Tod Bolsinger

Tod's Travelogue Lessons #2

In my last post I confessed that it is much easier for me to spend time in nature than in Bible Study.  But I also acknowledged that I need more than the inspiration of beauty to guide my life.  So putting both of those realities together led me to this first lesson: Let the wonder of creation lead us to Word of revelation.   

Today I want to say more about that.

First, this is not a gimmick.  It’s a deeply biblical way of cultivating a deeper spiritual life.  In his book, Sacred Pathways, Gary Thomas reminds us that the Bible is meant to be read outside (p. 37). 

The people of the scriptures were inspired by rushing rivers and green meadows as they described life with God.  When the psalmists look to the mountains for their help, they were probably looking at actual mountains.  When Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount, he was not standing on a carpeted chancel.  When he spoke of lilies of the field and fig trees and the birds of the air, its safe to presume that he actually pointed at those things and didn’t use a picture on a PowerPoint screen. 

(And for the record, the Bible tells us that Jesus, who was raised in Nazareth, moved as an adult to Capernaum, which is a beach town.  I often tell my congregation, that Jesus himself lived in a town at least somewhat like San Clemente.) 

There is no need to set nature and creation against the word and revelation.  Quite the opposite.  Instead let us who find it so much easier to spend time in nature than in the word of God let the wonder of creation lead us to the Word of revelation. 

Okay, you say.  But how?  How do we do it?  It’s not enough to say we should let the world’s beauty lead us to read and study the Word.  We need help in doing so.  How do we do it?  Through worship.

Never forget that Psalm 119, Psalm 19 and all the Psalms were songs of worship.  They are hymns that were sung, poems that were read, prayers that were offered.  People who had seen the beauty of the earth, the glory of the skies didn’t just climb a mountain peak and stay there.  They didn’t just swim in the seas or meander through a meadow.  When they were moved by the beauty of creation, they brought those experiences with them back to the community gathered in worship.  The inspiration of creation led them to give praise and thanks to the Creator in the community.

Do you know how close to God you feel when walking on the beach or sitting by a mountain stream, when gazing at a canyon view or even strolling down the 17th green?  It feels so inspiring that some of think that we don’t need to come to church.  We feel so close to God that we say that we don’t need sermons and choirs and offering plates.  We feel more inspired in creation than in worship, don’t we?  I know, I feel the same way believe me.  But let’s be careful not to make a common mistake.  Let me reiterate what I have already written: Inspiration is not worship. 

Inspiration is God’s gift to us, God’s reaching out to us.  Inspiration is God moving in our hearts and touching our souls.  Worship is our response to God’s inspiration.  When we are touched by the beauty of nature, the appropriate response is to bring ourselves, our offerings, our inclined and open hearts to God in worship.

• Worship joins awe and instruction. 
• Worship teaches us to respond to inspiration with dedication. 
• Worship connects our personal experience to a faithful community.

In worship we come into God’s presence, as part of Gods' people, we give him praise as the Creator and then we learn how to live as God’s creatures, God’s people, together.  In worship we find both the inspiration and the wisdom that we need to live faithfully and well.

If you are a person who finds it so easy to connect to God in nature, then take this one small step: respond to that inspiration by being faithful in Sunday worship. Let the inspiration "out there" lead you to be more regular in church. When creation inspires us, let’s respond with giving worship to the Creator and opening our souls to His instruction. 

For the past two summers, I led a group of high school senior on a hike to the top of Half-Dome in Yosemite National Park.  Half Dome holds a special place in my heart for the sheer majesty and awesomeness of it.  Just seeing it stirs my heart and I find that as I stand on the lookouts or hike the trail, something within me naturally begins to sing of the greatness of God. 

Maybe it’s because when I first took a group of Junior Highers we gathered at the view point right through the valley floor tunnel and sang the doxology, or maybe it’s because so much of my faith has been cultivated in beautiful places, but I just find that the very best response to this feast for my eyes is the word of God in my ears.

