CAN YOU KEEP YOUR FAITH IN COLLEGE? January 6, 2007
My church recently planted a new church next to the campus of San Diego State University where I lead worship every Sunday. It has been a few years since I graduated from college, but I can still recall the difficulties of that major life transition. As I’ve met and ministered to these young men and women on campus this past semester, I have been reminded of these challenges: moving away from the security of home and family, meeting new people, finding a new church, being challenged on what you believe by faculty and peers, the pressures of fitting in, parties, sex, academics, and of course…dorm life.
I recently came across a great book by Abbie Smith called Can You Keep Your Faith in College?, Abbie gathers together 50 college students to write essays on college life as a Christian. They openly discuss the ups and downs, pressures, perceptions, and challenges that a Christian college student faces on campus. The fact that this subject is written by actual college students living in the academic trenches helps to give this book credibility. I’m sure parents, pastors or professors could write a helpful book on the “dangers of college life”, but it just wouldn’t carry the weight and urgency that come from hearing from your own peers.
I think most young men and women cannot wait to get out of the house when they graduate from high school. The idea of calling your own shots is alluring, but it also comes with an incredible amount of responsibility - and this is something that is learned by experience. I found most of the writers that shared their experiences in this book to be extremely open about their struggles and sin, and I found this refreshing and not something you read too often in Christian literature.
In my favorite essay, Regrets and Grace, Sara T. mentions how she experimented with things she had never done before and is now living with the shame and guilt of her sin. Most of her peers told her that all religions were the same and not to worry about it, but Sara came to see the clear difference between Christianity and all other religions – and that difference is grace. She mentions that the best gift she could take away from her college experience was coming to grips with the grace she had received in Jesus. Other religions base their experience with God on a “If I do this, then you will do that,” or “If I say this, then you have to give me that” basis. But our Father in heaven’s kindness does not work like this:
“When the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of our righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy” (Titus 3:4-5).
I am going to use this resource in my college ministry and I would heartily recommend this book to high school or college students, parents, and churches that minister to college students. College life may challenge your faith, but it is also a great opportunity to deepen your faith as you come into your own as an adult.
Brian Thomas is the Director of Worship and the Arts for Kaleo Church in San Diego, CA. www.kaleochurch.com
TWO GOSPELS - Rick McKinley’s Beautiful Mess November 7, 2006
“What do you mean ‘two gospels?’” you might be saying to yourself. You might be expecting me to go into some weird new (or actually not so new) heresy of there being more than one gospel.
What I am speaking of is an interesting observation, explained more fully by Rick McKinley in his recent book This Beautiful Mess (Multnomah Publishing, 2006). McKinley, pastor of Imago Dei Community in Portland, Oregon, writes of the gospel of Jesus and the gospel about Jesus. McKinley explains it like this:
• The Gospel of Jesus–this is the announcement of the kingdom and his loving actions in his earthly ministry. Traditionally practiced in more liberal churches with a high emphasis on social justice, mercy ministry, political activism, social work and community service.
• The Gospel about Jesus–his work on the cross, his resurrection and how we can receive forgiveness through faith. Typified by most conservative churches with a high emphasis on proclamation of the gospel, personal conversion and obedient living.
McKinley proposes that a synthesis of these two gospels together are the actual true gospel: you cannot have one without the other and have it be the true gospel. Imbalance on either end leads to bitterness, despair and division—one needs only to look at the political battles waging as election day looms near. On one side you have liberals proudly proclaiming themselves as progressives, sensitive to the lower and middle class, against the war on terror and characterizing their opponents as “the religious right.” Against them are the conservatives, the flag-waving, Bush-loving, war-supporting, Bible-thumping rednecks who pit their “family values” against “the religious left.” What remains is not only a fractured country but a divided kingdom. What you are left with is no gospel at all.
The gospel that Christ himself lived and preached is a seamless combination of both “gospels.”
McKinley writes:
“If all we value is the salvation gospel, we tend to miss the rest of Christ’s message. Taken out of the context of the kingdom, the call to faith in Christ gets reduced to something less than the New Testament teaches. The reverse is also true: if we value a kingdom gospel at the expense of the liberating message of the Cross and the empty tomb and a call to repentance, we miss a central tenet of kingdom life. Without faith in Jesus, there is no transforming of our lives into the new world of the kingdom.”
