Willow World

Okay, back to the story at hand. As my seminary education was wrapping up, I was also trying to get the Weekday Church off the ground, but starting a lunchtime church in San Francisco’s financial district was not proving to be easy. So when Pastor John decided to inspire the troops by taking a few key leaders to a conference, I jumped at the chance.

The seeker-sensitive church movement may have started in Southern California, but its crowning glory was Willow Creek Community Church in the suburbs of Chicago. Led by an energetic pastor named Bill Hybels, Willow Creek started out in a rented movie theater, grew to a weekly attendance of over 15,000, and built a beautiful 90-acre campus in the town of South Barrington.

Eventually, Willow Creek began hosting conferences to share the secrets of their success, which brought our little band of BayMarin/Mt. Tam/Weekday Church leaders to Chicago. When we arrived at the church, it reminded me of an upscale office park, with carefully-manicured landscape and modern buildings. The vast parking lot was staffed by numerous attendants in orange vests, and as we entering the main building with 4,000 other conference attendees felt like walking into a basketball game or rock concert.

Once inside, I was even more impressed by Willow Creek’s spacious auditorium, jumbo video screens, and massive worship band, and floor-to-ceiling windows that showed off a beautiful panorama that included a tree-lined lake.

Despite (or perhaps because of) all the grandeur, Bill Hybels and the other conference speakers were quick to point out that they had never set out to build a megachurch, but rather a “biblically functioning community.” And the church’s skyrocketing growth followed as a natural consequence. This was not exactly a catchy phrase (“Visit Willow Creek: We function biblically!”), but it was good to know that our churches didn’t need a beautiful campus, parking attendants, or charismatic speakers to grow. We just had to straighten out a few functions here and there.

We also heard a lot about “spiritual gifts.” Willow Creekers emphasized that all believers are endowed by God with one or more special abilities that equip them to assume an indispensable role in the church. These abilities are listed in the New Testament and include teaching, leadership, encouragement, and evangelism.

Willow Creek had even developed a special questionnaire that could be used to identify one’s spiritual gifts. This instrument contained yes/no questions like “I regularly try to persuade others to my point of view” and “I have spoken in a language that is unfamiliar to me.” I had to answer “no” to both of those, as pushiness and speaking in tongues are not my spiritual gifts. And I felt sure that anyone who could speak in tongues would be able to figure out their gift without resorting to a questionnaire.

Still, the exercise was enlightening, as I learned that I had been endowed with “shepherding” and the rather vague gift of “helps.” Neither of these sounded particularly helpful to a potential church planter, but there was always the biblical functioning stuff.

No on Proposition 8

At times, I’ve felt nostalgic while writing about my seminary days and remembering all the friendships and good times I experienced. Then I come across story like this one and remember why I am no longer an evangelical Christian:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26891725

Here’s the deal. I understand how someone could argue that Scripture prohibits gay relationships, as I used to hold that position myself. And if that is your opinion, it seems perfectly reasonable for you to refrain from gay relationships and attend a church that only recognizes marriages between people of the opposite sex. So far so good.

But I do not understand the urge to raise millions of dollars and hold prayer vigils to deprive others WHO MAY NOT SHARE YOUR BELIEFS of a right THEY ALREADY POSSESS as Californians. Do you have nothing better to pray for or spend your money on? Like, say, starving multitudes, hurricane victims, or REO Speedwagon tickets?

Oh, I know—gay unions undermine “real” marriage, destroy the very fabric of society, blah, blah, blah. BALONEY (sorry for getting carried away with the caps here). My wife and I have been married 18 years, and in that time I’ve learned that the only thing that can undermine our relationship is the choices we make as partners.

Think about it—maybe you’ve got a gay couple living down the street. Maybe, like some friends of ours, they’ve been together for over 20 years and raised a child who now has a family of her own. Well, that couple isn’t going away. They are part of the community, and the only question is whether or not we will afford them the same rights and protections that we “straights” take for granted. If that supposedly menacing couple was going to undermine society, they would have already done it—so having the state recognize their relationship changes nothing for the rest of us but means a hell of a lot to them.

