Don’t we all love the prayer scene from Talladega Nights?
[www.youtube.com/watch](httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7pco3TTV5k)
OK, maybe not all of us. But, I sure do. What strikes me is that today is the day when we all celebrate “sweet baby Jesus”. On Christmas Eve we watched a full slate of classic Christmas movies for kids and all of them dealt with skepticism regarding the existence of Santa. At the end of the day the point was always, “Christmas is about helping poor people” or some derivation.
…the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day.
It’s funny how clarity can change things. After the first big winter storm the schools were all closed and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader had just been released, so we packed into the car and headed to the show.
The roads weren’t too bad but there was a constant spattering of stuff on my windshield. I hit the mister and nothing happened except for the mud and grime to smear. The realization of traveling on an expressway with no visibility was a little nerve racking. This got worse as I had to slowly make way around the exit ramp cloverleaf without falling off the side.
Sa a se bagay ki pi enpòtan ke ou te ka janm li. Ou ka li li l ’? Si ou pa kapab alò ou pa pral kapab konprann. Ou dwe konprann! Frape, frape! Ki moun ki la a? Ou. Ki ou? Oh pa kriye, li jis yon blag!
I think that I have heard the words, “Watch your language!” more than I could ever imagine. It turns out that when I was younger I did not have much of a filter. It also turns out that as an adult I do not have much of a filter. Every day my poor wife has to remind what not to say.
Don’t you feel bad for her? I do.
My issues are not the point of this post, however. The issue is language. Could you read the opening few sentences? Unless you are some sort of awesome linguist, then probably not.
If you are a follower of Jesus you speak a secret language, a language that not everyone speaks. To he honest, most people don’t speak our language. It is comprised of big words, special words, insider words and most of them end in “-tion”.
When I have conversations with people I am reminded that sometimes my Christian language is different from their language. I want them to understand what I am saying because when we are talking about Jesus, we are talking about the most important thing.
What is the language of your neighbors? I am not taling about English. What are the metaphors and narratives that give their world meaning?
I will almost guarantee it’s not the biblical narrative.
Television, films, music, celebrities, and to a lesser extent books provide the narrative arc for the world around us.
Can you speak their language?
If we want to be able to invite them to know Jesus we must be able to speak the language.
Oh, if you want to know what the opening paragraph says leave a comment!
I was 18 or 19, the room was jammed with more than 1,000 college students and we were enthralled by the man on the stage. He was thick necked and spoke with power and authority. When he got passionate the veins in his neck bulged. As a young man, I found in him the embodiment of all that I wanted to be: strong, intelligent, quick witted, and a command of philosophy and logic that left your head spinning.
He shared story after story of destructing the worldviews of other people thereby creating a vacuum for the message of Jesus to fill.
He didn’t share many stories of people becoming followers of Jesus.
Fast forward nearly ten years.
I am alone in my basement listening to a man with an English accent, whom I have never seen. He is sharing story after story of people responding to the story of Jesus.
One man built bridges and the other created vacuums.
One man started with humanity being created in the image of God and the other with human sinfulness.
One man started with the mindset of a builder and the other with the mindset of destruction.
If we respect people and understand what they believe we will necessarily find points from which to build bridges from their world to the glorious grace of God in the face of Jesus.
Building is harder than demolition, but it is worth it. It’s worth it because regardless of response the conversation stays open.
One of the most powerful feelings I have ever had was the time that I landed in Germany and realized that I had no idea what the signs said. It was remarkably uncomfortable. I had no idea what he ads were saying, I had no idea what the people around me were saying, I could not understand a thing. I felt very lost and very confused and very much alone (which is weird because I was traveling with a group of six others).
I felt these things because I knew I had no hope of being understood.
I have found that as a Christ follower who intentionally seeks to introduce others to Jesus I unwittingly speak German to them.
In my previous post I talked about respect. Well, if I respect someone then I can not caricature them. I need to honestly and authentically understand what they believe. This means that I must
listen. Not only that it means that I must
hear them.
This is hard.
It’s hard because the universe revolves around me and to really listen means that I need to set myself aside.
When you engage in conversation with someone about belief systems it is incumbent on you to be able to communicate back to this person their belief system in such a way they say, “Yes, that’s what I believe”.
Have you seen the movie White Men Can’t Jump? There’s a great scene where Woody and Wesley are listening to Jimi Hendrix and Wesley challenges him and says, “You can’t hear Jimi”. This is the point.
Can you “hear” another? If not then you are not really listening and you don’t really respect them and you will never understand what they believe.
I love the fact that Jesus took time to hear people and listen.
John 8 is an incredible story where Jesus hears and understands and then responds in a way that changes lives.
Will we?
Aretha sang, “Find out what respect means to me”. Respect is a simple word. It is one which causes people to get into fights, feel good, or get loud. Respect is something that is intangible and yet is required.
Today I interacted on a blog where some people were critiquing a friend’s book.
They had not read the book.
Yet, they trashed the book. They trashed him. They challenged his character. It was a personal attack.
They claim to be Christians.
Over the last couple of weeks I have been teaching a group of people about how to engage with those who don’t follow Jesus. We began with “respect.” Why? Because this is the place that Jesus starts. This is the place that Paul starts. They were respecters of people.
Consider Jesus’ interaction with the Samaritan woman in
John 4.
He respected her. He did not pull any punches but he dealt with her in love and did not demean her.
Respect is a powerful form of love and it opens many doors that might not otherwise open. It is foundational for relationship.
If the Church is going to be what it’s called to be it has to respect those who are far from God. This means that to caricature those who disagree with you is out. This means that you must take time to learn and actually hear what these people are saying.
Back to my friend, he has a dynamic to atheists at a large state university. He has written a fiction novel that uses a genre that is attractive to those whom God has placed on his heart. I am probably not going to read the book, because it’s simply not a genre that I enjoy. But, I am quite certain that many people who are far from God will and as they do they will come face to face with the story and message of Jesus.
Will that message look like the Four Spiritual Laws? Nope. But it will challenge the mind and will of those who read it.
Interestingly, the Christians who have displayed such disrespect are probably never going to have the hearing that a man who has written something they detest will.
Why?
R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
What is the meaning of Christmas? That was the question that NBC’s
Community asked last week in an incredibly creative stop motion animation episode that left me laughing. The episode was full of hat tips to great Christmas specials of the past and a few nice shots at the Christian faith.
Shots at Christianity in a Christmas special? Yes.
Are you offended?
The shots that they took weren’t the kinds that you might expect. The most crushing one came from Shirley, whose character is an outspoken Christian. She said, “I am a modern day Christian, I have learned sensitivity and so I say Happy Holidays not wanting anyone else’s religion to feel inferior to mine.”
I laughed. Then, I cried.
Not really. But, I have been thinking about this for the last few days.
Christmas has lost something in the post-modern malaise of mutual worldview affirmations.
Then I remembered last Friday, my son sang in a “Holiday Concert” at his school. They sang Happy Hannukah, Mud Slide, and Up on the Housetop.
Silent Night was played on the piano, no singing.
Something manifestly changed.
A hush came over the crowded cafeteria. You could have heard a pin drop.
Christmas, the moment when God split time one passover many years ago and entered into history. Even today with all of our sensitivity and complacency humanity still becomes silent before the reality that took place when God moved into the neighborhood.
Everyone in that cafeteria experienced something different in that moment than all that had come before. That moment was thick with the holy.
I wish I could sit down with Abed and over a peppermint mocha just talk about the meaning of Christmas.
Maybe I can, maybe there are people all around me looking for the real meaning if I would just open my eyes to see and have ears to hear.
What are you thankful for? This is the question that was posed by the boys at
Professional One a “boutique of awesome” or also known as one of the best real estate firms in the country run by
Mike and
Todd.
Ever since the question was asked I have been thinking about it.
This is a question we ask around our kitchen table as opposed to the generic “God is good, God is great…”
How can you answer such a question with any kind of authenticity and keep the post relatively brief?
When I think about what I am thankful for I am amazed at all that I really ought to be thankful for, but I’m not. I am not thankful, at least not usually. I want to be one of those people that are constantly overwhelmed by gratitude.
I really do. But, I’m not.
Life is more complicated, it seems.
What am I thankful for?
I am thankful that there are people who are asking the question and forcing people like me to actually consider the question. I hear that question and the normal sorts of things that I ought to be thankful for pop into my head: friends, family, God, faith, love, relationships, provision, daily bread, grace, mercy, and the like.
My head tells me I am thankful for these things. My life tells me otherwise.
I don’t think I’m alone.
To answer the question, I ask another: If our lives don’t reflect gratitude are we really thankful?
When you find out that most if not all of your preconceptions are misconceptions it leaves you reeling. The first time I woke up in Israel I struggled to believe all that I was seeing. I felt as though I had stepped foot out of the Matrix and into “The Real”. There was nothing that was what I expected. Not a single thing.
We boarded our bus and met Yaniv, our guide and soon to be our good friend. He took us to Caesarea by the Sea. It was a confusing time as we left Tel Aviv and arrived at a place that was over 2,000 years old. This is the kind of confusion that leaves you scratching your head and unsure of what you are seeing.
It turns out that Israel is a place of paradox. You never can quite get your mind around it. It is a living and breathing postmodern experience. What is new is old and what is oldest is often times new.
The ruins of Caesarea were like nothing that I had ever experienced. They were almost unreal. I felt like I had stepped into one of those coffee table books that you find at your great aunt’s house and you start looking at because you can’t touch anything else.
Only here you could touch.
Smell.
See.
Experience.
It was a round the winter of 1996 that I began to truly study the Scriptures with tenacity. I was particularly drawn to the person and writings of Paul. He was almost a mystical figure to me.
Until now.
I stood in the very place Paul did when he left for his journey to Rome. I saw the place where he was held prisoner prior to leaving.
Paul has now become a very real person for me. He became very real in a place that is a living paradox of new and old.
Any time you visit a new country there are always preconceived ideas that you have coming in. When I left for Israel I had a picture in mind of sand, mountains, and camels. Of course I also had the thought of one or two surface to air missiles and maybe a suicide bomber. I could tell that these were the same thoughts that some of my family had in mind too. I think that is part of the reason why I didn’t really get too excited about the trip, why it “slipped” my mind and why I did not talk about it much with those closest to me. My preconceived ideas had laid a foundation of fear.
Then I arrived in Israel.
I saw it.
There was no filter, there were no reporters or editors choosing what to show me.
I saw it with my own eyes.
What did I see, you ask?
I saw Tel Aviv and modern bustling city filled with people. There were kids on the beach singing and barbecuing. There were clubs thumping the bass so that you could feel it in your chest. There was graffiti. There were coffee shops and pubs. There were people jogging and riding bikes along the Mediterranean Sea. I saw a five star hotel that was had everything you could imagine.
I didn’t see a single camel. The only sand I saw was on the beach of the Med. I didn’t see a gun or a missile or suicide bomber. There were some explosions later in the weekend, but it turns out that people like to shoot off fireworks after Shabbat is over!
It’s a time to celebrate and party.
That first night in Israel I saw my preconceptions explode like an old land mine in the Golan Heights…
[caption id=“attachment_1246” align=“alignleft” width=“300” caption=“It’s not good if the baby goes with…”]
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For the last few years I have been on a journey. It’s a journey that has cost me friendships. It’s a journey that has caused me to look pretty deep and it has caused me to evaluate my understanding of “church”. This week I had an epiphany. It’s both/and and not either/or.
You’re thinking ,“That’s pretty cryptic.”
You’re right. Let me clarify.
The journey that I have been on has been the journey from thinking of church as primarily a “come and see” to that of “go and tell.” As per usual I have taken the pendulum of my life and swung it from one end of the spectrum to the other.
I didn’t even notice.
Passion does that.
This week I met with a group of pastors from the area for a planning time. We were meeting to plan what our churches would do together as we participate in “E.A.C.H.”, a city-wide movement of churches that are seeking to give “everyone a chance to hear” during the first forty days after Easter. We prayed and it was amazing.
Then we started talking.
Fairly quickly the debate began: proclamation OR service. The battle lines were drawn. The combatants were unwilling to budge. Then an image I used for many years with Campus Crusade for Christ (and I had used in a recent worship service) popped into my mind:
“You keep saying you’ve got something for me.
something you call love, but confess.
You’ve been messin’ where you shouldn’t have been a messin’
and now someone else is gettin’ all your best.
These boots are made for walking, and that’s just what they’ll do
one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.”
In the 1920s the Christians walked away from education. In the 1930s and 40s we walked away from science and academia. In the 1960s we walked away from culture. In 2010 it appears we have, by and large, we are in danger walking away from our communities.
Today I spent the day at a local hospital which was hosting an international taste festival and a world impact expo. The organizer sought to provide opportunity for ten congregations or organizations from each of the world’s three dominant faiths: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to highlight their mission efforts around the world. Only four Christian churches committed to participating. One backed out and one was a no show the day of the event.
The Jewish communities and Islamic communities had their full compliment and then some because the Christians were no shows.
The Christians were no shows.
Over the last few years I have read and heard a lot of rhetoric and polemic about Islam and its negative influence in the world. Christians have felt threatened. There has been a renewed zeal “evangelize” the “Muslim world”. There is great concern about Muslim extremists blowing things up.
But, in their own backyard the Christians were no shows.
We have to show up. When I worked with Campus Crusade for Christ we talked about how 90% of movement building was showing up.
A little over a week ago a group of high school students gathered at Grace Chapel, EPC in Farmington Hills, MI. They were there to play “A Minute to Win It”. They played a ton of different games, laughing, and trying to win, and then laughing some more. One of the volunteers in the crowd were recording the mayhem and a few of the videos were uploaded to
YouTube.
Then it happened. An email from an exec at NBC requesting the videos for use on an upcoming episode of A Minute to Win It! The media is now trolling the web to find media for itself to show to us as media.
In this new world of HD cameras and YouTube one thing is now certain:
The media creators have become the media consumers.
Think about it. NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, etc…need us. They need us to keep themselves relevant, hip, and in the know. They need us to create for them. They are consuming our self-made media as much as we are consuming theirs.
Ironic.
What does it mean for a Christian to think? I don’t mean the kind of thinking where one tries to figure out a problem. I am talking about the kind of thinking where one struggles with their core beliefs and tries to determine what is real and true.
We as Christians believe that the Bible is special revelation which shows us truth and points us to what is real. We believe that it is authoritative, that means we believe that we have a book that gives us real answers by which we ought to live.
I believe that this is true.
I repeat: I believe that this is true.
However we must not take our faith and use it as a replacement for critical thought. The Apostle Paul commended the Berean believers because they searched the Scriptures for truth. If we are going to be like them then we must take our cues from them.
I am coming to the thought that for the follower of Jesus to be a real and true thinker then he or she must truly believe that the Scriptures really do have authority. But that is not all. The belief must also extend to the necessity of a diligent study of the Scriptures. We must allow them to change our presuppositions and allow them to change what we believe about the core of our worldviews.
This is what happened with the Bereans. They were a community that believed one way about God until they took a fresh look at their authoritative text and allowed it to change them and change the core foundations of their entire worldview.
So, will we think? It takes work. It takes effort. It takes a willingness to hear the authoritative texts of our community, which are the very words of God, himself.
Rick Devos asked a simple question during his presentation at TEDxDetroit: When you plan an event are you thinking about activity or experience? This is a profound question. One that I think those of who are in the church need to think deeply about. We must ask ourselves what we are calling one another too.
I think that often times we are asking and calling people to activities.
“Come and do…”
“Bring your friend to…”
What if this became…
“Hey I am a part of…”
“Do you want to join me in…”
One set of phrases represents activities, the other an experience. Jesus is not something we do. Church is not something we do. Recently I have found myself saying, “We do church…” or “How do you do church…” These kinds of statements are meaningless. We can’t “do” church any more than I can “do” human being.
It’s interesting this kind of language is typically reserved for those who are impersonators, like this:
[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78FATeTMDaA&w=425&h=350])
Man, Hartman “does” a good Sinatra! But, he’ not the real thing. He’s an impersonator. He’s faking it. He’s doing his best but it’s not real.
I think that when we try to “do” church we are the same, simple impersonators who are doing best but not the real thing.
We need to think about the experience. How can we invite people into an experience where they come face to face with the body of Christ and its head, Jesus? This question is imperative for us to answer. Is it through fog machines and video? Is it done through a high church liturgy? Maybe on both. Maybe not on both.
It seems to me that it might be in the people. When we gather for worship are we looking at ourselves and our needs or are we looking to interact and engage with the God of the universe? Are we inviting people into his presence or to our building?
I would love to know what you think it means to think about experience versus activity in this context. Comment like crazy and let’s discuss…
The Phoenix is a mythical beast which lives and dies by burning itself into a heap of ashes. From the ashes rises the next generation Phoenix. I look around at the Detroit Metropolitan area and realize that we have become a heap of ashes.
The fire began to blaze in 1968 with the riots. From that moment on the death spiral had begun. The fire is out. We are but a pile of ash. The question now becomes what will happen with this pile of ash? Will we be blown away by the wind never again to breathe the breath of life? Or, just maybe, will we rise like a Phoenix from the ashes?
