the breakfast club

When I started this blog I set out to write third person non-fiction pieces related to my inquisitions about disconnections I was observing between the Bible and American Christianity. Things like, if the Old Testament explicitly describes tithing as a 10% fund for the poorest of the poor, then why is it used in America to primarily fund building maintenance and professional salaries. Why are American's so worried about gender roles, worship styles, even theologies, when Jesus explicitly called humanity to compassion for the poor, the orphaned, the widowed.

I've decided every once and a while I need to get over myself and realize this is a blog, and writing in first person is okay. My fear was that it would simply be my voice barking about my side of a phantom debate. I need to confess I have to find a new direction for the blog. I think I've worn out a lot of the initial questions I had about the bureaucracy of the American church...I tell people I am not post modern, I am post cynical. I am ready to see the change, not file the indictments.

When I was in college I was in a group of friends we referred to as the Breakfast Club. We would meet 3 times a week for Breakfast in the same dorm and eat pancakes made by the man who the character Chef, from South Park was based on (I went to CU Boulder, where Matt Stone and Trey Parker also went). We would debate things like pre-destination vs. free will, women's roles in ministry, and other controversies including worship styles and ministry models. All of these terms are most likely cryptic to the outsider.

A year later, one of the girls renounced her faith. She was a great friend of mine and it pained me to see her delve into some dark indulgences she has fenced out of her previous life. The tragedy had nothing to do with her now violating the unspoken codes of American Christianity, it was the fact that I could see exactly how she got there. We had boiled Christianity down to a roman numeral outlined document of clauses and sub-clauses, a puzzled equation of single sentences throughout the Bible and self-serving metaphors to support our immature vantages.

If the precepts of Christianity were so compartmentalized for me, I had to explore my view of God. I realized I viewed God as a fumbled mess of self-serving adjectives. Just when I wanted justice, graceful when I needed grace...all the while seeing him as a him...a personal being that exists in finite space, a sort of back room off in the distance requiring travel or long distance communication to get to. After that I realized I felt some obligation to run around the world telling people about my distant friend/judge and finding ways to get them into my portals to him (bible studies, church, etc.).

After a few years of processing all this stuff I had to recognize what John meant when he said God is love and what God meant when he said I am. God is not loving, he is love, and he is not some form of traits, he simply is. As a result, he is everywhere and Christianity, its scriptures, are the prescriptions to access him in the moment, in the place. The trouble with an argument like this is that it flies in the face of certain pieces of scripture. You can always take one line from the Bible and condemn facets of society to damnation or justify your own selfishness. But when you grow up, listen to people, and take in some stillness (as so many American theologians do not) you realize that from cover to cover in the Bible, only a few motifs carry through the complexities of God's history and those things transcend our precepts.