Thoughts about pain

            As I have written a few times, part of the reason why I started this blog back in December, 2010 was that I had the time to do so, due to not having the physical stamina to do a normal job.  Further, over the past three months or so, I haven’t felt sufficiently well to think enough to even blog.  Strangely, the past week or so, I have begun to feel better with regard to the latter, but there wasn’t a specific subject on my mind.

            On Friday, I was eating lunch, and I cracked a tooth down to the nerve.  It was a little painful at first, and increased over the weekend such as to realize that I needed to have it dealt with first thing Monday morning.  I did exactly that, calling my dentist about 8:15 am.  By 9:15, I had been asked to come in, had it x-rayed, had it confirmed that it was broken, given anesthetic, had it pulled, and was paying the dentist.  About 12:30 pm, the anesthetic began to wear away.  I have had teeth pulled before, and had been given warnings about pain staying around for a while, but there had never been a problem.  This time, pain was a real problem—one whole side of my head hurt.  Soon thereafter, it was off to the pharmacy to get a prescription of acetaminophen with codene filled.  Even with that, there still was some pain.  Today (Tuesday) at about 2:30 pm, I could finally say to myself that I don’t need to take the next acetaminophen with codene pill.

            Strangely enough, I feel like thinking.  One particular thought occurred to me over the past day and a half.  It is about the significance of pain.  I have never gotten around to reading C S Lewis’ The Problem of Pain, although I have certainly heard speakers and read authors make reference to major points that appear in that book, and understand that it is generally considered the major work on the subject.  This thought is really basic:  it couldn’t have been produced while experiencing significant pain.  Over the past day and a half, much of the time, I didn’t feel like doing anything other than holding my hands on my head.  On the converse, if one’s not going through significant pain, there is a degree of thinking about it as a memory, or something that is, to some degree, disconnected from one’s current state.  In other words, even as a believer in Jesus, when I was in significant pain, I was not particularly waxing thoughtful over its role in reminding me of the sinfulness of man and the all-powerfulness of God.  In fact, I couldn’t think of much else than wanting the pain to go away, and not knowing what else to do about it, or, if I had an idea about what to do about it, doing it.

Thoughts on edification and traditional structure

    I have written in the past that I have been struggling with health issues, but over the last couple of months, I have not blogged because I haven’t felt like writing , reading, or even thinking about anything of significant complexity. Hopefully, I am getting over that, given that I feel like writing today. The feeling of not wishing to do anything more complex than staring at the tv or doing simple things around the house is something I have never experienced before, and has given me experiential insight to how others feel about certain aspects of life.
There are times when thoughts have been bouncing through my head, which I would wish to comment on. One concerns an aspect of a favorite verse of those believers in simple, organic church, 1 Thessalonians 5:11, where it states that the believers in a church are to comfort and edify each other. Oftentimes, in the writings I read, the point of the comment on this verse is on the words “each other”, and the point that the traditional western way of one person (pastor, priest, or whatever) doing almost all the speaking makes the “each other” part practically impossible. One thing that I have noticed, but not seen commented on, is that a very large part of what is being called teaching, or edifying, is not so much teaching, but merely entertaining or inspiring talk. Further, a large portion of what could be called teaching is blatantly unbalanced, in that the speaker asserts a point, but does little to factually back up his/her point, or deal with those who would maintain a differing point of view as to the topic’s understanding, but merely asserts his/her idea (which can sometimes be way off track from the historical understanding of believers over the centuries, or even most learned believers today) and supports the assertion with clever phrasing, and anecdotal stories. Once one sees the difference between the two, it is amazing how much teaching has little true teaching in it, according to the way your local school teacher understands the word “teach”.
Therefore, more than ever before, I am coming to believe that the participatory Bible study, as implied in Acts 20, is far superior to sermons in teaching believers about faith in Jesus. Sermons, like other speeches, are totally dependent upon the speaker for the quality of teaching within them, and most persons giving sermons have concerns such as protecting their position, and using the point to increase support of their organization’s program. My feeling is that oftentimes that reaction is so buried underneath their previous experiences that they have no idea that they are even doing that.
Just in case this sounds too vague, let me give a few examples that I have seen. I know of a famous tv preacher that usually goes by “Doctor _____”. Strangely, he nor his organization will state where he got his doctorate from. Also strangely, he has written a book about integrity, and in this book, they somehow failed to put Dr. in front of his name. I further think of every sermon I have ever heard on tithing, in comparison to Bible commentaries clearly teaching that there are two tithes, at the least. Yes, I’ve heard that John McDonald does teach that the tithes are part of the completed Old Covenant, but I didn’t personally hear that, as one just can’t listen to everyone. I could go on and on, but it would sound like I have some kind of vendetta against all kinds of traditional organizational leaders, and I don’t. It’s just that they don’t usually have the intellectual check on them that the professor (including secular schools and subjects) has on him/her to keep their facts straight.
There is something I learned many years ago, when I was in college. I saw it in the college fellowship I was part of, and also in a revival trend I was involved with, and an institutional church I was part of later that would have an “open mike” night such that anyone could share. That is, that more learning as to how to function as a body of believers came out of someone occasionally standing up and saying something incorrect than from the rule of many institutions that allowed only those certified speakers to speak. The person getting up and saying the wrong thing taught those listening how to discern teaching, how to lovingly correct someone, and how to present the difference between correct and incorrect teaching. Opposingly, I have been part of institutional systems which had certified speakers who still taught incorrectly, and, even more than then, I see no practical means of correcting such a person, particularly if such a person is more concerned with holding onto position over following the Spirit.  

