Audio for Sunday's sermon
by Matthew Raley Take a 16-year-old and tell him what "cosine" is. Today at 10:25 a.m.
Make sure he knows that, in a right triangle, it's "the ratio of the side adjacent to a given angle to the hypotenuse." And you have less than fifty minutes. Tomorrow, the 16-yr-old has to learn something else, and something else after that, all the way to the tests that tell Secretary of Education Arne Duncan what you did all year.
My teachers, such as Chico High math pros Laurie Kincheloe and Dan Sours, understood that they were not information-conveyers interfacing with information-receivers. Each day, Mrs. Kincheloe and Mr. Sours opened a bridge from their minds to mine and walked difficult concepts across it. Teachers at every level and in every subject opened this bridge in a twelve-year collaboration that gave me knowledge, not just data.
Teaching is a communication feat. Mortimer Adler called it one of the cooperative arts: two beings, teacher and learner, have to work together, the teacher often enduring a struggle inside the learner, watching catlike for the moment to spring with a word.
For teachers to pull off this feat, families have to prepare students with the disciplines that make life work. Self-control, attention to detail, and good use of time are some of the skills that move students closer to their teachers.
Today, our community asks teachers to open a bridge with students who often aren't ready for learning. As Chico Grace Brethren has begun building a friendship with our neighbors at Fair View High School, I have been sobered to learn the chasms that teachers have to cross.
Consider the problem of poor school attendance. Our community used to assume that families would get students to school. But now many families are not strong enough to do that. Fair View principal David McKay says, "Students need to connect before they can accelerate their skills. They can’t connect if they’re not here."
Mr. McKay and the staff have set a goal of increasing attendance, recognizing that students need self-management skills to reach that goal. "We made a significant investment in our student support/counseling services last year," Mr. McKay says, "with the idea to boost opportunities for students to connect to an adult on campus and to stay connected with an adult when they felt their life spinning out of control."
Building those relationships has made a dramatic impact. For 10 years, Fair View attendance averaged 76%. Last year, attendance jumped to 86%.
Take another example of the chasms between students and knowledge. Our community used to assume that classrooms would be safe, but those days are gone. Among other factors behind school violence, students often aren't able to deal with their own anger.
Again, the Fair View staff take a relational approach. The biggest factor in managing challenging behavior, Mr. McKay says, "is having a well-trained staff, with the heart for kids, who know how to 'read the subtitles' of their behavior." Staff attend 4-5 workshops a year to keep up with the latest ways to manage hostility, and then train each other in what they learn. They strive to address the underlying need or emotion behind a student's behavior quickly.
The impact of a healthier campus shows in suspension rates. Fewer than 5% of Fair View students had to be sent home last year. Students are responding to staff interventions. The impact also shows in a low incidence of fighting. For the last 5 years among the four schools and 400 people at Fair View there have been fewer than 10 fights a year.
The teachers who open a bridge with their students at such a personal level every day are doing heroic work. And that's before they even get to the definition of "cosine." At Fair View, teachers' feats are evident in the more than 100 students who have been graduated annually for the last 5 years. And I have only given a snapshot of what teachers are doing in one school. Teachers across our region are meeting the same challenges.
As a new school year begins, it's not enough for us to recognize this accomplishment. We need to participate.
Individuals, service clubs, and churches all over Chico have made volunteering in schools a priority. As they mentor students, they are rebuilding our community's consensus about the disciplines that make life work.
Believers in Jesus Christ should have passion for this effort, especially when it comes to helping families bring order to their lives through the power of the Gospel. We follow a Savior whose specialty is not just feats of communication but miracles of healing.
Ultimately, our community needs Him.
1st service: 9 am
Brunch: 10:15 am
2nd service: 11 am
by Matthew Raley For American evangelicals, the resurrection of Jesus Christ seems to have become a tall tale. We retell the story with gusto, but by Easter afternoon the resurrection fades to legend.
Evangelicals historically saw Christ's rising from the dead as the volcanic core of the Christian life. He conquered death not just by rising, but also by pouring his life into his followers. To a person was hostile to God, the essence of spiritual death, Christ restored love. He replaced rebellion with willing obedience. Christ's presence was the hot energy that transformed a believer's motivations.
In other words, evangelicals used to emphasize Jesus's teaching in the Bible about the new birth, that human beings must have a resurrection of God-loving energy and that nothing else can save us.
