One of the benefits of being a blogger who has been around for a while and has some sort of audience is that I am on the list to receive free books from publishers looking for a snappy review. I confess that it’s a perk that I like, but honestly I rarely ever get around to reading many of the books. They usually sit on my desk, looking longingly at me, asking me to caress them and take them home. But many of them are self indulgent tomes to the failures of the church, and the downside of the human condition.

When I picked up the latest batch this week, one of jumped quickly to the eye. For one thing, it was perhaps the first hardback book I’ve received. For another, the publisher was Scribner, not your average “Christian” publisher. Finally, the subtitle grabbed me: “Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.” As a person who has both the fortune and misfortune of living for many years in the Mecca of Christian Pop Culture, and as one who has skirted the outskirts of that culture, I was interested in hearing what the author had to say.

I quickly learned that Daniel Radosh was not your average religious book author. For one thing, he is Jewish, something that always makes Christian publishers squirm a bit. For another, he is an accomplished journalist, one who I have heard interviewed on NPR in the past. He came into the project by accident, drawn by a family member to a Christian music festival, and what he experienced there do intrigued him that he spent the next year checking out the nooks and crannies of Christian culture to examine the motivations and experiences present there.

It would be easy for this book to fall into snarky satire, an outsider poking fun at those crazy Christians and their Jesus junk. Actually, if I had written the book I have little doubt that I would have fallen into that trap. But Radosh avoids value judgements for the most part (he does get a bit irate at the Prolifers against In-Vitro, but you will have to read that for yourself). He honestly tries to get his head around the paradoxes and contradictions of Christian consumer culture, treating it with a sense of respect while still acknowledging the madness.

This is not a “Christian” book by any means, but it is a book that should be read by Christians, for the perspective of the innocent outsider is one we need to hear. While I doubt that many of the readers of this blog are hard core consumers of Christian kitsch, this book both provides a great deal of insight into the separatist wing of evangelical / fundamentalist culture, while calling all of us to account for our unwillingness to cast a critical eye toward our this family we call Christendom.

The book is a great read . . . I hardly put it down the past day or so . . . and I would commend it to all.

I haven’t been writing much the past few days because there are simply too many plates spinning in the air. There are several projects that are promising, including a community project that has great potential to bring about change. But these things compete with my blogging, and something has to give. I’ll be back next week with a few thoughts for the journey.

Each Sunday morning at 8:30 a.m., a group of faithful folks gathers in the worship space at the Antioch United Methodist Church for a service we call prime:: This service takes its name from one of the traditional services of the hours, and is an attempt to be both contemporary and contemplative, focusing on the gifts of the community as best we can at such an early hour. The music is an amalgam of stuff, including traditional hymns (played on guitar and congas), modern praise and worship songs, and even a few original tunes in an attempt to take on the Solomon’s Porch practice of singing music that originates in the community.

“Holy Are You,” which was posted a day or two ago, was one of those songs which was created with prime:: in mind, adapting the traditional Eucharist prayer into a musical setting. I also have put a musical setting to the traditional Gaelic Blessing (May the road rise up to meet you…). Obviously, the lyrics aren’t original, but the music was what I was feeling at the time and we sing it occasionally at the ending of the service.

Here’s another PC based recording, probably too folky and very cheesy, but it’s the best I can do at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday.

\”Gaelic Blessing\” by Jay Voorhees

Several folks have asked me if there was recording of “Holy Are You,” the song that I shared that the Festival of Homiletics a couple of years ago. I cranked out a recording of it today, albeit not especially good, but it will give folks a sense of the tune.

The song is copywritten, but not registered with CCLI (for a variety of reasons). I really don’t mind you using it in worship if you feel so led, but am retaining the copyright in the off chance that someone wants to use it for a profit making opportunity. I don’t expect that to happen, but crazier things have happened in the world.

\”Holy Are You\” by Jay Voorhees

Once upon a time there was information.

Actually, if we want to be precise there was knowledge. It was something to be gained, something to be pursued, and the acquisition of knowledge was seen as a source of personal power. With the coming of the enlightenment, the age of reason and science, the pursuit of knowledge was seen as an ultimate goal in life, and many societal institutions lifted up the pursuit of knowledge as a primary task.

The church was one of those institutions that fell into the trap of adopting a knowledge based form of learning and growth. The church had been through many different ways of knowing about and experiencing God through the ages. Early on it was focused in the relationship of the community. Later, as Christianity became more legitimized in society (thanks to Constantine and his mom), a hierarchical model was adopted which put an emphasis on a trained clerical class who were granted access to the special gnosis (what Tom Wolfe called “The Masters of the Universe” in The Bonfire of the Vanities) and then informed the masses how they were to understand God. Yet, even from the beginning, there was this sense of importance to learning knowledge about the faith, seen most clearly in the catechism. Christians were expected to learn certain things — creeds, scriptures, etc. — and this gaining of knowledge about the traditions and theology of the church would lead to a deeper relationship with God.