On simplicity and complexity within faith in Jesus

            Yesterday, I was watching a tv program, in which a reporter was interviewing Walter Isaacson, the writer who wrote the biography of Steve Jobs.  In it, it was said that, while Jobs and Steve Wosniak visited India for seven months after they first became financially set, one idea that influenced Jobs’ later career that he absorbed from Zen was the idea that simplicity was the ultimate sophistication.  One can easily see how that influenced the products Jobs was connected with for the rest of his life, and how those products have influenced the world.

            As a believer in Jesus, I recognize that every philosophy has some element of truth in it, and sometimes we can learn from it without saying that such fact negates the ultimate truth of God, as centered in Jesus.  I fully recognize that some people, including some of my fellow believers, have problems with that.  One great example is Martin Luther King.  He went to Boston University Seminary to study whether the principles of Ghandi on passive civil disobedience for the purpose of social change, which he based on Buddhism, were equally applicable within a Christian belief structure.  Under normal instances, I wouldn’t recommend Boston University Seminary to any believer, and one only has to go to their website and spend a few seconds to see why.  Also, I am certain that King already had the conclusions of his doctoral thesis in his head, to a degree, before he ever even applied there, in the sense that Ghandi’s principles would also apply within a Christian framework.  In this case, there was a professor at BU that was as significant an expert on Ghandi as one could find at that time.  That also would be why King chose to lead a church in Montgomery, AL after graduating from seminary, when he could have had a professorship at many evangelical seminaries.  That is why, as I have stated previously, that Soledad O’Brien of CNN’s statement, in the documentary on King CNN aired, that King was “an accidental leader” is, at the least, untrue, and, at the worst, revisionist history to make a point that isn’t held up by the facts.

            Back to Jobs.  In marketing a product, the idea that simplicity is sophistication is true.  I was just given a used iPod for Christmas, with no directions.  So far, I have figured out that it has about 300 R&B recordings in it.  One of these days, I’ll figure out how to actually hear something out of it.  Then will come erasing what’s in it and putting in something I actually want to hear, provided it doesn’t cost too much, which at this time is any number over zero.  Part of the MacIntosh’s genius, with other things have followed, is that people like a product far better if it is simple enough that one can just guess what to do with a thing and be able to use it.  If you question that, when was the last time you read a car’s owner’s manual before driving it for the first time?  To quote that famous Ed Asner tv commercial, me neither.

            As it applies to faith in Jesus, though, this idea is largely not true.  There is a sense that all a person needs to be saved is to accept, “Jesus loves me.”  I am thinking of a man I know with about an 80 IQ. That’s about what he can handle, and that’s got to be OK from the standpoint of us humans.  It raises a lot of unanswerable questions that none of us are big enough to handle.  The larger idea is that, if (in the sense of the logical if-then sentence) God created the universe, which includes man, who, after the Fall, has a body, soul and spirit, and can give or not give his/her self to accept Jesus as Savior and Lord (however that works, which God alone understands), then mankind, in having been given dominion over the earth, has the God-given ability to learn about this universe while we live here.  Whether we choose to live to honor Jesus or not, we can learn facts about the complexity God put into His creation.  This includes people who do not honor Jesus with their lives learning such facts, even though they may misinterpret them, and people who do live to honor Jesus either misinterpreting those same facts in a different direction, and/or not caring about the details of God’s creation or being unable to make sense of the details, as with my aforementioned brother in Jesus, above. 

