What is Old is New Again

My first grade teacher was an innovator.   She pushed the desks against the wall and placed carpets on the floor.  We often sat in a circle and learned by stories, songs, and interactive games.  After that first year, it was 11 years of desk rows, lectures, and copying things off the blackboard. At some points I was convinced I could feel brain cells dying as the school day wore on.  My first grade teacher was w woman before her time.

Education has changed.  People who grew up on Sesame Street and Blues Clues and now entertain themselves with YouTube videos resist sitting in neat rows listening to someone talk.  Schools have adapted.  Education has become more interactive and utilizes multiple forms of media simultaneously—sound, movement, images, and words together.  Lecturing and orderly outlines don’t resonate with younger folks much anymore.  The church could learn something from this as we attempt to disciple people.

 M. Rex Weber (The Millennium Matrix: Reclaiming the Past, Reframing the Future of the Church) writes about “Impartational Discipleship” where the church takes on the dynamic of a family in which the more experienced (normally parents and grandparents) impart to the less experienced (normally the children) what they have learned from their journey. This means that we disciple people in the same way we raise our children.  We do not weekly sit our children down, give them a lecture on moral development, safety, and good hygiene and then send them out for the week.  Rather we walk with them through their lives helping them draw lessons from their successes and failures.  We listen to what is happening in them and around them and then help them sort out their decisions and weigh competing values.  Impartational discipleship is like that.  David Kinnaman wrote that disciples are handmade one at a time; they cannot be mass produced.  Growing in faith and obedience is not a classroom exercise; it is a lab project.  The church provides the graduate students who supervise the experience.  Note that those supervising are students themselves, still learning and growing.  Those teaching others demonstrate what faith looks like.  This makes discipleship an interactive enterprise rather than a passing on of information.  Another way of putting it is, we hang out together and make sense of what is happening in our lives and sort out what faithfulness might look like in our situation.

Does this sound innovative or ring of something you have read of someplace else?  I’ll give you a few hints.  Paul wrote:  “Indeed, in Christ Jesus I became your father through the Gospel. I appeal to you then, be imitators of me [1 Cor. 4:15-16]” and “To Timothy my true son in the faith [1 Tim. 1:2].”  And what about the three years Jesus spent with his disciples, helping them draw instructive lessons at the growth edges of their lives?  His preference was to ask probing questions rather than to lecture. He demonstrated daily what obedience and love and justice looked like.  The disciples were to take note and do the same.  Jesus was the master practitioner of impartational discipleship.  Life was the lab, and his follower were his students.

Yes, what is old is new again.  It was there all the time.

Blessings,

Jim

Executive Minister-American Baptist Churches of New York State

Downsizing But Not Calling It Quits

One of our ABC/NYS pastors recently called my attention to an article about what churches can learn from the “Tiny House Movement.”  This is where people move into houses measuring 150 to 600 square feet to simplify and focus their lives.   They ask:  What do I really need to live? Then they get rid of everything else.  There is even a show on HGTV entitled “Tiny House Hunters.”  For many years we have heard about downsizing our living space as we age.  We realize that we simply don’t need as much house as we used to need. The “Tiny House Movement” is like extreme downsizing.

As I thought about this, the First Baptist Church of Oneonta came to mind.  This congregation was struggling under the responsibility and financial burden of maintaining a building that was much

larger than they needed.  Their resources and time were absorbed in preoccupations that no longer enhanced their ministry.  They wanted a grander purpose than paying the gas bill and monitoring the roof.
They were not, however, interested in calling it quits as a congregation.  They still had energy for ministry and an ongoing commitment to one another and their community.  They simply wanted to get back to their core purpose of equipping one another for ministry and sharing the love of Christ.  Their building had become a hindrance and was no longer a useful tool in that endeavor.  They made the difficult but brave decision to sell their church building and start using the parsonage as their base for ministry. 

