Hiding Behind Call

I've been attending Central Presbyterian for almost sixteen years.  It's been a social justice church that whole time.  In fact, it's always been a social justice church.  It's kind of impossible not to be when your building is  across the street from the state capitol building.  Rallies of all kinds take place on our front porch, and we often open our doors to weary protesters to use the restrooms and get water.  But it's also impossible not to be a social justice church when Atlanta's homeless population camps out on your sidewalks and in your alleys.  This is what we call being "situated at the corner of power and powerlessness."

My family didn't go to Central because it was a social justice church, like so many people do.  We visited because my dad had gone to college with the pastor at the time, and we joined because it was such a warm, welcoming place and much more closely aligned with our politics and theology.  A good many people in my family do actually feel called to social justice, I do not.  So I've been struggling with my place at Central for a while.

My best friend, Adam, works in the Outreach and Advocacy Center (OAC), which is housed in the basement of Central and works exclusively with Atlanta's homeless men and women.  He's good at what he does, and I admire him so much for his work.  He is also a youth leader with me, so every time we're leaving youth on Sunday nights, he'll stop and talk to all the men camped on our sidewalks.  They know him, and he knows all their names.  It's truly remarkable.  I am constantly in awe of how he and the other staff at the OAC interact with these people as if they are actual human persons...

Clearly I am not called to homeless ministry.  When we walk out, I let Adam do all the talking and then justify it by saying I'm not called to do that.  It makes me uncomfortable, I don't know what to say or how to act.  I feel guilt for not being homeless.  Then I feel guilt for walking past them.  And then I feel guilt for starting my car and driving away, not ever having done anything to be a witness to what I know Jesus is calling all of us to do.  Being a Centralite is both wonderful and terrible.

So when I was confronted with an inescapable situation this past Monday night, I lived in my discomfort for a while.  As I arrived at church for a session meeting with Dana, a man lying on the ground stopped us and began crying.  He said over and over that he's just so tired.  Then he said he's hungry, but mostly he just expressed that he was tired.  I had brought a granola bar for dinner, but knowing I could wait a few hours, I pulled it out and handed it to him.  As I did, a remarkable thing happened.  Our hands touched.  I was suddenly compelled to sit with him, and so I did.  I listened and rubbed his back and arms and hands as he talked.  Dana came over and kneeled down and asked if we could pray together.  So she prayed for this man, Rodrick, asking God to bring him comfort and rest.  I said literally not a single word.  The two of them did all the talking, I was simply moved to sit and listen.  

It was maybe one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever done, but I couldn't not do it.  Last week in Greek we translated the parable of the good Samaritan.  Our T.A. asked us what we thought the story was about.  The common answer to that question is that we should, of course, be like the good Samaritan.  But he said, "What if we are the beaten man and Jesus is the Samaritan?"  As I reflect upon this encounter, I wonder if maybe Jesus is the beaten man.  We never know what form God will take in our lives, and when Dana and I were walking away, Rodrick called out to us, "You don't know who you just talked to."  It haunts me.

I Love the Gays: Ruminations on the Bad Name Given to Christians by Chick-fil-A, et. al.

There's SO much chatter on the interwebs about Chick-fil-A and their "stance" on gay marriage.  Lots of pros and cons to debate, and I have indeed weighed in on both the Facebook and the Twitter.  I mostly just commented that I finally feel like I can't eat there anymore, be it because of their ideas about marriage or their anti-choice ideology.  These things, says Dan Cathy, stem from being a Christian.  Well, my boycott stems from being a Christian, so I guess we have different ideas about what that means as well.  Shocking.


