A Prayer Journal | Flannery O'Connor

Yes, this is a short book. It includes a transcription of Flannery O'Connors prayer journal from her time at the University of Iowa writer's school. But the quality of a book should never be judged by its length.

It should be judged by its texture and depth. And for this reason I consider the book to be essential. The prayers O'Connor has written create a landscape for prayer utterly original in the Christian tradition, if also deeply embedded in it.

I am reading one prayer per night, sometimes two. They are leading me into new spiritual insights each time. I see myself in new ways through her prayers.

The book also includes a facsimile of the journal itself. It's really a pleasure to be able to see her hand-writing first hand, to imagine her as a young student writing each day in this journal.

I guarantee if you buy this book, when it arrives, you will do more than read it. You will cherish it.

And a great review by Marilynne Robinson:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/books/review/flannery-oconnors-prayer-journal.html?ref=books&_r=0

Kindergarteners, Hugs, Chuck E. Cheese and Interfaith Harmony

On Monday, per the birthday request of our eight-year-old, we went to Chuck E. Cheese for supper. It's amazing how fun pizza, salad bar, and a few game tokens can be.

When we arrived, our kindergartener saw one of her classmates from the elementary school eating pizza with his parents.

The two immediately leapt up, ran to each other, and embraced in an affectionate hug. The hug included jumping up and down with glee.

This child's family is recently arrived in Arkansas from Saudi Arabia. They are studying English this year, then doing graduate work in mathematics and organic chemistry starting next year. I had yet to meet the parents, so we spent a bit of time in conversation. They're so nice.

Then I went to eat salad with our family, but I couldn't get one thing out of my mind.

I have devoted my life to proclaiming a gospel and forwarding a movement (the church) that centers itself in a belief system that is, however you look at it, about the "layer" of reality beyond the layer we know empirically. Although Christians are committed to caring for the neighbor (and we really are, in our best moments) we believe this care of neighbor arises out of something we have experienced at another level--God, the Christ, grace, the experience of faith. We are incurably metaphysical.

But you know, that layer also introduces something into our hearts and minds that my daughter and her classmate have yet to adopt. I see this family, and I see difference. I see Saudi Arabians. I see Muslims. I think of them based on their nationality, and their religion. It helps that I'm a liberal Christian of some sort so I am favorably disposed and neighborly towards them because of my faith commitments.

But I still see them through those additional layers, and not as themselves, who they are simply as human beings.

My daughter sees her friend as her friend. He's her friend first. I'm not even sure she knows his religion, or his nationality.

I know this is not a profound revelation. Jesus himself taught us to have faith like children (Luke 18:16-17).

But it bothers me that I can't get beyond the metaphysical layers. I long ago fell in love with the Grundtvigian dictum, "Human first, then Christian." But the truth is the Christian religious layer always intrudes itself.

That hug between them has printed itself on my soul. I tear up every time I remember it.

Because any religion that would teach those two children to see each other as different, less valued, less saved, less human, is simply not worth the paper it is inscribed on or the community in which it is practiced.

I think my new religion is going to be this simple--you are my friends, and I hug you, and we dance.

You can change the world... give more money away

I refuse to be depressed by the news that giving to religious organizations in North America is at an all time low, comparable only to the level of giving during the Great Depression. Giving as a percentage of GDP has remained rather steady at 2% (see more statistics at the bottom of this post), but has remained depressed since the recession of 2008 and is not anticipated to recover until 2018.

Given that religious organizations are losing a percentage of this total giving each year as a percentage of total giving, I could get frustrated... but I refuse.

Here's why.

It forces us to get creative

In the past three years I have done more creative work inquiring into alternative income streams for ministry than ever before in my career. I regularly write grant proposals, research Kickstarter and other funding platforms, learn from planned giving specialists, and voraciously absorb stewardship best practices ideas. I'm still a novice, but I'm learning.

I'm especially trying to learn best practices from organizations outside of the church and religious section. Cross-pollination between non-profits of all kinds and the fund-raising work of the church is a necessary win-win situation. We can all learn from each other. Non-profits can learn from religious organizations how year after year we make up the largest percentage of charitable giving, and we can learn from non-profits why some of them are gaining on us.

It teaches us to trust God

What I've learned is there are three really good ways to raise money for the ministry of the church, and none of them work that well. But we keep trying. If it were easy to raise money, if it were simple to convince ourselves to be more generous with our resources, we would tend to trust our techniques rather than God.

I can't give up, because there is a world in need

Right now, I am inviting everyone I know to donate money to Lutheran World Relief for humanitarian disaster assistance in the Philippines. The money we donate to LWR will make a greater difference to people on the ground in the Philippines than acquiring a new book or CD or t-shirt. To be quite clear, a book will sit on your shelf. A gift to LWR may save a life.

I have to keep asking all of you, and inviting myself, to give more, because it makes a difference, an immense difference, in the lives of our neighbors in need.