So now, every year as we prepare to embark on the hike, we gathered the group at Glacier Point, looked at the mountain and heard these words from yet another Psalm,

He owns the depths of the earth,
and even the mightiest mountains are his.
The sea belongs to him, for he made it.
His hands formed the dry land, too.
Come, let us worship and bow down.
Let us kneel before the Lord our maker,
for he is our God.
We are the people he watches over,
the sheep under his care.
Oh, that you would listen to his voice today! (Psalm 95:4-7 NLT)

Tod's Travelogue: Lessons of Faith from Summer Vacation, Part 1

As the kids wind down the school year, many of us are making summer plans.  Family trips and times of well-deserved R & R are on the docket.  Newspapers and magazines even offer special summer "preview" editions of things to do, movies to see and the like.  Well, building on that idea, for the next couple of days, as you prepare to enjoy the lazy, hazy days of summer, I too offer up a "spiritual summer preview", some lessons that I have learned from summers past.

(On behalf of all my pastor friends out there let me say that the first thing we should all do before heading out for vacation is to pre-give our weekly offerings. Churches take a beating financially in the summer time because the faithful forget the offering plate while they are away.  Just give ahead of time and you won't have to "catch up" in September and the pastors won't have to fret all August. Now that that's over...back to the issue at hand)

Now, I offer this "summer preview" as part of my current series on Creation and Community. In this series, I have been exploring two questions:

1. Why so many people who love God’s good creation, struggle with worshipping and serving the Creator God amongst his people.
2. Why so many of God’s people—believing Christians—who wholeheartedly affirm God as Creator, don’t seem to care that much about caring for our enjoying creation.

In the last post, I discussed the confusion between "worship" and "inspiration".  Allow me to say more on this through this "travelogue" of lessons learned.

Last summer my family and I spent two weeks traveling to Zion, Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.  We clocked a couple thousand miles on our GMC Yukon and a rented motor home as we looked for wildlife and sunsets and fishing streams.  We were joined by some old friends and had a thoroughly memorable time.  But there were some interesting lessons that I learned along the way.

• I learned that Jello is the official state food of Utah. 
• I learned that there has been documented over 300 stupid ways to kill yourself in Yellowstone National Park. 
• I learned that there are more Starbucks in San Clemente than in all the state of Wyoming. 
• And I learned that there are few better ways to spend two weeks than in an RV on an adventure with Beth, Brooks and Ali.

But I also learned again in rare first hand fashion, just how spectacularly beautiful this world really is:

Of course, I am not the first to notice this.  Indeed, the psalmists tell us over and over again, that the beauty of creation declares the presence of the creator.  Look at Psalm 19:

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

Now, I am by training and calling and with sheer delight a most enthusiastic Bible teacher.  I treasure God’s word.  I have read all of it, I have studied most of it, I have memorized a good many passages of it.  Not many days go by that I don’t spend at least some time in the wisdom, wit and wonder of the Word of God. 

But here is something else that I have learned from my vacations.  Something that I have known all along, but re-discovered last year first hand when for the better part of two weeks, I never once so much as cracked open my Bible.  As much as I love and value the Scriptures, I learned that it’s easier to spend time in nature than it is to spend time in the Word.

For some of you, that is a confession that is just this side of scandalous.  How can a preacher prefer waterfalls to the Word of God? 

For others of you, that acknowledgment is simply stating the obvious.  All things considered, for just sheer soul-stirring goose-bump causing spiritual sensations, nature can be more inspiring than the Word…

Whether it is seeing
• A large dolphin breakthrough the glassy ocean while running one morning as I saw last week at the pier,
• The late summer sunsets that have been splashing red across the sky…
• The shooting stars that created a natural fireworks show for our teenagers at summer camp…
• Or seeing the sun come up on Yellowstone Lake while riding a bike up a mountain pass as a friend and I did last year,

We offer a hearty “Amen” to the writer of Psalm 19 who declares:

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

What I learned again last summer, that I’ll bet a few of you also experienced while on vacations with more breathtaking views than Bible studies is that nature can be more inspiring than the Word.  But inspiration is not enough.

While inspiration can motivate us to live vibrantly
While inspiration can encourage us to walk through this world gratefully,
While inspiration can stimulate us to reflect on our days deeply,

Inspiration itself offers no instruction, no direction, no wisdom for responding to what has so moved us. 

That is why experiences, even spiritual experiences are insufficient by themselves.  Inspiration is not enough.  Creation is not enough.  I need revelation.  I need guidance from God, a light to my steps. 

• Mountains are beautiful but they don’t teach me how to live my life. 
• A geyser is breathtaking but won’t help me keep my promises.
• A shooting star can stir my soul but not transform it. 
• A dolphin has never offered me wisdom. 
• A sunset has never granted me forgiveness. 

