Pluralism

Pluralism

I am participating in the National Novel Writing Month this November. During NaNoWriMo people from around the world try to write a fifty-thousand word novel in just thirty days. That comes out to one thousand, six hundred, sixty-seven words per day throughout November. I am about a day ahead as I have thirty-six thousand, eight hundred, forty-six words written so far and we need to have written thirty-five thousand by the end of the day.

I like NaNoWriMo because it gives me a chance to use my creativity in ways I don’t usually get to. It also challenges me to accomplish something creative, not just puts around with it. I am writing a science fiction novel this year, set in the same universe as the short story I started on this blog but never finished last year, and featuring many of the same characters as the NaNoWriMo book I wrote last year. I am hoping this year’s book will come out better, as last years book still needs a LOT of editing before I would even consider it to be a decent first draft.

How does Pluralism fit into my writing a Science Fiction novel? As a Christian on of the decisions I had to make when writing these books was how God was going to fit into them. Christian writers tend to go one several directions with this question. I am going to hi-light three.

One: The main characters are or become Christian in the book. This is usually chosen by Christian writers writing “Christian” science fiction set in an earth centric science fiction universe. God may or may not be actively involved in their lives other than their belief system sometimes guiding their actions.

Two: Leave God out entirely, either because they are Christians but are not trying to write an explicitly Christian book or because they don’t want to assume how god would act in any particular circumstance.

Three: Have God or a God figure be a defined character in the book, much like C.S. Lewis did in his fantasy Narnia books. In this case God’s actions are as central as those of the other characters and the God character is most certainly NOT passive like it sometimes is with the first option.

I have chosen to use a mixture of these and am still trying to solidify my decision.

My universe is NOT earth centric and in fact it is an entirely separate universe from our own. That being the case I cannot just have my characters be Christians and therefore settle the religious option.

I don’t like the second for several reasons, mostly because I think everything we do as Christians should be colored and guided by our relationship with God.

I am not writing a Fantasy book and most certainly not an allegory so having God be a character in the Aslan from Narnia fashion is just not an option.

What I want to do to the best of my ability is have God in my Universe be essentially the same God as we have here in ours. I have my characters refer to God primarily as either the Creator, the One Who Is, or when using a pronoun as they or them referring in a non-explicit way to a Trinitarian view.

As a side note I find it disturbing how often God is essentially passive in “Christian” books. The main characters may be Christians and believe in God and pray, but it is almost never made clear that God answered their prayers in a solid way. I know this can be hard to do well without being weird or preachy, but when your main character is running for their life from a bad guy and are they are supposed to be a Christian the way they get out of the problem should not be exactly the same way a character who isn’t a Christian would in a non-Christian book, based on the character’s own ingenuity, strength, cunning, or luck. At the very least the author should make it clear that God led the character to the clever answer or gave them the strength or cunning to fight back, or the lucky happenstance should be attributed to God’s actions. Even CSI: NY had an episode the other day where Mac Taylor essentially said that his personal opinion was that science had nothing to do with a certain victim’s survival, implying instead that it was the love of his mother that had somehow mysteriously kept him alive.

If a secular TV show can reference a belief in the supernatural why are so many Christian authors who are supposedly writing Christian fiction so reluctant to do so? Could it be that this is a reflection of their view of God? That God is essentially passive at this point in time, and practically speaking Christianity is only a religion that is good for anything as a moral compass and a ticket to heaven after we die. I don’t want to sound harsh but I am afraid that is exactly how many Christians view their faith and their God.

I don’t want to have the kind of faith that doesn’t really make a difference in my life; in a God I don’t really believe is active in my life. That just seems sad and pointless to me. I don’t always live this way, but I want my relationship with God to be vital and vibrant. I want it to be a central spring of life, inspiration, energy, and purpose that drives and guides every other facet of my life. I am not always sure how to get there but that is the goal.

Coming back to the main topic, my universe is made up of many different worlds, each and every one of them created by God. I have come over time to accept the probability that there is a lot of truth to the theory of evolution, and would probably say I believe in some form of theistic evolution. I think the odds are too crazy for this world and all life on it to have evolved purely by chance, but I no longer believe in a literal seven day creation of the world some six thousand or so years ago. That being said, most of the worlds in my story universe have “evolved” at the more or less the same rate, from around the same beginning date and most of them attained “hyperspace” travel within a few hundred years of each other. All the “human” species in my story are genetically and otherwise compatible, and I have not chosen to include any non “humanoid” sentient species at this point. These choices were not just made to simplify the writing, they were very deliberate references to the idea that God would probably choose a consistent “design” for humans across all the worlds God created in my story.

I realize that some great writers like C. S. Lewis chose otherwise in their Science Fiction writing, having God create completely “other” characters from us that were children of God, but I have not chosen to do so.

