Image of God, a review of sorts

as i got off of the phone with Bryan, i turned to Kate to let her know that it would indeed be the 9am service we’d be attending and not the pillow sensitive 10:30 service we had ventured to weeks prior. She reacted as i figured and then went about her business (of which i have zero recollection).

it was during our familial preparations for church this past sunday morning that rekindled the often heard trope that the hour before church might possibly be the most stressful moment of the week.

hi.

hi.

bryan and i beltched as we dropped our kids off at the registration heavy children’s ministry area. i’m not sure any of the men at the door could have prevailed against a gun toting crazy person, but eliot never mentioned fearing for his life…

lot’s of people mingling around the entrance to an impressive auditorium space that left me longing for my high school theatre days. and yet, i was never in theater (so spell it correctly) in high school, and really only wished i was years later…anecdotal as well as descriptively speaking, of course. imago had greeters that weren’t all that greetery. and throw a curve-ball at my postmegachurch mind, but the greeters didn’t actually handout anything but merely stood menacingly by a stack of bibles. i didn’t take one.

however, as i found a perfect sit with which to familiarize myself with this relatively young community, a woman kindly walked over and offered me a program. i took one of these because left in the wake of our mornings carnage getting ready was my back-pocket perfect, orange Rhodia notebook. i needed something to write on.

once seated the obligatory worship music began. it was fine. it might have been atypical in the fact that it was not ten years behind the times, although more like five or six (and there was this one song whose music had great potential to only find its doomed fate in horribly written and dare i say wordy lyrics). but i didn’t have to shake anyones hand. two points for imago (there will be no more points given or tallied for the rest of this post).

as the worship leader finished up his prayer i felt a bit of excitement welling up inside as i watched Rick Mckinley make his way to the stage. now i know very little of this man, the church’s history, or how he has time for four kids; but i have listened to quite a few podcasts during my biking to work days and his ability to preach is indisputable: he is extremely intelligible, especially with some complex theology, he is unafraid to point out that the mission of the church is to help the less fortunate (this church is service project rich), and in the end, is quite funny (a plus for anyone who longs to preach). but unfortunately, attending imago is as Kate suggested, Inland Hills 2.0.

now, is this a bad thing? to be honest, i’m not sure. it’s just that i haven’t been apart of a more corporate style church in nearly ten years. i’m not entirely sure i have it in me to be a small fish in a big pond. sure you could say that has more to do with me than imago, and that’s most certainly true — it does illuminate certain issues that i have. but i think at the heart of what i’m suggesting is that as the message ran on, i remembered why i started to have a hard time with this style to begin with — someone i didn’t know was trying to teach me something as if it was the gospel. he was looking at me and everyone in there as if what he was saying was indeed the breath of God; and i’m not sue it wasn’t, but was it?

there is more here i need to flesh out. i think i’ll post more, especially regarding the message and the great conversations that i had with my friend bryan afterward, but for right now i need to let this ruminate.

Maybe this is why

Last night the family and I decided to splurge at this Italian Restaurant downtown. The food was okay; eliot behaved for the most part; and Katie and I got some lively conversation in.

The catalyst behind the ‘lively’ convo was what I heard from the table behind us. As is typical in most city centers the business folk get off work, head to a local eatery, and begin the evenings dinning with a moment or two of decompression. I get this. I really do. (and here’s the qualifier that nullifies the previous statement) But when someone uses something, anything as the crux of their argument in a way that highlights exactly how much they don’t know about the subject, they need to stop.

The gentleman behind me said that as we look at the country of Africa then we will surely understand blah, blah, blah. Once corrected, he further digressed by asserting that Africa is a region. Now, i get that Africa is a region of the Earth. But his description could be likened to Napa Valley is a region of the Bay Area. It almost trivializes it.

The problem I’m posing here isn’t that he misspoke and then failed to accurately correct himself as much as trying to point out that marginalization starts in gross generalizations and propagates in our failure to acknowledge how nuanced Africa is (replace your area of interest with Africa).

We can’t possibly understand the plight of the Fur in Sudan by reading about the Tutsis in Rwanda or the Hutus in Burundi.

History is wrought by individuals who have marginalized the voices of the less powerful. This is not news. But unfortunately these voices continue to stay so because most of us deem it more appropriate to acquiesce to the point rather than initiate a didactic moment.

So, how can I listen to someone’s ’solution’ for a variegated people when all they see is black.

maybe I should write more.