Jon at Blog One Another posted an interesting take on a recent episode of This American Life, the NPR radio show. In the segment in question, Ira Glass records a couple of phone conversations between Kris Hogan (a high school football coach who enlisted his team's fans to cheer for a team from a local juvenile hall) and a woman who was moved by the story, and wanted to talk about faith. Trisha is a lapsed Catholic trying to reconcile her desire to believe in God with the recent death of a friend from cancer.

Jon does a nice job of pointing out how stuck in Christianese Hogan is, and how unhelpful some of his apologetic arguments are. His wife adds a concluding point, blaming those who taught him this form of evangelism:

"The coach was doing his best with every tool he had been given. He was taught this stuff, just like you were taught it, and it's pure crap. The teachers are totally to blame."

Most of what you were taught about evangelism is now irrelevant. Actually, in a post-Christian society, it's worse than irrelevant — you may inadvertently be practicing "devangelism"! For your outreach to be effective, you must adopt a missionary mindset and missionary methods. If you have a teacher who is talking about evangelism without training you to be a missionary, walk away and find another teacher. With the Holy Spirit guiding you, that teacher needs to be a "native."

The whole post is worth reading, but a couple of thoughts are stirring in my mind. We may need to peel the onion back a few more layers. I'm not sure that the problem is that traditional evangelism lacks a missionary mindset -- in other words, it misjudges the distance in terms of culture, language and worldview between the evangelist and the other person. If that's the case, then the coach just needs to find a new language for expressing the old arguments.

What if we throw out the whole idea that what we're doing in evangelism is providing answers or reasons to believe? What if this is not an exchange of information between people who know about God and those who are curious or ill-informed? If the evangelist is not teaching/preaching/arguing, what are they doing? Ironically, the image that comes to mind is Hogan's profession: coaching.

What I have in mind here is spiritual direction, but you could call it coaching. Trisha calls Coach Hogan willing to reveal the tenderest part of her heart -- her grief and questions around her friend's death. Jon describes the scene well:

So they try another phone call, being clear that the purpose is to discuss Trisha's questions about why God allowed her friend to die. It's a good question. It's a tough question. And from my perspective, even a direct question like this should not have an immediate answer, but be treated as an invitation. Trisha is exposing a very sensitive part of her heart, and that calls for respect and an exchange of trust.

Again with the Christianese.

But Kris Hogan doesn't waste any time sticking his foot in his mouth: "This is the most common question that folks who are anti-God ask."

Whoa! In a single statement, he slaps Trisha as "anti-God," and dismisses the possibility that earnest followers of Jesus also wrestle with that same question.

One way to reduce the distance between Christian and non-Christian is to fess up to the fact that this is the most common question human beings faced with loss or tragedy ask. Yes, Christians may come at it from a different perspective, but anyone who says they don't ask Why? of God is either deep in denial or lying. And we don't always get neat answers, or completely satisfying ones. People of faith, by definition, are the ones who keep wrestling, keep believing despite the questions.

So what if Coach Hogan could put himself in the position of a spiritual coach and offer Trisha some resources as she wrestles -- including first of all a listening ear and a safe relationship where all questions are admitted? If might mean entering into that uncomfortable space where Sunday School platitudes and philosophical arguments get exposed for what they are, while we wait together for God to speak. The old apologetics might still be helpful to frame the questions or define new ones: What does it mean to live in a fundamentally broken world? What can we expect if God's Kingdom is here but not yet? A coach's role is to offer resources, teach some skills, but in the end the athlete is the one who who plays the game. Spiritual coaching assumes that the Holy Spirit is at work and trusts that those who seek will find.

I'm just an April Fool!

Dang, twice in one day!

First it was Bro Maynard's story about how his former church wants to engage him as a consultant to monitor their change of heart...

Then, the food sustainability stimulus story from Civil Eats!

I guess it's easy to get sucked in by things you'd like to believe are true...

Slow Food, Real People

It rained over the weekend, or I would have attempted to get some veggies into the dirt in my backyard. I've been procrastinating -- even Michelle Obama beat me to it this year! I finally got a chance to watch the 60 minutes piece from last week featuring Alice Waters and the Slow Food Movement. While I'm sure Waters deserves all the credit she gets for moving sustainable food from the fringes to at least the mainstream media, a slow burn was growing in me as I watched the piece.

What irks me is the mindless association of fresh, local, sustainable food with the notion of being elitist. Yes, I want to cheer when I hear Waters say: "I feel that good food should be a right and not a privilege and it needs to be without pesticides and herbicides. And everybody deserves this food. And that's not elitist." Absolutely. Amen and amen.

