So I recently sat down with my remote to catch up on world events like every responsible citizen does: watching Stephen Colbert. I learned Fox News pundit Glenn Beck is receiving a one hundred year plan from God himself. This plan will reverse the course of American history. We will again become a Christian nation and our nation’s capital will return to its rightful place at the Creation Science Museum in Petersburg, KY as was prescribed in the Federalist papers. (I might have made that last part up.)

Glenn will be sharing God’s plan– his dream– for America at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th. What is the significance of this date and location? It’s none other than the anniversary and site of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech.”

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We’ve got a unique event coming up at Grace and I hope you’ll join us. We’re hosting a packing party with Operation Christmas Child. Kathy Schriefer is an inspiring leader who has a goal of this region coming together to assemble 13,000 gift boxes to send to children around the world. Last year, we pulled off 10,000– so…

We’re getting together Saturday, September 25. Hundreds of people from all over the community will be joining us. This is truly an intergenerational event– boy and girl scouts, Sr. Citizens, families– all unite to make this happen. Some do this in Jesus’ name, other work solely for a love of people.

Here’s a repost of how last years packing party impacted me. I hope you join us. Check in at whoisgrace.com for regular updates.

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My son recently returned from band camp and recovered from his grueling work by catching up on the past week’s Daily Show and Colbert Report. Stewart and Colbert must have referred to the term “anchor baby” a half-dozen times in reference to the immigration debate in Arizona.

“Anchor baby” is a new phrase to me so I started googling. I learned that it’s a pejorative phrase used by the most outspoken immigrant opponents. The theory is that immigrants will have a child born in U.S. soil and then use that child’s U.S. citizenship as the legal grounds to apply for their own citizenship. The U.S. born child will– when they turn 21-years-old– be able to sponsor their parents’ application for U.S. citizenship.

Let me be clear: This is horrible language. To label a person an anchor baby or an anchor child is to imply that they were born out of utility and not love, that their sole reason for existence is a tactic to serve the interests of the parents. To call someone an anchor baby is to label them something worse than a “bastard.” The term reduces the person to a legally necessary piece of flesh and nothing more. It’s devaluing language that can be used to mask the racism of the people using it. The immigration issue is complex and deserves to be discussed well. “Anchor baby” is an unworthy part of the political lexicon.

Let’s strike it.

Surprisingly, the only person this term could apply to would be our Savior. (more…)



The Twitter-verse runs on speed and the rush to judgement. So when Rick Warren tweeted:

I challenge any church in America to match the spiritual maturity, godliness & commitment of any 500 members of Saddleback.

Christian social media jockeys rushed to their chairs and pecked out their assessments. “Rick’s lost it.” “What pride!” and “I defy any church in America to find 500 people who need Jesus more than the people in my congregation.” (I kind of like that one.)

The reality is that we’re all familiar enough with Pastor Rick to know that he wasn’t being arrogant. We know his body of work. Let’s write it off to the dangers of communicating with 140 characters while being observed by a cloud of twittering witnesses.

I suspect that Rick was trying to affirm his congregation. Nothing more, nothing less. For decades Rick has endured criticism that he’s dumbed down Christianity to get butts in the chairs. The logical conclusion of that assessment is that the folk in his church aren’t spiritually discerning or deep. I’m sure some of Saddleback’s congregation understand this is how a segment of their peers view them. I believe and hope that Rick spoke with a pastor’s heart. He was attempting to validate the faith of his flock and the ministry of his leaders. He was saying “I see spiritual maturity. Our work here was not in vain.” His offered up his people as a witness that the power of the Gospel is active at Saddleback.

I’m wondering if we all could get off his back, or at least offer the benefit of the doubt. He’s been pastoring too long and too well to assume anything less.

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Dr. John Sowers is a smart and humble leader. I met John last year at The Mentoring Project annual advirsory board meeting. I was new to the board, hadn’t met any of other team members, and was more than a little nervous sitting around the table with some sharp thinkers. I’m sure John was a bit nervous, too. He had just transitioned from board member to president and was meeting us for the first time. But he was brilliant and down to earth. I left Portland realizing that this movement was in very capable hands.

