Christian Piatt Blog

Is life like hell without faith?

My wife, Amy, and I have been in Pueblo for nearly three years, trying to grow a new church. Had we known how hard it would be, we might have opted for an existing ministry. Starting a new church is one of the most emotionally volatile experiences we can imagine.

It’s easy to get hung up on the number of people who show up on any given Sunday. It’s hard not to take it personally when someone says they will come, and then they don’t. That, or they come once every few months and consider themselves regulars. Both of these scenarios happen all of the time.

We’ve heard nearly every excuse for not coming to church that could be imagined, to the point that we don’t hear them anymore. We believe we have something to share that’s worth people’s time, but we can’t make them do anything.

Some people said they really wanted to come, but that meeting in our home where we originally began was too intimate for them. When we moved to the college they still didn’t come. Some who felt the CSU-Pueblo campus was too far away hedged. We’re now located on the southwest side of town, and they still don’t come. Dozens of people said they’d come if we had services in the morning, so last week we had our first morning worship. None of the new people came.

Why should they, after all?

There’s a growing perception that faith can happen in a vacuum, that we don’t need community to nurture our connection with God. As Amy said in a recent sermon, many people find their spiritual nourishment on a mountaintop, in a book or by the ocean. While these things are useful and perhaps even inspiring, when you need an ear to listen or a shoulder to lean on, a book is no consolation.

No matter how much you love the divine creation of the outdoors, a mountain just can’t love you back.

Author Anne Lamott concedes that she makes her 14-year-old son go to church. She says it’s one of the only places she knows of where he can see people loving God back.

We learn about our spiritual ancestry by learning from the wisdom of others. We understand compassion and humility by seeing it modeled. We can’t learn the value of a community of faith if we’re so isolated that we never take the risk of sharing what we believe.

Church can really suck. I’ve been hurt by church, as have many people, but this is no excuse for walking away. We don’t abandon our families simply because we have hard times, do we? Do we quit our job every time we experience conflict? Maybe some people do both of these, but it’s a sign of one’s character to see how they respond to hardship. Do you withdraw, or do you allow yourself to be vulnerable?

No one has to go to church, though some churches are based upon the very opposite precept. Somehow they have a corner on salvation, and without them, you’re outside the circle. Lamott’s response: Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell, and faith is for people who have been there.

Fear is a terrible reason to go to church. As Lamott says, we’ve all been through hell, in one form or another. Still, we feel like we shouldn’t burden other people with our problems. In an increasingly do-it-yourself society, a communal approach to healing is hard to comprehend, let alone embrace. It’s risky, scary and will demand more from us than sitting on our butts, thinking up reasons not to go.

Church isn’t about getting a weekly dose of religion. It’s about realizing faith by living it together. You’ve been through enough. It’s time to stop thinking of reasons why you don’t deserve to be loved, for God’s sake.

Robertson spins ‘prophet’ into profit

Pat Robertson claims that God gave him a message during a prayer retreat. The perennial figurehead of the 700 Club says the divine missive warned of an imminent terrorist attack on American soil in 2007. Whether or not the threat would be nuclear was unclear.

Whether it involves reports of superhuman strength or condemnation of Louisiana residents for exacting God’s wrath in the form of hurricane Katrina, Robertson finds regular excuses to thrust himself into the limelight.

If said attack does transpire, Robertson’s self-proclaimed status as a modern prophet is given credibility. If not, his faithful are sure to go along with whatever reason he comes up with for the hand of terror being stayed. Most likely, this will involve a sufficient supply of prayer, Christian piety and a demonstration of faithfulness in the form of pledges to his media empire – oops, I mean, ministry.

Robertson has been hit-and-miss with his previous God-given predictions, yet his spotty record as the Farmer’s Almanac of eschatology has done little to affect his stature. It seems the man can do no wrong in the eyes of millions of advocates, no matter how hateful, self-aggrandizing or deluded his claims are.

Does that say more about him or about us?

It’s with some reticence that I commit this much space to talking about someone who I consider to be nothing but a charlatan. Each time his critics go on the attack, it only raises his profile to greater levels, suggesting that his rhetoric is worth the ink. What is worth discussion is our insatiable need to know, to lay claim to a magic lens that will peer into the future, giving us a Godlike perspective on the universe, and subsequently some greater sense of control over the outcome of things.

