Bad Religion? : The Chasing Francis Series

                

        Today, I found a book I read in 1993,  The Summa of the Summa. It is a brief summary (consisting of merely 532 pages!) of the most famous work of the great theologian, Thomas Aquinas. Peter Kreeft prepared the summary and his notes are a vitally important part of it. If one reads this book with Timothy McDermott’s paraphrase of the Summa, he may begin to understand Thomas Aquinas’s mind.

                

          I picked that old book up today because I realized that Thomas Aquinas may be  another Italian lurking in the shadows of Chasing Francis. I’ll tell you why in a moment. First, I’ll share what I wrote nearly twenty years ago about Kreeft’s book:

“The central issue in any discussion about Christianity involves deciding whether it is true. Most people understand that believers find faith comforting. The question is whether it is true. Aquinas’s common sense test for determining whether we know the truth about something is to learn whether the thoughts in our heads about it correspond with reality. This is a vital test, because Christianity cannot be comforting if it is not true. If it is not true, it is a form of madness. For mature adults to order their lives around some ‘universal end’ or ‘in hope of the general resurrection from the dead’ is a willful delusion of self if none of these things are true. In that case, Christianity exists to maintain an intellectual dysfunction we need to outgrow. I enjoy the likes of Robert Schuller and his message of positive affirmation. However, his success is based on a strategic and thus deliberate avoidance of the uncomfortable question every intellectually honest person must ask of the ideology he embraces: ‘is this based upon something real?’ If it is not, Schuller and Christianity’s other inspiring speakers are making a living inspiring people with amusing speeches about nothing. That even Christians have become uninterested in asking tough questions about what is real reveals that believers have been silently concluding that Christianity will cease to comfort us if we ask it or its defenders serious questions. We are afraid to accept the answers. So we have come to accept a version of our faith that is superficial, insipid, intellectually vacuous and ultimately meaningless. Either that, or we are slothful about being transformed by the renewing of our minds. In either case, popular Christianity has become, as our critics claim, a sort of mild morphine we embrace for no greater reason than that we find it comforting.”  

Why would Aquinas, one of Christianity’s most passionate defenders, provoke such a response? 

I won’t bore you with my reflections on what I have learned trying to read Aquinas. He was Italian. He was born in 1225 into a family known more for producing military officers than saints. However, he was drawn to his uncle’s way of life, who was an abbot. And, he utterly reordered European thought.

In many ways, we could say that Reformed theology was a reaction to some of his ideas. At the same time, his work helped form the intellects of the very reformers who challenged him. Behind both Aquinas and the reformers was Augustine, but that is a theme for another day! What I want to make clear about Aquinas in this blog is that people still study him; not only for his theology but for the philosophical structures he developed. He remains formidable, even after one discounts the limitations of his medieval understanding of science. He believed Christianity was true and his reasons for thinking this still shakes the foundations of secularism.

Not many Christian leaders, Protestant or Catholic, wrestle with the likes of Aquinas now. We study trends, demographics and management theories. We argue politics. We do fund drives. Then, one day, we ask ourselves why we are doing all of that. The malnourishment of our soul erodes the energy to keep it up.

The elders of the church in Chasing Francis thought their pastor was losing his faith. What was actually happening was that he was recovering his faith. What he was losing was faith in a form of Christianity American believers have found increasingly attractive, but which only superficially resembles any form of the faith embraced and confessed by past generations.

Whether Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Protestant, Christians throughout history have offered a robust structure of thought that one could examine, debate, and if he accepted it, embrace. In place of these structures of thought, lifestyle and spiritual formation, we have been steadily remolding our faith into a market-driven product for consumers. As a result, many of us are only marginally interested in whether those who preach Christianity actually live it. We are not at all interested in studying it ‘when we rise up and when we lie down’. We are downright hostile to the idea that Christianity might more important than our money, our chosen way of life, or even life itself. The faith is peripheral rather than central to our lives, and this shift mutates the faith into something historically unrecognizable.

This pastor in Chasing Francis discovered he could no longer sustain the ever-maddening competition for America’s diminishing Evangelical population. He was tired of clichés, silliness, masking political commentary with a religious veneer and turning the house of God into a flea market.

