Last night my brother was giving me a hard time because I have not been updating my blog very often. He said that he was losing interest. I told him that he should just use a reader and then he wouldn’t have to come to the site everyday to see if there was anything new (this is not intended to excuse my failure to post more frequently…).

I know that most, if not all, of you who read this could easily figure out how to set up a reader account on your own. But, I thought that if I gave an abridged version, it might encourage some of you who have always thought about using a reader, but never have, to give it a shot.

In this post, I will give you an idea of what a reader is, and then tomorrow I will walk you through creating a google reader account.

But first, what is a reader? A reader is like an email account, except that it collects articles from blogs that you subscribe to. Your reader will automatically put in your “inbox” any new content from any of the blogs that you subscribe to. You can save posts that you particularly enjoy (this has the added benefit, if you are a blogger, of serving as a way to flag things you want to link to later) and sort through your “messages” by blog, by whether they have been read, or however you want to go through it. One of the most important things about this is that it is all free! The reader itself is free to use (at the one I will recommend is) and all of the blogs that you subscribe to are free to subscribe to.

Second, if you have not used a reader, a word of caution - don’t get too excited right away and subscribe to everything. I subscribed to some of the bundles that google offered and quickly got overwhelmed when I first set up my account, because if I didn’t check it everyday, I knew there would be hundreds of things to sort through. Start small, and you can always add subscriptions as you get the feel for it. (Most importantly, subscribe to deeply committed!)

Interested? If so, check back tomorrow morning for an easy tutorial on how to set up a reader account.

If you haven’t seen N.T. Wright’s appearance on the Colbert Report, you should check it out. You can see the video here.

I was struck by two things as I watched this interview: 

1. Colbert seemed genuinely interested in what N.T. Wright had to say.
2. While I do not regularly watch the Colbert Report (we don’t even have cable at the moment), this interview seemed to be longer than most of the interviews I have seen him do.

Toby decided to lay down and take a nap on the couch this afternoon. Apparently, Jax decided this was a good idea too, and he must have decided Toby picked a pretty good spot, because he climbed right up on top of him and laid down! We love our dogs. (By the way, I stole the idea for the title of this post from Melissa, thanks sweetheart!)

Yesterday Melissa, Bethany, and I went out to lunch for a very nice Father’s Day meal. As I noticed people coming and going it hit me that it was generally pretty easy to tell who the people were who came from church and who had not gone to church. Obviously, you could be very wrong about who had gone to church and who hadn’t - and I know that at many worship services people may dress more casually than they do almost any other time during the week… but just go with me for a moment.

I remember cringing when I read in a book the story of a waiter saying how they hated working lunch on Sunday because that was when all the Christians ate out and they were notoriously bad tippers. I am guessing that many folks who work in restaurants on Sunday are noting who the Christians are and what difference being a Christian in making in their lives, or isn’t making.

I know this isn’t all that profound, but it just hit me yesterday as I was eating my orange chicken that Sunday at lunch is probably the time in the week when it is most obvious to the rest of the world who the Christians are. If you go out for lunch on Monday and you are dressed up, people will probably just assume you are a white collar worker on your lunch break… but when you show up for lunch looking like you didn’t just roll out of bed on Sunday, many people will assume you came from church.

If I am right, Christians have a wonderful opportunity… but I wonder how many of us are taking advantage of it? If nothing else, I know that next time I eat out after church on Sunday, I will be more aware of what my actions say about the impact that worshipping God is having on my life.

I was shocked to read that noted journalist Tim Russert died today. Russert was the commencement speaker at my graduation from the University of Oklahoma in 2002. My thoughts and prayers go out to his friends and family members.

As Melissa and I continue to work to get settled into our apartment I have been amazed out how fast things can change. Three weeks ago I was getting ready for a wedding rehearsal, two weeks ago was the last day of Annual Conference, and one week ago we were still up to our eyes in boxes. Now we are starting to get our bearings on the area that we live in. I am starting to figure out which roads to avoid during rush hour(s) and the fast way to get to Barnes and Noble.

In some of the reading I have been doing, I have also noticed how fast things can change within an institution. This has been particularly stark in Nathan Hatch’s Democratization of American Christianity. Hatch details how quickly British Methodism embarked on a “quest for respectability” and an “exaggerated concern for institutional discipline” after  1789 (91). By 1815 “rural itinerancy and the circuit horse were almost extinct” (91).

