Intro To Patient Kingdom

What Am I Talking About Here?

Hi friends! To those who read and shared my parable about chess with my dad, thank you. I’ve really enjoyed all the surprising little conversations that have sprung from it. Hope you’ll keep reading…

Confessions of a 40 Year Old Geezer

I don’t like talking about myself, and I certainly don’t plan to make a habit of it on this newsletter! That would be boring. In fact, what follows might be boring. But it seems only right to begin with a kind of personal confession of sorts. I turned 40 a few months back. People asked me then if it felt different somehow. I said no. But now I think it does. I think my perspective is shifting, especially regarding my own calling. Where do I fit best? What am I good for? Who needs me most and what do they need from me? 

Hannah and I have four children. Our youngest just turned seven. Obviously my role as father remains central and will remain so for a while. What I am for my two girls and two boys will likely outweigh every role I have ever imagined for myself in this life. Could there be any higher calling than to share the very name which our God himself assumes in relation to us…Father?

But lately, strange as it may sound, I have also begun to get a glimpse of myself as grandfather. Of course, I’m not there yet. Not literally, nor symbolically, in terms of the degree of elderly authority that is due me. I’m only 40. I have a ways to go. But still, I can’t unsee the “grandfather” vision in my head. As I see it, to be a grandfather is to be…not the one who begets and builds and shapes and provides, but the one who supports and advises, who brings a spirit of wisdom and rest to those who are yet still begetting and building. To be the one who shows—without needing to tell—that the tortoise beats the hare in the end. 

I know it sounds weird, but that grandfather is growing in me.

My twenties and thirties were a season of ambition. In Jesus’s parables, he often uses the image of a master giving land to a steward to manage. Sometimes that land will have a watchtower. For a long time, I used the tower on the land my master gave me in order to look beyond my land, to see what other lands I might acquire. Now I see he put the tower there for a different purpose: so that I could oversee the land he’d already given me. “Whoever can be trusted with very little, can also be trusted with much” (Luke 16:10). It has taken me a very long time to see this simple truth. Like most of Jesus’s sayings, I’m still not sure I’ve seen nearly to the bottom of it. But I see more than I once did.

I now love the “land” he’s given me with all my heart. I now see how big it really was and is, just how much of his own property he entrusted to me when I deserved it very little. I need nothing further. The one talent can be made into ten right here, in this place, in this present. I trust it’s already happening, by his grace. Otherwise, what little I’ve been given would be taken away. Very often, the difference between little and much is not amount but perspective. 

Perspective.

About seven years ago, I stepped down, seemingly overnight, from my role as associate pastor in a local church, and ultimately from the straightforward ministry path which I had hitherto thought would be the central calling of my life. In retrospect, of course, the transition did not happen overnight. Quite to the contrary, my transition away from formal church ministry began in the beginning.

It started with the complicated fact that I was, and had always been, an Episcopalian. This meant that I could never exactly picture myself doing ministry outside the tradition in which I had lived, and yet, I also could not picture myself doing ministry within it, at least, not without great difficulty. (In case you are unfamiliar, the Episcopal Church in America has been increasingly unfriendly to traditional Christianity for quite a while now. There are notable exceptions, of course. Thankfully the two parishes in which I worshipped and served as a lay minister were exceptions. To this day I thank the Lord for raising me in those churches, which remain healthy parishes. And I thank him especially for the people who mentored me there, who made me a Christian for a lifetime. I miss those people. I miss that tradition. And yet, we could not land there in this season of life.) 

To add to the complications, Hannah and I started the surf camp—not at all thinking it would become a real thing—the same year we graduated college, the same year we were married, and the same year we entered the discernment process for ordination in the Episcopal Church. Thus, almost from the very beginning of our lives together, we had more than one vocation. 

To add to that, Hannah had complicated feelings about my calling in ministry almost from the start. She was not so bold as to put it this way at the time, but a good part of her did not want me to be a pastor, nor herself a pastor’s wife. We tried to compromise the best we could, but over the years we learned that compromise was never as sweet as partnership. From the early days til now, her intuitions on the matter have remained largely unchanged. It took me most of that time, however, to recognize that her intuitions were the voice of God. She is a patient woman. 

Anyway, our last official stint in church ministry—the one that ended seven years ago—had been seemingly the most fruitful. Until…it ended. It was the first job I accepted after seminary, a small non-denominational community church in our hometown of Virginia Beach. Simple enough. I was the associate pastor. By this time, our surf camp was, by far, our main source of income. We would disappear for three months out of each year to run it. That was part of the deal. But I still saw the pastorate as my central calling. In retrospect, again, I can see that I was never a great fit for that church or that role. But being the kind of person who despises quitting things, I made my stay as awkwardly long as could be tolerated by all parties.

That was a measly four and half years.

Some of my closest friends were on the elder board at the time of my exit. They are still some of my closest friends, and we still share the joke that they “fired” me. The joke is… not untrue. I’m grateful for every single person I met, ministered to, and worked with at Christ Community Church.  It was the body of Christ, for better and for worse. And I have an even higher view of the local church now than I did before. Yet, the experience, especially the end, also served as a kind of megaphone to my wounded soul. I don’t say wounded by others, though I’m sure that was a small part. I mean wounded by my own lack of fitness—or perhaps I should say, fitted-ness—for a role that I had imagined would define the rest of my life. 

