Book Review: Henri Nouwen and Spiritual Polarities by Wil Hernandez

I read several of Henri Nouwen's books early in my experiences in ministry, and they forever shaped the course I would follow. It's obvious in his writings and his life story that he was thoroughly committed both to Christ and to ministry in the church, and I'll never forget his words, "Sometimes there is nothing so dangerous to our intimacy with Christ as our ministry for Christ" (may not be an exact quote). I may currently be on my longest Nouwen-less reading stretch to date, but I am eager to dig in again after reading the treatment of the tensions in Nouwen's theology and life in Henri Nouwen and Spiritual Polarities: A Life of Tension by my friend and spiritual director, Wil Hernandez.

From the moment that I read through the Table of Contents of the book, I was intrigued, because I could see that the aspects of Nouwen's life and thought that Wil would highlight were going to be a different twist on a theological characteristic that I've come to value deeply in my own Wesleyan heritage: the wisdom of finding a place for "both/and" where most people see "either/or". In Wesleyan categories, this surfaces on our emphases on both sides of apparent tensions such as faith/works, personal/social, scripture/sacrament, and others. (By the way, for a great book along the lines of understanding this aspect of Wesley's theology, see Paul Chilcote's Recapturing the Wesleys' Vision.)

Hernandez categorizes some of the tensions in Nouwen's life in three ways:

• Inward/Psychological Tensions (True Self/False Self, Self-Owning and Self-Giving, and Woundedness/Healing)
• Outward/Ministerial Tensions (Solitude/Community, Compassion/Confrontation, and Presence/Absence)
• Upward/Theological Tensions (Suffering/Glory, Present/Future, and Life/Death)

The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the life and thought of one whom I, together with many others, have long regarded as one of the spiritual giants of our day. Hernandez shows that he was such a giant, but not- as I had assumed about him at some point- because God and the Christian life were much clearer to him than they are to most of us. Rather, his greatness and the lasting impact he has made on so many, is largely due to his courage to live within the polarities as they are presented to us in the life of faith, rather than taking what often appears to be an easier route and focus only on one side of a tension while ignoring or even dismissing the other.

The book is filled with wisdom and insight, both for those already well familiar with Nouwen and those who may be new to his writings. Dr. Hernandez is one of the most reliable guides we have for continuing to plumb the depths of Nouwen's life and teaching from the years since Nouwen's death and on into the future, and this book is a great example of how helpful doing so can be.

Disclosure Statement:

I received this book free as a gift from the author. I was not required to write a review, nor if I did so, for it to be positive.

If you purchase resources linked to from this blog, I may receive an “affiliate commission.” I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Regardless of whether I receive a commission, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

Scripture Plaques You Won't Find at the Christian Bookstore, #17

[This post is one of a series of potential Christian plaques that we would never find at a Christian bookstore. See the rest of the list here.]

I've spent a lot of time in recent months studying and thinking about various Christian beliefs about baptism. The more I've explored the scriptures and how different groups of Christians approach baptism based on their readings of scripture, I've come to a couple of conclusions: 1) Different (even somewhat contradictory) practices can each be genuinely characterized as biblical, and 2) None of those practices, including my own, match up with everything the Bible says about baptism. If you think your approach to baptism is thoroughly biblical and consistent with everything the Bible says, please let me know what you do with this:

Superhero Jesus

A friend of mine has a four-year-old named Richard, and apparently Richard recently surprised his Dad by telling him, "I wish I was Jesus." My friend thinks that Richard wants to be Jesus because he thinks Jesus is a superhero with special powers. That's understandable, since four-year-old boys see plenty of stuff about superheroes, then when they're at church, they hear stories about Jesus healing sick people, making dead people come back to life, stopping storms, walking on water, turning a sack lunch into enough food for thousands of people to eat, and coming back from the dead himself. Pretty superhero-ish stuff.

