In the course of reading Redstate.com’s analysis of the Philly vote in this week’s Pennsylvania primary (an analysis which convinces me that, despite the smooth assurances that the Democratic coalition will come back together just the same as always once Sen. Obama limps to the finish line and finally secures the nomination, the Obama-McCain general election is going to look very different from what we’ve been used to seeing lately), I found a link to an old piece in the Village Voice written by Michael Gecan (a community organizer in the footsteps of Saul Alinsky, as Sen. Obama was) titled “The Tribes of Yale.” It’s a fascinating piece of cultural-political analysis; and if Gecan’s assertion that conservative political leaders “don’t know what in the world—in the bigger, broader world where most moderate Americans live and work, play and pray, and try to raise their kids—they are for” is inaccurate, as I’m quite sure it is, I think his broader argument that they’re driven more by what they’re against than by what they’re for is thought-provoking, especially in the context of his overall understanding of the liberal/conservative cultural clash. Even if his conclusions are incorrect, the story he tells is an important one, I think, for those who would seek to understand American politics in the first decade of the third millennium AD.
All aboard!
Ready to Ride
Sixth Street, sun is going down;
Pavement’s cool underneath.
A vagrant, so they say in town;
Seems like mercy can’t compete.Sleeping in a doorway
Near the docks of Oyster Bay.
Thirteen years of carrying shame,
Never hearing the voice of the One who took his blame.
A whisper—
He raised his head . . .Surrendered out, do you believe,
Are you ready to ride the train?
Abandoned not by love, you’ll see,
If you’re ready to ride.A one-piece paper suitcase;
A past whose future was foretold.
A life not made for dying;
Instead the mystery began to unfold.
Unfolding—
He raised his head . . .Chorus
Bridge
Born into despair an orphan child—
Will You care for me?
And like the train that saved me,
Adopted in by love eternally.Opening His arms, He wants you rich, you poor, you black, you white;
Receive His love that runs so deep and high and long and wide.ChorusWords and music: Matt Berry
© 1998 Photon Music
From the album Clear, by Clear
My thanks to Bill for directing my attention to this song; he posted the video and got the song stuck in my head, so I went out and bought the CD (which was dirt cheap on SecondSpin, at least). I’ve been thinking about the lyrics off and on ever since. It’s not the greatest lyric I’ve ever run across (it seems to me the bridge gets a little muddled for a moment), but I love the song’s central image, which I think the video captures quite well. In particular, I think there are two things this lyric gets at which we too often forget.One, we are the vagrant in the face of God’s mercy and grace; as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, we are the beggars at the foot of God’s door. We none of us earn our way to God; we can only accept his unearned (and too often unwelcome) invitation. By mercy and that alone we live.Two, God’s invitation to us isn’t to some private little one-on-one thing, it’s to ride the train. When you get on the train, you share the journey with whoever else is on there, and the train goes where it’s going to go; you have no control over where it’s going—that was determined by the one who set the route for the rails—or who your companions are. You’re all in the journey together; your only choice is to take it or get off. It seems to me that’s a wonderful metaphor for the life of faith. It’s not like driving our own car, because we don’t have the freedom to pick the route or set our own speed—God does that—or to make the journey on our own, because we become fellow travelers with the rest of the people of God, whether we always appreciate that fact or not. The train, the church, is going, God knows who and where and why and how fast, and he simply invites us to climb aboard and take our part in what he already has in process.”The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace . . .”
Fantasy, science fiction, and the mysterium tremendum
I argued yesterday, commenting on an interview with Lois McMaster Bujold, that “fantasy and science fiction, at their highest, appeal to an essentially theological impulse in the human spirit.” This morning I followed a link from that interview to the Mind Meld blog on SFSignal, where they asked a number of science fiction writers to answer the question, “Is science fiction antithetical to religion?” What I found is that, not only did very few answer “yes,” several of them agreed with my thesis.
Gabriel McKee:
Samuel R. Delany wrote, and I agree, that “virtually all the classics of speculative fiction are mystical.” Regardless of the stated beliefs of its authors—who aren’t all atheists, by the way—SF works best as a genre about the Big Questions of being and meaning, and any halfway-satisfying answer to those questions has to have a bit of religious flavor.
Carl Vincent:
Speaking entirely from personal experience, one of the things that science fiction drives me to do over and over again is to step outside and look at the night sky. While doing so I not only dream of space travel and daydream about whatever world I was just reading about, but I also stand in awe of my Creator and the wonder of the universe He created. Science fiction has never been antithetical to my personal religious experience, it has always enhanced it. Science fiction makes me think, makes me question things, and makes me not only evaluate my universe but also makes me evaluate my place in it.
