Bandits No More

Let me begin by saying that I’m happy to be your pastor. This church is full of interesting people – “characters” one might say. I can easily see your commitment not only to the church but also to the community. I have never served a church had so many community leaders. You may have noticed that I’m somewhat academic by nature. I appreciate the fact that you accept me as I am and have even expressed appreciation for the way this academic bent comes out sometimes. I have great people to work with – those on staff and those of you who are lay leaders.

Sometimes we pastors divide ourselves from our people. We use phrases like “your church.” My attitude is that if this church isn’t “my church” then there’s not much point in my being here. If you have to live in one place all your life or be the most recent of several generations in a place to truly be at home, then I’ll never be home. When we consider the Pittsburg tenure of everyone in the room tonight, I’m one of the newest here. But my calling is to make this town – and this church – my home as long as I’m here. This is where I’m committed. United Methodist polity says my membership is in the Annual Conference, and I understand what that is about. But for all effects and purposes my membership is here. I tithe my income here. I pour my energy here.

We – notice I say “we,” not “you” – face a number of challenges this year. These challenges are not new or peculiar to us here in Pittsburg.

The first challenge is the most obvious, but the one that counts for the least in the light of eternity. I’m speaking of our finances. We have a historic sanctuary and an aging church plant. We have money due on our renovations and more work needs to be done. This need will never go away. We also have a budget increase. Again. Adding a part time staff person to do children’s ministry may sound extravagant. Some might say, “How can you add staff when you already owe so much? Shouldn’t you pay off the debt first?” Perhaps we’ve allowed ourselves to be deceived. Cindy Strait led the children’s ministry these past few years, giving hours and hours every week. It cost her family financially. Over that time we got the idea that that much ministry could always be done for free. The church leadership doesn’t think so. We also don’t think it’s intelligent to put children’s ministry on hold until we get our debt paid off. When we look at our mission as a church it doesn’t make sense to say to families with children, “Why don’t you just take your kids to another church until we get our debt paid? Then we’ll be glad to have you!”

I’ve seen too many churches that hit a financial crunch after doing building work who respond to the crunch by doing the obvious: cutting ministry and staff. Then they wonder why people stop coming. However much all of us love our buildings, it’s not the buildings that attract or keep people. It’s us. As I’ve said before, we’re in the people business.

The foundation of a church’s finances is the tithes of its members. Tithing is more than putting something in the plate each week. It’s giving ten percent of your income. That’s really easy to figure. Someone asks, “Do I tithe my gross salary or my net?” I don’t care. If our people tithe, we’ll make it fine.

So tithes are the foundation. Additionally we have special offerings. Some in the congregation have been blessed in the area of resources, so they are able to give beyond a tithe, especially when it comes to special projects. From what Jerry Massey tells me, you’ve already given more than a hundred thousand more to our renovation projects than what the experts said you would. Our church has a strong heritage of responding to needs when they arise. We also need people who remember the church in their wills – people who want to see their legacy of faith continue on for the generations to come.

What about fundraisers? We have our annual Lord’s Acre next Saturday. Fundraisers can be a lot of fun, and when successful, can bring in thousands of dollars. But whose money is it? Many times it is our own. I’ve never understood why we need to have fundraisers to get money out of some church people. Fundraisers that draw in from outside the church – those make more sense. It’s like the Israelites plundering the Egyptians. Maybe someday I’ll get it. In short: fundraisers are good, but woe to the church that depends on them in any significant way.

It all boils down to trusting God in the area of money. I hope I do a decent job of modeling that for you. I know I’ve seen the Finance Committee and the Administrative Council do it in the past year.

Our second big challenge is activating the whole body. We have over 400 members. We have a goal of averaging 200 in worship – a milestone this church hasn’t reached since 1966. We’re really close. Do you know why we’re so close? Because you’ve been committed. You’ve been coming. You’ve been inviting your friends and neighbors.

Of course attendance in worship is only the beginning of activating the Body. When I read the bible I see that God’s plan is to have all members of the body connected to each other, growing in relationship to Jesus (the head of the body), actively involved in ministry, and vigorously influencing outsiders toward the Kingdom.

Body activation in this sense then, is the main reason for the 40 Days of Purpose Campaign that starts next month. It will be a concentrated time for all our people to deepen their connections to, in and through the body.