Were John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, John Wesley, Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and Jonathan Edwards to enter one of our market-driven churches, they would find plenty to disagree about among themselves. But all of them would be horrified to discover that the people on our pews no longer know what Christianity teaches. They would be more horrified to learn that many of our preachers do not know what Christianity teaches. But they would not even begin to comprehend that our loss of biblical, theological and intellectual formation has been a deliberate part of a strategy to attract religious consumers into the church.

If schools granted medical degrees to people whose real specialty was business administration, marketing or entertainment, there would be a public outcry. We know it may be possible to amuse a cancer patient, become his personal friend, and make his hospital experience pleasant without ever curing his disease. A hospital that operates by such priorities might teach us there are things we can do to make a patient’s experience more comforting and that would be profitable for everyone. However, we would think it grossly unjust for doctors to stop treating disease in order to be liked, or worse, in order to gain more patients.

            

       The elders of the church in Casing Francis were horrified when their pastor realized he was doing precisely this – pandering to religious consumerism while neglecting the people’s eternal needs. What the elders could not grasp is that their pastor had awakened from a spiritual stupor. He wasn’t going crazy. He was becoming a disciple.

               

      I read a book review this morning on the Amazon site. It is about a new book on the state of American Christianity and is called Bad Religion. I have not read it.  For all I know, I may I disagree with every word in it. I just know I deeply resonate with the review. So I end my blog by passing it along to you. I believe it deserves our careful consideration. 

“As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for the New York Times, Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. In Bad Religion he offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the rails—and why it threatens to take American society with it.

Writing for an era dominated by recession, gridlock, and fears of American decline, Douthat exposes the spiritual roots of the nation’s political and economic crises. He argues that America’s problem isn’t too much religion, as a growing chorus of atheists have argued; nor is it an intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian right believe. Rather, it’s bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional faith and the rise of a variety of pseudo-Christianities that stroke our egos, indulge our follies, and encourage our worst impulses.

These faiths speak from many pulpits—conservative and liberal, political and pop cultural, traditionally religious and fashionably “spiritual”—and many of their preachers claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly offering distortions of traditional Christianity—not the real thing. Christianity’s place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, Douthat argues, but by heresy: debased versions of Christian faith that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption.

In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, he brilliantly charts institutional Christianity’s decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith—which acted as a “vital center” and the moral force behind the civil rights movement—through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s to the polarizing debates of the present day. Ranging from Glenn Beck to Barack Obama, Eat Pray Love to Joel Osteen, and Oprah Winfrey to The Da Vinci Code, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel’s mantra of “pray and grow rich,” a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach, and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country’s ability to confront our most pressing challenges and accelerated American decline.

His urgent call for a revival of traditional Christianity is sure to generate controversy, and it will be vital reading for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.”

This is what the pastor in Chasing Francis discovered. Christianity is not only a communal experience and a weekly comfort. It is a structure of thought. It is a system of belief that must be deliberately taught, learned and adopted. If Christianity no longer offers this, then many now wonder if it offers much of anything; except, perhaps, a living for those of us who market it.

Was Jesus a Pacifist? : Chasing Francis Series

In Chasing Francis, a Rwandan nun lectures a confused pastor about what it means to be a peacemaker. She insists that a peacekeeper is not the same thing as a peacemaker.

A peacekeeper, she says, avoids intervening in things that upset others. He accepts things as he finds them. He doesn’t say or do anything that might challenge his world because he longs above all for a type of ‘peace’ called security. This ‘peace’ leaves him spiritually undeveloped. It may even lead him to become evil if security requires him to turn a blind eye to injustice.

A peacemaker, in contrast, works to bring God’s shalom into his world. Ultimate shalom is a whole person flourishing within a whole society through a living relationship with a holy God. Because we live in a fallen word, we will not fully experience that state until the Prince of Shalom comes to establish it. Until then, the people of God work to bring about states of relative justice and righteousness in a world that is controlled by forces that resist shalom. Because this work challenges the status quo of the societies in which they live, peacemakers often experience pressure, persecution, and even martyrdom.

For all these reasons, a peacemaker may suffer, not in spite of, but because he is a disciple of Jesus.

