 The Text Message
Reflections on Scripture and Church life
Rev. Tom Gough - Interim Pastor
Dear Friends,
I am writing this on Father’s Day (perhaps the
secular celebration most neglected in the life of the
Church) and, while I am not myself a father, I have
had one, known thousands, and have had reason to
be grateful to a many. From what I can tell, raising
children appears to be something of a blood sport,
like wrestling an alligator in a minefield. It is filled
with pitfalls, traps, and unforeseen circumstances
that can make it challenging and dangerous. It requires
agility, commitment, and a degree of on-thejob
training found in no other occupation. Both the
risks and the rewards are high stakes and I tip my
hat to anyone who takes that path in life.
One of the things that make it especially challenging
in our current culture is the fact that children
appear born with the capacity for contemplating
the deepest of things. They throw themselves at
the world like junior anthropologists and are not shy
about making their observations when the world
pushes back. They want to know things, deep, spiritual,
mysterious, unknowable things, things that
cause a quiver of anxiety in adults. This is, of
course, just how children are. What makes this challenging,
especially now, is the fact that so very
many of us live lives utterly disconnected from the
kind of faith communities that were once the natural
province of these very questions. In the course of
my career in ministry I have had a great many earnest
parents come looking for something they can
tell their kid who has just asked if God loves earthworms
or only people.
For children, the spiritual life begins here with
these very practical questions based in their very
surprising experiences. By nature we ask, as children,
the questions that will plague us, more or less,
for the whole of our lives. The unknowable, about
which we tell ourselves stories, as a means of whistling
in the dark. The most profound theological
questions were probably first asked by a child.
Recently, on NPR’s Speaking of Faith program,
Krista Tippett had as her guest, Rabbi Sandy Sasso.
Rabbi Sasso had some marvelous things to say
about parenting in the face of such dreaded inquisition.
From her conversation with Ms. Tippett I drew
two broad perspectives that I thought were at once
wise and practical.
Firstly, do not be afraid of the questions. Kids do
not necessarily ask deep questions because they
want a specific answer. Often the question itself is a
way of wondering out loud if it is alright to think
about such things. So there is no reason to stumble
over having the right answer, or no answer at all.
Perhaps the best thing we can do is hand the question
back to them and ask them what they themselves
think, or wonder with them (let them help
you figure out an answer). If we shut them down,
either because we are troubled by the question or
because we don’t believe that the question has
merit, we are also beginning to tell them not to use
their imaginations to seek solutions to things. If we
foist the questions off on the relevant professionals
(I once had parents bring me their daughter so that I
could explain what happened to the family German
Shepherd after the dog was put down) we are suggesting
that there are right answers that only some
people know. As Rabbi Sasso suggested, children
really need our questions as much as they need our
answers.
Secondly, as with anything else, you need fuel
for the journey. Spirituality is like any other practice,
it atrophies in the absence of use. It is no easier
to shepherd a child through the theological obstacle
course of childhood without some spiritual practice
of your own, than it is to coach their Little League
team from your Lazy Boy. To read, to understand,
to converse with others around the issues of mystery
and life, these are the intentions of spiritual community,
these are the gifts it offers. If you have children
who are beginning to ask potentially profound
questions, why not make spiritual community part
of your family experience?
With God's blessings,
Tom
The Text Message
Reflections on Scripture and Church life
Rev. Tom Gough - Interim Pastor
Dear Friends,
As we begin to get a little bit of warmer weather
and the Christian world speeds on toward Easter,
there are many notable changes taking place here at
IUCC. The levels of energy, participation, commitment,
creativity, and potential all seem to be on the
rise. As we organize and implement our four areas
of focused ministry we are witnessing a Spring-like
renewal in the heart of the church. This appears to
be a wonderful moment in which to apply your gifts
and skills to the work and life of the church.
Change is never easy for organizations, or individuals
for that matter. For some of us the desire to
dedicate our time, talents, and resources to building
something new and unknown comes naturally, for
others of us it is always a question of being convinced,
of having to adapt rather than wanting to
change. For any of us, at any point on the path of
renewal, the celebration of the Resurrection has
something important to say about new life. It is difficult
and costly but when it is entered into with a
spirit of faithful trust, the results can be astounding.
