Intertwined With the Poor: What the Missional Movement Lacks

by Lyndsey Graves

“I read the Bible, but I forgot the verses

The liquor store is open later than the church is”

- Macklemore, "Neon Cathedral"

 

“Our doors are locked all but four hours a week. If our neighbors think about our church at all, it must be as a place where dressed-up people gather to do... who knows what?”

- removed from my report to University Church regarding Outreach ministries

“We don’t want to offend anyone. Let’s take it out.”

I tried to argue for a bit. I mentioned that some others who read the draft had specifically mentioned that they found the sentence powerful. “More to the point,” I said, “this is not even an insulting statement; I’m just trying to be frank here.” And that is where I shut myself up.

As I spoke those words, I realized: to some of the powerful members of an upper-middle-class, white church situated in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood, the truth, frankly-stated, is itself offensive.

I don’t want to characterize my church unfairly. I believe the Holy Spirit is moving there: they are highly committed to social justice (and more so every day), and their hospitality to me has gone far beyond ordinary politeness. If I thought they were committing a heinous or unique sin, I wouldn’t bother to blog about it. Frankly, though, this “institutional blind spot”, represented in thousands of churches, contributes to the alienation of huge groups of people and, for some of these churches, their own demise.

To be clear, the blind spot I’m referring to is not necessarily the fact that people dress up on Sunday morning. I have no feelings about that one way or the other; every group of people follows norms that newcomers don’t expect or understand. What I take issue with is the fact that churches evaluate themselves on all sorts of scales, statistics, surveys, and checklists, but they rarely evaluate themselves from the perspective of the poor.

More importantly, churches sometimes evaluate their institutions from the perspective of the poor. Or they’ll demonstrate “Point #5 of our Strategic Mission: Commitment to Social Justice” by doing a Service Project once a month. But the people? They are afraid to look in the mirror, loath to ask themselves, “How do I welcome the poor into my church and my life?”

Once, a woman asked me with wide eyes, “Why don’t the young families come to church anymore? How come church is no longer their place to connect with other people?” A few weeks later she said to me, “I like to entertain people, but I can’t just throw open my home to the whole church any more. Some people - like [one of the poor single mothers in our congregation] - I’m just not comfortable around.” I still wonder if I should have confronted her about it.

Last week, I helped another coffee-shop-church in our neighborhood distribute flyers about a block party. Kind as they are to sponsor a neighborhood event, I wonder which of these poor people they expect to join a church that meets in a place of business where everyone else around the table cradles coffee at $2 a pop. They eschew sermons in favor of conversations, vaguely referring to God once in a while, in an effort to attract millenials and postmoderns. I wonder how many of these conversations revolve around matters with any connection to life in Syracuse’s Near East Side.

The thing about all this is, I care about the old people who love dressing up and listening to organ music. I care about millenials and postmoderns. And I care about the people of the Near East Side. Am I supposed to choose one group to belong to or minister to? If being “missional” means reinventing “church” and tailoring it to the tastes of any particular segment of society, it seems impossible to ever bring the college students together with the lifelong welfare recipients in this neighborhood.

I admire the missional movement and the coffee-shop-church, the desire to go out instead of holing up and daring others to come in. My church needs more of that. My church needs to at least unlock the doors more often. But sometimes, we get so caught up in movements that reimagine how we do ministry, we can lose sight of what we’re doing and whom we’re here for.

I do not know the answers to all this, but I do know one thing that law students and welfare recipients have in common: they are human, and we humans are desperate to be loved. We need to belong. We just want someone to take an interest in us and our well-being.

We know when someone only wants to collect our tithe, or add us to their Sunday school tally, or give us food so we’ll go away; but we also know when someone genuinely cares for us. And when we meet that person to whom we finally matter, it turns out we don’t really care how they’re dressed or what they look like or whether their organization implements a cool graphic design strategy.

I hope we learn to just love people, even if we’re afraid that they’re too dirty for us or that we’re not cool enough for them. May we ask God to reveal God’s love for every person to our own hearts, that we might reveal it all over again to them.

