Dear Easter Preachers,

Please do not give the top 5 scientific/rational reasons why the resurrection is an undeniable historic fact in your sermons tomorrow. Rather, inspire those gathered to live into the new reality of resurrection life. We can only know the resurrection if we attempt to experience it in our lives. We can do this by giving without receiving, by pursuing peace without violence, by pardoning sin, by sacrificing our privilege, and by offering hope in the face of evil.

Mental acknowledgment of the historicity of the resurrection is not faith nor faithfulness. Offering forgiveness in the face of violence is.

Today is Good Friday, the day we remember the crucifixion of Jesus. I’ve come to see the death of Jesus not as something God required, but rather as a result of Jesus living a faithful life.

Jesus died because he opposed evil and identified with the margins of society. Jesus did not die to appease an angry God.

So should we call today Good Friday? I think not, there is nothing good about an unnecessary death.

I wrote the following for an online Episcopal Magazine.  Enjoy.

Reflections on the journey: From a Post-Evangelical, Emergent, Episcopalian

The conversation usually goes something like this:

Inquisitive Person: “So, what is the emergent church?”

Me: “Well, technically there is no emergent church.”

Inquisitive Person: (Blank stare)

Me: “It’s more of a conversation than a church.”

Inquisitive Person: (Continued blank stare)

The conversation started for me during college while I was on a mission trip in East Africa.  I was on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania living with a Christian pastor, preaching in the local church, and participating in door-to-door evangelism throughout the island.  More than a million people populate Zanzibar and at least ninety nine percent of the population is Muslim. It seems an obvious statement when looking at the situation from a certain perspective to say that Zanzibar had not yet been reached by the gospel.  This opportunity was rather significant for me.  I had grown up in the Christian & Missionary Alliance, an evangelical church, where my Christian formation involved sharing the gospel with all people.  I remember a youth rally I attended where a guest speaker told us that 166,000 people die everyday without knowing who Jesus is, and that it was up to us to go into the entire world in order to share the good news of Jesus.  I took that challenge to heart and I committed my life to sharing the gospel with the world.  Three years later there I was doing just that: sharing the gospel with people who had never heard it before. The mission was not going very well.  People were not receptive to our message and as far as I could tell, I could not foresee their minds changing anytime soon.

And that is when the conversation began for me.  My constructed Christian faith just encountered a roadblock.  For me Christianity was understood in this way: God created the world and humanity for relationship with God.  Humanity rebelled against God.  God sent Jesus to save humanity from their rebellion.  In order for humanity to be saved they must believe in Jesus and follow him.  In order for people to believe and follow Jesus, Christians must engage in evangelism so everyone has the opportunity to believe.  Eternal life in heaven is the reward for those that believe and follow; eternal damnation in hell is the punishment for those who do not. The roadblock was this: In my suburban-American-church-on-every-corner context it was plausible for this version of Christianity to make sense.  The gospel is readily available to everyone and therefore people can either choose to follow Jesus or not.  On the island of Zanzibar however, this version of Christian faith makes very little sense.  There, people do not have access to the gospel and there are no churches for them to attend.  Their lives and their worldviews have been entirely shaped by the African, Arab, Indian, and Muslim cultures that exist in East Africa.  Even though my words were translated into Swahili, my gospel message was still a foreign language that they could not comprehend.  So even if my version of Christianity was true, what good was it, if the message could not transcend the context in which it was formed?

Broadly speaking, I could respond to this roadblock in three ways.  One, I could ignore the roadblock and keep going.  This would be possible if I placed blame on either the people of Zanzibar, myself, or God. In other words, I could blame the people for refusing to believe the message I shared with them, blame myself that I was not good at sharing it, or point the finger at a God who had not chosen them for salvation.  The second response to this roadblock would be to disregard or privatize my Christian faith. Since my faith does not make sense in this new context, then it is nothing more than a human construct and has nothing to do with God.  The third response to this roadblock is what I will call the emergent conversation. That is, a conversation held in the hope that there is a way forward.

