Where am I blogging now?

Greetings friends,

I appreciate all of you who have continued to come to this site. If you are interested in following what I am presently writing, here's some information for you.

First of all, I have finished my term as Interim Minister of The Park Church in Elmira NY. And (except for this post) I am no longer posting regularly to this blog. It remains available for those of you who want to look back at what I have written about "Healthy Liberal Christianity."

My main writing project these days is another novel that continues the exploration begun in Community of Promise: The Untold Story of Moses. Meanwhile, I am publishing weekly to a blog loosely associated with that novel. Because the story deals with Political, Economic, Religious, and Community issues, those are the areas that I write about in the new blog.

I invite you to check it out at:
http://entospress.blogspot.com

On that blog page, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of the posts, and you can become a "fan" of my "Community of Promise" Facebook page.

Thanks again for being faithful readers of "Healthy Liberal Christianity." I hope you will continue to participate in the conversation.

Wayne Gustafson
"The Promised Land is Within and Among Us."

I Have Books!

Greetings,

In my last post of this series, I reported that I was publishing my novel, Community of Promise: The Untold Story of Moses.

Books are now available!

For more information and to order your copy, go to www.entospress.com

Thanks for checking it out.

Wayne

It’s Time for a Change.

I have been writing this blog since April 16, 2008 and this is the 86th installment. For a while, readership was pretty consistent, but in recent months it has shown a steady decline. I think it’s time for me to take a break.

The purpose of the blog has been to articulate many religious, social, theological, and political issues from the perspective of Healthy Liberal Christianity. I feel that continuing to blog at this point will just result in my rehashing positions that I have made several times before. I will leave the blog up for a while longer for anyone who wants to look back over previous posts.

It has been a good exercise to take an intentional look at the world each week from the perspective of Healthy Liberal Christianity. The exercise has helped me think through many matters. Of course, I had hoped to generate more conversation than has developed, but that’s just the way it is.

Let me tell you about my next project, and invite you to come along and pass the word as appropriate. You will understand why I am making this request in a moment.

I have been the Interim Minister at the Park Church in Elmira, New York for about two years and I will complete my time here in June 2010. The Pastoral Search Committee is working diligently, so it is possible that the new minister might resume blogging on this site at some future time. You will hear about it if that happens.

Meanwhile, I want you to know what I will be doing next and I wish to invite your interest. Over the last few years I have written and refined a novel about Moses called Community of Promise that I will be publishing early in the New Year. I am looking for pre-publication orders (at a discount, of course), so let me tell you a bit about it.

In the Biblical account, Moses is prohibited from entering the Promised Land and he dies on Mt. Nebo. There is an ancient legend that Moses did not die a natural death, but was taken up directly into the presence of God. In my novel, Moses is not prohibited from the Promised Land by God, but he decides that all of the valuable learning from their collective experience in the Wilderness is about to be lost as soon as the people set about killing the present Canaanites and begin establishing their own government in the Promised Land. Moses decides that he will not to go across the Jordan River with the main body of the Israelites, but with a small group of like-minded people who help him fake his death, he and they return surreptitiously in the direction of the Wilderness where they plan to establish a very different manifestation of the Promised Land. The story raises many social, religious, theological, political, psychological, and economic issues.

I am in the process of setting up a website and another blog to market the book. A couple of church-based book study groups have already used the novel and their feedback has contributed to a study guide that will be included at the end. Perhaps an on-line book study group will be possible in the future.

More information on Community of Promise can be found at www.entospress.com.
Community of Promise will be published in paperback, complete with a study guide and will sell for $21.95. The cost per copy for any pre-production orders will be $15.

After June 2010 when I have completed my work at The Park Church, I will continue my Pastoral Counseling Practice in Watkins Glen and Ithaca and will be marketing the book to gatherings of religious groups.

Thanks for journeying with me so far and thanks to The Park Church for their support of this blog.

May your journeys be as rich in blessings as Moses’ was.

Wayne Gustafson
“No matter who you are, or where you are in life’s journey, you’re welcome here.”
The United Church__of Christ

What if you outgrow church?

It is evident that the moment a gathering of believers becomes an institution, the impulse to hold on to the institution’s members increases. In truth, its very survival depends on maintaining and even growing its membership roles. When its survival is threatened in any way, an institution can react in extreme ways that are not necessarily in keeping with its stated identity or purpose. These reactions can become quite nasty. Consider a person who presumes to outgrow the institution. It is not unusual for the institution to treat such a person as a traitor or an infidel. The institutional response to such apparently treasonous behavior can, and often does include heaping on shame and using the threat of eternal punishment to get the person back into the confines of acceptable behavior or belief.

