Frank Viola has written a book…or rather I should say Frank Viola has written a book again. Pagan Christianity? was originally published in 2002 and has recently been repackaged and republished with a shiny new co-author – the well-respected Christian pollster George Barna and the addition of an enigmatic question mark.

The point of the book? Christianity has been steadily consumed and been consuming pagan culture since the end of the apostolic age in roughly 100 AD. Viola presents an incredibly well researched book packed into a scant 269 pages showing the pagan origins of virtually everything we call Christian today in the Protestant side of Christianity. There is little reason to question Viola as his research is probably footnoted better than any book I have ever read.

Throughout the book the sub-text is very clear – the church we know is not the church of Christ…this church was consumed by paganism 1,900 years ago and needs to be revived and reclaimed.

There are a few concerns with Viola’s premise. First he virtually dismisses the Old Testament as having anything to contribute to ecclesiology. The other problem is that after reading the book one is left with the bleak opinion that the Spirit of God abandoned the church after the apostles died and left it to corruption. This is a reasonable assumption because Viola leaves no room for the possibility that God has been at work and has possibly blessed at least a few traditions.

The solution is clear to Viola – return to the first century church – a communal, non-structured, home-based gathering of believers.

One would think it is a problem that Viola does not answer the key question – what’s to stop the slide from happening all over again? It’s not a problem because this re-printing is a huge setup for his next book due out in Summer 2008 – Reimagining Church…very convenient.

There are a few small annoyances throughout the text – for instance Viola loves to use exclamation marks!!!! As though everything he says is a staggering insight!!! I don’t think I’ve encountered so many exclamation marks in a single written work before!!! (Annoying isn’t it!).

The length to which the book goes to avoid promoting any form of leadership structure is interesting as well. In the author bio on the back cover inside flap Viola is described not as a leader but rather as an "influential voice" in the emerging house church movement.

A tad self-righteous and cynical Viola nevertheless presents a very helpful and informative text that definitely challenges the church to take a long hard look at herself and her heritage because a lot of what she is doing is possibly not Christ honoring.

I would recommend the book as a reference text in corrective church history as well as a useful pointer for deeper study. Like many perspectives Viola’s may be at one extreme end of the ecclessiological spectrum with the institutional church at the other and the place we need to be is more likely in the middle somewhere.

 

In all the nerves and excitement of our re-commitment ceremony I was distracting myself with Amazon and noticed I had achieved Top 1000 Review status…in fact I am ranked 750 out of more than 4,200 reviewers on Amazon.ca! (small cheer erupts from back of head). Woot! Woot! All this means is that all of my reviews are appended with the Top 1000 Reviewer statement. As they say…small things please small minds!

 

Mine is a story-telling family. Most of the men in my family have left. The women in my family are the elders and they continue to pass on the knowledge and wisdom of the ages in torrents. Whenever family members gather the aunts dispense vast amounts of story, telling us about the time before we arrived and the time when we were young. I have been involved in many family gatherings, both my own and others. I have never witnessed such a desire to weave the family story as I have in my own gatherings.

 

I am home with my mum this week as she grieves the loss of my step-father Ken. Throughout this time my mum and one of my aunts continue to carry on the tradition of story-telling. As always I am enriched and blessed by the tales which are often filled with pain, sadness, and violence but more often then not also strength of character, courage and a deep love between mother and child which overcomes the adversity despite the continued patterns through the generations.

 

So as I am here ministering to my mum she ministers back with sage memories that she simply cannot contain in the presence of her children. The women in my family have suffered brutally at the hands of others as well as their own but they are all pictures of passion and sacrifice and I am better for them.

 

I was asked recently by someone why I believe what I do…this was my response:

====================

I was raised Roman Catholic in the sense that we were Irish/Italian so we had to be Catholic. We never went to church as a family. My dad was agnostic and my mom just never went. She would send us to Cathlic school (my parents we divorced when I was 5) and so this was my primary exposure to faith from Kindergarten through to Grade 9…from Grade 10-13 I went to a public high school. My mom had us baptized at Sacred Heart Catholic church by Fr. Stinson when I was 12.