Before I expand upon how I have experienced the emergent conversation I first need to say that there are many roadblocks out there.  Scores of us have experienced roadblocks around such issues as the authority of scripture, gender, sexuality, worship styles, science and religion, etc.    And more often than not, one roadblock leads to another.  The roadblock I experienced – Christianity and mission in a pluralistic world – is a common one for younger evangelicals who participated in mission trips in high school and college.  For younger Episcopalians a roadblock may be the hierarchal structures of leadership, an inability to have influence at church, or worship styles that are unappealing.  Whatever it is, the important thing to grasp is that something has occurred that has caused one’s Christian faith to no longer be applicable in the new world in which they inhabit.  An emergent Christian is someone who is struggling to be faithful in light of the fact that they know not what it means to be faithful anymore.  They are struggling to believe, when they do not know what it is they believe in anymore.  They are reaching out in mission, even though they realize it is they themselves who are in most need of evangelism.

By the time I finished my second mission trip in Africa I was a changed person and by changed I mean utterly defeated.  I was a stranger in my own skin.  The God I knew so intimately was suddenly a stranger to me.  The vocation I was called to made little sense in my mind.  The years that followed were quite difficult for me personally.  But as I continued in my journey of faith, I found help in the form of conversation partners along the way.

I found my first conversation partner in the early church theologian Origen.  Origen was a brilliant thinker and also a person who was not afraid to take risks, or re-think things.  In his writings I found theological imagination, especially in regards to God’s plan of redemption.  I realized I wasn’t the first person to re-think how God might bring about salvation for the whole world.  I found a second conversation partner in Brian McLaren.  Like Origen, in Brian’s writings I saw someone struggling to re-imagine Christian faith in light of contemporary roadblocks that many faithful people were experiencing.  From Brian I ventured into a more academic discussion with Post-liberal theologians: Hans Frei, John Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, James McClendon and continental philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein.  In their writings I found people who have devoted their lives to articulating what truth, language, faithfulness, and Christianity might look like in a postmodern world.

At this same time I met one of my most treasured conversation partners, Robert Webber.  I had the good fortune of being one of the last students to take classes from Bob before he past away.  Bob started my journey down the Canterbury Trail by introducing me to the incredible treasure that is liturgical worship.  A year later, while attending seminary at Mars Hill Graduate School, I started attending an Anglo-Catholic parish in Seattle. There, the seed Bob had planted in me came to full fruition as I participated in the proclamation of God’s saving story through word and sacrament.  I had found a home in the Episcopal Church.  I had experienced God again through the bread and wine.  And I found a tradition that could hold (and encourage) theological imagination.

The emergent conversation has not ended for me now that I have found a church home, and that is why I now serve at Church of the Apostles here in Seattle (an Episcopal/Lutheran church that is emerging).  I believe that COTA is an emerging church because our community is engaging the conversation.  We are asking the difficult question of, “What does it mean to be the church in our day?”  And we are seeking answers that are enlightened by our traditions and at the same time relevant to the new world that we now live in.

And this is why all people can participate in this thing called “emergent”.  Being emergent is not about having a rock band, or opening up a coffee shop, or piercing you ears and quoting Derrida.  Being emergent is about being faithful to the gospel in the world that you live in now.  Not faithful for yesterday, not for the early church, or for the reformation, or 1950’s America, but for the world that you and your community of faith live in at this particular moment in time.

Much has been said about the recent article in the Christian Science Monitor, The Coming Evangelical Collapse.  Now, it isn’t just evangelicals who are in trouble, but Mainline Protestant denominations find themselves in similar circumstances. In coming years, many churches will be forced to close shop because of dwindling attendance . These churches will be forced to close because they will no longer be able to afford the cost of their buildings or their staff. One solution to this new scenario is something that Church of the Apostles, the church I’m currently working at, is doing quite well: Open the building to the community.

