culture

Last week I ran across this article, an interview with Tim Keller, in Christianity Today. This week in my blog I decided to look at the questions he was asked, pull a quote from his answers, and share some thoughts.

Q: What are the changes that you see for your ministry?

A: The question is, How do you make sure that not only the particular theological and ministry DNA of the church is such that other people can get ahold of it?

Of all the things Keller said in the interview, this is the one I have the most issue with. While I'm confident that it's not his goal to package Redeemer and ship it out to all kinds of other urban churches (although him referring to sharing the DNA makes me worry a bit), that's what always happens when you do this. Rick Warren told people not to do what he did, but the result was guys in Minnesota wearing Hawaiian shirts. St. Toms in Sheffield, England makes the same argument when you go over there, and yet there are now churches all over the place using the Lifeshapes, holding cluster meetings, and doing all that stuff.

The problem with all this is that no other urban church is in NYC and has the exact same history and cultural conditions of Redeemer. The same goes for Saddleback and St. Toms. Those are unique situations ... just like the church that's buying up everyone else's resources. Certainly there's something to learn from the process and philosophy of ministry, but trying to replicate the DNA just isn't it.

That's why I'm loving the whole Church Unique book.

While I've never paid much attention to Garrison Keillor, whenever I heard of him in the past, I always assumed that he was sort of your traditional Lutheran type. Most likely this is because what I heard of him was always coming off the lips of old Lutherans expressing their love for a man who makes even the staunchest of old Lutheran, our traditions, our singing, and all the other cliches sound fun.

Then I was given one of Keillor's columns (by an old Lutheran) a couple of weeks ago. The old Lutheran in question decided to share after a Bible study discussion about my tech side. He'd read it the day before and was reminded of it during the conversation. When he gave it to me, I wasn't sure what to expect. When he pointed out the bit that made him think of me, I was even more uncertain of where this was going. It read:

Everybody in my coffee shop seemed to be in their 20s, locked into laptops, clicking and dragging, jumping to new links, sending IMs while text-messaging with the left hand, and the sheer volume of communication was impressive to behold ... I imagine them walking around with GPS chips that notify them when a friend is in the vicinity, and their GPSes guide them to each other in clipped electronic lady voices and they sit down side by side in a coffee shop and text-message each other while clicking their e-mail and hopping and skipping around Facebook to see who has posted pictures of their weekend.

With that limited information I wasn't really sure where to go with the article, after all, many of the people I encounter in the church world are fearful and therefore hostile to this emerging culture that is obviously disconnected from real people because they spend so much time online. Given my old Lutheran stereotype of Keillor, I couldn't help but think that this was just another version of the rant I'd heard so many times before. Then I read the whole article and found these words:

The young are towing a barnful of credit-card debt and they mumble and talk that weird stuttery talk of y'know like so anyway like awesome or whatever, and they don't know how to do arithmetic by hand or use a dictionary, but they have a great attitude. They're OK about themselves. They're really into their friends. Wassup? That's wassup. They're totally connected. Like a colony of ants. I sat in their vicinity for a few days and tapped at my novel and got into a halcyon mood and then duty called and I came back to the miasma. I am good and depressed again, but hey, I'm OK with it.

I have to say, it was impressive to hear somebody speak of a generation that they don't totally understand and, rather than ripping into them for not being "like us", taking a moment to say, "There's plenty I don't get, but here's something good."

Of course, the excitement was somewhat dampened when I looked up more info on Keillor and discovered that he's an ex-Lutheran and a democrat who's endorsed Obama, but that doesn't change the generation gap, only the stereotype.

Everybody who reads my blog with any level of consistency knows that one of my soapboxes is the interpretation of Scripture. Because of this I'll regularly comment on grammatical and cultural elements of the Bible that help us gain a better understanding of what was being said.

While Seminary certainly heightened my interest in interpretation and honed my skills, this isn't a new interest for me. A number of years back I went through a huge "Jewish phase" where I purchased a ton of books on understanding the teachings of the New Testament from a 1st Century Jewish mindset. My whole goal at the time was to try and gain a better understanding of my Christian faith.

A few days ago I pulled out one of these books while doing some sermon prep and it struck me that most of these books had little value for me as a Christian. While the ones that interpret Jewish history from a Christian perspective are still great for preaching on the Old Testament, the ones that seek to explain the teachings of Jesus in light of the 1st Century Jewish teaching have no benefit.

Why? When reading the Old Testament, the religious leaders of Jesus' day built their teaching around one interpretation. Jesus (and the rest of the New Testament writers) came along and offered an entirely new interpretation that resulted in some very different teaching (which is actually what God had intended to be the case all along).

You can see this in the beatitudes where Jesus frequently said, "You have heard it said" in reference to the interpretation of the day, followed by, "But I say" which was his interpretation. Similar ideas can be seen whenever the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament.

In the end, to try and understand Jesus' teaching based on the very teaching he was trying to correct would be foolish.

What this means, other than my need to sell off a bunch of books on Amazon, I'm not sure. But it struck me as interesting so I figured I'd post.