Archives For Nathan Aaberg

Why do you waste your time with that?

Nathan Aaberg —  June 14, 2016 — Leave a comment

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to speak at length on the phone with a Christian I had met at a gathering of conservationists and other community members in central Illinois. He and his wife are active members of their church. They also happen to care deeply for God’s earth.

This wasn’t always the case.

The turning point came in 2005 when he had back surgery while living in Ohio and couldn’t walk for some time. When he began to recover, he made it a goal to walk all 16 Metro parks in Columbus. The experience renewed his love of nature. Later, when he retired and returned with his wife to Illinois, he completed a Master Naturalist program. This, in turn, led him to get further involved with conservation through a local non-profit organization that preserves and restores natural areas. As part of their desire to live as simply as they could, they bought a seven-acre property, built a passive solar home, and have been restoring the land to native natural habitat.

Yet, he has found that not everyone at their church sees the connection between the Christian faith and the his and wife’s attentiveness to Creation.

He vividly remembers being asked by a fellow church member, “Why do you waste your time with that?”

In Our Father’s World: Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation, Edward Brown recounts a similar experience. He was having a conversation over coffee with a friend he deeply respected who had been the principal of a missionary school that both Brown and his wife had attended early in their lives. When Brown describes the mission organization he had founded (Care of Creation) and his personal commitment to environmental missions, he could tell this friend was distressed by all that he was saying. Here’s how Brown recounts his friends’ words to him: “He finally put down his cup of coffee, looked me in the eye and said, “Ed, what in the world does this have to with the Great Commission?””Our Fathers World #3484 IVP FINALOur Fathers World #3484 IVP Version

If you’re Christian and you’ve expressed a concern for God’s earth, you’ve probably faced something like this moment yourself. So how do you answer those questions?

The following excerpt from Our Father’s World, published by InterVarsity Press, will be helpful for you to read. You’ll see that Brown places a commitment to preserving God’s earth within the context of a whole Christian life.

He also pushes back. He highlights the negative consequences that unfold when Christian missions don’t present a complete faith that includes a commitment to shepherding God’s living world.

Here is the excerpt:

If you’ve stayed with me this long, you have a pretty good idea of why I believe caring for God’s creation has everything to do with that final command that Jesus gave his disciples: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). I’ve made a case for full, creation-restoring redemption. But my friend’s question is a serious one. He has seen the primary message of the gospel of Jesus Christ diluted by various kinds of “social gospel,” and he believes he has some reasons to be nervous. Is this just one effort to make a timeless gospel relevant, focusing on human needs but cutting out the essential heart of redemption and forgiveness of sins through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross? The history of Christian ministry is littered with the carcasses of organizations that attempted to adapt to the needs of the moment and in the process lost the spiritual power that made them unique.

So how is caring for creation different? The first part of the answer requires a review of the foundation laid in the first part of this book. Christian missions is the effort of the whole church to extend Christ’s ministry of reconciliation (see 2 Corinthians 5:11-21) to all nations and all peoples, making disciples and “teaching them to observe” all of Jesus’ teachings and commandments (Matthew 28:20), in effect teaching them to live in ways that will reverse the curse of sin throughout all of God’s creation.

We’ve seen that this process involves a restoration of each of the relationships broken at the time of Adam and Eve’s sin: our relationship with God is restored in salvation; our relationship with ourselves in sanctification; our relationship with each other in koinonia, the restored community of the church; and our relationship with nonhuman creation in learning to live in harmony with it again, a process reflected in the ancient Hebrew word shalom….. If, then, the purpose of Christian missions or ministry is the accomplishment of this kind of full redemption, including creation care is not a distraction from the main goal. It is the goal.

Countries like Kenya have experienced more than one hundred years of missionary presence, but their current state shows no improvement. Depending on what you want to measure, Kenya is possibly a great deal worse off than before the gospel arrived. Is there a correlation between this and the truncated view of the Christian missions we’ve promoted for the last century? If the biblical goal is shalom, but we thought we were finished when we delivered a simple message of salvation, it’s no wonder things haven’t worked out quite as well as we might have expected. Bad theology – or at least incomplete theology – will always give bad results.

