Musings on the subject of church - Part II

They say that by attending Regent College you will acquire a taste for Anglicanism and beer.  although the second is true I want to talk about the first: Anglicanism.
It's not necessarily true that you will become an Anglican but many do fall in love with liturgy and the more mainline church service.
I arrived at Regent College in all my anti-establishment fire and was placed in a class called CTC: Christian Thought and Culture. I was given a book called "Descent of the Dove" by Charles Williams and "The History of Christian Thought" by Jonathan Hill and then hundreds of pages of reading written by the likes of Augustine, St.Basil, Bernard of Clairvaux, Origen, Tertullian, John of the Cross, Ignatius Loyola, St.Francis, St.Benedict,  Schmemann, Aquinas, Donne,  and so on and so forth.
We read and read and re-read the thoughts of old, the musings on Christianity from the beginning of Christianity until the present day. The desert fathers, the rise of Christendom, Charlemagne, the monks, the celtic christians, and the reformation.   We read of strange ideas about God from the 2nd century ,we read of architecture and music and baptism and philosophy, science, and post-modernism.

And I sat in these lectures I realized that perhaps all the people between Acts 2 and the 20th century hadn't been so wrong.  I didn't know about this great tradition of people thinking and wondering and moving in the Christian faith.  I didn't know about the thought that had been put into how we do church and why we do church the way we do.  I hadn't ever thought about the fact that God deeply loves the church and has throughout history.

I had also never realized that the Holy Spirit has been present in the church since the beginning. He has not abandoned the church but has indeed been guiding it.  Now - I don't think that just because the Church has done something it means that the Holy Spirit agrees.  But I also can't deny that the Holy Spirit is in charge.

And so - through much struggling in my soul - I started to realize that I could not so hastily throw out the church tradition that bridged the last 2000 years. That there might in fact be merit to learning and reading about the way these people saw Christianity and recognize that the church has progressed and learned and moved beyond the Acts 2 church.
I'm not sure where I ever got the idea that what happened in the first group of Christians was normative and then everything after had been a disaster. In fact, I think that attitude disregards the Holy Spirit's presence in the church. The changes and movements in the church have been brought about by Jesus-loving, Spirit guided people.

Now, the church has been deeply broken and participated in absolutely terrible things over the past and I don't want to trivialize that. But in those lectures I realized that I couldn't just throw everything out believing that we had gotten on the wrong track after Jesus died because I don't think we did.

By the time I had finished at Regent I had a new appreciation for the tradition of the church. I realized that I cannot  either choose to be apart of the church or not be a part of the church  depending on it's faults. I can't just leave and start my own house-church apart from "the church" and say, "Well I'm doing real church here and you guys over there are just deceiving yourselves."
So, full of thoughts about how meaningful and rich life in the church could be I headed back to Edmonton to see how it all would play out.

Musings on the subject of Church - Part I

I have been thinking a lot about church over the past few years and I have wanted to post about this. Please feel free to share your thoughts and comments as I move through these different posts.

In 2004 I read Velvet Elvis - as perhaps many people did. And like many, I was inspired by what Rob Bell had to say about how to understand and live out the Christian faith.  Rob wrote about a different type of a church, about a different way of seeing the world, and about a different view of God.  I became convinced that the only option for church was now house churches. This was the only way to capture the true essence of community and to provide a chance to care about people.  Programs were out and house churches were in. 

I started reading more books like Rob's book - "This Beautiful Mess", "Irresistable Revolution", "Blue Like Jazz", and others. These books only fed my "anti-establishment" tendencies.   I grew cynical about having to leave my home community to go to a church building and I was sure that we were wasting too much time in programs that didn't do anything.  I felt like all I was doing was putting people through programs that took all my time and were burning me out. 


The problem for me was that the church didn't look anything like the church in Acts 2.  I assumed we were supposed to, that the first record of the church was the perfect, pristine and correct or atleast normative. But after about 100 B.C everything fell apart and we had been on the wrong track ever since.

The type of church I was involved with didn't leave any time to be friends with people who didn't know God. It seems as though it got in the way of the main mission of the church which was getting out and telling people about Jesus, building the kingdom and living life. I grew further and further apart from my friends from high school because i was so busy with church life. 

For me - it seemed as though the church was problematic, we had strayed too far for too long from the original mission and the church I knew now was definitely not what God could have intended.  No more buildings, no more programs, no more instititutions.  I was looking for something new and better. 

So with this attitude in mind I headed for Regent College expecting for them to tell me more of what I already knew. I went to learn biblical languages and textual interpretation so that I could better understand these texts fully believing that if we got right down to the Greek and Hebrew there would be clarity about how we should live, how we should do church and what the Christian world was all about. 

Spring

Creation stands silent in amber and crimson protest 
as white icy fingers take its voice.
Yet smiling it resigns 
knowing that resurrection lies 
within their smallest seed.

people

Every Wednesday morning I get dressed like a student and go to my New Testament class.  I take off my backpack, sit down and relish in the fact that i look like everyone else in the room, that no one notices I'm there and I can just sit in the backrow and listen.

Recently I've started arriving early so I can watch my professor's screen saver.  He has thousands of beautiful pictures of people.  I sit there in the early sleepy quiet that morning classes bring and am reminded of the beauty there is in regular every day life, in regular every day people.

My prof tells us several times every class that the New Testament is about Transformation. This man, Jesus, changed everything and changes us when we meet him. He always says "Something has happened, and the world will never be the same!" This something is Jesus.

