Page 2968 – Christianity Today (2024)

In 2001, one hundred "Lost Boys" from Sudan arrived in Dallas, Texas. Our church, Richland Bible Fellowship, was able to help 14 of these orphaned young men adjust to life in America. When hurricane Katrina hit, Dallas was again the new home to many folks in desperate need; our church adopted two families.

The magnitude of these disasters highlighted our congregation's lack of readiness and sparked a desire to move from good intentions to action in helping those around us.

"The stories and experiences of our friends from Sudan and New Orleans—Abraham, Peter, Tiffany, Terrell and Oceanic—connected us directly with marginalized people and opened our eyes to our own world," said Nita Thomason, the volunteer who now leads the church's local Mercy Ministry. "I remember learning how to ride the city bus so that we could teach the Lost Boys how to get around town. What an eye-opener!"

Actually, our thoughts in this direction had been incubating for quite some time. Several years ago our entire church studied The Purpose-Driven Life, with Rick Warren's catchy, undisputable statements such as, "A non-serving Christian is a contradiction in terms" and "You were put on earth to make a contribution."

Each year, we offered classes to help people discover ministry areas they are particularly "shaped" for, as Warren calls it. As we considered our neighborhood, the natural question was, what else could we do for those in need around us?

Then our pastoral staff taught a series called "The Treasure Principle" based on the book by Randy Alcorn, who challenges readers to ask God 31 radical questions about their personal giving habits. One of them: "Where in my community—or in the whole world—do You want me to go, to see, and participate in meeting physical and spiritual needs?" These sermons convicted us deeply with Scriptures such as "The righteous care about justice for the poor" (Prov. 29:7) and "A generous man will himself be blessed, for he shares his food with the poor" (Prov. 22:9).

Desiring to turn our newfound good intentions into action, Nita and her husband Mark asked if they could call an all-church town hall meeting. It was announced only once, very grassroots, led by volunteers not staff, with the goal of getting the pulse on how folks felt about the issue. More than 50 people showed up.

In the first town hall meeting, everyone's "causes" were scribbled on a whiteboard. Thomason recalls, "The multitude of ideas, the many areas of expertise and the variety of giftedness energized the crowd and it was obvious that momentum was building. We had over 30 ideas!"

The bookworms of the group were assigned specific titles that dealt with poverty, and then reported their findings at subsequent meetings. (See resource list for books.) We surveyed our members on their interests and involvement in local ministries. We also opened each time discussing a segment we watched from the video series, Intersect Culture.

We knew if we wanted to make a significant impact, we had to narrow our focus. We settled on five categories (eventually becoming four): basic human needs, single parents and widows, the elderly, education, and finally, community development, which we later realized was more international and better suited under foreign missions.

Rick Warren says, "If you are serious about having your church make an impact, become an expert in your community." So, we looked at all kinds of nonprofits such as, Habitat for Humanity, the Boys and Girls Clubs, and a local food bank. The "gatherer" reported the organization's mission, needs and volunteer contact information. If the group fit within our four categories of interest, a representative was asked to come and give a 15-minute presentation on how we could partner with them.

We discovered that there were things already happening right in our church. For example, once a month, instead of the usual Bible study meeting, our junior high pastor takes his youth group on service projects. The leaders of the Mercy initiative felt the need to pray consistently for unity and guidance, so a prayer team was established. Efforts like this were made more visible.

Challenges and encouragements

In the first meeting with a white board overflowing with worthy ideas, there was also the overwhelming sense of need—where do we begin? Organizationally, there have been frustrations, such as, how does a committee with so many interests work together? Or after actually doing a project, discovering that it is not a fit for us.

We quickly learned that initiatives to help the poor often require money, and because this is a new ministry for us, it is not a budgeted "line item." Volunteers looked for creative ways to fund projects, such as, setting up an E-bay store where people could donate items to be sold, with proceeds going to the ministry. In the future, such projects will be budget items, while the "emergencies" (paying rent, grocery gift cards) will continue to be provided for under pastor/elder discretion.

Still, encouraging things are happening. Jennifer Simin shares her experience: "As a result of attending the Mercy meetings, I now know where to turn for help when God places the needy in my path. Like the mother of eight I met at a church picnic who had survived Katrina but lost everything she owned. When she had to move to a different house, I turned to the Mercy Ministry and found needed boxes and help on moving day, all with one simple e-mail."

One need that emerged from the fix-it projects for the single moms was for financial counseling. Tracy Russell, a financial planner, volunteered to do one-on-one counseling that has greatly benefited these families.

Two volunteers heard about a nearby elementary school's back-to-school fair for homeless and low-income children; they recruited others to gather donations and in the fall will work the event.

Small groups are reading books that spur social action, such as the bestseller by Ron Hall, Same Kind of Different As Me, about the friendship of an international art dealer and a homeless man.

Recently our elders decided that reaching out to the poor would become one of the stated key values of our church. Our church is moving to a new building, and because of the new emphasis, the staff has designed the food pantry twice as large as the present one and right in the church lobby.

As our first year of efforts comes to a close, the Mercy Ministry team is pleased that their good intentions have led to several worthy actions, and our pastoral staff is excited to see so many volunteers taking the lead in this ministry.

Starter Steps

Here are some of the initial efforts the Mercy Ministry volunteers got the church involved in.

• Coat and Can Drive. This was our first endeavor—a simple one-time clothing and food collection to help a local food pantry. A member parked his trailer in the church parking lot on a Sunday morning, and as the services let out, people watched it fill up.
• Fix-it Projects. Some 50 letters were sent to single parents, widows and widowers associated with our congregation, offering to fix things in their homes. Fourteen responded. Small groups were recruited to "adopt" each one and then scheduled a time to do repairs such as sheet rock repair, tree trimming, and ceiling fan installation.
• Habitat for Humanity. One Saturday, we partnered with Habitat for Humanity to help a single mom build her first home. It was a huge success and one of our most attended events.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

St. Francis of Assisi, it is said, found the sight and smell of lepers repulsive. Normally, he could spot them from afar and give them a wide berth. Yet on one occasion, Francis came upon a roadside leper and something entirely different occurred.

Compassion rose from within and Francis felt compelled to get off his horse, offer the leper alms, and embrace the wretched soul—sores, smells and all—even giving him a holy kiss!

Climbing back into his saddle, Francis turned to bid the leper adieu, only to discover he was alone in an empty field. In that moment, he awoke to the conviction that he had encountered Christ himself in leprous disguise. His heart and ministry were altered forever. Francis became a channel of God’s love to the poor and the diseased, for in and among them, he had seen the kingdom and the face of God.

Fast-forward to the present. I’m not so interested in asking, “Who are the lepers of today?” This is already well-traveled territory.

My interest is more challenging. I’d suggest that those we often regard as insignificant are not to be regarded as mere target groups of Christian charity, but rather, our as mentors in the kingdom. They are guides to understanding God.

The Bible suggests that the marginalized—those the world regards as “the least of these” (in Jesus’ words)—hold the keys to spiritual doors of God’s kingdom that are inaccessible apart from their unlikely aid. To use Isaiah’s imagery (57:14-15), the “lowly” remove boulders and obstacles that would otherwise block our way to Mount Zion.

We often imagine that by attending to “the least” (literally, “little ones”), we were doing them a favor. But when we discern the presence of Christ in them, an undercover visitation of God, we realize the least are real mentors with spiritual keys.

The biblical foundation for this begins with God’s promise to reveal himself uniquely to and among the least and lowly. It climaxes in the revelation that whatever we do or neglect to do to Jesus’ little ones (namely, the poor, naked, hungry, thirsty, sick, the stranger [literally, “the immigrant”], and the inmate, et al), we are doing or neglecting to do to Jesus (Mt. 25:31ff). In this text, Jesus creates two theological quandaries:

First, Jesus seems to make acts of service the deciding criteria for judgment day, seemingly disregarding the gospel of salvation by grace through faith alone. Was Jesus really identifying good works as the true test of who enters the kingdom and who does not? We ought to wrestle with this question rather than simply using Ephesians 2:8-9 to trump the very words of Christ.

I would suggest that in Matthew 25, Christ transcends later faith-versus-works doctrinal debates with his own perspective of a “love-righteousness” that is the inevitable fruit of following him (thus pre-integrating the writings of Paul and James).

Second, in what kind of the “least of these” do we encounter Jesus? Are they specifically the Christian poor, the innocent prisoner, or the believing stranger? Might we see Jesus even in the “unbeliever”? Are we talking about recognizing the residual imago dei in everyone, regardless of their faith in Christ? Or does Christ mean more than that when he says, “Whenever you did these things to them, you did it to me”?

As I’ve pursued this second question, my understanding is that Jesus is saying: “You do not see me in others because they become Christians, but because I became human. When I came in the flesh, I identified with every man, woman, and child on the planet, but especially with those who know nakedness, homelessness, poverty, imprisonment, and torture. You see me in them when you remember that I literally became a peasant, a refugee, a prisoner. I live with the least, the lost, and the lowly; through them, you will meet me and come to know me, my heart, and my ways.”

After more than pocket change

A friend of mine, Ray Loewen, learned this firsthand. A successful car salesman in rural Manitoba, he was asking the Lord, “Is this all there is? Is this really my destiny? Please show me my mission in life.”

One night Ray visited a worship service in inner- city Winnipeg, an hour from his home. To get in, he had to cross over a sidewalk where glue-sniffers, pushers, prostitutes, and the homeless were loitering in the extreme cold of mid-winter. Once inside, Ray enjoyed a warm and wonderful evening of worship.

As Ray exited the building, he came face-to-face with a couple rushing down the sidewalk. The woman ran on, but the man halted abruptly in front of him. He was a horrendous sight: matted hair, deeply carved lines in his pocked face, eyes red and glazed, icicles of drool hanging from his mangled beard. He reeked of alcohol and glue. With slurred speech he demanded, “Hey buddy . . . got any change?”

Ray started fumbled through his pockets. The fellow repeated his request more aggressively, obviously agitated by the delay. Ray, increasingly nervous, continued to rifle through his coat.

Quite suddenly, the man’s eyes cleared and in fully lucid tones, he said, “Raymond, you know who I am. Hurry up and give me some change.”

Immediately, Ray was swept into a vivid vision of Matthew 25. Jesus spoke from his throne, “Raymond. I even used your name. Did you recognize me?”

Pulling out of the vision, I can tell you this: Ray found some change! But the issue wasn’t just an image of Jesus asking for pocket change; this was God’s way of getting Ray’s attention and directing him to an ongoing relationship. After that, Ray found his mission: to serve Jesus through a lifestyle of ministry to “the least of these.”

In addition to selling cars, Ray was so motivated by this experience that he began his own missions and relief organization called “Build a Village.” He leads teams to Central America and the Middle East where they rebuild villages that were destroyed through natural disasters or through acts of war. Ray indeed met Jesus and now continues to meet him as he “rebuilds cities and restores homes that were devastated” (Is. 58:12).

Where God’s glory rests

My own convictions about meeting Jesus in “the least” were not so much an individual encounter as they were discovered in the context of my faith-community, Fresh Wind Christian Fellowship. When we initially planted the church nearly ten years ago, a visiting prophet of solid integrity declared that God had laid a foundation of compassion in us (based in Is. 58:6-12) “upon which he would erect four pillars.” Once these pillars were established, “they would become a resting place for his glory.”

Brian West (as team-leader) and I (his trusty sidekick) surmised quickly that this prophetic word must be referring to us and two others—a theory that God quickly showed us was an erroneous interpretation. Over the next year, as the leadership team listened together in prayer, God progressively revealed our four pillars to be (1) people with disabilities, (2) little children, (3) “prodigals coming home” (e.g. people in recovery from addictions) and (4) the poor. All of these qualify as the “least of these” in terms of physical, social, or economic stature/status.

The Lord stressed that these folks were not our target groups …HE is. Our goal is to reach out to and welcome the Trinity and that when we do, God will bring his friends. Conversely, to welcome them is to welcome Him; we would never need to beg Him to come.

God also clarified that we might not like some of His friends; they might even scare us. But He brings them in order to disciple us in God’s kingdom values:

1. The disabled model for us the essence of God’s heart. They are unconcerned with trivialities such as one’s schooling, accomplishments, or giftedness. They restore us to what is central, loving God and each other. Whether they struggle with autism, Downs Syndrome, or epilepsy, they communicate repeatedly God’s core questions, “Do you love me? Can I love you?” That is their bottom line. That is Jesus’ bottom line.
2. The children are those to whom Jesus points when he says, “Unless you become like them, you will never even enter the kingdom.” We try to become like them in their implicit trust, their assumption of bold access to the Father, and their openhearted prayers. They remind us that laughter and joy and play are the sounds of heaven.
3. The prodigals remind us that we need fresh mercy every morning and that it is available. They set us free from the pseudo- and self-righteousness of perfectionism, calling us again and again to take part in Christ’s open banquet because we need it, not because we’ve arrived. They protect us from the futile heresy of making ourselves worthy of something that only the grace of God can open to us.
4. The poor have been chosen by God to be rich in faith. With Jesus, they teach us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Their dependence on God for this month’s rent or tomorrow’s groceries teaches us to be a sharing family and to rely on the Father’s provision as they do. Their unabashed testimony is that God is good.

As these pillars began to gather and become family, I confess that it has been both messy and glorious (see sidebar). But God has shown us that what might seem like disruptions during the service (sounds of the disabled vocalizing; toddlers meandering onto the stage; the smells of someone coming off a binge or filling adult diapers) might be opportunities for his kingdom to break in.

