WHITE PEOPLE PROBLEMS (A response to "When white people don't know they are being white"

Today I read through a blog post entitled "When white people don't know they're being white." What stemmed the post was a combination of an apparently offensive Facebook photo and post by Pastor Rick Warren, something to do with the Red Guard in China, and a recent Chris Tomlin video that has been circulating the web featuring the Song "How Great is our God" song in a multitude of languages and featuring some scenes of people singing the song throughout the world.

I want to first start off by saying I truthfully am not the most culturally sensitive person. When I was 18 years old I went with a class to visit a local Sunni Muslim Mosque in the Greater Vancouver area, and low and behold I was asking the guide about terrorism. I know not the smartest most sensitive way to start a relationship with someone.

All this being said I think that there is something that has been missing in this conversation of cultural sensitivity. Very few people want to acknowledge that so much of these things are a reflection of our own North American culture. Chris Tomlin, as much as he might like to think that he is reaching the entire world really is writing music that reflects the culture and values of middle-class white America, and really that is who he is and where he has come from.

This highlights for me what I have seen to be a common problem. This problem is that the cultural sensitivity police actually tend to be white middle-class people yelling at more white-middle class people. The author of the blog certainly fits this prototype: a self proclaimed white middle-class individual, with apparent cross-cultural training and extensive cross-cultural travel experience. I have had the privilege myself of traveling to Eastern Europe as well as Latin America and India all places that are culturally different than my own. Nowhere have I seen any place that really cares about cultural sensitivity like we North Americans do. If you ever travel to India you may discover that people have no qualms about making stereotypical assumptions about who you are and there is no one there who tells them they are being insensitive or offensive. That is probably because no one cares about those types of questions.

Now before I continue I want to say that I recognize that there are some terrible ramifications of western colonization. I do not want anyone to think that I support or belittle the turmoil that has been caused around the world because of this. On many levels I do agree with the blogger. White Middle-class people do often go around and pretend that they are heroes, saving the day for the rest of the world. They can still be very insensitive and disrupting to other cultures. An example of this can be seen in the modern world missions when western missionaries go into a culture and do not take time to learn the customs of the people but pridefully try and create a little western-style church in a place that has not concept of western values. In such cases I think the author's advice to move forward with humility is a noteworthy point. Too often our intercultural communication has been laced with pride and haughtiness.

My point however is that the examples being address as wrongful are clearly not aimed at other cultures but clearly at the culture of which both Rick Warren and Chris Tomlin are deeply entrenched in, (mostly white) middle-class North Americans. Even the example the author gives of offending a Middle Eastern student of Egyptian descent is laced with middle-class hubris. Again from my limited experience of traveling through various parts of the country I have been able to see the massive impact western culture has had on the academic institutions worldwide. Although students entering academic institutions will of course bring with them their own cultural experiences and background it is hard not to believe that they will inevitably be shaped by the middle-class western values that have almost certainly become a part of their academic institution. Similar to Hellenization shaped the Mediterranean world during the post-Alexandian period. How much more so is this true when foreigners come to schools in Western Europe and North America.

I want to conclude by saying YES there are real problems in intercultural communication; YES there are deep rooted issues caused both currently and historically by white westerners; and YES we do need to approach any person with a certain amount of humility so that we can do our best to be sensitive and understanding. But NO, it is not wrong for Chris Tomlin to show his Church that the song he wrote has connected with people of other language groups and to celebrate the Church's worldwide presence by using the tools of his culture (AKA flashy multimedia). I will not venture to give judgement on Rick Warren's post but I will wager to guess the woman who wrote him so thoroughly offended was probably well educated and middle-class.  

Affective Labour, Nazis, and Mumford and Sons

I want to first begin by placing credit where it is due, my thoughts on the following topics have been greatly developed and enhanced by a conversation I was able to have with my dear friends Josh and Charis, both accomplished writers and thinkers in their respective fields. 

Have you ever heard the term Affective Labour? According to the very reputable source (ahem wikipedia) "Affective Labor is a term identifying work carried out that is intended to produce or modify emotional experiences in people."  Essentially it is what most of our current advertisements try to do. We have known for a long time now that companies are not selling us products through commercials but feelings. When I was younger I wanted to have baggy bootlegger jeans. Why, because they were comfortable, practical, or maybe just looked nice? Heck no! The late 90s and early millennium was home to some of the worst fashion sense since... well the early 90s. At any rate I bought them because I thought they made me look cool. When I wore them I felt cool. That's it. Plain and simple.

