Big Differences

Who's allowed in church, who's allowed to have an opinion? Why does it matter.

These questions have been knocking around in my head for a while now. In my estimation the church is supposed to be a place that anyone can come to and find rest, a listening ear, and tolerance. The town square has been a place where people are allowed to go with their viewpoints and are given the ability to express them how they want.

In our country we are given so many freedoms that we forget the responsibility that comes with those freedoms. People on either side of the political, religious, whatever it is spectrum forget that with freedom of anything comes, out of necessity tolerance. I find though that neither side in any of the most recent debates is willing to extend much in the way of tolerance.

I would love to be able to say I have friends, but that's really not the case. I have friends on all sides. I have liberal and conservative friends, I have friends who are different nationalities, friends who are gay, friends who are strait. I have Christian and non-christian friends. I have friends of different faiths. I wish it were possible to just say I have friends but it's not. I also wish it were possible to be allowed to have the friends I have, but it seems that all the different sides find it difficult to handle the fact that it's possible to have friends that you don't agree with all the time. It's hard to have friends that allow for different opinions, different interpretations, different readings of rules, and laws and religious texts.

Everyone wants to be right, everyone wants to be validated, everyone wants to be accepted but they don't call it that, we don't call it that, we call it tolerance. We all want to be tolerated.

It's sad really, in it's desire to hold a line on sin, the church has forgotten that all have sinned, all are sinners, all are lost. In it's need to be accepted humanity at large dares anyone that has a different opinion than their own to share it, and if for whatever reason, be it political, religious or just personal feeling that opinion differs, suddenly oppression is happening, or a denial of freedom. It becomes important to completely shred the person, their beliefs, their convictions, whatever it is. This is when things really heat up. People start to dig for historical evidence, they start to look at the way things always were, suddenly armchair theologians look for ammunition and start shooting at anyone and everyone in their line of site. Back yard scientists start looking for proofs of the oppositions idiocy. I am ashamed to say that there have been times I have done the same thing.

The last few weeks and on through Easter Sunday we are in the middle of a series at the Church I pastor, still something I am wrapping my brain around, called From Carpenter to Christ. We are looking a bit deeper at the life of Jesus. It goes without saying that I am doing some serious digging in for all of this and what I'm finding is a Jesus who was tolerant of a lot, who accepted people wherever they were, in whatever state with whatever issues they have. He tolerates them, he accepts them, the person. He doesn't condone sin, he doesn't say it's no big deal, but he doesn't make the person into their sin, that's a modern day evangelical thing. People say love the sinner hate the sin, but if people were honest, if they would sit down and really be honest, it's hard to separate the two in our minds. Christians as a whole forget this..

Genesis 1:27 (NLT)
  So God created human beings* in his own image.
In the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

Being created in God's image is hard to believe and well, because of the fall of man, that did break the relationship with God there is that nasty little problem of sin that has to be dealt with, still if Jesus chose to not define people based on their sin, why do Christians? John 8:1-11 offers one of many pictures of Jesus refusing to define people by their issues. I love the last part of this set of verses. I don't condemn you, now go and stop doing the thing that brought you here in the first place. He didn't even focus on what the issue was, he just said stop. A far cry from what the church as a whole does.

But wait there's more...I also have an issue with my friends on the left,or with any group of people that is all about tolerance and acceptance as long as it's on their terms. Daring to have a different opinion than some people is grounds for being called a bigot, or intolerant. It's amazing how easy it is to label a person as intolerant or un-accepting, or bigoted if they don't agree with you a hundred percent.

Back around Christmas a Redneck Christian dared say that he believed a literal translation of scripture, now in a nod to all my liberal/left friends, I get it, I understand the argument that if people are going to espouse a literal interpretation of Scripture, that they can't pick and choose, but lets face it we all pick and choose what we want to accept or reject when it comes to any number of things. People on both sides of this whole thing do it all the time. As annoyed as I get at my fellow Christians who keep entire people groups out of church and away from God, I get equally annoyed at my fellow liberals for crying foul every time someone doesn't just agree with whatever they have chosen to believe. It's really not possible to tell an entire group of people that they have to accept you and all that you bring to the table but the minute they question some of those things they are unenlightened bigots who need to have their rights and freedoms guaranteed under the constitution stripped away.

What makes your pursuit of happiness more acceptable than theirs?

Years ago my great grandmother said something that has stuck with me, and I am coming to realize that it has a lot to do with more than just God stuff. We were sitting around the table one Sunday afternoon after a great dinner of pasta and her home made sauce. We were talking about church and preachers and how sometimes they say things that don't make sense or don't seem right. She looked at me and said. "Aaron no one is always right. When we listen to people who are teaching about God we have to be smart enough to chew up the meat and spit out the bones." This means more than what it first appears to mean, at least now it does. In my dealing with people I need to do the same things. There are things I will agree with and things I won't. I have a choice to make do I maintain relationship, agree that there are going to be areas we are not going to agree with and spots that we will. Is relationship with others worth looking past the parts that I don't like or understand?

As I move through life, as I get older, and as I pastor a church on the brink, I am realizing more and more that Jesus was more concerned with the person than he was with their mess. Mess can be cleaned up, mess can be changed, mess can be made into something new and beautiful. Lets face it as a whole humanity is a mess, and whatever side of the idiotic debates we fall on, we need each other.

Is God Really that Tiny?

Recently I have been wondering something.  I have always felt it is very important for us to question our faith.  I think it's important for us to struggle a bit.  Without struggle, without resistance without digging deeper into what we read, what we hear and what we say we believe, our faith will mean nothing.  

The other issue I have is this idea that we can't just say whats going on.  What we mean, what we think or what we believe to be the way it should be.  

