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A New Old Ecclesiology, Part 2

Last week I discussed my work as an intern at a local church and the idea of a reimagined ecclesiology. I examined the need for the church to stop tricking people into its doors, to become less like a weekly commitment and more like a way of life. Here I would like to continue this discussion by examining some issues I have seen and what to be careful of when viewing the church as “family.”

churchOne of the most pressing issues I have encountered at the church is the sheer lack of time parishioners spend in the church community. I see this as an issue particularly with the youth. These children are in the most formative years of their lives and yet they are only spending an hour or two a week with the church community. These young men and women, girls and boys, are bombarded with new ideas and pressured to conform to their world at every moment.

So how are we, the church, supposed to influence, shape, form and support our youth, indeed our adults as well, if we are only together an hour or two every seven days? We cannot expect a good sermon to last a week, to be formative enough to counteract everything our culture throws at us. The church cannot be only a weekly commitment, it has to be a haven, a safe place to return to after work each day, a safe place to relax at the end of a long week, a safe place to mourn, rejoice, worship and engage local and global issues. The church should be like returning to the comforts of one’s own home.

This is not to say that the church should not challenge. Families challenge. In our safest places we can be, rather we should be, challenged constructively. Of course we see this in Jesus: he is both our greatest comfort and our greatest challenge. The church should be a place where, although we are comfortable, we are able to exchange ideas, challenge each other to grow and question each other’s beliefs. All the while we should be reaffirming each other as children of God.

The forces of culture, politics, and social experiences influencing us on a daily basis should be countered by a church that does the same. I find as a youth director that it is extremely difficult to effectively counter what my students have experienced the past week with what we as a church wish to instill in their hearts. They have seen way more of the world in 6 days than I could show them of the church in one. For example, regularly I watch as healthy young women agonize over their weight, developing major insecurities because they have been told by their society that they are supposed to be skinny.

Now, I do not wish to sound like we should brainwash our parishioners. If you have seen the documentary Jesus Camp, know that I am not advocating anything of the sort. Indeed I believe that our culture does teach some healthy ideas, but the job of the church should be to act as a social filter. The church should be a place where parishioners sort out the wheat from the chaff; a place where men and women, young and adult, can abandon their insecurities and learn to find God in the places where they least expect him.

The whole idea of viewing the church as a family is to see that “secular” actions like hanging out, watching football, and playing cards and “Christian” actions like worship, word and sacrament can begin to find a place together. I am not advocating that we play cards in the middle of worship time, but I am advocating that Christians stop viewing church as a weekly commitment and start viewing it as the community in which they live out all aspects of their lives, the way a family member exists as part of a family.

Now I realize that the imagery of a “family” is flawed. There are plenty of broken families, and the idea of what a “traditional Christian family” should be is so elusive that employing it as a metaphor is almost useless. Here I define family as a group of people in which unconditional love thrives, a group of people who take care of their own and genuinely care for each other, a group of people who take the time to help form and shape, challenge and support each other, a group that is willing to spend time with each other.  Of course, there are plenty of families who do all these things and manage to be very inhospitable to those “outside” the family. So perhaps it is best to define the church as an “Open Family,” a group that takes care of its own, lives in community with each other, takes its relationships with extreme sincerity and has open doors to any and all who desire to enter. That is what the church should be.

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The Home and the Heart

Fall break is just around the corner and masses of Houghton students will sojourn home for a few (we hope) homework-free days. I love going home. It is the only stress-free place I can escape to outside of school, where I can find homemade chili and overwhelming amounts of blankets and actual, real alone time. I was not one of those kids who were excited to leave town and move on to bigger and better things, who could care less if they ever saw any of the same old faces again. I did not spend my senior year of high school itchin g to shake the dust off, to turn my back and run. I spent senior year actively pretending that graduation was but a myth. Freshmen year at Houghton was one big conscious refusal to refer to my dorm room as “home.” Every break I would rush home at the earliest possible moment, not bothering to say goodbye to my friends and hardly talking to them while I was gone. Even as a kid, I would never let my parents send me off to summer camp. It got pretty ridiculous, but home was the place I loved to be.

Coming to Houghton wasn’t the first time I had left home, though. I was born in northern Indiana and lived there for four years before moving to Orchard Park, where I lived for a two years before moving back down to central Indiana. These moves were consistent and concise. We never lingered in one place for too long. I always had my parents and brother with me. Really, nothing changed.

