The Diary of an Unwitting Antagonist.
What is at the heart of conflict resolution? What are the rules for acceptable debate in America?
Recently I’ve become more and more disagreeable. I’m not sure to what I will attribute this phenomenon, but I suppose I just reached a point in my journey where silent frustration was no longer viable for me and I was unwillingly brought into fold of public discourse. It would seem I have data to suggest that I would have been better off silent.
Thank you loyal readers for returning in support of this ashen and decrepit blog site. I do hope those of you who found this post did it with the help of an RSS reader and not by the dutiful and often fruitless task of checking the bookmark every so often. I think you’ll find this post a considerable argument for my continued use of this outlet to express frustration. The world, the one in which I walk, eat, and breathe, is not quite ready to hear me speak as I would write to you.
In this new term we “middlers” have begun the process of field education. This is the very practical part of ministry that many of you are probably thinking ought to be part of each year of seminary education. Well, it could be, but this second year is the required year. So, in addition to serving as Student Pastor for Cross Roads Presbyterian Church in Washington, PA, I spend my Tuesday lunches discussing field education with 12 other seminary students and one practicing minister.
The experience at Cross Roads is a great blessing. In the coming weeks I’ll be preaching there and I’ll be sure to post the transcript on this site. But for today lets return to my theme: the discussion section, and my antagonism therein.
Last week, Oct 3, we finally wrapped up our 4-week roundtable sharing time for everyone to talk at length about themselves and their Christian walk and moved on into the business of discussing matters related to field education. Each week a different student shares a case study from their particular placement and we all discuss it to promote new ideas and relate advice from our shared experience. To get things rolling the moderator, Cathy, let us in on a story from her job as a chaplain at a large retirement facility near Pittsburgh.
This is what she offered for discussion (paraphrased):
There is a woman who works on the staff at the retirement home who I’ve known for years. She became pregnant, and early in the second term she asked me to baptize the child when it was born. We made arrangements to baptize the infant on the grounds of the retirement center so the 350 or so residents and staff could participate and welcome the child into the community. After the child was born the administration of the facility and the child’s grandparents objected to the use of the grounds for a baptism, even though there is a chapel for other religious services. I can’t get into why they objected, but I didn’t know what to do next! Of course I have many friends who are pastors of churches and they would be glad to let me use their sanctuary for a baptism, but I couldn’t baptize the child into a community she would never return to! After much prayer and deliberation I finally relented and baptized the child in a church with only the family in attendance. I couldn’t deny the child the grace of God by refusing to baptize her, but what a tragedy to use a church she wouldn’t ever return to!
So I listened to that, quietly shaking my head in a few places (the whole telling lasted 10 minutes of a 55 minute discussion time) but I didn’t speak up, hoping I would hear one of my colleagues in the room quietly remind her that baptism is not a sacrament directed at a particular community of believers. I hoped someone would point out that to care about who did the baptizing or where the baptism took place was to miss the point entirely, and that she had unwillingly done exactly what she should have done willingly. I know there were students in the room who know that. Students who I have studied 1 Cor 1 with, and they know that the true nature of baptism is that we’re all baptized into one body, one Spirit, united solely in Christ. No one said that, they just wanted her to talk about why the parents disagreed about where to have the child baptized, something Cathy didn’t want to get into.
So when she started talking about the tragedy of the limited number of witnesses for the sixth time I had to interrupt. “I’m sorry, but you’re missing the point.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, you can’t say the baptism was in any way tragic, and you can’t require that there be any particular community present when it happens.”
At this point I see some heads nodding, so I get a little bolder and wax eloquent for 30 seconds about the blessed nature of the sacrament and how God’s grace is sufficient to bring people together in any number of different communities. Lots of heads nodding, even among the people who I know do not agree with most of my theology. Cathy says,
“Good, so we agree. But what do you think about ‘Father’ language?”
I think, wait, what? First of all we don’t agree and second, where is this coming from? Well, apparently somewhere in my mini-sermon I mentioned Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
So of course I wasn’t going to be the first one to answer that question, I’d just held for floor for 3 minutes, so I listened to the class hoping to hear some of those heads that had been nodding before start to speak about the necessity of invoking the name of God the Father as per the commission in Matthew. And I did hear that… sort of.
“I think Jesus did command us to go and baptize all nations in the name of the Father.”