May we emerge from our self-imposed loneliness and open the doors even to those who might mistake us for a liquor store, that we may encounter new facets of that love every terrifying new day.

Lyndsey lives and works in Syracuse, NY. She majored in theology at Lee University, which is like eating cake or listening to thunderstorms - too enjoyable to be called work. Also, no one will pay you to do it. You can follow her on Twitter @lyndseygraves and you can find more of her writing at her blog To Be Honest.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.
 
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On Breaking the Slump

by Ben Howard

Over the winter, my favorite baseball team, the Atlanta Braves, signed free agent center fielder B.J. Upton to a five year contract worth $75 million dollars. It's the biggest contract the Braves have ever given to a free agent. I was a bit hesitant upon hearing the news, after all that is quite a large investment, but Upton has been a solid player over the last few years. He's fast, plays good defense, and has the ability to hit a lot number of home runs. He isn't quite a superstar, but he is only a step or two down from that.
 
Unfortunately, B.J. Upton has started this season playing terribly. Over the first two months of the Upton had a batting average of .144. That means he got a hit in 14.4% of his at bats. To put that in perspective, his career batting average is .250. 

In fact, there's a term in baseball called the Mendoza line which defines incompetent hitting. It's named for a notoriously bad hitter named Mario Mendoza who hit .200 for his career. If you hit below .200, it's essentially impossible for you to be a useful player. Upton was far below that.

But this isn't a story about a player who was once good suddenly becoming terrible, this is a story about slumping. Upton didn't suddenly forget how to play, nor did his skills erode to the point where he was overmatched; he was just in a slump. In fact, this month, he's hitting a relatively robust .234.

So how do you get out of a slump?

Some say it's a matter of confidence. Some say you just need to relax. Others have more interesting and off-the-wall suggestions (if you're brave, look up the term "slumpbuster"). Ultimately though there's no real solution. You're simply in a slump until you're out of it. It's part of the cyclical nature of sports and life in general.

The worst part of a slump is when a player begins to press. If you're unfamiliar with the phrase, pressing is when someone begins to put pressure on themselves to succeed. It typically involves over-thinking processes that were once instinctual. For example a baseball player starts to think about how to swing a bat instead of just swinging, or a basketball player starts to go through the step-by-step process of shooting instead of just shooting. At its worst, it can lead to the "yips" where a player can no longer perform simple actions that they've done for years (i.e. a catcher who's unable to throw the ball back to the pitcher).

I mention all of this because I'm in a slump right now and it feels like I'm pressing. The thoughts that used to come to my head easily are a chore and the words I want to communicate just aren't there. Instead of writing on instinct, I've been....well, I haven't been writing at all.

Since I don't know the best way to break a slump, I'm doing the best I know how and leaning into the curve; trying to overcome my writing slump by writing about it.

I've noticed a curious thing throughout my attempts to break out of this feeling. I've noticed the desire to try and copy myself. When I felt like I couldn't access an authentic version of myself, when I felt like I lost my voice, I would simply try and be the best imitation of myself that I could be. If I couldn't "be myself" then I'd try to "act like myself."

Think about that. Think about what that means.

It means that I thought that there was only one "authentic" version of myself that I needed to be all the time. It means that sometimes I thought I wasn't "me". That's impossible. I'm always me. Every part, every emotion, every happy moment, every sad moment, every moment when I have a voice and every moment when I feel like I've lost it, those are all me.

I'm sure you've heard that people show their true colors when they're angry or when they're sad or when they're afraid. Bullshit. People show their true colors all the time. They are always themselves. Every bit of them is authentically them, even when they're trying to lie and hide it.

But there's something in our psyche that tries to avoid that truth. There's something in our mind that would rather see clean narrative arcs and easily defined personalities. We want to be able to encapsulate people, we want to be able to encapsulate ourselves. For people we say that they're "Thoughtful, reflective and kind" or "Surly, arrogant and rude." For baseball players we tick off their batting average.

