Grading is such a great joy. If I keep telling myself that, maybe I’ll begin to believe it.

I was honored to be asked to deliver the following charge to the minister at the ordination of Brian Warfield, one of our best former students. It was a pleasure to see Brian, Misty, and to meet their children. It was also great to catch up with friends at Spring Creek Baptist Church, where Brian was ordained. The text of my remarks follows:

Charge to the Minister
Ordination of Brian Warfield
April 11, 2012

Brian, I am honored to have this opportunity to participate in your ordination service. I have often wondered where students have ended up, and to what kind of ministry they were led. Facebook has changed that. Now I generally know even more than I wanted. Sometimes, I’m surprised to hear that a former student is now on a church staff, or that someone else is not pastoring somewhere. Sometimes, the proper response is not surprise, but sadness, especially when gifted young ministers feel compelled to leave their own tradition because there is no place there for them to serve. In this case, though, I felt a deep sense of pleasure when I read that one of my best students was being ordained by one of my favorite churches.

You have asked me to deliver the charge to the minister. A charge is a kind of challenge that is laid before you, something for you to keep in mind as you walk this path on which God has led you. So, I now charge you to remember these three things.

First, remember that the questions are quite often more important than the answers. Too many sermons are answers to questions that no one is asking. As such, they are vain, empty, and useless. One of the most common causes of failed ministries occurs when a minister is called to a new church, and begins proclaiming answers before asking enough of the right questions. Answers that come too quickly tend to show a lack of respect for the question, which is taken to be a lack of respect for the questioner.

Jesus understood the importance of questions. When he was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” he replied, after a story, with another question, “Which one of these was the neighbor?” Understanding comes not when we are force-fed answers, but rather when we are equipped to answer our own questions. Before that, though, we need to learn how to ask the right questions. That is one of the most valuable things that a minister can do for a congregation.

Finally, there are some questions for which there are no sufficient answers. Jesus’ cry from the cross is one of those, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When in the presence of such suffering, the right response is not to provide answers, but, with fear and trembling, recognize that the ground upon which you are standing is holy ground.

The second thing I’d like you to remember is that Kingdom growth is not the same thing as church growth. I remember having a conversation with someone when we were starting NorthHaven, our church in Norman. He asked me a question that I wasn’t quite sure how to answer - “What is your market?” At first, I laughed and replied “Liberals.” The more I think about the question, the more it disturbs me. If we treat the church as a marketplace, we shouldn’t be surprised that people are engaging in comparison shopping. We have failed to make disciples, instead we are making customers. And in the back of my mind, I hear Jesus’ words in the temple: “You shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”

The heart of the problem is that we have made church growth the ultimate goal. And when we do so, the church tends to become something that God never intended. Sometimes I wonder just how much of what we do in church today has anything to do with being the church described in the New Testament. In Acts 2, we get a glimpse of the church as it’s described in the New Testament. Daily activities include taking care of each other, sharing meals, and praising God. Everything, interestingly enough, except for evangelism as we now understand it. Yet, the Scripture says that the Lord daily added to their number.

Church growth is wonderful, but it shouldn’t be the goal. To make it the goal is to run the risk of compromising the Gospel. The easiest way to achieve church growth is by preaching what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” When tempted, think back to chapter 6 of John’s Gospel. After Jesus proclaimed a difficult teaching, John said that many of his disciples left him. It is a poignant scene when Jesus turned the twelve, and asked “Do you also wish to go away?” Making church growth the criterion of a successful ministry is to adopt a model of ministry that would make Jesus’ ministry on earth a failure.

The goal of church growth is going to church. The goal of kingdom growth is being the church, a community of love, the place where the kingdom of God has come into the world.

Finally, keep this in mind - remembering where you came from is more important than knowing where you’re going. Although we’re confident in our ultimate destination, none of us knows what intermediate stops we will have along the way.

Why are we here? Why is ordination important? Not so that you can minister. If you had not already shown that you were ministering to those around you, this church would have never considered ordination. We are not a sacramental tradition, so we do not believe that any special grace will flow to you today. So, why do we ordain you? My friend and colleague, Kevin Hall, likes to quote Spurgeon as saying ordination is the laying of empty hands on an empty head. I’ve read some of your academic work, so I’m confident that it is not an empty head that we lay hands on today. Still, though, why is this important?

Paul’s letters to Timothy give us a clue. 1 Timothy is primarily instructional. It’s about taking care of the business of the church. Things are good, let’s get down to work. 2 Timothy, though, has a different tone. After the salutation, Paul writes:

Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self- discipline.

What events prompted this change of tone? Why does Paul think it necessary to remind Timothy of the faith of his family and of the time of his ordination? I suspect that it’s because Timothy is experiencing one of those times in ministry that we all have. There will come a time when this thought comes to mind. It has happened to me, and I’m sure that it has happened to many others. The thought is this: “The only mistake that God ever made in history is calling me to ministry.” When that thought comes, remember this day.

