The Sporulation of Bacillus Subtilis: A Parable

The state of much Christianity in North America, to what shall we compare it, or with what parable shall we describe it.

It is like a certain bacterium called Bacillus subtilis, one of the most common bacteria on our planet...

This bacterium belongs to a special type of bacteria that has formed a special way to preserve itself for the future should adverse environmental circumstances come along. It sporulates. That is, it changes its physical form and how it functions dramatically, from a "normal" state where it reproduces by normal cell division to a "spore" state where it sort of "circles the wagons," creates a hard shell around itself, and essentially goes dormant until it receives a chemical signal from the environment indicating it's safe to "wake up," dissolve the outer shell, and resume its "normal" state. A "spore" can stay in this state, depending on the circumstances and the type of bacterium, for weeks, months, years-- some even decades, centuries or more!

Now most bacteria of this type, when they enter the spore state, "sporify" the entire cell. That is, the entire cell turns into a spore. But Bacillus subtilis does something a bit different. It divides its genetic material in half, reproduces a copy of the other half, and then moves half of that material to one end of the cell. Then it forms a septum (a dividing wall) to close off that end of the cell. Then it sort of pulls that end of the cell back into itself, and hardens a wall around it, creating a spore on the inside of the cell, as in this photograph.You could say it becomes "pregnant."

But before it actually begins this process it does something else, something that only a very few other bacteria do. It engages in chemical warfare. It projects from itself two chemicals. One of them stops other bacteria of its type from starting the sporulation process. The other one dissolves (lyses) the outer cell wall.

So in this photograph, you see the results. The green bacteria are all alive. But the red ones were killed by the lethal chemical warfare mix. 

But there's something even more peculiar about this bacillus, one of the most subtle the Lord our God has made. After it kills off the other bacteria around it, including many others of its own kind, it moves over to them and begins to eat them. Yes, Bacillus subtilis is not only a sporulating bacterium. It is also a cannibal. The bacterium on the right in this photo is in the process of devouring the one on the left, able to do so because its outer cell wall has been compromised thanks to the chemical warfare of efforts of the first one.

It does this so the "mother cell" can "bulk up" and have the energy it needs to produce its "baby" spore and protect it for a while. Then the mother cell itself "lyses" (dissolves) and the "baby spore" lies dormant for as long as it needs to-- up to many years.

Whoever has ears, let them hear...

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

(And, if you want to see a video about the sporulation process of this clever bacterium, here's one from one of the world's experts on it!).

Who Wants to Be an emergingumc Mission-aire?

So here we are, last question... the one that will determine whether you become the next emergingumc Mission-aire!

You've phoned a friend, checked with the audience, and taken the 50-50. You do still have one recourse, though-- you can check the Bible. But you only have a limited time.

So, here's the question.

Which of the following congregations was primarily responsible for "making" the disciples of Jesus?

A. The synagogue in Capernaum

B. The temple in Jerusalem

C. The synagogue in Nazareth

D. None of the above.

You've got 30 seconds on the clock, starting... now!

Picture Credit: Original Studio Schema for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Used by permission under a Creative Commons License. 

Dr Suess Waxes Missional: A Pew Forum Report in Rhyme

In the days when the scholars
of the Forum of Pew,
had studied “Millennials”
(though not all, quite a few)

they found not just for them,
or their parents, but theirs,
that of those not in church,
but at home in their chairs,


why for sixty-five years now,
of those who don’t come,
four percent is the most
who will get off their bum


and decide, Yes I think
that religion’s the thing;
I’ll get off of my couch now,
and come out and sing!


Four percent, that is all,
no matter what happened;
while those leaving went up,
those arriving stayed flattened.


 Not the big tent revivals
nor the TV crusades,
nor the activist Christians
who marched in parades


 Not the new church growth movement
with its principle “homogeneous’
nor the crafty new marketers
with all of their genius,


Neither lifting our hands,
nor swaying our hips,
nor being quite sensitive
to the words on our lips


Has made any change
in the new ones who come;
four percent is the figure,
the number, the sum.


