Charlie Wear’s Notes

My sister took this picture of Loretta, Ben and I on Christmas Eve.

Loretta, Ben and Charlie Wear

Why not just skip the invocation? That’s my question. There was no way that President-elect Obama could not have known that picking Rick Warren would highly irritate (that’s putting it mildly) a number of his supporters. You see, Rev. Warren has opinions. That’s right, the safe choice would have been someone with no clearly stated opinions.

There are a few highly divisive issues in our national dialogue: Abortion and Same Sex Marriage are right at the top of the list. Of course, being an evangelical Christian is not a very good idea, either. You see, abortion is a on-off switch kind of issue. You are either Pro-Choice or you are not. This is a situation where you can’t be a “little bit pregnant.” And if you are not Pro-Choice, and you express your opinion, vocal holders of the Pro-Choice opinion think you shouldn’t offer the invocation at the inaugural.

And for God’s sake, if you supported Proposition 8, you are clearly a hateful bigot. Especially if you let your opinion be known. This is another of those issues. You can’t be “kind of” in favor of marriage between a man and woman only. So, the LA Times is not going to want you to pray at the inaugural.

It is amazing that the proponents of tolerance are not very tolerant of opinions other than their own. Wouldn’t it be more respectful to agree to disagree? What is the President-elect trying to say with his choice of Rick Warren to pray at the inaugural? Maybe he is trying to say, I am going to be the president of all the people, even if I disagree with them on some issues. That would be refreshing, if true.

We are alive at an interesting time. Words no longer retain their original meaning (whatever that was) and in fact have deconstructed to the point where persons have chosen up sides to be for or against people who identify with these words in some way. Here is my short list, maybe you can add to it:

Gen-X ministry

Postmodern ministry

Emerging Church

Emergent

Evangelical

Evangelism

Fundamental

Heretic

Biblical

Non-Biblical

Inclusive

Non-inclusive

Here is a short list of words that will lose their meaning once we have finally decided what they mean:

Missional

Transformational

Incarnational

How can one know when a word is losing its meaning? What are the signs?

1. When people lose their funding because they are proponents of ________________ ministry. (you fill in the blank)

2. When multiple writers, proponents, and others start saying, I am not ______________.

3. When people say: ___________________ doesn’t work.

4. When people who have been using the term, writing books about the term, making their living talking about the term, begin to say it is time to stop using the term.

5. When prominent bloggers do an online poll with a few more than 100 participants and declare that the result indicates we should “dump” the term.

Here’s what I say….let’s just use my all purpose word: Hoodabada… When you want to talk about a rising cohort of generational leadership, just say the “Hoodabada Leaders.” We can rename websites and organizations: “Hoodabada Village” sounds good, don’t you think? We can write books about the “Hoodabada Church.” I think I am onto something here. What say you?

Quick Notes via Twitter/nextwave_ezine

• For more on “Truly Missional” see Bob Hyatt’s article in this month’s Next-Wave issue: http://tinyurl.com/4horsr
• Alan Hirsch defines “Missional” in this Christianity Today article: http://tinyurl.com/4gsefz “Missional is not synonymous with emerging.”
• This is a great post via TomOsypian: How to talk to Atheists (if you are a Christian): http://tinyurl.com/2pez4w

“For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:..18-19 NIV)

Change is difficult. In an era when our politicians have promised change, it is unlikely that any “real” change will occur. We have politicans expecting an entire industry to become “viable” in 4 months, by March 31, and by the way, fire all of your CEOs. We will help you by asking you to make frequent reports and by appointing a czar to oversee your operations. At the end of that time we want cheap electric cars that can be plugged into the wall socket overnight.

We want free health care with no rationing of services and high quality of care. We want financing for our homes and cars and we want our homes to hold their value. We want honest politicians who will not sell the powers of their office to the highest bidder.

Oprah wants to be able to lose weight and keep it off. She’s ashamed that she hasn’t been able to do that. She recently wanted to cancel an appearance because she looked like a “fat cow.”

On a personal level, I want to change. At times I lose hope and believe that I cannot carry out my desire to do good. A mentor used to talk about the orange groves of Anaheim, CA. He would recall that on a spring night when he was growing up he could hear the trees groaning with the effort of producing fruit. Of course, this was not true, trees do not strain to produce fruit. They produce fruit as a result of what they are.

Awakening to who we are is probably the most difficult task faced by each of us. This awakening is produced in a context of redemption and salvation. And it is easy to fall back asleep and to dream the messages of our upbringing rather than the message of our ingrafting.

So I will say it again. Change is difficult. But there is hope…

I recently finished reading Warren Buffet’s biography, The Snowball by Alice Schroeder. It is an incredible story and a loooooong book. The snowball is a metaphor for the compounding effect of money. The effect of spirituality and religion in Buffet’s life was conspicuous in its absence. The result of the snowball effect in Buffet’s life is massive wealth which he is in the process of giving away through acts of philanthropy.

His current plan is to give a great deal of his wealth to the Gates Foundation. His reason? They are geared up to handle the distribution of such a massive amount of money.

I’ll admit, reading the book made me want to be a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder and attend one of BRK’s annual stockholder’s meetings. Even at today’s depressed share price, however, I am unlikely to become even a “B” stock owner.

My friend, Steve Sjogren, would probably want to point out another kind of snowball effect, the compounding of acts of kindness in our daily lives. Seems like something worth considering, especially when massive amounts of perceived wealth are disappearing before our eyes.