Jesus warned his disciples of the dangers of casting out a demon and leaving the “house” swept, cleaned but unguarded. That demon returns with seven others more powerful than itself (see Luke 11:24-25). We have driven out the demons of paganism with a lightweight gospel of personal salvation. Today the churches in these countries are reaping the harvest. If we’re honest, the results of this are evident not just in the daughter churches of missionary-receiving countries, but also in many of the mother churches that sent missionaries out in the first place. Bringing creation care and missions together will restore the theological integrity of the missionary enterprise.

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Saving Snakes

Nathan Aaberg —  April 30, 2016 — 2 Comments

This week the environmentally-oriented charter school my younger son attends held a fair at which eighth graders shared information about the culminating projects they had been required to complete before they could graduate.

My son and his classmate had an unusual project on which to report. They had built, with the substantial help of the local township open space district and a local herpetologist, a snake hibernaculum at a local nature preserve.

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Hibernaculum is a fancy scientific word for a snake den that allows snakes to safely survive the winter. To survive winter’s cold, snakes need to get to find places where the temperature stays above freezing. Some smaller snakes can use the holes of crayfish to get below the frost line. Some seek out animal burrows or even holes in the ground formed by rock formations and fallen trees whose roots have rotted away.

As we have filled up the landscape with buildings and roads, however, we’ve created smaller and smaller islands of habitat. Each small island is much less likely to have natural overwintering sites of its own. And because snakes can’t fly, the snakes will usually end up dead and flat if they try moving from their island to another in search of shelter from the winter.

In other words, snakes need help. Snakes need saving.

The basic concept of man-made structures to help nature out isn’t new. People have been doing this kind of thing with bluebird houses for many decades. Without man-made bluebird houses to provide the cavities bluebirds need for creating nests and without the monitoring needed to keep out violently aggressive European starlings and house sparrows, we’d have very few of those beautiful birds around.

The success of blue bird boxes tells us something profound. It tells us that we can have the will and the ability to be Good Samaritans for other members of God’s Creation.

But are we willing to do that for snakes?

For many of us, they fill us with unease or worse. In fact, snakes have been persecuted for far too long, far too festively, and far too often by Christians who should know better. But snakes have a beauty all their own (Proverbs 30:19) and ecological value, too.

Seeing Creation as God would have us see it rather than through the prism of human culture is one important way that Christians can truly be the salt of the earth. That means we should see value in birds that add bright flashes of blue to our landscape and in other creatures.

The hibernacula created by my son, his classmate, and the local township staff was an all-day affair that required heavy-duty equipment. By the afternoon, our arms were dead tired as we shoveled dirt back into the larger hole in which the main chamber of the hibernacula had been constructed with drain tile pipes, portions of PVC tubes, as well as large and small stones. We created small mounds of stones to camouflage and protect the two entryways as well.

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There was a certain tiredness and even doubt in my heart as well.

Was all of this work going to make a difference? Unlike the construction of bluebird boxes, we didn’t know at the end of the day whether the hibernaculum would ultimately be successful. The art and science of snake hibernaculum construction are still very young.

Yet, it felt good to do something. I was proud of my son and his friend for pushing this project through a number of obstacles to completion. And I was profoundly grateful to the staff ot the local township and to the herpetologist whom all responded so enthusiastically and helpfully when the boys contacted them.

As I’ve thought further about that day, I also believe we were answering a fundamental calling. We’re called to use all of the creativity and ingenuity we’ve been blessed with to care for and to mend our Father’s world. We’re all called to be good shepherds.

Even when it’s hard and challenging.

Even when there is no guarantee of success.

Even when snakes need the shepherding.

