It’s Monday, the beginning of a new week. What are you looking forward to this week you Sharkigans?

Psalm 102:12-28; 2 Kings 4:8-17, 32-37; Acts 14:1-7

One of the things that I like about the Psalms is that they make me feel normal.

I don't know about you but when it comes to my experience with the divine it's up and down and left and right. It's a mixed bag to put it simply. There are days when I'm really angry with God. Then there are days where it feels like God is right in front of me and I feel God like never before. There are also days where I'm totally indifferent to God.

Maybe I'm an odd duck (well, I know I'm an odd duck, who in their right mind chooses to be a pastor...)?

Perhaps this isn't your experience at all. It sure is mine.

For a long time I tried to pretend that it wasn't like that. For my adult life I have been a professional Christian. I was a missionary to the college campus and now a pastor. I am supposed to have a dynamic relationship with God. One that is constantly on the upswing and never dips. That simply isn't true.

Over the years, I have learned that being honest about relationship with God has become the most important thing in having a relationship with God. It is amazing as I share struggles with others that they too have them and we are able to find encouragement from one another. When I pretend or lie about my relationship with God I inevitably isolate myself. During these seasons of isolation it can feel like I'm in a hole that I can't dig out of.

Thankfully, I have found myself in a community of people who love me without condition. I can share all of myself with them and as a result, I find that my relationship with God is more honest and real.

I resonated with verse 17 in Psalm 102,

“When he attends to the prayer of the wretched. He won’t dismiss their prayer.”

When I feel wretched, God won't dismiss me. When you feel wretched, God won't dismiss you either.

How amazing is that?

When we are at our most unloveable God still embraces us. Why? Because God is compassionate and loving and merciful and gracious.

— Discuss...

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We take a look at what Jesus has to say about the Law and Prophets…

Happy Saturday hooligans! Hope y’all had a good one!

…why do I always forget how pretty Sharkey’s interface is?

So PWA notifications work in Sharkey. How about that?

Psalm 147:1-11, 20c; Job 36:1-23; 1 Corinthians 9:1-16

Our decision all along has been to put up with anything rather than >to get in the way or detract from the Message of Christ. 1 Corinthians >9:12b, The Message

I love and hate this line from Paul.

In this chapter he's writing about his rights as an apostle. He is reminding the Corinthians that it's OK for him to be supported by the people of and to make a living as a minister of the gospel.

But, he has chosen not to exert those rights.

Why?

Because they can get in the way of the message of Christ.

Imagine, not using a right that is yours because it might detract from the message of Christ.

Am I willing to do such a thing? What are the rights that I demand that hinder the message of Christ?

So much to wrestle with.

— Discuss...

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Introduction

For a long time I was enthralled with “leadership.” I read everything I could on leadership. It was one of those intellectual itches that needed to be scratched. During this season of my life I was leading a team of people with a large parachurch organization and I found much of it to be helpful.

In the midst of that time I was also a member of a church where the pastor, who would become my mentor, was decidedly not pursuing the kinds of leadership stuff that I was. There was a cognitive dissonance that created deep frustration. Didn't he know that if would leverage the leadership strategies that I was learning about that he could grow the church faster and more efficiently?

When I became a pastor in a local church I participated in the research for another pastor who was doing his doctoral work in leadership. As we worked through the calls and discussions I grew more and more frustrated as it became clearer to me that the kind of leadership that we were seeing more in the church was rooted in the gospel.

What was going on?

Pastor as CEO

The consumerism of the American church necessitated that the pastor become a CEO concerned only with building their own platform so as to grow the numbers of people in the church.

There was a line in a leadership book that still haunts me. I'm paraphrasing but it went something like this: It said that the pastor was God's man leading the congregation toward the vision that God had instilled. Once the pastor knew God's vision then it was the pastor's responsibility to shepherd the sheep. Any sheep that disagreed with the pastor's vision was really a wolf. And you know what shepherds do to wolves? They shoot them.

We have bought into the idea that the church is a business. And yes, I'm using the word “bought” intentionally. We have turned what is to be the gathering of the family of God into big business. The main success criteria for most churches is bucks, butts, and buildings. The three “Bs”.