The truly disheartening thing, however, has been the multitude of people ranting against Christianity (admittedly against the bigotry of exclusion based on biblical principles) and it has prompted me to add my voice to the mix.  Here's my voice about it:


Not all Christians are against gay marriage.  In fact, I'm SO in favor of gay marriage, Christian gay marriage even, that I have vowed not to get married again until it is legal AND my church recognizes it.  Will I stick to that vow?  Who knows?  I'm a sucker for romance and I definitely want to get married, but my faith teaches me that justice is not served in this way.  The Bible teaches us a lot of things, but above all it teaches love, and I cannot stand idly by while love is being persecuted.  My form of protest may not affect anyone but me and the person I choose to spend my life with, but at least I can stand in solidarity with my brothers and sisters in Christ who are told time and again that "separate but equal" is going to have to suffice.  


My point is not to rant here.  My point is to show that there are Christians, many Christians, who hold to the biblical standards of love, acceptance, grace and mercy in the face of evil.  I am so saddened because I'm a super liberal, maybe not as liberal as my sister (I told y'all to follow her on the Twitter, @thejulieeffect, she's hilarious), but definitely on the left, and I hate hate hate seeing all the liberal websites lambasting Christians for this.  I wish there were some giant forum for me to scream that I'm a Christian and I love the gays, but it just doesn't seem to exist.  For now I'll settle for my blog.  


Maybe I'll go viral.  

Hugs Abound

I'm a hugger.  I always have been.  If there's anything my dad taught me to be great at, it's hugging.  So on Monday, with a grammar quiz fresh off our pens, I looked around at all my fellow Greek students and saw a need for hugs.  It started with Andrew, a Korean student who is struggling to translate from Greek to Korean to English.  His always happy face was a bit forlorn, and I wrapped my arms around his neck because there were no words.  His shoulders shook for a second, but when he pulled away he was smiling.  Then there was Kathy, a returning student who is doing extremely well, but is clearly working her fingers to the bone.  I put my arm around her and we touched heads, just a bit of solidarity between sisters.

After chapel I went to coffee hour and listened as everyone tried to determine how they did on the quiz.  I decided, with all these people in the room, to offer up hugs.  I called out, "Who needs a hug?"  They were hesitant at first, but one by one I heard, "I'll take one."  So I hugged.  But there was something more behind it.  We were developing a ritual for our community, one which seems to be enduring.

I had a very hard week myself, and my community noticed.  I'm not usually one to need a hug for comfort, but when my community asked me if I needed a hug, I said yes.  And they hugged me non-stop.  They wrapped me up in love and didn't let go.  They hugged me with grace for incomplete homework, they hugged me with study dates, they hugged me with long talks over wine, they hugged me with walks around campus, and they hugged me with their very presence.  But also, they actually hugged me.  As hard as this week was for me personally, it was a giant step forward in our quest to love and trust one another, and I am so thankful for that.

ENGAGE!!

I went to visit my sister in Los Angeles last week, and on Saturday morning we got up to go do her regular Saturday morning thing. She is a clinic escort with L.A. for Choice, a pro-choice group that stands outside a women's health clinic and helps women get safely from the curb to the door.  This group, and others like it, is necessary because there is also an anti-choice contingent on the sidewalk handing out fliers, cards and other propaganda.  The anti-choice people try to intimidate women and berate them with their brand of Christianity, the kind I do not subscribe to.  I'm also not a fan of beating someone over the head with my faith, but that's a post for another day.

So we're out there in the blazing sun, wearing our awesome orange tank tops emblazoned with PRO-CHOICE CLINIC ESCORT, firmly holding our ground between the protesters and the clinic.  We do not engage with them.  It is our job simply to escort women if they need it, and to offer to take the propaganda off their hands.  That is all.  An older woman protester brought her grandchildren, who looked to be about 3 and 5, and sat them on the curb next to the street to play while she sang Ave Maria and recited the Hail Mary for two hours.  This made me extremely nervous, and when the kids started crawling around under my feet I mentioned that she might want to take them home.  A man walked in between us and said, "You can go home, baby killer." 

Baby killer.  

I wanted to punch him in the mouth.  It was the most egregious insult ever hurled at me, and it rolled off his tongue so effortlessly.  