I visited the congregation several weeks ago and was delighted to see the transition they are making.  We worshipped in the living room, rearranged as worship space.  The service felt warm and lively.  One could feel the depth of the relationships among the worshippers.  After the service we ate in the dining room and had a good discussion about what they were learning through their experiences.  It felt much like the discussion an extended family might have at a holiday meal.  I thought back to a meal and discussion I had shared with them about 18 months earlier in the large fellowship hall of their old building.  The difference as remarkable. The atmosphere was more upbeat; they seemed to feel a sense of liberation from a burden they had been carrying for quite a while.   As we sat around the table in their new home, they were honest about the challenges they have overcome and the ones that still lie before them.  They are still not sure precisely how their future will look, but they are walking into it by faith trusting in God.

Gail Irwin, in her book Toward the Better Country:  Church Closure and Resurrection, talks about the menu of futures from which churches can choose when they come to a critical juncture in their lives.  First Baptist Church of Oneonta has cast their lot in the direction of resurrection.

Blessings,
Jim Kelsey
Executive Minister-American Baptist Churches of New York State

Nothing in This World is Forever

 

Our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel of 11 years died Sunday night in his sleep.  He was quite likely the greatest dog that ever lived; it is simply an objective observation based upon the facts.  He was a tricolor Cavalier with

 

broken patches of black and white, brown highlights here and there.  We named him Oreo after the American cookie.  He was a Belgian dog and had a European passport. He understood Dutch, English, and a little Pidgin English that he picked up from a Nigerian family in Italy with whom he would stay when we were gone. He never really got Italian.

 

Oreo was a Christmas dog.  On Christmas morning when Ben was 8 years old he opened a letter addressed to him and his brother Luke telling them that Debbie and I were to get them a puppy.  He shouted to his brother:  “They have to get us a puppy.  They have to do it.  Santa says so.”  And so began Oreo’s sojourn with us.  He stayed with us as we moved from place to place—Belgium, Ohio, Italy, New York.  He spent brief sojourns with my parents and Debbie’s parents as we made transitions.  In this way he became integrated into our extended families.  As we left homes and people and places behind, Oreo was a thread of continuity among us.  In each new place and set of circumstances his insatiable capacity to receive and give affection was unaffected; he was always the same Oreo.  He lent a dimension of constancy to our shifting lives. 

As you can see, this is about more than the death of dog.  He sat by as Luke and Ben learned to read and write in Dutch.  He sat in the chair with us as we read to them.  He walked to school to bring them home in the afternoon.  He regularly attended services in our house church in Belgium, sleeping through the sermon but waking up for the last song; he was not alone in this. He swam off the beaches of Normandy and patiently waited outside the cathedrals of Italy.  He suffered with us through hot Mediterranean summers and learned to navigate the snow of upstate New York.  He soaked up every precious moment of Ben and Luke’s visits home during college breaks. Oreo was a witness to our lives.  He carried the accumulated associations of the journey we have been on.

I never really marked Oreo’s getting older until last Christmas when I was watching some home videos.  I saw the difference between that young dog who seemed never to stop moving, interested in everyone and everything, and the still dog lying beside me on the couch.  Lately he was sleeping more and attempting fewer leaps.  We began hoisting him up on the couch and carrying him up the stairs at night; arthritis and too many treats were taking their toll.  He was, however, still Oreo with his insatiable capacity to receive and give affection.  His unchanging character had given the impression that he was eternal, that he would always be there.

Oreo's death marks the passage of time for me.  It is as if all those places and people and experiences we have left behind are made afresh for just a moment in his death.  The Buddhist priest Kenko wrote in his Essays in Idleness (1330-1033): 

"If man were never to fade away like the dew...never to vanish like the smoke…but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” 

Nothing in this world is eternal, no person, no place, no thing, not even Oreo in his unchanging character.  That is why it all so precious; it will not last forever.  Sometimes when I prayed, I would thank God for Oreo.  I am still thankful but a bit sad too.  He was, in all likelihood, the greatest dog that ever lived. It is just an objective observation based upon the evidence.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die (Eccl. 3:1-2).

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.  But the greatest of these is love (1 Cor. 13:13).

Blessings,
Jim Kelsey

 

 

The World is a Bit Emptier These Days

Dr. G. Daniel Jones, the pastor Emeritus of Grace Baptist Church in Germantown, Philadelphia, died recently, and I sensed a bit of a vacancy in the world.

I arrived at the Second Baptist Church of Germantown in the Spring of 1992.  It was my first pastorate and my first experience living in a real city; I had grown up in suburban Ohio.  It was my first time living in a racially diverse environment as well, indeed being in the minority. The overwhelming majority of my church members were black.   I was in a challenging new place.