John C. Wright:
Let us be honest. Science fiction is not necessarily about the science. It is about the wonder. Any writer man enough to portray religion as a source of wonder, as Gene Wolfe does, can make it a fit matter for science fiction.
I doubt many of these folks have read Rudolf Otto’s classic book The Idea of the Holy, but they have the clear sense that the best SF, for all its rationalist foundation, has at least a touch of the numinous.Perhaps the most interesting response along these lines came from a chap named Adam Roberts, who contends that “science fiction as a genre has its roots precisely in the religious conflicts of the Reformation.”
I think it’s a complex and evolving discourse still determined by its Protestant roots, a mode of art that is trying to articulate a number of core fascinations essentially religious in nature: questions of transcendence (‘sense of wonder’ as we sometimes call it, or ‘the Sublime’ in the language of literary criticism); atonement and messianism in particular.
He makes a compelling thumbnail argument; I’m going to have to pick up a copy of his book, The Palgrave History of Science Fiction, in which he argues his case at length. If he’s right, then it’s not merely that “fantasy and science fiction . . . appeal to an essentially theological impulse in the human spirit”; rather, going a step further, they arise out of that impulse as an expression of our need for transcendence—which is to say, ultimately, our need for God.
Fantasy, science fiction, and the epic
Lois McMaster Bujold is one of my favorite fantasy/science-fiction authors, so I was glad to read this interview with her on the blog Fantasy Book Critic (which looks, btw, like a good one for those who enjoy that kind of literature). She’s a sharply perceptive writer who doesn’t simply write conventional “genre fiction,” but who takes full creative advantages of the opportunities of her genres. (For instance, in her fantasy novel The Curse of Chalion, she created what might well be the first truly believable serious theological setup in fantasy since Tolkien.) As such, I was particularly interested in her analysis of genres, an analysis sparked by her experience in writing The Sharing Knife, in which, as she says,
I wanted to see what would happen when I tried to make a romance the central plot of a fantasy novel—and wow was that ever a learning experience, not only about what makes a romance story work, but, more unexpectedly, uncovering many of the hidden springs and assumptions that make fantasy work. It turns out to be a much harder blending that I’d thought, going in—after all, I’d had romantic sub-plots in both my fantasy and my SF books before, and wasn’t it just a matter of shifting the proportions a bit?Well, no, it turns out. The two forms have different focal planes. In a romance in the modern genre sense, which may be described as the story of a courtship from first meeting to final commitment, the focus is personal; nothing in the tale (such as the impending end of the world, ferex) can therefore be presented as more important. . . .Viewing the reader response to the first two volumes of TSK, it has been borne in upon me how intensely political most F&SF plots in fact are. Political and only political activity (of which war/military is a huge sub-set) is regarded as “important” enough to make the protagonists interesting to the readers in these genres. The lyrical plot is rare, and attempts to make the tale about something, anything else—artistic endeavor, for instance—are regularly tried by writers, and as regularly die the grim death in the marketplace. (Granted The Wind in the Willows or The Last Unicorn will live forever, but marginalized as children’s fiction.)I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.)
There’s a lot of truth in that, but I don’t think it’s quite right. As regards mysteries, I’ve written somewhere on the idea (which I ran across somewhere else—I’ll have to track that down) that the appeal of mysteries is the restoration of order to chaos; justice is a central component of that (the restoration of moral order), but not all of it by any means. That’s why so many of Agatha Christie’s novels end with two members of the surviving cast heading toward marriage—it’s another dimension of the restoration of order. With science fiction and (especially) fantasy, I think the appeal is the restoration of order to chaos on an epic scale; this scale demands political activity, but to characterize these plots as merely political is to overstate the point, for in fact they often transcend politics. One thinks for example of Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, in both of which the aim is nothing less than the destruction of the source of evil in the universe (though the two works construe that source drastically differently); these are nothing less than fantasies of theological agency. Another example would be the great exploration stories of science fiction, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama; I’m not sure how one would label that, but it’s clearly not political in its appeal.Though there are definitely fantasy and science fiction stories which can be accurately described as “fantasies of political agency” (most especially the classic “male teen power fantasy”), I think there’s a broader story here. Fantasy and science fiction tap into the desire for the epic that we see reflected in literature going all the way back to works like The Illiad and The Odyssey, Beowulf and The Tain; it’s the desire for a view of reality that’s big enough to satisfy our sense of ourselves, our sense that “there’s more to life than this.” We want stories that are “larger than life,” by which we really mean we want stories that show us that life is larger than the ordinary routines of the day-to-day; we want the sense that there really is a bigger story out there, if we can just find it. As such, I would argue that fantasy and science fiction, at their highest, appeal to an essentially theological impulse in the human spirit.
