Yesterday we successfully had our first public worship service for our new church plant New City Covenant!  It went really, really, well.  It was so much fun to see everything come together.  The praise band sounded great, the welcoming crew did a fantastic job, the volunteers who helped setup were tireless servants, the kids had a blast in the children’s ministry, the food was amazing, and the people who showed up were gracious and engaged.  It was a real privilege to have so many people join us for worship!  But perhaps the best part of the service was that God showed up!  There was a very tangible experience of the Holy Spirit that a number of people mentioned to me.  Without God’s presence it is all for naught.  I’m so thankful right now to all the volunteers and to God.  What a delight, and what a great way to get things started!

Our next service isn’t until January 10th, so that gives us a little bit of time to recover and think about how we can improve for the next one.  I look forward to getting better at what we do.  I also look forward to watching our community come into being.  There were a good number of new people with us yesterday.  I can’t wait to get to know them better and see how their gifts shaped the nature of our community.  Exciting stuff!

One of the biggest mistakes white evangelicals make when thinking or talking about race is to assume that it is a personal issue.  We often think that because we don’t believe people of color are inferior to white people that we aren’t racist.  We believe that racism is a personal sin issue that should be addressed by helping people individually become less racist.  It happens when someone makes a racist comment.  But the reality is that racism is ultimately a systemic evil.  I recently read a parable that helps explain this:

Both Maridel and Parker were overweight, to the point of being unnealthy.  They decided it was the time to do something drastic.  Responding to an ad for a Fat-Away program, they drove to a rural area in their state, where they were taken to separate areas of the woods.  For six weeks, they would be locked into these “compounds,” as they were called.  In each compound, according to the ad, were the perfect ingredients needed to lose weight.  Their goal was to each lose forty pounds.  What they did not know is that the less-than-ethical Fat-Away organization was really a research laboratory studying the effects of various diets, exercise programs, and weight-loss expectations on people’s weight change.  Whithout a word to Maridel and Parker, they placed Maridel in a compound designed to help her lose weight, but they placed Parker i a compund designed for Parker to gain weight.

In Maridel’s compound were running trails, a swimming pool, state-of-the-art exercise equipment, a basketball court, and a sauna.  In her cabin were magazines on proper nutrition, instructional videos on how to lose weight, an abundance of natural, healthy, low-fat, low-calorie foods, and no sweets.  Each day she was greeted early by fit and trim people who asked Maridel to go on a run with them, talked about how much they loved being thin, and encouraged her that she too can be thin — wonderful conditions for losing weight.

In Parker’s compound was only a tiny cabin.  No exercise equipment was available whatsoever, but there were plenty of videos and movies that showed high-calorie foods looking sumptuous, more high-calorie goodies than even a sumo wrestler could desire, and just a few fruits and vegetables.  The only other people Parker saw were also obese, and though they talked about losing weight, they seemed not to really care about their weight–not good conditions for losing weight.

The program called for each participant to weigh in at the start, and then every two weeks thereafter.  At the end of two weeks, with neither aware of what was inside the other’s compound, Maridel and Parker were taken to the weighing room.  They each took their turn on the scale.  Maridel stepped on the scale first.  She had lost nineteen pounds! Parker’s turn produced far less excitement.  He actually gained two pounds.

Maridel, who assumed that both she and Parker had the same type of compound, was irritated with Parker.  ”We paid good money to be here, Parker.  How can you waste it?  You have to exercise, you have to eat right!”  Parker tried to make his case, but it only made Maridel more irritated.  Maridel told Parker he needed to try harder.  Parker, though he was depressed about his weight gain and the difficulty in exercising adequately and eating right, resolved to do so.

Divided by Faith, pg. 110-111

According to the authors, white evangelicals blame the discrepancies in results between Parker and Maridel primarily in terms of personal effort and responsibility, but fail to take into account the system-level or structural elements that both constrain and shape the differing results.

The same holds true with racial inequality.  By not seeing the structures that impact on individual initiative — such as unequal access to quality education, segregated neighborhoods that concentrate the already higher black poverty rate and lead to further social problems, and other forms of discrimination — the structures are allowed to continue unimpeded.  pg. 112

To say to Parker that he failed to loss weight because he didn’t try hard enough, because he isn’t motivated, or because he wasn’t taking advantage of the opportunities presented to him seems naive at best.  As white evangelicals, we need to talk about system-level sin issues.  We need to see the structural difference available to people.  We need to confess the brokenness of our system, not just our personal faculties.

