Scanned two disconnected articles this morning. One was a blog post retelling some of the events surrounding Jonathan Edwards getting kicked out of his church. I first pondered this episode when I was reading Marsden’s excellent biography of Edwards. It is amazing how many truly significant historic Christian leaders were ill treated by churches they served, beginning with the Apostle Paul (Corinthians).

Another piece was a little article done in Holland Michigan regarding the currents state of affairs regarding church membership. I understand both that context and the cultural-church dynamic in play. It’s an area where its particular subculture of Dutch Reformed Christendom is receding to both consumer culture and American post-Christian culture. Church responses to these cultural waves follow predictably: the church response to consumer culture is the seeker church and post-Christian is the emergent and/or counter-culture impulse.

The Edwards episode as told by this blog post shows Edwards squaring off against a cultural wave with a head-on counter-culture approach. He no longer had blocking by Stoddard and got taken out.

I guess I had a few thoughts prompted by reading these two piece together:

There are lots of kinds of smarts. Edwards was both brilliant and godly but no one has all of the multiple intelligences.

People normally evaluate each other through their own filters. We can all be prisoners of our own filters. I’m sure some around Edwards knew how brilliant he was, but others also saw the whole picture of his personality, strengths and weaknesses. Heroes in history are usually presented and a bit distorted by non-touch adoration.

Leading people requires multiple kinds of savvy, usually nobody has them all. Human community is a complex matrix. Theologians and preachers can reduce reality just like everyone else to one aspect. Multiple intelligences figure out not just “what people should think” but also how to say things to people. I was thinking about this when I was pondering the Joe Carter piece where he links the Shane Claiborne Esquire piece with the Kevin DeYoung piece.

Claiborne is clearly getting traction with post-Christians (emergent) but Kevin De Young worries if that approach doesn’t give too much away (counter-culture).

After I read Claiborne’s piece I felt a bit of ache about something missing. De Young addressed some of that ache, but De Young gave me a new ache. After I read the De Young piece I thought of the well known contrast in how Jesus treated “sinners” and religious insiders. Jesus knew how to pull a punch and he demonstrated both insightful and cutting clarity to those who were equipped to see and understand it (or should have been) and yet gentleness with those for whom another condemning word would have broken that bruised reed.

All of this makes me think about how wisdom rests not just in individuals but in communities. We need each other. We need the counter-culturals, the emergents and the seeker-sensitive folks, along with lots of past permutations and learned approaches from the flow of historical change and response.

In another blog post this morning KT ponders her angular relationship with the perfect. In Matthew 5:48 Jesus admonishes us to be perfect (NRSV) as our heavenly Father is, but the verses preceding defined “perfect” for us. We generally define “perfect” in terms of how well things line up with our expectations for them. In this passage the Father’s perfection is seen in his generosity toward the unrighteous.

Generosity toward the unrighteous is an enormously difficult and complex thing as even Penn Jillette can see.

The Golden Rule does not fully exhaust or encompass love. It has its limitations (See Joe Carter’s take on Karen Armstrong and another KT blog. Every good parent wrestles with this reality. What does love require? We seldom get it right.

Part of the challenge is that our assumptions about accessibility are usually limited. During the seeker church heyday a lot of assumptions were thrown around about what people could and couldn’t assimilate. A lot of really good learning took place in that era about being hospitable (the more emergent word). Churches needed to cut down on the code talk, but at the same time I see how adept many people are at deciphering the code-talk, even better sometimes than the users of the code talk. Critics obviously don’t have trouble exegeting the code talk in their criticisms.

Love is the best word for all of it. Knowing how to love, well that’s hard.

The church membership debate is interesting in this mix because that is where the seeker layer is distinguished from both the emergent and the counter-cultural layer. The heart of consumerism is the unrestrained impulse to use people or groups of people for perceived individual value. It is the demonic desire to use people for the love of self. (See CS Lewis’ great contrast between how the demons define love and how God sees love: also relational polarity) As consumers we believe the cost-benefit balance for us in community is to our disadvantage, but sin is also blindness. Yes, we get hurt in community, but there is also love, wisdom, and a host of other goods that we have an uncomfortable relationship with. Both the emergents and the counter-culturals understand this.

Again, it comes down to love. We are gifts to each other and for each other.