Where is Brad Pitt Now?

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

Where is Brad Pitt now? I have just returned from a one-week missions project to New Orleans with nine Gordon-Conwell students, Jeff Arthurs on our faculty, and our wives. We had the privilege of serving post-Katrina New Orleans with a variety of building and recovery projects.

We, of course, visited the Ninth Ward of New Orleans on the first day we were there. A bomb hit it. It must have been a bomb, so devastating was the carnage, and this after five years since the hurricane. But right there in the center of the parish, like a Phoenix rising out of the ashes, were four or five futuristic-looking houses that can only be described through the lens of my own childhood Saturday morning television experience. The houses looked like they came right out of the Jetsons. Brad Pitt built them, I assume from the proceeds deep in the north side of his wallet. Much to his credit, he made an early contribution to the cause.

We stayed on the sanctuary and classroom floors of Faith Bible Church in neighboring Slidell. What a wonderful little, faithful church. When the storm first hit, they did the logical thing: They first cleaned up the two feet of muck and swamp water from their own church, and then went about the business of gutting and cleaning up the houses of their neighbors and others in New Orleans. They have been doing it ever since, hosting groups like us on a wing and a prayer for five years, even as their congregation gets smaller and smaller. To date, this little church, through the hundreds of volunteers they have hosted, has restored almost 60 houses, in addition to hundreds of other restoration projects.

I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am of our students and their contribution to the lives of total strangers this past week. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose, they didn’t sacrifice much other than a week of much needed study time. But they showed up, and on their own dime, and they didn’t have to. They were joined by students from two other schools as well. What an intense little community we became in just one week.

Which brings me back to Brad Pitt. Where is he now? One of the unsung songs in the national media, now that the television cameras are gone after five years, is that it is almost solely faith-based organizations—churches, Christian schools, and other religious organizations-- that are still packing their bags and heading down to New Orleans to patch the city back together again. Where did everyone else go? But why should the national media care? They already have their story. And the story is that apparently the church is full of hypocrites who think about little else but heaven.

I wish they would take five minutes to talk with my new friend, Sarah, as she tells, in her halting Korean-laced English, about her role in tearing down a storm-soaked trailer this week. She probably has never held a hammer before, let alone a crow bar. But there she was, swinging away, along with Sam, her husband, and Caleb and Joan, JK and Joseph, and Anna and Erin and Josh, and Jeff, Liz, and Cec. Just give her five minutes. Now that would be a story.

Through the Blistered Glass

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone. I celebrated it in our Exegesis of Revelation class by reading a bit of William Butler Yeats’ poem The Wanderings of Oisin. It recounts the tale of the Irish hero Oisin and his faery lover, with St. Patrick cast in the role of the disapproving, joy-killing Christian. The poem begins:

S. Patrick. You who are bent and bald, and blind,

With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,

Have known three centuries, poets sing,

Of dalliance with a demon thing.

Oisin. Sad to remember, sick with years,

The swift innumerable spears,

The horseman with their flowing hair,

And bowls of barley, honey, and wine,

Those merry couples dancing in tune,

And the white body that lay by mine;

But the tale, though words be lighter than air,

Must live to be old like the wandering moon.

Now by any orthodox account, Yeats was as woeful a theologian as he was wonderful a poet – and not simply because of his treatment of Patrick in the Wanderings. He was a devotee of Theosophy, a blend of Platonism, mysticism and highly doctored Buddhism that quickly degenerates into a vague, incoherent babble of Quarternaries, Triads, and something called an Etheric Double (you can read more on Yeats and Theosophy here: http://www.yeatsvision.com/Theosophy.html).

Why, then, read him in a course of Revelation? The answer is that, for all the becloudedness of his vision, Yeats still sensed or saw something, and spoke of it, in a way that often puts the church to shame. The words “the swift innumerable spears” are great poetry not only because they trip liltingly off the tongue, but because they evoke the remembrance of faded martial glory better than a thousand essays on the subject. In a much greater way Revelation, and all the apocalyptic bits of the Bible, offer us a vision of God’s kingdom that cannot be captured by staid, prosaic analysis. The seers throw us into the maelstrom of God’s grace and judgment; they set before us the horrors of the Abyss and the wonders of the New Jerusalem. They are so wild and dis-orienting we tend to avoid them altogether.

