Quitting Christianity: What Anne Rice is teaching us all

Greetings bloggers!

A few months ago, Anne Rice stated on her Facebook page that in the name of Jesus Christ, she was quitting Christianity and was no longer a Christian.

It's taken me this long to get around to this post because that sentence is tough to wrap your mind around. How can a person quit Christianity in the name of Jesus? What's really at the heart of Anne Rice's comment here? What does it mean for those of us who are in the Church and in Church leadership?

Rice's comments make sense in a world where we're told it's perfectly ok to be spiritual but not religious. On the plus side, it would appear to this casual observer that there are more people than ever who are interested in the life and teachings of Jesus. People are opening the scriptures and seeing the God of the Universe who cares for and loves their souls. These people fall head over heels for the savior.

But they simply can't stand his followers.

These folks read the scriptures, particularly the teachings of Jesus, and as their eyes glance up from the page they notice that the people in the pews around them are nothing like the savior has asked of them. They see the horrible things we are capable of doing in the name of Jesus, the way we treat each other, and the way we treat people who disagree with us, and they want out.

So the question is, can you be spiritual, but not be religious? Is it possible to lead a life of devotion to Christ but not be a part of the community of faith? Yes and no I think. I understand the heart of this feeling, the desire to distance oneself from "organized religion" (a phrase I find pretty funny, because as someone who works in the church I realize that it's seldom organized). I can even understand feeling like you're capable of accomplishing more on your own than you could with a group of infighting Christians.

But the truth is, you need that connection. You need that community. You need encouragement when things aren't going your way and challenge to see things differently when needed. You need to have your viewpoints challenged by caring and loving people who are willing to invest in you. I personally think everyone should be a part of a small group, a team of people who will listen to your life stories and help you put things in perspective. Sure, the Church can be ugly. To quote Augustine, the Church may be a whore, but she's my mother.

So Anne, I see where you might have felt compelled to quit Christianity. But I also beg you to seek out those of us who are trying to make authentic and purposeful communities, trying to live the life that Jesus has laid out for us.

Perhaps we should spend less time worrying about being Christians and worry more about being disciples.

Godspeed,

J

Why we need church unity more than ever.

Hello again!

I've been working through some thoughts for the blog, and really trying to rediscover what it is that I'm passionate about. As I keep bouncing back and forth through ideas, I keep coming back to how much it breaks my heart to see how the Church (big C = everybody) is divided and separated. There are issues that I think are funny, and issues that make me angry, but there are so few issues that can break my heart like the knowledge that our Church body is falling apart at the seams in some places.

Take for instance my own denomination, the lovely and wonderful Presbyterians. A few years ago now (I can't believe this has been going on that long!) we began a debate on whether or not we could ordain homosexual pastors. Well, actually we dipped our toes in the water of debate by taking back roads and attempting to hide our true intentions rather than open ourselves up to actual honest and authentic debate, but that's all semantics. Since then, we've seen churches engaged in lengthy lawsuits and arguments with their Presbyteries in an attempt to leave. When I get right down to it, I get angry with churches on both sides of this debate. If a church can no longer stay in the Presbytery because of serious and legitimate disagreements, we shouldn't make that harder for them by blocking their land use or trying to sue them broke. We should shake hands and say "Go in peace and love." On the other hand, I don't know that the issue is big enough to warrant picking up our ball and heading home. If we aren't in communion together, we aren't going to challenge each other and we're never going to grow.

I blame Martin Luther. Actually, I bet if the great thinkers of the Reformation were still around they'd be furious at us. Luther never intended to break away from Catholicism, just as Wesley never intended to break away from the Church of England and Calvin never intended to start his own denomination. These guys were deep thinkers and revolutionaries who saw the need for change, but not a desire for division.

Not to mention the things that divided the church then were significantly more severe than several of the divisions we face today. Luther was torqued because the church was trying to sell Christ's free gift of grace, an outrage to end all outrages. Some denominations split these days over the color of the carpet and whether a guitar can be used in worship. Priorities people, priorities.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe there are issues that are bigger than we can work past that I'm just not seeing. But as I mentioned in a previous post this week, I'm also seeing a newer and younger generation of Church leaders stepping up and begging for the Church to rejoin in communion together, to prepare ourselves for the wedding feast of the Lamb on the last days.

What do you think about our divisions? And perhaps more importantly, how do you think we can bring the church back together?

Godspeed,

Jason

Book Review: Hear No Evil by Matthew Paul Turner

Hello bloggers!

Every vacation seems to come with a beach read. This vacation was also the first to have my new iPad with me, so I did what you would expect of any youth pastor with an inability to focus would do: I spent the first three days trying to decide what to read.

