Beta Believer

I've moved already!

2006-07-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

Just to let you know, I've moved over to http://betabeliever.wordpress.com
I haven't been blogging very long, but I am aware of the wordpress software platform and this makes it easy without having to pay for a host quite yet. I really wanted a comments feed and this make is way easier than blogger. Please change your bookmarks or feeds to this new site. Thanks for visiting!

Nate

Linux and the now of prayer (part 2)

2006-07-19T23:36:00.000-07:00

But I just got so sick of constantly sanding and staining old doors and lugging ladders around and bending over toilets until my back was screaming and it was 8:30 at night. I began to grumble inside. I began to feel like we needed some wind in our metaphorical sails. One night we hatched a plan. We would go back to school. Lots of prayer and petitioning followed--along with a healthy dose of what I would now like to call 'sign watching'. You may or may not have tried this tactic in your walk with the Lord. If you haven't then you are probably more mature than me and I apologize for my lowbrow Christianity :) This is done by waiting for something to corroborate what it is that you feel God has spoken to you. In our case we started going to a home church that was pastored by a guy who had gone to Denver Seminary--Ok, pretty close. We were thinking that God had called us to go to Colorado Christian University in Denver. Then we met his wife and she said that she was good friends with the Dean of Admissions at Colorado Christian University. Closer still. Then we went to a Christian concert that was being headlined by the band 'Five Iron Frenzy' who are from Denver. My wife Charity came up to me at the end with a nice sticker and said hey look we can put this on our guitar case--and I was in 'sign watching' glory because I realized before she did that the sticker was essentially the Colorado State Seal (how I knew this is another post).
So we loaded up the truck and we moved to Denverly--swimming pools, movie stars. Not really, but lots of pretty mountains in the background, albeit much dirtier than once imagined in the foreground.
Anyway, speeding it up a bit...we went to school and we loved it but were very poor the entire time. Mainly because we went to school full time without any family support (because both sets of parents lacked a financial vivacity that we wished they'd had at the time) and we only worked a few lucrative work-study jobs--whatever we could find. And the dream of what school could be, what it was supposed to be, slowly died. We eventually switched our majors (mine was communications and broadcasting and hers was child development) to whatever was open in the 'School of Professional Studies'--which is where all the working adults go to finish their degrees. Since we were already in our late twenties we felt like we fit in more anyway. So we both got good jobs--I got an amazing job at the Denver Rescue Mission--as a computer technician. Something I had almost no experience doing--something that was a total miracle and was simultaneously the beginning of an ulcer that is still with me. One of the main reasons for switching was money. At the time it was the lack of it...the SPS program was so much cheaper--and the allure of a Computer Information Systems degree was sparkly too. I could graduate and start making 75,000 big ones a year! This was a few months before 'Y2K' (remember that?).
Of course the bottom fell out of the market that year in March and Silicon valley went on a ride to southern Cal and my degree went from being something to basically nothing, but I didn't know that at the time...and I had a good job. I was working full time while going to school full time (actually more than full time, more like time and a half--18+ credit hours a semester + 40 hr. work week=lots 'O fun).

To be continued again...

Linux and the now of prayer

2006-07-19T14:40:00.000-07:00

For the longest time I have struggled with my circumstances, with the place that I find myself. Stuggling against God in prayer I have petitioned him over and over for a change. I have gotten so weary. My wife and I have been going through an extended 'desert' time...you may be aware of such a time if you have been a follower of Christ for more than a few years. It's a long story, one that I might share more on in the future, but to sum it up, we have been restless people as a couple--we have been married eight years and from the very beginning we were hoping and waiting for God to show us what our unique path in life was and is--where and to what he has called us... We first met in Honolulu while we were both working with YWAM. We stayed in Honolulu for the first year of our marriage working with a local ministry called the 'X-Factory'. It was an old KimChi factory that had been bought by a local church and turned into a kind of compound that housed the ministry. The ministry focused on the poor Filipino population in its immediate area by acting as an arm of the Hawaii foodbank. But, perhaps the coolest thing about it was that it had a walk-in style freezer that we made into a recording studio. I was a painter by trade at the time so I helped them paint the concrete and get the thing ready for remodeling. This ministry also had a large covered stage area that would be used for monthly concerts that would showcase Christian bands from around the islands...most of them ska and punk bands. Those were fun times...my wife and I would go to the beach every weekend and basically just enjoyed the amazing weather and the ocean.
But I was always unhappy, and we were increasingly strapped for cash. I worked as a painter on the ministry grounds to work off our rent and also worked about 6 hours as a janitor for the Japanese-speaking pre-school where my wife was a teacher's assistant (she doesn't speak a drop of Japanese except she knew the word 'oshinko' which means pee and is probably spelled wrong).

