Last night at our Community Gathering for New City Covenant, we talked about money.  One of the passages we talked about was Luke 16:1-13.  In these verses Jesus tells a parable about a shrewd manager in order to explain why we cannot serve two masters, God and money.  You can read the parable here.  It’s weird, and it’s hard to understand why Jesus commends the dishonest / shrewd manager’s behavior.  It’s based on the understanding that the manager was likely considered dishonest because he was charging interest on the money he was lending out.

What I also find interesting is Jesus comment after the story, “For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.”  I wonder if he means something like this:  If you mess around with your boss’s money at your job you will get fired, but the church doesn’t hold people accountable when people misuse God’s resources.  I wonder if he is challenging us to be a community that pays a little more attention to the way we each spend our money.

This week at our Community Life Gathering we are talking about money, so I’ve been thinking about it more.  Jesus uses a bunch of different analogies to describe money in Matt. 6.  He says that the way we spend money is like a window into the soul.  How we spend our money reflects the well being of our spiritual state.

At New City Covenant we are trying to be a community of truth and grace.  We want to be honest and truthful about following Jesus, and we want to make room for grace when we all fall short of it.  I imagine that means we become significantly more transparent, especially around the issue of money.  Wouldn’t it be powerful if we shared our financial situation with those around us?  Wouldn’t it be freeing to talk to a small group about upcoming purchases we planned to make?  If they knew our net worth and how we spent our money, they could help us make decisions in submission to God’s will.

I’m not advocating for anything more than transparency.  I think the secretive-ness of our finances isolates us from one another and from God.  Spending money is hard, and we need the wisdom of God that comes through the wisdom of the community.  This is especially true when buying a house.  As Mary and I look at houses and mortgages and down payments, I would love to be able to bring others into this decision with us.  I would love to be able to say to people close to me: here’s what my salary is.  Here’s how much I have in my stock account.  Here are all my debts.  What do you think is reasonable?  What is a reasonable amount of money to spend on a house.  This is seriously hard and scary, but I think it’s worth it.

I look forward to our community growing into a place of truth and grace.  I look forward to becoming a place where this sort of transparency helps us connect with God and hear his wisdom in our lives.

In Don Miller’s book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, which I reviewed here, he begins with the story of a movie.  He wonders how the reader would feel about going to a movie in which the protagonist’s goal throughout the movie was to buy a Volvo.  The movie follows this character’s hard work and then ends with him driving out of the Volvo dealership having achieved his goal of purchasing this nice new car.  He asks what we would think of that sort of story.  Would it grip us?  Would we cry?  Likely not.  No matter how much the main character sacrificed for his Volvo, it just wouldn’t be a good movie because the goal was so lame.

He argues that many of our lives parallel this sort of lame movie plot line.  We frequently live our lives for the cool stuff we can get.  But just as this makes for a bad movie, it makes for a bad life as well.  A good life story is one with a mission.  In a good life story, we sacrifice for something that is worthy of our greatest efforts.  In a good life story our purpose isn’t just a nicer car.

It also shouldn’t be simply a nicer house.  As Mary and I continue to look at houses, we’ve had to repeatedly keep our mission for buying a house in mind.  Why are we buying this house?  Here are some of the main mission purposes of our house:

1. We would like to have more people living with us.  Whether that is more kids, out-of-town guests, renters, or someone who is in a financially difficult spot who needs a roof over their head, we want our house to be a place where we can have other people live with us.
2. We want to be able to host people.  We want to continue to have people over for small groups, parties, and other events.
3. We want our house to be a place where our family life can thrive.

When we make decisions about layout, carpet quality, kitchen countertop, etc. we measure the money we are putting into the house based on how much it will help  us achieve our mission.  When we look at different flooring options or countertop samples, we can ask, “How nice does this thing have to be to help us achieve our mission?”   So far it’s been a helpful guideline.  It’s given us direction to our decisions, and it has helped us feel like there is a purpose behind this huge amount of money we may potentially be spending on a house.

Mary and I are hosting a Wii Tennis tournament/party this Friday.  We’ve still got a few spaces available that we’d love to have filled.  We’re going to use our LCD projector to project the screen onto our living room wall.  We’re hoping to get our little Wii guys as close to life-size as possible!

If you’re interested, email me at john ‘at’ newcitycov.org.  It’s at our house at 7:00pm.  Refreshments will be provided!

