Four Reasons Christian Girls Are More Alluring

I know that a lot of this is terribly subjective and I married a Christian girl, so this is about as groundbreaking as Hugh Hefner explaining why he thinks that plastic girls with low self-esteem are the bee's knees. People are free to disagree with me: I make no claim to speak for all Christian men, much less all men or all Christians.
But I am eager for the young women of my acquaintance to know that being alluring is far better than being sexy, that it appeals more to the right sort of people, and that it costs them much less.

1. Modesty
     Say you really wanted some help from the chief of police with something but you were having difficulty contacting him. So, to gain access to the building in which his office was located you threw a brick through the windshield of a passing police cruiser. The technique will be immediately successful in one sense and an ultimate failure in the most important sense.
    When a woman dresses or behaves immodestly she is just throwing bricks through windshields. It gets attention, but not the attention she wants or needs.
     But modesty enhances a woman's allure. Her clothing says about her what a safe says about the treasure it contains.

2. Worship
    All of us have inhibitions and some of us are more reserved than others. A woman's reserve contributes to her allure in the same way that her modesty does. But her reservation is less important than the things that overcome it.
     When a woman overcomes her inhibitions with alcohol or allows them to be overcome through peer pressure or the threat of disapproval from those she wants to please she is signaling that she is someone who can be used and manipulated. But when a woman, moved by the love and the glory of her God, expresses worship in an uninhibited manner it adds tremendously to her allure.
     In the unselfconscious expression of worship there is the fragrance of Eden and a resemblance to Eve. This has the power to provoke an intense admiration.
    There is something very alluring about a woman who knows who to worship and how to worship Him.

3. The Advantage of Not Caring
     Allure, like the quality of being "cool," is a crop that only grows in fields where it was not sown. Aim for it and you've already missed.
     The Christian girl, being impressed with the importance of growing in grace, feeding the poor, and packing her bags for a mansion in Glory, has little time for making herself appealing. Having allure is so low on her priority list that it has a chance of being high on her list of personal qualities.

4.  The Boyfriend Factor
     When I was in high school and college I noticed a strange phenomenon in which a girl would suddenly seem more attractive upon entering into a dating relationship. There could have been a lot of things going on there, but I think mostly that another guy's appreciation of the girl had the effect of opening my eyes to qualities that had always been there.
     It adds to the allure of a Christian girl that she's been seeing Someone. She has an ardent lover who brings her flowers. How many flowers? All of them.
     When a woman is loved the way that a Christian woman has been loved by Jesus that changes her and it changes the way in which she is regarded.

Now all that I have said is at least potentially true of Christian girls . . . but it doesn't have to be true. Sadly, a girl who loves Jesus can still forfeit her allure. She can forfeit her allure by preferring the interest of a boy to the affection of her God. She can forfeit her allure by feeling the desperate need to cultivate it. She can forfeit her allure by dressing or behaving immodestly.
But my hope for the Christian girls I know (and particularly my daughters) is that they will be wonderfully alluring.

A Mild Rebellion

I live in the country now and the public space in our neighborhood amounts to the road in front of our house. It is hardly a freeway. The intervals between cars can stretch to significant lengths at times. But, having lawn and meadow, we never use the road for anything but transportation.
When I was a kid, though, growing up in Washington, D.C., the streets of our neighborhood were places for tag football, lightpost to lightpost. Public space was just that.
It occurred to me recently that over the last several years I have spent a good amount of time in nearby Rutland. I have driven down pretty much all of its streets at one point or another, at all times of day and in all sorts of weather and I have never once interrupted a game in the street. My minivan has never once been the occasion of the sentinel's bellowed "Car!!!" and the scatter of sweaty children.
I have, however, had to slow my car down for the sake of dissolute youth shuffling three abreast in their vaguely menacing hoodied packs. But I wouldn't say that that's a public use of the public space.
I'm not sure why behaving humanly feels so counter cultural, but there would definitely be something rebellious, something provocative about using a sidewalk in Rutland to do something other than walk along the side.
Well, here's to having picnics in public spaces, to stopping traffic, to doing the subversive work of living publicly.

Sinner!