Affective labour is now part of every aspect of our lives. It affects almost everything we do and we are constantly being targeted by it. In many ways it is truly inescapable. Various movements have tried to subvert it but in the end almost everything we now do in our western culture is tinged with the vague subconscious notion that we are being sold something. As a youth pastor I can't help but wonder how these cultural shifts influence and play into the Church. I believe that there are probably a wide variety of ways churches have themselves dived into the use of Affective Labour within their liturgy and programs. I know I even helped design our most recent website with the intention of presenting people with certain feelings rather than giving them straight information about the church community itself.

The biggest issue I think we face, however, is the use of Affective Labour in worship. Way back in the early 1900s a movement started at a little church on Azusa street California. It became a full blown movement that forever changed western Church culture. I'm referring to the Pentecostal movement and subsequent charismatic movement that heavily influenced the current style of worship. It has become normative to engage in high energy emotionally driven music as our chief form of worship. Here is where I think Affective Labour comes in. This emotionally charged experience is meant to drive people to a certain emotional response. In many churches the desired response is ecstatic emotion, often characterized by certain movements: swaying, raising your hands, falling on your knees. Don't get me wrong, music is a spiritual language of sorts and it should evoke some emotions in us but I wonder if we have somehow lost the point in our quest for experience. 

Let me give you an example. Every year there is a large Christian youth conference called YC that takes place in my city. The coolest Christian bands are invited and it is expected that the loud music and intense lighting mixed with emotionally driven speakers will bring about mountains of changed hearts in the students who attend. A few years ago I was there with a group of students and a few of the girls in my group were brought to tears by the music and the speaker. Later I decided to ask one of them about it. When I asked her if she thought God had done some change in her life she stated "no this is just YC." Now what happened here? Well I believe this is symptomatic of our own Affective Labour in  modern worship music. We have so developed the expectation that emotion is the end in and of itself that we have raised up a generation of students who have no real conception of what worship is outside of emotional response. For my student the point was the emotional response that was invoked in her. There was no drive to further life change, no greater desire to see a glorious God be recognized by the world around her.

If we look at the older generation, those who lived through the Second World War, we tend to see a more cerebral approach to worship. Why is this? I think it is because, for the most part, in the past worship was not so much focused on emotional response but on expressing theological truth. This actually makes sense when we think about where we get the word 'worship' from. It is derived from the old English word 'Worthship' which literally meant to ascribe worth to someone or something. I think even further than this understanding of worship, what we see is a skepticism that can only be bred from a generation who felt betrayed by their own emotional responses. Remember the Nazis... no for you younger readers they weren't the people who created zombies. The Nazi party was a very emotionally driven charismatic organization lead by one of the most charismatic leaders of all time; Adolf Hitler. He was able to manipulate the emotions of a post World War I Germany (a country that had suffered through a major depression), and turn ordinary citizens into hate filled zealots, many of whom committed some of the worst human rights crimes in history. Is it any wonder that the older generation is skeptical of heavily tinged emotional expectations? They know how Affective Labour works first hand and they are rightly cautious. However, what ends up happening is rather than this older generation passing on their deep and rich knowledge of what worship can be, they are often isolated in generational battles either because they themselves move to the fringes out of frustration or because the upcoming generations, who do not wish to hear that they have something to learn, push them to the side.    

Here's where the problem of Affective Labour in worship gets bigger. What happens when students either don't have the desired emotional response or else realize that they can have it outside of the Christian sub-cultural environment? I'll start by addressing the latter. This year I was able to see one of my all time favourite bands "Mumford and Sons." The mix of spiritual themes interlaced with literary allusions and a driving folk rock sound makes them an incredible live act to see. I managed to push up right in front of the stage and let me tell you I had one heck of an incredible worship experience. I was able to lose myself in spiritual ecstasy as I swayed to the music with eyes closed and hands held high for the ballads and I screamed out lyrics at the top of my lungs with fervour for the driving hits! What was different from YC? Well the music was better at the Mumford and Sons concert and there was no awkward trying to figure out if I was supposed to be worshiping God or rocking out with the band. What I believe I learned from this experience is that emotional ecstasy can be accomplished through several different means. Here's where it gets tricky. Mumford and Sons did it a lot better and more genuinely because they weren't trying to veil what they intended with so superfluous jargon about having a heart of worship. They wanted to put on an incredible show that moved people emotionally and they succeeded. So what happens when a student goes to a show like that, and is moved by the same emotions that she's being told are the presence of God? Well she might become a pantheist thinking everything is God, or she might reject the Church altogether when she realizes that the emotional experiences people have been calling the presence of God are actually a neural response that can be brought on by anyone who knows how to work some lights, play the right chord progression, and sing well. 

