I Hate My Voice

Here’s the thing: I hate my voice.

Sometimes at Christmas, we watch old home videos. There’s this one where I am six or seven years old, and I’m showing my sister Katie, who’s three or four, how to play piano. She’s just having a grand old time banging away on the keys, loving the drama and the noise. I smile sweetly and say, “No, no, Katie. That’s not the way. You put your fingers like this. Here is middle C.”

and this is how you hold a baby

 

The first time I saw this video as an adult, I cringed. And with good reason. Why was I trying to teach a three year old to play piano? Why was I such a stereotypical firstborn? Why was I such a damn goody-two-shoes? Why couldn’t I just dance to the chaos?

Recently I’ve started reading through my ten-year old journals. It was my first year out of college, and I was living in Southeast Asia, writing sometimes for myself and sometimes for my blog. Much of my writing has the same tone I had as a seven year old piano teacher: it’s sweetly didactic, and very sure of itself. I can’t stand it. 

 

From the distance of a decade, my naivete shines. The truisms I trumpeted (sweetly, (falsley) humbly) lacked depth or substance. They were sincere, yes, and usually true; but they were also awfully churchy and idealistic.Now, they just sound hokey, and ridiculous coming from someone my age, writing about things I really knew nothing about, railing against the materialism of the western church, coming up with bad metaphors about fireworks and stars and young nations and old nations.

 

Me, as writer and director of "A Cambodian Christmas Carol" at age 23

 

I don’t write much now, and in part that’s because I’m afraid of that voice coming out. I’m a teacher, after all; I often sound teacherly. Even if I tell stories, I can't get away from the lesson in them.

 

But who am I to speak? Who am I to say what’s right or wrong, with my youth and inexperience? Even if I’m right about what I say, isn’t it already obvious to everyone?

Won’t I be embarrassed, a decade from now, of anything I say with sincerity today?

“Not many of you should become teachers,” James warned. He was talking about Bible teachers. Sometimes I wish he had written that not many of us should be bloggers, or tweeters, or preachers with national platforms. (I really think not many of us should be teachers with national platforms.)

But sometimes I can’t tell if my silence is born more of humility (I don't want to be wrong, who am I to speak?), prudent caution (I don’t want to be wrong), perfectionism (I don’t want to be wrong), or fear (I don’t want to be wrong). Sometimes I want to add my voice to the cacophony, and sometimes I want to stay safe. Sometimes I think that of the making of many books (and blog posts), there is no end, so I’m just going to quietly fear God in my own little place.

 

When your heart burns within you, is that a time to speak, or a time to stay silent?

A question for you: How do you know when to speak, and when to stay silent?

cartographic lines within your veins

"How did this happen? How did she grow up? It was not fast. They all say it goes fast. But that wasn’t the feeling. It was its impermanence. Every moment never lasts."

Im teaching three classes this semester. Our schedule is all new and so many things are happening, I'm too busy to write out the emotions. But just looking at the difference in Rosie from the first day of 3 year old preschool to the first day of 4 year old preschool fills my eyes with tears.

Owen's not that happy about it, either. He wants to go to school, too.

But for now (for now, for now) he's home with me.

going to Georgia, coming home

Driving home from Georgia on Friday, we listened to my “wanderlust” cd - a mix of songs I made a decade ago when I was writing my senior thesis on the idea of the open road in American pop culture in the 1950s-60s. I guess I still empathize with that idea that freedom is in getting out and going - but I don’t dream of it in the same way.  In highschool, I used to daydream about being a truck driver - yes, a truck driver - because then I could see the country, clear my mind, and listen to my own cassettes.  My life plan at eighteen included a year spent touring the country in a VW van, and another year backpacking across Europe.  I managed to do shortened versions of those trips in my twenties. Backpacking in Europe was the freest I’ve ever felt.

But it could never be that way again.  Now, when I travel, I’m never footloose and fancy free. At least part of me is always thinking about my home and my children and my responsibilities. At least part of me is always ready to go home.

The first place we visited in Georgia was Ed's Lake Rd, where Jack’s grandparents live.  It’s this kind of magical place, hidden back in a tangle of woods, and named for Jack’s great-grandfather.  That makes us the fifth generation to be there, and even after so many years, it’s quiet and isolated. Jack’s grandparents keep bees and have Fox News on high volume all day. His great aunt Mary Alice collects local antiques and plays the harmonica. She baited the fishing lines for Rosie down at the dock behind her house, and the fish practically jumped out of the water to our poles.

How many years have they lived there?  We brought one of their extra hives back for bees on our land, too, and I wondered how long this new house will be ours.

Jack’s parents have lived in their home in Macon, where we went next, for about seventeen years. The house was newly built when they moved in, and they said the yard felt like it needed trees.  Now, the house is surrounded trees so that when you sit on the back porch and look out, you think you’re in a small clearing in the middle of a forest.  Our acres in Indiana are more field than forest, but I wonder - will we be here for seventeen years?  Will we grow a forest, too?

In Macon, we did the things we do; with seven cousins six and under, that means mostly that we eat and play, but we also visited a peach orchard and the Georgia Aquarium.

