Elsewhere in Dreams

When you get older, you’ll start to spell better and use more punctuation. This is so you don’t look like an idiot kid with their idiot kid language.
Sometimes you have to let things slide, even when you think they’re important.
You’ll never have time to do all the things you want to do. You’ll end up doing easy things instead. All the things you want to do are harder than you think.
Everything can be made into a double entendre if you want to. You shouldn’t want to.
Writing things on Facebook and Twitter and your blog is a lot easier than cleaning the house. Clean the house anyways. In fact, clean my house while you’re at it, as I’m busy on my blog.
Danger is usually in your mind. You live in one of the safest periods in human history, hysteria about crime notwithstanding.
Don’t buy a Mac unless you’re a designer. Even then, ponder it deeply. Macs are made of the same plastic and metal as everything else. They fail just as often. They are not the source of your power.
Brush your teeth. Floss. You’ll never regret if you do.
Remember that the world is powered by caffeine and sugar. You know what to do.
Don’t become famous. Being famous is a pain in the ass.
Every time you read the Bible, you’ll find something in it that you never noticed before. Try Proverbs. Good place to start.
Have as few cars as possible. Drive them sparingly. Walk lots. Never buy a new car. Have comfortable shoes.
Get groceries a few times a week instead of once a month. You’ll end up buying more vegetables that way.
A vegetable-heavy stir fry is better for you than a bag of chips or an instant dinner.
The easiest way to control the ingredients of your food is to cook for yourself. Approach cooking as a fun skill to be learned. Take pride in your accomplishments and learn from your mistakes. Don’t loose heart: your mistakes will probably still be edible.
Buy a good knife. Sharpen it often. If it can’t cut a tomato easily, you’re doing it wrong.
Give money to the church even if you don’t like what they’re doing with it. It’s not your money anyway.
Kids need pets. If you have a kid, get them a pet.
Kids need sports. If you have a kid, make them kick a ball around or something. There’s all kinds of value in that.
Tea and coffee are different. Tea is light. Coffee is heavy. Tea is for the evenings, coffee for the morning. There’s no shame in adding dairy to either.
Aspartame is not evil. Some people say it is, but a crazy thing called the scientific method says it’s not.
Vaccinate your children. They’re not going to jump up the autism spectrum if you do. That’s crazy people bullshit. Not vaccinating is terribly selfish.
Always ask, “What if everyone did this?” If the result sucks, don’t do it. For instance, if everyone drove to work in a Hummer.
Don’t be afraid of wasting your time. Don’t listen to crazy people who tell you to rush through life. Chill out. Then do something rewarding.
Read poetry. Moreover, read poetry you don’t immediately understand. There’s an entire world of people who think differently from you.
Stick to your guns. But sometimes don’t.
It’s not really important if people like you, but if everyone dislikes you, you’re probably a jerk.
Don’t listen to this guy who writes things on the internet. He probably doesn’t know that much.
Common sense is crap. Like anything common, it’s worthless. It’s called “herd instinct” and one day when you find yourself in a riot, running out of store with a TV in your arms, I’ll be here to say “I told you so”.
Oxford commas. Use them. And semicolons. They’ll save your life one day.
Don’t argue with idiots. Idiocy is contagious.
Argue with idiots. Take them down a notch.
Clear out a space where you can listen to music uninterrupted. Buy a record and listen to it all the way through. Really listen.
Put your keys in the same place every time. This way you won’t lose your keys.
Don’t throw recycling in the trash bin. Try to be a good citizen.
The greatest rebellion of all is to check out of the system of rebellion altogether, but that’s the one rebellion the system won’t tolerate.
If you ever do manage to check out of the system, they’re going to watch what you do and try to sell it to other people. Don’t get mad; why should you care?

I can’t get over Intelligent Design. It’s one of those things that just doesn’t do anything. At all.

Look, I’m a Christian, and I’m supposed to believe that God created the universe. I’m already on board with that. I can look at the world and see God’s handiwork any time I like. I get that. It’s a selection bias, sure, but I am persuaded that it’s a selection bias for truth.