What the peacemaker must not do is use violence in the name of Christ, even in order to create a good society. The popular way of expressing this truth is “the ends do not justify the means.” The reason this statement is true is because the means we employ always shapes the end we achieve. As the New Testament puts it, “the wrath of men does not work the righteousness of God.”

When a Christian uses violence in order to achieve “righteous” aims, he opens himself to the forces of darkness. This happened in the crusades. It happened in the subjugation of the Incas and Aztecs. It happened under apartheid in South Africa. It happened through the many European persecutions of Jews by Roman Catholics and Protestants. It happened when Americans enslaved Africans. It happened during the near genocide of native peoples on this continent.

In all these cases, Christians justified the use of violence because they claimed they were establishing Christian societies. In retrospect, we understand that these moments were incompatible with the teachings of Jesus. Then again, evil is always easier to identify by those standing outside of the societies gripped by it. It is much harder to spot when we are inside such societies.

Evil is especially successful at covering its tracks from those who seem to benefit from its work. Most of the time, the ones who first become aware of evil within their society are those who immediately suffer because of it.  However, their reactions to evil may contribute to its power. Evil actions encourage evil reactions. Those reactions often provoke yet new reactions.

Jesus calls us to destroy this cycle by warning us against resisting evil. He knew that a resistance to evil easily becomes another form of evil.

Therefore, when a Christian advocates the use of force to bring about a righteous end, he must utterly ignore The Sermon on the Mount. He replaces obeying Jesus with praising Jesus. Unfortunately, this is all too common.

The main place Christians face this temptation is not at the national or global level. We can easily voice our passionate opinions about the people and issues at those levels because they are too far away for our opinions to make any practical difference. No, it is nearly always in our everyday lives where our choices to speak or to act make real differences and invite real consequences. It is in our families, communities, and churches where we are called upon to become peacemakers. It is in our everyday world that we lovingly speak and act the truth, without coercion; without threats. 

We are often tempted to use some form of power to maintain our security instead of speaking or acting against injustice. Manipulation,gossip, withholding good from someone, raising an eyebrow, and sighing are ways of communication that allow us to cover our tracks. They are forms of falsehood and are, therefore, often evil. They seem small but they result in violence.

Jesus calls us instead to openly speak the truth, as we understand it. We must give people an opportunity to consider our words; so that those who hear us can make a decision free of coercion. They may reject our words. They may even become our enemies. Even so, we must speak without malice. We must act without coercion. We must speak and act whatever the cost because we are Kingdom people.

Sometimes, a type of limited force must be used to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Whenever possible, an officer of the law should do this. He or she is appointed by the state and, according to the scripture, by God Himself. Private citizens, however, should not, unless protecting the lives of those for whom they have responsibility. Private Christian citizens therefore do not need bazookas and Uzis. The desire to own such weapons is connected to our culture’s preoccupation with violence. It is difficult to understand why a follower of Jesus would have the slightest desire to associate with such destructive force, created as it was for the express purpose of maiming and killing other human beings.

We live in a fallen world. A Christian who speaks about justice and righteousness and who attempts to live out what he believes may suffer from the hands of violent people. And make no mistake; guns are not the only means of acting violently. A viral email can do extreme damage to a person’s reputation or dignity. Indeed, the victim of such an email might well prefer that the writer simply shoot him instead. Old fashioned person-to-person gossip falls in the same category. We have little control over such reactions. When one speaks truth, however kindly and wisely, he may suffer for it. However, if he is a Christian, he must not retaliate.


That is apparently what the Lord asks of us. But is it humanly possible? And if it it is not, do we dare edit Jesus’ words or simply ignore them so that we can keep up the appearances of a culturally acceptable religion we call Christianity? Just because we call it Christianity, will it really be Christian?

The tile of my blog asks whether Jesus was a pacifist. I do not know the answer.

Jesus said that he had not come to bring peace to the earth but rather a sword. He said he would turn father against child and daughter against mother. So what are we to think? Does a pacifist claim to bring a sword to the earth?



When we fail to speak and act, are we participating in the "peace" Jesus said he did not come to bring? On the other hand, he did say once he would give us peace, but not as the world gives. So are there different kinds of peace?


Does Jesus not intend to contrast the sort of “peace” that comes through our collusion with the status quo with His Shalom, which comes only through trusting in His ways of God and living accordingly? 