COTA meets at the Fremont Abbey, a building that we are currently in the process of buying from the Lutheran Church.  The building for most of its life was St. Paul’s Lutheran Church.  After St. Paul’s closed down, the building was used as a homeless shelter for a few years, and then 3 years ago, COTA moved in.  Instead of slapping our name up on the building, and making the building a “church”, the COTA community decided that this building was going to be for all of the Fremont Community.  And they thought the best way to serve the Fremont Community was to make the building a place for the arts.  Because of this the Fremont Abbey is home to two separate non-profits: Church of the Apostles and the Fremont Abbey Arts Center. Because of the Arts Center, the Fremont Abbey is occupied 7 days a week with a music school, dance lessons, a jazz band, concerts, mediation weekends, kids art classes, etc, etc…  And because our building is occupied 7 days a week, supporting (and paying for) the building does not fall entirely upon the church congregation.

I need to make something very clear, the Art Center does not exist as a bait and switch (i.e. “Let’s get people in the building so we can convert them”).  The Art Center is its own non-profit that lives in the Fremont Abbey.  And secondly, the Arts Center does not exist to support the mission of the church.  The Arts Center exists because the community of Fremont values the arts, and because so many people in the community volunteer their time, expertise and money to support the arts in Fremont and in the Fremont Abbey.

Now what is taking place in the Fremont Abbey is a mutually beneficial relationship between a church and a community arts center.  Neither of the missions are more important than the other, and we try and treat each other that way.  And because of this relationship we can both continue to exist, own property, and pay a staff in a very expensive urban area.

If the church wants to continue to have buildings and paid staff, but can’t attract large enough numbers to pay for these things it will have to figure out ways to open up their buildings to their neighbors.  And it will need to do this in a mutually beneficial way, avoiding a patronizing, bait and switch relationship.

For Lent at COTA this year a man in our parish is teaching a class on prayer entitled Great Arguments with God.  Last night we examined Jacob’s all night wrestling match with God.  To aid us in this exploratation we read from Frederick Beuchner’s The Son of Laughter.  In it Beuchner retells Jacob’s encounter with God in dramatic fashion.  What Beuchner reveals in his retelling is how Jacob really didn’t know who he was wrestling with or even why he was wrestling until the night was over.  Jacob’s confusion struck a cord with me, especially as we reflected upon prayer and fighting with God. 

It is easy to be energized by an argument or fight if one knows what it is they are fighting for.  We see this in other scriptural accounts where people argued with God because God was clearly in the wrong, or it was quite obvious that God needed to do something (i.e. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?). But what about when you are striving with God or life, or whatever, but you really don’t know why.  

I find this scenario more common for my own spiritual journey.  Wrestling in the dark with the unknown, wandering through the desert with no destination.  I’m told there is a promise, or blessing out there somewhere, but the fact that it is out there, fails to make the present any clearer.

The first Ash Wednesday service I attended was actually in an Evangelical Church a few years ago.  To this day I can still remember the feeling of the ash cross on my forehead and the words of the pastor that came with it: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  As I drove away from the service that night with the weight of the cross bearing upon my skin I was forced into introspection about my life, my mortality, and how it is in my humanity that I know God.  Out of all the worship services that I participated in at that church for a year and half, the Ash Wednesday service stands out to me most clearly.  

I remember it because the worship service engaged not just my intellect, but my senses.  The sanctuary was darkened, the mood was solemn, and then by going forward and feeling the touch of the pastor on my forehead, the harshness of the ash, and then continuing to feel the weight of the cross: all of me was caught up in an experience of God, worship, and contemplation.  

I participate in a liturgical church because my whole self is engaged in worship.  And tonight as my priest marks my head with the sign of the cross I hope that once again I am brought to a place of experience of God, worship and contemplation.

