A Prayer for Liberation

God of enduring grace,
you meet us in our situation
patiently, you endure our suffering with us before ever you demand that we flee from it.
Into our struggle, into our doubt, into our sin you come and there give hope;
a hope that endures,
a hope that sustains,
a hope that gives courage;
a courage which resists,
a courage which liberates,
a courage to follow in obedience and faith;
faith which remembers,
faith which sees forward,
faith which proclaims, in word and deed, the good news of God's reign over and in the midst of the struggle, the doubt, and the tragedy of sin.

God of enduring grace,
you meet us in our situation.
We do not need to conjure your presence, nor can we condition you to respond to us.
In your freedom, you captivate and liberate us.
While we were yet sinners, you assumed our sin and entered into our death.
You meet us in our situation.
Liberate us from our struggle to find you elsewhere.
Amen.

Graduation and the Gospel

It's graduation season. Lots of people are going out into the world from one sphere or another--from high school, college, graduate school, etc.

Many graduation speeches will be given, and the resounding message will likely be, "go out! Do great things! Accomplish amazing feats! You are capable! Your generation is the future! Go and do, influence, effect, and create!" These speeches will be inspirational, sometimes even life-giving, but the trap which they create will be ignored. The trap which is created when we orient our future toward accomplishment, toward goals and capabilities, is that we lose sight of the value of those things from which we won't benefit, those lives which might not help us change the world, and those beautiful things in the world which are so easily labeled as insignificant. We are caged behind the bars of ambition, isolated from the incredible beauty and worthiness of the poor, the marginalized, the insignificant, the small church in the country filled with people over the age of 60, the struggling high school student who probably won't even get into college, the friends with laborious occupations who meet for coffee but don't seem to have any potential for so-called greatness... 

The message of ambition can bury us under the burden of expectation and requirement. But the gospel message extends a hope and a freedom from the burden of expectation. The gospel tells us that we are saved by grace for which no work is a prerequisite. The gospel invites us to dedicate ourselves to the poor, the marginalized, the insignificant... to those from whom we cannot and will not benefit. We are invited to see the sacredness of living with the church that won't change the world, the significance of loving the high school student who will not be influenced, the greatness of spending mundane time with friends who won't accomplish anything worth remembering. We are free to become nothing. Such is the way of the cross which brings resurrection and ironically announces a future of joy. 

So here's a shout-out to all my Seminary friends who are graduating today. Congratulations! Now go into the world with the freedom in Christ to become nothing...to do no great things... to dedicate yourself to insignificance. Be free from the burden of expectation and requirement. Be only what grace requires of you and respond to grace with love. That is your mission.

"We can do no great things, only small things with great love." -Mother Theresa

A Journey Into Earth: from a theology of glory to a theology of the cross

"The crucified God takes believers on a journey into earth, into its pain and suffering, and finds in that journey not the holiness of pain but the wonder of life's power to persist and transform. The way of the crucified God seeks God in earth's humanity, which has been abandoned, rejected, and despised, the people who know life amid their struggle." -Mark Lewis Taylor (The Executed God, 3). 

It's one of the most difficult theological moves to make. The move from a "theology of glory"--a theology which takes the believer on a journey up and away to a holy God above, away from the earth, away from suffering, and away from humanity--to a "theology of the cross" which, as Dr. Taylor says it, "takes believers on a journey into earth..." and allows them to discover God in the midst of the pain and in the midst of that which has been rejected and abandoned. It's so difficult, but so necessary.

When our conception places God somewhere out there separated from and reacting to our suffering, perhaps even causing it, rather than actually experiencing it with us, then the cross becomes a means to an end, a transaction of God in purchase of the souls of humans, an exchange for the purpose of justification. Ministry itself then becomes a means to an end. Since God is somewhere else, people need to be taken somewhere else, people need to be changed, transformed, justified, and ministry becomes the means for change and transformation. People are subjected to an ideal. We elevate those who have succeeded rather than affirming those who suffer and those who struggle.

But when our conception allows us to see God on the cross, to see the crucified God, then the cross itself needs to be transformed. The bodies which hang on the crosses of history are affirmed as God joins them in their situation. God is discovered in rejected humanity. The transformation of people is not a goal reached my means of a transaction but a reaction to the realization of the empowering solidarity and presence of a God who has resurrection as God's future. Justification happens indeed because the crucified God is a coming God whose openness to creation and whose restored relation to humanity is essential to God from God's very origin. In other words, who God is in the end is who God is in the present and who God has been from the very beginning. Justification is just part of who God is, and so when God meets us in our suffering and in our sin, justification meets us there as well.  Ministry is not a means to an end, but an experience of God in the sharing of humanity.

