How the recovery model of spirituality has impacted me

I just finished a class that has probably impacted me more than any other in seminary thus far. It was called Spirituality and Recovery. It was looking at the meaning of spirituality in the context of the recovery process (or twelve step traditions). The professors (Dale Ryan and Matt Russell) basically believe that there is a recovery model of spirituality and that this model should be the main way we understand and practice the Christian life in community. It is a model that facilitates honesty, humility, grace, and reconciliation with one another.

I thought I'd share a few ideas from the class that have had a profound impact on me:

1. My spiritual poverty/brokenness is an occasion for God's blessing and love. God's grace and love is very real even when I'm hardened to sin, am not taking part in spiritual disciplines, and don't necessarily feel close to Him. I don't have to have it all together.
2. Intimacy comes through knowing and sharing your junk. In typical small group culture, intimacy takes time (sometimes years) as you begin to share your junk with people. In recovery culture, intimacy is immediate because everyone is bonded together through the understanding of their desperation and powerlessness over sin/addiction. I wish the church looked more like the recovery culture in this sense.
3. Believing is a result of belonging. The recovery culture emphasizes belonging long before you believe. The professors want to challenge the church to adopt this same mentality because the church can be too focused on "Who's in and who's out?" instead of including and loving people who aren't "orthodox" yet. Jesus told the disciples to "Come and see" a long time before He asked them "Who do you say that I am?"
4. I can't ultimately help people get better/healthy. Only God can. What I can do is listen, empathize, and love them despite their issues.
5. Focus on trusting God instead of trying to please Him. There is a (very) fine line between trusting God and performing, and trusting God is the only way to please Him. Sometimes trusting God feels like you're walking away from God or being irresponsible, because you have to let go of doing certain things or trying to fix yourself or others.
6. Honesty with our junk NOW helps people know God. People don't really care if God can do anything, they care about if He can do this thing. As pastors (and everyone else), we need to be specific about our struggles and sin in our lives now. This helps people to see God as real, not as abstract. This helps debunk the lie that the Christian life is all about victorious living, where all the scars are immediately healed.
7. Knowing Jesus doesn't equal no more issues. Our testimonies have often been 1) I was a screw-up, 2) I met Jesus, 3) now life is great. This is dishonest and does harm to others and to ourselves.
8. God wants to draw near when we sin. Matt Russell says, "God doesn't hate sin. God hates the separation of relationship that sin produces. Otherwise, sin becomes just a list of things we do." I'm still struggling theologically with that first sentence, but I still think it points to the truth that when we sin, God doesn't get disgusted with us and remove Himself until we confess. He loves us and longs for us to know His nearness. The presence of Christ is in the darkest parts of our hearts.
9. God is relational, not transactional. God is not mainly concerned with turning our badness into goodness. He is more concerned with our brokenness and separateness from Him and transforming it.
10. Making amends is a great way to understand repentance. Making amends is the 9th step in the 12 step process. You go to someone you have wronged or hurt in the past and tell them how you've wronged or hurt them. You don't ask for forgiveness (which can sometimes be coercive). You give the person space to say whatever they want, even if they get mad at you. And this process should be less about you and more about them.

With some of these things, I am still in process over what I think about them. Some of the ideas press up against long held beliefs. That's been a big part of my journey here at Fuller, trying to get my mind and heart open to truth, no matter how different it might seem to my current understanding.

I'll end with a couple of verses that our last class ended with. It's a great reminder that no matter how bad our past might seem to us, God is restoring us, loving us, and helping us be satisfied in Him. It comes from Joel 2:25-26:

I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten…You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD your God, who has dealt wondrously with you. And my people shall never again be put to shame.

The Medium is the Message

I recently finished a communication class here at Fuller. One of the assigned readings was The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church by Shane Hipps. I thought the book was really interesting, especially the first half.

Hipps owes most of his thinking on media to Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase, "The medium is the message." This is the thought that the medium (or media) through which information comes (books, TV, Internet, phones, etc.) is often more important for your message than the content itself.

In his book, Hipps is mainly writing about how the church is shaped by media. However, his thoughts can be applied universally to most other areas of life. Here are a few thoughts:

When we talk about media and technology as tools for the church, we assume they are simply conduits or pipelines useful for dispensing the gospel...

However, McLuhan’s simple yet provocative statement ‘The medium is the message’ issues a direct challenge in this understanding of media. He writes, ‘Our conventional response of all media, namely that it is how they used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. The content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.' In other words, media are much more than neutral purveyors of information. They have the power to shape us regardless of content and thus cannot be evaluated solely upon their use.

His point is that we often give little thought to how different media impact us. For example, he talks about how we are often oblivious to TV when we watch it. We don't understand that it is reducing our capacity for abstract thought, making us prefer intuition and experience over logic and reasoning, thus reviving elements of an individualistic culture.