In an Episcopal worship service the Word and the Sacrament are of equal importance.  This is acted out liturgically in numerous ways depending upon the parish.  At St. Paul’s the service of the Word ends with the Gospel text being processed to the middle of the sanctuary and held high for everyone to see, while it processes we all chant “Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”  The text is then announced by the reader of the gospel (either an ordained deacon or priest): “The Holy Gospel according to…”  As this is announced we in the congregation cross our forehead, our lips, and our hearts, so that we receive the words of Christ in our minds and in our hearts and we respond with our wills (mouth).  The congregation then responds in unison “Glory to you Lord Christ.”  The gospel text is then read by the ordained clergy with hands lifted high in blessing.  Following the reading, the deacon or priest says the “The Gospel of our Lord.”  The congregation responds with “Praise to you Lord Christ.”  Following the reading of the Gospel a homily is offered; typically lasting about 12 minutes.  

I won’t explain the whole Eucharist aspect of the service, but there is just as much to it as the service of the Word.  What this of course demonstrates is that the Word and Sacrament are of equal importance.  Each of them are God’s gift to us, each of them demonstrate the Gospel, in each of them we can experience the presence of Christ.  

In the tradition from which I came the Word had more importance than the Sacrament.  This of course is quite obvious to see; sermons happened every week and they usually took up 1/2 to 2/3 of the worship service.   Communion on the other hand happened once a month, and it was always done in the most efficient way possible: little personal cups and personal wafers passed down the rows for individual consumption.  

Now in reality what ends up happening in this system is not so much an elevated view of the Word, but the elevated view of one person’s (usually a man’s) understanding of scripture.  I know that sounds harsh but sadly I think its accurate.  

I preached my first sermon at Church of the Apostles last Saturday. Reflecting back upon that experience what struck me most was the experience of preaching in a worship service where Word and Sacrament are seen to have equal importance.  After my sermon, I sat down in my chair and I with my community moved into the Eucharist, where the Gospel is recounted through words, prayers, and the eating of bread and wine.  

I can’t tell you how good it felt that I didn’t have the final word of the service, but rather what I said was held in tension (and hopefully congruence) with what happened at the Table.  Furthermore, it was such a helpful reminder to me as a minister that I go forward to the table with everyone else to receive the blessing of God in bread and wine.  We all stand before Christ, and Christ cannot be contained simply in the words of preachers.

I gave the reverb at Church of the Apostles this past Saturday. A reverb is what we call a sermon at COTA, its short for reverberation, which means that the reverb is one person’s reflection upon how a passage of scripture has impacted them.  We use the Lectionary at COTA so I did not choose this passage of scripture myself.  

For those of you hold to more conservative theological views, there will be content in my sermon that I’m quite positive you will disagree with.  I encourage you to try and listen to what I have to say, not so you can agree with me, but that you might develop the ability to listen to the “other”.  

I had the privilege of meeting one of God’s unlikely evangelists the other day, Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church.  A few weeks ago he was invited to offer a homily and preside over the table at a service at St. Mark’s Cathedral.  What struck me about Bishop Robinson via listening to his sermon was the utter confidence that he had in the Good News of Jesus Christ.  He stood in that cathedral in front of hundreds of people, many of which are part of the LGBT community, a group of people that has been too often excluded from religious and civic life in our country, and told them with utter certainty that God created you, God loves you, God in Christ is redeeming you, and God wants relationship with you.  Following the sermon, Bishop Robinson presided over the Eucharist.  I went forward with all of the others in the room to receive the body and blood of our Lord.  Bishop Robinson was serving the bread.  I stood before him, and held out my hands. He lifted up the piece of bread up, and said “Child of God, the bread of heaven.”  His choice of words of course are not random. Bishop Robinson is well aware that most of the people that he would be offering bread to had heard otherwise from the church.  And here was this man, a man captivated by the compassion of Christ, boldly and unabashedly proclaiming the Good News.  

 I have been reflecting on my spiritual journey quite a bit during the last few weeks due to conversations at my new job as well as through reflecting and sharing at a mutual discernment group that I am participating in.  So as I have shared my story and reflected upon where I have been the number 166,000 continues to come up.  Yes, 166,000, I’m guessing an insignificant number to you, is actually a very important figure in regards to my spiritual journey.  

