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It is all in God’s Hands

By Rebecca Dailey

College is perhaps the most formative four years of any person’s life. For some, it is a chance at freedom; for others, it is a continuation of their schooling. However, I believe all of us can agree that this is the final gateway before adulthood. High school is the stepping stone before that, one last hurrah as teenagers, even as we pursue colleges, enter applications and scholarships, and perhaps hold part-time jobs. Many of us became caught up in the unknown variable of COVID-19, forever changing the way we look at our schooling. I graduated high school in the class of 2021, and the next stop on the train route was community college. 


Community College was not my first choice, but at the time, I didn’t see any other option. I was not able to look at college campuses, nor did I really want to, simply because I wanted my high school experience to have ended normally. God, however, had a much more interesting plan. After some last-minute scrambling, my school-issued email decided to shut down, so I missed a lot of important messages, including knowing the bill was ready to be paid. That first fall semester was spent online in mostly asynchronous classes and a few Zoom meetings where I feigned attention while working on other assignments. The spring semester of the same school year was much the same, with the exception of one class. Even then, the teacher, more often than not, would cancel classes, and I taught myself anyway. 

The second year came, and for the first time in almost three years, I was able to step foot in a physical classroom. I became frustrated by the lack of application my classmates had when it came to assignments. Due dates would often get extended while I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, having stayed up the night before. Perhaps the biggest nightmare was my children’s literature professor. He made it very clear how he felt about religion, especially Christianity. He enraged me, and I passive-aggressively protested and made my position clear. It was around the same time that I began looking for four-year schools to continue my degree. Fast forward through four in-person classes in the spring and waiting for them to mail my physical degree in the mail, I was more than happy to be finished. I didn’t even bother going to graduation, nor did I get involved around campus. I didn’t even stay in the dorms, but even nightmares come to an end. 

Houghton University was one of a handful of colleges I had considered. Some very quickly lost their place on the list for various reasons. I looked at one other campus, but none of it sat right. Stepping onto Houghton’s campus was the most surreal moment I’ve ever had. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, greeted me and dozens of others who were touring the campus. I was barely home that very same weekend and put my application in; Houghton was the only school I put an application in for. 
We can fast forward to right now as I write this as the semester begins. It has been a whirlwind of classes and new friends, and I couldn’t wish any other way. I have so far joined multiple clubs, took part in the Open Mic Night at Java, auditioned for HeartSong, bonded with the girls on my floor and throughout Gillette, still have time for homework, and I’m thriving. Every day is a new adventure with new friends and excitement. I once wrote in my application essay, “Every story has a purpose, but that purpose can only be acted upon when it is read and shared, creating the world of possibilities that I believed God wanted for us.” The possibilities are extraordinary because they are endless, but God knows, After all, he brought me here, and I can’t wait to see what he has for all of us. ★

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Worshipping Sentimentality

In the beginning of October, Lenny Luchetti spoke in chapel on the virtues of worshipping God with the head as well as the heart. He explained that when he first began attending college, he loved to lose himself in the feeling of worship through praise songs, a semi-charismatic and hands-in-the-air kind of guy. He would observe with slight disdain the behaviors of others who sat quietly through worship services without actively taking part. Eventually, as he grew in his faith while at school, his perceptions changed, and the point he made was that God deeply values the efforts of the mind and the act of praise through academics and critical thought. What he left to be inferred, however, was that both methods of connection to God are equally worthwhile, and that it is merely a matter of personality which form of worship one chooses to employ. I would argue that this is not true, and that worshiping God with the “heart” is not really worship at all.

worshipThe other day while I was driving, Jamie Grace’s “Beautiful Day” came on the radio. The “It’s been ‘like’ a whole day” in the first verse managed to slip by me unnoticed the first time around, but the chorus left me incredulous and indignant. After a few bouncy lines about how happy God makes her, Grace sings, “This feeling can’t be wrong/ I’m about to get my worship on/ Take me away,” implying, or rather, explicitly stating that worship is some kind of altered state of being one enters into with the expectation that they will come away feeling blissful and transcendent, reminiscent of a drug-induced high or the rush of sexual intercourse. In her Grammy-nominated song “Hold Me,” Grace reinforces this interpretation with the lyrics, “I’ve had a long day, I just wanna relax … I know I should be working but I’m thinking of you” in which Jesus is essentially equated with a happy hour cocktail, and put at odds with “work,” which I can only assume Grace is not, in this case, using as a means to honor Him.

I do not mean to personally insult the no-doubt well-meaning Jamie Grace. What I do mean, however, is to question the ease with which Christian society accepts this kind of bubblegum Christian pop praise music without any basis in scripture or intentional theology. Worship is intended to be a thoughtful meditation on the grace and the goodness of God, a practice that should no doubt invite feelings of gratitude, joy, and peace, but that should nonetheless find its roots in concentrated study and reflection. The concept of worship as it is found in the majority of contemporary praise and worship songs is that of “chasing the feeling,” craving the joy without the contemplation, the intimacy without the commitment, the sex without the relationship.

