Brian D. McLaren: Worship that Destroys (and Saves) the World

[Applause] well I should begin by saying that by my accent you'll know I'm from the far western colonies that went through a brexit about in the 18th century and and we're still conflicted about it and I would ask for your sympathy for what's going on in my country except I think empathy is probably the better word and I'm I'm very happy to be here I haven't been over to England in several years the last few years we've had so much trouble in my country it's kind of felt like the house was on fire and it didn't feel like a good time to leave and so now I've come here but what a great time for preachers to get together and what a great time to allow ourselves to be awakened to the importance and urgency of our work I think we all fight every single Sunday and in between against this sort of tamping down especially in times when people are worried about declining numbers and so on we're so desperately worried about offending someone and driving them away that we we all live with this pressure to be as politely irrelevant and ambiguous and vague as possible and so so many times on a Sunday our people leave choking on clots of ambiguity when they actually need some clarity to help them figure out how to place themselves and live in a world that is on fire amen so that's what we'd like to talk about I wonder if I could get my slides up well actually that was in my control there and so I would like to talk to you about your role as a preacher in the larger worship experience and I'd like to talk about worship that destroys and saves the world for the last 500 years while we've been happily worshipping Sunday after Sunday this beautiful planet has been plundered and raped treated like a stolen bank account or it's trash dump or a sewer while churches worship on obliviously and of course this all continues right up until this present moment can you see how much worse off the world will be if we do a better job as preachers bringing people into a little space where they're told that what God really cares about isn't this world it's somewhere else can you feel how if you actually were the creator of the world who cares about the plankton out in the ocean we often say that the rainforests are the lungs of the earth that's partly true but even more the plankton in the ocean are the are the lungs of the earth every breath that we breathe were breathing the products of trees in the rainforest and plankton in the ocean if the creator of the universe cares about the breath of this planet the pulse of this planet can you see how if for the next five hundred years our churches just go on avoiding the realities of what are happening what's happening in our world can you see how the Creator might wish some people to just leave where they'll hear about something that is close to the heart of God while we've been happily we the colonial era has happened over the last 500 years and while good Brits were singing hymns and praying and listening to the world's best preaching and while American audiences were gathering Sunday by Sunday to say Lord forgive me for my sins and then go out to whip their slaves that afternoon and for the next six or seven days and then come back again and every time they confessed their sins they were certain to not name the most obvious sin by which they lived not just in the south where they were directly whipping the slaves but in the north where they were making money from the cotton in the textile mills from the whip slaves it's really remarkable to think how much energy people like us good sincere people like us put into their sermons week by week to make sure that that was never addressed for hundreds of years can you see how when preachers get together at a time like this if we just talked about how to improve our preaching craft and become better at doing what we've been doing for five hundred years it would be a tragedy to get better at that while we've been worshipping and preaching even in more recent years there's a global resurgence of white supremacy and ethno-nationalism I had a life-changing experience just over two years ago I young couple who I mentored separately they didn't know each other and then I think I played some small part in them meeting each other and then getting married and they ended up in ministry together in a city small town in the United States you may have heard of called Charlottesville Virginia and I got an email from this couple and they said you may not have heard about this but we've had several Ku Klux Klan rallies and white supremacist rallies in our city and there's a really big one planned for August and they said we don't feel that these white supremacist and neo-nazis should come and take over our city for a day without having the clergy stand up and say that we are not okay with this and and that we need to make a statement together they said so we've been asking clergy to join us and even though it's going to be a dangerous state we know there's going to be a lot of weapons that day and there are people who are actually planning for violence we know this because an Tifa has been telling us they have infiltrators in these groups and they've been telling us what's what's coming they said we've had a lot of african-american clergy who are willing to come and put their lives on the line that day and we have a lot of female white clergy who've been willing to come we're having a hard time finding white male clergy to come and join us and so they said we know it's a long way away but is there any chance you would come and spend this