Weekly recap

Well, it has been a quiet week in the blogosphere. The best blogs I read this week reflected on the incarnation and what it means for us today--which doesn't change from generation to generation--and the top whatevers of the year. But here are a few things that caught my eye this past week.

If you are unfamiliar with the Advent Conspiracy, listen to this interview from NPR.

Bishop Willimon also has an interesting reflection on the incarnation that especially speaks to those who get frustrated with the church.

Over at Jesus Creed, Scott McKnight is beginning a review of the book, "God's Rivals: Why Has God Allowed Different Religions" McKnight does a fantastic job of reviewing books chapter by chapter and adds his insights and opinions. I don't always agree, but he always makes me think.

Over at Out of Ur (a blog sponsored by Leadership Journal), they've shared their top ten blog posts of 2007.

Finally, a wonderful article from Rueters on the popularity of libraries among Generation Y (or Millenials or whatever you want to call them). Leads us to ask--What do we do with a generation that loves the very things the generations before them sought to replace--libraries, traditional elements of worship, fellowship groups?

This week's recap

It has been a busy week at the Clontz house and at Trinty, so imagine my surprise when I looked at the calendar and realized it was Saturday--again! But here are some of the articles that have caught my attention this week.

Over at Emerging UMC, Taylor Burton-Edwards has been blogging about some recent comments by Lovett Weems regarding the missional future of United Methodism. I thought this week's reflection regarding the whether or not the church needs to change in order to reach younger people and a new generation to be particularly challenging. He basically means we have to go back to our roots to meet the challenges of the future.

As usual, nothing I think about it terribly cutting edge. This week both US News and World Report and Time magazine addressed some of the issues, I have been exploring in this blog. If you don't have a subscription to either, check out US News and World Reports articles on "A Return to Tradition" and "Mixing Jesus with Java." And then surf on over to Time to read "The Hipper Than Thou Pastor" (i.e., Rob Bell).

For those who are interested in reading more about the different generations and how they impact the world, the Harvard Business Review has an excellent article that is somewhat summarized over at Tribal Church in her articles Futurama and Futurama II. Their premise is not only does each generation have a different take on the world, but that there are four different archetypes that rotate througout history in a predicatable pattern. Really fascinating stuff by the authors of the Fourth Turning. I found the Harvard Business Review article worth the cost of the download and I recommend it to anyone who teaches, employs or works with folks of any age and wonders why the different age groups approach things differently.

Thoughts for the week

As I've often told people, I am awful at naming things. But since I read so many interesting articles in a week, I thought I would follow the example of the Mental Floss blog (which does this daily) and the Jesus Creed blog and provide a weekly summary of some of (what I consider) the best of the articles I've been reading. I've been placing most of them in my shared items folder, but this way I can make a comment or two. So here it goes (and if you have a wonderful title for this--please feel free to share!)

Whatever! Over at The Ooze, Tony explores our culture of apathy and how to combat it with a culture of anticipation. Seems appropriate for the Advent Season.

Into this Darkest Hour A beautiful poem by Madeliene L'Engle and Luci Shaw that seems so very appropriate for this Christmas season.

Signs of the Times -- Carol at Tribal Church reflects on one of my pet peeves--church signs.

EGens Scott at Jesus Creed summarizes characteristics of the 20 something generation that the church should address. And I love his new name for them "The Emerging Generation" or EGens.

Over at Theolog, we are asked to consider "How Comfortable is Our Religion?"

In the Journal of Lutheran Ethics, they explore the Andrew Greeley Principle which states that whatever the church neglects or downgrades a particular doctrine or practice, the culture will reinvent it in secular form within 20 years. Don't let the words journal, Lutheran, or Ethics scare you, this is a wonderful article that should challenge our thinking regarding worship and spiritual formation.

Donn at Jibstay reflects on Winthrow's book "After the Baby Boomers, a New York Times article about the "Odyssey Generation," as well as other articles and books about the change in the way the new generation is coming to adulthood and how that raises some significant questions for the church. I especially love his description of an emerging adult.

Finally, check out our Bishop's reflection on the incarnation.

Trinity Worship Survey

We are in the process of evaluating worship at Trinity. Your thoughts and experiences are important to us as we evaluate what we are doing well and the areas where we could improve. The survey will take about 25 minutes to complete. Please think about the worship service that you attend most regularly as you respond. Thank you so much for your time and prayerful thought.

Worship Essential #4: Interaction—Participating in a Relationship with God and Others

(Let me apologize for taking so long to finish this section. It’s been a bit busy around here.)

It would be ridiculous to think we could love our children just by thinking loving thoughts. True parental love is expressed in daily interactions: cleaning up spills, helping with homework, steadying wobbly bikes, pushing swings, participating in umpteen “knock-knock” jokes, reading stories, giving hugs, bandaging knees, and yes, saying “I love you.” Yet, more and more, we are satisfied with a lazy, armchair worship that only thinks loving thoughts.

In this last part of the chapter, Morgenthaler points out the importance of interacting both vertically with God and horizontally with each other. In scripture, worship is always described as a verb—an action. Yet, in our culture, much of what passes for worship is extremely passive. But not only do our actions show the depth of our feelings (as in the above example of a parent) but our actions also open us up to God and to others.