            Further, God, somehow, in His all-powerfulness, has chosen to make how we come to faith in Him beyond our understanding.  He has told us in scripture that He chose us, and that we didn’t choose Him.  I think back to when I came to faith in Jesus.  It felt in my spirit that I had a choice to make.  We have heard this wording, “make a decision for Christ”, or something like it, in evangelistic messages for our lifetimes, and most of us can look at a specific moment where we know that we moved from the unsaved to the saved, but we don’t understand how that works.

            I recently have been in correspondence with two persons who see themselves as leaders within the church.  Both occasionally write in a manner that seems to imply that to be intellectual in one’s approach to life and faith is a negative thing.  I have minimal doubt that neither has any significant amount of persons who respect them as a leader who have significantly greater education than they do.  They have valid points that, over history, many persons have used their intellect to deny God or, while affirming the God of the Bible, lead others down various dead ends or into incorrect understandings.  Part of the problem is that there is no simple rule for being able to determine who presents a proper understanding of a point of faith, and who doesn’t.  Oftentimes, as with the two persons I mention above, there is an implication that intelligence and education is a mark of improper teaching.  I also can find others who imply the opposite.  Even more irritatingly, some teachers are correct and excellent on one topic, and are off track on a different one.  An example is the second century church leader Tertullian.  His writings tell us about what was going on in the church in the generation just after the church in the Bible.  Still, for some reason, he wrote that Paul wrote the book of Hebrews, which, for a number of reasons, we can see is incorrect.  We can recognize that he was a respected leader in the church of that time.  He tells us details about those times that, if one throws them out, we know nothing about.  Was he not feeling well the day he wrote that?  I think of that given that, over the past few months, I have not been thinking as well as I used to.  If you knew me slightly, you might not be able to tell, but I can.  That’s why I’ve written few blogs over the past few months, as I just didn’t feel like even sitting and typing.  Could he have been going through something like that?  I believe that many of us believers have felt like crawling under a couch when Pat Robertson, Harold Camping, Gene Edwards, and others have said certain things.  I guess I think of that in that I’m still about twenty years younger than those three men, and I’m beginning to struggle to say things just right.

            Now, on the opposite side, sometimes I see things said due to a person thinking he/she is saying something bold, when it is just faith mixed with ignorance.  I know a leader that has personal leadership ability, but has had the tendency to read one book (which may be a popular, but unbalanced view of a subject) and go running with its conclusions, without bothering to examine writings that hold to the opposite side of a subject.  If this is mixed with the traditional “sermon” system, he gets up and says things again and again, the situation is such that others cannot challenge his point of view, but don’t change their lives with regard to this point because he just hasn’t been convincing. The results are that the leader is frustrated, and he is actually building a wall between him and the people who are supposedly looking to him as leader, putting up with him for other reasons, such as liking the other people around the group, or that it is always easier to keep the status quo than change.

            I feel the need to be sufficiently vague in what I’ve written above, and possibly it just doesn’t make sense outside of my head, but I cannot recall seeing or hearing someone attempt to address this point, so I’ve given a stab at it.  As an elder at a church I once was part of named Walt Thompson said more than once, “Take what’s good and pray about the rest.”  Even better yet, if I was unclear or flat our wrong, in your opinion, write me and tell me why.

New Year's Day 2013

            New Year’s Day, 2013.  I have blogged very little for the last couple of months because I feel too tired to think.  My son is in the Navy, so I am applying to be officially his dependent, which has been practically the case for quite a while, so I can be on his health insurance.  I don’t feel like reading.  A copy of “Master Leaders” by Barna is sitting by my feet, and I am most of the way done with it.  When one can barely get oneself going to do a few basic things in a day, the wisdom of leaders responsible for a lot doesn’t seem very relevant.  

