The Problem of Functional Atheism

11 03 2010

I had a great day away yesterday at St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, CA. It was a treat to arrive in time for 7:30am morning prayer in community. A friend and I spent until midafternoon on the grounds. My heart and mind unwound, and I was able to be more attentive to God’s presence with me. On that theme, I came across this insight from Gerald May’s book Dark Night of the Soul:

“At worst, we give lip service to God’s presence, but then feel and act as if we were completely on our own. I think of church committee meetings, pastoral counseling sessions, or even spiritual direction meetings I have attended. They often begin with a sincere prayer, “God, be with us (as if God might be in attendance at another meeting) and guide our decisions and our actions.” Then at the end comes, “Amen,” and the door crashes shut on God-attentiveness. Now we have said our prayers and it is time to get down to business. The modern educator Parker Palmer calls this “functional atheism. . . the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with me .” (Gerald G. May, M.D. Dark Night of the Soul. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004, p. 44.)

Ouch. How much functional atheism is there in my life still? Where in my life do I assume that God isn’t interested (or worse, not even welcome)? One of the core values of The Leadership Institute is something we call “The One-Third Rule.” Whenever we have leadership of a meeting, a gathering, a conference, whatever, we design the time so that at least one-third of the time is actual engagement in spiritual disciplines, or practices of community or mission. Not included in this one-third is talking about and teaching about these disciplines or practices. We seek to set aside sufficient space in meetings like May describes so as to be deeply attentive to God throughout the gathering. We want to avoid mere nominal recognition of God as a clearly unimportant initial element that we quickly move beyond.

For example, when we “open a meeting in prayer,” how open are we really if the prayer takes two minutes and the meeting takes two hours? To what degree do we actually expect and trust that God is with us in that meeting? What evidences of the fruit of His Spirit are there in our interactions and our shared life?

“Ultimate responsibility for everything rests with me.” This is Parker Palmer’s definition of functional atheism. Christians who believe in Christ may live, though, as if He were a million miles and a thousand years away. How would my life be different right now, or this week, or in this season, if I more truly believed that, by His Spirit, Christ is making Himself more and more at home in my heart?

Buy a copy of Gerald May’s The Dark Night of the Soul on Amazon.com


Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , ,
Categories : Attentiveness to God, Functional atheism, Gerald May, God's presence, Practicing the Presence, Prayer, with-God life

A Good Word: God Loves Beauty

10 03 2010

This morning (Monday), I will be driving with two friends up to St. Andrews Abbey in Valyermo, CA for a personal retreat. It will be a nice crisp day (compared to Orange county).

I recently browsed some quotations from Frank Laubach’s classic book, Letters by a Modern Mystic. I love how this one illustrates the connection between enjoying God and seeing the world around me through His eyes:

“One thing I have seen this week is that God loves beauty. Everything He makes is lovely. The clouds, the tumbling river, the waving lake, the soaring eagle, the slender blade of grass, the whispering of the wind, the fluttering butterfly, this graceful transparent nameless child of the lake which clings to my window for an hour and vanishes forever. Beautiful craft of God! And I know that He makes my thought-life beautiful when I am open all the day to Him. If I throw these mind-windows apart and say, ‘God, what shall we think of now?’ He answers always in some graceful, tender dream. And I know that God is love-hungry, for He is constantly pointing me to some dull, dead soul which he has never reached and wistfully urges me to help Him reach that stolid, tight-shut mind. Oh God, how I long to help You with these Moros. And with these Americans! And with these Filipinos! All day I see souls dead to God look sadly out of hungry eyes. I want them to know my discovery! That any minute can be paradise, that any place can be heaven! That any man can have God! That every man does have God the moment he speaks to God, or listen for Him!” (Laubach, Frank. Letters by a Modern Mystic. Westwood, NJ: Fleming H Revell Company, 1937, p. 28.)

How is God opening your eyes to the beauty around you? How might He be opening your eyes to the real needs around you that He wants to touch through you?


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Categories : Frank Laubach, Ministry, Missions, Practicing the Presence, Retreat, Spiritual Reading, beauty, evangelism

Recent Most-Visited Posts

9 03 2010

If you aren’t a daily reader, or in case you’d like to revisit a post that a number of others have appreciated, here are the most-visited posts of the last 30 days. (This doesn’t include the two pages that are always most visited: “Retreats”, which lists retreat centers in Southern California, and “Ministry Burnout Statistics”.)

