Author: J. Barrett Lee

From Prophecy to Evangelism

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

An amazing speech at General Assembly by Alex Patchin McNeill, executive director of More Light.

More Light Presbyterians's avatarThe 221st General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA)

Keynote address at National MLP Celebration Dinner by Executive Director Alex Patchin McNeill.

Nearly two months ago, I was standing behind a similar podium, except…if you can imagine, it was on an impossibly tall stage. The kind built so large crowds of 1,000 or more could see and hear someone speaking all at the same time. In true theatrical style, the house lights were semi-darkened and the stage lights were up to their brightest illuminating those of us standing on the stage. Outside the massive windows a gathering storm threatened to break out, casting an especially moody sky over the proceedings. I stood on that stage behind the podium, sweating in my neatly pressed shirt and tie as one-by-one, Teaching and ruling elders in the Presbytery of Western North Carolina came forward to the floor microphones to ask questions about my sense of call to candidacy in the Presbyterian Church.

View original post 1,666 more words

Calling All Prophets

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment

https://i0.wp.com/cruzblanca.org/hermanoleon/sem/a/pasq/pentecostes/pentec14.jpg

Have you ever been a part of something that didn’t exactly go according to plan?

Unless you live under a rock, chances are you have. Sometimes it’s fun, like when you come home from work on your birthday and all your friends jump out and say, “Surprise!” Sometimes it’s scary, like when you get that phone call with someone saying, “There’s been an accident.” Sometimes it’s a mixture of both exciting and scary, like when your wife says, “Honey, I know we weren’t planning on this for another year, but I just took a test and it says I’m pregnant.”

No matter what the circumstances are, whether it’s good or bad, no matter how well we’ve planned it out, it seems like life is always find a way to hit us with something unexpected. In fact, that’s the number one piece of advice I have for couples preparing for their wedding day: “The secret to the perfect wedding day is imperfection. Expect the unexpected. Something, somewhere will not go according to plan, so make up your mind now to just accept it when it happens.” As they said in Britain during World War II, “Keep calm and carry on.”

In theological circles, we like to quote an old Yiddish proverb: “If you want to give God a good laugh, tell him your plans.”

God seems to have a flair for the unexpected. Take, for example, our reading this morning from the Torah, the book of Numbers: It begins with Moses doing a very Presbyterian thing: electing and ordaining elders to help govern God’s people. And in good Presbyterian form, everything was being done “decently and in order.” The elders were called, chosen, and set apart for the work of ministry. These elders became mouthpieces of the Holy Spirit. Just like Moses, they proclaimed God’s word to the people. Just then, as this solemn ordination service was still going on, someone comes running up to the tent where they were meeting.

It was a teenager from the camp, a member of the next generation of Israelites. The biblical text doesn’t say much about who this teenager was, but I like to imagine him as a kind of punk: maybe the elders gave him the stink-eye because his robes were too short and his hair was too long. Maybe some of them had caught him smoking behind the camel-pen or writing graffiti that said “MOSES SUCKETH!” on the side of people’s tents. And all of a sudden, here he was: barging in to interrupt a solemn ordination service! My guess is that the elders were not amused…

But this wasn’t just any other punk kid, he was the voice of the next generation of Israelites. And he came with an announcement: “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp!”

According to the story, there were two guys who were supposed to be there at the ordination, but weren’t. Eldad and Medad had stayed behind in the camp. The Bible doesn’t say why (maybe, like so many of our elders, they had already been recruited to organize the post-ordination church supper). For whatever reason, Eldad and Medad weren’t at the ceremony with Moses and the others, but that didn’t stop God from making things happen in their lives.

I find that very interesting: God’s will for Eldad and Medad did not depend on them being in the right place at the right time. The Holy Spirit was able to work in them and through them, no matter where they were. God loves working outside the box.

And how did God let Moses and the elders know that this extraordinary activity was going on in the camp? By sending one of the youth: the voice of the next generation. This young person’s job was to point the finger back at what God was doing in unexpected ways and unexpected places. We know from the text that some of the elders were struggling with what they heard. Joshua, Moses’ assistant, had a particularly hard time with it. He said, “Moses, stop this! We’ve got to shut this new thing down before it undermines our God-given authority!” We can’t really blame Joshua for what he was trying to do. He was trying to protect what had been entrusted to him by God. He was being smart.