“But what about a person who has a poor relationship with their father?” Cathy says (in more words than that).
I’m thinking: is that a capital ‘F’? A poor relationship with God?
“Well, maybe for people like that you could use Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.”
A chorus of nods and assents
WHAT?! Which is it? Do you believe the biblical language is accurate or not? The gospel writers had access to Creator language but they didn’t say that! Why would you let a poor relationship with some human father destroy any hope for the intimate knowledge of God that we share by the unity we have with Christ? Doesn’t reverting to Creator language re-distance ourselves from redemption and show our refusal of grace? Are we still praying to YHWH? Does the retention of the Aramaic “Abba” change our relationship with God only if we ourselves are willing to call our procreative fathers “Daddy”?
I couldn’t hold that thought in my head, I actually interrupted Cathy (who talks more than most people who are intended to moderate discussion) to say that Father language wasn’t intended to be optional.
“But what if it is a stumbling block for people?”
“Then you find out why, help them through that. Lance the wound and help them heal, help them come to know a God that is infinitely more loving than any human father.”
“What if you don’t know them well and won’t have the chance to minister to them…”
Then don’t baptize their kids until you do know them. Yeah, I didn’t get to do more than think that last line, other people had stepped into the inclusive language discussion and we were going downhill fast. By the end of the time I was the only one who would claim that Father language has untranslatable value for people.
Our discussion is really hurt by the absence of Dr. Tappy. Each discussion section like this is supposed to be regulated by a practicing minister and a seminary professor. Our professor just had prostate surgery and hasn’t been in the group leaving us with what you might call ‘all heart, no head’ theology which really isn’t theology, it’s no kind of –logy, it’s emotivism.
So today, with Dr. Tappy still absent but his return promised to be soon, we began our time with Isaiah 40 and a prayer then Cathy gave a brief statement in which she implied she’d gotten several disgruntled e-mails from people in the previous class feeling like they’d been talked down to, etc. and that we weren’t here to preach at each other or convert each other. We need to have respect for one another’s beliefs.
You could tell by the way she looked at everyone in the room BUT me that I was the sole target of the impeachment. I had preached? I had sought converts? I had quelled discussion? Yes, it would seem I had, and all b/c I had grossly over-estimated my audience.
But did I learn? Did I change? Did I sit quietly and allow another discussion to fall away into the oblivion of cultural relativism? No. I tried, but didn’t succeed to keep my mouth shut. Once again I let my voice be still until the raucous agreement upon poor theology came to a deafening roar and I was compelled by something not myself to speak once again.
This time it was contemporary worship.
I’ve previously expressed views on Emergent, and this is quite similar to those objections. In the fight for contextualization it seems I’m hopelessly stuck on the idea that the church shouldn’t compromise to satisfy the attention span of the person in worship. Church shouldn’t be consumer-driven. In church you should be <1% consumer, you are there to give praise and worship to the risen Lord by whom you were called into being. You’re not there to feel good about yourself or to get cheered up, though those things might happen. You should never go into church expecting to receive until you have given absolutely everything you can to God and feel as though you have been fully emptied. When was the last time you felt that way? Honestly?
My way of phrasing this to the class was “when is it time to expect people to be willing participants in worship?” If we make our services an attempt to reach out to the unchurched, do we have an expectation of bringing them into something? It’s my contention that you should use contemporary means of worship only when you have a majority of your own members on board and willing to commit to the practice. Without that consensus you’re just making a new church, further dividing a divided body. I believe that if you promote a healthy attitude that all members of your church ought to be willing participants in whatever order of worship is surrounding them (provided someone with scruples and an accountability team is running the program) despite how they might react to some particular event they will attend and they will respond and they will learn to see in each other the true nature of diverse union in the body of the congregation. If you think it’s impossible to reach that consensus in your church I say send the dissenters to another church that suits them. That’s not the same as turning them away, remember, we’re one body, baptized into Christ.
So when I said this, that the Gospel should be preached and forget making people comfortable, I really struck a nerve with a fellow student who I’ve long considered a good friend. He’s very interested in Emergent and has spent a good deal of his ministry focused on how to bring the Gospel to people who don’t like traditional worship. He was deeply offended that I would suggest the Gospel isn’t preached when it’s preached in a contextualized manner. Now, that’s not exactly what I was saying, but something about me puts people on edge. I’ve become an antagonist.
