Hermeneutical Repentance: An Open Letter To My Former Tribe

24 May 2018

I was reared in a conservative evangelical tradition that was heavy on strict grammatical-historical hermeneutics. I have repented of that school of thought in favor of following the examples set by the NT authors themselves.

Look, you know I love you, but there’s no point in mincing words here: you guys suck at reading narrative. I mean, it’s terrible. Either you reduce the story to a disconnected set of little morality tales for Sunday school kids, or you chop it up into however many dispensations or homogenize it all into two covenants (or both). At best, you think it’s there as a means to the end of teaching “doctrine,” by which you mean something like systematic theology. In practice, of course, many of you mostly ignore the narrative in favor of the church epistles, especially in your preaching. To be fair, you’re mostly pretty good at the church epistles. Straight-out didactic literature is your forte.

But look, the narrative is three quarters of the Bible. Paul says that all Scripture is profitable for doctrine, and your hermeneutics courses are all a-flutter with warnings against “getting doctrine from narrative.” This means — it has to mean — that there’s something wrong with your hermeneutics. As long as you insist that your hermeneutics are fine, you’re going to continue to have the same problem, to wit: you don’t know how to read three quarters of the Bible. As soon as you contemplate some sort of hermeneutical repentance, though, you feel as though you’re about to throw open the door to every perversion and silliness that hermeneutical laxity has ever visited upon the Church. How can you proceed? How can you gain the ability to read the other three quarters of the Bible well without falling victim to the many traps and pitfalls that have snared so many of your unwary brethren?

I want to make an observation and propose a way forward. The observation: you’re scared. If your reason for avoiding narrative is that you don’t know how to avoid hermeneutical excesses, and your response to your lack of skill is to run away and hide in a church epistle…stop it. You can’t learn to swim by running from the water. God has not given us a spirit of fear.

Now, for a way forward. It’s simple in concept, sufficiently rich to cover the variety of problems you’ll have to face along the way, and as a bonus, it starts in your old stomping grounds — the church epistles. Even there, however, you’re going to have to face hermeneutical repentance. You’ve missed some pretty obvious stuff. The authors of the church epistles had none of your reluctance about drawing doctrine from narrative. For example, you somehow fail to notice that Paul derives his doctrine of justification by faith in Romans 4 from the narrative accounts of Abraham and David — the very thing you warn your students not to do. Nor is that circumstance unique — the authors of the epistles overwhelmingly draw their doctrine from the biblical narratives. Peter does it. Hebrews certainly does it. James does it. Know why? Because they’re following Jesus–He did it too.

The authors of the epistles may not have left you a hermeneutics manual, but they certainly did leave you with an enormous set of examples. Start with Romans 4, and work your way out from there. What other examples can you identify? How might you follow the example set forth for you?

Of course I realize that there will be differences of opinion, excesses, and all that. Sure. But if you’re not willing to get out there and make some mistakes, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ve gotta learn somehow.

Or you could keep being bad at reading three quarters of the Bible….

2 Comments | Hermeneutics, Letters, Meditations, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Corporeal Glory

3 May 2018

As I re-engage with this blog, I find myself wanting to give greater attention to anthropology and a practical focus on Christian physicality. This is the first of a number of planned posts on the subject.

Christian theology has had –- at best –- a very ambivalent relationship with the body over the centuries. When Nietszche sneered at “despisers of the body,” his arrow did not fly wide of the mark. What makes this so pathetic is that the ambivalence, and downright antipathy, are completely unjustifiable.

God made Adam and Eve (with bodies!), then looked back at all He had made and saw that it was “very good.” No exception clause for the bodies, I notice…

Of course, the historical comeback is that creation is all well and good, but that was before the Fall.  The dissenters have a point here, sort of.  After the Fall, the body is dead.  However, that fact, as important as it is, doesn’t seem to affect the inherent dignity of the body. When David praises God because he is “fearfully and wonderfully made,” he’s not talking about some prelapsarian state, but his own personal experience; when Solomon writes his Song, he takes a downright exuberant view of the pleasures of the flesh. (Ecclesiastes too: depressive commentators notwithstanding, the book is about how to enjoy earthly pleasures without worshiping — and thereby ruining — them.)

