Book Review: McKnight's Kingdom Conspiracy

Now it's Brazos Bloggers' turn. This is a brief review -- well, brief for someone used to 1200-to-2000-word reviews, anyway -- of Scot McKnight, Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (Brazos, 2014).

I enjoy reading Scot McKnight's work, even when I disagree with him (usually on relatively minor points). And I don't disagree with him here, for the most part. What he's trying to do, and largely succeeding at, in his new book is to reconcile two Christian views of "kingdom" -- as theology, as language, and as activity -- that have tended to diverge over the past century and are doing so again today. McKnight casts one stream of thought and practice, which tends to aim its "kingdom" work toward "the common good," social justice, and culture-making, as "skinny jeans kingdom" people, and the other, the kingdom-as-personal-salvation camp, as "pleated pants kingdom" people (including, cleverly, "the arch-Pleated Pants scholar" George Eldon Ladd, p. 10). Those who recognize themselves as falling into one camp or the other will find their views and practices represented well here, both in strengths and weaknesses. For those folks, and for the rest of us who find ourselves somewhere between the two extremes, this book serves as a fine biblical theology of church, kingdom, and mission. It's very readable, too: the most challenging words in the body of the text are perhaps eschatological and parabolic, while readers who want to go deeper can plunge into sources recommended in the endnotes (as when McKnight notes Tom Wright's recent two-volume work in its entirety in partial support of a point on first-century use of "Son of God" imagery, p. 132!).

Throughout Kingdom Conspiracy, McKnight nicely balances his attention to many facets of kingdom thought and action, including the tensions of its growth in this world (classically, the "already" and the "not yet", and as both "realm" and "reign"); the biblical (and deeply contextual) story that it encapsulates; and what it looks like to live out the kingdom in mission, in vocation, and in public and political presence -- or, simply put, what it means to embody the kingdom in and as the church. There are moments when the author nearly loses that balance. I wish he'd added more nuance to his study of the New Testament's view of "the world" and Jesus' confrontation with its idolatrous worldviews (pp. 17, 60): a brief focus on the way that Rome saw the world (as the oikoumenē, the inhabited world/culture that it had inherited from Greece) might have strengthened McKnight's discussion of culture and counterculture, both here and through the rest of the volume. But that missing nuance does little to hurt his overall argument. This book is highly recommended for anyone -- no matter how close or distant their relationship with "church" -- who has ever struggled with how the church is to embody God's kingdom in the world.

The Temporary Grease Monkey

Occasionally, during the long haul of our renovations, amid the self-castigating hollers that emanated from this or that corner of the house, Karen would hear a satisfied little chuckle, often followed by my observation that she, in her wisdom, had married "a clever little monkey": some little detail of a renovation task had finally gone just like I wanted it to, and though this was not what I had trained for, I could be momentarily proud of an accomplishment.

Well, after months of job-searching and continuing to work on little bits and pieces of the house, it's time to see how well this clever little monkey can pick up some new manual skills: for about three months, I'll be helping out in a friend's auto shop.  Again, not my first choice, but I'm happy to do it, and I may even survive it (though the first six weeks, where the job overlaps with the second half of my thrice-weekly stationary cycling workouts, should be, um, interesting).  It'll bring in some of that very helpful stuff called money, and it should end, neatly, just about the same time as the New Testament survey course I'll be teaching at Tyndale begins.  But it does mean that I'll have to reassess (again) just how to fit writing into my schedule.  It's likely I won't have a lot of time to reflect on that here -- but I've already created some space in the fall schedule to work on book reviews and a few other small projects, and hopefully whatever God has in store for me after that will allow a little more writing time than full-time automotive work does.  Maybe I'll even manage, through this interval, to learn a little more discipline with my time, so that I can make better use of what time I have after that.  Here's hoping.

Disciplined, the Better to Model Disciplines?

As noted in several of my "more recent" posts, I've been struggling quite a lot with the transition out of the home-renovation stage -- more than eight months of intensive work, almost exclusively on our house (save for a few conference presentations and one teaching opportunity), which I had no time or spare energy to blog about so had to content myself with posting pics on Facebook -- and into the next chapter, In Which I Find Work That Results in a Paycheck.  I have applied to everything from university presses, sessional teaching jobs and nonprofits on the one hand, to CostCo, Rona, Lowe's and local coffee shops on the other.  I still believe I will find work, soon, possibly even work that utilizes some of my best vocational skills.  And I haven't exactly been idle in the interim, either: I've done lots more little things for the house and assembled a book proposal, too.  But the Waiting remains frustrating.  

