For the Joy of the Journey

A Stained Beauty- Sexual Abuse and the Church – when Church gets it right

George June 15, 2022 A Stained Beauty 0 Comments

At the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Anaheim this week (June 14-15), delegates to the meeting, known as messengers, will grapple with the massive report released in May detailing the SBC’s Executive Committee mishandling of sexual abuse allegations in the convention.

Various segments of SBC have begun to speak out regarding what the SBC response should be. You can read three HERE and HERE and HERE. As illustrated by those examples there is a broad spectrum of ideas about what the response should be. Every Christian should be praying for the SBC Annual meeting.

Thankfully, today it is reported the SBC messengers voted in favor of reforms to address the Guidepost report. That is not the end but a first step.

As for all other Christian churches and/or denomination, each WILL inevitably respond to the very public SBC crisis.. The question is: What will those responses look like? I fear, for many, there will be silence, refusing to acknowledge any peril to their church and /or denomination.
Contrary to apathy in non-SBC churches, there appears to be significant awareness and passion in the public arena, including news and social media. A consensus of “no surprise here” predominates.. Reading the comments from a NY Times article on the SBC crisis is revealing and troubling. Here is one example:

Southern Baptists are perhaps the least Christian of any of the numerous Christian cults that infect our country. Their leaders are mostly misogynistic men who hold racist views and disparage Catholics and Jews. The leadership believes fear is the best way to keep their congregations in line and every service I ever attended was infected with fear and constant judgmental behavior. While they constantly judge others, the leadership holds itself above accountability because it absolutely believes it knows better than you. I [A] lack of humility, self-inquiry and self-awareness was palpable.
Darren, Oregon
May 23 NYT

You can read what people ( NYT commenters) think about SBC and Christian churches, HERE. It doesn’t appear commentators distinguish between SBC and Christian churches in general. Like it or not, the stain is not confined to SBC. The Church’s witness is at stake.

There will be concern about the risk of SBC crisis becoming an “issue” that detracts from mission, but, the depth and breath of the scandal trumps that concern. Red flags in the SBC report are myriad. Responsible leadership, informed about the SBC crisis will digest and assess the information and identify implications for their own context. It is an opportunity for self-examination.

SBC is a fire in the community that threatens the neighborhood. The first response is to recognize there is a problem, alert those in danger and take necessary actions to avoid being consumed by the conflagration. The fire is not the problem but it cannot be ignored.

Among the NYT comments was this anomaly:

Jesus attacked the hypocrisy and selfish, deceptive hearts of many of the religious leaders of his day. But he also found himself the object of false accusations from secular, political and religious groups. Through it all he consistently preached the most important commandment, to Love God with our heart and mind and to Love others as ourselves. But he also said he did not come to a healthy people, but to the sick. Those sick with evil and sin in our lives… all our lives. To all he offers grace and forgiveness for those who repent and accept his gift of amazing grace. He then calls those who have received that grace to walk forward in obedience to this most important commandment.
As a long time member of the SBC I join many others in calling the Church to repent where we have failed to exemplify his Gospel, and where we have failed to hold our leaders and one another to this standard. I’m saddened for the lives that have been hurt through all of this. There is no room for abuse of any kind in the Gospel. We should proactively initiate and accept reproof, and correction. Follow Jesus’s direction to repent, and seek to grow in our ability to Love him and Love others. Let him teach us to become men and women of God, complete, equipped for every good work. Then with integrity do that good work so that others may see God in us, and not us. He is perfect, we are not. [emphasis mine]
REPNAH
Huntsville ALMay 23

“If you’re brought up Jewish, don’t assume that you can lean back in the arms of your religion and take it easy, feeling smug because you’re an insider to God’s revelation, a connoisseur of the best things of God, informed on the latest doctrines! I have a special word of caution for you who are sure that you have it all together yourselves and, because you know God’s revealed Word inside and out, feel qualified to guide others through their blind alleys and dark nights and confused emotions to God. While you are guiding others, who is going to guide you? I’m quite serious. While preaching “Don’t steal!” are you going to rob people blind? Who would suspect you? The same with adultery. The same with idolatry. You can get by with almost anything if you front it with eloquent talk about God and his law. The line from Scripture, “It’s because of you Jews that the outsiders frown on God,” shows it’s an old problem that isn’t going to go away.”
Romans 2:17-24 MSG

“Let the church who is innocent condemn SBC.”

