What Law Will We Live By? - Law for Exiles

In the PostChristian America what law will we live by?  Once our forefathers felt that the laws that passed were based on Jewish/Christian precepts or "highly aligned" with them at least.  They also felt that the laws applied to all.

Two days ago for instance the FBI tried to pass off as "technical violations" their complete violation of the law with respect to privacy.  Patrick Leahy had a different persepective on that.  You may not care about privacy, but we should all care about the principle that the King and the Slave all are subject to the law, this was the dramatic difference that the Torah (Old Testament Law) had over the other Semetic codes (aka Hummarabi).  I'm sure we can all think of a few things that are going on in US law, or have gone on for the past few years that are absolutely the opposite of what we believe God is interested in.

But this is the turn, we need to stop looking at US law as "our" law and think of it as the "powers" law.  It turns out that we have some say in who the "powers" are, but how is that working for you?  Are you satisfied with your local mayor/supervisor, your local state rep/senator, your governor, your US congressman, president, etc.?  And how long have you been unhappy?  If you are a serious anabaptist you don't vote at all, you know that the law is of the powers, and your kingdom is not theirs.  I won't go there tonight.

As exiles we will do our best to conform to the law of the "powers", but we need to consider what the laws are of what we are going to diligently work on, the standard by which we live our lives and teach our children and grand-children.  We certainly have Jesus' answer to the greatest commandment, but we need a lot more than this principal, we need some more detailed principles, corollaries you could say.  Those corollaries actually exist, they are Torah law (Old Testament law), and you probably know 10 of them, but how does one apply them today?

For those who know Dr. Dorsey we need to apply the CIA (now a big word) hermeneutic - a way to interpret the Torah law.  It really isn't that hard, and he is about to make it easier, as he is writing a book on the Torah law and how to interpret it.  He breaks the law into three large sections:

A.  Instructions for Godly Living
B.  Civil Laws
C.  Instructions for Religious Practice

God spent a lot of time on section A.  Those standards look a lot different than what is encapsulated in the US lawbooks, and they are where our loyalty lies as exiles.  Dorsey breaks down "A" into five sections, and in my next post I'd like to discuss in that fourth section (Love for the Disadvantaged and Vulnerable), Dorsey's number 10 there is

Help indebted people who have lost their land (Lev 25:25, 35-38)

The Book of Eli & St. Francis' Dictum

"Preach the Gospel, and sometimes use Words" in my mind comes close to capturing one of the
levels of this film, and the other levels are equally well done.  What is amazing to me is the depth of a number of films in the last few years and their ability to enable serious spiritual/philosophical discussions.  I would add "The Road" to this list, but I read that compelling Pulitizer Prize book
back in the 70s.  The use of Frank Herbert's prophetically seeing the present as future (Dune Messiah), and Ray Bradbury's civilization destruction through book burning, and renewal through "gathering" (Fairenheit 451) in a Christian perspective was incredibly well done, and ultimately surprising at the very end.

Here is the story that no Christian leader would dare communicate yet which a very significant portition of post-christendom will be exposed to.  This is the kind of story that I've heard at bars from veterans about their experiences in Vietnam and elsewhere, from parents who had to let their children "go", experiences of profound moral challenge that only the distinctive knowledge and relationship to the Holy Other, and the sense of the unholy enemy's presence would allow a choice to be taken.

For Eli there was no two world view, his faith was fully integrated into his present actions, and
his simple prayer enough to affect a prostituting woman who wanted immediately to share it with someone in her family that she loved.

Walter Bruegemann's concept of "preaching to exiles" works for me as one who is in exiled here in postchristianity, exiled from the country and culture that once was.  Traditional preaching is only (and barely) relevant to the house of the redeemed, there is little relevance to the larger community, "testimony as a decentered mode of preaching" in Bruegemann's parlance IS relevant.

Eli represents a testimony in a form that is comprehendible to the current culture, and like Batman The Dark Knight has the ability to cause someone "to abandon the script in which one has had confidence."  Thinking of the Parables in their upsidedown'edness for the audience (or Amos for the coming downside, or Jeremiah on the coming downside, and then later on the upside by buying a field) certainly appears to be attention focusing, and preconception shredding.

Eli is a cultural portal, hopefully we can use it.

Missional Church - Missional Education for Pastoral Staff Part 1

Somehow 90+ credits for an MDIV over three years doesn't seem like a missional education structure - we'll lightly touch on content later.  But we might ask who we want to educate first.  I'd propose that we want to educate three clusters of people, those entering with high school diplomas who are 18 or more, those who have associates or bachelors who are 20 or more, and those with MDIVs who were prepared for institutional service.  I'd lump in the MA's and MAR's as well.

