What is Christian community?

I was doing some pre-work for a training I'm attending next week, and one of the questions was:
"Briefly describe your biblical/theological framework for community." I thought I'd post my answer here and see what folks think (and what should be added).

What is Christian community?
We eat. We drink. We get mixed up in one another's lives. We tell our stories. We find ourselves in God's story. We seek out ways to live our values together. We love. We argue. We mess up. We forgive. We live as followers of Jesus in a world that longs for Good News.  We notice our neighbors. We give ourselves away. We are not content with things as they are. We break down distinctions. We serve. We share gifts. We participate in what God is up to in the world. We are the Body of Christ.

Portland Craft Beer Adventure

Man, it has been a long time since I've posted. I always say that I blog a lot more on weeks I'm not preaching, but I didn't preach last Sunday, and no posts.  I'm on vacation this week, so I'd better get something going.  I've had several posts "in the hopper" for a while (meaning I have ideas that haven't found their way to the interwebs) but they just seem to be fermenting slowly.

Speaking of fermenting, that reminds me that I often find it best to get back in the blog habit by writing about beer.  And what a weekend it was for beer.  My wife's grandfather died last week, which accelerated our planned vacation trip to Portland by several days so we could attend the funeral.  But it also meant that my wife's sister and her husband came to town, and (thanks to babysitting grandparents) we got a day to adventure.

It's "Craft Beer Month" in Oregon, an event that culminates in the spectacular "Oregon Brewers Festival" this weekend (which I will miss due to camping, too bad).  But throughout the month are a number of other events and such, and really, every month in Portland is a good one for craft beers.  On our first day here I happened to stumble upon a copy of Portland Monthly Magazine with this irresistible cover:



It turns out it was a great issue, with listings for "Best of" for all sorts of things in addition to 48 Best Craft Beers including Best Brewpub, Best Bottle Shop, Best Brewery Tour, etc.  And it became the blueprint for a Portland Craft Beer Adventure.

The first place we decided to check out was "Saraveza" in Northeast Portland.


The photo in the magazine (similar to this one my wife took) showed a spectacular retro beer cooler, so I had somehow connected in my head that this was "Best Bottle Shop" but really it was "Best Continental Selection".  Since this was meant to be a Portland Craft Brew Extravaganza, you might think this would have been a fatal mistake, but in fact, this really cool old school pub (with lots of Ranier and Oly kitch lining the walls and shelves) DID have a great bottle shop, with both local and worldwide beers--and we stocked up for the "play at home" portion of the evening.  They also had a wide range on tap, so we decided to split a 5 sample taster between us.

Because the women were with us, I ordered the "Flemish" beer they had on tap as one of our samples, since it sounded like the kind of thing they would like. Normally I avoid Belgians (I know, what kind of beer snob am I?) and I'd never tried a Flemish style, so I gave it a try and was surprised at how good it was.  Before we left we decided to trade out an IPA that we'd picked that was also in the sample tray (turns out it was a LAGER--and tasted like crap. Who makes India Pale Lager anyway?). We wanted to replace it with a Flemish, and since they didn't have the one we'd sampled in bottles, the bartender suggested "Duchess de Bourgogne" and boy, was that a good choice.  This is now one of my new favorites, and makes me think I may even be able to be turned to Belgians. Maybe.

The other great find at Saraveza were these little beer journals they had on the counter for $4.



My brother-in-law and I picked up one each, and it turned out to be a lot of fun--our adventure had suddenly become a serious beer geek tasting and grading expedition.  We took it pretty seriously throughout the rest of the day (much to the initial amusement and then growing annoyance by the women-folk).  Here's an example of one such entry (for the aforementioned "Duchess":



Next stop was Hopworks Urban Brewery for lunch (rated Best Brewpub Overall in the magazine). The real reason we were going was to attempt to see the "bicycle bar" I'd stumbled onto a picture of online last week.  We enjoyed some great pizza and beer (their IPA is now my #3 beer after Diamond Knot IPA and Ninkasi Total Domination IPA).  One big plus for beer geeks with little books, the HUB brewery lists the "stats" for their beers on the menu and on the beer list chalkboard.  My Organic IPA was 6.6% ABV, 75 IBUs, and had an OG of 15.  My wife's "Velvet Underground Imperial Black ESB" was 8.7% ABV (wowza!), 56 IBUs, and had an OG of 21.  Nerdy, nerdy beer fun.