There are a lot of poor people in Cincinnati.  I was there for a wedding earlier this year.  I was staying at a hotel in the city, so I wanted to be prepared in case I ran into any beggars.  I went to a drug store where they sold gift cards to fast food restaurants and bought some.  I think I got six $5 cards.

I figured they would last me the weekend, but I was wrong.  There were people everywhere asking for money.  I would walk up to them and try and engage them, and then hand them a gift card.  Nothing fancy, but it left me feeling good — like I was a true disciple of Jesus.

I ran out of gift cards, but the city didn’t run out of beggars.  Two men approached me at about midnight after the wedding.  I was almost inside the lobby of my hotel before they stopped me.  They were in their mid-fifties.  They had run out of gas.  Their car was around the corner.  They asked for money so they could go and buy gas for their car.  I told them I’d go upstairs and change out of my suit and then come back down and go with them to a gas station.

As it turns out they didn’t need gas or even own a car.  They were just looking for money.  They’d been there for a while, and they had gotten a dollar.  We went out to dinner and talked.  I learned that one of them lost his daughter to gang violence.  The other, he looked like Forest Whitacker, had diabetes.  He was divorced.  He had married an Eastern European girl and there had been conflict with her family because he’s black.

They were nice, and they were normal.  I realized how close their friendship was when the man with diabetes had to ask his friend to tie his shoelaces.  For some reason he couldn’t bend over to complete the task.

We walked back to the hotel and I asked what they needed money for.  They said that they need medical supplies and sneakers.  The one who had diabetes had gotten his shoes for free and he had to wear a couple of socks to keep the shoes from falling off.  He also said something about diabetes and blisters.  I gave them $20.  We prayed.  I went up to my hotel room.

What I found interesting is how different I felt after this interaction from when I handed out gift cards.  When I gave out $5 gift cards to Burger King, I felt godly, morally upright, and certain I was doing the right thing.  But this time I felt unsure.  I sat in my hotel room feeling like something was wrong.  I took off my clothes because I felt dirty, even violated.  I didn’t feel like I had done anything good.  I just felt used.  Even though these two guys were effusive in their gratitude and I’d like to think they told me the truth about what they planned to use the money for, I still felt gross.  I wonder why.

When Jesus encourages us to give to everyone who asks of us, he gives us a reason but it’s not so that we will feel good.  He says we should do it “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.  For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matt. 5:45)  God gives us gifts whether we deserve it or not.  I wonder how he feels?  I wonder if he feels used every time his sun rises and the rain falls.

Don Miller learns to live an exciting story.  That should be the subtitle to this book.  In the process of trying to turn his Blue Like Jazz book into a movie, he comes face-to-face with the reality that he is living a boring life.  He has to sit down with the movie producers and turn his book into a screen play and he realizes his story lacks some essential pieces that make a good movie: purpose, conflict, and the resulting character.  So he attempts to change that.  He sets out to make his story more interesting, and in the process discovers his place in Jesus’ story as well as a bunch of other sub-stories.

This is a good book.  It’s really well written and hard to put down.  The strongest takeaway for me was in the power of story as a guiding force for our lives.  A story provides meaning to our otherwise meaningless daily tasks.  If we see ourselves as a part of a story, our lives have direction.  We can make decisions based on how a car, house, or job fits into our story.  We can take risks in an effort to make our stories more interesting.  But more than anything we can live with a sense that our life has meaning and that we are participating in some grander meta-narrative bigger than ourselves.  It’s a good reminder, and it’s a fun book to read.  I highly recommend it.

In this book Tim Keller offers his expanded interpretation of the parable most often referred to as the Prodigal Son.  He says that the two sons represent two types of people into which all of humanity divides.  Each of us falls into one of two categories.  The first is represented by the younger brother who pursues self-actualization by following his internal desires.  Those of us who are like him highly prioritize being true to our inner selves.  We passionately go after our dreams.  In these pursuits, we believe we are reaching personal fulfillment by breaking with tradition.  We throw off the bondage of expectation.  We ignore the “ought to’s” and do what we want to.  The second brother, the elder, is the opposite.  He does what he is supposed to do.  Those of us who resonate with this character can be categorized as rule followers.  We measure up and always try to meet expectations.  We value tradition.  We believe that if we do what we’re supposed to do, we will get a reward.  We also believe that pursuing one’s dreams when it means the rejection of what we ought to do is foolishness and in the end won’t pay off.