We don't have to get people somewhere else. We ourselves don't have to get somewhere else.  We simply need to open our eyes to the presence of the God who is with us.

Indeed, this is a difficult theological move to make... when Martin Luther stumbled upon the realization of the crucified God, not everyone was ready for it. Some found it literally liberating and others wanted to kill him over it. When everything you know has been built around the "theology of glory," when ministry has always been about getting people out of their sin and into heaven, when God has always been too holy to bear the presence of sinners, then the theology of the cross, the transformation from influence to presence in ministry, and the very suggestion that God might not be any holier than a withered body on a cross will be almost impossible to accept. But "it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God" (Eph. 2:8). Impossible as it may be to accept, we are empowered through faith to see that the crucified God meets us in our suffering with grace. We are free from transactions and exchanges, free from coercive ministry, free to encounter God as we share in the humanity of our neighbor--indeed as we love one another. We are free to go on that journey, the journey into earth, to discover God in our midst.

Farewell, Dallas Willard

I remember the day I created this blog.

I was a young college student, just starting to learn to think theologically, just beginning on the path which has lead me to where I am today. I had just been to a small weekend conference in San Diego with a group which I was working with from my school, a group I'd been involved with since high school that was committed to challenging high school students to think about their faith and live it out daily and authentically. The weekend conference was designed to be somewhat intensive. We got to choose "track times" where we studied specific topics. I chose the topic, "The Kingdom of God"  ...and to this day I consider that to be one of the most important choices of my theological life and development. I was exposed there, for the first time, to a particularly important author and theologian--Dallas Willard.

I had so many new concepts running through my brain, I just had to find an outlet. So I created this blog... "Living in the Kingdom." It's a silly name... what does that even mean? But I've kept it for these years, in many ways as a tribute to Dallas Willard and to that weekend where the Kingdom of God became the dominant motif in my theological reflection and the open door to a wide world of theological thought which I've only just begun to explore.

Dallas Willard's book The Divine Conspiracy was one of the most important books for me, one of the first theological books I ever read. And the chapter, "The Eternal Kind of Life Now" was the inspiration for this blog and its earliest content. After I read that chapter I became obsessed. I remember being star-struck when I finally got to meet Dr. Willard and ask him a question (probably a stupid one) about his perspective. He was charitable and remarkably kind to a young dumb college student trying to figure things out.

Today, Dr. Dallas Willard--one of the most important theological voices in the church--has succumbed to cancer at age 77.

His influence was profoundly important in my life. I owe a great debt to Dallas Willard! ...and I think that the whole church in the United States does as well.

Thank you Dr. Willard. You will be missed.

Breaking the Reign of Capitalism and Philanthropy in Relationships

I'm sitting here on a rainy day in Princeton at the local Starbucks coffee shop (there're actually several local Starbucks coffee shops), enjoying my "grande" iced mocha. As I sit in close proximity to the counter, I can hear people ordering their drinks and picking them up, sharing cordial and friendly conversation with the folks behind the checkout counter. I'm struck by the friendliness and especially the overall ease of the interactions. The people here don't know one another any better than the folks riding a public bus, staring at their feet in silence or pretending to be on the phone. There's no easy or natural way to conduct a conversation with a stranger on a bus. What makes these conversations at Starbucks, between customers and "baristas" so easy, so natural? I'm sure that it has something to do with the mutuality of the place. The customer has something to offer (namely money) and the barista has something to offer (a half-decent cup of coffee and some pastries). But it's a warped kind of mutuality isn't it? Nobody expects any different here, we wouldn't have it another way, but the mutuality here is a conjured sort. It's not about sharing, it's about exchange and transaction. And somehow, in this culture, this relationship of exchange—indeed, a counterfeit sort of mutuality—has become much more comfortable and natural for us than actual relationships of mutuality and sharing.


In many ways, mutuality in relationships—the kind of mutuality that involves authentic personhood and caring—has been swallowed up by capitalism. The exchange feels more natural to us than the gift, we are in our safe zone when there is something to purchase. It's even hijacked our friendships, I think. I tried to buy a friend some dinner a few weeks ago because he forgot his wallet... but as soon as we saw each other again, he handed me some cash to pay me back. Of course I took the money, lets not go crazy, but it was interesting to me how uncomfortable he was... and he wasn't gonna be comfortable again until he paid me back and the slate was clean. He "owed" me, so he paid me back. The conjured mutuality of exchange and transaction was much more comfortable than the mutual relationship of gift and reception.