HomeWe stayed in central Indiana for six years before my parents divorced. I moved to Long Lake with my mother, this time leaving behind not just a house, but half my belongings and half my family and all of my friends. I didn’t make things easy on myself. I insisted on calling Indiana my “true home.” Rather than exploring my new town and meeting the kids I would go to school with, I spent my first summer in Long Lake sitting indoors writing letters to my friends back home and talking to them on the phone.

As you probably guessed from my over-the-top reaction to leaving Long Lake to come to Houghton, things eventually changed. My visits back to Indiana became shorter and less frequent. I felt less and less connected to my old friends and to the things that went on there. I formed incredible bonds with the girls in my high school in Long Lake and grew more there than I probably ever would have, had I stayed in Indiana. The transition became fairly easy, actually. Indiana was always there, waiting for me—I never fully had to let go. I could have moved back in with my father whenever I wanted to, and in fact I considered it once or twice. I also thought about going to college in Indiana and living at home before I settled on coming to Houghton. And still, on breaks, I bounce back and forth between Indiana and Long Lake, keeping in touch with all of my old friends.

The transition to Houghton has turned out to be easy so far as well. Long Lake is but a (five hour) drive away. I still see most of my high school friends on breaks. And I’ve had wonderful experiences here at Houghton.  But college is an accepted transitional phase of life—I came here with the expectation that I would learn and apply myself for four years and then move on. I do not think about my home in the same way. I did not move to Long Lake thinking to myself that it would be a nice place to be for high school, but afterwards I would move on without a second thought. I do not think that way about my bedroom at home, my friends’ signatures on the ceiling tiles, my mother. With the impending certainty of graduation, my time in Long Lake will come to a sudden and screeching halt. It is a small town. There are no jobs available. There is no going back.

Home will constantly be changing, and quite often sooner than expected. How was I to know that things would escalate so quickly, that the last time I would spend more than a few hours together with my brother would be when I was twelve, that after leaving for college I would see my cousin maybe once more in his life. Missionary kids are tossed between countries for their entire childhood and then greeted when they return to the States, “Welcome home,” home being a place where they have never lived or had any contacts beyond their conservative grandparents who think they dress strangely, and their weird cousins. People say ‘home is where the heart is’ as if to assist in choosing a singular place to belong, but when the people and things and places that I love are scattered to the four winds, ‘home is where the heart is’ seems more like an impossible puzzle than a reassuring mantra. In order to manage the fissures of my “homes” throughout my life, disconnection becomes necessary between the home and the heart. My heart is in my father’s house. My heart is in my mother’s house. My heart is in the house of my education. My home is wherever I am.

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A New Old Ecclesiology

This past summer and current school year, I have been given the opportunity to work at a local church, assisting with youth and adult ministries. So far the experience has been a good one, but it has got me thinking about the nature of “the church” and its role in society. Ultimately I believe the church as it stands is in dire need of re-imaging lest it slip further and further to the periphery of Western society.

The re-churchimaging of the church is not a matter of being relevant. It is not about trying to make your church as appealing as possible to the outsider in order to draw her in. This, unfortunately, is what many churches are resorting to these days. I see churches that meet in bars, advertising a nice cold pint while you talk about the moral issues of the day. I see churches where worship is akin to a rock concert. And of course there are the 15,000 person mega-churches where the 45-minute sermon reigns supreme. All the while the idea of sacrament has all but vanished from many of these institutions. We are a collection of individuals appealing to individuals.

These attempts at a new church experience ultimately fail. After a while the new tactic stops attracting people and the church is left to find a new way to pull people in. If I were a member of one of these churches I would be infuriated because so much effort is spent on drawing people in that those who are already in the church are left to struggle their way on their own. Thus we are left with spiritually malnourished congregations and rapidly declining numbers in almost every one of the near 40,000 denominations.

So what do we do? Well, many have suggested that we have to start over, abandon our current traditions and become like the first century church. But the problem does not necessarily lie within our traditions; indeed I believe some of the answers are found exactly there. The solution is found in Jesus’ view of the family. For most they are familiar passages (Luke 14:26, Mark 3:31-35): Jesus repels his biological family and says that his followers are his real family. He even goes as far as to say that those who want to follow him must hate their family, turn and follow him.

I don’t think Jesus really means that we should hate our families; I think rather that he is emphasizing the importance of the church as a family. This is what we need to embody for the church to survive in our culture. I do not mean the church should be a family in the sense that we all feel close to one another only every Sunday when we gather. The term “family” does not mean simply that we have to tolerate each other. Reimagining the church as a family means that we meet like a family, interact like a family, care for each other like a family. It means that instead of church being a once-a-week thing, it is a lifestyle, founded on the sacraments. As Dean Jordan stated in chapel on Monday, church is not about the individual experience, it is about existing as a corporate body. The church should be a refuge against the anti-gospel veins in our culture, supplementing them with the words of Christ.

