What I'm Learning From Sunday Soccer - Part I

It was a warm Sunday morning in late spring. Instead of my usual place leading worship at the local Presbyterian church, I found myself on a soccer field, coaching my younger son's team. It was the big end-of-the-year tournament, and for the first time in league history, they had scheduled games that directly conflicted with traditional church time. I had already scheduled this particular week off as part of my family's annual beach trip, so we decided to come home two days early and participate in the soccer games.

As I stood on the sideline that Sunday morning and looked around the complex, I realized how many more families in my town had made the choice to do soccer than church. By my rough estimate, about six times as many. Some of those families, I understood, were simply not churchgoers. They had left church participation behind long ago, if they had ever attended, and the decision of whether to play soccer or go to worship was not a decision at all.

But for many families, including a few from my own congregation, the Sunday morning soccer games did present a conflict of priorities. In the vast majority of those conflicts, church was the loser, and I knew that this choice was not unusual.

Whether it is sports, family gatherings, other recreational activities, or simply sleeping late and relaxing at home - Christian families and church members in general are increasingly viewing Sunday morning attendance as optional. Many still value the concept of Sunday mornings at church, and wish to see it continue and thrive in their congregations. Yet more and more, they are choosing other priorities on an individual, week-to-week basis.

Pastors and other church leaders are well-acquainted with this reality, especially in parts of the country where the shift to post-Christian culture is much further down the road than it is in places like my small Southern town. But even in the Bible Belt, the fact that church attendance is losing out to pretty much everything else is becoming apparent.

Congregations tend to respond to this shifting cultural reality in one of three ways. The first is a call to arms, a conviction to fight back against the culture that is perceived to be stealing our people away. Whether it was 10, 20, 40 or more years ago, church members tend to remember a time when the pews were full and there were bunches of kids coming down for the children's sermon.

They want to recapture that time by bringing back all those people who now choose recreation or sleep on Sunday morning. In addition, they see new people and new families who have moved into their community but don't go to church, and they want to draw them in. Either way, the belief is that the faithful response in this situation is for the church to up its game, and to somehow entice people to change their minds and start choosing church over all the other Sunday options.

This mentality was reflected to me in a recent conversation held at my church's annual retreat. One evening, the talk at the dinner table turned to the declining number of families who come to worship. I told the story about being at the soccer field on Sunday morning, and how there are conflicts of priorities for this generation that previous generations never faced.

The consensus of the group was that the solution to this challenge is to change our traditional worship style. Some thought we should go to a contemporary service with a rock band. Others suggested we move to the Fellowship Hall for a less formal setting. Still others lobbied for a blended type of service with a combination of all those elements. They argued for a while about which of these formats would attract the young people.

None of them were happy when I said that it wouldn't matter what we did with worship, because none of those options will bring people back like they want. Like so many in the broader church, they believe that declining participation is the result of the church doing something wrong, or at least not doing the best thing; and they are convinced that the solution is to be found is changing that thing, and attracting people like we did in the past.

Whether it's how to do worship, or fellowship events, or the youth program; whether it's hiring the right kind of pastor or putting together a snappy marketing campaign; or whether it's simply being more open and friendly with visitors - congregations often shift into this battle mode, into this determination to fight back against post-Christian culture and draw people back in by out-competing all those other options that now exist on Sundays.

It is a natural and understandable approach to the situation, but it completely misses the nature of the challenge. The reality is not that the church needs to fix whatever it is we are doing or not doing, and in the process fix the culture. The reality is that culture has changed, that we can't do anything about it, and that we are called to adapt and move into this new situation.

In other words, we are not called to compel people to choose us over their other priorities so we can fill our pews on Sunday mornings again. The challenge, as I learned a few months later the next time we had a Sunday morning soccer tournament, is much different.

But before I describe that experience, it is necessary to go back to the second type of response that churches can have to our changing cultural situation. Instead of trying to compete with culture, some faith communities simply withdraw from culture.

In the neighboring county to where I live, there is a significant Amish community.  They operate a bakery in the town, but they maintain their own completely separate living space out in the country side. The only interaction they have with the larger culture is through the operation of their business.

Their children are raised and educated completely within their community. They do not participate in any recreational or social events beyond themselves. Their religious practice is completely separate from any of the other Christian churches in the area, and they do not engage in any sort of evangelism that I have seen.

One afternoon I stopped by the bakery to buy some doughnuts, and I was struck by watching two boys - about the same age as my two sons - helping out and playing behind the counter. "Their parents certainly don't face the conflict of having to choose between a soccer game and attending worship," I thought to myself.

