The Z factor and the end of Church – is it really happening?

There are have been proclamations, rants, even celebrations by some that with the fall in church attendance across the mainline Christian denominations that the days of “going to church” are quickly coming to an end.  By this I mean the days of packing the family up in the car and driving to a Sunday morning worship service, perhaps Sunday school and fellowship hall gatherings over burned coffee and cookies fresh out of a box.  To this bit of Americana I would have to agree – the days of this picture are fading faster than a Polaroid on a bulletin board (note: given that Kodak is discontinuing the Polaroid line, this metaphor is ironically fading out as well).

Is this such a bad thing? Well, a number of post-church (aka ‘emergent’) folks have been banging this drum for most of the late 1990’s and into the current century and have made quite a nice living on book deals and speaking gigs that have stirred the dismay and questioned the notion of “church” as a modernist construct to the point of people gathering around their books and conferences rather than as collectives of the Body of Christ.  Those who attend many of these “we are different” and”embrace Otherness” and  ”not your father’s Christianity” and “meaning as Twitter feed”  gatherings seem to keep coming and the folks who put them on are able to pay their mortgages so something is working, right?   (btw –  many so-called ‘emergent’ folks will ‘hate on’ this alignment of “emergent” = “post-church”… but emergent folks hate on any label… kinda cute actually…)

That said, my worry goes deeper than the business models of the so-called ‘different without a Creed’ gatherings.  My worry is that ultimately ‘the Church is Christ in the world’ (a phrase stated rather boldly by Dietrich Bonhoeffer)  and as such has such a brutally fractured presence in the world that it resembles the torn apart corpse of the Levites concubine in Judges 19-22 (if you are interested in this troubling section of the Hebrew Bible that is never preached on and not found in any lectionary, my colleague Frank Spina provides a great lecture on iTunesU available here)

What is left of the presence of the church other than torn apart, sun-bleached and picked over chunks of flesh and bone fragments as Christians continue to passively participate in ever-shrinking circles of affinity that rarely engage a larger conversation that could mean the end of their perspective and the beginning of some new relationship?

This is the question that is driving my book project entitled “The Z factor” which is a meditation on the words of the Minor Prophets and in particular the book of Zechariah.  It is something I have been musing over for a while and feel that it is time to kick start the project again.  I will be posting thoughts on it over the coming weeks and look forward to your contributions and help in musing these questions over…

‘We are born of sound’, or why you need to get Alex Ross’ book NOW

I am a bit late to the game in picking up Alex Ross’ Pulitzer Prize winning “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” and can’t say enough good things about it.  Ross is the chief Music Critic and an Editor for the New Yorker magazine and has pulled together a seminal primer for ‘reading’ the evolution of culture in the 20th century through the music that formed our lives and times.  Ross stakes a claim early in the introduction that “twentieth-century classical composition…sounds like noise to many…yet these sounds are hardly alien.  Atonal chords crop up in jazz, avant-grade sounds appear in Hollywood film scores; minimalism has marked rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward.  Sometimes the music resembles noise because it is noise, or near to it by design.  Sometimes, as with Berg’s Wozzeck, it mixes the familiar and the strange, consonance and dissonance.  Sometimes it is so singularly beautiful that people gasp in wonder when they hear it.”

I love this description and the way Ross is so spirited in his call for us to move from being passive listeners toward an engagement as full participants in the music that fills our iPods and cascades out of the windows and doorways of dorm rooms and bars, concert halls and the church sanctuary.  As I wrote in a recent theological review of U2’s recent album “No Line on the Horizon”, music is something that shapes and ultimately frames not merely marking the memories *of* experiences we partake in, but literally *are* the experiences themselves.  For many of us, music is as vital to what it means to be alive as anything else.  We return to the songs that give us hope, provide companionship in the midst of lament, carve out space for reflection and lay out a map for our journey both in recovering our past and forging into the hope of a redeemed future.  ”We are born of sound” muses Bono in the song “Breathe” off “No Line on the Horizon” and I believe he is absolutely correct.  To read The Rest is Noise to realize just how profound the birth of the twentieth century is and the genius that is found in the music we have been midwifed by into the life we now hold so dear.

exhaustion and imagination – on too much travel and the boundaries of identity

I am have been travelling quite a bit recently – a different city and a different conference for three weekends of the past four.  Venturing from the sublime (U2 academic conference in Durham, NC) to the ridiculous (was in a booth across from a disco dancing Yeti under a mirror ball blaring the Michael Jackson back catalog at the YS National Youth Workers Convention in LA) to the somber and informative (the AYME conference where I gave a paper on racial identity in teens in Louisville, KY), in the immortal words of Jerry Garcia – “oh what a long strange trip it’s been.”

