Pachebel's Children's Canon

Okay, we've been entirely too serious recently on this blog. So here is something for all you parents out there.



Pastor Bob

THE CHURCH AND THE HOSPITAL

I have Bipolar Disorder. It doesn’t usually get diagnosed as the first problem. I’d had problems with anxiety and depression since I was a teenager. But in Titusville, NJ things took a different spin.

First Pres Titusville, (I have now been pastor at 3 1^st Presbyterian Churches, all with no 2^nd Presbyterian Church in town), is a great church. There was a bit more conflict there than I expected but all in all they are good people and a good congregation.

Titusville had mixed worship. That meant that we had some good old organ music with traditional hymns and also some contemporary music with guitars and an electric piano. (My first question was, “Where are the drums?” I was told the congregation wasn’t ready for drums.) Later we added a midweek contemporary service.

Titusville is a very small river town near Trenton, NJ. If you walk out the front door of the church and across the street the ground drops off rather dramatically down to the Delaware River. And yes, the Delaware floods. Fortunately the church and the manse are on high ground. Also in town is the NJ side of Washington Crossing Park. Every year on Christmas re-enactors come and cross the Delaware.

The congregation was starting the Alpha Program when I arrived. It is a really good program for leading people to faith in Christ and also in basic Christianity. You invite people to come to just one class, with free food and fellowship, and they usually stick around for the whole program. There is dinner, some singing, a talk on an aspect of Christianity, (you can use the videos with this crazy English pastor named Nickey Gumbel) and a time for small group discussions. All questions and comments are acceptable! Not to be missed is the Holy Spirit weekend. The nice part was that almost the entire program was congregation led. I started off as a guest in the first program and then moved to helping in the kitchen. I also taught a class on spiritual gifts on the Holy Spirit weekend.

In some ways Titusville was ideal. The kids were both off at college and Debby and I both got involved in the congregation. The problem was I really hadn’t gotten over my anger about being kicked out of Oneida 1^st and it affected my ministry. More, it affected my mental stability.

To put it simply, Bipolar Disorder is a mix of depression and mania. It all has to do with messed up brain chemistry and the interaction between life and brain chemistry. I was used to being depressed and anxious. I had never recognized the low level mania before. I started to drink, spent too much money, and said whatever came to mind. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately for Debby I tended to say whatever came to mind to her and not to people in general. It all came to a head in November, 2003 when I went into a massive depression and went into the hospital.

I have some specific complaints about the U.S. way of doing healthcare, particularly healthcare for those of us with brain chemistry disorders. I am fortunate. I have health insurance. I watch the tragic inequality in the emergency room and hospitals. If you have insurance your insurance company negotiates the cost of your care with the hospital. If you don’t have insurance you pay the full price. When I got home from the hospital I got this weird bill that said the hospital had billed the insurance company an immense amount of money, the insurance company made a counter offer, much lower, which the hospital accepted, and I had to pay a certain percentage of the lower figure. Not bad right? The person without insurance pays the whole bill, no negotiations.

My other complaint is what hospitals do with those of us who have brain chemistry disorders. Most medications that affect brain chemistry take about a month to take effect. Insurance companies allow about 10 days in the hospital, no where near enough time for the medicine to work.

My time in the hospital actually, after I got over a massive panic attack, was actually not bad. There were a variety of people there with Bipolar Disorder and they are some of the smartest, kindest people I know – when they aren’t on a massive mania or unbearably depressed. There were a few people my age there and we became friends and talked about everything. The doctors changed my medications and I went home. Too early, of course.

I went into an outpatient program that actually was helpful. But I wasn’t ready to go back into ministry. Not for a long time.

I went into temporary disability. In the PCUSA this means you have to resign as pastor of your congregation, which I did. I moved out of the manse and into an apartment and tried to fill my days. The medications helped, kind of. I didn’t get too bored because I slept from 12 to 15 hours a day. I got out and got some exercise. I even helped the presbytery start a group for pastors with mental and emotional disorders. It probably won’t surprise you pastors out there that I was the only one who went to the group. We pastors don’t dare be seen as crazy. That’s a career killer. I had a few people in mind in the presbytery that I thought needed the group but I kept my big mouth shut. BTW, do you know that somewhere near 60% of pastors in the USA have some sort of emotional disorder and that a whole bunch comes from abusive homes? It shouldn’t be a real surprise. After all a lot of people in helping professions sign up because they are self diagnosing.

