Tod Bolsinger

Sex and Worldview: Overlooked Lessons on Love

In the most recent Leadership Journal, congregants report that they wished their pastors preached more on sex. Recent articles in Christianity Today and the recent special by Katie Couric point to a more dire situation than even we conservative evangelical types may have realized.  Providentially, I decided to preach a four week series on the Song of Songs during this past month as a way to kick off the year.  My church members didn't know this, but every January I try to preach on one aspect of a Christian worldview.  Of course, I never mentioned "worldview" because if I did, they would have been snoring. Instead I just said that I was going to preach an exposition of Song of Songs.  From the attendance standpoint, it was certainly a big hit.  But more than that, it has sold more tapes than any series since the one that became Showtime.

I really believe that people are hungering to hear God's intention for sexuality and preaching the Song of Songs is way more interesting (and unexpected) than the well-known NT passages. 

So, over the next few days, I'll be offering you a chance to link to my most recent sermon series called Divine Romance: Lessons from the Song of Songs.  I suggest you may want to read it with someone you love. Of course, married folks, homework is optional. So here goes.

The Nobility of Fidelity

This morning we start a sermon series on love.  Now, I know that when I say that, we all expect an exposition on the love of God, on unconditional love, sacrificial love, servant love, even the love we should express to each other in Christ. 

But that’s not what this is.  This series is on goose-bump love.  It’s lump-in-your-throat love, flip-flopping-heart and blushing-smile love.  It’s about the warm softness of the lumpy body that’s laid next to you for decades.  And the cold back that is turned toward you when you lie awake in the middle of the night after an argument.  It’s about teasing and giggling and mostly laughing at yourself. 

It’s about insecurity and feeling powerful, about wanting and being wanted, about desiring and feeling desirable.  It’s about bad poetry and the names we wrote on Pee-Chee folders during class at school.  It’s about shaking your father-in-laws hand when you come back from your honeymoon, and giving your daughter away in marriage.   

It’s about rainy weekends when the kids are away.  About long lonely nights when your beloved is no longer lying next to you. 

It’s about yearning and longing and desire.  About passion and purity, fidelity and frustration.  It’s about marriage, yes.  But even more than—much more than that--it’s about hearts and souls and bodies.  And since we all have hearts and souls and bodies, its about all of us.

And believe it or not, this series comes right out of the Bible.  Right in the middle of the Old Testament, is a book called the Song of Songs. and it is collection of love poems.  They are poems that tell the story of a girl and the boy she loves and the king who is trying to come between them.  And at times they are pretty steamy. 

For years, pastors and teachers have taught them as allegory, a story of God’s love for us and the church’s love for God.  Ok, that works.  You can certainly read them that way.  And it’s even pretty interesting.  But just pick them up and start reading them this week, and you’ll know for sure what they are. 

To read the rest of the sermon click here.

Or you can also get it here: Download song_of_songs_1_promises.doc

The Challenge to Seekers and for the Church…#4

Most of my writing and a good deal of my pastoral leadership has been fueled by one quote penned a half-century ago. 

If Christianity is what it claims to be, then it should be producing a type and order of life which is quite exceptional.  If therefore, we are to meet the challenge of the modern world we must be living the Christian life; and the question arises how we are to do so.
-- D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, “Review of G.C. Berkouwer’s Faith and Sanctification,” Evangelical Quarterly, 25 (April 1953), 107

I contend that we meet this challenge, in our now "post-modern world", not by seeking to accommodate self-centered spiritual seekers, but to connect to and challenge them with lives that embody the transforming communion of God. 

Indeed, this Spirituality of Fellowship and Following not only connects to the seeker by offering belonging, but also challenges the seeker by demanding fellowship.  Spirituality is not about making a solo ascent, but becoming part of community modeled on God-who-is-Communion, that is constituted by the Word as scripture and sacrament.  This spirituality challenges the individualism that is so rooted in both the culture and the church,  as well as seekers’ and believers’ tendency to create fellowship according to their own image. 

To that end, my book, It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian, offers a spiritual theology for Christian communities who want to develop people whose lives reflect God and answer the challenge of the world.  Because of this, the central “disciplines” of this spirituality are communal: Worship, Word and Witness.  And our spirituality is for the two-fold purpose of our own transformation and revealing God’s glory to others. 

We must hold before us the vision of Zechariah, where God’s presence is so evident amidst the people that spiritual seekers from every background and nationality will take hold of the garments of one believer who is simply gathering with God’s people in worship and declare, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you” (Zech 8:23).

