posted on January 31, 2011 in Columns, The Messy Table

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My niece is crazy about Justin Bieber. I don’t quite know what to do with that. We were at her birthday party this past summer and got to watch the swarm of small girls on the sofa pass around a freshly-unwrapped album and swoon together. Like watching a nature film, I thought. Choreographed at the instinctual level.

posted on January 31, 2011 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

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The volunteers at the Cross Cancer Clinic gave me tea and cookies today while I was waiting for Harry. It made me weep. After so many years as a hospital volunteer, I was touched by having the roles reversed. It was a somewhat humbling experience.

posted on January 24, 2011 in Columns, The Messy Table

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On Monday morning I went to ask God for a sign and found the cathedral locked. I’m trying hard to read this as a sign to look for God in other places than cathedrals, and not to stop looking for God.

Vancouver Poet, Adrienne Smith

posted on January 24, 2011 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

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We have the yard nearly ready for winter and most everything packed for our trip. We got little information on this place where we are going to stay. I couldn’t get a unit number or a phone number. All this confusion just adds to the stress levels we are experiencing.

posted on January 17, 2011 in Columns, The Messy Table

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I was washing the dishes when I heard the speech. There’s something about the hands-in-suds pose, isn’t there? I do a lot of listening at the sink. The radio murmurs on during the clatter of dinner prep or in the quiet in the afternoon, but when I run the hot water tap and pile in the plates and the ears turn on. Of course, speech is the same speech everyone else has been talking about this past week – US President Barack Obama’s speech at last Wednesday’s memorial service in Tucson, honouring the victims of the January 8th shooting.

posted on January 17, 2011 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

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And there it is, our little blue house. Home at last. We settle in and everything is familiar and I feel safe.

posted on January 15, 2011 in In Song

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Worship is a temporal art which reflects the value we place on time. What kind of time are we as a denomination spending on strong congregational singing?

posted on January 10, 2011 in Columns, The Messy Table

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“I like the blue butterfly.”

“I like the blue butterfly, too.”

“NO! No, you don’t! You like the green butterfly.”

“Okay. I like the green butterfly.”

posted on January 10, 2011 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

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Finally some definite news! Harry’s to get his three teeth extracted locally. His surgery is booked for July 3, so we’ll probably drive to Edmonton Sunday, pre-admission is Tuesday, and maybe on Monday we can make arrangements for accommodation when we are there for Harry’s radiation.

posted on January 5, 2011 in In Song

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Here are some ideas about worship and congregational song that I’ve begged, borrowed, stolen and (what’s more important) used in past years that have made worship more vital and joyful.

posted on January 3, 2011 in Columns, The Messy Table

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Happy New Year. Here’s a recipe for you. A messy table gift, if you like, maybe a challenge. You can do this with your kids, if you want a family adventure. Or lock them out of the kitchen and tackle it on your own. Let me know how it goes.

posted on January 3, 2011 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

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It is February 15, 2002. I wait anxiously for the sound of my husband’s car in the driveway. The back door opens, he looks across the room to me and my heart breaks. I read in his eyes what his lips begin to utter.

posted on January 1, 2011 in Letters

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I was 16 years old — I couldn’t wait to get my driver’s license. I couldn’t wait to work and make my own money. I couldn’t wait to go to college to be a social worker. I couldn’t wait to move out of the house and be independent.

I was going to have a great life — get married, have children, buy a house. I was a typical teenager. I was in control.

But life happens and my life has certainly been an adventure and not what I had planned at all! There have been many detours along the way.

One such detour occurred in the ’90s. Our family went through some terrible hardships (unplanned, of course, and unexpected).

In every hardship there are also unexpected blessings. The fund for ministerial assistance was one such blessing.

Sickness had left our family in a crisis and things were getting worse. But with the same spirit of determination I had when I was 16, I was going to manage (somehow!).

However, as time went on, we found our family caught between the left hand and right hand of financial assistance for those who are not able to work due to disability. My husband had no long-term disability at his work; the sick benefits through unemployment insurance were only for a short term (10 weeks approximately).

The provincial disability family benefits would only kick in when the E.I. ran out and once you were under the provincial legislation, you were expected to apply for all other benefits you may be entitled to, which in this case was Canada Pension’s disability plan.

Sounds complicated. It felt complicated. I remember what I felt like back then. Trying to juggle everything — hoping that we would find some stability. It seemed that we spent the entire year trying to unravel the bureaucracy of social assistance while my husband coped with a permanent disability at age 47 and what that would mean to him for the rest of his life.

