- “Life is not fair, yet it is fair because it is unfair to everyone.”
- I was recently asked by a young man whether a certain church practice was important enough to hold on to, whether it was important enough to push on others inside or outside our church, and how I looked at this issue. Aside from you understanding that we weren’t talking about a direct Biblical command such as 1 Corinthians 11:1-16 or Romans 16:16, it doesn’t really matter what the issue is in order for you to think about this correctly. A culture is a complex, interconnected series of practices, beliefs, and patterns. Is a singular practice important? It depends. If you have a stack of Jenga blocks, you can experience three effects from pulling a block 1)it can make the structure less stable (obviously), it can make the structure more stable (remove weight to rebalance one side), or it can have no noticeable effect…for now.
- On the subject of anonymity, I’ve always been an opponent to such a thought. Most reasonable people agree that if you won’t sign your name to something, you shouldn’t be pushing it out there. That’s true for writings, postings, and voting. At Kingdom Autocare, we do quarterly leadership surveys and all comments are delivered with the commenter’s name. This principle should hold true for social media, church votes, etc. Even in government, in a legislative body, all votes are public. Same for school boards. Why then, is there secrecy in our denominational church leadership ‘voting?’ We receive conclusions from the group veiled in secrecy. I’m not accusing anyone of working underhandedly or not being willing to be open about how they voted on a topic–rather it seems like just a blind spot, an “I’ve never really thought about why we do it that way sort of thing.” In the same way that anonymous letters do more harm than good by destroying trust, we have that issue going on with with major denominational decisions because conclusions are handed down by a faceless administrative body. Not good, unless I’m missing a ‘big’ something–I welcome your thoughts if you disagree.
- I can’t get Jim Nolan out of my mind–how did he know we were AC? By observing us…pretty obvious. We didn’t have a label on our shirts about being AC. If I took pictures of two families, what would you notice? You would notice what those families valued. Where they are, what they are doing, what they are wearing, how they are interacting. Is that culture? Yes. Jim saw/heard what we valued. My brother asked me, ‘did you ask him why he isn’t a part if he found AC so attractive?’ No, I didn’t, although we did talk about faith and best I can deduce is that he is a type of gnostic.
