Introducing your Children to God

So, we've had, so far, four answers to the question I posed last time: "What is the most important thing for a parent to ensure his or her child learns?"

The consensus seems to be, from what I can tell, that the one most important thing that a parent can teach his or her child is about God.  Specifically, to introduce one's child to God is the first and most important responsibility of a parent.  To mix what Orlinda, Juliana and Cameron said together, parents should teach their children who God is, that He loves them, and teach them to love Him back.

So, here's Question #3:

What is the second-most important thing for a parent to teach his or her child?

Third Time's the Charm, or Three Strikes and Yer Out…

So, obviously, my attempt to keep this blog going stumbled, again.  That means that this will be the third time that I'm trying to keep writing on a somewhat regular basis.  It I don't succeed this time, I'll be done with the whole thing and stop bothering everyone.  Hopefully, that won't be the case.

So, the consensus from everyone who answered my last question, both here and on Facebook, seems to be that, basically, the responsibility to educate a child belongs to the parents, especially in the area of ethics.  One commenter on Facebook pointed out Deuteronomy 6, the famous passage in which God commands the Israelites to teach their children about God and their history.

I definitely agree.  Children are given to parents, not to the State or to the community at large.  The responsibility to educate them falls totally to the parents.  That said, as a good number of those who commented pointed out, the possibility exists for parents to in some way arrange for others be involved in their child's education.  As besiderself pointed out, even when this occurs, the parent is not delegating ultimate responsibility for the child's education to the other people who are involved.  So, while Gilligan and James (through support) have a good point about how parents aren't always (or usually) equipped to totally execute their child's education alone, and how parents should let, say, someone who know's Calculus be the one to teach your child Calculus, most of the responsibility to have your child taught Calculus remains with the parent; I think we can probably all agree that some responsibility does, though, go to the person who has agreed to teach the child Calculus.

So, Question #2:

What is the most important thing for a parent to ensure his or her child learns?

Apologies, Reboot, Question

Hmm.

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that I started this off the wrong way.  I'm sorry.

I should have realized this sooner, but then I've never been known to my friends as someone who is terribly good at seeing how what I say is being received.

Here's where I think I went wrong:

1. I invited my readers to a conversation and then presented a multi-part story as the first part of the conversation.  There really wasn't any place for comment until the end of the story.  That makes for a lousy conversation.

2. I didn't realize just how different some of my starting assumptions are from some other people's and I just jumped right into where my thought processes are now instead of going back to the beginning of my thought processes so we could iron out assumptions and see if we end up back where I am right now or if we end up someplace completely different.

Here's what I'm going to do about it:

1. Reboot.  I'm starting the conversation over.  This time, no multi-part stories- which are, to one degree or another, me monologuing.  This time, more questions.

2. This time, I'm going to endeavor to "start at the very beginning, a very good place to start." (Sorry, one of my mom's favorite movies is Sound of Music, so I grew up watching it.)

So, let's try this again, shall we?

Question #1:

Who's responsibility is it to educate children?

Saltshakers and Bubbles, Part 1

So, maybe it was a strange way to start off this discussion in my head, with a fairy tale… but I think it shows a lot of my concerns about the current state of the Church in the States today.

But this is supposed to be a conversation- both sides of the issue battling it out in my head, in this blog (including the comments- I really do need other people's input to figure this out)- so that means we need some arguments for Christian Education as well as against it.  I'm planning on trying to dig some more up, but here's what I have so far, and I think that it will at least be a good start:

As Christians, we're to be the Salt of the Earth.  Salt is used to preserve and flavor food by being sprinkled or rubbed on food (or, as I learned yesterday, dissolved in water which the meat is then soaked in, called "brining"); for our purposes, the basic principle here is that the salt is everywhere- it permeates the meat.

The salt isn't concentrated- it permeates the meat evenly.


We should be doing that as well, as the Church.  We should be everywhere.

At first glance, then, it would seem that Christian Education is the exact opposite of this; it's a concentration of Christian kids and Christian teachers in certain schools, resulting in lowered concentrations of Christians in other schools- a dilution, if you will.  Christian Education seems just like a bubble from my fairy tale.

Here's an alternate theory: what if Christian schools aren't bubbles at all, but are actually saltshakers?  Saltshakers are concentrations of salt even higher than that found in meat which is treated with salt, but they are also far from unproductive.  They store salt until it is time for it to be used.

This alternate theory, then, is that Christian schools are saltshakers; they are for training and preparing Christian students to go out into the world and be the Salt of the Earth.

More on this in posts to come, but what do you think?  Are Christian schools, by nature, bubbles or saltshakers? Or does it depend of execution?  Can a Christian school choose whether to be a bubble or a saltshaker?  Do you have stories about one or the other kind of experience, or about being in a public school "diluted" by the existence of Christian schools?

A Fairy Tale, Part 3

And the Bubbleheads started to forget what it was that made them Bubbleheads in the first place.  They forgot that "Bubblehead" just meant that you were friends with the King of Everything and His Son.  Some of them started making rules for how Bubbleheads should act, and they cared more about that than about being friends with the King of Everything and His Son.  Others decided that being a Bubblehead was all about the experience of air all around you and cared more about the experience of the air than about the King of Everything and His Son.  Some people decided to live in the bubbles without becoming friends with the King of Everything and His Son.  They fit in because they followed the rules and they enjoyed the air.

And some of the Bubblehead's kids didn't became friends with the King of Everything and His Son, but lived in the bubbles anyway, because they were nice and safe and because they knew the rules to follow to make everyone think that they were Bubbleheads, but most of all because, when they were inside the bubbles, no one could tell whether they would have air around their heads if they left the big bubble.

But a sad thing began to happen.  Slowly, the bubbles the Bubbleheads lived in began to change.  The hot air that they used to keep others out began to mix with the cool air they lived in.  The people who weren't Bubbleheads that lived in the bubbles brought in the sea water.  The hot air and the sea water mixed and frothed and became a hot, salty foam that began to choke the people in the bubbles.

This happened so slowly that the people in the bubbles didn't notice it happening, but the people outside the bubble did.  When they came to see what the bubbles were about, they stopped wanting to go in and become Bubbleheads.  When they got a whiff of the air in the bubbles, they recoiled in disgust at the hot, salty froth inside.