While back in the forties,
those leaving were seven,
today’s figure is more
by ten or eleven.


With four coming in,
and eighteen going out,
it seems like religion
has opened a spout.


And while most are religious,
or at least so they say,
their numbers are clearly
now fading away.


So maybe, just maybe,
there’s no “next big thing”
that will actually lead
more to join us and sing.


And maybe, perhaps,
our whole focus was wrong.
It’s not about bigness,
or the size of the throng,


It’s not about buildings,
or credentials professional,
its not about praise bands
or costumed processional,


It’s not about what
we can do in our “show.”
It’s much more about
if we’re willing to go


Where we are, and there find
in the people we meet,
in our houses, our neighborhoods,
out on the street,


In the faces of people,
the ones who are real,
not in programs or slogans,
or any big deal,


but God’s reign, though it seem
like a small mustard seed,
that sprouts, and then spreads
like a fast-growing weed.


Just to live where we are,
just as if we’ve been sent
to be witnesses, signs,
of God’s kingdom that’s bent


On saving us all,
from the most to the least,
and inviting us all
to sit down at God’s feast


And here, at that banquet,
to give and to share
the Water of Life,
the Breath of pure air


The touch that brings healing,
the listening ear,
the voice for the voiceless,
each day, and each year


To pour out our lives,
in real time, here and now,
as Christ pours in us,
as our hearts may allow.


We can’t make disciples
like a widget or car;
we disciple, as Jesus did,
right where we are.


Discipling doesn’t 
require big dollars,
or pastors in polos
or ties or in collars


It doesn’t require
that we spend on our selves
to build family life centers
for our own “little elves.”


Discipling is free
but costs all that we have.
Will you pour out your life?
Will you be healing salve


Among those who are with you,
and those far away
as God’s kingdom still comes
on this earth, here, today?







Peace in Christ,


Taylor Burton-Edwards

Our Bodies Matter...

Companions,

The president of the seminary where I completed an M.Div. (he was not president when I was there!) has apparently come out with an attack on yoga and encouraged Christians not to participate in it.

You can read an article about that here.

Now, I'm fully aware of ways the press can misconstrue and misrepresent what church leaders say. For the most part I think it's not a question of malice on the part of the press, but actually an inability to translate the "insider speak" of the churches and our fairly intricate polity and theological distinctions to a wider audience. We know what we're saying to each other "inside," but others who overhear us may have few clues what we're really talking about.

I say all of that to make the point that what I'm about to say may or may not be an accurate reflection of or response to what Dr. Mohler actually said as reported in the above-cited article. All I can actually respond to is the article itself. 

So what I'm about to say should not be heard in any way as directed to Dr. Mohler per se. I just don't know what he actually said, fully, in any sort of context.

But the article says he said this:

Mohler said he objects to "the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine."

"That's just not Christianity," Mohler told The Associated Press.

Then later in the article there's another statement. 

He said his view is "not an eccentric Christian position."

You see the problem here. We have three statements, but no clear assessment about their context relative to each other.

So here's my reply to the statements as they stand. They're correct. This is not an eccentric Christian position. It's not a Christian position at all.

The statements as they stand can be read as heresy.

They're heresy in part because they are fundamentally gnostic. As stated, they posit that our bodies cannot be a channel by which we connect with God. Some gnostics believed that, and taught it widely. The body/flesh is evil and irredeemably corrupt. Only the "spirit" is capable of connecting with God. 

Christianity, however, rejected that. We embrace the doctrine of the Incarnation. God became flesh in Jesus, who was fully human, and fully divine. Christian leaders spent centuries working out ways to talk about that-- ways embodied in the Creeds, especially the Nicene and Athanasian creeds. The body matters. Indeed, the body is precisely the means God chose to encounter us, because it is the only means we actually have to encounter God. 

