pluralism and portable faith

There is a great post over on Pomomusings in Adam Walker Cleaveland's series on Pluralism 2.0 that has brought a host of great writers, thinkers, bloggers, theologians and more to discuss what it means to be in a Christian in a time of profound religious interaction and discussion amongst a variety of faith traditions in our country and world. And this post by Brian McLaren helps to ask some of the most important questions that I believe Christians should be asking today. The two paragraphs that I think if most of McLaren's critics read would settle a lot of the bickering, and also I think pointedly address faith in our current context:

"At the end of the day, I know myself to be an evangelist at heart. I believe the good news of Jesus Christ is good news for all people. I am eager to offer the gift of Jesus and his good news to all people, whatever their religion. I am eager to help all people, whatever their religious identity, to “taste and see” how good God is, and to take on Jesus’ yoke so we will experience together his meekness and gentleness of heart. I am not a relativist in the sense of believing that beliefs don’t matter and that all viewpoints are equally valid or invalid.

But my confidence is in Jesus and his gospel - my confidence is not in us and our religious systems or institutions. I don’t think any religion - including my own - “owns” Jesus or has proprietary rights on his gospel of the kingdom of God. The good news taught by and embodied in Jesus is, I am discovering, far better than the half-good/half-bad version many of us were taught."

So tonight the youth are meeting for a mini-retreat called "Creating a Portable Faith." We are keeping with the traditional get a new t-shirt at the retreat deal, but this time it is going to be simple and helpful. It is a simple charcoal colored shirt with a lime-green port-o-potty on the front. Our aim for this retreat is to help the students to develop a portable faith...a faith they can take on the road with them. So we are gathering around 5 practices: Story, Listening to God, Community, Exercise, and Conversation in which we help will begin and build on some tools that they need to have or need to sharpen to help them to explore questions of life, faith, God, relationships, theology, doubt, fear, and all that life throws at them. I couldn't be more excited for my good friend Stephen Gray to join us and lead us on this retreat and through not only the series of five mini-talks, but also through the experiential and applied learning exercises and practices to go with them. It's going to be a fantastic time and I'm really excited to see how this stuff gets fleshed out in student's lives.

You may be wondering why even do anything like this...and the truth is, we are seeing that in most faith traditions and parachurch organizations somewhere between 80-95% of students within one year of graduating high school are not part of any faith community be it church or otherwise. And we hope by giving the students the tools they need to navigate their faith or questions about faith, etc. that we are trusting God to continue to work and speak into their lives while also preparing them to think critically and significantly about the profound beauty and complex mysteries of life.

Tonight Stephen will invite students to hear the story of his life and how that has become included into the story of God's mission and love for the world, and will invite students to reflect on their life story and how that interacts with the story of God. Then after some grub, we will discuss how to listen to God, and talk about prayer as listening and creating space for God to speak...not just for us to speak. Then we will spend the night at some different students' houses and then meet for breakfast to talk about community and the importance of connecting and processing the story of God and the profound beauties and complex mysteries of life in a community. And also how the community is a community on mission that seeks to include others rather than exclude. Then we will talk about how exercise is important as it helps us to physically communicate with others, God, and also effects our self-image which in turn effects how we relate to God and others. Lastly we wil talk about conversation as a value, about the importance of relating and being in conversation with people who think, believe, and act differently than us, believing that by being in converation with others we will be able to hear God speak in new ways.

It is going to be a great and packed 20 hours, but I couldn't be more excited to flesh out and put into practice some of the conversations I've had with folks like Stephen, Tom Lynch, Chris McPeek, Chris Folmsbee, Seth, Todd Cullop, and others. Please pray for us, and I hope to share some reflections on this experience here on the blog and next Sunday, June 7th when I preach next!

The Justice Mission

Tonight the youth and I will be finishing up our last lesson in The Justice Mission curriculum. I'm not much of a curriculum kind of guy, but after some great recommendations from Seth, we embarked on the journey towards reconciliation, redemption, and justice for the marginalized and oppressed people in our world. I have gotten some really strong feedback from students whose lives are being impacted in our discussions, studies, and reflections about the mission of justice by God. The Justice Mission curriculum is supported with videos that I found to be conversational, and non-emotionally manipulative, which is nice for a change, and unusual for student materials. The curriculum focuses on the work of The International Justice Mission, an organization that puts into practice the justice mission in wonderful ways. While the videos moved me deeply, along with our discussions, even to tears at times, I didn't feel manipulated or forced into a corner with no hope of how to bring this stuff into reality. In fact, it was the stories of change and salvation that brought such hope to my heart; my heart which struggles to believe that this justice, holistic salvation of the oppressed and marginalized, for the down-and-outs, and hopefully for me, the oppressor, the slacker, and the perpetrator of injustice can somehow come into reality.