The next post: “the problem “

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George June 9, 2022 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

This is “grey cat”. When I’m feeling sorry for myself, I look at her.

Absolutes
So many theological systems are built on “absolutes”. That is, all questions must be answered. The answers, in the main, are binary. They are “yes” and “no”. We tend to speak of faith in Christ as a “commitment”, made once and then acted upon throughout life. Yet, in our lives, we all carry questions. We all carry the “Why?” that Christ cries out in the Passion. Yet, most theological systems leave little, if any, room for that question.
Duane Arnold

Reasons
It’s a strange paradox. When everything is permitted, when everyone has a “reason” to do something, we act as if that lessens their responsibility for their actions, when it should mean the opposite. The sociological obsession with root causes saps the importance of agency. Monsters become nothing more than “products of their environments” and hence victims, too. We have a twisted and deformed view that monstrous acts are justified if the monster’s feelings of victimization are justified or simply “understandable.” Jonathan Haidt

Real solutions
…we could do everything right with schools, red flag laws, etc., there’s still the obviously possibility that a person determined to murder large numbers of people will have the determination to work around those obstacles. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth making it harder for murderers to succeed, but maybe the real solution has little to do with putting bigger rocks in better places in the river. Maybe the problem is the river itself.
Learning the life of others, that is, learning to love them, opens us up in ways that expand us into more fully developed persons. In that we realize our own complicities as we learn the experiences of others.
Scot McKnight

“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.” ? Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Confidence in the Church
Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life. Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church. This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views.
Tim Alberta – Atlantic

Poets
(not the people who make rhymes) are discerners of newness, people who fashion images for hopes that have not yet become visible, who sense the deep undertow of life and welcome it, who present to us images of reality which are expectant and expansive, who are content to receive what they do not understand arnd to rely on that which they cannot control. It is the gift of breaking out of symmetrical language and symmetrical expectations into a context
where hopes get actualized in surprising and even ragged ways.
Walter Brueggermann

Rules
Rules don’t work. Of course, they are necessary and they have value, but if they are all we have, we don’t have much. Rules can protect us from ourselves and each other. They can create some semblance of external order, but they do not change people. Rules can govern human behavior, but they have no power to order the affairs of our minds and hearts.

People often identify themselves as being either rule followers or rule breakers, and both with equal degrees of pride. We do not need rules. What we need is a Ruler. The lordship of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with following the rules and everything to do with following the Ruler.
JD Walt

Only in Mississippi
..one of his [Michael Guest] campaign pitches is truly something we haven’t heard before—a proposal to provide “newlyweds with a $20,000 wedding gift, paid back if the couple divorces.” Who says Republicans never come up with new ideas?

You can’t successfully deconstruct, then reconstruct your faith by listening to the same voices that put you in crisis in the first place…listen to what other orthodox believers think outside your tradition…you may not be persuaded, but you will be informed…
Phoenix Preacher

San Francisco
I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.
Wondering what the church might learn from San Francisco ?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/

Fighting for the Kingdom
For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life.
Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/evangelical-church-pastors-political-radicalization/629631/

View from the Front Porch
The front porch came alive last week preparing for a celebration of our 60th Wedding Anniversary. All our children were here and many other family and friends. It was a beautiful event and we are still reveling in the afterglow. So much to be thankful for.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Stained Beauty – Sexual Abuse & the Church- when Church gets it Right.

George June 7, 2022 A Stained Beauty 0 Comments

The Body of Christ is beautiful; “when the church gets it right, she is beautiful. When the church gets it right—when we fulfill the intentions of our Lord Christ and His character is revealed through us—”
(John Stumbo – A Stained Beauty

The past week was an emotional roller coaster. The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas continues to weigh heavy on my heart. The Guidepost SBC report is gut wrenching. There may be some tendency to discount media reports as overstatements or secular critics gloating over the moral and ethical failures of the SBC. I an currently reading the entire report and have found no reason to mitigate any criticisms. The depth and breath of the SBC Executive Committee’s malfeasance defies understanding.

