Christianity

The ten-minute guide to oppressing women

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , ,

“Promise Keepers is here in St. Louis, but not without controversy…”
I’m surprised Promise Keepers doesn’t get more attention from the media, because you can always count on protesters. The biggest demonstration was a throng of militant abortion activists playing off this year’s “Storm the Gates” theme urging PKs to storm a local abortion clinic.

Strangely absent was Fred Phelps. He’s always good for a news story, although I would be afraid to interview him directly. I saw him at PK last year in Kansas City.

A half-dozen feminists were also protesting.

I didn’t see any incognito women this year, although I’m pretty sure I did last year. I saw some “guys” wearing really baggy clothes and sporting short but very feminine haircuts. Officially, PK is a male-only event. But I can’t imagine a woman in disguise getting kicked out if she’s recognized. PK really doesn’t have anything to hide.

Before I get into explaining what PK does and why, let me give my standard disclaimer: I’ve been to two PK events. I occasionally wear a PK t-shirt. There are some PK books on my bookshelf. I don’t know if I’ve read them. When asked if I’m a Promise Keeper, I answer yes. But I don’t agree with everything PK teaches. Since PK is inter-denominational, its theology is a very mixed bag. It’s heavy on decision theology, which bothers me a little. It’s very heavy on the Calvinist/Reform do-it-yourself attitude on grace, works, confession and absolution. There is confession, sort of, but no absolution. That bothers me. When you confess your sins, when you’re done, someone needs to reassure everyone of God’s forgiveness. Too often in Reform circles, there’s an unspoken “try harder next time” attitude. That’s present in PK. That’s spinning your wheels. But we already talked about that.

But I don’t agree with LCMS all the time either, and I’m on the board of directors of an LCMS church. So be it.

So I have some disagreement, but it doesn’t stop me from paying my 70 bucks to go and it doesn’t stop me from encouraging my friends to go.

So, how’s about some straight talk on PK?

Why no women? Mostly because they wouldn’t be interested. Last year, a one-time football coach named Joe White walked in carrying what looked like a telephone pole. Then he carried it up to the stage, put it down, grabbed an axe, and made a cross, right there onstage. Then he set it up. When he was finished with it, it took three people to hold up what he held up himself.

That’ll get a guy’s attention. And when a guy who can carry telephone poles around isn’t afraid to cry… That sends another message.

And then we found out he was dying of leukemia. This is what he was spending the rest of his life doing. So it must be pretty important to him.

This year, Joe White did almost the same thing, carrying an oversized cross around the perimeter of the Savvis Center rink in St. Louis. And at one point, later in the conference, he rode in on a motorcycle, rode up the stage, hopped off, and gave a 10-minute sermon on the power of God, in the style of professional wrestler bravado. It was the end of a combination video/skit that portrayed Jesus and the 12 disciples as a biker gang.

It’s not uncommon for a former football or basketball coach to come in and use sports metaphors to explain Christianity. It’s the language some men understand best.

Most women wouldn’t like it.

The other reason is that a lot of men act differently when women are around. Since getting right with God is a big focus of the events, it’s helpful if you help the men get over the act and be themselves before God.

What’s this take back your household thing? This is where the controversy arises. PK advocates that men take back the responsibility they’ve shoved off on their wives. Wanna know what form that took this year? A big, bald, burly black preacher telling us men to wash the dishes and take out the garbage. This isn’t about taking away a woman’s humanity. It’s about getting your butt off the couch, turning off the football game, and paying attention to your family.

Leaders give. Leaders serve. A real man serves. A real man gives, he said. Then he went on to say if you’re a man and you’re receiving all the time, he questioned their manhood. In more ways than one.

Both times I’ve gone, one of the speakers has advocated that the men take a basin and wash their wife’s feet (the way Jesus washed His disciples’ feet before the Last Supper) while confessing their shortcomings and asking forgiveness. Where’s the oppression in that? PK advocates humility and responsibility. Who wouldn’t want her husband or boyfriend to be more humble and responsible?