“The Lord wounds those he loves.” Or is it disciplines? Same thing. As my wife has often reminded me, “When the Lord is pruning you, he is holding you close.” He certainly pruned me then. I felt it. I still feel it. Of course, I didn’t always feel the holding part. But I know now that he was holding me then. In fact, now I can’t imagine him not holding me. I guess that’s what pruning is for: to remove all that is not trust and love and awareness and admiration of Him.

And so, over the last seven years, my kids have grown, our surf camp has grown, my love for God and the church (and my wife!) have grown. My partnership with Hannah in the surf camp has become almost certainly a more fruitful ministry than my role in the church ever was. Our accidental calling has remained our central and most profound one. In the off season, we homeschool our kids together and enjoy a more blessed life than I could have ever dreamed. I also remain a kind of unofficial minister-at-the-margins in Virginia Beach and serve as Teaching Director (until they find someone less weird) for a post-grad Christian leadership program called VB Fellows, which I helped to found with some of the same folks who “fired” me from my last church role.

God has been good to me. With the surf camp being less than a full time job, yet providing for all our financial needs, I’ve been granted an unusual bit of margin to think and write. Thinking is certainly my favorite thing to do, and perhaps it is what I’m best at. Writing less so, though I’m getting better by the day. Which leads me to the purpose of this newsletter…

Who Am I Writing For?

For the past seven years, I have written A LOT. I even became a failed novelist for a time! Very little of this writing has seen the light of day, and that is undoubtedly for the good of all. And yet, constantly writing has helped me to clarify and organize my theological thinking. And clearer thinking—along with the harsh feedback of a long-retired, wonderfully cranky creative writing professor—has improved my writing. Of course, being a perfectionist, the last thing I want to do is share any of that. But I’m finally at a place where I can see that my imperfect thinking and writing might actually be of help to others. I don’t mean on some wide scale. I have no ambitions to publish beyond the community with which I’m familiar. My watchtower can only see about as far as my neighbor. And it is precisely my neighbors’ problems that interest me. That my neighbor’s problems might be shared by people across the country and the world, I don’t doubt. But the greatest commandment is to love God and neighbor, and that is what I’d like to do with my writing. 

Deconstruction & Forgetting How To Drive

For many people I know, the last decade or so has been a doozy. Even as a lowly minister-at-the-margins, my phone has barely stopped buzzing with firsthand accounts of mental health crises, marriage crises, identity crises, faith crises, and deaths of despair. This is not even to mention just your normal everyday tragedies. Many of my Christian friends stopped attending church regularly years ago, most out of ambivalence, some out of anger. I don’t believe this is proof of the failure of the church. The church, which is Christ’s body, can never fail. Here’s what I do believe… 

Our Evangelical Christian communities are struggling. Wavering even. I don’t believe this is obvious yet, especially not to those who are most fervently trying to keep them alive. May the Lord bless those people. Yet still, I believe we “Evangelicals” (whatever that term now means) are in for a reckoning. The younger generation is different than any that has come before, and even the generations that came before are not the same as they were. Our cultural moment, our particular comforts, our technological trends, and perhaps especially our iPhones…have changed the game. It’s not merely that the religious and cultural landscape has transformed (it has). It’s that it is transforming at a scale and pace which defy even our best attempts to see what it is that is happening to us. 

In a word, we are all deconstructing without even trying, without even noticing. 

Of course, deconstruction is not always bad. You can learn a lot about a car by taking it apart. Likewise, you can learn a lot about your faith by taking it apart. From outside the church, we’ve spent the last decade or so rightfully exposing the flaws of broken church leaders and problematic church movements. Within the church, we’ve lived in a kind of heyday of church growth strategies led by CEO-style pastors who double as professional communicators (and even entertainers), “breaking down” the most mysterious stories and concepts in Scripture into digestible bullet-point propositions. All the while subbing out the vast majority of the spiritual pain and suffering of our congregations to secular specialists like professional counselors, with whom we meet individually and confidentially in sterile office buildings for a fee. These are all forms of deconstruction in a way. And again they’re not bad, per se. Certainly, we now know a great deal about church and trauma and God and the Bible. 

But knowing about is not the same as knowing. 

Imagine an alien from outer space came to you and asked, “What is a car?” Even if you’re a professional mechanic, you couldn’t give a sufficient answer simply by describing all the parts of the car. At some point, you would probably give up and just take him for a drive. But you couldn’t do that unless you put the car back together first. And as it turns out, reconstruction is much harder than its opposite. To put something back together, you have to know how it works, what it’s for, what it does. But those are exactly the kinds of things you are prone to forget when you live long enough surrounded by the deconstructed pieces of a car you don’t actually use. Not to put it too extremely, but our current dilemma is something like this: we are expert mechanics who have forgotten how to drive. 

