Not The Religious Type

The Upcoming Blue Ocean Summit Will Either Strike You as the Single Coolest Gathering Yet Convened. Or You're Not Who I'm Talking to. :)

So we've tried to get a little more...what's the word I'm looking for?...professional?...forward-thinking?...in letting people know about the Blue Ocean Summit this year, so you may have heard from us in one form or another in the last few days.  But, on the off-chance that you haven't, let me be the first to tell you that you should make a pretty good effort to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts this August 1-3.

Let me back up and give you some of the rationale of this gathering.  Maybe five years ago it struck me and a few of you that there was no place that we were aware of to talk about the things about God and the world around us that we were most interested in talking about.  Yes, many of us were in the sort of world where we could go to really impressive, well-run conferences about God and churches, which was great in its own way, but wasn't this thing that most interested us.  Should we notice that we lived in fascinating, usually pretty secular cities that we loved?  Was there anything we should be noticing about that?  Did our connection with God have anything to contribute to this conversation?  Was--strange as it might sound--any chance we could, say, collaborate with our city in a way that would bring more of God into it?  Basically it just didn't seem fun to us--all of whom were churchgoers--to think that our task was entirely to build context-free "great churches" in hopes that we'd be discovered someday by our city, like a starlet at a cafe. 

So, with only that amorphous idea, about a dozen of us journeyed to Cambridge to talk more about this.  The next year we invited a very few more people and had "talks" and "workshops" and that definitely moved us forward a bit.  The following year we invited zero new people and canned a bunch of the talks and most of the workshops and instead put our heads together once again about what we were learning.  Last year we tried to strike a nice middle ground and had lots more people show up. 

And this year we're going as far as we've ever gone to try to partner with some impressive people in many different fields on the intuition that the time has come for the faith we've been talking about to be pretty darn helpful in some pretty darn unexpected pockets of our larger world.

So Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann will lay out some of the most-compelling perspectives I've yet heard about how a type of faith very close to the one we find ourselves talking about might well be uniquely suited to this historical moment.  (I managed to mess up--on the technical side--two different attempts at a podcast with Tanya last week.  She's abandoned us and gone to Turkey.  But I'll try again late next week when she gets back, and you can learn more.) 

Do You Like Talking about Ethics (or Politics)?

Proving again that people like talking about sex, thanks for all your comments on the post on Friday.  If you're interested, I did indeed speak on this last Sunday and I incorporated snippets from some of your comments into the talk. 

A lot of what we talk about here--particularly how we like to point people towards Jesus rather than towards a religious system--makes for an anti-issues, anti-ethics way of life.  The conversation tends to shift from "right vs. wrong" to "helpful vs. unhelpful."  And yet I know from personal experience that many of you do, in fact, like nothing more than a good old fashioned give and take on things like ethics or public policy or whatever.  Talk to me about that!  How, for you, does that fit into your centered-set world?

I think of it because of this opinion piece from Ross Douthat on what he describes as the 160 million women who are missing from China and India since America introduced ultrasounds to those countries, which enabled them to abort second-semester girl babies.  He pitches this as a major ethical quandary, which acknowledging that his starting point is pro-life, so he'd, clearly, be prone to see the issue on these terms.  I agree with him while, with him, acknowledging the complexity of the issue.  (It's not that China and India wouldn't favor boy babies over girl babies long before they ran across ultrasounds and western modes of abortion.) 

In my "turn people Jesus' direction" world, I don't tend to crusade on behalf of such things.  But maybe I should.  How do you navigate your political or ethical passions?  Are you prone to take your passions to the streets?

Is Religion an Ethnicity? /Jeff Heidkamp

One of the atheist writers (I don't remember which) declared at the front end of his book that though he was certainly an atheist, he was definitely a Judeo-Christian atheist.  That is, the God he rejected was the God of western history- he couldn't claim to be actively atheist relative to, say, the Hindu pantheon.

I thought about that distinction as I enjoyed the comments on the sexual ethics post. What I thought about was how different I am from someone who grew up secular. And it has nothing to do with opinions, or faith-approach. On these we agree substantially. But, we come from different cultures.

The religion one grows up with, or lack thereof, colors worldview in a way almost nothing else can. And it's deeper than stage theory. Deep, deep in my psyche, I was taught that the main way one defines reality is through reading the Bible with a conservative evangelical lens. That will never change. And I'm not saying I wish it would. Deep, deep in the psyche of someone who grew up secular, there is a different way to define reality.

