Some Thoughts on Politics

Posted on August 28, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

This week the Democrats are going at it; next week the Republicans get their turn. When I think of individuals involved in politics, regardless of their affiliations, I can usually think of somethign positive about them. On the other hand, I can usually think of something negative they’ve said or done. I suppose that’s why I wouldn’t do very well at either convention. I know too much about both groups to allow me to get very excited about either.

Yesterday I was part of a group hearing from our new county judge. He told us that though he is identified with a particular political party, he finds both that his convictions do not match perfectly with that party, and that much of what that (and the other) part claims to stand for has no bearing on county business. If that is the case – and it seems natural that it would, since the major parties are mostly concerned with national issues – why must we continue to have partisan elections on the local level? I can think of a couple of reasons.

The first reason is somewhat cynical. For many, activity in local politics can be a stepping stone to higher office. If you want to run for the state legislature or for congress, it sure looks like you need major party affiliation to make it. By proving yourself on the lower (local) level, you demonstrate to the Powers Above that you would make a decent candidate for their party.

The second reason to have partisan elections is that their are different philosophies or outlooks when it comes to local issues. The difficulty, of course, is that these differences may not match up in any way with either the Democrats or the Republicans. It might also be that there are more than two identifiable philosophies. As long as we’re a two party system, however, we think (except thinking doesn’t seem to have much to do with it) there must only be two ways. What if we had a completely different set of parties that worked on the local level, parties that had no determinate relation to the national parties?

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

Joining the Big Story

Posted on August 9, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

One of the books I’m reading now (having a short attention span, I usually read several at a time) is Dave Schmelzer’s Not the Religious Type: Confessions of a Turncoat Atheist. On p. 105 Schmelzer says,

This [he’s been talking about how a person who desperately needs God is not bored with what he’s doing] does back to the hero’s journey, wouldn’t you think? Either there really is more going on around us than we think or there isn’t. And either we really have a central role to in that larger conflict or we don’t. And if it’s all true, either we say yes to that role or we turn it down and request new experiences or insights to alleviate our boredom.

That resonates on a few levels.

First, I’m continually praying for my children to experience this.

Second, it fits nicely with this Sunday’s sermon. I’ll be dealing with Mordecai’s words to Esther: “Perhaps it is for just such a time as this that you have come to be Queen.”

Finally, it makes me think of one of the other books I’m currently reading (a book much longer and slower reading than Schmelzer), Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Taylor describes one feature of the modern age as our propensity to see depths as inside us, not outside us in the world. Schmelzer’s sense of a bigger story that we may or may not enter is hard for us to fathom when we think all depth to life comes from inside us, either through self-exploration or self-expression. Jesus came not just do do something in the depths of my being, or to free me for self-expression. Jesus came to invite me – to invite us – to become participants in his story.

Posted in Charles Taylor, Dave Schmelzer, Metanarratives, Spirituality, Theology | 8 Comments

Need Prayer?

Posted on August 8, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

As one not attending Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit this year, I’m trying to learn from folks who are. Here’s Rob Wegner’s quote from Gary Haugen that grabbed me:

“The first place that reveals your currently level of safety is prayer. Mother Theresa said, ‘I can’t imagine going thirty minutes in my work without prayer.’ Can you go thirty minutes in your life’s work without prayer? If you can, perhaps it’s time for a new life’s work. Or finding a new way to do your life’s work.”

I play it safe way too much.

Posted in Ministry, Prayer | 1 Comment

Vision for the Christian Life

Posted on August 7, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

Where do you go to find your vision for the Christian life, where do you look to find your picture of what it looks like to live as a follower of Jesus?

If Christianity were only – or primarily – about going to heaven when we die, the logical place to look might be the insurance industry. We get our policy, and while hoping we never have to use it, know it is there if the unexpected and unwanted happens. But most of the time our policy just sits in our files.

