Blended worship on campus

by Craig Kocher

When I walked into the chapel at Hope College on a Sunday night late last spring, I worried that my worst fears about faddish campus ministry would be realized. A large stage had been built where an altar should have been and I didn’t see a Christian symbol anywhere near the six guitar players, who were letting loose as if opening for Jars of Clay.

Trygve Johnson, the dean of the chapel, hit the stage like a rock star, with a hands-free mic strapped to his ear, khaki pants and a button-down with rolled-up shirt sleeves; he was already sweating. I considered ducking out to catch the red-eye from Detroit back to Raleigh.

As the opening music died out, Dean Johnson yelled and moved like a rock star, but then he slowed and lit a candle more calmly than a Christmas Eve acolyte and invoked the presence of the Holy Trinity in the name of Jesus Christ, the light of the world. After the band fired up with three more songs, Johnson jogged out front and dramatically narrated two and a half chapters of the book of Revelation from memory— keeping all the signs, symbols and celestial beings of St. John’s vision straight, while the students listened intently. He preached for 30 minutes with flash, flare and a surprising depth of substance. Johnson emphasized over and over that worship is not about style, or feelings, or experience. He unleashed words like “community” and “discipleship,” “liturgy” and “confession,” “creed” and “character,” “Lord” and “Savior.” “All of you,” Johnson boomed, “should be able to leave Hope College with the skills to be a contributing member of any local church in the world. Being a Christian is about being a member of a community,” he reminded them. “It’s not about excitement and feelings. It’s not only about worship and fellowship, it’s also about discipleship and justice and community.” One of the most moving celebrations of the Eucharist followed the sermon.

As a college mainliner, I slink away from loud music, words and images on a screen, and guitars and drums on a stage, worried that participants will cross that fine line separating true worship from tainted performance (is any music immune to human performance?), sure that substantive theology can only be communicated through ancient rituals, or that the gospel can only be communicated through worship segmented into four parts. It’s too easy for my desire to be liturgically accurate and congruent with the more political dimensions of life in academia to block the path to Spirit-filled worship. In this case, I would have missed a beautiful service, one that teemed with guitars and creeds, scripture and PowerPoint, bread and wine, all pointing to substance, glory and faithful Christian formation. It was a risky service—risky enough to proclaim the gospel in dynamic, creative and sacramental ways to 1000 students in a modern-day liberal arts college.

Craig Kocher is a campus minister at Duke University

Abundance in poverty

by Jason Byassee

I was in Kansas City recently to work on a story. I could have stayed in cool, hip Midtown, or a decent hotel anywhere, but friends invited me to stay with them at Cherith Brook, a new Catholic Worker house in a rough part of town.

I should qualify “Catholic Worker.” The friends who started Cherith Brook are Presbyterians.

They spent two years living at and learning from the Open Door Community in Atlanta, famous as a sort of Protestant Catholic Worker. CW isn’t a denomination—you don’t have to get credentialed to “join.” It’s a loose collection of intentional Christian communities that seek to follow Dorothy Day’s vision of pursuing the works of mercy and shunning the works of war.

My friend Eric preaches at a nearby Presbyterian Church (USA), and teaches part-time at a local Jesuit college. His wife Jodi substitute teaches. That’s it for their taxable income. The rest of what they live on comes from support solicited from friends and patrons. They don’t have healthcare or retirement benefits. They wait in line at the local health clinic when they get sick, as the poor always have to do. They’ve pooled their resources with an older CW activist and a single mother with teenaged children, and plan to open their community to others who wish to join. They trust that their pooled resources will be enough. When they’re not, Cherith Brook will eventually reciprocate by sending on extra money from other CW houses. This way it not only share resources where needed but also keeps the individual houses from having too much.

The neighborhood is slated to gentrify in the not-too-distant future. The house they bought for an amazingly low sum was built at the turn of the century and has ornate carved wood, high ceilings and even a carriage house. It was an immigrant neighborhood for Italians then, who have long since joined the waves of white flight. Now there is gang graffiti and prostitution and drug dealing. There was a murder on the street behind them recently. That will all change as homebuyers bargain shop, move in and clamor for Starbucks.

