escapingbabylon.com

So some of you may know that I’ve been doing the children’s story at Pilgrim. The Children’s story is a time during our regular service where someone will call the kids up and share a story, message, mini-sermon or whatever that is targeted towards the children.

It’s a good way to communicate to the kids that they are important enough to have a section devoted to them in the adult service (though it would be great if adult services could also be kid friendly, but that’s another story).

So at the urging of an amazing friend of mine, I’ve started putting the illustrations online at a blog called Play Dough Gospel. Feel free to check it out, and let me know what you think.

p.s. That site looks significantly better in any browser but Internet Explorer.

• I’ve figured out my relationship to Christmas, but I still haven’t figured out my relationship to Lent.
• That being said, I think I’ve found a personal, legitimate reason to fast (and no, I’m not officially sharing it here yet).
• It messes me up when an 8 year old casually says to me that their father is in jail, and has been there “forever”. I hope that’s something I never get used to.
• During the Children’s Story today, I spoke about the Parable of the Mustard Seed . One of the women in church gave me a small packet of mustard seeds after service. Another member gave her a pack when she was in the hospital with cancer. Though (and because) she’s been cancer free for years, she’s always carried a packet with her as a reminder.
• I’ve been considering that small package all day. I think that God wants us to consider that the Kingdom of God is such that the things that seem small right now can transform a community so that 8 year olds no longer refer to incarcerated fathers as another fact of life.
• I realize that this post may make more sense if I had already done the Kingdom of God post. It’s coming. It’s a bigger, more personal post than I had originally thought.

So I’ve been meaning to do a year in review post, and even though it’s almost a month into 2009, I should still talk about 2008. And, as Chris requested, I should talk about seminary.

Truth be told, I’d probably be talking about Seminary anyway, it was a pretty huge life change for me that was a very long buildup to a very rapid change. It’s a story that spans several years, so I might as well settle down to tell  you about it.

Why Seminary

The short answer is that I wanted to learn how to do ministry better.

I did my undergrad at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. Macalester is known for many things, and among those things is a culture of activism and community service. Something it is less known for is the amazing community of Christians that gather as a chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship there. On the surface, this seeems like a strange statement to make seeing as during my time there Macalester became ranked as the #1 school where students ignore God. But that ranking, did not reflect the depth or strength of the Christian community there, a community I was deeply involved in.

At the same time, the community service office there had a program where one can earn the work-study part of your financial aid by working with local non-profit organizations. Through this program I worked for three out of my four years at Admission Possible (a time that deserves an entry of it’s own). It was sometime in my Junior or Senior year that I realized how important working towards making the world a better place  was to me.

Fast forward a couple of years, I’m working in a tech company that works specifically with non-profits, volunteering with InterVarsity and heavily involved in my church. One evening I was hanging out at Mac and listening to my roommate at the time talking about a particular tech problem he was trying to figure out. Now if you know my former roommate, he’s someone who is called to be a computer geek. So I listen to him and realize that while I enjoyed computers, I’ll never talk about coding the way he does. Instead I recognized that sort of passion when I talked about the small group I was leading at Macalester, or the 3rd and 4th graders I was teaching at Pilgrim.  That was the turning point that got me on the road to seminary.

A while back, I was on Pilgrim’s newsletter committee. I was on it to specifically do some design and layout stuff. I spent a little time and came up with the following design. It was meant to be printed and photocopied in black and white, and mailed out to some of our members. Pilgrim has always been a place that was proud of it’s history and tradition, but also was friendly and open, so I tried to capture both in the design, and keep it relatively light.

It was never used partially because of some wierdness that I’ve never completely figured out, and partially because I was the only person with InDesign, so nobody else could edit it. (Plus I never got any actual articles to be laid out). Anyway, enjoy the pics. Let me know if you have any critiques. Click to make the images bigger.

The front page. My plan was to have the masthead image be an image of the featured ministry that month/quarter

This was a pain to figure out. I still do't like the use of space here, but there are some things I really do like (like that baseline)

The back page: I actually really liked the back page.

edit: And now that I’m seeing this on my blog, I’m definitely noticing some design similarities here.

One of the biggest pieces of cultural tension that I experience at my church is the idea of “sacred objects”.

I grew up in a tradition that does not have sacred objects. We would have service at church on Sunday and then completely move all the benches out of the way so we could play games on Friday.  Then, if on next Sunday our dance and drama groups were going to be leading, we’d move the pulpit out of the way so that they would have the room. As a matter of fact, the last time I went home, the pulpit was pretty much gone because it was so much trouble to move back and forth. At my church you didn’t get attached to objects, that was akin to idolatry (Don’t worry about the pulpit, care about the word of God that is preached there. Don’t focus on the altar, focus on the prayers that you will offer there, and the God to whom you will offer the prayers).

It’s been hard for me  to be ministering at a church where you hear phrases like “We aren’t showing respect for the sanctuary by having this pile of books there.” Part of me wants to say who cares about the sanctuary!

But on the other hand, I know that for many people in this church I currently call home treating the sanctuary with care is a way of expressing their worship and devotion to God, and when someone does not treat it with care, or moves things around for that particular days agenda, it’s a statement of arrogance and of disregard. It’s a statement that this person thinks that whatever they are doing now is more important than the things of God (where things include principles, words and objects).

