<Theofragen>

Yesterday I officiated my first wedding. It was very special for me for several reasons. First, I was honored that my dear friends Adam and Sarah asked me to participate in their most special of days. Second, I had the opportunity to co-officiate with my great friend, Mark. Third, my beautiful wife, Abby, was there to watch. A preacher at a wedding is kind of like shocks on a car. As long as everything goes along smoothly we don't ever think about them. But as soon as the ride gets bumpy, that's all one talks about. Neither Mark nor I did anything to draw attention to ourselves (in a negative way). Therefore, I proclaim the wedding a success from a logistical standpoint. The wedding ceremony and the reception went off without a hitch (although there was some last minute drama in which the limo driver took the ladies to the wrong town!). Here are some thoughts from my perspective.

Mark and I went to undergrad together and became friends on one of the first days of school. After we graduated, Mark went to Columbia Theological Seminary, where he became friends with Sarah. I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, where I became friends with Adam. It was a fun rendezvous for Mark and I. We were surprised and honored when Sarah and Adam asked us to officiate together. Hopefully, we will find a way to get the homilies we preached uploaded for your listening pleasure.

The wedding was beautiful and tailored especially for Adam and Sarah. Jen Lemen offered the couple a very special blessing and charge and Harp 46 played the music. I know that Mark and I had a great time working on our homilies for them. Hopefully, we will get to tag-team preach again sometime.

Not that Adam, in particular, needs any more traffic over at his blog, but I'm sure the happy couple would appreciate any congratulations you might have to offer them. Peace.

posted by Jake at 5/29/2006 09:38:00 PM

Thoughts?

Question: Is it inherently contradictory for emerging ministers to expect to be paid to lead missional, counter-cultural communities of faith? Or, asked another way, has the professionalization of ministry birthed a laissez-faire clergy class that is robbed of its prophetic voice in service of job security?

Follow-up question: What are the implications of this for the Church in a post-Christendom world?

posted by Jake at 5/17/2006 08:40:00 AM

Green Martyrdom and the Christian Engagement of Late Capitalism

This was by far the best talk.

By Rodney Clapp

Consumer capitalism vs. Production capitalism

Consumer capitalism is a functional religion—the church should engage this critically
• Earlier capitalism was centered on production→ manufacturing of physical, material goods//instilled an ethos of hard work and lasting, durable products, meant to be repaired not discarded//emphasized saving over spending (to live w/in one’s means)//many excellent goods thrived outside of the marketplace (people didn’t “shop” for churches)
• Consumer capitalism—consumption becomes a way of life, character-forming rituals//privatized faith and made it unconcerned with “public” things like economics, politics, and education. Jesus=salesman or CEO.
• Some churches have co-opted fast-food franchises and have them in their facilities.
• Many Christians have redefined themselves in light of consumer capitalism
• Consumer capitalism is particularly adept at resisting opposition by co-opting it.
• We need to transform the church into a rock that consumer capitalism cannot swallow

Martyrdom
• Postmodern Americans do not understand martyrdom
• However, martyrdom is a central facet of Christianity (consider the cross)//Jesus = the proto-martyr
• 2 Cor. 2—we are not peddlers of the gospel//Jesus, not Caesar, was at the head of the triumphal victory parade//the captives are Paul and his fellow disciples (the traditional place of the vanquished)
• For Paul, the Christian witness is wonderful and terrible, it ends in death
• The example of late consumer capitalism is one of the most egregious examples of peddling the gospel.
• Martyrdom puts both soul and body on the line and makes things public
• Consumer capitalism advances itself with a velvet glove, not an iron fist. It seductively co-opts Christians rather than killing them.
• He is talking about a Christian ethos which includes martyrdom not defined by it.
• We must be able to honor those “red martyrs” who have actually paid the ultimate price of martyrdom. Martyrs do not die to save the world. They die imitating Christ.
• Faithful Christian witness remembers the martyrs and Christ while recognizing Christ’s continued impact in the world
• Celebrities are commodities//we discard them when we are tire of them
• Heroes are not forgotten, but unlike the heroes in war, martyrs can be followed in our daily lives. They make claims on our lives; of our allegiances and priorities.
• The whole Christian community needs to become a theater of martyrdom.
• Green martyrdom (the Celtic Christians developed this notion)→ these are the Christians who went out into the wilds for ascetic monasticism
o Green is the color of money
o Green is the color of grace (life and the earth)//the earth is not a resource for human resource and consumption
o Green is the churches color for “ordinary time” between Pentecost and advent.
• This keeps us in mind that green martyrdom pervades our world