To be continued....

I am going to do this post in a short series so that you won't look at this and think it is indomitably long and just navigate away...I promise I will get to the point though.

Continuation from Gathering in Light

2006-07-17T22:57:00.000-07:00

This seems a little silly to put up a post that is a continuation from the comments section of another blog...but I feel this is something important to discuss.

If you are just joining us, please reference this link for some background.

To 'John' a commenter from http://gatheringinlight.com:

Continued...

John,
I do think that you are right about the terms in question though. Many socialists/communists/facists have used the term and are at this moment trying to use ‘subversive’ means to bring down governments and political systems. But the violence that results from these tactics is far from subversive in the end. To ‘subvert’ means ‘To turn from beneath’. That’s the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary’s definition. Actually that’s the etymological root of the word—it’s origin in linguistical history. It seems that ‘corrupt’ is actually more of a secondary definition. But I don’t want to get into that too heavy—I don’t want to quarrel about words. You believe what you believe and I don’t think you are going to change based on this dialogue here.

I don't know if you have ever noticed, but most people do not change their minds or their beliefs based on a full frontal assault. This is why Jesus was so brilliant in the delivery of his message (among other reasons, not the least of which being that he was God). See, the reason why Pilate and Herod didn't take him for a subversive was that it wasn't plain to see. If he would have rode into town as conquering savior in the line of David, like what most people of the day were waiting for, he would have at once been opposed by the state as a supplanter. On the contrary, he used parables and stories and friendship to get out his very subversive (subversive to the established state and culture and ultimately all other authority structures besides himself) point that the rulership of the day was changing hands, that the government would now be upon his shoulders as prophesied. But, once again he couldn't just come out and say that without inciting a direct confrontation, so he told parables, which were like little ticking time bombs according to Eugene Peterson (the writer of The Message Bible paraphrase). Here is a quote from an interview that a Christian periodical called Mars Hill Review did with Eugene:

MHR: You've written a lot about being subversive in the pastorate and spiritual leadership. And you are a poet. Are poetry and the arts subversive?

EP: Yes--poetry and the arts are subversive. They come at things indirectly. They aren't usually frontal. They sneak in on you, and they're quiet.

Spiritually speaking, the self is constantly construing itself against God. That's the nature of our sin--we want to be our own gods. So we have all these layers of defensiveness that often take the form of pieties. Religion is the major defense we have against God. So how do you take people who are heavily defended against God by religion and get through the defenses? You do it by subversion. You get around the defenses. That's what a parable or a proverb does. Jesus did very little that was direct. People were always scratching their heads and saying, "What does he mean?"

On another, lesser level, culture develops ideologies to protect people from reality. So, how do you get past the ideology? Suppose someone says, "All black people are inferior," and you have been living that ideology all your life. How do you get behind that? You usually don't do it with argument or by being rational.

To be continued....

Disclaimer on previous posts and parenthetical extravaganza

2006-07-15T23:03:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to put up a simple disclaimer as to the content of my previous posts. I am leaving them up because they represent where I have come from in the past 18 months, and I still think they have some useful content. I want to say that I am only beginning on my journey into the whole 'Emerging Church' dialogoue (if that's what you call it--it seems like so much more--maybe Brian McLaren was right, it's more of a 'New Kind of Christian' thing because it encompasses so many other areas [of course that brings me to another caveat--I never want to fall down into that endless pit of assuming that whatever is new or apropos is better, because, especially with the 'Emerging Church' and it's emphasis on community etc...this has been the norm in other cultures for quite some time]) and everything that may go along with it. Oh yeah, and I don't claim to have the ability to skillfully use the theological language that goes with this topic either--but I have been accepted to the M.Div program at Fuller Theological Seminary for this coming September (whether I make it there is fodder for another post or series of posts--financially speaking). While I don't for one moment believe that this will make me 'official' in God's eyes (or hopefully not in anyone else's eyes, especially myself), I hope that I will at least be better able to understand what I am talking about.

