful force."
• "Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference."

While all this seems to be helpful, it is not distinctively Christian. In fact, the emphasis on an internal positive attitude can devolve into mere selfism, since it doesn't require dependence on God or others.

On the other hand, at my high school church camp, someone would occasionally yell, "Attitude check!" and all of us would respond, "Praise the Lord!" In the Christian world, it's often assumed that the proper Christian attitude is one of always being happy or joyful in the Lord—sometimes in seeming denial of challenging realities. That view also seems somewhat insufficient. Attitude has to be more than just happy feelings.

Is attitude primarily an issue of one's temperament, personality, emotion, or cognitive thinking? Is it just a mood? Can we cheer up and have a better attitude—or is it something more than that?

. . . Our attitude should be like Christ's, not merely in being mentally humble, but in taking the nature of a servant and being obedient to death (Phil. 2:7-8). It's significant that both the Philippians 2 usage of phroneo and the 1 Peter 4 use of ennoia connect a Christian's attitude with Christ's suffering.

If anything, Scripture's discussion of attitude is less about projecting a positive outlook on life and much more concerned with having a willingness to suffer as Christ suffered. For the Christian, attitude is directly connected with action, especially in taking on service-oriented, sacrificial acts.

As Max De Pree said in Leadership Is an Art, leadership means bearing the pain of the organization. That's a more biblical sense of what it means to have a Christlike attitude. Having a good attitude doesn't mean that we are chipper and happy in the face of adversity. A Christlike attitude means that because Jesus suffered, we too are willing to suffer. We do not avoid pain and difficulty; rather, we resolve to face it and bear it on behalf of others, because we know that it will serve the common good.

Partnering with civic organizations

2009-07-15T13:41:00.002-05:00

Two alumni of my undergrad alma mater recently wrote an article, "It’s Simple: Why We Partner with Civic Organizations to Serve the Community." It's a great example of how churches can partner with the public or nonprofit sector to seek the welfare of the city and to be good neighbors to their community. Here's part of the article:

Attend a community council meeting and you quickly discover what’s important to the people in your county. What some people call “bellyaching” sometimes tells you the most:

“We don’t have enough programs for our kids.”
“The shopping center is run-down and poorly lit. It attracts gang activity.”
“The homeless are tracking through our property to get to the liquor store.”

To address concerns like these, our community council naturally looks to its members, local law enforcement, and a host of civic organizations. While these groups may not be explicitly Christian, they are already engaged in many of the issues that should concern the church.

So, when discussing whether the church should partner with the government to serve its community, our first impulse has been to ask, “Why not?” If civic agencies organize themselves to invest in our kids, shelter the homeless, or care for any of those who have been marginalized, why wouldn’t the church, in the name of Christ, show up to work with them? If government bodies are fed up with the filth or the gangs or the drug abuse, then why wouldn’t we join them, in hopes of realizing true transformation?

Many of these agencies, after all, have already done much of the background work to identify needs and establish relationships; the church can extend its reach rather quickly by serving alongside them. And by doing so, we might help the community renew its confidence in the church as an agent of change. We can demonstrate that we’re not just a bunch of “bellyachers” ourselves, but that we care for our community and want to be part of transforming it.

Working with and through government agencies is also a healthy expression of the church as “the people of God everywhere and all the time,” rather than as an organization that just runs its own Christian programs. Simply put, “being the church” in the community does not require that we invent our own stuff.

Consider this: If the government operates an after-school program at the local recreation center, but most of those staffing the program are from the church, isn’t that the church being the church? Preaching the gospel may not be the program’s objective, but attracting 100 kids for a few hours every day certainly creates space for the gospel. It’s a venue where we can show up with the hands and feet and heart of Christ.

The "more likely to be killed by a terrorist than marry after 40" myth

2009-07-06T06:28:00.003-05:00

Audio and video for weeks 2 and 3 of my Willow Creek class are now available online. Week 2 was on "Seven Myths About Singleness and Marriage," and week 3 was on "The Power of Community, Inside and Out." Here's part of week 2, one of the myths about singleness and marriage:
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Have you seen Sleepless in Seattle? Remember the line: “It’s easier to get killed by a terrorist than to get married after 40”? Where does that come from? Well, it comes from a 1986 Newsweek cover story. In 1986, Newsweek reported on an unpublished study and said that by age forty, a single, educated career woman is more likely to be “killed by a terrorist” than to ever get married. Supposedly they had a 2.6% chance of getting married. The study argued that “white, college-educated women born in the mid-1950s who are still single at 30 have only a 20 percent chance of marrying. By the age of 35 the odds drop to 5 percent.” This study was widely quoted. The only problem was that it was totally wrong.

A Census Bureau report from about the same time found that single women at 30 had a 66% likelihood of getting married, not 20%, and at 40 had a 23% probability of marriage, not 2.6%.

The killed by a terrorist line wasn’t based on any research on terrorism. It was an exaggeration on Newsweek’s part, not a statistical finding of the study. It was written as a funny aside in an internal reporting memo by Newsweek’s San Francisco correspondent Pamela Abramson. She said years later, "It's true--I am responsible for the single most irresponsible line in the history of journalism, all meant in jest." In New York, writer Eloise Salholz inserted the line into the story. "It was never intended to be taken literally," says Salholz. But most readers missed the joke.

Newsweek finally retracted this “killed by a terrorist” claim twenty years later, in May 2006. Twenty years after the original article, they reported: "Those odds-she'll-marry statistics turned out to be too pessimistic: today it appears that about 90 percent of baby-boomer men and women either have married or will marry, a ratio that's well in line with historical averages."

The new article now says that the odds of getting married after 40 are more than 40%. And contrary to earlier projections that college educated women are less likely to marry, it’s now much more likely for women with college degrees to marry than not. A 2004 study says that of female college graduates born between 1960 and 1964, 97.4% will marry.

The original 1986 article looked at 14 women who were single and supposedly more likely to be killed by a terrorist. Twenty years later, Newsweek managed to track down 11 of the 14. Eight are married and three remain single. In other words, 72% of those eleven got married. One got married at age 40 and remains blissfully married at age 50. Several have children or stepchildren. None divorced. And none have been killed by a terrorist.

Singles at the Crossroads class at Willow Creek

2009-06-25T07:17:00.003-05:00

I'm in the midst of teaching a 3-week class about singleness at Willow Creek, based on my book Singles at the Crossroads. Video for the first week is available here, and you can download an mp3 of the talk here. I never like watching myself on video after the fact. I know you're supposed to review yourself so you can learn from it and improve your presentation skills, but I always feel like I look and sound goofy. One of the things I like most about book publishing is that it's a way of sharing and teaching without having my physical traits get in the way. (I caught a cold over the weekend, so last night my voice felt all scratchy and strained. Managed to get through most of it without too much coughing or hacking.)

Anyway, things have been going pretty well so far. First week I gave a basic biblical/theological/historical overview of how Christians have thought about singleness and marriage over the years, and last night I ran through seven myths about singleness and marriage. Whenever I present on this topic, it seems that the part that folks respond to as most helpful is my take on the "gift of singleness." Here's an excerpt:

In 1 Corinthians 7:7 Paul says, “I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another of a different kind.” This is the verse that some say is about the "gift of singleness." Sometimes people refer to the gift of celibacy or the gift of chastity. They usually mean something like if you have the gift of celibacy, you don’t want to be married or are specially empowered to resist sexual temptation or whatnot. Some Christians look at this verse and think people with the gift of singleness don’t desire marriage, and that if you desire marriage, that means that you don’t have the gift of singleness and ought to get married.

I think that confuses things and implies things that aren’t really there. The passage doesn’t say anything about people not having the desire for marriage. There’s no “gift of singleness” that magically makes people happy singles.

So what is the gift of singleness, if there is such a thing? How do I know if I have the gift of singleness? What if I don’t want the gift of singleness? My answer is pretty simple. Here’s my take. If you are single, you have the gift of singleness. If you are married, you don’t; you have the gift of marriage. Simple as that. Paul just says that some have one gift, some have another. Paul’s just saying some are single, and some are married. Paul isn’t making a distinction between singles who have some supernatural gift of singleness and singles who don’t. He’s saying that some are single, and that’s a gift, and some are married, and that’s also a gift.

The confusion comes because people think that the gifts in 1 Corinthians 7 are the same as the spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12. In chapter 12, Paul says that folks have different spiritual gifts – teaching, healing, leading, etc. The Holy Spirit empowers people to exercise their gift in ministry. That’s why they’re spiritual gifts.

But that’s not the case in 1 Corinthians 7. Nowhere does Paul say that marriage or singleness are “spiritual” gifts – only that they are gifts. In other words, he’s describing an objective status. These gifts are descriptive gifts. If you’re single, you have the gift of singleness. If you’re married, you have the gift of marriage. Neither one is a promise that the Holy Spirit will spiritually empower you to have a healthy marriage or a happy singleness. They’re not spiritual gifts. They’re not in 1 Corinthians 12. Paul doesn’t say that someone with the gift of singleness will not desire marriage or will be free from sexual temptation, any more than he says that those with the gift of marriage will be always happy with their marriage or not be tempted to stray. He just says that both are gifts and are to be valued and honored as such.

And if you don’t want the gift of singleness? Paul would say, you can get married. It’s not a restrictive gift, just a descriptive gift. If you have opportunity with someone who is willing to marry you, you can get married. When two people get married, they exchange the gift of singleness for the gift of marriage. When you exchange a gift at the store, you can’t exchange it for something of greater value. You can only exchange it for something of equal value. So singleness and marriage are equal gifts of equal value. Sure, both have their own opportunities and disadvantages. Both have their own sets of problems and challenges. But neither one is more spiritual or more valuable than the other. Both are ways to serve God. The challenge is to make a success of the single life if you are single, and to make a success of the married life if you are married.

Lessons from a 48-hour power outage

2009-06-22T10:43:00.002-05:00

Some severe thunderstorms came through the Chicagoland area last Friday evening, knocking out power for our neighborhood for the next 48 hours. Service wasn't restored until Sunday evening. A few observations on our experience:

- Neighbors are helpful. We brought some of our frozen foods and perishables over to a neighbor's house. They were just a few blocks away, but they had power. So we were grateful for their freezer/fridge's hospitality.

- Neighbors can be annoying. Some neighbors ran generators to create their own power supply. Which was fine, except that they were quite loud and ran late into the night. I don't know if our particular city has noise ordinances, but the experience made me wonder what it means to be good neighbors at such times, how we balance neighborliness and inconvenience.

- So much of our leisure/entertainment depends on electronics. No TV, no DVDs, no videogames. Josiah was charging his new Nintendo DS when the power went out, and he wanted to make sure that it was fully charged before playing it, so he very patiently waited all weekend until we got power back to charge and play it. Elijah kept trying to put videos in the VCR and eventually realized that it just wasn't going to work. So the power outage became a good unplanned fast from electronics. We spent much of our time reading, playing piano, and inventing a blow-up-the-Death-Star board game using checkers and wristbands. And we went to the local bowling alley for Father's Day, which was fun.

- Most non-cooking food choices cost more money. I got annoyed that we had to eat out more than we had planned. It's almost always cheaper to make meals than to buy meals, so it was frustrating to have our options limited to being consumers instead of meal-makers. (Though we did make do with what we could.) On Saturday afternoon we pulled our melting ice cream out of the freezer and told Josiah, "Okay, eat as much as you want."

- Teachable moments. Josiah couldn't sleep because of the neighbor's loud generator and said, "I'm so annoyed when there's no power!" So we told him that actually, many, many people in the world don't have access to power or electricity. We explained that we actually have to pay for power; he hadn't realized that. He said, "I think we should get solar panels for our house."

- It's good to clean out the fridge every few years. After we got power back, we went through the fridge and got rid of all sorts of stuff, including salad dressings and condiments that were probably several years past their expiration dates. Funny how we never think to purge stuff until we need to.

Acts 8 on reading and understanding

2009-06-15T06:58:00.000-05:00

The board of trustees for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship recently was in town and visited our offices at InterVarsity Press. During their meetings I gave an opening devotion out of Acts 8:26-40, the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. Here's an excerpt of my remarks:
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Let me zero in on just a few key verses. Verse 30, Philip asks, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And the eunuch replies, “How can I, unless someone guides me?”

This passage highlights reading and understanding. Reading plays a key role in people’s faith journeys. This has been true for centuries. Christians are people of the book. We have a heritage of reading, of being discipled by the written Word of God and Christian literature. But reading by itself is not enough. Do you understand what you are reading? How can I, unless someone guides me? Let me put it this way: Reading plus guiding equals understanding. We need to read, and we need to understand.

Reading by itself is not enough. Content is not enough. But relationship with no content is not enough either. Reading biblical content, in the context of Christian guidance and relationship, produces understanding and spiritual insight.

Obviously Philip is the main guide that helps the eunuch understand the text. But that’s not all. There are more characters in this story. First the angel of the Lord tells Philip where to go. Then the Spirit tells him what to do. Philip the guide is also himself guided.

The prophet Isaiah is also a guide. He is a written guide, giving testimony to who Jesus is, a sheep led to slaughter. Isaiah uses the power of the written word to point the eunuch to Jesus. Isaiah and Philip are partners in witness. They work together to bring the eunuch to Christ. And there’s another hidden guide here. Luke, author of the book of Acts. Luke writes and records this passage, and it’s a gift to guide us in our study and edification.

This says something about the nature of the written word. Writings are an extension of the writer. Through the written word, writers travel through time and space to be present with us. Isaiah still speaks to us today. So does Luke. And Augustine, or Bonhoeffer, or C. S. Lewis. I have a personal copy here of the very first IVP book, Discovering the Gospel of Mark by Jane Hollingsworth. Written six decades ago. This printing is from 1950. Through this book, Jane still speaks to us. She guides us through the gospel of Mark, just as Philip guided the eunuch through the prophet Isaiah.

Books are our guides when people are not physically present. In the early days of InterVarsity, staffworkers covered several states. They might visit a school every few months, once or twice a semester. Veteran staff Marilyn Stewart saw her staffworker just twice a year, so they made the most of their visits. And often those early IV staffers would disciple their student leaders through books. They’d leave behind an IVP book and say read these chapters, and we’ll discuss them the next time I’m in town. Books discipled our student leaders when our staff could not be present.

And IVP books extend the ministries of our IV staff authors. James Choung, Doug Schaupp, Nikki Toyama, Jimmy Long, Paul Tokunaga – great people, but they can’t be on two hundred campuses at the same time. But their books can go places that they can’t. And I’m thrilled that thousands upon thousands of students can benefit from their books.

Firms of Endearment: What makes you emotionally loyal to a company or organization?

2009-06-04T10:27:00.002-05:00

I recently came across the concept of "firms of endearment," which comes from the book Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose. Firms of endearment are companies that endear themselves to stakeholders (employees, customers, vendors, shareholders, etc.) "These companies meet the tangible and intangible needs of their stakeholders in ways that delight them and engender affection for and loyalty to the company."

The book reports that not only are these companies more beloved by customers, they are also significantly more profitable than comparable companies on the S&P 500 and even the benchmark companies chronicled in Good to Great by Jim Collins. In case you're curious, here's the list of the top FoEs:

Amazon
Best Buy
BMW
CarMax
Caterpillar
Commerce Bank
Container Store
Costco
eBay
Google
Harley-Davidson
Honda
IDEO
IKEA
JetBlue
Johnson & Johnson
Jordan's Furniture
L.L. Bean
New Balance
Patagonia
Progressive Insurance
REI
Southwest
Starbucks
Timberland
Toyota
Trader Joe's
UPS
Wegmans
Whole Foods

(There are other companies that are FoEs, like Target, that didn't make this top list.) The authors argue that people feel customer loyalty and attraction ("endearment") to these companies in ways that they do not to other companies. This rings true to me; I love Honda and Target but ignore Buick and recoil at Wal-Mart. I've always bought Reeboks and never Nikes. An excerpt from the book:

Of course, millions of customers do shop routinely at many other companies with which they feel no emotional attachment. Customers can be loyal in behavior to a company without being loyal in attitude. Attitudinal loyalty comes from emotional attachment, a force that causes a customer to drive past a Sam’s Club near her home to shop at a distant Costco instead, for example.

The logical “left brain” says you should shop at Wal-Mart so that your shopping trip ends up saving a few bucks. However, the emotional right brain may not welcome the experience. Integrating the two sides is one of the secrets to Target’s success. “Tar-zhay’s” customers get low prices, as well as a pleasant experience and more stylish products than they would find at Wal-Mart. Now consider the impact of these experiential differences from an investor’s perspective: Wal-Mart’s stock has been stagnant for the past five years while Target’s has risen nearly 150 percent.

Seems like this concept holds true not only for businesses but also for nonprofits, churches and parachurch organizations. What makes you love some organizations and not others? Why do I love listening to NPR and feel emotionally attached to them in a way that is not true of other media? What endears you to a particular ministry, church or community? And is there anything we can do to endear our own organizations to others? I'm curious what companies or organizations you find yourself fiercely loyal to, and why.

Summer in suburbia

2009-05-29T11:17:00.004-05:00

I haven't been able to blog lately because of school, work, life, etc., but here are some tips from a subtext article by Steve McCoy about how to live missionally in the suburbs this summer:
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So summer is an ideal time to connect with new folks in your suburb as we enjoy the weather and the culture around us. Here are a few suggestions for your summer from the things my family is doing. I hope you will add your suggestions, stories of stuff you’ve done, and share your plans in the comment section.

Be a Participant

Get involved in the life of your suburb. Find a community calendar on your city’s website and put some stuff on the family calendar. We recently attended a very popular fair in downtown Woodstock. My son and I were in the Little League section of the Memorial Day parade and my daughter was in the middle school band. Molly and the other two kids were enjoying the parade with some local friends from school. Through events like these we’ve met new folks, made new friends, and supported the life of our suburb.

Be a Servant

I’m the dad to four great kids, ages 6-12. I made a commitment to try to be a servant when possible as they get involved in public activities. This works best for me with sports. I’ve coached just about every team they played on. Just last night I sat in on the Bittie Ball (“coach pitch” level) coaches meeting. Daniel (6) is on the Devil Rays this year (Satan’s team). So while I’m already an assistant coach for Little League and soccer, I’m now also the head coach for Bittie Ball. It’s going to be a busy summer, but I get to serve a bunch of great kids and their families by being a coach. It forces me to learn their names and get to know them, and they want to know me too.