So, even if I agree with my friend-who-grew-up secular about something, we agree on it from different directions. I could feel this in some of my reaction to the comments on that post. Is premarital sex wrong? For me, the question runs as deep as kindergarten and little league. It's not even a question. It is part of reality. And even if I were to decide it was OK (which I haven't), it would be very different than the way my friend-who-grew-up secular would arrive at that conclusion. For the kid who grew up conservative-religious, it's bound up with questions of heaven, hell, and humanity.

Interestingly, being married to a Chinese woman brings this up in an even more interesting light. She doesn't have much skin in the game of the religious questions I wrestle with. Heaven, hell, biblical authority, world religions, Christian exclusivism are all interesting topics to her. But they don't go down as deep. They are part of something she picked up later in life- something crucially important to her, but not innate.

But- on many ethical matters, particularly sexuality, we actually share similar backgrounds. Her family's Chinese culture (note I'm not trying to speak for Chinese culture in general) is, along those lines, probably more conservative than most Americans. On these issues, we actually find our growing-up-cultures to be very much in line. I probably relate to issues of sexual ethics from a background that is more Chinese than east-coast liberal.

I don't really have any hard and fast conclusions here, just observations. How does the religious and cultural milieu of our growing up years influence how we answer the questions of life? Is it interesting or helpful to realize that even if we agree, we can agree from different directions? Are there times when conflicts might be best understood along these lines? Is religious background basically a form of ethnicity?

How Do You Navigate Sexual Ethics?

On occasion here we've chatted about how important sexual choices are to you--I'm thinking we seem to be in a yearly rhythm (apart from LGBT questions, which come up somewhat more frequently, including in recent podcasts).  So let me kick off this year's revisiting of the subject.

Maybe to put a nub on it for our purposes today: Is there a place in your world for premarital sex?

I'm assuming I won't find much support here for the virtues of adultery.  It might be worth kicking a few tires for your views of other issues related to sex--does any bold soul out there want to put in a good word for porn, say? 

But, having just finished prepping a sermon on sex, I'm reminded of a few trends, in churches and outside of them.  We talked here a few months back about this new book American Grace by this Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, of Bowling Alone fame.  It's chock-full of interesting survey data, but one of the more interesting beats is on this topic.  Apparently before 1969, 4 out of 5 adults said they always disapproved of premarital sex.  By the 1980s, the number had reversed--80% didn't see a problem with it.  Putnam and his coauthor theorize that the ethic of the 60s caught up with this question as the decade drew to a close, as it did to views on many social issues.  But what's interesting is their observation that all of those things got overturned in the 80s, a conservative decade when views reverted to pre-60s perspectives.  On everything EXCEPT premarital sex.  The numbers there didn't budge, nor have they since.

As churches and society at large increasingly have more and more older singles, singles--especially those in their 30s and beyond--who hold to abstinence are increasingly looked at oddly.  I hear this story a lot from our singles in this age range, some of whom are rethinking their previous conservative views.  Some are angry that they've held out for what now seems like a very poor reward--virginity and loneliness in their 40s. 

That said, don't get me wrong, I also hear plenty of stories of people who've been sexually-active and now regret it, particularly as they face marriage and wish they could scrub their mind and spirit of their sexual past.  (Some, with the help of prayer, actually seem to make good progress on this front.) 

It does seem evident to me that the Bible is on the abstinence side.  It, however, was written in a culture of arranged marriage (usually for kids in their teens) so the 40-year-old single person wasn't being kept in mind. 

What are your thoughts on how to navigate sexual ethics?  (Or, if you're looking for a yes/no option: Is premarital sex always wrong?)

Do You Distrust Religiously-Inspired Numerical Growth?

Totally interesting comment by Bill Hoard in response to the last post on church planting movements.  To I'm sure unfairly summarize his comment: a focus on religious numerical growth gives him the creeps, makes Jesus' gospel seem like a multi-level marketing scheme.  I wonder if you feel the same?

I'm torn.  On the one hand, I'm sympathetic.  The greatest focus on numbers in the U.S. is often in churches and movements in very-religious cultures, which can seem a little fake and plastic to many folks I talk to.  And in response to the complaint that exploding church planting movements might be producing lots of really bad "churches" (in quotes, because the churches in question in these things don't--as I understand it--look like a church you or I would actually attend; they're much less-structured than that, often not in a discrete church building, very small): I'm sure that's true; in fact I tried to flag just that observation in the original post.