Growing up, a lot of my friends were particularly interested in the prophecies of Nostradamus. I too bought a book of his writing and eagerly tried to connect historical occurrences to his ominously vague prognostications. Even today, people continue to use this sage’s predictions in an effort to determine the trajectory of our collective fate.

There’s one little problem with all of this, however; Nostradamus predicted the world would come to an end at the dawn of this millennium, rendering any predictions beyond the year 2,000 facetious.

Biblically a prophet doesn’t have a .500 average. They’re either a conduit for God’s truth or they’re not. Those who claim to be prophets without such a divinely ordained gift are called false prophets. We’ve been duly warned of the consequences of investing our faith in such characters.

Also, prophets aren’t just fortune tellers. Prophets are more broadly defined as proclaimers of truth, inspired by the word of God. This includes calling B.S. on those who would seek to mislead people with false hopes, misplaced fears or other human-seated motivations and desires.

Here are a few of my own predictions, just for fun.

Global climate patterns will continue to spiral into chaotic and destructive patterns as we continue to ignore the signs of ecological instability, right in front of our noses.

We will reduce our military presence in Iraq over the next few years, but the place will be a mess for decades. The Middle East will never achieve the kind of peace we think they should have in our lifetime, or our children’s lifetime.

Terrorists indeed will continue to target us as long as we are the biggest kids on the block. It’s always been that way.

Some day we will have a non-white and non-male president, but neither will happen in 2008. Finally, energy prices will continue to creep upward until we figure out it makes better financial sense to seek alternatives more aggressively and conserve non-renewable energy sources.

Here’s hoping these predictions offer you a bit of the solace you seek in the new year. Feel free to send any checks you had planned for Pat Robertson my way.

At the beginning of advent, I wrote about our apparently futile efforts to keep our three-year-old son, Mattias, focused on the central message of Christmas. Though we shared the story with him daily, he continued to insist that Santa was the most important thing about Christmas.

Every day, we sat down at the dinner table and lit the advent candles and read the meditation from the advent book. He’d make it a paragraph into the story before squirming onto the floor or sticking his fingers in the melted wax.

It’s enough to make a parent wonder if anything is sinking in.

Then, a few days before Christmas, Mattias crawled up into his chair at the table and, pointing to each of the five candles in the advent wreath said, “Look dad! All around the Jesus candle is peace, hope, joy and love.”

On Christmas morning, he gasped when he came down the stairs to find an empty milk glass and cookie plate by the fire. He squealed when he found his dinosaur beneath the tree.  Then, before playing with any of his new toys, he headed to the dining room table to help light the candles.

I’ve heard plenty of cynicism this year from any number of people about commercialism devouring the true meaning of Christmas. I’ve shared in the tirades about obligatory stuff-swapping and grudging acceptance of yet another Garfield necktie or fruitcake log. How, after all, do antlers that play “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” remind us of a child born on the fringes of Bethlehem?

I tire of the superficiality and glitter as much as anyone, but to be honest, I’m almost wearier of the complaining about how we’ve lost our way amid the gifts and tinsel. I’ve appreciated the stories I’ve read over the past few weeks about the quiet generosity that often goes unnoticed, all around us.

A woman in Spokane jumped aboard a public bus, along with a cloth satchel filled with envelopes. Before anyone on the bus could identify her, she handed Christmas cards out to everyone on board, each containing a $50 bill, and jumped back off to head to several other buses. No one ever figured out who the mystery woman was, but in the end, she had distributed thousands of dollars to people she had never met.

In Pueblo, scores of churches and community groups joined together to buy gifts for needy families, troops stationed overseas, and to collect clothing and supplies for children abroad. These people will forever be anonymous to those who benefit from their generosity, and they won’t receive so much as a tax break in most cases.

On Christmas day, more than a hundred volunteers took time away from home to feed hundreds of homeless and otherwise isolated people at the Union Depot in what has become an annual tradition. Everyone involved found benefit in the experience according to the Chieftain article, pointing to the fringe benefits of charity for the giver.