<><
What is at the heart of conflict resolution? What are the rules for acceptable debate in America?
Recently I’ve become more and more disagreeable. I’m not sure to what I will attribute this phenomenon, but I suppose I just reached a point in my journey where silent frustration was no longer viable for me and I was unwillingly brought into fold of public discourse. It would seem I have data to suggest that I would have been better off silent.
Thank you loyal readers for returning in support of this ashen and decrepit blog site. I do hope those of you who found this post did it with the help of an RSS reader and not by the dutiful and often fruitless task of checking the bookmark every so often. I think you’ll find this post a considerable argument for my continued use of this outlet to express frustration. The world, the one in which I walk, eat, and breathe, is not quite ready to hear me speak as I would write to you.
In this new term we “middlers” have begun the process of field education. This is the very practical part of ministry that many of you are probably thinking ought to be part of each year of seminary education. Well, it could be, but this second year is the required year. So, in addition to serving as Student Pastor for Cross Roads Presbyterian Church in Washington, PA, I spend my Tuesday lunches discussing field education with 12 other seminary students and one practicing minister.
The experience at Cross Roads is a great blessing. In the coming weeks I’ll be preaching there and I’ll be sure to post the transcript on this site. But for today lets return to my theme: the discussion section, and my antagonism therein.
Last week, Oct 3, we finally wrapped up our 4-week roundtable sharing time for everyone to talk at length about themselves and their Christian walk and moved on into the business of discussing matters related to field education. Each week a different student shares a case study from their particular placement and we all discuss it to promote new ideas and relate advice from our shared experience. To get things rolling the moderator, Cathy, let us in on a story from her job as a chaplain at a large retirement facility near Pittsburgh.
This is what she offered for discussion (paraphrased):
There is a woman who works on the staff at the retirement home who I’ve known for years. She became pregnant, and early in the second term she asked me to baptize the child when it was born. We made arrangements to baptize the infant on the grounds of the retirement center so the 350 or so residents and staff could participate and welcome the child into the community. After the child was born the administration of the facility and the child’s grandparents objected to the use of the grounds for a baptism, even though there is a chapel for other religious services. I can’t get into why they objected, but I didn’t know what to do next! Of course I have many friends who are pastors of churches and they would be glad to let me use their sanctuary for a baptism, but I couldn’t baptize the child into a community she would never return to! After much prayer and deliberation I finally relented and baptized the child in a church with only the family in attendance. I couldn’t deny the child the grace of God by refusing to baptize her, but what a tragedy to use a church she wouldn’t ever return to!
So I listened to that, quietly shaking my head in a few places (the whole telling lasted 10 minutes of a 55 minute discussion time) but I didn’t speak up, hoping I would hear one of my colleagues in the room quietly remind her that baptism is not a sacrament directed at a particular community of believers. I hoped someone would point out that to care about who did the baptizing or where the baptism took place was to miss the point entirely, and that she had unwillingly done exactly what she should have done willingly. I know there were students in the room who know that. Students who I have studied 1 Cor 1 with, and they know that the true nature of baptism is that we’re all baptized into one body, one Spirit, united solely in Christ. No one said that, they just wanted her to talk about why the parents disagreed about where to have the child baptized, something Cathy didn’t want to get into.
So when she started talking about the tragedy of the limited number of witnesses for the sixth time I had to interrupt. “I’m sorry, but you’re missing the point.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, you can’t say the baptism was in any way tragic, and you can’t require that there be any particular community present when it happens.”
At this point I see some heads nodding, so I get a little bolder and wax eloquent for 30 seconds about the blessed nature of the sacrament and how God’s grace is sufficient to bring people together in any number of different communities. Lots of heads nodding, even among the people who I know do not agree with most of my theology. Cathy says,
“Good, so we agree. But what do you think about ‘Father’ language?”
I think, wait, what? First of all we don’t agree and second, where is this coming from? Well, apparently somewhere in my mini-sermon I mentioned Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
So of course I wasn’t going to be the first one to answer that question, I’d just held for floor for 3 minutes, so I listened to the class hoping to hear some of those heads that had been nodding before start to speak about the necessity of invoking the name of God the Father as per the commission in Matthew. And I did hear that… sort of.
“I think Jesus did command us to go and baptize all nations in the name of the Father.”
