Faith, Hope and Haste

I do not have to understand it all right now.



I do not have to understand it all right now.



I do not have to understand it all right now.



I keep telling myself all that, but I get so frustrated sometimes, trying to put it all together and immediately. I am reading Brian McLaren (Finding our Way Again), Kathleen Norris (Acedia and Me), Phyllis Tickle (The Great Emergence), Eugene Peterson (The Contemplative Pastor) and the lections for Palm Sunday. I am still thinking about Dr. Gil Rendle and his comments about adaptive leadership, positions vs. interests, and the challenges facing the "bi-modal" church.

All of these great thinkers and writers are, it seems to me, writing from very different positions (except perhaps Tickle and McLaren), but diagnosing the Christian past, the present ethos and the days ahead in remarkably similar terms. Peterson's book can only be described as prescient, as he wrote it 20 years ago or more, while the other titles are very recent.

I wonder, reading this stuff, whether I have either the skill set or the insight to do any more than chaplain the dying mainline. I know they say that prayer, listening, attention--all of those things more than problem-solving activity; which is to say, faith and grace more than works--are called for in these unsettled and unsettling days. And yet, as Norris writes, "it is always easier for us to busy ourselves" than to be.