I found intriguing Elizabeth Kaeton’s piece on priests-in-charge.  It was interesting because it’s one of those rare posts (in this case from a liberal) which transcends the left-right divide that defines just about everything these days.

For my Evangelical readers, if you’re interested in the whole business of “priest-in-charge” you’ll need to read her post.  It is, more or less, an interim pastor, and that in an episcopally structured church (which is the one thing that we have in common.)  This means that the appointment is made by the bishop above, not called by the congregation (as is the case in Baptist or AoG churches.)

Several years back there was published a report on Church of God ministers that I usually christen the “Bowers Report” after the Pentecostal Theological Seminary professor who headed up its compilation.  One of the takeaways for me was that our pastors neither trusted the administrative bishops above them nor their laity below.  The result was pastoral stress, which was in part reflected in the high level of obesity amongst our ministers (the report used statistics, although anyone who has attended an Anglo Church of God campmeeting or General Assembly knows this to be so.)  The swelling waistlines are in part a product of a church culture which gives gluttony a pass while prohibiting alcohol and tobacco, but it’s also a sign of stress.  And there are indications (as Rev. Kaeton indicates) that pastoral stress isn’t restricted to the Church of God, or even to conservative churches.

How did we get in this mess?  I’ll try to avoid rambling, but let me lay out my ideas.

It used to be that churches could be described as polities.  People had a sense of ownership in their church, and that ownership was reflected in the power that the vestry/deacon board/church council had.  Sometimes they became tools of the ruling clique in the church and made some really silly decisions.  The most egregious one of these I saw growing up in the Episcopal church was the unceremonious booting of the ladies’ rummage sale from the church grounds, which lead the guild to start one of the most elite resale shops in the country.

In a country club church like the Episcopal church of the 1960′s and before, the membership could regard their rector as yet another of the hired help, there to do their bidding.  Many rectors, especially those who were in the ministry as a matter of pedigree, were more than happy to oblige.  Sometimes I think that explains some of my dislike for all of the hue and cry about the “authority” of our ministers, but that’s another post.

Now churches that go nowhere because of their controlling laity aren’t any more admirable than those that go nowhere because of their controlling clergy.  The result is the same, and is opposite when there is momentum from both sides to make progress.  The Southern Baptists didn’t become the largest Protestant denomination in the US because their deacon boards sat on their hands.  Congregational denominations are perfectly capable of significant forward movement, as the Assemblies of God are demonstrating these days, and they can’t move without the consent and participation of their laity.

The whole idea of the church as polity was significantly challenged in the wake of the 1960′s from a number of fronts.

On the left, activist clergy saw (and still see) themselves as the vanguard of change.  Those in the congregation who don’t see it their way will be considered to end up on the “ash heap of history,” to use Leon Trotsky’s phrase.  That’s demoralising for a congregation, especially in the time when the country was going through a collective nervous breakdown, and was reflected in the precipitous drop that the Episcopalians and other Main Line churches experienced in the 1970′s.  We’ve seen this again in the conflict over LGBT bishops and clergy in the past decade.

On the right, we had the likes of Bill Gothard challenging the whole concept of church as polity by saying that authoritarianism is “the Bible way.”  This flew in the face of two centuries of American church experience.  Conservative churches did so well forty years ago that the weaknesses of this idea were masked, but they’ve come home to roost of late.

We also have parachurch ministries and independent churches to erode the church as polity concept.  Both of these are built around the personality of one individual or his (usually but not always) family.  Both of these have encouraged another uninspiring trend in churches: the trend towards the church as a consumerist provider of services rather than a gathering of God’s people, a trend that needed little encouraging in our society.

Finally we have churches (such as the Roman Catholic and the Church of God) which were authoritarian early in their history onward.

The result is that, today, too many of our ministers (and the diocesans above them) are obsessed with their authority, and build their ministries around its maintenance.  Our lay people are reduced to three choices: submit, start a war, or flee.  Worst of all, our getting away from church as polity hasn’t reduced politics in the church.

It’s little wonder that our ministers, trapped in a no-win paradigm with their congregations, are stressed out.  Everyone involved is stressed out.  And it’s little wonder that house churches, with no payments (the need for funding drives way too much ministry, and is a big part of the problem) and informal structure, are gaining popularity.

