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Posts from the ‘Faith’ Category

Dec 18

A Body

There are days when the weight of human cruelty and carelessness seems almost too much to bear. I’m not speaking about the vicious climate of our political discourse or the endless shouting and posturing the dominates our news media—the wearisome, grinding tedium of left shouting at right and right shouting at left. This, too, is excruciating, but I’m thinking more prosaically today. I’m thinking of the middle school playground, or the creaking and groaning marriage, or the toxic workplace or the chaos and confusion of the dementia ward or the high school cafeteria. I’m thinking of the endless weaponizing of words, the myriad ways in which we are inhuman to one another in our everyday lives. Read more

Dec 12

10 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

A few unfinished scraps and fragments are cluttering up my “drafts” folder, so it’s time for another “Miscellany” post. There’s a common thread that runs through what follows—something like “the truth and how we tell it”—but nothing cohesive enough for a single post, evidently.  Read more

Dec 5

8 Comments

I Don’t Want to Be My Own God

Most Christians I know have a complicated relationship with the doctrine of hell. Many have grown up with a caricature, with gruesome images of an eternal fiery torture chamber with a horns-and-pitchfork devil presiding over the conflagration. This is deemed intolerable by most. Indeed, I am highly suspicious of those who retain this view. They often seem a bit too eager, not to mention selective, in their appreciation of God’s judgment. The rest of us struggle with hell in various ways. Those who accept the possibility of hell wonder how a merciful God can allow it. Those who reject hell outright often still implicitly long for, even demand, some kind of a final justice for those who have done great evil. We hate the idea of hell but we can’t quite let it go. It’s complicated. Read more

Dec 4

6 Comments

It’s All Your Fault!

There are at least two reasons to like the Nashville Predators hockey team. First, the yellow uniforms. Obviously. You have to admire a team that cares so little about the intimidation factor that they’re willing to skate out in mustard yellow. Second, the Preds fans have (had?) this delightful tradition that follows each of the home team’s goals. They begin by serenading the opponent’s goaltender, chanting his last name in a kind of whiny, mocking voice, and punctuating the ridicule by screaming, “It’s all your fault, it’s all your fault, it’s all your fault!!” It’s great fun—at least if you’re on the right end of the score. I watched a bit of a Predators game last night before heading out to my own beer league hockey game where, as it happens, half of the goals our team gave up were, well, all my fault. Luckily there aren’t many fans at beer league hockey games and the few who do show up can’t be bothered to summon the requisite energy for mockery. Read more

Nov 29

Look Up

The season of Advent approaches and with it the ever-present temptation to dwell in the saccharine, the safe, the sanitized—harmless images of God’s coming that trouble us far less than they ought to. I feel this temptation every year. It’s easy to prepare for the coming of a harmless child that is with us but demands little of us. It was and is all too easy for earth to receive her king poorly. Read more

Nov 20

6 Comments

The Disconnect

I spent last weekend participating in a church renewal workshop. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I tend to be a little ambivalent when it comes to these kinds of events. Whatever “church renewal” is or might look like, it seems like the sort of thing that resists easy formulas or clever strategies. Also, I hate group exercises. But desperate times call for desperate measures. These are hard times for the church in Canada. The litany is familiar enough by now: shrinking, aging congregations, dwindling budgets, the evacuation of younger generations, the perception of irrelevance (or worse) out there in the broader culture, etc. The wearisome data piles up. Something, clearly, must be done, even if many of us have little idea what that “something” might be (or whether, indeed, it is all the church’s frantic “somethings” that are part of the problem). Read more

Nov 13

2 Comments

On Excessive Enthusiasm

It’s almost the definition of a calling that there is a strong inner resistance to it. The resistance is not practical—how will I make money, can I live with the straitened circumstances, etc.—but existential: Can I navigate this strong current, and can I remain myself while losing myself within it? Reluctant writers, reluctant ministers, reluctant teachers—these are the ones whose lives and works can be examples. Nothing kills credibility like excessive enthusiasm.

— Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light

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Christian Wiman writes sentences that sound so good that you’re convinced that even if they’re not true, they probably should be. Like that last one: “Nothing kills credibility like excessive enthusiasm.” I laughed out loud the first time I read it. It brought to mind the many eager beaver pastor-preneurs I’ve encountered over the years, people who so obviously craved the stage and all that went with it, people so utterly convinced that they could save every lost soul by the sheer force of their own conviction (and often volume). Or the people who are just a bit too desperate to plaster themselves and their causes all over social media, as if almost to overwhelm people with the innumerable exciting things that they are presently catalyzing. I have rarely found such people credible. Who are you trying to convince or impress? I often mutter unholily under my breath. No, I have never much appreciated the fevered sales pitch, religious or otherwise. Read more

Nov 9

2 Comments

The Lord’s Insight

I mentioned Christian Wiman’s latest book in my last post. It’s a marvelous read animated by one central question—the question of all questions: “What is the central hunger and longing that drives our peculiar species?” As always, Wiman expresses our options in such compelling ways: Read more

Nov 2

2 Comments

Resurrecting Blossoms

Christian Wiman is a brilliant writer—one of my favourites as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before here. I’ve been eagerly anticipating the arrival of his most recent book, He Held Radical Light and yesterday the blessed brown package showed up in the mail. I spent part of last night reading it. The man has a way of communicating the longing and haunting desire of human existence like few others that I have come across. Read more

Oct 25

17 Comments

I See Things That No One Else Can See

He’s sitting in his chair when I arrive. That’s it. Just sitting. Not watching TV, not reading. Just vacantly staring up at the ceiling. The curtains are drawn and the window closed, even though outside it’s a pleasant October day. The air is stale, sad, heavy. Read more

Oct 23

5 Comments

On Getting Your House in Order

Most people recognize that to be a human being is to be on a lifelong journey in pursuit of two broad goals: to become the best version of ourselves that we can be and to contribute something of worth to the world around us. We don’t all do this very well or very consistently, but we generally realize that the idea is to try to leave the world a better place than we found it and to become a better person along the way. Read more

Oct 17

16 Comments

Why Appreciate a Pastor?

I was forwarded an email yesterday about “Pastor Appreciation Month.” I think I vaguely knew that this was a thing, but I had no idea that it was upon us. Apparently, one of the ways that my church can show appreciation to me is to give me a gift certificate for a discount on books. It’s a nice gesture. But honestly the last thing I need is more books. I already have a dozen waiting to be read and I have probably reached that stage of life and ministry where I am less optimistic than I once was that a book holds the key to whatever intellectual, pastoral, or administrative deficiencies I daily inflict upon my church. But, again, a nice gesture. And it got me pondering a rather simple question: Why appreciate a pastor? Read more

Oct 9

6 Comments

Nothing is Given?

A headline on Facebook this afternoon caught my eye. It came from one of those Christian sites that’s always hunting around in popular culture (movie stars, athletes, etc.) for any whiff of a reference to God or faith. The headline in this case was “Drew Brees Gave a Moving Interview About Faith After Breaking the All-Time Passing Record Last Night.” Brees is a quarterback who plays for the New Orleans Saints. As of Monday night, he’s also apparently the all-time leading pastor in NFL history. So, he’s a pretty big deal. The headline on Facebook was accompanied by the words, “Grab the tissues.” Against my better judgment, I clicked the link. Read more

Sep 21

12 Comments

How to Be a Bad Theologian

I’ve been thinking this morning about, of all things, hockey pools. For those unfamiliar with this phenomenon, a group of friends get together before the season and pick which NHL players they think will score the most points in the upcoming season. You assemble your roster and then watch to see how they perform against other people’s rosters in the year ahead. I’ve been doing this with a bunch of guys over the past few days. I tend to be pretty terrible at hockey pools, but it’s all good fun. Read more

Sep 14

7 Comments

Who Can Discern Their Own Errors?