Anyway. Over the summer my parents flew in to PA and I drove to my mother’s hometown. My great aunt needed to move to a nursing home and we had to sell the family homestead.

And where was God in all of this? Well, I’m alive. I could have committed suicide. I discovered that God is there even in the midst of the deepest depression. I also discovered that faith is not feeling the presence of God in the midst of deep depression and believing God is present anyway. I’ve discovered something terribly freeing about being openly crazy . . . um, I mean a person with a brain chemistry disorder. There are a whole lot more congregational members out there with emotional and mental disorders than you would ever believe. They talk with me because they know I know what they are going through.

Oh! I forgot to mention, while in Titusville I got into my ancestry and all things Scottish. I’m a kilt wearing pastor, although I still wear pants most of the time. My children are embarrassed to be seen with me in a kilt. My wife just accepts that it’s me. Have I said I really love my wife? She doesn’t put up with me wearing the bonnet. The bonnet is too much for her. Anyway, that’s why there is a picture of me in full dress kilt at the top of the page. You Can’t see the plain because the picture is too dark but that’s Black Watch, the original Campbell plaid.

Fall came and I felt well enough to circulate my dossier. Actually in the PCUSA it’s called a Pastoral Information Form or a PIF. Churches looking for pastors have similar forms called Church Information Forms, a CIF. It used to be done on paper but now you can download them. Still Pastor Nominating Committees print them out and hand them out to their members. Sometimes I think the motto of the Presbyterian Church should be “Kill a Tree for Jesus.”

As you might imagine it’s slim pickings out there for pastors on disability with a mental problem. Nevertheless this friendly church in suburban Philadelphia offered me a call: Tully Memorial Presbyterian Church.

Next time: Tully and my present life.

ONEIDA

I like to think of myself as a long term pastor. I was in rural PA for 7 ½ years. I was pastor at 1^st Presbyterian, Oneida, NY for 12 years. We moved to Oneida in 1989 and left in 2001. I was a member of Utica Presbytery before John arrived and after he left. In some ways Oneida feels more like home, except when we lived near my parents, than any other place we’ve lived and I’ve served as a pastor. When we moved to Oneida our son was in 3^rd grade and my daughter in 1^st. Both our children graduated from Oneida High School. Both still look on Oneida as home. For the first time in our lives we bought a house, which frankly isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

This will be a bit of a struggle about how much to reveal about my relationship with the church in Oneida. I’m going to say the good things first.

For the first time in my life I was a head of staff. Oneida 1^st had about 400 members on the roll when I arrived. I had taken courses in management and enjoyed being head of staff. We had a secretary, two sextons, a Christian Educator, and sometimes a Music Director and sometimes an Organist and a Choir Director. I tried to be a collegial head of staff. Unfortunately a couple of times I had to fire employees. I hated that, but it was part of the job. Joyce Irwin, our Music Director and later also the Christian Educator was the best organist, choir director I have ever had the pleasure to work with. And she developed innovative programs in C.E.

I continued teaching Kerygma classes, including Beginnings, a class on Genesis, Discovering the Bible, an introductory Bible class, Interpretation, a deeper class on how to interpret the Bible, and Hallelujah, a class on Handel’s Messiah. I urge any pastor to consider the Kerygma classes. I also wrote my own class on Mark a class built on the Kerygma model, classes on The Book of Confessions using Jack Rogers’ wonderful book, Presbyterian Creeds: A Guide to the Book of Confessions, and a series of small group Bible studies. All in all I had a blast teaching. And, as most teachers do, I think I learned much more than the students.

At first I had a great deal of support for change, but I didn’t rush into things. My two installed predecessors had lasted 2 ½ years and 10 month respectively and both had resigned but really had been forced out. So I took the process of change very, very slowly. We did experiment with different types of worship on Pentecost each year and incorporated some of the changes into regular worship.