In a large number of churches around the country the conversations amongst leadership teams boil down to those three success criteria. How do we get more people to get more money to make a better building to get more people... and so the cycle goes.

Do we as pastors religiously coat everything? Absolutely. I don't think there's a single pastor that would say that they are focused on the 3Bs. We would all say that what matters to us is people hearing and responding to the gospel of Jesus. Every single one of us would say that we want people to grow in their faith.

Sadly, in practice for many of us we have lost the plot.

When the leadership of the church goes corporate and the focus becomes “growing the church (by the 3Bs)” then you end up with the same kinds of things that happen in the corporate world. Pastors become insulated from the congregation. They get placed on a pedestal. Issues within the church get covered up, handled, and swept away because you can't have anything hurt the “momentum.”

Power becomes the currency of the leaders. Spiritual abuse begins to run rampant. Members of the church are nothing more than customers. Political games get played. People get used for the sake of the “vision.”

We have bought so deeply into the “leadership” cult of the secular business world that in many of our fastest growing churches you could strip away the Jesus aspects most wouldn't even notice.

Conclusion

Is it any surprise that when people see behind the curtain of the leadership of many churches that they walk away from the faith? I don't think so. These men and women that they thought were pursuing God are merely pursuing their own power and glory. The people that they thought were humble servants are actually power hungry control freaks. No, we shouldn't be surprised.

We must disentangle the faith from this corporatism.

What if we pastors instead of being CEOs simply sought to love well, being servants of those entrusted to us, and were simply present? What if we were actually open and authentic with those in our care? What if instead of seeking deep relationships outside the congregation we pursued them inside? What if we were simply content with caring for those in our immediate neighborhood not worrying about “growing the church (3Bs)”? What if we simply sought to model Jesus self-sacrificial love?

What if?

Discuss...

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Introduction

It was the summer of 1998 and I was raising support at the beginning of my time on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ. I was in the car on my way to a church gathering with a potential donor. He was going to be connecting me with a number of people from his church at this gathering. During our hour drive across Metro Detroit he shared with me his take on the future of the church in America. It went something like this...

The future of the church is the mega-church. The small neighborhood churches are just not going to be able to compete. Mega churches have the means by which to give the people what they want. We have plans at our church to offer so many different things that people will be able to hang out at the church all the time. We are planning a recreation complex, a coffee shop, even a restaurant! Everything we do is to meet the wants of folks from our community. Small churches just don't have the resources. They are going to lose and eventually, every town will have one or two mega churches. Our resources will allow us to have dynamic worship experiences and we will be able to bring in the most dynamic speakers. Our band is planning on publishing and selling CD soon too. The production value that we put into our worship services is second to none. Truly, if someone can't find what they are looking for here it's because they aren't really trying.

The conversation lasted an hour or so, but this was the basic gist. (Let me be very clear, the issues of consumerism and the critiques following are as prevalent in small churches as they are in mega-churches.)

When I was on staff with Cru at Illinois State I remember a student from Chicago who attended a famous mega-church in the suburbs came to one of our weekly meetings. I was excited to talk with him because he was a committed Christian and I thought that it would be great to have him involved so he could grow in his faith. He informed that he would not be coming back. Why? The production value of the weekly meeting isn't good enough. I just didn't compare to church back home. None of the campus ministries did and none of the churches in this podunk town had good ones either.

Conversations with so many people over the years about a church didn't “feed me” or didn't offer a particular program that I wanted or how the coffee was sub par. These things and so many lead to “church shopping.”

The American Christian church has become driven by consumerism.

How do we become bigger and bigger? How do we get more people? What do we need to do grow faster and faster? What will it take to attract more people?

Conversely those being shaped by this kind of church ask a different set of questions. What does this church offer me? Does this church meet my needs and wants? Does this church agree with me? Does this church feed me?

Consumerism

Consumerism is defined as, “the protection or promotion of the interests of consumers.”

When we think about the post World War 2 American experience it seems to me that consumerism is part and parcel of that experience.

