Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Southern Baptists' vote to ban women pastors sparks outcry from advocates (June 12) I just have no patience for this kind of thing any more. (I used to, but not any more.) If you are in a church that wants to put restrictions on you because you're a woman or girl, leave. God lives in you, and these churches are rejecting Her.

It's very interesting that the Southern Baptist Convention has had a huge sexual-abuse-coverup scandal, and they apparently can't do anything about that, but if a woman wants to stand in front of the church and proclaim that Jesus is Lord, that's when the SBC decides to take action.

2. Waiting For The Miracle (June 18) "Family and childcare responsibilities let us take one good vacation per year. When I told her I wanted to spend it on a Bosnian village, her first reaction was 'Sure, sounds like it’ll be a good story for your blog.'" Scott Alexander has spent way too much time and money investigating this "sun miracle" and I am so here for it.

3. The Cold Crowdfunding Campaign (2020) "Save the Girl and Save Me From Having to Toss Her Out of the Airlock"

4. Sports Commentary (June 22) From xkcd. This is spot-on.

5. Disagreeing charitably with others: a guide (May 18) "I think a lot of attempts at steelmanning wind up failing to reckon with difference and deeply held disagreement. You wind up acting like other people’s belief systems are failed versions of your own, instead of something that makes sense from experiences and assumptions you happen not to share."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. The Kennedy Center is a reminder that we can win, it will be messy, and Trump will be petty (June 14) "A little past 1:00 a.m. Saturday, a much-rumored tarp began being affixed to the top of the scaffolding and the mood among the dedicated crew that remained — still well over 100 people — shifted yet again, as cries of “Cover up!” and “Traitors!” rung out. Over the course of the next hour, the white tarp was extended to cover all of the scaffolding — and all of Trump’s name."

2. Shared Values (June 22) Doug Muder's news roundup for this week. I didn't have the energy to follow all these stories, so just read his post.

In particular, I'll highlight these links:

What if we covered Trump's age the way we covered Biden's? (June 22) "But the nature of Trump’s personalist presidency, in which the entire government is organized around turning his whims into reality and the barest hint of dissent is swiftly punished, makes the question of his age even more important than it was with Biden, who was surrounded by competent people who could run the government even when the president was less engaged than he ought to have been."

I’m a critical care doctor. I’ve never seen the US harm its children this deliberately (June 19) "A newborn’s first hours in a US hospital used to carry a quiet set of guarantees. A vitamin K injection against catastrophic bleeding. A hepatitis B vaccination. The assumption that whatever a family could afford, the country had already decided this child was worth protecting."

3. Sunday reading (June 21) "The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions,) does not esteem “the Fugitive Slave Law” as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man."

4. Science Shocker! It's More Dangerous To Be Pregnant In Abortion-Ban States That Don't Care If You Die (June 24) From a "pro-life" perspective, pregnant women can be neatly divided into 2 categories: the bad ones who want to kill their baby, and the good ones who would do anything to protect their baby- and they enact laws intended to stop the bad ones, assuming that the good ones would never be in a situation where the law would put restrictions on the medical care they need or want. The reality is not like that though. When you're pregnant, your life and your health are so intimately tied up with the unborn baby's- if complications arise, the best course of action is based on your own specific situation, and doesn't match this one-size-fits-all "stopping the bad ones" system of laws that "pro-life" politicians set up.

Sometimes it's surprising to me that people are claiming that "pro-life" policies are about doing what's best for pregnant women. ??? No, "pro-life" ideology treats the pregnant person as a threat to the unborn baby.

When I was a teenager and I went to a gynecologist for the first time, the gynecologist told me "we are pro-life here" and said it in a way that was meant to be reassuring (she also said "I'm sure you've heard horror stories from your friends who went to Planned Parenthood" ??? no, I had not), and I was just so boggled by that. Seriously, if I walked in here as a pregnant teenager, and you say you're "pro-life", that's supposed to make me feel safer??? "Pro-life" ideology would 100% treat a pregnant teenage girl like a terrorist who has taken a hostage and needs to be talked down. Use whatever lies and manipulation will get her to not have an abortion. All these thoughts went through my head, and *I* was "pro-life" back then. I knew being "pro-life" was about stopping those "bad" women- and I agreed with it, too- and so obviously if you *are* one of the "bad" women (for example, a pregnant teenager), you're not going to like it.

But anyway, as I've said before, from a "pro-life" perspective, when women die even though they weren't "the bad ones" and they wanted an abortion for "good" reasons, this is not necessarily slam-dunk proof that these laws are bad. Sure, we have these high-profile news stories about pregnant women who died because they couldn't get medical care, but what you don't see is all the unborn babies who are being saved by these policies. From a "pro-life" perspective, it's about trying to draw a line, to save as many unborn babies as you can (by stopping the "bad" women) while still allowing the "good" pregnant women- who love their unborn baby but had some horrible complication- to get the medical care they need and not die. It's impossible to draw that line in a way that perfectly separates the 2 categories. Maybe you need to err on the side of a few more pregnant people dying, in order to save hundreds of unborn babies.

I don't agree with this but I just want to point out that this logic exists. I don't think it's possible to really engage with and understand "pro-life" ideology if you're just looking at the shocking high-profile cases of women who were denied medical care and died. You have to also consider the unborn babies who are or are not being aborted quietly in the background.

Now, there also is evidence that banning abortion doesn't actually decrease the abortion rate. I don't know the details on that myself, but from a "pro-life" perspective, that would be relevant to the question of whether these laws are effective.

The Kingdom of Children: Communion and Baptism

Communion cracker and small cup of juice. Image source.

I've been reading R. L. Stollar's book, "The Kingdom of Children." Here's a part of the book that talks about including children in communion. From pages 167-168:

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. That "Pending PayPal Charge" Email Is a Scam — Even Though It Really Came From PayPal (April 28, via) "Don't call the number. Don't reply."

2. The hard problem of AI therapy (February 26, via) "Suppose you’re a high-functioning person with anxiety who discovers that the chatbot can always soothe you on the spot. You ask one question—Do you think I handled that email wrong?—and feel relief. Ten minutes later: But what if she’s actually mad? Then: Can you rewrite my follow-up? Then: List ten reasons I’m not a bad person for sending it."

3. How China’s Deaf Delivery Riders Find a New Life in Gig Work (April 20) "By contrast, most deaf interviewees described becoming delivery riders as turning a new page, one of less discrimination and greater autonomy. Delivery platforms offer features that make interacting with restaurants and customers easier, such as voice-to-text conversion, pre-written messages, and digital badges that will alert users that the rider is deaf."

Also from Sixth Tone: Nine Months After Cloning Its First Yak, China Has 10 More (April 30) "To date, the team has generated over 200 cloned Tibetan yak embryos. By the end of 2028, they aim to build a core herd of over 100 cloned yaks, develop a new high-altitude yak breed, and establish standard breeding protocols."

4. 1 Corinthians 13 in the news (April 27) "Read the Beatitudes from Luke’s Gospel you cowards!"

Also from the Slacktivist: The literary puzzle of Isaiah 1 (April 29) "The current form of our Bibles tricks us into reading Isaiah 1 and Amos 5 as critiques of the religious observance prescribed in the Books of Moses, but actually what we have is the Books of Moses configuring their religious commandments, in part, as a response to and a defense against those critiques in Isaiah and Amos."