Western Protestantism, formed in the crucible of the Enlightenment, bought into informational based models of faith development. As a “Word” centered faith, spiritual well being was seen in the ability to acquire information about the Bible. The “great” leaders in faith were renowned for their ability to memorize the words of the scriptures, or their ability to expound on the meaning of them. The Sunday School movement was developed in the belief that education focused on acquiring information about the scriptures and the world (in the early days of the movement) was part of seeking the desires of God. This movement influenced church education in the 20th Century and almost all models of Christian education focused on gaining information about the scriptures and traditions of the church.

As the 20th Century began to come to an end, and the influence of modernity (Enlightenment influenced thought) began to wane, Christian educators began to question the informational based modes of developing persons into disciples of Jesus Christ. They realized that there were many who knew a lot about faith, the scriptures, and the traditions of the church, however these persons were lacking in a vibrant relationship with Jesus Christ and an ongoing experience of the living God. As they reviewed the stories of Jesus, they recognized that Jesus’ model of leading his disciples focused less on teaching about the history and traditions of the faith and more on forming his apostles into people that took on a new lifestyle. This formational approach to faith development emphasized experiences and practices over the acquisition of information. The goal was the development of a lifestyle rather than a knowledge base.

The problem, as is so often true for the church, is in our tendency to over correct in reaction to the negatives with a particular movement. For some reason known only to God (and probably influenced by the assumptions of modernity) we church folks tend to be “either/or” kinds of folk. So in the desire to be more formational in our educational approaches, we often found ourselves denigrating information based education. Likewise, those who continued to resonate with informational schemes wrote off formational approaches as “touchy-feely”. Our need for categorization sometimes leads us into opposing camps, rejecting the value of the other as we hold up our own as given by God.

The fact is that holistic education requires both the acquisition of information AND the formation of the individual through experiences and practices. Experiences and practices without an understanding of the traditions and scriptures in which they arise leads to self absorbed faith with little connection to the larger story of which we are a part. Acquiring information helps us know the story, but offers little place for inserting our selves into that story. Growth in the grace and knowledge of God requires both informational and formational approaches to education, something that seems to be paradoxical in our world today, but is in fact complimentary approaches that are held in tension with one another.

 The task for those of us engaged in the formation of individuals into disciples of Jesus Christ is to recognize that tension and attempt to develop approaches to faith development which utilize both methods. In a coming post I want to share a vision of a curriculum that I am working on that attempts to do both, and invite your participation and help in designing that curricula.

 I confess that I originally wasn’t on the Twitter bandwagon. However, like so many things that get us in trouble, EVERYONE else seemed to be doing it, so I decided to give it a shot. And in point of fact, some folks seemed to be following what I was doing,

What seemed especially nice to me was the ability for Twitter to recognize the various places that I post information and provide a daily update that I could post on this blog highlighting articles from other locations. While this space used to be the general catch-all space for everything I am thinking about, I have moved to posting United Methodist specific stuff at The MethoBlog (as the editor and publisher it seemed to make sense) and my tech related stuff at The TechnoPastor.  I’ve been too busy to do much additional writing, so I haven’t been writing here. However, in looking at the past few weeks, I was startled to notice that this simply seemed to have become a place to see what I’ve been twittering, rather than a place of thought and conversation.

That came together for me a few minutes ago when a good friend and colleague sent me an e-mail:

…I’ve unsubscribed from your blog.  Lemme know when you quit this Twitter foolishness.

I would normally say that he is just a grump (well he is at some levels ). However, he makes a good point, one that I was already thinking about.

So, I have turned off the Daily Twitter Updates, and will begin looking at other ways to highlight writings from other places on this site. I also intend to find some time to get back to writing here, hoping that there are some folks along the way who want to read what I have to say.

Twitter Updates for today–

• 16:20 Hanging out at church while Grace is at youth.
• 17:29 [OWU] Daily Twitter Updates– tinyurl.com/5xtu5n
• 18:33 [MethoBlog] The Pastor’s Study — Five Things I Hate About Parish Ministry tinyurl.com/5j7ym6

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Twitter Updates for today–

• 01:11 Why am I up at 1 a.m.? And why do I think I have any gifts in ministry?
• 07:03 Another day in paradise. What? I’m where? Nashville. What happened to paradise?
• 15:30 Needing to sleep, but I have to much to do.
• 16:47 At the grocery with the girls. Can I scream yet?

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Twitter Updates for today–

• 00:26 [OWU] Daily Twitter Updates– tinyurl.com/5xxfua
• 10:01 Wishing I were hip like Bruce.
• 10:19 Listening to Barney . . . ugh!
• 20:44 Glad that he is not the moderator of the PCUSA!
• 21:22 {Articles I Like} Follow The Aqua Brick Road: tinyurl.com/573pxk

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Twitter Updates for today–

• 00:26 [OWU] Daily Twitter Updates– tinyurl.com/5ncmbj
• 08:29 [MethoBlog] The Pastor’s Study: The Case for the Quarterly Conference tinyurl.com/559qd2
• 18:02 Sitting overwhelmed by all I have to do, so I will play computer games instead.
• 23:06 Trying to put together a new curriculum.

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