Integrating Missionally

What is God doing?

He had a view of God passed down to him through his family and his experience with God. His understanding of God went something like this: obey God and he will bless you. Disobey God and he will crush you.

By the looks of things, he had been really, really good. A quiver full of kids and more warehousing space than should be allowed, this man had a roaring business. He had great friends and a great home. He treated his employees well, almost like family. His kids were careful to live a godly lifestyle and just in case they didn’t, he would offer a prayer of protection and seek forgiveness for them just in case they partied a bit too hard. He loved his life, his family, his company, and his God.

On this day, he went set out as if it were any other day. Prayer and praise, then off to the job of managing the family business. He was a little later into the office today than usual. He had a meeting on the other side of town. Yet, as he neared the campus, he was excited because business was doing great.

As he rounded the corner, however, a pile of twisted metal and steel lay where one of his warehouses had stood. He couldn’t get into the offices because of the destruction that he saw.  Getting out of his car, one foreman arrived with bad news. There was a great storm that came up earlier that morning and a tornado ripped through the company complex. All his kids, who were part of the family business, were killed. Not only that, but the storm destroyed the entire business complex. Everything was gone.

Tears rolled down the man’s face as he sought to process all that happened. He could not explain it. He could not understand it. All he could do was stand where his empire had been and weep. His wife showed up. They simply held each other. Friends who heard about the destruction raced to his side. Sometimes in time of need, you don’t need people to say anything, but you need people to just be there. That was the actions of his friends. They remained with him for days. They mourned the loss with him.

He mentally walked through the last few weeks of his life. Had he done something that would have made God angry? Had he not done something God had told him to do? He couldn’t think of anything major. Maybe there was something seemingly insignificant he had overlooked. Though he knew he was not perfect, he could not think of anything that would lead God to bring the destruction and ruin to his life that had been brought upon him. He was at a loss to understand these events.

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Has the “church” become frantic activity on the Sabbath? Isn’t a day off for “weak” people? Isn’t “play” just for children? What does creativity have to do with salvation? Are we missing the joy of keeping the Sabbath? Theologian and author Marva Dawn asks us to consider whether or not we are finding rest.

From The Work of the People

(ht: Todd Littleton)

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Fear.

The opposite of Love is not hate. The opposite of love is fear. What does scripture say? Perfect love casts out:

Hate?
Pain?
Anger?
Fluffy the vampire bat?

No, perfect love casts out fear.

Fear is the base emotion. One of the brain structures that is primary to our life is the amygdala. It is the section of the brain that deals with emotions. This brain structure receives important sensory and environmental information first so that the brain can prepare the body for fight or flight behaviors if necessary. It is a base structure. The base emotion that triggers our fight or flight reaction is fear. And primarily, it is the fear of the unknown. If you are camping in the woods and hear a branch snap, your body reacts by freezing, as if you are dead. That happens because of fear… fear of the unknown. Fear causes that physical reaction.

However, fear’s bark is bigger than its bite. At least in most cases. A shotgun pointed to your face by a serial killer is not one of those cases. However, most of our fears are not that dramatic. Most of our fears center around change, or what could happen in a particular situation. For instance, we may be afraid to ask for a raise because we are afraid that if we do, instead of getting the raise our employer may actually fire us. A person may be afraid to go down a water slide because part of it is enclosed. Whether it is claustrophobia or fear of the dark or fear that the slide will fall, some people cannot get past this fear. We may say those are irrational fears, but in the mind of the person, they are very real.

Fears hold a great deal of power because we are primarily emotional beings. When there is fear, a primary emotion, then our behavior will reflect that fear.

This is why I think fear is the primary driver of maladjusted behavior. It all goes back to fear. When there is fear, the body will do something to compensate for that fear. It will either fight or run. Examples of fighting include lashing out verbally or physically attacking some person or some thing. Examples of running (or flight) include ignoring someone or self-medicating through food or drugs.

The biblcial prescription for this is love, primarily perfect love. Perfect love only comes from Jesus. Perfect love removes all fear. It creates a perfect place of safety. When the disciples and Jesus were crossing over the Galilean Sea, a storm arose. The disciples were afraid. Jesus was asleep. When they woke Jesus up, he immediately calmed the sea by saying, “Peace, be still”. The sea was immediately calm. Jesus had been able to sleep through this because he knew the perfect love of the Father. He was safe. It was that same love that was able to calm the sea and eliminate the fear of the disciples. He brought peace to the raging sea and the fear of the disciples.

When we know the perfect love of the Savior, we have no fear. We are fear-less. However, this takes time and relationship. It is only through God going all Job on us from time to time and having him provide exactly the way He promises that we are able to see our fear transformed by His love. We truly begin to trust God and that trust creates that safe place for us.

Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the absence of fear.

Thanks, Todd Littleton for the discussion this morning on this topic

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The Trusting Brain

Since my dissertation included a good bit of brain research, I subscribed to a number of blogs of scientists and brain researchers. One is called “The Frontal Cortex“, which is part of Science Blogs. This morning they have an article on trust and the brain.  The article primarily concerns the economic struggles our country finds itself in and to what degree we will trust the government, business leaders, and our own understanding of the economy. However, the research has implications for our own trust in the Godhead.

The Relevant Study

The writer, Jonah Lehrer, describes a 2005 study led by several Neuroscientists regarding trust.

The research was born out of a serious limitation of conventional fMRI, which looks at the brain by itself. (An individual is put in a claustrophobic scanner and told to perform a task.) Humans, of course, are a social species, so the scientists (led by Montague) pioneered a technique known as hyper-scanning, which allows subjects in different fMRI machines to interact in real time.

The experiment revolved around a simple economic game in which getting the maximum reward required the strangers to trust one another. However, if one of the players grew especially selfish, he or she could always steal from the pot and erase the tenuous bond of trust. By monitoring the players’ brains, the scientists were able to predict whether or not someone would steal money several seconds before the theft actually occurred. The secret was a cortical area known as the caudate nucleus, which closely tracked the payouts from the other player. (The caudate is usually discussed in the context of addiction, since it plays a central role in modulating our expectation of pleasure.) Montague noticed that whenever the caudate exhibited reduced activity, trust tended to break down.

But what exactly is the caudate computing? How do we decide whom to trust with our money? And why do we sometimes decide to stop trusting those people? At first the caudate didn’t get excited until the subjects actually trusted one another and garnered their separate rewards. But over time this brain area started to expect trust, so that it fired long before the reward actually arrived. Of course, if the bond was broken – if someone cheated and stole money – then the neurons stopped firing; social assumptions were proven wrong.

The moral is that trust is ultimately about the expectation of rewards. Trust may be an admirable social trait, but it’s ultimately rooted in a greedy calculation, emanating from our primal dopamine reward circuitry:

Taken together, these results suggest that the head of the caudate nucleus receives or computes information about (i) the fairness of a social partner’s decision and (ii) the intention to repay that decision with trust. In early rounds of the game, the ”intention to trust” is evident only after an investment is revealed. With experience, this signal shifts to a time preceding the revelation of the investment.

What does this have to do with the economy? Over the last few decades, investors have grown accustomed to predictable rewards coming from the financial markets. We were used to our 7 percent return in the stock market, that 4.5 percent return from a money fund, and that 2 percent return from our bank account. We assumed our homes would always increase in value. In other words, these “rewards” were taken for granted. (It hasn’t helped that the last severe recession arrived in the early 1980’s, more than 25 years ago. People forgot that these financial rewards were contingent, just like the players in the trust game who were shocked that someone would abscond with their cash.)

When those rewards disappear – when home prices fall, and borrowers default, and the markets flatline – the end result is a collapse in the bonds of trust that all markets depend on. The problem, of course, is that restoring trust is ultimately about rewards, not reassuring statements or grand plans from Congress. Until those financial rewards start to feel predictable again – and that may take a long, long time – investors will continue to be wary of each other, just like people who got burned in the brain scanner.

The Impact on Life and the Gospel

The results of this study has a great impact for life and how we share the Gospel. Our trust in the Godhead comes only after levels of expectation and reward are observed and received. In other words, trust has to be developed; we do not give God our trust blindly. God, from the moment we are born, sets out to earn our trust. In earning our trust, we then can transition from the God who wants to be in relationship with us, to the the “Santa Claus” view of God to the deeply relational, Fatherly view of God.

In the midst of this process, we have to de-trust God in order to trust him deeper. Our brain has to have it’s’ neurons re-wired so that we can not only trust him more relationally but we can change our behavior in the trusting process. Our brains get wired in a certain way such that our thoughts and actions become automatic. However, to re-wired our brain and allow God to take us places through faith we could never other otherwise go, we have to de-trust what we already know. Then, and only then, can those new trusting circuits be rebuilt.

The reward changes during this process as well. We move from the Santa Claus view of God, where he gives us stuff, and helps us out (reward), to a deep relationship with the Father where the reward is the relationship. That takes a series of trusts and de-trusts where our reward changes over time.

This is what St. John of the Cross called the dark night(s) of the soul. It’s the Chrysalis of Alan Jamison. We will all have a series of stops and starts, a series of trusts and de-trusts, in our relationship with God.