Dying With The Cure In Our Hands

What I am saying is this: In 21^st Century America, we have no shortage of Christianity-as-information. We know more about the text of the Bible, at least technically, than the ancients ever did. What we lack is Christianity-as-participation. 

What the ancients received of the kingdom of God they received like manna from heaven. It actually fed them, though they hardly knew what it was. (Interestingly enough, the Hebrew word manna is a pun that sounds like, “What is it?”) By contrast, we moderns have put this mysterious bread under the microscope. We know—at least we claim to know—precisely what it is. Yet somehow, it does not feed us. 

How could this be? We are the people of God! We have been given the gifts of God. And yet, we are spiritually starving in much the same way as our (increasingly) non-religious neighbors. Mental health crises, marriage crises, identity crises, faith crises, and deaths of despair…these are not just happening “out there.” They are happening in here, to us. No wonder our culture is becoming less religious. Our religion, it would seem, is failing to feed its own adherents.

And there’s a reason for this. 

The manna is not feeding us, not because it is not real, but because we have stopped eating it. It is as though we were given the cure to cancer, and we’ve thanked the physician very much (even passionately, with songs and hymns and meetings). We have held great discussions with detailed analyses of the wonderful cure. But the one thing we have forgotten to do is inject it into our veins. And so we are dying of spiritual cancer, even as we praise the cure we won’t take, the cure that would bring us back to life. 

What Am I Hoping To Accomplish Here?

The humble goal of this little newsletter is to encourage participation in the truth. We were not meant merely to sit back and know things. In fact, that’s probably the best way not to know anything at all, at least, not anything that matters. We were made to live the truth, as though it were the air we breathe and the ground we walk on. Because…it is. 

For in him we live and move and have our being. —Acts 17:28

The kingdom of God is more than a word. It is a world. It is more than a set of doctrines. It is a dance. You cannot read a book about soccer and then know how to play the game. You have to play. When you watch a great film, you don’t just think, “I love watching this.” You think, “I want to jump into the screen!” That is what Jesus means when he comes proclaiming that “the kingdom of God is at hand.” The kingdom of God is not just something you “believe in.” It’s something you enter. And not just when you die. Right now.

If you’ve ever stopped to study a beautiful picture—say, an exotic landscape—you’ll notice it often gives rise to a complex set of emotions. Obviously, it’s enjoyable to look at. But sometimes there’s also a tinge of something else, something less enjoyable. Something like…longing. Sehnsucht is the famous German expression. Painful beauty. The feeling goes something like this: “How gorgeous! But why is it also somehow not enough? I feel like I need to go there. I want to be in that landscape, not just looking at it.” The picture reveals the inadequacy of the picture. Why?

Because we long for participation. To be in the thing we marvel at. But it goes even deeper. 

Let’s say, on some lucky occasion, you are granted the opportunity to go to that exact place where the picture was taken. To run in those same fields, to stand on the edge of that same towering cliff, to behold and smell and taste the infinite sea beyond. Now you’ve gotten your wish. Now you’re satisfied, right?

Wrong.

I mean, the view is amazing. But even when you’re there, somehow, the pang of longing remains. You think, “I’m here, yet still I’m not here. I want to be in this place, almost one with this place. I want to know it like the back of my hand. To feed off of it. To live in it. But no. I am just a tourist. A foreigner, who can do little more than take another picture of the view before I go back to where I came from.”

Of course, I’m not saying this would be your only thought. But a small part might feel those things. I know I have. 

But it goes deeper still.

Imagine, you’re still in that beautiful place, and all of a sudden your eyes focus on something new. Something moving amidst the scenery. A gnarly old man, not far off, is scaling some treacherous part of the cliffside you wouldn’t dare go near. And it occurs to you: What, to you, was only scenery is to him the path home. Further down, amidst the chaos of thundering waves, a tan-skinned child daintily dodges protruding rocks on his surfboard. Farther out, a fishing boat rocks in the swell as it makes its way slowly back to the harbor. A silhouette of a man stands tall on the bow. And you think, “They have it. They are here. This is their world, not mine.” And you would be right.

But…

You too have a world. You too are a local—in your space, with your people. It may not seem picturesque to you. Of course not. It is not a picture. It is your life. Yet that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful. It may seem ordinary. But, to the gnarly old man across the world, so does his little cliffside path. The kingdom of God is nearer than you think.

As modern, wealthy Westerners, we are faced with a choice that most humans for most of time never had to face. We can choose to be locals, unearthing the beauty of the kingdom of God in the here-and-now…or…we can choose to be eternal tourists, constantly seeking to escape our own place and people for the places where new and more exciting treasures might be found. In fact, now we don’t even need to fly on planes to get to those places. We don’t even have to leave home. We just reach into our pockets, pull out our devices, and the world awaits. Eternal tourism at our fingertips.

But the trouble is: the treasure can never be found in the places you can’t live in. Only more and deeper Sehnsucht.

Christianity is not tourism. It is coming home. It is finding out the treasure, which you would sell everything to buy, is buried in your own backyard. Now is the time to dig it up.