But let's look at another degree of freedom for "who":  those who want to plant churches, those who want to make or participate in the the making of an established church into a missional church, and "other".  Since all institutions have inertia and are inherently conservative/conservators one could imagine a whole lot of others in approved/experimental missional "activities" by a church.  In Indiana I met a staff pastor who was bivocational (and took zero money from his suburban church) who had established a church in an urban core, that his church had abandoned 40 years before.

The Missional Education should be "accessible", "affordable", "applicable","partnerable", and "certifiable".

Accessible:  hard to imagine driving to some remote location every week, this had better be online in a majoritive sense.  But it should also be cohort based, with face to face contact with the educators and the cohort.

Affordable:  this can't cost what a graduate degree costs, it has to look to the community college as the metric, that is the most that it should cost.  Given the missional nature, there should be a certification that no money was borrowed for this.

Applicable:   "Preaching" is an institutional practice of Christendom (philosophically I'd call it a "speech act" as it has an intended understanding for the listener).  This is post Christendom, a course in interpersonal communications and conversation is dramatically more important.  We have portals into these conversations, I'd prefer each course to have an assigned book from the NewYorkTimes BestSellers list to capstone discussed for 20% of the grade, then a final or paper.

Partnerable:  While many seminaries have successfully partnered with denominational institutions and should continue to with this cirriculum, they will have to learn to partner with individual churches that want to participate in this missional turn in post Christendom.

Certifiable:  In that partnership the seminary certifies it's half, the church must certifiy its half, this is undoubtedly more than licensing or ordination.  It is something else, and ultimately equally important.

A last point, in information theory there are three things that happen with information

CREATION, TRANSFER, USE

For millenium TRANSFER had a high value, and especially in North America through the 20th Century.  Our society is moving to a stage where TRANSFER is NOT valued, it is broadly applicable
but even more so to all forms of education.  Ultimately all time-domain (time serving) forms of
transfer will die, what is of true interest is mastery.  So while the traditional classroom model for
education is dieing, even online cohort is undoubtedly a transitional stage.  Mastering community
in this model is going to be very very hard.

Missional Church - BiVocation

I spent the weekend in Indiana going to a Dave Fitch http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/ "conversation" on the Missional Church that was attended by 70ish people from the MidWest. I had read Dave's book The Great Giveaway. Now in Year three of my odyessy of Seminary Education and Pastoral Contemplation/Practice my disquiet when I entered has only grown, and my opinions are "hardening" as iron sharpens iron.

The missional effort whether in plants or recasting can only be done through BiVocation. After looking at some of the data on personality types and what dominates the evangelical churches it is clear (to me at least), that my experience of very narrow types is universal, and the personality types to "missionalize" the church don't exist in the pastoral ministry, they exist in the engineers, lawyers, carpet layers, foreman, and truck drivers of the church. My personal opinion is that this has been an institutionalization of 1 Corinthians 12. One part of the body (by personality type or disposition) feeling privelaged over the others.

While BiVocational-ism is within the living memory of the traditions of my family and area (Wesleyan and Ana-Baptist), it has fallen away in the overall consumerism/professionalism ways of life that have trumped wisdom, fidelity, and a real review of utility (ie, has consumerism and professionalism REALLY worked for our society?)

What I fear in the resurrection of bi-vocationalism is it being cast/visioned as a solution to financial issues (it's cost effective!), or it's 2nd best (this is the best we can do), or it's transitional (when we get enough people/money, we can move them to "full time").

What I'd like to propose here is that this is the BEST way, as those who SHOULD be recruited into pastoral ministry are COMPLETEY missing (personality type wise), but they are the BEST because they can communicate through the portals of society which are neither theological or cultic (they have nothing to do with what goes on Sunday mornings). These portals are books, music, theater, sports, gardening, etc., and the conversations eventually lead to a dialog which is a mixture of philosophical, relational, and practical ("does it work?") light years before it becomes theological.

This proposition - bivocational as the BEST, is a hard concept to digest by the institutional biases now in place, but once upon a time in America, this would have been a mainstream thought for both similiar and additional reasons.

I'll attempt to post shortly some thoughts on the "educational" implications of this leadership.

Two and a Half Cent Incarnation

My two sons and I went to Swaziland in June which as expected was a leveling experience. We ended up far from the capital or any town for that matter, highly rural on the Mozambique border amongst the orphans, in a country of orphans. You can get the background data anywhere on the impact of HIV in Africa so I won't go into it here.

One of things we brought in our bags were beads and strings to make jewelry with the kids. Little did we suspect how such a simple thing would impact a bunch of kids (200+). Of course owning nothing provides a certain level of distinction.

There are various portions of the Gospels which as an American I have a hard time imagining. At least two of them I finally experienced in Swaziland in a way that no amount of reading or contemplation had elicited. In Luke Chapter 5 verse 1 "So it was, as the multitude pressed about Him to heard the word of God..." one of the many "pressing" passages in the Gospel especially around healing. What did that mean or feel like? I don't know but I'm sure there was no desire to hurt Jesus.

