Thoughts on Leading

I think I have made it no secret the love and affection I have for my tribe at the Tuscaloosa Vineyard. These people are quality. In the little less than a year I have journeyed alongside them it has been a place of healing, growth and challenge. One of those challenges has been stepping back into leadership.

From a worship night at my house. I love my tribe!

Even reading that statement is kind of odd. Since I have been in Alabama I have (unfortunately) landed in three churches before Vineyard. (I say unfortunately, because I like stability. I don't like being a hopper or a shopper. For the most part, those three congregations were filled with great people...especially my friends out in Buhl! I just had trouble finding my place.) And in those churches I have led youth, worship and small groups. So, it wasn't like I have been "out of the saddle" necessarily; it's just things feel different at The V. I think it seems more akin to what I feel my calling looks like.

So, this week was exciting because my buddy Tim asked me to lead worship. He is the worship pastor at the church and it was fun to see this type of initiation work itself out naturally, you know, from within, instead of bringing someone from the outside. Also, leading worship is something I tend to feel comfortable with since I have been doing that for over a decade now.

I probably wore this expression Thursday night.

But Thursday night, at practice for Sunday service something happened, that, to be honest, happens to leaders of all shapes and sizes, that I didn't expect. As I got in the saddle I just didn't feel comfortable. I couldn't find the right balance. I was just looking around wondering, "Does anyone else feel this shaky? Is this just me?" It was difficult to find myself lacking confidence in something that has always brought me great joy.

So I talked with a few people in the band/ leadership about it and as I drove off said a little prayer.

And here is where we get into a phrase that I often say, and when I look at friends faces I often wonder what they think when they hear it: God spoke to me. The idea of hearing the voice of God extra-biblically is something I think I will take on at another time. (BTW, quick definition of extra-biblical: outside of the Bible.) But for now, it was interesting to hear what the Lord was saying to me.

I will preface that message with this. I have been reading a lot lately. Henri Nouwen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eugene Peterson, Tyler Watson have been some of the more consistent reads. And I think their collective words helped me shape the message God was preparing to speak to me.

The simple version was this: when leading worship, your insecurity does not determine your offering. Do what you are supposed to do, and that is worship. Peterson has this great passage in A Long Obedience in the Same Direction where he writes about lifting your hands. Lifting up your hands is based on motor memory and not on some emotive response. Most people can lift their hands. When Scripture commends us to lift our hands it doesn't require working ourselves up to an emotional place where we can lift our hands. We simply send some neurons through the old neural freeway to our arms and say, "Wave around in the air like you just don't care."

When in doubt I read Merton.

So, when leading worship, of course, there will be in security. Just as there will be confidence, joy, sadness, weariness. We don't work ourselves up to worship. We worship. It reminds me of one of my favorite Merton passages:

What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.

 So, I just try to remind myself that worship is not dictated by emotive response in a given moment, that worship is beyond, yet includes my emotions. They are part and parcel with the whole living faith thing. 

I do however think there are certain differences in the corporate setting. We can't just be these crazed, responsive people, sliming others with our insecurities. We need to avoid being compulsive, but we can be honest. We can stop and say, "I am feeling insecure," to those close to us, without shouting to the congregation, "I'm out of control, I don't know what I'm doing up here!" There is an appropriate place for it. Just like there is a place to say, "I am probably a bit of a prideful git today." But neither determines our engagement with worship, because simply, worship isn't about us. It's part of something greater.

I think back to undergrad. There was a certain part of me that understood this, and a certain part that strove to be "authentic" saying things like, "I won't affront (because I used big words a lot in undergrad!) God. I'm not going to fake it...so I'm just going to sit here." It was a heart that said worship was about me. It made me the center of the worship act, not God. And it was something that I just had to overcome.

So, tomorrow, I get to lead worship at Vineyard. I get to be a part of this external act of worship where the men, women, boys and girls of our congregation are going to be feeling happy, sad, anxious, prideful and insecure. And together, we get to enter this place where we say, "Even with that...I will worship." And that is what God wanted to remind me of as I am growing back into leadership this week. I'm sure next week there will be newer lessons, and then again the next week. In our living faith we just continue to evolve and that is a pretty cool thing.

Thoughts on the Church

One of my last summers at Fuller I signed up for a class on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Like the Nouwen class I have described, this class was explicitly dedicated to studying Bonhoeffer. My friend Derrick signed up along with a pastor from Montecito. The only hang up was the drive to Ventura and overnight stays in a hotel since the class was Friday night and all day Saturday. Luckily, Derrick and I decided to split a hotel room each of the three weekends.

As is prone to happen in such a small class we went through the initial “awkward class” phase quite quickly. Derrick and I only had two personalities to get used to, Patterson had years of experience, and Chris was just a cool dude.