In the late 20th century, however, evangelicals' concept of the new birth degenerated. The phrase "born again" came to describe a ticket to heaven, eternal life guaranteed by a single prayer. We focused on getting people to pray that prayer, and with some success. Many got their ticket.
But we had trouble motivating ourselves to spiritual vitality. Those who prayed that prayer -- who in fact prayed it repeatedly, grasping for security with God -- were rarely taught that the new birth radically changed their identities. We generalized about "a relationship with Jesus" as if it were a life-upgrade, a fix for whatever made us unhappy, rather than life itself.
So Christ's resurrection became a mere story.
I meet countless believers who know that Christ's power is not extinct, but who only see glimpses of it. The trivial new birth taught by churches has drained their vitality.
I hear three such trivialized versions of the Christian life.
Many believers describe being born again as a cathartic emotional high, a personal, authentic experience that gives meaning to life. Following Christ to them means striving to recapture the high -- and failing. Their church has taught them existentialism with the name of Jesus attached on a post-it note. No one should be expected to build his life on such sand.
Others see the Christian life as maintaining a good family: striving to be a good wife or husband, striving to keep bad influences out of the home, striving to raise good children -- and failing. These believers have been taught moralism. Week after week in church, they have heard five steps to good communication, seven steps to good time management, and a wearying list of other "practical" suggestions for getting their act together. Christ's role in their spiritual life is to forgive their accumulating sins. And that's his only role.
Still others describe the Christian life as activism. Many older evangelicals strive to recapture America's political system and restore the culture they once knew. Younger evangelicals, reacting against their elders, often strive for progressive causes. But political striving fails too. These believers have been taught different forms of ye olde throne-and-altar religion, that Christ builds his kingdom through governments. Christ role for them is to get the right people in office.
These forms of striving -- existential, moral, and political -- have three things in common. Each replaces Christ with an idol, a totem of sanctified obsessions. Each fails to supply Christ's power, leaving the soul dessicated. And each consigns Christ's resurrection to legend: an inspirational diversion from the cares of life, but not ultimately relevant to our pressing work.
For evangelicals now, the most important thing about Christianity seems to be our responsibility to solve our own problems. Some dress that message up in therapeutic lingo. Others now supplement it with a grab-bag of medieval mystic practices. But it's the same old bad news: "God helps those who help themselves."
Churches must restore the emphasis on genuine power. Christ is risen. In him we also have been made alive.
I notice that discouraged believers still distinguish between the follies of churches and the power of God. In discouragement, they persistently hope in Christ, knowing that his subterranean heat remains fierce even if the ground looks cold.
They should take comfort. Easter is not empty.
by Matthew Raley With Mitt Romney's wins in Michigan and Arizona last night, the race for the GOP nomination may become more stable. But the diminishing political options for Romney's competitors will not change the attitudes of GOP voters. The candidates reflect America's deepening division without giving the leadership Americans need to reunite. Republicans will continue to grumble.
Great political leaders make coalitions that give different interests a place to combine. Ronald Reagan, for instance, is best understood as a coalition builder. He knew that strong unity begins with a dense message, one that integrates many points of view. The secret to his political power was the diversity of people and philosophies behind him. (The left has never understood this, preferring to call Reagan an illusionist.)
The two most significant GOP candidates at this writing, Romney and Rick Santorum, are not going to be great leaders.
Here are some of the cultural changes the GOP candidates reflect.
1. Economic divide.
Santorum and Romney reflect this divide perfectly. Santorum comes from a blue collar district in Pennsylvania, the real rust-belt deal. He articulates the priorities of blue collar people who have seen their way of life fall to pieces. Romney lives in the managerial world of law and finance, and articulates the problem-solving ethos of that world.
Both men talk about freedom. But the blocks of culture they represent need to hear how their specific interests in freedom combine. The question of the hour is, "Where do interests converge?"
2. Educational divide
One chunk of the nation has a college or graduate education. That block has mobility, options, and wealth. The people in it have seen their choices narrow in the last four years because of the bad economy. But they still have options to improve their lives.
The other chunk of the nation has a high school education and, maybe, work experience. This block has little social mobility, few to no options for improving their lives, and little wealth. Men in this group, particularly, do not see how they can make their way back into the economy with anything like the vitality their fathers enjoyed.
This educational divide has hardened into worldview divide. Many in the educated block view their education as a spiritual mission, a means to moral and personal transformation. Most in the uneducated block see the educational establishment as a fraud. Harvard, Madoff -- what's the difference? And this suspicion is all too well-founded (here and here). It is not just anti-intellectual bigotry, as the educated classes love to suppose.
