Not The Religious Type

A Fresh Suggestion for Encountering the Bible (Part 2)/ Vince Brackett (Chicago, IL)

As I mentioned before yesterday’s post, we’ve divvied up this week’s guest blogger entry into two short posts, since both addressed a similar subject.  If you missed yesterday’s post (and I can’t see how you would have missed it, given that it was Thanksgiving and all) check it out, as Otto has some provocative things to say, as does Vince today.  Tell us what you think! - Dave

I was trained to understand the Bible as an instructions manual, in which I see my situation from the perspective of the character in the passage at hand and draw life lessons from that.  There’s value in that, but I’m wondering if that’s all there is.

So, rather than the 'instructions' approach, what if we considered a 'mystical & experiential' approach, in which God, not the character in the passage, is the protagonist?  In this approach, the Bible won't tell me what to do in a given situation.  It won't give me instructions.  But it will tell me about and point me toward God, who I can then go and ask myself for instruction.

A case study:  Luke 1:5-38 tells the story of the foretellings of the births of John the Baptist to Zechariah and Jesus to Mary.  I have seen this scripture interpreted before with an 'instructions for me' approach:  Zech & Mary are the main characters in whose shoes we are to put ourselves, with Mary’s obedience positively contrasted with Zech’s lack of it. 

But maybe we wonder a bit: Weren't Zech and Mary's responses to Gabriel pretty much the same?  So why was Zech struck mute and not Mary? And why such a harsh punishment? 

What if we treat God as the main character?  With that, I get a different message:  First, I see God having a very specific and ordered plan for how he wants to bring these two children into the world.  So specific and ordered, it seems, that he has to strike this priest mute so he won't blab anything ahead of time to all his friends.  And then I see a theme that I have seen elsewhere in the Bible:  I see God exalting someone without status (a teenage girl) instead of someone with it (a male priest). 

I obviously do not know for sure that this is what God had in mind, but this does reveal a protagonist God who is thoughtful, in-charge, and planning something (even if I can only speculate as to what that is), things I missed in my previous—and ultimately unsatisfying—“instructions for life” reading.  Now, I'd say God and I have some real talking points.

A Fresh Suggestion for Encountering the Bible (Part 1)/ Otto Von Wachter (Philadelphia, PA)

Happy Thanksgiving! I was going to post an (awesome) filler here—some great scripture on Thanksgiving… but then two of you wrote thoughtful posts about how to think about the Bible from the perspective we chat about here. So I’ll pass on one today and another tomorrow.  (I’ve edited them a bit.)  As always, faithful readers, let us all know what you think!  - Dave

When I committed to following Jesus some years ago, I started to really study the Bible for the first time in my life. 

I really enjoyed studying the Bible in my small group and by myself, but it also opened a whole lot of questions and things I was uncomfortable with.  And I thought, well, I just need to wrestle with the text.  So I started reading it more closely, pondering it, asking questions.  Do I agree with that?  That's doesn't quite match what I know to be true in my heart. What did the author really mean? What was the historical context of this passage? I started googling passages and learning lots of fascinating things.  I bought books.  My mind loved it and drank up all the new information. 

However, the more I read, the more I realized that I wasn't any closer to getting to the bottom of it.  The more answers I found, the more questions I had. Not to mention that doing all this thinking seemed to make me more and more unhappy.  For my personality type, thinking too much seems to lead me to isolate myself and judge the world around me more.

I wondered if the gospels and the parables of Jesus are meant to be understood exclusively through thinking, seemingly regarded by most people as the only valid approach.  According to Carl Jung, there are four primary psychological functions:  Sensing, Intuiting, Thinking and Feeling.  We understand reality through all four.  When we are looking at art or listening to music, for example, we are primarily using the Sensing and Feeling functions.   So what is to say that Jesus meant for us to understand the Gospels primarily through thinking?  Is this a Western prejudice?