If our mutuality in relationship is not swallowed up in capitalism, then it's at least been lost in philanthropy. According to its etymological origins, philanthropy is the "love of humanity," it's the work of nurturing and affirming what it means to be human. But today we've narrowed it down to donating and volunteering. Now, I wouldn't want to discourage people from volunteering and donating, but in its most common forms, philanthropy hardly nurtures what it means to be human, unless we narrow that definition down to needs and wants. Needs and wants are definitely taken seriously in any full definition of what it means to be human, but people—more fundamentally—are not their needs and their wants. I tend to agree with Andrew Root when he says that people are their relationships. To nurture humanity, then, is to nurture authentic relationships, mutual relationships. When someone writes a check and sends it off to a child in Africa who they've never met, it might be kind and it might be generous, but its not a relationship and therefore its not really philanthropic—it doesn't directly nurture what it actually means to be human. In fact, it can be received more as condescension than as a gift (and this, I believe is where a lot of the tension between rich and poor has developed—not merely in inequality itself but in the misunderstanding between the two when a 'rich' person is trying to be "philanthropic" and the 'poor' person receives their offer as insincerity and insult). When someone helps build a house in Mexico, again, it might be good, compassionate, and even necessary, but if we do that in place of actually sharing in the humanity of people, then its just a counterfeit version of mutuality and relationship and it can't, in any holistic way, nurture what it means to be human. People are their relationships and relationships are about giving and receiving, not donating and volunteering.

The fact is, there's a little truth in both of the lies—the lie of mutuality hijacked by capitalism and the lie of relationship replaced by pseudo-philanthropy. Just as in the capitalistic transactional exchange, in any real relationship, both parties have something to offer. But it isn't money or coffee, its the gift of personhood. Exchange feels comfortable precisely because of this element of truth that exists therein, but the transaction leaves us empty (even if we are filled with coffee) because the relationship isn't actually about relationship when it's all said and done and the persons are reduced to functions—buyers and sellers. There's no gifts, just products.

Likewise, the "philanthropic" relationship of donating and volunteering has an element of truth. We are created to give... and we are certainly called to meet the needs of the people around us, but we're created to give of ourselves not just of our stuff. We are created to share...but we're created to share our hearts not just our time and energy. Donating and volunteering are good and they can, in fact, be very relational when we volunteer with our friends and donate out of the outpouring of mutuality and caring in a community. But donating and volunteering can't replace mutuality in relationships because we are also created to receive, to receive gifts not just products, to receive care not just cure. Such gifts and such caring can only happen between people who share in each others' personhood and humanity.

We need to reclaim the art of mutuality in relationships that's been lost in philanthropy and swallowed by capitalism. In order to do that, we will need to get better at giving and receiving rather than buying and selling, better at sharing and caring rather than donating and volunteering. We will have to learn one another's names, not by reading them on a name tag or writing them on plastic Starbucks cups. We will have to care for one another, not by sending a check or building something, but by sharing time together and suffering together. We have to start looking at and talking with the people who aren't selling coffee if we want to nurture what it actually means to be human.

Discipleship Vs. Disciple-Making

Now that I'm all finished for the semester, I've started in on some summer reading. Today I finished Out of Solitude by Henri Nouwen (which I could not recommend any more highly) and started reading Multiply by Francis Chan. I try to read whatever I can from Chan, not so much because I like what he has to say (in fact, quite often I don't) but because I think he's an important voice in the church. For some reason the evangelical tradition seems to have elevated him to "prophet" status and although in many ways it's a stretch for me to call myself an evangelical, I still haven't given up on the evangelical ethos.

Chan's book Multiply is designed more as a curriculum than a book. It's designed for people to go through it together in pairs - a 'disciple' and a 'teacher'.

Now, I know I have a history of being critical of Francis Chan... even when I was in college, when he spoke regularly at APU, I was that guy who wasn't as excited as the rest of my friends that Francis was speaking. But regardless... picking up Chan after reading Nouwen is probably a mistake for anybody.