But Moses, on the other hand, was more wise than smart. He was listening with the ears of his heart and heard something that Joshua didn’t. He said to Joshua, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all God’s people were prophets, and that God would put the spirit on them!” He recognized the Holy Spirit at work in the camp, even though it didn’t conform to his own expectations. Moses realized that God’s ultimate goal was to empower all people to be mouthpieces for the Divine, not just one or a few special chosen heroes: “Would that all God’s people were prophets, and that God would put the Spirit on them!”

Generations later, another prophet named Joel would echo this same hunch in his writing: “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit.”

The fulfillment of this prophecy, the coming-true of this dream, is what we celebrate today on the Feast of Pentecost: the day when God poured out the Holy Spirit on all flesh and all people became prophets – young and old, men and women, great and small. On this day, we are reminded that our God and the God of our ancestors has always been comfortable with thinking outside the box and coloring outside the lines.

On this day, we are also celebrating the anniversary of a time when another youth (four of them, actually) left the comfort of the camp and challenged the elders and leaders of the church with the news that God was at work in some unexpected ways.

In 1864, Eliza Valentine, with her friends Bertha Hilbert, Ada Haley, and Helen Reid (all of them 14 year-old girls) swiped some songbooks from the Sunday School room of First Presbyterian Church and, without telling their parents or their pastor, went and started a Sunday School class for kids living in what was then the woods north of downtown Kalamazoo.

This little adventure continued unnoticed for some time until the Superintendent of the Sunday School noticed that his songbooks kept going missing every Sunday afternoon and returning by evening. When he followed the girls to find out what was going on, he was shocked to discover an active Sunday School class of 30 kids being conducted outside in the woods, with planks placed over logs and stumps for seating. Now, the Superintendent could have done like Joshua and had the whole unauthorized project shut down on the spot, but he didn’t. Instead, he and the pastor, with the elders of the church, took the wiser path like Moses. They recognized the movement of the Holy Spirit and decided to support it.

Funds came in from the grown-ups of the church to support the newly dubbed ‘Mission Woods Sunday School’. They were soon able to procure a building and move their work indoors when the weather got cold. In time, the adults of the church started helping out and the parents of the neighborhood kids started coming as well. Pretty soon, a full-fledged congregation was in the works and by 1878 they were ready to call their first pastor. North Presbyterian Church was born! These girls, like that youth in the book of Numbers, pointed their elders to the truth that God was at work in some very unusual-but-exciting ways. The elders and pastor, like Moses, recognized it as the work of the Holy Spirit, blessed it, and supported it. Once again, the prophecy came true that God likes to color outside the lines, that the Holy Spirit speaks through all God’s people, and that even our young sons and daughters can be prophets.

This is no less true in our day than it was in 1864 or in the time of Moses. The same Holy Spirit that lived and moved in them is now living and moving in us. We are the prophets. Many of you here today have spent much of your lives in institutions like hospitals or group homes. Due to a diagnosis of mental illness, you’ve had to sacrifice your autonomy and sometimes even your dignity. You’ve probably been told, and maybe even started to believe, that you’re a charity case and therefore your voice doesn’t count. It might even feel easier sometimes to quiet down and just go along with whatever program your doctor or caseworker is prescribing, even if you have questions about it or different ideas about what might be right for you. You might even forget that God gave you a voice, but the Good News for you today is that you do have one. God has put the Holy Spirit on you and called you to be a prophet.

In the same way, it would also be easy for us to fall into that same trap as a parish. We’re small in number, many of our members are on a fixed income, therefore we don’t have a lot of money. Our operating budget depends on financial support from other churches in our presbytery. It would be easy for us to see ourselves as a charity case, but we’re not. We are prophets. And I believe that God has called us to prophesy to the other churches in the Body of Christ.

And here’s how:

It’s no secret that mainline Protestant churches in America have been declining in number, money, and influence for the past 50 years. Gone are the days of packed parking lots and overflowing Sunday School rooms. We no longer live in a society where we can assume that our neighbors go to church. This reality makes a lot of people nervous. They say that the church is dying, that God has abandoned our church, or that our church has abandoned God. Some say that Christianity’s day has come and gone, and that our religion will now fade into the shadows of history and mythology. But I don’t think any of those things are true.

Yes, it’s true that the church is shrinking, but I don’t think we’re dying at all. Jesus himself said, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.”