True wise and good living, true spirituality, true faith, a true response to the good God who created Mt. Moran, the Snake River, the Montana Sky, the Badlands of the Dakotas and Seal Rock of San Clemente is to listen and heed the Word of the Creator. 

That’s why the Psalmist so moved by the wonders of God’s creation that he declares that the earth is pouring out praise to God every day, then says
The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul;
the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple…

Experiencing creation leads the person of faith to crave revelation.
Seeing the wonders of the world elicits a longing for the wisdom of the Word.
Beauty creates a yearning for truth.
Taking in God’s handiwork inspires a desire to have God work in us. 

The earth, O Lord, is full of your steadfast love; teach me your statutes. (Psalm 119:64 NRSV)

And so here is my first lesson of summer, especially for those of you who like me prefer a walk on the beach to a desk and open devotional, who are tempted to think that inspiration is enough:   Let the wonder of creation lead you to the Word of revelation.

I’ll say more on HOW to do this tomorrow.

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Worship, Waves and Warm Days

As I alluded to yesterday, being a pastor in beach town does have some (okay a few) drawbacks.  If the sun is shining and a warm, well-shaped swell is coming in, and breeze is light and cool, the attendance tends to drop a bit.  The beauty of the ocean, the heat of the sun, a chance to a have few unhurried moments playing in the sand with your kids.  I hear the same thoughts from so many people I am not even surprised anymore: “I just worship God better on the beach with my family than in a pew with church people.”

Vacationing in mountain towns and living in a beach town means that I hear this kind of comment quite a lot.  In my book, It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian, I told of meeting a young couple who brought their new baby to be baptized. 

My predecessor at the church had baptized their daughter some years earlier.  They had attended church for a while and even considered joining it formally, but grew disillusioned during a time of congregational turmoil.  Now, meeting with me and answering the baptismal questions, it became apparent that while the mother could affirm an undeveloped but sincere Christian faith, the father really could not.  When I gently probed further, I found that the father was really quite skeptical of any organized religion.  He told me that he had “found peace in family and the ocean.”  But he also wanted his children to have a “traditional base” from which to operate. 

Without directly saying so, he wanted his son baptized because he believed that we should start in a tradition and then grow into individual experiences of God and self that we find on our own.  For so many people like this sincere Dad, the point of the spiritual life is to be connected to spiritual things, seeking spiritual inspiration and a connection to that which is so much bigger than themselves.  And for many people this is exactly what happens when they become immersed in the outdoors.

I appreciate and understand their sentiments.  I too enjoy nature and love to be with my family.  Sometimes, those moments are so acutely blessed that I am awed and moved to tears.  But that is not worship. 

Worship is not what you feel when you look at the ocean or when you are enjoying a wonderful mountain lake.  It’s not the way you feel smelling the cut grass of a perfectly manicured golf course or hearing the squeak of perfect dry snow under your skis.  Many of us confuse worship and inspiration. 

Inspiration is when God illumines our lives with his gracious presence.  Worship is our response to those moments.  If we truly want to honor the God who gave us perfect swells, clear trout streams, ski slopes, golf greens, beautiful children and loving spouses, we should enjoy those things six days a week and then give God the worship he commands on the seventh.  Worship always includes gathering with God’s people and participating in “spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). 

In an odd sense, the only real way to honor the Creator of all outdoors is to get inside a church. 

CT Citation

Last issue, Christianity Today magazine, featured a quote from It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian: How the Community of God transforms lives.  It is now on their website here along with some other quotes about the Lord's Supper.

The Great Divide…

As often as we can get there, my family and I love to vacation in Sun Valley, Idaho.  We are big skiers but have only been to Sun Valley in the summer time where I get to chase after trout on the Big Wood River while Beth takes plein aire painting classes.  A couple of summers ago, Beth and I went by a local art festival and I ended up talking with a photographer and fellow fly-fishing enthusiast.  I bought a couple of his pictures and that led him to ask what I did for a living.  When I told him that I was the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in San Clemente, California, he gave a response that I heard more than once during my vacation.

“You know, I used to be a Presbyterian, now I just worship in the mountains.”

Interestingly enough, he was truly positive about the fact that I was a pastor and a Christian.  He even communicated a sense of kinship and camaraderie.  From his perspective we were both fellow pilgrims of the spiritual life, both of us were friends of the soul.  From his perspective, my spiritual journey led me to church, his to mountain streams.  The journey and intention was the same, it was just the location that was different.