Here are two emails that I received from some students that highlight their thoughts about our investigation into the justice mission:

"Thanks for youth group tonight. I super really enjoyed it. I feel like it was kind of deep and mental in a very positive way. I predict that I will be thinking a lot about what we talked about throughout the week and I can't wait to work on the journal sheet you gave us. I'm not quite sure why, but I just really loved youth tonight."

And:

"I just wanted to let you know that I think this justice mission is a really great idea. A couple of weeks ago, we were watching Hotel Rwanda in class, and people were so ignorant and had no idea that genocide exists nowadays. I really think this is a great way to learn about all of the prejudices in the world and ways that we can help stop it just in every day life. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for a really great lesson. These past couple of weeks, I have really been struggling with the idea of oppression and what I can do to help. I am looking forward to hearing more about this and learning about it."

I was talking with a friend recently at a birthday party about salvation, and the penal-substitutionary theory of the atonement, and I've been thinking a lot about the importance of telling a story of salvation that includes a change of the self, our communities, and our world, in a way that includes a radical sense of joining with God in laying down our lives for others. If salvation is limited to getting off the hook for sin and getting out of the punishment of hell, where does the motivation and need to join God in God's mission of justice for our world come from?

This has been a great experience, and if you have been thinking about going through the Justice Mission, I would recommend giving it a try. I'm pretty skeptical of curriculum stuff, and this was really good. Not to mention that Marko, the folks over at the Justice Mission, and other Youth Specialties folks were praying for us, followed up with us, and will help with any questions you might have.

one last YL post

This is a little more info and another realm of the issue that I didn't even know about. An insightful post by Tony Jones. If these non-negotiables really do carry over to Capernaeum stuff, that is a bit crazy to me.

YL cont'd

The last year I was on student staff with YL and the last year I formally led (and was training freshman leaders with Shey) I was most involved with work with middle school students. I thoroughly enjoyed their energy, their questions, and their perspectives on faith issues. The other leaders on my team and I realized that the sort of formula of talks that we had been working with wasn't reaching kids in the way we hoped and the kids who had been with us for a while had heard similar talks for two years now, and more than that, the changes we saw in a lot of the kids wasn't lasting as long or going as deep as we liked. Now I'll be the first to say that we weren't a perfect team, or that the results were a direct result of YL formulas for talks or anything trite like that. I realize that life is never that black and white.

But in our third year of working with students we felt this overwhelming sense in our prayers and in our conversations as leaders and with some other leaders from other schools, and my conversations with the area director who I worked with at the time (who was going to seminary), that we may try to explore more of the story of God's over-arching narrative. That we would begin where the Bible begins and tell the story of God's activity and redemption, and creative reconciliation over the period of a year beginning with talks about God the Father and creation, then stories of sin, promises/covenants, brokenness, the birth of Christ, the life of Christ, the death and resurrection, the life of the church, the mystery of the Spirit...we were still all relatively conservative on most theological matters, but felt compelled to tell these other parts of the story.

The three of us who were leading did not come into a relationship with Christ through YL, though we all strongly identified with the mission, and the relational connections that YL espoused and lived, but we struggled with the club talks aspect and the formulaic approach to the talk schedule that didn't always fit in with where our kids were at, and in our thoughts didn't express the fullness of the story that we felt like beginning in the OT helped to accomplish.

We had some really positive results with the kids, but more than that, we felt like we were able to help kids to take a step back and look at more of the picture of how God has worked throughout the ages, especially in Christ, but also through the Spirit and in people. To expound on my first comment in the previous post on this stuff, I think the main crux of the issue is that McSwain wanted to present the gospel story in a different order: person of Christ, love of God, repentance (possibly here), cross, (repentance possibly here), resurrection (repentance possibly here), sin (repentance possibly here). YL is advocating: person of Christ (which may include love of God, but is different than what McSwain is arguing for in his understanding of covenental theology), man's need, sin, cross, resurrection, repentance. I may be a little out of order with man's need/sin, I can't remember which goes first for YL, but with McSwain, his issue seemed to be that the presentation of the gospel had to follow the YL outline when theologically it didn't mesh with his reformed and covenantal theology.

I have two issues with this situation mainly: first is the whole formulaic approach to the gospel presentation/non-negotiables. Where do you draw the line on the non-negotiables? If the non-negotiables are the essential matters of the faith, what does that do to the rest of the story of God in Scripture in terms of fitting in with the gospel presentation?

Second, is how the document is being used from the top-down as a litmus test of theological priorities for staff who are all over the board theologically. I am not trying to say YL is out to get people, I don't know Denny from anybody else, but it stinks that it has come to firing folks over disagreements over the methods of sharing the gospel in YL club talks.