Having a vast science fiction universe with multiple worlds, that is also supposed to have our God as its God brings up a very interesting question. What do we do with Jesus? This is where the Pluralism question comes into play. As a Christian I believe Jesus is unique. I believe he is the one and only son of God, and it is only through him that anyone is saved. (Whatever being “saved” really means, but that is a huge question for another blog post.) Having said that I also need to say I recognize how arrogant it can sound to someone who isn’t a Christian. However, my response would be that most of them probably believe some version of the same thing about their religion.

Traditionally, believing in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and believing that it is only through him that anyone can be save has been equated with believing that it is necessary for anyone who wants to be saved to hold these same beliefs. I no longer fully believe that.

My, that was a complicated paragraph. Perhaps an example would help here.

To say that it is only because of gravity that we are kept on this planet and do not go flying off into space is NOT the same thing as saying that it is only by believing in gravity that we are kept on this planet and kept from flying off into space. You can believe whatever you want about what keeps us here on earth, that doesn’t change the facts, and gravity isn’t going to throw you out just because you don’t believe in her.

Now admittedly God isn’t an inanimate force, but too often I think we think of and treat God that way The traditional Christian formula has people being “saved” by “believing that Jesus is Lord and confessing that God raised him from the dead,” and there is certainly biblical evidence for this formula and I believe it is true as far as it goes. I believe that if you “believe and confess” you will be saved, biblically I can’t not believe this even with the odd biblical evidence that this isn’t always so. (IE the verses about judgment where Jesus talks about God saying “Depart from me, I never knew you.”) What I don’t believe is that “believing and confessing” in Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection is necessarily the ONLY way a person can be saved.

Let me be completely clear, I don’t believe that there is any other way to be save outside of Jesus Christ. He is the door and no one enters except through him. I just don’t see why it is absolutely necessary for a person to KNOW this side of death that they are being saved through Jesus Christ. The obvious example is a people group in South America or somewhere else who has never heard about Jesus. Are they all doomed and cannot be saved because of this? I don’t think so. I believe a person is saved by a relationship with God, and that because God is Trinitarian by nature this relationship will also be with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but the person doesn’t necessarily HAVE to KNOW that in order for this relationship to save them.

I would just extend this principle farther than many would, to the Muslim who has never heard anything good about Jesus or his followers, and even to the American who has been very hurt by the Church and wants nothing to do with Jesus if his followers act that way.

So if this belief makes me a Pluralist than I guess I am one.

As for how to deal with Jesus in my Science Fiction Universe, I still haven’t figured that question out, except to say that people in that Universe, just like people in ours, will be saved by a relationship with a God I believe to be Trinitarian in nature.

Healthcare and the failure of the Church

Without seeming to be bitter of jaded, I believe God intended for the Church to be the primary institution that takes care of the poor, sick, and needy, and that the church has failed in this mandate, and it is only because of the failure of the church to be what God intended that the Government has had to step in and take up this mandate.

Granted this failure of the church is not universal, many denominations build hospitals etc... that provide free or low cost care to those in need, but as a general rule the church has stopped being a place even members can go to have their needs met.

I hope your church is different than those I have experienced but honestly I doubt it. Here is a simple question to test this: Does your your church offer health insurance to its part time employees that have no other source of health insurance? The last church I attended and worked for did NOT. Your church may not have part time employees so this may not apply, but you can still ask if they WOULD offer this insurance if they did have part time employees.

If the church is not even willing to take care of the health care needs of those who work for it, you can be sure they are not going to be willing to pay the medical bills of members who cannot afford to pay them, not to mention people who are not even part of that particular church.

If the Church will not take care of the poor and needy as God intended by providing for their physical health care needs than someone else is going to have to. In this case the Government has decided that they are willing.

I think it is nothing less than immoral to first refuse as a church to do our duty by the poor and oppressed by providing for their health care and then add insult to injury by opposing those who are willing to take up that duty for us.

GracePoint Leaves UMC a New Paradigm

I have been thinking about the whole situation with GracePoint Community Church choosing to leave the United Methodist Church quite a bit this week. I have googled as many different ways as I could to find all the information available both from new sources and blogs. Overall, the reaction from most of the UM bloggers has been grace filled but not overly hopeful. I would like to suggest a new paradigm for how we can view this situation.

My experience tells me that the way I think about a particular situation will change my emotional response to it, and the way I react to it and can in the end change the situation itself.

So, if I think a particular situation is terrible and a catastrophe I will treat it as such and it will more likely become a catastrophe.

If however, I think of a particular situation as being hope filled and full of unexpected possibilities I will treat it that way and it will, once again, more likely become so.

