Before I begin I should say I had a great time at MHGS. I say this because as hard on it as I am I did enjoy myself, learn a lot, and grow with a group of great people.
A couple of weekends ago Rob Bell visited the seminary and had a good interaction with students there. I watched the exchange online and enjoyed seeing Rob interact with people at MHGS. After he attended the school he wrote this on his webpage:
I had the chance to speak at the Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle. Those folks are so far out ahead. When you start there, you essentially do group therapy for a while, because, as they say, “you can’t take people where you’re not willing to go yourself.” Brilliant. This kind of holistic, flesh and blood, theological education is where it’s at.
Here I think Rob points out very clearly what is billed as the central experience at MHGS, Practicum. For many people at MHGS this type of situation is a well needed breath of fresh air that helps them get perspective on their lives. For many students the Practicum experience is a gateway to professional one on one therapy that continues healing for them but at times can turn into a sort of fetish for the MHGS student.
But I think my biggest problem about what Rob’s quote states is that it signifies an attitude that floats around the school that therapy is the thing that is going to take us to the places where we are not willing to go.
Granted, I am not the typical MHGS student, but practicum never met in that way. Maybe I wasn’t open to it, or it was the wrong time, or I was just too worried about passing. However, practicum served as a good opportunity to try on different modes of listening, and understand issues of transference. But there are those at the school who would echo what Rob is saying here and that therapy is the realm where we will surpass where we will go.
On a biographical note, when I was halfway through MHGS I started volunteering bi-weekly at a ministry for the homeless. It was the place I didn’t want to go but I found myself there none the less. I would sit and talk to people who from week to week couldn’t even remember my name. I soon learned that I had nothing to offer them, but I kept going and through the process people close to me began to notice I was changing as a person. After I graduated I started spending three mornings a week with the folks at this ministry. I would come into the house in the morning put on a pot of coffee, do the dishes, and just sit. Some days I broke up fights, some days I hung out in garden with them, some days I helped them with laundry. I prayed a lot. It was a humbling time, but with little else to offer it was what I did. This was the place of transformation, my holistic, flesh and blood education.
Before I came to MHGS I read a Brian McLaren book (I can’t remember which one) where he laid out that seminary could be a place where people came together and did things like this. I had misinformed myself enough to think this is what Practicum was and failed to ask the right questions before attending. While Practicum and therapy was for many students what Rob says it is I felt lost with the singular option I was expected to fit into.
This is my problem – when I think of flesh and blood, holistic theological education I don’t think of the classroom or the therapy session with other emerging adults, but of the places that Jesus will carry my body that I do want to go. When I hear what Rob describes I just can’t imagine the therapeutic experience aimed at creating a healthy individual who can enter into community changed but something else. I think of places we could not go but for Jesus carrying us there. Sitting in silence (see the bottom of this article by feminist theologian Sarah Coakley), placing our bodies between conflicts, teaching at risk youth coffee skills, joining a black Pentecostal church, going to the godless, working with the homeless, prostitutes, or the mentally disabled. I think the key thing for me is that I am convinced going places where we don’t want to go involves Jesus carrying our bodies there and not just our minds/souls.
I was one of a few students that got votes to address the graduating class and was asked to pray at the ceremony. Being aware that people thought of me as one to address the class I began to ponder what I would have said if I was giving one of the speeches and the only I think I could think of is this section of John that I feels gets to the heart of what I was trying to say during my time at MHGS:
Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, "Follow me!"
Never lie. Never Lie.
And you’ll discover that is hard work. And part of what it means not to lie is to preach truthfully and what it means to preach truthfully is to preach in manner that you expect God to show up because the Word has been proclaimed. As soon as you hear a minster say, “As my six year old was saying” you know its going to BS. Because its going to insight on the human condition that anyone could have at the Kiwanis club. What it means to preach truthfully and not to lie is to be willing to say when you don’t know what needs to be said…”But that we do see Jesus. We are not sure we know what needs to be said. If I said more than that I would be lying to you. But we do see Jesus.”
I also of course think it is very important to see Jesus in the body and blood of Christ… That won’t make us more faithful but at least God promised to kill us if we do it unworthily or at least make us sick. And I figure that that’s better than dying of boredom. If we return to Eucharistic celebration in a serious manner who knows what God would do with that. What it means to be a Christian is very simple. It means you worship Jesus. But it forces a extraordinary intellectual and moral challenge and we need to be people confident that God will help us speak and live appropriate to the speech we have been given. What I hope we do in the divinity school is give you confidence that you can use the language of the faith, Jesus is Lord without apology. Because if you do that God will show up and scare the hell out of you.
I know that I said I wouldn’t post aimless quotes here but at the tumblr instead but I broke that rule with this one. I think it’s because this quote seems anything but aimless.
Romano Guardini said the Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified; once could not separate Christ from His Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church.
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 150.
This came up in a conversation with Cabe today and I think it hits on one of the reasons why some of us can never give up the Church. And what we want and try so desperately to see is something that Ephraim Radner points out in hope, “Come and see the Body of our Lord. That’s what Christian ought be saying with respect to their churches. Come and see, but recognize in the body that is our Church the form of Jesus not something else…the Church looks like Jesus.”