In rejecting gnosticism (and really, gnosticisms-- plural-- over the ages), Christians have continued to assert in our Trinitarian theology that just as God is One, so human beings are one-- body, mind, spirit, soul (whatever terms one uses), all of this is continuous, deeply interrelated,  and so one. Christians reject gnostic dualism of spirit/body. We call that a false, wrong view of humanity.

But being wrong about something wouldn't be enough to convict of heresy in much of early Christianity. You could be wrong and even state wrong ideas, but it wasn't until you then sought to teach others the same and then break them away from the teaching of the Church by doing so, that you would have crossed the line into actual heresy. 

Heresy is error plus schismatic intent.

As a significant teacher and leader of a teaching institution in his own denomination, unless the Southern Baptist Convention has now embraced a dualistic understanding of humanity and thereby rejected the doctrine of the Incarnation, this statement calling for persons to reject yoga on these grounds at least participates in teaching error and seeking to break others from the established teaching of the whole church.

And so as represented in this article, the statements can easily be read as heresy.

But more than that, they're also bad science. To be sure, science can make no speculations about the Divine, and in fact, in its own methodologies, rules out anything like "divine intervention" as a first principle. So to describe how this is bad science, we also have to get rid of the word "Divine," since the Divine is simply not subject to scientific investigation. 

The basic premise in the the alleged objection to the notion that "the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine" isn't actually harmed in this way. The core of the premise is that "the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness"-- with whatever! That would be simply obvious in science-- and easy to test and confirm, again and again.

Consciousness is precisely a product of bodies and occasionally among bodies and can even, as can be shown, incorporate inanimate objects. (Experiments such as those where the body responds to tactile stimulation of a rubber hand not actually connected to the body, but mapped by the brain as if it were so connected, are cases in point).

So a rejection of this idea leaves one wondering-- assuming the Divine should exist in some way, by what possible other means than the body would one be able to reach consciousness with it? 

Heresy and bad science. Sort of a "double-play" for you baseball fans out there. (Go Reds!).

But again-- only if what this article asserts, and as it seems to assert it, actually reflects what Dr. Mohler himself said and intends. That we do not know.

And in fairness, I tend to think he didn't. Or at least I'd like to think so. 

I would like to think that he was trying to point out something more factual than philosophical or theological-- namely, that the practice of yoga is in fact a practice that is embedded in Hindu philosophy and religious beliefs, and that even in America yoga actually also comes "packaged" that way. Trying to sever the practices from the philosophies could do violence to both. 

So yes, it would be the case that if one is practicing more or less genuine yoga, one is simultaneously being taught a variety of religious and philosophical principles that are not grounded in Christian faith. Indeed they couldn't be grounded in Christian faith because yoga predates Christianity.

The final sentence of the article may suggest that this is what Dr. Mohler was driving at.

Mohler said many people have written him to say they're simply doing exercises and forgoing yoga's eastern mysticism and meditation.

"My response to that would be simple and straightforward: You're just not doing yoga,' Mohler said.

Here, I'd argue he may be right on every count.

But then a larger question-- and perhaps a different rationale for pushback-- comes into play. Are yogic teachings about the body as a vehicle for consciousness with the Divine so completely averse to Christian understandings of the Incarnation and discipleship to Jesus that one should be warned against yoga altogether, utterly reject it and teach others to do likewise?

Is there something more helpful than harmful that we Christians-- especially in the still at least semi-Gnostic, profoundly Platonic West, thanks to the Enlightenment-- could learn from yogic understandings of the connections between body and consciousness that may. Is it possible that such learnings may, as several in the article report, actually enhance our discipleship to Jesus?

Yogic instruction rarely posits itself in opposition to other religious teachings. Might we learn from Jesus here that "whoever is not against us is for us?" 

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards 




Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. Used by permission under a Creative Commons License.