If you think activating the body and getting the finances under control are big challenges, just wait till you hear the last one I’m going to mention. In the Great Commission Jesus commanded his followers to make disciples of all nations by going to them, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey everything he commanded. Does that sound big enough? We, like most churches in the country, are mostly configured around taking care of ourselves. We think of membership conferring privileges. We see ourselves as the recipients of the ministry done by the minister. The biblical model, however, is for God’s people to let him do his work in their lives so that the watching world can see, wonder, and ask questions. Through what they see of God in us – and I mean more than seeing that we’re nice people – and through what they learn from our bold response to their questions, they can come to the place where they are ready to give their lives to Jesus. It’s at this point that membership make sense – not membership as a claiming of rights, but membership as a taking up of responsibilities, of joining in the mission of Jesus.

Reaching outside the church in evangelism is another aim of the 40 Days of Purpose. That’s why we need more than just Sunday School – why we need to have groups meeting during the week as well. That’s why I keep talking to you about getting a Spanish language group going as well. We need to invite people. We need to offer them Christ.

Our internet ministry is also expanding, enabling us to reach the world. Sunday messages are now available to the world at streamgarden.tv. I’ve recently started a weblog where I post my commentary on what’s happening in the world from a Christian point of view. You can get links to both of these by checking out our website – www.fumcpittsburg.com.

If we pay all our bills, whip our debt and have piles of cash laying around, I’ll be happy, but I won’t be satisfied. If all four hundred plus of our members start coming to worship and get involved in the ministry, I’ll be happy, but I won’t be satisfied. I’m not going to rest – I’m not going to stop crying out to God until we become a place where people are regularly coming to faith in Jesus, crossing the line of commitment to Jesus and to the church.

Does all that sound impossible yet? Does it sound like something we can’t do? Does it sound like a set of goals we will definitely fail to reach – unless God intervenes? That’s the thing – we’re trying things that are hard and difficult – things outside the norm. We can fail. We need resources beyond our own, the chief being a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit that not only empowers us, not only sweeps away our apathy and lethargy, but also opens our mouths and lives to the watching world.

That’s what I’m working and praying toward. Will you join me?

Scott Burns wrote of longterm population decline in Sunday’s Dallas Morning News. By “longterm” he means 50 years out. He notes that population growth in Western Europe and Japan is already negative, and that it is declining in the US. For those who see overpopulation as one of the major risks facing humanity, this is good news. But Burns points out that this could be disastrous for a foundational institution, the family.

Drawing on the work of Philip Longman, Burns writes:

… no business or government institution can replace the functioning of a family. Without that functioning, society would cease to exist… Mr. Longman sees a birth rate that is literally verging on extinction (nearly half the required rate for replacement) in Europe, Japan and Russia. And he asks questions few are asking. Those questions turn on two words.

Care. It will become more difficult in such a rapid population shift. Mr. Longman points out that there will be 35 million fewer children in the world by 2050 but 1.6 billion more elderly people. We can measure that by asking what portion of the population will be at least 60 years old in 2050, remembering that in most of human history it has been less than 5 percent.

In forever-young America, the figure will hit 26.9 percent, the lowest of any of the developed economies. In Italy and Japan it will be 42.3 percent. In Germany it will be 38.1 percent.

These are massive changes. They will absorb the lifetime work of millions of younger people. It will strain – or completely destroy – institutional systems of retirement income and health care that depend on transfers from younger workers. It will put devastating strain on younger households that may have to care for aging parents and stepparents.

Nurture. This is what adult parents do for the next generation. Nurture will be increasingly problematic as young couples confront the competing demands of caring (or paying) for the elderly, paying off education debts taken on to be competitive in the job market and paying for expensive housing in the shrinking number of school districts that offer quality public education.

Burns has a long history of warning us about the upcoming demise of Social Security (the math just doesn’t work). Now we see the deeper problem – the generational balance is out of whack. We’re all happy about the advances of medicine that have enabled us to live longer. But we have not taken into account all the effects that ripple through society.

If we think that Burns (and Longman) are correct in their assessment, what can we do?

At the very least, we need to turn our attention to those places where the population is not cratering – especially Africa. Africa is faced with exploding populations, rotten government, and new diseases. As Christians, we need to find ways to bless the people’s of Africa. It won’t only be for their good, but for the good of the world. Perhaps Africa University will prove of immense importance here.