Cherith Brook is not trying to gentrify the neighborhood, increase its property value and push the poor out. Its members are responding to violence and blight by walking the streets to give out sandwiches. They provide housing to refugee families and those recently released from prison. They offer hot food and hot showers, a change of clothes and maybe a foot-care clinic. Eric recalls a man at the Open Door emerging from the Community with clothes that fit. He was well-fed, clean and shaven, and said, “I feel like a human being.”

They also plan to protest war, torture, illegal detention and policies that hurt the homeless. I asked Eric whether he expected his bright orange “Close Guantanamo!” T-shirt to do any good. He replied that the result is not up to him. His plan is just to practice Dorothy Day’s (or Jesus’) works of mercy as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving drink to the thirsty, visiting the imprisoned, caring for the sick and burying the dead. These were Day’s “answers” to works of war such as destroying crops, seizing land and food, destroying homes, scattering families, contaminating water, imprisoning dissenters, inflicting wounds and killing.

What strikes me about such places of hospitality is they assume a posture of material abundance. Most of us would panic at the loss of health insurance or suburban schools or retirement, but Cherith Brook doesn’t (or tries not to!). Like the story in 1 Kings 17:1-6 from which it takes its name, members expect God to provide.

I live in the suburbs where people have high incomes, but they hardly assume abundance. Their credit cards are maxed out, they have more money tied up in mortgages than they can afford to spend, they mistrust their increasingly brown and poor neighbors (the poor being pushed out of cities by gentrification). CW houses assume there will be enough for all, and share in order to make it so.

Callous about a chalice

by Timothy Larsen

A chalice has never been a part of my congregational life. My idea of ecclesiastical architecture has always been folding chairs in a gymnasium. When it comes to essential objects for the liturgical life of the church, I’ve always thought that the one thing needful was an overhead projector. For communion, my home church serves grape juice and Saltine crackers broken into bite-size bits.

There is no common cup, but rather many individual plastic ones. In other words, the chalice is disposable. Last year, to my dismay, my eight-year-old son, having dutifully waited his turn in line, knocked back the grape juice as if it were a shot of whiskey and then held the cup in the air and demonstrated his superhero strength by crushing it in the palm of his hand.

A chalice has always made me think of the Holy Grail which, in turn, has always made me think of Monty Python. For most of my adult life, if I used the word in conversation it was invariably accompanied by the adjective “poisoned.” I went to an end-of-semester party that the students in my program held just before the Christmas break. They presented me with a list that they had been secretly compiling of striking, funny or just plain odd things I had said during my classes that year. In one lecture, I tried to explain that the great St. Athanasius almost had his episcopal ministry permanently ended because a subordinate had reputedly smashed the chalice of a priest from the schismatic group, the Melitians. My students recorded my own sage adjudication of this allegedly sacrilegious act: “Call me a Protestant, but it was just a chalice.”

I became more interested in chalices when I co-taught a course on “Theology and Art” with a wonderful art historian and colleague, John Walford. In researching the medieval period for a class lecture on the sacraments, I learned that it was required by canon law that the inside and rim of a chalice be covered with gold. The reason, I explained to the class, is that only the very best should touch the blood of Christ. I found this idea strangely haunting and beautiful. I have taken chalices more seriously ever since.

I am currently on sabbatical in England, and I keep coming across chalices in museums. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has an impressive collection—a kind of sideshow in the space that houses medieval weaponry. Norwich Castle keeps its display-case chalices in the room that is home to an exhibit about executions.

Is fitting, I wonder, for chalices to become museum pieces? I ask this question, in particular, of any readers who come from ecclesial traditions that are higher than my own. Native American leaders and indigenous groups from many parts of the world have protested against sacred objects from their communities being owned by and exhibited in museums. Should the church also be protesting? Or is the sacred function of the cup, as it were, disposable?

Timothy Larsen teaches at Wheaton College

Are short-term mission trips a waste?

by Susan Olson

Mai-Anh spent spring break in Florida volunteering at a camp for children with life-threatening illnesses. Now she will tell anyone willing to listen that the trip, an alternative spring break trip sponsored by the chaplain’s office, has changed her life.