Oh, I also know—if we let gays marry, what’s next? People will start marrying dogs! I actually heard this argument recently, and frankly, this kind of “slippery slope” reasoning is laughable. When we have a significant group of folks wanting to wed their pooches, we’ll address that issue as a society (and I won’t hold my breath). The reality is that right now we have a host of friends and neighbors who are clamoring to retain the right to wed another consenting adult of their choosing. So let’s focus on that fact.

Having unburdened myself thusly, I am off to make another donation to NO ON PROP 8. Please join me!

The Haiku

The men’s group I wrote about in my last post continued to meet until seminary graduation sent us off in multiple directions. When the end was near, we decided to mark the occasion by surprising our wives with a group date. Matt suggested that we pack a picnic dinner and attend an outdoor Shakespeare production he had heard about. This sounded bad enough, but Matt upped the ante by insisting that we all write a poem to our wives and read them aloud during the meal. This idea met with immediate and protracted resistance, but Matt was not the kind of guy to take no for an answer.

Shortly thereafter, we found ourselves eating on blankets with our wives in front of an old amphitheater. After dinner, we husbands presented our wives with flowers, and Matt announced that an even more special gift was forthcoming. Hoping to get things over with quickly, I had volunteered to read my poem first, and Matt cued me to begin. When I finished the dozen or so lines I had painstakingly cobbled together, I was relieved to see the other 3 wives give Mimi closed-lipped smiles and little pats that plainly said, “You have such a nice husband.”

The other men, however, were staring daggers at me, which I was at a loss to understand. Didn’t they like it? Had I gone off track somehow? But the reason for their animosity became plain as soon as the remaining poems were read.

Matt went second and announced that he had decided to write his poem in the form of a “haiku.” This brought more smiles from the ladies, who were growing more impressed with their choices of mates by the moment. But by the time Matt finished, the smiles had turned to expressions of bewilderment, and an awkward silence descended over the group. Ethan finally spoke for all of us, asking, “Dude, do you even know what a haiku is?” Matt then expressed an eagerness to see what Ethan “had come up with,” so he read next.

Ethan’s “poetry” turned out to be a stream-of-consciousness manifesto that made little sense to anyone—his wife Carlie least of all. Jeff and I tried in vain to suppress our laughter as a vindicated Matt cried, “What on earth was that?! At least I wrote a poem!”

“Ever heard of free verse?” Ethan countered, but the damage was done. Jeff brought the proceedings to a reasonably dignified conclusion with his effort, but all in all, it was clear that some of our wives would have been far happier with the evening if we had dropped the poetry idea altogether. Mimi was an exception, I am happy to report, and at least for one night, my stock rose considerably on the home front.

Growing Your Hedges

My next brilliant idea was to gather a few friends who had recently gotten married and start a little men’s group. Initially, this group consisted of Jeff, a pal from church, and two fellow seminarians named Matt and Ethan.

The 4 of us began meeting weekly for breakfast, and we soon fell into a comfortable routine. Generally, one of us would begin by describing some incident during the previous week that had upset his wife, such as saying, “Could we talk about this tomorrow?” when the wife was trying to share some heartfelt concern right at bedtime. The other 3 would then remark, “Your wife doesn’t like that either, huh?” And we would all go away with a deepened understanding of our spouses’ mysterious needs.

While helpful, this strategy only took us so far, as the stories quickly began repeating themselves. To shake things up a bit, we decided to read and discuss a Christian book on marriage. The book we ultimately settled on bore the strange title of Hedges, and it promised to help husbands “affair-proof” their marriages. I now wonder why this theme struck us as a necessary or appealing one, but we eagerly began reading tips on building a union strong enough to withstand any outside temptations.

The book began with several detailed anecdotes about men who had been unfaithful despite having a strong personal faith. As I recall, all these stories followed a similar pattern, with friendly conversations and flirtations turning into emotional attachment and then, despite all efforts to resist, full-blown infidelity. I had a hard time envisioning this sequence of events playing out in my own life, as I had a tough time with just the friendly conversations part and had only dated about three women in my whole life.