How might Christianity (or following Jesus) look differently if we were to put more emphasis on these other functions: Feeling, Intuiting, and Sensing?  How might we read the Bible differently?

Help Out Your Friendly Neighborhood Blogger

I and the gang I run with--which includes many of you--continually have experiences that confirm we're onto something. 

A friend just last week had a conversation with a robustly secular friend in which my friend said the thing he was most excited about was promoting Stage 4 faith.  The man asked what that was, my friend did the best to tell him, and the man said, "I'm in!  What do I do next?!"  My friend reaffirmed that whatever Stage 4 faith was, it involved God.  Did this man mind that?  The man had to pause for a moment, but then he said, "No, I don't mind.  I'm in.  I want to be a part of this."  So...we'll see if we can find a way for this man to do that! 

All to say, it's a lot of fun thinking about this stuff and trying to put it into practice.

But some of us find we run into a repeated problem.  As we mentioned at the Center City Summit, folks can read a discussion of a faith that involves a progression of stages as intrinsically smug and superior.  Who, after all, wants to be any stage but 4? 

We protest that that's not at all what it's about for us, that by definition Stage 4 can't involve any judgment of anyone else at all!  We say that this talk of stages defines our aspirations, since which of us can say with any confidence what stage we're actually in?

And yet some of us find that this objection never goes away. 

As we move forward, I'm wondering if we need to recast the stages idea or just put it to bed and own it, with its immense strengths and also whatever challenges it brings with it.  What's your take?  I've debated getting rid of the word "stage" and replacing it, say, with "type" or "category," since those aren't progressive.  All we're talking about, in that recasting, is a "type" of faith, which then could be contrasted with other, perfectly reputable types. 

The downside here is that, even to explain these "types," I'd think you'd have to parallel them with human development, which deals with what happens as we age.  So there still is a progression; we just downplay it by staying away from the word "stage." 

All to say, any thoughts you have would be greatly appreciated. 

What Are You Reading?

I have a shameful admission to make.

I, who historically have liked to read as much as almost anyone I've ever met (I'm sure some of you could give me a run for the money), find myself getting easily bored by books that previously I just would have polished off and evaluated once I was done.  I just can't seem to get through books the way I used to.

I still read lots.  I just don't enjoy it nearly as much as I once did.  Either books are getting worse or I'm having some sort of brain calcification where only a very few pathways to my "reading pleasure center" remain open.

So I've read some books on God or the spiritual life this past year which have gotten right on through to that center.  I've mentioned them all to you before.  Heroic Leadership.  Absolutely.  He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.  No doubt, and not just because Trish Ryan is a faithful part of this blog, and not just because I evidently have a secret weakness for what's classically a women's book, but... well, I don't need to justify myself to you; I enjoyed it, can we leave it at that?  On the theology front, Reformed and Always Reforming.  Sociology like The Fall of the Evangelical Nation.  C. Peter Wagner's latest quasi-screed Dominion did a lot for me in the first two-thirds of the book. (If I can pitch an older book, I really liked his Acts commentary, Acts of the Holy Spirit; it looks like he may have a new update on it.)

But much as I've tried, again and again, to make my way through Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, and much as I've appreciated what I'm seeing as his fundamental point, oh why didn't its recommender on this blog mention that it was 800 pages.  That, my friends, is relevant information.  My experience there has been repeated with many far shorter books.  I get a third of the way in and think I can't keep going.

All to say, what are the books you're reading about God or the spiritual life that you're liking?  Why?  What grabs you about them?  Maybe we can help each other out a bit and guide each other towards new sources of wisdom and spiritual direction.  What books have you been liking?

Bob Jones University and Knowing What's True

I had the fun experience of speaking to some students at Harvard Law School last Friday (and welcome to any of you dropping by this blog who were there).  I pitched the kind of faith we talk about here and we had about half an hour of discussion after I'd finished my remarks.  What many students, presumably with a churchgoing background, wanted most to talk about was my take on truth.  If truth was really this big thing that we'd spend a lifetime exploring...was I saying, effectively, that truth couldn't be known?  It just seemed unsettling.