But being a good dad, my friend wanted Richard to understand that Jesus is different from the superheroes on the cartoons. Something about putting Jesus in the same category as Spiderman or the Incredible Hulk seemed too sacrilegious to accept, so my friend told Richard that instead of pretending to be Jesus (like we do with superheroes), he should try to be like Jesus.

But that wasn't good enough for Richard. He responded, "No. I'm just going to pretend to be Jesus and do the cool stuff he did."

I think I'm going to try and see if Richard can preach some weekend soon at our church, because regardless of how much of it he gets as a four-year-old, there's some pretty good theology there. The desire to be like Jesus can take us to some good places in the spiritual life, but it alone can't take us as far as we're meant to go.

Gary Moon helped me realize the difference in a great blog post for Conversations Journal. To translate part of what he wrote there to my experience: My sports hero in high school and college was David Robinson. I really wanted to be like him, and tried to find any ways I could to do so. I played his sport and chose his number 50 to wear with the teams I played for, but that's really about as far as any similarities could be drawn. Anything beyond those things displayed obvious differences: He had huge muscles, was incredibly quick for his size, could seemingly jump over opponents, and led the league in scoring, once scoring 71 points in a single game. I was skin and bones, couldn't run, couldn't jump, and in college averaged double points for the season (as in 2 points per game). But at least I wore his number.

Moon points out similarities and differences between the ways that we imitate our sports heroes (his was John McEnroe) and our imitation of Jesus as Christians. There's an important similarity in that, to be like them, we must imitate their overall everyday lifestyles if we have any hope of being able to do some of the things they did. But then he points out a really important difference: ”There is a distinct advantage for those who want to live like Christ instead of play tennis like McEnroe. Christ will actually step into your flesh (incarnate you) and show you how to play—from the inside out.”

Long ago, I worked hard at being a basketball player. Yet however hard I worked, there certainly was no David Robinson stepping into my flesh and teaching me to play from the inside out. College basketball was evidence to me that I had gone as far as my body would ever take me in the sport. I wanted to be like David Robinson, which certainly helped me toward being a better player, but there was never any David Robinson in me.

Yet at the heart of the gospel of Jesus is the opportunity we are given, in very livable and practical ways, to welcome him into us as we also are welcomed to live in him. There is a lot about this that's a bit mystical and mysterious, but at the same time it's stuff that gets played out in our tangible, everyday lives. If, out of our desire to be like Jesus, we generally order our lives as he did, doing the kinds of things he did in order to become the kind of person he was, the testimony of his best friends through the ages is that we will discover him there right beside us in the process, even in us, teaching us how to live from the inside out.

Then it's no longer just about us wanting to be like Jesus, but it's about Christ in us.

I'm pretty sure that's what Richard was trying to say, in a four-year-old kind of way.

Scripture Plaques You Won't Find at the Christian Bookstore, #16

[This post is one of a series of potential Christian plaques that we would never find at a Christian bookstore. See the rest of the list here.]

This plaque comes from the life of that old friend of God, Moses. There could certainly be enough of these plaques from his life to fill a warehouse of these unmarketable items, but perhaps this is one of the most interesting. Moses is certainly a hero of the Scriptures, and is described as someone who "spoke to God face to face, as a man speaks with his friend." Well, I've never had a friend say this to me, face to face or otherwise:

What Lent Isn't and What Lent Is

Two items caught my attention as Lent started this year, which reflected confusion about what it is. First, the picture above: Perhaps I've never enjoyed looking at a sign at a gas pump as much as I enjoyed this one. Promoted there, alongside the Marlboros and breakfast burritos, is, supposedly, an opportunity to repent and hear a first-century Jewish rabbi's call to deny ourselves, take up our own crosses, and follow him as he walked the road into his own unjust death.

Hey that sounds good. Oh, and let me grab a bag of Doritos to go with my three Lenten cheese enchiladas. As long as they're not meat-flavored, I think the man upstairs is pretty happy with me today!

