David Williams's Blog, page 73

Chapter One: Why The Small Church?

Why write about the small church?  Why research it?  Why care at all?One primary reason was reflected in a recent article highlighted by the hipster Jesus publication Relevant Magazine.  It was entitled:  "Five Really Bad Reasons For Leaving Your Church," or somethin' like that.It was a blog-missive from a church-plantin'-pastor type, Aaron Gloy.  Gloy spent much of this article admonishing Christians for some of the less-valid reasons they find to abandon a congregation, structured into one of those nice neat little listicles that are a surefire way to drive web traffic.It wasn't terrible, and I found myself agreeing with it, mostly, with one notable exception.That exception came with bad-reason-number-two:  "The Church is Getting Too Big."   As a reason to leave, that tends to occur when a community is experiencing significant growth, and folks feel a sense of loss as the thing they valued disappears.That, frankly, can be a major problem for some churches, as legitimate growth is sabotaged by human beings whose personal power within a community is threatened by newcomers.  On a more neutral front, it can be hard for others to find a way to let go of the sense of identity that a little fellowship provides.  There's real loss and mourning there, but that shouldn't prevent a community from being a place of welcome.But the pesky thing with bloggery is that it tends to push us to make bolder statements.  Like, say, that: "Remaining small is a sad and unbiblical goal."  He then goes so far as to accuse those who like intimate communities of being "in need of repentance." As a small church pastor, that got me dander up, it did.  But I took a few deep breaths, and tried to see it from his perspective.Because even there, I can see where he's coming from.  We're not supposed to hide our light under a bucket, after all.  We are charged with going out into the world and spreading the Good News.But organizational expansion and the Great Commission are very different things.  If I tell the Good News to another human being, and they are changed by it, that's the growth I seek.  I do not care if they choose to live that changed life out as a pledge unit in my community.  If I do, then the growth is about me and my desire, and not about the spread of the Spirit.In point of fact, "remaining small" is paradoxically central to the growth of the Gospel.  This is why Big Parking Lot Churches so assiduously and carefully support small gatherings.  That's where relationship happens, and conversation happens, and sustained transformation happens.  It's where the Spirit moves most freely.  The big emotional hit of a perfectly choreographed crowd-worship?  That fades away as quickly as Psy's fame.  Psy?  You remember Psy.  “Gangnam Style?”  Yeah, fame fades.Emotional manipulation does not represent spiritual growth.  The meat and life of the Way is in those places where you are connecting to other flawed, struggling, growing, beautiful souls, and walking the walk with them.Those places are small."Growth is inevitable," Loy suggests.  It isn't, because it can't be.  Why not?  Because despite the expectations of growth-driven suburban development and urban infill, not every community is growing.  I recently spent a weekend in West Virginia, and as I wended my way down some lovely, twisty country roads, I passed dozens of small churches.  There is no sprawl there.  It's rural, and population is either stable or declining.Churches there do not grow large, because they are not in the urban, suburban, or exurban places where growth in our culture is occurring.  They can’t grow, because they exist in a medium that does not permit it.Are these rural gatherings illegitimate?  Are they not places where the Gospel is needed and legitimately expressed?  I cannot believe either of those things to be so.  But it is easy, in our consumer culture, to equate numerical expansion with what is good.  This is not so."If you don't like big churches, you wouldn't have liked the first church, and you certainly won't like heaven," Loy suggests. I'm not quite so sure on either of those points.  First, the "first church," assuming he's talking about the ones Paul and Apollos and Cephas and others planted?  Those were house churches.  Not large, not flashy, not hundreds and hundreds of souls.  By our standards, those were small gatherings.  So I'm not quite sure what that means.   And second: heaven?  I don't think it bears any resemblance to Big Stadium Worship.  Or anything we now understand.  I mean, seriously, dude.  It’s heaven.Yes, I know American culture venerates expansion and growth.  Just look at our midsections. But let's not cast aside the small without considering what we're throwing away.  And so, as I’ve worked towards my doctorate, I've found myself thinking more and more about healthy small faith communities.  What makes them vibrant?  What makes them worth attending?  What maintains them as organic institutions?  Much of that has to do with perception and the sense a congregation has of its own identity.So the other day as I was looking over the web presence of my own little community, I found myself encountering a sentence I've read dozens of times with slightly different eyes.We are, or so the little blurb that pops up on Google informs you, "small but growing."    And I found myself suddenly wondering, "small but?"   Huh.   I'd never really thought about that before.  Does any church really need to have a "small but?"  Is small something that churches need to apologize for?Oh, sure, there are plenty of things of which I could see a church needing to repent.  There are plenty of entirely justifiable "buts.""We're emotionally manipulative and judgmental sometimes, but at least we've learned to recognize it." "We're a giant warehouse of a church indistinguishable from a Best Buy, but we try to build relationships in the midst of this faceless crowd." "We're a giant corporate church with a worship as carefully choreographed as a Cirque de Soleil show in Vegas, but we work hard to still have a human touch." "We're a social clique, but we've been trying to figure out how to be more welcoming." "We're drab, dull, and boring, but we're willing to change, or at least laugh every once in a while.""We're as mean as a rattlesnake, but you don't have to come here."Those things, I'd get.  Some are certainly spiritual afflictions of small faith communities.  And some churches really do stay little primarily because they have no good news to offer. But small itself?  I'm not sure that's a thing we need to qualify. We are small and vibrant.  We're scrappy and hardworking.  We are intimate and spiritual.  We are cute and cuddly.  We are a place where you can make a difference.  We are a place of belonging. Whatever we say, it needs to be:  "We know who we are, and from that place of authenticity, we speak the Gospel into the world."Because the way we understand ourselves has a tremendous impact on the way we respond to God’s call on our lives.  If we view smallness as something that marks our communities as inherently inadequate, then we’re succumbing to a peculiar and unbiblical assumption about the nature of church.It’s an assumption that arises out of our culture, out of a society that has increasingly fetishized size as the measure of quality.But it’s a flawed assumption, one that a small but growing chorus of voices is recognizing as unhealthy for the life of the church.  What are the alternatives to growing big, sprawling our church out across the landscape like an endless field of industrial-agriculture GMO corn?What does it look like for a community to be small, robust, and sweet, like that little patch of strawberries that thrives with a little bit of care in your front yard?That’s the point of this project, and the point of this book.To begin, a little history and a little context.  How did we get to this place in the great journey of the Way?  How did we reach this point where business models and growth projections and the skillsets of corporate culture are viewed as vital elements of a “healthy ministry?”This thing we call church is, after all, not a “business.”  We are not primarily about buying and selling, or about products.  Sure, we have “services,” but we’re using that word in a very different way.  And profit?  Profit is not our goal.What our gatherings are looks much more like the organizations we call “nonprofits.”  So for that, let’s first take a little walk through the evolution of charitable organizations in the United States.  
LINK TO CHAPTER TWO

