Category: Theology Page 2 of 3

Sharon and I were invited to a leadership training event at our church over the weekend. The theme was emotionally healthy spirituality. When I read the topic I immediately thought of heart work, but then in the instructions there was a note to bring a pen and paper, which left me concerned that it was going to be head work. I do find that evangelicals conflate the two. Both are important but they rarely share the same pedagogical space. I was happy that the event was more heart work, even though this set the tone for a difficult weekend.

Both heart work and head work involve a confrontation or challenge. In heart work the challenge is on an existential level – who are you? who do you imagine yourself to be? what ways do you sabotage your identity? why do you feel the way you do? or even why do you choose not to feel anything? On the other hand, head work challenges or confronts ideas that we hold to be true. These kinds of work can actually have a lot of overlap, such as teaching on what Scripture reveals about your identity. Despite this overlap, the head work emphasis is on gaining a better understanding from the tradition. Whereas, in heart work the emphasis is on what prevents head knowledge (understanding) from getting deep into our hearts. I use getting deep into our hearts as a metaphor for incorporating the understanding into our very sense of self. (I have a dear Baptist friend who calls one you thinker and the other your knower.)

In heart work you are deliberately giving space for deep emotional formation. This can be quite painful if not handled well. I tend to do a fair bit of heart work and still I found Saturday’s sessions emotionally taxing. The session brought up lots of emotions that I need to ponder. A friend asked me if I liked the session, which is absolutely the wrong question: one rarely likes heart work. But if it bears fruit in the long run then heart work is worthwhile. As a result I felt raw all day Sunday and still feel much tenderness today.

The other thing about heart work is that it builds on head work. If you do not have a different understanding of how you could see yourself, participating in the vulnerability of heart work can be irresponsible. I believe this is why they gathered leaders and former leaders for this day of heart work. Most of those gathered had at least a good understanding in their heads of who they are as Christians. The speaker, Doug Sprunt, shared stories of his own heart work journey which included the ways that his own self-understanding has been challenged over the years, usually through the trials he has endured. It was good to hear his story, I’ve known Doug just well enough to say hello and his vulnerability with us was helpful in shepherding this kind of process. I didn’t always agree with the insights he was bringing from his own heart work, but I really find that heart work is unique to everyone who bravely undertakes it, so consensus is never the goal of heart work, personal maturity is the goal.

Head work is what academics are most often concerned with. It is not that we do not appreciate the application of understanding, but the engagement with knowledge at a head level does not require heart application. I think this is why I tend to appreciate pastor-theologians, they tend to find ways to apply their head work to their own hearts. But head work does not require that extra step. One of my pet peeves about the Protestant influence on liturgy is that we have made teaching primary and left little room for the heart work that teaching is meant to support. As an academic I great value head work, but I do not want to confuse it as heart work. As an academic I regularly give my students tools to sharpen their critical thinking skills. As a pastor-theologian I also find space to encourage heart reflection on the head work we do in class. I am encouraged by how often students take up that challenge and share how they have grown spiritually from courses that can be highly theoretical and philosophical.

So while I didn’t feel very triumphal this Palm Sunday, I did feel that the heart work from Saturday was still doing its work in me. It is still working.

The picture is from a baptismal service we held at Freedom Vineyard way, way back. I have fond memories of the day when I baptized two people who came to faith in our community. What I loved about Freedom was our passion for balancing head and heart.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cffpRjIUePA&w=560&h=315]

The more I record and edit video the more I realize I need to be more careful in how I speak for video. Specifically, I need to cultivate two new skills. First I need to better break up my sentencing. I notice this whenever I want to cut something out of the video. It takes a lot of effort to find just the right break point between words or sounds. It might help me to do multiple takes of each segment, but I also do not want to lose that natural sense to my speech patterns.

What is more important for me to address is some of the imprecision that shows up in my casual speaking style. For example, in this video I start to talk about two types of sermons. There are actually quite a few different types of sermons. What I should have said is that I tend to do two different types of sermons: topical and textual. I also should have defined textual clearly, it is the style I’m preparing for my message to EcclesiaX. My friend Robert commented that in my maker videos I play loose with the technical terms of carpentry. Perfectly understandable for a hobby carpenter, and I try to correct these mistakes with text in the video. What is less understandable is the imprecision in my talk about subjects for which I am highly trained.

In the classroom a large part of what makes lecturing so exhausting (much as I love it) is that you need to be very careful how you phrase everything you say, you cannot play loose with technical details. I call this being ‘on’ all the time. Often at the end of a lecture I just need to sit and rest, which is fine, it lets me know I’ve done good work giving my best to the students. In terms of my videos I want to have a similar level of ‘on’ness. I think the answer is to record shorter bursts of video, because it is when I go off on a rabbit trail that I get the most in trouble. I expect that video work is a craft like any other and that I’ll improve with each one I post.

I would love to hear your comments about my first maker video for preaching.