I have hope that we will rise.
Why?
In the last 24 hours I have been a part of two significant events in our city. On Wednesday, September 29 I participated in TEDxDetroit and on Thursday, September 30 I participated in EACH. These two gatherings were very different and very much the same. Both of them are seeking to transform a city which has become an icon of failure.
One of the greatest characters in film is Mini Me from the Austin Powers series. Now, granted for many of you reading this blog you are already offended just with the mere mention of that film series, sorry, but keep reading it might come full circle (maybe). Have you ever wondered how Mini Me relates to Jesus? No? Hmm…
This Sunday I was talking with a group of people about the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle is a pretty cool thing. It was a fold up Temple that the people of God were able to take with them anywhere they went. It was a kind of holy Winnebago or something. Here’s a picture compliments of the ESV Study Bible:
The Lions are 0–3, the Tigers are out of the playoffs, U of M is undefeated but it looks like they probably won’t win a Big Ten game, that can only mean one thing: Hockey. That’s right we are ten days away from the start of the NHL and most importantly the Red Wings. Last season was frustrating. But, in the end it was great.
It was great because…
- We found out that Jimmy Howard is the real deal.
- We found out that guys like Eaves, Miller, and Abdelkader can play with the big boys.
- We found out that Mike Babcock is a ridiculously good coach.
- We found out that the Swedes have heart.
- We found out that the leadership on this team will take them a long way.
- Hudler found out that he needed the Red Wings.
- Mike Modano didn’t win a Cup and will go for one here in Detroit.
- The Blackhawks won their championship and a real original six rivalry was reborn.
- The Penguins didn’t win the championship.
- It made us as fans thankful for the nearly 20 years of amazing hockey we have seen in the D.
The boys from Grand Rapids grew into men last year. The Wings have FIVE NHL caliber offensive lines. They are deep. They are hungry. They are fast.
The big questions I have:
Pew Research posted a recent
study looking at how people’s religion effects their understanding of various social issues. What I found interesting is that on many issues even though people hear their pastor speak on issues it does not effect the way they think about them.
I think this study highlights a significant shift within the religious community. This shift points to the reality that people are looking elsewhere for wisdom. This is especially highlighted in issues where television political pundits have the loudest voices. The leaders of religious communities cannot compete with the 24 hour news cycle and the reruns of hour long editorial commentary that is played off as “fact”.
Continually, pastor friends of mine, are finding that people hear what they want. They don’t take into account the full picture. The Bible or the pastor are minor voices in a large conversation. I think that in many ways we could say that our politics are shaping our theology.
When this happens the faith community necessarily finds itself on shaky ground. The kingdom of God is a subversive kingdom which requires a radical reorientation of one’s view of the world. If the faith community is being transformed primarily through outside forces then it ceases to be the subversive community of Jesus but something else.
As I read this text, I am writing and responding. You are getting my fresh thoughts, ones which are rather raw. So, hopefully, this means that we will end up in conversation where we can interact over them and flesh it out a bit. Up to this point I have been wrestling with how Wright was going to answer the Authority question.
He does so by arguing for the necessity of theology in understanding the New Testament (and really any historical work) due to theology’s central role in world view. This then leads him into the question of authority which he answers this way:
As I continue to work through The New Testament and the People of God by N.T. Wright, I was struck by this statement: “history…is rather the meaningful narrative of events and intentions.(82)” Wright is arguing that history is not simply the subjective interpretation of events and ideas. It is however, connected to a reality outside itself and is a process by which those events are placed within a grander meta-narrative. He argues against the postmodern emphasis and focus on the centrality of the reader that disconnects texts from their historical setting.
This I think is very helpful. Primarily because he draws out the fundamental flaw in our current cultural milieu. Which is this disconnect from the fact that things do actually happen apart from someone writing them down.
The other thing that I think is key in his definition is that it points to “intentions”. The intention of an author is something that many in our world today argue against being a possible end. However, it seems that Wright wants to argue that we have access to intent. If this is the case then we can begin to grapple with the statements of the text that seek to subvert us.
In my previous post I asked the question, “where do we find authority?” I think that if we can find intent then we can have grounds for building authority. Apart from this, it will be difficult to do so.
So, do you think we have access to intent? Or is all this a bunch of hot air?
Yesterday I committed myself to watching The NINES leadership conference. I set up the laptop with the projector and big screen and kicked back in our youth room. I was impressed with the variety of speakers and the depth of insight that was being presented. I was less than surprised by some of the poor exegesis. I was able to invest in about half the conference.
For those of you who don’t know how the The NINES works it’s a single day web conference where speakers discuss a single topic. This year they got 6 minutes. So, over the course of the nine hours there were over 100 videos. The pace is fast and a couple fo hours disappear before you know it. This year’s topic was “Game Changers”.
My good friend
Damon Reiss and I will be spending some time reading and writing together on the issues raised in N.T. Wright’s
New Testament and the People of God. This text is the first in a five part series that Wright is doing on “Christian Origins and the Question of God”. Wright is understood to be the leading spokesman for the “New Perspective on Paul” and is embraced by many in the “emerging church” as their key theologian (oddly enough he does not really fit there). He has recently stepped out of pastoral ministry to engage full-time in the academy.
I think my hope for these series of posts is to:
Dear Dan,
In a recent edition of the Boston Globe you had this to say about Detroit:
Think about it: For the next five weeks, you could live in downtown Boston and your wife could shop on Newbury Street. Or you could live in downtown Detroit, amid the boarded-up buildings and the proverbial skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets. Is this really a tough call?
I would like to commend you on your lack of research. You seem to be looking at pictures from 1968 in the immediate after math of the riots. Do you still think there is a gunman on the campus of Kent State University? Or maybe you believe that the “British are Coming”?
Of course maybe you are upset that President John F. Kennedy had this to say about Detroit:
[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Di6YmCLZgc&w=425&h=350])
I don’t know what your issue is. I don’t really know why you feel like you have to chastise a proud city. I would invite you to come and see what Detroit is all about. Oddly enough I have not seen a burned out Chevrolet anywhere. From Midtown to Greektown to Downtown all I find are great restaurants, bars, world class hospitals, a world class university, and three great sports franchises.
When one determines to include the metropolitan area we find that on a weekend in the fall 110,000 people jam into U of M staduim, 70,000 at MSU, 20,000 for a Wings game, 20,000 for a Pistons game, 35,000 for a Tigers game, and 60,000 for Lions game.
Detroit is proud city with good people. We are a collection of urban and suburban working together for a great future. I suggest, sir, that you come visit before you write about our home again.
Sincerely,
Me.
PS — Thanks to Dave Mieksztyn for the following links that you might find interesting:
http://500coolthings.com/ (from the boys at Professional One)
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…where atleast I know I can buy, whatever I want, when I want it, and nobody can stop me.
There are few lasting images in my mind like that of September 11, 2001 and the days that followed. I remember where I was when I found out the World Trade Center had been attacked. I remember sitting and praying with a team of missionaries in my home for the families, the world, and our country. I remember looking at my son who was a few months old thinking what was his life going to be like?
Then it happened, the President of the United States finally spoke. He told us that the terrorists would not win. He told us that we can stand up to these people and fight! He told us to do that we must…we must…GO SHOPPING! Fill the malls and buy stuff, show them that they can’t take away your lives!
In that moment, I thought, “Yes! That’s right we must go on.” Upon nearly a decade of reflection I am becoming more and more distressed by this statement. What distresses me is the fact that it is emblematic of the broken culture within which we live in the West. We are fundamentally consumers. To go shopping and buy whatever we want is our highest freedom. It is what drives us.
Missional discipleship necessarily conflicts with this. Consider this passage from Jesus’ teaching,
In my experience the evangelical church has a bit of an integrity problem. No, I am not talking about the issues that just popped in your head. I am talking about the Holy Spirit. The last time I checked he was still part of the Godhead, you know the Triune God we Christians believe in? Yeah that guy. Our creeds give him second billing. In seminary our professors tack him on at the end of a course and seemingly never get to him. Yet, it is because of him that Jesus said it was better for us that he return to heaven and be with the Father.
It is to the person of the Holy Spirit that we now turn in our quest for missional discipleship as outlined for us in “Untamed” by Alan and Debra Hirsch.
The Hirsch’s spend much time discussing the abuses and problems surrounding our understanding of the Spirit and for that discussion I encourage you to read the book. I want us to focus on the heart of the issue in the chapter which is the carrying out of holiness with the Holy Spirit.
First, there is a comment made that I think is worth repeating. Holiness is not a list of “don’ts” but of “dos”. This is imperative for us in discipleship. The Holy Spirit is not a cosmic kill joy but one who spurs us to creativity, joy, passion, and mission. He also leads us into truth and reminds us of all that Jesus taught.
How does this translate into missional discipleship? Check it out…
Let there be creativity: The Holy Spirit is the Creator, and he lives in us. The on who created the
platypus can surely stir our hearts and minds to creative action.
Let there be risky mission: The Hirsch’s remind us that God is a sending God. He sent the Son and the Spirit. He has also sent the church. The Spirit of God is leading us on the Mission of God. Will we boldly and faithfully follow?
Let there be communitas: Community without mission is a social gathering. Communitas is developed around a mission. Is your community on mission? If not, then you don’t have communitas and you might be missing out on what the Holy Spirit is doing in your midst.
Let there be lots of little Jesuses: The process of discipleship is to become like our rabbi, Jesus. If we are not looking more and more like him and there are not lots of “little Jesuses” running around then we are missing the work of the Spirit in our lives.
Let there be love: Romans 5:5, “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” To love well means that we are in step with the Spirit.
Let there be learning community: The Spirit of God leads us into all truth. We can pursue a quest for knowledge and knowing and ought to because of our relationship with the Spirit.
Let there be some miracles: Embrace the miracles of God that happen and let it be OK to do so. We can set aside our enlightenment rationalism and rejoice in the working of God.
Let there be spiritual maturity: The Spirit is the means of spiritual growth, he brings us toward spiritual maturity, as we keep in step with him, we will see this growth.
Let there be a lot more discernment: To engage in the mission of God requires us to be in step with the Spirit so that we can discern between Spirit-led engagement and foolish absorption into the world.
Let there be unity around Jesus: I think this makes sense on its own.
Let there be ecstasy and intimacy: I have been reading some in the life of Abraham Lincoln and his counterparts. I am noticing that there is a great sweep of emotion and intimacy in their writings. This is largely lacking from our communities today. If we are in step with the Spirit then we will begin to experience this more and more.
Let there be liberation and transformation: As we engage more fully with the Spirit we will experience his transforming power in our lives and in the lives around us. This will be demonstrated through our being freed from the sin that entangles.
So, which of these do you question? Doubt? Struggle with?
“If God is not the defining center of our faith, life, and identity, then who or what is? (58)” Now there is a question. The Hirsch’s continue to challenge our thinking in relation to the center of our faith in chapter 2 of “Untamed”. There is nothing more central to who we are than what we worship.
Missional Discipleship, at its core, is about worship.
Worship at its core is about the person or object worshiped.
If we get this wrong then we get it all wrong. The Crusader, the jihadist, the cult leader all do evil because their worship is wrongly placed.
So, how do we know if we are worshiping rightly? The answer, Israel’s Shema:
““Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
(Deuteronomy 6:4–5 ESV)
This is the compass by which we set our heading in discipleship because it points us towards the reality and truth of who God is and what God has called us to do. Jesus said it this way,
“Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.””
(Mark 12:29–31 ESV)
Notice his expansion to love your neighbor. If you love God, then you will love your neighbor. It is a simple cause and effect relationship. If you do not love your neighbor, then you do not love God. I think that this modern re-telling of the
“Good Samaritan” proves helpful here.
The Hirsch’s argue that this place of “biblical knowing” comes when right thinking, right acting, and right feeling intersect. The process of getting us to this point is the task of discipleship.
The issue at stake here remember is worship. The Hirsch’s define it this way, “offering our whole world back to God. (76)” If our lives are not becoming to a greater degree more and more unified under the living God then we are not worshiping.
My challenge for each of us is to take stock here. Where are you disunified under God in your life? In what ways are you creating God in your image? Where are you missing in the areas of right acting, right thinking, and right feeling?
I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments…
Last week I spent some time reading Alan and Debra Hirsch’s newest offering, Untamed. It was so worthwhile that I thought I would take a few days to post a summary of each chapter. While there is nothing necessarily “new” in the book it is a really well done text that brings classic missional discipleship into an updated and fresh rendering.
We begin with our view of Jesus. The argument that is posited is simple, “Show us your Jesus and we will show you who you are (38).” This is key to our understanding who God is. This is why the Hirsches argue that the foundation of discipleship is Jesus. To know God is to know Jesus. In any way that our picture of Jesus fails so too does our image of God.
I think that Alan and Deb illustrate this well by asking this simple and yet profound question, “If we had a properly Jewish picture of Jesus would the holocaust have happened? (39)”
Let that question run around in your mind a moment. Is it possible that had the world rightly pictured Jesus as a Jew and not as a European could it be that the holocaust could have been avoided?
We must ask this question, do we believe in the Jesus of the Bible or do we believe in a created Jebus of our own imagination?
This is critical for the task of discipleship because it is Jesus who sets the entire spiritual agenda for his follower. Before continuing in your read, I would encourage to take a moment and consider, who is your Jesus?
Now we must determine what our agenda for discipleship is. Quite simply it is the pursuit of holiness. This pursuit of holiness is different from what we typically understand. Consider the fact that when Jesus was teaching there was a group of very holy people, the Pharisees. They had cornered the market on holiness, they had all the rules and all the ways to make sure you could stay close God. However, the people feared them and their religion.
Then this Jesus comes around and his brand of holiness is attracted people, and not just average people, but SINNERS. Yes, his holiness attracted SINNERS, the very people who the Pharisees, those hard hearted harbingers of holiness, despised and avoided. This holy Jesus was accused of being a drunk and a glutton. His brand of holiness is clearly stated in Matthew 5–7, that great sermon on the mount.
Do you hold to the radical and untamed holiness that Jesus espouses in the sermon?
What is astounding is that this holiness is based within the context of love, grace, and mercy and yet a radical standard that transcends anything that most of us would consider doable.
The first task of missional discipleship: right our view of Jesus.
The second task of mission discipleship: embrace the sermon on the mount as our agenda.
[vimeo 6302404]
I am really enjoying the ideas that are being put forth as part of the
Big Tent synchroblog. I think that one of the things I am noticing is that there continues to be one thing lacking in all of our posts, a center. It seems that each of us would say “Jesus” is the center. But, which Jesus? Alan and Deb Hirsch in their text Untamed do a great job of pointing out that our understanding of who Jesus is determines what we believe about God. It is here that I think we find either our center or the point at which the Big Tent falls.
For us to truly be a Big Tent we must find the good and the redemptive in each of the positions that are being voiced. There are too many voices that make it feel as though to enter the tent you must set aside your tradition and set aside your understanding of the faith. Yet, this not the way that the first Big Tent worked itself out. We must realize that we are blazing new ground. We are simply rehashing the same issues that have faced the church since the beginning: What do we make of the stranger? For the first century church this had everything to do with what to do with the Gentile convert.
The answer was: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28 ESV)“ Paul was simply admonished to “remember the poor”, which was the very thing he sought to do. The table was opened. There was freedom to approach God as male and female, Jew and Gentile, and so forth. Today we are still free to approach our God as fundamentalist, neo-reformed, reformed, orthodox, liberal, neo-liberal, emergent, etc… The question is will we embrace a consistent picture of Jesus?
I would suggest that this is the pen-ultimate question. Who is Jesus? Can we agree on an answer? Is it possible to listen to one another’s perspectives and find the baby in the bath water in each?
I appreciate the motto of the tradition that I belong to, “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.”
Of course this requires a definition of what is essential. The bigger the tent the larger the stakes required to secure that tent and keep it up. Here’s my minimal effort at a “Big Tent” list of essentials:
This my third post for the
Big Tent Synchroblog dealing with these questions: What are your hopes and dreams for the Church? More specifically, what does “big tent Christianity” mean to you? And what does it look like in your context?
I want to deal with the first question: What are your hopes and dreams for the Church? In my first post I dealt with a definition of the church ( group of people who communing together in the midst of being on mission with Jesus). So, here’s how I see that playing out in my hopes and dreams.
I dream about a church that is scattered all over a city, town, or suburb in small, intimate groups that are keenly aware of the needs, heart cry, and passion of their surroundings. These small gatherings would each have an embedded DNA of mission, compassion, and kingdom. These gatherings would be outward looking always seeking to broaden their definition of family by inviting the stranger into their midst. They would gather around a common table fellowshipping together and worshiping through prayer and the word.
These who are scattered would come together each week and celebrate all that God is doing in their midst. Stories would be shared and the DNA of mission and kingdom reinforced through the preaching of the authoritative Scriptures. The church would be diverse in as much as the communities which are represented in it are diverse.
