The novelty of the New Year wanes quickly, so only two weeks into 2012, this reflective look back at '011 already feels a bit cool. But I was away for the first week of January so I'm only getting to it now, and hoping that enough of you are still mistakenly writing "2011" on your cheques that a year-in-review will still strike a nerve.
Not sure how many of you remember any of the following headline highlights, but each in the list below stood out to me as especially significant, either for its impact on the Christian world, or for the light it shed on the State of that Nation known as the People of God.
January 12: Jay Bakker releases Fall to Grace
Son of the infamous televangelist with the same last name, Jay Bakker released a humble-autobiography-cum-church-manifesto about what's wrong with our present practice of the Fundamentals of the Faith, and what needs to change. I was under the impression that fundamentalist snipers had neutralized most leading lights in the Emergent Church, but Bakker's book, at the very least, shows that the movement's not yet dead.
March 2: Pakistani Minorities Minister shot dead
Shahbaz Bhatti's assassination for his political work in Pakistan to guarantee the religious freedoms of that country's Christian minority (1.5% of the population) was far more stunning and troubling than either the mainstream or Christian press gave it time for. It struck me then, and later still when Coptic Christians in Egypt started to suffer persecution after the much-lauded "Arab Spring" thawed that country, how little attention the Canadian media pays to Christian persecution around the world.
March 15: Rob Bell releases Love Wins
So much to say about this whole doctrine-meets-Internet debacle, so little time (which is perhaps why some distilled their commentary down to a single Tweet). It demonstrated in ways few were prepared for what the gasoline of social media can do to the fires of doctrinal disagreement; it showed us how ill-prepared Christians really are after all to navigate the sticky strands of the World-Wide-Inter-Web; it showed us that the closets of Western Evangelicalism were bulging with Universalists of all description waiting-- just waiting-- for someone to jiggle the handle and discover it was unlocked; and it showed us (yet again) the dark under-belly of celebrity-pastor-culture.
April 23: The Conservative Party promises Canadians an "Office of Religious Freedom" if elected
Whether this was, as some cynical pundits suggested at the time, a shameless ploy to secure the Christian Right vote, or not, it does shed light on the way politics and religion mix far less easily in Canada than they do down south, and that, more than any other party, the Tories "got" the psyche of the average Canadian evangelical.
May 1: John Piper vets Rick Warren
That John Piper, the old-guard of the Neo-Reformed movement, saw fit publicly to interview Rick Warren, the Hawaiian-shirt-frocked front man for Purpose-Driven pragmatism, on his doctrinal soundness, says less about Warren's supposed "orthodoxy" than it does about the cult of celebrity in American churches, the widening fissures in Western Christendom, the crisis in Evangelical ecclesiology, the troubling in-grouping-out-grouping tendencies of the Neo-Reformed movement, and the even more troubling ex-Cathedral authority pastors with lucrative publishing deals can accumulate to themselves.
May 21: Harold Camping's Rapture doesn't come
Probably the less said about this one the better, but it did remind me why I'm an Amillenialist, all over again, and reminded me of the wisdom of humbly taking Jesus at his word, when he said what he said back in Matthew 24:36.
June 1: Christianity Today launches a "Quest for the Historical Adam"
This was, it seems, the year of the "Evangelical Doctrine on Public Display": Hell, the Rapture, and Genesis-literalism all nova-ed brightly across the canopy of cyber-space this year. Though this article received less attention than Love Wins, it did show us that the debate is much further from being settled than we ever thought, and that along with those universalists, the closets were also bulging with theo-evolutionists of a distinctly Evangelical variety.
June 12: The Book of Mormon (The Musical) wins a Tony for Best Musical
I include this one on the list because the fact that a Broadway musical about Mormonism garnered so much acclaim and accolades illustrates, among other things, how mainstream this religious movement has become. One Mormon commenter, when asked if it troubled her to see a play so directly and irreverently satirizing her faith, said it all for me in her reply: "No," she said, "it just tells me that the broader culture has finally become comfortable enough with Mormonism to poke fun at it." At the risk of sounding prophetic: this illustrates an evolution in the main-stream perception of Mormonism that will have significant implications for credal Christianity and its witness in the world.
July 7: Mark Driscoll's latest drivel
I'm thankful to Pastor Driscoll for the regular lessons he gives me in throttling my own indignation and choking back my bile. He's so uniquely adept at saying stupid things insensitively that he has almost become his own adjective. So: suffice it to say that this summer, when he posted an open invitation on Facebook for his friends and followers to share derisive stories about their encounters with "effeminate anatomically male" worship leaders, it was, for lack of a better word, totally driscollian.