Two days ago my kids sneaked off with a box of strawberry cake batter mix from our pantry.  They ran to their room and opened it with the intention of eating the mix.  Not surprisingly, when they opened the bag some of the mix began to spill on the floor.  This became a game for them.  They took turns taking handfuls of this powdered sugar mix and flinging it into the air like confetti watching it rain down on top of everything in their room.  That’s when my wife discovered them.  They had been left alone for about 90 seconds, and they had covered their room with cake mix.

She came and got me.  Their mess was too good to keep to herself.  When I saw the mess, I was momentarily amused and then distraught.  The reality of cleaning up the equivalent of a half-pound of sugar sprayed all over their cloths, toys, and beds was disheartening.  Mary and I both have so much else to do that I just became angry.  This was an interruption I could not accept.

So I sternly chastised them and told them they needed to clean it up and I closed the door.  My rationale was that a part of their punishment would be to keep them in their room with the mess until they became annoyed by the mess themselves.  I thought if they were kept in their long enough they would naturally become remorseful for the mess they made.  I was wrong.

Over the next fifteen minutes or so, Mary and I heard squeals of delight coming from their room — always a bad sign.  I decided to go and see what was happening.  They had removed every article of clothing from each of their bureaus and created a mound of clothing more than a foot tall and a few feet in diameter in the middle of their room.  Mixed into the pile was the cake mix.  They had exponentially increased the mess by adding to the number of soiled items that would need to be cleaned.

What I’m coming to see is that their motivation for this behavior is rooted in their desire for attention, and part of my response of anger is rooted in my inability to give it.  I don’t have time to be with them as much as they want, so they created a mess that necessitated I make the time, which just made me angry.  My anger is rooted in my desire to control life.  My kids revolt against this.  They won’t be put off or ignored for any extended period of time.  When they feel neglected, they throw a tantrum or they toss cake mix.

I can’t stop them from acting this way, but I can change my response.  My anger did not spring up because of my frustration with what they did.  I can easily imagine how throwing cake mix into the air would actually be a lot of fun.  I’m not inherently against cake mix tossing.  They weren’t acting maliciously, just messily.  My anger happened because I wanted to control things — people, time, and my productivity.  I do this because I need to accomplish stuff to feel good about myself.  The source of my anger is in my own sense of worthlessness that I’m desperately trying to overcome in my busy working.  This cake mix incident has been yet another challenge from my kids for me to become a healthier person.  If I can become more secure in God’s depth of love for me, I will better be able to love my kids and anyone else who interrupts me.  And hopefully, I will continue to erase my response of anger from my life.

In the next 10 days or so, we plan to close on our first house and have our first worship service as a church plant.  Both of these decisions have been big steps of faith for us.  Over the past 6 to 8 months, I’ve increasingly been making decisions that are rooted in my faith and belief in God and what God is doing in our lives.  Buying a house and planting a church both seemed like crazy ideas that could either turn out great or potentially turn into disasters!  Unfortunately, making decisions in faith doesn’t mean following God into guaranteed successes.

Living by faith means  risk and fear will remain when I step out into a new venture.  Walking by faith is something of a call to live recklessly, or as Hauerwas puts it, out of control.  We believe in God and so we make decisions based on who he is and what he promises.  We forsake our impulse to control the situation and guarantee a good outcome to every decision.

When I was in Africa, the founding missionaries of African Bible Colleges had a saying, Faith in Action equals God in motion.  So far that’s been confirmed.  God is showing up and things are coming together.  We increasingly are connecting with people who are excited about our church.  Our friend from New Jersey who is going to run our Children’s ministry has moved in with us.  We gained a great Children’s pastor and we are able to fulfill a part of our vision for our new house.  We have a great praise leader who has done a ton of work to help put together our worship service equipment — something I could never have done by myself.  Lots of people are stepping up to volunteer at our preview services.  And generally I sense the excitement level raising with those who have been showing up and participating in our church planting group.  It’s all been really fun to see.

Willimon on the problem of power

if one is on top, well fixed, secure, then one can afford to be sanguine about sin.  We people in power always think of ourselves as basically good people living in a well-ordered world.  Why not? It is our world.  To such folk, “prophetic ministry” means mostly minor tinkering with the present political structures, the passage of new legislation, helpful advice to Congress.  Our world, while needing certain modifications, is basically good because it is our world.