Not that the Father of the heavenly lights hasn't continued to give good gifts (James 1:17) along the way.  Just yesterday, as I explained Karen's and my vision and purpose for the house at the request of a friend and colleague who will be blogging about us soon, one of his questions nudged me in such a way as to consider this Waiting in a slightly different way.  Now, Karen and I have been careful to acknowledge that the founding of a house for spiritual direction and retreat doesn't mean that we've mastered related disciplines like silence, solitude, or sabbath-keeping; far from it!  No, we've insisted, opening this house will require us to grow in these things in order to model and teach them to our guests.  But even once we'd acknowledged that, it took Jim's questions yesterday to make me realize anew that those who would claim to model disciplines must often first be disciplined, both in the active sense (self-discipline) and the passive (being chastened -- but let's not digress here into a full discussion of what that looks like in the biblical tradition!).  That is, it's almost as if God has us going through a time of re-learning certain disciplines -- in addition to the two years of similar experience, leading up to the envisioning of Lectio House -- before (not just at the same time as) we model them for others.

So the Waiting isn't necessarily any easier.  But it's a gift (a small one, he grumbled semi-gratefully) to know that what has felt like the psalmist's valley of the shadow of death will, with enough perspective, be only the shadow of discipline -- a dark place, yes, but one in which the light can still sometimes break through. 

Writing about Writing

I've been reflecting lately on writing as a vocation and a discipline.  Certainly I was doing so before I read and responded to my sister Chandra's post, "Going Public," on her excellent blog, "several drafts & a loving Editor" (which you should go and read as soon as you're done reading this... http://severaldrafts.blogspot.ca/2012/08/going-public.html), and more so since then.

Like Chandra, I call myself a writer, and again like her, I do not write enough.  If writing is (one of) my vocation(s), one of the things for which I am made and to which I am called, then in a sense I am neglecting that which I was created to do when I am not thus engaged.  If I do not consistently practice this as a discipline, it is difficult to say with any integrity that I pursue it as a vocation.

That doesn't make the writing easy.

Part of what I have been thinking about is that it seems to be easier to write about writing than it is to write otherwise.  Writers whose books I otherwise skim through turn suddenly engaging, insightful, and even funny when they write about writing.  Two examples:

Mark Buchanan (The Holy Wild [Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah, 2003], 9) recounts that God made him “a monk’s failed cousin, a writer. Both callings render you slightly odd, a man alone in a room, denying one part of his manhood in order to awaken another. Both force you to shape silence and darkness and waiting into prayer. Both teach you the agonies of silence and of speaking, and the way God’s voice can brim in each. Both require you to listen much, pray much, study much, plow much. One demands you drink much wine, the other much coffee. I’ll let you figure out which is which. Both are lonely vocations.”

Mitt Romney (No Apology: The Case for American Greatness [New York: St. Martin’s, 2010], 195), remembering the solid foundation in compositional skills he received in junior and senior high, desires for the U.S. a “national rededication to the practice of writing,” but adds parenthetically, "Those who read this book may quarrel with the success" of his school's writing program "in my case.  But at least I gained the confidence to give it a try."

The urgent need for a renewed focus on writing is one of the few points on which Romney and I agree; and of course that commitment to better writing needs to be personal, not just institutional.  Buchanan's description of the writing life as a lonely vocation is one part of what sparked this blog; others have applied the same descriptor to writing, as well as teaching, public service jobs, and other careers (so saith Google, in all its oracular wisdom).  It's a helpful reminder of the solitude, and with it the focus and dedication, one needs in order to call oneself a writer, in order to be a writer.  But for me, it isn't quite as lonely a vocation -- for at least three reasons.

First, whether in my nonfiction writing for academic journals, books, and conference presentations, or in my tiny-but-hopefully-growing record of published fiction, writing and the study that informs it are forms of worship.  As long as I am deliberate about it, then time and energy so spent are spent with and for my Creator, in his presence and for his glory.

Second, all my vocations -- or all the facets of my vocation, singular -- are intimately tied to my role as husband to my wife, Karen.  If I am a helpful resource for pastors and other Christian ministry leaders, it's because I learned (and continue to learn) much of how to do that by discovering what is most helpful to her.  If a point in my teaching or nonfiction writing is clearer and more accessible than it might otherwise be, it's often because I ran it past her first.  And if the artificial intelligences that frequently serve as narrators and principals in my short stories seem more credible, more human, easier to relate to, it's often because she's encountered them first and made suggestions that flesh out the stories and those who relate them.

And third, as this blog's description indicates, writing has company in my life; it's never complained about being lonely.  I am an editor, in freelance capacities for an academic publishing house (hopefully with more to follow) and for projects authored by friends, family, and colleagues.  I am a professor/teacher, both informally and in lecture halls whenever I get the chance.  And lately, I am becoming a manager of The Scaffold, a missional/theological book room affiliated with the TrueCity movement here in Hamilton.  On paper, as it were, that last facet will give me more time and space to write, once it gets going over the next few weeks.  But as with the worship aspect, that will happen only if I am very deliberate about it.  My prayer is that this blog will be, among other things, a means of holding myself publicly accountable to my overall goal -- to pursue my not-so-lonely vocation(s) passionately and wholeheartedly.