July 27: John Stott passes
We commended a lovely servant of Jesus and a humble states-man for the Faith to the Grace of God this year. Preacher, pastor, evangelist, philanthropist (in the best sense of that word), writer, Christian leader, missionary, he was, by all accounts, a beautiful man and God used him wonderfully. To commemorate his going to be with the Lord, I've added The Cross of Christ to my reading list this year.
(My) (Evangelical) 2011 in Review
Commentaries on the Book of Philippians
This fall I preached a verse-by-verse study on the Book of Philippians at the FreeWay. Being a relatively new pastor, whenever I start a new sermon series I try to invest in one or two commentaries to help build my fledgling library. See past entries for my reviews of the commentaries I used when preaching Ecclesiastes and the Gospel of John. Here are some thoughts on the three main resources I consulted in preparing my series on Philippians:
The Epistle to the Philippians (NIGTC).
Peter O'Brien
By far the best commentary on Philippians I encountered, O'Brien's work is thorough, erudite, weighty and insightful. Sometimes his exegesis went deeper and his review of scholarly debates went broader than necessary for sermon prep-- and sometimes this required a good deal of sifting and distilling on the part of the preacher--but the fruit of the labor was well worth it. It promises to be invaluable for more academic studies of Philippians (should the need arise); though for my immediate purposes, I found it helpful to couple it with other more homiletical and practical resources.
Basics for Believers: An Exposition of Philippians.
D. A. Carson.
While I was in seminary, I always found Carson's work with the ancient text to be disciplined, reliable and intently exegetical (sometimes almost stiflingly so). His Exegetical Fallacies was required reading in one of my Greek courses, and his monumental commentary on the Gospel of John was a touchstone for a paper I wrote in Gospels class, so I came to Basics for Believers fully expecting the serious and careful handling of Philippians that I got. What I did not quite expect was the deeply pastoral and above all practical applications he would draw from his painstaking exposition. Carson's ability to take scholarly minutiae about the obscure subtleties of Greek syntax and distill them down to concrete "basics" for believers is in stellar form in this slender volume.
Rediscovering Paul.
David Capes et. al.
While not focused specifically on Philippians, Rediscovering Paul offered me a helpful overview of Paul's life, times and theology. While at times I felt it might have gone deeper, or expressed its ideas more clearly, it provides some interesting and inspiring insights into the man behind the letters. Among these is its discussion of the communal aspect of first century letter writing, and the influence of one's community on one's personal sense of identity, and how those issues might have played out in Paul's writings. Another challenging issue that it tackles is the whole process of letter writing in the Greco-Roman world, especially as regards the role a scribe often played in shaping the text, smoothing out the language or providing stock phrases, etc. Very helpful tertiary material.
Welcome 2012
Happy 2012 everyone. I trust you rang in the New Year with verve, and I assume the word "verve" means enthusiasm and abandon, in the context I'm using it in here. Me, I spent the evening watching family home-videos with the kids, cherishing the times and loving the people God's put in my life over the years.
For those of you who have almost given up hope of ever seeing something new posted here at terra incognita, let me assure you that my blogging hiatus is officially over and I have resolved to resume consistent posting for 2012. When I launched this blog three years ago, the well was near brimming with blogging ideas; this winter I kept putting the bucket in deeper and deeper and coming up dry. A few months break has allowed me to refresh and recharge, and I trust this coming year at terra incognita will be better than ever.
But as I sit here at the start another 365 days of potential, let me take a short glance back at the personal highlights of 2011:
1. Preaching a series on Ecclesiastes. This time last year I was gearing up to tackle this profound book in the pulpit. Little did I know how indelible mark this series would leave on my own soul.
2. My first (2) weddings. This spring I had the honour of officiating at my first two weddings (one in April, one in May) as a pastor.
3. Appointment to SCOD. This spring I also had the honour of being invited to sit on SCOD, the Free Methodist's "Study Commission on Doctrine." Our 2011 meeting was in October, and it was truly a joy to be sitting at a table with such a dynamic group of brothers and sisters in Christ who share my passion for going deep with the things of God.
4. Final ordination interview. The process to become an ordained pastor in the FMCiC involves 3 interviews with the Ministerial Education, Guidance and Placement Committee, spread out over four years. This September, being two years into the tracking process, I had my second interview. What a gift it was to discover, after the interview, that the Committee had agreed to "fast track" my journey, and my second of three interviews would serve as my final. Just this week I sent in my final paper for the final course required for ordination: the ordination itself will be sometime in the next few months.
