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After working for Habitat for Humanity for five months I have been asked to join the staff of Wieuca Road Baptist Church. WRBC is a prominent CBF church in the Buckhead area of Atlanta. My wife and I started attending WRBC soon after we relocated to Atlanta. We were impressed, and a bit surprised, with the amazing community we experienced there. After I approached the Missions Committee about the possibility of supporting my church plant in L5P, the pastor approached me about the possibility of helping WRBC start an alternative worship experience in the Buckhead area as well. That seemed fair to me, I mean with synchronized backscratching and what not. A few months later I was floored when he informed me that the Personnel Committee wanted to interview me for a full-time staff position.

At the interview I was candid about my calling in ministry and the type of ministry I was moved to start. I shared my love of beer and blue jeans and that I had no intentions of being a traditional Baptist minister. To my surprise, the Committee extend an offer to join Wieuca's staff. That means salary, a Cadillac health and retirement plan, a con-ed budget and full-funding for trinitas.

"Missional Community" is a new concept for WRBC. Baptists have traditionally compartmentalized missions as naming a function of the church rather than describing its essential nature. I am enjoying the teaching opportunities that emerge when people ask me what missional community means. My job will be to facilitate missional living amongst our members in our community. This means I will be the point-person for all of the local ministries WRBC supports. I will be working to help our members become more active in these opportunities for service. Additionally I will be organizing and leading all of WRBC's mission trips. My first trip will be at the end of January to assist in the rebuilding process of many homes in Biloxi destroyed or damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. I am in the process of planning other trips in the future.

At WRBC I will also be working to equip our community to get out of the posh serenity of our massive church building and get involved in peoples lives. We will be working this year to launch emergentish church services in L5P and Buckhead. Lastly, I will be helping to coordinate the Singles Ministry at WRBC. This should be a busy year for me, but I can't express how excited I am to be working in an area where my passions lie.

Thanks a bunch to all of you who prayed for Abby and me as we transitioned from Princeton to Atlanta. Peace.

John of the Cross once wrote:

But those that are on the right path will set their eyes on God and not on these outward things nor on their inner experiences. They will enter the dark night of the soul and find all of these things removed. They will have all the pleasure taken away so that the soul may be purified. For a soul will never grow until it is able to let go of the tight grasp it has on God.

As I read these words, I wonder how John's reflection on the soul's journey towards God is manifested in 21st century American evangelicalism. I am assuming prima facie that John's words are an accurate description of this spiritual phenomenon, which he calls "the dark night of the soul."

Continue reading...

Many evangelicals have experienced what I would call a hyper-spiritual, emotionally charged conversion to Christianity. For many of us, this experience occurred in a church or youth retreat led by a charismatic, "firery" preacher/evangelist. Hence many evangelicals have a hard time understanding the conversion language uttered by our Catholic, Orthodox and Presbyterian sisters and brothers. We struggle to get our minds around how God could call anyone to be God's son or daughter over a period of time. This phenomenon is a marked departure from our radical, specific-point-in-time conversion experience. But I am digressing.

For many evangelicals, we follow this conversion by a radical departure from our "old ways of life." We destroy or sell our "secular" CDs or tapes. We stop hanging out with our "non-Christian" friends because, let's face it, "if you lie with dogs you're gunna get fleas." Or so we are told. We are "on fire" for Christ. We become "Jesus Freaks" committed to the task of "saving" our "heathen" neighbors and classmates from the very pits of Hell. We begin to consume the Bible and other supporting Christian literature. We may even open an account at the local LifeWay or Family Christian Book Store. We become spiritual gluttons. We pray. Some of us fast. For many of us our faith become intertwined with ardent biblical literalism and its twin-cousin, fundamentalism. Our new-found faith is palpable and our spiritual exercises are reified in our lives.

I then believe that something akin to John of the Cross' dark night of the soul takes hold. Our prayer life dwindles. That evangelistic flame that was once a roaring bonfire becomes cooling embers. All of a sudden, so it seems, our "quiet time" becomes a perfunctory task, lacking the joy and mystical adrenaline it once produced. We find ourselves at the midnight hour of this dark night with no hope of once again seeing the light of day.

This leads the evangelical soul in one of several directions, as I see it. One route leads to a kind of petulant fundamentalism that begins to fill the void left by spiritual fervor with rancor and discord. Such individuals seem to be somewhat like the character, Angela, from The Office, where all the joy of being a Christ-follower is hidden or gone.

Another route leads one to doubt the experience altogether. This person may speak of that time in his life when he went to church or youth group a lot. However, the waning 'rush' of Christian spirituality has yielded a commensurate abatement in participation in things Christian. Christianity becomes, for such a person, that thing I used to do one time.

Yet another direction leads to Christian intellectualism. Such a person may even chose to major in religious studies in college and go to seminary in pursuit of greater Christian acumen. She will progress further and further intellectually in hopes of enervating the pain felt from the emotionless spiritual void. This path can lead to an abandonment of the faith, as the intellectually "enlightened" has moved beyond such "simple" notions of faith.

