Selfless or Selfish?

Something occured to me the other day that I have never thought of before.

We think of those that go into ministry or some other type of service to humanity as selfless individuals. They are seen this way because of the great sacrifices they seem to make while serving others. These people are regarded highly because they seemingly forsake their own needs to meet the needs of others. One of the things we applaud these people for is their willingness to forgo the financial stability that might come from a "secular" job. We admire, respect and, in many cases, support them because they are willing to serve selflessly.

But is that actually the case?

Is it possible that what passes for selflessness and sacrifice is actually selfishness and indulgence? Think about it with me for a second.

As a former pastor, I have recently given thought to the idea that it was very selfish of me to pursue my passion of ministry even though it meant many personal sacrifices for my family. I indulged my dream and "call" while my family often struggled financially. I selfishly spent many precious hours building my ministry while my family observed from a distance, waiting for me to get home. We uprooted and moved away from stability to instability while I chased my dream. And each and every Sunday, while I was serving others, my family came to church without me, sat without me and most days went home without me... all for the sake of the ministry.

And at every place I served I was applauded and thanked for the sacrifices I made.

Sacrifice? SACRIFICE? It wasn't a sacrifice. It was me feeding my ego... subconsciously mistaking my "need to be needed" as a call from God.

Of course, I know that no one else can relate to this. As a matter of fact, I am probably just talking to myself here. Yeah, I am certain of it. I am completely alone on this one.

Yeah... it's probably just me.

Comment Fast

Several weeks ago I did something I had never done before... I fasted.

Now, I had done one of those 24 hour fasts with the youth group to help them gain an idea of what it was like for hungry people around the world and we would raise money for "World Vision" or whatever... but let's not kid ourselves, that's not a real fast. We would drink "smoothies" throughout the night and have some fun, playing games, and then the next morning share a big breakfast together to talk about our accomplishment.

But this was real... at least for me. I decided to start with a three-day fast to gain an idea of how I might possibly work into a longer fast at some point in the future. Coupled with the fast, I wanted to spend some time reading books that had encouraged or challenged me over the years. Many of these books have been the impetus to bring me to where I am today with SCP. For me the fast meant evaluating where I was in all facets of my life, of which SCP is an important part.

Physically the fast was demanding. It was a juice and water fast only. I learned a lot about how I would approach it the next time when I do this, because I just jumped right in, not knowing that I really needed to prepare my body better for this. However, the cold-turkey (pun intended) approach certainly shocked my system. My last meal was on a Thursday at lunch, and by the next day when everyone at work was heading to Del Taco for lunch I was pretty hungry. But I kept to it, drinking my home-made juice (bought the juicer and everything) and consuming plenty of water.

By Saturday morning, I was feeling better from a hunger pain standpoint, but worse everywhere else. My body ached, I felt feverish and later I came to find out that this is normal. They say the first three days of a fast are the hardest part because it resembles the flu. The good news is by Saturday night I felt much better, lighter, and actually I felt stronger physically than I had prior to the fast.... although I was a bit tired and listless. I also slept really well while I was on the fast, something I am not able to do normally.

When Sunday morning rolled around, I was feeling really good. One of the odd effects for me was how things around me seemed to slow down. Life moved more slowly when I wasn't eating and the little things didn't seem to bother me as they normally do. The small stuff became just that... really, really small and unimportant.

The thing I noticed was how I had seemingly lost my cravings for solid food and in some strange way, didn't want to end this fast. I wanted to taste food but didn't necessarily want to eat it. It was like I just wanted to suck a burger, not consume it... it was weird. It sounds strange, but I was almost frightened to eat again and preferred the way I felt now to how I felt before. I didn't want to go back... but I felt like I had accomplished my goals and so that afternoon, I broke my fast with some soup.

So how does this all relate? First, I would recommend a fast to anyone that hasn't done one. It was great for me physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally. Just the sheer feeling of discipline and accomplishment was important to me.

Second, it put things into perspective for me. It made me see that there are some things you just need to let go in life. I let go of some things that weekend.

Third, I was determined to share with my friends at SCP what I had re-read during this time that motivated me and inspired me over the years. More importantly, I wanted to take myself out of SCP for awhile. You see, I could have written these things and regurgitated what Aeschliman or Peterson wrote, but why not read it for yourselves. No need for me to re-invent the wheel.

So when I saw the direction the comments were going... off-topic, nit-picking, back and forth trying to "be right" instead of seeking to learn more about each other and our journeys... I was pretty much done with it. To me and in my opinion the comments are the "small stuff" I can do without if they detract from the bigger picture at hand. So for me, I felt SCP needed a "comment fast".