Introduction

IntroductionWhy strawberries?  Why “strawberry churches?”After starting it up a couple of years ago, the strawberry patch in front of our kitchen window is now going like gangbusters.   I was convinced, when I began the process of planting and growing them, that this wouldn’t be the case.  Surely, they’d be wiped out by either my incompetence or some blight, devoured by rodents or nibbled away by ants.  But what I’ve discovered is that strawberries are remarkably simple, robust and productive plants.  They set in well.  They spread on their own, spreading out on runners.  And they produce.  A little water, a little weeding, and that five-by-five square of stolid Virginia clay has been a veritable cornucopia of sweet and/or tart berries.So many, in fact, that the second year I grew them, for the first time in my existence, I spent a post-Sunday Monday morning making home-made strawberry jam.   Yummy, yummy jam.A larger patch has gone in on the other side of the driveway, and though it's taken a hit or two from some burrowing critters, it's on the way towards producing a really rather nice yield come late summer.  More jam will be forthcoming. I really enjoy growing strawberries, particularly when the tiny little cherub who lives next door comes over to check out how they are doing.   "Hello, neighbor," he says, in his tiny little voice, and then wanders over for one of those conversations that make me wistful for when my own lads were that age.He's marveled at our blueberries, and squatted down and peered earnestly at the green beans, and looked at the riot of blackberry vines.  But the strawberries?  He loves those most of all.Sure, they're simple to grow, being a robust and unassuming little plant.   But to a preschooler, for whom the world remains bright with magic, a bursting strawberry patch is an amazing, marvelous thing.And so it was struck me, when I was first showing my little neighbor the first tiny budding green berries, that the strawberry is a particularly lovely metaphor for the kind of church I think I like the best.Strawberry plants are small, sweet, simple and good.  They can thrive in a field, or in a little pot set out on the balcony of your apartment.And so the idea arose: what are we really looking for in a church?More often than not, we think we’re looking for something complex.  We’re looking for programs and buildings, for perfect music and a silver-tongued preacher.Many of us may be looking for those things.  But if we’re looking for something simple and gracious, spiritually nourishing and sweet to the soul, something that exists on a more human scale?  What does such a church look like?  What do we need to do to nurture and cultivate such a fruitful community?The rest of what you’re about to read is my best swing at answering that question.
Link to Chapter One

