I am in agreement in principle as long as discipleship emphasizes the communal aspects of being the church, and not just individual performance. I might say what Hirsch is driving at, not in terms of discipleship, but with the language of deep structures. That is, there are things that run along the surface of congregational life—things that occupy an inordinate amount of leaders’ time and attention, that are not as important as deeper realities that run beneath the surface.

I have a few diagnostics that get at the distinction I’m trying to make. Do you spend more time trying to attract religious consumers (great worship, full slate of age appropriate programs, welcoming environments, etc) or pursuing the living God? Put another way, do you think of pleasing God more than you do participating in God’s life?

Take a breath. It’s good to have thoughtful worship, meaningful classes, and a group where your teens feel loved and supported. And it’s certainly not wrong to want to please God. You can hit the targets on all these things, however, and still run across the surface of things, primarily because these are things humans do, church being measured by anthropological criteria.

The deep structures of the church are evaluated less by anthropological criteria and more by the theological. What are we discovering about the living God and what God might be calling us to to or to be? How are we being pulled into the very life of God? The focus is on God. The experience of God constitutes the church, not a list of criteria we satisfy or boxes we check. The things we do in these theological pursuits are things necessary to the pursuit.

I also want to be quick to say that these theological pursuits are by nature both communal and oriented to the presence of neighbors who might be the door to finding Jesus in new and surprising ways. In other words, pursuit of the living God is not simply an internal endeavor either for the individual or the church. It requires others because God is active in all of these “other” places and persons.

So, let’s talk about the significance in terms of the difference in these orientations. So, let’s say that a church decides it would be pleasing to God to reach out to its neighbors. So, the church does a needs analysis, defining neighbors, not by what they bring but by what they need. Not only have they objectified their neighbors in ways that are very paternalistic, but by playing the role of benevolent patron they have yielded the ground that would allow them to see God anew in their neighbor.

Participation would look very different. Neighbors are not seen in abstract terms, a number on a demographic sort, but as real life people with real life stories that carry the potential of news. Part of the deep structure related to the pursuit of the living God is the reservoir of stories that make up a shared imagination. Pursuit looks like attentiveness to our experiences, story telling around those experiences, and group discernment to see if the call of God has become clearer.

There is a difference between a church that has public prayers and one that is a characterized by prayer, where prayer is the shape of their common life. This distinction marks the boundary of the deep structures. I am convinced that nothing promotes congregational optimism more than having a palpable sense that they are swept up into the life of God. Prayer is the priority in participating in this kind of environment.

I’ve experienced the difference in one congregation I served. Our elders were actively pursuing prayer with members. We trained them to receive people for prayer, along with other mature men and women in the congregation. We started a fifth Sunday service for prayer and healing that was incredible. The momentum built behind these experiences led to prayer groups being spontaneously formed throughout the congregation. While we were careful not to draw a direct correlation between prayers and results, it is also true that we had some pretty dramatic outcomes, and not always for the things being prayed for.

I’m convinced that this experience of prayer deepened other aspects of our community life. It became easier to talk about hard issues. Our leaders had cultivated strong bonds of trust within the congregation. The quality of our love and mutual care grew and we found ourselves focusing on the big things and not getting bogged down in distractions.

I had coffee a few days ago with a local minister who is new to his current ministry context. He’s very good at what he does and this congregation is blessed to have him. As we talked, I realized how much start-up energy we typically spend (myself included) on things that run along the surface. They present themselves as important and might very well be. Sometimes, though, they promise more than they deliver and distract us from the real work of pursuing the living God and participating in God’s very life.

It reminds me of Jesus’ statement, “Seek first the kingdom, and all these things will be added as well.” Find the life that is in pursuit of the living God, and the other details of church life will reveal their significance. More on this in a future post.

I’m part of a tradition that is often labeled evangelical, and by some as fundamentalist. And to be fair, there are more than a few who belong to Churches of Christ who meet these definitions. I can make claims more confidently about fundamentalism because it’s easier to define that term around a view of the Bible as inerrant. Evangelical is a bit more slippery in definition. According to Barna and Pew Research, it contains the following elements: 1. belief in biblical authority (though not necessarily inerrancy), 2. an emphasis on personal salvation through Christ alone, 3. importance of sharing one’s faith, and 4. social activism as a response to the gospel (though only on certain issues and secondary in importance to personal salvation).

At one level, what’s not to like? I have a high view of biblical authority, and claim Christ as the source of my salvation, and believe I should publicly represent my faith, and work to see the world conform to the justice and righteousness of God. So, why don’t I identify as evangelical? Well, first let’s recognize that each of these four markers are very generally stated, covering a lot of ground without much specificity. There’s possibility for a wide range of understanding of these four items.

There is one identifier not explicit on this list that nonetheless lurks in the background of all four and is the basis for my rejection of this label. Evangelicalism is the ultimate “modern” expression of Christianity. That’s why I’m not an evangelical.

Let me explain.

The birth of modernity might be attributed to Rene Descartes’ famous dictum, “I think, therefore, I am.” He was looking for an indubitable foundation for belief, an authoritative reality that couldn’t be doubted. His quest led him to the conclusion that the only thing that couldn’t be doubted was that he doubted.

This conclusion had far ranging implications. It moved the ultimate authority away from traditional sources like the crown or the bishop, and into the interior or private judgement of the individual. Philosophers call this “the turn to the subject,” meaning that the autonomous self now became the final arbiter in all matters. The interior of the individual is the ultimate location of reality.

Maybe you think this is a thin justification for not counting oneself as an evangelical. Think, though, of some of the practical implications of the turn to the subject that are just how things are in many evangelical churches.

No Christian before the modernity ever said, “baptism is the outward sign of an inward reality.” According to this statement, which counts the most? The tradition of the church? The efficacy of symbolic participation? The experience of the community of believers? Or the inward reality of the individual?

In fact, as long as the interior of the individual is aligned with God, why would you need baptism at all? You might be served better by thinking of your salvation as secured by a prayer in which Christ is invited into your heart. Baptism might not be necessary at all, an optional add-on like leather seats.

The same could be said of the Lord’s Supper. My oldest daughter, who is on something of a spiritual odyssey (for which I am thankful), noticed that the church she visited this past Sunday didn’t share the Lord’s Supper. Her Church of Christ upbringing taught her to expect weekly communion as central to corporate Christian practice. Without knowing where she attended, I could predict with a high degree of certainty that she went to an evangelical church, likely a “non-denominational” church with a one-word title. My hunches proved to be correct on all accounts. Teaching and music were the emphasized practices, practices aimed at the interior of the individual (rational and emotional).

Historic practices like baptism and the Lord’s Supper are minimized in traditions where the “turn to the subject” determines Christian practice.

To be fair, some of these minimized traditions can be found in mainline congregations as well and some evangelical churches emphasize both baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but I think the general observation holds. Evangelicals are more likely to minimize practices that are mediated by a source outside the self.

This is because the same impulse that elevates the interior life of the individual also minimizes the importance of symbols and rituals. These are external to the thoughts and feelings of the individual and so are less meaningful. They don’t lack meaning, but their meaning is supplied by the individual. I’ve heard people say that practicing communion infrequently keeps it from becoming a “mere ritual,” meaning that its significance is supplied by the individual and not by the practice itself. I’ve also heard people appeal to what is “real” as opposed to the symbol or ritual, failing to appreciate the way that symbols and rituals are the way we participate in what’s real, particularly realities that are transcendent and cannot easily be expressed or given through mystery. In other words, distinguishing between reality and symbolic participation is another way to say that what happens inside of me is prior in significance to things that are external to me. Agree or disagree, these kinds of distinctions demonstrate the influence of the “turn to the subject.”

Several years ago I was doing research on “ecclesiology” (the study of the church) and became aware that were precious few books on the church written by evangelicals. I read a collection of essays on ecclesiology written by evangelical scholars, many of which confessed the neglect of this subject and the lack of something that might be labeled an evangelical ecclesiology. This, in my opinion, is due to the priority of the individual. The church, through this lens, is primarily a spiritual support group for saved individuals. Placing community prior to the individual makes the church more than a religious club, but the necessary location for drawing us out of ourselves and into the life of God and neighbor.

A perceptive student once wrote a paper for me that compared belonging to a church to joining a gym. The gym was not necessary for staying in shape but made it more likely. Same with the church, not necessary to maintain a relationship with God, but made that goal more likely. The triumph of the turn to the subject.

These thin practices align with theological priorities related to personal salvation. Evangelicals see salvation almost exclusively in personal terms, and then only as the salvation of the soul. Now, stay calm. I think personal salvation is important, but it is nested within the larger work that God is doing to make all things new.

Salvation incudes a new heaven and a new earth (Rev 18, 2 Cor 5). It includes the redemption of our bodies (cf. Rom 8:18ff).

Notice that Luke uses the same word for healing and forgiveness of sins. The Greek word sodzo is translated “saved” when applied to forgiveness, but “healed” when used for physical restoration (cf 7:50; 8:36, 50, 52; 17:19; 18:26, 42 among others). This is an unfortunate translation choice. Salvation applies to both. Notable is Jesus’ declaration to Zachaeus that “salvation has come to his house,” which when taken in context points to Zachaeus’ willingness to part with his wealth, a stipulation the rich young ruler is unwilling to fulfill. The reaction of the disciples to the sending away of the rich ruler is telling: “Who then can be saved?” Salvation in Luke refers to a broad spectrum of making things and persons whole, of the ordering of the world according to the reign of God.

