Every so often I get to writing something that’s a little bigger than my brain can hold together in a single piece. And then I don’t know quite how to go about writing on it. That’s where a blog comes in handy. I can make handy notes here, all tied together with a category tag, sketch out some thoughts and approaches as I get going, and otherwise make a public notebook for my topic, that might even get some helpful outside input.

I’m working now on tying together the recent emerging/missional thought with the older, but no less controversial, liberation theology.

So what? Why does this matter other than being an insulated academic endeavor?

Part of my goal in academic effort is to do what actually can matter. Not from the practical side of developing leadership practices, or putting together a liturgy, but by poking at Christian theology and see what fits, what rubs, what causes problems and solutions in unexpected ways. Theology affects how we act, and its my contention that while emerging/missional thought has done quite a lot in pushing for practical changes there has not been significant movement theologically, or at least this movement has not been as influential or as public as it should be. Except, of course, for those theological movements which seem to reflect more of an older turn towards less fruitful forms of theology that then force the rest of us to say, ‘he’s not speaking for me even if we share the same label.’

Learning how one similar approach is pursued and criticized helps hone another approach, making it so that emerging and missional thought can learn from what has been almost 40 years of liberation theological development. Meanwhile, a new context can help illumine old problems and even offer some solutions. At the same time, placing a newer theology within an established theological framework can help avoid false criticisms and misunderstandings. There might still be criticisms, and sometimes even accurate ones. But they will at least have the right picture to work with and build from.

And maybe this is my form of being missional, being where God has me, doing what God has called me to do, not directly on the front lines as much as working to hone the tools that can be best utilized by those in the trenches. Honing theology, focusing on what Christianity is and should be according to Divine revelation in Spirit and Scripture, undermines the religious chaos that cripples spiritual conversation and practice.

That’s a preliminary wandering of my mind in this direction and not really the goal of this post. The goal is to start adding to my pile of considerations on liberation and emerging thoughts. Compiling a little of what I know with new additions and connections.

First off an interesting little precursor. One way to tie together method and thoughts is to explore practices. If two contexts are illustrating a shared response, then maybe there’s a shared method and emphasis that requires deeper examination.

And indeed there’s a shared ecclesial response. One that I’ve know about, and want to make note of here so I remember to mention it when I keep sketching my thoughts. Base Communities. As wikipedia defines them:

Christian Base communities are autonomous religious groups often associated with Liberation Theology. The 1968 Medellin, Colombia meeting of Latin American Council of Bishops played a major role in popularizing them.

Created in both rural and urban areas, the Christian Base Community, organized often illiterate peasants and proletarians into self-reliant worshiping communities through the tutelage of a priest or local lay member. Because established Christian parishes with active priests were often miles away and because high level church officials rarely visited even their own parishes these “base communities” were often the only direct exposure to the church for people in rural areas or those for whom a “local” church may be miles away. Thus, the base community was significant in changing popular interpretations of Catholicism for multiple reasons. Initially, their very structure encouraged discussion and solidarity within the community over submission to church authority and, as their very name suggests, made power seem to flow from the bottom or base upward. The influence of liberation theology meant that discussions within the church were oriented toward material conditions and issues of class interests. Through this process of consciousness raising, evangeliszation turned into class consciousness.

Other Base Communities came into existence in the East Bloc, but with a different theological emphasis. They did not subscribe to Liberation Theology, as they were being persecuted by Marxists themselves.One of the best-known groups was Father György Bulányi’s “Bokor” (Bush) movement, which sought to save the teachings of the Christian Church and resist the increasing persecution by the Communists. The movement’s ideals were simple, namely to express Christian love in three ways, giving; service and non-violence. Bulányi was jailed for life by the Communist régime of Mátyás Rákosi in 1952, and was amnestied in 1960. However, he was not allowed to work as a priest. He continued to start small base communities illegally, and wrote illegal samizdat articles.

They are in some ways similar to Western cell groups (small groups), a notable component of many Pentecostal and some Protestant churches. Base Christian communities believe in helping people whose lives have been destroyed. Over 120,000 new churches have been set up to help the poor. The Base Christian communities follow the word of God and stand by the poor, they believe in helping the helpless. The Base Christian communities work to fulfill Christ’s purpose to proclaim good news to the poor, tell them of hope, and to remind all people that there is always someone loving them somewhere, and that they still have a chance in life.

A Base Christian community is a group of people who join together to study the Bible, and then act according to social justice oriented from of Christianity especially popular among the third world and the poor.

This post reminds me of a passage from my book. No, not that one. The new one, which should be out… sometime this year.

