Bandits No More

Sjogren’s seventh path on the way to becoming a “perfectly imperfect church” appears very rarely in church growth books. He says the church needs to be Safe. “Feeling ‘safe’ is the assurance that nothing is going to be forced upon a person at any time against his or her will or outside her comfort level.” As church leaders we need to work to maintain the safety of our people on many levels: physical, emotional, and spiritual among the most basic. Our Annual Conference is in the process of implementing (and causing local churches to implement) a Safe Sanctuary policy to protect children. Developing these policies is difficult – especially for small, struggling churches. These small churches that are used to fighting for perhaps one person to teach each Sunday school class now need twice as many. We’re looking at Summer camp now, and trying to figure out how to get twice as many adults to go as usual – when the old number was exceptionally difficult.

We live in a dangerous world – if we consider nothing more than the fragility of children, hard objects, and Newton’s laws of motion. As long as moral constraints were allowed in the broader culture, there seemed to be some damper on local human evil. Now with the divorce between morality and legality – leaving the latter as the only functioning restraint – it seems society is even more dangerous – for children.

So I understand the need for safety – for our children and also for adults. But I confess that as I read the Bible I find a God who isn’t terribly safe. Always challenging and provoking, God continually gets people in over their heads in situations they can’t handle. Read the end of Hebrews 11 sometime and see what God got those folks into. Taking Sjogren’s point, however, I have no problem thinking that as we church leaders make our churches as safe as possible so there is plenty of room for God to make his blessed trouble for people (including us!).

In his prescription for struggling churches wishing to become “perfectly imperect,” Steve Sjogren has so far stuck with the usual fare. The next path he suggests breaks the mold – Fun. He says, “I have come to the conclusion that people only do something for a prolonged period of time when it’s fun… We are hard-wired by God to do what is enjoyable.”

I confess that I’d rather have fun than not, but I also recognize that when FUN becomes the principle by which I live I (and the people around me) am in trouble. This hedonistic approach seems foreign to the way of Jesus. “So are you saying,” you may ask, “Was Jesus a kill-joy? A many who went around with a somber look on his face? A man who constantly looked like he’d been sucking lemons?” No – I think that’s a false dichotomy.

Surely anyone who has been involved in discipling work for any length of time knows that one of the hardest parts of the job is helping people have the “want to” – the desire to become like Jesus and obey him. “If anyone wants to follow me, let him take up his cross and follow me.” I understand the concept of “cross” and the concept of “fun.” I see no overlap at all.

Of course this can make it hard for us to grow our churches if we’re always talking about taking up crosses – of living a crucified life. There’s no fun in that. No fun perhaps, but there is joy. Consider Paul in Philippians 4. The whole book has dealt with suffering: the willing suffering of Jesus; the willing suffering of Paul; the call of God upon the Philippians to a double imitation (of Jesus and Paul) in taking up their own suffering. Given all this apparently morbid talk, how does Paul close the letter? “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice!” “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” And so on.

I think Sjogren needs to do a little more work on fun.

Within a long report by John Allen in the National Catholic Reporter, I found the following:

In graduate school in the 1950s, Ratzinger found himself fishing around for a topic for his Habilitationsschrift, the book-length contribution to research a German doctoral student has to complete after his dissertation. His mentor, professor Gottlieb Söhngen, suggested that he work on St. Bonaventure.

Ratzinger liked the idea, and produced a daring thesis on revelation. He showed that according to Bonaventure, words on a page mean nothing without someone to interpret them. Ratzinger saw this insight as a refutation of Luther’s sola scriptura principle, but his superiors accused him — in what many cannot help but see today as a supreme irony — of relativism. Ratzinger seemed to be saying that scripture could mean different things to different people!

The work was rejected.

Ratzinger then focused on Bonaventure’s conflict with the “Spiritual Franciscans.” That branch of the Franciscan movement had been inspired by the apocalyptic visionary Joachim of Fiore to expect a third age of history, an era of the Holy Spirit, in which the poor would be liberated and the rich torn down. Bonaventure, Ratzinger argued, rejected this expectation of a dramatic intervention by God inside human history.

The reign of God, in other words, had to wait for the next world. Ratzinger put it this way: Orthodox belief “tears eschatology apart from history.”

Thus when Ratzinger began investigating liberation theology in the 1980s, he thought it had a familiar ring. The liberation theologians too, Ratzinger felt, wanted redemption inside history, and he saw their hopes as equally false.

In taking on liberation theology, Ratzinger saw himself picking up Bonaventure’s argument against the Spiritual Franciscans from several hundred years before (he also, according to friends, saw echoes of the Marxist-inspired 1968 student revolts in liberation theology).

History town apart from eschatology… This way of depicting the God’s relation to creation seems to have been a dominant view in modernity, and, by my assessment, one of the most deadly failings of the church. Though I doubt Ratzinger – or Bonaventure for that matter – would take it as far as Lessing’s Ugly Ditch, their theological position seems like a step on the way toward accepting the rationalization and dehistoricization of the church and doctrine.

The view of eschatology inherent in this view sees it as something so absolutely otherworldly that it becomes difficult to see the church as continuing in the eschatological age inaugurated by Jesus. Salvation – in so far as we are concerned – too easily becomes something for the individual. The Pauline view of the salvation of all creation (Romans 8:17ff), if it is retained, is pushed to the end of history – or to after the end of history.

I think I will look at this further in the future.

This is the week when all the public schools in Texas are taking the TAKS Tests. These are the standardized tests by which we as a society allegedly judged the success of our schools as well as of our students.

There is an almost constant din of complain that Texas public schools long ago abandoned the teaching of subjects in favor of “teaching to the test.” School district’s success and teacher’s jobs are tied topassing rates, so can school be expected to do otherwise?