The response of almost complete withdrawal from the dominant culture, which the Amish and other groups have practiced for centuries, has succeeded in eliminating the culture vs. faith conflict. It may seem like an extreme measure to many - especially to those who feel that spreading the faith is a core element of church life - but it is more likely to succeed than fighting culture. In fact, it is a response that is often taken by more mainstream, less sectarian churches as they seek to preserve their worship and Sabbath traditions.

The first church I served as a pastor was a small congregation of less than 100 members, but they were blessed with a generous endowment of nearly half a million dollars. Feeling the challenge of declining membership, they rejected the response of attractionalism - which at the time, was the response I favored.

Instead, they circled the wagons and committed themselves to using the endowment money to keep the status quo going for as long as possible. Despite my encouragements, they showed little interest in making any significant changes designed to draw in new people. One patriarchal figure even told me that he was leery of new members, because they might have designs on spending the endowment money.

This congregation did not explicitly withdraw from culture as the Amish do, but they worked just as hard to shield themselves from it's encroaching influences -  and in some ways, they are to be commended for this. Within their church family, as there is in many small congregations, there is a strong sense of loyalty that supersedes the cultural competition for Sunday mornings. As pastor, I rarely heard "Sorry, but I won't be at church because...", as I so often do in my current church. The circled wagons might keep outsiders away, but they also keep the insiders from straying.

In the long run, neither of the first two responses to this challenge are healthy for the cause of The Gospel. The fatal flaw for both is that they focus on preserving the institution, not on sharing the Good News. Whether we fight culture or withdraw from it, we are making the assumption that we have Jesus contained within our churches, and that if we are getting smaller, then Jesus is getting smaller . But the third response rejects that assumption, and instead assumes that Jesus is out there among the people - especially the people that aren't showing up in our sanctuaries on Sunday morning.

Simply Free: A Working Outline

I'm putting together an outline for a book I may or may not end up writing. Comments are appreciated.

Working Title:  Simply Free

Thesis: Christian freedom is much more than being pardoned from wrongdoing. It is found in the release from all sorts of chains and boxes that bind our understanding and limit the flight of the human soul.

Section 1: Freedom from...

   A. Fear of death and loss

   B. Enslavement to wealth/ fear of poverty 

   C. Power and human systems

   D. Rationality and the illusion of knowledge

Section 2: Freedom to...

   A. Love God with all heart, soul, and mind

   B. Love one another (without condition)

   C. Speak up and act out

   D. Be content

Section 3: Simply free - Life in God's hands

The Line of Obligation

There is a division in our churches. It has nothing to do with race, gender, sexuality, or politics. It is loosely based on age, but specifically has to do with attitudes toward worship. I call it the Line of Obligation.

Above this line, people feel a sense of duty or obligation to go to church on Sunday morning. They might find worship fulfilling, but what gets them out of bed consistently is this feeling of "I ought to be there."

Below this line, the sense of obligation is gone. Church, if it is even considered, is just one of many possibilities for a Sunday morning. Those below the line who do attend regularly do so because of particularly strong faith or to enjoy the feeling of community. "I ought to be there" carries little or no influence.

As time goes by, the Line of Obligation creeps higher, and less people in our communities wake up on Sunday morning feeling the "ought to" feeling. Nonetheless, many churches continue to rely on the sense of obligation to get people there. 

As a result, churches are not only struggling to attract unchurched young people, but are also seeing many of those who do come slipping in their regularity. The answer is not to try to attract them back with consumeristic methods, but instead is to be realistic about what the end of the "ought to" age means. 

It means that we must do a lot more than try to convince young folks that they "ought to" come to church - and perhaps that we should stop considering attendance at worship the scorecard of faith. 

We have to find ways to nurture deep and abiding faith, and tight community to go with it - in ways that might go well beyond what church going meant in the "ought to" era. And when we do this, we will find a whole new way of living the faith opening up below this Line of Obligation.

A Parable for Today's Church

A man lives in a nice house in the country, just outside the city. Everyday, he wakes up at 6:30 and takes a shower and gets dressed. At 7:00 he sits down for breakfast and reads the newspaper. At 7:30, he gets in his car and drives to work, arriving on time at 8:00. This is his routine for 20 years.

Eventually, however, the city begins to grow. The country road the man lives on becomes populated with neighborhoods, apartment complexes, and shopping centers. Traffic becomes congested, and numerous stoplights are installed. The man's drive to work now takes an hour.
The man is not happy, and he complains about the new situation:

"They should not have done so much building on one road."
"They should not have installed so many stop lights."
"They should widen the road, or build a freeway."