Laying Down Your Soul

"No greater love than this," Jesus intones, and then he talks about laying down his life for his friends.

There's always been a resonance to this passage that I've struggled with.  Here, a text that seems to speak of dying for a band of brothers, and of the cross as blood sacrifice.  The cross is important to me, it is.  It is the mark and emblem and proof of who Jesus was, and why he was so important.

But so is every other part of my Teacher's life, and everything that he taught and did.  When his specific instructions on how to live are subordinated to a theology that places no ethical demands on us beyond obeisance, Christian faith becomes a stunted thing.  The cross has meaning because of who was upon it, and what they taught and lived.  What that person taught and lived has meaning because of how far he was willing to go to show that he meant it.  The two cannot be separated.

This tends to be read in terms of his willingness to die, physically and materially, as a sacrifice.  That's certainly how I've read it, particularly in the context of the "Farewell Discourse," in which this teaching occurs.  Jesus, talking about his dying.  That's how I've read it.  Here, an evocation of that blood-sacrifice demand that seems so peculiar in Christian faith, that God requires that a perfect human being must bleed and die for the world to be made whole.

I still struggle with the whole concept of substitutionary atonement, mightily, as did my spiritual teacher.

But I was noodling around in the sweet simple Greek of John's Gospel the other day, and suddenly something about this passage walloped me.  Because as the community of the Beloved Disciple retold the story of their Master, Jesus does not say "lay down his life for his friends."  

Instead, in the awkward, strangely evocative patois of literally translated Greek, the Beloved Disciple's Jesus says this in John 15:13:  Greater of this love not yet one is having, that any the soul of him may be placing over the fond ones of him.

Greek is a little different, eh?  But what smacked me upside the spirit was this: The word used in that text that gets translated as "life" does not mean "life" in the sense I thought it did.

It's psychen.  Psyche, like the English word that arises from it, does not refer to organic process, not blood and bone and breath.  It's more than that.  There that word is.  Soul.  I lay down my soul for those I love.

This passage has never been just about physically dying.

It seems, frankly, like an even more profound sacrifice, one written not in meat alone, but in the deep compassion of a whole person, body and awareness and all, turned to serve another.

Being a Friend and Being an Ally

In the struggle for justice in our culture, one of the terms that gets bandied about a bunch lately is "ally."  If you support the rights of LGBT folks (which I unreservedly do) you need to be an "ally."   In the leftist circles where I lurk, it's as prevalent a term as "comrade" once was amongst the fellow-travelers of the communist era.   Is true, tovarisch!  

But ally, unlike comrade, does not just assume a common goal or purpose.

The term "ally" assumes a common struggle against a common enemy.  It is, as a term, largely representative of the power dynamics between nation-states.  Allies go to war together.  Allies share common economic goals. That form of relationship is about power and power dynamics, writ into a set of established and negotiated expectations.  Allies have rules and contracts and treaties that establish their alliances, which serve the shared interests of both.

Again, the word has to do with the dynamics of power and self-interest, not organic affinity and appreciation.
Thinking in terms of the United States?  Saudi Arabia is an ally.  So is the current government in Egypt.

Canada, on the other hand, is a friend.  The kind of friend who breaks into your national song when the singer's mike fails at a hockey game.  The kind of friend with whom you don't really worry about boundaries, because you trust each other so much those boundaries really don't matter.  You can be completely yourself and unafraid with a friend.  This is not true with an ally.

