Radical Hospitality, Radical Mission

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Yesterday was a remarkable day at Grace Church. On an August Sunday, two weeks before the start of school, we had attendance that rivaled our average Sunday attendance. There were visitors from out of town as well as newcomers and church shoppers. There were also visitors from other Episcopal churches who joined us before participating in the Capitol Pride march.

After our 8:00 and 10:00 services, we introduced members and visitors to the master planning process on which we are about to embark and invited them to dream about the future of Grace Church, how, as I like to put it, we might become sacred space for our whole community.

While we were talking, people gathered for Capitol Pride. Some of our members joined the parade at its start; others joined after participating in the conversations we were having inside the building. I was struck by the juxtaposition of the two events. We were talking about mission in our neighborhood, while thousands gathered and marched outside. Here’s a photo from the parade (from Fred-Allen Self):

And I thought about something else, the way our building enables and limits our mission. I’m linking below to a couple of blog posts that challenge us to rethink the way we do mission or evangelism. It’s not enough to claim to be welcoming, our to assert our radical hospitality, we have to go out into the community and into the square, talk about our faith and invite people to encounter Jesus Christ with us.

Reaching Out to the Unchurched – Dr. James Emery White Christian Blog.

In today’s paper, there were probably dozens of ads for new cars.  If you read the paper, did you notice them?  It’s doubtful – unless you are in the market for a car.  (These days, it’s doubtful you even read a newspaper – but let’s play this out).

If you’re not in the market for a car, it doesn’t matter to you if a dealer is having a sale, promises a rebate, has a radio on-site broadcast, hangs out balloons, says they’re better than everyone else, promises that they will be different and not harass you or make you bargain over the price, or sends you a brochure or push email.

Why?  You’re not in the market for a car.

It’s no different with a church.  People today are divorced from seeing it as a need in their life, even when they are open to and interested in spiritual things.  They no longer tie that to the need to find a particular faith, much less a particular church.

And:

So how do you grow a church from the unchurched?

I’ll assume you know the “pray like mad” part.

Here’s step two:

Crawl underneath the hood of any growing church that is actually growing from the unchurched and you will find that the number one reason newcomers attend is because they were invited by a friend.

Churches grow from the unchurched because their members and attenders talk about it to their unchurched friends.  It comes up in their conversations like the mention of a good movie, a favorite restaurant, or a treasured vacation spot.

There is a culture of invitation.

Earlier, Scott Benhase said similar things in A Theology of Attraction:

Our churches ought to be places of pure welcome and grace. We truly ought to be communities of “radical hospitality” to the stranger.

And yet, the theology behind this practice, however right and good, has tended to mask something else that we need to acknowledge and address. For the sake of argument, I would call the theology behind the movement of “radical hospitality” a “Theology of Attraction.”

Such a theology holds that if we’re just open and welcoming enough people will naturally be attracted to us and want to come and join our churches. So, with this theology we declare that all people are welcome and we will offer them “radical hospitality” when they come into our churches.

Instead, he advocates a Theology of Mission:

We need a “Theology of Mission” like the early church had, in which modern day “apostles” (literally “ones who are sent out”) leave the friendly confines of our church buildings and go to where people are. We need to go to where people are because they are not coming to us, no matter how attractive we might be.

September 16 is Back to Church Sunday

Eating Flesh and Drinking Blood–the Mission of the Church: A Sermon for Proper 15, Year B

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August 19, 2012

As most of you know, Grace Church has embarked on a master planning process. I hope you will stay after services today to learn more about that process and begin imagining what our congregation might look like in five years. As I have said before in several contexts, this process encourages us to ask the questions: Who is God calling us to be as a congregation in the coming years? What is our mission in our particular context of Madison’s Capitol Square? Continue reading →

A couple of reviews of books about 16th century England

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Both reviewers are prominent historians. Keith Thomas reviews The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I by Stephen Alford. It’s a study of Elizabethan spies and intelligence efforts. He concludes:

Stephen Alford’s engrossing book reminds us that most governments will stop at very little if national security is at stake. When political conflicts are exacerbated by fanatically held religious differences, the outcome is even more deadly.