And slowly, slowly the people inside the bubble that were there for the air and the safety started to leave.  And the Bubbleheads' children decided that the sea water was nicer than the froth inside the bubbles and that they didn't have as many rules outside the bubbles and so, when they grew up, they left.

And, as sad as this was, the saddest thing was that the Bubbleheads living in their bubbles barely realized what was going on and didn't know what to do about it at all, because they had forgotten that what was important was that you were a friend of the King of Everything and His Son, not that you were living in a bubble, or that you followed all the right rules, or that you felt air all around you, or that you were safe.

And, one by one, as the people left and the Bubbleheads died away, all the bubbles in that country shrunk away and disappeared.

So, what do you think?  Is this fairy tale "true?"  And how might it apply to Christian Education?

A Fairy Tale, Part 2

As people began to understand that the Bubbleheads were there to stay, some of them began to react to them differently.  While some still put a lot of energy into killing them wherever they could find them, others stopped killing them at all.  They realized that trying to kill the Bubbleheads just spread them around and made them united.  Some places, where the king became a Bubblehead, made it a law that everyone had to be a Bubblehead.

In one country, Bubbleheads had a lot of freedom.  No one killed Bubbleheads, and if they did, they went to prison.  There were a lot of Bubbleheads there; in fact, many Bubbleheads had moved there because of the freedom they could have there.  When these Bubbleheads got together, they noticed how their bubbles joined together.  If enough Bubbleheads got together, they had giant bubbles they could walk around in and feel the air all over them, not just around their heads.  They decided that they liked this and wanted it all the time.  In fact, some of them decided that it was dangerous outside these big bubbles.  After all, people who weren't Bubbleheads still didn't like Bubbleheads, even if they didn't kill them, right?  They still said bad things about the King of Everything.  They lied about Him and about the Bubbleheads.  It was so much nicer and safer to be inside big bubbles with lots and lots of Bubbleheads all the time.

And so the Bubbleheads in this country decided to see if they could live in giant bubbles all the time.  They decided to all work together in the same places and had big bubbles there.  They especially decided to send their children to Bubblehead schools, where the teachers were all Bubbleheads and where no one would tell them lies about the King of Everything or about Bubbleheads.  Then the Bubblehead children went to Bubblehead universities where most everyone was a Bubblehead too, and then they got jobs with lots and lots of other Bubbleheads and lived in those bubbles.

Some Bubbleheads were born in a bubble, raised in a bubble, married in a bubble, raised their own kids in a bubble and died in a bubble.  They liked this, because the air felt so good.

But the people that lived at the bottom of the sea are a forgetful people and the Bubbleheads began to forget things too.

They began to forget how it felt not to have any air to breath.  They forgot that, just outside their bubbles, other people were gasping through their short, painful lives.  They forgot how to be friends with people outside their bubbles, because they hadn't had any friends that were outside their bubbles even when they were kids.  They forgot how to tell people about the King of Everything and His Son that He had sent.  They forgot how to tell people about the air bubbles around their heads.

They forgot that the King of Everything wanted them to tell other people about Him because He wanted more friends.

And the things that people said about the Bubbleheads came true.  The Bubbleheads began to think that they were better than the people outside their bubbles, and they said so.  Sometimes people tried to get close to the big bubbles to see what it was all about.  Sometimes they got whiffs of the cool, relaxing air and came in and became Bubbleheads.  Sometimes, though, they found that there was a wall of hot, blasting air between them and the cool air the Bubbleheads were living in.

And so the King of everything had less and less new friends in that country.

A Fairy Tale, Part 1

One of my favorite authors is George Orwell, who, among other things, wrote Animal Farm.  This fairy tale is inspired by Animal Farm and is in the same genre.  While some things have a one-to-one correspondence to our lives, others might not.  The point of this genre is to communicate the big picture in a new, fresh way so that it is easier to look at something we're used to looking at in one way in another way.  So, without further ado:

Once upon a time, there was an air-breathing people who moved to the bottom of the sea to live.

They had a problem: there was no air at the bottom of the sea.  Now, this air-breathing people could live a for a few years without air, unlike us, who can only manage a few moments, but, if they had air to breath, they would live forever.

And so this people continued to live on the bottom of the sea without air, gasping out their short, painful lives, and they began to forget that they could breath air, or that they could live forever when they breathed it, or even that air existed.  After thousands of years of living at the bottom of the sea, most of them even forgot what air was.

One day a Baby was born who had a bubble of air around his head.  He said that He had been sent by His Father, the King of Everything, to tell everyone that they could have air too, if they believed Him and became friends with Him and His Father.

Most people didn't believe Him.  They had stopped even debating whether air existed and didn't even know what it was anymore, so they didn't recognize that the bubble around His head was air.  Even the people who wanted to be His friends didn't really understand what air was, but they loved Him anyway and tried to understand.

One day, the people at the bottom of the sea got together and killed the Man with the bubble of air around His head, but He came back to life.  His friends started to understand what He had been talking about.  He went back up above the sea, but His friends started to have bubbles of air grow around their heads because they believed in Him and were friends with Him and His Father.

They started telling other people, people they knew and people they didn't know, about Him, His Father and the air around their heads.  Many people got excited about what they had to say.  Many people who had doubts about what they said were won over because they saw that the people with bubbles around their heads didn't gasp painfully through life the way they did.  Sometimes, when the people with bubbles around their heads got close to people who didn't, the people who didn't would bump the bubble and get a whiff of air.  Many people decided to believe in the King of Everything and to be His friend and bubbles of air grew around their heads too.

But many people decided that these people with bubbles around their heads were bad.  They killed many of them and chased most of the others from place to place.  They called them "bubbleheads" and said that the only air they had around their heads was "hot air."  They got mad at the "bubbleheads" for saying that they had bubbles around their heads and that other people didn't.  They said that the "bubbleheads" thought they were better than everyone else.

The King of Everything's friends started calling themselves Bubbleheads too, and continued to tell everyone about the King of Everything as they were chased from place to place, so that more and more people heard about and became friends with the King of Everything.  In time, many, many people became Bubbleheads.  Even some kings and emperors became Bubbleheads.

While it's not finished yet, does this genre seem to be working? Is it giving new perspective to old concepts and understandings?