            One of the few things I have done lately has been watch television.  I’m a sports fan, but I’m sick of watching sports, as I really don’t care about most of what I see.  As for news, we went over the “fiscal cliff” last night.  This is a great example of extreme speech.  When you go off a real cliff, you’ll be dead in a few seconds.  With this, we walked onto a rocky slope.  On a real rocky slope, one can still fall down and hurt oneself, even very badly.  I wish I could deliver a group insult for their work.  My thinking is that, if one works at McDonald’s, one messes up once in the first few days, one gets a stern warning, mess up a second time, you’re fired.  Most of our politicians in Washington are there as they get paid far better than McD’s people, for work that would get them fired.  I think of a line from a Larry Norman song, “Don’t ask me for the answers/I’ve only got one./A man leaves his darkness/When he follows the Son.”

Some thoughts on God's ways of correcting one

On my last writing, I finished by saying,

That’s one of the great things about using participatory Bible studies instead of sermons—if someone doesn’t understand what you are saying, which includes you leaving out some thoughts in your head that tie two points together, that person can ask, and you can correct yourself, or maybe realize that you are running down a mental rabbit trail to nowhere. The greater problem is for those of us who are either leaders or more highly educated accepting correction when God somehow chooses to send it through someone less educated or with less leadership ability or who shows normally less obedience or faithfulness or commitment.

            Carolyn Spence commented that she would like me to develop that thought more, so I will attempt to.  Many (although not all) persons in this network do not know me personally.  If you knew me, it would filter out and add certain aspects to what I am attempting to communicate, and that occurs wherever you interact with persons whom you know to some degree.  Since this is not the case for most, I need to tell you a little about me.  There are persons I know, particularly in some traditional Pentecostal institutions which honor zeal or excitement over intellectual study, who might take this as a defense of being zealous over having put in time in study (and not just in Christian studies, but also in almost any practical subject).  That’s not me.  As a young believer I learned that, part of what shows that the God of the Bible is truly God is that, to speak creation into existence, before creation, God thoroughly understood all the various things that make the universe what it is, from laws of astrophysics in the universe to what works at the subatomic level to dna, much of which the intellectually greatest of us humans have begun to understand to a degree only over the last few generations.  God understood it sufficiently to speak it into existence.  Then, He gave us a group of writings that speak to persons from extremely primitive to our current modern technological culture.  From what we see in Genesis about the fall, He could and did even conceive alternatives, one of which He put in place at the Fall, and another of which He will put into place near the end, at the least.  To say that sentence doesn’t mean that I, or you, begin to understand it. Even then, maybe, even probably, we are just guessing to the best of our limited understanding. 

            To that effect, what He is doing is spiritual.  When I prayed to accept Jesus as my Savior, something happened.  I felt it, but I can’t explain it.  Later, I learned that I didn’t choose Him, He chose me.  It felt at the time like I chose Him, but I believe God is not a man that He should lie, so somehow it is true.  Maybe after this life is over, He’ll explain it to us, and maybe we won’t care. 

            To the subject at hand, I’ll tell you a story that first brought this aspect to my attention.  I came to faith in Jesus between by freshman and sophomore years in high school.  After graduating, I went to a nearby public liberal arts college.  By the Spirit, He directed me to getting connected to a group of fellow Christian students of all different backgrounds for mutual support and to be a witness of Jesus to the campus community, which, of course, has somewhat of an anti-Christian leaning to its culture.  This group was about 50 on a campus of 4000.  I’m not saying, by any means, that we were the only believers on campus, as I’m sure there were believers who just got on campus and off, and had other things in life going on.  Anyway, one of these other believers was a young woman named Kathy, also a freshman, who had been messing with Zen through her high school years, and had come to faith in Jesus over the previous summer.  Her wardrobe still reminded one of someone who had just walked out of an ashram.  When winter term came around, a young man named Mike came to campus.  He’d been hiking around the country, and it seems God started speaking to him while touring the cathedrals of Montreal, and, if I recall correctly, doing drugs.  Somewhere during the first week of school, Kathy and Mike wound up in a conversation, and Mike accepted Jesus as his Savior.  The next Thursday, I ran into Mike for the first time, and we had a short conversation, and realized that this was the person I had heard had gotten saved during the previous week during about the last sentence of the conversation.  The next weekend, some of the students in this group (I was not there that day), for whatever reason, or for the experience of it, visited a church which might fit into what Frank Viola describes as “wacky”, or, to put it into conventional terms, old-time Pentecostal.  Mike was with the group, and as none of the other persons came from that background, they directed Mike to a professor who is a believer and could explain what went on (the good, the bad, and the ugly) better.