I dream about there being a revolutionary effect because the mission grows the kingdom and the pursuit of the King is relentless. Care and concern for the local would drive a vision for the global. The creation would be cared for through a reconnection to local food sources that would require the local culture to be sustainable for its own sake.
The Church would grow in scope as it scatters further and further birthing new celebratory gatherings and so on and so on. The very nature of DNA requires multiplication and diversity. When it becomes static and loses its diversity then mutations and problems occur.
For the church to be the beautiful bride of Christ it necessarily must be scattered, gathered, and multiplying.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I am on a study leave this week and a big part of that is preparing for the year that is to come. I am enjoying the time to think and plan. The
Big Tent Synchroblog has been stimulating some of my thinking and has been a welcome distraction to punctuate my work chunks.
My initial response to the blogs is that there seems to be a couple of main issues surfacing in the conversation. What are these issues you ask? It’s the issue of human sexuality.
Chad Holtz, and
Rachel Held Evans are good examples.The other issue is that of what do we do with those who disagree with us.
David Adams,
Greg Bolt,
Julie Clawson are good representatives of this side of the coin.
As I think about these two sides of the same coin I begin to wonder if we are missing the key issues that are potentially at stake in this conversation. While we talk about enlarging our tent, I think we are missing the key issue, as
Scott Frederickson helpfully points out, taking our tables out of the tent.
I am growing more and more convinced that as we authentically engage in the lives of people we will change our understanding of the way we understand “who” can belong. People with real relationships with the homeless easily include them in the community. People with real relationships with homosexuals easily include them in the community. People with real relationships with heterosexually broken people easily include them in the community. The list could go on…
The issue that continues to rise to the forefront of my mind is this: Who we know determines who we love. The unknown creates fear. To broaden the “tent” we must broaden our relationships. As we broaden our relationships we will constantly have to return to the question of grace and what it means to embrace those who “live in a broken world with broken relationships and bad records”.
Check out the blogs and let me know what you think…
I hope that as the week continues we will see conversations move from our personal “hot button issues” to grand visions of a unified body of Jesus.
So, I am a day late to the
Big Tent Christiaity Synchroblog. Here is the theme that we will be discussing this week: What are your hopes and dreams for the Church? More specifically, what does “big tent Christianity” mean to you? And what does it look like in your context? Oddly enough I am in the midst of a study leave this week and one of the questions my counter part in ministry asked me to wrestle with was, “What are your hopes and dreams for the Church?” Brilliant!
What are your hopes and dreams for the church?I think that before I can answer that question I need to ask a more fundamental question. What is the church? There are so many definitions running around that it’s hard to keep up. It used to be (back in the 50s in America) that the “church” was simply those folks who showed up and sat in their pew on a Sunday morning. Now we have “communities” and “networks” and “friends” and “who knows what else”. So, I don’t think I can express my dreams for the church until I can have some working definition of what the “church” really is.
I want to follow most of those before me and say that the church is broken up into two large parts, the church visible and the church invisible or universal. I hold to a robust sovereignty of God and so I leave the latter to mystery, I am more concerned with the former. The definition that I want to posit for the “church” is
a group of people who communing together in the midst of being on mission with Jesus. So, let’s break that down.
“A group of people”: this is necessary because following Jesus does not call people to be alone on mission. He calls them to be a part of his body, family, and bride. I think you can get a good sense of this from this clip:
[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le13by2WM70&w=425&h=350])
The body of Christ ought be a collection of people of who speak with one voice because they are centered on one man and pursuing the same mission.
“Communing together”. Alan Hirsch calls this “Communitas”. Whatever you want to call it, I think that the church must go beyond community to communing. This is the active lived life of a group of people together. They are engaged with one another sharing the mission, life, and life of Jesus. They are practicing the sacraments together (communion and baptism). This is a group of people who worship around a common table and as they commune with Jesus through the Spirit they find themselves drawn to one another.
“ In the midst of being on mission with Jesus”. A group of people doing “community” does not the church make. They must be on mission with Jesus. There is no other mission that they are to be on. They are to be on Jesus’ mission. This means that they are glocally concerned with living revolutionary lives calling those around them into this mission. It is interesting that Jesus’ invitation was always to follow him. This following was at its core an invitation to join him in his mission.
So, that’s my definition. What do you think? Later, I will post some comments on the other blogs in the discussion. Tomorrow, I will write about my dream for the church.
[caption id=“attachment_983” align=“alignleft” width=“288” caption=“I love that saying!”]
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I have been conspicuously absent in writing recently. This is partly due to a technical glitch when the most recent Wordpress version was installed (which broke me of the writing habit), this is partly due to a season of busyness, and this is partly due to a new season of learning. I want to finish my posts on youth theology and will hopefully soon. However, I am wrestling through some things in my relationship with the Maker and as a result, silence.
Something is coming but I can’t put my finger on it. It’s a weird season. Bear with me and hopefully when clarity comes you will be there with me.
In Matthew 18:3 Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
The word for turn is straphēte. The idea here is “to experience an inward change, turn, change (BDAG)”. Jesus is not calling them to “repent”, in Matthew that idea is expressed by the word, metanoeō. However, he is calling them to change. They must “turn”. The disciples must experience an inward change. From the inside out they must become something different.
Consider where we are in the life and ministry and Jesus. We are near the end. Jesus has set his face to Jerusalem, he is going to be sacrificed. These disciples were a group of men who were about have their lives changed dramatically. They are concerned who is going to be the greatest in the kingdom and Jesus calls them to change.
They are still proud, arrogant, and haughty. They refuse to ask for help. The disciples believe that they know it all. There is not an answer they don’t know other than “who is the greatest”. They sounds like typical adolescents. These teenagers had become so caught up in themselves that Jesus called them to change.
I think that the issue becomes more clear when we look at verse 4, “Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” There is a juxtaposition between the disciples question of “greatness” over and against the “humility” of the child. To get there one has to have an inward change.
Turn.
Jesus simply calls them to turn. Turn to away from themselves to humility.
This is the beauty of Jesus’ call turn. It is never empty. It is always to something. To act in humility, to be humble is a state of heart and soul. Most children I know are humble. They ask for help. They ask “why”. They know that they don’t know. They are interested but rarely self-interested.
I think we must all face this call to “turn”. I know I do. How about you? In what ways do you need to turn?
“At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
“Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me,but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”
(Matthew 18:1–6 ESV)
In our churches today children and youth are the silent ones. They are dropped off in their wings of a church for two hours so Mom and Dad can “worship in peace”. The harried teachers are expected to form these young spiritually to make them into mature Christians. Why? I think it is because we do not have a comprehensive understanding of youth and children from a scriptural stand point.
Let’s consider this statement by Jesus (the “founder and perfecter of our faith”) from Matthew 18. This is one of those passages that should cause to stop and think about things for a moment. In the first century children were treated similarly to ours only without the cool cartoon characters and ping pong tables. They were largely considered an inconvenience until they could be productive adults in the synagogue and society.
Jesus says that one who has become like a child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. What does this mean? I think that we have a hard time understanding this because we push our kids to the fringes of our communities of worship. I love the fact that the Presbyterian tradition includes infant baptism because it drives home the reality that children are participatory members of the community of faith. While this is what we ought to be embracing, we do not. We are going to have a hard time knowing and understanding what it means to be a child in the kingdom when we do not worship with them.
A child asks questions, incessantly. A child laughs when things are funny. A child laughs when things are inappropriate. A child can not sit still. A child finds mystery, wonder, and awe in the smallest of things (just watch one looking at the dust particles in a ray of sunlight sometime). A child believes their dad when he tells them something. A child loves the outsider. A child trusts. A child has fun. A child dances to the beat. A child loves to read. A child loves.
Unfortunately these things about children annoy us. We find them disruptive. “A child is to be seen not heard.“
It gets worse, they get pimples and hormones. They get attitudes and they question everything. They seek for identity and authenticity. They no longer take simple answers to complex questions. They grow and change and develop. They look weird. They have awkward stages.
Unfortunately these things about growing children annoy us. We find them disruptive.
Jesus is the great subversive. He graciously embraces the fringes and broken. Those without identity he shows them who they are. So, the question is will you embrace the child?
Our next post will focus on one word: “turn”.
Whitney said, “I believe the children our future…” I think that song begins to run through the minds and hearts of people when they begin to hear people talk about children or youth in the church. They immediately think “future”. Oddly enough many of us ignore the second line, “Teach them well and let them lead the way.” What would happen if the children led the way?
I think that we might play more. I think that we might laugh more. I think that we might collapse at the end of each day in joyful exhaustion more often. I think that we might smile more.
It is interesting is it not that we as the Christian church have largely removed leadership from the hands of the young. Is it not also interesting that the great revivals in the history of the church have often been led by the young? Do we wonder why we have not seen a great revival in this generation? Could it be that our understanding of the role of children and youth has become anemic?
I am going to take a couple of posts to walk through the references in Matthew 18, 19 (and parallels) and Proverbs 22 to children with the goal of developing some type of “Theology of Youth”. What role do they play in the community of faith? What kind of leadership should we give to them? What does is it look like to embrace children and youth in the context of the church community?
[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KjpyHX7X-o&w=425&h=350])
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=FFFFFF&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=danielmroseco-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&asins=0849946018 Jesus Manifesto by
Leonard Sweet and
Frank Viola, published by Thomas Nelson. Jesus Manifesto brings Jesus to the front and center. Sweet and Viola seek to highlight Jesus’ sovereignty and supremacy. This is a great little text that is worth the read. I found it to be very devotional and it met its goal of bringing Jesus front and center. It is always good to be reminded of the centrality of Jesus to the life of the believer.
This not a book that wows you. There is nothing controversial or new. It is a book that you read and then you find yourself thinking about an illustration from it. It is a book you read and then find yourself mulling over some description of Jesus. It is a book you read and then find yourself quoting it to someone else in conversation.
The only thing that twinged me as a downside was from the introduction. The comment made there is, “So what is Christianity? It is Christ. Nothing more. Nothing less. (xxii)” I agree that Jesus is central to the Christian. However, to say that Jesus is the full sum of the Christian faith is not exactly accurate. I would suggest that this be edited to highlighting his centrality. This statement by Sweet and Viola I think pushes down toward the problematic view of “me and Jesus” that is predominant in our post-modern world.
Overall: grab the book. It’s always worth the time remind ourselves how incredibly great Jesus is.
It has been difficult to post recently as life and ministry have been very busy and margin continues to get swallowed up. However, writing is a necessary output for my own spiritual formation, so I am taking some steps to build this into my schedule. Thanks to all of you who have inquired as to the missing blog posts in your RSS feeds. It does my heart good to know that both of you are reading this blog.
Infant baptism has fallen by the wayside in much of evangelical Christianity. So, when you post about this topic you get some good conversation via tweets and different formats where some great questions are asked. I wanted to answer these objections and questions in a post.
I remember the day well. It was a Friday night, November 2001, the night before Michigan was to play the evil Ohio State Buckeyes. Ethan, our firstborn, was reclining in the stroller and I was chatting it up with other college missionaries. Then it slipped (well it did not actually slip, I was waiting for just right the time), we had baptized Ethan, AS AN INFANT! It was pretty funny when almost everyone within about a 30 foot radius (maybe I said it a little louder than I anticipated) stopped talking and stared at me with a dumbfounded look. I think it might have been a world record for chins on the ground at one time.
In the world of parachurch ministries the idea of infant is relatively foreign. It is akin to saying that you are going to sew a third arm to your baby. Why? I think it’s because the dispensational and baptist movement has become quite pervasive in many parts of American Christendom. Presbyterianism, Methodism, Lutheranism, and other American denominations that practiced the historic sacrament of infant baptism moved toward liberalism and removed themselves from the public life of the church. Their conservative counterparts are small and as a result lost influence in the general Christian world.
This has resulted in a loss of covenantal theology and the biblical doctrine of infant baptism. This is one of the great tragedies that the church has faced. This loss is tragic is because it means that there is a loss of vision for the emerging generations. They have simply become a missionary object as opposed to valued members of the community who need to be discipled and cared for.
Why did we baptise our kids? We baptized them because they are members of the community of faith. We baptized them because we believe that God is going to draw them to himself. We baptized them because we believe that this promise is visionary for their life. We baptized them because we believe that the people of God are part of our family and that they have a responsibility to be a part of these kids lives.
It’s been about two weeks since I last wrote. I have missed the discipline of writing and thinking but I simply have not had the margin to write. Tonight it is quiet and I have been thinking about baptism, covenant, and the blessing that God gives. To that I end I want to begin my series of posts on baptism with some discussion of covenant because I believe that it informs our understanding of baptism.
What is a covenant? This is a bad question. We are talking about covenant in a very specific sense and not in a general way. We are not talking about covenant between people and people or even god to god. No, we are talking about God covenanting with
his people. So, what does this divine covenant look like? It is in its most basic understanding a suzerain treaty. You can read a fantastic description
here.
What is unique about the divine covenant is that God’s covenant of grace is one way. He sets the requirements and meets the requirements in himself. In the covenant of works man was required to merit favor and ultimately failed. God was gracious and provided the Law to act as a guardian for his people (Galatians 3:24) until Christ came and fulfilled the conditions of the covenant of grace. He was the embodiment of the people of God and his faithfulness as our federal head is given to us.
So, there are two covenants. The covenant of grace and the covenant of works. Both are gracious in that they are implemented by God to provide a means for his people to have relationship with him. In Hebrews 7 and 8 we find that the people of God failed in their responsibility in the covenant of works but Christ was faithful in the covenant of grace.
Baptism then must be understood in light of this reality. A few of the questions that I want to explore in future posts are how does baptism function as a means of the covenant of grace? What are the effects of baptism? What is the role of baptism in the identity of formation fo the people of God?
One day not very long ago my son and I were sitting in the gymnasanctatorium at our church readying for worship to begin. That particular morning was a communion sunday and the table was front and center and covered. For a 6 or 7 year old boy anything covered with a sheet is instantly mysterious and requires investigation.
“Dad, what’s under that sheet?”
“Communion son.”
“What’s communion?”
“It’s when we celebrate Jesus dying on the cross and rising again.”
“Yeah, but what’s under the sheet?”
“Juice and crackers.”
“Really? Do I get some?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because the juice and crackers are symbols for Jesus’ death and resurrection and the only people who get to eat them are those who believe in Jesus.”
“I believe in Jesus.”
“You do?”
“I do.”
“Well, you have to meet with Pastor Doug and talk to him about the fact that you believe in Jesus and what that means.”
“I do?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t do that, I would be too scared.”
“Well, then you’re not ready for communion.”
“Hmph.”
And so began a conversation about Jesus that lasted a few months until Ethan was ready to proclaim his faith and take communion. It was a remarkable period of time. Communion is a means of grace. The very act of taking communion leads us to the place where we actually talk about what Jesus did. In our tradition we “fence” the table and encourage those who don’t know Christ to allow the elements to pass. This is purposeful. It opens the conversation.
Why use a tract alone when the table is set and ready?
I am often times amazed at the fact that when the early followers of Christ came together they always gathered around a table. This table was where they would eat and enjoy the presence of one another and Jesus. It is remarkable when you think about the difference that most of us find ourselves in when we gather with other followers. Too often the discussion turns to an us versus them situation where we are worshiping our proper understanding of theology as opposed to the risen Christ.
What I love about the mystery of the Lord’s table is that it shapes us and reminds us of our in-Christness. When we fellowship at this table it is for the one who claims Jesus as Lord. When we gather the walls melt between us. We are caught up in the mystery and beauty of grace. We are found out to be sinners who need a savior and we are found to be a part of a community of forgiven saints.
The table reminds us of our identity, of who we actually are. Consider the words that St. Paul teaches us in 1 Corinthians 11:23–26,
The first Sunday of every month is our community’s traditional time to celebrate the Lord’s Table. It probably looks like any other communion celebration, but it does not sound like any other I have been a part of. As a church leadership team we found that there were a growing number of people who could not participate in communion due to gluten allergies. One of our resourceful volunteers found gluten-free “communion wafers”.
I love these things. They crunch like it’s nobody’s business and it is BRILLIANT!
Why? Quite simply when we take the “bread” and eat you know you are doing it with everyone else. Our Gymnasanctatorium has painfully bad acoustics and so when 150 or so people go crunching into the gluten-free wafer it ignites a sound that you feel in your chest. You know that you are not alone. You know that you are with others and they are with you. It is an audible reminder that sharing the Lord’s Supper is something you do in community.
We live in a day where community is a buzzword as opposed to a reality. We have air conditioning, TV, and attached garages, all of which are designed to keep us apart from other people in the name of “comfort”. It is comfortable because when I, the chief of sinners, interact with other people I make mistakes and I say things that hurt them. Isolation protects me from this. It is comfortable.
The communion table is supposed to draw us out from isolation into communion with one another. It is a time for us to be caught up in the spiritual mystery and grace of the supper where we remember Jesus and what he has done for us. It is a time for us to celebrate together the beauty and magnitude of the grace we have in Jesus. It is to shape us and mold us and change our
identity and help us remember anew the reality of our being in-Christ together.