And then came a blessing! (Unexpected and unplanned for.) The fund for ministerial assistance. I don’t remember who it was, but some kind soul directed me to the fund.

I am very determined and independent by nature! We will manage! But there is a time when we all have to put aside our pride and ask for help. It took a lot of courage back then to ask for help and looking back, I am so glad I did.

Today, I share my story for three reasons. First, I would like to express my deep and heartfelt gratitude for this fund and all who administer it. I respect your confidentiality, your kindness and love shared through the gifts given to our family that year. I also thank God for all those who are part of the team of people who hear stories like ours year after year and yet continue to offer such a genuine expression of care.

Secondly, I would like to express my thanks to Norman M. Paterson posthumously for having the foresight to see that his gift of generosity made in 1951 was needed and would continue to help many families like ours over the years.

At our 136th General Assembly the following recommendation was passed: “That the continuing need for new infusions of capital into the fund for ministerial assistance, in order to maintain the gifts to eligible ministers and their families, be drawn to the attention of sessions and to the members of congregations.”

As one who was a recipient of this fund many years ago, any donation to this fund will make a difference to some family this year … and in years to come. As the Moderator, Rev. Dr. Herb Gale, shared at General Assembly, let us board the ship of Generosity and give.

posted on January 1, 2011 in Letters

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At the risk of being pilloried myself, may I suggest we stop looking to the corporate business world as our example and start looking to Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our faith who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a bond-servant and, being made in the likeness of men and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Maybe it is time to be willing to lay everything — including our very life, at his feet and cry, “Lord have mercy on us!”

posted on January 1, 2011 in Called to Wonder

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Click here for this month’s Called to Wonder.

posted on January 1, 2011 in Letters

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Re Hats Off to Grandma, Patricia Schneider, Oct. 4

Ah! Tea parties. My little girls presented their share of them too, and giggled when their dad curled his not so little finger when he picked up the tea cup and played the part.

posted on January 1, 2011 in People & Places

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Haney welcomed Rev. Paddy Eastwood as their new minister of family and youth ministry. The congregation is excited to have her and her family — her husband Larry, and children Janet, Laura, and James — join the congregational family.

posted on January 1, 2011 in News

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The Life and Mission Agency released a memo on Dec. 7 that hopes to “identify pertinent questions so that the constituency will be aware of the direction of this reorganization.” It is available at presbyterian.ca/pcconnect/daily/5560.

The agency also posted applications for the position of associate secretary of Canada Ministries/the Vine. A job description is available at presbyterian.ca.

Canada Ministries and the Vine merge Jan. 1 and will be jointly headed by the current associate secretaries until a single department head begins work in September. — C.Purvis

posted on January 1, 2011 in Features

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A well-meaning business friend of mine sent me a little tidbit on how a corporate culture change guru is effecting change in a car company. He thought it would be applicable to church life.

The line he thought would be edifying for us ecclesiastical types was this: “It’s easier to act your way to a new way of thinking than to think your way to a new way of acting.”

What a great sound bite. What a delightful little maxim to repeat. The slight problem is that it isn’t true and it is especially untrue where it comes to the Christian and church life.

Both autonomous willing or thinking are not going to take us to anything new if we take the general thrust of the Reformed tradition (and frankly the gospel) seriously on both “will” and “reason.” This is overconfidence in human powers; for apart from the liberating grace of God in Jesus Christ, the will is in bondage to varieties of self-interest, which we try to pass off as our “free” choices. And reason manufactures idols, gods made over again in our image. Nothing “new” here. There is no reference to the renewing and liberating grace of God. This account features human willing and acting apart from what God does.

A lively sense of the agency of God among the baptized and in the world is not fundamental in much of business literature. I know there are analogies between “organizations” but the Spirit is promised to the church and the Spirit is no marginal consideration. Christ is with and among us. And that, in our Reformed and reforming tradition, has always been the basis of our reforming. We are not Reformed and reforming according to Harvard Business Review, Psychology Today, Scientific American or Deepak Chopra but according to the Word of God.

Listen to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth on the relationship between gospel and culture.