Above all else, PK advocates men taking the role of spiritual leader in their house. Many men are passive or apathetic about God. PK advocates that men pray for their wives and their kids. “My wife comes to me when she has a problem,” that same preacher said. “She doesn’t come to me because I’m a pastor, she comes to me because I’m her husband and she trusts my prayer life. Does your wife trust your prayer life, or must she turn to another?”

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve prayed for girls on a few occasions, with them present. There hasn’t been a one of ’em that didn’t like it. Women like it when a man prays for them.

Most of the women opposed to PK probably don’t understand that this is what PK teaches. Or they may be opposed to any conservative Christian movement.

Legalism is just the first sin all over again

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I don’t have much time, so I just want to say one thing in response to the legalistic second message I heard at Promise Keepers last night.
The Fruits of the Spirit and God’s law are diagnostic tools. They are means to an end. Neither one is an end unto itself. Neither is achievable all by yourself. A guilt trip accomplishes nothing; trying to do them on your own accomplishes nothing but showing you how futile the task is.

I was sitting next to Pastor as we got this message, and he fumed through the whole thing. And at one point, one of us said, “We love this stuff, because it tells us exactly what we should do.” And the other of us said, “This is the first sin all over again. This is trying to be God.”

So listen. If you don’t like the direction your life is headed, if you look at your life and you don’t see what Scripture says your life is supposed to be, don’t make yourself a to-do list. Make this your to-do list: Tell God what you see. Tell Him you don’t like it. Trust me, He doesn’t either. Ask God to forgive you, ask Him to invade your life–yes, again–and humble yourself and ask Him to show you the way you should go. Let Him set your path straight.

The good deeds we do on our own are nothing but filthy rags. The only things we can do that are worthwhile are what God Himself enables us to do. Face it: You and I both need a designated hitter. But God’s willing to be that. Let Him.

Trust me. The fruits will come. Obedience will come. And they’ll be a whole lot better than anything you can do on your own.

The pressure’s off.

I gotta get going.

The best week of my life revisited

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , , , ,

Well, I got word this week that my first video of significant length landed on the desk of the founder of Adventures in Missions. And he liked it.
It made its St. Louis debut the Sunday before last. I think it did its job. The subject was my church’s June mission trip to Belle Glade, and a number of the people who were there cried.

“God, send us some signs or something,” prayed the 15-year-old son of Christian author Tim Wesemann, about 30 seconds into the video.

Sign? You got it. A kid named Matthew set off an alarm in room 229 in the church where we spent our first night. So, for what seemed like an eternity, the PA system bellowed, “2-2-9.” And it beeped a lot too.

The minute he prayed and asked for forgiveness, it stopped. Things like that happened a lot that week.

That afternoon, someone looked up Matthew 22:9.

That became our theme. Which reminds me: We need to make t-shirts.

About halfway through, the words, “Wednesday, June 19, 2002: A night to remember” flashed up, simple white letters on a black screen. One of the girls turned back to me. “You got that on tape!?” I nodded. I shot at least three hours of tape that night. She reached back and squeezed my hand.

Let me tell you something about Wednesday night. I don’t know everything that was going through everyone’s minds that night, but by Wednesday, most of our kids (28 in all, I think) had been to the gates of hell and back. They were seeing the desperate situation the people in Belle Glade were living in, and although we’re middle-class white guys and gals from south suburban St. Louis, we live in luxury compared to any of them. We live in nice houses, drive nice cars, and get to eat pretty much anything we want, whenever we want. We don’t have to worry about any of our basic needs.

In Belle Glade, “affordable housing” often means four concrete walls, a concrete floor and roof, some kind of bed, and a 110-volt outlet to plug a hotplate into. A sink is a luxury. A lot of “discount” stores selling low-quality food abound. The food is affordable but not worth the prices they’re forced to pay for it. Blaxploitation at its finest. It’s pretty sickening.

And on Tuesday, there was an incident. One of the kids from our downtown VBS, an eight-year-old, got into a fight with a 13-year-old. The eight-year-old was everyone’s favorite. His was probably the saddest story we’d heard down there. But there was something else about him too. I had limited contact with him (I worked the other VBS) but I can attest to it. He drove me nuts most of the time. But I liked him.