Rosie wanted to have a princess party.  When she didn't smile for the pictures, I asked why. She said she was not supposed to smile: she was supposed to look regal. This is her most regal look:

You can see how excited Jack was about taking care of the boys during the princess party.

Sometimes it makes me sad - this sense that my wanderlust has quieted, that my possessions have weighed me down. My life had been rippling out and out: to Memphis and Austin and Gulf Shores, to Nashville and Mankato and Chicago, to Scotland and Paris and Haiti, to Italy and Vietnam and Cambodia, to LA and Seattle and now, Indiana. The ripples have stopped, the stone has sunken into the riverbed here. I’d still go, if I could, if I could still capture that feeling of freedom, but I know I can’t. Without becoming narrow-minded - I still want to keep the wide world in my mind, to settle in to this specific place without losing awareness of the beautiful variety of cultures and perspectives out there, without forgetting that though I am living comfortably, many people in the world are not - Now is the time for staying, for abiding, for following Wendell Berry’s instructions and knowing my place.

Now is the time for learning the name of every plant on our property, for walking it enough that I know just where the ground slopes, for growing the slow compost that will soften this clay into garden soil.

I was anxious to get back to our house (still so many things to do here before we are settled in!). But I was also surprisingly ready to get back to Indiana. I remember the first time we left Indiana after moving here.  We started driving south for Thanksgiving or Christmas, and as soon as we hit southern Indiana, a spot that was a bit hilly, I almost gasped with relief, like I’d been underwater until then, like the flat cornfields for miles and miles had been starving my soul.  I hadn’t even realized until that moment how much I’d missed the Olympic range, the Ozarks, the Rockies. But I had.

But Friday when we drove up through Indiana, cornfields on one side, soybeans on the other, the sky enormous above us, I felt peace settle in my soul, like I could breathe easy again. On 1000, the orange daylilies had faded, and something yellow bloomed with them that hadn’t been there when we left. The sunset glowed like cotton candy across our driveway, and on the back porch, its light hit my neighbor’s barn and soybean fields in just the way the sunset used to hit Twin Sisters when I stood on the back porch of the lodge in Estes Park. The hayfield next door, recently baled, called to mind a spot in the Ozarks where once, hiking by myself, I heard the voice of the lord in a frog’s mysterious croak. Inside the house, the saints of California gazed down on our suitcases and the girls in ao dai rode their bikes ceaselessly through the living room. We unloaded the bee hives we brought from Ed’s Lake Road and watched an episode of Veronica Mars with my brother.

Every place I've been is still with me now, and I'm home.

why we stayed

(Previously: Do We Stay or Do We Go? and Do We Stay or Do We Stay?)

We made the decision to buy a house last summer (though it took us a year to actually buy).  What that really means, I suppose, is that we decided to stay in Upland at least long enough to justify buying a house - the staying in Upland part was the big decision.

We moved to Upland, IN from Seattle three years ago, and told ourselves, “We’ll probably just stay for three years, and then move on.”  At new faculty orientation, someone told us that ALL the incoming faculty say that...and then they end up staying forever.  I smiled nervously and excused myself to cry in the bathroom.

Here’s how we got to Upland in the first place: Jack was applying for jobs after finishing his MA at the University of Washington.  The TESOL market was saturated in Seattle, and the cost of living there was high, so we knew we’d probably have to leave the city that felt like home in so many ways. He was applying (or, more often, I was the one actually sending inquiries and filling out applications) everywhere, and by the end of April, he had two job offers: first, a fairly prestigious one-year contract with the State Department to teach in Laos; second, a ten-month contract to be the Curriculum Coordinator and Assistant Professor of ESL at Taylor University, the small midwestern Christian college that his parents and younger sister had attended.

We wanted to go to Laos. But we really didn’t want to have to job-hunt again after a year, and we also wanted to have a second child, which would be more complicated in Laos.  The job at Taylor would almost definitely extend beyond a year, maybe even becoming tenure-track. We took it.

Only a few weeks later Jack was offered jobs we would have accepted in a heartbeat - at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville (in the gorgeous Ozark mountains and only a few hours from my family) and at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (halfway between Jack’s family and mine). But it was too late - we had just moved into our rental house in this “map dot/ stop sign on a blacktop” (as Tim McGraw would say). Upland, IN (pop. 3845) had a total area of 3.15 square miles, no stoplights, and (needless to say) no Thai food.  The main thing we noticed when we moved into town was the high number of overweight people on riding lawn mowers wearing bikinis.

For two people with family in the South, the midwest was not ideal.  For two people who had met in Southeast Asia and dated while living just outside LA, a small town white as homogenized milk was not ideal. For two people who loved food, music, and film, a town with no restaurants, little chance of live music, and no movie theater felt not only not ideal but downright ascetic. In Seattle we’d been within walking distance of Vietnamese, Mexican, Brazilian, and Thai restaurants, at least three historic movie theaters, and a number of venues for live performances; in Upland, we were within walking distance of cornfields.