Changes:Stirrings

2006-07-10T13:14:00.000-07:00

Much has changed in the last year, but the change really started about two years ago when my son was born. I started earnestly searching for words to describe the ideas and convictions forming in my heart and mind. Something about having a child made me want to become all that I feel I am destined to become...so that I can be a better father, a better husband. I don't know exactly how it all works, but that's how I felt and it propelled me. I was in Borders one day browsing the spiritual section and I felt the Holy Spirit guide me to a book called 'The Way of a Pilgrim: And the Pilgrim Continues His Way.' This short volume led me into the world of contemplation and Christian Mysticism. I began to try practicing stillness in my heart and the 'Jesus Prayer' (I am radically oversimplifying here for the sake of brevity). I found my way into Thomas Merton. I read 'Thomas Merton: Essential Writings' and 'Thoughts in Solitude'. I then began to read N.T. Wright's 'New Testament and the People of God'. I read Brian McLaren's 'A New Kind of Christian' and 'A Generous Orthodoxy.' I pulled out my fat theology book from my undergraduate program and started taking a closer look at the Postmodern/Modern thing and the Sacred/Secular split. I read about liberation theology and how Marx had his effect on some of the theology of South America. I read 'Grapes of Wrath' again. I read 'Prophetic Imagination' by Walter Brueggemann. I read a bunch of articles and an ebook by Eberhard Arnold the founder of the Bruderhof community. I read 'Colossians Re-mixed: Subverting the Empire' by Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat. I read some of the 'targums' or paraphrases that they published as a companion to the book. I began to read blog sites from people who are committed Christian's and who are also active in caring for God's creation. And I'm still reading, still processing, and am in no way 'there'. I have just found a path in the woods, a direction I hadn't known before and it's just the beginning.
Basically, I began to change in very fundamental ways. It was always on it's way though, it was like some kind of 'catastrophe theory' or theory of emergence...like there were things in me that were there all along but needed to reach a critical point for change to be seen on the outside. My wife and I are pretty much at the same place too, which is such a blessing because you can imagine what it would do to a marriage if the other party was still stuck driving a philosophical/theological Hummer if you know what I mean. I know that there are people that will not know what I am talking about here, but if you know, then you know. If you don't know, then please comment or send me an email so we can talk about it.

Has it been too long?

2005-03-21T09:50:00.000-08:00

How long can one go without posting in their blog for it to become defunct? How long can one go without using one's talents for them to be defunct?

I was always scared of video games

2005-01-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

I have had strange intuition that video games are somehow bad--as I am sure that a lot of thinking people have. I was never sure how wrong it could go--but I remember something that was mentioned right after the Columbine incident--namely that the perpetrators were immersed in first-person shooting-style games for hours as a life-style prior to the shooting rampage in "real" life. I feel very nervous about the massive amounts of time that people--especially children--are spending playing immersive video games. I came across this article and it reminded me of my own childhood playing the first Nintendo and how I could not sleep until I beat "Bowser" the mythical dragon in "Mario Brothers"--or the end "Boss" in "Contra". And this was at a time when video games were definitively not immersive--and looked downright cheap compared to today's technology. I fear for my nephew who just got a gameboy for Christmas and hasn't spoken to anyone since--literally. Let's begin to pray into this issue--that we could begin to do something before it's too late--before we are faced with thousands of "Columbine-style" automatons dressed as high-schoolers.

How big is the Kingdom of Jesus?