I found this passage particularly thought-provoking:

The system [of circuit riders in early American Methodism] kept the church dominated by young men who, according to a critic in the 1820s, were inexperienced, rustic, wanting in “social intercourse,” and contemptuous of their elder colleagues who had been forced to locate. If Americans first became susceptible to a cult of youth in this period, as David Hackett Fischer has argued, then it may be very significant that the Methodists advanced by means of a youth cadre and that power within the church constitutionally remained in the hands of the young rather than with those who could claim age and experience (87).

I really don’t have any in-depth comments to make about this, except that it is just very interesting that during Asbury’s tenure and during a time when Methodism in America saw dramatic growth it was dominated by inexperienced, passionate, youth (and one authoritarian leader, Asbury himself). There seems to be a lot of discussion about the need for young(er) clergy in the UMC. Yet, I have not noticed nearly as much action where young clergy are being given the opportunity to exercise meaningful leadership in their Annual Conferences than I have heard people lamenting the lack of young clergy leadership. For better or worse, the current approach to cultivating leadership seems to be very different than Asbury’s.

It has been more than three weeks since I have been able to post on this blog. The time has flown by. Melissa and I are still in the process of unpacking in Dallas. I did want to acknowledge that I am still here and hope to begin posting much more frequently in the next week or so. I also wanted to thank those of you who have left very thoughtful comments in the last three weeks. I am sorry I have not had a chance to respond to them. I will make an effort to respond to them as well as things settle down a bit here.

Here are some highlights of what has happened since I last posted:

• Annual Conference was from May 25th - May 29th
• May 25th my brother flew in from D.C. and I got to introduce him to my daughter Bethany.
• May 28th one of my mentors, Doug Strong, flew in from Seattle to be a part of the ordination service.
• May 28th I was ordained an elder in full connection in the Oklahoma Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church
• May 29th Melissa, Bethany, and I returned to Lamont and continued packing. 
• May 30th I played golf one last time and Melissa and I had a very enjoyable meal with dear friends.
• June 1st was my last Sunday in Lamont. It was very hard to say goodbye, but we had a very nice fellowship dinner after the service where Melissa, Bethany, and I were loved on by the wonderful people we have been blessed to serve with.
• June 2nd: Moving Day. Some highlights - We showed up at the Penske pick-up location to pick up the truck we had rented, and were told was guaranteed to be there, and were immediately told it was not there. (More on this in a future post.) I had to drive to U-Haul and rent a truck from them. Thanks be to God there was a truck available in the size that we needed and the person working there was amazingly kind and helpful. We were packed and on the road by 1:30 or so. It was hard to walk out of the empty parsonage for the last time, a place where we had so many firsts and memories. We spent the night with Melissa’s parents in Norman.
• June 3rd: Unloading Day. We got up at 5:30 and drove to Dallas. Melissa and I signed the lease and we began unloading the U-Haul. We were done by about 2:00. I think the high was about 95*…      H-O-T! When we were done there was barely room to stand in the apartment.
• June 4th noticed centipedes kept appearing in the apartment.
• June 6th woke up to the sound of running water. There was a crack in the ceiling of the guest bathroom and water was pouring through it. Maintenance arrived in less than an hour and a half (the water stopped running when the people above us finished their shower) and the leak was fixed in another thirty minutes. Later that day, the exterminator came to keep the centipedes on their side of the walls.
• June 8th we thought all morning about Lamont United Methodist Church. It is really strange to go from leading a worship service every week for three years to just being a visitor in a mega church in upscale Dallas. (We went to the contemporary worship service at Highland Park United Methodist Church, it is called Cornerstone.) This morning Melissa and I prayed for Lamont UMC and for its new pastor. We pray for God’s blessings upon them all.

In Constant Prayer is the second book in Thomas Nelson’s The Ancient Practices Series. (I previously reviewed the first book in this series - Brian McLaren’s Finding Our Way Again - here.) Robert Benson makes a powerful case for why every Christian should pray the daily office. Benson is a gifted and engaging writer. He does two things exceptionally well: he is able to explain a practice that may be unfamiliar to many mainline and evangelical Christians in a way that is both lucid and persuasive, and he writes in a way that really brings you into the conversation. He comes across as very humble and willing to be vulnerable. This is not a book written from an expert in prayer to people that the author is clearly on a pedestal above his audience. Instead, Benson writes to people who really want to make time for God, but often struggle to do so. And he writes not as someone who has found all the answers, but as someone who is willing to admit that he has often struggled himself to make time to pray the daily office.