Among the wisest of the secular ancients, that's why friendship was considered among the highest of the virtues.  Philia, that natural and volitional affinity, was a relationship of complete, freely given trust between one person and another.  Being an ally is a more sterile, formalistic, and mechanical form of relation, one in which lists of rules and trigger-avoidance-protocols define a carefully negotiated exchange.

And for those who follow the Nazarene as their Teacher in all things, the term "ally" sounds with a peculiar dissonance against the radical command to both love and friendship.   "A greater love has no-one than this," says Jesus, as he swore his life to his friends.  Not his "allies."  The Greek word for "ally" does not appear in any of the teachings of Jesus, nor does it occur in any of the Epistles.

It's also challenging, honestly, to integrate the conflict-assumption of the "ally" concept into the radical agape ethic taught by the Nazarene.  Sure, one can have enemies, those ruled by brokenness and the injustices created by our hunger for power.

But the idea that your calling in existence is to go to war with those who your allies war with?  It stands in tension with the ground of the most fundamental ethic of Christian faith.  It is difficult to be authentically Christian and part of that form of binary relation.  Attacking and tearing down are not the methodology of the Way.

Yeah, I know, there's that one overturned table episode that's everyone's favorite conflict-prooftext, but last time I checked, an overturned table is not the defining symbol of the Christian ethic.    Neither can we create easily demonizable caricatures of those who inflict injustice, even as we oppose injustices.

It is why, if they approach their commitment to discipleship seriously, Christians make somewhat awkward allies in a conflict.  They cannot be trusted in a fight, because their commitment to grace and mercy is too radical.

The Strawberry Church

So here, for your amusement, the "children's-book-for-pastors-and-church-leaders" that I made as a complement to my Doctor of Ministry project. It's just a Shutterfly Photo Book, but those are kind of a cool and straightforward way to make a one-off hardback. Enjoy!  Oh, and it's better fullscreen.


 

Stories, Data, and Truth

It was an excellent little article, an exploration of the struggle many Americans have with science.  On the one hand, we say we love it, because science is awesome and nifty and stuff.  On the other, we seem to have trouble processing science as a decision-making framework.

When presented with scientific findings, we are perfectly willing to ignore them, or find reasons to just keep on blundering along.  Science tells us that the universe is 13.9 billion years old, and does so definitively.  But we ignore it.  Science tells us, with charts and graphs and clear deductive reasoning, that homo sapiens sapiens evolved.  But we reject it.  Science coughs and suggests, strongly, that perhaps it might be a mistake to turn our planet into a superheated, carbon-choked Venus.  But we listen to the lies told by the folks who sell us gas instead, because we like our big SUVs.  Science sees us choosing not to vaccinate, and struggles not to punch us in the nose for being such complete morons.

It's a clear dissonance.  The question: why?

Part of it, I think, has to do with the way we human beings understand our world.  We are creatures of story.  Our stories define us, give us a sense of ourselves, and give us a sense of purpose.

And this, as the article describes it, is part of the problem.  For our understanding of what is true, the article laments, we rely on "stories rather than statistics."

We prefer our truths told as tales, not as data points.  So we'll base our decisions on anecdotes, which as we really should know, are not reliable reflections of broader realities.  That story spun out by the mom at your preschool whose sister knew a woman whose kid started showing signs of autism after he got his MMR shots?  That has more value than the reflections of a thousand researchers, God help us.

And that's problematic on a deeper level, not just because anecdotal evidence causes us to make stupid decisions, or to spin out tales that are fundamentally ungrounded in reality.

It is problematic because if we set the storytelling part of our humanity aside, we cease to be human.

None of us understand our lives in terms of statistics and data points.  That is not what gives us our personhood, what establishes who we are.  Narratives create both individual identity and community cohesion.

Deeper still, narrative establishes purpose and moral ground, in a way that science simply cannot.  Storytelling creates meaning, and establishes the valuations that determines how we choose to act on the information we're encountering.  The deepest and most transforming stories don't even need to have actually happened to create moral purpose.  The stories told by my Teacher, or the wisdom fables of Aesop?  They didn't happen, and yet they frame existence in a way that creates identity.