To me the comments on this site are what drives it. On my blog, when I write something, I want the feedback and the sharing of ideas to help me sharpen my views or opinions on things. Many times I hold back on commenting on things I have written, and I used to have a policy on never commenting on my writings... and maybe that's what I will do again. But the comments were an important place for the SCP readers to share, dialogue and grow together in understanding and strength for their journeys. I hope it will return to a place where we stop trying to "fix" people (and this goes for all of us), but seek to understand, challenge, and even laugh with and at one another. I say laugh because at the core of SCP, we are all guilty of some pretty stupid thinking that needs to be enlightened - even if we prefer our present ignorance.

A few days away from the things we think are important can clear the mind, let us see things for what they are, help us to re-evaluate and re-focus our energies and mindsets. That's what fasting is all about in my opinion.

The Creeps

This pretty much sums it up!



Thanks to C for this.

Hey Everybody....

SHUT THE "F" UP!

I have been writing for the past hour about how to address my feelings on this site as it currently stands....and I just erased it all, not sure what to say.

For now I am simply nauseated by what I read in the comments section of the past two posts.

Yeah... I never thought I would prevent comments on this site.... but I am now.

Some of you sicken me...

Go back to DOING what you felt was really important. You think what we DO here isn't important, so stop coming here and telling your friends to come visit our site. Get back to DOING what you FEEL is so important to enhance God's Kingdom. You have wasted enough of your precious time here. You could be reaching lost people or healing people or teaching or equipping or whatever it is that you actually DO.... instead of spending your time commenting over and over again here, trying to rebuke and correct us reprobates. Remember, there is nothing important happening here.... we are selfish, egotistical, immature, rude, obnoxious, pretentious and egotistical (or did I already say that). SO why waste your time here... you obviously have more important things to DO. So go DO it.

So for now Stupid Church People has gone the way of Tony Jones, Brian McLaren and the other great Emerging Church leaders.... for now this conversation is closed.

But those of you that are interested... please keep coming. We've still got some things to say. And we don't want anyone to talk. Just listen.

Shhhhhhhhhhhh.............

The Faking of the Pastor

I don't know of any other profession in which it is quite as easy to fake it as in ours. By adopting a reverential demeanor, cultivating a stained-glass voice, slipping occasional words like "eschatology" into conversation....not often enough actually to confuse people but enough to keep them aware that our habitual train of thought is a cut above the pew level--we are trusted, without any questions asked, as stewards of the mysteries. Most people...know that we are in fact surrounded by enormous mysteries: birth and death, good and evil, suffering and joy, grace, mercy, forgiveness. It takes only a hint here and a gesture there, an empathetic sigh, or a compassionate touch to convey that we are at home and expert in these deep matters.

Even when in occasional fits of humility and honesty we disclaim sanctity, we are not believed. People have a need to be reassured that someone is in touch with the ultimate things. Their own interior lives are a muddle of shopping lists and good intentions, guilty adulteries (whether fantasized or actual) and episodes of heroic virtue, desires for holiness mixed with greed for self-satisfaction. They hope to do better someday beginning maybe tomorrow or at the latest next week. Meanwhile, they need someone around who can stand in for them, on whom they can project their wishes for a life pleasing to God. If we provide a bare bones outline of pretence, they take it as the real thing and run with it, imputing to us clean hands and pure hearts.

More from the introduction of "Working the Angles" by Eugene Peterson.

This Guy is Angry at Pastors

American pastors are abandoning their posts, left and right, and at an alarming rate. They are not leaving their churches and getting other jobs. Congregations still pay their salaries. Their names remain on the church stationary and they continue to appear in pulpits on Sundays. But they are abandoning their posts, their calling. They have gone whoring after other gods. What they do with their time under the guise of pastoral ministry hasn't the remotest connection with what the church's pastors have done for most of twenty centuries.

A few of us are angry about it. We are angry because we have been deserted.... It is bitterly disappointing to enter a room full of people whom you have every reason to expect share the quest and commitments of pastoral work and find within ten minutes that they most definitely do not. They talk of images and statistics. They drop names. They discuss influence and status. Matters of God and the soul and Scripture are not grist for their mills.

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper's concerns--how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping, to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepreneurs; while asleep they dream of the kind of success that will get the attention of journalists.

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor's responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.

From the introduction of "Working the Angles" written by Eugene Peterson.

I Wish I Could Write Like This...

...but since I can't, I thought I would share this with you.