Salvation is not an escape. Not for the soul from the body, not for the individual from the world, not from the social and material to the spiritual. God is reconciling all things to God’s self, whether things in heaven or on earth. On the day of Christ, when all things, even death, have been placed in subjection under Jesus’ feet, the Son will hand the kingdom back to the Father so that God might be all in all (1 Cor 15).

To reduce salvation to a private transaction is to hive off God’s saving work from the rest of what God would reconcile. In their book, Divided by Faith, Smith and Emerson note MLK’s observation that the worship hour was the most segregated hour in American life and they place the blame for this reality at the feet of personal salvation. As long as you are certain of your personal salvation it doesn’t matter that everyone where you worship looks like you, votes like you, lives like you. As long as your personal relationship with Jesus is buttoned up, it doesn’t matter that there are vast disparities in wealth or that creation chokes under the cloud of global climate change. As long as you are good with Jesus, it doesn’t matter that you vote for your own self-interest rather than the interests of the poor, those without adequate healthcare, or those who are socially excluded.

Through the lens of personal salvation, poverty looks like a lack of personal responsibility. Through the lens of God making all things new, poverty looks like a failure to participate in God’s work of reconciling all things to God. This is not an either/or, a gospel of personal salvation or a social gospel. It’s not even a both/and. It’s one thing. It’s God reconciling all things to himself through the love of Christ.

I cannot get with the Christian right or with the heresy of Christian nationalism. This is not simply a matter of partisan choice for me. I cannot abide the theology that places the autonomous self prior to any other considerations. I attended the Missio Dei conference the year Trump was first elected president. This was a group of evangelical leaders who were trying to come to grips with the fact evangelicals went heavy for Trump. N. T. Wright addressed the group suggesting that this was not a bizarre anomaly, but a predictable outcome for a group whose center consisted of private salvation and a personal savior. There was little imagination related to God’s large work of salvation which might include the very people Trump was eager to exclude. This was not a policy position—not primarily—but the outcome of an impoverished theology.

My list could go on. Don’t get me started on worship music or the use of the Bible. Don’t ask me about the lack of a Trinitarian imagination, though this is a massive issue that might be the subject of another post. Or the abuses of power and the minimization of women’s leadership gifts. Evangelicalism is not for me primarily about the four indicators listed by Barna or Pew. It runs deeper, embedded in the cultural/philosophical currents of the modern age which goes to the very perception of the world and God’s saving work within it.

One album, though, that I’ve pulled from the stacks to give a spin lately that matches the criteria is Donald Fagan’s, “The Nightfly.” Recorded in 1982, it was Fagan’s first solo album, a departure of sorts from his well-known work with Walter Becker in Steely Dan. Steely Dan’s previous two albums, “Aja” and “Gaucho,” signaled the direction “The Nightfly” would take. Less “Reeling in the Years” and more jazz infused grooves.

I spent my hard earned steakhouse busboy money on “Aja” and “Gaucho” and fell hard for the slick and layered beats and textures the Dan was laying down. I recognize the brilliance of “Aja,” but “Gaucho” is my favorite of the two.

I lived in West Texas when these albums came out. I had moved there when I was 15 from Portland, OR. That’s a pretty abrupt cultural shift, especially in the mid-70’s. I showed up in my wide legged hippie flares and waffle stompers and was met with cowboy cut wranglers and Tony Lama’s. It was impossible to blend in without completely redoing myself. “Aja” was the opposite of West Texas. It was exotic and sophisticated. I’m pretty sure I bought the only copy of the album sold in my town. And it provided something of a cultural oasis that said, “though I live in West Texas, I am no West Texan.”

So, the minute I found out about “The Nightfly,” I purchased it. Fagan creates an album full of nostalgia, much of it tongue-in-cheek, both musically and lyrically. He sings about his experience as a Jewish teen growing up in New Jersey in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a boy, Fagan read science fiction and listened to Jazz on late-night radio, soaking in the hipster jive being laid down by the DJ’s. (His autobiographical collection of essays travels under the title, Eminent Hipsters). The character of the nightfly, Lester from Baton Rouge, is a composite of these DJ’s.

An independent station, WJAZ
With jazz and conversation from the foot of Mt. Belzoni
Sweet music, tonight the night is mine
Late line till the sun comes through the skylight

You'd never believe it, but once there was a time
When love was in my life
I sometimes wonder what happened to that flame
The answer's still the same
It was you, you
It was you
Tonight you're still on my mind

What caught my ear this time through were the utopian strains of the 50’s and 60’s that were both irrepressibly hopeful and apocalyptic—the overlap of post-WWII optimism and the emergence of the Cold War.

On the one hand, the opening song, I.G.Y., carries a 50’s world fair optimism. The technological advances anticipate a golden future under the waive of the stars and stripes.

Standing tough under stars and stripes, we can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright

This bright future includes underwater rail from New York to Paris in ninety minutes, perfect weather powered by the sun, and spandex jackets for everyone. There’s a space race to win, the result not in doubt, and tickets for those who wish to be space spectators. The chorus rings out optimistically:

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

In my favorite stanza, a prescient one give that it was written in 1984, Becker ironically imagines

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young

I heard an interview with a fella lacking a little compassion to go with his vision the other day. Elon Musk was selling an ideal future when AI does all the necessary work, leaving humankind to fill our time pursuing passion projects. The AI will be so productive that we will all be wealthy. The thing Musk has been clear about is that the old order will have to get out of the way so that the new can emerge.

Which brings me to another Nightfly song: “The New Frontier.” The setting is the cold war and the arms race. It opens with a party in a bomb shelter.

Yes, we're gonna have a wingding
A summer smoker underground
It's just a dugout that my dad built
In case the reds decide to push the button down
We've got provisions and lots of beer
The key word is survival on the new frontier

While the threat of a bomb hovers in the background, it’s also an opportunity to find momentary love against the backdrop of the apocalypse. Apocalypse as pickup line. The party’s host eyes a woman with a little bit of Tuesday Weld, the kind of woman with the “right dynamic for the new frontier.” Not only does she “love to limbo, that much is clear,” but she’s rumored to be “mad about Brubeck. He’s an artist, a pioneer. We’ve got to have some music on the new frontier.”

Under the anxiety and accompanying sexual tension of nuclear threat, however, day-to-day life goes on as the chorus indicates.

Well, I can't wait till I move to the city
Till I finally make up my mind
To learn design and study overseas

The threat of an apocalypse only alters behavior so much.

“The Nighfly” delivers something of a time capsule of life between overlapping epochs in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Fagan put his obsessive nerdy upbringing, full of science fiction novels and late night jazz radio, to the use of a diverse, slick, and sonicly brilliant album. What interests me most, however, is the overlap of the two eras that shaped his imagination and produced the album.

As some of you know, I’m working on a book about Paul, the New Testament writer, and discernment. A key feature of Paul’s theology is his apocalyptic outlook in which the death and resurrection of Jesus represents a turning of the ages. Christians live between the ages, impinged upon by the old age of sin and death which is passing away, while belonging to a new age which will endure but which is not fully present. This new age will culminate in the Day of Christ, when God will be all in all—nothing less than a new creation.

Life in the overlap of the ages possesses a certain moral urgency. Christians are to put away works which belong to the old arrangement of things and are to embrace the ways that characterize life in the coming age—to use Fagan’s line, the new frontier. The day is coming, the night is nearly gone. Live as those who belong to the day.

There are huge differences, of course, between Paul and Donald Fagan. “The Nightfly” carries no overtly transcendent themes. In Fagan’s world the apocalypse is only anticipated, whereas for Paul it has already occurred in the death of Jesus. Fagan’s utopia is technological, Paul’s is theological. And on and on.

In Fagan’s adolescence, the world was filled with dread realities: taking cover under desks at school, building and stocking bomb shelters in the back yard, Kruschev banging his shoe at the UN, Kennedy staring the Soviets down in the Cuban missile crisis. He lived in the shadow of this imminent catastrophe. And yet, life as usual goes on. Plans are made to move to the city and study overseas. The bunker is used for a “wingding,” a pickup line should this be our last day.

And, of course, utopias tend to collapse under the weight of their own optimism. The “fellas with vision and compassion,” programming machines to make “just decisions” end up being self-serving megolomaniacs. There are no spandex jackets for everyone. We don’t inherit “eternally free and eternally young.” Which, of course, Fagan knows and pierces the idea of any human produced utopia. He knows listeners can measure the distance between what was dreamed of and what exists. He sings less to make us nostalgic, to recover some golden era of optimism, and more to deliver a chastened realism.

I admit that I don’t live with much of a sense of the impending return of Christ. I mean, it’s been a minute. I don’t find myself pouring over charts and delineating dispensations to predict coming calamities and glorious outcomes. I live my life day to day and dream more about things like “to learn design and study overseas,” or its equivalent. As I move deeper into the back nine of life, as I take the fistful of pills that are part of keeping me going, I feel the pressures of time as I navigate each precious day.

So, the valley of the shadow of death has a certain motivating power that an apocalyptic utopia doesn’t deliver. And I’ve thought a good deal about that. My hunch is that if the imminent return of Christ was all Paul possessed to wrangle early Christian communities into conformity, the faith would have dissolved under the very real dreams of “moving to the city.”

But that’s not all that Paul had. Paul had a downpayment, a deposit, a guarantee of the glorious future. Paul had the reality of the Spirit of the resurrected Christ.