Worship as orientation
“The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace. It is from this heart posture that true liturgy flows, that music and arts find their highest calling and that the light of a worshipping community shines as a beacon of hope to a suffering and searching world.”—David RuisMy thanks to Jared for posting this quote from one of my favorite worship leaders (and also for the excellent post in which the quote is contained). This is why any worship service, whether “traditional” or “contemporary” (two labels which usually bear little or no resemblance to descriptions of reality), should begin with a call to worship: we gather to worship because God summons us. The initiative is his, not ours. Failure to remember that fact and take it seriously is, I’m convinced, the root of most of our squabbles over “worship style.” We fall into the trap of thinking that worship is all about music and how we do things and other matters of style and preference, and forget that all those things, while not incidental, are secondary. Worship, at its core, is an orientation: specifically, toward God, flat on our faces. The rest should develop accordingly, as Ruis says.This is, I think, the most important thing to remember for those of us whom God has called to lead his people in worship; what we are about is to lead people in precisely this. It’s the reason I believe in liturgy, whatever specific content we may put in it (such as whether the songs were written three centuries ago or three weeks ago), because the ancient form of the Christian service was designed to serve this purpose; but at the same time, if we begin to value the form for its own sake, we make an idol of it and thus defeat that purpose. What matters is that we teach people to trust God’s “sovereign power and unlimited grace” enough that they will be willing to abandon their agendas for his—that we teach them to come to worship out of that attitude, as an expression of that trust—and that we lead them in that by living and worshiping that way ourselves. Put simply, the most important qualification for a worship leader isn’t skill or talent or charisma: it’s a heart and life oriented in this way to the worship of God.
Hooray for the men of the docks
Last week, a Chinese ship anchored off Durban, South Africa to unload a shipment of arms from China for the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. The South African government refused to stop them—apparently siding with Mugabe’s deputy information minister, who told a South African radio station, “Every country has got a right to acquire arms. There is nothing wrong with that. If they are for Zimbabwe, they will definitely come to Zimbabwe. How they are used, when they are going to be used is none of anybody’s business”—but the South African people did what their government would not do. The workers of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, who work the docks of their country’s ports, refused to unload the cargo, effectively stopping the shipment. When a South African court declared that the arms could not be transported across South African soil, the ship raised anchor and set sail. The nearest non-South African port would have been Maputo, Mozambique, but the Mozambican government wouldn’t let the ship into their territorial waters, so it headed off the other way instead, for Luanda, Angola. Here’s hoping the dockworkers there do the same, or perhaps that Namibia and Zambia refuse the arms passage; however it plays out, here’s praying they never get where they’re going.
HT: Gordon Chang
The erosion of language and cultural decline
B. R. Myers, wielding his club like a rapier as usual, has an excellent piece up at The Atlantic on the work of Ian Robinson, a British critic (an evangelical, as it happens) who writes primarily on the ongoing collapse of the English language. The piece is partly a review of Robinson’s latest book, Untied Kingdom, and partly a look back at Robinson’s first book, The Survival of English: Essays in the Criticism of Language, but like any good review essay, it’s as much about Robinson’s subject as it is about his books—a subject on which Myers has a lot to say in his own right. I particularly appreciate his trenchant summary of why the state of our language matters:
Our language itself is losing its power to express moral disapproval. Obscene and sinful are headed the way of decadent and outrageous; perhaps depraved will be watered down next.Such changes affect the way we think, because we do so in words. This is why Karl Kraus, the founder of modern Sprachkritik, or “criticism of language,” was so hard on the Viennese press of the 1920s and 1930s. He is alleged to have said that “if those who are obliged to look after commas had made sure they are always in the right place,” the Japanese would not have set Shanghai on fire. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but the New York Times article speaks for itself. People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.
Skeptical conversations, part IV: Considering humanity
Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-III here.
