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Crises tend to reveal who we are and what we believe. And that goes for the church as well. Consider these two examples.

I recently read a message from a local pastor about the COVID-19 outbreak. Did the pastor take the opportunity to delve into the deep spiritual, theological challenges confronting us in this time of need?  

Well, not exactly. Mostly the message was a plea that we recognize our interconnectedness, especially to the global community. The climax of the message focused on the central issue of our day – the sin of wrongly identifying the epidemic as “the Chinese virus.”

Continue reading “A Non-Essential Service”

Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, famously stressed the importance of interpreting the Bible as “narrative.” By this he didn’t mean it isn’t true, but that its underlying meaning is grasped in the form of story.  

Noted for his almost indecipherably dense Germanic writing style, with dependent clause upon dependent clause, our assignment in divinity school was to read only about ten pages at a clip of his landmark four-volume tome, Church Dogmatics.

So, years ago, I based a children’s story on it. With the youthful trusting faces surrounding me up in the chancel, I asked them if they liked a good story. They did.

Continue reading “The Stories We Tell”

Back when I was deciding whether to seek ordination or not, I wrestled with the fear that being a pastor would place a barrier between me and others.

I had noticed that many of my friends and acquaintances had reacted poorly to the news I was attending divinity school. Many thought it odd and not especially worthwhile. Like many today, they couldn’t quite understand why I would commit to such a thing. Christianity, after all, was on the ropes, and being a pastor a dead-end proposition.

Indeed, over the years I’ve officiated at any number of weddings. More often than not the young people treat me as if I’m a Martian or something, an odd creature whose life-sensibilities are mysterious if not just plain weird.

Continue reading “Faith in the Time of COVID-19”

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An extraordinary event occurred this past Friday, though its significance is likely to go unnoticed. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, various medical experts and industry leaders gathered at the White House to announce to the nation various steps being taken collectively to address the virus’ looming threat.

This was an exceedingly rare instance of normally competing worlds agreeing to work together on a common problem for the common good. I was heartened by it.

Generally, in today’s economic climate, multinational corporations have little loyalty to the nations within which they operate. In an era of rampant financialization, the only loyalty is to the shareholder, not the country or its people.

Continue reading “Love in the Time of COVID-19”

As if beating a dead horse, I must yet again propose this simple truism – that the mainline church today is far more influenced by the secular culture than the other way around. And to make matters worse, they don’t seem to recognize it.

Perhaps the greatest fallout from this is the loss of “fellowship,” the sense of belonging, of being inextricably bound to one another, of being “in Christ.”

The surrounding culture has largely jettisoned this rather quaint notion, to disastrous result. Yet despite its pronounced effect, it remains largely unnoticed.

One of the root causes is the hyper-politicization of every aspect of modern life. One must choose sides. You’re either with us or against us. It’s Manichean, black or white.

Continue reading “Abstract Me-ism”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to say a prayer to change the weather. For some reason it’s a popular joke, implying that pastors have some special pipeline to God. More to the point, it betrays a shared sense that pastors are holy creatures, closer to God and immune to sinful pressures.

Now, I do think pastors should be held to a higher standard and that they should strive for holiness. But I also know every single one of them is a sinner. It’s biblical, after all, as well as confessional, doctrinal, and in accord with lived experience. We all fall short of the glory of God. No news flash there.

Yet some pastors seem to believe their own “press releases,” so to speak. The temptation is to assume that because you serve a religious community, you’re somehow immune to non-religious influences.

Continue reading “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”

Recently I was watching a YouTube interview with one of my favorite columnists who offered a startling observation. Except for maybe one or two, he said, most columnists avoid placing current events in the context of history. As a historian he always does.

For some reason this struck me, even though we live in an age that takes pride in avoiding history, if not rejecting it altogether. You might say it’s built into our DNA.

Though this trend has accelerated over the last 50-60 years, its roots go back at least as far as the Enlightenment some 400 years ago. Many would date it 100 years before that.

Continue reading “Making It All Up”

Pastoring a UCC church in Hawaii years ago, Tony Robinson convened an “interfaith dialogue” that included representatives from several of the world’s major religions. He discovered that while the other participants had no trouble articulating what their respective faiths stood for, the UCCers were at a loss, unable to define what they believed about their own.

This led Robinson to conclude that mainline Protestant churches tend to know what they’re against, just not what they’re for!

Then again, as with so much of mainline Protestantism, the origins of this peculiar malady are rooted in secular, elite opinion. Of course.

Continue reading “The Piety of Disenchantment”

Don’t Go There

A basic fact of human nature is that we are meaning-seeking creatures. Amid the confusion and uncertainty of everyday life, human beings require an overarching story, a narrative, that grounds us in reality and helps us make sense of life as well as death.

In his critically acclaimed book from 2017, The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray, British journalist and author, explains how Europe and, by inference, the rest of the Western world lost touch with its defining story, the Judeo-Christian story, which both birthed the West and gave it meaning.  

Now in its disquieting absence is revealed a malaise, an “existential tiredness.”

Continue reading “In Search of a Story”

One of the things I discovered during my years of ordained ministry is that the average person in the pews possesses enormous wisdom. I also discovered that many of my colleagues think the opposite.

Almost without exception, my experience is that if you are open with people and give them the facts, they almost always make the right decision.

So why do so many of my colleagues seem to disagree with this simple premise? Perhaps it’s because so many, flush with the latest speculative theories advanced by their seminary professors, patronizingly assume the average person in the pews lacks the requisite sophistication to judge rightly.

Continue reading “I Win, You Lose”