Monty Python’s The Life of Brian is turning 30, and I think it’s as fresh as ever.

At The New Statesman, Nelson Jones considers the legacy of the once controversial film:

[In Britain], Life of Brian remains as subversive as ever. If not an overt attack on Christianity, the film is devastating in its satire of religious behaviour. Blasphemy is parodied in the famous stoning scene. Just as pointed, in its own way, is the depiction of a would-be disciple who thinks that Brian will heal his wife’s headache because “her brother-in-law is the ex-mayor of Gath”. The scene in which Brian flees from a crowd of would-be worshippers manages to encapsulate the whole history of religion in around three minutes.

Brian himself is something of a holy fool. Though naive, and far more interested in getting off with Judith than in either revolution or starting a religion, he sees with more clarity than any of the idiots, charlatans and human sheep that constitute the local population. In some ways, he may indeed be the Messiah:

Look, you’ve got it all wrong! You don’t need to follow me! You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!

[HT: Call & Response Blog]

Tonight is National Night Out, known around here as Night to Unite (some controversy about where the money was going from a few years back).  Courtney, the kids, and I are hosting a block party.  We’ll have some grills going, a Frisbee throwing contest, and an outdoor movie.

My questions for you are:

1. What activities do you have planned for NNO?
2. What movie do you think we should show?  I planned on showing The Music Man, since it would appeal to the, er, more senior members of our block, but a neighbor thought that E.T. might be a better choice — and I think she might be right — but the problem is that E.T. is not streamable on Netflix, and I need a streamable movie.

In my ongoing series, pointing out the impending evangepocalypse, I bring you this news from Christianity Today:

Gender Debate: SBC Pastors Denounce NIV

Southern Baptist delegates passed a resolution criticizing the 2011 update and asked LifeWay stores not to sell the Bible translation.

Bob Smietana | posted 7/26/2011 10:02AM

Southern Baptists have asked their denomination-owned retail chain to stop selling a best-selling Bible translation, saying it contains errors when it comes to language about gender.

Church delegates—known as messengers—passed a resolution at their June annual meeting in Phoenix criticizing the 2011 update to the New International Version (NIV) as an “inaccurate translation of God’s inspired Scripture.” They asked LifeWay Christian Resources not to sell the NIV 2011, which avoids using male terms in passages where context suggests that both genders are intended, except where the pronoun in question has messianic allusions. [READ THE REST]

OK, let’s get this straight: evangelicals are rejecting an evangelical translation of the Bible, after they already buried another evangelical translation of the Bible because it wasn’t evangelical enough.

Zondervan, who holds the exclusive license to but does not own the NIV translation, has got to be nervous.  In the last couple of years, they have cut loose authors like Rob Bell and Doug Pagitt because those authors aren’t evangelical enough.  They’ve already taken it in the shorts after a long and expensive campaign to win support for the TNIV failed.  Now, the NIV itself us under attack.

Once this starts, the end has begun: you can’t be evangelical enough, because someone will always be more evangelical than you. It reminds me of a novel I’m currently reading about Vietnam — it’s an unwinnable war.  The only winning move is not the play:

How about a nice game of chess?

I don’t know if it’s what bell hooks had in mind when she wrote Teaching to Transgress, but Lauren Winner and I engaged in a bit of pedagogical usurpation at Fuller Seminary.  With no introduction other than saying that we were showing a film, we sat down after lunch on Friday and pushed play on Into Great Silence.

Filmed at the motherhouse of the Carthusian Order, Into Great Silence follows a group of monks who practice silence except for singing the daily office and a brief time of conversation on Sunday.  The film itself is an immersion experience into silence — it’s not what the unprepared viewer expects from a film.

Our class had varying reactions, from feelings of inner peace, to experiences of anger that lingered for a couple days afterward.  It was, ultimately, a galvanizing experience for the class and provoked a great deal of fruitful conversation.

My own experience of the film was an ultimately positive one.  At first, I battled the fidgets, then I battled sleepiness.  But by about the 40-minute mark, the film — which I had not previously seen — had drawn me in.  I was absorbed by it, and I didn’t look at my watch again, even as we approached the 3-hour mark.

It’s a great film that I highly recommend.  And I encourage you to really give yourself over to it if you watch it — allow this film to embrace you.

