New Churches

The church I attend is 100+ years old. I have been associated with it (sometimes living other places, but returning to visit while away) for 27 years. Yikes. Now I feel old.

I understand that new church plants grow, and that United Methodists see this in the Southern Baptist church and hope to emulate it. I know that the UMC has things to offer that simply aren’t offered in any other church. I understand that my congregation is fairly static in membership numbers because we don’t conscientiously reach out to people who have no church background. But I don’t know that I think that a constant building effort by the church is the way to fix that. Those churches will become old some day too.

This article is what brings me to think about this topic currently: Amid Growth…

Teaching

I’m a teacher. I don’t get paid for that skill, but I use it in Karate and at church. I’m decent at it, and more importantly, I’m willing to do it.

But I need something. I can’t keep teaching like this. Karate isn’t too bad right now, since it’s bodily involved, but the classes at church are not inspiring me, so I know I’m not inspiring my classes. I’ve read about the different learning styles, and I understand how different people learn from different styles, but nothing has jumped out at me in recent weeks.

Maybe it’s because I’m in about the third month of the book of Acts and I need a jolt. Maybe it’s the fact that my class seems perfectly happy to just sit back and listen to the few who have questions. Or, that they practically refuse to argue with me. Are they afraid that if they hurt my feelings I’ll quit teaching?

Preparation helps, and I can tell when I’m better prepared. I should work on that, since it’s one of the things that I can actually do. I can’t make the students care more. I can demonstrate how much I care. Keep trying.

High speed fast

Starting tomorrow I will be without high speed internet access for six straight days. I know I’ll survive, but SIX DAYS?! I’m headed to the land of the ice and snow (Syracuse, NY) so I’m sure I’ll enjoy myself, but really, six days? Maybe a neighbor of my sister-in-law will have an open wifi connection. How will I do without great videos like this one?

Christmas decorations


I always liked Christmas decorations. My father used to put up the big lights that would eventually burn your house down if you weren’t careful. I’m not as interested in decorating as he was though.

Last year, someone who thought they knew where I lived said “Your house looks really nice.” I guess they realized that I had no idea what they were talking about so they added “with the Christmas lights…”. I thought for a moment. We put up a lighted wreath on the side of the house, a small tree (and I mean small, a two foot potted fake tree with a string of lights) and one other wreath. We liked it, but it certainly didn’t catch your eye from the street.

I paused for a few seconds and then had the sense to ask “Where do you think we live?”. That’s when we worked out that the house they were talking about is this cute little Victorian house about a block away from mine, where they put out lights and decorations for almost every holiday. Seriously. Pink flowers for Valentine’s Day. They’re retired, so more power to them.

Last year some neighbors of ours hired someone to come in and put their lights up. It looked nice, and the thought of not having to untangle lights, and even worse, put all the lights away after the season is over was enticing.

But what really is the point? Let’s skip all the “Jesus is the reason for the season” slogans. Let’s just say it’s ok if you want to decorate your house for Christmas and put up lots of lights. The retired couple down the block get a lot of fun out of doing their decorating. People stop by and say “that’s really pretty.” You might admire a neighbors yard and say “Wow, that took a lot of work.” If they hire someone to do it maybe you could say “Hey, nice job finding even more ways to spend money during the holidays.”

I’m beginning to sound like Andy Rooney.

I did enjoy a Christmas parade tonight and the Jackson State Community College jazz choir, Innovations, put me in the Christmas spirit this weekend. The site adventconspiracy.org has me thinking of other things that might help me be less grumpy this year. If the Grinch can grow to embrace the season, maybe I can too.

Yancey on Wesley

Christianity Today has a brief article by Philip Yancey about his travels through England while reading Wesley. It’s worth a read.

One of our most difficult challenges as Christians is to order our desires—to maintain a proper balance between our investment in this world and in the next.

Article is here.

Unspoken creeds

I love the creeds of the church. Apostle’s, Nicene, Korean, Masai, etc.,. They help remind us of who we are in relationship to God. They are one way we demonstrate our Christianity.

Even churches that are opposed to creeds are usually not opposed to what’s contained in them. And almost all churches have creeds, even if they do not use them. Those who say “no creed but the Bible” will find themselves hard pressed to find such useful descriptions of the Trinity in scripture as they will in the creeds.

But unspoken creeds are less about God, and are only useful as a means to examine ourselves and what we’ve come to demonstrate as belief though it may have no scriptural basis. For example, at our church, one part of a church creed might include “We believe we should gather together at 11 a.m. on Sunday morning for one hour of worship. Anything beyond that is purely voluntary.”

Certainly, we would never say such a thing, but our actions speak it.

At a church retreat several years back, we had a person along with us to help with the children during events designed for parents only. She had been around our church quite a bit, even though she was a member of a different Christian faith tradition.

During the weekend, we shared the eucharist, and she was puzzled by this. Apparently at the church she was part of, one of the unspoken creeds was “the eucharist is to be shared in a church building.”

John Wesley wrote a brief statement called The Character of a Methodist in which he lays out the various scriptural principles which guide him and other Methodists.

In his summary he states:

If any man say, “Why, these are only the common fundamental principles of Christianity!” thou hast said; so I mean; this is the very truth; I know they are no other; and I would to God both thou and all men knew, that I, and all who follow my judgment, do vehemently refuse to be distinguished from other men, by any but the common principles of Christianity, — the plain, old Christianity that I teach, renouncing and detesting all other marks of distinction.

That’s of course what we’d all like to say about our church. We’re just doing what it takes to follow Christ. It’s the very reason that the predominant church in my town refuses to take any name besides “The Church of Christ”.