In the long run we started using the Logos Program for youth, a midweek program that included recreation, education, worship education, (mainly a musical experience like choirs), and dinner. It was fun. The high school youth started a rock band that played in worship occasionally and was well accepted by the congregation. This unfortunately led to conflict with the Women’s Association.

And yes I did weddings, funerals and baptisms.

One of the best things about Oneida was the Council of Churches. Most of the congregations in town participated including the Pentecostals and the Roman Catholics. We had some wonderful programs on differences and similarities of worship and even a program on baptism. I did joint weddings and baptisms mostly with the Roman Catholics. We started a voluntary hospital chaplaincy program which I headed for around 5-7 years. We even worked out a program to help people who needed assistance by writing vouchers to a local gas station/convenience store. The Methodists kept the records.

One of the big controversies in Oneida was about the Oneida Indian nation. They bought some land, negotiated with the governor and opened a casino. Then they sued the county government, claiming a lot of land as part of their reservation, including the whole city of Oneida. For some reason this didn’t go over too well with the home owners whose houses were on the land the tribe claimed. We pastors worked for peace and reconciliation, particularly when violence was threatened. This got some of us, including me, in trouble with some of our congregational members who didn’t want any reconciliation.

I took on some responsibilities with the Synod serving first as a member of the Personnel Committee and then as chair of the committee. I was chair of the committee through a rancorous downsizing of staff. It was a heartrending experience.

The biggest spiritual issues in the my time in Oneida, before the last two years, was that my wife became ill and spent 6 weeks in the hospital and later my daughter became ill and besides her time in the hospital, was ill for almost a year.

As John pointed out when we first started this dialogue I was an Evangelical in what, from my point of view, was a progressive presbytery. The good news was that, for the most part I was respected and heard. The presbytery rarely voted my way on important issues but that didn’t stop me from being respected and accepted. And I had one very close friend who was my spiritual advisor and I his. We probably knew more about each other than our wives did.

BUT! There was a curious dynamic of conflict in the congregation. I expected this and tried to encourage new styles of dealing with conflict, for the most part unsuccessfully. We got new hymnals but kept the old ones and I tried to use hymns from both, but some people didn’t accept the new hymnal at all. They wouldn’t sing the hymns if they were from the new hymnal. We tried a new method of serving the Lord’s Supper, coming forward to receive the sacrament. Some loved the new method. Some wanted only the old method, being served in the pews. We had a successful negotiation about this, having a congregational wide survey which helped people to not only state their emotional/spiritual reasons for wanting to receive communion in a particular way but also to make theological statements on the issue.

We also had a successfully resolved conflict about change in the chapel. We formed a task force of people who disagreed about how to use and set up the chapel and they came up with an elegant solution that was different than any suggested by any of the sides earlier and satisfied all sides. Unfortunately all problems were not so easily solved.

I started a DMin program at Pittsburgh Seminary in 1997. I loved it. I had spent too much time on administration and not enough on theology. The program gave me the balance.

In the spring of 2000 things came to a head. I had started training small group leaders to encourage spiritual renewal as part of my DMin project and talked with the Session about spiritual renewal. In the meantime I made the mistake of paying attention to the new members of the congregation who wanted change and not paying attention to the needs of older members. Finally, after we called in people from the Committee on Ministry the Session asked for my resignation. But with a twist.

My daughter had another year in high school. The Session allowed me a year to find a new call so my daughter could finish high school in Oneida. I had to drop my DMin project and program. The conflict and solution was hidden from the congregation. We decided to stay so my daughter could graduate. It was a great decision for her. It was a terrible decision for me. I spent a year working in a congregation where the Session had made it clear that I was no longer wanted and it hurt terribly. Fortunately I still had lunch with my friend and got a lot of support from the Interim Presbytery Exec. It was something but it wasn’t enough.

After several interviews all over the country, I ultimately accepted a call to a congregation in New Jersey. I resigned as pastor of Oneida 1^st, a decision I’m still not sure was the right one. Sometimes I think the conflict should have been brought to the congregation. And unfortunately I carried with me a lot of anger and pain from Oneida.

