Faith in the Halls of Power: Cosmopolitan vs. populist Christianity

Every year our family Christmas letter lists off notable books that we've read in the past year. One book that's certain to make this year's list is Michael Lindsay's Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. Lindsay, a sociologist, conducted 360 personal interviews with an amazing array of evangelicals in significant positions of influence and leadership in government, the academy, arts and media, and the business world. The appendix gives a staggering list of who's who, with former presidents and senators, billionaire executives and philanthropists, media moguls and celebrities, parachurch and seminary leaders, culture makers and influencers of every kind - Jimmy Carter, Kathie Lee Gifford, Pat Robertson, Phil Vischer, Kenneth Starr, C. Everett Koop, Francis Collins, Mark Noll, John Ortberg, Jim Wallis, Cal Thomas, Karen Hughes, George Gallup . . . the list goes on and on. The book shows how evangelical Christians have become prominent movers and shakers across all spheres of American society. These are people who have learned to navigate and wield power.

One of the most interesting points of analysis is Lindsay's description of these new evangelical elites as "cosmopolitan evangelicals," in contrast with what he calls "populist evangelicals." Cosmopolitan evangelicals distance themselves to some degree from the populist evangelical subculture; Lindsay reports that his interviewees went out of their way to say that they had never read Left Behind or purchased a Thomas Kincade painting. Cosmopolitan evangelicals attend invitation-only gatherings with other influential professionals, not populist mass rallies like Promise Keepers.

In politics, populist evangelicals are more likely to mobilize the rank and file to push for legislation and campaign against certain issues. But cosmopolitan evangelicals are more likely to sponsor year-long internships on Capitol Hill for future political leaders. It's a difference in strategy that focuses more on becoming full participants and insiders within cultural institutions and the corridors of power, rather than attempting to combat them or wield cultural influence from the outside.

This makes me wonder a bit about my own social location as an editor in an evangelical publishing house with some degree of cultural influence. Am I a populist who's really a cosmopolitan wannabe? As a Christian professional in the parachurch, am I a cosmopolitan who's distanced from populist issues and concerns? Is my role in publishing to speak to cosmopolitan Christians and influence the influencers, or is it to somehow bridge the cultural gap between populists and cosmopolitans?

I don't know that I have any answers to this. But it also occurs to me that the suburban context is one where we see this interface between the populist and the cosmopolitan. This is a vast overgeneralization, but rural areas may tend to be more populist, and urban metropolises may tend to be more cosmopolitan, especially in terms of contexts like where Tim Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church are ministering in Manhattan. But suburbia is a mix between the two, with multiple, overlapping subcultures. Neighbors and church members may be as likely to gravitate to NPR as NASCAR, country or opera, Joel Osteen or Joan Didion.

I think Lindsay's book is important for anybody working in or ministering among contexts of influence and power, whether in government, media, business or the academy. The people profiled in Lindsay's study give us keen insights for how society and culture can be transformed from within, by savvy Christians wielding their own power and influence wisely.

If Christ is King: Encountering the Sovereign

We Americans don’t have much experience with the concept of royalty. Maybe the closest we get is if we watch movies like The Queen or The Princess Diaries. If you’ve seen The Queen, you know that one major theme of the plot is how distanced the queen and the royal family are from the British people, in contrast with Princess Diana, who was viewed as “the people’s princess.” There’s a tension between being sovereign, over the people, and being incarnational, among the people. It was a big deal at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration for him to get out of the limo and walk the streets among the people. Which wasn’t done by Bush for his second inaugural because of security reasons.

My junior year of college, our choir tour went to Washington, DC. We had a few days to visit the museums and monuments. One morning a group of us were walking down the Mall, and at one street, traffic was stopped. We stood there on the curb for a few minutes, and soon a big motorcade of black limousines came through, passing by right in front of us. We found out later that it was President Clinton on his way to the opening of the new Holocaust Museum.

A few years later, I was in DC again for a grad school summer journalism trip, visiting various media organizations in DC. One of my classmates happened to be friends with a Secret Service agent, and the agent was able to get us in for a behind-the-scenes tour of the White House. We got to see stuff that wasn’t on the public tour. We stood at the doorway of the Oval Office and looked in. Saw the Cabinet Room. Went into the private presidential movie theatre, where the President and his family watch new movies with Hollywood actors and directors. I sat down in one of the front row seats, very comfy, and the Secret Service agent told us that Tom Hanks had just been there to watch a screening of one of his movies with the President.

We got to see the White House Press Room. It’s not a very big room. At the time it had just six rows of seats, eight chairs per row. The room was recently remodeled last year, but at the time of my visit, each chair had a little brass label on it: Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post. I have a picture of me standing at the podium. We actually sat in on an actual press briefing, with White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala. I was standing two feet away from George Stephanopoulos. Could have reached out and touched him. And would have been carted off by security.

That’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to presidential power, to a head of state. And it occurs to me that maybe the best modern day analogy to Jesus as king is Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa. Here was a man who was imprisoned for decades, raised from the depths to bring reconciliation and healing to his land. Mandela might be the closest we have to a picture of a servant king.

The picture we have of Jesus as Christ the King is the crucified God, the king on a cross. If we look at the Colossians passage, we see that this crucified king is now the exalted Lord of all creation. He’s the image of the invisible God. He shows us what we cannot see. What is God? He looks like this, like Jesus. That’s what God looks like. Don’t imagine that God is some abstract philosophical concept and try to fit Jesus into that mold. Flip it around. Look at Jesus – his compassion, his love, his power, his mercy, his sacrifice – that’s what God is like. Christ the King is both sovereign and incarnational. Above us and yet among us.

If Christ is King (continued)

[Another snippet from my Christ the King sermon.]

We usually don't focus much on the idea of God as king. Other themes get more play, especially in evangelical circles. We actually tend to hear a lot more about God as deliverer, God as savior, God as rescuer. Who is God? He is the deliverer who saves us from our sins. God is the liberator who frees us from slavery in Egypt. This is what Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls the gospel of rescue and deliverance, salvation for the have-nots, the people in peril and crisis. It’s part of the biblical narrative about who God is.

But it’s only part of the picture. What does salvation look like if you’re not in peril? If you’re not a slave in Egypt needing to be liberated or delivered? The other side of the coin, Brueggemann says, is the gospel of stewardship and blessing. And this is what we see in the kingship narratives. We see glimpses of it during the time of the united monarchy, and it’s also a major theme of the wisdom literature, especially the book of Proverbs. It’s the role of the wise king, the just ruler, who governs well, for the benefit of all in the land. At its best, the good king is a king of peace and harmony, bringing blessing to all under his rule so that all within the kingdom can thrive and flourish. The king is extending shalom, wholeness, well-being, the way life is supposed to be. That’s the other side of the gospel. God is not just deliverer and rescuer. Once we are rescued and delivered, we are to live wisely and well, under the governance of a good king.

What’s significant about this theme is that it’s creational. It predates the fall. After the fall, we needed a deliverer. We needed to be rescued. But before the fall, what were we called to? Tending the garden. Good governance, wise stewardship. Making sure that all was as God intended, that all creation experienced the shalom of God’s goodness.

For those of us who grew up in evangelical circles, we get a glimpse of this whenever we hear the formula of “accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord.” The Savior part is the deliverance theme. The Lord part is the kingship theme. Two sides of the same coin.