I thought of that conversation today over breakfast as I read this item, spotlighting what struck me as a completely unexpected move from the current president of the famously arch-conservative, arch-fundamentalist Bob Jones University.  Here are the first few paragraphs.

Bob Jones University has apologized for racist policies including a one-time ban on interracial dating that wasn't lifted until nine years ago and its unwillingness to admit black students until 1971.

The private fundamentalist Christian school said its rules on race were shaped by culture instead of the Bible, according to a statement posted Thursday on the university's website.

The university in northwestern South Carolina, which has about 5,000 students, was founded in 1927. It didn't begin admitting black students until nearly 20 years after the US Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

"We failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry. Though no known antagonism toward minorities or expressions of racism on a personal level have ever been tolerated on our campus, we allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful," the statement said.

Let's go back to that amazing statement early in the article:

The private fundamentalist Christian school said its rules on race were shaped by culture instead of the Bible.  A fundamentalist school says that something it believed and taught for eighty years was cultural and not the objective, obvious truth of God?  What sort of world are we living in? 

To me, this seems as clear a sign as any that the waters are shifting throughout the church, that what we've previously thought gave us the "truth" that we taught no longer seems so compelling.  We previously thought that compelling arguments helped us somehow gain God's vantage point on truth, that it would be an abandonment of the gospel to ever admit that all of us perceive everything through a cultural lens.  If we conceded that, then how could we say we believed and lived for the truth?  How could we know what it was?  To concede that would be to concede the whole game to the secularists.

Well, if Bob Jones University has given up on that point, that has to say something. 

So what is the basis for what you regard as true?  My answer on Friday night?  My experience was the basis for that.  I did, happily, regard the Bible as profoundly true.  How so?  Because when I did my best to live out what it pitched, it consistently was self-validating.  The things it led me to expect would happen when I followed its teachings did, in fact, happen.  Jesus, in particular, proved to be a trustworthy guide.

But is that your answer?  Truth, we all agree, is very important.  So how do you go about figuring out what's true?

Joy and Stage 4 Faith

I've had three different conversations in the last week or two in which my conversation partner and I have concluded that our most powerful spiritual choice would be to have a joyful day each day as a top priority, that this trumps whatever other wise spiritual strategy we might choose, for all their virtues.

There's an old Steve Martin joke I often employ.  He plays a huckster who shouts out, "YOU can be a MILLIONAIRE and never pay taxes!  HOW, you ask?  Two simple steps.  First..." (At this point he drops his voice and speaks fast.)  "...get a million dollars.  THEN..."  And then he continues the joke.

That "first, get a million dollars" line often seems like my life.  The thing I most need is, in fact, the un-gettable thing.  So saying to folks who fight discouragement or depression that perhaps our mutual top daily priority should be to be joyful is the ultimate "sure, but HOW?"  And yet it's had a strange resonance nonetheless.  If we're joyful, perhaps that alleviates a little pressure to navigate our lives or jobs or ministries perfectly.  Perhaps the joy itself will give us some breathing room, since it will help us feel like God can navigate his way through a number of choices we might make, whether ideal or not.  For those of us who work in or lead teams, joy helps there too, giving our team members a sense of safety and encouragement around us.  And then there's the upside that, whatever else happened during the day, we felt JOYFUL.  How bad could that be?

So... yes, but how?  Here's the suggestion a number of us have been trying.  We ask God first thing for a joyful day.  Would he be so gracious as to give us that?  We might throw up a refresher prayer mid-day.  And then at night we'll ask God how, from his perspective, we did.  My experience is that that last prayer is the key.  God often reinterprets my day in a way that's really satisfying and proves to be a big help in my next day.  So he might say, "Dave, you had a terrific, joyful day."  And I'll reply, "....Greeaaat...  Umm, how so?"  And he'll say, "Oh my goodness, you were so in the moment with me throughout the day.  So many encouraging things happened.  (Which he'll then list.)  My goodness, what an awesome day, and so full of joy."  And then I'll feel encouraged and go to sleep, and when I wake up the next morning and ask for a joyful day, I'll have 20% more faith for it than I had the day before, which will be reinforced when I check in with God at the end of the day.  (I find he's very motivated to encourage me each night that I, in fact, had a terrifically joyful day.)