In the parable, it’s clear to see how the younger son offends the Father.  He rudely insults him when he demands his share of the inheritance in advance, which is the equivalent of saying to his father, “I wish you were dead.”  He then makes matters worse by completely rejecting everything that makes him Jewish, epitomized in the closing lines of his rebellion story where he is feeding pigs.  This younger son returns to the Father with great awareness as to how he has wronged the Father.  It’s obvious that he used him to get what he wanted.  But Keller, argues that the younger son is not the focus of the parable — the elder is.  And, he argues the point of the parable is that the older son is just as distant from the Father as the younger.  Just as the younger used the Father for what he could get out of him when he demanded his inheritance in advance, so also the elder is using the Father for what he can gain.  He doesn’t actually enjoy being with the Father, he is just behaving and following tradition so that once his Father dies he can get the inheritance.  Both the younger and elder brothers are using their relationships with the Father for what they can get out of it.

Keller writes well, and the book is a very quick read.  He adds some more insights to the parable throughout, but the real richness of this book is its devotional character.  There isn’t a lot of new or profound insights in it, just good application that challenges the reader to love God for who he is not what he does for us.

When I read that God said to Abraham, offer up your son as a sacrifice, I wonder if this story should have been left out of the Bible.  What does it have to do with a loving God and his relationship with his people?  Isn’t this just at best a bizarre case of emotional manipulation and at worst divine child abuse?

But recently this story has started to gain new meaning for me.  Abraham’s relationship with God is meant to be based on his love for God, not God’s promise.  Isaac was God’s promise to Abraham.  I’m sure Abraham loved God for Isaac, but when God gives you such a wonderful gift it’s hard to know if you love him for anything but the gift.  I healthier relationship would be built on Abraham’s sure love for God, not what God can do for Abraham.  I wonder if this sort of testing is God’s gift to his children to expose the nature of our relationship with him.  It’s good to know that when tested the real character of our faith emerges.  For Abraham, his deep and abiding love for God the person won out over his love for God’s promise in the testing of his faith.

I’m at a place in this church planting process where I feel like my faith is being tested.  The same question that was put to Abraham is being put to me.  Do I love God the person or the promise of what he can do for me?  Do I love God for who God is, or do I love him for what I believe he promises to do in my ministry?  I’m pretty sure I love God, the person.  It’s nice to know.

The following is an excerpt from a recent ordination paper that I wrote which sought to answer the following question: Explain the effect of power and privilege in areas of race, economic class and gender upon your life and ministry.

If racism is a “system of advantage based on race,” (Tatum, Beverly Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria) then I am a person of significant privilege.  I experience privilege beyond just the sociological categories of race though.  I am a tall, relatively fit, well-educated, socially upper-class, heterosexual, white male who was raised in an affluent suburb of Minneapolis.  Growing up I was always a part of the dominant group, and because I was always a part of this in group, I struggled to see the presence of difference.  I saw my cultural experience as normal.  I was never overtly bigoted and neither were my parents, but I always understood my manner of life as the right way.  It was the American way.  It was the successful way of life.

Throughout a variety of experiences, I came to see the world from a different perspective.  I spent one year living in Africa as a missionary.  I had a very positive experience serving there.  It was here that I was first introduced to cultural differences embodied by the colonial style missions work that was ubiquitous there.  I spent a summer in Thailand doing an ethnography on an “unreached people group” that spanned the Laotian, Burmese and Thai borders.  Through this experience, I came to see the value and diversity of culture.  We tried to understand their culture first and foremost in our research.  I also spent a summer in Beijing where similar culture encounters helped to deepen my appreciation for a way of life different from my own.

These mission trips provided helpful cross-cultural experiences but they did not do much to help me understand my position of privilege in America.  I could talk about the rich beauty of cultures around the world, but I was still relatively naive about my own cultural position at home.  I mostly assumed that my culture was America’s culture.  Then I got married to my wife, Mary, who is a second generation Korean American.  Her parents moved here when they were in their late twenties from South Korea and Mary was born in Jersey City, NJ.  She grew up in a home where Korean was the primary language spoken and her dad planted a Korean-speaking church.  When I married my wife I became one flesh with a cultural outsider, and myself became something of an outsider.  When Mary acts or speaks on behalf of our family she is not given the same treatment that I received from society.  I experience racism through her continued encounters with a racist world.

