Teach the Controversy

by Rev. Jason Blanton

"We just don't talk about that kind of stuff!"

That is a common thought among families trying to "get along" during holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. People from far flung reaches of the country, with very different lifestyles and values coming together around the table can be quite challenging, so, in order to make things less challenging, we typically are taught to avoid certain topics.

Politics? Nope, can't talk about that!
How we raise our kids? Off limits.
Religion? Heavens No! (pun intended, wah wah)
How we hang our toilet paper? Forget it!

Unfortunately, that kind of attitude has infiltrated our churches, and so over the years we have avoided really talking about some things that really are quite important to believers, or at least should be. Now, in recent months, a couple of those topics have burst into the public conscience, and many believers have been left asking more questions than non-believers about what it is we actually believe.

It began with Rob Bell's book about Heaven and Hell. You guys remember that little tiff, right? It seems that what we have "always believed" about Hell may not be what WE'VE always believed. Or what we've ALWAYS believed. Or what we've always BELIEVED.

Many Christians were shocked to find that different interpretations of Hell, its nature and/or its existence have been prominent among different walks of faith for centuries - really since the very first theologians began to talk about such things. Yes, there is a general consensus, but it certainly isn't as open and shut as we've been led to believe.

Next came the Rapture - except, well, it didn't come! Evangelical American Christians were thunderstruck to read that a great majority of the world of believers think those "Left Behind" books should have been left behind - on the shelves of book stores.

At this point, the fangs and claws are usually extended, and we begin to divide ourselves up over these issues, not always fully understanding what it is that we think we understand so well.

So what happened?

A few thoughts. First, we've taken the Great Commission, to " as you are going, make disciples, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you..." and we've turned it into "go make converts."

We (I mean Evangelical Christians, because that is my context) have said that the most important thing we can do is get people to "accept Jesus," and we have structured ourselves according to that vision.

Frankly, I think that is all fine and dandy on Sunday Morning. Though I personally don't choose to do things that way, I understand why others do. It would have continued to be fine until we stopped having any other kind of discipleship.

I already hear you saying to your screen, "but Jason, we still have Wednesday services!," or, "we do small groups each week!." Those are great. Sincerely, I mean it, they are great, but they are only great if they are used as they are intended, to allow people to ask and probe and explore the depths of their faith.

If those smaller group times are only about teaching one particular viewpoint, or one particular interpretation, or one particular brand of orthodoxy, then we aren't making disciples at all, we are making robots.

Who do I blame? Me. Well, not just me, but all of my friends and co-workers who pastor churches. You see, we like being liked. And we like being smart. And we like being right.

We don't like when people question us, especially when they do a good job of it!

I distinctly remember going through seminary, and on a daily basis thinking, "why aren't the people in the pews being given any idea that these kinds of debates are happening every day among the people who stand in our pulpits every Sunday?"

I don't know if it is a lack of trust in our congregations, or a lack of trust in God, or a lack of trust in ourselves - but whatever the reason, we haven't done a great job of building theological depth in our modern congregations.

Its time to teach the controversy! Its time to have time set apart, in Sunday School, on Wednesday, or in small groups where people aren't just encouraged to ask questions, but also made to answer questions from believers in other denominations, or from other cultures.

Muscles only strengthen when you work them, and our faith only strengthens when we put it to the test.

I realize most of you reading this aren't preachers, so you may be asking what you can do. Take some initiative. Read more. Read people outside your comfort zone. Ask questions. Work your faith out with fear and trembling, and understand that God is big enough for any questions you may have, and that truth is true no matter how well examined.

Jason Blanton is the pastor of Grace Crossing in Charlotte. This article originally appeared on his blog, http://jasonblanton.blogspot.com/.

Justice for Hector, but a Long Road Ahead

by Rev. Laura Barclay

Friday, September 2, 2011, was over a year in the making for Hector Villanueva, CBFNC pastor and legal resident who faced deportation after applying for citizenship and was arrested for a 15-year-old crime for which he had already served time—cashing a check that wasn’t his while homeless. CBFNC staff organized ministers and laity to pack the courtroom in support, and Hector gave compelling testimony about his transformation in serving God through his ministry and his commitment to his wife and children, which includes two adopted daughters. The judge, moved by his testimony and our support, said that he was convinced of Hector’s “rehabilitation” and canceled his deportation. The judge carefully reminded him that he could never be a citizen under current U.S. immigration law, though his wife and children all enjoy that privilege.

