Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Church and TV Watching

In other writing of mine (like my last entry on “missio café”), I have argued for a more participatory approach to corporate worship.  But that doesn’t mean there’s not a place for the kind of large-group, celebratory gatherings with which many of us are familiar, where dozens (or hundreds!) of people gather together (often on a Sunday morning) for corporate worship.  These kinds of gatherings of God’s people are significant, and there are many expressions of corporate worship which really can only take place in such settings.  Inspirational preaching, the use of dance and drama and worship bands, etc. – these things often only “make sense” in the context of large celebration gatherings.  So, how do we capitalize on the wonderful advantages of such a gathering without falling prey to the very real danger of participants in such a gathering becoming merely a passive audience?  This is a major concern.

 

My son gave me a clue to part of the answer.  Now, when we think of being a passive audience, there’s not much that is more passivity-inducing than watching TV.  It generally doesn’t require us to “engage” very much at all.  In fact, that’s one of the reasons I like watching TV at the end of the day – it helps me slow down my mental rpm’s before heading off to bed.  Let’s face it – when you watch TV, you’re supposed to be a passive audience.

 

My little toddler doesn’t seem to understand this.  It is very difficult for him to sit still while watching television.  When there’s music, he likes to get up and move.  When there’s not music, he likes to get up and move!  He likes to sing along to the music, even when his lyrics don’t even line up with the music on the TV, even when his lyrics don’t match any known human language.  Davey Will is active when he watches TV.  For him, watching TV is a whole-body, whole-self experience.

 

I would suggest that this is the way we should enter into our corporate worship.  Even if the particular format of the gathering (whether due to size, tradition, or whatever) seems to foster the “passive audience” response, we are committed to engage with that worship gathering in an active, whole-self manner.

 

Now, granted, much of what Davey Will watches is geared for small children, and so they include lots of colors and music and action.  But that’s another hint for us.  If the makers of LeapFrog and Blue’s Clues can take a passivity-inducing medium like television and make it a participatory, interactive experience for preschool children, certainly we can do the same with the church.  These shows are brilliant in their creativity.  But surely they are no match for God’s creative people!  Let’s move beyond the trite “turn to your neighbor and say, ‘God loves you!’” approach to “audience participation” and come up with some creative ways to make our large-group worship gatherings more like Blues Clues!

 

Passivity isn’t a concept my toddler understands.  It shouldn’t make sense to the church either!

Missio Café

The following entry is excerpted from my ministry newsletter.

Over the past several months, I have been conducting a class for some of the young leaders at our local church.  I have called the class missio, based on the Latin word for “sending” which is the root of our word “mission.” 

The theme of the class has been the mission of the church.  In the first section, we explored some of the themes in Scripture which help us understand that God’s mission encompasses all of life.  We as God’s people are to introduce His shalom into every sphere of human existence, demonstrating that Jesus reigns over all. 

Another major section of the course was on discussing what kind of understanding of the church is necessary to fulfill this mission, so we looked at a model of the church as a “missional community.”  One of the key points made in this section is that members of the church are not supposed to be a passive “audience,” but are instead active agents of mission.  But so often the church here (like the church elsewhere) puts enormous emphasis on the Sunday morning service, and then conducts it as a program that makes most people behave like an “audience.” I wanted the class to consider whether there might be alternative ways of organizing corporate worship in such a way that was more participatory and active.

So, we tried an experiment.  Based on some ideas I’d encountered in my reading, we worked together to organize an experience that we called “missio café.”  In one of the rooms of our house, I set up tables and chairs like a small coffee house.  We held the gathering one Saturday evening, and used candles for our primary lighting.  We had snacks and drinks available, because we wanted to keep the atmosphere informal and community-oriented.  The theme was on prayer, and we did a lot of experiential stuff to explore that theme.  We sang songs together on the theme of prayer.  We had a Bible lesson where I shared briefly, but also gave the participants opportunity to dialogue together about prayer and anxiety, and then we ended the lesson with a responsive reading which collectively asked God to take our anxieties from us.  We used instrumental and reflective music as background, especially while the participants explored different “prayer stations.”  These prayer stations included a place where they could write their anxiety on a piece of paper and then burn it in a small bowl, a “prayer wall” where they could write out their prayers directly to God, and a station devoted to the story of Hagar, leading people to think about how God hears and sees the needs of the marginalized.  We also had artwork around the room (created by one of the students) that suggested various social problems people could pray for.

Whew!  I told my students clearly:  I’ve never done anything like this before.  I had no idea how it would turn out, and I was nervous for about two days before the gathering!

But in a special, amazing way, God used that time to give young people an opportunity to interact with Him in an active, intense way.  It was an experiment, and I don’t know if we’ll ever do it again, but I feel so privileged to have had the chance to witness people entering into God’s presence in a fresh, creative way.

 

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Re-Gifting

“Re-Gifting” is a euphemism, I reckon.  Taking a gift that you’ve received from one person, and then passing it on as a gift to another person.  (I highly recommend that you do not “re-gift” something back to the person who originally gave it to you.)  I suppose various communities and cultures have different standards as to the extent that re-gifting is appropriate.  Whether fruitcakes or trinkets of various sorts, the same object gets “gifted” again and again and again.