But then, once I got settled in, I landed on Matthew Paul Turner's book Hear No Evil. The first chapter alone is worth the entire price of the book. The only complaint I had was that at times Turner is so funny I laughed out loud, which made reading the book in public a bit of a challenge.

Turner walks us through his upbringing in a Fundamentalist Baptist church which seemed to have a unique relationship with music and the blossoming Christian music industry. It was a little difficult to read through some of the chapters that dealt so heavily with his baptist up bringing, as it was incredibly different from my own Presbyterian Heritage. It's weird to think that there might such a thing as denominational culture shock, but there absolutely is.

Hear No Evil is an absolute must read for anyone with even the slightest hopes of making it in the Christian Music Industry. As someone who spent some time on the inside, Turner exposes some of the more hypocritical nature of the industry. There are lots of stories in the book that I don't want to spoil, but let's leave it at this: Christian music isn't all sunshine and rainbows.

After I finished this book, I was so in love with Turner's writing style that I picked up a few of his other books on my Kindle for iPad app, and I'm sure I'll be reading them soon. But in the meantime, I highly recommend following him on twitter (@jesusneedsnewpr) and checking out his blog (be warned: he sometimes gets a little edgy...but then again I like edgy!). As for Hear No Evil, I give it two thumbs way the heck up!

Godspeed,

Jason

Caption Contest.

While we've had a lot of readers, and some pretty lively Facebook conversations, we should have some fun and take advantage of it with a good old fashion caption contest!

Come up with a funny caption for the photograph above and leave your entry in either the comments or on the Facebook post linked to the post. And in fact, we'll offer up some real life prizes this time! Deadline for entries will be 5:00 tomorrow. I'll pick the funniest caption, and the winner will get a free entry for the Veritas kick off if they're a student, or a lunch with me at my favorite spot (Sarku Japan) on the day of their choosing.

Good luck!

J

Where do you get your news?

Greetings Bloggers,

Home from vacation, and while I'm headed back to work on Tuesday, I figure I should make the best of my free time while it was left. After all, we had close to 300 hits here on the blog while I was away! Thanks for reading!

This week I covered some pretty dicey subjects from the news. We talked about the "Mosque" at ground zero, the issue of homosexual marriage and prop 8, and my overall distaste for Christian Rap. With the exception of the rap business, I posted most of what I did for two reasons: 1) because I had a fairly strong opinion on each of these issues, and 2) because they were all over the news. While I was working through each of the issues, you may have noticed that I took a couple of cracks at the media. I'm not wild about them.

Politics and spirituality in my mind don't mix, or at least not in the way that we seem to be mixing them these days. For instance, often when a person takes the bible very seriously and reads it on a daily basis, that person and those actions are labeled "conservative." If a person is serious about social justice, that person is typically labeled "liberal." So what happens to a person like me, who takes scripture very seriously, and is serious about social justice? Are we liberal, conservative, centrist? Or is it perhaps that the labels from our political system do not apply in any way to our faith system?

Which leads us to our problem with the media. Pick a station, any station to get news. Fox = Conservative. CNN = Liberal. MSNBC = Very Liberal. Even though TV is my chosen mode of transportation, it turns out newspapers, blogs, radio, and other forms of news media all fit into these left or right categories. So if you want to gather information about a news story, particularly a story that might affect your faith, which station do you use? Who do you turn into? I'll leave that up to the comments section tonight, leave a note and tell me where you turn to.

Enjoy the new layout!

Godspeed,

Jason

Prop 8 (And what it means for you!)

Hello friends!

I've been seemingly getting more and more controversial around here the last couple of days, so why not go the whole nine yards and bring up gay marriage again.

Let's start in the owners manual. As my beautiful and talented wife pointed out on her blog (http://sarahfett.blogspot.com/2010/08/homophobia-is-gay.html) (my linky thing is broken or something...sorry) the Bible is fairly clear on homosexual behavior, but fails to say anything at all about homosexual orientation. According to the Scriptures, you can feel however you want, acting on it is a bit of a problem.

I understand that the question of whether or not homosexuality is a sin or not is a pretty hot button topic, and that I don't know where I am, but let's push it as far to one side as we can take it for the moment and say for the sake of argument that it is 100% a sin. Let's say that a person is actively engaged in a homosexual lifestyle (a phrase that makes as little sense as "christian coffee shop," but whatever) but has accepted Jesus into their hearts as Savior. Wouldn't that make them beloved forgiven sons and daughters of God? Wouldn't that wipe clean their transgressions? Wouldn't that put them in exactly the same boat you and I find ourselves in?

