reflections on MLK Day

Today, in the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy of work on behalf of the forgotten, the minimized, and the marginalized, take a little time to reflect on his message and on the state of your community, our nation and world. What can we celebrate? What bright shoots of beloved community have appeared around you? Where has hope taken hold and love led to justice? Where is the hard work of reconciliation ongoing? And where does evil still lurk or pose uninhibited? Where does division and violence plague our streets and families? How do we remain alienated from one another and who is being oppressed? In what ways must you take on the role of prophet and speak truth to power on behalf of those who are voiceless? Who can you empower to raise their own voice? How do these prophetic words critique your own life? Do you need to sacrifice something, to redistribute your own unequal stash of power?

The following are some of my favorite MLK quotes, a few of which you probably haven't heard before. Read them slowly. Don't assume that they confirm what you already think. Let them challenge you in a new way as they are doing for me as I am typing them out. And, finally, open yourself to the incredible love that King announced, the love of God that fills you up until you can't help but spill it out all over your neighbor...

"Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority....In spite of this prevailing tendency to conform, we as Christians have a mandate to be nonconformists. The Apostle Paul, who knew the inner realities of the Christian faith, counseled, "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." We are called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, no social respectability. We are commanded to live differently and according to a higher loyalty." * 

"But the real reason that we must use our resources to outlaw poverty goes beyond material concerns to the quality of our mind and spirit. Deeply woven into the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are of infinite metaphysical value. If we accept this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see them victimized with ill health, when we have the means to help them. In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied together. They entered the same mysterious gateway of human birth, into the same adventure of mortal life." ** 

"In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be." *

"We must avoid extreme optimism--the notion that we have come a long way and have nothing to do but await the inevitable. We must also avoid extreme pessimism--the notion that we have come nowhere and can do nothing to alter our lives. We must say realistically that we have come a long way, but still have a long way to go. We must realize that change does not roll in on wheels of inevitability, but comes through struggle." ***

"What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed." ** 

"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state and never its tool. if the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority." *

"We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.... We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind's last chance to choose between chaos and community." **

"Above all, we must be reminded anew that God is at work in his universe. He is not outside the world looking on with a sort of cold indifference. Here on all the roads of life, he is striving in our striving. Like an ever-loving Father, he is working through history for the salvation of his children. As we struggle to defeat the forces of evil, the God of the universe struggles with us. Evil dies on the seashore, not merely because of man's endless struggle against it, but because of God's power to defeat it." *

*Strength to Love
**Where Do We Go From Here?
***first address as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Holt Street Baptist Church, Dec 5, 1955

Reading and Responding to Contexts

Wassily Kandinsky, "Concentric Circles" 1913.

In the last post I expressed my conviction that the world is now a "glocal" place requiring multivalent contextual awareness for effective leadership. But how exactly do we tap into the culture's worldview? More difficult still, how do we connect with those people who are at culture's leading edge? The Church has had a bad habit of responding to the questions people were asking 20 years ago with the kind of answers that made sense to people 50 years ago. How do we attune our minds to those shaping our culture's future so that we can have answers for our neighbors' questions before they even start asking them? (recapturing and reimagining the role of culture creating in post-Christendom America is a can of worms for another day!)

First of all, we will benefit from seeing that this task moves beyond awareness of current events. Knowing what is going on is important, and there's a slew of things in the news right now that the church needs to have Jesus shaped responses to. However, if our awareness of the culture is only as deep as the constant stream of news and people's reactive commentary on it we will remain stuck within the culture. By doing so we forfeit our right/ability to see its presuppositions, offer prophetic critiques, appropriate Good News and deeply relevant pastoral care.

Francis Schaeffer was a master cultural interpreter and apologist, and my first introduction to this task. In The God Who is There he explains how existentialist philosophy (specifically its dismissal of absolutes and sense of despair) progressed through Western culture. From his perspective, they cascaded in the following order:

Philosophy
---------------
                  |  Art
                   -------
                            |  Music
                             -----------
                                          |  General Culture
                                           ------------------------
                                                                        |  Theology
                                                                         -----------------


I think he needs to pay more attention to the historic events (usually driven by technology, economics and contact with some new "other") and shifts in the actual contextual forms and functions themselves that move philosophers to articulate new thoughts. But I agree that this is a fairly apt (though perhaps overly linear) portrait of how a cultural worldview shift takes place.

As Schaffer describes it, the church's problem was that it was too absent from spaces where people were asking the questions and experimenting with the ideas that eventually eroded modernism. We weren't hanging out at the exhibits where Dada artists acted out their beliefs on life's absurdity. We weren't listening to the music they listened to or reading the books they read. Far from shaping the conversation, we were not even at the table.

So we became irrelevant. And it's a practice we are still repeating.

Most Christians still struggle to understand what it means to be postmodern or "late Modern" (myself included!) even though the key bards of postmodernism (Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc) are all dead, and the ideas they offered have mostly had their way at the general culture level by this point. A new wave of thinkers is already writing and painting and filming and singing away while we continue to be mired in the questions of the previous generation.

My point in saying these things is not that every leader needs to be reading the latest philosophy books. We don't. Most contemporary philosophy books coming out will never take hold and it is impossible to know what will except in retrospect twenty years from now.

Rather, I am trying to affirm and intensify Karl Barth's charge that as pastors, theologians, community developers, and Christian leaders of all stripes we must hold the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. We need to see the big picture, the megatrends, the worldview/philosophical perspective that the majority share, tapping into the ideas innovators are pushing at culture's leading edge when and where we can.

My seminary professor Dr. Brian Ross offers three suggestions for understanding what he calls "the secular mindset":

1) Be friends with secular people and listen to them. Not in a creepy, you are only friends with them because you have an agenda kind of way. Just a normal friendship where you have fun together and share about the stuff that matters to each of you. But pay attention and note those ideas that seem to emerge from a different source than your beliefs.

2) Look into the founding "myths" of the culture. Whether it is a macro-culture like America (City on a Hill, a Christian nation, the American Dream, the land of opportunity, the Founding Father stories, the King Arthur tales, etc) or a micro-culture like the local craft brewery scene (Hipster ideals, local economy, environmental concerns, etc), every niche has narratives--some we are only subconsciously aware of--that provide the backdrop for our concepts of the the world, how to act in it and what the good life is. Researching these backgrounds helps us identify the presuppositions people in the culture are walking around with, even if they can't identify what they are for themselves.

3) Read what people are reading in the philosophy/english/sociology classes at the local universities, watch popular movies, definitely watch indie movies, listen to secular music, play secular video games, etc. As you watch/read/listen/interact with these media, consider the two basic questions that Howard Thurman claims all humans ask: "Who am I?" and "What am I here for?" At some level, we are all trying to figure out what it mean to be human and what our purpose in life is. What answers are the films and books and songs offering to these questions? To what fundamental longings or problems do the answers relate? Get together with some thoughtful friends and have fun with this one.


Once some categories begin to emerge, it is time to consider...

A) How Jesus' Kingdom culture might speak prophetically to the context

and

B) What the gospel (good news) might be for this context (Note: it may be different than what has always been good news for us; that's ok, God is more than big enough).


There's several gospel and culture related posts in the pipeline, so stay tuned. But in the meantime, I'd love to hear what you think.