Nine years ago today, the world’s sinful brokenness struck New York City. The refusal of Christ’s love led to hatred and division in our world. The hatred and division of September 11^th expressed itself by transforming planes full of innocent people into missiles of war. Airplanes, instruments of peace and industry, became instruments of war and death—plowshares were turned into swords.

The instantaneous creation of over six thousand victims shocked us. It led the politicians of the United States of America, like the elders of Israel in 1 Samuel 8, to call for a strong leader who could lead us into war. In the face of so many innocent deaths, we offered patriotic prayers. We turned to violence and war. We would eradicate the hatred of us by killing those who hate us.

Like Samuel, some prophets of our age warned us about what we were doing, giving up and taking on. The prophets warned us that succumbing to fear would transform the USA into a country where hate and bigotry become powerful and influential forces. They warned us that the economic toll of the military’s needs would be disastrous to our nation’s struggling livelihood. They warned us that the consolidated power would be abused, invasive, and turned to the ends of the powerful against the populace. They warned us that thousands upon thousands would join the six thousand who died. Despite warnings, we still called for a strong leader to lead us to war: someone who could save us from this threat, who would keep us safe and be our salvation. Just as when the Israelites were calling for a king, God granted us our wish and the prophetic warnings have come to pass.

On this anniversary, the wounds are fresh again. The images of terror and panic are new in our minds all over again. Relived traumas reinforce the pain. We also have the additional weight of our past decisions that tripled the count of dead through our direct actions. The weight presses the pain deeper into our psyche. It is oppressive.

On this anniversary, we have a chance to take a new choice. We cannot change the past, but we can take the pain we feel in the present and use it to make a better future: one of God’s kingdom come. We can learn how to do that by looking to another anniversary commemorated today. The other anniversary is of an event one hundred and four years ago today.

One hundred and four years ago today, another war started. This war was a new kind of war, a war that demonstrated that there was a force more powerful than tanks and mortars. The new war was based on faith in God, on faith in the power of martyrdom and truth to prevail over the most despicable and systematic acts of humanity’s sin.

The Muslim people who make up Afghanistan were key and powerful soldiers in this faithful war. This war drew one hundred thousand Muslims of the area into a movement called the Servants of God, dedicated to building up the destitute and to gaining freedom against a deadly oppressor. This new way of waging war converted the people of Afghanistan, then violent resistors and victims of oppression, into a force for peace and social betterment. This new way of waging war all started one hundred and four years ago, on the other 9/11.

The other 9/11 is when a man named Mohandas Ghandi launched of a new kind of war: one called “Clinging to Truth”. Believing that people are fundamentally relational, this war is based on exposing the truth of a situation and forcing people to cope with it. Exposing the truth of a situation may mean accepting violence done upon you without returning any in kind, a shocking concept in our age of industrialized state-advocated killing. Yet we as Christians know the power of martyrs who powerfully witness to God’s truth. Waging war through witness and relationship freed three hundred and fifty million people, and rippled throughout the twentieth century, especially informing the careers of the Methodist leader Nelson Mandela and the Baptist leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

On this 9/11, we have a choice. We can myopically focus on the pain of nine years ago and victimize ourselves all over again, or we can see the pain of nine years ago in light of the revelation of a century before. We can choose to entrust our salvation to a strong earthly leader and the ways of the nations, or we can choose to put our faith in the Heavenly King and in His ways.

If you would like more information about the other 9/11, there are booklets entitled “Hope or Terror? Ghandi and the Other 9/11” circulating around campus today. You can also retrieve a digital copy of the booklet at http://mettacenter.org/nv/resources/publications

For now, for all of you in field education, this is a great time to do some reading and writing for Confessio.  All of those sermons you are giving?  They are fabulous potential pieces for Confessio.  Again, this is the place to not just get published, but to share what you have been learning and thinking about not that you’re finally out of Westbrook 0016, or whatever 00 level classroom took most of your time.

On that note, we’ll be checking our e-mail occasionally, so if you have a great piece you finish this summer and want to send it in, we’ll certainly consider going ahead and publishing it (dukeconfessio@gmail.com).  Thanks for all your great work and we look forward to hearing from you!

Peace - the editors.