But doing so wraps a tourniquet on the church’s spiritual imagination. I have often contemplated teaching a course Horrible Protestant Fiction; I am now inclined to add another, Non-Existent Protestant Poetry. Both are exaggerations, of course; I am sure that worthy endeavors in both fields have been undertaken by the sons and daughters of the Reformation. But we Protestants do tend to be prosy proclaimers and inveterate explainers, with little patience for the ambiguity that inevitably resides in lean lines of verse. And I suspect our relative neglect of apocalyptic (aside from its utility for end of the world calculations) is a part of the problem.

We must of course reckon with the rarity of poetic genius. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and God’s scatters his creative gifts as he sees fit. As often as not they end up in what we consider the wrong hands (see our prior blog on Avatar for further evidence). We may have “acres of diamonds” at our feet, as Russell Conwell used to preach, but we don’t appear to have acres of Yeatses in our pews waiting to be furrowed. But those few who are genuinely gifted will not thrive if the church puts before them an impoverished, visionless Christianity. Preachers and teachers need to spread before their people the banquet of imagery in Revelation and Ezekiel and Daniel and Zechariah. If such texts prove rather hard to manage, that is a large part of the point: we shouldn’t want a God who fits so comfortably into our old word order that we can never move into his new one. If he does not shake us up, he can never wake us up.

Tolkien saw all this as clearly as anyone, though he did not make the connection with apocalyptic explicit, and his essay On Faery Stories remains the essential treatment of the topic. But it is fitting to end with an image, from the writer Frederick Buechner, in his book The Alphabet of Grace:

The window by the table where I work has large, old-fashioned panes with wavy places and blisters in the glass…my eyes are fixed sightlessly on the window just beyond the writing table and remain fixed there for I have no idea how long. Finally their sight returns and I see that all this time I have been looking at the window without knowing that I was looking at it. Through it there is a white picket fence across the street, and one of the blisters in the glass pane has taken an oval-shaped piece out of the fence and out of the grass beyond the fence; it looks as if there is some kind of hole in the world there, some kind of oval-shaped entrance to another world inside this world. (pp.89-90)

Are we willing to go through the blistered glass?

Theology and the Experience of Women

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling Charlotte campus

March is women’s history month. As I reflected on this, I found myself wondering about the lack of voice of women in the church. Despite the diligent and excellent scholarship of godly theologians who affirm the full equality of women, there remains in the church a widely held belief in the subordination of women. Many who affirm this subordination also affirm the dignity and value of women, suggesting that subordination is only a matter of function and not of being. As I look around me, however, it is difficult not to conclude that a belief in the subordination of women leads to a devaluing of women, with often tragic results.

I’m sure you, as I, have seen news reports and read stories about the experience of women around the world. But have we considered the real human tragedy of this devaluing of women?

In China, the devaluing of females has led to an epidemic of sex-selective abortions. In 2009, a study published in the British Medical Journal estimated that in 2005 there were 32 million extra Chinese men under the age of 20 because of this selective abortion of female babies. This has led to an eruption of a human trafficking problem in the sex industry in China that is only just beginning to be understood.

In India, angry husbands and rejected boyfriends respond to women by throwing acid in their faces. This results in disfigurement, blindness, and sometimes death. The BBC reported one such story of Mamata. Her crime was that she refused to stay with her husband who had decided to take a second wife. After months of efforts to persuade her, he met with her and threw acid over her face and arms, leaving her permanently scarred. The BBC reports that, in a society where “looks are everything,” especially for women, it has been difficult for her to get any kind of job, even as domestic help.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban know that terrorists are less effective in recruiting when women are educated. Therefore, one of their campaigns has been to destroy girls’ schools. Attacks on the girls might take the form of gunfire, grenades, or as in India, throwing acid in the face. Despite this terror, many Afghan girls are determined to obtain an education and continue despite the threats to them for attending school.

In Darfur in Sudan, in Rwanda, and elsewhere, rape is a tool of war and genocide. In Sudan, over 2 million Sudanese of minority ethnic groups were herded into camps. According to the New York Times, the soldiers then inflicted gang rape upon thousands of women and girls, as many as 20 men raping one woman, often in front of their mothers and fathers or children. Babies conceived through these rapes are considered unpure because their blood is diluted, and are often killed or abandoned.

