More self-indulgent thoughts on my life. Skip if that annoys you.

In the middle of this week, I heard some seriously bad health news about a good friend. Yesterday, I had to turn down an opportunity I really wanted to accept. Last night, I got a confusing and frustrating work-related letter. Today, I’ve really struggled to relate to the three worship experiences I’ve been part of. Tonight I received an email from a major blogger bluntly telling me about the depths of my “self-absorbed” character.

I could drive myself bonkers thinking about spiritual warfare on days like today. When I was a young Christian I imagined the devil tormenting me with all these difficulties while God stood by waiting for me to do the right thing, i.e. pray some prayer, take a bold stand, rejoice….something.

Now I believe this is simply life in the fallen world. It’s being human. It’s being 53. It’s being in relationships. It’s working with people. It’s writing. It’s just a day. In fact, this collection of blue days is so much better than most people’s lives it’s embarrassing to think about it. [Continue reading]

Young folks in ministry. Adults living in regret. This is for you.

There was a time, in the last decade, that I constantly and painfully struggled with regrets about various choices I’d made in my life.

I regretted not finishing doctoral studies. (I made it 37 hours in and never finished the paper.)

I regretted staying in youth ministry so long. (13 years full time, then back for 18 years where I am after 4 years as a pastor.)

I regretted staying in Kentucky. (I had opportunities to go to Oxford, Mississippi and to Texas, but followed my hillbilly instincts.)

I regretted that so many of my friends were pastors of First Baptist Churches and I never got close. (The cost of not getting that Dr. degree.)

I regretted a bunch of stuff I can’t talk about. (You don’t want to know.)

Sometimes, I’ve honestly regretted staying at one ministry in the mountains of Appalachia for most of two decades. There was a time I was constantly called to do speaking and seminars, but almost from the day I came here those opportunities stopped. Say what you want, when you’re in the mountains of southeast Kentucky, you’re off the radar. It can be very disorienting. [Continue reading]

I’m writing about spirituality these days. Yeah, I know how a lot of you feel about that word. So deal. We’re going to use it.

We’re also going to use another word some of you don’t like: formation. Now that we’re good and grumpy, let’s go for a ride.

I’ve been reflecting on the spiritual formation I’ve received as a result of my participation in the blogosphere. The Christian blogosphere.

What kind of Christian influences are coming into my life through the models of Christian faith I am exposed to in this medium? What is the shape of the spiritual formation I encounter here? Can I distance myself from it enough to make any kind of helpful observations?

I have to admit that the blogosphere is a unique experience to everyone. No one of us, no matter how many similar social networking or communication tools we use, encounters the exact same influences. I’m experiencing this medium from one place and through a unique combination of elements that I choose to read, view and participate in. Your mileage will vary. [Continue reading]

Back in the day, I got a psych major in my undergrad work. That’s pretty ironic, believe me, in more ways than you can imagine.

I can’t say I learned a great deal, but I did begin a lifelong journey of making observations and drawing tentative conclusions about myself. If I would have paid attention to all I’ve discovered about myself, I’d have a very different life. Some psychologist can tell me why I routinely ignore the lessons I’ve learned and repeat all the same mistakes.

One thing I’ve learned is that I’ve got some holes in my personality that go a lot deeper than I can understand. They are caverns in my self-understanding; potholes in the soul, so to speak. Like a series of tunnels that connect with points in my past and experience, these dark places are imperfectly mapped, sometimes frightening and very, very real when you fall into one. [Continue reading]

A good and dear friend recently updated me on developments in her recent spiritual journey.

Let’s stop here. If you’re reading this, here’s a question for you: What do you expect to hear now?

Thought about it? Good. Let’s go on.

Most of what she told me about would go in the category of signs and wonders.

A prayer was answered with the sudden appearance of a rainbow, and so on. Mystical, personal stuff in the realm of answered prayers and personal experience. Her entire spiritual life is not studying scripture, but about what she describes as a “deep, personal experience of God” that includes His very real activity to show His hand in signs and wonders. [Continue reading]

We talk about the evangelical wilderness around here a lot. It’s sometimes academic, and sometimes it’s very personal to all of us. These are some of my thoughts from there today. If God has taught me anything, it’s that you (yes YOU) are out there, and I’m not the only one.