The fall stewardship appeal keeps getting more fun

A lot of church leaders (and likely parishioners) get nervous at the fall stewardship appeal they conduct each year. It's not the end all/be all for encouraging benevolence to the congregation, but it is a worthy tradition. We need to hear God's call to support the ministry of the church financially. You can give your time. You can offer your presence. But if you really want to set the church free, if you want to make your church the kind of church that does amazing and gospel centered ministry, the most important thing you can do is give it such lavish and surprising gifts that it is overwhelmed with financial mission support and has to pray over what to do with the surplus.

If you want to make such a donation to a great Lutheran ministry and its mission development in Arkansas, here's your chance to do so. This year we began a much-needed transition to offering on-line giving. We plan to keep growing in this area.

When we give money away, we are free

Nothing is a surer sign that we have really heard and responded to the gospel than when we start giving ourselves away. The gospel, that we are free in Christ, sets us free, and freedom looks like no longer grasping and holding tightly the things that bind us. The most lavish givers, the free-est gifts, arrive and arise out of profound freedom. We give, expecting nothing in return, anticipating that the gift will help the neighbor in need.

Some charitable giving statistics

How big is the sector?

• Total charitable giving rose for the third straight year.
• Total giving to charitable organizations was $316.23 billion in 2012 (about 2% of GDP). This is an increase of 3.5% from 2011.
• As in previous years, the majority of that giving came from individuals. Specifically, individuals gave roughly $223 billion (72%) representing a 3.9% increase over 2011.
• Giving by bequest was $22.14 billion (down a whopping 7%), foundations gave $47.44 billion (up 4.4%), and corporations donated $18.97 billion (up 12.2%).
• Corporate giving accounts for just 6% of the total giving in 2012 which is actually a 12.2% increase from 2011.
• Most types of charities saw increases in donations. The two exceptions were Religion and Foundations.Arts, Environment and Animal organizations saw the largest increase which indicates that donors may be returning to their personal giving priorities (which they strayed from during the height of the recession in favor of supporting Food Banks and other Human Services charities).
• Historically, Religious groups have received the largest share of charitable donations. While this is still true in 2012, the percentage dropped by 2% from 2011.
• Even with the decrease in donations, 32% of all donations went to Religious organizations. Much of these contributions can be attributed to people giving to their local place of worship. The next largest sector was Education with 13% of all donations.
• Billionaire donors are starting to give at rates not seen since the beginning of the economic downturn.
• Revised Giving USA data shows that total giving as a percentage of GDP has barely strayed from 2% over the past four decades despite the huge growth in the number of charities. This figure climbed to a high of 2.3% in 2000, but otherwise tends to gravitate to 2% of GDP.
• Total giving in 2012 was 8.2% below giving in 2007, before the charitable sector felt the effects of the recession. If the pace of growth in charitable giving stays constant in the coming years, giving will not rebound to pre-recession levels until 2018.

Five Reasons Huffington Post is Destroying the Internet

It's Friday. Make it a Blockbuster Night!

Remember the days when you spent more time scanning the shelves at Blockbuster than actually watching the movie you rented? Those were the days. 

The space-time continuum was different then. 

There was a rule: the more people who went into Blockbuster to pick the movie, the longer it took to pick one... and factorially so, like orders of magnitude. Go in alone, you could be out in five minutes with a movie. But if Jesus and his disciples all went in to a Blockbuster, it would probably take them forty days to pick a film, and they'd end up with something disappointing to everyone, like Top Gun.

This week Blockbuster announced it was closing all its remaining retail stores. So first of all, my sympathies to the thousands of retail employees who are losing their jobs. It's never a good day when a great institution like Blockbuster closes its doors.

The logical culprit to blame in all of this is Netflix. Netflix, and all the other streaming services that set viewers free to watch pretty much anything, anytime, on-demand through their Roku, have brought about a transformation in the industry, and in an insanely short amount of time.

Like, remember when the CEO of Netflix wrote that really bad letter to subscribers explaining why they were partitioning the DVD division from the streaming division? It was a really bad letter, but we all got over it and the world moved on, right?

Personally, I blame Huffington Post. I mean, obviously a liberal/left scandal rag started by a conservative pundit trying to oust Clinton fro office, acquired by AOL and the winner of the first Pulitzer-prize for an on-line journal, is the obvious cause of the demise of Blockbuster. Right?

No, not really. But it does help me write a really great headline for this article that sounds quite a lot like a Huffington Post headline.

Returning to Blockbuster, what I really think about the closing of Blockbuster is that it is the canary in the mineshaft for Christian community in North America. 

Why? Because the population used to enjoy going out to a strip mall to pick their Friday night movies, but now all those resources are on the Internet wherever we are, and we can chat with friends on Facebook while watching our streaming movies to boot. 

In the meantime, the church by-and-large is going to try and hold out and stay open much longer than Blockbuster. We will say it is for theological reasons, and perhaps that is true, but nevertheless, there are a few things worth learning from the closing of Blockbuster and the rise of Netflix.