Suffice it to say that it was a bad parting. We sold our house and we moved to a church in Titusville, NJ.

I will talk about that next time.

EARLY YEARS OF MINISTRY

For all you Presbyterian Camp people, yes that is a picture at Ghost Ranch. An explanation in a few paragraphs.

I started out in ministry learning very quickly that seminary didn’t give much practical training for ministry, at least in the 1970’s. I knew Biblical languages and all kinds of theology but those didn’t prepare me for what I was to do. My first real test in ministry came with my first funeral. I got a call from a funeral home asking me to do a funeral for a non church member. It was a young man who was in the act of stealing gasoline and had been overcome by the fumes and died. What do you say at a criminal’s funeral who died in the act? I preached on grace.

Most of my work was with youth and taking communion to shut-ins. Youth are a great deal of fun and a real challenge. When they aren’t bored to tears they ask the questions adults are afraid to ask. And when they trust you they will tell you things that their parents wish the pastor didn’t know.

I started a new summer program in 1980. We had Bible studies at houses with pools. We also had dinner. Needless to say, food and swimming attracted lots of youth. The second summer the youth studied the Psalms for the summer. One of the youths had a close relationship with an elderly couple in the congregation. The wife was in the hospital with Alzheimer’s and pneumonia. We read and talked about one of those Psalms that say if you are good and faithful the Lord will reward you with health and riches. The girl got all upset; pointing out that here was a faithful Christian who wasn’t healthy or rich. She questioned the message of the Psalm. It was a very good discussion. The curious thing happened during prayer time. The girl said she wanted us to pray for her elderly friend. I asked what we should pray for and she said we should pray that the woman would have a quick and painless death. We did so. The woman died that night. I’ll leave the questions and debate about the theology and efficacy of prayer to you.

We also took two work trips, both times to Ghost Ranch. There is nothing quite like digging ditches, fixing trails and getting tumbleweed out of the sewer pond to help youth discover the meaning of mission. I’ve always thought that work trips build the faith of youth and adults because of the connection between the work and evening prayer and Bible study.

I did some adult education as well. I spent a year teaching Kerygma: the Bible in Depth. The class members learned something. I learned a lot. Teaching became a spiritual experience for me and on top of that I learned enough about the Bible to develop a preaching style.

The biggest spiritual event during my years in Anaheim was the birth of my son. Any Christian parent knows that you need a deeper faith when your child first does projectile vomiting. It scared the heck out of me! Having children means praying out of a position of helplessness. There are those little lives in your hands and you are responsible for both their physical wellbeing and their spiritual wellbeing. It’s an awesome responsibility.

The other important thing I learned in Anaheim was that there are different styles of church management. The senior pastor went to seminary in the 1950’s. The management style back then was the senior pastor is in charge and the assistant/associate pastor did what he/she was told. I learned a collegial style at seminary. Needless to say, we clashed. Which lead to me seeking a new call in 1982.

We moved to rural central PA, a massive difference from urban Anaheim. I had a lot of farmers in my two congregations. You could buy your veggies right at the farm. You could even raise a pig and have a party to slaughter and start cooking the pig! We didn’t raise pigs, but Debby canned and froze veggies and fruit with the best of them.

Now I was the pastor. Suddenly I had a whole lot more sympathy for my old boss. Now I got the complaints and the weird phone calls about the flowers for Sunday. I really didn’t care about the flowers at all but one deacon called me every week about the flowers. If I wasn’t home she wanted a decision from Debby. Debby was not amused.

I learned that prayer can be a very earthy thing. We prayed for rain. We prayed for the flood waters to go down. Most of all I prayed for and with people in hospitals.

Being a pastor of a couple of small churches meant you knew everyone well. Most of the funerals were for people I knew well. They hurt. I had to learn how to love people and minister too them while my own heart was breaking.

I preached every Sunday now, which took a lot of preparation time. I was very glad when computers came in so that I could edit on the computer! I learned that being pastor of two congregations meant that you could write one sermon but the message had to be different at each church because there were different needs. Worship took on deeper meaning. I discovered that it is difficult for me to be in a worshipful mood while leading worship. The Lord’s Supper became very important to me because as the elders served the congregation I could sit and pray and meditate on the sacrament.