When my sisters and I were young (between the ages of 5-10) we were exposed to a number of different protestant traditions simply because my mom would send us with whatever relative would take us to church on Sunday. I think this was her way of trying to teach us morality. For a couple of years we went to a Pentacostal church where we were exposed to hardcore pre-millenmial dispensationalism and speaking in tongues. We went to a Salvation Army Bible Camp a couple of years in a row and attended a Baptist church for a while as well.

As I grew I drifted away from thoughts of God, faith and religion. It just wasn’t talked about in our home (it was assumed). By the time I was in university I enjoyed faith from the perspective of a gadfly constantly trying to lure unspecting Christians and Muslims into debate and lead them into unanswerable questions (I was a jerk).

After university I got married, got a job and forgot about God completely. When I was 27 my first son was born and this led me to wonder about the moral & ethical framework I would weave for him. I didn’t feel I had one and I felt that letting culture weave it for him was fairly dangerous.

This started me thinking about God again…I was a classic agnostic at this point and that was becoming increasingly unsatisfying – like sitting on the fence and not coming to any conclusions on things of eternal significance one way or the other.

Well – in the coming years we moved to Florida where I worked for a major IT research firm and had brought myself to a point of making a firm decision in the direction of atheism. The decision was brought about by frustration and not by thorough thinking and research which was unusual for me because I would spend weeks researching the purchase of stereo speakers but I literally spent minutes on this. I remember it like it was the proverbial yesterday – I was standing on our porch looking at the Florida stars and I asked myself two questions – “Do I believe there is a God?” “No.”; “Do I believe that Jesus was God’s son?” “Well if there’s no God He couldn’t have had a son so – no.”

These decisions were designed to make me happy and end the spiritual angst of not making a decision but all they made me was miserable. I felt hopeless. I felt like there was no point to existing at all without God. I mean, why bother suffering through this world and dying for nothing and then blinking out of existance? This was where my mind was.

Realizing I had been intellectually dishonest I commited myself to doing some hardcore research/reading. I read some of the major faith’s primary sacred texts – The Koran, The Book of Mormon, Buddhist and Hindu writings etc. I also decided I should commit myself to reading the Bible cover to cover to give Judeo-Christianity a fair shake.

I was reading books by Elaine Pagels at the time (The Origin of Satan, The Gnostic Gospels) and so I e-mailed her and asked what translation of the Bible she would recommend to someone like me on a quest like mine. She graciously responded and recommended the New Revised Standard Version which I bought. I also picked up a New American Standard Bible for a more literal text and away I went.

During this we started attending a non-denominational church that met in a school gymnasium led by a couple of ex-Baptist pastors. There were about 50 people and they were some of the most loving folks you’d ever want to meet.

I decided we should go primarily for the social interaction. A couple of months into our attendance I took the pastor aside and said:

“I think we’d like to get our son baptized or whatever it is you guys do?” We needed the cultural rite of passage.

He responded by saying they did not baptize children but did perform a ceremony called a child dedication and wanted to come over and talk to us more about that. I agreed and he came over and had coffee with us and chatted. At a certain point in the conversation he began to sense that we weren’t like the average attendee at the church so he asked a fairly risky question that I honestly am not a big fan of but for his purposes it worked quite well:

“If you were to die tomorrow do you think you’d go to Heaven?” (see Bill Bright, Campus Crusade for Christ for source of question).

My response: “Well, I’d be a fairly arrogant guy if I told you I knew where I was going after I died (I didn’t want to tell him I was an atheist). I said I figured that I was generally a good person so on the scale of good and evil I was more good than evil and would probably end up in Heaven.

He decided that he and I should meet regularly for breakfast and chat a bit about what they believed so we didn’t dedicate our child into a faith we knew nothing about. I agreed and looked forward to some good sparring like the old university days.

In the meantime I was still reading through the Bible (cover to cover) as well as reading C.S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity and John Stott’s book Basic Christianity. I also received a copy of Lee Strobel’s book The Case for Christ from my wife’s grandmother which was weird because we never talked…ever…and she decides I would like this book because I was once a reporter with The Ottawa Citizen and Strobel was a reporter as well. So I read that alongside the Bible, Stott and Lewis. It was a powerful combination.

I kept challenging the pastors and other folks at the church we were going to about their faith and asking tough questions about where good people like Gandhi went when they died and why, if God was so loving was there suffering, and how can the Bible be the truth simply becuase it said it was, etc. They were gracious and patient in the responses and if they didn’t know the answer they simply said they didn’t know.