To drive this point home, Hipps quotes a very hyperbolic metaphor of McLuhan:

The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.

Hipps' point is that "the medium has far more impact on the culture than its content." I think it's so very important to notice the ways in which different media shapes the way we understand the world, not only for our benefit, but for the benefit of others as we seek to communicate truth.

I owe a great deal to my friend Roy for helping think through these things for the first time a few years back. Also my friend Scott has a lot of great thoughts on how technology is shaping us at his blog (particularly this post and this one). Also, if you're interested, here are a few other resources I would recommend:

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (one of my favorites)
The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman
Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith by Shane Hipps

Misdirecting twenty-something men in the church

This is a good, brief article discussing twenty-something men in the church today. It looks at how spiritually mature men are often misdirected by their church community to seminary or vocational ministry when they have passions and gifting for other things. The reason this is happening is because "spiritually interested young men are the exception rather than the expectation." Here's the conclusion:

When a younger brother says to me that “he feels called to ministry,” I usually understand that to mean that he craves and needs validation and would like to use the church to make him feel good about himself. Or even worse, as Leon Podles explains in his book The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, many young men feel called to the church because uninitiated men find the church to be “a safe place, a refuge from the challenges of life and therefore attracts men who are fearful of making a break with the secure world of childhood dominated by women.”

Whatever the reason, it would be great to see local churches so healthy and full of twentysomethings that the presence of spiritually vibrant twentysomething men would be so normal that we would have better criteria for sending men into ministry beyond being “on fire for Christ” and having a desire to teach and serve. That should be simply normal for any man following Jesus.

(HT:Challies)

Reformed Movements & the Enduring Church

I've really I've really grown to appreciate Michael Horton these last few months, mainly through reading his book People and Place in my ecclesiology class this semester. He has helped me increase in my appreciation for the church (as I've blogged about earlier) and the importance of being confessional.

He provides some interesting thoughts on what many have termed the "young, restless, and reformed" movement or the New Calvinism (which was highlighted by Time magazine last year). When comparing this movement with the historical Reformed tradition, he borrows an analogy from C.S. Lewis about the hallway and the rooms. The hallway is the place "where believers mix and mingle", but they can't live there. The rooms are analogous to the church where Christians are meant to live, to be fed and nourished.

Like wider evangelicalism, the “young, restless and Reformed” movement is a grassroots trend among people who are, generally speaking, not Reformed. I’m energized by this movement every day, as I interact with people from a variety of churches, backgrounds, and traditions who are drawn to the doctrines of grace. I spend a lot of my time in this hallway and am enriched by it.

Nevertheless, not even a “Reformed” hallway is anything more than a hallway. “Reformed” has a specific meaning. It’s not defined by movements, parachurch ministries, or powerful leaders, but by a confession that is lived out in concrete contexts across a variety of times and places. The Westminster Standards and the Three Forms of Unity (Belgic Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, and Canons of Dort) define what it means to be Reformed. Like Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Anabaptism, Reformed Christianity is a particular tradition. It’s not defined by a few fundamentals, but by a whole system of faith and practice. If being Reformed can be reduced to believing in the sovereignty of God and election, then Thomas Aquinas is as Reformed as R. C. Sproul. However, the Reformed confession is a lot more than that. Even the way it talks about these doctrines is framed within a wider context of covenant theology.

It’s intriguing to me that people can call themselves Reformed today when they don’t embrace this covenant theology. This goes to the heart of how we read the Bible, not just a few doctrines here or there. Yet what was once recognized as essential to Reformed faith and practice is now treated merely as a sub-set (and a small one at that) of the broader “Reformed” big tent.

And I love how he closes:

Right now, though, the “young, restless and Reformed” movement is in danger of succumbing to the fate of all movements at their peak: splintering. Our confessions help us major on the majors, leaving secondary matters open. Yet the “New Calvinism” movement is already showing signs of stress over questions like the age of the earth. Churches have ways of dealing with questions of fraternal relations and cooperation, but leader-driven movements can’t handle the stress. Conferences operate as quasi-official church courts, with vigilante benedictions and excommunications determining who’s in or out. It’s like the wild west.

Christ promised to be with his church to the end, expanding his embassy to the ends of the earth. Christ pledged that the gates of hell cannot prevail against his church. The same promise can’t be invoked for a movement. May God swell the hallway with new visitors! And may we all have the charity to come out of our rooms every now and again to bless each other and bear witness together to God’s sovereign grace. But discipleship has to be formed in the rooms—in real churches, where the depth and breadth of God’s Word is explored and lived.

Read the whole thing

(HT: Challies)