On many occasions while preaching, I have found myself competing with some commotion or another, and I’m tempted to be frustrated by the distraction and then I’ve felt God asking me, “What if YOU are the distraction? What if what I’m doing is NOT your words in the microphone right now?”

You see, when we stop mid-sermon to pray for a little brother who is having an epileptic seizure or a broken sister who is weeping at our communion table, or a child who wants to sing “Jesus loves me” through the microphone, what do you suppose touches people’s hearts and remains in their memories years later? Is it my eloquent words and lofty ideas? Very rarely. More important still, if God is our target group, according to Matthew 25, what will most touch his heart and get his attention?

But to speak selfishly for a moment, what’s in it for me is that miracle when I know, in the moment, that I am having an encounter with the living Christ through one of our pillars. I watch and wait for it. I posture myself for it. But, like Francis, usually God’s appearances are a surprise.

I met Jesus in Mexico through the orphans who gathered to lay hands on me for a healing in my neck. I felt him in the 11-year-old Haitian boy with the pure white shirt and bright smile who rubbed my back while I watched in terror as corrupt soldiers bound and beat a relief-worker with clubs. I experienced his power overwhelm me when Kathy, a woman with one eye, no hips, and a childlike mind took my hand and prayed, “Come, Jesus.”

He’s served me communion through a man crippled by arthritis and an addict just coming off his latest crack crash. Jesus has anointed me with oil and power through a three-year-old native girl who had just been adopted. And he has stroked my head and held me close with the hands of many a disabled man or woman.

I’ve heard him preach and sing and testify through seven-year-old Nadine who has joined our regular teaching rotation.

When we make space for the least, we make space for Jesus. It’s as simple and as difficult as that. This includes advocating and acting to create space for least to belong and be safe, but more so, to be Jesus to us and among us.

Brad Jersak is a teacher at Fresh Wind Christian Fellowship in Abbotsford, BC. He is author of Kissing the Leper: Seeing Jesus in the Least of These.

***

Trading My Sorrows

I was a guest speaker in Edmonton, Alberta, preparing to preach on “Seeing Jesus in Others” when Meghan became the living illustration.

As we sang worship songs, Meghan marched spontaneously to the front and began dancing. Perhaps eight years old, she used the full width of the stage to twirl ballerina-like from left to right. Then she performed an exuberant and formal goose-step back to the left. This was followed by an over-the-top headbanger kind of dance, flinging her locks round and round like a living windmill.

She seemed completely oblivious to the crowd, entirely in her own secret world. I’m not sure the congregation knew what to do with this. For my part, I was totally captivated.

One thing I’ve learned about autism is that sometimes you can enter that secret world by mimicking the child (or adult as the case may be), so that is what I did. What a sight as suddenly the guest teacher and the little girl repeated the odd anti-choreography together — now twirling, now marching, now thrashing. Scoff, but as King David once said, having danced with absolute abandon, “I will become even more undignified than this!” (2 Sam. 6:21-22).

Sure enough, little Meghan connected. She made that elusive eye-contact with me, and we were locked in.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before this out-of-shape preacher was huffing and puffing. I took a breather, doubled over as the music continued. Meghan came up, grabbed my head, and pulled it close enough that our foreheads were touching. Looking me in the eye, she proclaimed enthusiastically, “You’ve been to Scotland.” And then she “went off” as they say, “Hi Scot! Scot-Man! Scot, Scot, Scot. You’ve been to Scotland.”

I was stunned. What Meghan did not know was that I had indeed just returned from Scotland. So recently, in fact, that I was still recovering from jet lag.Now she had my attention! But of course, off she returned to her private world of dance.

Then she came skipping back to me, this time miming some disturbing sign language in rhythm with the music. She would point directly at me with her index finger. Then she would slowly draw the index finger across her throat in a dramatic slitting action, then pointing again. It felt like she was predicting my demise, and the accuracy of her first revelation made me hesitant to dismiss her too quickly.

Meghan’s grandmother saw what was happening and scurried over to rescue me. “Let me take her away. She’s autistic.”

“Don’t you dare!” I shouted over the music. “This means something. I need to know what she’s trying to say.”

Then, the Lord spoke to my heart in a tone that sounded like, “How dull are you? Don’t you get it?” What he actually said was, “You’re singing it!”

As Meghan continued to gesture, I awoke to the fact that I was singing along without thinking about the lyrics:

I’m trading my sorrowsI’m trading my shameI’m laying them down for the joy of the LordI’m trading my sicknessI’m trading my painI’m laying them down for the joy of the Lord.

I noticed that Meghan was pointing at the words “sorrow” and “shame” and “sickness” and “pain” and then excising them with the cutting motion. Whether she was tuned into this or merely God’s simple vessel, I could see Jesus in her. I could truthfully feel weariness being laid down in exchange for joy, health, and refreshment.

Through my new friend Meghan, Christ restored my body, soul, and spirit. Imagine my delight to be able to point to that little girl and bring the good news to her church — a church that gives space for disabled children to dance before the Lord.

—Brad Jersak

Helmets On, It’s Worship Time!

An unlikely service fit for a king.

They possessed no marketable skills. They lacked any sense of fashion. The few who could move themselves moved too slowly to be considered efficient by any standard. They were profoundly retarded, or, to use Jesus’ terms, “the crippled, the lame, the blind” (Luke 14:13).

They came to our church in two yellow buses, each specially equipped to accommodate the passengers’ special equipment. More space was required for each participant’s caregiver, an uncommonly dedicated group of men and women from all walks of life.

This monthly worship service, appropriately titled A Joyful Noise, began some years ago at a church I was then serving when a visionary woman named Nancy Chalfant (“Nanky” to her friends) recognized a need few others were willing to address. She inspired and organized fellow parishioners from St. Stephen’s to establish A Joyful Noise, and it drew participants from all over Pittsburgh.

The service ran throughout the calendar school year. Most of the congregants were wheeled up the stone ramp, bundled from head-to-toe in a stunning array of mismatched plaids, stripes, and checks. Many wore helmets to protect themselves. Others were so physically crippled they barely fit into a standard wheelchair.

So much about this gathering made no earthly sense. Yet, when all were settled in their places and the organist lit into a rousing rendition of “This is the day that the Lord has made,” it all just worked, in a quirky and mysterious way.

At times it was organized chaos: loud, unpredictable, sweaty, and smelly. Mostly though, it was beautiful. These men and women, most with IQs ranging from 0 to 5, were special guests at the Lord’s banquet table.

The time for a sermon immediately followed the opening praise choruses, meaning the preacher took his place at the front just as the congregation peaked in exuberance. The air in the room felt electric.

Few things unnerve the inexperienced mainline preacher more than a congregation accustomed to yelping, hollering, and every so often, flat out screaming through the sermon. The standard homiletics class is simply not designed for this sort of pulpit experience.

It is, however, precisely in this environment that I internalized the deep truth in Isaiah 55:8-11 that “the Lord’s word will not return to him empty, but will accomplish what he desires and achieve the purposes for which he sent it.”

Every now and then, a caregiver would offer a word of encouragement, noting something meaningful in the homily or referencing a moving praise hymn, but for the most part, absolutely nothing came back from the congregation. In this context, expended energy was like rain falling on parched ground, immediately absorbed, leaving little evidence behind.

But this was a banquet, and the purpose at a banquet is not measured results, but rich fellowship between the Master and his guests. The preacher, organist, and lay volunteers all served the Master and his guests.

Special needs, special ops

We often overlook needs and opportunities right around us. Most churches have at least one member who is disabled and would welcome intentional care. Begin by getting to know people with disabilities in your area. They’ll teach you how to love them in ways they—and you—need most.

These needs include medical issues, finances, extended family issues, schooling, and long-term care. For example, an entire family system may be cracking under the chronic strain of living with a severe disability. The church’s greatest gift to a family in this situation may be as simple as arranging for respite care, allowing the parents to spend an evening alone together.

Congregations can conduct a walk-through of their facilities and worship services “in the shoes” of someone with a disability. Is the facility accessible and accommodating? Could a person who is deaf or blind meaningfully participate in your worship service? Are there ways you could provide care for a child with Down syndrome, for instance, or cerebral palsy, allowing the parents to attend worship together?

An often overlooked aspect of special needs ministry is the theological and psychological cost of caring for those who cannot care for themselves. An active support network for caregivers can be a lifeline for those continuously caring for others.

Special needs ministry is, in some sense, a return to the heart of the Christian faith. By extending ourselves to those who cannot repay kindness for kindness, the Christian soul expands.

In the world’s economy, A Joyful Noise didn’t produce much. However, to its participants, the service was the blessed fulfillment of Jesus’ exhortation to invite to the banquet “those who cannot repay you” (Luke 14:14).

—Tony Welty is associate rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Nashville, Tennessee.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Kevin Sturt's life was crumbling. After years of addiction to p*rnography and sex with prostitutes, the 47-year-old consultant was sitting in his living room, confronted by his wife, his children, and their spouses or significant others, forced to acknowledge his activities and certain he would lose his family as a result.

After the intervention, he was broken and ashamed, but he was also determined to fight his addictions. A few nights later, he attended the weekly meeting of Mercy Walk, the recovery ministry of NewSong Church in Irvine, California, which he had been attending for years before his crash occurred.

"I was shattered," he says. "But when I went to Mercy Walk and had my first taste of a Christ-based recovery program, I gained strength and hope from others who have been in the same situation. My journey of recovery started that night. I was allowed to cry and share without condemnation and with complete love and acceptance."

Hidden addictions and wounds are not often acknowledged.

Steve Rivera doesn't have a resume that most would consider fit for a pastor. Growing up in a household with an uncle who helped start Hell's Angels in Oakland, living with an abusive stepfather, his life turned to gangs, drugs, and crime, until he ended up in a Christian rehabilitation home. There he began to turn his life around, and in time, he was leading others who had emerged from similar situations.

"I had led a destructive life," he says. "I wanted to give back for all I had done in the past. I had a love for helping people from the same situations I'd been in."

His experiences turned out to be exactly what was needed at Evergreen Baptist Church-Los Angeles, which was trying to reach the marginalized. In January 2007, the church hired him as its community outreach pastor. Rivera is gratified to be a part of a congregation that pursues reconciliation, as difficult as that is.

"I've seen so much injustice done to people in what should be loving church environments due to their socioeconomics or the color of their skin," Rivera says. "Many churches have their own built-in demographics, where you won't see the disabled, the poor, the transgendered. This has always bothered me."

After midnight on a typical summer evening, you won't find pastor Larry Kim of Cambridge Community Fellowship Church (CCFC) asleep in bed. For Kim, ministry actually begins around that time, as he builds bridges to at-risk youth in the Central Square area of Cambridge, Massachusetts, home not only to world-class educational institutions such as Harvard and MIT and numerous high-tech companies, but also to a large population of low-income families and immigrants. CCFC is no stranger to the children of these families, having built relationships with them since its inception in 1996. Currently, "we know just about every single at-risk youth who lives in Central Square, a network of about 100 to 150 kids," says Kim.

Midnight outings to the International House of Pancakes with a group of gun-toting, gang-involved young people may not be everyone's idea of ministry, but reaching these youth requires a different approach from running a typical youth group. Kim and his fellow lay leaders at CCFC also visit those kids who are in the local jail, as well as going to court dates to demonstrate their support and love.

"Most of these kids have been abandoned by everyone else. They are hated and outcasts by the time they are 13 or 14," Kim says. "We let them know that there are people who will fight alongside them and who will show them God's love in a way they have never seen before."

NewSong, Evergreen, and CCFC are just three examples of congregations that are reaching out to people on the margins, whether the marginalization comes from addictions, abuse, socioeconomics, race, or any other factor.

"We are trying to revisit what it means to love God and love your neighbor. Those two commands are inseparable," says Dave Gibbons, lead pastor of NewSong. Two key ways churches are demonstrating God's love are through mercy and justice ministries in their local communities, and by creating recovery ministries to bring healing and support for those who need it.

Gibbons acknowledges the difficulty of such ministry. "It might not be easy to be around these people, but this should be a normal part of Christian life. Jesus is calling us to a mindset and a will to love, learn, and serve in any culture, even in the midst of discomfort."

Journey of justice

Discomfort is exactly what Gibbons was feeling in 2002 when his staff discovered that a homeless woman had taken refuge in a storage shed on the church's property. Before that, God's words about taking care of the poor had not become a priority for Gibbons. But when this situation confronted him, he realized God was trying to tell him something. "I started thinking, God wants me to deal with this. Now it's in our own backyard."

The pastoral staff spent time studying what the Bible said about justice, and reading books and visiting locations both inside and outside the U.S. that had undertaken justice ministries. Gibbons put together strategic plans for both himself and the church.

Today, justice-related ministries are a core part of NewSong's identity. They launched a sister congregation in Crenshaw, one of most dangerous neighborhoods of Los Angeles; conducted street ministry in LA's skid row area, and extended their reach abroad by launching NewSong Bangkok, a multi-site church in Thailand.

NewSong also plans to relocate from its current home in upper-middle-class Irvine to Santa Ana, the most economically distressed city in Orange County.

"Churches are sometimes known for talking but not engaging," Gibbons says. "The church does ministry from afar but doesn't live in it. But Jesus was about going into the culture."