The other review is by Diarmaid MacCulloch of Eamon Duffy’s Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition. It’s a collection of essays by the author of Stripping of the Altars and The Voices of Morebath (both of which I assigned in my classes over the years). MacCulloch is critical of Duffy for overemphasizing popular resistance to Reform and argues in the review that by the mid-Tudor period, the lines between Catholic and Protestant were fairly clearly drawn, that Duffy tends to overemphasize Catholic sentiment, and occasionally simply misreads the evidence. Most interesting, MacCulloch ends with an anecdote new to me that reveals the complexity of religion in sixteenth-century England:

In 1566, Elizabeth I’s archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, was disconcerted to receive a bill from the bailiffs of the city of Oxford. They were still owed £43 out of the £63 that was their expenditure for guarding and burning Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer, back in Mary’s reign. Mary’s government added meanness to its brutality, and had not paid up. “The case is miserable, the debt is just,” the Puritan president of Magdalen College wrote in perplexity to the archbishop. So Parker, feeling that it was only fair, had a whip-round among his fellow Protestant bishops to pay for the expenses of burning England’s most famous Protestant martyrs. I wonder if any counter-reformation bishops would have reimbursed damnable heretics, had they presented that sort of bill.

Rick Bragg on the Southern Obsession with College Football

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A must read, for Southerners and Northerners alike. It’s a religion, too:

WE BELIEVE SOME things, down here. Some of them, I have lived long enough to question. We believe that if a snapping turtle bites you, it will not turn loose until it hears thunder, but since I have seen a snapping turtle as big as a turkey roaster bite a broomstick in two, I believe it will turn loose any time it damn well wants. We believe snakes have mystical powers and will charm you if you look into their eyes. When I retire, I plan to test that theory on water moccasins at my stock pond, and if they have not charmed me in four or five seconds, I will shoot them. Then, in times of drought, I will hang them in a tree. That, we believe, will make it rain. My grandmother, God rest her soul, told me so, so it must be true.

And we believe — well, maybe all but the Unitarians — that God himself favors our football teams. On Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, our coaches, some of them blasphemers and backsliders and not exactly praying men the other six days of the week, tell their players to hit a knee and ask his favor at the same exact instant the other team is also asking his favor, which I have always taken to mean that God, all things being equal, favors the team with the surest holder on long field goals.

h/t Alan Jacobs

Living with Homophobia

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Jesse Bering, whose essay against Chik-Fil-A president Dan Cathy was especially venomous, has this to say in his defense (and directed to progressive Christians):

Such old, unaddressed wounds, I gather now, never healed properly. Those 1980’s-era memories, along with several more decades of simmering in a toxic religious nation that has viewed me consistently and without apology as wilfully rejecting God by “choosing” not to be attracted to the opposite sex, is the backstory to my “angry rant.” From the time I was nine years old, I have felt, to my very bones, a palpable climate of Christian scorn, loathed not because of what I’ve done, but because of what I unalterably am. If this is not the Christ-like version of Christianity that you adhere to, I believe you, but know that your gentler version has lost the public relations campaign to that of your demonizing evangelical brethren, whose message of intolerance continues to be received much more clearly by the majority of gay youth.

Read it all here. His earlier piece is here.

We’ll be doing a little piece of PR for a “kinder, gentler” Christianity on Sunday on Capitol Square.

More incidents of Islamophobia

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From TNI, in addition to those I’ve already mentioned, the following:

ONTARIO, California. Worshippers said two women threw the three legs onto the driveway of the proposed Al-Nur Islamic Center in Ontario shortly before 10 p.m. Tuesday and sped away in a white pickup.

NORTH SMITHFIELD, Rhode Island. Muslims from a North Smithfield mosque are asking for extra protection after a sign outside their place of worship was vandalized over the weekend. North Smithfield police confirmed they are studying surveillance video recorded around 3:30 a.m. Sunday. That’s when a person was seen driving into the mosque’s parking lot and smashing the sign with a hammer.

