Criticsm in Minisry

Slings and arrows Living with criticism: http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=7156

I too well identify with this article!
The author accurately identifies that it is people most who are most connected to the needs of others that tend to make their way into ministry (probably the wrong people that should!)--more importantly, it is also the people who are sensitive to the praise and criticism of others.

When I am criticised (which happens regularly) it knocks the life out of me. It is one of the reasons I continually seek another line of work. What other profession finds the character and the abilities of the individual criticised so regularly whether or not he or she is "on the clock". It doesn't matter what time of day, or what day of the week, we are "on".

It's exhausting, and it drives many away.

Copenhaver writes a good point: that for most things that we do for others, the whole purpose is praise. From cooking a meal to giving a gift, we give it with the other's appreciation in mind; but not ministry. Or it is not supposed to be. Rather, we are to give because we are being faithful to God, for the purposes of Him being proclaimed.

Someone recently shared with me the secreted of their longevity in this field:
Stop looking to others. Every single person will eventually fail you in some way. Every person will let you down. Redemption, and trust, is reserved for Christ.

"I am clearer that this ministry business is not about me" Copenhaver writes.
"We have too many preachers who want to hear their parishioners say, 'What a great preacher we have,' and not enough who long to hear them say, 'What a great God we have.'" I think I'm finally getting it.

On Technology and Cloud Computing

I believe that technology should be freeing.

The other day, I walked into the office and found the administrator arduously attempting to lay out a document in a word processor for our copy machine has a single button to perform the same task. It's about the appropriate use of technology.

And, right now, I think we are tied to our computers. As a part of this experiment, I'm attempting to go entirely "in the cloud." I'm facinated by this world that will be uprooted from any OS or PC. Mac, Windows, Linux, desktop, laptop, or netbook, it doesn't matter! All of our information is actually being stored and run off of the internet.

It's actually more difficult in Canada where services like lala.com are not available (a site that allows you to upload your entire mp3 connection), so I will do it as much as is possible.

So far my services include Google Docs (I tried Zoho, but prefer the familiarity and dependability of Google) Picasa, and DropBox (the most amazing product ever.)

We'll see how this goes. Like I said, I believe that technology should be freeing.

Meetup

On a recent vacation, I was fascinated to hear about the milieu which breeds the innovation that takes place in Silicon Valley. Apparently, the entire community acts like a type of creative commons, where individuals are constantly meeting with one another to build, challenge and support ideas. These meetups occur everywhere from coffee shops and one-to-one's to conferences and group sessions. Innovation occurs because teams naturally form from individuals with similar interests, and complementary skills. There is no hidden agenda. Everyone in the valley knows the intention behind the meetups, and everyone is motivated to network and build. Everyone also knows they need a team to build anything of worth. Or, at least this was the theory as it was presented to me.

I was thrilled by this. It is like all of the positives of post-secondary institutions, with real world applications. My mind began to wander, what if the Church operated like this? What if individuals of similar passions (Christ) gathered and joined together with complementary skills and worked towards a common purpose. (Rather humbling to think that Paul mentioned this very organizational structure some 1950 years ago.)

In my excitement I quickly fired up Meetup.com, a very practical way of organizing with others who might also be interested in this idea. It turns out zero people are interested in Youth or Young Adult Ministry or gathering (my current fields) but 46 were on a waiting list trying to be Christian writers.

I wonder what statistics like these indicate?

Work and Wealth: A Response to the NYTimes Letter, "Dear A.I.G., I Quit!"

I can't buy the argument that "hard work" alone is what leads to incredible wealth.

I just can't.

If hard work led to wealth, then teachers would be multi-millionaires, and social workers would be the power behind hedge funds. If hard work alone led to wealth, new immigrants would live in the largest houses and mothers would be honoured above all.
Work builds wealth. Really. But incredible wealth comes not from the hard work, but from the control or power over those systems of wealth creation. If you are making an income hundreds to thousands of times more relative to others in the economy, then you are benefiting from systems which allocate you the fruits of another's labour.
This isn't necessarily bad (save that for another discussion) but it is true.

So when I read Jake DeSantis (NYTimes) argue that what was rightfully his for his long hours of hard work -- all $742,006.40 post tax -- I can't help but react.
And when I read him write that he and his family will not suffer because of his hard work and proper savings, I struggle. I don't like the witch hunt that has become the AIG bonus fiasco, and I feel no distaste for this particular member. (Although, one might compare Mr. DeSantis resume (LinkedIn) with another's to more accurately judge how hard he has actually had to work.) But his earnings are not all his.

