A theater in west end of London staging the musical “An American in Paris”. But on a Sunday it is used by a church known for their professional staging of services. In the heart of secular post-Christian London with security checks and bag searches on entry. The whole scene is filled with the juxtaposition of differences. I was in a meeting, part of a panel evaluating the work of some scientists. The sessions were somewhat adversarial. The scientists were, not surprisingly, sensitive of critique; the panel wanted to do their job but not offend. For myself it was a case of how to empathize with the scientists to understand how they received my comments and critique. I tried to stand in their shoes.
Jesus had a shoe fetish - he understood what the world looked like from other people's shoes. Many Christians do not love different shoes. To stand in another’s shoes you need to be willing to entertain a perspective alien to your own. That does not mean agreeing with it, but to take the risk of understanding what your faith looks like from a different viewpoint. The church needs a shoe fetish, most especially the chair-sitting general members. Without this, the church will become increasingly isolated in this relativist post-Chrsitian society. Without a shoe fetish, Christians cannot effectively engage with those outside the church If you resist doing this, you risk becoming a bigot. Think about what this means. It is not simply knowing the position statements of another, it is to try and really understand what the world looks like if you were to hold the position of another. That is hard. It takes practice. It requires a strength beyond simple reasoning. It requires empathy. This is dangerous to do, because if you are already uncomfortable in your own shoes you might find the shoes of another extremely comfortable. You might be tempted to give up your own Christian shoes. Try the shoe fetish challenge: you, a Sunday-attending Christian are sitting at a dinner table with the following three people. Engage them in a conversation that is effective at moving them to a place where they may be willing to consider Jesus as something they need to think about. Case #1
Try a role play in your imagination. I suggest many Christians would have one of two reactions to the dinner discourse. They may bury any conversation on religion and steer the discussion back to safe spaces. Alternatively, they will become defensive and reduce their contribution to hard-line binary statements, and as a result communicate an attitude of judgment. There are three issues I see about standing in another’s shoes. 1. Motivation What is the motivation for the average Christian to try and stand in another’s shoes? For many I suggest there is little motivation. It is threatening, difficult, and unsettling to look critically at one’s own faith from the position of someone who denies your faith – especially if your personal faith is not strong. However, if one desires to effectively communicate then one needs to develop a relationship with a different pair of shoes. That requires taking a risk, for how can I have a relationship that’s real if I am not willing to try see things from their point of view? I need to understand what my faith looks like to someone who rejects it, and who believe they are right. This goes into emotions beyond reason. The motivation we're needing is a genuine desire to bring something true and relevant into the other persons context. 2. Skills and competency The church does little to help their members understand how to lovingly engage in a non-condemnatory way. Jesus was a master at getting into a situation and steering it to a point where he could say something like “Neither do I condemn you, now go and sin no more”. The skills to stand in another’s shoes requires, of course, conversational ability, but beyond that it requires empathy, discernment, compassion, a listening ear, a commitment to wrestle with ideas, a willingness to examine one’s own conditioning, a slowness to jump to conclusions, and a patience to hear someone out. At the heart of furthering a discourse is the ability to pose questions (look at Jesus with the prostitute, the woman at the well, the rich young ruler). If you are unable to construct a probing question to unpack a conversation, you end up either making unsubstantiated statements that polarize, or staying so passive that the other person’s position dominates. Posing questions is a skill that dynamically adapts to an evolving conversation. One can have a library of useful questions, but in the dynamics of a situation these have to be shaped to the context. For example, faced with a statement “sex is simply pleasure”, one might open with a response such as “Hmm, what consequences do you think flow from that?” I think many church goers might instead respond with something like “Sex outside marriage is sin”, by which you have just passed judgment and condemned the other person, and so built a barrier to further conversation. 3. Theology. This is one of those words that scare many Christians, but one way to take it is “know what you believe and why, and what that belief means in the context of real world issues”. Paul says he would become whatever he needed to become in order to reach others for Christ. He was not saying his belief and faith was relative and malleable. Rather, that he would do whatever he needed to do in order to stand in the shoes of another so that he could relate with them. Paul’s willingness and desire reflect the prior two points; he had deep motivation for standing in the shoes of another, and he had the strength and ability to do so without danger to his own faith. I don’t know when I last heard a church teaching on how to do that, or how to become that. There’s so much more to consider, but think about this. Who did Jesus revile and condemn? Those who used God’s name for their own ulterior purposes. Think of the traders in the temple, and the pharisees who saw others as lesser beings. For everyone else he was driven by compassion; he did not condemn but pointed the way forward in their unique context. He did so starting from the place where they were standing. He stood in their shoes. Jesus has a shoe fetish. So did Paul. So did Peter. So do ... I?
1 Comment
14/11/2017 08:33:55 pm
Should the title of your 11/14/2017 article be "Shoe Fetish: the church needs one"
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Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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