a random observation

It’s interesting…I check the stats page for this blog occasionally and one of the most frequent Google searches that brings people to this blog is “church of Christ men’s business meeting” or “is the men’s business meeting scriptural?”  Sounds like I’m not the only one thinking about this question.

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Anyway, I am in the throes of class right now and consequently have little time for blogging.  Last semester was a bit of a drag, but I’m really enjoying this semester.  My classes are, surprisingly, overlapping somewhat.

Work continues as well.  We’re writing articles for the CD-ROM that accompanies our Annual Lesson Commentary.  This is always an enjoyable process, as it gives us a bit of freedom to research and write on a variety of topics we don’t get to deal with on a day-to-day basis.  This year, I’m writing introductions to the Pastoral Epistles and the Book of Revelation, as well as a historical survey of Christian eschatology (of the a-, pre- and postmillennial varieties) and a survey of practice regarding benevolence in the Church (inclusive of the first three centuries).

Peace be with you all.

on the moral education of children

Mark T. Mitchell, in Touchstone, on developing a moral imagination in your children.

Excerpt:

Are we raising kids who won’t fit in? I have asked this of myself regularly over the past few years. My wife and I are educating our three boys at home. We don’t watch television (only an occasional video). We emphasize books. We read to the kids and make them memorize poetry. We pray together on our knees. In many ways, our kids are culturally ignorant. They don’t know about Disney World. The other day, my five-year-old asked, “Who is Mickey Mouse?”

So I guess the answer to the question has to be yes. But the “yes” is a qualified one, for when one considers the concept of “odd,” one should ask, “compared to what?” This moves us in a helpful direction, for if “normal” is merely what everyone else does, then what is normal changes with the times. What is odd in one time might not be odd in another. On the other hand, if “normal” refers to a proper way of being human, and if human nature is unchanging, then what is odd, in the sense of being opposed to the majority, may in fact be normal.

As we consider exactly what, in our culture, sets the odd kids apart, it seems to me that the clearest and brightest line can be drawn when we ask the following question: Will your kids be raised primarily on books or on television? To put it another way: Will your children be educated in a logocentric environment, where the written and spoken word is the primary conveyer of meaning, or will they ingest most of their information through electronically generated images?

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Several years ago, when I was away at a conference, my wife took our three young sons out to eat. It was a family restaurant; still, apparently so families wouldn’t have to talk with each other, televisions were positioned at strategic points around the room. Now, children who don’t watch much television seem almost hypnotized when they encounter it. It is extraordinarily difficult for them to ignore. So with the television hovering overhead, my wife struggled to maintain a conversation with three young boys who were craning their necks to see the screen.

Somewhere in the course of dinner, an episode of The Simpsons came on, and this episode just happened to include a spoof on Homer (the Greek poet, not Bart’s dad). Our oldest son, Seth, who was six at the time, soon pointed and exclaimed, “Mom! That kid is pretending to be Odysseus!” He didn’t know Bart and Company, but he did know Homer. Score one for normal.

checking in

I am finishing my exams at the moment.  Expect new posts — the third and final part of my Christmas discussion, as well as a post on elders — later in the week.

In the meantime, here are a few things I’ve enjoyed over the past couple of weeks:

From The Onion: New Device Desirable, Old Device Undesirable (WARNING: Satire)

From ethicsdaily.com: “Clergy’s Ethical Ratings Drop to 32-Year Low” and “Different Books, Common Word.” As to the second entry, I’m speechless.  Any thoughts?

a brief interlude

In between Christmas posts, I want to direct your attention to a post by my friend Mac Ice.  On Friday, he posted a brief article on ‘carnal warfare’ from the pen of James A. Allen in the August 1942 issue of the Apostolic Times.  Mac prefaces the piece with some biographical information.  I have only to add that my grandparents were well acquainted with Bro. Allen in the last years of his life when all of them were members of the Duke Street church in Nashville.

Duke Street, founded in 1905, was one of a wave of churches established in East Nashville along the trolley car lines around the turn of the century.  In the disputes of the 1950s, it fell down on the non-institutional side of the split.  Allen was a member at Duke Street and was doing some preaching for the congregation by the early 1950s.  He remained there until his death in 1967.

