Rant of the Exiles

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been around for a long time. I pursued an education minor at UC Berkeley during the mid-1990s and Paulo Freie’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) was required reading in my ED190 class. Power dynamics is the bedrock of critical theory - the broader belief system for various types of oppression including racial, gender, socioeconomic, cognitive, disability, and sexual orientation. I vividly recall a class session where my instructor, a female graduate student, dressed in black leather, barked commands, and marched around the classroom, slapping a black riding crop on students’ desks. Her cosplay was exhibit A on the oppressiveness of traditional education. I remember classmates rolling their eyes at one another and taking it all in with amusement.  The non-role play class sessions were stimulating in other ways. We had good discussions and our instructor worked hard to treat us as peers and engage us in dialogue. This emphasis on dialogue as both a mea...

This is an occasional series on repentance. Part 1 is here . In these conversations I’ve had about repentance, the word tension has been mentioned. Tension means fear. Tension means conflict. Tension means uncertainty. It is the liminal space between what should happen and what will really happen.  In conservative evangelical circles, I’ve noticed we are quick to build and eliminate tension. N. T. Wright wrote a Time Magazine piece explaining the role of Christianity isn’t to eliminate tension but rather embrace it head-on. Coming to terms with tension is where Christianity shines. Not because Christianity offers answers but because COVID-19 has introduced all kinds of tensions in our lives and our instinct as evangelical Christians is to eliminate it as quickly as possible. I’ve noticed sermons (including and especially my own) build tension at the beginning and then work hard to completely resolve the tension by the end of the message. We know Jesus is the answer but is it reall...

Photo by  Michelle Jimenez  on  Unsplash Exactly nine years ago, my boss, friend, and mentor, Justin Buzzard, began planting Garden City Church and posted Top 10 Reasons NOT to Join a Church Plant . I thought it might be fun to share my own top 10 list. Like the church plant itself, which will be a Garden City daughter church, my top 10 list replicates much of the thinking in Justin’s list and extends it to the church plant’s unique context.  Do not join a church plant if . . . 1. Your personal dream for the church plant supersedes your love for other believers. “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together . This applies to every church, in its infancy or otherwise, and yet church plants are tempted by the idealism of its members, and th...

In a post that I have now removed, I made an analogy between therapy and prostitution. I  apologize for the hurt it caused. The analogy was intentionally absurd and offensive. A friend asked me what lessons I learned from the response to the post. Here are several notable ones plus an explanation of what I was trying to do: First, I believe therapy is extremely helpful. My life has been changed for the better through interactions with my therapist. My marriage is stronger and my relationship with my kids healthier because of work I did in therapy. Over the past fifteen years, I’ve recommended and seen dozens of people benefit from therapy. As I’ve noted elsewhere, I had no intention of disparaging therapy though I recognize that contradicts the repugnancy of the comparison. Second, it hurts to be misunderstood. I could sense the outrage behind some of the responses because commenters perceived I misunderstood therapy and in doing so, misunderstood their experience and misun...

This post is different from what I usually blog about as I have many friends with loved ones who are experiencing serious medical issues. In these situations, besides being present, it’s hard to know how to be helpful, especially when sitting in on conversations with doctors. My brother , who has been a practicing physician for twelve years, recommended a book that I found incredibly useful for facilitating conversations between doctors and patients. So whether you’re a patient or the loved one of a patient, here are my takeaways on how to communicate with your doctor from Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think :  1) The doctor wants to help: People tend to have a polarized view of doctors. On one hand, I’ve noticed people who have a deep mistrust of health care providers. They’ve had a past negative experience that casts a long shadow. They believe doctors are lazy, dismissive, condescending, and withhold crucial information. However, one study suggests up to 83% of diagnoses...

Pastor, how do you handle the emotional weight of carrying people’s burdens? Stories are bullets Tearing through flesh, rending bone It’s my job to catch them And when hit, the kevlar takes the brunt Yet when people shoot stories And I emerge unscathed The gap between us remains A chasm of comfort divides I take off the vest, I put it down Bullets strike Loneliness, anxiety, and depression Stories of pain enter and stop I carry the weight of the sadness The slugs slacken my steps Exhaustion overwhelms I cannot contain this leaden load LORD, let the stories pass through me Let them penetrate my walls Let my borders be porous Let the stories enter and come out Let me be wounded twice  Hurt when I catch the story Hurt when I let it go Let m e feel the exit wound Stories begin with you Stories end with you In the middle, they may go through me But you hold and tell them all For you catch all the bullets...

Understanding the Christian’s present relationship with the law is the subject of this series. If Christianity is centrally about grace - God’s unmerited favor and unconditional love - how then should a believer interact with rules and regulations (aka “the law”)? Since so much of our culture is driven by performance and moral judgment, this is a crucial principle to both understand and live out in a gospel-centered way. This post seeks to define “law” in its usage in the New Testament, particularly Paul’s epistles. Based on the English Standard Version, there are 231 New Testament verses that reference the term “law” (some variant of the Greek root “nomos”). 57% (130) of those occurrences are located in Paul’s epistles and 46% (60) of Paul’s references come from his epistle to church in Rome. Paul’s usage of “law" in Romans accounts for over 25% of the total occurrences and because of the systematic and comprehensive nature of Romans, I would argue also govern usage for th...