We are going to be doing some traditional worship/liturgy stuff through the Advent season. We’ll be hosting something at our apartment Sunday afternoons at 4 if you want to be a part of it. If you have any really neat ideas of things to do, feel free to leave it in a comment, as we are still very much in the idea phase. But we’ll start this Sunday regardless.
+Lord, may we use this season to see you more clearly and to focus our lives more fully around your Kingdom.+
I’ve been reading some stuff from Steve Bush lately. He has an interesting blog and also has some good articles on another website.
Two things in particular have stood out so far. One is an article he wrote called What is Salvation? and the other is this quote he shared from Stanley Hauerwas in Unleashing the Scripture:
“Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked, such as eighth-grade commencements. Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own.
North American Christians are trained to believe that they are capable of reading the Bible without spiritual and moral transformation. They read the Bible not as Christians, not as a people set apart, but as democratic citizens who think their ‘common sense’ is sufficient for ‘understanding’ the Scripture. They feel no need to stand under the authority of a truthful community to be told how to read. Instead they assume that they have all the ‘religious experience’ necessary to know what the Bible is about. As a result the Bible inherently becomes the ideology for a politics quite different from the politics of the Church.”
Ponder on those for a while…
I have this working theory that postmodernism is just Western culture being exposed to the rest of the world. Cultural postmodernism started in America in the 1960’s with exposure to eastern religions and thought patterns. It is growing and getting rounded out currently by more exposure to South American and African thought. We are realizing that we aren’t the center of the world anymore and that there are other legitimate ways of viewing the world.
As more and more of Americans take on worldviews from outside western culture, it becomes more urgent that we learn how to communicate Jesus to those worldviews. I think I’m gonna use that as an excuse to travel the world.
I was reading something that Alan Roxburgh wrote on the odyssey blog and it got me thinking. I am very much a problem solver in my thinking. I’ve been exposed to this style of thinking my whole life. My dad is an engineer. I was an engineering student for a little while. I make my living now diagnosing computer problems and fixing them. I’m good at it. I need to be able to think this way. But I am realizing that It seems to hurt me in other areas of my life. Problem solving thinking can be very hurtful when you apply it to people and communities. People get defensive, and rightfully so. People are not problems to be solved, and the problems people have cannot be handled in a proper manner just as problems. I am coming to the conclusion that when trying to help people a healthier approach would be hermeneutics(interpretation and explanation). I think I need to read some Ricoeur.
I have enjoyed all the comments so far about paid ministry, thank you everyone for sharing. This conversation has brought out a number of different threads between the couple of blogs that picked it up. This is my attempt to summarize the conversation so far.
The arguments against paid ministry were as follows: By being paid you become a “professional care-provider” and those who pay you feel that you have an obligation to them. It then becomes an exchange of goods and services. It reinforces ideas of a divide between the clergy and the laity and prevents the idea of everyone being a minister from taking hold. It is not necessary if church is not about numbers and weekly worship events.
The counter-arguments for paid ministry were as follows: In our cultural context it is necessary if you are going to be a more than a house/simple/organic church. It does not have to be an exchange of goods. You can be supported financially without being paid to do ministry. You can have a proper understanding of church and the priesthood of all believers and still see a benefit of allowing certain people more time for ministry by financially supporting them.
A worthwhile point Leslie made is that all christians are called to be full time ministers, not just those who are paid. The primary vocation of all christians is to serve God regardless of who signs your paycheck. Those involved in the conversation who do get financially supported would all get jobs and keep doing their present ministry if their financial support became unavailable for some reason. They just would not be able to spend nearly as much time doing it.
It also seems that which stream of church history you resonate with influences your side of this conversation. Those who resonate more with the evangelical stream seem more inclined to do whatever is necessary to reach people for Christ. This would include larger regular gatherings, paid staff, etc. Those in the house/simple/organic church movements seem to resonate more with the incarnational stream. They seek to, as a community, show the world what the Kingdom of God is. And it is not that house/simple/organic church people do no want to reach people for Christ, because they do. And it is not that emergent church people do not want to be a community that demonstrates the Kingdom, because they do. The difference seems to be in what they see their primary calling as.
There seem to be a couple of unspoken threads that I wanted to bring up as well. One is how our consumerism driven culture taints what we do. The other is how much influence the corporate world has on our thinking. They both deserve threads of their own, but they both influence this discussion as well. I’ll give them their own threads in due time.
I realize that certain things that play into the conversation did not get proper attention. Seminary training is one example. If that is your professional training, why would it not be your professional employment? Is there a place for a ministry professional as opposed to a financially supported christian leader? If not, then theological training should probably change in nature.
Obviously those involved in this conversation come from a small portion of the church as a whole, but I think they represent a good cross-section of the emerging missional church in America. These are the questions, the perspectives and the experiences that we have. Let us love each other where we are, and continue to sharpen each other as we go forward.