The ESL program Jack began working with was small and fraught with problems.  He put his heart into it, working with diligence and a strong sense of loyalty (as he usually does).  He started going gray.  Three years later, he is the Program Director, and the university has brought in Charlie Brainerd (who spent many, many years in China with ELIC, the organization we went to Vietnam with) to help expand and oversee the program. When Jack began, the program had a handful of Korean students.  Next year, we’ll have Korean, Chinese, Congolese, and Saudi Arabian students enrolled.

We struggled to find a church and to figure out where we fit in this small community.  For six months we visited churches within a 40 minute driving distance, but most of them managed to offend us in one way or another.  We had finally decided to just bite the bullet and attend one small church not too far from our house, and on our third Sunday in a row there, someone preaching from Revelations said something like, “I really have no idea what Revelations is about - let’s leave that to the scholars,” and I died a little bit inside.  We got in the car, looked at each other, and said, “Let’s go to the Episcopal church.”

When we’d first visited the Episcopal church, there had been hardly any kids there, and the congregation didn’t sing any songs we had ever heard before. Now, six months later, there were more families in attendance (though we still didn’t know any of the songs they sang).  Deciding to attend Gethsemane may have been one of the biggest factors in our eventual house-buying decision, and I suppose that’s how it should be: rootedness in a church ought to be that integral to life.  At Gethsemane we found friends and community, and for people like Jack and me, who are introverted and somewhat slow to connect with people -- it would be hard to leave these people and to start over again.

So, three years later, we’ve invested in the university and grown rooted in a church community.  We’ve also started to embrace small town life.  I love that we can walk to library story book hour every Friday, and on the way bump into other friends who are walking there. I love that I can walk my kid to preschool, and that I already know half the kids in attendance.  I love the sense of community at the farm four miles down the road. I love that Labor Day is garage sale day, and that I know which houses to go to for clothes to outfit my daughter for the upcoming year. I love that so many people garden and hang their clothes out on the line to dry.

Don’t get me wrong - I haven’t bought into this American mythology about the purity of small towns or farmers.  It’s true that I still probably disagree with my neighbors about all kinds of political issues. You can certainly find narrow-mindedness and divisions among the people here.  

But when it came time to decide if we should stay or go, it didn’t seem right to leave. We have good jobs (thanks to the nearness of the university, the plethora of dependable babysitters, and the support of the university, it’s easy for me to teach one or two classes a semester), the cost of living is low, and we have friends and church.  If another job came calling, we might leave, but it didn’t seem right to go looking for one.  It seemed more right to practise the Benedictine way of stability, learning humility through the discipline of place and community.

We’d like to be closer to family, and we’d like to be adventuring across the wide world, and we’d like to have a Thai restaurant in the neighborhood.  But in the end it seemed right to us, for now, to make it our ambition to lead a little life, to mind our own business and to work with our hands.  In the end, it seemed right to stay, and to live (as Tim McGraw puts it) where the green grass grows. 

Pretty soon I’ll be cutting that green grass on a riding lawn mower, just working on my tan.

abide {one word}

Yesterday I spent a quarter of an hour scrubbing the window above the kitchen sink.  I could go into great detail here - about the tiny, nearly impossible to plumb crevice between the back of the sink and the ridge of the windowsill, and how when the faucet leaks, it leaks into that crevice, and the mold that grows - or about how our hard water leaves a white film on everything, clean dishes, the innards of the coffee maker, and yes, on the window where steam gathers - but there I go going into great detail after all. Suffice to say, it needed to be cleaned.  

Cleaning the window doesn’t change the view: still snow, still fence, still wires and tree branches bare but for an enormous hornet’s nest.  But it does clear the vision.

That’s how I feel about New Year’s resolutions, too. For me, regrouping at the New Year is less about making a list of goals to eventually fail to achieve, and more about taking a minute (or more than a minute, but let’s be honest, I’ve got tiny children pulling on my legs) to reflect on who I am and where I’m going.  What are my hopes and wishes? Do I need to change the trajectory of my life?

Cleaning the windows of my soul these past few weeks, the word that came to me was ABIDE.

I think I need to remain where I am, to sojourn here a while longer.

I need to abide with small town Indiana. You know me, I’ve been moving my whole life. I lived in four states before I was five years old.  In the last ten years, I’ve had seven homes, two of them overseas.  This staying put is foreign to me, and I get itchy to move on to the next thing. But it’s time to abide.

I need to abide to the end of things. I get excited about things at the beginning.  I get passionate and dreamy.  But I rarely follow through to the end of projects.  I put down the quilt pieces and start planning a gluten-free menu, which I abandon in favor of New York Times chocolate chip cookies, and then I think about how I need to knit a french press cozy.  Maybe now it’s time to finish some things, to abide with projects and ideas and see them through.

I want to abide with my kids, being more present when I’m present, and less distracted. I want to abide with my students and friends here in Upland, and with you friends on the blog (yes, I’m sticking with my blog, though still re-thinking some aspects of it all). I want to move a little more slowly through days, through books, through thoughts, abiding with them longer.

I want to continue on in the directions I’ve been traveling this year.

I think it’s time to sojourn here for a spell, here where life looks still, quiet, even boring and monotonous, because I think this is an underground year.  Verily, he says to me, unless a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. This is underground year, a die to self year.