Why abstract this doctrine–that God created the universe, and all universes that may or may not exist–into something cloaked in scientific mumbo-jumbo and try to teach it to kids in schools? What purpose does this serve? Plenty of people admit that a God or an Intelligence or Something created the universe with just the right ingredients to produce people. But those people aren’t Christians in any meaningful sense; this idea of a Designer doesn’t affect their lives in any real way, which is the point, right?

Let public educators teach whatever they like. Let them leave the question of origins open and indeterminate (or let them tease young branes with M-theory if they like). We don’t need to hide God behind a non-falsifiable theoretical screen and then pull Jesus out like a puppet and say, “Oh and this Intelligence is JESUS!”.

That’s not how you get from here to there, you know?

ht to Hubbsy for the prompt to write.

I’d like to pick on the church for a while, if that’s alright. Specifically the church in our age. Every church in every age has its problems, mostly sharing them with the culture it’s in, and ours is no exception. So I’ll go right ahead and say it:

I don’t want to be entertained in church.

Really. I don’t. It’s probably the least appropriate space for entertainment. I can live with politics as entertainment, with news as entertainment, with public debate entertainment, but I can’t live with church as entertainment. I can shut off the TV, I can vote a certain way, and I can withdraw from the public square, but I can’t stop going to church.

It’s essential, right? “You can’t have God as your father without the church as your mother” and all that. It’s the point we constantly try to make, that what we’re doing is important. We’re getting in touch with the God who is there.

So what does it say about God if we act as if people might get bored and leave all the time?

I am already entertained everywhere else. By Sunday, I am sick to death of being amused and pandered to. Everywhere I go, someone is competing for my attention. They are clever, witty, funny, insightful, and to-the-point.

You don’t have to compete for my attention in church. I’m already there. You don’t have to lure me back. I’ll come back every Sunday as long as you’re creating a space for interaction with Heaven. I’ll be there as long as it’s real, as long as it’s about something important, as long as you’re telling me the truth.

That’s a nerve not many people can touch these days.

Church can do that.

I think we’ve lost a lot of the beauty of sanctity and holiness. There’s a mystery about Roman Catholic cathedrals that suggests you are stepping into a place steeped in something other. That you could have an encounter there. That the skin between the world of us and the world of God is fraying terribly and wonderfully thin.

There’s no place for entertainment there. If you don’t go, it’s not because you’re bored, but because you know deep in that part of your brain that knows these things that if you see God you will die.

The cathedral is a reflection of that Old Testament idea that God is really big and important and awesome.

Our current church vision is that God is a bit drab and humdrum and needs some special effects to get people interested.

But we don’t need cathedrals to bring that idea across. We don’t need to throw out our screens and our guitars. We don’t even need to have a complicated liturgy. What we really need is to turn down the lights, turn down the volume, and just knock off the antics. We need to act like what we’re doing is important, because it is.

If we love God, we love the church. And we don’t come glibly before God. We don’t try to dress him up. Instead we try to strip ourselves down, get rid of the junk that’s getting in the way, and meet with him.

One last thing: Churches generally suck at entertainment. Don’t try it. It’s embarrassing and awkward.

I think we have a problem with cops and pastors. I don’t mean that cops are having problems with pastors and vice versa, but that we choose who should be a cop and who should be a pastor based on criteria that don’t really match up with their real-world performance.

For instance, if you ask cops what they spend most of their time doing, you’ll find out it’s paperwork and relational work. Very, very little policework involves things like running, jumping, wrestling, and bench pressing. Why then do we choose cops in very much the same way we choose soldiers? After all, the EMF/SWAT version of policework we see on television is in reality a very constricted, minor part of real policework. From what I understand, police spend a lot of their time resolving disputes. Do you really need to be able to wrestle a bear to resolve a dispute? (Keep in mind that, at least here in Canada, the cops are also the ones with the guns.) This is why I think women generally make better police officers than men; also, it’s a tragedy when policewomen try to bitch themselves up enough that they can run with the dudes. If anything, they can probably do their job better than the guys anyways.