The daily office is “in the simplest terms… a regular pattern and order for formal worship and prayer that is offered to God at specific times throughout the course of the day. Each set of prayers, known as an office, is made up of psalms, scriptures, and prayers” (9-10). Benson’s professed goal is “to open up some of the mystery of the daily office for those who have had little or no exposure to this ancient way of Christian prayer” (10). For Benson this is no trivial matter as he has become convinced that “if the Church is to live, and actually be alive, one of the reasons, maybe the most important and maybe even the only reason, will be because we have taken up our place in the line of the generations of the faithful who came before us. It will be because we pray the prayer that Christ himself prayed when he walked among us and now longs to pray though us” (72-73).

Perhaps the highest praise that I can offer for this book is that in a time when there are more books on prayer than any sane person could read, this is one of the books I would recommend to someone who seeks encouragement in their prayer life and who seeks some basic guidance for not thinking about praying, but for actually praying.

The book also contains a sample office of morning prayer. Since reading this book, I have begun praying this morning prayer and am considering purchasing one of the prayer books that he mentions in the book.

I would especially recommend this book to spiritual leaders who are finding that their own devotional life is drying up. Benson is very candid about the reality that we sometimes fail to make time to spend in prayer with God. He writes in a way that is not accusatory and he even includes himself in the group of people who sometimes fail. But he lifts up the daily office as a tested and well-worn practice that helps “the rest of us” grow in our relationship with God. If you are struggling with consistent time with God in prayer, or you are “stuck” in your prayer life, this book would be well worth the read.

I just read a very interesting post on Adam Hamilton’s blog Seeing Gray. Adam Hamilton has made the decision, at least for the time being, to turn off the comments on his blog. I can really sense his wrestling with the desire to create a place for people to dialog and listen to one another. Instead, it seems that a few people are monopolizing the conversation, and they are doing so in an unloving way.

I have been blessed during my time blogging to not find that this has been a problem… so far. But, I have also been surprised to find how rude, even hateful, Christians can be on Christian blogs or discussion boards. A few years ago there was one board I finally had to quit visiting, because I realized I always left angry and hurt.

I have not been following Adam’s blog closely enough to know what the comments were about that he found to be troublesome enough to make the decision to go ahead and turn off the comments. But, there seems to be something very mixed up going on in our understanding (and more importantly out practice) of faith when we feel justified bashing someone verbally because we do not agree with them on a particular issue.

This seems to point to a broader concern that I have with the universal Church. People on different sides of issues far too often seem to be unable to respect one another to listen carefully to what they are saying and try to understand where they are coming from. More specifically, I see this happening to some extent with the United Methodist Church - particularly in relation to the most controversial issues.

I am reminded of Wesley’s exhortation that though we may not all think alike, may we not love alike? Unfortunately, this is sometimes used as a justification for doctrinal indifference. This is not what Wesley meant at all. Wesley made a distinction between essential and nonessentials. I wonder if the first step for Christians in trying to find a way forward might not be to first take a major step backward. Maybe instead of talking about specific issues that we disagree on, could it be that we first need to make sure we agree on what the essentials are? Sometimes when I observe arguments between Christians, I wonder if there is anything they agree on.

For Jesus’ sake, may we rediscover the essentials of the Christian faith and learn to listen to one another, remembering that Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor in the same breath that he commanded us to love God.

“The purpose of the ancient way and the ancient practices is not to make us more religious. It is to make us more alive. Alive to God. Alive to our spouses, parents, children, neighbors, strangers, and yes, even our enemies” (182). This seems to be the central thesis of Brian McLaren’s latest book Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices. This is the first book in a new series published by Thomas Nelson called “The Ancient Practices Series.” The series consists of eight books dealing with ancient Christian practices. Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices, is the introductory volume in this series.

Recently, there has been quite a bit written about a third way that goes beyond the polarizing options between conservative and liberal or left and right. McLaren, however, writes that “more and more of us feel, more and more intensely, the need for a fresh, creative alternative - a fourth alternative, something beyond militarist scientific secularism, pushy religious fundamentalism, and mushy amorphous spirituality…. The challenge of the future will require, we realize, rediscovery and adaptive reuse of resources from the ancient past” (5-6)

As a result, McLaren’s book, and the series of book that he is introducing, seek to flesh out this “fourth way” by reaching “beyond a reductionistic secularism, beyond a reactive and intransigent fundamentalism, and beyond a vague, consumerist spirituality” (6).

