Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder, Ken Greenberg (Vintage Canada) $21

At first glance this would appear to be a book that has little direct interest for a busy denominational executive or local church leader. But it’s worth the read. It is one of those books that crosses over genres and types. It surprises one with its insight into the art of cultivating the kind of imaginative change leaders are facing in the midst of deep, disruptive transformations.

Ken Greenberg is an architect addressing questions of how to make cities the creative, livable spaces of human thriving they were always meant to be. He learned his trade in the early seventies just as the oppressive modernism in city construction had reached its apex. Architects, urban planners and politicians were beginning to recognize that modernism, in all kinds of unanticipated ways, had created cities that weren’t contributing to the thriving of people in urban life. By that time a whole way of design, planning and construction had come to shape city life. Old, mixed-use neighborhoods had been bulldozed to make way for sparse, functional high rise towers separated from work, play and shopping in the conviction that this rationalization of efficiency would result in the urban utopia. Pathways through neighborhoods had been replaced by sleek highways and passovers that quickly moved people in cars through cities while also reducing the amount of face-to-face street-level engagements among people.

All of this social construction of reality was the work of experts and professionals who believed deeply in the new modern, rational, efficient design of social life. Onto this stage stepped Greenberg’s mentor – the decidedly un-professional, Jane Jacobs. She, alongside a host of others, began asking basic questions about the nature of a city and the ways we thrive as human beings in built environments. Greenberg’s story is the story of how he, with others, wrestled with these questions. They did not work from a blank sheet but had to engage a tough reality – the already constructed reality of high towers that had ghettoized people, strip malls, distant shopping centers, highways that pulled neighborhoods apart and a whole host of bi-laws that regulated and prevented innovation from taking place. In the midst of all this were the people in all those professionally designed communities – they were deeply suspicious of what another group of experts would do to them. Walking Home chronicles Greenberg’s journey of discovering how to work with these realities in order to cultivate a radically different imagination for living together in the city. It is still a work in progress!

So what does any of this have to do with denominational executives and local church leaders wrestling with the hard, day in and day out realities of imagining new life for the church? A great deal. Today, we too are dealing with a massive form of church that we now know was a huge mistake – the corporate denomination. From its many centers, staffed by professionals and experts it created a brand name, cradle-to-grave system from one end of the country to another. The world that made this system work is long gone but the structures and imagination, like the high towers that warehoused people, are still in place. Denominational executives still struggle under the weight of systems that bear no relationship to the realities of the worlds in which people live. Local leaders still work under the illusions of this professionalism even as they confess their own confusion and frustrations with the programs sent at them.

How do you creatively engage these realities? Too many of us know that the proposals to just scrap the old for some ‘new’ thing is basically silly and illusory akin to telling cities to just pull down all those towers, remove the highways, erase the strip malls and all would be well.

How do you create an alternative narrative that invites the people of God to join with you in constructing churches and church systems that contribute to the thriving of God’s people? Greenberg may not have intended it but his book is rich in descriptions of how to go about this.

Alan Roxburgh is a pastor, teacher, writer and consultant with more than 30 years experience in church leadership, consulting and seminary education.  Alan has pastored congregations in a small town, the suburbs, the re-development of a downtown urban church and the planting of other congregations.  He has directed an urban training center and served as a seminary professor and the director of a center for mission and evangelism.  Alan teaches as an adjunct professor in seminaries in the USA, Australia and Europe.  His books include:  Leadership, Liminality and the Missionary Congregation, Introducing the Missional Church, Missional Map Making and Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood.

As someone who is passionate about helping young adults develop their faith and spirituality, I eagerly picked up this book, anticipating a rich learning experience from two individuals seasoned in the work young adult spiritual growth.  Richard Dunn is currently a megachurch lead pastor in Knoxville, Tennessee, but has and continues to invest significant time in mentoring young adults.  Jana Sundene is a Christian ministries professor and church leader who cherishes the opportunity for disciple-making relationships with young adult women.  This book flows out of their desire to help train others to join them in their ministry.

Drawing from the work of psychologist Jeffrey Jenson Arnett, the authors adopt his label “emerging adults” to explain the transitional time frame of post-adolescence to adult stability.  While having adult capabilities, emerging adults struggle to function as adults due to the following five factors:

1. They are still engaged in identity exploration.
2. They are in transition out of their family of origin into independence.
3. Their lives (financially, vocationally, relationally, emotionally, etc.) are unstable.
4. They see life as full of possibilities which they want to pursue and experience to the fullest.
5. They, therefore, are very self-focused, while figuring out who they are and what they want to be.

Dunn and Sundene believe the role of mentors is to guide emerging adults to resolution of these issues so they can become spiritually mature adults.  They specifically give guidance to mentors on how to exercise discernment, intentionality and reflection in the areas of identity, personal spirituality, dating relationships, sexuality and real-world living.

The strength of the book lies in its recognition that the mentoring process is a long-term, messy and highly-individualized process.  While there are general characteristics that define most young adults, each young adult uniquely experiences those characteristics through the filters of their own faith, family, friendships, experiences and education.  No one should expect to find a prescription for mentoring that miraculously works across the board.

While the book, thankfully, shies away from giving such simplistic step-by-step solutions, neither does it do much more than advise the reader to listen a lot, pray without ceasing and search the Bible for answers.  The authors regularly incorporate personal stories and metaphor in an attempt to illuminate what effective mentoring looks like.  Sadly, these come across more as canned sermon illustrations than informative insights.

I was also disappointed that the authors viewed the role of mentoring of emerging adults as “restoring” them.  While not condemning young adults for what they go through in their twenties, the book’s underlying presupposition is that this age group is in grave danger of being ensnared in the false philosophies of the secular world and the church must rise up to rescue them before it is too late.  The church must convince them that Jesus is the Way, Truth and the Life and that non-Christian philosophies only lead to pain, sadness and separation.  While I wish the authors would have admitted the failures of dogmatic theology, discussed its contribution to young adults’ apathy towards Christianity, and called for a revisiting of our theological positions, their position makes sense when you understand that they embrace a fundamentalist, evangelical approach to following God and living a Christian life.