This is where my work at the local church comes in. They are a church that is on the right track. Worship is only every Sunday. The Lord’s Supper is celebrated every Sunday without exception and the church is grounded in the notion that we meet Our Savior every time we eat the bread and drink the wine. But the church does not stop there. Every other day of the week, the church is busy with parishioners coming and going, tending not only to the building but also to each other. The church building is a hub for all that is going on in the church community. People help supply each other with food, tools, service. It is not a group of people who are cordial to each other on Sundays. It is a group of people who live together, work together, play together and depend upon each other. That is what the church must be.

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Honesty is Not the Best Policy?

honestyI started listening to Lorde recently.  She is a sixteen-year-old musician from New Zealand who just released her first album in September.  If you have not heard of her I am sure you have at least heard her hit song, “Royals”.  She has a haunting voice and the hook is super catchy without becoming annoying.  I like to listen to it when I run.  It was the only song of hers that I had heard so far, though, so I decided to learn more about her.  I stumbled across an interview in which she called out Selena Gomez, saying “I love pop music on a sonic level, but I’m a feminist and the theme of her song [“Come & Get It”] is, ‘When you’re ready, come and get it from me.’ I’m sick of women being portrayed this way.”  When I first read this, I was on board.  Without making a comment about the singer herself, I have long found the lyrics to “Come & Get It” to be damaging; “You ain’t gotta worry, it’s an open invitation.  I’ll be sittin’ right here, real patient.  All day, all night, I’ll be waitin’ standby.”  This passive voice paves the way for responses like Robin Thicke’s horrendously rape-y “Blurred Lines” (a song that has been banned at five universities so far), which asserts that women are too coy to express their desire for sex, so men should go ahead and take it from them.  Lorde was offended, and so was I.

Then, however, Lorde also mentioned Lana Del Rey, saying  “She’s great, but … it’s so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to, you know: ‘I’m nothing without you’. This sort of shirt-tugging, desperate, don’t leave me stuff. That’s not a good thing for young girls, even young people, to hear.”  I was a bit taken aback.  While I like to think I agree with Lorde on an intellectual level, personally, I have always strongly related to Lana’s lyrics, so much so that I would never think to criticize her message.  To me, her lyrics seem much more specific and thought-out as opposed to Selena’s general “come and get it” call to the world.  After all, on an individual level, people really do feel intense longing and desperation.  Are artists like Lana Del Rey supposed to sacrifice their candor and sincerity for the sake of idealism?  Is it not just as important to be honest about your emotions as it is to be a good role model?

Oscar Wilde wrote, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” and I am not entirely sure I agree with him.  To me, it seems more like a cycle.  Artists pick up on barely realized themes within culture, or invent idealized ones, society notices trends within art and embraces them, artists perpetuate the trends, society perpetuates the trends, and the cycle begins again.  Perhaps I relate so strongly to Lana’s lyrics because I have grown up listening to these common themes in pop music my whole life, and the mentality has become ingrained in me.  What would it look like if musicians began addressing issues of love and sex in a much healthier way?  Several years down the road, would we relate just as strongly to those lyrics, having been slowly changing our viewpoints and our actions over time until we were all engaged in relatively healthier relationships?

Where is the line between being honest and being a good example—and how can we find a foothold in the relentless life-imitates-art, art-imitates-life cycle?  After all, Lorde was right—these commonplace “I need  a man” pop lyrics preserve negative gender stereotypes and continually affect the way young men and women see each other.  But Lorde also qualified her opinion by adding, “People got the impression I thought writing about love was shameful. I don’t! I just haven’t found a way of doing it which is powerful and innovative.”  I don’t think we need to throw out emotional honesty and vulnerability altogether.  I think we can be honest about that fact that our dependence on romantic relationships is unhealthy.  I think we can be honest about the fact that we need to find more constructive ways to communicate our desires and our boundaries.  We can celebrate our independence without denying our occasional loneliness.  Pop music has an incredible influence, and that does not have to be a bad thing.

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May the Force (of Words) Be With You

I was challenged and encouraged by the Faith and Justice Symposium last weekend, as I have been every year. Props to Ndunge Kiiti and her team. But, as usual at such gatherings, I was confronted by the idea that we are being asked to “speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.” When I commented on this statement, which was printed on the Bread for the World banner and read at the end of Eugene Cho’s chapel, a friend asked why I was so against it and suggested that perhaps I misunderstood the intended meaning.