R: Before we start talking about sin, though, I want to make a couple other points. One, our created purpose as human beings, our highest good, is to know, love and serve God, which means in part to serve others and to care for his creation. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism, one of the founding documents of the Presbyterian churches, puts it, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” John Piper, a Minnesota pastor and author, has put a bit of a twist on that, rephrasing it as, “The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever”; he captures the idea that true pleasure is only to be found in following God.
A: Pleasure? Since when does Christianity care about pleasure? It’s all about duty and self-denial and giving up pleasures because they’re sinful.
R: I’ll admit there are Christians who’d make you think so, but that’s not the truth at all. Remember, God created everything, and he created us as physical/spiritual beings; he created physical pleasures, from the smallest to the greatest, and he created them because he likes them. He’s a God of love, and of joy, and the pleasures of food, drink, sleep, sex and all the rest are gifts he’s given us for our enjoyment.
A: Sex? You’d better watch out, or your Puritan ancestors will rise up and throw you in the stocks.
R: Pure slander. The Puritans have been thoroughly distorted by later generations; you’d be surprised to see what they had to say about marriage. Yes, sex is a gift of God, one of the deepest. He created us as sexual beings—Genesis 1 tells us that he created us in his image, male and female—and that’s not merely a physical reality. I know there are people who argue that gender is socially constructed, but I have to disagree; our maleness and femaleness goes right to the core of who we are. It’s a way in which we represent the diversity in God. And sexual intercourse itself is more than just a physical act, which I think is a lot of the reason it’s so pleasurable; it really is, in a way, two people becoming one flesh, as Genesis 2:23 says. It’s our little experience of the unity in diversity that is God.
Which is why it’s so important that sex be handled rightly. That’s the problem with homosexual sex: it unites two people of the same essence, if you will, rather than bringing the male and female together as one. And that’s the problem with sex outside of marriage. The sexual union, to be what it is supposed to be, needs to be defended from invaders, for one thing; and because we’re human and imperfect, it needs to be supported and nurtured, to become a deeper and truer unity over time. Sex without that support—well, it’s like trying to put an anvil on a table, it’s going to do damage.
A: A doctrine of sex; I would never have thought to hear such a thing. I don’t know if I buy the argument, but at least I can see how you stand where you do.
R: I think much of it follows logically from taking human sexuality seriously. But you can see, though, that God’s strictures on sex aren’t born out of a desire to squelch our pleasure, but rather out of the desire to make that pleasure as full and deep as he created it to be. In general, that’s true. As C. S. Lewis put it in the essay “The Weight of Glory,” our problem isn’t that we want too much but that we’re too easily satisfied, that we settle for thin, weak imitations of pleasure; in his image, we’re like a child that wants to go on making mud puddles in a slum because it cannot understand what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. When we take the easy way—whether with sex, or food, or sleep, or drink, or whatever—we don’t just debase ourselves, we debase the pleasure. You can see that most clearly with recreational drugs like cocaine and heroin, which are imitation pleasure in its purest form.
A: It seems to me that you’ve come back around to the question of sin.
R: True; but then, you can’t talk about human existence for very long without dealing with sin. There is one last thing that needs to be said about human beings, though: we are free, self-determining moral agents, and this is how God created us. This is the root of our moral responsibility, for clearly if we were not free to act we could not be responsible for our actions. But we are free to choose, free to say yes or no to God, and so our actions are our own—and thus we may be judged for them.
A: But I thought you said that God is in control of everything. Wouldn’t that logically mean that he determines the choices we make, and thus that we aren’t free?
R: Yes and no. If I go out and order a hamburger, for instance, two things are true at the same time: I ordered that hamburger because I chose to do so, and I ordered it because God willed that I do so.
A: But if God wills it, then your choice is fixed and thus cannot be free.
R: That’s not necessarily true, actually. Did you make any choices yesterday that you regret?
A: Actually, yes—I bought a hot dog at the game. It gave me indigestion.
R: Sorry to hear that. Why don’t you change your mind and buy something else instead?
A: Huh? That’s the past, it’s done—I can’t change that, obviously.
R: So that choice you made is fixed. Does that mean you did not freely choose to buy and eat that hot dog?
A: What does that have to do with this discussion?
R: I’m just trying to show that it’s logically possible for an action to be both fixed and free—because that describes every action we’ve ever taken in the past. Now consider my point earlier that God is outside our time stream—both our past and our future exist for him in the same way that our past exists for us—and the analogy I used to the author of a novel.
