TheyCallMePastorBryan

February 13, 2012

My sister just sent me the best Valentines Day card I have received in quite some time!

February 10, 2012

Portlandia video of the day. Makes me want to grow out my beard again!

February 09, 2012

Stop using the word ‘missionary’ and stop sending people out to the ‘mission field.’ Or keep the word, but also commission public school teachers, and dentists, and CPA’s, and construction workers, and those people who take your money at the toll booth. We’re all disciples, all ground is holy, every interaction and conversation is loaded with divine potential, anytime, anywhere. Ordain everyone, call everyone a minister, invite the whole church to be on staff.

— Rob Bell | Hello, Rob Bell | This quote is from a great little interview that talks about connections between what we believe about our work mattering and the future of the world. Check it out.

February 06, 2012

Apparently I’m into taking pictures with my cell phone lately. This is a shot of one of the walls of my office building. For whatever reason I find painted over graffiti to be quite intriguing.

February 03, 2012

This is the mural at the parking lot Sacred Roots has been working on as part of the Our Happy Block project.

on insistence of pastoral authority

So it seems everything I hear this month about church leadership has been centered on asserting power and authority and how “questioning authority is sinning.” And all I can come to is that there are a large number of people who are obsessing over power in relation to leadership in the church. I’ve been holding out on writing because I just have not been able to bring up the energy to deal with it. But the more BS that comes out about bad use of pastoral authority and insistence on defining Christianity in masculine terms, the more I’m convinced that I have to say something.

Yet the truth is I’m tired of dealing with this, so I’m just going to tell a couple stories from the Bible and leave it at that.

In the Gospel of Matthew, there’s a time where John the Baptist is in prison and he’s starting to have doubts about whether Jesus is really the messiah, so John sends some of his followers to ask Jesus if John’s belief was wrong. Jesus sends these followers back and essentially says “You tell him about what’s happening here and he can decide for himself.” And then as he’s talking with those around him and reflecting on John’s imprisonment, Jesus says “From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of heaven has suffered violence and violent men lay hold of it.” In other words, the way of this Kingdom is such that there are those that will seek to control this movement by force, whether through imprisoning John the Baptist or through seeking to trap Jesus and get him in trouble with the political authorities.

We read this passage in Sacred Roots a few weeks ago and I was struck by how this idea continues to be true to Christianity. There are always those that try to control the Kingdom by force and by doing so do great violence to the Kingdom. Many times those of us who have been called into leadership have great doubts about our callings, and one of the easiest ways for us to allay that is to insist on a kind of authoritarian rule, a way in which we get to be little popes and if people threaten that we want to threaten to break their noses or other such nonsense.

What I’ve noted is that many times in our attempts to bear witness to and live in the Kingdom, we end up objectifying others and using them to work out our own issues, be that pounding somebody with some truth we are certain of because we’re struggling with doubt, asserting authority because we are unsure about our calling or feeling unloved. But the thing is, when we don’t deal with our interior lives we bear our crap out on others. As I’ve summed it up with my friends, “If you don’t deal with your shit, you will inevitably do violence to the Kingdom.” It’s not that we go out and intend to do it, but when we don’t deal with our interior lives it just tends to happen, we use other people to deal with our issues. Jesus points this out brilliantly when he speaks of correcting the speck in the others eye while ignoring the log in our own. We often think we can justify ourselves by fixing our problems in others.

Now this reminds me of the other story in Matthew which I keep being reminded of in the midst of what I see as some really bad misuse of pastoral authority. The mother of two of Jesus’ disciples comes to Jesus and asks that when he establishes his Kingdom that he make these two boys his left hand and right hand men. Jesus tells her and them that they don’t know what they’re asking for, for leadership in the Kingdom is not an issue of power but of constantly putting yourself out to get punched in the face. And then Jesus says what I believe ought to be at the center of any belief in church leadership we ever consider: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first must be your slave - just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Lost in the midst of a lot of this crap about pastoral authority and making Jesus out to be the most manly dude you’ve ever seen with calloused hands and some burly scars from woodworking accidents is the fact that his way of leadership looks drastically different from stating that questioning decisions is sinning and that he ought to break people’s noses for doing so. There is no insistence of you must submit but rather an insistence that the leader must serve. That is the paradox of pastoral authority, it is not gained by creating hierarchical structures and insisting on authority because of your position. No rather it is given through loving and serving. And this is the problem with the whole paradigm that people just need to submit to their pastoral leadership. When people know they are loved, they will recognize authority. When you walk in the Spirit instead of an insistence on lording over people and asserting authority, there will of course be moments where people will refuse to submit to pastoral advice. But that’s how the Kingdom has always been, willing to allow people to walk away, recognizing that lording over people never in the end produces what we want.

And that’s what I’d love to see, more serving and loving and less insistence on pastoral or positional authority and demanding of people to submit because in the end to me it sounds much more like Gentile leadership than Kingdom leadership.

February 02, 2012

My Portlandia post of the day. This is the sign for my office space on Foster Powell. We have definitely put a bird on it.

February 01, 2012

I saw this on J.R. Briggs’ blog and just needed to share it. It’s definitely true to my experience of a spiritual journey.

January 30, 2012

Needed to listen to this today.

January 24, 2012

Sacrilege #SpeakeasySacrilege

I received a copy of Hugh Halter’s Sacrilege through Speakeasy On Tap. My only real interaction with Hugh has been hearing him speak once and talking with others about the Tangible Kingdom.

Sacrilege was a pleasantly surprising book, one which breathed a lot of life into me as I heard a lot of similarities between Hugh’s experience and what we’re trying to do with Sacred Roots. Sacrilege is a book that identifies sacred cows, puts them on an alter and slaughters them for all to see.

It’s a book that helps us reconnect with all the little ways Jesus rubbed religious folks the wrong way by connecting with those outside, and being quite sacreligious in terms of some of the things he did.

Honestly, that’s about all the review I can give this. It’s good. I could probably nitpick a couple things, but I’m not going to, because overall this is the kind of book that a number of us need to read and be reintroduced to living the way of Jesus, who was mocked by the Pharisees for being a friend of sinners. At some point it will probably make you feel a little uncomfortable, but it’s an uncomfort worth pushing through. Go read it now!