A gluten-free wafer — The sound of community and communion.
The early church was accused of being cannibalistic. They were thought to be such because they feasted on the body and blood of Jesus the Christ. This was an unthinkable ritual and act. It was seen as barbaric and it was a stumbling block to the world around them. The Eucharist split churches in the 1700s and was a cause in Jonathan Edwards being released from his position in Northampton.
Today communion is a mundane and humdrum ritual that nobody really notices. This is a tragedy.
The celebration of the Eucharist, the Lord’s Table, the Lord’s Supper, Communion is one of the most beautiful acts that we as Christians get to participate in. When we do we experience the presence of Christ and join with the great of cloud of witnesses in a spiritual act that bonds us as the body of Christ. How can this astounding and beautiful means of grace become something that is largely ignored?
My senior year at Central Michigan University as new church was planted in Mt. Pleasant, MI. This church was unlike any I had ever seen. It met in an airplane hangar. Yes, that’s right an airplane hangar. The seats were couches and plastic chairs. The room was dimly lit and cold in the winter. There was nothing routine about this church. It was determined that the celebration of the Eucharist would occur whenever it seemed right to “us and the Holy Spirit.”
The first time that Amy and I celebrated communion there we were amazed. I was moved to the core of my being and changed that evening. The bread was homemade without yeast and the juice was in a 64 oz containers next to a stack of 12 oz cups. Barry, the pastor, stood and read 1 Corinthians 11:23–26. Then he said (atleast this is how I remember it), “This was supper. It was a meal that was shared. Jesus is not stingy in his grace or his mercy. Come, take, eat to your fill and drink till your thirst is quenched. Seconds, thirds, fourths, whatever you need Jesus will provide. Come, taste and see that the Lord is good.” We partook and we were filled.
I was left in wonder and awe. This was a far cry from the thimble of juice and crumb of bread that I was used to. We celebrated together the beauty and wonder of the crucifixion and resurrection. We marveled in the grace of God. We were a community perfectly united in a feast of grace. The bread was warm and smelled wonderfully. The juice was cold and refreshing.
I was changed.
I was left in awe.
I got lost and found in the mystery and limitlessness of God’s goodness.
I feasted that night on the body and blood. That night I became a cannibal and was forever changed.
Are you a cannibal?
I am a sports guy. I love Sportscenter and follow the NFL, MLB, and NHL. I have always admired the way that the Pittsburgh Steelers have handled their business. I am becoming more and more impressed with the way that Roger Goodell the commissioner of the NFL is conducting his.
Unless you have been living under a rock you know that Ben Roethlisberger has been suspended by the NFL under its player conduct policy. Many of the sports talking heads are decrying this as “legislating morality”. I think that there is a different issue here though. This is the first time that the NFL has suspended someone who has not been brought up on criminal charges. The
letter that Goodell sent was direct and clear. The behavior of this player falls outside the standards that the NFL desires to hold its players too.
I think that what we have in this instance is not a “legislation of morality”. It is simply a private company stating that it believes working for it is a privilege and that there is an expectation of a certain standard of behavior. Accountability is something that has been largely in our society at large. We are offended by the concept because it assumes that there is a right way and a wrong way to conduct oneself. This then requires that there is a standard or an authority by which we will be judged. To be judged is immoral.
The hypocrisy of the talking heads is amazing. When a religious leader is found to be immoral the culture screams for punishment. When an athlete is found to immoral the culture screams for forgiveness. It seems that what we need is integrity in our judgment of public figures.
Roger Goodell is doing things right. It is an honor to play a boys game for millions of dollars. Those who work for the NFL should be held to a higher standard and that standard is rightly determined by the league.
What about the church? Are we doing things right? What can we learn from Goodell and the NFL? I think that we can learn much if we would just open our eyes. Hit me up in the comments with thoughts about what the church can learn, if anything.
Over the next handful of days I want to tease out some thoughts on the sacraments. In the Protestant tradition we have two sacraments: baptism and the eucharist. I think that these two means of grace are essential for the church today and that they have been largely ignored or abused. The sacraments do not bring salvation. They are however means of grace.
This means quite simply that we experience something beautiful, authentic, and Christ-centered in their celebration. In an age where we talk about “
multi-sensory” preaching and object lessons it is as if we have forgotten the beauty and raw power that is to be found in these ancient acts that tie us to “
the great cloud of witnesses”.
A couple of years ago I wrote a few posts on these issues. One of them was an
argument for paedobaptism and I would encourage you check it out. I also wrote a
post on communion that lays out some initial thoughts and in the comments a friend suggested that I dig deeper. I hope these next days my metaphorical shovel will reach a new depth.
“Just because something is technically legal doesn’t mean that it’s spiritually appropriate. If I went around doing whatever I thought I could get by with, I’d be a slave to my whims.” — Eugene Peterson
The refrain, “It’s my right!” rings our everywhere today in our culture. Whether it’s in demand of entitlements or freedom from regulation. Regardless, our “rights” are something that we constantly demand. The quote from Peterson is actually 1 Corinthians 6:12 from the Message. This verse will be the final one that we look in our conversation about freedom and the law. It is used almost always to support the freedom of a person and their use of freedom. Based on Peterson’s rendering we are left scratching our heads as to “why?”
Well, consider the traditional translation from the ESV, “”All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be enslaved by anything.“
So, when we read this often we think, “Yes, I can do anything!” This leads us to a place of license. However, Peterson’s rendering provides us with the correct sense. There are things that we should not do because they harm us spiritually. 1 Corinthians 6–9 is a fascinating section of Scripture where Paul lays out many issues regarding freedom. To work through all of it would be too lengthy. So here are a couple of bullet points:
Our journey through freedom and the law is coming to a close, for now. I think this is the second to last post on the issue before we turn our attention to Baptism and Communion. The passage that I am interested in today is Romans 14. This is where we find the famous, “Therefore, let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother. (Romans 14:13).
This is a section that I think has been done great harm and violence in Christian circles because it is so often read through a grid of legalism. Where do we begin? First, the core issues that Paul raises here are those of food laws. It seems that what we had in Rome was a church comprised of a variety of different people as one would expect in a cosmopolitan city. This caused great tension within the community as they bumped into one another’s understandings of how they were to interact with God and what it meant to live all of life in a way that brings honor to God.
I think that some of my favorite moments in the Bible are when the apostle Paul gets worked up. As you read you can almost feel the juices flowing inside Paul. I imagine his forehead sweating and his face turning red. I can see him pacing and flailing his arms as if he would be mute without them. Then the climactic moment comes and his hands go to the forehead, veins popping, eyes clenched, and BOOM, a statement and a torrent of questions exploding!
This is the image I get as I read
Romans 5 and 6.
What concerns us today is Romans 6:15–23 (The Message):
We had been walking for a week straight. The pace was incredible. We did not even feel like they had homes any more because we were always on the move. This is the way it always was. There was a constant pressure to move on to the next town and to continue proclaiming the “good news”. Saturday was always the hardest day. Usually there was no way to prepare and have extra food on hand so Saturday was a hungry day. Today, was especially tough though. Our travels took us through a grain field! It was excruciating. But, to our astonishment the Teacher grabbed the head of a grain rubbed it in his hands and ate the kernel. We looked at one another, confused, it was the Sabbath wasn’t it? But, the Teacher picked and ate. We did too.
Then “they” showed up. The religious, the high and mighty Pharisees. They were always around. They said, “Your disciples are breaking the Sabbath rules!”
The Teacher’s response was amazing, “Really? Didn’t you ever read what David and his companions did when they were hungry, how they entered the sanctuary and ate fresh bread off the altar, bread that no one but priests were allowed to eat? And didn’t you ever read in God’s Law that priests carrying out their Temple duties break Sabbath rules all the time and it’s not held against them? There is far more at stake here than religion. If you had any idea what this Scripture meant — ‘I prefer a flexible heart to an inflexible ritual’ — you wouldn’t be nitpicking like this. The Son of Man is no lackey to the Sabbath; he’s in charge.”
Then we went into the Synagogue for worship. When we got there “they” thought they had the Teacher trapped because there was a crippled man there. “They” asked, “Is it legal to heal on the Sabbath?”
The Teacher got them again, “Is there a person here who, finding one of your lambs fallen into a ravine, wouldn’t, even though it was a Sabbath, pull it out? Surely kindness to people is as legal as kindness to animals!” Then he said to the man, “Hold out your hand.” He held it out and it was healed. “They” walked out furious, sputtering about how they were going to ruin Jesus.
(Based on
Matthew 12:1–14, with a little help from the Message)
–
This is an amazing story. It’s really a central text for our question about freedom and law. The law said, “Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Work six days and do everything you need to do. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to God, your God. Don’t do any work — not you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your servant, nor your maid, nor your animals, not even the foreign guest visiting in your town. For in six days Godmade Heaven, Earth, and sea, and everything in them; he rested on the seventh day. Therefore God blessed the Sabbath day; he set it apart as a holy day.”
The Pharisees were somewhat right in their questioning of Jesus and the disciples. In their minds they really were breaking the sabbath commandment. But Jesus response flips their understanding of the commandment on its head, “the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath”. Brilliant! He even says that the disciples in this case are guiltless! He goes so far as to point out that they missed the point of the command when he quotes
Hosea 6:6. In Hosea God has his people in the dock and calling them to account. The Pharisees would have felt the sting. Jesus was calling them out as heartless and completely disconnected from God himself.
In their quest to be faithful to God the Pharisees had missed God’s heart and his desire for them to worship. I think we are guilty of this. What are the rules that you have put in place to be faithful to God?
Maybe some of these ring true:
Tonight I heard Dr. Mark Noll say, “I think we should largely ignore talking heads on TV unless they are discussing a college basketball tournament.” Wise words. However, twice now I have had conversations relating to a previous
post that I wrote on Glenn Beck’s discussion of social justice. Here is a more nuanced response to the issues including a little perspective on Rev. Jim Wallis too. I hope you find it helpful. (Also, I was under the weather today and was unable to write the next post for our discussion of freedom and the law.)
To hopefully bring some clarity to my position I want give disclosure of my political presuppositions:
We spent some time looking at Jesus’ discussion about fulfilling the law. Now, I want to look at another of the stories that bring to the forefront the issue of freedom and the law. This one is found in Matthew 8:5–13:
“When he entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to him, appealing to him, “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.” And he said to him, “I will come and heal him.”But the centurion replied, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith.I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven,while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”And to the centurion Jesus said, “Go; let it be done for you as you have believed.” And the servant was healed at that very moment.”
You might be asking “what does this have to do with freedom and the law?” I think that has everything to do with freedom and the law. A Roman Centurion, the very image of imperial power comes to Jesus, a backwoods, Jewish rabbi and asks him to heal his servant. The word “appealing” is παρακαλῶν and it really is pointing to an “urgent exhortation”. Eugene Peterson renders it, “came up in a panic”. I think that this is a great picture. How humiliating it would have been. Then this Centurion, this image of Rome’s great power and might did the unthinkable, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof.” Truly, a remarkable image for those standing around watching. Rome was yielding authority to a Jewish rabbi. Incredible!
Jesus’ comment is even more amazing! He uses this as an opportunity to teach that the Kingdom is open to people such as this: tools of the Emperor’s oppressive regime will be invited to table fellowship with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! This is remarkable! The violent, oppressive Gentiles are invited to the table? The sons of the kingdom are thrown into outer darkness? How can this be?
Luke’s account gives us a bit more insight into the matter:
We have evaluated the great verse on freedom, Galatians 5:1 and now I want to go back. I want to look a the first in-breaking of freedom in the gospel of Matthew. We find it in Matthew 5:17–20:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:17–20 ESV)
This passage is insightful for us to begin getting a sense of Jesus’s thoughts on the law and of freedom. This passage from Matthew is unique, it is not found in the other synoptics or John (Luke 16:14–17 might be considered parallel but is so different that this is unlikely). However, there is a very clear allusion to this passage in Romans 10:4, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” Paul’s epistle to the Romans came prior to Matthew’s writing of the gospel. Matthew was also very likely to be from Anitoch (which was Paul’s sending community). I think that we should be mindful of the influence of Paul and Matthew and Matthew on Paul. This reality will help us to determine in greater depth what is going on here in the narrative.
This passage is in the heart of the “Sermon on the Mount” and Jesus is speaking to the masses. Verse 17 is critical as it sets up the rest of the teaching, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” Why does Jesus say this? It is because he is setting the stage for what will follow where he says, “You have heard it said…But I tell you…” Jesus is making clear that he is in no way setting aside the Older Testament. He is taking it to the next level.
There are some disconcerting comments made in this passage. First, anyone who relaxes the law will be called least in the kingdom and to enter the kingdom of heaven you have to have greater righteousness than that of the Pharisees. This is an incredible statement! The Pharisees were amazingly righteous men. They had laws upon laws to make sure that they never broke a single law. The Pharisees fasted, prayed, and gave. They knew the Scriptures better than anyone (well except for Jesus, since he inspired them and all that! This is a hard teaching.
But, we have the rest of the story. Two key words that I want to point out: πληρῶσαι and γένηται these are the terms that we translate as “fulfill” and “accomplished”. These are key for us who have the rest of the story. πληρῶσαι is the Aorist Active Infintive. The aspect of the Aorist is a completed work. Jesus is saying that he will complete the fulfilling of the law and prophets. How can he do this? He can do this living a perfect life. He goes on to say that nothing will pass away from the Law until all is accomplished. All what? All the Law. Jesus did this. In himself he did all the law, he fulfilled it. In a singular moment he brought about the final and perfect fulfillment of the Law.
I hope the logic here is becoming clear. The righteousness that he talking about, the greater righteousness is his own. There is no hope of living the Law with perfection. One cannot do it apart from divine aid. The divine one, the God-man himself is the only one who can bring about this fulfillment. Therefore, as we trust in his faithful fulfillment we find our righteousness. Remember Romans 10:4, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”
The dawn is breaking. The Law and the Prophets are fulfilled in Christ. We move from here to begin to see this reality played out on the stage of life. But, that’s for the next post.
Yesterday we began exploring Galatians 5:1, “For freedom Christ has set us free, stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” We explored the historical and literary context a bit. Today, I want to draw some conclusions regarding freedom. The key word in the verse is “freedom”. It is ἐλευθερίᾳ in the Greek text in the dative. ἐλευθερία is a word that that at its heart means liberty in the context of becoming free from slavery. Why is it in the dative? What is the purpose of this case here? This is the dative of interest which is a subset of the indirect object (Wallace, 143). This means that Christ set the Galatians free “for the benefit” of freedom.
Think about this for a moment. Christ set them free. Why? He set them free so that they would experience freedom. This means that they were, at some point, not free. What were they not free from? To what were they enslaved? Remember Paul is discussing in Galatians what it means to be “in Christ”. How can someone know they are in the community as opposed to be outside of the community. The Galatian converts were confused and needed direction. They turned to the other community of “the Book” and were informed that they needed to follow certain rituals. These rituals concerned table fellowship, festivals, and circumcision. These boundary markers, that have been thoroughly discussed by Wright, Dunn, Schreiner, and others, are the very things that are causing Paul such consternation.
The Galatians were becoming enslaved to boundaries of in/out that were obliterated in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In chapters three and four Paul laid out the differentiation between the law and the promise. Now he brings them to the point of action where they must realize that these laws are not necessary for them to interact with God. They do not need to become Jewish to be in Christ. Christ has set loose the boundaries of who is in and who is out. There is now freedom to live as they are in Christ.
Freedom here, therefore, is a liberation from a law which mandated one identify oneself by doing certain activities. The community of the people is open and free, the boundary markers have been shifted (baptism and communion, another series of posts coming soon). The outworking of being “justified” is inclusion or exclusion from the community of God. One cannot be “in the camp” if they are not justified. Justification prior to Christ came through the law, the following of mandated requirements to show that one was in the community of faith. Christ’s coming freed humanity from this stricture because he himself fulfilled these requirements and provides a means by his crucifixion and resurrection to enter into the community by faith alone, trusting in his finished work.
Paul anticipates the critics, “Freedom leads to license!” Not so, says Paul. This freeing from the old boundaries frees us “through love to serve one another. (5:13b)” Why? The freedom from boundary markers that separate one people from another allows us to love all those that come across our paths. We no longer have to concern ourselves with the issues that drove Jesus’s parable of the good Samaritan.
Summary idea: Freedom in Galatians 5:1 is the freedom for anyone to be in God’s community and for us to relate to God as who we are and to serve anyone regardless of who they are.
Whenever I think about freedom, I think about William Wallace. Is it because I have Scottish blood running through my veins? Maybe. Is it because of Braveheart (one of the greatest ‘guy’ movies ever)? Maybe. I like to think it is because the story of Scottish liberation from the tyranny of the English is powerful, beautiful, and thrilling. I like to think it is because the imagery of a small revolutionary movement, spear-headed by a single passionate leader is what I long to see happen in the church. I hope it’s also because freedom is something that is full of beauty, hope, and trust.
