I recently picked up (ordered for my iOS Kindle app) a new book called, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray. It’s a book about the cultural shifts that have taken place since the 1960′s in America. In particular, it’s about the ever-widdening cultural gap between the classes, which the author explores by comparing cultural practices of white Americans over a fifty year period from 1960-2010 (he chooses to limit his research to white Americans to show that this divide is not a race-related phenomenon). The author himself has written an article summarizing the thesis of his book and David Brooks has written an Op-Ed about it (also a critical review here). If you would like a summary of the book, these are good places to begin.

My interest in writing this post has to do with the effects the presence of this divide will have on me as a pastor and the the church in America more generally. What should we do about class division? Should some churches, as a seminary friend of mine contended, be focused on reaching only the cultural elite, the creative class? Or, should churches strive to bridge this class divide through diverse class-spanning congregations? Are there things that our churches do that implicitly or explicitly exclude certain classes?

Charles Murray provides a helpful analysis of the nature of this class divide that will help us answer these questions. He says that our widening cultural chasm has occurred because of the shifting reality of life in America, and he points to four culprits:

FOUR DEVELOPMENTS TOOK us from a set of people who ran the nation but were culturally diverse to a new upper class that increasingly lives in a world of its own. The culprits are the increasing market value of brains, wealth, the college sorting machine, and homogamy.

Murray, Charles (2012-01-31). Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (p. 46). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

He points to educational attainment as one of the clearest indicators of class. He argues it is heavily influenced by intellectual ability and is helped by wealth. Homogany, by which he means that educated people marry educated people and become friends with educated people, is really just a by-product of education, and the college sorting machine, by which he means universities segregate by intellectual ability, is likewise represented in an individual’s education. The essence of his argument is that the core issue at the root of the cultural divide begins and is defined by education.

Most of us are aware of this intuitively. We recognize the value of going to a good college, and we are aware of the lengths to which parents will go to ensure their children get a good education. I once had a conversation with someone from Europe who said the only royalty we have in this country is the royalty of our college education.

Murray goes on throughout the rest of the book to talk about all the other ways that the classes are different. He mentions things like divorce rate, television viewing hours, vacationing, religious practice and more as as key parts of the cultural divide. But education is the issue around which the class divide is defined.

This means that a local church will be class oriented community to the extent that education is a defining aspect of that community.

The church has typically been a place where education is highly valued. Churches and ministries have started schools around the world. They have encouraged children to work hard and learn as much as they can. And much of our ecclesiological structure has been modeled after academic institutions (e.g. sermons, Sunday School, and spiritual disciplines). Even when the fundamentalist church became anti-intellectual in the early part of the 20th century, these churches still valued education internally, as was evidenced by the numerous books written about creationism, inerrancy, and other doctrinal issues. Education has always been an important part of church ministry because it is the requisite first step towards reading the Bible by which we come to know about God.

Which begs the question, does the church’s valuing of education in some way exclude the less educated class? Do sermons that require education and thoughtfulness exclude some? Does the presence of an educated congregation shame the less-well educated out of participation? Does the church that values being intellectually responsible somehow engage in class discrimination?

I fear the answer might be yes, but I can’t envision any other way forward. I can’t imagine a church where we don’t push people to be more educated. Learning has been a significant means by which I experience God in my life and I hope to share that with others. I want people to read their own bibles and study theological texts that push their perspectival boundaries.

But I also believe the answer is no. We can value education without discriminating against the less well-educated. Outside the church, there is an unfortunate way by which “the world” can ascribe value and worth to a person based on their educational accolades that the church should shun. As education has increasingly become a class-definer in our country, it has also become a demarcator of importance and personal worth. The church should unabashedly reject this. We should affirm the intrinsic value and worth of all people regardless of intellectual capacity or educational attainment.

We recognize that true power and influence is not achieved because of the extent of our education but through our capacity to love. We know that people are ultimately moved by our willingness to serve them, not by our ability to impress them. We also believe that the most important person in the world is the one who is willing to lay down his life for another person not the self-important elite who believes his time is more valuable than those around him. In the church a teenager with Down Syndrome has the same ability to achieve importance in the kingdom as a lawyer or doctor. Both can love and serve, which means both have the power to effect spiritual transformation and salvation in others.

So while the church ought to continue to emphasize the importance of education, we should strongly resist the urge to ascribe importance to the educated. God’s grace is at work in all of us. God loves each person in our churches. The extent to which a community of Christians embraces this truth, is the degree to which people of both classes will feel welcomed in our churches. It’s also the extent to which God will actually be at work. God doesn’t favor anyone because of their class, and it’s this emphasis on grace that all people deeply need.