day with us it's going to be dangerous we think there's going to be violence but would you comment I I said oh of course I'll come I just won't tell my wife all the details you're giving me but I'll tell you I never thought in my life that I would walk down streets in the United States and see Nazi flags being carried and Nazi slogans being chanted I never thought this and can I tell you a lot of the people who were marching that day on that on that Saturday were in church the next morning there's been this resurgence globally it's it's not just in the US and the UK it's there's a version of it in Brazil and another and Italy and another in Philippines and there's this resurgence of course Denmark and all the rest it we we see around the world a resurgence of white supremacists though nationalism and being in room of mostly white preachers we have to ask what role we have in in a moment like this for 500 years we've been worshipping without dealing with this so if we just want to keep doing what we've done we'll keep getting what we've got we've been conducting our worship wars having big arguments about guitars versus organs and charismatic versus Calvinist but meanwhile what's happening in our world makes me worry sometimes that gatherings like this can be a weapon of mass distraction so that people argue and care and are energized about religious esoterica and don't deal with the actual issues facing our world a planet on fire an economy that is transferring not only wealth of the present to the currently wealthy but the wealth of hundreds of generations into the future into a small number of people whose names we all know you know one of the great blessings if you want to call it that of what's happening in my country is it's making clear we thought we were in a democracy and we're finding out that we're living in a global oligarchy and that the power of certain people to pull political strings around the world and in this realization that the lines of nation-states to them are just playthings because the reality is the exchange not of votes but of money and and and this is going on and we're we managed to not have much to say about it I don't know about you but I came into ministry because I wanted to deal with the most important realities in the world I didn't want to be an entertainer to help religious people have a nice experience for an hour a week and so you you realize if we just keep doing what we've done for the last 500 years faithfully will be custodians in this ongoing crisis one of my friends and mentors the late Alice Willard said our system is perfectly designed to yield the results we are now getting profound words and serious words for people who have been who were were part of the tradition that was supposed to be custodians of the moral values of your nation of my nation to the two most powerful nations over the last several hundred years so when we talk about how worship can destroy the world I think we have to just say if we would like to do that we should just keep doing what we've been doing since 1450 to now you also hold it 1492 we all know at that as what's 1452 in 1450 to pope nicholas the fifth told the european nations what to do the document that i never even knew about until I was probably in my 40s I think now is one of the most significant documents of Christian history it's not one we're proud but it is one that's had profound historical significance when Pope Nicholas realized that the Muslims were knocking at the door on his eastern flank he made a strategic decision he sent out a document that now it was called dum de versus but we call it the doctrine of discovery it was the Great Commission of Pope Nicholas v and I'm sad to say it underlies what many of us know as the Great Commission of Jesus Christ in other words the Great Commission of Jesus Christ was reinterpreted through the Great Commission of Pope Nicholas v it became the the Great Commission of white European Christianity go into all the world he said invade search out capture vanquish and subdue all Saracens that's Muslims by the way you know after September 11th in my country a lot of people started asking why do they hate us this is why they hate us invade search out capture vanquish and subdue all Muslims and pagans what whatsoever in other enemies of Christ we're so ever placed so now the entire non-christian world has been put in the position of being enemies of Christ and so if we'd like to go against enemies of Christ we we're on the side of righteousness and light subdue them vanquish them and their kingdoms dukedoms principalities dominions possessions and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them movable and immovable goods it sounds like a tax document or an economic document and it is and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery suddenly I read that document and I the history of my country came into a new light and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors their kingdoms dukedoms countries principalities dominions possessions and goods and to convert them to Jesus Christ and His gospel no to convert them to his and their use and profit so this document the doctrine called the doctrine of discovery the part of a series of documents that came out in subsequent years there are the they were they were the religious documents that launched that launched the Christian jihad against the rest of the world that we've kept a secret from ourselves and so when you read the stories of Columbus sailing the world it wasn't for discovery and some abstract sense it was to fulfill the Great Commission