In 21 days (not that I’m counting), spring break begins at Yale. We happen to have two weeks of spring break, so I’ll be leading two different mission trips, back to back. For me, as for most chaplains and campus ministers, January and February are a blur of double-checked travel arrangements, marathon meetings to plan menus and schedules, and an endless list of details. Mission trips take a lot of energy and time—and money.

Sometimes I cringe at the money part. I think about how much good that money could do in our local community, or in the places we go to serve. I know that quick one-week service projects are only band-aids on gaping wounds, and that long-term solutions will only come about through local volunteers, local activists, local prophets. We serve the tuna casserole to 600 people on Friday, but by Saturday we’re headed back to New Haven, and to lives markedly different from the spring break experience.

It all feels a bit useless, except for Mai-Anh. Except for Mai-Anh and Kimmy and Terrance, and my 16-old-self. I too was on a mission trip, mine to South Dakota, and it utterly changed my life.

A wise older college chaplain gave me this wisdom. “Move the spring break trip out of your mission budget and put it in your Christian nurture budget.” Although he grossly overestimated the complexity of my budget, he made a good point. I try to think of these trips as being double mission: useful mission coupled with opportunities to transform or at least inform the lives of young adults.

It doesn’t always work. Sometimes a trip is just a trip. Sometimes serving the homeless ends as the van departs homeward. But sometimes a light goes on and the gospel becomes palpable. Sometimes a spark for economic justice back home is lit by a week-long friendship with a homeless person halfway across the country. Sometimes seeing just how difficult pain management is for a seriously ill child ignites a desire to study it, fix it.

So I’m headed out again. And if anyone has a good recipe for dinner for 14 people—three vegans, a vegetarian and one with celiac disease—let me know. We’re on a budget.

Susan Olson is Assistant Chaplain at Yale University.

Church in a truck

by Jason Byassee

Our new church arrived Saturday. It came in a trailer packed with enormous ingenuity by Portable Church Industries. We’ve been calling it “a church in a truck.”

Sound strange?

Let me back up.

Flowing Grace is an outreach of Batavia United Methodist Church in Batavia, Illinois, a vital, healthy congregation that is also, unfortunately, landlocked. It’s taken a page from the book of an increasing number of evangelical churches that have multisite ministries. That is, the “same” church meets in different places at different times yet remains organically connected—sort of like the Roman Catholic Church, but smaller, and begun more recently. They’ve hired me to come provide adult education once a month, perhaps without realizing I’d also be studying them.

Batavia UMC is sending 50-odd members, $200,000, and energetic associate minister Jeffry Bross to a nearby town to meet in a middle school—and yes, it has ordered “a church in a truck.” Portable Church Industries has provided 600 or so of these trailers to new church startups over the last 5-6 years. For a healthy fee ($80,000 in this case), PCI provides everything you need to have church: A/V equipment, nursery stuff, communion set, coat hangers, storage bins, signage, the works. It’s deftly and tightly packed because new-site ministries generally need to set up and tear down their “church” quickly, in this case so Herget Middle School in North Aurora can have its school back. The trailer is then pulled to Batavia UMC’s parking lot and remains there until the next Sunday, when Flowing Grace sets up and tears back down again. The outreach site members can concentrate on getting the word out to its new neighbors instead of shopping for rocking chairs or cables, or figuring out how on earth to transport or store all the stuff they need to have church.

I admire the ingenuity both of Flowing Grace and of Portable Church Industries. I’m struck that the church startup industry is, well, an industry. Clearly there is money to be made here and PCI was one of the first on the scene. I’m also struck by the resources Flowing Grace has right off the bat. A quarter of a million and 50 people is more than the rural churches my wife and I served back in North Carolina ever had. I keep wanting to tell my new colleagues they’re not a church startup—they’re a church. Of course they want to grow much bigger (there’s already talk of needing a bigger site soon after the official launch on March 4th), and church-planting seminars suggest they’ve done everything right to do precisely that.