Network Schmetwork.... or Not Everything You See Is a Nail

Kudos to Malcolm Gladwell.

Or as we'd say in my home church, "Say it, Brother, say it! Come on, now, preach it!"

In a New Yorker article published today (dated October 4), Gladwell blows the lid of the myth that Twitter and Facebook have created a true social revolution, and more than this, have become engines for significant social change.

They haven't, because they can't.

"Facebook activism," Gladwell writes, " succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice."

Real social change requires massive commitment. All that Twitter and Facebook can actually generate (and they generate it quite well!) is massive participation.

Commitment requires discipline-- and discipline requires very close personal relationships-- relationships you're ready to lay down your life for.

And discipline that generates a scaling up effect to actual social change requires an actual leader. 

Social networks are generally leaderless, and notoriously undisciplined. That is, unless they're led by people with a fairly iron hand to get things done in them, and are able to get rid of or not be hindered by participants who won't follow that lead.

That doesn't make social networks bad. It just makes them fairly unhelpful by themselves if what you're trying to generate is social change. "Fanboys/fangirls" you can get. Lots and lots of them. And they can generate some "one-offs" that seem significant at the time. 

But one-offs do not actual "transformation of the world" make.  

That takes folks who will go with you to the front lines.

Folks who will pick up their cross daily and follow... as someone once said.

Social networks per se don't generate people like that.

Communitas, as Alan Hirsch describes it, does.  

Social networks can become a channel for those disciplined in communitas -- deeply committed, strong-tie community, as Gladwell terms it-- to travel and communicate their ideas across all sectors of society. 

In that way, social networks can be vital parts of transformation.

But they can't start it. And they can't sustain it.

Through social networks a meme can spread rapidly, even "virally."

But without the commitment-- and leadership-- generated by "strong-ties," spread is all you get. The meme comes and goes, and few, if any lives, are impacted, much less transformed.

Gladwell's article is a must-read for any who are in leadership or trying to "rethink" leadership or ecclesiology in The United Methodist Church today. We hear (and see!) much talk (and action!) of "replacing committees with networks," at multiple levels of our corporate life these days, all the while telling ourselves that these two very different kinds of social structures can get the same kinds of work done with equal reliability, or maybe even better. 

Gladwell notes that it would be unthinkable for a car company to try to design a car by using social networks. (Heck, even the "committee design" processes of British Leyland in the 1970s were an unmitigated disaster, for consumers and manufacturers alike!). 

The counter argument usually made is "But look at Open Source Software! That's designed using social networking tools, and anyone can participate!"

So say those who know nothing about what it takes to run an open source project. I lead one-- The Open Source Liturgy Project. It isn't self-organizing-- and few such projects are-- not if the desired end-product is the timely release of high-quality resources. Go read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which remains sort of the "bible" for this kind of work. Or actually join such a project. Then let's talk. 

No. Getting things done, and done well, things that will change lives in a positive way, requires high standards and high commitment-- and networks alone do not produce that. Never have. Probably never will. 

We need networks-- for the value that networks provide in reducing the bar to participation and thus increasing participation. All social ties are good-- whether the weak ones social networking can provide, or the really strong ones that can lead us to truly life-changing commitments.

But we also need, and critically need strong leaders and excellent managers of well-organized, disciplined systems AND well-organized, disciplined persons committed to achieving a common vision. 

The right tools for the right jobs.

As popular as "social networks" have become, they can't and don't replace the commitment, discipline and hard work necessary to change our world.

Network schmetwork? Maybe not quite that-- but if we're at all serious about being disciples of Jesus Christ "for the transformation of the world"-- or at least if that last phrase is to have any real, palpable, historical significance, we need far more discipline and accountability than any networks we have in place or even could build can possibly deliver.

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards




Image Credit: Kris Krüg. Used by permission under a Creative Commons License.