The same thing applies with pastors. Where I come from, the most spiritual, well-mannered men are advised that they should go to seminary, where their heads are filled with facts, and the come back to a doctrinal examination after which they’re called to a church. Is it a co-incidence then that most of these pastors aren’t good at preaching or relating to people? After all, what is being a pastor about, really, if it’s not leading people to a closer walk with God? And what is leading if not teaching and inspiring?

We pick our cops as if they’re soldiers. We pick our pastors as if they’re professors. Is it just me, or is there something wrong there?

The solution is, of course, to widen the pool of potential cops and pastors. You can certainly have a SWAT team, and you can certainly have masters of theology, but must every potential recruit be a potential SWAT team member or master theologian? I don’t think so. It certainly doesn’t seem to be making those professions any better.

I think the police force could use fewer beefy adrenaline monkeys and more level-headed problem-solvers. I think the pastoral corps could use fewer theologically astute snooze-fests and few more dynamic individuals who have the ability to teach, the ability to inspire people and engage them in their faith, and if possible both.

The difference between tradition for a reason, and tradition for tradition’s sake is this:

You tell your kid not to stand on the top step of a stepladder. It’s not safe. You’re quite likely to hurt yourself. You tell him this. He tells his kid the same things, but doesn’t pass along the reason. His kid isn’t very bright and starts to think that the top steps of ladders are somehow inherently evil. His kids take it a step further and suddenly the top steps of everything are evil. Their kids take it a step further and the tops of things are evil. Eventually no-one climbs mountains or trees, no-one lives in the top floors of apartment buildings, and everyone is wearing a hat so no-one else can see the (evil!) top of their head.

Of course, no-one falls off the tops of ladders, but not because they’re sensible and can tell that standing on the top step is a bit of a silly thing to do. Instead, its because they’ve vilified the tops of things, which is far sillier than standing on the top step of a ladder. It causes untold more difficulties because those who (rightly) go against the grain have to learn the lesson about ladders the hard way.

Experience would dictate, having seen 99 white swans, that all swans are white. Experience is of course a ridiculous guide for making future predictions: One event can change your experience in a way that the preceding events could not possibly have foretold. The 100th swan, the black swan, gives lie to the statement that all swans are white; suddenly only most swans are white, or at the very least most swans in the observed sample are white.

Ubuntu is our Free Software black swan. How do we explain its sudden, rapid rise to international Linux stardom? How do we explain its overwhelming success in that domain?

Well, we don’t. You can attempt to apply narrative to Ubuntu’s sudden critical mass, but it doesn’t work. Ubuntu was there at the right time (whatever that means) with the right feature set (not much different from others) and the right community (a little less technical than others, perhaps, but not much) and the right backing from Canonical (though other Linux distros have their own sugar daddies).

All of those statements don’t really explain how Ubuntu came to dominate Linux mindshare. In fact, I don’t think there’s any real way to make a narrative out of it. The reality is probably more like the Linux community tinkered and hacked and scratched the itch and tried things until one of those things really worked. This is a signal, to me at least, that the Linux community is growing up: We now have, like any other domain, a winner-takes-almost-all distribution. For good or for bad, this is how these things seem to go.

I think sometimes that the world is like throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks. Of course there seems to be some correlation between hard work and success: Those people who work harder are likely to try more things. But you can work and work and work and work (look at Debian and Fedora and Gentoo and Linspire and a hundred others) and not have someone else steal and eat your cake.

You draw your own lesson. Does Ubuntu deserve to be where it is right now? Sure. Maybe if you’re working on another distro it seems a bit unfair. But even the words “deserve” and “fair” imply you believe there’s some kind of narrative going on. I disagree. There’s no narrative. There’s a metanarrative, and that’s what matters.