Galatians 5:1 says, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” This little sentence has been the cause of a great many problems even though it was meant to be the solution of a great many problems. You know the old saying, “Give them and inch and they take a mile”? This is how many feel about Galatians 5:1. Why did Paul give them an inch? Why did he not call the Galatians to follow the ten commandments? I think that this is a wonderful starting point in our journey about law and grace.
The problem with beginning at Galatians 5:1 is that it is near the end of the letter to the Galatians. To get a good sense of what is happening we must understand the context from which this verse comes, both historically and literarily.
Where do we begin? Let’s begin with the situation to which Paul was writing. There was a significant Jewish minority in the region of Galatia, stemming from the fact that approximately 2,000 Jewish families were forced to relocate to the region in the second century BC. As the Galatian converts, whether Jew or Gentile, were coming into contact with the large Jewish minority they were facing questions that needed answers. The key question being in reference to what it meant for a person to be included in the community of faith.
This historical setting is critical to coming to an understanding of what is happening in Galatians 5:1. The community of faith wanted answers. These answers were not coming from the reality of the crucified messiah but from a Jewish tradition that did not always line up with grace. The general answer that this little group of Galatian converts were receiving was that to be in the community of faith you are to do certain things and not do certains things. This was a law that brought guilt, shame, and dishonor to most that sought to uphold it.
The literary context of 5:1 is also important. In Galatians 4 Paul has illustrated the difference of being under the law and under grace by comparing Hagar and Sarah. Following his brief discussion on freedom he moves on to look at the practical outworking of being a Christ follower in the second half of chapter 5 and chapter 6.
This issue of freedom is important because Paul is juxtaposing it against living under the law and equates is to living under grace. Therefore, we must grapple with what Paul is saying in 5:1 and come to some conclusions. We will pick this up tomorrow, so that the posts don’t get too long.
Now that we have finished our travels through Brian McLaren’s newest book I have been pondering what’s next. For a while now I have been chewing on the dual topic of freedom and law. What does Christian freedom mean? What is the role of the law this side of the cross? How does this affect our interaction with culture, religions, and one another? How do we know if we go beyond freedom and move into active disobedience? I am hoping that we can bring some clarity to some of these issues and also find some application for them over the next few days.
As we conclude the discussion on freedom and the law, we will then begin to explore the sacraments. I wrote a couple posts about this topic a couple of years ago but my thinking has developed a bit more. I am hopeful that we can engage in a dialogue surrounding baptism and communion that will help us to think about these two means of grace can help us engage with the world around us.
I am looking forward to the adventure. I hope that you will join me and that we can have some healthy conversations along the way. It’s much more fun when we do!
I saw this today and that it would be great to link these four posts for you. Emergent Village did an interview with Brian McLaren. So, if you are not reading his book you can at least hear him talk in his own words. I thought it was a good interview and will help give you more insight into his positions. While many of my own issues are not dealt with, he gives you more to think about.
Melvin Bray and Brian McLaren — Pt. 1Melvin Bray and Brian McLaren — Pt. 2Melvin Bray and Brian McLaren — Pt. 3Melvin Bray and Brian McLaren — Pt. 4This is the tenth and final post interacting with
Brian McLaren’s
A New Kind of Christianity. Please remember that I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.
The What-Do-We-Do-Now Question: How can we translate our quest into action?The final question that McLaren presents us with is really not a question that the Church is asking but is the question that the movement he is calling for needs to ask. This full out application, how do we move forward in light of the answers given to the previous nine questions? To answer this question McLaren turns to historians to help frame his answer. Specifically he calls on the macro-historian to help us understand where we are in the human quest. He labels each movement of humanity with a color of the rainbow.
This is the ninth post interacting with
Brian McLaren’s
A New Kind of Christianity. Please remember that I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.
The Pluralism Question: How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?McLaren begins his chapter on pluralism by setting the stage with this statement:
This is the eighth post interacting with
Brian McLaren’s
A New Kind of Christianity. Please remember that I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.
The Future Question: Can we find a better way of viewing the future?McLaren now sets to go to work on dispensational eschatology in his third question regarding the application of a new kind of Christianity. He paints a humorous and relatively accurate picture of the dispensational premillenial understanding of eschatology. McLaren sees in this understanding of the eschaton the inherent willingness to destruction and war because Jesus is coming back and will be setting the world right through massive bloodletting in the war of the apocalypse.
If this is the old way of understanding the future, then what is the right way? We are to understand the eschaton not from a perspective of a “fixed end point toward which we move, but rather a widening space opening into an infinitely expanding goodness. (195)” We are to reject the “soul/sort” universe where people are eternally sorted into eternal bins marked “redeemed” or “damned”.
No, the future is un-doomed (195). Jesus, by inaugurating his peaceable kingdom brings resurrection, liberation, reconciliation, and salvation. Judgment is the forgetting or destruction of things which are deemed unworthy and the good things of a person’s life will be saved, remembered, brought back for a new beginning.
McLaren argues for what he calls a “participatory eschatology” where we participate in God’s work and we anticipate it’s ultimate success (20o-201).
ReflectionAnytime that the predominant dispensational premillenialist view of the eschaton is brought into question I am grateful. This understanding of Christ’s return is damaging and does violence to the text. It indeed brings about the concerns that McLaren highlights. Much of what is said in answering this question is to be commended.
I do find that there are two key problems that need to be highlighted (McLaren also does a poor job of handling the term, “parousia” but responding to that would make this post too long!). First, the issue of judgment from McLaren’s perspective is problematic in that it does not take into account the text. It is not that someone foisted the idea of “soul-sort” onto the text. Jesus describes the time when when he will sort the sheep from the goats. This is not simply a “forgetting” of the things that Jesus did not appreciate. This is a casting out from his presence. McLaren simply goes too far and is wrong.
The second problem is greater than the first. The second problem is that there is no sense of an actual end a “telos” if you will. The eschatology that McLaren proposes does not include an ending of time where we see a real redemption of all things. We do not see any understanding or description of the life to come. What we do have is a works based, faithless, evolutionary understanding of Christian religiosity.
I would encourage McLaren to spend some time reading and understanding fully amillenialism. This perspective handles his concerns and remains true to the biblical text.
This is the seventh post interacting with
Brian McLaren’s
A New Kind of Christianity. Please remember that I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.
The Sex Question: Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?McLaren begins this second question of application in a way that plays to our prejudices (it’s a fantastic bit of writing!). He paints the picture of what many Christians would consider to be the “homosexual movement”. However, he is really painting a picture of what he calls “fundasexuality” which is centered on “heterophobia” or the fear of the different. He says that this is packaged in many forms, “Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or even atheist. (174–175)” McLaren goes on to argue that sociology tells us that “groups can exist without a god, but no group can exist without a devil (175).” Who is the devil for the fundasexualist? Gays, lesbians, bisexual, and trans-gendered people.
The argument against “fundasexualism” is built on the story of Ethiopian eunuch from Acts 8. I think I rightly summarize the argument this way:
This is the sixth post interacting with
Brian McLaren’s
A New Kind of Christianity. Please remember that I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.
The Church Question: What do we do about the church?This is the first of five questions on how McLaren sees his vision of
A New Kind of Christianity working itself out practically in the real world. McLaren paints a sad and realistic picture of the church. He says that owe are “divided, immature, confused about our purpose and identity, in danger of fragmenting our way into nonexistence, all at once bending over backwards and straddling fences, stiff of neck and soft of spine, and otherwise twisted and contorted in compromise. We have financial problems, sexual controversies, pride problems, schism threats, excesses in some forms of spirituality and deficits in others, and all manner of authority issues (165–166).” It is not a rosy outlook. McLaren reminds us that these were the same issues that the Corinthians faced and so he sets out to show how Paul dealt with these issues in 1 Corinthians.
Paul’s perspective, according to McLaren, can be summarized this way, ”…the church most truly is: it is a space in which the Spirit works to form Christlike people, and it is the space in which human beings, formed in Christlike love, cooperate with the Spirit and one another to express that love in word and deed, art and action. (171)“
We are to become a people who take action by “listening, dialogue, appreciate inquiry, understanding, preemptive peacemaking, reconciliation, nonviolence, prophetic confrontation, advocacy, generosity, and personal and social transformation (171).” This is the mission of the church.
ReflectionsI think that the picture that is painted of the church here is beautiful, powerful, and engaging. I think that McLaren has hit on something that we need to embrace again. If the Church looked like this then we would see a renewed engagement with the world that is far from Christ. We would see movements that seek to transform culture and build bridges to the gospel.
Nevertheless, there is something missing. I found myself getting excited about the picture that he was painting as it is very similar to the dream and picture I have of the Church. It is challenging. It calls the Church to a higher standard. However, in his exposition of 1 Corinthians there was again the absence of the discussion of the cross and the resurrection. McLaren handled the issues of knowledge, love, and power with insight but again excluded the cross.
Again, I must beg for more. I am concerned that McLaren “The Pendulum Swinger” (as a friend calls him) has removed the pendulum.
This is the fifth post interacting with
Brian McLaren’s
A New Kind of Christianity. Please remember that I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.
The Gospel Question: What is the GospelThe question of the gospel is critical. It is critical because in his letter to the
Galatians, Paul says it is. McLaren specifically sets out to refute the following line of reasoning:
This is the fourth post interacting with
Brian McLaren’s
A New Kind of Christianity. Please remember that I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.
The Jesus Question: Who is Jesus and why is he important?In this the fourth question, the Jesus question, McLaren seeks to find an authentic representation of who Jesus is in the Scriptures. The issue is particularly stated:
This is the third post interacting with
Brian McLaren’s
A New Kind of Christianity. Please remember that I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.
The God question: Is God violent? God is a tribalistic, violent, cosmic child abuser. Do you believe that? This is the question that McLaren undertakes in the third part of
A New Kind of Christianity. He says that as you read the Bible we bump into God doing or at least sanctioning genocide and violence. This seems to contradict the picture that we find in the life and person of Jesus. This leads to the natural question, “how can this be?”
Beginning with this question, McLaren, begins to apply to theological questions his understanding of the overarching storyline of the Bible and his understanding of authority (how the Bible should be read). In theological terms (and here’s your ten cent word for the day) we see his prolegomena being applied. This is where the rubber meets the road (add another cliche of your choice here). We do not have two perspectives fleshed out in this section of the text, what we have is an argument that is developed for an evolutionary perspective on the revelation of God.
McLaren uses a math text book as his analogy and it makes sense to quote it at length here.
Today I have a little procedure to deal with some scar tissue in my esophagus. It is no big deal. Last summer though our family dealt with a big deal medically. I won’t be writing a new post today but I thought that this was a timely one to re-post (it just so happens that the first Tigers telecast of the season is today). This post is from May 29, 2009.
A week ago yesterday my bride received a phone call. It was one of those calls that you dread. Her dad, Dennis, was in the hospital due to a stroke. It was “minor” but for a man like Dennis and for a family like ours it is major. Dennis is an athlete (at times becoming a scratch golfer!). Dennis is the life of the party. Dennis is the picture of the entrepreneurial spirit. Dennis is the kind of man that other men want to be. This is seen in the respect that his four son-in-laws have for him and the tender love that he bestows on his four daughters.
Amy left Detroit early last Thursday morning and drove (I am sure more quickly than she cares to admit) directly to the hospital room in Evansville, IN where Dennis was beginning his recovery.
But wait, that’s not the whole backstory.
The beloved St. Louis Cardinals were about to finish their three game homestand against the hated Chicago Cubs. The Cards had won the first two games of the series and were in position to sweep and return to first place in the division. In business like fashion they dispatched the Cubs and welcomed to town their cross state rivals, the Royals for a weekend set.
Every single day there was baseball. Every single day there was time spent in a hospital room. Every single daay there was a conversation over lunch or dinner that took place between Amy and Dennis about the Cards.
You see baseball was the beginning of healing. It was normalcy brought into an abnormal situation. It was the pastoral balm that allowed father and daughter to sit and talk and be. Baseball. Not doctors. Not a golden tongued preacher. Not a good book. Baseball. It was the context. The rhythm of life that never stops. It’s six on, one off created rhythm that touches us deep.
Some say the season is too long. Some say the games are too long. Some say it’s boring. Some say it’s day in and day out grind take away from it.
I could not disagree more. It is redemptive. It is ongoing. It is always with you. It provides passion, joy, pain, sorrow, elation. Most of all, it provides time. Time for a father and daughter to be together. Time for them to get lost together and forget that they are in a hospital room. Time for them to be transported to that place they both love. That place where the buzz of the crowd, the warmth of the sun, and smell of the hot dog fill you.
Baseball.
Redemption.
A Hospital Room.
Beautiful.
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This is the second post interacting with Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. Please remember that I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.
The Authority Question: How should the Bible be understood?
As with the narrative question, McLaren, sets up two opposing views of how to understand the Bible. The first is what he calls the “Constitutional View (78).” He sees this view as the cause for three critical problems he highlights regarding our use and understanding of the Bible:
This is the first of ten posts on
Brian McLaren’s,
“A New Kind of Christianity”. As we begin this little quest of ours I want you to know that I am not commenting on the introductory chapters and just diving into the “red meat”, so to speak. Also, I cannot reproduce the book in these posts. I will do my best to summarize without being overly simplistic or reductionistic. Each post will be two parts. The first will be a summary of McLaren’s discussion and the second will be my reflections.
Without further ado…
OK, so before I get into A New Kind of Christianity, I had to write about this. Yesterday I ran across this
story (this is a summary and includes some audio) about
Glenn Beck thanks to Scot McKnight at
Jesus Creed. In a nutshell he is arguing that churches which practice “social” or “economic” justice are covers for communism and nazism. I know, I could not believe it either. I am hoping that there is more to this. I have only the little clip on the link above. I want to believe the best in Mr. Beck, however, it is a bit disheartening when people like him choose to set aside the Bible for their political gains.
Jesus cared deeply for the poor, the dispossessed, and the broken. The scriptures are very clear about the role of justice and how it so closely connects to the heart of God. Let us look at but one verse, Micah 6:8:
“He has told you, O man, what is good; what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”Simple question, “what does God require of us”? Answer: DO JUSTICE. Friends, the heart of God is just and he is seeking to bring about justice. This is why Jesus himself had to die on the cross, so that justice could be done. Read the Psalms and you will find that justice is a key theme. Read the gospels and you will find that justice is a key theme. Justice is a core principle in the economy of God.
We tack on terms like “social” or “economic” and then try to run away from our responsibility. No. Justice is required of us. Finally, I would recommend reading Leviticus 25 and then tell me that God does not care about justice. Justice is not a cover for communism or nazism. Justice is the response of a grateful people who have been transformed by a resurrected savior.
I have been reading
Brian McLaren’s newest book,
A New Kind of Christianity. It has totally engaged me. My mind is wrestling through the challenges that he has laid out. I am about half way through the text and I am very frustrated that he end-noted instead of foot-noted, I have a callous now from marking my place at the end-notes (OK not really, but you get my point). I am going to write ten more posts on the book and in each one I am going to interact with the question that McLaren proposes.
Here’s your chance to look into the future:
Holograph (left), Tony Morgan (right)
Is the title a little extreme? Probably. But, that’s the point. Yesterday Tony Morgan sported some new technology on his website. It’s the same kind of technology that we saw on CNN during the presidential coverage, that’s right, holograms. Tony believes that this technology will be coming down in price such that it will become a regular in churches in the next year.
I think that this is a sad commentary on the state of discipleship in the church today. We already have pastors of “multi-site” churches preaching via video screen because they are unwilling or incapable of training others up. This takes it to the next level. I can see the sales pitch coming now, “Imagine having Rob Bell or John Piper preaching at your church EVERY Sunday for the low, low price of…”
I am an early adopter of technology. I am also a believer in the necessary availability of the preacher to connect with his people. One of my mentors said, “The most important part of the sermon is the slow walk after the service out of the sanctuary.” Why? It is because in those few moments you are able to engage with the people God has entrusted you with. You are able to field questions, talk more deeply, or just hear an encouraging word. Let’s see a holograph do that!
It seems to me with this technology, as with many others, the question is not “can we” but “should we.” What say you? Should you replace your preached with a holograph?
When I opened up my RSS reader yesterday and saw
Out of Ur’s article on Pastor Mark Driscoll’s
comments on Avatar, I was intrigued. I clicked. I watched. I was amazed. I was sitting with my wife and my jaw dropped and she began wondering if I had lock jaw on the off chance that I did not get my tetanus updates. The reality is that I was surprised by comments like this coming from a person who holds tightly to a Reformed perspective of doctrine (which I am coming to learn does not equate to a Reformed worldview, I am so naïve!)
First, let me say a few things to set the stage for my concerns.
Have you ever felt as though what you say does not matter? I have this experience often. Many nights I come home and flop on the couch and wonder why I ever speak. It is as if nobody is listening. Then I read
The Tipping Point by
Malcolm Gladwell and the “Law of Stickiness”that he has identified. Gladwell shares the story of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues and how both shows were developed in such a way that their messages would stick. I think that this might be my problem. I do not often think about how to make my message sticky.
