So I was twittering and happened upon this blog post by Paul Mayers. The post puts forth the premise that many of the books out there on “being church” are pornographic:  They titalate, they excite, they tempt, they fulfill fantasies and they may even provide some release. But ultimately, when we put down the book, are we truly satisfied?

As Paul says:

“I guess I’m just tired of the flood of book, blogs, podcasts, commentators who with voyeur like pleasure lift up the skirts to show me how wrong church is.  How broken church is.  How institutional church is. How hypocritical church is.  How abusive, myopic, out of touch, conservative, liberal, self serving, fragmented, divisive church is.  How really it is not what Jesus ever intended to be and quite frankly why he if he showed up he wouldn’t be darkening the door of those kinda places.”

“Those kinda places.”

You mean those corner suburban churches with buildings and budgets and programs and paid clergy?

Well that’s what I thought when I read this post. How boring. How vanilla.

I then let my mind wander a bit. I even fantasized about a vanilla church. The church is filled with women in pressed skirts and blouses, bustling to prepare some coffee and sandwiches for a visit from Jesus. I see the men in their khaki shorts and Polo shirts, neatly trimming the hedges to make the church presentable for Jesus.  The pastors are wearing their best suits.

(Oh ho, hum!)

But then the fantasy “got away from me”. This is how it went:

Jesus comes to the church.

And he darkens their doorway.

He shakes the pastors’ hands.

He admires the shrubbery.

He gratefully accepts some coffee.

(Wait a minute, why isn’t he turning over tables? Why isn’t he spitting these folks out of his mouth?)

Instead he accepts their service, their hospitality. He is kind to the bustling group,  saying to a woman who is fretting that the coffee isn’t hot enough:  “You are worried about so many things, aren’t you?”, as he pats her on the shoulder.

He inquires after the senior pastor’s well-being, noting that the pastor is burdened with many things, but that the pastor should feel free to come to him with his burdens, and he (Jesus) will give that pastor rest.

(Then I snapped out of it.)

(Boy, that was weird.)

Does it make us angry to think of Jesus behaving this way? The idea that Jesus might desire intimacy and union with those who “just don’t get it”? Why doesn’t Jesus realize how vanilla these folks are? Maybe he just doesn’t know what he’s missing.

Maybe Jesus never read our porn.

So where was I?

Ah yes.  In my last post I expressed dismay at the way that my own posts, as well as some discussions on other blogs, were treating the issue of transparency. It seemed to me that we were going ’round in circles, with a lot of hand wringing and caveats and personal opinions getting in the way of coming to any conclusions.

My primary problems with the way that “transparency” is being discussed are:

1. We seem to be equating “transparency” with “being honest when we screw-up”. Now this sort of honesty may well be a fruit of transparency, but it isn’t all that transparency entails.

2. We also seem to be confusing personal transparency with the sort of transparency that we expect from politicians and/or business leaders in their professional dealings/practices.  Again, I’d like to think that professional/political transparency is often the fruit of one’s personal transparency, but I would argue that being transparent in one’s fiscal processes (for example) is different than being personally transparent.

I think that we need to recognize the difference between transparency as a way of being vs transparency as a description of a set of behaviors. As long as we define transparency as something that we do, rather than something that we are, we are going to run into roadblocks, exceptions, and quandries.

More on this over the next few days. If you want to read what some other bloggers have had to say, visit:

KW Leslie’s Baring the Secrets of the Soul

John Smulo’s Wanna Play Peek-a-Boo?

Sally Coleman’s Just as I am. . .reflections on transparency

When I was a teenager, ads for anti-acne and “skin cleaning” products insisted that we could tell that the product was working because it made our skin “tingle” (i.e. burn). This clever marketing led my generation to erroneously connect pain with the medicinal efficacy of a skincare product.

I say “erroneously” because these nasty, burning products did nothing to keep the zits at bay: Instead, they burned because they were, in fact, really irritating our poor skins. The irritation had nothing to do with curing acne or keeping our pores clean, it just made our skin problems worse. Fortunately for younger generations, consumer advocates like Paula Begoun came along to set women straight: Girls now know that if a cosmetic product “burns” it is irritating and harming your skin, not healing it.

So eventually I got over the notion that in order to make my skin look better I had to apply stinging astringents. But I didn’t necessarily get over the notion that pain=healing. I kept with me the idea that the “right” choice for a Christian was almost always the most painful one.

Now I am perfectly aware that pain is unavoidable and that, indeed, oftentimes the right choice in a given situation is one that results in suffering. At the same time, however, I want to challenge the idea that we, as Christians, should assume that the most painful choice is always the correct one.

Discernment is always a difficult task, and it is made more difficult by the fact that it is often colored by our own desires and needs . But we can just as easily fool ourselves into making the choice that will cause us the most pain, just because we think that it is necessarily the “holiest” option. But just as we can deceive ourselves into thinking that God wants us to make the easiest, most pleasant choice for ourselves, we can also deceive ourselves into thinking that God always wants us to suffer.

The ugly truth is that humans are prone to self-deception. We are also prone to constructing self-images that, while inaccurate, we are deeply invested in maintaining. In choosing pain over something more pleasant, we may not be practicing selflessness, but instead might (emphasis on “might”) be engaging in a selfish boosting of our own ego. After all, if we can cast ourselves as sacrificial and selfless with our choices, the better Christian we (and others) will think that we are. In the end, though, we have made a choice that is primarily focused on us, with little concern for God’s desires or the needs of those around us.

There is no easy answer to difficult choices, of course (in fact, this is what makes them “difficult”). Thus, the easy/hard, pleasant/painful dichotomies need to be recognized as simplistic and false. Recognizing our humanity, with our creaturely needs and limitations, and honoring this aspect of who we are, isn’t selfish and it isn’t bad. In fact, it is the first step towards understanding ourselves in relation to our God and others. It is also the first step in learning that our suffering (or our joy) is not the most important consideration in our choices, nor, for that matter, in God’s decision to love us anyway.