But then she goes on to purchase grapes for $4 a pound and cook Stahl a lovely breakfast that no one that has to get children to school or themselves to work could afford to labor over for so long (not to mention the gazillion-dollar kitchen in which it was cooked). And like a compliant dope, Stahl asks "probing" questions about whether schools can afford to teach kids to grow and cook their own food. As opposed to training them to take multiple-choice tests till the cows come home? As opposed to feeding them fast food and candy bars in the cafeteria? But the whole exercise demonstrates nothing better than the inability of the major media outlets to hold an intelligent converstation. If Stahl had been doing her job, she might have left Waters in her dream world and asked some of the other folks shopping at the Farmer's Market how they balance their food budgets and juggle dinner prep. Here's a clue -- look for the women with kids grabbing samples off the tables.

What the sustainable food movement needs is not a gourmet chef explaining how to roast an egg over an open fire, but a real Mom explaining how fresh and local can be affordable, and how real food can make its way to the table via a few simple techniques before the kids melt down. Thanks, Alice Waters for launching the food revolution. But please, go back to your kitchen, and let some regular folks take it from here.

16 Decisions for Kingdom Living

Well, maybe not 16. As promised, I'm posting some thoughts I have about some key commitments that might help us resist the lure of affluence and materialism in favor of Kingdom values. I'm taking off the Grameen Bank's list of 16 Decisions, which guide their members -- mostly poor women -- in lifting themselves out of poverty . For the most part they are simple and concrete, memorable and measurable.

So here are some ideas -- feel free to suggest additions or deletions.

1. We will attempt to follow the great commandments: to love God with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
2. We will work together to help each other become better stewards of the resources we have -- breaking the power of consumerism by sharing together and talking about how we spend money.
3. We will be better stewards of the environment: waste less, buy local, grow our own food, carpool, etc. [Maybe some of these need to be spelled out separately?]
   
4. We will include the poor, marginalized and those not like us in our lives through acts of friendship, hospitality and service.
5. We will give time and money to help empower people in need in our community and around the world.
6. We will nurture one another's love for God through worship, prayer and other spiritual disciplines practiced together.
7. We will maintain an attitude of repentance regarding our own failures to swim against the current of our culture and grace towards one another.
   
8. We will enjoy God's creation, regularly spend time outdoors and teach our children to appreciate and protect natural environments.

Well, that's a start. Have at it -- debate, discuss, add, subtract.

Lenten Journey: Broken

I'm following along with Christine Sine's Lenten Guide this season. See her blog for a list of others writing on the topic.

I have to say I'm having a tough time getting into Lent. Ash Wednesday was the one day last week I could hang out with my parents before they flew back to Boston, so I went ashless. Since I've been worshiping with my Episcopal friends on Sunday mornings, I had really been looking forward to starting Lent right, but so much for my plans...

I haven't decided to give up anything specific for Lent, but I've done enough of the self-improvement sort of fasting from chocolate or coffee that I still feel a bit uncomfortable reaching for dessert or a glass of wine. I almost gave up caffeine by accident, but decided that sleep walking through Lent might not be the best plan, either.

So here I am again, with all my efforts at spiritual disciplines falling to dust around me. Really, should I be surprised at this point?

I walked the beach again today. I found myself wrestling with a question I'd read in Gerald May's book on the Dark Night of the Soul: In the midst of the dislocation of the dark night, would you really want to go back to the way things used to be? It was one of John of the Cross's diagnostic questions for recognizing a "dark night" or season when God was working in hidden ways in the soul. For me the question came out, would I want to go back to 1995? That's another story altogether, but whenever I bump into the fact that all is not as I would like it to be in my life with God, I find myself looking back to that particular season. I don't know whether I was sadder at the idea of giving up that idealized -- idolized? -- picture of the spiritual life and its consolations or at the realization that I was so deeply attached to that particular set of experiences.

So I think I've figured out what I'm supposed to give up for Lent: control, expectations. Sounds simple enough, let me make my list of ten things I'm going -- oh ... yeah.