Recently I had all the kids in the car with me and I took the opportunity to pose them some Uncle Josh questions. We were having fun considering one of the marriage related questions when it became clear that Obadiah had no time for this subject, already having determined who he was going to marry. While we all approved of his choice (no word yet on how Obadiah's conversation with the girl's father went) one of the girls asked him about a neighbor with whom Obadiah has played on occasion. 

He responded to the suggestion with indignation. "No! Her a sinner!"

We were all so aghast at this uncouth observation that it took a while to register what he said. It led to a very interesting conversation about theology and the limits of polite observation.

I said a number of things to Obadiah, chastening things I hope. But one thing I did not say is that "we are all sinners." 

I do sometimes run (under duress and in wheezing spurts) but that does not make me a runner. I can and do speak up, but not enough to qualify me as a loudmouth. In truth, I blog, but perhaps not enough to be a real blogger.

And these are important distinctions because these are meaningful categories. 

"Sinner" is a meaningful category. It describes someone whose patterns of behavior reflect a systemic, habitual resistance to the will of God. That is not true of me, by the grace of God.

That's not to say that I am perfect or that I do not sin. But the sin of which I am regrettably guilty does not amount to a feature of my identity. We are so shy of making this case because it invites a greater scrutiny and  accusations of hypocrisy. And I'd like to avoid that by glossing over the distinctions and downplaying the difference the gospel has made in my life and heart. But I have to have more respect for the accomplishments of grace than for the tongues of sinners.

If I call myself a sinner I make the category less meaningful and I deny the sanctifying work that has been done in my life which is one of the chief features and benefits of being Christ's disciple.  

I have no more right to call myself a sinner than to call myself a runner (but of the two I could make the case for "sinner" much more persuasively.)

The Church's Confused Effects and Purposes

Isak Dinesen famously expressed a cynical regard for man by asking “What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?"
It takes a remarkably low opinion of man to so confuse the effect of his drinking with the purpose.
I have a woodstove in the den. That little metal box is a wonderful device for reducing an acre of forest into a bucketful of ash.
And what is a gun but a remarkable device for separating bullets from their casings. Loudly.
This trick of identifying an obvious but secondary effect and pretending it's the purpose is not a particularly impressive trick, though it can seem clever when done on purpose.
But you wouldn't think it clever if you went to visit a friend in January and discovered his house to be inhospitably frigid. Coming into the house through an open door he greets you with a blanket and offers you an ice cube to suck on, all the water in the pipes being frozen. You note with perplexity the windows left open and ask him if he doesn't have a woodstove, having noted the piles of wood, cut, split and stacked beside the door.
He smiles broadly. "Haven't I! And it's a real beauty. I keep it going all the time." He takes you downstairs to show off his hard-working stove and you discover that what heat is not going up the flue is heading out the open windows. But it's not the heat that your host is pleased about. He wants to draw your attention to the buckets of ash he is proudly displaying. "Just look at all this ash! And I've got piles more ash outside. You want to go see the ash pile?"
Well, I'm afraid that we can come across that way in the church sometimes. We've been given the fuel of God's Holy Spirit to produce the warmth of God's glory but we are carelessly indifferent to that glory, reveling instead in the byproducts of that holy combustion, the programs of the church the increases in attendance, etc. But those things are, at best, an evidence of the good things that have happened and not the good things themselves.
I have made the mistake at times of measuring the church by the size of the ash pile and not by the spiritual temperature, and I'm embarrassed to admit it.

Five Steps Toward Agrarianism

"I'm small and it's God who makes the sun rise, the moon spin, the springs froth, the rain pelt, the mountains quake, the oceans surge, the deserts spread, the wind rake, and the snow to muffle. Not me. God."
That's the testimony of the Psalmist and all the other Old Testament saints.
But we have an inflated view of our importance and a diminished view of God's involvement. This leads to all manner of folly and harmful mischief.
When it comes to our environment, right living is a great aid to right thinking. The Bible assumes at least an agrarian awareness in its audience, if not an agrarian existence. The Jewish liturgical calendar is remarkably agrarian. The imagery and metaphor of Scripture is predominately agrarian. The curse in Genesis is agrarian and the depictions even of the New Jerusalem in Revelation have an agrarian dimension.
So here are five suggestions that even urban people might act on in an effort to get into our right minds.