Here's the thing that I've learned about being in a slump. Slumps are as much a part of who I am as the peaks. B.J. Upton's performance as a baseball player is not defined by his average, it's defined by all the bits and pieces along the way that go into that computation. You aren't one thing, you are all the things across the spectrum that compose that encapsulated view of yourself.

We limit ourselves and others to the average version of us. We define ourselves against our relative norms, and then we judge ourselves to be lesser when we fall below those norms. Perhaps the best way to break a slump, or to be confident in ourselves, or simply love ourselves (and others) is simply to realize that we are always who we are whether we're slumping or peaking or anywhere in between.

Peace,
Ben

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

 

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

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Ben Affleck Teaches the Church A Lesson

by Ben Howard

During the summer between my junior and senior years in college I worked as an intern at a small church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was difficult at times, but ultimately a great developmental experience. One of the more bizarre experiences involved one of the leaders at the church. He took me out to lunch one day and decided to lecture me about how I needed to be a better salesman. He used that classic line, "You're a salesmen and you've got the greatest product in the world!" I stared ahead and nodded politely while inwardly I shook my head.

It bothers me when churches try to market or sell themselves. I understand it, but it still bothers me. They've decided the gospel is something you consume, but that's not true. It's something you live. Something you inhabit that changes you into who you are meant to be. It's living art and art isn't something you consume, it's something you engage with.

I think churches and movie makers have a lot in common. There are mega-churches and blockbuster directors utilizing cliches and big budgets to make their message consumable for the masses. There are indie-chic auteurs and hipster churches that dazzle with artistry, but lose the thread under a thick layer of pretension. There are hack filmmakers who make the Left Behind books into movies and there are hack churches who tell people to go see it.

But this can be a good comparison too because sometimes churches, like filmmakers, can do amazing things. So today, I want to take a lesson from the making of a great film and see what churches can learn from Ben Affleck's latest movie Argo.

1) Tell Your Story

The first lesson of good movies and good churches is to simply tell the story. That's the reason you are there. You are being invited to be a part of this story.

Argo tells the story of a CIA mission to rescue six Americans from Iran in 1979 during the Iran hostage crisis. It's a good story and Affleck, the director, trusts the story to keep the audiences attention. He doesn't need gimmicks or explosions or any other ancillary pieces of movie magic. He just needs a good story.

Christianity has that. It is an amazing story. It is a story of creation, brokenness, liberation, power, exile, redemption, death, resurrection and reconciliation. It is the story of everybody and anybody filled with peril and grace and honor and loss and tension and love. It carries itself, you don't need to convince people to pay attention. You just have to tell the story.

2) Know Your Context

Argo does something really interesting in its opening sequence. It tells the story of the Iranian people leading up to the storming of the embassy in 1979, not the story of the United States. It explains the context of the country and why it might seem like a good idea to someone to use violent force against innocent US citizens. Essentially, it tells you why the story's ostensible villain isn't necessarily evil.

This is a vital lesson for the church. First, the church must deal with its own historical context and it's important that the church own this history. It must understand that it has occasionally been the villain, but that's not the same as being evil. It must also understand that those outside the church are neither evil nor the enemy of those inside the church. They are people too with their own specific motivations.

3) Pay Attention to Detail

During the end credits of Argo they show side-by-side comparisons of the actors and their real-life counterparts. The resemblance is remarkable. There are also photographs from the era shown beside shots from the movie which make it clear the level of research and prep that went into this movie. The movie is set in the 1970s in Iran and it feels like it. It is entirely possible to be immersed in the story because you know that everything has been crafted with such care.

This one in particular speaks to me. I'm bad at preparation and detail. I like to do things from the seat of my pants and usually it works out well, but not all the time. When I fail, I fail spectacularly. I also realize more and more that it's easy to tell when something isn't important to someone because of the lack of focus on details. Details show dedication. It shows importance. Churches are by and large volunteer groups and so details often go overlooked, but they are vital in the success or failure of a church. Pay attention to details, it shows that you care.