16 Decisions

No, I haven't changed my mind about New Year's Resolutions ... I've been reading Muhammad Yunus' Creating a World without Poverty. I have to say it's one of the most inspiring books I've read in quite some time. In case the name doesn't ring an immediate bell with you, Yunus is the founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, pretty much the inventor of the idea of microcredit for the poor and winner, along with Grameen Bank, of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

One of the things that struck me reading Yunus' account of the evolution of Grameen Bank was the 16 Decisions that every member of the bank pledges to follow. They support the agenda of social transformation -- Grameen Bank is not simply about lending money to poor women, but about lifting families and villages out of poverty. I'm going to quote them in their entirety, because they form such a powerful statement of how a society mired in poverty can be transformed. And they made me think about how those of us trapped in affluence might formulate a similar set of decisions to help us swim upstream in our own culture:

The Sixteen Decisions:
1. The four principles of Grameen Bank -- Discipline, Unity, Courage, and Hard Work -- we shall follow and advance in all walks of our lives.
2. We shall bring prosperity to our families.
3. We shall not live in dilapidated houses. We shall repair our houses and work toward constructing new houses as soon as possible.
4. We shall grow vegetables all the year round. We shall eat plenty of them and sell the surplus.
5. During the plantation season, we shall plant as many seedlings as possible.
6. We shall plan to keep our families small. We shall minimize our expenditures. We shall look after our health.
7. We shall educate our children and ensure that they can earn to pay for their education.
8. We shall always keep our children and the environment clean.
9. We shall build and use pit latrines.
10. We shall boil water before drinking or use alum to purify it. We shall use pitcher filters to remove arsenic.
11. We shall not take any dowry at our sons' weddings; neither shall we give any dowry in our daughters' weddings. We shall keep the center free from the curse of dowry. We shall not practice child marriage.
12. We shall not inflict any injustice on anyone; neither shall we allow anyone to do so.
13. For higher income we shall collectively undertake bigger investments.
14. We shall always be ready to help each other. If anyone is in difficulty, we shall all help.
15. If we come to know of any breach of discipline in any center, we shall all go there and help restore discipline.
16. We shall take part in all social activities collectively. (pp. 58-59)

I've spent a little bit of time in South Asia, and these commitments struck me not simply as nice ideals -- the way I feel about my daughter repeating the Girl Scout oath -- but as a powerful counter-cultural statement by people who have decided that they no longer will live under the oppression of poverty. They are practical (grow vegetables; dig latrines) and measurable. They are radical (rejecting dowry and all the enslavement to debt and endangerment of girls that goes along with that practice). They are commitments to community and to hope.

I was in Las Vegas this weekend for a family wedding. With the worst of American culture's enslavement to greed, lust, entertainment and consumption on vivid, neon-lighted display up and down the strip, I began to think that anyone choosing to move out of that oppression into the freedom of the Kingdom would need some simple, direct statements about their day-to-day life, too. The kind of affirmations people stick on the bathroom mirror or repeat at 12-step groups. Maybe 16 is too many; maybe not. Grameen's list evolved out of the experience of people striving to escape the grinding poverty of Bangladesh in the 1970s and 1980s. I can imagine neighbors talking to one another, urging them to stand firm in their decisions. This is life and death for our families: We will send our kids to school; we will take the time to boil water. There is no going back to disease and despair. As hard as it is, we must move forward.

There is something in me that wants to take a stand against the forces of materialism that would have me fritter my life away in shopping malls and in front of the TV. It rises up in me as the need to say NO! to the lies of the advertisers offering convenience and something bigger, better and newer. I want to have some friends who stand with me and remind me that my kids do not need that new gizmo or another set of lessons. I want to worship with brothers and sisters who do not believe that Jesus came to make me a better consumer of religious goods and services but an active participant in the expansion of his Kingdom in this world.

So here's my question: What would be on your list of 16 (or however many) Decisions for Kingdom Living? I have some ideas I'll share in few days, but first it's your turn.

Google Meme

I've been out of town for the weekend, and actually have some thoughts to write about when I'm not so tired, but I saw this meme at Kingdom Grace and wanted to have a go at it.

I was tagged by Bill Lollar to do this meme. So I took a few minutes to check it out.

Google your full first name and the word "needs" like this - "William needs" - and then post the first 10 things that Google finds.

So here's what Maria needs…

1. On second thought … that one seems X-rated, and this is a family-friendly blog. Moving right along…
   
2. Maria needs further surgery (thankfully, not me)
   
3. Maria needs – Leicester (huh? I think that's a city in England … pretty sure I don't need it)
   
4. Maria needs a job (not yet, anyway)
   
5. Maria needs your love
   
6. Maria needs your help
   
7. Maria needs your prayers (am I seeing a theme developing here?)
   
8. Maria needs you (now we're getting to the point)
   
9. Maria needs shadow to save (again, huh?)
   

and my personal favorite…

1. Maria needs diamonds
   

On that note, I'm going to bed and will hope to write something profound another day…