QUESTIONING COUNTRY CLUB CHRISTIANITY

One of my greatest struggles is balancing my public and personal personas. On one hand, I am an expert in the field of intimacy, and on the other, I am just a girl. One moment I am dispensing advice on the radio, TV or to a live audience, and the next I am making lunches, helping with homework and chatting with a friend. I have worked very hard to develop both my career and my relationships, but some days, especially when I feel like I am screwing up more than usual, the dichotomy between the two worlds becomes very painful. Who am I to speak about being kind to one another when I want to stuff those horrible words I uttered back in my mouth? Who am I to talk about balance when I can’t hear what my daughter is telling me because I am too absorbed with work? Who am I to talk about the wonders of marriage when Eric and I just had a knock-down drag out…on the way to the marriage conference?

In those moments of feeling like a complete fraud and failure, I realize that I am not alone. I remember the pastor’s wife who felt like she would get kicked out of the church if anyone found out that she loved Harlequin romances, the Marriage Ministry pastor who hated sex and lived like roommates with her husband, the youth leader who felt forever tainted because of a little action in the back seat of a car when she was a teenager, the elder who struggled daily with a porn addiction, and the pastor’s wife who was in love with another woman. There are other people who struggle with their public and personal realities as well. We all just do it in secret.

Sometime over the past 2000+ years, we have drifted into a country club type of Christianity. We have to show up perfectly polished and radiant. We have to look good. We have to be successful. We have to be winning the battle. Sin? Sure, that’s something that I deal with…but not often…and I gain victory over it quickly. Church is very rarely a place where you can be anything other than the public persona. Did you just find out that your husband has been cheating on you? Did you just get let go from work? Did you scream at your kids on the drive? Then put happy smiles on your faces as you walk through the door because you are going to worship Jesus.

And yet, the Jesus I read about hung out with the tainted, the screw-ups, the outsiders, and the unwanted. He had endless compassion for the people who came to him with the realization that they didn’t have it all together. In fact, the only people who pissed him off were the religious folks who, well, refused to acknowledge anything but their public personas. So why do we work so diligently to hide our sin when the church should be a place of refuge for all of us who realize how deeply broken we really are? Why do we feel the need – in our ministries and public lives – to have everything figured out, all the time?

I don’t have it together all the time. In fact, probably not even most of the time. But I also have a deeply held belief that I cannot lead other people places I myself fear to tread. If I refuse to acknowledge or examine the difficult, the scary, the thorny, the inconvenient, the ugly, and the broken parts of myself, and I am the “expert,” then what hope can I offer to the “broken” people who show up in my office?

The simple and tidy answer that the “Christian expert” would offer is, of course, I offer the hope of Jesus. And while there is truth to that – I grew up an evangelical, singing the lines, Jesus is the answer for the world today – I know that life is rarely simple and tidy. I think it’s disingenuous of us to offer up the trite “Jesus is the answer” when Jesus rarely answered questions directly when he was walking on the earth. He liked to remain silent, to tell stories or to respond with a question.

Somewhere along the line, we became afraid of questions and started worshiping the answers. Jesus camped out in the questions. I believe we will still find him there today. Because when we walk naked into the questions, we have stripped away our façade, our arrogance and our pretense, and have become those whom Jesus said he was sent to. “It is not the healthy who need a physician but the sick. But go and learn what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,’ for I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

So after all the training, all the studying, and all the years of “becoming an expert,” what I can offer is exactly what I need myself: compassion, empathy and understanding. It is from this place that Jesus still works miracles.

ERYN-FAYE FRANS, Canada's Passion Coach ®

ErynFaye.com

WHY LENT IS A GOOD IDEA FOR EVERYONE

By So Here's Us.... life on the raggedy edge.

It was the pancakes. That’s what caught my attention. Shrove Tuesday – a sacred day of pancake eating. How awesome is that?

There wasn’t much talk of liturgical calanders in my Evangelical upbringing. Just cautionary tales and the whispered suggestion that they might, POSSIBLY be Real Christians, but just barely.

Poor, meaningless automatons with their empty rituals. And then there’s the Catholics. A superstitious bunch, I was taught, barely discernable from the heathens; who prayed to statues, and for some reason, like to eat fish on Friday.

We weren’t very comfortable with anyone who wasn’t Us. Like the Pentecostals. And the United Church. And the Mormons. And the Agnostics. And the very scariest creatures of all: the Atheists (word is, they have an “Agenda” and we should watch out for that).

My world didn’t stay that small. Most Evangelical circles have opened up somewhat in the past decade (or two… or okay fine… three) since I was a child. The popular Mitford book series opened up the strange world of Episcopalians to many. These days, it’s not unusual to hear a discussion on Lectio Divina in a Baptist bible study. Or a more casual Stations of the Cross set up in the local community church.

As I got to know (and love and be related to) actual people who followed liturgical tradition, I began to see the unique beauty of it (and not just the pancakes). It may not be the style of worship I’m used to, but it is deeply meaningful and steeped in history. Ancient traditions so much more powerful that the latest born-again fad at the local Blessings bookstore.Maybe WE are the ones who have been missing out.

Which brings me back to the pancakes. Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent. When you get your house in order both figuratively with confession and literally (by using up rich foods like sugar, dairy and eggs) before a period of fasting or plain eating. Enter: hallowed consumption of pancakes.