I am pretty beat up after all this travelling and frankly marvel as frequent business travelers who keep up this pace.  It is utterly de-humanizing to be travelling those distances in that period of time.  I was bumped up to first class on one leg of a trip and got a taste of what happens to people who travel that much – people shoving their overhead luggage into you so they can secure a spot, barking at the stewardess for yet another drink, grunting at the elderly as they attempt to get off the plane with limited mobility.  I kept thinking “so THIS is what the boys in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” would have become if they had traveled by plane as opposed to ship…”

Being bone tired makes you realize your limits and on a spiritual level offers a space to consider what it is that makes us human.  Exhaustion is the end of the bell curve and I am beginning to see it as the polar opposite from imagination.  The lack of human intimacy, the frantic blur of locales and yet the utter banality of hotel rooms in drab sameness, the lack of distinctiveness in food all add up to a vacuum that provides no resources nor encouragement to even consider possibilities and a vision larger than just making it through another metal detector and TSA strip search.

Frankly, I am too tired to even know what to do with this… but at least I am home to think about it.

The Man in the Mirror: Michael Jackson and the National Youth Workers Convention mash-up

Los Angeles – arguably one of the most “American” cities you will ever visit.  Flash and image swirl around you in the reflections of 100 foot video billboards, half the television shows in the past twenty years are shot in a 10 mile radius of Wilshire and Figueroa in downtown where I am currently writing this blog at the pool side of an old 50’s faux Moroccan hotel: everything feels like a canceled TV show on Nick at Nite down to the extras walking across the street.

I am in LA this time at the National Youth Workers Convention.  This is the Superbowl of youth leader events if the Superbowl was only the halftime show and there was no game and held in a strip mall.  And perhaps that is my worry as I watch over 1,000 youth workers running around with the latest messenger bag with hip flare pins on the strap:  has youth ministry become only the halftime show and no game?  The Big Room events capture this perfectly:  huge expensive stage show with set musicians cranking out great covers of Stevie Wonder while the MC throws plastic frisbees probably made in a sweat shop in China to the cheering crowd who have spend the day grabbing as many free pens, T-Shirts, and funky USB drives from the booths as they could get their hands on… ‘consumerism sanctified’ to be sure.

Just outside the Convention Center where this is all taking place another gathering of the faithful has assembled:  hundreds of Michael Jackson fans have gathered around the Staples Center awaiting the premiere of the posthumous concert film of their dead hero.  For days they have been gathering, sitting in lawn chairs, dressed like MJ and iPod docking stations blasting out his back catalog for all on Figueroa to hear.  Votive candles have been lit and flowers left under a huge wall of messages written in memorium.

Both groups have gathered because someone died.  Both groups seek to honor their hero.  Both are also driven and defined by the products and merchandise that is being sold to give form to their faithfulness: CDs, T-Shirts, concerts, DVDs, books, hats, etc.

Question: if we switched the groups, traded the faithful at each gathering and televised it to the world, would the masses be able to tell the difference?  Could someone just watching behavior see which “King” is being lauded and worshiped?

I suppose like MJ I am wondering who IS the man in the mirror after all?