Well, the angel they’d seen that morning flashed his other side. At one point, he had a big rock that he was ready to throw at the 13-year-old–a big-enough rock that if he beaned him with it with enough velocity, it’d do some permanent damage. And the fire in his eyes suggested he was more than willing–if not able–to do just that.

Being an adult, I’ve seen people who have such polar extremes. Not everyone in their early teens has yet–and let’s face it, Oakville, Missouri is pretty sheltered. Seeing two people willing to fight, perhaps to the death, over something that warranted at most a minor scuffle represented a major loss of innocence, especially for the girls.

And the adults from the neighborhood wanted to just let the two kids fight it out and call the police when it ended. One of our adults intervened, broke up the fight, and seperated the two, and a group of people talked to each of them. We didn’t have any more problems of that sort with those two for the rest of the week.

On Wednesday, a couple of teenagers hopped onto the roof where we were holding our other VBS. They threw off a soccer ball and football that had been thrown up there. One of them also picked up a five-pound iron weight, attached to a belt–a crude gang weapon–that was up there. A number of kids were playing in front of the building. He pitched the weight off the top of the roof. He probably wasn’t thinking. And he probably didn’t care, to be honest. The weight came down off the 12-foot roof (he’d probably pitched it up a bit higher, so it may have fallen 18, even 20 feet) and hit a little girl on the head. It bounced off, like a rubber ball. She wasn’t hurt at all. She was scared because she didn’t know what happened, and because our kids were terrified–you know how kids are, they get scared when adults think there’s supposed to be something terribly wrong–but completely unharmed.

Those were just the major events of Tuesday and Wednesday. Enough other things happened both days to fill a book each.

End long digression. Wednesday night was a crescendo. Georgia-based worship leader Joey Nicholson was singing songs and leading us in worship, and his song selections seemed especially poignant that night. Emotions were running high and our kids were exhausted. Our kids were crying, hugging each other, encouraging each other… The total opposite of the all-too-common cold and impersonal church service. At some point, one of the boys in my subgroup–Matthew, he of 2-2-9 and a source of a lot of gray hair for me, prior to that day–walked up to the stage and knelt down to pray. And he stayed there. The rest of the kids stayed pretty much where they were, singing, crying, hugging, consoling, for about two songs. He was still up there alone, praying and it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to budge. Our pastor tried to inconspicuously walk up there. Well, that didn’t exactly work. He walked up, put his hand on his shoulder, and knelt down next to him, talking to him and praying with him. The next thing I knew, all 28 of our kids were up there with them. By the time I knew what was going on, I was one of about five adults still standing. We didn’t waste much time joining them. I ran my handheld camera as I walked up and knelt down, but then I turned it off. What was going on up there was between each of us and God. I wasn’t going to invade that.

We were up there for about an hour, praying for each other.

It was a Lutheran altar call, I guess. No decisions for Christ there–Lutherans believe that’s pointless, because it’s God who empowers us to come to Him–but there were plenty of people talking to God about what their present life looked like and asking God what He wanted them to be doing with it, instead of what they were currently doing with it.

With all due respect to Promise Keepers, 10 PK rallies can’t match the intensity of those few hours that night for the 43-or-so people who were there. Yeah, it was that significant.

That was the self-indulgent memories portion. My gift to those who went, pure and simple. The remaining 19 minutes were about the various ministries we participated in while in Belle Glade. I’ll make no bones about it–it was a propaganda piece. The group that organized our trip had been talking about pulling out of Belle Glade, making our trip the last one there. After seeing so many lives transformed, I wanted to convince them not to do that.

They’ve told us their plans to pull out are history. Mission #1 accomplished.

There were 38 of us who went on the trip, but according to LCMS records, our congregation has 1380 members. Obviously it’s not realistic to send 1,380 people, but a congregation our size can send more than 38. I wanted to make the people who didn’t go jealous, so they’d want to go next year.

Time will tell if that works. Right now it looks like it will.

And I had a fourth objective too. There are lots of churches in Belle Glade. Most of the churches we came in contact with weren’t doing much outreach. I don’t know why that is, and I’m not going to speculate. But here’s what happened: 38 white guys and gals from St. Louis came in for a week. They didn’t have a clue what they were doing. But every ministry we touched caught fire. By the end of the week, every time a group of us walked down the street, someone stopped them. “Where are you from?” And when we’d answer, “St. Louis,” the people would say, “We’ve heard about you.” Then they’d tell us what we’d been doing. Then they’d thank us.