So Morgenthaler suggests worship planners ask themselves these six questions every time they plan worship:
1. What is the one thing people can do for themselves this week that we as a worship staff typically do for them?
2. In what small way can we encourage people to externalize what they feel internally?
3. What can we do to begin redistributing the “active worship space” so that worship becomes more of a “whole room” versus a “platform” activity?
4. As a worship staff, what is the one thing we can do this week to become more “invisible”?
5. What combination of the arts can we try that will involve as many of the senses as possible?
6. What kind of interactive “twist” can we put on a standard worship activity (Scripture reading, prayer, etc.)?

So—where in your particular worship service, do you see the opportunity for more interaction of the congregation with God and with others?

The Word became flesh

Bishop Willimon's words often inspire and challenge me. His letter this week struck a strong chord in my heart, so I couldn't wait to share it with others. So here it is:

The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” John 1:1-14.

When I was new, people sometimes asked, “What has been your biggest challenge as a baby bishop?” They think I’m going to say, “Moving from an intellectual to a nonintellectual environment,” or “Having to work harder than I did as a professor,” something like that.

I’ve come to say that the most difficult part of being a bishop is to have to live, on a daily basis, in that great gap between who Jesus is (a marginalized, fanatical, Jewish prophet who was the God we didn’t expect) and what the church is (a rather sedate, rule-driven group of people who just want to be left alone so we can be “spiritual”). Jesus’ Body, the church, is the greatest challenge in following Jesus.

“I could believe in Jesus,” declared the poet, Shelley, “if only he did not drag behind him his leprous bride, the church.”

One of last year’s most popular church books was entitled, Leaving Church. Oh to rise above the muck and the mire of the corporeal and the ecclesiastical so that we can be free to descend ever more deeply into the subjective and the personal.

We’re in Advent, that time in the church year when we attempt to prepare for the shock of the Incarnation, the shock that God Almighty refused to stay above us but got down and dirty with us, in the flesh, moved in with us. Jesus Christ, Lord of Lords, has chosen to be a people, a family, this people, this church.

Bonhoeffer, before he went willingly to be hanged by the Nazis was forced by God unwillingly to hang out in the church. There he discovered the power of a God incarnate. Bonhoeffer, put it this way:

A truth, a doctrine, or a religion need no space for themselves. They are disembodied entities. They are heard, learnt, and apprehended, and that is all. But the incarnate son of God needs not only ears or hearts, but living [people] who will follow him. That is why he called his disciples into a literal, bodily following, and thus made his fellowship with them a visible reality Having been called they could no longer remain in obscurity, they were the light that must shine, the city on the hill which must be seen.

In my own life, the church that previously had been relegated to the margins of the university as a “sometimes helpful spiritual influence,” has now assumed a large place. As a bishop the church has for me, in Bonhoeffer’s words, “taken up room”. It’s a “Treasure in earthen vessels,” (2 Cor. 4:5-7) yes, but it is also for me the sprawling, cracked earthen vessel that takes so much of my time there’s precious little room left for the treasure.

To be a lay or ordained leader of the church is to be called to care for the visibility of the church, the corporeal mass, the machinery. This task is particularly trying in age in the grip of anti-institutionalism and solipsistic spirituality.

Jerome Burce calls our age that of “spiritual agnosticism” (Marcus Borg and the so-called “Progressive Christians”) in which “The Fundamental truth claim of our culture with respect to matters spiritual is that we cannot know about them with anything approaching sufficient certainty to command the allegiance or shape the conduct or, least of all, correct the spiritual and/or moral opinions of another.”

Flee the Body in order to ascend to some disincarnate spiritual realm. Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” last year was, “You” - we have lost interest in anything but us.

Professor Bart Ehrmann, professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote a bestselling book, Misquoting Jesus. Surprise, there are all sort of stenographic errors in scripture, errors of transcription and questionable renderings of what the Jesus Seminar says Jesus said. So Ehrmann ends his book asking present day Christians (Ehrmann was a fundamentalist as a kid and appears not quite to have grown out of it), “Do you really want to put your trust in a flawed, thoroughly human book like the Bible?”

Well Bart, just where on earth would we put our trust? We actually believe that God became flesh, took on our flawed, thoroughly human corporeal nature. So if we’re going to put our trust in God, it will have to be in this God, it will have to be here, now, the same God who has condescended to take up room among us as the United Methodist Church. When we put our trust in the “thoroughly human” we actually believe we’re putting our trust in God who loved us enough to become human.

We can’t love Jesus without loving his body. It is a crucified body, to be sure, in bad shape, statistically speaking, but a body all the more in need of a loving caress.

We are those called, at this time in the history of Christendom, to worry about what constitutes a church, to be a sign of the visible unity of the church, to keep encouraging members of the body to honor one another, and sometimes even to promise a dead, decadent body nothing less than resurrection. An embodied, incarnate Christ sanctifies our mundane ecclesiastical body work as his. The church is Christ’s way of taking up room in his still being redeemed world.

The night I was ordained, a bishop laid hands on my head, repeating the ancient words of the Ordinal, “Never forget that the ones to whom you are called to minister are the ones for whom he died.” There I was, wondering, “Will the church appreciate my superior training? Will I get an all-electric parsonage?”

And there was the church, once again forcing me to be a Chalcedonian Christian, once again forcing me to believe in the blessed Incarnation, once again telling me, “The often disheartening, sometimes disappointing ones I’m making you fortunate enough to serve, are the ones for whom I died. This is my idea of salvation. Don’t mess it up.”

Oh the challenge of believing the Incarnation!
Will Willimon