Asking the Right Questions (6 of them)

As a pastor, I often get asked the question: "So how do I know what God wants me to do?" And the answer I give is pretty much the standard issue one: pray + read your Bible + listen to the wisdom of the people God gave you + use your own common sense. But there's another step in there which has to happen before you can even begin the hard work of discernment.

You have to ask the right questions.

Let's think about it this way: if you are thinking about transportation, and you want to know the answer to the question "Does God want me to buy this Lexus or that Hummer?" then chances are you aren't going to be hearing God speak clearly because you haven't asked the right question. You've already narrowed the parameters so much that the Holy Spirit got marginalized. You haven't asked "Does God want me to get a car," or "Do I need to consider alternative transportation," you haven't asked the hard questions about how to spend the money you may or may not have, and you haven't asked any justice or righteousness questions (environment, workers' issues, etc.). Too often, the task of discernment is either too frustrating or too easy because we don't ask the right kinds of questions.

We've been engaged in a prayer journey over the past 38 1/2 days, and that will end this week. To immediately assume that because we spent 40 days praying, reading our Bibles, talking amongst ourselves, and using our common sense we are ready to fix the broken things in our churches would be presumptuous. These are the kinds of conversations I had with my best friends in seminary, and are still somewhat amusing, but don't take into account the real world in which we must do our ministry.

"40 Days of Prayer for the United Methodist Church" has been a convicting, heartening, difficult, joyous time. But before we begin the hard work of semper reformanda, we must ensure our premises and our questions are sound, and that they rest upon the cornerstone of Jesus Christ, else the building will--sooner or later--come crashing down around our heads.

So, you're invited to help discern what the right questions might be. Join us in asking "6 Questions for the United Methodist Church"--or 6qUMC--today. You can find more information at http://www.umcyoungclergy.com/6qumc and we hope that you will help renew the church from the margins.

Invite two friends to join you as you listen and converse. We're ready to begin asking the right questions.

For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.

Matthew 18:20

What the Church can learn from Star Trek

I admit it...I'm a nerd. I've loved Star Trek since before the "cool" reboot of this summer. It's in my blood: my father was hooked as a star-gazing teenager.

I thoroughly enjoyed the summer movie, though, and I began thinking about what made it an excellent movie, and what promises it made for revitalizing the franchise. (Caution: spoilers ahead!) Here's a few ways in which I believe the Church can learn from Star Trek:

Re-connecting at a deep level with people
Take the opening scene, with the famous James T Kirk's parents aboard the ill-fated USS Kelvin. The build of interest, engagement, and emotional connection to everything that was about to happen in the movie was kicked off with a vengeance in the first few minutes. George and Winona Kirk are believably real as they are separated, Winona gives birth, and George spends the last 2 minutes of his life listening to his son and picking a name, before he says a final "I love you" to his wife, defending her and the rest of the escaping crew to the death. At the end, as you watch the Kelvin annihilated in a self-sacrificial burst of light as the Kirk family continues in the new baby, you cannot help but be drawn into the narrative.

We rarely narrate our own "origin story" with the same emotive content. Our preaching is either irrelevant to the gospel and/or people's lives, or it gives no reason to actually touch the lives of the hearers. The same with Bible study and evangelism efforts. Recapturing the emotive heart of faith and coupling it with a robust re-telling of the Story of God that is in the Bible and Christian history must be at the center of any church renewal.

Fresh faces
What a great cast! A few seasoned veterans like Karl Urban (Bones) and Bruce Greenwood (Pike)...and of course Leonard Nimoy's extended cameo as Spock Prime...but a number of new faces from TV or obscurity. And they acted superbly--which is the most important thing. No wooden Anakin Skywalker-like portrayals in this universe. If you were a huge fan and could remember Kirk and Co. as they were originated by Shatner et al., you could really believe that these folks were just their younger version. If you were new, then the acting stacked up favorably against Wolverine, Angels & Demons, and other new releases in May/June.

Passion and youth have a great deal to contribute to the revival of the church. Things may not be done in the same way, but the intensity, homage to tradition, and skill brought to bear by the new actors of Star Trek '09 cannot be denied. Young Christians, young clergy would do well to bring the same balance of respect, excellence, and freshness to the faith today. (And many of them are doing so: check out UMCYoungClergy as a great example of this!)

