Durham, North Carolina United States for Tuesday, 29 May 2018
"Rejoicing and mourning online"
Faith and Leadership 
A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Angela Gorrell: Rejoicing and mourning online
HOW WE USE SOCIAL MEDIA IS A PASTORAL ISSUEMany Christian leaders want to make sure their institutions are using the right technology for ministry. But social media use is also a pastoral issue; social media spaces are places where people experience both joy and pain, writes an associate research scholar at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.
I posed this question recently to a group of college students at Yale: "In general, what two emotions do you experience when using social media?"
As the students responded with their cellphones to an online survey, a word cloud of their replies displayed on a screen behind me. I've done this exercise many times -- I usually ask this question when I lead workshops, give lectures and teach courses about social media.
People type all kinds of things in response, of course. But no matter the group, two emotions have showed up in every word cloud: joy and anxiety.
As someone who uses social media, I resonate with both of those responses. I imagine many of you reading this do, too.
Like those who take my cellphone surveys, I have experienced deep joy when using social media -- feelings of connection and solidarity.
In November 2016, a high school friend was dying. He made two final status updates on Facebook: one dedicated to his favorite basketball team and a sobering post promising to watch over everyone and asking friends to let him know whom to say "hey" to on the other side.
In response to those posts, people said things like this: "With tear-filled eyes all I can do is look at the sun rising over the clouds and imagine the beauty you are entering. Well done, my friend, what a wonderful life you have led here. You are so loved." And this: "Your strength, faith in God, and determination have changed so many lives."
Hundreds of people had been using social media to stay updated on his cancer treatment, hoping that he would be healed. For most of the last months of his life, he was unable to leave his hospital room and could have only a few visitors. Social media was his connection to his friends and to the world.
Social media in this case was a source of joy, nurturing healing and Christian community, and extending Christian practices like truth telling and compassion from offline to online spaces.
On the other hand, there are many reasons social media causes people to feel anxious. Some of us are worried about privacy -- a concern intensified by the recent news about Facebook.
Another source of anxiety is what we view online. Like you, on too many days I am profoundly grieved by what I encounter on social media. I’m unsure of what to pray for and crushed by my seeming inability to do anything about, well, anything.
When I discuss ministry in a new media landscape with Christian leaders, most want to focus on how their institutions can use technology well.
And while I think it is vital for Christian communities to consider what technologies they will use and how, they shouldn’t neglect one of the most powerful questions of social media for Christian communities: How can we use it pastorally? How can Christian communities address both the joys and the anxieties of social media in a pastoral way?
On the basis of the research I have been doing for the Theology of Joy & the Good Life project and my upcoming book with Baker Academic(link is external), I’ve developed some suggestions for ways a Christian community can begin to do this:
- Ask people to share stories about how social media makes them feel about themselves and others. Listen for pastoral concerns. Listen for joys, conflict, learning, laments, hope, anxiety, loneliness and connection.
- Pray often about the development of technology and people’s social media use. This is an indication that these things matter to God and that technology and social media have meaning and power in people’s lives.
- Use language in sermons, youth groups, meetings, planning, etc., that signals that the practice of faith includes new media (e.g., mobile phones, streaming services like Netflix), and be an active presence in social media spaces.
- Engage in meaningful conversation about acting faithfully in the midst of difficult situations on social media such as disagreement, shaming, gossip, bullying and harassment.
- Make connections between stories in the Bible, stories from history about technology and faith (e.g., the printing press, the Reformation), and contemporary stories about media development and engagement. Put historical and contemporary stories in conversation with one another, and ask the Holy Spirit to teach your Christian community what God is doing among you in the midst of this new media culture and how you might participate in God’s work.
The invitation in Romans 12 to “rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15) is a beautiful way of thinking about the pastoral use of social media. How can we engage the practice of compassion online, both participating in others’ joys and acknowledging others’ grief?
One mark of the “transformed” mind (Romans 12:2) is a willingness to see others’ joy or pain and embrace it, recognizing it as our own -- recognizing that, as Father Greg Boyle says, “we belong to each other,” offline and online.
Christians understand that joy is not scarce but abundant. And when the joy of other human beings is embraced as our own and then returned back to them, it is deepened that much more, both for them and, mysteriously, for us.
Similarly, when we see pain and acknowledge it and get close to it and then take it on and share it, that pain is somehow transformed. It is not necessarily weakened, but it is seen for what it is: unjust, cruel, traumatizing -- and real.
Sharing in that pain says, “Your pain happened, and it matters to me. In fact, it matters so much that I am willing to offer my resources, emotional and otherwise, to confronting it with you.”
This is one way I imagine that Jesus might enter social media spaces: looking for people with whom he can rejoice and mourn.Read more from Angela Gorrell »
Faith and Leadership A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
CAN THESE BONES PODCAST: MATTHEW CROASMUN
Episode 12: Matthew Croasmun on how (and why) to ask, "What makes a life worth living?"
What constitutes a life worth living? And how do you begin to explore that question?
The Rev. Dr. Matthew Croasmun and his colleagues tackle the issue in a course offered by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. In it, students engage with a range of philosophical and religious traditions to form habits of reflection that will equip them for "the life-long process of discerning the good life."
In his conversation with "Can These Bones" co-host Laura Everett, Croasmun talks about what he has learned from teaching the course, why engaging with other religious traditions is vital to his faith, and why he is one of the faculty advisers for Yale's secular humanist community.
CAN THESE BONES
A Faith & Leadership podcast »
EDUCATION, HIGHER EDUCATION, VOCATION
Episode 12: Matthew Croasmun on how (and why) to ask, "What makes a life worth living?"
What constitutes a life worth living? And how do you begin to explore that question? The Rev. Dr. Matthew Croasmun and his colleagues tackle the issue in a course offered by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. In it, students engage with a range of philosophical and religious traditions to form habits of reflection that will equip them for “the life-long process of discerning the good life.” In his conversation with “Can These Bones” co-host Laura Everett, Croasmun talks about what he has learned from teaching the course, why engaging with other religious traditions is vital to his faith, and why he is one of the faculty advisers for Yale’s secular humanist community.
Listen and subscribe
Listen to all the episodes and learn more about the hosts.
More from Matthew Croasmun
Yale Center for Faith & Culture: Life Worth Living(link is external) program
Life Worth Living video: “David Brooks and Miroslav Volf: A Conversation on Character, Flourishing & the Good Life(link is external)”
Yale University Office of the Provost: Yale Title IX(link is external)reports
Elm City Vineyard Church(link is external)
Yale Humanist Community(link is external)
Books and poetry mentioned in this episode:
“Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,”(link is external) by Anthony T. Kronman
“Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,”(link is external) by William Deresiewicz
“Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower: Finding Answers in Jesus for Those Who Don’t Believe,”(link is external) by Tom Krattenmaker
“God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom,’”(link is external) by William F. Buckley Jr.
“God Unbound: Wisdom from Galatians for the Anxious Church,”(link is external) by Elaine A. Heath
“As Kingfishers Catch Fire,”(link is external) by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Transcript
Laura Everett: From Faith & Leadership, this is “Can These Bones,” a podcast that asks a fresh set of questions about leadership and the future of the church.
I’m Laura Everett.
Bill Lamar: And I’m Bill Lamar. This is the last episode in our series of conversations with leaders from the church and from other fields. Through this podcast, we have aimed to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in “valleys of dry bones.”
Laura, you spoke with Matt Croasmun, a pastor and research scholar who teaches a wildly popular undergraduate class at Yale. Tell us a little more about Matt.
Laura Everett: Matt is the director of the Life Worth Living program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. And Matt and his wife, Hannah, also planted and have pastored the Elm City Vineyard Church in New Haven. By training, he’s a Paul scholar. He’s an author and an interfaith advocate.
But the focus of this interview is really Matt’s work in teaching the Life Worth Living course at Yale College. The course was founded by the theologian Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz. The course has been offered since 2014, and it’s proved to be wildly popular -- so much so that it’s now being offered at other universities.
I want to read you the course description, because I think it helps give a sense of what’s going on here. It’s the course Humanities 411, and it reads thus: “‘Life Worth Living’ draws upon a range of philosophical and religious traditions to help students develop habits of reflection that will equip them for the life-long process of discerning the good life. … [What does it mean for a life to go well? …] In short, what shape would a life worth living take? We will explore these questions through engagement with the lives and visions of founding figures from six diverse religious traditions of imagining a good life: the Buddha, the Torah and the Hebrew prophetic and wisdom writers, Jesus of Nazareth, Muhammad, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Nietzsche.”
The course itself is fascinating, and perhaps what’s even more fascinating is the overwhelmingly positive response to it. Students are excited to take this, and curious to ask this big question: “What constitutes a life worth living?”
Bill Lamar: You’ve almost made me want to go back to undergraduate, but probably not.
Laura Everett: No, I’m good.
Bill Lamar: Let’s hear your conversation.
Laura Everett: Matt Croasmun, welcome to “Can These Bones.”
Matt Croasmun: Thanks so much. Great to be here.
Laura Everett: We’re really glad to have you today. So this course, this Yale college undergrad course, Life Worth Living, began in the spring of 2014. Tell us the origin story of Life Worth Living.
Matt Croasmun: Sure. Actually, that particular story is only tangentially connected to me personally. But my colleagues Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz began designing this course when Ryan and I were both still in graduate school. Miroslav is a professor of theology at the divinity school, and Ryan was one of his graduate students.
And I think it began in large part for Miroslav with a kind of diagnosis of something unsettling in our universities and in our culture at large. I think a particular book that crystallized many things for him was Anthony Kronman’s book “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.”
And that book makes basically that case: that fundamental question of, What is the good life? What is the sort of life worth having? What’s the sort of life worth wanting? What’s the sort of life that we ought to want for ourselves and ought to want for our children? That fundamental question is both deeply contested these days, in ways that perhaps it was not in more homogeneous cultural environments, and yet at the same time, that question has been sort of given up on.
It’s no longer a question that’s being asked and answered in today’s universities. So indeed, for at least a year if not more in advance of teaching the course, Ryan and Miroslav and my other colleagues at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture were gathering scholars and professors from all over the country and asking, “Is it possible to ask and answer this question in a pluralistic environment and still take issues of truth really, really seriously?”
And the course that they taught for the first time in 2014 and that we’ve refined and expanded since then is our answer to that question.
Laura Everett: So clearly, students at Yale are smart and ambitious. I’m curious about what were the signs that you and your colleagues saw -- the notice that there was something missing?
Matt Croasmun: Well, there are a number of signs. Some of them you can see earlier; some of them take longer.
To be frank, on this campus, the Title IX reports that have come out in the last several years about sexual violence on this campus would be among the sort of signs that, early on -- that is, while students are here at Yale -- there is a sign that what it means to do right by one another, what it means to form this sort of community of honor and respect, is something that’s not happening the way that anyone here would want it to be.
I think a lot of the signs, though, may take longer to appear.
But Bill Deresiewicz, in a book -- which I’m not sure is entirely fair to the Yale education, but some of his criticism is really well-received -- in a book called “Excellent Sheep,” talks about that what many elite students are really good at is running on well-defined tracks. They’re not very good, necessarily, at charting their own way in the world.
The last moment -- and of course, we could talk about many other signs -- but the last moment to talk about is the midlife crisis for those who do succeed. They run on those career paths. They get everything they thought they wanted. And all of a sudden at the end, they realize they’re deeply dissatisfied.
And often they get to 50, 55 and they are -- winning wasn’t worth it. Because maybe they won a race that wasn’t worth winning. And so these questions of value and of worth, I think, were highlighted again and again, from the undergraduate careers of our students all the way into later periods of life, in which it was clear that these questions of worth, of meaning and value, were questions that our students are not prepared to answer. They’re worse for it, and the world in which they are in many cases leaders is worse for it as well.
Laura Everett: Matt, you talked about the tendency for people with wisdom and talent to know how to move on well-defined tracks, and maybe even strive to move fast on well-defined tracks, but that the winning might not be worth it.
It strikes me in the same way that academic courses can also run on well-defined tracks -- the Intro to Engineering, the Psych 101. There is a path that is clearly laid out for academic programming, and [it strikes me] that you all made the same decision, to create a course that was not just about being on a well-defined track. I imagine -- were there places of resistance for this kind of course?
Matt Croasmun: I remember when the course was first taught, there were these questions. We offer a retreat for students to attend, and at first we weren’t sure: Is this allowed? Is this appropriate? What would some of our colleagues think? What would administrators think?
We had some sense of what the bright lines were in terms of what we -- you know, we couldn’t require students to come to the retreat, but we could certainly offer it. But something like that really starts to sit outside -- “Wait, wait, what are you doing with your students there?” “Well, we’re taking them away for a weekend, and we’re inviting them to tell each other their stories and to share really personally where they’re coming from, where they’re headed.”
And so I think that, too, was something that sat really clearly outside the norm.
The other practice that I’d point out would be, on the very first day of class, I tell students -- usually within the first 10 minutes of the first day of class -- I tell students, “Look, I am a Christian, and worse yet, I’m a Christian pastor.” I tell them, “Look, I feel like I need to tell you this, because it means I can’t be your neutral tour guide about questions of the good life.”
We, in our course -- and presumably we’ll talk more about this -- we look at all kinds of different answers to the question of the good life. Religious answers, nonreligious, philosophical answers, answers and traditions that sort of sit in between categories of religion and philosophy and help us even think about what those categories are and what they mean.
But I can’t pretend to be neutral as we walk through. Because of my Christian convictions, it’s really important to me that the classroom be an open environment in which anyone, wherever they’re coming from, can approach each of these traditions and really hear them honestly and charitably, and give each tradition its fair hearing.
But again, I don’t do that despite my Christian convictions. I do that because of my Christian convictions. Because of who I know Jesus to be, I understand part of my love of neighbor to extend to that intellectual generosity that I want to offer to my students and to the authors and the traditions that we engage in the class.
But I tell them right from the beginning, “Look, this is who I am. This is where I’m situated. I know that you’re situated somewhere, too. And I hope that right from the beginning, we’ll recognize as we have these conversations that none of us is located nowhere. All of us come from somewhere. We have convictions. We have instincts. We have a history and a background and a set of impulses that have brought us to this table that are going to shape our conversation together and I hope even might themselves -- that is, our deep convictions -- might themselves be shaped by our conversation together. But that’s only going to happen if we actually bring our whole selves to the table.”
You know, I have multiple students every year tell me that they recognize, “Oh, that is not normal.” That is not the professorial neutrality -- which is only ever a myth. But even at least the myth of that neutrality is their standard experience, and they really, really appreciate that forthrightness.