Willimon, Will. Pastor, pg. 266

I blogged about the controversy surrounding the deadlyvipers.org site a couple of days ago.  There has been a lot of good commentary (here for example), and I’ve learned a bit more about the nature of racism through this process.  As I watched the drama unfold, first with Soong-Chan pointing out the DV site on twitter, then his blogs that included the back and forth email exchange with the authors, and then the assessment of the situation by so many people in the blogosphere, I was left with a bit of an uncomfortable feeling.  I wondered, “Did this have to be public?  Wouldn’t this have been better resolved by Soong-Chan contacting the authors directly and then working with them on a solution?”  It felt bad to expose someone else’s sin so publicly.

But as I’ve processed it, I believe that Soong-Chan’s response was essentially right, and that issues like these need to be dealt with in a public matter because racism is primarily a systemic evil and not a personal one.

I think the best way to understand this is to adopt counseling lingo here.  In family systems theory the person who has problems, the one who comes to a counselor for help, is called the identified patient.  Parents may bring a child in for counseling because she is acting out in school.  A spouse may come in for counselling because he is stressed out and exhausted from the toll his marriage is taking on him.  A woman may come in and complain about anxiety.  In each of these cases, the family system’s counsellor will look at the system in which the individual resides.  They will recognize that the maladies this person is manifesting are a product of the system not some isolated, independent individual.  The system is sick, and not necessarily the identified patient.

The child may be struggling in school because her parents’ marriage is falling apart.  The spouse may be exhausted in his marriage because he takes on all the responsibility in the family — he’s not sick, he’s too healthy!  The woman may be struggling with anxiety because of the way she relates to her mother who struggled in her relationship with her own mother.  Her solution will be found in standing up to her mom and not necessarily in trying to calm down when she’s in stressful situations.  In each of these cases, the sick person has been formed by the interconnected relationships he or she has.  Fixing the person is virtually impossible without changing the system.  Fixing the system is what really matters.

Racism is really a sickness of a system, and ‘the racist’ is the identified patient.  American culture is racially sick.  When two white males do something racially ignorant like what happened with this deadlyvipers incident, they are the identified patients.  Their sin is a reflection of the sickness of the overall system.  The issue isn’t so much with them as it is with the system in which we all live.

So, when Soong-Chan goes public with email correspondence and he writes blog posts that link to their books and criticizes their videos, he can do it as one who is challenging the system.  It’s not really about the two guys.  He’s not out to show what big jerks they are, because they aren’t (at least it seems like they aren’t).  They were just ignorant and unaware.  They are like the teenage girls who gossip about their friends because that’s the way they see mom talk about her friends.  The girls are steeped in a way of relating and they don’t even know that they are hurting other people when they casually bring up someone’s foibles to their friends on the phone.

This way of thinking about racism is helpful for me because I’ve done things that are racist in the past.  If I would have gotten called out like this, it would have been very hurtful.  Being called a racist is just about the worst thing that you can call a person, and if it happens to you the first thing I imagine you want to do is deny it.  You want to justify your behaviour.  You want to explain that you don’t really think white people are better than everyone else.

But if we see racism as a systemic sin, this changes the guilt level.  It’s still a matter of ignorance, but the problem is really with the system.  The system is sick and my racial sin makes me the identified patient.  I’m reflecting the sickness of the system.  So if I say or do something unintentionally racist and someone points it out to me, I can confess my sin knowing  that it’s an issue of ignorance not ontological deficiency.  I can also allow my screw up to fuel a desire to change the system.  I don’t want other people to make a similar mistake and perpetuate the pain of racial insensitivity.  Seeing racism as a sickness of the system and the racially insensitive person (the racist) as the identified patient seems to make confession and dialogue easier.  And dialogue is our best hope for changing the system for the future.

Stepping out in faith to attempt something new for God is hard.  Making the initial decision is hard, but following through with it can be even harder.  As we attempt to live into the new and scary journey God calls us to, uncertainty and fear well up in our hearts.  We wonder, can I really do this?  Did I really hear God’s leading correctly?  Was it really God who called me to this or was it just me?