as it was understood after Columbus's first voyage he went back again to Hispaniola and he wrote these words back to Queen Isabella it is possible with the name of the Holy Trinity to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell here there are so many of these slaves although they are living things [Music] there are as good as gold so there's a history to this Christian obsession with money that puts that values everything from oceans and mountains and soil err only in terms of money and values human lives and all living things only in terms of money there's a long history to this so much so that a living First Nations Scholar from Canada Canada named that huazi at Allen Road the people of Hispaniola had their lives actually let me stand down here and read it a little closer had their lives unjustly and savagely taken by as de las casas repeatedly notes professed Jesus followers and they were not as we all know the only ones to meet such a fate millions of these indigenous sisters and brothers on Turtle Island were killed at the hands of other Europeans as nation after imperial nation bearing Christ on their lips and crosses on their military standards followed suit lousy it's how and elsewhere wrote in fact I'll just tell you this next quote comes from a document that she wrote that I was asked to respond to as a Christian the publishers decided that what she wrote was too inflammatory so they didn't end up including it in the book that came out but I thought what she said needed to be heard and so I got her permission to continue to use the unredacted version which I'll read to you now from this vantage point Christianity has nothing absolutely nothing to teach indigenous people about how to live in a good way on this land in fact Christians have only demonstrated that there is something profoundly wrong with our cosmology and worldview behind more than five centuries of carnage carnage that has yet to even slow down Christians have so much negative history and Dogma to overcome within their own tradition I do not believe the religion is even salvageable the world is deep in the throes of an ecological crisis based in Western economics of hyper exploitation economies of hyper exploitation the planet will not survive another five hundred years of Christian domination so brothers and sisters do you understand that when you gather as Christians in a 500 year tradition of just the last 500 years of Christianity that if you want to to restore Christianity to its former glory you in a good possibility are doing something evil but if you become the preachers of a new way of being Christian that makes sense in light of our past and in light of our present catastrophes then suddenly a gathering of 500 preachers is so important it's going to require us to become more honest and forthcoming about so much of our history that we've kept secret from ourselves or we've minimized or we've just treated as if it were a nick an exception it's going to especially it's going to especially be hard for white Christians like myself who've lived with the privilege that came from our version of Christianity where we wrote the rules and we set the economy and we painted God with white cosmetics it's going to be especially hard for us to face this part of our history and we're going to be tempted to minimize the problems as exceptions and at every turn but if we are willing to accept the uncomfortable truth about Christian history I promise you I can tell you by personal testimony if we let that happen Jesus will appear as more precious and right and valuable and true than we've ever seen him before but he will also appear as the judge of the religion that bears his name not a judge who wants to condemn a judge who wants to save so let's just get a little more specific worship that celebrates an evacuation plan Osen leaves the earth and them to destruction destroys the world if we take seriously this evacuation plan gospel with my friend Diana Butler bass calls an elevator gospel I guess it would be translated to a lift gospel here but it's a gospel that's about escaping the world and leaving it behind if we were to take seriously the problems that that gospel creates it would require us to the very least changed the lyrics of a lot of our hymns and it would change the shape of a lot of our liturgy and we would it would require more than little adjustments on our part but I think it's what has to happen because a gospel that teaches us to seek first our own eternal security and personal well-being or salvation means that we break solidarity with our neighbors and we sell out the earth to the highest bidder you know I revered my grandfather growing up and I think about him a lot now that I am a grandfather I revered him I still do I I both of my grandfather's remarkable but my maternal grandfather especially I just loved him and he remains one of the most significant people in my life and I remember being a little boy we were driving through the state of Florida where I now live and there were those old fashioned oil derricks you know that bob up and down sucking oil out of the ground and I asked my grandfather we were sitting in the back seat of the car my dad and mom were in the front they were driving and I said to my grandfather what what are those things he said those are oil wells they're bringing oil out of the earth to make gasoline for our cars I said Oh what happens when they run out he said oh they'll never run out there's a lot of it a lot of gas under there and I said well someday they'll run out and my grandfather said Jesus will return