Dr. Jones called me my first week in Philadelphia and offered to come by and visit with me.  Our two churches had a long and cooperative history.  As we talked Dr. Jones, in his melodious Virginia accent, offered to be my cultural and civic guide.  He said that as I came across things I did not understand, I was free to call him; and he perhaps could unpack the situation for me.  I did that on a number of occasions.  He would give me some background and gently suggest some possible courses of action.  In those first years of ministry he helped me to feel welcome, more confident and competent.  He was God’s good gift to me.

As I reflect upon G. Daniel’s passing, I am aware of all the people who have shaped me, encouraged me, and sometimes challenged me to grow up a bit.  None of us are self-made people.  All of us, for better or for worse, show the fingerprints of those who have walked with us along the way. I am grateful for those people who have made me a better person, a more competent minister, and a more faithful believer.

I am also aware of the responsibility that comes with the investment others have made in me.  I too am to be mindful to share with others the investment that has been made in me.  To whom much is given much is required.  All of us have spheres of influence, regardless of who we are, where we are, or what we do.  All of us can sow encouragement, comfort, and challenge in the life of someone else.

I am grateful for the good gifts Dr. G. Daniel Jones gave to me years ago.  Upon news of his passing, the world felt a bit emptier for me.

To Timothy, my dear son: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord...I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.   For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands.  (2 Timothy 1:1-5)

Blessings,

Jim Kelsey
Executive Minister, American Baptist Churches of New York State

 

Going to Keep the Mud a While Longer

Last night I finally finished unpacking my bags from our mission trip to the community of El Socorro among the coffee plantations of Nicaragua.  I have my accumulated email count down to double digits, and most of the laundry is done.  My mud-covered boots still sit in the corner untouched.

 The challenges that the poor of Nicaragua face lend an immediacy to their lives.  Survival is a daily task.  Getting your children to adulthood is not an endeavor that always succeeds.  People suffer accidents while doing the rigorous work on coffee plantations, and the injuries often go without proper treatment.  There is no safety net insulating families from disaster. 

Everything is a struggle.  Children walk more than an hour up and down the sides of mountains to get to school.  Women arise at 4:00 am to begin preparing meals from basic foodstuffs cooked over wood fires.  There is no power or labor-saving devices.  Everything must be wrestled into usefulness by human effort.  The stakes are high for poor communities in Nicaragua. 

 During my tenure among them, this sense of urgency leavened my spirit.  We arose in the morning in a shelter with dirt floors and light coming through the walls.  We stepped out into the morning and ate in the open air. We bathed by pouring cold water over our bodies. It was all inconvenient in comparison to life in middle class North America.  There was an unmediated physicality to it all; you know you are alive.

My time there was quite brief.  I always knew I was just passing through.  My experience of life in that community was in no way comparable to the lives of the people who were born there, live there, and will someday die there.  I am not sentimentalizing poverty and a life of grinding physical labor.  I am saying that I learned something from the good people among whom I briefly lived.  They live interdependent lives; they rely upon and care for one another.  They enter into cooperative endeavors. They must; alone and isolated from one another, they would not survive.

It seems to me our churches could learn something from these communities about resourcefulness in the face of challenge.  Our churches become transformative places when we live into cooperative community, where we care for one another.  This not a bad image for our Region: a cooperative community of churches who know that together they are better equipped to embrace the opportunities and challenges that lie before them

I am not quite ready to knock the mud off my boots yet, to sever that physical connection with a place that taught some good lessons.

Blessings,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister ABC/NYS

 

The Choices of Holy Week

The Palm branches have been waved; the hosannas have been sung; the customary sermon has been preached.  Now we are into Holy Week.  Throughout the Gospel narrative, the tension between Jesus and his detractors has been thickening, the shadow of their threatening desperation growing more ominous.  Although we call it Palm Sunday, Jesus diminished the importance of the palms and brought to center stage the lethal plot waiting in the wings as he enters Jerusalem and the future that plot would yield:

As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, "If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace--but now it is hidden from your eyes.  The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment  against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side.  They will dash you to the ground, you and your children within your walls.  They will not leave one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you [Luke 19:41-44]."

