Hosea and the Emerging Church

In continuing to prepare my message for Sunday on Hosea 1:2-10 (really all of chapter 1), I came across this in Gary Smith's NIV Application Commentary on Hosea/Amos/Micah. See if this resonants with you as it did me:

...one can begin to suggest areas where the theological message of Hosea relates to theological issues the church has struggled with in every era of its existence. If one views Baalism as a cultural expression of a Canaanite religious worldview, the true comparison for modern application is not limited to situations where pagans are worshiping idols in India or involved in some perverted sexual cult in some faraway country. The Canaanite culture needs to be copmared to the British culture, the Hutu culture, the American culture, or the Brazilian culture.

Each of these countries has a popular "religious" philosophy of life that explains how the world works. Each culture includes ethical standards for appropriate conduct, ecomonic ways of gaining prosperity (fertility in ancient Near Eastern terminology), and an explanation of how people are related to the divine powers. The questions that the church in every culture must ask are similar to the questions Hosea raises. Are the people who claim to be believers actually the people of God, or have they so accepted the popular religious culture of their day that they, like Israel, are "not my people"? Has the syncretism of the church with modern religious culture so infiltrated the fiber of the fellowship that people can no longer see a distinction between the two? Has the church lost its identity by compromising its beliefs and accepting the moral standards of the society that the church was supposed to transform?

Some in the emerging church discussion are asking very smiliar questions to Hosea! I meet for prayer with several lol's (little old ladies) once a month on Tuesdays. My faith and their faith are in very different places. My beliefs and their beliefs are very different. Much of their thinking and prayers are based on a popular religious philosophy of how to get ahead in life and how God interacts with us. Very little of it is shaped by Scripture especially not Hosea! Please know I love and care for each of them greatly! Yet they fail to recognize how much the American popular religious philosohpy has influenced their lives.

And quite frankly, it is unappealing to me and to many "natives" in today's culture!

Microscopic Model of Sydney Opera House

Yahoo! News - World Photos - AP This is truly amazing! As they have been saying the next big thing is small.

Three great kids I can't afford! Three great kids you couldn't pay me enough for!

Owning Up to Abortion

The New York Times > Opinion > Guest Columnist: Owning Up to Abortion. Here's a disturbing quote from this column:

Honesty begins at home, so I should acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years. You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother. I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby lower-middle-class level. And when it comes to my children - the actual extrauterine ones, that is - I was, and remain, a lioness.

This statement strikes me as terribly sad. Actually terribly sad doesn't even begin to relate how I feel. It is a terribly sad day when our economic status determines whether we will carry through a pregnancy or not.

No wonder God spends so much time in Scripture talking about money. He is concerned about it because we are concerned about it. If God can't transform our relationship with money, it's doubtful he can transform us in any arena.

My wife and I had our first child when I was in seminary. We struggled mightily to make ends meet. Then 16 months later we had our second after I had graduated from seminary and while I was underemployed looking for a calling. We didn't have insurance. We were scrapping by. But it never crossed our minds that we should have an abortion because we couldn't afford our child.

We now have three kids, we get by on one income, and my future earning prospects are modest. (You don't enter the ministry to get rich!) In fact, by this writer's standards, we probably earn a "grubby lower-middle-class" income.

I guess it comes down to trust and faith. Do you trust God or do you trust yourself and the dollar to provide for you? It's also a question of sacrifice. Are you willing to sacrifice some financially in order to bring children into the world?

Finally, I don't understand why this writer didn't decide to give these babies up for adoption. There are so many people who want to have children but can't. There are so many wonderful homes where a child would be welcomed.

Wired News: Duke Gives IPods to Freshmen

Wired News: Duke Gives IPods to Freshmen:

Duke University will give each of its 1,650 incoming freshmen a free iPod this fall as part of an initiative to foster innovative uses of technology in the classroom

Wow! Just another reason to go to Duke! This is also more evidence of just how much technology is changing the way we interact with our world. By the time my kids get to college (in another 12 years or so) what will technology be like then? What will learning look like?

With this shift in mind, how should the church change? I pastor two churches full of immigrants who want to preserve the immigrant mindset. But clearly change is happening and natives will thrive in the new emerging culture. Immigrant churches are already stagnant and will continue to decline if they are unable to rethink ministry and mission and retool to reach natives.