None of us want to be cast out, despised, or ridiculed. We prefer to be powerful, wealthy and honored. Sometimes faithful believers get to be all of that. Usually, however, they don’t. Whether they do or not, they are always obligated to do all they can to speak and live the truth in order to spread God’s shalom. They must do this whatever the cost.

In Chasing Francis, the cost seemed to be astronomically high to the struggling pastor. It threatened the loss of his friends, reputation and financial security. But the cost of a soul, which the Lord once insisted was worth more than the entire world, cannot be measured. That was what was really at stake for this pastor, and for all of us. Will we trade our soul for security, or for human favor, or will will risk all to bring our soul and the parts of the world influenced by our soul, into harmony with God?  

“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God,” Jesus said.

Perhaps these are the words of an idealistic prophet, a man we love but do not intend to follow. Then again, they may be the preamble of a constitution meant to govern the heavens and the earth.

The Dirt on St. Francis: Chasing Francis Series

Kevin Guenther is a man in our church who won’t stop talking about dirt. He is obsessed with tomatoes and turnips. And bees, by the way! He thinks gardening is a sacrament.

If you see him, run for your life. If you don’t, you may soon hear a speech about healing your soul by digging in dirt. Soon, you may find yourself in a discussion about compost.

Kevin talks people into raising chickens and rabbits, even if they live in a city.

I have been watching the people involved with him passing around cheese and eggs. Just today I found a hunk of cheese in my office. He denies any connection to the cheese but no one in our church had ever passed cheese around before he came.

What’s up with this guy?

Well, he believes that when Christians lose their connection with nature, they lose a part of their faith. Their understanding of God begins to get distorted. People start thinking that meat is created in the backroom at Kroger; carrots come into the world in little pieces wrapped in cellophane. After a while, it gets difficult to thank God for our food. You begin to wonder what God actually had to do with it.

So, Kevin leads people to the dirt and teaches them to grow their own food. He even invented a contraption called Farm Garden in a Box. A person can use it to grow food on the balcony of a high-rise, if he so desires.

He teaches us to “dress, till and cultivate the earth,” because he believes we can meet God there.

In Chasing Francis, a confused pastor goes off to Italy. He meanders around the vineyards outside Milan. He goes to Rome and Assisi. He eats good food.  He then returns home with a new lease on life and faith.

Crone, the author of Chasing Francis, seems to think the pastor found his way because of the work of Francis of Assisi. Kevin’s theology indicated it might have been the garlic, olives and wine. The pastor may have been transformed by eating naturally grown vegetables.

Maybe there is a third option. Perhaps the pastor was healed because he returned to a culture in which one eats and talks with people who work in the dirt, a culture such as we once were.

How many times did the Lord say, “the kingdom of God is like this farmer who …” Jesus must have told those stories because the spiritual world operates very similarly to the natural world. That would certainly make sense if the same creator designed both the natural and spiritual parts of the universe. We actually confess that in the creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of all things, visible and invisible.”

Kevin thinks that one can learn how the invisible part of the universe works by becoming familiar with the visible part. Getting tomatoes at Kroger won’t do that for you. Growing tomatoes in your back yard just may.

Oh, and did you know that “Adam” means “soil?” We are made of that stuff. We return to that stuff. Our nourishment comes from it.

So our faith can be explained in three movements:

The Garden
The Kitchen, and
The Table.

An old communion prayer sums it up.

We thank you, Lord God, King of the Universe, for this bread and this wine, which you have created and human hands have prepared. They shall be for us, the body and blood of Christ.

People like Kevin remind us that the source of human life is earthy, common and precious. He helps us move beyond the plastic and artificial not because they are evil, but because they are insufficient instruments to nourish life.

Kevin takes a handful of dirt and tells us how to prepare it to feed ourselves.

So if you can’t go to Italy, take a trip to the field behind our church! Kevin has plowed up some land back there that might have made a perfectly good parking lot. He filled it with boxes. He filled the boxes with soil and seeds.

Kevin isn’t exactly St. Francis of Assisi. However, he is willing to go out into the field and talk about birds and rutabagas.  And, along the way, a few souls are gathering around him; getting steadily pulled out of a world of tomatoes that taste like plastic and into a lifestyle that celebrates “all creatures of our God and King.”