before then you don't need to worry about it and you know I was a little boy I revered my grandfather but in my heart I knew he's probably wrong about that and of course I had no idea then that every gallon or barrel that we sucked out of the earth and put into the atmosphere was creating a blanket to trap the radiant energy of the Sun and that that was creating another whole set of problems but his answer would have been the same don't worry about it Jesus is coming back this world is going to be destroyed anyway it's not important worship that puts God on our side as the chosen people and therefore creates a sense of spiritual elitism religious supremacy and accept excessive unreflective confidence destroys the world because it gives us permission to dominate exclude and seek our own interests even to the harm of other humans and our living other living creatures are non-human neighbors whom we are also called to love because God loves this sense of chosen as' and elitist nobody articulated it better than the British missionary Leslie Newbegin who after spending 40 years of his life in India as a missionary came back here to England and saw it in a new light and he wrote the greatest heresy in the history of monotheism is a misunderstanding of election the idea that election means that God chooses some for elite blessing when in fact election means God choosing some for suffering and service on behalf of all it's a lot packed into that sentence a lot packed into that sentence worship that frames the story of the universe as a cosmic war that ends in eternal conscious bliss for us winners an eternal conscious torment for the losers helps destroy the world because it justifies this history that I've just talked about the idea that the winners are absolute winners and the losers are absolute losers and that we divide the world into the winners and the losers and aren't we blessed to be among the winners so much of our preaching is about patting ourselves on the back and of course we're praising God for us being blessed but do you understand the effect of that on those who aren't considered blessed is well historically it's it's catastrophic worship that renders us clean and them unclean destroys the world I wrote about this in a book called why did Jesus Moses the Buddha and Muhammad crossed the road and I wanted to write a book about religious identity and religious violence and as soon as you start researching that you quickly come into contact with the language of clean and unclean and as I was working on that book I went back and reread Acts chapter 10 Paul's encounter with Cornelius where in entering the house of an unclean Gentile he has a revelation that were the where God says to him you should never again call anyone clean or unclean what do we do with baptism interestingly he baptizes Cornelius's house but whatever he was doing he wasn't saying now you're one of the clean like me in a sense I think he was baptizing them into a new way of living a new way of seeing the world where we stopped seeing the world in those dualistic terms of us and them clean and unclean because the fact is if you're watching the news of what's going on in my country suddenly anyone with brown skin or black skin is seen as unclean and you're allowed to put them in cages and you're allowed the the the Bohemians who are trying to get in are being turned away you know after this tragic hurricane you you realize that once you call people unclean you're only a few steps from other things that our history has told us are terrifying and I know you have similar movements here and and we have to say as preachers how much responsibility do we want to take for perpetuating those dualistic categories in in our preaching and in our songs and in our Eucharistic liturgy and in our prayers and in our readings worship that empowers toxic masculinity whether it's bureaucratic or charismatic patriarchy and the suppression and stigmatization of women and LGBTQ people and others destroys the world if we continue building up this idea of God as the super patriarchy as the super man as the super macho dude who will come back and really show his enemies what they deserve if this is the image of God that we continue to perpetuate an image of God that can be found in the Bible and then we will have to say that we will play a role in what that toxic masculinity does that has been empowered by our active or complicit support suddenly you realize that when Paul wrote in Galatians that in Christ there is neither male nor female Jew nor Greek slave nor free Paul was elucidating the gospel of the kingdom of God that Jesus preached and this is a gospel that ultimately subverts that kind of toxic patriarchy and in Jesus very use of the word father Jesus is subverting patriarchy although we have used his use of the word father to reinforce it worship that reduces Jesus to a variable in a cosmic damnation salvation equation or demotes Jesus to the level of personal Saviour destroys the world even though it has been energized by the evangelical versus liberal tensions the fact is when when Jesus is is reduced in any of these ways isn't it ironic that one of the big debates in the church has been who has the higher Christology when in a certain sense who has the higher version of a christ reducing Christology the fact is when Jesus is shrunken to the level of a personal Savior who goes along with my personal computer and my personal communication device and my personal playlist and all of my other personal accouterments you understand we're already in the wrong ballpark when we're playing in