You need to be ordained for the same reason that Jesus needed to hear the voice of the Father at his baptism, saying “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The memory of that moment may have been exactly what Jesus needed when it came time to face the trials that lay ahead. Ordination is important for those times that you don’t think that you are up to the task, when you don’t feel that you have the right skills or the right words. When that time comes that you cannot seem to believe in yourself, remember that today, a church, the Body of Christ, believed in you. That my friend, is surely enough.

Amen

Today was Youth Sunday at NorthHaven Church, following what was evidently a very successful Disciple Now weekend. I was speaking with two visitors this morning, and for some reason felt the need to apologetically point out that the service today would be unusual. Of course, after getting home, I read this essay by Rachel Held Evans.

I want a church that includes fussy kids, old liturgy, bad sound, weird congregants, and…brace yourself…painfully amateur “special music” now and then.

Why?

Well, for one thing, when the gospel story is accompanied by a fog machine and light show, I always get this creeped-out feeling like someone’s trying to sell me something. It’s as though we’re all compensating for the fact that Christianity’s not good enough to stand on its own so we’re adding snacks.

But more importantly, I want to be part of an un-cool church because I want to be part of a community that shares the reputation of Jesus, and like it or not, Jesus’ favorite people in the world were not cool. They were mostly sinners, misfits, outcasts, weirdos, poor people, sick people, and crazy people.

May we have a community filled with Jesus’ favorite people.

A very moving essay by Bill Wilson on EthicsDaily.com.

Disciple: “Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?”

Teacher: “As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.”

Disciple: “Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?”

Teacher: “To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.”

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

When I posted the video lecture on chapter 3 of the Critical Thinking textbook, I neglected to discuss the fallacies of composition and division. Both involve attributions of properties with regard to wholes and their parts.

There are some properties such that, if the parts of something have those properties, then the whole thing will also have them. An example is weighing more than ten pounds. If every piece of a wall weighs more than ten pounds, then the entire wall must weigh more than ten pounds. On the other hand, weighing less than ten pounds is not like that. If each part weighs less than ten pounds, there is no guarantee that the whole weighs less than ten pounds. When we attribute a property of the parts to the whole, and that property is not one that can be so attributed, then we commit the fallacy of composition.

The fallacy of division involves wrongly attributing properties of the whole to the parts. Our previous example, weighing more than ten pounds, can be used to commit the fallacy of division.

God’s forgiveness falls like rain but yet we can barely squeeze out a drop for each other.

This quote from Annie Hagans, a student in Introduction to Philosophy last year, prompted an interesting discussion on Facebook yesterday. What does it mean to forgive someone? To what extent are we obligated to forgive?

As I wrote recently, everything in existence is permanently impermanent.

I detect shades of Heraclitus here.

Question: is this a paradox? Answer: probably not, unless Rhone is committed to the belief that nothing at all, even impermanence, is permanent. It is a good opportunity to do some analytic philosophy, though.

What is permanence? Is it a real property, or is it a derivative analyzed in terms of the real properties of an object? What’s the status of self-predication; must permanence itself be permanent? If there is nothing in existence that is permanent, then does that mean that abstract objects (numbers, sets, etc.) do not exist? Does that commit us to something like subsistence for abstract entities? Does permanence mean simply that an object always exists, or does it also mean that an object never changes? If the first, then most, if not all, theists would reject the claim that nothing in existence is permanent. If the second, then we would have to at least reject the doctrine fo the immutability of God.

Here’s my first attempt to symbolize permance, attempting to say that that an object is permanent just in case for any property that the object has any time, it has that property at all times.

Robin Hanson, an economist who writes overcomingbias.com, reports the results of a recent Swedish survey.

The survey:

The survey was mailed to 2,450 randomly selected adults above the age of 18 years in Sweden during the spring of 2004; the overall response rate was 45%.

The main answer distribution:

How bad an action is, from an ethical point of view, depends primarily on:
5.3% How bad the consequences of the action are for myself
62.7% How bad the consequences of the action are for other people and for society  17.5% The extent to which the action infringes upon someone else’s natural rights
10.6% The extent to which the action violates what is natural
3.7% The extent to which the action violates Christianity according to the New Testament in the Bible
0.3% The extent to which the action violates the rules given by any other religion (such as Islam or Buddhism)

It would be interesting to see the full report of the survey and results, although I’m not sure that I’m interested enough to pay for a copy. The choices seem too limited from an ethicist’s point of view. The first two options force a choice between radical egoism and radical altruism, but most people are neither. The options don’t discriminate between various kinds of consequentialism in that none specify any particular consequences, such as happiness or welfare. It’s also difficult to know how a Kantian should respond. So, it could be that the majority of people don’t fit into any of those categories, but feel for various reasons that the second is the one that is closest to their position.