Knowtown…

Gareth Higgins’ How Movies Helped Save My Soul: Finding Spiritual Fingerprints in Culturally Significant Films does much more than review popular movies. If you are looking for a “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” type of resource you may want to look elsewhere. Instead, this book does a great job of training the readers how to find these spiritual fingerprints in films for themselves. Like other titles from Relevant Books, there is no attempt to push a spiritual agenda into an area where one does not really exist. It simply illuminates that these “fingerprints” are everywhere. Gareth shows us that one of the best places available to find these sacraments is in the cinema.

Each chapter in the book is structured around a theme, such as “war”, “brokenness” or “quest”. Its open-ended style reads like a conversation that begs for your interaction. I found myself thinking of films I would want to include in each section. While I appreciated Gareth’s observations of the films he reviews I think his insights into the human conditions he addressed in each chapter were the real strength of this book. Instinctively I know that there is more to a film than what I see on the screen but Gareth made me conscious of new depths, even in movies I thought I understood. He explores some transcendent themes with immanence perhaps only movies can allow for. The author’s great sense of humor is reflected throughout and makes this book that much more enjoyable to read.

With the medium of film being discussed, I would have liked to have seen some pictures from some of the films Gareth mentions. That is a minor complaint, but the only one I can find with this book. This would be a great book to give as a gift to anyone who goes to the movies. After reading it you will find yourself watching films in a new way. I recommend it highly.

I am really having a difficult time thinking about church stuff right now. It seems like all of the books, seminars and boot camps on church planting are about planning effectively. Get your core group together, write the vision statements, core values and mission. Assemble a leadership structure and plan how you are going to “launch” your corporate gatherings. Normally, all that stuff is right up my alley because I am usually an organizational thinker. But right now all of those methods and strategies seem pretty hallow and shallow. I can sense I am very close to living out an ecclesial dream but at a very deep level I feel like I am in the way. In my anxiousness to create something I am missing out on experiencing something else that is infinitely better.

I am really struggling with a lot of things right now. What does it means to gather corporately for worship in our culture? What functional role does a pastor play in the spiritual formation of a community of faith? How do we define ecclesial “leadership” when the goal seems to be “followership”? Why does church consistently get fragmented from the rest of our lives? Is there even a way to do church holistically or is it destined to be centered on an event?

I think that answering these types of questions sometimes creates just as many problems as they solve. Perhaps we put way too much emphasis on the planning. In light of this I am starting to lean towards Revisionist Ecclesial Dreaming. The way this would work is we would all live our lives trying to be faithful to the call to follow Jesus. Sometimes we will do OK and other times we will fail miserably. In either case we will not meet the standards of holy, set apart living so we will need God’s grace. We will need to extend that grace to others. When we wrong someone we will need to seek reconciliation. When others wrong us we will need to extend unconditional forgiveness. We will bear other’s burdens and think of them as more important than ourselves. We will be good spouses, parents, children, employees/employers… We will allow love to cover a multitude of sins. We will order our lives towards following God in the way of Jesus. We will allow the generous orthodoxy of the Christian faith to have authority on the decisions we make, how we spend our resources and who we invest in relationally. We will give rather than take. We will seek service over self-interest and stewardship over ownership. Our lives will become living sacrifices of worship that tell a story.

But the interesting thing about the story is that it cannot be told before it happens no matter how hard we try. The living it out comes first, then the story. Our ecclesiology is not based on what the early church “planned” but on what they actually did. It was only after the people shared what they had with others so that no one in the community had need that we could learn that was what a faithful community of Christ followers looked like. A group of people who actually lived out and embodied the displaced, resurrected body of Christ became a testimony, witness and story that we are still participating in today.

Unfortunately, I try to write my story before I live it. That is not working very well for me. I still think planning is important. I still want to be intentional about the disciplines and practices that make us church. I guess what I am trying to say is that I feel a need to spend more time on accounting and less time on budgeting. Budgeting is an attempt to predict what is going to happen in the future. Every successful organization should have a budget and try to stick to it. But life has a way of throwing curve balls we did not anticipate in our budgets. So we have to do more than budget by doing accounting. This is the hard work of seeing what actually happened. Budgets move in the geography of theory and accounting explores the geography of reality. I am starting to think some questions can never be asked or answered. They can only be experienced and lived out. This scares me a little bit because I lose the illusion that I am in control of how things can turn out. But if I can learn to get out of God’s way and simply live faithfully with other Christ followers in this fragmented world our community will eventually tell a powerful story of the redemptive purpose of the mission of God. After it’s all said and done we can reflect back on the experience and learn that we are revisionist ecclesial dreamers.