Lessons learned at table

Has hospitality ever changed your day? Your outlook? Your life?

I can't say that I was excited to come to Newark, New Jersey. I remember studying the map of the state over the years (I'm a map geek), and not thinking much of it other than noticing the extensive amount of highways noodling across the state. Every time I've come to Newark, all I see is concrete, industry and graffiti. Newark is a hub of transportation and commerce and helps millions in their livelihood, for which I am thankful. However, the implicit message I have always received is "thanks for stopping through and contributing to our economy, but don't expect anything."

My perspective has been altered by the stories and hospitality of others as I attend a training for congregational redevelopment. Yesterday we heard the stories of a Lutheran community in a Brazilian neighborhood in Newark--I was moved by the pastors and their stories of community connection. Newark became not merely a convergence of highways and commerce, but a place of people with stories of faith and life.

Last night my colleagues and I were encouraged to try Portuguese food in Newark. My home area is full of Asian restaurants, so I was excited to find a new cuisine for me. The waiter from Vila Nova do Sol Mar came to pick up my colleagues and I in a van and then proceeded to serve us like we were long lost cousins (they picked us up...are you kidding???). With tubs (not hyperbole) of paella, clams and pork, fresh cheese, bread and gladdened hearts created by conversation and port wine, my cynicism of urban life continued to melt. A massive great uncle of a man, the owner, came and greeted us with love and gratitude with his gestures, squeezing our shoulders like a trainer encourages a beat up boxer.

It's easy to feel beat up in life. It's easy to gloss over the places we fly over and drive past. Authentic hospitality placed faces and lives as part of those places I had no reason to think about. While I have wondered whether I have what it takes to help redevelop a faith community, I thought there was little opportunity to find a place to be fed in a concrete jungle and sea of highways. I was fed because someone picked me up and brought me to the table with friends. I wasn't even looking for it, and the hospitality came to me.

Not only were we merely dropped off at our hotel, but we learned a little more about Newark by our driver. We weren't shuffled off, but we were cared for and reminded that we don't leave alone.

What an example for congregational life. I probably would not have ventured into Newark on my own. I was brought to a table of grace and generosity by someone willing to come get me--to meet me where I was, feed me, love me, send me off with encouragement and remind me I am not alone.

Sounds a lot like Jesus and communion.








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Location:Radar Rd,Newark,United States

Where's the Breadth?

There are two kinds of people, so the beginning of the joke goes.

There are two kinds of churches...and it's no joke.

For church music it's one of two things:

1. The church uses an organ or piano and sings from a hymn book or printed music in a bulletin. Throw in another instrument if someone else plays one, but the music is essentially the same.

2. The church uses some combination of keyboard, guitar, drums and a cadre of vocalist leaders to lead people singing praise songs whose lyrics appear on a screen. Throw in another instrument if someone else plays one, but the music is essentially the same.

The beginning of the two kinds of people joke usually has some exceptions, but the (humor?) is usually true. Through consultations and interim ministry, the two kinds of churches joke appears to fit over 90 percent of the congregations I've observed.

Is that the way church music should be? Who said so?

My thoughts on this topic rekindled after attending a Pokey Lafarge and the South City Three concert last week--steel guitar, large upright bass, washboard, and harmonica filled St. Edward State Park in Kenmore, WA with the genres of string jazz and ragtime blues. What instruments, creativity, genres and people is the church missing because of an misplaced devotion to a particular strain of music?

A few exceptions come to mind.

The Roman Catholic Campus Ministry at the University of Kansas used to offer a diverse orchestra, likely based upon the gifts of the congregation. Bassoon, harp and oboe stood out.

Melanie and I used to worship at Nativity Lutheran Church in New Brighton, MN. The music had a Celtic flavor, with numerous flutes, mandolin, drums and harp.

Community Lutheran Church in Las Vegas hosted (maybe they still do) a country music worship service led by The Honkey Tonk Angels.

I know there are other examples of creative musical breadth in congregational life, but where is it? Where/what are the examples? The time is ripe for the church to take some musical risks. It's not like Mainline Protestant congregations are busting at the seams and the risk of offending folks will end congregational life as we know it. I am thankful for the pioneers who engaged in "worship wars" so that this idea of a guitar in worship would not raise such ire. They withstood much vitriol. Interestingly, "contemporary" worship music has become just as territorial as its predecessors with organ and piano.

What is the goal? I believe the church can facilitate a sense of awe in the Holy and encouragement for the community. It's not that a congregation has to employ a particular genre of music to be faithful, but that the musical gifts of the congregation are cultivated. I believe this movement taps into the creative power of God.