Culture-making
The Star Trek that burst onto the scene in 1966 was a rabid counter-cultural force, in some ways not unlike the early church as recorded in Acts. Building a loyal community centered around a different vision, a different way of doing things didn't ensure the original TV series a traditional version of success. It did create an out-of-the-mainstream cultural phenomenon that is more than 40 years old and has been a significant influence upon American society, the vision of space exploration, peaceful international relationships, and more. It is now poised with the promise to reach new people, tell engaging and timely stories (that are really about who WE are), and spark the imaginations of 21st century Terrans.

The church has the same promise. We may have made many mistakes over the past few years (centuries?) but we have an even bigger potential. We aren't in the business of creating consumers for tie-ins or fans to line up for conventions, but in making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. True inspiration comes from the movement of the Holy Spirit, and it is my hope that we will watch for the "reboot" opportunites afforded us in the church. Can we harness our passionate youth, our traditional elders, our emotions and our stories, our counter-cultural power so that the Spirit will truly "renew the face of the earth"? It's a challenge worth spending your life for, much as James T. discovers when he takes an old friend of his father's up on the offer to make something of himself in Starfleet.

I don't want to stretch the analogy to its breaking point, but if you haven't gone and seen the movie, go while it's still in the theaters! (JJ Abrams has not paid me off to push ticket sales...) It's the most fun I've had in a long time. I wonder: can those who encounter Christians and the Church say the same thing about us?

Why "Expatriate Minister?"

It seems like an odd handle or moniker to choose for my blog, now 4ish years after I started...and it's trickled out to other places on the web, notably Twitter. Yet I still think it's worthwhile to consider myself an emigre clergyperson. Here's why.

As I graduated from Candler School of Theology (Emory U., Atlanta) in May 2005, a lot of things were changing. I was about to not be a student for the first time in 20 years. I was only 18 months married, with my first child about to arrive. I headed to Texas for commissioning to ministry, yet I wouldn't be serving in my home state...I was headed across the pond to the British Methodist Church for a year. So when I created my blog as I began serving in the UK, "expatriate minister" was a pretty good summary for how I felt, with the bonus that it provided a unique perspective in the blogosphere.

Well, a year later, I was headed back to the United States, the United Methodist Church, and a new appointment to campus ministry. Did "Expatriate Minister" still apply? After reflecting on my experience whilst being stationed on the Scunthorpe Circuit and about what I might be called to do in campus ministry, the answer was: yes!

Campus ministry involved stepping out of my own cultural setting and entering a new one. If it was less visible a transition than moving across the Atlantic, it was that much harder to make precisely because of the invisible lines that separated me from the college students that inhabit Lamar.

All ministry, I have come to realize, requires becoming an expatriate. It involves leaving your assumptions, your culture-of-origin, your customs, even your identity to some extent behind. You have to adopt the attributes and identity of the people you are sent to--otherwise, being from another culture or country will truly make you an "alien."

This is what United Methodists call "itinerancy." It's being open to the leading of the Holy Spirit to move to a new place, minister in a new way, live out the love of God incarnationally among new people. Even if you are in the same place from year to year, you and I still have to itinerate out from behind the desk, out from the walls of the church, out from the "good church people" to bring the gospel message to those who need it most.

Finally, it means having the assurance of your true home in God's kingdom and not in any earthly habitat. Whether you have only known one home, or there are too many to count, our true home is not constructed by us amongst our expectations and self-made security. Our safety, our comfort, our home is with God...and wherever we find God's people at work building God's kingdom, we are no longer expatriates, but at home.

"But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ." (Philippians 3:20, NRSV)

Music for Pentecost

So one of the fun things I'm working on is having a decent playlist for all the liturgical seasons. Since Pentecost Sunday was yesterday, I've been digging through my music to find something that might relate to the Holy Spirit...and not having a lot of luck. Here's what I've got so far:

Oyaheya (Ricky Byars)
Spirit in the Sky (Norman Greenbaum, though I also have a dc Talk version)
Veni Sancte Spiritus & Within Our Darkest Night (Taize)

...and that's it. I also have some songs which might well fit into a theme if we merged this with Kingdomtide:

Be Thou My Vision (Van Morrison)
Love and Peace or Else (U2)
Prayer of St Francis (Sarah McLachlan)

But still not a great start. Anyone have suggestions? Please?

(I'll post other liturgical playlists when I get some time.)