I still led youth groups, including a class for junior highers on sexuality. What surprised me to no end was that parents made their children go to the class! Youth group attendance doubled during that particular segment. And the youth didn’t go into giggle mode but asked intelligent questions. It was a good program. I was very fortunate to have adults who worked hard to talk about the joyful gift of sexuality and how to use that gift carefully as a Christian.

I also learned that rural poverty could be as bad as or worse than urban poverty. One of my congregations was in a community that sat on the flood plain of the river. Almost all the church members had moved out of the community. I was very proud of them when they went door to door in the community, not just looking for new church members but trying to find out the needs of the people in town. We did a lot of work with the poor. I learned about the joys of having rats in your house because the people next door wouldn’t take out their garbage. I learned about the problems of absentee landlords who don’t keep the properties up to code. To my dismay I discovered that some of these absentee landlords were members of my congregation. I became the pastor for the community, called on to meet the needs of people who never went to church.

And Debby became pregnant again. This pregnancy was different. During the third month Debby started bleeding and had to stay in bed for two weeks. Besides giving me both the responsibilities of ministry and care for a 2 year old at the same time it made me think about children and abortion. I was driving down the road one day listening to a tape by Phil Keaggy and his song, The Little Ones came up. Here are some of the lyrics:

Who will speak up for the little ones,

Helpless and half abandoned?

They have a right to choose

Life they don’t want to lose.

I’ve got to speak up, wont you?

I had to pull off the road because I was crying and couldn’t see. I had been opposed to abortion before this on Biblical grounds but now it became real to me in a new way. I prayed everyday for our baby to live, knowing she might die. Others were making decisions that would cause the death of their babies. I came to the conclusion that there abortion is rarely a proper moral choice but mainly on emotional grounds. Our daughter was born with a few physical problems which were easily overcome by surgery. Unfortunately she inherited traits from me like stubbornness that appeared soon after she was born and continue to this day. On the other hand, both of are children were and are delights.

Rural churches can be a lot of fun but they also make a pastor spend a lot of time in the car. The closest hospital was 20 miles away, but a lot of people didn’t go there. They went to Harrisburg, Hershey or Danville, all over an hour’s drive away. Some days I just got in the car and spent the whole day visiting people in the various hospitals.

The other major issue that confronted me was doing counseling for people. I started working with people who were being physically abused, people going through divorces and people on drugs. There was no counseling center close by and there was a great stigma attached to seeing a therapist. Even talking with the pastor was frowned upon. And people found out, sometimes simply by seeing who’s car was parked near my house. Gossip moves in a rural community faster than the speed of light.

After about 5 years I decided it was time to move on. I took some church management courses and circulated my dossier. In November of 1989 we moved to Oneida, NY. While there I met this crazy pastor from up on the Tug Hill Plateau, John Shuck. More on Oneida next time.

MDiv

What’s the most fun you can have in Southern California? Going to Fuller Seminary! Okay, hiking in the mountains and body surfing come in as close seconds. The traffic is terrible and there is nothing quite like being able to see the air you breathe. Fuller is about five miles from the front of the San Gabriel Mountains and they disappear everyday at about 10:30 AM into the smog. Fortunately they come back out by 5:00 PM.

My years at Fuller were some of the best years of my life. I loved the learning, I loved the friendships, and I loved the classes. Well, maybe polity class wasn’t all that great but most of the rest were.

I don’t think I ever really considered going to a different seminary. Part of the reason was that I had been away from my family for 5 years and I wanted to spend time near Mom and Dad again. Part of the reason was that I wanted to go to an evangelical seminary and Fuller was the best. Looking back I think Fuller opened me to consider new and different ideas. If I had gone to a mainline seminary like Princeton I would have put a wall around me to protect me from all the heresy. Going to Fuller allowed me to relax and learn.

