Archive for category: Faculty Focus

Post Author: Dr. Amy Oden, Professor of Early Church History at Saint Paul School of Theology

“Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God … You’ll be changed from the inside out.” – (Romans 12:1-2, The Message)

This sounds like a great description of Christian mindfulness. As a church historian who is currently writing the book, Right Here, Right Now: The Roots of Christian Mindfulness (Abingdon Press, 2017), one common reaction I get is, “Mindfulness, you say? That’s not Christian, it’s Buddhist.”

I’m always shocked when I hear people say that mindfulness is not a Christian practice, given its powerful and persistent role in Christian faith over the last 2000 years. The call to be mindful of our lives “placed before God” rings through every Christian century. As I write this book, I’m struck by the epidemic of Christian amnesia, the fact that many Christians don’t know our own history, and, as a result, miss out on what God has been up to.

For too many Christians, the timeline of faith looks something like this one. It begins with Jesus as the dot on the left followed by a dot next to it for the Bible. A long, blank gap follows, with a final dot on the right end labeled “me,” as though the 2000 years of history in between the Bible and me are truly devoid of God’s life.

This view of history is a form of functional atheism, a belief that God has been impotent or on a cloud somewhere or simply absent from history. Or, perhaps our amnesia is merely the triumph of the world’s message of individualism. In this view, it is only my own life that matters so that all of history God was just waiting in the wings for me to be born so He could get back to work. Ouch.

The Lord of Life might be surprised to learn that that His mighty acts over the last 2000 years don’t matter.

One of our central Christian teachings, the Incarnation, expressly proclaims that God insists on acting in history, most notably in Jesus Christ. Further, Jesus promised the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, our teacher sent by the Father (John 14:26). To hear some Christians today talk, Jesus is wrong and God hasn’t been up to anything for 2000 years.

The good news is that our God is the Living God, alive and well, at work in every age. Our history as Christian people is the history of God’s mighty acts of redemption. You know this in your own life. As a Christian believer, you experience the work of the Holy Spirit in your life every day. It’s not hard, then, to grasp that God has also been at work in the lives of others in previous centuries. We inherit these gifts from the communion of saints and squander them at our peril.

The Kingdom: God’s Presence In and Around You

Now to mindfulness as a Christian practice.

Christian mindfulness is simply paying attention to our lives held within God’s life. As the Message says it, “Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God.”

This is not a complicated prayer practice, but it can be a difficult one. Mindfulness disciplines us to stop our frantic lives and pay prayerful attention to the present moment in order to attend upon God. Christian mindfulness cultivates what Jesus calls “eyes to see” and “ears to hear” the Kingdom of God at hand in our lives. Jesus calls us to pay attention to the present moment where the reign of God is, in the here and now. It’s almost as though Jesus were saying, “Have eyes to see and ears to hear this present moment, the reign of God, right here in and around you!”

As a church historian, it’s been fun to discover the many ways Christians have practiced mindfulness, from Evagrius in the desert to nepsis in Eastern Orthodox practice to the divine offices in monastic life to prayers of recollection to Wesleyan watchfulness and beyond. My book will trace these prayer practices that turn our gaze to God, that put our minds on Christ, that focus our awareness on the work of the Spirit concretely, in the actual experience of this moment.

All these different prayer forms share a common foundation in the focus on the experience of God’s presence with us, here in this moment. Mindfulness of our Lord is the taproot of prayer. Without such mindfulness, prayer can become a noisy gong, a flurry of words, empty and self-absorbed.

To be sure, Christian mindfulness has its own distinctive characteristics and is not exactly the same as mindfulness practice in other religious and non-religious traditions. I devote a section of my book to this.

For now, I hope Christians will become more curious about what God has been up to for the last twenty centuries. You will find a treasure trove of witness, saints, ways of loving God and neighbor, ways of being God’s people. We have a deep well of theologies and spiritual practices. And it’s important to add that we have taken wrong turns and learned to repent, again and again. Yet throughout it all, God has been mindful of us. God reaches out to all peoples in all places with an invitation to relationship.

We are hungry for it and in practicing mindfulness of God’s presence here, now, we learn to have eyes to see and ears to hear the kingdom of God in our midst.

Dr. Amy Oden is Professor of Early Church History and Spirituality at Saint Paul School of Theology at OCU. Teaching is her calling, and she looks forward to every day with students. For 25 years, Amy has taught theology and history, pursuing scholarship in service of the body of Christ.

Author: Dr. Henry H. Knight III

In the last two months we’ve looked at faith and hope as two of the marks of a transformed heart. Now we come to the most important mark of all: love. John Wesley fully embraces the words of the apostle Paul who said of the Christian life “now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (I Cor. 13:13, NRSV)

For Wesley, to be renewed in love was the whole point of salvation. It’s what salvation is.We were created in God’s image, and God is love. Wesley believed the goal of salvation is to restore us to that image, so that we love as God loves. Christ came that we might receive this new life as a gift. This restoration is a work of the Holy Spirit in us, and begins when our hearts are initially renewed. We then grow in love until it fills and governs our hearts.