I was watching 1923, the prequel to the show Yellowstone, the other night. The Dutton family had gone into the town of Bozeman, Montana. While they were walking around downtown they happened upon a salesman for electronic appliances. He was selling washing machines and a variety of other electronic conveniences. There was a great line in that scene that really struck me, “Sir, if we buy this stuff from you we begin working for you and not ourselvs.”

What a succinct illustration of the problem of consumerism.

Our whole society has been touched by it.

I am not sure that there are very many places that we go where we aren't consumers.

Consuming, that is something we are good at. Consider the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday. It is a day when America consumes. We buy all the things, whether we need them or not.

When I consume food do you know what happens? My plate is empty. It's gone. Eventually, I will again get hungry. I won't be able to eat that same food. It's gone. I need new food. So I buy more. Food is of course a necessity. But it simply illustrates the point.

When Consumerism Comes to Church

The Church ought to be a place where we do not consume. When we read our Scriptures we see that worship is offered, it is given, it is not about “me.” At the very least once a week we should have this counter-cultural moment where our attnetion is focused on something other than the self.

By and large, that's not the case.

Now, we church shop like we are buying a house or some shoes.

Church is all about “me.”

When consumerism comes to church we lose the gospel.

This is part of the reason so many people are becoming fed up with American Christianity. They are rightly seeing it as an empty sham that is nothing more than candy. A Christianity that is consumer driven offers us nothing in the face of the pain and heartache that is life. A Consumeristic Christianity is one rife with hypocrisy lead by power hungry pastors looking to build their own platforms and kingdoms.

As the ancient Scriptures tell us, eventually all will be brought to light.

Consumer driven Christianity would have felt at home with the crowds who at the bread and fish and then chased Jesus around the lake. He chastised them saying that what they wanted was their bellies filled, they didn't want him.

Conclusion

I think in large part this shift began with Charles Finney in the Second Great Awakening. He tweaked the gospel message to be about personal salvation. Billy Graham in the 1950s and beyond made it even more pronounced. The various parachurch ministries also jumped on the personal salvation band wagon.

All of a sudden the gospel was a sales pitch to get individuals saved.

The gospel is not a decision point. It is a proclamation of the work that God has done through Christ in the crucifixion and resurrection. It is a call to follow the narrow way of self-sacrificial love that we demonstrated by Jesus and taught by the earliest followers of the Way in the Scriptures. The gospel is a summons to die to self so as to live free to express faith in love.

The gospel is not something to consume.

No, it is upside down from our American culture.

We have to disentangle our faith from consumerism. Following Jesus for what he can give me will always end up in failure and frustration. Following Jesus because living the way he did with compassion, mercy, and self-sacrificial love will open me up to something beyond myself. When we live this way we discover that there is no us vs them, there is simply “we-all”. If we can pursue this way of Christ contrary to the consumerism of our culture then we will become givers and in our giving we discover that we are cared for.

Discuss...

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Psalm 147:1-11, 20c; Proverbs 12:10-21; Galatians 5:2-15

I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you >attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from >Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying >relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion >nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far >more interior: faith expressed in love. – Galatians 5:4-6, The Message

How often do I seek to live by my own religious plans and projects?

All. The. Time.

I remember when I first began learning about the depths of grace in books like The Ragamuffin Gospel, What's So Amazing About Grace, and Putting Amazing Back Into Grace. It was like someone took the blinders off me. All of a sudden there was this overwhelming sense of freedom that I never knew existed in my faith life.

But, then something happened.

I became legalistic about freedom.

As Paul might have said, I stopped practicing conscientious religion for a disregard of religion.

My freedom had become license.

Both legalism and license are missing the mark.

Grace frees us to live a life of faith expressed in love.

What a remarkable idea to consider.

My life is too often not one of faith expressed in love. It is often faith expressed in rules, expectations, demands, or control. Too many times everything boils down to a simple recipe of “do this” and “don't do that.”

But Grace calls me deeper. It calls me to a place of love. Love means that I'm free to serve, to be present, to listen, to simply be.

Grace-Love it's not easy to put your arms around. You have to just do it, live it, practice it. And oh does it take practice!