  • “I Need Your Feedback” – Many of you were kind enough to take a moment to let me know how you use this blog and how often you read. If you didn’t get a chance yet to do so, I’d still appreciate your input.
  • “What Do We Expect From Prayer” – In the last month, I’ve preached or led retreats with Ephesians 3:16-19 as the core passage. This blog post was my reflective imagining of what it might look like if this prayer was deeply answered in our lives and in our communities of faith.
  • “Burnout Stats: Physical Health of Pastor” – Here I shared some statistics about the pastor health.
  • “Misguided Humility and Prayer” – I reflected a bit on a word of counsel from Teresa of Avila about the temptation to quit prayers out of a sense of unworthiness or failure.
  • “A Good Word: What is Intimacy?” – I shared a couple of quotations from Spiritual Wholeness for Clergy on the theme of true intimacy.
  • “Some New Toys for My Library” – I shared a list of books I picked up at the Fuller Bookstore on my latest visit to campus to lecture in a class there. I’ve read many of them now. Good stuff!

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , ,
Categories : Blog, Books, Burn-out, Prayer, humility, intimacy

Waiting for an Unhurried God

8 03 2010

Today (Monday) begins an extended window of work on my Unhurried Time writing project. The ministry busyness of recent months has been a season of thinking and reading on the theme, but not doing much writing. Now, I have no preaching, retreat leading or teaching commitments between now and April 9. In preparation last week, I was reviewing my notes from Eugene Peterson’s Tell It Slant (Eerdmans 2008) and came across this:

“God is not in a hurry. We are repeatedly told to ‘Wait for the Lord.’ But that is not counsel that is readily accepted by followers of Jesus who have been conditioned by promises of instant gratification…. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, one of our great modern Isaianic prophets who had extensive experience with violence in two World Wars, wrote, ‘The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profound relationships.” (Peterson, Eugene. Tell It Slant. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008, p. 72.)

Reflection question:

  • Where are you feeling the most impatient in this season of your life? How might that be the very place where God is seeking to deepen your roots of unhurried relationship with Him and with others?

Buy a copy of Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers on Amazon.com


Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: , , , , ,
Categories : Eugene Peterson, Impatience, Patience, Unhurried, relationships, writing

Looking Back: Emptied to be Filled

7 03 2010

I’m writing this on Sunday morning as I prepare to preach at Crossway Church in Santa Ana, CA. I’m speaking on “Why Missions Matter for Every Christ-Follower” out of Ezekiel 47:1-12. Gem is with friends in Cambria. Sean is in San Francisco for a class conference. Bryan, Christopher and I are holding down the fort.

For the blog this morning, I found a couple of past posts from a late-eighteenth century French spiritual director, Jean Grou. He talks in practical terms about how we must be emptied before we can be filled, and how that may work in our lives.

Read more of “Emptied to be Filled”
Part One :: Part Two :: Part Three :: Part Four :: Part Five

Buy a copy of Manual for Interior Souls: A Collection of Unpublished Writings on Amazon.com


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : Burn-out, Empty hands, Jean Grou, abundance

Looking Back: Misguided Humility and Prayer

6 03 2010

This weekend, Gem is away with a few friends enjoying a spiritual retreat in Cambria. Our oldest son, Sean, has flown with his Virtual Enterprise class to the San Francisco area for a gathering of such classes from around the state. It’s just Bryan, Christopher and me.

In reflecting on this blog, I came across this post from May 2008 on the temptation to stop praying because we’re not worthy. Teresa of Avila had some good counsel for me a while back when I was feeling this one.

Read more of “Misguided Humility and Prayer”


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : Prayer, Spiritual Direction, Teresa of Avila, humility

Do Our Methods Matter?

5 03 2010

A while back, I came across this on Twitter: “The message is sacred but the method can be changed” (quoting Brian Houston, Pastor of Hillsong Church). If I were to paraphrase what I think he is saying, it might be something like, “What God says by His Spirit in the scriptures is unchanging, while human methods obviously change over time because we change over time.” Methods that made perfect sense in a thirteenth-century medieval body of Christ won’t make as much sense today. We easily make “sacred cows” out of “we’ve always done it that way.” But where, for example, do we get the idea that the main gathering of God’s people week-to-week should happen in a building set-up in rows of seating where one person does most of the talking? Is this how the first Christ-followers gathered? Shouldn’t we at least ask why we do things as a church using the methods we do?

(By the way, Shane Hipps suggests in Flickering Pixels: How Techology Shapes Your Faith, “The linear arrangement of pews in churches didn’t exist before the printing press. The medieval church didn’t have pews—just a wide open space for standing. After the printing press, church seating starting to mirror the pages of a book (p. 46-47).” Interesting, isn’t it?

Back to the methods/message question. Does God have anything to say about our methods, or is He only interested in our message? Too often, the statement Houston makes ends up being interpreted as, “We can do ministry any way we want. Old ways are empty. New ways are good. The latest way is best. Methods don’t matter. The message does.” It is this idea that I oppose. Eugene Peterson’s book The Jesus Way gets underneath the reality that how Jesus did things is just as normative for His followers as what He said. Do our methods echo those of Jesus, or do they sometimes oppose him? Chuck Miller suggests that ‘The Bible is not only our message book, but our method book as well.”