Still, I tried to keep an open mind—until the book suddenly got a little weird. The author began laying out some ground-rules he had developed for himself to short-circuit the progression of infidelity, which included his commitment to never—under any circumstances—ride alone in a car with a woman who was not his wife. Upon reading this, I wished the author had included a picture of himself on the back cover. Was he some Adonis who women couldn’t keep their hands off of during a routine drive to the airport? If not, his rule seemed like overkill, and I said as much during our next breakfast gathering.

The opinions of the group on the subject were somewhat divided. Jeff and Matt agreed with the author that it was better to be safe than sorry, but Ethan showed some sympathy with my reaction. “What if it’s some 70 year-old crone?” he wondered aloud. “Don’t you have to take this on a case-by-case basis?”

This remark stirred disquieting memories of my experience at the nursing home, but I was grateful that some common sense had begun to enter the picture. And before long, we all agreed that our marriages were “hedged” enough to allow us to move on to a new book.

The Miracle at South Bend - Part 2

Having decided to give up sports for the betterment of my marriage, I vowed to dispense with half measures and go cold turkey. No more games on TV, sports pages, or radio call-in shows. Why make an emotional investment in something I had no control over anyway?

Just forming this resolution in my mind had a salutary effect. Though I had yet to forego a single Monday Night Football telecast, I already felt more deeply connected to both God and my wife. The benefits of my decision were so tangible that I quickly began feeling selfish for keeping them to myself. Surely other Christian men shared my sports addiction, so perhaps I could start a program called “Sports Anonymous” that would minister to these miserable souls. Soon, broken men would gather all across the nation in dingy church basements, where they would share searing tales of shattered lives and new beginnings.

“Hi, I’m Joe, and I’m a Bills fan,” some disheveled slob would confess. “It all came unraveled for me when friggin’ Norwood shanked that kick in Super Bowl XXV. I lost my job, my wife—everything. But then a buddy told me about Sports Anonymous, and it saved my life.” Such stories would be met with knowing nods and warm hugs from men who had frittered their lives away on the Chicago Cubs or Cleveland Browns, and stadium crowds would begin to dwindle noticeably as the new movement took hold.

Filled with such lofty aspirations, I managed to make it for two weeks before cracking. Everything fell apart one Saturday afternoon when my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, was slated to play at mighty Notre Dame. Mimi had gone grocery shopping while I stayed behind to catch up on some school work (mistake #1). And as the minutes ticked by, I became increasingly consumed with finding out how the Vols were faring against the Fighting Irish. After waging an intense inner battle for an hour and a half, I finally couldn’t resist the temptation to turn the game on—just for a minute—to check the score. What was the harm in a quick peek?

Well, a peek revealed that, as the game neared halftime, Notre Dame was mauling UT by a score of 31-7. I wondered if this was God’s way of telling me I had made the right decision in forgoing this idiocy. But I decided it would be harmless to continue watching for a while, seeing as the game was already decided and wouldn’t be able to draw me in emotionally.

Around Knoxville, this game is now known as “The Miracle at South Bend.” Somehow, the beleaguered Vols staged a furious comeback, culminating in a thrilling 35-34 victory. And, in a remarkable piece of timing, Mimi walked in the door just as Tennessee deflected a last-second Notre Dame field goal attempt to preserve the win. Only dimly aware of her arrival, I began racing about the limited confines of our apartment making strange, guttural noises to express my great joy. Somehow, a stunned Mimi was able to refrain from calling the psychiatric unit to seek a forced admittance.

Shaken by the fact that I had almost missed the greatest comeback in school history, I felt it would be wise to reconsider my earlier resolution and began seeking more realistic ways to work on my relationship skills. But these would not work much better.

The Miracle at South Bend - Part 1

As my last semester at Golden Gate was about to get underway, Pastor John offered to set up an internship for me at the seminary that would provide 6 hours of credit and reduce my course commitments to nearly nothing. This attractive arrangement would, in turn, allow me to help John with his latest brainchild: The Weekday Church.

Yes, John had decided to start a church in San Francisco’s financial district that would meet during lunch time and target business professionals on their own turf. Attracted by brief, nontraditional presentations tailored to their needs and interests, these urban workers would be won to Christianity, then encouraged to settle into more conventional Sunday-morning congregations in the suburban neighborhoods they lived in. Like Mt. Tam and BayMarin.