Bonhoeffer writes, “The present is not where the present age announces its claim before Christ, but where the present age stands before the claims of Christ.” (No Rusty Swords)

Karl Barth writes, “It is not the case that the exposition of Holy Scripture must finally issue in answering the so-called burning questions of the present day, that if possible it will acquire meaning and force as it is able to give an illuminating answer to the questions of the present generation. We cannot know what the real present is, what are its burning questions, who and what are, ‘our generation,’ ‘the modern man,’ etc. In a very real sense this will not appear until the Bible opens up before us, to give us correct and infallible information concerning ourselves, and our real questions, concerns and needs.” (Dogmatics)

Barth and Bonhoeffer make the same Reformed point: The gospel of Jesus Christ is not raw material to make serviceable to what we or the present age identify as “felt needs.” This move, which we make when we take a survey approach to what we will make of the church, threatens to destroy the integrity of the Christian message. And indeed this is what too often happens. As the theologian Willam Willimon reminds us, how seeker-sensitive do we want to be when what many people are seeking is illegal and immoral?

On the other hand, this does not mean we don’t beg, borrow and steal ideas that might be serviceable to the gospel from outside scripture, from the present day; scripture itself does this. We don’t want to be fundamentalist and sectarian and isolationist. It does mean, however, that borrowing ought to be scrutinized by the gospel the idea serves. It means our borrowings are ad hoc and provisional, not systematic and final.

Listen to Augustine: “If those who are called philosophers … have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to our use.” (On Christian Doctrine)

There is however a huge proviso: lift and loot, if, and only if, what you seize can be bent, and shaped and accommodated to our faith. Please note the direction of the traffic here. What is borrowed for Christian thought and practice (evangelism, worship, mission and preaching) must yield to the gospel.

Pagan loot must be accommodated to Christ, not Christ to pagan loot.

And so, grab every golden idea you can get — beg, borrow and steal from Harvard Business Review, Newsweek, Harper’s, Scientific American, the Presbyterian Record or even O Magazine (although you should always be suspicious of a magazine that has the same person’s picture on every cover); in any case, borrow from the philosophers, the social scientists, Madison Avenue, too. Collect up intellectual, strategic, critical and constructive loot of every sort.

However, be careful what you borrow. Always remember that the loot Israel lifted on the way to the Promised Land became serviceable to the Egypt that was still in them. The golden ideas they borrowed became an idolatrous calf in the wilderness. We think we modestly borrow and what happens: the revenge of the Egyptians — the Christian gospel gets hijacked by self-indulgence and idolatry. Think prosperity gospel.

In a 2005 Harper’s article entitled The Christian Paradox, Bill McKibben argued that “the Christian gospel has been hijacked by a culture of unrelenting self-obsession … and a series of causes that do not reflect his [Christ's] teachings.” McKibben makes a powerful case that throughout North America, church has become disturbingly conventional, and that leaders focus relentlessly on “you and your needs.” He says that with the help of clergy Americans have made golden idols of themselves — become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. He concludes with this haunting line: “When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only the love of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of the same.”

What if we re-read our time and place through the lens of the gospel? What if instead of riding on the coattails of current cultural movements that give us relevance in the short term, we were actually patient and, yes, pious and disciplined enough to read events and perceived challenges with baptized reason in the light of the gospel? How would we begin to do that?

A Form for Imaginative Formation

With the coming back of John Calvin to Geneva in 1542, he proposed Ecclesiastical Ordinances, which laid out governance and oversight of the churches in Geneva and the surrounding district. The consistory (from which we get presbyteries) and the company of pastors are what he proposed.

The consistory was a mixed body — elders and clergy that oversaw the morality of the people in the city. Elders were elected from regions of the city and watched over neighbourhoods and helped resolve disputes; if they couldn’t do it individually they brought the matter to the consistory as a whole.

The company of pastors met Friday mornings at 7 a.m., and it existed to oversee the doctrine and fellowship of the church at Geneva. All urban ministers and the teachers of the church were expected to attend (and those in outlying areas when they could). When this group met as ‘congregation’ it was really a forum for the continuing education of the clergy, although many others also came. Very often one minister or teacher would lecture/preach on a passage from the Bible and discussion would follow. It was continuing education in the interpretation and application of Holy Scripture under the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

The fellowship of pastors helped to check fanciful interpretation. Preachers learned to read their own lives and their world through the lens of the gospel with the help of their friends. The company of pastors was about proficiency in preaching and spiritual formation; but it was also an exercise in holy friendship where each helped the other in lives pleasing to God. When Calvin was dying, he called for his friends in the company of pastors.

The Presbyterian Church (USA), I discovered just recently, is moving to rehabilitate the venerable company of pastors. Too often we leave this aside for the overwhelming administrative functions of presbytery — for us too often it’s just presbytery as consistory; but listen to the rationale for the rehabilitation of the company of pastors in the PC(USA) and ask, does it make sense for us to try and make a similar retrieval?