1. Follow the Moon
     If someone asked, would you be able to say what phase the moon is in today? Is it waxing or waning? To know requires the discipline of stepping outside in the dark to scan the sky, and that alone would be reason enough. We do far too little stepping outside in the dark and looking up.

2.  Take a Constitutional
     My grandmother was fond of taking a walk after a meal. It was very Victorian and quaint, but it served a valuable purpose beyond helping to digest one's food. Nature is obscured in direct observation, but reveals itself in the sidelong glance. If you would know creation well it's no good making a point of looking out the window or reading books on the topic. There is no substitute for strolling, for aimless walking.
     Honestly, when was the last time you walked beneath the trees with no haste and no object?

3. Keep a weather journal.
    My friend has a journal in his milking parlor. His grandfather kept a similar journal, containing notes about the weather mixed with observations about the goodness and majesty of God. There is something about accepting today's weather and jotting it down, whether with glee or resignation, that takes from tomorrow the power to distress.  Knowing what happened a day ago and a year ago makes me much less anxious about what will happen a year from now.

4. Experience extremes of weather
    If the wind never ruins your umbrellas, if the rain never soaks you, if the sun never warms you to the touch, if your return from the snow storm never means booby traps of icy puddles for your family to discover with their stocking feet you are soft and experientially impoverished.

5. Celebrate extremes of weather
     When confronted with weather extremes people are most likely to cry for legislation, but there is another, more legitimate response. When trees come down cry "Glory." When the thermometer rises cry "Glory." The wild variability of nature is not something of which we are guilty and it's not something we're responsible for fixing. It is a pointed reminder that our God is great, big, and thrilling. Let him thrill you and applaud him when he does.

Five Ministerial Titles in Order of Preference

There are so many things to call the leader of a local congregation and all of them are heavy with associations and connotations. And even though I have my preferences I have very little control over which ones people use or how they refer to me in my absence. But for what it's worth these are the ones I prefer.

1.  Pastor*
     It's awfully bland, I know, but it works across all sorts of contexts and requires no explanation. The word comes from the Latin word for shepherd, which makes it rich with all sorts of Biblical references. And "shepherd" is, while metaphorical, perhaps the most comprehensive description of what it is I do. And one of the things that I like about it is that when referring to me in Latin, "Pastor Tate," I am just a simple leader of a congregation. Whereas, if you switched from Latin to English, "Shepherd Tate," I would suddenly be a cult leader overseeing the construction of a compound.

Can you imagine calling this fellow
"Pastor John?"

2.  Preacher
     I have a dear woman in my church who calls me "Preacher." Just "Preacher," whether referring to me or addressing me. And I kind of love it. It makes me feel frontier, if you know what I mean. It's what John Wayne would call me. Straightforward and unpretentious.
     I've noticed that when people in the community meet me and figure out who I am they'll usually say "You're the preacher, right?" It's interesting that unchurched people immediately use that designation to identify me. It is the most public aspect of my role.

3.  Vicar
     Another of my parishioners has affectionately dubbed me "the Vicar." Again with the Latin! The root meaning of the word here is "substitute," and it shows up in "vicarious." I am, in a very real sense I hope, Christ's stand-in, where he'd like to be, doing the things he'd like to be doing. And he's pleased to accomplish those things through me, vicariously.
     That's lovely and all, but the reason "Vicar" is number three on the list is because it requires a lot of explanation. That, and it makes me sound like I should have my own sitcom on the BBC.

4.  Minister
     I do minister, but it's just so vanilla. And it's a term that gets shared with political office holders.
     And you can refer to me as "the minister," but it wouldn't work to call me "Minister Tate."

5. Reverend
    This is, sadly, a title that sinks under the weight of all of its negative associations. It sounds, to most ears, like a horribly pretentious and stuffy title. It could be redeemed, but it's probably not worth the effort. I sign my name "Reverend Tate" for official business and I make no objection when, in a public capacity, I am introduced as such, but I do nothing to promote the use of the title.