I’m not a Kevin groupie yet. But after meeting him, I do sing This is My Father’s Word with a lot more gusto than before.

This message was surely approved by Francis of Assisi!

Why Italians Don’t Read the Kama Sutra: The Chasing Francis Series

When looking through a copy of the Kama Sutra in a bookstore; wear a hat, a pair of sunglasses and a raincoat. If a member of your church catches you, don’t say, “I wasn’t really interested in these pictures; I was just reading the text.”

They won’t believe you.

No one will!

In most bookstores, the books with the words “Kama Sutra” in the title have very little text, which no one reads.

The real Kama Sutra is not about casual sex. It is about the spirituality of lovemaking. It teaches a person to become mindful, purposeful and focused upon his or her lover. It instructs one how to transcend the ego by attending to another person. The word sutra means teaching or instruction. Hence, the Kama Sutra means, “Instructions on Love.”

The Indians gave it to us.

They also gave us wonderful cuisine.

Behind the Kama Sutra and Indian cuisine is a deliberate approach to life and religion. An Indian table is filled with delectable foods of many textures and spices. The colors of the foods and sauces range from the brilliant red dhal to the green mint and the white nan. It takes hours to prepare. The one who prepares it assumes it will also take many hours to eat the food.

When civilized people eat a great meal they stop to comment on the taste of the food. From there they continually meander into other subjects. But the food is always a safe place to which one may return if things get too tense or awkward; “but my, this chutney is unbelievable!”

I am told that Hindus have a Sutra for food.  If so, I haven’t seen it. Perhaps that’s because cooking naked is not a good idea, in any culture. (See what a wicked imagination I have? I am assuming that a Sutra on food would be like our Western versions of the Kama Sutra: filled with pictures of naked people in pre-traction poses. Sick! Sick!)

Whether or not there is a sutra on food, there is a common idea behind the Kama Sutra and Indian cuisine.  It is that real pleasure, in any area of life, requires one to pay attention, remain purposeful, and move beyond one’s self. It requires a healthy surrender to the surprises of relationship and life. To truly live we must take time, open our eyes, open our hearts, and express what we are experiencing.

Multitasking is disrespectful to all those things we are trying to do at once. It is also disrespectful to those we are doing those things with. When we work; we should work. When we play; we should play. When we eat; we should eat. When we make love; we should make love.

I learned about the Kama Sutra while studying about Hinduism. As I read it, I thought it a shame Christians didn’t have similar scripture about sex and food.

Then I saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding. As I watched it, a light went off in my head. I understood why Jesus began his ministry at a wedding and why a three-day wedding festival required wine. Common laborers had very few opportunities to enjoy, really enjoy food. The festival also kept the guests preoccupied so the new couple could have privacy for their own pleasure.

Making a family requires, among other things, a purposeful attention to joy. Maintaining a family requires the same.

This brings us to the difficult question about how to understand Italians.

In Chasing Francis, God sends an uptight, frustrated pastor to Italy. Well, of course! That’s what God would do.

In Italy the pastor cries, laughs, reads, and eats. He doesn’t fill his day timer with appointments every fifteen minutes. He doesn’t read corporate reports between appointments.

He doesn’t eat out of Styrofoam.

He doesn’t eat in his car.

He doesn’t drink a cup of coffee while walking, driving, or writing. He savors his coffee. He sighs. He eats his food and laughs. When he works; he works. When he eats; he eats.

In Italy, in other words, the pastor becomes a person.

He sits and takes some time to eat good food. He talks with people as he eats. Really talks. He punctuates his conversations about God and the meaning of life with “Oh gosh, this pasta!” and “mmmmmm, ohhh, how can eggplant possibly taste so good!”

Italians teach the pastor how to venerate his food. That, in turn, teaches Him how to find God.

Only people who understand the spirituality of food can comprehend what occurs at the Lord’s Table. The rest of us are doomed to keep running for the next big gulp of spiritual junk food, wondering why we have such indigestion and why “we can’t get no satisfaction.”

It was in Milan that Augustine heard the voice in his garden saying “tolle, lege;” (take, read.) The voice invited him to eat the bread of life with his eyes. It called him to savor, consume, and digest the scripture. Once Augustine started, he never stopped. After that he was continually hungry for the words of God. He was hungry to discuss with others how the word tasted.