Since this enterprise we call Christianity is much more than that, however, we need to look somewhere else. Here are four places to consider:

The most obvious place people have looked over the years is the Bible. We look to the life of Jesus as an example of what it means to live a life pleasing to God. We also read the Apostle Paul telling his people to follow his example as he follows Christ’s example. Since he was personally acquainted with many of the recipients of his letters, they would be able to see his lifestyle first hand, something they couldn’t do with Jesus.

But just as Jesus, a Palestinian Jew, might be culturally distant from a Gentile Christian in Greece or Rome, Paul the traveling evangelist seems a world away from us. If we follow his approach, however, we can find pictures of a life dedicated to Jesus in the biographies and autobiographies of Christ followers in intervening years. For example, I’ve found great inspiration in the lives of people like Martin Luther, John Wesley, Brother Andrew and Hudson Taylor.

Are old timers the only examples we can look to? Not at all. As we hunger to know more of Christ and to be more faithful to him, it is to our advantage to watch for people around us who are more mature in the faith (or so it seems to us) than we are, so we can learn from them. While we submit to Jesus’ example, we can find powerful illustrations of how to live it out in the lives of some of the people we see on Sunday morning.

A final place to consider is quite different. Some of the hymns we sing are hymns of praise – they speak words about God or give thanks to God. Others, however, include aspirations to or descriptions of life with Jesus.

“I want a principle within of watchful godly care.”

For some of us, such a principle within us is a current reality, for others it remains an aspiration. Or,

“No condemnation, now I dread. Jesus and all in Him is mine, and clothed in righteousness divine, bold I approach the eternal throne and claim the crown through Christ my own.”

We can read  this in Romans 8, but what happens when we sing it with Charles Wesley and imagine it as our current reality?But as we sing the hymns – and pay attention to what we’re saying as we sing – we can find elements of a powerful vision for the Christian life.

Posted in Salvation, Spirituality | 1 Comment

Small Town Living

Posted on August 2, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

I just ran across this Chesterton quote at Alexander Pruss’s blog:

Chesterton says, “It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery… A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.”

Having moved here from Houston, I see the truth of what G.K. says here. In small town life we encounter and live out every day life with all kinds of people. I think this is one of the things my son was getting at when he expressed discomfort at his college orientation, “There’s just not the diversity we have in Pittsburg,” As G.K. would note, the irony is that it is the large polis or cosmopolitan institution (the modern American university) that prides itself on being diverse. Taken as a whole, sure they are. But in day to day experience it’s mighty easy to find a critical mass of friends and companions who are just like you.

It’s not just that I know more people, but that I know more kinds of people, and associate with them day to day. In a small town I know the folks at places I shop – often the people who work there and other customers. One of the factors in some articulations of secularization theory has been that as we relate to people in only one setting, one kind of relationship, secularization is one of the results. Small towns resist secularization (some of the time), not just because they’re uneducated “hicks” (the ones around here sure aren’t), but because they experience a different kind of depth to life, unable to segregate themselves from others as easily.

Posted in Culture, Diversity | 4 Comments

Interesting People

Posted on July 21, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

In my line of work I get to meet many interesting people. Some of the most interesting over the years have been World War 2 veterans.

My dad was a naval advisor in Korea back in the early 1970s. Since the country was fairly safe then, we were able to live there also. Living on base in Chinhae, one of our regular entertainments was going to see the movies on Saturday afternoon. Most of the movies on base were free – just the right price for us kids. One I remember seeing was Merrill’s Marauders, the story of American’s in Burma in World War 2. My later studies of history never led in that direction, so the movie (seen as a third grader) was my sole education on that subject. Until I met Joe Woodley, that is. Joe was a member of the first congregation I served, and had been one of Merrill’s Marauders after graduating from Texas A & M. Joe (a real character) put a face on my childhood memory.

My wife’s grandfather was another character. J.W. Anderson spent most of his career working at a paper mill in Lufkin. During the war he’d served as a paratrooper (513th Regiment) and was one of the few survivors of his unit (HBO’s series Band of Brothers depicted a unit very much like his own). He told of the great tiredness they experienced in combat. One time they were able to rest a little by catching a ride with a British tank unit. He promptly fell asleep. When he woke up he say destroyed tanks all around him. It seems that he’d slept through a tank battle.