Perhaps I’m a little dreamy-eyed, but before I became involved with Flowing Grace, my imagined church-plant was a living room with a few Bibles open on laps and a set of nervous but eager God-seeking neighbors. Plenty of now-enormous churches did began that way, including Rick Warren’s Saddleback. But even more churches that have begun that way will close. Flowing Grace, with PCI’s help, is far more likely to succeed. It’s virtually guaranteed.

Pastor as patient

by Jonathan Marlowe

I have been to the hospital so many times for someone else’s surgery that it’s second nature. I put on my clergy badge, which makes me feel official and professional, and show up at the hospital door all smiling and cheerful. I try to make small talk about the weather or the game on TV last night, thinking that might take their minds off troubles and ease their anxiety. Until recently, I didn’t know if my efforts worked or not. They might just have been too nice to tell me it doesn’t.

But now I know.

I was a patient myself recently. There’s nothing quite like that feeling you have when you know that a surgical team is about to put you to sleep and start doing things to you that you have absolutely no control over. It made me nervous, and no small talk was going to alleviate the panic. I was having a heel spur on my foot removed. Doesn’t sound like major surgery? It wasn’t: I’d be in and out of the outpatient room in one afternoon. That was when I learned the difference between minor surgery and major surgery. Minor surgery is something you have; major surgery is something I have.

I didn’t mind the nurse putting in my IV, although I have an aversion to needles. What really got to me was when one of my clergy colleagues came in the door in a black suit and looking seri-ous. “Good grief, why are you dressed like that, David?” I inquired. He told me he was on his way to a funeral, and he always wore black at a time of death. Then a broad smile flashed across his face. “Don’t worry. It’s someone else’s funeral.” Was I always this helpful when I went to see someone before surgery?

Then David looked at me with his hand outstretched and said, “Let’s pray.” He took my hand and my wife’s hand. No sweet, sentimental mush. Instead, in a clear steady voice, he prayed for God’s blessing and God’s healing. He thanked God for God’s presence in my life, especially during this time of surgery. And with that it was over, Amen. As I was being wheeled away into the operating room, I was still anxious. But I knew I had been prayed for by a priest and interces-sor who represented me before God. That’s what hospital visits are for—not for small talk, nervous laughter or even that momentary respite from anxiety. Hospital visits give us the chance to be oriented towards God.

Jonathan Marlowe is pastor of Shiloh United Methodist Church in Granite Quarry, North Carolina.

James Alison: Drown the inquisitor

by Jason Byassee

I don’t know anyone who’s gotten through the first semester of seminary without feeling overwhelmed. The sheer mass of reading is too much for anyone to master. I worry that future ministers and theologians are being shaped to read in undigestible quantities rather than to read carefully and well. It’s a long way from the habits of contemplative reading that ancient Christians taught—learning to chew on scripture like a cow does its cud, to use a popular medieval example.

There is no malice in this. Professors in each of theology’s four modern disciplines (scripture, history, systematics and practical theology) love their particular field, and can’t imagine letting students get through their introductory courses without having read a stack of “indispensable” texts. I’ve stopped being surprised when I hear of very good students sounding the alarm that seminary is too much and they should’ve done something else. They generally eventually make it through—after they’ve discovered what corners to cut.

It’s not as though what’s being imbibed is mere information without ramification for one’s existential well-being. During that first semester people with a convinced-enough sense of God’s presence to have enrolled in seminary have many of their most cherished assumptions challenged—on the authorship of the scriptures and the reliability of what their Sunday school teachers taught them (or if their background is more liberal, on the necessity of the church’s tradition as a mediator of our present life together). These nascent Christian leaders—who’ve been lauded to the point of folding up previous careers for this—are suddenly liable to get a poor grade in something as basic as the Bible. It’s not just frustrating. It can be soul-scarring.

James Alison’s take on this first-semester phenomenon is quite different from mine. He was a vowed Dominican who had already studied theology for three years—as long as most Master of Divinity degrees take. If he was overwhelmed, how hard must that program in Belo Horizonte, Brazil have been?