The other attention-grabber was an article about churches offering drive-thru Ash Wednesday services. There are some good things that happen when churches begin to think beyond the way they've always done things, and much of the beginnings of my own Methodist heritage is based on how John Wesley was determined to preach in places that weren't normal. But still...

 "From dust you came and to dust you will return. Repent and believe the gospel... Yes ma'am, that means changing the entire course of your life... No ma'am, getting out of the car isn't required to do so.... Say, is that Lady Gaga you have on the radio?... Okay, have a nice day [living exactly as you always have.]"

In their defense, there's probably at least someone who has had an encounter with God right there in their car because of these churches doing this who wouldn't have otherwise. And I'm sure that I don't know the whole story here, so I'm not offering criticism of these specific churches since I'm not there trying to figure out how to minister in their context as they are doing.

But, in general, the thing that came to mind for me as I read about it was this: our methods of ministering to people in the name of Jesus Christ aren't neutral and independent of the message we seek to communicate. Instead, our methods are part of the training people are going through in what it means to follow him. So, in what kind of training are we involving people when we encourage them to begin Lent without even bothering to get out of the car? Or, to put it another way, what percentage of people receiving an imposition of ashes while continuing to sit behind their steering wheel do we honestly expect to continue, for the rest of their lives, down the road of being whole-hearted, full-throttle students of Jesus? Again, there may be some example of someone to whom that has happened, for which I'm grateful. But is such a case a natural, predictable result of the way we do things with God, or are they just strange exceptions to the rule?

This kind of thing matters all of the time, but it really matters in Lent. Lent is the period of forty days leading up to Easter, not counting Sundays, and Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent. Lent is a time for house-cleaning our souls, so that when we come to Holy Week and Easter Sunday, we're prepared for the resurrection of the crucified Messiah to take more of its intended effect upon us. It's a time to pay attention to how dis-oriented we have become in the ways that we have lived our everyday lives and to find ways that we can re-orient ourselves to the one who said,

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?

So if you and I got into the drive-thru line for our ashes to begin Lent this year, or picked up our Lenten enchiladas at the gas station, or whatever else it is that we may have done during this annual period of repentance and re-orientation, are the things that we're doing of the type that naturally help us, by God's grace, to become more likely and more able to follow Jesus with our own crosses in tow? Or are they things that just help us to feel religious while leaving the houses of our souls exactly as messy and disoriented as they were last Lent, and the one before, and the one before, etc.?

Book Review: Our Favorite Sins by Todd Hunter

You probably think you know what this book is about. You're probably wrong. In Our Favorite Sins: The Sins We Commit & How You Can Quit, Todd Hunter examines what new research by the Barna Group says are Americans' favorite sins and he offers a way out. The first surprise in the book is that the things most of us would think would show up front and center in a book like this (sins generally of the sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll variety) don't even make the list. Rather, the sins addressed hit much closer to home, so that practically every reader will read and think, "Yikes, that's me." In fact, the sins that show up at the top of Barna's research are each pretty socially acceptable- even in the strictest Christian circles. (In other words, your pastor could have an obvious struggle with any or all of them, and you might not think anything about it.) So what are they?: anxiety, procrastination, over-eating, media addiction, and laziness.

Thankfully, Hunter's goal in writing the book wasn't to incur guilt on a widespread audience by addressing things that apply to all of us, but he very much wants to help us leave these sins behind. This is where the second big surprise of the book comes in: his remedy has nothing to do with exerting all of the willpower we can muster up, then urging us to do it all over again when we fall off the wagon. Rather, the remedy hangs on the premise of the entire book: that something is tempting to us when an opportunity comes along that matches a disordered desire already in place within us, and that reordering our desires by cooperating with God's grace is the key to being freed from these sins.