So... I'll submit that to you.  So many of my friends are coming to realize that this may be a bottom line for them, the single most important thing to pray for daily for themselves, the thing that will help the most other people by way of them.  What do you think?

Miracles and the Life We’re Hoping for

Last week I was chatting with an acquaintance who was helping me with an electrical problem. He's been a part of our church on occasion. While we were waiting for a circuit to be turned on, he asked about our staff member who's had cancer and he assured me he believes that God heals. Why? Because we'd encouraged him that direction.

He'd been in our church several years back during this season we'd called "40 Days of Faith." He decided that, for those 40 days, he'd pray that his brother's horrible scoliosis would be healed and that their parents would return to church. The day of his brother's scoliosis surgery—for which a special surgeon had been flown in from elsewhere in the country—and, as they were wheeling his brother into the operating room, someone rushed out and said they'd need to re-X-ray him. Something seemed odd. They did the next X-ray…and told him he wouldn't need surgery. There was nothing to operate on.

In the moment, their dad said, "This must be God! I'm going back to church!" And so he and his wife have, singing in the choir, leading in their church. Hence my acquaintance saying he believed in divine healing.

Charles Park and I were chatting this weekend about how God actually doing things, actually coming through for us, is an irreducible element of the faith we talk about on this blog. Does that seem true to you? How has that played itself out for you (or not)?

I Can Learn From What God Is Doing In Ted Haggard/ David Linhart (Cambridge, MA)

My dad doesn't follow Jesus, but he thinks the stuff that Jesus is about is noble. He tells me that gospel values are a nice talk that he never sees anyone walk. I tell him about a teen I know who, at first, didn't bring her son to our church, because in her previous church, she had to keep her pregnancy on the down low. Getting pregnant as an unmarried teen gets you kicked out of some faith circles as a reprobate, or at least marked as a bad influence. For all the talk of Jesus' forgiveness and restoration, and the assurance that he meets us where we are, when an opportunity arises to support God's work through someone's weakness, we balk.

But I told her there's only one way that anyone ever gets a kid-- as a gift from God-- and here we celebrate what God is doing. So bring your son! What type of influence might she be on other teens? She will show them what it looks like to grow up, which some do earlier and some do later. Come to think of it, maybe we never get out of that setting, and we simply trade whose turn it is to be the example of God maturing us. I mean, we look to King David's towering stature in retrospect, not always imagining what it might have been like to live under his leadership:

"WHAT? He did WHAT with Bathsheba while we were out fighting battles and he was supposed to be fighting with us?"

"WHAT? The reason my friends are dying of this horrible plague is because David took a census of Israel when God was against the idea?"

In a career with all kinds of contradictions, the consistent thread was that he kept going back to God, openly, so everyone could see what going to God looks like. His Psalms were not sermons, rather his private prayer life made public. Isn't that the same vulnerability of God revealing himself through Jesus, giving us as much of himself as we can handle? Isn't that why God calls David a man after God's own heart-- a heart that stubbornly insists on being fully known, despite the risks? David's example of purity is predictably a wash, because only Jesus sets that example; but David's example of transparency is timeless.

We can learn from what God is doing in Ted Haggard. If he disappears, an opportunity for the gospel to be lived out will disappear. That opportunity is there whenever anyone messes up, barely or colossally, where the only restoration that is effective is God speaking into our actual, individual lives in real time. I'm talking about restoration as a LIFESTYLE, not just recovery from a tragic episode. It helps to see what that lifestyle looks like, so we can support each other in living it together. But if it all happens behind the scenes until we're cleaned up and presentable, then all that's left is, well, preaching.

