Book Club: The Divine Commodity - Chapter 2

In chapter two of The Divine Commodity Skye Jethani begins by drawing our attention to the noisiness of our world. Everywhere we go we are bombarded by words – whether spoken, printed, broadcasted, projected or otherwise – we cannot escape what Henri Nouwen calls the “wordy world;” which is a shame because the pattern of authentic Christian spirituality throughout the ages has always been to meet God in silence. Just as we can be humbled and awed by the all the stars of the night sky, and our insignificance in the vastness of the universe and encounter with the truly transcendent one should leave us with nothing of value to say.

We see this exemplified in the life and story of Job. Jethani reminds us that the vast majority of Jobs 42 chapters are filled with the unending talk of men who speak definitively about God. They talk with assurance of understanding and confidence in their wisdom. That is of course, until God shows up in the whirlwind and puts Job and his friends in their places. When God shows up and bombards Job with question after question that he cannot possibly even begin to answer the proper response to the Almighty at last becomes clear – he covers his mouth.

“Job learned the wisdom of silence before God, but it appears many Christians have abandoned this value in our wordy world.” (p.34)

And it is in this illustration that Jethani turns the argument toward the real point of this chapter – our lack of silence about God is evidence that we have accepted the idea that God can be figured out. That he is somehow less that wholly other, less than infinite, less than transcendent; rather God is just another set of natural laws that we can understand, predict and bend to our will. In Jethani’s words, the whirlwind of Job’s story has been reduced to ‘a tempest in a tea cup’ by modern Evangelicals. And this is where the idea of a Divine Commodity begins to emerge.

You see we have taken our economic philosophy odd supply and demand and extended it to all areas of life. There is nothing in the world anymore that someone has not tried to commodify. In Bolivia they managed for a time to privatize and commodify rainwater, in the agricultural sector companies have patented and commodified entire species of grain and produce, in biotechnology the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 1980 began to allow private companies to patent living organisms and now a whole 20% of your own genetic code is legally owned by private corporations! This on its own should trouble us a great deal but the push to commodify our world is even more troubling than these examples:

“In a commodity culture we have been conditioned to believe nothing carries intrinsic value. Instead, value is found only in a thing’s usefulness to us, and tragically this belief has been applied to people as well. Divorce rates have skyrocketed as we’ve come to see marriage as disposable. When a spouse is no longer useful he or she can be abandoned or traded. Abortion, the termination of an “unwanted” pregnancy, is believed to be morally justifiable because an unborn child is not a person. Personhood is a legal status reserved for those who are deemed useful. Pornography, prostitution, and child sex trafficking are the result of sexuality being commodified. Modern people may express outrage at the horrors of the African slave trade or the Holocaust, but in truth the commodification of human beings that made those atrocities possible is more prevalent today than ever before.” (p.37)

If this has become the way we view even our fellow human beings is it any wonder then that we have adopted a similar view of God? The act of worship was once defined as ascribing value to God, which meant that we praised him for who he was in his divine nature, but the contemporary church has redefined worship as ascribing value to God – not for who he is, but for what he can do for us. We have turned God himself into a commodity to be exploited for our own purposes! Using the words of sociologist Christian Smith, Jethani proffers the suggestion that rather than Christians, many Evangelicals today are really little more than Moral Therapeutic Deists. Moral in that we believe that God wants us to be good and nice, therapeutic in the sense that we believe that God is primarily concerned with our happiness rather than our obedience, and deist in the sense that we believe in a God who is distant and uninvolved in our life unless we have sought his help with an issue relating to our happiness. According to Jethani, the commodification of God has led most people with the idea that God is more akin to a genie in a bottle to be called upon when we need help, rather than an all powerful creator and redeemer to be revered.

“The god of Consumer Christianity does not inspire awe and wonder because he is nothing more than a commodity to be used for our personal satisfaction and self-achievement.”  (p.38)

Jethani goes on to talk about an experience he had visiting garment factories in the developing world. He relayed stories about how labour is so cheap that companies will build a factory, produce clothing for a few years and then up and abandon the brand new factory to rebuild in a neighbouring country where they can hire even cheaper labour before. It is a continual cycle of investment and abandonment as the multinational corporations are always in search of the cheapest labour possible. He makes the point that we never think about the way our clothes are produced because the second unavoidable force of consumerism upon society is alienation.