Jesus apparently made it a challenge to join his little band of disciples. Some churches practically bend over backwards to get people to call themselves Christ-followers. Jesus said things that sometimes offended and puzzled people. Some present Christ’s invitation in a way that pleases people and makes them comfortable. Were people who had little interest in following Jesus comfortable around Him? Not really. I’m certainly not advocating that the direct aim of our lives is to be offensive and stupid. But, if we are actually following Christ, perhaps we wouldn’t be surprised if people responded to us as they did to Him.

I’d appreciate your thoughts and feedback.

Buy a copy of
Shane Hipps, Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith
or
Eugene Peterson’s The Jesus Way: A Conversation on the Ways That Jesus Is the Way

On Amazon.com


Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , ,
Categories : Eugene Peterson, Shane Hipps, The Jesus Way, The way of Jesus, church, discipleship

Looking Back: Praying the Psalms

4 03 2010

Today, I’m posting a link back to something from October 2008 I wrote as a personalized praying of Psalm 63. It is a psalm for which I have often been deeply grateful. May it encourage you as well:

Click to read “Praying the Psalms”


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : Journal, Prayer, desire, praying scripture, psalms

What You Never Dared Hope For

3 03 2010

I’ve been reading some of the writings of Brother Roger of Taizé. You may be aware of the musical tradition of Taizé—simple contemplative songs sung in community. Brother Roger was the founder of this community in Taizé, France. (Click here for the Wikipedia entry about him). Below is the extended entry I read earlier today and found so encouraging:

In each person there is a portion of solitude which no human intimacy can ever fill.

Yet you are never alone. Let yourself be plumbed to the depths (Romans 8:27) and you will see that, in your heart of hearts, in the place where no two people are alike, Christ is waiting for you. And what you never dared hope for springs to life.

Christ came ‘not to abolish but to fulfil’ (Mt. 5:17). When you listen, in the silence of your heart, you realize that, far from humiliating human beings, he comes to transfigure even what is most disturbing in you.

Does discovering who you are awaken a kind of inner unrest? But who is going to condemn you when Jesus is praying for you? (Rom. 8:34). If you started accusing yourself of all that is in you, would your nights and days be long enough?

When trials arise within you or misunderstandings arrive from without, never forget that in the same wound where the pangs of anxiety are seething, creative forces are also being born. And a way opens up that leads from doubt toward trusting, from dryness to a creation. (From The Sources of Taizé #11 in Brother Roger of Taizé. Essential Writings. Selected by Marcello Fidanzio. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006, 50).

Reflection questions:

  • Do you feel a disappointment with people that might just be a hollow within that only God can truly fill? How do you want to offer these places of holy emptiness to Him?
  • In what ways might you be harder on yourself than God is? Are you condemning yourself when God isn’t? How is God expressing His accepting love and mercy to you?

Buy a copy of Brother Roger of Taize: Essential Writings on Amazon.com


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , , ,
Categories : Loneliness, Spiritual Formation, Taize, condemnation, hope, solitude

The Right Kind of Hurry

2 03 2010

As I continue to think, read and write on the theme of Unhurried Time, I see new insights in familiar passages. For example, I saw this James recently:

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because our anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. (1:19-21)

James says when it comes to speaking and losing our temper, unhurried is the way to go. But when it comes to listening, we should jump at the opportunity. Is this how you regularly function? Me either. My pattern is too often the opposite. I can’t wait to say what’s on my mind. I can be very quick to lose patience. And when it comes to listening, I’m as sluggish as honey on a winter morning. I have a definite bias for speaking over listening. And my anger level is one measure of which I’m doing more.

As an introvert, you’d think counsel like this would be right up my alley. But as a leader, I usually solve things by talking. I’m a speaker, a teacher, and a presenter. I speak for a living. Slow to speak can feel unprofitable. But maybe following this counsel would be more fruitful than I expect. Maybe listening better would reduce the anger that jars my relationship with God and with others.

Where is my listening focused? James says, “Humbly [accept] the word planted in us which can save us.” I’m listening especially when it comes to what God is saying to me through scripture. Listening and salvation are working partners. I tend to seek rescue through saying something. But listening is a receptive mode of life. It’s a way of acknowledging that I need to hear what God and others have to say, that I need help from another. Do I believe this? Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t.

Reflection Questions:

  • In the very next conversation you have (live or on the phone), experiment with listening more than you speak. Trying asking a few more questions and making a few less statements. Seek to really understand the person you are speaking with. What might God have for you through what they are saying?
  • When it comes to reading scripture next time, perhaps read a few less verses and read them a few more times. Slowly. Receptively. As a listener. What is God saying through the scripture by the Spirit to your heart? What help is He offering?

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , , ,
Categories : Leadership, Unhurried, anger, listening to God, salvation, scripture reflection

« Previous Entries