Author: jkwest44

Replacing Membership

Replacing Membership

It may be time to replace church membership (I am Christian) with church covenant (I commit to go deeper).

The very notion that you can be a member of the church is at best meaningless and at worst a direct contradiction to the heart of the gospel message. To the former possibility, church members are often no more likely to do or be anything different than the rest of the world. Church’s rarely ask for any specific commitment of their members, and the only way off the membership logs tends to be through death or years of hard work by the church to purge old records. Membership often means nothing in particular about a person, their actions, or their relationships. To the latter, membership sounds reminiscent of and practically plays out like an exclusive club. Members receive special benefits or discounts whereas obedience to Christ often means sacrificing privilege for the sake of the outsider. Membership implies that we now have what we needed, whereas following Christ entails receiving daily bread along the journey.

The membership wall becomes a sometimes subtle, but all too real wall that we build up between insider and outsider. The gospel is focused throughout on tearing down the walls we build and finding God at work throughout all creation, especially in unhindered relationship with the least, last, and lost. Membership mentality goes so far as to imply ‘I am a Christian,’ which places the emphasis on me and what I’ve done. The gospel always starts with God and what God has done. Our lives are a response to what God has done and our hope is to say that we are following after Christ. To be is something static that can happen with or without God or neighbor. To follow is to realize we are always behind someone else’s lead, we are always changed along the way, and we are always surrounded by neighbors who are on the same journey.

The church does not exist to serve its members – it exists to fulfill the mission of God.

A better representation of what it means to ‘join’ a church is to become a covenant partner. Joining does not bring about a change in status or worth or depth of relationship with God, but it does enter us into a particular kind of covenant relationship in which our commitment provides a pathway to growth in relationship and discipleship with God and neighbor. Our commitment signals our intention to share in the mission of God as discerned and specified within a local congregation. It is a signal that I have chosen to follow in a particular way for a particular time.

A covenant partnership might be accomplished within the Methodist system by requiring a commitment to be made once a year by everyone wishing to be a partner. At stewardship time, cards would be passed out and set up a minimum expectation for each partner. Expectations should be kept at a minimum, but with enough shape to ensure that all partners are committed to the full mission of the church. Steps for deeper commitment could be given to allow for where people are on their journey.

If anyone does not sign up, their name can be read at that year’s charge conference. If they still haven’t signed the commitment by the next year, their name would be read a second time and removed from the ‘membership’ roll. To be taken off the roll is to have the burden of responsibility lifted from your shoulders and to instead be named as the one for whom the mission of the church exists. If membership is about privilege, it makes sense why someone would be upset to be taken off. If membership is about covenant responsibility, the easier path is be taken off the roll and simply get the free grace of God without the covenantal obligations to actually do anything. The open table is one simple UM practice that makes this distinction concrete – it is not membership that gets you an invite to the table, only the grace of God. To serve at the table may require training and commitment, but to receive at the table requires only the grace of God.

Could it actually happen? Would it actually matter in the life of a church? I have no idea. But the cultural meaning and emphasis on church membership has already shifted dramatically. This seems like a pretty good time to try something new.

Intractability and labels

Intractable seems to be the most applicable description of most discussions people are actually passionate enough to have these days. Intractability stems at least from a failure to appreciate the underlying faults in either side’s arguments. The right seems bent on properly labeling people and issues so that we can determine right from wrong and act accordingly. The left seems bent on removing labels and socially constructed identity from the conversation so that each person can live and let live. Labels are necessary, says the right. Labels are oppressive, says the left.

I’m convinced by research and experience that labels are the only way the human brain can make sense of the world. All possible identity labels represent the acceptance or rejection of labels that are inherited through culture, family, and experience. You can’t perfectly label everything because labels, by their nature, are socially constructed and thereby cannot be static. At the same time, you can’t experience the world or communicate with others apart from the use of those imperfect labels.

Therefore, the right won’t arrive anywhere in their quest for the right labels. And the left won’t arrive anywhere in their quest to end oppressive labels. What matters and what has meaning is relationship. Inside a relationship, the dynamic transformation of accepting and rejecting labels makes it possible to affirm the uniqueness of another person while creating the space in which community empowers more than it oppresses.

Facts Like Stakes

Facts are like stakes in an endless desert. A stake is necessarily located in the place where it is driven into the ground, but with no reference as to where you are in the desert, located-ness is no help at all. A network of interrelated stakes becomes more helpful, but still doesn’t tell you anything about where that network is in the larger desert. A fact, like a stake in the desert, is neither completely relative nor is it meaningful without relation to something else.