When we asked churches such as NewSong what they have learned as they reach out to the marginalized, whether in their own congregation or in local and global communities, they identified a number of lessons:

Take an incarnational approach

In his classic book Empowering the Poor (World Vision, 1991), Robert Linthicum, president of Partners in Urban Transformation, outlines three approaches that churches can take with their relationship to a particular local community, becoming (1) the church in the city, which occurs when the bricks-and-mortar of the church resides in the city, but there is no particular attachment or identification otherwise with the community, or (2) the church to the city, where a local congregation determines that it will service certain needs within the community, such as creating a youth program for local children.

These two approaches tend to be the most common.

The third approach is for a church to be with the community, "incarnating itself" in that community. "It becomes partners with the community in addressing that community's need," writes Linthicum. "That means the church allows the people of the community to instruct it as it identifies with the people … [and] joins with the people in dealing with the issues." The difference is subtle but profound; the result is that those who live within the particular community take responsibility, supported by churches and organizations that partner with them.

For NewSong, this means that in while working with a particular neighborhood, they do not seek to control what is happening. The church takes time to listen and get to know the community first, and they support the local efforts already in place.

"We always try to partner with existing churches and ministries," says Michelle Tam, NewSong's pastor of justice, advocacy, and compassion. "We want to work with someone indigenous to the area who is also an expert at what they're doing."

Such congregations take care to avoid entering into community with a paternalistic attitude.

"The church often comes in with a conquistador mentality, like a white knight to save the community, when we need to understand that Jesus is already there, has been there, and we would be arrogant to think we're the only ones bringing Jesus to them," Gibbons says. "We need to come in as a servant, as opposed to assuming we know more than the people in the local community do."

Serve more than spiritual needs

Well-intentioned churches can err in ministering to the marginalized by focusing exclusively on conversion and without paying attention to people's needs in other areas as well. CCFC's Kim remembers when this was his perspective. "In the past, the focus was solely evangelism—let's get people into heaven. But now I realize that God is actually working here and now, and there is hope for people right now, not just when they get to heaven."

"In the biblical perspective, persons are both material and spiritual beings," writes Ron Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action, in The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience (Baker, 2005). "That is why Jesus' gospel brings healing not just for souls but also for bodies. That is why the Scriptures constantly teach that God hates societies that oppress the poor and fail to provide opportunities for all to enjoy an abundant sufficiency of material goods. That is why the early church's dramatic economic sharing went hand in hand with its evangelistic proclamation."

Churches are discovering that the two processes are separate. Charles Butler, pastor of shepherding and men's ministry at Moody Church in Chicago, encourages churches "not to browbeat people or prostitute their needs, such as saying 'We'll feed you if you pray.' Jesus did not do that. He fed people because they were hungry; he showed them compassion and love while still being salt and light."

When the goal is a holistic approach, the results may not be apparent for years or even decades. At CCFC, for example, one reason the church has been able to influence so many at-risk youth in Cambridge is due to the foundation leaders laid more than ten years ago in getting to know children in the neighborhood when they were young.

"I was able to help one of the 21-year-olds who has been in jail recently because of the work done 11 years ago when he was attending our church's Vacation Bible School," Kim says. This kind of ministry is a long commitment. "It can be discouraging if you are looking for short-term results, but the fruits of what people were doing in 1996 showed up 11 years later."

Help those with hurts, habits, hang-ups

Although churches sometimes equate ministering to those on the margins with reaching the poor, the reality is that numerous needs may exist within their own core congregation in the form of hidden addictions and wounds, which are not often addressed or acknowledged. Recovery ministries allow churches to minister to those who may view themselves as outsiders in the church.

For NewSong's Kevin Sturt, discovering that he was not alone in his struggle with sexual addiction was a critical step toward following Christ. At his first Mercy Walk meeting, he not only felt acceptance and love from those around him, but he also gained strength from those who had struggled with the similar issues.

"The biggest tactic of the enemy is to tell us we're alone," Sturt says. "Going to Mercy Walk breaks that lie, and when that lie is shattered, so much hope emerges."

Three years later, Sturt has maintained a life of sobriety from his past addictions and now serves as a lay leader with NewSong's recovery ministry.

"All men struggle with addiction to some degree," he says, "even if it's just looking at lingerie ads in the Sunday paper, and they can only get over those addictions by being with God and other men. You can't get through it alone."

Mercy Walk is a weekly meeting for anyone struggling with a "hurt, habit, or hang-up," a phrase originating from Saddleback Church's Celebrate Recovery ministry. Those who attend eat a meal together and worship together, with a time of teaching or a testimony included. A key component of the evening is the open sharing time, in which the group splits up depending on size and everyone is given three to five minutes to speak without interruption about their particular struggle. The sharing time is kept confidential and anonymous.

The safe haven it provides is critical, Sturt says, because "for most addictions or hurts, if you talk about the triggering action that's causing it, it stays in the dark, and it tends to grow. Once you bring it into the light, the power the enemy has is taken away."

Those who have been a part of Mercy Walk describe the experience as being invaluable and say that their own progression of healing subsequently touches other people's lives.

"I had been struggling with abandonment and rape survivor's guilt for several years," says Laural Armster, a student at Long Beach State. "Today Mercy Walk is an integral part of my life, as the people I met there have become my family. Because of this family, I have come far enough down the road of healing that I want to offer the same healing to others."

The pastoral staff keeps the Mercy Walk ministry visible in the church to de-marginalize it and raise awareness about it for the larger congregation. Gibbons says, "We try to normalize what happens at Mercy Walk, as opposed to just referring to it as one of our ministries. We all have our addictions and problems. We often tell people that we are church for the misfit and the marginalized. We are trying to create a culture here that welcomes people who think of themselves as outsiders."

Counting the cost

Ministering to those on the margins is not without cost. Challenges come from both within and outside the congregation. Sometimes churches are able to bring people from the margins into participating and serving in the life of the church (such as in the cases of Sturt and Armster above), but not always.

At CCFC, for example, the at-risk youth they have befriended will occasionally come for the weekly youth meetings, but they rarely appear for a Sunday morning service or interact with other members of the congregation outside the pastors and lay leaders they already know. CCFC leaders, however, do not necessarily view this as a ministry failure.

Founding pastor Soong-Chan Rah, in Growing Healthy Asian American Churches (IVP, 2006), describes how his understanding of the church has changed: "I used to see church as a place where fun people gathered and the worship service was a neat presentation. … Now church is … a gathering of a dozen senior citizens and their caregivers, a hospital room where a distressed mother and child have no one to turn to but their church family … a kid like Jimmy, whose lips form the most absurd curses for a nine-year-old boy, but whose eyes speak of a sincere desire to be loved."

Leaders who minister to those on the margins recognize that the shape and feel of their efforts might be quite different from what has traditionally been described as church ministry. And they are comfortable with taking church's love and service to where the needs and opportunities are rather than necessarily bringing the needy into their bricks-and-mortar building.

"We call ourselves 'the church without walls,'" says Gibbons.

Another challenge occurs when existing members of a congregation do not understand or fully accept a church's vision to minister to the margins.

At Evergreen, as a result of ministry with young people in their local community (a largely Hispanic, lower income neighborhood in the Los Angeles area), its youth group grew significantly, but those who began attending were quite different from what this congregation was used to.

"Some of the kids from the neighborhood would be drunk, or possess drugs, and then parents began to pull their kids from the youth group. They felt we were bringing an element into the church that they didn't want their kids to be near," Rivera says. "We told the parents, 'You are naïve if you think your kids are only seeing this at youth group. This is an opportunity for them to grow and to experience living out their Christianity. Nothing will bring them closer to God than serving and seeing the hurt in other people and bringing them to Jesus.'"

Helping parents with the changing demographics of the church is an ongoing process. It takes time for a congregation to own the vision in the same way as the pastoral staff and lay leaders.

"To construct a diverse but redemptive community, we have to be extremely patient," says Ken Fong, senior pastor of Evergreen. "People are at different levels of readiness, and this will always be the case."

Gibbons's expectations are measured for how many members will completely support the church's commitment to reach those on the margins.

"Ten to thirty percent of our congregation might be actively involved," he says. "Most people buy into the concept, as they see that it is biblically rooted. But they aren't willing to give up comfort, protection, and safety, or the pursuit of their own material goals. Most aren't willing to sacrifice their lives."

And yes, ministry to those on the margins can demand that level of sacrifice. Moody Church's Butler recounts that at their church plant in Cabrini Green, a public housing development in Chicago, the pastor did 15 funerals in one recent summer alone.

"But you can't run away from a situation just because it has risks. Danger is a part of life, and you take precautions as best you can, but the commitment is to be ambassadors for Christ."

When CCFC's Kim began connecting with the gang-banging, gun-wielding Central Square youth, he was afraid.

"But I had to just go for it and say, 'I'm ready to die for this. If I'm not willing to put myself in harm's way, I shouldn't do it,'" he says. What he discovered is that despite the violent pasts and tendencies of these youth, "they have a built-in respect for clergy and pastors. It's the hip-hop culture—they fear nothing, but they do fear God. They are curious about religion, about God, about life after death, and they have a spiritual side to them."

After Kim began building relationships, others from the church joined him. Now six people are on the team working directly with these youth. When one person can break past their fear and show the way, it helps others do the same.

Where to begin?

The first step to such ministry is the strategy Jesus articulated in the Great Commission: first identify needs in "Jerusalem" (your own congregation), then "Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth." Look to your neighborhood and beyond for needs you're aware of, whether that means starting a recovery ministry or community-based transformation.

Gibbons recommends a simple strategy: "Ask God to show you who are the most marginalized in your community. That is probably where he wants you to go. And then it's just about asking the question, 'How can we serve you?' Then do it. If someone is hungry, feed them. If someone needs resources, find a way to provide them."

But to be effective, such ministry must begin with long-term commitment in mind.

"If you launch out but you don't have a plan, you'll just fizzle out," says Evergreen's Rivera. "Once you go into a community, you have to be there for the long haul. If they see people who just come once in a while and only put in so much, that is how they will view Christ."

Helen Lee is a lay leader at Parkwood Community Church in Lombard, Illinois, and co-editor of Growing Healthy Asian-American Churches (IVP, 2006).

***

A Warmer Welcome

One winter morning a man from the streets entered our church office to ask, "Do you all know where a warming center is around here?"

Our church, a two-year-old plant at the time, is in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, and the two women working in the office said, "No. In fact, we don't even know what a warming center is. What is it?"

The man explained the concept: homeless shelters are open at night, but not during the day. A warming center is a safe place folks can stay warm and maybe get something to eat during the day.

After checking around, the women learned that our area did not have a warming center, but after further research they brought the idea to the church's leadership team, suggesting New Community could open its own center for a few hours each day.

Today, nearly four years later, Warming Center continues to be a place where homeless people can come for practical necessities: a restroom, food, some clothing items, a safe place to rest, and access to telephones to keep in contact with family (one of the largest bills in the center is the phone bill).

Further, the center serves as a stable location for regular guests who need a mailing address for potential jobs.

Even though our center isn't open 24/7, the hours it is open offer friendly hospitality. It has also spurred on new ministry ideas at New Community, for example, a legal clinic to serve people who cannot afford lawyer's fees. We continue to seek ways the people of our church can embody the mission of Christ: "Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?" (Isa. 58:7).

Everybody passes people on the margins, be they homeless men, single moms, immigrants, or distressed couples. If the objective is to represent Christ to those on the margins, every church can do that.

To play your part

Each church has a unique contribution to make, but God also uses other churches and organizations in your area. Contact them. Let them know what you're doing and learn how you can complement each other's efforts. Your church's ministry is one key element in an entire network of organizations in your area. When you can't meet a need, point people to the resources that are available elsewhere.

1. Don't reinvent the wheel. We didn't need to start a homeless shelter. The need in our area was for a warming center during the day. Your church may find another critical area, a different margin, to address. Find a ministry opportunity that isn't being met in your community.
2. Enlist prayer partners. Ask some people you trust to join you in praying about the ministry opportunities before you. Praying allows the Holy Spirit to reveal God's plan and your next steps.
3. Let other like-minded agencies use your space. This allows you to develop relationships, work with other organizations, and encourages your membership to see your church's mission extending beyond the walls of the building.
4. Use students to build your volunteer base. Don't work alone, and don't encourage your members to work alone either. Partner with schools (high schools, colleges, or seminaries) to involve youth and young adults in your ministry. Those partnerships may even develop into new ministries like mentoring for students on academic probation or parenting classes for teenage mothers.
5. Keep your community informed. Attend open houses for Christian counseling centers. Connect with other pastors, political leaders, and business owners about your church and its goals. Keep a brochure that explains what you all are doing or planning to do.

—Michael Washington is a pastor at New Community Covenant Church in Chicago, Illinois.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Rick McKinley lumbers onto the stage like a bear in blue jeans. The screen behind him shows an image of the Portland skyline under the canopy of Mount Hood. He prowls the platform with a bottle of water. But as McKinley begins the message, a call to “Love Portland,” it’s evident this bear is more Teddy than Grizzly.

His speaking style is reflective, biblical, and riddled with humor. His sermon feels like a conversation, despite the hundreds of mostly 20- and 30-somethings gathered in the old high school auditorium where Imago Dei meets.

Emphasizing the reality of sin in the world, McKinley deadpans, “After Genesis 3, the world turns into a Jerry Springer show.” The congregation laughs. “I can tell that joke every week and it still works,” he says. “That’s just pathetic.” They laugh again.

