In the Beginning... Was the WAY

Before the church councils, before the church fathers, before the Gospel writers, there was a creed that was the central tenet of belief for the fledgling group of followers mourning the loss of Jesus.

"Jesus is Lord!"

That is it. That's all. No Trinitarian formulations, no doctrine of salvation... just a claim that at the centre of all we are and all we think is Jesus. 

Now, scholars and folks will tell you that this had serious overtones and repercussions. "Lord" (Kurios in Greek and Adonai in Hebrew) was a term of social understanding given to one who is your better. But at its core it simply means ruler. 

One of the main problems was that the Roman Emperor at the time, Octavian, carried the title Augustus, a fancy religious term for Lord. In other words - the Emperor was Lord, not Jesus - or vice versa depending on where you stand. 

Most agree however, that whether you said this for political or religious reasons, the point of Jesus is Lord is that you give yourself completely over to the teachings and examples of this guru and become someone who owes everything and does everything for Jesus. 

I occasionally find myself pausing to wonder if 2,000 years of interpretation and development within the church did not lead us astray from everything Jesus stood for. But to say it less dramatically, I wonder if we are too often putting our thought and emphasis on the wrong thing.

The "Church" is an institution. The Creeds are interpretation. The priests are intermediaries. And we are a hundred steps away from being actual followers of Jesus. 

Even - and I mean this in the best possible way - even if we could determine what Jesus actually meant without it going through the filter of Paul, and the church, and all of those writings and sermons.... Even then - would most of us who attend or work for a denomination of this global network of institutions be able to say we are following Jesus? 

I had a professor once, and I cannot remember who or where or when, sorry, who told us that the original title for the movement that came about after Jesus was "The Way" The people of the Way were the people who followed the example of Jesus.

And in the early church they took this stuff seriously. They gave away their possessions, they decided not to get married or buy property, they lived together and shared everything in a good socialist way - knowing that this brought them closer to being able to live like Jesus... who was, by all accounts, a wandering, poor, itinerant preacher and teacher. 

Now, none of this is new thought - I want to make that clear. Some of the best minds of recent years within the Christian Thought Factory have written and dissected the idea of Empire and how Jesus lived in opposition to it.

But as a progressive who is trying to make their way in the dying days of ecclesial empire, I think about this at a much more practical level.

How far away am I from living and thinking like Jesus. How would I reclaim the original intent of the faith which was much more of a social reform movement than anything else? How do I lead a congregation in a way that actually honours what Jesus was trying to get across and does not just build on the last millennium or two of Christian Empire building.

First off - I no longer like to use the word Christian. I think we should go back to People of the Way.

Secondly - I think the focus of worship and work within existing church structures should change to be about social justice as the main path to spiritual enlightenment. Or, to be more direct, love and loving everyone should be the main path to spiritual enlightenment.

But mostly I think we need to let go of all the division and fighting that happens in the modern church as we struggle to take our last gasp before going under. We need to understand that almost everything we fight about is made up, an interpretation, or at best, our opinion.

Whether you are left, right, up or down in your own thinking, we can all agree that Jesus basic answer to every question was "love everybody"

how about we focus on that for a while? 

Daisies Pushing Through

Today is 9/11. The first 9/11 I have been in full-time ministry for quite some time.

The original 9/11 was a bit of a problem for me. See, I was a young Turk, second pastoral charge, South Shore Suburban Montreal, meteoric career path, doing graduate studies, and I had a lot of answers.

I also had a parishioner, who worked in the Twin Towers, who had married the love of her life that summer. A Jewish guy from New York who seemed really cool and they seemed perfect together.

They died. Horrifically. Their death certificates said they were murdered. I sat with the family for weeks while they waited for news. More weeks while they confronted the inevitable. Then we set down to plan the largest funeral of my life.

Two years before this the worst funeral I did was for a young teenager, whose friends had stolen his clothes while he was in the river swimming with them. He was too embarrassed to get out, and they watched him drown.

9/11 was when I stopped believing in God.

9/11 was when I became an A/Theist

I gave up graduate school. I left Quebec. I left my wife. I left the church. Eventually.

Nothing was ever the same after that because I knew I was a fraud. I was a fraud because I told people that God loved them, that God had a plan, that History unfolded according to some predetermined but ultimately glorious outcome.

That outcome, it turns out, is hatred and death.

And God? God does nothing.

