Amicus Dei

For those of you who live in Cleveland, Ohio, I’ll be speaking at The City Mission next Thursday, June 7, from 10:30 am to 1 pm.  Rich Trickel, director of The City Mission, read my article, Learn To Partner in Leadership and asked me to come tell our story at their community development workshop titled, Building Without a Blueprint:  Walking Alongside Others To Transform a City.

I told Rich, “I’m not an expert — all I can do is tell our story.”  Fortunately, that’s what he wants me to do, so come join us for a couple of hours of learning from each other.  You can make reservations at The City Mission website, thanks to the kind folks on staff there.

While you’re at it, check out the ministries of The City Mission.  TCM has been at doing good in God’s name since 1910, which is pretty amazing.  After I tell our story, I have asked Rich to tell me their story.  To paraphrase an old country song, The City Mission was “doin’ good before doin’ good was cool.”  I’m looking forward to learning how they have sustained and expanded their ministries for almost 100-years.

Emergent Village’s recent blog post about Deep Church caught my eye.  The post was written by Jason Clark, emergent UK’s coordinator, who is also pastor and PhD student.  The term deep church was coined by C. S. Lewis and expresses a hope for the church that is…

"…far more than an ecumenical dream of coming together across the barriers of ignorance and prejudice: it is predicated upon the central tenets of the gospel held in common by those who have the temerity to be "Mere Christians."  This commonality in the light of the post-Enlightenment modernism is greater and more fundamental that the divisions and schisms of church history…Deep Church, as its name implies, is spiritual reality down in the depths — the foundations and deep structures of the Faith — which feed, sustain, and equip us to be disciples of Christ."   Remembering Our Future:  Explorations in Deep Church, edited by Andrew Walker and Luke Bretherton, from the Forward. 

The Deep Church conversation took root in an informal UK seminar with participants from charismatic Anglican, Baptist, New Church, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and other traditions.  The point was to explore the commonalities in our Christian tradition that unite, rather than divide us.  The result is the book, Remembering Our Future, quoted above.   For some reason, the book is not available in the US, but I ordered it from Amazon UK, and got it in about a week.  Here are some of the contents I found interesting:

• I like the idea that Deep Church unites the Christian community, not in a syncretistic manner, but by focusing on the core of the faith, however it might find specific denominational expression.
• I like the focus on theological basics and experiential practicality.  Catechesis, spiritual formation, baptism, worship, scripture reading, and "mundane living" are the topics of well-conceived chapters.  These are similar emphases in my concept of the church-as-abbey, but Deep Church comes at them from the perspective that these are things that unite all Christian traditions. 
• Contributors include Alan Kreider, Ian Stackhouse, Andrew Walker, Luke Bretherton, Andrew Rogers, Ben Quash, Christopher Cocksworth, and Mark Wakelin.  All are UK professors or pastors, except Alan Kreider.

This is apparently the first in a series of Deep Church books, published by Paternoster.  I’ll be exploring various chapters and concepts in future posts, but wanted to alert you to this new book because I think it holds a lot of promise for shaping the church conversation as an adjunct to the emerging, missional church conversation.  — Amicus Dei 

The late James McLendon, a "little b" baptist by his own description, paints a clear, yet disturbing picture of the evolution of the Christian journey in the history of  the church.  In his weighty first volume of systematic theology titled Ethics, McLendon says that by the time of Thomas Aquinas:

"The way was no longer the way of disciples walking with the crucified, risen, returning Jesus…rather the way had become a journey to God…"

"To concede in it that something has been lost, that the journey is no longer as it was in Scripture a journey with God but now only a journey to God…."

McLendon’s point here is that the Christian journey shifted from being a pilgrimmage with God as companion, provider, and guide to a lone pilgrimmage with the destination, rather than companion, being God.

Marcus Borg says something similar in his book, The God We Never Knew.  Borg, of course, argues for panentheism, our being in God even if we do not recognize God’s presence about us.  Borg describes panentheism as meaning "everything is in God."   Borg certainly gives us a new vantage point from which to see God — not just the transcendent/immanent dualism that classically defines God’s distance from us or closeness to us. 

Whether you agree or disagree with Borg, he at least places us in God, so whatever journey we are on, God is with us on that journey.  McLendon makes the same point — as the Great Story has evolved (by our own manipulation) it has become less about us with God, and more about us and God.   