Anyway, we could keep going on. There are many things that we do that are nonstandard, at least in our sort of environment. But the reason we do go ahead and teach a course and make it try to fit in this sort of box is that we want students -- Yale students are smart. I mean, our young people are brilliant wherever we’re encountering them, at whatever institution we’re encountering them.
And what we want to say by putting this in the curriculum -- because we could have taught this outside the curriculum. We could have put together another extracurricular. And of course, there are extracurricular communities that are helping students ask these questions, many of them campus ministries. In their best moments, that’s what’s happening there.
But we wanted to put it in the curriculum in order to say, “You know, the best of your intellect, the very best of your thinking that you apply to organic chemistry or to Russian literature, the very finest, the best of your intellectual energy -- that’s actually what this question of meaning and purpose and value and worth is worth. This deserves the very best of your intellectual energies.”
And so by putting it in the classroom -- now, of course, that means we have to reshape the classroom in all the ways that I just said -- but by putting it in the classroom, we’re trying to say, “This deserves the very best of your intellectual energies. You can reason about this. You’re never going to become an expert in answering this question, but you can get better at asking it. Posing it rightly. Thinking about it charitably, learning how to think about it together with people very much unlike you.
And those sorts of things may not sound like the normal sorts of intellectual challenges that you’re going to be presented with in the classroom. But they are no less intellectual, no less intellectually rigorous, and no less worth the best of your intellectual and academic energies.
Laura Everett: I want to turn for just a second to ask about you, because you said that all of us are located somewhere. And you and your wife, Hannah, were intentional about locating yourself -- planting yourself, quite literally -- as pastors, with Elm City Vineyard Church in New Haven. I wonder, how has teaching this course, Life Worth Living, changed your pastoring?
Matt Croasmun: You know, I think it’s shaped it a lot. And people who are in my church would tell you they hear a lot about this course in sermon illustrations and just in life together.
I said one of the ways that we do tackle these questions, even on a college campus these days, is we -- I hope -- we tackle them in campus ministries. And that was my experience as an undergraduate.
I was part of an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship; it was life for me. I believe in the church. I love Christ-centered communities. I planted one. I’m all about that.
But if that’s the only context in which we ever ask and answer these questions, I think we’re really, really missing something. And so I think this course has informed my pastoring, largely in saying, “Hey, the conversation we’re having here in the church? This is really, really valuable.”
And -- it’s not a “but,” right? And, because we follow Jesus -- Jesus who engaged with people across religious boundaries, across cultural boundaries, across all kinds of different socioeconomic sorts of boundaries -- becausewe follow that Jesus, we should expect that Jesus is in fact still going to speak to us across those sorts of boundaries today.
So in our church, we’ve intentionally cultivated relationship with the mosques and the Muslim communities in our city and in our metro area here. And we’ve done that in a way that hasn’t been -- this isn’t about proselytizing, but it might be about a richer vision of evangelism.
And with some of our interlocutors, who, in their Muslim convictions, have hopes for evangelization as well -- I’ve learned more about what it means to be a follower of Jesus by my engagement with my Muslim neighbors than I ever could just within the walls of the church. And so our church itself has become -- we’ve led people into those sorts of experiences.
I’ll never forget: one Saturday afternoon in the early fall in New Haven, we were working together with a local mosque, Masjid Al-Islam, and they were giving out -- they’re located in a poorer neighborhood here in our city -- and they were giving away book bags with school supplies for students as they were starting school.
And we just thought, “OK, well, that’s fantastic. We would love to help with that. How can we do that?”
And so we show up early that morning, we show up at the mosque, and we ask, “What can we do?” And they say, “You know, what we could really use you for is if you could go door to door in the neighborhoods around here and invite people to come down to the mosque.”
And I remember -- you know, the Vineyard’s an evangelical sort of movement. So you can imagine how challenging that might be for folks in a mainline church, and an evangelical church maybe even more challenging, right?
OK, we’re going to go door to door inviting people to the mosque. And my father was with me, and as we’re going door to door, I remember my father was maybe the one, I don’t know, knocking on this particular door.
And he gave them the flyer. He said, “Hey, they’re handing out book bags and school supplies; you should come down to the mosque. It’s just down the street.”
And the person said, “Oh sure, thanks.” And as we were walking away, they sort of quickly profiled us and asked, “Wait, are you Muslim?”
And my father, God bless him, I’ll never forget, just turned around and with all innocence and sincerity, said, “Oh, no, but we’re followers of Jesus. And we just think that if Jesus was here, the thing that Jesus would be doing is helping hand out book bags of school supplies down at the mosque. So we hope to see you there.”
And I just love that, right? Because the answer wasn’t, “Oh yeah, no, we’re not Muslims, but we’re Christians, and it’s more or less the same, and I hope we’ll see you down there.” Right?
It was, “No, we’re not. There’s a real difference here. We’re followers of Jesus, and because of -- not despiteour difference, our particularity -- but because of our particularity, because of the particularity of who Jesus is, for that reason, we’re going door to door inviting people to the mosque.”
And I could repeat that story with the secular humanist community in our town and other sorts of communities in which we’ve been engaged. And so for me, that’s become sort of irreducible.
That’s completely changed my picture of evangelism, in ways that maybe I’ve described a bit already. But it’s also just changed my sense of discipleship -- that that’s how I come to know who Jesus is. And how I grow as a follower of Jesus is by encountering Jesus in these perhaps surprising ways among these other communities. And I learn so much about Jesus in those encounters.
Laura Everett: You know, Matt, I had a question prepared about how this course is changing your students; I didn’t have a question prepared about how this course is changing you.
Right? It sounds like this is really changing a number of things about how you see yourself as a pastor, what your church’s relationship is to your neighbors, what it means to be clearly rooted in a tradition but widely open. That teaching in a pluralistic setting is changing something about how you think church can be in relationship with the world. Am I onto something there?
Matt Croasmun: Absolutely. So I remember just wrestling so much: “Am I a pastor? Am I a scholar? Am I called to the church? Am I called to the academy?” And it all came together around, “Oh, I’m a teacher.”
When I lead my church best, it’s when I’m teaching. That’s the mode in which I pastor best. Actually, in my personal life, with my daughter, when I father best is often when I’m teaching her something. And I came to figure out, “Oh, I’m a teacher.”
But what this course has taught me is more about what being a teacher, what teaching is. And I think that part of what -- this’ll be a little bit meta -- but I think that part of what real teaching is, is learning.
I can’t ask my students to put their lives on the table and be ready to be potentially transformed by their encounter with one or another of the traditions that we’re going to encounter together without putting my life on the table in a similar sort of way.
And so absolutely, my life has been changed, in part, just by the encounter with these traditions. I’ve sort of fallen in love with Confucius, which I never would have thought. The Analects are just so powerful. And I feel like I’ve come to understand -- I’m a Paul scholar by training -- I’ve come to understand Paul’s sense of the self and the social better by thinking about that question together with Confucius.
But it really is more than just the specifics of encountering each of these traditions -- though, of course, my Sabbath practice has been enriched by engaging with Judaism, and you keep getting those sorts of specific examples. But even more, it’s been this sort of metapractice that what it means to encounter Jesus is to go encounter Jesus among the people that my old evangelical self might have imagined needed to have Jesus preached to them.
I am at the moment one of the faculty advisers for the secular humanist community here at Yale, the Yale Humanist Community.
Laura Everett: Hold up. There is a Vineyard pastor who is the faculty adviser for the Yale secular humanist community?
Matt Croasmun: One of. But yes.
Laura Everett: OK.
Matt Croasmun: Yeah, and my bio on their website begins with “Matt Croasmun is the director of the Life Worth Living program and staff pastor at the Elm City Vineyard Church.”
Now, some of that’s because of the incredible charity and wisdom and openness of Chris Stedman, who for many years was the leader of that community. But the reason I’ve gotten so engaged in that community has been, again, not in spite of my commitment to Jesus but because of my commitment to Jesus.
I stumbled into this community at a time when a man who has now become a friend of mine, Tom Krattenmaker, was writing a book called “Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower.” He’s a board member for the humanist community.
He would tell you he’s pretty sure Jesus isn’t the Son of God, inasmuch as there is no God, but he just can’t let go of the words of Jesus. He’d ask me as a Christian, he’d say, “I know you guys, like, sit with this book all the time. But have you read it? Have you seen what’s in here? I mean, this guy, he says to love my enemies. I don’t even love my friends that well. Like, what -- I’ve been to church. You guys don’t seem to be all that flustered by this. But when I sit down and read this -- maybe it’s the religion that’s gotten you sort of, like, to the point where this doesn’t strike you like it strikes me.”
Maybe I’m putting words in his mouth. I think that’s probably what’s happened.
But I’m hearing, all of a sudden, afresh, the true power of Jesus’ vision of a way of life from my friend Tom the atheist. And he started [a monthly] gathering -- so all of a sudden, despite my best efforts to say, “No, no, I want to be here and hear from you all on your terms; I want to hear what it’s like. So many of my students are secular; they don’t have commitments to a particular religion or philosophy. Maybe they’re committed to something like humanism; I’d love to find out how you’re thinking about life. Please, don’t change what you’re talking about because I’m here” -- despite all of my insistence, I found myself in a monthly meeting with a group of eight to 10 atheists, and every week, all we were talking about was Jesus.
I kept saying, “Guys, please, can we talk about something else?” But all, you know, Tom was trying to -- “Let’s talk about Jesus.” He said, “I think Jesus is the great humanizer. This is who Jesus is for me. The teachings of Jesus help me become more fully human, and as a secular humanist, I can’t think of anyone better for us to spend our time talking about.”
Now of course, Tom’s a bit controversial within the secular humanist community for that. But I thought, “Jesus came to make us more fully human?” I thought, “That is brilliant christological insight! This may have been what Irenaeus was trying to tell us.” I mean, I can go back deep in the church’s history.
Anyway, so it’s those sorts of encounters that have me thinking. I mean, I love my small group, I love Bible study in the church, I love praying for one another and worshipping together, and again, I’m the biggest fan of the church you’ll ever meet.
But there is something irreducible to my spiritual life now. I have to be able to sit down with people who don’t believe like me, who, if we ever do stumble upon my Scriptures, our Scriptures, they're going to read them with fresh eyes.
If we ever do talk about Jesus, they’re going to have that sort of perspective. And more than even all the particularities of encountering the details of my tradition, I know that we have this shared question, where we’re all trying to figure out: What does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to live the true life? What is the life that’s most worth wanting?
Charles Taylor, the philosopher, says it doesn’t matter whether you are a religious person or not; we all live in this secular age. And what it means to live in a secular age is not that religious belief is impossible but that religious belief is no longer assumed. And so that’s why I’ve found something so shared with my secular humanist friends, because I may find my way into a life following Jesus. That’s where I’m located. But I have to choose that again every morning, or I have to construct -- I have to choose to live my life that way.
This question of flourishing life, of the good life, is still pressing to me in a way that, well, I want to be more and more analogous in many ways to my secular humanist friends. And spending time with them and feeling the urgency of that question, for those who are trying to construct meaning, whether it’s bricolage out of various different pieces that are out there or something more existential from their inner convictions, or however they’re trying to do that.
The urgency of that quest sharpens the urgency of my own discipleship to Jesus. And yeah, I have been changed. I have been spoiled for any other sort of religious life.
Laura Everett: Matt, what a beautiful vision of what is possible as a Christian pastor, as a scholar, and most importantly, as a teacher. It is impossible to listen to you and not hear that there is life being breathed in and through coursework, academic institutions, Christian institutions, by this wild and brave openness.
The Life Worth Living course is now going to be offered at other universities. We’re so curious to see how scaling and sharing what you’ve learned spreads to other communities.
Matt Croasmun, thank you so much for joining me on “Can These Bones.” It’s been a real joy to speak with you.
Matt Croasmun: Likewise. Thanks so much. This has been a great conversation.
Bill Lamar: That was my co-host Laura Everett’s conversation with Matt Croasmun, a pastor and a teacher at Yale.
This conversation was indeed quite interesting.
And let’s talk about a life worth living. I mean, it seems like a simple concept -- not simplistic, but simple -- yet quite elegant and quite thick, as Matt describes it.
As you do your work with the Massachusetts Council of Churches, what would you describe to your constituents as a life worth living?
Laura Everett: I hope my life is a life worth living if the world is more just when I leave it.
I hope my life is a life worth living if there is more truth and beauty in the world, if people are kinder and gentler and more honest to one another because I’ve been in it. I think my life has been worth living if I’ve shown something of the overwhelming and liberating love of God. And if that’s what I’ve done, then I can go home.
Bill Lamar: Don’t go today, Laura. We’ve got more work for you to do.
Laura Everett: Yeah, I’ve got a board meeting coming up.
[Laughter]
But also, I think there’s a parallel question, actually, for churches: What is the life of a congregation worth living? What is a church that has reason to exist in a community?
Christians have this practice of asking these questions and offering some answers. We say pretty clearly that a life worth living is not just one about making money or public acclaim, but in service to God and to our neighbors.
But I also wondered -- I mean, this conversation with Matt really got me asking: Are churches asking these questions? Do you think churches are asking these questions about what constitutes a life worth living?
Bill Lamar: Laura, I don’t want to throw water on the flame, but in my experience, I think that instead of the inquiry, what we are doing is repeating what we have heard. I don’t think that we are wrestling with that question, What is the life worth living? What is the cross-shaped life, the gospel-shaped life? What does that mean? I don’t experience that enough.
And to be honest, it may just be the air that we breathe. I have to force myself sometimes to start from that place, because it’s so much easier to read what someone else has written and to repeat it or to go with the tropes and the stuff that we’ve heard all of our lives.
But to step back and to ask the question … And I think that for the class to be so popular at a place like Yale -- you know, I think about the book “God and Man at Yale,” by the late conservative writer [William F. Buckley], just talking about what kind of campus that was and is. I mean, these are the future leaders of the world in many ways.
And so their hunger, I think, points to a deeply human hunger. If congregations and Christian institutions can facilitate these kinds of conversations around what makes a life worth living, or a community worth living into, I really think that we would be doing a great service.
It seems to me that as Jesus is walking with the disciples, a lot of what is happening could be considered a course in life worth living: How do I live a life worth living when I see my neighbor in pain? When I see my neighbor sick? When I see people being oppressed? How do I then engage in worthy living? It’s very interesting.
Laura Everett: I think of -- really, one church comes to mind when I think about whether or not this is happening broadly. And I want to stipulate, there are probably places that this conversation is happening that I haven’t seen. It turns out, I actually don’t know all of the churches. As it turns out.