What about my first point? What happens when you have a student that doesn't experience emotional ecstasy in a modern worship context? We have to remember that we are essentially teaching this generation that true worship invokes an emotional response we often like to call "the presence of God." There is a local Christian school I sometimes volunteer at and every year the Junior High goes on a youth retreat. After one such retreat I had a chance to meet with one of my students and I asked him about how it had gone. He was actually quite angry. What had happened is that some of his friends and classmates had had such intense emotionally ecstatic experiences that they claimed to have heard the wings of angels fluttering around the roof and see gold dust (nicknamed angel dust) drop from the ceiling during the worship time. Now I don't think there were any drugs involved in the service but some of these descriptions sound faintly similar to stories I've heard people tell me after they've taken 'shrooms'. My point is that my student actually felt completely abandoned by God and wondered why God didn't love him because God didn't show up. He didn't have any emotional experiences the whole weekend and thus his worship was rejected by God.

Here's the point I'm trying to get at. As the Church we are supposed to not be conformed to the world but it seems like we have actually saturated some of our most basic practices in idolatry. When emotional response becomes the expectation for worship does God get the glory or does it actually start to become about the individual? Remember that earlier definition I gave of worship "to ascribe worth to someone or something"? That is actually the point. Worship in the Biblical context is always centred around honouring and glorifying God. Is there place for emotion? Absolutely! As we continue to share about who God is and what He is doing in our lives inevitably it will at times bring with it emotional responses. But these responses are a side-effect not the goal. If we do not start raising up the next generation to engage in a deep worship that is based first and foremost on speaking about the character and works of God we will continue to see broken, hurting, and disillusioned students walk away from the faith.

Community and Worship

I had a wonderful conversation today with some friends over wings, prawns, and Edmonton Oiler's hockey. We were discussing the service of a local Church here in Edmonton. I want to begin by saying that I personally have never attended this service and so all of my thoughts and opinions on it are coming from my observations and conversations with those who have attended.

My problem with this particular event is that it seems to be largely removed from community. Within the Biblical context we never see Worship removed from the community. Throughout the Old Testament the unique way that Israel was instructed to honour YHWH was almost always in the context of communal celebration. Several times a year large religious festivals were held in which the entire community was to come. Interestingly as I've been reading through the Pentateuch over the last two months I have noticed that even within this large nationwide context most celebrations are broken down into even smaller tribal or familial celebrations.

This phenomenon of communal celebration and worship is not unique to the Old Testament. The New Testament is ripe with examples of how God's people responded in communal worship, from the small house churches described in Acts 2 and 4 to the Churches that formed throughout the Gentile world. You may remember the conversion stories of men like the Centurion Cornelius, who when he responded to the Gospel, it was in the context of his family and all were baptized or the Philippian jailor  that released Paul and Silas prematurely after a violent earthquake almost ended his career (and life). Again we see his immediate community is gathered and they respond together. Returning to our picture of the idyllic Church at the beginning of Acts, we see that the worship of the Church was inseparable from the community at large. The early Jewish Christians, did not leave their house Churches to go to a different house Church to hear a better preacher to get their "spiritual fill up" or visit the house Church down the street "which really knew how to worship." Their worship was a natural outcome of their community life, as they saw God move in incredible and sometimes terrifying ways they were able to join together in expressing their love and adoration for him.

I believe when we create services that do not naturally stem from the acts of God among our community, then we will almost always fail to attain a place of true worship. In our post-modern, self-seeking society it is not unnatural for youth, young adults, and to a large extent even mature adults to put their own desires and interests first and to choose where they worship based on these preferences. However, if this is the place we start from then we have already missed the point of worship. Worship is a response to what God has done and to who He is and it takes a community that has seen him at work throughout the week to help remind us of this fact. Left to our own sinful devices we will likely slip into an attitude of self worship but community calls us to acknowledge and celebrate the real tangible things that God has done in and through us. So I leave you with this challenge; the next time you have an opportunity to go to a service, take time to reflect on why you are going and who exactly you will be worshiping when there.

Missionality

I've been listening to some podcasts, watching lots of teaching videos and reading a heck of a lot of books all focused on this "missional movement" interestingly today I read parts of an article entitled "Why the Missional Movement will Fail" by Mike Breen. I will first off say that I definitely do not agree with his assessment and I think for a lot of what he says, he is missing the point but I do think there is some truth in what he talks about. The main thrust of his article is that the Missional focus of the Church cannot be a quick fix without people being properly discipled.

This article made me think of some of the literature I have read about this issue. In my reading I have seen two different approaches to Missionality. One is typified by the book Missional Renaissance. The focus of this book seems rooted in the idea that if we can just focus our Church on a new metric for success, then everything will be transformed and the Church will grow. Obviously this as a gross over simplification of the book however, in general I would have to say that it fits well into Breen's critique.