This pub has a whole bicycle theme (I nearly bought the bike jersey, and even more nearly the bike socks) in addition to brewing organic beer, sustainable food, and having a "green" building.  This is a place I would certainly frequent regularly if we lived anywhere around here. But the crowning glory was sweet talking our waitress (after a nice tip) into letting us check out the bike bar.  She arranged it with the brewery (literally downstairs from the pub) and down we went.  The bike was as amazing in person as it was online, and I kinda wanted to take it for a spin.  But I didn't.

But I really wanted to.

During our meal, the beer geeks perused the stack of Northwest Craft Beer related literature we had collected on our adventure thus far as we debated what would be the final stop on this journey.  My brother-in-law and I, reading different local beer magazines (ok, pause for a moment, there are MULTIPLE local magazines, newspapers, etc devoted to beer in Portland.  No wonder people love this city.) Anyhow, we were reading different magazines and both came upon the same ad for an event called "Puckerface" featuring sour beers at a "Beer Cafe" called Belmont Station in another part of town.  Given our fondness for the quite sour Flemish, we thought we'd give that a shot.  As I turned back to the original magazine that started this adventure, I came to realize that this pub is the pouring half of the Belmont Station Bottle Shop, which was actually the one rated "Best Bottle Shop".  And so we were on our way.

We hit the Bottle Shop first, and it was quite spectacular.


They had TONS of beers (and some wines, including wine in 12oz aluminum cans) at good prices.  And for only $1.50 more the attached pub would pour your recently purchased bottle into a nice clean glass for you to enjoy on site.  But we were here for "Puckerfest" and so bellied up to the bar (just before the crowd came it turns out) and ordered a round to pass and share.  I have to say, I was not that impressed. The beers were sour, for sure, but it reminded me why I don't generally like Belgians.  Meh.

And so, "Puckerfest" completed, we took our trunk full of bottles home to enjoy (and record in our little nerd books) and spent the evening continuing to sample.  But the hands down winner for the day was the "Duchesse de Bourgogne" by all judges--a rare feat in both my house and my brother-in-laws.  But at $11 for a 750ml bottle, this will be a rare treat indeed.  "Leafer Madness (2009 Fresh Hop Edition)" by Bear Valley (in Onterio, OR of all places) was in second place, and fresh hop beers are some of my favorite.  A "fresh hop" is one the brewery brews using hops the same day they are harvested. I find it gives a great aroma and flavor.  Bear Valley even has a video of them harvesting the very hops that went into the bottle we drank. Pretty cool. It's also 9% ABV. Hoppy and warm. Mmmm....

I'm pretty proud of our little team and how we started out by heading to Portland as a way to break up a pretty sad week with a death and a funeral and managed to turn it into a full-fledged beer adventure.  We celebrated "Oregon Craft Beer Month" in true Oregon Craft Beer style, and now can all head back to less beerly-enlightend places of the country (Spokane, WA and Manassas, VA) with the lingering taste of fresh Willamette Valley hops still tingling the backs of our throats (and recorded in extraordinary detail in our little books.)  I just wish the bike-bar was coming along.

Emerging Missional Conversation

So this weekend I'll be presenting a workshop entitled "The Emerging Missional Conversation" at the Eastern Washington/Idaho Synod Assembly in Boise. It should be a good time.  Here's a link to the materials I'm stealing all my content from (which will also be on a handout).

http://pubpastor.blogspot.com/p/emerging-missional-links.html

Sinners, whores, and other friends of Jesus: A conversation

So I'm meeting up with some folks at the Balefire Bar in Everett, WA tonight and thought I'd make it an open invite. Since the folks that are coming already will likely be talking about church (and because I came up with this great title) I thought I'd call this little meetup: "Sinners, whores, and other friends of Jesus: A conversation" and that the topic could be "What I hate about church". Everybody is welcome.

Who: you
What: beer and deep conversation (or whatever)
When: tonight (4/14) at 8pm
Where: http://www.balefirebar.com/
Why: this is my idea of fun

Why Lutherans Can't Evangelize

A little blog comment I wrote is making the rounds. "Pretty Good Lutherans" posted on the interchange with David Housholder I wrote about in my last post. Pretty cool. Check it out.

Another Blog Length Blog Comment

Ok, so I once again posted a comment to another blog that really could have been a blog post of its own. The blog post in question is entitled "Why Lutherans Can't Evangelize" by David Housholder. Here's the link to his original post, and here is my reply.

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I find a lot in this that is really helpful, and a lot that I think is not so helpful (kind of a both/and thing for me). I’ll start with the good news.