So it’s not just that we know Jesus as Savior. Jesus saves us from our sins, yes. Jesus rescues us from perishing, yes. But Jesus is not just on a mission to rescue people and ship us off to heaven. Just as important is that we live out our lives here and now, with Jesus as our king, that we live out our lives under the kingship, the lordship of Christ.

If Christ is King . . .

[I preached at my church this weekend, for Christ the King Saturday/Sunday. Here's an excerpt.]

This is Christ the King weekend, the end of the liturgical year. Once again we’ve come through the whole cycle, from Advent through Christmas, into Epiphany and then Lent, Holy Week and Easter, and Pentecost and Ordinary Time. And at the end of it all, the liturgical year makes this single, capstone declaration: Christ is King. We sing it in our liturgy: Alleluia, alleluia, Jesus is our King.

Over the last few weeks we’ve considered the Lord’s Prayer and looked at what it means that thy kingdom come, they will be done. For thine is the kingdom. Jesus’ prayer acknowledges that God our Father is our true king. But now we make a shift. It’s not just that God is king. Now the church proclaims that Jesus is king. Christ is King. And this move is absolutely astonishing. It’s one thing to proclaim the kingship of God, the creator, the Almighty. But to declare the kingship of this Galilean rabbi, executed on a Roman cross, it’s mindboggling. It’s counterintuitive. It’s radically countercultural. So what does it mean? If Christ is King, so what?

It’s unusual that the people of God would proclaim that they even have a king. What made the Israelites distinct for much of their history was that they had no king. Other nations had kings. There are references in Genesis to the king of Sodom or the king of Gomorrah, the king of the Philistines or the king of Edom. But Israel had no king. In fact, the most common reference to a king in Genesis and Exodus is the king of Egypt, otherwise known as Pharaoh. Not the best experience the Hebrew people had with a king.

At first Israel didn’t have a human king because the Lord God, Yahweh, was their true king. So Israel had judges instead of kings, and that was a mixed bag. Some were good, some were bad. The last of the judges was the prophet Samuel. And the people came to Samuel and said, “Give us a king.” This is in 1 Samuel chapter 8. They say, “Appoint for us a king to govern us, like other nations.” Here’s the geopolitical peer pressure. Everybody else has a king. Why don’t we have a king? Give us a king. We want a king.

Samuel consults with God, and God basically tells Samuel, “Don’t take it personally; it isn’t about you. They aren’t rejecting you. They’re rejecting me as their true king.” Just as they rejected God to serve other gods, the people rejected Samuel as judge and wanted to have a human king like other kings.

Samuel comes back to the people and says, “You think you want a king? You don’t want a king. Here’s what gonna happen if you get a king. He’ll take your sons as his soldiers. He’ll take your daughters as his servants (or worse). He’ll confiscate your land, your fields and vineyards. He’ll take your property, your livestock, your livelihoods. You want a king? You really don’t want a king.”

But the people refuse to listen, and they want a king anyway. If you’re a literature professor or an English major, this will jump out at you as Act 1 of the tragedy. At the beginning of every classical tragedy, there’s a prophecy, an oracle. The soothsayer tells Julius Caesar, “Beware the ides of March.” The ghost in Hamlet, the witches in Macbeth, the oracle in Oedipus. That’s what this scene with Samuel and the people is like. We want a king. You don’t want a king. If you get a king, this is what’s going to happen. And of course, it happens. Not just with the rise and fall of King Saul (whose story fits perfectly the literary archetype of tragedy). But also with King David. And King Solomon. And every king to follow, good or bad, mostly bad.

You would think that Israel would have learned. But it’s no different from the time in the wilderness when they wanted to go back to Egypt. This is how ironic their request for a king is. Imagine if they had said, “Give us a Pharaoh! We want a Pharaoh, like Egypt.” Samuel’s thinking, “Yeah, how’d that work out for you?”

So in light of all of this, why does God concede and let them have a king? Because the notion of a king, however corrupted and imperfect in human practice, still points to God’s own identity as king. God is sovereign. God is ruler. God takes a fallen human concept of king and purifies it and says, here’s what a king ought to be like.

Yet more microtrends

And here's one last batch of Microtrends.

- Soft drinks are the leading source of calories in the average American diet, accounting for almost 1 in every 10 calories consumed.

- A 12-ounce can of Coke has 34 milligrams of caffeine. Red Bull has 80. A child who drinks one can of caffeinated soda experiences the same effects as an adult who drinks four cups of coffee. Restaurants are now producing caffeinated donuts and bagels.

- In 2005, the bestselling books were on average more than 100 pages longer than they were in 1995, when they averaged 385 pages.

- One million households now employ nannies, and nannies with a college degree have an average annual salary of $43,000, well over the $22,000 that the average 18-24-year-old female makes coming out of school with a bachelor's degree.

- More Americans went bankrupt in 2005 than graduated from college. Bankruptcies have more than quintupled in the last two decades.

- Employment in the nonprofit sector has grown more than business and government. 12.5 million work at nonprofits, more than double what it was thirty years ago.

- More than 30 million Americans have tattoos - nearly 1 in 4 adults.

- Messy desks are linked to wisdom, experience and higher salaries.

- In the last decade, there has been a 444% increase in the number of cosmetic surgeries performed in the U.S. But the number of people having them has risen at a slower rate, meaning that more people are getting multiple procedures.

- Heavy technology users are more likely to be extroverts (nearly 60 percent) than introverts.

- Girls are more likely than boys to use cell phones (88 to 83 percent), digital cameras (54 to 50 percent) and satellite radios (24 to 18 percent). They use TVs, VCRs, DVD players and PCs about the same. Boys outpace girls on MP3 players and videogame consoles.

- Women are now the majority of college students, law school students, voters and car buyers.

- One in 4 videogame players is over age 50. The average player is 33 and has been playing for 12 years.

- 2.2 million kids are home-schooled, more than charter school and voucher students combined.

- While college enrollment rates are up, college graduation rates are about the same, meaning more students are dropping out (over 28 million in the past decade).

- New religious movements are becoming statistically more significant than many established religious traditions; 20 million Umbandans in Brazil outnumber the world's Jews by one and a half times and outnumber Unitarians by more than twenty times. The World Christian Encyclopedia chronicles 10,000 distinct and separate religions in the world and says that two or three new ones are being created every day.

More microtrends

More tidbits from the book Microtrends:

- The number of female clergy in America has more than tripled in the last two decades. In the last decade, the number of women majoring in religion or theology more than doubled, while among men it grew by barely half.

- Over 3 million marriages in America are interracial, ten times the number three decades ago.

- While people often assume that Latinos are Catholics, nearly a quarter of American Latinos identify themselves as Protestant. That's about 10 million Protestant Latinos - more than the total number of Jews, Muslims, Episcopalians or Presbyterians.

- 1 in 10 Americans have some hearing loss. Kids today can hear higher ring tones than adults and teachers, so they use "Mosquitotones" when they sneak their cell phones into class.

- Because of older childbearing and divorce/remarriage patterns, more children are being born to dads over age 40, meaning that more dads are working longer and retiring later to pay for college and later childrearing expenses.

- More people have pets than kids. Pet-owning households are double the percentage of households with children. Americans spend $40 billion on pets; pet products are a bigger industry than toys, candy or hardware.

- 69 percent of white evangelicals believe the state of Israel was given to the Jewish people by God. Less than 2 in 10 American Jews think this.

- Australia was founded by a total of about 165,000 criminals released from 19th-century British jails over eighty years or so of prisoner deportations. Four times that many convicts are released from U.S. prisons every year.