It was an innovative idea, but I immediately wondered how this new role would impact life at home. Mimi and I were still adjusting to married life, especially since we were both incredibly busy and exhausted. And, too, Mimi been proven strangely unwilling to live in the kind of dorm room squalor that my roommate Mike and I once enjoyed.

Of course, a bit of teamwork around the house was not an unreasonable expectation, so before tackling the Weekday Church, I resolved to make some changes on the home-front. It was time to start carrying my domestic weight and investing more time and energy in my relationship with Mimi. But that would mean simplifying my life somehow, and between work, school and ministry, I didn’t see a lot of room for trimming fat. And it wasn’t like I had a lot of time-consuming hobbies.

Except one. In the interest of full disclosure, it must be admitted I had (and have) a mild obsession with sports. Many an afternoon was spent watching a ballgame on TV, and poring over sports page each morning was an absolute necessity. Yes, I did often multitask while watching sports by reading a book or folding a load of laundry. But I also tended to get a bit too emotionally involved in the proceedings—particularly if my alma mater was playing—and displayed a tendency to carry on heated (and sometimes profane) conversations with the TV. Mimi found this behavior to be a little on the psychotic side, and I sometimes imagined her describing one of my more colorful monologues to a marriage counselor, who would then quietly refer her to a divorce lawyer.

Sobered by such visions, I decided to swear off sports completely, take on a fairer share of the domestic chores, and spend more quality time with Mimi.

What could be so hard about that?

The New Age Rage

Several weeks before I moved to California to attend seminary, I was advised by a well-meaning friend to read a book called The Seduction of Christianity and its sequel, Beyond Seduction. As I recall, these books represented a response to the New Age/Eastern thought that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960’s and emphasized meditation, religious tolerance, and world peace. Fearing that unsuspecting Christians would be unduly influenced by such pernicious ideas, the author of the “Seduction” books penned his grim, two-part warning.

I was directed to these works because they contained some rather disturbing information about Golden Gate Seminary. According to Beyond Seduction, nefarious agents of the New Age movement had infiltrated this once-proud institution and begun teaching a form of “shamanism” to its impressionable students. But after arriving on campus, I could find no evidence of New Age inroads into the curriculum, though surrounding Marin County had no shortage of gurus, psychics, and meditation centers. I soon became accustomed to references to crystals, karma, and role of “The Universe” in supplying all our needs.

(Note to evangelical readers: When dealing with New Age folk, refrain from smart-ass comments about “The Universe” stepping up its efforts in sub-Saharan Africa, or you might be told that the same could be said of the Christian God. Some of these New Age-types are cagier than they look.)

To help us understand this local phenomenon, one professor finally brought the New Age to Golden Gate during my last year of seminary. Dr. S, my favorite theology professor, offered a new class called “Responding to the New Age Movement,” which I eagerly signed up for. And not content to erect straw men, Dr. S soon had us reading popular New Age texts like The Aquarian Conspiracy and writing papers that identified the positive attributes of the movement as well as the negative ones.

And I had to admit that it wasn’t difficult to spot a few parallels between the New Age movement and Christianity. The Aquarian Conspiracy defined the movement as a loose network of activists who transformed the world without resorting to traditional structures like political parties—a description that could easily have applied to Christians in the days before Focus on the Family got its congressional scorecard down to a science.

Of course, there were clear differences as well. New Agers were less interested in getting to know Jesus than in getting to know oneself. Transformation was achieved through becoming mindful of your own mind, leading to a paradigm shift that, when experienced by enough people, would redefine every social structure from politics to medicine. Crystals and the channeling of spiritually evolved beings were also deemed helpful to the process.

In the end, it all struck me as a harmless blend of pop psychology and junk science. It’s not like New Agers were starting wars, grabbing for political power, or imposing their values on everyone else. Now that would really be scary.

Contemporary Models of Church Planting

Pastor John’s initial success in Marin garnered him a teaching slot at the seminary, where he offered a course called Contemporary Models of Church Planting. I eagerly signed up for the class after John mentioned that it would be more “practical” than “academic,” which I translated as “an easy A.”