True spirituality can’t be rushed. If you rush it, package it, take it on the run, or try to suppress the emotions or the intellectual questions it provokes, spiritual life will elude you. You will either give up or you will spend your life running to “the next big thing God is doing,” which will always be somewhere else than where you are.

If we learn to eat like Italians, we might learn to pray like Francis.

The Italians I know don’t read the Kama Sutra. That may be because their wives will kill them in a fit of passionate rage. However, most Italians don’t need the Kama Sutra anyway.

They have a table.

Like the confused pastor in Chasing Francis, Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi found God in Italy. That is not because Italy is holier than other places. It is because Italy cultivates a love for everyday life that real spirituality requires. Neither of these saints called people to overthrow the emperor or to yell at sinners. They just sat down, ate, strolled, and pondered. They savored the world because they knew it was deliberately constructed to reveal the presence of God at every turn.

God is everywhere. He is the source of all delight. We spend our lives seeking pleasure because we are seeking Him. But he is not far from any one of us because in Him we live, move and have our being.

So we don’t need the Kama Sutra. We just need to wake up and live.

An Italian taught me that.

A Dave Foster Tribute: Chasing Francis Series

What a week for Dave Foster to die.

 He is in good company of course, this being holy week and all. Still...I talked with him just last Wednesday. That’s the day the eagles, the discussion group to which we both belonged, meets. We have been discussing N. T. Wright’s book, Simply Christian.

 Last week, like nearly every other week, Dave and I took the opposite sides of the conversation. He was the Calvinist; I was the Armenian. He was defending the need to express faith in contemporary ways; I was defending the need for roots. He was pushing relevance; I pushing the need for encountering the holy. Last week was nothing different. We have gone down that road many times. Something N. T. Wright said in his book took us there again. Last week though, Dave stopped and said, “This is something I worry about all the time. How do I bring people with whom I am trying to relate into a holy moment in which they meet Christ? I mean, all of us who lead churches must both relate to people and help them find that transcendent encounter with Jesus.”

I admired Dave. Fortunately, I told him so several times. We were just wired differently. We each felt called to emphasize different ingredients of the message we were both called to preach. But we enjoyed one another. We certainly  believed in each other.

I’m not sure if Dave ever read Chasing Francis. I just know that he lived it. Like the pastor in the book, Dave was constantly talking about people who were fed up with church but were trying to find Jesus. Dave was drawn to such people. They were also drawn to him. In Chasing Francis, the pastor finally decides to stop marketing himself. He decides to just be who he is. He decides to relate to people who are willing to relate to him; the real him. He realizes that he connects to a woman who just came through the twelve step program better than he does most of the church elders. He stops fighting with his own identity.

Dave didn’t have to go to Italy to discover that. He was himself right here in Franklin, Tennessee. After building a great church, he had the courage to begin again. After just three years, he was leading a new flock of hundreds of people, meeting in a theatre. We often talked about the differences between leading a deeply rooted congregation and one that is just starting out. I pastor a church with a rich history, which is wonderful in so many ways. The downside of heritage however, is the resistance that a deeply rooted congregation can have to making even necessary changes. I talked about this with Dave a few times. “I don’t know what to tell you brother,” he said. “Why don’t you just be who you are? The people who like you will follow you. Those who don’t,’ won’t. What more can you do?”

He made it sound so simple “just be who you are.” He dressed how he wanted to dress. He preached like he wanted to preach. Some liked him. Others didn’t. But his congregation consisted of people who liked what he had to offer. He didn’t keep trying to market himself to those whom he would have never pleased. I admired his grasp of scripture. He loved the Bible. He could always quote chapter and verse to support his ideas. But he was no “Bible thumper,” in the sense of using scripture to abuse or overwhelm people. He wanted to make the Bible come alive by wrapping its message in the language and issues of our times. He worked hard at doing that. He knew who he was. He knew what he was about. Most importantly though, he had enough courage to live and minister his own way. Like David in the Bible who refused armor because he was a slingshot sort of person, Dave Foster understood what worked for him and acted accordingly.