I think a lot about Paul’s statement that “though our bodies are perishing, our inner nature is being renewed every day” (2 Cor 4:6), or his claim that those of us who have the the first fruits of the Spirit groan along with all of creation in anticipation of “our adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:23). I am unmotivated by utopias, even the hipster versions that include spandex jackets. I am motivated by the groanings I share with the Spirit of God and all of creation. They stir me to want more, to be more, to live more deliberately.

And to listen to great music.

I think, however, that to limit discernment to a process related to decision making misses what discernment is. To the extent that the church exists as it pursues the living God, the church lives in discernment. Its way of life is comprised by this pursuit.

I’ve observed that churches aren’t built for this. They’re built for Sunday mornings. They’re built to attract more people. They’re built for getting things done. These are all potentially good things, but they aren’t the one thing that structures properly the church’s life—discerning the leading of God. Do this, and all these other things will find their place.

I’m convinced by thinkers like Heidegger and Gadamer that we exist in understanding. Understanding is not so much a purely rational endeavor, placing it under the category of epistemology. Rather, understanding precedes us. We are thrown into it. It’s not simply a cognitive process, but flows from our being in the world. It’s what the American pragmatists like William James called “know how.” All of what we understand is based on what was understood before we showed up. And most of what we understand comes by way of being the end users of what is known—we handle things, taking care in the world. Understanding is not an epistemological category, but an ontological category.

In the same way that phenomenologists claim that we have our being in understanding, I think the church exists in discernment. We don’t exist in settled dogma. We don’t exist in the black and white of Torah, which if you haven’t noticed is not very black and white. And this also means we don’t exist in things like inerrancy. We exist in the life of God, and in God’s unfolding future. We exist, therefore, not in our own certainty, but in the hope of God’s own claim on our life. We exist together in this open pursuit of God’s call on our life in the concrete circumstances of our life. We exist in discernment.

So, come hang with me for eight weeks online as we explore theological, biblical, and practical aspects of life in pursuit of the living God. In eight weeks we’ll cover four units. This doesn’t mean we’ll be filling that whole time with instruction. Each unit has four 30 minute recorded lectures, a discussion board to learn with others, and a google meet at the end of each session. Learn in your own time.

The cost of the seminar is $80 per individual, the same cost for subscribing for a year to this Substack. Your paid sub means you are automatically invited to each of the four seminars we do throughout the year. We also have a group rate—$45 for each additional participant. You can register using this link: https://pci.jotform.com/form/261055210676048

Come learn with together about the life of discernment.

One of my favorite sections is 4:35-5:43. This section of stories includes Jesus calming a storm while in the boat with his disciples, the exorcism of “Legion,” Jairus approaching Jesus to heal his daughter, the woman with the “issue of blood” who is healed by touching Jesus’ garment, and the raising of Jairus’ daughter.

There are so many cool things to notice in these stories. We have a Markan “sandwich,” in which a story begins (Jairus coming to Jesus), is interrupted by another story (the woman who touches Jesus’ garment), and only then to return to the original story (the raising of Jairus’ daughter).

What holds all these stories together as a group is the word “fear.” The disciples are fearing with mega fear (a literal translation) after Jesus calms the storm, asking “Who is this, that even the wind and waves obey him?” When the townspeople see “Legion” “clothed and in his right mind,” they are afraid and ask Jesus to leave their town. When the woman touches Jesus’ garment and is healed, Jesus wants to know who touched him. The woman comes to Jesus with “fear and trembling” before Jesus tells her that her faith has made her well. And finally, when overhearing the resignation of Jairus’ servants over his daughter’s death, Jesus responds, “Do not fear, only believe.”

It is striking that in the first three instances, it is not the circumstance that is the occasion for Mark’s use of the word “fear.” It is not the storm. It is not the presence of a demon possessed man. It is not the disease afflicting the woman. These are all problems to be sure, and ones that could very well evoke fear. But Mark saves the word for their encounter with the power of Jesus. In fear, the disciples ask, “Who is this?” (the ultimate question in Mark). It is after Legion has been healed that the townspeople are afraid of Jesus and want him to leave. It is after the woman has been healed that she approaches Jesus with “fear and trembling.” It is their encounter with Jesus that evokes fear.

I’ve been thinking about what meaning to attach to this insight. I’m tempted to say that direct encounters with the holy are deeply unsettling and troubling. I’m having a hard time thinking of a theophany in the Bible that was comforting or reassuring. On the other hand, I can think of several that prompted fear. At any rate, the ratio of such stories heavily leans in favor of fear inducing. Which makes me think that following Jesus invites a certain amount of being unsettled when we truly experience his power.

Which makes me wonder if we truly know Jesus at all. I have friends whom I admire who speak so easily of the presence of Jesus in their life. I envy them and often wonder why my experience is so different. But I also wonder if Jesus’ presence has ever terrified them—if that was ever the cost of intimacy, or the cost of having storms stilled, or the scary neighbor clothed and his right mind, or the disease around which I have negotiated my existence gone—a bit of terror at being caught up in something so powerful.

Which makes me wonder if we’ve grown a little attached to the storm. I want to be careful here not to minimize the storm or the suffering we endure related to it, or even the loss of a livelihood as we watch our swine run off a cliff and into the sea. We live in a world of trouble, and that’s not ok.

But I wonder if the shape our lives take doesn’t in some way speak to our accommodation to it all, a little spiritual Stockholm syndrome, where the reduction of our lives is just the right size to think of it as “my life,” just the way things are, a life which though malformed is the life I’ve learned to navigate in my own power, and even found ways it serves me with the attention I receive for the sake of my suffering. And to lose that, even if the outcome is desirable, is to become something new, someone different, someone who owes life to a power greater than one’s own, someone no longer in control.

It makes me wonder.

The gospel of Mark ends this way. The women who go to the tomb only to find it empty flee the scene, “for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Later scribes thought this was an unsuitable ending for something called a “gospel,” so they supplied something more suitable. And I have to admire the dramatic moxy of the scribe who thought a little snake handling was an appropriate response to a wimpering ending of silence and fear.

But even though Mark end’s this way, we know the story doesn’t. We know that fear didn’t have the final say. We know that the good news is not just that we can accommodate our lives to the storm, or the scary neighbor, or the disease. We know that something else is possible.

The ending of Mark invites us to continue to follow Jesus even though it might be the end of us. Even though the good news of following Jesus might at times be scarier than the storm or the disease. I love the picture of faith we have with the woman who having endured much under many different doctors, snakes her way through the crowd to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment to somehow find healing. “Daughter,” Jesus calls her, “your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” And when he encounters in his very next step the unbelief that is death’s domain, he has this daughter in mind when he says, “Do not be afraid, only believe.”

This is how the gospel continues when fear won’t do for an ending.

And I get that much of this is put in place to protect students as consumers from predatory for-profit institutions, which unfortunately impacts all who require on student loans from the government to cover costs. I’m just saying that so many decisions are made beforehand and by people or agencies farthest away from teacher-student interaction. And I fear there’s not much that can be done about this. There are no blank pages in higher ed.

And as I pointed out in my two previous essays, the culture of assessment and reporting builds in an inevitable hierarchy related to compliance. I just don’t know how an institution of higher learning can be free of these top-down pressures. Since they cannot be replaced, any measures to make the institution more pliable to instincts related to the kingdom of God have to come alongside or within the givens of higher ed.

So, where to start?

1. Reimagine the institution from the bottom up. This of course begins with the student experience, but would also emphasize the experience of staff, adjunct faculty, low ranked faculty, etc. In my experience, institutional imagination begins with the “vision” of those at the top who then sell it to those down the chain of influence.

   I once endured a day-long “leadership workshop” directed toward deans and department heads where we were encouraged to think of our primary responsibility in relation to those parallel or above us on the org chart. They comprised our primary team. Not the faculty who taught in our departments, not the staff who made our work possible, but those higher up the org food chain. We were to align with them and to represent their priorities to those below us on the org chart. We were coached to respond to those who came to us for help by turning responsibility for the problem back on them. We shouldn’t allow people to bring their BMW’s to work (Bitching, Moaning, and Whining).

   Approaches like this push all the pain down. And this in an environment in which resources are scarce and people are already doing too much.

   What if the organization wasn’t imagined in terms of reporting lines, individual goal setting, and managers, but circles and collaborative teams? What if organizational discovery took a qualitative or narrative approach that began with those bearing the institution’s pain—namely those who are paid poorly and under-resourced? I know that solutions might not be possible for what ails the institution at these deep levels, but noting them and naming them carry the affirmation of being seen and provide a backdrop for institutional imagination. It puts human faces on budgets, particularly important for board members who see the institution principally through numbers and policies.

2. Change the allocation percentages on the budget. I’ll admit, I have little idea of what those allocations are or have been. I’ve read in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that the growth in the assessment layer and its subsequent addition of senior level staff is a key factor in the rise of higher ed costs. And I know this, that the percentage of full time faculty is decreasing with course loads increasingly shifted to adjunct faculty. It’s embarrassing what adjunct faculty are paid. What if those budget percentages shifted 5-10% a year. And if this isn’t where the shift should take place, find the places where it could happen.

   Here’s what I’ve observed. Senior admin positions are always filled. Some departments are fully staffed and rely less on adjuncts. Some are not. Make the budget a place where the principled arguments for the existence of a Christian university are visible. While I recognize the need for professional schools and think they can be delivered in such a way that the values of the kingdom of God can drive their priorities, the liberal arts are where the soul of the institution resides. Art, philosophy, virtue, letters, critical reasoning, historical and cultural awareness, and the list could go on. And while I don’t want to be a theological snob, the value of well-trained theologians contributing to the public life and discourse of the university is inestimable. It’s hard to make the case for a “Christian” education if the outcomes are increasingly utilitarian. So, make budget shifts over time that reflect these priorities.