Last night I was honoured to participate in a pre-show panel for the 9th Hour Theatre Company‘s production of GodSpell. 9th Hour uses theatrical presentations to “explore, examine, and express questions, ideas, and stories relating to faith.” (from their website) They steward this exploration through panels and discussions of the themes that emerge within the play which is how I became involved. Alexandra Bender reached out to see if I was interested in helping out as a local theologian. When I looked that the topics they were exploring through these panels (Poverty, Good News, and Loving your Enemies) I was excited about each of them, however my schedule fit best with the two panels on poverty: “Give to the poor! But will the poor always be among us?” I am back again this coming Friday evening to talk about this once again if you would like to join us.

First a word about the play. I found the play really moving. It opens up contemporary questions about who is the other and what kind of person the gospel (godspell)  encourages us to be. The base text is the Gospel of Matthew but it is punctuated with “headlines” that bring the gospel account right into the present. There is also a real interaction with the gospel text that is refreshing, we witness this as an ongoing wrestling and dialogue (back and forth between Matthew’s readings and the characters responses). This is a great contrast to the usual passive reception of text that we find in liturgy. I do not want to spoil the story, it is not your typical passion narrative, but right from the beginning the play unsettles you and provokes you. A couple of things that might not have been intentional but moved me greatly were the diversity of actors and the gradual and subtle emergence of a cross through the props, on Friday I’ll have to ask George Dutch if this was deliberate. I loved that the cross didn’t dominate the narrative because it is rightfully part of a much larger narrative, and I think us evangelicals sometimes forget that. I highly recommend the play even if you are not a Christian. If you are a Christian take the opportunity to let the story make  you uncomfortable – a good telling of the gospel should always make us a bit uncomfortable.

The panelists were moderated by Alexandra Bender and included George Dutch (9th Hour Theatre Company), Moira Davis (Ottawa Innercity Ministries), and myself. It was interesting to see the themes emerge as we explored the subject through Alexanrda’s guiding questions. George served as the dramaturge for this play which meant he worked with the director on how the themes were consistently expressed through the whole of the play. It was apparent from the conversation that he saw the gospel as having implications for the whole of life by orienting us towards being good news for the whole world. He also challenged some of the ways that we see success in our current social context, and how those views serve to twist our understanding of who we see as the poor. Moira used her own wealth of experience working with marginalized and homeless youth to draw us into questions of who are the excluded in society and how we might see a wisdom of inclusion emerging in the lives of those who have experienced marginalization first hand.

I tried to build on the conversation my colleagues started by highlighting how we get caught up in narratives that often reinforce the status quo. I looked briefly at the times in the gospels where Jesus says “the poor will always be among you” highlighting that in each case something very uncomfortable was happening and the statement was akin to calling out our tendency to deflect. We should have sold that perfume, for example, and used the money to feed the poor. John’s gospel is the most obvious about what Jesus is doing because the narrator tells us that Judas really had no intention of using the money for the poor. When Jesus responds with “the poor you will always have with you” he is being very provocative, that phrase comes from a passage in Deuteronomy that is all about actively lending to the poor and forgiving debt every seven years. My point is that we read those stories of Jesus in ways that do not always challenge our personal comfort – but if we dare to scratch the surface of the gospel texts we often find something that challenges us to our cores. My invitation to the people was to let the Godspell unsettle us, to challenge us. My hope is that this will help us be good news to the whole world.

The picture of the panel discussion was captured by my lovely wife Sharon. I was grateful that we could turn this event into a date night. 

I will be at Augustine College this afternoon to guest lecture on the topic of Pentecostal and Charismatic Theologies. This is an introduction of sorts which is part of a much larger History of Christian Thought course that is taught by Dr. Brian Butcher. I was quite happy to be invited as a few years back I developed a full course on the topic of Pentecostal/Charismatic Movements which I ended up shelving. I regularly use the Pentecostals as an example of the immanence of the transcendent God in my Trends in Western Thought course at Saint Paul University (HTP1101). In that course each lecture looks at two different ways that movements or theologians take up the tension between immanence and transcendence. But that is about the only place in my current teaching load that I get to speak so directly on Pentecostal and Charismatic theologies.

One of the reasons I think it is important to talk about Pentecostal and Charismatic theologies is that they are a growing influence on global Christian theologies and one that is so often misrepresented and misunderstood. When I started out studies at Saint Paul University I stumbled upon Stephen Land’s Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom in our library. It was a beautiful moment for this neo-pentecostal trying to find resources that did academic theological work from the Pentecostal context that formed my own spirituality. Land gave me hope that there was a real alternative to the anti-intellectualism that was so much a part of my early Pentecostal experience. (I highly recommend Rick Nañez’ Full Gospel, Fractured Minds?: A Call to Use God’s Gift of Intellect if you are interested in the shifting that is happening today as Pentecostal and Charismatic movements mature into their insights.) It is with great joy that I found other academic Pentecostal, neo-pentecostal, and charismatic dialogue partners along the way: Wolfgang Vondey, Jamie Smith, Doug Erickson, Derek Morphew, Shane Clifton, and others. The list continues to grow as does my library!

I’ll let you all know how it went.

EDIT: What a keen group of students, the lecture seemed to go very well. Thank you Dr. Butcher for the invite!