Today in church we had the news passed down to us that Freshwater Christian Church of Mississauga is going to be merging with Churchill Meadows Christian Church, also of Mississauga. I say “merging with” in lieu of the probably more apt phrase, “absorbed by”, considering that they’re the much larger church.

From a purely financial point of view, it makes a lot of sense (though this is not the only point of view from which it makes sense, I hasten to point out). Churchill Meadows is about five times or so the size of Freshwater, and has reached a point of fiscal maturity and sustainability, it would seem, so much so that they’ve been raising money for the last three years for and developing the plans for a building in which to meet. Freshwater — at least from what I saw today in the budget — has not reached a point of financial sustainability, such that the church is still gobbling up its initial setup fund. Solvent as far as I can tell only because of that fund. Freshwater gains financial stability in that they no longer have to worry about going into the red all the time. Churchill Meadows gains that extra 150 or so people that will frankly enable them to reach their building goal that much quicker. From a surface view of this all these seem to be the primary organisational benefits, without considering the obvious missional opportunities that a building and a less spread out staff entail.

I footnote that paragraph with my own experience of churches going broke: The Bridge, a wonderful place while it was still up and running, before it lost most of its congregation minus of course the core that started it. The Bridge was in the process of merging with 247 (if I recall the name correctly), when pastoral and leadership concerns put the kibosh on the whole deal, leading inevitably to The Bridge’s slow decline and finally its insolvency. When The Bridge finally closed down shop it left quite a few people with nowhere else to go, including some new converts who were very fresh to Christianity. It was, on the whole, a bad deal all around. Had The Bridge simply merged with 247 or some other like-minded church, I feel they would have been able to keep their ministry alive, give the people they sheltered a place to go, and especially provided the pastoral care for those new Christians. The Bridge closing its doors was, like I said, just a bad deal. I don’t fault anyone for this, but it was hasty, with the announcement coming a mere week before the organisation folded.

This merger is a little different, of course. We’re not closing down shop, Joel isn’t going anywhere, and we’re not about to disperse into the cold night never to see eachother again. It in fact prevents those things from happening. Which is a good thing in my view. The merger is also taking place with plenty of time in the interim: the churches are separate until October, when they’ll join at Freshwater’s current location. This gives us a lot of time to work out all those nasty little human problems that seem to occur whenever two organisations of any kind merge. For instance, I’m part of the worship team right now, playing keyboards every other week, and it occurs to me that Churchill Meadows also has a worship team. We’re really good (if I do say so myself; it’s not me, really, as much as Candace and Tim), but you have to expect that a church of 500 or so people has a better base from which to draw talented people. I raise this as an issue in particular because musicians, yes even Christian musicians, are generally a little more sensitive in the ego area than your average Joe off the street. When you try to merge two groups of people who both have separate synergies, you may end up finding that they don’t work as well together as they do apart. Or at least that the time it takes for two groups of musicians to get used to eachother can exceed your expectations. This might not even be a problem of course. I myself don’t have to play. I’ve gone to churches for a long time that didn’t need another pianist. Thankfully there’s a lot of time to work through this in people’s heads: I think the time-frame the leadership teams have chosen is a wise one. If there are any bruised egos, hopefully this will give them time to heal.

I’m writing this mostly to process it for myself. It’s going to be weird, seeing how every time I start attending a church something big changes. For instance, Living Waters got a new building and became an entirely different church almost overnight, it seemed. The Bridge shut down out of nowhere. Now Freshwater is merging, sort of losing its identity. This is fine; unless Jim (I think his name is) turns out to be some sort of heretic, or the church is just downright unfriendly and doesn’t have the missional heart I love so much about Freshwater, we’ll stick around. It’s not any further out of our way than Freshwater is. A different highway.