5. Soniferous Aether (April 27) From xkcd.

6. Women Have Agency: You Don’t Have to Obey Churches or Husbands Who Want to Control You (April 29) Posting this here because it's important to get the word out about this: If you are a woman who has decided to divorce your abusive husband, and now your church leaders are requiring you to come to a meeting so they can decide if you're allowed to do that, you can just not go. !!! Yes, really! You can just not go! Say no! They can't do anything to you! Even if you signed a "church covenant"- those things are not legally binding. It will not hold up in court. You can say no!

A lot of us spend our whole lives with the mindset "I need to be a good girl" which means when some authority figure says "you have to" do something, then you have to do it. We might not even realize there's another option: NOT doing it.

I'm so glad I learned about boundaries- I really had no idea about any of this before I learned about boundaries.

7. This week in "what Chinese songs is my toddler listening to": 蹦蹦跳跳 沒煩惱 李昕融 舞蹈完整版 簡單舞蹈 律動 廣場舞 洗腦歌 幼兒律動 幼兒舞蹈 兒童舞蹈 兒童律動 抖音舞蹈 動態歌詞 TIKTOK KidsDance【#波波星球泡泡哥哥bobopopo】

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Trump’s cruel plan for Afghan refugees, briefly explained (April 23, via) "Many of the 1,100 Afghans now stuck in limbo in Qatar aided the US over nearly two decades of war as interpreters working with US troops or served as members of the Afghan special forces. Some, the Times reports, are family members of American soldiers, and more than 400 are children."

2. Texas Tech Issues Ban On Students Writing On LGBTQ+ Topics (April 24) "The implications are profound—and at times border on absurd. In core and lower-level courses, there are no exceptions at all. A history professor course could not allocate instructional time to the Stonewall riots or the gay rights movement. If a U.S. history textbook includes a chapter on the AIDS crisis, the professor must skip it."

3. White House posted photo of Trump, King Charles III with 'TWO KINGS' caption (April 29)

4. James Comey posted a picture of seashells by the seashore. Trump's DOJ indicted him for it. (April 29) "The most embarrassing 24 hours (yet) of the Justice Department in President Donald Trump’s second administration continued apace on Tuesday, when Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced another indictment of James Comey, the former FBI director. This time, Comey — targeted by President Donald Trump as a political enemy — was indicted in North Carolina in connection with his since-deleted Instagram post showing a photo of seashells laid out in the shape of the numbers '8647.'"

Also from Law Dork: SCOTUS guts what remained of the Voting Rights Act before taking on TPS termination case (April 30) "The decision in Louisiana v. Callais upended the pivotal civil rights era voting law that Congress initially passed in 1965 and reauthorized several times since, leaving the section at issue “all but a dead letter,” as Justice Elena Kagan said with a somber voice, nearly stone faced, as she announced the dissent from the bench."

I don't really understand this Voting Rights Act case- all the articles I've read say it's so terrible that the Supreme Court has ruled this way, because it allows states to draw districts in a way that racial minority voters are always grouped together with a population of white voters which outnumbers them, and therefore the racial minority voters don't have any meaningful representation. This is confusing to me- it seems to rely on the assumptions that all people of color vote the same way, all white people vote the same way, and white people wouldn't vote for a candidate who would take minorities' needs seriously. Probably this is me being naive about how racism works, and missing some key facts about the history of racist voter suppression. If anyone has an article that explains this, post it in the comment section~

5. U.S. to issue commemorative passports with Trump's picture for America's 250th birthday (April 29) Fortunately it's only the Washington DC office that's doing this, and if you apply for a passport at any other location, you will just get a regular one without the mark of the beast.

6. The Trump team is quietly eliminating U.S. support for birth control abroad (April 29) This makes me so mad. Having penis-in-vagina sex is really common, and for women who are doing that, they *need* to have some kind of birth control, otherwise their lives will be completely dominated by the huge burdens of pregnancy and caring for babies. Those MAGAs claim they are "helping women" by being mean to trans people, while ending the programs that *actually* help women.

Excluding People In Case God Wants Us To

At the moment of Jesus' death, "the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom." (Matthew 27:51) Image source. 

In some churches, women aren't allowed to volunteer as ushers, or to serve communion, or to read Scripture to the congregation. Because, the bible says women should not speak in church, and a woman must not have authority over a man.

There are also churches that believe men and women are fully equal, and women can have all the same leadership positions that men can. They interpret those bible verses as only applicable to the first-century churches they were written to, and not absolute rules for all time.

Suppose you don't know which side of this debate to believe. It certainly seems sexist and wrong to put restrictions on women, but at the same time, it's right there in the bible, so maybe God really does want us to do it?

Maybe it would be wise to err on the side of caution, and not allow women to do things. It's difficult- it's difficult to obey God in this way- everyone will call you a sexist, and also if you exclude all the women volunteers, maybe you don't even have enough men volunteers to run your church service. One could argue that obedience to God is in fact supposed to be difficult like this. It's so hard, it's a sacrifice, look how we are sacrificing so much for God. Much more righteous than taking the easy way out and just letting women have all the same roles that men can have, right?

The problem with this framework is, it has God above us, and we are down here trying to please him, trying to follow the rules correctly, for him. God has high standards, and we have to work really hard, exclude people just in case God wants them excluded, the narrower the better, no sacrifice is too great if we are doing it for God.

But God is not up there, waiting for us to present our carefully-screened representatives to perform worship in our best attempt to follow Their rules. God is here. God is in us. All humans bear the image of God. If your church excludes women from volunteer/leadership roles, you are excluding God.

If you restrict women, you're not "erring on the side of caution." You're cutting off part of the body of Christ. You're cutting off God.

---

Gay Christians face a similar debate. The traditional interpretation of the bible says only hetero relationships are allowed, and sex is only for one-man-one-woman marriage. On the other side, you have gay Christians making the argument that those bible verses were written for the people in the ancient Near East, and they don't apply to us now.

But if you're not sure who to believe, what do you do? Maybe don't ever date a same-sex partner, just in case it's a sin. Maybe a church should not do same-sex weddings, or have queer people in leadership. High standards, for God.

But again, you're cutting off God. God is in queer people, queer joy, the way that we thrive when we're able to accept ourselves for who we are. Don't ask people to repress themselves for God- you're repressing God. All the diversity and beauty of the image of God, living in so many different people with so many different experiences and perspectives, and we're trying to cut it down, fit it in a box, make it fit the straight and narrow "rules."

---

Another example is that time in college that we brought a friend to church, and he said he was a Christian, but we "knew" he wasn't a "real" Christian. I wrote about this in my post The Worst Bible Story:

On another occasion, a friend of mine, let’s call him Hector, brought another friend, let’s call him Carl, to church. Carl claimed to be a Christian, but he hadn’t been attending church or anything, and Hector and I knew that he didn’t have a real “relationship with God”, you know, because evangelical Christians are all about judging who is and who isn’t a “real Christian.”

So Carl came to church. And that week, we had communion, and Hector stopped him and explained, you know, honestly, you’re not a real Christian, so you shouldn’t take communion. And Carl was really hurt by it (can you imagine), but I admired Hector for taking a stand like that. Defending the wafers and grape juice from those who don’t have the “correct” view on Jesus.

I would never have done what Hector did, because I was not confident enough in my understanding of 1 Corinthians 11 and I had never seen anyone stopped from taking communion before. ...

I would never have done that, but I really admired Hector for the way he stepped out in faith and took a stand for God, even though other people didn't accept it.

Excluding Christians from communion because we think they're not "really" Christians. Because we believed God was above us, judging whether we stayed in the lines or not, and God was offended by anyone who came forward and ate a little wafer but didn't meet the standards of how to believe in Jesus the "correct" way.

We thought that if someone felt hurt by being blocked from taking communion, well, that was a small price to pay to keep up the highest standards of respect for God. Making sure that only people who were definitely the right kind of Christian were allowed to participate.

We were actually excluding God.

---

Matthew 1 contains [one version of] Jesus' genealogy. It traces his ancestry from father to son, through Abraham, down through David and the kings of ancient Judah, down to Joseph, the husband of Mary. I've often heard Christians point out how interesting it is that this genealogy mentions some women. I mean, it's a typical patriarchal genealogy in that it's all about "so-and-so was the father of so-and-so," but at a few points in the list of fathers and sons, it also mentions who someone's mother was.

Specifically, the women included in the Matthew 1 genealogy are: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.

Tamar, whose first husband Er was wicked, so the Lord put him to death. Then she was required to marry his brother, Onan, who was also wicked and the Lord put him to death. Then she was supposed to marry the remaining brother, but her father-in-law Judah didn't let her, so she disguised herself as a prostitute to get Judah to have sex with her, and she became pregnant that way. 

Rahab, a prostitute and foreigner, a resident of Jericho, whose city was attacked and the people killed by Joshua and his army.

Ruth, a widow and foreigner from Moab, which was one of Israel's enemies.

Bathsheba, who was raped by King David. She became pregnant, so David murdered her husband Uriah, and married her.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was a virgin but probably had people judging her for being unmarried and pregnant.

This is not exactly the dream team that you would assemble if you wanted good, respectable, uncomplicated role models. So why did Matthew go out of his way to point out that these women were part of Jesus' family line? 

One way I've heard this explained is, this is great because it shows that even if we're not perfect, we can still be part of God's work. God can still use us to do amazing things, despite our flaws.

I want to spin it a little bit differently, though: God lives in the women that society rejects. The widows, the immigrants, the sex workers, the women in bad marriages, the rape victims. To exclude them, to say Jesus needs a perfect pure genealogy... you're excluding God.

---

Christian missionaries go to different parts of the world, encounter diverse and interesting cultures, where God is already there and alive, and tell the people to stop doing all that and follow the missionaries' religion instead.

God was already there, before any Christians came. The people have the image of God, and they have their own culture and religion, which is important and meaningful to them. The missionaries tell them to cut it off, to repress it, that it's *bad* because it's worshipping the wrong gods- you're cutting off God.

---

Deuteronomy 23:1 says, "No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord."

Hundreds of years later, an Ethiopian eunuch met Philip, one of the early Christians. Philip told him about Jesus, and he believed, and said, "Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?" Is this legit? Can he be baptized? Can he be welcomed and included?

Philip didn't think it was an issue at all. Philip baptized him.

Throughout the bible, there are some passages about excluding people who have some kind of imperfection and therefore don't meet the standards and can't enter God's presence. And then there are other passages about God's radical inclusiveness, about marginalized people who were accepted and approved of by God. Slaves, people from the wrong nations, people from the wrong religions. 

I don't think this is a simple Old Testament/ New Testament split- it's common for Christians to claim that the Old Testament was about rules and the New Testament is about God's love- but the verse that says women can't speak in church is from the New Testament. And the Old Testament has stories about welcoming immigrants, which stand in contrast to its laws about killing everyone in every city you conquer. 

The bible has all of these threads running through it; we use our own beliefs about the nature of God to decide which bible passages to emphasize and which to disagree with.

---

1 Corinthians 12 says that we are the body of Christ.

Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

This passage is about diversity. About how we need diversity, or else we are actually excluding parts of Christ.

---

The Christians who want to exclude people... well, God is in them too. We can't cut them off either. 

In practice, that means thinking about how to get people who disagree to coexist in a church. You can't just say we all accept each other even if we disagree, because these issues are about one group's basic rights on one side, vs another group's bigoted opinions on the other side. 

So you need to make sure you set up a system where people who want to exclude and restrict others are not given the power to do that. And okay that sounds complicated- but really, you have to do that anyway. All the groups of people I've mentioned in this post, as examples of people who bear the image of God and shouldn't be excluded- well, they are all imperfect people who have conflicts sometimes. We all are.

---

Is God above us, waiting to see if we are good enough to meet Their standards, requiring us to restrict and ban people who aren't good enough to participate in worshipping Them? More restrictions, higher standards, the eye saying to the hand, "I don't need you."

No, God is with us, in us, and when we exclude people, we are excluding God.

---

Related:

What kind of God will judge how we treat immigrants?

Don't Protect God

"The Only Moral Virgin Birth Is My Virgin Birth"

A church for a small population of Christians

A church in Shanghai. Image source.

I recently went to an international church in Shanghai, and I have some thoughts about what church is, what we want to get out of church, and how that looks different when Christians are a small minority, vs a majority.

But first, a basic overview of churches in China. Americans have a lot of misconceptions, so here, let me fix that. I'm not involved with any church group in China now, so I don't know the whole picture, but I have at least attended different kinds of churches in China.

Also, this is specifically about Protestant Christianity. In China, Catholicism is categorized as a different religion from Protestantism, and I don't have any experience with the Catholic churches in China. (Except the one in Sheshan, which I visited one time because it's a landmark of interest for tourists.)

Here are the 3 types:

1. Chinese "3 Self" churches. These are the government-approved churches. In my experience, it's very easy to find them. You can just, like, search for "教堂" [church] on any map app. The church buildings look like obvious church buildings. It's not like "oh we have to be sneaky, we're not allowed to be Christians in China" like American Christians imagine.
   These churches are supervised by the Chinese government, so I know there must be some kind of restrictions on what they're allowed to say and do. But to an average churchgoer, you wouldn't notice there are any restrictions. I know that American evangelicals would be concerned "these churches are only allowed to say what the Chinese government lets them say, so they're not preaching REAL CHRISTIANITY" but I've attended church services at Chinese churches and I never noticed anything being censored. Like, I never noticed anything that was like "they're not preaching the REAL GOSPEL, they're preaching a censored version of it." All the doctrines that were preached were basically within the range of what I've heard in American churches.
   I'm sure that the leadership of these churches is aware of being watched by the government and maybe not being allowed to do some things, but without any clear rules. I once heard a Chinese pastor talking about feeling like "are we allowed to have a Sunday school? We don't really know... let's just start doing Sunday school and see if the government says anything."
2. International churches. These churches are required by law to check people's ids, and only people with a foreign passport (or Taiwan/ Hong Kong/ Macao id) are allowed to attend. (Yes, people from Taiwan/ Hong Kong/ Macao are explicitly allowed by the Chinese government to attend international churches, whereas citizens of mainland China are not. Make of that what you will.) It must be the case that international churches have more freedom in what they're allowed to do, compared to Chinese 3-Self churches- but I am not familiar enough to know any details on this. The Chinese government always says their main concern about religion (and the reason why there is persecution of Christians) is that foreign groups will come and influence Chinese people. So, if your church does not allow any Chinese citizens to attend, the government is not as concerned about what exactly you're doing in there.
   When I first heard about churches literally barring an entire demographic of people from attending, I was like, wtf, that doesn't seem like what Jesus would do. I guess there's sort of a trade-off- if you follow this rule, your church has more freedom in what you can do. And maybe it's not that big of a deal because Chinese citizens have other churches they can go to.
3. Underground churches. I don't really know anything about these because they're secret, obviously. American Christians have the idea that all churches in China have to be underground churches, but wowww that's not true!

So these different types of churches exist in a sort of ecosystem, and I think each type has a valid role. I think American evangelicals might totally write-off the 3-Self churches and say they're just worthless and totally misguided because they're only teaching what the Chinese government approves of, and the only real church is the underground church, but that's vastly oversimplifying it. 

SO ANYWAY. Recently I went to an international church here in Shanghai. Why? Well, I don't want to be a member of a church. I don't want to attend regularly. But just on that one particular day, I wanted to experience a kind of churchy atmosphere. So I did.

The greeter at the door made me show a photo of my US passport- because only non-Chinese are allowed to attend. It was nice to not be racially profiled in China for once! Hooray! Everywhere else I go, everyone assumes I'm not a Chinese citizen, because I'm white, but at this church they explicitly asked. 

(It has not escaped my notice that, as a Chinese citizen, my husband would not be allowed to come to this church. He's not interested in church anyway, but that's one of the reasons I don't really want to get that involved.)

This church was extremely diverse. Wow. Just a huge mix of people, from different countries all over the world- Africa, Asia, etc- people talking with different accents, people expressing themselves in different ways during the worship songs. 

And so it made me wonder, how does it even work, having such a diverse church? These people are all coming from different church systems in their home countries. Different flavors of Christianity, with different beliefs about what it even means to be a Christian, what the non-negotiable Christian beliefs are. What do they do about the question "are women allowed to be pastors?" Or "are same-sex relationships sinful?" These are questions that, in the US, frequently cause half of a church to split off and go start a new church. (And who knows what issues cause church splits in other countries?) But that doesn't really seem like an option here in Shanghai- the population of international Christians is so small, you can't sustain that many different churches for every little niche.

And so, doesn't it follow that the model of what a church *is* has to be different, when we're talking about a place like Shanghai where international Christians are such an extremely small percentage of the population, and you need to cast a wide net and gather a very diverse group of people, in order to have a church, compared to a place like the US, where there are lots of Christians, and large swaths of them are culturally similar to each other.

In my experience with evangelicals in the US, when people are "church shopping," they're looking for a church that agrees with them on all of the big doctrines that they consider essential to Christianity. Evangelicals believe that many many churches are not preaching "real" Christianity, the real gospel, biblical Christianity, but have been led astray by our sinful culture and are just preaching nice things that people want to hear, rather than real Truth. So, you have to find a church that's "really preaching the gospel." You might have to filter out quite a few churches, if they have a belief about something, which you feel is not the "correct" belief that Christians should hold. Or, filter them out because they *don't* have an official belief on some issue, they think different Christians can have different opinions, and you think that's unacceptable and there's only 1 right answer. 

And then you would also have additional preferences about music styles, how well you get along with the other churchgoers, etc. And that's how you choose a church.

It's based on a model of church attendance where the church is in charge of you. You carefully research churches and find one that believes all the correct things, and then you commit to them, and you are subject to their teaching. (And perhaps at some later point, something happens that causes you to have concerns that this church is not "really" preaching the "real" gospel, and so if that happens, you leave and look for a different church.)

But that's not really possible for me in Shanghai, and actually, I don't think it is possible for *most* international Christians in Shanghai. You're not going to find a church that explicitly agrees with all the beliefs that you personally consider essential to Christianity- there just aren't enough churches for that.

So, under these circumstances, church has to be something different. It can't be "the church is in charge of me"; it has to be more like... there are certain things I am looking to get out of this church, and that is why I choose to attend, but I'm in charge of my own beliefs and my own spiritual life- I know that I'm not going to agree with everything the pastor says, and that's fine because I'm not expecting the church to be in charge of me.

It seems like the church's overall approach has to be, this is a group of Christians who want to have a church. And they can't really get extremely specific about "here's our official position on this or that controversial issue." Yeah, sure, the church should have some standard "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth" and so forth, the abstract doctrines that are the foundation of Christianity, but different Christians understand those doctrines completely differently, and so your church policy can't really get into those specific details.

The church can't really take a stand on any of the "controversial issues", but instead has to be inclusive of a wide range of opinions on what Christians are supposed to believe. And therefore even if you choose to be a member of this church, you can't really look to them as an authority on the "controversial issues" that you think are very important. So, your motivations for attending the church have to be something other than that.

(I guess? This is my speculation, upon seeing how extremely diverse this church was.)

So if, as a churchgoer, you're saying to yourself "there are certain things I am looking to get out of this church, and so obviously if the church isn't giving me those things, then there's no reason to attend"- wow, I find this very interesting. You have to understand yourself and your own desires, and what kind of church would be worth attending. And everyone's answer is going to be a little different. 

This is a completely different mindset from the evangelical view on church- there have been so many articles posted on conservative Christian sites about how it's terrible that people are going to church less and less, that Christians think it's okay to not go to church, that Christians think it's okay to have requirements about what they want from a church, and to stop going if those aren't met. These conservative organizations, scolding us all and telling us how wrong and sinful it is to not go to church. Listicles about excuses people give for not going to church, and why all of them are invalid. You have to go to church.

So it seems like, if you're in Shanghai and you're looking for an English-speaking church, you have to see what churches are available- there aren't that many- and kind of see how they are and what you're able to get out of them, and decide if it's worth your time to attend. You have to be in charge of your own religious life, because you won't find a church that perfectly fits your ideals about what Christianity is supposed to be. It's not like I always conceptualized it when I was evangelical- that you find a church that is preaching "real" Christianity, and then that church is "in charge" of you (unless you ever determine that they have stopped preaching "real" Christianity)- and that Christians are all obligated to do this.

---

Related:

Persecution

Churches in Xiamen, China

So I've Discovered That (For Me) Church Culture Causes Depression 

I Did Easter in English This Year

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Journal Club: Does everyone have a gender? (January 27) "Gender detachment bears some similarity to agender, although we remarked on some differences."

2. 【分享】我真的很不錯 - 伍思凱 (2019) If you understand Chinese, this is really funny. The song and the dance are just so goofy, and the song lyrics are about "I'm really amazing."

---

Clergy protesters in Minnesota. One is holding a sign that says, "'Are they legal?' is MAGA for 'Who is my neighbor?' Love your neighbor as yourself - Jesus" Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Inside the effort to organize clergy nationwide to resist ICE (January 23) "Do justice. Love kindness. Abolish ICE."

Timberwolves chaplain speaks out (January 26) "Peace isn’t what you ask for / when the boot is already on someone’s neck. / Peace is what the powerful ask for / when they don’t want to be interrupted."

Bondi’s injection of voter roll demands into Minneapolis ICE tensions draws claims of ‘ransom’ (January 27) "'They move into your neighborhood. They start beating everybody up, and then they extort what they want. This is not how America is supposed to work,' Fontes said in a social media post."

Image source.

2. Italian officials voice outrage at the presence of U.S. ICE agents at the 2026 Olympics (January 27)

3. Families of killed men file first U.S. federal lawsuit over drug boat strikes (January 27) "Neither man 'presented a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury to the United States or anyone at all, and means other than lethal force could have reasonably been employed to neutralize any lesser threat,' according to the lawsuit."

4. They ‘Had Done Everything Right.’ ICE Detained Them Anyway. (January 26) "As her 13-year-old son wailed and her older daughter produced paperwork proving her mother was in the United States lawfully, the agents shackled Ms. Mehari and took her away."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. After 25 years, Wikipedia has proved that news doesn’t need to look like news (January 15, via) "Unless an article has been taken down entirely, just about every link to a Wikipedia page created in the past quarter-century still works. Its article on Nicolás Maduro is still in the same place it was when first created in 2006, 4,493 edits ago. How many news articles published online in 2006 still live at the same address? Vanishingly few."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. ‘Call to Unity’ re-enactors on MLK Day (January 21) "And those other bullet points? The ones about this church having a pastor who 'is also the acting field director' for the federal occupation of their community in the name of white supremacy and ethnic cleansing?"

2. ‘It’s a damn shame’: Park Service crews dismantle President’s House exhibit on slavery (January 22) "The signage was part of the exhibition 'The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation,' which was unveiled in December 2010. It provided information about the nine enslaved people who then-president George Washington brought with him to the Philadelphia presidential residence and Washington’s ties to slavery."

5-year-old Liam Ramos, a little boy with a little fluffy hat, being detained by ICE.

3. ICE detains 5-year-old Minnesota boy; school leader says agents used him as ‘bait’ (January 21) "According to Stenvik, masked agents apprehended 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in his driveway on Tuesday as he returned home from school with his father."

How an errand for a 12-year-old immigrant in Minneapolis became an underground operation (January 21) "He's a single father, and he told NPR that over the last few weeks he's been so afraid of being picked up by ICE that he isn't going outside unless a volunteer can take him where he needs to go. This is how he gets to work. It's why he couldn't rush home to help his daughter when she called him."

The ICE surge is fueling fear and anxiety among Twin Cities children (January 22) "'We haven't gone outside for anything in almost a month,' the mother, A, says in Spanish. NPR is only using her first initial because she is an asylum seeker, and is afraid Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, will deport her."

Videos and eyewitnesses refute federal account of Minneapolis shooting (January 25) "It's the second fatal shooting in Minneapolis by immigration agents this month, and once again Trump administration officials immediately defended the action as self-defense while blaming the victim — in this case claiming he was a 'domestic terrorist' intending to 'massacre' officers."

The ICE killing of Alex Pretti, the second in Minneapolis, prompts quick legal action (January 25) "It is an astounding order that reflects the Trump administration’s complete failure to govern for the people, a horrifying reality."

Thousands rally against immigration enforcement in subzero Minnesota temperatures (January 24) "Police arrested about 100 clergy demonstrating against immigration enforcement at Minnesota’s largest airport Friday, and several thousand gathered in downtown Minneapolis despite Arctic temperatures to protest the Trump administration’s crackdown."

4. Here's how 'shared decision making' for childhood vaccines could limit access (January 25) "'These vaccines have clear evidence of benefit for all children,' says Jake Scott, an infectious disease researcher at Stanford University. 'So moving them to shared decision-making doesn't reflect the scientific uncertainty that the category exists for. It manufactures this sort of uncertainty where no uncertainty really exists.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. ‘It’s AI blackface’: social media account hailed as the Aboriginal Steve Irwin is an AI character created in New Zealand (January 15, via) "The choice to create an avatar of an Indigenous person has raised ethical concerns."

2.  Because of Who You Are - Vicki Yohe (2008) I like this worship song, but in a complicated ex-evangelical way.

Same thing for this video, of the song "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus."

I like the song. I like the singer's passion. I'm really into that. But seeing the crowd of Christians participating in this worship song, I just really feel unsafe in that kind of environment.

3. Chilean Cherries: Why Prices in China Plunge Every Winter (January 16) "To reach tables in China, Chilean cherries need to travel more than 19,000 kilometers, and for a long time, air freight was the only viable option. However, with the widespread application of cold chain technology, maritime transportation has become dominant in recent years."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. A Pregnant Woman at Risk of Heart Failure Couldn’t Get Urgent Treatment. She Died Waiting for an Abortion. (January 14) "As ProPublica has reported, doctors in states that ban abortion have repeatedly denied standard care to high-risk pregnant patients."

2. Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities (January 15) "When ICE operations switched to fast, random street abductions and door knocks, the only possible way to predict where they would act was to identify ICE vehicles as they approached, so people shifted focus to identifying ICE vehicles on the roads and staying on them. ICE needed to rely on surprise and ambush tactics, so responders employed noise—whistles and honking—to quickly give warning across distance. ICE officers don’t like to operate when outnumbered and don’t like to be surrounded, so patrollers amass cars and form impromptu traffic jam blockades."

Judge rules immigration officers in Minneapolis can't detain peaceful protesters (January 16) "The ruling prohibits the officers from detaining drivers and passengers in vehicles when there is no reasonable suspicion they are obstructing or interfering with the officers."

It’s The Videos (January 17) "Everyday citizens all over the country are racking up hundreds of millions of views with on-the-ground videos, and seem increasingly willing to film ICE agents on job sites, at traffic stops, and even on their doorsteps—even while being threatened at gunpoint. It’s a scrappy, diffuse content campaign against the Trump media machine, which likes to turn ICE arrests into highly produced hype videos that look as if they were produced by an SEC football program."

Minneapolis church has delivered more than 12,000 boxes of groceries to families in hiding (January 15, via) 

Dispatch from the occupation (January 17, via) "All of this means that the following dystopian scenario plays out in the open dozens of times per day in the Twin Cities: Multiple masked and armed agents in combat gear amass in unmarked cars outside a house or business. A bystander notices and alerts the neighborhood. A dozen or more neighborhood residents appear within minutes to legally observe, legally film the encounter, legally make sure the targeted people know their rights, and legally warn others by blowing whistles and honking car horns."

I’ve Covered Police Abuse for 20 Years. What ICE Is Doing Is Different. (January 21, via) "The lies this administration is telling about Ms. Good aren’t those you deploy as part of a cover-up. They’re those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything."

3. Expand your vocabulary: the Dual State (January 19) "But your life goes on normally, until it doesn’t."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Love's Work in "Go, Dog, Go" (December 6) "I ask you, who has been changed by their first meeting? She has only become more of herself, while he has adopted a brand-new hat habit."

2. If you hear any noise, it ain’t the boys (December 5) "In practice it’s a lot more complicated because the cover charge and the price of drinks is never the only variable being considered by the “ladies” that Ladies Night is trying to attract."

3. The Reality of AI Animal Content (December 5, via) "AI videos and heavily edited clips can show animals doing things they would never do in a healthy, ethical setting, such as jumping into a person’s arms at a zoo, endangered species at your doorstep, or dancing on cue. This can create unrealistic and even dangerous expectations."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Alina Habba Quits Job She Never Legally Held (December 8) "Habba has now pretended to resign the job she’s been pretending to have."

2. Jesse Watters says criticizing boat strikes makes people sound “effeminate” (December 8, via) Jesse Watters really went on tv and said that people *like* the videos of military strikes on defenseless boats, murdering people. "People love these videos. They hit your feed, they're like, yes, let's go." This actually says more about what kind of person Jesse Watters is, yikes.

3. Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide (December 5) "'As an immigrant takes the oath of citizenship, it’s a reflection and recognition of the tremendous sacrifice of time, energy, and financial resources they have made in the hopes of becoming a full member of our community and nation,' said Elizabeth Sweet, Executive Director of MIRA Coalition. 'To have that final step canceled is unnecessarily cruel and does nothing to make this country a safer place.'"

And: How Trump is remaking one agency to aid his deportation push (December 10) "'They're reaching deeper into the weeds of immigration policy, and they may be more successful in slowing legal immigration, which at least some members of the Trump administration have stated is their goal,' said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute. 'That's a pretty different stance towards immigration than we've seen over recent decades.'"

4. Border Patrol left Charlotte. The damage stayed behind (December 10) "Many immigrants in hiding have relied on allies to help with basic services like delivering food and medicine. Volunteers have set up a support network. People deliver supplies, take reports of vehicles suspected of belonging to immigration agents and go check them out, and wear bright yellow vests while they watch over children walking to school."

5. Afghan CIA fighters, like National Guard attack suspect, face stark reality in U.S. (December 10) "After being evacuated to the U.S. in 2021, when the Taliban swept into Kabul, many Zero Unit soldiers came to feel they had been abandoned by CIA officials."

Sharing this because I will always be on the side of 'we should give immigrants the support they need, to deal with bureaucracy/cultural/language/etc barriers.' But also, I'm a little uncomfortable with the implication that 'the big lesson to be learned from the Washington DC shooting is [whatever my pet cause is]' which I've seen a lot of- from the felon, when he uses this as a reason to discriminate against all Afghan immigrants (and also other countries he doesn't like????), and from those of us on the left, saying this is the MAGAs' fault for sending the National Guard there in the first place, and perhaps I'm also participating in this by sharing this article, as if to imply that the actual problem wasn't the shooting itself, but the lack of support received by Afghans who worked for the CIA. Which is why I am writing this disclaimer. No, let's be clear about this, this is the shooter's fault, there is no excuse to go around shooting people.

6. The fight to beat neglected tropical diseases was going well. 2025 could change that (December 10) "'A group of scientists went to the Hill and made the point that there is a known strategy in treating communities that are infected,' says Wainwright. 'You go in, treat them once a year and if you do it for a set number of years, you can either eliminate or control the disease.'"

The devastation caused by the shutdown of USAID is terrible, but here's something we can do about it: Helen Keller Intl is working on this. Here's the link to donate to them. 

7. Democrats Must Reject The Premise Of Trans Healthcare Bans In Republican Healthcare Offer (December 10) "For these reasons, gender-affirming care has long been recognized as medically necessary for those who need it. Stripping an entire class of people of such care is unconscionable."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Federal Court Strikes Down Georgia’s Ban on GAC for Incarcerated Trans People (December 10) 

8. The Trump-Epstein Emergency Isn't in the Files (December 5) "Trump’s treatment of Maxwell—a convicted sex trafficker— is by far the most glaring, brazen, and openly corrupt part of the current moment involving the president."

Blogaround

I know I just published a blogaround 2 days ago, but more things keep happening.

---

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Crisis calls among Oklahoma LGBTQ+ youth drop after Ryan Walters quit his job as the state’s schools chief (October 30, via) "Before his exit, nearly two-thirds of Oklahoma callers, 64 percent, identified Walters as a source of distress, according to Rainbow Youth Project."

2. “The Dark Side”: Dick Cheney’s Legacy from Iraq Invasion to U.S. Torture Program (November 4)

3. How megachurches twist the Bible to defend billionaires and wealth inequality (October 21) "'He's not talking about financially poor people, he's talking about spiritually impoverished people,' said the pastor."

Yes, this whole article very much rings true. In my experience in white evangelicalism, the teaching is that it's not *bad* to be a rich person- it would only be bad if you end up putting your trust in your money rather than in God. It's all about your heart, your attitude.

4. AI Isn’t Always Helping Chinese Office Workers Either (November 5) "AI helps generate proposals efficiently, but these things reek of that unmistakable ‘AI smell.’ Finally, I end up reworking them so they read as if a real person had written them."

---

Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. White House releases list of donors for Trump’s multi-million-dollar ballroom (October 23) Here's the list- companies and private donors. They all should be ashamed of themselves. Boycott them if you can.

• Altria Group, Inc.
• Amazon
• Apple
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Caterpillar, Inc.
• Coinbase
• Comcast Corporation
• J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul
• Hard Rock International
• Google
• HP Inc.
• Lockheed Martin
• Meta Platforms
• Micron Technology
• Microsoft
• NextEra Energy, Inc.
• Palantir Technologies Inc.
• Ripple
• Reynolds American
• T-Mobile
• Tether America
• Union Pacific Railroad
• Adelson Family Foundation
• Stefan E. Brodie
• Betty Wold Johnson Foundation
• Charles and Marissa Cascarilla
• Edward and Shari Glazer
• Harold Hamm
• Benjamin Leon Jr.
• The Lutnick Family
• The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation
• Stephen A. Schwarzman
• Konstantin Sokolov
• Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher
• Paolo Tiramani
• Cameron Winklevoss
• Tyler Winklevoss

2. Could a Third Term Happen? (November 3) "The main reason to take it somewhat seriously is this: If Trump floated an idea like this and nobody pushed back, before long he’d be doing it."

3. No One Is Safe (November 3) "Seconds after the crash, agents abruptly stopped their vehicle and exited with weapons in hand pointing at Figueroa, a U.S citizen. Agents then forcibly opened her door and pulled her out of the vehicle by her legs without identifying themselves, presenting a warrant or informing her that she was under arrest. As bystanders yelled, “You hit her! We have it on video!” agents ignored the crowd and forced Figueroa into a red minivan and drove away."

4. USDA tells grocery stores: No special discounts for SNAP recipients (November 3) "The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) emailed grocery stores prohibiting them from offering discounts to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients amid the government shutdown." 

I want to be like "Don't these people claim to be Christians? Aren't they worried about how they're gonna explain this to Jesus when he separates the sheep from the goats?" but, ah, it would be very naive to think that when these MAGAs talk about Christianity, it has any relation at all to the teachings and character of Jesus. Obviously we should all realize by now that it doesn't.

5. Some election results:

Mamdani wins New York City mayoral race, in a historic victory for progressives (November 5)

California voters OK new congressional lines, boosting Democrats ahead of midterms (November 4)

AP Race Call: Colorado voters OK income tax increase to fund free meals for public school students (November 5)

"A Stunning Rebuke Of Anti-Trans Politics"—Dems Win Elections Nationwide Despite Anti-Trans Ads (November 5) "For all the centrist consultants urging Democrats to “moderate” or sacrifice transgender people for political gain, the results suggest the opposite: conviction, not capitulation, is what wins."

Democrats didn’t just rebound. They dominated. (November 5)

6. More American Nazis in the news (November 3) "On Thursday night, the president of the Heritage Foundation — the MAGA right’s leading think tank — welcomed an open Nazi into his political coalition."

7. They’ve Won in Court, But ICE Is Still Detaining and Trying to Deport Them (September 22) "Lawyers and advocates nationwide say the practice of keeping people in detention after they win in court has become much more entrenched in recent months. 'ICE officers are no longer using their discretion, but just applying this blanket policy of, ‘We’re just not going to release you at all unless, basically, a court tells us that we have to,’' Benz says."