- Nearly 1 in 10 college students now seeks mental health counseling; 25 percent of these take psychotropic medicines (up from 9% in 1994).

- The fastest-growing group of people who knit are teens and twentysomethings, including 6 million junior highers and high schoolers.

- 8 percent of teens (1.6 million young people) make money on the Internet.

- 1.5 million children between 8 and 18 are vegetarians (up from virtually zero 50 years ago). Another 3 million pass up meat and another 3 million skip just chicken.

- In the early 1960s, the average man weighed 166 pounds, and the average woman weighed 140. Now the average man weighs 191 pounds and the average woman weighs 164.

Starbucked - some facts about Starbucks

Fast Company has some snippets from Taylor Clark's new book Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture:

• Starbucks's closest competitor in the coffeehouse market, Caribou Coffee, is just one-twenty-fifth its size. Every 10 weeks, Starbucks opens as many stores as the total number of Caribou outlets.
  
  
• Starbucks has had 14 straight years with at least 5% same-store sales growth.
  
  
• Contrary to popular opinion, Starbucks increases sales at rival nearby coffeehouses. For example, when it blitzed Omaha with six stores, coffee sales at local joints went up as much as 25%, and more new ones opened shop.
  
  
• According to Starbucks, the company pays more for insurance for its employees ($200 million) than it does for coffee beans, yet only 42% of its 125,000-plus workforce has company health insurance--a lower percentage than Wal-Mart (46%).
  
  
• The average customer spends $4.05 per visit for coffee; the average fast-food-restaurant visitor spends $4.34 for an entire meal.
  
  
• For a cup that costs $3.40, at least 40 cents is profit. When Starbucks bumped the 8-ounce cup off the menu, the 10-ounce "tall" (the new small) increased profits by 25 cents per cup for only 2 cents of added product.

• More people would give up sex before they'd give up coffee.

Microtrends: Extreme commuting, at-home working and more

I just started reading the new book Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn. Penn is best known as the pollster who first identified soccer moms as a cultural entity back in the 1996 election cycle. This book describes dozens of new (and sometimes contradictory) cultural trends in American society today.

For example, Extreme Commuters are the 3.4 million people who commute 90 minutes or more each way to work. These folks are naturally very concerned about gas prices. They also have health issues because longer commutes are linked to obesity. A study found that every 30 minutes of driving increases your risk of becoming obese 3 percent. Why? One poll reports that 4 in 10 people say that when they're stuck in traffic, they eat. The person identified as "America's Longest Commuter" drives 372 miles round-trip each day, leaving his house every morning at 4:30 a.m. and getting home around 8:30 p.m.

Of course, many of us find extreme commuting unappealing and unsustainable. The flip side is the microtrend of the Stay-at-Home Workers, 4.2 million who work from home full-time, plus another 20 million who work from home part of the time with some sort of flexible schedule (like myself). This trend is being embraced by employers not only because they can save on office space and the environmental footprint of office workers, but also because working from home results in happier and more productive employees. 76% of full-time telecommuters report high job satisfaction (vs. just 56% of on-site workers), and at-home workers put in an average of 44.6 hours of work a week (vs. 42.2 in the office).

Other microtrends: Commuter Couples, the 3.5 million people who are living geographically apart from their spouse or partner for work or school reasons; technology is making long-distance relationships more doable. Office Romancers (60% of employees have been involved in an office romance) and Married Colleagues (like me and my wife), who can be assets to companies because "they are productive for the firm even in downtime, since they wrestle with work challenges even as they give their kids a bath." Working Retired - more folks are working longer and later, into their seventies and eighties; they do so partly because of the meaning and purpose they derive from their work, but also out of fears of not having health insurance. (The extra work and taxes also means that Social Security is not as likely to collapse.) And longer lifespans and workspans mean that people can raise kids in their twenties and thirties and then still have forty or fifty years of work (or ministry) afterward.

This is an eminently blogable book. I'm just a few chapters into it so far, and there's lots more that could be commented on. I'll continue to post thoughts and trends from it as I go. But what's most helpful is that Penn doesn't merely treat these trends as pieces of interesting societal phenomena. More importantly, he notes that each trend correlates with a particular community or subgroup of people, each of which has its own distinct issues and concerns. Christians should read this book with an eye to considering the ministry opportunities and challenges that each of these microtrends represents. After all, after Penn identified "soccer moms" as a distinct category, churches started reconsidering how their women's ministries connected (or didn't connect) with these women. Maybe this book will spur churches into thinking about Extreme Commuters ministries or supportive networks and community for at-home workers.

Happy birthday to me: 10/20/30 years meme

I turn 35 today, which means that I am now eligible to run for president. But I will take this opportunity to formally declare my non-candidacy. However, this seems like a good occasion to comment on a meme that has been circulating the blogosphere: Where were you 10 years, 20 years and 30 years ago?

Let's see . . . I don't recall specifically what I did for my birthday ten years ago when I turned 25. It would have been my first birthday married to Ellen. We were living in our first apartment in Westmont, IL, and I was then a promotional writer for IVP, working on catalogs and ads and such. My first book, Singles at the Crossroads, had just been published. (I can't believe it's been ten years already - I think I may have been the second youngest IVP author ever at the time.) It's possible that we may have been volunteering as small group leaders at an InterVarsity student conference in downstate Illinois that weekend, but I'm not sure.

Twenty years ago in 1987 when I turned 15, I was a sophomore at Jefferson Senior High in Bloomington, Minnesota. I had just been baptized the previous summer, and with the shift from junior high to senior high, I stopped going by "Albert" (too geeky) and instead went by "Al" (which I thought was cooler and more fun). I also had gotten contact lenses to replace my glasses, which contributed to my identity shift. I think that fall was also the time when I wrote a bunch of short stories starring my friends and classmates. In one of them our honors English class was locked in the school as one of our classmates went psycho and killed us off one by one; another was a paranormal story where five of us got superpowers like telekinesis and astral projection (very Heroes-like, now that I think about it); yet another alternated between a fantasy Dungeons & Dragons motif and a sci-fi Star Trek world. Okay, so I was still pretty geeky.

Thirty years ago in 1977, I turned 5 while in kindergarten at Cedarcrest Elementary School on the east side of Bloomington. (The school closed a few years later, a casualty of the generational baby bust at the time, and eventually became an Assemblies of God church.) The only thing I really remember about kindergarten was that I got in trouble for talking too much and not paying attention in class. My memory may be fuzzy on this, but I think there was a little girl in particular that I was always causing trouble with. So my teacher put me and the girl in the school play as the kindergarten representatives to keep us occupied.

That's the best I can come up with without digging out my journals. Where were you 10, 20 and 30 years ago?

An announcement: I'm a CT columnist!

I'm pleased to announce that I've been asked to be one of Christianity Today's new columnists for 2008! The editors there said that it's public knowledge now, and I'll take that as meaning that I can blog about it. No, I'm not bumping Chuck Colson or Philip Yancey off of the last page. Those spots are pretty secure. Several of their other columnists are rotating off, and I've been invited to do a one-year stint of six columns, every other monthly issue, starting in February 2008.

At this point we have not yet determined an official name for the column. The exact theme and focus is still being developed, but my general sense at this point is that I'll be making observations about signs of the kingdom in culture and society. That's probably broad enough of an umbrella to include any number of topics I might want to do. I'm already mapping out possible columns that would be timely in August and October.