Fuller in the 1970’s was an interesting place to be. Some of the scholars who helped start the seminary were still there and some of the new great faculty was coming on board. The biggest problem at Fuller between 1975 and 1979 was the size of the student body compared to the number of faculty. Fuller grew so quickly that the some of the class sizes were immense. They even had MDiV students teaching Greek! I did some tutoring, mainly teaching people English grammar. You can’t learn Greek without knowing English grammar. I took a New Testament Theology class with Glen Barker that had 160 students in it. But I got to study under Roberta Hestenes, Paul Jewett, George Ladd, Fred Bush, Lewis Smedes, Bill Pannell, William LaSor and even Dan Fuller. And yes, I took a bunch of classes from Jack Rogers.

I was like a pig who found where the farmer kept the slops. I got to study what I always wanted to study. Even Hebrew was fun. The best thing about studying at Fuller was that the professors didn’t let you just learn evangelical theology. You had to study every perspective. So I read various liberation theologies, process theology, Pentecostal theology, even Quaker theology along with current and past evangelical theologies. I was required to read Luther, Calvin, Augustine, some of the Anti Nicene, Nicene and Post Nicene theologians, and lots of Church History. The one thing missing was any real emphasis on Eastern Orthodox theology. There were so many students from so many traditions you could have a theological argument about just about anything at any hour of the day or night.

And since there was the School of World Missions, now called the School of Intercultural Studies, you met a lot of people from all over the world. One of my intercultural learning experiences came one day as I walked into chapel with a friend from Africa. In parts of Africa men who are friends naturally walk down the street holding hands. You all may have noticed that this is not a tradition in America. My friend from Africa took my hand as we walked into chapel and I had this panic reaction. I kept telling myself this was a natural thing in Africa. My emotions told me that everyone around us thought we were gay. We weren’t, after all, in Africa.

I got married at the end of my first year at Fuller. I drove back east to New York, got married, went on a week of honeymoon and then we packed up all of Debby’s stuff and drove back to California. We moved into Fuller housing and Debby went to work to support us. It was a good thing my parents lived near by because some weekends we went to Mom and Dad’s to eat because Debby didn’t get paid until Monday. We managed to stretch three years at Fuller into four because we couldn’t afford to pay for all the classes for a three year schedule.

Ever notice that if you have a roof over your head, food to eat and books to read that life can be wonderful? We didn’t have a TV, rarely went to the movies, couldn’t afford to go out to dinner but had a blast. We hung out with friends, had each other over for dinner, talked theology, (which put Debby to sleep), played Frisbee and generally had a good time.

But the best for me was the learning. I learned how to read the Bible not just as a book with stories but as a book with authority. I learned to read the Bible as a scholar. I learned to lead small group Bible studies. I read theology, a practice I’ve kept up my whole life.

I considered going on and getting a PhD. I didn’t and I made the right choice. I am a pastor.

I spent one year working in my home congregation developing an Adult Education program. I spent a summer working with youth at another church and the next year working with college students.

And then I spent a summer working as an intern in a large congregation. It just so happened that the pastor had been the pastor of my home church in New Jersey had moved to Southern California. He had arrived the fall before and both the associates left almost immediately. Two weeks after I started he and his family went on vacation and I was the only quasi pastor there. It was a 1,500 member church. I survived. It made a big difference in the way I thought of myself as a pastor.

In the fall of 1979 I received a call and became the assistant pastor of education and visitation at First Presbyterian Church, Anaheim, CA.

COLLEGE AND JESUS

This is a picture of me and my family taken in the winter of 1970-71, after 1 quarter at college. I tried to find the picture of me with longer hair and a beard but can’t. That’s me with the long hair.

I went off to college one confused student. On the one hand I still believed God wanted me to be a pastor. On the other hand I was busy being a hippy. Looking back I think I was partly running away from the idea of being a pastor. So I turned to sex, drugs and rock and roll. On the other hand I became a religion major.

I learned very early in my freshman year that drinking a whole lot was a bad idea. It doesn’t feel too bad when you are drunk, even throwing up. The hangover the next day is a killer.

And I fell in love. I mean really deeply head over heels going down for the third time in love. I still had retained the training of my youth: if you have sex you get married. It was great and I was happy.