(Update five minutes later  - Right after posting this, I walked into the Big Room session and caught the end of the talk.  I was feeling like perhaps I had been too pointed in my reflections.  Then the speaker handed the microphone to a singer who launched into “a song to have in our heads as we think about change…”  The song?  Yup… MJ’s “Man in the Mirror”  Oh sigh… )

downsizing for the long haul – the way of the peregrine

Organizational guru and motivational speaker Steven Covey challenges individuals to “work to live, not live to work”.  Catchy aphorism to be sure, but hard to live out.  I just finished teaching a class in the MBA program at SPU that caused me to do some thinking on the issue of how and why people choose the work that they do.  A student in my class last night – the last class mind you – raised her hand and asked “Throughout this class, you have said that we should seek jobs that are fulfilling, that will serve the needs of the broken in our world, that will have a mission statement that we can support – is it realistic to find such a position when entering the workforce or do we settle with any entry level position?”  Great question to be sure.  My immediate answer was “yes”.  That said, the challenge is more to do with a willingness to wait for the goal and do the things in the mean time that will allow space for the goal to be realized.  This might mean changing my lifestyle a bit to allow me to work for next to nothing so I can do an internship and gain the experience necessary to fulfill the long term goal and not merely accept the short term gains of a better salary so I can buy a house, car, new clothes, etc.  This ‘down-sizing’ for the sake of the long term is a difficult and counter cultural choice.

economic malaise – on teaching ‘business as stewardship’

One of the things I enjoy about summer is the opportunity to move theological discussions into the realm of other disciplines.  For the last two years I have taught in both the MBA program in the School of Business and the MA program in the School of Education.  Both of these groups represent populations that don’t typically get framed as ‘theological disciplines’ in the purest sense of the word, yet consistantly offer some of the most insightful glimpses into the ways people ‘hear’ what a theological life looks and feels like.

Last night in my MBA class we discussed the Jubliee mandate of Leviticus 25 and the Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew 5 -7 as well as the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6.  These represent some of the most compelling ethical mandates in all of scripture.  As we walked through the scripture and discussed some of the implications, it was interesting to get a resounding “yeah…so…?” from the class.  Our discussion article for the night was Jonathan Rowe’s testimony delivered March 12 before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce.  The article of the transcript is published in Harper’s Magazine June 2008 entitled “Our Phony Economy”.  In the article, Rowe challenges the presuposition that the GDP is a metric worth maintaining as a measure of a healthy economy.  What is telling is that this comes prior to the Presidential election and just months before the economy started its downhill slide.  In the article, Rowe notes that if our metric for a healthy economy is based on consumer spending, then having a home garden rather than shopping at Whole Foods, staying home with our children rather than hiring a nanny, and going running with neighbors rather than getting a fitness membership at a local club is simply a bad thing.  In a pure GDP model, getting divorced, buying rather than making, using up rather than recycling and renewing are more ‘responsible’.

Most, if not all, felt that while the teachings of Jesus to care for the poor and marginalized is interesting, the pragmatism of our current state of economics, in particular the current ‘whatever it takes to get out of the recession’ mentality, leaves little to no room for strategic let alone imaginative visions for business let alone society.  ”Jubilee is purely utopian” was one comment.  ”Jesus is arguing for only those called to serve in ministry – not those called to make a profit to fund these ministries” was another.  ”How could a city like New York ever survive under a Jubliee mandate?” was yet another.  Over and over the repose was a blank stare, checking the balckberry for texts, and the glint of solitare backlit in the glasses from the laptop upon which ‘notes’ were being taken.

I am still licking my wounds from the class session and trying to figure out a better way to approach this…

article on Narnia and Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur

I recently published an article entitled “The Beatific Quest as Faith Formation in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Direction, Release and Integration” in the recent Aesthetics Issue of The Other Journal: Journal of Theology and Culture (issue #15, ISSN 1933-7957).  The article reflects on Lewis’s use of the Grail quest genre as exemplified in Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur as a typology for deep faith exploration that takes seriously both personal introspection and poetic imagination.  A version of the article is available here: http://theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=841

the power of art – four possibilities – Wayne C Booth

“I see only four possibilities.; They might attempt, like the Amish, to isolate themselves completely for the rest of American society, banning all art works except the scriptures. They might, secondly, attempt to impose a censorship program, allowing people (or trying to allow people) to see, read, or hear, only what the censors declare harmless or beneficial.  They might attempt to put their energies into harmless or “wholesome” arts like ballroom dancing, athletics, symphony orchestras that plays safe traditional music, hymnals, and fiction with clearly recognizable inspirational messages. Or they might try to develop a great art so powerful that it would counteract, by its very strength, the shoddy culture it opposes. [ In the end, we must accept that] bland art is no defense against powerful bad art.” (Emphasis added)