Richard Beck offered a few reflections on prayer this morning that resonate with my own experience and practice. Prayer doesn’t come naturally to me either. I, too, have been “saved” by the discipline of a regular practice. I, too need a morning routine to reroute me from less productive ways of starting my days, whether it’s uncritically beginning to feed at the trough of the entertainment news cycle or engaging in fruitless online discourse or whatever. I like what Beck says about how the way we “imprint” our day matters. If the first thing I reach for in the morning is my phone or my laptop, my heart and mind begin to be shaped in ways that are deeply unhealthy. Read more

Sep 11

5 Comments

Life and Love, In Progress

Perhaps it’s an utterly ordinary affliction of mid-life, but I find myself wondering often these days about what it means to make progress along the journey of life, whether this progress is physical, relational, professional, emotional, spiritual, or all of the above. It’s fairly normal, I suppose, to reach a certain stage of life and ask questions like, “Ok, how am I doing? Have I gotten any better at anything? Am I more disciplined now than I was at twenty-three? Have certain convictions grown sturdier? Is my faith stronger? Are my relationships healthier? Am I more confident in my vocation? Have I become a better husband, a more devoted father, a more faithful friend? Am I progressing on anything like a more hopeful arc in these important domains of life? Read more

Aug 23

13 Comments

On Big Churches (And Those Who Love to See Them Fall)

Yesterday, I posted a link on Facebook to an article by Jonathan Aigner called, “Farewell, Willow Creek: Where the ‘Regular’ Churches Can Go From Here.” It was ostensibly a kind of “where now after Willow Creek” piece. It was snarky in tone and read, at times, like an elaborate exercise in schadenfreude from an angry guy who seemed a little too happy to see a megachurch fall. But I thought the article raised a few important questions, even if I tried to distance myself from its bitterness and make it clear that I wasn’t expressing my approval for all that it contained. 

As it happens, if my inbox is to be believed, not everyone appreciated the link or my attempts to endlessly qualify my reasons for posting it. Which is fine—I didn’t expect everyone to like the piece. Indeed, I tried to make clear that I didn’t like everything about the piece. But I fear that whatever interesting points I might have been hoping the post might draw out were mostly lost due to the article’s tone. Those inclined to be supportive of the Willow Creek model of church felt attacked; those inclined to be critical of the Willow Creek model happily piled on.

So, I decided to do what I often do when I fear that I may have been misunderstood or when I have misgivings about whether or not I should have posted something: I wrote a long, tortuous blog post to make everything luminously clear. Ahem. Well, perhaps not. If nothing else, I tried to isolate what I found interesting and potentially worth discussing in the piece. In what follows, some of the key claims made by Aigner are highlighted, followed my own reflections on what these statements twigged in my own brain. Perhaps it will be interesting to others, perhaps it will only add to the frustration. If nothing else, at least the Internet has a few more words now, right? 😉 
Read more

Aug 10

1 Comment

Friday Miscellany (On Race, Identity, What We Can Say, and How We Can Say It)

A few days ago, I was meandering through a museum in a small BC town on a lazy summer afternoon. I was lingering over a historical image (the image to the left) of several Ktunaxa men and an inscription about how the gold rush had affected their people. The image itself was fairly nondescript. Six faces staring blankly back at the camera in front of what looks like a bush of some sort. I forget what the inscription beneath the photo precisely said, but I won’t soon forget a passing comment made by one of my fellow museum-goers as she passed in front of my view. “Look at the one in the top left, eh? Pretty good evidence that we come from apes! Hey, I just call it like I see it!” [knowing chuckle] She said it all so quickly. I wasn’t even sure if her comment was directed at me or to someone else within earshot. She was gone before my indignation had time to properly register. I simply stood there dumbly, staring at the picture, my temperature steadily rising. Read more

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