2004-12-28T11:22:00.000-08:00

If it is true that the atoning blood of the Christ has been shed abroad--for the sins of the whole world--then how big is the Kingdom of God? What does it encompass? If it is everyone and everything--every bit of created matter--then the "unbeliever" (and many "believers") is someone who just doesn't know about the reign of the Kingdom of God yet; even though the Kingdom is very much in effect around them, albeit mostly invisible. And that means that everyone is free to truly live. Even if living in sin. Because we all live with and in sin. But when we find out that Jesus is the true and presently reigning King and we embrace that--he will begin to show us why and how he has created the order of the Universe. And we will naturally begin to want to live by his created way--the way of the Kingdom. This is "holiness". It is not a set of laws; the world has seen that way already. The new world order of Jesus is freedom. Freedom to realize, understand and then proclaim him as the King; and to investigate his way, which in turn will cause emulation to spring from us.

purpose

2004-12-16T21:35:00.000-08:00

Many people have been locked into a type of stunted spiritual formation due to a misunderstanding of the Spirit of God and how he speaks to humanity. I want to have solid cause and purpose for action...I desire to act with a deliberateness that I have not had before. No longer do I want to merely act because I believe it is the right thing to do...I desire to act because the right thing is in me and I have become the right thing at my core. I am also wrestling with why and where are the causes for the focus of our "good" actions. It almost seems circular to continue to forget our own well-being in order to help those that are having problems similar to our own. But this must be the main goal of Christianity...of our faith...to bring about sweeping social change. If we were to focus on our own need the power of change may or may not be limited to our own backyard...never having the potency to reach even our own neighbors. Yet if we forget ourselves and make our neighbor the focus then we shall begin to reach our neighborhoods and in turn the world. This is why the worldwide "vision" of Christ must never be overlooked or we run the risk of losing heart when we simply help our neighbors. "Where there is no vision the people perish"...and this is true of the hearts of Christians when we forget what our true goal is...broad and sweeping social reform. We are not just nice people making a dinner for our neighbors randomly...we may as well be part of a local club. No, we are revolutionaries. We are engaged in a social revolt; our aim is the captivity of the world, which in turn is freedom. Where others wish to captivate for gain and enslavement, we wish to captivate for release, for we are bringing the kingdom of opposites to bear on the world. And isn't that good news? We could all rejoice at the "opposition" or the turning to opposite of the world and its enslavements.

watching police officers in a coffee shop

2004-12-16T21:23:00.000-08:00

Two police officers were sitting accross from me in my favorite coffe shop the other day. I wrote this in my journal as I thought about them and their role in Society.

Just like police officers who spend their lives on the borderland of danger and death, we as Christians (at least the ones who aren't already there) should go and be there for the changing of Society in the name and deep power of Jesus. It's not as if a police officer thinks everyday that he will die. He (or She) is just willing to risk his life for the Common Good, and he clings to the belief that the Good will prevail, both in Society and in his protection. How much more should the Christian have the same aim, knowing that the Common Good is the man Jesus.

Christ as Neural Network

2004-12-15T18:42:00.000-08:00

I read this the other day and it reminded me of a post that I have been meaning to write.

(From Mike Bishop at the Vineyard Community blog)
"We always think of leadership as the 'head' or 'heart' in Paul's body metaphor. But what if we thought of it as something vital, yet unseen. Say, the liver for instance. I like that."

I was watching my 5 month-old son grasp at something and I began to think about the ways in which his motor skills have drastically improved in the last few months and how that may relate to the Church. My son's motor skills are improving everyday as his neural paths strengthen and make new connections. The muscles, tissues and nerves in his body are wired back to the brain and the brain is making new connections within itself and connecting back to the body. This is in turn responsible for the development of finer ability to grasp objects ect... Maybe this is a picture of the "Emerging Church". The Internet and the things that it has spawned such as the blogging phenomenon give further and quicker place for more density of connectedness throughout the Church. As we make more and more "connections" in Christ and through things like the Internet, we are connecting the body by being first connected into the head (brain) and then routed back through a complex set of social (neural networks ie. Internet) connections into the body itself (church). This is allowing the Church to begin to "grasp" things never before grasped. The Church is increasingly able to interface or grab hold of the culture and its surroundings right now at this time and at this place in history on levels never before available due to our ability to be connected with one another (motor skills). Could this be partly what the writer of Hebrews was talking about when declaring that we should move on from elementary things?