The purpose of science is establishing what is or is not empirically true in our material reality.  That's the point of scientific method.  What it cannot do, and has neither the tools nor the desire to accomplish, is make any meaningful statement about how that information should be used.  Data is simply the ground for gathering more data.  Knowledge serves only knowledge.  And that path, clinically removed from its impact on persons and living systems, is a dangerous one to journey.

So where, in this dialectic tension between these two very different ways of knowing, lies the synthesis?  How do we integrate the data into the tale, and the tale into the data?

It lies, I think, in being willing to listen to the impacts of our stories on reality.  If the purpose of the story we're telling is radical compassion for neighbor and stewardship over creation, the report we'll get back from the data will go one way.  If the purpose of the story we're telling is material power, profit-maximization, or the glazed-eye pursuit of a snarling, fever-dream delusion, the data will report back another way.

Ye shall know them by their fruits, as the Teacher once said, in a pause between stories.

The Worst We Could Do

The images of medieval horror from the Middle East continue to pour our way, as helpless captives are beheaded or burned to death by the score in intentionally gruesome displays.

This is old school stuff, part of the pattern and dynamic of our dark past, and intended to both create fear and generate conflict.  Look at the terrible things we do, and fear us, ISIS seems to be saying.

Problem is, what they're doing is...well...quaint, in its bloodstained way.  Humanity has been through the 20th century and industrialization, and the peculiar retro character of their darkness seems callow.

I was reflecting on this while leafing through a book of the worst/most poorly designed weapons of all time, the sort of thing my adolescent sons seem to enjoy.  In that book was reference to arguably the single most horrific weapon ever designed by the United States of America.

This was the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, and the weapon system in question was the SLAM, a hypersonic nuclear ramjet missile, known alternately as Project Pluto, "The Big Stick," or the Flying Crowbar.  The concept was simple, really.

It was designed to fly at near-treetop altitudes, like a drone or cruise missile.  But it was also a hypersonic ramjet designed to evade Soviet radar.  To do that, it would fly under 1000 feet at speeds in excess of Mach 3.5.  The pressure wave of its passing over was enough to incapacitate or kill.

But wait!  There's more!  It also carried a payload of eight nuclear warheads, which it would scatter over targets as it passed.  It could obliterate every single inhabited area in an entire region, killing tens of millions.

But wait!  There's more!  The ramjet used for its power source an unshielded 500 megawatt nuclear reactor.  As it passed overhead at Mach 3.5, it would lethally irradiate everything beneath it.  And because it was nuclear powered, it could keep flying for thousands of miles.  During that time, it would layer death upon death, deafening and shattering and poisoning, passing over again and again.  It was a mindless automaton, an Angel of Death killing the first, second, and all-born, rendering the world below it uninhabitable for thousands of years.

This system was designed, concept proven, and ready to go.  The engineering was sound.  But it couldn't be tested, because, well, it would kill everyone and lethally irradiate an entire region during the course of the test.

And I look at the ritualistic, primitive butchery of ISIS, and know that it pales in comparison to what mechanized, technologically advanced civilizations can accomplish.  After the Somme and Dresden, Hiroshima and Auschwitz?  And considering what might have been, if we had wandered down that path?

God help us, but we're a mess of a species.

The Most Effective Church Youth Program In the World

There's a common refrain among oldline congregations and evangelical nondenominational types, and it runs like this:

We just can't hold on to our kids.  This is hardest among the oldliners, where college is pretty consistently the place where our progeny go off to vanish forever from the church.  But it's a challenge for the Jesus MegaCenter brand of Christianity, too.
The answer, as we tend to pitch it, is to make ourselves ever more "relevant."  We bring in screens and apps and software.  We hire young hipster youth pastors.  We awkwardly attempt to rap in worship, or do hippity hop, or whatever it is the whippersnappers are listening to these days.  We're extreeeemee, or we were, until that wasn't part of the lingo.  We make ourselves as much like pop culture as we can, scrambling to drop references that keep pace with the choking cornucopia of consumer-culture mythmaking.  And for all of the lipstick we slap on that pig, we still bleed out.