I arrived in Nashville on Thursday evening, just in time to take in the closing movie of the Nashville Film Festival, Cyrus, with the incomparable Gareth Higgins.  My tripartite review:

1. John C. Reilly and Marisa Tomei can act more with their faces than most actors can with their whole bodies.
2. Jonah Hill is uncomfortably huge (by that I mean he’s so overweight that it’s uncomfortable to watch.
3. It’s billed as a comedy, but it’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny.  It’s much more a tragicomedy.

After the film, I crashed the festival closing party and enjoyed the buffet.

Yesterday I ran a JoPa Productions Social Media Bootcamp for Pastors and Ministry Leaders at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church.  Good times.  And last night, as is my Nashvillian tradition, I joined Jay Voorhees at the legendary Station Inn to hear some bluegrass.  On stage was the equally legendary Roland White and a breathtakingly good back-up band.  At one point, Jay (a guitar player) looked to me (also a guitar player) and made the motion of chopping off his fingers, which is how I often feel when watching pickers who are so accomplished.

And today I’m addressing a group from the Alliance of Baptists about the intersections between emergence and their fellowship and about the Didache.

Gareth schooled me on the joys of bohemian Nashville, and I think I’m slowly converting…

Rick Bennett has taken his satire to a new level with this piece, imagining an Oscar roundtable discussion with Mark Driscoll, Brian McLaren, Ed Young, Jr., David Dark, and a fictional Baptist pastor (think Pastor Dan before he met Neo).  Here’s a snippet from the lattermost:

Rev. Smith: My wife made me go to see Blindside. I liked it. Sandra Bullock makes a pretty blond. I didn’t see anything else besides Up, when my grandkids brought it over. It was cute, but I didn’t like the chicken creature. Was it a girl? Thought it was a boy until the baby came along. I don’t like gender confusion. I did like the talking dog. That Hurt Locker sounds kinda interesting, but I suppose it has bad language. They always ruin the war films with bad language.

via cheaper than therapy: Oscar Roundtable.

A couple weeks ago, I watched (and blogged about) the David Di Sabatino documentary film, Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher.  David was kind enough to drop me an email after that post, and kinder still to send me a copy of his more recent film, Fallen Angel: The Outlaw Larry Norman.

It’s odd that I ever got into Larry Norman music when I was in high school, but I did.  In spite of growing up in a mainline Congregational church and having to this day never heard a Randy Stonehill song (as far as I know), someone turned me on to Norman’s music and I loved it.

I didn’t get the millenial theology, that’s for sure — famously, Norman’s song, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” was used in the campy Christian rapture film, A Thief in the Night.  And Norman’s music didn’t sound like the other Christian rock that my evangelical friends foisted upon me: Petra, White Heart, and Stryper.

Instead, Norman’s music sounded more like my favorite music: Led Zeppelin and their ilk.  His songs were often driven with acoustic blues rhythms, and his lyrics were shockingly raw:

Gonorrhea on Valentine’s Day,
and you’re still lookin’ for the perfect lay.
Why don’t you look into Jesus,
He’s got the answer.

That was all a bit of a neck-snapper for this nice, white suburban boy.

The fact is, it was clear to me even in the 1980s, when I was listening to Norman’s music on cassettes in my 1976 Ford Pinto hatchback that he was from a different version of Christianity than I.  I wondered what, if anything, I had in common with the Christianity that he was singing about.

I wonder that less today, but I am even more fascinated by Norman, Frisbee, and the Jesus Movement revival in the 1970s.  Fallen Angel isn’t particularly kind to Norman, but only because it tells the truth.  Like so many other gifted artists, he was tragically flawed and left a wake of broken relationships (including an unacknowledged son in Australia) and sour business deals behind him.  Throughout the many interviews in the film, the main feeling among those interviewed seems to be that they’re shaking their heads and wondering what-could-have-been.  And, not coincidentally, that’s almost verbatim what Chuck Smith, Sr. says at Lonnie Frisbee’s funeral in that film.

Both Frisbee and Norman died pretty much alone, far from the adoring throngs of fans that they’d known in the 1970s.  Maybe they were abandoned by the church (as they both claimed), or maybe they pushed the church away by their strange and sometimes abusive behavior.  Or, most likely, it was a combination of the two.  But, in any case, I’ve found both of Di Sabatino’s films to be poignant and tragic, and to open a window into an aspect of recent Christian history with which I was previously unfamiliar.