[Laugher]
Do you remember when our friend Stephen Chapin Garner was pastoring at the UCC church in Norwell?
Bill Lamar: Yes, very much so; I visited with them.
Laura Everett: They had a small group around vocational discernment. It was specific; it was designed for when people were at a place, at an inflection point in their vocation, in their careers, and they were thinking about making a change. And they gathered a group of people around them to pray and discern and listen for the will of God about what the next move might be.
I think about a number of my Quaker congregations that I work with regularly that have “clearness committees” that do that work of discernment in community.
But for the most part, I don’t always see churches asking these big questions. I wonder if we’re afraid of the heft of the language. It’s a big question to ask: “Is your life worth living?” There’s almost something accusatory in that.
Bill Lamar: The dean at Duke Divinity School, Elaine Heath, has a small book that she shared. And one of the questions in the book is -- essentially, what I am getting from it, the question is, maybe our God is too small. That God is so much larger than we can imagine. She’s using, as a partner, Paul’s writing to the Galatian church.
But I think about this. I think the reason we’re not asking this question in some corners of the Christian community is it might disrupt notions of God. It could indeed be, as I’ve heard someone say, that we worship a notion of God, and not God.
That asking these questions might force us to see a God at work in the world and in our institutions that might cause us to have to do things totally different, and make us very uncomfortable. I think the truth of the matter is all of us acculturate to a deity who kind of lets us get away with doing what we’re doing and being who we are. And asking this question is going to throw you into new categories.
And what I appreciate about what Matt talks about is, when he’s talking to his class -- you know, he’s got people who are religious, people who are not religious; there are religious answers to the question; there are nonreligious; there are philosophical answers -- but the one thing that he seems to value is that you start authentically.
I think this is where the modern church -- at Metropolitan, I’ve had people to come into the church to say that they’re both Buddhist and Christian, to say they don’t know if they’re Muslims or Christians -- and what the church has to do today is what Matt is doing in that classroom. Whoever you are, wherever you start, let’s engage the conversation. Not, “Go back and think like me, and come back and ask the question again.”
And I think that, especially for insular faiths that have not been used to new people coming in with new ideas, I think quite frankly if we look at theology and politics in America, people are often scared as hell of new ideas. Questions dislodge us. I think we’ve got a lot of work to do, and I think Matt is pointing the way.
Laura Everett: One thing that comes through so clearly in this is that they’re asking these big questions, not in isolation, but in community. This isn’t a self-directed study. They’re working this out with one another.
And there’s a theological fearlessness that I think Matt embodies for me, in saying, like, “Yes, I’m a Christian, and I need to be in conversation with Confucius’ writings and practicing Muslims.” Right? That he can live unthreatened by the possibility that God might show him something from another tradition, but that it must be done in community.
I don’t disregard that personal reflection time in meditation and contemplation is really important for listening to the voice of God. But part of the design of this course is that you can only kind of get at these big questions when you do it collaboratively.
Bill Lamar: I really, really want, myself, to begin to keep -- and I think it’s a practice that I’ve engaged -- but keep practicing listening to many. I think that many of us, our reading of Scripture and tradition makes us think that there may even be something sacrilegious to engage with the thinking of others.
But there is just, there is no way around it, and we should not look for ways around thinking through the wisdom of the ages and how that can help us to live more clearly into what I think is God’s vision for the world.
Again, you know, Matt names himself as a Christian pastor. He is clear about that, but he’s able to facilitate this discussion. And I think that if we have a faith that will not engage with others based on the truths that they hold, I would have to question what it is that we have.
Laura Everett: It reminds me, actually, of what we heard Eric Barreto say in an earlier episode: that if our theology cannot answer to the experience of Ferguson, then our theology is too small.
In a related way, I think Matt’s saying if our beliefs cannot engage with a world beyond our beliefs and our system for meaning making, then our faith is too small.
I don’t want a brittle Christianity. I want this vibrant, robust, integrated thinking that I really think we’re seeing in how Matt is thinking as a pastor, as a teacher, as a scholar and researcher -- as someone who gets to be the facilitator of such a glorious set of questions. I need that integrated thinking.
Bill Lamar: And I think also, Laura, we want to commend the many congregations and Christian institutions who are trying to facilitate these inquisitive spaces, where [they can engage] questions like, “Is life worth living?” or, “How can we live lives worth living together?” We want to commend them.
And for those who are trying to figure out how to do it, one of the practical things that we’ve engaged at Metropolitan is to convene on Wednesday nights and instead of studying books of Scripture all the time, we’ve read books together and asked questions together. And it has grown, and people are coming, because people want to engage in church, where they don’t have to hide their theological commitments, but they want to use that as a basis to have conversations with other people who are talking about things differently.
And I really believe that finding books to study, bringing in people to have conversations who may be different -- we’ve had immigrants come in; we’ve had people from other faiths to come in. How can we help to facilitate that kind of communal reality? I think that the church has a great opportunity here.
Laura Everett: What I hear is that at Metropolitan, it’s not just an accidental conversation; it’s an intentional one. That you are intentionally putting yourself in conversation with issues and questions that your congregants are asking, not just on Sunday morning, but through the rest of their lives.
Bill Lamar: I have to say this -- that these conversations can be very uncomfortable. Our leaders had a conversation last night, and it’s uncomfortable. We left with a feeling of love, but there was also tension. So I think that the church must learn that love and tension can coexist -- not love and violence, but love and tension, which might give birth to something beautiful. Those things can coexist.
Laura Everett: One of the things about being in conversation with other communities, other ideas, other religious traditions that I noticed in that interview with Matt is something that shifts around language.
Matt is unabashedly Christian. He has a sense of where his most serious commitments come from. But he’s also learning to talk in a way that doesn’t immediately shut down conversation with people who aren’t connected to the church.
And part of what I’ve learned by being in regular contact with people who don’t use the church vernacular is that I have to speak more broadly and clearly in ways that invite other people in. That there’s a real gift in getting outside of my own community, because I can’t just, like, go to the usual shorthand, or the terms that are such insider baseball. And I think that’s part of what’s happening as Matt’s teaching, too.
Bill Lamar: There is a spaciousness and a largeness, too. And I think it’s very appropriate that Matt is our concluding conversation, because he offers for us, for our churches, for our institutions, enthusiasm, hope, the integration of the church and the academy, the world of the church and the world of those who are not churched, not in churches, and a dedication to the succeeding generations.
So I think it’s very interesting he’s holding in tension the past -- received traditions, both the gospel tradition and other religious and theological and wisdom traditions -- holding the ancient in tension with the strivings and the hunger of the young. And I think that, wow, it shows quite a pattern for the church and for Christian institutions. This kind of integrative thinking offers so much hope and possibility.
Laura Everett: Well, and listeners, we really hope that this kind of integrated thinking is what we’ve offered through this series of 12 podcasts. I know that I have learned a ton about communicating and asking good and generous questions.
I’ve never done interviews like this before, so I feel like -- thank you. I want to say a word of gratitude to all of you listening who learned alongside Bill and me as we learned how to ask good questions.
Bill, I’m wondering what else you feel like you’ve learned through this process.
Bill Lamar: I have learned to be joyful about the fact that there are people around the world asking wonderful questions, doing great things, and that I don’t have to do it all -- but I do need to be in some kind of communication or conversation with these folks.
And I think this is why podcasts are booming. Because in some way, we are afforded the privilege of listening to conversations we might not have the privilege to listen to were it not for the miracle of this modern technology.
And so I don’t have to work at JetBlue to learn from Marty. I don’t have to be in Austin to learn from Gideon. I don’t have to ride the train from Washington to New York to learn from Vernon Jordan.
I can indeed just sit back in places of comfort and hear the conversations. And I am now even more committed, Laura, to listening in -- to, if you will, some holy ear hustling, some holy eavesdropping into the kinds of conversations that will remind me that God is at work in so many places.
As the poet [Gerard Manley Hopkins] says, “Christ plays in ten thousand places” -- everywhere these things are happening. And it’s happening in the church, outside of the church, in boardrooms, in coffee shops, in classrooms. And it excites me, and I want to continue to listen, because I think it makes me a better pastor, a better friend, a better leader, a better servant of the gospel that I am compelled, called and joyful to preach.
Laura Everett: Listeners, you’ve heard the benediction from the Rt. Rev. William H. Lamar IV.
[Laughter]
Now go and do likewise.
Bill Lamar: Something like that.
Hey, Laura, I think that we want to continue the conversation. How do you feel about inviting the good folks to join us on social media with their questions about how bones are living in their realities?
I’d like to begin by saying I’m easily found on Facebook -- William H. Lamar IV(link is external). And on Twitter @WilliamHLamarIV(link is external) -- Roman numeral IV -- @WilliamHLamarIV.
Laura Everett: I’d be happy to be in conversation with folks, too. I can be found on Facebook -- Laura E. Everett(link is external) -- and on Twitter @RevEverett(link is external). I would love to be in conversation with you all as you ask questions about how the bones of your own institutions can live, and how we can learn together about other folks we need to be listening to.
There are so many more stories out there.
Bill Lamar: And, listeners, if you’ve found the conversations valuable, please do share them with your friends, with your colleagues. And if you’re a good Christian, you should also share them with your enemies.
[Laughter]
And we’d like also to direct you to our website at www.canthesebones.com(link is external), that you might continue to share the good work of our conversation partners.
And indeed, we want to invite you to be asking in your churches, to be asking in your institutions, in your friendship groups, “Can these bones live?” To look at places of brokenness and death and to have the audacity, to have the gall, maybe to have the faith, to say, “I still see life.”
Laura Everett: Thank you for listening to “Can These Bones.” I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we did. There’s more about Matt Croasmun, including information about the Life Worth Living course, at www.canthesebones.com(link is external). You’ll also find the audio and other information from all 12 episodes of this podcast.
“Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions, and Matt Croasmun’s interview was recorded at Yale University. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment.
I’m Laura Everett, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.How do I listen to a podcast? »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT:
MINISTRY THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA
Faith and Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
SERMONS, PENTATEUCH, GOSPEL OF JOHN, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL MEDIA
Samuel Wells: Is social media trending or transforming?
Is social media trending or transforming?
Social media is helping us see that the Holy Spirit is much more unpredictable, subversive and playful than the church would usually like it to be, says the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London in this sermon.
Editor’s note: Faith & Leadership offers sermons that shed light on issues of Christian leadership. A version of this sermon was preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London on Sept. 13, 2015.
Genesis 11:1-9(link is external); John 16:7-15
Faith and Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL MEDIA, THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION
Verity Jones: Thinking theologically about using social media
Thinking theologically about using social media
The New Media Project wants to help faith leaders become more theologically savvy about social media, which is rapidly changing the landscape of Christian life.
Near Washington, D.C., the Rev. Tony Lee sees on Facebook that a church member’s brother has committed suicide -- news he would not otherwise have known -- and is able to reach out to the young man and attend the funeral.
To Lee, it’s a vivid example of how social media gives pastors “longer arms,” providing new ways to stay connected to church members and “touch people who need hope.”
In Seattle, social media is an essential part of the ministry at Quest Church. The congregation’s 25 small groups use Facebook to link members, encourage one another and share information.
“New media helps us more deeply engage in community,” said the Rev. Eugene Cho. “It’s certainly a way for us to build intimacy, … sharing prayer requests and concerns.”
Across the land, in that virtual “place” called the World Wide Web, The Young Clergy Women Project, an online social network of more than 500 clergywomen under 40, is providing young women pastors the support they need to stay in ministry.
Often lacking any nearby female peers, the pastors have found comfort in the online community, which gives them a place to relax and share with others who understand what they are going through.
These three stories are from case studies conducted by the New Media Project at Union Theological Seminary(link is external). They are just some of the many places we’re looking to find out how the church is responding in this age of constantly changing technologies.
Established a year ago with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc., the New Media Project seeks to help faith leaders become more theologically savvy about technology.
Although we don’t have all the answers yet -- or even all the questions -- one thing is clear: the widespread use of technology and social media in American culture today is rapidly changing the landscape in which Christian life occurs.
If, as Anselm said, theology is “faith seeking understanding,” then our challenge -- our hope -- is to understand what is at stake for the body of Christ during this time.
We hope to recognize new ways of thinking about ourselves, church and God that might be emerging. We want to know: How do our theological assumptions, doctrines, practices, or ways of being and acting in the world as people of faith hold up in this new context?
We began the New Media Project by asking pastors, congregations and leaders in other church-related institutions such as higher education how and why they use social media. Currently, we are surveying younger clergy about their use of social media, because they tend to think differently about technology than their elders.
We have conducted six case studies as a foundation for further theological reflection and maintain an active blog, where our six research fellows and guest specialists contribute regularly. In an effort to live into a social media world marked by creativity and collaboration, we share our research and our thinking as we go, hoping to contribute to the community of conversation now, not just later when conclusions have been reached.
What are we learning?
For one thing, as our survey found, an overwhelming number of younger clergy use social media in their ministries and in their personal lives, and they are generally quite thoughtful about it. They use social media for everything from community building and pastoral care to sermon preparation and event planning. They see social media as the new public square. Since growing numbers of people spend time there, so should they.
Consensus on best ministry practices, however, remains elusive.
Many clergy say it’s important to use social media in ways that emerge “organically” from the culture of a particular community.
As Lee, the pastor of Community of Hope AME Church near Washington, explained, his use of new media must “fit my flow and the flow of the church.” Similarly, the Rev. Eric Elnes, pastor of Countryside Community Church UCC in Omaha, Neb., avoids early adoption of new technology. He wants to ensure that whatever technology he uses makes sense with regular life -- a challenge that becomes easier almost every day.
“The fact of the matter is that as technology matures, it tends to look more and more like our everyday lives,” Elnes wrote on our blog.
Not surprisingly, people differ on what tools are organic to church life, or what the “flow” of a particular pastor might be. For example, the question of how public a pastor should be on Facebook is hotly debated.
On the one hand, Lee and the pastoral staff at Community of Hope use Facebook and Twitter to demystify the life of a pastor, posting news both joyful and mundane.
When Lee met President Obama last year, he used his smartphone to tweet and post photos on Facebook, sharing his excitement with his 2,200-member church. More often, such posts are about routine events -- eating dinner with Mom or going to a concert -- that let members know clergy are not “celebrities,” as one pastor said.
On the other hand, some young clergywomen we interviewed closely guard their private lives online. Developing their pastoral vocation is challenging enough without the openness of Facebook -- and the often-critical public eye that comes with it.
In higher education, many institutions are embracing the rapid changes in communications technology.
At Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, leaders say it is essential to reach students and shape them in the use of new media. They have developed a mobile learning initiative, ACU Connected, and an app, myACU, and equip all faculty and new students with mobile devices such as an iPhone, an iPod Touch or, more recently, an iPad.
John B. Weaver, the school’s dean of library services and educational technology, borrows from Hebrews 12:1 to compare new media -- especially on mobile devices -- to a “digital cloud of witnesses” that is omnipresent in student lives. In both Hebrews and social media, “cloud” is “a metaphor for close proximity and complete envelopment,” Weaver noted on our blog.
Fortunately, it is a cloud that Christian universities can “form and reform through biblical narratives, liberal arts, and Christian practices of confession and profession that are focused not only on the media, but also the messages to which they ‘testify,’” he wrote.
Surprisingly, few writers and scholars are pressing theologically -- beyond some critics’ legitimate concerns about distraction, alienation and addiction -- into the new media world. This absence of theological work may suggest that the church has not yet recognized how significantly the sand is shifting under its feet.
People who did not come of age in the digital world tend to view social media, if at all, as simply a new set of tools that need only to be acquired and mastered.
Once that’s accomplished, they think, they can just put the new tools into play and achieve the same old purpose. More than likely, they will fail. Something bigger is happening in new communication practices, something that skills retraining alone cannot quite capture.
Although the church may be slow to notice social media, the business world is not. Indeed, most articles about social media address the realm of marketing.
Every social media presentation I’ve attended (or conducted) recently has included Erik Qualman’s Socialnomics video(link is external), a short film that powerfully demonstrates how rapidly social media has changed the landscape of American -- and global -- life.
The video makes clear that a world altered by social media requires a different way of seeing that world. It is intended for business marketers who are realizing that social relationships drive consumer choices today more than advertisements do. Understandably, they want to learn how to use social media to market their products.
Unfortunately, for them at least, most marketers merely push out the same old message through new channels, without understanding how social relationships function and what they can do. They continue with a one-way communication strategy that has become counterintuitive to active social media users, with the same unimpressive results.
For faith communities, however, social relationships are not foreign. Christians know how social networks work, even if we don’t yet completely understand how they can function online. We’ve been networking ever since Jesus sent out the 70 to carry a message of peace into homes before he arrived.
To Christians, “networking” is better known as evangelism and community building, not marketing. If church people reduce evangelism to marketing as a means simply to increase numbers then they will misunderstand the power of social media and probably get the same poor results as the marketers.
If we define evangelism as transformation -- and understand that relationships are crucial to transformation -- then social media begins to make sense as a powerful tool for extending, as Lee says, “the touch” -- the touch of hope to God’s people.
For now, this new media world is messy.
In many ways, social media level the playing field, flatten the hierarchy. People can access huge amounts of information without requesting permission. They trust what their friends recommend more than what an expert might suggest. And that puts leaders and power structures under tremendous pressure.
The Rev. Gail Bantum at Quest Church confesses there’s “a greater demand for access and a greater expectation of response; … it’s more pressure.” Even those who embrace new media often fight an uphill battle with older generations. The Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber at House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, for example, in a post on the New Media Project blog, begs church leaders to “listen to Millennials, please.”
These tensions are bringing to the surface significant theological issues and questions for church leaders. The following are some of the important questions we face -- to which our project will continue to “seek understanding”:
Read more from Verity Jones »
Engage: A Theological Field Education Toolkitedited by Matthew Floding
Theological field education, in which a ministry student steps out of the classroom and begins practicing with the supervision of a mentor, is a critical part of accredited ministry programs. Engage equips both students and their supervisor-mentors to engage in this important opportunity with energy and imagination, and it prepares students for the challenging work of integrating theory into real-world practice.
Engage provides coaching from recognized experts in the arts of ministry: preaching, administration, evangelism, pastoral care, public ministry, leadership, faith formation, liturgical arts and more. Other chapters address themes such as race, gender, and ministry across faith traditions (or no faith tradition). The book addresses field education in a range of contexts -- from churches to non-profits.
Engage offers a valuable resource for students making the most of their transition from the classroom into real world ministry with all its joys and many challenges.
Learn more and order the book »
I’m Laura Everett.
Bill Lamar: And I’m Bill Lamar. This is the last episode in our series of conversations with leaders from the church and from other fields. Through this podcast, we have aimed to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in “valleys of dry bones.”
Laura Everett: Matt is the director of the Life Worth Living program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. And Matt and his wife, Hannah, also planted and have pastored the Elm City Vineyard Church in New Haven. By training, he’s a Paul scholar. He’s an author and an interfaith advocate.
But the focus of this interview is really Matt’s work in teaching the Life Worth Living course at Yale College. The course was founded by the theologian Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz. The course has been offered since 2014, and it’s proved to be wildly popular -- so much so that it’s now being offered at other universities.
I want to read you the course description, because I think it helps give a sense of what’s going on here. It’s the course Humanities 411, and it reads thus: “‘Life Worth Living’ draws upon a range of philosophical and religious traditions to help students develop habits of reflection that will equip them for the life-long process of discerning the good life. … [What does it mean for a life to go well? …] In short, what shape would a life worth living take? We will explore these questions through engagement with the lives and visions of founding figures from six diverse religious traditions of imagining a good life: the Buddha, the Torah and the Hebrew prophetic and wisdom writers, Jesus of Nazareth, Muhammad, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Nietzsche.”
The course itself is fascinating, and perhaps what’s even more fascinating is the overwhelmingly positive response to it. Students are excited to take this, and curious to ask this big question: “What constitutes a life worth living?”
Bill Lamar: You’ve almost made me want to go back to undergraduate, but probably not.
Laura Everett: No, I’m good.
Bill Lamar: Let’s hear your conversation.
Laura Everett: Matt Croasmun, welcome to “Can These Bones.”
Matt Croasmun: Thanks so much. Great to be here.
Laura Everett: We’re really glad to have you today. So this course, this Yale college undergrad course, Life Worth Living, began in the spring of 2014. Tell us the origin story of Life Worth Living.
Matt Croasmun: Sure. Actually, that particular story is only tangentially connected to me personally. But my colleagues Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz began designing this course when Ryan and I were both still in graduate school. Miroslav is a professor of theology at the divinity school, and Ryan was one of his graduate students.
And I think it began in large part for Miroslav with a kind of diagnosis of something unsettling in our universities and in our culture at large. I think a particular book that crystallized many things for him was Anthony Kronman’s book “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.”
And that book makes basically that case: that fundamental question of, What is the good life? What is the sort of life worth having? What’s the sort of life worth wanting? What’s the sort of life that we ought to want for ourselves and ought to want for our children? That fundamental question is both deeply contested these days, in ways that perhaps it was not in more homogeneous cultural environments, and yet at the same time, that question has been sort of given up on.
It’s no longer a question that’s being asked and answered in today’s universities. So indeed, for at least a year if not more in advance of teaching the course, Ryan and Miroslav and my other colleagues at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture were gathering scholars and professors from all over the country and asking, “Is it possible to ask and answer this question in a pluralistic environment and still take issues of truth really, really seriously?”
And the course that they taught for the first time in 2014 and that we’ve refined and expanded since then is our answer to that question.
Laura Everett: So clearly, students at Yale are smart and ambitious. I’m curious about what were the signs that you and your colleagues saw -- the notice that there was something missing?
Matt Croasmun: Well, there are a number of signs. Some of them you can see earlier; some of them take longer.
To be frank, on this campus, the Title IX reports that have come out in the last several years about sexual violence on this campus would be among the sort of signs that, early on -- that is, while students are here at Yale -- there is a sign that what it means to do right by one another, what it means to form this sort of community of honor and respect, is something that’s not happening the way that anyone here would want it to be.
I think a lot of the signs, though, may take longer to appear.
But Bill Deresiewicz, in a book -- which I’m not sure is entirely fair to the Yale education, but some of his criticism is really well-received -- in a book called “Excellent Sheep,” talks about that what many elite students are really good at is running on well-defined tracks. They’re not very good, necessarily, at charting their own way in the world.
The last moment -- and of course, we could talk about many other signs -- but the last moment to talk about is the midlife crisis for those who do succeed. They run on those career paths. They get everything they thought they wanted. And all of a sudden at the end, they realize they’re deeply dissatisfied.
And often they get to 50, 55 and they are -- winning wasn’t worth it. Because maybe they won a race that wasn’t worth winning. And so these questions of value and of worth, I think, were highlighted again and again, from the undergraduate careers of our students all the way into later periods of life, in which it was clear that these questions of worth, of meaning and value, were questions that our students are not prepared to answer. They’re worse for it, and the world in which they are in many cases leaders is worse for it as well.
Laura Everett: Matt, you talked about the tendency for people with wisdom and talent to know how to move on well-defined tracks, and maybe even strive to move fast on well-defined tracks, but that the winning might not be worth it.
It strikes me in the same way that academic courses can also run on well-defined tracks -- the Intro to Engineering, the Psych 101. There is a path that is clearly laid out for academic programming, and [it strikes me] that you all made the same decision, to create a course that was not just about being on a well-defined track. I imagine -- were there places of resistance for this kind of course?
Matt Croasmun: I remember when the course was first taught, there were these questions. We offer a retreat for students to attend, and at first we weren’t sure: Is this allowed? Is this appropriate? What would some of our colleagues think? What would administrators think?
We had some sense of what the bright lines were in terms of what we -- you know, we couldn’t require students to come to the retreat, but we could certainly offer it. But something like that really starts to sit outside -- “Wait, wait, what are you doing with your students there?” “Well, we’re taking them away for a weekend, and we’re inviting them to tell each other their stories and to share really personally where they’re coming from, where they’re headed.”
And so I think that, too, was something that sat really clearly outside the norm.
The other practice that I’d point out would be, on the very first day of class, I tell students -- usually within the first 10 minutes of the first day of class -- I tell students, “Look, I am a Christian, and worse yet, I’m a Christian pastor.” I tell them, “Look, I feel like I need to tell you this, because it means I can’t be your neutral tour guide about questions of the good life.”
We, in our course -- and presumably we’ll talk more about this -- we look at all kinds of different answers to the question of the good life. Religious answers, nonreligious, philosophical answers, answers and traditions that sort of sit in between categories of religion and philosophy and help us even think about what those categories are and what they mean.
But I can’t pretend to be neutral as we walk through. Because of my Christian convictions, it’s really important to me that the classroom be an open environment in which anyone, wherever they’re coming from, can approach each of these traditions and really hear them honestly and charitably, and give each tradition its fair hearing.
But again, I don’t do that despite my Christian convictions. I do that because of my Christian convictions. Because of who I know Jesus to be, I understand part of my love of neighbor to extend to that intellectual generosity that I want to offer to my students and to the authors and the traditions that we engage in the class.
But I tell them right from the beginning, “Look, this is who I am. This is where I’m situated. I know that you’re situated somewhere, too. And I hope that right from the beginning, we’ll recognize as we have these conversations that none of us is located nowhere. All of us come from somewhere. We have convictions. We have instincts. We have a history and a background and a set of impulses that have brought us to this table that are going to shape our conversation together and I hope even might themselves -- that is, our deep convictions -- might themselves be shaped by our conversation together. But that’s only going to happen if we actually bring our whole selves to the table.”
You know, I have multiple students every year tell me that they recognize, “Oh, that is not normal.” That is not the professorial neutrality -- which is only ever a myth. But even at least the myth of that neutrality is their standard experience, and they really, really appreciate that forthrightness.
Anyway, we could keep going on. There are many things that we do that are nonstandard, at least in our sort of environment. But the reason we do go ahead and teach a course and make it try to fit in this sort of box is that we want students -- Yale students are smart. I mean, our young people are brilliant wherever we’re encountering them, at whatever institution we’re encountering them.
And what we want to say by putting this in the curriculum -- because we could have taught this outside the curriculum. We could have put together another extracurricular. And of course, there are extracurricular communities that are helping students ask these questions, many of them campus ministries. In their best moments, that’s what’s happening there.
But we wanted to put it in the curriculum in order to say, “You know, the best of your intellect, the very best of your thinking that you apply to organic chemistry or to Russian literature, the very finest, the best of your intellectual energy -- that’s actually what this question of meaning and purpose and value and worth is worth. This deserves the very best of your intellectual energies.”
And so by putting it in the classroom -- now, of course, that means we have to reshape the classroom in all the ways that I just said -- but by putting it in the classroom, we’re trying to say, “This deserves the very best of your intellectual energies. You can reason about this. You’re never going to become an expert in answering this question, but you can get better at asking it. Posing it rightly. Thinking about it charitably, learning how to think about it together with people very much unlike you.
And those sorts of things may not sound like the normal sorts of intellectual challenges that you’re going to be presented with in the classroom. But they are no less intellectual, no less intellectually rigorous, and no less worth the best of your intellectual and academic energies.
Laura Everett: I want to turn for just a second to ask about you, because you said that all of us are located somewhere. And you and your wife, Hannah, were intentional about locating yourself -- planting yourself, quite literally -- as pastors, with Elm City Vineyard Church in New Haven. I wonder, how has teaching this course, Life Worth Living, changed your pastoring?
Matt Croasmun: You know, I think it’s shaped it a lot. And people who are in my church would tell you they hear a lot about this course in sermon illustrations and just in life together.
I said one of the ways that we do tackle these questions, even on a college campus these days, is we -- I hope -- we tackle them in campus ministries. And that was my experience as an undergraduate.
I was part of an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship; it was life for me. I believe in the church. I love Christ-centered communities. I planted one. I’m all about that.
But if that’s the only context in which we ever ask and answer these questions, I think we’re really, really missing something. And so I think this course has informed my pastoring, largely in saying, “Hey, the conversation we’re having here in the church? This is really, really valuable.”
And -- it’s not a “but,” right? And, because we follow Jesus -- Jesus who engaged with people across religious boundaries, across cultural boundaries, across all kinds of different socioeconomic sorts of boundaries -- becausewe follow that Jesus, we should expect that Jesus is in fact still going to speak to us across those sorts of boundaries today.
So in our church, we’ve intentionally cultivated relationship with the mosques and the Muslim communities in our city and in our metro area here. And we’ve done that in a way that hasn’t been -- this isn’t about proselytizing, but it might be about a richer vision of evangelism.
And with some of our interlocutors, who, in their Muslim convictions, have hopes for evangelization as well -- I’ve learned more about what it means to be a follower of Jesus by my engagement with my Muslim neighbors than I ever could just within the walls of the church. And so our church itself has become -- we’ve led people into those sorts of experiences.