If you are going to serve as a coach or help out at the local school (as Molly does) or help with a summer play or whatever else, you need to do it with excellence. It’s frustrating to have someone in your family in a public activity only to find out the people in charge are incompetent. If you serve, do it well. Truly love your neighbor and consider them as more important than yourself. It not only makes folks love the experience, but it endears them to you.

Serving through various cultural activities also provides us the opportunity to serve our neighbors beyond these events. We often see former team members and/or their parents out in public or at their schools. I will always be “coach” to these kids. One thing we work hard at is trying to have at least one cookout a year for players and their parents. And that leads to another suggestion for your summer in suburbia…

Be Hospitable

For Memorial Day (last weekend) we had a cookout. It was mostly community friends we’ve connected to through local school involvement, but we also invited a church friend or two and a visiting couple from the previous week’s worship service. We had about 40 people there, some I knew well and others I met for the first time. It was a blast. Here are a few things you should do to make your cookout a hit.

- Introduce people. If you are bringing folks together who don’t already know each other, and you should, make sure you introduce them so they all feel comfortable.

- Have plenty of good food. We had too much food because we wanted to be generous. Nothing like a cookout where you feel underfed. And make it good food, please. I don’t want to come to your house if you are going to buy the hot dogs with the highest amount of rat hairs and bone chips. Not all hot dogs and hamburgers are created equal. Get quality stuff. And spice it up. We got burgers at Sam’s and then added a layer of Famous Dave’s burger seasoning. People raved about the burgers, though most of them didn’t know why. You want your neighbors happy.

- Let people bring something if they want to. Sometimes people feel obligated. Sometimes they really enjoy bringing something. Don’t presume on people and don’t ask them to bring something. But if they want to bring something it can be a good thing. It makes them feel like they’re a good neighbor too. For our Memorial Day most everyone insisted. Some brought a dish, or chips and soda. One family brought a ton of Edy’s ice cream they got for free in a contest. It added a super-charge to the cookout that none of us could probably afford otherwise.

- Have plenty to do. We had more games we didn’t use than we used. You are providing opportunities, not a schedule. We had kids playing baseball in the church field, jarts, football, a fire pit as it cooled off in the evening, lots of lawn chairs, sparklers for kids after dark. And think of the little things, too. We fogged the yard before people came to kill most of the mosquitoes and then we had several cans of Off available. We had sunscreen. We had music. We tried to cover all the bases, though we learned a few bases we didn’t cover as well as we will next time.

The New Shape of World Christianity

2009-05-12T07:10:00.005-05:00

Now reading Mark Noll's new book The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith. Here's his snapshot of how the global church is changing:

• This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called “Christian Europe.” Yet in 1970 there were no legally functioning churches in all of China; only in 1971 did the communist regime allow for one Protestant and one Roman Catholic Church to hold public worship services, and this was mostly a concession to visiting Europeans and African students from Tanzania and Zambia.

• This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined—and the number of Anglicans in church in Nigeria was several times the number in those other African countries.

• This past Sunday more Presbyterians were at church in Ghana than in Scotland, and more were in congregations of the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa than in the United States.

• This past Sunday there were more members of Brazil’s Pentecostal Assemblies of God at church than the combined total in the two largest U.S. Pentecostal denominations, the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ in the United States.

• This past Sunday more people attended the Yoido Full Gospel Church pastored by Yonggi Cho in Seoul, Korea, than attended all the churches in significant American denominations like the Christian Reformed Church, the Evangelical Covenant Church or the Presbyterian Church in America. Six to eight times as many people attended this one church as the total that worshiped in Canada’s ten largest churches combined.

• This past Sunday Roman Catholics in the United States worshiped in more languages than at any previous time in American history.

• This past Sunday the churches with the largest attendance in England and France had mostly black congregations. About half of the churchgoers in London were African or African-Caribbean. Today, the largest Christian congregation in Europe is in Kiev, and it is pastored by a Nigerian of Pentecostal background.

• This past Sunday there were more Roman Catholics at worship in the Philippines than in any single country of Europe, including historically Catholic Italy, Spain or Poland.

• This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. Most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia.

• And for several years the world’s largest chapter of the Jesuit order has been found in India, not in the United States, as it had been for much of the late twentieth century. (pp. 20-21)

National Day of Prayer - and Action

2009-05-06T06:32:00.003-05:00

For the National Day of Prayer, here's an op-ed piece by the authors of Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers:

Let Us Pray… And Act

By Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Millions of Americans will gather today in hotel ballrooms and on town squares, in church buildings and on campus lawns for National Day of Prayer. Millions of other Americans will, no doubt, look on this public religious act with some suspicion. Is National Day of Prayer a hang-over from the days of the Religious Right? Are those who gather protesting President Obama’s assertion that we are not a “Christian nation,” but a democracy that welcomes and protects the practice of diverse faith traditions?

As evangelical Christians, we admit that our fellow Americans have good reason to be suspicious. Though evangelicals have often argued fervently for the separation of church and state, we have also blurred the dividing line when access to political power served our agenda (and our pocketbooks). Even when our churches have tried to serve as the “conscience of the state” that Dr. Martin Luther King challenged us to be, our concern has been too narrowly focused on issues of private morality, overlooking the problems of systemic injustice that King himself so boldly challenged. If we are going to pray in public, evangelical Christians must begin with a prayer of confession. We have shouted the gospel with our mouths more than we have showed the world good news with our lives.

But our confession cannot be that we have over-stepped the boundary between private faith and the public square. The problem is not that Christians have been too public with our prayer. What we must confess is that we have done too little to become the answer to the prayers we pray. So often when faced with the problems of our world we have asked, “God why don’t you do something?” without realizing that God might be saying, “I did do something… I made you.”

When prayed by followers of Jesus, “God bless America” cannot be a divine endorsement of a political agenda or an excuse for inaction (as if we were asking God to bless others so we don’t have to). When we pray for God to bless anyone, we are challenged to see that we might be the hands of that blessing, for God has no hands but ours. When we pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,” we commit our whole lives to caring for the least among us—the unborn and the undocumented. If Christians are praying with Jesus, we cannot stop praying and acting until we see the restoration of all that is broken in our lives, and in our streets… broken political systems and broken families, polluted ecosystems and shattered lives.

So, rather than argue that National Day of Prayer is something that should go away with Jerry Falwell and the Christian Coalition, we say keep it. Let’s call Christians (and everyone else) to prayer. But let us also challenge ourselves to become the answer to our prayers. When we pray for the hungry, let’s remember to feed them. When we pray for the unborn, let’s welcome single mothers and adopt abandoned children. When we give thanks for creation, let’s plant a garden and buy local. When we remember the poor, let’s re-invest our money in micro-lending programs. When we pray for peace, let’s beat our swords into plowshares and turn military budgets into programs of social uplift. When we pray for an end to crime, let’s visit those in prison. When we pray for lost souls, let’s be gracious to the souls who’ve done us wrong.

None of us can do everything, but everyone can do something. To begin to act on our prayers with any seriousness is to remember why we pray in the first place—because anything worth doing is beyond our power to do alone. We cry out to God because we know we need help. But the God chooses to work in and through us. We have a God that does not want to change the world without us. So let us pray… and let us act.

Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove are the authors of Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers: Prayer for Ordinary Radicals (InterVarsity Press).

For a list of "50 Ways to Become the Answer to Our Prayers" visit:
www.jonathanwilsonhartgrove.com

Crossroads College commencement

2009-05-03T17:25:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I was the commencement speaker for Crossroads College in Rochester, Minnesota. I graduated from here fifteen years ago when it was still called Minnesota Bible College. Kind of crazy to be back. Ellen and I spent a lot of the weekend visiting places we used to hang out and showing our kids where we went on dates and whatnot.

When I was invited to speak a few months ago, I wasn't sure what to say, given the state of the economy and all. But here's a snippet of what I came up with:

Graduates of the class of 2009, I congratulate you on this landmark day. The papers have been turned in, the finals are over. And here you are in cap and gown. This is a tremendous accomplishment, and I and the whole Crossroads community congratulate you today.

But let’s be honest – these are scary times. Recession, job losses, swine flu. I’m reminded of the 1994 movie Reality Bites, which came out the year I graduated from here. In that movie, Winona Ryder gives a college valedictorian address and says, “But the question remains… what are we going to do now? How can we repair all the damage we inherited? Fellow graduates, the answer is simple. The answer is... The answer is... I don't know.”

It’s a jarring scene, but I like it because there are no easy answers. There are a lot of things we simply don’t know. But as Christians, we have hope and confidence that our all-knowing God leads us even when the future is unknown.

So let me give you one main image to take with you. As you go on from here, do things not because you are driven, but because you are called. This comes from the author Gordon McDonald, though it’s probably not original with him. Don’t do things because you are driven, but because you are called. I love the contrast in imagery. One is the picture of a cattle drive where someone drives the cattle to go one way or another, perhaps against their will. The other is a picture of a gentle shepherd, calling his sheep to follow him, for he knows them by name, and they know the sound of his voice. That’s the kind of life that God calls us to. Don’t be driven to succeed, to achieve. Don’t be driven by outside expectations or pressures or fears. Be called. Follow the voice of our Savior Shepherd.

All of you are here today because God has been calling you from the start. At some point in your life, you heard God’s call to follow Jesus. It may have been at church, in Sunday school as a young child. Or it might have been later on in life, at a point of crisis, a moment when you realized that your life had to change. And you heard that first call, “Come, follow me.” So you turned to Jesus. And your life has never been the same.

Later on, somehow or another, you heard a second call, God’s call to come to this college. It may not have made sense, it may have been an unlikely choice for you. For many of you, coming here was a costly act of sacrifice, and you gave something up to come here. But you sensed God’s nudge, and you answered the call. You came.

And many of you have overcome great personal challenges and obstacles to get here today. Financial challenges. Personal doubts. Academic struggles. Maybe family opposition. Let today be a day of vindication, that whatever you may have faced in the past, you are here now, and you are a graduate of the class of 2009. Remember this when you face discouragements in the future, because nothing can take this day and this accomplishment away from you.

But that’s not all. Somewhere along the line, I hope, you’ve also heard a third call, a more specific call, to ministry, to mission, to participate in God’s global and eternal purposes for this world. You might have been at a camp or on a short-term mission trip. Or you may have heard the still small voice in a classroom here, or in a late night talk with friends, looking at the pond or standing up on the hill. For me it was all of the above, at a fireside at Pine Haven Christian Assembly, and during a God’s Hands trip in Minneapolis, and in classes at this college. I heard about how God was on the move, and that he was at work to redeem and restore this fallen world. And he was calling me to participate somehow. I didn’t know exactly what I would do. But God had called, and I would answer.

Today, graduates of the class of 2009, you continue to answer the call. And you are graduating for such a time as this. A time of foreclosures, bankruptcies and global recession? Yes. Because every scary headline in the news represents people who are struggling, in desperate need of hope. And God needs people like you to make a difference in their lives. More now than ever.

More religiously unaffiliated, but many are open to religion

2009-04-27T14:09:00.004-05:00

On the one hand, the New York Times reports that "More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops" and that "that those who claimed “no religion” were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years. Nationally, the “nones” in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990. In South Carolina, they more than tripled, to 10 percent from 3 percent." Some of the new atheists are a kindler, gentler form:

In keeping with the new generation of atheist evangelists, the Pastafarian leaders say that their goal is not confrontation, or even winning converts, but changing the public’s stereotype of atheists. A favorite Pastafarian activity is to gather at a busy crossroads on campus with a sign offering “Free Hugs” from “Your Friendly Neighborhood Atheist.”

On the other hand, U. S. News & World Report notes that the religiously unaffiliated are actually rather open to religion:

The Pew report also provides a striking new portrait of those religiously unaffiliated Americans, the fastest-growing segment of the American religious landscape. The report finds that religiously unaffiliated, widely considered to represent a dramatic spike in avowed secularists, are actually quite open to religion and that only a minority feel that science disproves religion.

Just like Protestants who left their denominations, religiously unaffiliated Americans are more likely to have grown disenchanted with their particular congregations or clergy than with religion per se. "Paradoxically, the unaffiliated have gained the most members in the process of religious change despite having one of the lowest retention rates of all religious groups," the report says. "Most people who were raised unaffiliated now belong to a religious group."

Maybe the grass is always greener. People raised in church give up on it, while those raised without religion gravitate toward it.

The U.S. News article also notes that "There are now 8 million nondenominational Christians, according to the Trinity report, up from 2.5 million in 2001." Another sign that we've moved into a post-denominational era.

Random stuff: "This I Used to Believe," false international adoptions, etc.

2009-04-23T06:42:00.004-05:00

Okay, in the midst of Earth Day, TV Turnoff Week, the 10th anniversary of Columbine, Susan Boyle (wahoo!) and other stuff filling the news, here are a few things that struck me recently:

"This I Used to Believe" on NPR's This American Life. My wife and I are NPR junkies, and often have "driveway moments" listening to various shows or articles. Last weekend we sat in our garage for at least ten minutes to finish listening to the second segment of this particular episode, which was about how different people changed their minds about what they believe. The segment was about a woman, Trisha, a lapsed Catholic who had lost her best friend to cancer at age 32. She somehow got in touch with a conservative Christian football coach who felt called to talk to her about God. What was fascinating was that they played parts of their actual phone calls together, and we as listeners could eavesdrop on his attempts to witness to her. What was sad and frustrating was that he kept trying to give rational argumentation to prove the existence of God, and and he just wasn't connecting with her. Trisha said later on that she didn't want to be argued at; part of her really wanted to believe again, but she just wasn't there - primarily because of the question of why her friend died of cancer. A good illustration of the limitations of apologetics and the need for listening to people's felt needs for comfort and companionship.

"The Lie We Love" by E. J. Graff, from Foreign Policy - a heartbreaking article about international adoption. Many adopted children are not orphans. Many have been kidnapped, stolen or purchased from their birth families. Some excerpts:

As international adoptions have flourished, so has evidence that babies in many countries are being systematically bought, coerced, and stolen away from their birth families. Nearly half the 40 countries listed by the U.S. State Department as the top sources for international adoption over the past 15 years—places such as Belarus, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Peru, and Romania—have at least temporarily halted adoptions or been prevented from sending children to the United States because of serious concerns about corruption and kidnapping.

In reality, there are very few young, healthy orphans available for adoption around the world. Orphans are rarely healthy babies; healthy babies are rarely orphaned. “It’s not really true,” says Alexandra Yuster, a senior advisor on child protection with UNICEF, “that there are large numbers of infants with no homes who either will be in institutions or who need intercountry adoption.”

So, where had some of these adopted babies come from? Consider the case of Ana Escobar, a young Guatemalan woman who in March 2007 reported to police that armed men had locked her in a closet in her family’s shoe store and stolen her infant. After a 14-month search, Escobar found her daughter in pre-adoption foster care, just weeks before the girl was to be adopted by a couple from Indiana. DNA testing showed the toddler to be Escobar’s child. In a similar case from 2006, Raquel Par, another Guatemalan woman, reported being drugged while waiting for a bus in Guatemala City, waking to find her year-old baby missing. Three months later, Par learned her daughter had been adopted by an American couple.

One American who adopted a little girl from Cambodia in 2002 wept as she spoke at an adoption ethics conference in October 2007 about such a discovery. “I was told she was an orphan,” she said. “One year after she came home, and she could speak English well enough, she told me about her mommy and daddy and her brothers and her sisters.”

A few quick book plugs: I just read through Andy Marin's Love Is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community. It's a tremendously helpful read. Andy is a straight married white Christian guy who has lived in the midst of a GLBT community for the last decade, and he describes himself as "the gayest straight dude in America." If you have GLBT friends and don't know how to interact with them, read this book. If you are GLBT and fed up with reactionary conservative Christians, read this book. Andy shows how all of us, gay or straight, Christian or not, can move beyond the conversation-stoppers and build real mutual relationships.

And N. T. Wright's new book Justification: God's Plan & Paul's Vision just came in from the printer (just in time for the Wheaton Theology Conference last weekend, where we sold a boatload of them). This book began as a response to John Piper's objections and grew into a full-blown treatment of Wright's take on justification. I'm about a third of the way through it right now, and it's extremely well done. If you've been following recent discussions on this topic, regardless of where you sit, this book is essential reading.

And on the lighter side: The Atlantic ran a piece about world leaders on Facebook (image here). Has items like "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad joined the group People Who Always Have To Spell Their Names For Other People." And here's a Facebook news feed summarizing Jane Austen. Funny stuff, like: Fitzwilliam Darcy is proposing to Elizabeth Bennet. It is not going well. :-/

"I'm going to kill you."

2009-04-15T09:04:00.004-05:00

Just read this in Bart Campolo's April newsletter. Thought it was well worth passing along.
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Dear Friends,

I often tell people not to ask me for statistics, because in this work all the statistics are bad. Ask me for stories instead, I say, because even in the worst of times I always have a good story. Whether it is one of my own or comes from someone else doesn’t really matter to me anymore. What matters is that it rings true. Like this one I picked up on a visit to Philadelphia last week, which was first told to psychologist Jack Kornfield by the director of a nearby rehabilitation program for violent juvenile offenders:

One fourteen-year-old boy in the program had shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to his gang. At the trial, the victim’s mother sat impassively silent until the end, when the youth was convicted of the killing. After the verdict was announced, she stood up slowly and stared directly at him and stated, “I’m going to kill you.” Then the youth was taken away to serve several years in the juvenile facility.

After the first half year the mother of the slain child went to visit his killer. He had been living on the streets before the killing, and she was the only visitor (in jail) he’d had. For a time they talked, and when she left she gave him some money for cigarettes. Then she started step-by-step to visit him more regularly, bringing food and small gifts.

Near the end of his three-year sentence, she asked him what he would be doing when he got out. He was confused and very uncertain, so she offered to help set him up with a job at a friend’s company. Then she inquired about where he would live, and since he had no family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home. For eight months he lived there, ate her food, and worked at the job.

Then one evening she called him into the living room to talk. She sat down opposite him and waited. Then she started, “Do you remember in the courtroom when I said I was going to kill you?”

“I sure do,” he replied. “I’ll never forget that moment.”

“Well, I did it,” she went on. “I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth. I wanted him to die. That’s why I started to visit you and bring you things. That’s why I got you the job and let you live here in my house. That’s how I set about changing you. And that old boy, he’s gone. So now I want to ask you, since my son is gone, and that killer is gone, if you’ll stay here. I’ve got room and I’d like to adopt you if you let me.” And she became the mother he never had.