The reality of the kingdom, however, as described by Jesus is not one or the other. A full-orbed perspective on the kingdom, how it has been ushered in and how it should advance is the ongoing work of His people in “this beautiful mess” we call the kingdom of God. It’s about proclamation but it also about reconciliation. It’s about conversion but it also about showing mercy. As a means of helping the kingdom advance, the redeemed live in tension between the perfect world to come and the present world that is in need of redemption. Until that day of consummation arrives, the church plows ahead in kingdom living–serving, loving, ministering and living out the faith we have been given.
Rick McKinley’s new book is out, This Beautiful Mess: Practicing the Presence of the Kingdom of God
Book Preview-Confessions of a Pastor September 8, 2006
“In acts of mutual confession we release power that heals … humanity is no longer denied, but transformed. The followers of Jesus Christ are given the authority to receive the confession of sin and to forgive it in His name.’’–Richard Foster, The Celebration of Discipline
“Confess your sins one to another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.”-James 5:16
The concept of confession of sin to one another in most Protestant circles is meet with, at the very least, indifference. At its worst, it is met with outright rejection. “That sounds Catholic to me,” they may argue. “I don’t need to confess my sins to anyone but God.”
The need of an outlet for confession is the motivation behind mysecret.tv, recently featured in the New York Times:
The LifeChurch founder, the Rev. Craig Groeschel, said that after 16 years in the ministry he knew that the smiles and eager handshakes that greeted him each week often masked a lot of pain. But the accounts of anguish and guilt that have poured into mysecret.tv have stunned him, Mr. Groeschel said, and affirmed his belief in the need for confession. (read the article)
Pastor Groeschel has written a book of his own confessions appropriately titled Confessions of A Pastor: Adventures in Dropping the Pose and Getting Real With God. Described as “the dark side of a pastor’s life,” Groeschel states bluntly “I have to work hard to stay sexually pure, I hate prayer meetings, sometimes I doubt God , and I can’t stand a lot of Christians…”
Unlike the users of mysecret.tv, Groeschel writes without the protection of anonymity–a bold and refreshing move considering how we tend to forget that pastors are real men who share the same struggles, face the same temptations and have the same dark secrets that we all have.
The Church Reaching to the Margins February 24, 2006
Recently I have been joining my friends Paula, Thomas and Suzanne on their weekly Sunday afternoon visit to a nearby convalescent home. To be honest, it can be pretty depressing and a little gross at times. When you first walk into the ward, you are greeted by the scent of human urine and an almost palpably desperate silence, punctuated by the occasional quiet murmur of nurses speaking into telephones. As you continue down the hall, you pass by some of the residents as they sit in wheelchairs positioned somewhat randomly in and around doorways and walls. Some sit with heads down, dozing lightly, while some nod to themselves, and others look up and smile even as their neighbor struggles with an uncomfortable restraint, letting out a pitiful scream of both pain and confusion. This last Sunday Paula and I stopped by Doris’s room, where she sat alone, clutching a stuffed polar bear, no light in the room but the fading glow of afternoon. While Doris was glad to have visitors, all attempts at engaging her and cheering her were met with dismay at her circumstances. When Paula asked if Doris had been out with her family recently, her response essentially damned not just her family, but our whole culture, and by implication the church as well. Doris’ answer was, “I don’t have any family; if they loved me they wouldn’t have left me.” For most Americans who aren’t taken by death at a tragically young age, this will be our collective fate: withering away from a life of vitality and promise to one of decay and regret, isolation, and for some, madness, in the human dumping grounds we euphemistically dub “convalescent homes.”
Not long ago I read the book Jesus in the Margins, by Rick McKinley, and the idea of bringing Christ to all those who inhabit the margins of life has been bubbling and stewing through my thoughts as of late. McKinley describes some of the characteristics of the marginalized as being a sense of isolation, aimlessness, emptiness, vulnerability coupled with defensiveness, and a disconnect from themselves and those around them. The people McKinley describes are people we all know, or he is simply describing us, and the book resonates with so many because it feels like it’s written to me and for me.
But therein lies part of the problem; the reason why there are people who are feeling left out on the margins in the first place, is that we’re still thinking about me. As much as those of us who have been saved out of the margins of life may still have a lot of work that God needs to do to clean up the mess that is our lives, and dig up the roots of our old worldview from the soil of our hearts, that does not free us from our responsibility to be conduits of grace to everyone God has place in our path. As I was driving to the convalescent home on my most recent visit there, the connection between this fact and the state of the people I was going to visit finally hit me in one of those “No kidding, Sherlock” epiphanies. Is there a group of people in our society that is any further out into the margins than the elderly? In the elderly you have a group of people who, first of all, need love from someone, anyone, it really doesn’t matter who, as long as someone is filling that need, and secondly, despite urgent physical problems, are often ignored by the very people who should care the most. This sort of love, going out and being with someone who is alone, and doing for someone the things he or she can’t do for themselves can be a tool that the Holy Spirit uses to crack open the hearts of stone that many elderly have spent a lifetime hardening, and it can soothe the fragile and desolate souls of those who have been abandoned. However, our fixation on our own pleasure and pain makes it pretty tough to address the needs, spiritual, emotional, and otherwise, of those who aren’t like us and aren’t directly involved in our social circles.