People do worship in different ways. I would not try to take away from those who connect most fully with God through music the right to do so freely and with joy. But there cannot be a divide between innervation and cerebration. Those who worship through song must be able to count on the lyrics to be studied and deliberate. Difficult and far-reaching questions that exist within the Christian faith can have devastating effects on those seeped in the superficial, sensationalist theology of pop praise music. They are not taught to ask, and they are unprepared to answer. In the words of Grace, “I’ve got not need to worry, I’ve got no room for doubt,” but what exactly grants her such infallible certainty is unclear, and in a faith as encompassing and exacting as the Christian faith, there can be no room for sentiment without qualification. Impassioned worship without a strong grasp on the basics of Christian theology is meaningless and empty, and Christians brought up in the tradition of vacant worship are not worshipping God, they are worshipping a semblance of the side effects of God’s entity. They are worshipping titillation.

I want to reassure you that I recognize the usefulness and, in fact, necessity of music in worship. The Bible would not contain so many references to praising God with song if it was not an important aspect of our faith. But let us never fail to recognize the dependence of meaningful emotional connection with God on intelligent and critical examination of our beliefs.

 

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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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Military Innovations: Cheapening the Sanctity of Life

Talk surrounding drone strikes has increased significantly, and many valid points have been raised both in objection and in support to the use of these killing machines. Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that are armed with weaponry and serve both for reconnaissance and for combat purposes. Arguments surrounding the use of these machines have revolved primarily around the moral and ethical dilemmas that their use entails.

Courtesy of http://dronewarsuk.files.wordpress.com/
Courtesy of http://dronewarsuk.files.wordpress.com/

A major concern deals with the large amounts of civilian casualties caused by drone strikes. According to a study by Stanford Law School and New York University’s School of Law, the level of targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is around 2 percent. For every terrorist killed there are approximately 50 civilians killed. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism one reason for the 98 percent civilian casualty rate is not a result of lack of training or terrible aim but rather a “double tap” strategy—reminiscent of terrorist organizations—which aims to target people who gather at drone attack sites to mourn the victims.
Arguments in favor of drones emphasize the utility of these machines in sparing American lives. Why risk sending a regiment of young men to risk their lives when you can send in an unmanned drone? From the perspective of the officials this isn’t even a question; there is no reason to ask someone to risk their lives if there is an alternative. But how many foreign lives are worth the American lives that are spared? The question I would like you to grapple with focuses on the sanctity of life.

The military has always been on the forefront of technological advances. If it weren’t for people always trying to find more innovative and efficient ways to kill and conquer each other, we would not have anywhere near the amount of technology that we do currently. What’s happened as a result of these innovations is that we have increasingly distanced ourselves from the act of killing, without decreasing the amount of killing. We are still using bullets and firearms, but instead of seeing, hearing, and feeling the individuals we are killing, we are merely seeing his or her figure through an iron site, a scope, or worse yet, a computer monitor.

In an interview with a sniper, the reporter asked if the soldier felt anything when he pulled the trigger. His chilling response was, “Yeah, the recoil.” This illustrates the effect of  the progression of our military innovations. As we create weaponry that distances us from the people we are fighting, we are not just distancing our soldiers physically, but we are removing them emotionally and even spiritually from the understanding and appreciation of the sanctity of life.

It is crucial for those doing the killing to fully witness the act, so that they may fully understand the severity of their decision.  The truth of the matter is that we are, in pulling the trigger, condemning our enemies to an eternity of something–whether that is heaven, hell, or simply nothingness–and there is no coming back.

When I play Call of Duty or any other first-person shooter game, I have no emotion connected with the act of killing my opponent. When I pull the trigger, all I feel is the vibration of the controller. Similarly, when the fighter pilot drops a bomb on a target, they do not feel anything except perhaps the shock from the explosion down below. When the sniper takes down his target, all he feels is the recoil. And when the soldier controlling the drone locks in on a group of suspected terrorists, all he or she sees are figures on a screen, no different from those on any other first-person shooter game. There is no better example of this than the always capricious Prince Harry. According to CNN, the young man who once wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party, “compared having his finger on the trigger of rockets, missiles and a 30mm cannon to playing video games.”

The Vietnam War was the first time in history where live footage of the war was broadcast. The result was widespread protests against the war. People were outraged because of what they were seeing. Since then, war has become a source of entertainment, to the extent that you can see footage of live fire combat filmed with the use of Go-Pro cameras fixed on the helmets of soldiers.

We have made a joke out of combat, and a huge reason for this is that we have distanced ourselves from the seriousness of killing. We are so quick to hop on board with the “kill them ay-rabs” attitude, without recognizing that once the trigger is pulled, their life is condemned to an eternity of heaven or hell.

This is not to say that defending your home is wrong. Being a soldier is not sinful. Of all of King David’s sins, being a warrior was not one of them. Nevertheless, God forbade him from building the temple because he was a “man of war and had shed blood.” This is because life is sacred, and though it is not sinful in and of itself to take a life, you are responsible for having committed the act. What is not right is making it easier—emotionally—to take a life, because it cheapens the sanctity of life.