During the third weekend we took lunch altogether, which we did each Saturday. We went to Dargan’s to grab a pint of beer and discuss “When is the Church no longer the Church.” Now, before you judge too harshly a bunch of theologians, sitting around deciding what action or belief is acceptable for the Church and who is in or out, you have to remember the topic of the course…Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer lived in a time and situation I doubt any of us will ever really have to go through, the church of his home was caught up in the throes of Nazism. Bonhoeffer had to legitimately tackle the question of what Church meant, and conversely what it meant to be a part of that Church.

For the three of us, the conversation revolved around PCUSA and the ordination of homosexuals. Why? Because Patterson and Thomas were PCUSA ministers. It was quite contextual. These men were part of a denomination deciding the future for congregants based on theological beliefs and understandings, while also reflecting the views of different parishes.

Now the purpose of this post is not to expose the views of either Patterson or Thomas. I spent a total of about 36 hours with these guys, well maybe 60 for Chris since I crashed on his couch twice…during the Olympics, which was kinda cool. (Side note. I still think Chad is Rad!) The point is there is this ongoing idea that runs into Christians’ minds of what (who?) is the Church. Most probably wouldn’t want to use that exact term, because it is uncomfortable to make this decisive statement that this person or that church or no longer Christian. I say most, because some people have no problem with it.

To a certain extent that is what the three of us discussed as I drank a Smithwick's for the first time. The two of them were discussing what was going on in PCUSA, while I avoided that altogether, being a theological mutt and not calling PCUSA my home. At the time, and to a certain point still today, I was more concerned with the lack of justice and sensitivity to a racially divided church. I was and am more concerned that men and women of different races and ethnicities have had such a hard time even endorsing one another, let alone worshipping together.

I doubt we ever came to concensus in that little pub to whether the PCUSA was still a true church. If we did, that was certainly not the takeaway I had from our conversations. But this takes me back to my previous post: when you are this lonesome, charismatic intellectual, how do you know that what you are doing, who you are, and who you worship with are still the true church? What are the anchors when your denomination is kinda loosey-goosey, this particular location looks like this, and that particular location really likes studying Romans more than speaking in tongues?

These are the theological questions that should be answered and can keep someone awake at night. So, what I came up with is this:

I believe in God, the Father almighty,

creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, died, and was buried;

he descended to the dead.

On the third day he rose again;

he ascended into heaven,

he is seated at the right hand of the Father,

and he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy catholic Church,

the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and the life everlasting.

Amen.

That’s right…a Charismatic evangelical finding orthodoxy in an ancient, Catholic Creed. What is Orthodoxy you may ask?

To be orthodox, or to hold orthodox views can mean one of two related things: First, to hold an orthodox view is “conforming to the approved form of any doctrine.” Second, to hold an orthodox view is to hold to a “sound or correct opinion or doctrine.” Those should go hand-in-hand. Conforming to an approved should belief should also indicate that it is the sound and correct opinion. However, as the narrative of culture changes things what is orthodox can be changed.

Simply stated, I choose not to worry too much about anything outside of this. If the men and women I worship with can affirm these basic beliefs of the early church, who took dedicated time to boil down the essentials of faith into a succinct text, that for the most part was unanimously agreed upon, then that is safe to serve as my baseline.

I know there are many arguments that come against this. For example, “James, you will have to give account for what you did on this earth. Did you do this for the poor, that for the homosexual, that for the mentally ill?” Others will say it is theologically irresponsible. "You need to have a definitive stance on what is permissible and what is not permissible. Who can continue fellowship, who can partake of the table, etc." And those are legitimate concerns and arguments. However, I think at the heart of the Gospel, at the core of loving God with every part of me, and loving everyone on earth, as I look for anchor on who the Church is, and what is still orthodox, anyone who can still agree to this is still fine in my book.

And I guess that is why I can hold a book by Thomas Merton in one hand, a book by Miroslav Volf in another, while listening to a sermon by Joyce Mayer. It’s also why I don’t worry if the Episcopals I worship with each Easter openly affirm LBGTQ, while the Vineyard I attend tends to be quite conservative. I trust that the men and women of both congregations are working out their salvation with fear and trembling and know both to worship the same Jesus. And sure, some may say that is a bit shortsighted, but I choose to err on the side of grace when the God I worship spent his time hanging out with hookers and outcasts.

On Second Thought

I just got through reading a few interesting articles. The premise of these articles is basically, “Who owns Dietrich Bonhoeffer?” There seems to be this raging debate between who Bonhoeffer would lend his sympathy toward, those ranting, raving far-right, Evangelical nut jobs, or those Godless, hell-bound expecting a handout, left-wing hacks. Yes. Apparently that is a real argument going on today. And though, I am in no way the same caliber of excellence of Bonhoeffer, I feel at times I have the opposite problem. My problem, is where do I belong in this hubbub.

