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Nathan wrote a great report that appeared in Books & Culture, reflecting on Witvliet’s Thursday seminar at Symposium last week.

Worship – What We’ve Learned

Some snippets from Mary Hulst’s session this morning at Symposium on preaching…

“Bring the stuff from the week into the pulpit. If you don’t, you’re not connecting your pastoring with your preaching. We can all preach sermons and we preach them as guests and we preach them at Symposium, but your congregation needs something that’s written for them, not something you can use at any church at any time you want. They need to hear that you’ve got their hearts and lives and minds in your heart and life and mind.”

“[Preaching] takes humility, it takes vulnerability, and these are things we preachers are not good at. We went into this profession knowing we would stand in front of hundreds of people who had to listen what we had to say. Humility is not our strength. We need to learn how to go to people and ask, How can I be a better preacher? Can you help me?”

“Pray about and for your parishoners during the sermon writing process. What do they need to hear? Think about seventh graders, think about young moms, think about the people in your office in the last few weeks. Be in prayer for them.”

“Weave the images of I-pods and Nintendo’s with AARP and aching joints so that everybody knows that this sermon is for them.”

Overheard in the morning section of “The Last Thirty Years: What We’ve Learned along the Way”, hosted by John Witvliet and including panelists Albert Aymer, Nancy Beach, Brian McLaren, Eugene Peterson, Larry Sibley, Joyce Zimmerman. I’ll post an entire transcript of the seven hour conversation as soon as I get it edited.

“There’s something about mystery in the sacraments. I know we want to make everything intelligible and clear and plain, but we forget that in the sacraments, there’s a whole lot of mystery. You try to explain why – what’s the difference between sipping a bit of wine… and eating a dry piece of wafer instead of sitting at home with a glass of wine and some cheese. What makes one sacrament and the other not? That’s something of a mystery. It’s something I do by faith.”

-Albert Aymer

“People come home from church enough Sundays thinking why did I go, and they stop going, and they gain their spiritual experience the same way they gain everything else.”
-Brian McLaren

“Every time I read the Gospel, [it says] Take and eat. It’s my body. This is my blood. This element of awesomeness and mystery to this great celebration is something we need to recapture and we’re recapturing, and I celebrate that.”
-Albert Aymer

“I never had a big picture. I was a pastor. I was trying to teach the congregation how to worship and I had, as it turned out, the best congregation to do that with…. I had to listen to them, listen to their stories. Even though I thought I didn’t know much about worship, I knew if had to involve the participation of people… their lives, their stories, their experiences. I was learning a lot, I was learning how central this act of worship was and how formative it was.”
-Eugene Peterson

“The reality of hugs and tears and coats happens in actual reality, not virtual reality.”
-Brian McLaren

“…we are part of the vast host of saints of those of who have gone before, and even now as we worship God, we worship in the presence of that vast company of unseen believers who surround us and are clapping their hands as we sing the praises of God. Church celestial and Church terrestrial. And there’s nowhere in Christian expression where that sense strikes me more forcibly than Christian worship, when you begin to celebrate God with the hosts of angels and all the company of heaven.”
-Albert Aymer

“If we don’t have a solid devotional prayer life that leads to and from liturgy, we force liturgy to do what it’s not supposed to do.”
-Joyce Zimmerman

Ed Dobson visited our preaching class on Tuesday, and we had an enjoyable conversation. Ed was recently diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, which prompted him to retire his position as long time pastor at Calvary Church on the north side of Grand Rapids. Calvary planted a church in Grandville, Michigan that eventually became Mars Hill, one of the fastest growing megachurches in the United States. I enjoyed listening to how Ed prepares sermons and the value he places on intense study and having a working knowledge of the Biblical languages. I was a little leery of his theology of worship, however. Here’s some of the conversation:

On preaching…

“…preaching is building a bridge from the world of biblical truth into the world where real people live. I find that helpful because it’s not starting in the world where people live. There are a lot of preachers and people who talk about preaching who begin in the world where people live, and you deal with issues in real life, where people struggle, and then eventually you build a bridge back to biblical truth and demonstrate the relevance of hteb ible to their particular need. I struggle with that… I see preaching beginning in the world of the bible, and then you bild a bridge into the world where people live. It lets me know where I need to begin and where I end up…”

On the importance of preaching…

“…Two things matter. One, that you preach the bible, two that you love people. Everything else about ministry is fundamentally irrelevant. I’m not sure abou that, but he said, if you’re not a good CEO they’ll forgive you… if you’re not good at raising money… organizing a vision, recruiting volunteers… all the stuff you get trapped in to doing – if you’re not good at that, they’ll forgive you if you preach the bible and love people. This course is the most important course for you to take … I would say that preaching is the most important course you’ll take, and everything else you’ll take – Hebrew, Greek, theology, history of the CRC – that’s the second most important […] it seem to me that much of what you take is for the purpose of preaching and my experience in church ministry is that what ultimately matters is the teaching of God’s word. At Calvary, over 6000 people are coming every morning; that’s six thousand hours that people are given up, and I always took that very seriously. If people are giving up that much time, I’d better wrestle with the text… how important is preaching? I think it’s core, in addition to loving people, but since this is preaching class, we’ll focus on that.

On studying…

“…my first step was to study the text. In Hebrew or in Greek, to actually translate the text, look at the grammar of the text, study the words in the text, do word studies, and I suspect that’s four or five hours of work. I didn’t look at commentaries, what other people said. I felt that the place to begin was to try to understand the text, especially in the original language… I had taken Hebrew many years ago… my Hebrew… I could read Hebrew, but I struggled… so I decided… knowing that I wasn’t going to be in pastoral ministry much longer… still important… step one was to translate, wrestle with, and do word studies in the text.

“The next step is I would then look at commentaries, and my favorite way of preaching was verse by verse through books o the bible. I didn’t always preach that way, but most of the time I was working my way through a book… I would… buy every commentary I could find on that particular book. If you saw my library, the books I preached on, there are rows and rows of commentaries on those books. The books I didn’t preach on, there’s nothing. …I preferred technical… over devotional commentaries. I usually bought as many liberal commentaries as I could, not because I’m liberal, but because in conservative circles, we all tend to think the same way. [Liberals] provide unusual insights into the text.

“After studying in language, I would get out commentaries… word by word, line by line, verse by verse… I would write down ideas, thoughts, comments from each of those commentaries.

“At this point, I’m eight or nine hours into the study. Usually, for every sermon, I spent ten to twelve hours of study. Some people do it in a couple of hours, but I never managed, in good conscious, to do it that quickly. When I got up to preach, I wanted to feel like I really wrestled with this. Not that I fully understood it, but at least I put in a lot of time and effort.”

On powerpoint…

“I’ve never done powerpoint. I know people who are into it, using videos, film clips, and I gues sbecause everybody’s into I’m not. I always feltlike I was out of step. I’m not against it, I just feel that getting up there as a broken human being teaching the bible as best you can is very coutnercultural to begin with.”

On preaching to myself…

“From Wednesday noon until Sunday, I try to pray it, think it, meditate on it, let the whole thing sink in, and always ask the question, how does this apply to me? How does it impact my life? I didn’t think you can get up and preach to others unless you first of all preach to yourself. … you can either lower the level of the preaching to the level of your living, or [vice verse]. You seriously need to ask yourself, are there things I need to do this week in light of the sermon? You’re not preaching to them, you’re first preaching to yourself.”

On pastoral care…

“I did 45 funerals a year, 25 weddings a year, I often went othe hospital, especially if it was a crisis situation. The story of the good shepehrd, I think when you go after the one sheep, you’re better able to minister to the 99 who are still there. John McArther, for example, doesn’t do any pastoral care… but I don’t see how yo ucan be an effective pastor and no do that, bc by listening ot peole and walking with them in the struggles of their life impacts how you preach the bible.”