I join the authors in calling the church to rise up and invest relationally in emerging adults.  We desperately need people to walk with them on this journey filled with energy, creativity, joy, heartache and confusion.  But we also need to listen to young adults.  Their very questions and struggles might reveal how the church needs to change to effectively live out the gospel.

Todd Leonard lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Robin, and their three daughters.  He’s planted and led churches for 13 years in Atlanta, Georgia and northeast Tennessee.  He currently serves young adults and high school students at Vallejo Drive Church in Glendale, California. 

John Dominic Crossan is a polarizing figure. His ideas would surely have been held suspect in the conservative circles where I cut my teeth on introductory catechism. He was not a featured scholar where I attended seminary due to his association with The Jesus Seminar. Needless to say, I discovered Crossan’s work later in my life, later in my journey.

I have found there is little to fear in the work of Crossan – if you hunger to get to the very heart of Jesus and the message of the Kingdom.  His scholarship is solid and his logic compelling. It is also quite evident that he follows Jesus with a deep passion, which comes through in everything I’ve read by his hand. But there is a danger in reading Crossan – the danger that many of your assumptions about the Biblical text will be challenged. You will the text differently and learn about the cultural environment that shaped it, you will encounter questions you never could have imagined before. You will be pushed and prodded. For me, the dangerous territory of this scholarship has opened up fresh vistas of discovery about Jesus and His Kingdom agenda. I find Jesus more captivating and true, the Biblical text more richly complex. I continue to discover that our participation in God’s story, even in the crafting of the text, says something magnificent about God’s desire to collaborate with us in His world.

Crossan’s most recent publication, The Power of Parable:  How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus, explores parabolic method in the Biblical text. Yes, he addresses the Jesus parables, but he also investigates other Biblical parables like Ruth, Jonah and Job. He defines parable but also demonstrates various types of parables in operation in the ancient context as well as the Biblical text. We most often assume parables are meant to demonstrate right behavior – a classic example parable of ‘go and do likewise.’ Sometimes they are riddle parables meant to tease our intelligence. But Crossan makes the case that Jesus most often employed challenge parables, a rhetorical device meant to up-end our assumptions and force us to think differently about our world. If repent means to ‘rethink’ then challenge parables were the perfect linguistic tool to invite people to rethink what they thought they knew about matters of faith and politics. Crossan makes the case that challenge parables were also a highly participatory teaching method that required crowd engagement, so well suited to the collaborative eschatology that Jesus preached and practiced. Parables, in old and new testaments, were meant to challenge and engage us.

The deeper challenge of the book is when Crossan moves into the discussion of the gospels as parabolic history about Jesus. One gospel at a time, he makes a comprehensive case for where we see the principles of parable at work in the crafting of each book. The gospel writers were men of their time, they wrote within a certain milieu and with their own pastoral agendas – what Walter Brueggemann would call the ‘vested interest’ in each book of the Bible. Some gospels are written as challenge parables about the life of Jesus. A couple of the gospels were clearly attack parables, not a style Jesus himself embraced. It is fascinating to consider how each author encountered Jesus, reflected on the meaning of His words and works, and then chose to represent the message of Jesus to their community.

I found it stunning to see how Mark described Jesus as always non-violent in His Kingdom campaign, even en route to Jerusalem and the cross. Matthew did not see (or perhaps want to accept) a non-violent Jesus in his day, so the Jesus we encounter in Matthew uses more violent rhetoric and even more forceful actions.  The side-by-side comparison of these two gospels on this count was so illustrative and insightful.  Another interesting observation was that Mark showed a very raw and vulnerable Jesus during Passion Week, almost out of control of the events around him. Yet John portrays Jesus as the one in control of everything, right down to when he chose to surrender his spirit on the cross. These contrasts, violent vs. non-violent and out of control vs. in complete control, are just small indicators of how each writer wrote Jesus differently. They each used parabolic method to craft gospels that would challenge (and even attack) their audiences then and now.

What becomes clear, at least for this reader, is how deeply involved our humanity is with the text. God allows us to write His story with Him, maybe even for Him, and that means our fingerprints are all over the pages of the Bible. Our own vested interests, our political leanings, words penned during various phases of history ranging from peace, exile, violent uprisings and amid non-violent campaigns are all braided into the text. Our story and God’s story are in the warp and woof of each page. What a testament to how God desires to collaborate with us in the most intimate ways, even trusting God’s own self-revelation into our hands. Maybe for some this is highly disconcerting and threatens an understanding of Biblical authority, but for this reader it showcases how real the Bible is and how deeply God involves us in his endeavors in the world.

Once again, John Dominic Crossan takes us into new territory and opens new vistas. We learn more about parables, about the Gospels and about how we are part of this on-going divine collaboration.

KJN

So much human energy is expended ameliorating the pain of simply existing in the world. This pain is also the source of a great deal of creativity, as almost every artist will attest. Memoirs give us a beautiful, poignant and sometimes humorous window into the struggle we all face even if we’re not all so adept at expressing it: what to make of the world and our place in it? This is certainly true of two new memoirs – for somewhat different reasons.

Still is a poetic and brutally honest exploration of love and loss from popular author, Lauren Winner. She gives  us a rare window into faith in its mid-life. Not Winner’s mid-life—she’s still a ways from that yet—but faith’s middle stage, where “first love” wears thin, much the way the initial butterflies stop fluttering so frequently in a romantic relationship. Most experienced couples will tell you that love really begins at this point. The same is true of faith. In fact, by definition, faith begins at the point when the evidence and emotion of religious life are against you. Winner speaks frankly about her divorce, loneliness and the crisis of belief in her characteristically lyrical way. For example she tells a story of her friend’s confirmation, at the age of 12.

A few days before the confirmation service, she told her father—the pastor of the church—that she wasn’t sure she could go through with it. She didn’t know that she really believed everything she was supposed to believe, and she didn’t know that she should proclaim in front of the church that she was ready to believe it forever. “What you promise when you are confirmed,” said Julian’s father, “is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that that is the story you will wrestle with forever” (172).

Mark Salzman’s book, The Man in the Empty Boat, begins from a very different place – that of unbelief, or maybe the impossibility of belief. Speaking of his chronic anxiety and the way it “turns the journey of life into a treadmill of worry and wasted effort,”

…if Godless Universe 4.0 is your operating system, your hard drive will reject most faith-based programs, and there are times when that can seem like a major disadvantage.