Yet it has great impact on how we share the Gospel. We have to concede that blind trust is not given by humans to God without any relationship whatsoever. Could it be that our starting place is to discover how and in whom people have seen the activity of God. That becomes the starting point, not where will a person will spend eternity when they die. This may have worked in years past because people had some experience with God. However, fewer people have a positive experience with God, assuming they have any, and are less likely to understand that question, accept your premise of them being sinners and needing heaven, or even want to engage you in that conversation. Despite a belief in “God”, experience with Jesus or his followers is minimal. Our starting point, then, is wrong. Our starting point should be discovering what, if any, activity they perceive (or we help them understand) of how God and Jesus has worked in their life to move them to a point of actually being able to trust.

This isn’t brain surgery. It is not rocket science. It is time and relationships and a discernment by us of what the Spirit has done in their life to move them closer to Jesus.

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The Theology of Journey

I want to do one last post on the Theology of the Journey. The journey into a deep and powerful Faith in God does something to our theology: it condenses it. That might seem a little strange to say, but I believe it is true. Let me explain more.

During this journey, our theology moves from something that is very black and white to shades of grey. The reason this happens is because so much of what we know about God gets challenged. For instance, we know the promises from scripture about seeking God first and He will provide everything we need. But when you are looking at no money in the checkbook and lots of bills to pay, that belief gets challenged. It’s not as pretty and tidy as we would like for it to be. What if part of this journey means that you have your house foreclosed upon? What if that means you don’t eat for a few days? This is serious stuff that gets challenged in the midst of the journey.

The journey changes our theology because experience may conflict or contradict our interpretation of scripture. It is true that God’s Word never changes. But our understanding of God’s Word does change. For instance, what happens if in the midst of your journey into Faith, you have an experience with ecstatic speech in a biblical manner, something you truly believe ended in the first century? At this point, you have a crisis of Faith. Do you trust the experience, which happened in a biblical manner, or your own interpretation?

When we have experiences similar to this, we learn to hold our interpretation of the scripture loosely. I do not mean that we abandon our beliefs, simply that what may have been black and white becomes grey because our experience with the Word has changed. We have a humble theology. It’s humble orthodoxy.

The Word becomes more relational than propositional. This is a huge transition. The scriptures are inherently relational, not propositional. In fact, Truth is relational, not propositional. Jesus said that He was the way, the truth and the life. No one gets to know the truth apart from relationship. In addition, when Jesus states that you will know the truth and the truth will set you free, He had already announced that He was the truth. In addition, “knowing” is a word that indicates intimacy, as in a man knowing a woman. It’s a relational word, not an intellectual word. Paul also uses the idea of experiential knowing in Colossians 1:9 “For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,” The phrase “filled with the knowledge” is to be understood as filled with the experiential knowledge.

When Paul says in 2 Timothy 1:12 “For this reason I also suffer these things, but I am not ashamed; for I know whom I have believed and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until that day,” we need to notice Paul did not say, “I know in what I believe…” He notes that he believes in some one, not some thing.

The journey causes us to hold on to a core of our theology. The trinity, the virgin birth, Jesus being the only way to heaven, the death, burial and bodily resurrection…all these things become the core of our Faith. Issues like women pastors, which we may have a developed theological understanding, are not issues in which we argue, get mad, or separate over. The Gospel becomes primary and other issues are not as important. We learn to hold on to orthodox creeds, but all the extra denominational chatter becomes “not so much” important.

This does not suppose a low view of scripture. In fact, it supposes a very high view of scripture and allows us to deal with what appears to be inconsistencies in scripture. What do I mean by that? In Rom 16:7 Paul says, “Greet Andronicus and Junia(s), my compatriots and my fellow prisoners. They are well known to [or prominent among] the apostles, and they were in Christ before me.” There are two major interpretive problems in this verse, both of which involve the identification of Junia(s). (a) Is Junia(s) a man’s name or a woman’s name? (b) What is this individual’s relation to the apostles? Many scholars believe Junia(s) is a woman. The question now requires us to see if Junia is “outstanding among the apostles” or “well known to the apostles.” People get down into the nitty gritty of the Greek, but there is no clear consensus on “among” or “to.” What happens if it is this is a female apostle? How does that affect our understanding of women are not to teach men or women are to keep silent in the church? And how do we reconcile these questions with the reality that Priscilla is most likely the primary teacher of Apollos? We end up having to explain these away in some manner.

In other words, things are not so black and white. They require us to hold our beliefs humbly and loosely. The Journey into Faith allows us to have a grey theology, be in a healthy relationship with others, serve with others, and hold to orthodox conservative theology.

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