P.S. I noted that Rev. Kaeton supports same sex civil marriage.  I would be interested to know why she thinks we need civil marriage in the first place.

HT to David Virtue.

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With this post I resume with a topic that generated the most heated debate at the Church of God 2010 General Assembly: the admission of women to the rank of Ordained Bishops.  (For my Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox friends, the term “Ordained Bishop” has a different meaning than a diocesan: in addition to including those and above, it includes a large number of our pastors and other ministers.  It is simply the highest rank of minister in our denomination.)

I have openly supported this idea since 2006, although I doubt that this support carried much weight.  Evidently the support of others didn’t either; it was defeated by a large margin in the General Council of ordained bishops, not once but twice during the same General Council.

In the wake of these votes, I’d like to make two comments.  (The entire General Assembly was live streamed, something I hope we see in the Anglican/Episcopal world; hopefully it will be archived at the GA site in the near future.)

1. Honestly, the speeches on both sides (or at least the ones I heard; I had many duties away from the sessions) may have been the “best shot” of both sides, but I found the overall calibre of the debate wanting.  Those against reminded me of some of the trade union grievance sessions and contract negotiations I went through in my family business.  The proponents were more eloquent, but some of them drifted into the same kind of  “soft” arguments that have gotten their Episcopal counterparts in trouble.  Such are, in a true Pentecostal context, unnecessary.  The Church of God, in common with most Pentecostal denominations, has a long and illustrious history of women in ministry free from the secular context that bedevils most liberal churches and based on a church life led by the Spirit.  If we believe and are convinced that this is God’s intent for the church, we should follow this to its conclusion.
2. This debate has driven home something I’ve come to realise but have never really wanted to admit: the ministers of the Church of God struggle with a really clear, straightforward debate on the important issues.  That’s a legacy of the aintellectual tradition we have, reinforced by the usual Evangelical fear that putting the Scriptures in a consistent philosophical context would lead to unBiblical results.  That affects even procedural issues, such as the Council voting down quadrennial assemblies because they would reduce the opportunities to vote on our leadership and then turning around and granting Executive Committee members four year terms!  And I’m not sure our institutions of higher learning have really addressed the problem effectively.

I think that, eventually, the Church of God will come around on this issue.  The tragedy of the whole thing, however, is that in the energy of the debate over women ordained bishops, the less than satisfactory role of the laity remains unresolved.  If our view of the role of the laity was in line with the New Testament, this debate would be much simpler, because the opportunity for ministry would be more open to everyone without the complexities of the ministerial ranking system (which, as one opponent of the motion admitted, itself has nothing to do with the New Testament.)  It would be a tragedy that we would end up with men and women ordained bishops in our pulpits and empty pews.

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Take a look at the interesting graph on the right that appears in Chan Akya’s article on why European countries want to ban the burqa and the US is in no hurry to do so.

I have a few observations about this:

• It’s ironic that France, where a larger proportion of Muslims consider themselves a citizen of France (or Europe?) first than in the neighbouring countries, was the first to ban the burqa.  That’s due to France’s long tradition of dirigisme (a hangover of the ancien régime) and some of the factors Akya mentioned in this piece: stronger position of women in European politics, stronger secularistic idea, etc.
• There’s no surprise in the attitudes of Muslims in Middle Eastern countries, or Nigeria.  The graph is striking in the exception that Indonesia is.
• It’s interesting how Christians in the US are far stronger in identifying themselves as Christians over Americans, even with the high level of patriotism we have in the US.  That’s helped by the fact that, leftist sneers about the religious right notwithstanding, Christians in the US viscerally understand that their faith is not fundamentally a political philosophy, and that there’s more to life than politics.
• It will be especially interesting for my Anglican readers to note Nigeria’s “Christian first” majority.
• I think that European Christians fervour for state vs. faith is due mostly to the notional nature of much of European Christianity, even in the face of the ease one has in being a secularist.
• One missing graph is the attitude of American Muslims, which I think would have tracked their Christian counterparts.

I don’t think that France’s ban on the burqa is a human rights move.  If that were the case, the ban wouldn’t be under consideration.  I think it’s the beginning of a major pushback of European (and Australian, under the new PM) secularism against a real religious threat to their idea.  It’s what I would call a “Ministry of Culture” kind of solution: use the government to impose what the leaders think is the nation’s culture by the coercive powers of the state (I had some fun with this idea here.)   How well it will work will depend on the vigour they pursue it with and what kind of reaction they get out of the Islamic world (both within and without their countries.)