Because we focus on the commodity alone we forget (or choose not to concern ourselves with) where the commodity came from, what its context was and how it came to be ours. There used to be a time when everything you owned had a story, and a face attached to it, and when something was broken you fixed it because it had inherent value because of the relationship attached to it. You knew the seamstress who made your dress or the furniture maker who built your chairs. You knew the farmer who grew your produce or the carpenter who built your house. These were not abstract items with no history or context they were every day reminders of the people you lived in relationship with – but all of that has changed. Everything it seems has been removed, or abstracted from its point of origin, the stories of these things are never told and frankly, when they are told we turn a deaf ear to them – is it any surprise that we do the same thing to God?

Jethani reminds us that the move toward commodification of God himself has left us with the same collective amnesia about his context, about his story. It has left us bereft of a true relationship with that same God as we obsess about nothing but the spiritual goods and services he offers us, or that the church offers us in his name. We no longer understand him in the context of his story the Scriptures or in the self-revelation of Jesus Christ – we have decontextualized God and in the process grossly devalued him. How can this be considered worship? We have taken the Scriptures and turned them from sacred revelations to self-help texts and we wonder why people are so blasé about Christianity.

“Our culture has confined our imaginations with an uninspiring vision of God. He’s been reduced to a manageable deity of consumable proportions. To break through this trap we need to see beyond our culture; we need to peer through the bars of commodification and alienation and catch a glimpse of a God far larger than our circumstances. Our imaginations can throw off the shackles of consumerism if we start to feel the infinite once again. This requires taking our gaze off the consumable manifestations of God so prevalent today — the music, T-shirts, jewelry, and yes even books that reduce and confine our perception of the Divine — and replacing them with the silent contemplation of what God himself has created. In a culture that insists on making God small, we can counteract the trend by focusing our imaginations on what is big.” (p. 44)

Vincent van Gogh saw a big God when looked into the sky and painted the stars, Job saw a big God when he gazed into the whirlwind, and John of Patmos saw a big God when he had his revelation – why has our God gotten to be so small?

This week as you reflect on the ideas the author puts forward in chapter two I want you to try and answer the following questions:

1.       Skye Jethani points to the absence of Scripture reading in most contemporary worship services as a symptom and indicator of our commodification of God. We are not interested in learning about him, only getting stuff from him. Is this a fair observation? Why or why not?

2.       Have you ever caught yourself trying to explain God? Have you ever felt like you succeeded? What does that say about your perception of God?

3.       Skye Jethani says on page 45, “there is an important hierarchy to knowing; before we can know anything about God we must first humbly confess that we know nothing.” When was the last time you heard that type of humility in someone who claimed to know God? When was the last time you heard that from the man or woman in the mirror? How do we reclaim that right place of understanding before the Almighty?

Until next time,

Chris

Book Club: The Divine Commodity - Chapter 1

In chapter one of The Divine Commodity Skye Jethani begins with what seems to be a foundational problem with the consumerist mindset that pervades our churches and culture – the lack of imagination. Beginning with the tale of Walt Disney’s dream of Epcot and the lack of vision and imagination in his successors to make his dream a reality and then looking to how the rise of the Christian goods and services industry as manifest in the account of the Christian Booksellers Association meetings seems to inversely mirror the decline of the North American church; Jethani demonstrates how good business sense and faithful adherence to the principles of consumerism are poor substitutes for imagination.

Our deficiency is not motivation or money, but imagination. Our ability to live Christianly and be the church corporately has failed because we do not believe it is possible. Like Disney’s successors we simply cannot imagine how to carry out the fantastical mission of our leader. Wanting to obey Christ but lacking his imagination, we reinterpret the mission of the church through the only framework comprehendible to us — the one we’ve inherited from our consumer culture. (p.18)

He goes onto demonstrate how in place of genuine Spirit-empowered imagination we have substituted worldly ideas, whether in creating a vast industry of Christian kitsch that rivals the Chinese black market (18) or in running our churches as if they were just another commodity driven enterprise by molding them with wise worldly business principles. We look to what has already been done in the world by the real innovators and try to recreate their success in our contexts. Sometimes without critically evaluating whether their version of success should matter to a community of faith at all.