We’ll also have to find ways to build up families in America. This will mean finding ways to encourage families to have more children. I have three children, so I know this is tough both economically and socially. Children cost us time and money. They’re the biggest investment we make. We need to find ways to convince people that investing in children (I’m not speaking of government investment in children but parental investment) instead of new and bigger houses, cars, vacations, etc.

Update: Here’s some new commentary on Africa University. Since they’re in Zimbabwe, thye certainly have their work cut out for them. Keep praying.

Rick Warren in this chapter makes both points that are profoundly true and points that are questionable. First the profoundly true:
“You are not an accident.” This is the thesis statement of the chapter. Many of us live like we are accidents. Not only do we not matter in the light of eternity, we think we don’t even matter in the light of this week. According to the bible, however, “God never does anything accidently, and he never makes mistakes.” He has a purpose for each of us.
“While there are illegitimate parents, there are no illegitimate children.” Some of us may have made a mistake when we “chose” our parents. That may have done a rotten job with us – led us to see ourselves as accidents – but God got the first word with us and will get the last word.
“If there was no God, we would all be accidents.” What he means here is (a) without God, it would only be random chance that brought us here, and (b) we would lack any purpose larger than ourselves.
He quotes Dr. Michael Denton of the University of Otago in New Zealand: “All the evidence available in the biological sciences suppots the core proposition… that the cosmos is a soecially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality have their meaning and explanation in this central fact.” This is a strong statement of what is called the Anthropic Principle.

What do I find questionable? Warren presents a strongly controlling God, pictured as actively planning everything that is. “God prescribed every single detail of your body. He deliberately chose your race, the color of your skin, your hair, and very other feature.” Including your disabilites and defects. Do you have any congenital defects? God prescribed those also. It sure reads like everything is the way it is because God planned it that way. When I read scripture, I see that something AREN’T the way God wants them to be. Sometimes God is disappointed in the way things are. God made us not only for a purpose, but to be freeling willing and acting beings. Our free actions have consequences, not merely in our own lives but in the lives of the people around us.

So what’s my alternative? How would I explain the defects we experience in our bodies? First, I would make a simple admission: Not everything we consider a defect is a defect in God’s eyes. Our values and valuations are warped by sin and our limitations. Second, because of sin we live in a broken world. This brokenness, which is not God will, affects us on many levels, even the genetic and biological. Brokenness is not only outside us, but within us.

Yahoo! News – ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ gets ‘axis of evil’ premiere:

“And even though his twenty-something son quipped in to say he was ‘disappointed’ by the film and asserted ‘politics is not as important’ for Iran’s younger generation, he did envy Moore’s position.

‘It sure is a great country, where someone like Moore trashes the president and gets away with it — and makes so much money!’ he laughed.”

Does this tell you something about America? People here see Fahrenheit 9/11 (I have not and probably won’t) and think, “Oh, we’re a horrible place!” Yet we often forget the tremendous freedoms we have.

When we talk about finding our purpose in life, more is in view than just “my life.” God made each of us with a role to play in creation. Each of us are unique, and our purpose in life is related to our uniqueness, but if we only pay attention to our uniqueness, we will never find our purpose in life. We must look outward, first toward God, secondly toward the activity of God in creation.

What is God’s role in all this? God wants us to know our purpose. He doesn’t create us and then tell us to grope our way towards purpose. No, he loves us enough to reveal himself, his purposes and his ways to us in the bible.

We also find our purpose through relationships: our relationship with God, our relationships with other people, and our relationship with creation itself. When sin has its way in our lives, these relationships are broken or warped, so we fall short of the purpose God has for us.

Our church is starting the 40 Days of Purpose Campaign Saturday, October 9. The core of this campaign is Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life. This book has forty chapters – one for each day of the campaign.

Rick Warren is pastor of Saddleback Church in California. Ostensibly a Southern Baptist congregation, they don’t make much of their denominational affiliation. From what I’ve seen of Rick Warren (I first heard him back in the early 90s while I was living in California), he and his organization honestly seek to be a blessing to other churches, whatever their denomination. They present their stuff – including the 40 Days of Purpose – as plain old basic Christianity. For the most part they’re right on target. But by downplaying their baptist heritage, there are elements of that heritage that come through without the label. What is presented as basic Christianity is actually the baptist take on basic Christianity. I’m not in the least perturbed by this. I’m United Methodist and I’m sure my tradition comes through the same way in what I write and say. Saddleback is also an extremely large church in Southern California, so some of what we find in the material may also represent a large church and a California take on basic Christianity. I share these obvious points simply so we will be aware while we read.