Star Wars, Twilight and Easter

2009-04-13T07:24:00.003-05:00

This Good Friday, Josiah and I watched Star Wars Episode I, which he hadn't seen yet. (We of course introduced him to the Star Wars movies in the correct order; we worked through the original trilogy first a few months ago.) Then we watched Episode II on Saturday. I know these prequel movies are fairly weak compared to the original trilogy, with insufferably cheesy dialogue at times, but they've grown on me somewhat over the years. I welcome them as more opportunities to revisit the galaxy far, far away.

Also this weekend Ellen and I watched the movie version of Twilight, as well as all of the bonus features. I thought the movie did a good job of capturing the style and mood of the books, with appropriate romantic tension, suspense and danger. It's been a few years since I'd read the first Twilight book, so I went back and started rereading it to refresh myself on the details.

Oh, and there was Easter Sunday too.

I found myself caught between these various narrative worlds this past weekend. It struck me that watching Star Wars makes me want to be a Jedi. (I already have a blue Force FX lightsaber.) Watching Twilight makes me want to be a vampire. That would be cool. But reexperiencing the Easter story doesn't necessarily make me think, "Oooh, I want to be a disciple. That would so rock."

I know I have a propensity to want to inhabit whatever world I'm vicariously experiencing at the moment. When I read Chaim Potok's classic My Name Is Asher Lev a few years back, I totally wanted to be Jewish. When I saw Rent last week, I really wanted to live in that New York arts community, where everybody bursts into song as a narrative soundtrack to life events. So it probably makes sense that I wanted to be a Jedi vampire this weekend. Except that it's Easter, and I should probably have been reflecting more on what it means to follow the resurrected Jesus.

I think that in some ways, those of us who are overly familiar with the Christian story need to reenter it through other portals. When I read the Gospels, it's not surprising anymore - it's a bit been there, done that. We know how the story goes. But when I do a mental pop culture mashup between Christianity and something like Twilight, then things get interesting again. Because when I watch Twilight, I'm hit by the sense of longing for the beloved, the willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of another, the desire for eternal life, issues of ultimate purpose. The tagline for the movie is a great theological question: "When you can live forever, what do you live for?"

So I don't feel too bad about watching vampire movies or Star Wars while celebrating the resurrection of Christ. Thinking about them together is actually more interesting than contemplating any of them on their own.

Perfect storm and Holy Week

2009-04-08T07:56:00.007-05:00

I haven't posted much recently not because of a Lenten fast but because the past few weeks have been something of a perfect storm. I had a two-week modular course (on problem-based learning, and we teased out some fascinating possibilities and implications for PBL in theological/seminary education), and this overlapped an in-house work seminar that I directed. Plus my wife was out for two separate business trips, and last week our kids were off from school for spring break and my in-laws came to visit for a few days. This past weekend Josiah and I volunteered at a Chicago 2016 Olympic bid event (and got free T-shirts!) and then went to the Adler Planetarium to watch galaxies collide (he was a little nervous afterward about an asteroid hitting the Earth). Last night Ellen and I saw the touring company of Rent (which had two original Broadway cast members). And today is Elijah's 4th birthday! And now it's Holy Week, and we're leading worship for our Maundy Thursday service (but don't have any responsibilities for Good Friday, Saturday vigil or Easter Sunday morning, thank God).

This is probably a good as time as any to report on my Lenten experience. Lent is supposed to be a time of reflection, self-examination, repentance, confession, etc. Some of that did take place in good and unexpected ways, but I'm a bit sad to say that the crush of life and the timing of events prevented this Lent from being overly meditative or contemplative. I did find myself to be less compulsive about Facebook, and I did cut out a lot of unnecessary reading (whether of library books, blogs or news sites).

One thing that I hadn't originally planned on but in retrospect was a good thing was that I read a recent "new atheism" book that I picked up at the library. I was thinking about this during my problem-based learning course because non-religion is now the fastest growing religious demographic. On the one hand this presents a "problem" for the church, but on the other hand, I think the new atheists raise great questions and problems that Christians need to grapple with to greater satisfaction. I would encourage pastors and church leaders to read through at least one such atheism book and give it a charitable read, not immediately with an eye for apologetic argumentation but rather to listen and understand where their irreligious friends and neighbors are coming from and what legitimate concerns and objections they might have about Christian faith.

Of course, my personal perfect storm is nothing compared to the storm that Jesus experienced this week. If you're an avid Facebooker, you might appreciate this clever and astute "A Facebook Passion" that walks through Holy Week through Jesus' Facebook profile and news feed (HT: Eugene Cho). Samples:

- The Disciples have taken the Which Messiah Are You? quiz: The Disciples are a Righteous Warrior: Messiah will triumphantly enter Jerusalem, lead the Jewish nation in a bloody slaughter of the infidels, and rule the world with an iron rod.
-- Jesus is downright uncomfortable.

- Jesus has taken the Which Messiah Are You? quiz: Jesus is a Suffering Servant: Messiah will usher in God's Kingdom of Shalom through radical self-abandonment and vicarious suffering for his beloved people.
-- Judas does not like this.

- The High Priests have given Judas a gift: 30 Pieces of Silver.

- Andrew created a new photo album: Hanging in the upper room with JC.

- John is sitting next to Jesus at dinner.
-- Jude thinks John would make a really attractive woman.
-- Peter is it just me, or does anyone else think John is a total brown-noser?
-- John don't hate me because I'm beautiful!
-- Dan Brown is thinking John is really Mary Magdalene.
-- John does not like this.
-- Mary Magdalene does not like this either...Maybe if I break a whole bottle of really expensive perfume and give Jesus a really good footrub, people will put this whole "John is Mary" rumor to rest.
-- Judas wants the money back he gave Mary for the perfume.
-- Dan Brown is writing.

"I can't afford to live in America," Jan. 1992

2009-03-24T11:39:00.001-05:00

I've been browsing through some of my old journals and came across this entry from the middle of my sophomore year of college seventeen years ago (egads!). The date was January 2, 1992, when I was home for Christmas break:

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I can't afford to live in America.

I have seriously been spending way too much money while at home this break. Let me just tally up my food and entertainment costs these last two weeks. First, eating out. Perkins was about seven bucks. Arnold's, another six. Baker's Square, at least eight. And today, lunch with Dan and Mooner at Fuddrucker's I kept down to four. Plus the odd snack or pop along the way, that's at least $25 all together.

Now entertainment. I didn't have to pay for Hook, but the entire price of the Children's Theatre tickets is on my charge card, and that's $37.50. Laura covered the Guthrie tickets, and then throw in a few more bucks for City Slickers, Fisher King, JFK, and then $6 full price for Star Trek VI tonight with Dan and Moon. So about $12 for movies. And don't forget the $6 for rollerskating on New Year's Eve. So that's already at least $55 there.

I forgot $2 at Burger King and throw in a $5 haircut today. And maybe six, seven bucks at Northwestern Book? We're talking ninety, maybe almost a hundred dollars on expenses this Christmas break! And it's not over yet! Can I keep up this level of frivolous, extravagant living? Can I afford to be spending six stinking bucks on a movie?

Heck no. I certainly don't have the resources for this kind of lifestyle.

Approaching the Eucharist as a family meal

2009-03-16T05:43:00.004-05:00

This weekend our church had a gathering for parents to talk about how to cultivate our kids' experience and practice of the Eucharist/Lord's Table/Communion. And something that struck me is that there's a qualitative difference between fast food and a family dinner. There's a difference between merely eating and truly partaking and communing together. We are so used to just munching, snacking and eating only for caloric intake that to have extended mealtimes of relational building is rare and countercultural.

We discussed the practice of the daily examen (asking questions like "What was good about today? and "What was hard about today?") and how this relates to our corporate practice of the Eucharist. As we cultivate the habit of simple daily examen with our children and in our own lives, we deepen our experience of meeting God at the table.

It struck me later that something I really appreciate about the Anglican liturgy is that the confession takes place at a different part of the service so the Eucharist is truly a time of celebration. Too often in many evangelical churches, the Eucharist is more of a mournful time of remembrance - remember Jesus' death, remember our sins, say you're sorry. Not that those things are unimportant, but Eucharist is a time of thanksgiving and celebration as well.

If family meals were just times that we got together and only talked about how we were sorry for all the bad things we had done to each other, something would be wrong with that. That might be appropriate on occasion, but it would get flat and one-dimensional pretty quickly. Family mealtimes should be places of sharing all the things of our days, the joys as well as sorrows, checking in about the ordinary as well as the extraordinary. Meals should be sharing of all of life, not just the penitential, but also the celebratory and relational. Eucharist can be the same.

The value of music

2009-03-13T08:09:00.004-05:00

Excerpts from an address at the Mankato Symphony Orchestra (HT: Andy Crouch). Has big implications/applications for worship and anyone in music ministry.
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"I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

"You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

"Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”

Why young moms should rule the world

2009-03-12T14:24:00.000-05:00

"I read somewhere an interesting suggestion. The nations of the world that most vigorously foul the planetary nest and those in possession of the most destructive arsenals ought to be governed only by young women with small kids. More than anyone else, such mothers live in the future, and they also face each day the realities of raw human nature. This gives them a special insight."

- in Children of God by Mary Doria Russell (pp. 207-08)

Grieving

2009-03-06T06:00:00.002-06:00

I just found out this morning that a publishing industry friend's wife died yesterday. Ann Baker was in a critical car accident in mid-January, and though she survived the accident, she was in a coma, and eventually it became clear that her injuries were not recoverable. She leaves behind her husband, Dan, and their two children, Adam and Ingrid.

I'm still in shock. Dan and I have been industry friends for about a decade. We're about the same age. Our kids are about the same ages.

I am at a loss. I have all these thoughts and feelings jumbled up in my head, but there is nothing to say.

Here are some excerpts from Dan's message. I am amazed by his eloquence and hope even in the midst of what must be horrible pain and grief. Please pray for him and his family.

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"The permanent repercussions of the Jan. 16 accident in so many lives and families represent an unfathomable tragedy and many unanswerable questions. It is what it is, and we grieve deeply. For Ann's part, our grief comes with the assurance that through her death, Ann has been welcomed into the fullness of Christ's presence, and that she will be spared further suffering in this life. Because she belongs to him, her joy and her peace are now complete, far beyond anything she has experienced in her 35 years with us. In confidence we await the day when death and crying and pain will be no more, and our children will run once again into her outstretched arms.

"As Ann's condition deteriorated, we held the Ministration at the Time of Death service from the Book of Common Prayer at her bedside. Near the moment of her death, I prayed for Ann using the words of the Commendatory Prayer from this liturgy, which is copied below. I invite this community to join me in this or a similar prayer for Ann, knowing that by the grace of God in Christ it is already being fulfilled:

"Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant Ann. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive her into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen."

Under the Same Moon: Immigration as a sign of the kingdom

2009-02-27T06:49:00.001-06:00

Last night Ellen and I watched Under the Same Moon (La Misma Luna), a movie about a Mexican boy's quest to be reunited with his mother working in the U.S. The boy, Carlitos, is nine years old and lives south of the border from El Paso. His mother, Rosario, is working in Los Angeles. They have not seen each other for four years, though they have weekly phone calls from pay phones. But circumstances change, and Carlitos goes off in search of his mother. It's a powerful, moving film that had us in tears at many points. Not only does it put a human face on the realities of contemporary immigration, it also serves as a timeless tale of the love between mother and child.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that if Jesus were preaching here today, he would probably use immigration narratives as the basis of his parables. I can totally imagine him saying, "The kingdom of God is like this: An undocumented worker gave up everything of the life she once knew, to journey to a new land, to gain a better life for her and her family . . ."

Or perhaps: "There once was a son whose mother was in a distant country. He left his home to search for his mother until she was found . . ."

What is striking to me is that at first Carlitos thinks that his mother doesn't care about him. But he gradually realizes that her absence is actually a paradoxical sign of her love for him. He has no idea of the sacrifices and pain she goes through on his behalf. It is not until he goes on his own journey that he realizes his mother's immeasurable love for him.

I can easily imagine Jesus saying, "You know this kind of love that propels people into extraordinary circumstances and compels a mother and child to be reunited with each other? If that is how much simple human beings can love, how much more so is God's love for you!"

Often in evangelical circles we emphasize the shepherd going off to search for the lost sheep. This movie shows us the flip side - the waiting parent of the parable of the prodigal son. Rosario's story is a counterpoint to Carlitos's journey. And both are seeking, in different ways. Carlitos gives us a picture of the yearning seeker who feels the absence of his mother so much that he is drawn to find her once again. It's a picture of the God-shaped hole, the heart that is restless until it finds the beloved that brings wholeness and completion.

One particular scene also jumped out at me as a Christlike model of substitutionary sacrifice. As it unfolded, I thought to myself, "Wow. I can't believe that just happened." It was an amazing picture of the cost of sacrificial love. But I can't say more because I don't want to be a spoiler!

The film is of course also about immigration issues, which are woven throughout the plot. It reminded me of the complexity of immigration policy and how the system desperately needs reform. Book plug: Check out the new IVP book Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion & Truth in the Immigration Debate by World Relief immigration experts Matthew Soerens and Jenny Hwang. It debunks myths about immigration and gives guidance for how Christians can be involved on both a public policy level as well as on a local grassroots level in practical ministry to our immigrant neighbors.

The film also invites us to consider where we are within it. As Carlitos goes on his modern-day odyssey, he encounters a variety of characters, some predatory, some compassionate. Which will we be? Where are we in the story?

Ultimately, Under the Same Moon depicts how we are drawn toward reunion with the beloved. It's a picture of the great lengths that love will go to for the sake of the other. Great movie. I highly recommend it.

Pruning

2009-02-20T06:07:00.004-06:00

Next week is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and I've been thinking about what to give up. People say that for things to be "living sacrifices," we should give up that which is "most alive in us," or else it's not really worth giving up. There's no point in giving up coffee if you don't drink coffee. But giving up something that will be a noticeable, even painful absence in your life can be far more significant and transformative. In past years I've stopped getting new books for Lent (including library books, comic books and other books), and I think I might do that again, to focus on getting through books I already own.

But the most "alive" consuming obsession in my life right now is probably Facebook. Now that I have 643 Facebook friends, there's a critical mass of constant status updates that can take hours to scroll through, especially if I click through all the various links that are highlighted or stop to comment or look at pictures or whatnot. I need to remind myself that I got along just fine without knowing the day-by-day goings-on of all my old friends and classmates. My irrational fear is that I'll miss out on something important, but the reality is that it's really not a big deal if I don't read everybody's Facebook status all the time. (See this Boston Globe article about how technology means that we are never alone anymore, and that's a problem.)

Another dimension is the fact that how we use Facebook can be spiritually unhealthy. There's a great discussion going on right now at The Mommy Revolution, triggered by the post "Carla is Jealous of your Facebook Status." Often our posts are designed to show off some aspect of our lives, and this can generate envy, discontentment, resentment, etc. I blogged a while ago about the different kinds of Facebook statuses, and I have to confess that some of my statuses are shamelessly self-promotional. (My current status is "Al will be his undergrad alma mater's commencement speaker this May. Figuring out what to say besides "Congrats, and good luck finding a job in this economy...") So I might have to start limiting my Facebooking. I'm not sure I'll drop it entirely, but at the very least it shouldn't be the first thing I check every morning.

More significantly, though, I've been thinking about the dynamics of God pruning things out of our lives. There are various ways of interpreting and applying John 15, some more ecclesial and others more individual. But here's a personal implication of the Father pruning branches that don't bear fruit. Some areas of my life are overgrown, and I spend entirely too much time on some things that detract from my potential fruitfulness elsewhere. To mix biblical metaphors, my life has weeds that crowd out the good seed, and I need to be both pruned and weeded.

Giving up things for Lent is something internal we do of our own volition, but it strikes me that pruning and weeding are external activities that are done by God to us. And I've been noticing some areas of pruning in recent months. I had a few speaking engagements that were cancelled (I think partly because of the economy), and though this was not really that big a deal, it felt like a bit of a pruning, that I'm not called to be a big-time conference speaker or whatnot. My Christianity Today column ended, and even though I knew in advance that it was just a one-year stint for 2008, that felt like another pruning - drop the magazine writing. I also dropped one of my doctoral classes for the spring because of the amount of space and time I would have needed to do it adequately. And I've been increasingly feeling like this blog is something that is inadvertently getting pruned. I intended to blog more from NPC last week, but just didn't get to it. I just don't feel like I have as much to say that's worth blogging about. Maybe because I waste too much time on Facebook!

So, all this to say that this Lenten season will probably be a time of scaling back, both by external circumstance and internal choice. This mid-thirtysomething season is a time of realizing that doing some things means that I can't do others. Life is full enough as it is, between work and family and church and school and everything else. I need to stop being so spread out and let myself be pruned somewhat so I can go deeper and be more fruitful overall.

At the National Pastors Convention

2009-02-11T10:31:00.000-06:00

I'm in San Diego now for the National Pastors Convention, connecting with my authors and schmoozing with folks and whatnot. Things are off to a good start. Yesterday we had plenary sessions with main speakers Efrem Smith and Shane Claiborne. Efrem encouraged pastors that "Now is the time for the church to be the church." We need to minister more than ever in this time of foreclosures and lost jobs. The economy is putting stress on individuals, marriages, families, etc., and people need to know that the church is there for folks to help people through tough times, and that God is a God of hope who can bring new life from the valley of dry bones.

Andy Crouch gave a seminar on cultural creativity in the church, extending and furthering his thinking since the publication of his book Culture Making. He observed that most Christians think that culture is made by someone else; folks in New England talk about culture being made in Hollywood, and people on the West Coast talk about culture being shaped by Washington. And Christians tend to think that culture is mostly made outside the church. But Andy said that all of us are called to be culture makers, both within and outside of the church. When the church becomes culturally generative outside its walls, that creates energy and vibrancy within the church.

One objection that Andy gets is that the church needs to focus primarily on evangelism and doesn't have time for culture making. He cited D. L. Moody's notion that God gave him a lifeboat and said, "Moody, save all you can." While not at all dismissing the importance of evangelism, Andy recalled the recent airplane crash landing in the Hudson River and observed that yes, we certainly save all we can and get everybody into the lifeboats - but it doesn't stop there. People, once rescued, are not meant to stay in the lifeboats indefinitely. The goal is to get them back to land, back home, to deploy them to continue to do what humans are supposed to do.