Streaming Sacramentality

What is a sacrament, and do you have to be together in real life for it to be a real sacrament? There was something sacramental about the Blockbuster experience, for sure. It bracketed the weekend tradition of relaxing on a Friday night. Finding the movie, choosing it with friends, frustration at late fees and having to drive back to return it the next day, all of these made Blockbuster a strangely satisfying embodied practice.

But clearly not satisfying enough for us to retain it when the streaming option presented itself. So too church is struggling with how to offer the sacraments, and where to offer them, in a streaming culture. The Methodists spent some time engaging this brave new world this fall. Huffington Post covered it, of course. 

Pretty much everyone tends to agree that communion should or at least could still include bodily reception of bread and wine. The question boils down to whether or not everyone needs to be in the same place when this communion takes place. Can you and I attend the same worship service on-line, but then receive the meal each in our own homes in some fashion?

What is the sacramentality of streaming? To what degree is streaming still embodied, just differently so? There are plenty of ways in which our participation in streaming media are fluid but still physical, disparate but still communal. Rather than dismiss the sacramentality of the stream, we need to learn how swimming in it is still embodied and faithful.

Equipping Home Chapels

Never before in the history of humanity have more households had more at their disposal as resources to turn their homes into chapels of faith. And yet very few households feel equipped to do this well. It's a paradox. Everyone has a bible on their iPhone, or can download one immediately, but very few of us actually read it.

I don't have to go to Blockbuster to get a movie. I have a pantheon of movies in my own home. So too the church simply needs to recognize this fact, and get creative about bringing to greater awareness among Christians that the resources for worship in place (even beyond home, since streaming resources naturally go with you on whatever device you carry anywhere you go) are at hand, always. You can pull up and pray vespers with your friend while driving down the interstate. The entire contents of the church video library is available for viewing and discussion Sunday evening after family dinner.

People feel busy, and often they feel they are doing many worthwhile things with their time on the weekends. Nor are they wrong about this. But often these good things are not yet worship or intentional faith-formation. The church, rather than constantly trying to get people to come to their local version of Blockbuster (that is, the church building) would be well-served to start imagining how faith formation might be streamed Netflix-like.

What is the church's version of a Roku? What is our Amazon Prime?

A Seminary in Every Device

Many seminaries are already clued into the streaming-ness of the church. They haven't necessarily figured out how streaming will contribute to their institutional longevity. In fact, this is a brave and scary new world. Seminaries used to exist, at least in part, to maintain a library. I spent hours and hours in the stacks of the Luther Seminary library. There was this spectacular antiquated book smell, and the library tower had the narrowest of metallic stairs I would race up and down to get from BS to BT. Proximity to books was a core value of seminaries. Learning in community was also important, but it centered around the availability and reading of books. 

Now, all these resources (or at least most of them) are readily available on your phone or Kindle.  

Luther Seminary, my alma mater, offers resources on the weekly lectionary at www.workingpreacher.org If you want to create your own bible study program and read more study resources, you can also visit their www.enterthebible.org Want to read pretty much any article ever written in English on religion? Then just access the ATLA database through the Luther Seminary library.

My other alma mater, Fuller Theological Seminary, offers some of the most extensive theological learning resources of any seminary in the world. 

Or check out the "disseminary" at http://disseminary.org. These are all just for starters. They're the tip of the iceberg. 

Teachers of all types are starting to find ways to turn their classes "inside out," recording their classroom experiences on Vimeo for all of us to view. When I Google "theology lectures Vimeo" here's the top hit: https://vimeo.com/71023067 A full hour of lecture on the New Testament by Tom Schreiner at South Baptist Theological Seminary.

How institutions or individual teachers will collect a hefty tuition from each of us remains to be seen. We are only now in the beginning stages of this transition. Much more needs to be considered. But there is no going back.

The Rise of Long-Form Television

Finally, notice how streaming has changed what and how we watch. Everybody thought television was dying out, what with the rise of the Internet and the destructive force of the Huffington Post, but television has made a strong showing the past few years. In fact, this might be the best era ever to watch television, especially long-form television. Long-form television is particularly well-suited to the streaming era, because you can watch it on your own time. Even if you don't subscribe to HBO, you can wait for Game of Thrones to arrive on Amazon or Netflix and then watch a whole season in one sickening binge session.

So too streaming culture will retrieve some parts of previous Christian mediation phoenix-like out of the ashes of the old. We won't always know which parts. God will catch us by surprise.

The one thing we will need to do is hold all forms of church lightly. Clinging to certain shapes or forms of mediating faith will be the one certain way to shatter them. Streaming culture is shaking up our use of space itself, and that's okay. It's really okay. Creative institutions like Netflix and Amazon are finding ways to make a profit in the new media era. Churches can learn from them, even innovate themselves on how to fund and staff ministry in new ways today, also.