The kids look at the permeable, seemingly irrelevant boundaries of the oldline, or the synthetic corporate falseness of market-driven faith, and they wander away.
I've wondered, of the forms of Christian faith, what church does this the best?  Who holds on to their pups?  Who sustains commitment?  Where do they stick around and remain part of the community?
Lord help us, I think I may have found it. 
I was doing due-diligence research for my novel (postapocalyptic Amish literary fiction, due out next year from Algonquin Books), and there it was.  It was a little stat, buried in Donald Kraybill's excellent, thorough sociological study of the Old Order Amish in Lancaster County, PA.  The willfully irrelevant Amish, with their beards and bonnets, buggies and barnraisings? 
Their retention rate is around 94%.
Ninety four percent.  Register that.  Only six percent of Amish young folk choose to leave the church.  This, in a community that actually encourages its young folks to get out there and sample the world as part of their process of choosing to remain, a peculiar "unconfirmation" process.  There is no less culturally connected, less cutting-edge faith group in the US, and they win the retention race.
The why of this is complex, but seems to revolve around several factors.
First, the Amish live out a radically wholistic, unprogrammed faith.  Their practice bears absolutely no resemblance to the big stadium corporate approach of AmeriChrist, Inc.  They don't divvy folks up into demographics, carefully dividing out their worship and church life by age and preference.  It's just all one thing.  But they also integrate their faith completely into every last aspect of their lives.  Why are we living this way?  Because of what we believe.  Clothing.  Housing.  Work.  All of it, manifest in the dynamics of their every day existence.  It is, as they say, "authentic."  What it is not is corporate, or driven by marketing sparkle.  The Amish are not a business.  They couldn't care less about growth.  And yet they are growing, slowly, surely, in the way that compound interest grows.
Second, the Amish create a powerful community culture. There's a clear, bright, and evident character of Amish faith.  It requires and maintains a deep level of commitment, with boundaries around the dynamics of group culture that are potent.  Their folkways present an entirely different story than the story of the world outside.  The demands on members are intense, sustained, complete.  It is, in the most profound sense of the word, countercultural.  In that sense, the Amish present a clear deliniation between participation and nonparticipation.   There is none of the oldline waffling about other ways being just as good.  This is who we are, they say.  This is not who we are.

Third, the Amish teach their young to be adult members of the community.  That is all they teach them.  If you are raised Amish, that's what you know. Kids learn, early, that they're expected to be a part of it.   Not just expected.  They are a part it.  Amish life, which revolves around faith, assumes that the young participate in every facet of youth life as soon as they are able.   Work, worship, community and home life, all engage the young.  Oh, they have youth groups, sure.  They call them "gangs."  There is no adult in charge, no youth pastor who oversees them.  They're free-ranging, organic subcommunities, self-organizing informal teen fraternities and sororities.  But even in that, they are preparing for their free-will engagement in a small, relational community.

It ain't perfect.  The Amish are quite painfully human.  The expectations they set for community participation, and around the patterns of their lives?  They'd feel oppressive to many of us, like the radical disciplines of a demanding pre-modern monastic order.  And it meshes badly with modernity, the demands of modern life, and pluralistic values.

But it works.

Our Strange Books of Lies

It's not real, or so we now know.

The story?  The book entitled The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven.  It was the tale that was recently, publicly, and oddly refuted by the young man--critically and nearly mortally injured in a catastrophic car accident as a child--who claimed to have experienced a glimpse of eternity.  With God, and Jesus, and angels, and demons.  The whole shebang.

"None of this is true.  I made it all up," he said, before going off on an awkward fundamentalist tangent.

So of course, I had to read it.  It's been pulled from the shelves of bookstores and offline, but...hey...that's what libraries are for.

It wasn't exactly what I was expecting.  The author isn't rightly the young man in question.  He's a character in the story, but not the primary voice.  He was a boy at the time of the crash, only six.  The narrator, and the primary voice of the book?  That's his dad, who recounts the horrors of the crash, his desperate guilt as a father at having accidentally harmed his son, and the struggle for the life of a child after a massive spinal cord injury.

It's moving, genuine, and human.  It's also...well...more than a little bizarre.  Here is a family steeped in charismatic fundamentalist Christianity.  Their world is populated by demons and angels and powers, every moment part of an endless spiritual struggle.  It's a magickal worldview, so fraught with supernatural esoterica that it's essentially Wiccan.  Mystic though I am, I  don't really share that approach to the world, but...as with the witchy folk I know...I find I can love those souls nonetheless.