 

It is, perhaps, better called Passion Sunday.

Holy Week is a week of stark choices for the city that will lead to both tragic and transformative consequences.  Holy Week is an appropriate time for us to think about our choices.  They don’t usually seem as stark as those that stood before Jerusalem, but they nonetheless are building a certain future for us and those around us.

A young pastor received a call in the middle of the night.  The woman said in a hushed tone:  “Pastor, I need you.  John is on a rampage.”  The pastor rose and dressed and drove through streets of darkened windows.  When he arrived at the house where the woman lived, every light was on.  He went to front door and knocked; the door was unlatched and opened slightly under the force of his knocking.  He heard angry voices in the back of the house.  He walked through the house toward the voices.  As he turned into the family room, he saw the woman sitting on the couch with a bloodied mouth.  Her husband was standing by the sliding glass door with a hunting rifle in his hands.

The young pastor stood for a moment and thought through his seminary training.  He could not remember ever receiving any guidance on how to deal with a desperate man holding a gun; it just never came up in class.  After a moment, he asked the man, whose name he fortunately remembered from the phone call:  John, what type of future are you building for yourself?  The question so surprised the man that he put down his rifle and began to talk.  He had come home that night to find his wife involved in an affair.  This discovery so devastated his life, so stripped him if all his securities, that he felt he had no future.  He saw no place beyond that moment; his life was over.  The realization that he still had a choice about his future stunned him.  The chance that some life worth living could lie beyond this moment woke him from his darkness.

Holy Week is a week where we remember the poor choices Jerusalem made, the terrified choices the disciples made, and the faithful choices some followers made as they stood at the cross.  We are reminded that our choices matter; we are always building a future of one sort or another.

We endure the weight of our power to choose with the hope that on Sunday God will turn these people’s choices inside out and raise new, unprecedented possibilities.  The glimmer of Easter lightens our load, knowing God can redeem even our worst choices.  But during Holy Week, it is good for us to bear for a few days the awesome weight of our freedom.  Day by day we are choosing.  What type of future are we building for ourselves, our families, and our world?

Holy Week 2015

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister-The American Baptist Churches of New York State

Mary of Nazareth, King Henry VI, and a Hijacked Chapel

Mary of Nazareth, King Henry VI, and a Hijacked Chapel

Luke 1:26--55

The Beginning of Mary’s Story  
“He will be called great…Son of the Most High…inherit the throne of his father David…reign over the house of Jacob…his kingdom will have no end…holy offspring called the Son of God.”  Can you imagine receiving a birth announcement like that through the mail?  The wording itself would seem pretentious; coming from Mary it would seem ridiculous.  Mary is a young, unmarried, Jewish peasant girl living in an insignificant village in a backwater region of the Roman Empire.  Something is happening here that cannot be captured on your standard piece of stationary.   It would take a book to unpack this news.

Henry VI and His Hijacked Chapel
I spent Christmas Eve of 1987 in Cambridge, England.  At the center of that university town’s celebration of Advent and Christmas stands Kings College Chapel.  It is a massive stone structure.  On overcast days, its spires are buried in the clouds.  Its vaulted ceilings are chiseled like ivory.  The organ pipes from on high fill the space with sound as if they will drive out the air itself.   Its stone columns appear to be able to carry the weight of the whole creation and not collapse.

It took five kings to build the place.  Henry VI began construction of the chapel to honor Mary, that unmarried peasant girl from that village who got that awkward birth announcement.  Henry’s vision was that her chapel would be a place of prayer.  His inspiration was Mary’s song in verses 46 to 55 where she sings of her humble estate and wonders at the great reversal God is engineering:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. (Luke 1:46-53)

Things did not turn out as Henry had planned.  Those builders who followed him got deterred and forgot all about the girl from Nazareth who was so taken by God’s regard for the unregarded of the world. 

A close inspection of the building tells the story.  Among the religious symbols and stained glass windows portraying the stories of faith are carvings of royal symbols and swords, knights on horses attired for battle.  Mary’s chapel is littered with the emblems of empire and conquest, war and wealth.  The fingerprints of patriarchy are unmistakable.  Henry’s chapel honoring a humble peasant girl became a monument to the kings who funded it, each king outdoing his predecessor.  The irony is palpable.  This chapel dedicated to a powerless teenage girl who courageously gave herself to God’s will became a shrine to the bloodletting and arrogance of monarchy.  The place came to honor Kings who held in contempt all that Mary stood for.

