• Personal

    Occasional forays into what I’m up to in real life.

    UMC Candidacy Questions: My Beliefs

    by  • February 21, 2012 • Personal, Theology • 0 Comments

    As a part of the candidacy process for ordination in the United Methodist Church one is required to type up and submit answers to a number of different questions and prompts. As I approach my meeting with the District Committee on Ordained Ministry on Thursday, February 23, I will be posting a few of my responses here. The third of these responses (and the last one I intend to post on this blog) follows, below. 

    ¶ 311.2.a.iii Write about your beliefs as a Christian.

    I believe that the God who created all things took on flesh and walked the earth in the person of Jesus Christ. I believe that Jesus is the Word of God, the fulfillment of the Old Testament’s history of Israel, the full enactment of God’s faithfulness to the promises he made to his people, the assertion of God’s Reign on earth. I believe that Jesus displays the power and the wisdom of God in the weakness and foolishness of his death on the cross. I believe that Jesus’ innocence, his faithful obedience, was affirmed when he rose from the dead. I believe that in Jesus’ death and resurrection sin was defeated and death itself died. I believe that God has poured out his Holy Spirit on the whole world to bear witness to this Good News about what God has done in Jesus.

    I believe that God has called-out the church to be witnesses of these things —- to partner with him in the sharing of this News and in the performance of this Reign through the power of the Holy Spirit. I believe that to bear witness to Jesus as Lord means to renounce all other lords as ultimately false and to follow after his pattern of Lordship by feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, showing hospitality to strangers, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick and imprisoned. I believe that living life towards this God who has come to love us his enemies in the person of Jesus means to live by a similarly radical kind of love toward God, toward neighbor, and toward our own enemies. I believe that holiness is becoming consumed by this kind of love, overwhelmed by its fulness and completeness, and graciously perfected and overcome by its practice. I believe that the Holy Spirit works on us through certain ‘means of grace’, central among them being the practice of baptism, whereby the church welcomes one into its covenant community of worship and witness, and holy communion, whereby the church takes up particular discrete acts of Jesus, gives thanks to God through them, breaks bread to remember what Christ has done for us and to rehearse for the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, and shares a common table as an act of holy hospitality and as spiritual food to empower our ongoing worship and witness. I believe that to follow after this Jesus, to walk on his way, is the only good and true and beautiful way to live, the only genuinely, fully and originally human way to be.

    I believe that the same Jesus will one day bring his Reign into its fulness, at which point we will answer for our sins, but he will wipe away our tears, make all things new, and come to dwell fully and completely with humankind in a New Earth. I believe that whatever this looks like, however God freely determines to wrap this whole drama up, it will be Good, and Holy, and Righteous, and True. And I believe that living our lives together and with the fellowship of the Holy Spirit between the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all things that his own resurrection foretells is what gives us the courage to live counterintuitive lives of faithfully hopeful love as described above.

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    UMC Candidacy Questions: My Calling

    by  • February 20, 2012 • Personal, Theology • 0 Comments

    As a part of the candidacy process for ordination in the United Methodist Church one is required to type up and submit answers to a number of different questions and prompts. As I approach my meeting with the District Committee on Ordained Ministry on Thursday, February 23, I will be posting a few of my responses here. The second of these responses follows, below. 

    ¶ 311.2.a.ii & ¶ 311.2.a.v: Describe God’s call to licensed or ordained ministry and the role of the church in your call. Describe your present understanding of your call to ministry as elder, deacon, or licensed ministry.

    My calling is to be a servant of Christ’s church -— to nurture the church and to call it to live more fully into its mission as God’s embassy in word and deed to a broken and hurting world.

    My whole life I’ve imagined that one day I would become either some kind of pastor or some kind of scientist. As a kid, most of that imagining took place with Klein United Methodist Church as my primary spiritual point of reference. Sunday School and worship, Weekday Ministries and VBS, Klein is the main community through which God began to work in my life. I learned about the Bible, how to pray the Lord’s Prayer, and I learned the Apostle’s Creed, the Gloria Patri and the Doxology. We took communion together, celebrated baptisms together, and for the most part we loved each other, with Jesus at the center of it all. I went through Confirmation and MYF and flesh was put on some of these things that I’d done for years without full understanding. I was taken by the beauty of it all, the fantastic drama of God’s love for us and his invitation for us to join him in the sharing of that love.

    While growing up in that environment, I waffled wildly about what I thought I’d do when I “grew up.” Most of those occupations were scientific, but ministry was in the back of my mind from a very early age. Even as I went to college to study physics the thought of some kind of vocational ministry steadily grew and grew, until I was unable to imagine studying anything other than theology. After a brief post-graduate stint in corporate America as a software consultant I did the only thing that seemed good and right and holy and sane. I went to seminary.