Christian Education

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about Christian Education, that is, private Christian schools, whether elementary/middle/junior/high school or colleges.  I'm going to begin to post a good number of entries to this blog that record the debate within me.  Last month in an email to a good friend I wrote the following; let it be a preview of posts to come:

And that's the tension I'm struggling with right now- my experiences and ecclesiology on the one hand, my confusion that Wine is still in the leaky wineskins, my internal check of my biased perspectives, my epistemological self-doubt and my wonder that other "organics" don't seem to believe in the evils of Christian Ed with the same ferocity that I do on the other.  On the one hand, I have the admonition that those who pick fights with the Bride don't take long to find themselves fighting with the Bride-Groom, on the other, I have the strong, strong "deviant labeling" in Scripture for those who are hurting the Church- at what point is criticizing the Church attacking Her chains and at what point is it attacking Her?

Thoughts? Any simple answers to prevent multiple posts wasting perfectly good internet?

I'm Back, Part 3

I'm still sold on this whole Organic Church thing, and I am still pretty fervent about this being the right way to be doing Church.  The thing is, I look around and most of the people around me in the Organic Church movement aren't as ready to breathe fire as I am, aren't as ready to insist that everyone should be doing Church organically.  Lately, I've seen this most in the difference between my view of Christian Education and other people's views on Christian Ed.  While I'm at a place where I would advocate the total abandonment of Christian Education, the people I do Church with seem to have more positive attitudes towards Christian Ed, to one degree or another.

This really confuses me.  Organic Church being the outworking of Biblical Ecclesiology seems so obvious to me while doing Church in the other ways that it is being done in the US today seems so wrong to me.  Why aren't other people who see things the way I do as adamant about this as I am?

Maybe I'm missing something.  Maybe I should slow down.

One of my good friends and mentors recently told me that when you start attacking the Bride, it isn't long 'til you're fighting with the Bridegroom.  While I'm trying to attack the chains that bind her, is it possible that I've been overzealous and been attacking the Church and not just the forms that bind Her?  As I said in my first set of posts, I'm young, unwise, rash and full of energy.  Perhaps I should concentrate on being wise right now.  When I'm old and hopefully wiser, I can concentrate on making sure that I'm breathing enough fire.

Maybe I'm being too close-minded.  Maybe there are more ways to do things Biblically than I thought.  I'm going to try to keep that in mind as I blog here.  There will still be some challenging things in this blog, as what I blog about here will be about what I'm going through, which will be challenging.  I'm just going to try to make it so that the challenge is framed so it is at us, both you, the reader, and me, instead of being from me at you.  I'll talk about what is challenging me and hopefully you'll talk back to me about it too.

I'm Back, Part 2

So, in "I'm Back, Part 2" I said that one of the changes in my vision of this blog was that it was more about God.  This is because I am more and more convinced that everything that has to do with Church is all about God.

I think that we oftentimes get caught up in "what, when, where, how" questions when we talk about doing Church.  I know I do.

That's exactly what I was doing when I started this blog.  I was convinced that I had found the movement that had, or was at least beginning to have, the answers to these questions right.  These people knew what to do correctly for Church, they knew when to do Church (all the time), they knew where to do Church (everywhere) and they knew how to do Church.  This, for the most part, is what drew me to the Organic Church movement.  I haven't really changed my mind concerning whether the movement has the right answers to these questions, though that's a subject for part 3 of this post.

What has changed is what questions I think are important.

I still think "what, when, where, how" questions are important, but I think that they pale in significance compared to "Who?" and "Why?" as questions we deal with when we talk about Church.  The answer to both of these questions, of course, should be "God."  God is Who the Church is for, Who Church is all about, Who we do Church to get to know better.  God is Who this is all about.

And God is Why.  God is why we can meet with people we don't have anything else in common with and can be united.  God is why we tell other people about Him.  God is why we have the love that is needed to sacrifice our own good for the good of others, from our family to our enemies.

When you boil it all down, when you cut through the fancy words, when you get to what this is all about, there's only one thing left: God.

Church, in fact, is nothing more, nothing less, than God loving me, me loving God back with His love, me being loved by others with God's love, and me loving others with God's love.  That's all there is to it. It's impossible if you take God out of any part of the definition, but it's ridiculously simple if He's there in all of it.  It's all about God.  He's Who this is all about and He's Why we're able to do this.

I'm Back, Part 1

So, as promised, with the new year comes renewed activity on this blog.  I plan to post two to four times a week.

Besides the fact that I plan to be posting again, the biggest change to this blog will be to the philosophy of the blog. When this blog started, I laid out a grand vision for my blog as follows:

I've become convinced that this is not just the way of doing church that best fits me, but that Organic Church, meaning the principles and foundations of Organic Church, is the way church should be done. This blog is meant to be a way to explore this idea and to engage in conversation about the way church should be done. It is meant to be a catalyst for discussion both within the Simple Church movement (there is a lot to discuss- Organic Church being the right way really means the right starting points, not the right exact executions) and without, as an apologetic organ for the movement. I hope to convince those outside the Simple Church movement that, firstly, this isn't apostasy or heresy and that, secondly, they should join us.

Here's my new vision for my blog:

This blog is to record my thoughts and serve as a place for discussion about my experiences and beliefs as I try to delve into the depths of "doing Church," which I'm increasingly convinced means "living life with God."

A bit of a change, huh? Besides being far less of a mouthful, the main changes are that it is more about God and isn't as dogmatic. 

More on these changes in parts 2 and 3 of this post.

We're still here

I want to apologize to anyone who might have been following this blog when I kind of just stopped posting new stuff to it.  I stopped posting for a few reasons: I had a long conversation that shook my certainty of my grasp of what Christianity is about (I could have always told you it was about Jesus, but I'm not sure just how much I really got that before the conversation), I was told by someone that my posts here were really cerebral and hard to understand and, honestly, school started up again and I got an job and I don't have as much time on my hands as I used to.

I still plan on continuing this blog.

But not yet.  My plan right now, Lord allowing, is to slowly start working on posts now so that when the new year comes I'll have plenty of posts that I can start releasing.  That way I'll be "ahead" and if I drop the ball now and then I'll have some slack that will allow me to keep posting.  I don't know how often a week I'll be posting, but we'll just have to see as far as that goes.