I had long been an opponent of the “dumbing-down” that is caused by “teaching to a test.” This felt a bit ironic to me because I had always been fairly good at standardized tests. In a discussion on the topic a few years ago I was shocked into another perspective on the matter.

“The problem is not whether or not they are teaching to the test,” he pointed out, “the problem is the test.” He was right! If a standardized test is designed to measure success or accomplishment that translates beyond the sheets of multiple choice into a real world, then teaching to the test could actually be a good thing.

Whether or not the TAKS is a good measurement of the acquisition of knowledge or skills or of one’s ability to succeed in the world of employment and family raising, I do not know. I will accept, however, that teaching to the test can be a good thing if it is a good test.

I am left wandering between oppsing camps on this matter. Like the Nostaglists, I lament the de-personalization of standardized tests and “national standards.” But I am also postmodern enough that underlying the cries of the Nostalgists I hear “but we’ve never done it this way before.”

For me, that’s all the more reason to try something different.

In addition to being Simple, looking Upward and Outward, Sjogren says the church that wishes to become “Perfectly Imperfect” should be Anointed. In my United Methodist tradition I’ve only heard that word used to describe Jesus as the Messiah – the “Anointed One.” In Sjogren’s (semi-charismatic?) understanding, it is a spiritual word meaning something like “Reputation.” He says, “A postive perception in your community is more powerful than words, programs, slogans, and all the great sermons in the world.” In it’s biblical context it would seem to be something that is solely dependent on the work of God. Sjogren, however, describes it as having both a “vertical” and a “horizontal” dimension. The former is what God does, the latter what we do. For the part we do, he mentions several things the church can do to build anointing. Here are some of them (read the book for his development of each).

• Be committed to small things
• Be real
• Do what people consider to be practical actions
• Be willing to take risks
• Be committed to producing outward-focused disciples
• Expect surprises from God
• Be willing to be near the least, the lost and lonely
• Be willing to act in simple ways to change lives

In my own church I often remind my people that we are in the “people business.” We have an old sanctuary (100 years old) and an old church plant – both cause enough debt & expense that we have to fight the temptation to think we’re in the money business. Sjogren’s sound mostly like good ways to love people practically, though since he is moving beyond Outward to Anointed, he appears to be focusing on a desired effect of our acts of love.

Sjogren’s distinction between vertical and horizontal anointing brings to mind the two main theories of revival. The school respresented by J. Edwin Orr sees revival as something God does. The church can prepare for revival and respond when it comes, but revival itself is a sovereign act of God. Charles Finney, on the other hand, saw revival as always a possibility for the church that was willing to use the right means to achieve it. According to Finney, God is always willing to send revival, if only we will fufill his requirements. With this chapter primarily focusing on “horizontal anointing” – what we do – it appears the Sjogren would side with Finney on this issue.

One final comment: I Peter talks about our reputation and its role in drawing people to Jesus. While Peter speaks of doing good, even more he talks about bearing up under suffering. He urges his audience to follow the example of Jesus (as Jesus fulfilled the image of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53). Thus according to the NT one of the key things we do in our relation to the world is willingly submit to the sufferings inflicted on us.

Listening to the live feed from Rome, it sounds like the Pope is Joseph Ratzinger. The feed must have heavy demand, so it keeps cutting out.

UPDATE: The Washington Post’s article reports the opinion of an American Catholic:

The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a theologian at the University of Notre Dame, said Ratzinger’s homily indicated that he believes the pope’s role is to “protect the sheep from the prowling wolves of unorthodoxy and relativism. He wants to defend the fact that truth is absolute and the church must speak the truth and be faithful to it.”

Sounds ok to me, though from what the Post says McBrien is less than is less than excited.

I first ran across Ratzinger while doing my doctoral work. One of my teachers, Miroslav Volf, used quite a bit of Ratzinger’s work in his own research on Christian community. I’d guess the connection has something to do with both of them being Tübingen people.

Christian philosopher Gilbert Meilander discusses feeding tubes and their removal from patients. A good discussion of the issue.

Steve Sjogren advises struggling churches to get Simple, look Upward, and work Outward. Sjogren first came to my attention as the strategist behind Servant Evangelism, and reaching people for Jesus remains noe of his strongest suits.

Worship and evangelism are closely connected in his thinking. “Sometimes having a dynamic worship experience makes us fall more deeply in love with Christ, which causes us to reach out to the not-yet-Christians God wants to include in his family. But sometimes it’s looking outward first that leads us to worship – as we lovethe lost, we feel a need to worship God.” As the “Perfectly Imperfect Church ” seeks to look outward, he offers several guidelines:

1. There are lots of different ways to be outward; the more varieties we have in our repetoire the better.
2. All Evangelism is good evangelism (He expands greatly on this in his other book, Irresistible Evangelism which I’ll blog at a later date.)
3. Leading others to Christ isn’t that complicated. Under this point he speaks about his omre recent experience, “I’m moving from a ‘tell ’em how it is’ to a ‘let’s discover salvation together’ mode.”

In leading people to Jesus he admonishes us to:

• Keep it Loving
• Keep it Real
• Keep it Straight
• Keep it Simple
• Be Consistent in Your Outreaches
• Tell Encouraging Stories Often
• Find Creative Ways to Make Outreach Prominent at Weeken Celebrations
• Stay Involved in Social Outreach
• Create an Outreach Identity
• Make a Strong and Enduring Commitment to Outreach

My favorite NT scholars include N.T. Wright, Gordon Fee, Richard Bauckham, James Dunn & Ben Witherington. The last of these has a new website up.

As a parent of a child with Special Needs, I try to keep my eyes open for helpful resources. There is so much I don’t know how to do, that we need all the help we can get. This site of Steve Rhatigan looks pretty good.