If there was any encouragement in the SBC report, it was the story how the investigation came about.

For three minutes last summer, a call to investigate how Southern Baptist leaders have dealt with sexual abuse was dead in the water.
Then a little-known denominational bylaw and a pastor from Indiana saved it.
“I just had to do it,” said Todd Benkert, pastor of Oak Creek Community Church in Mishawaka, Ind. “It was me or nobody.”
About 15 minutes into a morning business session at the Southern Baptist Convention’s June 2021 annual meeting in Nashville, Southern Baptist leaders announced that a motion to set up an independent sex abuse investigation was being tabled.
Because the motion dealt with the internal workings of an SBC entity — in this case, the denomination’s Nashville-based Executive Committee — denominational officials, relying on bylaw 26 of the SBC’s constitution, decided to refer the motion to that entity.
In other words, the Executive Committee would be put in charge of investigating itself.
Then-President J.D. Greear was ready to move on when Benkert stood up at a microphone with a motion of his own, based on another section of bylaw 26.
“I would like the opportunity to make a motion to overrule the Committee on Order of Business at the appropriate time,” he said.
Benkert’s motion was met with applause. Then a second and, then, almost all of the 15,000 local church delegates, known as messengers, raised their yellow voting cards in the air — far more than the two-thirds majority needed to overrule the committee.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/05/27/how-apocalyptic-southern-baptist-report-almost-didnt-happen/

Hopefully my previous posts raised your awareness. I recommend these two podcasts that speak powerfully to the SBC crisis and the problem of sexual abuse in the church. The SBC information is not “tweetable”, it requires intentional time and effort.

SBC’s response is yet to be determined and will shape the future of its 14,000 churches and 14 million members. Their response will have profound impact on the reputation of the Christian church for outsiders.

Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life. Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church.

To be honest, I have come to understand that my concern about sexual abuse in the church is not shared by many. Not to say they don’t care about sexual abuse, but it is more like our concern for starving children in Africa, terrible but thank God we are blessed— where can I send money?

It is my hope the information shared in this post and previous posts will somehow penetrate the shield we have erected to protect our idealized view of church. Confronted with the truth that the local church is very fragile, the SBC crisis can be a catalyst for self-examination and response in our own context.

Despite the negative impact of the SBC crisis, there is an opportunity to demonstrate the beauty of the church in our response and raise confidence in the Church.
The next few posts will address what I believe that response should look like.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George June 2, 2022 Notes Anthology 2 Comments

The hardest part of following Jesus is not when suffering comes, it’s when success and wealth come. It is easier to look to Jesus when the day is hard than when the day is flush with ease and fun and all things go well. Maybe that’s just me.
Matt Redmond

Interview Question
A question I used for years in interviewing potential assistants: Do you know how to drive a manual transmission? If you said no, you didn’t get hired.
I know that sounds terribly arbitrary. But here’s my reasoning. It is not necessary to know how to drive a stick in the 21st century—particularly if you’re 22 years old. So the only people who do are those who are willing to take the time to master a marginally useful skill. Now why would a 22-year-old do that? One reason is that they like knowing how to do things that most people do not. Another is that they realize that the most fun cars in the world to drive are sports cars, and the most fun sports cars to drive are the ones with manual transmission, and they like the idea of being able to turn a rote activity (driving) into an enjoyable activity. I want to work with the kind of person who thinks both those things.
Malcom Gladwell

Kenyans
Since 1988, 20 out of the 25 first-place men in the Boston Marathon have been Kenyan. Of the top 25 male record holders for the 3,000-meter steeplechase, 18 are Kenyan.
Eight of the 10 fastest marathon runners in history are Kenyan, and the two outliers are Ethiopian. The fastest marathon time ever recorded was Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge’s in the 2018 Berlin Marathon. The fastest women’s marathon ever recorded was Kenyan Bridgid Kosgei’s in the Chicago Marathon.
Three-quarters of these Kenyan champions come from the Kalenjin ethnic minority, which has only 6 million people, or 0.06% of the global population. The Kalenjin live in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Iten, a town that sits on the edge of the valley at 7,000 feet above sea level, is nicknamed the City of Champions.