Part of the problem lately has been my aversion to men such as Mark Driscoll and John Piper, while not being able to fully embrace the views of men like Tony Jones and Jay Bakker. Granted those are seemingly polar opposites, and whenever your comparison is “the fringe” of course you find yourself in a quandary. But, I think the problem is actually quite a bit larger than that. I think the problem lies within the “us and them” that has transcended culture and overtaken the Church. And that’s not a new problem.

When I was in, probably my second year of seminary, I was introduced to one Dr. James Cone. Cone scared (and still does to a certain extent) the crap out of me. Here was a man that said things like, “The time has come for white America to be silent and listen to black people...All white men are responsible for white oppression.” Now I’ll be frank for just a minute. A late-twenties, evangelical, white male, who has not been exposed to much liberal theology, can and was scared out of his wits reading this kind of language. BUT, Cone and I belong to each other. Not in an ownership kind of way, more like a tribal affiliation.

While at seminary I also took a course that studied Henri JM Nouwen. The entire course was just that, a study of his life, what was his theology, how did he minister, what were his psychological leanings and methods; these were the questions that we examined. I admired and still do admire Nouwen. However, there are a lot of people in the intellectual world who do not find Nouwen’s teachings palatable, either because he is A) Catholic, or B) spiritual and not academic. But just like Cone, Nouwen and I belong to one another.

Seminary also challenged me to read works by Marva Dawn and Nancey Murphy. In a field over wrought with Caucasian, gray-headed, white dudes, I could see the struggle of women trying to break through barriers long since placed before them. And like Nouwen and Cone there is this unity that draws Murphy and Dawn into the “us” that was forming in my mind.

Now backtrack to around the end of college or so. I was reading John Eldredge. I loved Wild at Heart. I’m not ashamed to admit that. Sure some things were over-simplified and generalized, but there was something that resonated with me. The same could be said for Neil T. Anderson and Richard Foster who were also influential during those formative years.

Finally, there was this influence of John Wimber, BennyHinn and Mike Bickle, etc. That was really my bread and butter. The experiential nature of God manifesting Himself to the Church; the love of God transcending into our lives like the Song of Solomon on display; tongues of fire, prophetic words, people slain in the Spirit: these mystical experiences I knew to be real. They were not conjured up in a moment of emotional hysteria. These men and women were the closest to family I felt in the Church, but something was missing.

The problem for a growing cohort within Christianity is simply this: for the Charismatic/Pentecostal intellectual there is either a vacuum with no legitimate presence, or there is this borderless realm with no limit as to who influences you. I have lived for so long in the odd loneliness of not being a typical conservative Evangelical, but finding no place within the larger liberal community because my views of Scripture/theology were far and away too conservative.

Bill Jackson and Todd Hunter coined a book called The Quest for the Radical Middle. I haven’t read it. I should read it. I probably will read it soon. But as the title suggests, for many there is this odd defiance that does not want to succumb to being defined as right wing, left wing, liberal, conservative, etc. We are different. And because our views do not line-up explicitly with someone like Eugene Cho or Shane Claiborne, and because people need to give others a label in order to know how to deal with them, we come across as non-committal and wishy-washy.

When I say I don’t know fully how to respond to homosexuality yet, even though I have been having conversations with others about it for nearly twenty years, that is a true statement. It is not me trying to appease you and your idea of full inclusion or saying homosexuals should be nowhere near a church’s doors. When I say that yes, I believe people are faking spiritual gifts and at times the charismatic church is full of emotionalism, it doesn’t mean that I want those same churches to stop seeking the spiritual gifts. Actually, it’s just the opposite. I want to see those same churches continue to seek out the power of the Holy Spirit and bridle it aside the truth of Jesus Christ so that lives will be changed.

I think back to the Shema in Deuteronomy and how it is repeated (in part) in the New Testament: And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. There is a definite complexity to loving the Lord with your heart, soul, mind and strength. And without the various streams of the Church I don’t think I could love the Lord fully. Without men such as Thomas Merton and Yonggi Cho and women such as Mother Teresa and Heidi Baker, the Church would not be who She is…and I cannot be who I am created to be, which is not this definable “white, evangelical 30+ year old with Charismatic and Catholic leanings,” but instead is simply as the Fleet Foxes sing “a functioning cog in some great machinery, serving something beyond me.”

First Thoughts

“So, we’re going to be friends aren’t we James Love?”

“Yeah, Tim, we’re gonna be friends.”