When we come to Jesus, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” All by itself, that single sentence goes a long way toward vindicating the body. In an instant, it sweeps away all gnostic and Platonic denigration of matter in general, and the body in particular.  Even better, the physical resurrection of Christ (as the prototype of our resurrection) carries the body, redeemed and perfected, into eternity. The closing chapters of the Bible describe the bright vision that God always intended for His creation: a perfected, corporeal humanity ruling a recreated, perfected earth as vassal kings under the King of Kings, in perfect harmony with God and each other.

That is not the end of history.  In many ways, it’s only the beginning.  Genesis 1:28-30 describes God’s design for the world He made.  Genesis 3 describes our rebellion against our design parameters.  Everything from Genesis 4 to Revelation 20 is about fixing that.  When it’s fixed, then — and only then — does human history begin to move in the direction that God set forth in Genesis 1.

Another way of putting it: Revelation 21-22 is “the end of the world,” but it is no more the end of history than Genesis 6-9.  As in the days of Noah, the existing world will perish, and the new world awaits.  As Noah and his family founded civilization as we know it today, so we — God’s elect — will join with Christ in founding the civilization of the world to come.  Obviously, the founding of it is only the beginning.

And it’s all gloriously corporeal.

A biblical view of history portrays the body as part and parcel of being human, every bit as bound up in human destiny as the soul and spirit. That viewoffers no shelter whatsoever to the notion that the body is a prison, or an impediment that will one day be cast aside for the purity of life as a disembodied spirit. Centuries of dyspeptic and flabby theologians have heaped abuse, insult, and degradation upon the body, and there’s just no excuse for it.

A slightly less demeaning, and more subtle, form of that error talks of the body as if it is the “earth suit” that the “real person” — i.e., the immaterial man — wears temporarily.  Proponents of this error will point to Paul’s reference to the mortal body as “this tent” in 2 Corinthians 5:4.  They should read the whole passage, in which Paul describes the disembodied state as nakedness, and makes it quite clear that his earnest desire is not to shed this body, but to be clothed with the resurrection body (which, by the way, is made of this one — see 1 Corinthians 15:51-54).

Operating on that foundation, the believer has every reason to regard the body as a gift to be enjoyed to the hilt; fallen and imperfect to be sure, but those problems are only temporary. God made our bodies to move, and to enjoy being moved well. The proper way to honor that gift is to move well, and eat well, and sleep well on luxuriant sheets with a ridiculously high thread count, and while we’re on the subject of things you do in bed [THIS PORTION CENSORED FOR THE SAKE OF CHILDREN AND PRESBYTERIANS] –and to enjoy it all!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

If the Trumpet Makes an Uncertain Sound…

19 April 2018

I heard something really appalling the other day in a sermon by a Christian brother of mine.  Now you’ve got to understand, this guy hasn’t had any formal training in the Word, but he’s walked with the Lord for a long time, and he has a gift for being doctrinally spot-on.  I really expected better of him.  I’m not going to name the guy — I don’t want to embarrass him — but it so perfectly highlights a common problem that I’m going to quote you the offending portion of what he said:

Remember how God waited patiently back in Noah’s time, while they made the ark?  Remember how in the ark God saved eight people by water, the water of the flood?  This is a pattern for us, and it corresponds to our salvation.  In the same way, what saves us is baptism.  Now I’m not talking about just washing off dirt; I’m talking about baptism as a response to God from a good conscience.  And we can have that good conscience because Christ rose from the dead and has ascended into heaven to sit at God’s right hand, and all the powers are under Him.

Now, no matter what this sounds like, I know this guy, and I assure you that he soundly believes in justification by faith.  That’s why I’m so stunned that he would talk this way.  I mean, you expect it from a Roman Catholic, or a Church of Christ guy, but him?  No way.  In his defense, he does get the qualifiers in, right?  He’s very careful to say that it’s not just about the physical act of baptism; it’s about baptism as an expression of a heart that’s right toward God — so presumably the faith would be there.  But still, what a confusing way to say it!