I am more like the pastor in Chasing Francis.  Like him, I have tried too hard to believe I can mold and market myself into a pastor that everyone will like. What utter foolishness! Each of us has a disposition, specific kinds of experiences, and particular talents and training. If we lack the courage to be who we are, we will fail trying to be someone else. Dave really, really understood that. Dave Foster didn’t want to wear a suit to church. So he didn’t. He wanted to drive a motorcycle. So he did. He preached like God gifted him to preach. He wrote what he wanted to write.  He didn’t take a poll to decide what sort of pastor he should become. He became the pastor God had made Him to be. He allowed people to honestly choose whether they liked him or not and to make a choice.

The pastor in Chasing Francis came home from Italy and told his church what he planed to do with the rest of his life. Then he left it to them to decide whether they wanted to go along with him on the journey. That is what all pastors should do. Life is too short to follow someone else’s script for your life.

So my tribute to Dave Foster is to be myself. I am going to dress in a way that is right for me. I am going to speak in a way that fits my ministry. I am going to teach what I believe. That is the way I will attract those who want to walk with me and repel those who do not.

I believe it was G. K. Chesterton who said that sinners were all cut from the same cloth; but that saints become real individuals. St. Francis was not Billy Graham. John Wesley was not John Calvin. The apostle Paul was not Phillip the Evangelist. When I meet Jesus, he will not be disappointed in me because I was not Francis of Assisi, or Dave Foster, for that matter. However, Jesus will be disappointed if I lacked the courage to become myself.

Last week, Dave tweeted, "To give up your creativity for the promise of security is the height of stupidity." Whether our “security” is financial or the vane pursuit of human favor, surrendering one’s self in the name of ministry is a crime. Dave was right; this should never be done.

I am taking fresh courage from Dave to do what he did. By God’s grace I will be who I am.

There is no better way to “chase Francis” than that.

Who Wants To Talk To a Naked Troubadour? - Chasing Francis Series

Chasing Francis is easy to read. Although its ideas are important for everyone they are not inaccessible to anyone.  Like many good books though, we can read it on several levels. Behind its simple story and accessible vocabulary there is a world of literature, theology and social commentary. We can enjoy the story without all of that; we will just miss out on its deeper levels. 

If we will allow to, Chasing Francis opens up a door to what Mortimer Adler once called, 'The Great Conversation'.  Adler was referring to the continuous discussion among history's great minds; the people who created what we call civilization. Unfortunately, our first encounter with civilization’s great ideas usually comes through boring textbooks read by bored teachers. A shock like that can make a person learning-resistant for life.  However, it is possible to overcome the trauma of a bad high school literature class and still join the dialogue that civilizes people.  This book is a good way to begin.

Chasing Francis is a modern story about a medieval man. Its author believes that meeting a medieval man may help us escape the ills of modernity. We certainly need to do that, seeing that the modern age has crashed. We are now well into the era of post modernity. Unfortunately, no one knows exactly what that means. We do know that if we only talk about the ideas of our own culture and age, we will be consuming the same regurgitated material as everyone else. That will be about as nourishing  as it sounds! From time to time, we need to escape the provincialism of our own era in order to truly understand it. Thats what the Great Conversation does for us; it pulls us into other ways of thinking.

The Western portion of the Great Conversation begins with bits and pieces of old material passed down orally through our ancestor’s stories and songs. It moves into the ancient world, principally in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. It then flows into the medieval age, or, as some might prefer to call it, the Age of Faith. After a thousand years it explodes to become the Reformation and Enlightenment. Those movements created the social world that most of us have known. Now the Great Conversation is taking a new turn. No one is sure about where it is headed, including Christians.

At each stage of its development, the Great Conversation has impacted, and has been impacted by, the way believers think about God, community and what it means to be an individual. When the Conversation shifts, things can get really crazy for a while. “Common sense” gets challenged. Then it gets modified. Some of us adapt quickly. Others get lost. 


Christians,like everyone else, respond in different ways to the great shifts like the one we are presently facing.  

If we don’t join the Great Conversation, all we will have to work with to determine our response to this cultural change, will be that nasty regurgitated material I mentioned earlier. We will all be talking about things we already know, already believe, and already feel.That may be comforting for a while but it won't help us very much. 

