The Pez Dispenser Breaks Down

I'm reading a book called Blue Like Jazz, and it's a great book. It's by the same guy who wrote Searching For God's Knows What , and I would highly recommend these books to you. In one of the chapters I just read, the author talks about how he led a college Bible study for a couple of years at a large church in Houston, and had all the acclaim and applause that he could ever want, but at one point he realized he was a phony, a fraud.

There is a point to this, believe me. Because I feel like he's describing me. Right now.

Anyway, he talks to the pastor and tells him that he's leaving, that he was going into the world to get his thinking straight. Here's the conversation that ensues:

Pastor: Can you tell me how you feel?

Don: No. I've tried to put words to it, you know, but I can't. I'm just really tired. Mentally drained. I feel like I am jumping through hoops or something. I don't feel like God is teaching through me. I feel like I am a fake person, you know. I say what I need to say, do what I need to do, but I don't really mean it.

Pastor: What does the real you want to say and do?

Don: I don't know. That's what the trip is about.

Pastor: Are you having a crisis of faith?

Don: Maybe. What is a crisis of faith?

Pastor: Do you believe in God?

Don: Yes, I want to go on a trip with Him.

Pastor: You aren't having any doubts at all?

Don: No, I don't have any doubts about God or anything; it's just me. I feel like I am constantly saying things I don't mean. I tell people they should share their faith, but I don't feel like sharing my faith. I tell people they should be in the Word, but I am only in the Word because I have to teach the Word. I said to a guy the other day, 'God bless you.' What does that mean? I have been saying that stuff all my life, but what does that mean? Then I started thinking about all the crap I say. All the cliches, all the parroted slogans. I have become an infomercial for God, and I don't even use the product. I don't want to be who I am anymore.

Pastor: So you think you should go away. Where will you go?

Don: America.

Pastor: America? We are in America right now, Don.

Don: Yeah, I know. But there are other parts to America. I'd like to see the other parts. I was looking at a map the other day, you know, and Texas was sort of brown with some green, a few hills, but then there were other places that were more green with big lumpy mountains. I'd like to go see those places.

Pastor: Do you think God is out there somewhere? Out there in the lumpy places?

Don: I think God is everywhere.

Pastor: Then why do you have to leave?

Don: Because I can't be here anymore. I don't feel whole here. I feel, well, partly whole. Incomplete. Tired. It has nothing to do with this church; it's all me. Something got crossed in the wires, and I became the person I should be and not the person I am. It feels like I should go back and get the preson I am and bring him here to the person I should be. Are you following me at all? Do you know what I am talking about, about the green lumpy places?

If I could, I would go. I would take my wife and daughter, and we would just go. I don't know where we would end up, I don't know what would happen, I don't know if I would end up finding myself in another ministry position, or if I would be working at a hardware store. I don't know if I would even go to church for awhile. I know that I would hang out at coffee shops, bars and other places that aren't church-like. I feel like I'm supposed to be this big Pez dispenser of wisdom for the church, that because I've been raised in the church and went to bible college and have been in the ministry for ten years, that I should have all the answers, that I should know exactly what to say, what to do, how to react, who to kiss butt to, who to encourage, who to pray for, how to overcome sin, where to turn for guidance, what to do when all hell breaks loose in your life, and I don't. My Pez dispenser is broken. Either that, or it's one of those dispensers that never really caught on, like a big Snorks Pez Dispenser.

Why won't I go? Fear. Fear for the unknown. Fear that I would never be able to get another ministry position again because I wigged out at the last one. Fear that I'm wrong and everyone else is right about this Christianity stuff, even though this author and me are like twins, I swear - and that by being wrong, I'm going to find myself at the wrong side of the line. Or that I'll hear something like this from Jesus: "I never knew you. Didn't you realize that you were supposed to like church? That you were supposed to look up to your bosses, you were supposed to not stir the waters, you were supposed to put on your Sunday suit, smile those pearly whites, and take the towns you lived in for me?"