When he’s discussing the use of tongues in the church service, Paul says this:

Even things without life, whether flute or harp, when they make a sound, unless they make a distinction in the sounds, how will it be known what is piped or played?  For if the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will prepare himself for battle?  So likewise you, unless you utter by the tongue words easy to understand, how will it be known what is spoken? For you will be speaking into the air.

Let me be clear: Paul is speaking about interpretation of tongues.  That’s the primary context.  But the principle surely applies: If we speak unclearly, then people will won’t understand, and we’re just — at best — talking into the air.  If we’re lucky, they’ll just walk away scratching their heads and thinking, “I wonder what that was about?”  More likely, they’ll misunderstand, and in a case like this that can cause real spiritual trouble.

It’s obvious — or at least it ought to be.  If you say “what saves us is baptism,” you’ll have people starting to think that getting dunked in the water (or sprinkled) somehow has something to do with your salvation.  You’ll have people who haven’t been baptized beginning to wonder if maybe they’re not really saved yet.  You’re going to have all kinds of salvation-by-works trouble.

Back before I heard him say this, I would have thought it would be great to go out and evangelize with this guy, but now I’m starting to wonder.  Maybe I’m better off staying away from him, if he’s going to be that careless.

*****

Okay, so for those of you who haven’t tumbled to it yet, the “offending” quote is a paraphrase of 1 Peter 3:20b-22.

But I’m right, aren’t I?  If somebody got up and said “Water baptism saves you” out loud, across the pulpit, in one of our churches, he’d hear all the things I said, wouldn’t he? Of course, he could defend himself by saying, “Hey, it’s right there in 1 Peter!”

Do you think that would work?

If your answer is yes, then I want you to put your reputation on the line by trying it.

A little reluctant?  A little nervous about it?  Tell you what, I’ll let you qualify the statement however you want, just so the words “baptism saves us” come out your mouth — and you make it clear that you’re talking about water baptism.

Still nervous?

I was too.  And that’s sin. Let me ask you, is it righteous to speak in the way that Peter and the Holy Spirit are speaking?  Of course.  Should we speak about things in the way that God teaches us to speak about them in the Bible?  Yes.  And should we be hungry to learn how to do this?  Yes again.

But we aren’t.  We’re scared.  We don’t want to learn to speak like God speaks about things.  We don’t want to make waves, or rather, we want to make only the waves that are pre-approved by our communities.  We want to speak the language of our doctrinal statements, and if that means there are certain plainly biblical things that we just can’t say, then so much the worse for the Bible.  God should have been a little more clear if He wanted us to follow His example.

Oh, yeah.  This is sin.

Jesus had a different take on things: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.”  If this is a righteous way of speaking — and it is — then we should be hungry for it.  And Jesus tells us that if we hunger for it, that hunger will be satisfied.  We will be able to see our way clear to speaking that way, if only we want to.

But we don’t want to.  Doesn’t Jesus know how people will talk about us, if we do this?

Jesus thought of that.  “Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake.  Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets before you.”

*****

So there it is: Water baptism saves us, just like the waters of the flood saved Noah and his family.

*****

You’ll note I haven’t tried to explain away the passage or rescue my theological credentials.  I just said what the passage says, and left it there.

Does that bother you?

2 Comments | Meditations, Speaking as God Speaks | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Subjective Spirituality: The Romans Riddle

2 January 2018

Paul ends Romans 7 crying out for deliverance: “Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this dead body?” Paul begins Romans 12 with a charge: “Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, *acceptable to God*, which is your reasonable service.” The gap between those two passages presents one of the great riddles of Romans. What happens between the end of Romans 7 and the beginning of Romans 12 that qualifies “this dead body” as an acceptable sacrifice?

Mull that over for a minute. 

Paul answers that question in 8:9-11. The body is dead, and will remain unredeemed until the resurrection, but there is a divine thumb on the scales. Despite the body being unredeemed, He gives life to our dead bodies through the Spirit who indwells us.

Once upon a time, knowing that would have been enough for me–I solved the riddle! Yay!!!