Gladwell’s “Law of the Few” says you need the right people. The “Law of Stickiness” says you need the right message. Gladwell reasonably states that if Paul Revere were telling people about a sale at his silver shop the Massachusetts countryside would not have been mobilized, there was something sticky about “THE REDCOATS ARE COMING!”
I think that this is critical for the church today. We lament that people are leaving the church. We lament the shrinking number of people trusting Christ. We decry the youth for checking out by the time they hit Middle School. Our researchers point to all kinds of reasons for these realities from the postmodern shift to divorce rates. It is not very often that we evaluate our message.
Somehow we have turned the stickiest message in history into a sheet of ice.The gospel is sticky. The Apostle Paul puts it this way, “Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor 1:22–24)” The message that has been entrusted to us is one that causes a reaction, a response. Unfortunately we have lost our communicative creativity and it has lost its stick.
The question we must ask ourselves as followers of Jesus is how do we get our “sticky” back? I think that we get our sticky back the same way that Jesus and Paul did. They spoke the language of the people. Jesus told short stories that got inside people’s heads. Paul understood the people he spoke to and bridged the gospel to their contexts. They used the
right words.
What are the
right words for us today? What is the language that the 21st century citizen of the United States speaks? I think that those around me speak in the language fo guilt ridden narcissism. The metaphors exist in film and popular music. This is the context we are speaking into.
In the midst of this how do we make our message stick? I think that the message will stick if we can become creative in our communication to create parables based in the metaphors of this generation’s context. We must not give over the metaphors and continue to speak a slippery message.
Jesus message is subversive. It cuts to the quick. It is by nature sticky. We have tamed it, we have set aside our imaginations, and as a result we have made it slick. I pray for a return to creativity, a return to cultural engagement, and a return to subversive preaching of the sticky gospel.
I have recently finished reading
Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. I was very impressed with the book and it has given me much to think about. Gladwell discusses epidemics and relates epidemiology to social movements. I am going to post a few of my reflections and I how think the ideas in the text relate to the local church because as we consider how to transform the world around us we need to be aware of these truths.
The first concept is “The Law of the Few” (30–88). The Law of the Few simply means that it does not take a large number of people to tip an epidemic. What you need to create a radical transformation is the right person. There are three kinds of people that can create a tipping point (in church language: the moment a ministry becomes a movement). The first kind of person is a “Connector”. A Connector is someone who moves in and out of many different social groups. Not only this they are able to connect the people in those groups to one another. There was a student at Illinois State University named Brad who was in my Bible study for a couple of years. Brad knew everyone. He did not just know names but he knew something about everybody. Almost every week Brad would talk about entering into a new realm of friends. It was incredible!
When a Connector catches a passion for something she is able to spread it fast into many different communities. We must identify the Connectors in our midst so that we can equip them to take the gospel message into their sphere of influence. When this happens a movement begins. People from many different backgrounds begin to interact and catch a similar passion and the movement grows.
The second kind of person is a “Maven”. Maven’s are the kind of people who know everything and they genuinely like to help you. A Maven is someone that people trust and turn to for advice. These are the people who correct Consumer Reports. When a Maven speaks you do what they say because you know they are right and that they have the done the research.
Imagine a Maven who comes to faith in Christ. When they go back to the people with whom they have relationships their testimony will have great power. It’s because those in their sphere of influence will respond to what they have to say. If Jesus works for the Maven, then Jesus will work for me. The power and influence would be incredible. However, they typically have smaller networks than a Connector.
The third person is the Salesman. A Salesman is the kind of person who gets results. They are larger than life personalities and they are able to win you over at “hello”. You know the kind of person that I am talking about. You are their best friend instantly. Salesmen have huge networks of shallow relationships. In spite of the shallow relationships they are highly effective at spreading an idea because people seemingly “can’t help but respond” to what they have to say.
A friend of mine named Darin is a Salesman. He said that everyone he ever met was his friend. People love to say yes Darin. It’s amazing to watch him have conversations with people. Within ten minutes they would trust Darin to care for their child (slight exaggeration, but you get my point)! People like Darin can tip a ministry into a movement. These are people who get tagged with “the gift of evangelism”.
In your community can you identify the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen? If your community is going to become a movement you need must be able to do this. To do this requires you as a leader to be have a great interest in every single person in your ministry.
Simply put movements explode because of the Law of the Few.
There are few things in life that frustrate me more than watching other parents do things that hinder their child’s spiritual growth. This may sound arrogant to you, it probably is. I am not a perfect parent, not even close. I get frustrated with my kids and I even yell at the little darlings every once in a while. I think over the last eight years (that’s how old our oldest is) I have asked for forgiveness more times than I can count (but that’s another issue for another post). This post is about pressure. Overbearing pressure does exactly this, it hinders spiritual growth.
I see parents all over the place putting undue and unrealistic pressure on children. This pressure broadens a relational rift between parents and children that naturally occurs at this age. This is many times seen in the context of education. Today more and more kids are pushed into AP classes. These classes are taught at a very high level and are preparatory classes to test for college credits. I took AP classes in High School but I had a Mom who understood that these classes were designed too teach me how to think and do research and that I would most likely not get an A. Her concern was that I simply worked hard and did my best.
I think that the disconnect has entered in because it seems that a B is not good enough anymore. That an A is required fare to prove that a kid is “working hard”. These grades have become the ultimate driving force in a parent’s life. They punish their child for a B in a college level course that they themselves would have no chance to pass. Students are then punished for doing well enough. Their punishment is often times limiting their involvement in social interactions. This limit is applied to the their faith community too. The youth group is seen as a “privilege” that can be taken away.
Please hear me, I am not saying that we should not push our children to excellence. I am not saying that we should not encourage them to take on academic or athletic challenges.
I am saying that we need to help them bring balance to their lives. If we push them to be all consumed with their academics or their athletics then we are clearly communicating something. We are communicating that these are the things around which life revolves. The center of life is your ability to “achieve”.
I have this sad image in my head of many parents standing before the God, whom they love, asking why their child is not spending eternity with them. Jesus’ face turns grim and says, “My brothers and sisters you taught them that a grade was better than me. You taught them that a grade was better than my people. You taught them to set me and my people aside to study and get a B+ instead of a B. You taught them that “the now” matters more than their eternity did. You taught them to love themselves over me. You taught them to love being apart from me and now what you have taught them has come to fruition.“
[caption id=“attachment_683” align=“alignleft” width=“300” caption=“A Case Study in Missing the Point!”]
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That’s what I call alliteration! Gen Y, Millenials, whatever you want to call them are the example for future generations to follow. Pew Research has just published a very interesting study that looks at the lives of these teens and twenty somethings. The basic gist is that they are connected via technology, they are diverse, they are optimistic, and they becoming frustrated with the status quo.
Two things in particular stuck out at me. First, this generation cares about the same things that generations past cared about: marriage and family. This is something that I think is insightful. We must come to terms with the reality that at the core of their being the emerging generations are people who are created in the image of God and their longings are going to be similar to those of the past. This does not take away from the fact that they are going to express these longings differently. For example, this generation is waiting longer to marry and begin their families. Why? I think because men do not have a clearly defined entry into adulthood and because of “the economy stupid”.
The second thing that interests me is the fact that this generation is already getting frustrated with politicians. It was a generation that became highly motivated during the election and has not had their agenda delivered. They believe that the government should help but are coming to realize that it might not be the answer they are looking for.
These two issues highlight for me where we, as the church, can step in and speak directly to this generation if we are willing to speak their language. Will we show them the church of Jesus Christ that radically effects change or will we be another voice in the wilderness gonging away? Will we teach them the principles of healthy marriages and families? Will we demonstrate for them these principles? I hope so. If we are going to speak to this generation things will have to change in the church because we are not doing a very good job right now.
However, there is an example of this beginning to happen in my own little church. There is a woman, named Robin, who is a part of our small group. She is gathering young moms and empty nest moms together. This is a time for encouragement and love. This is a time for the young moms to realize that they are not alone and that others have walked their paths. This is a time when principles will be taught and demonstrated, not in some classroom, but in the context of life.
Friends, God is on the move and he cares about this generation and he wants them to hear his story and his message. He desires for them to respond. We are his ambassadors. Will we speak the language? Will show and demonstrate? I hope so.
I am currently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s
The Tipping Point. It’s a fascinating read. One of the things that has really stuck out to me is the chapter on Dunbar’s number, 150. This is the number of meaningful relationships that a person can have. Human beings tend to only be able to handle 150 or fewer meaningful relationships. Today, I ran across an article from
MediaPost Publications that discusses the way that college students have their contacts broken down.
The study found that the average college student has, “Exactly 87 email contacts, 146 cell phone contacts, and 438 “friends” on social networks.“ What struck me was the cell phone contacts, 146. My guess is that the people in the cell phone are those who are considered “meaningful” relationships.
In this article they add these numbers up to come up with an influence circle of 671. However, I think that the real number is 146. These are the people who will actually respond to the student. These are the people who will trust what they hear from the person. My guess is that these 146 are duplicated in their social media and also in email.
146. That’s awful close to 150. More thoughts on this to come…
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=FFFFFF&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=danielmroseco-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&asins=0525951369 A number of weeks ago I reviewed Tim Keller’s
Counterfeit Gods. Over the next few days I am going to work through this little book with some thoughts of my own. I hope that you will find it to be a beneficial conversation. I hope that you will join in via the comments section. I think that these posts will be timely during Lent which is a time of preparation and setting aside idols in our lives.
The opening chapter discusses the story of Abraham from the perspective of “what happens when you get all you ever wanted?” This is a great question! As we consider our lives most of what we do is so that we can get what we want. We train and prepare for certain jobs so that we can make money. We take this money and we use it to buy what we want. It might be a house, a car, some tech toy, or even the right clothes or the right look to get the right girl (or guy).
Some people never get what they want and this desire drives them throughout their lives. Many get what they want. When you do the question is, “now what?” As I look around this world I think people just begin the process to get the next bigger and better version of whatever our desire is.
As Keller points out, God often asks for this back. Why? It’s because when we get what we want it becomes the center of our lives. This “thing” displaces God. This, according to Keller, is the center of the Abraham story. Abraham got his son. God asked for his son back and when Abraham was willing to give him it proved that Isaac was not the center of his life. I think that this is a legitimate interpretation of the story.
As I consider my own life I think that there are a two things right now that need to be given back to God. First, entertainment. I love to be entertained. I enjoy an evening at home relaxing on the couch and taking in my latest DVR’ed goodness. This time could be used to talk with my bride. It could be spent reading. It could be spent praying. It could be spent…well you get the point. I do not think that relaxing with a good television show is all that bad. I will continue to do so. However, I think that it needs to be put in proper perspective and I need to make sure that it is not choice numero uno!
Second, the internet. I love surfing the web and being in the know. If you check out my
strength finder profile you will see that input is one my strengths. However, it can quickly become ruinous. This is because I can spend hours gaining input, reading news, anything that will find my mind with new facts and details. Information gathering becomes central. Part of the reason for this blog is to help me slow down and communicate out some of what I am inputting through out my daily routine.
What about you? What is displacing God in your life?
[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqbOkvxpIDE&w=425&h=350])
One of the things that I have been struck with over the past few months is that many people are unwilling to think and even more unwilling to listen. We have been trained to process what we will say next and as a result we do not hear what is being said to us. It is this phenomenon that I think leads us to the place where we no longer actually think. Thinking requires listening and processing. One of the places that I have been finding this to be true is in the context of book reviews. Most recently has been the discussion that has been going on over Brian McLaren’s most recent book, “A New Kind of Christianity”. I do not have this book. I have not read this book. My point is not to enter into conversation about McLaren or his writing but to look at the way that the conversation has been going forward.
The men and women who have responded to McLaren’s latest title are brilliant people (at least the ones I have read) and have presented critiques that I am sure need to be made. What I found most interesting was the interaction between McLaren and
Bill Kinnon. This is the first time I have read Kinnon’s blog and so I do not have a vast working knowledge of his writing.
The posts between the two men are long. So let me summarize:
I have had a few conversations over the last couple of days about rule following. What does it mean to follow the rules? What is the line between the letter and spirit of the law? How do we determine this? What is the impact on our spiritual lives? What if following the letter of the law causes injury? What if following the spirit of the law is just our way of undermining authority? These are the questions that have been batted around in my world. These conversations have been stimulating and interesting. I am not sure though if we have dealt with the issue well.
I think that the biggest question that needs to be dealt with is that of determination. How do we determine when to set aside the letter of the law in favor of its spirit? This line is gray. There is no ideal or final answer in my opinion. However, I think there are some principles that we can follow.
I like to think. I like to think new things and seek to develop original ideas. I also enjoy reading and interacting with those who think in fresh ways. One of the people who I enjoy reading is David Fitch. He is a missiologist who is calling the church to be local and missional. He understands that the gospel needs to be contextualized to particular local contexts without undermining its narrative truth.
That being said, I think that David does something in a recent
post which is not authentic. He is discussing how to deal with conflict in the community of believers. He evaluates two approaches which are highlighted in the work of Al Mohler and Brian McLaren. He argues that neither of their approaches (autocratic or democratic) fit with the biblical model and he calls for a “new” approach, the incarnational.
I want to briefly summarize this approach:
I love the moment when an idea flashes in my mind and I grab hold of it and it turns into something worthwhile. This happened a number of weeks ago when I was hanging out with a friend of mine named Zak. I was asking him about his friends and what kind of context they would most likely come out to for a conversation about spiritual things. He said that a coffee house would be best. In that moment, what would come to be called Coffee/Doubt, was born.
An idea became a vision which became a mission.
Things started slow but momentum has been growing and continues to grow. The beautiful thing though is that it’s not really mine. It’s Zak’s. He own this things. Last Thursday there were sixteen adults and kids sitting at Starbucks for a conversation and Zak led it. Zak is a 16 year old guy who gets fat lips in mosh-pits and has two rings in his lower lip. He is not evangelical Christendom’s poster child which looks likes this:
Time/CNN recently published an
article about scientists who are trying to figure out the “peter pan” gene. They are trying to understand how to slow down and even cease the aging process. While this sounds like a very cool idea I have to wonder if this is a good idea. I think we must ask the simple question, “Should we?”
We come face to face with issues regarding global climate change which is in part due to world population growth. Sustainability is also a buzz word that we hear on an almost daily basis. We must find ways to use natural resources in such a way that we can sustain their use over the long term. We are told that by living longer we are making this more difficult. What if we are able to unnaturally extend the lives of people? What would this mean for our world?
I think that it is time for us to slow down and begin asking some questions about the effects of our endeavors. Wendell Berry in his collection of essays called Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community often says that as we seek to find solutions through science we will inevitably create even more problems. I think that this is often true. When it comes to any scientific and technological “breakthroughs” we must determine their value not only based on the immediate impact but also on the ramifications of the breakthrough.
What do you think? How do we answer the question of “should we?”
Do you want to know what I really hate? I really hate coming to the realization that I do not know what to do. I can not stand that feeling of helplessness that comes over me when I am out of my depths.
I had that feeling this past weekend. I was driving home from a youth retreat and pulled off the highway to get a tank of gas. After filling the tank the car would not start. I had someone with me and I just wanted to be able to get this guy home. We were stuck. I could not fix it because I know nothing about cars. Then I had to enter into the process of asking people for help. It’s embarrassing because most of the times the issue that is causing my car problems is some “easy” fix. That feeling is horrible.
I had a conversation that Sunday with a man I deeply respect named Jim, he was taking me to buy a battery and to help me install it. He said, “Dan, you spend your whole life serving others, why do you have such a hard time letting other people serve you?” That has been the question that has stuck in my mind since. Why?
I don’t like letting people serve me because I believe I live an amazing life. I believe that God has so graciously given me all I need to provide for my family. I see the body of Christ constantly meeting any need my family has and it is an honor to serve them. It seems that it is not fair to keep asking.
Yet, this is what being in a community is all about. It is about people with differing gifts and skills serving one another. Helping one another. Caring for one another. Consider what Paul says in 1 Corinthians:
The New York Times published an
article recently about the rise of Mixed Martial Arts being used as an outreach by evangelical churches for men. I know that guys like Mark Driscoll are all over this and that men are drawn to MMA and that God is using it. I am not going to lie to you, I enjoy a little Fight Club and some MMA myself. However, I am concerned by some of the statements that I read in the article. Here a few of them:
Over the last two weeks we have witnessed both the federal State of the Union, Michigan’s State of the State, and ESPN’s State of Sports. It has been interesting two weeks. Many conversations about politics and ideas about how to fix the country and the state. What has been most interesting is that people on both sides of the political aisle seem to believe that their position on every issue is what will make the world better.
When we consider how to respond to the issues and problems before us we must look at them from a different perspective. We can no longer expect a political party to represent “us”. Political parties simply represent those who pay to get them into office. There is little to no accountability. We must realize that the political corporation is the imperial power that we live in the face of right now. There is one simple concern that career politicians desire: power.