Leadership and Order in the Simple Church

This post is going to concern a subject I'm not completely certain about, but that I've been thinking more about lately and that I would like to see a lot more discussion on inside the movement.  Thus, this post is very much me thinking "out loud" and inviting (even more than usual) comments, correction, questions or other forms of contribution.  If this has been addressed anyplace, please let me know.

Simple church is about as close as you can get to applying the concepts of Anarchy to Christianity.  With it's emphasis on empowering everyone involved with a correct understanding of their priesthood, there is very little telling of others what to do, from what I can tell.  People are very much encouraged to go out and involve themselves in whatever they feel God would like them to be involved in, whether that is joining an activity or local movement of some sort, or starting something up themselves.  Those who are in positions of leadership tend to have a "hands-off" affirmative approach to people going out and working for God in ways that the leaders hadn't even imagined, often giving advice and guiding concerning whatever is happening, but leaving actual control to those who are involved in whatever ministry is going on.

I think this is good.  The Church, after all, is Jesus', not ours, and especially not exclusively our leaders'.  He gets to decide what, when, where and how things happen in His Church, not us.  This means that we don't have the right to be telling other believers, who we will never outrank because we all are priests, to serve God one way or another.  We simply don't have the responsibility to dictate others' service that way.

At the same time, though, sharp readers will have noticed that in order for leaders to have "hands-off" attitudes there have to be leaders.  That's right, the simple church movement definitely has leaders. (In fact, Anarchists have leaders too, if you do your research, but that's politics.  I try to keep that to a minimum here.)  And I think that is good, because it is biblical.

When we read the New Testament, in both Acts and the Epistles, and even some in the Gospels, we see that the Church is never without leaders.  In his first letter to Timothy, Paul gives criteria for overseers and deacons as well as instructions concerning elders, which obviously indicates that overseers, deacons and elders are things that churches should have.  This existence of leadership extends beyond the internal local church government, as well.  In multiple passages, believers are given instruction concerning role-systems where one party had more power than the other: parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and slaves, even instructions to submit to kings and governors.  Because the simple church movement has to be, above all, about doing church the right way according to God's word, it cannot abandon these teachings without contradicting its very reason for existing.

(There is, of course, the question of interpretation of these passages.  It is possible for two people to approach these scriptures with the same level of respect for Scripture as the plenary verbally inspired and inerrant words of God and, in good faith, come up with different interpretations.  How "official" do the positions of elder, deacon or overseer have to be, for example.  I do think that a serious and respectful attitude towards the Scriptures, however, does preclude some interpretations, such as those that dismiss specific teachings as culturally rooted without searching for the principles which the specific teachings were derived from in order to apply those principles today.)

An objection to this might be the passage in Galatians where Paul claims that we are all one in Christ, or perhaps the passage in Colossians where Paul claims that there is "no distinction" among Christians.  To rely on these passages to claim that no role-structure with leaders, whether in church government or in the home, should exist in the Church is to cynically ignore the multitude of other passages that indicate otherwise, as well as to ignore the point communicated in these two passages: that we all have the same worth and value before God, so that we should not treat others as valueless.  We all, then, are priests of equal rank, for Jesus is the only High Priest, but the Bible is clear, even in the same chapter as the passage linked above from Colossians, that there should be leadership and order in the Church.

I'm not an expert on the Bible, and I don't have the skills, wisdom and experience to pontificate about the details of how Biblical leadership should be conducted in the Church, in the Home and in the public sphere, but it doesn't take a lot of skills, wisdom or experience to recognize that the Bible teaches that leadership should exist in all those areas.  While people can disagree on the details of that leadership in good faith, ignoring this teaching from the Bible is both wrong and all too prevalent today.

This issue, I think, is especially important for the simple church movement to think through and deal with precisely because we are attempting to revert back to the Church-wide priesthood that is biblical.  Figuring out the details of whether men and women should behave differently from each other in the church didn't matter so much when both men and women mainly sat and listened to professionals on a stage.  When we encourage both men and women to seize their birthright of priesthood in Christ and actually do things in the Church, figuring out how all these verses apply to us today becomes top priority.

Again, while I'm always looking for responses and input, positive or negative, with any of my posts here (since the goal of this blog is to encourage conversations and dialogue), this is one of those posts where, since my thinking is especially unfinished, I would especially appreciate input, especially from leaders in the Church.

Priests and Superstars

First, some stories from college. (I've got to be somewhat post-modern here, don't I? I don't think I've told a single story on this blog so far.)

When we first got to college, my roommate/best friend since kindergarten and I decided that we would spend the first semester checking out churches, with no real commitment to join any of them until we decided on a church over Christmas Break. That didn't quite work out, as we got snagged by a wonderful church just after Thanksgiving, but it did give us a chance to visit churches that we knew ahead of time that we weren't going to plug in to, so we could see how other people do church. The first church we visited was an Orthodox Presbyterian church that was in the final stages of becoming a full member of that denomination (I don't know the proper terminology for that, but you get the idea). It had been started a short while before, apparently, and had been helped through the process by an Orthodox Presbyterian church in a neighboring town and was meeting in a hotel until they could get a building.

My roommate and I had a blast, even though we knew we weren't coming back. The people were very friendly, the sermon was good, if I remember correctly, and we discovered that some people actually sing Psalms as hymns, something I think is an awfully good idea, especially compared to the rather frustrating tendency of a lot of contemporary praise songs to just quote a verse or two from a Psalm instead.

One thing, though, bothered me. It turns out that the pastor of this church hadn't finished getting ordained or whatever by the Orthodox Presbyterians, so he wasn't allowed to give communion yet. So that this church could celebrate communion, every month or so this pastor and the pastor from the "mother church" would travel to each others' churches and the ordained pastor would give communion in this church while his church went without communion for a week. We happened to visit on one of those Sundays.

Another story: some of my friends, including my best friend, were in the college choir and thus went on the choir tour during spring break that year. I remember hearing that one of my friends, who is Plymouth Brethren, decided to have communion, I think with some apple juice juice boxes and some tortillas that were on the bus. It apparently took some major convincing of another of my friends for her to join in, because she wasn't sure you could "do that."