So I’m in search of a balance. I want to minister to this culture, and not try to force them to be my culture. However, I also want to do it in such a way that the line separating respect and idolatry is not crossed. Add to that, that I want to also be true to my own mode of worship (though that is secondary/tertiary).  So I have questions for you the readers. Firstly, for those of you in worship cultures with sacred objects/spaces, where is the line drawn for you, and in your culture between respect and idolatry. Secondly, for everyone, what suggestions do you have for ministering cross-culturally in this setting.

was from Kevin Farmer, currently of Sanctuary Covenant Church in Minneapolis.  He said, “What you feed will live, what you starve will die.” Recently I’ve been thinking about this in regards to Sunday morning services at Pilgrim. At some point I’m going to go in with a notebook and a stop watch and see what we are feeding and what we are starving. In particular, I want to look at :-

• How much time do we talk about things that serve the body, or things that reach outside the walls? How much do we celebrate each.
• How much do we talk about being blessed and how much do we talk about serving?
•  How much do we talk about performing arts ministries vs evangelistic ministries vs physical service ministries.
• How much do we talk about Jesus’ work vs. our work.
• How much we talk about going to church(or finding a church home, etc) vs how much we talk about following Jesus.

As one can suspect, I have my suspicions about what Pilgrim’s Sunday morning service looks like (and the possibility of that feeding into some of our deeper problems as a church). For now, however I’d like to gather some data. I’d also like to get data/help from anyone who is reading this. If you are willing, I’d like you to take a pen and a notebook/sheet of paper and record some of this next Sunday.  I’m going to post more about this later this week, but I think it may be an interesting experiment.

So I teach Sunday School for 7th and 8th grade students. As do many Sunday School programs, we use a Sunday school book as a guide/curriculum. Tomorrow we are supposed to be looking at Lazarus’ story from  John 11:1-44.  It’s a pretty interesting story, with lots of moments that make for good discussion, like how Jesus had the opportunity to go to Lazarus before he died, but didn’t, or the moment where Jesus shared in Mary and Martha’s pain, and of course, Lazarus’ resurrection.

So of course you would expect the book to include all three of these moments in the printed text (that’s also in the student books) right? No? Ok then, maybe two of these moments? One? Instead the book chooses to print John 11:17-27, and while that may be the theological crux of the story, it completely neuters the dramatic power of the story, and abstracts it away to the point where I would be completely bored in reading it. Not only that, but read out of context, it also abstracts away Jesus’* work on the earth (both then and now) to a theological belief and not an actual thing with real, physical effects in addition to the theological. I think that is probably one of the major issues of faith today. Religion/Faith in general is being reduced to abstract concepts instead of being expected to have actual effects.

That’s my lament. Suffice it to say I will be going beyond the book this week(although really, if it did suffice it to say that, I wouldn’t have posted all those paragraphs above would I).

*by the way, how do you write the possesive of Jesus, I’m always confused whether it should be Jesus’ or Jesus’s. Could someone with a better grasp of the grammatical rules in this case let me know?

Wow, it’s been a while. There’s been lots of things going on recently. Mostly dealing with InterVarsity and Hamline and all of that stuff. This is part of why I haven’t been posting as much recently, but I hope to remedy that over the next week/couple of weeks.

It’s a bit of a do or die time for me through the end of  the month and then the end of the year. I’ll talk a little bit more about it, but both the day job and my InterVarsity stuff are ramping up. Some decisions have been made and prioritization is going on. I’m being vague so that I can have something to post about in the next couple of days. Anyway, I hope all is going well with you out there. Peace.

From an IM conversation between Renée and I. But see Renée’s comments on the last post

Renée says:
i was at a church meeting on sat
Renée says:
so i saw first hand, once more
Renée says:
the impulse to organize, put systems in place
Renée says:
it;s a habit that’s not all bad. It can have good results, such as consistency
Richard Daley says:
yeah
Richard Daley says:
and some needs are systemic, and thus need to be addressed through systematically
Renée says:
but not all?
Richard Daley says:
I don’t know
Richard Daley says:
hmm…
Richard Daley says:
it’s a good question
Richard Daley says:
I mean, each individual sin occurence has its root in the system of sin that runs through the world
Richard Daley says:
and though each opportunity to sin is an individual decision, we are able to make the right ones through the grace of God, the solution to the systemic sin problem
Richard Daley says:
I guess it’s the question of what to systematize
Richard Daley says:
analogically speaking, it’s like getting wind energy
Richard Daley says:
you can try to systemitize (or however you spell that) where the wind blows
Richard Daley says:
but that’s not going to work
Richard Daley says:
it’s better to systemitize how best to place the turbines to take advantage of the wind, and how to transport the energy most efficiently
Renée says:
tell them that

Thoughts?

Looking at my schedule, I’m probably going to miss my church’s revival services again this year.

The reason I think that this may be my subconscious is that culturally/theologically (and honestly, probably a lot more of the former than the latter) I have problems with the idea of a revival as an event. In my mind, you study, pray, fast, and otherwise petition God and hope that God sends a revival. The idea of scheduling a revival strikes me as inverting the relationship between us and God.

However, this may just be due to my idea of what a revival is. The problem is that in general, people tend to view things that are culturally different as bad, and I am not immune to this aspect of human nature.

So, here’s my question.

• For someone who has done this before (preferably in a baptist church, but that’s not a requirement), how would you describe a revival practically, spiritually, and theologically?