“Pastoral ministry is essentially a corporate, rather than an individual calling. This conviction lies at the heart of Reformed pastoral identity, and was exhibited in Calvin’s venerable company of pastors, a direct antecedent of our presbyteries. Calvin convened the pastors of Geneva weekly to study an assigned biblical text, hear a paper from one of the pastors, pray together, consider together the obstacles and opportunities facing the witness of the gospel in their region, and to determine how best to address the pastoral challenges presented by those obstacles and opportunities.”

And then it concludes, “In our time, presbyteries are so often consumed with the urgency of putting out pastoral wildfires and with the constitutional mandates of regulating pastoral ministry that careful, intentional nurture of good ministry (sound biblical interpretation) gets short shrift.”

That sounds pretty accurate to me. What if we began to think again of the venerable company of preachers, learning from each other in ministry?

I am just dying to one day say after a presbytery meeting, “Wow! Now that was inspiring.” I’m not being cynical; I recognize the need to do business and that administrative work is crucial. But what if our business was framed by more intentional learning and spiritual support and imagination formation as it was in Geneva?

Mutual encouragement and love sustains us. And how much more confident, in the very best sense, would we be in the pulpit and behind the lectern, if we made ourselves responsible to each other for what we preach and how we teach? A danger of the ministerial life is how many of its functions are carried out in relative isolation without much accountability and encouragement.

A Formed Imagination at Work

Engaging Biblical Authority, Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, offers an essay — Inhabiting Scripture, Dreaming Bible — on biblical authority that delightfully escapes abstraction. She writes about her own formation in the world of the Bible. The role that the Bible played and still plays in helping her to locate where in the world she is, and how to construe her neighbours and the needs of the world.

“In the ongoing play of my imagination, there is a strong tendency for me to impose on everything I experience some sort of story about sin and redemption. It becomes instinctual, this habit of mental organization. Wearing the eyeglasses of faith, I experience life as constantly following a narrative arc, wherein a problem is identified (something is wrong) and its solution is promised and sometimes delivered (salvation happens) … In the midst of all of life, Jesus is constantly being born, living, confronting sin, being nailed to the cross, and resurrected to life eternal with God.”

She speaks about neighbours and how she imagines them as one shaped by the story of salvation: “I cannot look at anyone without seeing Jesus loving him or her … It is impossible for me to frame humanity in any other way than as Jesus-loved — this is my gut response to people … We are all constantly walking with Jesus, friend or foe. He walks beside us, healing, teaching, challenging, provoking and comforting.

“When I think about the deep habits of mind shaped in me by the scriptural story, I realize that I have learned to glance continually at the border of any story to make sure nothing is excluded from it, and, if it is, to try to pull it into the main frame. I constantly see Jesus looking up at Zacchaeus in the tree or toward lepers living in caves outside the city walls … Call it a penchant for the marginal, a habit of mind that moves toward the edge of what we normally see in search of what we do not …”

Jones goes on to describe how her imaginative formation by the scriptural story through childhood and adult catechesis has made her suspicious of exclusions, of consumptive market capitalism, open to the surprising intrusions of God and delighted at life in a divinely enchanted world full of playful possibility.

I’m worried as a Presbyterian minister and a teacher of the church that we don’t do this much anymore. I worry that often we don’t seem to have the capacity to do this anymore. I sometimes think that in the church, marketing is having its way with us, as though the only way to talk about church is given by the frame it provides. I worry that we talk way too much about sex and conflict and not enough about baptism and Christian formation. I think that we’re way too fussed about reasonable order and not fired by imaginative ardour. I’m anxious that we get co-opted too often in the Christianity and culture relationship because we don’t have the resources to work this relationship critically from our side. “Accommodation is us.” I am mindful of Jeffrey Stout’s criticism of much of modern theology: it gives the impression that it doesn’t have anything to say that an atheist doesn’t already know.

I think that we’ll become interesting to our time and place again when, by means of biblically imaginative misreading of our times, we have something distinct and odd to say to the world. As Flannery O’Connor once said, “You will know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”

Reading the World with New Eyes

Recently, I drove out to Castlegar, B.C. My son attends Selkirk College, where he’s studying wildlife and fisheries management. I drove there alone. We loaded up the car and drove back together through the mountains.

As we were driving along, the whole way back, he was my interpreter. On the way there, I saw trees, mountainsides without trees and various flowers and shrubs and animals. On the way back, he kept telling me the Latin names for the trees. I learned that the Ponderosa Pine — the layperson’s name for the tree — has bark that is fire retardant. He told me that ungulates don’t like corridors; and that the angiosperms are blooming.