“But what about a person who has a poor relationship with their father?” Cathy says (in more words than that).
I’m thinking: is that a capital ‘F’? A poor relationship with God?
“Well, maybe for people like that you could use Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.”
A chorus of nods and assents
WHAT?! Which is it? Do you believe the biblical language is accurate or not? The gospel writers had access to Creator language but they didn’t say that! Why would you let a poor relationship with some human father destroy any hope for the intimate knowledge of God that we share by the unity we have with Christ? Doesn’t reverting to Creator language re-distance ourselves from redemption and show our refusal of grace? Are we still praying to YHWH? Does the retention of the Aramaic “Abba” change our relationship with God only if we ourselves are willing to call our procreative fathers “Daddy”?
I couldn’t hold that thought in my head, I actually interrupted Cathy (who talks more than most people who are intended to moderate discussion) to say that Father language wasn’t intended to be optional.
“But what if it is a stumbling block for people?”
“Then you find out why, help them through that. Lance the wound and help them heal, help them come to know a God that is infinitely more loving than any human father.”
“What if you don’t know them well and won’t have the chance to minister to them…”
Then don’t baptize their kids until you do know them. Yeah, I didn’t get to do more than think that last line, other people had stepped into the inclusive language discussion and we were going downhill fast. By the end of the time I was the only one who would claim that Father language has untranslatable value for people.
Our discussion is really hurt by the absence of Dr. Tappy. Each discussion section like this is supposed to be regulated by a practicing minister and a seminary professor. Our professor just had prostate surgery and hasn’t been in the group leaving us with what you might call ‘all heart, no head’ theology which really isn’t theology, it’s no kind of –logy, it’s emotivism.
So today, with Dr. Tappy still absent but his return promised to be soon, we began our time with Isaiah 40 and a prayer then Cathy gave a brief statement in which she implied she’d gotten several disgruntled e-mails from people in the previous class feeling like they’d been talked down to, etc. and that we weren’t here to preach at each other or convert each other. We need to have respect for one another’s beliefs.
You could tell by the way she looked at everyone in the room BUT me that I was the sole target of the impeachment. I had preached? I had sought converts? I had quelled discussion? Yes, it would seem I had, and all b/c I had grossly over-estimated my audience.
But did I learn? Did I change? Did I sit quietly and allow another discussion to fall away into the oblivion of cultural relativism? No. I tried, but didn’t succeed to keep my mouth shut. Once again I let my voice be still until the raucous agreement upon poor theology came to a deafening roar and I was compelled by something not myself to speak once again.
This time it was contemporary worship.
I’ve previously expressed views on Emergent, and this is quite similar to those objections. In the fight for contextualization it seems I’m hopelessly stuck on the idea that the church shouldn’t compromise to satisfy the attention span of the person in worship. Church shouldn’t be consumer-driven. In church you should be <1% consumer, you are there to give praise and worship to the risen Lord by whom you were called into being. You’re not there to feel good about yourself or to get cheered up, though those things might happen. You should never go into church expecting to receive until you have given absolutely everything you can to God and feel as though you have been fully emptied. When was the last time you felt that way? Honestly?
My way of phrasing this to the class was “when is it time to expect people to be willing participants in worship?” If we make our services an attempt to reach out to the unchurched, do we have an expectation of bringing them into something? It’s my contention that you should use contemporary means of worship only when you have a majority of your own members on board and willing to commit to the practice. Without that consensus you’re just making a new church, further dividing a divided body. I believe that if you promote a healthy attitude that all members of your church ought to be willing participants in whatever order of worship is surrounding them (provided someone with scruples and an accountability team is running the program) despite how they might react to some particular event they will attend and they will respond and they will learn to see in each other the true nature of diverse union in the body of the congregation. If you think it’s impossible to reach that consensus in your church I say send the dissenters to another church that suits them. That’s not the same as turning them away, remember, we’re one body, baptized into Christ.
So when I said this, that the Gospel should be preached and forget making people comfortable, I really struck a nerve with a fellow student who I’ve long considered a good friend. He’s very interested in Emergent and has spent a good deal of his ministry focused on how to bring the Gospel to people who don’t like traditional worship. He was deeply offended that I would suggest the Gospel isn’t preached when it’s preached in a contextualized manner. Now, that’s not exactly what I was saying, but something about me puts people on edge. I’ve become an antagonist.
<><
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