3. Do less. And I’m thinking of this in two-ways. First, do the bare minimum in terms of required assessment. In my experience, visiting committees just want the boxes checked. Do assessment to the minimum standard. Don’t let it be the tail that wags the institutional dog. There is a certain momentum that gets attached to positions and responsibilities related to assessment. Those responsible for certain areas of institutional reporting want to do their best to justify their work. They want it to mean something. So, they grow it. They prepare the soil and plant and water it, and then they plow a new field which requires more planting and watering and weed pulling. And there are software vendors happy to tell you how you could do even more with their integrative data packages. Stop the viral spread. Do less.

   There are things that can make our work better and easier. There are cultural shifts that must be made so that all students recognize themselves in their learning experience. Things should progress. But ultimately the energies of the institution should be directed towards learning and not assessment.

   I have a friend who chaired an academic department for several years. Some in his faculty thought that their program learning outcomes should be changed or updated. The chair refused to spend the energy required to make that happen. The promise of slightly improved PLO’s (which if you’ve ever done this in a group is torturous) didn’t outweigh the time spent reworking them. Also, the real action takes place beneath the PLO’s in the efforts to improve content through research and the experience of actually teaching the material. In this chair’s estimation, and mine, PLO’s improved learning little if at all. Do less.

   By “do less” I also have in mind the proliferation of majors. At my last university, we added several majors thinking that this would improve enrollment. It didn’t. Our enrollment declined slightly. Evidence that this was a failed strategy is found in two straight years of massive firings of faculty and staff, with many of those being tenured faculty. I’m sure that some of the new programs had modest enrollment growth and that the faculty who were cut were from programs with far fewer students. What can’t be measured, however, is how many of those Financial Planning majors might have chosen history, or theater, or ministry had there been fewer options.

   Our university is not rare in that a high percentage of our students are athletes. They don’t come our way primarily because of our academic offerings. They come to play ball for just a few more years. And I don’t begrudge them that and was thankful for the opportunity to teach them. As a VP for admissions once told me, “We know where they are. We don’t have to look hard to find them.” In contrast, recruiters told me that they no longer spent time with churches, places where ministry majors or others interested in a Christian university might be found.

   I coached (assistant) one year of basketball for a small Christian college who recruited JV teams with the offer of skimpy scholarships, because the financial aid these students qualified for would more than cover the cost of their matriculation. The point is, these students don’t come because we have a stellar set of academic offerings. They come to play ball.

   So, when we add a program that we think will attract students, they usually can get the same degree at a university with a better academic reputation. This is true even for students who want a “Christian” education. We can’t compete reputation-wise with a Calvin or Wheaton.

   And again, a lot of these programs are added with the bare minimum of resources—just enough faculty to cover courses, but little in the way of administrative, technology, or recruiting support—support necessary for program growth. So, again I say stop thinning resources out with additional offerings. Do less.

   Begin instead with questions like, “What are we uniquely equipped to offer that a student can’t get anywhere else? How is the adjective ‘Christian’ functioning as more than a co-curricular value add? What would a ‘Christian’ pedagogy look like? How might the breaking down of departmental silos invite a synergy of resources around innovative and integrative learning? What can we do with what we already have, not by what we wish we had?” New things emerge from questions like these, and their embodiment does more to form graduates who can problem solve across academic disciplines, making them attractive to employers. (cf. Epstein, Range)

   The emphasis on doing less might rearrange budget priorities. But more, doing less refuses and resists the dehumanizing aspects of institutional life. Being realistic about the institution’s capacity and recognizing what we bring rather than what we don’t have is humanizing. No one goes into Christian higher ed to get wealthy, but being paid a living salary is a vital form of recognition, a dignifying gesture.

4. The elephant in the room that I haven’t mentioned yet is money. Universities that rely primarily on tuition have little margin. If enrollment is down even a little bit, the budget is in trouble for the next four years. Creating endowments and finding donors is crucial for the survival of the institution. I’ve sat in rooms with university presidents who caution not moving ahead on this initiative or that so that existing donors won’t withdraw their support and potential donors decide to give elsewhere. The flip side to this is that donors give to pet projects. They don’t endow faculty salaries across the board. They want their names on buildings or on prestigious research chairs. And capital building projects help the university’s asset to debt ratios, but don’t always help with cash flow which dictates how much can be spent on other needed things.

   The donor class at a Christian university often tilts conservative. They value higher Christian ed as a place to resist the encroachments of secularity and aspects of liberal learning. Wealthy progressive Christians send their kids to prestigious universities, whether public or private, and their money follows them. I sat in a room once with wealthy Christians from Texas who at the time were giving to the Obama campaign. Their kids went to Rice or UT or back east to places like Duke or the Iveys. They weren’t much interested in contributing to conservative Christian institutions.

   My point here is not to promote conservative vs. progressive as much as it is to say that money comes with interests, and Christian universities seem to attract more conservative donors. Even if the donors weren’t interested in day-to-day operations, their gifts still shape the imagination of the institution and exert certain pressures. They become a vital ingredient in the recipe of survival.

   And this is the point I want to emphasize. When survival becomes the main rationale for the institution, principle and mission take back seats. When protecting the life of the institution occupies the day-to-day life of the university, it’s lost its connection to the spirit of a faith rooted in death and resurrection. There are worse things than dying, like losing the very thing that would make you “Christian” in the first place.

   I drove with a consultant onto the campus of a university where I taught and when he saw the buildings, he remarked, “Humility didn’t build this place.” Indeed.

   I’m not sure what to do about the influence of money on Christian higher ed. I’m not so naive as to think private institutions could survive without significant gifts and givers. And I don’t have problems asking for money for causes I think are important. To change the way these realities impact an institution’s identity—to keep them from reaching the status of principality and power—seems impossible.

   I think maybe it would begin with the constitution of the board, that it include as many “mission” people as donors. A Christian university should include as many educators and theologians on its board as big donors. And this should accompany some sort of guiding imagination on how the word “Christian” should qualify “education,” how such an institution could be qualitatively distinctive. This would go beyond courses and mission statements to the deep practices that make up day-to-day life. Then go and die on that hill.

Whether you agree with Hauerwas or not, it’s a fair question to ask what would make an institution of higher learning “Christian.” I think most would respond that it means the curriculum includes courses in Bible and theology. I would agree that those courses should be present, but these don’t in and of themselves make an institution “Christian.” While I don’t think you can be a Christian university apart from those curricular additions, if they occur within a larger system of values and behaviors that are malforming, then Christian “content” won’t be enough to form students for servanthood in the kingdom of God.

I appreciate the efforts of groups like NetVUE who are interested in using the notion of vocation, or calling, to provide formational cues throughout the undergraduate curriculum. I have been a part of leading NetVUE grants and am very aware of how university governance structures can work against gains made closer to the ground.

Anyway, there are values related to the kingdom of God that might allow a university to think of itself as legitimately Christian. I want to be clear as I offer these that the university is not the church. But as a public moral institution, the university should embody values related to the kingdom of God, and at the very least not embody values that are contrary or opposed to the reign of God. In other words, it takes more than 12 hours of gen ed credit to make an institution “Christian”—it takes a footprint, a way of life, a public demonstration of values contrary to those given to us by the principalities and powers of this age.

So, let’s begin with the upside down nature of the kingdom of God. Fundamental to any biblical notion of what God is up to in the world is a commitment to those overlooked or excluded by other arrangements of power. By necessity, given the top-down values of society as a whole, any institution striving to be Christian must imagine its life from the bottom up.

In my experience, top-down is the norm in education structures. Part of this is related to the expectations of agencies to which the university reports. Standards related to governance, financial stability, the administration of aid, and student services related to things like title IX represent imposed requirements that pretty much require a top-down culture of compliance. I get that some of this is inevitable and may not be the expressed intent of a university.

But within and alongside these requirements exist opportunities for the flow of power and policy to move in different ways. A word I heard a lot in my time in academia was alignment. The question is, alignment to what and from where? Alignment assumes that things are moving in the same direction and that direction is inevitably top-down. You align with the top level statements of direction and purpose that are often the product of top level administrators. This would seem to produce efficiencies around institutional congruence, everything pulling in the same direction. Organizational studies, however, have demonstrated that while alignment might make language clearer across the institution, this does nothing to enhance performance. In fact, it can inhibit creativity and innovation (cf David Epstein, Range).

So, there are problems with alignment as the best possible organizational strategy in promoting growth and innovation, especially to the extent that it is laid over the top of a dynamic environment like a university. But my issue from a theological perspective is that any flow from a kingdom perspective should come from the bottom up and not the top down. The flourishing of the organization comes from the root system that works its way up. This imagination creates a different set of organizational questions. How, for instance, might the university arrange its life for the sake of the woefully underpaid adjunct faculty? For the increasing number of unprepared students who struggle to adjust to the demand of a college education?

Universities, in my estimation, have a supply side theory of success. Feed the revenue producers, send resources their way, and the windfalls will trickle down to programs that have fewer majors. In my experience, the trickle down is a dry bed. Evidence of this is the diminishment of the liberal arts in favor of professional schools. The expected revenue enhancements of business, medical, or technology programs, never seem to make it to theater, literature, history, or theology departments.