How Shall We Pray?

It isn't as if we have a choice. Prayer is like breathing, or communicating with our fellow human beings. We do it, whether we want to or not. I doubt it will even cease after we take our last breath.

The question, then, is "How shall we pray?"

What will our prayers be like?

For what do we pray?

Far too often, the prayers uttered on our lips throughout our week (and even spoken by pastors on a Sunday) are selfish. They focus on what we think we want, how we want it, when it would be best for us. They are prayers focused inwardly on our community, and rarely take into account where the Spirit is at work outside of the 4 walls of our congregation.

I think these 40 days of prayer for the United Methodist Church are different from such self-serving prayers. Yes, it's prayer for who we are as a people; but it is with the knowledge that we need God's wisdom, not our own. It's not prayer for a specific thing so much as for a way of looking at things, at ourselves, at our world. Of course, they aren't perfect prayers. But they are rooted deeply in our experience and (poor) practice at being the people of God.

Over these next 40 days, let's work together as a people--not to advance a particular political agenda, nor to put certain people in power, nor to marginalize a group--but to bend all of our collective will towards the discernment of where God is calling us. Invite your congregation to join in--I wrote about it in my church newsletter for this week. Share it with folks in your Annual Conference. Invite Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and blog readers. Spread the word that God is not finished with us yet!

40 Days of Prayer

I've been involved with conversations about what it means to be a young person called to ministry in the United Methodist Church for quite a while now...it's become something of a career in and of itself! But I got hooked into the conversation that's going on across our globe about a year ago at the Church's quadrennial General Conference.

That discussion has become something much larger--not just what the place of young adults in ministry and church, but what kind of church are we becoming. Who are we called to be, as Methodists, as Christians? And the quick answer is...we're not sure. We know that what has worked in the past doesn't work now; yet the gospel remains the same. We don't all agree, operate from the same perspectives, or have set starting points.

We do have something that is bigger than all of our differences and individual viewpoints: the One in whom we live and move and have our being. So a grassroots, social-media-enabled movement began to root whatever it is that we are in the process of becoming in prayer. Ben Simpson got the ball rolling, and it's being supported by UMCyoungclergy. You're welcome to read more about it today from these sources and the other folks who are blogging about it today. I'm writing one of the 40 days, and there are many more who have committed to the hard work of praying what we're setting down. This pilgrimage of prayer occurs during the yearly season in which Annual Conference sessions are held.

So I invite you: Pray with us. Pray that in the "dark night of the soul" which we often find ourselves in that our faith will be strengthened. Pray for God to continue to illuminate the path we are on. Pray for the renewal of the church. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen +

A Good Day

They don't come as often as I would like, but I want to celebrate when they do: it was a good day today!

I'm not saying it was perfect (or that I was!), but it was one of those days where you feel like you are doing the right thing. I was a pastor, priest, preacher, and teacher today. I saw new life begin to unfold. I saw new possibilities. I saw people I've known for a while in a deeper and truer way. I saw the Spirit of God move.

I have been working on a sermon about expectations, so the question of what do I expect of myself, of God, of others has been on my mind. I wasn't expecting today to be anything other than routine, catch-up, administrative work. And I was surprised by grace and joy and peace. I hope you are ambushed by your vocation--by a Christ-experience--as well.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,
according to thy word;
for mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
which thou hast prepared before the face of all people,
to be a light to lighten the Gentiles,
and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

Post-Ike Thoughts

Well here we are again after the storm. I thought I might offer a few
thoughts on the presence of God in these difficult circumstances.

First, I think God is present in the way that people prepared. Those
who evacuated, the hospitals and nursing homes who arranged transport
for those under their care, the emergency management teams and 211,
first responders, government and non-profit relief organizations--
along with many others--all showed an awareness of the needs in their
communities and constiuencies. As Don Saliers told me in worship
class, "The Holy Spirit never minds good planning."

I also want to highlight the ways in which neighbors are helping one
another out as the long work of recovery begins. Citizens putting
others' needs ahead of their own comfort is a great example of
Christlikeness. Those who have hosted strangers and evacuees, shared
generators, waited with grace and humor in long lines for basic needs,
and more all made God incarnate by their attitudes and actions.

The question of divine will in a natural disaster is one I cannot
answer. But in the response to tragedy, may our communities of faith
keep hoping in a redeeming God and re-present that God to all we
encounter.