One thing Americans have had the luxury of is the whole “God and Country” concept.  It’s even embodied in the Army chaplains’ motto.  As secuarlists advance here and “God or Country” becomes a more common choice, it will be interesting to see how that plays out.  On a practical level, the success in weaning Americans off of their reliance on God will depend, as it has in Europe, on the state’s ability to provide a secular source of temporal sustenance.  Given the wobbly state of our national finances, that’s not a given; the godless aren’t as brilliant as they think they are.

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As the New York Times observes, in the digital world it’s the end of forgetting, and in the midst of this Jeffrey Rosen draws from the Jewish world:

In addition to exposing less for the Web to forget, it might be helpful for us to explore new ways of living in a world that is slow to forgive. It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleadingly called a “global village,” to think about privacy in actual, small villages long ago. In the villages described in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people — oral or written, true or false, friendly or mean — was considered a terrible sin because small communities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But the Talmudic villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global village, where much of the content on the Internet would meet the Talmudic definition of gossip: although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records them in the book of life, they also believed that God erases the book for those who atone for their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud, people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes. “If a man was a repentant [sinner],” the Talmud says, “one must not say to him, ‘Remember your former deeds.’ ”

Unlike God, however, the digital cloud rarely wipes our slates clean, and the keepers of the cloud today are sometimes less forgiving than their all-powerful divine predecessor. In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Eric Schmidt, the C.E.O. of Google, said that “the next generation is infinitely more social online” — and less private — “as evidenced by their Facebook pictures,” which “will be around when they’re running for president years from now.” Schmidt added: “As long as the answer is that I chose to make a mess of myself with this picture, then it’s fine. The issue is when somebody else does it.” If people chose to expose themselves for 15 minutes of fame, Schmidt says, “that’s their choice, and they have to live with it.”

I think it’s fair to say that God will be around long after our digital cloud is gone.  But much of the problem here is that we are trying to force people into a perfect construct, something that human beings are simply not built for.  And that problem is going to get worse as we not only compete with each other for jobs and advancement but also with digital intelligence.

Christians know but don’t always understand that we are saved by grace, which we define as God’s unmerited favour.  The imperfections screamed out in cyberspace–be they by ourselves or others–underscore “unmerited.”  The reason why Jesus Christ came to give us eternal life by his work and not ours is because we could not meet God’s standard of perfection, and the problems people face by stuff getting out on the Internet only underscores our need for grace from God, who has by his own Son furnished the means to obtain it.

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As many of you know, for me, in one sense, this is it: at the end of August, I will be leaving as Ministries Coordinator of the Church of God Department of Laity Ministries.  Next week is our General Assembly in Orlando, in many ways the place where I will make my parting “social.”

As this 13 1/2 year span of my life comes to a close, I wanted to recount something I heard some time back and have been thinking about it ever since.  It came from the Rt. Rev. Daniel Vassell (right), Administrative Bishop of the Church of God in Ontario.  Before he went to Canada, he worked for the church’s Youth and Christian Education department, and working in the same building we got to know each other.

One Christmastime I met him in the lobby, and I think I mentioned something to him about my Anglican activities.  For someone whose roots are Jamaican like Daniel, Anglicanism is a familiar thing.  You even see Anglican traits reflected in the way Pentecostal West Indian churches worship and operate.  I remember one church I preached at in New Jersey where the Grenandan pastor changed the colour of the pulpit stoles.

Daniel was emphatic at the mention.  “You mark it down,” he said, not wanting me to forget what he was about to say.  Anglican and other liturgical churches were, in some ways, better at taking the “celebration” outside of the four walls of the church.  Pentecostal churches gathered on Sunday, exuberantly worshipping, and, in too many cases, that was it.  Because of the constraints of the liturgy, other churches had to celebrate elsewhere–and if there’s one thing that West Indian churches like to do, it’s celebrate.  But it’s better when the church took the celebration to the community around it and not just kept it to itself.