UPDATE:

We’ve found out two pieces of news to keep an eye out for.  First, our staff mentor Jason Byassee is out with a new book these days: The Gifts of the Small Church. Do check it out!

Second, Confessio has made it onto the Top 50 blogs by Divinity Students at The Divining Blog.  And you thought you were not getting read…

The sacraments were also very prominent in all the martyrs’ memorial sites.  One martyr was remembered in particular, Archbishop Oscar Romero, who died while saying Mass, (the main service in the Roman Catholic tradition that always includes Holy Eucharist).  One collection of Romero’s writings in English is called “The Voice of the Voiceless” and it was by saying Mass, by offering up the loving sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ, that Romero found one way to be that voice.  In the chapel where Romero was shot someone read aloud Romero’s last sermon, which was based on John 12:23-26 and includes this verse: “unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Likewise it was in Romer’s death that he was able to be an even stronger voice.  Romero’s house has been preserved intact, down to his car in the carport.  On one of the carport walls someone painted Romero sitting in on a rock at sunrise and with the stigmata – his hands and feet bore the marks of the crucified Christ. Romero not only presided over the broken body and blood, but he physically participated in Christ’s sacrifice as well.

Romero’s good friend Jesuit priest Padre Rutilio Grande had been killed in his car, along with two friends riding with him. Grande’s murder convincted Romero that the Church must speak out against the violence being committed both by the government and in response to the government’s violence. Padre Grande had been performing baptisms in Aguilares and was returning to the other church he served in El Paisanal when he was ambushed.  When we arrived in El Paisanal, on the 33rd anniversary of his death, priests were saying Mass in the town center, continuing the voice of God in that place.

Romero and Padre Grande were and are not the only martyrs of the violence. Six Jesuit priests and two ladies on their house staff were killed one night in 1989. In the middle of the University of Central America in San Salvador, where they lived, is the martyrs’ center. You can see the bullet holes and dried blood on their clothing as well as on a copy of Moltmann’s The Crucified God that one of the priests was reading.  The seventh Jesuit who lived with them, Jon Sobrino, was out of the country when it happened.  Sobrino has since described his work as taking the crucified people down from the cross.

Today’s violence in El Salvador does not stem from government-sanctioned death squads but from gangs. Pastor Juan de Dios Peña, the President of the Methodist Church in El Salvador and our host and guide for the week, related his own run-in with a gang last fall. He had traveled to a church to deliver Sunday school materials and other supplies.  While there, an 8- or 9-year-old boy walked in and put a gun to Pastor Juan’s head.  The boy was followed by about a dozen more kids, all gang members, and proceeded to tell Juan that he was going to die.  Then the kid sees Juan’s camera and demands it. Juan’s daughter, Gabriela, had taken pictures of herself on the camera that morning.  The film also held pictures of other Methodist churches; Juan worried for his safety, Gabriela’s safety, and the safety of those churches if he were to give over the camera.  Pastor Juan instead responded to the boy, “You know, God loves you.  No matter what you’ve done, God loves you.”  The boy replied, “No, God doesn’t love me.  And I don’t believe God exists, anyway.  I prayed to God when there was no food in my house and God didn’t provide food.  I prayed when there was violence in my house and God didn’t stop it.  There is no God.  Give me your camera.”  Pastor Juan responded, “You’re going to have trouble re-selling it.  Let me give you the money I have on me instead.”  He pulled out his wallet and handed over $20, all he had on him. The boy’s eyes lit up at the money.  He took it and let Pastor Juan, Francisco, and the rest of the church in peace.

Romero and the other martyrs were such seeds who died and produced more seeds.  The fruit they bore by being willing to die included the many youth and kids we met and in whose faces we encountered Jesus.  This is not suffering for the sake of suffering. It is suffering because Christ suffered. It is a suffering that Christ redeems. Christ calls us to follow Him, and some of us, like Romero and the martyrs, may die.  Others of us are called to lay down our life in other ways.  However, we all lay our lives down without fear for ourselves, because we lay down our life in the sure hope of the resurrection.  Amen.