And don’t think that this kind of abuse of women is limited to “over there.” Human sex trafficking is a significant problem in the United States as well. Charlotte, for example, has been rocked by the exposure of its own sex trafficking problem. It has been labeled by police the center of sex trafficking in the Southeast United States. Hundreds of young women are kidnapped and forced to work as prostitutes here in Charlotte alone. The violence of sex traffickers reported elsewhere in the world, including the drugging, beating, and rape of their victims, happens right here.

Ken Fong, senior pastor of Evergreen Baptist Church of Los Angeles, asks some important questions, as reported in CBE’s Arise E-Newsletter: “When some Christian groups interpret the Bible as teaching that God created women to live in a male-ruled hierarchy, that they must obediently submit to male 'heads' or risk violating a divine mandate, aren't they also contributing to the oppression of girls and women? . . . Even if the point is made that the Bible teaches that women are of equal value before God, if a person's being a female automatically and always means that she is overtly or subtly denied equal opportunities to learn, to lead, to teach, etc., that is oppressing her in the name of God.”

The first Sunday in March, my church celebrated the gifts of women. I would like to end with the Prayer of Adoration and Confession of Sin which we prayed in church that Sunday:

“Created in your image, O God, male and female, we confess that we often forget this fact of life. As men, we forget that our God is a nurturing, sustaining and loving God. As women, we have forgotten to speak out against unacceptable patterns of domination and abuse. As people of faith, we forget that God saw everything made and, indeed, it was good. God, help us to see everything you have made and, indeed, to know that it is very good. In our worship, may we be less like Martha, who was distracted, and more like Mary, who sat at Jesus feet and listened. Mary chose the better part; may we do likewise, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Fredrick Douglass, the Gospel and Me

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Fredrick Douglass, the nineteenth-century abolitionist had this to say about American Christianity:

“…I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. …I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members….The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of the week meets me as a class leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life and the path of salvation. …He who proclaims it as a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. ...The warm defender of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families—sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers—leaving the hut vacant and the heart desolate. …We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! All for the glory of God and the good of souls.” [Fredrick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass (1845), n. p., http//gbgm-umc.org/UMW/ bible/douglass.stm --cited in Global Voices on Biblical Equality, eds A.B. Spencer, W.D. Spencer and Mimi Haddad (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2008), pp. 6-7.]

As I read that text I find it so hard to believe that people could treat other human beings as mere objects or possessions, as merchandise to be sold as one would sell stocks and bonds – or worse! It reminds me again of how much harm has been done in the name of Christ and by people whose conscience showed no awareness of just how unjust and inhuman their behavior is.

Of course such reflection can make me feel quite superior in the knowledge that I would never dream of treating anyone that way. That is, until the next time I treat the person behind the counter, or the person who pumps my gas, or the person who serves me food in a restaurant, as just an instrument or means to accomplishing my goals. I may not beat them or sell them or rob them and I may not do anything to them that would be considered immoral or unethical by other people. But I am still quite capable of looking past them as though they are invisible or engaging with them as I would engage a candy machine or a Coke machine or some other inanimate machinery or flesh-covered household appliance that will accomplish some task for me as long as I just crank the right handles or push the right buttons.

And I am more than capable of considering my own needs (or the needs of my friends or the needs of my church’s latest project or campaign of great importance while turning a blind eye to human suffering going on around me, suffering that continues and is perpetuated because I and others with me decide that although it concerns us and should be addressed it just cannot be my/our priority today. Our agenda has us busy attending to other urgent matters….

But I hear the voice of my Lord reminding me of the place of lost and suffering people in his agenda and remember the lengths to which he went to see to it that we might know God’s love and be redeemed from the plight in which we find ourselves. And I am reminded of the words of the apostle Paul:

³ Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. ⁴ Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. ⁵ Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus. (Philippians 2:3-5 NIV).

May God give us the grace today to recognize our own propensity to subtly treat human beings made in his image as though they are actually something less than we are – as though they are merely means to achieving the goals and objectives we have for our day or for our lives. And may he give me (and you too, if you need it as much as I do) the grace to recognize and act on the opportunities he gives me to follow Christ’s model of treating others not only as fully human beings, but also as the special objects of God’s love and of Christ’s self-sacrifice. May the Christianity I affirm and proclaim with my lips not be betrayed by my own blindness to the injustices around me. May no Fredrick Douglass of the present or future find cause in my behavior to consider my faith a fraud.