5. Vacation to the Prairies. I miss the Prairies, a lot.
6. Learning the ukulele. We found Dani`s old childhood ukulele in a closet at my father-in-law`s house this summer. Toying around with it slowly morphed into experimenting with it into discovering its playful personality as a serious instrument.
7. Moving the church. I haven`t said much on this blog about the church move the FreeWay went through this summer. Mostly because I was so busy with the move itself, that I had little time to reflect in blogging form. I expect this winter I`ll have some time to do this kind of processing of the experience, but here as I look back at 2011, let me say that in many ways the church move dominated this year, and that God was doing some community-transforming stuff through it that has been a thrill to be part of.
Bridges: an online CD release party
You can download the CD here: [CD Download]
You can also download the CD booklet here: [CD Booklet]
(PS: I tried to arrange the album as a bit of a journey from dark to light, so if you're going to give it a listen, I'd suggest beginning to end.)
Prayers for Illumination
In my last post I mentioned prayers for illumination that I've prayed (after reading the scripture and before the sermon) that are based on, or "riffs on" specific Bible verses. The example I gave there was:
Your word, O Lord, is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path. Help us to see clearly by it today, we pray. Amen.
For the record, and in case you're a preacher and the idea of "praying the word" before "preaching the word" intrigues you, I thought I'd post a few more "prayers for illumination" I've prayed in the past at the FreeWay:
God, your word is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword; we pray that it would be so here today as we turn to it now. Amen.
God, we know that all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, correcting, rebuking and training in righteousness. We pray that it would be so for us this morning as we look to it now. Amen.
God, just like the rain comes down from heaven and doesn't return to heaven without watering the earth and making it fruitful, so is your word which comes out from your mouth:it doesn't return to you empty but accomplishes your purposes for it. May it water our hearts today and make them fruitful for you. Amen.
God, the Psalmist said: how sweet is your word to my mouth, sweeter than honey from the comb. Amen. May it be so here: give us an unquenchable taste for your word, here today. A sweet-tooth for the things of God, we pray.
God, we know that the man or woman without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned. We ask, Lord, that this would not be true of us today. Give us your Spirit, so that we may understand and accept your Word and what it would say to us here. Amen.
Praying the Word
If ever you've spent time with someone who's new to this "Faith thing," one of the questions that will often come up is: "How do you pray?" The most common response to a question like this is something along the lines of: "Praying is just talking to God, and you can talk to God just like you're talking to me now. Just talk to him." I fully understand the motive behind this kind of response. It helps people understand that the Christian God is real, and personal, and that he takes us as we are, and that he is so active in our everyday life that we can speak to him in everyday language.
I get all that and I think it is important.
But to be honest, I've always found something a bit unsatisfying about this answer. Because, really, you can't talk to God, just like you talk to a flesh-and-blood human being, and in asking the question, the "newbie" is recognizing that there is something sacred, something sacramental, something other about prayer, and I don't know that it's especially helpful to disavow them of this belief. Prayer is a sacred act and, while it's true that Jesus is always perfecting our prayers in heaven, no matter how imperfect they may be on earth, growing Christians should be maturing in their prayer life, too.
So I've been thinking about all this lately, and one of the things I keep coming back to is how seldom you hear Christians- especially "lifers"-- using the words of the scriptures to form the content of their prayers. This is, I'm becoming more and more convinced, the "lost art" of Christian prayer. Speaking the words of Scripture back to God, and letting them form the content of our prayers.
Some concrete examples may help. Let's say, for instance, I'm praying for someone in crisis. In the past my prayer might have sounded something like: Lord, we just want to pray for so-and-so that you would just help so-and-so and just give them peace about such-and-such.
These days, as I try to let the words of the scripture form the content of my prayers, I pray something like: Lord, you tell us not to be anxious about anything but in everything, by prayer and petition, to present our request to you. And you promised that when we do, that your peace, which transcends understanding, will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. So that's what we're doing now: we pray for so-and-so, that the peace of Christ which transcends understanding would guard their hearts and minds...
Okay, that's maybe a wordy example, but let's say I'm praying for someone who is having trouble making some life decision. In the past I might have prayed something like: "Lord, we pray for so-and-so, that you would just help them know what they're to do about such-and-such."
These days, as I try to let the Scriptures form the content of my prayers, I find myself praying things like: Lord, you told us that if anyone lacked wisdom, they should ask you because you give generously to all without finding fault. And that's what we're doing for so-and-so, Lord: please give so-and-so wisdom about such-and-such generously, without finding fault, just like you promised to do....