The temptation is to give into doubt.  We feel inadequate and under qualified for the work of God, and so we think we must have made a mistake.  As we attempt to do the thing God has called us to do, we become aware that we, in our own strength, cannot do that which we are called to do.  So we doubt we are doing the right thing, and we fear failure is inevitable.

But I think we have it backwards.  Throughout the Scriptures, the people who have done the most amazing things for God have been racked with fear.  The people who saw God powerfully at work in their lives and lived in intimate communion with him were often times overwhelmed and even paralyzed with fear.  God has to repeatedly remind his people not to fear — the command not to fear shows up repeatedly throughout the Bible.  This means that being afraid is not unnatural, and doubt should not change our course.   Fear and doubt are things we will all feel when we get serious about following God.  If we are stepping out in faith, like all the saints before us, we will feel fear like they did as well.  So with the help of some trusted spiritual advisors, I’m learning that feeling fear is an indicator of a life lived by faith.

When I my obedience to God leads me to a place of feeling fearful, I can be encouraged.  This is normal and even good.  The fear that used to sabotage my ministry with uncertainty and doubt is now a form of encouragement that affirms my faith journey.  Fear works as an emotional reminder that I am walking by faith.  I am right in the place that I ought to be, and I’m most likely to see God at work in my life because I’m living by faith.

There’s a whirlwind of blog commentary over the marketing strategy employed by Zondervan and on display over at deadlyvipers.org.  So much as been written, I’ll just share two links, and a quote.

Soong Chan Rah’s Blog

Eugene Cho’s post

Here’s a quote from Eugene’s blog that sums it up for me:

Folks may think the reactions of some are over-reactive but not the case. But having said that, there are seasons and situations you have to shout…how else will people listen especially when hardly anyone fears or respects the voice of Asians and Asian-Americans. You know what I’m talking about, right? Our image of passivity is something we collectively as Asian Americans must confront.

The blunt truth is that these kinds of caricatures simply won’t fly with some other ethnicities. Let me keep it real: Can you imagine the media letting Miley Cyrus go had she painted her face brown or black and mimicked caricatures of an African American?  If the publishers of this book chose to title the book in a way to capture the words and media images of  Urban Hip-Hop African American culture, would it be accepted, defended, and celebrated?

Today is Daylight savings time, that magical day when, unlike the parallel Spring day from hell, we get to add an extra hour to our night’s sleep — our clocks fall back instead of springing forward, and we are given a day with 25 hours instead of 24.

Every other night we go to bed thinking, if only I could’ve gotten one more thing accomplished today. If only I could have finished replying to all those emails. If only I could have had time to clean the kitchen. If only, I could have read for an hour today.

But not so today! What a gift today is! We get an extra hour today and now we can finally have a day in which we get everything we need to get done accomplished! We are given more time to accomplish all the things we usually leave undone at the end of our days.

But I usually find that at the end of today, as with the completion of every other day in the year, I still feel like there is more to do. On this day that we are given an extra hour, I am made aware that it’s still not enough. One hour is not enough, and I imagine two, three, or even four more hours in the day wouldn’t be enough either. On this day that we proclaim the day of blessing because we get more time, I wonder if maybe we have it backwards. Maybe we need to stop trying to get more time? Maybe a day with an extra hour in it isn’t what we really need to have a better life? Maybe we don’t possess time at all. Maybe time possesses us? And maybe the best course of action isn’t to try and constantly attain more time, but to let go of our need to achieve and accomplish so much.

With 25 hours or 24, deadlines will still destroy our sense of rhythm. Commitments will contaminate our longing to just enjoy things. And things that are meant to help us find peace, like church, become just another obligation that takes up a slot in our already cluttered and crammed schedules. It’s unlikely that having more time would change things.

This is what we find with technology. Smart-phones, email, and wireless phone cards for our computers promise to make us more efficient workers with more free time on our hands. But instead we feel the reverse happens. We work all the time instead of relaxing more. We still feel the need to be productive. We still work just as much if not more. We have things to accomplish, always.

Christians aren’t exempt from this mentality. The pastors I know are email addicts, and most of them are relentlessly chained to their blackberries or iPhones. We think with each day we can do a little more for God. We think God’s Kingdom grows in direct proportion to the productive time we spend working for God. We can make, build, and grow God’s kingdom through the efficient, hard work of our hands. Through diligent use of our time we can build God’s kingdom.

But the reality is the Kingdom is not something that needs to be built. It’s not something that needs to come into being. The kingdom is not a certain size that you and I are charged with growing so that it becomes bigger. Jesus never said to his disciples you are called to build, grow, expand, or make the kingdom.

He said you are to enter it. The kingdom was something Jesus came to proclaim. It is a reality that Jesus inaugurated that we can live in, now.

It’s a way of life that we can enter by slowing down, not by speeding up. Living in the kingdom happens when we pause and recognize that Jesus is already the King. He is the ruler of all things regardless of what we accomplish or accumulate with our time. We can pause and enjoy this invisible certainty. We can rest in God’s accomplished work, and recognize that all our striving, all our doing, all our busyness cannot enhance or establish what already is. We cannot make what is perfect any more perfect. We can just enter and enjoy it, and then go and tell others about it.

So on this day where we find ourselves with an extra hour to spend, join me in trying not to do more, but less.  Join me in slowing down and appreciating what already is.  Join me in celebrating the reality of a kingdom that doesn’t depend on how much I can get accomplished.

This is pretty much the worst story I’ve read in a while.  A 15-year old girl was gang raped outside her school on the night of homecoming.  She was abused for 2.5 hours by multiple people while as many as 10 people stood by watching and yet did nothing.  She was found unconscious under a bench early the next morning.  So far six kids have been arrested in connection with the rape, and police suspect more will follow.

At the arraignment, the perpetrators showed up wearing bullet proof vests.  I imagine they feared for their lives.  I get that.  They should be afraid.  I imagine there are few souls on the planet whose stomach is not twisted into knots over the horror of this crime.  And there are plenty of people crazy enough to bring a gun to the courthouse and attempt to shoot these kids down before their trial can ever begin.

This sort of story is similar to stories we find in the Old Testament.  It sounds eerily similar to the scene in Sodom and Gomorrah when the angels arrived to stay with Lot.  It is also similar to what happened in Judges near the end of the book.  These biblical narratives are the kinds of stories that cause us to realize the depravity of a culture, and for a moment we understand God’s wrath.  In fact we call out for God’s eradicating power to rain down on people like this.  A culture that not only perpetrates but perpetuates and praises this sort of behavior is atrocious.  Shouldn’t we do all we can to execute these rapists?  Is there any other action other than fiery judgment?

Paul says there is:

Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. (Romans 12:9)

Christians are called to forgo revenge and instead make room for the wrath of God.  Christians can pass up on the urge to exact revenge on these boys because we know there is a future judgment coming.  We also recognize our compromised position.  We are a people who crucified Jesus.  He was full of love and committed to non-violence and peace, and yet we killed him.  Our sense of right and wrong has been compromised by our own self interest.  Judging with justice is an elusive goal.  Our hope is that in the future God will judge all sin with justice.  For now, we have to wait.  We don’t hide out in the crowds with guns and attempt to take justice into our own hands.

The desire to do so is an unusual feeling.  Most American Evangelicals never have to wrestle with an inner feeling that desires to call out for justice, because we are rarely victims of abuse.  We rarely have to struggle with the call to forgive our enemies, because we are never oppressed.  We American Christians are a powerful and dominant group.   Many of us are among the richest 1% of the world’s population.  We are not subjected to injustice.  Apart from a rude customer service agent at the airport, we never think there is someone who is “out to get us.”  And so we find the promise of a future judgment and the reality of Hell distasteful.  We minimize the Bible’s language on Hell, because we just don’t see a need for it.  But the Ancient Israelites regularly called out for judgment of their enemies, and Jesus talked about it all the time.  It was a hope that the oppressed clung to.  Someday, they thought, God will avenge me.

This story about gang rape  is a good reminder of the feelings that well up inside of us when a victim we can relate to is brought to our attention.  This is not a story about the ethnic-other in some far away country that we can easily dismiss.  This is a story about a girl in high school in America who went to homecoming.  I have a little girl.  She will go to high school.  She will probably go to homecoming.  Could this happen to her?  Now that we can relate we think, “This is outrageous!  Something most be done about this heinous crime!”  We cry out for punishment, judgement, and justice.

But we would be wise to take pause and consider those around the globe who have been crying out for justice to be executed everyday.  This story of gang rape is a reminder of suffering in our midst and around the world.  It’s also a reminder that for some people the promise of judgment and Hell is the hope of a future vindication.