My least favorite title, by the way, is "Team Leader," or any other such modern foofoo-ism. Any pastor who elects to change his title to "team leader" ought to be forced to preach out of the Book of Numbers for a year as penance. The Book of Ecclesiastes if he thought he was being particularly clever.
The effort to come up with less churchy sounding names for church offices and activities is misguided folly. It does not succeed in making church more relevant or accessible. It removes no obstacles. And it has a very short shelf life. No one calling himself a "team leader" today will be doing so ten years from now, or will be willing to admit that he ever had.

*I'm kind of a stickler for "Pastor Tate," because "Pastor Joel" gives me the heebie-jeebies. I just don't like it. And there are number of other reasons why I'm opposed to the practice - but that's a post for another time.

Five reasons to love the apple

The roxbury russet is my favorite apple. I almost cried
when the Rutland Co-op ran out of them this fall.

1. No other fruit can match the apple for variety. It can be russetted, smooth, dimpled, seamed and seamless. It can be an almost translucent yellow, bright green, or a red so deep it looks black. It can be tart, sweet, juicy, dry, red-veined, pink-fleshed, tiny, and softball sized. Whereas a banana is pretty much a banana.

2. Apples are always being unfairly identified as the fruit Adam and Eve ate to bring the curse upon us all. And despite having been saddled with this monstrous bad rap have you ever heard apples complain of the injustice?

3. Apples require a certain number of “chill days,” times during their dormancy when the temperature falls below freezing, for them to produce fruit. This is a rebuke to the softness of the south, a redeeming feature of our otherwise hateful winters, and a ready made sermon illustration.

4. The trees from which the apples come are uncommonly beautiful in every season.

5. An apple requires no more effort for enjoyment than the effort involved in biting. But it can be peeled and pared and made into a hundred delightful dishes and an indispensable ingredient in many more.

Doing Church for Teens Counter-Culturally

     A hungry family goes to a family restaurant. The father takes his wife's coat while the kids scoot into the booth. The waitress arrives with a high chair and some crayons for the youngest child and a stack of menus for everyone else. There is a brisk dispensing of napkin wrapped cutlery and then the anxious parents, having surveyed the stack of menus, ask the waitress if they have anything at the restaurant for teens, indicating their oldest, a fifteen year old scarcely shorter than the parents themselves. The waitress is understandably perplexed by the question.

     Sometimes we're asked what we at Furnace Brook have for teens and one way to answer that would be to say that we have nothing for teens. There is no youth group, not a lot by way of teen Bible study or small group, and what fun events we have for that age group are occasional and ad hoc.

     But the real answer to the question of what we have for teens is everything . . . everything, that is, that we have for adults.

     If we have worship that looks for and finds God's glory, if we have preaching that is sound and challenging, if our fellowship is sweet and sharpens, if we have important work to be done it means that we have lots for teens, doesn't it?

     At our church the teens eat off the adult menu and I make no apologies for that. That's how it should be. In the Jewish tradition the transition to adult participation in the community of faith is marked at about 13 years old and that seems about right to me.

      So we have teens on the worship team, organizing church wide events, being trained to take over ministries and so on.

     They listen to the sermons and look to the pastor for shepherding and it seems very simple and straightforward.

     What's remarkable is how counter-cultural this approach is, counter-cultural both in the church and in the broader culture. That has made me feel insecure at times. We have all been trained by the church and the culture to treat teens so very differently, to be fearful of "losing them." It feels much safer to regard them as overgrown children than to treat them like aspiring adults, grown-ups in training.

     But it's consistent with the Bible and it's effective and so what if there aren't many others doing it this way? In fact, part of our ministry to the culture is to resist the culture.

     Consider this push back. Our teens will not be cossetted, nor segregated. There's not room in the nest for perpetual fledglings, not when there's so much flying to be done.

