Category Archives: Practical Theology

Don’t forget the Ascension

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Christian discipleship has a lot to do with locating yourself in the story of God. One of the ways that the Church has done this is through the Church calendar–taking time to place ourselves in the narrative of God’s redemptive work in Christ. There are other stories of which we are a part, but none is deeper or more important than the story of God’s reconciling the world to himself.

For low church evangelical protestants the temptation is to reduce this redemptive story to two movements, or even one as we’re pressured by the culture in which we live to mark time according to a different calendar–one where some of the holidays have the same name, but have very different meanings poured into them.

The Christian calendar (outside of strictly liturgical churches) often gets reduced to Christmas and Easter. If we’re honest, Christmas edges Easter out. Easter itself is often reduced to Maundy Thursday (if you’re lucky) and Easter Sunday, rather than the Triduum that the Church has historically celebrated (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday). True reflection on the work of Christ on the cross seems quite difficult absent three days to consider in community.

We rarely pause moreover to consider the significance of the Ascension to the story of God. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples that unless He leaves them the “comforter” (“counselor,” “advocate”) cannot come to them. He is speaking, of course, of the Holy Spirit.

Were it not for the Ascension, we would be without help and without a deep and living connection to the Godhead through the Holy Spirit.

Christine Sine offers a reflection on the Ascension by guiding us through the words of several liturgies used to celebrate this important day in the life of the faith.

Consider preparing for Ascension Day by reading and reflecting on the word of God.

From the Acts of the Apostles (9.11f., Phillips):

When he had said these words he was lifted up before their eyes till a cloud hid him from their sight. While they were still gazing up into the sky as he went, suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them and said, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing here looking up into the sky? This very Jesus who has been taken up from you into Heaven will come back in just the same way as you have seen him go.

And Jesus’ own words in the Gospel of John (16.7):

Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send Him to you.

Consider this liturgy from the Reformed tradition:

Our God goes up with shouts of joy!

Our Lord ascends to the sound of trumpets!
All: Sing praises to our God, sing praises!
Sing praises, sing praises to our King!
The Almighty rides in triumph.
The Almighty leads captivity captive.
Who shouts for joy? Who blows the trumpet?
The hosts of heaven sing the honor of his name;
they praise him with an endless alleluia.

-David Diephouse, Calvin College

Thanks be to God! Amen.

A secret about sin

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We’ve been discussing Tim Keller’s book The Reason for God in Graduate Christian Fellowship this semester. Last night we talked about his chapter on sin. Here are some reflections on the subject informed by reading, preparing, and discussing sin in community with my graduate student friends at Wake Forest University.

Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard defined sin as, “…in despair not wanting to be oneself before God” (Sickness Unto Death). Similarly he defined faith as the self being grounded in God. By virtue of this definition Kierkegaard adds to our common understanding of sin as violating the law by deepening it to include the fundamental relational nature of sin. Tim Keller writes (alluding to Kierkegaard), “Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from [God]” (The Reason for God, 162).

For this reason Reformed Christians often speak as all sins as manifestation of a deeper sin of pride or idolatry:

Pride seeks to bar Christ from intervening to redeem and restore us because we really believe we can handle it.

Idolatry seeks to prohibit Christ from intervening to redeem and restore us by turning to something other than Christ as a source of redemption or, at the very least, as a justification for our existence.

There’s a little known about sin–a surefire way to have recognize the deep and abiding presence of sin (typically in the form of idolatry or pride) is in the experience of failure. That’s right, failure will expose your heart like nothing else besides perhaps deep suffering. In our affluent and technological society, we often believe we have minimized suffering (especially in the form of disease), but there’s little we can ultimately do to overcome failure–it’s part of life.

How we react to failure shows where we’re looking for our deepest identity. Writes Tom Oden:

Suppose my god [my source of identity or justification] is sex or my physical health of the Democratic Party. If I experience any of these under genuine threat, then I feel myself shaken to the depths….Bitterness becomes neurotically intensified when someone or something stands between me and something that is my ultimate value.

In other words, mess with my gods and you’ll mess with my world. Take a minute to reflect on a deep experience of pain or of failure–what did it reveal to you about your deepest identity? Did you like what you found?

Calvin & monasticism

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“…Calvin and the monastics generally agree that the Christian life is fundamentally paiduetic and ascetic, a life of formative education, practical training, and spiritual discipline. Moreover, as we will see, they largely agree on which early church disciplines constitute the proper paiduetic repertoire: scriptural study, daily prayer and worship, psalm singing, moral accountability, the Lord’s Supper and so on. Where they disagree is over precisely how–and by whom–this paideia is properly lived out. And so if Calvin’s preferred suite of formative practices bears a remarkable resemblance to certain monastic repertoires, this does not, Calvin would insist, indicate any direct dependence on monasticism. Rather, it indicates that both Calvin and the monastics are dependent on what they take to be the church’s ancient disciplinary treasury laid out in Scripture and other early Christian texts. To put the point briefly: Calvin is no son of monasticism, but is close kin, and the family resemblance is striking.”

Matthew Myer Bolton, Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology. (Eerdmans, 2011): 24.

Why business models don’t work in the church

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Skye Jethani interviews business author Jim Gilmore over at Out of Ur. Turns out Jim’s book The Experience Economy has become a favorite for church growth consultants. According to Wikipedia:

Pine and Gilmore argue that businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers, and that memory itself becomes the product – the “experience”. More advanced experience businesses can begin charging for the value of the “transformation” that an experience offers.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how this thesis could easily be applied to churches in North America. The purpose of the worship service becomes delivering an experience that will be memorable for the congregant–religious theater that “adds value” to the life of the religious (or marginally religious) person.