But not anymore. I used to be an academic, but these days I’m a pastor and a bodyworker, and seeing people delivered from death is what I care about. I’m very much a practitioner first. So let’s apply it. If we take Romans 8:11 literally—and I don’t see why we shouldn’t—it means that there is a Person who is not me, indwelling me and enabling me to live in a manner that would otherwise be barred to me this side of the resurrection. That is not simply a matter of verbal contemplation; it is as experiential as it gets. So for example, suppose I find myself totally unable to forgive someone. This doctrine teaches me that what I cannot do in my dead body (Romans 7), God can make possible anyway. So I should cry out to God for deliverance, and see what happens.

In God’s providence, I experienced that deliverance long before I ever understood Romans 8.

I had labored to forgive a number of people who had wronged me. I had reached the point where I only had one person left to forgive–and I couldn’t do it. I understood all the doctrine, and I could say all the right words, but it just didn’t work. I hated her in my heart, and that was that. For days I tried. I could not forgive her.

Then, one afternoon, I got down on my knees and prayed a simple prayer: “God, I know you want me to forgive her. You know I want to, but I can’t do it. You have to do this, or it won’t happen.” Then I stood up. I don’t know how to describe what happened other than this: when my knees were on the ground, I hated her. By the time I was standing, the hate was just gone.

God answered my prayer; in Romans terms, the Spirit gave life to my dead body, enabling me to become an acceptable living sacrifice.

On a more recent occasion, I had someone on my table with a severe muscular problem in her leg. As I always do, I asked Jesus to show up and heal what needed to be healed in her. I released the muscles, but when the physical work was over, I could tell that we weren’t done yet. I anointed the area with oil and just held it, waiting. She got tenser, and tenser, and then the dam broke, and she began to sob. I kept holding and waiting. The storm passed, and when she was calm again, I asked for permission to move on. She gave it, and I finished the session. When a client has an emotional release like that, they often don’t tell you what it was about. In this case, she did. As I held that particular muscle, she realized she was harboring bitterness toward a friend who had betrayed her six months earlier. In that moment, she was able to grieve the loss of the friendship, and forgive the betrayal.

I knew almost nothing about my client’s situation; I could never have addressed it in that way. But God worked through me in ways that are well beyond my ability, and enabled her to see something that she’d been unable to see, too.

Another day, I sat across the table from a homeless man named Michael. Michael frequented a corner that I drove by often, and over the past several months, we had become friends. On this particular day, I’d been awake since 4 a.m., so at 9:30 I was having lunch, and buying him breakfast. As we ate, he told me about the several churches he would visit during the course of a week. He liked to go to these particular churches because they didn’t just give him stuff; they let him help out, so he was able to contribute something to them as well. “I go to four different churches, Tim,” he said, “and they tell me four different things about God’s plan for my life. What am I supposed to do?”

I laughed. “What, you want me to be the fifth person to tell you God’s plan for your life? How’s that gonna help?”

He chuckled.

“It sounds to me like you’ve heard plenty of people telling you what God thinks.” I said. “Now, you need to hear it from God.”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You might live a life where God will tell you things, but I don’t live that kind of life. God isn’t going to talk to me.”

I smiled. “Michael, you’ve heard about Jesus dying on the cross, right?”

He nodded, and I continued.

“Lots of people know that it happened, but I bet nobody’s ever told you what it means. Jesus was perfect. He took every failing you have, all those things you are and all those things you’ve done that you think are the reasons God won’t talk to you, and He took them all to the cross with Him. When He died, all that stuff died with Him, and He took it into the grave. When He rose from the dead three days later, He did not come out dragging a Hefty bag full of your junk. He left all that behind, dead and buried. God loves you. He’s crazy about you. He wants to talk with you, and none of that stuff can get in the way.”

I could see that he didn’t really believe me, but he understood what I was saying, so I kept going.

“Let’s just try it,” I said. “Give me 60 seconds.” I waggled my watch. “You listen and see if God talks to you. If you honestly don’t hear anything, you can walk out of here and tell yourself that I’m crazy, and you’ve only lost one minute of your life. But what if I’m right? Would you want to miss out on that?”

He thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay.”

I didn’t bow my head or close my eyes. I just talked like God was sitting in the booth right next to Michael (because He was). “God, this is Michael. He doesn’t believe that you’ll talk to him. I’m asking you to speak to him now, and to make it really clear, so he can hear you.” And then I shut up.