In many ways, that encapsulates what is, IMHO, wrong with most of North American Evangelical Christianity these days.  To start with, our churches–especially our Anglo ones–are far and away too performance oriented.  That’s odd, considering we preach that Jesus Christ’s work on the cross is what gets us to heaven, not our own works.  But we’ve come to equate fulfilling the mission of Jesus with what amounts to a business model of performance.

Beyond that, our obsession with worship has led us to focus our attention and resources on our Sunday service and how it’s done and housed.  That in turn has led both to wrapping our Christian life around our worship and to the expensive edifices that we’ve built to house that worship, edifices that have sapped the financial resources God has given us from directly ministry related activities, to say nothing of the celebration we’re supposed to be having.

But our life in Christ is to be celebrated, and that celebration needs to come out of the confines of the walls of our churches and into the world around us.  How that takes place depends upon the culture we’re ministering into and the legal status we have, but in a world racked by economic uncertainty the sight and experience of people who still have something to celebrate and do it is a powerful message.

So, as I prepare to venture out from the confines of the International Offices (my work has been part time, so the venturing in has been likewise) my message is this: it’s time to take the celebration of the life that Jesus Christ has given us out of the confines of our churches and into the community around us.   It’s time to take the celebration to the people.

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Coming from a blog like First Things, it could be:

Legal recognition of marriage would become a purely civil matter. A couple who wanted to marry would have to get a license and go to a civil magistrate. If they then wanted their union sacramentalized, they would go to the Church. If the Church refused to marry them because they did not meet its criteria for a sacramental wedding—if both parties were of the same sex, for example—the state could do nothing about it, since the Church is a voluntary association protected by the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

Fans of this blog know that I have advocated the complete abolition of civil marriage for a long time.  I would urge you to read this and the comments carefully.  He includes a quote from the American Spectator’s Emmett Tyrell calling for the privatisation of marriage.

I’ve talked about this for a long time, but I’ll reiterate the following:

1. As long as our ministers are agents of the state in civil marriage, they will be subject to anti-discrimination attacks.  It doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way our law has gone (and it doesn’t make sense either.)  Ending their role as agents of the state isn’t a complete bar for legal attack, but it would put things well down the road.
2. Doing the “two marriage” (civil and religious) deal, as is done in France, Germany, Russia and many other places, isn’t a complete guarantee that ministers would be free from attack either.  Many jurisdictions prohibit religious agents from sacramentalising marriage before its civil recognition, as Belgian King Leopold and Lillian Baels found out the hard way during World War II.

The only way to really solve this dilemma is to abolish civil marriage altogether.  Civil unions won’t cut it.  It’s that simple.  If the LGBT community won’t be the progressive group they claim to be on this, we should.

HT to Sanctus for this.

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It’s taking place amongst American teenagers, even Evangelical ones, according to a recent Barna survey:

The most striking change was the fact that teenagers today seem much less inclined to have spiritual conversations about their faith in Christ with non-believers. The survey question specifically asked if the survey respondent had “explained your religious beliefs to someone else who had different beliefs, in the hope that they might accept Jesus Christ as their saviour.” Among born again Christian teenagers, the proportion who said they had explained their beliefs to someone else with different faith views in the last year had declined from nearly two-thirds of teenagers in 1997 (63%) to less than half of Christian teens in the December 2009 study (45%).

Kinnaman noted: “Christian teenagers are taking cues from a culture that has made it unpopular to make bold assertions about faith or be too aggressively evangelistic. Some of the Barna Group’s other research shows that the vast majority of these students agree with the statement it is ‘cool to be a Christian.’ Yet fewer young Christians apparently believe it is worthwhile to talk about their faith in Jesus with others.”

Anyone who has had contact with people in an area where Christianity is legally proscribed knows that one of the first things one notices is a lack of training and initiative in sharing their faith with others, or at least in an open way.  This is understandable; in many of these places, doing so with the wrong person (especially if they’re working for the police) can land you in a great deal of trouble.  The gospel is spread and the faith is shared in places like this, to be sure (China is example #1,) but not in the way we’re used to in the U.S.

Kinnaman’s statement that “Christian teenagers are taking cues from a culture” is a typically American way of papering over the reality that’s in front of us.  A “culture” just doesn’t wake up and decide that it doesn’t like something or someone, it’s pushed.  Where we’re at in this country is the result of that simple fact that those who own and operate this place (and if they’re in the government, operate the place when they don’t own it) don’t like Evangelical Christianity and have taken the appropriate steps to make their beliefs the norm in our society.