I’ll never forget: one Saturday afternoon in the early fall in New Haven, we were working together with a local mosque, Masjid Al-Islam, and they were giving out -- they’re located in a poorer neighborhood here in our city -- and they were giving away book bags with school supplies for students as they were starting school.
And we just thought, “OK, well, that’s fantastic. We would love to help with that. How can we do that?”
And so we show up early that morning, we show up at the mosque, and we ask, “What can we do?” And they say, “You know, what we could really use you for is if you could go door to door in the neighborhoods around here and invite people to come down to the mosque.”
And I remember -- you know, the Vineyard’s an evangelical sort of movement. So you can imagine how challenging that might be for folks in a mainline church, and an evangelical church maybe even more challenging, right?
OK, we’re going to go door to door inviting people to the mosque. And my father was with me, and as we’re going door to door, I remember my father was maybe the one, I don’t know, knocking on this particular door.
And he gave them the flyer. He said, “Hey, they’re handing out book bags and school supplies; you should come down to the mosque. It’s just down the street.”
And the person said, “Oh sure, thanks.” And as we were walking away, they sort of quickly profiled us and asked, “Wait, are you Muslim?”
And my father, God bless him, I’ll never forget, just turned around and with all innocence and sincerity, said, “Oh, no, but we’re followers of Jesus. And we just think that if Jesus was here, the thing that Jesus would be doing is helping hand out book bags of school supplies down at the mosque. So we hope to see you there.”
And I just love that, right? Because the answer wasn’t, “Oh yeah, no, we’re not Muslims, but we’re Christians, and it’s more or less the same, and I hope we’ll see you down there.” Right?
It was, “No, we’re not. There’s a real difference here. We’re followers of Jesus, and because of -- not despiteour difference, our particularity -- but because of our particularity, because of the particularity of who Jesus is, for that reason, we’re going door to door inviting people to the mosque.”
And I could repeat that story with the secular humanist community in our town and other sorts of communities in which we’ve been engaged. And so for me, that’s become sort of irreducible.
That’s completely changed my picture of evangelism, in ways that maybe I’ve described a bit already. But it’s also just changed my sense of discipleship -- that that’s how I come to know who Jesus is. And how I grow as a follower of Jesus is by encountering Jesus in these perhaps surprising ways among these other communities. And I learn so much about Jesus in those encounters.
Laura Everett: You know, Matt, I had a question prepared about how this course is changing your students; I didn’t have a question prepared about how this course is changing you.
Right? It sounds like this is really changing a number of things about how you see yourself as a pastor, what your church’s relationship is to your neighbors, what it means to be clearly rooted in a tradition but widely open. That teaching in a pluralistic setting is changing something about how you think church can be in relationship with the world. Am I onto something there?
Matt Croasmun: Absolutely. So I remember just wrestling so much: “Am I a pastor? Am I a scholar? Am I called to the church? Am I called to the academy?” And it all came together around, “Oh, I’m a teacher.”
When I lead my church best, it’s when I’m teaching. That’s the mode in which I pastor best. Actually, in my personal life, with my daughter, when I father best is often when I’m teaching her something. And I came to figure out, “Oh, I’m a teacher.”
But what this course has taught me is more about what being a teacher, what teaching is. And I think that part of what -- this’ll be a little bit meta -- but I think that part of what real teaching is, is learning.
I can’t ask my students to put their lives on the table and be ready to be potentially transformed by their encounter with one or another of the traditions that we’re going to encounter together without putting my life on the table in a similar sort of way.
And so absolutely, my life has been changed, in part, just by the encounter with these traditions. I’ve sort of fallen in love with Confucius, which I never would have thought. The Analects are just so powerful. And I feel like I’ve come to understand -- I’m a Paul scholar by training -- I’ve come to understand Paul’s sense of the self and the social better by thinking about that question together with Confucius.
But it really is more than just the specifics of encountering each of these traditions -- though, of course, my Sabbath practice has been enriched by engaging with Judaism, and you keep getting those sorts of specific examples. But even more, it’s been this sort of metapractice that what it means to encounter Jesus is to go encounter Jesus among the people that my old evangelical self might have imagined needed to have Jesus preached to them.
I am at the moment one of the faculty advisers for the secular humanist community here at Yale, the Yale Humanist Community.
Laura Everett: Hold up. There is a Vineyard pastor who is the faculty adviser for the Yale secular humanist community?
Matt Croasmun: One of. But yes.
Laura Everett: OK.
Matt Croasmun: Yeah, and my bio on their website begins with “Matt Croasmun is the director of the Life Worth Living program and staff pastor at the Elm City Vineyard Church.”
Now, some of that’s because of the incredible charity and wisdom and openness of Chris Stedman, who for many years was the leader of that community. But the reason I’ve gotten so engaged in that community has been, again, not in spite of my commitment to Jesus but because of my commitment to Jesus.
I stumbled into this community at a time when a man who has now become a friend of mine, Tom Krattenmaker, was writing a book called “Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower.” He’s a board member for the humanist community.
He would tell you he’s pretty sure Jesus isn’t the Son of God, inasmuch as there is no God, but he just can’t let go of the words of Jesus. He’d ask me as a Christian, he’d say, “I know you guys, like, sit with this book all the time. But have you read it? Have you seen what’s in here? I mean, this guy, he says to love my enemies. I don’t even love my friends that well. Like, what -- I’ve been to church. You guys don’t seem to be all that flustered by this. But when I sit down and read this -- maybe it’s the religion that’s gotten you sort of, like, to the point where this doesn’t strike you like it strikes me.”
Maybe I’m putting words in his mouth. I think that’s probably what’s happened.
But I’m hearing, all of a sudden, afresh, the true power of Jesus’ vision of a way of life from my friend Tom the atheist. And he started [a monthly] gathering -- so all of a sudden, despite my best efforts to say, “No, no, I want to be here and hear from you all on your terms; I want to hear what it’s like. So many of my students are secular; they don’t have commitments to a particular religion or philosophy. Maybe they’re committed to something like humanism; I’d love to find out how you’re thinking about life. Please, don’t change what you’re talking about because I’m here” -- despite all of my insistence, I found myself in a monthly meeting with a group of eight to 10 atheists, and every week, all we were talking about was Jesus.
I kept saying, “Guys, please, can we talk about something else?” But all, you know, Tom was trying to -- “Let’s talk about Jesus.” He said, “I think Jesus is the great humanizer. This is who Jesus is for me. The teachings of Jesus help me become more fully human, and as a secular humanist, I can’t think of anyone better for us to spend our time talking about.”
Now of course, Tom’s a bit controversial within the secular humanist community for that. But I thought, “Jesus came to make us more fully human?” I thought, “That is brilliant christological insight! This may have been what Irenaeus was trying to tell us.” I mean, I can go back deep in the church’s history.
Anyway, so it’s those sorts of encounters that have me thinking. I mean, I love my small group, I love Bible study in the church, I love praying for one another and worshipping together, and again, I’m the biggest fan of the church you’ll ever meet.
But there is something irreducible to my spiritual life now. I have to be able to sit down with people who don’t believe like me, who, if we ever do stumble upon my Scriptures, our Scriptures, they're going to read them with fresh eyes.
If we ever do talk about Jesus, they’re going to have that sort of perspective. And more than even all the particularities of encountering the details of my tradition, I know that we have this shared question, where we’re all trying to figure out: What does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to live the true life? What is the life that’s most worth wanting?
Charles Taylor, the philosopher, says it doesn’t matter whether you are a religious person or not; we all live in this secular age. And what it means to live in a secular age is not that religious belief is impossible but that religious belief is no longer assumed. And so that’s why I’ve found something so shared with my secular humanist friends, because I may find my way into a life following Jesus. That’s where I’m located. But I have to choose that again every morning, or I have to construct -- I have to choose to live my life that way.
This question of flourishing life, of the good life, is still pressing to me in a way that, well, I want to be more and more analogous in many ways to my secular humanist friends. And spending time with them and feeling the urgency of that question, for those who are trying to construct meaning, whether it’s bricolage out of various different pieces that are out there or something more existential from their inner convictions, or however they’re trying to do that.
The urgency of that quest sharpens the urgency of my own discipleship to Jesus. And yeah, I have been changed. I have been spoiled for any other sort of religious life.
Laura Everett: Matt, what a beautiful vision of what is possible as a Christian pastor, as a scholar, and most importantly, as a teacher. It is impossible to listen to you and not hear that there is life being breathed in and through coursework, academic institutions, Christian institutions, by this wild and brave openness.
The Life Worth Living course is now going to be offered at other universities. We’re so curious to see how scaling and sharing what you’ve learned spreads to other communities.
Matt Croasmun, thank you so much for joining me on “Can These Bones.” It’s been a real joy to speak with you.
Matt Croasmun: Likewise. Thanks so much. This has been a great conversation.
Bill Lamar: That was my co-host Laura Everett’s conversation with Matt Croasmun, a pastor and a teacher at Yale.
This conversation was indeed quite interesting.
And let’s talk about a life worth living. I mean, it seems like a simple concept -- not simplistic, but simple -- yet quite elegant and quite thick, as Matt describes it.
As you do your work with the Massachusetts Council of Churches, what would you describe to your constituents as a life worth living?
Laura Everett: I hope my life is a life worth living if the world is more just when I leave it.
I hope my life is a life worth living if there is more truth and beauty in the world, if people are kinder and gentler and more honest to one another because I’ve been in it. I think my life has been worth living if I’ve shown something of the overwhelming and liberating love of God. And if that’s what I’ve done, then I can go home.
Bill Lamar: Don’t go today, Laura. We’ve got more work for you to do.
Laura Everett: Yeah, I’ve got a board meeting coming up.
[Laughter]
But also, I think there’s a parallel question, actually, for churches: What is the life of a congregation worth living? What is a church that has reason to exist in a community?
Christians have this practice of asking these questions and offering some answers. We say pretty clearly that a life worth living is not just one about making money or public acclaim, but in service to God and to our neighbors.
But I also wondered -- I mean, this conversation with Matt really got me asking: Are churches asking these questions? Do you think churches are asking these questions about what constitutes a life worth living?
Bill Lamar: Laura, I don’t want to throw water on the flame, but in my experience, I think that instead of the inquiry, what we are doing is repeating what we have heard. I don’t think that we are wrestling with that question, What is the life worth living? What is the cross-shaped life, the gospel-shaped life? What does that mean? I don’t experience that enough.
And to be honest, it may just be the air that we breathe. I have to force myself sometimes to start from that place, because it’s so much easier to read what someone else has written and to repeat it or to go with the tropes and the stuff that we’ve heard all of our lives.
But to step back and to ask the question … And I think that for the class to be so popular at a place like Yale -- you know, I think about the book “God and Man at Yale,” by the late conservative writer [William F. Buckley], just talking about what kind of campus that was and is. I mean, these are the future leaders of the world in many ways.
And so their hunger, I think, points to a deeply human hunger. If congregations and Christian institutions can facilitate these kinds of conversations around what makes a life worth living, or a community worth living into, I really think that we would be doing a great service.
It seems to me that as Jesus is walking with the disciples, a lot of what is happening could be considered a course in life worth living: How do I live a life worth living when I see my neighbor in pain? When I see my neighbor sick? When I see people being oppressed? How do I then engage in worthy living? It’s very interesting.
Laura Everett: I think of -- really, one church comes to mind when I think about whether or not this is happening broadly. And I want to stipulate, there are probably places that this conversation is happening that I haven’t seen. It turns out, I actually don’t know all of the churches. As it turns out.
[Laugher]
Do you remember when our friend Stephen Chapin Garner was pastoring at the UCC church in Norwell?
Bill Lamar: Yes, very much so; I visited with them.
Laura Everett: They had a small group around vocational discernment. It was specific; it was designed for when people were at a place, at an inflection point in their vocation, in their careers, and they were thinking about making a change. And they gathered a group of people around them to pray and discern and listen for the will of God about what the next move might be.
I think about a number of my Quaker congregations that I work with regularly that have “clearness committees” that do that work of discernment in community.
But for the most part, I don’t always see churches asking these big questions. I wonder if we’re afraid of the heft of the language. It’s a big question to ask: “Is your life worth living?” There’s almost something accusatory in that.
Bill Lamar: The dean at Duke Divinity School, Elaine Heath, has a small book that she shared. And one of the questions in the book is -- essentially, what I am getting from it, the question is, maybe our God is too small. That God is so much larger than we can imagine. She’s using, as a partner, Paul’s writing to the Galatian church.
But I think about this. I think the reason we’re not asking this question in some corners of the Christian community is it might disrupt notions of God. It could indeed be, as I’ve heard someone say, that we worship a notion of God, and not God.
That asking these questions might force us to see a God at work in the world and in our institutions that might cause us to have to do things totally different, and make us very uncomfortable. I think the truth of the matter is all of us acculturate to a deity who kind of lets us get away with doing what we’re doing and being who we are. And asking this question is going to throw you into new categories.
And what I appreciate about what Matt talks about is, when he’s talking to his class -- you know, he’s got people who are religious, people who are not religious; there are religious answers to the question; there are nonreligious; there are philosophical answers -- but the one thing that he seems to value is that you start authentically.
I think this is where the modern church -- at Metropolitan, I’ve had people to come into the church to say that they’re both Buddhist and Christian, to say they don’t know if they’re Muslims or Christians -- and what the church has to do today is what Matt is doing in that classroom. Whoever you are, wherever you start, let’s engage the conversation. Not, “Go back and think like me, and come back and ask the question again.”
And I think that, especially for insular faiths that have not been used to new people coming in with new ideas, I think quite frankly if we look at theology and politics in America, people are often scared as hell of new ideas. Questions dislodge us. I think we’ve got a lot of work to do, and I think Matt is pointing the way.
Laura Everett: One thing that comes through so clearly in this is that they’re asking these big questions, not in isolation, but in community. This isn’t a self-directed study. They’re working this out with one another.
And there’s a theological fearlessness that I think Matt embodies for me, in saying, like, “Yes, I’m a Christian, and I need to be in conversation with Confucius’ writings and practicing Muslims.” Right? That he can live unthreatened by the possibility that God might show him something from another tradition, but that it must be done in community.
I don’t disregard that personal reflection time in meditation and contemplation is really important for listening to the voice of God. But part of the design of this course is that you can only kind of get at these big questions when you do it collaboratively.
Bill Lamar: I really, really want, myself, to begin to keep -- and I think it’s a practice that I’ve engaged -- but keep practicing listening to many. I think that many of us, our reading of Scripture and tradition makes us think that there may even be something sacrilegious to engage with the thinking of others.
But there is just, there is no way around it, and we should not look for ways around thinking through the wisdom of the ages and how that can help us to live more clearly into what I think is God’s vision for the world.