Those who feel belittled by the world around them because they didn’t go to the right college need to know they have significance and value. They need a place to belong and be loved just for being human. And those who are high powered achievers need to know that God loves them simply because they are his children. He doesn’t love them because of what they have accomplished. This is the way I hope the church can bridge the culture gap in America. With this emphasis on grace and the value of all people, I hope our churches will be places where this class-divide is bridged.

So, when an early twenty-first-century North American says, “What the church says may be OK for some people, but I think it is important to think for myself,” that person thinks that he or she is thinking for himself or herself.  No.  He is only espousing that self-centered, limited way of knowing that has been imposed upon him by his culture.  One could almost say that, because this is North America, because of the United States Constitution’s rendering of religion into a private matter, sealed off from everything important like economics, politics, and public matters, that person is not free to think anything more interesting than “I think it is important to think for myself.”  As Stanley Hauerwas has told us repeatedly, for a contemporary North American to say, “I think for myself,” is solid evidence of cultural formation, externally imposed social determination, since she did not think up the credo “I think for myself” all by herself. Pastor, pg. 211

An article asserting the superiority of Chinese mothers in comparison to their western counterparts has been making the rounds recently.  I’ve had it emailed to me and I’ve seen friends posting it to their facebook walls.  You can read the article “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” online.

The article is written by a Chinese mother (who happens to also be a Yale Law School professor and author) named Amy Chua.  In the article she anecdotally argues for the superiority of Chinese mothers (somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not really) and then provides three summary reasons why.  They are:

1. Western parents are concerned about their children’s psyches. Chinese parents aren’t. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.
2. Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything….the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.
3. Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children’s own desires and preferences

She tells stories about how these three principles worked out in her parenting style.  She tells a story of calling her child garbage, which she says was done out of love and respect and a sort of belief in her daughter’s potential to do better.  She also tells a story of depriving her daughter of dinner until she mastered a difficult piece on the piano.  And she recounts her strict rules refusing some basic childhood amenities afforded to most white American children (like: TV, video games, and sleep overs).  Lastly she says activities like drama and gym (and any other instrument besides piano or violin) are a waste of time.

She boasts that her children turned out well.  They excelled in life because she knew what they needed and she was willing to sacrifice her own time in order to make sure they achieved it.  I read this article just a few minutes after reading a book by Parker Palmer called Let Your Life Speak and I was struck by the contrasting philosophies.

Palmer is writing about vocation and how we can find a way to do the work God made us to do.  He writes:

“Vocation does not come from willfulness.  It comes from listening.  I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about — quite apart from what I would like it to be about — or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.” pg. 4

“Today I understand vocation quite differently — not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received.  Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess.  Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I am not.  It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.” pg. 10

You can see the difference.  Palmer believes that our true self is given to us at birth and that the pressures and expectations placed on us — by mothers and all the rest of society — force us to wear masks that cover up who we really are.  He says that by the time we hit our 20s, our true self can be so covered by masks that it may be nearly impossible to discern any part of our true self in our external self anymore.

The tension that a parent faces (in the extreme) is between telling your child who they should become or letting them become who they want.  With the former, a parent can impose masks and false identities on their child as they try and force them into a preconceived mold of success.  In the latter the parent chooses not to exert any pressures on their child so that they are free to become “who they were born to be,” in which case they grow up to be bums.  No child choose to practice piano and do math homework when given the option to watch TV or play video games.  These are extremes, but there is truth in each perspective that can be applied to our parenting.

I think Palmer is right, we are different.  Part of our journey towards self-hood is discovering what we are good at and what we aren’t good at.  But I think the parenting style that best helps a child get to this place ought to look much closer to that of the Chinese mother in this article than the stereotypical white American mother who is letting her child’s inner self emerge.  Because the truth is, kids don’t know who they are until much later in life, and without the pre-requisite skills afforded them by hard work in school and extra-curriculurs they won’t be set up to be the person they were made to be.

God made me in such a way that my true self finds expression in pastoral ministry, but I am only able to be a pastor because I can read and write, understand theology, exercise creative thought process, be analytical, and a whole host of other things that I learned through hard work.  I’m glad my parents were self-sacrificial enough to work with me and push me to learn these foundational skills. Now, I can choose to become the person God made me to be.  But I’m also glad that my parent didn’t disown me when I quit my engineering job and became a missionary in Africa.  They were willing to embrace my journey of self-discovery without imposing an identity crisis on me.