A final example: when preaching, I always try to pray a short prayer for illumination between the reading of the scripture and the sermon itself. In the past these have been impromptu, wordy, drawn out and vague. These days, as I let the words of Scripture form the content of my prayers, I pray something like: Your word, O Lord, is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path. Help us to see clearly by it today. Amen.
I could go on, because such is the breadth and depth of the Scripture's themes, that there really is no life experience we might go through that it doesn't address, and give us words to address God with in return. And that's what's happening, really, when we use the Scriptures as the content for our prayers: we're addressing God's own self with God's own words; we're entering the throne room of heaven with heaven's own "language" (so to speak) on our lips. And that's something sacred, I think.
(A final corollary of praying the scriptures I've noticed: to pray like this, I need to know what the scriptures say. To have memorized them, or, at the very least, to have internalized the gist of them so that they are on my lips, and ready to speak back to God in any given circumstance. I'm not a traditionalist, per se, and I've never decried the fact that "we don't emphasize scripture memorization anymore," like I've heard some old-timers do, but there's something to this. If I'm going to speak God's word back to him in my prayers, I need to have a heart saturated with it. And this won't happen without conscious discipline and intentional effort.)
Inspiration, Imagination, and the Image of God
There's a story from the cradle of humanity that describes God creating human beings by the power of his speech, and it says that he created them in his image, "male and female, in the image of God made he them." There's far more going on in these few simple words from Genesis 1:27 than could ever fit into a 500 word blog post (indeed, they've inspired theological words-in-response at a ratio of something like 1,000,000:1) but what I'm thinking about today is the fact that, in the ancient world, a king who had conquered a land would then set up his image (zelem) in that land, the idea being that the image would effect, extend and continue the King's reign even when the King himself was not physically present. And in the ancient world's framework for cosmogony (stories to explain how the cosmos came to be), creation always happened through an act of conquering and subduing chaos. So in Genesis 1: God conquers the formless-and-void chaos of the world-in-the-beginning, and, once the wild and waste world is formed and filed with verdant life, he sets humanity as his kingly "image" in the newly-conquered-Creation. The implication here (among other things) is that humanity is called to extend, effect and continue the creative work he has begun. And the implication here is that one of the ways we "image God" is through the exercise of our own forms of creativity.
And with this all in mind, I can't help but notice that the words we most often use to describe the human act of "singing/drawing/carving/writing/making original things that didn't exist before" link it to divine things. There's "creativity" itself, but there's also "inspiration" (to be "breathed" into), and there's "imagination" and "visionary" and "musical" (connected, of course, to the Greek Muses). All of these words seem to be feeling around the etymological edges of that spiritual "thing" that happens when human beings act creatively.
I mentioned before that I started doing some songwriting this summer after a three year dry spell. What I didn't mention then is how the dry spell broke. It was the morning I sat down on the edge of the bed in the basement of my father in law's house with my wife's mom's old nylon string guitar (which I always dig out of the storage room whenever I visit). I was lamenting the fact that it had been so long since I'd even felt like really singing, that in three years I'd had neither the time nor heart nor inspiration to say something musically, and that whenever I tried, the words always escaped or the tune eluded me.
I was just kind of strumming over this sadness, and I started muttering some stuff about inspiration having walked out on me. I happened to remember that in Greek myth, Calliope is the muse of epic poetry, and suddenly this image sprang up in my mind of a melancholy lover waiting for his girlfriend (Calliope) to come back to him. Slowly the ice began to thaw.
Here's the song that eventually came out of that morning.
Previously on terra incognita...
I'd mentioned that I am working on a number of new writing projects that are taking up time otherwise dedicated to blogging. Among these is a collaborative theology blog with a couple of other FMCiC pastors that I hope to have up and running in a few months-- stay tuned for that.
Another writing project I've had on the go since August is a new album of music. This summer, as I dragged myself across the finish line and out west for a three week furlough from the ministry, I found myself sitting in the middle of one of those dark nights of the soul that the spiritually wise sometimes talk about. This isn't the best forum to unpack everything that was going through my head and heart then, except to say that in the middle of it, as God graciously and patiently sat there in the darkness with me, he started to give me some new songs. I haven't had a rendezvous with "sister inspiration" in almost three years, and while many of these songs were darker and raw-er than any I've written in the past, this unexpected return of an old friend was a restorative to my soul.
I've been arranging and recording and generaly polishing them up in the last few months, and hope to "release" my new album, called Bridges, very soon. In the meantime, and by way of a sneak-peak, I offer this one here, based (loosely) on the darkest Psalm in the book: