Dad and I love to bicker about theology. He prefers the Tradition, Reason, and Scripture quarters of the Wesleyan Quad. I prefer Experience and (Dad would dispute this) Scripture. Our most common debate starts over my belief in universal salvation, but boils down to a fundamental question: why be a Christian?

To hear youth ministers tell it, we should be Christians to feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and have a cosmic therapist to depend on. Good ol’ John Wesley feared a-roasting on Satan’s barbeque. In the middle, there are those like Dad who want to be transformed by Christianity; they recognize that true happiness only comes when we fill the hole in our heart with God. I usually hang out in the middle.

But a part of me is even uncomfortable with that. If I do something because it’s going to benefit my life, aren’t I being selfish? I believe yes, that  if I am motivated by my own gain then I cannot be motivated by someone else’s gain – like Christ or my neighbor – because I will always be in the back of my mind. If I get discouraged, it is my own immortal soul that keeps me going.

In the interest of full disclosure, if I were having a bad day, I might say that breathing is selfish because it took oxygen away from someone else who needed it (and I would automatically assume that everyone else needed it more) Conscious of my own biases, I still believe that happiness-seeking or heaven-bound obedience is selfish. I think we can all agree that selfishness is the antithesis of Christianity. Selfishness is not for God. It’s for me.

That’s not reverent obedience.

That’s a trade. At best, it’s a contract.

I want to draw a distinction here between a contract and a covenant. A covenant is something we do with a joyous heart. A contract is something we do when we do not trust the other party – when we have no alternative. My father and I have reached this point in the conversation many times and though he may disagree with me, he follows my logic. (I applaud him since I sometimes confuse myself.) This question is where I lose him:

“Well then, if not transformation or warm fuzzies or fear, then why?”

I believe the reason to be a Christian is quite simple: because we should; because it’s right. God is our Creator. Even simpler, He is God. God is in charge. Do you question whether your boss decides what your job is? No. That’s how a workplace function. The universe functions with God at the top. Yes, He loves me unconditionally. Yes, He blesses me every day. But even if He didn’t, He would still be God. The King. It is morally right for His children to do His Will.

Call me naive. Call me misguided. At the very least, however, we can agree on this: we should serve God even when it doesn’t make things wonderful for us.

It’s interesting to me: my church is as liberal as they come, but the curriculum is not. Really, liberal doesn’t do my church justice. I love my congregation, but we’ve grown stale in recent years. It’s rare to hear the name “Jesus” or even “God” in the contemporary service. Scripture is viewed as a nuisance to get around, not a gift to swim in. Life is hard and painful; faith exists to create a community who can help us through it. Yet these grade-school aged kids hear about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. We tell them to share, give even when it’s hard, and trust God unconditionally.

We expect more of six-year-old children than adults.

The main reason is that Cokesbury is much more moderate than my church. And I like Cokesbury for it. I wish the message we spread to the kids was the one we made the grown-ups pay attention to. Kids get told they make God sad if they don’t give their gumball money to the soup kitchen. By the time they’re youth, we just pray they will put away their SmartPhones for worship. Adults get a pat on the back if they attend Bible Study.

Of course, the average laymember doesn’t choose the VBS curriculum; the church leadership does. Maybe the leaders give up on the adults and hope to catch the youngsters for the next generation. Or maybe kids are less threatening. If you say something that makes a child’s life trickier, he won’t stop sending his monthly pledge. She won’t leave the church with an angry letter in the her wake. And a kid may actually listen. “…receive the Kingdom of God like a child…” I don’t know if this double-standard is a problem in other churches. Maybe in your church, it’s not at VBS, but in Sunday school or in the Children’s Moment. But we must be very twisted if we are too afraid to be Christians ourselves, but will inflict this supposed misery on children. Maybe we realize that Christ is the Way, so we give our children more than we can accept ourselves.

The problem is that VBS will not define kids’ faith lives. Their families will do that, especially their parents. A child will watch her parents to see how to live. Her VBS teacher may demonstrate an alternative, but a parent is more trustworthy, important, and constant. Her mommy may even scold her when she does what the teacher told her was good. If we are to form little Christians, the expectations must be the same – in fact, greater – for the grown-ups. I can tell my students til I turn blue that they should Remember Jesus Often, but if their families don’t show that in their own way on a regular basis, my words will fade or grow meaningless.

I guess I can sum it up like this: where’s the Vacation Bible School for the adults? Why aren’t they forced to give up a week of their summer?

