THE PLASTIC CITY
Late this morning I took a run on the Katy Trail, a 3.5 mile one-way paved trail that runs from Highland Park (where my church is) into uptown. It’s cool because it actually ends at the American Airlines Center, on the west side of a posh area of town.
Because of the location of the trail, you’re more likely than not to be passing young, white, middle-to-upper class people out for a walk, jog, or bike ride.
The more and more I run on the Katy Trail (and generally spend time in Dallas), the more and more I notice something strange…
If Chicago is the Windy City…
and Detroit is the Motor City…
and Philadelphia is the City of Brotherly Love…
LA is the City of Angels…
Maybe Dallas is the Plastic City?
Even in the midst of a recession, I can tell you it looks like there’s no shortage of work for plastic surgeons in the area.
Which reminds me of how superficial this town can be. On Valentine’s night, Ashley and I went to the Hilton Anatole close to downtown and spent the night away from parenting responsibilities. In our room was one of those typical magazines that describes the local flavor and entices visitors to partake in the local culture. By reading that magazine, you’d conclude one thing: the only thing there is to do in Dallas is shop and impress people.
Dallas may be the heartbeat of Texas, but it’s also a place where superficial lifestyles and elitism is pervasive. Everyone is trying to get ahead in every respect—money, family, appearances, cars, clothing, bodies, education, sports.
Which brings me back to something that kept being brought up at the Q Conference—the idea of being countercultural for the common good. What this looks like is for small groups of people, maybe 2-3, to start to put their privilege at risk to create cultural “beachheads.”
A beachhead is a clog in the system. It stakes a small claim on an area (not necessarily physical) and says “this is mine,” and you’ll have to pay attention. The point of a cultural beachhead is to make you think differently about things. To disrupt the rhythm of your routine and make you reflect critically on the way you’re living.
What will it mean to create a cultural beachhead in Highland Park? in Dallas? What will it look like?
And more importantly, who will try it with me?
david crowder is the future of worship
Funniest moment from Q 2009 —
David Crowder’s presentation was “The Future of Worship.”
When he first got on stage yesterday morning, he quickly (and jokingly) apologized… because, as he said, there was a confusion about the title of his presentation. He said that he believed Gabe asked him “what he wanted to be called,” not “what he wanted his presentation to be called.”
Naturally, Crowder suggested that that’s exactly what he wanted to be called and believed he was: The Future of Worship.
A couple of interesting tidbits of learning, and I’ll continue to follow up with this over the coming days:
- Tim Keel (The Gospel Revisited) spoke about the 4 narratives of Hebraic life in Jesus’ day: Creation, Exodus, Exile, & Priest. He talked about how our Gospel perception is almost exclusively shaped by a Priestly narrative, which emphasizes personal holiness. This, interestingly, is the narrative Jesus calls on the least. Keel’s plea was for a recovery of a full Gospel.
- Shane Hipps (Spirituality of the Cell Phone) said that Benedictine Monks were responsible for the creation of the modern clock. They created it to rigorously orient their prayer life—on the hour, every hour. It was supposed to bring them closer to God. If we trace the development of technology and culture, the clock was instrumental in giving rise to the Industrial Revolution, which in turn leads us into the predicament of working our tails off to earn money. The modern rat race of money and business does as much as anything in our world to keep us from God. The very thing that was created to help people grow close to God actually ends up keeping us from God (the dark side of technology).
- George P. Bush (Brown America) talked about the future of America. By 2050, America will be a majority minority nation. This has profound implications for our future as America and for a Christian church in this nation. We have to start to learn to be thoughtful and reflective about the future (which, coincidentally, is sort of Gabe Lyons’ whole ethos behind the conference).
do you want to be challenged?
From the conversations I’ve had and the way most churches position themselves, it seems to me that most people choose a church based on the level of comfort they perceive and experience.
People will ultimately settle on a church they best connect with, find people similar to them, have their needs met, and/or experience a level of general satisfaction with.
These things, in my experience, far outweigh (it’s not even close) how hard the church pushes them to fulfill the mission of God or to grow in their discipleship.