that game we're already on the wrong pitch when we're playing that game and and we have to rediscover a Christ of cosmic proportions whose message is good news of great joy for all creation worship that celebrates magical skyhooks and a predetermined future while guaranteeing that everything is under control right now ends up destroying the world because it allows us to be piously naively and irresponsibly complacent about the mess that we're in my grandfather who I told you I loved and you know his his worldview he loved Jesus which I loved about him but his the the framing of that in an in a story that the the world is just like a candy wrapper and it's going to be thrown away and the important thing this the candy bar inside that's like the human soul it's the only thing of value everything else has no value that framing of the story and that and the idea that what it's all about to have real faith is to be able to pray for a miracle so that the normal laws of nature can be subverted do you understand how in an ecological crisis when our irresponsibility to live harmoniously with our environment to fit with our environment by the way when Charles Darwin said survival of the fittest he didn't mean the most athletic or aggressive fittest meant the most fitting those that fit in with their environment the best you understand that when you have this sort of idea that Oh Finn with your environment doesn't matter because you can always pray for a miracle this ends up aiding and abetting the economy that's creating an environmental crisis we've got to deal with this my my mentor and friend Alice Willard said we are not only saved by grace we are also paralyzed by it in other words we developed an understanding of Grace and an understanding of miracles and an understanding of God's presence and action in the world that ends up making us all too often piously complicit and worship that requires us to say and sing Lord Lord but doesn't equip us to do it Christ taught and modeled or worship that requires us to believe things about Jesus and even worship Jesus but not follow him and be formed in his mind and spirit this is worship that will keep us going in the tradition of the last 500 years and in that way contribute to the ongoing destruction that was he at a land warned us about but what would happen if we actually saw our worship as empowering us to participate with Jesus in the saving of the world rather than its abandonment and describe destruction now listen we all know this at least I know this I imagine a lot of you feel a - that so much of the work of Christian ministry is trying to attract a crowd and the crowd is looking for a certain feeling and and your sermon should just be sure not to mess up the good feeling that the music creates and so in a way we've elevated a certain kind of in some of our churches it's a certain kind of rock concert and in other churches it's a certain kind of classical music concert and we argue about whether classical music or rock music should be the thing that primarily attracts people but our ultimate goal is to help them feel good as while the economy rolls on and the actual question of how do we help people be good and do good this really this just helps keep the whole system going and I'll have a little more to say about this in my message and the worship service tomorrow evening late tomorrow and worship that teaches us to seek forgiveness without sharing forgiveness worship that tries to to achieve a forgiveness transaction rather than introduce us into a forgiveness economy that kind of worship becomes an evasion of justice rather than a seeking of justice and again so much of our theology Protestants and Catholics for 500 years have been arguing about who has the best way to forgiveness but it's Protestants and Catholics together that have created the world that we're in and maybe it's time for both of us to look at this in a fresh way not seeking first forgiveness but seeking first God's kingdom and God's justice and then worship that relies on authoritarian and often quasi and errant leaders and compliant and even quasi cultic members destroys the world because it renders people susceptible to demagogues and artists who demand trust and obedience under threat of banishment punishment and death and worship that motivates primarily through fear guilt and shame destroys the world because it makes members easy to manipulate through fear guilt and shame and if you see people who are very very good and manipulating people through fear guilt and shame maybe it's time to say who taught those people to be so easy to manipulate who rendered them so compliant and so in summary worship that is a chaplaincy to an extractive and exploitive economy helps destroy the world because it keeps us straining at gnats while we swallow camels and helps us spiritual eyes poverty slavery sickness on hunger but never address actual poverty slavery sickness and hunger and in worship that lives by the donor and therefore dies by the donor because it is afraid to challenge or confront the donor destroys the world because at the end of the day I've come to realize that the donor is Lord it's funny a lot of us are really upset how government is run by powerful rich people but we haven't paid attention to how religion is run by powerful rich people and if we just want to be preachers to keep that going and and then to claim that the way we do it is the way God desires it then we won't ever be able to change it and and so we're at this point brothers and sisters where if we want to if we begin to see how worship can destroy the