As Christians, we have much bigger fish to fry: poverty, alienation and isolation, the sexualization of children, the utterly failed stewardship of God’s creation, and two-thirds of the world that does not believe in the salvation of Jesus the Christ. Once we get through handling all that, then we can bicker about whether gay people or women should be church leaders or whether the elements of communion are in some ontological sense “actually God.”  Until then, find a place in the body of Christ that works for you, and let others do the same.

To refuse to bless our Christian brothers and sisters because they have decided to shift to a different Christian tradition―especially another tradition confessing in the same Trinity, structured largely the same way, retaining the same rituals, and with a millennia and a half of shared history―is simply petty, if not outright sinful. And it’s very, very sad to see those of us who are supposed to be transformed into the image of the love of Christ engaging in that kind of behavior. With this kind of internecine bickering making headlines, it is no wonder our witness to the world is so weak, and as long as we continue to behave this way, our witness will remain hamstrung by our schismatic tendencies. There are many rooms in the house of the Lord, and we feel the need to lob grenades from one room to another. Who would want to move in to a house like that? Is it any wonder people move out in droves?

A person I know from a conservative Baptist tradition was once asked about her take on the question of “Biblical literalism”. She responded that she thought the whole dispute was from the Devil―after all, look how it sows dissention and destroys love among Christian brothers and sisters. Increasingly, I am coming to that opinion about doctrine in general. If you strive to live into Christ’s love, then I will call you a brother or sister in Christ. And that is true even if the smug, bickering, violent, and oppressive history of the church has caused you to revile the word “Christian”. That is true even if you don’t understand how the Trinity makes sense, or if you aren’t committed to a particular explanation of God’s election―because I struggle and wonder, too, and so I’m not one to be pushing away those with opinions that differ from mine. I would rather have you living into Christ’s love with me, sharing this life with me and seeking truth together.

And on a purely self-serving level, I do not want to judge others by their doctrines, for I do not want the Lord to judge me by my understanding of doctrinal confessions. Put in the eschatological terms of mainstream Christianity: you may think your denomination has some things right, and that you understand them thoroughly―but are you willing to stake your immortal soul on that fact? We first-year Duke Div students may have though the Church History final was rough going, but imagine coming to the end of days and being held to an exam of creedal orthodoxy with Heaven and Hell hanging in the balance. That’s horrific, but that is exactly the reality you are creating for yourself when you measure the worthiness of others to participate in your church’s salvation based on their doctrinal adherence. If that is the measure by which you (or the religious system you support) will judge others, then that is the measure you are setting for your own salvation. Or, to put it in more existential terms: I’d rather have people judge me in love and with a spirit of cooperative exploration than judge me by conformance to a creed. If that is how I wish to be judged, then why would I be so hypocritical as to judge others any differently?

What I am asking people to consider is a non-violent approach to theology. Let’s approach God and our understanding of God in humility. Let’s love others―especially our enemies―and seek to engage with them and to create a new world with them instead of trying to drive them out of our lives. If we want to have religious traditions, then that’s fine. I actually think that religious traditions are valuable ways to shape and guide a group of people―see Kwanzaa as a contemporary example. But let’s not confuse our artificial boundaries with the external walls of God’s House, nor confuse our constructions with God’s created order.

All of this is not to say that theology is unimportant. Insofar as learning about God brings us into a closer relationship and transforms our individual and communal identity, then such explorations are not simply important, but indeed critical. Debate, dissension, and the exploration of difference are part and parcel of the process of learning truth. Yet mathematicians don’t excommunicate people, because they don’t have to―they know that the truth will prove itself out in the end, and so the application of violence is both unnecessary and counterproductive. If they can trust their truths, how much more should we trust our truths, we who claim to have the Holy Spirit and the Creator and Word of truth on our side?

I have always been mildly obsessed with the Eucharist. By my senior year of college, my friends had transitioned from calling me a “closet Catholic” to just a “bad Catholic,” especially when I was occasionally showing up at night Mass in Duke Chapel. I hated contemporary worship and joined a Facebook group called “Praise bands annoy God.” I was horribly allergic to anything other than mainstream Protestantism, so much so that I never uttered the word “evangelism” during my freshman year of college, instead parodying “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” by speaking only of “the E-word.”