Surgeon General’s warning: Asking God to speak to people may cause elevated heart rate and blood pressure, sweating, and anxiety. Of course, I was silently praying furiously for God to speak. Meanwhile, I was watching Michael’s face and my watch, and trying to be calm about it. He looked down at his plate, and sat quietly. 30 seconds passed. Nothing. 40 seconds. Still nothing. I was praying hard: “God, You taught me to do this. I crawled way out here on the skinny branches for You. Don’t You dare let me down.”

With a few seconds to go, suddenly Michael’s face changed.

“What did you hear?” I asked.

“You know,” he said, “I have some people that want to help me get off the street. But I haven’t let them because I can’t pay them back. I just had this sudden thought out of nowhere that I need to humble myself and accept the help they’re offering me. That it’s my pride that’s holding me down, and I need to be willing to be humble.” He looked up at me. “Was that God?”

I laughed. “You’ll have to decide that for yourself, buddy.” I told him. “But in my experience, the devil doesn’t usually tell me to be humble, you know?”

I could give many more examples, stories from my own life and others I know. You can probably think of your own, too. (If you can’t, let’s talk. You’re missing out on something important.) But these are sufficient to make the point: whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, just like the man said. It even works in intercession, sometimes.
This is, of course, highly subjective. Since the deliverance in question is existential salvation from internal problems, I don’t see how it could be anything but subjective. But the problems were real, and deadly; the salvation is just as real. It’s life in the place of death, as promised in Romans 8:11.

 

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Covering Grace

17 November 2017

It’s not possible to learn a craft—-any craft—without messing up. Whether it’s shoe-shining or surgery, you’re going to make mistakes. And how! So what do you do when you’re in ministry? You’re elbow-deep in people’s lives, at the moments when they’re in deepest pain. You represent God. When you make a mistake, people get hurt — badly. They get a false view of God and other people that can impact them for years to come. You can’t afford to make those kinds of mistakes. Right?

Wrong. That is a lie from the enemy, designed to paralyze you into inaction.

God knows better than anyone that you can’t learn anything without making some mistakes. And He has planned, from eternity past, for your mistakes. He loves the people you work with and minister to, just as much as He loves you. He’s got them, just like He’s got you. This isn’t an excuse to be lazy or a reason to shortcut your preparation. Your diligence is definitely required, or you won’t get better at your craft.

But God has not given us a spirit of fear. Don’t refuse to practice your craft because you’re afraid. Get out there. Do your work. Rest on the grace of God that covers you. Trust Him. He’s got you, and everyone around you. Trust and obey.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Not That Simple

10 November 2017

I was talking recently with a friend about the differences between the way I used to prepare people for ministry (back when I was working in a seminary) versus the way I do it now. The biggest difference by far is the degree of experiential learning I insist on. We aren’t just going to learn about the Lordship of Christ; we’re going to put it to work by seeking to hear what He has to say to us and obeying, by praying for the world to come into submission to His will, by sending demons packing.

That focus on experiential learning does many things. It weeds out the people who want to be hearers, but not doers. It inculcates a great reverence for the truth, because we see it set us and others free in practice. But it also forces us to come to grips with the messy business of real application, which is frequently a lot harder than discussions in seminary classrooms make it sound.

 

In the seminary classroom, the prevailing questions would be “What is right?” or “What is true?” — both outstanding questions for a Christian to ask. But for many students, there was also a prevailing assumption that once those questions were properly answered, the proper course of action would be obvious. Well…not so much. Other students had a persistent case of the what-ifs: they could spin out endless scenarios that impossibly complicated any discussion of application. For both these problems, the solution is actual application to a particular situation.

For example, several years ago I was involved in an online forum for survivors of a particularly abusive group of churches. Many of these survivors posted anonymously because they were terrified of reprisals against themselves and their families. Meanwhile, active members of the churches in question would periodically come on the forum to defend their pastors, and would routinely challenge the anonymous posters to approach the pastors directly in line with the guidelines of Mt. 18, to identify themselves, and so on.

How are we to think about this?