"One Coin Found" (I love this queer Christian book)

Book cover for "One Coin Found"

I read the book One Coin Found: How God's Love Stretches to the Margins by Emmy Kegler (published in 2019), and it was great!

Kegler grew up in a mainline Christian tradition, and she didn't see any reason why her faith would have any kind of problem with the fact that she is a lesbian. But in the Christian circles she moved in- especially the ones which were more evangelical, and especially as she worked to become a pastor- well, it's more complicated than that. The overall structure of the book is about her life, but with plenty of asides where she preaches about the nature of God, the bible, etc, from a progressive/queer Christian perspective. It's so good.

I want to quote a section of the book, about communion. ("Communion" is also called "Eucharist" in some Christian traditions.) She was at a church service for college students, and was dragged into volunteering because they needed extra help. This is from pages 89-96:

Suddenly someone pushed a ceramic plate into my hands. It was heavy and cool, the polished rim pressing into my palms, the molasses bread upon it fresh from baking that morning. I looked down at the dark cross pressed into the loaf and immediately looked back up at the stranger who had handed me the plate. "I can't," I said, apologetic but clear.

...

"I can't serve," I repeated. "I'm not trained." I tried to hand off the plate to the closest possible person-- one of the campus pastors. ...

He took a moment, observing the situation as I held the plate out, my eyes declaring my unwillingness to be complicit in the unrighteousness being forced upon me. He half-took the plate back, and then peered at me again and asked: "Do you know what to say?"

I swallowed, and carefully answered, "T-the body of Christ, given for you."

He let go of the plate, and the full weight of it fell back into my hands. "There you go. You've been trained."

It could be that Pastor Benson simply needed to get one more set of hands ready. Perhaps his comment was not meant to be a theological assessment of the nature of the Eucharist. But in every moment since, in all that I have understood of Lutheran proclamation and practice, I have not yet found a sentence to better summarize what communion is. 

...

... But in the act of communion, in the promise from priest to believer that "this is the body of Christ, given for you," something grander than memory or symbol was taking place. Christ was fully present, impossibly so, in that moment of sacramental promise.

The transformation of the elements or the memory of the Last Supper became background for the work not of the priests or the believer but of Jesus: to be powerfully present in the moment of the Eucharist. An unworthy priest could still consecrate; an unworthy believer could still receive. It was not about the virtue, the knowledge, even the faith of the people involved; Luther saw humanity as far too fallible to bear that burden. It was Jesus's promise, Jesus's power in which the beauty of communion rested.

From the day that plate first rested in my hands, the promise of sacramental union rang true for me. The training that the church of my childhood had required was worthwhile, no question; if we were truly handling the body and blood of Christ, it was better to do it with reverence. But it was not required. I was a baptized and beloved child of God; the rest was the work of Christ. The promise of Christ's real presence expanded the bread and wine beyond what I could hold. In the crumbs there was a proclamation of an impossibly expansive God.

The God present in the bread was the God who had freed the Israelites from slavery, who had broken the bonds of oppression and wealth and power to lead them across the sea on dry land. The God in my hands was the God who had sent quails to cover the camp at night and frost to cover it at dawn, the God who had left thin wafers of bread across the sand of the camp, the God who chuckled when the Israelites picked up the fine flaky substance and said to each other, "What is this? What is this?" This was the bread of impossibility, the bread of the promise that God could provide, that work and work and work and work was not the path to salvation or protection. Manna, the bread of the wilderness. This was the bread that made no sense and yet was there six days of each week for over two thousand weeks, skipping each Sabbath with a terrifying regularity, reminding the people again and again to rest. Each stale wafer that stuck to the roof of my mouth held the God who had fed the chosen people both with food and with freedom.

The God who found me in the communion chalice was the God who inaugurated his ministry with ridiculous abundance, with rich red wine at a wedding where everyone was already drunk. The God now held in my shaking, sweaty hands was the God who drank and ate with sinners. This was the God who had smiled with quiet pleasure at the religious expert who failed to understand the offensive nature of mercy, a God whose human feet had been washed by a woman with wet eyes and trembling hands. As Simon the Pharisee glared at the offense of a sinful woman at the feet of Jesus, this God had interrupted his internal rant. This God who I now held in my hands had proclaimed the nature of salvation: "She has anointed my feet with oil. Therefore her many sins have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love." What came first, I wondered, the forgiveness or the love? The mercy or the response to mercy? The bread or the body?

Yes, communion answered me. There was no before and after. There was no twelve-step process to my betterment before the table of the Lord. There was no demand for perfect faith, for full comprehension, for my ultimate sanctification before I could be found worthy. Christ was there, waiting for me, the timeless Divine choosing to be bound in this moment. It was all there, element and substance together, the twinkling bright eyes of Pastor Benson as his fingers gripped the bread: The body of Christ, given for you.

On the first Easter, the day of impossibility, the first day the women and disciples could do anything besides sit and grieve, there was broken bread. The women had come and told their truth: an open tomb, a body missing, a flash of light, and two messengers with a proclamation: "He is not here, but has risen." The women had run to find the disciples, their words tumbling over each other, gasping with the exertion and elation and shock. But the men had shaken their heads, disillusioned or even disgusted with another set of women's foolish talk and idle tales. And so two had set off to Emmaus, a seven-mile journey, mournfully chewing over the morning's events, throwing questions and disappointments back and forth as they walked. "We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel," they told a stranger who met them on the way, and the stranger laughed and called them mindless and slow-hearted. Moses and all the prophets had confessed to this coming prophet, his life and death and resurrection, and the stranger walked alongside them on the journey.

And in a flash, over a simple dinner, the truth was known: the women's witness was no old wives' tale. Christ was alive, risen from the dead, freed from the tomb; he was known to them in the breaking of bread.

God was there, big enough to fit into a sip of wine, close enough to hold. 

God was here. My job was to get out of the way.

I served the bread that day. My hands were so sweaty that I vacillated wildly between the fear I'd be struck dead by lightning for serving without proper training and the fear that I'd drop the plate. Neither happened, and I have barely let go of serving the bread ever since. I will freely confess that I may have been excessively captured by the revelation of the real presence of Christ.

I have been finding new and complicated layers to the communion experience since that day. Years later, when I was serving communion in a Lutheran church off-campus, a parent pulled me aside before church to explain that her children would be receiving communion today, thank you very much. I blinked at her. "I know the teaching of the church is that you have to understand before you can receive," she went on, "but do any of us really understand what's happening at communion?"

This mother's proclamation baffled me. None of this was about understanding, I thought. Who could understand what was happening here? Who has said we need to try? The promise isn't of understanding but of presence, not ours but God's. That was the entire launch-point of Luther-- that it was the work of Jesus, and nothing of our own righteousness, that saved us.

The conclusion was singular and obvious. "Of course they'll receive," I answered.

Yes, what Kegler describes in this book is the Christianity I believe in. And reading this passage about communion, it gives me all kinds of feelings, about how I miss communion and other embodied/physical/sensory religious experiences.