The further into living a life of Grace-Love the more you find yourself in situations that you can't control. So, the temptation is ever present to grasp control back. I have to keep learning that the call, the deep call of Grace-Love is that of letting go.

It's neither license nor legalism. It something far deeper, indeed, a faith expressed in love.

— Discuss...

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Psalm 35:1-10; Jeremiah 29:1-14; Mark 5:1-20

One of my favorite movies is Garden State. There is a marvelous scene where the two main characters are sitting in a pool and they are talking about, “home” and “family.”

Andrew Largeman: You know that point in your life when you realize the house >you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you >have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone.

Sam: I still feel at home in my house.

Andrew Largeman: You'll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens >one day and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel >homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this rite of passage, >you know. You won't ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of >home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle >or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that's all >family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.

What resonates with me this morning is that line about how “home” is an idea that you create for yourself.

As I was reading these passages this morning this movie scene immediately popped into my head. In Jeremiah he's sending a letter to the people in exile and telling them create for themselves homes in Babylon. In Mark Jesus sends the healed demoniac back to his home country. Home is a theme that for whatever just jumped out of the text to me.

Home is not something that just happens. We cultivate it. We create it. Home can be anywhere! I'm watching my children create a sense of home at their respective universities. Sure, they love coming to my home for a visit, but there is a restlessness that is ever present because this house is no longer home for them.

I think there is something innate in us all to create a home. It's a reflection of the Divine. The first stories humanity told were about the Divine making a home for us. Now we reflect that every day.

In some sense we all find ourselves in exile. We await the eternal home. But until then, perhaps we would be wise to remember the letter of Jeremiah...

This is the Message from GOD-of-the-Angel-Armies, Israel’s God, to all the exiles >I’ve taken from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and make yourselves at home. “Put in gardens and eat what grows in that country. “Marry and have children. Encourage your children to marry and have children so >that you’ll thrive in that country and not waste away. “Make yourselves at home there and work for the country’s welfare. “Pray for Babylon’s well-being. If things go well for Babylon, things will go well for >you.”

— Discuss...

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Psalm 35:1-10; Numbers 22:22-28; 1 Corinthians 7:32-40

One of the things that I really like doing is spending time reading in The Message. The reason for this is that it often opens my eyes to familiar passages in different ways. It gets me to think about them differently. I really need this because I have spent so much time thinking about the Scriptures from a theological angle that to have my normal perceptions jarred is so helpful.

Today's reading, for instance, 1 Corinthians 7:32-40 is all about Paul's teaching on singleness and celibacy. This passage has always lead me into a million questions about marriage, singleness, etc...

Reading today in The Message, there was this translation of verse 32:

I want you to live as free of complications as possible.

It jolted me.

I stared at the line and it dawned on me that perhaps Paul's heart in this section was just that, he was calling people to consider how live lives that are free of complications so as to limit the things that demand our attention.

Could it be that that is the principle here? Is it possible that is the core of what Paul is talking about and using marriage as an illustration, while also sharing his opinion?

I think it might be.

So this then leads me to what I'm thinking about today, “What are the complications in my life that are taking away my attention from what matters most?”

— Discuss...

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Psalm 35:1-10 // Numbers 22:1-21 // Acts 21:17-26

But let me run loose and free, celebrating GOD’s great work, Every bone in my body laughing, singing, “GOD, there’s no one like you. You put the down-and-out on their feet and protect the unprotected from bullies!”

This morning as I was processing these passages it struck me that what I want is so often very shallow, very lame, and so much less than what God would have for me.

The stories told in Numbers and Acts each in their own ways point to the reality that there is more to what God is doing than what I often see. I get focused on immediate circumstances so easily. I lose the forest for the trees.

God, typically, has something so much more for me than what I think I want in the immediate moment.

I am reminded of the C.S. Lewis quote, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses.

Oh that I would pursue the infinite joy that is offered me!

And yet, where is that infinite joy put on display? It is put on display when when God puts the “down-and-out on their feet and protect(s) the unprotected from bullies!”

This is where I will find the infinite joy! When I get involved with what God is doing in the world then I will move beyond my weak and desires to those things that are much stronger.

— Discuss...

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