With that in mind, it’s interesting to look at my Palm/Passion Sunday this year. At Orange United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, the 9:00 a.m. Pathways service kicks off a full band (guitars, drums, etc.) arrangement of “Celebrate Good Times,” with the words changed to “Celebrate the Christ.” The band then launches into up-tempo arrangements of two hymns and closes out the first part of the service with a newer praise tune. The catch? The charismatic worship leader is my boyfriend of over a year, and I’m a vocalist on the praise team. I am the girl with a microphone and a tambourine that I used to mock.

So what? Plenty of young people discover contemporary worship and drop off the face of the mainstream, traditional Protestant earth. The thing is, I haven’t. When I finish singing at Orange, I head back to Durham to attend a service that in some ways is more high-church than those I grew up attending. My heart still belongs to hymns and liturgy and church choirs. Besides, I’m in Divinity School, so I’m constantly being made to think about (or simply being told) what constitutes “good” worship. And worship really matters to me:

“One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend.”

If you’ve been at Duke Divinity School very long, you probably guessed that quote comes from a book by Dr. Stanley Hauerwas. And if you’ve been in Dr. Chapman’s Old Testament class this semester, you may remember hearing how Amos connected liturgy and ethics. How we interact with God in worship shapes how we interact with people in the world.

What I’ve found in the past several years is that me being able to participate in and worship through different styles has helped me connect with a broader variety of Christian people and has made my own approach to worship richer. I grew up in traditional Methodist churches, but since coming to Durham five years ago I have worshipped in a predominantly African-American church. For a few years in undergrad, I was regularly attending Catholic Mass. Learning to appreciate contemporary worship (which, by the way, is the primary means of worship for a lot of American Christians) has been the next step for me. I still think much of what gets played on K-LOVE is garbage. Fortunately, my boyfriend only uses musically and theologically solid praise songs—he even regularly arranges hymns for the band. Being in conversation with him through the worship planning process has been educational, as it has made me think creatively about how to make non-traditional worship still reflective of its tradition (in this case, the Methodist tradition).

The fact is that a lot of churches do contemporary worship really badly. Sometimes it’s because it’s a small church trying to attract young folks but without the resources to do it well. Sometimes it’s a church that’s so big and successful that Sunday morning has become more of a rock concert than a worship service. But these problems are not unique to contemporary worship. I used to malign the entire genre for its emphasis on presentation, but then I remembered that I once quit a wonderful choir in a high-church setting precisely because I felt like it was more about performance than praise. In all forms of worship, there is a careful balance to be struck between offering something worthy to God and becoming too focused on how good the sermon or the music is. To take things a step further, it’s really more about why we care about excellence in worship—is it to be noticed and to garner accolades, or is it to glorify God and to build up his church?

Too often, worship style becomes a dividing line when the truth is that different traditions have much to offer each other. More than that, churches get divided from each other—and internally—by their approach to worship. They say Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week, and that doesn’t just apply to race, it often applies to generational gaps and cultural preferences, too. No matter the worship style, the challenge is the same: to make a genuine, faithful offering to God without letting it be tainted or qualified by our own pride. Sappy, sentimental hymns and pointless prayers exist in all styles of worship; organ music does not make your praise more heavenly and holding a guitar does not make Jesus more relevant. How we worship matters greatly, but let’s see what we can learn from different approaches, and let’s not forget that it’s not about us.

[Ed note: The quote attributed to Stanley Hauerwas above comes from his book The Truth About God written with William Willimon.]

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” “Why kill the Buddha?” “Because the Buddha you meet on the road is not the true Buddha but an expression of your longing.” Thus begins Jeff Sharlet’s Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible. If quirky Buddhist fables work as theological slants for religion journalists, this one would be Sharlet’s. The fable expresses what he sees as the phenomenon of religion in modern America: a land full of Buddhas masquerading as the Buddha, a nation full of different Christianities with different Jesuses to match. One need only replace Buddha with Jesus and vistas of fascinating American religious groups emerge—often falling under his description as ‘conservative,’ ‘fundamentalist,’ or ‘evangelical,’ (or some combination thereof).