I went to class too. I started taking religion classes. I read Augustine, Kierkegaard and Tillich. I started to take Bible classes. It was my first experience with the idea that the Bible didn’t drop down out of heaven and that some scholars believed that parts of the Bible weren’t true or at least didn’t happen exactly the way the text said it happened.

After going home for the summer to California I came back to the news that my girlfriend had a new boyfriend at home and was breaking up with me. I was devastated. I had my first extreme anxiety reaction and my first major depression. I spent most of the winter quarter playing cards and not going to class. Curiously I passed Sociology with a C without going to class or reading the book. I did read all my Religion texts. I had really bad experiences with drugs. I quit using and I quit drinking too.

I carried on my anti-war activities. I did draft counseling both at school and back home in California. We sat on the front steps of the draft board and offered advice on what the draft law really said. Neither the draft board nor the FBI were amused.

Sometime towards the end of my sophomore year I wandered into a meeting of the campus Christian fellowship. Something happened to me that night. I found out that two guys from my freshman dorm hall had been praying for me for over a year. And as I prayed at that meeting I felt the presence of God. Somehow it felt like these people that I barely knew were more my friends than my druggy friends. I felt a connection to God. But it didn’t change my theology.

I went home for the summer believing that Bultmann was right, that there had been no literal resurrection, that the disciples had had a resurrection experience. I tried to teach it to the youth group at my home church. It didn’t go over too well.

I went back to college for my junior year partly changed. I stopped running away from God and accepted that I was going to be a pastor. And I began to question the historical Jesus movement. Bultmann’s God didn’t help me at all. I needed a God who could actually change things in my life and in my heart. So I began to ask questions in religion classes. I was a pest.

Sometime in my junior or senior years I met a crazy Dutch Calvinist named Pete Steen. He introduced me to a whole different way about thinking of Jesus as Lord. He taught me that Jesus was to be Lord of all of life and I began to learn ways to think about that. When I talk about ethical issues it comes out of that tradition. Pete also taught me to question the philosophical assumptions of everyone. I found out that Reimarus was looking for a Jesus without miracles and that Bultmann started off with Existentialism and ended up with Heidegger. It wasn’t that I was convinced that the Bible was dictated by God. Rather I began to question the assumptions of the scholars. I lost faith in the idea that one could find a historical Jesus behind the Bible. And I began to trust the Bible more, both as a historical document and as a document that had authority.

I spent a year working for the university as a housing director. I spent some of my time teaching students about the presuppositions of the scholars they read in religion classes. The religion professors were not happy with me. After a year working for the university, (during which I met my wife), I headed off to Fuller Seminary, now a Calvinist Evangelical, still with long hair.

Grace and Peace

Bob

SIN AND ADIAPHORA

Sin

I dragged my feet for a while on this as I have written other things. Here is the end of the series: Apostasy, Heresy, Serious Error, Sin and Adiaphora.

Everyone sins and everyone is infected with the spiritual virus of sin.

The spiritual virus is original sin. Somehow we become sinners because we’re human. It wasn’t always this way. Adam and Eve weren’t born sinners. They chose sin, disobedience to God.

The Bible sees humanity as both a collective and a group of individuals. We westerners aren’t used to thinking of ourselves as mainly part of the collective so we have a problem with original sin. But Paul clearly sees us as a collective. He says that just as in Adam all die so in Christ all have new life. As individuals, however, we have to choose Christ to be released from the virus of sin.

Actually the problem is more difficult than we think. Our Calvinist ancestors in Holland said that we are totally depraved. That doesn’t mean that we set out each day to sin as much as we can or that everything we do is sin. It means there is no part of any human being that is without sin. Some like to think our reason is untainted by sin. This simply isn’t true. Just look at the contortions we go through to say that what we think is reasonable when it isn’t at all reasonable to our loved ones.

So before someone becomes a Christian that person has no choice. That person lives in sin. Without faith in Christ and the salvation he offers there is no release from sin. We inherit sin and death. If we have faith in Christ he releases us from the power of sin that utterly corrupts us.