This post is for a particular group of people.

People who really don’t have any choices about what church you attend. Through circumstance or choice, you are a church monogamist, not a church shopper.

You may be a person in a rural area, and your church choices are extremely limited. Maybe, if you are conscientious about your use of fuel and time, your choices are non-existent. [Continue reading]

Back in the day, many of you counted on me to write about my personal journey. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, almost all of that kind of material has gone into storage or been deleted. Hopefully, this piece will recalibrate us all on the journey, but not cause quite the chaos in my environment as before.

Many of you know the start of this story, but you may find some new things in the retelling.

In April of 06, I felt God instructing me to resign from the church I was serving. It was the church our family called home for a decade. I’d served them for 12 years. I had no idea that it was the end of almost any sense of spiritual “home” at all, and the beginning of a season of much change.

In May of that year, my son left home for college. In June, my daughter married. A few weeks later she would move to another state and temporarily quit college. (She’s graduating OSU in a few days, and I am very, very proud. But at the time, it was tough.) [Continue reading]

Here’s a useful question for me right now. (Maybe it will be useful to you, or maybe not.)

Can you find places in scripture where someone had to drastically revise their idea of God in order to know and follow the true God? If so, why and how?

I’m not asking for places where people just needed to learn some new information. No, I am talking about those in the Biblical story who had to radically revise, even abandon, the kind of God they believed in in order to take hold of the true and living God? [Continue reading]

In the book Rising from the Ashes, Becky Garrison interviews emerging church leader Peter Rollins, author of How (Not) to Speak of God and the soon to be released The Fidelity of Betrayal: The Ir/Religious Heart of Christianity.

Rollins has always intrigued me. Some of his ideas are difficult to grasp, but in this interview he does a fantastic job of describing some of the essentials of a Jesus-shaped spirituality. While his definition of being a Christian starts out well in the first sentence, it needs help after that, but the rest of this section of the interview is right on target for me.

This interview is taken from Rising From the Ashes by Becky Garrison, pp. 48-49. [Continue reading]

At the ministry where I work, we have a little guy I’ll call “Charles.” A middle-schooler growing into a young man.

Charles is a church kid, and he’s a Christian. He’s also very, very serious about impressing the adult Christians around him.

He wears a tie every day. Almost no one on our staff does that, and the students certainly don’t.

He wears dress clothes all the time. Our ministry has lots of donated suits, and he loves wearing them. Especially the oversized ones. He especially loves ties and suspenders. He wears the tie at night, around the dorm, often during free time, work time and on Saturdays. Here in Eastern Ky, at a ministry where no one dresses formally, not even the local pastor (who wears overalls), he’s quite a dapper dresser.

Many days he carries a very large, leather, KJV Bible with him. Collins/World. Expensive leather. In the original box. I’d estimate it’s $125 of Bible. [Continue reading]

It is the tradition of this web site to hear my confessions, my struggles and my emotions. “Confessional” blogging on my part has touched hundreds of readers and convinced one or two that I am unfit to be in the ministry or even a professing Christian. So be it. This is what’s set on my table these days. I can’t explain it to you; all I can do is write and pray. Trusting God is hard. His ways are not my ways, and his ways are unthinkably difficult for me right now.

So if you don’t understand these kinds of posts, I’m sorry. My journey. My struggles. My questions. My wrestling with God.

My Bible classes watch a lot of the “Turner” Bible movies. I’ve seen them all so many times that I frequently get them confused with scripture itself. Their storylines and scripts are embedded in my mind and I have to, occasionally, sort things out.