The Ministry of Resistance

The last thing our culture needs is to get its way more often.
Make no mistake, the gospel is going to make God's people different and that's reason enough to be different, but our difference serves a crucial purpose, culturally. I know that, in regard to our culture, the best thing for the church to do is to point to Jesus. But to be effective in doing so we need to practice this ministry of resistance.
It's like this. Say there's a car on the highway and the driver of the car is exceeding the speed limit recklessly. The driver is content to stay on the highway indefinitely but you know that there is a specific exit that must be taken for the health and happiness of the car and its occupants. And you can alert the driver as his exit approaches, but because of his speed he has no time to reflect, consider, or change lanes. If you are intent on him having a chance to choose the off ramp you have to get him to slow down before you can even point out the exit.
When the church is practicing the ministry of resistance that is what we are doing for our culture. We are providing a little big of drag. We're mixing things up and slowing things down and creating opportunities for culture's headlong impulses to be checked, opportunities for Christ to present himself as the new and living way.
Over the next several days I'm going to be highlighting some of the specific ways in which the church can and should practice this ministry of resistance, both doggedly and winsomely.

Five Reasons Not to Audition

As a pastor I am very tempted to spend my Sunday mornings auditioning. I want for people to like me and to like our church enough to make it their own, and that's understandable. But spending Sunday morning in an effort to woo potential parishioners into giving us the part represents not only a missed opportunity, but a real failure.

1. Auditioning is exhausting.
     It's not just that auditioning is wearisome, but in the case of a church which will face, potentially, a new set of prospective worshipers each Sunday it means a future of perpetual auditioning, all "once more with feeling," never moving on. That is an unendurable prospect.

2. Someone is always doing it better.
      Whether it's the preaching, the music, or the coffee there is always going to be someone local doing at least one thing (if not everything) better than we are doing it. We can't afford to audition because we can't afford to encourage the assumption that churches should be evaluated on the merits of their production.

3. Auditioning misses the point.
       We call it a worship service because it is a service to God. It's effect as a worship service needs to be judged on the basis of how well God is served. That's a simple point, but judging by how often I seem to forget it, it deserves some emphatic repeating.

4. It's an unattractive quality to the right people.
         All of this needy auditioning expresses a fundamental insecurity. And it's not that insecurity is always wrong, but in the case of the Bride of Christ it is, at the very least, hard to account for. The sweaty anxiety of an auditioning church is going to be a turn off to many people, people like me, people who are looking for an awesome God and the victorious citizens of his coming Kingdom.

5. It is an attractive quality to the wrong people.
        That insecurity, the insecurity of an auditioning church, might put me off but it's catnip to the manipulators, the ambitious, and the advantage-seeking. To those who want influence, position and authority a Sunday morning designed to get their approval is the same thing as an invitation to mischief. And to the spiritually complacent an auditioning church is the safest place in the world. But God wants church to be dangerous, a strait door through which lies the way to adventure and life everlasting.

To the tune of . . .

I am a big hymn nerd. I can't say for sure what it is about hymns that has so captured my imagination, but somehow I have collected a good assortment of hymnals. I've much more to say about hymns, but this is just to highlight some of the hymnals in my collection of some 60 different hymnals, songbooks, and psalters.
And by the way, lest you think that I'm a total poindexter, I'm listening to the indie band Blondfire while writing this post.

Most meaningful hymnal: the red "Hymns of Faith and Life" hymnal with "Houghton College Chapel" stamped on the front.
This was a Christmas gift from Christine our first Christmas together. She asked permission from then Dean of the Chapel, Coach Lewis, and it is a good Wesleyan hymnal with some excellent liturgical resources in the back. But it's the fact that it was hallowed by its use in the John and Charles Wesley Chapel (and that it was a gift from my wife) that makes me love it so much.

Most unintentionally amusing: Metrical Tune Book with Hymns
A collection of hymns from the holiness movement, this volume features a number of hymns by the Free Methodist firebrand V.A. Dake and his associates. "Hew the Agag," for instance, expresses an admirable sentiment but in language so purple and over the top that I could never sing it with a straight face. "Rotten to the very core, Covered with sin's unbound sore, Seed of sin, and daubed with hellish, lustful slime." It's almost enough to drive you into the arms of Hillsong.

Oldest: The Songs of Zion or the Christian's New Hymn Book for the Use of Methodists
Published in 1822, almost thirty years before Furnace Brook Wesleyan was founded, it follows the practice of most Methodist hymnals by inserting "O For a Thousand Tongues" as the first in the collection. As with most older hymnals there is no music included; all of the hymns are text only with a notation about the meter.

