On the Subtle Nuances of Train Whistles

Some are high-pitched like the steam engines of last century, sounding like a banshee shriek. One was a buzz so low I thought it was an electrical problem at a neighbor’s house. Some are dissonant, like nails on a chalkboard. One sounds like a string symphony imitating a train whistle. It was beautiful.

Until I lived near some Birmingham railroad tracks, I only had a passing familiarity with different kind of train whistles. We don’t live close enough that it is really disturbing, but sometimes in the night, if I’m already awake, I hear them blowing at the intersections. My father in law used to talk about how he would hear the steam whistle as a boy, and try to imagine who was on the train, and where they were going. It was a soulful, melancholy sound that always made him think about other lands and places to visit.

I might have a less romantic view of train horns and whistles if I lived right next door to the tracks. There’s a church near the tracks, and I wonder if the preacher has to pause during the sermon when trains go by. I’ve heard people describe the plaster shaken off of their walls, their windows cracked, and their conversations interrupted by the rumbling of freight cars.

That’s the power of the gospel. For some of us, it startles us awake. It may be jarring and annoying, and we wish it would be silent. For others, it calls to mind a different land and a longing for a place we can’t see. It can also be a summons: “Get on board, the train is leaving!”

Or maybe it’s an announcement: “Here comes the Freedom Train. The Kingdom can’t stop. The moment is at hand.”

New Church Update, July 25, 2012

At our worship gathering on July 25, our theme was justice. Thirty-five adults and children gathered together for our worship and planning meeting. After we had worship, we cooked out in the back (for both vegetarians and carnivores) and socialized. Some of us even gathered on the front porch to talk about children’s ministry.

When we began this venture, I was telling people, “Oh, it’ll be awhile before we need to talk about children’s ministry.” At that point, we were the only family with a youngster. Suddenly we have several families with children, and I realized we needed to begin thinking about where we wanted to go with children’s ministry so that we didn’t just wind up doing something out of habit! While our ministry is limited at the moment to child care, we’re going to begin working toward having our older kids teach the younger ones (with adult leadership). We plan to practice on our own kids so that when we begin our preview services and visitors show up, we have something good to share with them.

We are planning to launch at least one new home-based small group in August. We’ve also begun forming work teams around art, music, hospitality, and discipleship. I’m excited by the ideas being generated in each of these groups.

I’m also excited by our plan for August 5. On that Sunday at 9:00 AM we are going to have a prayer service at Vulcan. As we look out over the city, we are going to pray for its people, its neighborhoods, its leaders, its schools, its businesses, its churches, and all the wonderful people and resources God has blessed us to steward. We will pray for God’s direction in our next steps, and how we can join God in what God is already doing to renew all things.

I’m the Problem

Conservative churches grow. Liberal churches fail. That’s been conventional wisdom for thirty years. In the 1980’s, as the religious right was beginning to flex its political muscle, people said this kind of thing all the time. This is why the mainline Protestant churches were declining, and Southern Baptist churches and “nondenominational” churches were growing.

Only it turns out that neither their theology nor their politics had much to do with it. According to exhaustive research by Robert Wuthnow, a Princeton sociologist, it was mostly due to marriage and birth rates. The best predictor of whether someone is in church or not is if they are married and have kids, and the engine of church institutional life for the last century has been married families. As much as churches of all varieties liked to think that they were bringing the lost to Christ, the fact is that most of their numbers came from simply breeding new Christians. The mainline Protestants, who tended to be slightly higher on the economic ladder, expected their kids to go to college and delay marriage until they had a sufficiently high-paying middle-class job. Their pastors, likewise, were supposed to be well-educated (and thus slightly older) than their “evangelical” counterparts. This meant fewer generations in a given church, and therefore fewer people. Of course, once the non-denominational evangelical churches eventually caught up with the economic prosperity of the mainliners in the 1990’s, they started seeing the same downward trend. (In the second decade of the 2000’s, there’s another disturbing trend: marriage is increasingly the privilege of a shrinking middle class. A majority of households below median income are now unmarried. What will that mean for the church of the future?)

I do wish it were otherwise. I wish that most of our growth was from changed lives, new believers, people who were committing their lives to following Jesus. That’s what “evangelism” originally meant, before the related word “Evangelical” took on such conservative political connotations. I consider myself evangelical: I believe all people—sinners, saints, and skeptics—need Jesus. They do not need a doctrine about Jesus. They do not need a particular prayer or a set of words. They need the person, Jesus, even if they aren’t to the point of “accepting” him. As a fellow church-planter says, the gospel isn’t about us accepting Jesus into our hearts anyway. It’s about Jesus accepting us.

