The View from the West Mesa

A major discussion point in my faith community recently has been the concept of female elders. Not the actuality of female elders mind you, just the concept. Given my previous post on the proper roles of men and women, we need to ask what the purpose of elders is. Elders, rightly understood, are not institutional functionaries. This is clear because an institution is not what God is after. They are instead, sages of the People of God; mature, disciplined, faithful followers of God who grasp the faith as it was intended and can pass it along to younger generations. To do this job, elders form a deliberative and guiding body for the People of God – not a church. As such, elders pray, meditate on Scripture, contemplate what they know of God and His purposes, and provide guidance and correction collectively and individually to the People of God. To pass on the faith – or for the purpose of maturing believers – elders counsel, advise, teach, and preach with an eye toward forming the compl...

Let’s review what God is up to and how the church fits his purposes. By church, we too often mean an institution even if we consciously make a distinction between organizations and organisms. We are familiar with the Episcopal Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Church of Christ. We have a penchant of arguing over the arguing over the rules for these institutions so that we get “it” right. Unfortunately, this isn’t the point of church. We confuse ourselves by using a Biblical term for a modern manifestation. When God said He would build His church, He meant something more along the lines of “I will call my people out of the nations.” He wasn’t building a “church,” but crafting a people of His own. This people are intended to be a reflection of the originally intended economy – humans who live in the character of their Creator. This is the big disconnect – we want to build churches but God is after a people. Our doctrinal arguments arise often from two primary areas – 1) rule...

Recently I stumbled upon a presentation by the organizational leadership training office of a major entertainment corporation. The point of the presentation was essentially how to get all your employees on board with operational priorities and standards. The priorities of the corporation were presented as: Safety Courtesy Show Efficiency The presenters went to great lengths to make it clear that these were not a list of values (there’s nothing here about human life, or integrity, or anything similar), but were a decision making tool.  These are not just a list of random items, but are given in order so that the higher something is on the list, the more inviolable it is. For instance, courtesy is the second on the list and the corporation always wants to be courteous to its customers – unless safety is involved. If someone is in danger of being hurt, it is acceptable to be reasonably discourteous to a customer. Otherwise, courtesy is more important than efficiency in doing one...

The gospel, Matthew tells us is at least in part that Jesus came to save his people from their sins. In most Evangelical circles this is the case and it is interpreted as a legal or juridical saving. Essentially, people have sins and the payment for those sins is Jesus's coming and eventual death. Pretty short-sighted if you ask me. The context of verse 21 is the promise and directives to Joseph about what God is up to, and Joseph's responsibilities in that working. For some reason, we miss the connection between this statement and the prophecy on which it is based. That prophecy, according to Matthew, does not use the name Jesus, but Immanuel. The implication is that Jesus will save his people from their sins by being God With Us. God has decided it was time to live with his people, and in so doing restore (save) them to full communion with himself. Being saved from sins has a number of connotations including the strictly juridical one. While it is true that we are "save...

Merton never disappoints. Here's an excerpt from "Love and Living," a collection of individual writings collected after his death in 1968: "Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling; to do this one must recognize what is one's own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." This short passage is pregnant with meaning and spiritual insight (would we expect anything less?). Let's start with the last few words: "…make that offering valid." The offering of ourselves, of our lives is our calling. We offer ourselves to assist the re-creation of Creation; the reconciling of Man to God. The validity of our offering is measured in how closely we mirror the work of God; to what extent our motivations are based on knowing who we are rather than a slavish obedience to p...

The preacher this morning read a Facebook post from Anne Rice in which she says that she's quitting Christianity. Not God, not Jesus, just the troublesome, overly structured, overly restrictive, and often bigoted institution called Christianity. Well Anne, welcome to the club. In another Facebook post, Anne says she doesn't want to be anti-[fill in your favorite political hot potato] and apparently she thinks that at least some form of Christianity requires that she be anti-something. And she's right. Some otherwise fine Baptists apparently have no trouble telling the world that "God hates fags," and some Catholics don't think Protestants have a prayer. We could go on. In my little denomination we have folks who are against any number of things and expect the rest of us to go along with them. The problem is that from my perspective, they're out to lunch. Whether it's what women can do in church, or what sorts of music can be used in worship, or what so...

This past Saturday morning was spent at the Children's Home in Albuquerque. The summer clean up was in preparation for the two week nigh annual open house and barbeque at the home. This day there were about sixty people from a local congregation helping weed, move rock, and generally spruce up the entire campus. Great folks all, and I'm sure they were a bit sore come Sunday morning. One of the people who came to help was a boy of about seven years who helped clear some of the larger weeds from a fallow section of the campus. As we worked on removing Russian Thistles, he said that tomorrow is church. Having sixty of his fellow church goers on campus, in turn assisting a Christian organization accomplish tasks too large for the staff to do by themselves, I observed that he was in church right now. Understandably, his retort was "where's the church building?" As I was readying a short instruction on "church" and community, someone yelled that it was time fo...