Five Characteristics of Green Martyrdom
1. Laying our bodies on the line rather than expecting others to do it for our way of life (attentive to externalities)//supporting farmers markets and co-opts

2. Working towards an economy that doesn’t separate the rich from the poor//ghetoization of the poor so the rich don’t hear their cries//not to just help the poor but to be known by the poor and to know them

3. Find communities of resistance and stay there (no more church-hopping)//long-term commitments to local communities

4. Challenging idolatry by naming greed (early Christian communities are a head-on confrontation of idolatry)

5. Live our lives with the reality that we will die. Consumer Christianity tries to deny this by convincing us that we are gods. We will die and to avoid expensive treatments designed to “stave off death”

posted by Jake at 5/01/2006 09:45:00 AM

How to Not Comodify the Gospel

I stuck around for Vincent Miller's breakout session and I pressed him to clarify several things. This is what emerged.

Q: How does one avoid turning ministry into a commodity as well?
A: A community must ask itself, "Does a change in the church help people gather practices and habits into a whole, unified worldview or not?

Q: Is it either/or? Are we a part of a complete, structural, traditional mode or co-opting Christianity to meet the whims of postmodern, consumer culture?
A: It seems like commodities are only commodities in the church if the leaders fail to communicate the story behind the object of use.

My thoughts:
--Organic? Commodities? Newbigin-“community is the hermeneutic of the Gospel”—dreaming as a community, living out those dreams in community.
--Are words like organic, holistic, missional commodities? Perhaps the vital question one must be able to answer is why. We must be able to give an account of the story/philosophy/tradition that underlies the word or act.

Un-commodified Ritual or Practice:

Tradition/context/philosophy [imagine]→ n→ how this speaks into the life of the community itself [actuality]
A community must wrestle with n until it becomes ethological and efficacious
(where n = the practice/object that either could be a commodity or might not)

(Ex: Icons. Only if a community takes the time to understand the background (ex. history of iconoclasts vs. iconodules in 7th eccumencial council), tradition (ex. process of making icons by guilded societies in the East), and context (ex. how icons function within Orthodox communities) of icons and iconography, can that community begin to imagine how the use of icons would help its members to experience God with greater deapth in actual praxis.)

posted by Jake at 5/01/2006 09:43:00 AM

Faith in the Age of the Ipod—Christianity and Consumer Culture

By Vincent Miller

Asking what consumerism does to faith and practice
Advanced capitalism comodifies religion
We treat our religious beliefs like we do the commodities we consume; we thereby take a passive role rather than an active role in our faith development

What is most important is not what we believe but how we relate to our beliefs
1. Habits of how we relate to culture
2. Structures that connect religion and materials
Consumer culture is not just about consuming but consuming commodities (consumption of things without considering their story).
Comodification is culture assigning value to things—viewing products as abstract, exchangeable goods
His point is about perception, we don’t have access to the information behind the commodity. We base our decisions on shallow appearance or commercial appeal.
We buy clothes from nowhere, gas from no one that has no effects on the environment.

Ipod is not only an object of desire; it is a commodity. It enables a new practice of music. Changes the way we relate to music and culture. Ipod enables the disembeding of songs from their context. Random access. We get only top hits. Narrowing of depth through increased convenience. Consumer culture gives us a shallower perception but also more freedom of access to ranges of options.

Playlists: subjective consumption is not only an option but is preferred. We share the experience with no one but ourselves. People identify with their playlists.

Religion becomes like a playlist. It is comodified. We can download information about information of other religions and make our selection. We take it out of context. We have shallow religious commitment.

We use practices out of context that are devoid of the worldview from which they came. Our commitments too readily conform to culture. Consumer culture obviates standing against culture.

Tactics (the arts of the weak, who don’t control the field)// Distinct from Strategy.
1. Piercing the commodity veil to understand where things come from. (Pick a few commodities that are important and figure out the relationship behind them). Know the origins of things.
2. Consumer choice (the moment of decision to buy something or not). Actual space is stronger than imaginary space. Consumer culture tries to get us to imagine what it would be like to possess some commodity, which is different from the actual possession of the commodity. (Ex. The bowflex: Many more people own a bowflex than use one).
3. Swimming against the tide of consumer Christianity. Take the interconnections very seriously between traditions and between institutions. Does it enable connections in praxis?

posted by Jake at 5/01/2006 09:42:00 AM

A Biblical Approach to Poverty and Affluence

By Ron Sider
Advertising puts forth the great lie of our age: money/wealth/possession can make one happy or loved.