Today I had intended to write a post on seminary education using these quotes but somehow lost the thread I was using to tie them all together. If you can find a way to make it happen write the essay yourself but here is what I was going to work with:
Recently I had a long conversation with my friend Cabe in which both of us pondered whether Hauerwas’s corpus might be better read as liberation theology for American Christians. I can’t remember who came up with this thought but it gave some shape to my thinking about the critiques Hauerwas receives and what his project holds in our mind shapes the holes and themes we will see throughout his writings. Some who will read Hauerwas’s project as primarily about proposing something counter to identities produced by modern liberalism will find different holes than those who see his project as proposing a Christocentric form-of-life via Wittgenstein.
I had held off on blogging this thought, but today I came across this line in Mangia’s review of Hauerwas’s commentary on Matthew:
As I read the commentary, two things began to dawn on me: first, the extent to which Hauerwas’s whole corpus can be read as a kind of liberation theology for North Americans and Western Europeans, asking the embarrassing question as to how we can be Christians and yet so rich; second, the extent to which wealth and poverty are also themes in Matthew’s gospel.
Here, I agree with Mangia, but instead of using the word rich I would use the word comfortable. I would do this not as an effort to escape a critique of riches but I think Hauerwas seriously wonders how we can as Christians can be so comfortable in what he sees as a deeply disturbing society. Why nobody has yet attempted to read Hauerwas in such a way is beyond me given the large of amount of books we have interacting with his project for someone who is still living.
Luke Timothy Johnson, another scholar I respect, wrote a very powerful rebuke of Hauerwas’s commentary that asked “Hauerwas or Matthew?: Pick one.” While I thought his review pointed to several interesting critiques, I think he misses the question Hauerwas is asking those in biblical studies, theologians, and all readers of Matthew, “Matthew, Hauerwas, or Jesus? Pick one.” Hauerwas has no problem losing Matthew (or himself) in writing a commentary, as long as we find Jesus in his place. Near the beginning of his commentary Hauerwas explicitly makes this point in a discussion of apocalyptic and time:
Apocalyptic is the disruption of time by God’s time so that time might be redeemed. Apocalyptic means that there is another world, another time, than the one in which we live; but it turns out to be the same world in which we live. As Rainer Maria Rilke puts it: "There is another world, the same as this one." We simply must learn to see the world in which we live as the world that the Father created and redeemed through the Son. . . . Matthew’s gospel is, therefore, an ongoing exercise to help us see the world through Christ.
“Youth groups destroy children’s lives,” Fitch told me.
David Fitch is a pastor and writer who I respect, and I must admit I laughed out loud when I read that quote. First off I knew it was kind of an outrageous quote to begin with, so you can see in the comments that’s not exactly what he means. Second, I think David is right in the sense that segregating youth off to a different room, entertaining them and “challenging” them, then sending them to college with very little integration into adulthood (even though in most youth groups they are baptized full members of the church), is just giving kids a simplistic version of the faith does that can actually destroy their spiritual lives. During my time at MHGS it was hard to hear the consistent stories of what my friends where actually taught and expected to believe in
their youth groups.
Last week Christian Century raised a concern about youth groups with an article titled, Is Youth Ministry Killing the Church? Kate Murphy, who served as youth minster, wonders if we are just ministering youth right out of the church. By separating our youth from the church and entertaining them we may be doing little more than leading them anyway from the church. She writes:
Kenda Creasy Dean and others warn that when our children and youth ministries ghettoize young people, we run the risk of losing them after high school graduation….Over the years I’ve worked with young people as passionate and serious about their faith…I think I’ve done youth ministry with integrity. But I may have been unintentionally disconnecting kids from the larger body of Christ. The young people at my current congregation—a church that many families would never join because “it doesn’t have anything for youth”—are far more likely to
remain connected to the faith and become active church members as adults, because that’s what they already are and always have been.
But the more I think about youth ministry I think we really face the challenge that we are ministering them to the mega-church. If we minister to them to experience a complacent faith that is primarily about what they want when they do leave the church they will most likely be drawn to mega expressions of it that requires little from them. Most of the visions of the faith we are giving them is one that is primarily about them. However, I believe most youth will find this unconvincing in college and seek out something other than the Christian faith. Christianity Today has always written recently about the shape of youth ministry and I found this particular interview with Kara Powell helpful.
What other issues do teens face that make student ministry important?
There is a strong link between kids staying in church and their involvement in intergenerational relationships and worship. A couple of important things are going on during adolescence.
First, teens are in a quest to figure out their identity. They tend to try on different identities in different spheres, which leaves them feeling like they live somewhat fragmented lives—they’re one person on the soccer field, another person in school, another person on Facebook, and still another person at church and at home. Autonomy is a second major focus of an adolescent’s quest. "How do I make decisions apart from my parents?" The third is significance. So teens are asking, "Who am I? Where do I fit in? What difference does my life make?" In a sense, those issues are relevant to all ages, but the flame is turned up under those questions during adolescence.