What, then, could such statements mean? To me, it implies that there are people who cannot speak, people who are voiceless (another term sometimes used in the humanitarian domain). I take it as a claim of dependence upon those who have voices and power and an inability of the impoverished and oppressed to think and act on their thoughts. Am I reading too much into the words? Is the sentiment of concern and the call to action behind the words all that matters in the end? Perhaps it is just important to have someone stand up for those who are marginalized, no matter who it is taking the stand, as long as they are saying something that seems to be in the interest of the poor. Can good intentions alone produce meaningful and sustainable solutions to global issues that are rooted in the unequal distribution of power?

forceTheorists of dialogue and of critical thought, such as Wells, Bakhtin, Freire, and Gee, often suppose a powerful relationship between action, thought, and word. The connections among action, thought, and word are inconspicuous, but they are tight. They are so tightly woven that it is impossible, I think, to fully define the ways they influence each other. It is not enough to simply suggest that our thoughts affect the ways we speak, that our words will inform our actions, or that our actions prove what we really are thinking. The three are deeply fused, and I think that that is part of what defines humanity, and perhaps life in general. Words are particularly important because of the way they directly connect human beings.

When we say that we are speaking for someone, we not only imply that we are better able to communicate their concerns and ideas, but we also put them in a specific social position. Perhaps the “cannot” in the statement is not meant to indicate an inability on the part of the oppressed. Perhaps it is meant to imply a lack of power or place to speak, which, according to Jackie Ogega, director of a non-profit that promotes peace and grassroots development in rural African communities, is one definition of poverty. Maybe the purpose of the statement is to call people to speak alongside those lacking power and a place to tell their story. But the “for” makes me think otherwise. The “for” acknowledges the power that we (faith-based people, do-gooders, the privileged, etc.) have and perpetuates the hold we have on that power. It encourages dependence, which feeds into the savior complex that the West already suffers from, and inhibits the human right and ability to communicate one’s own desires and solutions for one’s community. I have been profoundly impacted by the work of Paulo Freire, who said that the oppressed must be the ones to lead in their struggle for liberation if they are to claim their dignity. I believe that speaking for people has terrifying potential to deny that dignity and strip them of their humanity.

I was empowered by Eugene Cho, personally and through his message. Bread for the World is an impressive organization that has a powerful influence and vision for change in the government and in systems that allow hunger and poverty to continue. I believe that everyone who took part in the Symposium had good intentions, and I am sure there are many who have considered the same things I have here. But if we truly desire to be champions of justice, we all must begin to think about the ways our words affect our worldviews and the way we relate to the injustices in our world.

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“Slut” is Now a Compliment

Earlier in September a black woman named Brandi Johnson took her black boss to court after he called her the n-word several times in a rant about her professionalism. The court ruled in her favor, and she walked away with $280,000. Headlines in the aftermath read “Black boss’s n-word rant to black employee costs him” and “Lawsuit airs double-standard myths of the n-word,” proclamations that to me sounded a lot like a bunch of white people clapping and cheering and crying, “Take that, blacks!” Now, to be sure, the reactions have been much more varied than just these oddly smug headlines. Most notable were the contrasting views of Shayne Lee, professor of sociology at the University of Houston, and Tammie Campbell, founder of the Honey Brown Hope Foundation, who encouraged the use of the n-word and frowned upon it, respectively. But the majority sentiment throughout mainstream news sources has been that justice was served.

slutThe reactions, though diverse, were all strong. Understandable, considering the word’s clear ties to times of slavery and oppression. Even though slavery in the United States was abolished over 140 years ago, racism is alive and well, there cannot be any doubt about that. Just recently my mixed race step-sister, while working as a hostess in a family restaurant, was told by a customer that he didn’t want a black girl touching his food. However, I grew up in a town where every person is the same color. Racism just is not something that I have personally experienced. I do not think I have ever even heard the n-word outside of a rap song (although I do listen to plenty of those). Forgive my sheltered life thus far, but the only point of view I can legitimately present is my own, right? So rather than discuss at length a word for which I have no context and therefore no right to opine on, I will focus on a word that I know too much about: slut.