Wow! I thought. He’s experiencing the world in more subtle ways now. He inhabits the world differently. He can see what I cannot see. When you move from learning concepts and words to interpreting the world by means of those concepts and words, you’ve been gifted with an educated imagination. I stand in awe of what his instructors have accomplished.

What if we did that at church? What if we so educated the imagination that any baptized and professing Christian could interpret the world with growing subtlety and richness and truth? What if imagination was so stoked with scripture that the Spirit could get Christians to inhabit the world as the place where the promise-keeping God keeps covenant with the world in Christ? What if preaching and church school and sacraments and fellowship and theological education were all geared toward Spirit-enlivened imaginative training? What if instead of preferring to interpret the Christian church in a foreign idiom, we co-opted that language, and brought it into the captivity of the Christ-centered, scriptural narrative of reconciliation?

I think this takes Holy Spirit-inspired guts. I think some people will despise your efforts. I am sure you will be met with the accusation, “come on, be realistic,” right at the door after you preach. I am sure that someone will say, “there’s no pure gospel.” That’s because the imagination of some of your hearers has been so taken hostage by a certain time and place that they would rather believe you are lying than that God is an agent in the world. Modernity and late modernity are hostile to divine agency. My advice: just press on. I think you will begin to offer your prayers for illumination with a new sense of dependence on God. I think if you persist you might even come to appreciate the language of conversion all over again. And I think you will be incredibly weird, as the world measures weirdness, but you will be wonderfully interesting.

posted on January 1, 2011 in For the Record

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One of the two questions I’m most often asked at social gatherings when I tell people what I do, is what kind of stories do we publish in the Record.

I tell them, Everything: from politics to social issues and cultural criticism — book and movie reviews — to disaster relief and community development overseas to, well, even the occasional sports-related story.

And, of course, the standard repertoire of theology, spirituality and the health of the church, from local congregations to national and international church structures.

And your letters. And your People and Places submissions. And artwork and photographs and, well, there’s not much we don’t publish. We even publish stories on where you can invest your money, if you think about it: the variety of opportunities in supporting church and church-related charities, for instance.

The second question I’m usually asked is what I think is the future of religion publishing in Canada. That’s much more difficult. And I wish I knew the answer. What I do know is that there is certainly still an interest in questions about religion, and there is certainly a role for religion in the political life — some call it the public square — of our country.

This was never so evident as the weekend before I wrote this editorial.

The Globe and Mail launched a series about the face of religion in Canada. The paper flanked its coverage with commentary from panelists of different faiths from across the country.

Three things struck me from the initial stories. First, a religion sociologist in Waterloo said the three things that attract people to church these days are “availability of parking, quality of preaching and children’s programs, in that order.”

There’s enough there to dissect and discuss that it would fill a whole year’s worth of the magazine and then some. So we’ll spread it out. But discuss it we will.

Secondly, one of the stories noted how immigrants are changing established denominations. The story observed that immigrants of most faiths are more conservative socially and theologically than Canadian-born practitioners, and noted the conservative influence of some of these groups in the Presbyterian Church.

Thirdly — and perhaps most concerning — is the continued increase in the declining relevance of religion to people under 60. Even among those over 60, a bare majority think of Christmas as primarily a religious holiday as opposed to a social one. (It was a dodgy question, but still.)

There are scores of stories here to be explored and the Record already has many lined up on these subjects. So I urge you not only to read the magazine but to share the stories with your friends and to engage with the writers.

Write us! Letters to the editor or comments at the end of stories online are a way in which you can participate in the discussion of these and other issues facing the church and society.

And to be sure, there is a need for the voice of religion in public discourse.

The parallel rise of secularism and fundamentalism in North America has tended to diminish the voice of reasoned faith in matters where religion has much to offer.

This is particularly so in the field of ethics, especially in medicine.

I have read several stories over the past year about questionable medical practices that Christian ethicists might have something helpful to add to the debate. So the Record will be bringing you some stories about contemporary ethical issues that we hope will engage you and society at large.

We already have an exciting year lined up and we look forward to you accompanying us on the journey.

The new year is always a good time to introduce changes and the Record is very happy to be presenting the magazine in a higher quality paper than we’ve been able to use before.

We hope that you find it a bit easier to read. It’s brighter but has a low gloss finish that minimizes glare. Like the newsprint we’ve been using for the past couple of years, it’s also ecologically friendly, with more than 90 per cent of its content made from reclaimed fibre.

Please let us know what you think. And have a very Happy New Year!