I sat for years in academic cabinet meetings hearing proposals for new academic programs that came with a pro-forma projecting strong revenue that never quite materialized. In my opinion, one reason for this is that the estimates for the required staff support were underestimated. It has long been my observation that the university builds its life on the backs of staff, the lowest rung in the university ecosystem. Because of low pay, staff turnover is frequent. Often staff vacancies are not filled, but the work is divided among other already overworked staff members.

The same is true at smaller universities for midlevel administrators (deans and program chairs). Most of them carry multiple titles, and due to low pay, teach overload to pay the bills. When I taught at a mid-level university for eight years, I never once taught overload. At the small university for which I taught, it was an every semester occurrence, and often required multiple overloads. In my time as Dean, I lost about 40 hours of annual faculty load in my departments due to faculty losses that were not replaced. Though I was promised that a few of those vacated positions would be filled, they were lost to other institutional priorities somewhere in the opaque world of senior administrative negotiations.

I understand that at a small university funds are limited, which I’m sure is as frustrating to senior administrators as to others down the chain. I’m just saying that what gets funded is a statement of values, a budget being a moral document. Some areas of university life are fully funded and staffed, while others fight for scraps. Not only are the poorly funded areas typically in the humanities, the areas which invite concentrated reflection on what it means to be human, but departments are paired way down so that the general education courses are staffed largely by adjuncts. No matter how well a university supports adjunct faculty, an over-reliance on adjuncts creates a gap in mission allegiance, teacher-student interaction, and student learning outcomes. Studies have shown that student retention, persistence in a major, enrollment in subsequent courses, and graduation rates are lower to the extent that students are exposed to adjuncts.

These outcomes, in my opinion, are seldom the fault of adjuncts, but rather are the product of a system that treats formation as an information download rather than rich, communal interaction. In my opinion, universities increasingly place weight bearing reliance on persons being poorly paid and whose formational impact on students is low.

In both universities I served full time, staff in critical areas were stretched thin. IT departments, facilities management and maintenance, student support (academic, mental health, spiritual), and office administration come to mind. They do heroic work in a “more bricks, less straw” environment.

And in my opinion, the kind of student that a Christian institution should specialize in—Pell grant recipients, students from poorer school districts—would require that these supporting staff areas be robust and enlarged.

I know that there are universities, including one I used to teach for, who think about these things and try to adequately staff more broadly formational environments. Overall, however, I think the top-down nature of education in general tends to create inequities at the bottom. This is where the pain lives. Attention to this, in my estimation, is the measure of the work “Christian” when it applies to an institution.

Ok, this is long on diagnosis and short on solutions.

I want to begin my reflections by recalling a meeting I attended in which the Dean of the Graduate School laid out the terms for use of a property the University had just purchased in a large metro area. It was a perfect facility for a project I was leading, and I was eager to learn the guidelines for its use. I was stunned to find that I would have to rent the facility from the same university I worked for who owned the facility. It’s not that that was a completely uncommon practice, though it seemed to me to be nonsensical for me to rent tables and chairs that the university already owned. In this case, however, the rental price seemed outrageous and would completely blow my budget.

My complaints fell on deaf ears. The Dean simply reiterated the university policy multiple times. Our shared exasperation was finally met with her telling me, “The university will require it!” There was now a power named that didn’t have a human face.

I was reminded in that moment of Charles Campbell’s book, The Word Before the Powers, which opens with a scene from Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath. The scene is a home foreclosure in the middle of the depression. A banker is breaking the bad news to people whom we knows—knows as good people—that they are about to lose their home. The owners plead with the banker based on their relationship, to which the banker acknowledges that everything they are saying is true. His hands, though, are tied. The bank, he says, requires it. The bank requires it. An institution, which has no emotional investment but simply enacts rules and policies, requires it. This account, Campbell claims, is a good example of the principalities and powers the Bible describes and that the kingdom of God resists.

I don’t want to throw my Dean under the bus. She was a fine person and someone I enjoyed working with. And this certainly was not my only experience with her or the university. I use this story instead as something of a metaphor for the way higher ed is increasingly defined by impersonal powers that are not in keeping with the kingdom of God.

In the 25 years I worked full time in higher ed, the job of being a professor changed pretty dramatically. I understand and approve of many of these changes. Overall, however, these changes created layers of policies requiring extra work that didn’t make teaching measurably better and often unwittingly removed the teacher a few degrees away from students.

In my estimation, the demand that universities be responsible for measurable results has created something of a cottage industry of reporting and assessment, adding increased layers of administrative functions. State, federal, and accrediting agencies have all added to the growth of these demands through policy requirements. And, of course, all of this has financial considerations related to student loans and grants, not to mention financial penalties for non-compliance.

The number of boxes to check before a teacher sets foot in the classroom is increasingly long. Course syllabi have quadrupled in length since I began my teaching career. Much of this is required to demonstrate alignment with institutional learning goals, program learning outcomes, and course objectives complete with rubrics for grading and assessment. Registrars and financial aid directors are the front line of compliance as they deal most directly with DOE regulations, especially given the growth of hybrid and online courses and programs.

Compliance with this dizzying array of requirements can be overwhelming. Coming up with the right ways to collect and report data is itself a whole deal. Figuring out what needs to be collected and reported for accrediting visits requires familiarity with new software and assessment protocols. As the director of a grad program and dean of a school, I was having to learn new management software or updates to old software every year, the rate of innovation moving way too fast which actually impedes adaptive innovation.

And I would also say that each new function created by this “culture of assessment,” (what our accreditors called it) came with its own self-justifying accelerators. In other words, no one seems to be asking how can we require the least amount of work possible, but seem to be justifying their existence by building out their areas of responsibility with all the bells and whistles. There is no office of institutional sabbath.

I haven’t even talked about money yet, or the pressures on schools that are tuition driven in light of the demographic cliff right in front of us. (The pool of potential students is decreasing). The financial pressures at my most recent school have tilted decisions away from mission and toward survivability, away from liberal arts and toward professional schools, away from our long confessional heritage and toward a generic faith aligned with evangelical politics. In the last two years, financial pressures at this small university (1,100 students) have led to the cutting of more than twenty employees including tenured faculty. None of these cuts were made in the areas of professional schools, but came to departments with low “majors” enrollment, including every single theology and ministry faculty (five total). How many full time theology and ministry faculty are left at this Christian university? Zero, zip, nada.

Those who were let go were told that this severing was not performance related, but simply what must be done for the sake of the institution. Worse, to receive compensation still owed to us, we were asked to sign a document that said we would do nothing to damage the reputation of the university, as if they hadn’t done that already. Nothing like asking the victims not to harm the victimizers.

And this is my point in this first post. The institutional structures and requirements have risen to the level of principalities and powers. The tail is wagging the dog. This is not the result of bad people doing nefarious things (mostly). This is what the higher ed conglomerate demands, and it leaves a trail of the tears of unintended consequences. And the question of the possibility of a Christian university is a legitimate concern.

A friend who teaches philosophy at a different Christian university recently posted the following note on substack: “If you’re trusting the institution to do right by you, you will inevitably be disappointed.”

I’ve also written on elders and accountability. But let me say a few things about “overlapping folds of mutuality and communal spirituality.”

The single most important task of elders is to nurture the spirituality of the people of God. And let me clarify what I mean. While the spirituality of the people of God (the church) includes the individual’s pursuit of the living God, the measure of achievement here is the shared life of the congregation. Is the congregation’s shared life conducive to the pursuit of the living God? Elders’ main task, in my estimation, is not making decisions or managing outcomes, but is ecological—maintaining environments in which the leading of the Holy Spirit can be perceived and named by the entire congregation.

I heard a story about two groups of elders from different congregations who met to discuss an issue of concern one of the congregations had concerning the other. An elder from the concerned congregation commented, “We’ve already decided that for our congregation.” An elder from the other congregation responded, “That’s the difference between our congregations. You decide for your people, we decide with ours.” The leaders of the second congregation had built a culture of listening to Scripture, to each other, and through that listening, to the Holy Spirit.

Beyond the power of deciding together, the effort to maintain that kind of environment was full of spiritual commitments and practices. In other words, being a discernment oriented congregation depended not only on the spiritual practices of the leaders, but of the entire group. This isn’t an abdication of leadership, but an embodied expression of it. Discernment requires wisdom for which leadership has an important voice or role. In fact, I would say that elders committed to this discernment oriented approach by virtue of the experience of listening for the Spirit among the people of God have more wisdom to draw upon.

Which brings me to mutuality. My understandings of the life of the Triune God and the testimonies related to Jesus in the gospels all point to human leadership in overlapping folds of mutuality. Jesus’ own perceptions of human leadership insist that no one gets to be called Father, rabbi, or instructor. These positions have already been filled (Mt 23). Instead, we are always and only brothers and sisters. We never graduate from being a disciple. All human leadership in the church exists to reveal how the Spirit is leading the church.

Or, we could cite Paul and the image of the body of Christ where everything proceeds from the source of its life—Christ, the head. No one else can say, “I don’t need you,” but respond to the call of God through gifts which are given (duh) and not earned. All of this speaks against elders being an unaccountable group handing down edicts from a perch above the congregation. Rather, they see their gifts as part of an economy of mutuality which seeks the good of the giftings of others through an ethic of service.

When I talk about the leadership of elders this way, I’m often told this takes too long. This reveals our addiction to efficiency, not a fruit of the Spirit (like patience), but also suggests to me that the kind of practices and skills for this kind of work are missing. So, you’re always starting from scratch. This is a way of life, which like every other way of life, requires practices, skills, and expectations. IMHO, the way I’m describing is more directly attributable to the way of Jesus. And when cultivated, this way produces surprising forms of life beyond what we ask for or imagine. And, leaders who pursue this way have more functional authority than those who see themselves as being over the church.