As a contributing editor for both Harper’s and Rolling Stone and the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of America Power, it seems natural to assume that Jeff Sharlet would be less than sympathetic toward religious groups who consider themselves politically ‘right’ or theologically ‘evangelical.’ Yet his other work with the online publications, The Revealer and Killing the Buddha, captures Sharlet’s more subtle vision of the American religious landscape, something he considers complex and worthy of serious engagement.

These publications reveal something else about Sharlet—he’s a heretic. And he writes for heretics, a notion he picked up from John Milbank, of all people. Milbank explained to Sharlet, during an interview in 2000, that to be a heretic meant one at least valued something in the old tradition enough to disagree with it. The old faith is worth critiquing, and the heretic, by definition, could not exist without it. Sharlet embraces the title, signifying he is a writer who both “believe[s] there’s something worth paying attention to within tradition and scripture, even as there’s much to critique,” and that no one story has the whole story. Put heresy “to a tune,” Sharlet writes, “and you get cacophony, not harmony, a song that’s part punk, part country, part gospel, part death metal.”

Sharlet’s own religious background reflects this theological posture. He describes himself as “a Jew raised by a Pentecostal Hindu Buddhist” mother who asked “Charismatic Christians to pray over her as she lay dying.” Sharlet confesses that growing up his mother encouraged him to explore other churches and temples, collecting people’s stories. “In my family, that’s just how you did religion.” This he believes contributes to the kind of religion writer he is—someone who “gravitates towards stories about what people believe and don’t believe and how that affects their lives.”

For such a mixed religious heritage, Sharlet’s work tends to focus on America’s Christian Right, albeit, in all its variety, as he insists. He writes on topics such as megachurch pastors and their relationship with political leaders, sexuality in evangelical youth culture, male ‘headship’ in conservative Christian marital literature, and Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri. To name a few.

Although these topics might seem like ploys for bashing fundamentalists, Sharlet displays some degree of restraint and deftness. His article, “Soldiers of Christ: Inside America’s Most Powerful Megachurch” is a good example. The article is about New Life Church in Colorado Springs, at the time pastored by Ted Haggard (prior to his public scandal). Sharlet portrays New Life as one might imagine—a church selling Christianity as a suburban lifestyle in a market economy of spiritual consumerism. To Sharlet, Ted Haggard isn’t shepherding the flock, he is selling Jesus and a lot of people are buying. But not everyone. A section of the article details a home-visit he had with a small group of the church. There he discovered a hidden texture to the Christianity he encountered—a group of folks in their 20s and 30s caught between strong disagreements with Haggard and their nagging sense of loyalty to the church community. His experience with the group did not alter his overall thesis, but it certainly added to the article a refreshing air of complication.

Sharlet’s ability to capture the gray shades of America’s Christian Right comes from a keen theological acumen (quite impressive for someone with no formal theological education) and a talent for solid, bold reporting. Research for Killing the Buddha took him and his co-author, Peter Manseau, all over the country meeting people, eating with them, praying with them, participating in their worship services, small groups, and unique communal practices. His work on The Family is no different. The Family, Sharlet’s most popular work to date, exposes an elite group of ‘Christian’ politicians and world leaders supported by a young ‘brotherhood’ being groomed for positions of leadership. Sharlet managed to live for several months with the brotherhood at their estate, Ivanwald, on the false premise that they “had mistaken my interest in Jesus for belief.” Over the course of several years, he rummaged through thousands of documents discarded by ‘The Family’ at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, IL.

Although the popularity of his stories arise from a knack to write about fundamentalism with nuance, scrappy reporting, and a resistance to stereotype, eventually they all begin to run together as one large meta-narrative. The setting, characters, and conflict may change, but almost every story ends the same: this is dark and scary and happening right under our noses.

Sharlet’s writing becomes more interesting once his topics branch away from the Christian Right. Which they do and with a fair degree of variety. Whether he is interviewing John Milbank at a coffee shop in Charlottesville, chatting about postsecularism with Rowan Williams over the phone, or talking the blues-like nature of theology with the ever-so-cool Cornel West in a basement pub in Princeton, Sharlet’s prose give the impression he is equally at ease with each. He has a gift for translating sophisticated theological projects (like Radical Orthodoxy) into language that someone with an undergraduate course in Western Philosophy 101 could handle. He even manages to draw connections between the sweet falsettos of Al Green and the possibility of the transcendent.

