Part II: What Is This?

Ideas, though often ill-advised, are generally a good thing. Sometimes there are bad ideas that make you want to slap your forehead and say, "What were you thinking?!" And sometimes there are those great ideas that make you want to slap your forehead and say, "What was I thinking?!" The exchange of ideas is one of the most important parts of who we are as human beings. We're hard-wired to approach a situation and begin thinking of things- problems, solutions, methods, or even something completely unrelated to the topic in front of your nose- you know, ideas! Cute little bubbles above your head, light bulbs, question marks, etc. What makes us human is thought, and the essence of thought is ideas.

Humans have figured out that if they can control thought, they can control other humans. They, often unconsciously, establish certain thought patterns. Usually these patterns have a very specific goal in mind and because of that they become rigid and immovable, and any ideas introduced into the fray become enemies that must be silenced, because this whole thing is already thought out to its end. This is where we enter into the realm of the "ideology". Ideologies have the tendency to shut down thought, to discourage ideas and to bring into line anything that is separate from the established thought process. It would seem to me that this act would cheapen the decisions made from this process… it would make everything simple, and it would get results, but it would cheapen everything. This is the epitome of industrial age thought, and the cheapening of things is a necessary and acceptable byproduct. But when it comes to people, I don't think anyone is interested in a cheap and simplified way of treating each other, especially when it comes to faith tradition.

There was a time during my senior year of high school that myself and some other people, mainly from the Pentecostal youth group I was involved in, decided it would be a good idea to start a Tuesday morning Bible study at school with some students from other churches. We asked permission from the principal to have a designated room, and asked one of the math teachers (who also served on the adult leadership team at youth group) to be our faculty representative. So we'd meet, and the idea was to have a topic of discussion pulled from a passage in the Bible and toss around ideas amongst ourselves, hashing out what it meant. We'd invite our friends, and I think at one point we may have put up fliers on the walls around the school or something to "advertise" our little weekly early-morning shindig. I think we mainly existed to make a statement to the folks around us, something to the effect of, yes, you go to school with Christians and yes, we're here and active and yes, we can pray and read our Bibles in this public place because yes, it's our right. We were alive and we were organized, so watch out! God's really gonna get ya now! While I liked the idea of having a group of us meet and talk about God stuff, I think I wanted it to be more about the conversation and the exchange of ideas than about the delivery of some kind of message, or keeping up some kind of appearance. However, I think that's all that most of us knew. Each week, we'd take turns leading the discussion, which was less a discussion and more like delivering a "message", a compilation of passages that we felt strongly about, to those who gathered with us- usually about 8 or 10- and no one would really have anything else to say about it and so off we'd march through the door of our meeting place, knowing that people knew where we met and who we were, and that they were probably watching us and might even ask us what we were doing in there and so we should be ready to speak confidently of our convictions. We'd then walk into our first period class and lose whatever we'd just talked about.

I think where it went wrong was in missing the conversation part. Somewhere in our subconscious effort to make a statement, we lost what we (or at least what I thought we) were going for- a group of people on a similar path exchanging stories along the way. Instead, we became some kind of support group for preaching at each other to keep each other "in line". And I think it happens all the time. We have this disproportionate focus on our message delivery- how we're presenting what we're saying, how we look while doing it, etc. And when it comes to learning about God, we are trained to sit and listen to the message. We don't know how to converse with one another anymore, because we emulate that which we are accustomed to- a monologue designed to convince someone of something. It becomes a sales pitch. There's no room for disagreement, and by the very nature of a message-delivery-focus, there is a specific need to have a unified front, with not even a hint of disagreement, because well, what does that say about the God that we serve? The message delivery becomes the most important part, and don't even bother questioning what the message is in the first place. And so it is no wonder that none of us really knew what to do with a "Bible study", and those who had the most sharply-honed message eventually began to assert their authority. Pretty soon, one person began assigning verses for each person to look up and read to the group, ensuring that everyone had something to say, but what was said was set up to be a unified voice, the voice of the message-bearer. Conversation was limited to a few comments on how to apply said message to one's life; no one even thought about stirring the pot a little bit.

My goose was cooked.

Not only did I not feel comfortable in this sort of environment, I probably spent too much time and goodwill trying to explain how this approach was even less effective than what we had been doing before. But there was to be no change; we must be unified, I was told. God hates division in His church. I was not the lone voice of discontent; there were a few others who felt very cramped by this approach as well. We began to talk about meeting on our own; this talk was swiftly met with vehement scolding from other students in the group, as well as adult leaders from the youth group. So instead of stirring the pot, I simply removed my spoon, as did a handful of others. I think the thing eventually dried up and died after awhile.