 

P.S. The local herpetologist who helped the boys shared with us the story of an unusual hibernaculum. Some years ago western fox snakes at a local natural area had begun using the hollow cinder block walls of the basement of a nearby home as a place to survive the winters. When the landlords of this rundown building contacted him, he was able to begin implanting little passive transponders in each one. This allowed him to monitor when each individual snake came into the basement during the fall and when it departed in the spring. At the peak, there were over one hundred snakes in the basement.

One of the tenants had been an elderly woman who lived there by herself. When the occasional fox snake, which is not a poisonous species, would find its way upstairs and even into her bathtub, she didn’t panic. Instead, she would call her son, and he would drive over and bring the snake safely back down into the basement.

 

 

 

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“God has to save them from our sin”

Nathan Aaberg —  April 14, 2016 — Leave a comment

Who is the “them” in this sermon excerpt?  An unfortunate group of people?  A community in some Third World country?  No.  The pastor in this case is referring to the trees, waterfalls, oceans, and other living things around us.

That and other provocative insights can be found in this sermon by Reverend Timothy Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. I urge you to listen to it with an open heart and mind.

In the sermon, Reverend Keller unpacks the larger meaning of Genesis 9:1-17 in ways you have probably not heard before. There has been a tendency I’ve long noticed for Christians to highlight only the covenant between humanity and God in this chapter and to neglect the significance of the fact that the covenant is also with all of life. But Reverend Keller asserts that it is actually outlining three great relationships we must pursue — with Creation, with fellow humans, and with God.

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Reverend Timothy Keller

Here is one other sequence of Keller’s words in the sermon:

“The Bible says Creation is speaking to you — the stars, the waterfall, the animals, the trees.  They have a voice.They’re telling you about the glory of God. And its your job as stewards of Creation, as stewards of nature to make sure they keep speaking, to not let their voice go out.  It’s your job to help them be themselves…. It’s your job to join the choir.”

We are in a world full of life and energy, in other words, and that life has been part of the God’s story and has its own unique value to God. What’s more, we are not complete if we are not attentive and in positive relationship with that life.

I continue, by the way, to be impressed by Keller’s preaching and writing.

One of the more insightful books I’ve read about the Christian books was his Walking with God through Pain and Suffering which I studied during a particularly difficult period of my life. He consistently reveals ways of understanding God and life in ways that are rooted in the Bible and yet have a nuance and spirit to them that are uniquely rich and robust.

P.S. I want to give special thanks to Ray Archuleta for recommending that this sermon to me.  I attended a full-day session on soil health farming presented by Ray Archuleta and Gabe Brown at the 2016 MOSES Organic Farming Conference in February. Two things struck me about Ray during that day of instruction: his unflagging passion (seasoned with wit and powerful stories) for building the life of soil as the central focus of good farming and his recommendation of the book The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation by Richard Bauckham. I recently reached out to him, and we had a wonderful conversation over the phone about his Christian faith. 

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Whole Faith Church & Membership

Nathan Aaberg —  March 30, 2016 — 1 Comment

My sons and I have been watching many of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament games, and one of the things I’ve been struck by is the intense teamwork. Recognizing that just one loss will bring their season to a sudden end, the players give everything they have together. They exult in each other’s successes. And they press each other hard to do things right even under tremendous pressure.

Shouldn’t church be the same way?

But when the Barna Group surveyed Christians across the country a few years ago, they discovered that “…only 5% of people say their church does anything to hold them accountable for integrating biblical beliefs and principles into their lives.”

George Barna, the study’s director, said this of those findings:

“One of the cornerstones of the biblical concept of community is that of mutual accountability. But Americans these days cherish privacy and freedom to the extent that the very idea of being held accountable by others—even those with their best interests in mind, or who have a legal or spiritual authority to do so—is considered inappropriate, antiquated and rigid.”

It’s in that context that I describe the first of many features of a whole faith church.