 

Last night, I realized something.  God is into re-gifting.  Not in the sense of passing on a gift received from elsewhere, but in the sense of giving the same gift again and again.

 

Take this computer on which I’m writing this entry, for instance.  It’s a really cool laptop.  Granted, it’s over a year old, so it’s not top of the line anymore, I’m sure.  But I really like it.  I enjoy working on it, and it serves me well.  It would have made sense for me to thank God for this laptop when I originally got it.  (I hope I did that.)  The provision of this laptop was a wonderful gift from God that I received over a year ago.  But that’s what hit me last night.  God didn’t just give me this laptop a year ago.  He re-gifts it to me every single morning.

 

Of course I assume that my laptop will be there eagerly waiting for me every morning, but that “ain’t necessarily so.”

 

The reality of this was driven home last night (a Tuesday).  Now, Monday evening had been our regular team meeting.  I remember being distracted during that team meeting by the sound of a whole bunch of sirens.  That’s unusual here in Cambodia, where emergency response systems aren’t what they could be.  I found out on Tuesday morning that there had been a serious fire on the north side of the city, and the report I read said that over 200 homes had been destroyed.  One young child was killed in the blaze.

 

Fast forward a bit to Tuesday evening.  Sopheaktra decided to go out with her sister and mom and niece to dinner (kind of a belated women’s day celebration), taking Davey Will with her, so I was at home waiting for my students to arrive for my evening class.  I heard a rather large commotion outside our house, and a short time later our doorbell rang.  I went to the door, and a young woman (probably a neighbor) told me to shut off our circuit breakers because a transformer down the street had blown.  I did that, then went outside to watch what was happening.  Sure enough, about a block down the street an electrical transformer was essentially “blowing up.”  It was sending out sparks as bright as a welder’s torch.  To my alarm, there were actually flames surrounding the transformer.  It was at least 100 yards away from my house, but I still realized the potential danger.  If those flames began to spread, the whole neighborhood could be at risk.  I was SO thankful that Sopheaktra and Davey Will were safely out of the area, and I called to tell them to stay away for the time being.  I mentally began making a list of the things I should try to collect from our house if we needed to evacuate.  (And, yes, the laptop was on the list!)  I knew, though, that I wouldn’t be able to get very much, and there was a viable possibility that we could lose most everything we owned if that fire began to rage out of control.

 

I was so thankful when the transformer stopped sparking, and someone was on a nearby roof with a fire extinguisher to put out the remaining flames.  Disaster averted.

 

The whole thing took less than half an hour.  But it was enough to make me realize what we could have lost, and I dropped to my knees in gratitude that God spared us the loss that might have been.  And that’s what made me understand that every morning I wake up with my wife and son nearby, with food to eat, with money to spend, with a laptop to use, etc. – every single morning all those things are new gifts from God.

 

I’m glad God is into re-gifting.

 

 

 

 

Monday, March 8, 2010

NOT IN THE LESSON PLAN

Sometimes, I confess, when I am teaching, I "get off" on a substantial tangent.  Usually the tangent is related to the lesson in some way, and often the rabbit trail is actually a worthwhile one.  But it still represents something that I didn't originally plan to talk about.

 

A case in point was the time when I found myself saying, "God's will is for us to have holistic sex!"

 

How did I get there?!?!?

 

I keep trying, again and again, to get my students to reject the Western dichotomization between body and spirit.  God has designed as whole people, He values us as whole people (hence the incarnation), He loves us as whole people, He redeems us as whole people (hence the resurrection), He wants us to obey as whole people, and He wants us to love others as whole people.  This is what I mean when I talk about being "holistic."

 

One way I encourage my students to think about this is through a set of rather silly questions.  First, I ask them how many of them know any corpses that they consider friends.  I have never had a student respond in the affirmative; I only get rather strange and puzzled looks.  I then ask them how many of them have friends who are ghosts.  Again, only strange looks, no affirmative answers.  A corpse is a body without a spirit, and a ghost is a spirit without a body - neither of which make for very good companions!  The only people we know and interact with are embodied spirits, or spirit-animated bodies.  In other words, we only know and love and communicate with and care for WHOLE PEOPLE - just the way that God designed us to be.

 

This line of thinking is what led me to my rather bizarre comment above.  I pointed out to the students that one of the major problems with pornography and prostitution (even fully consensual prostitution) is that they take a whole person and reduce her (or him) to something purely physical - merely a body as an object of sexual satisfaction and pleasure.  God's design for sex is to create a deep and intimate connection between two people - as WHOLE PEOPLE. Not just two bodies, but two whole body-and-soul people.  God's will is for us to have holistic sex.  That's one reason why it's so important to protect sexuality with the covenant of marriage - to ensure that the sexual relationship is not purely physical, but a whole-person union of heart and soul and mind, as well.

 

Satisfying our sexual desires by reducing people - male or female - to purely physical beings is ALWAYS degrading to their humanity, because God designed us as whole beings, body and soul, and His intention for our sexuality is every bit as holistic as we are.