On preaching after being diagnosed with a terminal disease…

“The people at Calvary would say that my preaching changed after I got the terminal disease. I don’t know if it did; it probably did, what I think happened that was people’s listening changed. […] I was no longer this guy up on the pedestal with their act together. I was a fellow pilgrim and a broken human being, and I think people listened differently… If I talked about giving thanks in all circumstances, people thought ‘I can take it from him’… and so I think it impacted the way people listened. Obviously, the greatest impact was probably not preaching, but in pastoral care, that when someone was diagnosed with a terminal illness, I could … say things to that person that nobody else could say, because I too was in the same boat. We were in the same boat together. I also think it gave me a greater boldness, because when you have a terminal disease… what are they going to do, kill you? Not that you’re flippant, but you can be more bold. You really don’t care what people think. You do to a certain point, but you really don’t.”

On planning worship…

“For 19 years, I had three worship leaders who begged me… just a month ahead of time would be good… have a theme from beginning to end of service. I said, you know, I’m not built that way. When I started a book, I never knew how long it would take. Sometimes if I wrestled with a text, there would sometimes be one phrase… I was never sure where I was going. I would let them know Monday, ‘This, in general, is what I’m going to preach.’ Sometimes they would do a theme related to it, sometimes it would be a completely different them. We never managed… organized. I’m a dispensationalist… we believe that Jesus could come at any moment… if I had my whole year mapped out and Jesus came… I’m kidding…

“What I found out is that when the whole worship part… I argued that when we met, we didn’t meet to worship, we met to pay attention to God… anyway, often when the music, scripture, prayer was totally different than sermon, someone would write me and say, we sang that, I’ve never heard… and the words were exactly what we needed to hear. Profound encouragement. I just trust God that when you pay attention to God, Go will use that, even if the song and messages don’t link. Spirit can use that.

“The continuity of themes is over-hyped.”

Lauren Winner was at Calvin College and Calvin Seminary on Friday. Her lecture at the January Series dealt with her most recent book, Real Sex (you can listen to it here). Friday evening, she had a conversation with Neal Plantinga about her memoir, Girl Meets God. Here are excerpts from my notes:

On memoir…

“When I teach memoir…workshops, I draw a distinction between memoir and autobiography. Autobiographies are the things that famous people write. Bill Clinton wrote an autobiography. You read it because you already know who Bill Clinton is and what really happened… it’s the inside scoop on a famous person. A memoir, by contrast, is a book by someone who is not famous, who is ordinary. If you pick up Girl Meets God, you don’t read it because you’ve heard of Lauren Winner. Memoirs, rather than being about a person’s life, work best when they’re really about something else, when they use the vehicle – autobiography – to illuminate a larger issue. …the story cannot finally be about you.”

On spiritual memoir…

“…I’m not trying to tell you what to do, I’m just inviting you into my story. That attracts some of us, but it can make us nervous, because we think, is there something vague and wishy-washy about that? Because maybe we [Christians] know a thing or two and maybe we should tell people what to do, to offer instruction instead of just inspiration.

“That said, it’s a genre that I love, and it’s a genre that I think, as a community, we in the church can embrace for a couple reasons.

“One, there’s something true about the messiness of life that is present… for most of us, the spiritual life is not about seven steps or forty days to Christian perfection. Messiness that storytelling and narrative unfold is scary and risky and authentic and true. God can take the truth, he’s big enough.

