Some random Friday ponderings 🧵

I've been thinking a bit about the "should I stay or should I go?" decisions a lot of us have struggled/are struggling with in churches or evangelicalism. I'll be the first to tell you that my original intent was to stay and fight and work for change to the broken systems and bad paradigms.

This is me in the back of a truck in Southeast Asia and starting to see how so much of my white American evangelical faith was caught up in theology and ideology that wasn't just toxic for me but for others. 👉 Using the Bible as a weapon instead of a literary source of knowledge and life

👉 Subscribing to a "Christian" patriarchy which sees women as less than men in practice and belief when Jesus (and Paul) trusted and dignified women

What if deconstruction is the way we examine our cultural and political idols?

That makes it HEALTHY and even DESIRABLE. It only threatens those who stand to gain from those idols being big deals.

This means deconstruction is not only a check on those idols but on those in power, which makes it vital.

Today in things I noticed for the first time in the Bible:

In Luke 9, Jesus sends out his disciples to preach the "good news." But later in Luke 9, when Peter says "you are the Messiah," Jesus says, "Don't tell anyone that yet. There's still more to do." That means the good news they were preaching was about the Kingdom (Lk uses good news/kingdom interchangeably), how it's come, what it means for their lives and the future, and they healed people too.

The Kingdom meant that justice was being done and wholeness was coming in.

I didn’t know until I saw her face …

I had my performance review at work last week. She mentioned that she noticed I was more COVID cautious than most of the team.

I told her we buried someone on two days before then because of it. The conversation went on and I shared that loss makes 3 we’ve known well and more like 5 if we count acquaintances in our circles - move out one degree and we’re on the cusp of double digits. In 13 months. Those 3 were healthy before it took them.

I once worked with a missionary who told me of one of his friends in Africa.

The friend helped shape a new Christian community and they wanted to be baptized.

The problem was that water was far away and far too precious to pour out for baptism. So they got creative. He tasked the new believers with creating a ritual that was meaningful to them and worked with their resources.

They dug a hole and brought out a blanket. The person being baptized would get in the hole and they would cover then uncover with the blanket.

When you understand that Paul was a utilitarian, culturally conscious missionary, his apparent contradictions become more clear. It’s why in one place he sends one of his people to get circumcised so they can share the gospel in synagogues and in another he says getting circumcised is accepting another gospel.

A manifesto for those of us with untidy Faith 🧵

#messymiddlechristians #messymiddlechristian 1. We believe in boundaries not boxes.

We hold to Nicene orthodoxy but we don't think Christianity in one expression is totally right or wrong. We fit a lot of places in between, and we're okay with that.

I consider my deconstruction as more of an untangling. After traveling and seeing the global church at work, I suddenly realized that my version of Jesus was tangled up with so much culture. I kept Jesus — but I went to the gospels to see him for myself.

I kept church — but I stopped expecting it to have all the answers or to look a specific way.

I kept my commitment to God — but I let go of my need for certainty & embraced more ambiguity & comfort with questions.

Church services may be scalable, but discipleship is not. And having more people in attendance does not necessarily mean you are faithfully executing God's mission in your community.