As Mac mentions, Allen was a long time presence at the South College Street/Lindsley Avenue church in South Nashville — in the years before Ira North arrived to become the minister in the late 1940s — and was the editor of the Gospel Advocate in the late 1920s.  Men of his sort, though, would not survive the new era of boosterism and institutionalization (read: secularization) that arrived after World War II.  The Ira Norths and Jim Allens of the CofC universe had little in common: North was the novus homo in mainline Churches of Christ in the 1950s — a relentless promoter, publicist, and booster who ascended to great heights of power and influence in local politics and led the Madison Church of Christ (a mega-church before its time) for some three decades; Allen, on the other hand, probably knew by the early 50s that the time for men like himself had ended in mainline Churches of Christ.  The last years of his life, after he ceased publication of the Apostolic Times, were spent serving in a small, obscure church in a working-class neighborhood in Northeast Nashville, a world away from the Nashville Church of Christ Establishment of the 1950s and 1960s.

The differences say a lot about what Churches of Christ would become in the decades to follow.

Christmas — Part 2

This series is going to spread out to a third post.  In that post, which I should have up in a couple of days, I’ll deal with the specifics of how we are handling Advent and Christmas.  This post will deal with some more preliminaries.

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In my previous post I attempted to give a fair description of the problem: NI churches by and large do not celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday (fine enough in a time when the culture was predominantly Christian) and now have few resources with which to face the consumerist juggernaut that is the modern American Christmas.

In this post I will attempt to describe the thought process behind my own approach in my family to this problem.

I should perhaps acknowledge at the outset that I have neither command, example, or necessary inference for any of this.  I appeal to Paul’s injunction in Romans 14.5-6 and beg your forbearance for what I propose here.  (The question of authority is not far from my thoughts as I write this.  I will take a moment to say that this is one place where our traditional method of Scriptural interpretation has shown itself to be less than adequate.  Many of us in NI churches value our heritage of cultural separatism — manifested in a pacifist ethic, a non-participationist stance toward human government, the wearing of the head covering, etc. — but the Baconian hermeneutic sometimes serves as a roadblock in trying to get there.  It has no category for “ought,” the very category in which I would place the following suggestions.  That’s a separate post, though.)

Back to Christmas.

It shouldn’t take a great deal of effort to see how the consumerist mentality (discussed in my previous post) has affected all of our holidays.  Consider our civil calendar as it unfolds toward the end of the year: we begin with Halloween (which really begins being marketed in September), but no sooner than Halloween is over (in some cases before) Christmas begins to be pushed most everywhere (not as a reminder of the birth of Jesus, mind you, but as an exhortation to go out and buy stuff).  This lasts until December 25th.  It might seem that Thanksgiving (a holiday seemingly devoted to a good principle) would be forgotten in the midst of all of this, but the advertising industry in recent decades has devised Black Friday and now Cyber Monday to give that holiday an appropriately commercial tint as a kind of prelude to Christmas.  It goes further than that, of course.  I noticed this year the advent of the “Black Friday preview day” on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  It would seem that there is nothing else the marketers can do unless they target Thanksgiving Day itself, which some have already started doing (Wal-mart, most notably).  The weeks following Thanksgiving and leading up to Christmas are a frenzy of shopping — and of being reminded, nagged even, to shop by the television, the radio and every other venue in which an ad can be placed.

In light of this, Christmas itself might seem to be a bit anticlimactic.  Not to worry!  Before the piles of wrapping paper can be cleared away from under the tree, the media begins to discuss (and encourage) returns and day-after-Christmas sales (the best time to find a bargain!  salve the pain of disappointment by getting what you really wanted!).  And so it goes on up until a little past New Years’ (also accompanied by sales) when the frenzy finally subsides.  The dominant motif here — do I need to point out the obvious? — is the buying and selling of stuff.  Especially with Christmas, we tell ourselves that if we get the right stuff, then we’ll be happy.  If we’re not happy, then we can go to the store and exchange the wrong stuff for the stuff we really wanted that will make us happy (provided we have our gift receipt!).  Simple, right?

I think we all know that the sketch just given contains a lot more truth than we might want to admit.  I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried!

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So how do we respond?

I see a few possible options.