4) Show, Don't Tell

I'm going to get a little nerdy here. When I watched Argo I realized that there is a pretty major sub-plot that was entirely cut out of the movie. This subplot involves the drinking problem of Ben Affleck's character Tony. I would bet that there are two or three scenes on the cutting room floor that directly address this issue, but they aren't in the movie. In fact, there isn't any dialogue in the movie about Tony's drinking problem, but there are pictures. You see him waking up with empty beer cans in the background, you his reaction to the lack of alcohol in Iran, you see him swipe a bottle of whiskey, these are all things you witness.

One of the great lessons of writing is that, when you can, show and don't tell. It's one churches have always struggled to learn in their context. We talk and talk and talk and talk and talk about love and grace and hope. But loving is hard and being gracious is hard and hoping for things unseen is hard. We say all the things we wish we believed and then we go out the door and show off what we actually believe. We need to learn to show, and if we can't show, then it isn't even worth telling.

5) Have Fun

Argo is a fun movie to watch. It's adventurous, it's tense and it can even make you laugh when it wants to. It was serious, but it was enjoyable.

Dear fellow Christians, please remember that at the end of the day you should be happy. At the end of the day, no matter how difficult life may be it is a ultimately a gracious gift. It is good. It is fun. Let loose and have some fun. Enjoy yourself and live the story.

Peace,
Ben

You can follow Ben on Twitter @BenHoward87 or email him at benjamin.howard87 [at] gmail.com.

Also, you can subscribe to On Pop Theology via RSS feed or email on the top right corner of the main page.

I'm Too Cool to Like Happy Things

by Ben Howard


I really want to be cool. That's about as honest and direct a statement as I can make. I'm not quite a hipster, but I'm definitely hipster-adjacent. I listen to NPR, I own a fedora, I listen to indie folk music and think Mumford and Sons may have been inspired by God. I mean, I watch Community and if you believe NBC, that show is watched by like five people on a weekly basis. I am part of the one percent!

Sometimes though, that whole "trying to be cool" thing chafes a little bit. It's constricting. You are allowed to enjoy anything, but some of those things you are only allowed to enjoy ironically. But I don't really like enjoying things ironically, I like enjoying them genuinely. It's just more fun if you actually like the things you like.

For instance, this weekend I went to see the new movie Pitch Perfect. It's pretty clear to any outside observer that this movie was made to take advantage of the "let's put on a show" trend that Glee seems to have popularized recently. It's about dueling acapella groups from a fictional college competing for the national title in acapella singing and dancing. That's a pretty bizarre premise. If somebody had mentioned saving the rec center you could have called it Step Up 4: Sing It Out.

Here's the thing: I loved the movie! The songs were excellent, the characters were fun, the story moved, the writing was funny and snarky and playful. This movie knew what it was and didn't take itself too seriously. It wasn't mocking the genre or acting like it was only ironically connected to shows like Glee, it was just having so much fun being exactly what it was.

It's important to note that authenticity and being genuine are things that come from happiness as much as they come from angst and pain. My disposition and personality make me crave for things that have authenticity, maybe its inherent and maybe its part of my hipster-proximity. One flaw in this craving is that I find things that are dark or broken or flawed to be more authentic than things that are happy or bubbly or joyful. There's a special place in my heart for songs in a minor key and romantic comedies with bittersweet endings. I'm the guy who loves the movie Friday Night Lights because the team loses the big game.

I think a lot of churches may have this blind spot too. In fact, I think churches are deeply melodramatic at heart. If you really think about it, most churches mirror the plot of a soap opera. We celebrate weddings and births. We encounter death constantly, both in funerals and the crucifixion. There are often tears and life-changing moments of personal insight. There's even a sizable amount of backstabbing and political intrigue.

But when it comes to joy? To excitement and happiness? It comes across forced and out of place. Church is for propriety and solemnity, not fun and enjoyment.

Why is that? Why can't the joy and excitement of the resurrection inspire a church-wide dance party? Why would that seem out of place? Is the church too cool to be authentically deeply happy? Is it too concerned with what it looks like to just have fun being what it is?