Unfortunately, the discredited idea that conservative churches grow and liberal churches decline has not yet died. It was trotted out again by Bishop Lawrence, an Episcopalian who is distressed about that denomination’s decision to bless same-sex unions and ordain transgender people. “Sexual and gender anarchy,” he claims, will lead the denomination into decline.

There are two things (besides the prejudice) that bother me about this kind of argument.

The first is that there is little evidence that the political or theological alignment of a denomination actually affects church participation. On the other hand, there is plenty of data that point to socioeconomic factors (class, marriage, kids) influencing church involvement

Church people are notoriously bad about making fact-free assertions. Lawrence claims it’s their liberal ideas that hurt mainline churches, but I could use his same set of facts to claim that it’s the weather: Churches in the Southeast are doing better than churches in other parts of the United States. Clearly, it’s hot, humid weather that makes people more religious! So all we need to do is get more people to move to the Southeast! Or make the entire planet hotter!

At our General Conference back in April, one delegate had the audacity to stand and proclaim the same conventional wisdom as Bishop Lawrence. He said that we Methodists needed to learn from successful churches like WillowCreek, megachurches that were more conservative. Adam Hamilton, pastor of the 10,000-member United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, sat maybe two tables away. I wish I could have heard his thoughts at that moment.

Clearly, churches across the theo-political spectrum are able to do well. Glide Memorial UMC in San Francisco is radically inclusive and very liberal, yet people line up around the block to get in. At the same time, there are plenty of dying conservative churches all over the country. Quality ministry does not depend on the orientation of one’s theology or politics. People who use the tired rhetoric that liberal churches are dying while conservative ones are thriving are simply spouting their own prejudices wrapped up in religious language.

The second thing that bothers me about Lawrence’s argument is this: I believe that if more churches gave a rip about about marriage and childbirth patterns, about the disappearance of the middle class, about the economic factors that make people poor and why that makes marriage less likely for them, they might do better ministry AND address a demographic problem of decline. But my saying that probably makes me a liberal. So according to Lawrence, I’m the problem.

You know what? I’m fine with that. I’m fine with being a problem. I dearly hope that we manage to grow a big Birmingham church of a gazillion people who are also problems, who also believe that God shows no partiality. I believe we problem people need Jesus, too, and I hope that we finally bury once and for all the idea that God only works with people who don’t cause such problems.

The Church Birmingham Needs

I’m going to try to be as honest as I possibly can about my hopes and dreams for this new church, which means saying some things that may make people uncomfortable, and taking a risk on saying something that may be wrong. That’s okay. I’ve been wrong before.

One of my deepest longings for this new church is that we will have a diverse congregation: black, white, Latino, and “other” (a category I always find amusing on demographic questionnaires, considering what “other” means in theology and sociology), straight, gay, lesbian (and “other”), old, young, (and “other”), rich, poor (and “other”), hard-core believers, agnostics (and “other”). Given Birmingham’s history and the continued political and social dysfunction we experience in our city as a result of that history, I believe we need churches that are as diverse as the Kingdom of God, who represent a community that truly believes “that God shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34, Galatians 2:6).

It is difficult to express this vision to others. I often get the response that “we can’t just have diversity for diversity’s sake.” I agree. We need diversity because it expresses the action of God in Jesus Christ who deliberately preached and acted on reconciliation and justice in his whole ministry. We need diversity because it strengthens our community. I am happy that most churches are at a point where they realize if their leaders are all old, white men that something is wrong. I am glad to have served churches that, as they are choosing leaders, will say, “we need a young person on this committee” or “we need some female representation on this team.” The leadership of these churches have gotten over the idea that this is “diversity for diversity’s sake.” This is about leadership and the mission of the church, about reaching new people for Christ and the realization that our own vision is limited. We need a diverse community to lead well.

Since moving and beginning the process of church planting full-time, I’ve been trying to meet as many people as I can. Yesterday was the first time we encountered old-school Birmingham racism. A man struck up a conversation with us, and we started talking about area schools. (We homeschool because traditional school didn’t work well for our son, but people attribute to us all sorts of reasons for our doing so. It’s interesting what our decision to homeschool reveals about other people’s attitudes.) He approved of our decision to homeschool, because he didn’t approve of the way public schools “indoctrinated” kids about civil rights and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wow.