After all, as NT Wright says in After You Believe, you can’t force changes in character on yourself.  They grow in subtle, quiet daily choices:

Character is a slowly forming thing. You can no more force character on someone than you can force a tree to produce fruit when it isn't ready to do so. The person has to choose, again and again, to develop the moral muscles and skills which will shape and form the fully flourishing character.

It’s a strange thing to me, to pick one word for a year, when really you have no idea what the year will bring. Can choosing a word change what the year brings to you? Or change the way you respond to it?  

Perhaps I’ll actually find that everything about my life this year will be overturned, and what the word really means for me is that Christ abides, and I abide in him, so I am unmoved.

Abide in me, O Lord, and I in Thee,

From this good hour, oh, leave me nevermore;

Then shall the discord cease, the wound be healed,

The lifelong bleeding of the soul be o’er.

Abide in me; o’ershadow by Thy love

Each half formed purpose and dark thought of sin;

Quench ere it rise each selfish, low desire,

And keep my soul as Thine, calm and divine.

As some rare perfume in a vase of clay,

Pervades it with a fragrance not its own,

So, when Thou dwellest in a mortal soul,

All Heaven’s own sweetness seems around it thrown.

Abide in me; there have been moments blest

When I have heard Thy voice and felt Thy power;

Then evil lost its grasp; and passion, hushed,

Owned the divine enchantment of the hour.

These were but seasons beautiful and rare;

Abide in me, and they shall ever be;

Fulfill at once Thy precept and my prayer,

Come, and abide in me, and I in Thee.

-- Harriet Beecher Stowe

quiet

As we drove through Lexington today, two-thirds of the way through our 13 hour trip, snow swirled around the car.  My mild, gray&brown winter turned white and very cold.

I'm home now, snow still falling, and I feel myself quieting, a daffodil bulb tucked in for the long night, a bear in hibernation, thinking about what I will be.

Or more specifically, what I will be in 2013.

///

It's only been nine months or so since this space took a turn away from the personal {family photos, recipes, a journal of the life of a family} towards the more public {more thoughts, more sharing, more of you} - a change I processed here and here as it was happening.

I've loved the change, and through it I've met some people who truly inspire and encourage me. I've also grown addicted to response, feedback, and approval, though.  So as the new year approaches,  I want to quiet myself for a bit, think through my motives, intentions, and goals for this space.  As the new year approaches, I'm thinking through who I want to be as a writer, a mother, a wife, a teacher, a neighbor, and a friend, and whether those hopes require any change here, or any more purposeful direction.

Will you share your new year's resolutions with me, if you have them?

church beyond starbucks

{When I was 22, I started writing a book.  Today when I plugged in my old external hard drive to look for a file with some Greek translations, I found the folder with all the work I had done on the book.  I was gratified to find that re-reading it, after almost ten years, wasn't too embarrassing.  Do you want to read the first chapter? I know.... no one reads posts this long on the internet.  But, because it makes me happy to listen to my younger, more sincere and serious heart, here it is.)

Church Beyond Starbucks: Searching for the Soul of the American Church (OR – Recovering authentic love and radical holiness in the American church)


By Amy Lepine

Chapter One: Introduction

When I was thirteen, my best friend Bekah drifted away from the church. Despite the fact that our youth group brought in rock bands and professional skaters and half-pipes to be relevant, she remained unconvinced. “I feel like it’s so much emotional manipulation,” she told me. The church was just another group trying to control us, to buy us; it was just another social game to master.

When I was sixteen, Leigh and Jeremiah had had enough of the social game. Most adults would tell them they were in an adolescent phase and just needed to mature, and so the only older Christians they would even talk to about religion were the few who would take them seriously. In the church, they found no place to admit doubt. They were considered in need of salvation if they had doubts – not to mention tattoos or bare feet. They liked music and literature and film and philosophy, and the church wasn’t speaking those languages. Instead, the church had practically banned those languages.

When I was eighteen, my friends and I dropped out of the college class at church, where we felt looked down upon for not becoming more and more involved in the certain “approved” venues of growth and leadership. We were less spiritual because we played lacrosse or joined sororities rather than leading the college class Bible studies.

When I was twenty, I spoke with European and American college and highschool students in Taize, a Catholic monastic retreat center in France. They had not been shepherded in their faith by their churches; to them, Christianity seemed like hollow tradition, a business or a set of rules. But in the simplicity of the communal life at Taize, in the silence and the prayers, they sensed something genuine. They were desperately seeking, but, as one said, “The Christians I know hate each other – and every Buddhist monk I’ve met seems to genuinely care for the people around him.”

When I was twenty-one, my friend Shawna left the church. She was a three-year old Christian, and I had known her for almost all of those three years. Initially she was so excited with her newfound faith, and her life changed instantly – she effortlessly gave up her old habits, and she loved learning about Jesus. The more involved in the church she became, though, the more disillusioned she became. First, she dropped out of the college class, and worked with the youth group like I did. Then she quit working with the youth group, under the pretense of being too busy job-hunting with only three months left till graduation. And finally she quit coming to church all together. She would still come to lunch once a week for prayer with Caroline and me, but that was the extent of her involvement with Christians.