Santorum spoke directly to this split, taking one side of it in unambiguous terms. Obama is a "snob" for talking up college. Santorum's approach is not going to benefit him. It will be seen as unpresidential even by those who might eat it up on a talk show. But, even though candidates do not gain the nomination with boorish jabs, there remains a deep and justified hostility to the socially approved waste of resources by colleges and universities.
Romney, for his part, is a numbers guy, planted complacently on the other side of the divide.
So the question remains: how can the interests of both combine?
3. Family divide.
Charles Murray has delivered another of his virtuoso performances in social science, speaking of numbers. In Coming Apart, he shows the predominance of traditional marriage among those who are educated with a secular worldview, and the predominance of broken families among the less educated. Michael Barone analyzes the Romney-Santorum battle in light of Murray's findings.
Santorum, in his populist flush, seems unaware that the working class no longer lives a traditional family life. Indeed, the most significant reason why the working class has fewer economic and social options is not the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, but the loss of resilience that comes from a committed marriage.
Romney has nothing to say about this. He has the gut of a financier, which, valuable though it may be, seems to leave him incapable of speaking effectively to these problems.
What will the new coalition for the traditional family look like? Actually, it won't be political at all.
The reason the GOP hasn't settled on a front runner is that no candidate is building a coalition.
If Santorum had wanted to be credible, he would have come out of the gate with a coalition message, and he would have made his strategy and tactics in the primaries cohere with that message. As it is, he is merely rallying a constituency, and is blowing an opportunity that only comes once in a generation.
If Romney had wanted to be credible, he would have launched his campaign with a deeper, more cogent assessment of America's problems. But he does not appear to have the imagination to do more than deliver slogans. And by now, he has morphed too many times to sharpen his message.
Gingrich and Paul? Paul does not want a coalition. That was never his game. As for Gingrich, I would never count him out. But the coalition he envisions seems to change every time his mic goes live.
In other words, every GOP candidate wants to be Reagan without doing what Reagan did.
by Matthew Raley So, I've been a little too stressed. On my 39th birthday last Saturday, I discovered I have shingles, as if Someone is underlining the end of my youth.
I do not like shingles.
The doctor who checked me out stopped the examination when he discovered I was pastor, and announced that he had gone to a Jesuit boarding school. He described this at some length, adding a critical analysis of the current papacy.
When by and by he was finished, he said I was extremely contagious. The nurse gave me something to sign, and when I handed back her pen, she refused to take it and said, "It's yours now. You should throw it away."
My right cheek is so swollen that my right eye can see it. There is sharp pain running down my face and neck. There are blisters inside my mouth and on my lips. I drink coffee through a straw.
Vicodin is bad. It keeps me from my scotch.
My boys stare at me. Malcolm (4) is particularly insightful about what I'm going through. This morning, huge blue eyes fixed on my blisters, he declares, "Bumps that make you sick are gross. You have a lot of bumps."
Through it all, I am thankful. At least I'm not yet 40.
today.
by Matthew Raley A few weeks ago, a prayer request went out at church for a family whose child had died suddenly. We later learned that the unnamed family was that of Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, now charged with the torture and murder of their 7-year-old adopted daughter Lydia.
The couple will enter pleas on March 18th.
Many of our people know the Schatzes personally through home school groups, so the story has already hit them hard. Could the couple really have done this? What could have motivated them?
But Butte County D.A. Mike Ramsey asserts a "direct connection" between Lydia's killing and the teachings of Michael Pearl, raising the killing to another level. The story has been picked up by Salon, which had already run a critical examination of Michael and Debi Pearl in 2006.
Many of our people read the Pearls. Privately, I have been asked several times over the years about the Pearls' teachings, and my answer has always been, "They're authoritarians. Run away." I give the same answer about Bill Gothard and Gary Ezzo, other child-rearing gurus. Since Lydia's death, however, I have been looking more closely at the Pearls' teaching, and I need to make my views public.
Before doing so, I want to be specific about where I think Michael Pearl's responsibility lies in relation to Lydia's death. Local law enforcement investigators and national journalists have not accused the Pearls of advocating child abuse, being careful to quote Pearl's warnings against doing physical harm to children.
These critics are making a different argument, namely that Michael Pearl irresponsibly encourages abusers, even if the encouragement is unintentional.
