Joy

One of the puzzling facets of the Christian life as I live it and see it lived is the lack of joy that we have. It seems to me that many Americans are living lives of quiet desperation, under layers of regret, hopelessness, frustration and outright depression. This applies to the unsaved as well as the saved, but in our case it is puzzling because of what Jesus has told us.

Jesus said, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” I imagine that the joy of Jesus is of such an infinite magnitude that it would be wonderful to experience. Furthermore, God sternly rebuked Israel for not serving him with joy. He said, “Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, because of the abundance of all things, therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and lacking everything.”

That seems to summarize our American condition succinctly - an abundance of things but no joy or gladness of heart. I’m sure that the reasons for this condition are many, “you must realize the depth of your sin and the reality of God’s sacrifice” I can hear someone saying. But I have some ideas on why we feel down in the middle of everything, or sometimes in the face of great actual suffering. In no order they are:

1. We don’t do what we should due to fear of man, i.e. we don’t suffer because we are too worried about our reputation. I often hold back in public situations when I think I will be mocked for Christ, I don’t identify with him when I should. Jesus said that in this world we will have suffering and he is the prime example of it. The Apostles rejoiced to be counted worthy to suffer with him. The mockery, beating and death they endured was a liberating cause of great joy for them. I avoid this kind of suffering and therefore my joy is not full.

2. Church isn’t what is should be. I don’t mean this in terms of a primitive, “New Testament” church or in terms of doctrine (thought it might be that too), but rather in terms of love, relationships, care for the poor, missions mindedness, and so on (think about the ‘one anothers’). To me, this is a huge factor in joylessness. Our relationship with Jesus is supposed to be lived out horizontally amongst God’s people. Instead, churches are full of people with clue about how to be hospitable, how to love, how to eat together, talk to each other, or otherwise be the body of Christ. When your church situation is good, the rest of life coheres and is easier. When it isn’t, the rest of life suffers from isolation, alienation and depression.

3. Debt. Our society is structured around debt slavery. Because we are in debt, we cannot contribute like we should, help those in need like we should and so forth. In my case, there aren’t good church options around me and I can’t move close to a good church due to the housing situation which essentially boils down to a debt situation.

There is a certain grim determination to put one foot in front of the other that gets many of us Christians through life and I think that is fine in a sense. The lie of “happy all the time” positive-thinking Christianity is a nauseating answer to legitimate suffering and depression. That’s not what I’m advocating at all. We will all suffer. Until recently, when I though of suffering I thought of persecution, medical problems or death. But now I think suffering includes (and perhaps primarily includes) the daily grind, boredom, Groundhog Day like repetition, rejection from the Church you are part of, not being able to exercise your gifts for God, things like that.

There are many other legitimate reasons for this lack of joy. I don’t have the answers, I just know the dilemma. Thank God we do have Jesus, for without him this joylessness would be truly overwhelming. The world if full of people numbing themselves  with movies, consumption, hobbies, family activities or whatever and all for nothing. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Fear God and keep the commandments, this is the whole duty of man.

Anglican Studies Houses

In two previous posts on this blog, I have written about an idea for an Anglican educational community, what I now call an "Anglican Studies House." I can report some progress on that front, and would like to issue a call, as well.

Progress: I have now shared this idea with several leaders in the ACNA (and to a lesser extent, the Episcopal church), and it has received enthusiastic support. Along the way, I have also learned of at least one other such initiative already under way. I am working to organize people locally so that we might begin planting one in the Chicagoland area sometime in the next year or so.

In these conversations, I have sensed a deeply felt need to 'do education' differently, in a way that forms young people in the Anglican ethos with a uniquely Christian worldview, to the glory of Christ and the advancement of His kingdom. Many have genuinely agreed with my general assessment that Anglicans (in north America at least) have done a poor job at this. We might worship Him well in our liturgy, but do we equip people faithfully, rigorously with the mind of Christ? All our endeavors, including learning and intellectual inquiry, should be seen as sacrificial offerings unto the Lord.

Ultimately, it is my vision to see these popping up around the country and in a variety of settings. Some may be connected directly to an existing college or university (a kind of 'fraternity' or 'sorority' for students wishing to be formed in the Anglican ethos while in school). Still others might be 'free standing,' in a part of town where unique work and/or ministry opportunities might provide a inspiring context for community building (e.g., in an arts district, a poor inner city neighborhood, a pastoral location in the countryside, to name just a few). Uniting these Houses could be a network(s) for sharing ideas or collaborating. A network of Houses could be united by a common rule of life.