This past Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. These 40 days (not counting Sundays) are a time for the faithful to prepare themselves for the celebration of Easter Sunday. It is a period of fasting or self denial, prayer, contemplation, examining oneself, and starting over.
For most of us from an Evangelical tradition, or no tradition at all, it is known as: Another-Wednesday-Just-Like-Any-Other. But who’s to say we can’t make it more? Lent is a good idea for EVERYONE and here’s why:

Be part of history.

Hundreds of years ago there was a tired, middle-aged (though still hip and young-at-heart) Mom just like me, who set apart these six weeks to live simply and refocus spiritually. That I might walk alongside her and the women who came before her and women who came after and the women who will come after me is something amazing. The Church (big C) is more than the congregation of my home church or other people in my country who may check the “Christian” box of a questionnaire; it is a family of faith that encircles the globe and stretches back throughout history. When we worship through Lent, we worship together.

We have so much.

More than any people who have ever lived. More than any who celebrated Lent before us. We are a culture and a generation of so much. So much to do. So much to see. So much to know. So much to eat. So much to distract and burden and overwhelm. We need Lent more than ever.

It’s a prelude to the feast.

Lent is not about asceticism (a harsh mentality where deprivation is the ultimate spiritual virtue). It’s preperation for the ultimate celebration. For those of us who worship Jesus, Easter is more than another stat holiday. It’s more than chocolate eggs and pretty dresses and church choirs. But if we don’t put the time and effort into preparing ourselves, even an inspiring sermon and touching music will not soak soul deep.

Lent is a good idea for everyone. The Evangelicals, and the Catholics, and the Pentecostals… and the Agnostics, and even the Athiests. We could ALL use a Spiritual Detox.
Make Lent your own this year.

So here’s me, fasting every night from 7 pm until 7 am (which doesn’t seem like it should be a big deal, but for me it really is).

Lent Resources:

This year I’ll be reading through Show Me the Way by Henri Nouwen

Lent and Dying to Yourself (video with Diana Butler Bass)

Why Evangelicals Need Lent by Tim Suttle

Get Lent by Andrew Santella

CHRISTIE HOOSSo Here's Us.com

THE HUNGER GAMES

I don’t read fiction very often. It is not that I hate it – in fact, it is just the opposite. I absolutely adore fiction. Nancy Drew lit the fire for me, but I quickly moved on to whatever I could devour. Spy books held a particular place of affection for me. I remember reading the Robert Ludlum series of novels when I was 13 years old, convinced that I would grow up to be a CIA agent.

However, my problem with fiction is that it turns me into a really bad wife and mother. I become so engrossed that nothing else in the world exists as I turn page after page. All requests fall on deaf ears because I am so immersed in the book. As such, I have made it a rule to only indulge in fiction on vacation. While my family is happily distracted by the sun, sand and water, I treat myself.

But, rules are meant to be broken. And when a pastor piqued my interest in The Hunger Gamestrilogy (he was complaining on his social media feed that the kids in his church were reading the series more than the Bible), I snuck a peak at the first book, which incidentally, my husband had just finished. For those of you who have been living under the rock, the crux of the story in The Hunger Games is a group of children who are conscripted by a despicably corrupt government to fight to the death in an elaborate arena. It’s like The Gladiator…on crack cocaine.

The series was as gripping as advertised. I was sucked in. I picked up the books in between coaching calls and administrative emails (ok, I am lying – the administrative emails got put on hold) and finished the books in three days. They were extremely good.

Later, over coffee, I was chatting about the trilogy with a friend. (After all, if you are going to blow off emails to read a good book, you might as well use it as fodder for excellent conversations over coffee.) She was commenting about the level of violence and I responded that I didn’t think it was that bad. She said, “Well, some of the parts were hard to read.” And then she cringed.

She cringed.

I continued to chit-chat in a light-hearted way, but I have since gone back to think about the cringe. And the violence. And why it didn’t affect me more profoundly.

This is what I realized. Going into the series, I was subconsciously prepared for it to be as heart-sickening as some of the stories I have been told over the years about child soldiers. For well over a decade, Eric and I have been (either peripherally or intimately) involved in the issue of children at risk. That is a fancy term that the United Nations uses to talk about kids around the world who are systematically abused for the pleasures or financial gains of adults.

When I was in my early twenties, I listened to horrifying stories by Phyllis Kilbourn about the conscription of children into Liberia’s civil war. I am still haunted by those stories. No, I will not relay them here, but let me assure you that they make The Hunger Games look like child’s play. And they are real.

As I realized that I was unaffected by the gory details that went in to the trilogy, something else occurred to me. The very fact that the series is “Child Soldiers Lite” opens up the doors for discussions about what is actually taking place around the world. It is an amazing teaching tool for children who are old enough (I am thinking at least 12 or 13) to read the series.

Harness all that indignation and anger your children are feeling about outrageous abuses of power. Listen to their deep desires for justice. Explain to them that they are feeling matters. Their emotions point to something that is close to the heart of Jesus…the least of these.

I think it is awesome that our kids are getting so engrossed in The Hunger Games. BecauseThe Hunger Games leads to a very natural conversation about the words of Jesus. And talkingabout the words of Jesus convicts us to follow the words of Jesus.

So, after you have had a conversation with your kids, challenge them to work towards solutions in parts of the world where young children are truly made to kill other children…and their own parents…and do other unthinkable things. They can fight on behalf of those kids. They can make a difference.

Of course, I am hopelessly biased towards my husband’s organization, World Relief Canada, but there are many others who are working diligently in Somalia, DR Congo and other parts of the world. Find out what you can do so that children in those parts of the world don’t have to live their own Hunger Games.

ERYN-FAYE FRANS, Canada's Passion Coach ®
ErynFaye.com