The Purpose Driven people strongly advise every church that uses their material to adapt it to their situation. That’s great advice, and the rationale for my blogging the book. I will be blogging each chapter of the book, offering my comments and questions. Hopefully it will be good for you. I know it will be good for me.

Introduction
Warren’s book is all about answering what he calls “Life’s most important question”: “What on earth am I here for?” It is comon to think that the best way to answer this question is to look inward: Who am I? What do I want? What are my talents and abilities? What makes me happy? Although these questions aren’t irrelevant, they will inevitably lead us astray if we don’t consider them in the context of who God – our Maker – is, and what God has done, is doing, and will do in our world. We’re part of something bigger than us!

Here are some pointers as you read the book.

1. Remember that it’s not the bible. It’s a devotional book. Measure what you read by the Bible.
2. Read only one chapter a day. Take time to digest it.
3. Interact with the book. Ask questions of it. Ask questions of yourself.
4. If you own the book (and you should), write in it. Underline or highlight parts you think most relevant.
5. Don’t take this adventure alone. Be part of a small group doing the book. Talk about it with your family. As we talk things over we engage our senses more fullly and learn more.
6. Pray. Allow God to be your partner. Ask for ears to hear what He wants to say to you.

Compass Direct

Once again bad news is coming out of Iran. Time to keep praying.

Hugh Hewitt comments on today’s LA Times article on blogs.
HughHewitt.com

The dominant theory of knowledge in the modern era is foundationalism. Foundationalism is the notion that we need an indubitable foundation upon which we can build our knowledge. Nothing certain? Then no real knowledge. Descartes got the ball rolling (I’m simplifying a bit) with his Cogito ergo sum, but Locke, Kant, and others followed the same path.

One requirement of the foundation of one’s knowledge structure was univeralizability – it had to be equally available to anyone. Thus the guardians of real knowledge had to be neutral observers – freed from all particularity. With this scheme the universal and the abstract held sway over the local and the particular.

Fast forward to today. The MSM sees itself as the neutral guardian of knowledge. They are the experts, properly trained in the skills of acquiring and building knowledge into a structure. The bloggers? They’re chaotic elements hovering on the edges. If we want real truth, they (the MSM) think, we must stick with those who are neutral.

Problem: Nobody’s neutral. No one stands nowhere. Thomas Nagel wrote a book years ago – The View from Nowhere. His aim was to describe a truly objective epistemology. His title, however, has been claimed by “the other side,” those who reject the possibility of standing nowhere.

According to moderns, knowledge IS built on foundations. If there are no foundations, then there is no knowledge. This is their take on the bloggers. The bloggers have no foundations. No universitality. They are to the media, what Nietzsche (and Nietzsche’s recent followers – I think of Derrida and Foucault here) is to the theory of knowledge. Real knowledge is foundational in structure, you [Nietzscheans, bloggers) say there is no foundation (only difference), so there is no knowledge. BUT: we all want knowledge, so we need the MSM, not the bloggers. QED.

But there are other postmoderns – and though I am fairly new to blogging, I think I would be right to think that whether bloggers consider themselves postmodern or not, the phenomenon itself IS – who refuse to accept that all knowledge must be conceived foundationalistically. Once we make that move, no longer do we have to worry about the lack of foundations.

So how might the blogs become producers of real knowledge given non-foundationalism? Well, it looks like they talk with each other. They push each other. They provoke each other. They argue. They critique. They learn.

Oh – but what if Blogger A is not really who or what he says he is? Eventually, if that is relevant to the piece of knowledge pursued, I believe it will come out.

Finally (it’s getting late) let me turn this around for a moment. I think it possible that what we’re seeing with the blogs vis-a-vis the MSM not only is a picture of the demise of foundationalism, but also might very well be an agent of the demise in broader culture. We’ll see.

For the past several months I’ve been hearing people describe Iraq as “another Vietnam.” We all know what “Vietnam” means, don’t we? The American armed forces leaving the field of battle with their tail between their legs, whipped and defeated. Our first loss in warfare. The mightiest nation on earth humbled.