This amounts to a de facto driving the church underground.  The most recent prominent example is the University of Illinois adjunct professor who got the boot for stating that the Catholic Church’s view of natural law deemed homosexuality immoral, but there are others.  Our “guaranteed” freedoms are trumped by the control that hostile people have over our institutions, especially our judiciary.  We as Americans refuse to see what’s going on for what it is, but we (and in reality our opponents, who proffer explanations full of “tolerance”) are lying to ourselves.

I can’t say that what Christian teenagers are doing is particularly admirable, but it’s understandable.  And it’s noteworthy that the gospel is spread in places where it is legally (and, let’s go ahead and say it, “culturally”) restricted.  To do so here will take a paradigm shift in the American church, but if that’s what it takes, then so be it.

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Now that I’ve published this, it’s time to move on and consider what’s in front of our church at its 2010 General Assembly in Orlando next month.  The agenda is online and can be found here.

This review is not intended to be comprehensive.  It is informed by more than a quarter of a century in the church, more than half of which found me working in the International Offices.

With that in mind, here goes:

Women in Ministry (Item 3): This should have been done a long time ago.  I elucidated my position on this subject here, much to the shock of some at our Seminary.  My only concern with this is that the whole issue of authority hasn’t been thought out very carefully.  My observations of this are here (in general) and here (in particular, relating to women in ministry.)

Pastoral Review System (Item 4): This is a sore subject with lay people, who find it strange that our ministers are unfavourable to periodic pastoral review when Administrative Bishops are subject to same and ministers bristle at the thought of eliminating an elective office or a quadrennial General Assembly.  As my father would say, “I’ve got a no-fit going here.”  (I thought of using my usual expression, “cognitive dissonance moment,” but I wanted to be clear on this subject.)  No substantive action is contemplated here, but there needs to be some.

Quadrennial General Assembly (Item 5): See previous item.  The General Assembly is an enormously expensive enterprise.  A more sensible solution would be a triennium like the Episcopalians use, but I pray that God smites us with a curse if we adopt some of the really stupid resolutions they have at their GC’s.

Elected Positions (Item 6): Personally I think the following would make for a better (or at least more consistent) elected officials mix:

1. Three (3) Person Executive Committee.
2. Council of Eighteen (18) with at least half of the members lay people.  (That’s right, lay people.)
3. State Administrative Bishops (elected, obviously, at the state/regional level.)  If it worked for a Doctor of the Church like Ambrose, it should work for us.

Restructuring of International Offices (Item 7): I think this would have a happier ending for everyone if my Item 6 suggestion (esp. the second point) had been in place before it started.  War is too important to be left to generals; God’s work is too important to be left to our ministers.

International Executive Council (Item 13): See my comment on Item 6.  I’d also mandate that the make-up of the IEC reflect the actual ethnic mix we have in our denomination.

General Overseer (Item 15): This would end one of the more interesting traditions we have in the Church of God, and some explanation (esp. for my Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox readers) is in order.

“And I saw the dead, high and low, standing before the throne; and books were opened. Then another book was opened, the Book of Life; and the dead were judged, according to their actions, by what was written in the books.” (Revelation 20:12)  This is, in effect, the theory behind how we make appointments at the General Assembly.  After our Executive Committee and Council are elected, they meet in conclave while the General Council/Assembly is still in session, and determine all of the “General Assembly appointments”: state and regional Administrative Bishops, missionaries, chaplains, boards, International Office appointees (like myself), and others.  We have a commissioning service at the end, where we who are elected or appointed are commissioned.  Only problem is, our appointments aren’t officially announced until after the service, when we rush to the exits and get a little booklet (it’s online now, too).  At that point “books were opened,” and we see, as one Presiding Bishop put it, “God’s will for our life.”

This delightfully suspenseful if somewhat unprofessional system is to be abolished under this resolution.  The appointments are to be made by the EC and IEC after the Assembly at the leadership meeting.  Although this on paper makes more sense, there are two issues surrounding it that need to be considered.

The first is that it takes yet another week off of the “musical chairs” that we have in August while appointees and elected officials move around (frequently physically) and get situated.  This is especially significant for those with school age children.  It also adds more dead time in the life of our church around the time of the Assembly, and there’s enough of that.