This struggle to cope with the pain and pressure of life takes shape in humorous stories about the new family dog (he vowed to never own a dog) and the excruciating death of his sister. Through it all, his biggest struggle is with himself. This reader finds this all too easy to relate to, even though faith-based programs do run fairly well in my hard drive. The real payoff in this read comes in the closing pages as he relates his new philosophy of life.

My normal sense of being the author of my life-narrative gave way and was replaced by a sense that I was the audience for it…. From that point of view, I could no longer believe that we determine what happens to us, or choose who to be; we find out what happens to us. We do what we must as we fall through time, which means—this is the feel-good part again—that we are doing the best we can, always.

It’s a liberating thought—a way to be gracious to oneself. For those who feel crushed under the weight of responsibility it is a huge relief to not have to carry the whole load.

So much sadness in the human experience is associated with the fact that life doesn’t turn out the way you had hoped. Both authors help us connect with our own deep disappointments, anxieties and fears. For Salzman, the answer is to expect less, or, as my golfing buddy used to tell me, “You’re not as good as you think you are. Once you accept this you’ll have a lot more fun.” For Winner, the answer is to keep wrestling with the story, recognizing that anyone who takes their life and faith seriously has passed through these dark middles. Her advice: hold on. Rumor is, people get through it.

RB

As soon as I read the title of this book it was instantly obvious to me. Human beings have an uncanny ability to miss what is right in front of their eyes. Particular narratives frame reality and admit or reject certain truths based on those narratives which run, like software, in the background, unexamined. But when our imaginations are opened to a truth, it is impossible to go back; impossible to not see it.

Such is the case with The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the latest volume from renown black liberation theologian and Union Theological Seminary professor, James H. Cone.

In this brief and engaging read, Cone highlights the problem of an anemic theological and social imagination on the part of some of our best thinkers. Cone begins, in the introduction, with these words,

The cross and the lynching tree are separated by nearly 2,000 years. One is universal symbol of Christian faith; the other is the quintessential symbol of black oppression in America. Though both are symbols of death, one represents a message of hope and salvation, while the other signifies the negation of that message by white supremacy (xiii).

In the first of five chapters, Cone draws our attention to the black experience in America and in particular, the experience of lynching. He then turns to perhaps the most famous theologian of Christian social justice in the 20^th century, Reinhold Niebuhr, and shows how Neibuhr, in spite of his teaching on the issues of race and social justice not only failed to make the connection between the cross and the lynching tree but failed to move his own congregation toward integration and justice. The chapter concludes with a story of Cone’s personal interaction with Neibuhr, by letter, when he came to teach at Union where Neibuhr had spent so many years.

Chapter three deals with Martin Luther King, Jr and his teaching about the cross. While it does deal with the way black preachers like King, and others, address the cross in the face of so much racial violence one gets the impression that even he did not fully grasp the parallelism. It isn’t until chapter 4, “The Recrucified Christ in Black Literary Imagination,” that the tragic irony that is the cross and the lynching tree becomes clear. It is, after all, the poets that help us see this connection. Billy Holiday’s lament, “Strange Fruit,” is more disturbing than any theologian’s reflection and Langston Hughes, “Christ in Alabama,” is perhaps the most provocative expression of all.

Christ is a nigger,
Beaten and black:
Oh, bare your back!

Mary is His mother:
Mammy of the South,
Silence your mouth.

God is His father:
White Master above
Grant Him your love.

Most holy bastard
Of the bleeding mouth,
Nigger Christ
On the cross of the South.

With a final chapter dedicated to the role of black women, Cone elevates our awareness of the real scandal of the cross with which we must still struggle.

“The real scandal of the gospel is this: humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst” (160, emphasis in original).

The lynching tree frees the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians and forces us to face the ongoing scourge of white supremacy and the contradiction inherent in the history and current practice of Christianity.

As I read this book I could not help but think of other expressions of lynching that happen today in our criminal justice system, U.S. government sanctioned torture of prisoners of war or the literal lynching of gays and lesbians in countries like Jamaica and Uganda.

RB

Dr. Tom Wright is a prolific author of both popular and scholarly works about the historical origins of Christianity, focusing especially on the Gospels and the Pauline writings. We spoke to Dr. Wright from his home in Scotland about his new book, Simply Jesus.

—The Editors

Your work has been tremendously helpful. I think because some of us were just so frustrated, sort of being car salesmen for the church, trying to simply get people into the pews, and then after about five or six years of that you begin to wonder, “Why am I doing this? What’s this for?”

Yes. Yes, that’s absolutely right. And of course a lot of folk in the church have simply said, “Well, it’s basically the more people we get in the pews the more people we get to heaven at the end of the day.” And, though obviously, as you know from some of my other works, the whole question of the long-term future and the new world and the new creation and resurrection is absolutely vital—you can’t do without that hope, but that plays back into the present life precisely because of the resurrection of Jesus. God has actually started this new creation project right now and when somebody becomes a Christian and starts to worship God in Christ, and join with others in doing so in the power of the Spirit, then things are supposed to be happening both in that community and through that community, in and for the world all around them. Of course the church has always basically done this and if you go back into the second and third centuries and so on, that’s the reputation that the church had, “Who are these funny people who go around being kind to everybody even though they don’t need to be?” And that’s how Christianity spread, rather than just the communication of great ideas or whatever, though they matter too. So I think the church at its best has always done this, it’s just that in the Western world we have forgotten the rationale for it.

When I picked up Simply Jesus my first question before I even opened it was, “How is this going to be different than The Challenge of Jesus?” So, is there new material here, and also maybe more importantly, what is the audience for this book? There’s a part of me that just can’t help but be curious if you had kind of an evangelistic intent about the book, given that it’s published by a very popular publishing house? Who is this for and what is your hope for it and how is it different than The Challenge of Jesus?

The Challenge of Jesus grew out of a conference at which I was speaking to last-year fellowship graduates twelve years ago, I think it was in Chicago. And as the last two chapters of that book bear witness to the fact that it’s very much aimed at the kind of the bright young graduate market who are thinking, “What difference does my faith make to my computer science, to my music theory, to my this, to my that?” And I know it had quite an impact in those circles, but perhaps those chapters particularly may have also got into a much wider circle.