But from what I’ve read of the history of the war (as opposed to the feelings associated with it), this picture is highly inaccurate. My main source has been Lewis Sorley’s Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America�s Last Years in Vietnam. The book tends to be repetitive, and thus longer than necessary, but the picture it gives of the war is very different than the “Vietnam” that lingers in public consciousness.

Sorley presents the work of Vietnamization – the plan to equip and enable the South Vietnamese to provide their own defense against the North. Under General Creighton Abrams, this strategy proved very successful. In theory, this strategy, combined with the treaties we signed with the North Vietnamese, left the South Vietnamese in fine shape. Every North Vietnamese offensive as far back as Tet 1968 (roughly the time Sorley’s coverage begins) had been stopped – with devastating effects on the North Vietnamese. Abram’s approach was also characterized by a concern for the security of ordinary South Vietnamese people. Sorley’s contention is that this effort was so successful that by the time of the American withdrawal in 1973, the Viet Cong was no longer a force to be reckoned with. So if we and the South Vietnamese were victorious on the battlefield, what happened?

First, the success of the policy of Vietnamization depended not only on the rise of the South Vietnamese armed forces in numbers and fighting capacity, but also in the continued support of the US in terms of money and war materiel. Although the US leadership promised to do this, they didn’t.

Second, the treaty specified that the North Vietnamese would withdraw all their troops from South Vietnamese territory. Makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, it’s a lot easier to conquer a territory if you already have troops there. But our leadership pretended that the North Vietnamese were honest on this – or engaged in wishful thinking.

Third, North Vietnam continued to receive aid from its allies – China and the Soviet Union. If it was only the South versus the North, the South might have won without us. But with the combined effort of such powerful patron’s, the North prevailed.

So – if this is a more accurate picture of Vietnam, what might it mean to say that Iraq is “a Vietnam?”

First, it would mean that we were unwilling to stick with our allies and keep the promises we made to them. The new Iraqi government, like the old South Vietnamese government, will most likely fall well short of our American ideals of democratic government. But in both case promises were made to those governments. We didn’t keep our promises to the South Vietnamese. If we fail to keep our promises to the people of Iraq (and I take a key element of those promises to be something like: “Democracy will not only work in Iraq, but it will be a blessing to your people. It will be lots of work, but it will be well worth it. And we will help you achieve that goal”) then we can truly say that Iraq has become another Iraq.

Second, if Iraq were to become “another Vietnam” it would mean that we stopped speaking the truth about the situation there and let sentiment and mere ideology (and perhaps even electoral popularity) prevail. Like the South Vietnamese, the Iraqis have multinational forces arrayed against them. These forces are quite different than what the North Vietnamese had, in terms of fighting capacity, but they are very numerous.

Am I saying the the war in Iraq was the right course of action? No – I’m just saying that it is not yet “another Vietnam” though we could very easily turn it into one by disengaging and leaving the Iraqis on their own.

One more piece of historical analogy before I quit. With the help of US armed forces, the allies prevailed in World War 1. We won! But then we disengaged. We left the Germans facing huge reparations. After years of postwar devastation Hitler came in and picked up the pieces, restoring Germany to its former glory – but more bellicose and dangerous than ever. We again mobilized, working with our allies to defeat Germany. This time, we didn’t disengage. We did the hard – and extremely expensive work of rebuilding Germany. We might have more clarity – and less emotion – if we face the decision in Iraq as whether it will be another World War 1 or another World War 2.

There are hints of a spread of reforming (some might say liberalizing) tendencies in Islam. Ziauddin Sardar presents several movements in this direction in the New Statesman. Islam is a complex tradition (and a complex of traditions), as is any other major “religion.” If Islam can learn to incorporate historical progression and find acceptable theories of cultural diversity (by “acceptable” I simply mean “acceptable in terms of Islam”), that would be progress. There has been a strong tendency in modern Islam (I am not an expert in any form of Islam), to see a lack of differentiation between the various levels of society (self, family, clan, state, religion, etc.) but rather to conceive of them monolithically. Thus Sharia is understood to apply on all levels and in all situations without deviation – and apparently without admitting that the Sharia of one culture or country differs from that in another, and both differ from 7th century Arabia.