Second, it would add more time for our church’s version of the “smoke filled rooms” to cloud our appointment process, and that time would be after everyone else had gone home.  There’s enough of that already, too.

Affiliate Churches (Item 17): I have to admit that this is the worst item on the agenda.  I think the idea of this is to attract large Charismatic churches with multimillion dollar facilities whose title would not have to pass to the central church (a problem that North American Episcopalians and Anglicans are well aware of.)  But this ignores some very important realities.

To begin with, denominations primarily exist to serve (that’s right, people, we’re supposed to serve) small and medium size churches.  Large churches don’t need a denomination.  And not all churches are called to be large churches, current theory notwithstanding.

More than that, it’s unfair to those who have worked within our system for years to sit and watch others waltz into it, receiving the benefits of affiliation without the price.  If local church ownership of property is so great, we should extend it to everyone (and I think there are very cogent reasons to do this) or at least divest the property to the state and regional levels (as the Roman Catholics do on a diocesan basis.)

Finally, it would over time turn our church into what Sun Yat-Sen would call a “sheet of loose sand.”  The North American Anglicans are wrestling with the problem re the “mission partner” churches on a much larger scale, and I think it undermines the integrity of the enterprise.  (Had they started out being a loose association, it would have been different, but their objective was to receive recognition from Canterbury, so…)

Now that I’ve ripped through the Agenda, let me bloviate on a few choice topics:

Church Planting Initiative

A good deal has been made of this; it has been one of the objectives of the Missional Revolt.  From what I’ve seen, my conclusion is simple: I think that church planting at US$50,000 and up a crack, whether it’s underwritten by the denomination or a local church, is economically unsustainable in a church where the median AGI of the membership probably isn’t that high.  Put another way, we’ll run out of money before we’ll run out of mission.  In a world of house churches and cell groups, using a “World Missions” type of model is probably a good way of marrying the career track of our ministers with our need to plant new churches (and I agree we need to plant new churches.) Obviously if you’re planting the likes of a Worth Avenue Church of God (and that would reflect more “out of the box” missional thinking than I’ve seen in our church) you’d need these kinds of resources; however, I don’t think it should be regarded as the norm.  This would be a good place to employ the services of our lay people, especially if the plant is out of an existing local church, but we are afraid of such an enterprise.

I would urge our ministers to take a look at Roland Allen’s excellent book Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? for an insightful look at this subject.

Internationalisation or Multiculturalisation

One major lacuna in our reallocation of resources is any effort to further the internationalisation or multiculturalisation of our church at all levels of its life.  A church drawn from all peoples was one of the promises of the first Pentecost and certainly the second, but our current set-up suggests a “hub-and-spoke” structure.  This will not do for a long list of reasons.  It will limit our church’s appeal.  Full Gospel Christianity is naturally multicultural, which is, for me, one of its big appeals.  We need not spoil it.

Role of the Laity

I saw a few references to the laity in the Agenda and related documents, especially to putting lay people on more boards in our church on a national and international level.  We will see if this is actualised; I tend to be a sceptic.  As it stands now, the role of the laity in our church as it is currently implemented has no support in the New Testament.  That needs to be fixed.

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Where we read the following:

I am the Good Shepherd; and I know my sheep, and my sheep know me– Just as the Father knows me and I know the Father–and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep besides, which do not belong to this fold; I must lead them also, and they will listen to my voice; and they shall become one flock under ‘one Shepherd.’  (John 10:14-16)

This, from our war in Afghanistan:

The night I arrived, (Lt. Col. Guy) Jones was conducting his weekly “key-leader engagement meeting” in an office on the second floor of the District Center. Jones, who majored in nuclear engineering at Texas A&M, had a lot of theories, and one — just politically incorrect enough to flourish in a remote place like Arghandab — had to do with the role of key leaders in Afghanistan. “Compare the Afghan people to sheep,” Jones said to me in one of our long conversations. “You know if you just suddenly jump at sheep, they’ll fall over and have a heart attack? When they’re scared, they’ll just huddle with the shepherd. As soon as they hear the sound of his voice, they’ll calm down.” The Taliban were trying to terrorize people into fearing that their shepherds couldn’t protect them.

