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Posts from the ‘Discipleship’ Category

Jan 29

6 Comments

Picking and Choosing

The denomination in which I serve—Mennonite Church Canada—is currently asking its congregations to engage in a lengthy and challenging process of facing challenging difficult ethical issues of our day (issues around human sexuality, religious pluralism, pacifism, environmental concerns, etc.) head on and discerning together what the Spirit seems to be saying to us regarding how we are to respond as followers of Jesus. The “Being a Faithful Church” process is an attempt to put hands and feet to our theology.  Mennonites affirm, among other things, the importance of community, the priesthood of all believers, the inappropriateness of hierarchical power structures and modes of relating to one another, and freedom of the Spirit to lead us into deeper and truer understandings of Scripture. The “Being a Faithful Church” process is an (ambitious!) opportunity for churches to demonstrate that we actually we believe what we say we do. Read more

Jan 21

13 Comments

Seeing Christ in “The Other”

Last night I participated in a local ecumenical service marking the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. It was only the second such service that I have been a part of, but these are already becoming a highlight on the calendar for me. It is a beautiful thing to see Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans, Salvation Army and United Church folks, and Mennonites worshipping the same God, together. Happily, last night’s service was quite a bit fuller than anticipated with people spilling out into the hallways of the small chapel at the local United Church. It was a very good night. Read more

Dec 21

10 Comments

I’m Not Ready for Christmas

It is December 21, 2012; four days from the day we celebrate the birth of Christ. The forecast calls for bitter cold and snow, so we may just have a white Christmas this year after a mostly brown and warm December. The malls are teeming with chaotic life and ravenous spending (I survived my one and only foray into the temple to consumerism with the kids last night!). The end of the madness draws nigh. I know this to be so because, aside from the aforementioned evidence, I have also reached my customary level of perplexed irritation at being asked the tired old question, “So, are you ready for Christmas?” Read more

Nov 29

2 Comments

The Choice is Ours

One commonly hears some version or other of the refrain that faith is difficult here in the twilight of modernity. How can we possibly believe in the God of Christianity in light of modern science? Or in light of an understanding of the history and composition of Scripture? Or in the context of such astonishing religious diversity and all of mutually exclusive truth claims therein? Or given the amount and variety of suffering in our world? Or given how much we know about the sociobiological basis of all of our thinking and believing as human beings? Or _____?

The impression often given is that faith is uniquely improbable or challenging or implausible here in our current cultural moment. All we are left with, it seems, is some vestige of faith as an individually chosen, privately held, subjective  collection of beliefs which may provide psychological comfort or a kind of illusory meaning for our lives, but has little bearing on the real world. Read more

Nov 15

9 Comments

How Dare You Speak of Grace?

I spent a good chunk of this week at a denominational pastors retreat in the Alberta foothills just north of Calgary. One of the things we did during our worship times each day was spend some time “dwelling in the Word.” The specific text we focused on each session was Luke 7:36-50, the story where Jesus is anointed by a “sinful woman” at the home of Simon the Pharisee. It’s a scandalous story—a woman of ill repute showing up a bunch of religious elites, crashing their party with her sensuous, inappropriate display of penitence, love, and devotion. Even more scandalously, Jesus praises her as an example to emulate, claims to forgive her sin, and sends her away in peace. One can only imagine what must have been going on in the minds of the esteemed, religious host and his respectable dinner guests! Read more

Nov 1

22 Comments

Secularly Spiritual? Spiritually Secular? (Gil Dueck)

Over the last few days, my commutes have been spent listening to the 7 part CBC Ideas series called “The Myth of the Secular.” I’m not finished the series yet, but it’s been very interesting thus far. Is “the secular” simply the absence of religion? Or does it require religion and lean heavily on versions of religious eschatology in its vision of the future? Is religion a private exercise in a kind of generic, value-free public square or is it public truth with private implications? Basically, what I’ve picked up from the series thus far as that “the secular” owes considerably more to religion than it often cares to acknowledge and religion is often fundamentally secular in its presuppositions and expectations. The lines are often very blurry indeed. Read more

Oct 24

6 Comments

The Power of All: Book Review

Over the past two thousand or so years the Christian church has consistently, in its worship, its leadership structures, its pedagogy, and its general ethos, deviated from the spirit and intent of the community Christ envisioned. Rather than becoming a community of believers gifted and called to participate together in the ongoing task of becoming disciples of Jesus in life and worship, the church has become an institution maintained by professionals. There have been exceptions along the way, to be sure, and of course God has seen fit to work with and through the church with all of its errors, but the general trend throughout most of church history has been to move away from multivoiced communities of active participants toward mono-voiced institutions filled with passive consumers. It is time for this trend to change. This is the provocative thesis of Sian and Stuart Murray Williams in their book The Power of All: Building a Multivoiced Church. Read more

Oct 11

“God Has Bound Himself To Us”

One of the interesting things about participation in the wild world of social media and online interaction is the many and varied mediums through which feedback and conversation can take place. Blogs are synced with Facebook and Twitter and who knows what else, and feedback can (and does) arrive from any number of sources.

