Personal Statement

Before this course, I think I found the world of Baz Luhrmann, limitless online opportunities, and global connectedness a bit frightening and most definitely not of God. Don’t get me wrong, I am not outside of this postmodern culture in any way, but in some ways, I considered culture as outside of and disconnected from a Sunday morning worship experience. I prided myself on being able to move back and forth between the two worlds of culture and religion. It didn’t make sense to me that someone could go on a hike or to a concert and say that they had a “worship experience” there. This disconnect in my mind became crystal clear to me when we watched the video of the Gen Xer woman who represented her generation to a church congregation of older people. That woman spoke my life into words and made me realize how much I had disconnected my pain and my heart from my faith. I was living in a church and faith of exegetical sermons and deep Bible knowledge but no understanding of how to appropriately and meaningfully apply it to the lives of the people I go clubbing with on Friday night.
When I realized this disconnect, I felt fairly helpless. I had no idea how to make the Bible relevant to my culture. I had found some relevance in it, but that was mainly because I had been raised in a church that preached sermons with such good and solid exegesis that I could occasionally find meaning in it. But I’m not in that church or that place of life anymore. And neither are my friends. My friends are bored; they crave something that touches them somewhere other than the intellect. They want to feel something all the time. So my question for the course became, first of all, is it realistic to expect this constant stimulus from church? Secondly, how can we as a church connect in any way to this need for authenticity and emotional experience in a way that retains the integrity of the text?
Probably the two concepts that were the most helpful in forming my thinking about how to connect the Bible to my generation were the concepts of DJ and storytelling. I’ve heard good DJs, where the mix is so smooth and so innovative that the whole crowd gets energy and excitement just hearing the transition. I’ve also heard DJs that made the transition choppy or predictable. The crowd would keep dancing, but would not experience much excitement. You could feel the mood die. When I think about translating this concept to transitioning the Bible into culture or transitioning the culture into the Bible, it seems exactly the same. Everyone will notice if the transition is choppy or boring and unoriginal. Just like a good DJ produces a “high” in its audience, seeing how the Bible speaks to my life in a new and original way should touch me. The danger, as we talked about in class, is making sure we as ministers DJ with integrity, rather than just throwing the Bible together with culture in a way that seems cool or new. As I think about how this combines with psychology and therapy, I can’t help but think about how much psychology has become a part of everyday culture. What I don’t think I or my clients realize is how much of good therapy is connected to the Bible. How does libertarian theology and the exodus story connect to my client who is in an abusive relationship, for example? In my profession, there is incredible opportunity to DJ the Bible with culture that changes as my clients change.
The other concept from this class that changed how I view living the text was the idea of storytelling. I know how much this culture loves a good story that is well told. What has frustrated me in the past is how poorly some people have told the gospel story. For some reason most of the “dramatized” gospel accounts I have seen, with the exception of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, have watered down the gospel story to make it less offensive or graphic. However, I believe that this generation craves raw and vital stories. As part of the desire for authenticity that marks my generation, we are not interested in stories that are glossed over and polite. Furthermore, this generation more than any other craves excitement and stimulus. I honestly don’t understand how to make the Bible exciting, or if doing so would maintain the integrity of the text. Was the Bible intended to be exciting? Can the stories within the text be told in a way that thrills my generation? These are questions I still have to wrestle with. At the very least, even if it is not necessarily as exciting or intriguing as the latest Quentin Tarantino film, the church can begin to tell the story of the Bible in a way that is real and that connects with its hearers. I know, from working with clients, what relief people experience from telling their stories and feeling heard by their therapist. There is a power in sharing and confessing a story that is difficult or painful. My task as a therapist and as a member of the church is to connect these stories with God’s narratives within the text.
In summary, I’m not sure that my view on how to integrate the text into everyday life is fully developed yet. However, I’m beginning to see that God is more flexible than I believed in the past. He is not repulsed by our culture. Postmodern culture offers several pathways to ministry that are exciting to me. I am, however, still unsure how to appropriately address these opportunities within the therapy experience. At this point, I think that until I become more holistic in my view of the text and how it relates to life and the postmodern culture, I will not be able to effectively communicate it in a professional context. I want to be a good DJ, without awkward transitions, and this will take time.

This is me....

Hi classmates~

I am a 23-year-old clinical psychology student here at Fuller Pasadena, just beginning my third year of SIX in this program.

I am from Oklahoma, specifically Edmond, which is just north of Oklahoma City, but I have lived all over the world. I live in Fuller housing in Pasadena, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with a woman in my cohort, which, I believe, is a new and radical definition of community ;). My life is full of people, so it is messy and chaotic, but also very rich.

I come from an independent Baptist background, which, in Oklahoma, is a bit suspect, since the majority of churchgoers attend either Southern Baptist or some form of charismatic congregation. My church was rocked by the radical ideas of grace and acceptance when I was in junior high (thank you, Brennan Manning) and has remained an incredibly non-judgmental and safe haven for me to return to when I get the chance to go home. The theology in my background was conservative, and the heart of my background was gracious.

Through these blogs, I hope to get to know you all better. I also hope to gain some new insights into how God is working in his usual diversity of ways in all of your lives. I hope this discussion is alive and gracious!