McKinley’s casual charm serves him well in Portland, Oregon, a city liberal even by West Coast standards. The importance of relationships and community is reflected in Portland’s ubiquitous coffee shops and pubs. Those values are evident during Imago Dei’s worship service.

After McKinley’s sermon, the band plays as worshippers fill the aisles. For 20 minutes people sing as they move toward communion tables in front. Around the bread and cup, heads bow, alone or in clusters—some blond, black, gray, even pink and green. Imago Dei is an image of Portland as well as an image of God.

When I got saved, I thought repentance was something you did once. Now I know it’s a gift God has given us to renew our lives daily.

But Sunday morning is only a partial glimpse. Unseen are the thousands in Portland impacted by Imago Dei who never attend a worship service. McKinley started the church seven years ago with a vision to take the whole gospel to the whole person. A daunting notion in a city like Portland.

Today Imago Dei is reaching the margins. Its people are serving the homeless, refugees, people with AIDS, struggling teens, single moms, and many others. Its ministry was highlighted in the influential book Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller.

It is a church on the margins, serving people on the margins, in a city on the margins.

How does Imago Dei inspire so many to reach out? “Our goal is not to create a community of volunteers,” McKinley says. “The goal is to glorify the King by doing what he’s called us to do. We’re in a story that’s been going on for thousands of years. The story of Jesus putting the world back together through the gospel.”

We sat with Rick at one of Portland’s bobo coffee shops to discuss Imago Dei’s journey.

What’s Portland like? A hard place be a church?

Portland is a very creative city, and it’s really fun. It’s a pub culture—the microbrew capital of the country. A bumper sticker here says “Keep Portland Weird.” That’s pretty accurate. Portland is a little weird. I walked out of church on Sunday and people were doing a demonstration on how to convert your diesel car to run on veggie oil.

I thought, What in the world? Then I got in my SUV and drove home. (Laughter.)

Does Imago Dei reflect that weirdness?

It has the same weird vibe. In every culture there are redemptive windows for the gospel, and we see those here. Environmental issues are important in Portland, so we can saddle up next to that for a different reason, as a biblical call to stewardship. It’s the same with the arts. Creativity is a great way for us to dialogue with the culture. And Portland is a city of need, and being a church that cares about the needs of the city helps us be a good neighbor.

How did your own journey to Christ shape what Imago Dei has become?

I didn’t grow up in the church. I came to Christ when I was 18, but I had trouble fitting in. I was able to fit in to pretty much any crowd–jocks, artists, punks, or stoners. Just drop me off at the party, and I’ll find my way in. But this Christian crowd was one I could not figure out. It made me feel flawed to the core. Just being me wasn’t acceptable enough. I had a great relationship with Christ, yet …

How were you made to feel unacceptable?

It wasn’t theological issues; I just didn’t understand the culture. I remember going to a party at the Bible college I attended, where we watched Cinderella. I stood there like, Are you serious? What planet am I on? Six months after I get saved, and I’m watching Disney cartoons with Christians. I didn’t want to get trashed or drunk, but dude, there’s got to be a happy medium here. That world just felt so insular and protected—miles away from reality.

Clearly, Imago Dei isn’t like that. What changed?

After I got married and had kids, I started working as a youth pastor in a little church. I finally realized that I don’t have to fit into the Christian subculture. That Bible college culture isn’t wrong, but it’s okay to like U2. It’s okay to enjoy provocative films and theater and other elements of the wider culture. I’ve always connected well with the unchurched, and I began to see that as an advantage missionally.

Is that when you decided to plant a church in Portland?

No, my plan was to start a business in California. I couldn’t do another church job. The entrepreneurial side of me was screaming. If you’re working in a church and you’re an entrepreneur, you feel like you’re trying to run a sprint behind a traffic jam.

So how did a plan to start a business in California become a church in Portland?

I was sitting at Starbucks reading the Gospel of John and Jesus turning five pots of water into wine. That’s like 180 gallons. That’s a lot of wine. I thought, Lots of Christians wouldn’t be comfortable around that Jesus. This same Jesus later tears up the temple with its religious BS.

I remembered how uncomfortable Christians were around me when I first got saved, yet Christ was pursuing me despite the fact that I didn’t fit in.

I had the gospel, I understood the culture, and I understood missiology. So, I felt God wanted me to go take the whole gospel to the whole person.

So did this church reach out to people on the margins from day one?

Not exactly. Early on we were just a small group, and when we started looking at the needs of the city, we had a very honest moment. We admitted that we didn’t really want to love broken, sinful people; we didn’t really want to love Portland.

We prefer safe and protected lives. Most of us don’t want to know about the abuse some homeless vet went through and how he mentally snapped. If I’m honest I have to admit I don’t want to know he exists. I’d rather not know.

But Jesus is ruthless. He’s not ignoring the lepers and the people pushed into places where I don’t have to see them. He goes right to them.

That was a major turning point for us. We met every Wednesday night and repented. I’d lay out all the needs I could see in Portland, and we prayed. We didn’t want to follow some methodology and get 300 people to start a church. We wanted it to be the real deal.

How long did this season of repentance last?

About six months.

That’s a long time to be repenting.

You can’t assume you’re going to have a big emotional night of crying and the next day everyone will love the world. We’re talking about transformation; you’ve got to stick with it.

When did you notice transformation beginning to happen?

I liken it to planting a garden; you throw seeds down and you water, but you have no idea what’s happening. During that season I couldn’t see anything happening. We were just trusting that God’s Spirit was growing something under the soil.

Eventually something started coming out of the ground. Someone emerged who really wanted to love homeless people, and someone else who wanted to share the gospel with her friend. Not everyone responded the same way. Some started engaging in justice issues, others engaging the arts community, and some had a passion for global issues. Their hearts changed, but it was gradual.

Is repentance still important to Imago Dei?

Yeah. We do communion every week, so there’s a natural rhythm of repentance. When I got saved, repentance was something you did once to come to Christ, and you repented again only if you were a bad person. Now I know it’s a gift God has given us to renew our lives daily. It’s a continual turning to the gospel and to the heart of God.

As peoples’ hearts were changing, did you begin organizing ministries around their passions?

No. As leaders popped up, they found their expression in different places.

Churches typically create a structure and then fight entropy. A church will start a youth ministry, for instance, and if the youth pastor bails, they try to fill that slot to keep the structure going. Imago Dei isn’t like that.

We are trying to create an environment and see what God births out of it. We’re trying to make sure that the environment is pure: there’s regular repentance, there’s love for one another, there’s Scripture. Out of that kind of environment come ideas for ministry that we’d never come up with.

So we never sat down and said we want to do this or that. We just fought hard to keep the environment weed-free. Out of that came one guy who decided to take his camp stove down to the street corner and feed homeless people. A group of girls felt called to adopt a low-income apartment complex. They went on a prayer walk and found a rehab center for single moms. They got plugged in there and started serving.

So ministries are not led by Imago staff people.

No. None of them.

Do people ever come to the staff and say, “You guys should start this kind of ministry”?

All the time, but we don’t operate that way. If people grew up in a church, that’s how they think it works. But what happens is the pastor starts a social justice ministry and then people think that’s what the pastor does, rather than it’s what we all should do. It should be normative for everyone to be engaged.

If your role is creating the environment, how do you cultivate a climate of service and mission?

First, lots of exposure. We do a missional moment every other week in worship. We expose people to the needs in the city and the things Imago people are doing to address those needs, and we invite people to join.

Second, experiences. We have two or three major events a year that are intended to get a lot of people rubbing elbows with people they normally wouldn’t meet. Some will stay involved afterwards and keep serving. It’s not that they don’t like marginalized people; they just don’t know them. When you do know them, everything changes.

The guy who leads our homeless ministry would tell you that the homeless are the greatest people he’s ever met. It becomes a reciprocal relationship. Typically we “need” poor people so we can feel better about ourselves, and they need us to supply what they lack. That’s very different from a relationship that acknowledges you’re homeless and I’m not, but we have a genuine friendship.

Third, an engagement plan. You can’t just scream, “You need to go love Portland!” You have to create pathways, some steppingstones for people to get to that homeless person, that single mom, that school. That’s the leader’s job—helping people get from here to there.

What happens when someone comes to you with a desire to begin a new ministry?

If someone wanted to start a boys and girls club, we would say: “That’s cool. Pray about it for a month, put your vision together, and then come back to us.” Everybody has great ideas on Sunday, but if they come back with something on paper, you know it’s something more. We then ask them to gather a team. Nobody starts without a team. If it’s just one person doing it, they’re going to get burned out and frustrated. If they can get two or three people to join them around this vision, then they’ve got a shot.

Does this system work well for you?

It isn’t easy. Imago draws a lot of entrepreneurial people. They aren’t necessarily asking permission to start things. A lot of churches pray that someone will step up and do something. At Imago we pray our people don’t blow something up while they’re serving. Our people are engaged, but it’s really messy.

We let people do what God’s calling them to do. We’re touching people others don’t want to touch. Sometimes that gets pretty gnarly.

What’s your role as the leader of Imago Dei? What part do you play in what God is doing here?

Preaching the Word. I am always explaining this environment. A lot of people can be serving for the wrong reasons. There’s an activist mindset among young people in Portland. That’s not a bad thing, but they need to remember why we are active. I’m always bringing them back to the “why” by unpacking Scripture.

With so many “activists” in Portland, are people receptive to deeper theological issues?

Portland is a fairly intellectual city. People have educated reasons why they’re not believers, so we can’t get away with napkin theology. We’re not just teaching people how to share their faith. In the urban core, it’s a different deal. They need to really learn their faith. And for seekers and skeptics, our ministry to “the least of these” validates the gospel that we preach.

As Imago people serve in the city, do you partner with other churches and programs?

Yes, there’s no way one church can do all that needs to be done. It’s ridiculous to even think that way. When you’re serious about community renewal and social justice, man, you have to get everybody onboard.

We’ve partnered with secular organizations on AIDS and tried to win a voice for Christians in that community. There’s so much already being done that creating a Christian version really isn’t necessary. Why reinvent the wheel? We definitely believe in “no logo, no ego.”

No logo, no ego?

Everything doesn’t have to be an Imago Dei ministry.

Do you promote outside organizations in the church, or do you focus on “Imago Dei” ministries?

They’re all considered the same. There might be a refugee ministry on our website that links over to Catholic Charities. There are people doing great kingdom work in the city for totally different reasons, which is a gospel opportunity in itself, but to come along and partner with them and talk about why we’re doing it—that creates great points for dialogue.

In every community across this country, there are organizations reaching out to “the least of these” who are dying for volunteers. At the same time, churches sit back and think one day we’ll create mission, but it never happens. Find those already doing something in the community, and lift them up as examples for the church. We tend to be so busy building our church programs that those people aren’t recognized.

What should a church expect if it begins to reach out to people on the margins?

Don’t expect it to grow your church numerically. It will grow your church, but it will grow it deep. The reality is some people aren’t going to get better. So the idea that they’re going to mainstream into the church, become members, and start a home group is just a pipe dream. Some people are never going to get off the street. We see people get off drugs and get their lives back together, and those are great stories. But there are Christ followers who are going to be homeless. You have to know what to expect.

How do you begin to clarify expectations?

Churches need to ask, “What part of the problem can we address? And did Christ call us to fix the problem?” Transformation is an internal spiritual thing, not necessarily a socio-economic thing. And I have to be comfortable with that. I’m not here to make them better Americans. We’re here to love them in tangible ways.

Do you expect people you serve to become followers of Christ?

Obviously that’s our desire. We feel the greatest transformation will take place when they put their faith in Jesus. However, we don’t assume that we can produce that. All we can do is create a context for that to happen where people see and hear the gospel.

What do you mean by “see the gospel”?

I guarantee there isn’t a homeless person in Portland who couldn’t tell you the gospel verbatim. They’ve had to listen to it three times a day to get a sandwich. They’ve heard about Christ, but they haven’t seen Christ. Who will sit next to them while they panhandle, who will enter their world? I’ve had friends doing that for 15 years. That is seeing the gospel.

Why do you think many churches are reluctant to reach out to people on the margins?

It seems like ministry today has been reduced to strategy and outcomes and production. And, frankly, that is what makes you famous—developing a new ministry strategy. If you can reproduce it and sell it, you can get a book deal.

Ministry to “the least of these” is about people, and it’s messy. But there are godly people all over this country who have been loving people in the name of Jesus, and I think that’s real ministry.

We hear some crazy stories. Like heroine addicts leading each other to Christ. God using heroine addicts! It blows all your stereotypes. The activity of the Spirit among the marginalized is amazing. Sometimes you have to ask yourself, is God at work inside the church? Sometimes I don’t know, but I do know he’s at work outside the church.

Sometimes we’re just reluctant to join him on the margins.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

For the Christian, the physical world we inhabit can never be seen as just there, a naked fact, to be treated as a neutral boundary or (worse) as something that is basically an impediment to a fulfilling life. The cosmos did not have to be. It is made freely, without any prior constraint or necessity superior to God’s nature or will. It is given, and given in the rich sense: as an expression of divine love, the love that is God’s own trinitarian life.

In his book Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, Leo Spitzer puts his finger on the decisive issue here in the context of a discussion about music as a metaphor of the cosmos. “According to the Pythagoreans,” he says, “it was cosmic order which was identifiable with music; according to the Christian philosophers, it was love. And in the ordo amoris (‘loving order’) of Augustine we have evidently a blend of the Pythagorean and the Christian themes: henceforth ‘order’ is love.” There is a huge difference between regarding the harmony in which musical sounds are grounded as simply a bare fact or as an outpouring of love.