I don’t know if you know many writers; I have several good friends who are well on their way to completing novels, and one thing that’s true of all of them is that their characters are real people to them with minds of their own. My friends created those characters, but they aren’t puppets to be manipulated around the stage. Rather, they act out their own intentions according to their natures, sometimes doing things that their author didn’t expect, creating the story as they do so. And yet, it is the mind and hands of the author that produce the story, and the author who is completely in control. So in some sense, you see, everything that happens in the story is the product of two wills, of the author and the character; and authors will talk about their books that way, taking credit in one breath for writing a line of dialogue, but in the next crediting the character’s wit.
Now, this is only an analogy, and it’s limited; but I think it shows intuitively how it is possible for an action to be the result both of our will and of God’s will. God is outside the story of creation, while we are within it. From within, we are free agents, willing our own actions; from without, he is the author, writing every scene as he chooses. And after all, as free agents we are acting out our characters—and he is the one who created our characters.
A: I’ll have to think about this some more. I take it, then, that your explanation of human evil is that it is the result of human freedom?
R: More or less, yes. Adam and Eve, the parents of our race, chose to reject God. They alienated themselves from him and fell from the state of grace in which they were created; their actions left them guilty of sin and corrupted in their nature, and that is the nature their children inherited from them, and that the human race continues to inherit. Even in this, God was sovereign; he did not decree their fall in advance, as if he desired it, but he was still sovereign in their decision to rebel, though it grieved him. As Pascal said, he allowed us the dignity of causality, so that we might be truly in his image as free persons. In our fallen state, we are still free in the sense that our actions are not coerced by anyone else, but we are slaves in another sense: we cannot get free of the corruption in our nature, we are bound to it, and so we are slaves to sin. In everything we do, even at our best, sin is at work. This is what theologians call total depravity, that we are incapable of any action which is completely free from sin.
A: So you’re saying that we inherit our tendency to evil, as if it were in our DNA somewhere. Is that what the phrase “original sin” means, I assume?
R: Yes. We are born with our desires and motivations twisted and crippled, and this is the root of all the evil we do. It’s nothing we can fix or cure, because the damage runs all the way through us; only a radical change in our hearts can remove it. You might say that we need to start from scratch, to be born all over again.
A: Ahh, yes—“born again.” I’ve heard that phrase before.
R: It’s a phrase Jesus used in John 3, and it really is an apt description of what needs to happen if we are to be free from sin. It is, obviously, not a change which can happen through our own efforts, but only through someone else: Jesus Christ. I said earlier that God chose to respond to evil through self-giving love, and the coming of Jesus to earth was that response. The Father sent the Son, and the Son came willingly, and it is on that fact and its consequences that everything turns; T. S. Eliot called the cross “the still point at the center of the turning world,” and he was right.
Brief meditation: on art
What is art? It’s a question that resists easy answers, in large part I think because it’s beyond us to ever fully answer. Art is something we do after the image of God, because he who is Creator made us (to use Tolkien’s term) sub-creators in his image; art then is something which partakes in some way of the nature of God, and so I suspect that just as we will never be able to fully define God, so we will never be able to fully define art. But then, what is a definition? It’s an attempt to constrain something, to confine it to a purely rational and intelligible space so that we can say confidently that we know what it is, and thus have some control over it. For most things, that’s good, because most concrete things and most concepts are small enough to be defined; but God isn’t. We shouldn’t seek to define God, because if we could define him, he’d be too small to be God. By analogy, I wonder if we should really want to define art. If it were that small, would it be worth pursuing? Rather, just as God calls us to know him not by definition but by recognition—”My sheep know my voice”—so too I think understanding art is a matter of learning to recognize it when we see it.
That does still raise the question, though: what are we looking for? Is art a matter of great skill and technique—is it something that can be graded empirically? I don’t think so; skill and technique unquestionably have their part to play, but art is bigger than mere virtuosity. Art, I believe, is akin to priestly ministry, and the work of the artist is somewhat like that of the priest, in that art is an act of mediation. Much as the great Episcopalian preacher Phillips Brooks described preaching as “the communication of truth through personality,” I would argue that the artist mediates a vision of reality through their personality, gifts, and chosen medium, to give that vision a particular expressive form which can be intuitively and sympathetically apprehended by an audience. That vision doesn’t necessarily need to be objectively correct in order for the result to be art, just as one doesn’t necessarily need to worship the true God in order to be a priest; I do think it helps, though, and that a truer vision makes greater art, just as better skill and technique makes greater art.