“He talked about what he found,” Nate continues, “but more specifically we talked about Abraham. How God worked in his life and the path he had for him.”
“For four days? This is what you talked about?”
“That’s what I said!” Karl exclaims.
“Basically. I mean we talked about other things too. And I took part in a gathering he has every week with some others in the area.”
“What kind of gathering?” Karl asks.
“Well, apparently about two years after he moved up there he realized he kept running into people who were fed up with a lot of church stuff, but really were seeking God. They felt alone and lost. Joe and these people started having a weekly conversation at McDonalds. These conversations kind of took shape. Joe doesn’t call it a church or anything special, but it sounds a lot like what we’re doing with the Upper Room. They’ve been meeting for about fifteen years or so.”
“Fifteen years.” Lisa says. “I thought we were doing something new.”
“Ha!” Nate laughed. “New to us I guess. I made the same point. Joe laughed and said, ‘What? You think you’re the first one the Spirit has ever worked in? God works, Nate, in a lot of places, even if he doesn’t always get newspaper and magazine advertisements about the work.’ I laughed.”

I have a friend who speaks of science quite well… in Nature.

Congrats to Izabela.

What’s interesting is that her work on friction got me to thinking of areas of friction in theology and life, likely getting a discussion going in my next Theological Methods paper.

A posting pause.

And what a curious post to leave sitting there a week. A mere aside became the standing representation of my thoughts. And a not particularly reflective aside at that.

I think that when I write I start poking at things, waking them up, and then I have to untie some of the knots that get formed when pulling the threads. That hit me in both apparent emphases of late. The idea of theology and science, and the idea of whether I’m missional.

Add this to the fact that I’ve been pouring in my head all kinds of reading from all kinds of unexpected directions.

It got me to thinking, and then because I don’t have a fluidity of posting just whatever, it got me to pause in my written reflections.

The thoughts continue but haven’t coalesced into something quite yet.

They have wandered farther along, however.

In regards to science and theology I left the story hanging there. I think that while this is my perception of the ‘dialogue’ (are scientists interesting in talking as much as theologians?) that’s not a final conclusion. Indeed, that’s not even reflecting the most helpful recent trends.

And that’s where it gets tied up, not only with itself but also with the other strand of thought in my head, the missional one.

What is really Christian thinking?

That’s a pressing topic for me as I engage in theology, supposedly Christian theology but most of the time its not as much wholly Christian in methodology as much as trying to justify itself outwards to other patterns of thought, philosophy, lifestyles.

What would a truly Christian theology and practice look like? One that is not trying to be relevant outwards but is instead willing to sacrifice making sense in order to embrace an inner coherency. Rather than being coherent with outside thought, I wonder what it would be like to be coherent to itself, in content and message. I think that would be a radical change indeed, though one we see again and again in the Gospels and in the letters, and really all through the Bible, in which God explains and acts like God will act, often not in a way that fits a recognizable ‘method’ but which is wholly his own method, and one which Jesus continues.

And, it should be noted, so does the Spirit.

Christianity on its own terms.

Might be very freeing.

That doesn’t mean retreating into a bubble. Just the opposite really. It means a boldness of self-perception and a willingness to leap in the direction of apparent foolishness in order to discovery radical creativity and wholeness.

This is all vague. I know.

I’m working on fixing that.

This is supposed to be my first real post on Philip Clayton’s book Adventures in the Spirit.

One of my quirks is to occasionally anthropomorphize concepts, situations, politics, etc. and see such as characters in a sitcom. Sitcoms have given us a wide ranging view of human interactions and if not entirely accurate, at least it’s a variously entertaining way to see how we silly people interact during times of often self-imposed crisis.

In coming to the topic of the interaction with science and theology I admit I’ve kind of gotten my head latched onto a particular sitcom setup.

Theology is like the high school popular girl, the leader of the pack who decided who was in and who was out. She had cool clothes, surprising influences, and her family came from a lot of money. All the cream of the crop wanted to be her friend. She wasn ‘t really mean but she could be vindictive. She was opinionated and biased and thought everyone would be happier if they saw the world the way she saw it, and experienced it the way she experienced it. She got good grades, was queen of the winter festival, homecoming, and prom in various years, head cheerleader, dated the captain of the football team (who got a full scholarship to Stanford), and volunteered at the retirement center ten hours a week, generally Wednesday and Sunday evenings.

Science is… well, science. You know that kid. Well, maybe you don’t (unless you were that kid). Spent a lot of time in the basement playing video games filled with grand adventure while having grand adventures of acne, programming, and a bit of a weight problem. Had friends at school, and they hung out by playing World of Warcraft, indulging their passions and intellect by figuring out how to demolish other tribes and capture the gold found in unexplored realms.

Only it’s not the medieval era high school anymore. Everyone moved on from high school, going different directions that reflected their potential more than their present. A lot of the kids went on to the enlightenment college, including the popular high school girl and the science nerd. They had, to be sure, entirely different experiences. The popular girl went to a party school where she studied a little bit, but mostly hooked up with the wrong sorts of characters. After a couple of years of this there were some scandals, and most of her friends abandoned her.

Meanwhile, the science nerd went to MIT and majored in astrophysics, where he met all kinds of people thinking just like him, a lot of them also alienated in high school, though a fair number of people who were shockingly popular and brilliant. He worked with some very important professors, and even as a junior wrote some software that made him tens of millions of dollars. The acne cleared up, he started exercising and that led to him dating more, and becoming more involved in the community. He started his own business, then bought up other businesses, and found that everyone wanted to be his friend, even if they didn’t always have the slightest clue what he was actually studying and working on.