As the morning wore on without further incident, I wanted so badly to go have a conversation with him.  I wanted to stick out my hand, say, "My name is Bethany.  Let's talk about that name you just called me and how it isn't actually true.  Also, not a very nice thing to say.  Oh, and by the way, I'm a seminary student with deeply held convictions on things like abortion.  Let's talk about these things, so you can get to know me a little before calling me such an ugly name."  I didn't, because we weren't there to engage, but oh how I wanted to.

Later, as I took time to process the events of the morning, I decided I absolutely should have engaged him in that conversation.  If for no other reason than to see that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how loving and gracious I was, he wouldn't ever love me back.

Or would he?

I found him on the Twitter, and started following him...and he followed me back.  I'm mostly just observing for right now, but I'm hoping this will create a safe space for us to engage in some real dialogue.  Via Twitter of all things.  Now isn't that interesting?

Twitter Evangelism

My associate pastor recently started following me on Twitter.  This chick is cool.  I've always thought so.  I remember when she was called to our church as a new seminary graduate about twelve years ago.  I looked at her that first day and thought, "We're going to be friends."  We weren't, but I still thought she was awesome.

We have spent a little more time together since I've started seminary, and she treats me more like a colleague now than a congregant.  I like it because, once again, I always thought she was cool.  Only now she has more than a decade of experience at an inner city, social justice church, which makes her that much cooler, and really wise.  So I lean on her and she has yet to lead me astray.  Which is why, when she leaned on me, I felt honored.  Actually, I felt a lot of things.  I'm almost ashamed to admit that the thing I felt the most...don't laugh...was cool.  Yes, she's fifteen years older than me and the fact that she leaned on me made me feel cool.  This is how awesome this woman is.

So I got a notification the other day that she started following me on Twitter.  "Uh oh, I have to tone it down now."  But I realized I've never been too outrageous, and therefore am probably safe.  Plus, she's cool.  Are you sensing a theme?  So, naturally, I followed her back.  Then I got an email from her.  "I don't know how to tweet.  If you were a pastor at Central, how would you use Twitter?"

OMG!!!!!!  MY.  PASTOR.  JUST.  ASKED.  ME.  FOR.  ADVICE.

Stuff like that never gets old.  It's actually really freaking awesome.  And she didn't just admit to not knowing what she's doing, she actually asked me to imagine myself as the pastor at our church and think of what I might do in her shoes.  BIG SHOES.  My extroverted self had such a fit when I told her we weren't answering right away. It would be so easy to just spout off a million different ways to use the Twitter (yup, I said it), but I wanted to give quality advice.  So I took a few days and finally responded this morning with a (fairly) succinct email on the way I use it, the way I know other pastors use it, and how my sister uses it (which I think is actually a great model for pastors).

So follow me @bethanyebenz, follow her @ckelly_kelly, and follow my sister @thejulieeffect (you won't regret it).  We're going to evangelize the interwebs (well, my sister won't, but she's funny).

The Church of Baseball

My dad was in town for spring break a few weeks ago.  He's a presbytery executive, so of course we talked about church and seminary stuff (my mom is also a pastor, so he has some experience as a seminary spouse and can dialogue with the best of them).  Having taken a lot of pictures and posted them on Flickr, he wanted to know about my Evangelism via Storytelling and Multimedia class, because it's unlike anything my mom ever took.  So I gave him the rundown: one picture on Flickr every day, one video a week, one blog post a week, etc...  Before I knew it we were talking about the emerging church and whether or not it's truly necessary.  In his view, the next church is all about "me."  It's okay to meet people where they're at in a lot of circumstances, but when did we throw personal responsibility, sacrifice and accountability out the window in favor of Saturday night partying which precludes an 11 AM worship service?  Okay, Dad, you make a good point.  When we ask the church to change to meet our needs, it's no longer about Jesus.

On Tuesday night of that week, we went with Courtney and Sam up to the Gwinnett Braves stadium to see the All-Stars vs. Future Stars game.  Bobby Cox, the former manager of the Braves, was managing the Future Stars team, which was made up of kids from all the Braves' farm teams.  As the four of us sat there, Courtney, Sam and me taking pictures for Flickr, Dad was ruminating on our conversation about the church from earlier.  We watched as Bobby Cox was announced (to wild cheering) and as each young farm team member came out and shook his hand.  Dad leaned over to the three of us and said, "You see that?  You see those kids all shaking Bobby's hand?  That's the church."  Preach.

