Losers Club

No, not the YS book but similar. I was listening to an Emergent Village podcast by Samir Selmanovic entitled Finding Our God in the Other. It was worth the listen for his provocative take on the kenotic nature of Christ and the implications of that for inter religious dialogue. A brief snippet however started another meme of a thought.

Selmanovic tells a story about a conference where pastors would confess their failures and then recieve a blessing or benediction or absolution from others. How refreshing to see a group of Christians deal with failure in a way that allows God's grace to enter into the situation. Instead of hiding failure by only focusing on the positive or deluding ourselves into believing no failure goes on, these pastors faced the fact that of 100 ideas, 98 don't work. For a faith that proclaims a God who failed intentionally, we don't do failure real well. Instead of looking for resurrection, we continue to crucify those who do fail.

My presbytery (a group of lay and ordained Presbyterians in an area) could use some of this kind of confession and absolution. Instead of getting defensive, we could accept that we don't get it right all of the time and accept God's grace to fail. I propose (and I'll do it in an email to my ministerial colleagues) that we form a Losers Club that is a place to fail with grace and to receive words of absolution from fellow sinners. We'll see how it flies.