Integrating Missionally

The danger of commodifying worship

David Phillips

– March 18, 2010Posted in: Formation, Theology

Worship Music

Worship is continuously in danger. It is in danger of commodification, being debased into a commodity for consumers who are shipping for the best buy in God or the latest in spiritual fashions. But the moment that God or the things of God are packaged and then advertised as programs or principles or satisfaction, we are depersonalized, diminishing our capacity to love. There is not much chance of growing to the measure of the stature of Christ in a place of worship that markets goods and services stamped with a God logo. This very place and time given us to cultivate conditions congenial for acquiring an understanding of and companionship in the practice of love is no lover available.

The extensive commodificaiton of worship in America has marginalized far too many churches as orienting centers for how to live a more effective life for God. What the secular culture has done to love by romanticising it into fornication and the pracice of adultery, the ecclesial culture has done by promoting ways of worship calculated to appeal to consumer tasttes in which love is redefined as “Oh, I like that,” or “I have to have that,” or negatively as “I don’t get anything out of that.”

From Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ

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Tags: Christ, love, Worship

And the Greatest of These is…

David Phillips

– August 18, 2009Posted in: Change Theology, Formation, Theology of Journey

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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Tags: Brain, Fear, Jesus, love

Caring For Your Enemies

David Phillips

– July 31, 2009Posted in: Video

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Are We Programmed to Care?

David Phillips

– October 29, 2008Posted in: Culture, Science

People are programmed to avoid inequality, according to recent research.

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, the grandfather of modern economic theory, referred to individual self-interest as “the first principle of pure economics.” Until recently, economists routinely equated being rational with being selfish. The assumption was that, because humans are biological creatures, we’d been programmed by Darwinian evolution to put our own interests first—survival, after all, is a tough competition. As a result, even seemingly altruistic traits, such as giving money to charity or helping strangers in need, were seen as traits ultimately rooted in self-interest.

Richard Dawkins, for instance, has claimed that “we are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior.” Although Dawkins allows for morality in social life, it must be socially imposed on a fundamentally selfish agent. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,” he advises, “because we are born selfish.” Such learned behaviors—for instance, children are taught to share at a young age—must struggle against our supposedly self-serving nature. As the evolutionary biologist Michael Ghiselin asserts, “What passes for cooperation [in nature] turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation. . . Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed.”

Programmed to Care?

In recent years the tide has swung dramatically against such a bleak view of human nature, however. Researchers are increasingly coming to understand that people are also “programmed” to care about others. A recent contribution to this theme comes from neuroscientist Ernst Fehr at the University of Zurich and colleagues. In a study, the researchers explored a particular type of unselfishness known as inequality aversion. Suppose individual A has $10, and individual B has a lesser amount, say $5. We say individual A is inequality averse if he shares some of his cash with individual B, thus reducing the inequality between them. We say individual B is inequality averse if he is willing to sacrifice some part of his money, provided individual A’s endowment is reduced to an even greater degree, so that, once again, the inequality between the two is reduced.

Fehr and colleagues show that, in a sample of 229 children between the ages of three and eight years, younger subjects overwhelmingly conform to selfish (self-regarding) preferences. They don’t like to share and aren’t interest in reducing inequality. In contrast, the vast majority of the older subjects are inequality averse when put in either the advantageous (individual A) or inadvantageous (individual B) position.

So wait. Let me get this straight. We are programmed for survival, but we are programmed to care, at least until we get older and it is more important to survive than care about others?