Around this same time, I was in a Social Problems class with a few of the same people who were in the Bible study and youth group with me. Our big semester project was to, with a partner, choose a social issue, invite a person from the community on each end of the spectrum to give a presentation of their side of the topic, and then present our own point of view. This was worth half of our grade- the other half was based on attendance and our performance in a stock market game, and though I had no actual stock in Enron, I can say that I incurred a personal loss when the company crashed, as my partner and I invested heavily in their stock, causing us to earn an "F" on that portion of our grade. But I digress. So after a demonstration at our school by a "God Hates Fags" church group with fiery signs and screaming people protesting the genesis of a Gay-Straight Alliance at our school, a group in the class chose the issue of homosexuality as their topic. The first presentation was from some lady from a local GLBT support organization, and was very interesting, to say the least. The next presentation was from the minister of a local ultra-conservative Baptist church. After giving his spiel about homosexuality being a perversion, God's impending wrath, and God desire to "save" people from homosexual sin, an angry discussion broke out amongst two of the Christian people in my class and a few others. Feeling it was not my God-given duty to make people feel bad about how they felt about gays and lesbians, I sat on the sidelines until one of the people from my youth group said "C'mon, Ian? I need some support here. Tell them you believe this stuff, too."

And I couldn't.

I didn't believe it was my place to argue against a lifestyle that, for all I knew, might not be completely in someone's control. I mean, yeah, gay pride parades and naked dudes and rainbows and stuff weren't my thing, but if my first reaction is to be grossed out, or even to hate them, shouldn't I step back and check why I feel that way in the first place, and that maybe I should be feeling how God feels about them? And as far as what the Bible tells me, I think God might actually love fags. And if God hates fags, why does He love me? Am I that different from a homosexual dude that God views him differently than He views me? I'll bet he and I and the next guy have the same problems, and might even love God just as much. I think far too much time is spent divining between sins. I also don't think Jesus was killed for being exclusive of certain people groups- it was because His message was so incredibly IN-clusive that the establishment killed him. And I think He'd probably stand out in front of the "God Hates Fags" people and challenge them to cast the first stone. Call me weak, but I just can't do it. And I heard an earful for it. "If you can't stand up for your sister in Christ, can you even stand for CHRIST?" "I'm supposed to stand for Christ, not against people." "Well, Christ stands for people!" "And fags aren't people?" "I can't believe you!" I guess I can't, either, but I think if Christ actually was with us today in the flesh, after he got done shaming the "God Hates Fags" people, he might want to have a few words with all of us because not any of us is without fault; no, not even one.

I just don't want to be, and I don't think a Christian should be, known best for what they are against. And the majority of the time, that's where we're at.

After these episodes, I began to feel as though there was a deeper thing going on than God and gays. I'd see it in youth group worship band practice when someone would introduce a new song or a new way to try a song. Or when someone would challenge the usefulness of those little fill-in-the-blank sermon follow-along sheets. Or when I asked about our attendance at the youth conferences we'd been involved with for the past few years, only to find out that a decision had been made by someone disconnected from all of us to uproot us from that sphere of influence. "God is moving. God is good." I don't know how many times I heard those sorts of words in connection with various odd and shadowed decisions by the "spiritual elders" that I was supposed to honor and have respect for.

"God is moving in a different direction."

Here's a thought: God is constant. It's us who move in different directions. Why is it that we have this need to invoke God when making decisions? I absolutely agree that it's important to discover what He's doing, but what He's doing doesn't involve every decision we make. Rather, it should be flipped: every decision we make should involve what He's doing. What He's doing is good, and you can join in the good things He's doing in any way you are able. Slapping the God label on things which are ultimately human decisions is just plain wrong at best, and evil at worst. I wonder, too, if that is actually a closer application for the Biblical mandate to "not use the Lord's name in vain."

Eventually, things came crashing down at the youth group. Initially, we were given permission to take a group to this youth conference, and we made plans accordingly. Then as it came down to crunch time, we were told that if we went on this trip, we'd be kicked out of the youth group. Long story short, we resigned our various positions in leadership and left. The 6 or 8 of us who left eventually began conducting our own Bible study. We were accused of being divisionists, of hurting the youth group (the numbers began to dwindle even further after we had left), and I was accused by name of being a hand of the devil, "leading people astray".