There's this underlying assumption, throughout Nouwen, that people are valuable as people and that ministry is an art of patience--patiently wading into the humanity of the other with no external agenda--out of which divine encounter occurs. Presence is the basis of ministry for Nouwen. And it seems to me that presence is the basis of ministry for Jesus too. "The friend who cares makes it clear that whatever happens in the external world, being present is what really matters" (OOS, 35). Nouwen invites Christians to see ministry as participating in the God who came to share our suffering. This means that we are to become people who, "instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures..." are willing to embrace the other on their terms and love them in their humanity. Who is the 'teacher'? And who is the 'disciple'? These distinctions are not yet determined... We are to be people who "can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing..." and can face with others the the reality of "powerlessness" (OOS, 34). For Nouwen, it's all about presence.

"Discipleship" (not presence) has become the buzzword in evangelicalism.

Throughout Multiply (and keep in mind, I just started reading it... maybe it gets better) I've come across bits and pieces which have been difficult for me to accept. Coupled with some questionable exegetical moves, there're some parts that just irk me. And I think it's all got to do with the underlying presupposition behind Chan's work... that discipleship is about disciple-making.

It's always been Chan's presupposition that ministry is about changing lives, which he defines as "making disciples." I hope he would think that this is a fair assessment.

For Chan, the hard reality is that if people don't 'accept Jesus' and change their lives, then they'll be sent to hell by God, to suffer there for all eternity. As disconcerting as this may be, this is not yet the problem. The problem is that this apocalyptic threat of eternal damnation has become, for Chan, the very basis of ministry and the basis of discipleship. Making disciples is the goal, because if you can make people into disciples, then you'll save them from hell.

Think what you want about hell, but as soon as it becomes the basis of your ministry--as soon as ministry becomes about changing people or "making" anything, even disciples, out of them--then you've introduced an ulterior motive into the relationships of ministry. As soon as you make this move, it will be difficult to make the kind of move that Nouwen wants us to make. In fact, ministry as presence and ministry as disciple-making are incompatible. Discipleship - living life in the way of Jesus - actually has a lot more to do with presence and with entering into relationships than it does with making disciples. For Jesus, presence preceded change, care preceded cure (OOS, 31-32).

Early in the book, Chan writes, "the Multiply process..." and yes, he calls it a process... "is meant to be highly relational" (Multiply, 10). But the sentence which got me to my computer to write this post was this one: "Jesus commands you to look at the people around you and start making them into disciples" (Multiply, 35).  He continues... "God has placed these people in your life so that you will do everything you can to influence them" (Multiply, 36). To see people through such a lens (and I know this from experience, I've worn that lens) precludes actual relationship. You might be able to fool people into thinking that you're being relational (and you'll have good reason to do this if disciple-making in the goal because relationships are the most manipulative and effective means for changing lives) but your true motive will always be conversion - not relationship, not presence. You can't actually minister to someone when you're just trying to make them into a disciple. You can't love a person when you have ulterior motives.

For Chan, disciple-making is the basis of ministry, you make people into disciples and you're doing ministry. Indeed, for Chan, discipleship is all about disciple-making. For Nouwen, however, discipleship itself is entering into relationships in the way of Jesus Christ without any other motive. We have to "take away the many barriers" - even those that seem so utterly "biblical" to us - "which prevent us from entering into communion with the other" (OOS, 41).

When your sense is that you are being commanded to "look at the people around you and start making them into disciples," then you're going to miss out on actual relationships and, therefore, on actual ministry. You're putting the cart before the horse, putting cure ahead of care and turning discipleship into disciple-making.

If we have the desire to see lives changed - and I affirm the desire for people to experience the love and the salvation of God in their lives - then we're going to have to have the patience to see people not as objects of disciple-making but as real people in whose humanity we can share. The only way we can change people is to strop trying to change people (which means we actually have to be suspicious of what I just said).

According to Jurgen Moltmann,

"Patience is the greatest art of those who hope. Hope accepts the 'cross of the the present' in the 'power of the resurrection.' It takes upon itself the real unredeemed state of the present as it is, the torture and the pain of the negative, without resignation and without illusion." (Hope for the Church, 11)

We need to becomes artists.... we need to have the patience to drop our 'disciple-making' agendas long enough to look at the people around us and just see... people.

Unmixed Attention: A 'New Direction' in Pastoral Care

It's finals week here at Princeton Seminary, and my brain is pretty much moosch... I just finished a research paper on John Huss and Martin Luther, I'm in the middle of writing a final paper for my class on "war and the Christian conscience" (which is fun 'cause I'm using a lot of Moltmann), and today I have a final exam for my Moral Philosophy and Aspects of Poverty class with Dr. Gordon Graham. Needless to say, I've been busy... too busy to blog with the frequency with which I am accustomed.