Absolute Truth as a Path

2004-12-06T09:09:00.000-08:00

Anything which attempts to reduce Jesus to abstractions is the Anti-Christ. To reduce Jesus to anything other than a real, living person with whom we can and must interact is to say that he has not come in the flesh. A personality forces inter-action. When a person approaches and begins conversation they must either be acknowledged through interaction or else ignored. And it is the ignoring that implies no acknowledgement. This is the same as denying a person's existence. A person must be interacted with to exist as a subject, otherwise they are an object and not a person; they become objective and not subjective. Jesus is the only path to life. Yes, he is life itself. However, in our age of abstractions and "objectivity" we actively seek to engage him as an object, which is why so many have trouble understanding him as "absolute truth". He is the absolute truth, but as a personality; which means that he is more of a path than an object. It is a path to get to know someone. We would never believe that we could absolutely know anyone that we interact with except that our knowledge of them grows through interaction. It is this way with Jesus. We must walk the path of inter-action, which is engagement. Therefore any so-called "knowledge" that does not result in action is actually another path. We must be on the path of action in order to truly know Jesus and to begin to know truth absolutely.

My son's first fever

2004-12-04T15:08:00.000-08:00

Over the past 48 hours my 5 month old son has suffered with his first fever....we knew this day would come, and we knew that we would freak out. Last night he began to breathe rapidly in spurts with periods of apnea. My wife and I were unable to sleep a wink. Around 5 in the morning we decided to take him to the emergency room. The point of this post is this.....what is up the whole medical community thing? It is as if the hospital system itself has metastasized and is vying for every place of authority in the community. We walked in and they checked all of my sons vitals and pronounced that he appeared healthy and that he probably just had a virus or something but that they would like to perform a chest x-ray and a blood panel before he left. Well, as life would have it he began to breathe fine while we were there and the doctor had this sort of Clint Eastwood make my day type of look on his face while he exclaimed that he was breathing normal. So, we decided that we wanted to go home and I proceeded to tell the nurse that we did not want to do the tests; to which he replied "well this isn't a prison...so you are free to leave...but it is against our better judgment so you have to sign these papers...". And so we signed the papers all the while the nursing staff stared on in horror at the "child abusers". It turns out that he was totally fine and that he didn't need those tests, but shouldn't it be something that is offered as a choice instead of a communist governmentesque mandate? Anyway, I think that this is a type of "Hypermodernity" which has arisen to fill some of the vacuum left in society by the modern fallout among civilians. It is as if the medical community has dug in their loafers and decided that all the more their brand of truth...which becomes a type of religion...is the most plausible absolute and that any threat to that system is treated to stares of the type that scream "I would call the police on you if I could". It feels almost like a type of persecution if you disagree with a doctor in today's society, even though most postmodern types would never fully trust such a total scientific person.
Could it be that the Church is in some way seen as this "Hypermodern" entity by regular people in society, creating in them the same response inside that I had to the hospital's "medical metanarrative"? I pray that we may begin to look deeply into our own hearts, each one of us and begin to address any and all areas that we are guilty of espousing an "absolute truth" system without having ever loved. Let us all begin to love our neighbors (the ones right next to us and the metaphorical "neighbor") and in turn change the climate of our communities.

Colossians Remixed

2004-12-03T21:57:00.000-08:00

Recently I have been visiting the Draft Theology (http://www.drafttheology.com) blog and have read the posts on a book titled Colossians Remixed by Brian J. Walsh & Sylvia C. Keesmaat. I am most certainly going to purchase this book and have downloaded the first chapter for a spin. (http://www.gospelcom.net/ivpress/title/exc/2738-1.pdf) What I have read so far has prompted me to scribble a few journal notes during the day.....

Globalization is aimed directly and specifically at the human passions. It has correctly identified all of the hottest points of human superficial conciousness and has as its chief aim a desire to kill the spirit and exalt the flesh as the new center of life; as if this were possible after all. Instead of enslavement as its ideological vision, a new Kind of man, a virtual cyborg whose passions are its soul and whose mind is computer like and body technofab. But this is the outward vision. All the while the great CEO of the air, that ancient Dragon knows that this is the Ultimate destruction of man.

Subversive Love

2004-12-03T20:50:00.000-08:00

I am launching this site to examine some "subversive" themes, specifically dealing with how we (the Church) might begin to "break up from underneath" our culture and the status-quo of normalcy within our communities. Many times I have found myself wishing to move to a new and more exciting place in order to "do" ministry. But I am beginning to believe that the most effective ministry is right where I live, among the people that make up my particular community. I hope to dig into some of the issues that surround subverting the local community and culture and in turn the world, and engender some meaninful discussion.