What I didn't get - 4

I think a person who have never eaten venison properly prepared, seasoned and cooked can not really understand the taste of it.  He or she has no experiential "hook" allowing a connection to the taste of well-prepared venison.  In a like manner folks like me who were not raised in the American church cannot "taste" the experience people have enjoyed or hated of being raised in church.

Oh, I "got" the notion that people raised in an ugly church were hurt by it.  I counseled a young lady whose father was a deacon in a church, and began abusing her sexually when she was six, claiming that God gave him that right because he was a deacon.  Ugly.  Wrong.  I could connect, at least a little, with that hurt.  I understood the gulf of despair living in folks raised in rule-based congregations as they read the Good News Jesus brought and realized they never experienced it as good news.  Just rules, often silly rules.  (The proper way to dress, the deference that must be shown to large givers, narrow visions of morality and propriety for instance.)

I didn't "get" the disconnect between my life experience in faith and my friends and colleagues life experience in church.  I'm not sure I really get it today.

I wonder, from time to time, why people keep coming to worship when they do not now and never have at any time experience God.  I keep involved, I keep encouraging my faith, because God has made Godself known to me at several points in my life.  I cannot deny what happened and I can find no better explanation for what happened.  In the words of the hymn, "He touched me."

Well, if I'm having a problem, my church friends who have not been touched by God have the same problem.  I must seem very, very strange to them.  The disconnect between my life experience and how it affected my pastoral leadership and the life experience of most folks attending church where I was pastor was huge.  I am just now "getting" it.

What do you think about all this?  Leave a comment, if you would.  Or is it just too weird?

What I Didn't Get - 3

As I continue to reflect on my own journey of faith, ministry, success, failure and church, I continue to new understandings.  I am not interested in "right" or "wrong" -- just understanding.  So far I understand that I cannot go back and "fix" anything, or change anything, or grow any faster than I did.
I didn't "get" that my life experience was substantially different than that of my fellow students, my fellow church members or my fellow pastors and ministers.  All the evidence was present.  I guess I was not present to the gulf in our various experiences.

In the 1950's many, if not most, "free" church congregation and pastors were influenced by the Billy Graham phenomenon.  Billy Graham was an evangelist who preached a simple, possibly a simplistic, message and called for a decision when he was done.  In secular terms he was a salesman who asked his customers to decide to "buy", to "sign on the dotted line".  Even the university church where I was touched by God, moderately liberal, bland and inoffensive, had a pastor who gave an "invitation" at the conclusion of the sermon.  It was to such an invitation that i responded after responding to the touch of God on my shoulder.

I thought everyone understood.  It seems that few expected such a response from anyone.  They were suspicious of the responders at Billy Graham Crusades, and few if any believed even in their own responses as anything but a cultural phenomena.  The notion that a living Being, God, might interfere in someone's life, and that someone might be O.K. with such interference was not believable.

I recall thinking after a few weeks as a "Christian" that it was too bad no one warned us about what God would expect.  We/I gave our/my allegiance in a "for all time" decision and then found out about morals, ethics, discipleship, attendance, people we would be associating with and tons of other stuff.  What I didn't "get" was why no one else was bothered.

Why would they be bothered.  Most of my new friends and acquaintances had never experienced a touch by God, and the "for all time" implications of their faith journey were the ones they had embraced by third or fourth grade in Sunday School.

More on this in another post.  Leave a comment.

Exclusive? I Think Not

In yesterday's worship we found a phrase, "You are ours and we are yours" in a prayer.  It sounds so damned exclusive.  (I speak theologically.)

Yet almost every faith grouping thinks or prays the same thing.  I picture it like this:

Think of all the smaller circles of faith, from speck sized to gigantic sizes all of whom are trying to say to the Ultimate YOU -- "I am Yours".

None of us has an exclusive claim on that One, and none of us is actually fully correct.  The One has give us to ourselves in so many ways.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and let us know.