The ten year high school reunion happens. Everyone gathers together again. The nerds, the jocks, uncategorized hoi polloi. The popular girl overhears the science nerd guy talking to one of her old friends, who during high school tended to be friends with all the various groups. Her name, in case you were wondering, was Sophia and she had majored in philosophy at a state school.

The one time popular girl has this realization that she and the science nerd really have a lot in common, and all those times in high school she ignored or rejected him really was a long time ago, and anyhow she never really rejected him as much as there was a lot of miscommunication on both sides.

So the popular girl steps up to the guy, gives him a hug like they are old best friends, and says they should go out sometime. He looks at her, says hi, and walks away.

The popular girl is left standing there with Sophia, her one time friend who is now an assistant professor of philosophy and a marathon runner.

That’s my sitcom view on the present situation with science and theology.

This post turns out to have very little to do with Philip Clayton’s book, but it does expose a little bit of my own attitude about the whole project.

I am cheering for that popular girl, truth be told, the Cordelia Chase of academic studies.

A little bit ago I signed on with a relatively new project called Transforming Theology.

Since that is certainly an interest of mine, I thought it might be worthwhile to see how others view this and how they are going about it.

On their blog, one of the key participants, Philip Clayton, gives a little bit of explanation and description of what they are about.

Well worth watching, I think.

The timing of this has been, for me, quite good. Especially given that I’m now taking a theological methods class, with Nancey Murphy and not long ago read her most interesting book Anglo-American Postmodernity. Especially interesting now because it gives a rather helpful framework for my understanding this new venture. Indeed, I’d recommend, again, my overview of her chapters on religious thought as quite helpful reading.

To give a real quick summary, it has been standard in theological and ecclesial conversations to label a particular theologian or theology as either Liberal or Conservative. This was not just a simple task of convenient categorization. It was, for the most part, an accurate description of assumptions and methods. There were distinctions within each of these camps, but for the most part there were different rules, presuppositions, approaches and dialogue in each that really maintained two distinct strands of theology for the last centuries, and especially the last 100 years.

For those of us engaged in theological thought it was also an easy way to figure out friend vs. foe. Though not always successfully. I remembering as a young student at Wheaton trying to figure out whether I should like or dislike Barth. He said so many good things… but he was a “Liberal” according to my understanding of classification at the time.

Over the last 50 years or so this pattern has been crumbling. Such labels might still be used but they are not really useful or altogether accurate, especially as they relate to distinct strands. Instead of there being hardened positions and assumptions there are convergences. Instead of there being an apparent choice between two opposite stances on key foundations, there are fluid positions along a spectrum of belief. This leads to a new approach of theology that can listen and learn and respect what other sides are saying without having to establish a friend or foe mentality.

This isn’t to say there are no, or should be no, disagreements. There should be and there absolutely will continue to be.

For me at least such a dialogue is not fruitful if it means merely watering down theology so as to make an agreeable stance that means nothing in heart or substance. It means engaging in dialogue with mutual respect so as to understand other positions, learn from them, and see how they can shape continuing thought, study and practice. This means, for me at least, not watering down, but indeed better understanding my own tradition and thoughts, communicating these as well as possible, sharpening them and thus being an able contributor.

This contribution to theology has two main goals, as I’ve seen it. While each are important to an overall theological perspective they really have two distinct directions of focus and might be, in some ways, exclusive pursuits. The first direction is that of coherence. In this theology is asked to make sense both to itself and to the broader intellectual world. The pieces of its claims should fit together and theological conversation should be able to, it seems, have a connection with other forms of knowledge–especially as we maintain that God is the God of Truth.

The second approach is that of integrity. Theology should mean something not only to academics and as a cogent philosophical system but also, and arguably more importantly, it should mean something to those living life as they experience it, with the hardships, struggles, concerns, and frustrations that life contains. A holistic theology should be able to speak both to those engaged in complicated intellectual pursuits and to the poor person who hasn’t eaten for two days.

To give a picture to this, I see the pursuit of coherence as being the rear guard, protecting theology from being undermined by developed instabilities that are created either by its own lack of contemplation or by new forms of knowledge about this world from other places (i.e. the earth revolves around the sun). It is not primarily concerned with what theological issues might mean to the desperate person, but that does not mean it has no vital function. If theology collapses because of incoherence, there is no ability to speak to those who are the most desperate. They will have rejected it before tasting of its ability to offer deep solutions.

That is, in a way, the state of Christianity in Europe and North America.

Theology in the pursuit of integrity is on the front lines, in the trenches, embracing praxis and problems. Taking stock of people’s questions and situations, not always an academic approach in expression or discovery. It can often take the approach of what Dyrness has called a Vernacular theology–a theology that is expressed by the people as they live, rather than what the official doctrines might say. It might also take the approach of a academic style theology that begins with questions of friction and difficulties and is framed to response to these without particular note of inconsistencies or systematic development.

Two theologians, I think, mark these two approaches particularly well, as they essentially began in much the same setting. Wolfhart Pannenberg exemplifies the pursuit of coherence, and Jürgen Moltmann exemplifies the pursuit of integrity. Like with the various foundational theological positions, this too is reflected on a spectrum rather than as two distinct choices.