But Jason (I can hear some of you screaming through your computers), they're living in sin and are not repentant of their sins. Fair point. Did you know that we have hard evidence that 74% of Americans age 18-34 are in that very same place? They knowingly participate in a forum of sin and debauchery, directly in opposition of Romans 1:25-31. They openly admit it, and in fact it's become such a part of the American culture that we have adopted part of the lexicon of this sin into our everyday lives.

I'm referring of course to Facebook.

Facebook is a center for little more than gossip, isn't it? Youth leaders, back me up on this, when was the last time you had a meeting where you DIDN'T hear someone say "Did you see what happened to so and so on Facebook?" or "Well everyone on Facebook is commenting on so and so's page" or "I have to get home so I can check on Facebook and stalk people." We all know that Facebook is a place for little more than gossip at best, and slanderous talk at worst, and according to our passage in Romans (typically used to oppose same-sex marriage) we see that it's a sin. Yet most of us unrepentantly continue to live a life consumed by this particular sin.

If you want to get a good feel on how severe a sin is, I would venture a guess that the number of times Jesus mentions it in the Gospels is a pretty good indicator of how important it is to God, right? Do you know how many times Jesus mentions homosexuality, orientation or behavior? Never. Zero. Nada. Go ahead and check me out on that, but while you're doing it, check out how many times Jesus talks about divorce, and then count the number of divorced people in your congregation. We seem eager to forgive them (as we should), but Jesus had some pretty harsh words for them. If we're going to be harsh with our homosexual brothers and sisters, then shouldn't we have some harsh words for those who have been divorced for reasons beyond infidelity? Or do we need to be harsh with anyone at all?

The trick is, if we're going to make the claim that homosexual behavior is a sin, and that is absolutely the worst thing we can say about it, then friends it's time to stop treating those folks like they're living a great life of debauchery while you and I are living a holy and blameless life. No one is blameless. Probably the most under rated and forgotten part of God's gift of Grace is that is levels the playing field. I am certainly no better than you, just as you are no better than me. In Christ's eyes, we're all the same.

As I mentioned on the blog yesterday, you and I have two jobs as believers in Christ. We have to love the Lord with all we've got, and love our neighbors as ourselves. If you keep reading you'll find the third job, to go and make disciples of all nations. These three things above all have we as Christians been called to.

I can't find on Google an exact breakdown of how much was spent on Proposition 8, with legal fees and propaganda and advertising and what have you, but I bet if we could it would be an astronomically big number. If you were a person of homosexual orientation, and you looked at the sensational amount of money the church was willing to spend to keep you from being happy, what are the chances you would be willing to accept Jesus Christ? What are the chances you would be ok hearing a person talk about the freedom that Christ has to offer? What are the chances that you would be wanting to walk through a door and find love in a church? Probably slim to none.

The truth is, we can't force everybody in this country to be Christian through the laws we pass, which is essentially what things like Prop 8 are trying to do. If your church or denomination is uncomfortable with gay marriage going on, that's fine and that's your choice. But we shouldn't force that choice on people who don't know the love and forgiveness of our savior. It's a religiously free nation, and if Jews are allowed to celebrate Passover and Muslims are allowed to celebrate Ramadan and the best you can come up with for the reason homosexuals can't marry is because the bible defines marriage as between a man and a woman, then we can't tell people it's illegal. It's simply not our place.

The bottom line for me is that I celebrate and worship a Savior, not a religion. Absolutely nothing would make me happier than to share with each and every person on the planet the great and surpassing love of Jesus. The truth is that I don't think we can do that while we're angrily telling people what they can and can't do. Let's start with spreading the love of Christ, and then move on to other issues as they come up.

That love of course applies to the comments on the blog and Facebook! I'd love to have a lively debate, but let's keep love first and foremost in our hearts. Game on!

Godspeed,

Jason

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:W Market St,Breezy Point,United States

The Mosque at Ground Zero: My Thoughts

Good morning friends!

While we're up here at the beach house, we have access to something that Sarah and I have missed a little bit more than we probably should: Cable TV. Yes friends, that endless stream of "information" is back in our lives. And while we've been using it appropriately every day (CSI: Miami, NHL Network, and Ghost Hunters to name a few), there have been times that we've turned our attention to things we probably shouldn't (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and The Daily Show to once again name a few).