Now for my call: I would like to connect with you if this vision moves you. Check out my initial posts (links above) which are brief sketches of the basic vision. I want to begin organizing a conversation about these Houses, perhaps the beginnings of a network.

Are you interested? Please leave a comment, below, with your e-mail address, identifying yourself and explaining the nature of your interest. The comment will need to be approved by me, the moderator. However, out of confidentiality, I will not approve it (unless you say so). In short, your email or identity will be held in confidence by me. Then, I will know to contact you privately from my own email address. Thanks!

Of course, feel free to leave comments, too! Either way, let's do talk. . .

A Canticle for Leibowitz and the Benedict Option

     I have been reading and enjoying A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr. The novel outlines a grim future where a global nuclear holocaust has sent man back to primitive times and an order of Catholic monks preserve any knowledge of our age that they can get their hands on. They laboriously copy and re-copy blueprints, scraps of textbooks and so on.
     The book describes how in the wake of the nuclear war, the people who survived turned on anyone of learning and killed them because they blamed the intellectuals for creating nuclear weapons and allowing or causing the massive death and suffering across the globe. In their fury the mobs kill anyone with knowledge and burn every book they can get their hands on. Vast stores of learning are wiped out of existence by these mobs. Add to this the nuclear war which has turned cities into lakes of glass and you have almost erased our civilization overnight.
     Reading this scenario in 2009 conjures up a Cold War feelings and the whole thing at first seems a bit quaint: mutually assured destruction and all of that. But when I step back and think about it, how absurd is it really? There is no real cause for the United states and Russia, China, or another nuclear power to start a war right now, but will it always be that way? India and Pakistan could certainly nuke one another which would not be a global conflagaration, but could produce horrors. And the future possibility of the USA and Russia nuking each other cannot be ruled out totally because we don't know what the future will look like and one thing is certain: man's evil nature has not changed.
     I highly doubt that there will be a "Flame Deluge" such as the one portrayed in Leibowitz, but the book does illustrate the fragility of our cultural heritage. With the increasing reliance on electronic storage for our texts, this heritage becomes even more fragile.
     Beyond the possibility of worldwide destruction, there is a more potent threat of the simple vanishing of knowledge due to self-imposed ignorance and the loss of habits of virtue. What I mean is that if texts are not studied by people living in community and then lived out in real life, they also can cease to exist in some sense. If the Bible is just a book that gets studied and no one lives what it teaches, it has lost all cultural value, at least for a time. If texts on electronics exist but no electronics are manufactured, the texts have no impact on the world.
     This again leads me to reflect on an Anglican Benedict Option. I see the preservation of texts by a community in an intentional way as part of that option. This would involve buying books, re-binding old books, printing books and perhaps acquiring the ability to hand-copy books for the unlikely eventuality that our society would experience a catastrophic reversion to a pre-Guttenberg age.
     Most important however is for us to re-invent ways of living the good life together that can be sustained in the modern world. The fragmented suburban life is not conducive to living out the Gospel, period. The suburbs could be made to sustain such a life, but it would still involve moving to the same subdivisions, working near them and having a parish near them. This is hard to do. Politics are harder to influence in communities of 30,000 versus communities of 3,000. My theory is that it would be better to attempt a reconstruction of a vibrant parish life that preserves the past as well as influences the future in a smaller town somewhere on the fringes of our empire. Making it our ambition to lead a quiet life and work with our hands, we could foster communities that might last for several centuries or longer, on into the future when the Church again holds sway over the West.

Rumblings of the Benedict Option?

The hunger is there, see this post:

New Towns

The Anglican Benedict Option

I’ve written a bit about creating an Anglican community by like-minded Anglicans moving to the same location. Steve has put down some great thoughts about what educational praxis could look like in an Anglican setting. I’d like to see all of this come together in an Anglican Benedict Option - fleeing the collapsing modern state and “preserving the remnants of Christian and classical virtues and laying the groundwork for the rebirth of a new civilization.” If you have any interest in really doing this and not just thinking about it, please contact me!

It seems to me that this would require some agricultural know-how. Working the land might be necessary in a small town with no big job-provider around. I am presuming that the internet and modern communication will persist, but that the permanent things will be left behind by a reckless culture. So I speculate on other trades that could provide income in a situation where a new community attempts to carve out a place and survive on the outskirts of the empire. I wonder if typography in the form of a type foundry could work in a small town? Fonts are distributed globally so perhaps that is a flexible enough craft to be performed from anywhere. Book binding is a niche market that would seem logical for the people of the book. Publishing in general would be desirable, and creating lasting editions of works like the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, and the Church Fathers would be essential to a Benedict option for Anglicans. Depending on proximity to the ocean or lakes, some type of boat building / repair might be profitable. Establishing a school and a university would seem to be necessary to perpetuate learning in the face of global ignorance and the bankrupt university system of the United States.

