Guest Outpost blog by Alex Becker I am invisible. It’s not something I regularly tell people, largely because if I told them out loud that I was invisible, they’d hear me and know I was there. The whole point of being invisible, after all, is not to draw attention to myself. As a pastor, it’s particularly useful to be invisible. When I get on a plane or a bus, when I’m out shopping for groceries or clothes, or when I’m out at a restaurant, it’s great to not have people ask me questions about being a pastor, or about Christianity, or about God in general. Instead of all those exhausting conversations, I’m free to go about my business camouflaged. Of course, I’m not invisible in the sense that you can’t see me with your eyes. I’m invisible in a spiritual sense – you’d never know from looking at me that I’m Christian. I’ve toyed around with the idea of wearing a collar or a cross necklace, but I’ve never been forced to wear them, and so I haven’t. You won’t see me … [Read more...]

We were invited by the Outlook this month to consider our marks of faith. I don’t have any tattoos or even major scars. I don’t think about my body marking me in faith. And yet, I have been marked in body by at least two things: my skin color and my baptism. These two things may seem unrelated. And yet, both are central to my identity as a follower of Jesus. I am baptized and white. And I think one has the power to transform the other. In baptism, we are “sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.” The language is beautiful and yet has not been foremost in my understanding of my identity. I live in the tension between knowing that in Christ, I am a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17) and struggling to live as that new creation. Too often, when I slam up against the tension between who I am and who I could be, I resolve to work harder to change whatever within me needs changing. I forget that I have been sealed by the Holy Spirit – a promise that it is the Spirit … [Read more...]

I got my first tattoo when I was serving as the youth director at a small Presbyterian Church in Tallahassee, Florida. The teenagers in my youth group pooled their money and paid for it themselves – much to the chagrin of many of their parents and most of the elders of the church. Somewhere in my travels, I had seen an image of a Jesus fish designed to look like a crown of thorns, and I couldn’t get the image out of my head. I decided that it was exactly what I wanted, and shared it more than a few times with the kids in my youth group. Back in the late 1990s, not many youth pastors had tattoos. In those early days, I got into more than few arguments with Christians I encountered who believed I was violating God’s law by getting ink. But over time, like my tattoo, those arguments faded. Now, the tattoo serves as a reminder of those early days of ministry. My second tattoo happened because of a documentary I saw on TV about how pilgrims to the Holy Land in the Middle Ages … [Read more...]