MORTON GROVE, Illinois. The shots were heard by worshipers who were outside the mosque and were powerful enough to damage the building’s brick wall.

LOMBARD, Illinois. The prepertrators hurled a 7-Up bottled filled with acid at the school during Ramadan prayers.

OKLAHOMACITY, Oklahoma. Authorities are investigating after vandals fired paintballs at an Oklahoma City mosque. ‘A car pulled here in front of the main entrance and started shooting paintball guns, but at the time, I didn’t know it was that. I thought it was bullets they were shooting into the building.’

More on the Illinois incidents here. The Lombard incident took place in the congressional district of Joe Walsh who proclaimed last week that militant Islam was taking over the suburbs.

The Scientific Study of Religion

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Tom Bartlett explores the “new science of Religion” discussing the New Atheists and those, like David Sloan Wilson (Darwin’s Cathedral) who try to explain Religion’s origins scientifically and especially through Evolution.

Bartlett begins with the question whether religion has been a force for good or evil. The new atheists assert its malevolent influence in human culture, while Wilson and others attempt to prove the opposite.

One of the authors cited by Bartlett, Scott Atran, disproves the widely-held belief that religion has been responsible for most wars in human history:

Moreover, the chief complaint against religion — that it is history’s prime instigator of intergroup conflict — does not withstand scrutiny. Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored “God and War” audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history’s most lethal century of international bloodshed.

Atran is especially critical of those scientists like Dawkins and Dennett who try to argue religion away:

In an age where religious and sacred causes are resurgent, there is urgent need for scientific effort to understand them. Now that humankind has acquired through science the power to destroy itself with nuclear weapons, we cannot afford to let science ignore religion and the sacred, or let scientists simply try to reason them away. Policymakers should leverage scientific understanding of what makes religion so potent a force for both cooperation and conflict, to help increase the one and lessen the other.

Combatting the Evil of Islamophobia

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We don’t yet know a motive for the shootings at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek but the perpetrator’s links to white supremacist groups are becoming clear.

A day later, a mosque in Joplin, MO burned to the ground. Authorities have labeled that fire “suspicious” and it had already been targeted by two arson attacks (most recently on July 4). Glenn Greenwald writes about islamophobia in the US providing a catalog of recent attacks on American Muslims. He adds:

All of this reveals a broader truth: Islamophobia in the United States is pervasive and intense, and worse, is as ignored and tolerated as it is destructive. The greatest harm from these incidents is not to the property they damage. It’s the climate of fear that is created for Muslims living in the United States. As I’ve written about before, it’s hard to put into words how palpable and paralyzing this fear is in American Muslim communities. It’s infuriating to behold: perfectly law-abiding citizens and legal residents feeling — rationally and accurately — that they are subjected to constant surveillance, monitoring, suspicion, denial of basic rights, hostility and worse solely because of their religion and ethnicity.

This happens because overt expression of Islamophobia is, far and away, the most accepted form of bigotry in mainstream American precincts. Now and then, certain expressions of it are so extreme as to embarrass mainstream circles — Peter King’s Congressional investigation into The Enemy Within or the Michele Bachmann attacks on Hillary Clinton’s Muslim aide — and are thus roundly condemend, but more often than not, they are perfectly acceptable.

On Salon (where Greenwald writes) there are also articles about anti-Muslim bigotry in the Republican Party (Rep Joe Walsh of Illinois claims “Muslims are trying to kill Americans”) and a piece about Muslim leaders urging Mitt Romney to denounce Michele Bachman’s witch hunt.

I’ve been following the story about the efforts of a group to open a mosque in Murfreesboro, TN. It’s dragged on for years with arson and local groups trying to stop it, and politicians fanning the flames of hate. In the end, only the Department of Justice and the courts ensured the right of freedom of religion would prevail. More here on the anti-Muslim efforts in Murfreesboro. The community will gather there for the first time today for Friday prayers.