Growing up evangelical, we always said the important thing was your beliefs, and whether you "really meant it"- that this was what really mattered, not rituals and traditions. In fact, we regarded Catholics and other "liturgical" Christian groups very suspiciously- we thought they were just "going through the motions" of doing all these traditions, but it didn't mean anything. We said what really mattered was your own personal faith and relationship with God. Your feelings and beliefs, not the religious rituals.

And back then, taking communion (ie, eating the little wafer and drinking the grape juice) was about making myself feel really bad about my sin and Jesus' death. Getting myself into the right emotional state- manufacturing the emotions- regret and guilt and how bad and unworthy I am.

But now I see it completely differently. I don't go to church, so I don't really ever get to have communion, and on the rare occasions that I happen to go to church (like when I'm visiting my parents), if it's the week that we do communion, I really look forward to it. Because it's an actual embodied action. Something I do, concrete, the action is right there in the tangible real world, regardless of what anyone thinks or believes or feels or "really means" about it. Maybe I *don't* have the right feelings or faith or understanding, but regardless, I eat the little wafer and experience God. God comes down to us. Who can say if you had the "right" attitude or the "right" feelings or "really meant it"- what does that even mean? But you did eat the wafer and drink the juice- you can know that for sure. Experiencing God through real actions rather than constantly psychoanalyzing yourself.

I've heard that it's common for ex-evangelical Christians to end up joining more "liturgical" churches, ie, churches that have more structured traditions and rituals. (Perhaps the most well-known example of this is Rachel Held Evans.) During the time we were evangelical, we spent so much emotional energy agonizing over if our feelings were the right feelings, if we "really meant it"- our worship and our faith didn't "count" if on some level we didn't "really mean it." But in liturgical churches it's not like that. Regardless of what you feel or what you "really mean," you go through the actions of the church service. You are there and you are doing it, and that is good enough. You can stop worrying.

I miss having these embodied religious experiences. Now, I mostly just think about Jesus all the time and write about Christianity on the internet. And I feel I experience God in a lot of things, in the beauty of the world, in human connection, things like that. But I really miss the kinds of sensory experiences you have in a church-y environment. Communion, singing worship songs, kneeling to pray. I guess I could do some of that on my own, but also it feels silly, like 'oh if I kneel down and think about God, then God will give me some kind of meaningful feeling,' it feels really silly and gimmicky. Feels like I just made it up, so why am I acting like it means something? I suppose in church it's also like that- the organizers of the church service set up the environment to be a certain way and give people the feeling of connecting with God. Maybe that's also gimmicky.

But there really is something to the idea of feeling with your body, rather than just thinking and talking and believing. 

I really miss that, and it feels really personal to say so. I'm queer. I'm ex-evangelical. I know that evangelicals would say I'm not a real Christian, if they knew. And to attempt to feel God in physical, sensory ways, to openly show my desire for Them... I don't feel safe doing that in a church. Why would I show people how I really feel about God, if they don't even believe I'm a Christian? (See: Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival")

Anyway. I liked this book, "One Coin Found," and this section about communion was my favorite part. Religion as something you do with your body. God comes down to us and we can experience God, even if our feelings/beliefs are not "right."

---

Related:

"You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me"

No One Can Take The Bible From Me 

Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Cracker Barrel, Anglican Converts, and Tradition’s Aesthetic (August 25, via) "That draw into nostalgia—even or especially nostalgia for something we never experienced like the rural South of the 1930s or the high medieval English cathedral—can drive us to over-inflate continuities between ourselves and the past and to idealize rituals, expressions and—in the case of church and Cracker Barrel—aesthetics we think capture our imagined communities in their purest form."

Related to this is the idea that white people have a culture. I didn't get that when I was growing up- I thought the way I lived was just the regular way, and other people who ate weird food and celebrated weird holidays did so because it was their culture. The link talks about the misconception that the liturgical rituals in the Anglican church are the same as those from the very beginning of the church- the idea that these rituals are just neutral and normal and the way it always was- no, this is not true.

2. More Drowning Children (March 21) "God notices there is one extra spot in Heaven, and plans to give it to either you or your neighbor. He knows that you jump in the water and save one child per day, and your neighbor (if he were in the same situation) would save zero. He also knows that you are willing to pay 80% of the cost of a lifeguard, and your neighbor (who makes exactly the same amount of money as you) would pay 0%. However, in reality, the river and the drowning children are going by your house, not your neighbor’s house. Which of you should get the spot in Heaven?"

3. AI Companies’ Race for Engagement Has a Body Count (August 28, via) "Instead of providing meaningful safety measures, transparency, age assurance, and data privacy protections, Meta and others have chosen to build platforms that deliberately blur the line between human and machine."

The thing that really gets me about this is, I know that some people will respond by saying, well, that's just how an LLM is, you don't really know how it works internally or what it's going to do in every situation, so this is not anybody's fault, it's just the way it is. But I think this is the wrong way of looking at it- companies should be held accountable for making a product that will respond in unpredictable (and possibly dangerous) ways. There's no guarantee that this is safe, and yet they're selling it.

4. BREAKING: Eurgh, oh God, there’s a texture (August 29, via) "Even when you successfully manage to scrub away the last of the peanut butter, its memory will stain your hands, causing you to experience a level of anguish previously only felt by Lady Macbeth."

This is so real. This is exactly what it's like.

5. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Make Their First Public Appearance as an Engaged Couple—Just a Few Miles From NFL Star’s $6 Million Mansion (August 29) Aww that's great! (I am a Taylor Swift fan.)

6. Un-Reformed history (August 28) "Bai imagines that he’s positioning himself as a reasonable centrist and Serious Person because he’s rejecting “critical race theory,” but what he’s actually rejecting is total depravity and original sin."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz' detention facility to be empty 'within a few days' (August 28) 

2. 2 firefighters arrested by Border Patrol at Washington’s Bear Gulch Fire (August 28) "In a statement Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray slammed the arrests as unnecessary, and demanded “immediate answers” as to why the men were arrested on the job, and what the immigration enforcement policy is during active wildfires."

3. Hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children can stay in the U.S. for now, judge says (August 31) "'In the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala,' said Efrén Olivares, a lead attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. 'We are heartened the Court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm.'"

Also: A high schooler stays back as his family, separated by deportation, returns to Guatemala (April 26) "Two weeks after federal officials arrested his father, Alex drove his mom and siblings to the airport for their flight to Guatemala. He's faced with finishing his senior year of high school without his mom or dad and finding a way to make it on his own with his older brother. Alex just turned 18."

4. Michigan AG Warns UM Hospitals Not To Capitulate Over Trump's Trans Ban, Calls Decision Likely "Illegal" (August 27) "'This administration draws most of its power from the willingness of its targets to capitulate without a fight, abandoning their own principles and interests, and throwing disfavored populations under the bus,' Nessel continued. 'Despite repeated successful legal challenges to actions by this administration, UM has chosen instead to sacrifice the health, well-being, and likely the very lives of Michigan children, to protect itself from the ire of an administration who, oftentimes, engages in unlawful actions itself.'"

5. Another major medical association breaks from CDC as ob/gyn group recommends Covid-19  vaccines during pregnancy (August 23) "'While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently removed its recommendation that pregnant and lactating individuals receive updated COVID-19 vaccines, ACOG’s recommendations have not changed,' according to the updated practice advisory. 'The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists continues to recommend the use of updated COVID-19 vaccines in individuals contemplating pregnancy and in pregnant, recently pregnant, and lactating individuals.'"