The following day I played Kitchen Guru with Rob’s Aunt Jen and his Uncle George. We split our Thanksgiving Prep with Boston Market and home cooked food. Someone needs to email me some pictures of the family around the table and the “Lutheran Tea” picture.

Following dinner Olivia fell asleep with her hand in a bag of chips and Elise snuggled with the men and watched football.

Later in the evening we were thankful for Dan’s pyrotechnic endeavors. I must say the Braziers are a supportive family. Dan made this bazooka all by himself. I’m impressed.

Friday was spent toiling up a HUGE mountain. Old Rag was our calorie burn for the weekend. The glory of God’s creation was certainly worth being thankful for.

Here’s some video from the top.

It was quite a trip. We got a LOT of requests for more pictures of the family while we were there, so click the link to our Flickr if you’d like to see some adorableness.

Remember to support the little guy this year. The economy will thank you for it!

Spiritual growth (sanctification) is never an independent project. All of scripture’s sanctification language is inclusive, rather than exclusive: People of God, the church as body of Christ, the vine/branches metaphor, the list goes on.

Scripture’s sanctification language is also relational. This is fitting for a religion that worships a God-in-three-Persons; God-in-Communion. The Church is called the bride of Christ, we are called sons and daughters of God. Indeed, we cannot come to know Christ apart from the work of the Church, and knowing Christ means union with Christ.

Lutherans talk about the church as the “priesthood of all believers”. As Dr. Wollenburg has written:

Individual members of the priesthood receive their identity when the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is put upon them. The nature and character of the royal priesthood is that of a community or society. The identity of each member of the priesthood is determined by his or her relationship to the community in which God lives with his Spirit (Eph. 2:22). In contrast to idolatrous baalism, paganism, animistic religions, and gnosticism, both ancient and modern, no one can know or belong to God as an isolated individual. The worship of the community of the priesthood is not a crowd of individuals coming together, each to have his own religious experience.

In this light, the language of “personal spiritual growth plans” to help on “your spiritual journey,” is really counter-Christian, regardless of the appeal to a culture defined by its icons of segmentation. If I want my family to participate in music together, I give them all instruments, not iPods.

Our sanctification is in communion with Christ and His Church. This doesn’t mean that individuals can’t each be at different places in a life of sanctification. Quite the opposite–the diversity-within-unity of the church is what makes it a community, and the blood of Christ for all is what makes it His bride and body.

For American Evangelicals, it seems that the journey metaphor is dominant, though not in as much in the sense of an ascent. I don’t know how to articulate this entirely, but it seems as if there is a sense in which people expect “growth” and “sanctification” to include, perhaps not secret knowledge, but maybe, secret feelings or secret insight. People expect change in their spiritual lives. Granted that change is inevitable, but I’m wondering if this has anything to do with the willingness of people to follow fads and change church bodies so readily.

I know exactly what Mike means about “secret feelings or secret insight.” In a lot of ways, throughout my teen years in nondenominational megachurches, this is what it meant for me to be faithful. It was very important that I always be learning something new–without those flashes of light, I felt like I was losing all vitality as a Christian.

I’m glad I don’t see things this way any longer. Learning new stuff is certainly not a bad thing. But keeping a list of our theological insights as a barometer for the work of the Holy Spirit just doesn’t work. In fact, scripture emphasizes time and again that we ought to be fools for Christ. I don’t know all that phrase entails, but I can bet it’s not code for “becoming more insightful.”

1. I have no idea how to work this blog. I have to have Rob resign me in all the time because I can never remember my username or password. I’m sure it drives him nuts. Right now it is stuck in HTML mode and I don’t know how to change it back.

2. Once I tried to teach myself CSS. That’s the only thing that helps me out when things like my blog going wonky happen. I can do just enough simple code to make things post.

3. Elise’s picture is going to be posted on the Thursday Gratuitous Cute Kid Picture at Anti-Racist Parent tomorrow. That’s pretty cool.

4. I spent the whole morning cleaning up half full baskets of clean laundry.

5. I have a very messy house, and I cope by closing myself in here with the excuse that I’m watching my etsy store.

6. Olivia refuses to nap most days and in order for us to both get a break I let her watch TV.

7. I HATE it when I let Olivia watch TV.

8. I need to go to the grocery store really bad. We have no eggs, no fruit.

You can too!

