Fulfillment through forgoing

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One of the presuppositions of our culture is that more is, well, more–that with greater material affluence comes greater happiness or fulfillment, a better life. This runs counter to the principle of askesis (Gk, “exercise” or “training”). The word is the root of our word asceticism–the forgoing of material comfort for the purpose of focus or spiritual benefit.

It turns out that in limiting ourselves (or in embracing our human limitations) we actually open ourselves up to the thing that ultimately make us happy–shared experience with people we love:

We are familiar with the frequently beneficial consequences of involuntary askesis. How many times have we heard as we have visited a parishioner in the days following a heart attack, ‘It’s the best thing that ever happened to me–I’ll never be the same again. It woke me up to the reality of my life, to God, to what is important.’ Suddenly instead of of mindlessly and compulsively pursuing an abstraction–success, or money, or happiness–the person is reduced to what is actually there, to the immediately personal–family, geography, body–and begins to live freshly in love and appreciation. The change is a direct consequence of a force realization of human limits. Pulled out of the fantasy of a god condition and confined to the reality of the human condition, the person is surprised to be living not a diminished life but a deepened life, not a crippled life but a zestful life. -Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant

The danger of blogging

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When you think about it, the advent of blogs has been a huge development in the life of our society. I’m no historian of technology, but it seems to me that blogs are the tracts or pamphlets of the 21st century–they provide a wonderful way to unite passion, and ideas with a cheap (free) means of communication.

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Blogs have some draw backs too. Because they occupy “virtual space,” there is no (or very little) limit to who or what you interact with on a blog. I can respond to something written by someone I do not know and who is writing in a context quite different from my own. In this sense, blogs create an artificial flatness to interactions and deprive them of the rich texture that can really only come about by knowing something of the writer and her context.

There is also something of a tribalism around bloggers. They run in packs–sometimes more closely resembling a pack of rabid dogs than a herd of placid deer.

Tim Challies provides some insightful reflection on some of the dangers I have outlined above in this post, which is worth a read.

Hearts and minds on fire

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by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing

Lauren Winner is interviewed at Comment, a journal of Cardus (a think tank dedicated to the renewal of North American social architecture). It’s an interview that’s worth reading. I’ll pull out some highlights below. Thanks to Andy Byers (@Byers_Andy) for the link.

Two Qualities of a minister…

 I teach future pastors at a divinity school because I believe that thinking well matters—I want my students’ future congregations to be guided by pastors who know how to think clearly, think well about (among other things) theology, politics, and history.

-Lauren F. Winner

Two qualities ought to be present and mutually-reinforcing in a minister: vital piety and a well-formed mind.

Parts of the church have elevated piety and made it to stand alone. A heart of fire is enough for these people, and they do not trust the mind. Others have emphasized the life of the mind and have come to distrust the heart.

In reality the two must go together–a heart burning with love to God and others as well as a keen mind with which one worships God and seeks to know God through His self-disclosure in Scripture. 

Five books you should read…

Reading is indispensable for those in leadership, especially for those whose leadership is in the church. Guiding a community of people is a complicated task at the best of times, especially when that group of people are “strangers and aliens” in the midst of a culture that no longer (if it ever really did) understands its story in the story of God.

The minister has an essential task of being rooted in the redemptive history of God and, at the same time, interpret and apply that story to a people who are also located in the world (which has a competing story). It’s impossible to do either of these things without reading. The Biblical world requires both knowledge and understanding. The contemporary world also requires hermeneutical skill and tools. The minister is, as John Stott’s book puts it, between two worlds.

In what ways do you think it important for ministers to be trained?

Some reflections on war

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by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing

In a well-tended cemetery with uniform grave markers situated just outside the city of Jakarta (Indonesia) repose the remains of my paternal grandfather. Harold George Gissing was an ordinary man, a painter by trade. His was a tragically short experience of war. Perhaps a year stationed in England for training and for civil defense, but less than two weeks in theatre and he was gone. His remains entombed in a common grave such was the destruction of his battlefield–remains were difficult to identify and assemble into a peculiar grave for each person.

There are strange mercies in war, however, and some might count it a mercy that he did not survive. His brother Charlie (who served in the same unit) survived the battle, but became a prisoner of war–a living hell by all accounts.

On the other side of the world, back in England, a little boy is experiencing warfare prior to the advent of precision-guided ordinance. Air raid sirens. Barrage balloons. Shelters. As I’ve talked with my father over the years I’ve been increasingly struck by the horror of those experiences. As a child, he recalls, there was a thrill to the sirens and tracer rounds. And yet there were unspeakable horrors like discovering a woman’s scalp in the back garden–apparently blown from her head by the force of an explosion. The rending of families. My Dad recalls that perhaps half of the men on his street died in the war. Countless families without fathers, wives without husbands.

To claim that “war is hell” is perhaps an understatement. War is inhumane. War is horrific. War is evil. War is sometimes necessary–fools rush to war. And yet generation by generation men (and women) repeatedly respond in the affirmative to the request to enter into this hell. I find this to be quite remarkable. And it evokes in me a profound respect that recoils from spectacle, from pomp and circumstance, and from grandiosity. In face of such evil, of such sacrifice, I find that silence is really the only thing that can even begin to capture to weight of the moment.

When calendars collide

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by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing

When secular and ecclesiastical calendars collide, the secular calendar always wins. At least, it seems that way to me. Christmas on a Sunday? Let’s cancel church–Christmas is a time for family, right? Pentecost on Memorial Day weekend? Time to head to the beach. Observing this little fact over the years suggests that culture is more deeply shaping many American Christians than the story of the Church.

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Pentecost celebrates the church’s coming into being as recounted in Acts 2. The giving of the Holy Spirit is no small part of the story of the Church and it’s no small part of the story of individual Christians. That we are so immune or ignorant of the Spirit’s work in our own lives is, again, testimony to the ill health of the Christian community.

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Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with secular holidays such as Memorial Day. As a Reformed Christians I have no problem observing the sacrifice of members of the Armed Forces who have given their lives in the defense of the nation. The military is an extension of the civil authority and therefore is to be respected.

Further, I don’t have a great deal of problem with a sense of allegiance to or respect for one’s nation. After all, we’re all born somewhere and as part of some people. It seems to me that love of neighbor begins with love of one’s fellow countrymen. It should be remembered, of course, that love of country and allegiance to the flag (or the crown) has its limits.

There is a prior or more ultimate allegiance for the Christian–Christ himself and His bride, the church. We shouldn’t forget how radical a statement that can be. After all, imagine such words coming from the mouth of a Muslim. Some of us might feel somewhat different in that instance.

What I long for is a day when the evangelical church is marked by a growing sense of its on-going participation in the story of Christ as marked by the church calendar. What I hope for is the sense that above and before all other commitments is a commitment to a local group of believers who live in intentional accord with the testimony in the book of Acts (2.42):

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

I get excited envisioning a day in which when two calendars collide, the church calendar wins.