This is the first time I realized clearly what I was seeing. Because I knew I wasn't "the hand of the devil", because I knew I was following God, I began to see that what I WASN'T following was the man-made system that was the church. Now, before I get all bleary-eyed about my patriotism for this or that, let me make something very clear- there was some pride involved. Of course there was. I felt that I was very right for doing some of these things, and while feeling you're right about something is a good reason to do something, it should never be the ONLY reason. As an eighteen-year-old, that wasn't always the case. But what I will say is that I began to notice that this whole thing called Christianity had a very deeply-seated streak of self-preservation in its system, that it was often less about God and more about just keeping this thing going, and keeping it going on a very ideologically set path.

It's a really funny human tendency, how we can take something that at first is so good, so genuine and turn it into something so synthesized, so robotic that it takes all the life out of it. Nowhere has this been so evident than in Christianity. We've become afraid of talking about what it is we're actually supposed to be about, and we're afraid of new ideas, because we're so worried that our "good and pure" religion is being defiled, so we take control of it and entwine God with all of our theologies, traditions, morals and leadership structures, and then we wonder, "Why is all this bad stuff happening in this world? Where did all the good go? Why don't people care about God anymore?"

I'll wager you that people care much more about God than we give them credit for.

It's our god that people don't care about.

Part I: What's Happened?

Certainly, our world is not the same as it was a quarter century ago, when I came into this world. Twenty-five years ago, we were marveling at the power of persuasion held by the family television. Already proven in its ability to give us an "insider's look" at the world- as it had just recently done so by bringing the harrowing images of the Vietnam War into our living rooms- we were learning of its profound ability to shape our public discourse into a superficial made-for-TV scheme of shallow one-liners and endless photo opportunities that only the wealthy could afford. Books like Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves To Death" would document this shift in-depth. Fast-forward ten years, and we're marveling over the Internet and its ability to connect billions of people worldwide and allow us to write to our relatives, manage our own finances like never before, and buy our Christmas presents in our underwear from the comfort of home. A few years later, we were learning of the vast cache of knowledge available to us by way of the internet (no longer spelled with a capital "I", such was its wide acceptance into our culture), its ability to endlessly entertain with the success of such "for fun" websites as homestarrunner.com and ebaumsworld.com, and its ability to connect and begin relationships with people we didn't even know were out there through the use of instant messaging, as well as websites such as lavalife.com, match.com and later, eharmony.com. And just in the past five years, we've seen the rise of MySpace and Facebook, where we can all post our silly party pictures and keep tabs on our friends by watching their every move on their "profile", a webpage which is in essence the "face" of a person on the internet. We've also seen the rise of the blog, in which anyone, anywhere, can talk about anything from dirty political rumors to the hot dish they cooked last night. We are able to find what amounts to a college education's worth of information through entities such as Wikipedia, which also allows us to contribute our own two cents on a topic, creating an ever-changing encyclopedic one-stop-shop for the knowledge of mankind, and also an incredibly easy way to blow an entire afternoon online. We can even get an ACTUAL college education as numerous public and private schools now offer online classes and degrees.

We're discovering how dependant we are upon this connection with each other, and discovering the value of everyone's collective ideas available for all to see. We no longer take a "talking head" at his word, but go delving for the information ourselves and come to our own conclusion. Through this conditioning of discovering the truth for ourselves, we have learned that "truth" is much more subjective than we had once realized, and that more often than not, the truth is found hanging in the balance between many perceived "truths". We have become skeptical of anyone claiming to "know the truth" about this or that, as we now have the ability within our fingertips to verify and often dispute that claim. We've also learned the value that our own personal experience provides us, and sharing our experience with others' experiences shapes a much more personal and compelling "truth" than any one claim to the same effect. Summarily, truth is no longer found in any centralized body or structure, whether political, commercial or religious. It is on the topic of religion that I would like to speak to, and I'll use a timeline of my own life experience to illustrate.