I heard Alison speak in Milwaukee a year or so ago. It was an off-hand comment that got me wondering what his take on theological education might be. He often speaks and writes of being a gay man who was repudiated by the Dominicans. He wishes to remain a Catholic priest and theologian but not to keep quiet about his sexuality, and so cannot get a teaching position in a Catholic institution. He described his vocation in his talk as being that of an original Dominican: he goes around preaching and begging for money, as St. Dominic and his followers did in the Middle Ages. This piece suggests again he has no intention of leaving, let alone bashing, his Dominican formation or the Catholic theological heritage generally. When I commented to him how unlike most self-described gay theologians he is in not adopting a strictly revisionist approach, he smiled and said “Give me that old-time religion”. . . .now filtered through several years of study, with its Inquisitorial guardian drowned.

Charm in a fading empire

by Richard A. Kauffman

Clifford Geertz, the renowned anthropologist, once said that he had lived “a charmed life in a charmed time” (Available Light). A member of the “greatest generation,” as a navy man during the war he was spared having to invade Japan by the atomic bomb. When he didn’t know what to do after the war, a high school teacher suggested he attend Antioch College, where his liberal arts degree was paid for by the GI bill.

Then a college teacher encouraged Geertz to do graduate work in anthropology, and got him a fellowship that paid his way to Harvard, where he was accepted into a new, interdisciplinary department called “Social Relations.” He was invited to join a new field study project in Java, and there he did the field research for his dissertation, which became the groundwork for his distinguished career in cultural anthropology. A charmed life, indeed! But he admitted that such a charmed life is rare and that it might not be possible any longer to live charmed lives in a charmed time, not even in America.

I am from the next generation after Geertz, a baby boomer. And while I can’t say that I’ve lived a charmed life in a charmed time, I have been blessed with wonderful opportunities and have few regrets. But I worry about my children and. When the U.S. declared a war on terror after 9/11, I feared such a war would unleash forces that would come back to haunt us, if not in my lifetime, then that of my children and grandchildren. And that was even before the current debacle in Iraq.

Go to www.costofwar.com. There you will see the cost of the war growing before your very eyes—$362 billion the last time I checked. It makes me wonder whether this war will bring down the American empire, much as the arms race during the Cold War led to the demise of the Soviet Union. It is said that the wear and tear on the military from this war has nearly broken the army, which may be a metaphor for the whole country.

One of my earliest childhood memories was of going to see the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at a great aunt’s house— the only person in our extended family at the time who owned a TV. Just several days before, Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa climbing companion Tenzing Norgay had become the first known persons to summit the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, at 29,000 feet. In those days mountain climbing was a highly competitive and nationalistic sport, and since Hillary was part of a British expedition, word was sent back to Britain about his accomplishment. This news reached the British Isles on June 2, 1953, the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Eventually, people from the British Empire looked back on this day as “the last great day in the British Empire.”

What will be said about the American empire 50 years from now—that its glory days are in the past? That it has been superseded by China or India or the European Union or some other upstart? And if its best days are over, what day will be labeled as the “last great day in the American empire”? September 11, 2001 might be viewed as the first of numerous very bad days for the empire, but not the actual beginning of decline might be reserved for March 20, 2003, the day the war in Iraq began—an unnecessary war that has created more problems than it has solved, and left us with consequences we may be living with for generations.

Blogging the will of God

by James Howell

I’ve just spent a month with my congregation studying “the will of God.” A local talk show interviewed me on the subject, and the host, not the friendliest interlocutor on matters of faith, posed a hard question just as the producer was gesticulating that the commercial break was rushing headlong our way: “How can you know what God wills? Give me an answer in three seconds.”

All I got out was something like “Uhhh…” and the ad jingle commenced.

I think I know God’s mind on this. It is God’s will that you cannot say anything meaningful about God’s will in three seconds. And since I am into a blog just now (and as I type I chuckle, since the word “blog” feels like “fog” or “bog” or “clog,” all of which connote getting stuck in murkiness), I wonder if a blog is an appropriate vehicle to say true things about God. Mind you, people want a blog or less. I’m sure my radio listeners held their breath, wanting not “Uhhh…” but the answer in those three seconds.