I agree, and I want to show you that the encouragement toward abuse is in Pearl's theology. His false gospel imposes mandates on parents that go far beyond what God requires.
1. Michael Pearl does not believe in the imputation of Adam's sin to all human beings.
He writes, "When a descendent of Adam reaches a level of moral understanding (sometime in his youth) he becomes fully, personally accountable to God and has sin imputed to him, resulting in the peril of eternal damnation." Pearl adds, "When man reaches his state of moral accountability, and, by virtue of his personal transgression, becomes blameworthy, his only hope is a work of grace by God alone."
This seems like a minor quibble, but it is profound. The Bible's teaching that all human beings have an inherited sin nature means that no human institution has the ability to purge sin and do away with guilt. Only Christ can change our nature. Throughout history, teachers consistently attack this doctrine in order to tell their followers, "If you put yourselves under my authority, you can learn the secret to getting rid of your sins."
Pearl imposes on parents the mandate to form godliness in a child before the "age of accountability." Pearl believes that parents have a direct role in saving children. The "hope" he offers in "a work of grace by God alone" is for those whose parents failed.
2. Michael Pearl believes that spanking delivers a child from guilt.
Because Pearl does not believe you inherit a sin nature, he articulates a new doctrine of salvation that is dependent on a parent's will. In his article, "In Defense of Biblical Chastisement", he writes,
When a child is bound in self-blame and low self-esteem, parents are not helpless. God has given them the gift of the rod. The rod can bring repentance, but it goes much deeper than that. The rod in the hands of a righteous authority will supply the child’s soul with that moment of judgment that he feels he so deserves. Properly applied, with instruction, it will absolve the child of guilt, cleanse his soul, and give him a fresh start through a confidence that all indebtedness is paid [my italics].
That simply annuls the atoning work of Jesus Christ. Notice that forgiveness is granted only on the basis of the punishment of the sinner, and that a human "righteous authority" is the source of this "gift." "All indebtedness is paid," Pearl says, not by Christ, but by the rod. No parent can believe this statement without also believing that he or she has the authority to cleanse a child of guilt.
Pearl goes much further:
To the child, a righteous parent is a surrogate god, representing the rule of law and the bar of justice. When the child is yet too young to fathom God, he is nonetheless able to relate to his parents in the same manner that he will later relate to God. The properly administered rod is restorative as nothing else can be. It is indispensable to the removal of guilt in your child. His very conscience (nature) demands punishment, and the rod supplies the needs of his soul, releasing him from his guilt and self-condemnation. It is the ultimate enforcer, preserving the child in authority and discipline until he is old enough to submit himself to The Eternal God.
These statements are the logical and inevitable application of his semi-Pelagian view of sin. Before the age of accountability, O parent, thou art a god.
(For another detailed treatment of Pearl's teachings, cf this analysis.)
To spank a child as a reasoned limitation on his or her behavior is one thing. But to imagine that you are purging the child of the guilt of sin, and that the pain is psychologically purifying, is to cross into another rationale entirely. In the wrong mind, it forms the imperative to "give" more and more pain. Such a mind would ignore Pearl's warnings against abuse, to be sure, but not necessarily his logic.
The news accounts of "quarter-inch plumbing supply line" sold by Pearl are chilling, but nowhere near as disturbing as the doctrine he sells.
I'm sorry not to have a post for you this week, but I've got the crud. Next week, I promise.
by Matthew Raley With regret, I'm not able to maintain my usual schedule of posts this week. I hope to resume on Monday. If you are so led, please pray that I'll have wisdom in many challenges over the next several days. Thanks!
by Christopher Raley i Their faces beheaded by fence line grotesque laughter, contort a bent double to disappear them then release them back to exposure’s buzzing yellow of dirty night.
She sits in watch of small frames detailing mimicry without and marks them a record in tickling her cynicism.
I stand in kitchen slider view of them bray back shaved scalps and strangle long necks for a tip-up glint of darkness.
Quiet rests her pleasure she forces no perspective, but flattens lines of emotion in comforting remove,
so let the bombard next door without a verb. Endless is the violence, and delight is without end.
ii I pull the drawers for snack and pill as lamp clicks off and her in bed. I check the locks against a thud and turn out light until the dark.
Her warmth is oblivion next to me, and blanket pulled up too cold to be but fear cutting a line at the base of my neck.
For her I am a child. I receive the blind worry of what may be evil with eyes open in darkness.
So I'm going to let the blog rest for a week. Until next Wednesday, farewell.