I would like to suggest that GracePoint UMC and the leadership of the KS West District of the UMC view GracePoint Community Church as a daughter church of GracePoint UMC. Granted this was not an intentional church planting, but unexpected and even at first unwanted children are often an amazing blessing. True, they can be inconvenient and they may even cause a scandal when they first arrive if they do so in an “unorthodox manner.”

GracePoint Community Church started out within the UMC and will always have some of United Methodist genes, so it truly is a daughter of the United Methodist Church and of GracePoint UMC. Sometimes our children grow up and don’t choose a direction we would want them to choose. Sometimes they even do things and make choices that hurt us. But the time comes when we just have to let them go and trust God to take care of them. After all they are his children too, even more so than they were ever ours.

Leaving the UMC

If someone truly feels that God is leading them in a particular direction shouldn't they follow that calling even if the action will be unpopular etc?

I know some might not view this as a fair way of phrasing the question but hey, its my blog. ;-)

Seriously though, 90% of the time most Christians I know would answer that question with a YES.

The only times the answer would normally be NO are when the action in question would be considered sinful. (As in I really feel God wants me to sleep with my boyfriend/girlfriend - or some such statement.)

So I guess the real question before us (I had no idea this was where this post was going) is to ask if Leaving the UMC is sinful.

First, here is a list of links that might me of interest on the question of GracePoint leaving the UMC:

http://www.mandoron.com/
http://andrewconard.wordpress.com/
http://thoughtsofresurrection.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/gracepoint-communityunited-methodist-church/
http://www.kansas.com/news/local/story/718983.html
http://www.mandoron.com/2009/03/03/1186/
http://lyricbrianne.blogspot.com/
http://www.mandoron.com/2009/03/01/sunday-setlist-march-1-2009/
http://godsteknon.blogspot.com/2009/03/gp-leaves-um-church.html
http://bishops.umc.org/Directory/ChurchDetails.asp?mid=222&FAC=131842
http://bishops.umc.org/Directory/RegionalOffices.asp?mid=556&FAC=131842
http://www.godspeedmediagroup.com/gracepoint/Site/Welcome.html
http://www.kswestumc.org/dsite.asp?dv=7
http://www.gracepoint.com/
http://www.gracepointchurch.tv/

The above links are in no particular order. They simply represent everything google seems to know about this topic. Which is naturally everything there is to know since Google is the fount of all knowledge and information ;-)

I think this quote from the Eagle article is informative:

Butts said the move is one that church leaders believe is necessary for the church to do what God has called it to do -- reach as many unchurched people and people who are hurting as possible.

"We're excited about the future that God has for us," he said.

GracePoint Community Church leaders stressed that their church has no malice toward the United Methodist Conference.

"I think the more churches, the better," Butts said.

And this quote:

In the end, Butts said, he hopes people will see that the issue was not the result of fighting within the church.

"It just came down to God's leading us in a different direction," he said.

"I guess at the end of the day, people are not concerned about a denomination. They want to know how you're going to help them change their lives."

So, the leaders of GracePoint believe God was leading them to do this. With that said, the big question I see is this one:

"Is leaving the UMC in this way sinful?"

I don't think so but would be interested in your opinion.

Grace Point leaves UMC

I am re-posting this press release from the KS West UMC Conference office here and will be commenting on this story more over the next few days.

---

A press release from Bishop Scott Jones and the Kansas West Conference Office.

CONFERENCE COMMITTED TO GRACEPOINT UMC
WICHITA--The United Methodist Church's commitment to a new church start in northwest Sedgwick County remains strong a day after the leadership of GracePoint United Methodist Church announced plans to leave the denomination and begin a new community church of the same name.

"We want the membership of this congregation to know that we are deeply committed to this church and that we hope they will continue to be part of GracePoint UMC," said Kansas Area United Methodist Bishop Scott Jones.

GracePoint United Methodist Church will continue to worship at Maize South Middle School at 37th Street North and Tyler Road. Jones and the district superintendents are working to name an interim pastor this week and plan to introduce the new pastor to the congregation at 11 a.m. worship Sunday, March 8.

"We would have liked to have some opportunity to discuss this in advance to see if the issue could have been resolved in a different way," Jones said. "While we knew there was some disagreement about the church's desire to expand faster than we were able to support, we were unaware of Rev. Bryson Butts' decision to leave the United Methodist Church."

Butts has surrendered his clergy credentials in the United Methodist Church and is no longer a United Methodist minister.

Hope

Today I am feeling hopeful.

God has promised that He will take care of us and I know that I can trust Him!

I am starting to realize how much I was getting stuck in a rut in my current job. There are so many possibilities out there to explore.