“At the beginning, everything looked so good,” she said. “The deeper I got though, I found that no one was willing to really be intimate with me. They wanted to keep their lives together and looking good and under control, and they didn’t have room for me in that. They just wanted me to climb the same ladder they were climbing…but there was nothing genuine underneath their happy smiles and controlled lives.”

This week (I’m now a whopping 22 years old), I celebrated Thanksgiving with a group of fellow English teachers in southeast Asia. During a car ride, our conversation turned to church. We discussed the forms our worship and community had taken in the different cities where we taught, and how that differed from our practices in the States. Becky’s parents had offered to send her sermon tapes weekly from their church, but she didn’t want them – “How applicable would that be to me here? –‘And remember, folks, share your Mercedes this week’ – right.”

She told me a story about her home church in the Chicago area. Last year, living in Chicago and working two jobs, she was regularly attending church as well as a weekly women’s Bible study. But she kept getting pressure from a woman in the Bible study to join a second study. “I didn’t have time for another study, and honestly, I didn’t need it. I was growing a lot,” Becky said, “but she was making me feel guilty for not being involved enough. She said she had time for a different Bible study every night of the week.”

Sally had a question along the same lines. “You know how books often recommend prayer journaling? I’ve really been trying to keep a prayer journal this year, but I just can’t do it. I’m not a journaling kind of person, and I keep failing at this. But I’ve read some books that say that if you don’t keep a prayer journal, you won’t see God work at all…they practically suggest that if you don’t keep a prayer journal, you might not be a Christian. I know that’s not true, but I’m feeling really guilty…”

And this year I also met M. – a twenty-year-old southeast Asian student, and a new Christian. Her faith is unhindered by legalism. She is open about her sin, her failures and her repentance. She’s not trying to be successful according to some “Christian” ladder of success. Her joy in the Lord in evident, and she’s trying hard to love those around her in a sacrificial way. Her friends can see the difference in her life.

Why don’t these things that characterize her spiritual life characterize the lives of so many church members I know in America? Why is Christianity so appealing and full of life for her, but so full of hypocrisy, legalistic ambition, and apathy for so many of my friends in the American church?

I’m twenty-two years old, and I love the church. I love the American church in all of its failures and inconsistencies, its off-key voices, its silly and grand traditions, its Sunday schools, its coffee and donuts, its youth retreats and acoustic guitars. But the church is losing my friends, and a huge chunk of my generation, for many reasons that boil down to one: praxis. Not one of my friends has left the church after doubting the propositional truth of the Bible. Not one has had a philosophical problem with the gospel. But friend after friend has turned away from the church because they don’t see people living out their faith. Put simply, they don’t see genuine love. They may find superficiality, legalism, hypocrisy, materialism, or commercialization, but they don’t see love.

In many cases, the church in America has yet to realize the fact that my postmodern generation is not going to be convinced by arguments against evolution, by historical proofs of the resurrection, or by the number of authentic ancient manuscripts that we have of the book of Isaiah. My postmodern friends want to hear the Story, and they want to see the Story coming true in specific lives and in communities living and loving authentically. They will believe in the Resurrection when they see lives characterized by spiritual Resurrection.

Rather than living out authentic love and radical holiness, the church has tried to reach my generation by being relevant. In some ways, it wasn’t a bad idea. It began when someone said, “If we could get a Starbucks-like café in our church, I bet we could really draw in the coffee shop crowd. We could have an event on Saturday nights, with live music and coffee, and maybe people who aren’t usually comfortable at church would come and learn to be comfortable at church. We could have the café open on Sunday mornings in between services too.” It was a good idea, and it met my friends where they were, putting the gospel into words that were familiar to them.

But at some point people began to get church and Starbucks confused. What, exactly, is the difference between a sermon and a decaf latte? What, exactly, is the difference between watching a talented band of musicians and singing praises to God? Does being conformed into the image of Christ mean wearing Abercrombie vintage t’s and a sterling silver cross ring? Does having a quiet time require owning a real leather journal?

Suddenly, what had been a creative way to reach a group of people was doing just the opposite - turning them off. My friends already had a Starbucks - they didn’t need another one. They didn’t need or want a church that conducted market research and surveys in order to offer a list of spiritual services and goods according to the felt needs of their target audience. They needed a church; they needed intimate relationships with set-apart people who love God. They needed a challenge to radical holiness. But all they found when they went to church was a watered down version of the culture they already had, another marketed product desperately claiming to be what will make you happy. This church was popular, and so some of them went, but it didn‘t mean much. And those who went didn’t usually stay long – after a while, the hypocrisy and superficiality became too much, and they left, still looking for something real.

The American church has often done a fabulous job of contextualizing - framing the gospel in meaningful and relevant terms and forms for American Christians. The problem is that now sometimes “Christianity” has become more associated with its contextualized trappings than with the actual gospel; Christianity has become a popular coffee shop, fitting too neatly into American life, rather than a message of authentic love that turns the world (and the believers themselves) upside down (Acts 17:6). American Christianity has pursued relevance at the expense of meaning; it has become a set of habits, values, and practices that aren’t necessarily essential to Biblical faith and that can obscure the gospel. Christianity has become comfortable; the church, seeking acceptance and marketability, has watered down the powerful gospel.