And for me all this means, I make Josiah do math and Mercy learn her letters before they go to school.  It’s also why Mary and I will consider going into debt to give Josiah piano lessons.  My wife, Korean though she is, had a chinese mother, and she secretly aspires to be one herself.

The church that Mary and I are a part of wants to be a place that takes the call to be the hands and feet of Jesus seriously.   We want to be a community that makes a difference in the world.  That’s why we’re partnering with One Day’s Wages to try and raise money for the flood victims in Pakistan.  Here’s a blurb from the ODW website:

This natural disaster is affecting nearly 20 million people – more than the Haiti Earthquake AND 2004 Asia Tsunami combined,many aid organizations are estimating. This is due largely to the loss of infrastructure: homes, businesses, crops, health and education services, that will take years to rebuild.

Unfortunately, there has been relatively little response to this crisis by the international community, when compared to other large natural disasters. The lack of response to the crisis is affecting flood victims, as many aid organizations are struggling with lack of funds to respond to the disaster.

For this reason, ODW has chosen to partner with two organizations -KASHF and World Vision. Both these organizations already have a very substantive presence in Pakistan and are currently engaged in the relief efforts. All donations through ODW’s Pakistan Flood Relief Fund will be evenly distributed between these two organizations.

If you’d like to join the New City community in contributing to the Pakistan fund, whatever the amount, you can do so here:

http://www.onedayswages.org/donate/org/new-city-covenant-church

We’d also appreciate it if you could share the link on facebook or twitter.  Thanks!

I just came across an article about a male Gordon-Conwell student (the seminary I attended) who allegedly broke into a female student’s dorm room and setup a video camera with the intent of filming her.  You can read about it on the Boston Herald or the Salem News sites.  I feel badly for this young woman.  I can’t imagine the feeling of invasion of privacy and the lingering effects of this incident.  I also feel badly for the student that broke into her room.  He’s clearly a troubled person who is dealing with some difficult desires that led him to make a life-altering decision — very sad.

What I find interesting is the responses to this story in the comment section on these two newspapers’ sites.  There is a sense of derision and mocking aimed at this young man.  There is even a sense of delight in reveling in his downfall as a person seeking pastoral office.  To be honest, I’m not sure what to think.  I get why people feel this way.  They think judgmental evangelicals are just as sinful as everyone else, and therefore they should keep their mouths shut.  And, I agree that this guy shouldn’t be doing this or anything like it, but I’m not surprised it happened.  I also don’t think this makes pastors who talk about sin insincere or necessarily hypocritical.   As a clergy member myself, I’m aware of the standard to which I feel called, but I’m also aware of the fact that I don’t measure up.

I’ve never broken into another person’s room to film them (nor done anything illegal), but there are undeniable ways that I fall short of God’s standard.   If my qualification for ministry was based on my personal performance, I’d be out of a job.  If I had to master every sin before I talked about it, there’d be a lot of things I could never preach on.  I’m not God.  I’m not perfect.  I sin, sometimes boldly.  What am I to do?  What are clergy to do?

Most hide it.  They put forward a portrait of perfection, but as I mentioned in my last post hiding it makes things worse, because hiding it gives the sin more power.  It isolates people and prevents them from receiving grace.  What we, the church, need to do is come to terms with the fact that our clergy are just as sinful as the rest of the world.  Our desires are just as dark and perverse as everyone else’s.   We’re broken too.  My hope is only that our hearts are receptive enough to grace and that we’ve experienced a deep enough level of transformation that we are safe to lead and wise enough to put parameters in place that protect us from personal pitfalls.

We need to be honest about our clergy, and honest about God.  This is no surprise to God, and it’s no disqualifier for grace.  My hope is that churches can be honest about sin so that they are able to call people to repentance, and serious enough about grace to provide a place that’s safe enough for confession and repentance to happen.   Often times this culture starts in seminary.  Pastors try to replicate the culture they experienced in seminary in the churches they lead.  Gordon-Conwell was a place that was safe enough for me to confess and experience grace while I was there, but I wonder if it was for this student.   For the sake of our pastors and the future churches they lead, I hope he is the exception.  My prayers are with the GCTS community.

I love Jim Gaffigan.  His routines are funny because they humorously describe the most common human experiences.  He has great bits on recycling, bacon, watching TV, and working out to name a few.  In the clip above, he captures the awkwardness of evangelism.  He perfectly portrays the discomfort that comes when someone says to you, “I’d like to talk to you about Jesus.”