True Friends
Here’s how to tell who your true friends are. If you’re starting to put your life together and you have friends that object, those are not friends.
Here are two hallmarks of a friend:
1. A friend is someone you can tell bad news to.
They won’t tell you why you’re an idiot, and they won’t interfere with your suffering. They’ll just listen, and maybe they’ll suffer along with you. And they won’t tell you some worse thing that happened to them.
2. But a friend is also someone you can tell good news to.
They will say, “Wow! In this vale of tears, some good happened to you. Great, man. Wonderful. I hope ten more things like that happen.”
And they’re not envious, jealous and one-upping you.
If you’re trying to get your life together, and your friends get in the way, that’s actually really useful for you because you’ve now identified who your real friends aren’t.
You might think, “Well, I can’t give them up.” Not only can you, you should and it would be better for them.
Jordon Peterson

Pastoral Care
Very few pastors see pastoral care as the heart of what they do or want to do. One has to wonder if the lack of pastoral visitation is not a contributing factor in the church’s demise in the USA. Pastoral visitation is not reducible to having lunch with someone if there is not some kind of pastoral interchange, some telling of one’s story, some prayer for the parishioner, some pastoral moment. To be sure, to be a pastor involves getting to know the other person but pastoral care is more than shooting the bull with one another. Scot Mc Knight

God sits among us in our grief. The good God who loves mankind wept at the death of His friend.
Fr Stephen Freeman

You can’t demonize people you disagree with, then pretend you’re offering them the Gospel…you’re simply offering them a chance to agree with you… Phoenix Preacher

The Bass Line of the New Testament
Let me use an illustration. In most rock songs, even in classical music, you need to have a bass part. In writing/constructing a tune we start with a beat/the bass and build everything around that. The “bass line” is the “baseline.” The bass line grounds the entire song. Take out the bass and see what happens. It changes the music fundamentally.
The Hebrew Bible is the “bass line” in every part of the New Testament. Without it, you have a song but it does not sound the same. To say it slightly different, the Hebrew Bible (“Old Testament”) is the foundational worldview of every single sentence in what we call the New Testament. How the New Testament “looks” changes as much as when we look at the night sky through optical wavelengths and infrared ones. So as a matter of course build into your daily routine prayerful reading and study of the Hebrew Bible. Just do it.
Bobby Valentine

When God id is “Less”.
If you ever feel that God is “less than” some good, true, beautiful or loving thing then you’re no longer talking about God. Pick up the word “God” and walk it toward the horizon where you imagine the most good, true, beautiful, and loving thing in the world. Place the word “God” at the limit of that horizon. And when your imagination expands to see something even more true, good, beautiful, and loving keep walking the word “God” toward that horizon. For God simply is that horizon. Or, more properly, God, as the Source of the True, Beautiful, Good and Loving, is the Horizon that our horizons keep chasing but will never reach. God can only name that which exceeds all that we imagine as true, beautiful, good and loving. God is never less.
Richard Beck

View from the Front Porch
On June 8 Ann and I will have been married 60 years. Our kids are hosting a celebration this Saturday. It is special time, family, friends and good memories abound. We are filled with gratitude.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George May 26, 2022 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Jesus is not a consolation prize when things do not go our way in life. He is the King.
Matt Redmond

Paradox
What do the empirical data actually have to say on one of the greatest paradoxes of our time, which is: If a major point of yoga is quieting the ego and reducing focus on self, why are there so many yoga pose pictures on Instagram?