Though we have heard the story so many times,
it still bears repeating, Jesus went to the cross without
certainty, without a firm grasp on what lay beyond
that horrible moment, without much confidence
in the outcome, but with a deep, abiding, profound
trust in God. Jesus ventured into the unknown,
even at times with faltering, hesitant steps,
based solely on his faith in the compassion and
promises of God. He did not need to know what
was next in any ultimate sense, he only needed to
know that God would be with him through whatever
might happen.
We are human, and sometimes that trust wears
thin. Sometimes the circumstances are sufficiently
challenging that we might forget, for a time, the
One who promises us rebirth and renewal. Yet how
often have we experienced some form of resurrection
in our own lives? The beauty contained in the
core of Christianity is, at least for me, that in all circumstances
God holds out the promise of new life,
whether it be for us as individuals or for us as a
community of faith. Renewal is at the center of
what it means to be faithful.
No one is stuck forever where they are, not with
the God of resurrection. We are always invited to re-form ourselves, to re-new ourselves, to return to a
deeper trust in the God who calls us forward in faith.
Things are happening here at IUCC, good things, renewing
things, but they are only happening because
you have decided that the God who has guided you
this far on your journeys, is still as trustworthy as
ever. And may our God just richly bless your endeavors
in this season.
In God’s Grace,
Tom
The Text Message
Reflections on Scripture and Church life
Rev. Tom Gough - Interim Pastor
Dear Friends,
Among other things, I have been thinking a fair amount about the Chick N’ Chop recently. This was my first and I really enjoyed the experience. Of course you all had this so organized that I was about as useful as a hairclip on a bald man, but I did enjoy seeing the way the day unfolded. I believe that from a financial perspective the news was good, we raised a fair amount and tried some new ideas that may well enhance the fundraising aspect of future events. That is all to the good, but my principal interest was in seeing the community pull together, work together, and create a community event. I have heard several people reflect on the sense that, when it comes right down to it, this is much more of a relationship builder than a bank account builder, and frankly, that is as it should be.
I witnessed a great many people applying their gifts and skills, their networks of knowledge and relationships, in pursuit of a common goal. Some contributed a great deal of time and energy over the entire event, some signed on only for a short stint on the day, but it all fit together beautifully and allowed the church to do what it does best – feed people. Well, feed people and build relationships. Folks had the opportunity to work along side others they have known for years and some they didn’t know very well at all. We had a chance to serve old friends and new neighbors. And this is good stuff.
Our series of study on the book of Acts is drawing to a close, as is summer (you know, that season we were supposed to get in July and August). We have looked both in a bible study setting and in worship at the early Church, how they understood themselves, what they felt was their call. Many of you have remarked that the early Church and the current Church don’t look much alike, and you would be right. It reminds me of that game, “telephone,” where we sit in a big circle and whisper something specific to our neighbors. The message rarely reaches all the way around the circle without changes. It’s hard to imagine something as old and pervasive as the Church making it all the way to the 21st century without changes.
We have always had to adapt to cultures, times, governments, and circumstances. But, somewhere along the way we seem to have piled an awful load of stuff on top of the original intent of the Church. Studying Acts helps remind us that first and foremost the Church intended to be a community of discipleship built on Jesus’ vision of agapic love, a love based in gratitude to God, not personal needs, likes, and prejudices. The Church was a community of mutual prayer, care and support, where resources were held in common and used as needed in a quest for healthy, loving, relationships – divine and human. The early Church built these relationships across all sorts of boundaries and barriers. They pursued and included the known and unknown in a joyous and courageous community of God’s people. This was a community of practice rather than belief.
This kind of community has always been a rare offering in the world, maybe that is why it has also been very compelling wherever it has been successfully sustained. Imagine a community where everyone has something positive to contribute, and every contribution is considered a valuable part of the whole. Imagine a community where everyone who wants to be is fully and joyfully welcomed. Imagine a community where everyone is loved, everyone is invited to the table, everyone is fed, everyone is gifted, everyone is trusted, forgiven, inspired, and filled with grace. Not just for an hour or two here or there, but as a way of being. Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed the Chick N’ Chop. It had a little of that flavor.
I don’t know about you, but that kind of community seems pretty worthwhile to me.