His point was that baseball hasn't changed just because a new generation is coming to play it.  It's still the same as it ever was, still just as thrilling, and a model for how we can do church for a new generation of players.  

Another Housing Policy Post

Yes, I'm jumping on the housing policy train with this post.  Not because I am trying to affect change with this blog, because God knows I want to keep readership to a minimum, but because this is a way that CTS is doing some seriously negative evangelizing to our community, the PC(USA) and the larger church.

God calls us to live on the fringes, to walk with the marginalized, but CTS is shunning that call.  These people, our sisters and brothers in Christ, are just exactly that...people AND sisters and brothers in Christ.  And yet, we are telling them they aren't equal and don't get the same love from the church that their straight friends do.  That is, simply put, bad.  By choosing money or politics or whatever over God's children, we are effectively shunning God's call.

Well, friends, you do get the same love from God.  That's about all I can say without getting up on my high horse and ranting against the establishment.  There are a lot of things that have already been said, so I'm mostly just trying to listen, engage, and fight this good fight with faith, love, grace and respect.  I believe with all my heart that this is not what God wants, and my faith tells me to stand up and fight.  My faith calls me to stand up and fight.  So fight I will.  Because if I've learned anything in my brief time here, it's to follow what God is calling me to do.

A Lamb Strays from the Herd

I've been timid on most social media this week.  Whereas I'm usually on Facebook several times a day, making snarky status updates and posting pictures, or tweeting the awesomeness that is Stan, I've refrained.  I had an experience, beginning last Sunday and lasting through about Wednesday, which involved some cyber bullying.  It was of course hurtful and humiliating, but more than anything else it was completely avoidable.  So, because of that, I'm taking this opportunity to stray a bit from the subject of my blog and talk about internet safety.

I thought I had a pretty good handle on how to be safe on the internet, which obviously meant everyone else did too, right?  But when I assume things, it bites me...hard.  So I got bit.  There are a lot of dangers lurking that we don't even realize are dangers.  It's more than just scammers and bullies and trolls.  The real danger lies in our own inability to properly navigate this infant technology.  Particularly in our context, with the constant threat of CPMs and search committees finding all the things we've ever done on the internet, we have to learn to be as savvy as possible.  Because once it's out there, you can never take it back.  Ever.  I have been going back and wiping off old Facebook status updates, but with the advent of the timeline, I'm now having to go back years and years because it's so easy to see my political fights with my uncle from 2008.  How dumb was I to do that in the first place?  Very.  How dumb was I to think that once I put enough time and status updates between then and now, they would disappear?  Extremely.  Technology changes all the time, it gets smarter than us, and it makes us catch up constantly.  So I'm still erasing stuff from four years ago, and I wasn't even a dumb kid then.  I was 25.  I knew better.  But technology sucks us in, because it's shiny and new all the time.

The problem with ever changing technology is that we never have a chance to get comfortable with something before a newer version comes along.  So rather than mastering one thing, we are always behind the curve and can get trapped in a dangerous situation more quickly than we realize.  We assume we know what we're doing, but there's a high likelihood we don't.

My point in saying all this is that this class has been a bit of baptism by fire for a lot of us and mistakes are bound to be made.  I hope we'll all be very careful and take our time, rather than fretting too much over deadlines and grades.  I want to be good at this, I'm sure everyone else does too, but I'm much more interested in being protected from all the ways I can harm myself.

Easter The Way Jesus Intended - Live Tweeting

Church the last few weeks has been interesting.  As I've contemplated Lent and walked my own grueling Lenten journey, I've been pretty much oblivious to everyone and everything around me.  I've cried in worship.  I've neglected my friends.  I've given the cursory, "Good morning!" (yes, I do speak in exclamation points)  But I've been so wrapped up in my own stuff that I haven't actually taken the time to notice what's been going on in the world around me...