Ted Haggard and Personal Healing

My local paper this morning reported on an interview Ted Haggard gave with Good Morning America in which he described being sexually abused by a man when he was seven.  He described how he’d never fully addressed that and despite becoming a "a conservative Republican, loving the word of God, an evangelical, born-again, spirit-filled, charismatic, all those things" (the ordering of those statements seems of interest in a different way than we’re heading, but I’ll let that go), that wound never left him and contributed to the pervasive, destructive behavior that brought him down.

I don’t know your take on Haggard.  I’m sympathetic to those who cut him loose after his mega-scandal, and there’s much to question in his conservative stridency and, I suppose, to being a mega-church pastor in general.  But, despite all, I’ve appreciated Haggard over the years and have learned from him (I may address some of the things he’s taught me in subsequent posts).  So all I felt in his fall was sadness.  And today’s story strikes me as the ultimate “no duh.”  Of course he was abused as a child!  The extent of his acting out despite his vocal preaching against those very sins speak of a man in conflict with himself, driven by things he’d like to suppress.  Maybe, as some secular writers suggested, this spoke of his being at odds with his fundamental sexual orientation.  Maybe.  But today’s story resonates more deeply with me.

This is an oft-repeated story—the gifted follower of God is knocked out by unaddressed wounds.  You could argue that Mother Teresa got away with this in her life only to be outed in her death, when her anguish-filled journals were published with the upshot that she’d found little to no joy in God for many decades.  She got the Haggard treatment in some circles—i.e. this proves that she was living a false front at best and a lie at worst.  I regard this just as I regard the Haggard story.  To me, she was totally sincere in what her life was about.  But she had unaddressed wounding from her youth that had to be kept under wraps for the sake of her life’s work.

Why couldn’t Haggard get actual help for that wounding and the acting out that came out of it?  Of course I don’t know, but I have a guess.  His culture would encourage him to shape up—clearly his behavior was out of bounds.  His marriage and ministry were totally at risk if he addressed these things, so his only choice was to take this as a matter of personal will and suck it up.  Mother Teresa did have a confessor with whom she shared these things, but I haven’t heard how she addressed the early wounds themselves rather than their manifestations.

I could go on.  Lonnie Frisbee, this guileless product of the hippie Jesus Movement, had a substantial part in the founding of two significant church movements—my own (the Vineyard) and Calvary Chapel.  And he’s rarely mentioned in those histories because of the unraveling of his own life and his ultimate death from AIDS.  (There’s a gripping if jaded documentary about him if you want to learn more.)

Complex wounds from my own childhood led to ten years of on-again-off-again mild depression before a blend of prayer, wise counsel and my own ongoing dialogue with God moved me past that.  Just this week I’m seeing other opportunities for addressing those wounds—and, thanks to folks like these, getting friendly hints from God of consequences for leaving them unaddressed. 

My pitch: Anyone interested enough in lifelong, potent faith to read a blog like this would be well-advised to learn one more lesson from Ted Haggard and Mother Teresa and Lonnie Frisbee.  Our behavior and mood are driven by something.  Relentless openness to our spiritual friends and to God himself seems like a great start towards getting the kind of powerful prayer and wise counsel that can keep us moving towards God and others for a lifetime.  Taking our issues into our own hands through continual re-resolve to do better and the secrecy that comes with that… that’s a lonely and stressful path, along with being a big, big risk with uncertain, at best, rewards.

Three Cheers for Doggedness!

In response to yesterday's post--which made the simple point that, for all our awesome, sophisticated thinking about this hopefully-fresh and helpful version of faith, we do have to actually DO the faith we're discussing--among each of the great comments, I was especially struck by Trish Ryan's.

This is one area where my new age past has served me well. Through my various seasons of spiritual furniture moving, mediating, and spouting affirmations, I got used to the idea that faith is something you do--that there's a participatory component to it that isn't dependent on how I'm feeling in any given moment.