I think what’s happened is, that over the twelve years between the two books, I have—well, scholarship has moved on and I have moved on because I spent most of the twelve years, of course, working in the Church of England as a bishop, and when you go around and actually work with ordinary church communities, in my case in a very impoverished area of the country, all sorts of questions about how you actually preach from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, what you say about Jesus to folk in those communities—they have become really second nature to me and so I decided that I wouldn’t actually go back and even re-read The Challenge of Jesus, but I would sit down and map out what I most wanted to say about Jesus right now. And I think one of the things which is most clear to me is the close integration between Jesus preaching of the Kingdom and Jesus himself as the surprising, shocking presence of the living God, honored and amongst his people. And I think the sense of the Jewish people—of the time waiting for God to come back and then getting Jesus as the one who arrived. . .

(Laugh)

Well you know, one chuckles because it sounds like a trick, but actually, that is what Mark and the others are saying in their gospels, that, you know, “Prepare the way of the Lord” etc, and in Isaiah and Malachi—those quotes are not about the coming of the Messiah, they’re about the living God. And the evangelists point that out as being about Jesus himself. So I think something has happened christologically. It’s hard to describe the sort of shift there and we’re becoming much more explicit, I think that you can only do this with the full works of the Jewish context—of how people were seeing it. But then as well, and this comes out in the last chapter but it’s there all the way through, really for those who have eyes to see it, the big debate as to what difference this makes here and now.

And the last chapter of the book I’m really in an intrinsic debate with James Davison Hunter whose new book To Change the World came out just as I was starting to work on that last chapter, and I devoured it and I thought that it was very good but it doesn’t go far enough. And I actually had to have a conversation with James himself, who’s very gracious to converse with me on it. And so the book has grown out of my sense that yes, everything that I’ve said before I still want to endorse, but I now see certain themes more clearly—they stand out perhaps more sharply, and particularly they raise the question more sharply for me, “How can ordinary Christian communities make this a reality in their daily and weekly life?” And from that point of view I think it is evangelistic, not in the sense that I’m simply taking people by the throat and saying, “you’ve got to believe in this Jesus right now,” but in that I’m holding before people a vision which says, “This is actually what Jesus’ project looks like, and when you look hard at this Jesus you’ll discover that he is summoning you to come and join in, which is going to mean a total transformation of your life by God working to transform that bit of the world that your life touches.” And I think that’s a very, very exciting way to do evangelism.

You talk in the book about asking the wrong questions or asking the right questions and I think that’s something that we really struggle with here in the church in America. What are some of the questions that we’ve been asking that might put us on the wrong track and ones that we could be asking and why does it matter what kinds of questions we’re asking?

I think that is a huge question and I have to say you’ve probably seen from Harper that I’ve got a follow-up book to this, which is about the gospels, called How God Became King, which is coming out God-willing in March.

Some of those questions I address more directly in that book. It’s really a two-part project: let’s look historically at Jesus and then look at the gospels tell the story. So I’m talking about misreadings and proper readings in both of the books. But just to say it now, I think for many ordinary Christians in the Western world it would have been quite sufficient if Jesus of Nazareth had been born of a virgin and died on a cross some years later and never done anything at all, except probably lived a blameless life, in between whiles. So if that is so, and I think that does describes the faith of many people I know, then there’s a big vacuum in the middle, and you look at Matthew and Mark, Luke and John and you think, “Well, if that is so why did they bother to say all that stuff?” And then people say, “Oh, well Jesus was just teaching us about how to go to heaven” or “He was just teaching us the true moral code” or “He was giving us a great example of how we should live our lives” or something like that. And I want to say, those in a sense are alright as far as they go, but they’re just scratching the surface, or to change the metaphor, they’re just wandering around in the foothills when there’s an enormous great mountain to be climbed and the mountain is the Kingdom of God.

That Jesus is launching this project, which God has had up his sleeve all these years – to rescue and renew the whole world and human beings with it. And unless we read the gospels like that, then we are just missing out what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are trying to tell us. The joke about this is that some of the people who got this most wrong are the people who proclaim loudly that they are the “biblical” ones. And yet here are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and they’ve often almost entirely ignored them. So many people have come to the New Testament looking for theories about how we get saved and so naturally they go to Paul—Hebrews or whatever. Now, in a sense that’s fine, but if your theories about how we get saved manage to ignore the great bulk of the four gospels then clearly, as a biblical theologian, something has gone very radically wrong. But on the positive side this is a project about learning to look hard at the Jesus that the Bible actually gives us as opposed to the rather thin and shrunken Jesus that many of our traditions, including sadly, those that call themselves biblical, have given us.

That really makes me think about Advent. Here we are in Advent and I’ve been preaching the Isaiah passages during Advent, and Isaiah was basically saying what you’re saying, which is that God is about the renewal of Israel, yes, but also about the renewal of the whole world and all of God’s creation. And he’s preaching that message, it seems to me, in the most unlikely of situations where the lived experience of people is that of exile and abandonment. And that’s not so different from our own experience in the sense that, I feel as a preacher, that I’m standing up and saying that God is the King of the whole world, and the whole world is changing right before our eyes. I guess the question is, as I do that year after year, how do we maintain hope when so much of the visual evidence is that God isn’t becoming King and Jesus isn’t in charge, or that across the board things don’t seem to be improving?

Well, that’s always been the case, of course. I mean, as a Pauline scholar I’m always struck about that fact that some of Paul’s biggest, most remarkable visionary moments when he’s talking about the sovereignty of Jesus over the whole of creation come in books like Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians which he’s writing from prison. And, you know, you might have thought that this was exactly the sign that God had not actually become King yet, that Jesus wasn’t really in charge if Paul is still in prison.

So clearly this is not a new problem for us, nor is it a new problem that you’d think of in the second and third centuries when they went around the world announcing the kingdom of God, and in the book of Acts it’s the same. And indeed, I think Acts is part of the answer to the question. Because in Acts, of course, the disciples are being persecuted, they’re being beaten up, they’re being killed, they’re being put in prison and yet, as Luke says again and again, the Word of God went on and did its work and communities get transformed and churches get built up and the news gets out. So that within a hundred years of the death of Jesus, the ambassador of northern Turkey, Pliny, is writing back to Caesar in Rome saying, “What should I do about these Christians, because we don’t seem to be able to stamp them out and they’re changing the face of our society?” And so it’s the vision really, which is there in the book of Revelation and the book of 1 Peter, that it’s actually paradoxically by the suffering and the current failure of the church that often it really advances.