There is ample reason for us to feel uncomfortable when a complete stranger approaches us and says, “I’d like to talk to you about Jesus.”  You never quite know what you are going to get, but it’s very likely that you are going to come out the other side of the conversation feeling guilty.

It’s not supposed to be this way.  The gospel, or the message about Jesus, is supposed to be good news.  The word gospel translated literally means “a message of good news.”  So why is it that it so often comes across as bad news?

This Sunday at New City Covenant, we are going to explore what’s good about the Good News, and we are going to talk about how we can communicate it in a way that actually feels like good news.  If you’re in the area, I’d love to have you join us!

Ruth Haley Barton says there is a dark side to leadership.  A church planting coach I recently heard, says that the biggest issue church planters and young leaders have to face is their past emotional baggage.  When leadership seems oppressive, difficult and emotionally taxing, what dark habits will emerge in your life?  What old emotional baggage will resurface in your life without warning?

I believe this happens.  I’ve seen it happen in my own life.  It’s a real problem, and Barton, in her book Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, says that the only solution is solitude and silence.  It is only when we stop and practice Sabbath and silence that we can deal with the dark side of our soul.  Quoting Parker Palmer, she reminds us that the soul is shy.  We are vulnerable and insecure human beings, and the chaos and demanding nature of leadership causes our souls to shrink back into hiding.  Only in silence will they emerge.

This is why, I believe rest is so important.  We are all leaders in some part of our lives, and we all need to rest. It’s one of our core values, and this Sunday at New City, we’ll be talking about the importance of Sabbath as a part of our weekly rhythm.  If we want to grow into the people God has made us to be, we must be people who rest.  I hope you’ll join us!

As a church planter in a community that is attempting to be more relational and organic, Parker Palmer’s words on leadership really strike a chord.  He argues that it’s in the less rigidly defined community that leadership is most important not in the structured and hierarchical system:

Unfortunately, our idea of leadership has been deformed by a myth that links leadership to hierarchy, as if leaders were needed only in systems that operate from the top down.  But when we are in “community” — which, at a turn of the kaleidoscope, evokes the romance of an instinctive life together — we can dispense with a designated leader, allowing the role to pass spontaneously from one person to the next.  Or so goes the myth.

Yet in my experience, a community requires more leadership than a hierarchy does.  A hierarchy has clear goals, a well-established division of labor, and a set of policies about how things are supposed to run; if the machine is well designed and well lubricated, it can almost run itself.  A community is a chaotic, emergent, and creative force field that needs constant tending. And when a community’s aims are countercultural, as they are in a circle of trust, its need for tending is even greater.  Lacking a leader grounded in the principles, skilled at the practices, and granted the authority to lead, a circle of trust will fail because the relational culture it requires is so rare and so fragile.  (Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness, pg. 76)

Palmer writes about circles of trust, which are similar to a particular type of sharing-oriented small group.  His comments about leadership in these circles of trust resonate deeply with my experience in church communities.  When relationships replace rules for dictating the way we relate to one another in community, the role of the leader becomes even more important.  Her job isn’t to simply hold up the rules and make sure everyone sticks to them.  Her job is to be in relationship with the people and shape the culture of the community so that love prevails in everything.  A good reminder of the importance of leaders to shape culture.

It seems like everyone in the evangelical world is talking about starting over.  Everyone is talking about how corrupt the church has gotten.  Many are urging us to return to the purity of the early church.  Others are saying our theology has been co-opted by a Greek or Roman or Platonic philosophical system, and we need to free our minds from this system in order to tap into the “true version of the church.”  Others, say that the right way to do church is emerging in this new generation that is radically contextualizing the Bible in new forms of Biblical justice and honest community.

I just want to say that while I believe these are all noble pursuits, ultimately they will be disappointing.  Every church sucks.  It’s just the way it is.  This side of heaven, every church is full of people, and people are full of problems.  There is no perfect model.  There is no perfect community.  And, there is no system under which our theology is oppressed and can be liberated into a pure and unadulterated form.  Theological perfection is a pipe-dream.  Theology is always done from within some system, church is always done in some culture, and community is always complicated.  There is no easy, perfect, or un-messy way to do church.

When Jesus laid out for his disciples the essence of what it means to follow him in a bizarre chapter in John 6, he concluded by asking his disciples if they were going to abandon him too.  He had just told them how hard it was going to be to follow him and now he wants to know if it’s too much for them.   They respond by saying:

Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.””

