Brethren Love Feast as sacred liturgy

My kinda countryside. Approaching Salem Mennonite, Freeman, S.D.

Last week I had the pleasure of spending Monday through Wednesday in Freeman, South Dakota, teaching and preaching at joint Holy Week evening services between four Mennonite congregations in the area, hosted at Salem Mennonite Church, where my friend Nicholas Detweiler-Stoddard is pastor. He and I worked together over the evenings to try and give an account of how worship works, relying heavily on the work of Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith and his "Cultural Liturgy" series.

To summarize, Smith's work is all about desires and loves, using ancient and contemporary wisdom to argue that we humans are worshipping animals who are what we love, and therefore worship what we love (in the churchy and non-churchy senses). The tasks for Christians, then, is to cultivate our loves toward faithful ends, namely love of God and neighbor (even enemies), and seeking first the peaceable kingdom of God. This happens by the enlistment of our imaginations, which is a whole-bodied enterprise. In volume 2 of his series, Imagining the Kingdom, Smith argues that "the way into the heart [and therefore the imagination] is through the body, and the way into the body is through story" (p. 14). Christian worship is the training ground to allow the "big story" of God's redemption of the world through Christ capture our imaginations, seep into our bones, train our loves/desires, and pull us toward a vision of the good life. Because of our sinful proclivity for self-deception, it's important that Christians also train our vision to see what other stories we've been enlisted into, and what false kingdoms we've been misdirected toward, because not everyone who confesses "Lord, Lord" with their lips and rational beliefs is a full-bodied Christian disciple. True evangelical faith takes practice, and the story-shaped, Spirit-filled practices of the church help cultivate faithfulness.

So on the final night of worship, the night before Maundy Thursday, I gave a narration of the Brethren Love Feast as I experienced it as a youth in Prairie City, Iowa, and made the argument that it is an example of a particularly "weighty" sacred liturgy, especially during Holy Week, and one that the wider church (and Brethren who have been letting it go by the wayside) should take up and appropriate. Rather than celebrate the full Love Feast in that service, we then moved into a time of washing the feet (or hands) of our sisters and brothers in Christ. In this area, these Mennonites have not commonly practiced feet washing, it was a beauty to behold children and parents, spouses, young people and elders, washing each others' feet and hands. Here's hoping a Love Feast might follow in time!

Boring worship makes life always interesting

Okay, so maybe not THAT boring
(Photo by Louisa Billeter/Flickr)

If church-going Christians don't go through their work-a-day lives being surprised and/or offended by the ways of the world, the ways of the world have become the background by which they live those lives. This is a problem.

If church-going Christians come to worship expecting to be entertained (or even "inspired" or "recharged"), the ways of the world have become the background by which they come to worship. This is a problem.

The everyday practices of becoming the people of God are necessarily "boring" in that they must seep so far down into our bones that doing things such as praying, reading scripture, forgiving, making peace, raising children in the faith, loving neighbors and even enemies become second nature. Only when they become second nature can we begin seeing the world aright and stumble into more faithful being in the world as the people of God, hemmed into Christ's body.

Worship in this sense may at first seem "wasteful," as my friend Aaron Kauffman has recently said.

But here's the thing: When Christian worship and discipleship become "boring" in the (good) sense that they become our second nature, then life becomes permanently interesting. Once God's story and your place in it becomes the primary way in which you live and have your being in the world, then the world becomes rightly seen as the site of God's reconciling mission to all of creation. We want to run to the sites of God's healing and participate. We delight in forgiveness. We rush foolishly into loving enemies. We take joy in washing the dirty feet of sinners (including when those feet are our own in the hands of a sister or brother).

Yes, we will screw this up, making worship boring in the bad sense, in that it does not engage our entire body, not grabbing us by the guts, and thus failing to capture our imagination. Church will and often has become soulless drudgery and life-sucking rather than life-giving. But when this happens it signals a failure of imagination-capturing, and the remedy isn't necessarily making things flashy and exciting. (Seriously, click that link and hold on tight.)

Rather, we must be re-oriented, restored and re-storied to the ancient bodily wisdom of the church and capture the sense for why we're going through these "boring" motions and why they orient us by God's Spirit toward life abundant.

Book reading update

It's been months since I've updated the "What I'm reading" Amazon widget off to the right, so I'm setting about doing that today and I'll make a few comments here.

First, I finally finished reading Chris Marshall's excellent book, Compassionate Justice: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Two Gospel Parables on Law, Crime, and Restorative Justice. In some ways it was the perfect book for me, blending my "theology and peacebuilding/restorative justice" background from grad school. Late last week I submitted my book review to the reviews editor at Political Theology, so that won't see the light of day in published form until late this year or early next. But there was so much richness in the book that a 999 word review couldn't cover, I'll likely draw on it in coming months in a variety of ways.