One of the most important doctrines in ecclesiology, I think, is the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Basically, it says that no one stands between any Christian and Christ, who is our High Priest and who stands between us and the Father, where He mediates for us. Not all denominations share this doctrine, obviously. The "higher" you go on the high church-low church spectrum, the less this doctrine is going to be held. Start with the Orthodox Presbyterians and other "mainline" churches, with communion only allowed to be "given" by those whom the synod or whomever has decided to allow and it gets worse and worse, from statements concerning priests absolving sins in the Anglican/Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, to the Catholic idea that the "Church" can decide that they don't like you anymore and excommunicate you, dooming you to Hell because they decide to withhold communion from you, depriving you of a vehicle of Christ's grace.

Obviously, pretty bad stuff. I would go so far as to actually say that it is downright evil.

The thing is, I think that this undermining of the priesthood of the believer is seeping into the low church. Remember the girl from my second story that wasn't sure you could "do that?" She's from a pretty low church background. And I don't think she's alone. What is the cause of this erosion? The "Superstar Pastor."

The idea is this: most evangelical churches today have pretty high standards for who they'll let lead them. Beyond the biblical requirements concerning character, they often require a seminary degree, which is quite an accomplishment, by the way. The pastor is also supposed to be a pretty good speaker, as well, because he'll be giving the sermons a few times a week. He's also got lots of other responsibilities, which he might share with the leadership team, whether that be in the form of other pastors, elders, deacons, deaconesses, or a mixture of all or some of them. On Sunday mornings, the pastor, along with the worship team/organist/pianist/choir does the morning service, which is on the level of a professional performance because, well, it is exactly that. All the power in the church, then, is concentrated in the leadership team, and, to varying degrees, is especially concentrated in the pastor. The pastor and his team have the training, skills, authority and audience that the laity don't.

Sometimes this works out pretty well so far as internal order and harmony go, for a few years at least, if not a few decades. Sometimes the pastor is a humble man of God who believes in and practices servant-leadership, fulfilling his responsibilities with a sense of awe and humility concerning the amount of power he has, putting his all into tending the flock God has entrusted him with. In short, sometimes churches invest this kind of power and responsibility into their pastor precisely because he can be trusted with it, despite the inevitable mistakes he'll make.

(Of course, this isn't always true. Anyone who's spent much time in evangelical circles has heard stories about, if not witnessed, pastors who have become corrupted by their privilege and power and have come to abuse their power and their flock, either on a regular basis or in the occasional power struggle. Some pastors have the gall to actually claim to be the "king" of their church. This is not an exaggeration, sadly.)

Despite how this concentration of power works out internally, it almost always works to destroy, to one degree or another, the priesthood of the believer in the minds of the congregation. The congregation starts to become passive, receiving and being fed (some would say breast-fed) from and by the pastor or leadership team. They might like to help, but, they reason, how good of a job could they do, compared to the very professional leadership team?

This attitude doesn't just affect how people contribute to the inner workings of the church, either. It affects evangelism and discipleship, the whole point of the Church. Evangelism? The laity isn't trained in that, they don't know how to do that. They'll just fund those who do have the training and know-how. They'll support missionaries and pastors, who can do that. After all, that's their job! Discipleship? How many of the laity have even been discipled in a group, much less been individually mentored? Given their lack of training, which has again been concentrated instead on the leadership team and the pastor, they hardly feel they can turn around and disciple and mentor others. This leads to a church where a few highly trained, responsibility-laden elites run around trying to maintain and serve a bunch of Christians who don't do a lot more than consume and pay their offering. Is it any wonder why pastor burn-out is so prevalent?!

I'd like to make this clear that this is an attack on the system of Superstar Pastors, not necessarily on those who play that role (with the notable exception of those who willfully abuse their position and call themselves "kings"). To a large degree, I think, this is an unhealthy system that hurts everyone, which people are engaging in because that's what they think they are supposed to do. The system is evil, but a whole lot of the people involved in the system are involved because they think that is what is best, because they think that the system is how things are supposed to be, because they think that it is possible for a church to operate in a healthy way within the Superstar Pastor system. They aren't out to exploit the church and power-trip.

Similarly, the laity whose parasitism victimizes the clergy aren't (usually) being parasites on purpose. They think they are doing what Christians are supposed to be doing. Sometimes they'll even try to help in ways they think laity can legitimately help. (Programs will then often sap their energy.)

At the same time, this doesn't negate the fact that the system is, in fact, evil. It needs to be eradicated and killed, just as the high churches need to disband. While people with good intentions live their whole lives in these systems, good intentions and sincerity don't make something right, and when you step back and look at all the damage, both internal and external, that disregard for the priesthood of the believer has done, and how lightly the doctrine is taken today, even among evangelicals, one can't help but be incensed. A little sense of history would tell those same evangelicals that they are willfully walking down a path the founders of the evangelical tradition died to avoid.

Here we go… (part 2)

In the last post, I promised that we would get to Snyder and his book Radical Renewal and I realized as I started this post that I hadn't yet. While I think the book is awesome and will probably explore more of its ideas in other posts, the part of the book relevant to this chart is another way to explain how it's OK for the forms of doing church to be changing all the time, the wineskin metaphor referenced in the subtitle.

Snyder is referencing what Jesus said in Matthew 9, Mark 2 and Luke 5 about new and old wine and wineskins. (Unfortunately, my copy of Radical Renewal is in a box in the garage with most of my library from college, so I can't tell you which of those parallel passages Snyder actually uses. I don't think it makes a lot of difference, fortunately.) What Jesus says in these passages is that you shouldn't put new wine into old wineskins because as the new wine continues to ferment it releases gases which will burst the old wineskin. Instead, you should put new wine into new wineskins because they will expand along with the gases, not bursting. In Snyder's view, Jesus is the wine, and He is always new, so we need to continually renew the wineskins we deliver Him in, or else the delivery system will burst and both the delivery system and Jesus will not be delivered and will be lost to those who need to be reached. The idea is that, as we try to take Jesus into new, different places, whether geographically or temporally, the way we present Jesus needs to change so as to be a way that works in the culture instead of impeding the gospel.

On to the X-axis. As can be seen, the X-axis is split into different columns which represent different ways of doing church. These columns don't represent specific models, but instead represent the foundational principles out of which multiple models have grown. It should be noted that almost every church incorporates experiences, programs and relationships into the way they do church. Emerging churches, for example, have both programs and relationships in their church. Traditional churchgoers both have experiences and have relationships with other churchgoers. The point here is that different churches base the way they do church around different things, incorporating a lot of things, but being based on a select list of principles shorter than all the things done in those churches.