Sure, we can all get caught up in the hoopla of the holidays. We eat too much, spend more than we should, and sometimes forget the point. We can find plenty of reasons to believe we’ve gone astray, but in some ways, the Christmas spirit persists quietly around us whether we acknowledge it or not.

Much like the child born to dazed and bewildered parents two thousand years ago, the spirit of Christmas doesn’t impose itself upon the world. It works steadily and quietly whether it’s recognized or not. It whispers amid the shouting, revealing itself one relationship at a time.

Christmas may not look exactly the way we think it should, and we’ll never purge ourselves entirely of the material pageantry. As I watched my son blow out the Christ candle for the last time this year, I’m reminded that people are basically good, despite my inclinations to believe otherwise.

It’s the time of year when mailboxes are flooded with year-end appeals from nonprofits. As a professional fundraiser, I recognize the challenge these organizations face in trying to meet demand.

Part of my job as a grant-writer and fundraiser is to help create a compelling argument for why you should give to this or that cause. I want to convince you that your dollars could not be better spent on anything else.

Another approach is to make giving as easy as possible. For example, one organization with which I have worked for years replaced its annual giving program with a monthly, automated bank-draft program. This way, people can give a few bucks a month instead of smarting after one big gift a year. Both the donor and the organization know what to plan for, and it’s more convenient for everyone.

The best part is that instead of having to ask the donor to give over and over again, they call the organization to cancel the automatic draft. The organization keeps getting its $10 or $20 a month until the person goes out of their way to stop, and who wants to seem like such a Scrooge?

So if my whole job is to convince people to give away their money, why did the article in last week’s Pueblo Chieftain on automated-giving kiosks in church bother me so much?

The premise is simple: a minister and his wife set up a machine in the foyer of the church where people can swipe a credit card to make an offering. The process is secure, convenient, and the church has seen an 18 percent increase in giving since the program started.

People don’t have to give if they don’t want to, and the church is providing a service that the congregation seems to want. Everybody wins, right?

There are a couple of problems with this. First, even though credit is a way of life in America today, the Bible offers a different perspective. Proverbs 22:7 says, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.”

In the New Testament, Jesus talks about money more than anything else. So by encouraging people to use credit cards to give their weekly offering, churches are enabling the further financial enslavement of their faithful to creditors.

But what about the bonus miles, you ask? Why not get a trip to Hawaii for the donations I make at church? If you pay off your credit cards, that’s great, but if so, you’re in the minority. The vast majority of Americans don’t pay off their credit cards every month though they intend to, and nearly half pay only the minimum payment.

At that rate, it can take as long as 30 years to pay off borrowed money, with the consumer paying 300 percent of the original loan in interest.

As a country, we hold $1.5 trillion dollars in debt. Not only should churches abstain from enabling this disease of indebtedness, but they should be proactive about helping people get out of debt. The 18 percent bump in giving just isn’t worth the price.

Also, there’s something unique about giving at church. Whereas donating money to a charity can be an act of compassion, giving an offering at church is supposed to be a form of worship. We’re not just handing over cash to keep the lights on or fund church programs; we’re handing something over that’s very powerful in our lives to God. It’s an act of submission and obedience.

Mark this day in your calendar, because it’s a rare occasion when you’ll hear me talking about submission and obedience. But when churches and their members start treating money more like a commodity than an offering to God, they should be reminded that giving is about more than adding zeroes to the bottom line of the ledger.

Religion’s role: Draw lines, or cross them?
By Christian Piatt

Last week yielded a number of memorable events which might not seem particularly related. However, upon looking back, they all got me thinking about where organized religion fits in matters of justice.

Friday, December 1st marked the fifty-first anniversary of when Rosa Parks earned the moniker as the “mother of the civil rights movement.” Her defiance of the Jim Crow laws that required her to concede her seat to a white passenger pushed her into the public spotlight, helping pave the way for the likes of Rev. Martin Luther King.