Chasing Francis can help us think about what “church” means in the new era we have entered. Even if we are very traditional and conservative, we need to understand the questions people are asking now. We will not know how to respond even to our own children if we cling for dear life to the world of General Eisenhower. “Just because” won’t cut it, even for our grandchildren, much less for non Christians.


If we don’t enter the contemporary conversation, we might as well move to rural Alaska and live alone in a hut. If our church decides to opt out of the conversation, we may be able to convince the whole congregation to move with us! 


Becoming hermits in rural Alaska could delay the need to engage with the world’s questions for perhaps another generation. But things are going to become quite unpleasant for either us or for our children when our corporate denial finally shatters. Science is not going to retreat. Technology is not going away. Globalization is not going to reverse. The Great Conversation has already moved on.

So how do we enter the Great Conversation?

Cron suggests that two old guys can help us. He introduces us to Francis first, of course, and Francis has the floor most of the time. However, lurking in the shadows is Dante. He too has something to say.

Dante takes us to hell in a hand basket, literally! Along with Milton, he invents Western Christianity’s conception of both paradise and inferno. Both Milton and Dante invented their scenes of heaven and hell from the scanty biblical material available. In so doing, they probably affected the ways we imagine those places more than even scripture itself!

However, just as Chasing Francis is not really about Italy – although our dear Minister of Music and his wife evidently think so -- may their conscience not afflict them as they stroll about in Rome and Milan while we labor in the Lord’s vineyard here; Dante's The Divine Comedy is not about eternity as much as it is about spiritual life in the nasty now and now.


In fact, The Divine Comedy has more to say about spiritual life than a hundred sermons. If you get a good translation with helpful footnotes, you will find it interesting, alarming, and, in places, even funny. Dante put the pope in Hell, for example. He didn’t do that for theological reasons – he was a Roman Catholic after all – but because the pope wasn’t living right. Michelangelo put the pope in hell too, but high on the chapel ceiling where it would not be discovered until both he and the pope were long gone.

(Michelangelo was ticked because the church was not paying the artists a fair wage. What was that pope’s name again?)

Dante has lovers in hell, rehearsing through all eternity how one nasty book overcame their sanctity and resulted in the loss of their souls. That will teach us to not read the Decameron!

I hear the voice of G. K. Chesterton in Chasing Francis too. Of course, his voice booms through a great many books and songs. He made his words out of glue and they stick on everyone he touches. But forget Chesterton. Don’t even look him up!  No one who reads him ever gets rid of him. So don’t say I didn’t warn you. Boccaccio and Chesterton, those are two voices that for different reasons seduce one’s heart. Take care!

Many people work a daily grind that makes it difficult for them to read great works. Also, people are gifted in different ways; not everyone enjoys digesting a book that requires a great deal of attention and focused thought. That’s why God appoints some people to prepare vital pieces of the Great Conversation for the general public. The Great Conversation is much too important to leave to professionals and experts. After all, the world’s greatest breakthrough once came from a carpenter.

Books like Chasing Francis connect working people to their heritage of faith and culture. Being connected to these parts of our physical life is extremely important for our spiritual life.

I say this because intellectual formation is an indispensable part of becoming a follower of Christ. St. Paul called it “the renewing of our minds.” It is the process of hearing what God's people throughout history say about the ideas and products of the Great Conversation; taking that information into our own minds until it forms our emotions, imagination and cognition; and then, learning how to make some sort of contribution to the discussion.

That’s what Dante did. As he felt the age shifting around him, he gave voice to his confusion.

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

After that, life became hellish for Dante, at least for a little while. Then, with the help of Virgil, he walked through his torment until he finally caught a glimpse of beatitude ahead. Virgil could not help him then. He needed a saint. The intellect can only take us so far on this path to glory.

So with a nod of gratitude to Dante, let's look back at Francis.

Unlike Dante, Francis didn’t leave us great literature. He left a prayer, a nativity set, and a community of servants who have built hospitals and cared for the dying. He left us a great hymn: All Creatures of Our God and King. But most of all, he pointed a safe way forward through the debris of a crumbling church system.

Francis had the courage to get naked. He took off every stitch of his troubadour clothes, laughing his way into the next era of history by the light of Brother Sun and Sister Moon.