Next, even though it's been listed to the right, I haven't opened it since last fall - but I'm getting started again on Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I'll be reviewing this book for Brethren Life and Thought, but it's also been high on my list because of the splash its making in restorative justice circles. The critique she offers of the current criminal justice system in the US has a high degree of relevance for RJ practitioners working in and around the criminal justice system in this country. I'm only a chapter or two in, but the historical narrative she offers on the institutional forms of racism in this country is compelling.

Finally, I've realized that I need to read way more fiction that I had through my four years of grad school. When I was finishing my undergrad in English the few years before that, I had a mountain of novels I was reading regularly, and I miss that. So per some recommendations from a lit nerd friend of mine, I just got in the mail Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and Zone One by Colson Whitehead. They might have to sit on the shelf for a bit as I finish nerd fiction piece, Lucky Wander Boy, which had been on my wish list since 2003! On the nonfiction front, I also received in the mail D.T. Max's new biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story - which I've heard is fantastic.

What books have y'all been into lately? Academic, fiction, nonfiction, or otherwise?

Philosophy, history, and the quest for understanding

In the introduction to his book, Why Study the Past?; The Quest for the Historical Church, former Church of England Archbishop Rowan Williams, a trained historian/historical theologian, has this to say about history and its driving impulse: "(H)istory is a set of stories we tell in order to understand better who we are and the world we're in."

For the past month I've been taking an Intro to Philosophy course in the MOOC format, run by the University of Edinburgh. In the first week, professor Dave Ward surveyed a few answers to the question, "What is philosophy?" and offered this as his own: "Philosophy is is the activity of working out the right way of thinking about things that matter most to us." He emphasized the active nature of the discipline, namely its being argumentative and dialogical, requiring the practices of listening and "the things that matter most to us" having to do with a desire for better understanding.

While these two noble scholastic traditions have developed their own sets of methodologies, starting points, and internally coherent thought systems, what seems to unite them is a search for better understanding, both of ourselves as human beings and our place in the world we inhabit and are a part of. The results of which are sets of theories about the way things are and, if there's a moral dimension to the theories, the way things ought to go.


Fellow NuDunker Josh Brockway, himself an historian-in-training, has started helping me see how my own approach to thinking about theology, history, politics, and ethics - may be influenced by another approach to working with history, that of the genealogy. "How things came to be..." is a popular refrain in the genre of genealogy. Moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre seems to do this in his landmark, After Virtue, where he starts with a lament on the present circumstances in moral philosophy and moral reasoning in Western societies, then proceeds to march back through history to narrate how we got here. Philosopher Charles Taylor seems to do this in his landmark tome, A Secular Age. Yet another example: Historian Brad S. Gregory's The Unintended Reformation.  (Gregory himself, in this lecture on YouTube, says his methodology is "heretical" to historians.)

To the historian, though, this approach has it backwards. Perhaps for the historian, if genealogy should be done at all (surely a point of contention), then it should be done with extreme caution and humility. Genealogy also seems to be somewhat of a boundary-crossing enterprise, which perhaps explains why other historians would label Gregory a "heretic" within his own discipline.

Perhaps because of my educational background in literature and being a life-long avid reader, I have to say that I find the genre of genealogy compelling. There is a hermeneutical dimension to it that appeals to me, in that the genealogist must take what materials they have available to them and craft a compelling narrative for how things got to be the way they are. This quest for understanding, it seems to me, puts it in league with the disciplines of history and philosophy proper.

And what of theology and its place in the work of history, philosophy, or genealogy? Given my limited theological training (yes, I have an Mdiv, and I would still say "limited"), I tend toward biblical and narrative theology, and I take those strands of theology to be derived from different disciplines than, say, systematic/doctrinal theology. The former tend to be more literary approaches to doing theology. I also gravitate toward political theology, which seems to have been derived from heavy engagement with political philosophy.  I've gravitated toward moral philosophy because I think the quest for a life well lived is a good one, and I do that as a Christian. Finally, throw in James K.A. Smith's influence on me and whatever he's shipped into my head from continental philosophers, phenomenology and all that. Oh and don't forget Hauerwas getting me turned on to Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy.

So I guess what I'm saying is this: My intellectual influences are a murky, murky soup. I know just enough of any number of disciplines to be dangerous, but don't know enough about their methodologies to do any one of them legitimately. Had I gone on to PhD work in any one discipline, would I have had to renounce the legitimacy of all others?

Good thing I'm not in the academy; this stuff makes me cranky.


See also: Why Study History? on Chris Gehrz's The Pietist Schoolman blog.