This helped me when I started following Jesus. Some mornings, the Bible seemed alive with exciting possibilities God put there just for me, and prayer felt like I'd found the hotline to heaven. But then there were the other days--when the Bible was the strangest, most depressing collection of stories I'd ever seen, and talking to God seemed only slightly less ludicrous than conversing with my dog.

But I'd made a decision to pursue this path--so I kept on keeping on. And the results have been pretty great. The stage 4 life, for me at least, involves some practices that look like Stage 2. The difference is that I know WHY I'm doing these things--it's to connect with the living God, rather than just to get my "This is what good Christians do" stamp.

A mixture of dogged pursuit of faith while all the time keeping in mind the WHY of what we're doing... That seems like a pretty powerful prescription for what we're hoping for on this blog.

We Do Have to Actually DO this Stuff

I'll get back to deep thoughts soon enough--goodness knows, I and so many of you love them so!--but I thought I'd interject something simple along the way.

A lot of what this blog is at the moment is what deep thinkers would call "meta-processing" about this take on faith that we're calling Stage 4 faith.  Meta-processing is talking about something.  So we're not actually, say, teaching Stage 4 faith, by and large, much less practicing it.  We're analyzing the ins and outs of it.  We'll leave the teaching of it, say, to church services or great conversations with friends.

But we can get a little lost in--or exasperated by--even the best meta-processing.  My goodness, how much can we hash something out?  When do we just live out the thing?  And... touche.

We run a course for people exploring faith that we call SEEK.  And a little while back, we realized we needed to add something to the last session which seemed too obvious to have needed to include up to that point: namely that, to get all the wonderful benefits we've been discussing over these ten weeks--and which many of you participants have been experiencing--you do actually have to DO this stuff. 

It might seem obvious, but it's surprising how easy many of us find it to keep hanging out in faith settings, enjoying the company we're keeping, while all the time forgetting that we're not going to get the good stuff without, say, diligent two-way prayer, heartfelt and regular enjoyment of the Bible, regular risks of faith all because God seemed to direct us towards them, great partnership with others trying to follow God even as we love and enjoy the neighbors around us...  Stuff like that.

And we often get sage nods: "Ahhh, the final tip from the masters--to get the good stuff, you do actually have to DO this stuff." 

So, as an interjection in our totally fascinating ongoing conversation, from which I'm learning so much, just to say... we do actually have to DO this stuff to get the good stuff, whatever the many rewards of thinking about it.

Back with more deep thoughts shortly, with a mind-blowing guest column to follow.

The Big Sticking Point

Thanks to Jeff for your post-election reflections, and I’m very much looking forward to our “posts of the week.”  I think I’ll learn a lot and have a lot of fresh things to reflect upon.

A little update: As I get a few more opportunities to speak to folks in fresh circles about the things we discuss here, the most controversial thing that comes up always hits me as a surprise.  It’s the pitch—made a few times here—that God is only good.  Secularists want to hear more.  But some evangelicals push back that that’s a naïve statement.  This always blindsides me, because in the history of people pursuing faith in Jesus, God’s goodness is pretty much the bedrock of everything, so I’m not making up some newfangled statement.

So what’s the sticking point with these evangelicals?  The first is that God, on this line of thought, is not good for people who don’t know him.  They’re headed to hell—a place we’ll all agree is not good.  And even in this life, were they to decide to give God a go, they’d have to give up lots of things they don’t want to give up, so they wouldn’t find the experience to be anything we’d commonly call “good.”  The second sticking point is that a statement like “God is only good” doesn’t account for horrors and suffering in the world.  Try saying that God is only good to sufferers in the Holocaust, for instance.  So, all to say, clearly God is not “only good.”