Music making and music hearing are ways we engage the physical world. Even in the case of electronically generated music, the body is often involved through, say, a keyboard, and patterns of vibrating air are mediated through physical speakers. The physical things we involve ourselves with in music have ultimately arisen through the free initiative of God’s love—they are part of the ordo amoris. To treat them as given in this full sense has a series of radical implications for understanding music. The most basic response of the Christian toward music will be gratitude. This does not mean giving unqualified thanks for every bit of music we hear, but it will mean being thankful for the very possibility of music. It will mean regularly allowing a piece of music to stop us in our tracks and make us grateful that there is a world where music can occur, that there is a reality we call “matter” that oscillates and resonates, that there is sound, that there is rhythm built into the fabric of reality, that there is the miracle of the human body, which can receive and process sequences of tones. For from all this and through all this, the marvel of music is born. None of it had to come into being. But it has, for the glory of God and for our flourishing. Gaining a Christian mind on music means learning the glad habit of thanksgiving.

Brought forth from God’s own free love, the cosmos as a whole is value-laden, the object of God’s unswerving faithfulness and the theater of God’s loving intentions. As such it is able to sing his praise despite the pollution that evil has brought. God, we said, has pledged himself to the world in its physicality—a pledge confirmed in the coming of Jesus, the Word made material flesh.

Sadly, this is often just where the church has been most hesitant about music. It is not hard to trace a double tendency marking much thought about music in the Christian West: a proneness to doubt the full goodness, and with it sometimes the full reality, of the physical. The outcome is that music, along with the other arts, has frequently been seen as fulfilling its highest function insofar as it denies, shuns, or leaves behind its own materiality.

This twin tendency surfaces prominently in the ancient Greek tradition, not least in some Platonic music theory: as part of this material world, music can be of serious value only insofar as it directs our attention to the ideal and enduring harmonies beyond the material. Even in Augustine there is a marked ambivalence about physical beauty and the materiality of music (especially in his early writing). In this current of thinking, musical sounds become a vehicle for the contemplation of eternal or ideal beauty, hence the colossal emphasis in much medieval writing on the superiority of intellectual theory over the practical making and enjoyment of music. Commonly, the thrust seems to be to look beyond material sounds to the order or beauty they reflect or point to rather than to welcome them as valuable embodiments of God-given order and beauty in their own right, with their physical character intrinsic to that value. Related ideas colored Zwingli’s attitude to music: the spiritual set against the material and an overplayed fear of anything that might imply an idolatry of music. Some modern evangelical approaches to music (and the other arts) have followed similar tracks: music, bound up as it is so closely with physical things, is regarded as at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous, tugging us away from the more real, nonsensory “spiritual” realities.

In modern times, it is probably fair to say that this reluctance to give lasting value to the physical in music has led to a focus not so much on Platonic-like eternal forms but more on the inner life of the individual, especially the emotional life. What Ernst Kris notes in the development of visual art from the 16th century—a shift from the artist as manual worker to the artist as individual creator—could well apply to music: “The work of art is for the first time in human history considered as a projection of an inner image. It is not its proximity to reality that proves its value but its nearness to the artist’s psychic life.” Perhaps the best-known version of this outlook is the philosophy of “individual expressivism”—the view that music is (or ought to be) the outward expression of inner emotion, an externalizing of emotional urges and surges, sometimes with the aim of stimulating the same emotion in others. The physical elements of music become the mere means to conveying and provoking a (supposedly) nonphysical emotion. This is an immensely popular outlook, often simply assumed by default, not least in Christian churches.

This mind-set received classic expression in the romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries (though with much greater subtlety than in most contemporary versions). With some of the Romantics, the artist’s inner life became linked to the rhythms of the cosmos, the restless, infinite, spiritual momentum of nature. The Great Tradition thus received a new lease on life—music was thought to turn into sound the infinite play of the cosmos, through the strivings and struggles of the romantic composer or performer. It was thought by many that music unencumbered by words could do this best: instrumental music came to be exalted by many as supreme. Rendered marginal for so long in modernity, art (in the form of music) has returned with a vengeance to assume massive proportions as part of a vast cosmology revolving around the human ego. But what we should not miss here is the implicit devaluing of the physical as physical. Indeed, in some versions physical nature, far from being honored and listened to in its own integrity, is seen as needing the creative artist to come to fulfillment.

This hesitation to give enduring value to the physical qua physical can take rather different forms, however. In 1910 the painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) completed what was to become a famous and much-read essay, “On the Spiritual in Art,” drawing on ideas from a philosophical movement known as Theosophy. Kandinsky is of particular interest here because he pulls in music to buttress his argument. He is anxious about a crass materialism in contemporary culture, a widespread belief that anything not verifiable by our five senses is meaningless: “Only just now awakening after years of materialism, our soul is infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim. The nightmare of materialism, which turned life into an evil, senseless game, is not yet passed; it still darkens the awakening soul.”

The only effective response is to recognize that all reality has a nonmaterial, spiritual dimension and that to be truly human is to find and resonate with this supersensuous presence. It is the artist’s challenge and calling to produce art transparent to the inner soul of humanity and nature. Though the artist is concerned with self-expression, this is only to the end that reality’s inner soul may come to expression, and the physical character of the world is a potential stumbling block to this process. Physical forms must be isolated from their everyday contexts and treated with a high level of abstraction so that their inner nonphysical meaning may shine forth, so that their physicality and particularity can be transcended. Hence the move in Kandinsky’s own painting toward abstraction. Reality’s deepest life can be expressed only if we relinquish the desire to depict objects, to represent the material world in its external, perceivable features. And here, significantly, music is held up as exemplary. Kandinsky was a keen music lover, an amateur pianist, and a cellist. Music is our “best teacher,” he claims. Why? Because for some time it

has been the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but to the expression of the artist’s soul and to the creation of an autonomous life of musical sound. A painter who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his internal life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the least material of the arts today, achieves this end.

Interestingly, a not dissimilar view emerges from one of the few Christian theologians of modern times to write about music (apart from those we have looked at already), the Congregationalist theologian P. T. Forsyth (1848-1921). Forsyth’s basic belief is that music is concerned essentially with releasing us from the bonds and limits of the finite and material order. Music is the least material of the arts (with the sole exception of poetry). Forsyth is struck by its impermanence and insubstantiality (it does not end up as a concrete object), its inwardness (it primarily arises from and is directed toward our emotional life), and its indefiniteness (it cannot refer with any precision to things beyond itself).

A rather more extreme example of pulling apart from physicality is seen in perhaps the most notorious of modern composers, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). As it happens, Kandinsky greatly admired Schoenberg’s skill, and they enjoyed an extensive correspondence. The painter writes, “In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.”

Schoenberg believed that music’s sensory pleasure—how beautiful it sounds to the ear—is irrelevant to the question of artistic significance (and to this day, the music will sound jarring to many). Music should be concerned chiefly with the creation and development of artistic ideas; the pleasure it affords should be primarily intellectual. The enduring significance and value of music lies not at the level of the physical at all; we must learn to rise from the mere materiality of sounds, Schoenberg believed, “to be coldly convinced by the transparency of clear-cut ideas.”

Whatever form it takes, Trevor Hart sums up well the outlook I have been tracing:

It is as if the artist must … regret the inherent physicality of artistic manifestation in the world, and would prefer it if some direct transmission of the spiritual or intellectual opus between minds could be arranged, short-circuiting the messiness and crudity of mediation through fleshly realities altogether. That it cannot, that some sort of enfleshing of the work of art must occur, is a problem rather than something to be celebrated … . The material artefact serves to translate us from the physical world into a spiritual one, to direct our attention quickly away from itself to some other, higher and more pure, object of consideration.

Views of this kind are not, of course, the only ones available in the modern marketplace. But, arguably, they have been influential and in some places dominant. A biblically informed Christian response refuses to apologize for music’s embeddedness in material reality and actually may want to recover a fuller sense of it. As we have stressed already, music involves physical entities. Sounds, themselves physical vibrations of the air, are produced by regularly constituted material objects. Music comes by pushing air from our lungs through vocal cords, plucking taut wire, drawing rough hair over catgut, depressing a key, stimulating the cone of a loudspeaker. And none of this in and of itself should make music suspect; indeed, it can remind us that goodness, beauty, and truth can be embodied by and expressed in such objects.

Here we join hands with numerous Christian writers on the arts of the last few decades. The Calvinist philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff urges that “the fundamental fact about the artist is that he or she is a worker in stone, in bronze, in clay, in paint, in acid and plates, in sounds and instruments, in states of affairs.” This is not to reduce music to the material, to explain it away as something wholly explicable by the physical sciences. But bearing in mind the long-standing legacy of thinking about music we have just considered, which has arguably suppressed a great deal of music and led to unnecessarily negative attitudes toward it (not least in the church), we might do well to regain a sense of music’s profound physicality—its embeddedness in God’s given material world.

With this will go a retrieval of the significance of the human body. The physical world we inhabit may be known intellectually and emotionally, but it is mediated initially through our bodies. To use Michael Polanyi’s language, we “indwell” the physical world. There need be no shame over our bodily involvement in music just because it is bodily. Again, given the church’s often ambivalent attitude to the body and the part this has played in suspicions about music, we may well need to develop a fuller awareness of its place in music. Our own bodies—themselves part of the good physical creation—are intrinsically part of musical experience. To insist that Christians are to be spiritual is indeed quite proper, but to be spiritual is not to renounce the body per se (though it is to renounce immoral uses of the body). It is rather to be Holy Spirit inspired, an inspiration that encompasses the body—indeed, liberates the body—and as such grants a foretaste of what it will be like to have a spiritual body beyond death (a body animated by the Spirit, 1 Cor. 15:42-49; cf. Rom. 8:11). There is a proper bodily involvement in the world that enhances the inherent value of our bodies in the process. This outlook has perhaps never been better expressed than by a composer, that virtuoso of the visceral, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971):

The very act of putting my work on paper, of, as we say, kneading the dough, is for me inseparable from the pleasure of creation … . The word artist which, as it is most generally understood today, bestows on its bearer the highest intellectual prestige, the privilege of being accepted as a pure mind—this pretentious term is in my view entirely incompatible with the role of the hom*o faber.

Patrick Shove has suggested that the problems many concertgoers have with serious contemporary music may be due in part to its distance from the body:

Many twentieth-century composers focus on sound qualities or on abstract tonal patterns, and performers of their compositions often neglect whatever kinematic potential the music may have. The absence of natural motion information may be a significant factor limiting the appreciation of such music by audiences. While compositional techniques and sound materials are subject to continuous change and exploration … the laws of biological motion can only be accepted, negated or violated. If more new music and its performers took these laws into account, the size of the audiences might increase correspondingly.

A parable: A few years ago I was part of a group that organized a large celebration event in the University Concert Hall in Cambridge. In one item we asked the whole orchestra to improvise on a given melodic shape and chord structure, in the midst of a giant chorus of praise sung by a sizable congregation. The majority of players were Christian. But some were not, among them a 14-year-old in the second violins. Later, she told others that she came to faith during this extravagant extemporization. Normally when she played in an orchestra she would play exactly the same notes as the seven others in a second violin section. Here, for the first time in her musical life, she discovered her own “voice,” but she found it through trusting, and being trusted by, others—and in the context of praise.

What was enacted for that girl through music was what the New Testament describes as koinonia, variously translated as “fellowship,” “communion,” “togetherness,” “sharing.” In Acts 2 we are told that on the day of Pentecost, with the coming of the Spirit, three thousand converts devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship (koinonia), breaking of bread, and prayers (v. 42) and had all things in common (koina, v. 44). Bonhoeffer’s metaphor of polyphony comes to mind here. In polyphony, more than one melody is played or sung simultaneously, each moving to some extent independently of the others. A central cantus firmus gives coherence and enables the other parts to flourish in relation to one another. Taking his cue from Bonhoeffer, Micheal O’Siadhail writes of contemporary living:

Infinities of space and time. Melody fragments;
music of compassion, noise of enchantment.
Among the inner parts something open,
something wild, a long rumor of wisdom
keeps winding into each tune: cantus firmus,
fierce vigil of contingency, loves congruence.

Bonhoeffer uses the image to speak of the relation between our love of God and the loves and desires that shape the rest of our lives. But we could also use it to speak of the relation of Jesus Christ to his church, and us to one another. Christ crucified and risen is the cantus firmus, the rumor of wisdom at the heart of the world. The Spirit takes human lives and weaves them into a polyphony around this cantus firmus. Moreover, by extension we could say: Christ lives in the polyphony of the Trinity, and by the Spirit we are granted, through him, a share in this trinitarian “enchantment.”

Christians are thus polyphonic people. At Pentecost, in opening the disciples and crowds to Jesus Christ and his Father, the Spirit opens people out to one another. Those otherwise closed in on themselves—because of language, culture, race, religion—now find themselves resonating with one another, communicating, and living together in radically new ways. Later, Jew is reconciled to Gentile, the stubborn apartheid of the day subverted. People become responsive to one another, tuned in to one another (the reversal of Babel, where confusion and dissonance reigned). But uniqueness is not erased; the crowds in Jerusalem were not given one language. They heard each other in their “own tongues” (Acts 2:8 KJV, cf. vv. 6, 11; “native languages,” NRSV). More than this, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear, the Spirit not only allows difference but also promotes it: in 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul speaks of the church as the body of Christ, the Spirit generates and promotes diversity, allotting “to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses” (1 Cor. 12:11).