But from my point of view, while the enjoyable pursuits of our lives were so linked, there was a sad, great divide between us.  Like two hikers who had come to a crossroad, we had been led down different paths that would eventually take us to two quite different destinations. 

Oddly, we would both use the same word to describe what our lives were about: worship.

I understand why my fly-fishing photographer friend describes being in nature as a kind of worship. There is little like being in nature that reminds us of just how small we are.  Climbers who take on the challenge of Everest often gather at a local shrine to humbly seek favor from the spirit of the mountain.  The writings of John Muir are filled with exultations of praise and exhortations to humility and gratitude because of the inspiration of the Sierra Nevadas (one of my very favorite places).  Muir, who was raised in a strict Presbyterian home naturally turned to the biblical phrases of his childhood when he tried to express his delight in the wonders of the natural world.  But as an adult it’s clear that he had left orthodox Christianity behind. 

Now, while most readers of this blog would quickly be able to identify the deficiencies of this deliberate “non-discipleship” of Jesus, what we can’t often articulate is why in our desire to follow Jesus, we seem to be so cut off from the very Creation that Jesus both made and saved—and so inspires us to feel like we are indeed worshipping!

While it is certain (as others have pointed out in the comments) that the creation makes less demands on us than the Creator (something I will return to), it is also certain that we who seek to serve the Creator often do so disconnected from the very creation of which we are part and have been charged with cultivating and keeping. 

In his book, Remember Creation: God’s World of Wonder and Delight, Scott Hoezee tells of a study from 1994 that demonstrated that “Christian congregations that show the greatest seriousness for the Bible and are the most committed to biblical inerrancy are the very same congregations that tend to be least concerned about ecology and are the least interested in the environment or in those programs and groups that promote its preservation” (p. 9).  Indeed, Hoezee points out that the more “liberal” a congregation is, with a lower view of the authority of Scripture the more likely it is to have much greater concern with preserving creation.  And even more, most leaders of most environmental movements today have little or no connection to biblically rooted Christianity.

While most of us biblically-rooted Christians can quickly see the problems with a spirituality that has left behind the Cross and the Creator to settle in creation, we can’t always describe why we who sing of the “beauty of the earth”, don’t care more about the earth that inspires such praise. 

While my fly-fishing photographer friend was certainly on the wrong path by leaving the church and heading for the hills, why are we in the church so unconcerned with--so disconnected from--the hills?

Over the next few days I will try to look at this great divide between we who worship the Creator and those who worship in Creation by looking at issues from both sides of the divide. 

But for now consider this:  How can we who follow Christ, lead our more outdoorsy friends, back into the shelter of a Christian community and biblical faith?  Won’t at least part of it be learning to enjoy creation in the name of the Creator?

Ode to My Outdoorsy Friends: Creation and Community

A week ago, I had the chance to get up to Mammoth Mountain for a last winter hurrah. My son, Brooks, two friends and I were able to enjoy the sunny beauty of the mountain that was empty of skiers but still packing nearly ten feet of snow.  Twas bliss for us.   

Now that summer is coming, my skis are being put on the rack, and the fly fishing gear and surfboards are coming out.  While I won’t be getting away anytime soon, I do have some plans to surf the local breaks of San Clemente this summer and get up to Oregon for a brief trip in August to wet a line on the Deschutes River.  I will also be leading the trip of High School Seniors to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite for the third straight year. 

Now the reason for this summer travelogue preview is to establish my cred with those of you who are concerned that a pastor may not really understand the allure of the outdoors.  The truth be told, the outdoors, nature, and the beauty of it is far more than alluring to me.  At times it has been so potentially seductive that it could take me away from my calling. 

In high school, I took up rock climbing and while I never did anything harder than one 5.10, a few of my friends are still regularly posting 5.10cs in their forties.  I still enjoy hiking and at one time dreamed of trekking the John Muir Trail.  In my life I have not only skied, fished, hiked and surfed (ok, badly…but I do it), I also have enjoyed backpacking, paragliding, snorkeling and scuba diving.  More recently I have been competing in triathlons so cycling, running and open water swimming are now regular parts of my routine. I have always had both a taste for adventure and an insatiable hunger (almost addiction?) to the outdoors. 