My working title for Not the Religious Type was Good God!, so evidently this issue is near and dear to me.  The faith we’re talking about here is absolutely dependent on God’s 100%, good-to-the-last-drop goodness, that “there is no shadow in him” that he “is good and does only good” (actual statements from the actual Bible!).  This is why we can encourage anyone from any culture to cast their lot God’s direction—because they won’t find any bad news in God.  (A friend I mentioned this to yesterday said, “Well, one very crude take on all of theology would be to say: ‘God is only good.  The Devil is only bad.’”)

 So how do we reconcile this with the surprisingly persistent objections that come my way?  Maybe one way would be to say that the “good God” argument only works in a world in which our first instinct is towards experience.  And the “that’s a naïve statement” objection, perhaps, comes from a perspective that leans towards thoughts and arguments.  So folks drawn this thoughts-oriented way immediately imagine all the prospective objections to such a statement.  And they realize that those are serious objections and so, as a serious thinker, they have to concede a few points here.  But I find myself responding back with guileless, non-polemical points of view like, “But, God forbid anyone would ever again have to go through something as unthinkable as the Holocaust, would such a person be advised to go through that (a) with God or (b) without God?”  And for those secular friends considering God who would perhaps feel the need to give a few things up in their lives if they pursued God—I’d think the only reason they’d give anything up would be for something better.  Actually following God, in the classic way of thinking about it, only involves trading up, never getting swindled in the transaction.

All to say, this is THE BIG STICKING POINT for many Christians (if not for pretty much any enduring theologian).  What’s your take on why this is such a biggie?

What the election results mean for Stage 4 Faith/ Jeff Heidkamp (Minneapolis, MN)

That was fast! We have our first guest columnist of the week, and thank you so much for those who've also already submitted. (To the rest of you, let's get moving!) As Jeff's post is time-dated, I thought I'd get us to it. And, as always, I'd love to know your comments about what Jeff has to say.

It doesn't take a person of faith to recognize that on one hand, Americans put way too much stock into presidential politics.  Yet, it feels impossible to deny that the election of 2008 seemed to really mean something in terms of faith, culture, and society, not just in the US, but in the world.  I know wonderful people, both people of faith and people outside faith, who are either dismayed or elated by the election outcome.  Now that the 2008 presidential election is done, what does it mean for people of faith on either side?

First, we should not underestimate the power of hope.  Cynics cannot defeat it, pessimists cannot disprove it, and experience cannot quash it.  Could it be that politics, probably unwittingly, tapped into the deeper reality that people of faith hold onto- the idea that the future, not the past, is ultimately determinative,?  That to proclaim "The Kingdom of God is at hand" is to proclaim that hope defeats fear?  Even for those utterly opposed to Obama's politics may have felt this- consider Friedman's take in the New York Times.

It was white conservatives telling the guys in the men's grill at the country club that they were voting for John McCain, but then quietly going into the booth and voting for Obama, even though they knew it would mean higher taxes. Why? Some did it because they sensed how inspired and hopeful their kids were about an Obama presidency, and they not only didn't want to dash those hopes, they secretly wanted to share them.

Second, ethnic diversity is a positive good.  Diversity is not neutral, it is good.  In response to my remark that I found Obama inspirational, a wise friend  asked me,  "Would you find Obama so inspirational if he were not black?"  I had to answer, quite simply, "no."  I don't mean I wouldn't have found him inspiring if he were white.  But his ethnicity is an undeniable part of his story, just as it is an undeniable part of the human story.  It has been part of the history of the church from its earliest days until now that the most effective followers of Jesus are very often those who are learning to embrace racial diversity and racial justice (Cornelius, Paul, St. Patrick, Wilberforce, King, not to mention emerging Pentecostalism in developing nations). 

Third, people long for someone to say that crisis is not always disaster.  If faith is not the opposite of doubt, but rather the opposite of fear, perhaps it would also be fair to say that it is the opposite of despair.  In our church community, one of the requirements for membership is to choose to avoid cynicism and embrace God's big dreams for our city.  I heard echoes of this in Obama's acceptance speech last night:

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there.