We can cultivate a different way of life in the face of the moral miasma that is the air we breathe. Formed by the cycle of the Church year and daily prayer, devoted to alms giving and works of mercy, fearless in proclaiming the Gospel and practicing the liturgy that has undergird the Church since her earliest days, we can begin again.

Whither Religious Communities?

Two recent stories in the Church Times lament the demise of religious (monastic) communities in the U.K., and especially within the Church of England.

The religious life within Anglicanism has never enjoyed the level of support found in Roman Catholicism. As a church born of the Reformation, religious communities were suppressed within the Church of England. They were, however, revived thanks to the Oxford Movement of the 19th century. Even some seminaries (like the one I attend) were inspired to follow the daily rhythm of Benedictine Rule.

Today, though, such communities are--again--on the decline. The stories in Church Times describe the paradox that ours is an age that enjoys anew contemplative forms of spirituality but yet membership in religious orders is at an all time low, and many communities as a whole are dying a silent death. The problem seems to be commitment. The idea of committing oneself, lifelong, to the rigors of monastic oaths--particularly, celibacy--is a cross too heavy to bear.

How might we address the problem (if you, like me, agree with the authors that this is genuinely a problem)? The second story raises this fascinating proposal:

Sometimes I wish we had a kind of monastic National Service, akin to the tradition of temporary monasticism found in some Buddhist countries. This is not as implausible as it might seem. The Melanesian Brothers and Sisters, the Anglican religious order in the Solomon Islands, take vows for five years at a time. Unlike most religious communities in the UK, the order is youthful, vibrant, and growing.

The predictable objection to the idea of temporary vows in the context of traditional monastic communities is that it would undermine the principle of stability, which is the very basis of their life. I wonder. Presumably among those who signed up for a limited term, there would be some who would stay longer, per­haps even for life — as is the case with the Melanesian Brothers.

It is possible that by removing the forbidding notion of a life-sentence, the prospect of being a monk, a friar, or a nun would seem a good deal more feasible to people who might like to explore the possibility, but felt unable to make a life-long commitment at the outset.

I like this idea a lot. In fact, it could easily become a feature of other kinds of faith-based communities--non-celibate intentional communities, for instance--where Christian brothers and sisters, perhaps even families too, could enter into a deeper form of community for a certain stage of one's life. Perhaps it is during one's graduate education; or during an transition stage, where one career path is opening onto another; or during an interim phase, where one lacks a clear path ahead and needs time for prayer and reflection. A family who finds itself homeless might join such a community as the parents train for new careers. For me, personally, the idea that I could have taken a 3- or 5-year vow during my graduate education, for instance, would have held genuine appeal. I needed the daily discipline of prayer and study, and doing so within a community of brothers in Christ could have given my education an entirely deeper spiritual dimension.

On a grander scale, my suspicion is that the luster of the modern world is beginning to wear off in the West. More and more, people sense that consumerism is vapid. The economy itself is teaching us that the pursuit of wealth is a vain delusion. Happy-go-lucky relativism is a luxury we can ill afford in a world full of 9/11s, Darfurs and AIDs pandemics. What has not faded yet, however, is a whole other panoply of romantic delusions. They live on. To whit: that we can live life on our own terms; that sexual experimentation is a right everyone ought to invoke as soon and as often as possible; and that commitment is only bondage, not genuine freedom.

Religious communities clearly are not immune from these cultural tides. But while the modern world dies in fits and starts, it seems to me that the things of enduring value will persist, even if they must--for a time--adapt. Religious communities are well poised to help us negotiate these turbulent times, and serve as a beacon amidst the storm. I hope that they will not die but will find a way to adapt and renew their vision and mission. For their sake. For ours. And ultimately, for our Lord's.

The Smaller, the Better

I can't find the quote right off, but I believe it is in his book The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction where Eugene Peterson states that a local church really ought not to be greater in size than about 200 people, give or take a few. The reason is quite simple. A pastor cannot get to know by name more people than that and continue to take an active, praying and listening role in each of their lives. Pastors must fundamentally be people of prayer and listening. Pastors ought not to be distant figures up on some stage, but incarnate amongst their people a prayerful, listening form of ministry.