The only reason that Mr. DeSantis feels entitled to the payment that he is owed, is because the system was so seriously askew to begin with. The whole reason for economic collapse altogether is that the wealth producers are so heavily burdened by those who feel entitled their production: the labour tax. In simpler terms: wealth production cannot support the wealth entitlement. People think they are wealthier than they actually are (feel they are more entitled than they actually are) and when that bubble collapses, so does the economy that was built on it.

(Rome fell for largely this reason: the farmers and lower citizens could no longer support the entitlements of the increasingly burdensome and expensive aristocracy. And, if our global markets dry up, the foreign producers who play a large role in doing this for us will send tremendous shocks through our own stability well beyond any threat to A.I.G.)

Hard work produces wealth, but it does not conjure Mammon. All of our wealth is relative to each other as we cultivate this planet together. The only solution becomes that which is suggested by Jesus: a healthy eye. How we perceive our own entitlement is vital to all economic justice. While we can create wealth, we can not create incredible wealth without the cooperation of others, in which case, how much of it is us, and how much of it is them. In short, loving my neighbour as myself, what am I worth? Religion is not just some private practice, separate from commerce.

God threatens Israel with exile:

Ah, you who join house to house,
who add field to field,
until there is room for no one but you,
and you are left to live alone
in the midst of the land!
The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing:
Surely many houses shall be desolate,
large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.
For ten acres of vineyard shall yield but one bath,
and a homer of seed shall yield a mere ephah. (Is. 5.8-10)

Marketplace: Whiteboard

I've been an avid fan of American Public Media's Marketplace for some time now. It's where I get much of my information, and it's even the podcast that I run to.
I just discovered this little beauty on their website to help understand some market fundamentals: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/videos/whiteboard/ (Marketplace Whiteboard)

Oh public radio, you are so wonderful.

Consequences: Individual or Corporate Responsibility?

My wife and I often talk about the differences in culture between where she was raised (rural California) and where I was raised (Ontario).

Firstly, a caveat: accept this as the broad-sweeping, hyperbolic and anecdotal musing that it is, and not a definitive explication on the roots of culture.

I’m intrigued by the degree to which consequences are deemed as a result of individual choice in the US. “You made your bed, now sleep in it.”

This foundation applies to both positive and negative things: wealth, success, and good health are products of individual hard work, ingenuity, choice, effort, and sacrifice and are all therefore deserved and honoured. Likewise, poverty, ill health, and moral failures are associated with poor choices, and therefore individual responsibility demands the individual bear them. (My mind moves directly to how leprosy and other diseases were associated with familial sin in the first century.)

I’m not sure this is entirely wrong, as choice does bear much weight in how things will come to play -- like a tree bears the fruits determinant on the type of tree that it is. But it’s how deeply this concept is rooted that amazes me. There is very little patience for bearing the weight of another’s poor decision, and there is very little recognition of the systemic nature of culture. (I.e. Jesus’ death was not a result of his own sin, but the community’s. Our culture affects us, regardless of how perfect our choices are.) Social welfare systems are eschewed and almost demonized in America for ameliorating the corrective measure of Moral Hazard. This idea of Moral Hazard even infiltrates the economy, creating a concept of “free market” that is as far from Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand than most would like to admit.

While Canadians and Americans, as well as Republicans and Democratics, shoot polemics over social ideologies, I think where this really comes to culmination is when morality is brought in to play. How right and wrong progress into consequences – I define right as choices or decisions that are either in order or out of order with our intended purpose. “Purpose” has thusly been the focus of conversation for many philosophers and theologians. (In my case, purpose, or good, is being in line with God’s Kingdom and Christ’s inauguration of His New Creation. Bad, is not merely morality, but all things disobedient and that oppose this order. When Peter opposed Christ for approaching his death, it might be deemed as “good” to many ideologies because it upheld the value of life, but it was “bad” because it opposed God’s redemptive action in the world. [Matt. 16:21-23] Good is therefore obedience to the new world order, and bad is all that opposes it. Bad is disruptive and ultimately hurts people because it attempts to make them something that they are not -- rather like convincing a fish that it doesn't need water. This brings up a whole new discussion surrounding ideologies versus obedience, and how we have sorely confused the two.)

Take the abortion debate. Traditionally, even the most liberal scholars (and I mean philosophically liberal) would view abortion as a social blight. Whether a fetus is human life or not, to physically enter and abort the telos of life is not the best of circumstances for anyone, mother included. (For those who are fundamentally opposed to abortion in all circumstances, birth control must also logically be opposed because it is the other side of the same coin. Both oppose the telos of life, and the natural progression. We’ll leave this for another time though.)