Now, our trouble is we’ve often got too little suffering and too much actual failure in that we have colluded in the Western church with the Enlightenment sentiment, which says that religion is all about kind of a spiritual upstairs reality, and, “We will run the downstairs reality, thank you very much.” Whereas, in Matthew 28, Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on Earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples.” So I think part of our difficulty is that we have completely forgotten in the Western church this part of our vocation—that we are to bear witness to, and implement the rule of Jesus on earth as in heaven. That, after all, is what we’re supposed to be praying for everyday in the Lord’s Prayer. But I think most Christians have simply privatized that.

But it isn’t simply a matter of, “let’s see if we can change this bit of our politics” or whatever. So much of what we have to do happens below the radar or on a different plane altogether. I think of the hospice movement; I think I mentioned that in one of the books anyway. Nobody, until sixty years ago, had dreamt that we could have actual hospices to care for people who were terminally ill. The doctors didn’t want it, the state wasn’t going to provide it, but Christians got together and said –  in my country, happily – and said, “We need to do this.” And now that movement has gone around the world and completely changed the way that everybody looks at end-of-life issues. There are all sorts of things like that, which have the fingerprints of the gospel on them, which really have made a difference. And then you look at South Africa, of course, and see how Desmond Tutu and his work just transformed things and so on and so on. So yes, there are many discouragements—we all face those—but they are also many, many, many signs of hope on the ground in ordinary lives in Christian communities.

One of the things that I’m aware of is that this message of “God is becoming King” in the ears of a lot of our postmodern folks these days sounds very totalizing and it doesn’t sound like good news that anyone is becoming king, let alone of all people, everywhere, at all times. It makes me wonder why Jesus chose to talk about what God was doing using the same power narratives that had been used for ill for so long–you know, narratives about kingdoms and rulers.

Well, yes. I mean, it’s a very interesting question the way you asked that because, of course, we in the West are all dyed-in-the-wool social democrats to a lesser or greater extent, and we look at the tyrannies in old Eastern Europe or in some parts of the Middle East to this day and we shudder. We say, “We really don’t want to be like that.” At the same time, of course, it has to be said that the great western democratic experiment has left a lot of people scratching their heads. I have read newspapers in America, and in my own country, which talk openly about the failure of our democracy and the crisis in our democracy and the fact that our democracy isn’t actually delivering the real choice and the real influence for ordinary people that it ought to. So I think more and more people are realizing that actually, maybe the way we have done stuff isn’t all that it was cracked up to be.

But at the same time, of course, the theme of God becoming King is one of the greatest themes of the Old Testament, right through Isaiah, right through the Psalms, right through many other passages going back as far as the Song of Moses in Exodus 15. And the idea of the true God becoming King is precisely the antidote to a false God becoming king. I have met this pastorally in another context when people say, “You talk about God as father where there are a lot of the people we work with are people who have a lot of very damaged family relationships for whom the word ‘father’ simply means horrible man who comes home drunk every once in a while and beats everybody up and then disappears again. So how can we possibly use the word ‘father’ in that setting?” And I’ve struggled with that in real life pastoral situations. But for me, the word “father” is too good a word to abandon, and I would always say we need to work, in this pastoral case, towards recovering the good meaning of the word “father” even though for some people it may be very difficult. In the same way, it may be difficult for some people to recover the word “king,” I think a lot of people find it really quite refreshing, especially when they’re scratching their heads and puzzled at the apparent failure, or at least hitting-the-doldrums mode of a lot of our present institutions. By the way, I should say, a lot of Americans say, “We can’t understand this language about ‘king’ because we don’t have kings and queens like you Brits do,” and my answer to that always is, “Actually, your president right now corresponds much more closely to a first-century king than anything we’ve had in Britain for at least a hundred years.” So. . .

Yeah. That’s a good perspective.

One of the things you wrestle with in the beginning of the book especially, but throughout the book—and which you say is autobiographical—is the way that the church in certain periods of history has kept the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith from every meeting one another, and your personal journey to try to bridge that. I just wonder if you would speak to that a bit more. How do we, as pastors, effectively keep these things together in a way that doesn’t confuse our members with a lot of academic stuff but at the same time doesn’t dumb down the message of Jesus and just make it about having a nice day or being a better employee?

I think it’s an ongoing challenge and I think actually each generation has had to approach this in its own way. I mean, in a sense, the sixteenth century reformers were doing their best to get back to the original historic meaning of the gospels and the epistles after layer upon layer of stuff that had been stuck on the top during the Middle Ages. But in a sense this is what every generation has tried to do—to go back to the sources and go, “Wait a minute, what did this mean at the time, and hence, what does it mean for us now?” And often, I find that you need to put some critical distance between yourself and your immediate predecessors in your own tradition, and do it in the full consciousness that this process will go on and that in the next generation people will be looking back and at me and saying, “Well, Tom Wright got some things right but he probably got some things wrong and now let’s move on and find out what else we need to say.” That’s fine. We should expect that that process will continue.

But I think part of the difficulty isn’t just people getting bogged down with academic puzzles and problems, but it’s as much with the popularized stuff wherein the media every Christmas, every Easter—whether it’s TIME Magazine or Newsweek or whatever—somebody’s going to do a feature on: “Was Mary really a virgin? Were there really three wise men? Did Jesus really rise from the dead?” What you then get is a really popularized version of whichever particular bits of semi-scholarship the person writing the article happens to have got a hold of, and because of our news media still having so heavily bought into the post-Enlightenment rhetoric of this “either/or” you get the polarization either Jesus was this, kind of, feet-off-the-ground docetic, divine son of God flying around in mid-air somewhere rescuing us from hell, or he was just a good Galilean chap who would have been horrified to think of a church being founded in his honor or any such thing. And so the press has thrived on this “either/or” because it’s there in our popular culture, and we in the church have to challenge that popular “either/or” culture and the best way is actually by living it. Because when you—as I say in Surprised By Hope—are actually working for justice and beauty; when a church is doing the stuff which speaks about God’s rescue of the present world and his making of new creation, then it makes far more sense to talk about Jesus, and it’s far easier to talk about a non-polarized Jesus, a Jesus who is both the embodiment of the living God, and the one who transforms all of reality by establishing His kingdom through His death and resurrection. That holistic vision makes much more sense when the church is actually doing it.