In his letter to the “saints in Christ in Philippi,” Paul prays with joy for the partnership in the gospel they have enjoyed “from the first day until now” and is confident that “the good work begun in you” will be brought to completion “in the day of Christ” (1:4-6). I want to highlight the “day of Christ” as the telos of the sharing in the gospel between Paul and the Philippians. The theological setting for his joy is the eschaton. Paul continues his prayer of hope for them in this way, “that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what really matters, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” Again, the day of Christ is in view and frames Paul’s pastoral intention, namely that they will have “produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God” (1:9-11).

Tucked in between the statements concerning the day of Christ is a fascinating vignette regarding discernment. Paul prays that their “love will overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight,” and not the other way around—that their knowledge and insight would overflow with love. We should also point out that love is not in this instance a feeling or emotion, but an action—a bodily gesture of putting another’s needs ahead of one’s own. This way of being in the world produces knowledge and insight. It is a way of knowing through practice and not primarily through rationality. And the result of this knowledge and insight is for the sake of discernment, “to help you discern what really matters”[1] in keeping with the day of Christ.

A similar dynamic regarding discernment is at work in Romans 12:1-2. Paul urges his readers “to present their bodies as living sacrifices holy and acceptable to God” which is their “spiritual worship.” He then makes an eschatological appeal, that they not conform to this age (aeon), but with renewed minds are to “discern the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect.” Again, Paul’s move toward discernment begins with the body, with a way of being in the world. As living sacrifices, they are to present themselves as holy and acceptable to God. What they do with their bodies is their spiritual worship. This embodied action is an act of resistance to the powers of this age, (not “world” as aeon is most often translated here) a nod to Paul’s apocalyptic outlook in which the new age has broken into the present as the alternative to the way the rulers and authorities of this evil age (Gal 1:4) would order things. Through this bodily act of resistance to the age that is perishing, the mind is renewed so that God’s will is discernible.

So, in both Philippians and Romans we see that an embodied way in the world changes fundamental perceptions of reality that result in being able to discern God’s will. And this “being toward discernment” is set within an apocalyptic framework, the fulness of which will finally be revealed in the “day of Christ.” While I have many interests emerging from these texts, my primary one is the relationship between apocalyptic and discernment in Paul, along with the role of the body in discernment.

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But I think the reason I began this habit that my wife finds “stinky,” is that it is something men do. While there are the occasional female smokers, walk into a cigar bar and it is made almost entirely of men. I will say that it is a fairly ethnically mixed group, popular particularly among African-Americans. At any rate, it is a pleasurable way to establish my male bona fides.

This is important to me because somewhere along the way, I missed the requisite training in the manly arts. I don’t hunt. I don’t fish. I don’t fix things or work on my car. I do own a chainsaw, though it’s electric and not a big smoke billowing gas powered lumberjack type. Still, I feel a little extra testosterone coursing through me when I cut something down, the smell of chain oil and sawdust in my nostrils. I feel like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now.

I could, and have, blame this life lacuna on the fact that my grandfather died when my dad was 2 or 3, thus leaving him without the generational training himself. There were few if any power tools hanging from a peg board in the garages of my youth. My dad did know farm stuff, having grown up on his uncles’ pig farms in Iowa and Minnesota, but by the time I came along those agrarian sensibilities had been replaced by books, and papers, and advanced degrees.

While my dad would make a good fall guy, truth is I was dispositionally uninterested in the masculine arts. Which brings me to music. I liked the Beatles and not the Stones. The Beatles sang about love, the Stones about sex. The Beatles just wanted to hold your hand, the Stones had “sticky fingers.”

And within the Beatles’ universe, I was a Paul guy who seemed nicer and his voice more melodic than the more roguish John. I was always drawn to what appeared softer, more melodic, less tooth and bone snarl.

While my high school contemporaries were celebrating the face painted, fire spitting, kabuki metal act, aka KISS, I was listening to James Taylor. I skipped the Foreigner concert and went to see Kenny Loggins. My album collection included Fleetwood Mac and Jackson Browne, not AC/DC and Black Sabbath. I listened to Styx but not Ted Nugent, Journey but not Judas Priest, Linda Ronstadt but not Iron Maiden, the Eagles but not Alice Cooper.

This might just be chalked up to musical taste, but taste comes from somewhere. Truth is, I’ve always been allergic to what I would consider hyper-masculine expressions of personhood.

Some of that is body image. I was uber skinny growing up. How skinny? My wrists were smaller than my girlfriend’s. We wore the same size senior ring. And there were other less than masculine traits as well. For instance, even after clearing cactus for a week from a friend’s land or digging a neighbor’s swimming pool, my hands were preternaturally soft.

Some of that is temperament. I was sensitive, cried way too easily, and was a committed introvert. The gang of testosterone that moved in a clump through the halls of my school, flashing devil’s horns and displaying their tongues ala Gene Simmons, were intrusive, taking up as much space as possible, constantly drawing attention to their boisterous badassness. They didn’t have the 8-track of the Best of Bread blaring through the speakers of their t-top Trans-Am, but the thump, thump, thump of Highway to Hell.

And I was bullied, pretty severely and over a long period of time, in 7th grade. I found myself constitutionally unable to make a fist, to throw a punch, to do anything but endure the beatings. I took different routes to and from school to avoid them. I was the brunt of jokes and lost all of my friends.

My status as pariah didn’t change until I made the freshman basketball team at my high school. Every game in warm ups the world had to witness that I could make my way in a testosterone infused environment. It wasn’t football, though. It was basketball, where guile served as well as brute force, where agility and fluid movement made me viable, even with skinny wrists.

I doubt even apart from the bullying you could have given me a KISS album for free. But I’m also fairly sure that this combination of factors, and others I’m unaware of, kept me away from any overt displays of tooth and bone and hair. I have always felt uncomfortable around groups of men.

Ok, back to music. Listening to music frames a way of being in the world. What we listen to shapes our perceptions of who we are, whom we belong to, and the nature of the world we occupy. We see reality, in other words, in part—in my case in large part—to the lyrics that roll around in thought, the melody we find ourselves humming, the beats we end up moving to. This deep alchemy of lyric, beat, melody, and personal narrative, shape how we see the world unfolding before us. It attaches us to the world in ways that other musical tastes don’t.

I narrated my life for years in terms of weakness. Just look at these skinny wrists. The soundtrack of my life had to maintain a certain congruence to that narrative. I don’t mean by that that songs had to be about or model in some way weakness. But my playlists needed to be about voice and melody, about beauty and fluidity, invitation and welcome, and not power chords and primal screams.

I learned from a very good therapist I once had to see my life story, not as weakness but as resilience. I’m still trying that one on. But I do know that I learned certain ways of being in the world that were not about domination or imposing my will. If I was to have influence and respect it would need to come some other way. It would need to come through empathy, through attentiveness, through wisdom, humor, and intelligence. This I can say: my vulnerabilities produced a way of life that serves me well. As the gospel insists, “When I am weak, then I am strong.”

The more I have learned to see my weakness as strength, the more my musical palate has broadened. I still prefer Joni singing “Both Sides Now,” to Black Sabbath’s, “Iron Man.” You get the idea. It is one of the great ironies of my life that students have often serenaded me to “They call me Dr. Love,” which I have tolerated as a sign of affection, if not a little sarcastic derision. But now, one of my favorite albums is “Exiles on Main Street” by the Rolling Stones, and I could listen on endless repeat to their song, “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.”

Think I’ll go spin some Karla Bonoff.

First, tell me by what process one might extract Jesus from the gospels that were given to us by the very communities of faith that he supposedly never intended? Let me remind our readers that the gospels were written decades after the events represented and that they cannot be historically harmonized. These are literary and rhetorical accounts, not purely historical, composed for the benefit of specific churches. I’m not saying that the gospels are unconcerned with the events of Jesus’ life, but the gospels are written not to set the record straight, but to set churches straight.

I suppose one could revive the Jesus seminar project to decide what the historical Jesus actually did and said, not what the gospels told us he did and said. Efforts like this, in my opinion, tell us more about those doing the excavating work than they tell us about Jesus. The Jesus we follow and honor, for better or even better, is the Jesus given to us by the church, or by churches.

Perhaps one could try a more mystical approach and locate Jesus outside of the testimonies handed down to us by faith communities, circumventing the church’s role in composing the gospels. This, however, seems to be another path susceptible to creating a Jesus more to one’s liking. I’m not saying there is no Jesus beyond the sacred page, but the primary way we know Jesus at all is through the gospels that were produced by and for specific faith communities.

This does not yet make the argument that Jesus didn’t intend a church, only that we know Jesus from documents produced by the church. And I suppose there’s no way to argue with the idea that the Jesus we’ve been given by the church is biased (Of course it is). But if we are allowed to cite the gospels themselves, it is patently clear that Jesus intended that he be represented in the world by a community. I’ll spot you the passages in which the gospels use the term ecclesia as being anachronistic. (I don’t think this is the slam dunk some think it is, but ok, whatever).

Let’s start with the fact that Jesus called twelve disciples, an unmistakable reference to Israel, which reminds us that the plan from the very beginning of Scripture was to bless all nations through the election of one. Moreover, Jesus is signaling in the selection of the twelve that he intends to bring the kingdom of God to all of Israel—both Jerusalem and Samaria. Simeon, Luke tells us, is looking for the consolation of Israel, and his counterpart Anna for the redemption of Jerusalem. The very notion of the kingdom of God, assumes a people, an intentional community, a church.