And as he complains, the man continues with his routine. He wakes up at 6:30. He eats breakfast at 7:00. He gets in his car at 7:30. And he arrives at work at 8:30. After a while, the man's boss becomes impatient with his constant tardiness, and the man is fired.

The Matrix and Freedom

The Matrix and Freedom

In the movie The Matrix, a young man named Neo learns that what he thought was the real world is actually a computer-generated virtual reality. The real world turns out to be a barren wasteland that has been decimated by an apocalyptic war between human and machines.

Freed from his virtual enslavement, Neo voluntarily re-enters The Matrix and works toward liberating the human race from this "prison of the mind". Back inside, he learns how to deconstruct the virtual reality around him. He becomes aware that many of the rules he once thought to be absolute can be bent or outright broken.

Neo uses this awareness to move through The Matrix in startling ways. He defies gravity, dodges bullets, and eventually learns to manipulate the appearance of the virtual reality from the inside. These feats are made possible by his ability to distinguish what is absolute from what only seems absolute.
   
Christian freedom is not unlike the freedom that Neo experiences. We might not be enslaved in a virtual reality, but we do lead lives that are governed by rules and categories that we have created. These structures and limitations often seem absolute, but many are not.

For Neo, the key to freedom was knowing that the world around him was virtual, created by a computer program. For us, the key is knowing the difference between what God has ordered and what humans have ordered. When we understand this distinction, we can begin to deconstruct all the structures and rules we have created, consciously and unconsciously.

Seeing the world more as it really is, and less as we have constructed it to be, we are freed to pursue the way of Christ. This deconstructed view of the world can allow us to move through and serve the complex matrix of human society in ways that are just as amazing as Neo's reality-bending heroics in The Matrix.

Of course, there is nothing new about this notion of Christian freedom. Throughout history, followers of Christ have sought release from the boundedness of human structures and rules. The Matrix analogy merely renews this tradition of faithful deconstruction for a new digital generation.

The Human Predicament: Sickness or Boundedness

The Human Predicament: Sickness or Boundedness?


Imagine that you wake up one morning in your bed, and you are sick. You have a headache, and you are lightheaded. You have a scorching fever, your stomach is violently upset, and you feel like you might vomit. You are so weak and in so much pain that all you can manage is to roll off the bed and crawl toward the bathroom. You realize that even accomplishing the most basic of tasks today will be beyond your capabilities.

The next day, imagine that your illness is gone, but now you wake up physically bound in multiple ways. Your hands, your wrists, your elbows, your knees, your ankles, and your feet are all tied together - not in a painful way, but it almost completely prevents you from moving. All you can manage is to wiggle yourself off the bed and along the floor. Just like the previous day, you realize that accomplishing even the most basic of tasks will be impossible.

Two days. Two different ways of being incapacitated. Two different ways of being rendered less than a fully functioning human being. Sickness, or boundedness. Which one of these is the better way to think about the human predicament?

The Christian faith, like virtually every belief system, is built on the notion of the human predicament. It assumes that there is some problem, some deficiency, something about our lives and our world that is not what it should be.

Christians explain this problem through the story of Adam and Eve. What was originally an idyllic, innocent existence is spoiled when the first humans ignore God's command and eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Since then, humans have faced the predicament of being born into this "sinful" condition, and we have struggled mightily to know how we might be delivered from it.

Which brings us back to those two days I asked you to imagine. By and large, Christians have viewed this predicament like the first day. We are born into a world where we and everyone around us are sick with sin. We have inherited the disease that first entered the world with Adam and Eve, and we continue the problem through our own disobedience.

Many of our classic hymns reflect this notion of sin as sickness, such as "There Is A Balm in Gilead" - where the saving work of Christ is repeatedly referred to as a healing ointment for the sin-sick soul. This perspective assumes that there is not only a predicament to the human situation, but that there is dysfunction - that we are doing something wrong and must be cured of our waywardness.

When we see our problem as sickness to be healed, it causes us to look for where the sickness resides - which leads us into negative attitudes of judgment and condemnation. Both with ourselves and toward others, we frame individual behaviors in terms of healthy and unhealthy, right and wrong, or even good and evil. And we see larger systems and the world as a whole in term of brokenness.

But let's look at our human predicament like that second day - when we didn't wake up sick, but rather bound up and tied together. What if, instead of being born with a congenital disease called "sin," we are born with chains that limit us - that do not need healing, but that need to be untied and unbound? How does this shift change the way we look at ourselves, at one another, and at this human predicament that we share? Does it lessen our negative tendencies toward judgment and condemnation, and instead increase our positive tendencies toward growth and freedom? In a world full of people destroying one another over notions of right and wrong and good and evil, is an orientation toward freedom instead of healing the more peaceful and compassionate path?