In God’s Grace,
Tom
August 2009 The Text Message
Reflections on Scripture and Church life
Dear Friends,
Part of a pastor’s calling is to help a congregation think through what it means to be the Church. This seems simple enough, and straightforward, but in our time and culture it can be especially complicated and difficult. Anyone involved in the life of an American spiritual community at the beginning of the Twenty first century can see that our cherished institutions are in trouble. Across denominations and with very few, but notable, exceptions, our Christian institutions have been steadily losing followers and energy, as well as financial and cultural power.
Books have been written and conferences have been convened in an effort to explain the phenomenon and prescribe treatments for our institutional decline. Some have delivered a measure of hope to beleaguered communities, offered enough possibility to get them over the hump, as it were. Many have simply been marketing strategies, helping the Church to repackage old institutional clichés so they appear bright and shiny to new audiences. A few, a courageous few, have pointed out the genuine flaw s in institutional thinking, the systemic difficulties within the Church itself. These have generally been ignored or roundly disputed because they highlight just how difficult it can be for the Church to make the changes necessary to become truly relevant and viable at this point in western cultural history.
It may not be our hobby to examine the state of the Church across denominational lines, but we have a good sense of what’s going on because Church friends from other places complain about the same things that worry us at Immanuel. Our concerns manifest themselves most noticeably in the financial realms. In 25 years of serving churches I cannot recall a church that was not worried about finances. We cut, we trim, we “nickel and dime” in an effort to keep our finances in check. This is especially true in our more congregational Church institutions where community oversight generally guarantees grand objections to spending a penny more than is absolutely necessary. But the financial squeeze that colors life in nearly every church is merely a symptom of a more profound confusion. We are uncertain about the purpose of the Church as an institution, and so we are equally uncertain about our relationship with it. In fact, one of the principle difficulties with the Church as an Institution, is the fact that we are an institution. We relate to the Church as an institution. This has a great many implications, but we can’t address too many of them in the space of this one article.
While the Church has always intended to be a community where a spiritually free people support one another in their life with God, it has too often been, in our culture, an institution that we approach as consumers, because that is the model of citizenship our culture encourages. As consumers we worry about getting good value for our dollar. As consumers we expect the institutions to which we contribute financially, to provide the services we require whenever we require them, regardless of our real level of participation. As consumers of Church culture we anticipate even that God will do as we require as long as we pay our dues and maintain our healthy institutional standing.
Clearly this is not true of everyone involved in any given church, nor is it a viable explanation for all the institutional ills encountered by the Church in general. It is a cultural artifact to which we are all more or less susceptible, and which must be consciously and conscientiously challenged by individual church communities.
Yet we really do stand at a point in history where our local churches can renew and redefine themselves, discern God’s call and follow it, or they can choose to disappear. Our churches will not be able to withstand much more “business as usual,” and even though the chaos of an uncertain future is a fearful thing to face, it is still the only way to move forward with God.
In the relatively few months that I have been with you at Immanuel, I have seen many hints of a willingness to be open to God’s call and to go in some new and courageous directions. This is all to the good and suggests a steady heartbeat at the core of our church. We can build upon this and develop exciting new strategies for being a vital, vibrant church in, but not of, the world. We can be the church that our community needs, but more importantly, we can be the church that God needs us to be.
Be a blessing,
Pastor Tom Pastor Tom’s e-mail address:
tom@clearparadigm.org
July 2009 Dear Friends,
The noted biblical scholar James Sanders once drew a very interesting distinction between Judaism and Christianity. He suggested that at some point Judaism took the ethos aspect of faith, while Christianity took the mythos. In other words, where Judaism began to understand itself as a way of life, a practice, Christianity began to understand itself as a story, a theology. The theological history of the Protestant Church has underscored this observation ever since Martin Luther began to talk about “salvation by grace alone.” Luther intended us to understand that salvation comes to us as a gift from God and is nothing that we can earn on our own, we can do no works that will gain us greater access to God’s love. But in emphasizing this aspect of faithful belief we, in the Church, have eventually come to a place where membership and belonging have become a substitute for faithful, ethical, and spiritual living.
We make fun of those spiritual institutions that appear to endorse a Sunday morning spirituality without regard to Monday morning behavior, but that is the institutional reality in which most of North American Christianity operates. We have come to a place in our culture where we appear to believe that all that is required of us is that we belong to our Church and perhaps try to be nice to the most of the people we encounter. Membership has its privileges. We are troubled generally by religious traditions that demand lifestyle changes and consistent ethical behavior of their observers. We tend to think of them as obsessive and cultish.