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Location:NW 63rd St,Seattle,United States

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose--for the church. An ode to Friday Night Lights

Do you think Friday Night Lights is a show about football? Think again. Football is part of the story, but FNL is about relationships. A creative culture makes it happen.

FNL makes its last hurrah as a current television series this Friday night. I'm not sure I've mourned the end of a series as much as this one. I admire the show for its passion and its creative process--and how a culture was created that facilitated and encouraged the creative process. This culture inspires me as a pastor. I hope that I can facilitate such a culture in the congregation and community I serve. Creation (not the "Intelligent Design" brand) is a theological foundation for me.

For a peek into the creative culture of Friday Night Lights, check out this oral history of FNL in Grantland (and if you haven't read Grantland yet, I commend it to you for writing on culture and sport that is moving far ahead of what any periodical is offering on similar topics).

Though the church has a history of inspiring creativity, the history is also long on burying creativity. Several teachers in seminary that I respect taught me an understanding of church based on replication. I took that teaching at face value for awhile. While there are some essentials in the life of the church to be replicated (and these things have been debated since Jesus arose from the dead), I believe much is up for creative interpretation. There are numerous periods in the life of the church where creativity has been squashed for a variety of reasons. This has happened and continues to occur in Mainline Protestant traditions. Even when there are wellsprings of creativity, these wellsprings are quickly institutionalized and become their own turf wars (see "contemporary" worship).

Mainline Protestant traditions were able to spread because of replication (plenty of cookie cutter church architecture out there). What else spreads because of replication? Chain restaurants. One may be able to get survival nutrition from a chain restaurant, but can people thrive? I have great hope to encourage a congregational culture where encouraging creativity is foundational to our relationship with God and one another. To me, this seems to be connected to the Great Commission: Where Jesus said, Go! Make disciples! Baptize! I am with you.

This is a creative directive from Jesus, with encouragement to go with it.

Encouraging creativity is contagious. The motto shared by Coach Taylor with his players and supporters: "Clear eyes. Full hearts. Can't lose." Though Taylor had some "my way or the highway" methodology to coaching--he always took into account the gifts and individual situations of his players (sometimes learning the hard way), which was linked to the creative process of the series. I love thinking about this in a community of faith.

Kyle Chandler, who plays Coach Taylor on FNL, talks about how that creativity spread from the show to a basic interaction in his life:

Chandler: I was back home in Los Angeles and we wanted to put a gate up in our yard. The fella came over and said, "Mr. Chandler, how do you want me to build this?" I said, "I'm not going to tell you how to build this gate. You just look around at what's here, and you build the best gate you can. Be as creative as you want. Take your time, and just give me a good gate." That gate's probably going to stand for 400 years.

Lessons from language learning

A primary lesson of 10 years of interim ministry was learning to maintain balance during times of change and flux. Not that everything around me was going to feel right or that I looked good, rather, that panic was avoided and that community life moved forward toward a goal. Interim ministry and transition is not the place for the perfectionist, whether a pastor or a congregation member. The ability to recover from a setback, mistake or anxiety trigger is paramount to progress. I know this to be true in ministry, athletic endeavors, parenting and now language. I'm leaning toward learning that the importance of recovery is a universal truth.

Here's how my learning has developed recently. I the past month I've taken on learning Korean as an avocation. Some people don't understand why I would invest my time this way. I see a multitude of Korean signs in my congregation's neighborhood, and I see learning language as a path to hospitality and connection. I suppose it would be beneficial for any immigrant to learn English, but I will attempt to meet them a little closer to where they are toward their destination. A favorite writer Keith Law recommended the Pimsleur method as an anchor for language learning.

I've been working with Pimsleur for 2 weeks, and I get more out of Pimsleur than I have in any other language learning process in my life. I've learned some Danish, French, Spanish, Russian, and reading ability in ancient forms of Greek and Hebrew, but my mental adjustments to Korean are different than any of the languages I have learned before. I'm not learning Korean easily, but appreciate the methodology. I began to understand while taking my 8-year-old daughter to speech therapy. Pimsleur was an applied linguistics and French scholar at UCLA and that his approach was similar to the approach of her speech therapist, whose specialty happens to be applied linguistics.