Upon seeing my Facebook status yesterday, one friend told me that he had subscribed to CT for several years but had let his subscription lapse. Then he saw that I would be writing for them, and he decided to re-subscribe. Hear that, CT editors? That's one new subscriber that you've gotten already because you made me a columnist!

Of course, I'm honored by the invitation and not a little daunted. I've been a CT reader since my college days in the early 1990s. One of the reasons I came to Wheaton for grad school was because of the proximity to CT as a possible employer. My original plan back in high school was journalism, and working in periodicals has always been one of my roads not taken. I ended up in book publishing rather than magazine publishing, though I've dabbled with freelance articles here and there over the years. I was just reminded this week that my first published piece was an article on Dilbert and a theology of work in Regeneration Quarterly issue 2.1, way back in 1996, long before the blogosphere existed to allow unknown grad students to find an audience. While the late, great RQ is no more, that article is now part of CT's archives.

At any rate, I'm pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to CT's pages next year. If anybody has any story ideas, send them my way!

What's your religious literacy?

The Quill Book Awards are a relatively new entry in book awards. They're the publishing industry's attempt to parallel the Oscars or Emmys. This year's Quills were recently awarded, and two that I was particularly happy to see were David Wiesner's Flotsam for Children's Picture Book and Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale for Debut Author of the Year.

More immediately relevant to my work in Christian publishing was the award for Religion/Spirituality, which went to Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - And Doesn't. Prothero is the author of the excellent American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, which came out a few years back. In Religous Literacy, Prothero argues that most people simply have very little understanding of the basics of most world religions and even the essentials of their own faith.

What's your religious literacy? Take Prothero's quiz:

1. Name the four Gospels. List as many as you can.
2. Name a sacred text of Hinduism.
3. What is the name of the holy book of Islam?
4. Where according to the Bible was Jesus born?
5. President George W. Bush spoke in his first inaugural address of the Jericho road. What Bible story was he invoking?
6. What are the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament?
7. What is the Golden Rule?
8. "God helps those who help themselves": Is this in the Bible? If so, where?
9. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God": Does this appear in the Bible? If so, where?
10. Name the Ten Commandments. List as many as you can.
11. Name the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.
12. What are the seven sacraments of Catholicism? List as many as you can.
13. The First Amendment says two things about religion, each in its own "clause." What are the two religious clauses of the First Amendment?
14. What is Ramadan? In what religion is it celebrated?
15. Match the Bible characters with the stories in which they appear. Draw a line from the one to the other. Hint: Some characters may be matched with more than one story or vice versa.

Adam and Eve  Exodus
Paul    Binding of Isaac
Moses    Olive Branch
Noah   Garden of Eden
Jesus   Parting of the Red Sea
Abraham  Road to Damascus
Serpent    Garden of Gethsemane

See here for the answers. I got most of these right (enough to score an "A" on their grading), but the ones I didn't get related to non-Christian religions. I had a world religions course in college, but it's a bit convicting to me that I can't recall some of these very basic fundamentals. (See also this world religions quiz - I got 9 out of 10 on this one.)

Eve of All Saints/Reformation Day

My Facebook status this morning: Al is wondering why churches have "Harvest Fests" when they could have Eve of All Saints or Reformation Day parties instead. Dress up as your favorite saint/reformer.

A comment on my Wall from Caryn Rivadeneira: "Good point about the saints/reformers. You could even add a spooky flair by dressing as your favorite martyr."

Oooh! That has all sorts of potential. You could have people who were crucified upside down, burned at the stake, beheaded . . . I just glanced on Wikipedia to look up how various martyrs were killed, and then it struck me that that's a little morbid, that these were real people who died for the faith, and I shouldn't be trivializing it.

I'm somewhat ambivalent about cultural practices surrounding Halloween. I'm not an extreme conservative type that thinks that Christians should all boycott Halloween, but I'm not enthused about the general creepiness of the occasion, or the sexualization of Halloween costumes, or the commercialization and candification. Our kids are young enough to still have cute/innocent costumes (like puppies and Care Bears), but Josiah is now getting old enough to be something more dramatic, like Obi-Wan Kenobi.

From a community involvement standpoint, I think trick-or-treating is still one of the best ways that suburban Christians can interact with and get to know neighbors. When else do we have occasion to actually go to someone's door uninvited? Of course, if you don't have young kids, it might be a little creepy for you to go door-to-door. But then you can stay home and hand out treats and greet neighbors that come by. And handing out treats can actually be a form of Christian hospitality and welcome.

Down Syndrome Awareness Month

October is Down Syndrome Awareness Month, and of course I forgot to mention it until the end of the month. Our two-and-a-half-year-old son, Elijah, has Down syndrome, and over the last few years we've been learning lots about Down syndrome. Basically the most important thing we've learned is that it's really not that scary or that big a deal. (See Ellen's post on Elijah's first birthday, and my Father's Day article for BeNotAfraid.net.) While Elijah has developmental delays and takes longer to do things, he's an active, healthy, happy kid, he loves Blue's Clues just like his older brother (and now points and says "ooo" when he sees a clue), and he has a good working vocabulary of signs so he can communicate with us and let us know what he wants.

Here's some info from the National Down Syndrome Society:

Did you know...

One in every 733 babies born in the U.S. has Down syndrome. The life expectancy of people with Down syndrome has increased dramatically in recent decades - from 25 in 1983 to 56 today. In that same span of time, advancements in education, research and advocacy have had a tremendous impact on the opportunities that individuals with Down syndrome have to live healthy and fulfilling lives. Today, many people with Down syndrome:

• Attend neighborhood schools and learn in typical classes alongside their peers without disabilities.
• Graduate from high school and go to college.
• Comprise a vibrant part of the American workforce.
• Actively participate in the social and recreational aspects of their communities.
• Live independently, make their own choices, and advocate for their rights.

I'm very grateful that today we have access to all sorts of early intervention programs and therapists, and that society is generally much more enlightened and people have better awareness and understanding of disability issues. It really was a different world just a few decades ago. If you've read The Memory Keeper's Daughter, you have a sense of what life was like for people with Down syndrome not that long ago, when they were frequently institutionalized and it was assumed that they could never live or function in society. Vanity Fair recently had a fascinating article about how playwright Arthur Miller (author of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible) essentially denied the existence of his son Daniel because of Daniel's Down syndrome. Interestingly, after Daniel's birth, Miller's career never reached the heights of his earlier signature work - perhaps because in never accepting Daniel's Down syndrome, he was cutting himself off from the greatest dramas that could have been written.

A few months back Newsweek columnist George Will wrote about his son who has Down syndrome and how increased prenatal testing means that many people with genetic "abnormalities" like his son (and mine) will be terminated before birth. He mentioned that something like 85% of prenatal diagnoses of Down syndrome are aborted (I've heard 90%). While prenatal testing can be a helpful tool that can let parents prepare for challenging circumstances, in too many cases it is automatically assumed that such a life is not worth living, and babies are aborted just because they have an extra chromosome, not because of any life-threatening condition to the baby or the mother.

So part of Down Syndrome Awareness Month is helping people know that a diagnosis of Down syndrome should not be an automatic reason to terminate a pregnancy. There are actually a good number of parents willing and waiting to adopt a baby with Down syndrome. If you or someone you know is pregnant and gets a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome, please bring the baby to term. Don't abort the baby because you think you can't take care of him or her. Whether you raise the child yourself or someone else adopts him or her, a life with Down syndrome is still a life that is fully human, fully created in the image of God, with full personhood and identity.