Jesus was an outsider.  He grew up as the quintessentially powerless pariah.  He was a Jew in a Roman dominated country.  He was poor.  He was homeless.  He was even rejected by his own people.  He was thrown out of his hometown for being too religious.  He was rejected by the religious for not being religious enough because as a friend of sinners, he socialized with all the unclean people.  Even crucified criminals mocked him.

Christians are called to follow this Jesus who lived on the margins of society.  Throughout much of the New Testament we are repeatedly warned not to fall in love with the world, but to fix our eyes on Jesus, to think of heaven, and to live as citizens of the coming Kingdom.  But this is virtually impossible for white Christians who enjoy unprecedented power on the global stage.  How can we understand what it means to follow a man who lived on the margins of society when we hold such positions of power?  How can the church teach us to live on the margins of society when it reflects the power structure and the dominant culture of the world around it?

My wife and her family get this intuitively.  I’ve seen the way she lives.  I’ve experienced the churches that her parents lead.  Immigrants and ethnic outsiders are eager to embrace their place in an alternative world because their place in this world is repeatedly maligned.  They are told by the culture in a myriad of ways that they do not matter and that they do not belong in this world.

The world in which I grew up always told me I belonged.  It told me I was important and valuable.  I did not need a God or a gospel to do that.  Why would I want to be a citizen of heaven when being a white male in America was such a good place to hold my citizenship and have my identity?  I am now united to my non-white other half, and I see the way this world that worked for me also works against her.  I’ve come to appreciate the character that is formed in my wife because of the marginal experience she has in this world.  We worked together at a church in Boston that was predominantly Asian-American, and I recognized the same richness of character in other non-white Christians.  I have seen the value in becoming an outsider.  Being so intimately attached to Asian-American cultures puts me in a position of significant privilege.  It has helped me understand what it means to live as an alien and an exile in the world.  I have grown in my ability to understand my own identity as a heavenly resident, and now I hope to lead a church that likewise strives to define itself by it’s allegiance to heaven and not this world — no matter how beneficial allegiance to this world promises to be.  I hope we live as citizens of our coming kingdom, and I hope that causes us to feel out of place within the world in which we live.

Andrew Sullivan, a prolific blogger for the Atlantic, recently posted a story on the growing religious demographic called the Coming Age of the Nones.  I’ve blogged about this before (here and here).  He has some great insights.  He sets the stage with these statistics:

In 1990, 8 percent of Americans reported that they had no religious beliefs. Twenty years later, that’s 15 percent. But when you look at younger Americans, you see that the proportion of “nones” is reaching 22 percent.

Then he tries to explain why this happened:

No doubt, some of this is a reflection of the sex abuse crisis. But the intellectual collapse of Christianity under the leadership of Protestant fundamentalists and Catholic theocons is surely relevant. The well-deserved inability of literalists to win many converts among educated people is also surely salient. The emergence of the politicized Christianist right – and its assault on Christianity as a freely chosen spiritual process – will surely lead to a continued and accelerating flight from organized religion.

Then he assesses the future potential for religion within this landscape:

But the Nones are not Ditchkins atheists. They express their position primarily as a form of skepticism and Deism…

61 percent of Nones find evolution convincing, compared with 38 percent of all Americans. And yet they do not dismiss the possibility of a God they do not understand; and refuse to call themselves atheists. This is the fertile ground on which a new Christianity will at some point grow. In the end, the intellectual bankruptcy of the theocon right and Christianist movement counts. Very few people with brains are listening to these people any more.

If the only form of Christianity that was available to me was the one represented by what Sullivan calls the theocons or the fundamentalists then I too would become a ‘none.’  I would rather be an agnostic hoping that there is a God out there that I can’t understand rather than believe in a god that seems so rigid, legalistic, and angry.  For me, this group has failed to contextualize the gospel.

Thankfully, I think there is another way.  I believe there is a growing number of churches and Christians that are integrating their faith with the complexities of our contemporary world.  I see faith communities emerging that are authentic and intellectually satisfying.  My goal as a pastor and church planter is to be a part of this group.  I want to ‘do church and theology’ in a way that presents the gospel in intellectually compelling ways to this demographic.  I love the nones, because I feel I am one of them.