Jethani maintains that imagination (like so many other things) was a victim of enlightenment philosophy. As we became more and more dependent on knowledge as the primary means of communicating truth we replaced imagination with facts. In the Christian world we began to (unconsciously) reduce God to a set of suppositions and ideas; we constructed elaborate systematic theologies and moved to educate more than inculcate. We downplayed (if not denigrated) the value of experience in the Christian faith and sought to contain and explain God through our many doctrines and statements about him. The intent was noble, but the results were not encouraging. “Generations of Christians had brains full of biblical knowledge and doctrine, but their lives showed little evidence of the transformation Jesus called forth in his Sermon on the Mount.” So he goes on to recount how a number of churches and ministries in the latter half of the 1900s began to shift their focus once again; no longer would they be concerned with teaching people ideas, theologies, philosophies and doctrines about God – instead they would teach people skills.

We see this shift in the movement away from expositional and theological preaching in many evangelical churches toward a more pragmatic style of communication. Sermons started to sound like many of the secular how-to seminars and self-help seminars that started to gain popularity at the same time: “5 Principles of Parenting; 7 Habits of a Happy Marriage; 3 Biblical Blessings for Businessmen.” And we feel the sting of the transition every time someone in a church complains that our young people aren’t learning doctrine, or that our culture doesn’t have any biblical literacy – we have moved away from knowledge transmission to skill development but have still not seen any significant change in people. (25)

The problem with basing our spiritual formation on either knowledge or on skill development is that they neglect that means of formation that Jesus was most frequently involved in. According to Jethani:

The Gospel writers show Jesus very infrequently teaching skills, and only periodically conveying didactic knowledge. Instead the Gospels are dominated by Jesus telling stories and weaving parables. He used these verbal Trojan horses to sneak radical truths past his listeners’ defenses and into the chamber where their imaginations slumbered. And as they began to awaken, Jesus’ stories illuminated a new vision of the world. They disentangled reality for his listeners, and his disciples slowly perceived the kingdom of God that Jesus saw all around him. It was a kingdom that defied the conventionality of his day. A kingdom where rebellious criminals are embraced by God like a loving father; where the poor and the weak are welcomed to God’s table; where the servant is honored and the powerful are brought low. It was a radical vision not everyone could accept. Some were too enslaved by the cultural conventions, too entangled in realism for their imaginations to be awakened. These people heard Jesus tell stories about trees, fields, treasures, or seeds — but nothing more. They could hear, but not understand. They could see, but could not perceive. (p.26)

In the end, the problem with a neglect of the Christian imagination is that it enslaves us to what we can see, hear, touch, taste and understand. A lack of Christian imagination makes us slaves to our senses and our senses are bombarded by the things and ways of the dominant culture in which we live. And for we North Americans that culture is consumerism. To make his point Jethani tells the story of the Japanese Kakure, or Crypto-Christians. These were Christians who were evangelized by missionaries before the missionaries were expelled from the empire in 1641 and forced to take their faith into hiding. Forced to outwardly appear to be Buddhists or Shintoists by law these Christians began to assimilate the worldview of their culture into their practice of Christianity. They began to confuse the faith they were protecting with the faith they were pretending and over time and generations the two worldviews merged into something wholly other. When European missionaries were allowed back into the country in the nineteenth century what they found among the remnant of the “Christians” in Japan was anything but Christianity. It was a wholly different animal.

The tale of the Japanese Kakure is a cautionary tale for the North American church. It teaches us that we can’t put all our energy into trying to be like the world without actually becoming like the world. When the Christian church aspires to nothing more than being a Christian version of a successful secular industry we won’t even be that. We will become like that which we worship – and whether we will admit it or not, we worship a worldly definition of success.

In our cultural quest for survival, driven by our fear of irrelevance, have evangelicals become Crypto-Christians? Have we clothed our faith with the forms of our American culture to the point that our Christianity has morphed into something entirely different — a folk religion altogether consumerist in spirit and content? Like the Kakure of Japan, are we holding so tightly to our faith that we cannot sense it has already slipped between our fingers? By yielding its imagination to the forms around it, has the church, like ancient Israel, lost the ability to be an alternative people of God? Is Walter Brueggemann correct: “The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that is has little power to believe or to act”? (p.29)

This week as you reflect on the ideas the author puts forward in chapter one I want you to try and answer the following questions:

1.       In what ways have you seen the Church in your life act truly countercultural and what was the response to its action when it did?

2.       Most complaints I hear from Christians about our transition to skill development in our process of spiritual formation are grounded in a plea to return to the good old days of knowledge transmission – but Jethani argues that those good old days weren’t so good either. Are we missing the point in our critiques of contemporary church models?