(John 6:67–69 ESV)

It’s as if Peter is saying to Jesus, “Following you is really hard but everything else is worse.  We know that in you are the words of truth even though it is so hard to follow you.  We recognize the source of life and the truth about all things in the words you say and the way you live even though living the way you do is so difficult!”

I think that is why there is a constant temptation to malign the church and look for better ways of doing things.  It’s easy to say the church has gotten it wrong for so long because being a part of the church is just flat out unpleasant at times.  It’s not nearly as rewarding as we dreamt it would be.  There is undeniable disappointment in the church.    But at the same time there is remarkable success and joy in there too — In it are the “words of eternal life”.  People’s lives are literally transformed in the context of Christian community.  People are saved from sin, sickness, and death.  The church is the place where people come in contact with Jesus.  It’s where they learn about his teachings and experience his acts.  The church is Jesus’ Body, his physical presence here on earth, and it’s in the church community that He resides regardless of what model the church follows.  For those of us who make the commitment to stick it out in a church community we end up experiencing God at work and experiencing God’s salvation.

This happens in the church on the corner that’s 110 years old and isn’t following any of the “right” church growth models and it happens in the up-and-coming mega-church that’s bursting at the seams.  God is in both, and neither should be scorned nor dismissed.

There’s often a lot of talk by Christians lamenting the non-religious nature of our government, but what I find ironic is that the early Christians faced criticism from the government lamenting that they weren’t religious!  The Roman Government repeatedly called Christians atheists and even killed them for it.  In fact, the first martyrdom recorded in Christian history outside the pages of the New Testament was due to just such a fact.  Polycarp, a devoted Christian was killed for not being religious 1,854 years ago from this upcoming Monday (scholars believe he was martyred on February 22, 156).

And when finally he was brought up, there was a great tumult on hearing that Polycarp had been arrested.  Therefore, when he was brought before him, the proconsul asked him if he were Polycarp.  And when he confessed that he was, he tried to persuade him to deny [the faith], saying, “Have respect to your age” — and other things that customarily follow this,  such as, “Swear by the fortune of Caesar; change your mind; say ‘Away with the atheists!’”

But Polycarp looked with earnest face at the whole crowd of lawless heathen in the arena, and motioned to them with his hand.  Then, groaning and looking up to heaven, he said, “Away with the atheists!”

But the proconsul was insistent and said: “Take the oath, and I shall release you.  Curse Christ.”

Polycarp said: “Eighty-six years I have served him, and he never did me any wrong.  How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

ed. Richardson, Early Christian Fathers pg. 152

To the Romans, Christians were atheists.  They didn’t participate in the religious practice of the Roman Empire.  They were often criticized, blamed and scapegoated for the maladies afflicting the Roman empire.  As Christianity spread and their numbers grew, more and more people reasoned that the gods were mad at the Romans and were punishing them for all these Christians who stopped being religious.  Significant writing takes place by early Christians trying to justify themselves as good citizens despite not participating in Roman religious practice.

I find it ironic that the tables have turned.  Now it’s the Christians who are in political office or positions of power that are the ones who are putting “atheists” on trial.  Our country’s problems are blamed on their faltering morality or their lax religious practice.  When natural disaster strikes, the economy tanks, an epidemic breaks out, or when they just need to rouse the troops for re-election these leaders are quick to blame all our woes on the “sinners” who are causing God’s curse on our country.

But that’s not how Christianity works.  God isn’t sitting in heaven waiting for a quota of religious participants to be met before he blesses a country.  He isn’t looking for sacrifices to pile up before extending his grace.  He isn’t looking for us to be good first before he can be gracious in response.  God’s favor and goodness don’t depend on our religious practice.  We can’t earn his grace.

A Christian’s engagement in religious practice is never done to earn God’s favor, it is always done in response to it.  God already loves us, and we engage in religious practice because we need constant reminders.  We engage in prayer, because we need to regularly refocus our vision of love for God’s world and for us.  We show up for a worship service on Sunday because we need to discipline ourselves to worship and give thanks even when we feel like complaining.  We engage in sacrificial service because without it we become so self-absorbed we’re libel to forget about the needs and concerns of those around us.  Religious practice helps us tap into God’s love for us and live out God’s love for others.

Like Polycarp, Christians should resist the notion that going to church and national blessing are yolked.  Like Polycarp, we should embrace the scorn of power-hungry leaders who use religion as political leverage and then call us atheists when we don’t subscribe to their agenda.  Knowing that Polycarp and the early church fathers were called atheists first makes me feel like I’m in good company.  Plus, Polycarp called them atheists right back.