Andy also lamented the "churchification" of cultural creativity. He meant that Christians tend to only think of church applications of cultural gifts - if we have gifted musicians, we invite them to play on the worship team. We don't imagine that gifted musicians can live out their Christian callings as artists in the community or marketplace. Andy mentioned Fringe in Atlanta, where a group of musicians who meet in church created a space for younger generations to discover classical chamber music. It's not "Christian" chamber music - it's just excellent chamber music. Fringe is creating a new cultural good and making something of the world.

We also "misunderestimate" our ability to create culture, especially on a local level. We have "creativity envy" of others who can do things "better" than we can. We just need to get over that, because all of us can create something that no one else can create. Also, we may well be doing too many things. Each of us has the capacity to do a few things well, and we may need to cut out some other things that we are not necessarily gifted or called to do.

During Q&A, various people lamented the fact that it's hard work to do culture making. Andy responded that we shouldn't think of culture making as one more thing to do on top of everything else we have to do like worship and evangelism. Rather, culture making should be a posture and attitude that infuses everything we do in the church. And Andy said that when churches invest in culture making, the return is that the church becomes infused with energy and vitality and draws out more people with more resources. Culture making doesn't take up a bigger piece of the pie - it becomes a pie factory and generates more capacity for cultural goods.

There's more that could be said, but I gotta go. More later.

25 Random Things About Me

2009-01-30T13:33:00.001-06:00

The 25 Random Things About Me thing has been circulating Facebook recently, and I finally got around to writing my own. Figured I'd repost it here. This ended up way longer than a lot of folks' lists, and it's a little unnerving how geeky I really am. Anyway, here goes:

1. I was born in New York City, and one of my earliest memories is going to a park (perhaps Central Park) and climbing a tree and getting stung by bees. And on another occasion getting wet cement in my hair. And getting spanked for sticking a fork in a rotary fan and shattering the plastic blades. If you want young kids to remember their early childhood, give them traumatic experiences that will imprint on their memories.

2. I grew up in Minnesota and lived there from age 4 to 21, and I still consider myself a displaced Minnesotan. I drink pop, eat hot dish and play Duck Duck Gray Duck. I went to Twins games at the old Met Stadium in my hometown of Bloomington (the site is now the Mall of America).

3. I moved across town between third and fourth grade and changed schools, and my claim to fame as the new kid was that I could solve the Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes.

4. I had some minor degree of childhood asthma, and my mom didn’t want me playing a brass or woodwind instrument because she thought it would be too hard on my respiratory system. So I played violin instead and hated it. But I enjoyed piano, once I got to play music I liked.

5. In eighth grade I got third place in the entire state of Minnesota at the St. Cloud Math Contest. I was also on our school’s MathCounts team, and in our state finals, the top four finishers went to the national competition in Washington DC. I tied for fourth, and after two tiebreakers, I lost by one point and didn’t get to go to nationals.

6. I got completely burned out by accelerated math programs, so I gave up on math and switched to the humanities, especially literature, theatre and creative writing. In tenth grade, I wrote short stories starring my friends and classmates. One story had my honors English class trapped in the school and all of us getting murdered one by one. Other stories cast our group of friends as having paranormal superpowers, or exploring fantasy lands a la Dungeons & Dragons, or in sci-fi scenarios like Star Trek.

7. I was in 4-H for many years, despite having no farming or agricultural experience. My projects were in things like bike safety and photography. The first time I ever danced with a girl was at a 4-H leadership conference held at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds.

8. I’ve kept a journal pretty much every day since tenth grade. I was really shaped by Bob Greene’s book Be True to Your School based on his high school journals, which he described as “time preserved.”

9. During high school I once had a part-time job doing phone surveys and market research, and of course I got a lot of hang-ups and annoyed people. So now I like getting phone surveys and always try to complete surveys whenever I’m called.

10. I also had a summer job working at Dairy Queen. We got bored making the same kinds of Blizzards all the time, so we’d invent our own. Or make alternative Peanut Buster Parfaits with layers like blue raspberry, Heath Bar, mint, Oreos, etc.

11. Once in ski club I was coming down an icy hill and couldn’t stop, and I collided with a popular cheerleader and ended up lying between her legs. I don’t know which one of us was more mortified.

12. I was in high school debate league and went to a two-week summer debate camp. I was told that the girls had a “hot guys” list posted in the girls’ bathroom and that I made the list. (Which probably isn’t saying much, but hey.)

13. I ran track for one year because most of my friends ran track. I never did very well, but I trained enough to bench my weight and run a six-minute mile.

14. I had bit parts in theatre in high school. One play, I had thirteen words (not lines – just words), so my cast T-shirt said “Thirteen.”

15. I love Broadway musicals. I’ve seen Les Miserables four times and pretty much have the whole three-hour symphonic recording memorized.

16. Ellen and I have a bunch of Coca-Cola polar bears because a few months after we started dating, she was in the hospital for abdominal surgery, and her family brought her a Coca-Cola polar bear from Hardee’s. I got one as well so our polar bears could date. When we dated long distance, one or the other of us would keep both bears so the bears could be together even if we were apart.

17. One of my college responsibilities was filling pop machines. Just before graduation, I and a friend put some cans of non-alcoholic beer in the pop machines in rarely consumed slots like diet A&W root beer, so they wouldn’t be discovered until the next school year.

18. When I went to Urbana 93, I bought two full boxes of IVP books. I now have what is probably the world’s largest collection of autographed IVP books – over 400 signed titles.

19. During grad school I had a journalism trip to Washington and one of my classmates was friends with a Secret Service agent, so we got a behind-the-scenes tour of the White House. We stood at the doorway to the Oval Office and got to sit in the private presidential movie theatre. I have a picture of myself standing at the press room podium. We also attended a real press briefing, and I stood two feet away from George Stephanopoulos.

20. My master’s thesis at Wheaton was the basis of my first book, Singles at the Crossroads. I had been dating Ellen for three years at the time, and I waited until the book proposal had been accepted and contracts signed before I proposed to her.

21. I love buying books at thrift shops for a quarter and selling them on Amazon for ten or twenty bucks. It feels like magic.

22. I like team comic books like Justice League and Teen Titans and ensemble cast shows like Friends and Lost. Probably has something to do with a yearning for community and the sense that we are better together than on our own.

23. I consider myself a moderate evangelical mutt. My church history has included Covenant, Evangelical Free, Alliance Church, Church of Christ/Christian Church, went to Lutheran retreats, worked at a Baptist camp, etc. I joined the Anglican church in 2005 and appreciate its ancient-future liturgy and worship. Many of the Christian writers who have most shaped my thinking are Anglican: C. S. Lewis, John Stott, J. I. Packer, N. T. Wright.

24. I have never had a broken bone. Or any major surgery, I think.

25. I am an ENFP on the Myers-Briggs and an Enneagram Seven (the enthusiast), so I am described as “a frisky puppy that likes to have his nose into everything.” My virtue is taking joy in life, and my vice/besetting sin is gluttony – I want to try everything and don’t want to miss out on anything.

Christianity Today Book Awards

2009-01-28T07:49:00.003-06:00

I am happy to report that two of Christianity Today’s 2009 book awards went to IVP books that I edited: Andy Crouch’s Culture Making in the Christianity and Culture category, and Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice’s Reconciling All Things in the Christian Living category. Here’s what their judges said:

On Reconciling All Things: “I love this book for its range, the weave of the two writers’ voices, its deep appreciation of process, and its combination of spiritual groundedness, accessibility, and ecclesial, psychological, and political awareness. It retrieves the term reconciliation from the buzzword bin, and offers hope and direction at the same time.”

On Culture Making: “An astonishing work that moves from sociological analysis to biblical theology (in story form) to their practical implications. Crouch’s main contribution is to show how Christians can and should do cultural analysis but not stop there: They should proceed boldly and deliberately to creating culture itself. This is a book for the whole church.”

(Just for the record - when I brought Andy's proposal to our publishing committee some years ago, I said, "This is the quintessential IVP book, and I predict that it will get a starred review from Publishers Weekly and win a CT book award." I'm not always correct in my predictions, but with this particular book, I was right on both counts. And it was named one of PW's best religion books of 2008, as well.)

In addition, IVP's Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry and Writings edited by Tremper Longman and Peter Enns received an award of merit in the Biblical Studies category.

The Suburban Challenge

2009-01-22T06:11:00.004-06:00

I haven't posted for a bit because of any number of factors - busyness at work, inaugural hoopla, watching all of season 4 of Lost last week - but now that the premiere of season five is past us, it's time to move on. Unfortunately I have nothing particularly new or exciting to say, so let me just link to this Newsweek article about "The Suburban Challenge," which highlights some of the changes and issues suburbia faces:

Suburbs now provide more jobs than cities. Only about 22 percent of jobs in major metropolitan areas are located within three miles of a traditional downtown; twice as many are more than 10 miles out. Suburbs also host more immigrants: in the largest metropolitan areas, nearly six in 10 foreign-born residents now live in the suburbs. In places like Charlotte, N.C., Minneapolis, Sacramento, Calif., and Washington, the first address of many new Americans is most likely down a suburban lane.

Then there are the downsides. Nationwide, a million more suburbanites are living below the poverty line than city dwellers. Suburban St. Louis County, Mo., has 50 percent more working-poor families than the city of St. Louis itself. The mortgage crisis only adds to the problems. The foreclosure rate in Clayton County, which encompasses many of Atlanta's southern suburbs, is twice as high as that in Atlanta. Homes in neighborhoods close to downtown Chicago, Pittsburgh and Portland, Ore., have held their value, while prices for homes far from those urban cores have plummeted, according to new research by Joe Cortright, an economist at Impresa Consulting.

The article goes on to note that "the mental line between city and suburb no longer makes much sense; policies need to treat metropolitan areas as a whole." I've argued for some time that we need not pit cities against suburbs, but rather that we should seek the welfare of the whole metropolis. Urban issues are suburban issues, and vice versa. As new suburbs and exurbs become the new cities, old suburbs become old cities, with all the same kinds of challenges and issues. The article concludes:

The end of the (traditional) suburbs was inevitable. Hopeful, mobile Americans may once have thought they could leave behind the pressures, demands and compromises of city life. But social concerns inexorably follow society. Our leaders, starting with a metro-minded president, now have to make the mental jump across the urban-suburban boundary, and catch up.

Living with limits

2009-01-12T07:07:00.002-06:00

This past weekend our church had a brief men's retreat (just a Saturday morning thing) on the theme of living within limits. It was quite timely, given the nature of the economy, and indeed several folks in attendance were dealing with employment issues. But all of us bump up against limitations in various ways, whether physical health, relational challenges, adult children outside of one's control or personal vocational/career ceilings. Now that I'm closer to 40 than 30 (ack!), I've been feeling the limitations of life a lot more. When we're in our twenties, everything is ahead of us and we think of life in terms of open-ended possibilities. As we approach middle age (ack!), we realize that there's only so many opportunities available to us, and that perhaps we will not be able to accomplish everything that we might have hoped for.

So our retreat looked at the theme of contentment in Philippians 4. Our retreat leader, Kevin Miller of Church of the Resurrection and Christianity Today, pointed out that the apostle Paul's life divided into two parts. The first half of Paul's life was one of status, opportunity and privilege as a Roman citizen, a top-notch education under Rabbi Gamaliel, an up-and-coming leader with power and influence. But the second half of his life, after conversion to Christianity, was one of persecution and suffering, beatings and imprisonment. And yet Paul was able to say in Philippians 4 that he had learned the secret of being content, in want or in plenty.

It occurs to me that it might be harder for us to be content when we are surrounded by plenty. We look around us, and our affluent suburban consumer culture shows us what we don't have, or how much other people have. On the other hand, facing realities of limitations like economic trouble or declining health might push us to be more grateful for what we do have.

We also looked at the temptations of Jesus in Matthew 4. Kevin mentioned the story of Phil Vischer, the creator of VeggieTales, and how he wrote in his book that he was gradually seduced by the desire to be the next Walt Disney. Vischer had been hiring corporate executives to work at Big Idea Productions, and along with that came a desire to live an executive lifestyle with executive-level income, housing, cars, etc. And then everything came crashing down and Big Idea went bankrupt. It's a cautionary tale about discerning one's vocation and giftedness (Vischer freely admits that he was not cut out to be a corporate mogul and was best as a simple storyteller), and also of the temptations of power. Matthew 4 is not only about resisting the temptations of grasping for that which we shouldn't have - it's also about being wise stewards of what we do have and not misusing our power.

I was processing some of these thoughts, and I'm not sure what to do with it all. There are any number of things that are outside my control, and only so much that I can do about them. I'm inclined to let a few things go and just not worry about them for now. In some ways, living with limitations and realizing our human finitude connects well with the serenity prayer - serenity to accept what we cannot change, courage to change what we can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Chicago area sub•text forum coming Jan. 17

2009-01-06T07:27:00.003-06:00

sub•text is a site/blog/resource/community for people interested in suburban ministry and mission, and they're hosting a free forum on Saturday, Jan. 17. I'll be presenting some material about suburban culture, and I trust that we'll have a good discussion about ministry in and to our suburban context. If you're in the Chicagoland area, come on by! Here are the details:

On January 17th the first sub•text forum is being held at Redeemer Fellowship in Saint Charles, IL from 10:30am - 2:00pm.

Al Hsu, author of The Suburban Christian, will be our guest speaker and will address the topics of “The Suburban Culture,” and “Mission to Suburbia.” The two main sessions will be broken up by a lunch (not provided). You can brown-bag it, bring in your favorite take-out, or order in some pizza. We want our lunch to be a good time of networking meeting others concerned for the glory of God and the good of the suburbs. Following the second session is a time for Q&A. Spread the word, bring some friends and join the conversation.

The sub•text forums are open to all and free of charge. We will take up an offering to cover any related expenses.

All the details are below.

The First sub•text Forum

Date: January 17th
Time: 10:30am - 2pm
Place: 1125 Oak St. Saint Charles, IL 60174

Session #1: 10:30-11:30 (The Suburban Culture)
Lunch Break: 11:30-12:30
Session #2: 12:30-1:30 (Mission to Suburbia)
Q&A: 1:30-2pm

Tom Wright on human flourishing

2008-12-31T07:20:00.001-06:00

The Following Christ grad/faculty/professionals conference wraps up today. It's been an invigorating and exhausting week, with lots of great sessions and meetings with folks. Tom Wright has been our main plenary speaker (as he was in 1998 - free audio here), and he's been speaking on the theme of human flourishing through the lens of Colossians. He cited Irenaeus that the glory of God is a living human being, and that humans act as something of "angled mirrors" at a 45-degree angle that both reflect God's image/glory to the world as well as reflect worship back to God.

Random snippets from my notes: In keeping with his themes in Surprised by Hope, Wright continued to emphasize that salvation is not just about an escape ticket to heaven and merely saving souls, and that we are not rescued out of the world, but are called to flourish within the world. The world needs wise and wisely flourishing humans. The more full of God we are, the more human we are. What it takes to be truly human is wisdom. In Proverbs 8, Wisdom is personified as delighting in human beings and invites us to come and learn how to be genuinely human.

Colossians 1 shows that Jesus is the personification of wisdom, that everything in Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8 is embodied in Christ. Col. 2:3 says that all wisdom and truth are in Christ, which points to the significance of all disciplines of study, whether physics or music or literature or sociology. There's truly a delight and joy in academic study and discovery, and these are expressions of human flourishing.

Also, human flourishing is not merely blissful enjoyment of human experience. It also includes bearing suffering. We bear the cross and take on our share of human suffering. Wright described the British Museum's "Tree of Life" exhibit, which is a sculpture of flourishing life created out of decommissioned weapons. Even in the midst of pain and death, God is at work to restore the glory of humankind. And the hope of glory is not escape from this world, but Christ in us, the global church, who inhabit and permeate the whole world and herald his good and glorious kingdom.

So what does it mean for me to be a flourishing human? At work, in my studies, in my family, at church? And how best to contribute to the flourishing of others? It's not merely that I delight in stuff that I think is fun and shun things that I find difficult or boring. As an Enneagram Seven, I tend to evaluate things in terms of whether I find joy and delight in them (rather than a sense of what is important, or right or good or strategic). I'm trying to figure out what might be a more holistic, wise way of living. And to not merely flourish in a secular sense of human accomplishment, but in a biblical sense of being filled with a sense of God-given vocation, calling and even cross-bearing. So maybe I should not do stuff just because I think it's fun (as much as I enjoy the new official Force FX blue lightsaber I got for Christmas) but rather think in terms of where I can best contribute to the flourishing of not just myself, but of others around me. Much to contemplate as we enter a new year. Happy 2009!

Michael Lindsay and Andy Crouch on power and privilege

2008-12-29T07:09:00.005-06:00

I'm now at the Following Christ 08 conference for grad students, faculty and professionals, cosponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and InterVarsity Press. It's kind of an off-year Urbana-like event for folks in the academy and professions. I was at the previous FC conferences in 1998 and 2002, and both were quite significant.

This year's theme is "Human Flourishing," and prior to the conference proper were a number of day-ahead events. The one I attended was on "Exploring Privilege and Redeeming Power," hosted by the Professional Schools Ministries department of IVCF. This pre-conference brought together people from various disciplines to discuss different dimensions of the use of power. Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power, gave a summary of his book. A few nuggets:

- Of the 360 Christian leaders he interviewed for his research, only one had ever been visited in the workplace by a local church pastor. Lindsay encouraged pastors to make pastoral visits to their church members' workplaces.

- The greatest indicator of a leader's character is how they treat an assistant.

- Disciplines that can help Christian professionals guard against the trappings of power: sabbath keeping (which is a recognition of human finitude and limits), deep friendship/accountability, humility/integrity, and using power/privilege in service to others.

Then yesterday morning, Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making, gave a presentation in which he made a distinction between privilege and power. The track had been using the terms somewhat synonymously, but Andy differentiated them this way: Cultural/creative power is the ability to successfully propose a new cultural good. But privilege is the accumulated benefits of past successful exercises of power. In some ways, privilege is coasting on previous actions, whether yours or someone else's.

Others in the track had argued that Jesus divested himself of power, but Andy pushed back against that and made a more careful distinction. Jesus retains power but does not exploit privilege. Jesus would certainly exercise power in feeding five thousand or stilling the storm, but when people wanted to hail him and accord him further status, he divested himself of that privilege.