And yet I remain intrigued, maybe for classic empire-building reasons or maybe for something different.  Giving myself the best benefit of the doubt, I think I'm interested because, to my satisfaction, I've received some great benefits from Jesus and I'd be eager for others to experience such things as well.  No empire building necessary.  If I have no overt connection to whatever good thing happens to other people through Jesus, I can live with that.  But I am eager to see those benefits go to others, if possible.  And so I do hope for more "numbers."

But does that sentiment seem suspect to you?  I'm totally curious.

Can We Learn Something from Church Planting Movements?

Are you at all hip to this phenomenon which the Southern Baptists are known to track that they call "Church Planting Movements?"  You can learn more about them here.  These are Jesus movements in countries where there are very few known followers of his.  Some of you have met our acquaintances, the Bakers, with Iris Ministries in Mozambique--they're in a church planting movement.  The one I've been reading most about recently is in an unknown country (it's closed to conversations about Jesus), but the Southern Baptists tell us that one church planter and his wife went there within the last decade and have since seen, conservatively, the start of 158,000 home churches and something like 1.7 million baptisms.  So...pretty impressive.

I think about church planting movements all the time.  My interest is to see one in the West, where pretty much none have happened since, perhaps, the circuit riders on the American frontier.  People often ask why we don't see such things in America or the rest of the West, and the customary answer is that wealth is the problem--people in the West aren't poor enough to have a hunger for God the way they do in the Third World, which is where these movements all-but exclusively happen.

And readers of this blog will have their own handy grid to explain this.  They'll (rightly, from what I can see) point out that church planting movements are usually very, very stage 2 and they happen in very stage 1 contexts, where stage 2 is very good news indeed.  Mozambique, for example, was the poorest country in the world when the Bakers decided to go there, with its infrastructure destroyed by unrelenting civil war.  This, then, becomes a major barrier whenever some eager Westerner says, "Hey, let's import CPM (church planting movement) ideas to America!"  What they don't realize is that hearty stage 2 doesn't work at all well in a stage 3 world--or even in a stage 2 world where other stage 2 structures (most churches, for instance) are already working fine.  One feels a little churlish to start praying that our country will go through an apocalyptic meltdown so that its newfound stage 1 problem can be addressed by our stage 2 cure.

Woody Allen, J. J. Abrams and God's Unique Work in Us when We're 14

I read a fascinating opinion piece recently that pitched that age 14 is the most important one for any artist (or any person?).  Age 14 was when Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney first heard Elvis. 

“When I first heard Elvis’s voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody, and nobody was going to be my boss,” Mr. Dylan once said. “Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.”

Mr. McCartney, the son of a big-band musician, abandoned his first instrument, the trumpet, after hearing Presley. “It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music,” Mr. McCartney has been quoted as saying. “When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ ” — which was released in 1956, when Mr. McCartney turned 14 — “I thought, this is it.”

Age 14 was when Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Gene Simmons and Stevie Wonder first heard the Beatles.  Billie Holliday and Frank Sinatra first heard Rudy Vallee (!) at 14.  I just saw Super 8 this weekend--perhaps ill-advisedly taking my three boys (ages 14, 13, and 10) with me.  Two, nonetheless, loved it (as I did).  And it totally freaked out one son (which was understandable--it's awesome, but as intense a movie as any of them have ever seen; when the lights came up I found myself trying to shield my 10-year-old from others--"Me?  Bring a 10-YEAR-OLD to this monster movie?  Pshaw!  I'd never do such a thing.").  All to say, it's J.J. Abrams' homage to early Steven Spielberg movies like E.T. and Poltergeist, which came out when Abrams was...14.  (I might be fudging here.  He might have been 15, depending on how his birthday aligned with the release dates.)

3rd Podcast --- Part 2: Dave & The LGBT Community

Note from Dan: Round three of the Blue Ocean Podcasts is brought to you in two parts, with this one being the second part. To listen to Part 1 click here. For this podcast, we thought it was high time to gather some friends in the LGBT community to discuss what it's been like for them to be members in our church and how we can make it better for others in similar situations.

 

 

(Right click and choose "save link as" to download the podcast)

 

Is it better to be right or be sorry?/ Jeff Heidkamp

I was pondering this nugget from Jesus in Luke 15:

There is more joy in heaven over one lost sinner who repents and returns to God than over ninety-nine others who are righteous and haven’t strayed away! 