In Swaziland surrounded by a 100 kids with my back to a wall sitting down on the ground with a bucket of beads which they did not even consider plunging their hands into (in fact when i dropped a bead they would put it back in) I got a taste of being "pressed". As the wife of head of the missions organizations prayed I began to speak about incarnation.

God comes as the string to bind with the beads, the beads are the flesh of man which becomes Christ the bracelet which we place ourselves into. Only the Holy Spirit can ultimately reveal the incarnation with two and half cents worth of beads and string, I pray that he does.

Stuff

We have too much stuff, that's pretty clear to Diane and I. While I'll never give up my books, my laptop, or my cell phone (well, maybe the cell phone). I think the rest can go.

The question is when and why. In my mind the issues is to minimalize the impact on the kids (ie fast change isn't good), and my desire to work in tech (and therefore stay "current" on a slice of "stuff" - electronics and software. But I wrestle with the legitimacy of those arguments.

Then there is motivation, saving dollars, simplifying life, becoming less fixed to place are all great goals, but are they enough? What do you do with the excess money, more time, etc....

The impact and influence of stuff on the kids is interesting, it's not that Diane and I didn't grow up in a consumer society in the 60's and the 70's. But there were limits: a television in the living room, maybe a record player or stereo in the bedroom, going to a movie or two. In my house I'm sure there are more electronics than the entirety of 5 blocks of 15th street in NewCumberland in that era.

I remember Uncle Pepper's first computer at his house, it died, and the UPS hated his power, seems he only had 50amps. He had lived there for 30 years on 50amps with no problem using his tools, his tv, his stove, and his dishwasher. No one builds houses without 200amps these days.

Walking into the store in San Francisco's Chinatown, it was clear to me that there are no limits and that it all looked like junk to me. But the no limits applies to Best Buy as well, and maybe I need to think of Best Buy as a junk store as well.

Planning for Mud Volleyball Or Looking for a Frontier?

Last year the youth group of our church had a mud volleyball "game" at our farm in a retention pond. The idea was mine, but the outcome was unexpectded. First while I thought maybe 12 or so guys would show up from the church, about 80 people showed up, half girls, and half guys, with a bunch of people not from the church.

And while the first 10 minutes were "volleyball", the next 30 were flinging, wrestling, wallowing, and laughing anarchy. I had arranged for a firetruck to come and hose them off, which probably allowed me to return to the church the next Sunday.

This year they want to repeat, and they want to add a mud slide to this and the expected numbers are much higher.

So what is the insight here? I'm not sure, but I think that at least for the kids (and for a few adults as well), the desire to do something different is very large. Our highly pasteurized and suburbanized world allows this only to play out in illicit situations and relationships at times. In my past of living in a small town in the 60's bounded by a creek and a river, fishing, fort building in the woods, mud slinging, stripping down to your shorts and putting war paint on your body, whatever WAS the norm. We acted out beyond the frontier of the house and lawns in these ways and were not judged by the rules of not upsetting the lamps, the cats or the moms in the house.

Sociologist's talk about the loss of he frontier for America and it's impact. I think we all need a place where the "high civilization" rules don't apply, but the boisterous good fun rules do - we all need a personal frontier and to go to it occasionally.

That Old Twisted Tree

"Twisted" is one of those words with serious negative connotations, but with the help of Evan and a dictionary it is the 8th of 8 meanings.

When I bought the Farm it was a riot of collapsed fences, buildings, poison, overgrowth, etc... Somethings were replaced like the training oval of an earlier posting, but not everything. The architect and landscaper had a field day in what they thought they could do; however, they ran into my hatred of killing trees needlessly.

Don't get me wrong, I own two chainsaws and burn wood to heat my house, and my greenhouse, but so far I've been able to do that with the ones that had to be moved or fell down.

The landscaper come architect, wanted to get rid of the three trees in the picture, two locusts and an ash. And so an argument began, why redo the fence, cut the poison and cut the grass with those old twisted trees dominating the perspective.

My argument boiled down to three points:

1) the trees reminded me of me, aka twisted
2) they represented a true farm vs a suburban scape
3) they had been there a long time, and would (probably) be there after both of us were gone

I thought of that tree along the lines of the preferred definitions in 1-7, specifically "to be entwined so as to impart a single thread", and "to have a coiled or spiral shape".

The trees were planted by the original farmers (held in the same family since 1740's), who used them for fences (especially the Locust's in this area), nuts, fruit, shade etc. they were part of the single thread of "a farm". And they were changed to be twisted by their circumstance: the wind, being planted on a bank, etc.

Ever since I was a kid I felt that I was part of a single thread of the lives of the people I knew and who I didn't they made up my family, my church, and the town that I lived in. Time and experiences changed me (not always for the better!), but thankfully the "soil" that I was "planted in", the "rain and the sunshine" etc., allowed me to live.