The ultimate moral value

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W

hat is God’s dream for this world? The Bible and Christian theology give no clear answer to that simple question, but there are glimpses. More than glimpses, perhaps. The Bible opens windows to see into the world as God desires it. If we know what God desires, if we know what God’s dream is, wouldn’t we give our lives to fulfill it? [The "dream of God," of course, is not a biblical term; but the idea is entirely biblical.]

Jesus’ invitation is this: “Seek first [God's] king-dom and [his] righteousness.” [Matthew 6:33] Seek the justice, the good works, the right ways, and the faithful-ness of God. Seek the path of God, the ways of God, the reign of God. Seek God’s presence, God’s embrace, God’s love. God’s kingdom encompasses all of that.

Among other things, when we seek the kingdom, we seek to know and to live according to the values, the moral values, of the reign of God. The question of God’s kingdom is what the world would be like if God were king, president, leader of the world, rather than those who are in charge. What are God’s values? What are the characteristics of the moral vision of God’s kingdom?  Read more ….

Creating a safe place

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In my book, Moral Values: What I Learned Growing Up in Church, (available as an eBook), I ask the question: “Can the Christian church, divided over different beliefs about moral values, create safe places so people can live together in love?” My answer, in part, includes a “Safe Place Covenant” to guide congregations in learning how to create places where people will feel safe enough to talk through their differences with love and respect. You can find the full covenant here.

Grace as a practice of love

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Grace is love freely given, with no restrictions and no demands on the person who is loved. Grace chooses to accept and respect other people simply because they are part of God’s creation, made in God’s image, and because God loves them. Grace is not only God’s gift to us individually, but our gift to other people.

God’s path of grace winds gracefully through the woods of this world filled with the sounds of people crying out for simple respect and for love freely given.

Gracious thoughts flow more freely for me now than ten years ago. I confess to a natural tendency to be critical of people, to see them do something “wrong” and to quickly “know” what they “should” do. Because I am naturally passive, I usually would not tell them, unless they asked. But the thoughts and judgments were there.

As a child I learned what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not judge” and “First take the log out of your own eye so you can see clearly to take the splinter out of your neighbor’s eye.” Yet I did not live up to those words. Judgments, even condemnations, came easily.

In the past ten years, an important path of my journey has been to move toward grace, toward love freely given, toward a non-judgmental and gracious attitude toward other people. It is not an easy path to walk.

THE GRACE OF GOD

We hear grace in these words from John’s gospel: God did not send [the] Son into the world to con-demn the world, but to save [heal] the world through him. [John 3:17] God loved the world and sent light into the darkness of this world because of divine grace, as a gift because of God’s own choice and not because of anything we had done. This is the gospel of grace.

If some choose not to accept that grace and choose not to come into the light of God’s love, they are like people given a wrapped present who set it down and never open it and never enjoy it. … Continue reading here

Emerging Church

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The Church that is emerging in the 21st century will be different from the common tradition of the historical Church in many ways. What is happening cannot be identified simply with some network (such as the Emergent Village) or some semi-organized movement called the Emergent Church.

People around the world increasingly value compassion and acceptance of others and resist inherited traditions imposed upon them by force of institutional hierarchies of all kinds. Nonviolent activism that challenges traditional authority and demands direct voice …. read more

A Divided Church

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From my 2004 book, Moral Values: What I Learned Growing Up in Church [now a free e-Book] – The church today is deeply divided over our understanding of moral values and their biblical roots. Some people define key moral values as abortion and homosexuality, and some say key moral values are larger than that, the values of life and love. Some see black-and-white values taught in scripture, and others see shades of gray in a biblical tradition with its roots embedded in writings spread out over 1,000 years.

The choice is not either/or but both/and. There are some clear black-and-white moral teachings in scripture (though not as many as some people think), and there are many shades of understanding of such concerns as marriage, family life, sexuality, religious life, the sanctity of all life, and the roles of men and women in society, to name just a few.

In a small book like this we cannot consider all the moral teachings of scripture. And this is not an academic study of any of them. It is a personal witness to my faith. I want to focus on the ultimate moral values of life and love, especially love. What does the Bible teach us about love, and what are the implications of love in our concern for those who have yet to be born and our concern for the sacredness of marriage – two areas of moral values argued so vociferously during the 2004 U.S. election?

Will the church survive its deep divisions? Will mainstream denominations in the U.S. find a way to continue to live together despite the seemingly insurmountable differences of understanding about what we believe to be of ultimate importance in our faith? Will the different branches of the church – sometimes characterized as conservative and liberal – be able to accept each other as members of the same spiritual body and family and learn to live together without rancor and with respect? These are the fervent questions in my heart and soul as I write this book.