I think this statement is quite accurate: “The Lutheran Confessions were not written to define how to reach the lost. They were written to defend the new Evangelical faith against a Roman Christianity which was organizing to resist the Reformation.” To try to get them to do something they were not meant to do is not helpful. Do they lay out a theology that can include mission? Certainly. Was that what they were trying to do–not really. So asking them questions about how to do something that wasn’t really the concern of the era doesn’t help much. No matter how hard I search, Deuteronomy just does not help me set the clock on my microwave. But I do think Luther et al were interested in the question “How do we turn ‘Christians’ into disciples?” which I think may be the question to get at first before we focus too hard on the “now go and make more disciples.”

I like your description of the three eras of Lutheran mission in America. I’ve thought about this before in the following pattern of missional purpose:
Phase 1: Find all the Lutherans
Phase 2: Make more Lutherans
Phase 3: Where are all the Lutherans? (Go back to phase 1)

This has been the functional Lutheran missiology in America for several hundred years, and actually, its worked well enough for us. But its just plain not working anymore. It worked in an era where people stayed close to home, had strong family and ethnic ties, and lived in a culture that assumed church participation for all (upstanding) citizens. That’s a world we don’t live in anymore. And so we’ve dropped the ball on mission and pretended that this will keep working. Let’s face it Lutherans, I know we think the young people we confirmed will be coming back once they have kids, the reality is that many of them have grandkids now, and at some point we need to figure out what we are going to do now.

So now on to the parts I don’t agree so much with:

While Lutherans may not have a functional eschatology that fits into current evangelical/pentecostal frameworks I find it hard to support the claim that we have no eschatology at all. Are we thinking all the time about being raptured up in the air? Hardly. But there is much more to eschatology that that. I’m a fan of a Pannenberg style proleptic understanding of eschatology–which I think makes the kind of sense to the people you are wanting to proclaim the gospel to. God created the end first, and draws us towards that ultimate fulfillment. Jesus is the presence of that future reality in our midst, and the cross becomes the “hinge point” moment where this is realized fully for all time. The whole world has already been reconciled to God (proleptically) in Jesus. It’s just taking the whole world a while to realize that and live accordingly. I, for one, am trying to live that all out now because it works better than not. So I follow Jesus. Its not that “accepting Jesus” gets me a “get out of jail free” card or extra points towards that prize (or that the trapdoor opens at the pearly gates if I haven’t done it in time) its just that the Jesus revealed something true about the universe–that it has been reconciled to God already. So why aren’t we living accordingly? And living in this reality, following Jesus, is not only good for me, its good for my neighbor whom I am now free to serve because I know how this movie turns out. Doesn’t get much more Lutheran than that.

I think Luther wasn’t so worried about the end times because either a) we are in them now or b) they we are not and they’ll come later. And really, what difference would it make. Plant your tree, live your life, love your neighbor. I tend to think Luther’s Antichrist stuff about the pope was more for dramatic effect (he was already under threat penalty of death by the pope, so he might as well go for broke). And I think he got kind of pissed off.

I’m also not taken with your claim that the answer is to become more like the Pentecostals. Not that I think that’s wrong–its certainly a fine way to live out one’s Christian faith–but I don’t think it will really become the driving force of Lutheran ways of doing things. Neither will an emphasis on conversion-decision, which is really based in a modern notion of faith coming through intellectual assent. The basic understanding of a conversion-decision assumes that if one just laid out the truth claim in the right way (“four spiritual laws”, the “bridge”, or more blatant attempts to literally “scare the Hell out of people”) that rational people would go “Oh, I get it. Yes of course. Jesus. Why didn’t I see it before?”

The trouble is that many people today say “Yes, I get Jesus. You Christians, though. Not so much.” In the modern world people were looking for the most right truth claim they could find (or institution holding such a truth claim) to stake their life on. Post modern people really aren’t looking to buy into the big plan. We’ve seen GM go down the tubes with our grandparents pension plans. And so too the church, leaving our grandparents (and us) to spiritually fend for ourselves.

I’ll also agree with your claim that we Lutherans don’t have an articulated theology of mission (we haven’t really done our good homework on this one, yet) but that doesn’t imply that it is impossible. I think there is a real possibility for a very Lutheran (very confessional Lutheran) theology of mission that is richer than anything we could copy off of Melanchthon’s test while the teacher wasn’t looking.