world we might then be ready to hear what my friend Alice Willard said also that if your image of God is unhealthy the more you worship the less healthy you will be because as Paul said we'll be transformed into the image of that which we worship and unfortunately that's for worse as well as for better but what Paul saw the vision he saw is as we with unveiled faces see the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another for this comes from the Lord the spirit his vision was of a worship that transforms us so that we can be agents of transforming the world but the question is what is the image that we are gazing at in the mirror and this might brothers and sisters this is my great concern that Sunday by Sunday the image of God that's being celebrated in song and prayer and sermon is an image that if we're transformed into that image will become more and more destructive just a quick story and then I'll close I was asked to preach at a church oh this is several years ago now and the the pastor said to me look the service is really simple there's a song and then your sermon and then some more songs so one song then your sermon so I'm the song began and after the song went on for about four or five minutes and it seemed nowhere close to being over I thought I'm gonna have to adjust my sermon and the song I remember I memorized the words the words were oh how He loves us how He loves us that was all the words and after about four or five minutes I realized well this is gonna go out for a while and I I started paying attention to the words and at first I thought well it's nice that people are singing about God's love that's that's wonderful although I about minute five I started thinking every time they say the word he I wonder to what degree that he is is being a hyper mask in lies masculinized pronoun that's that's reinforcing and their minds of masculine God Oh how He loves us huh and then after about minute eight I started noticing the word us and I started looked around a room and said this room is almost all white people and I wonder if unintentionally by saying us in a company of other white people the us becomes bleached and and I wondered if it also maybe creates us Christians versus them non-christians or us charismatic sources them non charismatic sore whatever it is and I remembered at about minute ten a more disturbing thought still hit my mind and by moment twelve minute twelve it really hit me if these folks need to sing for thirteen minutes about how God loves us who convinced them that God hated them so much that they need to be convinced that God actually loves them and so a whole lot of people because they have this sense that the kind of worship we're doing whether it's the kind that you consider better or worse a whole lot of people are saying both kinds look like they're destroying the world to me whether you have the better or worse form of worship that's destroying the world they don't really care they're basically saying I'm done with the whole thing but can I tell you I don't think we're better off taking people out of our churches and putting them in the hands of a blonde political leader I don't care where he's from you understand uh taking people out of our churches and letting them only be formed by Facebook and Twitter or only be formed by this or that advertiser or only be formed by this or that ideology I don't think we're in a better place we're only left with the same old stuff and the same old people in control you understand that's why I think we have to imagine worship that can save the world so that every experience of worship every element of every experience of worship actually aim to transform us more into the spirit of justice joy and peace it makes me want to ask what kind of worship could actually form people and to be the kinds of people that our world desperately needs right now what kind of worship what kind of preaching would do that and the person who I would like to let us I'd like to leave us with is this young woman you all know Greta Thornburg already can I make a confession through most of my years as a preacher I had another preacher over my shoulder he was my my example preacher and every one of my sermons he was critiquing in my imagination you know what I mean he was like my inner critic preacher might be your seminary professor it might be so you know but we all I'd like to invite Greta to become the person on our shoulder as we preach Greta said you may you say you love your children above all else and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes Greta said I love this she said people tell me I should study to become a clients climate scientist so I can solve the climate crisis but the climate crisis has already been solved we already have all the facts of solutions all we have to do is to wake up and change and she said I don't want your hope I don't want you to be hopeful I want you to panic and act as if the house was on fire and so I'd like to imagine Greta having a word to us about our preaching for this world that is being destroyed by the current system political-economic with its religious chaplaincy and I would dare to wish that the world's most powerful let's say Christianity's most powerful leaders some of whom you recognize I would wish that they would listen to Greta that a little child might lead them and if they were to listen to Greta I'm just imagine could you imagine if the greatest religious leaders of Christianity the most powerful white male leaders of Christianity would say in light of our current global emergency we hereby call on the Christians