I come from a mainly Baptist background, having a grandfather and an uncle ordained into the American Baptist denomination. I spent the first 10 years of my life in fairly traditional hymn-and-sermon Baptist churches. From my young memory, I remember these churches being places of kind-hearted and charitable people, accentuated by weekly potluck dinners and the implied importance of community, friendship and giving. After an out-of-state move, my family made the switch to a local Pentecostal congregation. These incredibly outgoing people were very focused upon seeing the glory of God physically manifested in every moment of everyday life, fighting militantly against the forces of darkness that threatened to overcome the world soul-by-soul, and a very specific teaching of submission to authority; generally speaking, your "spiritual elders"; more specifically, the pastor of your congregation. It was here that I would receive the bulk of my religious conditioning. After spending five years here, my family moved on to plant a church in a nearby town. This church was affiliated with the Baptist General Conference, a fairly conservative denomination, and was to be built on the Willow Creek/Saddleback model of "seeker-sensitive" churches, basically an approach designed for those who had "given up on church, but not on God", as the church literature would say. Here, I was exposed to many new and different ways of "doing church", from high-gloss Powerpoint presentations and tightly-produced worship bands to entire sermon series built on Hollywood movie themes. The entire flow of a Sunday service, and everything else about the way the church handled its business, was carefully choreographed, timed, and- quite often- scripted. The "growth story" of this church, an important part of a church's credibility, is now considered classic: we went from a living room to an elementary school, from an abandoned post office to an old car dealership and finally produced a large-scale fundraising drive to build our own church building. My father served on the elder board, and was also a lay advisor to the Great Lakes Baptist Conference, the regional governing body. My mom was nursery coordinator. My brother drummed for the worship band. I myself was involved in the youth leadership at this church. Simultaneously, I was involved in a youth group at an Evangelical Free denominational church, as well as continuing to serve as a student-leader and worship leader in the Pentecostal youth group at the church my family had left, also serving with them as an assistant camp counselor for two years. I was also occasionally involved in the local Young Life non-denominational organization.

Having such a relatively diverse church background and being immersed in leadership-this and ministry-that developed in me a strong sense that this was just what I was supposed to be doing with my life, and so in high school, I applied for admittance into the strongest ministry-oriented college that I knew of (and because they'd been sending me sweet-looking flyers since I was in 7th grade!): North Central University in Minneapolis. I was excited to gain admittance, and had it all planned out: I was going to start school, meet a girl first or second semester, marry her by junior year, graduate in 4 years and become a successful youth pastor, winning scores of souls for Christ and maybe writing a book or two about it. It'd be great.

I had written, in my admissions essay, of a desire to bring about a "revival"- an oft-used term in Pentecostal circles which typically means a large-scale change or deep shift brought about by the faithful in accordance with God's will. "Revival" usually looked like a whole bunch of people writhing in the aisles or dancing around at the front of the church yelling at God in strange languages. The pressure to "come on down and receive what the Lord had for you" was great; if you didn't get out of your seat or you weren't in the room for whatever reason, you risked "missing out"- the implications of which were never really clear, but you knew it might mean that something in your soul was in jeopardy, so you just didn't even go there. I mostly rolled with it, but I also felt like there was something more to be had, something much more practical, something much less weird, and that's what I wanted to see happen. It seemed to me that the "revival" I read about in the Bible was often at odds with the established order of things, and this revival I kept seeing was like a broken old 33 vinyl record playing on the 45 setting- the same old thing, but much more frenetic, and ultimately annoying. I knew this wasn't "it".

Before I'd leave for North Central, I'd begin to develop some ideas about what this whole thing looked like, or at least, what it SHOULDN'T look like…

A Prologue

I've really done it this time.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be rolling out a four-part series of blogs that are part autobiographical, part sociological, part historical, part potential, and in large part, whimsical. Among a host of other descriptive words, they will be incredibly introspective and very personal. You may find out some things you never knew, some things you didn't want to know, and some things about which you may not care. But it's my story; it's where I'm coming from, where I'm at right now, and where it all may be going. The purpose is threefold: 1) I've got an incredible writing itch to scratch; 2) I've got some things to sort out in my own head and by writing it all out will serve to help me in that process; 3) I'd like to involve in the process everyone who happens to read my words, allowing them to share their thoughts and create a conversation, and in the classic Ian blog sort of way, challenge people to examine themselves, their own stories, and where they're going. I will purpose in this story, as much as I can, only to name ideas and not names, as that's not the point here. If you feel slighted, as though I'm pointing a finger and just not saying your name, I apologize- there is no anger or resentment meant toward anyone. If you feel as though you're being praised or otherwise shed in a positive light, that's awesome: you know who you are, you should feel wonderful, and I'm still not going to call you by name! I don't purport to be superior to anyone else, or even special for that matter, as I'm sure countless others have followed a similar path in life. But it's me, it's mine, and it can be a part of yours, too.

I must also warn that in accordance with Point 1 of the Threefold Purposes of writing this series- the one about scratching the writing itch- I will be employing what may at times sound like a deliberately grandiose style of prose.

I like to hear myself think; my apologies.

Stay tuned…