But let’s face it — John Wesley was being intentionally obtuse for this argument. Surely he knew that Methodism had become associated with a different frame of worship, with “social gospel” ideas and an evangelism that went beyond the activities of the Anglican church from which it came.

Those are good parts of an unspoken creed. But as I mentioned with the 11 o’clock worship tradition, we might have some areas we need to examine in our unspoken creeds that are not as kingdom directed.

Unspoken statements such as “we’d prefer you have a first shift job so you can come to regularly scheduled activities” or “we believe you should have time to teach Sunday school if you bring your kids” or “we like wooden pews and if you’re not able to get out of your wheel chair, you can listen at home on the radio” might be some of the things we’re projecting that go without saying.

I’m going to spend this week thinking of some of my own unspoken creeds and confessing them. It’s certainly easy for me to point them out in others, so I shouldn’t have any trouble identifying them in myself. Pray for me.

Hallelujah

In his book Slam, Nick Hornby mentions the singer Rufus Wainwright. I hadn’t heard of Wainwright, but when I looked him up, I found that I had heard him, oddly enough, in the soundtrack to Shrek. However, the song Wainwright sings on the Shrek soundtrack is a song by Leonard Cohen. It’s “Hallelujah” and has been performed by dozens of musicians (including a rather dreadful version by Bono). This song has something of religion in it. It mentions David, refers to Samson and of course the chorus is Hallelujah.

Cohen wrote a lot of verses to this song. Artists pick and choose. Some leave out the David passage, but it’s beautiful poetry:

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?

It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah.

Ok, that’s enough from me. Listen to the song.

Local fun


For years I lived within 2 hrs. of the Jack Daniel’s distillery and didn’t take the tour. Whiskey is ok, but I just didn’t see how the tour could be very interesting. Then I went, and it was great fun. Lynchburg is a nice small town and the people who give the tour like their jobs.

Now I live near Century Farms Winery, and it’s a good tour too. I wasn’t expecting much, honestly, but it was a pretty weekend and it was a new place to me, and it made for a great trip.

Muscadines right off the vine, beautiful roses, a HARD working family making wine on a farm that has been in use for 150 years, and a great tour of the vineyard and some good wine to sample: time well spent. The kids even learned a little something and didn’t get bored.

Then we followed it up with a visit to a restaurant and shops we’d never visited. Artopia is in Jackson, in a building that was a hotel decades ago, then a boarding house, and then a planned children’s museum that got scrapped when “the tornado” hit it. But someone saw fit to fix it up and there are lots of small shops in it, as well as a decent restaurant, Cafe Capone. We had chicken parmesan, some great veggies and salads and dessert for the price of a Burger King meal.

So, all within easy distance of where I live there were places that were relaxing and enjoyable. I wonder what other places I’m missing?

Red, red wine.


There doesn’t seem to be much discussion about alcohol on the blogs, even the Christian ones. I have teetotaling friends and moderate drinker friends. The church I am part of encourages AA and Alanon groups to use our facilities for meetings.

When I first moved back to the rural West Tennessee area I now live in, a fellow church member invited our family over to their home. She couldn’t figure out how to ask if we’d like beer or wine. She had made a similar statement to another member of the church and had been judged pretty harshly for suggesting such a thing.

Our pastor at the time did not drink until his children had gone to college. Not because he was ashamed of it, but because he wanted them to know it just wasn’t that important.

I like wine. I like beer, I even like a shot of whiskey now and again. That’s not very Methodist of me, in terms of what the Book of Discipline says. I suppose I should dislike it as much as I dislike the lottery that Tennessee now has.

Maybe there will come a time when I take as much pleasure in a cup of tea (I have had some really great teas before)as I do in a glass of porto. I don’t think that my moderate consumption is a stumbling block to others in the faith. But I suppose we should think about it anyway.

Today, I am going to a winery. It’s small, it’s local, and it’s owned by a relative of a friend of mine, which makes it even more fun. It’s a gorgeous fall day, the sun is shining bright, and I look forward to a day of enjoying God’s creation. Pour yourself a glass of wine, a cup of coffee or a glass of tea and enjoy it with me.

Peace.

Shock Doctrine

Naomi Klein just released a new book. She was hoping for a blurb from Alfonso Cuaron, director of Y Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Instead, she got this film.

Watch it, but not with children around. Sights and sounds are meant to be provocative.

The video has done what it was intended to do, which is to create an interest in the book, as well as start some discussion, so that’s why I’m posting it.

The biggest thing I wonder about is this statement which is from the economist Milton Friedman. “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.”

I think that statement might be true, regardless of how it is then abused by the powers and principalities. The followers of Jesus certainly changed after the death and resurrection of Christ. Alcoholics speak of reaching rock bottom before they improve. People diagnosed with serious illnesses evaluate their lives.

Klein goes from the specific to the general and states that entire nations can be susceptible to the shock doctrine as well. She uses 9/11 and several natural disasters as evidence.

The nature of change is what actually interests me. I have heard it said that change of less than 20% is not really change at all; that incremental changes are just us trying to do what we can when we sense a problem but aren’t really willing to do anything about it.

I’ll use my church as an example. A few years back we went through several months of evaluation and statements of who we are and what we believe as an attempt to make better disciples. Nothing has really changed. We added a program here, scheduled some classes there, but essentially the same things that went on then are still going on.

Contrast that with the churches in Mississippi and Louisiana that are still involved in Katrina cleanup. They are substantially different churches than they were prior to the hurricane. One church with which we’ve partnered still has about 100 people a week that they house, feed and equip to work in the surrounding areas. This is a church that is not much larger than the groups they host.

So can those churches, like the group that I worship with, like me, truly change? Without a catastrophe? Without a huge split? Without a burned down sanctuary? How has your church changed?