Another reason why I'm sometimes ashamed to be called a Christian

Here's something that happened this past week that once again confirmed my frustration with Christian people:

My wife started receiving calls from a lady in our church who wanted to know something about her female doctor. They kept on playing phone tag, but finally my wife left a message that she would talk to her on Sunday. I of course didn't really want to be a part of this kind of conversation, but I happened to be the first one to see her on Sunday. She saw me leaving the gym, so she followed me out and asked me if I had met my wife's female doctor and what I had thought of him. I said that she actually had two different ones - the one who we met with most of the time while Debby was pregnant, and the other who actually delivered the baby because our primary doctor was on an emergency call at a different hospital. I said that I thought the primary one was nice and a good guy and all, and then she asked me if I thought he was gay. Not expecting this question, I stammered out a why. She said that her husband would have a real problem with him being gay because he would be supporting a homosexual person financially and didn't want to do that.

I was nonplussed. Who the hell cares if the guy is gay or not? He came highly recommended, he is a good doctor; and although he didn't deliver our baby, there are people on my worship team whose babies have been delivered by him and just think he's the greatest. I think I remember him talking about his wife and kids (it also may have been the other doctor, you don't really remember much of any conversation that involves your wife spread legged in stirrups with her nether parts exposed for the world to see), but even if he didn't have a wife and kids and instead had a partner named Chet - does it really have anything to do with his skill as a doctor? I must have had a funny look on my face, because she quickly added, "Well, I know we should love those kind of people and all, but we just have a problem with the guy being gay."

I wanted to yell out at her, "LOVE? THOSE KIND OF PEOPLE? WHY DON'T YOU JUST FREAKING HAVE HIM AS YOUR DOCTOR AND NOT WORRY ABOUT THIS KIND OF CRAP? YOU SAY YOU SHOULD LOVE GAY PEOPLE - DO YOU REALIZE THAT INVOLVES ACTUALLY KNOWING A GAY PERSON AND ALLOWING THAT PERSON TO BE IN YOUR LIFE?"

But I didn't. I just hopped into my car, went to the pharmacy to get some cough drops and water, and pretty much cussed the lady out in my mind all the way there and back.

By the way, I will be moving my thoughts on postmodernism, the emergent movement, the church, etc. over to this journal so those who wish to comment on them can do so. Here's one of those posts:

Some great quotes from a book I'm reading right now, called Searching For God Knows What by Donald Miller:

I began to wonder what it might feel like if Jesus came back today, you know, right in the middle of America, right in the middle of our church culture...What if the horse Jesus rode in on wasn't a Kentucky thoroughbred but a belligerent donkey? And what if Jesus, after He got here, frequented homeless shelters and bars and ate and drank with the kinds of cultures evangelicals have declared war against? And what if, crime of all crimes, He was ugly and when He went on CNN producers were uncomfortable with His appearance and only shot Him from the waist up, in a certain light? And what if, when He answered questions, He talked with a hick accent, and only spoke in parables that nobody could understand, and what if He didn't align Himself with a political party, and what if He didn't kiss anybody's butt?


At the same time, however, we are at a disadvantage because the Jesus that exists in our minds is hardly the real Jesus. The Jesus on CNN, the Jesus in our books and in our movies, the Jesus that is a collection of evangelical personalities, is often a Jesus of the suburbs, a Jesus who wants you to be a better yuppie, a Jesus who is extremely political and supports a specific party, a Jesus who has declared a kind of culture war in the name of our children, a Jesus who worked through the founding fathers to begin America, a Jesus who dresses very well, speaks perfect English, has three points that fulfill any number of promises and wants you and me to be, above all, comfortable. Is this the real Jesus?Is Jesus sitting in the lifeboat with us, stroking our backs and telling us we are the ones who are right and one day these other infidels are going to pay, that we are the ones who are going to survive and the others are going to be thrown over because we are Calvinists, Arminians, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics; because we are Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, or liberals; because we attend a big church, a small church, an ethnically diverse church, a house church, or is Jesus acting in our hearts to reach out to the person who isn't like us - the oppressed, the poor, the unchurched - and to humble ourselves, give of our money, build our communities in love, give our time, our creativity, get on our knees before our enemies in humility, treating them as Scripture says, as people who are more important than we are? The latter is the Jesus of Scripture; the former, which is infinitely more popular in evangelical culture, is a myth sharing a genre with unicorns.