The church is like the ragamuffin band of wannabe acapella singers in Pitch Perfect. Black and white, cool and uncool, traditional and iconoclastic, fat and skinny, weird and normal, yet somehow when we embrace those differences and just start to accept them and have some fun being who we are there's a chance for beautiful, transcendent harmony.

Peace,
Ben

When he isn't writing about Pitch Perfect, Ben is listening to the soundtrack. Yes, he bought the soundtrack. It's really, really catchy. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87 or email him at benjamin.howard87 [at] gmail.com.

Also, you can subscribe to On Pop Theology via RSS feed or email on the top right corner of the main page.

Shoulder Punching, Obscenities and Cancer

by Ben Howard

The film 50/50 focuses on a young 20-something named Will Reiser (Joseph Gordon Levitt) and his struggle with cancer and how it changes his everyday life and his view on friends, love and family. It’s easy to focus on the main character of this movie, he’s the hero, he’s the one who overcomes cancer, but I’m more intrigued by the supporting characters and what they show us about how to treat people going through devastating moments in their lives. In particular, I want to focus on Will’s girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) and his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen).

Our natural instinct in a situation like this, a tragedy in the life of a friend, is to play the role of the savior. We swallow our pain and assert our strong stoic exterior. Often it feels like their pain is more important than ours and as a result we no longer express our emotions in a truthful way.   

This is the tack taken by Rachael. Will offers her an opportunity to leave the relationship, but she can’t take it even though later events will make it obvious that she wants to go. This is natural, we don’t want to leave because we want to be the kind of person who can withstand the trauma and the heartache of a tragedy. We want to be the kind of people who can be relied on. We have to be strong, and strong people don’t crack, they don’t break. Until they do.

Eventually, Will discovers that Rachael has been cheating on him and breaks up with her. She vents because he doesn’t understand how difficult it’s been for her. She’s right and he doesn’t, but it’s because she would not allow it. We don’t do those we love any favors when we pretend to have strength we don’t have and pretend we don’t feel things that we really do. Honesty and authenticity are vital.

On the other hand we have Kyle. At points in the movie, Kyle comes across as an immature child and a miserable excuse for a best friend. However, the movie comes to affirm that this is kind of the point.  Kyle IS an immature child, and at times he IS a miserable excuse for a best friend, and he treats Will the exact same regardless of his illness. He treats Will like a person instead of a disease. Sean Burns of the Philadelphia Weekly wrote that Kyle’s, “fundamental, unexpected decency, which can often only be expressed through shoulder-punching obscenities, grows more quietly moving as the picture wears on.”

He isn’t perfect and he often acts out of his own selfish reasoning, but he doesn’t change who he is. Near the end of the movie, we discover that Kyle’s character has been reading a book about supporting a friend going throw cancer, in a quick shot of the book we realize that one of the passages underlined simply says, “Be There.”

I think this is at the crux of dealing with tragedy and dealing with pain. We want to fix things so badly, we want to make things better, we want to provide comfort and explanations when there are none available, but the more I think about it the more I believe that we just need to be there even if that’s just shoulder-punching and obscenities.

Peace,

Ben

You can contact me on Twitter @BenHoward87, via email or just leave a comment. Recommendations and guest posts are always appreciated.

Quoth the Raven

The first of I hope many guest posts.

by Joshua Martin
--------------------------

Jaded Love Interest: “I have a bad feeling about this.”

Sentimental Romantic: “This means something.  This is important.”

Jaded Love Interest: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Sentimental Romantic: “Wuv, twue wuv is what bwings us together today…”

Jaded Love Interest: “I am Iron Man”

Sentimental Romantic: “I love you.”

Jaded Love Interest: “I know.”