Here I think we find a more complete picture of what is going on with youth, but I am just not sure intergenerational worship is the solve all, as this article proposes it is. If you think about some of Christianity’s relations to these questions in Youth ministry it’s not hard to see how we have failed in this regard. For some Christianity just becomes another personality that gives an identity that often has little to do with any other part of their lives. Although my favorite and what I consider perhaps the most insightful line to consider is this:
Tenth graders study Shakespeare. What are we offering them at church? Nothing comparable to Shakespeare.
It might be fair to say that most 10th graders aren’t all the interested in Shakespeare as they advance in education and deeper into culture, but they most certainly find something to appreciate that leads them to believe that much of what they learned at church isn’t as beautiful or as compelling. But the church, I believe, has one of the most beautiful compelling stories in the world and yet somehow for all ages we have found a way to make that and boring prosaic.
I go back and forth on whether I should post my sermons online. Part of me feels that because I borrow so heavily from so many sources without showing where I shouldn’t do it. Part of me feels like a bad sermon opens me up to a lot of criticism. They are also extremely unedited because I fill in the gaps when I speak it aloud.
Despite those concerns I have decided that it wouldn’t kill me to share of my sermons online. I will normally post the texts a excerpt, and the rest will appear after the jump.
Texts: Isaiah 62:1-5, Psalm 36:5-10, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, John 2:1-11
What we have here is a God who messes with our expectations. His glory comes in his touch and it can be denied. His signs are not logical precise images but rather precarious moments that not every body sees. A God who bridges the gap between the historical sense of time and divine in way that we don’t quite understand. A God who takes our purification water and makes into a 100 gallons of glorious wine for all to drink so that we have nowhere to wash our hands. This is God who doesn’t function from a economy of lack or need but of great abundance, and it is abundance that makes us uncomfortable.
Now that I am a full time pastor I often consider a conversation that came up several times at seminary. When talking about the church at some point we would all begin to rail on how one medium is done (think worship, preaching, small groups) and laugh at how shallow, individualist, or consumerist some of the approaches we take to these things in the church. While it was a fun seminary thing to do, and many times good points were brought up, for those of us heading towards professional ministry it was a constant reminder that were going to have to do something when were employed.
One particular time this conversation came up was in regard to worship music. Everybody made fun of the Passion movement, repressed sexual lyrics about God, cheesy choruses, and we all had a good laugh. But since I just interviewed for a position that day I asked some of the most vocal people, “Ok, I totally agree with your critiques but when I go to work for a church they are going to want to sing something about God, what should it be?” The first response I got was, “Don’t ask me, I just stopped going to church.” Given that wasn’t an option I pushed a little further to get the general response of “we don’t know.”
“We don’t know” is one thing that often summed up the seminary critiques about the church. So when in the process of stumbling through the blogs I read this week I came across this video.
On the one hand I was instantly drawn toward critiquing the overused buzz word called “missional.” And yet when I got over my need to out think everything I realized this video very correctly displays some of my hopes for Lebanon Mennonite. In this area of the country there is a desire to make an invitation into evangelism and to become another wanna-be mega church. Sure the video isn’t all good but it isn’t all bad. And when I finally came around to not seeing it as just bland apology for the word missional, the video reminded me of am extremely simplified presentation of what Halden and Dr. Nate Kerr seem to be calling for from our churches. (They would most likely put the in place of mentioning the church in second scenario something like the church reminding us of the apocalyptic nature of Jesus in it’s place, but then they lost every non-theologian watching).
All of this to say that I am trying to get over my deep seated cynicism.
Michael Horton: One person pointed out a comment she heard from one of your talks, “Predestination puts self interest out of the equation and this seems to me to liberate one to act on motive more consitent with Christ’s teaching.” And she went on to say of your statement, “A certain self forgetfulness is the point. Like Calvin, Robinson’s cause may be suggested by the word reverence. Her work brims with a deep reference for life for our own lives for others and finally for the mystery of God whom we cannot fully comprehend but whose unmerited grace towards us is the one fact that abides.” Is that fair?
Marilynn Robinson: I think that’s more than fair. I think that’s lovely. I think it’s true also that, you know, predestination as an idea and you could call it providence if you wanted to look at from another side, that’s something that’s all caught up with time. You know the idea that if time unfold sequentially predestination is one thing. You know because it seems to imply that you can’t never act in a way that isn’t predestined, although frankly that’s not the way that theologians understand it. But if time is something else and we only experience it sequentially, then obviously another kind of thing is being described. Something for which we don’t have a vocabulary. But if you take it that you act not in your own interest, if you take it that you can put questions of heaven and hell basically out of account, and act as you do out of the desire to know God, which is what Calvin would say, then it is entirely another thing.
I don’t believe I have ever heard predestination described in such a compelling way. Not sure if I am for it, but it struck as an amazing way to speak of the providence of God.
Listen to the rest here. Her final thoughts on what a good book is should also be heard.
A current high point in my New Year. Eccentric Existence by David H. Kelsey. The remaining Yale School theologian. 1050 pages. Two Volumes. My Christmas money gone.
I am hopeless.