Although I think that Lt. Col. Jones’ case has merit, and certainly explains Jesus’ words clearly, the immediate problem is that his own shepherd–Barack Obama–is acting more like this:

I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. The hired man who is not a shepherd, and who does not own the sheep, when he sees a wolf coming, leaves them and runs away; then the wolf seizes them, and scatters the flock.  He does this because he is only a hired man and does not care about the sheep.  (John 10:11-13)

For those obsessive Ivy League elitists (and Teasippers) who would sneer at the thought of Aggie wisdom, I should point out that probably the most financially successful member of my A&M class is a nuclear engineering major who ended up working for the Rockefellers.

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Back when I was growing up, we’d descend from Palm Beach and venture to the Florida Keys for vacation, navigating waters such as shown at the right.  One of the more memorable side trips we took was a visit to a museum where artefacts from sunken Spanish galleons were on display.  The Spanish were most interested in precious metals in the New World; they systematically enslaved the Aztecs, Toltecs, Mayas, Incas and other people whom they conquered to dig gold and silver out of the mines for shipment back to Spain, in conditions one shudders to even think about.  The Straits of Florida were the main route from Mexico to the Old World, and since the reefs that parallel the Keys were there, some of those galleons never finished the voyage, depositing ship, crew and cargo on the bottom.  Some of these had been salvaged and I found the gold and silver coinage on display to be especially fascinating.

A little later in life I was introduced to another story of subaqueous gold: Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, his epic opera in four parts.  In this case it was a less inviting body of water (the Rhine River) where gold was guarded by Rhine maidens and available only to the one who would forsake love.  Sure enough, there’s always someone who will do anything for money, in this case dwarf Alberich, who got the gold and forged a ring of power.

In the meanwhile the Teutonic gods decided they needed a new home, so they contracted with the giants Fasolt and Fafner to build their new magnificent Valhalla.  Through a long ruse they managed to beat the payment for this out of Alberich, ring included.  Alberich curses his lost ring (as if that were necessary,) Wotan and the gods got clear title, and Froh, the god of spring, created a rainbow bridge for the gods to cross into their new home.  But the effort was doomed from the start by the way they were forced to pay for it.

Fast forward to the year where the left made its last attempt to defeat George W. Bush electorally.  (There’s a political angle to the “rainbow bridge” but I’ll skip it.)  My own church, which was my employer, had been engaged in a massive expansion of its central offices (with expense following,) and the process was complete.   Amidst one of the sappiest responsorial readings I had ever been a part of, the buildings, which surround an expansive prayer garden, were dedicated, and we crossed our own rainbow bridge.

There were prophets amongst us.  One of my colleagues proclaimed that Jesus had turned his back on us.  We peered out of the lobby of the building where our new office was (and is, for the moment) and saw truth in his words.  And there was the matter of payment.

The expanse of Wagner’s musical productions were only matched by the controversy they generated.  Their creator had a high view of his operas, but in his time he had detractors.  Instead of applause, there were many times when the audience was simply clasping its hands above their heads.  Such was also the case with our new Valhalla.

With life faithfully imitating art, it was time for the hero to appear.  Somewhere in my preppy education the idea that heroes didn’t come from warm climates bubbled to the top, that only cold, harsh climates could produce such.  As a South Floridian, this doesn’t sit well, and my response is here.  For once I was right.  Not so far from the sunken Spanish gold, where the animals are tame and the people run wild, a hero appeared that would doom Valhalla and many of its inhabitants.  It’s taken some time and the process has generated more heat than light, but earlier this year our reorganisation began, I announced that I was taking my leave, and we began the painful process of downsizing that has continued unabated to the present day.

Unfortunately, as was the case in the Ring, the hero’s appearance wasn’t an automatic solution to every problem.  The bottom line to our hero’s crusade was that less of the denomination’s cash flow would flow to the centre and more would remain in the field.  But, unlike mythology, there are many Valhallas out there, products of a generation whose penchant for grandiosity combined with availability of credit produced a proliferation of economically unsustainable physical plants.  (That’s what happens when the church follows the culture rather than the other way around!)

But someone needs to take a lesson from this.  It is my prayer that the gold will find its way once again to the bottom, the descendants of those who mined it (and others on the wrong side of slavery and colonialism) will take their rightful place in the church, and that I will never, ever again cross the rainbow bridge.

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