Foundations for my values

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What I know about moral values I learned growing up in Protestant churches and in a Christian home. We went to church on Sunday as a matter of choice, perhaps of habit. Whether out of choice or habit, we went both to Sunday School and to worship. And as a teen, I went to youth group and to choir. Some years it seemed we were at the church more evenings than not. After 40 years in ministry, my heart and mind still yearn for confidence that God is behind my convictions and moral commitments, that the Spirit guides my moral choices.

Given the  changes here and there in how I live out my fundamental values as a Christian, the moral values I hold and the choices I make still come out of the core of what I learned as a child growing up in church and in a Christian home. I learned early in life simple lessons like these:

  • Be kind to others.
  • Be patient.
  • Respect everyone.
  • Forgive people who hurt you.
  • Stand up to bullies without fighting.
  • Be honest without hurting people.
  • Let other people be who they are.
  • Be faithful to your friends.
  • Love God and other people.

These simple values form the concrete foundation for the life God calls me to live out in the church, as well as in the world. I am convinced that God calls the whole church to live by them as well. As I experience the church today, I see a large crack in the foundation.

Read the complete e-book here.

Five Movements

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Five Movements of Changing Churches:

1.      Compassion – Love of God and all creation guides all our decisions and actions.

2.      Contemplation – Practices of prayer and meditation combine with a deepening spirituality at the core of our Christian life.

3.      Community – Individual behavior comes out of knowing ourselves as part of a community of both church and world with a commitment to the well-being of all.

4.      Connection – Awareness that our relationship with God weaves together with all of God’s creation creates action seeking to heal and restore.

5.      Cooperation – Working together to fulfill God’s desires for creation displaces competition and exclusion, making shalom a reality for all.

5 Movements of Changing Churches

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The Church changes in every generation, certainly in every century. There are pivotal generations, however, and I believe we are living in one of those times. The history of the Christian Church focuses on such things as Creeds, Confessions, and Common practices.  When people talked about “what we believe,” they most often meant what we can understand and explain – our doctrines and denominational distinctives, for instance.

As the Church moves farther into the 21st century, all that will change rapidly. We already see a deepening chasm between leaders and pastors who focus on these traditional foundations and those who focus on what I call 5 Movements of Changing Churches:

1.      Compassion
2.      Contemplation
3.      Community
4.      Connection
5.      Cooperation

“What we believe” becomes more about how we live and how we demonstrate to the world God’s gracious love for all creation. Faith becomes more a matter of relationship with God and the world than a matter of intellectual and organizational uniformity. The Church is changing. The question is whether we will change with it.

Change our Language

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If we want to reduce violence in our world, language must change. The more often we use words of violence – even when our intent is to be humorous – the more deeply violence becomes embedded within us. If we can change our language, perhaps we can dig out this core piece of human experience and dispose of it by exposing its corrupting influence.


Some examples of language to easily and casually used by many of us –

Cut him off at the knees

Knock his block off

“I brought you into the world, I can take you out”

Knock the stuffing out of him

I could just kill you

You do this one more time, you’re dead!

I’m gonna smack you or You can smack me for this

“Target” people or groups for any purpose”

“Battling” this and that

“Fighting against”

“Wars” on …. [poverty, terror, drugs]

I’ll give you something to cry about!

It’s about who you are

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When church leaders are faced with change, they often look around for some model for adapting to change that other churches have used successfully. In a time of declining congregations among mainline denominations, especially, pastors and other leaders wonder why some other church in town is growing and their congregations are not. A common reaction of leadership is to say, “We need a different style of worship” or “We need to add on to our building” or “We need to be a ‘missional’ church.”

The essential need, however, for responding appropriately to change – and the inevitable conflict – is for people who are personally and spiritually prepared for effective leadership. The 10 Life Practices we teach (see menu bar at the top) will prepare you for that kind of leadership.

When you are centered in God and within yourselves and aware of who you are and what you bring to this situation, you can be both empathetic toward other people and assertive in what you say to them. When you are emotionally mature – meaning that you respond rather than react under stress – and when you connect with the people and your surroundings in a holistic manner, you are able to lead people in a way they can trust. You can listen to their stories and tell your own and help everyone learn to reframe what’s happening and see things from a different perspective, and you can guide people in creatively imagining a new future together. And with an underlying commitment to nonviolent engagement – to actively engage other people in a way that will not harm anyone – you can successfully guide your church into the good future God wants for it.