The early churches developed a saying:
The rule of prayer is the rule of faith
As we have moved through the centuries, things have changed. Our worship communities have moved from being centered on prayer, to sacrament, to preaching … and now many are centered on music.
I am proposing that now, the rule of worship is the rule of faith.
Watch this 5 minute video and let me know what you think.
you can also check out “changing words to worship songs“.
Conflict Case Study: 2nd Amendment, Abortion, Voting, Police
This is a follow-up to last week’s Conflict Culture.
5 elements to each:
1) Individualism
2) Remnant Structure
3) Technology
4) Intensity/Amplification
5) Trigger
2nd Amendment
Abortion
Policing Strategies
Voting:
What issue would you like to explore with this 5-part tool?
We live in changing times. This is part 3 of ‘Why things seem so bad right now’.
You can read the full post here [link]
Human knowledge and meaning making are culturally conditioned and socially constructed. This leads to a contested atmosphere.
Video for part 2 is here: Fragmented and Fractured
Here is a follow up video for the blog post (2 weeks ago)
You can read the full blog at [this link] and either comment here or there. I look forward to continuing the conversation.
Next up: There is no neutral anymore
Graham’s life show us so much about the changes in our society and the church: from newspapers, TV, civil rights, evangelicals, politics, media, and so much more.
I was moving into my new office and purging some old files. I found a magazine (Promise Keepers) from 1997 that had Graham on the cover.
Here are some of my thoughts in this short video.
Dualism offers us binary options that must be challenged. Evolution & Creation, Male & Female, Church & World, Jihad & McWorld, East & West, Think & Do etc.
This short video is in response to requests for alternatives to the either/or frame work that we have inherited.
It can be difficult navigating our hyperreal, liquid, fluid digital culture with any amount of discernment and sincerity. Disney Land is plastic and fabricated while branding itself the ‘happiest place on earth’.
Vampires, Zombies, Super Heroes and demonic exorcisms populate our movie theaters. Comedians are great at doing caricatures of TV preachers and faith healers. Surely there is something real somewhere in all of this.
In this 10 min video I use Rumsfeld’s ‘Known Unknowns’ as a model (and Zizek’s addition) to propose an idea about the Real/Real, Fake/Real, Real/Fake and Fake/Fake.
I’m working off of Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco in looking at the hyperreal.
Let me know what you think!
An interesting way to expose the difference between two things is to take out the subject of great quote and replace it with something else to see if it still works.
If your replacement X cannot work in place of the initial Y then you are forced to ask ‘why is this the case?’
Let me give you an example:
(The Church) was there to remind the (society) of what it had flouted: art, pleasure, gender, power, sexuality, language, madness, desire, spirituality, the family, the body, the ecosystem, the unconscious, ethnicity, life-style, hegemony. This, on any estimate, was a sizable slice of human existence.
When I find a great quote or list, I try to plug-in ‘the church’ and see if could be true historically.
I would love to be able to say that the church has been about these things:
If that has not been the case, then, I have to ask “why not?” and it is often that search which is telling.
If the church has not, or is not, about promoting those things then what has it represented? It is that search which is illuminating.
What is keeping that sentence from being true of the church?
Here is a second set of examples. All of these quotes are from the same chapter:
(The Church) refuses to identify freedom with any institutional arrangement or fixed system of thought. It questions the hidden assumptions and purposes of competing theories and existing forms of practice. It has little use for what is known as ‘perennial philosophy’. (The Church) insists that thought must respond to new problems and the new possibilities for liberation that arise from changing historical circumstances.
I want the above quote to be true! If it is not, then what is keeping it from being so?
They investigated the ways in which thinking was being reduced to mechanical notions of what is operative and profitable, ethical reflection was tending to vanish and aesthetic enjoyment was becoming more standardized. (The Church) noted with alarm how interpreting modern society was becoming even more difficult. Alienation and reification [turning people into things] were thus analyzed in terms of how they … robbed the world of meaning and purpose, and turned the individual into a cog in the machine.
The above quote is challenging because it is almost possible.
The next one is just for fun.
(The Church) lost its ability to offer an integrated critique of society, conceptualize a meaningful politics, and project new ideas of liberation. Textual exegesis, cultural preoccupations, and metaphysical disputations increasingly turned (the church) into a victim of its own success. The result has been an enduring identity crisis.
Any guesses as to who this was actually referring ?
These 3 quotes are from chapter 1 in Critical Theory a very short introduction. The first quote was from Terry Eagleton. After Theory (Kindle Locations 325-327) in reference to Cultural Theory and the traditional Left.
Why am I attracted to both Cultural and Critical Theory? Maybe it is because they are often about the things I desperately wish being a pastor was about …
I find this experiment helpful in attempting to crack assumptions about what the church is and has been.
I will never tire of reminding people that there is a gap between what many think the church is and what the church can be.
What do you think? Does the experiment work? Is it helpful?
Any quotes that you love we could try it with?
Three encounters in the past month have opened my eyes to a ‘kind’ of conservatism that I am suspicious I was not hip to previously. In the heated spectrum-thinking cultural climate that exists today, it is easy to get distracted by the exaggerated and inflammatory. What is more difficult to perceive is a kinder, gentler conservative mentality.
Here are 3 places it showed up recently:
The sentences are subtle – but once you pick up a pattern you begin to hear them more clearly.
“Since God is not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’, we gain nothing by using feminine pronouns for God … so let’s just stick with the tradition we have and the way it is in the Bible.”
That was the one that caught my attention. Then I started hearing that same formulation in other places.
“No one has ever provided iron-clad proof of macro-evolution … in the lack of definitive conclusion,Biblical creation is just as valid as any other ‘belief’ since we can’t prove it either way”
or
“You might be right about these cultural changes and the future of the church … but who is to say that your fancy new way will be any better than what we have now? We might as well not tinker with anything since there is no guarantee it will fix the problem – and might possibly create different or bigger problems.”
This is a subtle type of conserving. It is not the blatant ideological animosity that gets all the press and dominates the airwaves. It is a more quiet concern that we not move too far too fast.
Here is my fear: it seems to me that this tactic is employed by – and born out of – a status quo that seeks to protect / preserve itself. It is neither aggressive or egregious but is potentially just as harmful as it’s venomous counterpart. 
“I get what you are saying Bo … but what’s not to say that 10 or 20 years from now your new-fangled ideas don’t look just as dated and flawed as those you are criticizing today?”
See how it works? Since my innovation today might seemed cliché to the next generation … let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves and think that we have it all figured out. In fact, why change anything?
This ‘kind’ of conservatism doesn’t necessarily have a radical agenda. It doesn’t need one. It would be just fine if things stayed mostly as they are. It is perfectly suited to the current conditions. Stasis and a romantic reflection on the past is a perfect incubator for its ongoing preservation and, consequently, promulgation.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 