Well – I neared the end of John Stott’s book and at a certain point he writes that if I (the reader) had gotten this far and agreed with what he had been saying about Christianity and God that maybe I might be willing to accept the whole thing and possibly even try praying to this God I had doubted so much. He suggested I might even converse with God about how I actually believed and maybe thank God…I realized at that point that at some point in the journey I had crossed an imaginary intellectual faith line into belief and so I prayed there alone in my living room.

About two months later I was baptized in a trailer park pool in Florida (I still have the video) in the presence of my wife and two kids and in the coming months watched my wife’s childhood faith move out of infancy and blossom. I became a small group Bible study leader because those ridiculous pastors in Florida were willing to trust a new guy like me for some reason. Eventually I became aware of a gnawing tug pulling me in the direction of full-time pastoral ministry – I wanted to teach…I just had a great passion to teach and preach.

I told my wife and my pastors, my family and friends. We all prayed for quite a while. My pastors did their best to talk me out of it. They told me being a pastor these days was no picnic. The culture was leaving the faith. They told me these things but I was not persuaded and told them so. Eventually they relented and told me they thought I would head this way. My wife told me she somehow knew as well. Everybody was supportive.

It meant I had to go back to school though. I decided if I was going to be leading and teaching people about Christianity I owed it to these people to have a solid grounding because I did not grow up in the faith. I decided to pursue a Master of Divinity, Pastoral Studies. I looked at a lot of seminaries and settled on Tyndale in Toronto because it was “trans-denominational” and meant I would be exposed to professors from a variety of denominations. We sold our home in Florida, we sold our home in Ottawa and I worked for two more years at a software company in Ottawa to save money while we lived in my mother-in-law’s house.

We moved to Toronto and rented a house about four kilometres from Tyndale. We attended and I worked as a maintainance guy at a Christian & Missionary Alliance Church called Bayview Glen. This church used to be the Avenue Road church started by Charles Templeton who eventually lost his faith and became a famous atheist. The church was also pastored by A.W. Tozer. It had some serious history.

Well I went to Tyndale full-time straight through the summers and graduated with my Master of Divinity, Pastoral Studies. I had profs who were Baptist, Anglican, Pentecostal, Alliance, Salvation Army, and two spectacular United Church pastors…Victor Shepherd and Andrew Stirling (pastor of Timothy Eaton United Church in Toronto). Gary Hauch, pastor of Church of the Ascension Anglican in Ottawa was my Old Testament studies prof – fantastic.

Well – by the end of my seminary studies I had come to realize that I was closest in theology to the Christian & Missionary Alliance. I was invited to become Pastoral Intern at Bayview Glen and eventually called to Morden, Manitoba where I am Associate Pastor for Youth & Young Adults at Morden Alliance Church (a wonderfully supportive and loving congregation). My daughter Isabella was born in the midst of all this.

This is my story to date. It’s still unfolding. I wrestle with my faith every hour of every day. This coming Sunday I am baptizing my son. I am blessed.

 

It’s never a good thing when you get a phone call at 4:30 am. This morning my phone call came and I learned that my step-father had died suddenly in the night.

 

These are some good words about Kenneth Goebel (1929-2008). I remember Kenny as a calm man. A quiet man. A man of deep faith. He was passionate about music and was a genius on the steel guitar backing up some of the greatest names in country music over the years. Kenny enjoyed a good conversation but was just as happy to silently enjoy your presence. Kenny was a reader…I cannot count the number of times he had read through his bible.

 

I am thankful for Kenny and for his presence in my mother’s life. I am thankful for the time they had together. I am thankful he died at home with my mother present. Kenny Goebel was a good man and he will be missed.

 

Canadian United Church pastor (Westhill United Church in Toronto – www.warmplace.ca ) and now author Gretta Vosper’s book, titled With or Without God should really be titled Without God because that’s essentially where it leads; another fitting title would be Throwing the Baby (Jesus) Out With the Bath Water. By the end of the book Vosper describes the heritage of Christianity (and essentially all forms of belief in the supernatural) as human dreams and nothing more. There is no room for God in what she calls "progressive Christianity".