However, I thought I would share a story about something that happened this morning...

I caught the bus over to campus this morning in order to grab a little coffee prior to my 2-hour shift in the campus mail room. I sat down next to a friend, sipped my coffee, and talked with him about Greek, finals, and fall courses just to kill some time before work. While we were sitting, sipping, and chatting; a man walked up and sat down next to us. Neither of us knew him so I introduced myself and asked him if he was a student at the seminary. "No, actually," he replied. "I'm here for a conference on pastoral theology. I'm from a seminary in Canada." As it turned out, he was the Academic Dean of a Baptist seminary in Canada who was a professor of pastoral theology and had received his ThM from Princeton years ago. I asked him about the conference and he explained to me that it was a small conference (about 15 scholars) on the "new directions" in pastoral theology.

"So... what are the 'new directions' in pastoral theology?"

He said a few things about some of the papers that were being presented and then got onto what he was going to present.

"In my courses," he explained, "I have my students do an exercise... I send them into the inner-city for two hours, amidst some of the most obviously impoverished areas in the city, and I have them simply pay attention--unmixed attention--to suffering..."

He explained to me just how much energy it takes to pay unmixed attention to suffering, especially the suffering of others.

"...They pay unmixed attention to suffering and then the are to write a 15-20 line poem, articulating their visceral experience.... once you get past all the techniques of pastoral care, that's what's really beneath it all; paying attention to suffering and articulating it."

He gave me the impression that, while theories, strategies, and techniques might be important on one level, the real basis for pastoral care is what lies beneath--in the actual person-to-person relationship, in the empathic sharing of suffering (or maybe I just heard that because I read The Relational Pastor by Andrew Root).

"So you're trying to get beneath the techniques to the real basis, huh?" I asked (silly question, in retrospect... since that's exactly what he had just said to me in so many words).

"Exactly!"

This morning-coffee-encounter was one of those surprise blessings which you rarely come by. I wish I'd gotten his name... I'm sure he's quite a big deal in his world... but just thinking about the exercise that this professor was doing with his students really got my wheels spinning. When you just start paying attention to suffering, it's not yet determined exactly who is the helper and who is the helpee. Indeed, when we're actually entering into the suffering of others, the vernacular of helping seems labored and somehow insufficient. The encounter itself, and the articulation which allows you to internalize it, is the basis of pastoral care... the human encounter becomes the location and the experience of God.

It's a hard move for people to make. It's hard for people to understand or accept the divine quality--the presence of God--in the person-to-person encounter of sharing in humanity. It's hard for us to think about pastoral care without thinking--in some way, shape, or form--about what we need to "bring" with us. We need to "take" the gospel to the situation. We need to somehow conjure up the divine by directing the conversation or steering the relationship. We think that God is standing awkwardly outside the conversation, waiting to be introduced until we can successfully bring God into it--"oh, hey! have you met my friend, God?"

But the reality--the hard reality, in some ways--is that God is within the conversation. "Where two or more are gathered," when you shared in the humanity of one of the "least of these," God is there and by God's grace, God shares God's self. When we pay unmixed attention to suffering--when we refuse to share our attention with some alternate agenda or external goal--there God's life and being appears. When we can simply share in and pay attention to one another's suffering, then we are already well on our way through the work of pastoral ministry.

Ecclesiology of Lost in the Trees 2

Last night Amanda and I went down to Philadelphia to see a band called Lost in the Trees at a place called World Cafe Live. This wasn't the first time I saw them. A while back, Amanda and I saw them with a few friends at a venue in San Diego and we got obsessed pretty quickly. I actually blogged in a post called "Ecclesiology of Lost in The Trees" about their album, "A Church That Fits Our Needs" ...and not just because of what the album was called... Back then I was struck by what music like theirs - music which makes and leaves room for our humanity - can teach us about church. And last night, as I listened to their new stuff (which is all freaking great, by the way) I was struck again by a thought; that art itself can teach us so much about what it means to be the church.

I think some people want to try to compartmentalize their spirituality. Some Christians have this notion that they should only really be experiencing God through religious experiences. Now, of course, many Christians will resist the term "religious." They'll use some technical words like "revelation" or "proclamation" - but what they tend to do is reserve their experience of God to church services, scripture readings, and (maybe) "worship" music. Experiences outside of these sources may at best serve to draw them back to their religious contexts, but the experience itself, if it's labeled as 'human' or 'secular', isn't to be trusted. They'll admit that they had fun at the art museum or the rock concert, but if the context is too 'human' then they won't likely elevate it as an experience of God.