First, we could decide to chuck the entire holiday season.  A pox on all the holidays!  A pox on commercialism and on the (unscriptural) worship of Baby Jesus!  No Santa, no Jesus, no gifts, no anything.  This does, I suppose, have the virtue of being simple and uncomplicated.  But it leaves unaddressed the consumerism that created the problem to begin with: a vacuum that something will very likely come in and fill.  I’ve written here countless times before on the subject of how we like to pretend that larger cultural and social forces have no effect on our understanding and practice of the Christian faith.    The secularist and consumerist mindset of the late modern West is the granddaddy of them all.  I would argue that no one can get through this period in the year without somehow being affected by commercialism of it.

Second, we could try to have it both ways.  We could, as pointed out in the comment thread on the previous post, combine the commercialism of the season with a recognition of the birth of Jesus.  This is the path taken by many ‘mainstream’ Churches of Christ.  Examples could be multiplied.  Suffice it to say, though, that these efforts do little to actively curb the excess associated with the season.  Ultimately, this represents as high a degree (maybe higher!) of obliviousness to the surrounding culture and its celebration of the holiday as do our attempts not to celebrate the holiday.

Third, we could concede the value of observing Jesus’ birth at a commonly accepted time of year (in the same way that we have conceded the value of celebrating a number of secular holidays in our churches — Father’s Day, anyone?) and focus on giving up our consumerist idolatry.  That’s what I want to focus on here.  It’s the path that my family (I, my wife and my two girls) is taking.

What resources do we have for this? Where might we go for direction?

The Bible, to start with.  Assuming that we acknowledge the value of reflecting on Jesus’ birth — God taking on flesh and dwelling among us — we have a lot to learn from the prophets and from the accounts (largely ignored in our pulpits) found in Matt 1-2 and Luke 1-2.  Moreover, there is a large body of hymnody, already found in most hymnals in use among Churches of Christ, that instruct us on the significance of this event.  Read Charles Wesley’s “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing!” or the mediaeval Latin hymn “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” for two of the most beautiful and thought-provoking of such hymns.

Even if we grant this (and I recognize that some of you won’t go that far — and I respect that), how do we deal with the secular observance of Christmas.  Simply reading the birth accounts found in the Gospels and singing a few songs — as meaningful as that can be on Christmas morning — won’t prepare us or our children to face the onslaught that comes each year around this time.  For this, I think, we need a means of preparation that helps to focus our minds on these events in the weeks and months prior to December 25th.

Nowhere does the secularist mindset have us enslaved more than in the way it encourages us think of time.  Think back to the description of the calendar I sketched earlier.  At this point in the year, by the lights of that calendar we should be asking ourselves daily, “How many more shopping days until Christmas?”  It doesn’t have to be that way though.

The early Church understood this: It lived in a world that was ordered by a pagan/state-oriented calendar that set aside numerous days for sacrifices to the gods and the emperor, festivals in honor of local patron deities and gladiatorial combats also held in honor of the gods of the state.  The first Christians could not abide the idolatry inherent in this system.  To compete with it (and it was a very alluring system), the Church realized that it would have to recapture time.  The ecclesiastical calendar that developed in the patristic era was designed to do just that: it restructured time, for the Christian, around events in the life of Christ rather than around the worship of the state and its gods and their lewd (and often violent) festivals.  As it developed over the centuries, the last three months of the secular calendar were punctuated by several feast days, beginning with All Saint’s Day at the beginning of November.  In the western calendar, the four weeks prior to Christmas are known as Advent.  In them, the Scriptural focus is on Jesus’ first coming (as foretold by the prophets) and on his second coming (when he comes in judgment — traditionally Advent was understood to be a time of fasting, prayer and penitence, in preparation for Christmas).  The feast day of St Nicholas (the historical figure upon whom the Santa Claus myth is based) falls on December 6.  On it, Nicholas “the Wonder-Worker,” the Archbishop of Myra (d. 330) is commemorated, especially for his many acts of kindness and giving.  Finally, there comes Christmas.

This sketch, it should be acknowledged, leaves out a great deal, but that is the basic structure of the calendar during these months.

In my family, we are ordering our approach to Christmas around the traditional four weeks of Advent leading up to Christmas, and including a commemoration of St Nicholas’ Day as well.  We will use these markers as a way for us and for our children to prepare for Christmas.