The losing identity does sort of bother me, though. I like Freshwater the way it is, relaxed, full of great people, and with absolutely amazing music. And when Churchill Meadows comes along, it does follow that the smaller church will lose its identity to the larger one. What that identity will end up being is left to the hands of God, I suppose. I guess I also have a certain amount of apprehension about what this new church will feel like: It’s so very hard to find a God-honouring, God-glorifying church that isn’t too backwards and isn’t too cool-whoring. When you do find such a place, seeing it being subsumed in another church that may or may not operate along the same lines is a bit like gambling, it would seem. I don’t know these people. I don’t know their modus operandi.

Now, those are just my feelings after hearing about it for the first time. I’m sure I’ll read this in a few weeks and months and wonder what the fuss was about. In the meantime, there are lots of good thing about this that I feel like I’ve accidentally de-emphasised.

Have a building is a great thing, or can be a great thing. I’ve know churches to build a nice, modern place to operate out of and then squander it trying to keep it safe and pristine and comfortable. If you have a building, use the sucker! And I have every confidence that Freshwater, with a building, a bunch of extra people, and a Joel with some time on his hands, will do great things with the building. Joel mentioned a few ideas he had, all of which sounded exactly like what a church is supposed to be doing in the world, being the hands and feet of Jesus, as he says. Give Joel a building, and I’m sure he can whip something up in a hurry. (By the way, Joel, if you ever read this, I’d suggest credit counseling for the community at large; debt is a whore who won’t wake up and leave.)

The new church, whatever its name is, will also have a greater opportunity to contribute on the modern mission field by planting another church to replace the one being lost to mergers and acquisitions. And this time, they have an opportunity to get rid of this half-assed toss-the-hatchling-out-of-the-nest trust fund approach that inevitably leads to fiscal, spiritual, and physical burnout. They — or we, I guess — have an opportunity to be a real mother church, to be there in terms of money and people power, so that those labouring in the word and in the community don’t have to constantly feel like a shyster shaking down the congregation for money, a juggler with too many balls in the air, and a prayer warrior with no time to pray. Can I suggest a radically under-churched area? Okay, how about at about Bloor and Dixie? There are tens of religions and thousands of people in that area alone, and the churches in the neighborhood are old and dying out with no new blood to replace the septuagenarian blood that has long ago grown thin. That’d be a great area, only 15 minutes away, that simply begs for a minor revival. Just an idea.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I’m liking what I see so far, and Laura and I will keep the two churches and their imminent merger in prayer. The way I see it, the human interactions are like gears, and prayer is like grease. Or something like that. It’s not a very good metaphor.

I wrote a whole long post two days ago, saved it, and am returning. I kept approximately 5% of it, and if you had read it you’d thank me for my slash-and-burn editorial skills. Still, I think the post bears writing. It’s an important topic and one that is lightly addressed in scripture. Or to put it another way, there’s lots of room for opinion, pretty much the inverse of me. With these introductory comments in mind, let’s blaze on, machetes and chainsaws in hand.

Every time I get near a book on church building I feel an irrational urge to break its spine and repurpose the pages as a certain toiletry item. It’s just who I am. Sometimes I have a hard time accepting that you can do this and do that and suddenly have a successful church. The idea that you can simply follow a formula and arrive at anything but a formulaic church seems irrational.

But there have to be guidelines, right? There are a lot of wacky things going on in North American churches, mostly due to this idea that everyone can have church they way they like. I’d like to sketch out a few thoughts and see what happens.

First, church needs to be organic. Don’t be relevant, don’t be topical, don’t be with the times, don’t be postmodern, don’t be a counter-cultural ghetto. Like that awkward kid everybody’s known, the one who’s always trying to be cool but ends up a huge loser, churches that chase culture look stupid. They look like they need attention or something. Let your church be a reflection of and a reflection on the community it comes from.

Second, some churches will play hymns on a piano, some will have elaborate bands, and some will have no instruments at all. I’ve been blessed by all three. It’s not really a big deal. It’s something we have to get over collectively. Music is an important part of the human experience, and an important part of the Christian experience. Some people will simply not be comfortable with an organ. I can’t stand pipe organs; with the amount of noise they make you may as well have a rock band playing, but that’s just me. If your community happens to include a lot of people who like pipe organs, why not?