If you aren't familiar with the terms "immigrant" and "natives" check out this interview with Len Sweet.

Who Wants to Marry a Prostitute?

The book of Hosea fascinates me. This week, following the lectionary, I am preaching Hosea 1:2-10. It is a troubling passage in many respects. God commands Hosea to take a prostitute for a wife. Why would God do this to Hosea? Can you imagine the humiliation he must have felt in doing this? Can you imagine the risk this entailed for him and his children?

Think how many in the church would respond today if someone in our midst believed that God had called them to marry a morally questionable young woman let alone a prostitute. Wouldn't we doubt God had spoken to them? Wouldn't we challenge this notion? In fact, it appears that in regards to Hosea and I would argue many other prominent people in Scripture, that God violates the first spiritual law:

God LOVES you and offers a wonderful PLAN for your life.

I doubt Dr. Bill Bright had marrying a prostitute in mind as part of God's wonderful plan for anyone's life. Yet that is exactly the plan God had for Hosea's life. This is just one of the problems with reductionist thinking. We want to boil down the gospel in four spiritual laws, pithy statements that summarize our core beliefs concerning God and our relationship to him. Yet Hosea's understanding of God and his relationship to God was a tad bit more complex then a set of spiritual laws.

Hosea may have given rise to the entire reality TV genre. The original show was, "Who Wants to Marry a Prostitute?"

Bless This House?

LeadershipJournal.net - Bless This House?:

Could it be that the church is as it is in so many places not because of a lack of effort or a lack of sincerity or a lack of spirituality (or even a lack of money, commitment, or prayer), but rather because our sincere efforts, passionate prayers, and material resources are all aimed in the wrong direction—the direction of self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, self-improvement?

Some interesting thoughts from Brian McLaren. I know that for my two, small rural churches it's easy to focus on self-preservation, namely survival. It is often very difficult to get folks thinking in terms of mission here. But if what Brian suggests is true, that's the best thing we could do out here in the sticks:

How ironic if the church were to find life by losing it, by giving it away.

Declining Rural Communities

Great Plains: Rural Communities

Rural dwellers are now prepared to go to the larger centres to obtain the services desired and in the process bypass the local centres, eventually leading to the demise of the latter. Thus while these local centres have suffered the major centres have expanded.

Read Wal-Mart. We live 90 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart and yet we find ourselves making the trip 2 to 3 times a month. Prices are so much more reasonable, the selection is much greater, and the quality (especially of produce) is far superior to our little local grocery store.

Future Church: Ministry in a Post-Seeker Age

Amazon.com: Books: Future Church: Ministry in a Post-Seeker Age
This looks like an interesting book. Has anyone read it?

Weblog: Federal Marriage Amendment Doesn't Even Make It To a Senate Vote - Christianity Today Magazine

Weblog: Federal Marriage Amendment Doesn't Even Make It To a Senate Vote - Christianity Today Magazine
I guess I'm not terribly surprised. I am still trying to sort out how I feel about this issue. I am not terribly concerned with the government defining what marriage is or isn't. According to James Dobson, in an interview, he argues that "the legalization of homosexual marriage will quickly destroy the traditional family." Dobson sites evidence from "Scandinavian countries" that

when the State sanctions homosexual relationships and gives them its blessing, the younger generation becomes confused about sexual identity and quickly loses its understanding of lifelong commitments, emotional bonding, sexual purity, the role of children in a family, and from a spiritual perspective, the "sanctity" of marriage. Marriage is reduced to something of a partnership that provides attractive benefits and sexual convenience, but cannot offer the intimacy described in Genesis. Cohabitation and short-term relationships are the inevitable result. Ask the Norwegians, the Swedes, and the people from the Netherlands. That is exactly what is happening there.

But doesn't this sound a lot like the state of marriage here in America?

Next Dobson argues for a slippery slope, that "the introduction of legalized gay marriages will lead inexorably to polygamy and other alternatives to one man/one woman unions." Yet the legalization of polygamy for generations as described in the Bible didn't destroy the "traditional family". How quickly we forget that the heroes of the faith had a very different understanding of what a traditional family was. Abraham, Esau, Jacob, Gideon, David, Solomon, and Hosea all practiced polygamy and yet the Judeo-Christian ethic of monogamy came from this polygamist heritage.