So too we are called to exercise cultural and creative power in responsible, generative, Christian ways, and to divest ourselves of privilege. Power involves the risk of creating new cultural goods. But privilege can tend to lead to a sense of safety, complacency and entitlement. If we find ourselves in positions of privilege, we should try to find ways to use it on behalf of others. Rather than coasting on past accomplishments, the challenge is to continually use our power to generate new opportunities and cultural goods for others.

This was particularly challenging, to think about how I might be "coasting" on my accumulated benefit/work of the past, and how I might take risks to exercise cultural power for the benefit of others. I'm always a bit ambivalent about discussions about privilege, because it makes me aware of how I might be outside certain spheres of privilege and status. I'm not from a pedigreed background, I didn't go to Ivy League schools, I don't move in upper crust circles. And yet I realize that I do have certain levels of power and privilege that are not available to others, whether in terms of access to education, networks, social capital, etc. It's weird to remember that I do have cultural power, and it's challenging to ponder how I might be a good steward of that power.

Jesus was not born in a barn!

2008-12-23T08:27:00.007-06:00

I just watched The Nativity Story movie, and it's not bad. But the movie perpetuates something of a myth - Mary and Joseph, alone in a cave stable, giving birth to baby Jesus. It's commonly assumed that Jesus was born in a stable or barn because the biblical text mentions that he was placed in a manger. But Ken Bailey writes in Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes:

For the Western mind the word manger invokes the words stable or barn. But in traditional Middle Eastern villages this is not the case. In the parable of the rich fool (Lk 12:13-21) there is mention of “storehouses” but not barns. People of great wealth would naturally have had separate quarters for animals. But simple village homes in Palestine often had but two rooms. One was exclusively for guests. That room could be attached to the end of the house or be a “prophet’s chamber” on the roof, as in the story of Elijah (1 Kings 17:19). The main room was a “family room” where the entire family cooked, ate, slept and lived. The end of the room next to the door, was either a few feet lower than the rest of the floor or blocked off with heavy timbers. Each night into that designated area, the family cow, donkey and a few sheep would be driven. And every morning those same animals were taken out and tied up in the courtyard of the house. The animal stall would then be cleaned for the day. Such simple homes can be traced from the time of David up to the middle of the twentieth century. I have seen them both in Upper Galilee and in Bethlehem.

Bailey contends that it is likely that Mary and Joseph were given hospitality by a local family, and that Mary gave birth not by herself, but with the assistance of women from the village. Middle Eastern customs of hospitality and honor would have required it, especially since Joseph's family hailed from the region and likely still had extended relatives in the area. Bailey notes,

“No room in the inn” has taken on the meaning of “the inn had a number of rooms and all were occupied.” The “no vacancy sign” was already “switched on” when Joseph and Mary arrived in Bethlehem. But the Greek word does not refer to “a room in an inn” but rather to “space” (topos) as in “There is no space on my desk for my new computer.” It is important to keep this correction in mind as we turn to the word we have been told was an “inn.”

The TNIV has a better translation of Luke 2:7: "there was no guest room available for them." The word that Luke uses is not the ordinary word for a commercial inn. In fact, it is used later on in Luke 22 to describe the upper room. Bailey concludes:

To summarize, a part of what Luke tells us about the birth of Jesus is that the holy family traveled to Bethlehem, where they were received into a private home. The child was born, wrapped and (literally) “put to bed” (anaklino) in the living room in the manger that was either built into the floor or made of wood and moved into the family living space. Why weren’t they invited into the family guest room, the reader might naturally ask? The answer is that the guest room was already occupied by other guests. The host family graciously accepted Mary and Joseph into the family room of their house.
The family room would, naturally, be cleared of men for the birth of the child, and the village midwife and other women would have assisted at the birth. After the child was born and wrapped, Mary put her newborn to bed in a manger filled with fresh straw and covered him with a blanket.
. . . that manger was in a warm and friendly home, not in a cold and lonely stable. Looking at the story in this light strips away layers of interpretive mythology that have built up around it. Jesus was born in a simple two-room village home such as the Middle East has known for at least three thousand years. Yes, we must rewrite our Christmas plays, but in rewriting them, the story is enriched, not cheapened.

Merry Christmas!

Who gives?

2008-12-22T13:25:00.003-06:00

'Tis the season both for giving and for financial belt-tightening. The juxtaposition of economic recession and holiday gift-giving is interesting, because a number of recent reports are that a lot of us don't give very much in terms of charitable giving of any kind. Christianity Today's December cover story, "Scrooge Lives!" (by one of my authors, Rob Moll), highlights these facts:

More than one out of four American Protestants give away no money at all—"not even a token $5 per year," say sociologists Christian Smith, Michael Emerson, and Patricia Snell in a new study on Christian giving, Passing the Plate (Oxford University Press).

Of all Christian groups, evangelical Protestants score best: only 10 percent give nothing away. Evangelicals tend to be the most generous, but they do not outperform their peers enough to wear a badge of honor. Thirty-six percent report that they give away less than two percent of their income. Only about 27 percent tithe.
"Americans who earn less than $10,000 gave 2.3 percent of their income to religious organizations," Smith, Emerson, and Snell write, "whereas those who earn $70,000 or more gave only 1.2 percent." While the actual percentages are slightly higher for Christians who regularly attend church, the pattern is similar. Households of committed Christians making less than $12,500 per year give away roughly 7 percent of their income, a figure no other income bracket beats until incomes rise above $90,000 (they give away 8.8 percent).

In fact, in absolute terms, the poorest Christians give away more dollars than all but the wealthiest Christians. We see the pattern in recent history as well: When Americans earned less money following the Great Depression, they gave more. When income went up, they began to give less of it away.

And it's not just Christians who are stingy. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof takes liberals to task for not being as generous as conservatives. Some excerpts:

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.

It’s true that religion is the essential reason conservatives give more, and religious liberals are as generous as religious conservatives. Among the stingiest of the stingy are secular conservatives.

According to Google’s figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do. But Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes.

In any case, if conservative donations often end up building extravagant churches, liberal donations frequently sustain art museums, symphonies, schools and universities that cater to the well-off. (It’s great to support the arts and education, but they’re not the same as charity for the needy. And some research suggests that donations to education actually increase inequality because they go mostly to elite institutions attended by the wealthy.)

Conservatives also appear to be more generous than liberals in nonfinancial ways. People in red states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often. If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent.

Since I often scold Republicans for being callous in their policies toward the needy, it seems only fair to reproach Democrats for being cheap in their private donations. What I want for Christmas is a healthy competition between left and right to see who actually does more for the neediest.

I was challenged some years ago to give away as much as I spend on myself. I don't do this nearly enough, though I'm trying. This particular Christmas season, I've had this odd feeling that Advent is too long. I got most of my Christmas shopping done early, with weeks to spare. And then, with more time on my hands, I ended up buying additional gifts that I probably didn't need to buy. If Christmas had just been a week or two earlier, I would have saved myself a few bucks. (An additional factor is that my wife's birthday is Jan. 4. So I usually end up getting a bunch of stuff for her, and then decide later which will be for Christmas, her birthday, or Valentine's Day.)

At any rate, I'm sick of Excessmas already - bah, humbug. But I'm glad that Christmas is almost here.

Kingdom Sightings: Family Ties

2008-12-18T07:10:00.001-06:00

My December column for Christianity Today has been posted online. Here are the first few paragraphs.

Family Ties

Sometimes relatives differ, and that's okay.

Al Hsu | posted 12/12/2008 11:00AM

When my wife, Ellen, and I were dating, I found her sarcasm jarring. I would respond to her sarcastic remarks by saying, "Did you know that sarcasm comes from the Greek word sarkazo? It's a verb form of the noun sarx, meaning flesh. Sarkazo was used to describe wild dogs ripping out flesh. That's what it's like when you are sarcastic—you're tearing out my flesh." She didn't quite see it that way.

It wasn't until I got to know her family better that I came to understand that sarcasm was one of her family's love languages. They joked around with those they cared for; it was their way of saying, "You're part of the family." I gradually realized that Ellen's sarcastic remarks were her way of telling me that she liked me.

Holidays are usually times of gathering with extended family and relatives that we don't see very often. This can be a cross-cultural experience. The kids play outside while the aunts and uncles hash out family issues in the kitchen. We wonder, How can these people possibly be related?

We all have quirky family traditions and wacky uncles. But we are still family. Christianity Today senior writer Tim Stafford notes in Never Mind the Joneses that every family has its own way of doing things. Most marriages face conflict when one family culture bumps up against another. Successful marriages incorporate elements from the cultures of both families of origin and forge a distinctive third culture.

Socially, many of us rarely mingle with people beyond our own "family." Bill Bishop, in The Big Sort, observes that Americans tend to organize themselves into like-minded communities, both politically and religiously. We live in fragmented tribes in which we only interact with people we already agree with on most issues. Bishop notes that when communities are homogenous, opinion becomes far more absolute and dogmatic. Conservatives become extremely conservative, and liberals become radically liberal.

Some geographic areas are so overwhelmingly Republican or Democrat that it becomes inconceivable to residents that people could hold differing opinions. As playwright Arthur Miller asked during the 2004 election cycle, "How can the polls be neck and neck when I don't know one Bush supporter?" We live in echo chambers where our perspectives are not tempered by alternate views.

The church is also at risk of living in theologically homogenous echo chambers. . . .

[Go here for the rest of the article.]

On digital book readers and the future of the book

2008-12-11T11:19:00.005-06:00

For decades folks have been lamenting the impending death of the book, and plateauing book sales in recent years have reinforced these fears. New technology like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader are attempting to be for books what the iPod has become for music. But it's doubtful that these devices will replace print books anytime soon. I just came across Christine Rosen's article "People of the Screen," and she makes these observations about the new Amazon Kindle:

Despite Kindle’s emphasis on accessibility—get any book, anywhere, instantly—this is true only if you can afford to own the device that allows you to read it. You can’t share the books you’ve read on your Kindle unless you hand the device over to a friend to borrow. There are other drawbacks to the Kindle, more emotional than practical. Unlike a regular book, where the weight of the book transfers from your right hand to your left as you progress, with the Kindle you have no sense of where you are in the book by its feel. It doesn’t smell like a book. Nor does the clean, digital Kindle bear the impressions of previous readers, the smudges and folds and scribbles and forgotten treasures tucked amid the pages—markings of the man-made artifact.

. . . when you use a Kindle, you are not merely a reader—you are also a consumer. Indeed, everything about the device is intended to keep you in a posture of consumption. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has admitted, the Kindle “isn’t a device, it’s a service.”

Anyone who has read a book to a toddler knows that one experience with an e-reader would yield more interest in the buttons and the scroll wheel than the story itself.

I'm inclined to agree with James Gleick's NY Times recent article, where he says, "It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover." Most of us in the book publishing industry love not just the content and the ideas of the books we publish, but also the physicality of the actual books. The physical book provides tactile reference points - we remember where something is in a book by how far into the book it is, or whether it's on the upper left-hand page or near the end of a chapter. There are visual cues in a physical book that are lost in an electronic reading device.

Gleick observes that for mere information retrieval, electronic access has already surpassed print books - hence the rise of Wikipedia and the eclipse of physical print editions of Encyclopedia Britannica or the Oxford English Dictionary. And so CD-ROMs and digital versions of biblical references, dictionaries and commentaries make a lot of sense, when the main need is searchability and retrieval. But for the meditative experience of thoughtful reading, physical books are still the standard.

I still worry if my beloved book publishing industry will evaporate the way newspapers are dying off or how CD sales have fallen off a cliff. Thomas Friedman says that bailing out the Detroit auto industry right now is "the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. . . . It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet." So that's a good word of caution regarding the future of book publishing (or any industry).

Yet I'm encouraged by the dozens of comments on Eugene Cho's blog when he asked people to mention the books that have influenced them the most. People are reading, and not just stuff on screen. I'm hopeful that people will continue to be book readers, and that Christians continue to live out their heritage as people of the book.

Is this life worth living?

2008-12-02T06:54:00.009-06:00

Yesterday I spoke in chapel at Wheaton College on the topic of grieving a suicide, because of the suicides of three recent alumni over the past year and a half. The talk hasn't been posted online yet [Update: now available here], but here's an excerpt on whether life is worth living that relates a little to the Advent season:

A larger question that suicide raises is whether life is worth living. Some of you may be wrestling with this right now. And let me say this: This human life is worth living – so much so that God himself came to earth to live it. God didn’t necessarily need to become incarnate in Jesus. In his infinite wisdom, he could have had other ways to accomplish our salvation. But God created this world and our human life and declared it good. And this Advent season, we affirm that God himself came to earth in the person of Jesus. In doing so, he validated the human experience. Jesus tells us that this life is worth living.

When Lazarus died, Jesus didn’t simply tell Mary and Martha, “Oh, he’s in a better place now.” No, he wept because death should not separate us. Death is not the way it is supposed to be. So Jesus brought Lazarus back to life – even though he would die again someday. But the raising of Lazarus is another declaration that this human life is worth living. And it points to the ultimate truth that life will triumph over death.

The Bible has an example of suicide prevention. Acts 16 tells about when Paul and Silas were in prison in Philippi. When an earthquake opened the doors of the prison, the Philippian jailer thought that the prisoners had all escaped. He drew his sword and was about to kill himself rather than face execution. But Paul cried out, “Don’t harm yourself! We are all here!” He intervened in the jailer’s life and stopped him from killing himself. He gave him a reason to live and led the jailer and his whole family to Christ.

We can do the same. If you see people who are in despair, tell them, “Don’t harm yourself! We are all here! We are here for you.” The warning signs of suicide are prolonged depression and hopelessness, isolation or withdrawal, loss of interest in usual activities, giving away possessions, suicidal thoughts or fantasies, and suicide attempts. If you see these warning signs in a loved one, get help! Talk to them about it. Ask if they’re doing okay. Don't worry that you might be giving them ideas. You're probably not. Better to talk about it than to remain silent until it's too late.

My father’s suicide made me look into my own family history, and I learned that there’s some history of depression. And I remembered that back in high school one summer, I was pretty depressed about a girl who didn’t want to go out with me. I was at a summer camp, and I was acting all depressed. I learned later that my roommate and the camp counselors were concerned enough about me that they put me on suicide watch. They worried about me and talked with me to see how I was doing. I’m grateful that they kept an eye on me. They kept me from slipping further into depression. That’s what community does. We are here to help each other through the tough parts of life.

So if you or someone you know is struggling with depression, get help. There is no shame in going to the counseling center. If needed, ask a professor or pastor for help. In an emergency, call a suicide hotline or even the police. This life is worth living. Help one another live.

Crazy Love by Francis Chan

2008-11-26T07:27:00.001-06:00

I've been a bit busy with random stuff - work, school, prepping for a talk at Wheaton College next week, just life in general - so I haven't had much extra energy or ideas for blogging. So here are some perceptive quotes from Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God by Francis Chan:

Should you put your house on the market today and downsize? Maybe. Should you quit your job? Maybe. Or perhaps God wants you to work harder at your job and be His witness there. Does He want you to move to another city or another country? Maybe. Perhaps He wants you to stay put and open your eyes to the needs of your neighbors.

My suggestion as you think, make decisions, and discern how God would have you live is to ask yourself, "Is this the most loving way to do life? Am I loving my neighbor and my God by living where I live, by driving what I drive, by talking how I talk?" I urge you to consider and actually live as though each person you come into contact with is Christ.

Imagine if you opened up a drawer in your kitchen and found twenty cheese graters but no other utensils. Not very helpful when you're looking for something to eat your soup with. Just as there are different utensils int he kitchen that serve diverse functions, God has created unique people to accomplish a variety of purposes throughout the world.

That is why I cannot say in this book, "Everyone is supposed to be a missionary" or "You need to sell your car and start taking public transportation." What I can say is that you must learn to listen to and obey God, especially in a society where it's easy and expected to do what is most comfortable.

What would you want for your Secret Service code name?

2008-11-20T13:10:00.007-06:00

I just read about the Secret Service code names for the new first and second families:

Barack Obama - Renegade
Michelle Obama - Renaissance
Malia Obama - Radiance
Sasha Obama - Rosebud
Joe Biden - Celtic
Jill Biden - Capri

Cool. Previous code names include Rawhide (Ronald Reagan), Deacon (Jimmy Carter), Eagle (Bill Clinton) and Trailblazer (George W. Bush). John Kerry was Minuteman, John McCain was Phoenix, Pope John Paul II was Halo. Best one: Karenna Gore named herself as Smurfette, to her later regret and embarrassment. (I used to read Tom Clancy's novels, and in those books President Jack Ryan was Swordsman, his wife was Surgeon, and his kids were Shadow, Shortstop, Sandbox and Sprite. Love those.)

This is reason enough for me to run for president: I want a Secret Service code name. Maybe something like Bookshelf or Thriftshop. My older son would probably want to be Lightsaber, and my younger son would be a plausible Applesauce. There are Jedi name generators, superhero name generators and a Sarah Palin baby name generator - somebody should make a Secret Service code name generator.

What would you have as your Secret Service code name?

Lessons from the Westmont College fire

2008-11-19T06:51:00.002-06:00

I was sad to hear last week of the fire at Westmont College that destroyed several buildings there. It was a real-life exercise of the hypothetical question, "If your house was on fire, what would you rescue?" One report mentioned that student Beth Lazor only had time to grab her cell phone, laptop, teddy bear and debit card.

What's been interesting is that the whole experience has made the Westmont community reevaluate their relationship to their stuff. Admissions counselor Todd Pulliam was cited as saying, "I definitely lost a lot of stuff, but in the grand scheme of things it's nothing. I told God I wanted to simplify my life—and he's done it."

Stacey Torigoe, a staff writer for the student newspaper, offered these reflections:

When I heard the order to evacuate to the gym, I was going to sax quartet rehearsal. The only things that I’d been able to save were whatever I was carrying at the time: my precious alto sax and music, my cell phone and the clothes on my back. Hence the “homeless musician,” a label courtesy of my dear sister.

But I’m not planning on panhandling on State Street; I work strictly with ensembles. Maybe someday Jeff and I will get together and play duets, but for now, I’ll worry about whether my favorite jeans have gone up in flames or been soaked into oblivion (or both), along with, of course, my hiking boots and my pictures of home. As a Hawaiian, I long for a rain-soaked embrace after this scorching inferno.

It’s a strange feeling, to be homeless. Yes, I’m sad about losing things - my computer, for example, with irreplaceable pictures of memories that I’ve made at Westmont, my Spam musubi mold and my new hiking boots. Now I’m here in a hotel room downtown with my mom.