It's been interesting to remind myself of how if you watch CNN for any extended period of time, you'll come away feeling like a story is impacting each and every citizen of the union for days at a time, but the fact is it's impacting almost no one, they just use the story to keep people watching. When you go without the 24 hour news channels for a while, you quickly realize that most of the stories they offer are not as big as they make them out to be, nor will they have any impact at all on your day.

That said, I want to make sure people are reading my blog, so I'm going to imply their very same tactics and talk about the Mosque at Ground Zero here in NYC.

Truly, since we started turning on the TV here, almost all you hear about is the proposed Islamic Community Center in Manhattan. I hear CNN rant about it, I hear Keith Olberman rant about it, I hear Glen Beck rant about it, and then at the end of the night I hear John Stewart make fun of all three of them for ranting about it. It's as though this story is the only thing that matters in the United States right now.

Let's clear up a few things before we go any further. The word "Mosque" is probably inappropriate here. From what I've heard and read (which admittedly isn't that much, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) this will be a community center, offering activities and recreational opportunities to the community at large. It will indeed have some space to pray upstairs, but it is not an official house of worship where people gather each week. Also, the words Ground Zero are a bit over-exadurated as well. The news networks can't seem to agree on whether it's 2 or 4 blocks away from Ground Zero (we could launch into a whole debate on how it would be seemingly impossible for these "news" agencies to spin a measured distance like "blocks", but who has the time?). I spent the better part of the day walking around New York City, and 2 blocks is a bit of distance. Sure I'm out of shape, but I broke a sweat walking two blocks when Sarah and I accidentally got off at the wrong subway stop and had to walk back to our car. 2 blocks is not "right next" to anything in this city. It becomes even less so when you realize that those two blocks are often filled with sky scrapers that block out things like the sun.

But this of course is a youth ministry driven blog, and thusly a Christian driven blog, so I'd like to set aside any and all political ramifications of this issue and speak to those of us who are bold enough to claim to be disciples on how we should be responding here.

Jesus was once tested on what the greatest commandment in the scriptures were. In a stunning moment of clarity (usually Jesus answers these questions with a more confusing question), Jesus replies "Love the Lord with all your heart, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. All of the laws and the prophets hang on these two commandments." What this means for us is that if you are acting on something, and you think it jives with a piece of scripture, yet doesn't allow you to fully love God or love your neighbor, you've missed part of the message. Something is wrong. So when we Christians are taking a look at the "Mosque" story, if our hearts are filled with anything less than love for the people involved, then we've failed in some capacity. Yes, it's a messy situation. Yes, people who claimed to represent Islam did a horrible thing on September 11th. I strongly recommend we re-associate ourselves with some of the things people have done who claim to represent Christianity (The Klu Klux Klan, The Crusades, Slavery, Apartheid, and Christian Rap just to name a couple) to get a feel for how easy it is for a religion to be mis-represented. Islamic extremists are not the same as all Muslims, and in fact they are a GROSS misrepresentation of the values and ideals taught in the Koran. So when I look at our Muslim brothers and sisters, I don't feel hate. I feel compassion. I feel empathy for what they've had to endure because of the foolishness and evil intentions of the vocal few in their midst. My heart is full of love, and in fact it's because that's what Jesus insisted it needed to be full of.

The second thing is we have to be honest and look at the goals these folks are trying to acomplish. To build a community center is (I would assume) an attempt on their part to better the community around them. They are attempting to make the world a better place. Take a quick look at one of my favorite Scriptures, Matthew 25:31-46 and ask yourself a hard question: Are they doing a better job of following Jesus' commands than we are? Sure, there are Christian community centers all over New York City and the world, and they're doing fantastic work. But every time I hear a Christian spout off on one of the "news" networks, I wonder how much time and energy he or she put into that appearance to speak against the "Mosque", and how much good that energy could have done if applied in a different direction. They're trying to better the community, and we're trying to stop them (or at least that's how it's playing out in the news). What if instead of investing our precious time and energy in opposing something beautiful coming out of a different religion, we tried to create even more beautiful things in our religion? I mean, I don't want to turn this into a competition between the Christians and the Jews and Muslims as to who can improve their community the most, but honestly if we were in such a competition, we'd be getting our butts kicked, and we're the ones told to love our neighbors as ourselves.

These are just my thoughts. Again, I understand that this is a difficult subject (just wait till tomorrow when I think I'm going to tackle Prop 8!), so I welcome criticism and encouragement. But above all, let's remember the call we were given, to love God with all our hearts, and love our neighbors as ourselves. If our conversations don't line up with that, what good are they? If our actions don't line up with that, they're worthless. If our lives don't line up with that, are we truly to call ourselves disciples?

Godspeed,

Jason




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:W Market St,Breezy Point,United States