With this before us, it is imperative to recognize that while a spirituality of fellowship and following is a point of engagement with seekers, we do not offer a “spirituality of fellowship and following” to the world directly.  We offer God.  We proclaim and demonstrate the Good News of God’s present availability and reign in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.  We do not offer spiritual seekers a different spirituality, we offer them the very presence of God that has embraced us in the transforming communion of the Trinity, calls us to live in the transforming communion of the Church and sends us into the world as the extension of God’s transforming communion. 

In this way, the Christian church is obedient to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who are revealed in the Scriptures and in our own lives.  We do this to the end that the follower of Christ becomes like Christ, who himself was the image of the Triune God.

In this way, Christians enjoy and display together an “exceptional life” – one that changes them and their loved ones, one that commends itself to millions of seekers longing to find their places at the table of the family of God.  That, I believe, is both something quite exceptional and something exceptional to offer a seeking world.

Fellowship and Following, Cont #3

Okay...this post is the long one.  But hopefully you'll see that the ideas of fellowship and following as a response to those disenfranchised by church experiences is not just a knee-jerk emotional response, but something anchored in  the very being of God.

A spirituality of fellowship and following is firmly oriented within the biblical vision of a people of God who are on a journey with God, expressing the Reign of God, following God in trust and obedience and being transformed into the likeness of the Triune God in process. 

Further it is an obedient response to the invitation into communion with God that the Bible refers to as “following,” and is expressed in a specific fellowship of followers. We find this theme—being called by God into fellowship and then following God in obedience—grounded biblically in God’s call to Abram (Gen 12), Israel’s journey from Egypt to the promised land (Exodus), the instructions to “follow God” and be his own people (Deut 5ff; Lev 26:3, 12, 13), and especially in Jesus’ call to his disciple (Matt 4 and parallels) and assurance that those who follow him will be with him (John 10, 14-17, see also Matt 8:2, Mark 1:17, John 13:36).  These texts remind us that the destination of the spiritual pursuit is not ultimately a sacred place but a Person, not a “where,” but a “Who.”

As Augustine reminds us in his famous prayer from his Confessions,, “O God, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”  The source of soul’s rest is not what we can earn or buy or achieve, but the union of the believer with Christ.   The “destination” of the spiritual quest is the conformity of that believer into the likeness of Christ, through that union.   Fellowship with a communal God is expressed by following God.  Seeking must yield to abiding.

Such a spirituality of fellowship and following offers both the spiritually homeless a home (albeit with a “nomadic” spiritual people) and the spiritually seeking a path of discipline, guidance and connection to something outside oneself.  Ultimately it offers the fulfillment of God’s intention in creating human beings, that we all would be transformed into the divine image. 

This trinitarian spirituality of fellowship and following both connects to and challenges the cultural and theological situation we face today.  It connects to the challenge of the seeker, first, by acknowledging the hunger to become something different.  It speaks to the one who is searching by offering a language of transformation through “nurture”  – in a way that addresses the human need to develop through relationship and love.  Further, fellowship and following engages the rootlessness of society by offering a spirituality of belonging.  It is an expression of the Trinity which is an open communion reaching out to the world in the embrace of divine love.  Transformation through relationship with God and other followers of Jesus Christ is at the heart of this.

In this way, it is grounded in the Hebrew Scripture’s view of discipleship.  According to Rabbi Michael Goldberg, discipleship is an intentionally personal activity of one person who is in relationship to a teacher.  In direct contrast to the modern, detached, rationalistic academic approach, “arriving at the truth as traditionally understood by Jews and Christians, has hinged not so much on following a method but following the lives of other human beings.”   

With its focus on becoming and belonging, this spirituality also offers the seeker a sense of purpose and a wisdom for living purposefully.  A person engaged in fellowship and following necessarily engages the world and responds to its needs and cries with the example and power of Jesus the Communion-Incarnate.  But, as a result of the further incarnation of the Holy Spirit as the Body of Christ, it is not simply a set of beliefs, but a habitus, a wisdom for sacramentally living in the world. 

The outcome is people who bear divine love, offer hospitality and build community, who serve as docents of the Holy Spirit, that discern, witness to, and reveal in the ordinary circumstances of life the very presence of the Triune God “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). 