of the world to refuse to conduct worship as usual and instead we call for a time of creative disruption and liturgical and missional innovation could you imagine if they were to say we urge every Christian around the world to rediscover God as the loving presence who beckons us to grow beyond personal racial religious national and human selfishness we ask all the Christians of the world to rediscover Jesus as the in fleshed word who receives who reveals God's embodied solidarity with all creation we invite all Christians to rediscover the spirit as God's creative breath hovering over and moving through all of creation to foment justice join peace we it urge all Christians to rediscover the gospel of good news of great joy for all people but first for the poor and ultimately for all creation if they were to say to all of us stop doing business as usual but don't criticize what others are doing instead you improvise create and adapt stop being so afraid of breaking rules that made perfect sense in the distant past instead fear repeating the failures of the past and present in the uncertain future show the same creativity freshness and boldness in your time as your ancestors did in theirs dare to say you have heard it said but don't be slaves to the same old thing don't merely attend the tombs of the prophets behold God is doing a new thing and calling forth a new generation of leaders to face the current global emergency and preachers that's why I would urge you to think of the people who are trying to forge into this new territory and to say I would like to loan my voice as a preacher and as a worship leader and as a custodian and curator of public worship I would like to be part of the people who are taking this moment seriously and I'd like to be part of worship that saves the world [Applause] so mhm we have time we have a few minutes for some questions and so we'll have microphones on either side and if you could make your question very brief I'll try to respond briefly and if you make your question long-winded I will have a long-winded answer and it'll be terrible no but I so if we can have some questions and if you'll get the attention of the two folks of the microphones they will bring you the mic and then as soon as that person asks the question then look then the person with the mic will look around for someone else with her hand up and then they'll go to that person so we've got a question here and your name is hi thank you so much for those categories there's a particular my question is how can we have conversations with people to change their minds so for example there's a song I think it falls into categories two three and four it's written by the rend collective I can't remember all of it but there's one line you know Holy Spirit come invade us now which I don't like the militarism I don't like the chosen election thing and I also don't like the violence of it when I've said that to people they're like kind of well I like the song it makes me feel good I don't think of it as rapists in any way so you know that's your problem and when my husband told his pastor that he didn't like it the past was like well you know if you're kind of consenting to it how do you deal with um responses like that you know well first thanks for that question Esther because the responses that you've gotten don't they tell us something don't they tell us something so thank you for sharing that and this is where it's tricky and it's difficult and look your lives are already difficult your lives are going to be difficult either way so your lives are going to be difficult either way they might as well be difficult for the best purpose possible amen and I think we're going to have people upset with us no matter what we do here's the problem can I say it this way you're either going to have Esther and her husband upset with you or you're going to have someone else upset with you I'd rather I'd rather not have Esther and her husband upset with me because I think they're raising their concerns are important do we have a question over here yes I'm Helen I almost almost was about history I'm really interested in Celtic Christianity and and Hilde over Whitby and held a really important sin odd and I wonder if she she wasn't strong enough to say oi stop yes yes thank you so one of our interesting challenges you know the old saying that whoever wins writes the history and one of our challenges is often the people who won looking back like if we look at the people who are winning right now we aren't necessarily they aren't necessarily the people we would like to write the history can you let that sink in and if we look back and say that's been happening for a long time then we'll need to look at our history in a fresh way um so I I think that's and the Celts hold a beautiful role in this but let me just say one of our temptations is then to try to distance ourselves from the negative history and identify ourselves with what we now see is the positive history can you see the danger in that then we become the clean and they become the unclean and we're back into the same cycle so I think one of our great challenges at this moment is to own the ugly history as well as the beautiful history because ultimately what we're dealing with is not a problem of those people dirty people versus us clean it's a problem of us human beings we have a human problem here and when we own this as a human problem and know that we never escape it we will never be among the clean it will always be the problem it will be the flesh that is with us this is why Paul I think agonizes with