My own theological position would be best described as beginning from the conservative side of the spectrum, strongly developed in conservative churches and conservative institutions of learning, as they may still be accurately described. My own academic pursuits are now emphasizing Moltmann, emerging/missional church theology, and are concerned with how theology deals with questions of poverty, hardship, hurt, and frustration. In short, according to my framework, I start as a conservative with an interest in theological integrity.

That’s my place in this attempt for theological conversation. And my task, as it begins, is an interesting one. Tripp Fuller, one of the key organizers of this Transforming Theology forum sent me a book by Philip Clayton to review called Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action. Philip Clayton, as much as it would fit into my framework, would seemingly be coming from more the Liberal side of the spectrum with a strong interest in theological coherence, hence repeated references to Pannenberg at the beginning.

My approach is to hopefully write on this book chapter by chapter. A single post review of the whole text might be easier and quicker, but it would not, I think be as helpful overall to the broader dialogue. Instead of trying to give a judgment, my hope is to make notes along the way that would illustrate how this book contributes to people no matter where on the spectrum they are. I also hope to make his contributions more readily approachable by those without theological training or interest in the more abstruse aspects of theological and philosophical coherence.

I hope to write on what this work means to me and how the core ideas might be helpful to the people I know. That I do this without a proper background in either philosophy or science brings humility to this task and likely will shape the sophistication, or lack thereof, of my comments.

That’s my introduction to this new task of mine. Look for the posts to pop up periodically for the next few weeks.

I’m still exploring this issue. Honestly, it’s not one of those times in which I’m making some kind of story or series of posts lead towards an already decided position. I’m not starting with an answer and working up to it.

I’m actually really debating this in my head. I am, you see, pretty good at justifying my behavior and pretty good about taking terms that mean one thing and getting around them to make it seem like the terms describe me.

But, in this case I’m wanting to wander through my story a little bit, mostly for my own sake and see what I see as I do so. If others can add their contributions then that’s very helpful. But, I’ve learned not to depend on that…. which is sort of part of my story.

If I had to describe this story in a sentence I’d say: “I have sought God.”

That’s sounds so… Christianese. I know. It’s not like the worship songs sort of chorus though, the “I’ve only sought You, Lord”. Searching for God has shaped and focused just about every major decision in my life since high school or before, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been other concerns that have gotten mixed in along the way. But, now I’m breaking the cardinal rule of story writing. I’m telling, not showing.

Not sure where to begin really, as I see where I’m at as basically being the same long, still being written, story for about the last 15 years. Ever since I went to Wheaton….

But starting there would make the story too long. And not entirely immediately relevant for my question about whether I am now missional.

I went to Fuller Seminary… that’s a better beginning, as it’s a little closer to the present, starting in 1999. Not too much went into that decision, truth be told. I was in an in between place. I sat in a park and considered what I loved and what was my real passion. What would I do if money were not an issue at all.

I realized I loved studying about God. Note, this wasn’t me trying to figure out how to study enough to tell other people about God and push what I learned onto them. I didn’t really have a passion to be a pastor. I really liked studying God. I think because there were so many unresolved questions in my life, mostly related to the curious paths of poverty that seemed to have marked my life thus far. I was constantly poor while among those who had never come close to poverty. That leads to some sense of isolation. And leads to different kinds of questions than most others are asking, and demands different kinds of questions than churches directed to those others are offering as answers.

Which is probably why when I really have a distaste for church camps…

I went to Fuller, because I had deep seated questions, and felt a path towards answers that no one was handing out. I had tasted enough at Wheaton, read enough, to see there were greater depths of Christianity than Christians, that I knew, conceived of, and I needed to taste more of that.

So I went. And going to seminary brings with it responsibilities and duties and opportunities.

The church I was going to at the time I first started going to in late 1991 or so. It was a Gen-X church then. The first, if I’m not mistaken. Started by Dieter Zander and made up of almost entirely young singles. After I graduated in 1992 I participated in a small group, the best small group I’ve experienced, that was led by a couple of college students. I think it was good because it was so unintentional. No one new what they were supposed to plan for on the ministry expectations path, so they didn’t manipulate or force anything.

I went to Wheaton for four years, returning on breaks and summers. It was still my home church. That probably explains a lot of disconnection while at Wheaton. But when you go to “the flock that rocks” it’s hard to find other places as satisfying. Especially since it wasn’t about the music or the trendiness. It was about the real spiritual involvement I felt, the community of friends that were really seeking God together. It was about not being a college ministry, but about college aged men and women engaged in ministry, with shared leadership, open participation, involvement and goals. The sunday service was fun, but it was the other than Sunday goings on that I valued deeply.

Dieter left. Went to Willowcreek when I was a sophomore at Wheaton. I had no car, and no real way to make the hour drive there. So I didn’t join in on that ‘new’ movement that got all manner of attention.