Learning to love life by living through loss and mistakes
Lessons learned then gradually surfacing
Letting go, stripping naked to scream
I am not perfect, nor do I strive to be
I am alive in this world of face-first falls and public breakdowns
I'm a retarded, disfigured clown
Dying to be heard for the simple art of letting this heavy wall finally fall
I'm an equal being of no race or color
A hallucination if you will
Sneaking into the lives of strangers and letting them fall apart
To a new rhythm, just to feel better

"Retarded, Disfigured Clown" is spoken by Blue October on the album, "Consent to Treatment".

New Podcast... New Hosts??

In case you didn't know... well now you do!

See Ya!

Fan Mail

Josh and I get several email letters a week from people who come from all over the world, all walks of life, all manner of faiths and all at various points of their journeys. I am always interested to read their stories and hear their points of view and insights. Some are encouraging, some challenge me, some inspire me and then there are those rare and chosen few that just outdo themselves.

Here's one such selection of the special people that send us their love from time to time:


Click to enlarge.

Here's Hope...

The Anti-Stupid Pill

Got any ideas for a tag-line for this breakthrough pill? It could save us all.

An Uncomfortable Journey

In the situations (the journey to freedom from religion) we face the challenge of our will--do we want freedom badly enough to endure the ambiguities, marginalization, and misunderstandings that will come with our apparent obstinacy and betrayal of what we have been taught? The discomforts certainly will be our partners along the way.

AMBIGUITY, because the life of freedom will be uncharted for us. Where once there was mostly black and white, we will find that much has turned gray. Our flight to freedom--away from religion--will constantly put us in conflict with our particular moral upbringing. There's no road map here, simply an uneasy, unschooled conscience that has to meet Jesus anew.

And we will experience MARGINALIZATION, because the religious system must label us as somewhat heretical if it is to ensure that its other subjects do not interpret our deviance as a legitimate option.

Fear combined with negative labels has a powerful effect. If I have been trained to believe that a "liberal" is one who has rejected Jesus personally, then I certainly do not want to be one of them and face the consequences of eternal separation in hell. I am likely to avoid certain behaviors or opinions if I have been convinced that they reflect a liberal orientation. Those in our group who have trespassed the boundaries will be put aside, partly in the hope that their isolation will lead to repentance....And if we are honest with ourselves, we will avoid personal contact with them because we also fear their impact on our own minds and souls.

MISUNDERSTANDINGS will also be a part of our experience in the flight from religion. We'll blunder countless times with our newfound freedom as we attempt to articulate our contempt for the chains of our past. The conflicts that we are sure to engage will regularly be our own doing....We will hurt and offend others as we describe our encounters with Christ, because they will interpret our experience as a judgment of their own value and practices. This is not easily avoided and in fact is sometimes necessary, because at times the gospel is offensive.

Our experience of religion has hurt us, and it is our great fortune that in the middle of all the pain we have stumbled into the glorious freedom of Jesus Christ. We had accepted the burdens and chains of religion as being a part of our salvation, but now we are free simply to love Jesus with all our hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

From the book, "Cages of Pain" by Gordon Aeschliman.

Journey to Freedom

All sorts of people are ready to save our soul-not least among them being those who would plunder it. Being set free from religion is a process that unfolds to us as we contemplate the saviors who have supposedly come to our rescue. All of them pose as our friends, and few of them will settle for anything less than submission and servitude.

Absolute freedom maddens them.

You see, religion socializes us. By that I mean it puts us into a group of people where now we belong. We are family, we have identity, we are accepted. I follow the rules and they approve of me. I break the rules and they chastise me (for my own good, of course). This process is not unique to religion; it is the most basic description of how society operates. We become so dependent on the group, which has now become our reference point for what is right and wrong, that our very self becomes a reflection of the group's values and beliefs. In fact, our self-worth is measured by our perception of what the group thinks of us.

The process of socialization, then, is the means whereby we learn the rules of the "in club" and then adjust our lives accordingly.

Religion's socialization process is lethal. It not only offers us the acceptance and affections of a specific group of people, it also offers us the acceptance and affection of God. We become secure in our religious sense of self and vigorously join with the others in defending the fundamentals of our worldview. This is what much of our Christian education is about... a certain percentage of Sunday School classes, sermons, doctrine courses and seminars are not as much about pursuit of truth as they are about religious socialization.

The acceptance and affection of God offered to us by religious socialization come with high stakes. Any rejection of this religious group's values and behavioral expectations will bring down upon us the wrath and rejection of not only the group but also God.

To become free people is to unleash the indignation of religion.

We must be clear that the journey to freedom is at times a bleak and lonely path, one that offers us few of the familiar comforts that came with religion. We are left to ourselves to discover our true salvation, and we are often confronted by the animosity of those who find our freedom a threat to their religious tranquility.