3.       What are you doing/planning to do to cultivate a Spirit-empowered Christian imagination in your life?

Until next time,

Chris

The Pastor's Library: A Year of Biblical Womanhood

It's been a while since I've featured The Pastor's Library on this blog. In fairness it's been in part because I've been reading so much academic literature for my seminary courses that I don't fully understand that it's been hard to recommend many of those books to you. I'm kind of working through this a little bit with the book club, but I thought that it would be good to give you a taste of a good old fashioned Pastor's Library post to share some of the interesting things that I have been reading with you. Today I'll feature a little gem I picked up over Christmas and read within the last month:


Rachel Held Evans:  A Year of Biblical Womanhood

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading this book. In truth, I wasn't going to bother; having been somewhat disappointed with the often radical left-wing theological positions that the author takes on her blog. I've generally agreed with RHE in the principles she advocates for a theology of gender in the church but I find her applications of that theology sometimes unhelpful in themselves as they swing the pendulum (which DOES need a good swing) too far in the opposite direction. However, a Boxing Day sale on the ebook that allowed me to purchase it for only 2 dollars convinced me that I should give it a look. And I'm glad I did.

Perhaps it was the guidance of a good editor or perhaps it was merely the time to think things through and ruminate on issues that is not afforded to a prolific (nearly daily) blogger but I found this book to be much more measured and less sensational that much of her online writing. Some criticisms of this book may allege that she is unfairly caricaturing the 'Biblical Womanhood' movement championed by people like Piper and Grudem, and I admit too that I found myself paging through my copy of 'Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood' a few times to make sure she wasn't taking the more inflammatory and unbelievable statements that she quotes out of context (she doesn't). Another criticism that could be lobbied against the text is that at times she veers into making this a year of experiencing Jewish culture rather than biblical womanhood as she seems particularly fascinated with the rituals and celebrations of Orthodox Jews. I won't deny that the observations on that culture and their practices are fascinating, but it seems at time to derail her from her central thesis.
In the end her conclusions will frustrate complimentarians (as has already been evident in internet chatter) but her exegesis is well researched and her treatment of their position is almost always charitable and fair - perhaps that is some of the most surprising growth that happens over the course of this year-long journey. But her conclusion about how we interpret these texts is a fair one that I have long advocated in my own teaching.

"For those who count the Bible as sacred, interpretation is not a matter of whether to pick and choose, but how to pick and choose. We are all selective. We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Are we reading with the prejudice of love or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed?" (296 Kindle Edition)

I would in the end recommend this book, if for no other reason than to foster dialogue and critical reflection on this pertinent and important topic for the church. 

Four Stars.

Until next time,
Chris

The Lighter Side of Life...

And now for something from the lighter side of life...

So today I finished my goal of watching all eleven Star Trek movies in order (yes, I am that lame) and as I have had some time to reflect now on the different captains, crews, stories and ships and the voyages of all the different star ship Enterprises that appear in the feature length movie franchise, I have made some observations that I’m ready to share with the citizens of the internet.

First of all, even as a self-identified Trekkie and long time follower of the franchise – it has to be said that a few of these movies are absolutely terrible! By and large the accepted rule of thumb with the Star Trek film franchise is that the odd-numbered movies are awful and the even numbered movies are great or at least passable for entertainment value. This pattern largely holds true in experience with the even numbered films being the most successful and the odd numbered movies being critically reviled even into the Next Generation films (7-10) that aren’t officially numbered. The theory breaks down when you get to the latest film “Star Trek”, which is J.J. Abrams first foray into the Star Trek universe and is unofficially number 11 as it is technically a sequel and NOT a reboot as is most commonly believed (more on that later).

So rather than give a synopsis or evaluation of each individual film (which could take a long time and would be rather uninteresting) I want to quickly give an overview of the film franchise as a whole and highlight some notable things that stuck out to me and then afterward I’ll go out on a limb and give my nod to the best and the worst of the film franchise in a move that is sure to infuriate the die-hard faithful in my readership. So here goes.