I love living at the beach and deeply understand why people would choose the sanctuary of the open air to a church cathedral on a Sunday morning.  But I am also a pastor and really do believe that there is a difference between the inspiration of a sunset and true worship of the God who made it. 

So, I think that I really do get it and am probably more disturbed by a divide that I see than many. In this series I want to probe two questions:

1. Why do so many people who love God’s good creation, struggle with worshipping and serving the Creator God amongst his people?
2. Why do so many of God’s people—believing Christians—who wholeheartedly affirm God as Creator, seem to have so little interest in caring for or enjoying creation.

If there are two things we can say about God pretty confidently from the Bible,   it is 1) that God is the Creator of all living, and 2) that God has chosen a people to glorify and reveal him within in creation.  So, why the divide? Why don’t creation and community go better together?

Hope you’ll read along and chime in…

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Ligament Lesson #5: A Memo to the Laity

This series began as musings on the circumstances in five churches where there were no apparent moral, theological, or social divisions, but all were going through a time of painful split in the body.  In every case, at the center of the pain was a pastor embroiled in controversy over leadership style, vision and decisions.  In my last post I wrote a Memo to Pastors, today I am going to bring this series to a close today with a memo to the Laity. 

To Faithful Members of the Body of Christ everywhere,

Greetings.

I began this series by asking the question, “whose church is it anyway?” And if you read along with me you know my response:

“It’s your church.  The church is about the people, not the pastors." 

Pastors are part of the church with very specific, but limited, God-ordained roles to play.  But neither THE church universal, or any church particular belongs to the pastor.  And no church member belongs to any pastor either.  It’s your church, because it’s Christ’s church.

My friends, I am writing today remind you who you are together.  In an earlier post I told you that the most important thing that I learned in seminary is that in the NT the “yous” are plural. They are “y’alls”. 

Y’all are the temple of the Holy Spirit.  You together are the place where God’s presence dwells on earth today.
Y’all are the body of Christ on earth.  You together are God’s activity working in the world to bring the Kingdom of God to earth today. 

I believe that once we Christians recover that important biblical truth, we’ll be on the way to healthier, happier congregations.  Once we remember that everything in the New Testament is about teaching us how to be together the body of Christ, the Temple of the Spirit, then we’ll never approach the church the same way. 

The church is not the place where each of us finds resources for our individual Christian journeys.  The church is not the place where each of us gets our needs met, finds our purpose, or gets “fed”, the church is not “a place” or about “each of us” at all.  The church is all of us.  The church is “all of us” in a local place being the tangible, physical, actual representation of the church that is “all of us” in all the world.  That church both local and universal is the body of Christ on earth today.   The Temple of the Holy Spirit on earth today. 

So here is my charge to y’all:  Be who you are.  Be who y’all are. 

It’s the job of us pastors to remind us who we are and to equip us to live out this shared identity together.   Indeed, this is primarily what our teaching, preaching and leading are all about. 

In his discussion of New Testament ethics, Richard Hays demonstrates that the community, not the individual, is the “primary addressee of God’s imperatives,” in order to form a Christian Community as “alternative order” witnessing to the life-changing presence of God. (See Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation, 196.) 

This is good news to us, because recent studies have revealed that while Christian belief alone doesn’t lead to demonstrably different lifestyle choices than non-Christians, regular churchgoers do show a marked increase in charitable giving, environmental causes, civic duties, volunteerism and other socially desirable activities and a significantly lower levels of drug and alcohol abuse, promiscuity, and other social ills. (See Rodney Clapp, “On the Making of Kings and Christians: Worship and Christian Formation” in Todd E. Johnson, ed. The Conviction of Things Not Seen: Worship and Ministry in the 21st Century  113-114.)

In other words, if y’all will be who y’all are, the difference God makes in life will be revealed to the world. 

I guess in closing I want to remind all of us of this all too obvious truth.  Because part of being who y’all are is also acknowledging what we are not.  So here it is: We are not perfect, we are not even particularly good or spiritual all in all.  Mostly we are just messy, broken humans who are like porcupines in a winter storm. We keep huddling together to keep warm until we start poking each other. So, this church thing is hard work.  It takes both thick skin and deep commitment. 

But it was messy, broken humans like Peter, James and John that Jesus first called to be his disciples and become his body.  And today, it will be messy, broken humans that God will use to be his body in the world and reveal his presence in the world.

If y’all will be who y’all are.  (And that includes me, too.)