Category: Brotherhood

Don’t Let Offense Make You Deaf

~ Joseph McBee ~ Leave a comment

Over twenty years ago I lost a friendship because someone spoke the truth to me and it made me angry.

I was angry because my desire to go into vocational ministry was not manifesting in my life and I was basically griping about it.

My friend, who was, and still is, a full-time vocational minister said, “You know, maybe no one will ever call you pastor…”

That was all I heard. I am sure he went on to say some encouraging and loving things because that’s the kind of guy he has always been but I didn’t hear anything he said.

I was too offended.

My friend wasn’t unkind, rude, or cruel. He was honest. In fact, what he said was the most loving thing he could have said at that time and it turns out, he was absolutely right.

The problem was that my offense made me deaf to his encouragement.

I cut him out of my life for a while. I’m not proud of that.

When I realized that I was carrying bitterness in my heart against him I asked to meet him for lunch and asked him to forgive me.

As a brother in Christ, he did and there was reconciliation between us of a sort. But it was never really the same.

When something someone does or says touches a place of deep pain in us, we recoil and maybe even lash out.

“That hurts!!”

The mature and wise thing to do is to question those overreactions. To dig a little deeper. When our reaction is out of proportion, it is a signal. Something deeper is being touched, and it deserves our attention

I was not mature enough at the time to do that. I am trying to be now.

Don’t let offense make you deaf. Don’t let it harden you against the men who care enough to speak with honesty. A true brother tells you the truth in love. When it touches a place of pain, press in. Do not retreat.

From the Commonplace Book: Eradicating Selfish Ambition in Christian Communities

~ Joseph McBee ~ Leave a comment

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, 2 complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. (Philippians 2:1-4, ESV)

I have the joy of preaching on Philippians 2:1-4 at Southpoint Fellowship in McDonough, GA this Sunday and in my study and preparation, I came across these 7 principles from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I won’t be using them in my sermon, but I still wanted to share them.

To eradicate selfish ambition in Christian community, Christians, Bonhoeffer says, should…

  • hold their tongues, refusing to speak uncharitably about a Christian brother (or sister),
  • cultivate the humility that comes from understanding that they, like Paul, are the greatest sinners and can only live in God’s sight by His grace,
  • listen ‘long and patiently’ so that they will understand their fellow Christian’s need,
  • refuse to consider their time and calling so valuable that they cannot be interrupted to help with unexpected needs, no matter how small or menial,
  • bear the burden of their brothers and sisters in the Lord, both by preserving their freedom and by forgiving their sinful abuse of that freedom,
  • understand that Christian authority is characterized by service and does not call attention to the person who performs the service.

The Commonplace Book: Dehumanizing Language

~ Joseph McBee ~ Leave a comment

As an everyday example of how this Enlightenment-era machine metaphor persists comes from a friend who has a daughter with Down syndrome. My friend heard someone observe that a classmate was ‘low-functioning’ in comparison to my friend’s child. This well-intentioned comment made my friend realize that talking about any person’s abilities in terms of ‘functions’ is dehumanizing because it serves to ‘compare them to a machine.’ When we use language such as ‘functioning’ to describe human beings, my friend wrote, ‘we play into the dehumanizing rhetoric of modernity.’ We treaty ourselves as Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, as if we were ‘created in the likeness of a machine rather than in likeness of God.’ – Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination

My professional career is in Training and Development, which is a part of Human Resources, a term I have never liked. There was a time when HR was called Personnel. I had a colleague who had the habit of referring to his employees as “resources.” As in, “we have ten resources at that account.” To which I usually replied with something like, “You mean human beings, right?” This usually elicited an eye roll from my colleague, but I was serious.

We see this dehumanizing language everywhere…

  • That’s just the way I’m wired.
  • I need to reboot.
  • That does not compute.
  • We’re working like a well-oiled machine.
  • I need to let off some steam.
  • I need some time to process that.

As I thought about this a while, I realized that I don’t have language to replace it with. This kind of dehumanizing language that diminishes the dignity of being made in the image of loving Creator has become such a part of the way I think and speak, that I don’t know what to say instead.

I’ll admit that changing the way we speak is a challenge and may even make us look a little weird. But hey, if we’re Christians, we’re weird already so why not really lean into it?

Of course, instead of referring to people that work for us as “resources” we can simply say, “employees” or, what I like to use is, “team members” or “colleagues”.

Perhaps, the way we speak about ourselves and others will change based on the way we see and think of ourselves and others.

The Commonplace Book: Self-Optimization is Isolating

~ Joseph McBee ~ Leave a comment

From David Zahl and Plough Magazine.

Self-optimization has become a go-to euphemism for what used to be known as self-help. The word’s evolution foregrounds the perfectionism that was always inherent in more rigorous forms of self-help while deftly leveraging the therapeutic elements of self-care, thereby lending the whole operation a moral sheen.

According to the school of self-optimization there exists an ideal version of you, and your main assignment in life, as an adult of substance and value, is to enflesh that apparition by whatever means necessary. It is time, in other words, to become the person you were always meant to be, the main difference being that you now have smart-tech to monitor your every step and ensure that you are taking the most well-informed and efficient route to the new you. Self-optimization is a data-drive approach to self-realization.

Self-optimization is almost always a solo act. Nearly everything we do to get our numbers up – of books read, of REM hours slept, of miles run, or meditation minutes logged – involves doing things on our own. The self-absorption isolates even further from one another at a time when loneliness reigns over every demographic of the population. The church of self-optimization imprisons us in our skull-sized kingdoms when what we need most is connection. It advocates a very narrow form of self-care, which is really not care for oneself (or others) at all.

I worshipped at the false church of self-optimization for many years and always found it isolating and that it brought me nothing but death-dealing shame. There was no way to become my “optimized self” and I honestly wasn’t sure what that looked like anyway. The standards were constantly changing based on whomever was popular at the time as an “expert” on self-optimization.

It certainly didn’t look like Jesus.