What criteria separates the good Christian blog from a bad one? The only way to determine that is to know the mission of the Christian blogosphere. Then the good blog is the one which fulfills that mission. But what is our mission? Are we a sort of cyberspace community garden, each blogger tending a patch in hopes it will yield fruit? Are we a think tank for the church, formulating strategies and policies? Or are we simply an extension of seminaries and should stick to theology? I believe the key to a successful church is intentionality. I wonder if it’s also the key to the blogosphere.

The sermon I heard Rev. Moore preach at DYA was so jam-packed with spiritual awesomeness that I could write a book on it. This quote in particular changed my life. I realized that if you can’t go to function and by the end know who are the Christians by how they act, then we’ve done something wrong.

Yet as a church, we’re not very good at constructive advice on how to live differently. Congregants want an instruction manual on faithful living. The clergy seem resistant to provide one, perhaps for fear of becoming Catholic (X in the morning + Y in the evening = Christian). I, however, don’t find practices nearly as suspect. Our grandmother, Judaism, is based in the principle that practices and rituals are a natural response to faith, and reproduce that faith. A routine of practices is in fact the Christian life.

So pray twice a day. Read the Scriptures. Join a covenant group. Love til it hurts. Volunteer. Give more money than you can afford. Forgive. This is what it means to live differently. It’s far more radical than it appears. The unspectacular practices are just that: practice. Moses had to spend 40 years in Midian doing the simple stuff before he could tell Pharaoh, “let my people go!”

For what are we practicing? What Rev. Moore called “God’s great project.” We’re working toward no less than the salvation of humankind. Brick by brick, my son, brick by brick.

Shortly after I declared my blog break, a friend of mine posted an interesting status on Facebook. I don’t know if it was a quote from someone famous original. “Being nice and accepting to people close to you makes you human. Being nice and accepting to everyone makes you a good person.”

Nice. I’ve heard that insidious word before. A few months ago, I posted about “The Cult of Nice” as described by author Kenda Creasy Dean. Niceness is not the self-sacrificing love of Christ that we are all called to practice. “Nice” is a performance of noncommittal politeness. It doesn’t crack crowns or heal hearts. It lets us do whatever we want – or whatever society tells us to do. And it pervades Western values.

The accepting part doesn’t seem nearly as suspect. In fact, it appears positive. If Palestinians and Israelis could just accept their differences, they might know peace. So I thought if my friend’s Facebook status became true, it wouldn’t be so bad. We’d have a lot of consumerism, but a lot less racism.

Except, I realized, we wouldn’t have less prejudice. Just as there’s a difference between tolerance and coexistence, there is a difference between accepting and treasuring. And it is contingent on the Cult of Nice.

Almost every church member has had a foot-washing service. The transformative power keeps them in vogue. One by one, a pastor or lay leader washes the feet of the congregants. I’ve been on both sides of the washing and for me, it is much easier to wash than to be washed. I have a theory about this that is based on a lecture by (you guessed it, subscribers) Dr. Amy Laura Hall. Middle-class, white Americans fear being served. We spend our lives cultivating an image of perfection and invulnerability. Why do you think white congregations have to go to minority neighborhoods for their mission trips? Why do you think minority congregations never serve at white churches? Because white people want to provide, not to receive. It’s not a racism based on hatred, but on niceness.

I didn’t always think this way. A large component of the Duke Youth Academy (DYA) curriculum is about racial reconciliation. As a white teenager, I had never seen race as a church issue. That was in the past. We were all integrated and colorblind now. The government had racial issues to confront in education, health care, and housing, but the church had healed from the 1950s. My eyes were opened over the weekend at DYA. Not only do past wounds still affect us, but the present isn’t perfect either. And to my surprise, people my own age  – who I thought were oh-so enlightened – perpetuated this new racism. Yet the Civil Rights Movement shows that youth are uniquely empowered to stop the cycle. It’s a discussion for youth rooms, not just the over-60 Sunday school.

But to overcome the racism that puts what W.E.B. DuBois called a veil between black and white, we can’t tap dance. Niceness doesn’t bring people together in selfless community. Niceness doesn’t even make us good human beings. Rather, it leads us to live in certain neighborhoods, work in certain offices, talk with certain words, all so we never have to encounter anyone not exactly like us. We can’t nod politely at the church mixer, pretending the veil isn’t there.

Instead, the church must strive for a deeper relationship than acceptance. We must pray for hearts that will wonder what there even is to accept. Niceness isn’t courageous enough for the job.

I realized this today when my dad gave me a new definition of the Means of Grace: that which incorporates us deeper into the life of God. I want to become an active, moving part of God’s universe again. I need to get back to the practices and the routines of faith. So I am going to spend the next couple weeks falling in love with God again – through His Word and His people.

See you in June!