However, in an environment where consequences are a result of individual decision alone, then, the individual must suffer the result of their poor moral choice. Hence the mobilization and energies surrounding protesting and criminalizing abortion. How many of the people who are so desperately opposed to abortion supportively walk alongside the mothers and their children? How many would help pay for or care for the individual who can’t afford to mother, or who is to bear the child of a date rape (Think of the Good Samaritan -- who was the real neighbour. The religious walked on the other side of the road.)? How many would invite them into their homes to help look after them?

The pendulum swings to the other side in the culture that I grew up in, which, having been greatly affected by 19^th century psychology, almost sees individuals as entirely victims to consequences. While we may continue to view abortion as a sad reality and “partially” wrong, since we are merely pawns in the chessboard of our environment, we could never force someone to bear the consequences alone. In fact, if there is a fault in this supportive mentality, it is that our entire social system views almost all individuals as a result of the community choice alone. If you don’t want to be helped, then we are going to continue pestering you until you do. (Very "modern and progressive" in thinking, and remarkably imperialistic for an anti-imperialistic culture.)

The natural progression of such thinking is twofold: Obviously, consequences become a social burden to be upheld by the entire community, regardless of cost. However, much more interestingly, if we are constantly the victims of the consequences of greater social systems, then empowerment is shifting morality from being proactive, to being reactive. If we are not our past decisions, as our past decisions were made in the context and particularity of an environment which led us there, then the only way to “liberate” ourselves is by giving us choice over the consequence rather than the decision. You didn’t decide not to have sex and get pregnant, but morality itself is imbued in your ability to choose to abort to negate the consequence (forget that the consequence is itself a decision rooted in its own particularity). Hence the epistemology of the “Pro-Choice” movement. All choice, is liberating, and therefore good. (The obvious limitations of choice-good morality, is generally shouted down as oppressive in the midst of the rhetoric.)

While also containing positive elements, this extreme favours choice for everyone, including the individuals who choose for the sake of convenience, eschewing consequences for careers, prosperity, and other overly-individual reasons. The freedom to choose itself is the moral good in this culture – a definite leap from the milieu of individual consequence in which my wife grew up.

My personal belief is that we are neither directly responsible for every consequence that we face, nor are we victims of a cruel game played by the fates. This is why the gospel resonates so deeply with the human experience: If the world is indeed broken, then bad consequences afflict the virtuous and the non-virtuous alike. And good decisions ameliorate poor conditions, albeit unequally. Keeping in mind grace, we have all made poor decisions, and, as participants in God’s healing Kingdom, all are called to participate in leading lives in line with the New Creation. In "Suprised By Hope", N.T. Wright says that the language of God in the New Creation is love, and we, the workers in this Kingdom, are called to share this with the world around us. That means to live a type of Holiness and purpose in order with God’s redemptive plan, as well as to help bear the consequences in a world where not everyone does. Love and mercy is the food of the New Creation, served in the banquet of the sacraments, and in the mission of the Church and its people. Therefore, the members of this Kingdom, are not sitting around waiting to be evacuated to another place, but are at the forefront of bothing living the difference (i.e. bearing individual responsibility) as well as helping others who don't (i.e. taking part in corporate responsibility.) When these two combine -- keeping in mind forgiveness and sharing, essentials in the Kingdom -- we have a progressive, community based model of where consequences and responsiblity are borne together, but also morality (as in being who we are supposed to be) and individual choice is upheld.

Trust

It's funny the word that is so sordidly wrapped up in our entire current economic crisis -- or, that is, the lack of the word: trust.

While the President and his men desperately try to reinstill confidence, the words that erode it continue to surface: avarice, arrogance, hubris, selfishness, pride, myopia. The children of Mammon.

Despite our intelligence, despite our systems, despite our power, and despite our wealth, at the core of it all is the ability to look at our neighbour and respond honestly to the question , "Can I trust you?"

Trust that you will care.
Trust that you will honour.
Trust that you will respect.
Trust that you will attempt.
Trust that you will accept.
Trust that you will share.
Trust that you will value him enough to think beyond yourself.

When all else has failed, and we don't know where to invest, trust is the only, most precious commodity upon which we can rely.

Lord, teach us how to trust as you did.
Open our eyes to the reality of righteousness.
Help us to set aside disbelief in lieu of a hope that renews all trust.
Including trust that sees enough to sacrifice, even to the point of death on a cross.