Quick three-second soundbytes about God are in plenteous supply, as are the blog-length little digests, and they misconstrue God’s will every time. Here is the typical truthiness most church members cling to as self-evident: “God is in control of everything,” or “We cannot know why God caused that car accident,” or “The door was open, so it must be God’s will,” or “God needed your spouse in heaven more than you did,” a monotonous string of half-truths, half-baked. And you just can’t set it all right in three seconds, or in a blog or two.

The beginning of God’s will might just be that God wills some concentration, some sustained thought, wrestling, reconsidering, employing our God-given brains to realize people die because illness takes its course or it’s just plain dangerous to drive tonnages of metal down highways near mere mortals (who might be reading a blog on their Blackberry), how God is intimately involved in suffering without inflicting it, and also a good bit of stammering. Once upon a time, as Daniel Boorstin suggested, when a great thinker paused for a good while before saying anything, you knew genuine wisdom was being formulated. To speak truly of God, to do God’s will, you pause, you stammer, you’ve barely started the “Uhhh…” and the blog is over, the ad is zinging away, but perhaps God’s will was voiced in its failure to get a quick word in.

James Howell is senior minister at Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, NC.

Born-again media

by Louis R. Carlozo

Here is news, to paraphrase newspaper guru Gene Roberts, that isn’t breaking but trickling and seeping without much notice: Newspapers are still very much alive.

Let’s dive in by way of analogy. Remember when a little thing called television came along in the 1940s? It was supposed to kill off radio for good: Who wanted to listen to a box without pictures when something new, sleek and flashing was available?

That was 60 years ago, and radio today is more buoyant than ever with its leap into cyberspace. People can stream broadcasts from across the world on their laptops. Before that, FM revolutionized radio—and before that, AM Top 40 helped launch the cultural tidal wave of a British Invasion. Radio didn’t die so much as it was born again and again and again.

Now for the facts: Yes, fewer people read papers while more tune in to YouTube. But in Time’s December issue, Jeremy Caplan revealed what most underpaid reporters suspected all along: The operating profit margins of newspapers still hover ABOVE 19 percent. That’s well ahead of hotels (14 percent), computers (9 percent) and airlines (below 3 percent).

Why all the hand-wringing, then, about the imminent death of Gutenberg’s great-great-great grandchild? I can think of several reasons. First of all, keeping bad news alive gives some publishers (and profit-hungry stockholders) all the excuse they need to make draconian cuts in newsrooms. Readers suffer, morale in the newsroom suffers, too—though I can’t recall the last CEO who gave back that big bonus for creating “operating efficiencies” ( firing people).

Second, there is what Alan Greenspan might call “irrational exuberance” surrounding the heir apparent to newsprint, the Internet. While stock prices at Tribune Company, for example, have been flat over the last few years, Google has multiplied five times in value. Yet the experts, for all their complicated market formulas and forecasts, often get it wrong. Markets operate on emotion, too, and the overvaluation of Google and the undervaluation of Tribune stock fail to reflect the reality out there. If a couple of kids can invent YouTube in a garage, what’s to stop some other Digital Age hotshots from inventing the next revolutionary search engine before Google gets around to it? Google, after all, blew Yahoo out of the water when Yahoo was once tops in the field.

Meanwhile, papers are not the technological laggards experts would have you believe. Behind the scenes, options are being explored, from e-paper (a cyber-ready cousin of newsprint that would change the content of a newspaper multiple times in a day) to Internet subscription models that really work. Remember when people laughed at iTunes charging 99 cents a song? How many billion downloads ago was that?

Just as with radio changed, though, newsrooms need to adapt and embrace change if they are to survive. Part of this is not technological so much as philosophical: in an example from radio, NPR’s news outlet is so obsessed with Iraq War and Middle East coverage that its “news” on “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” resembles the body counts and human interest fluff one might expect from Armed Forces Radio. There are bigger wars involving poverty, political acrimony and AIDS that go unreported on our homefront while NPR and our newspapers play the roles of glorified ambulance chasers.

Newspapers are alive. But just as any patient believing a bad diagnosis can take a turn for the worse, those in the Fourth Estate need to look ahead, rather than obsess over their aches and pains. Which could, if viewed in proper light, be growing pains.

Louis R. Carlozo, a Chicago Tribune editor and DVD columnist, teaches reporting and writing at Loyola University in Chicago.