Once the class started, John began by carefully outlining the characteristics of Baby Boomers, a generation whose vast numbers and pot-addled minds apparently called for entirely new forms of church life. This generation was defined as all Americans born between 1946 and 1964. As it happened, Mimi was born in 1964, while I came along in 1965, the year “Generation X” (or “Slackers,” as many of us prefer to be called) arrived on the scene. This critical difference in our ages would, I quickly realized, allow me to drop statements like “You just don’t understand my generation” or “That’s just what I would expect from a Boomer” whenever Mimi and I had a disagreement.

But John also pointed out that not all Baby Boomers were alike, so each new congregation had to be carefully designed to fits its particular community. To discover the preferences of one’s target audience, John taught us to conduct brief surveys that could be used to assess the needs, likes, and dislikes of potential church members so that worship services could be designed accordingly. Our first class assignment was to design such a survey, use it to interview 5 unchurched people, and write a report on our findings. Keeping things simple, I focused on 2 key questions:

1. Why do you think most people in Marin don’t attend church?
2. If you were looking for a church to attend, what are some things you would look for?

The responses I got to this little questionnaire surprised me. Virtually all the respondents mentioned the wealth and fast-paced life of most Marinites as the key impediments to both church attendance and the development of a spiritual life. One interviewee named Darrel went so far as to describe American society in general as “greedy, status-oriented, sterile, and phony” and recommended starting a church with “a revolutionary attitude” that would spark a “cultural jihad.”

Based on these results, my best bet would have been to start a church which addressed such topics as Don’t Come to Us—You’re Already Way Too Busy! and Looking for Inner Peace? Lose That Bothersome Fortune! And there would have been plenty of biblical material to draw on, as everyone from Jesus to the crusty prophet Amos took a dim view of striving after riches. But even with my limited understanding of church planting methods, I knew that it was probably better to forego the “cultural jihad” and stick with a cookie-cutter approach.

Because, truth be known, there were very few differences between any of the seeker-sensitive churches that were springing up around the country. They all followed the same basic formula, and most of them were growing like gangbusters.

The Prodigal Son's Brother

Remember Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son? It’s the one where the younger son squanders his share of the family estate in wild living, only to have his father throw a lavish party when junior finally goes broke and crawls back home with his tail between his legs. Sometimes people forget that there was an older son in the story, too—one who had been carrying the load all by himself while little brother snorted coke in the bathroom of some seedy nightclub (or whatever spoiled rich kids did in biblical days). Big brother never got a party to honor his faithfulness, so he was none too happy about all the fuss over junior’s return.

Well, I, for one, always thought the older brother had a legitimate beef. He did the right thing year after year, got taken for granted, and watched some immature coke-head get all the attention. That sequence of events would be tough for anyone to swallow without feeling a tad resentful.

I know because I sometimes felt like the big brother during my last year at Golden Gate. I kept trying to do the right thing—build a strong marriage, work hard, get good grades, pour myself into two young churches—but it was all a bit exhausting. And Pastor John did not seem like the man to turn to for sympathy, fond as he was of statements like, “Relax? That’s what heaven is for!” and “Technically, a biblical workweek was 72 hours.” John based that last number on the agrarian societies that dominated Bible times, where people worked six days per week from sunup to sundown. To him, those were the good old days.

The ever-increasing efforts eventually left me feeling like the older brother in the parable. New people were coming into the churches, and while most of them weren’t exactly fiscally irresponsible coke heads like the prodigal son, there was no question that each Sunday service was a party thrown in their honor. Every last detail had been carefully orchestrated to make them feel welcomed, put at ease, and valued. But there weren’t any parties for the poor schmucks who were making it all happen.

As one of the worker bees, I sometimes fantasized about donning a disguise and trying to pass myself off as a non-Christian visitor with a shady past—just so I could get a taste of the prodigal son treatment. Of course, when these thoughts came, I recalled that the older brother was not exactly the hero of Jesus’ story and tried to will myself to be happier that things were going so well at church.

When that didn’t work, I reminded myself that if they stuck around long enough, all the newbies would eventually become worker bees themselves. And as they wondered where the party went, these ex-prodigals might also find some sympathy for the dutiful older brother.

This made me feel a little better. But not much.