I've recently started doing some reading in the fields of disability studies and theology of disability, and I may blog about this further at some point. In the meantime, let me link to some interesting resources:

If People with Down Syndrome Ruled the World
The Body of Christ has Down’s Syndrome: Theological reflections on vulnerability, disability, and graceful communities
Encountering the Disabled God
Disabled Christianity blog
Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity by Amos Yong

Commercial impact

Yesterday evening at the grocery store, Josiah was helping us shop. We told him that we needed raisins and pointed him to the raisin shelf. He glanced at the various options, selected a Sun-Maid raisins package to put in the cart, and said almost to himself, "Sun-Maid is proud to sponsor PBS Kids."

Aaauggghhh! Even supposedly non-commercial PBS is indoctrinating our five-year-old into corporate brand recognition and identity. He already makes a consumer choice to prefer Sun-Maid over other brands simply because they sponsor shows on PBS Kids. Sigh. Well, at least it's a healthy choice. Could be worse, I guess. At least he's not saying, "Budweiser is a proud sponsor of Sesame Street."

Ellen and I don't watch much TV, and one reason is that we don't want to put up with the commercials. If we follow a show, like Lost or Alias, we prefer to get the DVDs and watch them straight through, without commercial interruption. The only exception is Heroes. Sometimes we watch it live and mute the commercials; other times we tape it and watch it later, fast-forwarding through the commercials. It's disturbing how the ads tout their products as essential to human happiness and fulfillment - like anyone really needs a cell phone MP3 player or a luxury car that parks itself.

And sadly, product placement within the shows themselves makes advertising even more unavoidable. On Heroes, Claire's new car happened to be a Nissan, with the logo prominently visible (and was promptly followed up at the break with a Nissan commercial to reinforce it, in case you missed it in the show). New character Elle (played by Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars fame) holds her cell phone in such a way that the Sprint logo is clearly seen.

Cynical Gen Xers that we are, sometimes we will bust out laughing at the absurdity of the commercial messages. Like the one saying that you can get exclusive preview clips of Heroes sent to your phone - it's a commercial to get you to download more commercials! Or the Target ad that talks about how a percentage of your purchases goes back to community philanthropy - it's pitching shopping as virtuous and charitable. Help the community by buying more stuff! Feel good about your consumerism, because some tiny percentage is being donated to help people! Sad, really. Commercial messaging is so much the air we breathe in our consumer culture. We can do our best to unplug and avoid it all, but it's everywhere.

Robert Wuthnow's After the Baby Boomers

The latest issue of Christian Century has a review (by Brian McLaren) of sociologist Robert Wuthnow's new book After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion. Here are some statistics and snippets from the review:

- "Young adults are marrying later, having fewer children and having them later, moving more often, going to college in higher numbers, living with more immigrant neighbors and therefore more ethnic and religious diversity, and living in the suburbs even more than their baby boomer parents." [The suburban note is interesting to me, as often we imagine that twentysomethings are all hanging out in the cities a la Friends, but sheer demographics of suburban majorities seem to bear out that young adults are likewise gravitating toward the suburbs. And the juxtaposition with immigrant neighbors is not a contradiction, as suburbia continues to diversify.]

- Wuthnow says, "The net result is fewer young adults contributing to the activities of local congregations or receiving support from these congregations."

- Being married or unmarried has a stronger effect on church attendance than anything else.

- The average adult age of mainline congregations is 52, and for evangelical congregations, it's 48. Both mainliners and evangelicals are losing young adults. The only groups for whom young adult retention has remained stable are Catholics, Jews and black Protestants.

- In 1970 the ratio of mainliners to evangelicals was five to four. In 2000 it was two to three.

- The more recent evangelical growth comes from Roman Catholics becoming evangelical - 9 percent of younger evangelicals were raised Catholic (compared to 4 percent in 1970).

- 46 percent of people in their early 40s attend church weekly, while only 29 percent of twentysomethings do.

- The proportion who talk about religion with their friends is highest among young adults in their twenties (despite higher percentages of being uninvolved with a church).

- Rates of orthodoxy are higher for those with a college education than for those without.

- About 38 percent of younger adults lean conservative religiously (with 20 percent being "staunchly conservative"), while 56 percent lean liberal religiously.

- 56 percent of young religious conservatives attend church weekly, while only 14 percent of young religious liberals do.

- Evangelicals are 1.7 times more likely to be "unwelcoming toward Asians and Hispanics" than nonevangelicals. "Evangelicals are a more likely source of mobilized resistance against newcomers than any other religious group."

One of McLaren's conclusions from Wuthnow's data is that "we should increase dialogue between church leaders and people working with young adults in Christian colleges and in ministries on secular college campuses. These are people who rub elbows with young adults day to day, and they have a lot of good advice to offer local churches, but hardly anybody asks."

From my location as an editor at InterVarsity Press, one of the best ways that the church can access the expertise of parachurch campus ministry leaders is through books they have written. A number of upcoming books are written by InterVarsity staff: Don Everts's One Guy's Head series of postmodern apologetics books, I Once Was Lost by Don Everts and Doug Schaupp about what they've learned about postmodern evangelism from two thousand recent converts, and narrative book True Story and companion giveaway booklet Based on a True Story by James Choung, who offers a fresh presentation of the gospel that's far more holistic, missional and justice-oriented than traditional summaries. (See this YouTube video for a three-minute version of his approach.) All of these are good resources to help the local church can understand today's twentysomethings and thirtysomethings and contextualize ministries in ways that resonate better with them.

The Year of Living Biblically

Last night I finished reading The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, by A. J. Jacobs. I'd read Jacobs's previous book, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, about his journey reading all the way through the Encyclopedia Brittanica. I thoroughly enjoyed The Know-It-All as a fascinating, geeky read, ideal for book geeks who enjoy spouting off random trivia. Both books also double as contemporary real-time memoirs, as you follow Jacobs through his year and get an inside look into his very amusing life.

The Year of Living Biblically is particularly interesting because Jacobs is a nonpracticing secular Jew. He has a vague sense of wanting to connect with his heritage but doesn't really believe in all the God stuff. But he reads through the Bible, makes a list of all the commands (both Old and New Testaments) and does his best to live them out over the course of a year. He grows out his beard, writes commandments on his doorframes, learns to pray and observe the Sabbath. His quest takes him on some journeys to visit communities that also hold strictly to the Bible, such as the Amish, Jerry Falwell's church, snake handlers and the remnant of Samaritans living in Israel.

While in Jerusalem, Jacobs finds himself on a busy street where he's encountering Hasidic Jews, hearing an Ave Maria as well as a Muslim call to prayer. And it occurs to him that his humble quest to live biblically is an entirely autonomous, individualistic enterprise. He feels utterly alone in his attempts to follow the commandments, precisely because he is not anchored in any faith community.

This made me think that the Christian life is not merely about privatized, pietistic attempts to live godly lives. Not that personal holiness is unimportant. But certainly the Christian life is meant to be embodied in community, that Christian living can only really be done with the support of fellow brothers and sisters on the journey. We are the people of God, not merely individuals of God.

At the end of his year, Jacobs is still unconvinced. But he is somehow more attuned to the possibility of the divine, and he has moments of encountering transcendence. His prayers have shown him the importance of thanksgiving, and his life is more virtuous. So his exercise has not been unfruitful, even if it is incomplete. I hope he continues on his spiritual journey, and that he really comes to know the God he has been praying to.

