For the Joy of 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

A Stained Beauty – Sexual Abuse and the Church- Opportunity

George May 25, 2022 A Stained Beauty 0 Comments

This week media has been flooded with news about Guidepost’s report of their investigation into Southern Baptist Convention’s response to allegation of sexual abuse, corruption and cover-up. Commissioned by the SBC, it was shocking. The full report can be read HERE. There were many articles in response, I found two particularly insightful. Russell Moore and David French.

At this point, I ask, were you aware of the Guidepost’s SBC report? If not, perhaps your attention was on other matters. This would be a good time to catch up. Hopefully, previous posts sensitized you to the subject and you have heard or read about it.

…there are more allegations of child sexual abuse in Protestant congregations than there are in Catholic ones…

The report is a defining event, not only for SBC, but all churches. Whether or not the SBC report has the attention of churches is yet to be determined, but I am certain people outside of the church are acutely aware and curious see how churches respond. We must not stumble like the Catholic Church has. What happens in the aftermath will determine whether observers see the Church as Stained or Beautiful. The credibility of our witness is in the dock.

Churches have no recourse but to respond. Silence is, in itself, a response, and will speak loudly.How we respond will reveal the true character of our institution.

Responding is a minefield. Leaders who choose to grab “the bull by the horns” or initiate a “sky is falling” narrative can create chaos in a church family, producing paranoia and suspicion, to no good end. Any response must begin with prayerful and honest self-examination. Transparency is of utmost importance. Action comes when we are convinced there is a problem.

It is time to abandon the myth that our churches are safe places and confess that we are as vulnerable and wounded as other communities. We must review the lens through which we perceive reality: our theology, language and practice.

For decades now, the church has been trained to believe that the greatest threat to it was external…when the reality is that it is internal…the rot in the SBC is just a picture of most “Christian” denominations and non-denoms…and it’s the tip of the iceberg… (Phoenix Preacher)

“For the time has come for judgment, and it must begin with God’s household. And if judgment begins with us, what terrible fate awaits those who have never obeyed God’s Good News?”??
1 Peter? ?4:17? ?NLT

“I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for pastors, church leaders, and church cultures to become trauma informed. Trauma is not something that happens “out there” to “those” people.” “Trauma is the mission field of our time.’”
@DianeLangberg

What looks like a serious crisis may mark the moment of new life; what looks a sinister threat may in reality be a great opportunity.
Hans Kung —THE CHURCH

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)

“Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me,
All His wonderful passion and purity,
Oh, Thou Spirit divine, all my nature refine,
Till the beauty of Jesus be seen in me.”

Next: When the church gets it right…

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George May 19, 2022 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Mystics
The mystic is not somebody who says, “Look what I’ve experienced. Look what I’ve achieved.” The mystic is the one who says, “Look what love has done to me.”. . . There’s nothing left, but the being of love itself giving itself away as . . . the concreteness of who you simply are.—James Finley, Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate

Lying
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. (vv. 9–10 NRSV)
Unfortunately, so many people live so much of their lives unaware of these things. Lying to one another does not mean telling untruths to each other; rather, it means projecting an image of yourself to other people that simply is not true. Most people do not intend to do this. They can’t help it. One’s outward image is a direct projection of his or her inward sense of identity and when this identity is built on things that are not true (i.e., anything other than the image of God), that individual’s outward image lies about who he or she most deeply is.
JD Walt

Prayer of Elderly
. . Sometimes I say to myself a little prayer in my advancing years, “God, help me to be the kind of old person young people want old people to be. Help me not just to talk like this, but help me to walk around like this and answer the phone like this and talk to my grandchildren like this.” We’re all trying to do our best here to walk the walk.
James Finley with Kirsten Oates, “Dialogue 1: The Ascent of Mount Carmel,

Reading the Gospels
At every step Jesus seemed to confuse his listeners. I’ve been reading the gospels a lot over the past year. A few chapters at a time. And Jesus is constantly confounding the expectations of everyone. Except those who are desperate for his healing. They expect him to heal them. But those who want him to overthrow Rome seem consistently disappointed and thrown off kilter. Of course, it was never his mission to overthrow Rome. At least not with armies and swords. The American church has never learned this lesson.
. I want you to imagine that Jesus is with you right now. Think about it. Imagine what that would feel like. Would you now think, feel, and talk about “the news” of the day the same way if he was sitting with you now.
Here’s the thing…He is.
So many of us, who identify as Christians are looking for life in the wrong place. We are looking for life in politics, work, money, sex, substances, power, body image, reputation, (kid’s) sports, and even doctrine. And it is making us sad and angry and full of anxiety. But life is only found in one place, the person of Jesus.
Matt Redmond

Being Moral
Morality is a very low bar, and if that’s what we are aiming for, our lives will hover back and forth just above and below this threshold. Virtue is simply good morals on steroids. Love, on the other hand, is the holy presence of Jesus Christ filling human beings together to the measure of all the fullness of God. This is the secret long hidden and now revealed. It’s not about aspiring to better behavior but becoming abandoned to Jesus.
And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. (v. 14)
J D Walt

Healthy religion is always humble about its own holiness and knowledge. It knows that it does not know. The true biblical notion of faith, which balances knowing with not knowing, is rather rare today, especially among many religious folks who think faith is being certain all the time—when the truth is the exact opposite. Anybody who really knows also knows that they don’t know at all.
Richard Rohr

what might a more healthy relationship with the state look like?
One answer comes from “A Letter to Diognetus,” a piece of early Christian apologetics from the second century. In the letter, the author describes how Christians relate to the nation states in which they dwell:

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country.
Richard Beck

The Storyteller
Sometimes the storyteller’s impact is minimal. He [Elie Wiesel]tells the story of a rabbi who before Passover sought to persuade his people to be generous for the poor. When he got home his wife said, “Nu, how was it?” “Did you accomplish anything?” He said, “Only half.” Thus, “I did not succeed in convincing the rich to give, but I managed to convince the poor to receive.” Quite a story there. Scot McKnight

View from the front porch
In a Jewish legend Solomon “knew the songs of birds and could interpret them.” A later Hasidic master was asked by a student how that could be, and he said, “When you know what your own soul is singing, you will also understand the songs of the bird.” Are those birds – ach, the warblers above all – singing something inherent, too, to who we are?
Although, I’ve always appreciated birds, in recent weeks my interest has increased. I discovered an amazing bird app which identifies bird calls. Of course the next step is bird feeders… two at the end of the porch. I am still awaiting my first feeder… 18 hours and counting. I suspect I have a lot to learn about bird feeders.
Furthermore, I apparently I do not understand what my own soul is singing… working on it.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Stained Beauty – Sexual Abuse – The Invisible Gorilla

George May 17, 2022 Sexual Abuse in the Church 0 Comments

My previous post presented information on the presence and prevalence of sexual abuse in churches. It is well documented factual information is not very effective in countering opposing views. I am confident that most readers, like myself, have a positive bias for the church. Information contrary to any bias is most often rejected and perhaps that happened when you read the post. One intuitive defense when hearing factual negative information is : “That may be true, but I have never known of or witnessed anything like that in our church.”
In 1991 a controversy erupted over accusations of sexual abuse in fundamentalist churches reported in the Nashville Tennessean .

Predictably, the article created a firestorm of reactions. Serving as an elder and aware of the presence of sexual abuse in my own church, I was encouraged that someone was speaking out. My optimism was quickly extinguished when I read a guest editorial in “The Gospel Advocate” written by a prominent and respected evangelist in the Church of Christ. Rather than considering any possibility of misconduct he wrote:

Guy N Woods in his guest editorial, responding to: “The more conservative the church, the more more incest you have in families”. wrote:
“I have preached, I think, in more places and for more congregations than any man living in the churches of Christ today. .. In no instance— not one— in all the meetings I have heard so much as a rumor of any active member of the church being accused of incest. The “family life minister’s” statements though distasteful and offensive, are so ludicrous and patently false that most thoughtful people on reading them will smile, shake their heads and dismiss the matter as unworthy of further consideration.”
The Gospel Advocate – 1991

Numerous others echoed Wood’s sentiments. Participants cited in the article were excoriated, receiving personal and professional scorn. I was angry. What an idiot, did Woods think his casual interactions would reveal incest? How could an, otherwise, intelligent person be so blind? Time and experience have tempered me. I have come to better understand how Woods and others, including myself can be blind to the “obvious”.

Which brings me to “The Dancing Gorilla”. a famous study from 1975.

It will be helpful if you take the test HERE. Follow the instructions carefully.

…the Invisible Gorilla Test, This study, a revised version of earlier studies conducted by Neisser and Becklen in 1975, asked subjects to watch a short video of two groups of people (wearing black and white T-shirts) passing a basketball around. The subjects are told either to count the passes made by one of the teams or to keep count of bounce passes vs. aerial passes. In different versions of the video a person walks through the scene carrying an umbrella (as discussed above) or wearing a full gorilla suit. After watching the video, the subjects are asked whether they noticed anything out of the ordinary taking place. In most groups, 50% of the subjects did not report seeing the gorilla (or the person with the umbrella). Failure to perceive the anomalies is attributed to failure to attend to it while engaged in the difficult task of counting passes of the ball. These results indicate that the relationship between what is in one’s visual field and perception is based much more on attention than was previously thought. –Wikipedia

Attention Blindness – where we can become so focused on an individual task that we become blinded to other important variables in our midst.

Bias, prejudice and other factors can mask the presence of sexual abuse, but I am suggesting that attention blindness is a significant reason for rejecting any suggestion of sexual abuse in the church. Watching the Invisible Gorilla video multiple times, I found that the gorilla was always invisible when I strictly adhered to instructions to count passes by the white shirted participants; otherwise the gorilla was always visible.

The opposite side of the attention blindness coin is inattention blindness.

I see the challenge of recognizing the presence and prevalence sexual abuse in the church as two-fold : 1) attention blindness and 2) inattention blindness.

Research on a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness suggests that unless we pay close attention, we can miss even the most conspicuous events.

This post primarily addresses inattention blindness, pointing out a reality to which attention needs to be drawn. My hope is that attention to the subject will produce conversations and concerns resulting in meaningful actions. Attention blindness is its own “stain” and will be the subject of subsequent posts.

In churches across this nation, children have said, “Someone touched me,” not even understanding what was done to them, and in response, law-abiding citizens of heaven have said, “This doesn’t happen in our church. It cannot be true because the accused person is so nice, and teaches Sunday school, and would never do anything like that.” Instead of facing the truth, they discredit and ignore. Why? Because acknowledging the truth will completely disrupt the system.
We often confuse the system of Christianity (Christendom) with Christ. But no so-called Christian system is truly God’s work unless it is full of truth and love. To tolerate sin, pretense, disease, crookedness, or deviation from the truth is to do something other than the work of God, no matter the words used to describe it.So how should we respond to systemic abuse? It begins with facing the truth. Consider what a healthy response to a physical symptom looks like. A person discovers a lump on their body; they can choose to ignore the lump or to take action to protect their physical system. When a response is driven by fear of what the lump might indicate and how disruptive or painful treatment might be, the person may hide the facts from themselves, denying the presence of the lump even though it could cost them their health or even their life. But if they face the truth and do what is necessary to address the symptoms, they can bring healing to their body.
Diane Langberg – Redeeming Power – Understanding Power and Abuse in the Church

STILL ON THE JOURNEY