Now, megachurch-type ministries have sought to honor this principle in their own way by breaking the big church up into smaller units, sometimes quite intentionally calling them separate "congregations." But I think the economy of scale presupposed by the church as a whole may just miss the point and perhaps undermine the concept from the start. Big churches accustom people to, train their sensibilities in anonymity. What's more, when they fight anonymity, they generally do so by allowing people to 'shop for' their own 'niche,' for their own congregation or social grouping among more people like themselves (e.g., the 20s, young professionals, seniors, etc.). In a sense, they have you go deeper into your individuality, not transcend it. If you are never really forced to pray for or listen to someone outside your social group--which you can easily avoid in a megachurch--then you are far removed, I believe, from growing in the love of neighbor. As such, megachurches can exacerbate inter-generational or social group differences and lose any sense of cohesion.

That's the point of Peterson's model. It actively seeks to resist anonymity throughout an entire church not just throughout one's self-chosen small group or the like. Church should challenge us to love our neighbor right next to us, whether they are like us or not, by having that neighbor right there next to us at each point along the way.

I am deeply moved by Peterson's vision, to the point where it has opened my eyes to a whole new sense of what church ministry possibly could be. (I sense that part of why his vision inspires me so much is that I see such strong elements of this embodied in our very own pastoral team. I've seen it work, and it is good.)

As a result, I now believe firmly that any church which approaches, roughly, 200 active attendees ought to raise up a core group of 30 to 50 to plant a new church. If not before!

For me, the key now is not size, but dynamism. You want a church where intimate relationships can develop, and one-on-one discipleship is a living reality. You want that church to reach out well to folks in the community with whatever gifts the parishioners bring to the table. Small is better in this sense because it remains personable, not threatening and overwhelming as some shopping-mall sized megachurches probably are to the unchurched. We need to be busy in the relationship business, and you can only do that when you have a church where everyone can realistically get to know everyone.

What's more, it's gotten me thinking that the most logical way that you keep a church congregation small but dynamic is to have it plugged into a local community. Here I want to revive the old historic 'parish model' of doing church, where a church is at the center of a local community--the living, breathing hub of spiritual and social life. In such a model, the priest is a pastor not just to those on the inside but, in a sense, also to even the non-churched person who lives down the block. A pastor should know all the people in the surrounding community by name. They should know who could pray for them, if they want, where to find pastoral help, if they need it. And so the small, local congregation should end up being the hub for everything from after school tutoring and summer programs for kids to feeding the hungry, providing food for shut-ins and the sick or hosting block parties. To be sure, the church is not just a dispenser of social services (which is what I fear some socially active Roman Catholic parishes end up becoming). Rather, the Gospel is preached with power, and lived out within a local community. It ought to be an attractive way of doing church, with a genuine appeal to those who do not know Christ (yet) because the Body of Christ incarnates Him and makes Him real in the community.

On this model, local parishes should not be about recruiting members from outside of a given radius but constantly focused on getting to know and then serving everyone within their own. If enough people from another local community start attending--as they are certainly welcome to do--then they ought to begin thinking about how they are going to plant a similar church in their own neighborhood. And so on. Church growth, then, is a process of planting small but dynamic congregations who know their communities and serve them with the hands and feet of Christ.

My sense is that this model would work not only in densely populated urban areas, but especially well in the suburbs, where we could begin seeing subdivisions as parishes with their own church and the like. Rural areas may cover relatively larger swaths of land, but that is well-known terrain for such people. They are used to 'driving into town.' All is means is that the pastor must visit homes much more--and be the kind of person whose presence is always welcome.

Being a welcoming presence: that, to my mind, is the key. Everything else follows from it. For example, in contemporary American suburbs there could easily be zoning issues if a parish wanted to build a building (which would serve as a visible sign and physical meeting place for the community). But I would like to insist that before there is ever talk of a building, there must be genuine worship and service flowing out of the homes of parishioners to that community. If the church is a welcoming presence, it will likely be welcomed by her neighbors. Welcome enough, I would hope, to where the people of that community might actually desire the parish to build a facility, where they might see the value of having one in their midst--even if they themselves never intend to darken the door for worship. If church is built on relationship first--the core of Peterson's model for pastoral ministry--then everything else, including a meeting space, etc., will follow on its own.

In general, Christians need to stop viewing church as an organization whose members meet to worship and engage in all sorts of 'Christian activities.' Rather, church is the relationship we have amongst ourselves and to the world. To be the church, rather than to have one--that is the heart of the matter.