I’ve just started teaching a class at Trinity on “Issues for Men in Ministry.”  I’m taking the angle that really it is manhood that is the mystery here, not not ministry.  That unless men learn (maybe for the first time) what manhood is then it is impossible to function as a man in ministry.  Indeed, many pitfalls and failures in ministry come from this lack of male initiation. But before I get into all this I wanted to start things off with a brief talk by Richard Rohr.  Do you think Rohr goes too far?

(Disclaimer: for those who don’t know me as well, I’m very supportive of women in ministry and breaking male dominance, but I’m not dealing with that now not because I’ve forgotten, but it’s just not what I’m thinking about right now).

The Catch 22 of Male Initiation
by Richard Rohr, O.F.M.
February 1, 2008

Catch-22 is a term coined by Joseph Heller in his novel Catch-22, describing a paradox in a law, regulation or practice in which one is a victim regardless of the choice one makes.  It has become rather clear to many of us that both top leaders in the church and leading politicians in society are largely made up of men who wanted to get there.  They pursued roles and positions of power for any multitude of reasons, some of which are even praiseworthy.

At the second level of “management” you find priests, ministers, civil employees, and corporate bureaucrats who have rightfully sought their own career goals, but unless there has been some influx of wisdom, suffering, or mentoring from life itself, their ego structures tend to be pretty well intact and self serving. “My personal upward mobility, but for the sake of the kingdom of God” is the best we can hope for!  They have done even good things, but the underlying motivations of self image, security, status, and self aggrandizement have never been looked at or seriously questioned.  In fact, they assume this is what life is all about.  This creates a major spiritual blindness at both levels of leadership, and of course in all men who have not stumbled, fallen, and been raised up (the central paschal mystery).

What is lost to our society, however, is much needed wisdom and the common good, and often just basic spirituality.  Such patriarchy becomes a self perpetuating machine at an arrested level of consciousness.  Uninitiated men appoint, affirm, and promote other men at their same level of moral development, because their own ego standards are all that they have to judge by.  In other words, the water never rises, levels of consciousness do not naturally proceed by attraction and promotion from the top, which is what we all hoped for. This is the meaning of eldership, seniority, and mentoring, but it only really works in “wisdom based cultures”, which we now have very few of (Tibet, Bali, and small, hidden pockets, especially in remaining native cultures still found on all continents.)

So wisdom often has to come from the outside, the bottom, or the edge.  Is it any surprise that Jesus was not a priest, a scholar of the law, or a leader in his society?   He was an uneducated layman.  The systems of this world do not evolve from the top down, as we expected, except in rare cases like Abraham Lincoln, John XXIII, and Nelson Mandela (but who originally came from the edge and the bottom in all three cases).

The only way to break into such a watertight and self perpetuating system is through the failure, suffering, and humiliation of those on their climb upwards or those who begin their climb downwards.  Initiation rites were preparing a society for such leadership, by encouraging, allowing, and guiding the wisdom and necessity of falling—either from your high perch, or before you make the mistake of climbing too high in the first place.

Thus, it is alright to climb into social position and to seek power.  But you better know: That is what you are doing, it is merely a “first half of life” concern, why you are doing it, be honest about your real motivations, who you still are, and really are (Your True Self) all of its many and specific dangers, listen to both Jesus and Buddha here, so you had better compensate for these dangers in very practical ways,  and know that it does not mean anything in and of itself anyway!

Such is the significance of the central and necessary wounding at initiation time.  It repositions the male inside of real success, and takes away his love affair with false success.  That is why we say that a man is not initiated until he has seen through the illusions and pretenses of his false self, and has had at least one enlightening encounter with his True Self.  Without such initiation, we have societies built almost entirely on illusion, arrogance, and ignorance.  No wonder we have the problems we do with war, greed, ambition, and pride at every level.

So the reason I call it a “Catch 22” is that you have to build your tower of success, even though it is the every thing that can destroy you, and will destroy you if we do not see through it.

We will lose if we do not find our power.  But we will also lose if we find our power and then do not “unfind” it!

So you must let go of the very thing that you have supposedly found.  But the trouble is you are very identified and attached to it by then!  So someone must warn you ahead of time, or it is often too late.  That is initiation.

The first finding is not the real finding.  The letting go is not losing at all.  This is the utter counter intuitive nature of Jesus’ teaching and of Buddha’s practices, and what has been modeled by all those we call saints and mystics and holy men.

This is surely what Jesus meant when he said, “Anyone who finds his life must lose it, and anyone who loses his life will find it.”  (Mark 8:35)  It was his own Catch 22, and most of Christianity has never named, accepted, or lived this central paradox.

No wonder many do not take Christianity seriously.  What a wonder it could still be if we did!

I‘m looking to hire some staff.  Let me know if you are interested.  I don’t ask for much…just your souls!