I always enjoy reading McLaren’s work because he is a gifted writer. His conversational style and his ability to bring you into the story that he is telling make it easy to go along with him for the ride that he wants to take you on. He has the ability to make you feel as if he is actually speaking directly to you saying, “Hey, here are some things that I have been thinking about. Let me show you what I am seeing and see what you think about it.”

Finding Our Way Again is certainly no exception to McLaren’s ability to engage the reader and invite them into a conversation. McLaren is at his best in the chapters where he explains the ancient practices of katharsis, fotosis, and theosis. In these chapters he explains these concepts by asking the reader to imagine themselves to be “a young spiritual seeker who has just come into possession of a time machine… You come to a monastery and are given a hospitable welcome. You meet with the abbess, a short, wrinkled, slightly hunched-over woman who walks with a stick at a pace that exceeds the speed limit you would imagine for a wrinkled, slightly hunched-over woman” (148). I suspect that most authors would not be able to pull this off in a believable way. However, at least for me, I read this passage and never blinked. Before I knew it, I was fully absorbed in this new world with an abbess from the Middle Ages explaining these ancient practices through very ordinary stories and exercises.

In this volume, at least, McLaren also seems to occasionally overstate his case. I found his argument for “Why Spiritual Practices Matter” in the second chapter to be the least convincing of the book. The chapter begins with a focus on the role that I play in forming my character that seems to tend toward works righteousness. The notion of sin that is presented seems to be one where sin is the result of bad habits that come from my not tending the soil of my character closely enough, rather than something that is deeply ingrained within each one of us and cannot be uprooted by our own efforts, but only by the grace of God.

I also thought that McLaren was a little too anxious to make these Christian practices applicable to everyone, whether they are a Christian or not. He writes, “In these two ways, then, paying attention to ‘life practices’ is worthwhile for everybody, those who consider themselves spiritual and those who don’t: first, because nobody wants to become a tedious fart, and second, because nobody wants to miss Life because they’re short on legroom and sleep in economy class [a reference to a story he just told about being on a long flight in economy class]” (17). To be fair, McLaren does immediately qualify this by saying “I haven’t told the whole story though… Spiritual practices are ways of becoming awake and staying awake to God — that’s the third reason” (17-18). But still, the argument seems to be a bit of a reach. His argument seems to be analogous to saying that everyone should play basketball because nobody wants to become overweight and die of a heart attack. There is a difference between making the case for the importance of a good diet and exercise and universalizing the importance of one particular type of exercise. I may be misunderstanding McLaren’s argument, but it seems that in wanting to try to find something universally beneficial about the ancient practices, he would either fall into the trap of universalizing practices that are specifically Christian (Would non-Christians agree that there is a benefit to following the liturgical year?) on the one hand, or watering down the specifically Christian content of the Christian practices and making them nearly unrecognizable on the other hand.

Aside from the arguments I found to be distracting in that particular chapter, there were several statements that stuck with me and stirred up visions, thoughts, and dreams within me that remained long after I closed the cover of the book. Here are two of my favorites:

I think that’s part of what’s going on in this time of change and transition. Old sectarian turf wars are giving way to a sharing of resources — heroes, practices, flavors, and styles of practice. And this, in a way, is itself a new practice, namely, the sharing of previously proprietary practices. We might say that Christianity is beginning to go ‘open source’” (58).

I also really appreciated McLaren’s discussion of the way that God’s Spirit moves within institutions and how the work of God’s Spirit cannot be contained or hampered by bureaucracy. He discusses the work of William Wilberforce and others in England who worked to end slavery, despite the vigorous defense of slavery by the Anglican Church. “Their fledgling movement grew in the spaces between the institutional structures of their day, not within the structures themselves” (134). This conversation leads to the profound insight that “When any sector of the church stops learning, God simply overflows the structures that are in the way and works outside them with those willing to learn… God can’t be contained by the structures that claim to serve him but often try to manage and control him” (136-137). McLaren follows this up with the powerful question: “Are we a club for the elite who pretend to have arrived or a school for disciples who are still on the way” (137)?

All in all, I found this book to be worth the read because it is another important invitation to enter into a conversation about what it means to be a Christians and what it means to be a part of the Body of Christ. May this book and McLaren’s ministry help disciples who are still “on the way” find their way to God through the ancient practices that McLaren and the other author’s in this series seek to resuscitate.