Missional thinking demands we understand our position as with God on God’s mission.   God’s presence surrounding us, and our response to that Presence, is where friendship with God occurs.  Every person called a friend of God in Scripture, walked with God, knew God intimately, even argued with God as they journeyed with God on God’s mission. — Amicus Dei

Scot McKnight has an excellent post about Emerging Evangelism and the concerns of "old-school evangelism."  Check it out, as there is now a buzz out there about what this business of the evangel in evangelical is all about.  — Amicus Dei

Quotes on evangelization as an invitation to God’s future, from Jurgen Moltmann’s Jesus Christ for Today’s World: 

"Up to now, the purpose for evangelization was either to extend Christian civilization, or to propagate the church, or to spread one’s own experience of faith.  This was not mission in the perspective of the end — not the mission of God’s kingdom — not an invitation to God’s future.  " — pg 145. 

"Evangelization is an invitation, nothing more than that and nothing less.  It is not instruction, and not an attempt at conversion either.  It is a plea:  ‘Be reconciled with God!’ The people who consciously or unconsciously witness to the gospel, and the people who are commissioned to proclaim it, have no authority except the authority of a plea."  — pg 146. 

– Amicus Dei

I wrote this prayer on a trip to Hong Kong in March, 2002, and just ran across it in an old journal. 

Prayer of Hope

The peace of still waters be with you;

The warmth of the sun shine on you;

The smile of a baby touch you;

The joy of heaven fill you.

Thanks be to you, O Christ

For calming stormy seas,

For tending to your creation,

For hope in small packages,

And, for a peek behind the curtain.

Thanks be to you, O Christ,

Thanks be to you.  Amen.

– Chuck Warnock, March 2002, Hong Kong

According to cable channel TLC, Miami Ink ranks as one of their hottest shows.  I was looking for my other favorite cable show, Pimp My Ride, when I ran across an episode of Miami Ink.  For those of you who do not have MI on your watchlist, the show is about a tattoo studio in Miami — hence the name, Miami Ink.  Pretty clever. 

Anyway, this episode featured not one, but two people who were having photos of their dead loved ones tattooed on their backs.  A twenty-something-guy had his little sister’s photo tattooed in the middle of his back.  She had died of cancer and looked to be about 11 years old.  The other tattoo was on a young mother — a photo of her daughter, who had died at age four.  Both tattoos were large and  in color, and both tattoo artists did an amazing job. 

When each tattoo was finished, the new "owner" looked at it tearfully, remarking how beautiful it was.  Other family members had tears in their eyes, too.  I was really moved that the families wanted to keep the memories of these little girls alive.  Both thought a tattoo would be the most-enduring memorial to their loved one.   I also have seen ‘memorials’ decaled in the rear windows of cars and pickups, witness to the memories of those who died too young and too soon.   

My observation is that the people who remember others with tattoos and window decals would not feel comfortable in a typical church.   Whether or not they would be welcomed in a typical church is something else to think about. 

What does it say about our culture, when the most fitting memorial that young, working class adults can imagine is a tattoo or rear-window decal?  How are we as churches, as Christians, failing this group in our culture?  And, are we so put off by their attempt at remembering their loved ones that we dismiss it as an ethnic thing or a poor thing or an uneducated thing to do? 

If church is the place where we make sense out of life and death for people, how have we missed a whole generation who turn to the tattoo artist rather than the pastor for comfort and consolation?  Why don’t we have something for these young adults to do to keep these memories alive?  Right now I have a lot of questions and not many answers.  Any thoughts? – Amicus Dei   

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I’ve written a couple of posts about neo-evangelism, mostly my thoughts on how we might go about presenting a more authentic, intentional witness to the world.  Last Friday I picked up New Evangelization:  Good News To The Poor, by Leonardo Boff.   Published by Wipf and Stock, and translated from the original Portuguese, Boff articulates what must change if new evangelization is really going to be new.  I realize that there is a technical difference between evangelism and evangelization, but I think Boff’s book can inform evangelical thinking about both.

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ChristianityToday.com picked up an excerpt from my sermon, Where Is God?  I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 22, after the Virginia Tech tragedy.   Our church is less than 2-hours drive from the VT campus, and we have Virginia Tech alumni, a board member, and student in our congregation.  I also posted, Ministry To A Community in Grief on my other blog, Confessions of a Small-Church Pastor.  I hope these two resources are helpful to you.  – Amicus Dei