A fourth route follows what John of the Cross advocates: pushing through the void. Such people realize that their faith is more than the "warm fuzzies" they experience. They perceive that their commitment to follow Christ carries with it certain crosses to bear. Again John of the Cross writes:

The problem is this: when they have received no pleasure for their devotions, they think they have not accomplished anything. This is a grave error, and it judges God unfairly. For the truth is that the feelings we receive from our devotional life are the least of its benefits. The invisible and unfelt grace of God is much greater, and it is beyond our comprehension.

Hmmm.

So what do you think? Have I missed another alternative in this rumination? How does this reflection speak to those of you who have not experienced a "radical conversion? I welcome your input. Peace.< /scan>

Permalink posted by Jake at 12/15/2005 08:58:00 AM

Monday, December 12, 2005

The Whitening of Little Minds

Yesterday my wife and I attended a Christmas party with our Sunday School class. Everyone interested in attending was encouraged to participate in our church's program for assisting families in need during the holiday season by purchasing a "joyous toy." We were all handed a list of needed toys from the agency with whom we have partnered. So before the party, my wife and I swung by our local Target to pick up one of these toys. Among the items that appeared on the toy list were African American and Hispanic baby dolls. That sounded like a good idea to us, so we fought through the Christmas crowd like a middle linebacker, in search of one of these baby dolls.

We live in a rather economically and racially diverse area of Atlanta. So you can imagine my surprise when our local Target did not have any baby dolls that were African American or Latino/a. We searched up and down the toy aisles twice in search of such a baby doll and none were to be found. We ended up finding a Dora the Explorer doll (who happens to be Latina). As we proceeded through the check-out line, I took a quick scan of the room and realized that the majority of people whom I could see were in fact minorities.

When I was a kid, I remember playing with my toys. I recall that whenever I played with my Thundercats, He-Man, or G.I. Joe toys, I entered into the imaginary world of those characters. Even now, many years later, I still hear the theme songs and characters of these respective shows racing through my memories. ("Thundercats are on the loose... (come on, you know the rest)"). I still believe, through many hours of cartoons and boy-hood play, that "knowing is half the battle" and that maybe, just maybe, if I grab a sword and shout, "I have the power!" I will turn into He-Man.

If the majority of people at my local Target hail from minority communities, and toys are a means by which a child's imagination is expanded, then what message are toy manufacturers and stores sending to said communities? "We want your African American, or Latino/a, or Asian children to pretend to be...White kids?!" WTF? Peace.

Permalink posted by Jake at 12/12/2005 03:01:00 PM

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

The Church that is Emerging

I have recently been doing a good bit of reflection regarding the Church's reason(s) for existing. Some would argue, it seems, that the Church is the threshold by which humanity enters into a salvific relationship with Christ. Others might feasibly contend that the Church exists in order to be Christ's incarnational presence (His body) in a world that desperately needs a touch of grace. Still others might lay emphasis on other manifestations of the Church's reasons for existing: to vie for social justice on behalf of the oppressed and marginalized, to edify and equip the saints for service, to share the Gospel with the world. Certainly all of these answers are appropriate, the reasons need not be either/or. The easy answer to this question, and the one toward which my moderate proclivities are inclined, is to say, "Yes" to all of them and brush one's hands of the discussion. Yet, it seems to me that a fair amount of vituperative diatribes and vehement denunciations of the aspects of different manifestations of Christianity revolves around disparate theologies, which in turn informs variant methodologies. Have we lost sight of the reason that we were "called out" in the first place?

C.S. Lewis wrote:

This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else. It is so easy to get muddled about that. It is easy to think that the church has a lot of different objects--education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects--military, political, economic, and what not.
But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden--that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.
In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men [and women] into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became [hu]man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.

If Lewis is right, and I think he is, then much of the in-fighting amongst Christians is wholly antithetical to the Gospel, the Church, even Christianity itself! This leads me to a second reflection. If the church truly exists to draw humanity to Christ (incorporating the manifold implications of such a relationship), then perhaps the manner by which the Church endeavors to accomplish such a feat ought to shift as the culture shifts. We are well aware of the horrid morass that resulted from 20th century missionalization efforts in Africa and Asia seeking to make "little Christs" that looked strangely like "little Americans." Because humans can never divorce themselves from culture, and given the fact that culture changes and varies, it seems that the manner by which we engage people must necessarily change as well.

This is a reason that I agree with Brian McLaren, who contends that the term "Emerging Church" is less than helpful. It sounds like it is a new denomination or something (like the Baptist church or Orthodox church). I have tended to speak of this movement as a conversation, following Tony Jones. McLaren has pressed us to consider labeling this conversation under the heading, "The Church that is emerging." I like this. Some iterations of the Emergent Conversation have sometimes sounded like a neo-gnosticism. "We have discovered the secret formula for being Christians and all of you 'traditional' folks, have missed it." Such a mentality misses the mark. Nevertheless, those who are participating in this discussion, largely, are passionate about how the church might actualize Her purpose in a postmodern, post-Christian world. This necessitates rethinking everything (theology, method, sacraments, etc.) save our central focus of drawing men and women to Christ.

Perhaps there is something that I missed in this reflection. What are the holes that I ought to fill? Any ideas? Peace.

Permalink posted by Jake at 12/07/2005 09:13:00 AM

Coordinator for Missional Community

The Dark Night of the Evangelical Soul

The Whitening of Little Minds

The Church that is Emerging