Author: skipper

Church on Christmas?

I was surprised to read that some columnists (like this one) are complaining that some churches are choosing not to have services on Christmas day. Even (gasp!) Willow Creek has decided not to open the doors on Christmas. What’s the big deal?

The columnist I linked to says that not having church on Christmas means: 1.) We love things more than we love Jesus. 2.) The church is compromising. 3.) The church is hypocritical. 4.) Non-christians think we are compromising and hypocritical. 5.) The family has become more important than Jesus.

All this because of skipping one service. This leads me to ask the question, what is the purpose of a church service, anyway? According to this guy, we go to show the world that we are self-sacrificing world-haters who would rather attend church than see our families. In his defense, he also says that a church service is an opportunity to “gather with God’s people for worship.” A noble endeavor, of course, but is that it?

To me, it depends on whether the purpose of Christianity is to facilitate church services, or whether the purpose of church services is to facilitate Christianity. I fall into the latter camp. I attend church for the same reason I take my car to the gas station — it’s an opportunity to fuel up. I gain spiritual energy through fellowship and corporate worship, helping me to live the rest of the week as Jesus would have me do. Missing one week doesn’t drain my tank, and some services (you’ve been to them, too) don’t exactly overflow the tank, either.

I didn’t decide to follow Jesus so that I can attend church services. I attend services to help me follow Jesus. Church is not what we do on Sunday morning. Church is when we talk with our friends, when we gather with our families, when we live out our Christian faith in our everyday lives. I don’t know about you, but I definitely will be “attending church” on Christmas.

The shallow atheist

Thanks to djayt for this link to Penn Jillette’s stance on why he is an atheist. When I first read it, I didn’t think much of it. Then I read it again, I still didn’t think much of it.

I first dismissed Jillette’s musings as those of an entertainer, so I shouldn’t expect him to be very deep or insightful. I therefore ignored his errors of logic, his ramblings, and his self-absorbtion. Then I noticed he’s a research fellow at the Cato Institute. Whatever that is (and I don’t know), I guess it’s supposed to make me think that he is someone with something to say. After all, he’s lectured at prestigious universities, written books, and produced TV shows. I’m not sure how the TV shows fit into all this, but I’ll just go with it.

Ok, so let me deconstruct his points. Jillette claims he’s beyond atheism, which he defines as “not believing in God”, whereas he claims to “believe in no God”. If there is a distinction between the two positions, Jillette’s doesn’t make it very well. Whether you say, “I don’t think anything is there” or “I think nothing is there,” you are making this point: “If you look, you won’t find it.” Word games aside, Jillette is an atheist. Why try to get fancy and say something different?

(One point in Jillette’s favor: at least he acknowledges that his atheism is a belief system. By saying, I believe there is no God, he is making a statement of faith, and it’s refreshing to have someone be so open about it.)

His second paragraph begins with a conclusion which he has not established in the least: “So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God.” At best, this is an arbitrary starting point. What reasons does Jillette give for doing this? Absolutely none. How frustrating to have a conversation, even one like this, with someone who presents only conclusions!

Ok, frustrations aside, let’s briefly examine Jillette’s technique for finding God. “She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power,” he says. This is such a backward way of discovering God, although it has been tried for (literally) millennia. If you want to discover natural things, you observe nature, which can be (although not always is) done objectively. If you want to discover supernatural things, you observe….super-nature? How can this be done objectively? The god of our major religions claims to be a spirit; how can a spirit, or the actions, motivations, and effects of a spirit, be observed objectively? If you want to discover whether there is a god (Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or other), then the solution is to pursue him/her/them passionately, fervently, with a hope of finding that which you seek. Oops, hope isn’t objective. See? You can’t get there from here. (Side point: has Jillette actually searched for this evidence, objective or not? He makes no claim to do so. Instead, he makes a statement of faith: “I believe in no God,” then proceeds from there. Sigh.)

I feel sympathy for Jillette. He sees the truth staring at him, yet doesn’t realize it. He describes his wonderful life (love, blue skies, rainbows), and acknowledges that he has “won the huge genetic lottery” and needs nothing else. To summarize: I have a happy life on earth because there is no God. That is apparently good enough for Jillette, what about those among us without earthly happiness? More on them later.

Jillette impressed me with the word “solipsistic.” I had to look it up. Then I wondered if Jillette looked it up. The definition I found was: “The theory or view that the self is the only reality”. Now, Jillette is saying that his atheism keeps him from being solipsistic. So he’s saying that believing in no God keeps him from viewing himself as the only reality? But isn’t the opposite true? By saying, “I have found no objective evidence for God, therefore no God exists,” Jillette is claiming that his is the only reality, his experience is the only one that matters, and that if something is outside of his perception, it either does not exist or is irrelevant. Sounds like a pretty good definition of solipsistic to me.