What I want to do in this book is ask what would happen if we took the “American” off of “American church”. If we stripped off the contextualized trappings of our faith, what would we have? Would we find the roots of an ancient and life-changing faith? Would we find something real for my generation to cling to? Drawing upon my experiences and those of my friends in the American church, and comparing and contrasting that with my experiences in the church in Europe and Asia, I want to look at the negative ways in which our church has become a culture - that is, ways in which the church has become a marketed product or an ingrained habit instead of a dynamic group of people working out their salvation with fear and trembling. And then I want to look at some positive ways we can recover authentic love and radical holiness in our spiritual communities.

My hope for this book is that my own reflections will spark conversations among my peers and among those who are discipling my generation. What should our church look like? What trappings need to be peeled away? There is nothing wrong with seeking to be culturally relevant, but we must guard against letting that become our most important goal. How can we build a church that is characterized by authentic, biblical love put into action? Ultimately, I want to see the church in America characterized by authentic love and radical holiness, not by a set of popular marketed catchphrases and products.

I have seen this kind of love and holiness, in both individuals and communities.

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Though authentic love and radical holiness manifest themselves in every aspect of the life of the Body, in this book I will only look at a few aspects. Specifically, I will look at those aspects in which I see that the church has taken on America’s values instead of embracing counter-cultural biblical values. First, we’ll survey the landscape of the church in my generation, looking briefly at the history of evangelicalism in this century and where it has left us. Before delving into specific aspects of Body life, I’ll begin with a general look at syncretism (the blending of several religions) in the church, showing broadly how Christianity in America has blended sycretistically with American values.

Then, more specifically, we’ll study what I see as the key obstacles that need to be transformed in the American church in order for us to move toward authentic love and radical holiness: materialism, commercialism and commodification, superficial community, and the balance of truth and praxis. Finally, we’ll take a look at the first church in Acts in order to establish some principles to guide the church in the 21st century.

In this book, I may say some offensive things about the church. I may make some generalizations that aren’t true in every case. And I will certainly call the church to a high standard that I myself fail to reach. As I examine my church, I must necessarily examine myself as well, and often we both need serious adjustments. May God grant us wisdom to

getting in line

Today was Rosie's  - excuse me, she told her teacher she preferred to be called Rosemary - Rosemary's first day of preschool.

As someone who never attended preschool - who never went to any school at all until the age of ten - I have had more than my fair share of apprehension about Rosie going off to school at the tender age of 3 1/2.

My sweet little extrovert, on the other hand, has had less than her share of apprehension.  She's been waiting for this day for weeks.

And this isn't just any preschool.  In a town of 2,000,  you already know almost all the three year olds in the class, who their mamas are, and where they live.  The preschool is run by the Methodist church, and it's down the street from the library and the dance studio.

You can walk there in the starting-to-be-cool autumn mornings with your daughter and her best friend. (And someday, maybe you'll be able to stop at the cafe just down the road for a little treat on the way.)

I stayed dry-eyed, dropping Rosemary off.  We're just talking about ten hours a week.  When I picked her up at 11:30 and asked her about her morning, she said despondently, "They just made us get in line everywhere."

I know she needs to learn to get in line...but I hope my little sweetheart always feels free to march to the beat of her own drummer, too.

our sixth anniversary, and divorce

Just after our one year anniversary, Jack and I flew from Hanoi, where we had spent a month leading an English language camp, to Seattle, where we had decided to make our new home.

My memories of that first jet-lagged week in Seattle are both clear and cloudy. We stayed at Jack's sister's place, in the spare room, and took dim evening walks around Greenlake. Everything was grey, cool, clean, and silent, compared to the sensory overload of Hanoi; we lay in the double bed on top of a white down comforter and watched The Office on DVD, long hours of the night when we couldn't sleep. In the mid-morning we ate yogurt and granola at a sun-dappled table and wondered precisely what kind of new land we had discovered.

Jack's sister and her husband shared their house with Anna and Luke, all of them Taylor grads who had married just after graduation and found their ways to Seattle. The four of them welcomed us into their little community in the seconds before it began disintegrating.

I always think of Anna and Luke around my wedding anniversary, because that week they were making a mix cd to celebrate their third year of marriage. They had compiled a playlist of their favorite songs from the year, and were burning it to CDs, hand decorating covers, to share with all their friends.

They had made something lovely together that otherwise would never have existed.

We adopted that idea, and every year around our anniversary I post our song list, Jack draws some cover art, and we pass CDs out. Every year I think about how I don't listen to as much music as I used to, and every year I think about the first mix cd Jack made for me, that softened my angry heart in Chiangmai, and every year I think about Anna and Luke.

Anna and Luke divorced two years ago. I don't think they ever got to a year six playlist. I never knew them as well as I wanted to, and I can't really say if life is better for them each now, apart, than it was then, together, but whenever I think of them (which is whenever I think of my own anniversary) I'm sad; because whenever there is love, and then there isn't love anymore, something beautiful is lost, broken. It sounds cliched, but: they were so young for it to end.