United Methodist Metrics for Discipleship and Mission

Companions,

In 2008, Steve Manskar and I developed some new questions to be added to charge conference forms based on our United Methodist statements about membership found in Paragraphs 216-221 of the Book of Discipline and the three General Rules. We submitted these questions to the committee responsible for editing and presenting the charge conference forms (and lots of other forms) for the 2009-2012 quadrennium.

A colleague at GCFA was delighted with these questions-- real, palpable and measurable ways both to describe and to account for how local congregations are (and are not yet!) fulfilling the stated mission of the United Methodist Church in the ways the Book of Discipline already calls for us to do so.

When the committee met, it decided not to include any of these questions on the charge conference forms for this quadrennium. Committee members agreed that these questions do measure discipleship. But a concern was whether making the form any longer than one page would make pastors less likely to complete it. One comment was "These questions are too hard for most of our local congregations to answer." 

That may be true. 

But here they are. Look over them. See what you think.

The numbers in parentheses are the related paragraphs in the 2008 Book of Discipline.

And specifically-- since we plan to do this again in 2012 if given the opportunity-- share what you see that could make them (or questions like them) more likely to get taken seriously and actually incorporated next time around.

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards

  

Membership and Discipleship

1. How is your congregation making possible “a comprehensive and life-long process of growing in grace?” (216)

2. How many children and infants (with their families) have been instructed and nurtured in the meaning of faith, the rights and responsibilities of their baptisms, and spiritual formation using materials approved by The United Methodist Church? (216.1.a)

3. How many youth have committed themselves to discipleship and been confirmed using the services of the Baptismal Covenant? How has the pastor been specifically involved in this process? (216.1.b, 216.2.a)

4.

a) How has the congregation, with the support of the pastor, instructed youth and adults not yet baptized in the meaning of the Christian faith and the history, organization and teachings of the United Methodist Church using materials approved by the United Methodist Church?

b) How many of these who have received such instruction by the congregation have been baptized, confirmed, and received into the Church during the past year?

5. How has the congregation formed all its members in the baptismal covenant and the call to ministry in daily life? (216.2.a)

6. How has the congregation provided for the preparation of all people, including adults, for profession of faith and confirmation? 

7. Specifically, how does your congregation 

a) Help all professing members live out each of the seven vows of the baptismal covenant? (217.1-7). 

b) Support those who are baptized but not yet professing members, and their sponsors, to lead persons to live into the seven vows of the baptismal covenant?

8. How has the congregation ensured that its professing members are participating in all the means of grace, including private and public prayer, worship, the sacraments, study, Christian action, systematic giving, and holy discipline? (218, also General Rule 3, Par. 103.2)

9. How has your congregation equipped its members to watch over one another in love and to confront conflict with a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation? (219)

10. How has your congregation ensured that all members fulfill their obligation to participate in disciplined groups that help them live out God’s mission in every context in which they find themselves on a daily basis? (220)

11. How are the Social Principles used as an essential resource to guide every member in being a servant of Christ on mission? (220)

12. How are all members (baptized and professing) being held accountable to the covenant of baptism? (221.1)

13. How many members have been restored to accountable living of the covenant of baptism through the means described in Paragraph 221.2-5?

The General Rules and Missional Impact

1) What measures are in place to show that persons who participate in spiritual formation activities are growing in holiness by overcoming evil, loving God and neighbor and experiencing the transformation of natural tempers into holy tempers? (General Rule 1-- Par 103.2-- and Sermon 92, On Zeal)

2) How is your community noticeably different because people in your congregation and your congregation as a community are doing good to all, and especially to the poor, the marginalized, and persons in prison? (General Rule 2-- Par. 103.2)

3) How is your congregation doing good to the earth and all of God’s creatures by the way it functions corporately? How is the congregation helping people to live as faithful stewards of the earth and its resources individually? (160) 

4) How does your congregation ensure that all its members observe all the ordinances of God regularly and joyfully?(General Rule 3-- Par 103.2)