Come On Church!

In light of all this Rob Bell talk, I feel like weighing in and trying to push the conversation a little bit further. This “controversy” caught me a little bit off guard to be honest. I keep thinking we are moving from emphasis on orthodoxy to orthopraxy (right doing over right thinking). But this whole ordeal shows we’re not quite ready for it. I’ve been familiar with Rob Bell’s work for quite some time and the points he brings up in this book are not new for him as he has been sharing this message for many years now. I guess since he decided to write a book about it, it has been brought to others attention.

I want to address two things with this whole situation. One, with this “new” concept of heaven/ hell and the Kingdom of God, what does this mean were supposed to do? And two, how does this make the church look as a whole?

I have seen many folks consider Rob Bell to be a heretic, universalist and that he is watering down the gospel and the cross. He is accused of trying to repackage the gospel to be appealing to more people by making it about love. That the grace of God is to be for everyone just the way we are. How scandalous.

With this though, does not mean the gospel isn’t challenging or cheap. We are called to bring heaven on earth. To work in communion with God to push the real hells people face every day here and now. It’s about now, not waiting till a triumphant end but working here and now. Things like loving your neighbor, loving your enemy, promoting peace, justice, mercy, humility, and love. I don’t know about you but these are hard to do. It takes a lot to give yourself to these. I’m struggling: to reducing my footprint to help those affected by the environment, trying to not support companies that don’t violate their employee’s rights, passing a homeless person on the street and not knowing what to do knowing that I am a kingdom person. We live in a broken world of different shades grey muddle decisions to promote the kingdom.

I was lucky enough to spend some time with Brian Mclaren last weekend when he was speaking in Atlanta and I asked him what he thought about the new/ old Rob Bell “controversy”. Brian went on a little story about being in a room with several youth from his old church. On a semi spur of the moment decision he took 2 strips of large paper. He first asked the kids what they thought were big issues facing the world. The kids spoke of war, starvation, disease the environment, over-consumption and several others. Then he asked about the biggest issues facing the church. The kids talked about homosexuality, abortion, doctrine, ordination of women, divorce and others.

The church has a choice right now. Continue to stay irrelevant staying distracted by its own problems or it can look outwards, following the call of Christ to be here and now, serving the world to bring heaven on earth.

I fear the churches future if it continues to squabble over issues irrelevant to folks outside the church while ignoring or denying the major issues facing God’s children.

In the Name of Justice?

Last year a prominent human rights lawyer named Peter Erlinder visited Rwanda to defend Victoire Ingabire, accused of the infamous genocide denier charge. The genocide denier law wields big power in Rwanda. As Mr. Erlinder came into the country, he was arrested for this same denier law. Most people know this law is overreaching and that I think most of the outside world would have agreed that his arrest was unjust. To make that story even spicier, a few days into imprisonment, Rwandese authorities claimed that Erlinder tried to kill himself by overdosing on medicine. Those close to him were shocked and saying that Peter would never do such a thing. This was obviously a clear attempt by the Rwanda government to bend the law to railroad Erlinder and make him a non-intity. It obviously worked because he was released a day later and forced to leave the country. Ms. Ingabire is still in prison today.
This story screams injustice and a huge violation of human rights. Rwanda should be held to a higher standard but by who?
I wanted to share that story about a developing country struggling to uphold human rights, but lets fast forward to today.
Wikilinks splashed into the media with a sharp condemnation of the high profile Julian Assange. The person that enabled Assange to leak those thousands of documents was a boy, a 23 year old soldier named Bradley Manning. He has been held at Quanico in continued solidary confinement 23 hours a day, well except for a guard checking on him every 5 minutes. Going to sleep, he has to strip down to his underwear and cannot lean toward the wall. He also is not allowed to exercise at all in his cell. Last week Manning’s lawyer reported that Manning was forced to strip naked and remain that way for 7 hours due the murmur of… suicide.
Maybe we’re not so different Rwanda and USA, these 2 cases seem deniably similar and disgusting to me. As I have said many times before, we are all children of God and deserve dignity. This is disappointed and needs to stop.

Something is Not Right Here

A new survey came out by the Pew Institute the other day and I found it quite interesting. How could these be? I mean I thought we were moving forward a little bit but how could we get things so… wrong. The survey polled evangelicals and non-evangelicals on budget items they would like to increase or decrease.
Number 1 in spending cuts for evangelicals is Aid to World’s Poor, coming in at 56%, compared to 50% of non-evangelicals. On the flipside you have 45% of evangelicals in favor of increasing “defense” spending compared to 28% of non-evangelicals.
The list of things to cut was closely followed by unemployment and the environment where evangelicals favored reducing spending towards the 2 issues at almost a two to one rate compared to non-evangelicals.
Christians over non-Christians are willing to spend more money killing people than helping people. I don’t mean to demonize here but how did this happen?
I have one theory. I troll the Relevant website and have started to notice a trend. In many articles addressing serving the poor or helping those in need, many people comment that it’s not that they don’t believe in helping the poor, but they don’t believe in a handout and want people to take personal responsibility. Ah, I think we are starting to get to something. Folks are still buying the 1970’s myth of the welfare queen cruising along in her caddy spending government money on drugs and other non-necessities. This was beautiful crafting by the larger than life Ronald Reagan which is apparently sticking with us through today. Just to speak a little bit about the myth, with our economy in shackles, currently 1 in 7 Americans live in poverty. With welfare, the maximum many states set is $400 a month and that goes to single mothers with children, which do make up 90% of welfare recipients. These are tough numbers but its truth.
We have got to give people the benefit of the doubt, that includes those who are poor and it includes evangelicals who I am trying to hold to a higher standard. Many folks haven’t met each other and don’t know each other’s plight. I’m going to chalk this depressing graph up to misinformation but how about we all get together and have a face to face talk. See others eyes and learn the truth that were all children of God and deserve a fair chance to plea their own case.