Why?
Let’s say you wanted to choose a training program to lose weight, or maybe a trainer to help you.
What would be your primary characteristic of evaluation?
Would you want a training program that primarily pushed you hard to lose weight efficiently and effectively?
Or would you choose a training program that kept you comfortable?
Because here’s the thing: you’ll never lose weight staying comfortable.
Now, notice I spoke about the “primary” thing. Being satisfied and comfortable have their place. But they should not be primary.
After all, you don’t want a workout program that causes harm to your body by overworking you or incorrectly working you out.
Why would we be more passionate about losing weight than living a life that glorifies God? It seems that our criteria for our life of faith often leaves something to be desired.
prophetic moments
When I use the word “prophet,” what do you think of?
It’s a very intriguing word to me. When you’re a kid, you mostly understand it used to describe someone who predicts the future. Then, in my experience, you go through a period where people explain that (at least in Biblical/Christian views), the word is used to describe someone who interprets the future—perhaps through visions, dreams, etc.
I’ve been doing some Googling this morning to see what others say. After my first line of defense—Dictionary.com—came up empty, I had to resort to other avenues. Here are some thoughts from the interweb…
Wikipedia
In religion, a prophet is a person who has claimed to have been encountered by the supernatural or the divine, often one who serves as an intermediary with humanity.
In Christianity a prophet is one inspired by God through the Holy Spirit to deliver a message for a specific purpose. It is often associated with predicting future events…
Princeton Wordnet
an authoritative person who divines the future; someone who speaks by divine inspiration
The Free Dictionary
1. A person who speaks by divine inspiration or as the interpreter through whom the will of a god is expressed.
2. A person gifted with profound moral insight and exceptional powers of expression.
3. A predictor; a soothsayer.
and again, from Wikipedia
Traditionally, prophets are regarded as having a role in society that promotes change due to their messages and actions.
The prophetic function in the Biblical narrative is probably more closely related to this last definition from Wikipedia. The prophets in the Old Testament, in the Nevi’im (the Hebrew Bible’s component of the Prophetic Books—divided into Former Prophets and Latter Prophets), are more expansive than most people realize. Kings, Samuel, Judges and Joshua are part of the Hebrew Canon as prophetic books.
I would say that these books, anything from Kings to Isaiah to Amos, hold a few things in tension:
First, they are honest about the way things are. Are the people sinful and disobedient? Boom! Called out! The prophets had a way of getting right to point and being completely honest. No sugar coating, no sparing the people, they did the work that had to be done.
Second, they see (you can use the word predict, I guess) the way things are supposed to be. These people are incredibly convicted by the way God created the world. In their heads, through visions and dreams and prayers, they are constantly wrestling with and talking about a world they can only see in the future. It’s a better world, where justice flows like rivers and things are put to rights. Where people worship the One who created them. The prophets can see the world God intended, and it’s bigger and more complex than any one nation-state becoming powerful and dominant.
Third, they allow the entrance of Prophets and prophetic moments into the story. And the function of these moments and people are to push things from the way they are to the way they are supposed to be. They call the people into a better reality.
The primary function of Prophets in the Bible is to push the people Israel to a better way of living, the way in which they were called as the people of God. Prophets were weird, abstract, edgy, and extreme. They talked strange and acted strange. They were always talking about and for the will of God.
They were people on the fringe of society, pushing society to be better. It was required that they be so abnormal that they literally dealt a severe blow to the status quo. They ruffled feathers by not just offering a social critique, but by finding clever and creative ways of living out a social critique.
These were and are not normal people.
And I would argue that this is very intentional. There is a distinct separation between prophets and the rest of the people. If everyone acted like those prophets, then things would never get done. Everyone would be depressed. Prophets and the prophetic function are just a part of the picture, if even a beautiful and disturbing part.
The point I want to make in looking at prophets is also to analyze the idea of prophetic moments in our lives. I think we have experiences—short term, one time, long term, etc.—which act in a prophetic way in our lives.