Today I read two different articles, both bothered me.  The first had to do with Pastors of large churches that have lately done some pretty boneheaded things.  We all do boneheaded things, we all have people in our lives who do the same things, sometimes in our name.  The other was an article that detailed Christians dislike for the reboot of Carl Sagans Cosmos that airs on Fox.  (I find it ironic that Christians have anointed fox news as their chosen place for all things fair and balanced and christian, and deride most of the television that comes from it's parent company as evil.)  Anyway it may seem strange that two seemingly unrelated articles would strike a nerve with me but they do.  

When did pastors and Christians decide that God was so tiny.  The first article I read detailed a pastor who built a 16,000 square foot home, and then told his mega church congregation the money came from book royalties, not from his salary and while this may be partially true it was not fully honest.  Others mentioned in the article used for profit tactics to put themselves on the best seller list and keep themselves there longer than they would otherwise have been.  Other authors do it.  They set up buying campaigns to get their books noticed and on the top of the charts, while this may be understood and accepted in secular circles as business as usual, churches and pastors doing the same thing leaves a bad taste in everyone's  mouth, including my own.  The thing is these pastors god is tiny to me.  They don't feel right about having the money to build a large house, because they have the idea that having a large house is somehow counter to the image that a pastor is supposed to portray.  At some point they took the reigns of their career away from God.  The difference between a career and a calling is muddy, but in this instance what started as a desire to introduce people to Jesus, to see a church grow because it meant that God was getting into peoples lives and changing them, morphed into a career, full of staff, agents, handlers, book deals and conference invites. I guess I'm naive enough to believe that if you get the feeling  you need to hide the fact that your salary at the church is large enough to afford a 16,000 foot home, it could be time to listen to what God is saying, instead of to what the tiny god has been striving so hard to achieve.  

The second article has to do with the tiny god that many evangelicals have placed on the throne in their lives.  Do we really want to say that there is no possible way for our world to be older than 10,000 years.  That the universe has only been around between 6000 and 10,000 years?  Is the evangelical idea of God so small that for him to create more than one earth more than one galaxy, more than one solar system really what we want to say?  My belief in God creating the universe really has nothing to do with six literal days, or six ages, it makes no difference to me how it was done, or how long it took, what matters is my belief, my faith that God created.  People being upset over a TV show that looks at scientific data and interprets it because it doesn't give enough time to two people running around a garden naked 6000 years ago is just sad.  Why do we make this a priority?  Why is it so important to be right about creation, when so many in our world need to know a few simple facts. Humanity is broken, Jesus came to fix the problem by being broken, all we have to do is accept the help he offers.  

This whole thing is part of a much larger conversation to me that has to do with this verse.  

2 Timothy 2:23 (NLT)

²³ Again I say, don’t get involved in foolish, ignorant arguments that only start fights.  

The passage goes on to talk about being kind and patient, to tell people the truth and then to let God do the rest.  Somehow though the god many serve is to tiny to do those things.  I would submit that the reason the god so many serve is so tiny is because that god is the one that has been manufactured.  The tiny god that is so easy to serve, is that way because we ascribe to him the attributes we are most comfortable with, we take the best parts of ourselves and pin them to the god that we are comfortable serving, because lets face it, it's easier to serve the tiny god of self than it is to serve God...

Process or People?

Pastoring a church is something so other to me.  I have been in ministry for the better part of my life now.  Starting when I was 16 volunteering with Metro in Youngstown all the way till now, and I have to say that being the pastor of a church as opposed to being a staff member of a church is a whole lot of hard.

J and I have spent the past few years on long drives working through all sorts of stuff, one of the most important things that I have learned through my time as a staff pastor, is that J was given to me for a reason.  I lost sight of that, I must say it's a good thing that I got a much needed shift in perspective before I started this journey. One of the things that we have done has been the whole if we are ever, or if I'm ever. Well now the ever has happened and while we don't have any staff pastors yet, I am sure there will come a time that we will need to look at hiring others to come along side us.

One of the things that I am finding is it's very easy to get caught up in the processes of pastoring.  There is so much to do, especially when you are tasked with bringing a church back from the brink of extinction.  I wish this was an over exaggeration, what I find is everyone involved in leadership in the church tends to have an eye for the processes that need to be put into place to make things happen.  It's so easy to get stuck in the middle of the vision and implementation.  When we put together an action plan it usually involves steps, and lists, and goals, it needs to, that's how it goes, but in the middle of all the processes that have to happen in the name of growth it's really easy to forget that the whole point is the people that we are trying to reach.

I am in the middle of a challenge at our church, a fairly big one.  We must re-brand, we must launch into the neighborhood, we have to make the church more visually appealing and we need to revamp our services to appeal to the people in our neighborhood and in the 21 Century. I understand that there are people that will read this and get all uber spiritual on me.  They will say things like; "Just preach the word," or "let God do the work that he wants," or "remember who's church it is Aaron."  Yea all that sounds great but it's not realistic, and no one really believes it, at least no one that I know. Truth be told God gave us brains, creativity and energy to be used.  He won't fill up a church when the people leading it and the people attending it could care less about the cosmetics.  As much as we all say and know that programming is not the way to build a church, there has to be programming in the church.  Sometimes I think we use spirituality as a cop out, but I digress.  The real issue here is that it's really easy to get so involved in these things that have to happen, and in making sure the cosmetic's are taken care of that we forget we are doing these things for the people that are coming and that we want to come.

If we have a building and it gets used, if we have chairs and they get tipped on, or a floor and things get spilled on them.  If we have a presentation that we have worked on but it gets interrupted by kids, well that's the people that's the point.

When the plans and the processes get in the way of the people well that's when things must change, that's when we have to step back and see what the point of the whole thing is.  It's a balance though.  I just am not sure how easy it is for anyone to maintain that ballance.