 When I was in high school I participated in a weekend church retreat centered around missions.  At the end of the weekend the speaker was presenting his final appeal to us young people to take Jesus’ great commission seriously.  In his appeal he unrolled a very long scroll of paper with thousands of black vertical lines: one, two, three, four, and then a horizontal dash through the middle, five.  In total there were 166,000 black lines.  Once the scroll was unrolled the speaker told us that each one of these lines represents a person who will die today who never heard the name Jesus. These people would spend eternity in hell because they had not heard the good news of Jesus.  The speaker ended his plea by urging us to be the people who would bring the gospel to these 166,000.  I decided then and there that I would be one of those people, I would devote my life to sharing the gospel so that 166,000 people did not die every day not knowing the good news of Jesus.  

 A few years later I found myself on the small island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania with a Christian mission team that was working to share the gospel with the one million Muslims who lived there.  After spending many fruitless hours walking door to door sharing my faith with these people I found myself on the back of a truck driving through the heart of residential Zanzibar.  I thought to myself “These are the 166,000, these are the people that speaker was talking about…and this is never going to work.” 

I will never forget that moment, it has and it continues to be a defining moment in my life.  It was a moment of defeat, but it was also very much a moment of re-birth. Because it was at that moment that all my prior notions of who God was began to crumble and at the same time began to expand.  It was also then and there that I began a long journey towards a new way of life.  A way that was not consumed with making up for the irresponsibility of a petty and vengeful God but rather a way of life that was open to the unending possibilities of a world that is held in the powerful and redeeming hands of a very good and unpredictable God.

On November 1st I started a new job. I am now the Community Architect at Church of the Apostles, a sacramental/liturgical/emerging church in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle.  My main purpose as the Community Architect will be working to create systems of communication and connection that allow for the fostering of community within the church.  

This new leg of the journey has caused me to reflect upon the path that I have been traveling for the past few years (though it goes back even farther).  Back in 2005 and 2006 I completed a year of study at Northern Seminary in Lombard, IL.  During my time there I had the privilege of taking classes from the late Robert Webber.  In his classes on worship and spirituality Bob introduced me to ancient and liturgical forms of worship as well as integrating them into the postmodern world that we live in today.  He taught me that to worship is to participate in the enactment of the story of God (See Why Episcopal I, II, III).  Under Bob’s teaching I was soon an Evangelical on the Cantebury Trail.  

During this time I was also becoming more and more disillusioned (if you are at all familiar with my theological musings the reasons for this are quite obvious) with the church tradition that I found myself in.  This disillusionment and other circumstances that Kate and I were going through brought us to the realization that we needed to go West.  In the summer of 2006 Kate and I packed up our stuff and headed to Seattle to attend Mars Hill Graduate School.  We went to MHGS with the hope of re-imagining our Christian faith with the help of others.  Little did I know that my journey towards Anglicanism would pick up here in Seattle.  Some friends of ours were attending St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Lower Queen Anne (the neighborhood that Kate and I moved into).  Upon their invitation we started attending, and it was pretty soon that Kate and I knew that we were home  (Again, see Why Episcopal?).   

However, this new found home also caused me a vocational dilemma.  I am now part of a mainline protestant denomination where most of the paid jobs belong to ordained priests and I just graduated from a little known evangelical/emergent seminary that has no ties to this church.  Where in the $&^% am I going to find a job?!  And then right as I am graduating I am presented with a unique opportunity to work at a church here in Seattle, that is both Episcopal and emerging.

I resist using language of “God ordained this” or “it was God’s hand leading me the whole way”, etc…  That language is difficult for me because one, I used that language to describe choices in my life before that turned out to not be the healthiest choices, and then I am left with the dilemma of “Did God want to cause me harm?  Or did I mess up God’s plan, etc…”.   And two, I believe that God wants me to make choices, wise choices, that reflect upon a whole range of things, only one of which is “What is God leading me to do?”.  

In this situation though, I can’t help but smile a little bit with the sense that God is walking with me as both God and I make our way into this next leg of the journey.