(As background, in Needed – A Whole Faith Church, I asserted that preserving and renewing God’s earth will only become part and parcel of what it means to live a Christian life when churches have a whole faith woven into their worship, theology, and culture. I’m beginning to work out what that would look like.)

Ironically, the first feature I’ve identified does not explicitly relate to God’s earth at all. It’s this simple thing – membership in a whole faith church would not be a casual association but a deep commitment to being a follower of Jesus, to the church, and to other members of the church.

Membership, in other words, would mean something profound in a person’s life.

An article in Leadership Journal included this provocative statement:

“The church should be less like a cruise ship and more like a battleship, says Ken Sande of Peacemaker Ministries. Rather than emphasizing their casual atmosphere and fun activities, Sande says it’s time for churches to raise the bar, to focus on a serious mission, and ensure that every person aboard serves a vital function.”

To get a sense of what that might look like, I’d encourage you to read Call to Commitment by Elizabeth O’Connor. First published in 1963, this book chronicles the beginnings and development of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC which attracted considerBook imageable attention for its unusual approach to church life and the devotion of its members to living out that faith together out in their community.

The leading figure in the origin of this church was Gordon Cosby, and one of his formative experiences was serving as a chaplain to the 101st Airborne during World War II. Cosby discovered that the average self-avowed Christian in the unit wasn’t ready to deal with moral pressure and difficulty of any sort. The faith these Christian men expressed loyalty to and the way they lived had been shaped more by the culture of their family and community than by a deep personal commitment to God.

A turning point was when Cosby led a man named Joe to profess a faith in Jesus. Cosby was delighted and anxious to see what a difference that faith would make in Joe’s life. When Cosby checked in with Joe’s commanding officer a short time later and told him of Joe’s conversion, however, he was in for a surprise.

“If Joe’s a Christian, “ he said, “nobody in the company knows it.”

So when Cosby and a tight-knit core of other committed Christians began to come together to form the Church of the Saviour in a house in Washington, D.C., fostering Christian integrity was a critical concern.

The following are key elements of what membership involved at the Church of the Saviour.

Extensive education requirements: A person desiring to be a member was required to take six courses in their School for Christian Living. In addition, as part of the process to becoming a member, a sponsor was chosen for that person who could get to know the member on a deeper level and help the member develop further in his or her spiritual life.

Ongoing growth in faith life: The School for Christian Living offered elective courses to enable people who had become members to continue to grow in their faith. Personal study programs were also encouraged.

Sacrificial commitment: Sacrificial giving was expected and all members participated in a mission group that met regularly not only carry out that mission activity but to also worship, study, and pray.

All members are ministers: Each member of the church was seen as a non-professional minister. For this reason there was a concerted effort to identify the particular ministry gifts of each member and to find ways for those gifts to be expressed in the church. Through an ordination service for laity, the church as a whole confirmed a clear role that the particular member was called to fill.

Powerful vows of membership: The book details the vows that the first members took when the church was launched in 1947. Here are just some of the statements:

“I unreservedly and with abandon commit my life and destiny to Christ, promising to give Him a practical priority in all the affairs of life. I will seek first the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness.”

“I commit myself, regardless of the expenditures of time, energy, and money to becoming an informed, mature Christian.”

“I believe that God is the total owner of my life and resources. I give God the throne in relation to the material aspect of my life. God is owner. I am the ower. Because God is a lavish giver I too shall be lavish and cheerful in my regular gifts.”

Each year, by the way, existing members renewed their membership vows as a way to remind each other of what they are committed to and their commitments to each other.

Living a Christian life: Members were expected to live a Christian life. Here’s how Gordon Cosby put it in one of his sermons:

“It is fundamental to everything which we do as Christians, that we personally develop a style of life which is recognizably Christian. This means that in our family groups, in our businesses and our government offices, when we walk in, a light goes on.”

In other words, a deep commitment to God will lead to a common Christian culture that is expressed by Christians in everyday life decisions 24/7.