The conversation made me aware of how much I’ve gotten used to being around people like me (white, middle-class, generally open-minded), and how easy it has become for me to be unaware of racism in my own context. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been used to moving in a social environment where the “soft” racism of privilege is still acceptable. People talk about crime or neighborhoods instead of race or class. It’s just that I hadn’t bumped up against privilege’s overt cousin in several years.

I can tell when I start talking about this stuff that people squirm a bit, and I have to be honest that I feel the sting of my own words. I’m living in Crestwood, a neighborhood that is “gentrifying,” that is on the right side of the tracks (literally) for urban renewal. I’ve had people tell me that churches that manage to be diverse don’t talk about such things. They just focus on Jesus, or just focus on relationships. While I believe in the importance of Jesus and developing interpersonal relationships with my whole heart, how can I not speak the truth?

I recognize that the challenge will be not coming off as paternalistic. Nobody wants to be part of a church where they are valued only as token members of a demographic. But I also recognize that churches do spend a huge amount of time figuring out how to attract people between the ages of 18 and 35, and they have done marketing and theological acrobatics to reach the “Nones.” They have celebrated preachers with hipster glasses and tattoos who have the same tired evangelical theology of their great-grandparents but who repackage it as “edgy.”

I am not interested in being edgy. I want to be truthful. I think that’s the church that Birmingham needs. Perhaps it is naive of me, but I do believe that all people need to hear and experience that kind of community.

New Church Update, July 8, 2012

We had a full house last night! Thirty-eight adults and children gathered for our second worship and planning meeting. We talked about the second aspect of our life together as a worshiping community: Devotion.

Devotion is how we love God as individuals and small groups. The word “devotion” shares the same root as the word “vow,” and it’s about how we commit ourselves to loving God with our heart, mind, and strength. There are many ways that we can open ourselves to grace and allow God to change us, but I focused on four: prayer, study, giving, and meeting together.

While a lot has been written about prayer, and there are many ways to pray, my biggest learning about prayer in the last several years has been how to pray with my body. After meditating with Buddhists in South Korea to praying with hand-waving charismatic Christians there, watching Jews rock back and forth at the Wailing Wall and Muslims bow with their faces to the ground in Cairo, I realized I was missing out on something. Most Protestants learn to pray with their eyes closed and their heads bowed, stationary and silent, like people asleep. But God is not just an internal voice in my head. The living God likes physicality, and when I learned to pray nonverbally by bowing, kneeling, feeling the texture of beads, or journaling, it was like I had discovered a new country. I hope people in the new congregation find new power in prayer as well.

Study likewise is not just piously poring over scripture as God’s Word. It means wrestling with a text, arguing with the authors, questioning things that seem like cliched truths and bumping up against the rough edges of scripture. I wish progressive Christians had been reading their Bibles in California during the Proposition 8 controversy, and in Alabama during immigration. I wish more Christians memorized the verses that say God shows no partiality, instead of just the comforting, misquoted ones about personal salvation (“I know the plans I have for you,” for example, is really “I know the plans I have for y’all.”)

Giving. Man, where to begin. People in Nigeria, and Zambia, and Kenya dance their offerings down the aisles of the church with joy. Here in the richest country in the world, we’re embarrassed to ask for offerings in church. Because we don’t talk about money, we have a hard time asking for commitment. Uncommitted people gripe the loudest and give the least. You don’t have to look much further than two recent contenders for the presidential nomination. Each loudly said that government shouldn’t help the poor—that’s the job of the churches. Neither one, according to their tax returns, tithed. (For the record, both Obama and Romney do tithe).

I would not ask such a person to be the president of my administrative board, much less of the most powerful nation on the planet. If you don’t believe in the mission and ministry of the organization you serve enough to give to it, you should find an organization whose mission you can tithe toward. When I give the first dollar of my paycheck away, I no longer work for Visa, or beer, or the mortgage company. I work for God. If my first thought with my money is how to spend it on myself, then I work for all the petty gods of this world.

Finally, meeting together is part of devotion and how we love God. Theresa of Avila said that in order to know God better, one should frequent the company of God’s friends. It is difficult to be accountable to these other things I’ve mentioned without being part of a community. Even Jesus needed a circle of 12 friends around him, and needed their prayers. If Jesus felt the need, I figure I’d better do the same.