However, this is not the only idea being developed. Groups like the Adullum Community of Denver and Soma Communities in the Seattle-Tacoma area seem to take a markedly different focus. Although they would agree with the writers of Missional Renaissance, that the Church has for too long been inwardly focused and set goals that far too often reflect personal empires for clergy and elite status for congregants, the solution is much broader and much more rooted in the New Testament Narrative. At a recent Church Planters Cadre I attended, Caesar Kalinowski of the GCM collective and also part of Soma Communities shared along with Jeff Vanderstelt about their work in Soma and overwhelmingly it was impressed upon me how inseparable discipleship and mission are. In fact, if we truly take a look at the passage generally referred to as the Great Commission found in Matthew 28:16-20, we read the line "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (v.19a) Inextricably, we see that within this monumental imperative, that the going must lead to the discipling. Thus inevitably as people are discipled part of what they must learn is to GO and make more disciples. 

I want to finish off by saying the biggest problem with Breen's assessment is that he has made the common mistake that many in the Church have been taught through years of bad theology, that is that in following God one can separate mission from discipleship. These two actions are invariably intertwined and inseparable. To be a disciple is to be on mission, to be on mission is to make disciples.  So as we continue to reclaim the heart of what Jesus commanded his Church I challenge you to look further than  few basic changes to your Church programming or metric of success and start to think critically about what it means to be a sent people who are discipling those God has placed in our paths to follow all Christ commanded us.

Regrets, and the need to retreat

I have recently felt a deep sense of restlessness in my life. I know there are several contributing factors but within the busyness of life it has been difficult to work through and discern them to see which are things I need to ignore and which are things I need to take heed of.

I think it is a definite symptom of our North American culture that we allow ourselves to get so busy that we never truly have time to work out those things that are bothering us. Perhaps that is part of why, even well meaning Christian couples now end relationships in divorce, simply because they do not take the time to rest and reflect and work through the issues in their lives.

For me this Christmas break has been my retreat. As I have escaped from the busyness of my Pastoral ministry and life in Edmonton and had time to sit, read, pray, think, and talk (with God and other people). I have really been able to see things more clearly. I won't get into the larger details but one particular conversation stands out to me. I was able to chat with my own former youth pastor, who has now been in the ministry for over a decade. He challenged me with the amount of events that I do for Youth Ministry because rather than doing them all well I have been so concentrated on quantity rather than quality. I think I have fallen into that trap of "getting by." Through this time of rest and reflection I now feel inspired to go back into Ministry and make healthy changes. I want to do what I do with excellence, not just to get by. It reminds me of a line from the movie "Courageous" where the main character has a conversation with his co-worker about fatherhood. The co-worker says: "You've been a good enough father" to which the main character replies something along the lines of "I don't just want to be a good enough father." I don't want to be just a good enough youth pastor, I don't want to look back with any regret on the work that God entrusted to me, but in order to refresh ourselves of this perspective I think retreat is necessary. After all Jesus himself constantly took time away to spend with the father presumably to continue to refresh himself and to gain perspective for his own Kingdom work.

Love

I am sitting in my office here at the Church. I just returned back from a trip to visit some dear friends in the Maritimes and so it seems somewhat appropriate that I am working on a sermon dealing with the topic of Love. As I have been working through 1 Corinthians 13, I remembered some of the wonderful writing of C.S. Lewis in his incredible book The Four Loves, And have thus been driven to once more skim through it. I have actually been searching out a specific passage that deals with the human relation to animals but as I was skimming through I came across this incredible passage which I think every Evangelical Christian needs to read.

It is probably impossible to love any human being simply 'too much'. We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the inordinacy. but even this must be refined upon. Otherwise we shall trouble some who are very much on the right road but alarmed because they cannot feel towards God so warm a sensible emotion as they feel for the earthly Beloved. It is much to be wished - at least I think so - that we all, at all times, could. We must pray that this gift should be given us. But the question whether we are loving God or the earthly Beloved "more" is not, so far as concerns our Christian duty, a question about the comparative intensity of two feelings. The real question is, which (when the alternative comes) do you serve, or choose, or put first? To which claim does your will, in last resort, yield?

- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 122-123.

I have often felt the compelling drive in Christian circles to experience an intense set of feelings which more often than not, I just do not feel. However, I know that I thoroughly do Love God. I think this passage brings home for me just how I can identify that.

A Life Pondering

Why is it that God created men with an insatiable appetite to fix problems and women with lots of problems which they have no desire for men to help them fix? Perhaps it is to teach men patience and also the ability to listen but I have to admit that whenever I have a female in my life going through some type of tough situation it is really hard to just hear about it and not jump in to attempt to make it all better