Don’t Call Me “Pastor”

May 1, 2013 By 15 Comments

Seth Merrin said that having no titles is symbolic, but it really works. (Earl Wilson/The New York Times)

When I talk to journalists, I regularly need to ask them not to refer to me as “Pastor Tony Jones,” or “Tony Jones is a Christian pastor…” That’s because I am not, currently, a pastor. Call me a “minister” or a “clergyperson” or a “theologian-in-residence,” but not a pastor.

“Pastor” is a role, not a title. Even better than a noun, it’s a verb, and if one is “to pastor,” then one needs a congregation to pastor. Deriving from the word for shepherd, a pastor needs sheep.

But, as you might guess, I’d rather do away with titles in church life altogether. I am firmly against hierarchies — bishops, synods, general assemblies, district superintendents, etc. — because they are bad for the gospel. They may be good for organizational proliferation, but the gospel has absolutely no interest in organizational proliferation.

Last weekend, the New York Times reported on Liquidnet, a brokerage firm that has recently done away with all titles. Seth Merrin founded Liquidnet, and the interview with him is fascinating — and should be studied by pastors, church council members, and denominational employees. Here are some money quotes:

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The Way of the Agnostic

January 21, 2013 By 41 Comments

How do you evaluate the claims of a religion? Many readers of this blog are agnostic or atheist (as witnessed in the comments of the latest Questions That Haunt (which I will answer in the next 24 hours!)). Well, Gary Cutting has some words of wisdom for you:

To evaluate a religion, we need to distinguish the three great human needs religions typically claim to satisfy: love, understanding, and knowledge.  Doing so lets us appreciate religious love and understanding, even if we remain agnostic regarding religious knowledge.  (For those with concerns about talking of knowledge here:  I’m using “knowledge” to mean believing, with appropriate justification, what is true.  Knowledge in this sense may be highly probable but not certain; and faith—e.g., belief on reliable testimony—may provide appropriate justification.)

A religion offers a community in which we are loved by others and in turn learn to love them.  Often this love is understood, at least partly, in terms of a moral code that guides all aspects of a believer’s life. Religious understanding offers a way of making sense of the world as a whole and our lives in particular.  Among other things, it typically helps believers make sense of the group’s moral code.  Religious knowledge offers a metaphysical and/or historical account of supernatural realities that, if true, shows the operation of a benevolent power in the universe.  The account is thought to provide a causal explanation of how the religion came to exist and, at the same time, a foundation for its morality and system of understanding.

He continues:

There remains much more to be said about the status of religious knowledge, looking in detail at the cases for and against various religious claims.  My own view is that agnosticism will often be the best stance regarding religious knowledge claims (both religious and atheistic).  But my present concern is to emphasize that, even if it falls short of knowledge, religion can be an important source of understanding.

Non-believers — and many believers themselves — assume that, without a grounding in religious knowledge, there is no foothold for fruitful religious understanding.  But is this really so?  Is it perhaps possible to have understanding without knowledge?  Here some reflections on the limits of science, our paradigm of knowledge, will be helpful.

Read the rest: The Way of the Agnostic – NYTimes.com.

I’d be keen to hear what some of you agnostic and atheistic readers think of his essay. (For the record, I’m currently somewhere on the Christian agnosticism/igtheism spectrum.)

Filed Under: christianity in america Tagged With: 41 Comments

John Piper, Doug Pagitt, and a Lame Duck

January 2, 2013 By 19 Comments

John Piper (StarTribune/Bruce Bispring)

Some interesting items in the news last Sunday. Rose French wrote a profile of the semi-retiring John Piper, in which Your Favorite Blogger was quoted:

Tony Jones, a theologian-in-residence at Solomon’s Porch church in Minneapolis, is one of Piper’s frequent critics.

“I don’t think the fundamental nature of God is wrath at human sin,” Jones said. “I’m not going to say God isn’t disappointed by human sin … but at the very core of Piper’s theological vision is that God’s wrath burns white-hot at your sin and my sin. When I read the Bible, that’s not the God I find.”

Piper offers no apologies for his theology.

“If you try to throw away a wrathful God, nothing in Christianity makes sense. The cross certainly doesn’t make sense anymore, where [Jesus] died for sinners.”* His views of the tornado and bridge collapse, he said, “are rooted in the sovereignty of God. Even though people see them as harsh, negative, wrathful, whatever, they are good news.”