Charles Wesley gives expression to this yearning for a renewed heart in this way:
O for a heart to praise my God,
a heart from sin set free,
a heart that always feels thy blood
so freely shed for me.
A heart in every thought renewed
and full of love divine,
perfect and right and pure and good,
a copy, Lord, of thine.
UM HYMNAL, 417

John Wesley notes that the “necessary fruit of this love of God is love of our neighbor, of every soul God hath made, not excepting enemies…(The Marks of the New Birth, III.3)

Not only does Jesus tell us to love others as we love ourselves, but to love others as we have been loved by Jesus. Jesus has loved us to the uttermost, even unto death on a cross.

To love God and our neighbor are what Jesus identified as the two greatest commandments. Sometimes we think that we can never love in this way. Maybe it’s an unattainable idea, or maybe it means we should just try harder. But this is to miss the point that this new life of love is a gift. The key is not effort but receptivity to what God offers us.

What happens when our hearts are renewed in love? Love begins to be the motivation for our action and the well-springs of our desires. It becomes the disposition of our hearts. This means that our loving God and others does not depend upon our always feeling loving. We may feel love from time to, but we can always be a loving person.

So how do we receive and grow in this new life of love? We do it through experiencing God’s love for us in Christ. That occurs through means of grace: reading scripture, praying, worshiping together, receiving the Lord’s Supper, and caring for others. As we do these things with open and receptive hearts, the Holy Spirit continues to renew us in love, and then more and more our lives reflect God’s love into the world.

The following is a guest blog post from Saint Paul Preaching and Worship Professor Dr. Mike Graves.
His personal blog is called Pulpit & Pew and can be found here.

Multimedia in Sermons?

In my introductory preaching class at the seminary this semester I decided that one of the three required sermons need not be preached “live,” but could be a video of a sermon preached in a ministry setting. I had good reasons for offering this option, but when watching these sermons I was struck by something unrelated to it being on video. Or maybe not.

What I couldn’t help but notice is how many of these grand old sanctuaries with their beautiful woodwork and grand organs now had projectors and screens as well. They were hard to miss. But if preaching classes use technology like a video recording of a sermon preached elsewhere, why should I be surprised that these churches embrace technology too?

Students in class and clergy in workshops often ask my opinion on using technology in worship, and more specifically in preaching. Typically I stammer for a few moments, trying to articulate what I believe. It’s not that I don’t know, but it’s complicated. If I start with skepticism, they think I’m a Luddite, opposed to technology for whatever reasons. If I start with endorsement, they assume I support it wholesale. Neither is quite right; the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Consider this my attempt to be more articulate, even while acknowledging the complications.

Two words come to mind: use and diffuse.

By the first term, I’m thinking about the decisions to be made about its use at all in church. This is complicated, so hear me out. I remember a sermon by a really gifted Disciples preacher who at one point in her sermon was describing our tendency as fickle believers to flip-flop as followers of Christ. Sometimes we are faithful, and sometimes not so much. You get the idea, I’m fairly certain.

Only the preacher wasn’t so sure, so she had inserted a PowerPoint slide with the picture of a flip-flop, you know, a sandal like you wear to the beach. There’s the obvious problem that the idea of flip-flopping isn’t about the poolside shoes at all, but even beyond that, don’t most folks know what flip-flopping means without a picture? If the sermon had been about something that happened at a beach resort on vacation, we probably wouldn’t need a picture of a hotel or beach either.

The church has been using paper for a long time now, centuries in fact. And we have that down pat, how to use paper. We print bulletins with the order of worship on it and announcements crammed in as well. Of course in this green age of recycling, some have wondered about that practice. In which case, the use is guided by ecology. I bring up the use of paper, because we are still new at using screens. Very new. It will likely take us many more decades before we figure out their use. In some places it feels like an awful lot of money for clip art and preacher’s outlines.

The second term, diffuse, refers to what happens when we visit a museum and are overwhelmed with too many images. Next time you venture into a museum of art, try this experiment: Instead of trying to take in the whole museum, pick out one image and stick with it. You don’t even have to know which image ahead of time. But find one painting, one piece of sculpture, and once you do, ponder it for a long time. Sit on a nearby bench if possible. Why did you settle on this one image? What do you make of it? What sticks with you long after leaving?

Too often preachers project too many images, too many pictures and slides. As a result, none of them get our full attention and we drown in a sea of slides. Diffusion. I know a Presbyterian pastor who chooses one slide each week, just one. Most of the time it’s the image of a painting, portraying the biblical story on which the sermon is based, Jesus feeding the multitudes, or walking on water. Just the one image. It stays up the whole time and becomes a visual portrayal of what he describes verbally.

I have heard confessions from preachers in which they admitted to spending more time on their PowerPoint images than their study of the text or finding stories for the sermon. That seems to me a poor use of their time and could lead to a very diffuse sort of existence as minister. So what do you think?

For the original posting and more, please visit Dr. Mike Graves blog: Pulpit and Pew