Again, you know, Matt names himself as a Christian pastor. He is clear about that, but he’s able to facilitate this discussion. And I think that if we have a faith that will not engage with others based on the truths that they hold, I would have to question what it is that we have.
Laura Everett: It reminds me, actually, of what we heard Eric Barreto say in an earlier episode: that if our theology cannot answer to the experience of Ferguson, then our theology is too small.
In a related way, I think Matt’s saying if our beliefs cannot engage with a world beyond our beliefs and our system for meaning making, then our faith is too small.
I don’t want a brittle Christianity. I want this vibrant, robust, integrated thinking that I really think we’re seeing in how Matt is thinking as a pastor, as a teacher, as a scholar and researcher -- as someone who gets to be the facilitator of such a glorious set of questions. I need that integrated thinking.
Bill Lamar: And I think also, Laura, we want to commend the many congregations and Christian institutions who are trying to facilitate these inquisitive spaces, where [they can engage] questions like, “Is life worth living?” or, “How can we live lives worth living together?” We want to commend them.
And for those who are trying to figure out how to do it, one of the practical things that we’ve engaged at Metropolitan is to convene on Wednesday nights and instead of studying books of Scripture all the time, we’ve read books together and asked questions together. And it has grown, and people are coming, because people want to engage in church, where they don’t have to hide their theological commitments, but they want to use that as a basis to have conversations with other people who are talking about things differently.
And I really believe that finding books to study, bringing in people to have conversations who may be different -- we’ve had immigrants come in; we’ve had people from other faiths to come in. How can we help to facilitate that kind of communal reality? I think that the church has a great opportunity here.
Laura Everett: What I hear is that at Metropolitan, it’s not just an accidental conversation; it’s an intentional one. That you are intentionally putting yourself in conversation with issues and questions that your congregants are asking, not just on Sunday morning, but through the rest of their lives.
Bill Lamar: I have to say this -- that these conversations can be very uncomfortable. Our leaders had a conversation last night, and it’s uncomfortable. We left with a feeling of love, but there was also tension. So I think that the church must learn that love and tension can coexist -- not love and violence, but love and tension, which might give birth to something beautiful. Those things can coexist.
Laura Everett: One of the things about being in conversation with other communities, other ideas, other religious traditions that I noticed in that interview with Matt is something that shifts around language.
Matt is unabashedly Christian. He has a sense of where his most serious commitments come from. But he’s also learning to talk in a way that doesn’t immediately shut down conversation with people who aren’t connected to the church.
And part of what I’ve learned by being in regular contact with people who don’t use the church vernacular is that I have to speak more broadly and clearly in ways that invite other people in. That there’s a real gift in getting outside of my own community, because I can’t just, like, go to the usual shorthand, or the terms that are such insider baseball. And I think that’s part of what’s happening as Matt’s teaching, too.
Bill Lamar: There is a spaciousness and a largeness, too. And I think it’s very appropriate that Matt is our concluding conversation, because he offers for us, for our churches, for our institutions, enthusiasm, hope, the integration of the church and the academy, the world of the church and the world of those who are not churched, not in churches, and a dedication to the succeeding generations.
So I think it’s very interesting he’s holding in tension the past -- received traditions, both the gospel tradition and other religious and theological and wisdom traditions -- holding the ancient in tension with the strivings and the hunger of the young. And I think that, wow, it shows quite a pattern for the church and for Christian institutions. This kind of integrative thinking offers so much hope and possibility.
Laura Everett: Well, and listeners, we really hope that this kind of integrated thinking is what we’ve offered through this series of 12 podcasts. I know that I have learned a ton about communicating and asking good and generous questions.
I’ve never done interviews like this before, so I feel like -- thank you. I want to say a word of gratitude to all of you listening who learned alongside Bill and me as we learned how to ask good questions.
Bill, I’m wondering what else you feel like you’ve learned through this process.
Bill Lamar: I have learned to be joyful about the fact that there are people around the world asking wonderful questions, doing great things, and that I don’t have to do it all -- but I do need to be in some kind of communication or conversation with these folks.
And I think this is why podcasts are booming. Because in some way, we are afforded the privilege of listening to conversations we might not have the privilege to listen to were it not for the miracle of this modern technology.
And so I don’t have to work at JetBlue to learn from Marty. I don’t have to be in Austin to learn from Gideon. I don’t have to ride the train from Washington to New York to learn from Vernon Jordan.
I can indeed just sit back in places of comfort and hear the conversations. And I am now even more committed, Laura, to listening in -- to, if you will, some holy ear hustling, some holy eavesdropping into the kinds of conversations that will remind me that God is at work in so many places.
As the poet [Gerard Manley Hopkins] says, “Christ plays in ten thousand places” -- everywhere these things are happening. And it’s happening in the church, outside of the church, in boardrooms, in coffee shops, in classrooms. And it excites me, and I want to continue to listen, because I think it makes me a better pastor, a better friend, a better leader, a better servant of the gospel that I am compelled, called and joyful to preach.
Laura Everett: Listeners, you’ve heard the benediction from the Rt. Rev. William H. Lamar IV.
[Laughter]
Now go and do likewise.
Bill Lamar: Something like that.
Hey, Laura, I think that we want to continue the conversation. How do you feel about inviting the good folks to join us on social media with their questions about how bones are living in their realities?
I’d like to begin by saying I’m easily found on Facebook -- William H. Lamar IV(link is external). And on Twitter @WilliamHLamarIV(link is external) -- Roman numeral IV -- @WilliamHLamarIV.
Laura Everett: I’d be happy to be in conversation with folks, too. I can be found on Facebook -- Laura E. Everett(link is external) -- and on Twitter @RevEverett(link is external). I would love to be in conversation with you all as you ask questions about how the bones of your own institutions can live, and how we can learn together about other folks we need to be listening to.
There are so many more stories out there.
Bill Lamar: And, listeners, if you’ve found the conversations valuable, please do share them with your friends, with your colleagues. And if you’re a good Christian, you should also share them with your enemies.
[Laughter]
And we’d like also to direct you to our website at www.canthesebones.com(link is external), that you might continue to share the good work of our conversation partners.
And indeed, we want to invite you to be asking in your churches, to be asking in your institutions, in your friendship groups, “Can these bones live?” To look at places of brokenness and death and to have the audacity, to have the gall, maybe to have the faith, to say, “I still see life.”
Laura Everett: Thank you for listening to “Can These Bones.” I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we did. There’s more about Matt Croasmun, including information about the Life Worth Living course, at www.canthesebones.com(link is external). You’ll also find the audio and other information from all 12 episodes of this podcast.
“Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions, and Matt Croasmun’s interview was recorded at Yale University. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment.
I’m Laura Everett, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.How do I listen to a podcast? »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT:
MINISTRY THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA
Faith and Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
SERMONS, PENTATEUCH, GOSPEL OF JOHN, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL MEDIA
Samuel Wells: Is social media trending or transforming?
Is social media trending or transforming?
Editor’s note: Faith & Leadership offers sermons that shed light on issues of Christian leadership. A version of this sermon was preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London on Sept. 13, 2015.
Genesis 11:1-9(link is external); John 16:7-15
Genesis 11:1 (S: vii) The whole earth used the same language, the same words. 2 It came about that as they traveled from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shin‘ar and lived there. 3 They said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them in the fire.” So they had bricks for building-stone and clay for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city with a tower that has its top reaching up into heaven, so that we can make a name for ourselves and not be scattered all over the earth.”
5 Adonai came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 Adonai said, “Look, the people are united, they all have a single language, and see what they’re starting to do! At this rate, nothing they set out to accomplish will be impossible for them! 7 Come, let’s go down and confuse their language, so that they won’t understand each other’s speech.” 8 So from there Adonai scattered them all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 For this reason it is called Bavel [confusion] — because there Adonai confused the language of the whole earth, and from there Adonai scattered them all over the earth., John 16:7 But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I don’t go away, the comforting Counselor will not come to you. However, if I do go, I will send him to you.
8 “When he comes, he will show that the world is wrong about sin, about righteousness and about judgment — 9 about sin, in that people don’t put their trust in me; 10 about righteousness, in that I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me; 11 about judgment, in that the ruler of this world has been judged.
12 “I still have many things to tell you, but you can’t bear them now. 13 However, when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own initiative but will say only what he hears. He will also announce to you the events of the future. 14 He will glorify me, because he will receive from what is mine and announce it to you. 15 Everything the Father has is mine; this is why I said that he receives from what is mine and will announce it to you. (Complete Jewish Bible)
5 Adonai came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 Adonai said, “Look, the people are united, they all have a single language, and see what they’re starting to do! At this rate, nothing they set out to accomplish will be impossible for them! 7 Come, let’s go down and confuse their language, so that they won’t understand each other’s speech.” 8 So from there Adonai scattered them all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 For this reason it is called Bavel [confusion] — because there Adonai confused the language of the whole earth, and from there Adonai scattered them all over the earth., John 16:7 But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I don’t go away, the comforting Counselor will not come to you. However, if I do go, I will send him to you.
8 “When he comes, he will show that the world is wrong about sin, about righteousness and about judgment — 9 about sin, in that people don’t put their trust in me; 10 about righteousness, in that I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me; 11 about judgment, in that the ruler of this world has been judged.
12 “I still have many things to tell you, but you can’t bear them now. 13 However, when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own initiative but will say only what he hears. He will also announce to you the events of the future. 14 He will glorify me, because he will receive from what is mine and announce it to you. 15 Everything the Father has is mine; this is why I said that he receives from what is mine and will announce it to you. (Complete Jewish Bible)
I’m going to start with what social media means for society, then move to the church, and finally explore what it means for God(link is external).
Not long ago, I was speaking at a diocesan clergy conference. Near the front of the audience, there was a newly ordained person. I could tell the person was newly ordained, because they were wearing a clerical collar at a clergy conference -- they hadn’t gotten the memo that that wasn’t cool. But their clerical shirt was multicolored and edgy, and that was also a giveaway, because clergy soon realize that there’s nothing cool about a clerical shirt, whatever color it is, and they might as well revert to something unobtrusive and dull. As soon as I finished my 45-minute address, my friend with the multicolored shirt raised a hand, saying, “There’s a huge storm on Twitter after I posted what you said about power.” I said, “Tell me what you posted.” My media-savvy friend quoted some words. I was dismayed. “But that’s not what I said,” I insisted. “Well, it’s set off a huge storm,” my friend replied. I said nothing. But what I wanted to say was, “If you’d listened to the lecture rather than tweeting all the way through it, you might have heard what I actually said.”
Think about the way that incident crystallizes the social media revolution upon which we’re embarked. Once upon a time there was an Internet, and it was like a great billboard on which could be found easily a number of things that were already available -- but perhaps less accessibly -- elsewhere. Then the Internet became interactive: articles would have comment boxes underneath them, and a host of well-informed, opinionated or sometimes very angry correspondents would engage with something that had been blogged or posted. The host of the website would “angst” about balancing free speech with wise and constructive utterance, and whether to censor the views of often-anonymous contributors. But in the last 10 years, we’ve slain the host, and through Twitter and Facebook, we now have wholly participatory conversations with no chair or editor, only mechanisms for choosing which conversations to follow and who one wants to befriend or listen to.
Each of these three generations of the information revolution has had profound effects. If you go back to my lecture at the conference, when I stand up to speak, the audience has access, through text and video, to a host of things I’ve said before, countless things others have said on the same subject, and a myriad of other messages and information that might be a great deal more interesting and engaging than listening to me -- and all on a little device smaller than a person’s hand. In that context, I have to work hard to be worth all those people’s time, and very hard to keep eye contact and not let their attention divert to the gadget in their hand.
What this means is that relationships start in different ways. When someone first attends St Martin’s, they’ve usually begun by sounding us out on our website. When a person makes an appointment to see me, they’ve often done a bit of homework on me on the Internet. I once met a famous American poet who was shocked and angry when I asked her a question that, if I’d read her biography on the Web, I’d have known not to ask. I assumed she was a stranger; she took for granted she was public property. But it also means we do things at any time of day. Shopping changes, because we can buy things at any hour. We get very impatient if we can’t get things on demand. This isolates us, because we miss the human contact of meeting people in the course of our journey down the high street; but it can connect us with people on the other side of the world in an instant. The whole nature of human interaction changes: we can be a member of several parallel communities, according to our hobbies, politics, professional associations and interests -- and our neighborhood and family relations need not be the most pressing of these connections.
But returning again to my clergy lecture, there’s another dimension, which is that the whole notion of one person being wise and knowledgeable and everyone else sitting at their feet feels like it comes from another era. Authority has changed: it doesn’t come from accreditation, like academic degrees conferred or ordination undergone or job title recognized; it comes from likes and hits and trends and follows. The whole process of sharing information has been democratized. When I taught the introduction to ethics course at an American seminary, one end-of-semester evaluation sheet demanded the student be reimbursed not just by the college but by me personally for what he’d calculated as his outlay of $100 per lecture, because everything I’d said was available elsewhere. I don’t know what new information he wanted me to offer in an introductory course that was by definition discussing material available elsewhere. But the experience showed me that the authority of the professor is unavoidably subverted in the Internet age. A doctor faces the same issue with a patient: if the patient is coming with a breathing problem, it’s highly likely the patient has scoured the Internet for diagnoses and possible treatments, research that inevitably becomes the backdrop to evaluating anything the doctor might say. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the knowledge and information that’s available to everyone and the wisdom of the professional that discerns which item of knowledge is most appropriate for today.
These changes are bringing about a social revolution. But perhaps more disturbing is the third dimension that my interaction with the multicolor-shirted cleric at the conference disclosed. I refer to the reaction when I replied, “But I didn’t say that.” What followed wasn’t an apology -- just a shrug of the shoulders that said, “Well, it’s on Twitter now; it’s out there.” At moments like this, you wonder if truth has got trodden down by comment, reaction and the froth of opinion and instant judgement. It’s some consolation that there’s so much comment out there that one misunderstanding doesn’t count for a great deal. But try telling that to someone whose misquotation or unwise offhand remark has led to massive national or international reaction and consequent shame and opprobrium and ostracism. It may be true that nothing lives on the Web for very long -- but it’s even truer that nothing ever dies. Once put there, it can be next to impossible to remove. In 20 years’ time, you can find that you’ve missed out on a job because the shortlisting panel did a Web search and found a stray Twitter debate that may be irrelevant and perhaps was never even true. The casualties are not restricted to individuals whose records can never be cleared or names given proper dignity; the more far-reaching casualties are truth and justice themselves, since the discipline of peer review or the practice of public compliance or the justice of libel laws seldom if ever applies to the Web. Everything is up for comment, nothing can truly be trusted, and communication is speeded up and expanded as fast as it is devalued. The Babel that became Pentecost has become Babel again.
