Sunday, April 29, 2012

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.  

Sunday, April 22, 2012

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.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

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.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

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.

Saturday, April 7, 2012

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.