Desiring less

My favorite quote on the topic of simplicity is from G. K. Chesterton: “There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”

I first came across this quote during grad school while reading Richard Foster's lesser-known-but-still-classic book Freedom of Simplicity. It was a life-organizing principle for me then, and I try to come back to this notion of desiring less whenever I find myself wanting things I don't really need.

The other concept that helps me corral my acquisitiveness and materialism is the simple idea that we don't need to own something to enjoy it. I don't recall now when this first hit me, or if I came across it in a book or heard it in a sermon or something. But it rang true to me when I realized that I would purchase something and immediately have a sense of buyer's remorse - okay, I own it. Big whoop. Now what? In fact, it's a cultural lie that we need to own something to enjoy it.

My problem is that personality-wise, I'm a collector. When I was a kid, I collected coins, stamps, stickers, buttons, baseball cards, comic books, postcards, matchbooks, patches, pencils, keychains, magnets, rocks, shells, pop cans, action figures, Transformers . . . it never ended. Not surprisingly, my room was a mess. Over the years, I've found myself winnowing my collections down and limiting myself to certain things and not others. I'm currently maintaining a few ongoing collections (autographed IVP books, US Mint proof sets, Olympic pins, Justice League comics) and forgetting about the rest. In other words, I've been trying to practice the spiritual discipline of desiring less.

Of course, even when I try to desire less, stuff keeps on showing up, like T-shirts or coffee mugs from conferences. How many coffee mugs do any of us need, really? At least when we desire less, it's easier to let stuff go.

From church competition to church collaboration

I had a good weekend in Minnesota at my alma mater's Homecoming. Got to see some old friends that I haven't seen for five or ten years or so, wandered around campus and looked at the new buildings and facilities. (When looking in some of the new housing units, I told current students, "Back in my day, we didn't have dishwashers! We had to wash our dishes by hand! And we didn't have pre-installed microwaves in the kitchens - we had to bring our own!" and so on.) My talk went well; I basically crammed an hour-and-a-half-long workshop into about 45 minutes. But people seemed to appreciate the whirlwind tour; a number of students came up to me afterward to thank me for the presentation, and a few asked me to sign copies of books. Kind of funny, because I remember when I was an undergrad there, I did the same thing with guest speakers sometimes.

Drove back to Chicagoland Saturday so I could continue guest teaching an adult education class Sunday morning. This week's topic was suburban church ministry, especially the tension between being contextualized and being countercultural. The class got into a discussion of church calling and "brand identity," what makes a church distinctive in a particular community to distinguish it from other area churches. Just as every radio station and TV channel tends to draw certain kinds of listeners or viewers, every church tends to attract certain kinds of people and not others. (The MTV show Beavis and Butthead was a "signature show" that not only attracted MTV's core demographic of males 18-25, it also repelled virtually everybody else, with the effect of purifying its audience for its advertisers.) Few churches, in actual practice, can really be all things to all people - but all churches can be some things to some people. So the challenge is in each church figuring out what they as a congregation are called in particular to be and do.

This led to a discussion of church competition, since in a suburban environment, the default setting is for people to shop for churches just as they shop for everything else. And it seems that churches compete with each other to have distinctive ministries. If I were to rewrite chapter 8 of my book today, I might revise it to frame this discussion less in terms of church competition and more in terms of church collaboration. Every individual local church needs to collaborate with other local churches because no one church can reach everybody in their community. But all the various churches working together can reach more people and more kinds of people than any one church can on their own.

At my college's Homecoming, one alum gave a presentation about what is going on in Rochester, Minnesota. A group of about twenty-five evangelical churches have gotten together as Team Rochester to work collaboratively. They do things like CareFest, a service project day where some 1700+ volunteers from all the churches combine to do practical service work around Rochester, painting public schools, helping with building and rehab projects for the park district and other community institutions. It's an amazing witness to the city of Rochester that could not have been done by one church on its own, but can be done with all of the churches working together, each contributing various gifts and emphases.

Too often we only apply 1 Corinthians 12 on an individual basis - each individual Christian is a part of the body, an eye, an ear, a hand, etc. But I think this applies on a congregational basis as well. The body of Christ is made up of many local congregations, each of which has their own distinctive callings and giftedness. And the more that churches get to know the other churches in their area, the less they'll think of one another in terms of "the competition" and instead they'll see how they can collaborate together to minister to and reach the whole community.

Back to college

I'm headed to Minnesota this weekend to go back to my undergraduate alma mater, Crossroads College. I've been invited to be one of the speakers for their Homecoming events. I graduated in the class of '94 and started there (at what was then named Minnesota Bible College) as a freshman in the fall of 1990, seventeen years ago. Which means that the current freshman class were just toddlers when I was starting college. That's a little freaky. Of course, another alum on the program graduated in the class of '49. So she was in college two dozen years before I was born.

It's been a while since I've been back, and I'm looking forward to seeing old friends. Being in Illinois, I'm a little out of the loop in keeping up with news of what's going on in Minnesota, since I don't get back there much anymore. A lot of my former professors have retired or moved on, but I hope to see at least a few familiar faces. I owe a lot of my faith and spiritual journey to Crossroads alumni, from a youth pastor who took me under his wing and showed me what it meant to be a Christian, to the pastor who baptized me and later officiated at my wedding. Not to mention all the faculty and classmates that helped me grapple with theological questions and personal crises in late night talks at two or three in the morning.

Many of my old classmates are now pastors or in some other form of church ministry. And that's an alternate life for me, the road not taken. I was a pastoral leadership major (along with a major in biblical studies & theology) and I appreciated the program very much. I was geeky enough to really enjoy second-year Greek and exegetical method (though Hebrew, not so much). But somewhere along the way I got a feeling that I could do church work if God really called me to it, but I didn't know that that was really what I was called to do. My original interest from high school was journalism and writing, and then I went through the common Christian college student phase of thinking that to really serve God I needed to be a pastor or missionary. It wasn't until the end of the college years that my eyes were opened to other possibilities, whether marketplace, parachurch or whatnot. So I was glad to be able to integrate my biblical/theological interests with my writing/publishing interests and get into Christian publishing.

So anyway, I'm deeply grateful for my undergrad education, especially how it trained me to think biblically, theologically and pastorally. I learned the importance of building a solid library (I graduated with over 200 IVP books on my shelves). And it's certainly shaped how I go about my own writing and editing. I'll occasionally get a thank-you note (especially for my Grieving a Suicide book) that mentions that they appreciate my perspective being "pastoral." Well, I think some of that comes from what I learned from my college days as a pastoral ministry major. And I'm glad that my current vocation allows me to help provide resources for students in the academy as well as ministry professionals in the church. It's my small way of giving back to all those who invested in me all those years ago.

Straw poll answers, and branding intentionality

Okay, here are where these straws are from:

- a green straw: Starbucks
- a white straw with red and yellow stripes: McDonald's
- a red straw: Burger King
- a white straw with yellow stripes: Wendy's
- a black straw: Panera
- an orange straw with pink stripes: Dunkin' Donuts
- a blue straw: Culver's
- a white straw: Subway

When I used this exercise at the Willow Creek conference last week, since folks were from all over the country, some of the guesses were things like Whattaburger, Sonic, In-N-Out and Carl's Jr. Funny to hear regional variances. The one person who correctly identified the Culver's straw was from Wheaton, Illinois.

Several of these straws had the brand name and logo preprinted on the wrappers. Only a few chains had generic translucent straws with plain white wrappers - Chipotle, Boston Market, maybe Quiznos. Most restaurants had straws with color schemes that reinforced their brand identities.