Well, it seems that my long-time friend and occasional sparring partner, Andrew Jones (TSK), has (once again) said we’ve reached the end of the emergent/-ing church movement.  TSK’s ambivalence for the “emergent/-ing” language and the partnership that some of us in the States have with publishing houses is well known.  And I think it’s always dangerous to start to declare something over as an historian when one is still up to one’s ankles in it.

To be fair, TSK clarifies in a comment on the post when he writes that in 2009 the ECM became,

less radical and non-offensive but actually larger in scope and impact than it has ever been.

Let’s take those in reverse order.

I used to think I knew what the term “radical” meant, but then I entered a doctoral program in theology.  How that term is used in the academy versus how it’s used in the streets and in the church is virtually unrelated, as far as I can tell.  What I now mean by “radical” is informed by Marxism (another word that’s dirty outside the academy, but everyone in the academy seems to know what you mean when you use it).

Karl Marx (he looks as nice as a grandpa)

In short, what Marx did was to see what others did not see,

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. (from The Communist Manifesto)

The capitalist system, he’s saying, is predicated on constant changes in production, which both wipes away all former fixedness of human existence and precludes the ability of the bourgeoisie or the masses to reflect on their existence because they are always too busy trying to keep up with said changes.  What is “radical” about Marx and Marxists is their ability to see and proclaim this, and to potentially catalyze a revolution that will overturn this way of being.  Of course, it’s somewhat ironic that now, 150 years after Marx, his ideas live on the academy but are virtually unknown in politics.

That being said, is the ECM still “radical”?  Has it ever been?  It seems to me that, yes, there is some radicality left in the ECM, for it seems to me that emergents are and have been among those proclaiming that the “emperor has no clothes” — here the “emperor” being the conventional church.  And, contrary to Aaron Stewart, who commented at TSK,

The Emergent conversation is coming to an end because people eventually get tired of just talking,

the fact is that those of us in the ECM have spent a lot more time doing than talking.  To push that even further, why that dichotomy?  When TSK travels Europe and talks to folks about starting new, off-the-grid Christian communities, is he “just talking”?  Am I, when I write a book or a blog post or give a talk somewhere?  Of course not.  Talking is actually doing, so let’s all stop using this tired trope, okay?

And secondly, is the ECM becoming “less offensive”?  Let me shake my Magic Eight Ball.  Mine reads, “Outlook not so good.” If my personal and anecdotal experience is any guide, the ECM is more offensive than ever.  In the States, the Evangelical Intelligentsia has determined that emergent leaders are not true evangelicals, leaving pastors like Dan Kimball and Bob Hyatt to choose between evangelicalism the ECM.  Personally, I have been disinvited from three speaking engagements this year, and one that I’ve got coming up in 2010 was moved off of a college campus and into a nearby hotel because of my presence at the event.

TSK notes that the conventional church in the UK and Europe has been more accepting of emergence in their midst, even supporting leading ECM thinkers like himself and Jonny Baker and underwriting emergingchurch.info.  Agreed.  From Rowan Williams on down, it seems that European church leaders are generally more comfortable with theological and ecclesiological innovation than their American brethren (although the protesters that have greeted Brian McLaren in Scotland and France and Germany show that European acceptance is not universal).

Interest in the ECM is peaking among mainline leaders in the States, if my speaking schedule is any indication.  I, for one, hope that this does not mean a lack of controversy — in fact, in one speaking engagement to which I just agreed, I’ll be speaking alongside Will Willimon, and we’ll be taking contrary positions on the benefit of denominati0ns.  That might lead to some controversy.

***

Lonne Frisbee

Last night I watched the documentary, Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher.  Although the productions leaves something to be desired, the content of the film is both fascinating and harrowing.  In brief, Lonnie Frisbee was a gay, drugged out hippie who converted to Christianity during an acid trip.  As it turned out, he had a knack for preaching and healing, and he was pivotal in the genesis of both the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard Associations, and he was like a son to Chuck Smith, Sr. and then to John Wimber.  But as his sexuality became more public, they both turned on him.  When he died of AIDS in 1993, he had been ostracized by the churches that he helped found, and he was surrounded only by his longtime friends from the Jesus Movement.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Max Weber‘s definition that charisma is,

a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.

That’s Lonnie Frisbee in a nutshell.