The political eschatology of Les Misérables

Eschatology at the barricade; Photo by Laurie Sparham/Telegraph.co.uk

Here in the little town of Toledo, we have a local treasure: The Wieting Theater. It's been in town for ages, but had started to fall on hard times and was threatened to close until a few years ago when local citizens and the theater guild - who didn't want to see this public gathering place die at the hands of a 60" HDTV in every home - got organized. Because of their efforts, today we have a beautifully restored classic small-town theater with a state-of-the-art digital audio and projection system, and a great stage for the periodic live performances that run. The movies are usually a few months behind, but for someone like me who couldn't care less about seeing most movies right when they come out (except "The Hobbit"), this is fine.

Well this past weekend, the recent movie production of Les Misérables was at the Wieting. My wife went on Friday night with a few other gals, came home and said "I'm going again tomorrow night." So Saturday night, my wife, daughter, and I caught it together.

It is stunning. It is incredible. Wow. There are a hundred directions this could go for me, but I want to focus on something peculiar I noticed at the end of the movie, having to do with eschatology or "kingdom(s) coming, on earth as in heaven." But first a bit of set-up...

NuDunkers: A vision for Brethren theological education

(Moocow image by Gordon Lockhart;
remix of ‘la vaca de los sinvaca‘
by José Bogado/Flickr)

Last week the NuDunkers held our second live discussion on Google+ Hangouts, on the topic of pneumatology. Here's the video, and the event page has a transcript of questions and discussion items that were raised by folks watching the video discussion. Unfortunately, I missed the whole event because of an internet outage. But I still benefitted greatly from the pre-hangout blogging exercise and the follow-up remarks from our guest (new NuDunker?) - Laura Stone. I think we're off to a great start.

Simultaneously, in my professional world of educational technology, I was busy participating in, thinking about, and writing critically (and humorously) about the MOOC - massively open online courses - a phenomenon that has the higher ed world all up in a tizzy.

And as often happens for people who wear multiple hats, my worlds happily collided. I thought to myself:

Is NuDunkers a MOOC?

It's my contention that the NuDunker project is almost a MOOC in some senses, and with a bit of tweaking and explicit thought around digital pedagogy, it could be more so. And not only that, but NuDunkers could be a vision for Brethren theological education. Stay tuned as I unpack this a bit...

Of course!

From the beginning last fall, NuDunkers has been framed as a conversation. It has been, though, a certain kind of conversation - namely a theological and somewhat academic one, but with the intent of doing theology from and for the church. We want to use our brains faithfully for the concrete work of God (discipleship, ministry, mission) through God's concrete people (the body of Christ). So in this way there is an educational dimension to our conversations and their intended impact.

For the foreseeable future, we will be holding these blogging/discussing exercises around particular theological topics (last week: pneumatology). Given that these topical, educational discussions have time dimensions put on them, we start moving toward something that could be considered "a course" - that is, a particular group of people engaged for a particular period of time in the work of teaching and learning around a particular set of topics. I want to say that theological education is already happening in NuDunkers.

Open season

One important mark of a MOOC is that it is open. NuDunkers, from the start, has been intended to be open in a number of ways very similar, if not exactly like a MOOC. We're open with respect to...

• Cost - If you have a device with an internet connection, you're in. No registrar, no admissions, no tuition.
• Participation - You only have to have an interest in the work we're doing and a willingness to engage in respectful dialogue. You're not required to have a bachelors or associates degree, or even a high school diploma, and you don't have to be a professional pastor or seminary professor (in fact, that would probably help overall).
• Media - We're carrying this out in an array of online media and networks that are open to the world: YouTube, for everyone to watch the discussions; Twitter, for everyone to see tweet-sized bits of information; blogs, for everyone to read the more substantive writings and discussions. We're not locking this stuff behind university or seminary systems.

True, the language will be a bit academic, but again this is an educational endeavor, and we're trying to build a bridge here between the academy and the church. Negotiating the language games is going to be tricky at times, but we're convinced that risking those negotiations is both necessary and worthwhile.

All in for online?

U.S. institutions of higher education, including theological education, are in big trouble these days. The cost of college and grad school is, like health care in this country, spiraling out of control, while at the same time the plight of the professional pastor is looking increasingly grim.  Many schools are turning to online programs to bolster enrollments in their flagging institutions. But these programs often foster very little in the way of substantive engagement between students and instructors, and provide food for the head only, starving the rest of our bodies and our relationships.

While NuDunkers is being carried out entirely online, we're trying to do so in ways that engage more than just our intellects; we tell stories, we laugh, we pray. We also share an emphasis on the importance of local bodies of worship and discipleship (i.e. congregations) - so our work online should inspire and propel us deeper into local and more embodied forms of mission and ministry.

Questions going ahead

• For NuDunkers: How can we take our pedagogical vision further?
• For Brethren institutions: Are you interested in NuDunkers? What if you somehow got involved? What if you granted credit for participation in NuDunkers?
• For Brethren in the pews: How can we better engage you for the renewing of our minds in the body of Christ?

#etmooc assignment: Make an animated GIF

V1

V2

Online animated GIF generator: Picasion