I don’t expect this to be a cure-all.  Children especially are susceptible, even when their parents aren’t (and how often do we totally avoid it?), to the lures of the consumerist worldview.  It’s a start, though.  And if we start early enough, it may just catch on by the time they face their first conversations about Santa Claus at school.

More to come…

Christmas

The time has come around again.  I’ve promised for the past couple of years a post on this topic, so here it is.

First, what I write here is a reflection of my individual conscience.  I do not necessarily advocate what is to follow for anyone except myself.

Having children, like nothing else, has forced me to seriously consider what we do at Christmas time in our household.  For some years, especially after my wife and I were married, I have been comfortable with the notion of observing Christmas as a religious holiday on a very basic level, of taking the day to remember the birth of Christ even if only for the evangelistic reason that one might be able to speak of Jesus on this day and that people might listen as they might not at other times.

I am fully aware, as I write, of the (near) consensus among non-institutional churches on this matter: that we don’t know when Christ was born and that the holiday has demonstrably Catholic origins.  In my experience growing up, I never sat through any strident anti-Christmas sermons — mostly the holiday was ignored and we treated the Sunday closest to it as we would have any other Sunday — but I was definitely taught the conclusions above in Bible classes and I accepted them by and large.  I did not accept any religious understanding of the holiday and saw it simply as a time when family members could exchange gifts.  The closest we got to ‘putting Christ in Christmas’ was my aunt’s insistence that my grandfather read Luke 2 to our gathered family on Christmas Eve.  My grandfather — I can now see this as a reflection of his graciousness of spirit even as he had firmly held convictions on the issue — never argued with this.

Having children, though, has caused me to see all of this — both the practices of my upbringing and the practices that my wife and I have engaged in since we were married — as a terribly inadequate response to this season.

In one sense, I don’t have a problem with the view that I inherited from my upbringing.  When American society was dominated by Protestant Christianity (prior to say 1960 or so), it made sense for our little counter-cultural movement to protest the (so we thought) excessive attention given to this one day.

Things are most assuredly different now, however.  We live in a society that is driven by a consumerist mentality (I don’t feel the need to argue this; I take it as a given — if you want to argue it, feel free to do so in the comment thread).  The consumerist mindset affects everything we do from our homelife to our jobs to our churches to our public life to our holidays.  In America, with the creeping advance of secularization in religion and in public life in the 20th century, holidays both secular and religious in origin have become little more than opportunities to buy things, to “stimulate the economy,” or however you care to phrase it.  The consumerist mentality is total and pervasive; there is virtually nowhere that it can be escaped.

Many Christians give little thought to the way that social factors such as this one affect their spiritual lives.  We see the television (whose almost sole purpose is to advertise to us) and the radio (ditto) and the Internet (ditto) as essentially neutral forces that can be used for good or evil.  We don’t realize that there are very, very few public or private spaces where we are not marketed to anymore (e.g. the sides of buses, clothing, billboards…the list is endless) and the insidious ways that the technology with which we have surrounded ourselves crowds out God and encourages us to focus on “stuff.”  And we bring this into our churches and into the way we do holidays.

Nowhere is this more true than in our approach to Christmas.  We pride ourselves on knowing that December 25th isn’t Jesus’ birthday and then we turn right around and fully participate in the orgy of materialistic excess that is the modern Christmas.  We’ve allowed ourselves to be steamrolled by the consumerist juggernaut that is Santa Claus…and we never even knew what hit us.  (Already this morning I’ve visited the blogs of a number of “conservative” Christians crowing about their “Black Friday” purchases.   In large part, this came about because, in expelling Jesus from Christmas, we left a vacuum open for other darker forces to come in and occupy.  We haven’t realized that when we emptied Christmas of religious content, we left a big gaping hole and didn’t fill it with anything.  Santa Claus and the consumerist mindset walked right in and filled the void.)

This year (and the coming years) will be different for my family.  They have to be.  We’ve come to the conclusion that our girls can’t be raised healthily with the notion that Christmas is all about getting stuff.