From the book, "Cages of Pain" by Gordon Aeschliman.

-------------------------
I picked up this book some time around 1992 when I was visiting Westmont College in Santa Barbara with a small group of youth pastors on retreat. Little did I realize how much it would mean to me during the following year. No book has meant as much to me as this one and I return to it time and again to find solace, encouragement, and hope.

In the next few posts I plan on sharing some of it with you. It is a powerful story and one that will bring healing and empowerment to those in the process of gaining the freedom they seek from religion. I hope it also brings understanding to those surrounding us.

The Gods are Dying

The gods are dying. The gods of this world are sick unto death.

Which gods? The gods that we worship. The gods that our enemies worship. Their sacred names? There is Science, for one: he who was to redeem the world from poverty and disease, on whose mighty shoulders mankind was to be borne onward and upward toward the high stars. There is Communism, that holy one so terrible in his predilection for blood sacrifice but so magnificent in his promise of the messianic age: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Or Democracy, that gentler god with his gospel of freedom for all peoples, including those people who after century of exploitation and neglect at the hands of the older democracies can be set free now only to flounder in danger of falling prey to new exploiters. And we must not leave out from this role of the dying what often passes for the god of the church; the god who sanctifies our foreign policy and our business methods, our political views and our racial prejudices. The god who, bless him, asks so little and promises so much: peace of mind, the end of our inferiority complexes. Go to church and feel better. The family that prays together stays together. Not everybody can afford a pyschiatrist or two weeks of solid rest in the country, but anybody can afford this god. He comes cheap.

These are the gods in whom the world has put its ultimate trust. Some of them are particular gods, and there are plenty of others, each can name for himself. And where are they now? They are dying, dying, and their twilight thickens into the night. Where is the security that they promised? Where is the peace? The terrible truth is that the gods of this world are no more worthy of our ultimate trust than are the men who created them.

And where are we? Stripped of our securities and bereft of our man-made gods, we stand as lonely and hypnotized spectators at the dance of death as it is being played out in our time. With the gods that we have created all going or gone, soon all that may remain is the God who created us, brooding over our darkness.

The former things are passing away and the gods are dying, just as the former things must pass away and the gods must die so that the new things can begin to come to life beneath the dark wings, so that creation can go on happening. My question is this: Are there in us, in you and me now, that recklessness of loving heart, that wild courage, that crazy gladness in the face of darkness and death, that shuddering faithfulness even unto the end of the world, through which new things can come to pass?

If not, God have mercy upon us, for we will soon be as yesterday when it is gone. If so, then we, even we, will have some part in the new heaven and the new earth the God is creating.

More excerpts from the second chapter of Frederick Buechner's book entitled "The Magnificent Defeat".

In the Beginning...

What is life?

Everybody asks this one way or another, at one time or another, and tries to answer it. Life is a rat race, we say, or a bed of roses, or not a bed of roses; or it is a battle to the death, a pain in the neck. This is the language of poetry too. Life is the flight of a bird that swoops out of the darkness of night into the great fire-lit hall of a castle. He wings his way wildly, batting against the walls, the ceiling, until finally he finds a window, then out into the darkness again.

Life is what we would be dead without. Life is what we are. Life is our little portion of Being itself. But that is only to define one mystery in terms of another. You and I and the most distant star and the dragon's fly wing and the rustle of leaves as they fall-these all have one thing in common, which is that they all are, we all are, part of Being.

What is Being?

Think of this world. Think of the great globe itself, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, and all the people of this world. Then take it all away.... Think of the universe itself. Then take away all of the planets and the stars, take away space itself and take away time. What is left? All that one might say is left is the absence of all these things. Now take away this absence. Nothing is left. Non-Being. So Being is what we have instead of this. Your Being and mine, the Being of our world and of all the unseen worlds. This is the great miracle. That Being is? It might have not been. Where did it come from? Why?

We are not asking a scientific question now, and if I tried to give a scientific answer, if I started talking in terms of the Big Bang theory... if in other words, I tried to tell in the language of science how everything got started, I would leave you still unsatisfied because even if I could prove my theory to be true, your question would go deeper than my answer. It asks not what the process by which Being came to be, but what is the purpose. Not how was it created, but why was it created. Who created it? Because that is the way in which both poetry and religion finally ask it. Who?

If anyone says that is a pointless question because there is no way of arriving at a definite answer, all one can reply is that, be that as it may, one cannot help asking it even so, if only because life keeps asking it of us.

An excerpt from the second chapter of Frederick Buechner's book entitled "The Magnificent Defeat".