A lesser known, but similarly significant, event took place five years earlier in New Orleans. Jerome Smith, ten years old at the time, removed the screen placed between the black and white passengers on a streetcar. He was subsequently boxed on the ears by an older black woman on the car for disrespecting the white travelers, though she later embraced him in private, urging him to never stop in his struggle for equality.

Smith later became the founder of the New Orleans Chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality.

Last Thursday, Pope Benedict XVI completed his trip through Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, with a visit to the famous Blue Mosque. He removed his shoes, entered silently and prayed alongside the local cleric in an ongoing effort to express his respect for Islam. His fence-mending mission was seen as a significant step forward in repairing the rifts caused by his remarks in October, deemed offensive by millions of Muslims.

Finally, December 1st marked World AIDS Day, reminding us that nearly 40 million still live with HIV in the world today, including more than 2 million children, and almost twelve thousand new infections every single day.

Though most religious institutions remain woefully silent about the HIV pandemic, others have taken the opportunity to teach the world a lesson. Pat Buchanan calls AIDS “nature’s revenge on homosexuals,” and Jerry Falwell claims the disease is “proof of society’s moral decay.”

Though it is not a popular public position today, it wasn’t so long ago that politicians and religious officials alike celebrated the sanctity of segregation. I have a friend who told me recently that his grandmother used to believe that separation of the races was ordained by God, as taught in her church. It took someone like Rev. King, from within the racist, religious status quo, to finally push for change.

Pope Benedict took a risk not only in traveling to Turkey to begin with, but also in worshipping within a Mosque. He could have been harassed by locals, incensed by his previous insensitivity. Instead, the world breathed a sigh of relief as his trip was concluded in peace.

There are those who believe it is religion’s responsibility to draw the boundaries of propriety within which the rest of society should operate. Others feel it is their spiritual calling to step across some of these same lines, drawing cries of heresy from the ones making the rules.

This moral tension changes form over time, but it never goes away. Siddhartha Gautama shocked his stewards by leaving the safety of his father’s palace, along his journey to become the Buddha. Jesus challenged the authority of the Pharisees to the point that they played an integral part in his arrest, trial and crucifixion.

Religious leaders historically play both sides of the fence on many major societal issues. I’m not necessarily claiming the righteousness of one position over another, but as one who places Rev. King, Jesus and Buddha higher on my list of role models than Rev. Falwell and Pat Buchanan, I’d say there’s still room for a few agitators within the church.

There is No ‘I’ in ‘Prayer.’
By Christian Piatt

Originally printed in the Pueblo Chieftain newspaper

I was with my wife, Amy, in Mexico last week for vacation. She found a small store, sandwiched between a convenience market and a show shop, which sold more religious paraphernalia than I ever knew existed.

Amy was particularly drawn to the milagros (Spanish for ‘miracle’) which are little metal emblems, stamped in Italy – and I assume blessed by priests – with the images of various saints, scriptures and other religious icons. She enjoyed poring over the scores of glass jars, selecting just the right ‘miracle’ for friends and family back home.

When we went to the front to pay, I ducked to avoid a clothes line, hanging just over the counter. Although I am of average height in the states, I feel like an adolescent to big for his body in many Mexican structures. The line was covered in hundreds of rosaries, the small strings of prayer beads used in the Catholic tradition.

Right next to the rosaries were clothespins holding the most recent scratch-off lottery tickets for sale.

Now, that’s interesting product placement, I thought.

Although I’m sure the proximity of the prayer beads and lottery tickets was coincidental, it got me to thinking about the reasons we pray. Last year, Newsweek and an online service called Beliefnet joined together do conduct a prayer survey. When asked, “What do you think is the most important purpose of prayer?” The most popular answer at 27 percent was “to seek God’s guidance.”

Close behind that were along the lines of giving thanks and drawing closer to the Divine. Lagging far behind at an anemic nine percent was “To improve a person’s life.”

Call me a skeptic, but I think this survey reflects a lot more about what we think intellectually about prayer than what we actually do. At the risk of beating a dead horse, I feel the urge to revisit the Prosperity Gospel concept once more.

I’m not suggesting that we’re all praying to win the lottery, although it’s my guess that more than one in ten sends up a good word when the Powerball creeps up over $100 million. From personal experience, I like to think that I make prayer a regular discipline to help strengthen my spiritual connection, but often times, I find myself forgetting to make it such a regular habit: that is, until I need something.