    After a season of prayer and discernment God called me to a small seminary in Seattle, Washington. But the longer I was up there, the more I longed to come back to my old spiritual family in the Texas Conference of the United Methodist Church. I fell under the influence of some of Wesley’s influences on the topic of sanctification (Anabaptism and Eastern Orthodoxy), rediscovered Paul through the writings of a few Methodist New Testament scholars (Richard Hays and Michael Gorman), and fell in love with high-church liturgy. I met several times with an associate pastor from FUMC Seattle to discuss what the ordination process looks like in the UMC. She was kind and encouraging. So, after another season of prayer and discernment, God called me to come back down to Houston and follow him by serving his church among the people called Methodists.

    And so again, my calling is to be a servant of Christ’s church -— to nurture the church and to call it to live more fully into its mission as God’s embassy in word and deed to a broken and hurting world.

    I would be greatly humbled at the opportunity to live that out as an elder in the United Methodist Church. But given the complications primarily involving my education** I’m not entirely sure how all of this is going to play out. For some time I’ve been in conversation with my pastor and others about tweaking my current job in a few ways and turning it into a Licensed Local Pastor position. The thought of that is exciting for several reasons, but more recently as I’ve struggled with where I’m at, where the UMC says that I need to be at, and what God’s will might have to say about all that, I have come to the decision that I probably need to take a year to discern. So at present my understanding is that I’m called to seek certified candidacy while I seek God’s will, hopefully in continued holy conversation with our District Committee on Ordained Ministry and other trusted mentors, colleagues and friends. I’m not sure what God has for me in the medium to long-range future. But I am hopeful that God will see me through, and regardless of what happens my prayer is that God would bless the United Methodist Church and form it more and more into a body oriented toward the worship of and the witness to Jesus Christ our Lord.

    **The United Methodist Church requires that Candidates receive a Masters of Divinity degree from a seminary approved by the University Senate of the UMC, or its equivalent. My seminary is not on the University Senate’s list, and in spite of the phenomenal amount of assistance I’ve received we have not been able to find someone willing and able to determine what “or equivalent” means. One can also take an alternative route involving what’s called “course of study”, but this route has a built in age requirement: 40 years old. This 28 year old tends to think that’s a bit of a reach. This difficult dynamic made the last paragraph of this response by far the most difficult to write. Nonetheless I remain hopeful, albeit a bit discouraged of late.

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    UMC Candidacy Questions: Most Formative Experience

    by  • February 16, 2012 • Personal, Theology • 1 Comment

    As a part of the candidacy process for ordination in the United Methodist Church one is required to type up and submit answers to a number of different questions and prompts. As I approach my meeting with the District Committee on Ordained Ministry on Thursday, February 23, I will be posting a few of my responses here. The first of these responses follows, below.

    ¶ 311.2.a.i: What is the most formative experience of your Christian life?

    I could answer this question by talking about my church growing up, or the amazing and encouraging friends that God has blessed me with, or my experience in seminary and how it was probably exactly what I needed right when I needed it – all are wonderful gifts from God. But I think at this point I’d like to say that the most formative experience of my Christian life has been my current job as director of youth ministries at Aldersgate UMC in Santa Fe, TX.

    This charge is strengthening my faith. I loved seminary, but writing an exegetical paper on a passage from Isaiah (for instance) is much easier to me than convincing a roomful of skeptical 9th graders that God has done something dramatic and beautiful -— even exciting -— for us and for our world, and that God wants us to participate in the continuation of that drama, beauty and excitement that he’s still doing today. It’s not that I don’t already have faith, or that I don’t already believe these things that I teach. I most certainly do. But the exercise of having to explain my faith and why I’m so excited about it, and having to do so in different words and from different angles, has been deeply formative for me. It’s as if my mouth having to form the gospel is teaching my heart all over again how to love it. Having to explain why the good news is so good enhances and enlivens that goodness for me. Talking about how exciting God’s reign is has made God’s reign even more exciting.

    Further, being at Aldersgate encourages me to pray. There’s nothing that has encouraged prayer more consistently and humbly in my life than my being responsible for the spiritual formation of this small band of young people. Jesus claims that there’s a lot at stake here. Evidently messing this up might end worse for me than if I had a millstone tied around my neck at the bottom of the sea. But I’m also humbled and driven to prayer by the simple fact that I love these teens that I get to work with, and I care deeply for the families with whom I interact. And so I give thanks often, and I intercede on their behalf. What a gift!