This is why I think it's so important that theology starts at the cross of Christ. On the cross, the deepest darkness of humanity and human brokenness is taken up into the life and being of God. The cross becomes the place to find God... and the cross is as human as it gets. There's nothing further from "the glory of the Lord" than a bleeding and broken body being executed by religious and civil authorities. And yet it's here, on the cross, that we find what Paul Tillich calls, "the God above God" - the one true God "...who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt" (The Courage to Be, 190). Human experience becomes God's experience, so God's future becomes human future.

That means that there's nothing too human for God. That means that human experience can be sacred because it is soaked in God. And that means that the church can be a place of utter and honest humanity and brokenness. The church is free to discover God in their midst. As Martin Luther wrote, "God wants to come to us and we do not need to clamber up to him, he wants to be with us to the end of the world" (Martin Luther, ed. John Dillenberger, 242). We don't have to search for "revelation" in "religious" experiences. We don't have to conjure up divinity, we can find God in our humanity when we see through the lens of Christ's cross.

At the Forums on Youth Ministry yesterday, at opening worship, the preacher said, "Following a physician (Jesus) doesn't mean that we become physicians ourselves, but it's to be an example of what it means to be a good patient." We don't need to transcend our humanity to experience God or to engage in the action and ministry of God. And that's where art comes in...

Art creates a space for our humanity. It pushes beyond itself, it 'reveals' something transcendent, but it does so because it comes through the body of a person. It is precisely because it is human that is becomes transcendent. Bad art, however, just imitates. It has some external referent, and it just tries to conjure up the image of that referent... but good art is expressive (even if it's not expressivist). The referent of good art, on the other hand, is somewhere inside of us. And thus, through good art, a space is created for pain, for joy, for grief, for celebration. Art gets at the depths of our humanity. It goes even where we do not want it to go. It exposes us.

The church is art, not when it conjures the image of an external referent, but when it exposes us.

Church is art when it creates a space for our pain to be held and for our joy to live. Church is art when it holds our stories within God's story - the story of crucifixion and resurrection. When it allows us to discover our humanity and relate to each other in honesty and generosity, the church becomes sacred ground.

...and these are the thoughts I had while listening to Lost In The Trees.

2013 Princeton Forums on Youth Ministry

This week the Princeton Forums on Youth Ministry are happening here at Princeton Theological Seminary. I've been looking forward to this for a while now, and I'm excited that it's finally happening. In the past, the only Youth Ministry "forum"-type experiences I've had have been in the context of big conferences and evangelical retreats (I'm thinking of Youth Specialties, especially). I've always loved those kinds of events and some have done a better job than others at hitting the tough theological questions of the discipline of Youth Ministry (the theological forums at Youth Specialties were pretty fun), but the broad attempts at asking those questions have always been conditioned by a sort of preference for the practical (and for the conservative) that often has the effect of limiting where the conversation is allowed to go.

I'm looking forward to some good conversations here that take the practical seriously without forgetting to prioritize Youth Ministry (and ministry in general) as a theological task necessitating theological reflection. In case you're wondering, the list of speakers and leaders is my reason for anticipating that the conversations will take this kind of shape (not to mention that Kenda Dean has something to do with this event... even though she's not here...). Folks like Andrew Root, Beverly Gaventa, Mark DeVries, Robert Dykstra, Elizabeth Drescher, and Nate Stucky are sure to make the event worth while.

On Sexual Orientation

I like the Vlog Brothers!

And I especially like their recent video on "sexual orientation." 

The brilliance of this video is that it doesn't bother espousing some ideology about sexuality or sexual ethics. It just shares real people's stories. That's it. And that's the only appropriate starting point, I believe, in such a discussion. Even if you'd like to start with the Bible... I'm sorry, but you can't exactly do that in an unambiguous way. You always bring yourself and the stories by which you've been shaped whenever you come to the Bible. So if you want the Bible to be your norm, you've got to be even more intentional about the stories you allow to shape you. You've got to let real people's stories shape you, not the stories of ideologies and abstractions. 

As Christians we have got to be about listening to people's stories, hearing their voices, and allowing the other to penetrate our being. If we're going to take incarnation (especially the cross) seriously, if we're going to take it seriously that humanity has been taken into the life and being of God, then we've got to take humanity seriously. Humanity MUST precede ideology.