However, it also responds to the challenge of the seeker by also offering a counter challenge.  Like the God who questions the questioner (Job 28:3, Luke 20:3),  the Triune God challenges the seeker to find full humanity through repentance, not fulfillment.  The seeker is challenged to accept that true becoming begins with baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and being joined into the life of the Triune God.  Baptism expresses both God’s embrace and our submission.  As God’s activity, it is the loving welcome into the covenant; as something we undergo, it demands humility that calls us beyond spiritual self-expression.  As Ellen Charry has written, “Christian identity is neither self-made nor constructed from the narrative of one’s personal history or biology.”   This is a cause for celebration, she notes.  But it is also a confrontation, calling the seeker to ground one’s search in a relationship and a tradition, both requiring commitment.   

From this we see that such a spirituality is also a challenge to a world where the “formation of the self has been overshadowed by the emancipation of the self.” (Charry, again.) 

Seekers are confronted with a spirituality that is both gift and demand.  The Triune God offers fellowship to all who would accept it freely, but the cost of following is a life of repentance.  The gift of fellowship is given to empower the following; the promised presence of God makes certain the fulfilling of God’s purposes (Phil 1:6) but instead of self-satisfaction, self-actualization or self-realization, this involves the utter transformation of one’s whole self so as to become like God (Romans 8: 29). 

Miroslav Volf describes this as changing self-centered people into “de-centered centers,” those who have been embraced by God in the fellowship of the Trinity and have had their old self-centered nature “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:19-20) and are now able to demonstrate through their lives the presence of the God whose essence is love (1 Jn 4:7-12, 1 Jn 3:16).     Seekers must seek in order to become, to become we must change, and to change we must die to our old selves and find our new life in the Transforming Communion of God. 

Next post, we wrap this up.

Fellowship and Following, part 2

Last post, I began to offer some excerpts and thoughts from my book, It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian, with some practical strategies for addressing the challenge of our “culture of seekers.”  I ended by saying “if the Church is going to produce the kinds of exceptional people that provide a satisfying and attractive example to a watching world then our Christian faith must be more deliberately, intentionally and inextricably communal."

For those of us who lead churches, there is both a clear call and opportunity here.  While there may no longer be a strong sense of sacred space, Community calls us to see our mission as focused first and foremost on a people in a particular place.  To that end, let me suggest that the old monastic vow of stability needs to be reconsidered in some form.  Pastors who are busy climbing ecclesial ladders should well reconsider the value of long (maybe even life-long or career-long) tenures in one church.  Denominations who move pastors from one parish to another should reflect upon whether organizational stability is holding back the opportunity for some local congregations to thrive over a long period of time.  Seminaries need to equip pastors for the spiritual and psychological requirements of a long, healthy pastorate.  How can pastors build a truly life-transforming Community if they are changing jobs every 3-5 years?

Secondly, as church leaders—both clergy and laity see their call as “Community-builders” who are helping to shape holy and healthy churches as the life-transforming culture of exceptional living, they will necessarily face demand of living out the vision of a God who is Communion, and insuring that all the central activities of the church reinforce and “enculturate” members as a Community of people who embody God’s own character in the world.

Lastly, if the Community is the witness to the world, then the stale debate about “ministry” vs. “mission” or “what we spend on us” vs. “what we give to mission” is over.  Yes, there will always be need and demand for churches to eagerly and generously join together in furthering the work of the mission of God in the world.  Yes, there will always be a necessity to send out missionaries and to send resources to areas where the resources are limited.  But if the Community of God’s people are in fact the witness of God, the mission of God, to a particular location, then the people of God are the sent ones as a Community, the mission of God is right before us and our post-Christian, post-modern, seeking world is our mission field, wherever we are. (Which is a central tenet of the Gospel and Our Culture Network’s Missional Church emphasis.)   

That sense of mission to the seekers of the world gives our Communities an even more urgent reason for being.  We must—by the way we live together—affirm the reality of who God is as a Divine Communion and model our lives on God’s life.  That “witness by living together,” calls forth a spirituality to be lived out in our larger communities.   We are not only messengers of the Gospel; we are, by our lives together, the very mission of God who is at work in the world. 
As Christians, our life is founded on the Divine Communion of God gathered around the eternal table brought into the world.  That life is celebrated and enriched through the most ordinary of rituals ever given to humanity: eating bread and drinking wine. 

And finally, that life is extended into the world so that the most ordinary events of life, events expressed metaphorically at every table in every home, every office, and every school or public gathering place, are opportunities to encounter the God who is love who has come into the world.  We must be a truly life transforming spirituality of fellowship and following.  Which is where I will pick up tomorrow.