Sarah Davidson - Living Generously

We are so lucky to have someone like Sarah Davidson among us. Sarah is a thoughtful theologian with a heart for connecting with anyone, regardless of their place within society. She really challenges popular thinking but does it in an incredibly gentle manner with an openness that puts everyone around her at ease. I think she's an important voice for us to hear often and it is great to have her as part of the community.

This talk of hers is well worth the time to listen to more than once!

The Mighty Manning and More from our James Series

When the glory of the transcendent God is not addressed, our focus shifts to human behaviour, the cultivation of virtues and the extirpation of vices, the qualities of discipleship, and so on. Personal responsibility replaces personal response to God, and we become engrossed in our efforts to grow in holiness. Our primary concern becomes our spiritual, intellectual, and emotional well-being. When other Christians ask us if we are happy, we automatically respond in the affirmative or brush them off with a benevolent smile even if we are close to tears.

Obviously, there is something pokey and cramping about this inordinate attention devoted to ourselves, the state of our souls, and the presence or absence of happiness in our hearts. As Simon Tugwell notes, “One of the surest ways to avoid being happy is to insist on being happy at all costs. The religion of cheerfulness, as Father Brown reminds us, is a cruel religion, and maybe the best way not to go mad is not to mind too much if you do go mad.”

Moralising surges to the fore in this unbalanced spirituality. At the very outset, it presents a warped idea of the relationship between God and humans. From her parents a child learns of a deity who strongly disapproves of disobedience, hitting one’s brothers or sisters, and telling lies. When the little one goes to school, she realises that God shares the fussy concerns of her teachers. At church, she learns that God has another set of priorities: she is told that he is displeased that the congregation is not growing numerically, that irregular attendance is the norm, and that his recurring fiscal demands are not being met.

When she reaches high school, she discovers that God’s interests have expanded to an obsession with sex, drinking and drugs. After twelve years of Christian indoctrination at home, school and church, the teenager realises with resentment that God has been used as a sanction by all those who have been responsible for her discipline – as when Mommy and Daddy, at their wits’ end over her mischievous antics as a toddler, alluded to “the eternal spanking”. Through this indoctrination, God is unwittingly associated with fear in most young hearts.

Moralism, and its stepchild, legalism, pervert the character of the Christian life. By the time young people enter college, they have often abandoned God, church, and religion. If they perservere in religious practices, their need to appease an arbitrary God turns Sunday worship into a superstitious insurance policy designed to protect the believer against God’s whims. When wounded people fail, as inevitably they must, they engage in denial to protect themselves from punishment. The perfect image must be protected at all costs.

We work hard to protect our collective image as well. When a youth worker in a Midwestern town dared to confess to the staff one morning that he struggled with pornography, he received his letter of termination that afternoon.

Clearly, the God of our imagination is not worthy of trust, adoration, praise, reverence, or gratitude. And yet, if we are unwilling to address the issue of transcendence, that is the only deity we know.

The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry at a capricious God, and the jetsam of smug bibilolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and exactly what he plans to do.

- Brennan Manning "Ruthless Trust" p79-81

Sam and Elliot say some stuff about things for you.

These are the messages from the last two weeks.

I hope they enlighten you your soul, enlarge your gaze and enrich your wanderings on this earth.

Chur boi.

Robert Farrar Capon - The Corporate Model of the Church

As the nineteenth century wore on into the twentieth (and the corporate model became increasingly consumer-driven), the local churches became little more than franchises of brand-name businesses vying for market share. Membership statistics and financial viability  were made the measure of every unit’s success or failure. And when you add to that the tendency of American demographics to change more and more with each passing year, you get the whole passel of undesirable results in which we now find ourselves.

For one thing, denominational “brand loyalty” has given way to church-shopping. Born-and-bred Methodists who move to Phoenix, for example, may try a Methodist church there, but if they take exception to the cut of the minister’s jib, or the quality of the choir, or the dowdiness of their child’s Sunday School teacher, they may hie themselves to the Episcopal church – until, of course, they move to Tulsa, where the search for the right religious shop begins all over again.

For another thing, the temptation to make the local franchise bigger and better becomes almost insuperable. The mega-church with four thousand members, a staff of seventy-five, and thirty-six programs turns into the ideal – into the ecclesiastical counterpart of Wal-Mart. For yet another, this supermarket vision is realizable  only in certain circumstances. Depending on which church judicatory you’re talking about, anywhere from one third to two thirds of its local units have already become marginal in terms of the corporate ideal. 

Predictably, the home offices of those “problem churches” can  think of only one thing to do with them: set them a “growth goal” (read an ultimatum of “say, two-hundred-fifty members in five years or less) and revoke the franchise if they don’t come up with the corporate snuff.

For still another thing, all the clergy, mega or mini, who try to turn back the tide of marginality begin to burn out at an alarming rate. And for a last (thought the list could go on and on), the burnout doesn’t usually happen soon enough to prevent such clergy from committing actionable peccadilloes that scare the wits out of ecclesiastical bureaucrats and their ever-watchful  insurance companies. The church becomes prey to product-liability suits over such things as “sexual harassment” and “exploitation”; the offending clergy are run out of their franchises; and the church (which is supposed to open its catholic arms to everyone, sinners included) ends up looking like a condemnatory piece of work that never heard of grace or Gospel. And all for the bottom-line reason of keeping  a corporation from losing its angelic shirt in a lawsuit. My, my. As I said, there may well be some good intentions behind our current alarms and excursions over sexuality. But we’re certainly smashing a lot of Gospel china in the process.

Indeed, far from following the secular lead and paring our corporate structures back to a leaner and less cumbersome condition (“less is more”), we are proceeding full-bore in the direction of involving additional classes of church members in the corporation’s trials and tribulations. The guidelines now being produces by panicky judicatories for dealing with the “clergy misconduct” brouhaha do not stop at clergy misconduct. On the principle that misery must be provided with company even if the proposed company doesn’t appreciate the invitation to misery, the churches are busy manufacturing computer-aimed, armour-piercing artillery, programmed to fire automatically at church-school teachers, organists, choirmasters, parish secretaries, janitors, and anyone else who might get the corporation in financial Dutch by lifting so much as an eyebrow in the service of sexuality.

The sad result of this insistence on taking as much of the church as possible down with the foundering corporate model has been to endanger even further the church’s catholicity. We are supposed to be witnesses to the fact that God in Christ has taken away the sins of the whole world. But by insisting on the moral irreproachability of even minor functionaries in the witnessing community, we are effectively saying that we cannot have in our midst any recognisable representatives of the sinfulness that is so obviously God’s cup of tea. Which is manifest nonsense, of course, because one of the things all Christians are supposed to do ad nauseam is tell God what miserable sinners they are. Quite frankly, it makes the church look a bit like a carpenter who, while he claims to be the best woodworker in town, tells you that unfortunately he can’t repair your house because he’s allergic to wood.

- An excerpt from "The Astonished Heart", a brief overview of the different models of the church throughout history.

Catching up on the James Series

Hey guys!

Here are the last few sermons from Elliot and Amanda in our James series.

Get in ya in a big way.