Third, an effective church does a bunch of things. It provides people a place to gather in community, it provides a clear path to God, it provides for its own members, it provides help for those in need, and it provides a bunch of different opportunities in different areas. You could write entire books — and trust me, people have — on just those statements. This means that a church needs to be scriptural and Spirit-filled. Everything that a church does flows from scripture and from the workings of the Holy Ghost. Without either of those things, none of us would go to church. There wouldn’t be a church. That means that you need scriptural community, etc. You need the Spirit because, well, these things are pretty hard to do.

Fourth… that’s it. I think I lied, though; none of these things is easy. But they are pretty simple, right?

Just a moment ago, I was vacuuming the carpet in front of her whilst she ate Wendy’s fries and a junior burger combo. Does a woman’s life get any better than that? I don’t think so!

I don’t mean to perpetuate any stereotypes with this post, by the way. I may be stuck in the past when I say that a mother place is, in most circumstances, in the home with her child(ren), but a woman’s place is wherever she chooses.

When the founders of the United States first envisioned their country, it seemed they saw a country where religion would inform government, but government wouldn’t impose strictures on religion. Obviously, this sort of pragmatic stance resulted from the obsession old world’s states had with organised religion, as if without a state-mandated faith, their societies would crumble. It probably also had a lot to do with economics, but that’s a whole other topic.

We’ve come far from that point. In Canada, I’m pretty sure we never even were at that point. Now, separation of church and state means more that both government and religion should not inform eachother as much as is possible. This is what we call the secular state.

Christians of all stripes can view this a bunch of ways, I think. There are some that think that a secular state is an impossibility, and that trying to create one is a mistake. Others view the secular state as a sort of unfortunate necessity, a goal that can’t really be reached, but must be, under the circumstances.

I think both are fair positions to take. They both take a different kind of nation with different kinds of goals, sure. Yet they’re both reasonable.

I’m in the second camp, mostly. I say mostly because those categories are a reduction, a sort of boiling down of a whole range of though. I’m not expecting anyone reading this to fall exactly into either category. Life isn’t that binary. I’m mostly in the second on the list. Mostly.

Here’s what I think. The Christian faith has a bunch of goals, right? There’s an overarching purpose to it all, that God glorified himself, as he should. Yet there are smaller goals as well. Jesus restoring his creation to himself. His followers living like him and practicing true religion. Christians loving their neighbors, whoever that may be. Praise. Loving God. The pursuit of holiness. These are some of the goals of the Christian faith.

Nations-states, however, have a radically different agenda. Their overarching purpose, though it may unwittingly glorify God, is self-preservation. Like any other organisation, a nation-state takes on the agenda of its constituents, and exists simply to exist. There are smaller goals beneath that, like expressing ethnic identity, gathering around a shared value, or simply protecting a bunch of land. At the end of the day, though, nations are about self-preservation, whether offensively or defensively or both.

These goals clash. Christians simply don’t spread the faith through violence and force. Nations preserve themselves through force: it’s not a perfect world.

When these two entities co-mingle, the resulting monster is hard to put down. The state intrudes into the faith and suddenly there is tyranny and persecution. The faith intrudes into the state and suddenly there is fanatical nationalism and oppression.

Christians can be politicians, and politicians can be Christians, no problem. But the domain of the state is not conducive to the practice of true religion: you do not wage a “Christian” war, and you should not crouch a war in religious terminology. While the state must use force, the Christian absolutely must not.

On the other hand, though the government must not be a respecter of religions, religions are not bound by such strictures. Religions are about opposing truth claims. Christianity makes truth claims that say, among other things, that all the other religions of the world are counterfeits. And while governments must not make these sorts of claims, Christianity must be free to do so, whether it irks the tolerant soul of every civil servant labouring towards an equal commons.

This is essentially what I believe on this matter. Freedom of religion is essential, a secular state is essential, and the separation of the two is the guiding essential that keep both from collapsing into and ruining eachother.