Newsong continued. It planted churches, which would even more so fit the model of missional/emerging. One was in Pasadena. The other was in Pomona. The Pomona one, curiously enough, got a strong mention in Alan Hirsch’s and Michael Frost’s book The Shaping of Things to Come. I had friends in both church plants. Circumstance kept me from joining both, mostly due to transportation, and so I stayed at the main Newsong, which moved to its own building during my first year or so at Fuller. It became a propertied church.

I joined up with a small group/home church, whatever the term of the moment was. It was me, the worship leader at the church, his girlfriend (soon to be wife), and assorted other people they knew with a fairly strong mix of church background. They were not, to be sure, the stereotypical church members and it was a group I’m confident in saying was in fact missional in shape and form and function. This was about the year 2000… before missional was really part of the parlance. At the same time, I was pushed towards being relevant to those without church experience I was being pushed deeper into studies of spirituality, ministry, and theology taking my seminary learning seriously. It wasn’t a degree for me. It was formation. I encountered John Cassian for the first time and the wonders of desert monastic spirituality. I also started becoming quite active in church ministry, not on staff really but for my internship, but involved in all kinds of functions at the church. I played saxophone on the worship band. I worked on developing an alternative service for the church, one that would reflect a lot of the then burgeoning “church within a church” styles. It was all coming together nicely until the day 2 weeks before it was to start in which all the work was torpedoed by a lead pastor who decided he wanted a class on door to door evangelism to take place at the same time and the same place. I learned this while sitting in the church service and listening to the announcements. Not by being told directly. Basically, that started a path of learning that while I was busy there were alternative plans for the church being developed that didn’t include any of the burgeoning styles, but instead hearkened back to the ministry models of the 1970s.

This was a regular occurrence during my latter tenure at Newsong. Indirect, passive aggressive leadership that tended to be concerned about protecting territory and asserting hierarchy. Oddly enough, this also seemed to be reflected in a lot of the church plants, those proto-emerging movements that I was aware of.

I did get to put some of my creative ministry juices to work in various events, as I accepted invitations to join up with others’ ideas. I saw what I had in my heart turn out to be as successful as I had thought… once given the space to move and breath. The Stations of the Cross we did in 2001 was a high point of this. I realized how broad participation that depended on the oft “silent” people in a church was so, so helpful.

For whatever reason, I didn’t get in on the politics of the church and so wasn’t able to either influence, push, or otherwise find a place for continued participation for a while. Not all of those were on the church side of things. I wasn’t particularly mature in understanding the ways of churches or emotional communication and probably contributed to the alienation. But, by this point I had begun to lose my earnest joy in ministry and began to expect the hidden knives and silent torpedoes. That does not do well for a passion. I began to get cynical and alienated from church ministry. Not from the usual sources of church frustration, those established kinds of churches that reflect christendom that are such the topic of frustration from emerging folks. My distaste was partly in that direction and increasingly in the emerging direction, as I saw the broken husks of other once earnest souls wandering about having been burned by emerging leaders seeking their own place in church influence.

It was a general, and almost total, distrust of leaders in general. In pursuit of “vision” no one was safe. Everyone was a tool or target. Especially in those emerging places where there was no mature guidance or established locations.

My interest was still to pursue God. I didn’t care about ministry, though those who did care about ministry “vision” apparently didn’t see that and thought I was interested in their territory. I just wanted to see God and see others join with me in seeing God. Whatever way that works out best. I got back involved at Newsong my last year in seminary. I helped teach some classes, mostly the membership classes that the staff, for whatever reason, couldn’t themselves be bothered to teach. That increased my disconnect with what the church said it was about and what the church actually was about. And once a person sees that wide gap, it’s hard to join in with the celebration of leadership that seemed to be the way into the heart of ministry there.

I worked on a young adults group, found a method of conveying theology and Scripture that brought the participants into the conversation. I finished up seminary. I was almost entirely burned out on church, ministry, and those who did ministry for a living. I still sought God. I still sought God with those who also sought God. I realized, maybe unfairly, that so, so many people involved in church work don’t seek God directly as much as they seek organizational leadership models, patterns of ministry, and other forms of leadership events that use God as an object for their more important purposes. The ‘vision’ is always, it seems, more important than the content or the people.

There are exceptions. And sometimes profound exceptions. Those exceptions, however, were not my experiences.

Something was wrong. Not only with Christendom churches but something that was a poison even within those communities that were missional and emerging. Both the Pasadena and Pomona church plants collapsed, their participants scattered, not all to other churches.

That wasn’t why I left Newsong though. I was broken. Almost entirely broken. My joy in serving God, in seeking ministry creativity, in seeing the delight of other people come to deeper insight in knowing God was almost entirely exhausted. I loved working with people, but I hated, hated, hated the politics, visions, missions, programs, leadership, of church work. But I was still committed to people if not the church.

Only I couldn’t find a job after seminary. No one would hire me. The church I was working at for 40 hours a week wouldn’t pay me, even as I kept my bitterness and frustration hidden and tried to be a good little church boy for a while. The politics expanded as one pastor left and a new pastor was hired, a process that took over a year even though it was the assistant pastor who was finally hired. I made my voice louder and more known. I took a stand for what was true and right (as shown by subsequent history). But I didn’t play nice as I should. I was shunned, in essence if not in fact.