But what makes Sharlet’s writing laudatory also warrants criticism. His flare for the sacrilegious tends to cloud his judgment and shape his descriptions, both of people and institutions. In his article, “Holy Fools,” he piggy-backs on Frank Schaeffer’s (Francis’ son) portrayal of L’Abri in the ’60s and ’70s as “a place of blasting music at all hours, drugs, sex and rock’n'roll.” The comment sparked a slew of responses from previous L’Abri residents and most notably, Os Guinness (Christian writer and long time friend of Francis Schaeffer’s), decrying the description as a ’tissue of falseness.’ The L’Abri article earned Sharlet other enemies as well. Regular Books & Culture contributor, Alan Jacobs, has made Sharlet an object of criticism in several articles, resulting in a public exchange of words between the two, where Sharlet felt the need to defend himself, protesting that he is not “some fanged enemy of Christendom.”

Yet for a writer who makes a career as a heretic killing Buddhas, Jeff Sharlet should expect, on occasion, that someone will want to burn him at the stake.

You’re Going to Hell, Boy

It’s two a.m. and I open my email to find the word “REPENT” in all capital letters in the body of the first message I open. Not only am I told to repent, I’m also told I’m going to hell. This is the third time in a week I’ve been threatened with eternal damnation via email. Emails from the occasional backwards Christian kook are entertaining, as well as depressing: some members of the Christian faith are truly ridiculous. My email attackers generally don’t offer real critiques and rarely explain why they’re writing. I slouch in my desk chair and pray, “Lord, save me from your followers.”

Why do I get these hateful emails? In February 2010, I co-founded a website called Churchrater.com, which lets users write reviews of churches, much like they’d review restaurants on Yelp.com. You might think, “This is a great idea! I’ve been waiting for someone to do this for years.” Or, like the libelous emailer, you think: “This is the final straw. This monster is turning church into Wal-Mart with free crackers.” Either way, I’m pushing forward. This is my charge of the light brigade: I’m going to take flak, but I believe Churchrater.com can be a positive tool for religious democracy.

Church Rating Has Been Going On For Awhile

The basic premise of Churchrater is nothing new. People have been “rating churches” for centuries.  As a Roman Catholic–dare I say it?–what the heck do you think Martin Luther was trying to do?  Go back to the first century; the majority of the New Testament is made up of letters from one party to another that included critiques, instructions, rebukes, compliments and evaluations.  Look at ancient Israel: Amos and Isaiah are harsh critics of God’s children. And if you’re under the delusion that those prophets, especially Amos, wouldn’t rail against the current state of the church, it’s time to reflect on what you think Bible is really about.

‘The times they are a changin.’ Like many other 22-year-old students, I don’t own a phone book. Who needs paper when I have Google on my smart phone? Young people are going to use sites like Churchrater.com to find essential services for the rest of their lives. Churchrater.com does a better job helping people get useful information on church services, because, let’s face it: Church websites are more like advertisements than accurate explanations. I wouldn’t trust a salesman to give me a balanced review of his product in same way I wouldn’t trust a churchgoer to give me a fair description of her church’s services.

Handing Over The Power

Churchrater.com gives underrepresented followers a voice. The Christian church has historically been patriarchal. The democracy brought by the Internet can shake the very foundations of these patriarchal structures. With Churchrater.com, women and the poor can voice their opinions in a truly democratic forum that social structures within their churches may not allow.  Christians don’t preach the Gospel: they bludgeon with it. The Gospel doesn’t preach “Stop abortion and gay marriage,” as the Religious Right over the last few decades would have us believe. If there’s one thing outsiders like about Christianity, it’s our service for the downtrodden. When I read the Gospel, I see “preach the Gospel, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and house the homeless.” The message of loving service has been subsumed by a message of hate. Churchrater.com is a soapbox for Christians and outsiders to tell the world how they feel about church and what they think Church should be about. For centuries, Christians have been issuing vague threats of hellfire to outsiders and telling them what to think about church. It’s time for Christians to stop shouting and start listening. Christians need to evangelize with their ears: Churchrater.com gives insiders and outsiders the ability to engage in open and constructive dialogue about the essence of church and Christianity.