But thankfully my family is much more exciting than this.

The boys and I made this a bit ago.  Fun with blocks and catapults.  Proof that I’m not only a book worm.

An essential failure in disciple in our church, and perhaps in evangelicalism, is dawning on me.  Not only a failure to follow Christ in his radical discipleship, in his self-giving love, in his calls from/against the world, for the sake of the world.  This failure of discipleship is of course the great omission of which Dallas Willard speaks.

I’m thinking of the failure to understand discipleship as becoming a child of the Father, of knowing the Father that Jesus knew.  The Fatherhood of God is the most distinctive aspect of God of Jesus’s teaching.  The Old Testament refers to God as father only a handful of time while Jesus teaches/refers to God as the Father over a hundred times (just in the Gospels!) and the rest of the New Testament picks up this thread.

In the evangelicalism that I come from, and the missional churches I know, the hard calling of following Christ is rarely linked to the high calling of being a child of the Father.  Our discipleship is rightly based in seeking the Father’s will just as Jesus did, of learning to say with Jesus “Take this cup from me.  But not my will, but your will be done” (Mark 14:36).  But this picture of selfless abandon in the Garden of Gethsemane, as right as it is, is incomplete because we often exclude the first part of the verse (“Abba, Father…”) and the relationship of trust and love that flows between Father and Son.

Jesus knew, in everyway, that the Father loved, valued, and rejoiced in the Son, and it was only from this place that Jesus could obey, live, suffer, and die according to the Father’s will.

I fear that we too often call ourselves, and others, to live, love, suffer, and die for the mission of the gospel of the Son, but do it without knowing the Father’s love for us.  And I’m not talking about the general-generic love that God has for the world, that God loves us and died for us, that God’s love saved us.  I’m talking about the specific knowing, rejoicing, celebrating, and protecting of me, of you, of individual people that our Father wants to pour out on us.

Of course I understand how an overly sentimentalized, even therapeutic, or health-n-wealth view of God in many evangelical or charismatic churches has caused this reaction and shift to radical discipleship in Christ, but we must learn again to balance being disciples of the Son and being children of God.  As one in our congregation said, “The radical calling of Jesus is a call to be children of the Father rather than children of the world.”

Whose child are you?  If we labor under the banner of Jesus, but not also of the Father, I fear we will most often end in despair and dejection or legalism and triumphalism, rather than the joy and peace available to us.

I posted Augustinian Inversions: How would the Bishop Contend in Postmodernity? over at church and pomo. This is how it begins…

—

Over the last several years of studying contemporary (continental) philosophy and theology and the theology of Augustine, I’ve noticed several recurring themes, or rather, inversion of themes between contemporary theological battles and those in which Augustine was involved.  Of course these inversion only makes sense from a broadly Augustinian point of view (which you can feel free to contest), but I think noting these inversions may demystify some common differences and misrepresentations between theologian camps.  These inversions do not function uniformly, and they really have more to do with Augustine’s opponents and how they have become inverted: the Philosophers (transcendence), Pelagius (virtue), Donatists (purity).

You need to bake the bread before you give it away.  Likewise, we need to nurture the church to bless the world.  These are the basic movements of the church gathered and scattered.

So often we forget one of these steps.  For some, the moment of blessing the world is so emphasized, of going to the poor and oppressed, of transforming, of advocating, that they neglect the preparation of the bread.  In the haste to bless the world, some feel the church is expendable, secondary, and often times positively a hinderance to God’s mission in the world.  “Why are you so focused on the church when God loves the world?” they often complain.  But this overemphasis often leads to burnout, self-righteousness, and the lack of a developed maturity in Christ.

For others, the moment of nurturing the church is emphasized, the moment of discipleship, of depth of wisdom and understanding, of community and spiritual formation.  In the excitement of nurturing the church it is mission that becomes secondary, an advance step of discipleship, or something that only those with the gift of evangelism do.  Or it takes the mentality that if we build it ‘they’ will come.  But this perspective often leads to stagnation and also keeps the full maturity of Christ from being manifested in us.

But the life of gathering, of baking, of contemplation leads to the life of scattering, of blessing, of action.  To neglect one is to ruin the other.  To bake bread and not share leads to its wasting and rotting.  But to bless the world with something other than the bread of life within us is not blessing at all.

“May the Holy Spirit fire take the individual kernels of our lives and bake us together into one loaf, that we might be the sweet fragrance of the gospel and a blessing to the world.”

Here is an interesting piece by NPR on Evangelicals, spurred on my McLaren’s book.  Listen to it below, or read it at NPR.

So here is a picture of the dangers of homebrewing.  This is a porter that we started last weekend.  If Ivan hadn’t discovered the clogged airlocks (which let the little yeast farts out), the lid probably would have blown, spraying perfectly good almost-beer all around the basement.