I believe God is pruning us, as the Church, so that we might be more spiritually fruitful in generations to come. The Church of the next generation will not be an institution will massive buildings and budgets. The Christianity of the future will no longer be the civil religion of the American empire. We will no longer be beholden to the golden calves of money and power. We will be a community of prophets: committed believers who stand in solidarity with the “least of these” – the poor and oppressed peoples of the earth, the marginalized, the outcast, the scapegoats, the persecuted, and the forgotten. The Church of the future will once again follow in the footsteps of Jesus, our Lord and Savior, who walks the streets of this world, where hurting hearts cry out for healing and hungry souls cry out for bread. Christ is present there, and it is there that the Church will find him again.

Just like he said to us in his first sermon at Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” If that’s what the Holy Spirit did when she came upon Jesus, then we can expect the same thing to happen when she lands on his Church today. I look forward to that.

Here at North Church, I believe that we have a head start in that process. Ever since the days of Eliza Valentine, we have known what it means to have faith in the power of Almighty God over the power of the almighty dollar. We are already a community of people out on the edge, where those who have no place else to go can find a welcome, a home, and a sanctuary.

The rest of the church supports our ministry, not because we’re a bunch of charity cases, but because they recognize the work of the Spirit among us in this way. They realize that this ministry is too important to let die. They know that they will soon need in their churches what we have already discovered here. They need us, just as much as we need them. As it says in our New Testament reading, there are many gifts, but only one Spirit. I believe our gift, as North Church, is the gift of prophecy. We are speaking forth the Word of God and showing the rest of the Church what the future will be. Let us speak gently, boldly, and with all the faith, hope, and love that the Spirit of Christ inspires in our hearts.

Let us prophesy and tell the world the truth that has brought us together again and again, Sunday after Sunday for the last 150 years, and brings us together again this morning:

That I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Be blessed and be a blessing!

Liberal Christianity – 10 things to know about the ‘middle way’ (reblog)

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

This is a good, concise introduction. Most (though not all) of these criteria apply to the way I practice my Christian faith. I wish the author had noted that there are many evangelicals and catholics who also meet several of these criteria as well, although they would not apply the ‘liberal’ label to themselves. These folks are no less followers of the ‘middle way’. Not all evangelicals are fundamentalists.

Another critique I have of the article is that they lump all ‘mainline’ Christians into the liberal camp, which is patently untrue. Mainline denominations, like my own (Presbyterian), tend to make room for liberals to exist within their borders, but that doesn’t make them ‘liberal’ per se. The sense I get is that both liberals and evangelicals feel like the minority within their denominations, while our leaders try to maintain some kind of middle ground that leaves room for both parties to co-exist in good conscience.

With those caveats in mind, I still think this is a good 2 page intro to liberal Christianity and is worth reading.

One of the things I enjoy most about occupying this particular theological territory is that neither Richard Dawkins nor Pat Robertson knows what to do with me.

By Douglas Todd
Reblogged from the Vancouver Sun

When North American media look at religion, they home in on people who cite Jesus to condemn homosexuality, abortion and euthanasia, reject female clergy and organize Tea Party protests against taxation. This polarized portrait is amplified when famous atheists attack such views as backward.

Liberal Christianity offers an alternative. But few know about the option, which Columbia University history professor Gary Dorrien, the foremost expert on the subject, calls “a progressive, credible integrative way between orthodox over-belief and secular unbelief.”

Why I Stay

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized15 Comments

Image

Last week, the Office of the General Assembly for the Presbyterian Church (USA), released its 2013 statistics on church attendance and the number of congregations in our denomination.

You can read that report by clicking here.

Since the report’s release, Presbyterians have engaged in the usual ritual of nail-biting and finger-pointing over the current state of the church. Various pundits have offered their opinions online and in print, analyzing and interpreting these statistics.

I’m not going to do that.

What I’d like to offer now are some of my thoughts on why I came and why I stay in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

I’m a young pastor in the Midwest who falls somewhere on the line between GenX and Millennial. I’m young and married with kids… exactly the kind of demographic that most of our churches are trying to court.

Yet, we’re not just attending church, my wife and I have given our lives to it as pastors. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t believe this denomination capable of carrying the Christ-light into the future. So, here’s a little advice from your target demographic…

We are so DONE with whining about mainline decline and finger-pointing over whose theology is to blame. When Boomers and members of the WW2 generation give voice to that spirit of despair, they belittle the commitment we’ve made. What’s even worse is that their belly-aching ignores what it is that makes us the Church:

I was born in 1980, so I never saw the “glory days” of the 1950s. I never saw the packed pews or overflowing parking lots that others remember so fondly. I’ve only known a Presbyterian Church in numerical and fiscal decline, but that hasn’t stopped me from coming or staying.