Slut, like the n-word, is a word that induces a strong reaction. Also like the n-word, I tend to hear it in my rap songs. Brooke Candy’s self-defining anthem “Das Me” proclaims, “It’s time to take the word back; ‘slut’ is now a compliment … lady who on top of it, a female with a sex drive.”  Candy’s rap echoes the growing movement among women to “take back” the word slut, as made famous by protests such as the SlutWalk, a march against victim-blaming in rape cases. The premise of the movement is similar to what started blacks using the n-word: this word has been used as a weapon to oppress us, so we will take the weapon away from our oppressors. We will negate its definition and we will nullify it. “Slut is now a compliment,” or in the words of Shayne Lee, “As smart, educated, modern people we can use our hermeneutics, our ability to interpret context, rather than just imposing in a blithe way meaning and degradation to a particular word.”

Certainly it is a positive goal to blunt the blades that would try to cut us down. For years, the so-called double standard that the headlines decried has worked in the opposite direction. Only whites called blacks the n-word. Now the tide has turned, and for slut, too, the tide is turning.  Power over something that in the past has had power over me gives me hope, but it is not hope without reservations. I’m not alone in this; others have been slow to embrace the term. Melanie Klein writes for Ms. Magazine, “The word slut now brings up feelings I’ve developed over time about the hypersexualization of our culture … Collectively, this makes claiming the word slut, an effort I found revolutionary and exciting over a decade ago, now feel cliché, confusing and counterproductive.” The important factor, I believe, is how we then use our newly repurposed words. Brandi Johnson’s boss clearly was not using the n-word in a positive way. If, by claiming the word slut as our own, we assert that it will be used to empower women, we cannot turn around and then use it to degrade them. With so many ins and outs at stake, is it not better to simply put such words to rest? Are we really making a difference with how we choose to perceive one word, or are we, in the end, only embracing a reversed double standard, and perpetuating the same stereotypes we wish to erase?

 

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Let’s (Not) Talk About Sex

Many have, rightfully, bemoaned the decline of the family and the unquestionably devastating consequences of the so-called ‘sexual liberation’ of the modern world. I want to propose the idea, however, that in the Christian reaction it has become all too tempting to (inadvertently) treat marriage and family as the ultimate end of the Christian life. In this fixation on ‘the family,’ we may think we are being counter-cultural. But the big surprise awaiting us is that in doing so we have not really offered anything much different than the world.

Kyle Johnson
Kyle Johnson

Many of our behaviors imply that we believe that marriage and sexual fulfillment should be one of the primary goals of the Christian life. Abstinence teaching in our churches focuses on telling us that the purpose of our sexuality is for marriage and that we should seek purity for better enjoyment of marital life. Sexual purity is supremely important and a failure to maintain it (especially for women) is a unique sin that marks us in ways other sins do not. We, now as young adults, feel pressure in some corners to get married and make babies quickly.

There are places for many of these discussions and arguments. Yet, we must take care lest we find ourselves falling into the trap of having an obsession with marriage and the nuclear family that borders on idolatry. In doing such, we end up merely repackaging many of the same premises of modernity: finding our ultimate identity in our materiality and personal fulfilment, namely our sexuality.

Please do not misunderstand me: family is absolutely a crucial institution. And I applaud and join with those who speak about the need for strengthening families. I merely want to encourage us to expand our vision, carefully reassess priorities, and catch some things that I wonder if we are leaving out.

Unmarried Christians are often not encouraged enough to be constructive with their singleness, which is more prevalent now that people are tending to marry later. As a result many men and women become ‘angsty,’ desperate, insecure, self-obsessed, and often lazy – and waste their young adult years without a sense of purpose. Churches arguably also don’t know how to deal very well with divorcees, single parents, barren couples, remarried couples, or those who have had sex outside of wedlock. I have seen many times where this has, beautifully, not been the case in practice. But often it seems that we don’t exactly know how to find a place for these people in our churches.

 Walk through a Christian bookstore and find countless books on preserving marriage in our society, parenting, dating, and (my favorite cringe-worthy category), how to have good ‘Christian’ sex. Whatever that means. There are plenty of important topics that need to be talked about within these areas. But the abundance serves as a suggestive contrast in light of the comparatively minimal available selection of books on theology, care for the needy, spiritual discipline, and classic Christian writings. This is not a slight on Christian bookstores. It’s more of a slight on us, the customer they sell to.