It's scary to me how distinctive and intentional the branding is. If I say "little pink plastic spoon," you know it's from Baskin Robbins. If you see a yellow napkin, chances are you'll recognize it as being from Wendy's. Remember sporks from KFC?

I remember during grad school one of my media theory classes analyzed a Pepsi commercial featuring Cindy Crawford, and we noted that her white tank top, blue jeans shorts and red car reinforced the white, blue and red color scheme of the Pepsi can. That had to have been intentional (and was probably also a not-so-subtle appeal to American patriotism). Later on, Pepsi made their cans blue, in an attempt to claim blue as their brand identity the way that Coca-Cola has claimed red. (And though it is an urban legend that Coca-Cola created Santa Claus to reinforce their ubiquitous red and white look, Coca-Cola's advertising certainly helped popularize images of the red-and-white Santa.)

At Willow Creek, and a straw poll

I'm posting this from the Willow Creek Group Life Conference, where I just presented two back-to-back workshops on "Building Community in Suburbia." Things went well in both sessions, with some good interaction and discussion. One fellow mentioned to me how his church frames their ministry in terms of being good neighbors to the community, getting involved with the local fire department, park district, civic organizations and such. He said that this community involvement has been more fruitful than exhorting church members toward individualistic evangelistic witness. I think that's the power of the witnessing community. When churches and Christian communities are corporately involved in the life of their local neighborhood and municipality, that often speaks more loudly than anything we do as individual Christians. Not to discount the efficacy or importance of personal evangelism, but I think it's essential these days for churches to corporately invest in their local areas and seek the welfare of their suburbs.

One of the things I talked about was the importance of local geography and neighborhood, and a fellow mentioned to me that he knows a guy who's selling his multimillion-dollar house in order to buy a small condo and relocate closer to his church's ministry context. Which is a great example both of intentionality in neighborhood location and parish (to counter commuter culture) and also of downshifting one's lifestyle (to counter consumer culture).

It's interesting to be here at Willow Creek, because even though they're near me here in the Chicago suburbs, it's been a few years since I've visited. They in many ways have been the flagship church of all suburban churches. They do many things very well; indeed, much of their growth and success can be attributed not only to their creative and seeker-sensitive approaches, but to a more fundamental commitment to being incarnationally suburban in their ministry. And they are currently shifting away from an affinity-based ministry approach to a more geographic-locality-based ministry approach, learning from multi-site churches like Community Christian Church. (I affirm both approaches, since different churches and contexts usually require different things, but I applaud the geographic shift in emphasis.) I have some cautions about Willow and other suburban megachurches, as I've detailed in my book, but it's good to be here and see the national and global reach of their ministry.

At any rate, when I started writing this post (at a computer in their speakers' lounge), my main purpose was to give a quick straw poll. As in literal straws. Some time ago I realized that restaurants coordinate their straws to reinforce their overall brand identity. So this weekend Josiah and I went around to various restaurants to collect straws, which I used as an illustration in my workshops here. So, can you identify the sources of the following?

- a green straw
- a white straw with red and yellow stripes
- a red straw
- a white straw with yellow stripes
- a black straw
- an orange straw with pink stripes
- a blue straw
- a white straw

These are all from fast food or quick-casual restaurants in the Chicagoland area. Take your guesses! No prizes, but you can have the satisfaction of successfully identifying how much consumer culture and corporate branding has permeated even the details of restaurant straws.

On speaking and writing, teaching and learning

I'm in the middle of a busy season - nine speaking engagements in six weeks. Six of those are the Sunday school class I'm guest teaching at Immanuel Presbyterian (which one of the class members blogged about). This past Sunday I also gave an hour-and-a-half presentation at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in St. Charles; it was kind of like giving three different sermons back to back. A bit tiring, but it went well. I don't know how professors teach three- or four-hour block classes! Then next week I'll be leading some workshops at the Willow Creek Group Life Conference. The week after that I'm headed to Minnesota to speak at Homecoming at my undergrad alma mater, Crossroads College. Whew! Plus I'm also scheduled to lead a morning devotion during a planning retreat next week.

They say that whenever you speak, you actually give three talks. There's the talk that you plan to give, the talk you actually give, and the talk you wish you had given. This was certainly the case at Bethlehem Lutheran. I came in with way more material than there was time for (always better to overprepare than underprepare, I think). So during small group processing times in the midst of the presentation, I was scribbling around my manuscript, slashing paragraphs, deciding what to cut and skip and highlight and whatnot. I was discombobulated enough at one point that I glossed over an entire page and then tried to go back later and catch some of it. It didn't flow great, but it was okay.

I tend to be a manuscript speaker. I generally write out all my comments ahead of time, word for word. Other speakers and preachers are able to speak from outlines or brief notes ("tell Jell-O story here"), but I can't do it. I'll adjust things on the fly as I speak, so I'm not entirely tied to the text, but unless I'm very familiar with the material, I can't speak without notes. The manuscript pages are my security blanket. That way, if I have a brain freeze and blank out, I can at least look down on the page and read something.

Writing and speaking are very different mediums, rhetorically. It doesn't work for me to cut and paste from my book chapters and try to turn them into talks. It tends to sound too abstract that way. I find it works better to look over my published material but then to open a new Word document and write a fresh talk around the content. Otherwise I'll use vocabulary and language that just don't sound right conversationally.

Blogging is a little different. My "blogging voice" tends to sound more like my conversational speaking voice, so I can occasionally cut and paste from a blog post and insert that material into a talk. But I can't cut and paste from a talk or a blog entry and try to put it into a book chapter. Writing for publication, for me at least, requires a different mindset and approach, and I'm a lot more careful about word choice and sentence structure and all that.

These days, authors are increasingly required to be public speakers. The more visible an author is, out speaking and whatnot, the more likely people will find the books. But many authors are not great public speakers, and many public speakers are not great writers. Though there's overlap, these worlds are very different. Compare this with music or theatre. For musicians and actors, public performance is a necessary component of their art. They give concerts, they have onstage personas. But writers, often introverts by nature, usually ply their craft in solitude (or at Starbucks), and what emerges from that creative context doesn't necessarily translate well to the conference platform.

At one point I was planning on pastoral ministry, so I've had my share of homiletics courses and sermon prep. I'm an extrovert, so I enjoy going out and speaking and interacting with people. And I learn a lot from these experiences; all of it helps refine my material and shape my thinking. But sometimes part of me wishes I could just mail my book out instead of talking. After all, in terms of sheer content delivery, talks are rather inefficient. I can only say so much in a half hour talk, and books can give a lot more analysis and depth. When I'm talking, I'll think to myself, here's the overview and the summary bullet points, but if you want the real scoop on all this, read chapter 3!

But I know that pedagogically, public speaking can do things that mere reading can't. I think in some ways it might be harder to construct a good class or workshop than to write an essay or article. When writing, I'm mostly just thinking about content and style. But a workshop or talk requires thinking through how people will be experiencing the material in real time. Is this too much? Too theoretical? Do I need an illustration here? Group discussion? An interactive activity? Sadly, it's easier to just deliver a lecture and be done with it than to really work through what would be good pedagogy. As one of my mentors mentioned to me, professors usually focus on their teaching and don't think enough about the students' actual learning. Because it's harder - there are a just a lot more variables and factors beyond the teacher's control.