It’s a lesson in materialism, long overdue. While going through mental lists of what I lost and trying to figure out what can be replaced, I am constantly reminded of the fact that no matter how precious, none of the stuff in M102 was ever really mine - it was God’s. Even the clothes on my back that I escaped with were never really mine - and they still aren’t. They’re a gift, and they were given - and, by grace, taken away - for a reason.

There's a wisdom and maturity in these reflections. Westmont College is one of the most expensive Christian colleges in the country, and the surrounding area is extremely affluent, where celebrities live in multi-million-dollar homes. (Because of the high cost of housing, Westmont had built on-campus faculty residences so professors could afford to live there, and a number of those residences were destroyed in the fire, meaning that some professors lost both their homes and offices.) This is a community that has had to live in uneasy tension with materialism and wealth. Some students are children of privilege; others are not as well-to-do. But now all of them are rediscovering that material things are not what's most important in life. That's something all of us should remember.

A shout-out to Compassion International

2008-11-18T07:42:00.003-06:00

Yesterday I called Compassion International to update our credit card; we support two girls and a program for child survival. I provided my account number and name and address, and the fellow answering the phone asked, "Did you write that book?"

"Um, which one?"

"The suburbs book. I read your blog."

"Oh, that's great. Thanks!"

That was kind of wild. I was surprised and thrown off balance enough by the exchange that I didn't catch the person's name. So, if you're reading this, thanks again, and thanks to Compassion for all the good work you do around the world!

L’Arche and new monastic communities

2008-11-11T06:52:00.001-06:00

After sitting in the Raleigh-Durham airport for four hours due to a flight delay, I'm back home from a quick trip to Duke Divinity School for the launch of the Center for Reconciliation’s new Resources for Reconciliation book series. They brought in Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, along with theologian Stanley Hauerwas for the release of their new book Living Gently in a Violent World. (I love this book. It just received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and they also ran a profile of Hauerwas.) Vanier is in his 80s and is not likely to travel to the United States anymore, so it was a privilege to meet him and hear from him. People from L’Arche communities from all over North America came this weekend to see him.

L’Arche is a network of communities that brings together people with and without disabilities to live together in mutuality and friendship. It’s a place of profound countercultural witness. Society often does not know what to do with people with disabilities. But L’Arche is a place that declares to the disabled, “I’m glad that you exist.” During a talk Sunday night, Vanier said something along the lines of, “If we want to have a society that is more human, we must create spaces for those who are different. And we will discover that we are all people beloved by God.”

While in Durham, I stayed with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (coauthor with Shane Claiborne of Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers) at their neo-monastic intentional community of Rutba House. It was good to spend some time with them and get a glimpse of how they do life together, making meals, sharing things in common, confessing to one another and forgiving one another, connecting with the community. They are thoroughly embedded in their local neighborhood and practice a degree of hospitality that is rare in our contemporary culture.

I love how L’Arche and the new monasticism both point to the kingdom of God in their own distinctive ways. Hauerwas says that L’Arche is a sign of hope and exemplifies a kind of gentleness and patience that reminds the church of what it is supposed to be in the world. John Swinton’s introduction to the book says, “L’Arche shows, as the church is called to show, that Christianity is true by demonstrating what community would look like if the gospel were true.” The church in America has much to learn from how L’Arche and the new monasticism practice community, peacemaking, friendship and gentleness.

Wow. History. And the soundtracks for election night nailed it.

2008-11-05T06:57:00.008-06:00

I was thoroughly impressed with both McCain's concession speech and Obama's victory speech last night. Both hit just the right notes, and I am encouraged that we really can be a United States of America and move forward as one nation. Yes, we can.

I loved the fact that my local CBS affiliate had no voice-over commentary after Obama's speech and just let the cameras roll as Obama, Biden and their families celebrated with the Grant Park crowds. I thought the music sounded like a movie soundtrack, and I learned this morning that it indeed was. And both candidates used music that interpreted the meaning of this election. This is from the MTV Movies blog:

Movie lovers might have noticed that each man chose music from a [Denzel] Washington movie to play while walking offstage after their respective speeches. And, not for nothing, but we think they both made the perfect choice.
Consider: McCain left the Arizona stage to part of Hans Zimmer’s score from “Crimson Tide.” (This part, actually.) The 1995 Tony Scott film focused on a career Navy man (Gene Hackman), labeled a maverick by some, who is stripped of his authority and ultimately beaten by a young black guy, somewhat new to the scene (Washington).

Then there was Obama, who left the stage to the strings of Trevor Rabin’s score from “Remember the Titans.” The 2000 Disney/Bruckheimer joint? It followed an African-American coach who brought together whites and blacks to win a championship.

Election Day 2008, finally!

2008-11-04T06:34:00.002-06:00

Well, this is it. After this wild and wacky, interminable election season of Tina Fey and Joe the Plumber, it all comes down to today. It's been a fascinating, discouraging, maddening and exhilarating ride. If my friends' Facebook statuses are any indication, my friends' presidential preferences seem to reflect national polling percentages. I have friends that are far more conservative than me and far more liberal than me, so it's been interesting to watch the dueling Facebook statuses and the links they've posted to a whole range of articles and YouTube videos. (My favorite this year: this one. Very clever, and quite amusing even if you disagree with the position.)

As recently as mid-September, I was genuinely undecided and ambivalent about whether even to vote. What surprised me was that as I engaged in discussion and conversation with various friends, I found myself being pushed out of my indecision and toward a commitment. I could not sit on the fence indefinitely. That's the democratic process at work, apparently.

(BTW, this year I've been particularly annoyed at the negative campaigning. And I have to say that some of my more partisan friends, in sending me various negative links, actually pushed me toward the other candidate because it seemed that they had nothing positive to say about their own candidate.)

One key concern I have this election day is whether the President-Elect will be able to bring the country together and work with people who voted the other way. I'm encouraged that Obama has the support of folks like Colin Powell, and that McCain has the support of folks like Joe Lieberman. Whoever wins, the reality is that the new president will have to govern from the center. So I am hopeful that the new administration will include independents and people from both parties in key positions.

During the primaries, at one point I thought it would have been great to have an Obama/Huckabee or Huckabee/Obama ticket and have the best of both of them. What if we had just quit the campaign after the primaries and declared a copresidency between both parties' nominees? Think of the hundreds of millions of campaign dollars that would have been saved and could have been used more constructively elsewhere. I think it would be interesting to have a coalition government where conservatives and liberals share power and need to work together to govern. Families and churches need to learn to live with people who disagree with each other; why not the presidency itself?

But alas, that's not how our system is set up. So last week, on the last day of early voting for Illinois, I stood in line and voted early. I'm one of the formerly disillusioned that sat out of the 2004 election because I could not bring myself to vote for either candidate that year. So it says something about this national moment that I was drawn back in to not merely vote out of duty or obligation, but genuine interest and civic concern.

So go ahead and vote. (Unless you determine that you cannot in good conscience vote this year. I think it's okay to not vote as an act of protest.) Whatever happens, pray for whoever wins, and for the common good of the country.

And if your candidate doesn't win tonight, don't get all bent out of shape. After all, in a few months the 2012 campaign will start up and we'll go through this all over again.

Matthew 11 on learning from Jesus and finding rest

2008-10-27T08:02:00.004-05:00

In the midst of a crazy time juggling work, school and life in general, this past weekend I experienced a bit of an oasis in the midst of the storm. I was at the Invite 08 Soul Care for Leaders retreat/conference, hosted at Willow Creek and cosponsored by the Spiritual Formation Alliance and Soul Care. I was there leading a workshop on spiritual formation in the suburbs, and I was grateful for the gift of a time of retreat, worship and restoration.

In the morning, Doug and Marilyn Stewart (veteran spiritual directors with InterVarsity who go to my church) provided a guided retreat reflecting on Matthew 11:28-30, the classic passage where Jesus says, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." I realized that I often come to Jesus distracted and fragmented, but that's okay. He still invites me to come, even in the midst of those distractions, and to bring those things with me. And what jumped out at me was that Jesus does not say "I will take away your burdens." The stuff of life is still there. But he gives us rest, and that changes how we interact with our burdens.

I was also struck by the next line: "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me." I'm in the midst of an educational studies program, and something that has become clear to me is that there's a vast difference between teaching and learning. Christians have tended to focus a lot of energy on teaching and communicating the gospel and doctrinal content, but we have not thought as much about how people actually learn. We tend to assume that if we preach about it or teach about it, people will learn it. But that's often not the case. So this verse jumped out at me as one of the relatively few verses that speaks specifically of "learning" rather than "teaching." And it's significant that there's an experiential dimension to the learning. It's not just content download. It's lifestyle, practice, and exercise of trust.

Something else that was jolting to me was an application of the next phrase, "for I am gentle and humble in heart." I've always glossed over that, thinking, duh, of course Jesus is gentle and humble in heart. But I hadn't seen the connection between Jesus' character/identity and his call for us to learn from him. Could it be that Jesus wants US to learn to be gentle and humble in heart? Yikes - that changes things entirely! That means that this passage is not just about us getting a restful spiritual benefit. It means that Jesus is concerned about our apprenticeship to him and our character transformation. The more we are yoked to him, the more we should become like him.

Perhaps then we will be more likely to find rest for our souls. The more we are humble in heart, the less bent out of shape we will be by our burdens and the stuff of life. This passage is not just about God changing our external circumstances. It's about our internal transformation as well, which equips us to face our circumstances.

I have to admit that I am not very good with extended solitude and silence. I am a fairly antsy, restless person, and rather than sitting still during the retreat, I found myself roaming the halls and wandering aimlessly around the church. I am ambulatory that way. But even so, I think God connected with me in the midst of my frisky-puppy ENFP prone-to-wander personality type. And I am grateful.

During my workshop, something that came up in discussion was how frantic and crazy busy our suburban culture and lifestyle is. And we observed that that's perhaps why evangelical interest in spiritual formation has grown so much in recent years. It's countercultural to practice silence, solitude, retreat, sabbath, quiet, contemplation. It's interesting because I've now presented on suburban issues both at activist social-justice-type conferences as well as contemplative spiritual formation events. And the two kinds of communities can temper one another. We may naturally gravitate toward one group or the other, but the contemplative tradition can temper the activists, just as the activists can exhort the contemplatives. The church needs both.

Anyway, thanks to Mindy Caliguire and the Invite 08/Soul Care team for putting together the event, and for the invitation to come to Jesus and learn from him.

Jack Mezirow on transformative learning

2008-10-23T10:10:00.000-05:00

I’m in a class on critical thinking, and one of our readings is from educational theorist Jack Mezirow’s book Learning as Transformation. Here are a few snippets that jumped out at me as having particular relevance to us this election season:

“Our culture conspires against collaborative thinking and the development of social competence by conditioning us to think adversarially in terms of winning or losing, of proving ourselves smart, worthy, or wise. Deborah Tannen (1998) writes of ours as an ‘argument culture,’ a cultural paradigm that conditions us to approach anything we need to accomplish together as a fight between opposing sides, like a debate or like settling differences by litigation. Political discourse becomes reduced to negative advertising. . . . We tend to believe that there are two sides to every issue and only two. We set out to win an argument rather than to understand different ways of thinking and different frames of reference, and to search for common ground, to resolve difference, and to get things done.” (pp. 11-12)

“Discourse is not based on winning arguments; it centrally involves finding agreement, welcoming difference, ‘trying on’ other points of view, identifying the common in the contradictory, tolerating the anxiety implicit in paradox, searching for synthesis, and reframing.” (12-13)

“Our values and sense of self are anchored in our frames of reference. They provide us with a sense of stability, coherence, community, and identity. Consequently they are often emotionally charged and strongly defended. Other points of view are judged against the standards set by our points of view. Viewpoints that call our frames of reference into question may be dismissed as distorting, deceptive, ill intentioned, or crazy.

“Who we are and what we value are closely associated. So questions raised regarding one’s values are apt to be viewed as a personal attack.” (18)

“A more dependable frame of reference is one that is more inclusive, differentiating, permeable (open to other viewpoints), critically reflective of assumptions, emotionally capable of change, and integrative of experience.” (19)

"I Shall Not Want" sermon, and what happened when Elijah broke the DVD player

2008-10-20T10:45:00.000-05:00

A week ago I preached at our church, and the MP3 audio for the sermon is now available online at our church's website. The sermon (dated 10/11/08) was titled "I Shall Not Want," based on the lectionary text of Psalm 23 (and a little riffing off the other texts of Ex. 32 and Phil. 4). I was asked to fill in on somewhat short notice, so I repurposed a fair amount of my suburban workshop material on consumer culture. If you have a half hour to spare, you can listen to the sermon and get a summary of my book's chapters on consumerism and branding.

The week prior to the sermon, Elijah broke the DVD tray on our TV. We have one of those combined three-in-one TV/VCR/DVD players. A few weeks prior, Elijah had broken the VCR part, and it doesn't eject videos right anymore. It still plays them once you get one in, but you have to really fight to pry it out. And now the DVD tray is off of the track or something, and it no longer closes.

I had a section in my sermon about how in consumer culture, if we need something, we go out and get it ourselves. Our default setting is to consume. If something breaks, we buy a new one. Instead of automatically purchasing new things, we should take the practical step of first saying "I shall not want," and pray to see if we can do without it, or borrow it, or if God might provide it through some other means. And I mentioned Elijah breaking our DVD tray. (Now I had to see if I would really practice what I preach. Funny how our own sermons preach to ourselves that way.) I observed, in the big picture of things, we don't really need a DVD player. People have survived for thousands of years without one. So we would live without one in the meantime.

I have to admit, when Elijah broke our DVD tray, part of me wanted to throw out the whole thing and say no more TV/videos/DVDs, ever again. On the other hand, another part of me wanted to go out and buy a new TV. Maybe a nice big plasma flat-screen thing we can hang on the wall, out of kids' reach. (Or not.)

Ellen and I could still watch DVDs on my laptop, but I didn't want the kids touching it (especially since Josiah wrecked an earlier laptop by pouring milk on the keyboard). So Ellen and I were wondering if instead of replacing the whole TV, maybe we just get a cheapie thirty-dollar DVD player and use that with our current TV. Still, it felt like an unnecessary consumer purchase for something we don't really need.

Then yesterday, Josiah and I were playing Lego Star Wars on the Playstation, and it suddently hit me - hey, maybe we can play DVDs on the Playstation! We'd never tried it before, but sure enough, the Playstation also works as a DVD player. The game controller works as the remote control. So now the kids can still watch DVDs on the TV, through the Playstation, and we didn't have to buy anything new. Problem solved. The Lord is our shepherd, and we shall not want.

Debate camp flashbacks and lessons

2008-10-15T14:06:00.005-05:00

In anticipation of tonight's third and final presidential debate, the New York Times has an article titled "Debate Camp," which triggered memories of the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school when I went to debate camp. I was in high school debate, and I debated for two years (and lettered in debate - how geeky is that?) before dropping out senior year to make more room for other activities (like newspaper and theatre - how geeky is that?).

I actually was thinking about debate just last week because I caught up with fellow high school debater and friend Jenell Williams Paris, who was speaking at the Ancient Evangelical Conference. Her talk on the church visible as good, bad and ridiculous is available online here. Excellent material - she argues that the church as the continuation of God's narrative necessarily includes the good, the bad and the ridiculous, and that all of these are integral elements of the plot and drama of the Christian story and our own stories, with all their character development, conflicts, plot twists and surprise endings. It echoed Kevin Vanhoozer's talk from last year's conference about the gospel as drama. (Speaking of Vanhoozer, I finally got a copy of his Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, which is an absolutely stunning compendium of multidisciplinary scholarship. I looked up the article on poststructuralism, and it had me at hello. Seriously.)

Jenell and I went to different high schools in the same debate league, and we debated against each other numerous times (she was very good). We got to know each other because we were in the same lab group at debate camp. I figured out that she was a Christian because she had Amy Grant tapes, and back then only fellow evangelical church kids had Amy Grant tapes. We reconnected years later because both of us wrote for the late, great Regeneration Quarterly and we bumped into each other at a Vine conference in 2000 and have kept in touch via the blogosphere and Facebook ever since.

Anyway, all this made me reflect on how much being in high school debate league has shaped my worldview and perspectives. First and foremost, I learned how to structure an argument. "Resolved, that the United States government should adopt a policy to increase political stability in Latin America . . . Contention 1. Harms. Contention 2. Inherency . . ." I find that how I organize and structure books now draws much from the flow of debate cases - you establish the significance of the topic and the harms/problems at hand, and explore the reasons that the problems are not being solved. Then you introduce your plan for addressing the problems and demonstrate how your plan achieves solvency, yada yada yada.

I also learned how to research, and I recall many long hours in the library making photocopies of the Congressional Record and clipping quotes as evidence to be cited from notecards. I learned how to think on the fly and write a rebuttal speech while listening to an opponent's speech. I learned how to tie a necktie. I learned how to talk fast. Well, I already talked fast, and debate made me talk even faster.

A side effect of being in debate was a tendency to frame everything in terms of argumentation, and I came to disavow this default setting later on. In fact, one of the reasons I quit debate was that I got tired of it being so adversarial all the time. It's exhausting, and some of the rhetoric of this current election season reminds me of those debate modes. Nowadays I'd much rather work more collaboratively in discussion rather than argumentatively in debate.

But I also learned from high school debate that basically every argument has some degree of merit, and every position has its strengths and weaknesses. No policy or case is ever fully right, or fully wrong. During the course of a debate tournament, we would regularly debate the affirmative side in a case one round and then debate the negative side the next round. We would routinely need to marshal our own best arguments against ourselves. We would have to learn how to argue for and against various positions, regardless of our personal beliefs on the issue. This didn't make us all relativists; rather, it taught us critical thinking skills and helped us learn to weigh the merits of every position and line of argument.

I think being trained in high school policy debate has made me more skeptical about absolutist claims from either political party or platform. Theorist Richard Paul talks about two kinds of critical thinking: "weak" critical thinking is only able to employ critical thinking against opposing viewpoints. But "strong" critical thinking is able to be self-critical and to examine one's own positions. As such, strong critical thinking usually leads to greater epistemic humility and is less dogmatic. As Esther Lightcap Meek puts it in her book Longing to Know, there's a difference between certainty and confidence. Absolute certainty is unlikely, and an impossible standard. But confidence is a more biblical way of thinking about things.