My only compliant about John is that he introduced me to Stumptown Coffee. This ruined my enjoyment of Starbucks for several months. But other than that, John’s a good man. Here’s chapter one of his new book, Fatherless Generation: FG Chapter One.

Amy,

Thanks for fourteen amazing years. Your dreams are my dreams.

Helplessly yours,

Larry

In the weeks ahead you’re going to notice a sharp narrowing of this blog’s focus. Last year I finished writing a memior-ish book about my relationship w/ Christmas. I had come to a point where the holiday stopped making sense to me– and I’m not talking about the busyness of the season or the consumerism of the holidays, although those things don’t make a heck of a lot of sense either. I had come to a more dangerous place, where I couldn’t connect with the story of the incarnation.

I responded to this by researching all of the original players of the Christmas story. I thought that perhaps I didn’t understand the story well en0ugh. Maybe time and culture had varnished over the narrative’s canvas and that my task was to strip back layers of tradition so I could gain a clearer picture of what happened.

That whole exercise was valuable, but I discovered my dilemma ran deeper. The Incarnation provides a template for a life of being a servant and I was growing tired of it. Privately, I wanted an alternative. I found myself feeling like George Bailey, from It’s a Wonderful Life. I wasn’t jumping off bridges, but I had grown tired of my story and wondered when I was going to get mine. The memoir is the story of how I got my head straight again.

I’m in the slow process of finding a home for this book. In the meantime, I have research that didn’t fit the book and stray thought about Christmas. So I’ll be narrowing the focus of this blog to Christmas, the Incarnation, and my continuing journey to live a personal story that’s consistent with the Incarnation, because without being too sentimental, that’s what it means to live a wonderful life.

“They said to him, “Say Shibboleth”, and he said “Sibboleth” because he could not pronounce it. Then they seized him and slaughtered him at the fords of Jordan. At that time 42,000 of the Edomites fell. ” Judges 12:6

I’m fascinated and a little saddened by a habit I see Christians practice, myself included. We tend to use Christian leaders and authors as points of reference to define our own tribes. Last week, for example, Anne Rice made waves in the Christian blogosphere by announcing she was quitting Christianity. She was careful to say that she was not quitting Christ, or even the church; but she had enough of the divisiveness and judgmental attitudes she experienced since her return to faith ten years ago. Reflexivenely, bloggers have evaluated her story and use it to define their own tribe. “She’s Christian, not religious (like me and my people)” or “She’s shipwrecking her faith with an arrogant individualism (unlike me and my people.)”

Anne has become, for a news cycle, anyway, a “shibboleth” to define our in- and out- groups. We do this with others, don’t we? Years ago I held an organizational meeting about a college ministry we were starting. I mentioned that we were using the “Nooma” videos in our meetings. A few in the room decided that we had abandoned the faith and have succumbed to the emergent movement, all because we use used by a video series by Rob Bell. Rob Bell as a shibboleth to those people and I found myself lumped into a tribe, irrespective of what my own convictions actually were. Brian McLaren has been flattened into a shibboleth and so has Mark Driscoll. It’s too much work to see these pastors and leaders as having complex personalities, strengths, and flaws– so we create overly simplified versions of them. Nuance does not lend itself to black and white thinking. So bloggers cast Donald Miller as liberal and emergent, Don’s reminders that he attends a theologically conservative church be damned.

I suppose we do this out of necessity. Celebrity Shibboleth is a time saving practice that allows Christians to quickly assess how they should relate to other believers. If I ask you your thoughts about Ted Haggard’s new church or John Piper’s Calvinism, I can make fast opinions on your theological makeup. Differentiation is not a bad thing. But we don’t seem able to stop at noticing our differences, we divide into factions.

This, ironically, is not the outcome that the objects of our “sibboleth-ing” hope for.