 This is admittedly more controversial territory, but I want to suggest the possibility that current conversations about ‘Biblical womanhood’ and ‘manhood’ that focus on ‘recovering’ so-called God-ordained ‘models of masculinity and femininity’ are often part of this same phenomenon. These claims sometimes seem to imply, to me, that our identity should be found in the family roles our sexual differences (supposedly) relegate us to; my identity is found in being a breadwinner, provider, authority in the home, and if I am not at least aspiring for these things, I am not a man. (When these roles are described, by the way, they sound to me more like the 1950s than anything the Bible actually says). This seems like a slippery slope, and runs the risk of putting our identity in Christ in the background to our sexual/gender identity. I wonder if this doesn’t sound a lot like the world’s obsession with sexual identity, just in a different form.

Many early Christians had a different attitude towards sex and marriage. And, sometimes for good reason, we have rejected some of their ideas (such St. Augustine’s teaching that sex itself was ‘the original sin’). But they still have much wisdom for us. Many early Christians put a heavy emphasis on the portions of Scripture that propose sexual asceticism. In their time, cultural pressure to procreate in order to secure wealth, prosper society, and create a legacy, was much greater than it is today. Renouncing (or at least taking a few steps back from) sex, family, and possessions in order to live for the service of others, holiness, and a Kingdom not of this world, became the counter-cultural rallying cry of some early Christians: We don’t need to live for these things anymore.

I think they’re on to something.

By the resurrection of Christ we have the power to live entirely for God and others, and no longer for ourselves. That makes for a counter-cultural life, not 2.5 kids and a white picket fence. Anyone can do that.

No wonder we live with rampant sexual promiscuity, pornography, lust, and are watching our families deteriorate, in the Church as much as in the world. We are creating self-obsessed, short-sighted, individuals not well suited for healthy marriage and healthy sexuality in the first place because we have not taught them to live selflessly, in Christ. Preaching abstinence purely for the sake of marriage is not creating Christians who are much holier than the rest of the world and is, ironically, not making for better marriages.

I think the strongest church will be a community where people at all stations, and in all callings, regardless of their sexual/marital past, know that they are a part of the Kingdom: their identity is in their devotion to Christ, not whether they have two kids and a stable marriage.

Christ gave His body to us. Our body belongs to Him. He is our first love. We are His beloved. Our marriage to Christ should be the narrative upon which our sexual ethics falls.

A life of striving after sexual fulfillment and progeny, even in the bounds of marriage, is not all that God calls us to. There’s so much more.  This path is promised to be a hard one. Assuming the ultimate end of this life is a happy family is wide of the mark, and defeating our ability to actually be a place of prophetic vision, and healing, for the world.

We may enjoy many blessed things along the way, like a family, but He is our only guarantee. And He has made His marriage proposition very clear: be mine only, and know that our path together is the path of the cross. It’s a path right into the pit of hell: for the lifting up of the needy, for the proclamation of new life to the dead.

Some of this material is adapted from postings on the blog I share with my fellow Houghton alumnus, Nathanael Smith (’12) which you can find at www.toomuchlovenathanaelkyle.blogspot.com

S. Kyle Johnson is a Houghton alumnus of 2012, and is currently working on a Master of Divinity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He can still be found at his Houghton email address, spencer.johnson12@houghton.edu

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Twinkies Over the Bread of Life

Too often, what the church communicates to the world is a weak faith. Within our contemporary Christian culture, I see a belief in a weak gospel. This lack of confidence demonstrates itself in the insecurity with which we attempt to make our faith relevant to the world. We dress it in popular culture, hoping that the candy coating will allure people into swallowing the antidote of the gospel.

Courtesy of dealbreaker.com
Courtesy of dealbreaker.com

Consider youth groups, conferences, Sunday school curricula—what are the attractions? The Word of God? The power of the cross? Or is it games, prizes, and music? None of these things is inherently problematic, but I think it worthwhile to ask whether, underneath the fluff, we have lost the substance. And perhaps more disconcerting: do our endeavors to gift-wrap the gospel reveal a doubt in the value of the gift itself? As soon as the church enters the business of trying to sell the gospel, the inherent value of the good news is obscured behind the flashy veneer of popular culture. If it is powerful, then why do we feel the need to dress it in Batman’s utility belt? If it is beautiful, then why do we doll it up? If it is relevant, then why do we try to fabricate relevance through pop culture references?

If we continue to use thin threads to tie Christ’s message to our world, the sad result will be a disregard for the all-sufficient bride of Christ. When we neglect the riches of our inheritance in Christ, all we have left to give are trinkets. What do we communicate when the primary selling point of our Christian community is mere accommodation of secular culture? We communicate that we have nothing more. We suggest that the bread of life leaves us craving Twinkies. Why should that attract anyone? The world doesn’t need the rhetoric of the day wrapped in WWJD paraphernalia. It needs Christ.