The bigger problem I find in our current “fact free society” isn’t the truth or falsity of particular claims. The bigger problem is the lack of a common narrative underlying the facts to act like a road map to locate ourselves in the same desert. As long as we lack agreement about the sand beneath our feet and where we ought to be headed, it will never be all that helpful to point at a stake. It is meaningless to talk about facts as though they convey anything apart from their relative spot in the endless desert of life.

On preaching: or why an Evangelical/Fundamentalist stance against women preaching is the most anti biblical stance around

On preaching: or why an Evangelical/Fundamentalist stance against women preaching is the most anti biblical stance around

If 2preach=2speak the gospel of Jesus resurrected & the bible is clear women don’t preach; why’d women preach the 1st sermon #literalismftw

If you’ve been to an evangelical or fundamentalist ministry, you’ve probably been confronted in some way by the argument that women are not to teach or have authority over men. For me, it was most obvious in college when I was sitting in a planning meeting for a summer camp and the female co-leader of the whole camp got up to talk. She began by telling us not to worry, she would only be exhorting us in Scripture, not preaching. And so for the next 20 or 30 minutes she walked us through about 30 or 40 verses of scripture, each time offering a word or two about how this verse applied to our task ahead. I suppose if she had started preaching rather than exhorting, the Bible itself would have become a tool for Satan by tricking us poor men into hearing a woman preach.

This was the first time I’d been struck so concretely by the implications of a tradition’s refusal to let women preach or lead churches. I was bothered at the time, but did not know why it felt so problematic. I have since come to recognize that any form of the argument is no more persuasive to me than “separate but equal.” The contortions required to justify any particular set of practices have never made sense and have often caused and justified harm.

I find that the more ‘literal’ we view the whole of scripture, the more often we really just mean we take the parts that justify our conclusions literally to the extent that they literally mean what they need to mean to justify our literalistic conclusion. In practice, literalism tends to mean something along the lines of being too lazy or afraid to have to explore the mysteries of God and nuances of living out God’s love. Needless to say, I don’t put much stock in a strict literalism when it comes to scripture. But I was struck by a new literalist reason to disagree with those traditions that prohibit female preachers last year when preparing for Easter Sunday. In good literalist fashion, I’ll use the clear and specific words of scripture to further make my case against prohibiting female preachers.

I’m confident this has been pointed out before, but I can’t recall having seen it anywhere in particular. Preaching, to the extent that it is a unique form of public speaking and thereby something worth doing, is a proclamation of the Gospel message. Namely, that Jesus lived, died, and was resurrected in fulfillment of the promises of God. Even Paul, author of the greatest battle cries against women in ministry, says as much in a variety of ways in the first chapter of 1st Corinthians. Most succinctly stating in verse 23 – “we preach Christ crucified.” Unless he just changed his mind by the time he arrived at 15:14 (if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless), crucified would be nothing without resurrected.

I was struck to recognize that to accept that preaching is the art of proclaiming Christ’s death and resurrection requires that we also accept that women preached the first recorded sermon. Matthew (28:7) and Luke (24:9-10) make it crystal clear that the two Marys and other women were the first to be told that Jesus is risen and the first to go and proclaim that good news to others. The implication is the same in John’s gospel (20:18) as well and the ending of Mark’s gospel makes no clear statement. If God did not intend for women to preach, it seems quite odd that women were clearly the first to preach the gospel message. Women can preach. The Bible tells me so.

Why Trinity

Without viewing God as Father, it is impossible to take seriously enough the notion that the creator is wholly other than creation.

Without viewing God as Son, it is impossible to take seriously enough the notion that God is part and agent of creation.

Without viewing God as Holy Spirit, it is impossible to take seriously enough the notion that the two is one or that there is a deep connection between creator and creation.

I came up with this idea in seminary as a way to try and say something worthwhile about why we call God Trinity. I still can’t decide if it’s helpful/meaningful or just a bunch of words. The only thing I think I would add to it is the fact that marriage seems to be such a great analogy – the two become one in marriage while still retaining their two-ness. Without an interdependent lens similar to that of the Trinity you collapse into a broken marriage or an enmeshed jumble.