Mostly though, I was poor. I couldn’t pay rent, but had a kind roommate who took up the slack. A kindness that means more than I likely ever expressed and continues to fill me with gratitude. I was eating about half as much as I should. I lost about 25 pounds.

I had a choice. I could pay for gas to go to a church where people didn’t really care if I was there or not (but for the 10 or so people I was directly working with) or I could eat. I continued to eat. In a church of 1000 people or so, there was no offer of help or a job. Not just a church job… any kind of employment. It was community in name only, and only as far as I could play the expected role.

I ran out of funds. Couldn’t pay rent. Became profoundly depressed.

Suicidal. No where I looked seemed to have a place for me. No matter how good I was in studies, in ministry creativity, in anything, I couldn’t find a place. I started writing. In that I found peace.

My parents had moved to the mountains in Southern California the year before. My dad worked as a teacher in juvenile hall. My mom didn’t work outside the house because of her post-polio syndrome. I was faced with a choice.

I could try to subsist in Pasadena, among people who didn’t seem to care if I was there, while doing something I didn’t like to do for money (assuming I could find something that would pay rent). Or I could be entirely counter-cultural in a way that doesn’t get respect for counter-culturalness. I chose the latter.

At age 29 I moved back in with my parents. I continued to try my hand at writing, writing mostly fiction. I thought maybe this could be a direction to go towards. Meanwhile, instead of merely existing for myself I could participate with my parents, who themselves had their own issues. I could assist my mom, who could not drive and who could not walk, in both practical ways, as well as having mutually influential spiritual conversations that helped us see truth within difficult circumstances. I also began to develop web design skills and began working for my dad, who had developed a theory of working with juvenile delinquents called academic triage. I put together a website that reflected this methodology, and he began to use that in the classroom, and began to make huge strides with students who had long ago been left behind.

They became my spiritual community, my family and, in so many ways, my mission as I joined with their missions.

I did not go to church again after I moved to Lake Arrowhead.

What was the point? I was bitter. I was burned out. I saw spiritual development in every way happening outside the church and not nearly as much within the church. My spiritual restoration began as I delved more deeply into the monastics, learning the patterns of spiritual life that occur day to day, in deeper and more profound ways. I wrestled with myself, with my God, with my circumstances, with my history. I continued to write.

I realized what churches had missed in their visions and methods. They had the name of Christ, but no Spirit of Christ.

I wrote a book about the Spirit. It was a catharsis and it was a way forward. It was published.

To stir my brain I took a class on Moltmann. My work in that class led to being invited to join a PhD program at Fuller Seminary. I applied. I was accepted. I was given a scholarship.

I worked on promoting my book, which was published but not by the major publishers, and so didn’t have the marketing reach. I met a woman while promoting my book while she was promoting her CD. I got to talking to her more. Long story, short, I married her this past January.

I moved from the mountains and back to Pasadena. I’m now in school full time, working on emerging/missional theology as it relates to more established theology such as that of Jurgen Moltmann.

I still haven’t gotten connected with a church. But, I’m open to that now. Or really, open to finding others who just want to seek God within where they’re at.

I seek God. That has been the driving force for my life.

But am I missional?

I was spending some time going through an old journal and came across this post. One of the more recent in the journal, about 2 years old. Thought it worth posting here:

I’ve come to realize one of the hardest lessons for the spiritual life isn’t about the internal state nor is it even directly related to our perception of God. The hardest lesson of the spiritual life has to do with that oft source of frustration — other people. It’s hard because we’re always around people, and it’s hard because this is the area of life in which life with the Spirit goes so much against our natural inclinations that it requires a constant and steady work of the Spirit in order to keep us in line with Christ.

What are our natural inclinations? We want to control people. We want to judge people. We want to rate people. We want something from people. We have expectations of people. We have demands. We have desires. We want people to make sense. We want them to agree with us. We think God should be doing the same thing in other people that he is doing in us. We want respect. In short, there’s a quality in which we want to be a little god to other people, God’s own representative so that we can manage people to be the way they should be. Even if there’s only a few Mugabes and Pol Pots in history, we’ve all a bit of the tyrant in us. Which is expressed in anger, or depression, or a maybe, if we’re really trying hard, just a mild form of irritation. We get out of sorts.

And yet, Paul wrote in Philippians 2:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death–even death on a cross!

We are not called to be little gods, but rather to follow the lead of Christ in letting go our insistence on our supposed dues and becoming a servant.

Servant is an overused word in Christian culture. Everyone wants to be a leader, everyone wants to be a servant. We all want to be the kind of servants who get to tell other people how and when we will serve them, lording over them with our service. But, Jesus, though Lord, didn’t lord over anyone. He didn’t assert his authority but did something else.

He remained open to people. And that is one of the most profound spiritual acts a person can do. Why? Because people hurt, insult, fight, ignore, crush, use, abuse, dismiss. People have mixed motives. They fail. They have different goals and different hopes and different expectations. They might not share our feelings, or our yearnings, or our dreams. People can be fickle. They can be flighty. They can be ignorant. Indeed, God might even just be talking to those other people as much as he is talking to us, and what he is saying to them isn’t the same.