In my next post, I will talk about the specific things we are doing to address the problem.  As always, your comments are welcome.

on the right to discuss “religious subjects”

For is not this the error, the common and fatal error, of the world, to think itself a judge of Religious Truth without preparation of heart? “I am the good Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known of Mine.” “He goeth before them, and the sheep follow Him, for they know His voice.” “The pure in heart shall see God:” “to the meek mysteries are revealed; ” “he that is spiritual judgeth all things.” “The darkness comprehendeth it not.” Gross eyes see not; heavy ears hear not. But in the schools of the world the ways towards Truth are considered high roads open to all men, however disposed, at all times. Truth is to be approached without homage. Every one is considered on a level with his neighbour; or rather the powers of the intellect, acuteness, sagacity, subtlety, and depth, are thought the guides into Truth. Men consider that they have as full a right to discuss religious subjects, as if they were themselves religious. They will enter upon the most sacred points of Faith at the moment, at their pleasure,—if it so happen, in {199} a careless frame of mind, in their hours of recreation, over the wine cup. Is it wonderful that they so frequently end in becoming indifferentists, and conclude that Religious Truth is but a name, that all men are right and all wrong, from witnessing externally the multitude of sects and parties, and from the clear consciousness they possess within, that their own inquiries end in darkness?

John Henry Cardinal Newman, Sermon 10 (Epiphany 1839) “Faith and Reason, Contrasted as Habits of Mind”

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A note to my readers: I like this quotation a lot.  The sources that called it to my attention yesterday seem to be using it polemically in the context of some internal Orthodox squabbles.  I’m not Orthodox and I don’t have a dog in that fight, but I still really like this sentiment.

 

this and that

Some recent posts/articles that I enjoyed:

Bill Kauffman uses a review of a rather unsatisfying book to talk about the slow and agonizing death of rural America.

Think the recession’s over?  Not by a long shot.

Lastly, John Mark Hicks on Alexander Campbell’s continuing fascination with demonology.  A recent post deals with an address delivered by Campbell on a trip to Nashville in 1841.

Adams on the “men’s business meeting”

As you all know from some of the discussions in the past regarding polity in non-institutional congregations, I’m not a big fan of the “men’s business meeting.”  I’ve known of churches that have existed for decades without elders, living under the business meeting arrangement for decades.

All that to say that I ran across this passage from James W. Adams’ Words Fitly Spoken (Bowling Green, KY: Truth Foundation, 1988), pages 20-21, and thought it worth sharing:

At various times through the years, a considerable number of brethren have sought to circumvent the oversight of New Testament elders, bishops, or pastors of local congregations of the Lord’s disciples.  Inasmuch as there must be a directing element in all group activity, such brethren have been forced to conceive and set up some form of government for the discharge of “local church” business.  Due to the onus that is associated with congregational rule by a majority vote of the total membership, they ordinarily seek to avoid that arrangement.  In most cases, they have instituted instead the rule of the congregation by a majority vote of a “business meeting” composed of the adult, male members of the congregation.  In so doing, they have literally “met themselves coming back.”  Instead of getting rid of their problems, they have increased and compounded them.

When authority over congregational affairs is vested in the voice of the majority of a “business meeting,” an opportunity is created for any capable, personable, designing individual with a Diotrephes complex (3 John 9) to dominate a congregation.  Through psychological influence and pressure (and sometimes not so psychological), he can exercise political control by bloc-voting his satellites in the business meeting while maintaining a public image of self-effacing humility.

The whole article, titled “Hung on His Own Gallows,” goes into somewhat more detail.

What are your thoughts?  Why do we allow the patently extra-scriptural business meeting arrangement to stand?

a few links

I’m back for the moment.

Recent discussion on the Stone-Campbell e-mail listserv has pointed me to John Hardin’s recently completed Auburn Ph.D. dissertation on B.C. Goodpasture, directed by the estimable Ed Harrell.  The dissertation, titled Common Cause: B.C. Goodpasture, the Gospel Advocate, and Churches of Christ in the Twentieth Century, was completed earlier this year and looks to be a good analysis (as good as any) of the power dynamics at work in the Churches of Christ in the middle of the twentieth century and the ways in which that power was used to marginalize and neutralize dissent.  I’m only a little ways in, so I don’t have extensive comments just yet.  Hopefully time will allow that in the next couple of weeks.

Second, I’m a little late to this, but Kyle Colvett does a nice job analyzing anti-Catholic sentiment in the history of Churches of Christ.

Lastly, Fr. Tobias gets so many things right here.