To be clear, I am not referring to any particular religious institution. All are subject to some form of this institutional reactivity. One example is the institution called family. Some families behave as if loyalty and obedience to the leadership of the family is the highest, perhaps the only, acceptable value. But, doesn’t that position obscure what might be the more central purpose of a family: that of nurturing children into becoming fully functional adults?

I see any healthy system, including church, as resisting the temptation to put its institutional survival ahead of the wellbeing of the people in it or ahead of the wellbeing of the community it serves. To use the imagery of Jesus, what does it profit us to gain institutional survival at the expense of individual and corporate spiritual growth?
I would like to believe that the church is most successful, not when it has full pews and well-lined coffers, but when it helps people make the transition from childhood, through adolescence, and then into adulthood.

I would like the church to affirm the requirements of the individual for appropriate nourishment, even if the particular institution cannot meet that particular need. I would like the church to be proud of its “graduates”: those who follow a path of mature integrity like Jesus did.

Buildings, congregational relationships, and governance structures have their value, but we must be ever vigilant that they not substitute obedience and loyalty in the rightful place of healthy development.

A particularly dangerous situation emerges when religious institutions believe that they have the correct set of beliefs and/or practices, and that “God” will be unhappy with anything else. One of the hallmarks of healthy liberal religion is when it recognizes the limitations of its understanding, and similarly, the limitations of any word, image, ritual, or tradition to encompass the fullness of divine presence and meaning. All of these have their value, but only as ways to point us toward ultimate reality. The limitations of finitude will always keep us well short of complete understanding, but those same limitations can motivate a lifetime of growth and learning.

I see two possible benefits, one for the individual and one for the institution. A healthy institution will always help individuals to develop more fully, and at the same time the institution has the opportunity develop more fully as well. Maybe the Realm of God works something like this.

What do you think?

Wayne Gustafson

Perspectives on Advent and Christmas

Yesterday, I made a phone call. I was trying to obtain a new battery for my laptop computer. It was bad enough that “they” kept me on hold for 20 minutes, and then announced that “all our agents are busy, please call again.” But the worst part was the truly awful music that played in my ear over and over again for the entire time. Apparently what I was hearing came from their latest Christmas television commercials: badly sung Christmas carol tunes with lyrics touting the joys of receiving big-ticket electronic appliances. Aaarrghhh!!!!

Of course, the commercialization of Christmas is nothing new. We all have been indoctrinated into believing that for many companies, their very survival year after year is largely dependent on holiday sales, and for the rest, it’s about company profits, executive compensation, and stock share price. It’s almost un-American to be any less than an avid consumer of things we barely want, bought from people we don’t know, using money we don’t have. (I don’t remember who first said this line, but I like it!)

What really struck me in this experience was how assaulted I felt. If they think I will be motivated to go right out and buy their products after hearing that, they have another think coming. Or do they? Perhaps I am the exception. Can it be that simply getting our attention, no matter how obnoxious the means, does tap something vulnerable and needy in the depths of our collective psyche?

Making people feel bad so they will “buy” a particular product is nothing new. Religions and governments have been doing it for millennia. The essence of any marketing campaign is the objective of getting the potential buyer to “need” the product. Conventional wisdom says that people who feel spiritually healthy don’t need the “products of salvation” peddled by the church; people who feel safe, secure, and free don’t need the ministrations of government touted by politicians; and people who have “enough” for a meaningful life, however simple, do not need all the stuff of the holiday buying season. Sadly, marketing campaigns in business, politics and religion don’t have a corner on the market, so to speak). We do it in our individual relationships, too. Be honest now. How many times have you said to a friend or family member “What you need is …!” or “All you need is …!”

A rich man came to Jesus wanting to know what he needed to do to enter the Realm of God. Jesus affirmed everything that he was already doing, but then noted one more thing that was standing in his way. Please notice that Jesus was responding honestly to the man’s honest question. “Go, sell all you have and give the proceeds to the poor.” And the man went away troubled.

For me, the point of the story is that Jesus was not selling anything. Clearly, he did not need to exploit the man’s sincere question for his own gain. Now, we don’t know if the man ever attempted to walk the path that Jesus had pointed out to him. All we know is that Jesus didn’t chase after him in an effort to “close the sale.”

The marketing world chases us in all sorts of ways. It has done a thorough job of making us feel guilty if we don’t give enough, or deprived if we don’t get enough. The challenge before Healthy Liberal Christianity is to identify a different kind of foundation for giving and receiving – a foundation more in keeping with freely shared love and grace.

Meanwhile, there are many alternative approaches to giving during the holidays. I won’t try to list them, but here are a couple of web addresses for you to explore if you wish. (I don’t “need” you to do this.)
http://www.buynothingchristmas.org/alternatives/index.html
http://globalministries.org/get-involved/special-giving-opportunities/alternative-christmas.html

Some churches even offer alternative Christmas fairs for their surrounding communities.