Finally, Dobson argues,

With marriage as we know it gone, everyone would enjoy all the legal benefits of marriage (custody rights, tax-free inheritance, joint ownership of property, health care and spousal citizenship, and much more) without limiting the number of partners or their gender.

Though he overstates the number of partners based on his slippery slope argument, I find it difficult to object to giving these rights to homosexuals. Homosexual couples can already adopt children, so custody rights should naturally follow. I don't really care about tax-free inheritance, joint ownership of property, and spousal citizenship. Health care would seem to fall into the relm of social justice. Who doesn't need health care today and who couldn't stand to have better health care?

Is this really what's at stake? If it is, we've already lost the most profound portions of this battle.

Business Copycatting the Church @ e-Church.com

Business Copycatting the Church @ e-Church.com: I guess the church isn't the only organization with something to sell! Yikes.

Dr. Danny Carroll article on Society of Biblical Literature

Society of Biblical Literature:

This group of scholars tends to be members of the Fraternidad Teologica Latinoamericana (FTL), an association of a broadly evangelical persuasion that was founded in 1970 with the express purpose of reflecting upon the Bible in light of the needs of the continent. On the one hand, they were frustrated by the failure of more traditional evangelical circles to respond adequately to those realities; at the same time, their interaction with liberationist scholarship stimulated them to look at the biblical text through a more contextualized lens.

Here is a great article from a great professor, Dr. Danny Carroll at Denver Seminary. Dr. Carroll wrestles with contextualized readings of the Bible. If you are not familiar with his work, I'd encourage you to check it out. Here's more from the article, the first part from the text of the article and the second from a footnote related to the clipped text.

Sometimes formal academic training dichotomizes exegesis and contextualization; some believe that such a combination diminishes their academic standing, especially in the academic guild beyond the continent; [4] and, to be honest, others are themselves detached from the warp and woof of their context and thus to incorporate those concerns is not a natural move.
[4] In my own experience I have sometimes found that First World scholars have not taken work from the Two-Thirds, or Majority, World seriously. In various ways they have communicated that, whereas those approaches might be "interesting," "real academic study" is done in North America and Europe according to more traditional methods. I have had students from the Two-Thirds World, who are studying in the West, confide in me how they have been discouraged from relating their research to their home context and have been told to "just deal with the text."

I believe that the emerging church in many respects is seeking to do contextualized readings of the biblical text. The emerging church in many respects is "doing theology" as the liberationist scholars often put it.

Obviously from the footnote and from my experience, many evangelicals are uncomfortable with this practice. The idea of "just deal with the text" is in many ways a western modern notion in which the text is seen as the subject of objective scientific inquiry. However, this is impossible. We all arrive at the text with many biases and our interpretation of any given text is greatly shaped by these biases. I believe that we will continue to see more untraditional methods employed in the study of Scripture in the years to come. And I believe that these methods will prove to be very beneficial.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: AP - U.S.: Catholic Church urged to draw on laity

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: AP - U.S.: Catholic Church urged to draw on laity:

Roman Catholic officials need to look to the laity for many parts of the church's mission that historically have been dominated by priests and nuns

Wow, is the priesthood of all believers even going to apply to the Catholic church? It is amazing what necessity will do to a church...

Bishop William B. Friend of the Diocese of Shreveport, La., said there used to be large numbers of people taking holy orders, enough that Catholic schools and hospitals once were heavily staffed with nuns working as teachers and nurses.

"Now their numbers have diminished. But the good news is there are large numbers of young lay people" who are interested in helping the church, Friend said.

Makes you wonder if they would be considering help from lay people if there wasn't a shortage.

As a pastor, I am always trying to help my congregations understand that they are the ministers. They do the ministry.

Vicar sorry after Church carpeting

ic Birmingham - Vicar sorry after Church carpeting:

A Midland vicar apologised to a Church of England court yesterday - for laying a new carpet.

The Rev Nigel di Castiglione, Rector of St Mary's and All Saints' Church in Trentham, Staffordshire, covered some rare tiles with the carpet, took out some pews and moved the font to tidy the place up.

But he carried out the work without the permission of his diocese.

Gotta love church politics and power struggles!

Churches Ministering to the Public Through Signs

Churches Ministering to the Public Through Signs:

'Don't let worries kill you; let the church help.'