The Courage To Listen

What makes this environment so special? Churchrater.com is a seam state: it’s not church, and it’s not “the world;” it’s a place where insiders and outsiders can be comfortable discussing their hopes, concerns, and ideas about the church. I like to think of Churchrater.com as a type of demilitarized zone for Christianity where dialogue, not invective and recrimination, is the mainstay of insider-outsider discourse. This is why Churchrater.com is not a Christian ministry: I started the site with an Evangelical and an atheist in order to have this kind of broad conversation.

During my undergrad years, I came to an impasse: I could write books my whole life about how to do church, or I couldcreate a democratic tool where everyone could work toward changing church. The latter struck me as a much better course of action after I read Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. He says the three basic concepts of social media and crowdsourcing are making a promise, offering a tool and striking a bargain. Churchrater promises users the ability to rate and find churches, and we created a tool (the site) that allows users to do just that. But the reality of the Internet is such that we can’t control how our audience chooses to use this tool. I can’t use Churchrater to drive people to my “radically liberal,” Catholic Worker approach to ecclesiology. I have to give the power away. Because people have different criteria for what a “good church” is, I’ve promoted this tool with the hope that people are going to change their churches for the better. I don’t expect or even want homogeneity: I want to have a national conversation about how we do church.

Join me–it’s Parishioner Power!

W. David O. Taylor, ed., For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts (Grand Rapids: BakerBooks, 2010).

In 2008 pastors and artists converged on Austin, Texas for a symposium called “Transforming Culture: A Vision for the Church and the Arts” organized by David Taylor—then Arts Pastor of Hope Chapel in Austin, and now Duke ThD student. Happily, Taylor has just published an edited volume of essays by speakers at the symposium (plus contributions from two who were not, and ample illustrations) so the rest of us can engage with its vision. For the Beauty of the Church is a remarkable collection of essays from academics, pastors and artists aiming, as Taylor puts it in the introduction, to “inspire the church, in its life and mission, with an expansive vision of the arts.” These essays provide an inspiring vision, always framed theologically and made concrete through practical stories and suggestions. Rather than offering a summary of the book’s contents (Taylor provides a nice overview on pages 23–26), here I want to consider a few questions the book raises in order encourage you to read it yourself.

One question is the utility of art. What purpose does art serve that might justify its place in a world of scarcity? Some writers argue that this misses the point of art. In the opening essay Andy Crouch argues “art and worship stand together on the common ground of the unuseful.” His point is that both art and worship are ultimately tied to our view of human nature. If the final explanation of human culture is in terms of biological or economic utility, then ultimately humans themselves are only useful (which has chilling implications for those deemed to lack usefulness). The challenge for the church, Crouch concludes, is to “bend our lives toward the recognition of Christ’s body, beautiful and broken, at play and in pain….to discover Christ taking, blessing, breaking, giving.” (Note here the emphasis on honest engagement with the brokenness of the world, a theme that pervades these essays, and is tonic to those weary of overly sentimental “Christian art.”) Similarly, Barbara Nicolosi, a Catholic screenwriter in Hollywood, says in her essay that art “is useless—except as a vehicle for the beautiful.” By which she means that art is about responding thankfully to God’s gratuitous gift of the cosmos. Thus, following Pope John Paul II, she writes that artists function in a sort of “priestly” role insofar as their being and work leads to praise of God. For both Crouch and Nicolosi art, like Creation itself, is not reducible to utility.

On the other hand, Lauren Winner—in the creatively titled essay, “The Art Patron: Someone Who Can’t Draw a Straight Line Tries to Defend Her Art-Buying Habit”—traces the function of art in North American Christianity and concludes that art is useful. “A Christian understanding of art involves a recognition that art does things,” she writes. “In our Christian history, art mattered. For good and for ill, it was a key part of the Christian experience. Art had a purpose. It taught children to love the Bible. It schooled viewers in theological stories. Sometimes it incited violence. Sometimes it directed Sunday worshipers’ attention heavenward.” Winner does not disagree with the types of arguments for the uselessness of beauty that Crouch and Nicolosi advance, but she points out what such arguments tend to obscure: the uses to which art has been put.