Absolutely. I love that section of Surprised By Hope and I’ve used it repeatedly.

Oh have you? (Laugh)

Just on a personal note to close, we know you’ve recently moved again from being a churchman full-time as the Bishop of Durham to now back in the academy at St. Andrews. What’s that been like for you, and what are you hoping for in the next few years?

It’s been a wonderful move for me, and this is not the first time this has happened in my life. I love working in the church, I love working as part of a team with ordinary local folk trying to make the gospel happen on the ground. That’s really very much part of who I am. But the trouble is that doing that grows, and grows, and grows, and leaves me less and less time for doing the writing and research. And I have seen other people get towards the end of their careers and not actually complete the big books that they said many years ago that they were going to complete.

And so, after I had my sabbatical in Princeton, which was two years ago, I realized that I was just not going to finish my big book on Paul, let alone any of the others if I stayed much longer in Durham. And I would have loved to stay longer in Durham. And now if I go through Durham on the train as I have to do from time to time, I can hardly bare to look out of the window because I still absolutely love that place and I miss the people, and the work, and so on very, very much.  I’m happy to say they’ve got an excellent new bishop to take my place. I’m very, very glad with who they’ve got, and so I’m very happy about that. I would have been fairly devastated if I hadn’t had full confidence in my successor, but I do.

But, so St. Andrews is great. I teach one undergraduate course, which this term has been on the letters to Philippians and the last session of that is tomorrow, and I teach PhD students in New Testament and I’ve got some very good, bright people. I’m hoping to take some more as well next year, and I have a good deal of time to write, which is why I’ve been able to write not only Simply Jesus and How God Became King but also the two final volumes for the Everyone series of commentaries over this first year. So I have every hope that I will be able to finish the big book on Paul and then move on to a couple of other big projects that I’ve got in mind.

In his latest volume Yale theologian, Miroslav Volf, puts his finger on one of the most relevant and hotly contested subjects in our world today – the role of faith in public life. In particular he seeks to chart a course between what he sees as two equally unhelpful extremes – “totalitarian saturation of public life with a single religion” and “secular exclusion of all religion from public life” (xiv).

What guides Volf’s approach is the conviction that the main contribution Christianity brings to the public arena is a vision of the common good, or human flourishing, as he puts it. The primary way that Christians are called to work toward this objective is not by imposing its vision on the world but by bearing witness to Christ who first shapes our lives.

One of the most compelling and original contributions of this book is found in the opening chapter where Volf details the two primary malfunctions of faith as it seeks to engage with the world: idleness and coercion. While coercive faith is a bit easier to identify as a malfunction, idleness seems like virtue in today’s world. Having reduced faith to the private realm, modernity has no room for the public embrace of religion at all. A publicly idle faith seems ideal according to our spirit of the age.

The problem with an idle faith, or a merely private faith that has no bearing on how people live in the world, says Volf, is that it serves to energize a way of life untouched by the values of the faith itself. It is all power and no direction. Instead, he argues that “prophetic faiths should be a way of life, not just a ‘religious’ resource for a way of life whose content is shaped by factors outside of that faith itself (such as national security, economic prosperity, or our thirst for pleasure, power and glory)” (29). Evidence of this kind of “thin” faith is evident all around us, on the right and the left. In this way, religion can be an extremely destructive force. Even so, it is still jarring to read the author’s suggestion that what we need in a world torn by religious violence is not less faith, but more faith.

Volf writes,

A central challenge for all religions in a pluralistic world is to help people grow out of their petty hopes so as to live meaningful lives, and to help them resolve their grand conflicts and life in communion with others [emphasis in original] (100).

This is easier said than done. When people start taking their faith commitments and living them publicly in a pluralistic world they are bound to encounter others who, equally convicted, are living out their faith. This is at the root of so much violence in our world. For Christians however, Volf is adamant that our role is not accommodation to the culture (idle faith) or the total transformation of the culture (coercive faith), but creative engagement with the world.

For the author’s vision to be a reality, faith must, of course, be understood thoughtfully and practiced with integrity, in community. That is the purpose of his book – to commend this particular public faith. This will be difficult work. There is no shortage of religious hucksters and opportunistic pundits and politicians wanting to exploit religious fervor for objectives completely outside the Christian vision. This book will be an invaluable resource to Christian communities who are working out for themselves what this creative engagement with the world looks like in their context.

RB

At the 2010 Wheaton Theology Conference, nine prominent biblical scholars and theologians converged to interact with the scholarship of N.T. Wright. The subsequent book, Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright from Intervarsity Press, is the result of their combined work.

While their interaction with Wright’s work is critical in nature, editor Nicholas Perrin describes the book as type of festlich, saying, “the highest honor that can be paid any scholar is not undiluted applause, which in the end amounts to empty flattery, but a sympathetic and critical assessment.”

Jesus, Paul and the People of God, is divided into two parts, the first dealing with Wright’s scholarship on the historical Jesus, the second, his scholarship on Paul, often referred to as the new perspective. Each chapter is followed by a brief response by Wright, followed by his own essays on Jesus and Paul.

In the first part of the book, “Jesus and the People of God”, Marianne Meye Thompson questions why Wright appears to have neglected the Gospel of John in his scholarship, instead focusing much of his work on the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Richard B. Hays, looks at the theological gains and losses in Wright’s approach to using history and biblical criticism. Sylvia Keesmaat, and long-time Wright friend, Brian J. Walsh, use a dialogue format to analyze views of justice in the Gospels. And Nicholas Perrin attempts to bring together Wright’s views of eschatology and Kingdom ethics. Their work is then followed by Wright’s essay, “Whence and Whither Historical Jesus Studies in the Life of the Church?”