Power is something that those who claim to follow Christ need to look for in a different place. We do not find power in taking control of others. We find power in relationship with the crucified and resurrected Christ. This means that if we are going to make change in our community and culture we must look to the way of Christ and find solutions there. The reality is that the solutions are there. What might they be?
They are found in balancing justice and productivity. How do we do this? We do this by seeking local development in agriculture, business, and education. We do this by understanding the process by which various goods and services get to us and into our homes. We have to make choices in light of creation mandate that requires sustainability. We also must be creative and look beyond the technological for solutions. People and their relationships with one another are crucial to the fixing of this place.
There is nothing easy about any of this. We must rise above the din of political fury and realize that there is a subversive way to go about changing the economic reality of our local, state, and federal collectives. They are found in the way of self-sacrifice, community development, and seeking justice. You can call me naïve. That is fine. But if you do, would you at least be willing to dream with me about what could be if we applied the redemptive and subversive principles found in the joy of the redemption parade?
Michael Hyatt the CEO of Thomas Nelson recently published a blog on what he calls “Leadership 2.0” and it really fits into some of things that I have been wrestling with in light of my series on Leading With a Limp. Here are his bullet points on Leadership 2.0:
- Leadership 2.0 embraces change. Like Web 1.0, old-style leadership was fairly static. Leaders resisted change and were more focused on preserving the status quo. However, Leadership 2.0 embraces change. New-style leaders are on the cutting edge of experimentation. If something doesn’t work, they change course quickly. They are more concerned about driving the right outcomes than maintaining business-as-usual.
- Leadership 2.0 demonstrates transparency. Old-style leaders were opaque. They wouldn’t tell you anything they didn’t have to tell you. They kept themselves shrouded in mystery. (Think of “Oz.”) New-style leaders are open and transparent. They let you see them for who they are — warts and all. They risk self-disclosure, preferring to acknowledge the truth of who they are rather than pretend to be something they are not.
- Leadership 2.0 celebrates dialogue. Old-style leaders delivered a monologue. They did all the talking. The fact that they were the boss was proof enough that they were smarter than everyone else n the room. New-style leaders listen more than they talk. They ask questions. They lead powerful conversations. Why? Because they know that “all of us are smarter than some of us” to quote James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds.
- Leadership 2.0 employs collaboration. Old-style leaders were competitive. They held all the cards close to their vest. They didn’t “play well with others.” They refused to help anyone they perceived as the competition, even if they were theoretically on the same team. New-style leaders are all about teamwork. They are inclusive in the way they lead, drawing you in and making you feel that you are doing something great — together. They enroll others as “colleagues” and “partners.”
- Leadership 2.0 practices sharing. Old-style leaders hoarded their resources — their contacts, their insights, their time, energy and money. They played a zero-sum game. They didn’t believe they could be generous without depleting their own pile of stuff. New-style leaders are just the opposite. They have an abundance-mentality. They freely share their resources, believing that “there is plenty more where that came from.” They know “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (see Acts 20:35)
- Leadership 2.0 welcomes engagement. Old-style leaders were aloof and detached. They didn’t expect to get their hands dirty by actually talking to customers and other constituents. They stood above the fray, dispassionately observing the masses. New-style leaders don’t think in terms of hierarchy, as if something is beneath them. They jump in with both feet, happily and passionately engaging with anyone and everyone.
- Leadership 2.0 builds community. Old-style leaders were rugged individualists. They pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. They didn’t need anyone else. They could do it all themselves, “thank you very much.” New-style leaders, on the other hand, enjoy working with others and building a sustainable community that will go on long after they are gone. They get great satisfaction from working together rather than working alone.
As I consider these seven points I realize that much of my intentional leadership development took place from 1995–1998. This is at the height of Leadership 1.0. I am struggling now to really engage in become a leader who leads from a Leadership 2.0 standpoint. This is necessary if we are going to faithfully engage with the emerging generations. They are being trained on the Leadership 2.0 model and expect those who lead them to do the same.
I think that I struggle deeply with numbers 4 and 6. I find it hard to really embrace engagement with people. I have a vision, mission, and dream. I am willing to do what it takes to get it done. However, it’s very difficult for me to bring others along for the ride. I also struggle with collaboration when it comes to my vision and dream. I do not necessarily want nor do I think that I need other people’s input. This is a shortcoming and I am finding that I am learning, ever be it slowly, that I am better with others than alone.
How about you? Are you a Leader 2.0 or do you struggle as I do?
There are few TV shows that capture the imagination. There are many that are entertaining. There are many that make you laugh. Occasionally one might make you think. However, I can’t think of many that actually capture the imagination. ABC’s Lost is just that. It captures your imagination. It’s the uncomfortable balance between what is, what could be, and what needs to be. It has characters that are real and unreal. It asks you to suspend reality and also invites into reality. But what about it catches the imagination? I think you can sum it up in one word:
Redemption.
There are two articles floating around the internet that catch onto this reality. One was written recently by Jeff Jensen over at
EW and the other was from Mikal Gilmore over at
Rolling Stone. Both of these articles were sent to me by my friend
Kristin. To me the greatest insight into this show comes from Carlton Cuse one of the producers:
What do you think of when you consider laziness? My guess is you almost immediately think about some college kid laying on a couch playing XBox or PS3 and skipping classes. I would tend to agree with you (although when I did this it was a PS, I was not lazy, I was saving my energy!). Dan Allender in
Leading With a Limp argues that busy is the new lazy. He says, “Being busy seems to be the polar opposite of laziness, but a busy person is not so much active as lost. (128)” Wow! That is a paradigm shifter.
In the
Matrix of Brokenness Allender argues that weariness is something that all leaders will face and they will respond with either fatalism or hope. Fatalism usually displays itself in the context busyness. Hope comes when we find disillusionment in these lesser things that keep us busy. As we become disillusioned we turn toward that greater love, the Christ who called us initially and become bold in our declaration that he is best and lesser things must find their proper place.
As I read this I could not help but think of Hebrews 4:
Loneliness, according to Dan Allender in
Leading With a Limp, is one of the things that any leader will bump into. He can choose one of two
responses: hiding or openness. Hiding is the act of manipulation. We feel alone and solitary. As a result we hide. In our hiding we manipulate the world around us to think that all is well. The next thing you know another pastor has flamed out of ministry or has
killed himself. Leaders are alone. I have written
previously on the “oneness” of ministry.
The opposite response is openness or as Allender puts it, “Honest Hunger (120ff).” This honest hunger requires us to open ourselves to people. This openness is an authentic listening to others and the willingness to invite others in.
I don’t know if I can explain how hard this is. But maybe using an unrelated illustration will help. I like a good beer. I enjoy evaluating the hoppiness or wheatiness or aroma or smoothness or flavor of a beer. I enjoy the experience of sitting with friends at a watering hole and taking in a pint of something dark and rich. When Amy and I worked with Campus Crusade for Christ at Illinois State University we were located in a small town. We were a part of a small community where people very different opinions about whether someone could drink a beer. Many of these people supported us financially. I was afraid that if they knew or saw me drink a beer they would stop supporting us. Therefore, we did not drink alcohol of any kind in Bloomington-Normal. We hid and manipulated the situation.
You see, this is the situation that leaders find themselves in every aspect of their lives. They evaluate every little thing. “If I say I saw
THIS movie or that I watched
THAT television show or I think
THIS political thought or whatever, what will
THEY think?” So we hide. We never really tell anybody what we think about anything. We deflect for the sake of keeping things easy and clean.
At some level that is OK. We are called to respect the
weaker brother. This is someone who does not experience the same kind of freedom in Christ that we experience. However, there comes a point where if you never let anyone in, if you never communicate what you really think about something, you go crazy. You go crazy because nobody knows you.
I am struggling with this. I am struggling to learn who those people are that I can be completely open and honest with. I am really struggling with what Allender says though:
I really enjoy the Super Bowl. I really enjoy Sports Talk Radio. I really like it when two opposing worldviews collide. However, I do not like it when I turn on Sports Talk Radio and all I hear about is the “culture war”. Over the last few days there has been a tremendous amount of conversation, yelling, and pure craziness regarding Tim Tebow, former Heisman Trophy winner, appearing in a Super Bowl Ad for Focus on the Family. The problem lies in the fact that the commercial is Pro-Life.
There have been a large number of Abortion Rights groups speaking out against the commercial and CBS for airing it. What is interesting is that there is no flack coming from these groups regarding the commercials that put women on display as sexual objects. Which of these commercials is most hurtful to women? I would argue that one which objectifies women and uses them for nothing more than their physical attractiveness is more damning.
I am also saddened by the rhetoric that has come out of this. I have many of my fellow Metro-Detroiters saying that Tebow should not be allowed to “shove his beliefs” down their throats. To my knowledge Focus on the Family paid for the ad time. Planned Parenthood, to my knowledge did not purchase any airtime. If an advocacy group wants to advertise let them pay for it. Is it possible to have the intellectual integrity to see that both sides of a coin have the freedom to speech? You as a television viewer have the freedom and ability to mute the commercial or pause the DVR and then hit the “live” button.
We live in a country where the freedom of speech is part of our Bill of Rights. If you do not like that there is an ad about being Pro-Life and you desire “balance” then pony up the 2.5 million and broadcast your take. Until that time comes please, please, can you let sports talk go back to sports talk? Thanks.
via
CBS to Air Tim Tebow Super Bowl Ad.
At the turn of the New Year we all make resolutions. When Ethan, my eight year old son went to school after the turn of the new year he and his classmates did a project where they made a wish. The teacher got the idea from the Japanese Daruma Doll. Here’s a quick second grade summary of the Daruma Doll:
“In Japan, one way to make a New Year’s wish is to buy a daruma doll. This doll has no arms, legs, or eyes. It does have a heavy bottom. If the doll tips over, it rights itself. The doll is a reminder to never give up! When a wish is made, one eye is drawn on the doll. When the wish comes true, the second eye is drawn. The doll is kept until the end of the year.”
So each student colored a doll and then responded to three questions:
Jerk: a contemptibly naive, fatuous, foolish, or inconsequential person. I am one. How do I know? I know because in my life I have struggled with the feeling of betrayal. I think I have authentically experienced it. I think that I sometimes read different situations and think that betrayal is happening when it is not. However, when I face the pain of betrayal or even the perceived pain of betrayal I become a jerk.
Dan Allender in
Leading With a Limp provides what I call the “Matrix of Brokenness”. You can find it
here. Regarding the issue of betrayal Allender argues that narcissism is the negative response. Where does this narcissistic response come from? It comes from envy (96). Envy grabs you and you respond with a narcissism that is ugly, in short, you become a jerk.
When I read that and thought about it I was not sure if I agreed with this idea or not. However, as I pondered a time over the last few years when I felt betrayed, my evaluation led me to the realization that my
initial response was indeed narcissistic and was indeed narcissistic and fueled by envy.
I was being evaluated for a leadership position that was being vacated by another person. I had been in a similar leadership a few years before and in my estimation this would be a formality. However, it turned out to be one of the most painful experiences I have endured. I did not get the position. I did, however, receive a large list of things that I was failing at in ministry, relationships, and perceived in my walk with God. This list was delivered with the tact and grace of a sledge hammer. Nonetheless, the evaluation was accurate in many ways. My initial response was anger and a sense of betrayal. I wanted answers. I wanted to quit. I stopped relating to God and turned inward. I was so wrapped up in my own sense of self-confident awesomeness that I could not see how this was God’s hand calling me to a new level and season of development.
I would not have admitted it then but I was envious of whoever would take on the role that I was passed over for. In my mind this role was an amazing place to serve and lead. From this role a leader would have influence regionally and nationally within the organization. I was envious that it would not be me. There was not anyone in place to take the role and this envy turned to an ever deepening narcissism. Clearly God needed to teach me.
He has. He is. I am still learning this lesson. I am learning how to respond to all this. I am learning that often my perception of “betrayal” is nothing more than God using people to move me away from my self-centeredness. This is why the appropriate response to betrayal is gratitude. I need to be thankful that I have the opportunity to grow closer and to enter more deeply into reliance on God.
I am a jerk. But I am not as much of a jerk as I used to be.
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=FFFFFF&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=danielmroseco-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&asins=0525951369 Timothy Keller is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York. His recent book
Counterfeit Gods continues to cement his place as one of this generation’s leading voices in calling the church back to where it belongs. Keller, however, has the unique ability to speak to the hearts of people who do not claim follow Jesus as well.
The driving question that Keller is seeking to answer comes from a description of Americans by Alexis de Tocqueville who said that Americans exhibited a, “strange melancholy that haunts the inhabitants…in the midst of abundance. (x)” De Tocqueville analyzes this “strange melancholy” and comes to the conclusion that it is the result of taking an “incomplete joy of this world” and having that become the center of your life. Keller states, “That is the definition of idolatry. (xi)” He goes on to say that an idol is, “anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give. (xvii)” This is the central motif of Keller’s text. He then draws us back to the reality that it is in relationship with Christ, the idol breaker, that we can be set free from our idol worship.
Keller hits on topics like money, greed, power, politics, sex, and love. He grabs your attention with riveting personal stories from his life, his ministry, and from the headlines. The economic collapse of 2008–09 plays a heavy role. If you come to this text with an open mind then you will walk away from this text with a challenged heart. It is strong in biblical exegesis as Keller works through key texts and draws out their central teaching and their contemporary application. I would say that the weakness of this text is that the issues raised are difficult and that in such a brief text they can only be given a cursory examination. I would like to see Keller develop this text more fully at a scholarly level.
I was deeply challenged by the book. I was most especially brought to a place of deep consideration regarding the idolatry of religion. I think that as a pastor I am easily swayed by this idolatry. I can get caught up in my Reformed, Presbyterian dogma and lose sight of the sacrificial savior who called me to follow him. Following a self-sacrificing savior is painful, difficult, and yet fully satisfying and glorious! But, the comfort of a religious dogma that provides all the answers is seductive and so easy to embrace.
I encourage you to grab this little text and evaluate the idol factory in your heart.
I like to think of myself as a person who has great intellectual flexibility. Often times I am very creative when it comes to problem solving. I even like change. I thrive on change. Change is a good thing in my mind because on the one hand it makes a jingly sound in your pocket and on the other it keeps divine bovines to a minimum. I also like to think that I handle complexity well. Again, it’s something that I face with a certain level of confidence and joy. That is, until complexity meets me outside of my comfort zone. When this happens well, it is not pretty.
According to Allender, when a leader finds himself in a position of complexity they can have a negative response of dogmatism. Dogmatism is defined as an “arrogant, stubborn assertion of opinion or belief.” It is not what you believe but is an issue of how you believe. Dogmatism is a symptom of rigidity. When the world becomes too complex, Allender argues, people can tend to become rigid in an effort to control the world around them.
I read this chapter in Leading With a Limp and thought, thankfully I do not do this! Then, as I continued to process more I realized that I do not do it in areas where I feel I am gifted or strong. I do however move in this direction when I am faced with complexity in places where I am out of my comfort zone.
For example, last summer I led a team of High School students and volunteers to Appalachia, Kentucky. We were there to serve people by working on two building projects. We were bringing some physical relief and dignity to people who desperately needed it. I am not especially gifted or talented in using my hands. I really do not enjoy it and the thought of doing this for a week really scared me. It took everything I had to keep my emotions in check on the site because felt so stupid.
When we would return to the camp I felt that I was back in my domain where I knew what to do and how to do things. This junction of physical and emotional exhaustion left me in a place where I became rigid when complexity struck at the camp. The complexity took the form of High School not doing things exactly as I expected them to do (surprise, surprise right?). This led me to be more dogmatic and rigid in how I approached various situations.
So, how do I move forward? Well, I am learning that awareness and communication are key. If I know that I am going to be in a situation like this then I need to prepare myself and my team that this might be an issue. That way WHEN my sin rears its ugly head everyone will know what’s happening and we will be able to interact honestly and openly about it.
Community. It’s a buzz-word. It’s a television sit-com. It’s a longing in our hearts. But what is it? What does community mean? There have been books, long books, written on the subject. There have been many sermons preached. There have been many university seminars given. I have to be honest with you, I have talked about community and thought about community and yet I do not think that I could define community. Community. Community. Community…
Then I read Wendell Berry’s essay, “Writer and Region” in What Are People For. His definition of community is astounding: “a common experience and common effort on a common ground to which one willingly belongs.(85)” Consider with me for a brief moment what the ramifications of this definition are for us. First, a common experience. People who seek to have or be a part of community must have a common experience. This means that they must actually do something. I think that often people think community will just develop or happen around them, it does not. What is a common experience? It is a common doing. It means that a person willingly does something with others. They engage. They enter in. They participate.
Second, a common effort. The term effort implies that there is a mission or a purpose for one to be in relationship with another. Community develops along the lines of mission. There must be a purpose or a mission before one can have community because there must be a common effort. This again requires a person and individual to choose to set aside herself to enter into a mission with others. Effort will then be exerted when the mission is grasped and understood and embodied by the group.