    Lastly, my time at Aldersgate continues to grow my love for Christ’s church. Churches are messy. Sometimes we fight or bicker. Sometimes we spend way to much time talking about things that are really just silly distractions. And sometimes we do a terrible job of loving each other, not to mention our neighbors and our enemies. But sometimes the church gets it. Sometimes we catch a vision, if only a fleeting one, of God’s mercy and grace, and sometimes we even act on that vision. Sometimes we live out our allegiance to God’s Reign instead of trying to fortify our own reigns. Sometimes, if just for a moment, the church lives into her calling by really and truly worshipping God, and by really and truly living into God’s mission for which he’s sending us out into the world. Church is messy, sure. But by a miracle of grace God nurtures and shapes these messy bodies into what will become his bride. Aldersgate can be messy. And yet somehow God still manages to offer us his Sanctifying grace. And that has been deeply formative for me.

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    On the lull

    by  • September 4, 2010 • Personal • 0 Comments

    There’s been a bit of a lull in the action over here, but rest easy; my resolve to be a more dutiful blogger is making progress over at http://kirchlicheblogmatik.wordpress.com/, where Shedden and I both made a commitment a few weeks ago to blog more regularly, and we’ve actually followed up on it. Kind of like 11 or so months ago, when we decided to read 5 pages of Barth every day, and we’ve both actually done it. Evidently when Shedden and I both resolve to do something, we actually follow through.

    And this is good for me. Reading and writing regularly and with discipline are like eating your intellectual vegetables.

    As for this blog, I haven’t forgotten. In the meantime, read my thoughts on Wittgenstein and Barth over here: How (not) to speak of Pete Rollins. Or enjoy a conversation about Barth’s questionable grammar here: On syntactical courtesy.

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    William Cannon “Grandaddy” Matthews

    by  • September 24, 2009 • Personal • 2 Comments

    June 12, 1927-September 14, 2009Grandaddy (obituary)

    I wrote this short reflection for The New Olympian, the newsletter for Olympic View Community Church of the Brethren in Seattle, WA.

    My dad’s mom, known to me as Granny, walked down the aisle at First United Methodist Church of Pineville, Louisiana, accompanied arm-in-arm by her older brother James, the same brother that led her down the aisle at her wedding fifty-six years ago. Behind her followed her three sons, known to me as Uncle Bill, Uncle Al and Dad, her ten grandchildren (including myself) and various daughters-in-law, nieces and nephews and other relations. The congregation stood as we passed by, accompanied by a solo piano playing Great is Thy Faithfulness.

    And that’s when it really hit me, fully, that he was gone.

    Of course I teared up a little a few weeks ago when I visited him and he reached for my hand and held it, weakly, but warmly and affectionately. He didn’t say much of anything to me, but he did look at me, eye to eye, for an extended period of time, and I think he knew who I was. As I remember it he even smiled ever so slightly without breaking his gaze, that old sly smile of his.

    I’d also been to the visitation the day before the funeral, and lightly wept as I stared into his face and tenderly touched that same hand, now cold and stiff, with my own warmer, fleshier one.

    We had also all cried together as an extended family as, over and over again, we watched a video made in his honor by his employer for the celebration of his retirement many years ago, a photo slideshow set to music, featuring pictures of him the way I’ll always remember him: with all his humor and wit, his playfulness, tenderness and strength. And that smile. His face in those pictures was so full of vitality and energy.

    But in spite of these things, it still seemed as though my coming to grips with his passing did not yet seem complete. As special as he was to me, as much love as he poured out on me throughout my whole life, in light of all the gratitude I have for who he was as a grandfather and as a man I had expected from myself a much stronger reaction. (I wasn’t by any means preoccupied or self-conscious about this, but it was just something I had noticed.)

    As a whole, it was a beautiful funeral. The pastor summarized the obituary that was penned by my dad and his brothers; my Uncle Bill and some friends told stories about him – of which there are many good ones; I had the privilege of reading the 23rd Psalm and parts of John 14, and the pastor talked about Jesus at his friend Lazarus’ funeral, among other things.

    But the most memorable moment for me was walking down the aisle in that caravan of Matthewses and McCabes. We were there to remember, mourn and celebrate the life, death and resurrection of William Cannon Matthews, known to me as Grandaddy, and my ability finally to fully remember, properly mourn and adequately celebrate was only realized as the piano melody to Great is Thy Faithfulness rushed into my ears. I sang quietly to myself:

    Great is Thy faithfulness!
    Great is Thy faithfulness!
    Morning by morning new mercies I see.
    All I have needed Thy hand hath provided;
    Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

    Now that that family caravan is spread back across the United States, and I’m here sitting at my desk in Houston, it almost seems like a strange song for a funeral. But it isn’t. That lonely piano preached to me a sermon that I needed to hear. It turned out that on that day, it was only in the context of remembering God’s own faithful love and mercy that I was able finally to situate my grief at Grandaddy’s death, as well as the fullness of the joy I have for having been a part of his life.