The first column, going from the left, is the column with churches who are based upon experiences. Their primary focus is to provide experiences which people will enjoy and find attractive, therefore making the decision to join and continue to be involved in the church. Examples include the "seeker sensitive" churches which primarily target "moderns," that is, those generations up to and including a lot of the Baby Boomers, and a lot of the "Emerging Church," which targets "post-moderns," those generations after the Baby Boomers. This means, interestingly enough, that, because Post-Modernism is primarily a reaction against Modernism, the Emerging Church looks worlds different from the seeker sensitive movement of the past even though they both have virtually identical basic principles. Both seek to fulfill the experiential desires of different demographics so, since moderns like big open spaces with lots of light and an emphasis on reason over emotion and a break from the past, while post-moderns like darker, more filled spaces with an emphasis on emotion over reason and experiential rituals which make one feel like they belong to something bigger, seeker sensitive and Emerging churches are very different in their forms.

The next column over is that which contains churches based upon programs. Again, every church, or at least almost every church, has programs, no matter how much they are stripped down or thought through. We're talking here, though, about churches whose basic principles which determine how they conduct church are their programs. The idea is basically that if people go through different programs, they will become better Christians, growing closer to and knowing God better, becoming better, more godly people and loving each other more. The church is seen, unconsciously or not, as a collection of programs, where people go to "do" things, whether AWANAS or Bible study or Sunday morning service, etc. It is assumed that if someone goes through these programs, the programs will make them better people. This is largely the way the traditional church is run, and is a distinctly Modern way of looking at church, catering to those who think that people can be programed much like machines. Rationally, logically, the thinking goes, how could someone not be affected by going through a program where they read the Bible or memorize verses or hear about the Bible?

The last column contains the churches which use relationships as the basic foundation from which they gain their forms. For these churches, everything is planned around the relationships involved in the Church, the relationship Christians have with God, the relationships they have with each other and the relationships they have with the World. Again, these churches have programs and experiences too, but they are generally rare and thought-through enough that you don't notice them when you come into contact with them. The prime example of this is the Organic or simple way of doing church that this blog is concerned with arguing for.

My discerning readers will probably have noticed that there is only a dash under the "Program Based" column for the "Post-Modern" row. This isn't an accident. As I stated above, programs are a very Modern kind of thing. While no one can escape them, post-modernists dislike them strongly and will abhor doing church in a way based around programs. While other churches in the Modern row will generally slowly shift into the Post-Modern incarnation of their principles, the "Traditional," program-based way of doing church is going to die within the next century, to be generous. This leaves the individual local churches that fall under the "Traditional" category with a choice, if they choose to listen to this wake-up call, and wake-up call it is. Coming to understand that this is the way the Church is in America right now is more important to Traditional churches than to any other type of church, because they are on a course that will lead to their extinction.

So please, wake up, for your own sakes. (And, yes, for Christ's and our sakes too, but especially for you.)

Traditional churches have a set of three options, which are pretty simple, really. They can either stay in their column or move to the right or to the left, into different columns. Either a church will stick to its guns and philosophic foundation and die or it will reevaluate its foundation and either go Emerging or Simple. Those are the three choices, plain and simple. My prayer for Traditional churches is that they wake up and realize that they have this choice to make, and then that they make it wisely.

Here we go… (part 1)

I don't think I've said anything immensely controversial in these last few posts (except, perhaps, that I think Simple Church is the way we should be doing church, and also the implicit assertion from my Anabaptist history post that the Reformed movement isn't as loyal to its oft-vaunted Sola Scriptura as it claims) but I'm pretty sure that I'll be breaking that pattern in this post, so I want to offer a rather large caveat so that when this post is dissected and torn apart (yes, I'm admittedly flattering myself that this post will get that much attention) it will get torn apart on the right points, not the wrong ones.

I'm a big idea person. I think and speak in generalities and, while I think I usually can see both the trees and the forest pretty well, I tend not to communicate the trees as well as the forest when I write or speak. When I make statements, they are often sweeping and "skip" over exceptions (which I tend to think are either too obvious or too insignificant to mention). So, let it be noted that there is an exception to everything I assert (including this assertion.) If something I write isn't true, by all means, please let me know, but if I, for example, say that such-and-such a philosophy leads to such-and-such an outcome for such-and-such a reason and then lay out examples one, two and three, please don't take my meaning to be that this happens in absolutely every case and that one or two isolated counterexamples prove the assertion wrong. Please, assume generalization and exception in what I say, because you can't talk about sweeping movements, big ideas or general theories effectively without assuming them.

Thanks.

So, this post is about where I see the Church right now, in America (the clauses "right now" and "in America," that is, the States, being rather important). To aid in my explanation, I've created the little chart below. I should note that I came up with it myself, but that a few people older and wiser than me, and in the know, have said that it is generally accurate and that they liked it. It certainly isn't in any kind of final draft form and I'm especially unsure of some of what I've put in the top right area, but I'm sure enough of it to show it to people, like those that read this blog. I've found that it generally helps people understand what I'm trying to say. Also, if you find this chart helpful, feel free to use it, as well as anything on this blog that originates with me. While my jury is still out as far as some parts of the paying people for ministry issue goes, I'm very sure that the very green, unfinished ideas I'm posting on this blog should be free. I apologize for the small size. If someone can give me pointers on how to make it bigger, I'd be much obliged.

So, the Y-axis, if you will, represents time, measured in the predominant culture in the United States, progressing forward as we go down the chart. We see that we are in a transitional phase, as we are leaving the Modern Era and entering the Post-Modern Era. This is one of the fundamental truths that we need to understand, in my opinion, if we are to understand well where the Church in America is today.

To explain this idea a little more, I'm going to have to take a detour. My Junior year in college, I took a Christian Ministry course where I had to read a few books. One was by Howard Snyder and called Radical Renewal: The Problem of Wineskins Today. I recommend the (rather short) book highly. Another was Brian McLaren's Church on the Other Side, a book that I recommend not because I agree with it, but because it is a great primer to help one understand the Emerging Church, I think. We'll get back to Snyder's wineskins, but we need to address McLaren right now.