The real problem for Christians is that when we become Christians we don’t automatically stop sinning. There is a distinction between justification, (being declared guiltless because of Christ’s death and resurrection for us), and sanctification, (becoming holy in our daily lives). Justification sets us free from the power of sin but not the powers of temptation or habit.

So, we sin. Everyday we Christians get up in the morning with the best of intentions. We want to spend the day living as God’s people, living holy lives. Yet everyday we fail somehow. By the end of the day we find ourselves confessing our sin to God, asking for forgiveness and hoping tomorrow will be different.

I’m not going to provide a detailed list of sins. It would take too much space and I probably would leave something out anyway. The clear message of how to live a holy life comes from Jesus, “You shall love the Lord with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” I know, it isn’t an exact quote but the point is there. If we love God with our complete beings and love neighbors in the way we love ourselves, (or better, for those of us with self image problems), in the way God loves us, we won’t sin.

So the Christian life follows a pattern of moving away from God into sin and then moving back towards God as we confess, repent and ask for forgiveness.

Sanctification is the process by which we give up some of our sin. It takes work but we can, with the help of the Holy Spirit, stop sinning a particular sin. With the hard work of prayer and thinking before I speak I can stop swearing. Of course that is only one small category of sin. I might stop swearing out loud but I would still need to work on the things I think about others. And in each of us the list goes on and on.

I am convinced that the best way to work at sanctification is in small groups. The problem is to do so we have to trust others. We need the people in our small groups to keep their big mouths shut. We need the humble acknowledgement from all that all of us in the group are sinners, looking for help. We need the prayers, specific prayers of the others in our group, asking God to help us change. We need the group to be bold and ask us how we did in the past week working on that particular sin. Finally we need the certain knowledge that the group will not hate us or kick us out because we fail.

That is a real and important task of the Church. Unfortunately we don’t do it, for the most part. We want to talk just with God about our sins. We want to be lone ranger Christians. And that is not God’s intention for us. Being a member of the Church, a Church filled with sinners, should be terribly freeing. When we gather with our particular congregations we should know as we walk in the door that everyone in the room is a sinner, including the leaders of the congregation and the pastor. No one is exempt. Tthe great good news is that the congregation is a group of forgiven sinners. And when we are at our best we help each other, with humility, to overcome our sins.

Adiaphora

Don’t you love the way the leaders of the Church toss around words that most members don’t understand? Adiaphora is one of those words. Adiaphora means things indifferent. Despite our assurance that God cares about everything in our lives there are some things that don’t really matter. God doesn’t care what color we paint the sanctuary. God does care if we use lead based paint because it might harm someone, but God doesn’t care about the color. God doesn’t care about the order of worship. Get the essentials in and God is completely satisfied as long as we come to worship with an attitude of praise and humility.

The list of things that just aren’t important is pretty long. God doesn’t care if the pastor wears a robe in worship or not. God doesn’t care if men wear ties to worship or if women wear pants. God likes rock anthems and classical anthems. I suspect that God would prefer that we not spend so much money on church buildings but God doesn’t care what the building looks like. After all for centuries Christians met in living rooms, on hillsides and even in tombs, (the catacombs under Rome). God doesn’t care how long or short your hair is although God doesn’t want you to spend a whole lot of money on your looks.

Curiously we humans seem to care more about adiaphora than we do about sin, heresy, serious error or apostasy. The biggest church fights I have ever seen were about what color to paint the back stairwell and what hymnal to use. And don’t even get me started on traditional worship and contemporary worship. We seem to major in the minors. God cares about gossip, the enduring sin in the Church that everyone seems to accept as acceptable. God doesn’t care if the pastor uses perfect grammar or not.

So I have a suggestion for all who read this. Take a look at your life and the life of your congregation. Go ahead, make a list of the things that you know God wants you to change, a list of your sins. Read the Bible and see what God wants and doesn’t want. And then make a list of the things that simply aren’t important. Try, very carefully, to suggest to your fellow Church members in the midst of an argument that God doesn’t care if there are pews or chairs in the chapel.

Try to distinguish between sin and adiaphora. Then maybe we can get down to the real business of the Church.