Reality//
--1.2 billion survive on a dollar a day
--2.6 billion people survive on less than $2/day

Three realities: poverty abounds in our world, the Bible has hundreds of verses talking about how God cares for the poor, and as Christians grow richer we are giving less and less.
Infant mortality is 9x higher in the rest of the world than it is in the US.

Four Key Biblical Themes:
1. Gods care for the poor-Ex. 3:7 (God acts on Gods promise to Abraham but also because of oppression). God lifts up poor and needy persons. God pulls down wealthy persons (ex. Magnificat; James 5:1). It is wrong for people to gain wealth by oppression. It is also wrong for rich people to not share, be generous. God works against such people. If we claim to be Gods people and do not share Gods concern for the poor and oppressed, we are not Gods people. This does not mean God is biased. But God sides with oppressed people because we arent naturally inclined to do so.

2. Sin is personal and social-Evangelicals used to focus on personal sins. Mainliners used to talk about corporate/social sins. Neither group do this as much any more. Both types of sin equally disturb God. Laws can be unjust. Its so subtle that we can participate in social sins without much thought.

3. Key understanding of economic justice-Old Testament serves as the example. People work hard on their own land. Every 7 years they make sure that everyone has land to work hard on. Economic justice demands that everyone has access to the productive resources. In our society, education is a capital commodity.

4. Biblical responses to wealth-the material world, in the biblical sense, is good. Its not bad in any way in and of itself. We were made in Gods image as workers and co-creators. Creating wealth is a good thing. However, this must be done justly and in a way that respects Gods creation. We also must not over-emphasize material possessions.

Some poverty is created by 1) laziness, 2) worldviews (ex. Hindu caste system), 3) natural disasters, 4) people dont have the right tools (community development), 5) unjust systems (ex. women do 63% of the work, make 10% of the worlds income, and own 1% of the worlds wealth).

Rons view is that a market economy is superior to a state run, socialist economy provided that everyone has access to the market resources.

Suggested Solutions
A. We need to change ourselves. We need people to live among the poor.
B. We need to change our churches. Smaller, less elaborate buildings are essential if churches are going to offer any kind of a plausible witness in our consumer-driven culture.
C. We need to change structures. Get to the root problems rather than treating the symptoms.

Good news: progress has been made. In 1970, 35% of all people in the world were chronically malnourished. Now, its 17%. In 1980, only 20% of children in developing countries received basic immunizations. Now, 80% are immunized. But we can do better:
Example: Christians constitute 1/3 of the worlds population and possess 2/3s of the worlds wealth. If all Christians gave 1% of its wealth in loans to the poorest 1 billion people, it would take one year to raise their standard of living by 50%.

posted by Jake at 5/01/2006 09:41:00 AM

Christianity in a Consumer Culture

Last weekend I sojourned in rainy Minneapolis for a conference called Christianity in a Consumer Culture. Check out the speakers here. My overalimpressionon of the conference was positive and some of my interactions with participants were very telling. Here are some observations that unfolded: 1) I was encouraged to see so many evangelicals asking good questions about how we can obviate corporate comodification of the gospel; 2) I was impressed with the contributions of the speakers who offered an unmitigated challenge to the church to resist such comodification germane to our consumer culture; 3) I was surprised how many people with whom I spoke knew about the emergent conversation through the work of D.A. Carson; 4) I was surprised by the nearly univocal proclamation that "Emergent" is about challenging facets of liturgy and not theology; and 5) I was blown away by the number of church planters/missional community folks who seemed to position themselves in between A) consumer, evangelical culture, B) high church liturgical traditions and C) Doug Pagitt; and 6) everyone was white.

It was very interesting to me to be an alternative voice--in a group of evangelicals I was a post-evangelical, in a group of conservatives I was a moderate, in a group of suburban and rural pastors I was an inner-city pastor, in a group that likened the emergent conversation to gathering of subversive liturgists I was a voice for those of us who are questioning both the mediums and the message in our postmodern, post-Christendom world.

Over the next few posts, Ill be putting up some notes I took during the conference. Enjoy.