Healthy Liberal Christianity thinks of Jesus’ life as a gift, not an imposition. How does this perspective work for you?

Wayne Gustafson

Thanksgiving without Violence

I grew up believing that Thanksgiving was a lovely holiday. It seemed to combine the best of family, food, football, and fall weather. As I grew older, I began to hear smatterings of stories from the Native American perspective and realized that there existed a shadowy underbelly of violence to Thanksgiving. As I have matured in understanding, I have come to know that everything real always has more than one side, so I am not surprised that Thanksgiving is no exception.

For a time, there was pressure to make Thanksgiving a time of confession and penitence in response to all the violence perpetrated on the indigenous population as white dominance swept across the country. While that approach was and is understandable, nothing healthy comes out of merely substituting guilt in the place of holiday gratitude.

I suggest that we can look carefully at our history and tradition in the service of creating a mature Thanksgiving celebration: one that does not perpetuate a culture of violence.

The history of Thanksgiving is thought to have begun at the Plymouth plantation in 1621. After landing at Plymouth at the beginning of winter, 1620, more than half of the Mayflower’s pilgrims died during the next few months. The bountiful harvest in the fall of 1621 gave the survivors good reason to be thankful because it assured them that they had a much better chance of making it alive through the next winter.

In their early years in Plymouth, the settlers were greatly helped by some of the natives, but within a generation, bloody war had broken out between them. Violence continued as a huge influx of immigrants displaced more and more indigenous peoples from their tribal lands. In time, the Thanksgiving celebration broadened beyond a grateful celebration of the harvest to include the (God given?) land, the growing opportunities found in a fledgling nation, and ultimately the values of freedom and democracy enshrined in America’s founding documents.

Now, I was born in the middle of the twentieth century into a culture that had long before been established. I didn’t kill “Indians”. Nor did I steal their land. Still, the land I know and love as my home is soaked by the blood of millions. These statements are not designed to generate guilt or to diminish how much I know I have to be thankful for. It is simply the truth, and I think avoiding or denying this truth perpetuates immaturity that results in spreading the spirit of violence. Gratitude should never simply be the product of violence, no matter how long ago it may have occurred. True gratitude must lead us to kindness, compassion, and to the creation of social structures that do not perpetuate the spirit of violence in our age. We must learn from our violent past if we are to create a non-violent future.

Finally, we must avoid the trap of implicating God in our violence. We should never thank God for giving us the land and bounty that is first taken from others. Sadly, too many religious traditions promote a God who effectively steals land from one group and gives it to a different group, purportedly in keeping with some inscrutable divine purpose. Such images of God perpetuate war and violence throughout countless generations.

If we’re going to be thankful for anything this year, let’s be thankful that we carry an image of God who is Love, and that we can use loving divine power to transform the world. We will never eliminate violence totally, but at least we can stop giving it divine authorization.

May the blessings you enjoy this Thanksgiving become the gifts you share in God’s Realm.

Wayne Gustafson

Is God Violent?

Recently, I attended the Eastern/Northeastern Regional meeting of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. For those of you who might not be not familiar with Pastoral Counseling, it is the integration of psychotherapeutic and spiritual/religious perspectives. Pastoral counselors typically have education in both areas and have done some considerable work to integrate them. While many pastoral counselors are ordained ministers, that is not a requirement.

When pastoral counselors gather, we try to further our development in this integrated approach. This year’s presenter was Dr. Matthias Beier, who has written about the problems of violent images in the way people view and characterize God. (http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/0826415849)

While his presentation was on a different but related topic, I think his work in identifying and the ever-present, but harmful violent God images is important, particularly for those interested in Healthy Liberal Christianity.

Many religions have traditionally maintained control and discipline through the threat of punishment by God. The standard logic used to support this approach is that left to themselves, people are so perverse that without the threat of punishment, they would have no moral compass at all. It seems to me, though, that such an approach backfires. Rather than keeping people from hurting one another, the image of a punishing God instead gives justification for violence in the name of some “righteous cause.” Jesus’ words do not support this justification of violence without some severe twisting of their meaning.

Fortunately, some very positive resources are available to help in this effort. At The Park Church, in worship we often use material from “Worship in the Spirit of Jesus: Theology, Liturgy, and Songs without Violence” by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer and Bret Hesla. Also, while legitimate critique exists regarding some of the lyrical changes in “The New Century Hymnal” of the United Church of Christ, I commend the publishers for their efforts to remove violent imagery as much as possible.

We have a lot of work to do in this effort. God and violence have been linked in human minds for a very long time. Still, those who can peel away the violent layers can then discover the loving God that Jesus followed and portrayed in his teaching.

Because so many human conflicts, sadly including wars, are fueled by the perceived demands of a violent God, our long term survival may well depend on our ability to hold god images that are not violent.

I’m curious how you react to this idea.

Wayne Gustafson