In a way, the church members were obviously right. The Matthew 18 guidelines for conflict resolution must be adhered to; they are not merely a suggestion. And how about the golden rule? Would the anonymous posters want someone to post anonymous accusations about them on a public forum for the whole internet-connected world to read?

Moreover, there is no biblical precedent at all for anonymous accusations, and why would there be? The whole point is to bring about resolution of the conflict, and that can’t happen as long as the accuser remains anonymous, can it?

So that settles it, yes?

Not so fast…

First of all, for a number of these anonymous folks, the Matthew 18 standards had been tried. When they approached the pastor about his transgressions alone, he abused them and then lied to others about the conversation. He had his congregation so fooled, or so cowed, that for the most part nobody was willing to accompany the offended party to confront him a second time. As for telling it to the church…forget it.

Secondly, let’s look at the Golden Rule again. Suppose you had been brutalized by such a pastor, and suppose, broken and battered, you spoke up about it, only to incur further abuse and reprisals. Suppose you discover an internet forum where you can talk with fellow victims, receive some help and validation, and begin to heal, a place where you can speak freely without reprisal, because nobody would know who you were. Would you want that chance? Thought so. So why would you deny it to someone else?

Let us not forget, too, that there is a biblical example of speaking publicly to this sort of failure and abuse in a pastor’s ministry — III John. John the Apostle is more than willing to speak frankly in his letter about Diotrephes’ character, and also promises to address the problem more directly when he comes in person.

So the whole picture is a bit more complicated. Of course it is true that reconciliation can only happen if both parties are at the table, and neither one is hiding behind a cloak of online anonymity. And of course it is true that reconciliation is desirable. But reconciliation is not the only thing at stake here. Battered sheep need wound care. They need time in the spiritual hospital. That healing cannot happen in silence. The wounds need to be addressed in community with fellow believers.

What this means in practice is that the anonymous party will probably end up telling his story more than once. As a battered sheep who is simply trying to heal, he can share it anonymously and get some help. As he recovers and becomes, not just a battered sheep, but a Christian soldier prepared to do battle with wolves, he will tell the story again — but this time he will identify himself, give specific names and dates, and handle the reprisals as the cost of doing business. The goal with a battered sheep is to grow him into a Christian warrior. But growth takes time, and we have to start him from where he is — which is what God does with us.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Strong Magic Takes Blood

14 July 2017

My essay, “Strong Magic Takes Blood” was published at Theopolis Institute.  Take a look. 

1 Comment | Meditations, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Nobody Will Notice: A Love Letter

29 June 2017

“Pastor” means “shepherd,” but most of the people who have the word “pastor” on their business cards are not, in fact, shepherds. (This is okay; you can be a legit church leader without a shepherding gift. The Bible has other words for that — but that’s another post.)

Churches mostly don’t seek, interview for, or pay for shepherding. When it comes to the position we call “pastor,” churches mostly pay for the same things that any other corporation might pay for in a leader: visionaries, fundraisers, orators, administrators, technocrats — things that are visible or sexy (or preferably both), and relatively easy to track and measure.

Shepherds are hard to track.

The nature of effective shepherding is that if you don’t do it, nobody will notice. Injured sheep tend to hobble along with the rest of the flock as best they can, trying to look normal. They don’t want anyone to see. The whole group will join them in the pretense and be willfully blind to their wounds, because wounds make everyone uncomfortable. Lost sheep do not report themselves missing, and they don’t send up signal flares so you can find them. Nobody — not the missing or injured sheep, not the church leadership, and certainly not the rest of the flock — nobody actually wants a shepherd to do his or her job. Nobody wants the wound treated like it’s really there. Nobody who stayed wants to know why the lost sheep left.

You will be rewarded for following the crowd in their pretense that everything is fine. No one will complain. For the most part, even the lost and the wounded don’t expect you to help them. (In fact, “Why are you doing this?” is one of the most frequent questions I encounter. The answer is always the same: “Because you’re worth it. Because Jesus would.” They don’t believe me at first, but that’s okay.)