When Jesus spends forty days post-resurrection with the apostles, they ask him if this is the time when he will restore the kingdom to Israel. Their question is not challenged by Jesus at the level of intention—restoring the kingdom to Israel—but about knowing the timing. In fact, his ensuing instruction that they be his witnesses in “Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” is a way to emphasize the work of restoring a united Israel (Judea and Samaria) to their vocation of being a blessing to all nations.

I would underscore this by suggesting that his actions of justice, care for the poor, and critique of the religious leaders of his day was precisely intended to restore the values of the kingdom of God to Israel. Samuel’s warning that a human king given all the trappings of royal power would make Israel just like the nations around them is a critique Jesus shares. Jesus is not calling them away from being a people of God’s own possession—to be individuals with the kingdom of God in their hearts—but to be a repentant community living again according to the covenant standards through which they were created. It’s not whether they will be a community, but what kind of community they will be.

Only modern people who conceive of reality in terms of autonomy and self-realization, would question the very premise of an intentional community. The very nature of being as the creative achievement of a divine community assumes the importance of a people who embody the desire of the creator. We are created by and for community. It’s baked into the way the world exists.

As is religion. We are a meaning-making species. And the primary way we make meaning is through narratives that we ritualize. Even the most devout atheist is religious in this sense. Jesus was religious.

Jesus attended the synagogue, was presented in the temple, practiced piety, and encouraged his followers to do the same. He was baptized and instituted a shared meal in the midst of a passover observance, and gave his followers a model prayer. It is striking, particularly in the opening passages of Luke, how the Spirit comes upon those who were scrupulously religious—Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary, Simeon and Anna. To cite Acts, the sequel to the gospel of Luke, the first Christians were devoted to apostolic teaching, a common life, the breaking of bread, and the prayers. They were in the temple daily and constantly together in prayer. And the story of the inclusion of the Gentiles in Acts begins in the home of Cornelius, one noted for both prayer and almsgiving.

I’m not saying that Jesus didn’t challenge some religious practices of his day. He did. But he did so from within. The choice we are presented in the gospels is not between Jesus and religion, but between good religion and bad.

There are bad forms of Christian faith, bad churches, ones that bear little to no resemblance to Jesus as presented in the gospels. These expressions should be called to repentance. There is no such thing, however, as a non-religious individualistic expression of Christianity. Jesus intended a church, one that practiced its faith religiously.

There are plenty of critiques to offer of contemporary expressions of Christianity. I long for churches that take seriously the teachings and actions of Jesus. I want an expression of religion that is life-giving and meaning-making and not bureaucratic and hierarchal. But the distinction to be made here is not between Jesus and church or Jesus and religion, but between good church and bad, good religion and bad.

OT examples of this abound. But what about the NT? Let me begin to answer this question with the observation that the lynching of Jesus by an unruly mob places injustice at the heart of the faith of the earliest Christians. The crowd that a few weeks earlier participated in this act of violence against God’s own Son, is cut to the heart when Peter lays bear the mechanisms of lynching and their own complicity in it. “What can we do?” they ask, which might be better stated, “Is there anything we can do?”

They had put themselves in the caboose of the long train of the killing of God’s prophets “from Abel to Zecheriah” (Luke 11:51), and in doing so had placed themselves on the opposite side of both God and the oppressed. The stunning offer of God at Pentecost is forgiveness and the reception of the Holy Spirit for those who repent—those who put themselves on the right side of this story. After all, Jesus can claim that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him “‘because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor’” (Luke 4:17-19).

From the perspective of Pentecost, being a Christian means carrying this story of injustice as the defining story of God’s reign and aligning oneself accordingly. Carrying this story, one of sustained and sustaining grief, places deep within our perception of faith a hermeneutic of suspicion—are we on the side we think we are? After all, some of those who put Jesus to death thought they were doing God’s will.

Our suspicion is met with God’s unwavering desire to take our side. These are two parts of the whole—our self-suspicion as an act of dying and God’s response of enduring love and life. In fact, this love is demonstrated precisely at the place of injustice, or the revealing of sin as a power that constantly lures us to occupy the place of the oppressor rather than to grieve with the oppressed. The cross demonstrates the lengths God’s love will go to take our side. “Nothing,” Paul proclaims in light of God’s own experience of injustice in the suffering of Christ, “can separate us from the love of God which is ours in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:39).

So, as a people established in grief, “we carry in our body the death of Jesus,” or “always being given up for Jesus’ sake,” or “death is at work in us” (2 Cor 4:10-12) and find ourselves vibrantly alive along with others. “We carry in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus might be visible in our body.” The life of the one given completely to God, subjecting every human project to nothing for the sake of the life giving love of God. Those born of this divine grief for the world are “always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus might be visible in our mortal flesh.” And because our divinely directed grief frees us from the compulsions of achievement and a righteousness of our own, we can say “death is at work in us, but life in you.”

Let those with ears to hear . . .

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When I was a young minister, I believed that authentic spirituality was spontaneous and that structure was its mortal enemy. I still believe that church leadership is not an end in itself, a self-perpetuating monument to importance, but that it has to be flexible and responsive to the call of God and human need, aka mission. Ironically, this responsiveness is served best, not by a laissez-faire-follow-your-bliss-kum-by-yah-seat-of-my-spiritual-knickers modality, but by a deliberate and intentional structure that promotes clarity and and resourcefulness. Not an organizational structure designed for control, which in a primarily volunteer organization easily becomes stagnant and susceptible to abuse by leaders whose drug of choice is control.

So, let’s apply all of this to elders. And I will work backwards from our three stated values. So, first let’s look at accountability.

In some traditions, including my own, elders are at the top of the org-chart. Too often, their authority is practiced behind closed doors. When they are mentioned in the public prayers of the congregation, it is in relation to decision making. And often, they are like supreme court justices—appointed for life. In these organizational traditions, everyone is accountable to them and they see themselves accountable only to God. And in many congregations of which I am aware, the current elders choose the new elders. In such systems, they create a bottle neck in terms of innovation and risk-taking that is necessary for change. And because they have received no training for their job, they respond to their insecurity with greater measures of control. Accountability vis-a-vis the congregation is low.

My own sense is that the authority of Christ resides in the body of Christ. The bishop doesn’t constitute the church, but the church the bishop. This doesn’t mean that elders have no authority, but it means that it is embedded in the church’s authority. While mutuality is the way of the kingdom of God, it is best to think of elders serving the church rather than the church serving elders.

My support for these assertions begins with the nature of the life of God which exists in relationships of mutuality and reciprocity. Biblically speaking, I could cite many texts, but will provide one for now. Jesus, in Mt’s gospel, is insistent that his followers call no one on earth “rabbi, father, or instructor” as these titles of honor obscure the fact that it is God in Christ who retains these prerogatives. Instead, leaders are simply to be known as “brothers and sisters” (Mt 23:8-10).

In light of this, it is interesting to note the example of binding and loosing in Mt 18. When your brother sins against you, go directly to them. If they do not listen, take a few witnesses. If they still don’t listen, we might expect the instruction to include a ring of leaders—scribes or elders. But that is not the instruction. The church is the ultimate human authority in this case. Jesus adds, “Whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. . . Where two or three of you are gathered in my name, I am with you. ” (Mt 18:15-20).

Whatever authority elders possess, it is conferred upon them by the congregation as the body of Christ. And, in turn, elders are accountable to the congregation.

So, what might this look like? First, the church selects their elders. This is a task of spiritual discernment, and has the benefit of not only identifying elders, but also of forming the congregation such that their imagination related to any issue is listening for the Spirit of God. And while I’m talking about spiritual processes, let me say that elders are ordained and installed. You install mufflers. You ordain elders as a statement of belief in God’s guidance and to confer God’s blessing on their work.

At ordination, they should also be tasked with the roles to be taken up as a group. These roles should be written down and both empower and limit their work. Role descriptions can seem like a burden, but they are protection for those tasked with leading. And not every person selected as an elder performs well related to everything on the role description. To do the work of eldering, it takes a group and not just an individual.

Elders should have terms, periods when they can be evaluated and confirmed by the congregation related to their role, or a designated time when they could step away and/or new elders be ordained. At the congregation I served as preaching minister, our story with elders began in wariness. So, we did elder selection every two years. We would do existing staff evaluations in alternate years with elder selection. Every two years seems quick when I describe this to others and it might be best to do it in three or four year intervals. In the eleven years I served there, we never had the experience of an elder being denied continued service by the congregation. We did, however, have elders decide to step away and new elders to be ordained.

This process of evaluation does mean, however, that an existing elder might not be confirmed to continue in that role. I was part of a ministers’ group that would meet for a retreat every year and share how things were going. One from our group complained every year about an elder who was making everyone’s life miserable. They had no elder role description, they had no evaluation process, and elders served indefinitely. This elder’s leadership was toxic and the fallout from not confirming him to continue in that role would likely have been contentious, but ultimately would have made the congregation a healthier place.

Having standards that would provide some measure of accountability going in, coupled with periods of evaluation, ultimately make serving in that role more meaningful in my estimation. Having the continual affirmation of the congregation and clear on and off ramps provides clarity and vital sense of God’s effective presence.

I want to reiterate my insistence that the occasion of having an elder role description obligates the congregation to provide training for elders as they take up incredibly important role. Next post, communal spirituality.