I didn’t grow up Presbyterian. In fact, I didn’t even attend a service at a PC(USA) congregation until I was in my twenties. I grew up in an evangelical mega-church with contemporary worship, dynamic preaching, and no bureaucratic ties to a denomination that might hold the congregation back from following the Spirit’s lead. It was a pretty good place and I’m thankful for the gifts I received there.

But when the time came for me to follow God’s call on my life, I came here.
Did you get that? I’ll say it again:
I. Chose. You.

Here’s why:
There is depth here. This is a place where I can connect with something greater than myself. This is a place where I am forced to encounter the presence of Christ in the face of those who disagree with me. This is a place where I can be rooted in tradition, yet inspired to branch out in new directions. I’m rarely comfortable here. In fact, I feel like a fish out of water most of the time, but I stick around because YOU have convinced me, in your preaching and praying, in your singing and voting, and most of all in the Scriptures and Sacraments, that personal discomfort is the surest sign that Christ is at work in me, continually calling me toward new life and growth in faith.

If that’s not worth sticking around for, I don’t know what is.

When it comes to reading statistical reports and fretting over what our future will look like, I want to re-direct our attention back to what matters most: to the Christ who comes to us, walking on the water, calling us to step out of the boat in faith, daring us to do the impossible. Let’s not tremble in fear at the wind and waves that threaten to overwhelm us, but fix our eyes instead upon the Author and Perfecter of our faith, the One who began this good work in us and will see it through to completion in God’s time.

I know this little rant of mine won’t solve any of our immediate problems. We still have a General Assembly to convene, budgets to balance, buildings to maintain, pastors to pay, and missions to support. The cause for concern is real. My purpose in sharing this is to give you hope by offering a testimony of faith from a young voice who has come to and stayed in this denomination, not because you have big buildings or budgets, not because you have slick worship or good preaching, not because your theology is evangelical or progressive, but because Jesus Christ loves and challenges me through you.

That is the gift you bring. That is what makes us the Church.

As you read the above statistical report and gather for General Assembly in Detroit, keep that in mind.

Remember how our elder brother, St. Paul, said it:

“Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

Time of Silence

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

northchurchblog's avatarNorth Presbyterian Church

CC BY-SA 3.0

Contemplation and practice feed each other; the two together make up the stage of silence before God. In prayer we remain speechless, we simply place ourselves before the Lord. To a degree, we remain silent in our practice as well, for in our involvements, in our daily work, we do not talk about God all the time; we do indeed live in God, but not by discoursing on God. as Ecclesiastes says, “there is a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (3:7b). Silence, the time of quiet, is first act and the necessary mediation for the time of speaking about the Lord or doing theology, which is second act.

The time of silence is the time of loving encounter with God and of prayer and commitment; it is a time of “staying with him” (John 1:39). As the experience of human love shows us…

View original post 209 more words

Disarming the Powers: Subverting the KKK

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Ignore the misleading YouTube headline. This is a story about nonviolent resistance and the power of love to overcome hatred.
I’ve sat with many civil rights and equality activists who continue to emphasize education and legislation as the key to overcoming injustice. I agree that both are necessary, but the core element that will change hearts is relational proximity. Some criticize him for what he is doing, but the proof is in the results he gets.
“Racism is like cancer: if you choose to ignore cancer, it metastasizes.” -Daryl Davis

It’s the End of the World as we know it (and I feel fine)

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

northchurchblog's avatarNorth Presbyterian Church

“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” -REM

“Do not let your hearts be troubled.” -Jesus

Harold Camping

It seems like there is always some group of Christians who think they’ve got the inside scoop on the end of the world. A few years ago, one radio minister caused quite a stir when he predicted that the world would end precisely on May 21, 2011 at 6pm. Judging from the fact that so many of us are still here today, I think we can safely say that Mr. Camping’s calculations were (at least) slightly off.