the sense we all have these tendencies and so we'll hold this with us we how do we have someone over here yes right here yes go ahead so the church that I'm at is is is largely doing quite a lot of what you're already saying in terms the way frame things but we still got a way to go particularly in it being in a very white rich wealthy area the capitalism is still major issue and I guess my question is when you speak like this it all feels so much it's like where do you even start and how do you make sure that you take the congregation with you on the journey and don't just alienate them how do you how do you move them yes well that's a good question ask with one minute left but no but this is really the million dollar question and thank you for asking it let look let's be honest you will alienate some people it's just a question of what will a lien eight and four now you could alienate a lot of people unnecessarily or a few people strategically and and this is where I think our next lecture is going to be by Paula gooder and she's going to talk about the parables and can I just say I have become stunned looking at Jesus in this light now Jesus alienated a few people including some of the people who he thought were on his side but he was a master of communication and we're going to have to be masters of communication it's going to require us to rethink a lot listen I'm not trying to sell you anything here in fact I'll give this away for free but I just have been grappling with this question because I'm going through some disillusionment about my naivete about the communication process in light of Trump to be honest and in light of the way that religious people catholic protestant white religious people have lined up behind him with unprecedented zeal and and and my friends in brazil are telling me the same thing Polson arrow and and and and so on and so I'm I'm struggling with this myself so I've got a little short ebook it's called why don't they get it and if you go to my website it's it costs $6 u.s. but if you put in a code common good don't tell anybody this just for us but common good you can get that for free if that'll be helpful because it's my attempt to look at Jesus as a master communicator in these difficult times I think we have one more right here yes I'm just a survey ssin about and start the chat one of the churches that I'm working in is a thousand years old and we have some medieval wood carvings on the end of our pews and some of them depict slaves so that must be from like the 1400s yes because we only quite near the coast so I guess they could have come from from America or wherever but it kind of like they celebrated because they're these really unusual carvings and we want people to come and visit the church but they kind of symbolize this really horrible history don't know as well say it I think our buildings are kind of part of all of that oh my goodness you're backing Becky so Becky does everybody feel Becky's I mean you know you just being in this space you think when this space was renovated what the architecture says now compared to what it said before I've an architect friend who says architecture always wins whatever your message is architecture wins there's a church in Memphis Tennessee in my country you know something about where Tennessee is right and in Memphis Tennessee this the inside of the church was built in the 1800s the cities called Memphis you know where Memphis is right Egypt right it's done an Egyptian style can you imagine choosing Egyptian style to do a church in America in the decades after slavery longing for that era I'll just say I was in Northern Ireland a couple of years ago and I preached in a church and Northern Ireland Anglican Church and and on the back was a carving to honor the soldiers who went to India and and and I forget the exact language but it elevated the great British soldiers who went to defeat the pagans you know and it was and I thought if a person of when that was carved in the wall they never would have guessed how much Currie could be bought in that town and how the world would change and other and you'd wonder what would it feel like to be a person of Indian descent to come into that church and so this is a problem we face what do we do do we cover it up do we but here's what I think we do we start telling the truth about our history and it's and and we and we you you have to put it in writing somewhere and you have to have it on your website you and you have to let that now become something that pushes us in a new direction and that helps us emphasize our different view now and how we're changing that's an artifact of our past and the fact that we can't get rid of it forces us to tell the truth about it that's why you've heard in my country there are big arguments about what we do with Confederate statues and some people want to get rid of them what other people are saying no those things should be there they should just be in a museum where they can be because we don't want to obliterate them we want to remember that's part of our history well wherever we put it we've got to remember our history if we deny our history we won't we won't go into the future of the appropriate humility and resolve our time is up thank you so much for your attention god bless you you're we're in this together [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Church Times

Views: 2,916

Rating: 4.5087719 out of 5

Keywords: preaching, Festival of Preaching, sermon, Brian McLaren

Id: wP8QYflTB-s

Length: 59min 46sec (3586 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 07 2019