The reason this is surprising is because we normally seek to beat a bad habit by tackling it head on, but if we'll admit it, we know ourselves well enough to know how ineffective this is. No one beats anxiety by demanding themselves to become an un-anxious person. Rather than this direct approach, Hunter's key is indirection. This is why he doesn't spend all that much time delving in to each of these top five sins in all of their nasty but common detail, but instead goes to quite an effort to point out what's common between them and every other temptation: our disordered desires. So, it doesn't matter if your besetting sin isn't even on the list, because Hunter's goal is to expose the common root of all kinds of sin and point us toward the well-tested and tried way out.

Rather than depending on willpower to free us from our sins, Hunter suggests that we make changes in the other parts of who we are (thoughts, feelings, body, and social context) and then our will/desires follow along. He gets very practical in suggesting ways to do so, primarily by intentionally putting habits into our lives that open us to God's grace and help to free us from "the tyranny of what we want" [in our disordered desires]. If you're unfamiliar with Hunter's story, these habits will likely be a third surprise of the book, as he suggests the practices of praying liturgical prayers, receiving the sacraments of baptism and holy communion, and reading the Scriptures following a lectionary.

Much in this book could be delved into more deeply, but Hunter does a terrific job of making a historic Christian approach to sin accessible to any reader today.

Disclosure of Material Connection:

I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

If you purchase resources linked to from this blog, I may receive an “affiliate commission.” I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Regardless of whether I receive a commission, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

Defining Ministry Success

I was in full-time Christian ministry for 11 years (9 of them in churches) and felt successful at very little of what I did. And I'm not entirely basing this on feelings. Though I did have some times where the implicit criteria for success was something like, "Well, Daniel, all buildings and children are still standing, so it looks like you're doing a great job!", in the times when it was anything more defined than that, my report cards usually weren't very good. Sure, there were some highlights along the way, but for the most part, I set a lot of goals and accomplished very, very few of them. If you analyze the paragraph above, you can see a partial definition of success: the ability to set good goals and achieve them. I don't have any problem with that, but it reveals the tremendous importance of being wise about the goals that we set.

As I think about the 11 years in full-time ministry (particularly the 9 in churches more so than the 2 as a missionary), I don't think many goals were set wisely, and since I accomplished so few of them, it's easy to see why I felt so unsuccessful at the time (and why I don't really carry any guilt about those report cards).

The tricky part is that every goal I ever set was something good. It's not like I ever had a goal of intentionally doing anything damaging or that would lead to a waste of people's resources and time. ("By next January I'd like to decrease participants' involvement by 50%, and put undue stress on those helping me.") No, of course every goal was something that if you looked at it, you'd say, "It would be good if that happened."

Yet those good things I wrote as goals almost never came to pass. It wasn't because I went through the process poorly. (For those of you familiar with such processes, I could BHAG and SMART with the best of them.) It wasn't because I was unwilling to work hard to accomplish things. There was a lack of talent for some of the things I tried to do, but that's not enough to explain how rarely I accomplished the SMART BHAGs I wrote down.

So what was the issue?

For me, the entire process was flawed because it seemingly had to start with a poor idea of success, which almost always boiled down to making something bigger and (of secondary importance) better. From this point on in any ministry efforts, I've decided to never again feel like adopting the bigger/better premise is the only option available.

As is often the case, this paradigm shift is due to running across a simple statement from Dallas Willard. In a 2010 interview in Leadership Journal, he said,

Success in ministry is to develop a vital relationship with God and the capacity to pass it on to others.

I have been part of a lot of goal-setting processes, but never one that implicitly or explicitly began there.

How would your church be different if every staff person and volunteer viewed success in their role through that statement?

If a staff member resolved to define success in this way, what resistance might they encounter?

Would this view of success bring up fears in anyone? What would they be, and what does that tell us about ourselves?

What kinds of goals could someone write down based on this framework of success? Do you believe those are worth a person's whole-hearted pursuit, really? Would the culture of your church/ministry allow it?