            The next Thursday, I ran into Mike again.  In the course of a conversation, Mike said something (I no longer remember what) which, as soon as I heard it, I knew was something true about following Jesus, but which had never occurred to me before, and I knew that I, or at least my spirit, hadn’t ever heard.  Exactly what it was isn’t the point.  The point is that it was a jolt to my spirit that I had been desiring to follow Jesus for about four years, and someone who had been a believer for a week and a half was teaching me!  Now, I had grown up going to an intellectualistic institutional church which was always led, by denominational decree, by a person with a master’s in theology.  This started showing me that, in reality, leadership, in this case teaching, is by gifting, not position or title.  As I would know him for the next couple of years, I came to see that God gave him certain abilities immediately that I would never have.

            This is one of the wonderful things about the true church, that is, groups of believers.  God is showing us what true spirituality is by having the true church function in a manner different than businesses, government, or the military.  Now, I was still decades away from even realizing simple, organic church existed.  After I graduated from college, and particularly after getting married, I knew that there was something special and more powerful in a Godly way about that informal group in college than the institutional churches I was part of once I was living in the “adult” world.  Not just in salvation, but in many aspects of sanctification, we can look back and feel within one’s spirit, “How could I have missed that?”  Even if afterward, a certain thing looks like an intellectual point, it actually is a spiritual one.  You cannot learn the point, one must follow Jesus and eventually experience it, and then know what God said in the Bible.  The rabbis of Jesus’ day missed the prophecies of Him, and we almost assuredly are not  understanding some of the prophecies of His coming again the way we will when we can look back at it.

            So far, I have discussed the intellectual aspect.  Leadership ability can be a natural gift or a spiritual gift.  We know of persons, both believers and non-, who have an ability to lead, either in general, or in specific situations, and to differing degrees.  The military believes that it can teach leadership, but that is difficult to clarify in a situation in which leadership is stratified by titular position.  In many capitalistic businesses, leadership is nothing more than a position, its title and responsibility.  I have had many managers at work who both didn’t have a hint of even caring about leading the persons who reported to them.  The manager expected the amount of respect that went with his position sufficient for all in a working group to collect a paycheck every week or two.  In government, such as in the U.S. where I live, we elect leaders, but I don’t remember if I have ever met one of these “leaders”.   I am certain I could meet some if I would go out of my way and find out about the meetings of one of the political parties (assuming it is a major party). 

            In the world, it is a threat to power to open a situation where those who have less power can ask a question, which is why we often see conflict between politicians and reporters. As the world’s way of doing leadership was forced into the church, much of institutional church has operated that way for centuries.  In a fallen world, a major reason behind it is that those in power are protecting themselves from being challenged or embarrassed.  In a true church, Jesus is the Head, we are all followers, and, to honor Him, we should all be attempting to build up each other.  If we don’t, it is still a teachable moment.  Even when I was in institutional churches, oftentimes the greatest lessons in faith came from something not as planned, or, unfortunately, someone in their humanity attempting to cover up something going wrong (at least in their own mind). 

            The last category is learning from someone who normally has shown less obedience (to the Holy Spirit), or faithfulness, or commitment. This takes situations which are closer to organic church, even if they are formally marked by names such as youth groups, parachurch organizations, home groups, prayer meetings, participatory Bible studies (as opposed to what certain churches call Bible studies which are nothing more than sermons following a book of the Bible, in which no one other than the speaker studied the Bible or can contribute anything) or just informal interactions in real life.  It takes a situation in which any person can speak.  This means that someone can say the wrong thing, and others in the group get to practice dealing with this person in a way that shows Jesus’ love and care for them through us.  More to the point, that person just may be able to say something beyond where they have grown spiritually, and in doing so, actually grow closer to there.  I think of one time when I was a young believer, and I quoted “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations”, which is Isaiah 56:7, but I didn’t know that I knew that.  Afterward, when I was alone in my room, I was amazed to think of that.  As much as I assuredly heard it before, in my spirit, at that moment, it seemed miraculous.  I have been in other situations in which, particularly a young believer, says something that is wisdom, just in the midst of a normal conversation.  We don’t necessarily know what that means, except when either that piece of wisdom comes, surprisingly, out of one’s own mouth, or it is exactly the thing we needed to hear.  One special instance is when the person speaking says something that touches a point in oneself that God wishes to speak to you about, you know it, and you know the person saying it cannot know it.