It bothered me that Jillette took pot shots at religious people. My children, who have studied logic, would call this a Straw Man Fallacy. Jillette describes religious people as those who say, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means [sic] more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” If Jillette has had the misfortune to associate with that type of religious person, I understand his distaste for religion. However, that’s like hating Ray Kroc because a McDonald’s employee treated you poorly. Don’t blame Ray for the ignorance of his employees, and don’t blame God because some of his followers are idiots. And especially, don’t deny His existence because of it.

The Straw Man of an ignorant religious person is easy to knock down. How about taking a shot at Mother Theresa? That’s not so easy to do.

Finally, Jillette gets to what apparently is his real point, which is the old “If God were as good as I am, things would be much better on the earth” complaint. I don’t have much to say about this for Jillette, because he just finished telling us how his life is so great precisely because he doesn’t believe in God. Now he says that the lives of other people are so bad that they also demonstrate there is no God. Can you have it both ways? Apparently, if you’re a research fellow at the Cato Institute, you can.

The myth of safety

I heard a sermon the other day, and it started me thinking. (Isn’t that what good sermons are supposed to do?) The preacher was, among other things, encouraging us to steer clear of some of the supernatural things out there in the world (psychics, etc — it was around Halloween), and to concentrate instead on safe ways of encountering God.

The pastor encouraged us to find God in the following: salvation and baptism, growing the fruit of the Spirit, and ministering to the poor and needy. These, he described, are safe ways of finding God.

That was the term that started me thinking: safe. I started thinking back to the God-encounters folks in the Bible had, and how many of them could be described as safe. Starting from the front and working backward, I think we can agree that the apostles did not choose safety when they opted to follow Jesus. Jesus himself chose to put himself quite literally in harm’s way in order to please his Father. No one can say the life of a prophet was safe; not only was it life-threatening, but it was embarrassing to boot (Ezekiel playing with army men, then lying on his side for over a year is an example). Gideon, Moses, Abraham — all chose the unsafe way.

Before I go on, let me try to define “safe” in this context. Things are safe when the results are predictable. They are safe when others have done them first. They are safe when the welfare of our families is not threatened. And they are safe when we can stop at any moment.

So why do we play it safe? I agree that there are risks with trying to find God in the unsafe: we could have bad theology, we could encounter evil, we could look foolish, we could make mistakes. But God is asking us to take risks; He wants us to find Him in the unsafe.

Those things the preacher suggested are truly ways to encounter God, but we all too often limit ourselves to those ways, and we avoid anything that might be unsafe. Mike Yaconelli said, “We have defanged the tiger of truth. We have tamed the lion… The tragedy of modern faith is that we no longer are capable of being terrified.” I think it’s all too true, and moreover, we studiously avoid being put in a place where we could be terrified.

Let me close with a lengthier Yaconelli quote, which of course says it better than I could:

I would like to suggest that the Church become a place of terror again; a place where God continually has to tell us, “Fear not”; a place where our relationship with God is not a simple belief or a doctrine or theology, it is God’s burning presence in our lives. I am suggesting that the tame God of relevance be replaced by the God whose very presence shatters our egos into dust, burns our sin into ashes, and strips us naked to reveal the real person within. The Church needs to become a gloriously dangerous place where nothing is safe in God’s presence except us. Nothing — including our plans, our agendas, our priorities, our politics, our money, our security, our comfort, our possessions, our needs.

Pot and kettle

I saw this posting, and it reminded me that people are the same, no matter how they define themselves.

To summarize the post, this woman apparently describes herself as emerging, and is looking for a job in a “culturally relevant church”. She found a job description which seems perfect for her. (You really need to read that job description. Wonder if we could use it here….) Then she finds out that this particular community does not accept women in the lead teaching position, and watch the fur fly.

She and the folks on her blog proceed to take this church apart, in unflattering, ungenerous, and (dare I say) unChristian ways. Apparently, Ms. Pittman has already determined what an emergent, culturally-relevant church believes, and the ordination of women is on the list.

Others who respond agree with her in the most uncharitable terms, post email addresses of the church staff, predict they’ll “never emerge” (is that a goal, anyway?), and in general buffet the church for not thinking the same way they do. Sounds like something the modern churches would do.

One staff member from this church responded to the posting, trying to describe his church’s situation, but he was roundly dismissed as being disingenuous (read: lying), and the flogging went on.

If you skip down to the bottom, the third-to-last post (this morning, anyway, from Anonymous at 1:52pm) says more or less what I was thinking: this group of emergents is no different than the groups they are emerging from. In our zeal to get the world (or the church) to see our point of view and do something about it, sometimes we forget the big picture, which is to continue to look like Jesus in the midst of it.

Whether the issue is ordination of women, or incense in the service, isn’t one of the main points of the emerging discussion to “broaden the tent”, as it were, and allow more freedom of expression — not just different expressions — into the church?