For the Beauty of the Church is made more compelling by the inclusion of pastoral voices, all of which speak frankly of his or her failures and successes with engaging the arts in the churches. These pastoral voices add a where-rubber-meets-the-road legitimacy to the collection. For example, Eugene Peterson discusses how he learned more about what it is to be a pastor from his interactions with artists than he did from his seminary professors, primarily because the artists he met upheld a distinction between their vocation as artist and whatever job they were doing to pay the bills. Joshua Banner, the Minister of Music and Art at hope College, offers a fecund metaphor of the pastor as farmer, patiently and carefully nurturing those in his or her charge. “As patient, careful stewards,” he writes, “we, as pastors and leaders, can nourish the soil of our culture by the way we love artist intentionally—loving not only their artwork, but who they are as persons in process.” Like farmers with land, pastors must nurture artists, he says, not exploit them.

In the last essay in the collection, Jeremy Begbie gives the richest theological account of the future of arts and the Church, by beginning with God’s future. “The Spirit arrives with a vision of the future already assured,” he writes, “and invites us to share in his work of re-creating the present in the light of that future.” His depiction of a vision for the arts and the Church “when the Spirit comes from the future” is hopeful, subversive, and challenging.

Hopeful is perhaps the best adjective to describe For the Beauty of the Church. As even the brief, selective sampling presented here shows, the compelling vision these essays put forward just might engender fuller engagement of the arts by the churches. Let us hope that it helps contribute to a more beautiful Church.

It was a teaching moment I could never have predicted, could never even have imagined in my wildest dreams—especially in upstate New York, where the Bible is not particularly taught, known, or appreciated.  But it was also a learning moment.  The paradox that these boys embodied—that of both jumping off rocks and crying out to the Rock—struck me then and now as nothing short of beautiful. Is this what it means to be truly human?  To engage our physicality and also our noetic capacities? To be abundantly silly and deeply serious?  To play in utter exuberance and joy in this life God has created, stretching our muscles and expanding our lungs in exuberant, jovial shouts as well as to embrace the One who created our muscles and lungs and the whole of us?

It seems to me that this is the kind of life, the kind of humanity, that we were created for.  More importantly, this is the kind of life Jesus has redeemed us for.  Many of the church fathers spoke of salvation as being recreated and restored to our original glory as humans made in the image of God, and I imagine that original glory meant a wholeness I glimpsed in these two boys. Jesus’ taking care of all the most significant movements of history frees us to play and revel in what he has given us.  His command to love God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind calls us to engage our minds as well as the rest of us. It strikes me, then, that when we aren’t living this kind of life, we aren’t really living. If we’re neglecting the jumping and playing, or the asking of big questions, or the silliness, or the wonder and praise of God, then we’re not being fully human. If we’re not taking time to enjoy one another’s company over a cup of conversation while we also spend good time reading the church fathers, or if we fail to work hard and write good papers while we also take time to stretch our legs and play, or if we forget to laugh deeply while we live deeply, we’re not living into our salvation.

It also strikes me that these boys could do all of these things at once.  They didn’t have to jump for a while and then ask questions or memorize Scripture; I watched them run and jump while asking questions about the Incarnation and salvation and hike and play hacky sack while reciting John’s prologue.  To them, there wasn’t such a thing as a “secular” part of life and a “spiritual” part of life.  To them, it was all just life. What if we understood that more often?  Could spiritual formation be something that happens in our classes, and not merely something we attend an hour a week for our first year of divinity school?  Can we worship while playing basketball or Frisbee? Can we laugh and be silly while studying atonement theories and looking up words like “extracalvinisticum”?  I am inclined to think that we can, and indeed, that we should.

As I reflect on the paradox of my campers, I think of something Fredrick Buechner wrote: “We are moved also by those precious moments when something holy seems to break through into our lives both to heal us and to summon us to pilgrimage” (Longing for Home). That morning on the trail through the Siamese Ponds Wilderness Area in the Adirondacks I saw something holy break into my life in the most unexpected place, and it called me to pilgrimage. God called me to follow the way of these crazy fourteen-year-old boys, which is in fact the way of his Son, who himself was once a fourteen-year-old boy. Christ has made it possible for us to live this way, desires for us to live this way. So let us find some rocks, call out to the Rock, and begin to live.