Star Trek: The motion picture begins with the ominous arrival of a dangerous energy cloud that of course threatens the very existence of Earth (a theme that would be repeated in various forms in films IV, VIII, and XI) and the first thing we notice is how OLD all of the original crew have gotten in the 10 years since the end of the original series. William Shatner in particular did not age well, nor did DeForest Kelley, James Doohan or Walter Koenig. All of the crew look significantly older than their characters should be.  An indeterminate amount of time has passed in the story universe but we know that Kirk cites his 5 years at the helm of the Enterprise as the reason for his special qualifications for taking control of the ship so it would seem that not that much time has passed in screen time since the end of the original series – which makes the age of the crew all the more jarring when we first see them on screen. The second thing that we notice is that the crew have all scattered. Kirk is now an admiral, Spock seems to have resigned his commission and is searching for some sort of inner peace on Vulcan and McCoy has retired. The Enterprise has gone through some sort of extensive retro-fit and there is a new command crew in charge. Captain Will Decker, the man hand-picked by Kirk to command his ship is getting the crew ready for its shakedown voyage but the crisis forces crew and ship into premature service to save Earth.

Which of course they do after reassembling the original bridge crew and killing off the interesting new characters that could steal attention from the stars (interestingly the characters of Decker and the telepathic Lieutenant Ilia who shared a romantic past became the templates for the more famous and enduring characters of Will Riker and Deanna Troi in The Next Generation continuity) the movie ends without much resolution to the characters’ futures. Kirk is still an admiral, Spock’s future in uncertain and McCoy never officially re-enlists.

In Star Trek II we begin with the first mention of the famous Kobayashi Maru test at Star Fleet Academy.  A new character, a Vulcan female played by a strangely miscast young Kirstie Alley (Saavik would later be recast for Star Trek III). We learn in this scene that Kirk is still an admiral, that Spock is now the captain of the Enterprise and that it has been reassigned as a training ship for cadets and young officers. In the next scene we learn that Chekov has been reassigned to the crew of the USS Reliant and once again the main crew is scattered across different assignments needing a crisis to pull them together. That crisis is Kahn – Ricardo Montalban reprising his role as the genetically augmented superhuman who is this time out for revenge against the man who marooned him and his crew in the original series episode Space Seed. Star Trek II is nostalgically remembered by many as possibly the pinnacle of the original six movies but frankly I think that nostalgia is clouding better judgement. Kahn is a mediocre villain at best and the genesis device which serves as the ultimate weapon that endangers the crew is one of the worst MacGuffins in all of Star Trek lore. The only thing that makes this movie the least bit memorable is the sacrifice of Spock at the climax of the film. Followed by a funeral service that even had be tearing up the franchise follows it up by immediately squandering all the good will they built with the horrible movie that is Star Trek III.

The less that is said about Star Trek III the better, but the consequences of the plot is that Kirk’s newly discovered son is killed (setting up a major plot point for movie VI), Spock is resurrected and the Enterprise is destroyed. Oh, and we learn definitively that Christopher Lloyd, while making a great Doc Brown, makes a horrible Klingon. That distinct voice just does not work.

Star Trek IV is also fondly remembered by most fans of the series. It is also known as the movie with no Enterprise, very little action in Space and of course Whales. This is the second time an large and powerful probe of some type is inexplicably headed for Earth and has threatened human existence. The plot takes the crew back in time to 1980s San Francisco in what ends up being one of the most lighthearted and funny films in the series. At the end of the film a new Enterprise is unveiled (NCC-1701A) and Kirk is busted back down to the rank of captain finally getting things back where they belong in the Star Trek universe and all but guaranteeing a fifth film in a few years time; which is a shame – because Star Trek V was awful. Anytime you mix themes of getting old (a theme that would be much better realized in the sixth film), space exploration and the search for God within the campy universe of Star Trek – you know that good things are not forthcoming.

Star Trek VI is where I think the original crew really shines in the film universe. The film is a social commentary on the western world coming to terms with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the passing of a generation into irrelevance. This is demonstrated not only by the reflections on age and retirement, but also in the comparison of the aging Constitution class Enterprise with the new and powerful USS Excelsior under the command of former Enterprise helmsman, Captain Sulu. I think also that the legendary Christopher Plummer delivers what is probably the best performance ever in the role of a lead villain in a Star Trek film.

Star Trek Generations (VII) is by all accounts a movie that only existed to kill off Kirk and give the crew of The Next Generation ‘permission’ to start making movies. It also features the only canon appearance of the Excelsior class Enterprise B (The Enterprise C had been previously featured in the TNG episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and the destruction of the Enterprise D – which was to give the Next Generation movie franchise a fancy new ship to carry on with; which set-up the events of Star Trek First Contact (VIII) and the debut of the fancy new Sovereign class Enterprise E.

