Month: June 2019

Yesterday, sitting in worship at First Presby and listening to testimony from three members, I reflected on my previous post and realized how inadequate it was. I know most people who read this are family or close friends, but even still: what do you care about how I read the Bible? Or any of the other things, other than to confess hypocrisy.

What matters more broadly is how I fail to proclaim the Gospel. This summer, I’m taking a course on worship from the University of Dubuque. The point of worship is to prepare us for mission. In today’s church vernacular, “mission” is usually interpreted as acts of charity or service.My denomination, though, declares a different mission in the opening section of the Book of Order:

In Christ, the Church participates in God’s mission for the transformation of creation and humanity by proclaiming to all people the good news of God’s love, offering to all people the grace of God at font and table, and calling all people to discipleship in Christ.

PC(USA) Book of Order, F-1.01

Acts of charity and service are necessary but not sufficient. We must proclaim the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

So a more appropriate confession is this: I have failed to teach others about the good news of God’s love for all humanity. If you read my statements of faith (old and new), you’ll see that I believe that all are welcome in God’s kingdom. But if I don’t actually TELL people that they are welcome, or what that means or why they should care, what’s the point?

The dominant cultural narrative is that churches reject gay “lifestyles” and transgender “ideology.” If you ask a random person in Rolla, would they know that there are any churches where LGBT individuals are welcome? Any place where there are people who accept them as they were made in the image of God, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity? Probably not.

One recent audiobook I listened to was Getting Things Done. My list of things to look into includes setting up an LGBT resource center of some sort in Rolla. S&T students have access to the student diversity house, but what about younger students, faculty, staff, or people in the community? What can I do, as a straight, cis-gender man, to support the LGBT community?

One last note: I was asked if I want feedback on these posts. Sure! I have it set that your first comment will need to be approved (just to keep spammers and trolls away), but feel free to comment on anything I post.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks while I’m running. I get them from the S&T library, which has OverDrive. I recently listened to Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller, subtitled “Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality.” Actually, I didn’t get to finish it because my checkout expired. Still, it opened my mind to a lot of interesting perspectives.

One recurring theme is that our actions can block the Holy Spirit. That is, our sins are already forgiven, but until we confess them and place our trust in God, we cannot fully experience the power of the Holy Spirit working through us. One time this theme appeared was in the context of tithing, but that’s a topic for another day.

There’s a chapter in which he and the rest of his little Christian group hosted a public confession booth. Imagine a booth with one member of the group on one side of a divider (the “priest”) and a visitor on the other. What made it different, though, was that the “priest” was there to confess HIS (or HER) sins to the visitor. So often, those of us inside the church are perceived to be judging those outside the church, and/or to be hypocrites who fail to see the log in our own eye. They tried to flip the script.

Sins fall into two broad categories: sins of commission and sins of omission. I’d say I do OK on the sins of commission. I haven’t murdered anyone lately, but I need to work on coveting. Overall, maybe a B-. When it comes to sins of omission, though, I have a long way to go. More like a D+. So here goes: a far-from-exhaustive confession of sins of omission.

A couple months ago, I wrote about Radical, which ends with a call to change your life. There are five key parts to it:

• Pray for the whole world. My prayers continue to be me-centric. My life, my family, my job, my church. When I’m at my best, I pray for people who are in the news, maybe once. If I’m not praying for, say, LGBTQ equality, how much do I really care about it? If I’m not praying for people outside my immediate tribe, how can I hope to expand my circle and play a role in transforming the world?
• Read the whole Bible. I’m using the Bible In One Year app, which is good. However, my time with the Bible is rarely Spirit-filled. I scroll through it while drinking my coffee, or listen to the audio version while I’m getting dressed or something. There is little spiritual formation, just information.
• Give sacrificially. I got started on this, but we are now building a house. So I put that on hold. Again, back to being me-centric. I can justify, or perhaps rationalize, my current giving level by the uncertainties associated with construction, selling our house, kids, etc. Still, there are ALWAYS reasons (excuses) not to be generous.
• Go somewhere to spread the Gospel. I looked into Solar Under the Sun and was going to get started on it, but the schedule didn’t work out. I could have found some other program or other way to get outside my normal life, but I didn’t. They do training twice a year; I still have the next one on my calendar, so we’ll see.
• Community. This is perhaps the one that I’m doing the best, being a part of a Christian community. However, if I’m being honest, there’s only a fraction of my church that I actually engage with.

Beyond that list of areas, there are plenty of other ways that I fall short of God’s calling. I just started listening to Racism Without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. (Honestly, it may be a little too academic for an audiobook. We’ll see if I can get through it.) So far, it has just reminded me that I am a product of extensive privilege: a highly-educated straight, cis-gender, white man. I know that I made the most of opportunities I was given, but I also know that I was given many opportunities that other people will never have. I should be working to rectify racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, and so forth. Yet I am content to be a passive recipient of these privileges.

Confessional Community

The next piece of what Miller described was confessional community. That is, he did not personally go out and confess to random people on the street (or on the Internet, as I’m doing). He did it as a part of a Christian community that was honest with each other, and honest about the corporate sin of the Christian Church. How can we build that kind of community within First Presbyterian Church of Rolla? If not as a whole congregation, perhaps as a smaller group.

On an earlier post, Rev. Robert Rogers commented, “I think it should be the personal and the communal, because faith is both personal resulting from the promises of our baptism, but it is a baptism into the communal or tribe.” Amen! It’s a both-and situation. I am personally responsible for my own sins and their impact on the world. I am also part of a congregation, a denomination, and a universal Church that have sinned throughout history, and continue to sin in ways big and small. We fail to live up to our calling as the body of Christ. I cannot disentangle my personal sins from our corporate sins.

The tricky thing is to confess in humility, and not to make it a humblebrag. I hope that I have struck that balance in this post.