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.

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.