They’re weird, abnormal, and extreme. They’re highly convicting and probably original. They are not the norm but they are meant to change us.
Please think about that and don’t throw it away: they are not the norm but they are meant to change us.
They push on us and prick our imaginations. They call us out on our crap and give us a picture of a better reality, a better world. They give us a glimpse of what the world should be like, maybe in combination with how the world is, and then call us to align ourselves with that vision.
Prophetic moments make us feel justice deep down in our bones and they disturb our sleep. They mess with our heads and we should come out on the other side of the encounter somehow different.
Be on the lookout for prophetic moments. Savor them (though they may be painful), learn from them, and let them infect you with a passion for a better way of life. And then go, do something about it. Don’t dwell on it and by all means, don’t throw it away.
Jesus Christ said of Himself: “I am the life,” and this claim, and the reality which it contains cannot be disregarded by any Christian thinking, or indeed by any philosophical thinking at all. This self-affirmation of Jesus is a declaration that any attempt to express the essence of life simply as life is foredoomed to failure and has indeed already failed.
Feed a brother
A few moments ago I was reading the 11th Chapter of Acts. As I’m slowly reading through the book, I’m trying to remain in the framework of Luke’s intention for writing the book. He was writing up a specific account with some goal in mind, explaining the action of the earliest followers of Christ. If you’re familiar with Acts 11, you’ll remember that it includes the account of the church at Antioch, where “the disciples (of Jesus) were first called Christians.” It’s the place where they were, for their love and obedience, they were known as Little Christs. That’s an amazing honor. It then reads:
And one of them named Agabus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world (this took place in the days of Claudius). So the disciples determined, everyone according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea. And they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabus and Saul. [Acts 11.28-30, emphasis added]
Jesus had told his followers that the world, specifically those who hadn’t joined their Order, would be able to identify them by their love for one another. By their care, concern, compassion, and ultimately submission to the goodness of something greater than themselves. And this makes sense right? It lines up well.
Here’s what confuses me. In our day, there’s a great trend towards volunteerism and social agendas mixed with the Gospel. And some of it’s good, because we should be feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. We should, as Christians, be charitable and benevolent, serving and giving. But in Luke’s documentation (his story) of the earliest Christians, he specifically points out that they were giving towards other Christians.
I have to believe by the telling of history that these earliest Christians were probably generous towards non-Disciples during the days of Claudius and the sufferings of the Roman Empire. But here we have Luke specifying, for some purpose, that the Christians were benevolent to each other as a natural reaction to the circumstances.
If we abstract it from the context of feeding the poor during famine… maybe we learn that our generosity and grace towards our brothers and sisters in Christ is absolutely vital. So whether we want to call people names or fling our rhetorical poo across the Evangelical room, we’ll be ruining our cause until we learn to be the Church united.
How will the world know us? By our love.
There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice
Absence
In the moment when God seems most absent, he is strangely most present.
With the suffering of Jesus on the Cross, the subsequent burial, and then the haunting absence of his presence in Jerusalem, the day after must have been peculiar for most and even more painful for some.
A few were relieved, and a handful were perplexed.
We often talk about experiencing death, and even more about experiencing resurrection—but what does it mean for us to experience today? To experience the moments of burial?
When you’re dunked in the waters and then pulled back out, what’s the significance of the moments you spend immersed? Not the action, not the result, just the experience of being absent.
In the moment when death has overtaken Christ and he is yet to rise, it appears God is absent. Missing. Resigned.
But maybe in those moments he is as engaged with His Love as he has ever been.
Because in that experience is the culmination of His identification with Us. All that He is colliding with all the we are not. And without such, we cannot experience Sunday.
This day, in the Great Absence, we learn what we cannot do. We cannot fight for ourselves.
Yet there is one who is fighting to take our place and will be victorious in our place. I am thankful for the Absence. That eerie, lonesome, abandoned absence. Because on this day, we are forced to wrestle with our helplessness.
I'm a runner, writer, thinker, and pastor. I love to agitate people's consciences. I like to spend my time reading, running, and relaxing with family & friends.