Relief and joy washed over Hector, his family, and reverberated throughout the CBFNC network. We’ve received countless messages of support for Hector over the last year and in the wake of this positive decision. However, the fact that Hector is barred from citizenship is a reminder to us that our system is flawed and there is little room for grace. States across our union are faced with these realities every day. Denominations are suing the Alabama state government for violating the practice of their faith by passing a law indicating that anyone who aids an undocumented immigrant will be arrested. Arizona requires all immigrants to carry and show their papers. Here in North Carolina, our Hispanic Network of Churches is facing a growing crisis. Police officers camp outside their churches, checking the documents of every driver entering for worship. Many of our Hispanic pastors, who are citizens or legal immigrants, have to drive vanloads of members to church because the police can only check the driver’s ID. Our current system is clearly broken, and our immigration quota system has barred many immigrants from ever obtaining citizenship. This means there is no line for those without documents to get into in order to immigrate legally.

We as Christians are called to respond to our neighbor. In Matthew 25:40, Jesus reminds us, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Whatever your opinions on what immigration reform should look like, the gospel is clear in how we should treat the stranger in our midst.

What can you do for your immigrant neighbor? You can begin by getting to know them. Consider a partnership between your church and a Hispanic congregation. Listen to their stories. Learn more about our current immigration system, by non-partisan resources and not from the mouth of a politician trying to get your vote. CBFNC, along with the United Methodist Church and other faith groups, has partnered with the Baptist Center for Ethics to produce a documentary, Gospel Without Borders that can be used in Sunday schools paired with an online discussion guide. Consider attending an upcoming screening. The North Carolina Council of Churches also has an excellent church resource called Becoming the Church Together which includes lessons and a concise time line for learning about the history of immigration.

Throughout Hector’s ordeal, I learned that immigrants have no right to an attorney and no right to benefits other than public education and emergency care. Many states have barred children brought here by their parents from obtaining a college or vocational education. Immigrants are under such hardship they can barely attend church without getting deported. We must ask ourselves what an authentic Christian response looks like in these difficult situations. I, like many of you, am a white, U.S. citizen who has never had to worry about such consequences. Instead of harboring guilt for this privilege, the proactive question remains: How will we use the privilege we were born with to change the system for those who have none? I hope that you will take advantage of one of the above resources and walk with us on the journey.

Love Wins – A Review

by Rev. Laura Barclay

Intrigued by all the controversy about Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell, I delved into this book expecting some shocking revelation similar to one of the tabloids in the grocery check-out aisles (i.e. “Christ Really an Alien!”). Alas, this book is not nearly as controversial as all the media coverage made it seem, and many of the detractors didn’t even read the book before condemning it due to rumors of its content before it hit bookstores. What I can say is this: If I had read this book in college after many bad experiences with churches, I wouldn’t have spent several years outside the church.

Rob Bell is writing this book for “all those, everywhere, who have heard some version of the Jesus story that caused their pulse rate to rise, their stomach to churn, and their heart to utter those resolute words, ‘I would never be a part of that.’(viii)” In other words, he’s talking to those who have left the church because they felt or observed others feeling excluded or judged which was not in keeping with their understanding of a loving God. Bell is careful to cite Scripture and theologians to show that his views are not new, though they may not currently be the loudest narrative on judgment and the afterlife in America.

Bell goes on to address the topics of heaven, hell, end times, and the good news. From my interpretation of his writing, Bell believes that both heaven and hell are present realities that extend beyond death. Jesus talked about the kingdom of heaven being near during his ministry and also talked about being with the thief on the cross in paradise after death. Bell says there is life-giving work that Christians can do to create the community and ministry of Christ on earth and after death. Here, the reality of heaven is not fully realized, and after death we are with God, but still have no body. We must work toward the day when the kingdom of heaven will be joined with earth (forget millennialism and the dozens of failed Rapture dates), answering Jesus’ prayer to see things “on earth as it is in heaven.” Only then will we see the kingdom of God fully actualized as described in Revelation—a beautiful city with open gates.

Additionally, Bell believes that hell is also a present reality that extends beyond death. We can freely choose at any point in this life or the next to live into God’s message of love. Hell isn’t permanent, but a state of being one chooses daily. Rejecting love is its own punishment—the isolation of living for one’s self, of embracing greed, and of not loving one’s neighbor. This is a daily misery from which God desperately wants us to turn. Bell works through all the passages in the Bible related to hell and cites many that talk of God’s love, justice, and grace to point toward a more redemptive, cohesive view of God as one of endless love and hope. Bell believes this view of God is more powerful than one that would limit God’s powers’ of salvation to a specific time period while one is living on earth. Bell states, “So when the gospel is diminished to a question of whether or not a person will ‘get into heaven,’ that reduces the good news to a ticket…The good news is better than that” (179). The good news is that God loves us, and we can be in relationship with a God whose arms are always open.

Ultimately, there will always be a wide range of ideas on the afterlife. Many of these can be healthy when Jesus’ message of love is taken seriously and given the utmost importance over that which we cannot know. I do think that many in my generation (Millenials or Generation Y) who are friends with people of all faiths and no faith see more traditional views on salvation as unhelpful in a post-modern reality. Bell’s book can start a discussion among many who have left the church or are considering leaving. According to Robert Putnam, author of American Grace, the fastest growing group of those considered religiously unaffiliated are young people. Until the 90s, about 5-7% of young people were religiously unaffiliated. That number has risen to between 25-30%. Perhaps beginning a conversation with young people that starts with God’s boundless love rather than fire and brimstone is a good starting place!