            Before I conclude, I wish to bring up a situation that I struggle with.  This is those brothers and sisters in Jesus who wish to make every problem something that can be answered with a clever phrase and/or quoting one or, at most, a few scripture verses.  Among persons in that group, anyone that gives an involved answer, especially without quoting scripture verses (whether quoted in context or not is irrelevant) is somehow seen as unspiritual.  If these persons are in a leadership position, oftentimes they have been respecting those who have practiced emotionally moving others as opposed to teaching, and are unaware of the believers over the centuries who have struggled with problems of life and faith, and have communicated both excellent and incomplete answers, the latter of which has been further examined by others over time.    As I have said previously, I have not been able to have been in a missionary situation outside the U.S., but I suspect that such people appear in all cultures.  One last benefit of organic verses institutional church is that, if house church is the norm, such persons can send fewer persons off track.

            I sense that much more could be said about this issue, but these are thoughts I have at this time.

On using too few or too many words

            I fully well understand that this site is read by persons all around the world, and, therefore, we live in different cultures.  I also understand that many of my brothers and sisters in Jesus are not sports fans.  Therefore, I would like to relate a piece of U.S. sports news to this discussion area.  Here in the U.S., yesterday’s top story was of a professional athlete committing suicide in front of his coach and the person who ran the business side of the team.  Today, a nationally seen sports talk show host stated that, in this day, he perceives that he is expected to have a definite opinion on everything, and to have it in 140 characters or less (the size of a Twitter entry), and on this subject he doesn’t have a clear one, and by implication, if he did it couldn’t be that short.

            As we write here on the House2Harvest site, the first two sentences appear when emails get sent to everyone else.  It is tempting to try to say something important in that amount of space.  The general rule is, in attempting to, what is said is either obvious or totally unclear, particularly when read by someone in another cultural area.  Personally, I haven’t felt to say something here often, as I am a person that, not only has never served in a mission situation outside of the U.S., but has not been outside the U.S. other than a day trip across the border of Mexico, and a few days in Canada, which is only slightly different from the U.S.  I have spent time on secular college campuses, which culturally is very different from the world across the street from them.  Now, that is a perspective that is important, as I’ve also been to churches in which leadership is based on emotionalism, and of which the leaders could not have effectively dealt with college culture if they tried (maybe, fortunately, they don’t). 

            Many of us have sat through hundreds of structured speeches (sermons), and some have delivered hundreds.  Many of those were highly worked on, were theologically correct, but went in one ear and out the other.  There have been other instances in which, in the middle of one of those, one sentence was said which, at least for oneself, the Holy Spirit was in to touch and change oneself.  One may remember that occurrence years, decades later, but not remember the greater message, or even who spoke it.  I do not believe it is something you or I can try to do.  I know that Kenneth Copeland says that he tries to say something shocking every ten minutes.  I don’t know that that makes his style better, and I am certain that I could find some sincere brother that feels it makes his style worse.

            Some of us might argue that a compacted version of the message of salvation, i.e. 4 Spiritual Laws, and similar pamphlets, have been a boon to communicating the message of Jesus, and others argue that they ultimately been a bane.  Personally, I do not know a person who has come to faith totally from the result of a tract.  I have known many that have come to faith through seeing believers in relationship to the world and other believers.  I have known many who have come to faith via the Spirit speaking into their spirits, oftentimes just a few words which, in and of themselves, don’t say much, but with the realization that God is behind it making all the difference. 

            Many years ago, when I lived in another area, a certain tv station started doing a tease (one sentence description of the lead story) at 10pm for the 11pm newscast.  One evening, the anchor appeared, and with eyes extremely wide open said, “Nuclear accident at (town about 100 miles away)—details at 11.”   Since this is potentially a matter of life and death, I stuck around (actually trying to find other news sources during the hour).  When 11 came, the story was that a cooling water pipe broke, that is was no big deal, but, according to the government’s definition of a nuclear power accident, it was a (lowest level) accident.  One of the things I face before the watching world in my culture is we believers in Jesus (maybe not you or I, and then again maybe so, and definitely some others) overdramatizing things to the point that in some cultures with freedom of speech, everything we say is ignored.  Its one more reason God works in relationships.  Using many words does not make our words more effective.  Neither does using too few.

