James 24:7

I wrote it in an email to someone a few days and then just came out with it yesterday in my sermon...God is a weaver. 

Over the next several days I am going to tell you a story.  Every word of this story is true.  I am just telling it to you as it happened. 

I will warn you in the beginning that I will be jumping around a bit, tying this "loose" end to that (or at least showing how loose ends get tied), going forward and back in time, and linking seemingly unrelated events.  As I hope you will see, my story is like my emerging theology.

As the soap opera puts it, "...these are the days of my life"...at least lately.  I am thinking I want to live here but the almost daily surprises so take my breath that they scare me.

Some of this will be stream of consciousness, so try to hang with me...I will be doing very little editing.

The story begins....

Several weeks ago I received an email from Jack Holland inviting me to teach a class next January at Emmanuel School of Religion.  I jumped at the opportunity hoping that I could pull together my thinking/studying on the missional church and connect it up with how we disciples of Jesus can do a better job of delivering on Jesus' platform for ministry to the hurting. (Luke 4:18-19)

I also hoped to tie all of that thinking back to my real live ministry with North River Community Church.  Specifically, I hoped to join the missional literature with the care and counseling literature and think about what that might look like in a suburban church like the one I serve.

I got the green light for the class and have been enjoying diving into the missional material.  I am revisiting some things I read years ago and finding new things all the time.

Lately I have been trying to get a handle on how the writers in the area of the missional church are thinking about North American culture.  (One of the things that spurred the whole missional church movement is the disconnect between the contemporary church and American culture.  Whereas the church once served as the conscience of the nation, it has, as a result of long cultural processes, been kicked to the curb.  I and other missional thinkers believe this may be a very good thing!)

At any rate, I began to write down a list of things that missional writers say about our culture.  Right now my list can be summarized like this:

"North American culture is driven by a marketplace mentality that tends to reduce everything and everybody to a commodity to be sold somehow in some way.  That 'everything' includes the church which is seen as a center offering religious goods and services to religious consumers. 

Self-determined needs (or...better...culturally dictated needs) drive this marketplace and churches are pressured to meet the growing demands of consumers to 'stay in business.'  

We are living in a diverse and pluralistic society.  More and more people are pulling up their chairs at the table of democracy and demanding to be heard.  The floor upon which these chairs sit is a level floor.  No one sits any higher than anyone else; no one's view is privileged over anyone else's view.  In short, no one is in charge.

Everything that is said at this table is said by somebody.  And all of those somebodies speak from their own history, experience, self-interests, cultures, needs and neuorses.

No one has an objective view on anything 

As a matter of fact, those who claim 'objectivity' are often the most suspect because they are claiming a vantage for themselves that cannot be demonstrated to be true.  The claim to objectivity is a power-move, a way of jockeying for position.  Everybody- even the so-called objective people- have an agenda.

About the only reality you can trust is the reality of the surface.  What you see is what you get at any moment in time.  Image is everything.  Celebrites and focus-group-driven-politicans with their changing faces and reinvented personas remind us the surface is all there is anymore.  We are all capable of reinventing ourselves for any and every occassion. What we see 'out there' is often a reflection of our own deepest desires and wishes. 

Everybody is some kind of sales person.

Multiplicity is all the rage.  Since there is no objective truth, all we can have are multiple inputs from multiple (and infinitely malleable and changeable) sources with multiple forms of intelligence to arrive at some semblance of 'truth' which is itself always in process and always finite.

We cannot even trust ourselves. We have been knocked off our own centers as we have come to realize that we are but the products of history, circumstance, genetics, the unconcious, the media/industrial complex.  We are a mass of needs, a people who live off our 'choices' which, ironically are dictated by the power of the marketplace. 

We live in the 'now'.  We are ignorant of history and settle for nostalgia.  We are losing our capacity for regarding the consequences of our actions so we just 'act' based upon whatever the surfaces dictate as to how things are at any given point in this shifting time.

However, we love technique.  We believe that anything is possible if we just find the right technique.  You might say that golf has become the metaphor of the time.  Identify your goal (the hole), acknowledge where you are (fairway, rough), grab your tools (clubs) and follow these steps (techniques as to club selection, lining up on the ball, your swing, etc.)

The logic of golf can be applied to any area of life such as how to have a happy marriage, raise fulfilled children, lead a team, make a fortune in real estate, or save your soul.  "Select a goal. Figure out where you are.  Get your tools.  Apply these 7 steps."

Where technique fails we fall back on magic which is itself a form of technique.  We do not step on cracks for fear of what might become of our mothers.  We think positive thoughts to attract our heart's desires into our lives.  We are careful of what we wish or pray for.  We knock on wood, throw salt over our shoulders and cast pennies in wishing wells, etc. etc. etc.   We do this because it gives us a sense of security in this shifting and unpredicatable world of ours....."

These are the kinds of things that missional theologians are saying about our culture as they write about the challenges we disciples face as we reach out to those around us.

You might ask yourself, at this point, how you feel about the above list.  Like stopping reading?  Confused?  Overwhelmed?  Bored?  Like hiding under the bed or downing a 5th of Scotch? Like wrapping up your favorite afghan and watching Oprah?

If it explains nothing else, perhaps this critique of culture helps explain why so many are hurting, searching, hiding, 'addicting', retreating, etc. etc. etc.

We are in a flux...White water...

At any rate, as I thought about what I was reading my eye was drawn to the bit about technique about things like golf and magic...

Not long ago a friend wrote me and said she had recently read Joan Didion's book called The Year of Magical Thinking.  My friend loved the book. 

I was in the book store a couple of weeks ago and picked up Didon's book.  I read the first 50 pages or so in the book store. The book is a reflection on her daughter's coma-inducing illness and her husband's sudden death at the dinner table (both of which occured in the same time frame.)

Didon is a great writer- so much so that her words sort of scared me.  Her husband died of sudden cardiac arrest...ventricular tachycardia to be exact.  I live with that...it's why I have a defibrillator. 

One second he was talking about a book he read on World War I and the next second he was dead.  (I suspect that's how I'll go..sharing the lastest thing I read just before I step onto the glory land express.)

Didion was captivated by the fact that her husband died in ordinary time.  We are just brushing our teeth at 7:20 on Tuesday and then we aren't.  That sort of thing.

She wrote about having to get rid of his clothes but that when she came to his shoes...well, she couldn't part with them. 

She feared throwing away his shoes because she thought he might come back and need them. (I suppose the point of that is that if she got rid of his shoes he really might never come back and that was a horror her grief-broken heart could not accept.)

My mind flashed back to my dad's death and this crazy idea I had for about two weeks that I had I been there he would not have died.  (Not that I could have done anything...I don't even know CPR) I just thought I could have thrown up a wall against the old Reaper and stopped that nonsense.

I thought about my joke at a recovery meeting once: "Hi, my name is Jim and I believe if anyone is unhappy it's all my fault."

As I read Joan Didion, I understood where the old girl was coming from. 

More of this tale later.....