I'm not sure if the church that ran this saying on their sign understood what it sounds like they are saying!

U.S. church signs known for groaners

TheStar.com - U.S. church signs known for groaners:

'The best vitamin for a Christian is B-1.' 'God answers knee-mail.' 'Free Trip to heaven ... details Inside!' 'Running low on faith? Stop in for a fill-up.' Motorists glance at them for just a moment, but ministers see church marquee messages as a great chance to attract people with a groaner of a pun or a thought-provoking phrase. Coming up with pithy messages has even sparked a cottage industry of sorts, inspiring a half-dozen books and e-mail traffic.

This seems to be the epitomy of reductionist thinking. "If we only have a pithy enough saying on our sign, then people will come to church."

This reminds me of a joke I heard in seminary. The homelitics professor assigns his students to come up with a sermon title that is so powerful it will cause people riding the bus by the church to come to church to hear that message.

One students sermon title: "There's a bomb on your bus."

Cultivating what we honor

Here are some great quotes from William Sloane Coffin from an interview on beliefnet:

The churches are a reflection of the truth of Plato’s statement, "What’s honored in the country will be cultivated there." When we got started as a country, we had no more than 3 million people--less than Los Angeles County today. Yet we turned out Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton--you can name a list as long as your arm. How many people on the public stage can you name today who are of the caliber of those first men? And why aren’t there more? Because what’s honored in the country will be cultivated there.

Or how come those itty, bitty Italian city-states turned out one fantastic painter and sculptor after another? Because every kid couldn’t wait to get his mitt on a paint brush. What’s honored in the country will be cultivated there. We have fantastic athletes. I watched the Spurs and Lakers yesterday. Those guys play basketball like nobody’s business. Yet we have mediocre politicians, and the clergy is pretty mediocre also. But what’s honored in a country will be cultivated there. The greatest recession in this country is not economic; it’s spiritual. And so the great biblical mandates of pursuing justice and seeking peace are shortchanged.

How true these words are! There is much to digest in this excellent interview.

CBF workshop explores postmodern phenomenon in churches : Wednesday, July 7, 2004

CBF workshop explores postmodern phenomenon in churches : Wednesday, July 7, 2004:

In the postmodern worship experience, emphasis is often placed on the feel of worship, incorporating the five senses into a service.

This article discusses several of the differences in a "postmodern church" but the feel of the overall article is that the differences are merely on emphasis and on feel and structure.

Yet I believe from my reading that much of what the postmodern church is espousing is far more than new dressing on old forms. The postmodern church is often emphasizing a new theology, a rethinking of the gospel and our understanding of the gospel. It is in many ways a reaction to modern reductionistic thinking especially in regards to the gospel and the church.

Hence the strong reaction to slogan, bumper-sticker theology from the postmodern church. For more on this see Doug Pagitt's blog Camping Mocks the Homeless .

Ultimately, many in the emerging church discussion are seeking to become more authentic followers of Jesus Christ. And to do this, they instinctively know it is far more complex than the simplistic, reductionistic slogans offered by the modern church.

Bloglines | My Blogs

Bloglines | My Blogs:

Bloglines Clip Blogs - The easiest way to create a blog - Fully integrated with all your Bloglines news feeds- One-click blogging from any Web page

Some interesting changes at bloglines.

Syncretism or Contextualization?

HatchSpace:

In other words, is the emerging church movement a vital example of contextualizing the gospel, or is it a syncretism

This is a great question and I assume that the answer is far from easy. Like most things, I believe that the overall picture of the emerging church is a mixed-bag with some crossing the line to syncretism and others doing a great job of contextualization.

One thing that some critiques of the emergent church discussion miss is the fact that our culture is changing and that clearly the church is losing ground in the modern culture. Because of technology, younger generation's minds are wired differently and therefore require a different style of teaching and learning. Unfortunately the church is often slow to address these changes.

My two churches can serve as a great example here. They both are very traditional or in Len Sweet's lingo, immigrant. They both have hymns which are spread throughout the service. They both have traditional liturgy and nobody knows why it's there. They both emphasize the sermon (much to my delight). Yet there is very little energy in the service. Most of those coming to church are 55 and over. Attracting young families to this type of worship service is difficult if not impossible. Slowly but surely these two churches will die for failure to contextualize the message to the younger population.