            Also, assuming that my brothers and sisters, or for that matter, any other person, is thinking of the same nuances of a word that you or I am using is dangerous.  On this site, for leaders, if one, in leading Bible studies or speaking, has been emphasizing any one certain meaning of any one word or scripture or periscope does not mean that any of the rest of us is thinking along that same direction, even if you are correct!  That’s one of the great things about using participatory Bible studies instead of sermons—if someone doesn’t understand what you are saying, which includes you leaving out some thoughts in your head that tie two points together, that person can ask, and you can correct yourself, or maybe realize that you are running down a mental rabbit trail to nowhere.  The greater problem is for those of us who are either leaders or more highly educated accepting correction when God somehow chooses to send it through someone less educated or with less leadership ability or who shows normally less obedience or faithfulness or commitment. 

Comment to Stayrev Victor

Stavrev Victor posted in House2Harvest Network Group Page

	Stavrev Victor	10:49am Nov 25
	Is communism in the church in the west or is that a slander ? Who can give some teaching on humanism and socialism mixed with some organic vision ?

Stayrev,

While this is a short question, the answer is not short. Now, I believe that I have seen that you are based in Europe. I have lived in the U.S. all my life. I feel, therefore, I could not reasonably comment about any society I haven't lived in, and I have no idea whether you have ever been to the Americas. Anyway, I will give my opinion from where I am.

First, since you are writing from an organic church perspective, or at least on House2Harvest, which recognizes church as a group of believers, not an organization, you are probably aware that few of us can comment on what's going on outside of the church one is part of and some others nearby. From society's traditional definition of church, though, it is clear that some liberal/progressive churches have socialistic influence in them, but they aren't the true church, or have believers in them. I will also say that some of us might say that history shows that back in the days of the civil rights movement in the U.S., there appears to have been funds from communist organizations funnelled into that movement, but that doesn't negate the faith of those who were believers who were involved in it. Some of my brothers and sisters in Jesus may, though, disagree with me on whether that is actually historical. If you have never visited the U.S., "communist" is a generalized perjorative. Due to having gone to a secular liberal arts college in the early 1970's, I have actually known four persons who publicly considered themselves to be communist, and two of them overtly couldn't stand each other. A communist couldn't get onto a library board in most of this country.

Therefore, "is that a slander?" cannot be answered, in my opinion, in that I have no clue who you are thinking of.

Your third question, "Who can give some teaching on humanism and socialism mixed with organic vision?" is also quite difficult. Humanism is a point of view in many of the social sciences. As a believer in Jesus, humanism is too low a view of man and most everything in comparison to the Christian view of man, God's work, and everything. Now, one problem is that, among us believers, there are persons who are highly educated and intellegent, and others gifted towards the opposite degree, and some of our brothers and sisters will confuse "humanism" with "humanitarianism". The believers view of caring for our neighbors includes humanitarianism and more. Socialism is a political philosophy, which, to my understanding, is different in different areas. A philosophy of religion professor looking at the west (which in this use would include Europe and the Americas) would say that Catholicism is more socialistic, and Protestantism is more capitalistic. In recent weeks, you have been criticizing some of my fellow believers in the U.S. for tying their faith to conservative politics, and, in general, I would agree. I will also say that here in the U.S., there is a full fledged Christian media, and, if you watched or listened to it, there would be no indication that organic church even exists, as it is dominated by music companies that release songs that reflect basic Christian beliefs, and preaching programs that are paid for out of institutional church funds, either to get more people to come to their organization, or, at the least, allow leaders to say to other leaders, "We have a media ministry" (whether anyone is listening is another story, as in my city, we have roughly 12 Christian radio stations available).

Those generalities said, there are assuredly some points of view on certain subjects that might be labeled "humanistic" or "socialistic" that one could argue narrowly would be congruent or similar to proper belief for followers of Jesus, but that doesn't prove anything. At times, we will be in agreement with someone that we vehemently disagree with in most things, even if it is within the trivial ("It feels cold today"). That doesn't mean that one has "sold out" on important subjects. Therefore, "Who can give teaching on humanism and socialism mixed with organic vision?" If you meant that question literally, probably a brother with experience dealing with one or both of these subjects in either the practical or theoretical, and with experience and gifting for teaching in the organic setting. The Holy Spirit would need to show me the reason for that, as I cannot picture any urgent topic where I live that demands that. If you meant that question in a rhetorical manner, such as that the two are so opposite as to be impossible, this is, again, a situation where attempting to say things in too few words brings about misunderstanding. Maybe such inference is clear to the fellow English-speaking/reading believers that you are around, but the nuance was unclear to me from where I live.