    Grandaddy used to tell us grandkids, usually in connection with a lively embrace, “I love you so good.” It was such a unique way of expressing that sentiment, and he said it so often, that it became his signature expression. His great and persistent, generous and extravagant love for me, his grandson, is to me like a parable of God’s love for us.

    I’ve said it before: Christianity is basically all about death and resurrection. In Christ the crude physical reality of death has been overcome and the life and love of the Kingdom of God now reigns. Because of the great faithfulness of God, I can affirm that the cold, dead, stiffness of Grandaddy’s hand won’t have the last word. The Christ who suffered so brutally on the cross before being raised up and shown to be Lord of all has taken up the collective suffering of Grandaddy’s life into his arms, and with his own pierced hands finally restores and makes new Grandaddy’s hands, restoring warmth and life greater than any previously imaginable.

    And the same Christ in his faithfulness and mercy takes my grief at the loss of Grandaddy, and not just that but all the grief and suffering of the entire universe, into his arms as well. That same Christ promises to wipe away tears from every eye, and to destroy death for forever. And that same Christ promises to make, not just Grandaddy, but all things, new. Great is his faithfulness.

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    I’m moving to Texas

    by  • June 30, 2009 • Personal • 0 Comments

    http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/states/texas.jpg

    My home state, famous for cows, oil, Republicans, large belt buckles, irrational fear of Canadians and secessionist tendencies.

    I’m serious. No kidding.

    I’ve mulled it over for several weeks now, discussed it with various friends and family, and now it is all but a done deal.

    At this point I don’t see myself staying in Seattle long term, and, that being the case, now seemed as good a time as any to make the move. I’m looking forward to being geographically closer to family, particularly my grandfather/fishing coach whose health continues to diminish, and whose location in Pineville, Louisiana has proven logistically difficult to visit from Seattle. I’m also looking forward to finally making a trip out to New Orleans to hang out with Matt, and having a less complicated trip to see sister Allison graduate with her Bachelors in Social Work from my alma mater, the University of Texas,  next May. But there are plenty of other people who constitute compelling reasons to move, and there are plenty of Chuychangas that also constitute compelling reasons to move.

    This was not an easy decision. I will miss the phenomenal beauty of the mountains up here, the cool, sunny summers, the unbelievable espresso at Caffe Vita and my ability to walk almost anywhere from my apartment in Lower Queen Anne/Uptown. (Where can I live in Texas where I’ll be able to walk three blocks to the grocery store?) But more than all that I’ll miss the many good friends I’ve made up here in Seattle, particularly (but not exclusively) my friends from Olympic View Community Church of the Brethren.

    My current home, famous for coffee, crappy operating systems, Democrats, flannel, irrational fear of talking to new people and tendencies toward depression and passive aggressiveness.

    My current home, famous for coffee, crappy operating systems, Democrats, flannel, irrational fear of talking to new people and tendencies toward depression and passive aggressiveness.

    I won’t miss the dreary winters. I can’t remember where I read it, but someone once said that living in Seattle is like being married to a super-model who has a really bad cold eight or nine months out of the year. I’m really looking forward to being able to see the sun more often between October and April. I’m not looking forward to the heat of the summers, but having dealt with Seattle winters for three years I think I’d prefer Texas summers. It might be more for the familiarity than anything else. Weather is, I think, a good analogy for my cultural preference of Texas over Seattle. It isn’t that one is objectively better or worse than the other – both have their own great positives and negatives – instead it has more to do with the fact that the positives and negatives of Texas are my positives and negatives, and they have shaped and formed me into who I am.

    I hate the Texas heat as much as the next guy, but few things sound more appealing to me than an ice cold beer on a scorching hot day. So even in light of a clear negative, strategies of coping with it (air conditioning, beverages, floating the river, etc.) in a way make up for the problem, but actually also almost make me miss the problem. The problem and the ways of dealing with the problem are a part of me. I think this has analogical implications far beyond the weather.

    So I’m returning to my roots, but my roots won’t pay the bills. So I’ll be looking for a job. So if you know anyone looking to hire a passionate, intelligent, sociable  person with strong opinions about coffee and ecclesiology, and who recently earned a Master of Divinity, send them my way. Especially if they are in the Houston, Austin or Dallas metropolitan areas. And go ahead and throw New Orleans in there too, just for good measure.

    In the meantime I’ll be hanging out in Seattle for about another six or so weeks. My approximate moving date will be August 15. I imagine some sort of more formal farewell will be in order, details forthcoming.

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