The New Methodists
A blog about being United Methodist, missional, emergent, and midwestern. Plus other stuff too!
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I was sitting on my couch on Sunday night after getting home from a tough day at church. I was looking for sports highlights when it was announced that Bin Laden had been killed.
It was a weird feeling. I wanted to both cry and jump for joy. It was mostly a feeling of relief. Hopefully we learned some lessons.
The day before I met someone who had graduated from college in 2010. I graduated in 2000 and told her about my first decade of post college life.
Well, George W. Bush stole an election and then 9-11 happened. It will be eleven years since I left Earlham and nearly that entire time has been shaped by 9/11. There are kids who are leaving elementary schools who have known nothing except for this endless war.
So how do I feel about Bin Laden’s death? We’ll see.
I am a big Rob Bell fan.
For those who don’t know him, here is a write-up from the New York Times:
” Mr. Bell, 40, whose Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., has 10,000 members, is a Christian celebrity and something of a hipster in the pulpit, with engaging videos that sell by the hundreds of thousands and appearances to rapt, youthful crowds in rock-music arenas.”
To sum up the controversy around Bel that broke out last weekl, here is a summary from the same New York Times story:
The new book is called “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.”
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Lets time travel back to 1991 when I was a seventh grader and somewhat involved at Calvary United Methodist Church in Brownsburg, Indiana. It is a place where the pastors respect people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and worry about being gender neutral when describing God but where much of the congregation itself is fixated on Reaganism and some of the people leading the youth program think satanic rock music is a big problem. (Thank God for Petra!)
One of the youth group adult leaders had an overnight retreat at his house. We watched a very scary “documentary” about Hell, Satan, and rock music.
I wasn’t too hip to the ways of the world or church back then. The “documentary” was scary. Was I going to go to hell because my mom bought me a copy of REM’s Out of Time album?
Much had changed since I watched that scary movie. Those people eventually left and by the time I entered high school a new youngish associate pastor got the youth program focused on mission, theological study, social justice, and having fun (without worrying so much about the (bogus) satanic rock music. It was a perfect youth group in many ways and it would forever change my life.
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This summer when my family and i moved back to Brownsburg, I went to Sunday school at Calvary for the first time since I left for college.
And what was the Sunday school class watching? A video produced by Rob Bell called Matthew from the Nooma series. The short film/seron is about Matthew, a friend of Bell’s who died at age twenty-seven. Here is how one blogger describes it:
This adult Sunday school was moved by “Matthew”. How do you grieve? How do you respond to untimely death or family tragedy? How do you support someone going through the grieving process? What does the deepest part of our faith tradition say about this? If Jesus weeps at the grave of a friend, are there any simple answers to these questions?
It also turned out that the Calvary youth group or Sunday School class had been watching the NOOMA video earlier in the year.
And this is why I will always love Rob Bell. Instead of watching evangelical, conservative Christian fantasies about fake satanic rock music, or going to crappy Christian rock concerts with easy, shallow answers, youth (and adults) are more likely today, even in the unhip suburbs, to watch the theological art of preacher/prophet/poet Rob Bell.
I got a picture of the March 1 Venus-Moon conjunction with the swamp that had developed in our yard.
We got some pretty big rains that week and our yard becomes a two acre wetland when it rains hard. It only lasts for a few days before it drains but what once was and is standard old central Indiana lawn becomes something closer to its natural form.
And, it is not long before the geese, ducks and birds show up.
I live in Hendricks County, Indiana, about three miles west of Indianapolis city limits. If my 4th grade Indiana history class serves me right, the county was basically a huge wetland and unbroken wilderness–and home to Delaware Indians– up until the settlers showed up in the 1820s and started cutting down trees and draining the place. The landscape has been forever altered. What is now not subdivision are now well-drained fields, soon to be planted with genetically engineered corn and soy beans. The fertility of the topsoil is such that one might be hard press to grow anything in those fields without the wizardry of industrial agriculture.
I saw something yesterday that gave me hope. Small-scale organic farming can feed the world.
I’m not feeling too optimistic about our global problems these days but maybe we can restore what has been lost, resurrect was destroyed
History still may be on the side of us dreamers. Wetlands can be restored, with plenty of food and good meaningful jobs to go around.