Perhaps the reason Scripture includes so much poetry in and outside the narrative, so many parables and stories, so many visions and emotional letters, is because it is attempting to describe a relational break man tragically experienced with God and a disturbed relational history man has had since then and futhermore, a relational dynamic man must embrace in order to have relational intimacy with God once again, thus healing himself of all the crap he gets into while looking for a relationship that makes him feel whole. Maybe the gospel of Jesus, in other words, is all about our relationship with Jesus rather than about ideas. And perhaps our lists and formulas and bullet points are nice in the sense that they help us memorize different truths, but harmful in the sense that they blind us to the necessary relationship that must begin between ourselves and God for us to become His followers. And worse, perhaps our formulas and bullet points and steps steal the sincerity with which we might engage God. Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies.


I realize it all sounds terribly sentimental, but imagine the other ideas popular today that we hold up as credible. We believe a person will gain access to heaven because he is knowledgeable about theology, because he can win at a game of religious trivia. And we may believe a person will find heaven because she is very spiritual and lights incense and candles and takes bubble baths and reads books that speak of centering her inner self; and some us believe a person is a Christian because he believes five ideas that Jesus communicated here and there in Scripture, though never completely at one time and in one place; and some people believe they are Christians because they do good things and associate themseves with some kind of Christian morality; and some people believe they are Christians because they are Americans. If any of these models are true, people who read the Bible before we systematically broke it down, and for that matter, people who believed in Jesus before the printing press or before the birth of Western civilization, are at an extreme disadvantage. It makes you wonder if we have fashioned a gospel around our culture and technology and social economy rather than around the person of Christ.


I recently heard a man, while explaining how a person could convert to Christianity, say the experience was not unlike deciding to sit in a chair. He said that while a person can have faith that a chair will hold him, it is not until he sits in the chair that he has acted on his faith. I wondered as I heard this if the chair was a kind of symbol for Jesus, and how irritated Jesus might be if a lot of people kept on trying to sit on Him. And then I wondered at how Jesus could say He was a Shepherd and we were sheep, and that the Father in heaven was our Father and we were His children, and that He Himself was a Bridegroom and we were His bride, and that He was a King and we were His subjects, and yet we somehow missed His meaning and thought becoming a Christian was like sitting in a chair.


I confess that at times I have thought of Communion as a religious pill a person takes in order to check it off his list, and that the pill is best taken under the sedation of heavy mood music, or in silence. How odd would it seem to have been one of the members of the early church, shepherded by Paul or Peter, and to come forward a thousand years to see people standing in line or sitting quietly in a large building that looked like a schoolroom or movie theater, to take Communion. How different it would seem from the way they did it, sitting around somebody's living room table, grabbing a hunk of bread and holding their own glass of wine, exchanging stories about Christ, perhaps laughing, perhaps crying, consoling each other, telling one another that the Person who had exploded into their hearts was indeed the Son of God, their Bridegroom, come to tell them who they were, come to mend the broken relationship, come to marry them in a spiritual union more beautiful, more intimate than anything they could know on earth.

I will add more later, but I love this book.

A fresh start, so take a whiff...

Well, here's to a brand new year and a brand new online journal.

My reason for starting this journal is twofold:

First, the place where my old journal is located at is shutting down their journal section and changing it to something else. I don't want to have to start my journal there all over again, so I decided to start anew somewhere else.

Secondly, I have become more and more immersed in the Emergent Church Movement (formerly known as the Postmodern Church Movement). Because of this, I wanted this to be a place for me to wrestle with deconstructing Christianity and the church, to share my thoughts and to see what happens as I continue to be on this journey to become "A New Kind of Christian".

A little information about myself:

My name is Adam. I am 34 years old, and I live in the lovely state of Arizona. I am a worship and creative arts pastor at a seven year old church plant in the Northwest Valley of Phoenix. I have been here for almost three years; before that, I was a youth pastor at my homechurch in Colorado for six and a half years, and in Dallas for a year and a half.

I am married, have been for eight years now, and I have an eighteen month old daughter, named Noelle. I also have a ragdoll cat named Kramer.

Between work and my family, I don't have a lot of extra time, but when I do, I play my guitars, play my X-Box, and read books.

So, there you go.