Why would a repenting sinner garner more rejoicing than 99 righteous? Because the 99 are actually self-righteous and not truly righteous? Maybe, but let's think a little more.

Most people try to be righteous and do a decent job most of the time. Even people who might largely be regarded as "bad" typically have a take on why they aren't as bad as they might be perceived. (Say, the pot dealer who says at least he doesn't sell crack outside schools. And he might have a point.)

Most people don't think they are perfect. We know we make mistakes. So what do we do about it? Perhaps we self-justify. Or we sink into shame and guilt. Or we just ignore our failures and hope they go away. Or whatever else. And sometimes, that might be harmless. But often, it causes a lot of trouble. How much suffering comes into the world because of evil ideologies built around self-justification, or child abuse that grows out of the unprocessed pain of the parents.

Nothing Good Will Be Lost/ Brent

Yesterday I talked with a man who is 72 years old. Speaking Chimiini, he told me about nkoonko and maayi ka mpeembe. Both were games played by young men in his home town of Barawa in Somalia. In Nkoonko, teams of ten (always from rival quarters of town) used long sticks to whack a small ball up and down the beach, trying to score in the other’s goal. The winners would parade around town singing a victory song that he recited for me. In Maayi ka Mpeembe, young men would go out in the sea with hollow cattle horns and use the horns to fling water at each other, which can be pretty painful. It is one of those fun, violent games boys sometimes play and the goal was simply to outlast one’s compatriots. Last man standing wins. He told me about the particular times of the year these games were played and the bragging rights winners received. He himself is still legendary for the nkoonko skills he displayed as a youth and I could tell he enjoyed telling me about it.

Yet there was sadness, too, as he told me something I already knew – it isn’t likely either of these games will be played again. His people’s culture – their games, ways of cooking, building houses, even their language – are quickly disappearing, the victims of a horrific civil war now twenty years old with no signs of being resolved any time soon.

Can We Appeal to Something Other Than Morality to Mobilize Service and Social Justice?/Vince Brackett

Lately, a friend and I have thinking about what it would look like to mobilize the younger, Stage 3-leaning generation toward service and social justice initiatives.  It’s often observed here that with Stage 3 tends to come a passion for social justice, and, as I look around, that is obviously true of us young people: we believe as a given that social justice is important and good.  But the issue is moving from the level of gut belief to the level of lived-out, intentional behavior.

For the sake of argument, my friend and I came up with a hypothetical: bridging the gap between someone “liking” a “stop human trafficking” page on facebook and someone actively doing things within his/her means to help such a cause.  The common approach to bridging that gap seems to be a sort of morality play:  “Are you really doing all you ought to?”  “Shouldn’t you be giving your life to such a worthy cause?”  The assumption in this approach is that the problem is people’s passivity, and good people will overcome that.

If You Listened to the LGBT Podcast

We'll post Part 2 of the LGBT Podcast next week, which will continue what, for me, has been a very provocative conversation.  Among the questions the group discusses there is how they interact with the Bible, including the scriptures on homosexuality, which was an item of interest for some of you. 

As I mention on the podcast, my hope is not so much to pitch anything in particular as it is to invite those of you who are interested into a conversation that many of you tell me you have no opportunity to have.  And so you'll note that--apart from one instance of me recounting at some length our church's history on this--I pretty much ask questions and let my guests talk.  (That said, should you have any interest, last Feb. 20, I did speak on this subject to our congregation.)

Faith is our birthright/ Amy

I just read the best book I’ve ever read about faith (sorry,Dave ;-), and it was written by a Buddhist. Seriously, everyone should go out and find a copy of this book, stat. It’s not very long and it’s not hard to read and it is so amazingly relevant to so much of what we talk about on this blog.

It’s called Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, and it's by Sharon Salzberg, who was one of the founders of the Insight Meditation Society.  She is a Buddhist, but, like many prominent American Buddhists, she was born and raised a Jew.

(The interaction between Buddhism and Judaism in modern America is a really interesting subject in itself -- for many years Judaism just hemmhorraged the spiritually-minded into Buddhism, and modern Judaism has in part responded by depersonalizing God and emphasizing the Jewish contemplative tradition. I don't mean to make this sound like a marketing war, exactly, although I'm sure it sometimes was -- just that there's been a lot of really fruitful if sometimes contentious interaction between Jews and Buddhists lately -- far more than what we see between Jews and Christians, for example.)