Maria Baer

Difficult Incidents Shouldn’t Surprise Us

Most people who show up to an AA meeting don’t need to be convinced they have a sin problem. Christians should show up to church the same way, but with an even deeper hope. We don’t need to expect perfection or even social grace from all of our brothers and sisters all of the time. Humility says for every time we suffer “church hurt,” we may just as easily have inflicted it ourselves.

On a recent episode of actor Dax Shepard’s Armchair Anonymous podcast, he solicited calls about the craziest things folks had seen at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. A recovering addict himself, Shepard said these meetings are always good for drama. One woman told a story of a man taking up a collection for some kind of kickball league. After gathering the cash, he proceeded, in full view, to stuff it into his backpack. The group kicked him out.
Rather than sounding scandalized (“Look how toxic these meetings get!”), the woman telling this story seemed almost amused, like a mom shaking her head at her kids’ harmless mischief. These addicts and their hijinks, am I right?
My mind wandered. What if that had happened at church?
There are many similarities between church and AA, even beyond the not-so-subtle “Higher Power” stuff that only really makes sense in reference to the God of the Bible (although AA effectively “secularized” a few decades after its thoroughly Christian founding.) Like church, AA is also supposed to welcome everyone. People are supposed to share deep, uncomfortably intimate and unflattering details of their lives with a group of people they may have absolutely nothing in common with outside of their addiction.
Read More
Related Posts:

They Think We’re Cannibals

When Elisabeth Elliott returned to the jungle in 1958, after subsequent missionaries had made successful contact with the Huaorani, the tribe told her they’d speared the five men because they thought they were cannibals. Reading back through the men’s journals after this revelation is like going back to the beginning of the movie and noticing all the signs you can’t believe you missed. 

Sixty-eight years ago this month, missionary Jim Elliot and four others were speared to death by Huaorani Indians in the Ecuadorian jungle.
However we understand this story now 70 years on—(was this a martyr’s epic adventure or an object lesson in cultural ignorance?)—I think it’s important to say that should anyone claim to know that God did not, in fact, call those men to that work and to their death, they are lying. Elliot and the others loved Jesus and were doing what they thought He wanted, at great personal cost. Let no cynicism invalidate that.
In my recent reading of Through Gates of Splendor, the book in which Elisabeth Elliot retells the story through the men’s journal entries, what struck me most was not the cultural awkwardness or even the great drama. It was the missionaries’ total confidence in their own intelligence gathering. For weeks leading up to their ground approach of the Huaorani, the men flew their prop plane over the tribe’s settlement, dropping gifts and yelling phrases they believed translated to “friend.”
They then painstakingly analyzed every tiny movement the tribe made in response. Jim wrote one day that he “saw a thing that thrilled me—
Read More
Related Posts:

Diversity is Not a Virtue

Just as bodies in pews aren’t hard evidence of heart change, neither is a certain type of bodies in pews evidence that a church is racist or self-absorbed—or that a church has practiced true hospitality. Christ builds his Church. Christ is already building a diverse Church from every tribe, tongue, and nation. It’s our job to celebrate and welcome that while serving each other and spreading the gospel in the time and places in which He has—for now—scattered us.

Somewhere in the tiny Himalayan country of Nepal, there’s a small Christian church. In fact, there’s quite a few. Nepal has one of the fastest-growing Christian populations in the world.
Imagine I—a curious, white, English-speaking, American Christian—land at tiny Lukla airport. Maybe I’m about to trek up the rocky face of Mount Everest. Before heading for base camp, I stop for Sunday services at a small rural church. I’m far from home. I’m really cold. I’m a little scared, too.
Is the church ‘ready’ for me? Is there an English-speaking greeter, ready to make me in particular feel comfortable? Is there a group of English-speaking western worshippers, guaranteed to make sure I don’t feel ‘out of place’ or ‘othered’? Will the liturgy accommodate my western expectations?
To put it another way: how is the Nepalese church’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategy going?
The thought experiment isn’t quite fair. But there is a fair number of American Christians and Christian institutions calling for similar diversity efforts here at home. A charitable read of their efforts would suggest more reasonable expectations: that the people who make up our congregations would reflect the communities we’re in; which are on average much more racially and ethnically diverse than a small Nepalese village.
There has been racial and ethnic partiality in the American church in the past. Still, modern calls for focused diversity efforts in American churches are often problematically shallow. The Nepal thought experiment, silly as it might be, offers a helpful illustration. Diversity for diversity’s sake doesn’t make sense when it’s applied without context. The American church isn’t just one church, but hundreds of thousands. Widespread undertaking of “diversity” efforts within churches and ministries warrants a few questions on the front end, then.
First: what do we mean by “diversity?” Modern conversations tend to use the word almost exclusively to describe diversity of either race or ethnicity. But what about diversity of age? Of socioeconomic status? And does diversity for diversity’s sake—when we widen the definition — always make sense? Imagine criticizing a college ministry for not having elderly members. Imagine faulting an urban church in a city center for not having enough farmers in its congregation. The logic breaks down.
This leads to another question: why, exactly, should we pursue diversity? Often Christians advocating for diversity programs answer by reminding us that partiality is sinful, and that the global church at the time of Jesus’ second coming will include people of “every tribe, nation and tongue.” In other words, calls to achieve diversity are meant, in part, to encourage Christians to celebrate diversity. Celebrating the wide human diversity within the body of Christ is a good thing in itself.
Read More
Related Posts:

Scroll to top