Let’s turn now to what social media means for the church. The church has three dimensions -- relating to God, to one another and to the world (or worship, ministry and mission, as they’re usually called) -- and the pressing question is always how much you need one to engage in the other two (or how much you need the other two to engage in one). So people say, “I can relate to God (or truth or my soul) without needing other people,” which is often called “spiritual but not religious.” Or people relate closely to church but not world, which is called being a “holy club.” Or people are taken up with making a better world to the neglect or bypassing of God and the church, which is sometimes known as the “social gospel.”
All of these tendencies stand to be exacerbated by the communications revolution and social media. It’s easy to access all sorts of spiritual images, videos and texts from the Web, many of which are much slicker and more attractive than what’s on offer at your local parish church. At my last church, we got huge plaudits for webcasting our main act of worship, but we found that a lot of people who watched it did so from only a mile or two away and could quite easily have showed up in person. By offering a webcast, we may have implicitly been encouraging the tempting idea that you can have God and even church without troubling yourselves with the untidiness of other people. Social media facilitates holy clubs, because you can engage in plenty of Facebook and Twitter conversations while screening out the likelihood of encountering someone with whom you seriously disagree, or ever needing to trust one another as a local congregation does when setting its budget or framing a policy for safeguarding vulnerable children and adults. And social media affirms the inclination to make the world a better place without the complications of God or church, because it gives us access to countless online campaigns and the chance to share widespread chat room outrage about questions and concerns of which we have no firsthand knowledge and toward which we have no intention of developing personal engagement or investment.
While these are dangers, they shouldn’t become excuses for wistful lament. The challenge of that interaction with the multicolor-shirted cleric at the conference was not that the cleric was inattentive and I was misrepresented; it was that the cleric was engaging with the church of the future and I wasn’t adapting fast enough to a new reality. To adapt to the social media revolution, the church needs, first, to identify its goal, and second, to be imaginative, flexible and proactive in adopting and incorporating such media as can advance its goal. As I understand it, the goal is to draw all people to be with God, one another and the world in such a way that embodies trust, honor, joy, mutual flourishing, gentleness, peace and love. Ideally, those qualities are discovered, shared, embodied, expressed and advanced in face-to-face relations. But social media can hasten the day when such relations are realized. Social media can inform, challenge, connect and enrich the church in its engagement with the isolated, the oppressed and the antagonized, and can offer the church opportunities to witness and make known the gospel of God in Christ through a host of new channels. Not all media offer promising routes to advancing the kingdom: some are addictive, distracting, demeaning or cruel. But others are useful, accessible and popular, and Christians should be engaging them as quickly as, 500 years ago, they realized the power of the printing press to spread the words of Scripture. Without the printing press, there would have been no Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. But the printing press also democratized discipleship, because everyone could make their own judgments about the meaning of the Bible. Today, that democratizing is going a step further, and the church is becoming less a voice of authority to decree and proclaim and announce, and more an agent of hospitality to convene and affirm and forgather. The Internet may be about to trigger a new reformation. Perhaps it needs to.
Finally, a few words about what all of this means for God. Is social media a trend in culture or a transformation of truth? The answer, I suspect, lies in how we understand the roles of the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity -- Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Jesus, whose role is to be God in relationship with us, embodying and fulfilling the covenant with Israel, was an identifiable person who spoke with authority and did astonishing things. He was frequently misunderstood, and some of his words are playful and provocative rather than precise and prescriptive, but he is nonetheless a historical figure one can point to with confidence and accuracy. The Holy Spirit, by contrast, whose role is to make Christ and his forgiveness and eternal life present today, is much harder to pinpoint, even though its activity is widespread and constant.
The institutional churches have struggled with this elusiveness of the Holy Spirit. They’ve created systems that try to offer the tangibility of Christ. Roman Catholics have the pope, the living interpreter of God’s will. Protestants have the Bible, the constant witness of the action of God. While these ways of preserving confidence in the authority of the church have served Christians well for many centuries, they’ve always been in danger of narrowing the church’s perception of what God can do, limiting the power of God to the written word or the ordained hierarchy, containing the wind of the Spirit within a prescribed range.
You can see the analogy between what social media is doing to society and the church and what it is making us see about God. Social media is opening out society, undermining some fixed institutions, subverting established authority, leveling hierarchies and unleashing energy. Some of the changes are scary, some unwelcome, but together they’re expanding influence and connection and visibility to the many, not the few. What this is helping us see about God is that the Holy Spirit is much more unpredictable, subversive and playful than the church would usually like it to be. Authority can’t be controlled by the powerful and the qualified, and God can’t be limited by clergy or Scripture. It makes for an uncertain, roller-coaster experience of faith for those who want their religion tidy and measured; but it’s an invitation to a kingdom more radical, more wonderful and more joyful than most Christians dare to believe in. The fixed points are the same: God was fully disclosed in Christ in Bethlehem, Galilee and Jerusalem; and Christ will come again with the new Jerusalem and a new heaven and earth. God isn’t changing character. But if social media pushes Christians, reluctantly, grudgingly and tentatively to recognize the uncontrollable, ever more unmanageable and yet thrillingly redemptive nature of the Holy Spirit, it will indeed have proved a blessing beyond measure to the church.
Read more from Sam Wells »Think about the way that incident crystallizes the social media revolution upon which we’re embarked. Once upon a time there was an Internet, and it was like a great billboard on which could be found easily a number of things that were already available -- but perhaps less accessibly -- elsewhere. Then the Internet became interactive: articles would have comment boxes underneath them, and a host of well-informed, opinionated or sometimes very angry correspondents would engage with something that had been blogged or posted. The host of the website would “angst” about balancing free speech with wise and constructive utterance, and whether to censor the views of often-anonymous contributors. But in the last 10 years, we’ve slain the host, and through Twitter and Facebook, we now have wholly participatory conversations with no chair or editor, only mechanisms for choosing which conversations to follow and who one wants to befriend or listen to.
Each of these three generations of the information revolution has had profound effects. If you go back to my lecture at the conference, when I stand up to speak, the audience has access, through text and video, to a host of things I’ve said before, countless things others have said on the same subject, and a myriad of other messages and information that might be a great deal more interesting and engaging than listening to me -- and all on a little device smaller than a person’s hand. In that context, I have to work hard to be worth all those people’s time, and very hard to keep eye contact and not let their attention divert to the gadget in their hand.
What this means is that relationships start in different ways. When someone first attends St Martin’s, they’ve usually begun by sounding us out on our website. When a person makes an appointment to see me, they’ve often done a bit of homework on me on the Internet. I once met a famous American poet who was shocked and angry when I asked her a question that, if I’d read her biography on the Web, I’d have known not to ask. I assumed she was a stranger; she took for granted she was public property. But it also means we do things at any time of day. Shopping changes, because we can buy things at any hour. We get very impatient if we can’t get things on demand. This isolates us, because we miss the human contact of meeting people in the course of our journey down the high street; but it can connect us with people on the other side of the world in an instant. The whole nature of human interaction changes: we can be a member of several parallel communities, according to our hobbies, politics, professional associations and interests -- and our neighborhood and family relations need not be the most pressing of these connections.
But returning again to my clergy lecture, there’s another dimension, which is that the whole notion of one person being wise and knowledgeable and everyone else sitting at their feet feels like it comes from another era. Authority has changed: it doesn’t come from accreditation, like academic degrees conferred or ordination undergone or job title recognized; it comes from likes and hits and trends and follows. The whole process of sharing information has been democratized. When I taught the introduction to ethics course at an American seminary, one end-of-semester evaluation sheet demanded the student be reimbursed not just by the college but by me personally for what he’d calculated as his outlay of $100 per lecture, because everything I’d said was available elsewhere. I don’t know what new information he wanted me to offer in an introductory course that was by definition discussing material available elsewhere. But the experience showed me that the authority of the professor is unavoidably subverted in the Internet age. A doctor faces the same issue with a patient: if the patient is coming with a breathing problem, it’s highly likely the patient has scoured the Internet for diagnoses and possible treatments, research that inevitably becomes the backdrop to evaluating anything the doctor might say. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the knowledge and information that’s available to everyone and the wisdom of the professional that discerns which item of knowledge is most appropriate for today.
These changes are bringing about a social revolution. But perhaps more disturbing is the third dimension that my interaction with the multicolor-shirted cleric at the conference disclosed. I refer to the reaction when I replied, “But I didn’t say that.” What followed wasn’t an apology -- just a shrug of the shoulders that said, “Well, it’s on Twitter now; it’s out there.” At moments like this, you wonder if truth has got trodden down by comment, reaction and the froth of opinion and instant judgement. It’s some consolation that there’s so much comment out there that one misunderstanding doesn’t count for a great deal. But try telling that to someone whose misquotation or unwise offhand remark has led to massive national or international reaction and consequent shame and opprobrium and ostracism. It may be true that nothing lives on the Web for very long -- but it’s even truer that nothing ever dies. Once put there, it can be next to impossible to remove. In 20 years’ time, you can find that you’ve missed out on a job because the shortlisting panel did a Web search and found a stray Twitter debate that may be irrelevant and perhaps was never even true. The casualties are not restricted to individuals whose records can never be cleared or names given proper dignity; the more far-reaching casualties are truth and justice themselves, since the discipline of peer review or the practice of public compliance or the justice of libel laws seldom if ever applies to the Web. Everything is up for comment, nothing can truly be trusted, and communication is speeded up and expanded as fast as it is devalued. The Babel that became Pentecost has become Babel again.
Let’s turn now to what social media means for the church. The church has three dimensions -- relating to God, to one another and to the world (or worship, ministry and mission, as they’re usually called) -- and the pressing question is always how much you need one to engage in the other two (or how much you need the other two to engage in one). So people say, “I can relate to God (or truth or my soul) without needing other people,” which is often called “spiritual but not religious.” Or people relate closely to church but not world, which is called being a “holy club.” Or people are taken up with making a better world to the neglect or bypassing of God and the church, which is sometimes known as the “social gospel.”
All of these tendencies stand to be exacerbated by the communications revolution and social media. It’s easy to access all sorts of spiritual images, videos and texts from the Web, many of which are much slicker and more attractive than what’s on offer at your local parish church. At my last church, we got huge plaudits for webcasting our main act of worship, but we found that a lot of people who watched it did so from only a mile or two away and could quite easily have showed up in person. By offering a webcast, we may have implicitly been encouraging the tempting idea that you can have God and even church without troubling yourselves with the untidiness of other people. Social media facilitates holy clubs, because you can engage in plenty of Facebook and Twitter conversations while screening out the likelihood of encountering someone with whom you seriously disagree, or ever needing to trust one another as a local congregation does when setting its budget or framing a policy for safeguarding vulnerable children and adults. And social media affirms the inclination to make the world a better place without the complications of God or church, because it gives us access to countless online campaigns and the chance to share widespread chat room outrage about questions and concerns of which we have no firsthand knowledge and toward which we have no intention of developing personal engagement or investment.
While these are dangers, they shouldn’t become excuses for wistful lament. The challenge of that interaction with the multicolor-shirted cleric at the conference was not that the cleric was inattentive and I was misrepresented; it was that the cleric was engaging with the church of the future and I wasn’t adapting fast enough to a new reality. To adapt to the social media revolution, the church needs, first, to identify its goal, and second, to be imaginative, flexible and proactive in adopting and incorporating such media as can advance its goal. As I understand it, the goal is to draw all people to be with God, one another and the world in such a way that embodies trust, honor, joy, mutual flourishing, gentleness, peace and love. Ideally, those qualities are discovered, shared, embodied, expressed and advanced in face-to-face relations. But social media can hasten the day when such relations are realized. Social media can inform, challenge, connect and enrich the church in its engagement with the isolated, the oppressed and the antagonized, and can offer the church opportunities to witness and make known the gospel of God in Christ through a host of new channels. Not all media offer promising routes to advancing the kingdom: some are addictive, distracting, demeaning or cruel. But others are useful, accessible and popular, and Christians should be engaging them as quickly as, 500 years ago, they realized the power of the printing press to spread the words of Scripture. Without the printing press, there would have been no Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. But the printing press also democratized discipleship, because everyone could make their own judgments about the meaning of the Bible. Today, that democratizing is going a step further, and the church is becoming less a voice of authority to decree and proclaim and announce, and more an agent of hospitality to convene and affirm and forgather. The Internet may be about to trigger a new reformation. Perhaps it needs to.
Finally, a few words about what all of this means for God. Is social media a trend in culture or a transformation of truth? The answer, I suspect, lies in how we understand the roles of the Second and Third Persons of the Trinity -- Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Jesus, whose role is to be God in relationship with us, embodying and fulfilling the covenant with Israel, was an identifiable person who spoke with authority and did astonishing things. He was frequently misunderstood, and some of his words are playful and provocative rather than precise and prescriptive, but he is nonetheless a historical figure one can point to with confidence and accuracy. The Holy Spirit, by contrast, whose role is to make Christ and his forgiveness and eternal life present today, is much harder to pinpoint, even though its activity is widespread and constant.
The institutional churches have struggled with this elusiveness of the Holy Spirit. They’ve created systems that try to offer the tangibility of Christ. Roman Catholics have the pope, the living interpreter of God’s will. Protestants have the Bible, the constant witness of the action of God. While these ways of preserving confidence in the authority of the church have served Christians well for many centuries, they’ve always been in danger of narrowing the church’s perception of what God can do, limiting the power of God to the written word or the ordained hierarchy, containing the wind of the Spirit within a prescribed range.
You can see the analogy between what social media is doing to society and the church and what it is making us see about God. Social media is opening out society, undermining some fixed institutions, subverting established authority, leveling hierarchies and unleashing energy. Some of the changes are scary, some unwelcome, but together they’re expanding influence and connection and visibility to the many, not the few. What this is helping us see about God is that the Holy Spirit is much more unpredictable, subversive and playful than the church would usually like it to be. Authority can’t be controlled by the powerful and the qualified, and God can’t be limited by clergy or Scripture. It makes for an uncertain, roller-coaster experience of faith for those who want their religion tidy and measured; but it’s an invitation to a kingdom more radical, more wonderful and more joyful than most Christians dare to believe in. The fixed points are the same: God was fully disclosed in Christ in Bethlehem, Galilee and Jerusalem; and Christ will come again with the new Jerusalem and a new heaven and earth. God isn’t changing character. But if social media pushes Christians, reluctantly, grudgingly and tentatively to recognize the uncontrollable, ever more unmanageable and yet thrillingly redemptive nature of the Holy Spirit, it will indeed have proved a blessing beyond measure to the church.