The contrast with the Romantic model of the artist and with his pale echo, the postmodern aesthete, could hardly be greater. In “Pentecostal polyphony” my relatedness is part of who I truly am. For the Romantic, relations with others are secondary to the process of artistic expression, in which my unique inner life is externalized. (Indeed, relations with others are more likely to impede than aid the creative process.) For the modernist self, the first step to discovery of the true self is the individual agent’s inward turn; unbounded space to be is the key to freedom and fulfillment. And for the postmodern, even this self is shorn of responsibility in the endless play of aesthetic desires and thus is always on the verge of collapse.

In Pentecostal polyphony, by contrast, both the suffocating individualism of modernism and the erasure of personal uniqueness of postmodernism are overcome. True enough, the self is always and already a social product (an important postmodern concern), and yet the self is centered when addressed and treated as a distinct you by another person or other persons. I discover who I am in koinonia—as I am loved and as I love in the power of the Spirit, with a forgiving love, rooted in God and now opened out to us through Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost. My identity is discovered not despite but above all in and through relationships of this kind. The contemporary Greek Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas is sometimes cited in this connection, in his insistence that my hypostasis—my particularity—is discovered in ekstasis, “a movement toward communion,” as I am turned outward, as I am directed by and toward another person in love. We have all known what it is to greet at the station or airport a very close friend we have not seen for years: we don’t care what we look like; we run toward that person with a self-forgetful joy. We recall the father running out to greet the prodigal, and the son discovering who he really is as he is embraced. Such is the ecstatic love at the heart of the Triune God in which we are invited to share.

Jeremy S. Begbie is honorary professor of theology at the University of St. Andrews; associate principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge; and an affiliated lecturer in the faculty of divinity at the University of Cambridge. This essay is excerpted from his new book Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (BakerAcademic). Copyright 2007 by Jeremy S. Begbie. Used by permission from the Baker Publishing Group. Please note that documentation for quotations, included in the book, has been omitted here.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Nietzsche experienced music as authentic reality and colossal power. Music penetrated to the core of his being, and it meant everything to him.”1 That Rudiger Safranski opens his monumental biography by focusing on music should almost certainly come as a surprise, probably even for many Nietzsche scholars. After all, isn’t the “real” Nietzsche all about such topics as the death of God, the will to power, the superman, and nihilism—topics that have kept the Nietzsche industry humming away? Indeed, the reality is that most scholarship on Nietzsche—even that by first-rate Nietzsche scholars—virtually ignores the prominence of music in both his life and thought. As Georges Liebert notes, “Nietzsche’s repeated avowal is often cited: ‘Without music, life would be an error,’ but almost as though it were a quip. Rarely is the decisive importance music, in fact, had for the economy of his thought recognized.” While it would be too much to say that no attention has been given to Nietzsche’s relation to music,2 there is no full-scale work on Nietzsche that does this subject justice.

Sadly, that remains true, despite the appearance of Liebert’s Nietzsche and Music. Liebert suggests that Nietzsche’s oft-quoted aphorism can be taken to mean that “music makes us forget life” or that “life [is] understood only as music.” Clearly that first possibility could hardly be what Nietzsche intended. The second possibility is Liebert’s ostensible point of departure, and yet he never really gives us a thorough investigation of how music affected Nietzsche’s own thought, even though he is thoroughly aware of the profound influence of music in all of Nietzsche’s works.

That said, Liebert does provide us with a rich exploration of Nietzsche’s relation to music, which was key to his very existence. Some of Nietzsche’s most memorable moments were those spent in improvising at the piano. He wrote to a friend that, at such times, he often felt as if he had moved beyond the realm of rationality. Perhaps not coincidentally, in the twilight of his sanity, Nietzsche’s friend Peter Gast arrived in Turin in January 1889 to find him improvising endlessly. Nietzsche himself composed music, particularly in his youth, and Liebert spends some time analyzing those compositions—largely Schumannesque in character and not particularly memorable. Liebert contends that, while Nietzsche fails as composer of music, he succeeds as a philosophical composer. While that thesis is no doubt true, I wonder whether it is all that important. Already by age twenty, Nietzsche had admitted his shortcomings as a composer and largely moved away from musical composition.

What Nietzsche and Music principally gives us is a detailed description of how Nietzsche’s musical and philosophical tastes developed in tandem. And that is a significant contribution. Liebert devotes much of the text to Nietzsche’s relation to Richard Wagner, a relationship that ebbed and flowed over time but surely one that proved formative for Nietzsche’s development both musically and philosophically. Although Nietzsche later claimed that he was “a Wagnerian” as soon as he heard the piano redaction of Tristan und Isolde, it actually took him a few years to warm to Wagner’s music. But, once converted, Nietzsche turned his first book (The Birth of Tragedy) into a panegyric to the great musical seducer. Those early years as Wagnerian acolyte were heady ones indeed. Even long after the master’s spell had been broken, Nietzsche still spoke of “days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime accidents—profound moments” spent at Wagner’s home. Nietzsche was equally effusive regarding Wagner’s music: upon hearing the prelude to Tristan and the overture to Die Meistersinger, he wrote that Wagner set his “every fiber and every nerve aglow.”

Nietzsche’s falling out with Wagner is one of the best-known aspects of his life. Although the Bayreuth Festival of 1876 is often cited as the moment of the break, it had been brewing for a long time. Nietzsche had grown increasingly disillusioned with what he saw as Wagner’s vanity and his willingness to please the public at any cost (despite all of Wagner’s rhetoric about the purity of his art). But it was the sheer decadence of Wagner’s music that finally caused the breach.

The Case of Wagner, written in Nietzsche’s last year of sanity (1888), makes that case forcefully. For Nietzsche, Wagner’s artistic decadence lay in the fact that, in Wagner’s compositions, “the whole is no longer a whole” but an artificial composite with no inherent integrity. But worse still for Nietzsche—indeed, worthy only of utter contempt—was Wagner’s acceptance of the notion that humanity stands in need of redemption. “There is nothing about which Wagner has thought more deeply than redemption: his opera is the opera of redemption.”

No opera better signified all that Nietzsche despised than Wagner’s Parsifal. For not only is it quintessentially an opera of redemption (and explicitly so), it also represents Wagner’s capitulation to Christianity. Of course, whether Wagner had really turned “Christian” is open to question. True, he sent a copy of Parsifal to Nietzsche signed “Richard Wagner, Church Councilor” and spoke more than once of the joy he had in receiving the Eucharist. Yet Cosima (his wife) claimed that the blood turning to water in Parsifal (rather than the other way around) represents a break with Christianity. But even if Cosima’s interpretation were true, Nietzsche would simply heap scorn on Wagner for having used Christian motifs as a way of appeasing the public.

As important as Nietzsche’s relationship to Wagner was, it is disappointing to see it so strongly dominate Liebert’s text. What, for instance, about Bizet, who receives relatively scant attention from Liebert even though Nietzsche celebrates Carmen as the very antithesis to Wagner’s decadence? Liebert does provide some helpful discussions of Nietzsche’s relation to Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Rossini (Nietzsche could not “get along without” Rossini’s music, he said). Still, having rightly insisted that music is central in “the economy of [Nietzsche’s] thought,” Liebert fails to deliver. In light of all that Nietzsche says about music—and the way that music remains for him a means of critiquing thinking, all the way from The Birth of Tragedy to Ecce hom*o—it is particularly disappointing that Liebert never tries to explain what “musical thinking” in Nietzsche could possibly be.

Consider the suggestive passage (cited by Liebert) in which Nietzsche says “thinking wants to be learned as dancing wants to be learned, as a kind of dancing,” and set beside it Nietzsche’s claim that “one becomes more of a philosopher the more one becomes a musician.” How are we to understand such claims? Liebert’s approach is to dodge them, arguing that, “properly speaking, Nietzsche never thinks music—because it is unthinkable, happily unthinkable, he might have said—his thinking begins with music.” This is muddled. Liebert is right in going on to say that, “rather than with philosophy, music begins with the body.” But, for Nietzsche, philosophy also begins with the body. Moreover, Nietzsche certainly tries to articulate what music is and how it influences us—and in many passages he is quite successful.

A central question would be what Nietzsche means by “thinking” that is a form of “dancing.” How might we work out that idea? Let me very briefly suggest two possible ways. First, central to such a conception of thinking is Nietzsche’s contention that what we normally call “thinking” is merely “little reason,” which is quite different from “big reason”—i.e., the body’s ability to think. As Nietzsche puts it, “the problem of consciousness … first confronts us when we begin to realize how much we can do without it.” Given this emphasis on bodily reason, it is not surprising that, at one point in his unpublished notebooks, he claims that “our most sacred convictions, our most unalterable faith in the matter of supreme values, are judgments of our muscles.” The body, then, is the locus of our convictions and thus it is also the locus of change of those convictions. Nietzsche goes so far as to say “first one must convince the body.”

For Nietzsche, then, it is dance that proves to be a pervasive way of changing our convictions. Of course, Nietzsche likewise speaks of dancing in a much broader way, saying that a “noble education” results in “the ability to dance with feet, with concepts, with words: need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?” Accordingly, becoming a good philosopher is a way of becoming a good dancer. Nietzsche writes: “I wouldn’t know what the spirit of a philosopher might more want to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, and finally also his only piety.” If the philosopher’s ideal and art is dance, then it hard to escape the conclusion that philosophy is a kind of dance for Nietzsche.

Second, “thinking” as it is normally defined is not just too narrow for Nietzsche, but it also misses what life is all about. This is why Nietzsche points to a kind of thinking that is not dialectical or logical but is nonetheless more truly rational—for it understands life in a way that “rationality” as typically defined cannot. As early as The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had claimed that Socrates had helped drive music out of tragedy and excluded music from dialectic, which is why Socrates failed to understand life. For Nietzsche, “music” stands for all that cannot be easily explained theoretically, for precisely what escapes neatly laid-out systems. Music gives us the truth about life in a way that conscious thought never could.

Could Nietzsche be right that thought has forgotten music? Certainly that claim is open to debate. Yet, if one realizes that Nietzsche has in mind the ancient Greek conception of mousike (which not only includes dance, rhythm, and logos but also connotes the very cultivation of the soul), then the idea of connecting thought to music and dance may be at least worth considering—certainly in more detail than Liebert does here.

Bruce Ellis Benson is professor of philosophy at Wheaton College. Among the topics in his forthcoming book Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (Indiana Univ. Press) is the role of music in Nietzsche’s thought.

1. Rudiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch (Norton, 2002), p. 19.

2. See Babette Babich, “Nietzsche and Music: A Selective Bibliography,” New Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 1 (1996), pp. 64-78.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In 2006, the heavy “prog rock” band Tool released their fourth full-length CD, 10,000 Days. Since Tool puts out new material every five years or so, each release tends to be a big event. The band has been touring nonstop since May 2006 with shows booked through this September, and 10,000 Days claimed the #1 Billboard slot after its first week on-sale with no advance media hype—the result of a rabid, word-of-mouth fan base eager to devour the band’s latest achievement.

I was riding the train home from work that day in May 2006 when my cell phone rang. Without introduction, the voice of an old friend coolly announced, “Remember, the new Tool CD is out today.” Excellent! Fortunately my wife and kids were otherwise occupied, and I hunkered down with the new CD, hoping for a set list filled with infectious, odd-timed grooves, demanding lyrics, and frequent displays of technical prowess that would spark “How do they do that?!” conversations with other musicians for years to come. (I’m a drummer myself, and Tool’s Danny Carey routinely astonishes me.)

At the end of the evening I was not disappointed, but I was surprised. Along with all that I’d come to expect from Tool, there was something more, in the haunting two-song set entitled “Wings for Marie” and “10,000 Days (Wings part 2).” As best as I could tell—no lyrics were provided in the CD packaging—this seemed to be a commentary on a life well lived by someone close to the band. Thanks to one of the fan-run websites, I discovered that a complete set of unofficial lyrics generated by spontaneous fan submissions was already available within a couple days of the CD’s release.

The lyrics—and some additional online digging—revealed that this two-part song is a lengthy meditation by the singer, Maynard James Keenan, whose mother had died during the making of 10,000 Days. The title of the CD—and the corresponding track—refers to her 27+ year-struggle with paralysis caused by a stroke.

Keenan, who was raised a Baptist, transports listeners to his mother’s funeral at the local family church. One by one, pastors and church members rise to recount tales of Judith Marie’s victorious Christian witness. But their comments are awash with a perverse boasting that flattens all suffering and life experience into some kind of generic triumphalism:

Listen to the tales and romanticize,
How we follow the path of the hero.
Boast about the day when the rivers overrun.
How we rise to the height of our halo.

Listen to the tales as we all rationalize
Our way into the arms of the savior,
Feigning all the trials and the tribulations;
None of us have actually been there.
Not like you.

Keenan’s disdain for such spiritual showboating—in contrast to the private, suffering faith of his mother—is visceral. He portrays a church community so eager to preach the good news that it forgot, or never understood, how real saints are made. “My mother’s suffering is not a rhetorical device,” Keenan seems to suggest. “Why have you co-opted her memory and turned this funeral into an opportunity for self-congratulating motivational speeches? It’s not about you.”