After the sermon, we shared communion. In the response part of our worship and meeting, we did some polling about potential names for the new church, and Angela led the group in making various kinds of prayer beads. The word “bead” actually comes from the word for prayer, because they’ve served as a mnemonic device in many cultures for many centuries for prayer and meditation.

I am excited that people seem to be turned on by what we’re starting here, and that they are beginning to dream about the possibilities available to us. God is doing great things.

What I Learned Last Sunday

A week ago Sunday (June 24) I got to visit Innerchange UMC in McCalla, Alabama. Several Trinity members visited Innerchange last year and told me that I should visit. (It is tough to visit other churches when you are a pastor, but I’m beginning to think it is essential. I’ve learned so much from just the last few Sundays of visiting around).

RIght off, I loved the signage. It was so easy to see where to go. Big, brightly-colored signs are right on the buildings pointing the way to different areas. Greeters welcomed us warmly. I was on crutches and someone held the door open for me. We were directed to the coffee bar and to a welcome table. Mike, the pastor, was sitting at the table and he welcomed us, too. He is the founding pastor of Innerchange, and I really appreciated his words to us newbie church planters. I also appreciated during the prayer time that he offered a special prayer for us. One lady sitting beside us put her arm around me as we prayed. It meant a lot to me.

I think the coolest thing was just the genuine sense of community there. I liked the informal, semi-round seating in the warehouse. Mike sat down to preach, and it felt more like shooting the breeze in someone’s living room than a sermon. People felt free to comment and talk back to him.

I also really appreciated the fact that the band clearly wrote a lot of their own music. The last song in particular was good (it had a good meter as well as rockin’ rhythm). Although I can’t quite recall it, if I heard it again I could sing along immediately.

Worshiping in the round in the gym at The *Story

I mentioned to my group on Sunday that for a long, long time I’ve wanted to design worship in the round or semi-round, like an ancient Greek theater or one of the coves along the Sea of Galilee. We found that in our contemporary service at Trinity, when people sit in a circle, they can hear each other sing. They tend to participate more. They can see other faces and it has a much more intimate feel. The main action of worship happens among us instead of in front of us. When we began an alternative worship service called The *Story at Fairview, we worshiped in the round and most people seemed to really dig it.

I didn’t get to visit another church’s worship service this past Sunday, but I hope to go somewhere else that will stretch me a bit.

The words “must,” “ought,” and “should” just make me tired—but seeing love and grace in action makes me want to move. It’s the same way with preaching!

Otherwise Thinking

Preaching the Good News…

 …as Good News

For a variety of reasons, we often fail to communicate any motivating “good news” in our sermons. From my experience, there are several reasons for this.

Sometimes we cave in to the culture’s pejorative definition of “preach” – thus the need to sound “preachy.” We load sermons with hard or soft imperatives: “we must,” “we should,” or “let us,” and “we are called to….” When this happens, I am reminded of the hospital nurse, using the “nurse’s ‘we’”: “we need to take our medicine now,” “let’s sit up now and eat some lunch.”

At other times, we worry that the congregation is not doing all that it could do to support our exciting vision for church growth or social justice. We feel compelled to nag at our congregations for their failings.

At other times, we lose sight of the redemptive good news…

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Church Update: July 1, 2012

On July 1, twenty-seven people gathered at our house for our first afternoon worship and planning meeting, followed by a potluck supper (because you can’t be a real church without potluck suppers!). The vision of this new church is to become a diverse community of sinners, saints, and skeptics who join God in the renewal of all things. “The renewal of all things” is a pretty big idea, so we try to break it down into five aspects of our life together: Worship, devotion, compassion, justice, and witness. Each of the five Sundays in July we will gather at 4:30 to talk about one of the five areas.

All of these flow from the two great commandments: Love God and love your neighbor. We love God as a community through worship. We love God individually through our devotion. We love our neighbors as a community by doing justice in Birmingham and in the world. We love our neighbors individually through ministries of compassion. Binding all of them together is our witness to what God has done and is doing through Jesus Christ.

We also went about the business of doing business and delegating roles. Over the next few weeks Angela and I will be talking with folks about how they would like to grow spiritually through this new church, and what they can in turn offer to others.

We are so thankful to Trinity and Canterbury UMC for all their encouragement, financial support, willingness to serve, and prayer. God is already doing great things.