SMITCHing

This post’s title sounds a little like a restaurant in the Pearl, “Young & Elder.” It can also seem like a contradiction in terms until we read Paul’s words to a young elder: "Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity." 1 Timothy 4:12 This verse shows that age has precious little to do with leadership. However, sharing an exemplary life with others has everything to do with it. Often that sharing happens across generations, with older people offering hard-won wisdom to younger generations. However, Paul’s words to Timothy also make space for younger people to lead those who are older. Timothy’s example makes it clear that giftedness, calling, and character matter more than age. The Holy Spirit is not constrained by someone’s birth date.  Age ≠ Always Equal Caracter and Wisdom Many prominent Evangelical leaders have fallen recently, and these tragedies teach us a har...

  In 1984, Apple Computer Co. introduced the MacIntoch with a video concept that ran only once as a paid advertisement during the Superbowl. The commercial was directed by Ridley Scott, who created an inspired short film, claiming that the MacIntoch personal computer held the promise to democratize power, keeping an autocratic entity from manipulating the masses. It was brilliant. It was also brilliantly wrong. In the 2020 documentary, the Social Dilemna , filmmaker Jeff Orlowski, rips the mask from big tech, showing how the Silicon Valley of1984 ushered in a revolution that virtually guaranteed our world would become exactly like the one depicted in Orwell's 1984. Using a mixture of dramatic performance and interviews with some of tech's social media pioneers, Orlowski shows how the sophisticated machine learning of major social media platforms is expressly designed to manipulate us, turning people into a product. The goal is to get us to spend as much time as possible on our...

A friend of mine gave a public message and got some feedback from a listener. She emailed him and wrote that she would not apologize for being white and middle class. My friend is a pastor and he'd taken racial inequality to task as part of a recent series of messages. His remarks made sense. A lot of people were, and still are, talking about racism, especially people in his church. None of that is strange. Public speakers like pastors reference current events all the time. Listeners often express opinions about what they've heard. However, what's odd about the woman's email is that there was nothing in the messages that would have called her out specifically, requiring an apology. So, why did she refuse to apologize? She obviously felt challenged. When one says things like, "Racism is wrong. Systemic racism is a thing. It's not enough to say that you're not a racist. You need to be anti-racist." None of those statements are explicitly aimed at white p...

My wife occasionally serves up a deliciously misspoken turn of phrase. I find it delightful, especially her most recent which is the title of this post. "I'll see it when I believe it"got me thinking because it captures an aberrant view of faith, and what it means to really believe in something. Her remark was in reference to a local meteorologist's promise of good weather in our native Oregon. Many in the church would agree with her statement as an orthodox expression of how faith and knowledge intertwine. Martin Luther certainly did. We can paraphrase him with a simple statement, "It is always faith seeking reason." Luther believed that a cognitive AND relational knowledge of God through the Scriptures—what we would call faith—was superior to human reason. Luther did not discount human reason, but he did see it as subordinate to divine revelation. He believed that faith was an affective response of the heart to God's self-disclosure, as access...

It's hard for most white people not to think about race in terms of skin pigmentation. I get it. As a child of the 60s, I ingested civil rights ideals with my mother's milk. Oddly enough, my parents were raised by people who used the N-word as casually as they might say, "Hello." And some of their parents participated in genocide during the frontier wars of the American West. I love my family, warts and all. I'm not about to throw them under the bus. My ancestors may have been racists, but they were more than that. Fortunately, the tide began to turn with my generation. We were—I was—taught that skin color didn't matter. Character did. My parents told me that I must never say the N-word, that it was as bad as the F-word. They told me skin color shouldn't matter. Our schools began to be integrated. We were taught that Dr. King was right and racial supremacy was wrong. As a result, things did begin to change, slowly and to a point. They did get better. ...

I could have entitled this with "husband" rather than "wife". I wrote the title as I did though because I can relate to it more directly. Though I've never been crushed by the pain of infidelity, I do adore my wife and imagining how a betrayal on her part could hurt sharpens the point of this post for me. My reflections on infidelity began after I read a piece in USA Today. Columnist Tom Krattenmaker wrote about the impulse among college students for a deep engagement with religion. He writes: Students open to a conversation about Christianity, even on a campus with an ultrasecular reputation? Such is the state of affairs at the nation's colleges and universities, where religion is experiencing something of a renaissance, although not necessarily in the shapes and forms older generations are used to seeing. I believe him, in part because I've spent some time recently with college students, and they all exhibit what Tom observes: a keen interes...