If you resist the temptation to ignore the lost and wounded, if you roll up your sleeves and do the hard work of fostering real healing, for the most part, no one will know except the people you help. You won’t announce to the world that you’re going to call Jack, who seems to be isolating himself, or that you think Madeline is not dealing with her mother’s death as well as she’s pretending. You will just call Jack and Madeline.

In most organizations, even those ostensibly devoted to healing, no one will assign you this job. If you resist the temptation to ignore the lost and wounded, about the best you can hope for is that nobody will notice. But honestly that’s not likely.

More likely, people will resent your shepherding without ever knowing what you are doing. Shepherding takes time, and you will always have other responsibilities. You will be encouraged to spend your time on visible, trackable things — managing programs, initiating a new social media marketing campaign, updating the website, promoting the building program, speaking, whatever. If you actually go and spend significant time with Jack and Madeline, your superiors are going to wonder why you’re not at your desk where you belong. What could you be doing, anyway, and why aren’t the TPS reports done?

(This is like wondering why a shepherd is out looking for a lost sheep instead of hanging around the sheepfold all day — but  good luck getting the board of your 501(c)(3) corporation to understand that.)

So you will initiate this work on your own, and in the teeth of your other responsibilities. You will just call a wounded sheep and say, “Hey, let’s get a cup of coffee.” Or you will swing by their house with a six-pack after work, sit on the patio, and drink and talk. You won’t just keep their secrets; you’ll keep it confidential that you even met, unless you want it blabbed all over church, or showing up as a sermon illustration. (Yeah, sorry, but that actually happens. Regularly.) It’s no one else’s business but theirs.

Maybe it’s one meeting. Maybe it’s two hours a week for a year. It doesn’t matter, because when you made that first phone call, you were signing up — to the best of your capacity — for whatever it takes. If you can’t help, you connect them with someone who can, but you usually don’t just get to drop it at that point. You check back in. You walk with them through it. Whatever it is — and it might be minor, or it might be literally the worst thing you’ve ever encountered in your life.

That’s the discipline.

That’s what good shepherds do.

If there’s a way of making a decent living at this, I certainly haven’t figured it out. But if Jesus called you to it…do it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

An Introduction to Spiritual Disciplines

17 September 2015

I had occasion to address Mosaic Church on the subject of spiritual disciplines. In this sermon, I don’t present a bunch of options so much as I aim for the heart of what makes a life of spiritual discipline that moves us closer to God instead of just building a better Pharisee. I hope you find it helpful.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Firm Foundations

24 August 2015

This post is part of the August 2015 Synchroblog on “What it means to be pro-life.” The writing prompt included the following quote from Sister Joan Chittister, OSB: “I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”

“I say, old chap, you don’t look very balanced.”

Opposing abortion but turning a blind eye to the child once he’s born is not a balanced way to love your neighbor. That said, the imbalance on display is the same kind of imbalance you see in a sailor leaning off the high side of the boat for all he’s worth, trying to keep it from going over. The legal slaughter of a couple thousand children every day is the sort of thing that might send you off-center, if you think about it. Molech never had it so good; for Yahweh-fearing vertebrates, single-issue voting is an astonishingly mild response. What would Phineas do?

But a bunch of us want to talk about subsidized school lunches, early reading programs, and clean water in the third world — not so much because we are pro-life all the way through as because we’re tired of being uncool. [EDIT: The notable lack of participation in this month’s Synchroblog is a case in point. Compare it to August last year, or the ‘cooler’ topics — it’s painfully obvious that a bunch of us just found this one too hot to touch.] All the cool kids still think it’s better to keep the slaughter legal, and we’re tired of sitting at the nerds’ table. And the thing is, we don’t even have to give up our private pro-life convictions to change seats — all we have to do is not talk about it. Talk about Head Start, STEM education for girls, ethical coffee farming — anything but abortion.

Why? Because we are winning the war of definition. It used to be impossible to say that abortion is killing a baby without my hardcore pro-choice friends going off like Mount Vesuvius, but not anymore. I can say so out loud and in public and get away with it — as a man, yet! That was definitely not true even ten years ago. Even at the cool kids’ table, you can win that argument. You might struggle to get anyone to engage in the conversation, but if you have any spine at all, you’re not going to lose.

We. Are. Winning.