I am a master theologian. I studied ethics with Gregory Baum, Systematics with Doug Hall, Reformation History with Ed Furcha. If I had of written my Theses I would have ended up with five university degrees in Systematic Theology and Religious Studies instead of the three I have now.

And in one fell swoop, thousands of years of the greatest thought on the nature and essence of God meant nothing to me. My experience. My feelings. My mind told me there was no old man in the clouds who could make things better. If there was, he would.

18 years later and I am back in the pulpit.

And I believe in God.

And I am an Athiest.

But it took me a long time, a lot of reading, and a lot of feeling to put Humpty back together again.

Atheism got a lot of press for a while with the Christopher Hutchins of the world, and then the Greta Vosper debacle in the United Church of Canada. I read all that too.

I know that most people should have looked this up before if they follow any of this stuff - but Atheism does not mean "does not believe in God" it means "against theism"

And theism is a belief in the existence of one God, as the creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.

Which is nonsense. There is no old man in the sky deciding who lives and dies. That idea is just untenable. And causes nothing but problems. For example, if we pray hard enough to our god, then he will listen and vanquish our enemies. Or I am cured of my cancer because God loves me. But Billy over there dies from the same surgery because of... what? God hates him?

We are a people of stories - that is what defines us - and throughout history, we have told stories where God is on our side, because it makes us feel better, and because we wanted something.

We created God in our image because it was the best that we could do. But we have had thousands of years of history and development and thought and grace and love and hate and it should have taught us how to move past this.

To me God is the collective spirit of Good in the universe, perhaps drawn from the living organic creatures in the same way we name Gaia the collective spirit of or energy from the planet.

People said of Greta Vosper, how can an atheist remain a minister. Well, the simple answer is that theism is a small part of our understanding of what God is or could be, and not subscribing to theism does not mean that one does not subscribe to the idea of divinity, of God(s), of the spiritual, or the magical.

So I am back in full time because, I guess, the thing of it is, I still believe in the idea of goodness and that we need to actively work at being good, helping each other to love, and spreading the message of hope.

I have a social media presence. I just need to turn on my computer to feel bad about the world. But we still have a role to play by being followers of Jesus, who basically wanted us to enjoy life and love abundantly.

That is what 9/11 did to me. It made me into the person Jesus would have loved to drink with.

Too Bad We Don't Believe this Whole Death and Resurrection Thing

(as an aside - my brain is constantly at work - but I have to admit that is often because of the conversations I have with many people wiser and more experienced than myself - some of the impetus of my thoughts comes from them - but I do not tell you "Dave said this" because I want to be fully responsible for the upset and ire my blogs create. But I am humbly grateful for those who share their deeper thinking with me)

I am not talking about Jesus.

I am not talking about us.

I am talking about the general philosophical principle that in reality was once the centrepoint of our theology. Things die - things are reborn.

It is at the very beginning of the Bible for God's sake - we get kicked out of the garden and have to start over. The world floods and we have to start over. The prophets are replaced by a monarchy. Deportation and Exile to rebuilding and restoring... Our history, whether written or experienced is one of the old ways dying and the new ways emerging.

To be fair - this often does not go as well as we might hope... just ask Martin Luther - whether you are talking about the medieval or the modern one. When we stand up and admit things have to die, no one wants to hear it. (For that matter, ask Jesus...)

And this is where we find ourselves.

The prophetic voices in the midst of most congregations stand up and say this is a failing enterprise. There are those who admit that our resources are almost depleted and the doors will soon close. And often they are told to hush... that negativity will not win the day... that we should focus on what we have... or some variation of the type of thinking that I fear got us into this mess in the first place.

"What can we do to bring people back into the church" has become our sacred mantra. We invent program, services, music, and outreach based on our belief that the way we do things is not only right but has more meaning than the rest of the world understands.

And I wonder - does all of this mean that we, at our core, do not believe the central tenet of death and resurrection.

See, the whole story of Jesus dying and coming back from the grave on Easter morning was never meant to be about one person - or about supernatural powers - or about heaven... Instead, it was meant to be the philosophical underpinning of kingdom thinking.

Everything Dies - Something New Rises Up

We should all get tattoos of that phrase. We should be required to say it as a mantra. We should come to understand that when Jesus taught us to pray that things on earth would be more like things in heaven - this is what he meant - that we would be able to see that life leads to death leads to resurrection.

And again - it is not about me. It is not about getting into heaven. It is about seeing that everything has a time and place, energy and enthusiasm, an impact and meaning - AND THEN IT DIES.