My prof spends a lot of time in class talking about how human beings are "image-bearers" of the mighty Creator God. He talks about how this reality should radically change how we see the world.  If all people bear God's image then slavery is wrong because we are treating those that bear the mark of the creator as possessions rather that infinitely valuable creations.   We start to care for the poor because they are precious humans being marginalized.  We love our fellow man because God made them and knowing God should change how we see everyday people.

I think that is why my prof has all these pictures of people on his screen saver.  The reality of Jesus in his life makes every day broken people worth photographing. And if you watch the pictures long enough you can be equally fascinated with the mystery and depth that is in every face.  I've been thinking about how when we come to know Jesus and are drawn deeper into relationship with him, I think we start to see people differently. People become more precious, more important, and more valuable.  And it's this transformation, not guilt,  that moves us to have compassion.  It's this transformation that helps us recognize the beauty that is in every day life and in every day people. 

Oh Donald, how I have missed you!

I have returned from a rejuvenating break at home.  It was nice to feel like myself again, talk with people about new ideas in a familiar way, eat and drink things that I am used to and enjoy the comfort that comes with people you can easily laugh and talk with. It was good to be home.  As a result of this break I have had a change of heart towards the world. I feel as though the world is a big secret waiting to be found out, pursued, and discovered. That things around me are buzzing with potential and that I am capable of participating in it. I even feel the desire to read and think again.

When I was at Regent I read so much that I had couldn't even talk about it after I left - in some ways I didn't know how to talk about the things I had learned because there were not very many venues in which to discuss the ideas.  And I often felt like I was in a completely different head space than most people I met.  I would try and talk about the things I was processing from my time at school and people often just didn't understand either the importance of what I was saying or why it would matter in the first place. Not many people are too interested in how the printing press sparked the beginning of individualism within Christianity or how gnoticism has seeped into Christianity and distorted the good news of Jesus. If it wasn't for my lovely husband to talk about these ideas with I probably would have imploded.  By God's grace my faith was still intact by the end of Regent but I had no idea where to move next and experienced significant apathy towards any movement in my spiritual journey.

But this break I got the chance to meet with some friends who were my "idea" friends. When they were first married I would go to their house and we would drink tea and talk for hours about the church and Christianity and such things.  And seeing them sparked this feeling inside me that I wanted to read again and engage with the Christian world. Whenever I start to feel like this I want to read a Donald Miller book and then I also want to write a book.  I’m not sure what it is about old Donald but he just perfectly fits the mood that I am in at the moment.  I can remember the Christmas Break in 2005 where I felt like this and I read  Blue Like Jazz followed closely by Through Painted Deserts in early 2006.  I like the way he sees the world.  And luckily - Donald has a new book out and it's about the story of our lives and living meaningfully.

It feels as though there is space in my brain again for thoughts and ideas.  The things from Regent have been somewhat chewed on, digested or spat out or merely forgotten.  So here I am in 2010 - beginning on a little journey into reading and thinking again and I'm feeling hopeful about it.

I'm writing a paper on the theology of suffering and taking a course where suffering comes up a lot.  So it's on my mind.  This is the quote I will share with you. It makes me wonder at what price come the music and literature I enjoy.   I know this quote is a bit heavy but I also think it is beautiful - in a sad way.

"What is a Poet?  A poet is unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. His fate is like that of the unfortunate victims whom the tryant Phalais imprisoned in a brazen bull and slowly tortured over a steady fire: their cries could not reach the tyrant's ears so as to strike terror into his heart. When they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music. And men crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again"; that is as much as to say: "May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be formed as before; the cries would only frighten us, but the music is delicious." And the critics come too and say: "Quite correct, and so it ought to be according to the rules of aesthetics." Now it is understood that a critic resembles a poet to a hair; he only lacks the suffering in his heart and the music upon his lips." 
Kierkegaard

Confessions of an money-saver

I have been thinking a lot about money and me these days.  you see I have been anti-money for most of my life or should I say "anti-wealth".  I never wanted to be in a place where money was something I was seeking or controlled by and I never wanted money to be the most important thing to me.  So I sought to live a life of frugality.
I have always been careful with my money.  I would never spend money on something frivolous.  I would rarely ever go out for dinner; I frequented cheap movie theatre and almost never paid full price for a movie. Clothes that I bought were always second hand and if not they were definitely on sale. I remember the first time I spent $20 on a pair of jeans - I felt like I was becoming materialistic.
I often find myself wondering "can i get a better deal?" or "what else could I do with that amount of money?" .  The other day I went to buy a Hot Chocolate from Starbucks and after pondering the purchase I decided to buy 2 liters of juice instead because it would last longer and was cheaper.  And if I buy more than $20 on myself I get real buyers remorse because I'm just never sure if I spent my money wisely.  By trying to not care about money I have actually started to value it too much because I'm concerned about wasting it.

I was thinking about taking art lessons today and the first thing out of my mouth was, "Well, it's probably too much money."  But maybe, just maybe, art lessons might be a really good thing for my soul that has been a bit displaced since moving, maybe I would find it really freeing to paint and watch the world around me, and I might even just get a kick out of mixing colors and creating.  So maybe money should be only part of decisions and not the deciding factor.  Taking art lessons could actually be an investment.   I could think about using money to expand my horizons and invest in life.   Maybe I'll start small with a fruit smoothie at Starbucks (i've never tried one before) or try the Thai restaurant near our house - the possibilities are endless!