We face a world aching with injustice. What hope do we bring to citizens of war-torn countries suffering from PTSD? Do we believe that Christ might have something to say to them? Do we have enough confidence in Christ’s message of forgiveness to see its role in empowering ethnic and racial reconciliation?

Why do we rely more heavily on human strategies than on the strength of the gospel itself? The effort to meet spiritual needs is considered invasive and ethnocentric – an imposition of our religious preferences; meanwhile, responses to physical and emotional needs are applauded. Why, if the gospel is relevant, powerful, and life-giving, do we hesitate to share it?

What we, as the church, believe about the gospel, we profess is critical. It determines what we communicate to the world about this gospel and, in turn, how the world perceives our biblical truth-claims. So what is the gospel? Is it relevant?  Is it hope-inspiring?  Is it powerful?  Is it a message worth sharing?

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To Infinity and Beyond; Religious Plurality and Dialogue

We live in a religiously pluralistic society. We see it in manifested in our own faith tradition with tens of thousands of Christian denominations, and also outside in the realm of world religions, spanning Hinduism and Buddhism in the East, to Islam, Judaism, and beyond. Even in the evangelical Christian milieu of Houghton there is still a reasonably large spectrum of beliefs and experience. For Houghton, as a Christian institution, does this plurality merely represent our extensive mission field? Or does it perhaps provide us with the opportunity to understand our faith—as individuals and a community—more deeply?

monstersPractically speaking, it is necessary that we come to terms with our religious differences, both across the spectrum of Christianity (which we experience on campus) and across the spectrum of religions we see as “others”. Though our respective traditions may be directly opposing one another, faith remains essentially a human trait, something solid to provide a basis for successful interfaith dialogue. But how are we to go about this dialogue?

Last fall in my Judaism class, I read an article by the rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, (known popularly as “The Rav”) which I found to provide solid guidelines for interfaith dialogue. He stipulates that a confrontation (dialogue) between two faith communities is only possible if it is accompanied by a “clear assurance that both parties will enjoy equal rights and full religious freedom.” Additionally, both parties must have an assurance that they will be upheld in high respect, and not dragged through the mud, so to speak, when difficult issues or severe disagreements arise. In other words, if we neglect to provide a safe environment for these discussions, it is inevitable that neither party will come away with anything constructive, rather both sides will probably emerge somewhat insulted or discouraged.

Granted for the majority of us on campus it will be far easier to approach different denominations rather than entirely different religions; engaging a Catholic is quite different than engaging a Hindu, whose vocabulary, beliefs, and traditions are completely foreign for most of us. That being said, it is vitally important that we as a Christian institution strive to engage these very “other” communities. If we continue to avoid interacting with these other faiths, we risk allowing “monsters to grow in the silence,” as Dr. Case said, one of our world religions professors. I would define these “monsters” as our tendency to demonize or vilify any religion that opposes Christianity. This mindset only serves to further the disparity between our respective faith traditions, burning bridges rather than building them.

Thus these conversations should not be taken as opportunities to merely target non-Christians for conversion (or even to convert those outside the perimeters of our preferred denomination). In other words, our mission should not be to proselytize, but to establish relationships. These dialogues and relationships would help to destroy our unwarranted prejudices and misconceptions about other faiths, and aid us in being effective in a world that preaches tolerance. Constructive interfaith dialogue should force both sides to be open minded without requiring either side to sacrifice their beliefs to the other, helping foster conversations and relationships as opposed to mission fields.

This being said, we do have a “missionary mandate” as a Christian institution and church, and when all is said and done, even in these honest dialogues there remains an element of persuasion on each side. While conversion should not be our only aim, it is legitimate, but perhaps it is best pursued in the context of these relationships we establish through dialogue. After all, is our goal merely to increase numbers for the church or is it to welcome new members into the body of Christ? It’s at least my experience that the most successful evangelism is done within the context of real relationships, and when it comes to people of other faiths, we cannot hope for true relationships unless we are willing to engage in open dialogue.

Houghton appears to be heading toward becoming a more welcoming campus when it comes to interfaith matters. Dean Michael Jordan has said that the administration is on-board with increasing the diversity of speakers both in and outside of chapel. He mentioned that the Franciscan friars will be back, along with a couple speakers representing the Catholic and Presbyterian churches in the coming spring semester. This is a step in the right direction, providing the campus an opportunity to learn from and engage faiths that may be foreign to our own. Jordan also said that he is open to, and hopes to welcome, speakers outside of the Christian tradition on campus for panel events and discussions in later semesters. Presented with these opportunities, we have the potential to become a community of believers who are open and willing to engage in dialogue with the religious diversity in our own community and outside it.

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The Passion of Miley Cyrus

Miley

I am very sure that you are tired of hearing people talk about Miley Cyrus.  In the aftermath of the VMAs (the MTV Video Music Awards, a live performance in which Miley twerked on Robin Thicke (for the definition of twerking, please resort to your local Google machine (or not)), there was an outpouring of public response, both Christian and non-Christian.  The Christian responses were comprised mainly of tender claims of tears on Miley’s behalf, praying that she find her true self and cast off her sinful ways.  Her “true self,” they claim, can only be found in her eventual salvation. Blogger Rihanna Teixeira penned “A Letter to Miley Cyrus” that went viral soon after the VMAs.  Teixeira felt “sad” for Miley, expressing concern for her continuing rebellion and encouraging her, “I know that there is something deeper in that little heart of yours and that’s what the world wants to see.”  The prevailing sentiment in Christian reactions has been the poor Miley clearly has no idea what she is doing, she is not being true to herself, and some kind of dark outside force is pressuring her to do the things that she is doing.

But, according to Miley, she has never been more herself than she is now.  In interviews surrounding the release of her upcoming album, Miley has stated numerous times that she finally feels able to express herself artistically.  She told Billboard Magazine, “I want to start as a new artist… I actually found out more about who I am by making this music.”  Like it or not, Miley is not being anything but herself.  It is surprisingly hard news to conceptualize for many.  Miley used to be so innocent and no one can believe that she really turned out this way.  Christians in particular want to believe that if she came to follow Jesus, she would become a different person.

When Saul became Paul, he was in the midst of a Christian-slaying rampage.  He was angry, passionate, and stubborn.  Christians everywhere had heard of his rage and spoke the name Saul with fear.  He was a dangerous person and I am sure they all wished that his craze would cease.  He was quite literally on the warpath when he was stopped in his tracks and spoken to by Jesus, and came to follow Christ.  Thus he became the Paul that we know: prolific, articulate, confident, and, yes, angry, passionate, and stubborn.  Paul, in essence, did not change.  He stopped killing Christians.  But he himself did not change.

Miley Cyrus does not need to be saved.  That is, no more than anyone else.  Her actions may be grandiose, but her motives are no more so than any other average human being.  Saul did not need to be saved any more than anyone else either.  Saul was and Miley is on the same level of metaphysical priority as every other soul.  And I think it is safe to say that if Miley were to start following Jesus tomorrow, she would not change.  She would stop twerking, and posing nude, and singing about drugs, but she herself would not change.  Her personality would remain very much the same.

We were created with unique personalities.  The same characteristics that made Saul a great persecutor also made Paul a great evangelizer.  He believed in himself.  He had strong convictions.  He was convincing and powerful and a hard worker.  Those character traits were an intrinsic part of his self and his personality, and after he began following Jesus, those same traits that caused him to voraciously hunt Christians then caused him to be one of the greatest Christians in history, and the writer of a hefty chunk of the texts on which we base our faith.

Miley’s empire spreads far and wide.  Starting with Hannah Montana and continuing on through Party in the USA, her haircut, twerking, the VMAs, and Wrecking Ball, she has been one of the most talked-about celebrities in history.  Her personality is a large part of what has made that possible.  She is a workaholic; she told Sunday People, “I work so much, I’m always on the road so I eat healthily. I have to give my body what it needs to keep going.”  She’s passionate about what she does.  “I have just put this music first,” she told Billboard Magazine, and to MTV News, “I have had to fight for what I want on this record.”  Hard working, passionate, ambitious, prolific—Miley’s personality is something to be valued and not overlooked.   It is thoughtless to assume that everything Miley has strived for and thrown her energy into is but a façade and some kind of leftover scrap of teenage rebellion.  Yes, her actions are irresponsible and often in poor taste.  Saul’s actions could have been described as irresponsible (if slaughtering human beings can be described so lightly), but no one would ever doubt that he was doing them intentionally and of his own volition.

It is a fine distinction between thinking of being saved as a transformation and thinking of it as a repurposing, but it is an important distinction.  Talking about coming to Christ as being completely changed devalues the strengths and passions that we were born with and probably sounds, to those who are hearing the message of salvation for the first time, as if we must give up being ourselves in order to know Christ.  Salvation is not an erasure of the self.  Salvation is an acknowledgement of self-worth, and a strengthening of the natural personalities and gifts that God blessed us with in a way that brings glory to God.