How to Get More Out of Committee Meetings in Your Church

By John Jefferson Davis
Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics

Can you relate to the following scenario? Two friends meet one evening in the church parking lot and one says, “I have just come out of a mind-numbing budget committee meeting at the church. I can only stare at lines of numbers on spreadsheets for so long before my eyes glaze over.”

Most of us can remember committee meetings in our churches that, if not exactly “mind numbing,” have left us tired and frustrated, with the feeling that all the talk and discussion and debate had not accomplished as much as we would have hoped. Perhaps we find it difficult to rest well that night, our minds still running with the unresolved issues and tensions of the meeting. Many of us spend a lot of time in our church or other Christian organization going to meetings. Does Scripture give us any hints as to how committee meetings in the church can be more satisfying and productive? The good news is that the answer is a definite “Yes!” Let’s consider briefly a number of key passages that can take our meetings to a whole new level of satisfaction and fruitfulness.

Before looking at the first passage – Exodus 4:2 – we can stop to observe that typically, church committee meetings follow a pattern like this: 1) open with a sincere (but somewhat token) prayer for God’s guidance; 2) individuals on the committee share their ideas and have discussion and debate; 3) a plan of action is adopted; 4) the meeting is closed in prayer, asking God to bless the plans that we have made. As we shall see, a more biblical pattern would look something like this: 1) united prayer, seeking a common mind; 2) corporately listening for the voice and plan of God in the midst of the discussion; 3) being energized by the Spirit of God to execute God’s ideas (cf. Acts 13:1,2, the church at Antioch, energized and united for mission).

Principle One: Relinquishing Our Agendas to God: “What Is That In Your Hand?”

In the call of Moses God meets Moses at the burning bush, and later in the conversation asks Moses the question, “What is that in your hand?” (Ex.4:2). Moses answers, “a staff.” God tells Moses to throw the staff on the ground, and it becomes a serpent. God commands Moses to pick it up again, and it becomes a staff – which later God uses, in the hands of Moses, to part the Red Sea waters. The “staff” can be a symbol for those things that we bring to the meeting: our ideas, our agendas, our knowledge, expertise, training, and hopes for the church. God asks us to throw our staffs on the ground – to relinquish and surrender our ideas and agendas to him, so that he can return them in a form that has been transformed and energized by God’s own power. This conscious and intentional act of each committee member being willing to relinquish control and surrender his or her “staff” to God is the first step for having God’s empowerment for the committee’s work.

Principle Two: Seeking a Common Mind: the Principle of Spiritual Alignment

Another beautiful picture of extraordinarily fruitful “committee work” in the church is found in Acts 1:14: “They all joined together constantly in prayer” (Acts 1:14). Jesus had commanded the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until the Father sent the gift of the Holy Spirit to energize them for mission (Acts 1:4,8). In 1:14 Luke uses the relatively infrequent word in New Testament Greek, homothumadon, which means “of one mind” or “of one purpose.” Luke also uses the same word to describe the unity of the early Jerusalem church in worship and fellowship (Acts 2:46) and in the praise of God (Acts 4:24). This significant word homothumadon signifies that the disciples in Acts 1 were “on the same page” – not only being in the same place physically and geographically (in the upper room), but in the “same place” mentally and consciously, with shared understanding and purpose. This could be called the principle of spiritual alignment: when the disciples were united, with their minds aligned with the purpose and plan of God, the Spirit powerfully energized their mission (Acts 2), and the church expanded in effective mission (Acts 3 - 28). The key here is to see the critical order of the process: 1) achieving unity of mind; 2) being empowered by the Spirit; 3) engaging in fruitful mission. All too often, “conventional” work in the church tries to accomplish step #3 without first achieving steps #1 and #2. The powerful transition from Acts 1 (“common mind”; “alignment”) to Acts 2 (empowerment by the Spirit) is reflective of the fact that the “Acts 1” unity is an answer to Jesus’ Jn.17 prayer for Christian unity – and of the fact that Jesus blesses richly those who obediently align themselves as answers to his prayer!