So, some rambling thoughts on the phrase: Is this a term Christians should be using? Does “spiritual journey” really capture the Christian hope in the resurrection of the body, the restoration of earth and heaven, the union with the Christ and all saints? The journey underscored by Christ and the disciples isn’t some sort of traversal of higher planes of Christian understanding, but a move from life to death to new life. And I mean physically, too.

To my ears, these words have lost a lot of their saltiness. In the context of the video clips Willow Creek leadership summit, they somehow sounded more gnostic and narcissistic than Christian.

Eugene Peterson has done a lot of work in his writing to recover this phrase, and really to recover the word “spirituality” in general. I highly recommend his books “Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places,” “Eat This Book,” and “The Jesus Way” on the subject.

Peterson’s primary thrust is that you can’t go talking about spirituality without talking about a Christianity that’s lived. Not lived in the sense of a life that follows some sort of principles for success, but a Christianity that’s lived in places, conversations, meals, lived while driving the minivan, walking the dog, tending to your sick children, getting up and going to work and coming back and lying down again. That’s not to say the Christian spiritual journey is the “same old” life. No, but it’s life where the journey happens, life shaped by the cross.

Maybe it’s worth saying that the Christian spiritual journey has more to do with waiting than escaping. The Apostle Paul’s image of the long and painful footrace of perseverance is also a good one, if you can put yourself in the mind of the runner trudging along mile after mile, and not the spectator tuning in only to catch him crossing the finish line.

The basic premise Hawkins lays out is as follows: Megachurches like Willow have defined themselves with the following method:

• Churches exist to make disciples of Christ. Hawkins describes a disciple of Christ as someone who has “increasing love for Christ, and increasing love for others.” (Jesus used a similar formula when asked to sum up the Law…)
• Churches make these disciples by creating stuff for people to get involved in: Service projects, small groups, worship services, bible studies, etc. After the initial step of belief, involvement in these programs turns people from new believers into disciples.
• Taking these first two points, you can then make the case that a church’s success is going to be determined by the congregation’s head-count. The more people are involved in more programs, the more disciples are produced.

But Willow’s recent research indicates that things don’t actually work out this way. Instead, those who consider themselves most devoted to Christ are those also getting the least out of the programs and activities provided by the church. In fact, in Willow’s own surveys, they found that people self-described as “fully devoted followers of Christ” were the most likely to be thinking about leaving the church. Individuals who had gotten past the initial rush of exploring and diving into faith were progressively less and less interested in all the “stuff” that had brought them into Willow Creek in the first place.

In this video, Willow founder Bill Hybels talks about the new direction the church is going as a result of these findings. He offers the opportunity for other churches to run the same survey, gather the same data, and join along on Willow’s course. Maybe I’m missing something, but the new direction Hybels lays out doesn’t look that different from the old.

Hybels talks about how his team is going to begin providing “customized personal spiritual growth plans,” explaining “You go to a health club, and you get a personal trainer who tells you how can do physical conditioning in the way you need it. Well, we need to provide customized personal spiritual growth plans to people at Willow to get them to become self-feeders.” Hybels goes on to say, “We’re gonna up the level of responsibility we put on the people themselves so that they can grown, even if the church doesn’t meet all their needs.”

To be blunt, this whole thing is pretty gut wrenching. All the standard megachurch criticisms can be made–that the whole thing is boardroom-slick and marketing-savvy–but what particularly gets me is how it leaves no room for the Holy Spirit to just do His work. Would C.S. Lewis’ growth plan have read “marry a divorced woman with a terminal illness”? Bonhoeffer’s, something like “join a secret organization dedicated to rescuing Jews and speak out against Nazi power.” Lazurus’ would be short and sweet: “Die. Trust us.”

Even while watching the videos, I was holding out hope. I kept expecting a record-scratch sound effect to interrupt. An old woman to start pounding out “The Church’s One Foundation” on a creaky upright. Someone to open up a Bible. Anything that might snap the whole thing back to something close to orthodoxy. I guess I was just expecting to see the cross.

And, no; despite the title, this post has absolutely nothing to do with Lutheran heritage.