Even more odd was the refutation, placed in the context of the story the book told.  Here, a vision of heaven that was drawn completely and totally from Biblical literalism.   "When I made those claims, I had not read the Bible," the young man said as he recanted.  Yet everything about his now-repudiated vision was formed and shaped by fundamentalist Christianity and its interpretation of Scripture.  The vision of God.  The nature of Jesus.  The forms and shapes of angels.  The character of heaven and the heavenly city.  The devil.  All of it, riffs on a familiar theme.  Most peculiar.

There's something else, though.  There's an interesting twist on it.  It's a telling filled with details, spun with precision and pathos, every moment cast out until that instant of trauma, and then you, right there in the thick of life with them as the aftermath unfolds.  Conversations go back and forth, told word for word, as if you're there as the story is unfolding.  The recounting was surprisingly well done.

But it is also not likely entirely true.  Why?  Because there's such a profound level of detail.  Not of the trauma itself.  Trauma sears time into us, burning in memories with a bright fire.  But little details before the event?  And the precise wording of extended conversations afterwards, paragraph after paragraph, exchanges back and forth?  These things we are not good at recalling, not as they really were.

I recently did several interviews for my doctoral research, and in the absence of an adequate recording device, I transcribed sections of them on this very laptop.  My fingers were flying at certain points, struggling to keep up as folks dropped wisdoms and knowings that I wanted to capture.  Some stuff, I'm pretty sure I got verbatim.  But in other places, for large sections, I wasn't able to quote, because I didn't get it precisely enough.  If I ever publish it formally, I'll run it by the folks in question to insure it represents them fairly, because...even in my best effort to capture both tone and exact language...I know I might have filled in from my own subjectivity.  Not embellished, not intentionally.  But spun or misrepresented as my mind interpreted what they were saying.  It's a danger.

So here I am, reading a story.  It is not, cannot be, exactly true.   Not just about the heaven part.  But about the earth part.

We make lousy recording devices.   But then, that's not really our purpose, now, is it?

And Who Is My Neighbor?

I don't know exactly why I stepped outside.  It was just to see what the temperature was like, I think, and then to look up at the brightness of the night sky on an unusually warm February evening.
The moment I stepped outside, though, I knew something was off.  There was the smell of fire, not of wood, but that acrid sharpness of synthetics and plastics burning.  I stepped from our carport, and the street was filled with smoke, hanging heavy around the streetlights.
I called out my younger son, who agreed that there was something amiss.  We prowled down the street, checking, smelling, observing.  
Three houses down and across the way, the smoke seemed heaviest around a darkened home, and when I went to bang on the door, the muffled tone of a smoke detector's klaxon could be heard from within.
Other neighbors came out, and I called 911.  It took just minutes for the fire department to arrive in force.  They broke in, and thick smoke poured out from both front and rear of the house.  They found the fire, and extinguished it.
The word went around that there'd been a couple of small dogs removed the house, although I didn't see them myself.
But what we didn't know, what no-one I talked to seemed to know, was who actually lived there.  Not their next door neighbors.  Not the folks in the house across the street. 
It was a rental, and some folks knew the owner.  
Not a soul who gathered in the red-brilliant-stuttering light of those fire-engines knew the occupants.  There was no number to call, no urgent text or email to send, no way to say, hey, hey, your house is on fire, get back now.   I may have seen them, I think, now and then.  Getting into and out of their vehicles, a shadowy flutter between home and car, witnessed in passing.
Here, there were human beings who live close enough to my house that I could hit their home with a well placed frisbee throw.  I may have called in the volunteer heroes who saved their house and--God willing--their pets, but I do not know who they are.  I couldn't pick them out of a lineup.  
And I remember, this morning in my reflections, that time a man asked Jesus, so Jesus, who is my neighbor?
Back then, that meant one thing.  It assumed we would know, that the physical, material reality of the human beings who share our place was known to us.  It assumed we would be biased in favor of those souls, and against the stranger.  My Teacher challenged his listeners to expand their thinking about who is and is not a neighbor, about who deserves our compassion and care.
But now?  Now that question has different, stranger resonances.
Jesus.  Who is my neighbor?