In spite of the prevalence of Islamophobia, there are also those who take stands against it. Greenwald highlights online efforts to raise money to replace the mosque in Joplin. In just a couple of days, they reached the goal of $250,000. In Missouri, Ashley Carter, student at nearby Ozark Christian College, has organized a rally in support of the Muslim community for Saturday, August 25.

When the media and our political culture fail to challenge purveyors of hate whether they are in the fringe or elected officials, it’s up to us to take the kind of stand that Ashley Carter has taken.

The Sikh Temple Shootings, Random Violence, and American Culture

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Robert Wright writes about a perceived gap between our attention to the Aurora shootings and to the Oak Creek Temple:

At the same time, one responsibility of journalists and pundits is to see things in terms of their larger social significance. And it seems to me that the Sikh temple shooting, viewed in that context, is at least as frightening as the Aurora massacre. This was violence across ethnic lines, and that kind of violence has a long history of eroding and even destroying social fabric.

Riddhi Shah is thinking along the same lines:

On Sunday night I turned on the TV to find that only CNN was covering the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin that killed six. Fox News had a program about a prison in Latin America, and MSNBC, something else that was equally irrelevant.

Compare this with the coverage of an incident that happened only two weeks ago, the shooting that killed 12 people in Aurora, Colo. Networks devoted themselves round-the-clock to the attack: Who was the shooter? Why did he do it? There were entire segments dedicated (rightly) to covering the vigils and a community in mourning.

By the way, my google reader feed had no new items about Oak Creek this morning.

Francine Prose has a thoughtful reflection on evil in the wake of the Aurora shootings:

But if we no longer believe in Satan, then what do we make of our sense that something is wrong with the world, that a random malevolent shooter lurks in the schoolyard or the cinema lobby? Our collective disquiet about the mass murders of our time is intensified by the sense that they select their victims at random; that they have come from different backgrounds and harbor dissimilar grudges, and that we have failed to come up with an “explanation” for their actions, or a reliable template to help predict or avert an attack. And yet we remain reluctant to accept the possibility that evil is not a problem that can be solved or a question that has a solution. How do we reconcile our wish to prevent further violence and to protect ourselves and our families with the suspicion that, as those who believed and believe in Satan would argue, evil is an element in the universal order, an aspect of nature and of human nature, a force and a constant threat that exists—and will continue to exist—despite our best efforts to understand and eradicate it?

 

And she too wonders whether it’s the randomness of the shootings (and the white victims) that grab our attention:

The media’s preference for stories about (preferably white) American victims—as opposed to reports of violence further from home—helps persuade us it’s fine to feel that way: a natural human instinct.

Innocent citizens in Mexico are regularly being sprayed with bullets in the course of their daily lives. But we can’t quite imagine ourselves waiting in line at a clinic in Veracruz, whereas we might think: Hey, I almost took the kids to the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in my town! The number of Syrian civilians killed daily during the last months surely outnumber the dead in Colorado. But I haven’t seen Assad’s mug shot on a tabloid headlined “Face of Evil.” Am I not supposed to worry about blameless Afghan citizens killed by mistake during a drone attack? Why should intentional violence perpetrated by narcos, soldiers, dictators, or machines—and resulting in the accidental deaths of the innocent—seem less evil to us than the methodical picking out of random strangers in a move theater? Aren’t all such incidents variations, in a sense, on a single theme—the theme being the evil things that crazy or “sane” people will do to one another given the opportunity, license, and a weapon?

More on the shooter

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According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, he was a neo-nazi.

The Southern Law Poverty Center, a group that has studied hate crimes for decades, reported Monday that Page was a frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band known as End Apathy.

 

He bought the gun within the last ten days. NBC News observes:

Wisconsin has some of the most permissive gun laws in the country and had passed a law in 2011 allowing citizens to carry a concealed weapon.

‘Nuff said.