The explosion of the popularity of what I call “self-help Jesus” spirituality, from the eighties and on into the new century, suggests I’m not the only one. Such teaching has many champions such as Joel Olsteen, Joyce Meyer and the Copelands.

It’s quite a system, really. The principal is that God want’s the world’s righteous to prosper (materially), and that one of the main ways you show your faithfulness, aside from praying for affluence, is to give significant amounts of money to these ministries. This comes in many forms, including outright gifts, as well as book sales, lecture admission fees and more. I don’t know if Joel Olsteen sells T-shirts at his gigantic rallies, but it would not shock me.

The effect is self-evident. If you’re not growing in material abundance, you’re not working the system right. Duh!

It’s easy to castigate such a distortion of the gospel that not only fits so easily into the greedy value system of modern America, but also makes its proponents incredibly rich.

It’s not wrong to ask God for things. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us as much. But Jesus asks only for daily bread, not the whole stinking factory. Also, the whole prayer is in ‘we’ language. Nowhere in his prayer is the first person ever introduced.

If Jesus was around today, what would our modern-day Prosperity Gospel mavens tell him about his life of poverty? They’d probably tell him to pray harder, or maybe say he just wasn’t giving enough.

Hope or wishes? Joy or happiness?

            Anyone who has watched the movie A Christmas Story understands the tenuous and fragile nature of wishes. From the beginning, young Ralphie is obsessed with getting his hands on a Red Rider bee bee gun, complete with a compass in the stock, for Christmas. Adults repeatedly warn him of the dangers of shooting his eye out, and scheme after scheme is foiled. Finally the blessed day arrives, and beneath the tree, he finds the object of his desire.

He dashes outside to give it a try and, with his first shot, shatters his glasses and narrowly misses shooting his eye out.

Pueblo falls victim to some of the same fantasies. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t open the paper to read about this rumor or that about a new business that promises to lift us from our economic sluggishness. Some of them work out, but often times, these stories dissolve into the ether, never to mature.

I too follow such starry-eyed longings. My friends know I’m a fan of Chipotle, the Mexican food restaurant, to the point of obsession. I got in the habit of eating there at least five times a week when I lived in Denver and Fort Worth. Now, at least once a week, I drive an hour each way just to chow down on a monster burrito at the nearest Chipotle in Colorado Springs.

For two years, I have heard rumors about a store opening in Pueblo. I was so convinced by the most recent anecdote that I drove by the prospective site to see how far along the construction was. Once again, my hopes were dashed as the signage for yet another payday loan store was being secured to the front.

The word “hope” as used above actually is misused. Ralphie, Pueblo and I all get focused sometimes on outcomes, over which we have less control than we would like. These outcome-based longings actually are wishes. Hope is something greater, and thank God, it transcends physical results as we assess them.

Hope is universal across the religious spectrum, but we generally confuse this with wish-fulfillment. Examples of this can be found in the “Prosperity Gospel” messages of religious hucksters, promising wealth if you get right with God, and also send them a monetary token of your commitment.

Whenever we pin our faith on outcomes, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment, and we’re setting God up for what we perceive as failure. It presumes we know what we really need, and it also assumes God is more concerned with what’s going on around us than what we’re experiencing within.

Fulfillment of wishes does bring happiness, in some cases. However, this feeling generally is fleeting, as we realize we replace one want with another, or that the thing we expected to fill the void we carry around didn’t do the trick.

Beware of any religious leader who tells you God wants you to be happy. True, we’re called to joyfulness, but like the difference between wishes and hope, joy transcends the bumps, bruises and abuses of daily life.

Things around us don’t have to change for us to have hope. Our ever-growing wish list doesn’t have to be satisfied for us to understand joy.  In fact, the more we focus on wishes and happiness, the less hope and joy we’ll have. Real hope doesn’t ebb and flow with circumstances, and joy isn’t a mood: it’s a state of being, transcendent of any suffering, disappointment or unfulfilled expectations.

Now, that’s a gift that keeps on giving.