This notion of narrative participation, of simply adding our names to the story as though we were signing a contract with God requiring no further investigation or involvement, has been combined, in our culture, with a philosophical over emphasis on the worth of the individual. It is a brew deadly to the life of the Church. The Church begun by the disciples was not intended to be an enterprise of individual salvation, or of salvation through kind thoughts. It was intended to be a place of support for a community committed to living according to the movement of the call of God. The Holy Spirit was sent into the midst of that community to encourage them and give them the power to live according to that call. As it tells us in the second chapter of Acts, the early Church “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers.” They were, in other words, dedicated to a living faith rather than simply a believing faith.
Every mainline church that has made an effective turn-around has done so by encouraging this shift from incidental Christianity to active faith. It only makes sense. If our faith is really little more than a vague, cultural idea that we hold among all our other ideas about life, then what is the need for a church? People who make a commitment to an active faith expressed through all the decisions we make in life, need a community of encouragement, development and growth. If we want to thrive as a church, we just have to learn to think differently about what Church means.
Peace,
Pastor Tom Pastor Tom’s e-mail address:
tom@clearparadigm.org
June 2009 Dear Friends, In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Congregational preacher, thinker, and prolific writer, Horace Bushnell turned his considerable attention to the mechanism by which Christians are produced. There was, at the time, a strong trend toward “Revivalism,” with its emphasis on the immediate experience of conversion. Tent revivals and church revivals of all kinds were touting the notion that the only honest means of becoming a Christian was to have, as an adult, a conversion. Bushnell wrote in preference for what he termed “gradualism,” and came to think of as Christian nurture. The idea, thought Bushnell, was for the Christian ideal to seep into a person’s consciousness as they were exposed to Christian teaching from their earliest days. This idea of Christian Nurture struck a chord with the Protestant church in America. It gave rise to the Sunday School movement as well as the eventual notion that America was a Christian nation, her citizens coming to maturity so immersed in Christian thought and Apologetics that we would hardly know any other way.
Bushnell’s vision of America was a powerful and compelling wave, and it lifted the national boat well into the twentieth century before setting us down on the alien shores of the 1960’s and 70’s. Although many of us were raised in households that still considered Sunday School a necessity of childhood exposure, fewer of us sought that continued exposure as adults. By the late twentieth century Christian Nurture was being sidelined as something good for kids, but of limited value for grown-ups. We were essentially only inoculating our children against a case of Christianity. As a consequence it is becoming increasingly common to meet people who have neither much genuine exposure to Christianity, nor much particular interest.
Our brothers and sisters in the more Evangelical Protestant traditions have never lost the knack of promoting more of a conversion experience. In an increasingly “un-churched” world this can be a distinct advantage for those intending to offer ministry among adults. Most of us who labor in more Mainline vineyards have neither the tools nor the perspective to make use of this kind of revival orientation. Our mainline Protestant gradualism has gradually petered out. We live now in a largely secular and very diverse world about which we know little, struggling to promote a faith about which we know even less. Decades of inattention to the educational function of the Church has relegated Christian Ed to the realm of children and deprived adults of the ideas, language, and intellectual tools necessary to deepen our own faith or share that faith with others.
In every church there are a handful of folk who attend Bible studies or other classes, but the general adult world in the Protestant Mainline has not made Continuing Christian Education much in the way of a priority. That really needs to change if the Church is to have anything worth passing along to another generation. We cannot assume that the Sunday School of our childhood laid a sufficient foundation for the future of the Faith.
During the summer months I will be offering a study series on Wednesday evenings based on the Book of Acts and related to the worship themes each week. The nature of the study will be to look at the earliest Christian communities and see what we can learn for our own future. I also want to ask for your help in developing a list of topics about which you have some curiosity and some interest. Whether it might be other religious traditions, a variety of spiritual practices, issues of theology, biblical history, ethics, or prayer, let me know what it is you would most enjoy learning about. We will then develop the resources to lead a variety of seminars, short studies, and discussion groups to engage us as Christian learners. Maturing in faith and developing in discipleship depend, in part, on our willingness to learn new things. We can, and should, become a community dedicated to spiritual development.
We can no longer take it for granted that people know what it means to be Christian, but we can be the kind of community that offers people the opportunity to find out.
In God’s Grace, Pastor Tom Pastor Tom’s e-mail address:
tom@clearparadigm.org
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