I wish we could go back to that cool late summer in Seattle, before so many things were broken (though some are stronger now), and just share a house again, and watch tv late into the night, and eat breakfast across the table from each other. A little more openhearted this time, a little more wise, we'd listen together to the music they made.

i (want to want to) surrender all

I’m alone in my room, sitting in the center of the double bed, thinking about how I should be ready to give anything to God.


I’m about four years old, and I’m thinking about Abraham offering Isaac on the altar to God.

I feel compelled to offer God what is most precious to me, too, and so there are two options: brown bunny or strawberry girl. It’s hard to decide which I value more, or at least I pretend to myself that it is; in my heart I know strawberry girl is the one I love. I just can’t bear the thought of losing her. So I tell myself I love them pretty equally, and pick up brown bunny.

“Here, God, you can have it,” I say out loud, but nothing happens. I stand on the bed and lift both arms, raising brown bunny as high as I can toward the ceiling, feeling like a prophet from the pictures in my Bible. “Here, God, you can have it!” I say again.

He doesn’t zap brown bunny out of my hands, though, and I sit back on the bed, disappointed not in God, but in myself.

God knew that I hadn’t offered my best to him. That’s why he didn’t take it.

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I surrender all, I surrender all. All to thee, my precious savior, I surrender all.

These days, I barely sing those kinds of words. My goal in worship now is not so much to offer my best, most-beloved possessions to God as it is to try to be more honest with God.

If the words were, “I want to surrender all,” or, better, “I want to want to surrender all,” then I could sing them, but no one writes songs that way, or if they do, we don’t play them at church.

All I really pray, these days, is “Help us to know how much you love us,” because it’s only when I know that, when I believe that God saved Isaac and provided a ram in the thicket, that God saved us and provided his son in our place, it’s only if I really believe that he loves me that much, that I might be willing to trust him with my all, with my everything, with my strawberry girl and my brown bunny, both.

do I stay or do I go?

It's been almost exactly two years since we moved from Seattle to Upland.

(photo by Jim Garringer)

We were thankful for the job, but it's fair (and perhaps an understatement) to say we had some trepidation about the location, and all we were leaving behind.

Upland.  Four square miles. No stoplight. Really, less a town in the middle of cornfields than a cornfield with a few buildings in between the stalks. The dictionary definition of a Christian bubble.  We told ourselves that we'd try it for three years, and then maybe move on (like back to the mountains, and the oceans, and the downtowns).

(At new faculty orientation, they told us that's what all the incoming faculty say, and then they all stay here forever. We laughed nervously.)

This summer we've decided to try to buy a house. A hundred year old bungalow, a place with a little land.  A place that will need some work - that will require investment.  A place where we'll plant trees.  Where we will put down roots.

I've never been one for roots. And although this decision to stay feels right to me,  this week it's been throwing me for an existential loop along the lines of "We are all going to die one day!  What are we doing with our lives?!"  I'm all set to tap-dance out of here looking for a newer, bigger, better adventure.

It sounds silly, but I'm serious. Life is short, and is this the right way to spend it?  In a small town in middle America, raising two kids, teaching ESL to rich international students?  Remodeling an old farmhouse, growing blueberries and corn, swimming at the lake every day with our friends? Experimenting with more sustainable ways of living, reading a lot of books, watching too much tv?  It sounds like a pleasant life, but is it a well-stewarded life?

It isn't exactly how I envisioned my life. For a girl who was raised on Amy Carmichael and told to do "big things" for God, to change the world, somehow saving the My Little Ponies from the (invisible) monsters every single day just doesn't feel quite as meaningful as saving child prostitutes in another country.

 No matter how much I know in my head that there is no sacred/secular divide - that God is as present in the changing of the diapers as in the changing of evil regimes - that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first - I have to work, hard, every day to reorient myself to the realities of this upside down kingdom.

But at the same time - even while I learn to value the quotidian mysteries of faith and life - I do believe it's right to question my assumptions. It's fair to ask if this is where we belong, and if this is the best way to steward our gifts.  Is my restlessness a selfish restlessness, or a holy restlessness?  Am I valuing comfort and safety more than I should be?

Amy Carmichael wrote, "Verily, the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul," and I don't want to totally quiet the voice that tells me not to get too comfortable here.

Growing rooted, but staying open. How do I do it?

my grandmother

Grandma with Rosie, June 2012.


Today my grandmother, after a bout of pneumonia, had a feeding tube inserted. She will never "eat" another meal again.

I can't stop thinking about that.

About food, and what nourishes us; about breaking bread, and about doing it together; about Eucharist, and how every bite is grace; about life without these rituals of obtaining food, preparing dishes, eating a meal, and washing up.

About the turkey and gravy over biscuits she always made the weekend after Thanksgiving. About the nutty healthy cookies she kept in the freezer in case we came over.

About Last Suppers, and how I hope she had one worth remembering, and how I want her to know that every bite of bread, broken, is forgiveness; that every sip from the shared cup can be hope, sweet on the tongue.

Grandma with her mother and with me, June 1981.

my journey towards mutuality

Today I'm linking up with Rachel Held Evans in her Week of Mutuality, dedicated to discussing an egalitarian view of gender. The goal is to show how scripture, tradition, reason, and experience all support a posture of equality toward women, one that favors mutuality rather than hierarchy, in the home, Church, and society. Rather than digging into debate, I simply want to share the story of my journey towards egalitarianism. Later this week, I hope to post on 1 Corinthians 11 and on how I define feminism.