Mrs. Phyllis Tickle and Chris Folmsbee...and it all ends in the presidential suite

Today was a good day. It was the second day of the NYWC in Atlanta. Shey and I have been having a great time, especially after this morning's general session. Phyllis Tickle, author, speaker, prophet, and guide shared a message and lesson this morning. She talked about "The Great Emergence," or this time in history which we find ourselves in today. This is the term she has given to describe the next period of reformation in the church which is happening today and is changing the landscape of Christianity, especially in the West. If you have never had a chance to hear her speak, or use the prayer manuals she has created, I highly recommend her works, and finding a way to hear her speak the next chance you get. You'd never expect a 73-year old woman to get up at a youth conference and blow your mind, but that's just what happened today, and is what happened when she spoke at the general sessions at the Emergent Convention a couple years ago in Nashville.

In the afternoon, Shey and I went to Chris Folmsbee's super-seminar called "Stories, Signs, and Sacred Rhythms: A Narrative Approach to Nurturing Students." Chris' message and seminar was fantastic. He proposed a philosophy of youth ministry that could have a profound impact on the landscape of Western Christianity and youth ministry in the coming years. The models of faith development and beginning in the narrative will be extremely helpful and insightful in working with students whose very lives and thus their stories are being fragmented, alienated, and disjointed from others, God, and themselves on a regular basis. The language and metaphors that Chris is exploring is powerful and helps put 'words to some of the things' many of us are thinking about in this round table of discussion and conversation. Be on the lookout for his new book that will most likely have the same title of this seminar to be coming out in the future.

I'd like to post some more comments and thoughts about both Mrs. Tickle's talk and Chris' seminar, but it is too late to dig out the notebook. Shey is knocked out already, it's late...and I've ended on a high note. I got to see Shey when I came back, and the place I came back from was Marko's suite. I spent the evening with Chris and some other guys who work with the newly joined Sonlife/YouthFront. They are doing some amazing stuff that youth ministry folks should check out.

I met some cool guys tonight, and unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to talk to Marko, but Chris, Doug, Len, Scott, Mark, and others made me feel right at home this evening. It was fun to meet some of the other speakers, and to see some of the ways these folks hang out together. There is a warm spirit of hospitality and graciousness that was great to be around. All in all, Day 2 was a good day.

A good weekend and a new friend

This weekend marked the second Summit Lake Fall Retreat for senior high students that I've taken students on since being a youth pastor. We joined about 200 folks in a weekend of reflection, worship, conversation, and fun. The retreat was put together by a team of youth workers from NorthStar Church Network, which my church is a part of, and in the last three years as I've gotten more and more involved on the associational level, I've made some good friends, and been able to help create some positive experiences for students that help to push the confines of the conversation to new places. We were able to incorporate worship stations, great music, powerful breakout sessions, together with a thought-provoking and generous speaker Chris Folmsbee, to help us work into an on-going emerging conversation taking place in a theologically diverse group of churches. Last year my friends Harp 46 played for the entire weekend, and this year they were back for two of our four worship gatherings over the weekend. Hearing Harp 46 play live is such an amazing experience...whether we are singing "worship" songs or not, being in the same room while they do their thing is simply beautiful. Last night as Shey and I were discussing the retreat, we both kept coming back to Harp's worship sets, and how we just miss that kind of reflective, prompting music that offers more complexity and texture than the typical pop-worship we are accustomed to. Harp 46 also has added another member to the band, Amanda Lee, who has a tremendous voice, and did a fantastic job helping lead our students through a time of worship through music.

It was also really great for Shey and I to get to hang out with April and Nuc's son Lukas during their worship sets. There were some cool moments as Chris was talking about the importance of new life and how we are made in the image of God, to be able and look over to see such new life in some of the children there, like Lukas, it was very moving.

So we had a good retreat, and over the last couple of months in conversations and emails, and now after hanging out a bit, it was a blessing to be develop a new friendship. As I mentioned before, Chris Folmsbee was our speaker this weekend. He's the author of A New Kind of Youth Ministry, and is now the Chief Ministry Officer of YouthFront and President of the Sonlife division of YouthFront after the recent merger of the two ministries. (YouthFront and Sonlife) He did a great job speaking and helped urge the conversation amongst our students and youth workers to new places as we discussed being made in the image of God, holistically missional, life change and action, and the importance of being open-minded (amongst many other things). We had a chance to hang out for a bit on Saturday night, and it was encouraging to hear about the ways the YouthFront and Sonlife are coming together to help shape and stimulate the conversation and provide some great resources for future youth ministry. If you have a chance to hang out with Chris, or hear him speak, make sure you do. Thanks for a great weekend and great conversation Chris! Oh, and he's also blogged about his experience with us here.