“Another reason I think we can embrace the genre is that I think there is a lot of evangelistic power in this type of literature. There will always be people who are brought into Chrsitianity by a classic apologetics, by a Lewis Mere Christianity-type book. In sort of emergent church, postmodern circles apologetics and dogma have become bad words, and I don’t think they are at all. On the other hand, I do think that there are people who will be left cold after Mere Christianity. …I wasn’t interested in being rationally persuaded with the veracity of Christian claims…. The Alpha program… is good program in a lot of ways, but one of the strange things is that the trademark image is a drawing of a guy soldiering a gian red question mark, an the impliation is that there are a lot of people out there… they just need this one question — Darwinism and the biblical account of creation, whatever — answered and they’ll kneal and pray. But I think we live in a moment where I think there are a lot of people not asking those questions, or if they are, that they don’t know they are. While not interested in taking up Mere Christianity or Alpha, they are still interested in entering someone else’s spiritual story. I was one of those people. The reading of memoir was hugely significant in my converstion to Chrsitianty. Long before I was willing to go to church, I could read a memoir and dip my toe into the Christain story without ever leaving my bedroom.

“I think that as a community we are drawn to this type of literature because it meets us in a cultural moment where we don’t want to be told what to do. We sense that there is something missing from the seven steps or forty days approach, and I think this is literature that can both disciple us and evangelize us.”

On James Frey…

“…that raises a whole nother set of issues about the genre.”

On liturgical time…

“[It had a] symbolic purpose in that one of the real concrete ways I think about my conversion is… what calendar am I really inhabiting. One of the big markers for me in the first two or three years… I was still living on the Jewish calendar. It was the most basic calendar. …It’s a constant marker how engrained the church calendar has become in my life, and each year it becomes a little more nature, I become a little more embedded it in. That is the central symbol when I think about my conversion.

On Sabbath…

“I still have not figured out what it means to robustly have a Christian Sabbath. …Mudhouse Sabbath [also by Lauren Winner] looks at eleven practices that both communities do. It asks if there are things Christianity can learn from those practices. I have tried to incorporate not the specifics but some of the principles. Two majors priciples: the positive command to be joyful and the negative command to avoid work. I haven’t begun to observe the particularities, but I have thought, okay, these are the overarching guidelines, is there a Christian ways of incorporating these habits.”

On confession…

“I would enver say that saying a formal confession is a theological necessity, and I don’t think we’re more forgiven if we do that. […] Bonhoeffer… suggests not that the confessor is the intermediaty, but that in all sacraments, there is some stuff, and in confession, the stuff is the body of the person hearing the confession. I can’t dogmatize that, I don’t understand that, but there is something poetically that speaks to me that in that moment that God is present to me in the body of the person in front ot me. I’m not confessing to my priest, but I’m confessing to God… confession is related to spiritual direction. It’s about having another set of ears. It’s not about having another person really speaking. I also do think there’s a psychological value. If one is honest in the space of a confessional… I’m self-diluted, I like to hear myself… so another person having some authority, and having a time and space consecrated to doing that work, I find very helpful. I said [this afternoon] that, among other things, I got it about sex. I’m sure other people said to me, you’ve got to stop having sex, but it took the authority of that priest saying ‘Lauren, that’s sin’. I don’t think I would have been less forgiven if I had prayed about it somewhere else… it’s a discipline that even if someone doesn’t sit down with the clergy, that unfolding ourselves in front of another sibling in Christ… not to absolve me, but to speak God’s absolution to me.”

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“The Seahawks are at heights unseen in a quarter of a century. They will play either Chicago or Carolina in the NFC Championship game next Sunday at Qwest Field after beating the Washington Redskins on Saturday.”

In a discussion in Thorubos last spring about memoir, the conversation seemed to revolve around conceptions of self and conceptions of others. We live in a culture that places emphasis on the self and the individual experience, without the healthy corrective of corporate, shared, communal experience. We’re individualists.

I tend to think that we balance this individualism by wanting to peer into the lives of others, including both their actions and conversations and also their deepest emotions and thoughts. This seems to explain the recent interest in reality TV shows and the number of memoirs published in recent years. In progressive evangelical circles, books by Don Wilson, Ann Lamott, and Lauren Winner have gained enormous popularity for these same reasons. We peer into the lives of others, hoping to see the world as they see it, feel what they feel, and in doing so, somehow glimpse truth in a fuller sense.

