John Meunier

Ship of Fools lists the 10 Worst Verses in the Bible. The list was compiled by reader submissions and votes. It is cavalcade of rape, murder, misogyny, and gay bashing, except for No. 8.

For that one we get God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. When I read that on the list, it leaped out at me because of the importance of binding of Isaac in so much Judeo-Christian commentary and history. It simply is one of the great – and challenging – episodes in the entire Bible. It is not Paul giving out household advice or the chronicle of obscure Israeli military leaders. This is one of the defining episodes in the Bible.

Ship of Fools concludes its commentary on the list with this:

It’s an unedifying list, but we think the Bible can survive bringing these shadowy verses into the spotlight. It’s not the all-or-nothing book that fundamentalists (atheist and Christian) say that we must either accept wholesale or burn. We need a view of the Bible that is nuanced enough to treasure its comforts and challenges, its classic stories and groundbreaking ethical wisdom, while facing the plain fact that some of it is unacceptable.

This seems rather cavalier in its attitude toward Abraham and Isaac. If that story is unacceptable, then what is off limits?

I was watching an Andy Stanley sermon over the weekend in which he was trying to present the central problem that causes people to grow cold in faith or not have any interest in it in the first place.

When he got down the Bible, he turned to Acts 26 where Paul comes before King Agrippa and retells his conversion story. For Stanley, the key piece was the end of this section:

I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. ¹⁶But get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me^* and to those in which I will appear to you. ¹⁷I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you ¹⁸to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.

The end of verse 18 after the “so that” is what Stanley said was the crucial thing we forget or let slide from our vision. The reason that Paul was sent was so people would receive forgiveness and a place among the holy ones of God.

The problem, Stanley said, was that people do not recall or believe they have anything they need to be forgiven for. And I liked his analogy here. We all admit freely that we’ve done stuff that falls short of our own expectations for ourselves. We need to forgive ourselves. We all admit that we have done things to or regarding other people that falls short of their reasonable expectations of us. We need to be forgiven by other people.

Somehow, though, we are reluctant to take that one more step and acknowledge that we have done things that fall short of God’s will and desire for us. Most of us have no problem admitting that we need forgiveness from ourselves and others, but we have a hard time saying that about God – who is the most willing and ready to offer it.

I found Stanley’s discussion on that point really helpful.

The Canadian Bible Society put together a lovely set of pictures and music to go with Ecclesiastes 3.

Click here to visit the page. Make sure you turn on the sound on your computer.

Will Willimon posts a favorable review of an essay by Fleming Rutledge about preaching. Willimon includes his own praise of biblical preaching.

Preaching is powerful when it is biblical, when it takes the biblical witness with primary seriousness, when it is first interested, not in the limits of the hearers, or in our felt needs and cares, but in what God, in power, wishes to say to us, how the Holy Spirit, in power, wants to transform us. Nothing can create the church, nothing can raise up a new generation of Christians, we believe, other than the originating, fecund, life-giving power of the word.

Good Willimon prose. I’ve read much like it.

I’ve read some of Willimon’s sermons. I’ve read a few of Fleming Rutledge.

Having done that, I am struggling to bring to my mind the kind of preaching that they are worried about. In the post and elsewhere, Willimon frets over preaching that is not biblical or that starts with human needs or human limitations. I think he has in mind the kind of preaching we find displayed on the stages of the most successful mega-churches. Preachers of such churches write books that give advice that says we need to start precisely with human questions and human limitations. Students of communications arts, they know that the audience is crucial.

So, here is what I want a homiletics professor to do. Go round up a bunch of sermons that are in the Willimon/Rutledge style and a bunch of sermons that are in that “other” category – whatever that is exactly – and show us how they are different. Show us the difference and help us – or help me at least – see what consequence in terms of the theology and teaching that comes out of the preacher’s mouth is of each kind of preaching.

Maybe I’m the only one for whom this is not blindingly obvious. But I’d read the book.