Relationship, narrative, and neurology

I tend to see things more clearly in my mind than I can articulate them. One thing I see but cannot articulate well is that the narrative character of human experience and knowledge points to the same reality as the social/emotional structure of the human brain. To say that we are narrative creatures may very well stem from the fact that we are wired for emotion and relationship such that logic and reason are only possible after the shaping of who we have become. Who we have become/the neural pathways that have been formed by our lives are the concrete manifestation of the storied existence that gives shape and meaning to our view of self, life, and world.

 I say these two ideas point to reality rather than are the same thing because the assumption within each is that the shaping of any individual is unique enough that the language and concepts of any given mode of analysis are contingent enough to make the notion of “same thing” meaningless. Perhaps the point is that everyone necessarily sees things more clearly than can be articulated because there is simply not a ‘thing’ to articulate; rather, any attempt to get out what is seen inside is an artistic endeavor. Those who offer a moment of clarity into a deep subject merely lean into the tension between what is seen and what is possible to convey well enough that a subject becomes accessible enough for a heuristic transfer of meaning to take place. That process is likely the ultimate goal of knowledge development and transfer rather than a limited subset of theoretically objective processes.

I see that the analogy of relationships as the lens through which we understand the nature of reality may be the most productive means by which to articulate the connection between narrative and emotion. By the way we experience the ambiguities and beauties of relationship, we get a sense that intimacy is possible despite the fact that there can be no finite formula for love. By analogy, we get a sense that truth is possible despite the fact that there can be no way to speak that is not shaped by the particularities of a life.

Finally, it may also be that narrative and social/emotional shaping also point to the same reality as Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, MacIntyre’s insistence that rationality is necessarily shaped by tradition, Hauerwas’ emphasis upon habits of life over discrete bits of knowledge, conscious realism by Donald Hoffman, the predictable irrationality of human behavior as described by Dan Ariely, and the human need for concepts and categories to make sense of the world.

My Why

Why?

Because God’s Love is Bigger

What that means in practice:

  1. Dare to Hope – there is plenty in scripture and tradition to suggest that some will never taste and see that the Lord is good, but we must dare to hope that all might be saved; salvation isn’t for ‘my’ sake but for the building of God’s kingdom. No matter what may eventually happen, we must live in the hope and expectation that the agent of all creation is able to restore all creation as well.
  2. Tearing down walls, not building them differently – both giver and receiver are at risk of being equally challenged and changed in Christian action, as in the story of Peter and Cornelius. For instance, charity can easily become a way to give money so that I can feel good without having to actually change anything meaningful about my life and interactions. To embody God’s love, for me to interact with “the poor” is to admit that my life is not ‘better’ but that the ‘better’ things I do have need to be shared just like the ‘better’ things that the poor have need to be shared. Action is not I have and they need, but in the mutual exchange of the good gifts of God, we get a glimpse into the active peace God makes possible.
  3. There are only people – There are no issues, no strategies, no theories, no ideologies. These categories are just ways we are forced to put words to the world because of our limited power to think and communicate. Words have ambiguous potential to help, but if the categories we use become an end in themselves, we have missed the point. The kind of problems we try to name and solve with such categories only represent truth if we assume we can have all the facts of the case and must then choose how to act. In people, there is always more to the story than any finite set of facts could show – to think in categories is to presume control. God asks instead that we give up control and love people – in all their complexity and depth. Treating categories of life as more truthful than life itself renders impossible the coherence of a created self. Any roles we play don’t remove from us the responsibility to be God’s children in all things.
  4. Not either/or but other than – The either/or choices we are given in life are almost always insufficient to capture the heart of God. We do not have an objective story and set of facts from which we are supposed to choose the right answer; instead we are invited to see the world in the light of God’s story that changes everything. One concrete example is to say that God is not pro choice or pro life. God desires that we become the kind of people so ready and willing to welcome new life into the world that we can no longer imagine a world in which abortion even makes sense. To create that world is to challenge many of the basic assumptions of our time and become a radically united community that lives as much for each other as for ourselves. It is this broken body that is redeemed, transformed, and made new. God does not go around history, but through the cross. Therefore, we have to be open to the radical ways that we are called to build the kingdom even now.
  5. God doesn’t want your money, God wants your whole life – “Give unto God what is God’s, give unto Caesar what it Caesar’s.” Some might take this as the separation of church and money, but the nature of Jesus and the calling he offers requires us to see a much more challenging reality. All that is belongs to God. We are stewards of the gifts and we are called to be a blessing to the whole world. St. Basil went as far as saying that we are stealing from the poor if we are not sharing our abundance. Charity is not an act of generosity, it is a means to finally participate in the justice of God that does not perpetuate the way things have always been, but sets all things right.