Incidentally, I double-majored in college, in Biblical Studies and History-Political Science, and I can't help but be reminded of Karl Marx by McLaren (and here some of my political ideas are going to spill into this post, as much as I am going to try to keep them generally out of this blog; I'm sorry). Like Marx, I think McLaren has quite often hit the nail on the head when trying to diagnose what's wrong. Just as Marx's criticisms of the cruelty and injustice of the economic system around him were dead on, a lot of McLaren's criticisms of how the Church in America isn't acting as it should really are dead on. Just as Marx did, however, I think that McLaren has also gotten the solution terribly, awfully wrong. (I also think that Marx and McLaren also have a tendency to be so optimistic and confident as to be a little silly at times. See the Marxist belief in the inevitability of the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie and McLaren's chapter on foreign missions in Church on the Other Side for examples. At times, neither Marx nor McLaren seem to have any idea what they are talking about when they really have a responsibility to.) So I'm going to borrow liberally from his diagnosis here, as well as just restate some basic missiology that everyone in the Church should be familar with. (I suspect that what I'm about to borrow isn't original with McLaren, just that I first heard it explicitly stated and well explained from him.)

When we visit a foreign country on a short term missions team, we don't have a problem when church is done differently by the people there. We, usually, understand that different cultures will have different ways of doing church. We see that it is right and healthy for the same basic foundations of Christianity, the DNA of Christianity, if you will, to be planted in two different cultures and to grow differently. It's OK that two vastly different cultures worship God in different ways, as long as they hold to the same basic tenants of Christianity: Jesus is God and He died for my sins, God is Three in One, the Bible is the inspired, infallible Word of God, etc. As long as they hold to these kinds of things, it doesn't really matter whether one culture's church uses pews and another has everyone stand, or if there is one pastor or if everyone rotates preaching, etc. The external forms of worship aren't what need to be the same across the board, but the internal, foundational beliefs and relationships are what need to be the same. The external forms grow out of these foundations, growing differently in different cultures. (This isn't to say that forms don't matter, or can't be right or wrong, just to say that different cultures should have different forms.)

We need to take this understanding that doing church will and should be different in different cultures and apply that to the shift we see in culture in the United States. We see that there is a difference in culture, not over geographical space, but over time in the United States. This is what happens (especially in the West) and it's OK. No culture is completely evil and no culture is completely good, but each culture has parts of it that agree with a biblical worldview and parts that don't. This goes for both Modernism and Post-Modernism. The important thing that we need to realize is that doing church will and should look different in a Post-Modernist culture from what we see in Modernist culture. We are currently crossing a temporal border and it is right and good and healthy to adjust the way we do church as we the Church in America are increasingly Post-Modern in culture. Does this mean that it's OK for those of us who are Post-Modern culturally (and I do not count myself among that number, by the way- I've spent too many of my formative years outside the West to feel I belong to any Western culture) to hold onto all of our Post-Modern culture? Absolutely not. Just as with every culture, there are parts of the Post-Modern culture that run counter to the Bible, to the Truth and that should be changed by any Post-Modern Christian. The point, though, is that it is possible to be a Post-Modern Christian; we don't have to be Modernists to be Christians. Just as we wouldn't expect people in the CAR, say, to do church the way we do, those of us who are Modernists shouldn't expect people in the 21st Century to do church in the same way they did in the 20th century.

So, along the Y-Axis, then, we should expect to see changes in the way church is done, because culture is changing along the Y-axis.

Stay tuned for an explanation of the X-axis in the next post.

Anabaptist History

Having brought up the term "Anabaptist" as a central part of why I'm in the Simple Church movement two posts ago, I thought it might be a good idea to discuss the history and beliefs of Anabaptists very briefly in this post (we're talking hundreds of years of history here, so this is a vastly simplified and summarized treatment).
The history of the Anabaptists starts starts with a man named Huldrych Zwingli, a one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation. Most people haven't heard of him because he is overshadowed by such giants as Luther and Calvin and because he died in a battle, giving him only about 12 in the Reformation, rather than the decades of Luther and Calvin.

Zwingli was the Roman Catholic priest in Zurich, Switzerland, and very shortly after he began work there he began to make waves, challenging fasts and the requirement that clergy stay unmarried.

In Zurich, the way for questions such as these to be solved was to have a disputation before the city council. Several of these took place during Zwingli's career, the first one having to do with the Zwingli taking Zurich formally into the Reformation by rejecting some teachings of the Catholic Church.

Somewhere around this time, a group of men interested in the works of Erasmus began translating Greek texts into German, led by Zwingli, starting out as a cultural group but soon transforming into a Bible study group which worked on translating from Erasmus' Textus Receptus. Zwingli seems to have left the group at some point.

Members of this group showed up to Zwingli's second disputation in front of the city council (along with almost a thousand other people), which had to do with images in the church and the nature of the mass. It was decided, among other things, that mass shouldn't be done the way it was being done, nor considered to be a sacrifice. When this was decided, Conrad Grebel, a member of the study group, asked how the mass should be celebrated if it was not correct the way it was at that time being conducted. Zwingli replied that the council could decide, to which another member of the study group, Simon Stumpf, retorted that it was not up to Zwingli or the city council to decide how to conduct the mass, but that the Holy Spirit had already decided and put the instructions in the Bible. He was overruled on this count by Zwingli and the council, but this is the central foundational event and doctrine of Anabaptism: the Bible is above every human authority in determining truth, belief and practice.

In accordance with this stance on the Bible, the study group pushed for faster, broader reforms in Zurich and the conflict quickly centered upon baptism. Rejecting the teaching that baptism brought one into Christianity and that it was a necessary vessel of grace for salvation, they instead taught that baptism was a symbol of one's identification with and trust in Christ and should thus be performed only after an identification with and trust in Christ was professed. In a third disputation, Zwingli attacked this idea and it was ruled that those in the group not citizens of Zurich should be banished, those who where citizens should not be allowed to meet or preach and that there should be a penalty of death for those who were not having their children baptized as infants or who were practicing adult baptism.

In blatant contradiction to this ruling, the group and others met at Felix Manz's mother's house, where, after prayer, George "Blaurock" Cajacob asked Grebel to baptize him, which Grebel did. Blaurock then was asked to baptize the rest of the group and did, marking the founding of the Anabaptist movement (on January 21, 1525).