In the second part of the book, “Paul and the People of God,” Edith Humphrey is intrigued by the “beautiful feet of N.T. Wright”, analyzing the “feat” of the scholar’s work on Paul and his views on righteousness. In “The Shape of Things to Come? Wright Amidst Emerging Ecclesiologies”, Jeremy S. Begbie wonders why the emerging church movement has identified so strongly with Wright, identifying components of this work the movement has emphasized and neglected. Markus Bockmuehl’s “Did St. Paul Go to Heaven When He Died?” is the most critical of all the essays, challenging Wright’s views of what happens after death, namely do we go to heaven when we die? In the cleverly titled “Wrighting the Wrongs of the Reformation? The State of the Union with Christ in St. Paul and Protestant Soteriology”, systematic theologian Kevin J. Vanhoozer, tries to bring together the work of N.T. Wright with Protestant theology and the Reformation. Again the section concludes with an essay by Wright, “Whence and Whither Pauline Studies in the Life of the Church?”

While critical in nature, Jesus, Paul and the People of God, ultimately is favorable to the body of Wright’s work. While scholarly rigorous, it is also accessible, and likely to be a worthy introduction to N.T. Wright’s scholarship. It also works as a helpful review of his various views on Jesus and Paul, causing this reviewer to revisit several of Wright’s books such as his seminal, Jesus and the Victory of God.

One of the most revealing insights into the work of N.T. Wright is his ecclesiology, which he admits to never having focused on. Yet even to his own surprise, much of this work has inadvertently developed a theology of the church. As he writes in his response to Begbie’s essay on Wright’s ecclesiology and the emerging church, “I have been developing an ecclesiology for the last few decades without being aware of it.”

Both essays on Jesus and Paul by Wright, are worth the price of the book alone. In his essay on Jesus, Wright challenges many contemporary views of Jesus, particularly the personal Jesus, removed from history. Saying, “we must today stress that it isn’t enough to believe that Jesus is ‘my savior’ or even ‘my Lord’; you must know who Jesus himself was and is. Without that, merely saying that we have Jesus ‘within our heart’ or that we ‘have a sense that Jesus loves me’ or whatever can easily turn into mere fantasy, wish fulfillment” (119). Therefore, Wright argues, we need history to prevent the church from reinventing more non-historical Jesus figures.

In his essay on Paul, Wright surprisingly considers Paul’s letter to Philemon as a good starting point for understanding a theology of Paul. Based on the relationship between the master Philemon and his slave Onesimus, Wright contends that the central symbol of Pauline theology is the united family. It is practical theology at it’s best – a case study of Galatians 3. According to Wright, Paul’s work was the beginning of Christian theology and it was never meant to be removed from being worked out in the life of the church. Therefore the task of theology comes down to standing between the Philemons and Onesimuses of the world and saying “In Christ you are reconciled, and here’s how it might work out. This life, this community, here now is where it matters.”

Jeff Gang is a pastor at Crosswalk Church in Redlands, California, where he has been working for six years to shape a  missional conversation in suburban Los Angeles. He is a devoted family man and a two-time Ironman triathlete.

It was…pretty hard to see how paintings of pretty people leisurely reclining on beautiful hardwood floors, saturated in sunlight, could be relevant when thousands were outside my door reclining in filth on the streets for years on end.

Christopher Chinn just completed a larger than life sculpture of a homeless man reclining on the sidewalk and installed it for one day in May. I sat down with Mr. Chinn to find out what inspired this sculpture, what kind of conversation he is hoping to engender and what his future plans are for his work.

You can make a tax-deductible contribution to the future of his project entitled Encounter, through a partnership with US Artists. Click  here to learn more and contribute!

You just completed a larger than life sculpture of a homeless man. What was the inspiration for this piece?

The idea for this work began in 2008 during a solo exhibition of paintings. The gallery director and I were discussing ways to bring the homeless who had modeled for the work to the gallery. We ultimately decided that while well intentioned it was largely misdirected. What really needed to happen was just the opposite, to move the artwork out of the gallery and onto the streets where it could be experienced by the homeless without barriers. My interest in this subject matter developed about ten years ago after I graduated from USC. My first studio after graduate school was just south of skid row in downtown Los Angeles. There were four homeless people living in the long walkway to our new front door when we moved in. It was very difficult to witness everyday the living conditions of those on the streets. I realized pretty quickly after moving there that it was something I was going to have to deal with. I came to the conclusion that the best way for me to do that was with my artwork. It was also pretty hard to see how paintings of pretty people leisurely reclining on beautiful hardwood floors, saturated in sunlight, could be relevant when thousands were outside my door reclining in filth on the streets for years on end. My previous painting lost all meaning for me, and I realized that I wanted my work to directly engage real social issues.

Where is this latest piece being exhibited?

The sculpture was exhibited for one day, on May 27, 2011, from 5:30 am to 9:00 PM, on the corner of 5th St. and Towne Ave. in downtown Los Angeles. This first piece will be joined by many others. I hope to be able to install several such sculptures at the same time for a few months throughout the skid row area. The art audience would have to take a long walk, bus rides or a bike ride in order to see all of the pieces, leading them through different pockets of the neighborhood. Although this is specifically designed for downtown Los Angeles, I think that the sculptures can work just as well in any big city with a significant homeless population, or even in different areas of LA.

What kind of conversations did you have that day on skid row during the one day exhibition? Did anyone come along and tell you you couldn’t have it there? Did homeless individuals have an opinion about the piece?

I was really surprised by the positive reaction from the neighborhood. Everyone seemed to be taken with it, starting with the group of people who awoke that morning across the street from it. People who worked in that area stopped to photograph it and to have their photos taken with it. It became a sort of prop for people to act out what their experiences of homelessness were, kneeling and praying for him, covering him with their coat, sharing a beer or cigarette, picking his pockets. I’m still not sure what to make of it all. There were plenty of real homeless people a few paces away who nobody would stop and do those things to, but I guess the sculpture made it safe for people to express those thoughts. Homeless people loved the piece as well, and they participated in the improvisational acting game with it. I was told several times that it should be made permanent.  Others said that they would like to see more and hope that this becomes the past of skid row, were people don’t have to sleep on the streets like that anymore.  I was really overwhelmed by it all.