Craig Adams dug an old file off his hard drive and slapped it up on his blog. Fortunately for us, it is a goodie.

The author of the article asks how we can tell if our church is sick. His answer:

If your minister’s or pastor’s presence and involvement are virtually essential to its worship, teaching, leadership and administration your church’s days are numbered. This is the primary cause of sickness and even death in twenty first century churches. All over this country such churches are dying. And the tragedy is this – most of these churches are dying at their own hands.

How many of are truly working with all our strength to make ourselves replaceable?

By the end of this week, I may be rethinking my policy on lectionary preaching. Being both naive and foolish, I am preaching on the gospel this week – Mark 10:2-16. Divorce.

I’ve been reading some material already, but much of it seems to be working very hard to say that Jesus did not really mean what he says or that we cannot expect such a standard for our lives. I understand that impulse. That is basically what the Social Principles say.

But here is my problem. The Lutheran reading – a I understand it – of the Sermon on the Mount is that it is in the Bible to convict us of our failures. We read the sermon and are left with a clear picture of our failure to live God’s will, which throws us to our knees seeking mercy. Such an approach to the Sermon on the Mount could be used to read this text as well.

But that is not how we perfectionist Wesleyans have traditionally read the Sermon on the Mount. The sermon is not an impossible ideal, but an attainable one with God’s help. It is not an instrument of conviction, but a guide that tells us when we have at last arrived at holiness of heart and life.

In other words – if we are being true to our Wesleyan roots – we preach the sermon because we expect to be able to follow its teachings as we grow in grace. Should we not – then – preach Jesus’ teaching on divorce the same way?

If so, how do you speak to the ears of those who are already divorced?

Any wise and experienced preachers who want to offer some advice?

A Facebook conversation about the recent story noting where new UMC elders and deacons go to seminary caught me by surprise.

The original poster on Facebook, who I will not name here because Facebook is only quasi-public, took note of the statement in the story that 78% of new elders and deacons who are minorities chose to attend one of the 13 UM seminaries. Overall, 59% of new elders and deacons attended one of the 13 seminaries, which means minorities were disproportionately more likely to attend a UM seminary than the population as a whole.

Some basic data from the study:

• Racial minority elders and deacons: 69, 54 (78%) of whom attended a UM seminary.
• Non-minority elders and deacons: 389, 221 (57%) of whom attended a UM seminary.

The comments in reply were rather interesting. I won’t quote them here since the people posting probably did not consider the communications for public consumption. But they raise a question that seems rather important to me.

The tenor of some of the comments was that white, male seminary students are disadvantaged at UM seminaries. Scholarship dollars are not as available to them. Campus culture may even make them feel unwelcome. This has not been my experience. I applied to and was accepted by a UM seminary. I was offered a generous scholarship. I have not enrolled because of personal and work issues, but at no time did being a middle-aged white guy make me feel anything other than I have always felt.

But some of the commenters insisted that they were given subtle and not-so-subtle messages that white guys would be more welcome and comfortable somewhere else.

This is so at odds with my experiences that I wanted to share it here. Has anyone else out there ever heard of anything like this?

From Dallas Willard’s Hearing God.

Lily Tomlin: “Why is it that when we speak to God we are said to be praying but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?”

Taylor Burton-Edwards wrote an insightful comment on Dan Dick’s blog about the nature of congregations.

Here’s his comment:

We really need to be more realistic, I think, about what the congregational format of Christianity is and has been designed to accomplish since about the sixth century.

Basically, the congregation as we have known it all these years (over 1400 of them!) was and is designed to be a PUBLIC form of Christian community that does the following, and really not much else:

1) The public worship of God
2) Teaching the basic doctrine of the faith
3) Providing some means for caring for each other (pastoral care, fellowship groups, and the like)
4) Being a good “institutional player” for the good of the larger community

Those are the things, and really the ONLY things, the congregation AS congregation, is designed to do.

Making disciples– committed followers of Jesus who are growing in grace and holiness– is not on that list. It never has been except in “marginal” settings since about the sixth century.

That doesn’t make congregations bad things. It just means they are what they are. If we want discipleship to happen for more than a very few number of people, we need to create additional forms of Christian community that facilitate that.

For many centuries in many places, monasteries and extra-ecclesial “societies” took on that role.

In England in the 18th century, Methodism did that.

In both, it was understood that BOTH some kind of congregational life AND some kind of accountable small group life were essential for people to grow in holiness and discipleship to and mission with Jesus. So those early Methodists weren’t trying to rethink church without congregations and the signficant facilities they had to do what they did– public worship, teaching, care, and being institutional players. Rather, they were trying to rethink church by ADDING structures that ALSO helped everyone in those additional structures ALSO grow in holiness of heart and life.

Congregations as public institutions usually can not do that well. If you are public, you are de facto open to everyone, and you really can’t exclude (or even easily discipline) anyone that the local public standards would say are fine the way they are. That’s pretty much what being a public institution means. It’s almost certainly what folks who hear “Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors” think we mean when they hear that.

When Christianity went public, then, and located its public life in more public buildings designed for the public… well there were tradeoffs in what it could do in those public forms of community.

The biggest trade-off was that being public means you’re not going to focus much on growth in holiness as a norm for everyone to be part of the community in the first place– because you can’t. The number of people is too large to hold each other accountable. And they can’t hold people accountable for much– being a public institution.

When (and where, still today) the church is a house church, it was (and often is) not a public institution. And historically, what we would now call the congregation was not a public institution until after Christianity became not just legal but THE legal religion in the late fourth century. In many places, you would never see ANY part of Christian Sunday worship until you had been in intensive daily catechesis for three years or more! The “congregation” was much more of a secret society with its own secret ritual (and therefore, in part, maligned, ridiculed, and accused of all sorts of terrible things by those who were not part of it!).

If you think that ONLY the pre-Constantinian form of Christian communities– where the congregation was not public and was very exclusive– got it right, then, maybe you can get away without significant public worship spaces, teaching facilities, and sizable institutional expenses for those things and for the public good. But if you think that the post-Constantinian forms of congregation as public institution PLUS other forms of Christian community that are more intensive and focused on growth and mission can ALSO be right– and then if you recognize that THOSE represent the primary reality of the UMC, then, well, there is good reason, as Dean noted, to invest well in such facilities.

Where Methodism really began to vanish isn’t when it started building significant public buildings per se. It’s when it quit ALSO holding its membership accountable in other forms of community that were exclusive and very effective and making disciples of Jesus who were joining God’s mission of transforming the world.

Early this week I published a post in the form of a letter to Adam Hamilton soliciting his thoughts about the problems posed by congregational attachment and devotion to a pastor. I got some unexpected blow back on the post, so I deleted it. My intention was not to criticize Hamilton – indeed, I still think the post used language of praise - but to use him as an example to discuss a question that is on my mind.

So, let me approach this in the abstract.

Most of us know of pastors who have become the focal point of people’s faith. This is because they have been gifted and graced by God for pastoral leadership and preaching. But the undeniable fact is the person of the preacher sometimes becomes the reason people go to church. I’ve heard the situation described as the preacher having groupies.

This is not something I have first-hand experience with. My small congregation blesses me with their attention and patience each week.

But here is what I’m curious about. Do all-star preachers – for lack of a better word – think or worry at all about the dynamic that clearly happens. Do they see any downsides or risks to that? Do they do anything to reduce it?

The obvious issues I see are idolatry – replacing God with the preacher – and building our faith on sand. When the preacher fails or leaves or dies it can shatter the groupies.

Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that great and dynamic preachers should not use their gifts. But how do you avoid the risks that clearly exist? How do you keep idolatry at bay?