The Anabaptist movement quickly underwent a period of intense persecution, during which most of its leaders were martyred and those who weren't martyred scattered. Catholics who caught Anabaptists generally burned them at the stake while Protestants generally drowned them as an ironic third baptism. Numerous enemies attacked the Anabaptist name as well as their bodies, associating these pacifists with apocalyptic groups such as the Zwikau Prophets. The label of "Anabaptist," which comes from the Greek for "re-baptize," was actually given to the Anabaptists as a way to justify executing them, as the label "Anabaptist" had been applied to a totally different group to which capital punishment was applied. The Anabaptists, with their first generation of leaders martyred, also sometimes were hijacked by those manifestly untrue to Anabaptism. Despite the fact that non-violence had been adopted by Anabaptists in the Schleitheim Confession almost ten years earlier, a group of apocalypse-preaching, violent polygamists who happened to practice adult baptism and were admittedly influenced by Anabaptism, became associated with Anabaptism when they took over the city of Munster for about a year and then were violently put down.

Besides the main, foundational characteristic of holding the Bible to be the ultimate authority, the early Anabaptists held the following beliefs and practices, claimed in the Schleitheim Confession:

• Believers' Baptism: Baptism is a sign and symbol only and should thus only be performed when someone has become a Christian through belief.
• The Ban: Christians should practice church discipline, which includes shunning those who refuse correction after three attempts at correction.
• Communion for Christians: Communion, as it symbolizes the unity of Christ's Body, is for unified bodies of Christians only.
• Separation: Christians should refuse to associate with those who are not Christians, as nothing good can come of associating with the World.
  
• Shepherds: Pastors should be of good character according to the tests laid out by Paul, and should also be awarded the privileges laid out by Paul.
• The Sword: The famous Anabaptist renouncement of violence.
• Oaths: Prohibition of oath-taking.

What all of these positions have in common is their reliance upon the Bible, as all of these ideas run counter to the teachings of men of the day. While I agree and disagree with them to varying degrees, my belief that the Bible is the ultimate authority is why I consider myself to be an Anabaptist.

The Anabaptists scattered mostly west into the Netherlands, north into Germany and west into Moravia, where, eventually, new, strong leaders emerged. Those who lived in the Netherlands followed Menno Simons and became Mennonites (and Amish), those that went east followed Jacob Hutter and became Hutterites, and those that went north mostly followed Alexander Mack and became the various Schwarzeneau Brethren groups.

I hope this has been a helpful bit of history and doctrine for those interested or curious. Other good pieces of reading can be found here and here and here.

"Likewise, ye younger, be subject unto the elder. Yea, all of you gird yourselves with humility, to serve one another: for God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble." –1 Peter 5:5

"Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an ensample to them that believe, in word, in manner of life, in love, in faith, in purity." –1 Timothy 4:12

These are the two verses that I want to guide how I use this blog. At 22 years of age, I'm hardly experienced and wise. While I'm a college graduate, I don't know a whole lot. I'm still learning the ropes of life and am closer to the beginning than the end of my race (well, probably). I've got a lot more energy and conviction than wisdom or experience. I'm not equipped to be a leader.

At the same time, I have something to contribute. I'm a thinker. I have energy and I want to expend it towards furthering the cause of Christ. I'm equipped to be involved, and in the future I will be not a young man, but an older man, leading and equipping those younger than me. If I am to pass on the baton to the generation after mine, I had better work to be receiving it now!

So, that's what I hope to do with this blog. While on the one hand I'm going to have lots of ideas (a lot of them, especially at first, probably recycled from leaders of the movement), I'm also going to have a lot of questions. I need training and input, and, if this blog gets any following, the young people who read it will too. I hope that this blog can be a place where I'm not the only one giving ideas, but that older men will engage me and others on this blog and offer wisdom and even correction when something I or someone else says is wrong.

Thanks in advance!

Where I'm coming from

So, to get this blog started, I think I should lay out the basics of who I am and what I want to be doing with this blog.

I'm the son of Grace Brethren missionaries to Tokyo, Japan, and have spent the majority of my life in Japan. Since graduating with my Bachelors in May, I'm about to begin studying for a Single Subject teaching credential, which will allow me to work as a high school or middle school teacher, teaching Social Studies. I hope to use teaching as a way to tent-make (support myself financially while doing church work for free).

In the last year, I've gotten really interested in Organic or Simple Church, to the point where I don't see myself being involved in doing church in any other way for the rest of my life. I've become convinced that this is not just the way of doing church that best fits me, but that Organic Church, meaning the principles and foundations of Organic Church, is the way church should be done. This blog is meant to be a way to explore this idea and to engage in conversation about the way church should be done. It is meant to be a catalyst for discussion both within the Simple Church movement (there is a lot to discuss- Organic Church being the right way really means the right starting points, not the right exact executions) and without, as an apologetic organ for the movement. I hope to convince those outside the Simple Church movement that, firstly, this isn't apostasy or heresy and that, secondly, they should join us.

An important part of me choosing to join the Organic Church movement is my Anabaptism. As someone who is interested in history, I've studied the roots of the Grace Brethren fellowship and have learned and adopted the general attitude of the Radical Reformation. The way I understand it, being an Anabaptist primarily means that I hold the Bible to be the supreme revelation from God and guide for the Church. Anabaptism, primarily and above all, is about the preeminence of the Word of God above the traditions, teachings and philosophies of men. As an intellectual, I obviously believe that human traditions, teachings and philosophies have some value and certainly don't advocate throwing them out completely, but, whatever value they may have, their value cannot compete with the the Word of God. This means that I believe that what I understand the Bible to be saying should guide my conduct and worldview above all else. Historically, this is what got early Anabaptists in trouble, as humans, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, demanded a place properly reserved only for God's revelation and the Radical Reformers refused to give it to them.

I see the Simple Church as the logical continuation of the Anabaptist legacy. Anabaptism is about a refusal to take what one has been handed down for granted, questioning everything, testing it in the light of God's Word, holding onto what is good and rejecting what is not. Anabaptism is about going back to the Word of God and finding out what is true and what we, the Church, ought to be and do. This, striving to be a healthy Body for Christ, purging the cancers that infect us, in my understanding, is what the Simple Church movement is striving to do and it is what I want to do for the rest of my life.