The only way a church will be strong enough, however, to be a community of people where God’s ways are lived out in every phase of life (including the cherishing of God’s world) is if being a member of that church really means something.

An early brochure about membership in the Church of the Savior highlighted the danger of being a fully committed member of their church along with other disciples of Jesus: “It is indeed dangerous for if one becomes committed to this way, all life will be different and every sphere of one’s existence involved in the change.”

When was the last time your church described membership as a dangerous thing?

I realize as I write this that a sense of intense mission is one of the things I find missing in the churches my family has visited as we look for a church home.

On the other hand, I realize, too, that intensity and deep commitment to church have too often given birth to cults, abuses, and narrow, harsh interpretations of the Christian way.

Nevertheless, the Bible and many Christian thinkers have long asserted that becoming who God wants us to be happens best and most thoroughly when we are in close, committed, loving fellowship with others.

And for everything else in a whole faith church to work, that closeness, that commitment, that willingness to be accountable to each other must be present.

This is a leap of faith we must be willing to take.

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Needed – A Whole Faith Church

Nathan Aaberg —  March 19, 2016 — Leave a comment

In the last blog post, I asked this question – when will preserving and renewing God’s earth be part and parcel of what it means to live a Christian life?

Here’s my answer – that will happen when churches have a whole faith woven into their worship, theology, and culture.

This is a radical thing to propose.

Many Christians would flatly deny that caring for God’s earth is an essential part of being Christian. Others would give lip service to that ideal while recoiling from any call to tangible action that might inconvenience them, much less challenge them.

You will find Christians, of course, who care deeply for God’s earth. You are likely one of those already. You live in thoughtful, self-sacrificing ways outside of church. You may even lead or support activities in your church – like recycling or improving energy efficiency – that move the church toward collectively being more responsible in its stewardship of God’s earth.

These are all good and worthy of honor. That has probably not always been easy in your church community.

But if we look with eyes wide open at the state of God’s earth around the world and the lack of concerted action by churches and Christians in addressing the earth’s desecration, then it is painfully clear that what is being done is not enough.

Earth stewardship too often is one of a number of activities that are in orbit around the core life and culture of a church. In no fundamental way is a loving concern for the life of God’s earth integrated into a church’s DNA.

It is like a mother and father who take their family on a two-week summer vacation trip each year but otherwise neglect their children and rely on nannies and school activities for engaging their kids. For years the parents are able to pursue their professions, interests, and hobbies unhindered. They are dramatically successful and accomplished in every way. But they eventually reap what they have sown. Their kids have troubled adolescent years. Later, to the parents’ surprise, the children turn out to be selfish and uninterested in visiting the nursing home where the parents end up, alone and full of regrets.

What those parents needed to do was not plan even more special vacations or even better birthday parties. They needed a whole different value system that permeated the way they lived and the way they interacted with their children every day and every moment.

Similarly, what church communities need is an awareness deep in their culture and worship that the salvation God ultimately offers is the healing of all Creation. They also need an urgent, church-wide commitment to protecting and healing God’s earth as part of their membership’s united efforts to help make God’s will be done.

Can this completely happen in existing churches? I’d like to think so, but I don’t know.

Established institutions have a hard time changing. It is difficult for all of us imbedded in our culture to distinguish what about our values is cultural and what is the fruit of hearts and minds fixed on God. It will be much easier and instinctive for denominations, theologians, pastors, and long-time believers to dismiss these concerns as secondary or even heretical based on long-standing theologies.

For those reasons, I can’t help but believe it is time for new wineskins.

It is time for new whole faith churches.

These wouldn’t be churches for everyone. They would be, however, cherished church homes for people who have been spiritual nomads to this point. They would be homes for people who love God so much they find it hard to worship when they can hear the cries of people and the non-human life of this world who are falling, metaphorically, into a pit that we ourselves have helped dig. They would be seeds of larger change as well.

I write all this with trepidation. Yet, I see no other way.

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