For example, in the movie “David,” the prophet Nathan tells David, “God makes it difficult to be a king.” Scripture never says that (at least not that I know of) but it is appropriate for the story of David and his particular failures. [Continue reading]

Early on in my blogging career, I encountered some of the ideas of N.T. Wright and a strong dose of the theology of Robert Capon. It’s safe to say that both “saved me” in a way that I need to revisit frequently. Here’s an early essay where I was just getting a feel for what these brothers were saying and the implications of their theology for my own experience of the Gospel. It was, to say the least, a revolution in the way I looked at the Gospel and God. From 2002.

“What this says to you and me who have to live with the business of trying to confess our sins is that confession is not a pre-condition of forgiveness. It’s something that you do after you know you have been forgiven. Confession is not something you do in order to get forgiveness. It’s something you do in order to celebrate the forgiveness you got for nothing. Nobody [nobody] can earn forgiveness.” -Robert Capon, “The Father Who Lost Two Sons”

Exactly what do I mean?

I am setting out to do something that is unlikely to be extremely popular. I am writing a theologically tentative essay about a word most of my readers have never heard and an issue I’ve only heard one other person discuss. Why this word would inspire serious theologizing on my part, and require an essay to explain, will only be evident to those who expend the effort to read and think along with me. (And as I said, this is a very tentative project.) While it isn’t my goal to persuade, I believe that some segment of my readership will find this essay a further step along a road they’ve been traveling for some time.

The word is “transactionalism.” I no longer believe in it, which won’t bother anyone who has no idea what I’m talking about. Fair enough. The dictionary defines a “transaction” as “a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other.” Transactionalism would be a belief system that involves a transaction- actions on our part and results- between God and a human being. All based on reciprocal actions. [Continue reading]

Here’s the answer to the trivia question “What is the closest the iMonk came to becoming a Muslim?”

In October of 1995, Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan sponsored what was called the “Million Man March” on the mall in Washington, D.C. While probably less than half a million men attended, the march was a high point for African-American men, and certainly had an impact on the evangelical community.

Instead of an event of political rhetoric, the Million Man March was promoted as a day of “atonement and reconciliation.” Men were encouraged to repudiate and repent for behaviors against women, children, the community and themselves. Many African-American men who were aware that Farrakhan was a controversial figure still attended because of their desire to send a message of unity to the larger African-American community. [Continue reading]

Every time I feel like I have lost my way in the Christian life, I find myself back looking at monasticism, and the lessons I learned in two decades of reading Thomas Merton.

I’m not attracted to Catholicism, but I am very much attracted to the tradition of self-conscious, disciplined spiritual formation into a disciple of Jesus Christ. This is a great failing of our side of the church.

As much as we Protestants talk about being shaped by the Bible alone, most evangelicals are thoroughly formed and shaped by the communities where the Bible is handled, taught and practiced according to a “rule” or accepted authority, and by the media that supports and communicates the values of that community.

It is, without a doubt, one of the most appealing and positive aspects of Catholicism that it is self-conscious about its “rules” and authorities for spiritual formation. (Rule as in “way,” as in The Rule of Benedict.) It surely must be humorous to knowledgeable catholics to look at the various sects, denominations and varieties of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, all claiming to “just read the Bible.” [Continue reading]

Every so often the internet will provide you with something that you will never hear anywhere else. I’ve found it this morning, and I hope you will read and share it. It’s entitled “Jesus Talks To A Gay Man,” and it is from a remarkable post by Steve at Ragamuffin Ramblings.

It is a retelling of the story of Jesus and the woman at the well in John 4. Not only is it creative and well-written, but it does exactly what the original story was supposed to do- and did- in its original context: It shocks us. It startles us. It makes us want to ask more questions.

You might want to use this with any Bible study groups you lead. I gurantee you discussion will follow

This is one of those weeks when I am travelling and may not be able to post. Those of you who pray are invited to pray on Tuesday for my mom. At 83 she is blind in one eye and has about 10-15% vision in the other. They are doing a procedure to draw some blood out of the bad eye. Our hope is for improved vision, but it will be a frightening procedure with no gurantee.

If you don’t know about Macular Degeneration, learn about it, and be aware that there is no cure. It’s very common.