At any rate, I've been thinking about some of these things during the last presidential debates, and I'm sure they'll be on my mind tonight. I'll be looking for the candidates to move beyond the talking points of their stump speeches and to employ critical thinking and analysis, not merely attacking or deconstructing their opponent's positions, but also demonstrating epistemic humility and awareness of the complexity of the issues.

Obama on Niebuhr

2008-10-09T07:54:00.002-05:00

Stumbled across this David Brooks comment this morning: "I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I'm getting nowhere with the interview, it's late in the night, he's on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he's cranky. Out of the blue I say, 'Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?' And he says, 'Yeah.' So i say, 'What did Niebuhr mean to you?' For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say."

(Note: Reinhold Niebuhr should not be confused with his brother Richard, who is most known for his classic Christ and Culture.) I was interested that the Wikipedia article on Niebuhr linked to this David Brooks New York Times column from last year:

Out of the blue I asked, “Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?”
Obama’s tone changed. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.”
So I asked, What do you take away from him?
“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”
My first impression was that for a guy who’s spent the last few months fund-raising, and who was walking off the Senate floor as he spoke, that’s a pretty good off-the-cuff summary of Niebuhr’s “The Irony of American History.” My second impression is that his campaign is an attempt to thread the Niebuhrian needle, and it’s really interesting to watch.

Back in college (or was it grad school?) one of my profs pointed us to Niebuhr's Moral Man in Immoral Society. I just came across this comment on Niebuhr's thought:

While individuals in their personal dealings often transcend self–interest (hence "moral man"), nations dealing with other nations, or social classes with other social classes, have little or no capacity for self–transcendence ("immoral society"). Nations and classes have limited understanding of the people they harm by their unjust self–assertion; they lack appreciation for the often complicated laws and institutions through which such injustice is perpetuated; and they are more inclined to embrace rationalizations of self–interest than prophetic denunciations. These facts, for Niebuhr, explain why dominant groups rarely yield their privileges except when put under pressure by some countervailing social force.
Niebuhr’s "Christian realism" was not, however, a Darwinian or Machiavellian ethic of pure struggle and the will to power. Niebuhr stressed the relevance of agape, or Christian love, not as a directly practicable political principle, but as the ideal toward which justice strives and the standard of judgment on all political achievements in history. Moral, rational, and religious appeals might be subordinate factors in the struggle for justice, but Niebuhr still counted them as real: if rational and ethical considerations alone don’t make oppressors yield just concessions to the oppressed, they often do enable them to internalize rather than contest reforms once they are established.

Does this give us a hint about how a President Obama might govern? Perhaps. It may also be significant that Niebuhr is credited with writing the serenity prayer: "God, grant us grace to accept with serenity that which cannot be changed, courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the difference." That's not just good Christian realism; that may well be a good philosophy for governance.

Young adults want Obama for a professor but want to read McCain's diary

2008-10-06T11:06:00.009-05:00

A new Gallup poll reports that young voters ages 18-29 are more likely to vote Obama than McCain. No surprise there. But something that jumped out at me from the report was this paragraph:

"Obama also beats McCain on several lighter dimensions tested in the poll. A majority of 18- to 29-year-olds would choose Obama over McCain as a teacher, boss, drinking buddy, or advisor. McCain's only appeal on this level with young adults appears to be his personal life story as young adults are more likely to be interested in reading McCain's private diary than Obama's. While such items may seem trivial, basic likeability can be a key indicator of a presidential candidate's ability to win votes."

Here are the details:

Google, then and now

2008-10-03T13:09:00.003-05:00

For Google's tenth birthday, they created a way to search their oldest available index, from January 2001. I did a few vanity searches to see the difference over the past seven years. The results:

Search for "al hsu":
in 2001: 70 results
in 2008: 13,800 results

Search for "albert y. hsu":
in 2001: 1 result
in 2008: 9,120 results

Search for "suburban christian":
in 2001: 368 results
in 2008: 22,700 results

So the Web has grown quite a bit in the last few years. No wonder I can't keep up with everything anymore. I also can't imagine life without Google. I use it basically every day, looking things up, fact checking, etc. I remember when I was an editorial intern in 1994 or '95, I actually called a museum to fact check something. And for a grad school media class, I had to go to the physical offices of a cable TV company to look up original air dates of a TV show season and episodes. Can't imagine doing that today.

The Atlantic recently wondered if Google is making us stupid. I wonder how Google is changing how people interact with information in general and books in particular. Not only are we less likely to look things up in a print book when we can just search Google or Wikipedia, it's also probably true that we're less likely to have the capacity for sustained analysis and argument because we've gotten used to short blog posts and snippets of information. I think it's significant that many blog entries I see are short quotes of a few sentences or paragraphs lifted from books - they might have nuggets of insight or wisdom, but they're isolated from the larger context or point that the book was making.

As I've gotten into my precourse readings for my grad school classes (after twelve years away from formal coursework), I've been finding it challenging to carve out the time for book-length reading and study. And even in my daily work, where I'm working on book manuscripts all the time, I find myself constantly distracted by this or that little thing that somebody posts or links to on Facebook.

And Google has completely changed the whole notion of research. In the mid-'90s, For my master's thesis/first book, I was almost completely dependent on the physical library, books and journals for research. A decade later, for my suburban book, I had no end of leads, ideas and material from around the world, instantaneously available via Google. But the sheer amount of stuff was overwhelming, and it was hard to know what to sift through and go after. Call it the law of unintended consequences. Google has been great for access to info, but we are all completely swamped, distracted and ADD as a result.

(I'd say more, but this post might already be longer than anybody cares to read.)

Kingdom Sightings: Surprised by Disability

2008-10-01T15:48:00.006-05:00

[My October column for Christianity Today has now been posted online. Here are the first few paragraphs.]

KINGDOM SIGHTINGS

Surprised by Disability

Why the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensible.

Al Hsu | posted 9/30/2008 07:09AM

When my wife, Ellen, and I received prenatal confirmation that our second son would have Down syndrome, we were concerned but also relieved. Why? Because a previous diagnosis was more severe: that our son's condition might have been, as the doctor put it, "incompatible with life." He told us that we could terminate the pregnancy, but we chose to "do no harm" and prepare for our child's birth, come what may. Several months later, we joyously and nervously welcomed Elijah Timothy Hsu into the world.

Life with Elijah has been challenging but not unmanageable. He has had his share of doctors and therapists. But for the most part, he is a happy and healthy three-year-old who loves Blue's Clues and Signing Time DVDS, roughhousing with his older brother, saying "No!" and giving hugs.

October is Down Syndrome Awareness Month, and the public needs to know that Down syndrome is not nearly as scary as many imagine. Recent articles in both the American Journal of Medical Genetics and Prenatal Diagnosis report that more than 90 percent of pregnancies prenatally diagnosed as Down syndrome are terminated. As prenatal testing becomes normative, expectant couples may be more likely to abort babies who are not exactly what they had hoped for.

Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche communities, which bring abled and disabled people together under one roof, warns in Living Gently in a Violent World that in a few years there may be no more children with Down syndrome in France because they will have all been aborted. In China, babies with disabilities are often abandoned. Extremist groups in the Middle East have even used people with mental disabilities as unwitting suicide bombers. The church must advocate on behalf of those most vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Care for the disabled is a global justice issue.

The 2000 U.S. Census found that 19.4 percent of the population is affected by physical or intellectual disability. One in 140 children now has an autism spectrum disorder, according to the 2007 Annual Review of Public Health. Cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injuries, spina bifida, Alzheimer's, and a host of other conditions affect millions. If you don't currently know someone with a disability, chances are that you will.

[Go here for the rest of the article.]

George Fox Q&A: Overseas missions vs. urban ministry

2008-09-28T14:35:00.000-05:00

Another question from Elizabeth: "On pg. 179, you say, "many suburban churches give more to overseas missions than they do to support local ministries in nearby urban centers." Why do you think this is? Is it because churches have individual callings and some are not called to urban centers? Or is it lack of knowing about the needs? Or some other form of neglect? Thanks for doing this - I've enjoyed interacting on the blog."

Thanks, Elizabeth - it's been fun for me too!

I think that historically, evangelicals have championed overseas missions in a way that has not been true with domestic urban ministry. We've romanticized the heroic overseas missionary, going to the far corners of the world. At the same time we've had something of an anti-city bias. Evangelicals have tended to view cities and urban centers as dens of iniquity and evil. And part of this has been affected by America's racial history and dynamics; even though both suburbs and cities are far more diverse today, there's still a cultural narrative that says that white folks live in the suburbs and other folks live in the cities, and thus suburban white churches have been nervous about urban connections/ministries because of their "otherness."

So when young people say they want to become overseas missionaries, their suburban home churches are likely to laud the decision and support them as their sending churches. It bolsters our sense of identity to reach out in such noble ways, to those "poor natives." But if our young people say that they want to move into a local urban neighborhood or get involved with a ministry in the city, that's not as glamorous or sexy. That makes people nervous. That might be perceived as outside our turf or sphere of responsibility - those city churches can minister to their own.

(The cynical side of me would say that for some predominantly white suburban churches, it's fine to minister to different-looking people on the other side of the world, but not people with different skin color in the same metropolitan area. Somehow the local cross-cultural dynamic is scarier than the exotic overseas journey. I saw something recently about a study showing that multiracial churches tend to work only until kids get to high school age. Then white parents bail out because they don't want their daughters dating black guys.)

Also, there's a dynamic where it's easier to support overseas missions because of the remove and distance. You don't see the daily realities because they're not immediately before you, so it's a safe way of ministering by sending a check or going on an occasional short-term mission trip or hearing updates from the missionaries that you support as your proxies. But local metropolitan urban ministry is nearby enough to be inconveniently disturbing. You're just a few miles away from people who live in contexts far different than your own, and it's troublesome to ask why they live in such unjust conditions when you have your comfortable houses just a half-hour drive away. Better to not get involved at all so you don't have to think about those troubling realities.

I realize I'm caricaturing and overgeneralizing, but I think these are some of the subtle psychological dynamics at work behind why we selectively choose to support some missions/ministries and not others. It's hard for us to be self-critical and ask probing questions about how we prioritize different ministries, since there's almost always good reasons for this or that. So to answer your latter questions, yes, it's all of that - some churches might legitimately feel callings not to focus on local urban work (though this can be a cop-out), and others just aren't aware of the needs or issues involved and need to be better informed. It ultimately might boil down to an idea that "we are not the city, so it's not our problem."

As I've said in various ways, as the suburbs continue to urbanize and diversify, suburban ministry is becoming urban ministry. Suburban churches no longer have the luxury of assuming they can merely stay in their suburban bubbles. It's increasingly important for all churches, urban and suburban alike, to seek the welfare of the whole metropolis. It's got to be a both/and. Limited resources mean that every church needs to be discerning and selective about what they do and don't do, but we can't overlook our own metropolitan area and only deploy resources in our immediate suburban communities or overseas. It ought to be a triple both/and, that we have concentric spheres of ministry that are suburban, urban and global.

George Fox Q&A: Urban engagement/relocation and church hopping/anonymity

2008-09-26T07:17:00.003-05:00

Two questions from Christy:

1) "I appreciate your thoughts on urban vs suburban living. What observations would you have for Christians who desire urban engagement but are hesitant because they feel they would be sacrificing things such as their children's education etc.?"

Relocation has of course been one of the hallmarks of John Perkins and the Christian Community Development Association, and they have long advocated that true transformation and urban renewal happens most when Christians incarnationally live in a local community rather than trying to minister by commuting in from a remote location. If someone is sensing the call to relocate but has doubts, I'd recommend reading books like Bob Lupton's Renewing the City and Randy White's Journey to the Center of the City and Encounter God in the City to get a good picture of both the challenges and the opportunities of relocating to an urban context. Both authors talk about how they've grappled with issues like parenting and education, and the short answer is that their kids have come out fine, with appreciation for the experience. And when Christians really inhabit a community and get involved in the local school districts, the education experience improves not only for their own children but for others as well.

As I say in the section on "Displacement" (pp. 184-86), relocation (in any direction!) needs to be discerned carefully. Sometimes taking baby steps of displacement (short-term trips, urban plunges, etc.) can be a catalyst for a larger lifestyle change and an opportunity to hear God's call to a new environment. And of course it's essential to have like-minded community and fellow travelers to help you in the discernment, displacement and relocation.

2) "In your book you address the mega church response to suburban life. Can you share some of your observations regarding the issue of 'church hopping' in these types of communities? Can you expound on the idea that anonymity is one reason these larger church communities are attractive to those with the suburban mentality?"

I'm not sure I have any significant observations about church hopping except that it happens. It's kind of a default way people find and change churches these days; we've long passed the era of denominational loyalty. I read a statistic some years ago that when couples get married, if they come from different denominational backgrounds, 9 times out of 10 they leave both traditions and start going to a third. In our consumer culture, people change churches and church hop just like they change brands of jeans or cars. If they have a strong sense of community and affinity with a church, they'll be more likely to stay - if not, they'll hop.

Regarding anonymity, I'd first note that anonymity tends to be a suburban cultural norm. We tend to be anonymous when going to the grocery store or the movie theatre. Even if we're regulars at a particular store or restaurant, often we won't ever see the same cashier or waiter. It's easy to slip in and out of places without connecting with anyone or having name recognition. So that's a cultural norm and unconscious expectation that many suburban church visitors bring with them when they visit churches.

Various church experts have noted that in many cases, certain kinds of visitors actually don't want to be greeted at church the first time. Many want to just slip into the back of an auditorium and watch the proceedings while they decide whether or not this particular church is their cup of tea. At smaller churches, it's more likely that an usher or greeter will make personal contact with a handshake or a conversation, and so megachurches with large worship spaces provide a more anonymous entry point for those who are initially wary of being approached. This is not how things should be, but this is generally how things are, at least for some.

So smaller and midsize churches can provide an alternative by genuinely welcoming visitors - some have said that for people to stick with a church, they need to be able to identify and recognize at least six or seven other people by their fourth visit. Sometimes this will be a self-selecting kind of thing, and people who want anonymity will naturally gravitate to the bigger churches, while those who want to connect and know and be known will go to smaller churches. But there's always a complex mix of dynamics going on in every situation.

George Fox Q&A: More on megachurches

2008-09-25T08:03:00.002-05:00

This question is from Dan J.: "I have been greatly influenced, as have many, by the ministry of Willow Creek. Your book makes some good observations about Willow and other megachurches as far as influencing the lives of suburban Christians. However, I'm wondering how much of a detriment that an all inclusive Christian community such as Willow Creek might be to the overall idea of creating or influencing redemptively the "physical" communities that suburban inhabitants actually live in? In other words, can we really afford to spend more time hiding from the communities that we've been called to?"

Your question gets to the heart of some of the megachurch backlash that we've been seeing in recent years, as megachurch attendees start to wonder if the megachurch is really good for them and their community or not. Call it the law of unintended consequences at work. Megachurches do some (many) things very well, and that's why they're megachurches. They would not be what they are if they were not authentically ministering to lots of people on a large scale. But the fact that they create this "all inclusive Christian community" has its own unintended consequences in relocating the focus of Christian life and activity to the church facilities rather than incarnationally dispersed throughout local neighborhoods. Hence the multisite corrective I mentioned earlier.

I think the bottom line is that megachurches can do some things that smaller churches can't do, and smaller churches do some things that megachurches can't do, and we need both. Some people will be reached by megachurches that would never be reached by smaller churches, and vice versa. So there's a place for both in the suburban landscape. Churches of all sizes need to be aware of their own pitfalls and tendencies, and to guard against negative unintended consequences, like hiding from our communities, as you mention. If church time displaces us from really being rooted and involved in local neighborhoods, then we probably need to cut back on how much time we spend and invest at the church and rediscover ways to locate ministry and community life away from church.

George Fox Q&A: Finding your church's calling

2008-09-25T07:59:00.001-05:00

Another George Fox question from Vaughn: "In Chapter 8, you repeatedly mention the vocation/calling of suburban churches. Could you say more about how you believe local churches go about determining their calling, and is there anything specific that suburban churches should keep in mind when seeking their calling?"

One way that churches can determine their uniqueness and sense of calling is to explore their own history, identity, context, experience, and gift mix of current members. Every church has a particular story and a distinct way of being and doing church that is different from other churches in the area. One diagnostic that always gets a lot of good discussion is for church leaders and members to ask each other, "Why did you come to this church? Out of all the other churches in the area, why did you visit this one? Why did you stay? What did you find compelling about this particular church?" (I blogged earlier about some other questions that churches can ask themselves.)

How a church discerns its sense of call and vocation is a mysterious process much like it is for us as individuals. Over the years, we as individuals get a sense that God has created us in certain ways, with particular gifts and interests and aptitudes for certain kinds of work or ministry, and we prayerfully ask for God's guidance as he leads us into things that seem to be what he has called us to do. When we find those things, it's like Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire - "God made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure." Likewise, God made our churches in particular ways, and each church is uniquely positioned to do some things well, and when we do those things, we feel God's pleasure.

Books like David Benner's The Gift of Being Yourself can be read and discussed congregationally and applied to a church context. Also, resources like Good to Great (and the companion Good to Great and the Social Sectors) are helpful in determining what it is that your church can be best at.

As far what suburban churches in particular should keep in mind, let me tag back to the previous post and say that suburban churches should understand their calling in relation to their particular suburban context. Your church exists for such a time and place as this. What is it about your particular church that is called to minister to this particular suburban context? Know thyself, and know thy context, and somewhere in the intersection of the two may be clues to your church's missional calling.

George Fox Q&A: Systemic mission and field reconnaissance

2008-09-24T11:59:00.002-05:00

A question from Vaughn: "I really appreciate your encouragement to see the suburbs as a place for mission both in the sense of personal transformation and systemic transformation (p .187). I would love to see my small suburban church plant develop a parish mindset in which we found common purpose around a mission to bring transformation to our local neighborhood (as some have defined "Missional Church"). However, in my middle class neighborhood there aren't many visible systemic issues other than those that you noted in your early chapters (consumerism, individualism, etc...and I certainly share your concern with these issues as well). Do you have any suggestions for how middle class suburban churches might approach "systemic" mission in their own neighborhoods?"

Great question. I think that every church can identify the systemic needs and issues in their particular community and neighborhood by doing some "field reconnaissance." One pastor I know (whose church is located in a Southern Californian suburban area with lots of changing demographics) talks about how every suburb has systemic issues, but they're often hidden below the surface, and it takes some work to sniff them out. Some ways you can do this:

- Visit and talk to social service agencies (whether governmental or nonprofit) serving your area. What needs do they see? What resources do they lack?

