LAMENT

WARNING:  IT IS GONNA GET HONEST IN HERE

The post below was written a month ago while I was on vacation in Michigan over the holidays.  I have been waffling on posting it.  In the end, inspired by the “Keep it 100” segment on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore (which you all should check out), honesty won out.  #keepit100

Today (Sunday Dec. 28, 2014) I listened to a sermon by Nate Bull at Centerpoint Church in Kalamazoo, MI.  Preaching out of Exodus 33 he challenged the congregation to recommit their lives to following Jesus in 2015.  It was an excellent message about seeking God's place in your life and what it means to believe in a God that is light and contains no darkness at all. 

During the message Pastor Bull quoted an author (which was uncredited, unless I missed it) as saying, "God has shown his willingness to bless something He will not inhabit."  Twenty years of ministry and four decades of life tells me this is true (1). The scriptures also show this to be true.  The statement itself is not what has been nagging at me from the second I got out of the service till the time I took out my iPad unable to sleep 12 hours later.  The bit that I can't reconcile is what if God does neither?  What if He doesn't bless or inhabit a life, a ministry, a place, a neighborhood, a season?

This is no abstract theological puzzle (I love those, but never have they kept me up at night).  These questions, and the tears they induced (which I choked back as to not embarrass myself or the family members whose church I was visiting) as I walked out of the auditorium, are very real.  For a long time now I have felt like God is very distant (other than in fleeting moments) and that I have been left alone in my struggle with Him and life.  The best way I know to describe it is that I am tired of fighting.  After a couple of years in which the demands of work and ministry (even when your full time job is ministry the reality is some things are just work, anyone who says different is not telling you the truth), church leadership, as well as family, have left me too tired to fight anymore.  Two years of my wife fighting cancer depleted me.  The ministry I helped found and lead has undergone massive changes that daily leave me feeling stretched beyond my capacity to guide it.  The youth that our ministry serves are among some of the most voiceless in my city and my throat is horse from being a voice for them, with them and to them.  My desire to try to lead change or minister in my home congregation has disappeared in a puff of smoke.  All in all, my spiritual fervor has dwindled to a faint flicker - a spark where a fire used to be.

Those that know me well know me as a determined fighter.  I have always been pushing and struggling, willing to fight to get things done.  In the early days of Parachutes when asked by my boss to write a job description I took a Sharpie and scrawled on a Post-It note "whatever it takes."  I have often joked that my walk up song, if I were a Major League Baseball player, would be The Nightwatchmen's "Whatever it takes."  For years I was willing to do anything and everything (often to the detriment of my family) to make sure Parachutes survived and that I was   ministering in my church and neighborhood the best that I could.

In recent months there has been a sharp contrast in my approach to life.  As I have written before, I experienced a bout with anxiety and depression this past fall and the residue of those struggles continues.  I often think about something I scratched out as I worked through those issues, again written in Sharpie marker: "I have never felt so weak."  And so it was again today.  I feel weak.  I feel like God is neither blessing me or inhabiting my body, my life, my ministry, my family or my mind.  I feel like God has forsaken me.

I grew up in a world were I was told that if you work hard and do what God asks you to do you will be blessed....maybe even inhabited.  But my question is, what if you have worked hard and done what you thought God has asked you to do and in the end all you are is tired?  What if the blessings you have received are cancer, a job that pays almost exactly the same as it did when you took it 14 years ago (and pays 1/4 to 1/3 of what others in the field get paid), a 40 year old mobile home, obscurity, and exhaustion.  It's damn hard to find the blessing in that! 

So if God is out there blessing things, things that He isn't even going to inhabit, why do I feel like I have served the best I can and don't feel blessed, or inhabited, just burned out?  Why do I feel like Jason Bateman’s character in the film “This Is Where I Leave You” when he says, “I’m too old to have this much nothing”?

I'm taking a pretty big risk throwing this out on the Internet.  My family reads this thing.  My wife's family reads this.  I have supporters that read this.  Volunteers and board members read this.  Anyone could read this, it's the worldwide web after all.  Frankly, that has been part of my struggle.  I feel like as a leader I can't share my struggle easily or at all.  Making matters worse is a Christian culture that is quick to arrive at easy answers.  I know that some of you reading this are already formulating the words to share with me that "I am blessed" and to "look what God has done" and a hundred more cliches.  Trust me I know them all because I say them to myself every day and the reality is I still feel like God has walked away from me.

In Lamentations God's people cry out to Him and rail against Him for leaving them.  In that entire book God never speaks.  He leaves space for the cry.  The cry is so important that He lets it be.  One third of the Psalms are Laments.  Lamenting is part of faith, and that gives me some comfort.  On the other hand lamenting sucks!  God's people are in the desert for 40 years.  Being in the desert sucks!

So for 2015 I am not rededicating myself to God...I'm being honest about my Lament and asking God to honor it...but I'm pretty tired of the silence and I wouldn't mind a blessing or inhabitation either.