-       Wayne C. Booth from the University of Chicago when discussing if art and religion can go together in today’s world. (found in “Religion Versus Art: Can the Ancient Conflict be Resolved?” Wayne C. Booth, Arts and Inspiration: Mormon Perspectives, edited by Steven P. Sondrup. Brigham Young University Press: Provo, UT, 1980, pp 30 – 31.)

end of a class – the legacy of open questions

I just finished teaching a 10 day intensive for Fuller Seminary on Christian Ethics.  As an exercise in community, intensives have always felt like a parody in many ways – akin to the ‘new car smell’ that car companies spray into the seats of cars before they roll off the assembly line… smells real but is far from it.  Granted, I know that teaching flexible format courses – online, distance learning, intensives – is just a reality of the current situations that most students find themselves in as they attempt to balance classes, working to pay for classes, and families and friends and ministries they are enmeshed in.  That said – as a faculty member teaching these classes – I find the experience terribly draining spiritually and psychologically as I try to get through difficult material in a timely manner yet still allow space for the engagement of deep and abiding learning in light of ministry.  I am a teacher (like many teachers) who desires to know my students and teach to the space in which they find themselves called to.  Spending 10 days with them focused on plowing through ethically challenging questions doesn’t give much room for that.  Many of the challenges we had together as a class would have been alleviated if we had simply spent time getting to know each other at some level, learned to trust one another, and then entered into these complex questions of poverty, just war theory, abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, etc.    True, we may have emerged with the same disagreements and unanswered questions as we did this week.  But as opposed to seeing the questions as unaswered, the depth of relationship would have framed them as open questions to continue journeying through.

I pray that the students find some community to wrestle with these difficult questions and wish I could continue to the journey with them, but the week is done and so is our context.

Go with God, my friends.  Journey well…

k(no)w (you)r(self): The Missing Art of Being K(no)wn in Christianity

Some of you know that I have been working on a book project looking at the nature of “kenosis” in Christian identity formation.  “Kenosis” is a Greek term taken from Phil. 2:7, where Christ is spoken of as having “emptied himself” (NRSV) as the true mark of what constitutes humanity. There has been much discussion about this entire crucial passage (2:6 – 11), and the scholarship surrounding the exegetical history of the Carmen Christi of Philippians 2 is expansive.  While I will be referring to a number of key works, this book primarily explores the philosophical and theological questions that arise from the Kenotic tradition as they inform theological anthropology or the question of ‘being human’.  In addition to the many texts that will be cited throughout the book, recent texts that have  particularly informed this study are C. Stephen Evans’ recent edited volume Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self Emptying of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Michael Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), and Kevin Cronin Kenosis: Emptying Self and the Path of Christian Service (London: Continuum, 2005).   The chapters in the book offer readers new conversation partners from the breadth and width of human reflection on what it means to be human and with these conversations partners I will offer a theological method for kenotic identity formation – a means and discipline to remain aware and open hearted to what the Kenotic life can be reimagined as.  The contours of this reimagined life will look at the re-framing of the deeply lived life by both internal (seen in the model of St. Augustine) and external (as seen in the work of Aristotle) concerns, radically decentered in location (as seen in the challenge of French theorist Jacques Derrida), found in the face of the other (seen in the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas), and ‘given’ rather than taken (as seen in the Catholic theologian Jean Luc Marion).

The challenge of writing a book is more than the research and putting proverbial pen to paper… it is knowing who you are writing for and speaking in a way that can be grabbed onto by the intended reader.

One of the things that has been difficult is finding this perfect pitch given the subject matter.  I have called the book “The Kenotic Self”  but have found from those who have looked at a draft of the proposal that the jargon may be off-putting.

My latest title:

k(no)w (you)r(self): The Missing Art of Being K(no)wn in Christianity

Thoughts?