First Contact was undoubtedly the most frightening of the eleven feature films with a deliberate attempt to mix a bit of the space horror genre into the plot. It balanced this with lighthearted shenanigans on 22^nd century Earth trying to get a notoriously irresponsible and drunk Zephram Cochrane to successfully launch the first warp ship in human history to preserve their timeline. It also started the trend of Data being the unquestioned secondary lead in the crew for plot attention and the trend of finding excuses for Worf to keep coming along for the adventure since he was no longer an official part of the crew as he was assigned to Deep Space Nine.

Following First Contact was Star Trek Insurrection (IX) which was notable not only for its general lameness, but also for being the film where Riker and Troi rekindle their romance (an important plot point in the next movie). Stuff happens, stuff blows up. Worf inexplicably ends up along for the ride and the good guys win.

Star Trek Nemesis (X) was the fourth and final movie in the Next Generation franchise. The whole theme of the movie was goodbyes. Riker and Troi were married in the opening scenes and Will had accepted the post as the captain of the USS Titan. Beverly Crusher had been (once again) appointed the head of Starfleet Medical. Worf was once again somehow there (and yet officially not there because he wasn’t a part of the crew) and Data did his best impression of Spock saving the ship by sacrificing his own life in the climax of the film. Being an even numbered film and featuring a fearsome new foe with ties to the Romulan Empire it should have been a great movie, but at this point the air was out of the Next Generation crew’s balloon and the whole movie was just one long epilogue to the TV and film series that spawned it.

Star Trek (XI) the reboot that wasn’t really a reboot would follow seven years later with a new take on the original series crew and a new vision for the franchise courtesy of J.J. Abrams. It turned the tables on  Kirk making him an outsider fighting his way in, turned Spock into a much more human character (and gave him a romantic relationship with Uhura), remade the Enterprise into some sort of hybrid between quasi industrial and Apple computers type of ship (seriously, the Engineering section looks like it belongs on a 20^th century steam ship while the bridge looks like it’s a part of Apple headquarters in Cuppertino). It also changed history in a big way by destroying one of the most important planets in the Federation – Vulcan. Yet by a stroke of genius Abrams incorporated a time travel element that kept it firmly in the original continuity as a sequel to Nemesis while creating a new timeline that essentially frees him from sticking to the original canon in subsequent sequels.

So after wasting so much of my life watching all of these films in order (not all in one day thank goodness) I do have some awards for the best and worst aspects of the film franchise as we get ready  for the much anticipated 12^th film due in theatres this May.

Best Captain: This is the question that is most likely to divide the fan base in half but I think that hands down the best captain in the series has to be Picard. Even with only four moves to Kirk’s seven (and I count Kirk Alpha as a different captain) he distinguished himself as a much more capable and intelligent officer than Kirk ever did. How Picard is not yet an admiral (and Janeway is!?!) is beyond me.

Worst Villain: The whaling industry. Seriously. In Star Trek IV Leonard Nimoy, who directed the film, wanted to have such a strong environmental message that he wrote no villain into the plot. The antagonist was us and the way we treated the environment. Lame.

Best Villain: General Chang from Star Trek VI. You don’t get much better than a Klingon who recites Shakespeare as he tries to kill you and ruin the plan for peace between the Klingons and the Federation. That and Christopher Plummer.

Best Ship: Hands down that has to go to Picard’s Enterprise E, although I am also partial to Sulu’s Excelsior.

Most Bizarre Casting Choice: Christopher Lloyd as the Klingon Commander Kruge. I spent the whole movie waiting for him to invent the flux capacitor.

Worst film: Star Trek the Motion Picture is hard to beat in this category but Star Trek III:The Search for Spock gives it a run for its money.

Best Film (I-VI): Certainly the Undiscovered country wins this award

Best Film (VII-X): Hard to find a better Next Generation film than First Contact. How can you go wrong with the Borg?

Best Film overall: I’m going to offend all the traditionalists here and go with Star Trek (XI) on this one. Abrams has re-imagined the Star Trek universe in a way that is fresh and modern and has found a way to both honour the source material and canon while simultaneously freeing himself from it.

Bonus Category – Worst Uniforms: Star Trek the Motion Picture. What were they thinking? Who knew that the 70s would be back in style in the 23^rd century.