In a sense, a worship service is theatre. The problem with the application of Gilmore’s thesis as I have it above is that it posits the congregation as the audience. Instead, Christian worship is an audience with God–we perform, to the extent that we can use that word, for the pleasure of and to proclaim the worth of God. 

Interestingly, Gilmore himself is aghast that church growth consultants and pastors are flocking to his book. Why?

Because business is the most corrupting influence on the visible church today.

Gilmore contends that in emulating the business world, the church has lost its foundation in the right preaching of the Word, the right administration of the Sacraments, and the administration of discipline:

The talk of “multi-sensory worship,” the installation of video screens, the use of PowerPoint, having cup-holders in sanctuaries — and I’m not talking about for the placement of communion cups — and even more ridiculous applications really took me back. I even read of a pastor who performed a high-wire act, literally–above his congregation. All of this effort to enhance the so-called “worship experience” arose at the same time that I detected a decline in the number of preachers actually faithfully preaching the gospel through sound exposition of the scriptural text.

Gilmore has been influenced heavily by the work of Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper. The church acting like a business is misguided because the two occupy different spheres of culture and creation and work toward different purposes or ends.

The church exists for the purpose of rightly worshipping God and proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the redemption of humanity. Businesses exist for the purpose of contributing to the common good by creating/facilitating the exchange of goods and services for what is called in contract law “consideration” (i.e., money or other value). The church doesn’t have a product to exchange for money or some other thing of value.

In fact, Gilmore goes so far as to say:

The church does not exist to help guide transformations, and this goes for two types of transformations. The church has no role in guiding personal transformations in individuals, which only contributes to turning Christianity into what Christian Smith has described as therapeutic moralistic deism. Neither should the church see itself as guiding collective transformations–ushering in some new worldwide ethos-system, the kind of “parousia” nonsense that Brian McLaren fantasizes about.

These are strond words and while I understand (I think) why he would say them, I am not sure that I entirely agree. After all, discipleship is one of the purpose of the church and discipleship is marked by growth in Godliness or holiness, which is a personal transformation that happens in the context of community. This is not, of course, the primary purpose of the church. But it is a purpose of the church.

So while I applaud Gilmore’s reticence to apply his work to the church context, I think he may be just a little carried away by defining the church along the narrow lines of Word, sacrament, and discipline. What do you think?

Waiting for Jesus, waiting for the Fellowship

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The Board of the Fellowship of Presbyterians is meeting in Chicago this week and will release (probably today or tomorrow) two important documents. One is a statement of theological essentials and the other will outline the polity requirements for the new reformed body. I’m really looking forward to spending some time considering these two statements since they represent both the DNA of the Fellowship and also have been put together by two talented working groups.

In advance of the release the board released a re-statement of the mission and values of the Fellowship of Presbyterians yesterday:

MIssion – to build flourishing churches that make disciples

Values - 

  • Jesus-shaped Identity: We believe Jesus Christ should be at the center of our individual lives and making disciples of Jesus at the core of our ministry.
  • Thoughtful Theology: We believe in theological education, constant learning, and the life of the mind, and celebrate this as one of the treasures of our Reformed heritage.
  • Accountable Community: We believe guidance is a corporate, spiritual experience. We want to connect leaders to one another in healthy relationships of accountability, synergy, and care.
  • Egalitarian Ministry: We believe in unleashing the ministry gifts of women, men, and every ethnic group.
  • Missional Centrality: We believe in living out the whole of the Great Commission – including evangelism, spiritual formation, compassion, and redemptive justice – in our communities and around the world.
  • Center-focused Spirituality: We believe in calling people to the core of what it means to be followers of Jesus – what “mere Christianity” is and does – and not obsess over the boundaries.
  • Leadership Velocity: We believe identifying and developing gospel-centered leaders is critical for the church, and a great leadership culture is risk-taking, innovative, and organic.
  • Kingdom Vitality: We believe every congregation should vigorously reproduce new missional communities to expand the Kingdom of God.
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I like these values. I see in them a number of things that drew me to working for InterVarsity.
On initial read, a couple of these values jumped out for me. “Thoughtful theology” is essential and I’m glad to hear that the life of the mind will be a central value for the Fellowship. A critic of the Fellowship (not that I am one) could construe it as a pragmatic movement–a new community of churches centered around a methodology rather than theology. I think that’s a false criticism and this value demonstrates that.
“Kingdom vitality” is also critical. The Fellowship wants to be a movement that multiplies churches. One of the factors that demonstrates the poor health of the PCUSA is that it does not value and cannot actually do the work of planting new congregations in any meaningful number.
These values make me hopeful and eager to read the new documents coming out of the board meetings this week. Look for one or two posts this week taking a look at the theological and polity identity of the Fellowship.
I’m especially eager to see how the word “Reformed” shows up in the theological statements. There seems to be some disagreement about what the word actually means and how it is used in defining a denomination or movement. For some, Reformed means calvinist in the classical sense of the word. For others, it means influenced or informed by Calvin. Some think of Reformed essentials (i.e., to be reformed you need to believe this) and others prefer to think of reformed distinctives (i.e., this is what makes our tradition distinctive among the churches, but you don’t necessarily have to believe all of it).
I think the Fellowship will turn out to be a new reformed body that is essentially evangelical and informed by calvinism, but not necessarily Calvinist. Clearly classical Calvinists will be welcome, but being one will not be essential to belonging. For those who value a narrower definition of reformed, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church will probably become the destination of choice given that it is governed by the theological standards of Westminster.