Faith and Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL MEDIA, THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION
Verity Jones: Thinking theologically about using social media
The New Media Project wants to help faith leaders become more theologically savvy about social media, which is rapidly changing the landscape of Christian life.
Near Washington, D.C., the Rev. Tony Lee sees on Facebook that a church member’s brother has committed suicide -- news he would not otherwise have known -- and is able to reach out to the young man and attend the funeral.
To Lee, it’s a vivid example of how social media gives pastors “longer arms,” providing new ways to stay connected to church members and “touch people who need hope.”
In Seattle, social media is an essential part of the ministry at Quest Church. The congregation’s 25 small groups use Facebook to link members, encourage one another and share information.
“New media helps us more deeply engage in community,” said the Rev. Eugene Cho. “It’s certainly a way for us to build intimacy, … sharing prayer requests and concerns.”
Across the land, in that virtual “place” called the World Wide Web, The Young Clergy Women Project, an online social network of more than 500 clergywomen under 40, is providing young women pastors the support they need to stay in ministry.
Often lacking any nearby female peers, the pastors have found comfort in the online community, which gives them a place to relax and share with others who understand what they are going through.
These three stories are from case studies conducted by the New Media Project at Union Theological Seminary(link is external). They are just some of the many places we’re looking to find out how the church is responding in this age of constantly changing technologies.
Established a year ago with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc., the New Media Project seeks to help faith leaders become more theologically savvy about technology.
Although we don’t have all the answers yet -- or even all the questions -- one thing is clear: the widespread use of technology and social media in American culture today is rapidly changing the landscape in which Christian life occurs.
Recommended reading
- Heidi Campbell(link is external), associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University and author of “When Religion Meets New Media”
- Elizabeth Drescher(link is external), author of “Tweet If You ♥ Jesus”
- Keith Anderson(link is external), Lutheran pastor and co-author with Drescher of “Click2Save: The Digital Ministry Bible”
- Kwok Pui Lan(link is external), professor of Christian theology and spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass.
If, as Anselm said, theology is “faith seeking understanding,” then our challenge -- our hope -- is to understand what is at stake for the body of Christ during this time.
We hope to recognize new ways of thinking about ourselves, church and God that might be emerging. We want to know: How do our theological assumptions, doctrines, practices, or ways of being and acting in the world as people of faith hold up in this new context?
We began the New Media Project by asking pastors, congregations and leaders in other church-related institutions such as higher education how and why they use social media. Currently, we are surveying younger clergy about their use of social media, because they tend to think differently about technology than their elders.
We have conducted six case studies as a foundation for further theological reflection and maintain an active blog, where our six research fellows and guest specialists contribute regularly. In an effort to live into a social media world marked by creativity and collaboration, we share our research and our thinking as we go, hoping to contribute to the community of conversation now, not just later when conclusions have been reached.
What are we learning?
For one thing, as our survey found, an overwhelming number of younger clergy use social media in their ministries and in their personal lives, and they are generally quite thoughtful about it. They use social media for everything from community building and pastoral care to sermon preparation and event planning. They see social media as the new public square. Since growing numbers of people spend time there, so should they.
Consensus on best ministry practices, however, remains elusive.
Many clergy say it’s important to use social media in ways that emerge “organically” from the culture of a particular community.
As Lee, the pastor of Community of Hope AME Church near Washington, explained, his use of new media must “fit my flow and the flow of the church.” Similarly, the Rev. Eric Elnes, pastor of Countryside Community Church UCC in Omaha, Neb., avoids early adoption of new technology. He wants to ensure that whatever technology he uses makes sense with regular life -- a challenge that becomes easier almost every day.
“The fact of the matter is that as technology matures, it tends to look more and more like our everyday lives,” Elnes wrote on our blog.
Not surprisingly, people differ on what tools are organic to church life, or what the “flow” of a particular pastor might be. For example, the question of how public a pastor should be on Facebook is hotly debated.
On the one hand, Lee and the pastoral staff at Community of Hope use Facebook and Twitter to demystify the life of a pastor, posting news both joyful and mundane.
When Lee met President Obama last year, he used his smartphone to tweet and post photos on Facebook, sharing his excitement with his 2,200-member church. More often, such posts are about routine events -- eating dinner with Mom or going to a concert -- that let members know clergy are not “celebrities,” as one pastor said.
On the other hand, some young clergywomen we interviewed closely guard their private lives online. Developing their pastoral vocation is challenging enough without the openness of Facebook -- and the often-critical public eye that comes with it.
In higher education, many institutions are embracing the rapid changes in communications technology.
At Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, leaders say it is essential to reach students and shape them in the use of new media. They have developed a mobile learning initiative, ACU Connected, and an app, myACU, and equip all faculty and new students with mobile devices such as an iPhone, an iPod Touch or, more recently, an iPad.
John B. Weaver, the school’s dean of library services and educational technology, borrows from Hebrews 12:1 to compare new media -- especially on mobile devices -- to a “digital cloud of witnesses” that is omnipresent in student lives. In both Hebrews and social media, “cloud” is “a metaphor for close proximity and complete envelopment,” Weaver noted on our blog.
Fortunately, it is a cloud that Christian universities can “form and reform through biblical narratives, liberal arts, and Christian practices of confession and profession that are focused not only on the media, but also the messages to which they ‘testify,’” he wrote.
Surprisingly, few writers and scholars are pressing theologically -- beyond some critics’ legitimate concerns about distraction, alienation and addiction -- into the new media world. This absence of theological work may suggest that the church has not yet recognized how significantly the sand is shifting under its feet.
People who did not come of age in the digital world tend to view social media, if at all, as simply a new set of tools that need only to be acquired and mastered.
Once that’s accomplished, they think, they can just put the new tools into play and achieve the same old purpose. More than likely, they will fail. Something bigger is happening in new communication practices, something that skills retraining alone cannot quite capture.
Although the church may be slow to notice social media, the business world is not. Indeed, most articles about social media address the realm of marketing.
Every social media presentation I’ve attended (or conducted) recently has included Erik Qualman’s Socialnomics video(link is external), a short film that powerfully demonstrates how rapidly social media has changed the landscape of American -- and global -- life.
The video makes clear that a world altered by social media requires a different way of seeing that world. It is intended for business marketers who are realizing that social relationships drive consumer choices today more than advertisements do. Understandably, they want to learn how to use social media to market their products.
Unfortunately, for them at least, most marketers merely push out the same old message through new channels, without understanding how social relationships function and what they can do. They continue with a one-way communication strategy that has become counterintuitive to active social media users, with the same unimpressive results.
For faith communities, however, social relationships are not foreign. Christians know how social networks work, even if we don’t yet completely understand how they can function online. We’ve been networking ever since Jesus sent out the 70 to carry a message of peace into homes before he arrived.
To Christians, “networking” is better known as evangelism and community building, not marketing. If church people reduce evangelism to marketing as a means simply to increase numbers then they will misunderstand the power of social media and probably get the same poor results as the marketers.
If we define evangelism as transformation -- and understand that relationships are crucial to transformation -- then social media begins to make sense as a powerful tool for extending, as Lee says, “the touch” -- the touch of hope to God’s people.
For now, this new media world is messy.
In many ways, social media level the playing field, flatten the hierarchy. People can access huge amounts of information without requesting permission. They trust what their friends recommend more than what an expert might suggest. And that puts leaders and power structures under tremendous pressure.
The Rev. Gail Bantum at Quest Church confesses there’s “a greater demand for access and a greater expectation of response; … it’s more pressure.” Even those who embrace new media often fight an uphill battle with older generations. The Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber at House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, for example, in a post on the New Media Project blog, begs church leaders to “listen to Millennials, please.”
These tensions are bringing to the surface significant theological issues and questions for church leaders. The following are some of the important questions we face -- to which our project will continue to “seek understanding”:
- How do we interpret incarnation and embodiment in relation to online activity?
- What models of the body of Christ are emerging from these new experiences, and what are their underlying theologies?
- Is salvation mediated differently in this new context, and if so, what does that look like and how do we talk about it?
- How do we come to know God and each other today?
- What cautions must we attend to, and what lessons from our history can help us navigate these changes today?
- Do new ways of experiencing each other and the Triune God challenge or undergird what we believe to be true about humanity and the divine?
Read more from Verity Jones »
Social media has changed many aspects of our lives and how we engage with others. We shop differently, research differently, communicate differently, and we experience community differently. So, it only makes sense that pastoral transitions in this new age would become more complex, and look much different than pastoral transitions even ten years ago.Read more from Adam Cleaveland »
After serving a United Methodist church for just over three years, I took my first call as an ordained Presbyterian minister. About a year and a half later, I accepted my second call and moved across the country to Chicagoland, where I currently serve as an Associate Pastor. I’ve dealt with this new type of pastoral transition a couple times in the past few years. I will say that it is definitely more complex than it used to be, but there are ways in which you can help both yourself and the congregations you’re connected to during these transitions.
I’d like to think about how to engage with parishioners on social media first, and then share some practical tips and tools to aid you in future transitions you may go through in your ministry, both as you leave churches, and as you start jobs at new churches. Becoming “Friends” With Church Members
A friend of mine was recently going through the call process, and was a little shocked to find that there were members of the church she was going to be called to already requesting to be friends with her on Facebook before it was even official. I’m a few months into my current call as Associate Pastor at Winnetka Presbyterian Church (Winnetka, Illinois), and I had some folks reach out to me early on in my time here because they wanted to connect online.
I still remember sitting in classroom discussions in seminary, talking about how pastors really shouldn’t become friends with parishioners. We talked about the power and boundary issues, and about how it just made things too difficult when you were called to another church; what happened to those friendships? Could you still stay in touch? What could you talk about?
I always had issues with those conversations in seminary; part of that has to do with my own desire to be radically transparent in my ministry. I didn’t want to hide who I was with parishioners, or not be open to friendships for my wife and I, even if they happened to be with members of the congregation. Sure those friendships would always be a little bit different because I was their pastor, but I didn’t think it made sense to think that some folks were “off-limits.”
Part of that is probably why I have chosen to always accept any and all Facebook friend requests from people at the churches I’ve served, and why I have chosen to only have one Facebook profile. Many pastors have tried to deal with the question of “friending” parishioners by creating a separate, work Facebook profile. You may have friends and colleagues who have done this; often they choose a distinctly church name for the account (e.g. “Pastor Adam Walker Cleaveland” or “WinnetkaPres Adam Walker Cleaveland”). It’s always a little bit awkward, and it goes against Facebook’s Terms of Service by having more than one profile for an individual. However, those who use two profiles say that it allows them to use Facebook personally, and not have to worry censoring what they post, for fear of upsetting parishioners.
I’m not interested in having two identities on Facebook, partly because I don’t want to have to spend time curating two completely separate Facebook profiles. That just sounds like too much work for me; I think there are enough good reasons, both theological and practical, to only having one Facebook profile, and for using that profile to engage with folks in your congregation.
Disconnecting from Friends & Followers
So, what happens when you leave a church? In addition to all of the normal boundaries that you’ll have to figure out between you, the church and your denomination’s governing body, now you have to figure out what you’re going to do with all of the people that you’re Facebook friends with from your congregation.
Do you just unfriend everyone on Facebook? Unfollow everyone on Twitter? I’ve actually had some people tell me that when they left their congregation, they went through their Facebook Friend Lists and unfriended everyone from their former congregation. Their reasoning was that they were serving those folks as part of their job, and now that they were moving on, they were not obligated to remain connected to them.
That seems pretty harsh to me, and I couldn’t see myself doing that. But, I do think it’s important to give people from former churches some breathing room and space to continue on without their previous pastor as involved in their online and social media life, particularly with youth. At one former church I worked at, I had quite a few students who were very active on Facebook and Twitter, and we’d often get into conversations online, “like” many of each other’s statuses and found the online world a great medium to communicate in.
So, when I left, it was important for me to not be tempted to continue to “like” their updates, comment on Facebook or reply to Tweets. Below are some of the steps I have taken when leaving churches to help make the transition a bit smoother in the world of social media:
Facebook Friend Lists: Facebook actually makes curating lists of people you are connected to on Facebook very easy, with the use of Friend Lists. I think this is probably one of the most powerful, but most under-utilized, features that Facebook has. Whenever I accept any friend request on Facebook, I always assign each new friend to a specific Friend List. I have Friend Lists for many different seasons of my life: college, seminary and each of the churches I’ve worked at. This is a powerful tool, because it allows me to organize and categorize my Facebook friends, but it also allows me to unsubscribe from updates from specific lists, and it allows me to both post status updates to specific lists, or hide my updates from specific lists.
When I leave a church, I put everyone associated with that church into one Friend List. Then when I go in to edit the settings for that list, I can simply uncheck all of the Update Types for that friend list, and then I will no longer see the status updates posted from that group of people. That helps me from being tempted to engage with people from my previous church for a predetermined amount of time.
Unfriending People: I will say that you may indeed need to unfriend a few people from your congregation, but that is always a case-by-case situation. Maybe you have someone who likes everything you post, always leave comments and is extremely active on Facebook; that might be someone to unfriend for the reason of giving them space to connect with whomever is following you at the church. Or there might be a few people who you were connected to on Facebook because of your role as their pastor, but there was some conflict or other reasons that it would be better for both of you to not be connected in that way anymore. I think there are situations when it is helpful to unfriend people; I just don’t think it’s necessary to unfriend everyone from the church you’re leaving.
Remove all social media accounts from your computer, iPhone or other media devices: In order to prevent accidentally posting from a church account after you’ve left, and to remove any temptation to post, or check on things that are happening at the church, I suggest going through your computer, iPhone, iPad and any other media devices that might be connected to the Twitter or Facebook profiles, and delete those accounts. This will help give you a more clean break from the church’s social media life.
Talk about your plan: Talk to the church leadership about boundaries and your plan. It shows that you’re being pro-active and thinking through these issues. Be specific. Let them know what you’re planning to do about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other social media platforms that you’ve used to connect with folks at the church. Make a plan, and then communicate that with the appropriate parties involved.
Give people space: In most cases, you’ll be leaving one church and moving on to a place you’re really excited about. But everyone else is staying where they were – they don’t get to share in your excitement about new opportunities and possibilities. Give them the space and time (online) to grieve that you are not their pastor anymore. If you’re constantly checking in with them, commenting on their Facebook status updates, it doesn’t give them the space they need.
To read the entire article from Congregations magazine, click here.
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