So as we engage the broader conversation of what it means to be pro-life, we need to build on the very effective and clear foundation that we have laid. We need to be masters of good and necessary consequence. We should take every opportunity to drive Sister Chittister’s reasoning to its conclusions. If we are in favor of saving that baby in utero, then we can’t balk at feeding the kid, or teaching him to read. We’re pro-life. And on the other hand, if you’re such a big fan of WIC that you’re willing to send IRS agents armed with home liens to collect the funding, then how in the world could you have been okay with flushing the kid just months before? Or put the other way round, if you were fine with killing him in utero, then why in the world do you care if we flush him now, at age 5, when it’s clear that he isn’t keeping up with the pack? Back then we were only guessing that he’d get left behind; now we know….

We should be sharpening the antithesis at every turn. The merchants of death who suddenly get religion about caring for children once they pass through the birth canal must be called to follow their visceral convictions about the value of newborns to the necessary conclusion. (Which, in case you missed it, is that Jesus is King and He built us to know the value of every life, including the ones who aren’t born yet.)

It is equally vital that the broader conversation focus on actual results, not just good intentions. We’re more than willing to hold the pro-life movement to this standard.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” they say, “of course we love children after they’re born.”

“Sure,” we reply, “but what are you going to do about it?”

And if all their money goes into fighting abortion at the opportunity cost of early literacy programs, if their intentions for the young children are professedly good but the results just aren’t there, then we will call them hypocrites — as Sister Chittister did.

But that leverage needs to get applied on the other side of the fence as well, and Sister Chittister’s statement sparkles with irony coming, as it does, from a Roman Catholic nun. She surely knows that privately funded programs (like the ones the Church runs all over the world) produce much better results than the expensive and ineffective tax-funded programs she wants us all to endorse. I am not quite prepared to believe that I can’t really be pro-life unless I’m willing to sign off on an extensive set of interventions administered by the same set of jokers that brought us the DMV.

Yes, yes, the intentions are good. We all feel ourselves very virtuous voting a bunch of public funding into something for the children. But remember, we are building on the foundation of the abortion conversation, and one of the key lessons is that results matter more than intentions. The mother may believe the hype about a lump of tissue, and have no intention of killing a baby. But if she goes through with the abortion, the baby is just as dead as if she’d given birth and then smothered it with a pillow. The actual results are what matter, and that doesn’t change after the child passes through the birth canal. So let’s not be idiots. Intentions don’t feed a kid or teach him to read — and neither does voting.

So I work with a community church that hosts a weekly food bank — not just dry goods, but fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy, too. Beyond that, we have a drop-in youth center 3 days a week (we want to do every day, but we don’t have the volunteer base for it yet), and we have a little “coffee shop” area that’s open anytime we’re in the building. Come calling anytime, and if someone’s there, you’re welcome to come in out of the weather, have a seat, and get a cup of cold water or hot coffee, as the whim takes you.

Our friends at the church two blocks down host a small medical clinic (and a food bank, too). Our friends at the church across the street have a day care and preschool for low-income families. And we do it all for you-wouldn’t-believe-how-little money. Because we are pro-life.

Is it working? Some of it, yes. The youth center is going gangbusters. The day care is great. The medical clinic catches problems that would become ER cases left untreated, and treats them while they’re easy and cheap to treat. That saves our local homeless population an incalculable amount of human suffering. The food banks, though….

You can’t starve in this town if you get sick and can’t go to work. The food banks furnish a safety net to folks who hit a run of bad luck, and that’s great. Some of our clients have taken advantage of the safety net when they needed it, and then gotten back up on their feet. Some others, instead of being empowered and encouraged, have become permanently dependent on us. That was never the goal, and we need to do better by them. Human dignity thrives when we are able to be generous, not when we are continually dependent on the generosity of others. We have a population that we have failed to empower to give; we are robbing them of their dignity in order to feed them. I don’t know what the answer is — if I had a better solution, I’d be pushing for it. I pray that God will give us one.

Until the New Jerusalem comes in for a landing and heaven has officially come to earth, there will be room for improvement. Let’s seek all the improvement that God will give us.

***

You might also enjoy the other posts in this month’s synchroblog:

 

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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