Prison Letters/Sacred Writings

by Dr. Tim Moore

Recently, I’ve been reading “prison letters.” I find the experience of reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison depressing. It has been a very different experience than reading MLK’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail, Elie Wiesel’s Night, or Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. Each of them was a survivor. Bonhoeffer never walked free again. During the first year of his imprisonment, he wrote to his fiancé and to his parents of hope that he would have a trial date and would be released on the trumped up charges the Nazis had created. It is clear by the second year that he is aware that he will probably never be released and his only earthly hope of getting out alive is a quick end of the war.

It is however in the second year of his imprisonment that his writing takes on a much deeper level. In the first year of his imprisonment his writing is focused on his assimilation to prison life, concern for his fiancé and family, hope for a trial date, frustration when trail dates are postponed and, most obviously, a hope for being released from prison. By the second year of his imprisonment such “hope” is gone. It frees him to write philosophically and theologically in a more unattached way. It is almost as if he is already an outside observer to our human existence. In one sense he is already dead. The life he knew before he was arrested, before the plot to assassinate Hitler, before the foundation of the Confessing Church as a protest to the Lutheran Church, which supported Hitler, this life was gone. He was buried alive in prison. He could write to family and friends from the grave, even have short, supervised visits with a few of them once or twice a month. But they were visiting the living dead. Bonhoeffer admits in one letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge that he purposely focuses his attention to thinking and writing to avoid his own personal desires, which would be “simply self-torture.” In this way he lived beyond his life.

Christian mystics describe something like Bonhoeffer’s experience. That in the hours, or days, of meditation and solitude they transcend their own lives – forgetting their desires, detaching from their lives – which opens them to God in new and profound ways. But then, of course, their period of meditation ends, and they return to their lives, return from the dead. It is however different for Bonhoeffer, who knows he is under a death sentence. In that sense his writings are sacred, words shared from one whose life is gone but whose heart still beats. It’s also why reading “prison letters” are unlike any other reading.

Tim Moore is the Pastor of Sardis Baptist Church in Charlotte. http://www.sardisbaptistcharlotte.org/home. This article originally appeared in their church newsletter, Signposts.

In Solitude

by Rev. Tommy Bratton

As I near the end of my sabbatical, I am spending time in solitude here in Kentucky at Bethany Spring, the retreat house for the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living, just down the road from the Abbey of Gethsemani where Thomas Merton lived as a monk.

According to the Merton Institute, when living contemplatively, we recognize:

*Our everyday, ordinary life is our spiritual life.

*It is every person’s primary vocation to be fully human, aware of who we are and how we relate to others.

*All relationships are interrelated and we see God in each of them.

*Our spiritual formation cannot take place in isolation. It is grounded in the experience of relationships and community.

*Our personal transformation is the foundation for societal and cultural transformation.

Words like solitude, silence, and contemplation are not words many of us find comforting. We are not used to being alone with ourselves and God. We might even be afraid of solitude. We definitely don’t think we have time or need for it.

But solitude is a time for rest, renewal, refreshment. We all need sacred spaces, “thin places” where the veil between heaven and earth is thin, where we can simply sleep and eat and pray. We need a space where God speaks to us and humbles us and re-commissions us. Do you have a place like that?

Trevor Hudson, in speaking of the transforming nature of solitude, reminded me, “The God who called you to solitude promises to meet you there.” I believe that to be true.

He also quoted Henry Nouwen who once said, “Solitude is the furnace of transformation.”

Here is a poem that I have written while here in the retreat house. While I am not much of a poet, these words reflect my experiences here.

In Solitude

In solitude, I was not alone.

The Spirit that infuses creation spoke loudly
through the chirping of crickets, the fluttering
of birds of all kinds, and the persistent buzzing
of a bee reminding me to respond.

Those whom I love were there in the silence.
I smiled as I recalled (how could I ever forget?) their faces,
their quirks, their hugs, their laughter,
their uniqueness as children of God.

And of course, the shadows were also there -
The need to be loved, the fear of failure,
the competition to be smarter, the temptation
to define others for my own sake.

But in solitude, the shadows are more recognizable and less frightening.

Then, a still small voice in the silence (because I am finally still and small and silent) reminds me . . .
“You are loved.”
“You are accepted.”
“You are not alone.”

In solitude, I can hear the Spirit’s voice.
In solitude, I can see myself more clearly.
In solitude, I am never alone – I am surrounded by love.

Tommy Bratton is the Minister of Christian Formation at First Baptist Church of Asheville. This article originally appeared in his blog, Getting Dressed in the Dark.