J.W. was a Methodist all his life though he didn’t become a follower of Jesus until late in life. His wife had prayed for him throughout their marriage. He only gave his life to Christ after she died. Even though he was a senior citizen at the time, he didn’t “rest” in his salvation. He promptly started teaching Sunday School and leading bible studies in his home, continuing into his 80s.

Just last week I heard that Hiroshi Yamashiro had passed away last month. Hiroshi was a member of our church in California. Raised a Buddhist, he had become a Christian after his family moved from Japan to Hawaii. At the time I knew him, Hiroshi was one of the happiest people around, always quick to laugh. He kept his garden (and the church garden) going, and carried his camera everywhere, taking pictures. During World War 2 Hiroshi had been a member of the famous 442nd Regiment (all Japanese Americans fighting in the ETO).

These three have all gone on to glory now, a glory due them not because of their prowess or participation in warfare or defending their country, but to their faith in Christ. I’m hapy to have counted each of them as friends.

Posted in Friendship, War | 2 Comments

Dark Knight thoughts

Posted on July 19, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

If you haven’t seen the movie, and don’t want any hints of what happens, don’t read any further.

I saw the movie yesterday with my two oldest children. Here are a few thoughts:

  • At the end, Batman was reckoned a sinner so that the people of Gotham City could be delivered from crime. Joker had tried to show that even the best of the best would become evil in the right (wrong?) situation. Batman decided that Joker couldn’t be seen by the people to win that argument (though to a certain degree, Joker did win the argument: Harvey Dent did go bad). To defeat Joker, Batman bore Harvey Dent’s sin – but only a very few were allowed in on the secret. Jesus bore the sin of many, and did so without compromising on the truth. There was no need to maintain an illusion of the goodness of the people for whom Jesus died. It was pure grace. “Ah, but what about the common attribution of sinlessness?” Batman (falsely) wanted to see a kind of sinlessness attributed to Harvey Dent (how much of this was to cover for his own – as Bruce Wayne – over-reliance on Harvey Dent, on his own will to believe?). I see two things in Jesus’ sinlessness that help us more than Harvey Dent’s. First, Jesus’ sinlessness was in the context of non-violent, non-reactive suffering. He, like Harvey Dent, was truly tempted. He, unlike Harvey Dent, said NO to temptation. Second, as one who was tempted like we are – whether we’re the morally upstanding Harvey Dent’s or the gangster Maronys – Jesus understands our temptations, even our giving in to them, and still extends us mercy.
  • Joker saw his larger role as fomenting chaos. Chaos in the Dark Knight is seen as evil. Batman, though operating outside the bounds of order, seeks to prop up order. Is the order good? Well, not exactly. The order – pre-Batman, at least – included organized crime and its depredations on Gotham City. When we see Batman seeking to eliminate the evil in the order, we seem to be moving beyond a simple Manichean order of good and evil in constant warfare. If chaos is a kind of anti-order, perhaps even a prelude to a new order, then Batman himself is an agent of chaos. Joker seems altogether different, however. He seems in favor of no order, no predictability, no security. Jesus brought chaos – I think of his cleansing of the temple – but never served as the agent of chaos like Joker. Jesus was not for Order – just any kind of social stability – he was for the Kingdom of God and its ordering.
  • Joker is a kind of satan, some only to “kill, steal and destroy.” He lives as the accuser, the liar, the one who seeks to “help” others stray from the path.
Posted in Dark Knight, Jesus, Movies | 1 Comment

“That’s nice, preacher”

Posted on July 15, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

I’m a knowledge and information junkie. I read piles of books. If I had the time and money I’d go to a ministry conference every month. I used to go to more conferences and read more ministry books, but I’ve mostly given up on them.