From TV to movies to music to comedians to books and on and on and on...until we are virtually incapable of carrying a conversation of our own without quoting that one line from that one place.  Throughout our days we experience a multitude of emotions and thoughts and express them in a culture that is driven by the media we use and consume. From the next song, to the next movie, to the next book to read (and I'm worried books are going out of style) and into a dimension that is filled with constant separation from non-mediated, real world experiences. As a result, we have become more and more influenced by all the noise that surrounds us.

Test a theory for me, the next time you hang out with a group of friends see if someone, perchance even yourself, quotes a movie or a TV show, or a song, or a line that you heard that one time at the one place.  I find from my experience that when we try to be inspiring, or when we try to speak from the heart, we inevitably fall into our grab bag of quotations.  This is not bad, most of us quote a verse from the bible or a good moral compass-type turn of phrase because it conveys our point. Often times we may not carry the cred to actually have a conversation on a particular subject and if we cannot quote a popular saying from our culture our our perspective may come up short.

But when I look on Facebook and see status after status of quotable quotes (myself included), it amuses me that most people are missing the chance to share a significant thought from their own experience.  The popularity of quotations spawns from the access we have to at least one, if not a hundred or a thousand popular quotations.  If randomly asked you to tell a joke or say something inspiring, just imagine the encyclopaedia of quotations that immediately surface.  Sure you could try to pass along your own thoughts, but someone else has already said what you want to say but better and with more effective wordplay.

Quotations aren’t bad, they can be quite useful.  Whether it's to serve as an inspiration or to recall a shared moment between two friends, quotations are meaningful. In conversation with friends a good quotation can call to mind a particular moment and everyone can share in the humor, or the awkward guy in the conversation (a.k.a. me) will often quote something to throw the attention onto something else.

Quotations are a shared experience that make a past experience relevant for a moment. Quotations can alienate or insult as well as bring joy and comfort; they are a mix of experiences that are brought from the past into the present. What was the last thing you quoted, did it give a weight and depth to the thought you wanted to express, give support to a statement or opinion upon which you would take a stand? I guess I’m exploring the function of quotations in society.  Do we utilize them to support our expression and our beliefs or do they allow us to be identified as the "guy that can quote anything" or "girl that can say every line from Princess Bride"? (though that is awesome)  So my challenge is this: Can we relate our own thoughts to others without simply quoting the thoughts and assumed wisdom of others.

It just may be possible, but don't quote me on that. (audible groans commence)

Tales From A Stranger's Living Room Floor

by Ben Howard

Last Friday afternoon, I left work early, got into a car with a close friend of mine and proceeded to drive 3 hours north on I-65 so I could sit on the floor of a strangers living room and listen to a man with a scruffy beard sing sad songs.  This was a great decision!

The scruffily bearded man in question is singer/songwriter David Bazan who some of you may know as the lead singer of Pedro the Lion or from his two most recent albums, Curse Your Branches and Strange Negotiations.  Bazan’s music, especially his solo albums which is the work I’m most familiar with, is intensely introspective and explores themes of doubt and disillusionment both with his faith, his society, and himself.  On top of this, Bazan’s personal story is one that resonates strongly with myself and with the lives of my friends.

Bazan grew up in a conservative Christian home, and like many of us from the same background, rarely questioned what he was taught at an early age.  However, as he aged and matured he began to take a more skeptical look at the things that he was taught and found many of them to be incongruous with the life as he experienced it.  Through his music Bazan has explored his frustration with the church, his frustration with God, his frustration with faith, and like many of my close friends he became quite ambivalent (to be gentle) about the God our society tends to project.

Now, to be clear, I disagree with a lot of the things that Bazan believes.  While I’m certainly ambivalent about our cultures understanding of God, I’m more than convinced that the God of our culture is neither the biblical God or the God of reality.  But I appreciate the artistry of wrestling with issues that are at times very difficult to address, and I admire the honesty of saying things about yourself and your beliefs that while true, are not easy to admit.  Honesty and authenticity are essential to our need to grow and develop as people, to become more like the people we need to be, and in a Christian understanding to become more like the people we were made to be.  In the words of today’s subject, “It’s hard to be a decent human being.”

Peace,

Ben