Meditation: on barbering churches
“A haircut is defined by its edges. That’s what I was taught, that’s what I believe, that’s what I teach.” So declared my barber the other day, going on to talk about how if the edges are ragged or uneven, that’s what catches people’s eyes; and since he’s outstanding at what he does, and since what he said sounds perfectly reasonable to me, I believe him. He got me thinking, though: of what else could we say that? And specifically, is the church defined by its edges?
Of course, there are a lot of churches which quite deliberately define themselves by their edges, taking the “bounded set” approach to membership and identity: everyone who believes these twelve things is welcome, and anyone who doesn’t, isn’t. Keep the edges nice and neat, a sharp line between us and them, that’s the idea. It’s almost a way of defining the church by appearance. But what about churches which don’t take that approach? Are they, too, in some way defined by their edges?
I incline to think so, for a couple different reasons. Most obviously, there are those which quite deliberately and self-consciously invert that paradigm; they would tell you they don’t define themselves by their edges, but in fact, they do. It’s simply that, rather than taking pride in their nice neat edge, they take pride in having a ragged one—it’s their chosen mark of “authenticity.” “We’re open to x kind of people—we’re Christ-followers, we accept everybody just like Jesus did,” and so on. Certainly, sharing the desire of Jesus and Paul that the gospel should be preached to all people, regardless of any other considerations, is a good and noble thing; but focusing on the ragged edge for its own sake is unhealthy. For one thing, it can make us disinclined to challenge people to repent and pursue God’s holiness; some people won’t find that “accepting,” and they’ll leave. (Others, meanwhile, will answer the call, and grow in holiness, and as a consequence will no longer look different enough to remind everyone how accepting we are.) We need to remember that our purpose is to preach the gospel and make disciples of Jesus Christ, and that we can’t subordinate those tasks to any other goal, however noble.
For another, a focus on the ragged edge can all too easily become a fetish, and an opening for spiritual pride and self-delusion—the delusion, if nothing else, that we actually are accepting of all people, when actually we’re simply accepting one particular group of people who aren’t accepted elsewhere. That’s a noble thing in its own right, but it’s not the same as building a church where all people are truly welcome; for one thing, it’s much easier. Building a church to fit one “out” group really isn’t all that hard, as these things go; building a church in which the goal is that anyone who comes will be welcome is extraordinarily difficult (in fact, it’s impossible by human effort), because it means accepting people who don’t accept each other, and teaching them to get past that and accept each other as well.
Even leaving aside intentional self-definition, however, I do think that in part, the church will always be defined by its edges whether it wants to be or not. Most basically, the edges are where the church interacts with the world around it; thus, whether a church sees itself as a bounded set (defined by its boundaries, and thus by whom it chooses to admit or shut out) or a centered set (defined by its collective focus, on which its existence is centered), whichever of those two models it uses to define itself, the world is always going to be looking at the edges, and drawing its conclusions from them. Do we maintain a nice neat edge by only welcoming people who are just like us, or do we make room for people who stick out? (And if we do, do we allow them to continue to stick out, or do we set to work changing them?) Granted the difficulty of truly accepting people who “don’t fit,” do we try? Are we willing to pay the price to minister to people who are “extra grace required”?
It seems to me that if the church is being the church, we should expect some ragged edges. (This is the truth that gets exaggerated in churches that take pride in them.) After all, the only way to prevent that is to focus on the edges ourselves, and that’s not what we’re called to do; the church should be not appearance-driven but (to quote Jared Wilson) gospel-driven. As Jesus defines us, we are a people on the way, his disciples traveling together down the road through life, “following Christ in mission in a lost and broken world so loved by God” (to quote my denomination’s mission statement). This is why my own mental image of the church is rather like a comet: there are those who are farther along and more mature in their faith, leading the way for the church, and then others who haven’t come as far yet, and then the trailing edge is rather ragged indeed; but the key is that we’re all traveling the same direction, and that those who join us aren’t left to trail along behind, but instead are nurtured and discipled and mentored until they too are mature and strong in their faith and ready to do the same for others.
In a way, then, pastoring is a matter of barbering churches, but with a bit of a different emphasis than most people would probably expect. Being a pastor isn’t a matter of keeping the ragged edges trimmed; rather, we have to be careful to allow them, lest we end up trying to shut people out of the kingdom of God—and we need to make sure that the church as a whole understands this as well. At the same time, though, we need to make sure people aren’t left hanging around on the ragged edge, as if that was good enough; we need to bring them toward the center, toward the focus: toward Jesus. The movement of the church, and of everyone in it, must always be toward Jesus.