I believe the correct term  for this—the usage of which would undoubtedly make me sound far smarter and more technologically savvy than I really am—is “multi-platform engagement.” I am only scratching the surface on these matters, having recently linked my blog to Facebook (and having thus far resisted the madness of Twitter), but it’s been very interesting to interact with the same content in multiple contexts. “Likes” and comments and “re-posts” and “pins” and “tweets” and “re-tweets” “+1’s” and before you know it my head is spinning. I remember the good old days back in 2007 when all I had to remember to check was if there were any comments on my blog. Read more

Sep 29

The Long View

Amidst the many astonishingly trivial deliverances of the Facebook news feed, the odd gem comes through now and then as well. Like this prayer I came across this morning. It has been attributed by many to Oscar Romero, the famously martyred archbishop of El Salvador, although evidently it is far from clear that Romero ever wrote or spoke these words. Bishop Ken Untener is believed to be the prayer’s actual author, composing it in 1979, and apparently it was Cardinal John Dearden who delivered it as part of a homily for departed priests (like Romero). Confused yet? Me too. Read more

Sep 26

15 Comments

Indicting the Cross

Last night was spent at a local theology reading group hosted by a philosophy professor from the university in town. It’s an eclectic mix—a few professors, a chaplain (who was gracious enough to invite me!), history and philosophy students, Mormons, atheists, agnostics, and a handful of other positions on the way to or from faith, no doubt. The discussion was freewheeling, lively, and very stimulating. I spend a lot of time in “churchy” circles where I am supposed to be some kind of “authority” or, ahem, “expert.” It was nice to take that hat off for an evening and just explore some interesting questions with others. Read more

Sep 25

2 Comments

Winners and Losers

I’m sitting in a waiting room with my daughter yesterday.  We’re both reading quietly, but gradually an animated conversation across the room takes over and fills the the space.  Only bits and fragments at first, but then a narrative begins to emerge.  A party the night before, a limousine, and a driver who wouldn’t just shut up and stop talking. Read more

Sep 17

10 Comments

God Loves Human Beings—Start with That

Just over three years ago, I threw up a post about a conversation with my son about the word “amen” and whether the “men” part of the word meant that God was only interested in men and not women. It was a rather quick post about the nature of the words we use, how our relationship to them changes over time, and what these words communicate about our views on gender. I didn’t think much of the post at the time. There are some posts on this blog that I spend a fair amount of time writing, but this was not one of them. It was an interesting conversation with my son, a few reflections of my own, and not much more.

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Aug 2

5 Comments

Holier than Thou?

Over the last few weeks, a number of articles around the issue of the decline of the liberal church have made headlines and generated a significant amount of commentary. First, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wondered if liberal Christianity could be saved from its many and varied capitulations to secular culture and “recover a religious reason for its own existence.” This was followed, predictably, by Diana Butler Bass’s piece at The Huffington Post which argued that liberal Christianity had simply experienced in advance the declines that their conservative brethren are about to experience or are already in the middle of experiencing. She went on to point to signs of renewal in liberal churches, and even wondered if, ironically, it might be the liberal church that would end up saving Christianity in general.

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Jul 24

17 Comments

Jesus Didn’t Dance, Did He?

Last weekend, our family headed up to Drumheller, AB to attend The Canadian Badlands Passion Play, a dramatic portrayal of the story of Jesus in a natural amphitheatre in the central Alberta Badlands. I wasn’t really sure what to expect—I had heard good things about the production, but to be honest the main reason I went was because I received a “pastor’s discount” in the mail. And I’m very glad that I did, because the play did a magnificent job of humanizing Jesus and capturing what it might have been like to experience the events of his life narrated by the gospels.   Read more

Jul 17

8 Comments

Back to the Bible?

Well, it’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks of travel and holidays back in British Colombia which has, obviously, meant less time for writing here. I plan on posting a bit more in the coming weeks, but things will likely remain a bit slower than usual over the next little while as I try to get caught up and settle back into a regular routine. I am also planning on tackling the intimidating stack of unopened/half-read books that I have accumulated over the last year or so. I spent much less time reading than usual during the last year as I stepped into a new job, and I am beginning to think this needs to change. I plan on reading more and, perhaps, writing a bit less over the rest of the summer.  Read more

Jun 27

14 Comments

The Anabaptist Vision—Synchro Blog

A few weeks ago, someone who has been worshiping at a Mennonite church for nearly a year, and who had no prior exposure to or experience with Mennonites, remarked to me that, while they had deeply appreciated their time with the community, it seemed to them that Mennonites were basically people who did lots of good stuff and liked to do things together.  It is a common enough sentiment.  Many expressions of Anabaptist faith can come to seem like little more than an ethical system designed to produce Christ-like behaviour and character with little, if any attention, paid to the indwelling presence of Christ and the ongoing power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. Read more

Jun 25

2 Comments

“He’s Still Breathing On Us”

I went to the library to renew my membership card today, and as I was walking out the door I a book on the shelf caught my eye: Sara Miles’ Jesus Freak. A friend recommended Miles’ Take This Bread a while back, but I have never gotten around to reading it. But, Jesus Freak?! Well, the title alone was enough to stop me in my tracks. After reading a few pages I decided that this would be a very interesting read indeed. I just finished the first chapter, which confirmed my suspicions.

I have no reason for posting this quote other than because it accomplished the somewhat rare feat of making me smile and squirm at the same time:

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Jun 15

21 Comments

Ellipsis

It happened again this morning. I was reading a devotional book that more or less adheres to the lectionary texts for the week, and I looked at the reading for the day: Psalm 92:1-4; 12-15. I have, over the years learned to grow suspicious of omissions in texts, and before I even flipped open my Bible I was irritatedly wondering, “What about verses 5-11?! I knew, more or less what to expect—a pleasant selection of the inspirational bits of a Psalm with the nasty parts left out.

I was right. Read more

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