The irony goes even deeper, in 1987 the chapel was the possession of a male-dominated church.  That Christmas Eve all the clergy and choir were male.  For much of the history of the chapel, Mary would have been compelled to sit silently behind the organ screen bisecting the building.  I suspect that Mary would have been very self-conscious in her own chapel.  She likely would have been drawn to a simple parish church in the countryside with a thatched roof and roughly-hewn pews at the end of an unpaved road.

Why did God Choose a Young Woman Who Was So Easily Forgotten by the Powerful?  
 Mary was the type of person who finds no place in the history books; her voice is rarely heard.  She was a Hebrew, a race thought to be crude, untrustworthy, and clannish by the broader world.  As a young woman she would not even have had a voice in her own family about her own life; she was facing an arranged marriage.  She represents all those people whose lives are carried along by the whims of others, her days shaped by the convenience of the powerful.

At the word of the angel, Mary is troubled.  People like Mary spend a lot of their lives in apprehension.  They try to go through life unnoticed because they are usually on the losing end of most interactions; they walk quickly and don’t make eye contact.   Most of the news they receive is bad news.  The angel, however, cautions Mary not to be afraid; this is some good news for people like Mary.  The favor of God rests upon her, says the angel.  Then the other shoe drops:  “You are going to have a baby.”  Mary probably knew enough Jewish history to know that wearing the favor of God is not always easy.  It is often disruptive, inconvenient, and sometimes dangerous. It can come as a crown or as a cross; one never really knows.  Being an unwed peasant girl in a very traditional society will be no cakewalk for her.

What is Mary’s response to this disruptive piece of news?  “I am the Lord’s servant.  May it be to me as you have said,” she responds.  People like Mary are more prone to trust in God because they have found the world to be, for them, such an untrustworthy place. Her song of praise betrays what she believes about God:  God looks with favor on the lowly; scatters the proud; dethrones the powerful; lifts up the humble; fills the hungry; and sends the rich away hungry.  In a world that is stacked against people like Mary, she gives herself to a God who is clearly for her.  In this God, mercy and power are wed; justice and love join forces.  Mary cannot say no to a God like this.

Don’t Get the Wrong Idea
We might want to idealize Mary, put a halo on her head and wrap her in glowing garments.  In this way we can distance ourselves from her.  What if she were not so special?  What if she were a bit like the rest of us?  Then we would hear a challenge in her words: “I am the Lord’s servant.  May it be to me as you have said.”  If Mary is not a haloed saint, then we too are capable of saying things like that.  When Mary goes to visit Elizabeth, Elizabeth does not call Mary extraordinary or fantastic.  Rather Elizabeth calls her blessed.  Blessing is not something you earn or deserve; it is all gift all the time.  Mary was receiving a gift.

Maybe the real power of this story lies not in Mary’s extraordinary character but in her ordinariness.  This would mean that we are not so different from Mary.  God can work through us; Jesus can, in a way, still be born in us.  And it all comes as gift to those who can’t resist a God like this.  Who among us cannot do that?  Maybe Mary is not so special, but the God who gives to her this gift is the one who is so special.  Mary had the good sense to recognize this.

Back to the Chapel
I sat in that chapel full of contradictions on Christmas Eve.  I contemplated the two stories writ large there, Mary’s story being overwritten by the royal story.  The space was lit by candles masking the details of both stories.  Mary’s song of praise was read loud and clear.  Hers was the only voice in the place.  In that moment I realized the enduring quality of people like Mary.  The Kings who scribbled their vanity on the walls are mostly forgotten, their feats buried in history books somewhere.  Yet the song of this peasant girl, first heard only by God and Elizabeth, is still being sung.  It echoed off the walls that night:  “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be to me as you have said.”  Christmas belongs to people like Mary, and someday her story will have the last triumphant word.

May Christ be born anew in us this Christmas.  May our stories come to sound a bit like her story.
Jim Kelsey
Advent 2014