Third, a common ground. This can mean all sorts of things but I think Berry means it in the sense of proximity. Community happens in a place. There is a proximity to it. Boots on the ground together as a group on a mission in the same place. I think about a place like Ocean City, NJ where I spent a summer on mission. I can picture the people and the things done but they are all tied to a place: the boardwalk, the Ambassadors Inn, Philly, or Broadway. A place, a common ground.
Finally, there must be a willingness. This community will not happen unless a person willingly submits himself to the group. He must enter in of his own accord. Apart from this willingness he cannot know community because he cannot be with the others on the common ground; his heart is elsewhere.
Community: common experience and common effort on a common ground to which one willingly belongs.
Dedicated to
Jay and
Vince, both of whom are now Daddys.
When I would look at men who had little girls there was something different about them. They had this look about them that was different from those of us with only sons. There was a tenderness in their eyes as they would watch their daughters play or walk or sleep. There was a gentleness to how they handled their little girls. And, there was the look of incredible love when that little girl would look back over her shoulder at her daddy.
The day, the moment, that Libby was born, I understood. There is something unique about little girls. They are sweet and gentle. You look at their face and know that soon you will hear that little voice whisper, “Daddy.” Just knowing that your heart melts, just the thought of it. I love my son with all that I am. He is my buddy, my partner. But there is something different about my Libby. It’s hard to explain.
There is just something special about the love of a Daddy toward his little girl. A desire to protect her. A desire to keep her safe from the fallen world. The reality that another will come along one day and make her his own. Knowing that some day she will wear a white dress and take the hand of another man. She will not always be all mine.
I don’t know. There is something intangible about the love of a father to a daughter. I can not possibly do it justice. All I know is that I love her and get lost as I watch her. All I know is that I see her Mommy in her and know that she is an amazing gift that is to be cherished and loved only to be given away.
The scene is Haiti is horrific. The cries for help. The reality of people being buried alive. The dead littering the streets. The pain, chaos, and heartbreak enveloping a country that is already impoverished and broken. To this situation Pat Robertson on the 700 Club today spoke. He stated among other things that it was a “blessing in disguise”. Check out this video and then read my response:
[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5TE99sAbwM&w=425&h=350])
This response is heartless, cruel, and un-pastoral. My good friend Scott Crocker has posted a wonderful
response and I would encourage you to read it. Near the end of this clip Mr. Robertson speaks of a pact made with the devil. This is a rumor, an urban legend. It may have happened, it might not have happened.
We seek to find meaning out of tragedy, it is our natural response. To make this tragedy into something other than it is simply smacks of pretentious self-righteousness. The sad fact is that we live in a world that is broken. It is broken at every level. St. Paul tells us “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.(Romans 8:18–23 ESV)”
You see the creation is longing for its own redemption. What happened in Haiti is not the result of an act of a vengeful God. It is not the act of a God who was tired of waiting for the Haitians to build big buildings. No, this was the result of the tragedy that took place in the Garden. This is the outworking of the fall.
I am thankful that Mr. Robertson called for prayer and compassion at the end of this clip. However, his call is empty and meaningless due to his previous comments. I believe that Mr. Robertson believed that he was speaking truth. He spoke without love though and became a “resounding gong.”
The old saying goes, “It takes one to know one.” Sadly, I know a lack of gentleness, an absence of compassion, and graceless truth. It takes one to know one. I know one.
I am learning that you must be careful about what you ask for, you just might get it. That’s right, I think I am getting what I asked for. Heaven help me!
In my quieter moments, a number of years ago, I would have told you that I would like to start something from the ground up. I think at the time I looked at things like history and tradition and fel that they were rubbish. I still feel that way, most of the time. However, I am learning that history or backstory is important. It provides you with a road map for the reasons why people are the way they are. It gives you insight into ministry mindsets and culture. Backstory, history, tradition: they are important.
Important though they may be these things are the cost of vision. If you have a vision, a dream, a desire it comes to you in power only if you are unhappy with the status quo. There have been many times in my life when I have had vision. I think I am in one of those times. But vision comes at a cost, it costs the status quo. It costs the sacred cows. It costs comfort and ease. The one with the vision does not pay this price because they have already lost their comfort and ease as a result of their broken heart that leads them to vision. No, this cost is paid by those to whom the vision is cast. This makes setting a new course pretty difficult, if not impossible.
A few years ago I read, Visioneering by Andy Stanley. One of the key components in that book is that people need to hear the vision over and over and over (and then over again!). What was assumed in the book was that the one casting the vision had a pulpit, microphone, and captive audience. So how do you this without a captive audience, microphone, or pulpit?
Well, it turns out when you are fumbling your way through you don’t do it very well. It’s something that has to change in my ministry. I have to get the vision out to three audiences: volunteers, students, and parents. These three audiences are vastly different. It’s no wonder that “youth pastors” burn out so quickly. I am trusting that as I am coming to this conclusion it will help me communicate the vision, mission, and values of the movement I lead more effectively.
But, it will come at a cost. It will come at the cost of comfort, ease, and tradition. I understand the picture. I am the dog and the vision is the rocket. The question is: Is there a guidance system? I hope so. I need one.
Youth Specialties just dropped a
post over on their blog about
Passion 2010. The heart of the post was that college students in any number have incredible potential to change the world. This is so true. It’s the whole reason movements like
Campus Crusade for Christ,
InterVarsity, and
Navigators exist. I love that conferences like Passion are springing up and highlighting the potential of the emerging generation.
I think that there is a larger conversation that needs to take place and that is a conversation about power. In the church (and in every other institution) there are multiple generations existing together under one tent. The question is how will the generations that are older begin the process of taking on new roles? The generation that populates the leadership of most churches is the generation of the Jesus Movement. It saw incredible mobilization toward causes that was bigger than itself. It was a generation of radicals that forcibly took power in politics and church. It is the generation that created the “mega-church”. It figured out how to reach a de-churched population with skill and wisdom. The emerging generations need to be grateful for what has been done.
But, now is the time for the established leaders of the church (50s+) to realize that they must enter into a new leadership role. The time is now for them unlock the potential of the emerging generations. They need to actively choose to not become like their parents/grandparents. The “Great Generation” would not yield power and become coaches so the “Boomer” struck out on their own and created it’s own institution. Now, will they choose to embrace the leadership of the emerging generations? Will they listen? Will they hear what the culture is like NOW? Will they determine to bring emerging leaders up and hand over precious power and set aside their preferences to reach the next generation?
Youth Specialties and Passion are right. There is incredible potential in the emerging generations. But will it be coached and brought to maturity or will it be required to makes it own course and not come to maturity until they reach their 50s?
In Allender’s matrix the first challenge is that of crisis. What do you do when the world comes crashing down around you? Thankfully I have not faced any huge crises in my time as a leader. I have experienced personal ones within the context of my family but not so much in the context of ministry. This is God’s grace.
In these crises though I know that I experience the pull to cowardice. I want so badly for there to be someone else who can take on the problem and have the hard conversations and to make the decisions that nobody wants to make. I feel it. My hands sweat. My stomach gets upset. My breathing quickens and my heart pounds.
Thankfully I had a model of courage when I was a boy. My mother was and is one of the most courageous people that I know. It’s remarkable how courageous she is. With three young children she worked full-time, went to school full-time, and made sure we did not become screw-ups. She had hard conversations. She did hard things. She didn’t hide. She faced it, all of it.
When I think of the crises that we have faced as a family over the last five years and I think about how I responded I know it’s because of the model that she was. I think that in the face of crises I actually move into courage. I think I move there because I remember my mom’s story and I embrace it as my own.
Allender says that a limping leader understands, “I don’t know if I am right, not am I sure the path chosen is the best, but after reflection, feedback, debate, and prayer, I am choosing this path. In the process, I will seek life life like water and drink death like wine. A confident leader remembers her own story of redemption. She remembers that in the past God has been good to giver her favor and a way out of disaster; therefore, she borrows from the past to invest in the crisis du jour (74–75).”
That’s courage. Courage is embracing the narrative that God is writing in you and seeing the redemption that he has wrought. Then you grab hold of that fact and drink it like water.
Thanks mom.
The
Backyard Missionary posted recently on some thoughts about holiness by Alan Hirsch. It was interesting to see these ideas in front of me, nearly 15 years after I first heard them. I had been dating Amy (now my bride) for a few months. At the time I was new to this whole follow Jesus thing in every aspect of your life and the guy who was teaching me to walk with Jesus (Matt) wanted to have a conversation about my dating relationship. That was weird.
So, Matt and I headed to the Bovee University Center on the campus of Central Michigan University and grabbed a table in the Down Under Club. It was awkward as he asked me some really personal questions. I told him what he wanted to hear (whether or not it was the truth is another story). Then Matt asked me what I thought the statement, “Be holy as I am holy” meant. Well, I listed off as many rules of good Christian moralism as I could muster and Matt took it in. This was not his first time around the block. He smiled and asked, “Is that it?” I squirmed (not smiling) and replied, “Yeah.”
At that point Matt flipped my entire grid of what it means to be holy. He changed the way I thought because he opened my eyes tot the reality that I was focusing on all the things that I couldn’t do and still honor God with my life. The key thing, Matt explained, was what we could do. We could be holy. We could choose to live our lives in such a way that shows the world around us that we are different.
I had never thought about it like that. I thought following Jesus meant that I needed to understand the rules. The reality is that the rules aren’t the point. The point was living like someone and as opposed to not like someone. It’s so much easier to watch someone model something and do it than figuring out how not to do it. You see Jesus lived life the way we ought to live life. He lived it full, he lived it fun, he lived it on the edge. Do I? Do you? Jesus was called a drunk and a glutton. Most of us would only be mistaken for Tom Sawyer’s good-goody cousin Sid.
Holiness pushes us out to the brink. Holiness challenges us in ways that makes us uncomfortable. Holiness subverts our ordinary lives and causes us to live life on the edge where only angels dare to walk.
There is a saying, “One is the loneliest number.” For many years I thought one was not all that lonely but a nice change of pace. I think that’s because in my former life as a staff member with Campus Crusade for Christ there was such a crushing emphasis on team that you almost couldn’t escape it. I am not an introvert by nature so for one to feel not lonely is saying something. I have been a “pastor” for one year now. I am coming to the conclusion that “pastor” equals “one”. I want there to be a team around me.
I desire for there to be a team around me. But, the nature of the office is that there is the pastor (full-time, on duty, Christian-type) and then there are those around the pastor (people who are working out their faith in REAL life, in the REAL world, here and now). It seems to me that those around the pastor are amazing, awe-inspiring actually. I mean they work, they work hard all day for some company somewhere and then they work, and work hard in the context of the church. Pastors become pastors because (and let’s be honest here) they can’t or are unwilling to do that (yes, I understand there is an aspect of being called by God to vocationally serve his church, please don’t think I am missing that or downplaying it, I am not; I feel very called and very led to vocational service. I also know that if I wasn’t in vocational service I wouldn’t serve to the level that I do).
Leadership requires one to plan, prepare, and set direction. This takes place as we dream, think through the possibilites of how to make this dream work, and then begin to put it into practice. This is very easy to do in the context of the parachurch (relatively speaking). You have a team of full-time professional staff who are committed to the mission of the organization. There is already a base of like-mindedness or they would not have spent the time they did to raise all that money. Now you come to the church context where everyone (and I mean everyone) has their own idea of mission, direction, and praxis. There is only a handful of professional staff (all of which are working in specialized areas) and there are volunteers. The volunteers care deeply for the people they are ministering to but generally don’t have a broader desire to lead, cast vision, or set direction.
As a result this means that for the pastor there is much that must be done alone. However, this is then compounded by the reality that he must bring his volunteers along and up to speed with his dreams and vision. This requires the pastor to be a coach. I stink as a coach. I am a terrible coach. I am pretty good at casting vision, setting direction, and bringing change, however, I am not good at bringing others along with me.
So, what does this mean? I think it means that I have to learn to hold certain things more loosely and do a significantly better job at bringing people into the conversation at the beginning of the process as opposed to the end. This means that I have to cast vision to them to help them see how important it is for them to set direction with me. I think I see why Dan Allender calls his book “Leading With a Limp”.
It turns out that people are actually taking this stuff I write seriously! It also turns out that when I post something it is no longer for me but for the world to read. Oh right, I
wrote about that.
Well, today I cam face to face with one of my weaknesses in our staff meeting. I realized today, in light of a great conversation around a big table, that my
Achiever combined with
Futuristic makes it hard for me to field questions regarding vision and direction (see my page on my personal strengths
here). I take in so much information and I am constantly learning that my vision and direction are based on good strategic information. The details of the conversation aren’t important. What is important is that for the first time in a long time I was actually aware of how my brokenness was being displayed.
I realized today that I need divine intervention so that I might be more gentle, not some wishy-washy gentleness, but the kind of gentleness that meets people where they are. I am comfortable with being like this in relationships with people who are not in relationship with God, however, I struggle to live this way alongside those who are.
Why?
I don’t know, that’s why I am writing and processing and limping my way through all this. Thanks to those around the table who are willing to enter in with me in spite of how broken I am.
As I said
yesterday I am going to work through and begin to try and identify the weaknesses that I have. Before doing that though I need to show you the matrix that Allender developed in for the challenges that leaders face and their potential responses. It’s helpful and it’s a bit of a diagnostic tool. It also provides a good grid for framing the discussion.
There are five leadership challenges with which every leader comes face to face. I have re-created the grids that Allender developed on pages 8 and 9 of
Leading With Limp.Dan Allender says, “So here’s the hard truth: if you’re a leader, you’re in the battle of your life.” Welcome to a challenging text called
Leading With a Limp. This is a book that was given to me by a man who mentored me for six years, on the day of my ordination he mailed it to me. I finally got around to reading it this Advent season and what I read has brought me to a place where I need to re-evaluate how I have been leading. I have not been leading with a limp.
The assumption of Allender’s book is this, “To the degree you face and name and deal with your failures as a leader, to that same extent you will create an environment conducive to growing and retaining productive committed colleagues (2)”. He goes on to say, “To the degree you attempt to hide or dissemble your weaknesses, the more you will need to control those you lead, the more insecure you will become, and the more rigidity you will impose — prompting the ultimate departure of your best people (3).” These are the presuppositions. They are truthful and if you have been in leadership for any length of time you have experienced these statements in an all to painful way.
In the swath of leadership literature that I have read this book is changing the way I think about leading. Allender is not calling for leaders to be “authentic” and “self-disclose”. He is calling for leaders to do more. He is calling us to embrace our weaknesses and then in the company of those we lead to take our weaknesses apart piece by piece. This is not a “work on your weaknesses” kind of effort. This is an embracing of our brokenness that will necessarily lead us to a place of humility and in search of grace.
As I consider my leadership in the past I realize that more often than not I ignore my weaknesses, I write them off. I ask for forgiveness when I offend. I have never considered the idea of inviting those on my team into my weakness. I am going to process some of my weaknesses out here and subvert myself. Other weaknesses will have to be embraced elsewhere. In all of them, I need to invite people in. To live out of my strengths (which I am going to post soon too) I need to
dismantle the atomic bomb of my weakness.
On January 1
Charlie Rose had a montage of his best interviews. Well, we usually put Charlie on in the background and fall asleep to him. I suppose it’s gentle North Carolina accent or the intonation of his voice but he knocks us out pretty quickly. In one particular clip he was interviewing
Frank McCourt, the author of
Angela’s Ashes and ’Tis. McCourt said, “Religion is good at guilt.” For some reason that idea stuck in my head and I have been thinking about it ever since.
I have recently noticed that people who are supposed to be academics, people who are supposed to be representing an intellectual position, are becoming increasingly snarky towards those who disagree with them. I am especially noticing this in the intelligent design/evolution debate that seems to be gearing up again. It’s interesting to me that many on both sides of the debate start, continue, and end with name calling. They refer to one another in demeaning tones. I see this happening in the political debate too. Where ever an issue has two sides with strong feelings it seems that emotion takes precedence over reasoned intellect.
I think the reason for this is found in a comment by Wendell Berry in his essay, “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey”. He is discussing Abbey’s tendency to tip sacred cows. Berry’s says, “Any human product or activity that humans defend as a category becomes, by the very fact, a sacred cow — in need, by the same fact, of an occasional goosing (Berry, 42).” In our current cultural milieu we struggle for meaning and for finger holds. Therefore, we tend to categorize everything and everyone. This categorizing leads to the development of multiple “consecrated bovines (Berry, 42).” As these cows begin to fill our world we are constantly bumping up against someone’s deeply personal category and they defend it with passion. When sacred cows are engaged the one protecting them flares the nostril and becomes a raging bull.
This kind of debate and conversation is wholly unhelpful. If we are to engage with meaning and purpose with those of other perspectives and worldviews there must be a willingness on both parties to discuss rationally and with grace. What is the purpose of just being snarky? What is the point of just making fun of someone you believe to be wrong on an important issue? Can you not bring to the table more than one liners designed to gain the smiling head nod of your supporters?
References:
Berry, Wendell. What are People For? North Point Press: San Francisco, 1990.