It is only then that something else comes along to continue on in a different form.

Imagine if this really was our core belief. Imagine if I could say that the people in imaginaryville built this church when the town was founded to give a sense of community and purpose and holiness to the endeavour of creating a town - but that work is finished, it has lived its life, and it is time to die... Let's burn the church and figure out what comes next.

Look around - the modern world does not find meaning in the things it once did. People have changed so quickly and dramatically - the traditional church will not ever come back to life - it has served its purpose....

Now people find meaning in nature. They find meaning in art. They find meaning in online social arguments. They find meaning in the "religious" experiences of a rock concert, or a party, or even a vacation to Disney.

If our goal is to see the Kingdom of Heaven become an accepted reality, why are we holding on to a "kingdom" that was never of heaven and no longer exists? Why are we not looking at the real world and real experiences and saying - how do we find holiness, spirituality, sanctuary, nirvana - however you want to define those thin moments - in the actual day to day reality we face.

What would it be like if we believed that it is possible the local church needs to die in order for something to be reborn from the ashes.

After all - aren't we all about celebrating resurrection?

What is our Ministry?

I hate cutesy titles.

Just throwing that out there.

So when I look at a church bulletin and they have simply renamed every single thing they do as their "ministry" it always causes me to roll my eyes.

ministry of music, the ministry of toilet cleaning, the ministry of coffee hour, the ministry of envelope stuffing, the ministry of...

When churches do that I think they are just pulling a fast one, switching out the idea of an essential part of the workload by calling it their ministry. There is nothing inherently wrong with this... it just does not work for me.

You see - I don't think running a church is part of the ministry.

I know this is a controversial thing to say - but I want you to think about this in other ways. Maintaining a hospital is not providing health care. Painting a tank camouflage is not part of the purpose of the armed forces. Getting an oil change is not the purpose of a car.

There are in fact two distinct things happening when we look at a church and for some reason, we have never liked to separate them out. We are running an organization called the church, and we are doing the ministry of a Christian.

I think the two are separate and they do not overlap nearly as much as we think.

So we need to upkeep a building, keep records, worry about sound systems, transportation, budgets, and administration. We need to have background committees on every level to ensure the functioning of the organization. We need to hire and fire and discipline staff. And on and on and on...

This is not ministry - this is business.

Now, to follow Jesus we need to, figuratively, care for the widows and the orphans. In reality, we need to have outreach programs in the community to care for the disadvantaged, we need to host worship services for deepening spiritual understanding, we need to offer educational opportunities to learn about faith, we need to mentor and counsel people on morality and ethics, we need to provide life transition events like baptisms, weddings, and funerals in order to give meaning to existence...

In either category, there are thousands of other possible answers but I hope from these two examples you can see the line I am trying to create. There is the business and there is the outcome. And perhaps it is time to separate the two out.

Back to the cutesy titles. I think it is disingenuous of us to pretend that we are doing the latter when we are doing the former. I think most of our effort is spent on the business of being the church and too little of our time is on ministry.

And on top of that when we do ministry we are often doing it for the reason of business. We operate programs as if they were advertising campaigns... We do good works hoping that they will lead to engagement with the business.

If you do not think this is true I want you to think back to any planning meeting and ask yourself if you have not heard this statement in some form or another - "well, how does that put bums in the pew?" "Does this bring more people to church?" "Does this translate into increased giving?"

If any of those questions can be answered - then you are probably doing ministry for the wrong reasons.

Again, would it not be better to have the two things completely separated out.

We need to provide a school breakfast program... (because there is child poverty, because education is important, etc.)

What business strategies do we need to engage in to afford and manage a school breakfast program? (meetings, budgets, advertising, etc.)

You see where I am coming from?

We are always asking - how do we keep the church open? And then secondly we are asking what we can afford to do.

What if we turned that around and asked - what ministry do we need to do? And then secondly we asked how do we become able to do that?

Is Sunday Morning worship important for us? What outreach is necessary for the community? What would Jesus do if he lived here? NOW... after we answer questions like this... then ask - can we afford our own building? Where would the best place to operate out of be? How many people do we need to hire to do this? etc.

By the way - I do think we need to be very honest about staffing too... Right now most churches expect staff - whether orfained, administrative, or even volunteer - to accomplish all of category A, all of the business, while hoping that they are actually spending most of their time on category B, ministry.

I don't think we have really stopped to consider if this model works. Or if we are being honest about what we want and how to get it.