Hartford’s book is helping me make my world add up.<\/p>\n
I have the great joy and privilege of being a pastor of a local church in the Northwest. I’ve been pastoring here for nearly 12 years and have pastored people through the highs and lows of their lives, my life, a global pandemic and presidential elections. I love the simplicity, beauty and immense complexity that comes from pastoring and preaching alongside people as week to faithfully follow Jesus and show his love in our community and our daily lives.<\/p>\n
But as unique and specific the location and people that I share life with are, I recognized in Hartford’s book accurate descriptions of the pressures we as a community have felt over the past 12 years. With the use of “Fake news” as a doubt casting mechanism and the onslaught of statistics as weapons to destroy someone who thinks differently than me, we’ve been well trained over the last decade to reinforce the incessant tribalism that now tries to deepen a widening rift in our country and cultures as another American election looms.<\/p>\n
Is there a better way to live? How can we navigate these complexities? How do we look behind the curtain of these weaponized statistics? Hartford gives us the tools to do so.<\/p>\n
Each of his 10 commandments were extremely helpful to me and, I’m hoping, to others in my community as we walk through this year together. But it was his first two commandments that really resonated with me because I think so much of what is contributing to tribalism and incivility in our world today is the lack of awareness that we (including myself) have to my own personal feelings and echo-chamber reality that is curated for me by the media I consume and the world I swim in.<\/p>\n
In his first commandment Hartford reminds us that, “when we encounter a statistical claim about our world, and we are thinking of sharing it on social media or typing a furious rebuttal, we should instead ask ourselves: ‘How does this make me feel’ then, ‘WHY does it make me feel that way’?” (49)<\/p>\n
Those initial feelings we have tend to be a response of our ingrained need for protection and tribalism. In understanding our deep-seated need for tribalism, the book “Truth over Tribe: Pledging Allegiance to the Lamb, not the donkey or the elephant” by Keith Simon and Patrick Miller, has been extremely helpful in suggesting a new way forward for followers of the Lamb. Simon proposes, similarly to Hartford, that we must use emotions as data, not directives, that then help us assess the information being shared so that we can process the idea itself isolated from its emotional load it carries. Simon says, “The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish it away.\u201d-Keith Simon. We must engage these ideas, rather than avoiding them.<\/p>\n
I’ll admit as a pastor of a local church I’ve used avoidance as my primary survival tool in a world where every word you say from the pulpit could be used to cancel or dismiss you. But the problem with that course of action is two-fold. One, avoidance doesn’t actually ‘equip the saints for the work of ministry’ in this time and place. Saying nothing encourages disengagement with a world that desperately needs grace-filled, Christ-centered leadership and dialogue. Secondly, it assumes that the people that I am pastoring and preaching to are reactive and ready at any moment to cancel or dismiss me, which I have absolutely no evidence for in the last 12 years. I have been blessed to pastor in a church of people who are kind, thoughtful, gracious, intelligent and are earnestly wrestling with how to be Christ-like in a challenging era. I must do better. My avoidance comes, not from any actual evidence of crisis or conflict, but of my own need to be liked and fear of being rejected. This projection onto my church family does not equip them for the year in America or for the other issues that we are already facing in our world.<\/p>\n
There are some potential ways forward and some signposts from the past, two of which I’ll mention here.<\/p>\n
The first is advice from a major church influencer, John Wesley. While I think Wesley was far from perfect (which is ironic if you come from a holiness background like I do, because of our theology of entire sanctification), Wesley made significant theological and pastoral contributions during a time in the history of the Western world that was also divisive. He gave this advice in his journal on October 6, 1774:<\/p>\n
“I met those of our society who had votes in the ensuing election, and advised them:
\n1. To vote, without fee or reward, for the person they judged most worthy
\n2. To speak no evil of the person they voted against, and
\n3. To take care their spirits were not sharpened against those that voted on the other side.\u201d<\/p>\n
The advice that Wesley gives here is still applicable today and seeks to also work against are desire for default tribalism. If these words of advice were followed today, I wonder how much different American politics would be, and more importantly, how different our faith communities would be.<\/p>\n
I have also always admired Abraham Lincoln as a leader and a masterful orator and politician. While watching “Lincoln” with my son this week I was reminded of how Lincoln fought against the idea of naive realism mentioned in the 2nd commandment of Hartford’s book.<\/p>\n
Lincoln surrounded himself with people who disagreed with him. He knew that in a radically divided country he had to model a way forward that would hold the country together in a time of its most serious testing. In Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, “Team of Rivals” she masterfully unpacks how Lincoln was able to accomplish this and suggests the key is integration of ideas and perspectives:<\/p>\n
\u201cLincoln understood the importance, as one delegate put it, of integrating \u201call the elements of the Republican party\u2014including the impracticable, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.\u201d-Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Doris Kearns Goodwin)<\/p>\n
Lincoln had strong convictions about what is was he was called to do, but recognized the importance of integrating the realities and opinions of others in what he was doing. He could have set up an echo-chamber to alleviate the tremendous pressure he felt at the time of America’s greatest need. But, instead, he surrounded himself with people who would question, accuse, even reject the ideas and proposals he was making. This made him an even better leader.<\/p>\n
For the sake of my congregation, Hartford’s book has challenged me again to think more deeply about how I can engage media and messaging rather than sticking my head in the sand. It has also challenged me to equip and encourage our church family to do the same.<\/p>\n
A final reminder from Hartford: “When we slow down, control our emotions and our desire to signal partisan affiliation, and commit ourselves to calmly weighing the facts, we’re not just thinking more clearly–we are also modelling clear thinking for others.”-(49)<\/p>\n
May God give us all, for the sake of the Church, the grace to do so.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hartford’s book is helping me make my world add up. I have the great joy and privilege of being a pastor of a local church in the Northwest. I’ve been pastoring here for nearly 12 years and have pastored people through the highs and lows of their lives, my life, a global pandemic and presidential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","cohort-dlgp03"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35549"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35551,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35549\/revisions\/35551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}