Apocalyptic History

This is not the first time someone has made such precise predictions about the Apocalypse. In fact, Mr. Camping himself previously insisted that the end of days would arrive promptly on September 6, 1994. Before him, there was the very famous case of the…

View original post 1,894 more words

Alcuin, Deacon and Abbot of Tours, 804

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Todd Granger's avatarFor All the Saints

Alcuin (Old English, Ealhwine) was born in Northumberland around 735 into a noble family related to Willibrord, the first missionary to the Frisians. Alcuin was educated at the cathedral school in York under Egbert, archbishop of York and a pupil of Bede the Venerable. Ordained a deacon in 770, he then became the head of the York school. Under Ælberht, bishop and then archbishop of York, he visited Rome and the Frankish court and helped to create a library at the cathedral where he served as librarian and Master of the Schools. Following a meeting in 781 with Charlemagne in Pavia, the Frankish king persuaded him to join the court scholars at Aachen and to serve as his chief minister, with special responsibility for reviving education and learning in the Frankish dominions.

Alcuin withdrew from court life in 796 to become abbot of Saint Martin’s at Tours, where he died…

View original post 285 more words

St. Benedict and the Gift of Presence

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
Image
By Randy OHC [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

I know that some of my readers are curious about my week at St. Gregory’s Abbey, an Episcopal Benedictine monastery in Three Rivers, Michigan. In the week since I’ve been back, I’ve been trying to sift through what emerged during my time there. Much of it is too personal for publication, suffice to say that unplugging from work and electronics gave me the space I needed for some internal things to float to the surface, where I could deal with them.

One of the things that amazed me about this time was my experience of sharing space and time with others in silence. There were a few other visitors in the guest house with me. We were present with each other often, but talked very little. We slept in adjacent rooms, ate together, worshiped next to each other several times a day, read next to each other in the library, but said almost nothing.

This experience was quite unfamiliar to me: being present with each other without exchanging information. I got to know these neighbors of mine throughout the week, but there is almost nothing that I know about them. This was new for me, especially considering that I am a chatty, extroverted, social butterfly. Shutting up and just being together in the silence was agony for me at first, but I came to appreciate it by the end of the week.

What strikes me about that experience in retrospect is that it is the polar opposite of what happens with human interaction via social media, where relationship is entirely made up of information exchange and utterly void of real presence. I have Facebook friends and blog readers who I have never met, but we exchange information regularly. Most of it is quite pleasant or amusing. But when I read the comments on a YouTube video, I see the dark side of people whose humanity gets temporarily lost in arguments that are rich in data exchange but poor in intimacy. Spammers and Trolls do not see the humanity in the people on the other side of the screen. Hiding behind the comfortable curtain of anonymity, they say things they would never say to someone they loved, respected, and had to interact with. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I am not totally innocent of this offense myself.

Reading the Rule of St. Benedict this morning, I came across this passage from chapter 2:

Furthermore, those who receive the name of prioress or abbot are to lead the community by a twofold teaching: they must point out to monastics all that is good and holy more by example than by words, proposing God’s commandments to a receptive community with words, but demonstrating God’s instructions to the stubborn and the dull by a living example.

Benedict is the anti-troll in this sentence. He leads by example, especially with those who are resistant to what he has to say. He makes no attempt to argue; he has nothing to prove. He reserves talking for those who are already on the same page with him, so that they might develop and refine their ideas together.

It occurs to me that there is almost no capacity for this kind of leading by example online. Quiet presence offers no exchange of information, therefore no relationship (at least as far as the internet is concerned).

The recovery of sanity and civility requires that each of us recognizes and acknowledges the humanity we share in common with each other, especially those with whom we disagree in matters of politics and religion. Let us recover the lost art of being present with each other when information is not being exchanged, that our conversation might be all the more rich and fruitful.

The Shepherd’s Voice

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Today’s sermon from North Church:
“We know from experience
that we can survive without living
and still lose, even when we win.
What Christ the Good Shepherd reveals to us
is that there is also a way to live without surviving
and still win, even when we lose.”

northchurchblog's avatarNorth Presbyterian Church

Image Image from http://www.cruzblanca.org/hermanoleon/sem/a/pasq/4/06.jpg

Pop Quiz

It’s time for a pop quiz in honesty: Who here has ever been in an argument? I better not see a single person with both hands down right now. We’ve all been there.

Further question: Who here has ever won an argument?

For extra credit (points for honesty): Who here has ever won an argument and felt really bad about it?

Parenting Kids

Parents of small kids know exactly what I’m talking about here. My kids are really small, so I presently have the advantage of being both bigger and smarter than them (something that will not be true for very long), which means that I am pretty much able to win any argument, either by logic (which doesn’t always work with kids) or by physically picking them up and moving them to wherever I need them to be.

This arrangement works pretty well for…

View original post 1,662 more words