Certitude
I want to point out that there are two different kinds of certitude: mouthy and mystical.
Just for the sake of alliteration and cleverness, I call the first one “mouthy certitude.” Mouthy certitude is filled with bravado, overstatement, quick, dogmatic conclusions, and a rush to judgment. People like this are always trying to convince others. They need to get us on their side and tend to talk a lot in the process. Underneath the “mouthiness” is a lot of anxiety about being right. Mouthy certitude, I think, often gives itself away, frankly, by being rude and even unkind because it’s so convinced it has the whole truth.
We have to balance mouthy certitude with “mystical certitude.” Mystical certitude is utterly authoritative, but it’s humble. It isn’t unkind. It doesn’t need to push its agenda. It doesn’t need to compel anyone to join a club, a political party, or even a religion. It’s a calm, collected presence, which Jesus seems to possess entirely. As Jesuit Greg Boyle writes, “There is no place in the gospel where Jesus is defensive. In fact, he says, ‘Do not worry what your defense will be’ [Luke 12:11]. Jesus had no interest in winning the argument, only in making the argument.”
Richard Rohr

Lecturing
Lecturing never works. Think about it, the only time we use the word “lecture” in a positive sense is when we voluntarily go to one, which we have probably paid for. That tells us that sometimes we need to wait for the ones we love to come to us for help and guidance and entrust them to God in the meantime.
Matt Redmond

Baseball box score
“Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment—ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay—and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.”
Roger Angell

Moral Seriousness
What do I mean by moral seriousness? I don’t mean guilt and shame. I don’t mean sin and Judgment Day. I simply mean that being a good person was a front burner priority in my childhood home. Moral integrity and virtue were talked about, they were goals. Goodness mattered to my parents, and they wanted it to matter to me. And as a parent myself I put being a good person on the front burner for my two sons. Telling the truth and being honest mattered. It was a priority. Keeping promises mattered. Being patient, kind, and generous mattered. Sticking up for those being picked on at school mattered. Including those who were excluded mattered. Sharing mattered. Eschewing materialism mattered. Resisting stereotypes and racism mattered. And above all, love mattered.
Richard Beck

Is God a fool?
In its excellence, the world did not know Christ. We not only dispise fools but seek incessantly to portray our enemies as fools (“those idiots!”). However:
“God resists the proud but gives more grace to the humble.”
I many times suspect that God stands before us as a “mute fool,” giving no answer to our accusations and recriminations apart from the silence of his corpse on the Cross. One of the desert fathers once said, “If I cannot edify you by my silence, then I certainly cannot edify you by my words.”
In our world, perhaps only a fool could speak the truth. But, then, it would mean that only fools could understand him.
Fr Stephen Freeman

“We cannot make Him visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to Him. So we open our thoughts to Him — feeble our tongues, but sensitive our hearts. We see more than we can say. The trees stand like guards of the Everlasting; the flowers like signposts of His goodness — only we have failed to be testimonies to His presence, tokens of His trust. How could we have lived in the shadow of greatness and defied it.”
Abraham Hershel – I Asked for Wonder

Every Opportunity
Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. Colossians 4:5–6
Make the most of every opportunity. (v. 5b)
What is the opportunity? I used to think the opportunity was to try and work in some way to share the gospel message with them, which in retrospect looks more like trying to get people enlisted on my multilevel marketing discipleship pyramid scheme.
I think of the sharing the gospel differently now. It’s more about the mystery than the messaging. As we have discussed, the message of the gospel is the mystery of Christ, and the mystery of Christ is Christ in us. To the extent I am attuned to “Christ in me,” I can be present to the person sitting across from me. To the extent I can be present to that person, Christ will presence himself with us and the mystery will become manifest. As I become genuinely interested in another person, Jesus manifests his interest in him or her.
The opportunities are everywhere. The overwhelming majority of people in the world, outsiders or not, are not listened to. No one leans into them and listens with genuine interest. This is what supernatural love looks like in ordinary clothes.
JD Walt

View from the Front Porch
The morning is fitting: gloomy, rainy. My heart is heavy with grief and anger. I am thankful I can speak freely to the ONE who knows and cares, but comfort is AWOL.
My words are complaint, the bitter howl of unbelief in any benevolent God in this moment, a distrust in the love-beat of the Father’s heart. (Ann Voskamp)

“My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak, but God remains the strength of my heart; he is mine forever.”
??Psalms? ?73:26? ?NLT??

STILL ON THE JOURNEY