Most personally influential: Olney Hymns
This is a reprint of the original hymnal compiled by John Newton and his friend William Cowper for the use of his rural parish. First of all, the preface is beautiful and instructive. Newton had a fine grasp on the role of the hymn writer and he took himself lightly.
 But the hymns themselves are the real treasure here. There is a disarming frankness to them, as when Cowper admits in "Decide this Doubt" that, while others seem to find comfort in the house of prayer, it leaves him cold.

A reason to pray for Vermont

There are, of course, lots of reasons to pray for Vermont. It's famously unchurched and resistant to churching. It is an innovator in the field of legislated morality, which is about as wise and helpful as being an innovator in the field of arithmetic. And it's a place where winter is long, soggy, painful, debilitating and expensive, so that's a good reason to pray for the poor souls who live here.
But consider this: Vermont's population is at about 626,000. That's it! Two senators, one of whom is the Senate President Pro Tempore, for 626,000 citizens.
But the thing about that number is what it fails to indicate, because Vermont's influence and effect is out of proportion to its size.
El Paso, Texas, comes in at about 665,000.
I'm not saying anything against El Paso, and I have no basis in fact for making any assumptions about the city or the caliber of its citizens. But frankly, which place is more likely to be the setting for a major Hollywood film? Which place is more likely to produce the nation's next poet laureate? Which place is more likely to boast an author on the New York Times bestseller list? Which place is more likely to spark a national movement or capture a musician's imagination? Which place is more likely to produce a national leader or be mentioned in the nightly news?
I know, I know; that's awfully subjective and anecdotal. But it's true, don't you think?
And, even if you agree that Vermont's effect is out of proportion to the size of its population, we could argue about whether that's true because Vermont is productive of genius or simply attractive to it. Because, after all, if there is a great novelist living in El Paso (and again, there could be dozens living there now for all I know) there's a good chance that he'd end up moving to Vermont to write his book.
Let this consideration add some urgency to your prayers for Vermont.
It's part of the reason, by the way, that I love ministering here so much. The work here comes with a terrific sense of potential significance.
What a place!

The Good for What Ails Us

I enjoy reading about health fads of the past. Their claims are bold, their language colorful, their tone earnest, and their promised remedies completely unrealistic. There is a certain charm in the suggestion that "Dr. Compton's Fennel Elixer" could cure baldness, purify the blood, and diminish the night fidgets, a charm utterly absent in today's bloodless health commercials.
Whether it's been ridiculous tonics or carefully applied leaches, there have always been remedies of dubious effect. When, after leaving Eden, Eve came down with that first case of the sniffles Adam , in a fit of genius, grabbed several catkins from a pussy willow and gave them to his patient, instructing her to place them in her nostrils, promising that they would draw out the evil humors. And thus was born the field of medicine (and the writing of apocrypha).
I don't mean to suggest that all medicine is snake oil. I am very grateful to doctors and to the science behind our medicine.
But here's what interests me. If each generation has found amusing much of what the previous generation found medically compelling, it seems that there are two ways of responding to that insight.
For the most part we respond to that insight with the smug conviction that everyone who came before us was adorably stupid. "Tonics for female sickness" we shriek, in a tone of incredulous fondness. "All those well-meaning primitives who proceeded us . . . " we murmur, with a disbelieving little shake of our heads.
Well that's one way to respond to the evidence that at any given point in human history a good portion of what we believed about health was, as it turns out, balderdash and poppycock. We can respond with disdain and, perhaps, sympathy that those benighted souls did not have the good fortune to live in a wiser, more sensible age, an age like our own, an age of pure science.
Or we can respond to that chastening insight with humility. We can look at the evidence and conclude that much of what we believe now with unshakable conviction will provoke the disdain of our posterity, assuming it does not actually prevent the production of our posterity.
I have some suspicions about what history will reckon to be our pharmaceutical follies but I'm less interested in arguing against specific remedies or diagnoses than in arguing for a general posture of intellectual modesty. I would like for every doctor to carry around, in addition to the stethoscopes and prescription pads a jar of leaches. I would like for every pharmacy to offer their customers complimentary teaspoons of castor oil with each prescription filled.
Because it's hard to write the prescription for the good for what ails us, when what ails us most is pride and vanity.