And then Tim jumped up from his chair and hugged me, smelling of smoke, hair from his ponytail hitting my face.

Tim (not his real name for legal purposes) is schizophrenic. And one of the particular ways Tim’s illness manifests itself is being direct, presumptuous and desiring relationship. If you think about it, that’s not terribly different than someone who isn’t ill. And that is what got me to thinking about humanity. You know, all of that pie in the sky, brotherhood of man nonsense.

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One of the last quarters I was at Fuller Theological Seminary, I took a course entirely on Henri J.M. Nouwen. He was one of two individuals that I took time to study for an entire quarter, the other being Dietrich Bonhoeffer. If you think about it, taking time to study a person exclusively is a great way to learn more about history. I feel like I learned more about World War II, ethics, ecclesiology and what it means to truly be a pastor by studying Bonhoeffer. When the personal meets history it changes things. That is why, I believe, the Civil Rights movement is still so impactful for Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr. Rosa Parks. Even just reading those names, there are pictures and stories that come to your mind. That history is personal. The Civil Rights movement wasn’t (isn’t) just the clash of two powers, it was people you could see and hear.

And I think that is why studying Nouwen made such an indelible print on me. Nouwen is in some senses a pretty cut and dry figure if you want him to be. He was this priest, who became a bigwig professor, then left it all to care for men and women with developmental disabilities. That is the quick and easy Nouwen. Heck, the quick and easy version of Nouwen for most is someone they never heard of. He never was raised on the pedestal of a Billy Graham or Albert Einstein, yet he lived in both worlds. He was a man of the cathedral and the university.

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I frequently joke with friends that if 19 year old (really, replace any age below 26 or 27 for this joke) James realized that he would daily be spending his time with former military schizophrenics, manic-depressives, and sufferers of PTSD, depression, anxiety and a host of other issues, he would have either: A) laughed at you, or B) ran far, far away. But the problem was running far away is kind of where this all started.

I didn’t run away in the way you might think of someone leaving it all behind, cutting off any trace of their former identity. For example, Brenda Heist is in the news these days. Heist one day, in the midst of divorce, afraid of raising kids “on her own,” meets some homeless folk and joins them. Leaving behind everything…more importantly everyone.

That wasn’t my running away. My life in Texas was pretty good. I mean it could have been better. I was working really hard, but not getting anywhere. I was in a community where I struggled. I bought into the lie of presenting yourself a certain way for acceptance, and fighting every moment to keep that public persona together. So, when I sensed the time to go back to school I decided, I wanted to get the heck out of dodge. So, I did. I went to Los Angeles. Far, far away from everything and everyone, BUT, just a flight away from all that I left. It wasn’t about a clean break; it was about a fresh start, knowing where my roots lay.

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Nouwen had a similar journey in some regards. His education (more the fruits of his education than pursuing education) took him away from his Dutch roots and tossed him into America. Remaining a priest, Nouwen became a professor and taught at such institutions as Notre Dame, Harvard and Yale. This man was brilliant. His students would often talk about his fervor demonstrating itself in his big floppy hands when he taught. For some reason, that is the imagery I remember most about Nouwen. He had these big floppy hands. He wasn’t perfect.

Nouwen, through his tenure struggled with his vows and an increasing awareness of loneliness. Eventually the loneliness led him out of the institution and into a community called L’Arche. At L’Arche Nouwen became a part of a community. The community was made of those with developmental disabilities and those who helped take care of them. But at the heart of L’Arche was this identity of this being the community. Nouwen was as much a part of the community as a young man named Adam that he cared for. Nouwen was not just an employee, he was heart and soul the same member of community as Adam.

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I have three cousins named Stephen, Blake and Bradyn. All have varying degrees of developmental disabilities. All are fully family. They aren’t any different than myself, my cousins, aunts and uncles, etc. They are just a part of who we are. That is kind of what L’Arche is about. It’s about a lived experience that Nouwen flourished in.

And so what Nouwen and my family have planted in me has met Tim. It has also met Nick and Anne, who are part of the community where I worship, Vineyard Tuscaloosa. And here is the thing that Nouwen has prophetically reminded me of, and my family has lived with me. Anne and Nick (and outside of church Tim) are fully a part of my community. They have gifts to bring and needs to be met in community. They are fully community just as pastors, parishioners, psychologists and nurses are fully community. Where we often “miss it,” is this false belief that men and women like Anne, Nick and Tim are either there to be served or sequestered into a corner. Neither is a viable solution. Serving them only denies they have gifts to give community. Putting them in a corner denies they have needs community can meet. I think when the “other,” whether it be men and women of different races, developmental abilities, or even just varying ages, are invited fully into community, the community comes closer to being whole, closer to how it was always intended to be.