This crucial principle of alignment can be illustrated as follows: an ordinary bar of iron has countless iron molecules each of which is a tiny magnet (“dipole”), but the bar of iron as a whole has no magnetic force, because the individual iron molecules are oriented in random directions, and the little individual molecular magnets cancel one another out. If you take a powerful magnet and stroke the iron bar repeatedly, the molecules in the bar become aligned, the little magnets are working in the same direction, and an ordinary bar itself has become a powerful magnet that can do some “heavy lifting.”

Or consider the advice that the coach of the legendary hockey team – TeamUSA – that upset the Russians in the 1980 Winter Olympics – gave to his players: “Forget the name on the back of your jersey – your name – the only name that matters is the name on the front of the jersey: TeamUSA.” The being-of-one-mind alignment of TeamUSA lifted a talented collection of individual hockey players to an extraordinary level of team effectiveness.

Principle Three: Lectio Divina Committee Listening: Listening as Body of Christ

A third principle of effective committee meetings in the church could be called “lectio divina committee listening.” Most of us are familiar with the lectio divina method of scriptural prayer and meditation: a quiet, unhurried, contemplative and meditative listening to a passage of Scripture read perhaps several times, with a view to hearing the voice of God speaking to us through the biblical word. The same posture and attitude can inform how we listen to one another during the meeting. All too often, in the typical meeting, after the opening prayer we revert to our individualistic mode of relating, not really acting as though we really believed that we were connected as Body of Christ; not listening to one another intently and empathically, but being preoccupied with preparing our own statements so that we can voice our own ideas when we “get the microphone.” In the lectio divina model of committee listening, the committee members bring an awareness that as they meet, they are an expression of the Body of Christ, not autonomous individuals. They patiently try to hear what God might be wanting to say through the other members of the body.

This lectio divina style of committee listening can in itself be a small answer to Jesus’ High Priestly prayer for Christian unity (Jn.17:21) that the disciples would be one as he was one with the Father. Christian unity is not just about the “macro” issues of interdenominational relations – but can start at the “micro” level of a church committee meeting.

This type of listening was modeled by Jesus himself: “I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me … what I have heard from him I tell to the world” (Jn.8:28;26). These principles of having a “common mind” and “listening” are so powerful because they reflect the very inner life of the Triune God, manifested in the life and ministry of Jesus, and in Jesus’ relation to the Father: Jesus first listens to the Father; then aligns his mind with the Father’s mind; relinquishes his will to the Father’s will; and is then empowered by the Spirit for effective and fruitful ministry (cf. Lk.3:21, at the baptism: “as he was praying”; 4:1-13: listening to God/testing in the desert; 4:14: “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit”).

In the plan of salvation, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit always work as a team – not as independent individuals. A church committee that patterns its methods of work on the model of the Trinity and on Jesus’ relationship to the Father will discover that God will bless the work in extraordinary ways.

A Concluding Summary: Some Suggestion on “How To”:

To conclude, how could these principles be applied in practice? Here are some suggestions: First, the leader of the meeting could recount the story of Moses (“What is that in your hand?”), and invite the members to “throw their staffs on the ground” at the outset of the meeting. Second, the committee spends some time in quiet prayer, asking for Christ to bring about a common mind, and asking the Holy Spirit to be present, and to help in attentive listening for hearing and discerning the Father’s ideas as the members speak with one another. Third, the committee then engages in its discussions and agenda items, but with a consciousness that “We are ‘Body of Christ’ as we meet as a committee – not separate and autonomous individuals.”

Fourth, and finally, before the close of the meeting, the committee again spends some time in quiet, silent reflection, asking God to “push forward” the ideas and action items that he wants to go forward. At the close of the time of silent reflection, the leader attempts to articulate any consensus that seems to have emerged, or items about which consensus has not been achieved.

It’s not rocket science; it is really quite simple. Try it in your next church committee meeting, and see if God turns what could be just another meeting into a surprisingly fruitful event in the life of the parish. Believe me – it really worked for Jesus – and it can work for us as well!

For Further Reading:

Roy Oswald & Robert E. Friedrich, Jr. Discerning Your Congregtion’s Future

(Alban Institute, 1996), pp.5; 145-146; “Centering Prayer”.

Charles M. Olsen, Transforming Church Boards into Communities of Spiritual Leaders

(Alban Institute, 1995).