Month: March 2024

“American Christianity and biblical discipleship are two different things, with only minimal overlap.” Is that harsh? I don’t know. Jesus, how do you see your church–your people–your BODY in this country where I live? I do not want to talk smack on your bride—never goes well with a husband. I just know that I love my brothers and sisters, and as I read the New Testament and its clear picture of radical devotion to Jesus, there seems to be a fog. Years ago, John Piper said in a talk “The hardest place in the world to live as a Christian–America.” That’s pretty weird isn’t it? And yet.

So here are a couple of poems along this theme. The first just deals with some specific challenges of living devoted amidst the cacophony of options and distractions in my everyday American life.

The next one is more specific to the longing I have to experience some of what I’ve seen in believers in other cultures, particularly in the way they gather in microchurches and experience the family of God in some rich ways that our usual Sunday morning expressions of “church,” as good as they may be, aren’t really set up to facilitate (I actually wrote this poem sitting in a Sunday morning worship service). And also my takeaway point on an Ichthus mission trip to Kenya in 2021, “The United States is a strange, strange bird, and unless God massively intervenes, we’re screwed.” (Note I say “we” — I am right thoroughly in the midst of all of this along with my brothers and sisters, needing every single bit of the massive intervention for myself and in the bodies I lead and in which I gather.)

Oh, a few helps: The title plays on the location of Asbury University; the “oval” is the overlap of the Venn diagram of American Christianity and biblical discipleship; and “Power” refers to the “powers” Paul refers to in, say, Ephesians 6:12. As always, I welcome questions, comments, thoughts, etc.!

Wrote this one thinking about Genesis 6:6-8 (title hits Romans 8:19):

Yahweh regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So Yahweh said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in Yahweh’s eyes.

It’s more poetic perhaps than “theological.” But I love how Yahweh is truly a character in the Bible, not (as Dallas Willard would say) “the great unblinking cosmic stare.” And the thought of his heart being deeply troubled moves me.

Had the image (which itself was a vision of sorts, in that impressionistic-y way I occasionally get vision-like things) in the first stanza of this poem come into my mind this morning when I was thinking, “I should post a poem.”

When I went back and re-read it, it struck me that it meshed with a recent thought theme lately of Jesus’ being embodied, where he actually brought divine DNA into the actual physical world and how cool that is. AND it’s also good timing for this Lenten season.

So that seemed to me like enough of a confirmation to post this one. As always, I would love any thoughts, questions, comments, engagement–reach out if you’re so inclined!