I am also starting to wonder if I have compromised too much of what I believe about what the Church should be and do, in order to be able to work within the institution. I have loved working at Chapel Hill, but there is much about the way this church operates that I don't think is either biblical or the best. However, I have pushed these thoughts aside whenever they came up over the last couple of years because some of these same ways of doing things were essential to the continuing existence of of my job position. And for that matter, pretty much any paid ministry position within the Church.

Lost Job

Today I met with Jerry Vogt, the Executive Pastor at Chapel Hill, and Terri Gurthrie, the head of the staff parish committee. At my last evaluation I had asked about the possibility of their increasing my hours and was told going in to this meeting that they were going to address that request. Instead of increasing my hours the staff parish committee has decided to eliminate my position as of May 1st, 2009 and fill the position by using volunteers. I was told this decision was not in any way because they were unhappy with my work. I believe it is mostly an economic decision.

Frankly I think they are crazy as Chapel Hill does not have a culture of volunteerism and I believe much of what I do will end up falling back on to Cheryl Ashley, our church secretary. However, this is their decision to make and theirs to deal with the consequences. I wish this was not happening but it is.

I write this for three reasons:
1. I need to debrief, and get this off my chest.
2. I believe in being open and transparent.
3. I am starting Job hunting and would ask all of you to keep me in mind and in your prayers.

Conversation

I have been engaging in a fun and enlightening conversation in the comments of a blog http://aunitedmethodistemerging.blogspot.com/ though the author took down the particular blog post for the conversation. I would have just closed the comments as taking down a post feels like lying and denying the conversation ever happened to me, but it is not my blog.

So,

Eric Mattson

if you are reading this, I think your last comment really cleared things up for me. No, I don't mind measuring things or using numbers to continue to do the work of ministry better. I just always want to be aware of the temptation to measure our success based on the ABC's (Attendance, Buildings, and Cash) rather than the growth of God's Kingdom on earth, both within and outside of the traditional church.

The church should be about the business of changing the future

Cool thought from Matt Cleaver,

"The church is the place where imagining a new future should be a perpetual practice, not just every four years. The church should be about the business of changing the future, not just preparing people for it. We participate in bringing about God’s kingdom on earth, changing old to new, and seeing life where there once was death."

http://mattcleaver.com/2008/11/05/why-politics-is-more-exciting-than-christianity/

Being Missional

I often wish Chapel Hill put more emphasis on being "missional", which to me means joining the "God of the Oppressed", in working for the redemption of this world by ministering to the poor, the friendless, and the needy. I personally am less concerned about witnessing to people in order to save their souls, and more concerned about loving "the least of these", and helping those in need. As a side benefit people WILL come to know Christ when they see our love in action.

One problem I face as a staff member of Chapel Hill is where to draw the line between actions taken as a staff member, and actions taken as a member of the body of Christ.

I did not grow up as a Methodist, and am in some ways I am still not one at heart. I strongly believe that there is no Ontological difference between the so called "clergy" and "laity" (terms which aren't even biblical as far as I know). I really believe in the "priesthood of all believers" something the UMC claims to believe but, in my opinion, denies by their actions in only letting certain people teach in Church, or give communion, or baptise, or even marry people.

Because of this belief I sometimes struggle with wondering what my role should be as a paid staff person at a Church, since I am not even sure I think churches should have paid clergy, let alone staff. The best answer I have found is that our role should be "to equip the people of God to do the work of the ministry." If this is true, as I believe it is, then the staff and ministers need to be very careful not to takeover doing the work of the ministry for the people of God. Hence my dilemma, in not knowing where to draw the line between doing ministry and empowering ministry.

Being on staff brings with it a fair bit of power, and the temptation would be to use that power to move the Church and the people in a direction I want them to go, instead of trusting God to move the Church and the people in the direction He wants them to go.

Perfect Church

What would your perfect church be like?

I have been thinking about this a bit, being on staff at Chapel Hill I get to see and experience the great things about CHF and the not so great things. Seeing a church from the inside can sometimes burn you out on church because you see all the ways the Church and people are disfunctional and just very human.

The other part of my thinking has been caused by my struggling with the question of my being called to the ministry and what this really means.

Some things that bother me about CHF are less a problem with CHF and more and issue of my not agreeing / fitting with CHF and more especially Methodism in general.

My perfect church would:

1. Truly believe in and practice the priesthood of all believers. To the degree that we would not really differentiate between those on staff and those not on staff at the church. Anyone could baptize, give communion, marry people (we would have to work this out with the laws of the state) etc... and not just one or a very few people would get to teach in our meeting.
   
2. Be a VERY communal place. Community would be central to the life and DNA of the church.
   
3. Be good for the world and our community.
   
4. Be a place that preaches and practices grace.
   
5. Be a place that believes in hope for the world.

I will add more to this later.