I’m of the opinion that elders, as volunteer leaders, shoulder massive responsibility, very little for which they have received training. I am also of the opinion that the health and vitality of churches depends more on innovating the capacities of “lay leaders” than it does professional ministry staff.

As I argued in my last post, the relative paucity of role description related to elders in the NT leaves a vacuum into which contemporary elders pour meanings from their own experience. And because, in my estimation, elders tend to be chosen from the more higly educated, white collar professions, the practices of leadership tend to mimic their own experience.

I’m mostly appreciative of the movement in my own tradition (Churches of Christ) to use the term “shepherds” to refer to elders. This definitely carries with it more pastoral connotations and we owe the work of Lynn Anderson and his book, They Smell Like Sheep, a debt of gratitude for pushing us this way. My hesitation here is word study posing as theology. But I quibble.

Let me back up for a tick and say that however we arrange our leadership structures and whatever titles we apply to certain roles, they should conform to understandings of leadership in the kingdom of God. Leadership is and should be an expression of human power and authority. As Paul puts it in Romans, “the kingdom of God is not about talk, but power.”

I define power as the ability to accomplish things within the field of endeavor. And the field of endeavor here is the upside down nature of the kingdom of God. All human authority is transparent to the leading of God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Elders, for instance, do not decide for the rest but discern the leading of God through the collective experience of those upon whom the Spirit of God has been poured out. The authority of all leaders is embedded in this reality of the collective wisdom of the biblically informed, Spirit inspired people of God.

As such, all human leadership is expressed in overlapping folds of mutuality, communal spirituality, and accountability. And it should be responsive first not to the donor class, but to the least of these who are considered greatest in the kingdom of God.

I hear from both sides of the elder/pastor configuration a complaint about lack of power. I hear it more from pastors who complain that they went to seminary and that their expertise should give them certain privileges of authority. I’m not unsympathetic given my collection of four seminary degrees. But authority is not about sheepskin bling, and ultimately not about expertise. In a system of mutuality, spirituality, and accountability, authority should be a function of gifting. True authority is not a matter of position, but is earned through compassionate and faithful service.

Still, elders gifting should be supported by training. Again, my opinion based on experience, is that elders tend to grab for authority because they are assigned tasks for which they have little training.

I serve a church that when I arrived had no elders. Long story, but the congregation was in no hurry to have them again or at all because of unaccountable authority in previous elder regimes. As a congregation, we negotiated what a kingdom oriented leadership might look like complete with a role description. It was a great day when we ordained five new elders. Even though they agreed to serve under these conditions, they expressed their personal reservations concerning their competence to fill these roles. So, we brought in resources to provide training. And our early leadership meetings were filled with orientation, implications, and practice so that they felt more competent to fulfill their calling. Particularly due to their training in prayer, these elders functioned in powerful ways having the confidence of the congregation. It was a beautiful thing to be a part of.

More on this in my nest post.

Much of what elders did or who they were is hidden behind a screen of ancient assumptions. And many of these assumptions are made by persons living in an agrarian society where elders were ubiquitous. That’s a world we just don’t know, and so any comparison between elders then and today is likely to be a case of comparing fujis to golden delicious. I have serious doubts whether contemporary elders as an “executive board” have much resemblance to biblical elders.

It would be easier to extrapolate a “qualities” description from a role description than vice versa. And while I’m on this point, the list of qualities in 1 Tim and Titus are not the same, suggesting to me that they are not once-for-all-time instruction, but provided to offer guidance for a church outliving their founding apostle. I will say, unlike those designated as diakonos (“deacons”), in the pastorals elders appear to be local leaders upon whom the reputation of the Christian community depends, which seems to be the main concern in 1 Tim 1 (1 Tim 3:7).

I have other thoughts, though, about these lists in 1 Tim and Titus. Let’s begin with the fact that the lists are not the same. They are similar, but not identical. This to me strengthens the suggestion that they are contextual. They are written for the moment, not as an exhaustive list for all time. They reflect the concerns of late first century communities who are facing the challenge of transition beyond the apostolic era. What should they do to secure the continuity of faith into future generations? The recipe in the pastorals is to find the right leaders, ordain them, make sure they have healthy words (the phrase “sound doctrine” is literally “healthy words,” as opposed to words that “spread like gangrene” (2 Tim 2:17), and seems to correspond to the formula unique to the 1, 2 Tim and Titus: ho pistis, ho logos which is often translated “the saying is sure,” but is more literally translated “faithful word”), and maintain the public reputation of the church.

In comparison, the Johannine letters are facing a similar circumstance as they anticipate the loss of the “beloved elder,” and yet the recipe found there for continuity is different than the pastorals. They are not told to locate their teachers and ordain them, for “you have no need for anyone to be your teacher” (1 John 2:27). Why? They have received an anointing from the Holy Spirit and are to test the spirits to see if they are from God.

I’ll come back to this difference between the pastorals and the Johannine letters, but I also want to point out that the “qualifications” lists are no guarantee that a truly spiritual leader will be identified. I’ve known elders who had believing children, were the husband of one wife, and who were apt to teach, and yet who were spiritually shallow, even spiritually dangerous. I prefer the way Acts often describes those who are to lead in the church: “full of wisdom and the Holy Spirit.”

The lists in 1 Tim and Titus, then, are not “qualifications.” They are more contextual guidelines or things to consider that meet the moment. They are designed for continuity and stability. When you factor in 1 John, however, the pastorals are not the only way to think about continuity. The question posed by these letters set side-by-side is, “Do you secure continuity through a deposit of dogma and the ordination of leaders, or do you trust the ongoing leading of the Holy Spirit?” I am not suggesting these are mutually exclusive, but they are not the same and they often do not sit comfortably together under an ecclesial umbrella.

It’s clear from the experience of the second and third century church that they followed the advice of the pastorals. It is no coincidence that charismatic expressions of the faith in this era of Christianity became more rare and were often opposed by bishops who were increasing in power. This also coincides with a more male-centered practice of leadership, indicating perhaps that where the Spirit is seen as active, gifts given to both men and women are more likely to be honored.

I do think that 1 John, though written toward the end of the first century, is more in keeping with the leadership ethos of early Christianity which was more fluid, mission centric (as opposed to survival-centric), and charismatic or gift driven, and as a result less hierarchical. Elders appear all along the way, but are sometimes indistinguishable from other leadership forms.

It is worth pointing out that there are precious few mentions of elders in the gospels, though there is much, especially in Matthew, about leadership in the kingdom of Heaven. In fact, the purpose of the writing of Matthew in the estimation of many appears in the very middle of the gospel as Jesus finishes a large teaching section consisting of parables on the kingdom of heaven. When the disciples respond that they have understood the parables, Jesus tells them “A scribe trained for the kingdom of Heaven is one who brings from his storehouse treasure old and treasure new” (Mt 14:1).

The description of the leader as a scribe opens up a set of contrasts made throughout the gospel and reveals something of the context for the writing of Matthew. This contrast in leadership styles is highlighted in the opening of Mt 23 which contains a blistering critique of “those who sit on Moses’ seat” (23:1-12), a detail which reminds us that the earliest Christians continued in the structures of the temple and synagogue. This opening of the final discourse is followed by woes. “Woe to you scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites . . .” (23:13-26).

The woes stand in contrast to the beatitudes in the opening teaching discourse, the Sermon on the Mount. There are formal correspondences between the beatitudes and woes tying them together even though they are at opposite ends of Matthew. In both, the first and final saying feature the kingdom of heaven. In both, the final saying deals with persecution. In both, the middle term features mercy. Given these correspondences, it seems right to ask, “If the woes in chapter 23 identify bad scribes or leaders, might the beatitudes in contrast identify “scribes trained for the kingdom of Heaven?” I think they are meant to be read this way. I’m not saying that the beatitudes don’t apply to all Christians, but I do think Matthew intends for the church to whom he is writing to use them to identify its leaders. While the lists in Timothy and Titus are not guaranteed to produce spiritually mature leaders, the beatitudes most certainly will. The meek, merciful, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, peacemakers, those who mourn—these can be trusted with the authority of heaven.

This detour by way of Matthew adds two things to this essay. While “scribes trained for the kingdom” are not literally identified as elders, there is overlap. Scribes would be expected to teach and interpret Scripture, especially to name the relationship between things old and new. But a strict identification of the two is both unnecessary and instructive. Matthew shows us something of the diversity of leadership in the NT era. Diverse leadership structures are emerging in relation to mission. Some things are being carried over from the practices of temple and synagogue, while others are emerging in relation to the Hellenistic and Roman environments that the first Christians are venturing into.

The question of faithfulness to the witness of early Christianity then is less about duplicating a rigid and elusive pattern and more about embodying the values of the kingdom of God. This is the key issue related to applying ancient texts to contemporary circumstances. It is a tension the NT writers wrestled with as well. How much of the law written for circumstances that are very different than the ones they lived in is directly relevant to their lives?

Regardless of what titles we give leaders, they should stand in contrast to other forms of leadership that value authority over others, the bottom line over people, or the good of those at the top rather than “the least of these.” The potential problem, one to which we often fall prey, with uncritically deploying thinly rendered biblical titles like “elder” is that we fill them with our own cultural values. These values come with practices that betray forms of power that are not befitting God’s reign.

That said, there are advantages to using biblical titles where we can. They tie us to a long tradition, to the church through time, and when deployed in theologically appropriate ways can serve us well. I would rather the church theologize around the title elder, than president, senator, or CEO.

In the next post, I will turn to issues faced by contemporary elders and churches.