To some extent, a listener’s response will depend on his readiness to accept Keenan as a reliable witness. Those for whom churchgoer and hypocrite are synonymous—a good segment of Tool’s audience, perhaps—will be inclined to trust the singer. But even those who are put off by Keenan’s own self-righteousness, his boundless disdain for the “ignorant fibbers in the congregation,” might want to hear him out. He devotes most of the 17-minute set to marveling at his mother’s life of persistent faith. The lyrics overflow with gratitude for her prayerful devotion:

It was you who prayed for me so
What have I done
To be a son to an angel?
What have I done
To be worthy?

This little light of mine, the gift you passed on to me;
I’m going to let it shine to guide you safely on your way,
Your way home … .

You are the light and the way, they’ll only read about.

Daylight dims leaving cold fluorescence.
Difficult to see you in this light.
Please forgive this bold suggestion:
Should you see your Maker’s face tonight,
Look Him in the eye, look Him in the eye, and tell Him:
“I never lived a lie, never took a life, but surely saved one.
Hallelujah, it’s time for you to bring me home.”

Scathingly honest in his own self-critique, Keenan catches himself falling into the same trap as the churchgoers he just castigated. Readily admitting that he too is set in his ways—arrogant and resistant to change—he acknowledges that his mother’s Christian life is all the evidence he should require for naming what must be true if the God of Jesus really exists.

If there is any truth to be found in the Christian story, then surely it shines forth in the suffering witness of this saint. Pleading for heavenly justice to be done, Keenan longs for his mother to “Shake your fists at the gates saying, ‘I have come home now! Fetch me the Spirit, the Son, and the Father. Tell them their pillar of faith has ascended.’ ” This is indeed a song about a life well lived from the perspective of one who experienced it firsthand: “[You] didn’t have a life, but surely saved one … . You were my witness, my eyes, my evidence. Judith Marie, unconditional one.”

This was not the first time Keenan wrote about his mother’s faith. The song “Judith,” released in 2000 with another band he fronts called A Perfect Circle, is a vicious attack on his mother’s spiritual fidelity:

You’re such an inspiration for the ways that I will never ever choose to beOh, so many ways for me to show you how your savior has abandoned youF___ your GodYour Lord, your ChristHe did thisTook all you had andLeft you this wayStill you pray, never strayNever taste of the fruit,Never thought to question whyIt’s not like you killed someoneIt’s not like you drove a hateful spear into his sidePraise the one who left you broken down and paralyzedHe did it all for you

How did the singer get from that point to the meditation that followed Judith’s death? Would anyone listening to him a few years ago have expected it? Look where God, uninvited, shows up after all.

Very well, very well, you say, but Keenan is no Christian. For all the tenderness of his love for Judith Marie, he’s still full of pride, reveling in his attack on the faith. Why look to him to reflect back to the church its own shortcomings or remind us about how real saints are made? Can’t we find this critical feedback within the church? Yes. But the dubious distinction between Christian and non-Christian music is as unhelpful as the proposed dichotomy between the Bible as the source of all truth and its supposed rival pagan sources. All truth is God’s truth. Categorically accepting or dismissing claims according to the source alone leaves us open to committing the same mistakes as the romanticizing parishioners at the funeral, or following the path of Keenan’s own confessed arrogance at refusing to change when his mother’s life clearly revealed the true character of God.

The Holy Spirit is the giver of all gifts. If someone elects to use those gifts in the service of God, good. But those gifts are not rendered dormant or defunct by virtue of our intent. An artist who explicitly rejects God, as many have done, nevertheless remains a “sub-creator,” as Tolkien said, a creator in the Creator’s image. We should be suspicious of our tendency to insist that God only shows up in the right places. Sometimes, pagan sources can most accurately reflect back to Christians the power and lasting impact of genuine witness. You never know when and where God might reveal himself.

Roger Freet is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and a senior editor at HarperOne Publishers.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

My father turns seventy this year, and my mother has survived breast cancer. While they are both still vigorous enough to chase grandkids around for an entire day, their aging is becoming a more frequent topic of discussion among our family. During one conversation about their eventual plans to move to a retirement home and possible need for nursing care, I must have looked bewildered. “What’s wrong?” my father asked. “Oh, Valerie still doesn’t think you and Ruth are going to die,” my husband chimed in—not unkindly, but (my apologies) dead right. Youth’s parents are, apparently, as immortal as youth itself.

For thirtysomethings like me, not yet the meat of the sandwich generation but no longer the bottom slice of bread either, Virginia Stem Owens’ new book, Caring for Mother: A Daughter’s Long Goodbye, is a possibly unwelcome but valuable portent of things to come. An unflinching account of Owens’ seven years spent caring for her mother, who suffered from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, Caring for Mother reads like a map of the territory we may be about to enter. If aging is indeed “Another Country,” as the title of psychologist Mary Pipher’s book on aging suggests, then caregiving for the elderly is like hiking alongside our loved ones in a foreign land. Death is certain, Owens writes, but the process of dying is an “open, anxious space where we set up camp, uncertain how long we’ll be there.”

Owens’ story begins when her mother is suffering from Parkinson’s but is still mostly lucid and living at home. Gradually, however, her hallucinations increase in frequency, and Owens grapples with how to respond to her mother’s conviction that men have broken into their attic and that tar is seeping through the floor. Recognizing the gravity of the situation, Owens moves into a house down the street from her parents and spends the next seven years taking her parents to doctors’ appointments and helping her mother move into a nursing home, where she lives for five more years. Accompanying her mother as she slowly drifts into a semi-dream state, Owens ponders topics such as the medical establishment, caregiver fatigue, nursing home culture, brain chemistry, and Eastern and Western understandings of the self.

Caring for Mother is, in a word, relentless. Owens is unfailingly honest about the agony of watching her mother lose her faculties, her own frequent sense of failure and guilt, and her floundering faith in a gracious God. She does not shield herself or her readers from the anguish of a parent’s decline with Christian platitudes about heaven or the virtue of a life well-lived; indeed, she quashes the notion that spiritual fortitude or lifelong practices of faith will necessarily carry a person into tranquil twilight years. At the end of her life, Owens’ mother found no comfort in the faith that once sustained her, and she became displeased by any mention of religion. Owens tries repeatedly to help her mother recover her belief, to “find the switch that can flip on that steadfast faith she had always relied on.” In a heartrending scene toward the end of the book, Owens’ mother has a panic attack at the imminence of her death. Gripping her daughter’s hand, she says, “I don’t want to go away from you.” Owens is speechless and can only stroke her mother’s arm, “abashed to discover she loves me more than God.”

Before reading Caring for Mother, I assumed that the serenity that characterizes my own grandmother, who will turn 100 later this year, was bought with the countless hours she has spent throughout life in prayer, Scripture reading, and spiritual attentiveness. She’s the archetypal “prayer warrior,” that most cherished of Christian images of aging: the grandmother who spends hours praying for the struggling great-grandson, the overworked pastor, the granddaughter with three small children who lives an hour’s drive from family (that would be me). It seems that for some people, a lifetime’s stockpile of spiritual resources can be cashed in for peace at the end of life. But Alzheimer’s, which has been called “the theological disease” because it ravages memory and identity, can deplete even the most saintly Christian’s spiritual capital.

Indeed, end-stage dementia threatens the popular Christian narrative of “prayer warrior” aging to its core. That narrative can accomodate some humorous lapses in memory and judgment: the old woman can forget her children’s names, confuse a nurse for a granddaughter, even hobble into the dining room in her slip. What this narrative has not managed to hold, however, is an aging Christian’s agnosticism, what Owens calls, in her mother’s case, “the amputation of her spiritual sensibility.” In his study of Alzheimer’s and the love of God, Forgetting Whose We Are (Abingdon, 1996), historian David Keck writes that Alzheimer’s “subverts our narratives” and “challenges and relativizes all of our assumptions about language, meaning, and humanity itself.” He then develops what he calls an “Alzheimer’s hermeneutic,” which “learns through the humiliation of disease, dissolution, and death that we approach the Bible’s narrative as creatures in need, creatures whose own selfhood is dependent on the support of the family, the church, and God.” Owens’ memoir would have been strengthened by reference to Keck’s thorough exploration of dementia and Christian faith. Still, her account ends with a parallel move to Keck’s analysis, with a measure of confidence that her mother’s loss of volition, faith, and identity actually returns her to the arms of God.

While Owens gives her readers few distractions from the ache of her story, there are snatches of beauty and grace here. Owens labors throughout the book to figure out what remains of her mother’s essential self, with decreasing success as time goes on. But she does discover an “underlying signification system” beneath her mother’s garbled words and actions, one that she slowly learns to decipher. “The day before my brother or my daughters arrive for visits, she spends the afternoon cooking in her nursing home bed, propped up on pillows, handing me finished dishes to store away,” Owens recounts. “‘Is there enough?’ she asks me with a worried look. ‘Are the beds made?’ These are her metaphors for love.”

Just as she increasingly relies on her mother’s gestures as glimpses of her true self, Owens herself more frequently turns to metaphor as the book goes on. Her lovely penultimate paragraphs, in which she reflects on her own grandchildren, move her story from past and present into the future:

Through our three generations of bodies runs a literal string of messages, etched in that most elegant of scripts, deoxyribonucleic acid. This chain, ladder, stream of life—call it by whatever metaphor you like—carries the letters of the dead to the yet-unborn. What are they saying? What do I want my note, tacked to the string, to say?
Only this: Loving people is such a burden. If love, in and of itself, weren’t the center from which life flows, if it didn’t, as Dante says, move the stars, how could we bear such weight?

Owens’ book widens the ribbon of recent narratives by caregivers for aged parents that began with Changing Places: A Journey with My Parents into Their Old Age by journalist Judy Kramer and No More Words: A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh by Reeve Lindbergh. These autobiographical accounts are especially relevant now: one in four families is caring for an aging relative, and the number of elderly people in the United States is expected to double by 2030.

Caring for Mother does not make policy suggestions for the resulting roster of gerontological questions facing our society, nor does it offer pat solutions for how caregivers can retain sanity as they watch loved ones lose theirs. It does, however, shine a light on the alien land that spreads out before many adult children. And it does offer some modest, makeshift advice—which, in this case, is really the only appropriate kind—if readers find themselves caring for elders with dementia. Relying on her extended metaphor of dementia as the rubble under which her mother is trapped, Owens suggests, “Do what you can to comfort with your presence when there is nothing else to be done. Like earthquake survivors waiting near those trapped in debris, simply stay.”

Valerie Weaver-Zercher is a writer and editor in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

How would you feel if your 12-year-old ran around the house singing, “I’m Selling My Pork Chops, but I’m Giving My Gravy Away”? Personally, I’m a little nervous about it, though I admire a child with entrepreneurial spirit. It seems to me that a pork chop is only a pork chop until it shows up in a song by Memphis Minnie, the Mississippi-born blues singer who belted out double-entendres before Little Richard was a twinkle (or a leer) in anybody’s eye. If Minnie had been a Girl Scout, she’d have sold a lot of cookies.

Well, I have only myself to blame for the musical happenings around here. Myself and Roy Blount, Jr. Reading his new book, Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South, gave me an appetite for the music he describes so deliciously in essays like “Good Gravy,” “Memphis Minnie’s Blues: a Dirty Mother for You,” and “Love Those Bozzies.” So, by the miracle of iTunes, I dredged up songs by the Boswell Sisters and the metaphorically vivid Minnie, along with my own all-time favorite, Fats Domino, who has recently resurfaced in New Orleans. You can’t keep music like this to yourself; actually, you can’t keep from yelling it out in the shower at the top of your lungs, which is why even the dogs next door to us are now howling about pork chops.

Blount is such a good writer that I almost—ALMOST—paid $35 to go see him at a fundraiser in Birmingham. Most writers have to pay other people to come to their book signings, but Mr. Blount lends his amiable Southern voice to the NPR show Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, which makes him a celebrity, at least among the kind of people who go to book signings. If I had gone, and had the chance to shake the author’s hand, what would I have said to him?

I probably would have said, “Mr. Blount, nobody’s worth $35, but you’re a heck of a writer. I don’t write as well as you do, but I think I could—if my life were so full of ironies.”

OK, it’s not true that I could ever write as well as Roy Blount, Jr., but it is true that his life is awash in irony. The most ironic thing about him is that he writes so well about places like Atlanta but lives in western Massachusetts. His politics are liberal, he’s spurned the Methodism of his parents, and though he still considers himself Southern, it’s only in the best senses of the word, which are mainly literary and musical-culinary rather than political. He likes Faulkner, Krispy Kreme Donuts, and Ray Charles; he doesn’t care for George W. Bush (a pseudo-Southerner, anyway). Still, he can understand why people wouldn’t vote for a Yankee liberal—somebody like John Kerry, for instance. After all, Reason and Enlightenment only get you so far, and then you’ve got to be able to tell a good story.

Which brings me back to his essay on Memphis Minnie. In looking for a biography of the singer, Blount found just one, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues, by a pair of married scholars named the Garons—and woe, I say woe unto the Garons on the day he crossed their path. Blount calls Woman with Guitar “one of the goofiest damn books I’ve ever read,” “a vaporous mishmash of transmutational femino-Marxist ‘paranoiac-critical’ Franco-Freudian-surrealist theory.” (Tell us what you really think.) Though he praises their discography, research, etc., he despises the “flummery” which they “have heaped upon the supremely no-nonsense Minnie, of all people.” Songs that advise, “Babe, I’ve got to have a socket if you want me to iron your clothes” aren’t really that hard to figure out, are they? “To me,” Blount says, “blues music doesn’t seem so exotic that it requires recourse to France. It may be surreal, but it’s not trying to be.”