So kudos to all teachers, professors, pastors and preachers out there - I recognize how difficult it is to do what you do! Thanks for your faithfulness in preparation and teaching day in and day out, preaching Sunday after Sunday, year after year. Those of us in the publishing world have a lot to learn from you.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Last night I finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner. It's a worthy follow-up, and I think it might have been even more haunting and captivating than his first novel. The book follows the intersecting lives of several women in Afghanistan throughout three decades of recent history. The narrative portrays the impact and brutality of war on local families and communities, and highlights the fact that inhumanity and cruelty often come not from outside enemies but from those closest to you. It's a tragic, heartbreaking story, and yet one laced with hope and redemption.

I won't give away too much of the plot, since it really must be experienced for yourself, but I will say that one discomfiting dimension of the book was that the novel describes events in contemporary history that I've lived through but have been largely ignorant of. As a kid, I vaguely remember hearing something about Soviet troops in Afghanistan but of course had no idea what any of that was about. Like most of us in the West, I only heard of the Taliban after 9/11. Hosseini's novel gives us a startling portrait of the on-the-ground lived realities of life in Afghanistan, particularly the plight of women.

It was disturbing to realize that some of the events described in the book (and lived out by countless Afghan citizens) took place as I was going to college and grad school, getting married and setting up my happy little suburban life - completely unaware of how people around the world were suffering. Several of the characters in the book are roughly the same age as me and my wife, according to the novel's timeline, and it strikes me that they and so many real-life people like them have endured far more trauma and faced more painful choices in their young lives than most of us in the West have encountered. This is the power of good literature, to help us understand and experience what we normally cannot even imagine.

Particularly interesting is the role of religion throughout the book, for good and for bad. I don't know if the author intended the book to be an "Islamic novel" the way we think of our contemporary "Christian novels," but the portrait of Islam in the book is quite realistic, demonstrating both its capacity for fundamentalism and oppression as well as its potential for transcendance and hope. Christian readers of this novel will find that certain plot points have deeply Christian implications and resonances. One particular instance of sacrificial love struck me as profoundly Christ-like, and I wonder if it could serve as an illustrative bridge to the gospel for Muslim or secular readers.

At any rate, this is a significant novel and a fine example of contemporary literary fiction that transcends time and culture. Out of its particulars, it speaks to universals of the human spirit, perseverance and love. It will break your heart, but I also hope that it will enlarge your heart and encourage you to pray for our troubled world.

Pitfalls of romanticizing worship

[It's been a busy week, and I haven't had much time for original blogging. So what follows below are some of my thoughts from an e-mail discussion a few months ago regarding the topic of worship and love and to what extent worship songs and services should image a love relationship between us and God.]

Let me chip in with an observation about my own ambivalence about love being the primary lens or metaphor for worship - not because it's unbiblical, but because most of us late-modern/postmodern North Americans view that love primarily through the notion of romantic love, not a more holistic, agapic, communal, cosmic, sacrificial love. It's usually filtered through the grid of individualistic romantic comedies and overly personalizes the worship experience into a "Jesus & me" experience, losing the corporate sense of the worshipping community. Hence the "Jesus as idealized perfect boyfriend" type worship ballads.

Yet another concern with romanticizing worship is that it's a relatively recent and particularly Western and North American construct. As I've argued in Singles at the Crossroads and was just reading in Thomas Cahill's Mysteries of the Middle Ages, the vast majority of human history did not have a romantic understanding of love - romantic love is a development of the late middle ages and then heightened by 18th-century Romanticism and then 20th-century Hollywood. So I resonate with Bob Webber's concerns [about romanticized worship songs]. Culturally, I think that when we Christianize romantic motifs in our worship, we often merely substitute one idolatry for another, rather than challenging the very validity of romantic love as a controlling narrative in our culture.

So if we are to recover a more biblical, contextually Jewish and Trinitarian Christian understanding of worship as expression of love, we need worship songs that more faithfully reflect love as it would have been understood historically by God's people. What was the Israelite understanding of love as lived and practiced in the OT and second temple Judaism? What was the Christian understanding of love as lived and practiced in the early church? It seems to me that their notion of love in worship was often wedded to care for the widow and orphan, welcoming the stranger and the alien, rescuing the abandoned, poor and marginalized. This is borne out in Isaiah and the minor prophets as well as Acts and patristic literature. In other words, love of neighbor was the primary understanding of love, not the romantic/erotic love of a lover. And if acceptable worship was understood in love terms, it was this larger corporate love of others, not an individualistic notion of romantic love.

I suppose this might be too broad a brush - Hosea of course uses the marital metaphor (with the emphasis on God's faithfulness in the face of human infidelity - how often do we have worship songs proclaim, "We have been unfaithful adulterers, O Lover of my soul"?). But of course there corporate Israel is the beloved, not isolated individuals. And bride of Christ language is also intended to be corporate.

I realize I'm addressing several topics at once - romanticism and individualism - which overlap and are often fused. And I suspect that depending on one's tradition and context, some churches tip too much toward rationalism while others veer too much toward romanticism, and likewise some emphasize individualism too much while others emphasize collectivism. So depending on your location, you'll have different dangers to beware of. I suppose much depends on local leadership being able to diagnose their own congregations' health. Mark Labberton, author of The Dangerous Act of Worship, mentioned to me that his church has pretty much replaced all "I, me, my" language with corporate "we, us, our" language in all their worship and liturgy. That's their way of resisting the radical individualism of their cultural context (Berkeley), and I suspect it also reduces overly romanticizing the worship experience.

Anyway, these discussions have been going on for centuries - if I recall correctly, John Wesley was concerned that his brother Charles was getting too romantic and sappy in his hymnody. So how can the church be contextual and countercultural in such a time as this? In an age of American Idol, should we resist solo performances? In an age of over-privatization, should we not do podcasts? I don't know. But there's obviously plenty for us here to think about for years to come.

"live sin the suburbs"

Yesterday morning I was guest teaching a Sunday school class at Immanuel Presbyterian Church, and I was amused by this typo in the bulletin:

"More than half of the population now live sin the suburbs."

Live sin the suburbs! I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it sounds dastardly.

This weekend seemed busier than usual. Saturday morning we went to the arboretum with our local Down syndrome network group. Ellen and I led worship Saturday evening, and after church we had a children's ministry kickoff time of food and games. Then Sunday morning I was with the good people at Immanuel, and in the afternoon our neighborhood association had its annual picnic with food and games. Rather exhausting and draining, all told. I was so wiped out that I kept falling asleep while reading Return of the Jedi with Josiah.

It occurred to me that this is part of the challenge of suburban life. It can be overly busy, leaving us frazzled and worn out. And we can be tempted to check out, to just say, forget it - never mind getting involved in the community or trying to connect with neighbors. It's too tiring. It's easier to forget the world and just live our own privatized lives in our isolated bubble. Even though I'm an extrovert on the Myers-Briggs, I've been feeling more introverted lately and feel like hiding from the world sometimes.

But I have to remind myself that it's good to be intentional to meet neighbors and work toward building community. A new family moved in across the street from us this past week, and I brought over a flyer inviting them to the association picnic. I was glad to see that they showed up, and their kids played with our kids. (There were three little boys at the picnic all named Alex. And Josiah's middle name is Alexander. Kind of funny. I wanted to yell, "Hey, Alex!" and see if they all turned around. But I didn't.) We re-met another family (we had met them briefly while trick-or-treating last year), and we got to know them a little, exchanged phone numbers and said we should set up a playdate sometime.

So even though it might have been easier to just stay home and nap, I'm glad we got to meet some of our neighbors. It's all part of living Christianly in the suburbs, I think.