All this to say, regardless of your political preferences, I think the election bodes well for faith in 21st century North America.  Some of what Obama tapped into with the limited resources of political campaigning are the same things the church wants to tap into with the unlimited resources of the kingdom of Jesus.  I have no doubt there is much the Obama administration will do that some people of faith will find distasteful or repulsive.  But the broad strokes of his campaign show that people in North America are not entirely closed off to the message of the Kingdom.  

ANNOUNCING: You—Yes You!—Might Have YOUR OWN BYLINE!

 I'd love to open up your friendly blog just a bit. 

 From the beginning of this blog (a robust…five months ago?), the idea has been that it would ultimately become a forum for these sorts of thoughts about what we're calling Stage 4 faith, not that it would uniquely be a mouthpiece for me. To date, it has uniquely been a mouthpiece for me (in the post sections at least—the comments have been all yours), but that's primarily because the thinking has been that someone has to set a tone and the parameters of the conversation.

And the blog, by the way, seems to have done pretty well in kicking off that conversation. I'm told there are about a hundred million blogs out there (you read that right) and that the gold standard is to try to get your blog in the top million. We've made it from, I'm proud to say, about the 24 million ranking in our early days four or so months back to, this week, in the 800,000s (and with a bullet, I might add).

So, if you're game, why don't you submit a post here? I'd love to start our process of opening up this conversation by having, if all goes well, a "contributor of the week" post, and then maybe we'll figure out how to proceed from there. Here's what you should be thinking. 500 words, give or take. Your goal is to try to open up a conversation about something that interests you about the kind of faith we talk about here. So, in theory, it should be possible for others to comment on whatever you write. Sadly, there are two things I can't promise, so you'll need to decide up front to have at least a minimally thick skin. (1) I can't promise, obviously, to run your submission. One never knows how many submissions will come in, for one thing, and… well, you understand. (2) I can't promise to justify to you why I didn't run your submission. Who knows? I might. But it could get beyond my time capabilities each week to enter into multiple dialogues about why certain posts aren't running.

But enough of the qualifiers: Get writing! I know that I, for one, want to know what you'd post about!

Send them to me at dave@notreligious.org. Operators (well… me) are standing by!

Faith versus “The Faith”

A woman I know keeps blowing my mind by doing things like throwing iftars at our church to celebrate the end of Ramadan with neighborhood Muslims. (And drawing a nice crowd.) Or brainstorming ways to love folks at the local housing project and suddenly finding herself running weeklong soccer camps for 90 kids. She has no problem with thinking big.

Many of you inspire me in just that way. One of you continually kicks tires of unexpected ways to kick off Jesus-based gatherings among secularists in your large city. Another finds yourself meeting powerful person after powerful person as you consider broad-based ways to stir up conversations about faith.

Not long ago I looked up every usage of the word "faith" in my English-language Bible. A couple surprises: (1) It's pretty much exclusively a New Testament concept; pretty much doesn't come up at all before that. (2) Even in the New Testament, it gets used in two different ways. In the synoptic gospels, faith is a thing—it's the stuff Jesus talks about all the time that either invites God's power or (because of its lack) repels God's power. Later in the New Testament, it becomes a body of belief, often called "the faith."

I'm not sure if there's any point to be made here about one fitting better in with Stage 4 and the other in Stage 2. But I do know that I gravitate more towards that Jesus-in-the-synoptic-gospels things, where our conversation is all about seeing astounding works of God as we develop our faith. I find myself less-interested in any sort of theological refining process, which is where we often seem to run with "the faith."

And, I don't know about you, but it seems to me I know lots and lots of awesome people who clearly, to my satisfaction, have whatever faith would be needed to go to heaven (they're clearly sincere), but who don't traffic in this synoptic-gospel "faith" that will get amazing things done.

Do you see a difference between "faith" and "the faith?" Do you gravitate more towards one than the other? (I'm not arguing that both don't have a place—they're both most definitely in the New Testament. I'm just talking on an emotional level.) Why? What have you learned as you've tried to make strides in "faith?"