Blount writes that Minnie was a talented songwriter who began to perform while she was still a kid around 1910. “Coal-black beautiful,” with “all gold teeth across the front,” she played “in joints, on the street, at house parties and fish fries.” She was big-hearted and wild, and often sang “while chewing Brown Mule tobacco and sitting in such a way as to show off her pretty underpants.” Though she never had the fame of Bessie Smith, she had a great influence on later artists, including Chuck Berry. At the end of his essay, Blount imagines that he has a chance to go back and visit the singer in her old age, that she bakes him some of her famous (non-metaphorical) biscuits, and that he gets the real story of her life. Food, music, and story: the Southern trinity.

Just after I read Long Time Leaving, I picked up Huston Diehl’s Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated Elementary School, 1970. Diehl is a professor of English at the University of Iowa, and her book is part memoir, part academic study. Like the Garons, Diehl has not chosen a subject that only a professor could love (I’m thinking of a friend’s dissertation on the varying size of bluebird testicl*s at increasing elevations). And, like Roy Blount, Jr., I have a personal interest in the subject of the book: while Huston Diehl was teaching fourth graders in a yet-to-be integrated public school in Louisa County Virginia, I was a first grader in an integrated Christian school near Richmond.

Like so many academic books (Woman With Guitar, for instance), Dream Not of Other Worlds has a lyrical title. In the forward, Diehl tells about teaching Paradise Lost in one of her first university classes in New York. An African American woman (who had defended the poem up until then) suddenly became enraged at the angel Raphael’s advice to Adam, “Dream not of other worlds, Be lowly wise.”

“I knew immediately,” Diehl recalls,” that, like my African American students in Virginia, she must have been told all her life to ‘Dream not of other worlds.’ … I saw her very presence in my classroom as a triumphant act of defiance against all the people in her life who had tried to stifle her dreams.”

Diehl returns to her year in Virginia, describing herself as an idealistic, 20-year-old northerner with dreams of liberating her students’ minds, opening their eyes to the broader world. After being hired by a disengaged superintendent, she found herself at the head of a class of 38 fourth graders who had never seen a white teacher before. Apart from their natural fears and suspicions, she struggled with a pitiful lack of teaching materials (many students couldn’t afford books), with low expectations from the community regarding how much “negro” children could learn, with her own reluctance to use corporal punishment in a culture that expected it, and with all the attendant problems of the children’s difficult home situations. Above all, she lacked experience. Near the end of the year, with her classroom in chaos, she spoke to the white superintendent again, only to hear him blame the children for her own failures. “I knew in my gut,” she says, “that Dr. Martin was siding with me solely because I was white … . [I]f I accepted [his] backing, I would implicitly be acquiescing to the racist assumptions behind it.”

A couple of things here. First, the kind of race bonding that Diehl describes is something I’ve observed my whole life in Southern white society, and (to my shame) occasionally been party to: someone makes a casual comment about a neighborhood “going down,” or a mall that’s “practically abandoned.” Everybody knows what’s really being said, and nobody demurs. Who wants to be sitting outside the circle while the rest of the tribe has its little war dance?

So I admire Diehl’s fortitude of conscience. I admire, too, her willingness to examine her own shortcomings in such a public way, hoping that good might result. Plenty of people flop early in their careers, and schoolteachers notoriously have terrible first years. Thirty years on, as a respected scholar of English literature, she didn’t have to tell this story.

But Diehl, thinking like a scholar, has goals beyond telling her own story or the story of her classroom. Frequently she pulls away from her narrative to examine the history of African Americans in Louisa County, of racist attitudes regarding education, and of the social and legal inequities that laid the foundation for a segregated South. This information is helpful for historians and researchers, no doubt, Still, I wish she had decided to keep the memoir personal rather than academic. The more detached and scholarly her writing becomes, the more she limits her audience and creates a barrier against the sympathy of the very people she may want to influence. For instance, while she speaks of her African American students with affection, and forgiveness too when called for, she treats the white Virginians in her book as a faceless monolith, a subject mainly for research. Having been one little brick in that monolith, I meekly protest: did you ever try to know us? Then how in the world can you write about us?

Now, Diehl does a better job than the Garons, certainly. A pretty good writer, she doesn’t heap flummery on her fourth graders or (in the words of Roy Blount) take a wildcat (the rural South) and surround it with the bubblewrap of politics and theory. But neither does she burrow down to the heart and bones, the pork chops and gravy, of her own life or the lives of the people in Louisa County.

Diehl tells us that she was in Virginia to be with her new husband Bill, who was also a teacher. But we want to know more. Where did she and Bill live? What did they eat, what did they talk about, what did they fight about? What was it like to be a young woman with a new husband so far away from home? Later, Bill disappears, to be replaced by other husbands. Diehl eventually writes books about English literature and theater; then, just before she turns fifty, she learns she has cancer of the salivary gland under her tongue. Uh, not to be nosy, Professor Diehl, but would you mind telling us more about that? Actually, would you mind giving us the story of your life—I mean the whole story? Because it sounds like a good one. And if you want to make us some biscuits … .

This is the Southern way, and I’m not apologizing for it. Context is good, research has its place, but knowledge is ultimately sensual. To put it another way, Reason and Enlightenment only get you so far, and then you’ve got to eat.

Betty Smartt Carter is a novelist and Latin teacher living in Alabama.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Whenever someone starts talking about “God’s way of X” or “what the Bible says about X,” I’m tempted to turn and run. Especially when X involves food or sex. It’s very hard not to read our own opinions back into the Bible, picking and choosing verses to defend whatever it is we’re defending—I know because I’ve been guilty of it. But here’s one book on Sex in the Bible that does a better job than most at prodding us to encounter the biblical texts in all their strangeness.

“The most interesting thing about sex in Bible,” J. Harold Ellens insists, “is the fact that the Bible does not moralize sex.” Now this may sound like an all-too familiar prelude to some special pleading. Taken at face value, it’s obviously misleading. (Start with that injunction against adultery, for instance, and other inconvenient counter-examples readily spring to mind.) But there’s a good deal more to Ellens’ case than this pronouncement suggests.

The Bible resists our attempts to distill it into a universal rulebook because it’s mainly a collection of stories and poems crafted over a span of centuries by many different authors, often with conflicting implications. When it comes to sexual mores, the Bible is actually full of “situational ethics.” For example, Ellens notes, polygamy is the most common model of marriage in the Bible, and one can still make a strong biblical argument for polygamy in societies where women greatly outnumber men (such as in areas ravaged by war).

Driving home this point, Ellens cites the Old Testament stories where women, most notably Ruth and Esther, employ their feminine charms to seduce men for the furtherance of God’s aims (and their own). Far from being condemned, these women earn nothing but praise from the biblical authors. It’s ironic that Ruth is upheld as a role model for conservative Christian girls today. Instead of “waiting on God” for a husband, she spotted a good man, followed him home from a party, and jumped into bed with him—violating three “Biblical Rules for Dating” at once.

Ellens also devotes a chapter to the Song of Songs, that “uproariously successful erotic celebration of robust sexual play” between partners who are never identified as a monogamous husband and wife (another assumption we tend to bring to the text today). Ellens pokes fun at the celibate theologians over the centuries who flattened the Song into an allegory of Christ and the Church, or Christ and the celibate soul, sublimating sexuality into spirituality to the point of neurosis. Does the poem have an allegorical dimension? Yes—but that doesn’t warrant a reading that treats the plain sense of the text as nothing but an elaborate code. By exorcizing earthly eroticism from the Christian life, Ellens believes, these commentators unwittingly drove people to seek sexual pleasure in harmful ways. “The church owes the world of humans an enormous apology for the centuries-long lie it perpetrated in this regard, and for the psychological and social pathology it produced.”

Does such an argument have any resonance today, in the era of Sex and the City and internet p*rn and Girls Gone Wild? Having sat through enough skewed presentations on sexual purity to earn a free pass out of Purgatory, I can testify that even today the church too often focuses on the bad to the neglect of the good. I remember one high-school youth group presentation in particular, a video in which James Dobson interviewed a serial rapist and killer about the lure of p*rnography. The implication—inadvertent, perhaps, but unmistakable—was that any boy attracted to images of nudity and sex was likely to go on a rampage someday.

Ellens argues that the Bible treats sex as a normal and important part of life that connects us both to other humans and to God. Of course, it can go wrong, as in promiscuity, abuse, adultery, incest, bestial*ty, and rape, all of which make appearances in the Bible. But the problem is not with sex itself.

And yet, more deeply than many other “normal and important” parts of life, sex is interwoven with personhood—hence the seriousness with which the church has traditionally regarded sexual sin. That this emphasis has often clouded our appreciation of the essential goodness of sex is undeniable, just as a distorted emphasis on the reality of our fallenness has obscured the essential goodness of creation. But until the dawning of a new heaven and a new earth, our sexuality will always be a tangled affair.

The Bible reminds us of the enigmatic character of fallen sexuality again and again, in passages that can’t readily be made to fit any agenda. Ellens focuses on three such stories from Genesis—one well-known and two obscure: the seduction of Eve by the serpent (Gen. 3:1-24), the sons of God mating with the daughters of men (Gen. 6:1-8), and God’s slaying of Onan (Gen. 38:7-10).

Ellens reads the story of Eve, Adam, and the serpent as an allegory of human maturation—a story which, unfortunately, implies that sexual awakening unleashed evil into the world. The serpent, he notes, was a common phallic symbol in the ancient Near East, and the fruit a corresponding fertility symbol. While the point of the story is not that sex is bad, Ellens says, still it casts a negative light on the exploration required to transition from childhood to maturity. “Should we look at adolescent alienation, pain, and anxiety as difficult but inevitable stages in the evolution of persons,” he asks, “or as an unfortunate aberration of a sinful or destructive behavior that makes God exceedingly disturbed?”

Here, Ellens can’t help but adding what he wishes the Bible had said:

What if our loving and lovemaking, our sex and sensuality, had been cast from the beginning as the positive and beautiful thing that it is? That would have been the truth, and would have provided our sexual experimentation, exploration, achievement, and union a positive and celebrative aura, marking lovemaking as the supreme expression of the unique nature of human spirituality.

While I sympathize with Ellens, the biblical story reflects a tension that is true to human experience. Genesis holds two things in balance: there is the divine celebration of fruitfulness and multiplying, the consummate delight promised in the story of Eve’s creation (“the two shall become one flesh”); and there is also the Fall. Neither aspect of sexuality can be ignored.

I grew up in a literalist church where a talking snake was a talking snake, and a forbidden fruit was a forbidden fruit. We were taught to take every biblical story at face value—which is probably why I never heard a sermon about Genesis 6, where the “sons of God” swoop down and mate with human women, giving rise to a race of supermen. (This gives new meaning to Touched by an Angel.)

According to Ellens, this troublesome tale actually runs parallel to that of Eve and the serpent, as an alternate account of the origin of evil. Here, sin enters the world through the sexual desire of angels, not human beings. Wickedness abounds among the ungodly offspring of the angels, leading directly to God’s judgment with the Flood.

Nor do I recall any sermons about poor Onan, who refused to produce a child with his sister-in-law Tamar. Knowing well that his offspring would simply provide an heir for his deceased brother, Onan spills his seed on the ground before sleeping with Tamar. Angered, God himself swoops down and slays Onan on the spot. In Ellens’ view, this is a ridiculous story that presents God in a most ungodly light. (God’s response can be inferred from his conversation with Job.)

Despite its weirdness and obscurity, the story of Onan has had a profound influence on church history. “First of all,” Ellens writes, “for centuries Jews and Christians used this scripture as an argument to turn the very natural experience of masturbation into an evil behavior, even a terrifying sin against God.” More than this, early Christian commentators like Augustine and Jerome used the Onan story to condemn coitus interruptus and, by extension, all other methods of birth control.

These early theologians believed that “sem*n is a sacred fluid” and that to deliberately waste or misuse it is a grave sin worthy of damnation. But, Ellens argues, they misread the text. Onan was not punished for separating sex from procreation or for spilling his sacred sem*n: “His error was that he refused to perpetuate the memory, name, and lineage of his brother.”

The consequences of this confusion, in Ellens’ view, have been tragic. “Had it not been for this strange story of Onan, misinterpreted by the church’s theologians for centuries … the Roman Catholic Church could have led the world into a wise and wholesome course of action that would have approved and encouraged preconception birth control and forbidden abortion.”

I can’t summarize Ellens’ entire book, which includes chapters on polygamy, the status of women under Old Testament law, and hom*osexuality—timely subjects indeed. We’re awash these days in “Bible-based” arguments both for and against hom*osexuality, patriarchy, the celibate priesthood, dating, premarital sex, divorce and remarriage, and a host of other sex-related issues. About the only sexual issue in the Bible not being hotly debated right now is the morality of cavorting with angels.

It seems there are at least two ways to respond: by becoming more entrenched in our respective interpretive traditions, or by returning to the biblical texts, in cultural and literary context, with humility in the face of ambiguity. For those inclined to the former approach, Sex in the Bible will be unsettling and subversive. For those inclined to the latter, Ellens is a welcome guide, worth reading and learning from and arguing with and reading again.

Sam Torode is coeditor of Aflame: Ancient Wisdom on Marriage (Eerdmans, 2005).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.