My parents have a beautiful, loving marriage of thirty-three years. Despite fairly significant differences in the way they approach life (Mom’s a vegetarian, for example, while Dad’s as red-blooded a carnivore as they come), they are loyal to each other in every way. They love and serve God. They make decisions together, and they treat each other with kindness and respect.

They are also pretty fierce complementarians. They believe that God designed different, but equally valuable, roles for men and women in the home and at church, that these roles are hierarchical, and that the truth about God and his church is best displayed in a marriage where the husband is a servant-leader and the wife submits to him as his helpmate. They taught me how to defend this position, and they taught me that it was the only legitimate interpretation of Scripture.

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Buckled in the eighties minivan, we pass a church marquee. The pastor’s name, printed right there on the sign, in front of God and everybody, is a woman’s name. I mock it, the same way I mock Michael Dukakis with the neighbor kids in the backyard – that is to say, I mock it out of total ignorance. A female pastor?! Well, they clearly don’t believe that Scripture is God-breathed! Hope somebody leads them to Christ!

At Walnut Valley Christian Academy, we have a four-year class called Worldview. Spring semester, freshman year, we read Expository Preaching by Haddon Robinson. For final projects we prepare sermons. I am nervous, and overcome stage fright by imagining myself as Hilary Clinton (true story). I preach, to my co-ed class of ten, on Daniel, and Mrs. Fuqua gives me an A+.

Sophomore year I self-identify as a feminist. We study How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Fee and Stuart, and we write in-depth papers on small portions of Scripture. I don’t want to be bored with the project. So I choose “that passage” from 1 Timothy 2. You know the one. “I do not permit a woman to teach, or to have authority.” I read the commentaries we have at home. I conclude that while some of Paul’s principles did seem to be cultural rather than timeless, the fact that he referred to pre-fall Creation order (“for Adam was formed first, then Eve”) to make his case seemed to indicate that these were in fact guidelines for all time. However, I decide that the way he combined “teaching” and “exercising authority” meant that the only role specifically barred from women was that of head teaching pastor. I feel my conclusion is a little arbitrary.

Meanwhile, I take on about every leadership position open to me in the church. I lead small groups of junior high girls every Tuesday night. I am a counselor on retreats. I exhort the whole youth group, boys and girls, about our besetting sin of materialism. I testify in front of the church (the mega-church) about the value of community. In college I join a similar church, but almost immediately I find the college group oppressive. There is a clear ladder of spiritual superiority, a clear moral mold. I ditch, and help lead the youth group instead. The first time I lead a small group Bible study for girls, my co-teacher looks at me amazed. “I think you have the gift of teaching,” she says.

I go to southeast Asia, and I see God do miraculous things. I begin to wonder if the gift of apostleship (church-planting) is open to women, because a new church is being born around me, in the middle of a spiritual desert.

Then a church from my hometown asks if I’ll send a video message for the Father-Daughter Banquet in February. It’s not my church, and I’m not sure why they’ve asked me, but I agree, and carve out time to record. I speak about the things I appreciate in the way my dad raised me, connecting his parenting to appropriate Scriptures, and encouraging the fathers at the banquet to imitate my dad’s example. I send the video off and forget about it.

Until a few weeks later, when I hear that things didn’t go so well. In fact, some men in the audience, some male leaders in the church, think my video was wrong. Not that what I said was wrong: but that I, as woman, said it to men.

I thought that's what they had asked me to do.

A little bit heartbroken, I kind of go, “to hell with it,” and keep doing the work God has put in front of me.

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Despite all this, I never really explored egalitarianism until this year. Perhaps I was hesitant to make a fuss. But I’ve grown increasingly ecumenical in my theology, and a solid half of the people who mentored me spiritually in my twenties were egalitarian. We rarely spoke of it, this belief that hierarchy was a result of the fall, and that embracing the kingdom of God included embracing the mutuality of pre-fall creation, but it was clear in the way they lived. When we joined an Episcopal church, I felt I should be conversant with the theological arguments for women in leadership. I read How I Changed My Mind About Women in Leadership, and it was interesting. When I read Finally Feminist, though, my jaw dropped, because this was an honest, compelling way to understand Scripture, and one I had never heard.

Though I’ve always been a feminist, a part of me did not want the egalitarian case to be so convincing. I didn’t want to disagree theologically with my parents, especially on a subject that is pretty foundational for them, and for most of the Christians I grew up with. Beyond that, for me the freedom and fullness and possibility of egalitarianism is scarier, and harder, than the clearly defined roles in complementarianism.

But what interpretation is easiest for me to live with isn’t the best evaluative question. Which one is the truest to Scripture?

This is how I lean, now. I lean towards mutuality. I know, like any good student of expository preaching, that you can’t make a watertight case either way. Intellectually, though, I think Finally Feminist is the best interpretation of these scriptures that I’ve found, and it makes sense in my life experience, too. I’m wondering if it might be time to make a fuss about it.