It is within that context that James Frey said on Larry King live a few nights ago of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces,

“I’ve acknowledged that there were embellishments in the book, that I’ve changed things. In certain cases, things were toned up; in certain cases, things were toned down; that names were changed; that identifying characteristics were changed.”

It seems that Frey certainly undermined the public’s assumptions of what they can expect from a memoir.

Not so, says Oprah, who endorsed the book on her show (it’s in her book club). She called in to Larry King at the end of the show. She said:

“…I feel about “A Million Little Pieces” that although some of the facts have been questioned — and people have a right to question, because we live in a country that lets you do that, that the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me. And I know that it resonates with millions of other people who have read this book and will continue to read this book.”

So it appears that the truth of the book still remains. But there are lots of books out there with made-up events that still communicate profound truth through the characters, plot, and narrative. That’s fiction, folks. Apparantly, according to this article, Frey had limited success with his book before he called it a memoir. As soon as it became a memoir, publishers started to notice. The book became more interesting once it became “real”.

Given that the truth has now come out, I find it refreshing that the media is asking, “What is real? Where do we find truth?” Is it in the story or in what the story represents? Is the truth of A Million Little Pieces located in the life of James Frey or in the narrative of redemption manifested in that particular story?

The latter, I think.

I came across a rather interesting article in Slate about Starbucks drinks. I’ve blogged before about s drinks offered by Starbucks that are absent from the menu, but I was unaware that in the case of cappuccinos, one can get a drink that is not only smaller and cheaper but also tastes better. The article says:

The short cappuccino has the same amount of espresso as the 12-ounce tall, meaning a bolder coffee taste, and also a better one. The World Barista Championship rules, for example, define a traditional cappuccino as a “five- to six-ounce beverage.” This is also the size of cappuccino served by many continental cafés. Within reason, the shorter the cappuccino, the better.

read more…

Gender-inclusive language has been a hot topic in Bible translation over the last few decades, and rightly so. Many masculine pronouns that are found in Greek were translated in the NIV with masculine language or are turned into plural pronouns in more recent gender-inclusive translations.

A professor of mine once cautioned me against the latter translations in favor of the former. After all, the gender-exclusive translations remain truer to the original language (grammatically, at least) and shouldn’t be translated as plural. The English language lacks a gender-inclusive singular pronoun, so many of these pronouns, such as “he”, are turned into plural pronouns, such as “they” in gender-inclusive translations. Furthermore, these plural pronouns must never be used with singular nouns. After all, that’s a basic rule of English grammar that I learned back in English 101.

As soon as I heard “basic rule of English grammar” I began to listen carefully to the pronouns people used as I talked to them, and I found that this so-called rule is broken regularly. A few Google searches verified that the same thing happens in print, both on informal websites and more formal pdf documents.

A few days ago, two articles appeared on Language Log that dealt with this very topic. One article points to Sean Lennon, who is quoted in the New York Post in his search for a new girlfriend:

“Any girl who is interested must simply be born female and between the ages of 18 and 45. They must have an IQ above 130 and they must be honest.”

As a further proof, another article appeared a few days later that pointed to more of the same, this time from Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors:

There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend

And this from the BBC on November 29:

“UK scientists have identified the part of the brain that determines whether a person perceives themselves as fat.”

After a few more examples and some jargon-filled explanation, Pullman concludes:

By all means, avoid using ‘they’ with singular antecedents in your own writing and speaking if you feel you cannot bear it… don’t try to tell us that it’s grammatically incorrect. Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare’s rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us… This use of they isn’t ungrammatical, it isn’t a mistake, it’s a feature of ordinary English syntax…

So it appears that plural pronouns aren’t a plural as we thought they were. I wonder what this might mean for the future of Bible translation.

In addition to the Newbery award he won last year, Gary Schmidt has won an anti-bigotry award.

From Calvin’s website:

Lizzie Bright was one of 10 literary works so honored year by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America, whose chief purpose is “the review and identification of outstanding books written each year about discrimination and bigotry, and ways to develop equitable future communities and societies.”

Read more…