I think we’re all familiar with James 1:27, which says that “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” At best they are visited by our money, but not our selves. Even in the church, it seems that we are bent on achieving the same level of materialistic success that our culture tells us we must have, which means we have basically committed ourselves to spending an ever-increasing amount of our time on the achievment of that success. Practicing genuine Christian community becomes a nuisance, a drain on an already busy schedule, or something we’d love to get around to someday. The return on our investment towards material success comes with diminishing spiritual returns, though. The more time we spend in this quest, the less time we have to invest in others, and practicing a pure and undefiled religion before God will
end up on the backburner. Besides ignoring a large segment of our population that desperately craves human care and interaction, we’re setting ourselves up for the exact situation we are so intent on tuning out or pretending will never happen to us. Someday when it’s our turn to be old, who will be there for us with the time and the interest to take care of us? Probably no one, if we’re honest with ourselves.
The first time I went to the convalescent home, I recall going with Thomas into a room with a couple of gentlemen whose Alzheimer’s disease had reduced them to laying in bed and staring at the drabness of the walls, or the television as it sat there chattering narcissistically to itself. As Thomas spoke with one of the men, I went over to chat with his roommate. Above his bed were pictures of someone’s (hopefully his) kids and grandkids, along with some faded portraits of a young World War II airman. I shook the man’s hand and began talking with him about the photos, but he was unable to speak even so much as his name in a coherent fashion. His grip was strong, though, and he did not let go of my hand. I realized that that was probably all he needed, was for someone to talk to him and hold his hand, so I plowed on ahead. As Thomas and I prepared to go look for some other folks that he wanted to visit with, I told the man that I had to leave, but that it was good talking with him. Still clasping my hand, he shook it vigorously and as his glazed and clouded eyes searched my face, he repeated again and again, “Don’t forget me, don’t forget me, don’t me…”
I don’t think I ever will, but I pray that the church hasn’t forgotten yet.
Under the Overpass – A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America January 23, 2006
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a street person? What is life like begging for spare change, living in shelters and interacting with other homeless people? Mike Yankoski lets the reader experience being a homeless person first-hand in Under the Overpass. Over the course of 5-months, Yankoski and his trusty partner Sam Purvis wandered the streets of five cities (Denver, Washington D.C., Portland, San Francisco, Phoenix and San Diego) in a journey of faith.
The most striking observation is how the church respondes to Yankoski and Purvis when they came into contact. The book provides several stories of churches forcing them off their property or Christians giving them a cold shoulder because of their disheveled appearance. At one church in Phoenix, the man who kicks them off the church property turns out to be the deacon in charge of homeless ministry! (Thankfully, the deacon runs into them later and with a tearful apology asks their forgiveness.) Yankoski does a great job of not over-simplifying the complexity of homelessness and what the church should do about it. The book weaves a number of highly entertaining stories that gives you insightful glimpses of the underground community, desperate drug addiction and the territorial nature of street life. One character that I enjoyed was the “Sugar Man” in Portland who fed, cared for and witnessed to the homeless at one moment and would light up a bong with them the next. This is not something many churches could handle.
The good news is the increasing volume of conversation from believers that seeks to tear down the four walls of the American church. Christians are dissatisfied with the programs and isolation felt in modern churches and desire to experience something more. Part of this conversation must include our role as bearers of the whole ‘gospel’ and not just a message of individual salvation. The good news is not simply that a person is spiritually forgiven of their sins, but that God plans to renew the whole world and establish His Kingdom here for eternity. It is in our pursuit of social justice and alleviating suffering that we serve as a reminder that God will one day restore all creation to its rightful place.
About the author: Drew Goodmanson lives in San Diego and is a Pastor at Kaleo Church. He was a weekly column writer for the San Diego Reader. He currently spends his time as a church planter, a tent-maker, a church technology strategist, a husband and father. You can view additional writings on culture, community and the church at his blog goodmanson.com.