Treading Grain

Excellent article:

It struck me the other day that one of the reasons I have returned to mainline religion is because it’s so, well, adult.

Contrary to what I hear around me so often, I want my grandfather’s church.

I know, I know… there are characteristics of that old, traditional church that are not desirable: many had a narrow, parochial spirit, many were characterized by pervasive judgmental attitudes. They could be exclusive, racist, uncreative, and stuck in their ways. This I readily admit and abhor. A congregation that replaces a living, thriving, growing tradition with anemic or dead traditionalism is of no interest to me.

But I want a church where I know and feel that the adults are in charge, where wisdom trumps enthusiasm, where historical perspective is considered, where depth is valued as much as breadth, where stories have shaped us for generations.

I want a church building made of stone and wood, quality materials, with natural light and symbolic significance and a certain level of aesthetic excellence upheld in architecture, art, furnishings, music, liturgy, and preaching and teaching. I don’t want to be snobbish about it, as though these things are there to represent and satisfy my good taste. That is not the point. Rather, they should communicate weightiness, solidity, permanence. Those who come among us should think: “This is a place where life and love and God and people are taken seriously.”

I’m done with an approach to the faith that flies by the seat of its pants and calls it “spiritual.” Gatherings that feel like pep rallies, youth conventions, or pop concerts hold no appeal. I need to be humbled, not enthused; to know my place in a diverse, multi-generational community of ordinary people who are learning to “walk and not faint,” nourished by spiritual leaders and institutions that have gravitas and maturity.

Give me the neighborhood church on the corner, not the big box church on the suburban highway; the robed pastor in the pulpit, not the hipster who preaches from his iPad or the superstar on the video screen. Give me candles and altarware, you can keep the stage lights. Walk me through the Church Year, and help me teach my kids the Catechism. Keep things simple and meaningful. Don’t program us to death with something for everyone. Let us learn to love our neighbors by participating in the community through being involved in the schools, the sports and recreation leagues, the Scouts, the arts and in charitable causes. Give us time to have evening meals with our families and Sunday afternoons at the park or visiting with friends.

Read it all.

From Katharine Welby, the daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby:

I have depression. I get it quite badly on a regular basis and kind of cry and get tired and just generally see no hope in the world. Problem is, recently I have had hope. I am very low, very sad and yet at the same time very happy. It seems like the chemicals in my brain are at war with my circumstances ‘I am happy’ ‘No you are not’ ‘no really I am’ ‘no really you are not’. This is the current sound track to my life.

Amongst all the dull thoughts I have been thinking, I have been pondering the happy/depressed state of my mind and wondering at it. What does it mean to find hope within an illness that is doing everything possible to rob you of it?

I have friends, a nice home, a very supportive family near by, a good church, a good job, a brilliant doctor, and an incredibly wonderful boyfriend, however, previously I have had many of these things and still found myself unable to find a way out of the despair.

So what has changed? For me the change has been an increased understanding of what ‘God loves you’ really means. It goes beyond the point of a strange and distant sense ‘I know, I know, but what difference does it make’ to a point where it has given me the strength to change my mindset and outlook on life.

Now don’t get me wrong, when I am very low I still will see a black veil of nothing hanging in front of me, I will still find that point of hopelessness where there is no way forward. My brain gets full and I cannot possibly understand how to empty it or what the way forward is. However, in between these moments I find life. There is a hope that comes from the understanding that in it all, the highs and lows, the hope and despair there is truly a place where you can find peace.

The bible is my key. Reading the psalms (that oh so regularly quoted ‘you can yell at God, look’ book) I find that I don’t need to have hope every second of the day. In my hopelessness I just need to acknowledge that God is bigger than my illness and he will come through – eventually. Not always easy, but always possible. I go back to Job in the bible, again an inspiration, a man in despair, who maintained trust and faith, but not in a squeaky clean ‘all is fine’ kind of way. In fact, I don’t know that I have yet encountered a single person from the bible who did have a ‘everything is fine’ kind of life. So why do we feel we need to?

The church is the place where hope can be found, but this is only possible if the church is willing to accept that life is not always rosy. The stigma around mental health illness – of any kind, must be eradicated. The bible is full of people who screw up, who get miserable, angry, who hurt and who weep. Even Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane found life a little too much to bear and pleaded with God.

My hope comes from an understanding that life is not easy or straightforward. It is complex and frightening, but I have a God who will stand with me every step. It is just a shame that so often his people will not.

Read the rest.

“Third Floor” (i.e., the clergy floor at SAMP) conversations are varied and amusing. Of late, though, conversations have settled on the alarming state of Christian thought – or lack thereof – demonstrated by those who profess belief in Christ.  Christians actually believe something – our faith has substance.

In a post late last week Rob addressed the issue of emotions – contrasting them with emotionalism.  It was a fine article and well worth your consideration.

Here’s a snip:

I remember watching Arnold Schwarzenegger’s film Commando when I was about five years old.  The news that I had seen that film at such a young age (or seen it at all!) horrified my Christian neighbors, which looking back upon it gives me a little bit of a chuckle.  One of my take home points from that is that Arnold somehow made it through the whole film without crying.  His daughter got kidnapped.  Arnold didn’t cry.  He got thrown out of a plane.  He didn’t cry.  He got flung from a car.  He didn’t even wince.  He was stabbed in the ribs, blown from a building, and shot (multiple times!) and Arnold never shed a tear.  I have high value for all of these things.

I have low value for group hugs, sitting in drum circles, tight jeans, and men crying (there seems to be a link between these things).  This of course is not a biblical conviction.  I just find these things distasteful, kind of like ketchup based BBQ.  I just don’t like it and have suspicions that such things somehow undo the moral fabric of the universe.  Nevertheless, I do have a high value for the emotional life of the Christian.  When I say this, I want to differentiate between emotionalism and the emotional life.  One is bad.  One is vital.  Let’s talk about them briefly.

Read the rest.

Another fine article from Carl Trueman over at Reformation21:

Two things came to mind: the beautiful young things of the reformed renaissance have a hard choice to make in the next decade.  You really do kid only yourselves if you think you can be an orthodox Christian and be at the same time cool enough and hip enough to cut it in the wider world. Frankly, in a couple of years it will not matter how much urban ink you sport, how much fair trade coffee you drink, how many craft brews you can name, how much urban gibberish you spout, how many art house movies you can find that redeemer figure in, and how much money you divert from gospel preaching to social justice: maintaining biblical sexual ethics will be the equivalent in our culture of being a white supremacist.

And the second thing that came to mind were the lyrics of a Jagger-Richards song: ‘Just as every cop is a criminal And all the sinners saints’.  That is surely a brilliant statement of the topsy-turvy morality of the world which sin has produced and in which we now live.  Oh, and the name of the song?  ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, of course.

Read it all.