“Name-It-and-Claim-It” feels hunky dory as long as everyone is getting what they want. If Joe claims the Audi in Jesus name and then manages to make those monthly payments, then God can his co-pilot, or GPS– whatever the slogan is on the bumper sticker, I mean Flair, these days. If Susan claims, by the Blood of the Lamb, that her children will grow up to love Jesus and one grows up to be a dope dealer or a congressman, then thinks start to get dicey between Susan or God.

One of the problems with the Prosperity Gospel is that it doesn’t account for the fact that we live in a broken world filled with pain, sin, and disappointment. What the Prosperity Gospel does offer is an acute sense of justice. Here’s the moral schema of the Prosperity Gospel:

1) God wants all of his children to be materially blessed. This is the entitlement of God’s children. All they need to do it to make faith affirmations and to give generously to the kingdom.

2) If you are God’s child, the fact that you have received the material blessing you claimed is validation that you are right with God.

3) If you have not received the material blessings you claimed, after a period of time the only conclusions one can make is that your faith is weak or that you aren’t generous. You are a faithless person

The person whose live isn’t working out, let’s call him Job, has another way of looking at things:

1) I’ve asked God to bless my life.

2) I’m a just and faithful man. My personal piety and devotional walk is impeccable. I know how much I give to the poor. It’s a private, but trust me, it’s sacrificial.

3) My life is a train wreck. I’m suffering and I’ve lost everything I’ve worked for an everyone I’ve loved.

4) Therefore, God has been unjust to me. He is an immoral God.

We all know how Job ends. God appears and overwhelms him with dozens of questions about the order of the physical universe that Job can’t answer. God follows that if Job is ignorant of the physical order of the world that he shouldn’t be surprised that the moral ordering of the universe is also beyond him.

So the prosperity Gospel demands justice and those who violate the formula to be held accountable. Justice is a fine thing but it needs to be anchored in reality.

The image is a painting by Guy Rowe.

There’s been a term that’s been around just under a decade– “slacktivism.” The word is a jab at “feel-good” measures, in support of a social cause that does little-to-no good, other than give the slavktivist a little self satisfaction. We’ve all been a slacktivist at one point or another. I’ve signed countless online petitions to save Dafur. We buy awareness bracelets imprinted with political slogans, put ribbon magnets on our cars, or joined facebook groups. We can join the “Buy Nothing Day” and “Earth Hour” movements and barely be inconvenienced. All these efforts make people slightly more aware of the cause. They help us manage our personal brand: I’m compassionate. But efforts like  But not much really changes for the better. The problem we claim to care about doesn’t lessen, and we aren’t reshaping ourselves into caring people.

We’ve even found a way to connect Slacktivism to consumerism. I can justify buying the red Ipod I really can’t afford because a percentage of the money does to the One Campaign. I can purchase the designer t-shirt without a twinge of guilt because somewhere a village in Africa will get a kickback. Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing non-profits for doing what they can to raise funds for make positive change. I’m just fascinated by how we all seem to leverage these products to sustain our status quo. We’re still consumers, but dressed in activists clothing.

This is what makes the Prosperity Gospel so tempting: We get to accessorize our lives with God-talk but still chase after whatever it is we want. I want to be a follower of Jesus to the point that I actually have make inconvenient edits to my personal story. When a preacher comes around and tell us that we can have it all, deep down we know this person is a liar. But he’s offering a convenient lie, so we play along.

Maybe this is the test of knowing whether or not I’m chasing the right stuff: What if I took Donald Miller‘s advice and viewed my life like it was a story. I’d describe my ambitions, what my conflict was, and how I was going to fight to overcome that conflict. Now what would happen if I imagined that story taking place in a universe without God? Would I be forced to change anything in my story? If nothing in my story changes, then chances are I’m a spiritual slacktivist. I haven’t allowed God to shape my ambitions or how I approach conflict.  God isn’t anything more in my story than the trendy t-shirt that I buy to feel good about myself.

That’s part of the problem with the Prosperity Gospel. It gives us permission to want and chase after the same things we’d want if God wasn’t in the universe.