More damning, however, is Weber’s conclusion that religious charisma is always routinized and bureaucratized as the generation that follows the charismatic leader attempts to capture the charisma and make a living from it.

And that is Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard.

If anything — and I think that TSK may agree with me on this — the question that looms over the ECM is whether it will become domesticated as the first generation of leadership passes the mantle to the second.  But, the truth is, the answer to that lies not with me or TSK, but with you.  Yes, you.

[UPDATE: It seems that TSK took my post to be more in-your-face than I meant it.  I really used a couple disagreements he and I have and used them as a jumping off point to reflect on movements in general, and the ECM and Calvary Chapel and Vineyard specifically.  My apologies to Andrew if this post seemed overly antagonistic.]

Last night, I watched the HBO documentary, The Trials of Ted Haggard, and then caught the second half of Ted and Gayle Haggard’s appearance on Larry King Live.

I went in quite skeptically.  I know a couple persons who knew/know Ted, and they describe him as something of a meglomaniac.  No surprise, Alexandra Pelosi paints Ted as a sympathetic figure.  In fact, using footage from her earlier documentary that features Haggard, it’s clear that she has a real affection for him.  Through the doc and the LKL appearance, I couldn’t really get a handle on Ted.  He’s pretty circumspect on many issues; for instance, he just wouldn’t answer the question when a caller from Orlando who described himself as a gay Christian man asked Ted about the possibilities of being a gay Christian. Ted’s response was basically: read your Bible and get into a good church.  Ted obviously doesn’t feel the authority to judge anyone right now, which is surely smart on his part.

What stunned me, both in the doc and more acutely on LKL, was Gayle Haggard.  Either she is one of the finest actors I’ve ever seen, or she is one of the most spiritually and psychologically healthy persons on this planet.  She answered every question with composure.  She’s not the stand-by-your-man-no-matter-what, mindless, conservative evangelical woman that some have portrayed her to be.  Nor is she the unkempt, sexually uninterested wife that Mark Driscoll infamously insinuated when the scandal broke (of course, Mark’s orginal post is gone, but the Internet never forgets!).

She is, instead, thoughtful, kind, gracious, and forgiving.  She has stuck with Ted through a truly horrific experience.  She has accepted his remorse and granted him forgiveness.  And, as a cherry on top, the Haggard’s eldest son, Marcus, joined them for the last bit on LKL and he was even more composed than Gayle.  This is a truly extraordinary family…

…Or, they are positioning themselves for a new career.  I’ve been told by one insider that the Haggards, basically broke, are hoping to establish an income by writing and speaking about their trials.  Indeed, at the end of LKL, both Gayle and Ted said several times that they want to “communicate their story.”  Fishing for a book deal? Speaking gigs? A reality TV show?  Very possibly.  So, my cynical side has to acknowledge the possibility that Gayle’s (and Ted’s and Marcus’s) grace and composure is actually a patina, covering a family in great distress trying to dig themselves out of a massive financial hole.

I suppose time will tell.
 

My friend, Patton Dodd, has a piece up on Slate in advance of Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary, The Trials of Ted Haggard, premiering tonight.  Patton used to work for Haggard and New Life Church, primarily as a writer and editor, so he writes about Haggard with some authority.  Money Quote from Patton:

Two years have gone by with little more than occasional peeps from Haggard, and now he’s back in The Trials of Ted Haggard, an HBO film directed by Alexandra Pelosi, a sort of sequel to her Friends of God,
that documents Haggard’s dreary life in exile–no job, no home, no
friends, no ministry. Earlier this week, when CNN’s Anderson Cooper
interviewed Pelosi, he tried to open with a question about the fallen
minister’s “spiritual restoration.” Pelosi interrupted Cooper before he
could finish the question, saying she couldn’t speak to Haggard’s
mental or spiritual condition. Fair enough. But Cooper’s question is
the right one–for journalists, for Haggard, for his former church, and
for countless other congregations that have suffered similar betrayals.

I spoke to Patton on the phone last night, and one of the more vexing questions in my mind is this: Why is Ted Haggard promoting a documentary about himself?  It seems odd, doesn’t it?  Would Roger Smith promote Roger & Me?  Definitely not. 

I’d like a journalist to ask Pelosi and/or Haggard what is the financial arrangement between them, and that might color how we all view this “documentary.”

Regardless, I’ll be watching it tonight.  And I’ll be interested to read all of your comments here.