So the question in my mind was, if 38 St. Louisans can come down and spend a week and lots of great things happen, what can the churches that are down there do the other 51 weeks out of the year?

To my knowledge, the video’s been shown at two different churches, one in Belle Glade and one in Wellington, an affluent community a half hour away.

I hope they’re insanely jealous too.

Not that any of that was going through my mind as I watched. No. I was noticing how the audio needed to be normalized, and how a few of the shots desperately needed either to have been shot on a tripod or a healthy dose of post-production image stabilization, and how awful the lighting was and how nice it would have been to be able to do some post-production color correction.

Powerful? Sure. Worthy of winning a Telly? No way.

But the media director at church just told me to win a Telly. She didn’t tell me when. So there’s always next year.

But if we go back next year and I make a video about it and we win a Telly, I’ll betcha the Telly still isn’t the highlight of my year.

Something for your dart board

Dave Farquhar Christianity

Who annoys you more than anyone else? What do they do that annoys you?
Picture me standing at the front of a room with a bunch of people, asking those questions. I’ve got a dart board and some darts, and I write those things down on the dart board. And then I show off my spectacular skill by naming those things off, throwing darts at them and hitting them as I rattle them off. Siblings who bicker over their inheritances. Drivers who pull into intersections when they’re backed up at a light and stay there, making you sit through three greens before you can finally move. Executives who commit fraud, make lots of money, and leave before the fallout is complete, money in hand, but destroying the retirement accounts of the “lesser” employees, who’ve invested much of their life’s savings in that company.

I’m sure you can name some others.

And what if after I pulled the darts out of the board, I peeled back that paper, and behind it you saw a picture of Jesus, riddled with those holes?

You don’t have to tell me your reaction. I just want you to think about it.

One of the girls in my Bible study shared that illustration this week. A monologue in text doesn’t do it justice. I think I need to save that one and use it.

Where does faith come from?

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , , , ,

Following closely on the heels of the question of how to pray, people often ask me where faith comes from, and where they can get more of it.
The best response to that question, usually, is, “Why do you want more faith?” Read more

I thought this went without saying, but…

Dave Farquhar Christianity

When someone e-mails you or a group of people asking you to pray for still another person, just do what the person asks and don’t start rumormongering, OK?
I heard of an incident recently (if you want to assume I was involved in it somehow, go ahead) where a longtime friend e-mailed a group of people s/he thought trustworthy and knew prayed on a regular basis. S/he gave some details about the situation. I won’t go into them. I’ll just say there were a few taboos involved. The person who was suffering from the problem didn’t want this to be common knowledge. Read more

My spiritual journey

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , , , , ,

I guess this is as good of a time as any to write my spiritual autobiography. It’s not as long of a story as some–years of apathy have ways of shortening stories.
I guess I could sum up my current state in a couple of lines: Reach the world. Work within the system and change it from within.

Here’s how I got there. Read more

It’s about people

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I’ve been thinking about my mission trip again. I guess that shouldn’t surprise anyone, since I spent six hours yesterday poring over videotape we shot while we were down there. And yeah, I still think it was the best week of my life. But I’m a little disappointed in the leadership.
The leadership’s focus was on prophecy. That makes me uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong. It was the best week of my life, and our leadership definitely played a big, indispensable role. But prophecy had nothing to do with it. Read more

The coolest thing that happened to me, personally, in Belle Glade

Dave Farquhar Christianity

A group of us was prayer walking–walking the streets, talking to people as we see them and offering to pray for them, and praying for situations as we saw them–when we came upon a church.
In Belle Glade, everyone believes in God, but not a lot of people go to church. So when we came upon a small church, our pastor suggested we stop and pray for the church, its pastor, and its staff.

When we finished, someone was watching us. Read more

How to pray

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I’ve had a number of conversations the past couple of weeks, and the most common theme, by far, has been prayer. Not so much “will you pray for me?” or “should I pray for you,” but more asking how to pray.
People just don’t know how to pray, mostly because nobody ever taught them. Read more