- Talk to public school teachers. If you have any teachers in your congregation, they may be some of your best "field agents" because they are on the ground, in the community, and they see what their students are facing. Teachers are often the first to see problems when students are struggling, and can often get a sense of trends in economic hardships, parental alcoholism or abuse, lack of health care, mortgage foreclosure, etc.

- Go to a city council meeting. I know, these can be mind-numbingly boring. But some people really get a kick out of them, and they can shed light on what systemic issues a community might be facing. If you have a policy-wonkish member of your congregation that loves debating politics, send them to a local city council meeting and have them invest their energies on a local level instead of just being concerned with national politics all the time. All politics is local, and often local concerns are far more bipartisan and less polarizing than national issues that can be all abstract and removed.

- Visit neighbors. Bill Hybels did this when starting Willow Creek, and he got a sense of what kind of people lived in his community and what concerned them. We can do the same today. It's unfashionable to go door-to-door these days, but maybe there are ways we can talk to people at parks or Starbucks, not with an evangelistic tract or a hokey "religious survey," but with genuine efforts to hear what people are grappling with locally and personally.

These are just initial steps, obviously, as I don't know that I can make specific recommendations for next steps without having a sense of the particularities of your actual context. And I'm going to wrap up this post because another question just got sent to me!

George Fox Q&A: "Consuming Christianly" or "being consumed by Christ"?

2008-09-23T07:28:00.001-05:00

Here's another George Fox student question. This is from Josh: "On page 76, you ask, "Is there any way to consume more Christianly?" While I agree that Christians, by and large, fail to live by Christian standards in the marketplace and global economy is this really the question that we need to be asking? I agreed with many of your conclusions regarding suburbia and how it shapes and defines how we understand and define spiritual vitality; yet, is it not the suburban mindset that would lead us to ask, "Is there any way to consume more Christianly?" It seems that a more pertinent question that we should be asking is: How can we be consumed by Christ? In your opinion, what can we do to help people move from consuming to fully surrendering themselves to God, and thereby be consumed by Him?"

Good question and good point, Josh. You're of course quite right, that we should be asking, "How can we be consumed by Christ?" I think you can ask both questions side-by-side. One is more practical, one is more spiritual. My question "Is there any way to consume more Christianly?" was in the context of the discussion of consumption. Because consumption is unavoidable, we can't simply say, "Don't consume." We have to consume. So we have to ask how we can do it most Christianly.

And, as Andy Crouch points out in Culture Making, some cultural goods are meant to be consumed and received with gratitude. He writes, "There are many cultural goods for which by far the most appropriate response is to consume. When I make a pot of tea or bake a loaf of bread, I do not condemn it as a worldly distraction from spiritual things, nor do I examine it for its worldview and assumptions about reality. I drink the tea and eat the bread, enjoying them in their ephemeral goodness, knowing that tomorrow the tea will be bitter and the bread will be stale" (p. 92). But he goes on to say that Christians consume far more than we ought, and that consumption should not be our default posture. Consumption is an occasional gesture to be used appropriately, but it is not our fundamental stance toward all of life.

So consumption should not be the center of the Christian's identity, and I think you're getting at the question of whether even using the framework of consumption is in some way capitulation to consumer culture's values and worldview. That's a very good point - Christians should subvert and transform consumer language and find more thoroughly Christian language and vocabulary.

As far as the specifics of your question, "What can we do to help people move from consuming to fully surrendering themselves to God?" I think a starting point is a fundamental reorientation of rooting our identity as citizens of the kingdom of God as opposed to as consumers in this consumer culture. Our primary identity should be as followers of Jesus and heralds of his good news. Once that reorientation takes place, we can begin to resist the idolatry and competing allegiances of our consumer culture. We can employ any number of spiritual disciplines and practices to cultivate a deeper commitment to God, which of course can vary depending on your theological tradition and ecclesial background. (I point to disciplines of creativity, generosity and simplicity, but of course there's much more that could be said than just these.) We can affirm the theological truths that God truly is shepherd and that he is our fundamental source of provision. Trusting God as shepherd is a theological orientation that runs counter to our cultural consumer narratives that we need to provide for ourselves via our own consumption.

One quibble, though, with the language of "being consumed by Christ." Sometimes this comes across as an overspiritualization, that we are so caught up in adoration of Christ that it's all we think about, that he consumes our every waking thought and whatnot. The language of "being consumed" can imply that we're consumed in the sense of something being consumed in a fire - used up, extinguished. I'm not sure that's the most helpful metaphor or image for Christian devotion or ministry. Better, I think, to talk in terms of being equipped, mobilized and deployed for God's good works, not just to be consumed up in some private act of devotion.

When we eat food, we consume it, but not just for the sake of consumption - the food fuels our bodies for activity and good work. When we fill up a car with gas, we consume the gas, but for a purpose, of transportation and getting us somewhere. Likewise, if we are consumed by Christ, it shouldn't be just exercising energy for our own personal spiritual benefit. It ought to be deployed outward, with some sort of missional purpose, that God is using us and our resources for some good ends. Ideally, we should all be fully devoted to Jesus, to "be consumed by him," but in the sense of living actively for the sake of the kingdom, in whatever ways he has called us and gifted us to live.

Well, that's what comes to mind this morning. What do you think? Are there other ways to counter consumer culture and to be consumed by God in positive, constructive ways?

George Fox Q&A: Megachurch response to commuter culture

2008-09-18T08:32:00.001-05:00

A question from Dan: "On page 63 there is reference to the commute that Christian people may have to their places of worship. What positive ways, if any, have you seen the megachurch respond to the idea of the "recovering a parish mindset" that you talk about on p. 67?"

Later on in the book I talk about the multisite church movement, and this is something that has been bubbling up in recent years. Instead of churches building bigger and bigger facilities and people commuting in from farther and farther away, churches are decentralizing and focusing on individual neighborhoods and local communities. They're setting up local campuses and neighborhood home groups that are still connected to the regional "mother ship," but focus on a particular local area or suburb. It's a retooling away from the commuter model toward the parish concept.

It's encouraging that megachurches like Willow Creek have been shifting away from an affinity-based ministry approach to a more geographic-locality-based ministry approach. (A few years ago they hired Randy Frazee, author of The Connecting Church, to help them focus on local multisite campuses.) So instead of affinity-based ministries segmented out for twentysomethings and thirtysomethings and divorcees and singles and recovery groups, now Willow is focusing on local campuses like their DuPage County campus, or McHenry County or North Shore or downtown Chicago. Even those attending the main Willow campus in South Barrington now organize themselves so they sit with people from their local community. Lake Zurich area here, Mundelein, Schaumburg. If you go to Willow’s website and click on the Neighborhood Life link, you’ll find ways to connect with others in various local suburbs. Much of it is organized by school district. That way people can connect with people from their local area and build community together (and spend less time commuting all over the Chicagoland region).

The shift from affinity-based ministry to geography-based ministry is one of the major paradigm shifts of the last five years or so. I affirm both approaches, since different churches and contexts usually require different things, but I applaud the geographic shift in emphasis. And it’s often a both/and. A megachurch like Willow is big enough to have plenty of people within the geographic groups to also have affinity groups within the geography groups. For smaller churches, there are certainly times to have affinity groups for singles or college-age or retirees or whatever. But there’s a big benefit to having local, community-based intergenerational life together that crosses affinity group categories.

Another megachurch example of parish localism happened at Rick Warren's church, Saddleback Church in Orange County, a totally suburban environment. After 9/11, Saddleback provided lawn signs to their church members. The signs said "Pray for Peace" or something like that. Folks went home and put the lawn signs on their lawns. As it turned out, people saw these lawn signs pop up all over their neighborhoods, down the block, across the street. They discovered that all these other Saddleback Christians lived in the same area. They had no idea that these neighbors were Christians, let alone went to the same church! And out of that a lot of local small groups were developed, and people became intentional about creating community in their local suburban neighborhoods. Not only did this help them connect with Christian friends that were nearby, these groups had better evangelistic witness and ministry impact in their neighborhoods.

George Fox Q&A: "missionary impulse" and "critical mass"

2008-09-18T08:13:00.000-05:00

Another question from a George Fox student, Elizabeth: "My experience with suburbia is that there are few Christians in suburbia who have any kind of "missionary impulse" (pg. 30) and if a "critical mass" (pg. 52) were reached in a neighborhood it would result in a Christian clique forming rather than an embodied witness of the body of Christ to the neighbors. How do you define "critical mass" and can you offer any suggestions on how to inspire a "missionary impulse" in such a group?"

Elizabeth - alas, yes, there are too few suburban Christians that are truly missional about their suburbs! Most suburban churches are concerned about evangelism and outreach, but that's somewhat different than seeing your suburb missiologically and actually exegeting/exploring one's suburban culture for the purpose of living and ministering there incarnationally.

A "critical mass" of Christian presence in a neighborhood naturally would look different in different situations, so I don't think I have a specific guideline or concrete number of how many or what percentage. I agree, there's certainly a danger of Christian cliquishness (which is true of any church or Christian community). But the alternative is usually that there's no visible Christian presence or witness at all. So better to build a Christian community and to guard against it becoming ingrown and cliquish.

How to inspire a "missionary impulse"? Here's one practical idea. I love what Todd Hiestand's church, The Well, in suburban Philadelphia did this past summer - they had a short-term mission trip to their own suburb. Think of how much anticipation and preparation the average church does for an overseas short-term trip. People raise money, write prayer letters, learn basic language phrases, watch videos, try making indigenous food, get acquainted with culture, music, clothing, etc. Well, imagine if a suburban church invested a similar amount of time and energy preparing for a mission trip to their own suburb! I think people would start to view their suburban context very differently if they went through the exercise of preparing to be short-term missionaries to their suburban area.

The limitations of voting

2008-09-17T07:59:00.002-05:00

As all of the conversations around the water cooler and on Facebook indicate, we are in the thick of the political frenzy season. I'm already feeling political fatigue and am ready for this whole election thing to be done with. So just for the heck of it, here's a post that has the potential to annoy everybody on all sides.

The campaign process wades through long months of complex debate on innumerable topics and issues but then drills down to one ultimate question: How will you vote? I think one of the limitations of the American two-party political system is that it necessarily forces us to make imperfect voting decisions as if we are giving full endorsement to one or another position. There is no way to vote with reservations, to say, "I want to vote for candidate A's health care policy but candidate B's foreign policy" or "I'm only voting for this part of the candidate's platform but not that part." Every party and every candidate is a mixed bag, and I wish we could offer partial votes.

This election cycle, I'm hearing more people say that there's much they agree with and disagree with on both candidates, and neither one fully encapsulates the "ideal" candidate or ticket. I was interested to discover in 2004 that respected Christian historian Mark Noll had publicly stated that for several elections he could not bring himself to fully support either major candidate, so he has chosen not to vote.

A new book just came out a few months ago called Electing Not to Vote: Christian Reflections on Reasons for Not Voting, edited by Ted Lewis, which argues in favor of Noll's position. It argues that not voting could and should be a legitimate option for Christians. I've not read all the way through the book yet, but it has provided a number of very interesting perspectives that seem to resonate with the many Christians who feel that they can't fully support either ticket.

Contributors suggest that voting reinforces the idolatry of the nation-state, and they discuss how voting has been co-opted by the party system, how voting is necessarily an overly simplistic response to very complicated issues, and how historically some of the most significant social changes have happened outside of the actual voting process. For example, the civil rights movement was accomplished in many ways by people who were shut out of the traditional voting process. Social change can and does happen apart from voting; voting is one avenue of public engagement, but certainly not the only one.

One interesting observation is that Christians might actually wield more influence prior to voting than afterward - once your vote is cast, you can be taken for granted. So to withhold your vote might actually be an act not merely of protest but of active political engagement. The contributors argue against an easy checking out of the system and say that if you don't vote, you actually need to be more involved in the political process in different, alternative ways.

If a voter has studied all the issues and candidates and still could not support a candidate, it could be legitimate to not vote as an act of protest. If we cannot vote with a clear conscience, then we should not vote. If the system is broken, then it may be an act of futility to participate in the system. Our electoral process is a tremendously flawed, imperfect system that unfortunately happens to be better than any other alternatives. Of course, this is not to say that we should abandon government. Those who are gifted with political savvy and governmental access can work for reform; others of us not so called may well sit out.

Some have argued that voting is a right, a privilege, an obligation and a duty for us as American citizens. They say that we are derelict in our responsibility if we do not vote. But I am quite skeptical of language about the "duty" or "obligation" to vote. During the primaries, one of my colleagues exhorted everybody to vote. I responded that the right to vote also means the right not to vote. I think using the language of "duty" or "obligation" to vote might actually weaken the principle of participatory democracy. If we are not free to NOT vote, we are not truly free to vote.

Anyway, I'm not necessarily convinced by all of this book's arguments, but I thought it raised a number of good points and it gives voice to a lot of the ambivalence and conflictedness that I'm sensing this year. I haven't decided yet how I will vote, or even if I will vote. But these are my thoughts at this point of the season.

Okay, I've said my piece. Open fire . . .

George Fox class Q&A: Intentional communities

2008-09-15T12:30:00.005-05:00

Jason Clark is teaching a course on Missional Ecclesiology at George Fox Evangelical Seminary, and one of his textbooks is The Suburban Christian. His students are reading the book this week and next, and Jason asked me if I'd be willing to interact with them via this blog. I said sure, I'm game.

So here's the first question, from Tom B.: "On page 51, you discuss intentional community and the idea of a sixplex with individual living quarters and a communal kitchen, dining area and common area. This idea is intriguing. Are you aware of any such dwellings here in America? Is there any information about how this concept actually works in practice?"

I first heard this idea from Tom Sine of Mustard Seed Associates some years ago, and he described it as an alternative to typical suburban single-family housing, which tends to isolate us from one another and also saddles us with heavy individual mortgages. The sixplex model was designed by one of Sine's friends, and he referenced the sixplex idea in his books Cease Fire and Mustard Seed vs. McWorld. Here's a little more detail on the concept:

Sine suggested beginning "cooperative communities" as an alternative to suburban living. A starter home in Seattle, he said, costs an average of $150,000. Financed over 30 years, the accumulated cost is $500,000, he observed. By contrast, homes can be built in a "six-plex" with common activity areas for about $60,000, financed over five years. Eventually, a husband and wife living there could afford to cut back to 20 hours of work per week, freeing up more time to spend with children and for ministry. "We're going to have to think that radically," he said. "The single-family detached lifestyle is the most expensive way to live," Sine said. "If we don't create a community where people start to care for one another, we don't have a future."

I'm afraid I don't know to what extent this has been lived out; you could probably contact Sine and find out. Of course, the new monasticism has been saying a lot about intentional communities in recent years, and it seems that they can take form in any number of kinds of living spaces, whether traditional single-family houses, rehabbed storefront or warehouse space, apartment complexes or old churches or school buildings. With the ongoing mortgage crisis, some are speculating that today's suburban McMansions will become new multi-family housing for the suburban poor. It's possible that suburban new monastic groups could get a big foreclosed house on the cheap at an auction and turn it into a new way of doing intentional community in the suburbs.

I'd love to hear suburban examples of intentional community in whatever kind of housing configuration. Stories?

A corrective to parents' lives revolving around their children

2008-09-11T07:21:00.006-05:00

My wife, Ellen, just got back from a trip to Hong Kong and South Korea. The boys and I picked her up from the airport last night, and we're all thrilled to have her home. And this morning I realized that it's the 7th anniversary of 9/11. Just heard a piece on NPR about a passenger of Flight 93 that had been a standby passenger. So sad. So I'm not taking Ellen's safe return for granted, and I'm remembering the victims of that day.

In honor of Ellen's safe return, I'm reposting an entry from her blog that I thought was quite insightful. While researching my suburban book, one suburban pastor told me that one of the biggest issues for his church and community is "the idolatry of children." Ellen's post seems to me a healthy corrective to some common pitfalls about parenting and kids.

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A Confession

I have a confession to make. Not everything I do is for the enrichment of my children. Sometimes I do things just because it's something I enjoy.

At a recent event I attended one young mother mentioned how her sisters' lives seem to revolve around their children and the various activities they are enrolled in. One mom mentioned that it would be good for our kids to have one night a week where they can't participate in outside activities because it is mom's night to do something. Another mom mentioned that her friend tells her children that date night with her husband is "to make sure you are happy."

As I drove home from the event I thought about the idea of explaining date night to our kids as something we do to keep them happy. Explaining alone time with my spouse in this way, I realized, would actually reinforce the idea the world revolves around our kids. While it may be true that maintaining a happy marriage will help my children remain happy, the main reason I spend time alone with my spouse is that I really like him. I enjoy having uninterrupted conversations with him that allow us to connect at deeper levels than "When was the last time we changed Elijah's diaper?" or "Have you seen Josiah's backpack?"

The same is true of other activities that take me away from home. I enjoy taking sign language classes, leading worship and having coffee with friends. I could explain to our kids that I am a better mom when I am able to pursue activities I enjoy, but I think it may be better to simply tell them, "I am doing this because it is something I enjoy."

I can't do everything that I enjoy all the time. Sometimes I decide not to do something because I would rather spend time with my family or because my kids need me to be with them. I enjoy being with my kids and I want them to feel loved and to know that they are important to me. And I am intentional about making sure that I am frequently home with my kids. At the same time, I want them to know that I am more than just their mom. God has given me gifts to serve both my family and the world around me. Having children may require modifying my activities, but it doesn't mean that I have to hit the pause button on my life indefinitely.

Having a child with special needs can sometimes exacerbate this issue. Children with special needs often require more of our time and energy. We may become so wrapped up in helping and advocating for our children, that we allow their diagnosis to become a primary part of our identity. If mothers of typical children are tempted to believe that their kids can't survive even one evening a week without them, imagine how mothers of children with special needs often feel, especially when our children require special medical care.

But when we lose our own identities to our children we are not the only ones who lose something. Our churches and communities lose out too. They may lose out because we are not using our gifts to serve, but they may also lose the opportunity of using their gifts to serve us. And, if we are so worried about our children that we do not allow them to spend time in someone else's care, they may lose out on the opportunity to learn about our kids and how to love and serve people with special needs.

I just signed up for a second class in sign language this fall. I'll be out of the house on Wednesday evenings from late October through early December and the kids will be spending a little more time with Al or, in some cases, with a babysitter. But that's okay. I enjoy learning sign language. The kids will survive without me for one night a week.

Posted by Ellen at 12:23 PM