Full Circle at the Goose

It was in 2003 that my mentor gave me a copy of A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren. He told me that he would deny ever giving it to me if someone asked. I was thirsty for a connection with God but I had so many questions. I was not the type of person that just accepted things because everyone else did. I had spent 5 years of my life in active addiction and in 2003 my mind was clear, I was sober and ready to take on whatever was put in front of me. I was reading through book after book about the emergent church and the books against the emergent church. I was studying philosophy in school and so I was interested in post-modernism and how that philosophy affected the thinking among certain christians during that time. I remember reading D.A. Carson's book, Becoming Conversant with the Emergent Church, it was a good read but I was not swayed. I remember waiting patiently for Kester Brewin's book, The Complex Christ (UK title) to be released in the US so I could tackle another perspective on emergence. I remember listening to podcasts on the  Emergent Village website, reading blogs, and attempting to have conversations with my friends from the church about the issues. The truth is I felt alone. Although I read everything I could get my hands on I was not around others who wanted to talk about these issues. A few of my friends seemed to humor me with conversation but I wanted more and did not know where to go.

Around 2008 I pretty much gave up. I just figured I had my beliefs and I would be able to live them out no matter what arena I found myself in. I wrote my senior thesis about Post-modernsim and it's affects on the Emergent Church. I defended my paper in front of the Philosophy department professors at a Catholic School. They certainly found what I said interesting but it did not seem to garner much further discussion. I even remember emailing Brian McLaren about possible resources I could use for my paper. In his generosity he did email me back and gave me a lot to use for the paper.

I married Teresa at the end of 2008 and in September of 2009 we moved to South Florida. The only connection we had were my grandparents who attended a Plymouth Brethren church and we certainly were not going to go there. I started to look up possible places for us to go and found an emergent group about an hour away from our house. We went and she fell in love with the idea of the emergent church. Because of how far away it was we needed to find something we could go to close to our house and get involved. I walked into St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Delray Beach and immediately felt like it was home. I started to attend bible studies and asked a lot of questions. I talked about the Emergent Church and the rector fielded all of my questions and seemed open to my thoughts and beliefs. Within just a few months he asked me if I was interested in becoming the Youth Pastor (I had done it for 5 years at the Brethren Church). Of course I said yes.

So over the past few years Teresa and I have been involved with starting a church service for people seeking a deeper connection with God that is inclusive and accepting. St. Paul's has given us so much freedom and has supported our mission to be emergent in Delray Beach. Over the past few years Teresa has connected with so many people in the emergent church through her work in Young Adult Ministry, blogging, and Facebook (things I am not great at) and has led us to the Wildgoose Festival. We have attended the last two years and I feel like I have made it home. I had great conversations with some amazing people. I even had the opportunity to talk with Brian McLaren for a few minutes and felt that things had come full circle. I had the chance to tell him that his book brought me down an introspective and philosophical journey that has helped me to recognize the power and love of God that transcends human wisdom and understanding. I can only hope that I will be able to share my reflections about theology, spirituality, and philosophy with some of the wonderful people I was able to meet at Wildgoose.

How's that humble pie?

What does it mean to be humble? What does it mean to accept the possibility that you may be wrong? Humility is not something that a lot of us are accustomed to, we don't like it and we want none of it. Humility is about acceptance and honesty, humility is about seeing beyond your own scope and recognizing that there may be more to something than you can see. Humility is knowing your place in the world and accepting it. We expect children to be humble and listen to what we tell them because we are older and we know more, we expect our subordinates at our jobs to be humble because we are the managers and supervisors, sometimes we expect our spouse's to be humble because we know more about a specific subject than they do, we expect humility from other people, but rarely do we practice this principle in our own lives.

The apostle Paul wrote, "the man who thinks he knows something does not yet know what he should know." We are a people who claim to know everything. We have all the information we can possibly want right at our fingertips. If I want to know what the year 200 b.c was like all I need to do is press a couple of keys and there it is, if I want to know who won the olympic games 40 years ago, its easy to find. In our world knowledge and information is so easy to acquire that we have all, in our own minds, become experts on any topic. The problem with this is that in reality we are not experts. We base most of what we know on google searches and wiki answers. We have not done the real work of study needed to become experts in anything.

Socrates said, "the only thing I know is that I know nothing." Socrates was a great teacher who using his own method. When someone came to him and asked him a question, Socrates would often ask a question back to the person and allow the person to come to the answer on his own. We call this the Socratic Method. Socrates believed that the answers to questions we hidden deep in the person and that he needed to do was allow them to see that they had the answer already. He would cause people to think and use their rational faculties in order to come to an understanding of things. Jesus often used this method (although I don't think he would have called it the Socratic Method) often with those that would listen to him speak. Someone would ask him a question and he would tell a story and then ask a question to the questioner. Asking questions to me is a sign of humility, it points to the fact that you don't know something but you believe the someone else might.

I believe that asking questions is a vital part of spiritual growth. When we want to understand something on a deeper level we ask questions in hopes that we will find the deeper meaning. Unfortunately asking questions in certain settings has been deemed inappropriate. What if you were sitting in church one day and the preacher says something that you didn't understand or even agree with? Would you just sit there and accept what he said or would you go up and ask him afterward to further explain? If you leave church that day without getting any clarification, then either you ignored him and kept thinking the way you want (not humble) or you just believed what he said and threw out your own understanding (not humble). In my understanding the best thing would be to go and speak to the person and ask questions. The person speaking may have more insight for you to better understand and so its possible that you may learn something new. Or maybe you may have more insight than that person and that person may learn something new.

Humility is not throwing away all your knowledge and experience, humility is recognizing that you may not know everything. Wisdom is combining what you have experienced and what information you have studied and conversing with those who have experienced and studied other things. Can you imagine if we were more open to others in our daily lives? Can you imagine what we can learn and what we can accomplish by pooling all the experience and knowledge around us?

I wonder what church would look like if we didn't have all these denominational splits. I wonder what would happen if we opened the doors to new ways of worship and study. I wonder if we are missing an experience with God because the name above the door to our church is different than the one down the road.

About 5 years ago I was exposed to a very different type of worship. I had never been to a Pentecostal church before and didn't know what to expect. As I sat in the seats listening to the loud music, watching people dance waving flags, trying to understand the people prostrating themselves, I prayed to God. I prayed that He would allow me to see the beauty in this form of worship and push out all my presuppositions and beliefs that the way I do it, in my church, is the only way it can be done. That prayer has been repeated many times over the last 5 years. It was a piece of humble pie that I needed to eat. I believe that piece of pie forever changed my life and has opened me up to the God is not boxed into my own understanding. God does not belong in our boxes, he doesn't belong in any box or confined space, so why do we try and put him there?