In the face of this, where other people for whatever reason don’t match up us, it is extremely natural to let the ego have its way. The ego is that part of us that defends our supposed identity. It provokes anger and frustration when people don’t match what we want them to match. It stirs up jealousy and fear and provokes us to go on the attack, rejecting or denying another before they get the chance to do anything to us.

And so in the face of natural inclination we have to be thoroughly unnatural. We have to risk being hurt. We have to enter into interactions in which there is a possibility for heartache. We have to set aside our ego’s attempt to defend our innermost self, and let our innermost self face the brunt force of other people’s egos. We have to trust. We have to help. We have to give. We have to love. Even when this might not return to us. Even when our being open might deliver to us sadness, or hurt, or emptiness.

That is Jesus on the cross. That is our call, to carry the cross, not the cross of our own sinfulness or our own faults, we have to carry the cross that others build. In remaining open, even and especially in the face of potential hurt, we become conduits of the Spirit to move within a situation, taking hold of faith’s promises rather than our ego’s fears.

This is, frankly, humanly impossible. Which is why I think of this as being one of the more advanced spiritual lessons. Learn this and there is nothing anyone can do to removed us from God’s presence, nor are we battered by the fierce storms of others. This is the love of the martyr for their persecutor and the love of Jesus for all of us. It is the openness of love, that transcends our ego and places us within the community of the Spirit who seeks the wholeness of all people.

That sounds nice theologically. Practically? It means getting the heart crushed and broken but still not crawling into a shell. It means understanding when someone else is hearing from God and that means a limitation or a separation or a silence, while still praying for their best and knowing that they are walking with God. It means listening to those in pain, and offering assistance to those who hurt when there’s not a bit of chance they offer anything in return. It means being a friend and risking unshared feelings, doing the part God asks. It means letting go of the often right perceptions of slights and insults and dismissals, washing the past from all regrets and ill will. It means acknowledging all the hurts that have been caused, understanding these as being real and true, but not letting any of this guide future actions. Bless those who curse. Honor those who insult. Make peace with those who yearn for war. Turn the other cheek.

This isn’t an exhortation for national policy, this is how I am supposed to live as a disciple of Jesus. I have to remain open to people, even and especially after being hurt, knowing I probably will be hurt, and while being hurt. I have to let even that go for the sake of Christ, always seeing others as Jesus sees them, and hopes for them, and yearns for them. The Jesus who welcomed the denying Peter back into the fold is the model for my own personal interactions.

And God has been teaching me this lesson, certainly through my life, more explicitly over the last year.

But sometimes it’s too hard. Sometimes I close off. In the absence of palpable sources of renewal sometimes I lose heart, and hope, and so struggle to maintain my openness. Sometimes it’s too hard. That’s not a sign of someone else. That’s a reminder of my own immaturity.

Tonight I see the ways in which I have remained open in the face of potential hurt. And I see the ways I have remained open in the face of recent hurts, knowing friendships served purposes even as they took part of my soul with them. And I see the ways in which I couldn’t sustain it and lost my perspective, lost my openness and likely contributed to hurt, and the hardening of other egos.

I pray that I do more of the former and less of the latter, taking on hurt so as to help be a beacon of peace and openness to others.

I think at that point I will truly see Jesus, for I will have finally grasped his attitude.

I used to live in a forest. Not anymore.

The view has changed a little bit.

But, I’m still taking pictures of what’s outside. It’s raining outside and this is what caught my eye in the courtyard of the Cornerstone apartment complex.

Neil Swidey writes, .

There have always been boors blabbing in places where they should be quiet, blithely ignoring the shushes from librarians or the stares from fellow elevator passengers while behaving as though they’re the only ones whose problems matter. Bad manners are bad manners, irrespective of technology, right?

Yes, only technology has vastly expanded this bad behavior, eroding much of society’s stigma against it, and making it everybody’s problem. But here’s the real point: It is dulling our very capacity to ever be alone, or alone in our thoughts. The late British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott popularized the phrase “the capacity to be alone” in the 1950s, to describe a pivotal stage of emotional development. Winnicott argued that an adult’s capacity to be alone had its roots in his experience as a baby, learning to function independently while still in the presence of his mother. Yet today we’re seeing this capacity weakened, whether we’re in public places known for contemplation, like churches and libraries, or whether we’re just sitting by ourselves at home, losing the fight to resist answering our BlackBerries (just ask our new president) or checking our laptops for Facebook updates.

“We’ve gone from an American ethic that championed the lone guy on a horseback to an ethic of managing multiple data streams,” says Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at New York University and author of the new book Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. “It’s very hard for people to unplug and be alone — and be with the one data stream of their mind.”

Or let others be alone. I’ve noticed this for quite awhile whenever I visited Fuller Seminary campus. At first it seems like this wonderful oasis in the midst of the city. There are trees, and walkways, places to sit, a small prayer garden with a bit of a waterfall. It has the appearance of a place of quiet, not entirely unexpected in a setting where spiritual development is seen as a priority. Yet, there’s hardly a place to sit in quiet. There are perpetual conversations, and much of these are the one-sided cell phone conversations of people unable, or unwilling to remain out of verbal contact with an other.