...until today.

Today was Easter.  I was sure I would be so overcome with emotion that it would be a sob fest.  Instead, my joy found a different outlet.  I sat with my sister who hasn't darkened the door of a church in about a decade.  She live tweeted the service, in her truly snarky and irreverent manner, but it made me so profoundly happy to think that this person who hasn't been inclined to go to church in so many years could find a creative way to make it work for her.  Granted, it was mostly pictures of people in choir robes saying they needed a wardrobe change (and by "people" I mean me) and her commentary on the punctuation in the bulletin, but I'll take it.

How Reformed?

So the church is changing, right?  I'm resistant to that change, despite my claims of being left of Canada and always open to change.  Despite the fact that we are "Reformed, always reforming."  And despite my having embraced so much change in my own life recently.  But this...  This is too much.  I like high church.  I connect to hymns written by old, dead, white guys.  I even believe every single thing in the Nicene Creed (with the exception of a paternalistic God, but whatever).

Did you notice what just happened?  I resisted change so much that I went back to the Nicene Creed, which was written long before the Reformation.  My point is that I'm a fan of both.  There is value in each, and being so far removed from them, having reaped the benefit of them, it's easy to see that value.  But what do we do when the change is right in front of us and we're going to be the ones responsible for breaking down the system and rebuilding it in a fresh, new way?

It's a scary proposition, one which puts the change in my hands.  Part of the reason I'm so resistant is because I see all these new models of church popping up and I listen to their theology and it's just bad.  So I want to be the new model with the old theology.  But it's entirely possible that the old theology is bad, too, I'm just not willing to admit it.  Rodger Nishioka said to me recently that this change which is coming is really what Jesus intended.  The church isn't meant to be at the center of the universe, ruling over all, because that's not what Jesus did.  Jesus lived on the fringes, on the margins, and he preached to the marginalized.  Maybe this new way of churching is how we'll go back to the fringes, instead of keeping ourselves at the center.

Do I? Should I?

Jeff Alexander has posted on your wall: "You don't seem like a church person."

That was a message I got from an old high school friend about six months ago.  I had to wonder what about me says I'm not a church person.  I go to church every Sunday.  I am on committees and play in the hand bell choir and work with the youth.  I am active in the young adults group, I'm about to be ordained as an elder.  Surely there is something about me that says I'm a church person.

P.S. I think that friend was disappointed when I told him I was going to seminary.  He hasn't "spoken" to me since.  Whereas he once thought I was cool, now I'm just another Christian.

Skip ahead about four months.  I'm out at Twain's with the young adult group from my church.  We're drinking, playing darts, just having a merry old time.  I invited one of my work friends to join us, and by the end of the night she was saying she wanted to come to my church because we don't act like what she has always assumed about church people.  Around the same time, I told another work friend I was planning on seminary, and she conveyed her appreciation for me not being a proselytizer, and that she would also like to go to a church where that isn't a theme.

I have such an urge to ask what the difference is in these stories, but I know what I should really explore, based on the name of the blog, is how they are similar.  I like to think of myself as an embodiment of all that is contrary to what the media and politicians say about Christians.  I'm not though.  I'm just packaged differently.  I'm the next generation of Christian...the ones who evangelize by taking their friends out drinking and then wake their asses up for church the next morning.  So I don't look like Rick Santorum or Pat Robertson or even Billy Graham.  I look like Bethany Benz, and I look like a church person simply because I am one.

So what does this have to do with evangelism and technology?  I'm skeptical of internet evangelism.  I've said a few times that I don't believe pastoral care can be done over the internet, but can evangelism?  I'm still not sure, and so far the evidence in my life is pointing to "NO."  But maybe I'll contact Jeff Alexander and see what my form of evangelism ("Let's hang out and not talk about church, then you'll see how cool I am and that church people can be kind of awesome") looks like online.  I'll let you know how it goes.