Lutheran missiology starts, where everything else does, in Baptism. God’s redeeming action and ever-present promise given to and for us even though we don’t deserve it and had nothing to do with getting it. That promise manifests itself throughout our lives in vocation–and in particular a call to love one’s neighbor in the real world. Baptismal vocation lived out fully (for example, as Jesus did) is contagious and transformative. It’s the kind of counter cultural love that makes people stop and say “Whatever those crazy Christians have got, I need that for my life too.” We’ve (Christians in general I think) have done a really poor job of living in such a way that our lives proclaim the Good News of Jesus and so we’ve had to resort to turning evangelism into tricks and gimmicks, strong arm techniques, or just plain not caring about our neighbor and ignoring the call to “make disciples”.

A gospel shaped life lived together in community that organically draws others in is how the Christian movement began (I don’t remember any stories of Jesus asking “Have you accepted me as your personal Lord and Savior?”) It’s how it spread throughout the world and (even in a nominally Christian culture) I think its how Christians actually found themselves as followers of Jesus. We Lutherans actually have plenty of theology to make this work, we’ve just done a poor job of talking about it, and an even worse job of putting it into practice.

But I think you are right that younger people today are hungry for just the kind of faith conversation Lutheran ways of talking about God lead to. Luther lived in “in between” times just as we did–and though the authors of the confessions and those that followed the first wave of the Reformation would eventually use them to draw distinctions rather than connections–the original impulse of the Lutheran movement was to help the Church move into a new era together. And that’s a threshold we are standing on once again. I think the Lutheran church could lead the way in this new Reformation.

Will it happen through Pentecostal leaning Lutherans? Perhaps, but that’s not where I’m putting my chips. But I do think it will happen through Lutherans who reclaim the real power of the Spirit that calls us into the world that God loves. And I’m with Chris who commented above. Here we are, forgiven sinners blessed with a theology of abundant grace. We are sitting on a whole pile of what the struggling people in our neighborhoods are dying to get a hold of. And we’re refusing to share it. “When did we see you hungry, or thirsty or a stranger?” When indeed.

Notice Name and Nurture with the Methodists--Part 3

It's slightly embarrassing to say that the last two night sleep on camp bunk bed mattresses have been some of the best night's sleep I've had in a long time (I've got little kids, though, remember?). But it's not at all embarrassing to say that the past two days of conversation have been some of the best in a long time as well. The process of sharing deep and often quite personal stories, and learning how to help one another in drawing out and crafting those stories, has been really rewarding. I feel like I know the folks in this room much better than our 48 hours together would suggest. Its exciting to me to think about where these Methodist congregations take the material we've engaged these past two days.

Today's content is to get at how we go about facilitating this “Season of Practice” in our congregations, and community organizing practices lay at the heart of the “how” of this. But we spent a fair amount of time this morning debriefing what we had learned and exploring together why it is important. It's clear I'm not the only one for whom this process has been personally meaningful and others are also excited about the ways in which VoCARE practices might begin to transform their congregations and how they relate to the young people among them. And its also clear that there is more to these practices than simply a program for improving the number of pastors emerging from congregations. There is something in this process, in these stories and this way of being Church together, that could have deep and profound implications for all of our communities.

I'm slightly disappointed as I leave this gathering because I know that the timing is not right for my congregation to engage this process right now, and it also seems to me that a moment has passed for our cluster of Lutheran congregations in Spokane to engage in it together either. But I'm hopeful that there is some way, and some place that these Vocation Care practices can take root among Lutherans and among congregations I'm connected to. And since the training this fall I've already begun to engage in the story-telling practices, both inside and outside of my congregation. And I'm struck at the way in which this focus on call and a community that nurtures call is resonating with people outside of organized religion. When I've described this process, this curriculum, this project or just asked the sort of questions that lead to story telling with my non-church connected friends, they have gotten really excited. It seems like everyone is asking questions about call, and that the answers out there are just not cutting it. I've once again caught a vision for a transformed Church that takes vocation seriously, and becomes a community that deeply nurtures callings for all people—young and old, those inside and those outside—and releases them for the sake of the world. It's exciting to wonder about where this journey will take me next.

For now it's taking me back on the ferry and then back to my parents house to pick up my little ones who (hopefully) will sleep most of the 5 ½ hours back to Spokane. It's been a great journey with the people of FTE, with my Methodist brothers and sisters, and with the Spirit into the deep question of how do we nurture call within our congregations for the sake of the world. And something tells me this journey is only beginning.