He said he considers himself a “happy Calvinist — which is an oxymoron. I’m on a crusade to make that not an oxymoron.”

Over in the New York Times, Doug Pagitt rated a quote in a story about church planting:

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Another Bad Argument against Marriage Equality

February 28, 2012 By 22 Comments

Andrew Rosenthal at the New York Times:

Perhaps the most ridiculous argument against marriage equality is the one voiced most recently by David Bates, a Republican member of the New Hampshire legislature – that homosexuality is a choice, and thus same-sex marriage is not a civil rights issue.

“Civil rights have to do with intrinsic qualities that a person just can’t change,” said Mr. Bates, the sponsor of a bill that would repeal New Hampshire’s marriage equality law. Being gay, he said, doesn’t qualify. “There’s no other example of any basis that we afford a civil right based upon a behavior or a preferential choice,” he said.

It’s astonishing that anyone in the 21st century would hew to the notion that humans choose their sexual orientation. I wonder when Mr. Bates made the affirmative decision to become a heterosexual.

But in any case, the preference issue isn’t sufficient to end the conversation. We choose our religious affiliations—or at least we have the freedom to choose—and yet it’s illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of religion.

READ THE REST: David Bates of New Hampshire Describes Sexuality as a Preference – NYTimes.com.

Filed Under: glbt Tagged With: 22 Comments

Are We Out of Big Ideas?

August 18, 2011 By 8 Comments

In Sunday’s NYTime, Neal Gabler surmised that we’re out of big ideas.  Surprise, surprise, he blames social media and mobile technology for the sad state of how dumb we are:

The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.

We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions.

Gabler is wrong.

As someone who is attempting to make an impact — and a living — as a public intellectual, (mostly) outside the walls of academia, I welcome our society’s changes.  This blog, for instance, is the platform for a pretty damn robust conversation around theological ideas.  And it’s open to anyone, not just those who are paying big bucks to a seminary.

And I’m all for that.

By the way, thanks for reading.

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Homoerotic Churches

July 13, 2011 By 67 Comments

There’s been a lot of talk so far this year about the church and mixed martial arts (MMA).  The New York Times had a story in February, “Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries,” which read, in part,

Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events.

The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”

My former friend, Mark Driscoll — he who calls out “effeminate worship leaders” — has gotten into the act, too, saying in a video, “I don’t think there’s anything purer than two guys in a cage.”

With all this talk about MMA in the church, does anyone else see what I do: MMA is the most homoerotic sport I’ve ever seen.

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And the Moral of the Article Is…

July 9, 2011 By 14 Comments

In today’s New York Times, Mark Oppenheimer has a story about an evangelical couple who, in their early 20s, wrote a book advocating natural family planning (that’s a euphemism for abstaining from intercourse, or pulling out early, when the woman is ovulating — or simply having a bunch of kids).

Now, a few years later, the couple is divorced with shared custody.  They’ve left evangelicalism — they each attend prog-liberal churches — and they have publicly repudiated their book.  They’ve asked Eerdmans to take it out of print (oddly, the article notes that it will never be available as a Kindle book, but it already is).

It’s a short article, so there’s not much nuance.  But the moral of the story seems to be: Christians in their 20s shouldn’t write books.  (At least not books that advocate theological or moral positions — if you wanna write a book about, say, how to get better gas mileage, I guess that’d be okay.)

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Byassee on Kristof

November 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

From the Call & Response Blog at Duke:

I heard an old-time evangelist preach to a full house here at Duke the other night. The crowd was buying what he was selling. They laughed at the jokes, nodded at the profound points and lined up for the altar call.

The evangelist was Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. I mean him no disrespect by comparing him to an evangelist. He spoke with the boldness and conviction of Billy Sunday, Billy Graham and the apostle Paul all rolled into one. And the message he spoke was as true as anything those other men preached. The altar call was a line that stretched outside the building for his signature on the book. The sellers didn’t bring enough copies. As jaded as the Facebook generation is, they wanted to sign up for this.

via Duke Divinity Call & Response Blog | Faith & Leadership | Jason Byassee: The moral challenge of our century.

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