Urgency.

I spoke with a good friend of mine, Kyle, and he talked me off the edge today in regards to a great frustration that I have.

Over the past several days I have become frustrated at what I can only describe as a lack of urgency in the church I serve (both local and regional). This is not a knock on the people of the church but I find I am beat down sometimes by some aspects of the church culture - what I perceive as a lack of urgency.

After talking a bit with others I think my sense of urgency is deeply rooted in my lack of friends my age involved in the church. I thank God for Kyle to help me see this.

As I look to the older leadership of the church they have a lot of friends in the church. They have other ministers and even friends whom they have been in ministry with for years. They are around the same age or they have kids who share the same youth group. The older leadership of the church seems to have a lot of friends within the church.

I do not.

I have watched more and more of my peers become de-churched and are not coming back to the church. I have seen youth involved in youth programs and leadership in the youth programs, but then move out of the youth group only to find the church is not doing much for that age group. The resources are lacking.

And so, over time, most of my peers have left the church. I have few friends within the church. I have more friends my age who are outside the church, and the latter group grows by the week.

I wonder if my frustration with church work is rooted in this concept.

Would you "do" church differently if you gave your life to the church only to find there was no one your age?

Would you have a sense of urgency?

I pray for a spirit of urgency (not panic or stress or anxiety) in the lives of church leaders.

Alter the Altar

At AHUMC we do not call it the communion table. We do not call it the communion rail. Rather we fall into a historical theological position when we reference these things however, because we call them the altar and the altar rail.

As I read the publications from the UMC, I understand this is 'altar' language is incorrect language for those areas. I for one agree.

Catholics celebrate the Eucharist and in that ritual Christ is sacrificed again (as I come to understand it), thus to call it the altar is correct. However, the UMC does not affirm this theology and instead affirms the Communion as a symbolic ritual of remembrance. Therefore communion table is the correct label.

But this seems like semantics.

However, for those Christians out there who do not affirm that Christ died as a substitutionary atonement for sin, to call it an altar can be troubling at best. The UMC has room for you who do not affirm this theology of the atonement.

Thank God it does because then I am not sure where I would be.

Rather my atonement theology is not so much Anselm as it is Girard. While Girard does not address the atonement much at all himself, his disciples have. In fact my wife did just that.

In her research in the class we shared, it became evident to each of us that Girard might fall more in line with 'Ransom' theory of atonement (which is the first atonement theory the church put forth).

This theory states that humanity was set free by God by paying a ransom to the Satan. This ransom was Jesus.

This sounds very archaic and fundamentally conservative. However, Girard's lens on this statement would in fact allow liberals and conservatives alike to claim this statement. While some of the terms need to be defined for a fuller understanding (such as Satan and ransom), Girard is one who is able to bring the left and right together.

Such a rare gift indeed.

So to all my UMC friends out there. Let us not continue in a tradition we do not understand by refereeing to the communion table as an altar.

Alter our language and we might just be able to alter the current course of the church.

Will YOU tell God that I have been really busy lately...

At Starbucks the other day with my mentor and friend, Kyle. We were talking about stuff which we were excited about when I saw a woman order coffee who attends the congregation I work with. I walked up to her as she was adding milk to her drink and said hello.

Of course I forgot her name until after she left, but recalled her kids names and asked about them. It was a normal conversation which everyone has 10 times a day. Then something happened in the conversation which is beginning to happen more and more. She apologized.

"Sorry we have not been at church lately..." "Things are busy and you know..." "We plan to get back..." etc.

I used to be put off by these comments as though, as Rob Bell says, I am carrying around a clipboard checking names off a list of who is and who is not in worship on Sunday. But this time was different. I began to wonder if her families lack of attendance at Sunday worship and congregation involvement is not because of her schedule or life situation but the church's in ability to express and show relevancy, nourishment, and/or connection to the lives of this family?

Parents find school for their kids very important. So important in fact that it affects where people move and even housing values!

When was the last time someone bought a house because it was in a certain church's district?

Is it because people believe schools are relevant, nourishing and connect to their lives and churches do not?

Neo-Calvinist - I am not.

I recently had a conversation the past week which really highlighted a theological distinction I have with other Christians. Neo Calvinism. In the course of our conversation it became very clear to me that I am not a Calvinist/Reformist.

Recently Time magazine had an article which was titled, "Ten ideas that are changing the world". Idea number 3 was the "New Calvinism". This was out of the March 12, 2009:

Here is the article, written by David Van Biema for your consideration:

If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard "The Old Rugged Cross," a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of "Shine, Jesus, Shine." And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are...well, hark the David Crowder Band: "I am full of earth/ You are heaven's worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity."


Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin's 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination's logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.

Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation's other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don't have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by "glorifying" him. In the 1700s, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards invested Calvinism with a rapturous near mysticism. Yet it was soon overtaken in the U.S. by movements like Methodism that were more impressed with human will. Calvinist-descended liberal bodies like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) discovered other emphases, while Evangelicalism's loss of appetite for rigid doctrine — and the triumph of that friendly, fuzzy Jesus — seemed to relegate hard-core Reformed preaching (Reformed operates as a loose synonym for Calvinist) to a few crotchety Southern churches.


No more. Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don't operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, "everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world" — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom's hottest links.

Like the Calvinists, more moderate Evangelicals are exploring cures for the movement's doctrinal drift, but can't offer the same blanket assurance. "A lot of young people grew up in a culture of brokenness, divorce, drugs or sexual temptation," says Collin Hansen, author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists. "They have plenty of friends: what they need is a God." Mohler says, "The moment someone begins to define God's [being or actions] biblically, that person is drawn to conclusions that are traditionally classified as Calvinist." Of course, that presumption of inevitability has drawn accusations of arrogance and divisiveness since Calvin's time. Indeed, some of today's enthusiasts imply that non-Calvinists may actually not be Christians. Skirmishes among the Southern Baptists (who have a competing non-Calvinist camp) and online "flame wars" bode badly.


Calvin's 500th birthday will be this July. It will be interesting to see whether Calvin's latest legacy will be classic Protestant backbiting or whether, during these hard times, more Christians searching for security will submit their wills to the austerely demanding God of their country's infancy.