No Syllabus for God-sightings

July 10. Registration day for fall classes. Oh, wait, that’s right. I won’t be taking classes this fall. One of the new experiences gifted to me because I am going on internship is a semester without coursework.  Most of the time, I recognize it as a gift; sometimes, like this morning, I want to throw a two-year old’s tantrum and scream, “But I need that class now...” I think that, besides interrupting the reassuring, steady march of completing degree requirements, what I fear is missing the structure of having a schedule and a syllabus and some predictability. Instead I’m living in a pretty unstructured environment, for a few weeks anyway; trying to listen and watch what God may be trying to teach me in this time and space; and, watching internship draw closer on the horizon.

The learning doesn’t stop, fortunately. I discovered the local library system has a free online language tutor that lets me refresh my Spanish and bridge its Castilian foundation to the Latin American Spanish we hear more often in the Americas. I visited the stacks of the local used book store where it looks like somebody traded in a library of emergence theology and other interesting books. (so, I obligingly brought a few home)

I was finishing up a library copy of Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian and hoped to find a used copy to buy but I didn’t have any luck. I’m not surprised; it is a sticky book − one I expect I’ll reread even though I don’t usually read things more than once. In Almost Christian Dean writes about the 2003-2005 National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) and talks about teenagers, contrasting popular, cultural faith which reflects a moral therapeutic deism and “consequential faith”, which develops in teenagers in congregations who “portray God as living, present and active, place a high value on Scripture; reflect the life and mission of Jesus Christ in its practices and relationships; and emphasize spiritual growth, discipleship and mission.”

As someone who is more comfortable talking with people born in the ‘20s than people living in their 20s (or teens), a while back, I adopted a mantra for ministry: “break stereotypes, learn flexibility, build relationships and communicate well.” Dean challenges stereotypes of teenagers who aren’t interested in talking with adults and who aren’t capable of conversations that take more than 140 characters.  She includes an important reminder in Almost Christian that can get lost in the tussling about that is parenting a teenager:

[Every teenager is] an amazing child of God. Their humanity is embedded in their souls as well as their DNA. Their family is the church, their vocation is a grateful response for the chance to participate in the divine plan of salvation, their hope lies in the fact that Christ has claimed them and secured their future for them.

In Almost Christian, there’s a challenge to be intentional about living this truth out in our relationships with teenagers. There's also a challenge to Christian adults and to parents, particularly in mainline Protestant traditions, to recognize how we influence the faith of children, whether we know it or not, and to not be as afraid of speaking about God and Jesus, of pointing to the ways that God is moving in our lives. We tell our lives in stories and unless we are talking about our God-sightings and God-stories, how can anyone else recognize themselves in the Christian story?

So one hope I have for this unstructured time I have is to participate in more conversations about God’s active presence in our world, and more readily answer where I saw, heard or experienced God in everyday life. I hope you’ll listen in.

Like a Milkpod Bursting

"Like a milkpod bursting" was how Phyllis Tickle described the communities that grew out of a year-long gathering in Kudzu's, a local bar in Memphis. From her description, I would guess a lot of the participants in "Beer and Bible" might have refuted that it was church. Certainly, it didn't look like church if you imagine church as a building with pews and hymnals and offering plates, but, undoubtedly, it was church, the ekklesia: it was local people gathered around the Word of God. 

(Read a little bit more in this 2008 article on Sojourner's website)

What mattered was the people who came and went on those Tuesday nights had questions they wanted to ask about faith, about truth, about the Bible and about God, and they had a space where they could come and ask them. When they ran out of questions, they stopped meeting. A year later they reunited to mark the anniversary of what they had been doing and sometime after that, the milkpod burst and they began meeting in smaller groups.  

Tickle gave the illustration of this emergence community to give us a picture of how church is happening today outside our mainline congregations.

Explaining a cascade of sociological and historical events that have set the stage for “The Great Emergence”, Tickle was challenging those of us “in the business of religion” to listen for and address the hard questions that people ask. The questions aren't meant to tear down the Church we have known; they are to get at which traditions carry something worthwhile – Living Water (John 4:10) – and which ones are like cracked cisterns that need to be thrown out. 

Encouraging leaders to designate a pastoral allowance that lets pastors go where people are – whether that is a neighborhood bar or a coffee shop – Tickle argued that we need to be reminded that our congregations and churches are not the kingdom of God, but we are called to serve the kingdom of God and that means talking to whoever is looking at us, wherever they find us. 

"Take the kingdom out to the people around us."

Here we go!

I had a professor who would begin his four hour lectures with these words, "Here we go!"  They seem appropriate as I transition from being a full-time student and nonprofit fundraiser to being the full-time vicar, or intern pastor, at a local congregation. For the past four years, I have been in seminary preparing for this move, and now it's here.

One of the gifts that internship gives me as a seminarian is a time of discovering more about living life in public Christian leadership and who I am as a pastor. Gathering up wisdom from the people who have gone before me, I am reminded of Robert Fulghum's All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten, where we discover our lives together are rooted in some basic, simple truths.

One of the basic truths I learned from that same professor was, "Take regular breaks." He could be mid-sentence, but at ten minutes to the hour, we stopped and took ten minutes to walk outside, breathe or re-caffeinate. It didn't really matter what we did as long as we got up from our desks and did something else. He didn't want to talk more than fifty minutes in one sitting and I doubt any of us wanted to listen for more than that. Another professor makes the same suggestion when she hits a wall in the process of sermon writing: take a break and do something else for 15 or 30 minutes. Don't just keep staring at the empty screen or tablet of paper. Whether it's preparing a sermon or teaching others, taking regular breaks will benefit everyone involved.

From my grandaddy, I am reminded, "Take care of the patient, not the illness." A doctor at a teaching hospital,  he saw too many new residents who never really saw the patients as real people; instead they attended to the disease and diagnosis, and overlooked the living, hurting human being who stood there. Our congregations and communities aren't numbers on offering envelopes, or statistics for the annual report - numbers on a page - they are living, breathing and hurting human beings.


Getting to know real people means having real conversations, but what those conversations look like has changed a lot in the thirty plus years since I was in kindergarten. When it comes to our conversations here and on Twitter and Facebook and other social media outlets, a United Methodist pastor in Indiana shared these guidelines which advocate, "Avoid harm, do good, be connected and help others connect to God." Pastor Keith Anderson, formerly of Woburn, Mass. and now in Ambler, Penn. writes about weaving social media and ministry, too, and a group of folks who regularly chat about church and social media using the Twitter hashtag #chsocm dove into questions of boundaries and authenticity on June 26 (here's the transcript).


I will be sharing what I am learning throughout the year in future posts and look forward to our conversations.