Verbs

Monday Angie comes to Canada. Yay! What I didn’t mention is that all my family is coming: mom, dad, sister, and two nieces, with only my oldest nephew, all grown up now and working, left behind. I had been wondering where I would put all seven of us, but Janey came to the rescue, offering to take her family on holiday to Paris just so we could have the house (just kidding! about why she's going, not what she offered)… 

Irony. As I was typing that paragraph, the phone rang. It was my mom telling me my dad is in the hospital after having emergency surgery. As well I could make out (I haven’t talked to him directly; just piecing it together from mom’s description and Wikipedia), he has Amaurosis fugax. Although this sounds like quick lover’s syndrome, it’s actually a kind of stroke that blocks blood to the eye.  So I’m waiting to see how he’s doing, and realizing my parents aren’t coming after all. Meanwhile, I called Angie, and she says it looks like she will be selling twenty, (twenty!) houses this week, with all the detail that entails (and I thought bureaucracy in Oaxaca looked like tangled cheese!), so she might not come…

Adjusting…adjusting…

It seems unfair how much our expectations affect our reaction to things.

But rather than dwell on that, I am going to turn a corner and relay what happened next, when my mom took a cell phone into the hospital so I could talk to my dad, who is still in ICU, and whose voice is still hoarse from the anesthetic, and who looks like a porcupine with all the monitor lines and tubes sticking out of him like so many quills, and who has lost vision in one eye but assures me he can still work on the computer, designing a course that trains church leaders outside the classroom, following an apprenticeship model, and he’s 82, my dad, and he almost immediately switches the conversation to me. How am I doing? He loves my blog. Etc. And he asks me what kind of readers I have, and what kind of comments, and I tell him, and one comment reminds him of what he considers the gravest danger in the church today, and off we go into a discussion of the dangers that the church faces today. And he’s in ICU, and my mom is making faces at him to take care and not get excited. This is why I love my dad. One of the reasons.

And, according to my dad, this is the gravest danger to the church today: abstraction. Not distraction, but abstraction. What dad means is that we can get so caught up in lists and discussions about doctrines and theologies and word studies that we miss the point of doing them. He says this is the gravest danger of relying on seminaries to train leaders because they tend to emphasize information, which can be measured on tests, over practice, which requires the more difficult Paul-and-Timothy-working-in-a-real-church model. In our culture, knowledge is so often assumed to transform behavior, but when you don’t check through active discipleship, do you know it’s changing lives? When they hand you a degree in divinity (!) do they know you've grown in divinity? There't the rub. There is a reason that some languages (Mixtec, for example) have only word for our two: listen and obey. At one point in our history, these two ideas were united in one English word as well, but the modern tool of analysis (not a bad tool unless badly used) made it much easier for us to analyze when we should be out the door, doing.

Abstraction means that people are hearing the Word, studying the Word, getting degrees in the Word, judging  people’s faith by their interpretation of the Word but not necessarily obeying the Word.  The Spanish translation of John 1:1 captures the idea so much better than the English: “In the beginning was the Verb.” [Guatemalan Ricardo Arjona sings it like this:  “To not be redundant, I have to say that Jesus is action and movement, not five letters forming a name, that Jesus likes for us to act, not talk, that Jesus is Verb, not Noun.” (link to the lyrics: Jesus is Verb)] My dad said, “Just look at the beginning of John where he describes Jesus. It’s all verbs. All actions—not an abstract noun among them.” (My dad writes training materials all the time. He'll write the day he gets out of the hospital. With every title a verb.)

My dad said he’d sent out a survey that compared seminary course content with field worker “course” content. What he found, and the results he sent out to 50 seminaries, was that the seminary course content was filled with abstract terms, while the field worker “course” content was mostly actions—verbs. His final conclusion asked: In which context should we be training our future workers? Isn’t it time we opened a second track?

All of this on a phone, from ICU, with Mom making faces in the background. My dad, planter of churches, coacher of coaches, and writer of verbs. If you ever wondered why I am who I am, a big part of it you just saw--in verbs.

Tranquil Father's Day, Dad.

Hadn't thought of that 'til now.
Irony.