It used to be that I’d read a book or come back from a conference fired up with enthusiasm and new ideas. I’d tell my leaders about what I learned and what we could do and the usual response was, “That’s nice, preacher. Occasionally they’d humor me and play a loing for a little while. They really had no reason to listen, however, except to be nice. They’d been in the church longer than I’d been alive and knew how to do things. Stuff happened before I arrived (or came back from the conference, or read the book) with my my new ideas and ways of doing things. Stuff would continue to happen.  Why both learning new things when you alreay know everything you need to know?

But from my perspective they didn’t know all they needed to know. The church continued to decline as they did the same thing over and over again. “If it was good enough in the 1950s, it’s good enough for today.” They refuse to see two things. First, doing what they did in the 1950s isn’t filling the church like it did (if it did) in the 1950s). Second, what they did in the 1950s didn’t produce as much lasting fruit as they thought.

I think of the old William Booth story. He’s gone to a meeting somewhere and a society lady comes up to him. “Mr. Booth, I don’t care for your method of doing evangelism.” He replies, “Madam, I don’t care for your method of not doing evangelism.” If all we need to do is “keep the doors open,” or maintain institutions and buildings, or keep old time members happy, we might be able to get by with doing what we’ve always done. But if we’re out to keep people from running headlong into hell, then we’ll have to do something different. We’ll have to learn some new things.

<Sarcastic comments> I’d better stop there.

Posted in church growth, Evangelism, Leadership, Ministry | 5 Comments

United Methodist Restrictions

Posted on July 7, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

United Methodists have varying views on restrictions in the church, though there seems to be a strong trajectory against restrictions in general. We emphasize Open Communion. We preach the call of Christ to all to come to salvation.

What restrictions do you see United Methodists affirming or defending?

Posted in United Methodism | 1 Comment

Two Big Mistakes

Posted on July 4, 2008 by Richard Heyduck

In my years of ministry (mostly in East Texas), I’ve come to see two big mistakes the church has made. One mistake is characteristic of my own Methodist tradition, the other characteristic of the dominant Protestant tradition of my region, the Baptists.

I’m not a Baptist, but I’ve observed over the years that they think it’s really important that people get “saved.” Obviously this desire – whether using the same terminology or not – is common to many Christian traditions. I can look at my own Methodist tradition, particularly as instantiated in John Wesley himself, and see a powerful passion to see people come into a personal relationship with Jesus. So this in itself is not a mistake. The mistake I’ve seen is that many operate as if this is all that matters. The point of ministry/preaching/teaching is to get people saved. Once a person is saved, they’re taken care of and we can safely move on to the next unsaved person.

The modern Methodist mistake is, in a way, the opposite of the Baptist mistake. While they often assume that no one is saved (“let’s sing Just as I Am just one more time”), we usually assume everyone is. Whether our universalism is explicit or implicit from a kind of unthinking spiritual introversion, we have negelected helping people cross the line of faith. Oh, we’ll take in new members, but clarity about coming to faith in Jesus? That’s too baptistic for us.

Both mistakes have proved deadly. The mistake of assuming all we need to do is get people saved, to make a decision for Christ, has led us to believe that life with God (aka the Christian life) just happens naturally after one’s “salvation experience.” We inculcate a sense that salvation doesn’t come from works – from doing things – so we leave out the doing things that constitute actually living out life with God. We believe – and think that’s enough. Believing is certainly a good and necessary thing, but it’s mighty thin gruel, especially the face of the acids of modernity.

The Methodist mistake desn’t do us any better. With our emphasis on doing good – and the good we do is, for the most part, very much worth doing – accompanies a de-theologization of our tradition. It becomes easy for our people, as they mature, to come to think the religious verbiage is just an easily discarded husk, leaving the purity of true and universal spirituality and morality. We become comfortable living on the “necessary truths of reason” side of Lessing’s ugly ditch, missing out on the ongoing activity of God in history, the very activity in which  a life with God  seeks to include us.

No one is saved. Everyone is saved. Either strategy seems to set up too many of our people into the position of seeing Jesus as only a get out of hell free card, or a nice, but mostly irrelevant (because foreign and outdated) moral teacher. We both need to get back to the place of preaching the whole Jesus.

Posted in Ministry, Salvation, United Methodism | 7 Comments