 

It is amazing that she can be considered a pastor, literally one who is called by Christ to shepherd people in The Way, given she doesn’t even promote a belief in God let alone the divinity of Christ, etc. The appendix to the book is a description of a Theistic and a non-theistic (why not say Atheistic – that’s what it is) service. The preference is clearly toward the non-theistic church service.

 

The book is inconsistently footnoted and often vast, sweeping statements and assumptions are made without any external reference (see p.89 which references Emperor Constantine’s motivations for converting). This particular style of developing the argument is similar to that of Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln in their book Holy Blood, Holy Grail – for their effort the first letters of their last names came to form an apt acronym.
 

I would be lying if I didn’t say that the massive amount of coverage for this book in Macleans and the CBC didn’t disappoint me primarily for it’s one-sidedness. There is no care to bother interview orthodox Christian scholars but rather any reference to this side of Christianity is made by those who staunchly oppose it. Well – for what it’s worth everything Vosper has to say in this book has been said before and far more eloquently by the likes of Marcus Borg, John Shelby Spong, and John Dominic Crossan (none of whom I agree with but scholars all).

 

Vosper is also the chair of the group – Progressive Christianity. All in all this book is less substance than a kind of a cultural bookmark not unlike the kind emerging secular leaders are "required" to publish in order to move to a higher level of leadership in the culture. This book feels the same – like an attempt to establish Vosper rather than to promote serious dialogue.

 

So you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been writing a lot lately. I know you’ve noticed ’cause I know you and you notice all sorts of things (that’s what I like about you). Well I’ve been dwelling a lot on the nature of the church lately (go figure – who’d a thought a pastor would dwell on such things). The more I think about it (ecclessiology in GreekGeek speak) the more my head and my heart hurts. Writing then is therapeutic. I get to blast excess thoughts into my digital pensieve and come back later to them on a consultation basis.

 

So the church is many things to many people:

 

– a building

– a group of people

– pain

– love

– a corporate entity

– judgementalism

– fear

– joy

 

You get the idea…so I’ve been reading about it in bits and pieces…a little of 1 Corinthians, a little of Acts, a little of John, Ephesians…and I’m still reading and have realized I’ll be reading till my bones are in the ground. Have I learned anything? Some. There is much the church is (and we’ll get to that someday) but one thing it is, unequivocally and without a doubt – the church is a ragtag group of believers around the world who confess belief in Jesus – this group, this church is the body of Christ, the presence of God in the world right now.

 

The fearful thing is that this is a surprisingly forgettable fact. Somehow the reality of being God’s hands and feet in the world is so incomprehensible to believers that I think there is a willful forgetting of this…a surprised "this can’t be" state of mind. Do we will ourselves to forget who we are? Is the church sometimes like Christ with amnesia stumbling through the world? The very thought is offensive and hopeless.

 

Of course even in the midst of our own denials of our own saved nature there is hope…Christ continues in the world and in our lives even when we deny Him…our own forgetfulness will not separate us from His love (nothing will). We can deny Him once, twice, three times by our own actions and He will continue to look at us and ask "do you love me?" until we respond – "Lord, you know I do" and when this happens and we hear His voice and we remember Him and He sends us out into the world to love as He does. Powerful…I’m glad Christ is stronger than my greatest weakness.

 

So it’s fitting and wierd that as I finish this post Joan Osborne has been shuffled to the forefront of my iPod and has started to sing to me "God is great, yeah, yeah, God is good…"

 

He is at that…He’s the best thing there is…even when I forget Him He still remembers me.

 

The biblical book of the week award goes to (drum roll please…) – 1 Corinthians!!!!!!! <Applause> Well done 1 Corinthians may you be read by everyone!

 

I attended a seminar today on Self-Harming Behaviour in Adolescents which was REALLY good. The content was very helpful and the speaker was excellent. Kimberly Klassen is a Child & Youth Worker who has set up shop in Morden and offers her services as a child & youth therapist…she can be contacted at 822-9544. Anyhow the seminar reminded me of a song I was listening to on my iPod yesterday by Johnny Cash called Hurt which was written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (see Media Player to left). The lyrics seem to capture the mindset of the self-harming individual quite well:

 

 

There is a way out of self-destructive behaviour but the path is toward an understanding that one is of infinite worth and that one is loved…

 

 

I was afraid of the dark

                                  once

but there was no one there

<fear of emtpiness>

 

I was afraid of the light

                                  once

but there was someone there

<fear of fullness>