One person’s noise always becomes other people’s noise. It’s hard to hide behind perpetual sounds without injecting that noise into many others. The noisy one, after all, always wins the battle of preference with the quiet one.

This is interesting to me because of what it says not only about society in general but, at Fuller at least, what it is saying about those particularly emphasizing a life as spiritual leaders. If any are to know quiet, it is they. So they can teach it to others.

The noise is perpetual, and I suspect the exterior noise is merely a tip of an iceberg to the internal, which seeks distraction more than confrontation, something quiet does all too well.

Worth reading Swidey’s whole essay, if you can find a bit of quiet.

I’m taking a class on Theological Methods right now. Basically, that’s the study of different approaches to writing and thinking about theology. For the class each student is responsible for two presentations based on assigned readings and a major research paper (25 pages or so).

At the beginning of the class I picked up presentations to do on the 4th and 5th week of the class. Last week and this week. I’ve had to read the assigned books particularly closely and then put together a 20-25 minute presentation (about 10 pages). Needless to say, these last couple of weeks I’ve been a bit focused on those tasks. Add to this a big change in the class schedule between this week and last. Last week we met on Thursday afternoon, this week we met last night. So instead of a week, I had about 3 days of preparation.

But, prepare I did. And last night offered my summary of two chapters from Nancey Murphy’s Anglo-American Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspectives on Science, Religion, and Ethics.

It’s a worthwhile book because so much of the discussion on postmodernity assumes the sort of deconstructionalist, relativist side of things, which isn’t inherent to everything that is postmodern but is, rather, limited to a particular form of postmodernity, much of which originated from continental Europe. This is frustrating because everything with a hint of movement from modern assumptions gets lumped in with the most frustrating of this philosophy, pushing those of us who seek to discover new approaches to defend such approaches from what are really rather unsophisticated charges.

This is important because so much of missional/emerging theology is not about pushing for relevance as much as it is really, authentically postmodern. All throughout the church people have discovered that the tools the modern period gave us are often either insufficient or even destructive.

Nancey Murphy’s book is not a particularly light read, but it’s not a hard read given the subject matter. I’d highly recommend it to those who are seeking a more coherent philosophic justification of newer forms of theology and church.

Oh, and another little curious change in the class worth mentioning. The professor who was to lead the class got sick (he’s now getting better) and another professor took over for the rest of the quarter. The new professor is Nancey Murphy.

Which means I spent about a half hour summarizing her book to the class and to her.

This sort of thing seems to keep happening to me.

Here’s an excerpt from my presentation:

Although both liberal and conservative expressions of theology have found relative success in many aspects of understanding both religious and scientific thought, they each have at their core key assumptions of modernity. By adopting the particular answers to these core questions, which are not wholly separate but indeed lead and feed into each other, a particular framework is constructed and direction of development established.[1] As these assumptions have weakened over the course of the last half century, both liberal and conservative theology have become weakened as well.[2] Their foundations are, it might be said, now past the point of retrofitting and the edifices built upon these are now in danger of imminent collapse, even as there are many on both sides not willing to accept this quite yet. For those seeking a more coherent picture of reality as it is presently understood, however, neither the liberal or conservative expressions of modern theology offer acceptable paths. Instead, these categories are no longer helpful and there is a need for new patterns of knowledge that better allow for a more holistic spectrum. Nancey Murphy points us in key directions to do just this.

She begins by looking briefly at two postliberal theologians.[3] George Lindbeck and Ronald Thiemann are very helpful in addressing key weaknesses of modern thought and contribute a great deal to new directions in theology, especially in their attempts to replace foundationalist thought with a model based less on a building metaphor and more on Quine’s web of belief.[4] Yet, aspects of their approach may not be as helpful to those who begin with core conservative assumptions.[5] The first of these core assumptions is the place Scripture has as a special authority, more so than experience. The second is that God is understood to interact with this world. Finally, any postmodern theology must allow for truth claims about Christianity in particular. While these core values may have been at the heart of conservative modern theology they are not inherent to modern philosophy and so should be able to find expression with any new formulation of theology. Key to this new formulation, for Nancey Murphy, is the work of Alasdair MacIntyre.

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[1] “The choice of any one of these options tends to determine the choice of options from each of the other three pairs.” Murphy, 110.

[2] “It may be only a slight exaggeration to say that it has simply been impossible to do theology in an intellectually respectable way using the resources of modern thought.” Murphy, 112.

[3] Murphy, 115ff.

[4] See Murphy, 50ff. See also the diagrams on 120ff.

[5]Murphy, 118. Unlike modern thought, however, the differences are not inherent to the project and are not permanent. Rather, there is an expected convergence between liberal and conservative postmodern thought. To find this convergence, however, it seems important to not only move from one strand to the other, but to explore how each strand can best be expressed in postmodern terms and in doing this allow the two to meet in a suitable middle place.

Read the whole thing!