 

Knowledge, Truth, and How To Avoid A Snake

As I see it, there are five modes people use to discern knowledge and truth. They roughly correspond to different different movements in human history.

1) Pre-awareness (Pre-history) Knowledge that does not require cognitive process or education. Like fear of snakes.

2) Reliance on authority (Pre-modern) We believe something because it is affirmed by a trusted authority figure or institution. "This is true because _______ says it is true."

3) Rationality (Modern) We believe something because we have considered all the facts available and made a logical and objective evaluation. "This truth should be apparent to anyone who thinks clearly about it."

4) Contextuality (Postmodern) We arrive at our beliefs as best we can based on our own experiences, but concede that others might arrive at different truths from their own perspectives. Truth emerges from the conversation between different perspectives. "My understanding of truth is no more or no less valid than yours."

5) Deconstruction (Post-history) Truth and knowledge are seen as illusory, as human constructs that have little to do with what is really real. All cognitive understanding is suspect and categories that were once assumed to absolute are challenged and rejected.

In many ways, the fifth mode comes full circle to the first mode - only with an awareness of the other modes and their illusory nature. In the fifth mode, the other modes can be used as tools when useful, and set aside when not useful.

Many folks might consider the fifth mode as part of postmodernity, but I think it's important to delineate them. To see truth as contextual,and to completely deconstruct the concept of knowledge and categories, are vastly different experiences.

In fact, we would likely consider someone in the fifth mode to be mentally ill - which  would certainly be consistent with modes of knowledge that medical practices tend to use. The diagnostic manuals that psychiatrists use are based on a combination of logical experimentation (mode 3) and the passing along of knowledge through schools and publications that have been vested with authority (mode 2).

And that's a good thing. We need for our doctors to be getting their information from tested and reliable sources, just as we need them to make evaluations using the most objective thought processes possible. I would be inclined not to go back to a doctor who was operating in the fourth mode, as if my opinion on how to treat a disease was just as qualified as hers.  And I certainly wouldn't see a fifth mode physician who told me that they had deconstructed and rejected most of what they learned in medical school.

The key to this system of modes is that all of them are useful tools, but none of them are absolutes. Take the fear of snakes, for example. That is purely a first mode type of knowledge. If I'm walking across my backyard and happen upon a copperhead, I'm heading the other direction before I have time to think about it - it's a process that happens away from the cognitive center of the brain, and which has allowed humans to avoid deadly predators since prehistoric times.

Imagine if I happened to be born without this instinctive fear, as some people are. When I see that snake, I would have to rely on another mode of knowledge to tell me to back away. I could remember how my mother had warned me about snakes when I was a child - a second mode authority-based response.

Or, I could rationally process what I know about snakes.  They tend to strike when surprised, and this one looks like it's poisonous because of the marks on its back - a third mode logic-based response.

Or, I could think back on previous experiences I've had with snakes, like how much it hurt when I was a teenager and got bit by a non-poisonous snake. And I could remember others' experiences - like that kid at camp who got bit by a water moccasin and had to go to the emergency room, or that snake-handling preacher in West Virginia who recently died from a rattlesnake bite - a fourth mode contextually-based response.

Or, I could totally deconstruct the situation. I could think about the fact that my eyes are processing light and sending signals to my brain, and that my brain is processing those signals and determining that it was a copperhead. And I couldn't question whether my brain was getting it right - whether that really was a poisonous snake.

And in the process, I could question the whole reality that I'm perceiving. Am I really standing in my backyard, or am I just lying on an operating table somewhere with a scientist manipulating my brain - a classic science fiction concept and a fifth mode response.

With any of modes 2 to 5, by the time the knowledge that this is a dangerous snake found its way to the part of my brain that responds by thinking "Run!", I likely will have been bit. But thanks to my automatic first mode, non-cognitive response, I'm able to retreat to safety.

In the same way, each of the modes has specific times they are useful. Telling a young child not to step into the street requires second mode knowledge to be transferred. Figuring out why you computer crashed is a third mode activity. An Interfaith dialogue on peace needs fourth mode communication to be fruitful. And writing a groundbreaking piece of music that establishes a whole new genre is pure fifth mode.

No one mode is superior to another, and we don't go through life trying to move through them in a neat progression. But as we mature, we do successively acquire the ability use higher and higher modes.

Some fields, such as medicine and architecture, demand a certain level of absoluteness that is offered by reliance on authority and rationality - with