At one point before lunch a police car rolled up.  The officers got out and talked at their car for a while, and afraid that they would ask for my permit for the sculpture I did my best to ignore them. Then a second car stopped right next to where I was sitting. That officer joined the other two and they slowly strolled over to the piece. I thought that the day was over, when they pulled out their cell phones and began taking pictures of it. They really loved it as well and had a lot of questions for me about it. I was surprised that they would like it as much as they did, as moving people off of the street it kind of their job. The sculpture was also sitting right under a sign that says “No person shall sit, lie or sleep in or upon any street, sidewalk or other public way.” I thought that was quite ironic.

One woman who lives on the street right across Towne Ave. from where we were came over to look at it several times throughout the day. At the end of the day as she was setting up for the night she came over again and said the best thing to me.  She said that she really liked the way the sculpture disappeared into the gray of the sidewalk and block building.  She totally got it, and I was so thankful for that.

You indicated that there were some specific locations where you would like to see your work exhibited.

I thought that locating the piece outside of the door to the Center for the Promotion of Democracy could create a significant interaction of ideas concerning democratic voice, economic influence and civic responsibility. It is my feeling that the individuals living on the streets have very little if any political voice. Certainly there are institutions that work for them who strive for political influence, but the people themselves have none. A vibrant democracy requires a healthy and educated public. I think it is pretty clear that far too many are left behind in this regard, at least in our city. Taking care of our poor is a civic responsibility that strengthens our democracy. I think that we (at the city, state and national levels) have forgotten that detail about how our government works. It is a relatively new train of thought for the artwork, but one that I am excited about exploring more fully.

You also mentioned to me an idea you had about it being permanently in the public and that this type of installation would be a part of the art itself. What would that public interaction have to do with your artistic vision for these pieces?

I would like to see the sculptures installed on the street for a month or two, or even permanently. The idea that the work would get beaten up, cracked, tagged, and generally weathered is definitely a part of this project. That kind of wear and tear on the sculpture is akin to the beating that those living on the streets take year after year. The interaction with the public is directly a part of the art for me. The actual sculpture is a catalyst/vessel for those kinds of reactions. Homeless people get beaten up both by each other and “normal” housed citizens. They are also, in a way, a part of the urban landscape, and I would like to see the sculpture disappear into that landscape with them. When you are on your way to your car, you do your best to not see them. I am working on making that happen.

Do you ever worry that your art exploits or in some way glorifies people’s suffering?

I have always worried about the criticism that this work exploits someone’s suffering for my own profit. In fact, I didn’t begin working with this subject matter for at least a year while I wrestled with this very question. I am committed to donating half of what I make from the artwork to organizations that work with the homeless. I have always viewed my artwork as collaboration and I want to make sure that the homeless are able to profit from it as well. When I was living in downtown I developed relationships with my homeless neighbors and I knew a lot of them. That has been harder now that I no longer live there, but I still try to get to know anyone that I might like to use as a reference for the artwork.  I always ask for their permission so that they have a say in whether they want to be a part of it or not. I am trying to raise awareness about, and better understand for myself, an issue that is very important to me.  While I use individuals, with their consent for that purpose, I do everything I can to keep it from being abusive and unfair.  I have a lot of respect and admiration for my models, and I try to honor that relationship with the artwork.

Is this your first sculpture?

This is my first sculpture since undergraduate school. Sculpture is so much more difficult than painting for me.  There is a lot more process involved, it is much more costly, and then there are the physical aspects that aren’t really concerns in 2D work like the scale and scope of the work in terms of weight, mass and strength of materials, etc.  It has been a huge learning experience for me, but my undergraduate sculpture professor was delighted when I told him what I was doing.  He said he “knew I would come around.”

RB

For decades church growth gurus have taught conscientious pastors that one important key to the numerical growth of congregations is the “homogenous principle.” That is, churches grow best when they focus on one type of person. “Like attracts like,” goes the popular adage. Who can deny the truth of this? A church full of young families, for example, is undoubtedly attractive to many other young families. In social settings people feel more at ease when they can identify others like themselves.

In their new book, Churches, Cultures & Leadership, Fuller Theological Seminary professors Mark Lau Branson and Juan F. Martinez, challenge this conventional wisdom, arguing that church leaders need to take a fresh look the role of churches in God’s reconciling mission.

[C]entral to this book [is the question], what is the call of the gospel on churches? How can churches model gospel reconciliation and be agents of reconciliation and justice in our cities and in our nation? We believe that God’s grace calls us beyond racism and ethnocentrism. The question is how to express the new reality of the gospel in ways that both celebrates our differences and draws us toward unity in Jesus Christ (17).

They approach their subject with academic rigor, pastoral concern for the church as well as a deep awareness of their own ethnic narratives and experiences. They have both served many years in multi-cultural congregations and now co-teach seminary students.

The book aims at an ambitious target: to outline a practical theology of intercultural, congregational leadership. Any one of those themes would be challenging enough, but here, Branson and Martinez work at integration. In the end, this is a work of practical theology.

They begin by laying out the frameworks within which they will discuss the challenges and opportunities of intercultural life and leadership in congregations. Beginning with a practical theology framework, Branson shows church leaders how to be contextual theologians by weaving congregational stories with the Biblical narrative and contextual narratives to arrive at suggestions about how a congregation can engage with God’s initiatives. It also frames the conversation in missional terms by lifting the church’s focus to what God is doing in the world. Ultimately leaders and church members must broaden their understanding of spirituality from a concern about intimacy with God to a concern about participating in God’s initiatives.

Part two uses the tools established in part one and addresses the central issues of worldviews, language and power, self-perception, individuality and modes of thinking that are the hidden, but very real, obstacles to multicultural life. Part three focuses directly on the practical skills of communication and leadership by bringing together the learning from part two within the frameworks of part one.

Besides being well organized and tightly constructed, this book is also immensely practical. Each chapter includes Bible study outlines, which can be used in personal study and reflection as well as group processes. When understood within the framework of the practical theology cycle described in chapter one, these Bible studies have the potential to transform the perspectives of church members by raising their awareness of God’s healing and reconciling initiatives in the world. There are also suggestions included throughout the book for movies that can add to the individual and group awareness and understanding of intercultural challenges and give some exposure to other cultures. There are also exercises that can be used in church groups or classrooms to continue the conversation started by the authors.

Branson and Martinez have given the church a gift: a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary tool – both theologically rich and immensely practical – to guide congregations in shaping intercultural congregational life.

RB