Joel K

“Doubt is the way of faith sometimes”

                                    - Five O’clock People

(1)  I do think this statement is limited because God could choose to do neither.  Pastor Bull never examined this other option leading the listener to believe God is either blessing or inhabiting things/people/situations, etc., or both inhabiting and blessing, but not neither.  The option for God to remove both His blessing and inhabitation was not even alluded to.

Anchorage and Antioch: Reflections on MLK day and the segregation of the church

I live in a very diverse city.  Anchorage, AK boasts the most diverse census tract in the United States (1) and two of the more diverse High Schools in America (2).  In the Anchorage School District 93 different languages are spoken (3).  I could go on with stats, but I think Russian Orthodox Archpriest Michael Oleksa sums it up when he noted, “The world has come to Anchorage.” (4)

I have been thinking about my cities amazing diversity today as well as an event that happened over fifty years ago.  In 1963, just months after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at Western Michigan University.  Following the address was a question and answer session.  In that session the President of the University asked Dr. King a series of questions.  It is this exchange from the question and answer section that has been on my mind today:

“President Miller:

Don't you feel that integration can only be started and realized in the Christian church, not in schools or by other means? This would be a means of seeing just who are true Christians.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

As a preacher, I would certainly have to agree with this. I must admit that I have gone through those moments when I was greatly disappointed with the church and what it has done in this period of social change. We must face the fact that in America, the church is still the most segregated major institution in America. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation. This is tragic. Nobody of honesty can overlook this. Now, I'm sure that if the church had taken a stronger stand all along, we wouldn't have many of the problems that we have. The first way that the church can repent, the first way that it can move out into the arena of social reform is to remove the yoke of segregation from its own body. Now, I'm not saying that society must sit down and wait on a spiritual and moribund church as we've so often seen. I think it should have started in the church, but since it didn't start in the church, our society needed to move on. The church, itself, will stand under the judgement of God. Now that the mistake of the past has been made, I think that the opportunity of the future is to really go out and to transform American society, and where else is there a better place than in the institution that should serve as the moral guardian of the community. The institution that should preach brotherhood and make it a reality within its own body.” (5)

The reason this has been on my mind is the simple fact that Dr. King’s words are true in my life.  The lease diverse place I go each week is my church.  My work life is very diverse, my neighborhood places me (a white middle-age male) in the minority, and the shops I frequent are reflections of the city at large.  However, my church – while well intentioned (diversity is one of our stated goals), and not entirely without diversity – is the least diverse place in my life.

While Dr. King’s words over 50 years ago should have been a wake up call for the American church I am not sure that in the following years much was done on a large scale to make his statement not just as true today as it was when he first uttered it.  In fact I think that the Church Growth movement begun by Donald McGavran in the 1950’s and continuing into our present day relied on principle of homogeneity that made matters worse.  McGavran wrote, “People like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers.”  His protégé, C. Peter Wagner, stated it even more directly when he wrote, “segregation is a desired end.” (6)  While the leaders of the Church Growth movement had the spread of the gospel in mind, the end result was the American church looking less like Dr. King’s dream, or the church in the Book of Acts, and more like a niche marketed product devised to segregate people.

Our human nature may make McGavran’s statement that “People like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers” true, but neither the theory, or the practice of segregation, is what we see in the Bible.  Ray Bakke notes in his book A Theology as Big as the City” (7) that in Acts 1-12 we see Pentecost unfold as the church moves from being multi-lingual to multi-cultural.  By the time we get to chapter 11 and we read about the church in Antioch and see a group of Jesus followers in a very divers city (3^rd largest city in the Roman empire divided into Greek, Syrian, Jewish, Latin and African sectors) that has a pastoral leadership team of 5 pastors from 3 continents.  The church in Antioch is very diverse and it is in this context – a diverse church, in a diverse city, with a diverse leadership team – where the followers of Jesus are first called Christians.  Could it be that it is this type of incarnation that finally fulfills what begins on the day of Pentecost? 

So today as Dr. King’s observations ring in our ears from over 50 years ago and the legacy of Antioch echoes down from the early days of the faith, all of us who desire to follow Jesus should take a long hard look in the mirror and ask a few questions about how we are doing in our “Institution(s) that should preach brotherhood and make it a reality within its own body.”

(1)   http://www.adn.com/2013/04/06/2855271/hometown-u-data-show-mountain.html

(2)   http://www.ktuu.com/news/news/study-calls-east-bartlett-west-americas-most-diverse-high-schools/24725354

(3)   About the Anchorage School District, Anchorage School District, http://asdk12.org/aboutasd/, (accessed 18 June 2014).

(4)   Communicating Across Cultures with Father Oleksa, Alaska Staff Development Network, 30 October 2013 – 2 November 2013, BP Energy Center, Anchorage, Alaska.

(5)   http://wmich.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/MLK.pdf

(6)   Donald McGavran and C. Peter Wagner taken from citations in Slow Church: Cultivating a Community in the patient Way of Jesus by C. Christopher Smith & John Pattison.  Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books. 2014.  Pg. 47 (Chapter 2, Terroir: Taste and See contains a good summery of the Church Growth Movement).

(7)   Bakke, Raymond J. A Theology as Big as the City. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997. Chapter 12.