My daughter has auditory processing problems. She hears sounds well, but the movement from sound, to processing the sound, to speech doesn't work well. With regular speech therapy, she is improving. If the conversation doesn't move as planned, my daughter gets frustrated and the conversation breaks down further. What her speech therapist teaches her through a variety of drills and practical approaches is a growing ability to recover when communication inevitably breaks down (this IS universal). This ability is easily taken for granted, though we know in our own lives that communication breaks down frequently. The ability to recover makes a difference. My daughter learns to recover through speech therapy.

I do something similar using the Pimsleur method. Through its series of drills breaking down the sounds of language in many different combinations, I don't necessarily merely focus on memorizing particular words, but through work with sounds that make up language, I find myself less lost. Our speech therapist says these approaches in therapy and language education are similar, and that we are not being equipped to be perfect with language, but rather that we can recover when communication breaks down.

During my years of interim ministry, I have found no greater lesson. The ability to adjust and recover in during communication break down is far more important than learning to do something perfectly. The goal is to connect. The goal is to share a message. The goal is to build relationships. The goal is to learn. I still like to strive toward perfection to some degree, but frustration over not reaching perfection ends many attempts in life to do something good. I encounter this break down daily--in parenting, in building a household, in marriage, in ministry, in health, in vocation. It remains to be seen whether I will be able to live this out in the many facets of my life, but I have the lesson played out regularly during my trips to speech therapy and Korean language sessions.

Place matters--how do your surroundings affect how you see the world?

How does where you live--culture, environment, physical surroundings and their corresponding relationships affect how you look at the world? How does it affect how you look at faith and congregational life?

My passion for these questions took a sabbatical over the past few years. After living for 20 years in the Midwest, I moved with my family to the Seattle metro, where I grew up before taking off for college and early adulthood. I am thankful for the relationships (where I met my wife), mentoring and opportunity in the Midwest (I lived and worked in rural and urban areas in KS, MN, WI, SD and IA). However, there was always some dissonance about my perceptions (particularly of faith and congregational life).

That dissonance runs both ways. I watched it last night at a grant planning meeting, where my Minnesota-native wife raised a particular point to the group. Someone responded, "is that a Midwest (church) thing?" No, Melanie responded, the congregational cultural attribute was part of her Las Vegas congregation, where she served her internship. She hears this kind of question/response loop in her work with congregations. In the particular expression of Lutheranism in the Pacific Northwest, it is common to hear about the church prowess of the Lutheran Holy Land of the Northern Great Plains (MN, ND, SD, IA), with the implication that the Pacific Northwest expression is somehow inferior. It appears from folk culture to church structure to leadership orientation.

One of my colleagues in South Dakota and I discussed this dissonance of place and perception on occasion. I had perceived that sometimes the Midwestern ethos is connected to a moral superiority. I had collected a series of op-ed pieces and letters to the editor that rejected the values of the West Coast and espoused the life in South Dakota. I was attempting to interpret what was behind that understanding. She responded that a Coastal ethos often depicts a cultural superiority. It was hard to disagree with either observation.

In congregational life the diversity of backgrounds is hard to ignore. For every perception of a degree of homogeneity, there are several divergent variables that affect perceptions and relationships. I remember seminary days with scholars and students who espoused some kind of pure faith and theology where culture didn't matter, and that somehow that pure theology could exist in a vacuum. To say there is a pure Christianity apart from culture reeks of gnosticism, where only insiders get to know and understand the "pure" theology.

Today's reflection was inspired by Kansas native Chris Suellentrop and his thoughts on the Kansas City sports landscape. Maybe you're interested in sports and place. If not, what caught my attention was one particular observation about the intersection of place and life, and one that didn't come from a Midwest outsider like me (if you don't want to read the entire article):

"Combine this romantic, backward-looking vision with the traditional Midwestern delusion that you are more American than the rest of the country, and you're left with a strikingly insular self-conception, a sense that you are in a place in righteous decline."--Chris Suellentrop, grantland.com, 7/7/11

That post re-awakened in me the importance of place as a variable to understanding our relationships with God and one another. It made me think about what it means to be a Lutheran Christian in the United States. Who once lived in the Midwest and married someone from the Midwest. Who loves everything about the geography of the Pacific Northwest (reacquainting myself with this love has distracted me from the deeper questions--they're now back). All of these things affect my relationship and vocation. The question is how? What does it mean?

Place matters. For a person of faith, place matters. The Bible features several stories and reflection about the land--think about the Promised Land. Even buildings receive special billing--the Bible features several stories about building programs. There is lament and hope intertwined with building destruction and reconstruction, and all that goes into the construction and recognition of place.

The question for me about the intersection between place and life is not that it exists, but how and why? What do you think?